09/11/2017 article

For centuries, the relationship between man and the outside world was based on the principle of receiving all kinds of material goods from nature. The human race is characterized by using available resources to the maximum extent possible without considering the contradictions that arise from such tactics - and this is our trouble.

Unfortunately, the realization of what has been done comes only at the moment when society is faced with another problem that calls into question its further existence - with the ecological crisis.

According to the scale of the changes that have taken place, two types of ecological crisis can be distinguished - global and local.

At the local level, environmental crises occur much more often and, as a rule, pose a threat to individual species or populations, but the high frequency of such situations certainly indicates the approach of a global environmental crisis that can engulf the entire planet.

Ecological crises - how many of them actually happened?

As for the experience of the human race in dealing with global forms of ecological crisis, there are events that are rooted in the history of mankind so deeply that some of them take the form of theories and conjectures.

The results of other, less distant environmental crises, we observe to this day.

Comparing some facts, we can say with confidence that throughout the existence of mankind, it was accompanied by a constant and inevitable complication of the ecological situation, from time to time acquiring critical proportions.

Pre-anthropogenic crisis

Perhaps this is the only ecological crisis in the entire history of mankind that occurred through no fault of people, not counting the depletion of gathering resources that followed it, to which human activity is indirectly related.

According to the theory of N.N. Reimers, an honored Soviet zoologist, the first ecological crisis, which consisted in a significant decrease in climate humidity (aridization), played the role of a stimulus in the development of upright walking for our ancestors - anthropoids.

Modern research calls this theory into question. According to paleecological data, aridization in East Africa, which was assigned the role of the birthplace of the first people, occurred much later than the transition to upright posture took place. The time gap between events is equal to 2 million years.

One way or another, both theories confirm the fact of the ecological crisis, which occurred about 2.5 - 3 million years ago.

Impoverishment of gathering resources for ancient man

Approximately 30 - 50 thousand years ago, the society that had been created by that time clearly felt the acute shortage of natural resources used by man for food. The impoverishment of the diversity and abundance of gathering products led to the second ecological crisis in the history of mankind. To solve the problem, our ancestors learned to use primitive biotechnical techniques to renew ecosystems. A striking example is the method of burning the soil.

Overfishing of large animals

The steadily growing number of representatives of the ancient tribes inevitably entailed an increase in their appetites, for the satisfaction of which hunting was used for the most part. Thus, the disappearance of the mammoth, cave lion, cave hyena, woolly rhinoceros and many other representatives of the ancient fauna, nature, according to numerous paleontological studies, owes to ancient hunters.

Justice requires the elucidation of another theory, according to which the cause of the extinction of mammoths was climate change during the onset of the ice age and its end. However, paleontological excavations in the region of Siberia make it possible to verify that the last mammoths lived there no further than 8–9 thousand years ago, that is, much later than the end of the ice age. The only convincing reason for their death is the extermination of the species by numerous hunters.

The time period corresponding to this ecological crisis, called the crisis of consumers (from the Latin "consume" - to use), falls on the period of 10 - 50 thousand years ago. It is rightly considered the first environmental crisis of an anthropogenic nature. In fact, it was also the first economic crisis in the history of mankind, as it was characterized primarily by an acute shortage of food in society.

Mankind found a way out of the situation in the development of primitive forms of agriculture and cattle breeding, which saved many lives from starvation both in those days and in the future.

This period in history has been given the name of the Neolithic (or biotechnical) revolution.

The Crisis of Primitive Irrigated Agriculture

About 1500 years ago, the human race was brought to a new crisis by the irrational use of cultivated land. As a result of depletion and salinization of soils, their fertility has noticeably decreased, forcing people to look for alternative ways to get a crop.

The crisis became an impetus for the development of rainfed agriculture, which involves the cultivation of the soil without the use of artificial irrigation. Thus, the localization of arable land moved to areas near oases and to the foothills of the mountains.

Lack of plant resources and food

However, soil resources are far from unlimited in any area, and 250 years ago, their active use led to another crisis associated with depletion and a decrease in land fertility. Meanwhile, the food needs of the vastly increased population of the planet required an early solution to the issue, and this time the industrial revolution was the way out. The widespread industrialization increased the productivity of production by replacing manual labor with machine labor.

Ecological crises of our days

It would seem that industrialization has become a solution to the problem of providing humanity with everything necessary for a comfortable life, but is it really so? As the near future showed, the active use of multi-waste technologies eventually led to several environmental crises at the same time.

Global environmental pollution and the threat of resource depletion

Elementary logic suggests that the more actively and dynamically the resources of nature are pumped out of its storerooms, the sooner and more inevitable is their depletion. The crisis, which began about half a century ago, today is becoming more and more menacing. Industrial waste poisoning the environment has become a significant addition to the growing problem of soil degradation and the irreversible extinction of biological species.

The main ways to combat the crisis are the development of alternative energy sources and non-waste production, but at the moment the situation remains deplorable.

Global thermodynamic crisis (thermal pollution)

The problem of the global thermal crisis is inextricably linked with the high percentage of industrial emissions of hazardous chemical compounds into the atmosphere. Methane, carbon dioxide and other vapors contribute to an increase in the overall temperature in the lower layers of the atmosphere, which leads to irreversible consequences in the ecosystems of the earth's surface and the world's oceans.

The primary task of modern society is to prevent the aggravation of the greenhouse effect through the use of new, environmentally friendly technologies.

Global Exhaustion of Ecological System Stability

This problem serves as a kind of outcome of all the above environmental crises that humanity has gone through on the path of its development, and this is its complexity. The global, comprehensive impact of man on nature is ultimately expressed in the imbalance of ecosystems, leading to the death of entire biological species - important links in their food chain. In other words, having mastered the most complex production technologies, we simultaneously learned to destroy nature as a whole, leaving it no chance for independent recovery.

