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It’s the GDP-obsessed growth model, many reformers argue, that’s leading us to perdition. They decry the irresponsibility of a relatively few taking more than their share, who are profligate with the earth’s dwindling resources. Certainly this “we’ve hit the limits” framing rings true, for,...
Approximately three billion persons around the world eat daily meals cooked with fuel consisting of wood, twigs, agricultural waste, animal dung, and charcoal. They cook in diverse ways with diverse foods in diverse pots across many cultures, often on three-stone fires. A three-stone fire refers to...
The absence of a global regime to control international trade in conventional arms persists despite the fact that in the 22 years between 1989 and 2010, the world witnessed the outbreak or continuation of 131 international armed conflicts,1-3 involving the forces of 112 countries and 217 political...
Mobile phones: you see them being used in airports, at the grocery store, on subways and buses, and even in the hand of your doctor. In fact, it is difficult to go anywhere these days without seeing someone use a mobile phone. That should not be surprising considering that, according to the...
Introduction
In recent years, a boom in immigration and high birth rates among the foreign-born population has led to significant growth in the number of children in the United States who speak a language other than English at home. Immigrant youth, defined as children who are either foreign-born...
"He who receives an idea from me, receives instructions himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me."
Thomas Jefferson1
"Our common history is deeply pervaded by the most grievous wrongs. And these wrongs taint the huge inequalities this...
For almost a century, New York City has drawn its drinking water from the Catskill Mountains, more than 100 miles to the north. In April of 2007, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced the results of a several-year review of the city’s ongoing program to maintain clean drinking water...
Discussions about the green economy are shifting the emphasis of development from quantity to quality: the narrow focus on economic growth is opening up to include concerns about environmental sustainability and social equity. Public sector food procurement is one area where price concerns have...
The road construction project around the local rotary had been going on for over a year. As a result, the whole town was cranky. One afternoon, my son and I drove the rotary just before 5:00 p.m., along with throngs of irritable commuters, anxious to get home. Tempers were short and the sound of...
The Challenge: Global-Scale Overshoot and Collapse
It was in the early 1970s that the profile of a possible global-scale overshoot and collapse was first highlighted in a publication, The Limits to Growth,1 based on a computer simulation model. “Overshoot” referred to exponentially growing trends...
Independent researchers detected arsenic in the groundwater of West Bengal as early as 1983. In the arsenic-affected areas, people continue to substantially rely on this groundwater for drinking and irrigation. Arsenic enters the groundwater from naturally occurring arsenic-bearing sediments in the...
"If we do not take care in where we place our cities, how we grow our cities and how we live in our cities, then we will fail in our mission to protect biodiversity."
Dr. Robert McDonald, The Nature Conservancy
In 2003, South Australia premier Mike Rann invited me to be a “Thinker in Residence” in...
Civil society organizations (CSOs) are groups such as developmental and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs), community groups, women’s organizations, faith-based organizations, and trade unions. They have had much success in addressing global problems like climate change, food...
The July 20th shooting spree in an Aurora, Colorado movie theater left 12 dead, and more than 57 wounded. This tragedy is another reminder that American lives are at risk because of the failure to adopt common sense public safety measures that make it very difficult and always illegal for...
Americans face a unique challenge in solving the climate crisis. Unlike other Western countries and Japan, where population is projected to be relatively constant, the U.S. population is set to grow by at least 100 million—and likely 150 million—people by 2050. Where and under what conditions these...
Introduction
The problem of climate change is defined predominately as a scientific issue: greenhouse gases (GHGs) are building up in the atmosphere, generally warming the global climate and altering the statistical distribution of localized weather patterns over long periods of time.1,2 But, while...
The United Nations’ first global assessment of the planet’s land resources makes for grim reading when it comes to agriculture. It warns that a quarter of all farmland is already highly degraded at a time when the world’s population is growing exponentially. The UN estimates that farmers need to...
On November 20, 2006, Premier Wen Jiabao of China invited six education leaders in higher and basic education to the state council for a special meeting. In his usual straightforward and humble manner, Wen told them of a visit with Qian Xuesen, a well-known rocket scientist who had studied at the...
