| 
  • If you are citizen of an European Union member nation, you may not use this service unless you are at least 16 years old.

  • You already know Dokkio is an AI-powered assistant to organize & manage your digital files & messages. Very soon, Dokkio will support Outlook as well as One Drive. Check it out today!

View
 

Ehle- Earth Democracy in Action MY REMIX

Page history last edited by Ehle so fly 13 years, 5 months ago

You need a title

By: ??????

 

Introduction paragraph

HOOK

point a

point b

point c

thesis

 

 

Scarcity: when people take more than their environments have to offer.

 

Simple problem, simple solution, Bhutan caught on.

 

i like how you open with the story, but i think you should also have some what of an introduction paragraph that includes a thesis or over view of what you are going to talk about and then go into what is below.. Also what are both sides of the argument from the start could be important.

 

 

I sat across a table from a wealthy business owner, listening to him talk about a restaurant he planned to open; “fast service, that’s the key, high volume is the game”.  I poked his mind about his franchise, among those questions that came up; “How much do you pay your employees” he laughed in a not-so polite manner; “minimum wage, their job is not difficult”. I must have had an epiphany in that moment. What if the adage about the customer always being right was tossed, what if instead the employee came first, the customer second and the product third. It seemed like the most natural progression; Happy employees mean healthy, hard working individuals, producing the best product they can and promoting the company they “love”.

 

 

transition is need here- Also, try to put visuals in your essay to further explain your argument. Pictures make it more enjoyable for the reader.  

 

India has a poop problem. Yes, the eleventh largest Economy in the world, the fourth largest Purchasing power parity (PPP) still has people dying from poor sanitation, their most sacred river, the Ganges is jet black from human shit. Many of their people may be starving, dying, swimming in their own excrement but at least their economy is growing. Maybe they should put their employees (people) first.

 

 


 

The Kingdom of Bhutan had a traffic light, but it made the people upset. They took it out. A police officer replaced it. They don’t have plastic bags in Bhutan, because the people don’t like them. They are getting the idea. They don’t measure their success in GDP they use instead Gross National Happiness (GNH). The small landlocked nation has one of the world’s smallest economies, yet since launching this program of developing the GNH rather than GDP their life expectancy rates have soared to be 20 years higher And yet somehow in 2007 Bhutan ranked as the world’s second fastest growing economy. But how? The answer is simple, happy people fueling a sustainable development; it is a natural no frills, back to the basic, no politician cramming his pockets with money progression.  

 

 

This rapid, uncontrolled progression of some nations is ruining our forests, melting our glaciers and causing global warming.

 

The Average sea level worldwide is projected to rise up to two feet by the end of this century. Eliminating approximately 10,000 square miles of land in the United States.

 

Coastal zones are particularly vulnerable to climate variability and change. Key concerns include sea level rise, land loss, changes in maritime storms and flooding, responses to sea level rise and implications for water resources.

Hurricanes in the Atlantic are likely to become more intense as ocean temperatures rise.

 

As temperatures rise, some migratory birds are spending the winter an average of 35 miles further north than they did 40 years ago.

From heat waves to melting glaciers, the signs of a changing planet are documented in a new EPA report presenting 24 indicators of climate change.

 

So, why is the issue so important?  Shit happens right?

 

Well, obviously, we've all stepped in a warm pile of dog poo walking in our yard, damning our neighbor's canine "Roofus" as we start scraping our shoe off on the pavement, exclaiming "ewww, ewww, gross!" I mean it happens right? I think the worst part by far has to be that disgusting smell, ah geez.... makes you almost wanna gag. Its happened to you, don't deny it, you step in shit, walk into your car, get to work and suddenly everybody is asking if you had an accident. Embarrassed you exclaim hell no! And question who could have just soiled themselves.

 

But why should we be so repulsed by that earthly aroma of fresh,warm shit. It turns into fertilizer, it can be used as an alternative fuel source we could probably even use it to build homes and buildings (brings on a whole new meaning to a pile of shit, huh?) but seriously, whats so bad about poop!? Why all the disgust, why all the shame when you eat some bad McDonald's and find yourself taking refuge inside your friend's bathroom, attempting to light match after match, flooding the room with Poporui CFC's out of a can.

 

So why all the shame!? All the disgust? Readers, I bring you fulfilment, enlighment and answers to the question  old as time. HEIGHTS.

 

Yes. HEIGHTS, for my grandmothers and grandfathers in the audience finding this passage offensive, I implore you, do not adjust your hearing aids, Yes, its true you find Shit offensive because HEIGHTS.

 

How you ask? Can't make the link you say? Let me further my explanation.

 

Like shit, we are born with a natural aversion to heights. The smell of shit and most likely the taste of shit would cause natural physical and physiological reactions which raise red flags telling us something is wrong and to flee the situation.

