Foreign Policy Blogs

Economic Development in the Arctic

Economic Development in the Arctic

There’s an event next Wednesday, April 6th, in NYC that you might like to attend.  It’s being cosponsored by NYU’s Center for Global Affairs (where I teach) and the government of Québec.  Our public programming at CGA is, as a rule, pretty interesting and engaging.

This program, Going North: Economic Development and Sustainable Livelihoods, “…will weigh the potential economic benefits” of development in the Arctic “… against the challenges of protecting ecosystems, sustainable livelihoods and traditional ways of life.”

For me, straight up:  We should be back-pedaling from development in the Arctic as fast as possible.  We depend – all of us, everywhere, on God’s green earth – on the Arctic and as it melts from the influence of global warming and black carbon deposition, to exacerbate the melting by extracting even more fossil fuel and depositing even more BC is …. what’s the word I’m looking for here? … oh, yeah, it’s madness.

For much more on the Arctic, see my fellow FPA blogger Mia Bennett here.

For Greenpeace’s simple, eloquent and eminently sane argument for a moratorium on development in the Arctic, see their video:

Soundbite with Mads Christiansen from Greenpeace in Nordic on Vimeo.

 

Author

Bill Hewitt

Bill Hewitt has been an environmental activist and professional for nearly 25 years. He was deeply involved in the battle to curtail acid rain, and was also a Sierra Club leader in New York City. He spent 11 years in public affairs for the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation, and worked on environmental issues for two NYC mayoral campaigns and a presidential campaign. He is a writer and editor and is the principal of Hewitt Communications. He has an M.S. in international affairs, has taught political science at Pace University, and has graduate and continuing education classes on climate change, sustainability, and energy and the environment at The Center for Global Affairs at NYU. His book, "A Newer World - Politics, Money, Technology, and What’s Really Being Done to Solve the Climate Crisis," will be out from the University Press of New England in December.



Areas of Focus:
the policy, politics, science and economics of environmental protection, sustainability, energy and climate change

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