3.3 Ecological degradation
The productive and constructive engineering may interfere with native ecosystems through the excavation, cover and occupation of land, destruction of vegetation, and consumption of energy and resource. Although wind and solar energy are clean energy sources, those have also caused inescapable environmental issues in practical applications. The construction of clean energy destroyed forests (Figure 6) and grasslands (Figure 2 and Figure 3b), and reshaped the landforms (Figure 3a), resulting in a lack of nutrients suitable for plant growth on the new surface, and thus leading to vegetation recovery is difficult. Once the land has been desertification (Figure 3), the treatment of land desertification needs to take more time and money to restore vegetation in mobile dunes and stabilize sand fields. Besides, the construction of clean energy also caused environmental pollution, such as photovoltaic projects. Wastewater and exhaust gas were generated during the production of monocrystalline silicon which is the main material of solar cell panels. Besides, once the solar cell is retired, itself becomes untreatable waste (Tammaro et al., 2016). Moreover, if endless solar panels are planted as crops in the fields, the right to enjoy the sunshine of plants and land is deprived, which may lead to the negative impacts on biodiversity and ecosystem functions. For example, Xu et al. (2019) reported that to avoid the negative impact of the photovoltaic project on the land, the so-called ”ecological photovoltaic” was implemented by planting vegetables and raising rabbits in the remaining space of photovoltaic farm station, which ultimately failed due to the lack of sunlight. Besides, wind power as another clean energy also brought negative effects on the environment. It was reported that the noise, electromagnetic radiation, and moving shadows generated by the wind power generator near the Trionyx Sinensis farms affected the reproduction and growth of the Trionyx Sinensis , resulting in a loss of RMB 1.63 million (Bai, 2019).