Global Warming Solutions
This article points one several global warming solutions. Fact is that global warming is the most serious problem mankind has ever faced and our future depends on how we deal with it. That's why it's also useful to share information regarding this matter and to propose different solutions no matter how strange they might seem at first. The problem is not completely out of hand yet, so there is a way around it. Ten years after the 1992 Earth Summit, an assessment of the state of the world indicates that neither environment nor development has fared well. While awareness of environmental issues has increased and remarkable progress can be cited in niches such as wind power and organic farming, nearly all global environmental indicators continue to be headed in the wrong direction.
Wherever possible, we should move towards an economy that is based on renewable energy and material resources. Sustainability is not synonymous with renewability but it is strongly linked to it. Where we do use non-renewable resources they should be used wisely and recycled whenever practical. We should learn to manage our population voluntarily. The UN Conference on Population, held in Cairo in 1994, concluded that the most effective way to manage population growth is the education and empowerment of women. This leaves no place for patriarchy, religious fundamentalism, or dictatorships. We should develop a more globally unified analysis off the relationships among land use, energy and resource consumption, forests and biodiversity, and population. Policies that have global implications must not be logically inconsistent one with the other. We should learn to be better gardeners at both local and global scales. With 6 or 8 billion mouths to feed this will require more intensive agricultural production including the use of fertilizer, synthetic pesticides, and biotechnology. It is a simple fact of arithmetic that the less land we need to grow our food the more is available for forest and wilderness. Urban sprawl must be brought under control. We have allowed the automobile to determine urban form by default. 300,000 hectares of forest are lost in the United States every year, all of it due to 200 cities spreading out over the land. Denser, more livable, cities must be designed if population continues to grow. Deforestation in the tropics must eventually be stabilized or reversed. This can be accomplished by the transfer of intensive agricultural practices, the establishment of fast-growing, sustainable fuel-wood plantations, and the management of population growth. |