More Perspectives
On a cool day last December, the eminent Swedish scientist Johan Rockström stood in front of a large audience at the European Parliament in Brussels and pleaded his case. “This is what we could call ‘the scientist’s nightmare,’” Rockström said. “We have disturbed the energy balance to the point where we are committed to three degrees warming. We have reached the sixth mass extinction of species on planet Earth—the first one to be...
In 2010 David Letterman asked Hollywood actress Salma Hayek if she routinely eats bugs. “Look,” she responded. “I'm salivating! They’re delicious!”
Insect eating, officially called entomophagy, is an age-old custom found throughout the world and often considered standard dietary practice. Nearly 2,000 species of insects are eaten by approximately 2.5 billion people worldwide.1,2
We come from a long line of bug eaters. Our earliest...
What comes to mind when you think about green communities? I find many people think about technology—solar panels, wind turbines, or rapid public transit. Another important pillar of green communities is action: the actions people take related to the buildings in which they live. Green communities must incorporate technology and action.
As an uncertain housing market continues to plague the economy, obesity rates escalate, and the...
Improved cookstoves ought to be one of the easy wins in global health. Inefficient, old-fashioned cookstoves do real damage to human health and family incomes. Traditional cookstoves are generally open fires in the middle of three stones, which hold the pot. The fuel is biomass (wood, animal dung, and crop waste) and coal, and the smoke and fumes cause health problems that range from burns to respiratory infections to cancer. Since...
A four-year-old arrives at school and starts crying when she realizes her lunch is packed in a generic plastic bag, not the usual Disney Princess lunchbox she so loves. A friend tells her she won’t be able to sit at the princess lunch table—it’s only for girls with princess lunchboxes.
A fourth grader arrives home from school all excited. He has a Book It certificate from Pizza Hut because his mother signed the form showing that he met...
2010 was a rough year on the Mongolian steppe for the country’s herders. That year, an extremely cold winter struck, known locally as a dzud, wiping out 9 million animals, or 20 percent of the national herd in a country where livestock continues to be central to herders’ livelihoods and play a vital role in the national economy. The freezing temperatures of minus 50 Celsius were the worst in living memory, although the effects of...
When countries crash, a natural thing for their inhabitants to do, inter alia, is inspect their legal and constitutional foundation to look for latent flaws and to fix them.
—Thorvaldur Gylfason1
The Post-Collapse Scene: Pots-and-Pans Revolution
For much of the past decade, Iceland enjoyed surprising economic growth. Following the privatization of its three major national banks in 2000, a mania of privatization gripped the country....
A New Focus on Adaptation following Hurricane Sandy
There are quite a few people in New York and New Jersey who want the government to do something. They want to make sure that the horrendous effects of Hurricane Sandy are not repeated in the years ahead. In the Northeast, the unusual “superstorm” resulted in extensive property loss and more than 100 deaths. Current estimates are that the storm caused more than $60 billion in damage in...
Fossil fuels, including natural gases, coal, and crude oil, play an enormous role in development, directly affecting the lifestyles of every single individual across the globe as well as impacting the energy systems and economies that they depend upon. However, roughly two billion people worldwide do not have access to modern energy supplies and, historically, there has not been a nation which has experienced growth or progress without...
Happiness: is it just a fad of the day or the wave of the future? On July 19th, 2011, the United Nations (UN) passed a resolution urging governments across the globe to start measuring happiness and well-being “with a view to guiding public policy.” The UN recognizes that gross domestic product (GDP) is an insufficient guide for safeguarding the well-being of people or our future. Instead, the UN suggests “a more inclusive, equitable...
The development of biofuels over the last decade has been highly controversial, with negative media attention focusing on the impacts of subsidized biofuel production on food prices, the destruction of the rainforest to make way for new plantations or farms, and the trampling of local land rights. This criticism has led to the quest for more sustainable biofuels, with efforts to develop best practice and certification schemes, and to...
On June 20–22 global leaders gathered in Rio de Janeiro for the Rio+20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (UNCSD) to discuss the future of our planet, society, and environment. While officially deemed a success, the outcome of the meetings has been met with mixed reactions: Detractors found that the meetings made little important political progress, that they merely reaffirmed existing agreements and committed...
A long series of questions fuels the debate over sustainable development and the green economy. To name a few: Will the human capacity for innovation be able to offset environmental degradation? Can growth remain an economic priority? Or, conversely, is abandoning growth a viable development path? Amid theories and hypotheticals, the arguments must eventually shift from the abstract arena of general principles and focus on specific...
“If still more education is to save us, it would have to be education of a different kind: an education that takes us into the depth of things” E.F. Schumacher
Making a switch to sustainable development requires deep, structural transformation in our economic, cultural, and technological systems. We need new ways of interpreting, analyzing, and understanding the world, and we need new tools to help us deal with tumultuous changes and...
The vast archipelago of Indonesia, with 17,500 islands and almost 250 million people, is the fourth most populous country in the world. But while its economy has undergone rapid expansion in recent years, 33 percent of the country’s citizens still have no access to electricity.
Hydropower throughout the country carries tremendous energy potential, and Indonesia has already built several large dams for centralized electricity generation...