The modern crisis - what is its peculiarity?

It is natural for a person to be afraid, first of all, of the threat that is in the immediate vicinity of him. Is this why the current environmental crisis is considered the most serious of all experienced by the human race? Of course, many would like to believe in this, and most people do so.

However, there are logical arguments in favor of the fact that today the situation on our planet is approaching a critical point - the point of no return to normal, habitable conditions.

Calling all the above forms of crises global, we mean their scale in quantitative terms: there was an extermination of large animals, soil depletion and other difficulties covering the entire territory of human habitation in a certain period of time. Today's ecological situation is of tremendous importance in terms of its complex nature.

Let's try again to briefly list the environmental problems of all periods of the development of human society and find at least one that has gone irrevocably into the past:

• depletion of natural resources;
• the disappearance of a number of animal species;
• land degradation and desertification;
• lack of food resources;
• global pollution of soil, atmosphere, oceans;
• the greenhouse effect;
• instability and instability of ecosystems.

Each of these problems remains relevant today, no matter how many thousands of years it has existed.

Based on these facts, it is time to draw a conclusion: for hundreds of centuries, humanity, by and large, did not struggle with numerous environmental crises, and even more so did not try to prevent them - it diligently accumulated ecological problems overlapping each other.

All these years, we have chosen the path of temporarily removing the threat of the crisis that has overtaken our planet today, like a snowball that has grown many times over, and there is no time to shift this burden to future generations, as they may simply not be. Today, the struggle for the life of our planet is the immediate duty and necessity of every inhabitant of it.

Let's start small: just look around and think: "What can I do right now?".

Certain contradictions in the interaction of society with the natural environment are inevitable. In the process of exchange between society and nature, matter does not disappear anywhere, but passes from one form and state to another. At the same time, the progress of society inevitably goes “at the expense” of nature, because, in satisfying their needs, people in the process of production borrow material goods from the natural environment, alienating them from it. However, if a society exists at the expense of nature, its progressive development can be infinite only under the condition of infinity and the natural environment. But a real society always develops in a space limited in volume, which is our planet. Therefore, at a certain stage, it must inevitably face an environmental problem. Consequently, this problem is due to the increase in contradictions in the material, energy and information connections of society with the natural environment.

Over the past century, two major shifts have taken place in human society. First, the population of the Earth has sharply increased ( to 6.0 billion people in 2000) and there is a tendency for its further increase. Secondly, production has increased significantly.

Mankind declared itself as a force, in terms of the power of impact on the surface shells of the planet, almost not inferior to the total impact of all living organisms. Possessing the ability to influence the secular course of biospheric processes, humanity has created the technosphere. Technosphere – a part of the biosphere transformed by people with the help of direct and indirect impact of technical means in order to best suit its socio-economic needs.

Modern humanity uses not only the huge energy resources of the biosphere, but also non-biospheric sources of energy (for example, atomic energy), while accelerating the geochemical transformations of nature. Some anthropogenic processes are directed oppositely to their natural course in the biosphere. This is the dispersion of metals, ores, carbon and other biogenic elements, inhibition of mineralization and humification, the release of conserved carbon (coal, oil, gas) and its oxidation, disruption of large-scale processes in the atmosphere that affect the climate, etc. Ultimately, all this leads to ecological crises in the biosphere.

Ecological crisis (according to I. I. Dedyu) - a situation that occurs in ecological systems (biogeocenoses) as a result of imbalance under the influence of natural disasters or as a result of anthropogenic factors. More broadly ecological crisis- a critical phase in the development of the biosphere, during which a qualitative renewal of living matter occurs (the extinction of some species and the emergence of others).

In the prehistory and history of mankind, a number of environmental crises are distinguished. (Table 3).

The modern crisis is often called the “crisis of decomposers”, since decomposers no longer have time to clean the biosphere from anthropogenic waste or are potentially unable to do this due to the alien nature of the emitted synthetic substances - xenobiotics. In other words, the biosphere has lost the ability to self-repair.

Table 3

Ecological crises in the development of the biosphere and civilizations

(N. F. Reimers, 1992 - with changes)

	Name of the crisis	Time	Causes of the crisis	Ways out out of crisis
	Predantpropogenic (aridization)		The onset of the dry period (aridization of the climate)	emergence upright anthropoids
	Depletion of gathering and fishing resources for humans		Lack of resources available to primitive man	The simplest measures such as burning vegetation for updated ecosystems
	Overhunting of large animals (crisis of consumers)		Destruction of available large animals by a human hunter	Transition to primitive agriculture, pastoralism (Neolithic Revolution)
	Primitive irrigated agriculture	1.5–2 thousand years ago	Primitive irrigation, concomitant depletion and salinization of soils	Transition to non-irrigated (rainfed) agriculture
	Lack of plant resources and food (crisis of producers)	150–250 years	Exhaustive land use, backward technologies	Industrial revolution, new technologies in agriculture
	Global environmental pollution and the threat of resource depletion (decomposer crisis)	Until now	debilitating nature management, multi-waste technology	Energy-saving technologies, waste-free production, search for environmentally friendly solutions
	Global thermodynamic (thermal pollution)	Started and predicted	The release of a large amount of heat into the environment, especially from internal sources, the greenhouse effect	Limiting energy use, preventing the greenhouse effect, finding solutions
	Global Ecological Systems Reliability Exhaustion	First signs and prognosis	Violation of the ecological balance on a planetary scale	Priority of environmental values ​​over all others, search for solutions

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Almost simultaneously with the “crisis of decomposers”, two other ecological stresses are actively manifested: thermodynamic (thermal) and caused by a decrease in the reliability of ecosystems. They are associated with the environmental consequences of overproduction of energy in the troposphere (greenhouse effect, construction of thermal and nuclear power plants, etc.), as well as with the violation of the natural ecological balance. These environmental crises are likely to be resolved on the basis of the energy and planned environmental revolution (Fig. 6).

