World History II

Chapter 32: Independence, Progress, and Conflict in Asia and the Middle East
1945 to the Present

58: Mon, Apr 13, 2020

Please read the chapter and take the quiz by midnight on Sun, Apr 12, 2020.
Please also post in the forum for the day a short essay in response to this question:

We now live in a world with enormous resources, and enormous demands on them. Balancing them has never been more difficult, and the nations we have examined in this chapter bring some of these problems to a particularly sharp focus. How in particular do the people of the Asian continent especially strain the world’s resources? What, on the other hand, do they have to teach the rest of the world in these matters? The picture is fantastically complex; don’t assume it’s all one thing operating in one direction.

Consider:

• People: A world population of nearly eight billion people continues to grow, and all those people are contending for a finite supply of critical resources. Of these, approximately 4.4 billion live in Asia, with 1.35 billion in China, and another 1.34 billion in India. Different parts of the world have taken different approaches to dealing with these nearly unfathomable numbers; solutions usually come with disturbing moral issues attached. China has begun aggressively limiting population growth by means of legislation, forced abortion, sterilization, and financial incentive; India has not taken nearly such an aggressive line, but it has definitely taken an initiative, for good or ill. In both countries, however, policies have been extremely controversial, and they have proven economically and socially destabilizing in ways that are not often easy to predict.
• Food: People, in their physical dimension at least, are made of food. A continuous supply of food is essential to human survival, of course, and we are in some areas running out of the ability to produce it. Occasional famines arise from idiosyncracies of weather, which cannot be predicted fully; others are the byproducts of poliotical and governmental policies. On the bright side, though, there are also occasional innovations that reconfigure the equations considerably, such as the development of dwarf wheat by Norman Borlaug, who is credited with saving thereby more than a billion people from starvation.
• Energy: Energy is the lifeblood of the economies of developed nations: manufacturing, distribution, travel, and communication all require energy, and growth in those areas necessarily demands energy in increasing amounts. Look at the photograph on p. 985 and consider what the level of illumination means for the people who live in the light and dark areas — this is, in a fairly realistic sense, a map of energy consumption in the Eastern Hemisphere. Look at the map on p. 996, and notice where much of the world’s oil production is coming from. The very dependence of the rest of the globe on Middle Eastern oil has itself produced economic imbalances that have disturbingly immediate political and social ramifications. Energy policy is at the foregront of our national discourse, and the increasingly problematic question of buying fossil fuel abroad — and sometimes having to pay people we’d rather not support for it. China has taken a militantly aggressive policy toward increasing its energy production, often with very little regard for environmental consequences. India is somewhat behind China in this regard, but it’s a major player.
• The Global Commons: The globe supports a finite atmosphere and a finite quantity of water. It seems to be the case that we cannot consume energy without the production of at least some kinds of pollution; some energy sources use a good deal more than others. We find in our own country an ongoing dialogue in the public sector about pollution and climate change. Whether you are wholly persuaded by those who are most anxious about it, there is indisputably some connection between our use of energy and the weather. Even a small change in global weather patterns can create a very considerable change, over the course of generations, in the habitable parts of the world. We have already seen some undeniable evidence of atmospheric degratation, oceanic acidification, and rising sea levels. We have talked in the past about the so-called "tragedy of the commons". This can be manifested in a village; it can show up in global terms as well.

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