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Green Thoughts The essays, articles and stories in this site are intended as food for your thought. As my fellow green futurist from kiddy-corner across America, Hazel Henderson, advocates "Steal these ideas" and play with them in your own words. My fortunate position on the periphery of change is great for inspiration and creativity, but being a boomman out here in rainy Howe Sound isn’t a great platform for delivering green thoughts to movers and shakers uptown. Astro Family and Thebra are attempts to model our present imperatives beginning a new millenium shifting from the cowboy frontier economy to the spaceship economy of the future. Biomimicry and Natural Capitalism (book reviews) are two hopeful attempts to model sustainable room to grow. Is it wrong? looks at how increasing global integration is changing our moral context in the global village. Monotremata is about contingency, mistakes and how we integrate knowledge. Iraq is our generation's Sudetenland. And our 'Hitler' is also profoundly anti-environmentalist. Looks like a challenge for enviro-activists. I've tried to tell the true story about illegal war and the serious consequences for our complex and evolving global society of 'hollowing out' multilateral relations by this criminal flouting of international law. Three newspaper articles together postulate a frog in boiling water problem with our western democratic governance systems. Balance looks at salmon time and how our political vision ignores the past and discounts the future. Tyranny is a portrait of our service economy as straight jacket - where needed change cannot impact the economy by 10%?, 2%? Talk And Log introduces path dependency, sunk costs and lock-in; even if we know that we are on the wrong policy path, it might not be possible to change to a sustainable path. Path dependence is an emerging social science concept of importance to environmentalists concerned with a range of topics from global warming to sprawl: change to a more sustainable worldview and technologies is restricted by paths taken on decisions trees in the past. Sustained yield path dependence (SYPD) is an informative example of this problem. Path dependence, escaping sustained yield is an appeal in Conservation Ecology for an integration of ecologists and political scientists to confront SYPD. My Tidepool review of IN SEARCH OF SUSTAINABILITY, an insightful look at forest policy in BC in the 1990’s focuses upon SYPD. E-commerce and other manifestations of a high tech economy and ecotourism have been advocated by environmentalists as more sustainable than the present resource based economy still lingering on in Cascadia. This argument is another example of a shallow environmentalism that, like the present forest and fishing industry, is happy not to try and quantify the externalities and their own footprint in developing a sustainable economy. (Thanks to Tidepool Editor Ed Hunt for the editing, superb layout and the many useful hyperlinks.) Accelerating investment in alternative, non-fossil fuel energy technologies is more effective than applying the brakes on the fossil fuel economy road we’re traveling. Choose Climate is a very innovative website where you can find out a ton about the effects of carbon emissions on climate, especially carbon emissions from air travel. I used the Choose Climate interactive map to track the carbon emissions produced by the Toronto Blue Jays in the 2000 season as a way of educating about possible practical use of investment in clean energy by one business in America. Commentary is an editorial segment of CBC Radio's national morning program. I've had the privilage of recording two Commentarys. Compounding Interest looks at the mis-use of compounding interest in our growth dependent economy as a fundamental factor in anthropogenic change such as global warming. Luxury CO2 Production is concerned with our use of gas-guzzling toys and luxury travel in the production of global warming inducing CO2. Neoliberal governments are killing us. Business orientated governments in service sector economies are dismantaling safety nets and eroding environmental regulations in a mad, competitive race to grow economies. Sarah's Green Democrat press conference models evolution to caring, nurturing governments beginning with my native British Columbia. (For my Dad) "It’s the economy stupid!" Neo-liberals believe that growing the economy is the primary task of government, but what if a politician recognized the importance of the environment and the perils of the ‘bottleneck’ situation that we face in the 21st century? Al Gore seemed to understand the importance of the environment. A Speech For Al is an attempt to model the presidential campaign of a candidate aware of the bigger, much more important environmental picture. |