The Environment and Human Kind Essay

Tags: earth environment global warming greenhouse gases population

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As Coleman and Kerbo (2009) note, social interactions serve as “the basis for the ideas we develop about who and what we are” (p. 13-14). That is why it is so important to interact with multiple perspectives—so that our ideas and beliefs are not narrow or ill-defined but rather informed and based on a wide variety of inputs. This paper will approach the issue of human kind’s impact on the environment from such a point of view by analyzing and critiquing two articles expressing the opposing sides of the issue and identifying their strengths, weaknesses and any remaining unanswered questions that still need to be addressed.



The question of whether human kind is dangerously harming the environment is answered, “Yes,” by Brown (2005) who identifies several statistics to provide context for the issue—namely that in the last 70 years, the global economy has grown sevenfold, water usage has tripled though the “capacity of the hydrological system to produce fresh water through evaporation” has not, seafood is being consumed at levels beyond that which will support sustainable oceanic life, and fossil-fuel burning has increased carbon dioxide emission levels fourfold, which of course has accelerated the rate at which greenhouse gases are trapped in the atmosphere to warm up the earth and lead to global warming (Brown, 2005, p. 18). The strength of Brown’s argument is that he is able to identify concrete facts that illustrate well the impact that human kind is having on the planet: it is consuming more than it ever has in history and its consumption rate is not able to be matched by its ability to sustain the environment. In other words, human kind is taking more than it is giving back from Mother Nature, and this will have a destabilizing effect on the environment that can be dangerous for all life on the planet—plants, animals and humans alike.

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However, Lomborg (2001) takes the opposing position and asserts that human kind is not dangerously impacting the environment—though he once believed it was. In his article, Lomborg addresses the main points raised by Brown—namely that natural resources are running out, the population is growing too rapidly and consuming too much, the natural balance off ecosystems is being destabilized as a result, and the planet’s air and water is becoming polluted thanks to humans. Lomborg (2001) shows that the data used by Brown et al. is misleading and presents an alternate set of facts that paint a different story: for example, the population may be growing but it is also producing more food than ever before in history, meaning that “fewer people are starving,” and, moreover, fewer than 1% of animal species are projected to be extinct within the next 50 years—not the very high figure of 25-50% (p. 1). Likewise, greenhouse gases are being trapped in the atmosphere but the impact of this is overstated, according to Lomborg. Lomborg’s strengths are that he addresses the arguments made by Brown—but his main weakness is that he does not always have a compelling argument to Brown. The facts and figures he presents to rebut Brown’s facts regarding population explosion, over-consumption, species extinction and greenhouse gases are all acceptable. However, when Lomborg asserts that “despite the intuition that something drastic needs to be done about such a costly problem [as carbon dioxide emissions], economic analyses clearly show that it will be far more expensive to cut carbon-dioxide emissions radically than to pay the costs of adaptation to the increased temperatures” (p. 5). This assumption is on the face of it rather weak because it is not based….....

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References

Brown, L. (2005). Pushing beyond earth’s limits. The Futurist, May-June, 18-24.

Coleman, J. W., & Kerbo, H. R. (2009). Social problems (10th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Lomborg, B. (2001). The truth about the environment. The Economist, Aug 2, 1-6.

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