Key Issues, Evidence and Human Activities
This chapter provides some key issues. The subject is approached from the perspective of employee subjectivity rather than the organization as a whole, which, however coherent it may be as both an entity and a research perspective, often tends to be viewe
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Key Issues, Evidence and Human Activities
Abstract This chapter provides some key issues. The subject is approached from the perspective of employee subjectivity rather than the organization as a whole, which, however coherent it may be as both an entity and a research perspective, often tends to be viewed as devoid of personality. The aim is to provide points of reference with a view to illustrating how members of an organization exert pressures on the natural environment through their professional activities. Keywords Evidence · Organizational activities · Human activities
2.1 The Environmental Crisis: Key Issues and Evidence 2.1.1
Prolegomena
As a sign of the times, it has become increasingly common to come across the subject of ecology and the environment as a theme in works of popular culture. A good example is the movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, in which Klaatu, an alien visitor from a distant world, comes to Earth to warn humans that they are threatening the future of mankind. The nature of the threats posed by mankind has changed over the last fifty years. In the original 1951 version, director Robert Wise emphasized © The Author(s) 2020 P. Paillé, Greening the Workplace, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-58388-0_2
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the nuclear risk and the irreversible damage caused by nuclear warfare. In the 2008 remake, Scott Derrickson chose the environmental crisis as the backdrop for a retelling of the story. As the saying goes, reality is sometimes stranger than fiction. 2.1.2
Mounting Evidence
Current evidence suggests that human activities are the cause of ongoing large-scale changes, leading some to speak of the emergence of an entirely new geological epoch known as the Anthropocene. The term was coined by Crutzen and Stoermer in a May 2000 publication in which the authors posited that the Holocene came to an end around the 1750s with the emergence of a new epoch coinciding with industrial development. According to Crutzen and Stoermer (2000), the presence and concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon, methane and nitrous oxide), or GHG, are one of the main characteristics of the Anthropocene. The World Meteorological Organization found recently that the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere has increased significantly since the pre-industrial era, and there is a broad consensus among climate scientists that a close correlation exists between the concentration of GHG in the atmosphere and global warming (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2018). The data compiled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its report published in 2014 show that human activity in 2010 generated 49 gigatons (or 49 billion tons) of greenhouse gases in carbon equivalent terms. According to a recent press report, the amount of GHG emitted since then has been estimated at more than 53 billion tons (source: La Tribune, November 2019). Many of us would likely struggle to comprehend what that might represent in practice. Consider this: according to the ecoconso.be website, one ton of car
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