[All] "Resilient People, Resilient Planet": Putting Wise Words into Global Perspective

[Peter Kofler]

 A collage of recent articles which attempt to put current and future geopolitics into perspective:
 
One can't help but applaud the recent UN instigated report "Resilient People, Resilient Planet" ... with this proviso from a recent Treehugger column:
 
By 2050 We're All Likely To Be Using Fewer Resources, Whether We Like It Or Not
http://www.treehugger.com/economics/by-2050-were-using-fewer-resource-whether-we-like-it-or-not-u-n-sustainable-development-report.html
Resilient People, Resilient Planet may not explicitly present a cornucopian vision of the future. Indeed, it presents a stark future, that we can choose to avoid, if we follow the presented policy recommendations. But I just wish somewhere it would mention that if everyone keeps consuming resources like we have been that by 2050 we'd need 2.5 planets, and continuing to do so is recipe for ecological and civilizational collapse. If we don't avert course the vast majority of us will be consuming less whether we like it or not.
 
I think it's pertinent at this point to note that Canada, the US and Australia, while participating in the commissioning of the recently released International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) Global Report, initiated by the World Bank and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations(FAO), subsequently panned the report. The report rightly placed emphasis on forms of agriculture other than industrial scale agriculture/factory farming as a solution to the world's impending sustainability and resilience challenges in food production, GHG emissions, energy consumption, unsustainable nitrate pollution, ocean acidification etc. After presumably conferring with their partners in Big Agribusiness, these global spoilers decided not to put their support behind the report.
 

 
And what about the world's corporate elite? Apparently they've been talking "Great Transformation" at the recent World Economic Forum in Davos. 
Greenpeace executive director Kumi Naidoo was on hand to call bullshit on the summit's "transformational" rhetoric, observing that "it's more about system recovery than system redesign.”  So things like, for example, prosecuting financial fraud, redesigning incentives for corporate predation, and, well, reining in a capitalist system that is sucking the world's real economy dry, are just not on the table. Link to an Alternet article below:
 
http://www.alternet.org/economy/153941/how_male_global_elites_work_hard_to_fix_the_economy_-_in_their_favor/?page=entire
 
 
I could be wrong, but it's beginning to sound like some of the world's corporate elite are intent on steering the world on a radically different (and, I would argue, radically unsustainable) course for the foreseeable future. Acclaimed writer Chris Hedges sounds off below on the upcoming implications of the corporate response to global protests in support of greater democracy. Perhaps we should be taking the familiar corporate bromides we're being fed with a grain of reality salt:
 
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/corporations_have_no_use_for_borders_20120130/
Chris Hedges' Columns
Corporations Have No Use for Borders
The voices of dissent sound like our own. And the forms of persecution are familiar. This is not an accident. We are fighting the same corporate leviathan. 
 
“I want to tell you that I was arrested because I am seen as a threat,” Canadian activist Leah Henderson wrote to fellow dissidents before being sent to Vanier prison in Milton, Ontario, to serve a 10-month sentence. “I want to tell you that you might be too. I want to tell you that this is something we need to prepare for. I want to tell you that the risk of incarceration alone should not determine our organizing.”
 
“My skills and experience—as a facilitator, as a trainer, as a legal professional and as someone linking different communities and movements—were all targeted in this case, with the state trying to depict me as a ‘brainwasher’ and as a mastermind of mayhem, violence and destruction,” she went on. “During the week of the G8 & G20 summits, the police targeted legal observers, street medics and independent media. It is clear that the skills that make us strong, the alternatives that reduce our reliance on their systems and prefigure a new world, are the very things that they are most afraid of.”

 
 

 
 
 
 
  		 	   		  
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