Modern times offer a very diverse way of expressing oneself. The expression of a single person who consumes more than they need may not be enough to hurt the environment; however, the overproduction of harmful waste from big business is big enough to impact the environment. Critically acclaimed author Anna Lappé describes the climate crisis through the food production industry in a sector of industry where people rarely scrutinize in her article “The Climate Crisis at the End of Our Fork.” In a very different, yet scarily similar way Carolyn Merchant metaphorically describes the problems with modern human tendency and desires through the image of a shopping mall in “Eden Commodified.”
The United States is obsessed with conservation efforts …show more content…
There are many commodities in the world today that are traded with very little insight into the environmental impact. As asked by Lappé in an introduction: “what do Quaker Granola Bars and Girl Scout Cookies have to do with the climate crisis? These processed foods…. Share a common ingredient, one with enormous climate implications: palm oil” (753). Palm oil is one commodity which is rapidly becoming more accessible to the consumer, and in more demand by the manufacturer and harvester. The harvesting of palm oil produces methane which is arguably one of the most detrimental greenhouse gasses being released today. The only thing about the production of palm oil is that the big companies do not care about their impact on the environment because their profits are so extremely high. The sin of the production does not lie within the release of the gasses into the environment, rather the value of the commodity over the environment itself. Todays society is faithful to consumer commodities and their major sin is the lack of empathy for the environment. To put into consumer prospective, think of a shopping mall. “Malls are places of light, hope and promise – transitions to new worlds. People are reinvented and redeemed by the mall. Said one ecstatic visitor, ‘I am the mall…. This place is heaven’” (Merchant 731). This is sad. Not only is this sad, but this is also the basic root of our environmental problems, and will be until the ideologies of modern peoples change. The mall represents the lust for new and plenty; the major problem with this thought is that is not how the environmental world works. There will be times of plenty, but those times will not be always and forever; and people of today do not understand that the world is a give and take place. People’s ideas will need to change about how the world works, however until then the
The United States is obsessed with conservation efforts …show more content…
There are many commodities in the world today that are traded with very little insight into the environmental impact. As asked by Lappé in an introduction: “what do Quaker Granola Bars and Girl Scout Cookies have to do with the climate crisis? These processed foods…. Share a common ingredient, one with enormous climate implications: palm oil” (753). Palm oil is one commodity which is rapidly becoming more accessible to the consumer, and in more demand by the manufacturer and harvester. The harvesting of palm oil produces methane which is arguably one of the most detrimental greenhouse gasses being released today. The only thing about the production of palm oil is that the big companies do not care about their impact on the environment because their profits are so extremely high. The sin of the production does not lie within the release of the gasses into the environment, rather the value of the commodity over the environment itself. Todays society is faithful to consumer commodities and their major sin is the lack of empathy for the environment. To put into consumer prospective, think of a shopping mall. “Malls are places of light, hope and promise – transitions to new worlds. People are reinvented and redeemed by the mall. Said one ecstatic visitor, ‘I am the mall…. This place is heaven’” (Merchant 731). This is sad. Not only is this sad, but this is also the basic root of our environmental problems, and will be until the ideologies of modern peoples change. The mall represents the lust for new and plenty; the major problem with this thought is that is not how the environmental world works. There will be times of plenty, but those times will not be always and forever; and people of today do not understand that the world is a give and take place. People’s ideas will need to change about how the world works, however until then the