Showing posts from category environment.
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Nancy Lindborg, The Huffington Post
Chronic Crisis in the Sahel Calls for a New Approach
›July 10, 2012 // By Wilson Center StaffThe original version of this article, by Nancy Lindborg, appeared on The Huffington Post.
It is the lean season in the Sahel, a spine of arid and dry lands that runs from Senegal to Chad in western Africa, and once again we are seeing the devastating images of children gaunt with hunger. This is a region that faces high childhood malnutrition and underdevelopment even under the best of circumstances so one poor harvest can push millions of the most vulnerable into severe risk. In the aftermath of poor rains, and with food prices stubbornly stuck on high since the food crisis of 2008, some 18.7 million people across eight affected countries in the Sahel are at risk of food insecurity this year alone. At least eight million people are already in need of emergency assistance.
At USAID, we are determined to get ahead of these kinds of chronic crises. We know that millions of Africans living in the dry lands of the Horn and Sahel regions need new solutions. Last year, the worst drought in 60 years ravaged the Horn of Africa, driving 13.3 million people into crisis. And this summer, families in the Sahel are feeling the peril of depleting food supplies, high food prices, and rising malnutrition.
We can’t prevent what appears to be increasing cycles of drought, but we can and are working to create better solutions and build greater resilience among the most vulnerable.
Every crisis is complex, and the Sahel is no exception. A regional drought has been overlaid with instability stemming from the coup in Mali and conflict in the northern part of that country where armed militant groups have forced the suspension of critical relief operations. More than 184,000 refugees have fled to communities in neighboring countries that are already deeply stressed from drought. Though still functioning, local and regional markets have been disrupted, driving food prices even higher. And as of mid-June, swarms of locusts from southern Algeria and Libya had arrived in northern Mali and Niger; now expected to move southward, these infestations could result in crop destruction exacerbating an already worsening situation.
Continue reading on The Huffington Post.
Image Credit: West African medium-term food security outlook, courtesy of the Famine Early Warning Systems Network.
Nancy Lindborg is the assistant administrator of the Bureau for Democracy, Conflict, and Humanitarian Assistance at the U.S. Agency for International Development. -
Geoff Dabelko at the Aspen Environment Forum: “We Have to Find Ways to Do Things Differently”
›July 9, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodECSP Director Geoff Dabelko was in Colorado last month to participate in the fifth annual Aspen Environment Forum, a three-day series of discussions about some of the world’s most vexing environmental concerns, hosted jointly by the Aspen Institute and National Geographic. Dabelko took part in two panel discussions, considering recent efforts to “green” the U.S. military in one and addressing the nexus of climate change and conflict in the other.
The U.S. Department of Defense is currently pursuing an ambitious strategy to minimize its dependence on oil, aiming to produce 25 percent of its power from renewable energy sources by 2025. During the 75-minute “Is the Military a Model?” panel, Dabelko joined Sharon Burke of the Department of Defense, Sherri Goodman of CNA, and U.S. Army Major General Joseph Anderson to discuss the extent to which the military’s embrace of more efficient and alternative technologies can spur wider innovation and adoption. Many have previously cited the military’s role in developing technologies like the Global Positioning System and the internet as a reason for optimism in this regard.
The “Climate and Conflict” panel, meanwhile, addressed how and to what degree climate change might affect future conflicts. According to Scientific American, “the consensus was that climate change per se will not cause conflict, armed or otherwise, but will exacerbate existing conflicts and instabilities.”
This was Dabelko’s third trip to the Aspen Environment Forum, and he spoke enthusiastically about the event in a brief interview with genConnect, which was covering the event. “The experience has been excellent,” he remarked, highlighting the diversity of participants as one of the forum’s greatest strengths.Dabelko acknowledged that much work remains to be done to achieve environmental and energy-related goals, but praised the realistic and grounded approach of attendees: “We have a tremendous set of challenges, and we’re not yet really succeeding in addressing them. So there’s a self-reflection that what we’ve been doing isn’t necessarily getting us where we want to get, and so we have to find ways to do things differently.”
One way to improve, according to Dabelko, is to work on communications. “[We need to have] conversations about complex issues, [and we] need to understand how to make them more accessible and more simple. But ‘simple’ does not mean ‘dumb’ or ‘incorrect’…we need to get smarter about how to have these conversations with wider and [more] diverse audiences.”