The Chesapeake Bay is one of the largest and most productive estuarine systems in the world.1 A 2001 study estimated the value of the Bay at between $360 million and $1.8 billion.2 In 2005, Maryland’s fisheries alone contributed about $1 billion to the state’s economy, sustained around 4,000 jobs,...
Albert Einstein, to his death, could never accept the probabilistic underpinnings and uncertainties of quantum mechanics. In a letter to Max Born in 1926 he wrote, “I am convinced that God does not play dice with the universe.” In the following year, at a physics conference, Niels Bohr admonished...
China’s economic growth in recent years has been extraordinary but uneven. Vulnerable groups, such as smallholder farmers and their communities, are most affected by this unbalanced development, which is expressed in terms of widening income gaps between urban and rural regions, unequal government...
Deep inside the Pentagon and the secret world of the intelligence community, a radical idea is emerging about national security. It can be summarized this way:
The best war is no war.
The best weapons are plowshares.
The world cannot be secure without sustainable societies and strong communities...
"I and thousands like me have forsaken everything for what we believe."—Video message from Mohammad Sidique Khan, jihadi perpetrator of the July 7, 2005, London Underground bombing
"One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."—Twitter message from Ander...
The modern economy experiences two types of cyclical debt cycles: the short-term business cycle that produces the familiar oscillation between expansion and recession, bull and bear; and the long-term debt cycle that we are experiencing now. During the 75-year period of these cycles, the debt-to-...
For most of the two hundred thousand years or so of human existence, we used but a small fraction of the earth’s freshwater resources. It has been only a few thousand years since humans first learned to exert any control over water by channeling it for irrigation and supply for cities. In a...
Policymakers and resource managers often frame ecosystem services management challenges as a matter of protecting natural areas outside of cities. Assuring good stewardship of nature’s services in rural areas is indeed crucial but is only part of the solution. Over 50 percent of the world’s human...
The temperate rainforests that hug the coasts of Oregon and Washington are some of the most productive forests in the world.1 Temperate rainforests sequester more carbon per hectare than any other ecosystem on earth, are rich sources of biodiversity, and provide the people of Oregon and Washington...
Ecosystem services are conventionally defined as the human benefits provided by natural ecosystems and include the capacity of those systems to reproduce or replenish themselves. It is useful, however, to distinguish between two types of flows from nature that benefit humans: ecosystem services and...
The world is currently facing a paradox: the true value of ecosystem services is finally being recognized by governments and intergovernmental bodies at the very time that these services are declining more rapidly than ever before. The total economic value of ecosystem services is estimated in...
One of Australia’s greatest challenges is the persistent socioeconomic disadvantage faced by Aboriginal (Indigenous) people. This is particularly acute in the more remote regions of northern Australia, where Indigenous Australians make up most of the nonurban population. They own much of the land...
Note: This piece includes an excerpt from the authors’ new book Creating Wealth: Growing Local Economies with Local Currencies (New Society Publishers, 2011).
The financial meltdown of 2008 highlighted the role that banking systems play in the world economy, bringing financial and monetary...
How does one “green” an economy? For governments seeking a cleaner, more efficient, and ultimately more sustainable pathway to economic prosperity, this question entails both promise and great challenges. For one, the scale of transformation it requires is exceptionally daunting: in his 2011 State...
Two hundred million people have been affected by natural disasters and hazards in the last decade. For every person who dies, some 3,000 are left facing terrible risks. Ninety-eight percent of these victims live in the developing world, where billions of dollars in aid are absorbed annually by...
Some crises appear and disappear in global media while remaining acute in the lives of real people. Global food insecurity is this type of crisis. In January 2011 the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) warned that global food prices in December 2010 exceeded the 2008 peak...
There is a wide gulf between the necessary scale of government action on climate change and the scale of response that governments currently agree on. Essential as it is that the international community continues to work toward a binding agreement for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, this gulf...
The Danish Commission on Climate Change Policy reported in 2010 that Denmark could be independent of fossil fuels by 2050 with a concomitant greenhouse gas emission reduction on the order of 80 percent compared to 1990 emissions. The commission defined independence from fossil fuels as no use of...
In the mideighties, seven villages in the Belizean rainforest pledged to conserve their lands for the region’s endangered black howler monkey (Alouatta pigra). The agreement was unprecedented and sparked the creation of the first community-led conservation project in Belize. There are hundreds,...
