1) Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem?
2) Stress development over growth. That is, make the economy better at satisfying human needs, not simply bigger.
3) Make prices tell the ecological truth.
4) Account for nature’s services.
5) The precautionary principle. This is just the age-old wisdom of “first, do no harm” and “look before you leap,” but applied to public policy toward new products (like chemicals) and technologies that could pose serious risk.
6) Commons management.
7) Value women.
TED has hosted a number of excellent speakers on the topic of climate change. However, I found 2 interesting almost opposite approaches to solving the issue.
In this talk, energy guru Amory Lovins lays out his plan for weaning the US off oil and revitalizing the economy in the process. It’s the subject of his book Winning the Oil Endgame, and he makes it sound fairly simple: On one hand, the deadly risks of continued dependency, and on the other, some win-win solutions.
Environmental scientist David Keith talks about a cheap, effective, shocking solution to climate change: What if we injected a huge cloud of ash into the atmosphere, to deflect sunlight and heat? As an emergency measure to slow a melting ice cap, it could work. Keith discusses why it’s a good idea, why it’s a terrible one — and who, despite the cost, might be tempted to use it.
Check out this very engaging talk (embedded below) by former President Bill Clinton. He was a keynote speaker at the 2007 U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Summit hosted by Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels. Worldchanging.org has good overview of his speech here.
UPDATE: Removed embedded video due to broken link.
This is an unbelievably eye-opening story on the ancients doing terraforming-type activities on a massive scale. Maybe I am going a little over the top. But read this to find out more about this ‘carbon-negative’ agricultural practice … I think this has a tremendous potential for addressing some really critical global issues.
Amazonian Dark Earth, or terra preta do indio, has mystified science for the last hundred years. Three times richer in nitrogen and phosphorous, and twenty times the carbon of normal soils, terra preta is the legacy of ancient Amazonians who predate Western civilization. Scientists who long debated the capacity of ’savages’ to transform the virgin rainforest now agree that indigenous people transformed large regions of the Amazon into amazingly fertile black earth.
This post is for today being Blog Action Day. The theme is ‘Environment’ and here are some quick and easy things we can all do to preserve the environment and probably even save some money in the bargain. I can’t think of a better bargain !
As featured on Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria. This video excerpt from a film by Dan Schreiber explores the tension between tradition and tourism in a remote region of Northern India.
This is a video of the the Pale Blue Dot.
As the Youtube psot says having Carl Sagan read to you from the book with the same title is something else. Enough said. Take a listen and leave comments please.
Treehugger reports that the Northwest Passage has become ice-free for the first time in recorded history. Is it now too late to act? The melting poles has renewed interest in their mineral wealth. The article also says
While it had long been expected that the Northwest Passage would gradually open up as a result of rising global temperatures, scientists were taken aback at the speed with which it happened.
Check ‘The 11th Hour‘ the upcoming movie by Leonardo DiCaprio. The movie looks at some of the most critical man-made problems of the planet and seeks to find answers from some of the best scientific minds of our times. After the movie I ended up playing the PlanetGreenGame and even got this badge… I think I will catch the movie when it releases….
Farmingsolutions.org website has a touching story of the success of farmers’ self-help group in India. How they overcame all odds to work themselves out of poverty with sustainable agriculture at the same time caused a social revolution.
ScienceDaily reports on a just invented process to make a high-energy liquid bio-fuel from fructose. This is all fine and good but we need to ask ourselves honestly… do we really need to convert corn into fuel and animal feed when a quarter of the world is underfed?
That’s what the narrator says at the end of a short video feature about greening the desert sustainably using permaculture. The video and a short write-up is posted here on worldchanging.com
This Foreign Affairs article points out that massive increase in demand of biofuels like ethanol may displace food crops and increasing food prices.
filling the 25-gallon tank of an SUV with pure ethanol requires over 450 pounds of corn — which contains enough calories to feed one person for a year
The irony is that automobiles like SUVs are a big cause of global warming…Is this a case of stealing from the poor to solve the rich man’s problem? We need better ways of harvesting solar energy than food crop-based biofuels.
Strangely, this reminds me vaguely of something I read about India’s Green Revolution many years ago- The Green Revolution introduced crops which were shorter than the traditional crop breeds- this resulted in reduced production of straw/hay for fodder… the scarcity of fodder was the impetus for introducing factory-produced fodder.
I am a MS (Information Science) graduate from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and work for a management consulting firm. When I am not travelling for work, I live in Pittsburgh. My hometown is Bangalore, India and did my college education from New Delhi, India and Chapel Hill, USA.