Photo Credit: Geoff Dabelko, courtesy of the Aspen Institute. Video: genConnect. -
UNHCR Report on East African Environmental Migrants: Long on Anecdotes, Short on Data
›July 6, 2012 // By Graham NorwoodAs part of the recently-concluded Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) presented a new report last week, titled Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Human Mobility: Perspectives of Refugees From the East and Horn of Africa. The report was created in order to “understand the extent to which refugees and IDPs (internally displaced persons) in the East and Horn of Africa have perceived, experienced, and responded to climatic events and trends in recent years.”
In order to achieve this goal, UNHCR and its collaborators (including the United Nations University Institute for Environment and Human Security, the London School of Economics, and the University of Bonn) interviewed approximately 150 refugees and IDPs in parts of Ethiopia and Uganda.
While the narrative is more anecdotal than data-driven, it nevertheless identifies several apparent trends in climate-related migration:Overwhelmingly, stories of mobility associated with moving away from worsening impacts associated with climate variability followed a specific pattern. That is, where movement related to climatic stressors did occur, such movement was taken as a last resort (only after all efforts to remain and adopt other methods of adaptation had been exhausted), particularly where the land being left was self-owned and only after all efforts to remain and try a number of alternative forms of adaptation had failed. Where movement occurred, in most cases it was likely to be internal, circular, and temporary rather than cross-border and permanent.
Stories of international migration were rare, and generally occurred either because migrants already lived near a border and were familiar with the area, or because they had encountered violent conflict (often of a political nature) during an earlier intra-state relocation.
The report also mentions that a majority of those interviewed claimed to have noticed significant changes in weather patterns over a 10- to 15-year period. In fact, many interviewees frequently claimed to be able to distinguish “normal” climate variability from more “permanent” changes.
Significantly, Climate Change, Vulnerability, and Human Mobility highlights several ongoing sources of debate and controversy regarding the issue of climate-induced migration as well.
The links between climate change, migration, and violent conflict are not well understood. And the question of whether climate change precipitates conflict or merely exacerbates it is still unresolved, though research on the subject is ongoing.
The terminology used to describe climate migrants remains a hotly-contested issue as well. While terms like “environmental refugee” and the especially popular “climate refugee” can make for good headlines, the UNHCR report strongly disapproves of such terms, given that the word “refugee” has a very specific legal definition.
Indeed, there is still much debate over how to classify climate migrants. It has been pointed out, for instance, that it is virtually impossible to separate out the various factors that induce migration, and questions as to whether migration is forced or voluntary also persist. For the most part, the UNHCR report shies away from such contentious questions, aiming instead to present a general and “human” narrative designed to call attention to the plight of climate migrants.
Definitional debates aside, the issue of climate-induced migration has been in headlines recently. The Asian Development Bank reported in March that 42 million people were displaced in the region during the last two years due to storms, floods, and other extreme weather events. And Israel signaled a tougher stance on immigration by deporting South Sudanese refugees in the wake of a major Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection report warning of future climate-induced migration.
The particular vulnerability of women too is drawing increased interest. An article in Environmental Research Letters points out that “women tend to be poorer, less educated, have a lower health status, and have limited direct access to or ownership of natural resources,” and will therefore be disproportionately affected by climate change. Gender disparities must be accounted for in policymaking then, to ensure that future climate migration policies are equitable and inclusive, the author, Namrata Chindarkar, argues.
The challenges of defining and measuring the phenomenon remain – the UN Environment Program’s 2006 prediction of 50 million climate migrants by 2010 has not come true, and has even been a source of some embarrassment for the organization – but the recent UNHCR report is a timely reminder that climate-induced migration remains a major issue with tremendous long-term implications.
Sources: Asian Development Bank, Environmental Research Letters, Human Rights Education Association (HREA), The Jerusalem Post, The New Republic, National Geographic, OECD, Scientific American, Der Spiegel, UNHCR, The Washington Post.
Photo Credit: Displaced Somalis, courtesy of UNHCR. -
An Update on PRB’s Population, Health, and Environment Project Map
›As reproductive rights advocates reflect on their disappointment with the outcome of last week’s Rio+20 summit, it is encouraging to see that population, health, and environment (PHE) projects – which fundamentally connect women’s health with sustainable development – continue to sprout up around the world. The Population Reference Bureau (PRB) launched their community-supported PHE Project Map in March 2010, and since then, the map has grown to include 76 projects across three continents, and has been viewed more than 82,000 times.
