"The Earth provides enough for every man's needs but not every man's greed" (Mahatma Gandi). Expand on this statement and explain the main causes of environmental degradation.

Some of the bottom billion poorest could be found in some of the African countries and other 3rd world countries. Their influence on environmental degradation could be grouped in two parts. One is the economical side and the other is the social side.

The economical side is that, most of the national income “GDP” of these countries are from exporting or trading of their natural resources such as Timber and Oil. These resources are their only form of income because advances in technologies in these countries are quite low therefore they cannot compete at that level, this then makes it difficult to compete in the world market and brings rises of the opportunity cost of increasing GDP or degrading the environment. Obviously, when both are weighed, a government put in this position would choose to improve GDP over preserving the environment. An example of this is the massive deforestation going on in countries such as Congo and some of the South American countries.

The social side is that, some of these countries are really poor to the extent some average households cannot afford the basic needs for their family. An example could be electricity or sometimes even electric cookers etc. and therefore firewood would have to be used for cooking. The wood is extracted from the forest, which eventually cuts down on the natural resources, and the burning of the wood produces larger amount of green house gases into the atmosphere. A single household wouldn’t really affect the environment however, when you take into account the amount of poor people that have no choice than to use these woods as a process of cooking, then the reality of the environmental degradation could be made clear. The other social side could be the lack of education in these countries. The lack of education would mean majority of people are unaware of the importances of the environment and what effects are actions could do to the environment and our lives.  Improvement in education would bring awareness of the need for individuals “not only the government” to protect and preserve our environment for our future generations.  

   

Apart from the top richest and the bottom poorest, other factors could lead or encourage environmental degradation. Some of these factors could be population growth, policies and decision adapted by governments and the costs associated with improving process of production to reduce degradation.

Population growth has a close relation to environmental degradation. This is partly due to the statement that the world’s resources are limited such as oil, and the living resources such as the forest and its natural habitats in it. Therefore an increase number of dependants on these limited natural resources would do nothing than exploit our environment. This could be better explained as, “we would need more from the environment than what is can provide for us if rapid population growth is not controlled”.

Policies and decisions adapted by the government could encourage environmental degradation. An example of this is the first Bush administration in the Kyoto Protocol. When countries came together to talk about ways to adapt sustainable development policies to reduce the effects of environmental degradation. “The first Bush administrations aligned themselves with many optimists who downplayed threats to the environment and argued that more studies needed to be done. Furthermore, they claimed, any of the measures proposed to protect the environment were too costly, and unfairly penalized U.S businesses”. Although the US is the highest polluter in the world, yet, they were hesitant to help improve our environment and make it a better place. This action of the Bush administration has a complementary relationship with the statement made by Mahatma Gundi.

The other factor that promotes environmental degradation is the cost associated with improving our process of production. On the national level, most environmentalists believe the government should intervene into the market to correct market failure of the way resources are allocated and distributed leading to environment degradation. This is true because most firms do not add the true cost of production to their prices. These firms only take into account the private cost of producing their products, such as cost of labour and raw material. The social cost to the environment are normally not included in these prices, cost such as pollution cost, ozone depletion cost etc are normally not included. Most environmentalist believe making the firms pay for the cost of damaging the environment would help acknowledge the problem and reducing the amount of damage done to the environment.

On the International level, the overall cost to a country such as the US as agued by the Bush administration would be the opportunity cost of GDP growth associated. These cost affect the competitive advantage of a country as the improvements would increase cost of production, which would eventually be included in prices. Higher prices would mean less competitive advantage over other countries and therefore national income from trade decreases. This would mean, there is a trade off between adapting sustainable development policies and economic growth. Hence it could also be a reason why it is difficult for countries to adapt sustainable development policies.

Although sustainable development policies and environmental degradation policies have their costs to economies, I believe every country should help adapt these policies and educate individual households of the importances of adapting such policies, if not, a continuous environmental degradation would be the long term course of a decline in global progress.

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