Ecological problem is a change in the natural environment as a result of human activity, leading to a violation of the structure and functioning nature . This is an anthropogenic problem. In other words, it arises as a result of the negative impact of man on nature.

Ecological problems can be local (a certain area is affected), regional (a specific region) and global (the impact is on the entire biosphere of the planet).

Can you give an example of a local environmental problem in your region?

Regional problems cover the territories of large regions, and their influence affects a significant part of the population. For example, pollution of the Volga is a regional problem for the entire Volga region.

The drainage of the swamps of Polesye caused negative changes in Belarus and Ukraine. Water level change Aral Sea- the problem of the entire Central Asian region.

Global environmental problems are problems that pose a threat to all of humanity.

Which of the global environmental problems, in your opinion, cause the most concern? Why?

Let's take a quick look at how environmental issues have changed over the course of human history.

In fact, in a sense, the entire history of human development is a history of increasing impact on the biosphere. In fact, humanity in its progressive development went from one ecological crisis to another. But crises in ancient times were local in nature, and environmental changes were, as a rule, reversible, or not threatening people with total death.

Primitive man, engaged in gathering and hunting, involuntarily disturbed the ecological balance in the biosphere everywhere, spontaneously harmed nature. It is believed that the first anthropogenic crisis (10-50 thousand years ago) was associated with the development of hunting and overfishing of wild animals, when the mammoth, cave lion and bear disappeared from the face of the earth, on which the hunting efforts of the Cro-Magnons were directed. The use of primitive people fire - they burned the forests. This led to a decrease in the level of rivers and groundwater. Overgrazing of pastures may have had the ecological result of the creation of the Sahara desert.

Then, about 2 thousand years ago, followed by a crisis associated with the use of irrigated agriculture. It led to the development of a large number of clay and saline deserts. But keep in mind that in those days the population of the Earth was not numerous, and, as a rule, people had the opportunity to move to other places that were more suitable for life (which is impossible to do now).

In the Age of the Great geographical discoveries the impact on the biosphere has increased. This is due to the development of new lands, which was accompanied by the extermination of many animal species (remember, for example, the fate of the American bison) and the transformation of vast territories into fields and pastures. However, human impact on the biosphere acquired a global scale after the industrial revolution of the 17th-18th centuries. At that time, the scale of human activity increased significantly, as a result of which the geochemical processes occurring in the biosphere began to transform (1). In parallel with the progress of scientific and technological progress, the number of people has sharply increased (from 500 million in 1650, the conditional beginning of the industrial revolution, to the current 7 billion), and, accordingly, the need for food and industrial goods, for an increasing amount of fuel has increased. , metal, machines. This led to a rapid increase in the load on ecological systems, and the level of this load in the middle of the 20th century. - early XXI in. reached a critical value.

How do you understand in this context the inconsistency of the results of technological progress for people?

Mankind has entered the era of the global ecological crisis. Its main components:

• depletion of energy and other resources of the bowels of the planet
• the greenhouse effect,
• depletion of the ozone layer
• soil degradation,
• radiation Hazard,
• transboundary transfer of pollution, etc.

Mankind's movement towards an environmental catastrophe of a planetary nature is confirmed by numerous facts. People continuously accumulate the number of compounds that are not utilized by nature, develop dangerous technologies, store and transport many pesticides and explosives, pollute the atmosphere, hydrosphere and soil. In addition, the energy potential is constantly increasing, the greenhouse effect is being stimulated, etc.

There is a threat of loss of stability of the biosphere (violation of the eternal course of events) and its transition to a new state that excludes the very possibility of human existence. It is often said that one of the causes of the ecological crisis that our planet is in is the crisis of human consciousness. What do you think of it?

But for the time being humanity is able to solve environmental problems!

What conditions are necessary for this?

• The unity of good will of all the inhabitants of the planet in the problem of survival.
• Establishing peace on Earth, ending wars.
• Termination destructive action modern production on the biosphere (resource consumption, environmental pollution, destruction natural ecosystems and biodiversity).

Development of global models of nature restoration and science-based nature management.

Some of the points listed above seem impossible, or not? What do you think?

Undoubtedly, human awareness of the danger of environmental problems is associated with serious difficulties. One of them is caused by non-obviousness for modern man of his natural basis, psychological alienation from nature. Hence the disdainful attitude to the observance of environmentally sound activities, and, to put it simply, the lack of an elementary culture of attitude towards nature on various scales.

To solve environmental problems, it is necessary for all people to develop a new way of thinking, to overcome the stereotypes of technocratic thinking, ideas about inexhaustibility natural resources and misunderstanding of our absolute dependence on nature. An unconditional condition for the further existence of mankind is the observance of the ecological imperative as the basis of ecologically safe behavior in all areas. It is necessary to overcome alienation from nature, to realize and implement personal responsibility for how we treat nature (for saving land, water, energy, for nature protection). Video 5.

There is a saying “think globally, act locally”. How do you understand it?

There are many successful publications and programs devoted to environmental problems and the possibilities of their solution. In the last decade, quite a lot of environmentally oriented films have been shot, and regular environmental film festivals have begun to be held. One of the most outstanding films is the environmental education film HOME (House. Travel Story), which was first presented on June 5, 2009 on World Conservation Day. environment outstanding photographer Yann Arthus-Bertrand and renowned director and producer Luc Besson. This film tells about the life history of planet Earth, the beauty of nature, environmental problems caused by the destructive impact of human activity on the environment, threatening the death of our common home.

It must be said that the premiere of HOME was an unprecedented event in the cinema: for the first time, the film was shown simultaneously in the largest cities of dozens of countries, including Moscow, Paris, London, Tokyo, New York, in the format of an open screening, and free of charge. Viewers saw the one and a half hour film on large screens installed in open areas, in cinema halls, on 60 TV channels (excluding cable networks), on the Internet. HOME was shown in 53 countries. At the same time, in some countries, such as China and Saudi Arabia, the director was denied aerial photography. In India, half of the footage was simply confiscated, and in Argentina, Arthus-Bertrand and his assistants had to spend a week in jail. In many countries, a film about the beauty of the Earth and its environmental problems, the demonstration of which, according to the director, "borders on a political appeal", was banned from showing.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand (fr. Yann Arthus-Bertrand, born March 13, 1946 in Paris) is a French photographer, photojournalist, Chevalier of the Legion of Honor and winner of many other awards

With a story about the film by J. Arthus-Bertrand, we finish our conversation about environmental problems. Watch this movie. It will help you think better than words about what awaits the Earth and humanity in the near future; to understand that everything in the world is interconnected, that our task now is a common one for each of us - to try, as far as possible, to restore the ecological balance of the planet that we have disturbed, without which life on Earth cannot exist.

the video 6 hi den excerpt from the movie Home. The entire film can be viewed http://www.cinemaplayer.ru/29761-_dom_istoriya_puteshestviya___Home.html .