Rice. 6. Ecological crises in the revolution (according to N. F. Reimers, 1990)

The first, according to scientists, will be the maximum energy savings and the transition to its sources, which add almost no heat to the surface layer of the troposphere, the second - in a regulated co-evolution (i.e. parallel, joint, interconnected evolution of all living beings of the biosphere) in the "society - nature" system, the construction of the noosphere.

There is an important observation: common to all anthropogenic crises is that the exit from them was accompanied, as a rule, by a decrease in the population, its migration and

social upheavals, in some cases crises ended with a change in the social system. Thus, the first anthropogenic crisis caused the resettlement of hunters, or the "great migration of peoples." The transition to agriculture and cattle breeding was accompanied by the disintegration of the primitive communal system and the emergence of a slave-owning system, which was accompanied by desertification and depletion of land resources and the transition to the feudal system.

RUSSIAN CHEMICAL - TECHNOLOGICAL UNIVERSITY them. D. I. MENDELEEV

CHAIR OF PHILOSOPHY

ESSAY

OFF THE TOPIC: NATURE AND SOCIETY. GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES.

POSTGRADUATE STUDENT OF THE CORRESPONDENCE DEPARTMENT

Krainova E.A.

SCIENTIFIC DIRECTOR

_________________ / ________________

MOSCOW, 2003

Introduction.

The global ecological crisis that has engulfed the biosphere of our planet makes us turn with special interest to the history of past ecological crises. The most famous and well-studied crisis occurred at the end of the Cretaceous, which caused the extinction of dinosaurs and Mesozoic biota. This crisis opened the way for the development of angiosperms, higher insects, mammals and birds.

The flourishing and extinction of individual large branches of organisms is a natural evolutionary process, which is accompanied by a change in environmental conditions on Earth or in its large regions. Ultimately, most species are destined to become extinct sooner or later. Some of them are transformed into more advanced types in evolutionary terms, but most organisms, in the end, cannot adapt to constantly emerging new environmental conditions or compete with more adapted species and therefore die out.

Thus, on the path of evolution, various social formations arose, were reborn and died out.

Social formations (society) are a special, highest stage in the development of living systems of the biosphere, which manifests itself in the functioning and development of social organizations, institutions, movements, as well as social contradictions (in the framework of this work, environmental crises).

Almost all living beings on Earth were in close relationship with nature and obeyed the general ecological laws.

By nature here it is expedient to understand the unity of space, time, matter and processes that ensure this unity.

However, over the past 12 million years, under severe conditions of physical and mental stress, a suprasocial species has formed Homo sapiens sapiens(A reasonable man), who, having learned to use the advantages of his high intellect and blood-related relations, got out of trials and became the master of all life on Earth.

Ecological crises in the history of mankind.

The idea that the extinction of the mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, cave bear, cave lion at the end of the Ice Age was first questioned by the Ukrainian paleontologist Pidoplichko I.G. , who hypothesized that the Cro-Magnon was responsible for the extinction of the mammoth. According to the calculations of Masson V.M. in the era of the Upper Paleolithic in the Acheulean era, 250-300 people lived in the Prut-Dniester interfluve. During the Mousterian era, the population of this territory increased by a third and amounted to 270 - 320 people. The basis of their food was the cave bear, tarpan, bison, reindeer, which accounted for up to 83% of the prey.

From a biological point of view, the behavior of extinct animals and the Cro-Magnon can be divided into two main types: selfish and altruistic behavior. Selfish behavior prescribes to an individual a strategy of actions that provides individuals with maximum survival even to the detriment of other individuals. This kind of behavior has developed in the Cro-Magnon due to individual natural selection. Altruistic behavior assumes in the strategy of an individual's actions a certain component of such actions that do not directly contribute to the survival of the individual, but help its genetic relatives to survive. This line of behavior is supported by group selection, which favors the survival of a similar genotype presented in close relatives. Such group selection is, in essence, a variant of individual natural selection, since the unit of application of individual selection is a single genotype present in a single individual, and the unit of application of group selection is the same single genotype replicated in several related individuals.

The gradual increase in the number of Cro-Magnons in the Upper Paleolithic, the extermination of some species and the reduction in the number of others, led mankind to the first evolutionary crisis in history.

The invention of the bow and arrow in the Mesolithic contributed to the expansion of the number of hunting species. Evidence of the anthropogenic load in this period is the disappearance of the sea cow ( Hydrodamalus stelleri) .

The Neolithic period following the Mesolithic is associated with the transition from gathering and hunting to crop and animal husbandry. This stage of development began earlier in the Middle East, where the first types of cereals were bred. The goat and the ancestors of the sheep were also domesticated here. By moving from gathering and hunting to farming and animal husbandry, humanity provided itself with food and got the opportunity to increase its population. At the same time, the number of domestic animals increased sharply.

In order to expand agricultural land and pastures, forests were burned. Due to primitive agriculture, the soil quickly lost its original properties and degraded, then new forests were burned. The reduction in the area of ​​forests led to a decrease in the level of rivers and groundwater.

Irrigated agriculture was an undeniable progress: crop yields increased, and with it the size of settlements, the number of irrigation canals (see Fig. 2) and the number of domestic animals increased. However, during irrigation, a person encountered soil salinization, therefore, in the place of the once fertile flood lands and tugai, clayey and saline deserts and semi-deserts arose. The accumulation of large masses of people and livestock in small riverine spaces has led to the pollution of river waters.

For the first time, the problem of drinking water quality arose. Already in Mesopotamia, special canals with aqueducts were being built to transport unpolluted drinking water to cities located on large rivers.

