"Bananas are the number one export crop for several of the central and south American countries with Ecuador and Costa Rica being the first and second respectively in total production. According to the Rainforest Action Network, Costa Rica is cutting 2000 hectares of virgin rainforest annually to add to their existing massive network of multinational owned banana plantations - United Fruit, Chiquita, Dole and PPI Del Monte.

Bananas are grown in the typical unconscious western chemical manner, leaving in its wake a legacy of massive fish kills, human chemical exposures, and poisoned and depleted soils.

The effects on the rainforest are devastating, far more detrimental than even cattle production due to the massive chemical scale of banana production.

United Fruit pulled out of the town of Golfito in Costa Rica due to the extensive copper residues left from the heavy application of fungicides, basically leaving the soils unusable for any agricultural production.

Intensive banana cultivation depletes ordinary soils in 15 years. The banana planation is a plantation in movement; it migrates and occupies new space, modifies the landscape and abandons areas which have been depleted."

"Coca production has already devastated over 700,000 hectares of Amazonian forest, and processing the coca into cocaine dumps into rivers thousands of gallons of an explosive chemical cocktail - sulphuric acid, ether, kerosene, ammonia."

"Cotton probably occupies about 34 million hectares (84 million acres)."

Quite how much difference the replacement of Forests with crop plantations has made to the Planet’s Carbon capacity is not known. The reduction in the Planet’s Photosynthetic capacity must be significant.

"According to Sedjo and Clawson plantation forests on a global basis occupy some 9x107 ha which is equivalent to about 3% of the extent of the world’s closed forests."

Tree plantations cause, or necessitate, significant ecological damage.

"Plantations are not without problems. When trees are harvested, they generally take along a large stock of nutrients, requiring increasing applications of fertilisers to maintain the site's productivity. Moreover, like many monoculture cropping systems, plantations are particularly susceptible to attack by insects and disease."

Another aspect of plantations is the common tendency to plant imported varieties of trees rather than indigenous varieties, "Exotic cypresses have no appropriate place or function in the African ecosystem. They are all exotic trees which have been imported in the past by colonialists."

Large areas of the Planet which were once covered in natural Vegetation have now been covered in a carpet of grass - or green cancer as Bill Mollinson calls it whether this is roadside verges; domestic and civic lawns; playing fields and recreational areas; sport arenas; golf courses; cemetaries; parks, etc . This causes a considerable reduction in terrestrial Photosynthesis.

Inundation covers a number of different but related phenomenon; water-logging caused by bad irrigation; the construction of water reservoirs; the construction of reservoirs for hydro-electric power; and flooding whether temporary or permanent. Terrestrial Photosynthesis is replaced by aquatic Photosynthesis. The inundation of land causes a reduction in, although not a cessation of, Photosynthesis. There has been widescale inundation of land whether caused by accident or by human design.

Irrigation is one of humans’ major inventions which has led to a huge increase in food production. However, it can also cause ecological degradation which may eventually lead to a drop in food production, "Irrigation is also temporary - since dams and canals eventually silt up, underground water supplies can be drained, and irrigated land is often ruined by salting up and waterlogging."

The scale of land around the world inundated by waterlogging is not known.

Huge areas of land have been inundated to create water reservoirs.

The scale of global inundation caused by the creation of water reservoirs is not known.

There is a prospect of increasing numbers of water reservoirs either to meet the needs of growing populations and increasing economic growth or to offset the possibility of droughts brought about by global warming.

There is often no need to construct water reservoirs. Water supply could often be maintained by plugging the numerous leaks in the water pipeline network. Repairing leaks might cause less ecological damage than building new reservoirs. Unfortunately, "Water companies curtsey to the idea of repairing their leaks but there is no real incentive for them to do so and its easier to build more reservoirs or sink more boreholes."

A disasterous miscalculation about the construction of a dam on an inlet to the Caspian sea has caused colossal degree of ecological damage.

The scale of inundation caused by the construction of water reservoirs for dams has been considerable. "In the past 40 years, the amount of water trapped behind large dams has increased 25 fold and now amounts to around 5000 cubic kilometres. This is a substantial interruption to the planet’s hydrological cycle; artificial reservoirs now hold the equivalent of roughly 13% of the total run off of rivers to the oceans."