There are approximately 15 million human settlements on Earth today. All of them are in complex interaction with nature. The strength and direction of such interaction in different historical epochs varied depending on the development of certain forms of settlement, the growth rate of cities, their technical equipment, and many other factors. Let us dwell in more detail on the most important issues for urban ecology in the development of cities and urban systems.

Cities of the Ancient World and the Middle Ages

The first settlements arose on Earth probably 10-12 thousand years ago, when agriculture gradually began to turn into one of the most important human occupations. These settlements numbered 100-150 people and were quite distant from each other. Approximately within a radius of 3-4 km, the natural landscape experienced a strong change - the natural cover gradually turned into agrocenoses (fields are cultivated, vegetable gardens, etc.). The area of ​​cultivated plots was small; the immediate surroundings of the village was a mosaic of transformed and uncultivated sections of the landscape, which has a high ecological potential. Within a radius of 10-15 km, the landscape was still almost untouched by man, who used it as a hunting ground and a natural pantry. In general, Neolithic man, due to his small number and low pressure on nature, fit well into the biotic cycle.

Cities arose in the VI-V millennium BC. as a result of an increasingly strong territorial division of labor, the displacement of handicrafts from agriculture and trade. The heyday of the slave system was at the same time the heyday of cities ancient world. So, for example, Babylon (Assyria), Memphis (Egypt) each had 80 thousand inhabitants, Athens during the reign of Pericles - 300 thousand, Carthage - 600 thousand, and Rome of the era of Augustus Octavian - 1 million inhabitants. Ancient cities, with a few exceptions, were distinguished by crowding, low amenities, high building density, exceeding the levels of population density in modern cities.

Cities were closely connected with agriculture, many peasants lived in them. The pressure on nature around the city grew. Landscapes were turning from mosaic to monocultural; soil erosion has become commonplace. Ancient cities, as the focus of cultural, social, commercial and other spheres of life, also became ecological pests of the surrounding area. They consumed water, food and other resources from a large territory without giving anything in return.

The level of transport service and sanitary improvement in the cities of the ancient world was extremely low. For example, the width of the streets in Rome did not exceed 4 m, in Babylon - 3 m. According to Julius Caesar, a special law was approved that limited the time for the movement of various types of carriages through the streets of the city. Due to the overcrowding of structures (bad conditions for changing stagnant air currents over damp lowlands), outbreaks of epidemics were not uncommon. The first plague epidemic in the VI millennium BC. e. in the Eastern Roman Empire, swept many countries of the world and claimed 100 million human lives, approximately 1/3 of the entire population of the Earth.

Already in those ancient times, many philosophers and scientists had doubts about the expediency of the social and functional structure of their contemporary cities.

Even in the ancient epic about Gilgamesh, in the description of M. Vruka (PI thousand BC), the ratio of built-up and unbuilt areas in the city walls is given. Later, many Greek thinkers - Plato, Aristotle, Hippocrates, Vitruvius and others, spoke with treatises that dealt with the issues of the optimal size of settlements, public assessment of hygiene, city planning and other problems of building art and architecture.

The concept of Greek urban planning can be represented according to the descriptions of Plato (5th-4th millennium BC), who believed that, in the ideal case, the city should be planned in such a way that each of its sections had the shortest exit outside the city, and all residents should both in the city and outside it. Hippocrates (5th century AD) substantiated the principles of choosing a place to build a city, taking into account the prevailing winds and their impact on the microclimate and the health of citizens.

Byzantine urban planning legislation, adopted in the form of the “Law of the City” as part of the “Measure of the Righteous” of the end of the 10th century and the leaders of the books (“The Pilot Books”) of the 12th century, determined the spatial structure of the city, taking into account its relationship with the surrounding area.

In the Middle Ages, along with feudalism, which replaced the slave system, a new type of city was born - a fortress city surrounded by powerful defensive structures. Medieval cities were inferior in size to the settlements of the ancient world and rarely numbered more than a few tens of thousands of people. The number of the largest of them - London and Paris, reached in the XIV century. 100 and 30 thousand inhabitants respectively.

At the same time, their hygienic problems were no less acute, and epidemics remained the main threat to the inhabitants. The second plague pandemic that broke out in the 14th century killed about a third of the population of Europe.

The process of city formation can be divided into three stages.

Stage I lasted until the 16th-17th centuries. Mostly local sources of food and water were used, the energy of wind and water mills, horses and other domestic animals, manual labor prevailed in production. The waste that entered the environment was mainly the waste products of people and domestic animals. The environmental problems of ancient cities were associated with pollution of water supply sources by these wastes and, as a result, periodic outbreaks of infectious diseases.

Stage II coincided with the development of land and water transport, roads, the discovery of opportunities for the use of thermal energy for transport and production purposes.

And stage II (began in the XIX century.) Associated with the industrial revolution, was marked by a sharp increase in the impact on the natural environment.

By 1400. The first urbanized country in the modern sense was Great Britain.

The Renaissance was marked by a significant development of urban planning ideas, the emergence, first of all, of urban planning utopias of "ideal cities" by I. Campanella, T. Mora, Filaret and other authors. The proposed schematism of these cities, their emphasized geometricity, is a kind of protest against the chaotically disordered cities of the Middle Ages.

The accelerated pace of urbanization present stage associated with further expansion. energy needs society, the emergence and development of new types of transport, the increase in the system of public services, a high level of comfort of life, intellectual communication.

The word "ecology" is most often used not in a strict sense, but in a narrower one, denoting the relationship of a person with the environment, those changes that occur due to anthropogenic pressure in the biosphere, as well as the problems of people that have their source in the forces of nature. People often tend to idealize the "bright past", and vice versa, to experience apocalyptic moods in relation to the "foggy future".

Fortunately or not, it shows us that "whatever the age, then the iron age", and if we are talking about ecology, then ecological disasters on a regional scale, at least, took place even before the birth of Christ. Since ancient times, man has done nothing but change, transform the nature around him, and since ancient times, the fruits of his activity have returned to him like a boomerang. Usually, anthropogenic changes in nature were superimposed on the actual natural rhythms, intensifying unfavorable tendencies and preventing the development of favorable ones. Because of this, it is often difficult to distinguish where are the negative influences of civilization, and where are the actual natural phenomena. Even today, disputes do not stop, for example, about whether ozone holes and global warming are the result of natural processes or not, but the negativity of human activity is not questioned, the dispute can only be about the degree of influence.

