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Ensure Sustainability

How can we ensure that the forthcoming world of nine billion human beings can live in peace together in a healthy, positive environment?

This is an area in which there are dramatically different opinions regarding key issues. In an area in which there is so much polarization of rhetoric based on older political tribalisms, we hope to convene a more open dialogue in which individuals from different tribes learn to disagree with civility as they learn to achieve win-win innovative solutions to environmental problems.

Links

1. The Ecology Fund, "Save Land for FREE!! - Protect 63 square feet every day!" A simply brilliant concept: click on a link and, merely by allowing yourself to be exposed to advertisements on that page you thereby support ecological causes. Fees from the advertisers are donated to organizations that such as The Nature Conservancy that support habitat preservation. You get to choose which region you want to support. Go viral with this site now!
2. Greenspirit, founded by Patrick Moore, a founder of Greenpeace who became disillusioned by the anti-science, anti-technology, anti-business, and anti-civilization bias of the environmental movement (including Greenpeace) that resulted in “the use of sensationalism, misinformation and downright lies,” Moore’s Greenspirit sets the gold standard of integrity for the environmentalist movement to reach toward
3. The Commons Blog, "Markets Protecting the Environment." An informed economic perspective on how to create a sustainable future.
4. Amory Lovins, “More Profit with Less Carbon,” a fascinating article by the founder of the Rocky Mountain Institute, published in Scientific American, in which he outlines a market solution to reduction in carbon emissions based on energy conservation in a world in which energy prices are not subsidized by government.
5. Stewart Brand, “Environmental Heresies," - an article by the creator of the Whole Earth Catalog, published in Technology Review, that suggests that the environmental movement will have to re-think it’s positions on population growth, urbanization, GMO, and nuclear energy.
6. The Green Scissors Campaign is an alliance of environmentalists and libertarians, focusing on those policies in which government spends money to harm the environment.
7. John McCarthy's "Progress and Sustainability" - a highly original mind approaches sustainability issues in a highly original way. One of the founders of Artificial Intelligence, McCarthy is, in his words, " an extreme optimist" regarding sustainability.
8. The Ten Cube Project - “The mission of The Ten Cube ™ Project is within two years to invent a new power source that is ten times the power of a conventional battery, one tenth the cost, size and weight, which will be environmentally sustainable, and help to level the playing field of rich and poor countries. As important as this breakthrough is, equally important is the infrastructure and processes of macro-innovation and collaboration which will enable many other breakthroughs to be achieved in sustainable energy and other fields, following the same model.”
9. Jeffrey Smith, “Geonomics: Recovery of Site-Rents for Urban Density,” a good introduction to Geonomics, a Henry George-inspired approach to the Green Tax Shift that combines egalitarianism with free market sympathies in an interesting way.
10. Dan Sullivan, “Greens and Libertarians: The Yin and Yang of Our Political Future" - an essay that brings out the libertarian strand of the Green movement along with the Green strand of the libertarian movement.
11. J. Bishop Grewall, Free Market Environmentalism - an on-line syllabus that includes readings that are both for and against free market environmentalism.
12. Michael deAlessi, Fishing for Solutions - a sketch of a solution to the problem of the depletion of deep sea fisheries.
13. Steve Raynor, “The International Challenge of Climate Change,” an informative article that suggests a wide range of approaches to begin work on climate change issues that do not rely on international consensus.
14. Dialogue between Steven Hayward and Paul Ehrlich, " Time Has Come Today: Global Population and Consumption," a debate between Hayward, an environmental optimist, and Ehrlich, the most famous environmental pessimist.
15. Steven Hayward, "Index of Environmental Indicators," an extremely useful survey of environmental indicators which indicates in which areas things are getting worse as well as in which areas things are getting better. Such an index could help FLOW entrepreneurs focus on those specific environmental issues in which the need for a turnaround is greatest.

Books

1. Andres Edwards, The Sustainability Revolution: Portrait of a Paradigm Shift. A collection of resources of various businesses and related initiatives inspired by the sustainability movement.
2. Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. “This study looks at the problem of collectively managing shared resources. Because of the book's unassuming nature and rather formal scholarly tone, it's easy to pass it over as just another academic work. But together with such books as Herman Daly and John Cobb's For the Common Good, Paul Hawken's The Ecology of Commerce and Vandana Shiva's work on restoring the commons, I consider it one of the more far-sighted and genuinely significant works to emerge in recent years on environmental resource management.” From a review at http://www.scottlondon.com/reviews/ostrom.html.
3. Gary Libecap, Contracting for Property Rights. A compliment to Ostrom’s work (above), Libecap’s work provides an analytical history of various situations in which groups of people have voluntarily solved commons problems by means of contracting property rights amongst themselves. Libecap shows both the strengths and limitations of this approach.
4. Gregg Easterbrook, A Moment on the Earth, subtitled “the coming age of environmental optimism.” This book anticipated by nearly a decade the current evidence that in the Western nations, all forms of pollution except greenhouse gases are declining. Hugely controversial when first published, “A Moment on the Earth” has stood the test of time in 750 pages of detail – and books that are denounced when published, then widely respected a decade later, often have most long-term influence. "Will wind up on a shelf of classics, aside Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ and Aldo Leopold’s ‘Sand County Almanac.’" -- Richmond Times Dispatch.
5. Bjorn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist. While reviled by many prominent environmental activists, and probably weakest on global warming, Lomborg’s work in other areas provides a useful perspective that ought to be balanced against the rhetorical approach taken by the mainstream movements.

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