Sam Ziemba: Assigned Class Reading 2: Chapter 10

   This chapter of the book discusses urbanization and human development. One thing that stood out to me from this chapter was the environmental sociologist William Cotton describing industrialism and colonialism as “the two most important breakthroughs in human history- and also as the two main roots of our current environmental changes”(261). I think this rings true in our world. With this so-called “development” came environmental degradation. What is labeled as societal “improvement” was environmental degradation. 

This chapter also discusses the gap in economic inequality. In this situation, the gap between the rich and the poor is more and more significant. Unfortunately, the “rich” are often the heads of corporations, whose concern scarcely falls on the environment. It seems as though their negative environmental influence is rewarded through their economic gain. 

This chapter reminded me of my anthropology class, where we often discuss the issue with the word “civilization”. This word holds a lot of controversy on what it means to be “civilized”. Previously, there was a colonialist idea that to be civilized, you must follow the same societal pattern as the white Europeans who coined this term. This has more recently been criticized, but there are still these ideas in our culture today. Many label countries as “third-world countries”, to describe their differences in culture. This is derogatory and harmful to label societies as such. Many of these countries have much lower environmental footprints than we do, and I think we have a lot to learn from them. I think that a lot of the environmental problems in our world are rooted in our mentality of shaming those who live a different lifestyle than us. Industrial development is seen as an achievement, when in reality, it is ruining our planet for everyone. This chapter was very interesting to me and points out the negative human impact and negative mindset we have had.