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POPSEconomists Search for New Definition of Well-Being
"GDP has increasingly become used as a measure of societal well-being and changes in the structure of the economy and our society have made it an increasingly poor one," Stiglitz told the news agency Bloomberg in a recent interview. "So many things that are important to individuals are not included in GDP." In the model they unveiled last week in Paris, the academics recommend including other factors, such as sustainability and education. Significant Shortcomings Even the inventor of the gross domestic product measure, the late Russian-American economist Simon Kuznets, was aware that the classic method of computing GDP had significant shortcomings. "The welfare of a nation can scarcely be inferred from a measure of national income," he said in 1934. This is because the growth rate says nothing about the distribution of wealth in a country, the state of health of its citizens or their life expectancy. The number provides no information about the cleanliness of rivers or the amo
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POPSThe Crisis of Global Land Use
Meeting these huge new agricultural demands will be one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century. At present, it is completely unclear how (and if) we can do it. If this wasn't enough, we must also address the massive environmental impacts of our current agricultural practices, which new evidence indicates rival the impacts of climate change. Consider the following. Already, we have cleared or converted more than 35 percent of the earth's ice-free land surface for agriculture, whether for croplands, pastures or rangelands. In fact, the area used for agriculture is nearly 60 times larger than the area of all of the world's cities and suburbs. Since the last ice age, nothing has been more disruptive to the planet's ecosystems than agriculture. What will happen to our remaining ecosystems, including tropical rainforests, if we need to double or triple world agricultural production, while simultaneously coping with climate change? Yes, it is an inconvenient truth as the origi
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POPSFood Is Power and the Powerful Are Poisoning Us
I don’t think anyone disagrees that a single corporation can be more efficient than several smaller companies. However, when it comes to food production, bigger is not better. I am not a big fan of mega-corporations, I think they lose touch with consumers and this leads to them doing whatever they think is most financially beneficial to themselves without regard to their customers desires. It’s the old ‘too big to fail’ mentality. This loss of connection, along with us losing (giving up) our knowledge of how to grow our own food, is contributing to our poor diets and as a result our poor health. ‘Big Food’ produces more convenience foods, typically cheap and fatty, because it is cheaper for them to produce and because we buy it. In order for us to loosen the grip that ‘Big Food’ has on us and to regain our sense of self-sustainability, we are going to need a major shift in our commitment to our health and re-learning how to grow our own food is how this is going to happen.
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POPSPopulation and Sustainability "The sustainability benefits of level or falling human numbers are too powerful to ignore for long" The question remains however, in what fashion can we individually change the sustainability balance. important article.
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POPSTim O'Reilly - Seeing our culture with fresh eyes More: What will people think of our enormous steak dinners and obese portions of food? That's on the cusp of changing. What will they think of our profligate use of fossil fuels and other non-renewable resources? Our assumption that the American way of life will go on forever, just as it is, much as the British thought their empire would go on forever? What about our assumptions about unlimited technological progress? Will science fiction visions of star flight or "the Singularity" seem as quaint as "the White Man's Burden"? Above all, what will they think of the appalling amount of waste in our culture? Have you ever walked through a tourist area - say Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco - and seen entire stores devoted to schlock, made in developing countries by people who must scratch their heads in wonder at a people so wealthy that they can afford to spend money on things that are so utterly and obviously useless?
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POPSFake Steve Jobs: When you buy "made in China", this is what you're buying
More: Well, this is the world we are living in. These are the people we are dealing with… We can't make these products in the United States. Nobody could afford to buy them if we did. And, frankly, the quality would be about half what we get out of China. But these guys play rough. They really do. They are not nice people. And, though we talk a good game about how we insist on workers being treated with dignity, blah blah blah, well, I mean, come on. Have you ever been to China?… We know what goes on there. We know how they open your mail, and listen to your phone calls, and let their factories pollute like crazy and exploit workers, all in the name of progress. And we turn a blind eye to it. We let them know when we're coming to visit, and they give us a tour and put on a little show of how great things are, and how wonderful the dorm life is, and afterward we pretend to keep an eye on them -- but it's all theater. It is. We know it. What's more, you know it. Everyone knows it.
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POPSRoundup weedkiller kills human cells More: One specific inert ingredient, polyethoxylated tallowamine, or POEA, was more deadly to human embryonic, placental and umbilical cord cells than the herbicide itself – a finding the researchers call “astonishing.”…Roundup might cause pregnancy problems by interfering with hormone production, possibly leading to abnormal fetal development, low birth weights or miscarriages…an Argentine scientist and local activists reported a high incidence of birth defects and cancers in people living near crop-spraying areas. Scientists there also linked genetic malformations in amphibians to glysophate. In addition, last year in Sweden, a scientific team found that exposure is a risk factor for people developing non-Hodgkin lymphoma… Federal law classifies all pesticide ingredients that don’t harm pests as “inert”…Inert compounds, therefore, aren’t necessarily biologically or toxicologically harmless – they simply don’t kill insects or weeds. Monsanto is evil.
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POPSIs the United States drifting toward "war socialism"? The difficulty with the BNP supporting these kinds of ideas is that they are associated quite rightly by the mainstream with the Party's racialist history. The time has come for a New Party to be formed which embraces autarchy, but not racialism. The same for the US: Time for a New Party.
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POPSWhat Would It Look Like? awakening, ecological crisis, global, hope, inspiration, interconnectedness, oneness, paradigm shift, reality, sustainability, transformation, unity http://www.globalonenessproject.org/videos/goptrailer
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POPSOakland is 4th greenest city in US (San Fran is #2, Berkeley #7) More: Since there is as yet no official criteria set by the Environmental Protection Agency for determining a city's "greeness", Mother Nature Network considered several key areas to measure the effectiveness of a municipality's efforts at carbon footprint reduction. These included air and water quality, efficient recycling and management of waste, percentage of LEED certified buildings, acres of land devoted to green space, use of renewable energy, and easy access to green products and services.
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POPSCenter for Radical Urban Sustainability in Trouble I wonder how many buildings the City of Austin owns, that are not kept up to code? Why don't they help keep good tenants in and save themselves the trouble of taking over another property? Then again, may be there's a new buyer hoping to put up some condos after cutting all the trees down. That would be the plan here in Buffalo!
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