Urbanization the Predecessor of Industrialization

Industrialization: Major Negative Effects!!

Photo 1 

Ever since I was a little kid, passing on the highway from my grandmother's house in Chaguanas there was a part of the highway I looked forward too. The Petrotrin Industrial Estate which is seen from afar along the highway seen in Photo 1 above which lights up very beautifully at night. However with time comes wisdom and sadly the innocence of a child is lost... as a child all I saw was the pretty lights and fire, but as an educated adult I now see it for what it really is. A major source of capitalism and pollution! It represents the sad reality we live in where human advancement and our planet is put behind capital accumulation. Day in, day out fire and smoke is seen erupting from the furnaces of the industry... how do people not see this as a major problem? 

As stated by Dear and Flusty 1998 "the most important underlying shifts in the contemporary political economy is from a Fordist to a post-Fordist industrial organization" That is most economies have shifted from agriculture to industrialization. This is followed by major negative impacts, again illustrated by Dear and Flusty 1998 using California as an example they stated that the people of California had no regard for the environment and they have been "energetically, ceaselessly, and sometimes carelessly unrolling the carpet of urbanization over the natural landscape for more than a century". They listed the impacts of this as mainly air pollution followed by habitat destruction for animals. 

In our case the implementation of major industrialization due to our mono-crop oil and gas economy has and will continue to have negative effects on the environment. Firstly there is the issue of habitat loss as forests are felled to produce these sites. The aesthetics of nature are lost and the uprising of modern metallic structures replace the forests as seen in Photo 2 below. Adapted from a booklet received from Petrotrin.com 

Photo 2

These industries occupy large areas where nature once prospered and to me this is a very sad state, is capital worth the environmental degradation these mass producing industries produce?

Industries generate large amounts of air, water and land pollution. Industrial waste are high in toxins and if improperly disposed of can enter the food chain via bio-accumulation and make its way onto our plates hence having direct effects on humans themselves added to the direct effect of respiratory illnesses it causes.   

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas which contributes largely to global warming. With the felling of forests more carbon dioxide is left present in the atmosphere as said forests act as carbon carbon sequestration units (filters and stores carbon dioxide from the air). This leads to increasing rates of global warming, to make matters worst these industries PRODUCE carbon dioxide, as seen from photo one the fire and smoke constantly escaping from the furnaces. This not only has negative effects on the country of Trinidad and Tobago, but on a wider scale the world is affected. 

Global warming poses large threats to humans, as temperature rises polar ice caps melt at a faster rate hence rising sea levels. Lands close to the coast are loss and major flooding could occur. Also as a result of the rising sea levels Coral Reefs are greatly affected as they are sensitive to change. The deeper water causes the photic zone to decrease, corals need sunlight to grow so with less sunlight less growth would occur and they could possibly die. The Buccoo Reef is a major tourism attraction in Tobago, tourism generates a large source of Tobago's revenue therefore is completely destroyed less tourists would visit the island and less revenue will be earned. As such in this "hunger" for capital accumulation our own economy is contradicting itself and at the cost of the environment. 

These effects need to be reduced, and it should be of utmost importance for the government to find cleaner ways of producing oil and gas. They can also take measures to diversify the economy into a more environmentally sustainable ways such as tourism. Barbados solely depends on tourism for the majority of their revenue, maybe our government can take a note from their playbook. The environment would highly appreciate it! 

The following are further articles about the effects of industrialization:

http://www.trinidadexpress.com/business-magazine/Latin_America_and_the_Caribbean_in_2013__Building_on_a__decade_of_inclusion_-184772871.html

http://environment.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/gw-effects/

https://kaitlindeforest.wordpress.com/what-are-the-consequences/

References:

Petrotrin. Petrotrin A Valued Partner. May 2015. Accessed May 25, 2015. file:///C:/Users/Narik/Downloads/Petrotrin-A%20Valued%20Partner%205_15%20(2).pdf