How Green Are You?

* How green are you? * * By Dasha Vlasova * * It might seem like the world was always concerned with the pollution the human population has been giving off in the past centuries, but that statement is actually false- the environmental movement did not take off until after World War 2. Only then, people began to recognize the costs of environmental negligence, disease and widespread air and water pollution. This was the climax point at which the ecocentric people started to complain and attempted to regain their rights concerning the environment. The technocentric community started to oppose, and this is where the conflict between them aroused. * * Everyone on the planet has a specific environmental worldview on the world’s ecology. I personally tend to believe in anthropocentric worldview, meaning a human centered worldview. Humans most definitely dominate the planet and therefore should decide what to do with the ecology. There will always be resources which can be exploited and I believe humanity is able to keep everything under control. Even though some ecologists raise the issue of Global Warming, Global dimming and other problems that might occur because of the pollution we produce, I still believe we can manage to keep the Earth clean and ‘healthy’. * * On the other side, I completely understand the viewpoint of ecocentric people. With the rapid growth of industry, the Earth has experienced some very unpleasant waste (oil spillages, CO2 released into the air, etc.) which could’ve been avoided, had the major industrial companies been more careful. Even though I do believe industrial growth is very important, I think that it is happening too quickly for the population to manage the waste. If, for example, we take the mass production of paper- it leads to deforestation, and the nature is unable to replace the initial resource of wood with a new resource. Adding onto this, there are also much less ‘recyclable’ companies than