Over the past decade, environmental issues have risen to the top of the list of pressing global concerns. As part of the Social Justice and New Globalization series hosted by the sociology department, Walden Bello, executive director of Focus on the Global South and
professor of sociology and public administration at the University of the Philippines, tackled some of these issues in a lecture he gave on Tuesday, entitled "The Challenge of Global Warming: Solutions from the Movement of the Global South."
Bello said that corporation-driven globalization is detrimental to the environment, as well as to grassroots environmental movements. Capitalism generally advocates that technological progress and rapid industrialization are the solution to problems in underdeveloped countries. Bello said that he disagrees with this approach, especially in regard to the toll it can take on the environment.
High-speed industrialization has proven dangerous to the environment in many industrializing nations such as Korea and Taiwan, where enormous amounts of toxic waste have been dispersed into the water and air. The problem has only worsened as rising numbers of American industrial companies turn to China and Southeast Asia for cheap labor.
Bello said about the environmental crisis in China, "The contribution of foreign investors is not insignificant." He explains that Western companies have moved many of their most environmentally unfriendly divisions to China. This has increased the most significant environmental threat: the rapid rise of sea levels, which are already rising at a rate of 10 meters per year. Since roughly 56 percent of China's population resides in the Southeast along coastal provinces and municipalities, a rising sea is a call for disaster.
Many other nations are struggling with pollution-related issues. In Taiwan, pollution-related unrest has mixed with concerns about land erosion and the usage of what land remains. The Indonesian government, struggling to meet the country's rapidly increasing need for energy, planned to build its first nuclear power plant on a volcano. In India, the Himalayan glaciers are retreating due to global warming, which could lead to the displacement of 63.2 percent of the lowland population.
2008 Woodie Awards
