Main factors in the American society that cause or contribute to what is called the `Environmental Crisis'

Main factors in the American society that cause or contribute to what is called the `Environmental Crisis'

The rise and spread of capitalism has been accompanied by the greatest increase in population, the greatest advances in humanity's capacity to harness energy and matter to its own ends and the greatest increase in growth rates in human history. Exclusive focus on one or other of these symptoms has led to three false classes of diagnosis of the environmental crisis.

Too many people'

Accompanying the development of the environmental crisis has been an explosive growth of the world's human population. At the beginning of the 20th century there were 1.6 billion people, by mid-century there were 2.5 billion, in 1987 the world's population passed five billion and by 2000 it will reach six billion. The increase in the past 40 years has equalled the total increase over the four million years from the first appearance of humankind until 1950. According to United Nations projections, the next 40 years (to 2030) will bring a further increase to 10 billion. Of the additional 5 billion, the UN estimates that 4.75 billion — 95 per cent — will be in the world's poorest countries. (Fegley, 2011)

Unsurprisingly, many Western ecologists blame the environmental crisis on this rapid growth in world population, which by placing increasing demands on scarce resources is degrading the global ecosystem. Professor Paul Ehrlich, author of the Population Bomb, is a leading advocate of this "too many people" thesis. In his 1972 book Population, Resources, Environment — Issues in Human Ecology Ehrlich argued that:

The explosive growth of the human population is the most significant terrestrial event of the past million millennia. Three and one-half billion people now inhabit the Earth, and every year this number increases by 70 million. Armed with weapons as diverse as thermonuclear bombs and DDT this mass of humanity now threatens to destroy most of the life on the planet … No geological event in a billion years — not the emergence of mighty mountain ranges, nor the submergence of entire subcontinents, nor the occurrence of periodical glacial ages — has posed a threat to terrestrial life comparable to that of human overpopulation (Wojcik, 2011).

This attempt to explain a range of social problems as a result of population growth outstripping limited resources (carrying capacity) has a long ...