A 2011 World Bank study estimates that environmental wealth accounts for 26 percent of the total wealth of low-income countries. This is contrasted with 13 percent of wealth in middle-income countries and only 2 percent of wealth in OECD countries. Therefore, investing in sound and equitable environmental management makes good economic sense and is essential to […]
environment
Posted inBusiness, News/Politics
Realising the potential of electricity
As the latest climate change conference in Bonn draws to a close today, the full implications of commitments made at COP17 are beginning to sink in. The nations of the world find themselves united by a challenge that is both eye-watering and conceptually simple: hold the global average temperature increase below 2°C versus the long-term […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Why we always sow the same old reap
I think most readers will be familiar with that unbearable screech which sometimes blasts out of a concert’s or meeting’s sound system. Well, that screech is caused by the feedback into the sound system of some of the amplified sound already produced by the system. Because the sound wave of the feedback is in phase […]
Posted inGeneral, News/Politics
Is it time for a South African Spring?
Let’s face it, our world is in a total mess right now. Social strife, political skullduggery and infighting, environmental degradation, and, for most, severe economic hardship, are pretty much the common denominators across every nation which makes up the global community. What makes this mess so particularly vexing to contemplate in South Africa is that […]
Posted inGeneral
Beyond protecting the environment: Ensuring life support
Several recent reports on a variety of things have made me return to an important book by Thomas Princen, Treading Softly – on which I have written here before. The news items that caught my eye covered different, but related topics. Two of them focused on court cases involving big oil companies – Chevron and […]
Posted inBusiness, Environment, General, News/Politics
Drilling Africa’s Arctic
The Virunga National Park, Africa’s oldest Unesco World Heritage Site, is situated along the border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Uganda. It contains more species of mammals, reptiles and birds than any other protected area on the continent. It has an exceptional diversity of landscapes stretching from the glaciers of the […]
Posted inGeneral
An exceptional South African thinker
In 1995 one of the best loved, most down-to-earth and wisest of South Africa’s thinkers, the philosopher Marthinus Versfeld died at an advanced age. If anyone thought that philosophers must of necessity always have their “heads in the clouds” of abstract thought – like the ancient Greek philosopher Thales, who once fell into a well […]
Posted inGeneral
An industrial revolution for whom?
By Alex Lenferna As a person who is going to live quite a bit longer than President Zuma, (or so I hope, although perhaps six wives supported by the state is the key to longevity) the State of the Nation address (SONA) was worrying. Not only did Zuma spark a rather ironic note by swearing […]
Posted inGeneral
Going green in 2012: 12 steps for the developing world
Many of us are thinking about the changes we want to make this year. For some, these changes will be financial; for others, physical or spiritual. But for all of us, there are important resolutions we can make to “green” our lives. Although this is often a subject focused on by industrialised nations, people in […]
Posted inGeneral
The ‘economistic worldview’ and the destruction of life
In his important recent book Treading Softly – Paths to Ecological Order (see my earlier post on it) — Thomas Princen distinguishes among four “worldviews” in relation to the environment, that is, four different ways of “perceiving and conceiving and making sense of one’s world” (pg 164) within what he terms “the current industrial, commercial […]