It is possible (although this fact has not been proven absolutely reliably) that man has made a great contribution to the emergence of the largest Sahara desert on the planet. The frescoes and rock paintings found there and dating back to 6-4 millennium BC show us the rich wildlife of Africa. The frescoes depict buffaloes, antelopes, hippos. As studies show, the desertification of the savannah on the territory of the modern Sahara began about 500,000 years ago, but the process took on a landslide character from 3 tons BC. e. The nature of the life of the nomadic tribes of the South of the Sahara, a way of life that has not changed too much since then. As well as data on the economy of the ancient inhabitants of the North of the continent, suggest that slash-and-burn agriculture, cutting down trees, contributed to the drainage of rivers in the territory of the future Sahara. And immoderate grazing led to the hoofing of fertile soils, the result of which was a sharp increase in soil erosion and desertification of lands.

The same processes destroyed several large oases in the Sahara and a strip of fertile land north of the desert after the arrival of the Arab nomads there. The advance of the Sahara to the south today is also associated with economic activity indigenous peoples. "The goats ate Greece" - this saying has been known since ancient times. Goat farming destroyed the woody vegetation in Greece, the hooves of goats trampled the soil. The process of soil erosion in the Mediterranean in ancient times was 10 times higher in cultivated areas. Near the ancient cities there were huge dumps. In particular, near Rome, one of the dump hills was 35 meters high and 850 meters in diameter. Rodents and beggars who fed there spread disease. Drains of waste on the streets of cities, discharges of city wastewater into reservoirs, from where the same residents then took water. About 1 million people lived in the same Rome, you can imagine how much garbage they produced.

The reduction of forests along the banks of the rivers has turned the once navigable water streams into shallow and drying up. Irrational reclamation led to soil salinization, the use of a plow turned soil layers (it has been actively used since the beginning of our era), deforestation led to massive soil degradation, and, according to many researchers, led to the decline of ancient agriculture, the economy as a whole and the collapse of the entire ancient culture .

Similar phenomena were in the East. One of the largest and oldest cities of the Harrap civilization (II - III millennium BC) Monkhefno-Daro was flooded several times, more than 5 times, and each time for more than 100 years. It is believed that floods were caused by silting of water channels due to inept melioration. If in India the imperfection of irrigation systems led to flooding, then in Mesopotamia to soil salinization.

The creation of powerful irrigation systems led to the emergence of vast solonchaks due to a violation of the water-salt balance. Finally, due to environmental disasters caused by human activity, several highly developed cultures simply perished. Such a fate befell, for example, the Mayan civilization in Central America and the culture of Easter Island. The Maya Indians, who built many stone cities, used hieroglyphics, knew mathematics and astronomy better than their European contemporaries (the first millennium of our era), subjected the soil to such exploitation that the depleted land around the cities could no longer feed the population. There is a hypothesis that this caused the migration of the population from place to place, and led to the degradation of culture.

On Easter Island (Rapanui) in the Pacific Ocean, one of the most interesting cultures of the ancient world mysteriously arose and died. Rich in flora and fauna, the island could become the home of a highly developed culture. The inhabitants of Easter knew how to write, made many-day voyages. But at some point (probably around 1000 AD), mass production of huge stone idols began on the island, possibly representing tribal leaders. During the construction of the statues and their delivery to the parking lot (only about 80 statues were ready, weighing up to 85 tons), the forests of the island were reduced to nothing. The lack of wood prevented the construction of figures and the production of tools. Links between Rapanui and other islands have been drastically reduced Pacific Ocean, the population became impoverished, the society degraded.

And lastly, Ecocide is a word that has entered our circulation relatively recently, but we can find examples of ecocide even in antiquity. So, the soldiers of Genghis Khan, who invaded Turkestan and Western Asia, destroyed irrigation facilities there, which in particular caused salinization and desertification of lands in the region of ancient Kharezm, even the Amu Darya turned west because of this, which caused the decline of the Central Asian oasis of civilization. But much more often, environmental problems arise due to the economic activities of people.

Bibliography

Yuri Dorokhov. Ecological disasters of antiquity .

Introduction 3

§ 1. The essence of environmental problems in the ancient world 6

§ 2. Environmental problems in ancient Egypt 14

§ 3. The relationship between man and nature in Ancient Rome. Major environmental issues 21

Conclusion 33

References 35

Introduction

The problem of the relationship between man and nature for centuries has caused conflicts of opposing points of view, one of which is associated with the idea of ​​the dominance of the natural environment over man, the other with the idea of ​​the superiority of man over nature. For us here it is of interest to find out whether the ancients already thought about their relationship to nature and whether they experienced it in a conflicting way (and to what extent). Since ancient times, the problem of the relationship between man and the natural environment has been approached in a completely different way compared to our fundamental today's formulation of the question: attention was paid only to the impact natural conditions per person, and also established a direct relationship between the natural environment, climate, resources - on the one hand, and the features of the appearance and behavior of different peoples - on the other. On the contrary, they did not pay attention at all to the inevitable interaction and interdependence of the population and its own ecosystem, and the direct anthropogenic impact of the man of the ancient world on nature was not the subject of research.

In accordance with the foregoing, the problem of the relationship between man and nature in the ancient world seems to us to be quite interesting. Interest in the problem of research is largely due to the fact that in modern domestic historical science An insignificant amount of research is devoted to environmental problems that arose in the ancient world.

So, recently this issue has been actively developed by such domestic researchers as D.B. Prusakov, Yu.Ya. Perepelkin, V.V. Klimenko, E.N. Chernykh and some others. In the works of these historians, some aspects of the problem of interest to us are investigated. In the works of E.N. Chernykh poses the problem of the connection between anthropogenic environmental disasters and ancient mining and smelting production. The researcher points to the undoubted global significance of such catastrophes, reveals the dynamics and degree of human influence on the nature of the ancient world. In the works of V.V. Klimenko and D.B. Prusakov examines the dynamics of climatic conditions in ancient Egypt, reveals the relationship between social and climatic shocks.

Much more development received a problem of interest to us in foreign historical science. Abroad, environmental problems in the ancient world were covered in the works of B. Bell, R. Sallares, P. Fideli, A. Gardiner, V. Zeit, D. O'Connor, K. Batzer, R. Faybridge, S. Nicholson, J. .White, J.Flenley and many others.

Sources on the research problem are numerous and varied. Among them, literary monuments of that time should be noted. However, here we are limited by the irreparable losses of many ancient texts. Nevertheless, a significant part of the written sources that have come down to us is of interest for the study of such a promising problem as representations ancient man about nature and his relationship to it.

A huge number of archaeological finds is an invaluable material for historical analysis.

In connection with the above, the urgent task of historians is to combine all types of historical sources (literary, documentary, archaeological, natural science) to write a comprehensive history of the ecology of the ancient world.

Thus, we defined the topic of our research as follows: "Environmental problems in the ancient world."

The purpose of this work is to characterize the essence of the relationship between man and nature in the Ancient World and environmental problems arising from the interaction of man and nature.

The object of our study is the natural and climatic conditions of the Ancient World.

The subject of the study is the environmental problems of this period.

