Young Leaders at AEF
The Aspen Environment Forum brought together policy leaders, innovators, scientists and a group of young leaders pushing for social change. Two of them, Roli Mahajan and Orain Edwards, with inspiring stories of their own, blogged about the forum for Amplifyyourvoice.org, a youth advocacy group focusing on sexual and reproductive health.
Armed with Flip Cams and notebooks, Roli and Orain reported from panel discussions and interviewed speakers, hoping to raise awareness about the links between sexual and reproductive health and climate change. Here are their dispatches on social media, interviews with forum speakers and more.
The two bloggers themselves spoke on a panel with other youth activitists about change and sustainability in the future. Watch:
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Comments
The family of humanity as well as much of life as we know it are now here inhabitants of a finite planet with a frangible environment that is failing fast. What really matters is being inadvertently ruined on our watch by the human population, but is not being openly discussed. My 'blood boils' in the truth that we have possessed knowledge of so much about ourselves as human beings with feet of clay and acknowledged so little about what has been known for so long about our distinctly human creatureliness, based upon extensive empirical research and unchallenged scientific evidence. Elective mutism and silent consent in the face of the reckless degradation, relentless dissipation and willful sell-off of what everyone knows to be sacred looks to me like the worst of all precipitants of the colossal ecological wreckage that appears in the offing. Inside and outside the community of top rank scientists, as well as among first class professionals in demography and economics who claim appropriate expertise of issues concerning human overpopulation issues, one issue is not being discussed by anyone. A worldwide conspiracy of silence continues to prevail about the population dynamics of the human species. The last of the last taboos is the open discussion of extant scientific research of human population dynamics. The implications of this astounding denial of what could somehow be real are potentially profound for the future of life on Earth, I suppose.
Within the human community a tiny minority of self-proclaimed masters of the universe hold the ‘destiny’ of all in their hands. This elite group is operating behind the scenes these days and "growing" the global economy to such a colossal scale that it could soon become patently unsustainable on a planet with the size, composition and ecology of Earth because our planetary home is not, definitely not "too big to fail."
Three cheers for scientific integrity in the leadership of AEF! In the name of scientific integrity will someone with appropriate expertise, please, pray tell us, what scientists and experts with appropriate expertise have known, based upon the best availabile scientific evidence, about the population dynamics of the human species? During my lifetime, what did so-called experts know and when did you know it? Why the worldwide conspiracy of silence concerning human overpopulation issues in the past 66 years? Hurry up, please, it is time for speaking out loudly, clearly and often before it is too late for human action to matter. Like it or not, ready or not, intellectually honest and morally courageous scientists have unassumed responsibilities to science.... and unfulfilled duties to humanity that must be performed.
In 1948 Aldo Leopold wrote: "our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs that it has... lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings. Perhaps such a shift of values can be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things natural, wild, and free." In our time greed is extolled as a virtue. Many too many are invited by the few to do 'good' things. Seven billion are told the global political economy was saved today, but not told at what expense: mortgaging the children's future. Nor were they told at what price: the Earth as a fit place for human habitation? To say that greedmongering is "unhealthy" seems tame to me. There must be stronger words deployed to describe such obscene per capita hyper-consumption and patently unsustainable individual hoarding; such conscious dissipation of Earth's finite resources and willful degradation of its frangible ecology. Perhaps we can find other words that more adequately describe how the planet we inhabit is being ravaged on our watch. And if we can find the words, who will speak out loudly, clearly and often? A worldwide conspiracy of silence is in effect. Self-proclaimed masters of the universe have already bought and paid off 'the brightest and best'. The greediest among us are selling off the Earth to the "lowest bidders." Greed rules the world, I suppose.