Wealth Inequality: An Environmental & Social Crisis
A climate change protest in Washington D.C. (Photo Courtesy of Pan Macmillan)
By Leah Nath, Staff Writer
Though the climate crisis is still a highly debated and politicized topic, the consequences of global warming are being increasingly felt all around the world. Many of the world’s nations are clinging aggressively to their nationality and to the means of national evaluation by which we judge a nation’s worth. These concepts of evaluation are arbitrary and human-made, giving us the valuable opportunity to reassess or disregard some of the traditional measures of success like GDP, in order to put people’s lived and future well-being above an abstract concept like the economy. However, the current status of governmental functioning and American mindsets are not understanding the necessity of worldwide collaboration and community, all in the name of capitalist greed.
Kuznets Curve, originally designed to compare national income with income disparity and adapted to compare national income with pollution, follows a parabolic shape. The curve hypothesizes that as a nation’s income increases, so will its income disparity and pollution, until reaching a peak. After this peak, the nation is supposed to have enough money to actively decrease income disparity and pollution. For many years this concept has been heralded as a guiding philosophical theory for up-and-coming generations of students and policymakers, although the current state of the world is proving more and more each day that the economic distance between classes and countries is on an ever-diverging path.
Demographic transition has been modeled in five stages: (1) in an agrarian society based on resource extraction, births and deaths are both high and the total population is low due to a high infant mortality rate, low education and low healthcare technology; (2) as the nation develops with industrialization, focusing on manufacturing, birth rates remain high, but death rates decrease rapidly due to developments in medical innovation; (3) once a service structure is built, births rates rapidly decrease because less children are dying and less children are needed to work to support the family, and death rates begin to slow their descent; (4) once developed into an information society, birth and death rates begin to balance out, as women get married later in life due to increased autonomy, education and career goals; (5) yet unseen and undefined, populations may grow or decline depending on the stability of the nation. In environmental studies classes at Gettysburg College, philosophers like Malthus and Marx are compared to explain the “issue of overpopulation,” some of whom argue that education is the most important factor in decreasing population growth, while others maintain the misogynistic and often racist belief that family planning, contraceptives, and sterilization are the best way to decrease population growth. The demographic transition model, by definition, argues that industrialization contains the key to stabilizing population growth, despite the problem of the demographic trap–the model is based on countries that are already industrialized, who managed to do so through colonization, making the path impossible for other countries to replicate in the world’s current state. Moreover, with the impacts of intense fossil fuel burning through the Industrial Revolutions of post-industrial nations beginning to manifest with increasingly visible consequences, less developed countries cannot hope to industrialize in the same way without forcing the human species into rapid collapse.
This philosophical debate represents one of many ways in which Western societies manipulate education to raise new generations of xenophobic, laissez-faire policymakers. The issue is not “overpopulation,” it is a disparity that lies at the heart of this matter. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the world produces 4 billion metric tons of food per year, which is enough to feed 10 billion people. However, 1.3 billion metric tons of food per year go to waste. Still, the current population of the world is estimated to need 3.7 billion metric tons of food per year, produced even despite the amount of food wasted. So why are millions of people still impacted by starvation and malnourishment? We have the means to support a growing population, but we cannot even feed the population we have right now.
More than any other species on Earth, the human species has managed to evade carrying capacity limitation factors time and time again. Identifying the issue of overpopulation is inherently immoral, as the wording suggests that the problem is a result of the people. No person, alive now, or to be born three generations from now, should be blamed for the downfall of society or made to feel like their existence is a burden to the world. Besides being a matter of basic human decency, the concept of overpopulation places the brunt of the responsibility for the world’s problems on struggling, underdeveloped countries, rather than the post-industrialized countries that are responsible for the degradation of the Earth’s environment and who are the top consumers of the world’s resources.
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) has previously been correlated to carbon dioxide emissions, with an increasing amount of wealth resulting in increased emissions. According to the Kuznets curve, this pattern should have begun to change, with the wealthiest countries now being those best positioned to invest in renewable energy and transition to a more sustainable functionality. Though countries like the United States and Australia have technically decreased the percentage of emissions per capita released over the past twenty years, they are still emitting tens of thousands of tons more carbon dioxide per capita than other countries around the world. The Paris Agreement of 2016 only requires nations to take responsibility for the emissions that come out of their own boundaries. Because pollution is now something that can be outsourced, the wealthier countries can, on paper, decrease their emissions, while paying for more pollution than ever, and ensuring that that pollution degrades far poorer countries than themselves. Beyond the widening gap between the wealth of individuals, the wealth disparity between nations is growing to an alarming level.
If America intends to be the “leader” of the world and of the future, this is not the way to lead. Teaching new students language and philosophy that implicitly places the blame for environmental degradation, starvation, or wars onto the most disadvantaged, oppressed, and impoverished countries is a stealthy and cruel tactic to maintain America’s position as an oppressor and imperialistic nation. As we enter a new era in the fight for environmental safety and rights to basic necessities like water, the divisions between nations have to dissipate, rather than grow more polarized. As individuals, it is our responsibility to shed the capitalistic, xenophobic, oppressive mindset masquerading as the “patriotic” American Dream and instead decide to stand with the rest of our species as a singular human species working towards mutual survival and success.
