starting point. Up until this starting point, the community was the central unit of sociological structure. Families and communities were tightly knit and gave support to one another. This type of lifestyle provided an accurate sense about how one person’s actions affect everything around them and the relationship that humans had with their environment reflected this awareness. Yet, with the rise of capitalism, individuals and not groups, became the focus. This shift in viewpoint now emphasized the rights of the person over the rights of the community and set up a sociological structure that could condone the overuse of natural resources, the contamination of public goods, such as water, and general disregard for the impacts of ones actions. Communities no longer had the right to control the environment that they lived in, since that environment was now owned, and the law now protected the rights of the businessman and the property owners. The capitalistic view of efficiency, which in modern times has involved touting the benefits of privatization and self-regulation, is another culprit in the devastation of the world’s natural resources. While efficiency in the market may have been intended to prevent the misuse and overuse of resources, modern corporations have seriously modified it. They have come to use this tenet to protect their interests and to allow them to continue, unchecked, behaviors which are detrimental to all living beings. They claim that their more complete knowledge of the situations at hand empower them to be the best planners and in the name of efficiency, governments have been allowing businesses to self-regulate. Even when a problem is so serious as to demand regulation, corporations have been the authors of the very regulations they are subject to. In The Globalization of Corporate Culture, Karliner sites how “U.S. corporations also helped write laws that use a risk assessment formula...
