Have you ever wondered why we have or need green plants and what the benefits of are to you and your environment?
As an environmental researcher, I have found green plants to be essential to livelihood and healthy wellbeing. This is due largely to the numerous benefits derived from the “greens”.
Plants in colors of green are not just important to the human environment, they form an essential part of ecological engineering, and even exist as the basis for the sustainability and stability of nature in environmental systems.
Here are three key roles of green plants emphasized below:
The first point to note is that Green plants are environment’s first aiders, they aid the environment naturally. These aids comes in varying forms from natural cooling to the reduction in the rate at which heat exist in our surroundings. Plants also stabilize the soil, plant roots hold soil tightly to prevent soil erosion.
Secondly, Green plants serve as air sieves, absorbing Carbon Dioxide in the environment, processing it as parts of their food before giving out clean Oxygen(that is their byproduct).
A research of the World Bank estimates that 20 percent of increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide levels has resulted from deforestation, and as much as 50 percent of global warming over the past 50 years is due to changes in land use patterns and deforestation in the modern age.
Though photosynthesis is referred to the process by which green plants manufacture their own food, man also enjoys some dividends in that process; plants consumes carbon dioxide(the air man breaths out) as part of the photosynthetic process and emits oxygen(the air man breaths in) as a byproduct.
Lastly, Green plants are foundations on which ecosystem are built, the concept of ecosystems engineering is one that appraises the roles of individual functions, seeing one as dependent to another. Green plants are found at the very lowest level of of food webs and chains, herbivores and insects feed on them. These organisms are subsequently eaten by carnivores, which are themselves eaten by even bigger animals or man, and thus the chain goes. Therefore, without green plants, ecosystems are incomplete or may not even exist.
Conclusively, green plants are our major food source, as they serve as points of extraction of resources and are of great medicinal value to man.
This is a call to shun deforestation and excessive felling of trees/shrubs and encourage a green environment to reduce erosion, global warming and other environmental concerns of adverse effect to the environment.
Written by Gafar Abass.
Original piece posted on http://www.geginitiave.wordpress.com by your favorite envirotard,
Gafar Abass.