Group items tagged

This is a crucial time for people to rethink how we meet our needs today to help to ensure a desirable future for following generations. Local government officials must play their part in reinventing our institutions to help communities and residents stay healthy and whole. This is because we have entered an era where human generated pressures on the natural world are unprecedented and threaten our current way of life. A few examples include depletion of non-renewable resources - 65% of U.S. oil is gone and the world is at or past peak oil; insufficient drinking water for two thirds of the world's population; consumption of land and loss of topsoil at unsustainable rates; projected loss of 90% of the world's fisheries by 2048; extinction of a distinct species of plant or animal, on average, every 20 minutes (qualifying the present period as one of the six great periods of mass extinction in the history of Earth1); and the presence of 250 persistent toxic chemicals not known before 1945, many of which are now found in human tissues.

One of our country's most pressing goals is to build an economy that provides good jobs now-and that creates a strong foundation for enduring prosperity. To accelerate job growth for this and future generations, that foundation must be built with expanded housing and transportation choices, greater energy independence, and better protection for our clean air and water.

This article talks about the advances in technology and development of using cane sugar to produce ethanol and diesel. Over half of Brazil uses renewable energy resources and farmers must reserves 20 percent of their land for biodiversity fuel. Awesome!

"To ensure equality, water must be considered a human right and not just a need, privilege or commodity." (Photo: Edwin Huffman / World Bank) What is called for is an international code for the public's access to a guaranteed supply of water as a basic human right.

I agree, water should be a human right and not a privilege. Erika Usi

The Story of Stuff, originally released in December 2007, is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world.