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Posted on 09/09/2002 4:03:23 AM PDT by kattracks
Johannesburg (CNSNews.com) - One of participants at the "People's Earth Summit," a parallel (protest) event to last week's United Nation's-sponsored Earth summit, said, "If anyone in a developing country looks to the U.S. and wants a lifestyle like the average American--it's total bull---t!"
Paula Snyder, an American who is traveling around the developing world to promote various Green causes, told CNSNews.com , "Greed is the enemy - the underlying problem is greed, and that leads into most of the problems with the ecological system and the political system."
The People's Earth Summit was held at St. Stithians College near the U.N.'s main summit site in Johannesburg.
"We're going to need 16 more planets if everyone aspires to be like an average American," Snyder added.
'Social change project'
Snyder is traveling throughout the developing world as part of her "social change project," sponsored in part by the Earth Island Institute and Patch Adams, the famed doctor, known for his social activism and irreverent style.
Snyder said she has learned through her travels that residents of the world's poorer nations only think they want to emulate America.
"They want what we have -- but they don't realize how ugly it is," Snyder said.
Snyder implored her fellow Americans to "stop using so much...stop driving everywhere or carpool, stop wearing clothes that have brand names on them, stop using paper napkins for everything, stop using paper cups, carry your own travel mug, read Julia 'Butterfly' Hill's book, One Makes a Difference . It's the little things that really do make change." Hill is the young woman who lived in a California redwood tree for two years to protest logging practices.
"I wish I could make a total redistribution [of wealth]," Snyder said. "Things are going to change. They have to," she added.
"A lot to learn"
Katie Silberman told CNSNews.com , "I think the developing world has a lot of lessons for us as Americans in terms of limiting our consumption and reducing our waste."
Silberman is from the Oakland-based Center for Environmental Health, the group that led the heckling of Secretary of State Colin Powell during his address last week at the Earth Summit. (see story: American Environmentalist: 'I'm Ashamed For My Country')
"The American way of life at this point is so overblown in terms of materialism and consumption," Silberman explained. "We actually have a lot to learn from the Southern Hemisphere in terms of community health," she added.
Silberman cautioned against too much growth in the developing world. "We live on this one small planet and it only has a certain carrying capacity," she said.b?
'The natural way'
Eleven-year-old Akshit Batra, an Indian representative of the "Children's Earth Summit," said "greed of the people" is destroying the earth.
"People are very corrupt, they are not worried about the environment, they are not worried about the next generation," Batra said.
He said U.S. citizens "should try to change their lifestyle according to the natural way and farmers should decrease the use of pesticides."
'Ecological debt'
Richard Navarro, the chairman of Friends of the Earth International (FoEi) spoke at a People's Earth Summit conferences entitled, "Earth Democracy: Your Earth Rights."
FoEi played a prominent role in the main summit, and Navarro was sharply critical of the summit's final outcome. He said the world gathering was "hijacked by free market ideology, by a backward-looking, insular and ignorant U.S...."
Navarro's speech to the "People's Earth Summit" focused on the "ecological debt" owed by the industrialized "North to the [developing] South" for the North's pollution and consumption habits.
"How can a person on this planet have more right than others to consume more?" asked Navarro.
According to Navarro, men also owe the women a "debt" for gender bias, and he spoke of the debt that a "white person has with colored persons and indigenous peoples" because of racial discrimination.
In fact, all of mankind has "a debt from our species to the rest of nature," according to Navarro.
"Other species take from nature only what they need to survive," he stated. "Which other species has the capacity to destroy the earth?" Navarro asked.
Navarro said that the September 11th terrorist attacks on the U.S. were a tragic criminal act, but he noted, "That very same day, there were 7,000 people dying of diseases related to water [sanitation]. Isn't that also a crime?"
'New equality'
Herbert Girardet, chairman of the British-based Schumacher Society, said he was unhappy with the main Earth Summit because it was reduced to the "lowest common denominator - in other words, what the Americans think is okay."
Girardet said the agenda of the People's Summit was not to look at "what is possible, but what is necessary."
"The Earth is in such a profound sense of emergency" and "we must create a new equality between human life and the natural world," explained Giradet.
People at the People's Earth Summit waved posters reading, "Earth Spirituality"; "Free Trade Means Famine"; and an anti-genetically-modified-food poster reading, "Seed to Bread, Farmer to Farmer."
E-mail a news tip to Marc Morano.
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Fantastic! It's so good to see the environazis finally getting behind space exploration. Earth First! (We'll log the other planets later)
"I wish I could make a total redistribution [of wealth]," Snyder said. "Things are going to change. They have to," she added.