The goal of the map is to show which organizations are doing what PHE work where and when. While the map highlights expected hotspots like Ethiopia, Madagascar, and the Philippines, it also brings into focus countries that may not necessarily come to mind when thinking about PHE – South Africa, Venezuela, and Vietnam being among them. The map is updated on a rolling basis, and has grown substantially during its first two years.
These numbers should offer encouragement to reproductive rights and sustainable development advocates. Even if world leaders are still struggling to integrate these issues into a global development framework, NGOs, local nonprofits, and development agencies across the world are moving full-speed ahead to improve healthcare, strengthen ecosystems, and empower women and men across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.
To add a project to the map, contact PRB’s Rachel Yavinksy at ryavinsky@prb.org. -
Book Review: ‘World Population Policies’ Offers Sweeping Overview of a Complex Field
›July 2, 2012 // By Elizabeth Leahy MadsenWith much attention in the international family planning community directed to the impending anniversary of the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development and the closing date of the Millennium Development Goals, the fact that 2012 is the 60th anniversary of two other milestones in population programming may have escaped notice. In 1952, the International Planned Parenthood Federation was created, and India became the first country to formulate a national policy to reduce population growth.
These and many other landmarks are highlighted in World Population Policies: Their Origin, Evolution and Impact, a new book by demographer John May that reviews several decades of policies, advocacy, and program interventions addressing the full range of diverse demographic trends seen globally.May, who spent more than two decades working on population issues at the World Bank and other international institutions before recently assuming a fellowship at the Center for Global Development, is well-positioned to provide such an ambitious overview. Although the breadth of material included in the book means that some topics receive less coverage than a specialist might wish, it serves as a sound introduction to this diverse field, and offers some particularly interesting case studies.
The book’s main chapters begin with a summary of current population trends, including a comprehensive array of figures and statistics about population size, distribution, and projections. Some important concepts, such as the demographic transition and dividend, are perhaps covered too quickly, and in such cases the book would have benefited from more than a handful of figures, charts, and graphs. May classifies regions and countries as demographic “hotspots,” where the number of people outstrips available resources, and “coldspots,” which have too few residents. He makes an ambitious suggestion that high-density countries facing resource challenges, such as Bangladesh, should consider promoting rapid fertility decline below replacement level to stop population growth, then reverse course and increase to a rate that promotes a stable population – but such a reversal from low fertility is a feat that has stymied several countries in Europe and East Asia.
Evolution of the “Population Movement”
In addition to summarizing the ways that demographic issues have been framed in the past several decades, May briefly describes the long-running debate between demographers and economists about the ways in which population is theorized to affect economic development.
Three points in this chapter were particularly striking: First, the concept of family planning as a human right dates from well before the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development. In 1968, the Tehran International Conference on Human Rights defined the ability to choose family size and spacing as a fundamental right; still, some programs, such as India’s under the Emergency-era government of the late 1970s, adopted coercive practices. Second, population policies are not limited to official initiatives targeting fertility, mortality, and migration, but also encompass implicit or “passive” policy measures that arise without advance planning or that have an unintended effect on demographic trends. Related to this, May suggests that “contextual variables” such as education, health, gender, culture, and religion can have a greater impact on population policies’ effectiveness and demographic outcomes than government structures or funding.
Although population policies are most often designed at the national level, May’s discussion of the “population movement” highlights the influence of international networks and donors on such policies. By the late 1960s, the U.S. Agency for International Development had begun funding family planning programs overseas, and the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) was active. Although the United States has become less dominant over time, population programming remains a Northern-driven movement.
Beginning with a meeting in Belgrade in 1965, a series of international population conferences successfully raised the prominence of population issues on the global development agenda and built consensus around international goals, while also becoming increasingly political.
May’s cautions about such conferences are timely given this month’s London Family Planning Summit: “Consensus-building through international conferences and their preparatory meetings is often inefficient as a process, whereas such events could be used to promote learning among policymakers and experts…The gap between the conferences’ resolutions and the actual policies implemented at country level is important to remember” (110).
Growth and Aging Distinguish the Demographic Divide
In his chapter focusing on the developing world, May notes that population policies have become broader in the nearly 20 years since the Cairo conference, incorporating a reproductive rights framework while also addressing new issues such as the environment, HIV/AIDS, and poverty. But under this more holistic approach, national policies are susceptible to becoming overly diffuse, with an ambitious agenda not matched by concrete action plans.