To achieve this goal, we set and solved the following tasks:

To characterize the essence of environmental problems that arose in the Ancient World;

Describe the main environmental problems that arose in ancient Egypt;

To reveal the nature of the relationship between man and nature in ancient Rome.

Describe the most important environmental problems of Ancient Rome.

To solve the tasks set, we used the following methods of historical research: the study and analysis of all available historical literature on this issue, the analysis of archaeological data, the study of historical sources, etc.

Research structure. This work consists of an introduction, three chapters, conclusion, bibliography.

§ 1. The essence of environmental problems in the ancient world.

The concept of "ecology" is relatively recent. It was put into circulation by E. Haeckel, a student of C. Darwin, in 1866. However, if we take into account the Greek etymology of the term, which comes from oikos - "household", then we can conclude that in the ancient era there were concepts related to this term . Many subjects that fall into the field of view of modern ecology served as the subject of reflection for ancient people as well. Ancient people, like us, were sensitive to complexity and diversity. natural phenomena(20, p. 19).

Climate change is one of the global problems of modern ecology. In the system of ancient views on nature, climate played no less a role; it was often thought of as the dominant way of life of entire peoples and the cause of differences in ethnic behavior. Empedocles formulated the theory of the four primary elements. It formed the basis of the teachings of Anaxagoras and Alcmaeon on opposites, which in turn influenced the emergence of ideas about the four primary fluids (blood, phlegm, yellow and black bile). We will find the beginnings of these ideas in Hippocrates. They received their final expression in the writings of Galen (20, p. 39).

Deepening our knowledge of the climate of the past will sooner or later resolve some contentious issues. ancient history. In this regard, it is necessary to say a few words about the hypothesis of "three catastrophic droughts". There is an opinion that around 1200. BC. the Eastern Mediterranean was hit by a severe drought that lasted several years. This assumption serves as an argument with which they try to explain the reasons for the almost simultaneous decline and disappearance at the end of the Late Bronze Age of the old political centers of the Eastern Mediterranean and Western Asia (Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Egyptian New Kingdom, etc.). Proponents of this hypothesis usually associate the beginning of the Great Greek colonization with the drought. Finally, some researchers believe that in the second half of the 4th c. BC. Attica experienced another severe drought that lasted for several decades.

The slightest climate change led to the fact that the worst agricultural territories became completely unsuitable for agriculture, and the exploitation of the best lands increased significantly.

Changing climatic conditions are not the only ecological problem of the Ancient World. So, from the second half of the III millennium BC. in a number of places in the Mediterranean there was a reduction in forest tracts. At the same time, the composition of forests changed: evergreen vegetation replaced deciduous trees. It is now clear that forest retreat was mainly the result of global climate change, although human activity should not be discounted. This process continued in subsequent millennia, and its further stages require a more detailed explanation (8, p. 4).

Some areas of Southern Greece lost their forest covers as early as the Early Bronze Age, when the climate was unfavorable for year-round vegetation and arid in the summer seasons. As for the northern part of Greece, in those areas that are outside the zone of a typical Mediterranean climate, forests remained until the second half of the 1st millennium BC. and even later. In other words, the process of the disappearance of forests here continued in the classical era, as ancient authors mention. So, in one passage of Plato, it is said about the disappearance of forests in Attica. The ancient Greeks constantly needed a lot of wood, which was used to build buildings and smelt metals, such as silver in Attica or copper in Cyprus. In the V-IV centuries. BC. the Athenians were forced to export ship timber from remote regions to build their fleet. It is no accident that they northern colony Amphipolis was of strategic importance to them. The need for forests and the classical era was so great that, according to some modern historians, it was during this era that the predatory destruction of forests led to the current bare landscapes in many places in the Mediterranean, no doubt, ancient man is responsible for the disappearance of the forest in certain areas of the Mediterranean, for example, in the mountains of Lebanon, which supplied Egypt and other states with cedar for several millennia, or in Crete, once famous for its cypress trees (10, p. 72).

Recently, however, studies have appeared, the authors of which are revising the thesis about the detrimental impact of man on the Mediterranean forests. O. Rackham, the most famous representative of this trend, believes that in a number of places in the Mediterranean, such as Attica, where thick limestone layers do not retain moisture, forests were initially doomed to extinction. According to the researcher, the descriptions of landscapes by ancient Greek authors corresponded to contemporary reality. True, by the "forest" of ancient Greek texts, we must understand shrubs and other small vegetation, since the authors of these texts have never seen a real forest with giant trees like the northern forests. The complexity of the "forest problem" increases if we take into account the fact that many Mediterranean forests are secondary, since they appeared on the site of former wastelands. A typical example is the Aleppo pine. This tree is found everywhere in Greece today, while in the Neolithic and Bronze Ages it was rare in the Balkans. Pine spread here at a later time, mainly because its seeds germinate well in places of wastelands and conflagrations (8, p. 5).

The history of ecological problems of the Ancient World cannot be limited only by the framework of long-term processes. Often, episodic events have long-term environmental consequences. These events include volcanic eruptions. The question of how the volcanic eruption on the island of Fera in the 17th century influenced the world climate is still controversial. BC. Probably, the consequences of this catastrophe were significant and no less in scale than the consequences of the recent eruption of Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines. The Sicilian volcano Etna is known today as a source of colossal amounts of carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide, the emissions of which into the atmosphere affect the modern climate.

It is possible that the eruption of this volcano in 44 - 42 years. BC. significantly influenced the climate of the Mediterranean in the Roman era. Various cataclysms of the biosphere can have no less ecological consequences. Here it is appropriate to recall the outbreaks of infectious diseases observed in antiquity: the "pestilence" in Athens in 430 BC, the "plague" (rather, it was smallpox) that struck the Roman Empire under the Antonines, or a real plague that struck Constantinople in the 6th century The origins of these contagious epidemics must be traced back to the Bronze and Early Iron Ages, when the population density in some places reached a level sufficient for the rapid spread of diseases such as smallpox, typhoid, influenza and measles. A special place in this series was occupied by malaria - the source of high mortality in the Mediterranean population in antiquity and later eras. Some researchers go too far, attributing to malaria the reasons for the disappearance of the Etruscan civilization or the decline of Hellenistic Greece. At the same time, no one can still say with certainty when this disease appeared in the Mediterranean: in the prehistoric period, in the 5th-15th centuries. BC. or in the era of Hellenism (8, p. 8).

