Keio University ­ Falculty of Science and Technology

Culture ­ Science ­ Technology - Term end report

"Economic growth and environment conservation"

Le Tien Anh

"Do economic growth and environment conservation go together?" That was the

old question asked by many generations. Logically, the answer tents to be "NO", both

from the personal business to the government policy maker point of view. In this small

report, I will try to recognize, analyze environment problems and summarize some of

the solutions for them.

What can be defined as the environmental problems? In my opinion, whatever we

human being does can be considered environmental problems because we can do

nothing without affecting our living condition. They rank from ordinary activities like

throwing out the garbage without separation to extra-ordinary activities like leaving

unused astronomy parts in the space We may create environmental problems even

with the actions that we thought of as environment conservation. For example, to avoid

global warming, people try to avoid green house fuel. In order to do that, they may think

of some replacement:

Thorium

[1], for instance (but there are many other proposals,

you can name them...). Although it is a very promise nuclear fuel [2], although it has

just been researched and there are still many difficulties that scientists have to overcome,

some precautions have been raised:

"

Exposure to aerosolized thorium can lead to

increased risk of cancer of the lung, pancreas, and blood. Exposure to thorium
internally leads to increased risk of liver diseases. This element has no known biological
role"

[2]

.

Can I call those precautions as environmental problems? We cannot solve

known problems by creating unknown ones, can we?

Obviously, we can control the environmental problems by controlling our

activities. Imagine that we human being just do nothing, take it easy and relax, so I don′t

see any reasons for the environment to cry. But it is just an illusion because people have

to use the surrounding environment to feed themselves (so everywhere existing the

human, there must have been environmental problems existed too).

Of course there is a time that the environment cannot suffer us anymore. Naturally,

the human being is noticed by storm, flood, desert and green house effect...People soon

realized that message and agreed that we should do some things to prevent ourselves

from distinction. We create dramatic films to warn other people about environmental

problems ("The Ice Age", "Armageddon", to name just a few...), and to make money.

But who is responsible for such those huge problems salvation? Of course, every single

human being is. But what a pity, "everyone" means "no one".

Why? We can see that nowadays, almost every human′s activities are controlled

by money, businessmen usually do not want to pay their money in the green

technologies unless they are forced to do so by their investors, their consumers or by

their governments. The investors cannot wait for their capital to rebreed. All they want is

1