"Floods have made more than 10 million people homeless in China this year."

Flooding causes ecological damage and folld prevention schemes cause even more ecological damage.

Colossal water engineering projects proposed for Africa.

"The Bangladesh Flood Action Plan, drawn up 2 years ago by the Bangladeshi government and the World Bank, is likely to cost around $5 billion."

The scale of global inundation caused by flooding is not known.

Forest fires, whether caused by humans or by natural factors do not cause desertification. The burning of Forests produces ashed full of nutrients which enable Vegetation to grow and eventually the Forest will reappear.

Greenpeace’s ‘The Climate Bomb’ provides many examples of the number and frequency of Forest fires around the world.

"Dr Norman Myers observes that as much as 400 billion tons of carbon could be sequestered in the 4.3 million square miles (three Europes) of boreal forest, and these are being logged and burnt apace. Some 70% of these forests are in Siberia, where logging has reached 15,500 square miles per year, and where some 4,000 square miles are being eliminated in forest fires each year."; "Siberia’s forests are also being depleted by fires .. While most forest fires are now caused by humans, they may well be overtaken by wildfires as global warming starts to bite. (The forests could dry out and become vulnerable to fires). Much more drastic will be the full force of global warming. (Trees will have to migrate but there is no room for trees to do this). Climatologists estimate that a full 40% of boreal forests, perhaps more, could disapear within the forseeable future. This would release 1.5-3 billion tons of carbon per year or as much as is being emitted from tropical deforestation today and 20-40% of all current emissions of CO2."

"In Australia .. By 1984, it was estimated that half of the country's agricultural land was affected by soil degradation."

"In China .. official estimates suggest that one-seventh of China's vast land surface is now affected by soil erosion."

"Such an incredibly large amount of silt eroding from farms, construction, roadbuilding and shorelines has entered Chesapeake Bay that it is sinking! According to a joint study by researchers from the University of Maryland and the Horn Point biological laboratory, the approximately 8.8 BILLION TONS of silt that have entered the Bay over the last century are causing a geological phenomenon called, 'downwarping'. Under this tremendous additional weight, the floor of the Bay is sinking, dragging the shoreline down with it."; the US is estimated to be losing 1 billion tonnes of topsoil per year.

In the 1950s there was a drive to .. "open up the marginal grasslands of areas such as Khasakstan to cultivation .. in total about 100 million acres were ploughed up between 1954 and 1960. Within a decade of the start of the programme almost half the land had been severely affected by erosion."

Asia is estimated to be losing 25 billion tonnes of topsoil a year. .."

"Europe is estimated to be losing 1 billion tonnes (of topsoil) a year."

"The twentieth century has seen the steady advance of deserts into once productive areas. Desertification now affects the south western parts of the US, northern Mexico, north Africa, the Sahel, large parts of southern Africa and parts of Australia. Between 1925 and 1975 the Sahara desert grew by about 250,000 square miles along its southern edge."; "More than a tenth of the world's soils have lost a substantial amount of their natural fertility in the past 45 years, according to the first results of a 15 year Global Assessment of Soil Degradation, funded by the United Nations Environment Programme. In Europe an estimated 20 million hectares of soils have been seriously damaged by industrial activity, mostly by air pollution such as acid rain and the fallout of heavy metals."; "Each year, the world's farmers lose an estimated 24 billion tons of topsoil from their cropland in excess of new soil formation. During the 1980s this translated into a loss of 240 billion tons."; "Annual (global) soil loss amounts to 75 billion tonnes."

Salinization resulting from over-irrigation also causes desertification.

"One scientist argues that salt threatens the national economies of Argentina, Egypt, India, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan and Syria."

"Hundreds of thousands of hectares of Western Australia have been poisoned by salt."

"Between 1960 and the late 1980s the Soviet Union lost more previously productive land to waterlogging-salinization than the cultivated area of Ireland and Belgium combined."; "Overall, more than 70 million acres of irrigated land has been ruined and the adversely affected area is increasing by about three and a half million acres a year."

"Erosion, salinization and water logging are now destroying as much, if not more, land than that being brought under cultivation."