Another ecological problem of the Ancient World is the overpopulation of the centers of a particular civilization. Among the consequences of the pressure of the "excessive human mass" on nature, in addition to the reduction of forests, the first cases of environmental pollution in history should be noted. Studies of Greenland glaciers and lacustrine deposits in Sweden showed a sharp increase in their lead content starting around the 6th century BC. BC. The increase in lead content in the atmosphere was a consequence of mining and metallurgy in the Greco-Roman era. The dispute about the nature of the ancient economy continues, despite the harsh verdict of M. Finley, who argued that the ancient Greeks and Romans had no idea about the economy as such and that the organization of their economic activity was primitive, not going beyond handicraft production. However, the scale of this production was capable of causing air pollution over Sweden and Greenland. We know from historians that the Athenian fleet was kept at the expense of the Lavrion silver mines - the key to the naval power of the Athenian Empire. However, historians do not mention one unpleasant fact - the Avrion mines, whose by-product was lead, were a powerful source of environmental pollution. The Mediterranean Sea today is one of the dirtiest seas on our planet, it urgently needs to be cleaned. But it would be wrong to believe that it has become so in our century - even in the pre-industrial era, the dirty imprint of human activity was imposed on the Mediterranean.

Since the time of Ancient Egypt, there has been a further increase in human impact on the biosphere. In some cases, this led to the expansion of the population ranges of various animal species, in others, to their reduction. First of all, the range of domestic animals expanded. During Greek colonization, a highly productive woolly breed of sheep spread throughout the Mediterranean. It is possible that the Greeks were the first to learn how to breed fine-fleeced sheep. Starting from late antiquity, the draft Longhorn breed of cows, which existed in Europe since the Neolithic era, is gradually being replaced by the dairy Shorthorn breed. However, this did not lead to an increase in the consumption of dairy products (with the exception of cheese) in the Mediterranean countries, where the goat continued to be the main dairy animal. In the course of a long selection selection, the Greeks and Romans managed to develop larger breeds of livestock and poultry. In the Roman era, they spread in a number of provinces, for example, in Gaul and the Danube region. Along with the increase in productivity in agriculture during the period of antiquity, the productivity of animal husbandry increased.

In ancient times, porcupines, ferrets, mongooses and guinea fowls came to Southern Europe from North Africa. The domestic cat also entered Europe from Egypt in the 1st millennium BC. Thanks to the Romans, the population of the provinces learned about the rabbit, whose homeland was Spain.

The ancient Greeks and Romans were well acquainted with some large animals, which have now practically disappeared in the Mediterranean basin due to the hostile attitude towards them on the part of ancient man. In antiquity in North Africa and Asia Minor there were lions. Findings of lion skeletons in the Neolithic sites of Ukraine allow us to say that these animals managed to survive in post-glacial Europe as well. The skeleton of a lion, probably performing in a circus, was found in Olbia. Recently, the remains of a lion dating from the middle of the 6th century BC were discovered at Delphi. BC. On the existence in Greece in the IV century. BC. tame lions is reported by Isocrates. Earlier records of lions in Greece include data from the excavations of the Mycenaean palace at Tiryns, where archaeologists found the bones of a lion, probably a not-so-rare animal in the Aegean during the Bronze Age. It is no coincidence that his appearance is captured in such monuments of art as a dagger and steles with scenes of lion hunting from the shaft tomb IV at Mycenae. G. Mylonas suggested that a pair of lions, decorating the column that crowns the Mycenaean Lion Gate, was the emblem of the dynasty of Mycenaean rulers of the 13th century. BC, i.e., perhaps Agamemnon himself. Sensational discovery in Vergina, the tomb of Philip II of Macedon with images of a lion-hunting scene confirms the words of Herodotus and Aristotle that in their time lions were found in northern Greece (12, p. 100).

The king of beasts became the most visible victim of the ancient man's attack on nature. A kind of lion, which was known in antiquity to the inhabitants of Hellas, today is extremely rare in the wild in India. They had much less opportunity to get acquainted with the East African breed of lion, a frequent inhabitant of modern zoos. The Carthaginians and Romans probably knew the North African lion, which has disappeared without a trace today. As for another species of this animal exterminated by man - the South African lion, the ancient inhabitants of the Mediterranean hardly suspected its existence.

Today in Greece, bears are found in one or two remote places in the north of the country. In ancient times, they met much more often. Pausanias reports on bears living on Mount Parnassus in Attica, on the slopes of the Taygetus Range in Laconia, as well as in Arcadia and Thrace. Bears have been hunted since ancient times, as a result of which their numbers in the Mediterranean have declined sharply.

The largest land animal also suffered from humans in ancient times. Indian elephants came to Asia Minor in the 4th-3rd centuries. BC. At that time, in North Africa, there was a local, not so large compared to the Asian, breed of elephants, which has now completely disappeared. North African elephants were caught and tried to tame to be used in the war, however, without much success. The peak of demand for these "tanks" of antiquity coincided with the III century. BC, in connection with which it is impossible not to recall the battle of Raphia in 217 BC. between the Ptolemies and the Seleucids. Like lions, North African elephants were exterminated by the inhabitants of Carthage and the Romans who subjugated it. At the beginning of our era, no one remembered these animals. Strabo wrote that the shepherds and farmers of Numidia should be grateful to the Romans, who, having exterminated wild animals, secured labor in the fields. This remark well illustrates the attitude of ancient people towards wild animals. If the activity of ancient man contributed to the growth of populations of domestic animals and small pests, then large wild animals inevitably lost from contacts with him.

Another equally famous example is the Egyptian papyrus. The plant was so widely used in the ancient world that it brought it to the brink of extinction in the Nile Valley in the distant past. By the beginning of the spread in Egypt of modern irrigation systems, which have a detrimental effect on papyrus, it already belonged to a number of rare plants. Today, the only place in the Nile Valley of Egypt is known, where several dozen copies of this plant have been preserved. Fortunately, papyrus is still common in Central Africa. Thus, the scale of ancient man's intervention in the natural environment was significant enough to lead to changes in its biological universe. There is no need to recall the relevance of this problem for modern ecology.

Destroying the habitat, the ancient peoples doomed themselves to extinction. One of the most compelling examples is Easter Island. Pollen analysis showed that the Polynesian colonists destroyed all the trees on this island, which was once teeming with vegetation. As a result, soil erosion intensified, which led to the degradation of agriculture and the decline of culture, which left mysterious megalithic statues. Lost in the vastness of the Pacific Ocean, the island turned out to be a trap for its inhabitants, doomed to extinction in environmental conditions that have become unsuitable for life. On the continent, the way out of the ecological crisis was migration - whether we are talking about repeated bursts of Greek colonization or about the migrations of the peoples of Eurasia.

§ 2. Ecological problems in ancient Egypt.

An analysis of the history of Ancient Egypt allowed some domestic researchers to put forward a working hypothesis, according to which its historical evolution was characterized by three socio-ecological crises - the largest turning points in the life of society. The most severe was the second crisis. He covered the 1st Transition period and the Middle Kingdom (XXIII - XVIII centuries BC). Now there is no doubt that its most important natural conditions were a significant decrease in the level of the Nile floods and a severe drought, which apparently affected at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. not only Egypt, but also a number of other countries of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. In other words, climate change played a huge role in the history of ancient Egypt at this stage. However, there is still a fair amount of uncertainty regarding the nature, chronology, and causes of the climatic fluctuations of interest to us.