The structure of the agrocenosis affects the albedo value, the parameters of water and carbon metabolism, i.e. into quantities that we call climate-forming factors. The largest result of the Neolithic agricultural revolution, due to overgrazing of herds of cattle and sheep, was the creation of the Sahara desert. The expanding rice production in China and Southeast Asia has set in motion a new anthropogenic factor -

Rice. 2. The growth in the number of settlements (points) and the construction of irrigation canals (lines) in Mesopotamia near Uruk. The left picture is earlier Uruk time; The right picture is late Uruk time.

an increase in the release of methane into the atmosphere, and the burning of forests for pastures - carbon dioxide. For the first time on our planet, the problem of climate warming due to greenhouse gases arose, which confronted humanity with all its severity in the last third of the twentieth century.

The intensive development of agriculture and animal husbandry led to a new attack on wildlife. A powerful reserve has appeared for increasing the volume of food and thereby increasing the total ecological capacity of the human habitat. By 1500 AD, the population of the Earth was about 350 million people, of which 1% or 3.5 million people accounted for hunters, fishermen and gatherers.

It has now been scientifically proven that with every tenfold decrease in the area (range), on average, the territory loses 30% of the species of organisms characteristic of the area. Thus, an increase in the number of one species within its range reduces biological diversity and worsens the quality of the environment, which inevitably leads to environmental crises.

The level of demography of society and its impact on nature.

The first (Upper Paleolithic) population explosion of mankind was accompanied by the Upper Paleolithic technological revolution. The second (Pleistocene/Holocene) population explosion triggered the Neolithic agricultural revolution. And, finally, the third (modern, which began in the 11th - mid-16th centuries) population explosion caused an industrial technological revolution in Western Europe.

The number of animal species in nature is regulated by natural selection, competition and predation. These parameters determine the capacity of the medium. Due to changes in environmental conditions, the number and density of populations are constantly changing. Usually these fluctuations are disordered and depend on a random combination of many factors. But in any case, the population density fluctuates around the level of the average capacity of the environment. If the environmental resistance is low for a long time, for example, due to favorable weather and food conditions, then the species may reproduce rapidly.

After the Quaternary glaciation 13–10 million years ago, when the eco-environment was reorganized from less to more productive and back, specialized forms of mammals could not quickly reorganize and died out, and only terrestrial bipedal hominids with equal teeth turned out to be the best option for an evolutionary response to the beginning rise and fall in the bioproductivity of the environment.

Due to the high metabolism, the life span and ontogeny of hominids turned out to be extended compared to other mammals of equal size. For this reason, the evolutionary-ecological reactions of hominids to changes in the eco-environment were inhibited. Standard mammals respond to a temporary increase in the bioproductivity of the eco-environment (we are talking about short-term environmental changes) by an immediate increase in their livestock, which, with the depletion of natural resources, entails a decrease in the number of animals. This process, called population waves, ensures a generally stable population of animals in a biome. Non-participation in population waves created for hominids a tendency towards slow but continuous demographic growth.

From an ecological point of view, the emergence of a productive economy meant that the population explosion in primitive society required a similar population explosion in the environment of organisms that could serve as an acceptable source of food for Australopithecus. This allowed the demographically growing society to maintain a trophic (food) energy balance with the environment. In fact, agriculture and animal husbandry is, from an ecological point of view, an artificial population explosion of a number of plants and animals edible for humans. It is quite obvious that such a population explosion can only be explained by a previous population explosion in Australopithecus.

and on the dispersion (s r) at the maximum population size N m Т = f(r, s r , N m) (Goodman, 1989).

The study of the model showed that the extinction of the population is possible under the condition s r > 2r, provided that r and N m can be represented as functions of body mass. It follows from this that for a high 95% probability of survival over the next 100 years of the population Homo sapiens sapiens should have a population of at least 500 individuals. For comparison, the population of elephants is 100, and that of mice is 10,000.

Probably the normal biologically determined abundance of the species Homo sapiens sapiens with a body weight of 10 to 100 kg should correspond to the range of species numbers in the range of 500 - 10,000,000 individuals, where the lower limit is determined by the probability of population survival, and the upper limit by the capacity of the environment.

Calculations show that humanity has exceeded the maximum population limit by 610 times. The last statement suggests that the global increase in the number Homo sapiens sapiens represents a danger.

The level of development of society's technology and its impact on nature.

In addition to a high level of specific metabolism, man and his ancestors had another important difference from higher animals, namely: all tool hominids had the means of collective productive consumption (collective tools). Unlike other tool animals, hominids have mastered the means of collective and at the same time productive consumption: tools made in accordance with the collective tradition and used in various collective crafts.

From an information point of view, in order for the entire part of the community engaged in the production of collective tools to be in the same position in the production process, the optimal number of direct creators of the industry should be close to the quantitative indicator of technology. When the degree of complexity of a technology is equivalent to the number of its creators, each of them, relatively speaking, accounts for a certain percentage of the total degree of technology complexity, which expresses the average optimal efficiency of its reproduction. If for some reason the community grows, then, on the one hand, non-standard products begin to accumulate in the products of labor, completely redundant for the informational revival of the replication process, since they begin to duplicate each other; on the other hand, the percentage of technology per producer falls, which is equivalent to a decrease in the efficiency of crop reproduction.

In the opposite case, when the size of the community decreases, on the one hand, the complexity of culture replication increases, and on the other hand, a biologically unacceptable moment of degradation of the demographic state of society appears. Obviously, of the three possible options for the ratio of the degree of technology complexity to the demographic state of the community, the intermediate one is optimal, when demographic and technological indicators are close.

