Environment and Public Protection
British politician Peter Ainsworth acknowledges that "climate change can seem huge, complex, remote and someone else's problem." An example which contributes to the effects of climate change can be viewed within Anthony Penna’s book “The Human Footprint: A Global Environmental History” in which Penna states, “Unregulated local industries continue to pollute the soil, water, and air, while the depletion of local wood reserves for fuel degrades the forests." Such environmental destruction can be viewed as Someone Else’s Problem since many individuals are unaware of unregulated destruction taking place and when this fact is discovered they may feel as if there is nothing that they themselves can do to contribute to ceasing this process- ultimately linking it to the condition- diffusion of responsibility.
Douglas Adams was himself concerned about such failures to recognise the need for action and, with Mark Carwardine, published the book Last Chance to See, which highlighted endangered animal species. This can coincide with the quotation, “Nature is 'it' not 'thou'”, which sums up the contemporary trend that many individuals/populations have “othered” themselves from the environment resulting in devastating levels of destruction to the land and mass extinction rates. “The background rate of extinction is somewhere between one and five species per year. But today, the extinction rate appears to be anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times greater than that.”
Read more about this topic: Somebody Else's Problem
Famous quotes containing the words environment and, environment, public and/or protection:
“People between twenty and forty are not sympathetic. The child has the capacity to do but it can’t know. It only knows when it is no longer able to do—after forty. Between twenty and forty the will of the child to do gets stronger, more dangerous, but it has not begun to learn to know yet. Since his capacity to do is forced into channels of evil through environment and pressures, man is strong before he is moral. The world’s anguish is caused by people between twenty and forty.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Guns have metamorphosed into cameras in this earnest comedy, the ecology safari, because nature has ceased to be what it always had been—what people needed protection from. Now nature tamed, endangered, mortal—needs to be protected from people.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)