Cultural Diversity Essay Example

The original movement of cotton and modern shipping containers have greatly affected the way people move around the world on a global level. First of all, the surge of cotton production in the south around the 1830s created the need for laborers to pick the cotton. Instead of doing it themselves or fairly hiring laborers, plantation owners decided to enslave people, usually from the coast of Africa, to do the work for them.

The surge of cotton’s popularity around the world meant the displacement and dehumanization of people was going to reach a level no one had ever seen before: “In all, an estimated 12 million slaves were taken from Africa to the Americas by European traders; about 10.7 million survived the trans-Atlantic passage, making it the largest forced migration by sea in history” (Rubin). In addition, with the intention of making global shipping faster, cheaper, and less dependent on manual labor, the shipping container was created: “…without the humble container, the global economy wouldn’t be nearly as global as it is” (NPR). Items from around the world are now more accessible than ever before which would be a good or bad thing.

While this seems like a great step for modernization, if international items can show up a one’s doorstep in a matter of days, they are less likely to actually travel to the place of origin of the product, limiting the amount of their culture they will be able to spread. Another downside to shipping containers that needs to be highlighted is the amount of fuel that is used to ship products internationally. Pollution due to globalization has always been a problem, but if the shipping process does not take as long, there can be more shipments made it a shorter amount of time, which means there is more pollution.

Pollution is a “silent emergency” that no one seems to be finding solution to, but after discovering that pollution is responsible for about 9 million deaths a year, air pollution alone causing 6.5 million of these deaths, it would be fatal to not make changes to the world humans are living in (Jensen). For context, there are about 7.53 billion people in the world. If the death rate due to pollution stays at a constant rate and is evenly distributed around the world, the entire current human population will be dead in about 837 years. While this might seem like a long amount of time, it is unrealistic to think that the number of deaths will not continue increasing with the amount of pollution increasing, and compared to the 3.5 billion years life has been present on Earth, it is an extremely short amount of time.

Also, if more non-renewable energy is being used up, that means there is less non-renewable energy is being allotted for people to use in order to move around themselves and spread their culture in the process. In conclusion, this presents the moral dilemma, should convenience be valued as more important than the destruction of other humans and their own world? Hopefully the human race will stop turning a blind eye to the atrocities occurring behind the movement goods, which will ultimately stunt the amount of people able to willfully move.