Discussion - Week 2

1. What, in your mind, is the most important global environmental problem? Why?

When I think about what is doing the most harm to our environment, the first thing that springs to my mind is similar to what many others have said in their own blog posts: over-consumption, along with the waste that it produces. I feel that we have fairly well covered that topic, but we have only talked a little about just what it is that causes us to consume so much and be so unaware of the impact we have on the environment. I think several things contribute to the way people in industrialized societies treat the environment: lack of knowledge about the environment; detachment from the source(s) of the things we consume; and detachment from the areas being most negatively effected.

Our lack of knowledge stems from the fact that, while we may learn the three R's in school and have a vague understanding of how the environment works, students in our society generally don't have intimate knowledge of how the environment works. We don't really learn where all of the material that makes our buildings and cars and toys comes from. We don't generally have to deal with our waste, because we throw it away and trucks come along and drive it off and we never see it again. It would probably help if students in industrialized society were taught a little bit more about the environment.

We are also far removed from the places that our materials and food come from. Because we live in an industrialized society, we simply go to the store to buy food. We don't need to work to grow it, we simply need to work to make money for it. Similarly, we don't grow trees to make lumber for buildings, we simply have someone else cut down the forest and dig out the quarries and build our homes and office buildings for us. The forests being destroyed are far away, so we don't even notice that there aren't any trees left. (But someone else certainly does...)

We are also detached from the places that receive our waste and are hardest hit by the drain of resources. Because we live in the core nations (according to world system theory), we essentially get everything we need from the periphery, and when there is a shortage in the world, we don't really notice; we simply drain the periphery of its resources even faster, increasing both input and output and hurting the environment even further.

Essentially, the biggest problem facing the environment today is that the people who are hurting it the most often don't realize it. Industrialized societies are getting the benefits of the harm we do to the environment; underdeveloped societies are paying most of the costs and seeing the worst of the effects of our waste.