sushil_yadav wrote:The environmental catastrophe we are witnessing today is a consequence of the attempt by the west to westernize the entire world.
Today the entire world is collectively involved in destruction of environment but the biggest role in this process of destruction was played by Western Civilization.
Western Civilization suffered from total lack of foresight.
The West was the first to start Industrial Revolution.......the first to travel on the destructive path of Industrialization and consumerism.......It then forced western lifestyle on its colonies in Asia, Africa and America whose cultures it had already destroyed during the era of colonization.
I think you mean
Britain, not "the west". But I'm not sure you can blame us for lack of foresight. It was not until the middle of the 20th century that it started to become clear how bad the coming ecological catastrophe was going to be, and by then Britain was no longer in the driving seat of global culture. You can blame the Americans for "consumerism", which is a much more recent invention.
The west did not have the foresight to know that a lifestyle based on loot, plunder and exploitation of natural resources would destroy the very things that created and sustained all life on earth for millions of years and ultimately lead to total destruction of biodiversity and ecosystems.
How could our ancestors have known that? If you'd told people in 1900 that 70 years later a man would walk on the moon, they'd probably have thought you were completely mad.
The "lack of foresight" wasn't just to do with the environmental consequences of the invention of industrialised civilisation. At the start of the industrial revolution, nobody understood the scope of what was happening. One of the first important developments, for example, was the building of the first commercial canals, which revolutionised the transport of materials like coal and wheat. Vast amounts of money was invested in building more canals all over the country, yet the heyday of the canal network was very short-lived, because at the same time as the network was being built, somebody was busy inventing the mobile steam engine. Now...it should have been totally obvious to all concerned that horse-drawn canal boats were never going to be able to compete with steam-powered railways but most people simply
weren't able to imagine it happening. Railways already existed - trucks pulled by horses in areas not suitable for building canals. Stationary steam engines also existed, mainly for pumping water out of mines or up to the summit level of the canals. But almost nobody managed to put 2 and 2 together and realise that somebody was going to put a steam engine on wheels and render the canals yesterday's technology. This inability to imagine the future led to many people losing vast fortunes because they continued to back the canals against the railways, even after most of the canals had been bought up by railway companies and deliberately left to rot.
Anyway...what I'm trying to explain is that at the start of the industrial revolution, nobody had any real idea where civilisation was heading. It was way beyond anything they were capable of imagining, so you can't really blame them for lack of foresight. Most people couldn't even imagine the next step, let alone where we were going to finally end up.
"We fail to mandate economic sanity because our brains are addled by....compassion." (Garrett Hardin)