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GE 7
The Contemporary World

HANNA JOYCE B. MACAWILI

4 The Contemporary World 1

3
UNIT 5: Environmental
2 Crisis and Sustainable Development

5.0. Intended Learning Outcomes

a. Discuss the origins and manifestations of global environmental crises.
b. Relate everyday encounters with pollution, global warming,
desertification, ozone depletion, and many others with a larger picture
of environmental degradation.
c. Examine the policies and programs of governments around the world
that address the environmental crisis.

5.1. Introduction

If you live in Metropolitan Manila and travel school (or to work) every
day, the moment you step out of your home, you are already exposed to the
most serious problem humanity faces today: the deteriorating state of the
environment. As you walk out of the gate, the fetid smell of uncollected garbage
hits you and you go near the trash bin, curious about what is causing the smell.
You see rotting vegetables, a dead rat, and a bunch of whatnot packed in plastic.
These three “wastes” are already indicative of some environmental problems –
the vegetables ought to be added to a compost pile; the rat either buried or
burned (to also get rid of the lice that might jump into the hair of the children
playing nearby); and the plastics washed and recycled because, unlike the other
two wastes, it cannot decompose.

You hop on the first bus and as it approaches Epifanio de los Santos
Avenue (EDSA), the traffic slows down considerably. It is the normal Manila
morning traffic where, as the joke goes, the turtle can outpace even the fastest of
motor vehicles. You look out of the window and see the smoke coming out of
diesel vehicles, and as you lift your head up to the sky, you see nothing but
smog, courtesy of the cars and buses, as well as the coal plant several industrial
sites located alongside the Pasig River. You notice the oil spots on the river, not
to mention the tons of effluents (human and non-human wastes) floating
alongside each other. In the city you live in, there is a dying river, an increasingly
poisonous sky, and enormous amount of waste, and a declining quality of life.

At this point that you recognize the ecological crisis happening around
you, and how the deterioration of the environment has destabilized population
and species, raising the specter of extinction for some and a lesser quality of life

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for the survivor of their offspring.
2

Are you familiar with sights like this?

Stop and Think! Exercise #1

Go around your community and see if there are sights like the
image provided above, and take a photo of it.
Are there sewage wastes in your barangay? How will you help in
stopping the deterioration of our environment?

5.2 Discussion

The World’s Leading Environmental Problems

The Conserve Energy Future website lists the following environmental

challenges that the world faces today.

1. The depredation caused by industrial and transportation toxins and

plastic in the ground; the defiling of the sea, rivers, and water beds by
oil spills and acid rain; the dumping of urban waste.
2. Changes in global weather patterns (flashfloods, extreme snowstorms,
and the spread of deserts) and the surge in ocean and land
temperatures leading to a rise in sea levels (as the polar ice caps melt
because of the weather), plus the flooding of many lowland areas
across the world.

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3. Overpopulation.
4.
2
The exhaustion of the world’s natural non-renewable resources from
oil reserves to mineral to potable water.
5. A waste disposal catastrophe due the excessive amount of waste (from
plastic to food packages to electronic waste) unloaded by communities
in landfills as well as on the ocean; and the dumping of nuclear waste.
6. The destruction of million-year-old ecosystems and the loss of
biodiversity (destruction of the coral reefs and massive deforestation)
that have led to the extinction of particular species and the decline in
the number of others.
7. The reduction of oxygen and the increase in carbon dioxide in the
atmosphere because of deforestation, resulting in the rise in ocean
acidity by as much as 150 percent in the last 250 years.
8. The depletion of the ozone layer protecting the planet from the sun’s
deadly ultraviolet rays due to chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the
atmosphere.
9. Deadly acid rain as a result of fossil fuel combustion, toxic chemicals
from erupting volcanoes, and the massive rotting vegetables filling up
garbage dumps or left on the streets.
10. Water pollution arising from industrial and community waste residues
seeping into underground water tables, rivers, and seas.
11. Urban sprawls that continue to expand as a city turns into a
megalopolis, destroying farmlands, increasing traffic gridlock, and
making smog cloud a permanent urban fixture.
12. Pandemic and other threats to public health arising from wastes
mixing with drinking water, polluted environments that become
breeding grounds for mosquitoes and disease carrying rodents, and
pollution.
13. A radical alteration of food systems because of genetic modifications in
food production.

