by Naoya Suizu

The earth is dying by human action.  Since the Industrial Revolution happened in Britain in the eighteenth century, human beings invited many new technologies and raised the standard of living by industrialization.  But, the development was hardly considered about environment then. As a result, human beings caused various environmental problems such as global warming, desertification and so on.  Gradually, many people begin to notice the big problems and try to improve them by the various means now.  The means are very different by every nation because it has every political, economic, religious and environmental background, particularly between developing countries and developed countries.  At the same time, people begin to cooperate about many environmental problems because they are not the problems of a nation.  To our regret, they aren’t solved now.  So, we should seek the road of the solution in every nation and need the unity around the world based on the improvement of the environmental problems still more.

When we think how to protect environment, we can’t help thinking the process of the economic development.  For all nations, it is very important and developing countries don’t want to be prevented from it by the environmental protection particularly.  But, developing countries face to the problems more than developed countries ironically and they have to treat the problems for their own country.  So, developing countries which have the limited money, resources and techniques don’t obey the process of development like developed countries but need to create new possibilities for development because they will also destroy environment same as developed countries did.  For example, Rwanda promotes Eco-tours.  It is the plan that we can see some gorillas in front of us in Rwanda’s National Parks.  It benefits the local community around Rwanda’s National Parks directly and the benefit is used for conservation. So, it has economic effects while it urges the environmental protection.  It is called Eco tourism and it is thought as a part of important industries. Like this, developing countries have the possibilities and we should think the proper means of economic development and environmental protection for every developing country.

In addition, the international conferences are very important as the place where every nation shows their idea.  The other day, the Rio+20 environmental summit was held in Rio de janeiro and representatives of every nation discussed environmental problems mainly.  But, the summit couldn’t get the good result because of the gap of the opinion between developing countries and developed countries. Exactly, it is the fact that this summit wasn’t enough, but it had changes, in particular, the aim for the sustainable development.  From now on, every nation has to discuss compromise point in the international conference to start action for the environmental protection earlier all over the world.

In fact, it is not easy to cooperate with each other for environment in the world because the economic development has priority for most nations.  But, every nation needs the discussion for the new possibilities of economic development the same as it protects environment now. I think we should solve many environmental problems together around the world by using proper means for every nation to continue to protect the beautiful earth in the future.

Reference

http://www.rwandaecotours.com/ (accessed July 1st)

http://www.swissinfo.ch/jpn/detail/content.html?cid=32975598 (accessed July 1st)

井田徹治　末吉竹二郎『グリーン経済最前線』岩波新書