Citola Blog
Population Growth and Depleting Resources (The Earth Is Full)
Tom Friedman, 3 x Pulitzer price winning author, New York Times columnist, author of The World is Flat and Hot, Flat and Crowded and world-renown ‘green’ commentator has published an article with the New York Times stating the ‘Earth is Full’.
In the article Friedman states:
‘You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?’
Paul Gilding, a veteran Australian environmentalist, has said in his book, The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World, that because the predicament is so large and with global implications, that denial and ‘business-as-usual’ is prevailing. However, common sense would indicate:
“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” Gilding has stated. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”
Gilding continues on the response to depleting natural resources and the transition to a 'green' economy:
“Our response will be proportionally dramatic… We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”
As we have stated here and here, the transition to a ‘green’ economy will be driven by large and liquid environmental markets and this is something that resonates with Citola and our partners.
The full New York Times article can be viewed here.
Post new comment