The possible connection of demography with technology sheds new light on the dynamics of the development of productive forces. The latter consist of personal (subjective factor) and material (means and objects of labor) elements, and the self-development of the productive forces begins with the personal element. This scheme seems quite plausible, but the initial change in the subjective factor of production is determined not by the improvement of the producer, but by the change in his demographic state, which entails technological changes. The facts show that changes in the degree of complexity of human technologies in history were chronological consequences of changes in the demographic state of mankind.

A vivid example that occurred at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic, when a modern type of man came from Africa to Eurasia. The contemporary Neanderthaloid population had less complex industries than the Upper Paleolithic and, consequently, was smaller than the carriers of the Upper Paleolithic cultures. Neanderthaloids and modern humans also occupied the same ecological niche in which they competed. As a result, modern man, with its greater numbers (more precisely, population density) and more efficient technology, has supplanted its Neanderthaloid contemporaries. Similar events took place in the Neolithic-Chalcolithic era, when the Middle Eastern Sino-Caucasians, and then the Indo-Europeans, spread across Europe, possessing greater population densities and more sophisticated technology of the productive economy than the Mesolithic natives. The latter were forced out or assimilated, and only in the west of Europe did they apparently take over the productive economy, preserving cultural continuity with the Mesolithic state.

The level of social organization of society and its impact on nature.

The Paleolithic and Mesolithic communities were in ecological balance with the environment, and the local level of its bioproductivity favored some particular variant of blood-kinship relations characteristic of primates (matrilineal endogamous promiscuity, matrilineal exogamy, patrilineal hierarchical endogamy and other variants, including a paired family, etc.). ). It is possible that the Middle Eastern inhabitants of the subtropics, with their significant bioproductivity, could have matrilineal blood-related structures, while their neighbors in less productive regions had rather a tendency to patrilineal hierarchical endogamy (with a tendency to organize harems).

The material means of internal social integration of the Neolithic society fall into two main groups of phenomena that are in a genetic connection. The first group of integrative phenomena is associated with the objective form of the structure of a civilized society, which is embodied in the material formations of an urban-type settlement. The city is a means of collective unproductive consumption of the sacred (cult, religious places, buildings, structures), administrative, housing and fortification (defensive structures) type, it is an objective form of the structure of a society of divided labor, designed to rigidly link the living conditions of very heterogeneous divisions of labor in a single urban conglomerate, which performed the most important social-integrative function for a society split by the division of labor.

From observations of primates in captivity, it is known that they perceive the restriction of their freedom, absolutely regardless of the availability of food, as falling into an unproductive desert biotope, begin to compete for food (despite the fact that there is enough of it) and organize patrilineal hierarchical community structures. Primates in this case react to the lack of constant free access to food sources, which is indeed equivalent to the conditions of an unproductive biotope or a biotope in which access to food is limited by predators (the situation with baboons in the open savanna).

Human behavior in the transition to urban life faced a similar problem. Patrilineal relations became kinship relations in urban civilization, and the citywide social structure acquired hierarchical features. In form, this organization had an ancient ethological (natural behavioral) origin. However, in the conditions of a civilized society, potentially disintegrated by the specialization of labor, the hierarchical patriarchal structure began to function beyond the framework of blood-related relations and determined the specific centralized-distributive nature of the economic relations of labor units. In this case, it is not the genesis of the hierarchical structure itself that needs to be explained, but its socio-economic application, the reason for the implementation of which is visible in the suitability of the hierarchical structure for socio-integrative functions.

At first glance, the hierarchical structure of a civilized society was a successful invention for the regulation of socio-economic relationships between labor units. But on the other hand, it increased the pressure on nature due to an increase in population density and an aggressive attitude towards reality.

Thus, civilization, having inherited from the primitive society the beginnings of a productive economy, and the prerequisites for the hierarchical organization of society, placed all these social achievements in a certain social-integrative matrix, which made it possible for them to further specialize and develop without prejudice to the integrity of society, but significantly changing the natural environment.

Synergetics or forecast of the future.

In the past twenty years, it has been shown that the "long-term forecast" of the behavior of a huge number of even relatively simple mechanical, physical, chemical and ecological systems can be predicted within a limited time. An arbitrarily small inaccuracy in determining the initial state of the system grows with time, and from some time on we lose the ability to predict anything.

Indeed, there is a vast area in which our ability to predict is very limited. However, in some cases, a conscious barrier not only deprives of illusions, but also helps to see the true scale of the problems. This is due to the irreversibility of the theory of relativity by the so-called dynamic chaos. The most important property of deterministic systems with chaotic behavior is sensitivity to initial data. Initial deviations increase over time, small causes lead to large consequences. Thus, in deterministic systems with chaotic behavior, there must be failures in order to maintain a relatively stable state.

It is known that many systems of our body operate in a chaotic or close to it mode. Moreover, chaos often acts as a sign of health, and excessive orderliness as a symptom of illness. Researchers of deterministic systems with chaotic behavior are trying to see behind this a new, deeper level of the unity of nature.

These systems have many degrees of freedom. However, everything is arranged in such a way that in the process of evolution several main criteria are singled out, to which all the others are adjusted. These principal degrees of freedom are called order parameters. There are also prohibition rules. Attempts to "impose" something on deterministic systems with chaotic behavior or try to influence them by trial and error are doomed to failure.

In the process of development and stabilization of the activity of such systems, impulses should arise and disappear (in other words: flow from one type to another), which finely regulate the interaction of positive (for example, catalysts) and negative (for example, inhibitors) feedbacks. The first should make the spatially homogeneous state unstable and provide the possibility of the birth of structures. The latter are needed to stabilize processes far from equilibrium and set the range in which the order parameters will change.

