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Don Quixotes of the Environment
(ENGLISH)
"Don Quixote fought windmills, thinking he was fighting giants. I fight giants thinking I am fighting windmills."
DON QUIXOTE VS THE WINDMILLS!
When the environmental crisis worsens, how can one remain passive? Neither the Rio Earth Summit nor the Kyoto Protocol, regrettably, will do much, particularly when the worst predator refuses to participate. A big change is needed--or else.
I have been long enough on this planet to witness, not the use, but the reckless abuse of resources. While the system measures "success" by the size of the vehicle and the motorboat there can be no solution. And while the system denies space for bicycles and other efficient alternatives there can be no solution.
I have, however, a few earthy proposals:
1. INCREASE THE PRICE OF GASOLINE, such as in Europe and Japan. The revenue so raised could be used to IMPROVE ALTERNATIVE TRANSPORTATION*, from fast trains to the creation of BICICLE LANES along all major streets.
2. Open letters from parents to children, perhaps encouraged via the schools, in which the parents vow to specific lifestyle changes. Such letters are to be conspicuously displayed in the home. For example, it could say, "Ride bicycle to work," etc.
Let's give our children the rigtht to live in harmony with nature. Don Quixote would have said: "Sancho, let's go for the giants!"
*"A massive public works project that did not expand the deficit would help; something like a massive clean energy program or nationwide high-speed rail network financed by new taxes on pollution and fossil fuels. A more progressive tax system would help as well. Both seem inconceivable since the Bush administration wants to spend public works dollars on Mars not earth, and Congress that has just enacted tax breaks that exacerbate the wealth gap."
http://www.eugenelinden.com/news280.html
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Don Quixotes of the Environment
"I feel like Don Quixote, but quite the contrary," says Marina Silva. "Don Quixote fought windmills, thinking he was fighting giants. I fight giants thinking I am fighting windmills."
http://www.sdearthtimes.com/et0298/et0298s6.html
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HOW CERVANTES WAS FOOLED
One day the Lie, which inhabits at the highest and most incredible places such as the government and the pulpit, decided that such Don Quixote was a very dangerous enemy because many others could follow his example... This way in the famous occasion when the noble knight was about to attack the Bad Giants, the Lie revealed itself to Cervantes as windmills...
And that's how from then on more than one revolutionary was frustrated for fear of being called "crazy"...
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Book Review: 'Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed,'
by Jared Diamond
"Moving from the Polynesian cultures on Easter Island to the flourishing American civilizations of the Anasazi and the Maya and finally to the doomed Viking colony on Greenland, Diamond traces the fundamental pattern of catastrophe. Environmental damage, climate change, rapid population growth, and unwise political choices were all factors in the demise of these societies, but other societies found solutions and persisted. Similar problems face us today and have already brought disaster to Rwanda and Haiti, even as China and Australia are trying to cope in innovative ways. Despite our own society’s apparently inexhaustible wealth and unrivaled political power, ominous warning signs have begun to emerge even in ecologically robust areas like Montana.
Brilliant, illuminating, and immensely absorbing, Collapse is destined to take its place as one of the essential books of our time, raising the urgent question: How can our world best avoid committing ecological suicide?"
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/product-description/0670033375/ref=dp_proddesc_0/103-3245296-6883049?%5Fencoding=UTF8&n=283155
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2004 Signals More Global Warming, Extreme Weather: UN
Dec 15, 2004
By Thomas Atkins
GENEVA (Reuters) - Global warming (news - web sites) is set to continue, and bring with it an increase in extreme weather such as hurricanes and droughts, scientists from the United Nations (news - web sites) World Meteorological Organization (news - web sites) warned on Wednesday.
The year 2004 is set to finish as the fourth-warmest since record-keeping began in 1861, fitting a pattern that has placed nine of the past 10 years among the warmest on record, the WMO said in its annual global climate report.
"The series of warm years is continuing," Soobasschandra Chacowry, a director at the WMO, told journalists.
The year is also finishing with an above average number of hurricanes and deadly typhoons, with floods killing thousands in the Philippines and Haiti and storms wreaking $43 billion in damage in the United States. Droughts swept Africa, India and Australia and contributed to record forest fires in Alaska. The global mean surface temperature in 2004 is expected to reach 0.44 degrees Celsius above the 1961-1990 annual average of 14 degrees, with October the warmest October ever recorded.
"It is expected from models that the air temperature will go on rising and the surface temperature will go on rising and the glaciers will go on melting," said WMO scientist Gilles Sommeria.
"There is the likelihood of an increase in extreme events in the coming decade."
PINNED BLAME
Sommeria said the rise in greenhouse gases was man-made.
"The controversy on the greenhouse effect is somewhat artificial," he said, pointing to a 2001 U.N. report predicting global temperatures will rise by 1.4-5.8 degrees by 2100, mainly due to the burning of fossil fuels such as gasoline and coal -- the sharpest rise over a century in the last 10,000 years.
Environment ministers from 80 countries met on Wednesday for the final days of a U.N. conference on climate change that has been unable to crack U.S. resistance to join international efforts against global warming.
The conference of nearly 200 nations has turned into a polarized affair, with the European Union (news - web sites) and nations supporting the Kyoto protocol to cut greenhouse gases in one camp and the United States, the world's biggest polluter, in the other.
Just two months before Kyoto goes into force thanks to Russia's recent ratification, the United States has made it very clear it will not sign up for Kyoto's mandatory caps on emissions after Washington withdrew from the agreement in 2001.
Scientists say rising temperatures are likely to disrupt the climate and trigger more floods, storms and droughts. As glaciers melt, sea levels may rise, swamping low lying Pacific islands and coasts from Florida to Bangladesh.
Chacowry urged governments and people to take heed of year-to-year developments in the abnormal weather patterns documented in the WMO study.
