Say Good Bye to Kiribati

The Pacific islands of Kiribati were among the last places to be colonized by humans. But now, because of rising sea levels, they may be among the first to be abandoned.

Should Kiribati President Anote Tong surrender to climate change and evacuate? Can anything be done to help him buy more time?

Duration: 25:59
Location: Kiribati
Producer: James Heer
Language: English

Source: IFAD

Would These Children Ever Get Their Wish?

Severn Suzuki speaking at UN Earth Summit 1992. Her call is as relevant then as it is now

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZsDliXzyAY

The transcript:

Hello, I'm Severn Suzuki speaking for E.C.O. - The Environmental Children's Organisation.

We are a group of twelve and thirteen-year-olds from Canada trying to make a difference: Vanessa Suttie, Morgan Geisler, Michelle Quigg and me. We raised all the money ourselves to come six thousand miles to tell you adults you must change your ways. Coming here today, I have no hidden agenda. I am fighting for my future.

Losing my future is not like losing an election or a few points on the stock market. I am here to speak for all generations to come.

I am here to speak on behalf of the starving children around the world whose cries go unheard.

I am here to speak for the countless animals dying across this planet because they have nowhere left to go. We cannot afford to be not heard.

I am afraid to go out in the sun now because of the holes in the ozone. I am afraid to breathe the air because I don't know what chemicals are in it.

I used to go fishing in Vancouver with my dad until just a few years ago we found the fish full of cancers. And now we hear about animals and plants going extinct every day -- vanishing forever.

In my life, I have dreamt of seeing the great herds of wild animals, jungles and rainforests full of birds and butterflies, but now I wonder if they will even exist for my children to see.

Did you have to worry about these little things when you were my age?

All this is happening before our eyes and yet we act as if we have all the time we want and all the solutions. I'm only a child and I don't have all the solutions, but I want you to realise, neither do you!

* You don't know how to fix the holes in our ozone layer.
* You don't know how to bring salmon back up a dead stream.
* You don't know how to bring back an animal now extinct.
* And you can't bring back forests that once grew where there is now desert.

If you don't know how to fix it, please stop breaking it!

Here, you may be delegates of your governments, business people, organizers, reporters or politicians - but really you are mothers and fathers, brothers and sister, aunts and uncles - and all of you are somebody's child.
I'm only a child yet I know we are all part of a family, five billion strong, in fact, 30 million species strong and we all share the same air, water and soil -- borders and governments will never change that.

I'm only a child yet I know we are all in this together and should act as one single world towards one single goal.

In my anger, I am not blind, and in my fear, I am not afraid to tell the world how I feel.

In my country, we make so much waste, we buy and throw away, buy and throw away, and yet northern countries will not share with the needy. Even when we have more than enough, we are afraid to lose some of our wealth, afraid to share.

In Canada, we live the privileged life, with plenty of food, water and shelter -- we have watches, bicycles, computers and television sets.

Two days ago here in Brazil, we were shocked when we spent some time with some children living on the streets. And this is what one child told us: "I wish I was rich and if I were, I would give all the street children food, clothes, medicine, shelter and love and affection."

If a child on the street who has nothing, is willing to share, why are we who have everything still so greedy?

I can't stop thinking that these children are my age, that it makes a tremendous difference where you are born, that I could be one of those children living in the Favellas of Rio; I could be a child starving in Somalia; a victim of war in the Middle East or a beggar in India.

I'm only a child yet I know if all the money spent on war was spent on ending poverty and finding environmental answers, what a wonderful place this earth would be!

At school, even in kindergarten, you teach us to behave in the world. You teach us:

* not to fight with others,
* to work things out,
* to respect others,
* to clean up our mess,
* not to hurt other creatures
* to share - not be greedy.

Then why do you go out and do the things you tell us not to do?

Do not forget why you're attending these conferences, who you're doing this for -- we are your own children. You are deciding what kind of world we will grow up in. Parents should be able to comfort their children by saying "everyting's going to be alright" , "we're doing the best we can" and "it's not the end of the world".

