Industry and Environment Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Industry is the term used to describe all of the businesses making a particular product or providing the same service. Product industries include the automobile industry, munitions industry, textile industry, construction industry, shipbuilding industry, and thousands of others. Service industries include the insurance industry, banking industry, stock brokerage industry, retail industry, and real estate industry.

Historically, most goods before the Industrial Revolution were part of a cottage industry, in which goods were made in private homes of the poor. The Industrial Revolution took vast number of poor people from small villages, farms, and cottages and put them into large-scale production centers. The first industry organized in this way was the textile industry.

Wool production increased dramatically with the enclosure movement, which drove small-scale farmers off of their lands and into growing factory towns like Birmingham, England, which were located near sources of cheap energy such as water power or coal. They were soon filled with cheap housing that disintegrated into slums. The factory system had many negative consequences for workers, but the factory system created a huge flow of cheap finished goods for the global market.

Modern Industrial Needs

Natural resources use by industry are either renewal or nonrenewal. Corn is a renewable resource that can be planted every year to make corn syrup or a great many other products. In contrast, the resources needed by the service industry, such as financing or insurance, are far fewer.

Capital is a resource needed by industry to build capital goods like production machinery and to hire people as managers or laborers. The canning machinery or the electrical motors for running an operation are also capital goods. Some industries are capital-intensive, such as an oil refinery, which requires few very skilled workers but a vast investment of money for the oil refinery equipment.

Industry needs at least some human labor. In labor-intensive service industries such as hospitals or law firms, a large number of skilled workers solve medical or legal problems. They are also capital intensive in regards to human capital.

Management in industry is typically highly skilled to supervise the vast number of steps in the making of complicated goods or the delivery of services. Each worker in an assembly line or in the manufacture of other goods does only a small part of the total part of the work; this specialization of labor magnifies human productivity. This was recognized by Adam Smith in his book, The Wealth of Nations. Smith concluded that the wealth of nations was the productivity of their people; he described his visit to a highly productive pin factory, where its productivity would have been a great deal less if each single worker had to undertake all of the steps in making a pin.

Technology is composed of the unique skills acquired from practice, tools, machinery, and techniques used by industry. Technology also multiplies the productivity of an industry.

In the developed countries of western Europe, North America, and Japan, industries have employed people almost since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In other regions, such as Asia, Africa, or Latin America, there are still huge populations in rural villages. Since China changed its economic policy to promote a market economy, thousands of industries have opened. Industry in the Third World or developing world has been undergoing developmental problems since its beginnings. One of the major problems is the environmental impact of consuming huge quantities of raw materials.

Another major problem is supplying energy to the great new cities of Asia. Japan is increasingly supplied by nuclear power, but in China, with huge supplies of coal and also with the damming of a number of rivers, including the Three Gorges Dam, there has been an enormous increase in energy supplies.

As China, Japan, and other newly industrializing countries prosper, there is also an increase in the demand for transportation and consumer goods, including automobiles. This makes necessary the building of new roads and railroad lines.

The environmental impact of industry, whether in manufacturing or in farming since the end of World War II, has been tremendous. The used of pesticides, herbicides, and the burning of fossil fuels have had negative consequences for the environment. In order to deal with the pollution created by industry, great expenditures have been made for eliminating or cleaning up pollution such as chemical waste dumps.

Food industries, such as cattle ranches, poultry farms, and hog operations, have all become industrialized with the use of exact mixtures of feeds, as well as vitamins and antibiotics to prevent disease. While keeping the cost of meat low and feeding billions of people, these industrial farms also generate huge quantities of waste that must be disposed of safely.

Debates, political strife, and lawsuits have been part of the response of those concerned about the pollution caused by modern industry. However, the money made from industry, as well as the global competition for jobs, has made this difficult. Industry can relocate from a country with strict environmental protection laws that require costly capital investments to environmentally lax countries of the developing world, where jobs are more important in the beginning than the environmental consequences.

“Making a living” also implies ethical treatment of people and of the environment. The excuse that pollution is necessary to meet the competition is a rationalization to justify harming people, plants, and animals. The challenge is clean industry, which does no harm but is also one that is highly productive and profitable.

Bibliography:

Andres R. Edwards, The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift (New Society Publishers, 2005);
Daniel Esty and Andrew S. Winston, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage (Yale University Press, 2006);
Paul Hawkin, Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (HarperCollins, 1994);
Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins, and L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism (Little, Brown & , 2000);
William McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002);
Andrew W. Savitz and Morgan McVicar, The Triple Bottom Line: Why Sustainability Is Transforming the Best-Run Companies and How It Can Work for You (John Wiley & Sons, 2006).