I use several Professor Sachs's speeches practicing simultaneous interpreting as a trainee. The more I did my job, the more I admired him. Salute, professor.
Sunday afternoon in Malaysia now. I am listening Prof.Sachs' talk on Sustainability fundamentals. This is my first lesson on geopolitic for today. Thank you so much Prof for sharing your brilliant knowledge on this subject with us. Climate change is the most important issue globally. Agree with your opinion sir on the food system of today.
Thank you, Prof. Sachs, for your personal effort in advocating for a sustainable human impact on our planet. I am not as optimistic as you are, but your optimism gives us courage. If I may, I would like to give an example of what puzzles me in this era of access to information. As an architect I have no farming activities myself, but I try to find videos of interest online. Amongst others I particularly found interesting and inspiring the experiments and study by Joel Salatin who focuses on regenerative agriculture and Michel Bush, a beekeeper who has made several presentations on no treatment beekeeping in which he explains why everything that is considered professional practice is wrong - like spraying pesticides on bees which are insects - changing their natural size etc. So, if this exists, jet no one knows of this, as is the case here in Greece where I live and presumably in many other places, then I have to conclude that those who farm and practice beekeeping refer to themselves as professionals - those who have the know how - and are uninterested in finding out that there are better, more sustainable ways of doing things. In my opinion it is impossible to change this.
Jeff, I suggest looking into the work of ecological economists and gzneralists like Nate Hagens. Changing energy source is not sufficient to solve the material depletion side of the polycrisis. Apparently less-polluting forms of energy would gave the adverse impact of hastening the extraction of minerals, lumbers, and biomass. We need to lower expectations of people by an order of magnitude at least
Tragically and terrifyingly humanity, as a species, is diverging in almost diametric opposite directions from the ancient wisdom that Dr. Sachs always speaks about. It is tragic and infuriating that individuals like him no longer represent the thrust of modernity. It is good to be old.
IF, IF, IF. It is a no-brainer that if we "do the right things", all would be well. The point is that We, as a species, are behaving in ways that are inimical to life itself, spearheaded by those very people we have entrusted with our own stewardship and the care of the Earth itself. It is good to be old.
I find it very difficult to maintain my optimism for the future of my species. It seems that the rate of the deterioration of the environment is accelerating. Here in Canada, millions of acres of our northern forests have been devastated by massive fires that leave city dwellers choking from the smoke for the last two summers. The story is the same in Europe and in around the world . The very lungs of our planet are being destroyed and instead of producing oxygen to breath, the burning forests product acrid carcinogenic smoke.
Spot on, how to produce food without relying on the current energy-intensive approach, which yields a poor food caloric energy return on investment (EROI) less than 0.1, and on a planet on track to 4-5C of warminy by 2100 at the current total GHG anthropogenic forcing of 4 W per m2 (Hansen et al, 2023), is the single most baffling conundrum within the polycrisis. There is little hope of convincing the average person that the only biophysically feasible solution is for people to become human labor-based peasants (EROI ~3), with massive co-deployment of radiative cooling shades for the crops.
Sustainable development and cooperation is the diametric opposite of what modern humanity has introduced to the 21st Century. Modern day "deciders" are operating in their own self-interest and ignoring the plight of 8 billion of us, as well as the rest of the life-giving natural world. At the age of 75 I have become ashamed to be part of the human species! It is good to be old.
Fine words in principle, but the devil will be in the detail. Development? Of the perpetual exponential kind of increasing use of resources that we have come to expect? Optimism? Based on relying on tomorrow's technology to solve the problems created today as we do?
I admire Prof. Sachs a great deal. But I don’t agree that China was impoverished in 1980. China was impoverished before 1949. Extreme poverty actually ended when the Communist Party of China came into power due to the drastic “equal distribution”measures carried out by the communists. All peasants got land, which means all landlords have to work like everyone else instead of living off poor peasants’ labor. In the city, homeless people were moved into spare rooms of the big mansions owned by rich people. All abled bodies were put to work. Since then, life was getting better every year until a decade ago with the out of control real estate industrial complex. Capitalism/ market economy also destroyed China’s public education, healthcare, brought unprecedented corruption, decadence, injustice, inequality, etc. to the Chinese people since 1949.
It was impoverished, no question about it then. My family was there. China of today is rich and powerful and the new government since Deng Xiaoping has done a great job, but stop trying to act like the diaspore in HK and Taiwan didn't have to send clothes and money and food back to China to help family in the 70s because we did.
