Urbanization and the Environment: A Global Challenge

The environmental tradition has historically been about embracing and preserving the wild places, and environmentalists have often viewed cities as dirty, polluting, unfortunate habitats that pose a great threat to nature.

This' tendency to position nature and humanity in opposition derives from both the popular rejection of the Victorian city, its polluting factories, and from the roots of environmentalism in saving threatened species and preserving habitat and scenic beauty.

Environmentalists responded by' regulating industrial and urban discharge into water and air, through planning laws to preserve countryside and reclaim industrial land, and through preserving and conserving farmland and wild places as green lungs for the planet.

The result has been, at least in the global north, cleaner water, purer air and' sustainable parks and nature reserves. At the same time, however, huge global population growth, and the move from subsistence farming to industrial agriculture have together brought about an urban' explosion, and cities have become a' dominant feature in both the human and natural environment. According to the United Nations Environment Program, of the global population increase of 2.2 billion by 2030, 2.1 billion will live in urban areas, and by 2030, more than 60 percent of the world's population will be urban' dwellers.

Two issues arise here. First, if all these urban inhabitants adopt the suburban living patterns and lifestyles of the United States and Western Europe, the problems of climate change, resource' depletion, waste and pollution will be greatly worsened. Second, many if not most of the urban residents in the global south live in grossly overcrowded slums, rife with cholera and other diseases. These slums may be environmentally' civil, but only because their residents have next to nothing.

Global urbanization is thus both a social and environmental issue, and the challenges of raising global living standard while reducing carbon' emissions is a knotty and worldwide problem—for all of the traditional reasons about pollution and overcrowding, plus challenges of public health, nutrition and engagement in' venue society.