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	Our Commons Future is already Here by Maude Barlow On the Commons   Oct 2010   (Maude Barlow gave this speech, to the Environmental Grantmakers Association annual retreat in California. Barlow, a former UN Senior Water Advisor, is National Chairperson of the Council of Canadians and founder of the Blue Planet Project).   We all know that the earth and all upon it face a growing crisis. Global climate change is rapidly advancing, melting glaciers, eroding soil, causing freak and increasingly wild storms, and displacing untold millions from rural communities to live in desperate poverty in peri-urban slums. Almost every human victim lives in the global South, in communities not responsible for greenhouse gas emissions. The atmosphere has already warmed up almost a full degree in the last several decades and a new Canadian study reports that we may be on course to add another 6 degrees Celsius (10.8 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100.   Half the tropical forests in the world – the lungs of our ecosystems – are gone; by 2030, at the current rate of harvest, only 10% will be left standing. Ninety percent of the big fish in the sea are gone, victim to wanton predatory fishing practices. Says a prominent scientist studying their demise “there is no blue frontier left.” Half the world’s wetlands – the kidneys of our ecosystems – were destroyed in the 20th century.   Species extinction is taking place at a rate one thousand times greater than before humans existed. According to a Smithsonian scientist, we are headed toward a “biodiversity deficit” in which species and ecosystems will be destroyed at a rate faster than Nature can create new ones.   We are polluting our lakes, rivers and streams to death. Every day, 2 million tons of sewage and industrial and agricultural waste are discharged into the world’s water, the equivalent of the weight of the entire human population of 6.8 billion people. The amount of wastewater produced annually is about six times more water than exists in all the rivers of the world.   A comprehensive new global study recently reported that 80% of the world’s rivers are now in peril, affecting 5 billion people on the planet. We are also mining our groundwater far faster than nature can replenish it, sucking it up to grow water-guzzling chemical-fed crops in deserts or to water thirsty cities that dump an astounding 200 trillion gallons of land-based water as waste in the oceans every year.   The global mining industry sucks up another 200 trillion gallons, which it leaves behind as poison. Fully one third of global water withdrawals are now used to produce biofuels, enough water to feed the world. A recent global survey of groundwater found that the rate of depletion more than doubled in the last half century. If water was drained as rapidly from the Great Lakes, they would be bone dry in 80 years.   The global water crisis is the greatest ecological and human threat humanity has ever faced. As Vast areas of the planet are becoming desert as we suck the remaining waters out of living ecosystems and drain remaining aquifers in India, China, Australia, most of Africa, all of the Middle East, Mexico, Southern Europe, US Southwest and other places. Dirty water is the biggest killer of children; every day more children die of water borne disease than HIV/AIDS, malaria and war together. In the global South, dirty water kills a child every three and a half seconds. And it is getting worse, fast. By 2030, global demand for water will exceed supply by 40%— an astounding figure foretelling of terrible suffering.   Knowing there will not be enough food and water for all in the near future, wealthy countries and global investment, pension and hedge funds are buying up land and water, fields and forests in the global South, creating a new wave of invasive colonialism that will have huge geo-political ramifications. Rich investors have already bought up an amount of land double the size of the United Kingdom in Africa alone.   I do not think it possible to exaggerate the threat to our earth and every living thing upon it. Quite simply we cannot continue on the path that brought us here. Einstein said that problems cannot be solved by the same level of thinking that created them. While mouthing platitudes about caring for the earth, most of our governments are deepening the crisis with new plans for expanded resource exploitation, unregulated free trade deals, more invasive investment, the privatization of absolutely everything and unlimited growth. This model of development is literally killing the planet.. Visit the related web page
	Climate justice can help to end poverty by Kumi Naidoo Executive Director, Greenpeace International   Oct. 2010   In some circles it has become politically acceptable to state that poverty cannot be eradicated in our lifetime: that the means are not available, that there is a lack of political will, or even that those who "can"t keep up" need to assume more responsibility for their own lives. Others are politically correct enough not to say any of this aloud, yet their actions (or lack thereof) expose them. Even the Millennium Development Goals call only for a halving of the proportion of people who suffer from hunger. In other words, the international community will consider itself successful if by 2015 "only" about 500 million people are left starving in the world (a target we do not look set to meet).   I would ask those who do not believe we can eradicate hunger to travel to the developing world - better yet, to travel to the slums of their own countries - and meet some of the close to one billion people who currently go hungry every day. Meet these people so that numbers become faces and faces receive names.   After bearing witness to the suffering and even the deaths of these people, they might then find the means to make poverty history. It can be done; there is still enough food on this planet to feed all of us, it is how this food is allocated that needs changing.   In the meantime, while 50,000 people die from preventable causes daily, what we need is the universal will to make change. October 17 is the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty and this year the call is for Climate Justice to End Poverty.   Because climate change causes drought, floods and other natural disasters that affect food production, it has become one of the greatest threats to reducing poverty, advancing global development and realizing human rights that the world has ever seen.   Two years ago, Kofi Annan"s Global Humanitarian Forum estimated that 300,000 people had died of the results of climate change. It"s a good bet that close to all of these people were among the world"s poor and were least responsible for the climate chaos we find ourselves in.   The year 2010 looks to be the hottest ever recorded and predictions for the coming years are grim: warmer temperatures, less and more erratic rainfall and more extreme weather events. The list of what we can expect as a result of increased global warming is frightening: resource scarcities, unstable weather conditions and higher food prices. Most people living in the developed world, have so far been spared most of the more dangerous phenomena, but we are reaching a point in time when fewer of us will be able to escape climate change related ravages; we are, for example, already effected by higher food prices.   During last weeks world"s first ever Global Work Party on climate change, organised by a range of activist groups, including Greenpeace and the Global Call to Action Against Poverty, people in 188 countries took part in over 7,000 events meant to establish new habits that will help curb the carbon emissions that cause climate change. The Global Work Party was a cry to governments that people want action, that enough is enough. We will not sit idly by and watch as our planet and millions of the people who live on it are slowly destroyed because those in power would not make the changes necessary to curb catastrophic climate change and help eradicate poverty.   History teaches us that when decent people take risks and engage in struggle for principles, peacefully and courageously, then those who occupy the instruments of power, whether in government or in the financial sectors, will listen and understand.   It will take an unprecedented alliance of people from all walks of life to force fundamental changes in the institutions that are holding us back: from environmentalists, faith-based organizations, human rights activists, trade unions, educators and those on both the left and the right who have never considered how the natural world affects their lives.   We must work in the places where the actions causing climate change can be reduced - in our own homes and workplaces as well as the rainforests of Brazil, Congo and Indonesia and the coal mines of West Virginia and Poland. We must direct much more of our resources to the developing world for training in how to adapt to the irreversible consequences of the climate change already under way.   I have seen people die from completely preventable causes and wouldn"t wish the experience on anyone. By eradicating poverty and hunger, and vigorously addressing climate change, many such deaths may be prevented. Hopefully politicians will learn to act before it is too late. Visit the related web page
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