Hurricane Daniel (the equivalent of a typhoon in China) hit eastern Libya on September 10, causing severe flooding. So far, more than 10,000 people have been killed, and more than 10,000 others have disappeared!
The city of Derna, a disaster-stricken area in Libya, declared a state of emergency on September 14.
According to Arabia TV, the city of Derna, in order to improve the efficiency of rescue, restricted access to the city to rescue teams. Local media officials said that a large number of missing people were buried in mud, rubble or washed up in the sea.
Many bridges and roads in eastern Libya were washed away by flooding, and international aid forces broke through obstacles and rushed from all directions to the Libyan disaster area. The World Health Organization and WFP urgently deployed relief supplies for relief efforts.
In recent years, extreme weather in the world has continued to occur, and extreme weather such as floods, droughts and high temperatures have brought more and more disasters to mankind. With the acceleration of global industrialization and urbanization, as the world's population continues to rise, human beings demand from nature continues to strengthen, nature's temper becomes more and more moody, global temperatures continue to rise, and extreme meteorological disasters frequently appear.
Just like this summer, Europe has a rare high temperature weather in history, and in eastern China, northern Shandong and Hebei often have high temperatures above 40 degrees Celsius, Arctic glaciers have melted a lot, and global temperatures are rising, making the earth more and more unsuitable for human survival.
Flies do not bite eggs, and when disaster strikes, they are the first to descend on those ecologically fragile places, and Libya is a country with an extremely fragile ecological environment.
Libya is a North African country with an area of 1.76 million square kilometers and a population of 7.1 million in its capital, Tripoli. After the overthrow of the Qaddafi regime in 2011, the political situation was turbulent and violent incidents were frequent. Due to domestic oil production, life is better, with a GDP of $38.8 billion in 2022 and a per capita GDP of $5,465, which is not low in Africa's hot, poor and backward land.
Although Libya has a land area of 1.76 million square kilometers, which at first glance sounds like a lot, most of these countries are covered by desert, more than 95% of the entire territory is desert or semi-desert, only the coastal and northeastern inland areas are plains below 200 meters above sea level. There are no perennial rivers or large lakes in the territory, the economy is mainly based on oil extraction, and there is a certain fishing industry in the northern coastal areas. That's why Libya has such a large land area and a population of only 7.1 million.
To make matters worse, Libya's desert belongs to the Sahara, the world's largest tropical desert, extremely arid, almost without grass, covering an area of more than 7 million square kilometers. Belonging to an extremely ecologically fragile region, Libya faces the Mediterranean Sea to the north. The sea, surrounded by three continents, is now moody and unpredictable.
So, what is causing the increasing number of extreme weather events around the world?
The first is the growing population of the earth, which has entered the "8 billion era". The population of 8 billion marks an important milestone in human development, but it also greatly tests the earth's ecosystem. What behavior pattern human beings choose will determine whether the earth can host so many people, and building a harmonious ecological civilization between man and nature will enable human beings to enter the stage of sustainable development.
Humans have now ruled the entire earth, becoming the hegemon, and can manage the earth and everything on it at will according to their own will. However, overpopulation exceeds the carrying capacity of nature, lack of respect for nature, excessive exploitation will also be punished by nature. In a way, human beings themselves are part of nature, and we are not saving the earth, but ourselves.
Interestingly, around the world, almost the poorer countries are, the more likely they are to have children, and their populations are growing rapidly, while those in developed and rich countries have slow population growth, and some even have negative growth.
First of all, many poor areas have a lower cost of raising a child, basically like raising a puppy, while in developed rich countries the cost of raising a child is very expensive and requires more time and effort. Most people in developed countries are enjoyable people and have little interest in having children.
In addition, there is another important reason, that is, people in many places are full of fear of death because they have no real faith, and they always want to keep more of their genes on this earth by having many children. In some remote and impoverished mountainous areas in Yunnan, China, some couples whose families were originally poor ended up giving birth to more than a dozen children in one go. These farmers are quite selfish, always thinking of raising their children as puppies, so that the children can inherit their own poverty and suffering.
In fact, every child is forced to come into this world, and the first voice of a human baby is a cry. Without good living conditions, having a bunch of children and suffering with oneself is in itself a kind of selfishness and sin.
Originally the living space is limited, coupled with the extremely high cost of living, many people are stressed, anxious, either involuted, or evasive, or lying flat, or 996, 007, working overtime day and night, so many people are depressed. Why the mainland rarely produces Nobel Prize winners, why we are always impetuous, always unable to calm down, because our living space is too small and the pressure of life is too great, the cost of living is too high, one of the sky-high housing prices makes many young people choose to lie flat and not marry and have no children. In such an anxious and depressed environment, people are not in the mood to delve into learning, and they are always bent on how to make money, how to take the postgraduate examination, how to defeat the opponent, and increase the degree of involution. There is also the devastating threat to human beings and human society, of nuclear weapons that hang over each of us, which we are proud of today. So we can only be anxious and restless.
Second, with the rapid development of global industrialization and urbanization, a large number of pollutants such as carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide are discharged into the atmosphere, and some heavy metal pollutants that have not been strictly treated are discharged into rivers, lakes and seas, causing serious damage to the earth's ecology. The first is that the atmospheric ozone layer has been seriously damaged, and the depletion of the atmospheric ozone layer is not limited to the Antarctic and North Poles, and the entire atmospheric ozone layer has been damaged to varying degrees. In addition, as the earth's waters are polluted, the land in some places has excessive levels of heavy metals. All these have made the natural ecological environment more and more harsh.
