Sep '06 - Dec '09
Today was cold, so Al Gore came to give a speech about global warming. He was here to launch a series of new Harvard-wide green initiatives and encourage people to think deeper about these issues. Among the most interesting things he did, and something I had not heard before, is a rhetorical connection he sees between the environmental crisis and the financial crisis. The argument was that just like a global crisis can be started by a few people giving unregulated bad loans, a climate crisis can be started by a few people releasing unregulated CO2 into the atmosphere. Then he gave props to Obama.
Sadly, as Harvard President Drew Faust was listing the ways all the schools are helping the effort in detail she hardly mentioned the GSD. Regardless, it was nice to see the whole University come together, this is something that doesn't happen often.
NECN
More info:
http://www.green.harvard.edu/
http://studentgroups.gsd.harvard.edu/greendesign/
3 Comments
i also found the enviro/financial crisis link to be interesting, but my take on his speech is a little different than yours...i didn't get the impression that he was saying a few people could start a crisis, but that a crisis will occur when people start to ignore reason (galileo/war/etc). another point which i thought was very interesting, which gore addressed in passing was, given the government's role in the housing/financial crisis, it is now in a very powerful position to promote sustainable lifestyles if it chooses to.
Xacto,
I think your last point about the government's position to mandate/encourage certain tendencies of growth now more than ever is very interesting. Especially when tied to a greening of infrastructure, given that there is already talk of a major stimulus package directed at state and federal infrastructure spending...
maybe the government could start by cleaning up some of the myriad ways they subsidize/encourage sprawl...
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