 

 

With good reason might I add that we are born with these natural aversions and fears. Survival of human kind would not be possible if we built two story homes without staircases and found it more convenient to jump out of top story windows. Most likely we wouldn't have lasted very long. So thank God, we can't do complex math equations while walking on tight rope, one misstep would mean disaster and like our aversion to heights our aversion to Shit keeps up at bay from disease. And because we have this natural fear we don't expect NASA scientist to figure out how to send elephants to the moon while standing on tight ropes, so why should we expect people walking a the tight rope of life and death from rotting shit that causes disease to concern themselves with the "environment".

 

Hence, I ask how can we expect people to give a shit ( no pun intended) about the environment, when people are dying of diseases from poor sanitation. And yes, shit is a player in the global environment, raw sewage in our expensive clams and oysters, fogging up our crystal clear waters and snow white beach sands, making the view from our luxury timeshares in TampaBay look, well a bit shitty. But can we really reason to argue that we can relate to their situation? Our kids aren't exactly evicting their bowels to death from the problem, our problem is an environmental one, theirs is on the other hand is a struggle for survival.

 

When people are not surviving the environment comes second, people can't afford themselves to saving tony the tiger, Yogi the bear, or Trix when they're bathing, smelling and eating their own shit. So lets give this Environmental stuff a break? Lets focus on people, preservation of the environment will only naturally follow. We have to remove the common beliefs of what scarcity is and examine disparity more thoroughly. Perhaps it is unhappy people that create scarcity, scarcity stems from necessity and having no other resources to draw upon.

 

Many people assume that scarcity has always been part of the human condition and that scarcity is closely related to population increases. Shiva said different parts of the planet are endowed in different ways. There may be little rainfall in the deserts of Rajasthan, but the culture of Rajasthan evolved to manage that amount of rainfall, and they have developed miraculous technologies for harvesting and storing what rain they get. They have sophisticated underground storage systems and water-harvesting systems so that not a drop is wasted. These technologies still sustain cities like Jodhpur. They have enough drinking water because they've developed a conservation culture, and they grow crops that don't need much water.

 

The moment you think the desert of Rajasthan should be growing rice paddy or cotton, you create scarcity. Scarcity is not a result of uneven endowments—that is diversity. Scarcity is having a mismatch between a culture and nature's giving. Cultures have evolved cultural diversity to mimic the biological diversity of climates and ecosystems. It's when that relationship is disrupted that you get unsustainable population growth. There is no society in which you've had so-called population explosions as long as societies have lived within the context of their rights to the resources and the ability to conserve those resources for the future. Just look at two situations. In England, the population explosion started with the enclosures of the commons—when peasants were uprooted from the land and had to depend on selling their labor. In India, 1800 is the watershed for the consolidation of colonial regimes. For centuries before 1800 our population had been stable. When you depend on the land, you know there are five people who can be supported. You work your society out so you have five. When you are selling your labor power on an uncertain basis, in an unstable wage market, you know that having ten is better than having five. So dispossession from the Earth's natural wealth is at the root of instability and population growth. It is happening in the United States as well. It's a vicious cycle, and we need instead to create virtuous cycles that allow economic democracy to feed political democracy, cultural identities, and cultural diversity. Shiva said that it comes back to deepening of democracy. What we have at this moment is democracy reduced to the rule of lies—lies in the way the popular will is being counted, as we saw in Florida in 2000, and lies in the way the people's wealth is being counted, as we see in today's accounting scandals.

 

That false wealth is influencing who will rule—it's all just too false now. Our system of food security is being destroyed in the name of economic growth and economic liberalization, and people don't have enough food to eat. Our farmers are being ravished by seed companies, being pushed into debt, and committing suicide. This system is going to cost lives even in the US, where people don't know how they'll pay for their health or retirement.

 

The way out of this violent cycle is to deepen democracy—to bring decisions that directly affect people's lives as close as possible to where people are and to where they can take responsibility. If a river is flowing through some communities, those communities should have the power and the responsibility to decide how the water is used and whether it is to be polluted. The state has no business giving to Coca-Cola the groundwater of a valley in Kerala, resulting in rich farmland going totally dry. Communities need to take back sovereignty and delegate trusteeship to the state only as appropriate. What we have now is a regime of absolute rights in the hands of corporations with zero responsibility for the environmental and social devastation and the political instabilities they are creating. If we want to reactivate and rejuvenate democracy, we have to bring back the economic content. 

 

i suggest this paragraph gets broken into multiple paragraphs that can be expanded on.. too broad.. too long.. not eye catching.. I  am not very interested in reading this huge paragraph. I broke it into where I thought it split well, try to edit it with transitions to fix the gaps.

 

- Ehle 

 

 

 

" target="">please wait 2 seconds for an uncompressed image, or press Ctrl+F5 for original quality page

 

Comments (0)

You don't have permission to comment on this page.