These are the CASSE blog articles on food and agriculture.
Ask Americans what the Green New Deal is all about, and you’ll get two basic answers. Most often you’ll hear, “It’s about moving to renewable energy in order to fight climate change.” You’ll also hear, from a camp further right, “It’s all about socialism!”
Either way, the really green, really new feature is overlooked. What the Green New Deal is really about is the transition to a steady state economy.
This Earth Day, Brent Blackwelder urges us to double the current amount of native forest cover.
Many activities that today damage rivers and fisheries would not occur in a steady state economy.
A momentous choice is before us. Will we choose more mega-highway projects, centralized electric power plants, and mega-dams, or more decentralized wind and solar investments?
What do we do when water supplies are cut off to a city of 400,000 people?
In Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development, sustainable development is described as a process of change which meets the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs and aspirations. To achieve this objective, the report suggests a series of goals that should underlie national and international action on development.
Brent Blackwelder provides an overview of some of the ecological costs of economic growth, as presented in Tony Juniper’s latest book, What has Nature Ever Done for Us?
The purchase of expensive luxury goods requires an agricultural and extractive surplus at the base of the economy–this is the “tropic theory of money.”
What can you do in the face environmental and social mayhem? Learn something, say something, and do something.
Want healthy ecosystems and healthy economies? You’d better think about conserving biocultural heritage.