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 deal

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ative robotics has sometimes been granted the status, which the ancients allotted to the gods. In ôCan Technology Replace Social Engineering?ö Alvin M. Weinberg suggests that the wise use of technological advances can at least partially solve some of the worldÆs most perplexing social problems (Weinberg 39). In contrast, Wendell Berry, a contemporary American poet who celebrates the vanishing agrarian lifestyle rails against contemporary technology. In ôWhy I Am Not Going To Buy a Computerö Berry offers a simple but elegant ôindictment of centralization, bigness and consumption-driven technological societyö (Berry 66). Between these two polarities which praise technology for its power and condemn it for its depersonalization of life, modern economists, social scientists, government officials, poets and everyday citizens must find a space of accommodation. In Environmentalism and the Future of Progressive Politics Robert C. Paehlke recalls that the avid environmental movements of the 1960s and the 1970s were most often apolitical (Paehlke, 1). Even during the avid activities of these two decades many environmentalists were split as to how they envisioned the future. Some perceived it pessimistically as an inevitable hell
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1830
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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