Afghanistan is known to the world as a failed state. Who decides what a failed state is, and the extent to which one has failed? Max Weber describes a failed state as one which is unable to maintain a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within its borders.1 Noam Chomsky includes in the definition a state which fails to provide security for the population, to guarantee the population’s rights at home or abroad, or to...
Lin Ostrom led a revolution in our understanding of how society can govern our natural resources. Around the globe, millions of humans and countless members of other species benefit from her ideas on how to manage ecosystems. Sadly, Lin passed away on June 12, 2012, at the age of 78. Her husband, friend, and close collaborator, Vincent Ostrom, died two weeks later on June 29 at the age of 92. Lin worked tirelessly until her last days,...
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a peculiar situation: although hardly anyone would deny the deep ecological crisis facing humankind, we seem to be caught in a net of assumptions that impede a practical solution. Having acknowledged that we need to reduce consumption of energy and materials drastically,1,2 we still often think that adjustments within the current system of production and consumption...
No challenge facing humanity is broader in scope and importance than achieving a sustainable future. Every dimension of our lives is affected, and every discipline and sector of society must be involved in meeting the challenge. Yet we consistently place less importance on distant events than on those close to us in time (as well as in other dimensions). This so-called discounting of our future makes more difficult our ability to...
The World Health Organization estimates that 884 million people do not have access to safe sources of drinking water. Meanwhile, about half of the world’s population continues to use unsustainable, biomass-based energy sources for indoor fuel, leading to extensive deforestation, harmful indoor air emissions, and in many cases upper respiratory disease and high commodity costs for impoverished families. Exacerbating these problems are...
For centuries, wild pearl oysters and mussels were fished in the quest for natural pearls and shell material. This eventually led to the drastic overexploitation of oyster stocks in many areas of the globe.1 Scientific innovation and entrepreneurship eventually unearthed a solution: Researchers discovered a way for humans to farm pearl oysters and induce the formation of a cultured pearl. A century after this discovery, many pearl...
The United States possesses a housing stock that is old, comparatively large, “leaky” in terms of energy loss, and operated inefficiently. That’s the good news, at least for those seeking to find cost-effective reductions in energy use and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
While the U.S. buildings sector demonstrates these characteristics, the largest opportunities are in residential properties, where buildings alone account for 22...
“It’s kind of embarrassing,” Emmanuel of Oakland, California, responded when asked about carrying a reusable shopping bag. “It looks like a man-purse.”1
Emmanuel was part of a recent OgilvyEarth study entitled, Mainstream Green: Moving Sustainability from Niche to Normal, which investigated the discrepancy between Americans’ actions and intentions around sustainable living and shopping behaviors, otherwise known as the Green Gap....
The discipline of positive psychology studies what free people choose when they are not oppressed. I call these desiderata the elements of “well-being,” and when an individual or nation has them in abundance I say it is “flourishing.”
Governments continue to organize their politics and economics around the relief of suffering, and I cannot confidently predict that the planet’s future will be bright with nonoppressed peoples freely...
It is quite possible that by the year 2100 human life will have become extinct or will be confined to a few residential areas that have escaped the devastating effects of nuclear holocaust or global warming.
—Brian Barry1
Evolution equipped us to deal with threats from dependably loathsome enemies and fearsome creatures, but not with the opaque and cumulative long-term consequences of our own technological and demographic success. As...
The prevailing system of management has destroyed our people. The destruction starts with toddlers. … The fundamental task of leadership is transformation of this system … [which is] the same system in education and business.
—W. Edwards Deming, pioneer, Total Quality Management
“How do you think about the future?” (President, School Superintendents of America)
“We sort of think that you drank your juice, and then you drank ours.” (11-...
In 1987 the Brundtland Commission released a report that would define the next 25 years of progress toward a sustainable future. Breaking with earlier conventions that saw development exclusively in terms of economic growth, the report urged policymakers to include social and environmental impacts in their considerations. The UN Brundtland Report also introduced the concept of intergenerational equity, that is, no generation has the...
Happy people are healthy people. Happy people live longer and enjoy a greater quality of life. They function at a higher level, utilizing their personal strengths, skills, and abilities to contribute to their own well-being as well as that of others and society. They are more likely to be compassionate and, therefore, to contribute to the moral fiber of society in diversely beneficial ways. They are less prone to experience depression...
Resilience, in the context of the earth’s ecosystems, is defined as the capacity to absorb a shock, reorganize, and continue to function as before. This basic ability is often taken for granted by the global economy, and yet evidence is mounting that crucial ecosystems are in decline. Without a rethinking of how we use the earth’s resources and the development of an approach based on resilience, many of those declines may be...
Thirty years ago, the fourth king of Bhutan famously proclaimed that “Gross National Happiness is more important than Gross National Product,” setting the country on a development path that seeks to integrate sustainable and equitable socioeconomic development with environmental conservation, cultural promotion, and good governance.
This “happiness” has nothing to do with the common use of that word to denote an ephemeral, passing mood...
In today’s global marketplace, with its ever-diminishing resource stocks, one thing is obvious: demand is outstripping supply. And here’s the conundrum: increases in living standards are tightly coupled with growth in resource consumption. We have all heard the dramatic statistic that if all seven billion people on earth lived like the average American, we would need five planets to support us. But as the consumer class in developing...
For the coming generation, the critical challenge is an interior one—a shift inside us that could trigger a tectonic shift outside.
