Showing posts with label alex steffen. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alex steffen. Show all posts

06 October 2006

Common Justice for the Commons

Here's a perceptive thought from Alex Steffen on the dangers inherent in the success of the movement to get global warming recognised and dealt with:

What is worrysome, though, is the idea, which one is beginning to hear all over the political map, that climate change trumps every other environmental issue, or, even more, that climate change is not an environmental issue at all. These arguments usually precede a call for some action which reduces carbon output but has other demonstrably negative environmental impacts, whether that's damming a river for hydropower, launching into a massive nuclear energy program or seeding the ocean to produce a plankton bloom.

In other words, we can't repair one commons - the atmosphere - by destroying others like the oceans or the land. We cannot solve global warming by simply transferring the ecological deficit from one commons to another. We need a "global" global warming solution, not one restricted to a single domain. It's all connected, people.