Environmental Impact
See also: Environmental issues with agricultureIronically, given the industry was started by government research aimed at soil conservation, a number of negative impacts have emerged. The two major criticisms are the run off of fertiliser into streams and waterways which encourages marine plant growth, leading to choking of the waterways and altering the fresh water ecosystem, disadvantaging many fish, (and frustrating anglers). To minimise impact, topdressing is now prohibited within certain distances of water. The second impact is less direct. By enabling sheep to be run profitably on steep hillsides, the topdressing industry stopped reforestation of otherwise uneconomic land, contributing to the erosion it was originally designed to prevent.
The mining of superphosphate from guano deposits on the tiny South Pacific island of Nauru temporarily made the island one of the richest nations in the world on a per capita basis, but removed most of the soil from the island making 80% of it unusable.
Read more about this topic: Aerial Topdressing
Famous quotes containing the word impact:
“One can describe a landscape in many different words and sentences, but one would not normally cut up a picture of a landscape and rearrange it in different patterns in order to describe it in different ways. Because a photograph is not composed of discrete units strung out in a linear row of meaningful pieces, we do not understand it by looking at one element after another in a set sequence. The photograph is understood in one act of seeing; it is perceived in a gestalt.”
—Joshua Meyrowitz, U.S. educator, media critic. “The Blurring of Public and Private Behaviors,” No Sense of Place: The Impact of Electronic Media on Social Behavior, Oxford University Press (1985)