Feel-good hokum, you say? Let me attempt a logical case.
As we watch ice caps dissolve, forests burn, and species vanish forever, we have to ask: Is our species really so dense that we can’t see that we are destroying our own life-support systems? Or, are humans so evil—narrowly self-interested and...
As we see our present interconnected global challenges of widespread environmental degradation, climate change, crippling poverty, social inequities, and unrestrained militarism, we know that the obstacles to the flourishing of life’s ecosystems and to genuine sustainable development are considerable.
In the midst of these formidable challenges, in an era that Paul Crutzen has dubbed the Anthropocene,1 we are being called to the next...
The UN recently held its first conference on happiness and well-being with the stated purpose of "realizing the future we all want." But what is it we all want? Is it maximum well-being or happiness, or is it just meeting our needs, as proclaimed by the popular definition of sustainable development?1 Happiness and development goals are, to a great extent, non-material. They are also hard to define, measure, and implement.
The commonly...
The overarching goal at the upcoming Rio+20 summit must be achieving sustainable prosperity for all. Within this broad objective, the subject is bracketed, if you will, by two of the greatest challenges faced by the international community: the greatest social challenge, world poverty, and the greatest environmental challenge, climate change. There can be no sustainable prosperity without victory on these two fronts.
As I approach the...
The earth is finite and so are the chemical elements of which it is composed. Those elements, represented by the symbols that fill the boxes of the periodic table, fuel all human consumption. Yet we are mining and redistributing these fundamental elements at such a rapid rate that many are already in short supply or likely to become so in the next few decades. To maintain supply lines to the dinner table and to industry, we must...
Can tenth-grade Inuit students in Repulse Bay (Nunavut, Canada) teach the world governments something about ways to measure progress?
In a recent classroom project taken from Sustainable Happiness and Health Education Teacher’s Guide, these students created a video celebrating what makes them happy: fresh air, spending time with family and friends, sports, home, a peaceful place, ice hockey, listening to music, square dancing, and...
In 2010, an earthquake devastated Haiti. The rebuilding work has been slow, with tens of thousands still living in emergency tents. It may not seem like a good time to talk about envisioning a sustainable future for the island, but that may be exactly what is needed to stave off the next disaster. Deforestation has been a major problem in Haiti, as with other Caribbean and Central American countries, where collectively 285,000 hectares...
Many politicians want us to lower our expectations about the economy. I say it is time to raise them. We should go beyond the shriveled thinking imposed on us by today’s mania for austerity. Even the Contract for the American Dream—ten steps for fixing the economy, selected from over 25,000 ideas submitted online by both experts and everyday Americans—should be seen as just a springboard—and not a ceiling—for what Americans might dare...
Ecological restoration—the rehabilitation of degraded landscapes—is a bright spark in the effort to achieve sustainable development. If given a chance, damaged ecosystems can recover rapidly. Research shows that forest ecosystems recovered in 42 years on average, while ocean bottoms recovered in less than ten years. Ecosystems affected by either invasive species, mining, oil spills, or trawling recovered in as little as five years.1...
Industrialised world reductions in material throughput, energy use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet’s ecological means.
Business Council for Sustainable Development1
It’s not as if we’re unaware of the problem. Symptoms were already so persistent two decades ago that a proclamation by many of the world’s top scientists warned...
Since the Industrial Revolution, two main motivations have driven the movement for work-time reduction. Free time away from the job improves individual well-being, while reducing work hours can cut unemployment by better distributing the available work. These historical motivations for work-time reduction have been joined by a new rationale: the need to reduce the impact of human societies on the environment.
The urgency of reducing...
Unsustainable patterns of consumption and production have led to multiple problems threatening our future—like poverty, resource scarcities, hunger, disease, and environmental harm. Focusing on correcting key drivers such as consumption and production leads to integrated solutions that can solve many problems simultaneously, where piecemeal solutions have failed before.1 The consumption-driven global economy already uses natural...
A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.
Oscar Wilde
Simply put, there are currently two pressing problems in the developed and in the developing worlds: unemployment and the depletion of the planet’s resources. In my opinion, Western fiscal systems are the fundamental cause of both.
Our culture has devised systems of taxation in which the vast majority of government income from business (80 percent...
The global economy rests on a knife’s edge. The financial crash of 2008 caused 50 trillion dollars and 80 million jobs to evaporate.1 And the wreck is not over. This article describes the major challenges facing the economy and proposes solutions.
The Challenges
The International Labor Organization sets forth the following grim statistics:2
Studies of 69 of 118 countries with available data show an increase in the percentage of people...
In hearing rooms, hallways, and conferences where the world’s policymakers are wrestling with the big issues of our day, something important is missing.
Vision.
By vision, I don’t mean those forward-looking policy papers that tell us how we might shape the future with a global Green New Deal, or the Millennium Development Goals, or a Copenhagen Accord. Those intellectual constructs are critical, but they are not enough.
We’re missing...
My solution is: get outraged.
Having written the first book about global warming 23 long years ago, I’ve watched the issue unfold across decades, continents, and ideologies. I’ve come to earth summits and conferences of the parties from Rio to Kyoto to Copenhagen, and many places in between.
All along, two things have been clear.