Many of these problems are caused by natural changes. Volcanic

eruptions release toxins in the atmosphere and lower the world’s
temperature. The US Geological Survey measured the gas emissions from the
active Kilauea volcano in Hawaii and concluded “that Kilauea has been
releasing more than twice the amount of noxious sulfur dioxide (SO2) as the
single dirtiest power plant on the United States mainland.” The 15 million
tons of sulfur dioxide that were released when Mount Pinatubo erupted on
June 15, 2001 created a “hazy layer of aerosol particles composed primarily of

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sulfuric droplets” that brought down the average global temperature of 0.6
2
Degrees Celsius for the next 15 months. Volcanologists at the University of
Hawaii added that Pinatubo had released “15 to 20 megaton of sulfur dioxide
into the stratosphere to offset the present global warming trends and severely
impact the ozone budget.”

Stop and Think! Exercise #2

List five (5) environmental problems in your community and how
will you solve it.

Man-made Pollution

Humans exacerbate other natural environmental problems. In

Saudi Arabia, sandstorms combined with combustion exhaust from traffic
and industrial waste has led the World Health Organization (WHO) to
declare Riyadh as one of the most polluted cities in the world. It is this
“human contribution” that has become an immediate cause of worry. Coal
fumes coming out of industries and settling down in surrounding areas
contaminated 20 percent of China’s soil, with the rice lands in Hunan and
Zhuzhou found to have heavy metals from the mines, threatening the food
supply.

Greenpeace India reported that in 2015, air pollution in the

country was at its worst, aggravated by the Indian government’s inadequate
monitoring system (there are only 17 national air quality networks covering
89 cities across the continent). Furthermore, 94 percent of Nigeria’s
population is exposed to air pollution that the WHO warned as reaching
dangerous levels, while Gaborone, the capital of Botswana, is the 7 th most
polluted city in the world. The emission of aerosols and other gases from car
exhaust, burning of wood or garbage, indoor-cooking, and diesel-fueled
electric generators, and petrochemical plants are projected to quadruple by
2030.

Waste coming out of coal, copper, and gold mines flowing out
into the rivers and oceans is destroying sea life or permeating the bodies of
those which survived with poison (mercury in tuna, prominently). The
biggest copper mine in Malanjkhand in India discharges high levels of toxic

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heavy metals into water streams, while in China, the “tailings” from the
2
operations of the Shanxi Maanqiao Ecological Mining Ltd., producing 12,000
tons of gold per year, “have caused pollution and safety problems.”
Conditions in China have become very critical as the “toxic by-products of
production processes are being produced much more rapidly than the Earth
can absorb.” Meanwhile, for over a century, coal mines in West Virginia have
pumped “chemical-laden wastewater directly into the ground, where it can
leech into the water table and turn what had been drinkable water into a
poisonous cocktail of chemicals.” The system “goes back generations and
could soon render much of the state’s water undrinkable.”

Pollution in West Africa has affected “the atmospheric

circulation system that controls everything from wind and temperature to
rainfall across huge swathes of the region.” The Asian monsoon, in turn, had
become the transport of polluted air into the stratosphere, and scientists are
now linking Pacific storms to the spread of pollution in Asia. Aerosol is
tagged the culprit in changing rainfall patterns in Asia and the Atlantic
Ocean. These climactic disruptions have similarly caused drought all over
Asia and Africa and accelerated the pace of desertification in certain areas.
Twenty years ago, there were over 50,000 rivers in China. In 2013, as a result
of climate change, uncontrolled urban growth, and rapid industrialization,
28,000 of these rivers had disappeared.

