Highest Pressures

A sustained laboratory pressure of 170 GPa (11,000 tons force/sq in) was achieved in the giant hydraulic diamond-faced press at the Carnegie Institution's Geophysical Laboratory, Washington, D.C. and reported in June 1978.

Using dynamic methods and impact speeds of up to 18,000 mph, momentary pressures of 7000 GPa (540,000 tons/sq in) were reported from the United States in 1958.

330200 – Инженерная защита окружающей среды (The Engineering Conservation of the Environment)

CONSERVATION OF NATURAL RESOURSES (8755 characters)

planned management of a natural resource or the total environment of a particular ecosystem to prevent exploitation, pollution, destruction, or neglect and to ensure the future use of the resource.

Although the idea of conservation is probably as old as the human species, the use of the word in its present context is relatively recent. Over the years conservation has acquired many connotations: to some it has meant the protection of wild nature, to others the sustained production of useful materials from the resources of the Earth. The most widely accepted definition, presented in 1980 in World Conservation Strategy by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources, is that of "the management of human use of the biosphere so that it may yield the greatest sustainable benefit while maintaining its potential to meet the needs and aspirations of future generations."

The document defines the objectives of the conservation of living resources as: maintenance of essential ecological processes and life-support systems, preservation of genetic diversity, and guarantee of the sustainable use of species and ecosystems. More generally, conservation involves practices that perpetuate the resources of the Earth on which human beings depend and that maintain the diversity of living organisms that share the planet. This includes such activities as the protection and restoration of endangered species, the careful use or recycling of scarce mineral resources, the rational use of energy resources, and the sustainable use of soils and living resources.

Conservation is necessarily based on a knowledge of ecology, the science concerned with the relationship between life and the environment, but ecology itself is based on a wide variety of disciplines, and conservation involves human feelings, beliefs, and attitudes as well as science and technology.

Technological Issues

Technological progress is another important reason for many conflicts in matters pertaining to conservation. Although technology can be a boon, it can also be poorly related to environmental realities. Through the use of technology great environmental changes can quickly be brought about. Although these changes are usually intended to be beneficial, they frequently occur in natural environments in which all things are ecologically related to one another. As a consequence, the changes may produce side effects that were not anticipated or that were discounted as being of little importance, thereby disrupting other human activities or the environment as a whole. Examples of such situations include the polluting effects of certain industries or the spread of waterborne diseases following the construction of major irrigation projects.

The recent history of conservation has been marked by a great expansion of government roles in protecting the environment and by a growth of public interest in and support for this process. National-park systems, dedicated to the preservation of wild nature and to the provision of outdoor recreation space, have grown rapidly, and national-forest systems, dedicated to the multiple use of wild-land resources, have also become firmly established. In the United States the conservation of wildlife became a cause of national interest and led to the establishment of a far-ranging system of wildlife refuges and the gradual restoration of most wild animal species to levels approaching, in some cases exceeding, their primitive abundance.

On private lands, however, and on government or public-domain lands not specifically reserved as national forests, parks, or refuges, deterioration continued, reaching a peak in the 1930s, when it became widely recognized that those range lands in the public domain had been disastrously overgrazed and that many privately owned farmlands had been depleted or exhausted. Firm control over the management of lands in the public domain and federal intervention to establish soil conservation on privately owned lands were accepted as appropriate activities for the national government.