One, the scientists who warned us about climate change were absolutely correct—their only mistake,...
As a sociologist, I often roamed the dirt tracks of the poor sections of my hometown Caracas, and it seemed to me that from the open windows, I would always hear someone singing or strumming the Venezuelan four-string guitar, el cuatro, or see some fellow unselfconsciously walking by whistling or singing. Later on, reading the memoirs of an English officer of Simón Bolívar’s British Legion that fought for the Venezuelan Independence...
Psychologists have collected data from thousands of people in dozens of nations around the world to understand what humans value and how they prioritize different aims in life. These studies consistently show that the human value system is composed of about a dozen basic types of values, including aims such as having caring relationships, having fun, pursuing spiritual understanding, and feeling safe. Thus far, the evidence suggests...
There are many historical case studies of past societies that show how they waxed and waned in the face of climate, technology, war, and disease. Classic examples include the collapse of the Mayan civilization due to land stress, warfare, and climate change and the end of the Roman Empire due to its overextension and financial mismanagement. Typically, these cases are used as simplistic analogies for modern predicaments. However,...
In the summer of 2009, we were treated to a bicoastal spectacle of conflicts over water in the western and southeastern United States. Farmers in California were on television, complaining about a “congressionally induced” drought; the mayor of Atlanta was arguing that Florida’s wetlands were taking water his citizens needed to survive. In 2011, the water shortages shifted to the Midwest and northern China. And these global water...
In September 2010 I joined a team of latter-day explorers in the Netherlands on a quest to discover what American communities can learn from the Dutch about transforming bicycling in the United States from a largely recreational pastime to an integral part of our transportation system.
We were in search of the “27 percent solution”—the health, environmental, economic, and community benefits gained in a nation where more than a quarter...
The term refugee is overused and misused. Many of us believe that to be a refugee is simply to be displaced. Instead, a refugee is someone who has been forced to flee her country due to violence or persecution and who cannot return. To be a refugee is to be attacked, abused, to lose your family members, to find yourself in an inhospitable foreign land where you can’t speak the language or negotiate for your own survival or that of your...
The set of the reality TV show Fekr Wa Talosh (Dream and Achieve, roughly) is mounted with a few overhead lights and draped with a velvet background, maroon on one half and black on the other. Paper signs are taped up in the background with sponsors’ names and logos written out in marker. A group of about 20 men and women, in turbans and various styles of headscarves, sit in three tight rows of white metal chairs, hands folded in their...
By 2080 the effects of climate change—on heat waves, floods, sea level rise, and drought—could push an additional 600 million people into malnutrition and increase the number of people facing water scarcity by 1.8 billion.1 The precise impacts will, however, strongly depend on socioeconomic conditions such as local markets and food import dependence. In the near term, two factors are also changing the nature of food security: (1) rapid...
It is an article of faith that global trade will be an ever-growing presence in the world. Yet this belief rests on shaky foundations. Global trade depends on cheap, long-distance freight transportation. Freight costs will rise with climate change, the end of cheap oil, and policies to mitigate these two challenges.
At first, the increase in freight costs will be bad news for developed and developing nations alike but, as adjustments...
Within the U.S. military, there is no debate about the risks, threats, and challenges of climate change and energy dependency as they relate to our national security.1 Climate change and energy efficiency have become standing military planning considerations, as both will affect the twenty-first-century strategic landscape and operational environment to such a degree that to ignore them would be a gross dereliction of duty and an...
From competition among hunter-gatherers for wild game to imperialist wars over precious minerals, resource wars have been fought throughout history; today, however, the competition appears set to enter a new—and perhaps unprecedented—phase. As natural resources deplete, and as the earth’s climate becomes less stable, the world’s nations will likely compete ever more desperately for access to fossil fuels, minerals, agricultural land,...
Two decades of research into the management of what economists call common-pool resources suggests that, under the right conditions, local communities can manage shared resources sustainably and successfully. These revolutionary findings challenge the long-held belief in the “tragedy of the commons.” Instead, we have found that tragedy is not inevitable when a shared resource is at stake, provided that people communicate. In many...
Interest in both the science and practice of ecosystem services is on the rise. Many studies have confirmed the economic value of investing in the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of ecosystem services.1–5 This burgeoning world is now in need of institutions capable of managing the thousands of projects currently devoted to these issues. One such project can be found at the Baviaanskloof Mega Reserve in South Africa. The...
The Willamette River is the 13th largest river in the United States, and its 29,727 square kilometer basin supports a mosaic of agricultural, timber, and recreational resources as well as several growing urban centers and their water supplies. The Willamette River Basin (WRB) has a Mediterranean climate with dry summers and wet winters. The river drains the Coast Range on the west side of the basin, the Willamette Valley, and the...
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Seattle’s water was provided by wells, springs, and private water companies. Lake Washington served as both a source of water and a sink for waste. After epidemics of cholera and typhoid, Seattle became known as one of the unhealthiest cities in the U.S. Finally, the Great Seattle Fire of June 6, 1889 destroyed the entire 64-acre business district due to the lack of water available from the...
In October 2010 the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) study published a groundbreaking series of reports, which presented governments, local authorities, and businesses with a powerful economic case for protecting the natural world. The reports, initiated in 2007 by the G8+5 major nations, urged governments and companies around the world to account for the value of ecosystem services in their decision making and...
