Blog Entry #5

Four of the major issues that Latin America faces in regard to the environment are deforestation, air and water pollution, illegal mining, and oil production. Deforestation not only harms those who live there (whether it be Brazil, Peru, or elsewhere) through animals losing their habitats, soil erosion, and flooding (which often harms locals or indigenous people), but implicates other countries too; deforestation bringing down the trees that keep our Co2 levels low and increasing greenhouse gases affects our global environment, not just the surrounding land of the Amazon. Pollution of the air and water of a city or country increases cancer rates, and can harm the environment of that area (whether it be from acid rain, or depletion of the ozone), which in turn harms the global environment. Illegal mining results in minerals that many countries that suffer from it export, and quite often abuses the men (or children) who work there; children are often forced to work doblas (24 hour shifts), and are exposed to dangerous materials, chemicals, and situations (like explosions or breathing in pollutants) daily. Oil production is particularly influential upon the international community, as almost every country but a very select few import their oil, and the environmental impacts tend to be along the lines of oil spills polluting waters and causing deaths of those in the regions they exist in and majorly harming the environment by drilling deep into the land and ruining the affected earth. Some of the major environmental issues we should pay heed to because they affect the global environment (as in the cases of deforestation, oil production, and pollution), and some we should because it’d be somewhat immoral to gloss over the issue, to cast it aside as unimportant (particularly with illegal mining, but with all of them on some level).