Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 1-12
Global
outlook:
one in every
three children under age
5, such as this child in
Lunda, Angola, suffers
from severe malnutrition
caused by a lack
of calories and protein.
According to the World
Health Organization,
each day at least 13,700
children under age 5 die
prematurely from malnu-
trition and infectious dis-
eases, most from drink-
ing contaminated water
and being weakened by
malnutrition.
Economics: Positive Effects of Affluence
on Environmental Quality
Affluent countries have more money for improving
environmental quality.
Affluence need not lead to environmental degradation.
Instead, it can prompt people to become more con-
cerned about environmental quality, and it provides
money for developing technologies to reduce pollution,
environmental degradation, and resource waste. This
explains why most of the important environmental
progress made since 1970 has occurred in developed
countries.
In the United States (and other developed coun-
tries), the air is cleaner, drinking water is purer, most
rivers and lakes are cleaner, and the food supply is
more abundant and safer than they were in 1970. Also,
the country's total forested area is larger than it was in
1900, and most energy and material resources are used
more efficiently. Similar advances have been made in
most other affluent countries. Affluence financed these
improvements in environmental quality.
tries. It is based on the assumption that buying more
things can, should, and does buy happiness.
Most people infected with this virulent and conta-
gious
shop-'til-you-drop virus
have some telltale symp-
toms. They feel overworked, have high levels of debt
and bankruptcy, suffer from increasing stress and anx-
iety, have declining health, and feel unfulfilled in their
quest to accumulate ever more stuff. As humorist Will
Rogers said, “Too many people spend money they
haven't earned to buy things they don't want, to im-
press people they don't like.”
Globalization and global advertising are now
spreading the virus throughout much of the world. Af-
fluenza has an enormous environmental impact. It
takes about 27 tractor-trailer loads of resources per
year to support one American, or 7.9 billion truckloads
per year to support the entire U.S. population.
Stretched end-to-end, these trucks would more than
reach the sun!
What can we do about affluenza? The first step in
the rehabilitation of shopping addicts is to admit they
have a problem. Next, they begin to kick their addiction
by going on a “stuff” diet—that is, by living more sim-
ply. For example, before buying anything a person with
affluenza should ask: Do I really need this or merely
want it? Can I buy it secondhand (reuse)? Can I borrow
it from a friend or relative? Another strategy: Do not
hang out with other addicts. Shopaholics should avoid
malls as much as they can.
After a lifetime of studying the growth and decline
of the world's human civilizations, historian Arnold
Toynbee summarized the true measure of a civiliza-
tion's growth as the
law of progressive simplification:
“True growth occurs as civilizations transfer an in-
creasing proportion of energy and attention from the
material side of life to the nonmaterial side and
thereby develop their culture, capacity for compas-
sion, sense of community, and strength of democracy.”
Connections between Environmental
Problems and Their Causes
Environmental quality is affected by interactions
between population size, resource consumption,
and technology.
Once we have identified environmental problems and
their root causes, the next step is to understand how
they are connected to one another. The three-factor
model in Figure 1-13 (p. 16) is a starting point.
According to this simple model, the environmen-
tal impact (
I
)ofapopulation on a given area depends
on three key factors: the number of people (
P
), the aver-
age resource use per person (affluence,
A
), and the ben-
eficial and harmful environmental effects of the tech-
nologies (
T
) used to provide and consume each unit of
resource and control or prevent the resulting pollution
and environmental degradation.
In developing countries, population size and the
resulting degradation of renewable resources (as the
poor struggle to stay alive) tend to be the key factors in
total environmental impact (Figure 1-13, top). In such
countries per capita resource use is low.
In developed countries, high rates of per capita
resource use (affluenza) and the resulting high lev-
els of pollution and environmental degradation per
person usually are the key factors determining over-
all environmental impact (Figure 1-13, bottom) and
a country's ecological footprint per person (Fig-
ure 1-7). For example, the average U.S. citizen con-
sumes about 30 times as much as the average citizen
of India and 100 times as much as the average per-
son in the world's poorest countries.
Poor parents in a
developing country would need 60-200 children to have
