The recent report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most worrisome so far. Paired with data from the 2014 National Climate Assessment, there is no question that the climate crisis is here and is accelerating at a faster pace than predicted. Its effects are widespread and dangerous, yet real solutions are being suppressed.
The latest bestseller in economics has done a great deal of service to progressives in highlighting the imperative of shared wealth. But given the social and ecological limits to economic growth, this emerging conversation on global sharing has to get a lot more radical.
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Choking on tears, the owner of Campsite Deulo haltingly greeted 300 activists standing by the camp’s lake, which the “leftist” regional Brandenburg government of Social Democrats (SPD) and socialist The Left (Die Linke)1 seek to destroy, along with 3000 people’s homes, businesses, farms, forests, water, even churches and graveyards in the Lausitz area.
According to the Assessment of Southwest Climate Change (Arizona Institute of the Environment), the five decades from 1950 to 2000 were the warmest in over 600 years. The report predicts that reduced snowfall and increased evaporation from global warming will lead to more droughts over the next 90 years.
Editor’s Note: The following article comes to us from our friends at Strategic Relocation and has been contributed by well known relocation specialist Joel Skousen. As is usually the case with Mr. Skousen’s highly informative briefs, this one touches on some key points to be digested by anyone looking to leave the big city in search of greener…
Over hundreds of millions of years, Earth and all living things have tolerated five mass extinctions, one of which wiped out over 90% of living things. You might say that such happenings are part of natural processes and beyond the control of Earth’s occupants, but humankind’s ascendency over what is seen as our kingdom defies, maybe even defiles, that judgment.
The implications of moving towards a global sharing economy are immense, but there are many reasons to embrace this simple concept – which is far more radical and urgent than it may at first seem. As a primer from STWR makes clear, the necessity of sharing the world’s resources is central to the most critical issues that face humanity in the 21st century.
On this world date to combat desertification – and when considering the great mountain ranges in Morocco as well as desert – we point to conditions replete with prosperity-potential, as well as systemtic poverty and serious risk to the region and nation that will come with delayed action.
The world has gone dramatically wrong as she is ravaged by ecosystem collapse, abject poverty, grotesque inequity, militant nationalism, and resurgent authoritarianism. Overpopulation combined with inequitable over-consumption, leading to a state of permawar, in particular are root causes destroying natural ecosystems and threatening collapse of our one shared biosphere. Either the human family learns to share, simplifies our way of living, and takes any and all truthful actions to end the current state of global ecocide; or else we collapse into nothingness.
If the sharing economy movement is to play a role in shifting society away from the dominant economic paradigm, it will have to get political. And this means guarding against the co-optation of sharing by the corporate sector, while joining forces with a much larger body of activists that have long been calling – either explicitly or implicitly – for more transformative and fundamental forms of economic sharing across the world.
