Global Economics and Earth Day: We Just Don't Get It!

It's Earth Day today, a time when we are supposed to appreciate our environment, and do things that save rather than destroy the planet. I commend those who are actively involved in all endeavours associated with Earth Day, and admire the commitment of people who make Earth Day an everyday event...

With that being said, I find it laughable that we have global "leaders" who will on one hand talk about the need to save our planet, but on the other, encourage people to continue their consumer habits in order to support "positive" growth. This global economic framework is no longer valid!!!!!!!! It is, simply put, a model built on greed...Growth is monetary and quantitative, we need to focus on a development model which supports qualitative aspects associated with social and environmental betterment.

The Current Economic Growth and Greed model:

-allows places like Dubai to build out of control in order to guarantee that the rich are kept luxuriously ignorant of its unsustainable future...a shopping mall with a ski resort (in a city that hits 50 degrees in the summer)?!...Housing developments built on man-made islands in the shape of the world (by the way they're sinking and because of the dredging, have completed altered the aquatic ecosystems in the area)?!

-gives Beijing the right to tear down long-established Hutong (cultural) communities to make way for progress in the form of sports facilities and shopping malls...industry is also running rampant under its new economic policies (the sky is permantly grey from the pollution)!

-helps support sub-Saharan Africa's downward spiral into poverty from which it can never hope to recover (and due to this poverty, gives no choice to people but to actively degrade their environments further).

-supplies status and wealth to followers, who as loyal subjects are sometimes afforded the freedom to marginalize and suppress others in order to further support the model.

The list goes on, and I will stop my rant there before I begin on my own country (tar sands in northern Alberta???).

Happy Earth Day everyone!

T