Nowadays, our environment is in great danger, there are lots of reasons of causing the damage to the environment. Could you list some of them?
(ask audience questions)
(If someone says something like war, battle etc.)Yes, you are right, this is one of the cause
(If nobody say so)That's some of them, but I'm afraid that all of you have forgotten one cause, warfare
warfare is not only one of the cause of environmental problems, but it is also one of the biggest reasons of those problems.Here, the environment doesn't mean nature environment, but the whole living environment of human beings.
I divide my presentation into three parts,
First of all I'll tell you about the history and development of warfare, and how it damages the environment
then, I will discuss different kind of damage caused by different king of warfare.
At last I'll talk about a great process of stopping warfare in history. It can also be think as the great process to stop the destruction of the environment.
As soon as human existed, they had warfare or conflicts in different forms, in the past people used swords, spears, axes and sticks to fight against enemies, I have to say that the destruction had already at that time, cutting and burning trees, killing wild animals in large areas are the commonest behavior during war time.
After the invention of gunpowder the destruction of the nature became much more often than before. Instead of cutting and burning, people started bombing and shooting to destroy forests and animals
With the development of technology, the weapons have developed as well, and so have the ways to damage the environment.
Right after America bombed the first atomic bombs, many other countries started research in nuclear weapons, it wasn't a warfare, but it was a military competition which caused serious environmental problems. Even in the south pole nowadays, there is still lots of radioactivity remain.
Nowadays, there are quite many warfare in the mid-east, because of destroying oil well, there are problem in atmosphere of these countires
As you can see, whenever there is a warfare, there must be pollution, but is all the pollution in the same form? This question led us to the second section, different warfare and different pollution
Firstly, I am going to talk about the commonest warfare, which is called the normal warfare. Armies usually use normal weapons like firearms,artillery, and some heavy weapons,normal warfare usually causes the destruction of buildings and nature environment, as well as wasting many unrenewable materials, for example, in the Persian Gulf War from January to February in 1991, over 500 oil wells were destroyed and plenty tons of oil were poured into the Persian Gulf, this event caused the percentage of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere above Kuwait increased 2% and millions of sea animals had been killed. Before the Gulf War, the number of tanks had been 5500, but after the war, there were only 15% remain, the number of aircraft had also been half.
Comparing with normal warfare, the rest several kinds of warfare is not so common but it is far more destructive than the normal one, they are chemical warfare,biological and nuclear warfare, we just call both of them destructive warfare.