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Toward a Green Economy
Humanity is facing historic and truly unprecedented challenges from climate change and the rapid decline of ecosystems that sustain life.
The 2005 Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) found that 83 percent of the planet's natural systems are in serious decline or on the brink. Adding to this already dire situation are the twin pressures of population growth and increasingly consumptive lifestyles.
Global population is expected to soar from today's 6.6 billion to 9 billion by 2050. Even though we crossed the point of sustainable use of natural resources in the mid-1980s, many of the 2.4 billion people living in China and India are striving mightily right now to approach the materialistic lifestyle of the average North American.
So how can we find our way around the global calamity the human race seems to be hurtling towards?
"Humanity needs a fundamentally new approach to managing the assets upon which we all depend," said Janet Ranganathan, director of the People and Ecosystems program at the World Resources Institute, an environmental group based in Washington.
"We need new ways of making decisions at all levels that fully value ecosystems and the services they provide us," she said.
Farming and forestry in nearly all countries is only about maximizing food or lumber production, but that has to start including maximising the ecological goods and service those ecosystems also offer. And since they are extremely important services, the stewards of these lands to ought to compensated so these services will be preserved and enhanced.
"Healthy ecosystems are our best insurance to buffer us from the impacts of climate change," Ranganathan told IPS.
Funds to pay for such services should come from taxes on polluters, including a carbon tax, cap and trade or other financial mechanisms, she said.
In Ecuador, a Water Conservation Fund (FONAG) collects user fees from those who benefit from the water in the Condor Bioreserves -- a 5.4-million-acre network of public protected areas, farms, ranches and indigenous territories. It uses these funds to support watershed management projects, according to a new report called "Restoring Nature's Capital: An Action Agenda to Sustain Ecosystem Services", co-authored by Ranganathan.
In Brazil, states allocate some revenues from taxes on goods, services, energy and communications to municipalities to help them support protected areas for forests and other resources. With massive deforestation threatening the viability of the Panama Canal, insurance and shipping companies are helping finance a major reforestation effort.
"At the very least we should stop subsidizing economic activities that degrade ecosystems," Ranganathan said.
Since humanity is facing unprecedented challenges in a markedly changed world from 50 years ago, there is a vital need to create new institutions. One idea is the creation of Ecosystem Service Districts to protect and maintain natural capital at the local level in ways that support human need.
Local protection won't be enough, so on a larger scale the report recommends Biome Stewardship Councils. Biomes are large ecosystems with similar climate, soils, plants, and animals -- like woods, deserts, mountains, grasslands and tundra. The MA identifies 15 biomes and a stewardship council for each would maximize ecosystem protection and human welfare within a biome.
Since ecosystems are vital to poverty reduction and achieving other U.N. Millennium Development Goals by 2015, there is also a need to create a Commission on Macroeconomics and Ecosystem Services for Poverty Reduction. This commission would broadly communicate the fact that healthy ecosystem services are fundamental to reducing poverty and achieving economic development and provide guidance on development projects so that they would protect and enhance ecosystem services.
At the highest level, something more inclusive than the current G8 is also needed. The G8 is a group of leaders from industrialized democracies that meets to discuss economic and trade issues primarily, although the environment is getting more attention.
However, a new forum has been recommended by the U.N. High-Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change. This "Leader's Forum" would include heads of state from countries at different levels of economic development and also different cultures and deal with cross-cutting environmental and social as well as economic issues.
What these proposed institutions have in common is that they integrate knowledge about ecosystem services into daily decision making rather than the current silos of information trapped in separate government departments such as agriculture, environment, economic development and so on, says Ranganathan.
And they also emphasize local rights to resources and local rights to decision making that must be part of the new way forward.
"Big change is coming, the era of cheap oil is ending and people are unhappy in their lives and with the state of the environment," said Fran Korten, executive director of the Positive Futures Network, a U.S. group with a focus on "active engagement in creating a just, sustainable, and compassionate world".
"Most people aren't sure what they can do or how things could be different," Korten told IPS.
The lack of general public awareness of these issues is one reason why the Network started publishing its magazine "YES! A Journal of Positive Futures" to profile the many and highly varied creations of viable, sustainable and healthy communities.
Green entrepreneur and social activist Paul Hawken estimates in his new book "Blessed Unrest" there are likely one to two million grassroots organizations around the world working toward ecological sustainability and social justice. Hawken calls this "the largest coming together of citizens in history".
Still, "it's unknown if [most] people will rise to this enormous challenge," said Steve Chase, director of the Environmental Advocacy Program at Antioch University in New Hampshire.
"We do know that people have done so in the past," Chase told IPS.
Ghandi's independence movement in India, the Solidarity Movement in Poland and the U.S. Civil Rights movement are examples, and have many parallels with the renewed environmental movement, he said -- including the very powerful and wealthy interests opposed to any changes perceived as threatening to the status quo.
Despite the enormous pressure and propaganda to keep people passive and make them believe they can't make a difference, the only way forward is for the public to become educated, mobilized and organized, he argued.
"People will have to roll up their sleeves and work hard to be active citizens," Chase said.
Voting and choosing environmentally-friendly products is good but not nearly enough, he noted. Only collective action will produce the substantial changes that are needed. "You can't choose to use public transit if there isn't one available," Chase said.
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter Press Service.
8 Comments so far
Show All[[the only way forward is for the public to become educated, mobilised and organised]]
Through MAIN STREAM MEDIA!