"As much as 28% of the world's land surface suffers from drought. Mineral stressed soils account for a further 23%."; "Each year about 11 million hectares of our arable land are lost through erosion, desertification, toxification and conversion to non-agricultural uses. Altogether, one third of the planet's land surface is semi-arid or arid."; "At bottom, 35% of the world's land surface is at risk from turning into deserts. This land is home to 850 million people.";

"15 million acres every year turns to desert,

50 million becomes too poor to support crop or cattle (because of aggressive farming, overgrazing, salinity)

800 million is losing topsoil at an alarming rate because of erosion by wind or water."

"By the end of this century one-third of all the world's farmland will be unproductive semi-desert."; "Around 6 million hectares of new desert are formed every year through poor management and changing climatic conditions."; Approximately 6 million hectares of arable land are turned into deserts each year.; "According to the UN Environment Programme, over 35% of the land surface of the earth is now threatened by desertification."

Another form of desertification is the creation of concrete deserts. Concrete suffocates the Planet’s Carbon absorption capacity. The sooner it is accepted that concrete is one of the biggest ‘pollutants’ on Earth the greater the chance of avoiding a major disruption of the Planet’s climate.

"In China, the non farmland needs of a population of 1.1 billion people for new houses, factories, schools, and roads are reducing China’s cropland area by an estimated 1% every two years."

"The survey reveals that in the six years from 1984 to 1990 the built up area of Britain grew by around 130 square kilometres a year from 16,100 to 16,900 sqr kilometres. This is an increase equivalent to 16 cities the size of Exeter."

"Between 1945 and 1975 about 30 million hectares of land in the US were lost under concrete and asphalt."

The scale of the land suffocated beneath concrete is not known. A rough estimate can only be inferred from the scale of cement production, "The rate of use of cement .. in 1980 it was 920,000x103 tonnes."

The Planet's Carbon absorption capacity is also reduced in the same way as concretization when land is suffocated by oil spills. Oil spills on land are often temporary but sometimes they become permanent if the oil is baked by sunlight into something resembling a road surface.

"For nearly 20 years, international oil companies, led by Texaco, have sucked oil from a vast reserve near the headwaters of the Amazon. A pipeline stretches from the Oriente (the Ecuadorian Amazon), climbs nearly 10,000 feet over the Andes and drops back down to the coast for refining export (mostly to the US). For the past two decades, this pipeline and other oil activities leaked more than 16 million gallons of oil (more than the Exxon Valdez spill) into the rainforest."

"In the al-Sabriyah oilfields in northern Kuwait, huge oil lakes are threatening plants and wildlife and the water supplies used by Kuwait city."

"In 1979, the amount of oil lost worldwide on land and sea through spillage, fire, and sinkings reached a peak of 328 million gallons; since then it has dropped between 24 and 55 million a year."

The Planet's Carbon absorption capacity is also reduced when land is covered by waste tips. Large areas around the world have been covered in an array of car dumps, tyre dumps, waste disposal sites. This section concerns both the legal and illegal dumping of waste products into the environment which suffocates the soil.

"There are more than 4500 toxic waste tips in Britain alone, at least 1300 of which have been identified as posing a serious risk to the environment."; "One million tons of fly tipped waste now awaited clearance from 500 illegal sites in London."

The scale of global despoilation is simply not known.

Huge areas of the Planet's Carbon absorption capacity have been damaged by open cast mining. The creation of waste heaps as a result of underground mining also destroys Photosynthesis.

A huge uranium mine may be permitted in an Australian national park.

Peat extractors. (New Scientist 3.8.91. p.27).

"The Brazilian Carajas project, one of the greatest man-made ecological disasters this century. All the evidence shows that an area of Amazonian rainforest larger than Europe has been deforested or flooded in the last 10 years partly to provide EC industry - including British Steel - with cheap ore. The EC provided a $600 million loan contract in return for 13.6 million tonnes of iron ore a year for 15 years. The parallel Grande Carajas project costing US$62 billion and covering an area of 900,000 sqr kilometres which has involved vast hydro-electric projects, iron ore workings, lakes the size of Europe, a railway and other develkopments."