There are also many countries in the world that have built nuclear power plants, and although the vast majority of nuclear wastewater is treated, it will also have a certain impact on the ocean. However, Japan dared to risk the world's condemnation and discharge the nuclear wastewater caused by the nuclear leakage of the Fukushima nuclear power plant into the sea, which was a fatal blow to the marine ecological environment, a crime to all mankind, and a disaster for the marine ecology. Or it could also affect major changes in the entire marine climate.
Some people say that the earth is not suitable for survival, and we humans can explore other planets to survive! The person who said this is ignorant and ridiculous, the earth has been scourged by human beings like this, should it continue to plague other planets? Can't we think of a path for the harmonious development of human beings and nature? If human beings act recklessly, let their selfish greed swell and seize at will, then even 10 more earths will not be enough to destroy, and the point is that we currently have only this one earth.
Third, due to the massive increase in the earth's population, human beings need more land to feed the increased population, so China's Loess Plateau has been cut from the original dense forest to today's yellow sand and full of holes. More seriously, the earth's tropical rainforest, which is the lungs of the earth, is often cut down on a large scale to develop the local economy and reclaim land for food.
Excessive deforestation will cause vegetation destruction, reduced vegetation area, increased soil erosion, river blockages, global warming, increased pollution, and more extreme weather on Earth.
People all want to live in a place with a beautiful environment, abundant water and grass, and abundant food and grass, but we human beings should have a consciousness, have a minimum reverence for nature, and coexist with nature. Fully respect objective laws, rationally develop and utilize natural resources, and consciously control the number of people to exceed the earth's carrying limit for human beings.
If human beings do not discipline themselves and do not control their endless desires and greed, eventually the entire earth will be destroyed by human hands, and human beings will disappear into the long river of the universe.
Sometimes I look at the world's topographic map and feel anxious, although China has a large land area, the area of plains that are really suitable for human survival is too small, and most of the 1.4 billion people are crowded in the hilly areas of the eastern plains, which is one of the important reasons why we are so involuted.
A comparison of the areas of the plains of the major countries: first, Russia 12 million square kilometers; second Canada, about 5.4 million square kilometers; third United States, 4.82 million square kilometers; fourth Australia, about 2.76 million square kilometers; fifth Brazil, about 2.3 million square kilometers; sixth place China, about 1.15 million square kilometers; Seventh place India and Kazakhstan tie: about 800,000 square kilometers.
It can be seen from this that because of the large number of people and the small number of land, our Chinese nation is destined to struggle hard, is destined to have serious involvement, and is destined to move mountains foolishly; throughout the ages, all peasant uprisings in Chinese history have generally been agrarian revolutions, which are caused by the class contradiction in which China's land area is too small, a small number of people own a large amount of land, and most people have no place to stand. This is one of the reasons why there have been frequent dynasties in Chinese history.
For a people with the theme of agricultural civilization, land is the root of life, but excessive cultivation, violation of natural laws of population growth is too fast, and has also received many punishments from nature. So far, China's land area has reached 1.4 billion people, excessive multiplication, land resources are more scarce, land finance is unsustainable, rapid urbanization, and the construction of too many high-rise buildings must have a great impact on the climate.
The traditional Chinese concept of not having true faith is that it likes to be born and taboo death, likes to have many children and blessings, and likes to let one's own genes
Legend has it that in order to overcome the fear of death, they fought death by desperately producing offspring, but never considering the carrying capacity of the land to the population. So, in order to feed so many people, we desperately reclaimed the land, and in the hills of Shandong, in many places we built terraces under the cliffs; On the banks of the Han River in Ankang, Shaanxi, people directly cultivated land on a 30-40-degree slope, without even repairing terraces; What is even more amazing is that the other day I went to Huozhou, Shanxi Province, and used aerial photography to find that a large area of terraced fields had been reclaimed on the top of Huo Mountain, which was 1,500 meters high, and I think there should be a small mountain village nearby.
In fact, according to the area of China's plains alone, it is reasonable for China to have a population of 500 to 700 million, when the population declines, the per capita occupation of resources will be greatly increased, which will greatly alleviate the involution and reduce the damage to the environment and the impact on the climate.
The ancient Chinese were keen on land, and today's people are obsessed with building houses and speculating on houses, and the 1.4 billion population has reduced 600 million houses, which is said to be enough for 5 billion people, and it is still being built. The key is that our current population has shown a negative growth trend, these houses, not only occupy a large amount of arable land, are not conducive to atmospheric precipitation air circulation, have an adverse impact on the ecological environment, and after a hundred years, will leave a heavy burden for our future generations, these concrete garbage alone is difficult to dispose of.
Chinese always say that "man conquers the sky", and change the natural environment according to his own will, which is not right, the development of human society should match the carrying capacity of nature to the number of people, should learn to respect the law of natural development, a society to develop benignly, must achieve three balances: political ecological balance, social ecological balance, natural ecological balance.
It is hoped that human beings can truly respect nature, seriously consider the enlightenment brought by these extreme natural disasters to people, and strive to explore a new path of harmonious development and symbiotic coexistence between man and nature.
Loving nature is to love human beings themselves, we must seriously think about how to achieve sustainable development, not only develop the economy, but also maximize the protection of the environment, reduce the damage to the natural world, and thus also reduce the occurrence of extreme weather disasters! The harmonious development of man and nature will be an eternal theme!