Once an environmentalist always a communist. And some people wonder why they are called watermelons
We live on this one small planet and it only has a certain carrying capacity," she said.
This is true but we haven't even come close to that capacity. I read here that the entire population of the world could fit in Texas with 2500 sq ft per person. That leaves us well over 90% of the world for support services. We've got tons of room left!
God Save America (Please)
(I have the same question about liberal women. Conservative women such as our freeperettes are great looking while the liberals tend to look like hitlery or madeline albright or reno)
GSA(P)
Eleven? And this child knows something of the "greed of the people?"
Feh. Hogwash...
When Katie dies, we will have gotten rid of a HUGE waste (of skin)
Is she?
Damn straight, you let-me-mE-ME-tell-you-what's-good-for-you-poor-little-brown-people control freak, things ARE changing. The economies of developing countries that have embraced globalism, trade, capitalism, development are growing at an average rate of 5 percent, compared to developed countries' average rate of 2 percent. (The economies of the progressively smaller number of countries following your f-ed up advice are contracting as their populations are increasing. Look up "natural selection" to deduce the ultimate result of this.)
IOW globalism and economic development, building things, growing things with chemicals, digging and drilling stuff in the earth -- all the things that you hate (and that feed people and cloth them and shelter them and give them resources and security to advance their condition in life and the development and education of their children) -- are NARROWING the gap between the rich and poor nations.
It's your worst nightmare, you hope-killing, freedom-hating poverty whore. Billions of little brown people over the course of this century will be leaving their mud huts for air-conditioned houses with a personal auto in the garage.
What will you do when you can no longer haul your well-fed white butt around the globe lecturing the little brown people about the glorious "sustainability" of their impoverished degradation? I wish you a long future molding in the dark corner of some Karma Cafe commiserating with your fellow socialists about how no one pays attention to you anymore.
(O.K. Done ranting. I feel better now.)
You Greenies can have one of them to commune to death for yourselves. You can even have one with air and water. You can even pick any one you want except this one, and the offer is good until 4 Oct 2009.
The name suggests even more proof that the Greens are Marxist in ideology. What are they looking for a Peoples Republic of Earth?
If our lifestyle is total bull---t then why do we have an EPA, emission standards and laws regarding pollution while China (Marxist/Maoist Communist) is belching out a hughe brown cloud of real bull---t fumes?
Why did the international community have to catch the Soviets meltdown at Cherynobl while our overblown 3 Mile Island incident shut down an industry?
Sounds like the same old bull---t to me...Blame America first.
Too bad she wasn't sitting in one of the millions of trees that burned this summer - due to mismanagement of the forest and arson by forest service employees.
Semper Fi
Well, she's cute, but I bet she doesn't shave her 'pits.
Shop smart, shop S-Mart
Things will change when we eradicate socialist's like her !!
Stop the attacks on our Freedoms by, the brain dead, wacko, extreme left-wing, lunatic fringe, dirt worshipping Green Jihadist, enviro-nazis terrorist's and their toadies in the media !!
Death To All Tyrant's !!
Freedom Is Worth Fighting For !!
Molon Labe !!
FMCDH !!
F.I.R.E. !!
Actually, if they want to help the poor, Bank officials should focus less on "inclusion" and more on freedom - because that's the real antidote to poverty. This is confirmed by the "Index of Economic Freedom," published annually by The Wall Street Journal and The Heritage Foundation. This guidebook ranks nations by how economically free they are. It consistently shows that people who live in countries with the fewest economic restraints are wealthier than those in economically repressed countries.
Take Haiti and the Dominican Republic, two developing countries with a common border. The 2001 Index shows that of the 155 countries graded, Haiti ranks 137th, while the Dominican Republic is 59th. So what? Well, the answer to that question is this: Thanks to a more market-oriented economy that features low tax rates, Dominicans earn nearly five times as much as Haitians: an average of $1,799, compared to Haiti's $370.
Examples like these abound. So why the Bank's misdiagnosis? Partly because of what it sees in the former Soviet Union. We've poured billions into many of these countries, and they're worse off today than under Soviet rule, Bank officials say. So capitalism obviously doesn't work.
But as the United States and other democracies have shown, capitalism isn't just the absence of socialist-style economics.
The reason should be clear: All the loans in the world are no substitute for economic reform - for freedom. Countries that want to be rich don't need charity; they need to unshackle their people's economic potential. Perhaps then the Bank can adopt a new slogan: "Our Dream is a World That's Really Rich."
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