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.