The challenges expand to policy implementation as well. Kenya is profiled as emblematic of the difficulties facing population programs in fast-growing sub-Saharan Africa, particularly political disinterest, mismanagement, opposition from some religious groups, and commodity shortages. But when implemented well, such policies can be very successful. The book offers a thorough summary of research findings on the common features of effective family planning programs (such as leadership, monitoring performance data, and opening access to contraceptive methods at lower levels of the health system), as well as their demographic impact. Several country examples are cited to show that family planning programs reduce lifetime fertility rates by 0.5 to 1.5 children per woman, while also benefiting individual and social health, income, and well-being.
While population policies have been often effective at shaping demographic trends in high-fertility settings, even in changing cultural norms about family size, May notes that their impact has been notably weaker in reversing the trajectory of declining fertility in developed countries. While countries such as France have maintained a fertility rate close to, albeit still below, replacement level thanks to generous paid parental leave, housing initiatives and public child care facilities, policies that try to boost low fertility through financial compensation have been particularly ineffective.
Developed countries are less likely to have formal population policies and tend to address demographic issues through incentives and disincentives implemented by multiple agencies. Aging and immigration are receiving greater attention in such countries, along with low fertility rates. Population aging raises policy concerns that are both economic and social, and May focuses largely on the benefit of reducing incentives for early retirement. He notes that thanks to improvements in health and life expectancy, “today’s 65-year-old persons are young compared to their counterparts” of previous generations (180). Despite their economic soundness, government efforts to raise retirement ages are widely unpopular, and France’s newly elected president has promised to cut the retirement age from 62 to 60 for some workers.
What Comes Next
Some observations are intriguing and could have been further detailed. For example, May notes a recent “fragmentation” of organizations working on population issues, and suggests that “too many institutions and NGOs appear to support their own limited mandates as they also struggle for resources that are less abundant” (5). Decentralization and integration within health systems is a growing trend that could have been discussed in more detail, along with the legacy of pronatalist laws and attitudes by colonial powers in Africa, the effect of recent European efforts to tighten immigration policies, and the achievements of forums designed for collaboration on population policy issues (for example, the United Nations Commission on Population and Development or the Reproductive Health Supplies Coalition).
Looking towards the future, May foresees continued integration of demography with related development issues, such as poverty reduction and equitable growth, gender and youth perspectives, environmental issues, and conflict prevention. He notes a few challenges, including sub-Saharan Africa’s lag in fertility decline and the overall ineffectiveness of policies aimed at addressing the pressures of urbanization on infrastructure and resources.
In high-fertility settings, May recommends that instead of framing reproductive health writ large, policies should more specifically target family planning and women’s empowerment, including education and income-generation opportunities as well as legal rights. Bangladesh is presented as a model for other countries, as a setting where cultural change and economic development laid the groundwork for successful family planning outreach efforts. Most of all, May entreats government leaders to maintain a policy focus on population issues, regardless of where they stand in the demographic divide.
Elizabeth Leahy Madsen is a consultant on political demography for the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program and senior technical advisor at Futures Group.
Photo Credit: “Crowded Shopping District,” courtesy of flickr user EnvironmentBlog. -
Gwen Hopkins, Aspen Institute Global Health and Development
Aspen Ideas Festival Takes on “The Population Challenge”
›The original version of this article, by Gwen Hopkins, appeared on the Aspen Ideas Festival blog.
The pictures flash quickly: lush sea vegetation replaced by empty grey-blue seabed as carbon bubbles out of undersea vents. Reservoirs depleted too quickly, never to refill. Forests and mountains leveled for coal, deep sea oil rigs ablaze, the arctic ice cap visibly retreating. Dennis Dimick is answering the question posed to him with a litany of evidence collected by National Geographic: Does population matter?
Yes, he says – a lot.
Kicking off the Our Planet: The World at Seven Billion track, on a panel called “The Population Challenge,” Washington Post staff writer Joel Achenbach moderated a conversation between Dimick and Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE USA, following Dimick’s presentation about how the earth’s human population has made its presence known.
