Social, Economic, and Political Forces in Environmental Change: Decadal Scale (1900 to 2000)

摘要

This chapter provides a brief sketch of the scale and scope of environmental changes around the world over the past century or so. It also explains at greater length the evolving contours of global political economy which helped to shape environmental change. Over the past century a grand, global struggle took place between efforts to create autarkic national or imperial economies, championed at various time by Germany, Japan, and the U.S.S.R., and rival efforts to build an integrated, international economy, championed by Great Britain before 1914 and by the U.S.A. after 1945. While concentrating on this dimension of political economy, the chapter also treats modern trends in science and technology, in population and urbanization, and in energy use, all considered insofar as they related to environmental change.