The environment and globalization

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

by Bun Kin

As globalization has gotten more and more attention, people have started to achieve their huge-scale aim no matter how big the impact toward environment would be. In developed countries, they actually try to decrease and control the amount of pollution brought by globalization of market economy, however, developing countries especially don’t have the financial power to improve the pollution issue usually. They remarkably have increased their exports to other countries and have started natural extinctions, for example tropical forest or polluted atmosphere air and ocean.

The World Trade Organization has also encouraged increasing the exportation of primary products such as coffee or wood as the goal “the spreading of business will advance development”. As the result of this, there is no limit to establish these kind of primary products, which finally became the reason of the environmental damage becoming bigger and bigger. Plus as the value of these products get lower and lower, the negative impact on the environment occurred to try to reduce financial losses, and then this increases the gap between the rich and the poor.

Globalization not only brings environmental pollution, but the globalization of damage to the environment is occurring by itself, for example with global warming, which is one of the biggest environment issues among all over the world. Because developed countries have never stopped discharging CO2 unlimitedly, the whole earth temperature has being getting higher, which also leads the issue of subsidence in places like Bangladesh and small islands in the Pacific Ocean.

The new political way of thinking, financial capitalism, is a branch of globalization. This approach has established a system to let the mass production get popular, and this is also one reason of environment pollution. Also to spread the market scale to be wider is also a great factor of increasing financial gap in the society.

However, it is obvious that people are paying more attention to this serious issue, and are providing many methods to relieve the damaged earth and its situation. For example, to encourage the incentive for 3R (Reduce, Reuse and Recycle) to save the resource as more as people can. This kind of effort would bring a huge merit to human being in my opinion. People have the responsibility to get involved in earth-protecting activities for each of us is a person living on the earth. And the precious thing is to try to change the current conscience personally will also make a big impact to the whole environment situation to good way. But this can be said hard for giant companies and people who still statement the capitalism. This is the very basic problem for environmental issue.