Global Issues

Our world is full of problems.  You are likely aware of some of these problems, but not how deep these problems run.  Yet despite all these problems is hope for the future.  Can we achieve a better future? Yes!  But you yourself must contribute in making that happen.

Precious Resources Being Consumed

Oil and Fossil Fuels Production of crude oil could peak by 2010 and natural gas by 2020.  After a production peak, shortages will occur, leading to increased prices in fossil fuels and everything that depends on them.  Standard of living for most people will likely drop while alternatives to fossil fuels are put into place.  The alternatives to fossil fuels from worse to better are more expensive fossil fuels, nuclear power and renewable resources.

However, we can not go entirely without oil.  Oil is the basis of petrochemical fertilizers that help keep agricultural yields high.  Oil is also the basis of plastics and polymers, which is the basis of most consumer products.

Agricultural Land Agricultural land worldwide is being strained to the limit from desertification.  In an effort to keep agricultural production high, to feed our massive world population, the soil is being overused, leading to loss in topsoil, and losses in yields.  Petrochemical fertilizers are being used in the developed nations to compensate for topsoil loss, but the availability of these fertlizers are in threat due to the future oil shortage.  To ease the stress on the land, if beef and other animal meat consumption was significantly reduced, the land would have a chance to repair itself and could feed over a billion starving people in developing nations.

Habitat Loss Nature itself is at risk.  Habitat for wildlife is being replaced for pasture, agriculture, urban development, mining, and forestry.  Some wildlife is at risk more than others.  Countless species are being lost to make room for cattle pasture in tropical rainforest, in a wasteful slash and burn process.  Ancient forests -- forests that need hundreds of years to generate are being lost to forestry because the most commerically valuable wood are in these forests.  Less than 10% of the world's ancient forest still exist, some types of ancient forests are down to less than 1% of what they were.  Many creatures can only live in these forests.  Road development is making nature into islands split up by roads, reduce valuable habitat.  The amount of roadless areas left in the world are getting smaller and less numerous.  Ripary areas, the area close to shorelines are in risk from agriculture runoff and ill planned housing.  Ripary areas are the richest areas for life in terms of biomass and biodiversity.

Wildlife Loss Habitat loss is major contributor to wildlife loss.  Inside these habitats, animals are being hunted for sport or food at unsustainable rates.  Even though only a small percentage of people hunt, it is still too much because our population is thousands of times larger than what the land can feed us by hunting alone.  Also, global fisheries are down to 10% of their orginal abundance.  Coral reefs, the major structural component of ocean ecosystems, are in significant decline.  Alien species, species that don't belong in a certain habitat are resonsible for deleting native populations in many cases.

Employment Technology is displacing countless job in agriculture, industrial and service sectors of the economy.  When technology first reduced jobs in agriculture and industry, workers shared in the productivity gains by getting shorter work weeks and higher pay.  Today, however, this is not happening.  Workers worldwide are getting longer work weeks at lower pay and business owners are pocketing the gains in productivity.  Unions are systematically being deconstructed.  The middle class is shrinking due to flattening out of company hierarchies.  The result is a growing underclass that is idle and economically useless and are increasingly turning towards crime.  This is wrong.  The benefits of information technology should be shared giving people increased leisure instead of increased unemployment.  Job growth can be improved by empowering the third sector -- non-profit companies -- by taxing the private sector more, especially the super rich.  An added benefit of non-profit companies is it provides balance over the relentless profit machine.

Consumption Consumption is the resource the fuels profits for the private industry.  Without it business would not exist.  However, a person only needs to consume so much food, water, consumer products and services.  Saturation of demand and utilitiarism is not good for business, so private industry has done everything in its power to sustain demand for over a hundred years.  How has business pumped demand?

• Advertising.  Changing advertising from utilitarian and descriptive to emotional appeals to status and social differentiation.  Brand names.  Selling products that used to be made at home.  Consumer credit.  Payment by installment.  Planned obsolence.  Product placement in popular entertainment. Upgrading instead of waiting for products to break down.  Lower cost products to make repairing a more expensive option.  Creating a "dissatisfied customer".  Changing investors in the future to spenders in the present.  Changing from buying to renting, subscriptions, outsourcing, leasing and virtual experiences (entertainment).  Changing from local to global markets.  And much more.

While some consumer products have indeed improved our standard of life, we do need as many of them as we currently consume.

Loss of Self-Sufficiency If you lose your employment you are in a pickle.  There isn't much left we can do for ourselves.  We can't grow our own food, produce our own electricity needs, make our own clothes, are dependent on cars for travel etc.  We have lost access to the means to do things ourselves or don't have the knowledge to do it ourselves.  Because employment is getting harder to find crime is rising worldwide.

Environmental Problems

Pollution Pollution comes in many forms.  Global warming and ozone depletion are two well known variations of air pollution.  But there is also water, ground water, light, noise and cultural pollution.  Pollution is well described on the EPA website (Environmental Protection Agency).

