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It’s the GDP-obsessed growth model, many reformers argue, that’s leading us to perdition. They decry the irresponsibility of a relatively few taking more than their share, who are profligate with the earth’s dwindling resources. Certainly this “we’ve hit the limits” framing rings true, for, inarguably, human societies have exceeded the limits of destruction, depletion, and disruption our planet can sustain without massive human and nonhuman loss and suffering.
But is there a more effective way of understanding the roots of our predicament?
Here’s a possibility.
Let’s start with findings from neuroscience and psychology that offer significant clues about how we got into this mess: Humans beings, it turns out, don’t see the world as it is. “It is theory which...
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Approximately three billion persons around the world eat daily meals cooked with fuel consisting of wood, twigs, agricultural waste, animal dung, and charcoal. They cook in diverse ways with diverse foods in diverse pots across many cultures, often on three-stone fires. A three-stone fire refers to three stones placed on the ground, supporting a pot under which a fire is lighted. Cooking with these traditional cookstoves is mostly inefficient and grossly polluting. Exposure to smoke from traditional cookstoves and open fires causes four million premature deaths annually (eight per minute), and is the largest environmental threat to health in the world today, measured in disability-adjusted life years.1 Women and newborn infants kept close to them are at the greatest risk, as the women...
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Meet the Feature Authors
Director, Energy and Environmental Technologies Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Associate Professor of leadership studies and philosophy, politics, economics and law (PPEL) at the University of Richmond
More Features
The absence of a global regime to control international trade in conventional arms persists despite the fact that in the 22 years between 1989 and 2010, the world witnessed the outbreak or...
Mobile phones: you see them being used in airports, at the grocery store, on subways and buses, and even in the hand of your doctor. In fact, it is difficult to go anywhere these days without seeing...
Introduction
In recent years, a boom in immigration and high birth rates among the foreign-born population has led to significant growth in the number of children in the United States who speak a...
In Focus
Environmental security has taken on new meaning in the twenty-first century as sustainability and natural resource...
The pathway for conversion to a renewable energy future has been pioneered by Denmark and a few other visionary nations. But...
If the United States intends to meet the Department of Energy’s goal of producing 20 percent of the nation’s electricity...
I fully agree with the idea that world population growth can—and should—be reversed through fertility rates that fall below...
The Guttmacher Institute provides estimates, covering various years in the last decade, of the proportions of all...
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