Corporations Case

Question 5.

In my humble opinion corporations should be held accountable for all that they are doing, because they have a share in our common responsibility to future generations. Their every wrong action has its eventual consequence in long as well as short term environmental harm. Therefore, companies should be considerate of the future generations wellbeing. The terrible consequences of short-term thinking have been widely documented. We have recently observed a nuclear power explosion in Japan, in which its effects are resurfacing right now and will surely be affecting our children. Future generations have the right to be assured to live in a toxic-free, filled with animals and greenery world. Therefore people along with corporations should make sure that we are not polluting ground water, extinguish habitats and drastically change the world’s climate. While making decisions, corporations should turn their attention away from profit and focus on preventing environmental degradation. Corporations have been criticized for their negative effects on the natural environment. In order to avoid such accusations they need to be proactive rather than reactive. They ought to make sustainable decisions, in other words, they can’t be harmful to the environment and exhaust natural resources, but instead they should make decisions that support long-time ecological balance.

However, not only corporations contribute to the degradation of the natural environment. There are three economical components that add up to ecological crisis. The exponential growth of the world’s population is believed to have a significant effect on the natural environment. For so many years, population growth was gradual, but recently people have been reproducing much faster, as well as their lives are longer than in the past. This process will affect the eco-system, because the future growth won’t be distributed equally. When western, industrialized countries’ growth is slowing down, it picks up speed in less developed countries, and as a consequence, it will increase the strain on natural resources. Due to the expansion of usage of these resources, more pollution will be created. People’s demands for food will increase, thus farms will be overused, which will lead to even deeper poverty as people will try to make their living of less productive lands.

An inequality between the rich and poor of this world is another factor that destroys the eco-system. Although general living standards have been improved due to economical development, about 40 % of the world’s population still lives in extreme poverty. Less economically advanced nations tend to act in very ignorant and destructive way in regards to the environment. Poor, uneducated people do not think about sustainable development, because their only concerns are their basic physiological needs.

I was especially devastated after watching a video in class