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What If We Create a Better World For Nothing?

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091207usatoday global warming.91
One of my goals in 2010 is to help move the sustainability debate beyond Global Warming. Global Warming or Climate Change is still arguable – while other environmental impacts and issues are not. Its surely time for sustainability advocates to reframe our narrative – and get beyond the Global Warming debate. We might as well try and convince evangelicals of evolution… instead we need to start focusing on immediate and real issues- such as a lack of potable water in many geographies. Energy independence is perhaps the best argument for renewal energy. People are generally more worried about national security than the potentials threats of global warming.

Of course some really major climate events may change the game, but for now, we should focus on the changes we can make in terms of business, culture and politics. You can understand why I love this cartoon from USA Today, which sums my thoughts up beautifully.

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Avoiding The Sere

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I didn’t know this word until it came across from Doctor Dictionary today- “sere”. Its what we really want to avoid.

Word of the Day for Friday, July 6, 2007

sere \SEER\, adjective:

Dry; withered.

. . .a country that has been transformed from a place of lush abundance to a sere, mutilated, inhospitable land.
— Zofia Smardz, “A Nice Place for Extinction”, New York Times, June 15, 1997

Recent rains have done little to relieve the sere conditions.
— Thomas Omestad, “The struggle over water”, U.S. News and World Report, April 10, 2000

Mr. Campbell, a biologist, spent three seasons in the Antarctic and returned with eerily clear perceptions of that sere and uninhabitable place.
— review of The Crystal Desert

, by David G. Campbell, New York Times, December 5, 1993

There was a lavatory at the end of the garden beyond a scraggy clump of Michaelmas daisies that never looked well in themselves, always sere, never blooming, the perennial ghosts of themselves, as if ill-nourished by an exhausted soil.
— Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg

Deserts can be beautiful, but they are inhospitable, and we really don’t need any more of them. Goats in the middle east, sheep in Australia, over-grazing, over-farming. Photo courtesy of CairoCarole.