Even though it is not my week to blog, I thought I would pass along a few links of things that I find thought-provoking and, yes, at least a little uplifting.
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2011/09/two-thirds-worlds-biggest-businesses-put-climate-change-central-to-strategy.php?campaign=th_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29
These are the kinds of things I like to see. I firmly believe we need big responses to the big problems that we face. Business and commerce play huge roles in our lives. What if the world's biggest businesses were to all adopt more ecologically sustainable business practices? That would be a revolution in commerce that could have a tremendous impact on our lives. I question that it would be what we really, truly need, but it would certainly be a step in the right direction. Perhaps the best solution would be for huge corporations to go away completely, but at this point that seems neither realistic nor imminent. However, I can imagine that, if the world's biggest businesses succeeded in going "green," their customers could begin to take a hard look at their lifestyles and make conscious choices to change how they live, which could eventually lead to mega-business slowly going the way of the dodo as consumers choose smaller local products to the extent possible, and maybe even overthrown our consumer society completely. Now THAT would be a revolution
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/The-Beginning-End-Suburban-atlantic-1156625650.html?x=0
Here's another example of a big structural change that could have big ramifications. The article doesn't delve too deeply into why this is happening, but the study linked within the article does. It discusses some of the structural economic issues that have led to a decline in suburbinization. I don't know if this necessarily represents a change in attitudes, but I guess it's a step in the right direction. I hate seeing urban sprawl, so anything that makes some of it go away is fine by me. Maybe a crappy economy and high gas prices will cause people to slowly realize that living way out in the middle of nowhere isn't so great. Unfortunately, though, that same crappy economy is hitting hard at public transportation and other social programs that could bring people closer to their places of work (assuming they still have one) and play, which illustrates the limits of what passively letting events dictate our actions gets us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNlwh8vT2NU
Finally, I saw this movie at the IU Cinema last weekend, and thought it was really good. "Wasteland" is about an artist who goes to the world's largest landfill in Rio de Janeiro, where he meets the scavengers who sift through the garbage in search of recyclables, befriends them, photographs them, and then makes pieces of art out of the photos using the same garbage the "pickers" collect, ultimately selling the pieces and giving all the money to the pickers themselves. It's mind-boggling to see what happens to all the crap we throw away. Also amazing is what we reduce some segments of society to; I think the artist, Vik Muniz, indirectly refers to the pickers as trash early in the film, before he's gotten to know them. When you think about the confluence here of our human and inanimate detritus...it's actually pretty sickening. But at the same time, the movie manages to show that there is some hope there, and that these people are real and have real thoughts and aspirations for the future. Rent it, if you can...or Netflix it (possibly the first use of "Netflix" as a verb ever, and if it is, I want credit for it), if you're still using Netflix after their price increases, that is.
That's it for tonight.
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