People now can better protect the environment than they could in the past？ As the air condition deteriorates day by day, people begin to think about how to protect the environment and lead more environmentally-friendly lives. Some people believe that with improving science and technology, people today can protect the environment better than they could in the past. However, I personally believe that although advanced technologies can help to preserve environment to some extent, they may even bring more adverse effects than those positive counterparts. Firstly, the total population among the world is growing rapidly. More people means larger energy requirement, and larger energy requirement directly leads to more pollution, rapid increase on arable land and decrease on natural vegetation. Forests, with large amount of trees which can absorb carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, serve as natural environment protector. However, because of the rapid growth of the need of arable land and human inhabited regions, human begins to wreck havoc on natural forests to provide enough space. Besides, the change of climate has caused many species go extinct, which puts a great stain on biodiversity. Gradually, the equilibrium of ecosystem will be damaged and then cause even further chain reaction to destroy environment. Secondly, nowadays the society is more prosperous with increasingly need of communication and transportation. In order to pursue higher efficiency, people tend to choose faster transportation methods such as airplanes or trains. Even in daily life people tend to go out by car instead of on foot. This kind of lifestyle will definitely lead to more exhaust fumes and air pollution. Moreover, even the renewable energy technologies have their own adverse effects to environment. For example, Chernobyl nuclear accident is still influencing the lives of surrounding animals and human beings even after so many years. Commercial wind turbines have huge noise which may kill some small animals such as birds. To sum up, although there are many technologies nowadays that can help to protect environment, whether those technologies have more positive or negative impacts is yet not determined. Moreover, because of the rapid growth of population and prosperity of current society, it is harder to protect environment today than in the past.