But I don't think you can say that to us anymore. Are we even on your list of priorities? My father always says "You are what you do, not what you say."

Well, what you do makes me cry at night. You grown ups say you love us. I challenge you, please make your actions reflect your words. Thank you for listening.

Copenhagen climate change conference: 'Fourteen days to seal history's judgment on this generation'

This editorial calling for action from world leaders on climate change was published December 7, 2009 by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial. We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

Unless we combine to take decisive action, climate change will ravage our planet, and with it our prosperity and security. The dangers have been becoming apparent for a generation. Now the facts have started to speak: 11 of the past 14 years have been the warmest on record, the Arctic ice-cap is melting and last year's inflamed oil and food prices provide a foretaste of future havoc. In scientific journals the question is no longer whether humans are to blame, but how little time we have got left to limit the damage. Yet so far the world's response has been feeble and half-hearted.

Climate change has been caused over centuries, has consequences that will endure for all time and our prospects of taming it will be determined in the next 14 days. We call on the representatives of the 192 countries gathered in Copenhagen not to hesitate, not to fall into dispute, not to blame each other but to seize opportunity from the greatest modern failure of politics. This should not be a fight between the rich world and the poor world, or between east and west. Climate change affects everyone, and must be solved by everyone.

The science is complex but the facts are clear. The world needs to take steps to limit temperature rises to 2C, an aim that will require global emissions to peak and begin falling within the next 5-10 years. A bigger rise of 3-4C — the smallest increase we can prudently expect to follow inaction — would parch continents, turning farmland into desert. Half of all species could become extinct, untold millions of people would be displaced, whole nations drowned by the sea. The controversy over emails by British researchers that suggest they tried to suppress inconvenient data has muddied the waters but failed to dent the mass of evidence on which these predictions are based.

Few believe that Copenhagen can any longer produce a fully polished treaty; real progress towards one could only begin with the arrival of President Obama in the White House and the reversal of years of US obstructionism. Even now the world finds itself at the mercy of American domestic politics, for the president cannot fully commit to the action required until the US Congress has done so.

But the politicians in Copenhagen can and must agree the essential elements of a fair and effective deal and, crucially, a firm timetable for turning it into a treaty. Next June's UN climate meeting in Bonn should be their deadline. As one negotiator put it: "We can go into extra time but we can't afford a replay."

At the deal's heart must be a settlement between the rich world and the developing world covering how the burden of fighting climate change will be divided — and how we will share a newly precious resource: the trillion or so tonnes of carbon that we can emit before the mercury rises to dangerous levels.

Rich nations like to point to the arithmetic truth that there can be no solution until developing giants such as China take more radical steps than they have so far. But the rich world is responsible for most of the accumulated carbon in the atmosphere – three-quarters of all carbon dioxide emitted since 1850. It must now take a lead, and every developed country must commit to deep cuts which will reduce their emissions within a decade to very substantially less than their 1990 level.

Developing countries can point out they did not cause the bulk of the problem, and also that the poorest regions of the world will be hardest hit. But they will increasingly contribute to warming, and must thus pledge meaningful and quantifiable action of their own. Though both fell short of what some had hoped for, the recent commitments to emissions targets by the world's biggest polluters, the United States and China, were important steps in the right direction.

Social justice demands that the industrialised world digs deep into its pockets and pledges cash to help poorer countries adapt to climate change, and clean technologies to enable them to grow economically without growing their emissions. The architecture of a future treaty must also be pinned down – with rigorous multilateral monitoring, fair rewards for protecting forests, and the credible assessment of "exported emissions" so that the burden can eventually be more equitably shared between those who produce polluting products and those who consume them. And fairness requires that the burden placed on individual developed countries should take into account their ability to bear it; for instance newer EU members, often much poorer than "old Europe", must not suffer more than their richer partners.

The transformation will be costly, but many times less than the bill for bailing out global finance — and far less costly than the consequences of doing nothing.

