Travelling around the world you have to notice the environment that you travel through.  We have travelled through some of the most extreme areas from arid high altitude plateaus down to lakes situated below the sea level.  We have travelled through snow covered bare plains of -40 degrees to palm tree ridden places pushing +40 degrees.  The human influence is obvious in every part of the world, affecting every element of our environment.

The effect of global warming is subtle but you can see the detrimental result of hundreds of years of industrial revolutions, burning fossil fuels and destruction of our fragile climate.

Since Kazakhstan has been released from the USSR there has been oil prospecting that has increased exponentially.

Almost 80% of China has no connection to the electricity network, so they burn coal, charcoal and wood causing further environmental destruction. Long term, the Chinese.will be the most important environmental driving force. The Mekong River is drying up as the Chinese use more water than there is available.  This is affecting those countries located downstream from China who rely on the Mighty Mekong for water, irrigation and transport. There is less water available to them all as the region dries through hotter and hotter summers. China through dictators and poverty has managed to hunt most of their native species to the verge of extinction.

In 2005 in Northern Thailand, the King paid to have the clouds seeded (an expensive process of inserting silver nitrate into the upper atmosphere to make clouds and rain form) to ensure that there is enough rain for the rice crop to prevent mass starvation in a nation that relies on rice.

In Australia, the inhabitants of north Northern Territory are used to humid weather but those in the central Northern Territory all made comments that there has been an increase in the humidity in the past 5 years. Australia is in the middle of one of the worse droughts since the first colonies arrived on the continent.  They are in the process of installing water saving devices and desalination plants to save their water.  Their reservoirs are struggling to exceed 40% in some areas.  Tasmania has had the hole in the ozone situated over it for the past year (2005) which has lead to an shorter time to deep fry your skin.

Pinochet was worried about the Argentines invading the southern part of the Chile, so he provided licenses for 1 million hectares to be developed for agriculture. In the process of developing the virgin forests, over 3 million hecatres of prime forest was burnt to the ground.

Brasil has yearly floods that becoming worse year by year. The floods in 2007 made over 30,000 people homeless, roads wash away and houses are demolished by landslides.

Bolivia had the worst floods that they have had in a 10 year stint of bad floods in 2007. The water flooded in excess of 1m in the northeast of the country. The Salar de Uyuni is normally dry during March but in 2007 one night of rain provided 20cm of rain.

Peru has a large glacier that is decreasing in size at a rate of 30 m per year due to global warming. Once the glacier has disappeared in an anticipated 20-30 years, the 70% of the population that relies on the water will be completely withou a water supply. It is anticipated that water will become as expensive as a barrel of oil.

In your life time, just your normal life, not using cars, not using aeroplanes you consume the minimum equivalent of 80 trees worth of carbon dioxide. Think about that next time you leave a light on, waste paper, unnecessarily use the car to drive 20m down the road.

Our round the world trip in a petrol driven car will hopefully be one of the last.  Not willing to lecture, as we know that we are just as responsible as the next car driver, paper consuming, electricity user, deodorant sprayer on the planet, we should all try to make a difference now.  As a world alternatives to the combustion engine come into being, we should all make a push to chose cleaner alternatives in our daily travel routine.  We should also use cleaner renewable energy and demand that our governments improve our public services that use energy.  We should use solar panels. We should use less water. We should recycle our metals and plastics. We should mend things we break. We should all use our buying power to change the way of our world’s future.