Our Environment Contents

2. Impacts

Environmental limitations of a new kind are now beginning to bite.

Deforestation

For many thousands of years, trade and technological change have enabled societies to exist at higher than the natural carrying capacity of the regions they occupy. Environmental limitations of a different order, however, are now beginning to bite - limitations of a kind which traditional solutions alone cannot overcome. Resource scarcity on an international scale presents a different order of magnitude than resource scarcity at a single local level. Trans-national environmental quality issues such as climate change, ozone depletion, and rainforest destruction, are also of a different order of magnitude than earlier environmental problems.

Can you think of examples of environmental problems that are complex and unpredictable, and some that are simple and predictable?