Author Note: This article is based on the papers “A safe operating space for humanity,”1 published in Nature, and “Planetary boundaries: Exploring the safe operating space for humanity,”2 published in Ecology and Society. See these papers for a complete description of the planetary boundaries....
Residents of Spanish Fork, Utah, a city of 32,000 located about 50 miles south of Salt Lake City, had often complained about their windswept hair and leaf-littered swimming pools. The predictable winds are the result of diurnal mountain gusts that blow back and forth at dawn and dusk through the...
Those who ponder humanity’s future in the twenty-first century generally take at face value demographic projections suggesting that the world population will reach something like 9 billion around 2050 and will then stabilize at about that level.1 The widespread belief that this 30 percent increase...
Across the Islamic world, women’s rights are contentious politically and ideologically. Attitudes toward women have defined and divided the worldviews of conservative and progressive Muslims. Conservatives link women’s piety to the purity and Islamic authenticity of their societies. They use...
Eavan Boland, the Irish poet, wrote that, for women, engaging in political struggle was about daring to be at “the scene of the crime.”1 But, for the most part, it was the men and not the women who were remembered by history. Politics is the struggle for ideas and the power to put them into effect...
For centuries, women have struggled against challenging social, political, and financial barriers. Forty years ago, statistics revealed that women and children disproportionately shouldered the burden of poverty yet received a surprisingly small percentage of traditional philanthropic dollars....
Men and women as caregivers of children or elderly parents face unprecedented challenges in the worldwide workforce today. For the first time in our history, approximately four out of every ten mothers in the United States are primary breadwinners, and almost two-thirds are breadwinners or co-...
In 2008, Rwandans elected women to 56 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies, making Rwanda the first nation to break the halfway mark in a lower house of parliament and placing it nine percentage points above second-place Sweden (as of December 2010, that has increased to 11 percentage...
The diagnosis for the planet is clear. While a great many problems require more research, the focus of future research should expand dramatically to maintain and restore biodiversity rather than focus on, as coral reef biologist Nancy Knowlton has said, “further refining the obituary of nature.”...
Marine conservation has few success stories; it has been criticized for almost exclusively focusing on problems rather than solutions. And while it makes sense to fully understand a problem before framing possible solutions, scientists often focus on the problem description stage—writing the...
Stretching for 2,300 kilometers along the northeast coast of Queensland, Australia, the Great Barrier Reef (GBR) is the world’s largest coral reef and one of the world’s richest, most complex ecosystems. Home to 30 species of whales and dolphins, six species of marine turtles, and a breathtaking...
At the height of the Cold War, in the early 1960s, the Antarctic Treaty was an unexpectedly positive development in international relations. A successful international research program known as the International Geophysical Year, which focused on Arctic and Antarctic research, had just concluded...
As we near the end of the United Nations International Year of Biodiversity, we need to take stock of recent events. We should reflect on increasing ecological risks and disasters and our collective failure to meet biodiversity targets. In 2002, the world’s leaders agreed to drastically cut back on...
All over the world, climate change, environmental destruction, financial crises, and the widening gap between rich and poor are spreading insecurity and fear. Common sense suggests that these challenges are too big for one country to handle alone and too structural in nature to ignore where our...
The American Graduation Initiative proposed by President Obama calls for the U.S. to have the highest percentage of college graduates per capita in the world by 2025. This would require that we produce 16 million more college graduates than we would at current rates.1 We do not believe this is...
A native of Chicago, I spent my childhood summers with family in Udaipur, Rajasthan, then a verdant oasis in India’s most arid state. With each successive year, I witnessed with dismay the surrounding forests and lakes shrinking and drying up as factories and mines sprouted outside the city. My...
It’s no secret that the United States is still locked in an ideological battle over how to reform our health care system. The health care reform bill passed by Congress in early 2010 is a watered-down version of what progressive Democrats advocated that lacks the “public option.” Yet Republicans...
Worldwide, there is a growing consensus that strong action is needed to reduce carbon emissions. European Union (EU) governments have begun large-scale policy initiatives to do so; the United States lags behind but has finally begun a serious debate about proposals for climate legislation. Yet at...
During the past 2.5 million years, Earth’s climate has demonstrated remarkable volatility, shifting in and out of glacial and interglacial conditions in synchrony with cycles in the Earth’s orbital configuration relative to the sun. This same 2.5 million-year period coincides with the time frame...