Light Pollution: Light pollution has many effects.  Glare is blinding light that is misdirected into peoples eyes.  Examples are car lights and street lights.  Glare from street lights and other cars reduces safety when driving at night.  Light trespass is when light invades a person's home.  Light trespass can result in a poorer quality sleep due to street lights and other lights shining directly into a bedroom.  Light pollution can degrade the night sky, robbing the people of the opportunity to see a gorgeous night sky.  Light pollution can significantly stress nocturnal wildlife.  Light pollution can also rob people of a rarely practiced form of outdoor recreation -- night walking using only pherheral vision.  Nightwalking is very relaxing.

Multinational Corporations

Multinational corporations are dangerous to our world.  In addition to problems discussed above, such as environmental degradation and consuming non-renewable resources multinational corporations are also responsible for arms trade, animal suffering, censorship, oppressive regimes and exploiting workers.  Worker exploitation works on two levels.  In developed nations workers work at minimum wage with little overtime pay, in very stressful environments.  Unions are strenously opposed.  In developing nations, the situation is worse -- sweatshops.  Imagine pay that isn't enough even in developing nations, imagine screaming bosses, constant servalence, mandatory over-time shifts, sickening factory conditions, and more.  Two of the worst corporations are Walmart and McDonalds.

What Can We Do?

• The biggest thing we can do is cut our animal meat consumption in half or more.  This greatly benefits our health.  It also reduces global hunger, our impact on the environment, animal suffering and more.  If you do eat meat, try to get humanly made meat from animals treated right like those from a family farm.
  
• Reduce your consumption of consumer products.  When buying new, buy things that are made to last. Or buy things second hand.
• Educate yourself about the companies you shop from to make.
• Take a stand and educate others.
• Reduce your energy consumption.  The number of ways to reduce your energy consumption number in the hundreds.  Some of the bigger ones include weatherstripping your home, reducing your use of your car by bicycling, walking, car pooling or taking the bus, buying energy efficient appliances and lights and more.
• Consider making yourself energy independent -- look into renewable energy sources such as windmill, solar energy and small hydro.  Also look into fuel cell to store the energy collected.
• Reduce water consumption.
• Recycle, compost and reuse.
• Volunteer and set up bartering networks such as LETS  http://www.lets-linkup.com/

Links

Beef and Animal Products
http://www.mcspotlight.org/media/reports/beyond.html Beyond Beef, a campaign to reduce beef consumption 50%

Anti-Consumerism
http://adbusters.org/campaigns/bnd/updates/buy_nothing_all_year.html Adbuster's Buy Nothing All Year campaign
http://adbusters.org/home/ A counter-culture magazine
http://www.mind-trek.com/articles/l10.htm Cultural Pollution
http://www.moea.state.mn.us/berc/srcheck.cfm Reduce consumuption

Human Rights
http://www.globalpolicy.org/globaliz/cultural/index.htm Globalization
http://www.sweatshops.org/index.html All about sweatshops
http://www.responsibleshopper.org/ Find out what companies are doing.  Mostly US companies.
http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/antiwalmart.html Walmart http://www.mcspotlight.org/case/pretrial/factsheet.html McDonalds
http://www.mcspotlight.org Landmark anti-McDonalds website. 
http://www.ethicalconsumer.org/ Ethical consumer

Environmental
http://www.epa.gov/epahome/topics.html Index of environmental problems
http://www.darksky.org/ A site about light pollution, a barely recognized form of pollution.
http://www.alternate-energy.net/ Alternative energy network
http://www.iaea.or.at/worldatom/Periodicals/Bulletin/Bull393/table.html Changes in the environment from 1972 to 1997.
http://www.learnlink.emory.edu/STUDENTS/000388D6-8000000C/greenbook/gbcontents.htm A green book about the old environmental problems you heard about in the early 90s.  Still important.  Covers recycling, transportation, energy conservation, green eating, and composting.
http://www.sustainableenterprises.com/ Excellent site on sustainability 
http://wwwistp.murdoch.edu.au/teaching/N212/n212content/topicindex.html A book about global sustainability
http://www.thegreenpages.ca/web_resources/default.asp Links to all kinds of environmental sites
http://woodwise.org/
http://www.lyrec.com/account/calculator.htm Energy use calculator

Ancient Forests
http://www.ancientforest.org/guide.html White pine forests in Ontario, including Temigami
http://archive.greenpeace.org/forests/ Ancient forests
http://www.championtrees.org/oldgrowth/AncientForests.htm
http://geoggeol.wku.edu/jall/Classes/geog280/pdfs/Chapter_14.pdf Land use primer

Other Links
www.sciencedaily.com Daily science magazine.  Occasional environmental news item.  Some shockers.
http://www.edwdebono.com/ An activist with lots of books and lots of techniques on thinking skills

Books

Jeremy Rifkin has opened my eyes to a lot of problems in the world I wasn't aware of or how deep they went.  His books are excellent and incitfull in describing the problems, but weak in describing the solutions.  He is hopeful but does downplay technology somewhat.  If we are aware of the problems surrounding technologies, can better prevent the problems from occuring while reaping the benefits of the technologies.  Here are four of his most important works.  I have not read the last book yet.

Beyond Beef -- The Rise and Fall of the Cattle Culture
End of Work -- The Decline of the Global Labor Force and the Dawn of the Post-Market Era
The Age of Access -- The New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life Is a Paid-For Experience
Hydrogen Economy -- After Oil, Clean Energy From a Fuel-Cell-Driven Global Hydrogen Web