Cast your mind back to the last time you purchased a car.
Did the salesman win you over with a pitch about the 457 nuts and bolts of the car, about the 33 types of plastic used in construction, about how the wheel turns 1,368.5 times in a kilometer, and about the temperature in the combustion chamber?
It’s doubtful. More likely, he told you about how the car’s services and benefits affect your life directly: how many people it can...
There are “sweet spots” in life where circumstances come together to create seemingly ideal points in time. Some of these are ephemeral: the sweet strike of a golf club on a ball, for example; or the endorphin rush of a long run or an intense romance. Others occur on a larger scale: the height of an empire, like the Romans, Mayans, or Mongols; the end of World War II; or at the extreme, James Lovelock’s concept of Gaia, in which the...
The global uprisings that began with the Arab Spring and more recently the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations are indications of growing unhappiness with the state of the world, especially among the younger generation. Americans are finally directing their frustration at the right people—the financial and corporate elites who currently govern the United States and have caused the ongoing crisis. Anger and protests can be effective at...
Christine Walela is a smallholder farmer in Kisiwa, a village in western Kenya. She has four children, and, as is the case for many women in western Kenya, her husband does not support the family. He lives with his second wife, and Christine hardly ever sees him.
Christine depends on farming for food and income. In 2009 she planted one acre of maize and harvested six bags, just enough to feed her family, but not enough for school fees...
For centuries, Minqin Oasis, along the Silk Road in northwestern China, provided a welcome port of call to travelers, serving as a natural barrier against the unremitting dryness of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts. That changed in the 1950s, when Chairman Mao implemented a national plan to boost food production. The resulting cultivation, deforestation, irrigation, and reclamation of the oasis initially boosted food output, but...
Rural China is home to about one in every ten people on earth and to more than 150 million school-aged children—a staggering number, comparable to half the entire U.S. population. The children of rural China suffer the negative consequences of the country’s economic boom: their parents often move to the cities as migrant workers and they are left to fend for themselves in underprivileged communities. Many rural parents see education as...
Since World War II, many of the United Kingdom's native woods have been felled and replaced with non-native conifers for fast timber production. The dense growth of conifers prevents light from reaching the woodland floor and therefore reduces biodiversity. Less than 12 percent of the UK's landmass consists of woodland cover, compared to a European average of 44 percent. Only 8 percent of the woods the UK does have are native British...
Stanwell Chirwa is 42 years old with a history of poaching wild animals in the Luangwa Valley, Zambia. He admits to killing 11 elephants, more than 20 buffalo, and kudu and eland. Farming had been his main livelihood, but poor yields and low market prices pushed him into poaching. He was arrested once, but was acquitted in court. On a second occasion, Chirwa was apprehended but managed to escape. He knew his luck would run out someday...
The HBO series The Wire vividly depicts the crime, corruption, and immorality of the war on drugs in Baltimore. While accurate and compelling, there is a much more hopeful story to be told about the city. It is the story of 9,000 Baltimore residents who have safely resolved their own crimes and conflicts, within their own neighborhoods, using something called “community conferencing.”
Community conferencing is an effective community...
Once again, Father Giovani Presiga is on the phone with a murderer. Calmly he tries to wrangle a life out of a guerrilla commander who has the blood of hundreds of people on his hands. “Let the kid go! He has no money, much less his family!” The victim is from the padre’s parish near the Colombian city of Medellín. Abductions for ransom are one of the main sources of income for both left-wing guerrillas and right-wing paramilitaries,...
Mozambicans traditionally eat a lot of chicken and the demand has been growing. But in 2004, two-thirds of the frozen broiler chickens sold in Mozambique were imported from Brazil. By the time they reached store shelves, they were often past their sell-by dates. But they sold well because they were cheaper than Mozambican chickens. The country had the resources to supply its own chickens, and a thriving poultry industry could...
In many ways, farmers in Iraqi Kurdistan have never had it so good. After the 2003 overthrow of Saddam Hussein, the mountainous region of northern Iraq did not suffer the same level of violence as the rest of the country. In 2009 the Kurdish Ministry of Agriculture announced an ambitious plan to achieve agricultural self-sufficiency within five years in the production of grain, produce, oil, and agricultural inputs such as livestock...
The problem has been well documented: the American public’s grasp of scientific processes and principals is lagging behind the rapid growth of an ever-more scientific and technological world. Decades of tests have shown that American students from elementary to high school are falling behind students of other industrialized nations in math and science literacy across a broad range of disciplines.1 American universities are churning out...
As the unfolding nuclear disaster in Japan has shown, the costs of cleanup after a nuclear meltdown are borne in large part by national governments and taxpayers rather than the industry. Paying for cleanup is just one of many hidden costs of nuclear energy that make judging the value of nuclear power difficult. Many countries, including the United States, are rushing to build a new generation of nuclear power plants to reduce carbon...
Since the mid-nineteenth century, the international community has joined forces in the search for effective laws, policies, and practices to prevent and combat prostitution and human trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation. As a result, key international treaties state that such acts are not only crimes that should be prosecuted but are also incompatible with the dignity and worth of the human person and with the equal...
