General knowledge

It's time

I’m doing a double today, so please, feel free to get super excited for this! I’m going to get right to it.

• The world’s per capita grain production has been on the downfall since 1985 despite the use of fertilizers and pesticides.
• The uncontrolled fishing that is allowed has reduced the amount of commercial species. Some species, up to one tenth of their original population.
• Every day 50 to 100 species of plants and animals become extinct as their habitat and human influences destroy them
• The Earth has been around for 4.6 billion years. Scaling this time down to 46 years we have been around for 4 hours, and our Industrial Revolution began just 1 minute ago. (wow this is scary!) During this short time period, we have ransacked the planet for ways to get fuels and raw materials, have been the cause of extinction of an unthinkable amount of plants and animals and have multiplied our population to that of a plague.
• (But hey! There is a solution!) Despite all of the damage we have caused the environment, most of it is reversible. (So, start at your local park, get involved on Clean up Australia Day, do whatever you can to help our precious environment!) We can restore habitats and return species to them; clean rivers; renovate buildings; replenish the top soil, replant forests. However, these activities do not relieve the worst symptoms of the damage. We still have to fix the source of these problems; us and our vision that we must progress.
• In Peninsular Malaysia, more tree species are found in 125 acres of Tropical Forest than in the entire North America.
• In Peru a single bush may contain more ant species than in the British Isles.
• A study has shown that there are possibly over 30 million species of insects dwelling in the canopies of tropical forests.
• 63,000 square miles of rain forests are being destroyed each year.
• Already over half of the world’s tropical forests have been lost
• Madagascar is the home to a rainforest where 60 percent of it’s 12,000 different plants species are unique to that island
• When you visit a pharmacist, one in every four purchases will have come from a tropical rainforest
• Medicine produced in tropical forests bring in commercially 30 billion dollars a year
• More than anything else, rainforest is destroyed by peasant farmers. However, the responsibility for this lies largely with the governments who fail to promote land reform and sustainable agricultural practices as an alternative to forest clearance.
• Greater than a quarter of our rainforest is in Brazil
• The Grasslands cover one-fifth of the land on Earth.
• The majority of grasslands are found around the tropics.
• Natural grasslands are; the Savannah's of Africa, the North American prairies, and in Southern USSR- the dry steppes.
• Semi-natural grasslands are where the forest has been cleared and grazing, cutting or burning maintains the grass cover. Tending to be more productive most South and South-East Asian grasslands are semi-natural grasslands.
• The temperate grassland soil contains a lot of organic material (more than the tropical)

So that is all my facts for today, using up one website, there are other facts that I didn’t put up on here, so you can go to the link in the bibliography section- Check. It. Out. See you tomorrow! Or have a one-way conversation type thing... :D




Until next time, stay green.