International Studies Compendium Project

Extract

Comment on this article   The condition of the global environment matters for the welfare and well-being of both nature and people. Though much of this concern is of relatively recent provenance, environmental change has been, and will be, a continuous process throughout human history, whatever people might or might not do. What, then, has changed? Globalization. To be sure, the concept of globalization is an essentially contested one ( Hirst and Thompson 1999 ; Scholte 2000 ), but few observers would deny that the pace of technological, economic, and social change has increased dramatically over the past generation. Linked to this, wide-ranging environmental changes that once took centuries, mostly as a result of variability in geological and physical systems, now happen on timescales of decades or less, as a result of human practices. Social responses to such changes, which once took centuries, are now compressed into much shorter periods of time too, sometimes as little as weeks or days. Throughout this essay, we use the term globalization to denote a multifaceted phenomenon, with deep historical roots, that is a result of material, social, and cognitive changes over the past 40 years. Globalization is material in the sense that it involves the rapid and largely unfettered movement of capital, technology, goods, and, to a limited degree, labor, to areas with high returns ... log in or subscribe to read full text