Sex trafficking is an exceedingly barbaric, highly profitable component of modern-day slavery. In the course of ten years of research across twenty countries, I have directly interviewed more than one thousand current and former slaves of all kinds, and some of the most heartbreaking tales I have heard were those narrated by individuals who have suffered years of sexual enslavement at the hands of traffickers and pimps. Despite recent...
The crucial move toward sustainability may not come easily for either huge corporations or the average consumer, but we can hasten this evolution by identifying and nurturing the personality traits that most naturally drive sustainable living. Those qualities that we’ve long called “feminine” could be the answer.
No matter how many men also possess them, traits like empathy and a focus on communication and social connections have long...
In 2000 the United Nations Security Council adopted Resolution 1325. This milestone resolution placed women’s equal right to participate in peacekeeping on the agenda of international peace and security. Sustainable peace is better assured through the participation of women in peacekeeping and by addressing the differential impact of conflict on women, men, girls, and boys.
In recent years, the demand for UN police peacekeeping has...
For millions of rural women and their families in developing countries, rights to agricultural land and forest resources are critical determinants of their well-being and their security against destitution. Not only can such property rights enhance individual welfare, they can also strengthen livelihoods for the most vulnerable and help conserve forests that are of global importance as carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity.
Women...
Five years ago, 220 scientists from around the world signed a statement calling for marine managers to shift to an ecosystem-based approach. Such an approach would seek to protect “ecosystem structure, functioning and key processes,” recognize the interconnectedness of human and marine systems, and be place-based rather than driven by individual activities. The scientists called this method ecosystem-based management, or EBM. Their...
A remarkably simple lesson has emerged from recent research into preserving marine resources around the world: concerted human planning and effort are effective in preventing further decline of marine ecosystems. Fundamentally, the deterioration of marine ecosystems signals a crisis of governance, and the widespread degradation of our environment is a symptom of inadequate, dysfunctional, or missing institutions.1 Currently, most...
Let’s talk about the differences between environmentalists and scientists. They both seek the support of the general public but, at least in theory, their goals are different. For starters, environmentalists know what they want. Scientists don’t. Environmentalists want a specific outcome. Scientists seek only knowledge.
Environmentalists know they want this particular forest or that specific estuary to be protected. Their mission is to...
Shark fin soup is the “food of the wealthy,” elders used to say. I first encountered the dish when I was young, accompanying my mom on one of her business dinners at an upscale Chinese restaurant. I remember her dressing me up for what I was told would be a “special dinner.” The chairs in the restaurant were cushioned and embroidered—I was so small my feet couldn’t reach the floor. She told me I was going to be eating something very...
Between 1999 and 2002, 30 collaborators illegally harvested nearly a third of the Dungeness crab population in south Puget Sound. Detective Bill Jarmon and I worked the case. By analyzing invoices, shipping records, and airbills, we learned that the group had stolen at least 85,000 pounds of crab from the Nisqually area and more than 200,000 pounds of geoduck, a large endemic bivalve clam in high demand in the Asian marketplace....
More than a decade ago a colleague and I were facing the prospect of losing another policy battle on Capitol Hill. Once again, we found that our compelling scientific case was not enough to carry the day and lamented, “If only fish could vote.” We should have said, “If only fish made political contributions to candidates to help them get elected.” Fish don’t but people do, which is why years later I cofounded Ocean Champions—the first...
Some people may question how a love affair with a piece of federal legislation is possible, but that’s what it has been for me. Our courtship has not been easy, but I’m hooked.
In 1975, the first national marine sanctuaries were designated under the Marine Protection, Research, and Sanctuaries Act of 1972. One was the area around the iron-clad warship Monitor off of North Carolina. The second was 103-square nautical miles of coral reef...
Scientists estimate that, within a decade, the Inupiaq village of Shishmaref, located on the barrier island of Sarichef off the coast of Alaska, will be swallowed by rising seas. In October 2001, a severe fall storm caused the shoreline near the village to move inland by 125 feet. The Inupiaq people have lived here for over 4,000 years but will now be forced to relocate to higher ground at a projected cost of almost $200 million.1,2...
In a world that worships economic activity, doing right by the earth is often more time consuming and expensive—either in actual dollars or opportunity cost—than succumbing to our manifest destiny. The same rule applies when conserving land: if it’s not financially advantageous, it often doesn’t happen. The question, then, is how to make open space, clean water, and intact wildlife habitat pay for itself. Daan Wensing and his...
We know what we need to do to mitigate climate change; we have known for decades. The challenge is not one of technology (although we will need to invent new technologies), nor is it one of workable policy options. In fact, the best way to address climate change would be through one of the simplest measures imaginable: an annually escalating greenhouse gas tax on all sources of energy.
But the simplest solution turns out to be the...
The need for consistent, decisive environmental accounting principles has been argued in professional circles for some time, but has perhaps never been better illustrated than in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe. This need became clear to the chairman of the board of British Petroleum (BP) PLC when the calls from the crisis center in Houston woke him in the middle of the night at his home in Sweden. And it became...
Can the aviation industry ever be sustainable? Aviation may only be responsible for 2 percent of global CO2 output,1 but that’s 13 percent of the world’s transportation fuels each year,2 or 670 tonnes (metric tons) of CO2 annually.3 It would take roughly 23,680,000 trees planted per month to offset all the aviation carbon produced each year.4 The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) predicts that aviation will continue to...