About the drought and low floods of the Nile as the immediate natural causes of the collapse of the VI dynasty and the Old Kingdom as a whole, B. Bell wrote in detail, based on the paleoclimatic data at her disposal, with the involvement (in translation) of a large corpus of written sources of the 1st Intermediate Period and the Middle Kingdom . At the same time, the researcher did not at all deny the importance of the socio-political factors of the collapse of the old Egyptian centralized state, insisting only that environmentally conditioned economic crises can take place in history, which no social system can overcome. B. Bell's conclusions formed the basis of the later rather widely accepted idea that the death of the Old Kingdom was directly related to the sharp deterioration of natural conditions in Northeast Africa (8, p. 6).

Socio-natural analysis suggests that the deterioration of the ecological situation on the banks of the Nile at the end of the Old Kingdom not only led to the complication of people's living conditions, which contributed to the weakening of the state during the VI dynasty and its subsequent collapse, but to a certain extent predetermined all further qualitative technological, administrative- economic and socio-political reorganization in ancient Egypt at the epochal historical transition to the New Kingdom.

Among the significant social prerequisites for the Second socio-ecological crisis, one should probably single out the demographic growth and the strengthening of novy administrations to the detriment of the capital's nobility, which should be the cause of the confrontation between the parties. The gradual deterioration of environmental conditions undoubtedly exacerbated the political situation in Egypt, contributing to the irreversibility of the centrifugal process of the decline of the Old Kingdom. In turn, the collapse of the centralized state and the onset of a period of social unrest and internecine wars caused the destruction or division of a single irrigation system! - the basis of agricultural production in the country. The texts of the 1st Intermediate Period, almost throughout its entire length, inform about grain shortages, which sometimes led to a famine so severe that it even pushed the population of certain regions of Egypt to cannibalism.

It should be noted that the cause of the drought at the end of the 3rd millennium BC. before, an increase in solar activity was considered in accordance with its 1800-1900-year cycle, however latest research disproved its existence. Nevertheless, thanks to the same research, it was possible to give a different natural scientific explanation for the increased aridity of the climate of the Nile Valley during the 1st Intermediate Period and at the initial stage of the Middle Kingdom. The fact is that the end of the III millennium BC. was characterized by the peak of a strong global cooling, which began, apparently, no later than the 24th century. BC.

Research results confirm that in the 19th century BC. not only significant, but unprecedented for all historical time increase in the flow of the Nile to a value of 160 million cubic meters. m / year, which is almost twice the level of the XXII century. BC. Such an increase in runoff could only be ensured by an even more significant increase in precipitation (8, p. 9).

Following a brief climatic optimum, the second half of XIX in. BC. came a new wave of cooling, and extremely fast. To imagine the scale of this cooling, we note that it exactly corresponds to the magnitude and speed of modern warming, which, of course, is one of the most significant in world history and causes serious concern of the world community in connection with the observed and potential environmental consequences.

The reason for the cooling in the era of the Middle Kingdom, in our opinion, is the unfavorable coincidence of declining solar activity with a low content of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and one of the most powerful explosive volcanic eruptions in the last 5000 years at the beginning of the 17th century. BC. As a result of this colossal volcanic explosion, the researchers estimate that the global average temperature should have dropped by more than 0.5 ° C within two to three years after the eruption.

This was to lead to one or more catastrophic droughts and crop failures, such as had not been seen in Egypt for at least the preceding 400 years. This can be confirmed by the results of studying the composition of the bottom sediments of Lake Meridova in the Fayum depression, where in layers dating from about 1920 - 1560. BC, the sand content increases sharply, which indicates the activation of sand dunes and eolian transport accompanying dry periods. Thus, the rapid cooling, which reached its minimum already at the beginning of the 17th century. BC, of ​​course, should have seriously reduced the amount of river flow and introduced significant difficulties in the operation of new irrigation facilities created in the era of excessive moisture. It can hardly be considered accidental that this cold snap corresponded to the appearance of evidence of the degradation of the Egyptian irrigation system and the return of famine after the decline of the XII dynasty, the final collapse of the Middle Kingdom and the conquest of Lower Egypt by the Asian tribes of the Hyksos.

Egyptian sources of the 1st Intermediate Period (XXII-XXI centuries BC) report the extreme shallowness of the Nile: in some places the river, the average width of which in valley Egypt before the construction of the high-altitude Aswan dam was approx. 1.22 km, allegedly waded. This kind of ancient evidence is supported by the information about the sharp lowering of the mirror of Lake Meridova in the Fayum oasis, which was fed by the Nile water, that took place at the same time, amounting to several tens of meters as a result. It seems that the fall in the level of the Nile during the interregnum reached a catastrophic degree, which was reflected in the documents of that era.

The decrease in the height of the Nile floods was one of the most dangerous environmental disasters in ancient Egypt, because. entailed a reduction in the area of ​​​​the most fertile flood lands, which already in the second half of the Old Kingdom, before the disunity and decline of the irrigation network, should have resulted in a drop in grain yields. In addition, the shallowing of the Nile, most likely, was accompanied by a decrease in the level of groundwater in the alluvial valley of the river, fraught with disaster for those gardening households of the common people who used water from wells. The situation was aggravated by the fact that approximately in the XXIV century. BC. Sands began to attack the Nile floodplain from the west, due to the formation of deserts and increased eolian activity. The most dangerous was the intrusion of sand dunes into Middle Egypt, where it engulfed a significant part of the floodplain and possibly led to a deterioration in the quality of alluvial soils.

An analysis of the content of the sources of the second half of the Old Kingdom, taking into account environmental data, suggests that the economic crisis deepened in Egypt during this period. For example, the massive impoverishment of the country's population noted by Egyptologists, the development of debt slavery, and the widespread use of corporal punishment, including by high-ranking officials who managed production on the estates of nobles, are indicative. On the whole, it can be concluded that under the 6th dynasty, the prerequisites for the Second socio-ecological crisis of the ancient Egyptian civilization had already taken shape.

The second socio-ecological crisis was marked by a radical administrative and technological reorganization of the agricultural economy in ancient Egypt. The non-specialized "working detachments" that prevailed in the fields in the ancient Egyptian era were replaced by professional tillers by the beginning of the Middle Kingdom, who were obliged to fulfill the individual labor norm, mastering standard allotments. The prototype of these allotments can already be seen in the sources of the 6th dynasty, and there is reason to believe that such areas did not appear everywhere, but in the floodplain of the Nile as the border of floods retreated in the second half of the 3rd millennium BC. Thus, the reduction of floods, apparently, was one of the immediate prerequisites for reforming the old Egyptian system of land use and taxation, the reduction in the area of ​​\u200b\u200bthe most productive, naturally irrigated lands, must have put society in the face of the dignitaries before the need to improve the quality of their cultivation and more stringent fiscal accounting, which led to the state standard rationing, primarily of grain production, which was also characteristic of the New Kingdom. The "individualization" of the labor of farmers was obviously closely connected with the emergence of the tradition of holding regular reviews of the labor force in order to distribute it according to social and professional categories and the liquidation of large noble households, which ended in the Middle Egyptian era (12, p. 101).

