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HUMAN INFLUENCE

Human influence has been extensive. The forests that once covered the land have largely disappeared. Britain has a greater proportion of grassland than any other country in Europe except Ireland.

It was in Britain that the word ‘smog’ (a mixture of smoke and fog) was first used. As the world’s first industrialized country, its cities were the first to suffer this atmospheric condition. In the nineteenth century, London’s pea-soupers’ (thick fogs) became famous through descriptions of them in the works of Charles Dickens and in the Sherlock Homes stories. The situation in London reached its worst point in 1952. At the end of that year a particularly bad smog, which lasted for several days, was estimated to have caused between 4,000 and 8,000 deaths.

Then, during the 1960s and 1970s, laws were passed which forbade the heating of homes with open coal fires and which stopped much of the pollution from factories. At one time, a scene of fog in a Hollywood film was all that was necessary to symbolize London. This image is now out of date, and by the 1970s it was said to be possible to catch fish in the Thames outside Parliament.

Some people worry that Britain’s sovereignty is in danger from the European Union and from Scottish and Welsh independence movements. But what is certainly true is that Britain itself – the island – is in very real danger from the sea. For one thing, global warming means rising sea levels everywhere, so that low-lying coastal areas are threatened. For another, the Atlantic waves which hit Britain’s north, west and south coasts are getting taller. This means they have more energy than before – energy with which to strip sand from beaches, undermine cliffs and damage coastal defences. Finally, the east coast, although safe from those Atlantic waves, is actually sinking anyway. Every year, little bits of it of it vanish into the North Sea. Sometimes the land slips away slowly. But at other times it slips away very dramatically (as when in 1992 the guests of the Holbeck hotel, built of a clifftop near Scarborough, had to leave their rooms in a hurry; the cliff was collapsing into the sea – and so was their hotel).

London is in special danger because it is also vulnerable to flooding through tidal surges along the River Thames. In 1953 a tidal surge killed 300 people in the Thames Estuary to the east of London. Realization of the scale of the disaster that would have been caused if this surge had reached London provoked the construction of the Thames Barrier, completed in 1983. Since then, it has been used to protect London from flooding an average of three times every year. It is widely thought that the barrier will soon be inadequate. New defences are being considered.

 


Date: 2015-01-12; view: 1175


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