Modernization and Environmental Degradation
Scrutiny of the ideology underlying modernization helps to account for the nearly intolerable high level of environmental degradation, which accompanied it. In order to understand the current environmental crisis and attempt to offer pertinent recommendations for its improvement, there will be a need to critique how this degradation reached these absurdly high levels. This essay will focus on different perspectives on the relationship between modernization and environmental degradation inclusive of epistemological critiques. Attention will be given to the analysis of how different ideological camps define key terms such as sustainable development. Consideration will also be given to ideological divisions among different groups regarding their own individualized distinctions between resource use and environmental preservation.
First, the term modernization should be scrutinized. No one modernization theory exists. Instead, this term came to identify "a variety of perspectives that were applied by non-Marxists to the Third World in the 1950s and 1960sö (Harrison 1). Modernization theories emerged from reinterpretations of such classical sociological theories as "evolutionism (with its focus on increasing differentiation), diffusionism, structural functionalism, systems theory and interactionismö (Harrison 1). To classify and critique modernization theory is to begin to see how global economy and variant cultures have dealt with issues of progress, overpopulation, resource allocation and refuse collection. Although the concept of modernization with its consequent theory of progress can be traced back to antiquity, it actually did not become systematized until the eighteenth century (Harrison 1). Yet it was with Darwin and his theories of social evolution which began to codify classical sociological theory (Harrison 2).
Nineteenth century theories of evolution emphasized...