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Essay on Transportation's Impact on Our World

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Transportation's Impact on Our World

Methods of transportation have always occupied a certain niche in society. Beyond their obvious practical use, transports from horses to speed boats to sports cars embody the romance and intrigue of travel. However, beyond the obvious effect low fuel-efficiency standards have had on pollution in the United States and elsewhere, the environmental impacts of transportation are rarely taken into account. Advances in transportation have had two main effects on the environment. Technological advances in transportation are some of the direct reasons behind particulate emissions, global warming and other pollution problems of the industrial age. In addition, transportation has neutralized barriers to …show more content…

I point these examples out not too suggest backtracking in our methods of transportation. Reverting to less advanced methods of transportation cannot and will not solve our problems, nor is it even a viable option. Increases in efficient, reusable energy sources and methods of transportation is the key to a step forward where we can mitigate the damage our own expansion has caused.

Expansion in pollution is only the most direct environmental effect of transportation. It also has had a very strong influence on the diffusion of political power, technology and disease. As Carlo Cipolla points out in his work Guns, Sails, and Empires: Technological Innovation and the Early Phases of European Expansion, 1400-1700, European colonizers relied very heavily on their advantage in sea transportation to propagate their empires. Whereas they had little military or transportation advantage on land, the sea allowed for quick transportation of goods and cannons to any position that necessitated them. This advantage of transportation technology allowed the Europeans to expand beyond the limits of their land-based transportation, mainly that both they and their enemies on the continent could use

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