1. The tragedy of the commons is a metaphor that highlights the potential impact of human behaviour on the planet’s resources and its delicately balanced ecological system. According to this parable, it depicts a medieval English village wherein the “green” was considered common property and all of the villagers could graze their cattle in it.
However, because everybody has the freedom to access the commons and assuming that the villagers were driven by greed and profit to maximize their stocks, it would be inevitable that adding one more cattle for one’s profit would result in the destruction of the grazing area. Thus, each person pursuing his own personal interest would result in the ruin or destruction of everybody.In terms of contemporary demography, the tragedy of the commons blames the freedom to breed offsprings would result in the destruction of all. Since the right to produce children is considerably unregulated, the tragedy of the commons emphasizes that the only way we could preserve the other freedoms afforded to us, we must relinquish as well our freedom to breed or produce children. Simply stated, overpopulation results in the imbalance of economic development and depletion of resources.
2. Ever since the OPEC gained monopoly of the production and supply of oil, the world was left at the mercy of the organization who threatened to use oil prices as an instrument of coercive democracy in order to influence the course of the unfolding war on terrorism, particularly between Palestine and Israel. Thus, potential alternatives for oil were sought in order to replace the world’s dependency on oil and among them are coal and nuclear energy.Coal, although considered has been considered as an old version of producing energy from heat may be used as an alternative to oil.
Coal can be hydrogenated to convert it to a liquid or gaseous fuel. This was done on a large scale to supply Germany’s need for gasoline in World War II, and the same process is used in South Africa today. However, the use of coal has other ramifications and dangerous consequences to the environment. By a change from oil to coal, air pollution will be changed but not eliminated. One of the principal contributors to smog, the partially burned hydrocarbons from automobile exhausts, will cease to be a problem, but the oxides of nitrogen and sulphur may be as bad or worse with coal.On the other hand, known technologies also paved the way for the using nuclear energy as a leading alternative to fossil fuel dependence.
But safety and financial problems have forced countries which use nuclear energy to reduce their nuclear programs. Current reports indicated that there are more than twenty nuclear electric power plants are in operation in the United States, with over a hundred more either being built or on order. About 2 percent of the nation’s electricity is produced by these facilities.Nuclear energy is used to generate electricity. Nevertheless, the tremendous power within the atom is beyond question.
Well-publicized nuclear accidents in the United States at the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 and at Chernobyl in Ukraine dramatized the potential dangers of nuclear power. As usually suggested by the details that using nuclear power is indeed beneficial for technological process, but utilizing it for the daily activities of mankind may be both detrimental to the environment and the human health as well.3. The individual level of analysis focuses on humanitarian concerns and the barriers to human development and human rights. It is an analytical approach to the study of world politics that emphasizes the psychological and perceptual origins of the foreign policy behaviours of international actors, with special attention to leaders. Allegedly, the so-called great powers constructed a system to serve their own parochial self-interests by creating rules that would not only help them regulate their relationships with another but would also enable them to conduct diplomacy in ways that would preserve their predominant positions at the top of the global pyramid of power, at the expense of deterring the rise of less-powerful states seeking to join them.
4. Whenever war and armed conflicts arise, there is a tendency for tension and terror to spread. Thus, states are doing everything to ensure that each national security is free from foreign aggression. According to political realists, security is a function of power. However, as fact would have it, security is not just about power but the capacity of a nation to resist external and internal threats to its physical survival or core values.
By power, it may also refer to the ability to control.Meanwhile, political realists contend that power is function of military capability. By the definition of power alone, it can be adjudged that it is something that gives states the ability to promote national interest, to win in international bargaining and shape the rules governing global system. Thus, a state’s show of military capability might as well be the central element in a state’s power potentials. A state’s expenditure of the military armaments and defenses are ways in order to estimate the power potential and extent to which they spend money on acquiring military capabilities.Nevertheless, it is true that a state’s military is a measure of national greatness.
There are certain considerations in determining a nation’s success: relative size of a state’s economy, population and territorial size, geographic position, law materials, degree of dependence on foreign sources of materials and many others. But it is only through a state’s military strength that a nation’s greatness is tested. All these considerations are immaterial except for the fact that a state whether big or small, can withstand physical and political attacks from other states. Although mere possession of weapons does not increase the state’s threat to its adversaries, it however shows its foes that its military has the capability and the power to defend itself.