At present, in futurology, global dynamics, the term "co-evolution" is often mentioned. Co-evolution is understood as a joint change (co-evolution of man and nature, technologies and civilizational imperatives) and interaction in the course of development. Co-evolution allows a complex system to change in concert without falling apart into its simplest parts.

There is a very high probability that the aggravated environmental problems and the depletion of resources are preparing our civilization for a sharp slowdown in technological development. And only deep meaningful mathematical models related to a specific historical reality can become a decisive argument here.

The mathematical model of the picture, for example, the destruction of the environment when using traditional technologies for nature management, corresponds to a sharp decrease in living standards and, over time, reaching the level of renewable resources. The two upper isolated branches (sustainable and unstable) correspond, for example, to a new nature management technology. And here the great utility of diagrams like the ones drawn becomes clear. Let us assume that we in no way represent the curve of our historical development. Then catastrophes, disasters and serious troubles await us at the points l 3 and l 4 (see Fig. 4c).

Rice. 4. Bifurcation diagrams of co-evolution of complex non-stationary structures that allow visual historical interpretation .

a.- Bifurcation with a stable branch of development.

b.- Bifurcation with an unstable branch of development. May correspond to the crisis of the "consumer society", which has very high living standards.

c.- The collision of the "phantom" with the trajectory of sustainable development, after which catastrophic changes occur.

Conclusion.

Comparison of the demographic, technological and social state of society in the pre-civilized and civilized eras forces us to look for socio-philosophical means of explaining the nature of social contradictions, the definition of which is associated with a number of methodological difficulties, because the process of differentiation of society is unlimited and develops according to the law of geometric progression.

From an empirical point of view, the contradictions between society and nature in the form of environmental crises arise when three interrelated factors are combined: the achievement by local communities of a significant demographic state capable of giving rise to a civilization with a certain social structure (ancient Egypt, Sumer, Elam, Harappa) and the dominance of a productive economy.

To maintain a relatively highly bio-productive environment, it is favorable to stimulate matrilineal exogamous blood-kinship relationships without transition to promiscuity (the stage of unrestricted relations between the sexes, with violations of the norms of marriage and family forms), which stabilize the growth of the population. Homo sapiens sapiens and contribute to the harmonious development of society and nature.

This statement is not an unambiguous solution to social contradictions, because on the one hand, a real civilized society lacks resources, biodiversity is declining and the quality of the natural environment is deteriorating - this is a negative fact of a large number of people. But on the other hand, a civilized society has acquired a number of properties that are directly related to the ability to identify and predict entities, improve technologies and social behavior - this is a positive fact of a large number. Because under the conditions of the law of large numbers, not only the behavior of members of society, but also the nature of the information at their disposal becomes predictable. A civilized society is turning into a so-called "living computer" capable of accumulating information about entities expressing certain positive knowledge about nature and society, and looking for ways for further co-evolutionary development.

Culture, religion, ideology, scientific theories to a large extent determine not only the current state of society, but also its expectations (long-term forecasts), which in some cases can play a stimulating, and in others destructive role.

At the present moment, there is every reason to believe that history is preparing many surprises for our civilization. According to the forecasts of the authors of the book "Synergetics and Forecasts of the Future", there is a fairly rapid departure from the previous trajectory of human development. The search for possible solutions to this shift is the super-task of all science, because the scale of the expected changes is too great, and a lot must change in the person himself.

The choice today will have to be made not between good and evil, not between stability and volatility, but between greater and lesser evil, between various unstable trajectories for which different prices will have to be paid.

Bibliography.

1. Akimova T.A., Khaskin V.V. Ecology: A textbook for universities. – M.: UNITI, 1998, 455 p.

2. Budyko M.N. On the causes of extinction of some animal species at the end of the Pleistocene // Izv. Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Ser. geogr. 1967. No. 2.

3. Vorontsov N.N. Ecological crises in the history of mankind. // Soros educational journal. 1999 No. 10, p. 2 - 10.

4. Kapitsa S.P., Kurdyumov S.P., Malinetskii G.G. Synergetics and forecasts of the future. Ed. 2nd. M: Editorial URSS, 2001, 288 p.

5. Klyagin N.V. The origin of civilization (socio-philosophical aspect). - M., 1996. - 252 p.

6. Komissarov B.N. Novistika and the study of global problems of our time // Interdisciplinarity in science and education. St. Petersburg, 2001, p. 63-72.

7. Lisichkin G.V. Ecological crisis and ways to overcome it. // Soros educational journal. 1998 No. 12, p. 65 - 70.

8. Lopatin I.K. Diversity of the animal world: past, present, conservation problems. // Soros educational journal. 1997 No. 7, p. 18 - 24.

9. Lot A. To other Tassili: New discoveries in the Sahara. L .: Art, 1984, 215 p.

10. Pidoplichko I.G. About the Ice Age. Kyiv: Publishing House of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR, 1946. V.2. 264 p.

11.See: Vishnevsky A.G. Reproduction of the population and society: History, modernity, a look into the future. M., 1982. S. 67–71.

12. See, for example: Dewsbury D. Decree. op. pp. 56–57, 339: Pianca E. evolutionary ecology. M., 1981. S. 187–190; Manning O. Decree. op. pp. 235, 330

13.See: Klyagin N.V. To the prehistory of civilization // Civilization and culture in the historical process. M., 1983. S. 15; He is. From prehistory to history: Paleosociology and social philosophy. M., 1992. S. 143.

On the topic "Ecological crises in the history of mankind"

Pupils of 10 "A" class

GOU secondary school №513

Moscow

Vasilyeva Kristina

I What is the ecological crisis and its causes.

II Ecological crises in the history of mankind.

III Ecological mistakes of some civilizations.

2. As a mongoose against rats used.

3. War as a cause of ecological crises.

IV Problem of the Aral Sea and ways to solve it.

VI List of used literature.

