Environmental Studies Quiz #4

Social and political sustainability

Jeopardized by gaping domestic and global inequality

Growing inequality

Potent and proximate cause of environmental degradation

People at either end of the income spectrum

Are more likely than those in the middle to damage the Earth’s ecological health

Rich people

Consume a huge and disproportionate share of the Earth’s food, Energy, raw materials, and manufactured goods

Poor people #1

Their poverty drives them to damage and abuse the environment

Poor people #2

They are able to afford mainly older, cheaper, less durable, less efficient, and more environmentally damaging products

Poor people #3

Pressure to modify behavior or curtail consumption even more

Affluent people

Minimal consequences for modifying their lifestyles

Poor people vs Rich people

Impact and experience environmental problems in different ways

Short-term practices

• Abbreviated fallow periods

• Harvests exceeding regeneration rates

• Depletion of top soil

• Deforestation

Being landless

Common condition in many LDCs

Marginal natural environment

Cannot lift its inhabitants out of poverty

History of stolen lands, broken treaties, and displacement to marginal land areas

Perpetuates a vicious cycle of poverty and vulnerability to environmental and climate induced harms

Illegal resource extraction #1

• Oil

• Timber

• Diamonds

• Copper

Illegal resource extraction #2

Linked to arms trafficking, paramilitary violent conflict, human rights violations and modern day slavery, humanitary disasters (famine), and environmental destruction and disaster

Illegal resource extraction #3

Beneficiaries: MDCs

Who Shoulders: LDCs and the world’s Poor

MDCs

Consumerist cultures, purchasing powers, and economic arrengements through the world market economy to consume a disproportionate share of the world’s resources

Green Imperialism

Talk of “saving the environment” by the world’s wealthy