Photo credit: Deivis

During a recent visit to Cuba, we stopped by an agricultural cooperative on the outskirts of Havana. Its farmers and cooperatives across the country are part of what’s widely acknowledged as the world’s largest organic farming experiment. Hundreds of thousands of farmers at the grassroots proudly proclaim themselves part of Cuba’s “environmental movement.”

In 2008 Cuba was devastated by three full force hurricanes that caused some $10 billion in damage, including 400,000 homes destroyed and widespread crop damage. Cubans link the growing destructive power and frequency of the hurricanes with global climate change. Understandably, environmental awareness and the need for radical measures to curb global warming run high.

Remarkably, in 2006 the World Wildlife Federation rated Cuba as the only country that combined high human development standards as defined by high literacy and health indexes with a low ecological footprint including electricity consumed and carbon dioxide emitted per capita.

This got me interested in the path of sustainable socialist development Cuba has chosen and how environmental consciousness developed. How could an underdeveloped country with limited economic resources have an environmental record better than its wealthy neighbor to the north? The story gives one great hope that planet Earth can be saved.

(more…)

What is equality and development? And what kind of influence has the environment on both of these relations? For me, environmentalism has always been about caring about the well-state and equality of everyone and everything. Al Gore said, during the annual World Economic Forum Meeting in 2008, that you can’t solve climate change or poverty in the developing world “without dealing with the other”:

“Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other (Gore, 2008)”.

So if we are to solve the equality in the world, our uneven development and environmental problems we just can’t work on one of them. They are all connected and thus we have to deal with all of them at once.

(more…)

Photo credit: World Economic Forum

George Monbiot writes today on the Guardian that the new EU emissions agreement is a disaster and calls it carbon colonialism.

So much for the Europeans leading the way on climate change. Even as our governments claim they want to drag the world into an effective climate agreement in Poznan, they have just pulled Europe out of one in Brussels.

The agreement they have just reached is a disaster. The 20% carbon cut they promise by 2020 falls miles short of what’s needed, and they’ll be able to buy most of it from abroad anyway. All this means, in a world which has to eliminate most of its carbon pollution, is that other countries, which have sold their easiest reductions to us, will then find it harder to make emissions cuts of their own. It’s carbon colonialism, in which Europe picks the low-hanging fruit in developing countries, leaving them with much tougher choices later on.

(more…)