We should keep Alaska's nature

Name: Uhm, Young-sik
Class: EAP2
Date: Apr 3, 2006
We should keep Alaska’s nature

The author said Alaska’s pollution of fresh water is serious. “A mixing zone is an area where pollutants are diluted with ocean or freshwater”, the author explained in this article. Many industrial operations usually released sewage in the mixing zone. However, the problem is that this bothers living things in water, especially spawning fish. That’s why, the government proposed avoiding using the mixing zone during spawning season, but there was a lot of complaining about that. So they try to make good plan of mitigation. That’s why, they were gathering public opinion.

I think they should consider the ecosystem of water. It could bring a lot of advantages, in spite of the fact that they should think about the ecosystem first; because if we lose the ecosystem, we would get more disadvantage.

First of all, when they make a regulation they think about living things first. This kind of issue is very complicated. Just giving up one of them won’t be a solution. In my opinion an ecosystem is more important than industrialization. In Korea’s case, from the 1970s to the 1980s, we only focused on development, and then we made it, the so-called “miracle of the Han-river”. However we realized that during this period of time our nature became decayed. A lot of species disappeared, and we couldn’t drink water without a water cleaner, and most of trees were cut down. We messed up our environment in only 20 years. So from the 1990s, we started to recover our nature. That’s why, Korea has a holiday for planting trees. However some expert said it will take approximately 200 years. So they should remember that destroying is easy but recovering is very difficult and it takes a long time.

Second, they should worry about extermination of certain species. During industrialization, so many species were exterminated in the world. Recovering these exterminated species is almost impossible. I think every existence has a reason. So exterminated species somehow affected our life, we just couldn’t realize it. So the Alaskans should protect the spawning seasons, even if there are too many complaints, or give their industry a lot of disadvantages.

Finally Alaskans should try to keep their primitive nature. They should check out MDCs (More Developed Countries) situation, and try to not make the same mistake. Of course industrialization is very important because it gives us a better life, but we should remember eventually clean nature gives us a better life than industrialization.

We misunderstood that nature is our possession. Actually nature is helping us. Look at our life. We can not live without nature. Protecting nature can give our industry many disadvantages. However if we lose our nature, we would got more disadvantages. We should remember this fact.



Reference:
Dobby, P(2005, OCT 18). Comment sought on pollution; MIXING ZONE: public will have its say on the plan until Dec. 19. Anchorage Daily News. Retrieved from Lexis-Nexis Mar 29, 2005