Is Globalization good for the environment?

We recycle a fair amount. Often enough, that we wish the recycling was picked up every week and the trash pickup was only once every two weeks, the reverse of what it is now.

That being said, if I decided to stop recycling, the impact on a global scale would be pretty small. Yes, every little bit helps, but for global change that means you’re relying on a lot of people to go out of their way when there is little incentive beyond the basic “I feel good because I’m doing my part”

How much money is spent on awareness campaigns to encourage people to do something just because it’s the right thing to do?

Consider two models:

One is a vast array of 10,000 small, self sufficient farms. Everyone operates in a largely self sufficient way, occasionally bartering with their neighbors, but nothing more beyond that. For each farm you have basic overhead (the farmers) as well as infrastructure: Barns, fences, and hand tools. Historically, a system like this has allowed people to subsist, but not necessarily prosper. If a season goes well, you eat well that year. If a season goes badly, you starve to death. Morever, let’s say that out of 20 lbs you harvest, you lose 1 lb to damage, spilling, general human error.  That’s 5% waste, but to the individual it’s only 1 lb. Multiply it by 10,000 farms and you’ve got 10,000 lbs of waste. But, the cost of saving that last 1 lb becomes prohibitively expensive for an individual farmer.

Model #2: One farm that occupies the same area as the previous 10,000. There are fewer barns, farm houses and fences, meaning that more land is available for farming because of reduced overhead. Suddenly, a single farmer is faced with the prospect of 10,000 lbs of wasted food, you can bet they’re ready and willing to invest the capital to reduce that, because it means more food for profit, because by this time they’re making far more than they need, and are selling off the excess. While I acknowledge that greed is a vice, it’s one that can be leveraged to do good, no?

Obviously, one giant farm that produces all of the food for the world is a bad idea, because monopolies are a bad idea. Free markets dictate that people will choose the price, and competition is necessary for people to have a choice to dictate that price. But does that mean that an inherently more viable market economy is intrinsically more wasteful? Is the best system an oligarchy of farms under the watchful eye of publicly funded watchdog group ensuring that the farms collaborate on efficiency, but compete on price? Is that even fair to the markets? If everyone is on equal footing, then they are dependent on geography and weather to produce competitive yields, and those will never be the same. If we then impose restrictions on sale prices, or subsidize those that had a bad year, we’ve just taken away the market incentive to be competitive.

I’ve always perceived globalization as a homogenization of larger corporations leveraging global resources to optimize efficiencies (which tend to reduce waste and emissions) as a means of maximizing their profits. This has the benefit of also being better for the environment. But does that mean that what is good for the environment is bad for the economy? If so, then who wins?

I guess I support the current method. Let free markets reign while attempting to increase awareness and leverage available knowledge and tools to increase individual’s efficiency and environmental responsibility.

At the very least, I will keep recycling.