| Abstrakt: |
This article focuses on the world environmental history. A pervading transformation that seems certain to dominate human interaction with the environment is the continuing spread of high technology and its rapid series of innovations, so radical as to merit a historian's designation as a new technological revolution. Machines with greater power and sophistication in making environmental changes will be created. The speed and spread of the reach of communication will continue to accelerate. One of the most far-reaching ways in which human impacts on the natural environment are augmented in present times is the growing world market economy. This is true because industrialization and intensive agricultural production increases demands for land and resources and generates pollution, and trade accelerates economic growth. Demand in one region can be met by impacting the environment in a distant part of the world. Dominant economic thought today presents a neoclassical model that treats the environment as a factor of production, a subset of the human economy, instead of what it is: a biophysical system which embraces the human economy and makes it possible. |
