How to Address Humanity's Global Crises? Vandana Shiva

[nosmokes]

Ahh, Vandana Shiva, A hero of mine, for sure. Here she cuts to the heart of the problem as probably only someone as well acquainted with poverty as she is can do.As always however, Ms Shiva, while being completely honest and realistic, is never hopeless and always offers whatever she can in the way of solutions and positive actions. A bit on the longish side but worth reading.
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original-alternet

How to Address Humanity's Global Crises? Challenge Corporate Power, Embrace True Democracy

By Vandana Shiva, AlterNet. Posted October 1, 2007.

The physicist, activist and author outlines the scope of the "triple threat" represented by the end of cheap oil, human-induced climate change, and resource scarcity.

Editor's note: the following remarks were made this September at a conference on "Confronting the Global Triple Crisis -- Climate Change, Peak Oil, Global Resource Depletion & Extinction," in Washington DC. For more information, visit the International Forum on Globalization's website:


Before I came here I was very fortunate to join the group of scientists and religious leaders who made a trip to the Arctic to witness the melting of the icecaps. An entire way of life is being destroyed. You've seen the polar bears losing their ecological space, but the highest mobility in that part of the world is the dog sledge. And they can't use it. They're locked into their villages because the ice is now too thin to travel on it. But it's still there and therefore not good enough for them to use boats.

The same melting is making the Himalayan glaciers in my region, the Ganges glacier, recede by 30 meters a year. In twenty years time, the Himalayan glaciers will have reduced from 500,000 square kilometers to 100,000 square kilometers. And given our rainfall patterns, in the hot summer season when we have a drought, it's only the melting of the glaciers that brings us water. So we're talking about one-fifth of humanity, twenty to thirty years from now, having no water in the grand rivers around which the grand civilizations of Asia have been built.

And where did this start? All this feels so timeless, but it started with humanity getting at the fossil fuel, which was never supposed to be touched… But that model carries on. And globalization now is industrializing every activity of every human being's life across the planet. For me, globalization is really expanding the use of fossil fuel.

And so while on the one hand, when we talk climate change, we're talking about reducing emissions, the entire economic model is based on increasing emissions. It is based on increasing emissions by destroying small-scale peasant farming and introducing large-scale industrial agriculture. It's increasing emissions by making every one of us dependent on our everyday needs to come from China.

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complete article here