Which of the following innovations would you push your government to support this year?

Recommended Reading: Paul Hawken's Blessed Unrest

In it he describes the "movement" that we all know about, yet has no formal name, leader, or ideology. It is made up of NGOs, non-profits, for-profits, farmers, architects, engineers, individuals, and many others. The movement cannot focus on environment health while neglecting social injustice, indigenous rights, they are all tied together.

The government is a power house of influence, however, it is ran from the top-down: an "elite" few making policy for the majority, which has the potential for disaster. To counteract this and create a bottom-up system, it is up to the individuals, groups, communities, populations, to manifest the change that we want to see in the world today. We have vast amounts of social, environmental, educational and political injustices that need addressing and without people to regulate and fight them, those injustices remain and flourish. Pick a cause, research it, and find out how you can get involved.

There are many problems in the world today and there will not be an end to it all. Do not focus on making a global impact, else you will fail; rather, save the local farm that's under attack by industry or buy energy-saving light bulbs. To be even more efficient, choose to solve for pattern instead of individual problems. In medicine, we don't try to heal every symptom, but the underlying cause of them. This is why we need innovative designs to heal, restore, and prevent the viruses of injustice from infecting what concerns you. YOU are the cure to injustice.

Anthony Rosas

If you're interested in finding more information on organizations or would like to post your own organization, please go to: www.WiserEarth.org

*This is my paraphrase/summary of Paul Hawken's book mentioned above. I am not affiliated with the author, nor the publisher, but I truly believe that he has published a book that's worth your time.

Laydown

Here is what I think the priority of our government is: Give up the notion that we can profit (Govt. contracts) from buying weapons, and selling weapons, and things that explode. Even though the profit margin be the highest of any "goods".
STOP IT! Let us instead explore the profits that really benefit everyone - like all that good stuff posted above. : - )

Well, it is about time for this !!

:-) anyone listening out there ?

time is running up
doing nothing is not an option

Personal action and responsibility first. We can only hold others accountable is we are accountable ourselves.

http://www.sustainablearizona.org/

email: ecosistemas2@gmail.com

Greetings!
Three points:
1.- I understand that throughout History mankind has only studied 9% of all the vacular plants. Vasculars provide our food, textiles, medicine and industrial feedstock. Human civilization is based on them. Shouldn't we be studying the 91% that remains unknown???!! Imagine what we could find there!

2.- We should be looking for answers in other places of our beloved world: deserts, oceans... I am developing a project to produce ethanol from agave (co-products: cellulose, fructose, inulin, bioplastics, biomass, fibres...). Agave produce more that twice the ethanol per hectare/year than corn or sugar cane and it costs much less than half. They don't need water nor agro-chemicals, and are not food. About one third of the world is semi-arid or arid land or degrtaded soil, where agave could thrive. The ocean? WOW!!!

3.- Build bridges, get in touch, know each other. There are a lot of people doing amazing stuff out there. Save the earth. TAKE CONTROL.

All the best

A few notes to those who missed the memo:

1) Peak Oil is here now. The net export crisis is going to start biting major importers like the USA hard within 5 years.

2) Climate Change is here now. The big early impacts are not going to be rising sea levels but droughts and flooding - disruptions of rainfall patterns that will hinder global agriculture just as Peak Gas starts boosting the world price of fertilizer. The effects are already visible and, contrary to our previous understanding that they would only become serious over the medium and long terms, will become globally disruptive over the next decade.

3) The economic crisis is here now. We're starting to see the unraveling of the global debt economy, starting in the USA with the sub-prime mortgage fiasco and rippling out to hit other industrialized countries. I understand that the global derivatives market involves about 8 times the total global GDP (around $500 trillion on paper), and it's essentially a house of cards. When the real economy on which this edifice is built stumbles, the whole thing is going to come crashing down around our ears. The result will be a global depression of indefinite depth and duration.

The economic mess will mean a greatly restricted pool of capital to deal with such things as energy shortages and food supply disruptions around the world. This capital restriction will in turn combine with the limbic fears de-prioritize development of any meaningful scale right off the table.

So while technical bun fights are always interesting (at least to engineers) they are ultimately irrelevant, because they are trying to answer questions that will never be asked.

We should be in full "damage control mode", full scale, civilization wide.

Instead of this, the western world is still in full "party mode", while the rest of the world (those who can) try to imitate us.

This does not bode well.The psychological opposition to change is too deeply entrenched and the window of opportunity for change is about to close.

BUT:

doing nothing is not an option

Cheers,

Sun

PS: there is a good example of what could be done here:

www.mareinitiative.com

Jay Braun

I voted "other," specifically thinking of population control issues because I see this as at the root of all of the other problems listed here upon which fellow "Worldwatchers" are voting. Two of my most memorable lessons from college days (circa the '50s) came from a laboratory exercise that was associated with a genetics course: We were breeding successive generations of E. coli to be increasingly resistant to penicillin; lesson #1 came from watching colonies of E. coli spring up on concentrations of penicillin that were lethal to the original stock - evolution in action was being demonstrated in my very own petri dishes! The second lesson - the one most relevant to my vote for "other," came from watching the demise of the E. coli colonies as they consumed all of their resources and became somewhat toxic.

All of the other issues listed here will contribute to supporting an ever increasing world population by tweaking carrying capacity. But the poor will still become poorer, conflicts over limited resources in less fortunate parts of the world will continue to increase, and limits will be reached, just like in the E. coli experiment. Unfortunately, the bacteria knew nothing about prophylaxis and from a genetic standpoint they had never confronted a challenge that would limit or destroy their species. We are in a quite different situation on both counts.

When will we make sustainability a core part of our education systems? When will we come to understand it's as important as being literate or numerate or versed in the principles of science (or moreso)? When will we call on our governments to grant core status to sustainability within education systems? Define it (living within the limits and tolerances of the Earth's natural systems)...and teach the principles and practices that make it possible.
Yes, this will affect economies. If we do it right, it could improve them. If we don't do it, it will undermine them (un-sustainability, that is).
Change takes courage, and public insistence, and a clear sense of what's right. We know (deep down) that unfettered consumption is not sustainable. Our children will have less, not more, if we work primarily to consume.
It's time to think ahead, for our children, for all the species and ecosystems we are putting at risk, for the beauty of this planet that we mindlessly destroy with every additional flick of indestructable plastic waste and splash of persistant pollutant.
Societies educate for what they think is most important.
It's time to educate - universally - for sustainability.

Elise Houghton
Environmental Education Ontario (EEON)
Canada

kia orana, greetings all,

Having lived on a small island for the last 30 years, I (modestly, naturellement) believe I am ideally equipped to issue perspectives on saving a rather small planet.

Well, not so much the planet itself, as the species lucky enough to survive on it, at least for now. All the poll options outlined sound good, but, really, it seems increasingly like rearranging deck chairs on a vertically inclining Titanic.

What is needed is an anti-slavery, universal declaration of human fights and corruption crusade rolled into one, big, fat revolution, via the internet, a kind of community based journalistic jihad against captains of industry, exposing these idiots as increasingly clueless about where the real icebergs of existence lurk. New definitions of GDP? Oui, absolutement.

kia toa, stay strong,

jason brown
editor
avaiki news agency

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