Climate Change, Human Rights, and Italy

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Climate change takes away the basic human rights of being able to have a home, food, and water. Due to Western consumption, these violations disproportionately target poor and developing countries around the world. This leaves the problems of deforestation, air and water pollution, toxic environments that demote food production, and food scarcity to affect what are probably the most marginalized people in the world. As these people fight for their basic right to live, the West continues to turn a blind eye to them.

Unfortunately, by continuously ignoring that Western ideals and culture are what’s fueling climate change and- by default- human rights violations, Western society is beginning to also be impacted by the world’s inability to keep up with Eurocentric practices. These impacts are recreating the world’s racial, religious, gendered, and geographical inequalities within the West itself.

For example, Italy- or more specifically, southern Italy, which is considered to be the agricultural backbone of the entire country- is facing many environmental issues that are byproducts of trying to survive as a country in world that is constantly consuming.

Venice, Italy Flooding @ ctvnews.ca

Southern Italy, like most Southern European countries, is losing majority of their trees and forests due to the rising temperatures and diminishing rainfall. Experts believe that the decreased rainfall could also lead to an increase in evaporation in the Mediterranean region. The decreased rainfall, coupled with the extreme weather and the flooding in Southern Italy is believed to be leading to a lack of fresh, usable water and unstable lands for agriculture, which may result in a reduction of the yielded summer crops. 

For example, this could lower the production of regional cork, which is a major industry in the region

This could possibly prove to be detrimental to the already slumping south, that relies mostly on the exportation of their agricultural goods and tourism to stay afloat. It also widens the economic gap between the South and the North, which- as I presented in my first blog post- is a problem that is becoming so big that the two geographical regions are constantly at each other’s throats over the inequality and stratification of resources that stems from it.

Fortunately, Italy is one of the countries leading the charge in Western society to take control of the environmental issues. They’ve made huge gains in cleaner technology (like solar energy), and they have many organizations that are pushing for environmentally friendly solutions to their recycling problems and decreasing their greenhouse effect.

However, Italy can’t do it alone. The West in general can’t reverse climate change alone.

The West vs. the World @sites.google.com

We, in developed society, are so focused on having the best ideas of how a society should run that we don’t realize that we shut out other cultures and other ways of thinking. When we think of human rights violations, we automatically think about dictators in Asia, Africa, and Latin America that maliciously deny their people of necessities. We do not think of the strain we put on these countries to conform to our society. We do not think of the factories we set up in these countries that contribute to their human rights issues. We do not think that we’re causing their problems.

We believe that these countries don’t care for human rights, but it’s really just the fact that they might value something different than we do. For example, here in America, the last few years have been a constant debate of our freedom of speech or our freedom to arm ourselves against the government. Those are the freedoms that we hold most dearly in this country at the moment. So, when we look at countries that don’t promote free speech or defense, we criticize them.

In actuality, these people are probably more concerned with just having the right to live life and not having to struggle for nutritious food and fresh water. They’re more concerned with the right to live in a peaceful society, free from war (that we arguably cause a lot of the time).

Our egos in the West are the most dangerous thing that these cultures encounter, because our egos do not allow us to take responsibility for our actions and the role we play in climate change and human rights.

We need a less Eurocentric way of viewing this world in order to change anything, and to do that, we have to open our minds to different cultures and their methods.

Farish Noor’s main point, in the reading of Beyond Eurocentrism, is that we, as a global society, will never achieve truly equal, diverse, multicultural society until the West puts aside its superiority complex and its disrespect for what is different. Until then, the solutions to our problems, like climate change, will be limited and Eurocentric ways of thinking about these problems all will forever be our biggest obstacle in tackling human rights violations.