Development.

People always strove for the best life and tried to improve their life conditions. Eventually we began to name this improvement as «Economic development». Actually, economic development usually refers to the adoption of new technologies, transition from agriculture-based to industry-based economy, and general improvement in living standards. And of course this activity influences the environment a lot.
We live in a culture that seems to assume that all of our problems can and must be solved with technology. Certainly, technologies make our lives easier, doing some manual work, improving obsolete ones. With its help, countries can compete for leadership in the world of technologies. Thereby, technologies increase our productivity, reshape our world, and improve our quality of life. But we forget about the way that was chosen to achieve these benefits. We haven't always done a good job of assessing the costs, particularly those with long-term consequences, and now some of those costs are catching up with us. Our global water systems contain 50 dead zones. The planet's temperatures are on the rise. There is a hole in the earth's ozone layer.
The biggest pollutions on our planet are the result of fossil fuels use. Mode
society is simply unthinkable without gasoline, oil, and coal, as they are dominating industrial world. The gove
ments of rich states instead tu
ing to alte
ative energy resources like wind energy, sun energy and geothermal energy are still more focused on decreasing the pollution caused by the use of fossil fuels rather than search for acceptable alte
atives. Also, alte
ative energy resources are only used in rich countries in order to decrease the pollution in their own lands. To make things even worse, rich countries, more often than not, transfer their own dirty industries to poor countries that do not have nor the appropriate knowledge nor the means to even think about ecology, and are pretty much dependent on these obsolete technologies.