Strayer, last excerpt of last chapter 24

Despite the last chapter discussion’s emphasis on secularism, globalization, and religious backlash against science and related ideas such as evolution, the practices of abortion, this last segment in the chapter deals with Environmentalism and how that has impacted the world as it’s gone hand and hand with globalization bringing acknowledgement of environmental issues to the forefront of awareness by the public via media and so on. Memories of empires and revolutions, wars et cetera, have faded from memory of many to remember wars like Vietnam and others during the 20^th Century. There was perhaps a time when the resources of the world seemed endless. We had two world wars, genocides that killed millions, and yet still the population has recovered and continues to challenge our ability to transform the planet and deal with dwindling resources for a growing world population. Environmentalism brought this concern into the public sphere. Tapping new energy sources such as hydro-electric power, natural gas, and nuclear power allowed mankind to power larger cities, which meant more people expotentially; this allowed more economic growth. We use more energy in America than most places in the world, 50 to 100 times more power consumption than the average Bangladeshi for example. But, with the growth of these new economic, industrial and residential zones, came a host of other modern problems. Particularly the increase of domesticated animals for mass-consumption, and a lot of air pollution problems that some estimates killed 35,000 people a year by 2002! I knew that careless industrial accidents and lack of environmental oversight in the former Soviet Union had caused a lot of industrial waste. But, the authorities tended to censor environmental impact of their pollution there. I remember a friend told me you could only drink bottled water when you traveled to Romania. She said you couldn’t drink from wells or the tap because the water was so badly contaminated with pollution from the period when the Soviets occupied Eastern Europe, for example. 20 percent of Mexico’s population interestingly lives in areas described as “ecological disasters.” Sometimes industrial progress trumps the human rights of people unfortunately. Before the 1990s there wasn’t much concensus about the impact of global warming, it seems. The biggest concern was that of the burning of fossil fuels, and the deforestization of regions having an impact upon greenhouse gases being trapped in the atmosphere, polar ice caps melting, and extinction of whole species. Environmentalism began it seems via the discussion of Romanticism era poets like Blake and Wordsworth interestingly. You wouldn’t imagine poets as social activists in favor of environmentalism typically, but maybe that’s not a stretch since a lot of poets have written poets that eulogized the awe and beauty of nature itself. By the early 90’s only 14 million Americans were members of environmental organizations. That, I guess is a lot of people, but it’s still not the majority of the population fo the time. Still it’s an impressive start. In Germany, environmentalism was also prominent with parties like the Green Party, who were originally opposed to nuclear weapons on European soil, who took more of a general environmentalism stance later on with the rest of the movements.