Modern economic growth is characterized by unparalleled technological change, which has transformed the world more in the past two centuries than all the other events put together since the beginning of agriculture 10 millennia ago. This technological change was accompanied by a prodigious increase in the use of inanimate energy, particularly fossil fuels and other renewable and nonrenewable natural resources. The associated industrialization and increases in agricultural productivity, urbanization, population, mobility, trade, and consumption of material goods have transformed the social, cultural, and physical landscapes of societies.
"The Improving State of the World: Why We're Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet" by Indur M. Goklany
ReplyDeleteTogether, economic growth and technological change have redefined the role of women and children, restructured the workplace, undermined age-old arrangements of caste and class, expanded the middle class, and developed new institutions and organizations. In turn, societies aspiring to faster economic growth are restructuring themselves-freeing economies, bestowing property rights on private parties, giving individuals more latitude, and strengthening education-even as those very factors reinforce economic growth in empowering middle classes to create the basic conditions for democracy in societies that have never tasted it.
ReplyDeleteEconomic development, however, is also changing humanity''s relationship to the rest of nature. At first, industrialization and urbanization-in many countries, the first steps in modern economic growth-may have made people wealthier but, as Dickens so vividly depicted, not necessarily better, particularly for the masses. For many urban dwellers, crowding, unsanitary conditions, polluted air, and unsafe water may have led, at least initially, to a life that was nastier, more brutish, and, perhaps, even shorter than for their rural compatriots. The countries that industrialized first were the first to experience those problems. But, by the same token, they were also the first to devise solutions to those problems, which now benefit those who came later to the path of economic growth. But even as old problems were solved, new ones cropped up. Today, with technology enabling us to detect one molecule of a pollutant among a billion other molecules, we feel beset by trace gases and debris of human origin in the atmosphere and the stratosphere, in the Arctic and the Antarctic, at the bottom of the ocean, and even at the top of Mt. Everest.
The twin forces of economic growth and technological change having, first, given us a degraded environment, now have provided, as antidotes, environmentalism, as well as a romanticized view of nature. Despite significant reductions in the past few decades in various forms of pollution, especially in wealthier countries, many Neo-Malthusians and environmentalists remain suspicious of these two forces. They argue that economic growth and technology are among the driving forces behind environmental impacts and natural resource use, which-unless checked-will eventually degrade both human welfare and environmental quality. All the progress to date may yet prove to be ephemeral. In this view, because of economic growth and technology, the world may yet come to resemble Dickens''s "cheerless region, where not a blade of grass was seen to grow; where not a bud put forth its promise in the spring; where nothing green could live but on the surface of the stagnant pools...."