The online magazine Grist has an interesting interview with New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. He's advocating an environmental and foreign policy called "geo-green". Basically, the idea is that the US should drastically reduce its dependence on fossil fuels, thereby forcing oil producers to diversify their economies and allowing for the spread of democracy.
He even advertises the strategy as appealing to conservative Christians:
If you're obsessed with the right to life, you have to be obsessed with sustaining the environment -- that is also God's creation. He didn't create human beings to live in parking lots.
Give it a read, check out Friedman's other stuff, tell me what you think.
1 comment:
Matthew,
Thanks for presenting that Friedman quote wondering why conservative right-to-lifers don’t have the environment first and foremost on their agenda. It shames me, as an American, that my nation - world’s #1 heavyweight polluter - not only isn’t at the forefront of developing a sound environmental policy for the world, but is dragging its heels on this issue.
The reason is that Corporate America is at the helm of our ship of state. A recent major scientific study I heard quoted on NPR points to extensive destruction of the ecosystems on which all our lives depend. But if you’re wealthy, have a vested interest in practices that harm the environment, and, most importantly, are shortsighted enough not to care about life on earth beyond the lifespan of your own grandchildren, then everything is fine.
I’d like to call attention to something as close to the root cause of the increasing control of “our” government by corporate America as I’ve been able to find: the 1976 Buckley v. Valeo Supreme Court decision, which equates unlimited spending on behalf of political candidates with “free speech”. Money has been talking with a megaphone ever since. It’s why, for example, we have a health insurance industry that excludes millions, and overrules the decisions of patients’ doctors every day.
The National Voting Rights Institute in Boston, MA www.nvri.org is at the forefront of trying to remedy Buckley v. Valeo, as well as other issues social and political injustice.
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