Many of us, particularly in the developed world, will have to change our lifestyles. The era of flights that cost less than the taxi ride to the airport is drawing to a close. We will have to shop, eat and travel more intelligently. We will have to pay more for our energy, and use less of it.

But the shift to a low-carbon society holds out the prospect of more opportunity than sacrifice. Already some countries have recognized that embracing the transformation can bring growth, jobs and better quality lives. The flow of capital tells its own story: last year for the first time more was invested in renewable forms of energy than producing electricity from fossil fuels.

Kicking our carbon habit within a few short decades will require a feat of engineering and innovation to match anything in our history. But whereas putting a man on the moon or splitting the atom were born of conflict and competition, the coming carbon race must be driven by a collaborative effort to achieve collective salvation.

Overcoming climate change will take a triumph of optimism over pessimism, of vision over short-sightedness, of what Abraham Lincoln called "the better angels of our nature".

It is in that spirit that 56 newspapers from around the world have united behind this editorial. If we, with such different national and political perspectives, can agree on what must be done then surely our leaders can too.

The politicians in Copenhagen have the power to shape history's judgment on this generation: one that saw a challenge and rose to it, or one so stupid that we saw calamity coming but did nothing to avert it. We implore them to make the right choice.

This editorial has been published Monday, 07 December by 56 newspapers around the world in 20 languages including Chinese, Arabic and Russian. The text was drafted by a Guardian team during more than a month of consultations with editors from more than 20 of the papers involved. Like the Guardian most of the newspapers have taken the unusual step of featuring the editorial on their front page.

• How the Copenhagen global leader came about
• Write your own editorial
• The papers that carried the Copenhagen editorial
• In pictures: How newspapers around the world ran the editorial

Deep Ecology - An Old Idea That Could Save Us All

Before the rise of civilization the world was populated with tens of thousands of different cultures. Each one of these cultures had a common thread. They all believed that man belonged to the world. Not a single one of them thought that the world belonged to man. Although they would never have used this term all of these cultures had a deep ecological view of the world.

They saw value in nature for its own sake. The world was not cut up, divided and measured into how useful it was for man. The forests were good in their own right regardless of the fact that they provided us with firewood and building materials.

Civilization changed this. One culture out of the tens of thousands decided that the world belonged to man. It was ours by right. Suddenly in their eyes the world became one big farm for human food. A new way of life was born. The people of civilization sought to turn as much of the land as possible into producing human food. The more food they produced the more people they could support. As their population grew they expanded geographically. From one tiny starting point in the Fertile Crescent civilization spread across the entire globe. All in a mere 10,000 years.

Tribal cultures were sustainable because their vision meant they did not devour the world. They did not see the world as theirs so they did not turn the world all into human food. Their vision of man belonging to the world meant they were happy just to take what they needed and let the rest of creation do its own thing. They did not seek to control nature and obtain mastery over the planet.

Our civilization at its very core is unsustainable. Our destructive nature is caused by this vision that the world is ours by right. Whenever we cut down a forest to turn it into farmland we are displacing other life forms. But we do not think about that. Of course we can cut down the forest. Who cares about the birds and insects; they do not own the forest, we do. For 10,000 years we have been adding more human mass to the planet and at an equal rate non-human life has been disappearing.

Now as the human population grows faster than ever other species are dying out at an alarming rate. 200 species a day are becoming extinct. Our place at the top of the food chain is preserved only by maintaining the integrity of the earth's ecosystem as a whole. The more we destroy the other life forms that support us the more likely it is that the structure of the ecosystem will crumble. The straw that breaks the camels back is not that far away.

What To Do?

Most of the environmental messages you hear today are messages of shallow ecology. Recycle, ride your bike, do not use plastic bags, do not waste paper etc etc. Shallow ecology realizes that we are destroying the planet. So it encourages us to refrain from that - but only so we can continue to own it and exercise our control over it.

Deep ecology advocates a change at the fundamental level of our culture. Recycling will not save us. Changing the vision, seeing ourselves as a part of the community of life is what needs to change.

