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not to be forgotten but still unforgiving
Jan. 31st, 2012 10:15 amA UN panel issued a report yesterday called Resilient Planet, Resilient People: A Future Worth Choosing.
The report gives an overview on how the panel members see the world relationships between politics, economy, sustainability, education and poverty. They paint a picture of how things are likely to go if we continue on the current track, and some of the reasons why we're stuck on that track.
As these things go, they call for change:
The panel goes on to make 56 recommendations (.pfd) to get us off this track. As I was reading them, I was thinking -- yep, this would probably do it.
Fretful, fretful, fretful.
I have been thinking of something and last night I decided that I need to get off my butt and do it; I'm going to write a book to my grandchildren.
I'm going to write an essay every year about what things look like around me, how I perceive the world, how all of the family has done in the last year (births, deaths, graduations, marriages, jobs, homes) and how The Plan is going. I will tell them how I spend my days, and what I think about. :P I'm sure they'll be fascinated. Once a year, for the next twenty years. I'll include an addendum of what I think are the most important news stories and scientific papers. I'll print it out on archival paper and place it in a wooden box -- Lisa's Book.
The report gives an overview on how the panel members see the world relationships between politics, economy, sustainability, education and poverty. They paint a picture of how things are likely to go if we continue on the current track, and some of the reasons why we're stuck on that track.
As these things go, they call for change:
That is why the Panel argues that the international community needs what some have called “a new political economy” for sustainable development. This means, for example: radically improving the interface between environmental science and policy; recognizing that in certain environmental domains, such as climate change, there is “market failure”, which requires both regulation and what the economists would recognize as the pricing of “environmental externalities”, while making explicit the economic, social and environmental costs of action and inaction; recognizing the importance of innovation, new technologies, international cooperation and investments responding to these problems and generating further prosperity; recognizing that an approach should be agreed to quantify the economic cost of sustained social exclusion — for example, the cost of excluding women from the workforce; recognizing that private markets alone may be incapable of generating at the scale necessary to bring about a proper response to the food security crisis; and requiring international agencies, national Governments and private corporations to report on their annual sustainable development performance against agreed sustainability measures. We must also recognize that this is a core challenge for politics itself. Unless the political process is equally capable of embracing the sustainable development paradigm, there can be no progress.
The panel goes on to make 56 recommendations (.pfd) to get us off this track. As I was reading them, I was thinking -- yep, this would probably do it.
Fretful, fretful, fretful.
I have been thinking of something and last night I decided that I need to get off my butt and do it; I'm going to write a book to my grandchildren.
I'm going to write an essay every year about what things look like around me, how I perceive the world, how all of the family has done in the last year (births, deaths, graduations, marriages, jobs, homes) and how The Plan is going. I will tell them how I spend my days, and what I think about. :P I'm sure they'll be fascinated. Once a year, for the next twenty years. I'll include an addendum of what I think are the most important news stories and scientific papers. I'll print it out on archival paper and place it in a wooden box -- Lisa's Book.
