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CHAPTER 16
GLOBAL RESPONSIBILITY FOR THE PRESERVATION OF THE
ENVIRONMENT
Where do you stand depend on where you sit is an aphorism
used to describe the determinants of peoples positions when they
make decisions. Where do you stand on one the most hotly
debated issues created by a warming globe and deteriorating
environment? You may already have strong feelings about this
controversy. Many others do. On whichever side of the
environmental debate you fall, there is at least one scholar and
several politicians who share your opinion.
Some scientists and politicians reject the view that the planet really
in danger; they claim that there is not a real problem because
technological innovation can reverse the trends in global warming.
These people claim that environmental and resource depletion have
many people needlessly alarmed.
Other scientists pessimistic and are now certain that the treats are
real. They are themselves alarmed by optimists who fail to face the
clear and present danger of environmental threats and undertake
reforms.

THE GLOBALIZATION OF ENVIRONMENTAL DANGERS

Global environmental issues engage the competing perspectives of
optimistic cornucopians and pessimistic neo-Malhusians.
Cornucopians is optimist
who question limits-to-growth
perspectives and contend that markets effectively maintain a
balance between population, resources, and the environment.
Neo-Malthusians is pessimists who warn of the global eco-political
dangers of uncontrolled population growth.
Cornucopians and neo-Malthusians paint very different pictures of
our future, and how we frame our understanding of environmental
challenges will affect our policy prescriptions.
Framing the Ecological Debate
Environmental concerns are linked to other values that state prize,
notably, security, economic prosperity, and social well-being.
Security means freedom from fear, risk and danger. Security has
conventionally equated national security, the struggle for state
power central to realist theory and it emphasis on armed
aggression.

Environmental security is a concept recognizing that environmental

threats to life systems are as dangerous as the threat of armed
conflicts. The liberal epistemic community has redefined security
in order to move beyond realisms conventional state-centric and
militaristic portrayal of international politics. Epistemic community
scientific experts on a subject of inquiry such as global warming that
are organized internationally as NGOs to communicate with one
another and use their constructed understanding of knowledge to
lobby for global transformation.
Today, many experts urge people and governments to construct a
broader definition of what really constitutes security. This
reconstruction is compatible with liberal theory, which empathizes
that security should be defined as the capacity to protect quality of
life. Out of conditions of global poverty and want emerge the socalled politics of scarcity which is the view that the unavailability of
resources required to sustain life, such as food, energy, or water can
undermine security in degrees similar military challenges.
Ecologists-those who study in interrelationship of living organisms
and the Earths physical environment-use the term the global
commons to high light our interdependence, because they see the
Earth as a common environment made up of the totality of
organisms. In a world where everything affects everything else, the
fate of the global commons is the fate of humanity. The planets
carrying capacitythe Earths ability to support and sustain lifeis
at the center of discussion about the future of the global commons.
Sustainable development is now popularly perceived as an
alternative to the quest for unrestrained growth. Sustainable
development is an economic growth that does not deplete the
resources needed to maintain life and prosperity.

CONTROVERSY
WHY IS THERE A GLOBAL FOOD CRISIS?
You dont have to go far to learn about the impact of the global food
crisis. Globally, increased food prices have created of good deal of
civil unrest as well as a wave of humanitarian crises in the
developing world. Between 2007and 2009, at least thirty countries
had food riots, the riots had been generated by the lack of money to
buy food. As World Bank President Robert Zoellick concluded, we
are entering a danger zone that threatens to drive over 100 million
additional people into extreme poverty.
Examining some of the major factors that are pushing us into this
danger zone provides insight into the interconnected nature of
global threats, the trade-offs inherent in trying to provide for human
needs, as well as the ways in which the policies of individual
governments and international organization can influence the

international system as a whole. With that in mind, let us briefly

touch upon some of the major root causes of the food crisis:
Environmental Stress.
Changing demographics and climates contribute to the crisis.
Government Policies.
As noted in chapter 13, governments have traditionally
protected their agricultural markets through subsidies and
tariffs, which have served to increase the price of many
agricultural goods.
Prices.
The cost of agricultural inputs has risen greatly. Agriculture
relies heavily on petroleum for many aspects of production as
well as transport, and the sector has thus been hit hard by
increases in energy prices (Mendelshon 2009). Moreover,
fertilizer prices have also risen dramatically.
Food Consumption Patterns.
In emerging markets, such as China, India, Russia, and Brazil,
people have changed their eating habits as their countries
have developed. In particular, these countries have greatly
increased their consumption of meat and dairy products.
The food crisis is thus at the crossroads of many international
phenomena and raises many fundamental issues about the
international system. An immediate issue of concern is whether the
food crisis will continue into the future.
This raises a related issuehow should we respond to this crisis?
Most every international organization has begun to articulate some
type of response, though maintaining the political will to in enact
fundamental changes is always difficult. Developed countries, for
example, such as the increased use of genetic engineering and
transgenetic crops and livestock, are quite controversial and not
supported by a variety of countries and NGOs. The dominant
cornucopian social paradigm stressing the right to conspicuous
consumption is under global attack, but many challenges remain to
achieving sustainable development worldwide.
The concept of sustainable development is even more directly
traceable to Our Common Future, popularly known as the
Brundtland Commission, after the Norwegian prime minister who
chaired it. The commission concluded that the world cannot sustain
the growth required to meet the needs and aspirations of the
worlds growing population unless it adopts radically different
approaches to basic issues of economic expansion, equity, resources
management, energy efficiency, and the like. Rejecting the limits to
growth maxim popular among neo-Malthusians, it emphasized
instead the growth of limits. The commission defined
a
sustainable society as one that meets the needs of the present
with out the compromising the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs.