In Africa, poverty and environmental degradation are inextricably linked. If we want to talk about long-term sustainable solutions, we cannot address one without the other.
I live in an area of rural Kenya where people cut down indigenous trees to process and sell as cooking charcoal. Every morning, I see men riding into town on rickety bicycles weighted down by large, overstuffed bags. These 50-kilogram sacks were once filled with...
“The only preventive and the only remedy is for the people to choose one another, and their place, over the rewards offered them by outside investors.”
—Wendell Berry, “Does Community Have a Value?”
Just a little over 30 years ago, Wilmington, Ohio, the county seat of Clinton County, was a different place. The county was having its heyday, with a booming pork industry, a host of diverse manufacturers, family heirs and heiresses, a...
Eight years ago, Robert Costanza, ecological economist, and John Todd, ecological designer, were inspired to redesign the Burlington municipal water tower at the University of Vermont to be an ecofriendly office tower. As Costanza looked at the tower one day on his daily walk to campus, he thought, “Why can’t this be more? What an opportunity to use core real estate for more than a utilitarian tower. Why not use the water stored in the...
Getting to 350 parts per million CO2 in the atmosphere will require massive investments in clean-energy infrastructure—investments that can too often be foiled by a combination of special interests and political sclerosis. Take the recent approval of the Cape Wind project by the U.S. Department of the Interior. In some ways, this was great news for clean-energy advocates: the project’s 130 turbines will produce, on average, 170...
.jpg "Wendy Tomajko builds a cucumber trellis at the Croton-on-Hudson community garden.")
In Carmel, New York, Town Supervisor Ken Schmitt put it this way when we met him: “We’d like to know how we can save money.” After a career in local law enforcement, Schmitt got himself elected supervisor a few years ago only to inherit a municipality with aging infrastructure, outdated codes, and a population very wary of property tax increases.
Schmitt leaned forward. “Do you have many wood-fired boilers in Croton? We have folks...
.jpg "Over 5,000 young people gathered in Washington DC for the Energy Action Coalition’s Power Shift climate change rally in November 2007.")
We were married in a teepee. Forty of the bride’s family and friends (almost all Navajo) filled the southern side, and 40 of the groom’s family and friends (almost all white) were seated to the north. We were seated to the west with the setting sun, and a fire was in the center. Needless to say, it was an awkward moment for everyone—the white folks all hoping not to do or say anything wrong, and the Navajos thinking to themselves: “...
Over the last decade, big green groups in Washington DC have lobbied hard for a carbon tax or an equivalent carbon cap, but they have never made federal support for innovation a priority. We think that advocacy for innovation should be at the heart of the drive to get atmospheric CO2 to 350 parts per million (ppm). Without significant technical progress—without the development of “renewable energy cheaper than coal,” as Google frames...
Most communities around the world aren’t yet aware of how climate change will drastically impact their land, economy, and way of life. But the downsides of a fossil fuel–based economy are already well known in the coalfields of central Appalachia, a region including southern West Virginia, eastern Kentucky, southwest Virginia, and east Tennessee. Central Appalachia’s coal economy has severely altered the landscape and created...
In the history of Appalachian coal mining, Harlan County, Kentucky, is a landmark in the grassroots fight for better living and working conditions. Labor unrest in the 1930s earned the county the nickname “Bloody Harlan.” Intense organizing continues today, as Harlan County resident leaders help their communities transition from a coal economy into one based on renewable energy and energy efficiency.
Poor communities in Appalachia...
In 1998, tobacco was Kentucky's top cash crop. Kentucky was one of the three states with the largest number of family farms still in operation—and domestic tobacco was their main crop.
Major changes swept over the tobacco industry that year when it was pressured to compensate states for the public health costs associated with smoking as part of the National Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. Kentucky received a payout of $3 billion...
I don't use the term "clean coal." There will always be environmental issues surrounding the production and use of coal. But for the foreseeable future, global energy demands are going to require us to keep on burning it. That has brought everyone's attention to bear on Carbon Capture and Storage, or CCS, the process that most commonly uses chemical solvents to "scrub" CO2 from the overall emission stream, transport it, and then inject...
There is nothing so fixed about the future that it can’t be un-fixed.
—Myles Horton, the Highlander Center
My family has been on the roller coaster of central Appalachia’s economy for the past 150 years. We have gone from subsistence agriculture to a coal-based boom; from the depths of the Great Depression to a World War II resurgence, followed by the long downward slope of the past 60 years. I tell my family’s story because it is...
"The land shall not be sold for ever; for the land is mine; for ye are strangers and sojourners with me." —Leviticus 25:23
Kathy Lindquist knew she was going to die. She must have. After spending most of her adult life battling lymphoma, the 45-year-old church lady and Girl Scout troop leader—a woman with a soft touch for hard issues—would leave a gift. She might have known at the time that it was just the kind of small gesture big...
For hundreds of years, it wasn't uncommon for farmers in Europe to till their land and plant their crops only to see the soil wash away by year's end. Before they started all over again, many had to carry the lost soil back up to the fields. Piles of dirt overflowed oxcarts or burdened the farmers' backs as they made their way up the eroding hill.1 This Sisyphean effort was not unique to Europe; in the days of Mao, near-starving...
