Risk society ulrich beck

FROM INDUSTRIAL SOCIETY TO RISK SOCIETY
By Ulrich Beck

Throughout the article Beck addresses several points concerning society, however, he does not get involved to much with the point concerningof what these social changes have cause to the ecological sphere. In a first sense he compares how industry has changed in the past years and the risks that these changes imply to society.
In thepast, risks that threatened mankind where neither caused nor controlled by him, everything was a natural struggle between humanity and the forces of nature. Nowadays these risks have actually beencreated by the industrial progress and this is how conservation and more precisely, transformation of matter become essential to this issue. How does human being has managed to create all these threats tohim? Threats, which are not only artificial but that also, reach magnitudes beyond imaginable leaving humans helpless and unprotected from their own “creation”.
We must not come to think that allthese new risks have come from nowhere. The fact is that mankind in it’s arrogance and thirst for power over nature, this desire to control everything that surrounds it, has modified drastically a seriesof materials usually found in nature in harmless conditions and has turned them into weapons and potential threats to all humanity. It astonishes how these materials can be tempered to the level thatthey actually become something completely different from what they originally were and even more, a risk.
According to Ulrich there has been an increasing irresponsibility concerning the industrialuses of some materials and if we see it in other sense, human beings have made a whole lot of material useless for development. All our sources seem to be running out and we are but turning them intoglobal hazards, polluting, destroying ecosystems, consuming a lot more than we need and giving no retribution to what nature has given us. Where do we go from here? Asks Beck, a common sense...