Some years back, approximately at the time of the first Earth Day, there was an economist who courageously said there were "limits to growth" based upon the natural resources of the planet. He was totally discredited and "you can have it all" came into play. Well, we're definitely at the point of having to look in the mirror and admit that the "all" we want to have is growing smaller with every passing day of continued exploitation.
What picture of one's future life holds greater attraction than unlimited consumption of ever more available goodies? What does the desire for a better life translate into, in terms of "humane, sustainable, compassionate future"?
NMBill: Mainstream media will only stop advertising/selling the "good life" when people no longer respond to it. Apparently tv viewing time was way down for the month of April, and advertisers are not snapping up prime time for next season the way they have in the past. Are people really tired of what's on tv? Or, turning to the internet as more substantial? Regardles of the reason, the point is clear: advertizers want to know they're reaching their target audiences and will change their behavior accordingly. I guess it works both ways: media shapes public opinion and attitudes, but without public response media is forced to discover where people are at and change accordingly.
Seems like what we're looking at is the need for a shift in values, a very interior process, whereby people live according to what is really most important and dear to their own heart, not according to the standards set by outside forces. It's happening, slowly, but going to take more time because we have to undo our beliefs based on the lies we've been told.
This is heart-rending. What are we doing to ourselves ? I wish i hadnt seen that image as its gonna haunt me all week.
This coming together the author was talking about. It can only happen through government.
And this government has to have its citizens as watchdogs over their representatives.
No I am not talking about government own farms or even the governmant taking control of every tree.
I am talking about Government of one mind It's citizens. And this said government would keep watch fopopr violaters/ Those out to make a buck at the expense of us all/Free enterprisers. we ought to know by now Free enterprise if there ever was such a thing is dead.
Will this idea the writer wrote about work? Even with what I added to the dream?
Frankly I doubt it. We cannot even to get people to agree on one God nevermind taking care of the Earth that was claim it was given us.
But who knows and at the very least there is a chance. Which is more then we got today.
Let me repeat what I think was the most important comment in the article: "At the very least we should stop subsidizing economic activities that degrade ecosystems," Ranganathan said.
No one can dispute the reasonableness of this position, and least of all the advocates of a free market economy.
I would like to suggest a solution to these ecological problems, one that you may find strange or, at first, may even seem preposterous. I am suggesting that these, and other ecological problems may be addressed and solved by reshaping and redesigninig the largest constructs that humans have ever built on this earth---CITIES. Present day cities act like cancerous tumors, sucking away the life of the planet's material and energy resources, resulting in such things as deforestation, global heating, ozone depletion, acid rain, poisoning of the soil and atmosphere, species destruction, humongous garbage dumps, etc., etc.
The solution I'm proposing is not new, although it is recent, developed in the 70's by alarmed and forward looking people. This was the concept of building, or rather re-building, cities in balance with nature, of cities in a dynamic and harmonic balance with the ecosystems in which they resided and of which they were an inextricable part, which is to say, ecologically appropriate cities--Ecocities. This concept was seen as THE way to address ecological problems, but also a way to address the problem of developing our full potential as human beings. The goal being to live in ecological harmony with the rest of the earth's species, rather than percieving ourselves to be superior and dominant, an outdated and dangerous paradigm.
The new paradigm took a systems view of life, seeing it as a complex-whole. Humans were not standing outside nature viewing it as an object. We are seen as nature itself, an intrinsic part, co-evolving within the natural world. Cities themselves, as part of the human exo-skeleton, are a part of the natural systems, ecosystems. Therefore, it inevitably follows that cities should be Ecocities, cities as part of natural processes, co-evoling with them, within them.
This point of view is little known by the general public, if it is known at all. Even those who are aware of the concept do not really comprehend its critical significance in addressing ecological problems and solving them. The focus lately is that of addressing the global warming problem by reducing use of fossil fuels, primarily through more fuel-efficient vehicles, or by using hybrid vehicles, or even plug-in electric vehicles with energy provided by solar activity. Some have suggested a hydrogen based economy, others a solar-electric based economy. These alone might mitigate the global heating problem, but would ultimately be insufficient, since they do not address the entire global ecological crises in as a complex-whole, that is as a systems problem. In this case a ecosystems problem involving the entire ecosphere of the planet.
The only way to address our global crisis is to approach it via this systems view, wherein the primary issue is that we humans have become so destructive in our way of life that we are threatening the entire planet, causing a mass extinction of species on earth that has not occured since the last natural extinction. The current extinction, however, is caused by a human artifact, cities. As I mentioned above, our cities are cancers on the face of the planet, sucking out its life. It is crucial to address this problem by reshaping and rebuilding our cities in an ecologically appropriate manner, by creating Ecocities. It is vital that we do so, and critical to begin the process now, and to avoid attacking these problems on a piecemeal basis, one at a time. These are a systems problems and demand a systems solution.
I haven't even described an Ecocity, but they will be very exciting, bringing humans back into contact with nature in a way that once again we'll begin to see ourselves as nature itself. And we'll begin to realize our true potential as human beings, and as a society of human beings.
In order to get the big picture, with all its illuminating details, let me recommend an excellent resource, a book by Richard Register, an original founder of the Ecocity movement and one of its most ardent and eloquant supporters. His book is titled "Ecocities" and is subtitled "Building cities in balance with nature". It is a very well written book, illustrated by the author, and passionately presented. You'll enjoy it. Its a real eye-opener, and a great educational experience.
I think we are SCREWED.
Walt C. do a google search for Curitiba Brazil. Here's a little taste here:
http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/fellows/brazil1203/