The Ecopolitics of the Atmosphere

For years, scientists had warned that global warming-the gradual
rise in world temperature- would cause destructive changes in world
climatological patterns and that rising sea levels, melting glaciers,
and freak storms would provoke widespread changes in the globes
political and economic systems and relationships.
Fears have increased in conjunction with the continuing rise of
planetary temperatures. In response to the series of record-setting
global temperatures in the twenty-first century, attention to the
pollutants blamed for global warming has risen.
Climate Change and Global Warming
Major gaps in knowledge about climate change remain, but most
climates scientists are now convinced that the gradual rise in
Earths temperature, especially evident since the late eighteenth
century when the invention of power-driven machinery produced the
Industrial Revolution, is caused by an increase human-made gases
that alter the atmospheres insulating effects.
The globes temperature is now projected to further increase
dramatically by 2100 if aggressive preventive action is not taken.
Some scientists insist that the rise in global temperature is only part
of a cyclical change he world has experienced for thousands of
years. But most climate scientists say human-induced greenhouse
gases are at workand note that these temperature changes
correlate with levels of carbon dioxide. The UN team of hundreds of
atmospheric scientists for around the world known as the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Changes (IPCC) first
conclusively stated in 1955 its belief that global climate trends are
unlikely to be entirely due to natural causes, that humans are to
blame for at least part of the problem, and that the consequences
are likely to be very harmful and costly.
The IPCC warns that the effects of continued rising temperatures will
be both dramatic and devastating:
Sea levels will rise, mostly because of melting glaciers and the
expansion of water as it warms u.
Winters will get warmer and heat waves will become
increasingly frequent and severe, producing avalanches from
melting glaciers in high altitudes.
Rainfall will increase worldwide.
Because water evaporates more easily in a warmer climate,
drought prone regions will become even drier.
Up to 30% of living species will face an increasing risk of
extinction as entire ecosystem vanish from planet.
The combination of flooding and droughts will cause tropical
disease such as malaria and dengue fever to flourish in
previously temperate regions that were formerly too cold for
their insects to carriers

 The world will face increased hunger and water shortages,

especially in the poorest countries.
The politics of global warming is dramatically illustrated by the
tensions between countries over carving up the Arctic in order to
reap economic payoffs from exploitation of the resources that lie
beneath the polar icecap. Climate change affects the Arctic
intensely, because the average temperature there has risen at a
rate about twice as fast as the rest of the planet.
The Ecopolitics of Biodiversity, Deforestation, and Water
Shortages
Success at containing ozone depletion has raised hopes that other
environmental threats also can be given higher priority than vested
financial interests. Forests are critical In preserving the Earths
biodiversity and protecting the atmosphere and land resources.
Threats to Global Biodiversity
Biodiversity, or biological diversity, is an umbrella term that refers to
the Earths variety o life. Technically, it encompasses three basic
levels of organization in living systems: genetic diversity, species
diversity, and ecosystem diversity. Because so much of the Earths
biological heritage is concentrated in the tropics, the tropics, the
global South also has a growing concern about protecting its
interests in the face of MNCs efforts to reap profits from the sale of
biologically based products.
Shrinking Forests, Dust Bowls, and Water Shortages
Over the past eight thousand years the World Resources Institute
estimates that almost half of the forests once covering the Earth
have been converted for ranching, farmland, pastures, and other
uses. This has led to deforestation and desertification, which turn an
increasing portion of the Earths landmass into deserts useless for
agricultural productivity or wildlife habitats.
The Ecopolitics of Energy Supply and Demand
Throughout the twentieth century, demand for and consumption of
oil spiraled upward. An enormous growth in the worldwide demand
for and consumption of energy followed. The suppliers of oil have
also changed over the past decade. Old players such as the OPEC
remain. Oil supplies assume great importance in world politics
because oil is not being discovered at the same rate it is being used.
The world today does not faces the immediate threat of running out
of oil: it faces instead the problem that over half of the proven oil
reserves are now concentrated in a small number of OPEC countries
that are drawing down their reverse at half the average global rate.

