Posted by: Tamie Wexler
on 23 Apr, 2012
It's generally easy to be environmentally friendly around the house when you live on your own and you own your own home, but it can get a little more complicated when you're a renter, as many of us are. Worse still, when you share a house with people who aren’t environmentally friendly or sustainable at all. Their lazy actions make your bills increase and you’re left to foot the bill. If you’re like me, it probably drives you crazy when your housemate leaves the light on after they leave the house and won’t even use the recycling bin. Seriously, how easy is it to recycle these days? So how do you make a lazy flatmate change their habits and be a little more sustainable and eco-savy?
Posted by: Mark Mann
on 24 Jan, 2012
Lester Brown is one of America's leading environmentals, and founder of the Earth Policy Institute and Worldwatch (which produces the annual state of the planet reports). World on the Edge, his latest book, outlines the Earth Institute's "Plan B", a big-picture blueprint to save the world/civilisation from environmental catastrophe.
The first part of the book rounds up our current environmental woes. It's familiar territory, but a useful overview nevertheless.
The underlying problem, Brown says, is over-population (itself made possible by using fossil fuels, soil nutrients and water at unsustainable rates). This, in turn, is driving rapid deforestation, soil depletion and desertification, draining ancient freshwater aquifers and pushing fish stocks to collapse.
Rapidly rising consumption in emerging economies such as China, India and Brazil is exacerbating these problems.
On top of all that, increased use of fossil fuels is causing climate change. This will devastate agriculture through sea level rises, changing rainfall patterns, heat stress, increased drought and melting glaciers. For instance glaciers, most notably in the Himalaya, act as frozen freshwater aquifers on which a quarter of world food production depends. A one metre sea level rise would shrink Asia's rice harvest. Drought is spreading Africa's Sahara desert south. Ocean acidification and ocean warming will destroy coral reefs and devastate already depleted fish stocks.
Depressing, huh?
But Brown believes we already have the knowledge, technology and money to prevent climate change and environmental disaster.
Read the book if you can, but here's a condensed summary of Brown's plan to save the world...
1. Drive a switch to greater energy efficiency and clean energy by including the full environmental and social costs in the energy price. Make energy companies pay to clean up their pollution; they will pass the cost to the consumer. That would instantly make renewable/zero-carbon energy cheaper than fossil fuel and make energy efficiency more financially compelling. (Currently, taxpayers subsidise fossil fuel through government spending on health and environmental cleanups, and the loss of environmental services and amenity.)
2. Reverse population growth. It is well-established that improved primary education, healthcare and birth control will achieve this in poor countries, which are where the growth is taking place.
3. Implement an "earth restoration plan" of massive reforestation and more environmentally aware farming techniques. This will check soil erosion, stabilise water supplies and draw down carbon from the atmosphere.
4. Redefine "security". Most conflicts and failing states are due to environmental stresses, which leave governments unable to feed their populations. If we redirect some of our "security" budget from military spending to environmental restoration, Brown calculates we can fund his population and earth restoration programs with just 12 per cent of the world's annual military spending. (Or, 28 per cent of the $661 billion US military budget alone; America accounts for 43 per cent of global military spending.)
5. Act quickly: history shows change of sufficient speed and scale is achievable, if the political will is there. Brown cites President Roosevelt harnessing America's industrial might in the second world war in less than three years, and how Iran halved its birthrate between 1987 and 1994.
Of course, generating the political will is the real problem. Brown doesn't have an answer to that. I guess it's up to the rest of us.
Posted by: sustainadelic
on 18 Feb, 2011
In the wake of last year's Deepwater Horizon oil spill, there have been developments in an 18-year court battle over an even larger oil disaster.
Posted by: sustainadelic
on 11 Nov, 2010
Former UK lawyer Polly Higgins, in her new book This Is Ecocide, asks the question: what if destroying the environment was a crime?
Posted by: sustainadelic
on 04 Jun, 2010
Like terrorist attacks, it seems disasters are more important if they happen in the US.
Posted by: sustainadelic
on 24 Mar, 2010
It's not just carbon dioxide and methane, as this excellent article in New Scientist explains.
Posted by: Mark Mann
on 08 Oct, 2009
The recent dust storm that hit Sydney and the east coast could be a sign of things to come, but it's soot, not dust, that could be the real worry. Read more on my Ecoisms blog.
Posted by:
on 31 Mar, 2009
An excellent article in The Age today by Guy Pearse exposes the fatal flaws in the Rudd government's proposed emissions trading scheme. Well worth reading, and also well worth watching this interview with him on SlowTV.
Posted by:
on 13 Nov, 2008
I was listening to a news item about a report from UN's Environment Programme (UNEP) on the brown cloud of smog that tends to hangs over a large chunk of Asia. Just another environmental bad news story, I thought. Then they said this...
