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Our environment has been the forefront of heated debates for many years now. Not only was it one of the major topics in the 2004 election it has since grown to its own global movement "going green". For a long time now we have been trying to figure out the role business in our environment. The attitudes that are prevalent in our society suggest that businesses have increased our environmental problems. Business seems to think that the environment is a "free and unlimited good", which is something that they can exploit, or squander without any consequence or regard to the future.
For some time now businesses have thought the environment to be a free limitless good. For example the air free to pollute with hazardous vapors and toxins, water to dump hazardous and toxic waste and land to cut down all our precious trees without any cause to replanting them. With the rapid rates are forest are moving extinction is eminent and with that further polluting the air. Our book says that the belief that both sorts of resources are free and unlimited promotes wasteful consumption of them.
We have come to find that business have started polluting in third world countries. Because of US regulations against dumping and the fines. Big Business has sought to dump in these under-developed third world countries where they have little or no pollution regulations. As for the inhabitants of these countries they rarely complain because in a way the smell of the harmful gases is a smell of jobs and a better life for them. Ethically how can we value one human life from another? Or case study 7.2: Poverty and pollution states that the poor pay the price of pollution. Lawrence Summers the director of the National Economic Council has argued that banks should encourage dirty polluted industries to poorer less developed countries. In many Third World nations, pollution is unrestricted.