@@cyansadventures Your family WAS in China and you sent clothes to them, so you know more about China than I do, right?! With all due respect, from your personal experience with your family, I can see how you have arrived at your conclusion. But maybe you could read my comment again, and acknowledge that what I said is also true - that the “impoverished China” was way better off than the China before 1949. What you also don’t know is that I was living in China before 1996. And I have been living in the West ever since while my close family members still live in China. For a few years in the 1990s, I was sending thousands of dollars to my family in China because college education was not free for my youngest brother anymore like it was for me in the 1980s, but I didn’t feel rich at all. As a matter of fact, I felt so impoverished because I couldn’t even afford being sick for more than a single day. My parents didn’t have to worry about paying for college for me in the 1980s like they had to do for my youngest brother in the 2000s. They did NOT need me to send clothes or food at the time for survival but that doesn’t mean they felt richer than they were in the 1980s. . I don’t know why your family needed you to send clothes to them , because for me and my family, we were never faced with starvation or even had to wear rags ever since I was born in the 1960s. People never ever had to worry about becoming homeless in China in the 1980s, though the housing conditions weren’t impressive by today’s standard. Nonetheless , in the West at all times, most people would become homeless if they could not pay rent or mortgage because of a drastic change in their income level. Even today in the USA, on any given day, thousands of people live on the streets and millions live in fear of becoming ill because they don’t have healthcare or their health insurance is too expensive for them to see a doctor. Right now, I can rack up thousands of dollars of medical bills if I even go to the doctor for a common medical condition, which would drastically put me in a very bad financial and personal position. From my experience of living in both China and Australia and USA, I never felt impoverished in China but have always felt impoverished in the West. In today’s China, more and more people have also have to face the risk of becoming homeless or facing death if they don’t earn enough to pay for rent or mortgage or exorbitant medical expenses. And unemployment is closing up on the Chinese people since college students have to work as delivery drivers because there are just not enough suitable or well paid jobs for them. I would say that being homeless in the West or anywhere is way more impoverished than anyone in China in the 1980s who simply did NOT have the kind of nicer clothes or the abundance and variety of foods or the much better housing they have today.
@@youmonxintl And your comment about no homelessness in the 80s just isn't true because I have seen it myself on holidays in the late 90s, beggars sleeping on the streets and h00kers and their handlers on the streets of Shenzhen. I don't know your family's circumstance, maybe they were in better positions than mine? Mine were branded as "bourgeouis" because they were poor farmers dumb enough to pickup firesale properties that were abandoned by landowners who fled to Taiwan when the KMT lost. Landowners for a few weeks before the PLA swept through - and no matter who it is, when soldiers hold absolute power over people they don't care about, they turn into animals.
@@cyansadventures You are still arguing from a very narrow perspective. You see one family, I see the whole country. I grew up in the countryside in the middle of Shanxi Province where you go to see the Terry Cotter Warriors. My mother side’s family was the landlords class who owned land as well as a big house and had poor people working for them. So my family situation was not much better than yours. My great grandmother and her children had their properties confiscated but otherwise were not treated too harshly because they cooperated with the new government. You are so bitter about the “harsh” treatments that your family suffered because you are not aware of the fact that there are always people everywhere in the world who have suffered in the hands of some people entrusted with certain authority, not that I condone such behaviors. I have been treated unfairly and unreasonably in at times in every country but France I have been to, so I understand it is more of a matter of the character of individual who was doing the job. Stupid or rigid people tend to treat people harshly unnecessarily. As for people begging on the streets back then, some were made to do so by criminal gangs. No one knows where they even came from. Chinese citizens didn’t have to live on the streets if they didn’t mind working the land like millions did before, or if they didn’t ignorantly go to Shenzhen or any other places without adequate resources to accommodate contingencies. If they left their homes in the countryside and went live in the city without a job or enough money to cover their expenses and meet contingency, I can’t think of any other ways for them to live but to be like homeless people on the streets. I don’t think you read my comments carefully or understood what I was trying to say. You are entitled to your opinion. And let’s agree to disagree. I really don’t care to hear from you anymore, let alone “arguing” with you.
Sachs endorsement of Russian aggression and genocide in Ukraine does not make me optimistic. I am for sustainable development. The Ukraine war cannot end until Russia loses militarily, and withdraws from Ukraine. NATO is a defensive alliance, I am sorry Sachs is dissing defense and endorsing aggression. He should read Mozi instead of Aristotle
