W2B-021 Zoo - Environment-4.txt
"The Environment - A Sustainable Future" Billy McAlister, architect, town planner and environmental assessor
Ulster Tatler has for some time been aware that environmental issues are playing an ever-increasing part in our lifestyle. We have asked Billy McAlister, Architect, Town Planner and Environmental Asessor to edit a series to ensure that Ulster Tatler makes a necessary contribution to the environment initiative.
Everyone's talking about it, most people know something about it and a few people are very concerned about it - THE ENVIRONMENT.

WHY, all of a sudden, are we being subjected to a massive media promotion of matters relating to our past, present and future living standards, highlighted by disasters causing irreparable damage to our world resources? Every day there is some reference to degradation and destruction at global, national and local levels. Have values changed and living habits altered to an extent out of all proportion with patterns of earlier long established standards? The answer is that the situation has been slowly creeping up on us and at an increasing rate over the past 50 years.

A SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT boils down to maintaining a balance between the use of the world's resources and the number of human beings using them. Tribes, in earlier times, and in some parts of the developing world today, maintained this balance by controlling their population directly related to the availability of resources, such as food, and, materials for clothing, shelter, and weapons. If the balance was or is not maintained the small community either had to split and move away, or as has happened, in many cases disappeared. The situation can also be applied to a certain degree affecting much larger communities and even nations and dynasties looking back through history. Maintaining a state of balance is best likened to a see-saw on which two equal sized children can maintain a simple equilibrium. Once, however, one child, through over-eating, weighs heavier than the other, the resultant state of imbalance creates difficulties for each of them.

ACCENTUATING the difficulties in maintaining this status quo is another aspect, that of CHANGE, an inevitable dimension brought about by "man's" natural ability and motivation for invention and innovation. Since the advancements brought about by the Industrial Revolution, which were also reflected in commerce and agriculture, CHANGES have been increasing in rapidity, in complexity and scale. In transport terms alone, the movement from the horse-and-carriage to the super-sonic jet-propelled aeroplane and the "off-the-shelf" 100 m.p.h. motor car, has been achieved in less than 100 years! However, these new forms of transport require fuel, and so followed the exploitation of oil which has gone along apace over this period. The same scenario applies to food production, and the over-demand of a dynamic increase in world population necessitating the introduction of special innovations in framing practices and animal breeding and husbandry.

ALTHOUGH "warning bells" were set ringing after the last war indicating that continued "progress" (for want of a better word) of this nature and magnitude could lead to problems of scarcity of natural resources, little notice was taken, even though the effects of the consequences which might ensue were known and well publicised. It was not until events took place which had considerable impact on human beings and their desired lifestyle, did the "person in the street" become aware that there was a threat to their own personal well-being. We, who are old enough, can well remember the London Smog after the last war over a period of three weeks, when an estimated 50,000 deaths were attributed to breathing the over-polluted air, the Abervan slag-heap slippage, when no regulation of this type of waste product was in place, the first oil tanker spillage of the Torre Cannon, the Bhopal Chemical Factory emission in India when 3,000 died and the effects are still being felt, as with the Chernobyl nuclear fall-out. The Exxon Valdes oil tanker spillage in Alaska has been followed by one nearer home recently in Shetland, and oil fires pollution from the Kuwait oil fields shocked us all at the time. Closer to home we have the continued controversy of Selafield effects making us realise the gravity of the earlier near disaster fall-out at Three-Mile Island in the U.S.A.; even nearer home, the Du Pont accidental chemical emission into the Foyle, which probably got little or no international coverage, which makes one wonder if these sort of events are a daily occurrence
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on a world scale.

SOME major events which affect many square miles of territory bring conflict between neighbouring nations, with Scandinavian countries pointing the finger at Britain for the effects of acid rain on their land and forests, or, on a much greater scale, the U.S.A. and Europe accrediting changes in weather and climate to the massive scale of the destruction of the South American rain forests.

Led by initiatives in the United States dating back to the early 1970s and the recent dedication of the European Community to effect environmental policies attempting to ensure a sustainable environmental future, considerable compliance requirements are now in place and these are supported by the appropriate legislation to effect severe penalties (fines up to £ 10 million) on the "polluter" and making avoidance of duty of care relevant to the high risk of legal action.

As this series progresses, the author hopes to examine the issues which form the make-up of our environment, such as flora, fauna, climate, traffic and human beings and their cultural and economic needs, etc. relating these to the constructive viewpoints that a sustainable future can be achieved providing we all have a sense of awareness and a will to create and then maintain a worthwhile world for generations to follow.

Only 40 years ago we saw our planet from space for the first time. We saw it as a small unsuspended ball in space, comprising, not, as we think of it as people, of buildings and highways, but of soils, water, vegetation and clouds and it is these we must preserve.
