question: What 3 ideas, thoughts, solutions can you come up with to address environmental issues after watching the videos and reading the article? Explain.

Watch the following videos: 

Crash Course 5 Human Impacts on the Environment:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eTCZ9L834s

Plastics documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9-dpv2xbFyk

and read the article 

EXPLAINING THE RESCALING OF GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICS

Global environmental problems reflect a range of ecological, scientific, social, economic, and political complexities and interdependencies. They manifest themselves in different ways across political spaces and jurisdictions from the local to the international, engaging diverse actors at each level (5, 6, 10). Given the inherently multidimensional nature of environmental issues, what explains the significant rescaling of both the scholarship and practice of global environmental politics over the past two decades? Does this rescaled treatment reflect an ontological change driven by changes in the ecological, economic, social, political, and technological realities of these problems? Or is it primarily an epistemological change in which the reevaluation, if not wholesale rejection, of a focus on the nation-state and intergovernmental interactions has allowed the emergence of an increasingly accurate recognition of the more complex and realistic ontology of multiple actors interacting on multiple levels that was always there? We posit that the rescaling of environmental politics reflects both influences, an interplay that has resulted in a closer fit between subject matter and analytic tools (175). Real changes in the magnitude and complexity of environmental problems, globalization, and institutional density have generated changes in the character of global environmental politics that, in turn, have influenced and been illuminated by the increasingly sophisticated and multidisciplinary theoretical toolbox of the study of politics.