People’s health has been severely compromised. An archived

article in the journal Scientific American blamed the pollution for “contributing
to more than half a million premature deaths each year at the cost of
hundreds of billions of dollars.” The International Agency of Research on
Cancer blamed air pollution for 223,000 lung cancer deaths in 2010. In
Indonesia and Malaysia, the link between forest fires and mortality had been
well-established. The aforementioned coal mining in West Virginia, has also
made people sick, some with “rare cancers, little kids with kidney stones and
premature deaths”, and children born with congenital disabilities and adults
having shorter life expectancy.

It has been the poor who are the most severely affected by these
environmental problems. Their low income and poverty already put them at
a disadvantage by not having the resources to afford good health care, to live
in unpolluted areas, to eat healthy food, etc. In the United States, a Yale
University research team studying areas with high levels of pollution

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observed that the “greater the concentration of Hispanics, Asians, African-
2
Americans, or poor residents in an area, the more likely that dangerous
compounds such as vanadium, nitrates, and zinc are in the mix of fine
particles they breathe.” In India, studies on adults health revealed that 46
percent in Delhi and 56 percent of in Calcutta have “impaired lung function”
due to air pollution. In China, the toxicity of the soil has raised concerns over
food security and the health of the most vulnerable, especially the peasant
communities and those living in factory cities. In 2006, 160 acres of land in
Xinma, China was badly poisoned by cadmium. Two people died and 150
were known to be poisoned; the entire village was abandoned. Hong Kong
faces the same problem.

In Metropolitan Manila, 37 percent (4 million people) of the

population live in slum communities, areas where “the effects of urban
environmental problems and threats of climate change are also most
pronounced due to their hazardous location, poor air pollution and solid
waste management, weak disaster risk management, and limiting coping
strategies of households.” Marife Ballesteros concludes that this unhealthy
environment “deepens poverty, increases the vulnerability of both the poor
and non-poor living in slums, and excludes the slum poor from growth.

One of the major ironies of urban pollution is that the necessities

that the poor has access to, are also the sources of the problem. The main
workhorse of the public transport system is the bus. However, because it runs
mainly on diesel fuel, it is now considered “one of the largest contributors to
environmental pollution problems worldwide.” This problem is expected to
worsen as the middle classes and the elites buy more cars and as the road
systems are improved to give people more chance to travel.

The other mode of transportation that the poor can afford is the
motorbike (also called the two- and three-wheeled vehicles). According to the
Centre for Science and Environment in Delhi, India, “two-wheelers form a
staggering 75-80 percent of the traffic in most Asian cities.” Motorbikes burn
oil and gasoline and “emit more smoke, carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, and
particulate matter than the gas-only four-stroke engines found in newer
motorcycles.” Finally, adding to this predicament is the proliferation of
diesel-run cars. These vehicles usually command a lower price because of
their durability and low-operating cost, and hence affordable to the middle
class. However, they also release four times the toxic pollution as the buses.

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“Catching Up”
2
These massive environmental problems are difficult to resolve
because governments believe that for their countries to become fully
developed, they must be industrialized, urbanized, and inhabited by a robust
middle class with access to the best of modern amenities. A developed
society, accordingly, must also have provisions for the poor – jobs in the
industrial sector, public transport system, and cheap food. Food depends on a
country’s free trade with other food producers. It also relies on a
“modernized” agricultural sector in which toxic technologies (such as
fertilizers or pesticides) and modified crops (e.g., high-yielding varieties of
rice) ensure maximized productivity.

The model of this ideal modern society is the United States,

which, until the 1970s, was a global economic power, with a middle class that
was the envy of the world. The United States, however, did not reach this
high point without serious environmental consequences. To this very day, it
is “the worst polluter in the history of the world,” responsible for 27 percent
of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Sixty percent of the carbon emission
comes from cars and other vehicles plying American highways and roads, the
rest from smoke and soot from coal factories, forest fires, as well as methane
released by farms and breakdown of organic matter, paint, aerosol, and dust.

