by Jessica Herd

Created on: November 11, 2009   Last Updated: November 12, 2009

1. While I was growing up, the concept of adopting clean environmental practices was very familiar to me. As a child I never really understood why people needed to be instructed to be green, but now after what we have been studying in class I understand the reason. People have not taken our home, Planet Earth, seriously. People feel that they can live any how they please, which includes destroying our environment. I do not blame the individual so much at this time, because everything we have read involved large groups in business not taking responsibility for all the trouble they have caused. Our current economy causes environmental problems. Everything we have read points to this fact and to the ticking clock that we are now racing against to correct this before we are all doomed.

2. Economic Causes of the Ecological Crisis by Barry Commoner was one environmental crisis article we read. Commoner explains a concept of externality and the ways it helps to explain environmental problems. According to Commoner, the fair exchange of a private economy is the fact that someone makes a profit from a purchase and the one who made the purchase gets a service or something that they need is satisfied. It's considered an illusion because whatever the person is selling most likely came from somewhere else; somewhere they really had no part in. The exchange isn't fair because the person who makes the profit isn't paying costs of all the people most likely involved in producing the service/item. Also, the person doing the purchasing most likely has no idea of all the people involved. From Commoner's description something seems to be hidden in a commodity exchange. He used an example of bananas, I am hungry and decide to buy a banana from you. A private economy is based on the assumption that such an economic exchange is fair and mutual. You make a profit from my purchase and my hunger is satisfied. He then goes on to explain that the business that sells the banana doesn't pay certain costs and instead someone else does. So, certain costs are hidden in a commodity exchange and prices are excluded from the price of (in this case) the banana.

We were asked to look closely at this question, What would a pesticide treated banana really cost if these costs were internalized in the price rather than externalized onto the rest of society? My response to this question was that the banana would cost a lot more if they were to internalize the price. Internalizing in this sense means

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