The Issues Effecting Global Ecological Integrity - Essay Example

Critical analysis of the issues effecting global ecological integrity and how they impact on the health of populations Global ecological integrity is an umbrella idea that includes the following criterion: the ecosystem should retain its capability to contract with outside intrusion and, if essential, reinforce itself; the systems' reliability reaches a peak as the optimal capacity for the greatest number of potential enduring development options, within its time/location, is attained; and it must retain the capability to continue its continuing change and development, unimpeded by human interruptions, past or present (Lemons et al. 1997; Westra 1994, 1998; Westra and Lemons 1995; Pimentel et al. 2000). Conversely, ecological disintegrity, ecosystem need, and ecological deprivation are used to express the opposite of a state of veracity and health. Biological insolvency inspires each of the concluding terms (Karr and Chu 1999). The idea of ecological footprint developed by Rees and Wackernagel in the early nineties (Wackernagel and Rees, 1996) summarizes the environmental force of a motion in a single measure. Mcmichael (2001) defined the development of human frontiers geographic, climatic, and intellectual and technical has met many setbacks from disease, starvation and deteriorating resources. The communal and ecological revolutions wrought by agrarianism, industrialization, fertility control, social transformation, urbanization and mass utilization have intensely exaggerated patterns of health and disease. These days, as life expectancies rise, the planet's ecological units are being dented by the combined weight of populace size and exhaustive economic activity. Global warming, stratospheric ozone diminution and loss of biodiversity cause large-scale risks to human health and endurance. Human population and individual health eventually depend on the veracity of ecosystems and the ecosphere (i.e., without an environment competent of supporting life, no population and, hence, no health can exist). Healthy populations can subsist in restricted environments that have lost their ecological integrity such as most urban constituency only if healthy ecosystems subsist elsewhere to sustain them. This is a purpose of technology and trade and is a trait of human culture that exceptionally differentiates humans from other animal genus reliant on their local environments. That is, human health can be retained by healthy ecosystems (or, at least, productive ones) elsewhere. In this technique, the local population inflicts its ecological footprint on the global commons and on other regions or countries (Rees and Wackernagel 1996; Wackernagel and Rees 1996; Rees 1996, 1997; Pimentel et al. 2000). This interregional dependency can unclear the connection linking people and their health with the health of ecosystems. "To help define shared perceptions of long-term environmental issues and the appropriate efforts needed to deal successfully with the problems of protecting and enhancing the environment, a long-term agenda for action during the coming decades, and aspirational goals of the world community." (Bruntland 1987: ix). It is improbable that increasing "footprints" are sustainable in the long run. The ideas of global commons, ecological health, ecological health, ecology health, ecological integrity and disintegrity, and the like, usually relate to the situation of the biosphere that supports life. Indicators have been developed by agencies such as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) (WWF 1998) as standard measures that offer a sense of the health of environmental life support systems. The ecological footprint of population (Wackernagel and Rees 1996), the index of biotic integrity (IBI; Karr and Chu 1999), the measure of mean useful integrity, and the findings by those metrics reported in the 1998 WWF report all point to humanity above the global carrying capacity and to linked collapses in ecological life support systems. All of these concepts and measures are linked to public health by virtue of the connection between the sustainability of human health as a function of the persistent health of ecological life support systems. Global environmental risks cause distinguishing challenges to establish societal monitoring and alerting practices. A high extent of scientific and political uncertainty often permeates such issues. Past experience of interactions, rates, or magnitudes of change might be unreliable as a guide to prospect risks on the global scale; instead, societal alerting and evaluation systems will require taking on a larger burden of expectation (Mcmichael,A.J.2001, Rees.W.& Wackernagle, M. 1996). So imagining alternative futures is an authorizing venture, and positively part of a more democratic risk analysis. These authors see two particular assets to processes intended at deliberating alternative futures such activity can considerably reduce social distrust and it can also lessen uncertainties concerning managing future global environmental risks. With interesting examples, they reveal that such imagining can occur in numerous forms beside the written text. They also give further substance to the meaning of emancipator risk assessment in expression, in roles and power, and in participation. however whatever the mode of imagining and debate, the core issue immediate risk adjudication and allocation in their view is that of who will have initial and best access to the future, and who will control the shaping of the future. I believe, with these changes in risk will come an escalating contentiousness around uncertainty. Numerous of the newer risks genetic engineering, cybernetic hazards, and global change will be convoyed by high levels of uncertainty. Such uncertainties and the growing require for anticipation and forecasting of risk, will place greater weight on the assessment of improbability. This would emerge to call for greater applications of science and prescribed analysis at a time when society, in its autonomous impulses, appears more distrustful and skeptical of both. Paradoxically, the two approaches to risk decisions have greater require for each other than is usually recognized: risk assessment requires normative principles to put goals for decisions, yet normative directions still depend upon analysis and diagnosis for their intelligent application and for a economical use of society's limited resources. In addition, this struggling with risk futures will become more overtly international and global in scope. In a world in which regions and places are more firmly integrated in a global economy and social communication system, the panoply of risk dealing with nations, regions, and localities will be profoundly more trans-boundary in nature. The sources of risk will more likely to lie beyond the scope and control of those charged by society with assuring public health, safety, and well-being. Several of these risks will be those linked with systemic global environmental change; others will reveal the growing attain of technologies, information systems, and a global economy. But the implications of a reformation of risk is that economic processes, and the reaction to the risks they generate, will shape futures across the political montage of the globe and for people in the future as well as those living now. Thus, ideas of "our common future" are not merely wishful rhetoric. Fundamental global risk is the issue of who will settle on the future of others. References: Karr, J. R., and E. W. Chu. 1998. Restoring life in running waters: better biological monitoring. Island Press, Washington, D. C. Lemons, J., L. Westra, and R. Goodland, eds. 1997. Ecological sustainability and integrity: concepts and approaches. Kluwer, Dordrecht. Mcmichael,A.J.(2001). Disease patterns in human biohistory, Human frontiers, Environment disease: Past patterns, Uncertain Future. Cambridge, Cambridge university press. Chapter 1, pp 1-29. Pimentel, D., L. Westra, and R. F. Noss, eds. 2000. Ecological integrity: integrating environment, conservation, and health. Island Press, Washington, D. C. Rees, W. E. 1996. Revisiting carrying capacity: area-based indicators of sustainability. Pop Environ 7:195-215. Rees, W. E. 1997. Is "sustainable city" an oxymoron Local Environ 2:303-310. Rees.W.& Wackernagle, M. (1996). Urban ecological footprints: Why cities cannot be sustainable- and why they are a key to sustainability. Environ impact assess rev. 16:223-248. Wackernagel, M., and W. Rees. 1996. Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth. New Society Publishers, New Haven, Conn. Westra, L. 1994. An environmental proposal for ethics: the principle of integrity. Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham, Md. Westra, L., and J. Lemons, eds. 1995. Perspectives on ecological integrity. Kluwer, Dordrecht. World Commission on environment and development- Our common future, Oxford university press, Chapter 2: Towards sustainable development. pp 43- 66. Read More