Environmental Problems Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Humans have faced poor environmental conditions throughout history, but what we think of as ”environmental problems” became more common and apparent with urbanization. In the USA urban air and water pollution attracted growing attention throughout the last century, and by the 1960s became recognized as significant problems. Celebration of the first ”Earth Day” on April 22, 1970, helped transform ”environmental quality” into a major social concern, and a wide range of environmental conditions from pollution to declining wilderness and wildlife became major social problems. Examining the socio economic processes that generate environmental problems is beyond the scope of this essay, but the nature of such problems can be clarified via use of an ecological perspective.

Ecologists note that the environment provides many ”services” for human beings (and all other species), but we can simplify these into three general types of functions that it performs for human societies. First, the environment provides us with the resources necessary for life, from clean air and water to food and shelter, as well as the natural resources used in industrial economies. In providing what ecologists term the ”sustenance base” for human societies, the environment is serving a ”supply depot” function. It supplies us with both renewable and non-renewable resources, and overuse of the former (e.g. water) may result in shortages and the latter (e.g. fossil fuels) in potential scarcities.

Second, in the process of consuming resources humans produce ”waste” products; indeed, we produce a vastly greater quantity and variety of waste products than any other species. The environment must serve as a ”sink” or ”waste repository” for these wastes, either absorbing or recycling them into useful or at least harmless substances. When the waste products (e.g., city sewage or factory emissions) exceed the environment’s ability to absorb them, the result is pollution.

Finally, like all other species, humans must also have a place to live, and the environment provides our ”habitat” – where we live, work, play, and travel (e.g., our vast transportation systems and recreational areas). Thus, the third function of the environment is to provide ”living space” for human populations. When we overuse a given living space – from a city to the entire Earth -overcrowding and/or overpopulation occurs.

In sum, when humans overuse an environment’s ability to fulfill any single function, ”environmental problems” in the form of pollution, resource shortages and overcrowding and/or overpopulation are the result. Yet, not only must the environment serve all three functions, but when a given environment is used for one function its ability to fulfill the other two can be impaired. Functional incompatibilities between the living-space and waste-repository functions are apparent, for example, when using an area for a waste site makes it unsuitable for living space. Similarly, if hazardous materials escape from a waste repository and contaminate the soil or water, the area can no longer serve as a supply depot for drinking water or agricultural products. Finally, converting farmland or forests into housing subdivisions creates more living space for people, but means that the land can no longer function as a supply depot for food or timber or habitat for wildlife.

Separating these three functions and analyzing our conflicting uses of them provides insight into the evolution of environmental problems over time. In the 1960s and early 1970s, when awareness of environmental problems was growing rapidly in the USA, air and water pollution and the protection of areas of natural beauty and recreational value were major concerns. The ”energy crisis” of 1973-4 highlighted the dependence of modern industrialized nations on fossil fuels, and thus our vulnerability to energy shortages. The living space function came to the fore in the late 1970s when it was discovered that the Love Canal neighborhood in upstate New York was built on an abandoned chemical waste site that was leaking toxic materials, the first of a rapidly growing number of contaminated sites continually discovered (but seldom fully remediated).

More recently, problems stemming from functional incompatibilities at larger geographical scales have become common. The quest for living space and agricultural land leads to tropical deforestation and loss of biodiversity, while use of the atmosphere as a waste site for aerosols and greenhouse gases produces ozone depletion and global warming.

Analysts use the ”ecological footprint,” a measure which captures all three functions of the environment, to measure the ”load” which humans place on the global ecosystem, and results suggest that the current world population is unsustainable. However, the footprints of poorer nations are vastly lower than those of wealthy nations. Furthermore, wealthy nations are able to protect their living spaces in part by using poorer nations as supply depots (importing resources from them) and waste repositories (exporting pollution and polluting industries to them). Efforts to solve global environmental problems such as human-induced climate change thus encounter major equity issues.

Whereas historically the notion that human societies face ”limits to growth” was based on the assumption that we may run out of food supplies or natural resources such as oil, contemporary ”ecological limits” refers to the finite ability of the global ecosystem to serve all three functions simultaneously without having its own functioning impaired. The limited ability of the Earth’s atmosphere to absorb greenhouse gas emissions without producing deleterious changes in climate may prove the most significant ecological limit of all, making prevention of global warming a critical challenge.

Bibliography:

Dunlap, R. E. & Catton, W. R., Jr. (2002) Which functions of the environment do we study.? A comparison of environmental and natural resource sociology. Society and Natural Resources 14: 239-49.
Kitzes, J., Wackernagel, M., Loh, J., Peller, A., Goldfinger, S., Cheng, D., & Tea, K. (2008) Shrink and share: humanity’s present and future footprint. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 363: 467-75.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) Ecosystems and Human Well-Being: Island Press, Washington, DC.