Monday, May 11, 2009

The 11th Hour

Caught portions of the movie 'The 11th Hour'. This is a documentary in line with Al Gore's 'An Inconvenient Truth'. This movie seeks to increase the awareness of the hideous condition of our environment and tries to bring about a change in how we think. Definitely liked what I saw but one para narrated by David Suzuki, an environmental activist, really stuck. Here is the paragraph:

Economists don't include all of the things that nature does for us for nothing. Some technologies would never be able to do what nature does. For example, pollinating all of the flowering plants. What would it cost us to take carbon dioxide out of the air and put oxygen back in, which all the green things do for us for nothing? It's possible to do a crude estimate of what it would cost us to replace nature. Well, it turns out, Constanza, estimated it would cost us $35 trillion a year to do what nature is doing for us for nothing. Now to put that in perspective. If you had added up all of the annual economies of all the countries in the world at that time, it would come to $18 trillion. So, nature is doing twice as much service for us as the economies of the world. And in the madness of conventional economics, this is not in the equation.

These are the kind of things that people should listen to. Everyone has their view of this world. This particular point should be noted down by economists and business people. Global Climate change is not just a problem that science alone can fix. It is not something you should think about only in your individual capacity but it is something that big Wall Street firms can sit up and take notice too. After all there is an economic formula that can applied even to this. This environmental problem that we face needs a change in everyone's thinking and at all levels...