What is an environmental crisis and its causes.

An ecological crisis is a violation of natural processes in the biosphere, which results in rapid changes in the environment. There is a tension in the relationship between humanity and nature, associated with a discrepancy between the volume of consumption of natural components by human society and the limited resource and environmental capabilities of the biosphere. At the same time, it is important to pay attention to the differences in scale between the global ecological crisis common to the biosphere and local or regional ecological disturbances and local ecological catastrophes.

The increase in local environmental disasters indicates the approach of a global environmental crisis and the possibility of a global environmental catastrophe. However, ecological crises can and have had a favorable resolution in the history of mankind.

The growth of the modern ecological crisis in the relationship between nature and society is associated with the scientific and technological revolution. At the same time, crisis situations arising from the depletion of natural resources are successfully resolved by improving the technologies for the extraction, transportation, processing of traditional natural resources, the discovery and use of new ones, as well as the manufacture of synthetic materials.

Modern environmental crises have several causes:

Unrestrained and very rapid growth of the world's population
imperfect agricultural and industrial technologies
the frivolity of mankind and the neglect of the laws of the development of the biosphere

Ecological crises in the history of mankind.

1. The first ecological crisis.

The largest herbivores - mammoth, hairy rhinoceros, wild horse, as well as large predators - cave bear, cave lion, saber-toothed wild cat - disappeared by the end of the last glaciation, i.e. 10 - 20 thousand years ago. The latest discovery of mammoth remains dates back to the 7th millennium BC. e., and the remains of a large-mouthed deer - to the XVIII - X millennium BC. e.

Proponents of the hypothesis about the extermination of large animals of the so-called "mammoth fauna" by a human hunter consider this phenomenon the first ecological crisis on the planet, or a consumer crisis (from Latin consumo - consumer). Even if we assume that the primitive hunter was the exterminator of the "mammoth fauna", it still could not lead to an ecological crisis. Rather, it was a "food" crisis for those groups of hunters who specialized in large herbivores. It is now well known that the ancient hunters changed the “profile” of hunting: they switched from one species of animals to another. Consequently, after the natural extinction of the "mammoth fauna" there was no "food" crisis, just primitive people began to hunt medium-sized animals.

It should be emphasized that a person could not completely exterminate one or another large mammal. A sharp decrease in the number as a result of hunting leads to the division of the species range into separate islands. The fate of small isolated populations is deplorable: if a species is not able to quickly restore the integrity of its range, inevitable extinction occurs due to epizootics or a shortage of individuals of one sex with an overabundance of the other.

Mammoths, cave lion and cave hyena (Crocuta spelaea) were destroyed. Man's companion disappeared - a cave bear, twice the size of a brown bear. This species was confined to karst landscapes and became not only a competitor of humans in the use of shelters, but also an important object of hunting. Bison were subjected to mass destruction.

The gradual increase in the human population in the Upper Paleolithic, the extermination of some species and the reduction in the number of others led mankind to the first ecological and economic crisis in its history. Hunting species remained underdeveloped, for which driven and battue hunting was not effective - many ungulate plain and mountain landscapes were difficult to get with a spear.

The cardinal way out of this ecological crisis was found by the Neolithic revolution.

2. Neolithic revolution and its ecological consequences.

After the Mesolithic, at different times in different territories, the Neolithic began - the period of the manufacture of polished stone tools, the invention of stone drilling, the appearance of an ax (which contributed to the reduction of forests), and later the invention of molding and annealing clay for making dishes. Accordingly, pre-ceramic and ceramic Neolithic are distinguished.

The domestication of animals has led to the competitive displacement of their wild ancestors and relatives from their native habitats. The ancestor of the common goat, the bezoar goat (Capra aegargus), the ancestor of the common sheep, the Asian mouflon (Ovis gmelini), were pushed back to the highlands of Western Asia. The domestication of the horse, a descendant of the European tarpan, led to the almost universal disappearance of a wild species that survived in the southern Russian steppes until the 19th century, but disappeared in most of its range at the end of the Neolithic. Wild relatives of domesticated species have also been ousted. Thus, the Przewalski's horse (Equus przevalskii) survived until the middle of the 20th century in the ecological pessimum of its range - in the Gobi, but much earlier it was forced out by domestic horses and humans from its ecological optimum - the steppes of Khentei, Altai and Kazakhstan.

The largest ecological result of Neolithic pastoralism was the creation of the Sahara Desert. As studies by French archaeologists have shown, 10 thousand years ago there was a savannah in the Sahara, hippopotamuses, giraffes, African elephants, ostriches lived. Man overgrazing herds of cattle and sheep turned the savannah into a desert. The rivers and lakes have dried up - the hippos have disappeared, the savannah has disappeared - the giraffes, ostriches, most of the antelope species have disappeared. Following the disappearance of the North African savannas, the once numerous cattle also disappeared.

The desertification of vast areas in the Neolithic was the cause of the second ecological crisis. Humanity came out of it in two ways:

1) moving to the north, where as the glaciers melted, new territories were liberated;

2) the transition to irrigated agriculture in the valleys of the great southern rivers - the Nile, the Tigris and the Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges, the Yangtze and the Yellow River. This is where the earliest civilizations originated.

3. Ecological consequences of the era of great geographical discoveries.

This topic is extremely broad. The 507 years that have passed since the first voyage of Columbus have changed the world beyond recognition. The list of species of cultivated plants, domestic animals, synanthropic species exported from America and brought there is huge. Many acclimatized species in the new place play a greater ecological, economic and cultural role than in their homeland. It is hard to imagine Russia without potatoes, Ukraine without sunflowers and corn, Bulgaria without tomatoes, Georgia without beans and tea, Uzbekistan without cotton, Canada without wheat, the "wild west" of the United States or Argentina without cattle and horses, Australia and New Zealand without sheep. .