As a direct consequence of the fall of the Nile floods, we consider the appearance in the 1st Intermediate Period of large channels, which were intended for watering the so-called "high fields" that lay outside the floodplain. Apparently, with the help of such artificial channels, the regional rulers sought to compensate for the loss of naturally irrigated lands - a practice that then established itself in Egypt for millennia. Just as in the era of the First socio-ecological crisis, a single irrigation network was created on the basis of local basin systems, which in fact marked a revolution in the development of the irrigation economy in the Nile Valley, in the conditions of the Second Crisis there was another qualitative revolution in irrigation construction.

Canals for supplying water to the "high fields" have become a reliable means of overcoming the food and social crisis by individual regions and the growth of their economic and military power, and it is natural to assume that the nomes, located upstream of the river, had advantages in taking water from the shallow Nile, in while the economy of the lower regions, on the contrary, suffered additional damage as a result of the irrigation activities of the southerners. It is possible that all this served as an extra reason for civil strife and to some extent predetermined the victory of Thebes in the wars against Heracleopolis in the 1st Intermediate Period and the hegemony in the era of the Middle Kingdom of rulers who came from Upper Egypt.

After the formation of the Middle Egyptian state, irrigation innovations reached a grand scale. During the XII dynasty, a large hydroelectric complex was built in the Fayum oasis, which made it possible to artificially regulate water balance the vast agricultural region created here: Nile water accumulated in Lake Merida, which entered it from the Bahr Yusuf branch and then, if necessary, was supplied to the cultivated fields through a special system of channels. This outstanding hydrotechnical achievement is quite consistent with the realities of the Second socio-ecological crisis, probably being directly caused by them: the drought and low floods of the Nile, apparently, prompted the population of Egypt to realize the need for radical actions that would drastically reduce its dependence on the state, and first of all on catastrophic changes in the external environment. In this case, being a product of the socio-ecological crisis, the new organization of the irrigation economy, which significantly increased the efficiency of agriculture as a whole, at the same time became an important condition for the ancient Egyptian civilization to overcome it. The construction of the Fayum complex interrupted the series of economic crises that shook Egypt since the end of the Old Kingdom and created the basis for the relative socio-political stabilization of the Middle Egyptian state (8, p. 14).

The acquisition by the Egyptians of the skills of creating diversion canals throughout the country, which made it possible to artificially expand the area irrigated by the Nile, as needed, and the construction of the Fayum hydroelectric complex, we regard as an epochal revolution in the development of agricultural technologies in the Nile valley. The basin irrigation system, inherited by the Old Kingdom from the early dynastic era, was elementarily adapted to the previous regime of the river. A less arid climate and high floods made the enclosing landscape relatively comfortable for people in the pre-crisis era, which saved them from the need to significantly modify it. With the onset of the Second Social and Ecological Crisis, the population of Egypt, in order to preserve itself, was forced to start actively transforming its living space. At the same time, it seems quite plausible to assume that the need to adapt to qualitatively new conditions of existence, up to meaningful intervention in the natural, "God-given" appearance of the surrounding world, should have contributed to a revolution in the worldview and, as a result, in the ideology of the ancient Egyptians.

