Within nature things grow in size only to a certain point, look at the growth of a hamster, the weight of a hamster doubles each week from its birth until it reaches puberty. If this progress of growth continued after it matured, until it was 1 year old in age, we would be faced with a nine billion tonne hamster. Nature and its ecological systems grow and develop to a certain extent, yet economists and politicians believe the economy can have limitless growth. This is a fantasy. It is impossible to have limitless growth on a finite planet. Mankind’s obsession with a booming economy has overshadowed the concerns for sustainability within nature and is causing both environmental destruction and societal damage, as we push aside both the needs of underdeveloped countries and the needs of the environment. The capitalisation, in the western world in particular, causes degradation of nature and the natural resources from our surroundings, many of this destruction occurs in developing countries and the extensive growth of the Western’s economy is ultimately leading to the exhaustion of nature’s resources. By understanding how we measure a countries wealth we can ultimately see what impacts this has and overall see what we depend on, our economy or environment and resources. Possible solutions may arise and impossible means of how to continue.
A worldwide common measure of wealth, GDP, gross domestic product is a number which causes great concern amongst politicians and economists. A measure of only monetary transactions produces an impression that wealthy countries with strong capital, and a greater output than input of products are the countries on top. Not those which harvest the natural resources to create these products, or those th...
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6. Shiva, Vandana., (2013), “How economic growth has become anti-life”, The Guardian.com, 1 November, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/nov/01/how-economic-growth-has-become-anti-life
7. TEEB – The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity for Local and Regional Policy Makers., (2010), “The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity”, Teeb Web, http://www.teebweb.org/wp-content/uploads/Study%20and%20Reports/Reports/Local%20and%20Regional%20Policy%20Makers/D2%20Report/TEEB_Local_Policy-Makers_Report.pdf
8. The New Economics Foundation (NEF)., (2014) “The Impossible Hamster”, NEF, 24 January, http://www.impossiblehamster.org/
9. Vivero Pol, Jose Luis., (2013) “Why Food Should be a Commons not a Commodity”, Our World Brought to you by United Nations University, 16 October, http://ourworld.unu.edu/en/why-food-should-be-a-commons-not-a-commodity
Roberts believes that “food is a solution, a cause for joy and positive energy” (Roberts, page 18). Most of the time, it is more costly to waste the food than to use the food as a tool, which can bring new opportunities. As the example he provides in the book, Will Allen, a gardener from the US, uses spent grain as an opportunity to make compost for sale and to heat his own greenhouses using the heat generated from the composting process (Roberts, page 21). This way, he has also helped find an effective way to dispose of used food rather than treating it as trash which is actually not cheap to manage. Hence, Roberts concludes that there are so many hidden resources in the world, which can be used to work with food to create opportunities and to benefit the society, economy and environment while saving money (Roberts, page
In Raj Patel’s novel Stuffed and Starved, Patel goes through every aspect of the food production process by taking the experiences of all the people involved in food production from around the world. Patel concludes by eventually blaming both big corporations and governments for their critical role in undermining local, cultural, and sustainable foodways and in so doing causing the key food-related problems of today such as starvation and obesity. In this book of facts and serious crime, Patel's Stuffed and Starved is a general but available analysis of global food struggles that has a goal of enlightening and motivating the general Western public that there is something critically wrong with our food system.
O’Hara, Sabine U., and Sigrid Stagl. "Global Food Markets and their Local Alternatives: A Socio-Ecological Economic Perspective." Population and Environment 22.6 (2001): pp. 533-554. Web.
In the Introduction, Patel outlines some of the major issues he addresses in the ten chapters of his book. The most important of them being: the abundance of food in the world vs. the starvation that is evident in countries such as India and Mexico, reduced prices on crops and how farmers compensate by working harder and producing more, and how the number of people involved in the food economy is gargantuan compared to the number of people who actually make decisions and control what happens in our global food system.
In this article, “The Shadow of the Past” Clive Ponting, proclaims the vital importance for our modern global civilization and offers a provocative and illuminating view of human history and its relationship to the environment. Ponting points out that as our species increased in population, it had a direct effect on our environment and our ecosystems could not support our increasing number. He argues that human beings have repeatedly built societies that have grown and prospered by exploiting the Earth’s resources, only to expand to the point where these resources can no longer sustain the society’s population and subsequently collapsed. Ponting is trying to get across a point by saying that if humans continue to markedly use resources or create unnatural resources, the natural ecosystem will not be able to follow these changes and it will soon be destroyed. Agriculture is what caused our population to grow which lead to a greater population. As our population grew, the more land we needed to cultivate on, the more ecosystems we destroyed. Since agriculture is our most important res...
