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Tag Archives: sustainability
The Changing Climate on Climate Change
The Changing Climate on Climate Change In the early 1990s, when I was Prime Minister of Norway, I once found myself debating sustainable development with an opposition leader who insisted that I tell him the government’s single most important priority in that field. Frustrated, I replied that what he was asking was impossible to answer. […]
Securing a Sustainable Future
Securing a Sustainable Future When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote that “All that is solid melts into air,” they intended it as a metaphor for the disruptive transformations that the Industrial Revolution implied for established social norms. Today, their words can be taken literally: Carbon-dioxide emissions and other industrial pollutants released into the atmosphere are changing […]
The circular economy’s missing ingredient: Local
The circular economy’s missing ingredient: Local Courtesy ofMari Viramontes The Chicago flag, made from wood salvaged at The Plant. One Saturday in early June, a group of people gathered behind an old meatpacking plant on Chicago’s South Side, armed with shovels and handmade compost sifters. In teams of three, the group began sifting a huge […]
10 Successes of the Sustainability Movement to Date
10 Successes of the Sustainability Movement to Date Wind turbines image via shutterstock. Reproduced at Resilience.org with permission. The environmental movement had a lot to brag about. In a mere ten-year span in the 1960s and early 1970s, a relatively small community of student activists, along with crusading scientists, from Rachel Carson to Barry Commoner, managed […]
Earth Overshoot Day and Not-For-Profit Enterprise
Earth Overshoot Day and Not-For-Profit Enterprise In 2015, 13 August is Earth Overshoot Day. The day marks the estimated calendar date when humanity’s demand on the planet’s ecological services (which produce renewable resources and assimilate wastes) outstrips what the Earth can supply. This means that for the rest of the year, we are taking more than […]
Moving Towards Sustainability – by Eating Less Meat
Moving Towards Sustainability – by Eating Less Meat The amount of meat humans eat is immense. In 1965, 10 billion livestock animals were slaughtered each year. In 2012, that number was 55 billion. More chickens are killed in the US every year than there are people in the world, and there are one billion cattle […]
Snatching Defeat
Snatching Defeat “What we must ask is what we intend to sustain when we speak of sustainability? “ Last week we concluded our post on climate change with a quote from James Hansen, “the matter is urgent and calls for emergency cooperation among nations.” All this year we have been leading up to our collective fin de […]
How Sustainable Can Cities be When TheyCan’t Even Deal With Their Own Shit?
How Sustainable Can Cities be When TheyCan’t Even Deal With Their Own Shit? A sewage treatment plant in Hamburg, Germany: The shit never looked so pretty (photo by Mark Michaelis) The Dr. Pooper Papers, Issue #3: Just this past week the City of Toronto wasinformed by the Ministry of the Environment that it must now notify the […]
Cincinnati’s experiment with an economy that works for everyone
With the 2016 presidential campaigns underway, economic populism has taken center stage. Bernie Sanders, calling for a $1 trillion investment in a sustainable infrastructure jobs program along with publically funded health care and college education, has forced Hillary Clinton to offer vague support for similar measures, while even some Republican candidates, like Marco Rubio, have asserted the need to stop the “fall […]
Food and Agriculture Play Significant Role in City of Los Angeles Sustainability pLAn
Food and Agriculture Play Significant Role in City of Los Angeles Sustainability pLAn Los Angeles, known for its extensive freeway system and broad boulevards, fast food, car culture, lawn-filled suburbs and smog, is getting serious about sustainability—and the effort includes local and sustainable food and agriculture. When Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti took office, he […]
The Dismal and Hopeful Future
The Dismal and Hopeful Future One doesn’t have to be a brilliant social analyst to see that the contemporary world order is doomed, destined to start visibly crumbling within the next decade or two at the latest. The neoliberal system, in fact the corporate capitalist system, is radically unsustainable. It is too unstable, too universally […]
Why the Cash Economy in Greece May Be Ending
Why the Cash Economy in Greece May Be Ending Many believe we have a teetering world economy, even without Greece as an indicator. Now Greece is looming ever larger as a critical if unknown actor. It is mostly considered a bad one, for the entire European, and even the worldwide, financial system and economy. The […]
No scientific evidence of GM food safety
No scientific evidence of GM food safety It is “premature” to declare GM safe due to “incomplete” scientific knowledge, finds report commissioned by Norwegian Environment Agency A new study commissioned by the Norwegian government, and conducted by a nationally recognised scientific authority on the safety of biotechnologies, concludes that available scientific data on GM crops […]
Greece Diary
Greece Diary I was in Greece from June 23 through July 5, and, while I had no meetings with government officials that might give me insider information on how events there are likely to unfold, nevertheless the experience was both enlightening and disturbing, and is worth relating. Travel to Greece came at the invitation of […]
If everyone lived in an ‘ecovillage’, the Earth would still be in trouble
If everyone lived in an ‘ecovillage’, the Earth would still be in trouble We are used to hearing that if everyone lived in the same way as North Americans or Australians, we would need four or five planet Earths to sustain us. This sort of analysis is known as the “ecological footprint” and shows that even the so-called […]