The sailors of Columbus brought syphilis to Europe from the West Indies. The Spanish conquistadors brought smallpox to the Americas. A 38-chromosome black rat was brought to America from Europe with Spanish sailors. The Portuguese settled her in Africa and Western India. (The rats escaping from a sinking ship are precisely black rats.) Sailors from Southeast Asia settled an East Asian 42-chromosome species of black rat around the islands of Oceania. Along with the goods, a person settled around the world and a gray rat, or pasyuk, not too fond of sea travel. Synanthropic house mice settled from Eurasia. To combat rats, mice and snakes, the mongoose was brought to the tropical islands from India. Mongooses successfully ate rats, then destroyed endemic species of rodents and birds, and then died out themselves.

The fauna of the islands is especially vulnerable. In Madagascar, the Malagasy (the main population of the Republic of Madagascar) in the 10th-12th centuries destroyed the giant flightless ostrich-like birds epiornis. In New Zealand, the Maori (the main population of New Zealand before the arrival of Europeans) destroyed giant moas. By the 17th century, the giant flightless dodo, or dodo, had been destroyed on the island of Mauritius. In the 18th century, the Russians destroyed the sea cow on the Commander Islands, in the 19th century European colonists destroyed the natives of Tasmania, and in the 20th century, due to competition with the dogs brought here (the dingo was not here!) the marsupial wolf disappeared.

Ecological mistakes of some civilizations.

1. Extermination of sparrows in China.

The extermination of sparrows is the brightest side of the large-scale pest control campaign organized in China at the initiative of Mao Zedong as part of the Great Leap Forward policy (1958-1962).

The idea of ​​the campaign was to destroy the "four pests" - rats, mosquitoes, flies and sparrows. The campaign against sparrows took on the most massive character. Propaganda explained that sparrows massively devour the grains of the crop, bringing a huge loss to the national economy. The plan was developed in 1958. He was supported by the President of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Academician Guo Moruo.

Certain contradictions in the interaction of society with nature are inevitable. The progress of society comes at the expense of nature, because, in order to satisfy their needs, people borrow material goods from the natural environment. However, if society exists at the expense of nature, then progressive development should be endless only under the condition of the infinity and diversity of the natural environment. But since society develops in a limited space, such as our planet, it inevitably faces an environmental problem at a certain stage. This problem is due to the growing contradictions in the relationship between society and nature, which ultimately leads to environmental crises in the biosphere. Ecological crisis- this is a change in the biosphere or its parts over a significant area, accompanied by a change in the environment and ecosystems as a whole into a new quality.

In the biosphere, crisis phenomena have repeatedly occurred even before the appearance of man, caused by climate change and the accompanying glaciation or desertification. According to the periodization of N.F. Reimers (Table 5), the last pre-anthropogenic crisis occurred about 3 million years ago. It was associated with a sharp drying up of the land, which led to the appearance of steppes and savannahs in place of forests and the emergence of upright anthropoids.

Table 5

Environmental crises in human history

№	Name of the crisis	Time	Causes of the crisis	Ways out of the crisis
	Pre-anthropogenic (aridization)	3 million years ago	The onset of a dry period (aridization of the climate)	The emergence of upright anthropoids
	Depletion of gathering and fishing resources for humans	30-50 thousand years ago	Lack of resources available to primitive man	The simplest bio-technical measures such as burning vegetation to renew ecosystems
	Overhunting of large animals (crisis of consumers)	10-50 thousand years ago	Destruction of available large animals by a human hunter	Transition to primitive agriculture, cattle breeding (Neolithic revolution)
	Primitive irrigated agriculture	1.5-2 thousand years ago	Primitive irrigation, concomitant depletion and soil salinization	Transition to non-irrigated (rainfed) agriculture
	Lack of plant resources and food	150-250 years ago	Exhaustive land use, backward technologies	Industrial revolution, new technologies in agriculture
	Global environmental pollution and the threat of resource depletion	30-50 years ago to present. time	Exhaustive nature management, multi-waste technologies	Energy-saving technologies, non-waste production, search for solutions
	Global thermodynamic (thermal pollution)	Started and predicts	The release of a large amount of heat into the environment, especially from internal sources, the greenhouse effect	Limitation of the use of electricity, prevention of the greenhouse effect, search for solutions
	Global Ecosystem Reliability Exhaustion	First signs and prognosis	Violation of the ecological balance on a planetary scale	Priority of environmental values ​​over all others, search for solutions

Since its inception, human activity has repeatedly contradicted nature, which gave rise to crises of various scales. But due to the small population and ᴇᴦο poor technical equipment, they never took on a global scale. The exit from them was accompanied, as a rule, by a decrease in the population, ᴇᴦο migration, social upheavals and a change in the social system. Over the past century, the technical capabilities of man to change the natural environment have grown rapidly, reaching their highest point in the era of the scientific and technological revolution. Mankind has declared itself as a force, in terms of the power of its impact on the biosphere, it is almost not inferior to the total action of all living organisms. Using not only the huge energy resources of the biosphere, but also non-biospheric energy sources, mankind accelerates the geochemical transformations of nature, disrupts large-scale processes in the atmosphere that affect the climate, and so on. As a result, the current crisis has engulfed the entire planet, i. is global. He's called decomposer crisis, since natural decomposers do not have time to purify the biosphere from anthropogenic waste or are potentially unable to do this due to the alien nature of the emitted synthetic substances. In this regard, there is a threat of global pollution of the biosphere. In addition, two other environmental stresses simultaneously occur: 1) thermodynamic (thermal) and 2) a decrease in the reliability of ecosystems. They are associated with the environmental consequences of energy overproduction in the lower troposphere and with the violation of the natural ecological balance.