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| The Issues |
| The Movement |
| Our Future |
| Three Spheres |
In order to most effectively move forward and truly build a more sustainable and regenerative world, we must understand what the issues are and where they are, what the solutions and opportunities are involved in this movement, where we are heading and what the future could look like.
This section lays out the main points mentioned above and gives perspective on our current world and the important moves to focus on in our future.
The Issues
“The defining challenge of the 21st century will be to face the reality that humanity shares a common fate on a crowded planet. We have reached the beginning of the century with 6.6 billion people living in an interconnected global economy producing an astounding $60 trillion of output each year. Human beings fill every ecological niche on the planet, from the icy tundra to the tropical rain forests to the deserts. In some locations, societies have outstripped the carrying capacity of the land, resulting in chronic hunger, environmental degradation and a large scale exodus of desperate populations. We are, in short, in one another’s faces as never before, crowded into an interconnected society of global trade, migration, ideas and, yes, risk of pandemic diseases, terrorism, refugee movements and conflict.”
—From Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet, by Jeffrey Sachs
“Our situation today is far more challenging because in addition to shrinking forests and eroding soils, we must deal with falling water tables, more frequent crop-withering heat waves, collapsing fisheries, expanding deserts, deteriorating rangelands, dying coral reefs, melting glaciers, rising seas, more-powerful storms, disappearing species, and, soon, shrinking oil supplies. Although these ecologically destructive trends have been evident for some time, and some have been reversed at the national level, not one has been reversed at the global level.”
—From Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
Globally, every 24 hours we consume and release the same amount of energy that the earth needed 27 years to store. Every year we lose 25 billion tons of fertile topsoil and somewhere between 20,000 and 100,000 species. The recent UN Millennium Ecosystem Assessment concluded that we have polluted or overexploited two-thirds of the ecosystems on which life depends to the point that the ability of these ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted. Humankind is harvesting the earth's resources at a pace which greatly outstrips the pace needed for these resources to regenerate. Climate change threatens to raise sea levels and displace millions of people within the next century. Modern society is grossly overexploiting the world's natural resources and could soon cause an international disaster.
There exist today a myriad of environmental groups that seek to protect an extraordinary array of environmental interests, from mammals to minerals to marigolds. The need for such institutions is indisputable; humans are usurping the planet's resources and contributing to global climate change at a startling rate.
Even for its staunchest defenders, it is becoming difficult to support the limited view that resources are infinite and that it is appropriate to live singularly within the goal of personal, immediate gain. Whether swayed by moral arguments or pressing necessity, each citizen of humanity is currently faced with the reality that we have inherited a world in which we have no choice but to consider both the environmental and social components of our personal and professional decisions. Envirolution seeks to make people aware of how our lives are implicated in this reality and how we can prepare for a sustainable future in a carbon-constrained, climate-conscious world. We see an impressive Green Wave taking hold, and Envirolution seeks to build on this momentum and help realize a sustainable future.