Dimick explains that this new geologic era has been dubbed Anthropocene, the age of man, as we “transform the planet to perpetuate our lifestyle.” That’s a lifestyle powered first and foremost by what he calls “the new sun” – coal, oil, and gas, or in Dimick’s words, “ancient plant goo.” These transformations are deep and widespread – and according to Dimick, growing worrisome in their magnitude. While there is searing inequity – “few have a lot, and a lot have few” – those that lead the consumption have, for example, caught 90 percent of the big fish in the sea already, and burn in one year a quantity of fuel that took a million years to coalesce underground. “If everyone in the world lived like Americans do, we’d need four planets.”
Continue reading on the Aspen Ideas Festival blog.
Photo Credit: Aspen Institute. -
IPPF and Partners Connect Reproductive Rights With the Environment and Development
›A new framework for sexual and reproductive health is needed, argued panelists in a recent event at the Wilson Center, and the Rio+20 conference on sustainable development would have been the place to start. An international consensus around women’s human rights was developed at the International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo in 1994, but Carmen Barroso, director of the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Western Hemisphere Region, said there has been slow implementation, little funding, and furthermore the world has changed significantly since then.
Barroso was joined by Latanya Mapp Frett, vice president of Planned Parenthood Global, as well as two representatives of Planned Parenthood partner organizations, Marco Cerezo of FUNDAECO and Ben Haggai of Carolina for Kibera.
New challenges to the reproduce rights landscape include the rapid spread of HIV/AIDS and decreased funding for international programs. But new opportunities include rapid dissemination provided by the internet and globalization and a subsequent mobilization of youth. “Young people are the largest cohort in history,” Barroso said in an interview with ECSP, both in absolute numbers and in percent of the population. “We have a historical opportunity [to incorporate] them in these decision-making processes.” Additionally, gender and health issues are incresaingly seen by many as linked with the environment and development.
Intersection of Health and the Environment
Marco Cerezo’s FUNDAECO (Foundation for Ecodevelopment and Conservation) is an example of Planned Parenthood’s partnership with other organizations. Based, in rural Guatemala, they shifted from primarily focusing on conservation and sustainable development to incorporating women’s health after finding a vicious cycle of poverty, high fertility, and environmental degradation in the places they worked.
Women’s health was so dire it was holding development back, Cerezo said. “Sustainable community development will not be possible without the education, empowerment, and support to rural women,” they write in their mission statement.
FUNDAECO now acts as a model for the intersection between reproductive health and the environment. Cerezo reported that once women are healthy and empowered through clinics established by FUNDAECO, they become more active in all aspects of the community, including ecological preservation.
Building Healthy Communities
Ben Haggai, who works in Nairobi’s biggest slum, Kibera, further reiterated the need for integrated programs. Carolina for Kibera has a number of programs to improve the quality of life for residents, he said, and has a particular focus on youth with sports associations and education programs.
Youth are the best reproductive health educators, Haggai said, as they are able to talk frankly with their peers. The NGO trains peer youth educators to reach out to community members about reproductive health and other issues like substance abuse. Since the young people work as volunteers, Haggai said, they are motivated only by a desire to improve their communities.
A Natural Intersection
Latanya Mapp Frett agreed that sexual and reproductive health aligns quite naturally with issues of sustainability. “We try to work in the countries overseas in Latin America and Africa where we focus particularly on non-traditional health sectors,” she said in an interview with ECSP following the panel. “One of those sectors is the environment.”
While emphasizing that contraceptive use is a cost-effective way to ensure sustainable development, Mapp Frett cautioned against framing sexual and reproductive health only in the context of reducing fertility. While this may have been common in the past, she noted, it’s important to ensure that women have the right to make childbearing choices for themselves.
Mapp Frett also urged policymakers in the United States to look to developing countries for intersections between development, the environment, and reproductive health. She said that Planned Parenthood’s partner organizations, including FUNDAECO and Carolina for Kibera, have found these connections and successfully partnered with already existing networks like churches to more effectively reach the community.
Translating Into Effective Action
Each member of the panel spoke about the challenge of articulating the need for sexual and reproductive health programs to people outside the field. Barroso mentioned research conducted by Brian O’Neill which found that meeting the current unmet need for contraception would slow population growth enough to reduce emissions by 17 percent.
Cerezo emphasized the importance of consensus among the staff of a given organization, saying it is difficult to make a case to agronomists and farmers if a culture clash exists within the institution. Haggai agreed, adding that focusing on reproductive issues is an important measure of prevention which helps protect both the environment and the health of women in a community.
