And the Best Writing Activity is...

Decidi blogar as melhores Writing Activities dos meus alunos, e a inauguração será em grande estilo. Ana Letícia de Aquino foi minha aluna do nível 6 nesse primeiro semestre de 2010 e ela, que trabalha com o meio-ambiente, se esbaldou no tema da nossa segunda redação. Pedi aos alunos do nível 6 que escrevessem um artigo sobre qualquer aspecto relacionado ao meio-ambiente, em inglês, como se um jornal da UFSC estivesse pedindo. Aqui vai o ensaio maravilhoso da Ana. Parabéns!

Brazilian water flows are in danger. Not even the upper ones, like rivers, lakes, creeks and seas, but also the subterranean water like our famous “Aqüífero Guarani”.
Human-beings, following the animal behavior, always lived by the shore or the water streams. We need the water for our simplest actions. We need it for our very tiny metabolism, to wash, for transportation. We need water for food. We depend on healthy water. But, since the human population has become huge, the water flows have been suffering the consequences of it.
Human kind, a collective species, evolved the languages, the culture, the big clusters of people called cities (and now mega cities), the agriculture, the industries, all for its own well-being. We have to produce more and more food and goods, we have a growing amount of people to take care of. We lie down and wake up in the morning thinking about development. Our presidents meet each other in the name of it, so it is very important.
But we have forgotten one thing about our planet: it is the only one we have always had and will ever have. If all matter goes in cycles, if everything is changeable and nothing else is created, as Lavoisier said, we have to think clearly about what we have been doing with our limited resources.
We use fertilizers to grow our crops. When it rains, all nitrogen we put on the soil is washed to the rivers. A lot of algi and other microorganisms grow in the fertilized water and consume all oxygen, killing the fish and other species. It is called eutrophization and it is the lake or river death. And there are the pesticides too! And there is soil going to the rivers also.
The impacts of industry pollutants on water are well-known: heavy metals bio-accumulate in all species and the changes in the water temperature (in order to cool the engines) are just two of them. There are even medicines and hormones found in the water. They come from our drug industry and everything we drink and eat goes obligatorily to the water because of our sewer systems.
We have neglected our water sources for thousands of years, and now we have to develop new ways to clean it up, and for our own sake! We are a very selfish species.