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"Our dependence on foreign oil can only be limited in a significant way
if we reduce our consumption of oil. (4) There is substantial room to
achieve such reductions since the consumption of oil per dollar of GDP
is now more than 40 percent higher in the United States than it is in
Germany and France. Politicians have generally been reluctant to
pursue this goal aggressively because it has been assumed that doing
so would require a European style gasoline tax. As anyone who has
driven in France or Germany knows, an important reason for their lower
consumption of oil is that their gasoline taxes cause gasoline prices
to be nearly three times the level in the United States. The political
impossibility of imposing such a tax was brought home very clearly by
the abject failure of President Clinton's 1993 proposal for a general
Btu energy tax."
http://www.nber.org/feldstein/oil.html
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And then unbelievably the 'Christia-nuts' welcome such unfortunate and preventable destruction of the environment. What's worse, they control the politicians who are sure to vote against any solution. We may be doomed indeed if they have their way...
"Many Christian fundamentalists feel that concern for the future of our planet is irrelevant, because it has no future. They believe we are living in the End Time, when the son of God will return, the righteous will enter heaven, and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire. They may also believe, along with millions of other Christian fundamentalists, that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed -- even hastened -- as a sign of the coming Apocalypse."
http://www.grist.org/news/maindish/2004/10/27/scherer-christian/
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ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM
"Environmental devastation globally and what we call environmental racism in the United States, are violations of human rights, and they occur for similar reasons: it is cheaper to pollute if you do not have to clean it up and the communities affected tend to have limited political and economic power to prevent such pollution in the first place. Globally, a double standard exists as to what is acceptable in certain communities, villages or cities and not in others. That will change as more communities see the link between what is happening to them and what is happening to others, and understand the connection between the global economy, environmental devastation and human rights violations."
http://www.technicalassistance.com/ipu.htm
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But there's hope...
The Greening of the Kibbutz
Environmentalists hope to restore the kibbutz movement to its former place on the leading edge of social innovation
by Jan Martin Bang
Imagine a string of villages, settled over the last twenty five years by young people from all over the world, inspired by the ideals of building a new society. A cooperative society, not using money, trusting each other, each village having unique characteristics, owning all things in common, bringing up their children in a new educational system, practicing democracy at a grass roots, village level. In short, building a new type of culture.
Doesn't that sound inspiring? Can such a thing exist? Is this just a dream? A utopia, no place?
(...)
It is clear that many of the features of kibbutz society are not seen in an environmental focus. Sharing resources such as cars, washing, and eating makes for much less impact upon our natural ecology. Just the reduction in the amount of food packaging achieved by bulk buying is quite significant. Kibbutz certainly has not solved all the ecological problems of our society, but it is a long step forward from the consumer oriented nuclear family situation prevalent in most western societies.
(...)
On the way home on the early morning flight I reflected on what I had experienced over the last few days. I had been privileged to visit a group of communities who were looking to the future with an earnest wish to create a culture and a lifestyle that would be sustainable and kind to the natural ecology in which they found themselves. This desire to give something worthwhile to the future was so in keeping with traditional kibbutz ideology that here indeed lay the future of our movement. We were founded upon a desire to build something for future generations, and much of this has been dissipated in the fast paced modern life we find ourselves in, compounded of intrusive western dreams of consumerism and competition. The task of the Green Kibbutz Group became quite clear to me, to find this concern in every kibbutz in the country, and nurture it, helping it along to make the kibbutz movement once again a leading social experiment. Where modern consumerism and capitalism armed with the latest technology are creating a wasteland unfit for human habitation, we have a task to create a new society, one which will use the technology available to us, in a spirit of cooperation, to create communities which will be sustainable and live lightly on the land.
http://www.ru.org/artkibb.html
Also, Scandinavia leads the way in SUSTAINABLE ENERGY...
"Renewable energy will play an important role in the future global energy supply and the Nordic region is taking a leading role in transforming the way we supply and use this new energy. From wind and water, to hydrogen and solar power, these resources are developing quickly in the Nordics..."
http://www.nordicatexpo2005.com/object.php?obj=20000c
(SPANISH)
DON QUIJOTE VS LOS MOLINOS!
Cuando la crisis ambiental se agrava, como puede uno permanecer pasivo? Ni la Cumbre de Rio ni el Protocolo de Kioto, lamentablemente, van a resolver mucho, menos aun cuando el peor depredador se niega a participar. Se necesita un gran cambio--o sufriremos las consequencias...
Yo he vivido lo suficiente sobre este planeta como para ser testigo, no del uso, sino del abuso descuidado de los recursos. Mientras el sistema mida el "triunfo" por el tamano del vehiculo o el bote de motor no puede haber solucion. Y mientras el sistemsa niegue espacio a las bicicletas y otras alternativas eficientes no puede haber solucion.
Yo tengo, sin embargo, unas propuetas:
1. INCREMENTAR EL PRECIO DE LA GASOLINA, tal como en Europa y Japon. Los ingresos asi obtenidos podrian ser usados para MEJORAR EL TRANSPORTE ALTERNATIVO, desde los trenes rapidos hasta la creacion de LINEAS DE BICICLETA a lo largo de todas las avenidas principales.
2. Cartas abiertas de padres a hijos, quizas implementadas por las escuelas, en las cuales los padres se comprometen a cambios de vida especificos. Tales cartas serian visiblemente exhibidas en el hogar. Por ejemplo, podria decir, "Usar bicicleta para ir al
trabajo", etc.
Demosles a nuestros hijos el derecho de vivir en harmonia con la naturaleza. Don Quijote hubiera dicho: "Sancho, vamos por los molinos!"
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The Simpler Way
The Rich and Famous
Reagan's legacy
Silent Tsunamis
The Heat is Online
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