These ecological consequences, however, are far from the mind

of countries like China, India, and Indonesia, which are now in the midst of a
frenzied effort to achieve and sustain economic growth to catch up with the
West. In the “desire to develop and improve the standard of living of their
citizens, these countries will opt for their goals of economic growth and cheap
energy,” which, in turn, “would encourage energy over-consumption, waste,
and inefficiency and also fuel environmental pollution.” With their industrial
sector still having a small share of the national wealth, these countries will be
using first their natural resources like coal, oil, forest and agricultural
products, and minerals to generate a national kitty that could be invested in
industrialization.

These “extractive” economies, however, are “terminal”

economies. Their resources, which will be eventually depleted, are also
sources of pollution. In Nigeria, Niger Delta oil companies have “caused
substantial land, water, and air pollution.” Nigeria is caught in a bind. If it

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wants “to maintain its current economic growth path and sustain its drive for
2
poverty reduction, the very polluting oil exploration and production will
continue to be a dominant economic activity.” If the United States lets its
environment suffer to achieve modernity and improve the lives of its people,
developing countries see no reason, therefore, why they could not sacrifice
the environment in the name of progress.

This issue begs the question: How is environmental

sustainability ensured while simultaneously addressing the development
needs of poor countries?

Climate Change

Governments have their own environmental problems to deal

with, but these states’ ecological concerns become worldwide due to global
warming, which transcends national boundaries. Global warming is the result
of billions of tons of carbon dioxide (coming from coal-burning power plants
and transportation), various air pollutants, and other gases accumulating in
the atmosphere. These pollutants trap the sun’s radiation causing the
warming of the earth’s surface. With the current amount of carbon dioxide
and other gases, this “greenhouse effect” has sped up the rise in the world
temperature. There is now a consensus that the global temperature has risen
at a faster rate in the last 50 years and it continues to go up despite efforts by
climate change deniers that the world had cooled off in and around 1998.

The greenhouse effect is responsible for recurring heat waves and

long droughts in certain places, as well as for heavier rainfall and devastating
hurricanes and typhoons in others. Until recently, California had experienced
its worst water shortage in 1,200 years due to global warming. This changed
recently when storms brought rain in the drought-stricken areas. The result,
however, is that the state is having some of its worst flashfloods in the 21st
century. In India and Southeast Asia, global warming altered the summer
monsoon patterns, leading to intermittent flooding that seriously affected
food production and consumption as well as infrastructure networks.
Category 4 or 5 typhoons, like the Super Typhoon Haiyan that hit the central
Philippines in 2013, had “doubled and even tripled in some areas of the
(Southeast Asian) basin. Scientists claim that there will be more of such
typhoons in the coming years.” In the eastern United States, the number of

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storms had also gone up, with Hurricane Katrina (2005) and Hurricane Sandy
2
(2012) being the worst.

Glaciers are melting every year since 2002, with Antarctica

losing 134 billion metric of ice. There is coastal flooding not only in the United
States eastern seaboard but also in the Gulf of Mexico. Coral reefs in the
Australian Great Barrier Reef are dying, and the production capacities of
farms and fisheries have been affected. Flooding has allowed more breeding
grounds for disease carriers like the Aedis aegypti mosquito and the cholera
bacteria.

The melting of the polar ice caps illustrates the reality of man-made climate change.

Since human-made climate change threatens the entire world, it

is possibly the greatest present risk to humankind.

Combating Global Warming

More countries are now recognizing the perils of global

warming. In 1997, 192 countries signed the Kyoto Protocol to reduce
greenhouse gases, following the 1992 United Nations Earth Summit where a
Framework Convention for Climate Change was finalized. The protocol set
targets but let if to the individual countries to determine how best they would
achieve these goals. While some countries have made the necessary move to
reduce their contribution to global warming, the United States – the biggest
polluter in the world – is not joining the effort. Developing countries lack the
funds to implement the protocol’s guidelines as many of them need

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international aid to get things moving. A 2010 World Bank report thus
2
concluded that the protocol only had a slight impact on reducing global
emissions, in part because of the non-binding nature of the agreement.

