Global Change and Our Common Future Papers from a Forum (1989) / Chapter Skim
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11. The Human Causes of Global Environmental Change
11. The Human Causes of Global Environmental Change
Pages 90-100
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From page 90... ...
The human side of the framework is characterized by at least three broad parts: the proximate sources of change, the human driving and mitigating forces, and human behavior.]
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From page 91... ...
PROXIMATE SOURCES OF CHANGE The proximate sources of change constitute the near-end or end products of human activity whose immediate consequences are alterations and transformations of the environment. As such, proximate sources can be viewed as lenses through which human forces are directly translated into environmental change; they represent, therefore, the observational points of departure for empirical examinations of the human dimensions of global change.
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From page 92... ...
HUMAN DRIVING AND MITIGATING FORCES OF CHANGE Empirical examinations of the material relationships between the various elements of land use and industry, and their environmental impacts are, however, only the first step in developing a more complete understanding of the human causes of environmental change. These relationships must be linked with the underlying or deeper social forces that drive the proximate sources.
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From page 93... ...
Human Driving Forces Human driving forces are the sum of individual and group actions, but more manageable, collective categories of these actions or action and impact relationships are needed for comparative analysis of the type that is especially important for understanding global change. Only broad typologies or classifications of these forces have so far been developed.
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From page 94... ...
The elaboration of technological capacity is such that enormous, global-scale increases in production capacity have been possible, even at lowered energy efficiency: witness the global increase in food production, which has kept pace with global population growth, in part through technologies that have increased the intensity of production by some 80 percent since the midpoint of this century. This elaboration through fossil fuel technologies has increased enormously the impacts on the basic biogeochemical flows of the biosphere, placing this kind of transformation on a par with or ahead of basic landscape change.
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From page 95... ...
It has been claimed that political organization of resources affects the degree of environmental impact. Yet it appears that many centrally planned economies with state control over physical resources have problems of environmental degradation similar to those of capitalist economies based on private ownership, although pure cases of each system are difficult to find.
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From page 96... ...
Those forces of mitigation involving regulatory environmental control have been most successful when addressed to specific environmental issues and driving forces or to specific regions and zones, for instance, the regulation of the whaling industry, the soil conservation measures implemented on the Great Plains of North America after the Dust Bowl, the decrease in the global use of DDT, and the apparent leveling off of industrial emissions in much of the developed world. It is important, though, to distinguish mitigation effected because of environmental concern from that resulting from other processes: oil price increases in the 1970s and consequent market adjustments, rather than authoritative regulation, were responsible for a significant part of the reduction in automotive pollution at that time.
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From page 97... ...
Just as agglomeration of economic activities increases production efficiency, so too may the agglomeration of production and consumption lead to changes in the driving and mitigating forces, in the proximate sources, and, ultimately, in the environment. For example, some evidence and interpretations indicate that the increasing size of cities is related to increasing per capita municipal waste.12 And a recent attempt to examine global historical trends in the changes in some of the components of the biosphere suggests that even with expanded production and consumption, mitigating forces designed to counteract some industrial effluents have led to decreases in the rates of delivery of some chemical elements and compounds to the environment.
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From page 98... ...
This research informs us of both the awesome power of human actions to transform the earth beneficially and detrimentally, and of the ingenuity of humankind in adjusting to its environmental blunders, albeit not without substantial and unequal sacrifices.13 The messages from this work and its brief explore, ation here are simple. We are the cause and the solution, and both of these attributes of ourselves are extremely complex and are made even more so by their connection to the global environmental system.
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From page 99... ...
C Mitchell, and the various members of the Graduate School of Geography, Clark University, associated with The Earth as Transformed by Human Action program.
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