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)
“If the Revolution has the right to destroy bridges and art monuments whenever necessary, it will stop still less from laying its hand on any tendency in art which, no matter how great its achievement in form, threatens to disintegrate the revolutionary environment or to arouse the internal forces of the Revolution, that is, the proletariat, the peasantry and the intelligentsia, to a hostile opposition to one another. Our standard is, clearly, political, imperative and intolerant.”
—Leon Trotsky (1879–1940)
“Health, learning and virtue will ensure your happiness; they will give you a quiet conscience, private esteem and public honour.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“The best protection parents can have against the nightmare of a daycare arrangement where someone might hurt their child is to choose a place that encourages parents to drop in at any time and that facilitates communication among parents using the program. If parents are free to drop in and if they exercise this right, it is not likely that adults in that place are behaving in ways that harm children.”
—Gwen Morgan (20th century)