The follow-up treaty to the Kyoto Protocol is the Paris Accord,

negotiated by 195 countries in December of 2015. It seeks to limit the increase
in the global average temperature based on targeted goals as recommended
by scientists. Unlike the Kyoto Protocol which has predetermined CO 2
emission limits per country, the Paris Accord provides more leeway for
countries to decide on their national targets. It largely passed as international
legislation because it emphasizes consensus-building, but it is not clear
whether this agreement will have any more success than the Kyoto Protocol.

Social movements, however, have had better success working

together, with some pressure on their governments to regulate global
warming. In South Africa, communities engage in environmental activism to
pressure industries to reduce emissions and to lobby parliament for the
passage of pro-environment laws. Across the Atlantic, in El Salvador, local
officials and grassroots organizations from 1,000 communities push for crop
diversification, a reduction of industrial sugar cane production, the protection
of endangered sea species from the devastating effects of commercial fishing,
the preservation of lowlands being eroded by deforestation up in rivers and
inconsistent release of water from a nearby dam. Universities also partner
with governments in producing attainable programs of controlling pollution.
The University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute sent teams to India to
work with government offices, businesses and communities in coming up
with viable ground-level projects that “strike a balance between urgently
needed economic growth and improved air quality.”

When these local alliances between the state, schools, and

communities are replicated at the national level, the success becomes doubly
significant. In Japan, population pressure forced the government to work
with civil society groups, academia, and political parties to get the parliament
to pass “a blizzard of laws – 14 passed at once – in what became known as the
Pollution Diet of 1970. These regulations did not eliminate environmental
problems, but today, Japan has some of the least polluted cities in the world.

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The imperative now is for everyone to set up these kinds of
2
coalitions on a global scale. For at this point, when governments still hesitate
in fully committing themselves to fight pollution and when international
organizations still lack the power to enforce anti-pollution policies, social
coalition that bring in governments, and even international aid agencies
together may be the only way to reverse this worsening situation.

Stop and Think! Exercise #3

Answer the questions comprehensively.
1. How do poor countries balance their need for development
with the necessity to protect the environment?
2. How do you define sustainable development?
3. What are the major environmental problems you are
exposed to? How are these problems global?

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5.3 References
2
Claudio, Lisandro and Abinales, Patricio, eds. 2018. Quezon City: C & E
Publishing, Inc., pp 119-131

https://encrypted-
tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQCgphVzwamCnSOY_RcpuRvHG3O
zMHVGWMFwQ&usqp=CAU

https://encrypted-
tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQM55PcadFhJFktwFD7rbRtYXI8_VP
CM-H7jA&usqp=CAU

5.4 Acknowledgment

The authors would like to extend their heartiest thanks and respect
to all those who provided help in the preparation of this module. The
information contained in this module were taken from the references cited
above.

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2 EnvironmentalUNIT 4 ASSESSMENT
Crisis and Sustainable Development

Name: _____________________________ Course, Year & Section:

Subject: ____________________________ Instructor:

Learning Activity: Finding everyday pollution

Go around your neighborhood and list the different kinds of pollutants you
see. Widen your observation by looking at the areas surrounding your
neighborhood.

Make a list of these pollutants and check which ones can be recycled and
which ones need to be put together for the garbage men to collect. With the recycled
ones, list the possible things that you can do to make them usable and explain this in
a report. Do not simply limit yourself to what you can do with the recyclables. Your
report must include suggestions to the neighborhood, the barangay, and the city
district.

C. M. D. Hamo-ay
SAMAR STATE UNIVERSITY
ARTECHE BOULEVARD, CATBALOGAN CITY
6700 SAMAR
www.ssu.edu.ph

email: [email protected]
telefax: (055) 543-8394