Climate change in comparison with The New Renaissance reading

When I read the paper over The New Renaissance a couple weeks ago it really didn’t stick out to me too much. I thought that the author had some interesting things to say and I especially was interested to see what he had to say about morality and the different virtues of the Muslim community compared to that of more western values. Even with his interesting points I wasn’t too big a fan of his paper at first because he really didn’t seem to accept that both Islamic and Western culture have their faults, but it still had enough interesting views to keep me interested. However, earlier this week in my class on environmental philosophy we discussed climate change in detail, and I saw a very interesting map that showed exactly which areas of the world would be most effected by climate change. Sure enough the middle was one of the top areas that was most likely to be negatively effected by climate change. After seeing this chart, I revisited the paper on The New Renaissance and the first half of it suddenly had a lot more meaning when I read it. In a specific section in the first half of his paper he speaks on the “failure of the west.” In this section he speaks on the failure of the social principles on which western society has been built. He speaks on how we are constantly pushing forward with not much of a care for others, constantly flooding the world with mechanical products. Now that I read that section with climate change in mind it has a lot more meaning to me. Most western countries are causing the vast majority of climate change, yet poorer areas of the world like the Middle East and India will suffer the most for it. Although the author might not have been thinking this exactly while writing his paper, I think that it is an interesting interpretation.