Road Map to Capitalism

If nature were a business, it would gross $33 Trillion dollars in profits every year.

I wanted to start this reflection by making a comment on the picture to the left. There really was a Biosphere 2? I thought that was only a movie by Paulie Shore! Well I'll be darned.

So this is a pretty good article if you love reading about statistics all day. The overall tone is pretty optimistic and a rare case that I don't feel like crying myself to sleep after reading. I just think that Lovins et al draw too much their percentage change of this and that. They are throwing around numbers way too much, and I'm sure that if most of these were checked out, they would not add up.

That said, I admire them for going through the whole process of calculating these amounts, because there is no doubt in anyone's mind that reducing paper consumption will save trees, and blah blah blah. Actually, when I was helping my uncle lay the pipes in his chalet, he made sure we used as many straight lines of copper pipes as possible because he said it caused less resistance. So I was pretty happy to know this already once I read it in the text.

The ideas of adopting innovative technologies are novel ones. We must really stop thinking about what is easy and start thinking about what is right for the environment. I loved the statistic that said that only 1% of all product inputs come out as actual products. So much of what we make is wasted every single day.

One last comment I want to make is about this movement to replicate nature: biomimicry. It makes so much sense because you always hear of animals and plants doing things so unimaginable that you wonder how it's done. Everyone has heard that spider webs are some of the strongest material on the earth. And this summer, I saw a spider eat its own web probably recycling it to make another at a later time. I just wanted to say that nature was so cool and that we should do our best to keep it healthy

Global Economy and the Third World

This is one of the best articles so far this year albeit having a negative tone. I like that Khor made us realize that, yes most third world countries were not well off before colonization and globalization, but at least they were self sufficient. Through indigenous techniques, they were able to keep themselves and most of the community fed. With globalization, companies brought in harsh working conditions, dangerous chemicals which come into contact with those people, and strip their land of resources.

Khor is the president of the Third World Network, in which he is the leading voice behind the opposition of the current pattern of globalization. I TOTALLY agree with that!!! There is a definite need to globalize and modernize the planet, but the way we are going about it for the most part is totally wrong. Khor seems to have the right idea here.

Back to my previous point. Khor points out that so much harm has been inflicted upon third world countries by cash hungry corporations such as the Bhopal disaster in India where so many died. And these companies pinned communities against each other to compete in agricultural production. The ones that didn't use expensive fertilizers had to bite the dust. All the companies care about is to tear the land clean of resources.

A perfect example is fishing boats having to go out further and further into the sea to catch fish because of so much overfishing. People in the third world won't have access to fish supply because they don't have boats that can go out to sea.

There are so many examples of misuse of resources or mistreatment of people, and Khor outlines these methods. What he is calling for is a new methodology. We cannot repeat the same things we did in the past and expect different results. That will never happen.

He has a nice call to action in the end. Not only does he want us to stop tearing at the earth for luxury resources, he also says to stop undertaking massive projects like the Three Gorges Dam or nuclear power plants