Politics is complicated. Environment is complicated. If we want to talk about Environmental Politics on an international stage, it's mission impossible. Most of the frameworks, conventions and meetings that involved hundreds of parties around the world did not bring any solid result or goal towards global climate change or environmental related issues. We have covered a lot about history related with international environmental politics, but it's really hard to see any results for now. Even though most of the countries do have their voices that support '' global climate change is real and we need to do something to stop it ''. When it came to reality, especially when different parties talking about economic related topics, they tend to avoid to make any sacrifices for global climate changes. The whole idea about stop global climate change became a blaming-shifting issue. Parties, especially the ones who had biggest power over the others do not agree with step back to protect the environment because they are afraid of that other countries may take the opportunities as their advantages. So people's attitudes changed a lot towards environmental issues. Most of them have the will but not the real actions.
Personal changes will not help us with current situation, which is bottom-up strategy. Completely depending upon the hierarchy will not work either. Plant a tree will not save us from dome. What if one out of five people plant a tree? We have 7 billion people on Earth now. To tackle the environmental problems, we need to start actions from both the head of the issue as well as the end of it. To be more specific, start from the conception of consumerism which could be the end of the production line; it also could be the head of demanding. If there are fewer and greener demands for products, maybe we can push the entire system one step forward towards sustainable. If from the production line, we could start from the design of all products as what we learned about wastes equal to food, we will limit the amount of wastes the produced as by-products of commercial goods. This will help us both saving energy to produce these "wastes" as well as energy to deal with them.
Environmental protections are needed yet so difficult to put into reality. We tried to solve different environmental politics related issues in group exercise while we do not have any personal or financial involvements with the issues, however, it's really difficult for groups of people which about only 25 of us in the class to come to an agreement. So when we apply this to international scale, hundreds of parties get involved as well as billions of people. Not only economy drives the direction, health issues and other major issues get involved. I think this sophisticated feature will persist unless there is an organization that has super power over all countries around the globe and have the power to command all. Or on the road towards international environmental politics, current situation will persist and doing nothing good for the environment. We are just speeding up to the end of human society.
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