Stung Eye
Stung Eye

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Stats that piss me off

Rain drops on roses [Feb 12] »

I'm fucking sick of it. We all know the problems, we've all seen the numbers, and we don't do shit about it.

Here's a refresher courtesy from Paul Hawkin taken from his book, Ecology of Commerce:


  • Every day the worldwide economy burns an amount of energy the planet required 10,000 days to create. Or, put another way, 27 years worth of stored solar energy is burned and released by utilities, cars, houses, factories and farms every 24 hours.
  • If our standard of living doubles in the next forty years - the accepted projection - we will quadruple our impact [on the planet], a physical impossibility.
  • Each person in America produces twice his weight per day in household, hazardous, and industrial waste, and an additional half ton per week when gaseous wastes such as carbon dioxide are included.
  • In some Thrid World countries, pesticides kill more people than do major diseases.
  • We are losing 27,000 species a year, seventy-four per day, one every twenty minutes, due in no small part to the 500,000 trees that are cut every hour in tropical rainforests.

Hawkin also notes that "no major piece of environmental legislation has ever been supported by corporate America. When business does acknowledge ecological issues, as it is increasingly forced to do, it proclaims unbounded optimism in the power of technology. When scientific data foretell resource depletion, toxic contamination, or detrimental impacts on human communities, thes predictions are overridden by a religious belief in the ability of humankind to devise new technologies for offsetting the hazards of the old technologies. Common sense advises us to doubt this logic, which not only requires faith in technology, but - predictably - rationalizes the further unshackling of industrial capitalism to use more of the earth's resources to fuel future ingeniousness."

So we gotta start doing shit about this... but what? post ideas.

rant rant.

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