she directs the independent Global Water Policy Project and in March 2010 she was named the National Geographic Society's first Freshwater Fellow.
In 1992 Postel authored Last Oasis: Facing Water Scarcity, which now appears in eight languages and was the basis for a PBS documentary that aired in 1997. She is also author of Pillar of Sand: Can the Irrigation Miracle Last? (1999) and co-author of Rivers for Life: Managing Water for People and Nature (2003). Her article "Troubled Waters" was selected for inclusion in the 2001 edition of Best American Science and Nature Writing. Sandra has authored well over 100 articles for popular, scholarly, and news publications, including Science, Scientific American, Foreign Policy, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.…
than would have been the case if growth had been proactively curtailed decades ago. Global leaders now face the need to accomplish four enormous tasks simultaneously:
1. Rapidly reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
2. Adapt to the end of economic growth.
3. Design and provide a sustainable way of life for 7 billion people.
4. Deal with the environmental consequences of the past 100 years
of fossil-fueled growth.
Each of these four tasks represents an enormous challenge whose difficulty is multiplied by the simultaneous need to address the other three. The convergence of so many civilization-threatening
planetary crises is unique in our history as a species.
…
r natural beauty and vitality. Employing concepts of sustainability, ecological economics, and natural capital, the film shows how conventional economics encourages exploitation of our natural resources, ignoring the value of critical goods and services like clean air and water, fertile soil, and other natural assets. We hear from economists who propose a new model that puts a hard currency value on the virgin resources, considered Natural Capital, being harvested from the earth, and impose a value on the burden of squandering these resources in the forms of waste, byproduct and pollution. Mama Earth dispels the myth that being eco-friendly is merely an altruistic endeavor. In the future, it will be the way businesses not only positively impact the environment, but their bottom line as well.
Available from: http://www.videoproject.com…
Added by Michael Grove at 11:56 on December 10, 2010
s a whole. As the crisis intensified, German banks started to withdraw the money lent to Greek banks to finance the Greek deficit. Since no-one would lend to the Greek banks to finance these withdrawals, they were forced to call on European Central Bank liquidity support.
Meanwhile, the German banks are suddenly flush with cash from their newly called in Greek loans. Some of this money is on lent to the German economy, where there has been something of a construction and investment boom, but there is obviously a limit to how much of the money coming back from Greece can be viably on lent, so it gets deposited with the Bundesbank. The Bundesbank in turn lends the money to the ECB, which lends it to the Greek Central Bank, which lends it to the Greek commercial banks to repay their German loans. The circle is squared and the deficit is financed.
Quite obviously, this is an unsustainable model. It is simply not viable indefinitely to finance a customer who cannot pay his way. But generally you don't find that out until you demand the money back.
So to return to the question raised at the start of this article, at what point does that happen? Well it might happen sooner, but it will certainly happen once the costs of the demographic timebomb start to impinge on the German economy, and it requires its surplus savings to finance a dignified old age. These costs start to kick in big time about ten to fifteen years from now.
So assuming the euro manages to stagger on until then, that's the point of no return.
Now back to the real world. It's most unlikely the euro will survive in its present form to see this moment of doom, but you get the picture.
The whole thing is essentially a house of cards.…