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Co-founder of UN climate panel dies
Malin Rising, Associated Press
Bert Bolin, a Swedish climate scientist and co-founder of the Nobel Peace-winning U.N. panel on climate change, has died at age 82.
As early as the 1950s, Bolin produced research about the circulation of carbon in nature that remains relevant to the debate on climate change. He played a key role in communicating the dangers of climate change and served as the first chairman of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from 1988 to 1998.
The panel won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with former Vice President Al Gore for helping alert the world to the threat of global warming.
Visiting Sweden in December after accepting the Nobel Prize in Norway, Gore said: “Bert, you set up the framework for the IPCC and without your contributions we would not have come to where we are today. Thank you for starting the process.”
(2 January 2008)
Environmental Activist Questions the Goals of Globalization
Paul Solman, PBS NewsHour
PAUL SOLMAN: For three decades, physicist Vandana Shiva has been a key activist in the fight against globalization, especially in her native India, where she says it threatens hundreds of millions of peasants still down on the farm.
She’s accused beverage companies of stealing the people’s water in India, this footage by a new documentary by Swedish filmmakers PeA Holmquist and Suzanne Khardalian.
Outside the European patent office, Shiva challenged corporate patents of seeds, what she calls the biopiracy of natural resources.
…PAUL SOLMAN: At home at the foot of the Himalayan Mountains, Shiva is trying to hold back the forces of globalization, and return to what she says would be a more sustainable way of life, traditional agriculture. She’s using the Indian farm she grew up on to preserve native crops by maintaining a seed bank, promoting the use of India’s equally native fertilizer.
This had led the likes of free-market think tanker Barun Mitra to bestow a B.S. award on Shiva for sustaining global poverty.
VANDANA SHIVA: Why did you give me an award in Johannesburg for making the world starve because of organic farming?
MAN: It is because the agriculture today is not economically viable.
PAUL SOLMAN: Everywhere she goes, Shiva fights globalization. We met up with her recently at the University of Oregon Law school, and its 25th annual Public Interest Environmental Law Conference, where Dr. Shiva was to give a keynote speech, before which she sat down to answer some questions — among them, doesn’t Barun Mitra have a point, that small-scale farming isn’t viable?
VANDANA SHIVA: Farming on small plots of land is viable if it’s done without generating super-profits for agribusiness and the seed corporations.
Our farmers in the organic movement are doubling their incomes and their production, and are not in a desperate situation. Farming, as a vocation, is something the small farmer of India or the small farmer of Africa or the small farmer of Latin America is not voluntarily giving up.
…PAUL SOLMAN: You’re trained as a quantum mechanics nuclear physicist, right? How did you make the leap from that to one of the world’s most vocal and — and, in some sense, most extreme activists on environmental issues?
VANDANA SHIVA: If globalization had not been forced on us, I can imagine I would have gone back to doing my puzzles with quantum theory.
(reshown 1 January 2008; original 23 March 2007)
Outspoken environmentalist puts his money where his mouth is
John Richardson, Portland Press Herald / Maine Today
In his fight against global warming, it seems Fred Padula’s generosity is as limitless as his criticism.
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Some people around Portland know Alfred “Fred” Padula for the pointed e-mails he fires at them from a computer in his energy- efficient home near Back Cove.
Padula is a prolific critic, a nag even, of local institutions and bureaucracies that he believes are not doing enough to fight global warming. And not many escape that list.
But other people know a different, more private, man. That’s the Padula who volunteers to help people make their homes more energy-efficient and donates untold thousands of dollars for things like solar panels on school buildings, climate education programs, and library collections on global warming and energy conservation.
Padula, a retired history professor, is not a politician or a celebrity. You’ve probably never heard of him.
But when it comes to believing that the world is hurling itself toward a climate catastrophe, and that one man can make a difference, Al Gore has nothing on Fred Padula.
(27 December 2007)
Norman Reynolds, 1941-2007
A people’s economist
Patrick Bond, University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society via PEN-L
22 Dec 2007 23:59 Norman Reynolds, a beloved partner, father, friend and mentor, died last Saturday, December 15, while hiking with his daughters in the Drakensberg. [Africa]
Remembrance by Marjorie Jobson , a board member of The People’s Agenda, which Reynolds chaired
Reynolds was a development economist who dedicated his life to envisioning and implementing economic rights-based programmes that restore the local economies of communities through processes that reclaim African traditions of mutual care and support and bring economic growth. He worked with people in damaged communities, advocating that development begins with reclaiming their identity and renewing their culture. He asserted that a renewed sense of community was the appropriate vehicle through which social grants and investments might be directed towards public benefits, such as providing for child, health and investment rights.