In Lester R. Brown's novel Full Planet, Empty Plates, the issue of food scarcity is explained through an environmental perspective. He begins the novel by addressing the issue of the world's high demand for crops, such as grain, and the stress it places on farmers to keep up with the increase in demand. In a time where there is a significant water shortage, higher temperatures, and eroding soils, food scarcity should be at the top of everyone's agenda. Brown poses the question whether or not food scarcity will be our civilization's "weak link" in terms of survival. He demonstrates how food security is a serious issue across the globe. As supply decreases, demand increases, thus raising the price of food. Unlike global resources such as oil,
We as a world, waste so much food. “In 2010 133 billion pounds of edible food at the retail and consumer level went uneaten (1,249 calories per person per day) with about two-thirds of this waste attributed to consumers” (Qi & Roe, 2016). Much of the produce is essentially “thrown out” because grocery stores want to sell the perfect produce. If an apple has a bruise because it fell from the tree it cannot go into the grocery store. Instead it goes to a waste land, farmers market, or even donated. This idea was something I did not think about at all. However, after watching this film I was able to value a Farmers Market so much more. I do not wish to continue the idea of perfect produce, therefore I will ensure I get my future produce from local growers. This film truly changed my perception of food in
Moreover, if the theories of modern ecology and sus-tainability (or lack there of) hold true, the ramifications of this ideology become global. Dobson creatively illus-trates in his book that there are not any simple solutions to correcting the shadowy future that industrialism is be-stowing upon us. The author further emphasizes two criti-cal features in relation to ecology and sustainability. The first is that technological solutions will not bring fourth infinite materials in a finite system. Secondly, the exponential growth of industrialism promises that Earth’s resources are unsustainable in lieu of the growing population. With that having been said, the challenge of the ecological movement is to convince the consensus that change is prudent. The heart of the debate of limited con-sumption involves the tradeoffs required to achieve sus-tainable development. For now, the majority of society would rather leave the grievances of repoliticalization and social change for the future generations to deal with, rather than conserving today, in order to plan for tomor-row. Here, I mean conserving in the sense of not merely “cutting back,” but actually re-thinking the technological processes utilized to achieve the luxuries that we as a so-ciety have become so accustomed to.
As the world population grows and consumption per person increases, the demand for food is rising. To an extent, fossil fuels have made an increase in food production achievable, but the finite supply is rapidly depleting. Over the last 50 years, global food production has tripled (Mosier et al. 2004). Despite this, an estimated 870 million people were undernourished in 2010-2012 (FAO 2013) while in 2008, 5...
The human population growth rate is an alarming issue that brings with it irreversible consequences, that will likely effect the way of life for future generations to come. With the serious incline in population statistics comes catastrophic processes such as global warming and deforestation that have major ‘knock on’ ramifications. It’s issues such as these that need to be considered when we think about the growth of the human population, and we must take into account why these issues are occurring. We must also explore the options available to us that may assist in limiting the problems, or eliminating them all together, to provide a better place, not only for us in existence now, but also those who will walk this earth in the future decades and centuries to come.
Economic growth and social development are complementary and they have a close but complex relationship. With the economic growth, it is clear that there are many environmental concerns in today’s society. Air, water, and land pollution have worsened; the environment of wild animals and plants has been seriously damaged; many species are threatened with extinction, deforestation and over-exploitation of mineral resources.
Economic valuation is an important component of environmental policy, although it is difficult to affix a cost on the environment and ecosystem services, it is a measurement that is relevant to most in society humans. Therefore, economic tools may be useful in reinforcing the importance of maintaining biodiversity and preserving fragile ecosystems.
“Thus sustainable development can only be pursued if population size and growth are in harmony with the changing productive potential of the ecosystem (p.
Though several people see large rapidly growing populations in developing regions as the primary culprit in environmental decline, we need to focus on the costly environmental outcomes of overconsumption among the gradually increasing populations of the developed nations. These differing emphases naturally point to fundamentally different solutions: slow population increase in less-developed nations or change destructive consumption and production patterns in the more-developed nations. This debate, however, assumes a one-step answer to the complex problems created by population pressures on the environment. Both population size and consumption ...
Over the past few decades there have been discourses both in favor and against Globalization’s capacity to guarantee a sustainable future. Authors attest societies and businesses’ inability to account for ecological and environmental limits when dealing with economic growth, examples of this are some of the traditional business metrics used by most global companies, and nations’ measure of wealth (GDP); both sides heavily resting on economic factors, fail to account for societal and environmental concerns (Byrnea & Gloverb, 2002). Other researchers point at the intensive use of resources, especially by global corporations; such as the increasing and careless consumption of fossil fuels, water, precious metals, etc. leading to a rise in GHG (Starke, 2002) (United Nations Development Program (UNDP), 2000). Most fervent opponents go as far as to call ‘sustainable development’ an oxymoron (Ayres, 1995).