Tuesday, October 28, 2008

Live with less stuff

LIVE WITH LESS STUFF - Stan Cox, a plant breeder and writer has an article on AlterNet that talks about how the financial crisis can have a beneficial effect on the environment if we all are forced to live with less stuff. He discusses the concept that negative economic growth is essential to keeping atmospheric carbon dioxide below 445 parts per million (ppm). Cox writes,

"But in all scenarios, however rosy their assumptions, economic growth will have to be thrown into reverse or else. Everything depends on how that economic contraction is handled.
The US economy declined by about 55 percent in just four years at the start of the Great Depression, with the well-known catastrophic outcomes . . .


There is still time to cure the malignant economic growth that we've unleashed, but the solution won't come from those people and institutions that have managed to wreck both the global economy and the global ecology. A new way of thinking and acting will have to come from the bottom up, and from both hemispheres of this ailing planet. We'd should be ready; the unsettled times that lie ahead may offer the opening we've been looking for."

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