I think that his ideas are compelling, but not his delivery, nor his writing. What to do, what to do? He needs an editor who understands him and will 'punch it up,' so that others will know that it's important, which I truly believe it is.
Can anyone help him out? May 15, AM. This guy turned me off within 2-seconds, with his holier than thou attitude as if this audience has had semesters and semesters of his Agenda 21 jibber jabber babble. Talk about full of oneself. He comes across as an elitist and a snobbish attitude. May 04, PM.
What is wrong with his hair? The second point is climate change, having the climate become noticeable…. Global warming, one of the major concerns for the world leaders today is a direct result of our dependence on non-renewable fossil fuels. As such, there is an immediate urgency for all the countries in the world to make commitment to cut down on greenhouse gas emission; and for the rest of us to start reducing our carbon footprints.
The global temperature rise is a…. Although the international community has made efforts to end poverty, inequalities and climate change are threatening to undermine the efforts of people to escape poverty as two major injustices Byanyima, Climate change accelerates the effects of poverty and structural inequalities and the situation has been worse.
Climate change is no longer limited to the environmental concerns and extinct animals, but it can be perceived as….
He does a very effective job warning us of the devastating impacts that the continuous burning of fossil fuels could lead to, however I feel as though his argument falls short of what a movement would entail.
Being educated the results of burning fossil fuels are and which companies do this, is something McKibben thrives in. McKibben ultimately creates an enemy throughout his article- the fossil-fuel companies. However, I believe that this is where his argument goes wrong. Instead of creating an enemy, why not act in a collective effort together to stop the burning of fossil-fuels and move towards other energy efficient ways the companies can still make profits and our climate can be protected?
The matter that truly worsens climate change is the human appetite for luxury, which exhausts natural resources. Because this is also a structural issue within numerous societies and production companies, a system of regulation must be widely enforced.
By using collaborative techniques and eco-friendly scientific suggestions, a systematic change could easily take place as governmental organizations implement these positively transforming schemes upon masses of people. Since technological quick fixes are unreliable and dangerously consequential, humankind must not rely upon these strategies, but instead depend on gradual restoration methods of energy and material efficiency.
However, like the society in Feed, we misplace the blame for this onto one another. Like in Feed, it is the major corporations that hold the most power and control in our….
The use of fossil fuels is destroying the Earth and causing new diseases according to Steingraber. Essays Essays FlashCards. So, this is a frequent theme: societies collapse very soon after reaching their peak in power. What it means to put it mathematically is that, if you're concerned about a society today, you should be looking not at the value of the mathematical function — the wealth itself — but you should be looking at the first derivative and the second derivatives of the function.
That's one general theme. A second general theme is that there are many, often subtle environmental factors that make some societies more fragile than others. Many of those factors are not well understood. For example, why is it that in the Pacific, of those hundreds of Pacific islands, why did Easter Island end up as the most devastating case of complete deforestation? It turns out that there were about nine different environmental factors — some, rather subtle ones — that were working against the Easter Islanders, and they involve fallout of volcanic tephra, latitude, rainfall.
Perhaps the most subtle of them is that it turns out that a major input of nutrients which protects island environments in the Pacific is from the fallout of continental dust from central Asia. Easter, of all Pacific islands, has the least input of dust from Asia restoring the fertility of its soils.
But that's a factor that we didn't even appreciate until So, some societies, for subtle environmental reasons, are more fragile than others. And then finally, another generalization. What really bugs my UCLA undergraduate students is, how on earth did these societies not see what they were doing? How could the Easter Islanders have deforested their environment? What did they say when they were cutting down the last palm tree?
Didn't they see what they were doing? How could societies not perceive their impacts on the environments and stop in time?
And I would expect that, if our human civilization carries on, then maybe in the next century people will be asking, why on earth did these people today in the year not see the obvious things that they were doing and take corrective action?
It seems incredible in the past. In the future, it'll seem incredible what we are doing today. And so I've been trying to develop a hierarchical set of considerations about why societies fail to solve their problems — why they fail to perceive the problems or, if they perceive them, why they fail to tackle them.
Or, if they tackle them, why do they fail to succeed in solving them? I'll just mention two generalizations in this area. One blueprint for trouble, making collapse likely, is where there is a conflict of interest between the short-term interest of the decision-making elites and the long-term interest of the society as a whole, especially if the elites are able to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions.
Where what's good in the short run for the elite is bad for the society as a whole, there's a real risk of the elite doing things that would bring the society down in the long run. For example, among the Greenland Norse — a competitive rank society — what the chiefs really wanted is more followers and more sheep and more resources to outcompete the neighboring chiefs. And that led the chiefs to do what's called flogging the land: overstocking the land, forcing tenant farmers into dependency.
And that made the chiefs powerful in the short run, but led to the society's collapse in the long run. Those same issues of conflicts of interest are acute in the United States today. Especially because the decision makers in the United States are frequently able to insulate themselves from consequences by living in gated compounds, by drinking bottled water and so on. And within the last couple of years, it's been obvious that the elite in the business world correctly perceive that they can advance their short-term interest by doing things that are good for them but bad for society as a whole, such as draining a few billion dollars out of Enron and other businesses.
They are quite correct that these things are good for them in the short term, although bad for society in the long term. So, that's one general conclusion about why societies make bad decisions: conflicts of interest. And the other generalization that I want to mention is that it's particularly hard for a society to make quote-unquote good decisions when there is a conflict involving strongly held values that are good in many circumstances but are poor in other circumstances.
For example, the Greenland Norse, in this difficult environment, were held together for four-and-a-half centuries by their shared commitment to religion, and by their strong social cohesion. But those two things — commitment to religion and strong social cohesion — also made it difficult for them to change at the end and to learn from the Inuit.
Or today — Australia. One of the things that enabled Australia to survive in this remote outpost of European civilization for years has been their British identity.
But today, their commitment to a British identity is serving Australians poorly in their need to adapt to their situation in Asia. So it's particularly difficult to change course when the things that get you in trouble are the things that are also the source of your strength. What's going to be the outcome today?
Well, all of us know the dozen sorts of ticking time bombs going on in the modern world, time bombs that have fuses of a few decades to — all of them, not more than 50 years, and any one of which can do us in; the time bombs of water, of soil, of climate change, invasive species, the photosynthetic ceiling, population problems, toxics, etc. And while these time bombs — none of them has a fuse beyond 50 years, and most of them have fuses of a few decades — some of them, in some places, have much shorter fuses.
At the rate at which we're going now, the Philippines will lose all its accessible loggable forest within five years. And the Solomon Islands are only one year away from losing their loggable forest, which is their major export. And that's going to be spectacular for the economy of the Solomons.
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