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Environmental problems of cities It is often believed that the ecological state of cities has deteriorated markedly in recent decades as a result of the rapid development of industrial production. But this is a delusion. Environmental problems of cities arose along with their birth. The cities of the ancient world were characterized by high population density. For example, in Alexandria, the population density in the I-II centuries. reached 760 people, in Rome - 1500 people per 1 hectare (for comparison, let's say that in the center of modern New York there are no more than 1 thousand people per 1 hectare). The width of the streets in Rome did not exceed 1.5-4, in Babylon - 1.5-3 m. The sanitary improvement of the cities was at an extremely low level. All this led to frequent outbreaks of epidemics, pandemics, in which diseases covered the entire country, and even several neighboring countries. The first recorded plague pandemic (it entered the literature under the name "Justinian Plague") occurred in the VI century. in the Eastern Roman Empire and covered many countries of the world. For 50 years, the plague claimed about 100 million human lives. Now it is difficult to even imagine how ancient cities with their population of many thousands could do without public transport, without street lighting, without sewage and other elements of urban improvement. And, probably, it was not by chance that it was at that time that many philosophers began to have doubts about the expediency of the existence of large cities. Aristotle, Plato, Hippodamus of Miletus, and later Vitruvius repeatedly spoke with treatises that dealt with the optimal size of settlements and their arrangement, the problems of planning, building art, architecture, and even interconnection with the natural environment. Medieval cities were already significantly inferior in size to their classical counterparts and rarely numbered more than a few tens of thousands of inhabitants. So, in the XIV century. the population of the largest European cities - London and Paris - amounted to 100 and 30 thousand inhabitants, respectively. However, the environmental problems of cities have not become less acute. Epidemics remained the main scourge. The second plague pandemic, the Black Death, broke out in the 14th century. and carried away almost a third of the population of Europe. With the development of industry, the rapidly growing capitalist cities quickly surpassed their predecessors in population. In 1850, London crossed the milestone, then Paris. By the beginning of the XX century. there were already 12 cities in the world - "millionaires" (including two in Russia). The growth of large cities was at an ever faster pace. And again, as the most formidable manifestation of the disharmony of man and nature, outbreaks of epidemics of dysentery, cholera, and typhoid fever began one after another. The rivers in the cities were horribly polluted. The Thames in London became known as the "black river". Fetid streams and reservoirs in other major cities became the source of gastrointestinal epidemics. So, in 1837 in London, Glasgow and Edinburgh, a tenth of the population fell ill with typhoid fever and about a third of the patients died. From 1817 to 1926 there were six cholera pandemics in Europe. In Russia, in 1848 alone, about 700 thousand people died from cholera. However, over time, thanks to the achievements of science and technology, the success of biology and medicine, the development of water supply and sewage facilities, the epidemiological danger began to weaken significantly. We can say that at that stage the ecological crisis of large cities was overcome. Of course, each time such overcoming was worth colossal efforts and sacrifices, but the collective mind, perseverance and ingenuity of people always turned out to be stronger than the crisis situations they created. contributed to the rapid development of productive forces. These are not only huge advances in nuclear physics, molecular biology, chemistry, development outer space, but also the rapid, unceasing growth in the number of large cities and the urban population. The volume of industrial production has increased hundreds and thousands of times, the energy supply of mankind has increased more than 1000 times, the speed of movement - 400 times, the speed of information transfer - millions of times, etc. Such active human activity, of course, does not go unnoticed for nature , since resources are drawn directly from the biosphereAnd this is only one side of the environmental problems of a big city. The other is that in addition to the consumption of natural resources and energy drawn from vast areas, a modern city with a million inhabitants provides great amount waste. Such a city annually emits at least 10-11 million tons of water vapor, 1.5-2 million tons of dust, 1.5 million tons of carbon monoxide, 0.25 million tons of sulfur dioxide, 0.3 million tons of nitrogen oxides and a large number of other contaminants that are not indifferent to human health and the environment. In terms of the scale of impact on the atmosphere, a modern city can be compared to a volcano. What are the features of the current environmental problems of large cities? First of all, the numerous sources of environmental impact and their scale. Industry and transport - and these are hundreds of large enterprises, hundreds of thousands or even millions of vehicles - are the main culprits of pollution of the urban environment. The nature of waste has also changed in our time. Previously, almost all waste was of natural origin (bones, wool, natural fabrics, wood, paper, manure, etc.), and they were easily included in the cycle of nature. Now a significant part of the waste is synthetic substances. Their transformation under natural conditions is extremely slow. One of the environmental problems is associated with the intensive growth of non-traditional "pollution" of a wave nature. Are getting stronger electromagnetic fields high voltage power lines, radio broadcasting and television stations, as well as a large number electric motors. The overall level of acoustic noise increases (due to high transport speeds, due to the operation of various mechanisms and machines). Ultraviolet radiation, on the contrary, decreases (due to air pollution). Energy costs per unit area are growing, and, consequently, heat transfer and thermal pollution are increasing. Under the influence of the huge masses of multi-storey buildings, the properties of the geological rocks on which the city stands are changing. The consequences of such phenomena for people and the environment have not yet been studied enough. But they are no less dangerous than pollution of water and air basins and soil and vegetation cover. For residents of large cities, all this in the complex turns into a big overstrain of the nervous system. Citizens quickly get tired, are prone to various diseases and neuroses, and suffer from increased irritability. Chronic ill health of a large proportion of urban residents in some Western countries is considered a specific disease. It was called "urbanite". Road transport and the environment In many large cities, such as Berlin, Mexico City, Tokyo, Moscow, St. Petersburg, Kyiv, air pollution from automobile exhausts and dust is, according to various estimates, from 80 to 95% of all other pollution. The smoke emitted by factory chimneys, fumes from chemical industries and all other waste from the activities of a large city account for approximately 7% of the total mass of pollution. Automobile exhausts in cities are especially dangerous because they pollute the air mainly at the level of human growth. And people are forced to breathe polluted air. A person consumes 12 m 3 of air per day, a car - a thousand times more. For example, in Moscow, road transport absorbs 50 times more oxygen than the entire population of the city. In calm weather and low atmospheric pressure on busy highways, the oxygen content in the air often drops to a value close to critical, at which people begin to suffocate and faint. It affects not only the lack of oxygen, but also the harmful substances of automobile exhaust. This is especially dangerous for children and people with poor health. Cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases are aggravated, viral epidemics are developing. People often do not even suspect that this is due to car gas poisoning. The number of cars in cities and on highways is increasing from year to year. Ecologists believe that where their number exceeds one thousand per km 2, the habitat can be considered destroyed. The number of cars is taken in terms of cars. Heavy transport vehicles running on petroleum fuels are especially polluting the air, destroying road surfaces, destroying green spaces along roads, poisoning reservoirs and surface waters. In addition, they emit such a huge amount of gas that in Europe and the European part of Russia it exceeds the mass of evaporated water from all reservoirs and rivers. As a result, clouds are becoming more and more frequent, and the number of sunny days is decreasing. Gray days without sun, unheated soil, constantly high air humidity - all this contributes to the growth of various diseases, a decrease in crop yields. More than 3 billion tons of oil are produced annually in the world. They are mined with hard work, at enormous costs, with great environmental damage to nature. A significant part of it (about 2 billion) is spent on gasoline and diesel transport. The average efficiency of a car engine is only 23% (for gasoline engines - 20, for diesel engines - 35%). This means that more than half of the oil is burned for nothing, goes to heat and pollute the atmosphere. But this is not all losses. The main indicator is not the efficiency of the engine, but the load factor of the transport. Unfortunately, road transport is used extremely inefficiently. Reasonably built vehicle must carry more cargo than its own weight, this is its effectiveness. In practice, only a bicycle and light motorcycles meet this requirement, the rest of the cars basically carry themselves. It turns out that the efficiency of road transport is no more than 3-4%. A huge amount of oil fuel is burned, and energy is spent extremely irrationally. So, for example, one KamAZ car consumes so much energy that it would be enough to heat 50 apartments in winter. For many centuries, the horse has been the main mode of transport for a person. Energy in 1 liter. with. (this is an average of 736 watts), added to a person’s own power, allows him to move quickly enough and perform almost any necessary work. The boom in the automotive industry has taken us to power levels of 100, 200, 400 hp. s., and now it is extremely difficult to return to a completely sufficient norm - 1 liter. with., in which it would not be so difficult to ensure the ecological cleanliness of the environment. How to solve the problem of creating efficient transport? Switching transport to gas fuel, switching to electric vehicles, putting a special absorber of harmful combustion products on each car and burning them in a silencer - all this is a search for a way out of the impasse in which not only Russia, but the whole of Europe, the USA, Canada, Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, China. Unfortunately, none of these paths lead to complete solution Problems. With any of them, there is an overexpenditure of energy, emissions of steam, carbon dioxide and much more. Obviously, a well-balanced set of measures is needed. And their obligatory execution should be based on clear, strict laws, among which, for example, may be the following: a ban on the production of cars that consume more than 1-2 liters of fuel per tonne of vehicle mass during a run of 100 km (single exceptions are possible); given that in a passenger car, one or two people most often travel, it is advisable to produce more two-seater cars. The amount of tax on transport (car, tractor, trailer, etc.) should be determined by the amount of fuel consumed. This will bring into line the economic feasibility of transporting goods by road and the increasing level of environmental pollution. Whoever pollutes our environment more is obliged to pay more tax to society. One of the ways to reduce harmful car emissions is to use new types of car fuel: gas, methanol, methyl alcohol or its mixture with gasoline - gasohol. For example, all public transport in Stockholm has been running on methanol for several years. The impact of automobile exhaust gases on the atmosphere is significantly reduced by ordinary green spaces. An analysis of the air in adjacent sections of the same highway shows that there are fewer pollutants where there is an island of greenery, at least a few trees or shrubs. The amount of toxic substances in the air directly depends on the speed of traffic on city streets. The more traffic jams, the thicker the exhaust. In this regard, it is necessary to continuously improve the road transport system of the city to create optimal conditions for traffic.