'Society', 'culture'and 'environment' are among
the most contentious concepts when used to classify human
development. Society and culture are sometimes treated as virtually
synonymous, sometimes radically distinguished. On the one
hand, their study has been maintained as the particular preserve of
social and cultural anthropology. On the other hand, they are
often linked toegether by biologiststo embrace almost the entire
field of animal behaviour.
For the purposes of defining the changes brought
about by the human economic system, culture is defined as local
behavioural characterisitcs that are transmitted from generation to
generation by non-genetic means.
Society is defined by those characteristics that
rest on the symbolic organization of experience. The link
between society and culture is sociality, distinguished in terms of
its interactive, regulative, and constitutive forms, which
establishes the connections between social life and the spread of
ideas between individuals and groups. Economic impacts on society
are defined in terms of settlement, education, health, human
relationships and economic well being.
Environment is defined by the ways in which human
beings and other animals construct their environments, which
requires a characterization of the connection, established in
production, between social and ecological systems.
Links between all three concepts involve the
relation between human learning, thinking, and consciousness.
The cultural impact of economic development that
has a modern ring to it is first noticeable in 14th century
Italy. It is marked by the significant spread of wealth
beyond kings and princes that was seen in Venice at the turn of the
14th century.
The flow of money into the north Italian towns
was a stimulus to the growth of humanism that defined the
Renaissance. It also gave rise to the idea of human progress
in terms of increased wealth and increased standards of living, at
least for those with money.
The relationship between economics and progress
came to a head in the 1851 Great Exhibition in London.
However, the shift in thinking about economic development as
cultural progress towards its deletarious impact on society and
environment began in the 18th century. One eighteenth-
century British tourist who recorded his opinions about the
environment was the Hon. John Byng, later Viscount Torrington, who
undertook a series of tours through England and Wales between 1781
and 1794. He never intended his journals, which have been published
as The Torrington Diaries, to appear in print, and the
honesty of the opinions makes them very valuable to the historian.
Although Byng was an extremely conservative, indeed reactionary
character, he went out of his way to visit the new industrial
centres, invariably disliking them when he arrived. In 1792, he
wrote of Aysgarth, a relatively small development in modern terms,
in the Yorkshire Dales:
'But
what has completed the destruction of every rural thought, has been
the erection of a cotton mill on one side, whereby prospect, and
quiet, are destroy'd: I now speak as a tourist (as a policeman, a
citizen, or a statesman, I enter not the field); the people,
indeed, are employ'd; but they are all abandon'd to vice from the
throng... At the times when people work not in the mill, they issue
out to poaching, profligacy and plunder - Arkwright may have
introduced much wealth into his family, and into the country; but,
as a tourist, I execrate his schemes, which, having crept into
every pastoral vale, have destroy'd the course, and beauty of
Nature; why, here now is a great flaring mill, whose back stream
has drawn off half the water of the falls above the
bridge.
'With
the bell ringing and the clamour of the mill, all the vale is
disturb'd; treason and levelling systems are the discourse; and
rebellion may be near at hand.'
A few days later, he was gratified that when he
asked a man 'if the cotton trade did not benefit the poor?' the man
replied, The worst thing in the world in my opinion, Sr., for it
leaves us neither stout husbandmen, nor modest girls; for the
children bred in a cotton — mill, never get exercise or air,
and all are impudent and saucy.'
The impending ecological disaster was clear to
John Ruskin, who saw in his lifetime, the impact of mass tourism on
the clarity of the alpine streams. In this respect, S.T. Coleridge,
in his poem 'Cologne', could write:
But
tell me Nymphs, what power divine
Shall
henceforth wash the river Rhine?
Today it is often thought that the oil crisis of
the early 1970s seemed to prove the economic ecologist argument
beyond doubt. The West's dependence on this finite resource seemed
very clear when an abrupt rise in price created shortages and
economic depression. The long- term implications of a shortage of
mineral resources could be impressed clearly on the public
mind.
However, the emergence of finite resources as a
global issue predated the oil crisis. In 1972 a report was
presented to the United Nations World Conference on the Human
Environment by Barbara Ward and Rene Dubos. It argued that man had
to replace family or national loyalties with a sense of allegiance
to the planet. It preached imminent doom through man's
technological capacity. The book prophesied that children alive
then would see the global crisis take inescapable shape. The Club
of Rome was also founded in 1972. It too prophesied imminent global
catastrophe, unless resource use was curbed, and resources shared
.
The ideal of global planning of resources had
emerged well before the Second World War. Later bodies that
embodied this ideal, like the United Nations and its subsidiaries,
had begun the post-war era full of hope. Yet their scope had grown
in almost direct proportion to their increasing powerlessness over
Third World countries. Fears of their over-population increased in
the 1960s. Theories of increasing immiserisation continued in
parallel with increasing population growth and prosperity.
Many environmental impacts stemming from economic
activities now cross national boundaries. Some are global in scope.
Although most of the activities that give rise to such risks are
concentrated in the industrial countries, the risks are shared by
all countries whether they benefit from these activities or not.
And most countries have little influence on the decisions that
affect these activities. These risks include harmful effects from
hazardous waste and from increasing concentrations of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. The issue of
greenhouse gases and climate change has emerged as particularly
urgent, with scientific observations and analysis indicating that
significant global warming and climate change are likely over the
next few decades. Although the effects may not reach critical
proportions until the later this century, their potential magnitude
is so great that it would be unwise to postpone efforts to limit
their causes. In addition, there has been a transfer of
environmental costs from industrial to developing countries, as
some of the "dirty" manufacturing processes have relocated away
from the developed countries.
Environmental stress has long been seen as a
result of the demand for scarce natural resources and the related
pollution of the air, water, and land generated by rising living
standards. But poverty also creates environmental stress. In order
to survive, the rural poor often degrade and destroy their
immediate environment as they cut down forests for fuelwood,
overuse marginal agricultural land, and eventually migrate to the
shrinking areas of vacant land or to urban areas. Severe air and
water pollution is tolerated in many cities because it permits
other gains deemed more valuable than the immediate benefits of
pollution abatement and because the long-term benefits of abatement
are heavily discounted.
Proper management of the natural resource base is
actually especially important in poor countries that cannot afford
the consequences of rapid soil degradation and other irreversible
losses of potentially renewable resources. Nor can they afford
high-cost efforts to remedy environmental damage. Efforts to
develop sustainable agriculture, forestry, and fisheries may fail
unless population growth slows down.
Appropriate technologies do not exist in many
resource-poor areas to sustain the present and projected
population; even some resource- rich areas are reaching their
maximum output. According to the FAO:
"The
objective is to create an economic environment in which it is more
profitable to conserve resources than destroy them. Soil and water
conservation measures, for example, should, where possible, be
designed to show an economic return to the farmer in the year of
application, because otherwise they are unlikely to be widely
adopted. Similarly, habitat conservation and game cropping for
tourism should be seen as a socially and economically profitable
alternative to forest and savannah destruction."
Sustainable agriculture will thus require changes
in the ways the rural poor live, increasing their income-earning
capacity and helping them to withstand shocks and stresses in their
life support systems.
International economic relations pose a
particular problem for developing countries' efforts to manage
their environment, since the export of natural resources is a large
factor in their economies.
Nevertheless, there is still a strong argument
that the historical benefits of economic progress can be maintained
alongside the environmental and social impacts of mass production
and mass transport.