Change the vision and the actions will naturally follow. But try and mitigate a destructive vision with minor actions like Eco-friendly light bulbs and you will fail.

By Thomas Maurer is a writer who explores the links between our culture, individual suffering and the present environmental crisis. He is an advocate of Deep Ecology which argues that man is a part of nature; not divorced from nature and needing to control it.

Sustainable Farming: An Imperative

We hear it all the time: farming is 'in crisis'. In Europe, and across the 'developed' world, there is not a day that passes without more reports of farmers going to the brink, even committing suicide out of despair at the state of their industry. It is not unusual to hear farmers cry that this is the worst crisis on the land since the depression of the 1930s. Unfortunately, it isn't getting any better.

Governments are of no help. The solutions they advanced are a combination of short-termism and defeatism. Give more money to the farmers, in the form of ever-larger subsidies, whilst accepting that, in the long term, traditional farming is doomed, and the only way to go is to engage in an ever-more intensification, combined with 'diversification' for those who don't have the machines, money or land area to rough it out in the new global agricultural market.

At the other end of the equation, mostly in the 'Third World', are peasant subsistence farmers who are finding it difficult to survive whilst their centuries-old farming systems are being undermined by global politics and economics, and who would consider themselves lucky if they produce enough food for their families, let alone generate a surplus for sale.

There is a clear connection between the problems of farmers in the developed and undeveloped worlds. Both are brought by a global trade in agriculture which subsidizes and promotes vast, intensive, capital-rich farmers and destroys everyone else. This approach benefits big 'agribusinesses' and supermarkets, but not the countryside, smaller farmers and the communities that they support. It does not take into consideration the ecological, social and cultural factors necessary to real agriculture. On the contrary, it undermines centuries-old traditional farming practices and drives farmers already in a desperate situation into a vicious circle of technological dependence that further weakens their vital cultural links with the land.

The system that is killing farmers and farming all over the world is a system that regards agriculture as just another industry - a global food factory, subject to the same rules of 'free' trade as car factories or mining. This is a fallacy, but within the current system, it is one which remains virtually unchallenged. For within the current paradigm of global-tradecomes-before-all-else there is, as Margaret Thatcher once famously put it, 'no alternative'.

But there is. And it works.

Towards A New Relationship With The land

Profiteering from land transactions degrades both the nature-human relationship and the social fabric of humanity.

Access to land is important in the economic sphere (as well as the residential sphere, of course). But when access is perpetuated, once the productive purpose has stopped, it becomes inappropriate and destructive.

This article is not promoting socialism, per se. It is not recommending that means of production be transferred to common ownership. As Steiner indicates: “Instead of common ownership of the means of production, a circulation of the means of production will come about within the social organization, so that these continually become available to the people whose individual capacities can render them of greatest possible use to the whole community.”

In this model, land-property ceases to be what it has been up until now. And it does not revert to an old, outdated form, such as common ownership represents, but is led forward to become something wholly new. Land-property is made more fluid, entering the flow of social relationships and processes. The individual can no longer manage land in his own interest to the detriment of the general interest; but nor can the general community manage it bureaucratically to the individual’s detriment. Instead, suitable individuals will gain access to it, and use it to serve the community.

Of course, this social renewal also includes the cultivation of spiritual and creative faculties, faculties that are largely over-whelmed at this time by our materialistic focus. For example, economic theorists often cite profit motivation as a necessary driving force in the economic realm of society. However, once an individual discovers the greater profit that is born out of his/her individual spiritual and creative process, and that moves into the world as a beneficial resource for the well-being of the community, or overall social organism, material profit as a motivation becomes redundant.

Finally, a quote from Vision and Action for Another World – Powerful Ideas and Inspiring Practical Approaches, ed. Ulrich Roesch:

“Land belongs to everyone, though it is utilized by individuals. In this sense, individual ‘ownership’ of land can only refer to the right of utilization. As long as such individual utilization continues unchanged, there is no need for societal action. Society only has to ensure that a new user can step into the rights of the previous user, when the previous user quits. In such a system, the right of land utilization would change hands only by assignment, not by sale. In this way, land ‘ownership’ would be brought back into circulation within the social system.. Society would not manage the land; it would only ensure that it is available to (suitable) individuals for utilization, and also that such utilization is not made impossible because of prohibitive pricing.

