By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Hopefully you’ve heard about this weekend’s People’s Climate March in New York City.  It is being billed as the biggest climate rally in the U.S., taking place before UN Secretary Ban Ki-moon’s climate summit. While there will be many organizations and diverse views being touted during the march, there is one
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Global overshoot.  You’d have to be in serious denial, or living under a rock, to not realize that humanity today is living beyond planetary means.  We take so much from Earth to live our lives today. August 19th is designated as Earth Overshoot Day, the date humanity exceeds the carrying capacity
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org In 2013, the amount of carbon dioxide in Earth’s atmosphere passed 400 parts per million (ppm) for the first time in modern human history. And now, in 2014, carbon levels have remained above 400 ppm for three months in a row.  This makes the past three months the first period of
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org There is no denying that humans are impacting the planet, and not necessarily for the good. Some people may argue this point, but one look at mountaintops blown off in Appalachia or forests cleared for palm oil production would have to elicit some acceptance of human alteration of the environment. Many
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Consumer knowledge on the destructiveness of palm oil production – found in everything from ice cream and crackers to detergents and cosmetics, is rising.  Increased awareness is sorely needed, as more and more forests are cleared to make way for palm oil plantations. There are a lot of questions around the
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By Anjie Cai, guest youth blogger for www.howmany.org Capitalism as we know it today came into force around the early 1700s when Adam Smith laid the groundwork for the free market system in his famous book The Wealth of Nations. It quickly gave power to corporations, allowing them to control much of our lives. In
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By Anjie Cai, guest youth blogger for www.howmany.org. It’s frightening to look at bottled water from an economic perspective. Using cost-benefit analysis to examine the impact of bottled water, we realize how harmful it actually is. The Environmental Working Group’s 2011 Bottled Water Scorecard reported that bottled water costs “up to 1,900 times more than tap
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org A United Nations report titled Assessing Global Land Use: Balancing Consumption with Sustainable Supply highlights the pressing need to cope with changes in a growing and consuming world that is shifting quickly from the one we’ve known for decades. According to the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), the need to feed a
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org If you want to have an impact on reducing carbon emissions and the effects of climate change, look no further than your kitchen. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), every year the world wastes a third of all food for human consumption – nearly 1.3 billion tons – equal
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By Suzanne York, www.howmany.org Slowly but surely, economists and other experts are beginning to see the light on the need to rethink society’s obsession with growth, be it population or economic. Dean Baker, an economist with the Center for Economic & Policy Research, took the New York Times to task for celebrating fertility rates in
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