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The world is hungry for fish. Faced with declining wild stocks, the fishing industry is giving way to aquaculture, or fish farming, which produced close to 53 million tons of fish in 2006 alone (half of all fish consumed in the world). The worldwide industry is growing at an average of 6.8 percent per year, making it the world’s fastest-growing food sector. But this growth has come at a cost: Chemicals and antibiotics used in fish...
A week after the November 2008 elections, my civic software company, Front Seat (www.frontseat.org), launched ObamaCTO.org to collect ideas on priorities for one of Obama’s campaign promises—appointing the country’s first Chief Technology Officer. The site took about an hour to build using a service called UserVoice. Shortly after sending out 200 emails, we were getting dozens and dozens of votes per hour until 18 hours into it, when...
“If we refuse to take into account the full cost of our fossil fuel addiction—if we don’t factor in the environmental costs and national security costs and true economic costs—we will have missed our best chance to seize a clean energy future.”
–President Barack Obama, Carnegie Mellon University, June 2, 2010
The continuing oil spill from the Deepwater Horizon is causing enormous economic and ecological damage....
Early in 2009, the number of mobile phone users exceeded 4 billion— with the majority of users living in the developing world. The implications of this fact are profound: most people on Earth are carrying computers that continually transmit information about their relationships, movements, and even financial decisions to closed databases distributed throughout the world. While the privacy implications of this data should not be...
After a long seven years of war and bloodshed, the national elections in Iraq this Spring 2010 took place in relative stability. The resulting government, when it is announced, will offer the first real indication of whether Iraqis intend to use democracy to empower conservative religious leaders, or whether they will turn to secular politicians, more in keeping with Iraq’s pre-war tradition of separating mosque and state.
The...
Little can happen in this world without economic support. So it follows that little will happen in the climate realm until the international financial architecture is revamped to drive positive climate change responses, including increased energy efficiency and robust renewable energy programs.
Historically, concerted efforts to remold the international order are infrequent. The 1884 Berlin Conference, which divided the world into...
It is a typical Saturday afternoon at the mall for Mr. Smith and his children. As he wheels his 20-month-old son through the drugstore, the toddler spots a familiar face prominently displayed on the juice boxes. “Elmo, Elmo!” the child shouts. Mr. Smith tries to move swiftly on, but his seven-year-old son keeps tugging at his shirt: “Dad,” he says, “after this let’s go to Burger King. I need another G.I. Joe movie toy that comes with...
In the evening hours of June 22, 2003, Mohammed and his brother were returning home in their car and approached a U.S. military checkpoint near Kunduz, Afghanistan. They slowed and came to a stop as requested by the soldiers manning the checkpoint. The car was searched; nothing was found. But confusion on both sides ensued, and the U.S. troops opened fire. Mohammed was hit twice, once in his arm and once in his leg, and a bullet...
When the Samoan government published its 2007 Climate Risk Profile Report to assess what global warming means for this tiny Pacific nation, it came as a shock to many of the islanders. Not that Samoa, a cluster of ten tiny volcanic islands in the midst of the South Pacific Ocean, weren’t already braced against the power of the Pacific. Still, the report made for pretty grim reading: an expected sea level rise of 1–1.6 meters by 2100...
"True, they don't have any electricity," John Corsi, CEO of Solarex Corporation, told me in 1990, "but they also don't have any money." The chief of America's then-largest solar company, later absorbed into BP Solar, expressed doubts about my idea of starting a non-profit organization to bring solar lighting to the developing world. I explained that as many as two billion people on the planet still had no access to electricity,...
The traditional approach to conservation demands segregation—a boundary dividing man and wild. Conservationists identify endangered species' core habitats and try to fence them off from human contamination—from guns, cornfields, or shopping malls. In many cases, this strategy has worked: protected areas have been important to species and ecosystem survival around the world. But it is also limited, especially when the human landscape...
Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries, and the picture looks grim indeed.
But why are both the U.S. economy and the larger global economy ailing? Among the mainstream media, world leaders...
The UN Copenhagen Climate Conference provided a sober look at the process the world faces to achieve enhanced global governance for sustainability. This piece looks at some of the positive dimensions that began to take shape, set against the deep divides that emerged between large and small emitters, the most powerful and the most vulnerable nations.
Three issues dominated the Copenhagen Climate Conference: emission reductions, funds...
Few challenges are more pressing in the Arab World today than finding ways to absorb the 80 million job seekers who will come out of the pipeline over the next 12 years. The significant increases made in educational attainment have made little impact on worker productivity, and employment prospects remain low for Arab graduates. Such poor returns suggest low quality in education and the failure of schools to address the needs of the...
American business thrives on easy money—not low-interest money from banks, but stupendous sums of money from Congress, passed on through the departments of the federal government. Some think the system should properly be called "subsidism," not capitalism. Whatever we think of this mechanism, it created the victorious war machine of World War II and has generously supported the two dominant economic institutions of the post-World War...
Imagine our colossal, municipal landfills as mines full of resources for building our future urban and suburban spaces. What kind of effort is required to reuse their copious contents? For hundreds of years we have designed cities to generate waste. Now that more than half of all humans are settled in urbanized areas, waste management needs a radical revision: it is time we design waste to generate cities.
This message, which I’ve...