"Cyanide Heap Leach Mining makes previously insignificant deposits of gold cost-effective to mine. It involves strip-mining MILLIONS of tons of earth, crushing it, and heaping it onto a polyethylene liner. The unearthed mountains are sprayed with a highly alkaline cyanide solution which leeches out the gold. The gold laden solution is then drained into a holding pond until it can be pumped through to the on site processing plant. The gold is distilled from the cyanide and prepared to be used by jewellers, dentists and the computer and aerospace industries. The cyanide is then either re-used or pumped with waste ore to a tailings pond."

The scale of global mining extraction is simply not known.

In America it is possible for anyone who finds a deposit of commercially valuable mineral .. "to claim the land and patent it as private for for only $5/acre. Public lands are littered with these unpatented time-bombs, and since Wilderness and Roadless Area Protection Acts are not retrospective, the holders of old claims can decide to, patent them and begin mining them even after areas are set aside as wilderness. 3.2 million acres of once public land have been made private under this act."

"Over the past 60 years or so, US$25 billion has been spent on dams and embankments nationally (but) there has been no reduction in deaths from flooding, and economic losses have doubled .. The main reason for this is that there has been increased development on floodplains. Over the last 200 years, around 475,000 square kilometres of wetlands have been drained. These wetlands traditionally formed a buffer between the rivers and other low-lying lands, and their loss has meant that floodwaters became concentrated further downstream causing the floods ..."

The following definition of wetlands is much wider than the one used in this work, "The current global loss of wetlands amounts to 3 million to 6 million hectares (7.4 - 14.8 million acres) annually. There are about 300 million hectares (741 million acres) of wetlands including coral reefs, intertidal areas, mangroves, and salt marshes, globally. They are being lost to human development as well as sea-level rise, a cause for concern because of the biodiversity implications. Professor Pier Vellinga warns that the loss of biological diversity can in principle have major impacts on the global biogeochemical system." Coral Reefs and Mangroves are looked at separately below.

As more and more consumers become wealthier and wealthier, they can afford to own not merely cars but motorboats. There has been a rapid growth in the number of marinas to accommodate the increase in boat ownership. The creation of marinas requires the construction of barrages across river estuaries which results in the destruction of tidal mudflats. It has been noted above that the inundation of land by water reservoirs reduces Photosynthesis. Barrages permanently indundate tidal mudflats and this might also cause a reduction in Photosynthesis. There are also proposals to construct barrages to produce electricity and/or to protect against a rise in sea levels caused by climate change. It is ironic that the construction of barrages to protect inland cities from flooding could also contribute to global warming and hence rising sea levels.

"Britain's 155 estuaries, the nation's most valuable wildlife habitats, are without proper legal protection and are being destroyed says a Nature Conservancy Council report, "Nature Conservation and Estuaries in Great Britain."

There is no information about the scale of global inundation caused by the construction of barrages.

v) The Destruction of Grasslands.

The Earth’s terrestrial surface has never been entirely covered in Forests. In recent geological history a substantial part of it has been grasslands. Grasslands are known by many different names, "Different vernacular terms are used depending on the part of the world under consideration; thus grasslands (with fewer than 10-15 trees per hectare) may be called

steppes in Eurasia,

prairies in North America,

Ilanos/cerrados/pampas in South America,

savannas in Africa, and

rangelands in Australia."

vi) The Destruction of Mangrove Forests.

"Mangrove forests are made up of diverse tree species which thrive in upper tidal zones along flat, sheltered tropical shores. In the mangrove forest, life abounds. One can find shorebirds, crab-eating monkeys, fishing cats, and mud-skipper fish. The mangroves are the ocean's equivalent of the rain forest."

vii) The Destruction of Phytoplankton and Aquatic Vegetation.

The destruction of Phytoplankton and aquatic Vegetation is caused by a range of different factors.

viii) The Destruction of Coral Reefs.