He demonstrated that citizens could become responsible parents, proud community members and partners with government through rebuilding their local production bases. The local pilots of these programmes bear testimony to this vision. Reynolds’s innovative, sustainable community investment programme — being implemented at several sites across South Africa and adopted by the department of provincial and local government as its official approach to local economic development — created road maps whereby all Southern Africans, trapped because of systematic disempowerment and exploitation, might take steps towards establishing working local economies in which cash circulation is raised by up to 400%. In the private sector Reynolds pioneered democratic employee ownership.
He was born in Harare on July 14 1941 and attended Peterhouse Secondary School before enrolling at the University of Cape Town for a degree in economics. He completed his PhD in 1968 with a Study of an African Irrigation Resettlement Scheme in Eastern Zimbabwe. He was a visiting fellow at Harvard, Cambridge and Cape Town universities and was an Ashoka Fellow. He worked at the World Bank with colleagues, such as Joseph Stiglitz and David Ellerman, and at the World Bank in India between 1970 and 1975. …
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Remembrance by Patrick Bond (University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society}
I can offer some partial, highly biased, professional (sort of) and heart-felt reflections on the work of Norman Reynolds, who died last week in a site I’m sure he was happiest: up an African mountain hiking with family members.
…One key reason Norman had influence, audience and great admirers across Southern Africa and the world, is that he contested conventional wisdom so earnestly, including Thabo Mbeki’s attempt to compress a multifaceted, *singular* economic system into the idea of ‘Two Economies’, which Mbeki claims are ‘structurally disconnected’. Here was one of Norman’s replies:
We have a “dual economy”. Not, however, the double story house model that government pushes, as in ASGISA, where the rich are partying in the top floor and the poor are trapped below without the ladders (delivered education, skills, houses etc.) to climb to the top floor and join the party… The real “duality” is global and marginalised local economies. The global is well served by GEAR and a plethora of institutions. The latter, marginalised local economies, lacks any real attempt to create a set of policies and programmes that promote “Localisation” to balance out the opportunities and threats of “Globalisation”.
Norman spent enormous time and energies addressing shortcomings of the alleged ‘dual economy’ with the same kinds of systems that make the first economy so prosperous at the expense of poor people. These included titling and mortgaging land, increasing the scope of the cash economy (through more appropriate institutions), and promoting microcredit. Norman did these better than anyone I know. Some of the materials I’ve been looking at today – such as his recent call for a bank oriented to the Zimbabwean exiled diaspora – reflect this sense that a more robust, interventionist, institutional economics could solve market imperfections.
But although, coming from the left, I still have my doubts about these as strategies, four commonalities kept our conversations as comradely as could be. Norman took as a first priority an approach to *local-level*, national and regional economic linkages which we agreed were far preferable to export-oriented growth and the mindless extraction of natural resources. Just consider a few sentences from a recent Zimbabwe paper written for The People’s Agenda project, in a section on ‘A Stable Yet Dynamic Foreign Exchange Regime’: “Keynes made the all-important distinction: people, ideas and some goods and services must move freely between countries – but not goods and services that can be produced locally and certainly not money. He argued for controls over capital flows so that each country could set interest rates according to domestic economic policy needs.” Hear hear! That’s radical stuff these days, far to the left of Cosatu’s appeals to Jacob Zuma.
Second, no one I knew had as diverse and full a set of experiences setting up local marketplaces as Norman. That meant, from time to time, there were disasters which Norman was perfectly frank about. I quote a paper of his in my PhD (Uneven Zimbabwe: A Study of Finance, Development and Underdevelopment) providing evidence for a problem we Marxists call ‘overaccumulation’: “The danger for all participants, including banks who finance small rural enterprises, is that local markets with small demand can be quickly saturated by a commonality of available materials and skills.”
Third, we agreed that the big megaprojects carried out in lieu of proper development were ridiculous white elephants. Even one which has been widely praised – the Kariba Dam in his native Zimbabwe – was subjected to tremendous scrutiny by Norman and some colleagues in a scoping paper he wrote for the World Commission on Dams. Brilliant work, which I still give to students interested in environment, energy and economics.
(20 December 2007)
Many short articles by development economist Norman Reynolds at the original.
