Environmental & Social Change Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Environmental & Social Change - Essay Example Skeptics of global warming are especially prominent in the US that explains the reason why the country did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol. In addition, since the signing, the US has increased emissions by 20% with Europe reducing emissions by 2%. An answer to this is to be found through a combination of scientific understanding of global warming and interesting ideas in sociology. Global warming is a result of the inability by Americans to deal with the individualistic consumer culture, as well as the lag time present between emission and the production of global warming, which takes approximately 50 years. The US society is in the throes of individualism and consumerism that makes it difficult to accept or grasp that going for bigger cars and houses, â€Å"better food†, and frequent flights are an irresponsibility that has huge ramifications. Culture, inevitably, is always lagging behind reality that is always changing in the economic, social, and environmental environments (Art 33). This leads to increased difficulty that weakens the capability of the political system in dealing with the issues. The US culture is behind the scientific understanding and knowledge of the country’s environment. The individual’s culture involves an uncomfortable mix of doxa, habitus, and field (Art 34). The three components are interactive in a manner that perpetuates cultural behavior and assumptions even when there are changing realities, which often result in people acting in a way that is not in their best interest. Field can be defined as the intellectual or social arena where individuals spend their active hours; for example, their job, their social group, their profession, or their intellectual profession (Art 44). For the youth, the field is usually their schools. The field, in sum, is constitutive of the realities that govern one’s daily existence where the focus is on the efforts