The Smart Grid–Enabled Energy Services Utility: How Utilities Can Become Sustainable by Selling Less
Energy efficiency (EE) is the lynchpin of any strong U.S. climate policy. In the power sector, efficiency will provide somewhere between 15 and 40 percent of our total electricity "supply" between now and 2050, in addition to displacing substantial amounts of other fuels.1-3 In the next 10 years,...
In early November 1996, workers arriving for the morning shift at the Louisiana Pacific plant in Dungannon, Virginia, were told to go home. After 10 years of operation, the plant, which used the region’s forests to manufacture oriented strand board, a type of engineered wood commonly used in...
The soil is the great connector of our lives, the source and destination of all.
—Wendell Berry, Unsettling of America
Coal Mining in Appalachia
Coal mining has been practiced in Appalachia since the Revolutionary War. An upsurge in extraction began with the twentieth century.1 By its end,...
Like many waterways in the U.S. region of central Appalachia, the Cheat River once ran acidic—a legacy of drainage from the watershed’s countless abandoned coal mines and refuse piles. Just a couple of decades ago, the noxious waters stressed fish populations and polluted potable water supplies,...
Central Appalachia has much to recommend it. It contains one of the most biologically diverse forests in the world and breathtaking mountains that have inspired artists and writers for centuries. These same mountains have helped to shape the people who call this region home. Appalachian people are...
The communities of the Coal River Valley suffered a heartbreaking catastrophe on April 5, 2010, when Massey Energy's Upper Big Branch longwall mine exploded, killing 29 miners in the worst U.S. mine disaster in 40 years. The disaster at Upper Big Branch should remind the nation that with our...
Last year, almost 1 billion people lacked access to potable water. Each year, 3.575 million die from waterborne diseases like diarrhea, which could be easily prevented by treating the water.1 To prevent this global catastrophe, the World Bank estimates we need to spend $36 billion a year over the...
The Trouble with Agriculture
Across the farmlands of the U.S. and the world, climate change overshadows an ecological and cultural crisis of unequaled scale: soil erosion, loss of wild biodiversity, poisoned land and water, salinization, expanding dead zones, and the demise of rural communities....
The United States—indeed, the global community—is at a crossroads. We have a choice between two futures.
The first is business as usual. In an effort to continue economic growth in the conventional sense (growing Gross Domestic Product with little concern for distribution of wealth), we exacerbate...
If America’s present system of political economy were performing well, there would be little need to question it or seek fundamental change. But that is not the case. Asked what the key goals of economic life should be, many would reply, “to enhance social well-being while sustaining democratic...
In June 2003, Benton Harbor, Michigan—a city of 12,000 located on the Lake Michigan shore in the southwest corner of the state—experienced its fourth race riot in 50 years. For two nights, hundreds of young African Americans set fires and vandalized police cars as they battled 300 state troopers...
With 4,300 miles of coastline, most of Maryland sits within miles of the Atlantic Ocean or the Chesapeake Bay—and a third of the state lies between the two bodies of water. With sea levels rising, storms growing in power, and patterns of rainfall and summer temperatures changing, residents have...
The Challenge of Climate Change
No country can solve the global climate change problem by acting alone. If only one country in the world tried to solve climate change—even one of the wealthier countries of the world—this would be a grossly inadequate effort. On the other hand, waiting for a single...
A steady-state economy is incompatible with continuous growth—either positive or negative growth. The goal of a steady state is to sustain a constant, sufficient stock of real wealth and people for a long time. A downward spiral of negative growth, a depression such as we are entering now, is a...
Solutions Classic
How do we change the structure of systems to produce more of what we want and less of that which is undesirable? After years of working with corporations on their systems problems, MIT’s Jay Forrester likes to say that the average manager can define the current problem very...
In 2008, the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds in the UK announced a final call to find the slender-billed curlew, a one-time resident of Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa, last seen in 1999. Meanwhile, scientists in Australia pronounced the white lemuroid possum extinct; a native...
Anthropogenic global warming has a relatively short public career. Twenty years ago, in June of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen first told Congress that global warming was a real threat, marking the start of open consideration on this issue. The formation of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate...
