More Editorials
It is commonly assumed that our national security depends only on our capacity to project military power beyond our borders and has little to do with how we organize the internal business of the country. The nation’s armed strength and its “soft power” are necessary components of security, but they are not—and cannot be—the whole of it. A larger vision of security includes the internal resilience...
This special issue of Solutions is devoted to the idea of ecosystem services—the benefits humans derive from our shared “natural capital” assets, including everything from climate regulation to water supply to pollination to cultural amenities.
The idea that preserving the environment is an asset, rather than an impediment, to economic growth and development is both very old and very new. For...
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from a speech Senator Sanders (I-VT) gave in December 2010 on the senate floor to protest President Obama's proposed tax cut compromise.
As everybody knows, the United States has a record-breaking national debt exceeding $14 trillion at the same time as the middle class is collapsing and poverty is increasing. It is important to first say a word about...
Most of us who care deeply about the conditions of the United States and its public policy are sustained and carried forward by the expectation that serious progress in the directions we favor is coming, sooner or later, and that things will get better. And the harder we work for the change, the better it will be. This comfort zone is where most of us are most of the time.
Maybe. But there is a...
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”
—H.L. Menken
Everyone, it seems, has a solution for the energy and environmental problems our global civilization must confront in the next two decades. Build more windmills. Grow corn to produce ethanol. Construct more nuclear plants. Clean up coal. Drill baby drill. Tap ultra-deep subsea petroleum and gas....
In 2010, the world’s women face daunting challenges, yet they are also the most promising and untapped agents of change. Who can forget the ink-stained fingers of the 2,000 Iraqi women who ran for parliament in that war-torn country’s 2010 elections; or the mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina fighting for justice and human rights; or the Women in Black in Israel, widely credited with...
We met in 1974 on the north coast of Jamaica, in Discovery Bay, then one of the great pioneer centers of coral reef science. At the time, many of us blithely took the reefs for granted. They were already largely fishless, which we noted, but luxuriant living corals carpeted the reefs built up by their ancestors over thousands of years. We had no inkling of a time when the corals themselves might...
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Could the old adage “Seeing is believing” have it backwards?
Increasingly, we’re learning that we humans see our world through a paradigm, as Donella Meadows reminded us in her seminal article, republished in the first issue of Solutions. A paradigm boils down to our “great big unstated assumptions,” she wrote, “or deepest set of beliefs about how the world works.”
These core assumptions...
In late 2008, James Hansen and nine colleagues published a paper designed to save the world. Years from now, when historians write the definitive history of the climate movement, they may well conclude that Hansen and his colleagues succeeded. For consider the remarkable impact to date of their paper, “Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?” On October 24, 2009, less than one year...
A patient diagnosed with cancer must confront a long, difficult road to recovery. The same can be said for the hundreds of mountaintops in Appalachia that have been ravaged by strip mining. America’s addiction to cheap energy has spread disease amongst some of our most beautiful natural resources. From a fatalistic point of view, we fear that Appalachia might soon die.
Once a lush, verdant...
Last September I attended the Prairie Festival at The Land Institute in Salinas, Kansas. At the institute, Wes Jackson and his colleagues are undertaking one of the most important agricultural research projects in the world. They have gone back to first principles and are breeding new grain crops that are perennials rather than annuals. To do so, they cross high-yielding annual crops, such as...
A Copernican shift is underway in fields as diverse as agriculture, materials science, architecture, engineering, business, economics, urban planning, waste management, national security, and many others. In every case, it is driven by the need to discover patterns and larger systems essential to reaching higher levels of efficiency and lower environmental impacts—and by the requirements of...
This inaugural issue of Solutions marks the beginning of what we hope will be a long and fruitful dialogue across our global society. To help build a shared vision of where our society wants to go and initiate a broad agreement about how to get there—these are our intentions.
We want Solutions to help us move beyond the debate that dominates public discussion toward substantive and constructive...
