SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT;
says the Ecologist

The environment itself is inherently global, with ecosystems frequently crossing national boundaries, pollutions spreading throughout continents and oceans and a single shared atmosphere which provides all living entity on earth with climate protection from damaging UV rays.

Globalization and the impacts on our environment are influenced by a couple of factors – I believe the economy plays a major role in this topic of discussion.

The Economy
Everywhere our forests are overlogged, our agricultural lands overcropped, our grasslands overgrazed, our wetlands overdrained, our groundwaters overtapped, our seas overfished, and just about the whole earthly and marine environment is overpolluted with chemical and toxic. Not to mention, the atmospheric ozone layer which is man’s protection to harmful UV rays, is gradually being depleted. From these adverse effects, it is only obvious that the environment is slowly disintegrating due to man’s economic activities.

Increasing trade today is justified because it represents economic development which equates with progress. In the global conception of modernization, it is the only way to produce materials and technology advancement.

However, it is most unfortunate that through economic development, it has resulted in further increase in economic activities. Taiwan and South Korea are two good examples. These two principal newly industrial countries (NICS) that have achieved the most stunning rates of economic growth over the years are currently Third World countries role models to emulate.

In the case of Taiwan, deforestation has been practiced to accommodate industrial and residential developments and to allow the expansion of plantations. The virgin broadleaf forests that once covered the entire eastern coast have now been almost completely destroyed. The vast network of roads built to open up the forests to logging, agriculture and development, has resulted in severe soil erosion, especially in mountainous areas where entire slopes of bare soil have already slid away.

In its pursuits for economic growth, the use of pesticides has also greatly increased. Despite being a major source of contamination of Taiwan's surface waters, no governmental control has been implemented to monitor the distribution of such harmful products. The food produced is getting so contaminated with pesticides to the extent that Taiwanese farmers prefer to grow and consume their own organic crops instead of getting it from the market.

According to Taiwan’s government, 20 per cent of farmland is now polluted by industrial waste water, while 30 per cent of the rice grown in Taiwan is contaminated with heavy metals, including mercury, arsenic and cadmium. In Hou Jin, a small town near the city of Kaohsiung, forty years of pollution by the Taiwan Petroleum Company has made the water not only unsave to drink but actually flammable.
Air pollution has also increased massively. Sulphur dioxide and nitrous oxide pollution in Taiwan are now intolerable. The incidence of asthma among children in Taiwan has quadrupled in the last ten years, while cancer has now become the leading cause of death, its occurrence doubling over the last 30 years.
We are most certainly facing an environmental crisis in the world. Before conditions worsen, measures should be taken up immediately to ban or at least limit activities that are particularly destructive and at the same time, channeling economic development into areas that are less so.

Our environment is very precious and I believe it should hold precedence over anything else, that including the development of our economy. Furthermore, there has been no evidence that trade or economic developments are absolutely essential to man. World trade has increased by eleven times since 1950 and economic growth by five times, yet during this same period there has been an unprecedented increase in poverty, unemployment, social degeneration and environmental devastation. On the other hand, our environment is our greatest wealth as there can be no international trade, no economic development on a dead planet.

Sophia Chew