Sustainable Local Production To Large Scale example essay topic

This destruction of nature's economy and peoples' economies is never taken into account by modern economics, and hence processes that lead to ecological destruction and poverty and deprivation for millions are presented as 'growth' in national accounts and the global economy. However, it is not growth when assessed in terms of the health of ecosystems and societies. This contrived pseudo-growth camouflages the destruction it unleashes on the lives of Third World communities. A good example of such pseudo-growth is in Third World agriculture.

The shift from a 'food first' to an 'export first' agricultural policy in India is justified on grounds of food security, because export earnings are supposed to pay for food imports. In fact, export-oriented agriculture has reduced food security by encouraging a shift from small-scale, sustainable local production to large-scale, non-sustainable industrial production. It also brings changes in ownership over natural resources and means of production, from small autonomous producer / owners to large corporate interests. Peasants are displaced from farming, while commercial interests take over land for production of export commodities. These enterprises often have negative environmental impacts, creating further hardship for local communities. On Church Street in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a large and colorful mural, sponsored by the Women's Community Cancer Project (WCCP), encourages environmental awareness and activism.

The mural depicts several women gathered around a model of the earth, and is emblazoned with the motto: "Indication of harm, not proof of harm, is our call to action". In other words, we should not wait for confirmation of our fears; if something seems horribly awry, it probably is, and will only get worse while we do nothing. This has been called the precautionary principle, and it is often invoked today in connection not only with chemical pollution, the elimination of which is the goal of the WCCP, but also with supposedly even greater threats like overpopulation and global warming. The problem with the precautionary principle, however, is that it is wrong. One of the peculiarities of the human condition is that we are irrationally averse to risks, and tend to overestimate the probable negative consequences of actions and events. We are fascinated by bad news, and generally bored by good news; more often than not, we tend to perceive things as being worse than they actually are.

Whatever the ultimate reasons for this predilection, it is hardly a sound basis for dealing with complex, long-term problems. In the 1960's and 70's, a string of alarmist tracts -- most notably Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb (1968) -- stoked fears in America and Europe of an imminent apocalypse that, needless to say, never came about. Strangely, however, we took no notice of the fact that the catastrophes we worried about had failed to occur. Even more strangely, the doomsayers never lost their credibility, instead merely postponing their deadlines to convenient future dates. One person who pointed out the absurdity of all this was the late economist Julian Simon. It is true that Simon had a somewhat bellicose style, and a flair for provocative thought-experiments.

(In his 1981 book, The Ultimate Resource, for example, he estimated that the entire population of the world could be supplied with food from an area equal to the combined land mass of Vermont and Massachusetts, or about one-thousandth of presently cultivated land.) Partly for this reason -- but mostly because his arguments ran counter to what environmentalists believed to be true -- Simon was dismissed as a right-wing crank. Meanwhile, the environmental movement continued to imagine new and even greater problems, all of them requiring immediate action..