Images courtesy of Encyclopedia Britannica (left), and Wolfgang Schlegl (right)
We are no longer living in a way that is in cooperation with the environment; in the name of private profits and the economy we are sacrificing public welfare and the environment.
We are degrading our natural environment by polluting, fragmenting, and desertifying it. We are cutting down the last of our forests faster than they are able to grow back, we are losing biodiversity at unprecedented rates, and we are depleting fossil aquifers that cannot recharge. Half the world still lives on less than $2.50 a day, and one in three children in developing nations do not have adequate food or shelter. Human actions are causing global climate changes that are making more areas of the earth uninhabitable for humans and other living things. And we are consuming natural resources without regard for the depletion we are causing or the waste this behavior is creating.
Energy security, food security, access to clean drinking water, and the current global predisposition to dump human and industrial waste into the earth and its water sources are a few of the most significant issues facing all nations in the 21st century. While politicians, economists, and scientists debate the details, destruction of our natural environment continues, and living things continue to suffer. We can chose to ignore, and thereby implicitly support unrestrained destruction, or we can change our approach, resist further environmental destruction, and take action to regenerate the earth for the wellbeing of all living things.
If we aspire to create opportunities for socio-economic transformation and ecological regeneration, where should we start? If we hope to best inform our efforts to counter the destruction we have caused and develop appropriately tailored, integrated strategies for change, we must first take collective ownership for the damage we have caused, and cultivate a deeper understanding of the earth and our land use history.
To learn more about the local and global problems we strive to counter please click on the topics listed in the menu bar to the left. If you are already familiar with these problems, please check out our strategies to learn more about our integrated approach to addressing these problems.