For Mapp Frett, women’s reproductive and sexual health is indivisible from other aspects of development. “As you talk about sustainable development, you talk about ensuring that women are empowered to make sure that our earth is sustainable,” she said.
Assessing Rio+20
The panel took place before the UN Conference on Sustainable Development got underway in Rio. Participants had high hopes for a renewed focus on gender and reproductive rights at the conference. Unfortunately, language on reproductive rights was first weakened and then omitted entirely from the final outcome document (see the account written by ECSP’s Sandeep Bathala at Rio for more on the conference).
While pressure from the Vatican and the G-77 kept reproductive health out of the outcome document, it was not entirely forgotten at the conference. A number of side events highlighted the importance of reproductive rights, especially in the context of the environment and development.
Hillary Clinton also re-affirmed U.S. commitment to access to contraception and reproductive health care. “Women must be empowered to make decisions about whether and when to have children,” she said at the conference on Friday. “And the United States will continue to work to ensure that those rights are respected in international agreements.”
Clinton shared the urgency expressed by the panelists at the Wilson Center. “There is just too much at stake, too much still to be done,” she said. “We simply cannot afford to fail.”
Event Resources:Sources: FUNDAECO, UN Conference on Sustainable Development, U.S. Department of State.
Photo Credit: Sean Peoples/Wilson Center. -
Alexandra Cousteau on the Global Water Crisis and Choosing Between the Environment and the Economy
›Above is a short discussion filmed after a full dialogue TV episode last week; for the full interview, please visit the Wilson Center.
“We have serious issues that we need to address, yet we’re largely unaware of them because water seems so abundant,” said Alexandra Cousteau in an interview at the Wilson Center. “That myth of abundance is finally reaching an age of limits.”
Cousteau spoke with John Milewski of the Wilson Center’s dialogue TV program, after an event on the recent global water security assessment by the U.S. intelligence community. She discussed the work of her organization, Blue Legacy, which seeks to raise awareness of the ‘global water crisis’ – from degrading quality to growing scarcity and the proliferation of water refugees.
Global Water Crisis
“Traditionally our understanding of the global water crisis has been very narrow,” said Cousteau. “We have talked about it mostly in terms of the very real water and sanitation crisis that is happening in the developing world.” Without minimizing the severity of the situation in developing countries or oversimplifying the tangled nature of their problems, she characterized these water and sanitation struggles as fundamentally “solvable.”
Cousteau argued that there are also substantial water problems in the United States. Pollution due to runoff and over-utilization of major riverways are threats that are much different from those in the past.
“In Nixon’s time, when he signed the Clean Water Act, it was because rivers like the Potomac were in such bad shape, and they could see it from their office windows,” she said. “But the threats to our water are different today…before, it was industrial effluent, and what we were putting in the water that we could see. The Hudson River would change color daily based on the paper mills and what color paper they were printing that day.”
Today, chemicals may impact water quality without changing the appearance of water: “You don’t see it, the water can be perfectly transparent.”
Blue Legacy Expeditions
Cousteau has taken two expeditions with Blue Legacy to highlight water issues around the world. The first in 2009 was global; Cousteau and her team traveled from India to Botswana and beyond. Throughout the voyage, she worked to make her travels accessible to the general public and was surprised at her success.
“It was an experiment, but it worked. And when we came back to the United States, we got a lot of feedback, and one of the things people said was, ‘Gosh, that was an incredible adventure, thanks for taking us along for the ride! Clearly, there is a global water crisis, now I understand that. I’m just so relieved it’s not happening in America.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my Lord, I guess we have an expedition to do in America!’”
Her 2010 North America expedition focused on issues ranging from the over-exploited Colorado River to the polluted Mississippi, and sought to make water problems personal “at a time when our demand on water is at a tipping point.”
The Environment and the Economy
Cousteau’s interview was particularly timely in light of global economic troubles which have led some to say the environment should take a backseat. Cousteau said this doesn’t have to be the case. She emphasized the interconnected nature of the environment and the economy, saying that policymakers don’t have to choose to focus on one or the other.
“We feel like we have to make a choice between the economy and the environment, and that’s a false dilemma. A healthier environment is a more prosperous economy. And when we fail to realize that we don’t have to sacrifice one to have the other, then I think we wind up sacrificing a lot of the quality of life and the opportunity that we take for granted.”
Video Credit: Dialogue/Wilson Center and Alexandra Cousteau.
