from Greenpeace USA
This video introduces the Bering Sea, and the animals who rely on it. Bad fishing practices have hurt this ecosystem, including the people who live near it.
To find out more about the issues facing the Bering Sea, take a look at:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL3762013D6511AE99&feature=edit_ok
from 350.org
On 350.org’s Climate Action Day, a group of a friends climbed the melting Dana Glacier outside Yosemite National Park, California to connect the dots between local weather and global climate weirding.
Credits
Director – David Gilbert
Editor – Stefen Ruenzel
Music – “Demain je change de vie” by Lohstana David
from 350.org
On 5/5/12, people around the world volunteered, documented, educated, and protested to connect the dots on climate change. We’re just getting started — join us at http://www.350.org
from 350.org
“Over the past five years, grassroots leaders throughout the country (and the world) have led the charge for a clean energy economy with 350.org. We’ve organized more than 15,000 actions together, helped stop a tar sands pipeline, and generated momentum to solve the climate crisis. Join us http://350.org“
from The Nation and On The Earth Productions
“In this video from The Nation and On The Earth Productions, ecologist David Holmgren traces the path of permaculture from its roots in the 1970s to its potential, in the future, to reshape how humans interact with the planet. He explains how its premise—working with nature rather than against it—will help us adapt to and survive in a resource-scarce world.”
Cross-posted from the website of the Center for the Advancement of the Steady-State Economy (CASSE).
There is a Conflict between Economic Growth and:
(1) Environmental Protection
A growing economy consumes natural resources and produces wastes. It results in biodiversity loss, air and water pollution, climate destabilization, and other major environmental threats.
(2) Economic Sustainability
A healthy environment is the foundation of a healthy economy. We need healthy soils for agriculture, healthy forests for timber, and healthy oceans for fisheries. Along with clean air for breathing and clean water for drinking, these are the building blocks of a prosperous economy and a good life.
(3) National Security and International Stability
When economic growth threatens the environment and economic sustainability, social unrest is the result, and national security is compromised. Economic growth was once used for building military power, but in an overgrown global economy, economic sustainability is more conducive to diplomacy and stability among nations.
(more…)
It’s business as usual that’s the utopian fantasy, while creating something very new and different is the pragmatic way forward.
Cross-posted from YES! Magazine, where it was originally posted on July 6, 2011.
Today, the reigning policy orientation holds that the path to greater well-being is to grow and expand the economy. Productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption: all must go continually up. This growth imperative trumps all else. It is widely believed that growth is always worth the price that must be paid for it—even when it undermines families, jobs, communities, the environment, and our sense of place and continuity.
The Limits of Growth
But an expanding body of evidence is now telling us to think again. Economic growth may be the world’s secular religion, but for much of the world it is a god that is failing—underperforming for billions of the world’s people and, for those in affluent societies, now creating more problems than it is solving. The never-ending drive to grow the overall U.S. economy hollows out communities and the environment; it fuels a ruthless international search for energy and other resources; it fails at generating jobs; and it rests on a manufactured consumerism that is not meeting the deepest human needs. Americans are substituting growth and consumption for dealing with the real issues—for doing things that would truly make us and the country better off. Psychologists have pointed out, for example, that while economic output per person in the United States has risen sharply in recent decades, there has been no increase in life satisfaction and levels of distrust and depression have increased substantially.
We need to reinvent the economy, not merely restore it. The roots of our environmental and social problems are systemic and thus require transformational change. Sustaining people, communities, and nature must henceforth be seen as the core goals of economic activity, not hoped for byproducts of an economy based on market success, growth for its own sake, and modest regulation. That is the paradigm shift we seek.
The Progressive Fox is proudly powered by
WordPress
Entries (RSS)
and Comments (RSS).
Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 License