Where
are we going as a nation?Navigating the site:
Paz, Octavio
On 12 May 2008, John McCain, Republican candidate for the Presidency spoke to the point that global warming was and remains a serious matter for national security and not just the threat to small island states, arctic native peoples of wildlife populations such as polar bears. The point seems to be clear enough; by changing the planet's atmosphere with by combustion of fossil fuels we are creating international turmoil with lasting impacts on the nation's security interests in Asia and the Americas.
Dodds on Kyoto | Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | looting the commons
"Ecosystem functionality is the basis of ecosystem service provisioning and adaptation to climate change."
•"A global map of the functionality of terrestrial ecosystems," Lisa Freudenbergera, Peter R. Hobsonb, Martin Schlucka, Pierre L. Ibischa.
Ecological Complexity, Volume 12, December 2012, Pages 13–22. •
"The functionality of ecosystems is important for energy dissipation, ecosystem service provisioning, resilience to global change and adaptive capacity. Ecosystem complexity and ultimately functionality depend on higher levels of biodiversity, biomass, heterogeneity and evolutionary potential, such as genes. These characteristics are also likely to promote system resilience and adaptive capacity, which are becoming increasingly important under global climate change. This paper proposes a global proxy-based index of ecosystem functionality (EFI). The results generated for all the main global biomes recorded highest index values for tropical and extratropical forest ecoregions. Out of the selected variables vegetation density, topographical heterogeneity and carbon storage demonstrated strong correlations with the ecosystem functionality index. It is argued that the ecosystem functionality index is not only useful for ecological research and conservation science but also as an effective prioritization scheme for biodiversity conservation at the landscape scale in times of rapid global environmental change."
"Ultimately, any proposals for the protection of the earth's atmosphere and Antarctica * have to recognize the unequal power relations between North and South. Global agreements such as the Climate Change Convention are often flawed in the sense that proposals to cut emissions reflect Western scientific assessments and environmental values."
Northern NGOs such as Greenpeace have therefore been important advocates of more precautionary action and more appropriate behavior in the wake of these ever widening North-South inequalities."
Dodds, Geopolitics, p. 124.
"He has used the war on terror to implement Dick Cheney's neo-con agenda --invade Iraq, sink the UN, enrich Haliburton, reward the rich, open our lands to oil and mineral development, destroy our wetlands, hand obscene tax breaks and subsidies to the energy barons, and take a blowtorch to our constitutional rights and environmental laws --all in the name of homeland security."
RFK, Crimes Against Nature, p. 173.
"Lincoln Steffens (1904) concluded that the corruption and failures of American democracy stemmed largely from a single source --the control of government by businesspeople acting in their own self interest. Steffens characterized that formula as a kind of treason, because 'the effect of it is literally to change the form of government from one that is representative of the people to an oligarchy representative of the special interests.' "
Generations of Americans will pay for the Republican campaign debt to the energy industry and other big polluters with global instability, depleted national coffers, and increased vulnerability to oil-market price shocks. They will also pay with reduced prosperity and quality of life at home. ...The administration's attacks on science and the law have put something perhaps even greater at risk--our values and our democracy."
"The country as ... a grab bag for the robber barons."
They are cashing in our air, water, aquifers, wildlife, and public lands and divvying up the loot."
Ibid, p. 198.
* consider, fisheries, ocean protection or any global commons as facing the same problems as Dodds relates here.
Contemporary problems with commons.
Advocacy Class Base | Ecological Accounting | International Reforms needed