Coral Reefs are home to billions of Fish and invertebrate Animals. They are also the most delicate and easily damaged eco-systems on Earth. Their existence depends on clear, unpolluted water (Corals must have plenty of sunlight and an environment free from unnaturally high levels of algae); no excessive ultra-violet radiation which, it is believed, is dangerous to Corals; no interference from humans (just touching living coral can kill it); the Fish and invertebrate species which maintain the Reefs. Coral Reefs extract Carbon from the oceans and, by stopping the oceans from releasing this Carbon back into the atmosphere, helps to moderate global warming. Unfortunately, however, many Coral Reefs are being destroyed. This is decreasing the Earth’s Photosynthetic capacity and boosting global warming. Coral reefs are being destroyed by a number of factors.

"Australian marine scientist, Dr. Clive Wilkinson, from the Austrailian Institute of marine Science in Townsville, says climate change and contamination will destroy one-third of the world’s coral reefs within 20 years and two-thirds within 40 years. Wilkinson believes that reefs in the Philippines, Thailand, Malaysia, Java, the Caribbean, east africa and Florida will be gone within the twenty year period. Coral experts believe that coral reefs may be deteriorating faster than the world’s tropical forests."; "Let us not understate this (coral bleaching). We are dealing with the prospect of slight increases in temperature killing, en masse, the very living foundations of tropical paradise on this planet."

The destruction of the Earth’s Photosynthetic capacity has been explored in Part One. Part Two looks at how much of this destruction may have been caused by pollution.

i) Deforestation.

Many Forests in the over-industrialized nations which have not been logged are being attacked by pollutants which are slowly poisoning and killing large numbers of Trees. There are a vast array of pollutants destroying Trees.

I: The Depletion of the Stratospheric Ozone Layer.

It is believed that Trees are damaged by the increasing levels of ultra violet radiation caused by stratospheric ozone depletion.

"European wide surveys have estimated that 35% of Europe's forests, or nearly 50 million hectares, are affected (by acid rain)."; "Acid rain will cost Europe 118 million cubic metres of wood - worth £16 billion - every year for the next century."

"Acid rain has now affected over 7 million hectares of forest in over 20 countries."

It is believed that .. "industrial solvents and dry cleaning fluid may both make a very important contribution to forest decline."

Trees may be killed by a chemical reaction between isoprene and ozone which forms hydroperoxides.

"Large areas of forest are dying and scientists suspect that a major cause is either acidification or the direct toxic effects of sulphur dioxide and ozone."

ii) The Defoliation of Plants.

The previous section looked at Forests; this section concerns Plants.

I: Tropospheric Ozone Poisoning.

Troposheric ozone poisoning is poisoning Plants.

A: Tropospheric Ozone Poisoning by Country.

a) The United States of America.

"Ground level ozone (from vehicle exhaust pollution) during the 1980s led to an estimated US crop loss of at least 5%, and possibly as much as 10%."

iii) The Destruction of Topsoil and Desertification.

I: General Pollution.

A: The Destruction of Topsoil by Continent.

a) Europe.

The 15 year Global Assessment of Soil Degradation, funded by the United Nations Environment Programme, has discoverd that, "In Europe an estimated 20 million hectares of soils have been seriously damaged by industrial activity, mostly by air pollution such as acid rain and the fallout of heavy metals."

b) The United States of Soviet Russia.

"In the Soviet Union in 1990, some 16% of the land surface was considered an environmental disaster area."

II: The Depletion of the Ozone Layer.

Ultra violet radiation destroys nitrogen fixing enzymes in the Soil like nitrogenase. It is possible that ozone depletion will lead to an increase in Soil damage and Soil erosion.

iv) The Destruction of Phytoplankton and Aquatic Vegetation.

I: Acid Rain.

"Acid rain .. has eliminated trout in rivers across 35,000 square kilometres of Norway, acidified 90,000 kilometres of brooks and 18,000 lakes in Sweden and severely affected over 50 lochs in Scotland, 700,000 lakes in Canada and many in the Adirondacks in the USA."; "In Norway, 35,000 km2 of lakeland are affected and in Sweden 18,000 lakes have been acidified, rendering 4,000 of them unable to support fish."

"The damage done to certain species of plankton by increased ultra-violet radiation - this scenario was highlighted recently by the ozone trends panel of the UNEP but ignored by the IPCC."

Huge quantities of atmospheric pollution eventually end up in the oceans destroying Plants and poisoning marine life.