What can industry's do to help lower land degradation and how bad is it?

Question

need help with land degradation

Answer 1

Land degradation is the adverse alteration of land due to human land use activities.  These activities can range from agriculture to recreation.  The only "industries" commonly using the land are agriculture (including logging and ranching), waste disposal, and mining.  Recreation is an industry which also makes heavy use of the land, but I suspect you are referring to goods production industries.

Agriculture impacts the land by removing micro-nutrients, or established flora.  In annual agriculture, the land is put through a cycle of planting and harvesting, which leaves the land intermittently bare.  When the land is bare, it may undergo denudation, the removal of top soil through erosion.  In the 1930s, extensive farming and drought led to wide-spread denudation, which caused the "Dust Bowl".  To prevent future dust bowls, a process of crop rotation has been standard farming practice since the mid 1930s.  Whenever harvesting is involved, some part of the micro-nutrients in the land will be removed, and they must be replaced with fertilizers of some type.  This has been done since the 1920s.

Ranching also can lead to denudation, as cattle or sheep eat away at the ground covering.  The herd is constantly moved by the ranch hands to prevent over-grazing in any one part of the ranch.  Ideally, the land will have had time to recover before the herd is moved back.  This has been a fairly standard practice for over 100 years.

Logging also removes vegetation from the land, but much more intermittently than other agriculture.  Logging companies re-harvest the same areas of land, and thus replant trees after a harvest.

Mining can "scar" land, and can bring toxic metals to the surface as mine tilings.  Depending on the design of the mine, affected land may be left to natural recovery, or some type of rehabilitation may be performed at the cessation of mining.  Because mining removes the desired ore, it essentially has a one-time impact.

Waste disposal is the last "industry" that commonly affects the land.  Apart from your normal garbage removal service, some manufacturing companies dispose of waste themselves.  In the 1960s and 1970s the rampant dumping of waste began to cause serious land degradation.  Environmental regulations were created to limit what and how much of what could be dumped.  Highly polluted land was reconditioned at the owner's expense, or if the owner went bankrupt, public expense (super fund).  Dump sites must be constructed under plans to limit toxic runoff.  As is the general case with waste disposal; making less waste means disposing of less waste, which means less land impact.

There is a common thread in most of these land use issues:  They were all recognized as problems and solved decades ago.  So what industry can do to help lower land degradation today is to keep doing what those industries have already been doing.

Also keep in mind that humans have actually been re-using the same land again and again for a long time now without problems, and when we abandon that land, Nature doesn't waste much time taking it back.