New look – new hope

As part of the new-look Organic Gardener magazine, we will continue to investigate environmental and environmental health challenges facing humanity.

In the lead up to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (November, 2015), we’ve included a number of articles in the latest issue of Organic Gardener magazine, looking at the impacts already being felt from a disrupted climate, what the world needs to do and what we as gardeners and farmers need to plan for. We also look at some of the technological innovations that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

In the 1990s, when I was on the editorial team of the Permaculture International Journal (no longer in print), we covered articles on leading sustainability groups such as the Rocky Mountain Institute (still going: rmi.org), its co-founder Amory Lovins and social change visionary Paul Hawken who wrote about the urgency of preserving our natural capital. In their 1999 book Natural Capitalism, Amory Lovins,  L. Hunter Lovins and Hawken defined natural capital as “the earth’s natural resources and the ecological systems that provide vital life-support services to society and all living things”.

Lovins, Lovins and Hawken were highlighting the somewhat radical idea at the time that protecting our natural capital was essential to our economic future and to the planet’s future. This idea is finally gaining traction as global leaders and businesses contemplate the effects of climate change on the world’s economies, people and other life forms. 

Has this understanding and our acceptance of climate change come too late to prevent its worst effects? Many believe there’s still time, but it will require united and concerted global action and developing countries to ‘leapfrog’ our polluting energy sources into the new world of renewable energy.

The world will be looking to the Paris summit for real leadership.

For a sneak peek click here.