Impact of humans is increasing

  • population growth
  • consumption increase
  • technology

Political Ecology

Views on who is doing damage differs with scale

  • Global: poor do more damage
  • Local: poor use organic materials, wealthy ones use pesticide -> wealthy become wealthier

Population

Disaster affects rich and poor and populated/less populated differently

  • rich: financial
  • poor: loss of lives and financial

Patterns of Consumption

Modern humans require so much more resources than hunter gatherer -> globalized needs for consumption

  • especially true for core
    • US person 250x more energy than Bangladeshi person
  • growth in periphery -> local impact
  • growth in core -> global impact

Technology

  • energy to travel
  • pollution of tech
  • allows for global damage fast

Tranportation

  • resource use scales with population
  • facilitates consumption

Energy

  • 46M barrels per day in 1970 -> 73.27M barels in 2007
  • 75% of Middle East economy
    • Kuwait needs water instead -> desalinization

Alternative Energy

  • EU heavily funds ECU for wind parks in Navarra in Spain