Significance of photosynthesis?

Question

Can anyone please help me to find the social, economical, environmental and political issues of photosynthesis?

Answer 1

The only thing I can think of at the moment is the environmental issue of lack of photosynthesis in some regions of the world.

With deforestation occurring in much of the world's tropical areas, carbon dioxide levels are in increasing. The lack of trees and green vegetation makes it impossible for carbon dioxide to be recycled into the biosphere in the form of healthy oxygen! It basically contributes to global warming, a worldwide issue that is beginning to effect us all.

I don't see how it can be socially, economically, or politically harmful... haha.

Answer 2

Let's start with the environmental issue. Without photosynthesis you would not have any oxygen to breathe. Until algae evolved many hundreds of millions of years ago, no animal, including us, would have lived more than a few minutes because we would have suffocated.

Your remaining parameters are so intertwined that I can't give separate responses. Almost our entire economy is based on recent photosynthesis or fossilized photosynthesis. Everything we eat (except for salt, and maybe a few other minerals) is a photosynthesizing plant, or an animal, or a fungi. The animals eat the plants and fungi. The fungi eat the plants or animals. (And a few plants eat animals: Venus flytrap for one.) The base of our food chain is photosynthesizing plants.

Not only our we dependent on photosynthesizing plants for food, but we depend on them for cloth and most of our building materials.

Coal, natural gas, and crude oil, and their byproducts fuel our civilization and provide the feedstock for plastics. Crude oil, coal, and natural gas are the result of the anaerobic decomposition of photosynthetic plants. Even the production of mineral or stone based products rely on photosynthetic fuels for their mining, refining, and finishing.

Politically, photosynthetic products have been and remain the ultimate cause of most of our conflicts. If you want more food, you need more land, which is usually inhabited by someone else. Photosynthetic resources such as spices, herbs, medicinals, fibers, foods, and fuels were the impetus for trade routes, treaties, colonization, and wars.

The current global food crisis is the result of redirecting a photosynthetic food productx, corn and rice, from a food source to a fuel source. Using corn and rice as the feedstocks for biofuels has diverted it from direct consumption as a food and from feed for livestock. So the price of foods has risen dramatically in most countries. Part of that rise in the cost of food is also due the rise in the cost of fossil fuels, another product of photosynthesis.