Magnitude and Complexity of Environmental Problems

People have been transforming the earth at least since development of the ability to control fire (176). The development of tools, the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, and human population growth have led to a situation in which more human impacts exceed nature's ability to absorb and recover from them and a greater share have transnational or global impacts that require transnational or global responses. In some arenas, human environmental impacts may reflect exponential rather than arithmetic growth rates, generating impacts that are not greater in proportional terms but are dramatically larger in absolute terms. An invasive plant whose population doubles every year may take 13 years to cover half of a lake but will require only one additional year to cover the whole lake. So too, we may be experiencing only the last in a sequence of impacts from environmentally damaging behaviors that exhibit exponential growth, including pollution of the atmosphere, rivers, lakes, and oceans; losses of wetlands, tropical rainforest, and other habitats; species extinction; and various indicators of climate change. The combined effects of various human behaviors also create ecologically more complex problems. Global fish populations are in decline not only because of overfishing but also because of marine pollution, fish farm escapement, warming ocean temperatures, and ocean acidification (177, 178). Biodiversity loss increasingly reflects the cumulative and interactive effects of hunting, habitat loss, invasive species, pollutants, pesticides, and air and water quality. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's climate models recognize and model the multitude of economic, technological, demographic, and cultural factors that contribute to climate change and the complex ecological response of the natural system to such forcings. Environmental changes, in turn, affect human societies in ways that vary considerably across localities, socioeconomic groups, regions, and countries, with some effects better understood than others. The concept of "coupled natural and human systems" (3) captures the complexity of many modern environmental problems in which relevant human causes, nature's responses to those causes, and the human impacts of those responses are multiple and interacting and involve complex positive and negative feedback loops. This recognition has been forced upon us by the increasing strength of nature's feedback signal but also by changes in human understanding of the environment, not least the increasing acknowledgment of the human dimensions of environmental change (179). If environmental problems have become more complex over time, our concern and recognition of their complexity have increased yet more rapidly. Growth in international attention to environmental problems after World War II, and particularly after the 1970s, reflected a combination of both greater understanding of human impacts on the environment as well as growing environmental awareness about those impacts and their interdependencies. In the 1970s and 1980s, international diplomats sought to address a growing list of distinct and separable environmental problems with neatly compartmentalized treaties addressing particular species, particular pollutants, particular rivers or lakes, or particular sources of a problem. Experience and scientific research demonstrated, however, that acid rain and heavy metal pollution cannot be resolved by tackling one pollutant at a time and that biodiversity loss cannot be resolved one species at a time without taking complex ecological and socioeconomic conditions and multiscale interactions into account (169). Both the inadequate results of prior policies and advances in scientific understanding have clarified the need for a better fit between policy and the problem being addressed (5). Generating such a fit dictates building on improved scientific understandings of complex Earth systems, as evident in the increasing frequency with which policy makers look for insight and recommendations from scientists, the epistemic communities of which they are a part, and the global environmental assessments that they generate (78). Generating a better fit also dictates a recognition that framing environmental problems as global involves accounting for the ways those problems affect and are affected by actors, ideas, and processes of contestation at multiple spatial scales and in various jurisdictions (8, 11). The linkages between the complexity of environmental problems and the multiscale nature of environmental politics have shown up over the past two decades both in the practices of political actors and the environmental politics literature. Reports of international environmental NGOs, such as Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund, for example, point to the close correlation between commoditized market prices and rates of deforestation, local incentives, and national institutional capacity, and these insights, in turn, motivate efforts to identify new conservation strategies that involve multiple stakeholders operating at local, national, and transnational scales. In many cases, actors mobilize politically after learning how particular environmental problems harm their economic, social, or political interests. In other cases, those concerned about problems realize that they must engage other actors who either are those whose behaviors must change or are "veto players," who will block policy progress if their interests are not taken into account. These political realities that dictate engaging a wider range of actors across multiple scales of politics and governance have been reinforced by arguments that engaging all affected parties in participatory, democratic, and transparent processes is both effective in an empirical sense and preferable in a normative sense (180). Ignoring the localized nature and contested politics of global problems, such as water, climate, land degradation, and biodiversity, is a major pitfall of an international environmental politics literature and practice that focused almost exclusively on the nationstate as a political actor (8). Elinor Ostrom (11) has reintroduced the concept of "polycentric" governance to illuminate the challenges and opportunities related to coordinating political action and policy at the global level in ways that engage the incentives and knowledge of actors at other levels that are better attuned to the context-specific characteristics of human-environment interactions. In short, the rescaling of environmental politics arises from an increasingly complex understanding of increasingly complex environmental problems. Globalization and Interconnectedness We can explain the rescaling of global environmental politics across issue areas by references to processes of economic and cultural globalization as well as secular technological and social changes, which have influenced both the types of environmental problems we face and our understanding of those problems. Growth in international trade, capital, and investment flows has generated concern about their environmental effects and stimulated waves of political opposition to the policies and institutions that promote them. The persistence and spread of deadly civil wars across the globe and their close relationship to commodity markets and the exploitation of natural resources have renewed academic interest in the resource curse and the environment-security nexus, leading to a reconsideration of what constitute global and local threats to security and environmental sustainability and of the interplay among security, resource management, and human development (181, 182). But, rescaling across issue areas also reflects quite self-conscious political strategies to draw greater attention to environmental problems within nonenvironmental issue areas (e.g., with respect to security, trade, and development) or to couple environmental concerns to migration, the plight of indigenous people, and related social issues to ensure that the latter do not go unaddressed. Whether in efforts to green the World Bank, to get ministries of defense to focus on environmental degradation, or to bring environmental suits before WTO dispute panels, activists have sought to frame environmental protection as empirically and normatively linked to other higher-priority concerns of governments "as a way of gaining attention from high-level decision makers and mobilizing resources" (170, p. 303, see also 165). State and nonstate actors explicitly seek to construct and frame discourses to promote understandings, perceptions, and responses that are alternatives to conventional taken-for-granted framings (102). In short, the rescaling of global environmental politics is due to greater interdependence among places, peoples, and issues but also to different groups seeking to construct the social world in ways that foster their preferred political and policy outcomes. The incentives and ability of such actors to mobilize politically, in turn, has been fostered by the increased number and complexity of communications, interactions, and interconnections that globalization and technological change have made possible. Globalization has fostered cultural communication, often improving understandings of the linkages between global environmental problems and the protection of local resources and human rights, issues that were previously treated as separate and even in conflict (183). The thickening of global interdependence thus not only increases the scale, salience, and interconnection between global problems but also helps actors organize across borders, link causes, and apply political pressure at multiple levels (184). Denser Institutionalization Finally, the greater density of intergovernmental institutionalization and NGOs has itself contributed to the rescaling of politics, illustrating the interdependence between institutional context and political action. Whether referred to as interaction, interplay, overlap, cogovernance, or something else, scholars pay increasing attention to the fact that "the effectiveness of specific institutions often depends not only on their own features but also on their interactions with other institutions" (179, p. 60). Institutional interactions occur among international environmental institutions and also between these institutions and those addressing trade, security, human rights, and other nonenvironmental issues. These interactions can involve conscious efforts at coordination or organic, unrecognized, and unexpected side effects of independent actions by institutions. Such interactions sometimes foster the goals of the institutions involved but, at other times, undermine the efforts of some or all of those institutions. Rarely, however, do such interactions lead to the same outcomes that we would expect in their absence (5, 185-187).