Instead of a purchase price paid to the previous owner, society could impose a social compensation payment for any ongoing utilization of land. This is justified because the use of land by one individual excludes everyone else from using the same plot. Communal income accruing from the compensation payments would be used to benefit all people in the respective region of that part of the world. Such compensation payments do not constitute interest on capital, since no sale, and thus no capital transfer, has taken place. Their quantification would not be determined by supply and demand but by social considerations. For instance, society can adjust the amount of payment so as to further ecological agriculture, or some other societal goal.”




Further resources:


The reader is invited to visit the full version from which this article has been excerpted - The End of Real Estate - and what can take its place.

The Important Differences Between "Climate Change" and "Global Warming"

Many people in the media (and elsewhere) use the terms "climate change" and "global warming" interchangeably, as if they were the same thing. But there are differences between the meanings of the two terms. 

Getting a better handle on the definitions of and differences between "global warming" and "climate change" will help us understand why the threat caused by continued warming of the planet is so serious.

Planet Earth's current warming trend is based largely on natural warming and cooling cycles that have been happening for eons; as well as human-caused additions to greenhouse gases, which are boosting the atmosphere's ability to trap heat in the biosphere. Minor factors like an overall increase in the sun's solar intensity play a smaller role.

While greenhouse gases are an essential component of a livable planet - they're what keep Earth from being a lifeless ball of ice - humans are causing greenhouse gas levels to increase so quickly that it's causing the average global temperature to rise much faster than it would naturally. This warming is predicted to lead to a variety of negative effects, including:

1) Melting (and possible disappearance) of glaciers and mountain snow caps that feed the world's rivers and supply a large portion of the fresh water used for drinking and irrigation.

2) A rise in sea levels due to the melting of the land-based ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica, with many islands and coastal areas ending up more exposed to storm damage or even underwater.

3) Increasingly costly "bad weather" events such as heat waves, droughts, floods, and severe storms.

4) Lowered agricultural productivity due to less favorable weather conditions, less available irrigation water, increased heat stress to plants, and an increase in pest activity due to warmer temperatures.

5) Increases in vector-borne infectious diseases like malaria and Lyme Disease.

6) Large numbers of extinctions of higher-level species due to their inability to adapt to rapidly changing climate and habitat conditions.

The first two of these effects are mostly related to increasing average temperatures. Items 3-6 are related to heat too, but also playing a role are non-temperature factors - i.e. "climate-change factors."

Climate change is about much more than how warm or cool our temperatures are. Whereas "global warming" refers to increasing global temperatures, "climate change" refers to regional conditions. Climate is defined by a number of factors, including:

1) Average regional temperature as well as day/night temperature patterns and seasonal temperature patterns.

2) Humidity.

3) Precipitation (average amounts and seasonal patterns).

4) Average amount of sunshine and level of cloudiness.

5) Air pressure and winds.

6) Storm events (type, average number per year, and seasonal patterns).

To a great extent, this is what we think of as "weather." Indeed, weather patterns are predicted to change in response to global warming:

1) Some areas will become drier, some will become wetter.

2) Many areas will experience an increase in severe weather events like killer heat waves, hurricanes, flood-level rains, and hail storms.

It's tempting to think that all of these changes to the world's climate regions will average out over time and geography and things will be fine. In fact, colder climates like Canada may even see improved agricultural yields as their seasonal temperatures rise. But overall, humanity has made a huge investment in "things as they are now, where they are now."

Gone are the days of millennia ago when an unfavorable change in climate might cause a village to pack up their relatively few belongings and move to a better area. We have massive societal and industrial infrastructure in place, and it cannot be easily moved. Climate-change effects will generally not be geographically escapable in the timeframe over which they happen, at least not for the majority of humans and species.

 James Nash