TOWARD
SECURITY

SUSTAINABILITY

AND

HUMAN

The Tragedy of the Global Commons

Humanity faces enormous challenges of unprecedented scope and
danger: arresting global climate change, preserving biodiversity,
providing clean water, and restoring forests, fisheries, and other
overly exploited renewable resources. No single causes is
responsible for trends in the global environment. Rather, many
causes interact with each other to produce the dreaded dangers
undermining the preservation of the worlds life system on which
human existence depends.
The tragedy of the commons is popular terms constructed to
capture the human roots of the growth threats to the planets
resources and its delicately balanced ecological system. The
commons emphasizes the impact of human behavior driven by the
search for personal self-advantage, and although it stresses the
importance of individual action and personal motivations, it also
ascribes those motives to collectivities or groups such as
corporations and entire countries.
The tragedy of the commons has become a standard concept in
ecological analysis because it illuminate so well the sources of
environmental degradation and many other global problems and
predicaments.

Global Solution
In political world in which growing population means growing
demand for energy, food, and other resources, the politics of
scarcity becomes central. This is the vulnerability created by
interdependent globalization. Moreover, how countries meet their
growing demand for energy directly influences the evolution and
preservation of the global commons.
Converting to Renewable Sources of Energy. A new and less
destructive sources of energy could emerge because of the advent
of revolutionary new technologies that derive energy from the sun,
wind, and other abundant and renewable sources of energy such as
hydrogen. Among known technologies, nuclear energy has often
been championed as the leading alternative to fossil fuel
dependence. Concern about the risks of nuclear power extend
beyond safety. A related fear is that countries that currently do not
posses nuclear know-how might develop nuclear weapons. Others
efforts to develop alternative potential fuel resources have also
begun in hopes of breaking our dependence on fossil fuels.
Conversion to renewable sources of energy represents a possible
avenue away from global environmental degradation. Many believe
this will not happen soon enough.

International Treaties for Environmental Protection

Success breeds success. The Biodiversity Treaty was followed by the
other international efforts to deal with environmental problems by
agreements globally. A big example was the Kyoto protocol of 2005
in which 156 countries accounting for at least 55% of global
greenhouse emissions pledged to cut emissions of gases liked to
global warming below 1990 levels by the year 2012. Only United
States refused to cooperate.
Trade, the Environment, and Sustainable Development
Multinational corporations are key players in the ecopolitics game
that has potential to determine the Earths fate. Corporations rule
globally, and they are strong advocates with powerful lobbyists of
free trade.
Beyond issue of the grains from and the costs of trade,
environmentalists and liberal economists differ in their assessments
of the wisdom of using trade to promote environmental standards.
Trade-off must sometimes be made between goals that, in principle,
all seem designed to increase human well-being and security.

National and Local Solutions

A huge concerns is that some very powerful states, advantageously
positioned in the global hierarchy, are selfishly resisting making
painful and costly adjustments now. They are resisting of their own
existing environmental protection policies.
Many people worldwide are dissatisfied with the tardy reaction of
national governments to the appalling dangers to the global ecology.
Another solution is rapidly materializing.
It is hard to determine whether this reaction as a result of pressure
from huge numbers of private citizens who believe that it is crucial
to set limits on climate-changing greenhouse emissions because
they feel that this is the right thing to do.
What should you do as a global citizen? Ecologists will tell you
quickly that you can make a difference, all by yourself, or more
powerfully, by joining an NGO that shares your concerns and is
pressuring governments to take the perceived needed urgent steps
for change. In An Inconvenient Truth, former U.S. presidential
candidate Al Gore recommended five simple things you can do to
stop global warming:
Change a light.
Recycle more
Use less hot water
Drive less
Conserve electricity
There are of course, many other actions that individuals can
undertake that might affect the future of the planet. There is such a
long list of things that could be done and that should be done and
that should be done that the options are about as unlimited as are
the multiple threats to the planetary ecological predicament.

If necessity really is the mother of invention, there is hope. The

planet must be saved, or all other opportunities will be closed, the
global; environment will face certain doom, and human history will
end. Therefore, the stakes are so high that perhaps solution will be
found. As the world struggles, the debate about solutions is likely to
continue on two tracks: between those who think human kinds
concentration should be geared to trying to reverse environmental
deterioration, and those who prefer to concentrate on creating new
technologies to contain environmental damage. Both strategies
appear to be urgently needed.
Our entirely planet, its land and water areas, the Earths surface
and its subsoil provide today the arena for a worldwide economy,
the dependence of those various parts upon each other has become
indissoluble.
--Leon Trotsky, Russian radical communist theoretician