Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, has recently become a popular tourist location, with its numerous luxurious hotels and newly acquired American lifestyle. Liz Alderman, columnist for the New York Times, in her article entitled "
Dubai Faces Environmental Problems After Growth," explains that:
In the last year, tourists have swum amid raw sewage in Dubai’s slice of the Persian Gulf. The purifying of seawater to feed taps and fountains is raising salinity levels. And despite sitting on vast oil reserves, the region is running out of energy sources to support its rich lifestyle.
Dubai is the perfect example of the lavish American lifestyle spreading to other places, and promoting greater waste, environmental damage and use of crucial, decreasing resources. Everyone wants to live like the Americans, and while this does bode well for immigration, when people transform the lifestyles of their country into American lifestyles, waste tends to vastly increase and the greenhouse effect increases and produces a more widespread and harsher global worming. As people in various places around the globe become wealthier as the world becomes flatter, to use one of Thomas Friedman's terms, more and more people will be able to support and live the lavish, expensive and wasteful lifestyle. While this does provide great support for the world economy, it is an issue today and for the future because the American lifestyle is incredibly wasteful and is one of the things that Friedman pushes us Americans to move away from because of its significant contribution to global warming and other detrimental environmental and economic effects.
No comments:
Post a Comment