Title: As a summary…
Author: Cattaneo Augusto
Last saved by: Invitado
Company: E.D.B. CATTANEO S.r.l.

As a summary1….

Issues:
•	Some environmental problems can often be seen as social-environmental problems.
•	Over pollution and over exploitation of natural resources is due to lack of environmental policies, but also to the unfair distribution of the rights of access to the natural resources (political ecology is a discipline related to ecological-economics dealing with such issues; according to this discipline, western countries = and their transnational corporations- are “recolonizing” developing countries)
•	There are figures that show improvements in the pollution levels, especially in western countries (SOx emissions, CFCs…).
•	Open access resources are often over exploited, sometimes international agreement work (ban of CFCs use, regulation of SOx emissions), sometimes they lack (overfishing), sometimes they are not implemented (Kyoto Protocol)
•	Energy use has increased dramatically, especially the exosomatic use of non-renewable resources
“Intensive” or “productive” agriculture is not sustainable: if we look at energy inputs we see that they are higher than their outputs.
There is enough food for everybody on this planet, the problem is, again, an unfair distribution.
•	Over population is a controversial problem: if we expected everybody to consume as the westerners, we would need at least a couple of more planets…. So over population of the poor countries is a problem with respect to over consumption of the rich countries.
•	Environmental perceptions are different between western culture and other (traditional) cultures: they are based on a human-environmental split, a lost relationship with nature, a utilitarian view of nature: anthropocentric (and “marketcentric”) view versus the “ecocentric” view.