Boudreaux: The Environmental Phillips Curves

Environmental ethics has widely circled around human interactions with biotic ecosystems. Little voice has been given to city residents who are overexposed to environmental hazards. It is a subject rarely touched upon by mainstream environmentalist. Though conservation efforts receive much media attention and advocacy, environmental pollution in urban areas inhabited by minorities and the impoverished receive less attention despite it clearly being a grave injustice. It fact, it can be argued that minority and impoverished neighborhoods are deliberately targeted by corporations and governmental agencies because of the inherit vulnerability of the inhabitants. It is no secret that the impoverished in this country frequently live in areas characterized

Since the early 20th century the environmentalism movement has migrated from the struggles of consumers versus producers, or saving the planet as a whole as shown by Donald Worster in Nature’s Economy to a more socio-economic view based on urban growth and industrial health. Robert Gottlieb’s book Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement argues that as society goes so too does the environmental movement. As the emphasis on working environments and commercial goods we buy including food changes so too does the environmental movements. It did not matter whether it was large politically prominent environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club or the Audubon Societies or any other numbers of local grassroots

In the essay Lifeboat Ethics by Garrett Hardin and the essay A Challenge to the Eco-Doomsters by Walter Benjamin, there are many things I agree and disagree with. Both essays make very good points with facts to back them up. But I can’t help but side with Hardin on his essay Lifeboat Ethics. In this essay I am going to compare and contrast some of the similarities and differences between Hardin and Benjamin’s essays about the aid the United States provides to poor nations all over the world by reducing pollution, controlling population growth, and the dependency of economical imports and exports.

High profile cases such as the Flint water crisis has brought environmental inequality and environmental racism into the limelight. As such, it is becoming a prominent social justice issue and a political talking point. However, there is much to suggest that environmental inequality is the result of economic factors. This paper therefore focuses on developing an understanding of environmental inequality from an economic perspective.

Jobs and protecting the environment, important or not? George Will wrote his essay, “What Price Clean Air?” to convey the message that most of the Navajo Nation run and work at the power plants in Arizona, but as the growing change in protecting the environment, those Native Americans are forced to alter their livelihoods. George Will directs his essay to the American people, to persuade them to help find a change. Using the best equipment and spending billions of dollars on new technology may be affected by the uncertain environmental movement. With ethos, logos, and pathos, George Will effectively uses the rhetorical devices to convey his argument about the social and economic damage brought on by the federal government.

With the well-being of future generations in mind, environmental concerns have begun to establish a permanent residence atop the priority ladder for a vast array of Americans. Consequently, writers and political pundits alike are seizing this opportunity to capitalize on advocating their stance on the issue. Information, representing all positions, pours in at an unrelenting and unfathomable rate. For the average American it can be an arduous process sifting through all the rhetoric in attempt to find the real truth regarding our impact as humans on the environment; one such example is Susan Brown’s article The EPA’s Mercury Problem. In this article Brown attempts to expose hypocrisy among progressives by paralleling the Environmental Protection

Encouraged by diverse foundations from across the globe, The Environmental Justice movement has become one of the most important topics in the media. Europeans have used Marxist philosophy on class laddering, while non-Western countries required its encouragement in the criticism of colonialism. In the United States, The Civil Rights Movement was its forerunner. The notion of “Environmental Justice”, nevertheless, has its genesis in the resistance of black culture and lower income-communities in opposition to uneven ecological trouble in the United States during the last few years of the 1970s and the early 1980s. In the framework of racial improvement and public activism, the phrase was

The relationship between people and their environment in A Land Remembered is one where the profit from land exploitation is naturally corrupting and exponentially increases the exploiters lust for larger profit, leading to the exploiter planning larger scale endeavors in the future. The author, Patrick D. Smith (1984), suggests the idea that communities naturally grow in a hedonic cycle to crave more resources to fuel loftier endeavors that require even more resources from the environment, an idea that is also discussed by Aldo Leopold in the Land Ethic as wholly negative, and that is also part of my world view that is rather more optimistic.

In “Compromise, Hell!” Wendell Berry argues that we should be less submissive when it comes to environmental destruction. As an essayist, novelist, and poet, Wendell Berry has written over 30 books and has won several awards for his writing. Berry starts his article by scolding the American population for

The author is able to draw his audience in emotionally by speaking of such countries, and how it eventually ties in to the United States, stating that “(if) a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich,” (3) concluding the connection between the U.S. and those countries who have a lower living standard.

While environmental questions are frequently channeled through practical and economic prisms, it is also appropriate to consider our econolgy as a function of morality. The ethical dilemmas which contribute to our policies and our behaviors regarding the use of fossil fuels and our attention to global climate change are frequently overshadowed by more immediate concerns of survival or mere comfort.

In the article “ Lifeboat Ethics: The Case Against Helping the Poor”, Garrett Hardin (1974) argues that wealthy people should not be responsible for the poor and that the consequences of feeding the poor are detrimental to the environment and to the society as a whole. Hardin was a well known philosopher and ecologist. He earned his bachelor's degree in zoology from the University of Chicago in 1936 and also earned his doctorate degree in microbiology from Stanford University in 1941 (Garrett Hardin, n.d.). The main issue that he tackled was human overpopulation and one of the books that he wrote that analyzed this issue was called ‘How Global Population Growth Threatens Widespread Social Disorder’(1992). Because the author has a sufficient

Hazards and pollutants are apparent in a variety of outcomes. Possible outcomes include asthma, cancer and chemical poisoning (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004: 1647). Furthermore, “Although debated, the main hypothesis explaining these disparities is that disadvantaged communities encounter greater exposure to environmental toxins such as air pollution, pesticides, and lead” (Gee and Payne-Sturges 2004: 1647). Therefore, disadvantaged groups, such as people of color and the poor, experience greater environmental risks. Additionally, “Blacks in particular are exposed to a disproportionate amount of pollution and suffer the highest levels of lead and pesticide poisoning and other associated health problems” (Jones and Rainey 2006: 474). People of color, essentially, compete to live healthily. For example, African-Americans and Africans alike, struggle with the negative affects of oil refineries and unresponsive governments. The same can be said for Hispanics in California and the natives of Ecuador, who are forced to cope with the pollution of the Texaco oil refineries (Bullard 2001: 4). Environmental racism not only exploits natural resources, it abuses and profits from the communities involved. Governments and polluting facilities will continue to capitalize on the economic susceptibilities of poor communities, states, nations and regions for their “unsound” and hazardous operations (Bullard 2001: 23).

Throughout his presentation, Hans Rosling shows that the rich and wealthy release the most carbon emissions, but they are often the ones telling Africa or another developing country they shouldn't begin using fossil fuels and other technology because it's hurting the environment. Rosling claims that the rich end look down at the "poor" people and say, "You cannot live like us, you will destroy the planet." Technology, however, is key to progressing out of poverty and developing. As shown in his graphs, the wealthy release the most emissions, but shake their finger at developing countries that are starting to use technology and/or burn fossil fuels. An example used in the video is Africa and the coal available to them to provide warmth and light.

Guha describes that environmental movements in the poor countries of South America developed quite differently from those in the rich nations of North America and Western Europe. Southern movements began as a challenge to the "postmaterialist values" of the North, according to which the backward South was incapable of developing any serious environmental movement until it became fully developed like the North. On the contrary, Guha then descirbes the environmentalism of the poor South is steps ahead of the North. This is because the southern environmental movements simultaneously demand social justice. This relationship is divorced in the environmental movements of the developed North. Guha sites the examples of radical environmental movements