A central concept in sustainable management of renewable resources is that you live off the interest without dipping into the principal--e.g. don't cut forests faster than they grow. And you exhaust nonrenewable resources as slowly as possible--e.g. make minerals expensive so they aren't wasted.

A central concept (an oath, actually) in the medical profession is that you do no harm--e.g. don't make people worse off than before you got involved.

If you read the news today, you'll notice we are raiding the principal that future generations will need, and we are doing harm to all life on the only planet on which it is known to exist. The vast scale of these manipulations is unimaginable. The news keeps coming in every day, and it is overwhelming.

We need comprehensive solutions. Attempts to solve one issue often create more problems with the other.

We can feed more people (thus temporarily increasing our principal and harvestable interest), however the conventional approach takes more pesticides and fertilizers, which do harm to the ecosystem, the additional people you are feeding, and everyone else. Children that don't eat organic foods have 9 times higher levels of insecticides in their urine. It is dangerous to eat a can of mercury-laden tuna a week (thanks to coal-fired power plants around the world, you'd get 4 times the safe limit)... and those tuna schools are being overfished at the same time.

Comprehensive, integrated, worldwide solutions. We need them now.

Our modern economic system (supercapitalism) is not set up to value these fundamental human needs of environmental safety and security. Citizen and government action (democracy) are the only tools we have that are powerful enough to control these externalities. I'm sorry to tell the Republicans this, but we need a strong government, we need it to do the right thing, and we need it now.

We need to wake up, immediately acknowledge this, and begin to stop. At all levels of government, this is very urgent. We need strong executives that, in absence of legislative resolve, aren't afraid to issue executive orders that immediately protect the health, safety, and welfare of their constituents. And we need a vocal citizenry demanding that the government act, in spite of powerful corporate interests. To do any less is to allow vast harm to continue and to abandon the trust of our grandchildren.

Before you click on the solutions link above, we should consider what the problems are. To solve many of the problems that corporations cause, we just have to change this one law:

"Our laws make a company's directors legally liable for something termed 'breach of fiduciary responsibility' if they knowingly manage a company in a way that reduces profits. The car manufacturer Henry Ford was in fact successfully sued by stockholders in 1919 for raising the minimum wage of his workers to $5 per day: the courts declared that, while Ford's humanitarian sentiments about his employees were nice, his business existed to make profits for his stockholders." --Jared Diamond in Collapse

This corporate philosophy (and legal requirement!) that profits are the only goal is a huge problem, especially when you realize that it legally obligates corporate "persons" to minimize their ethical responsibilities to society if it doesn't result in profit. No true "person" would ever behave that way without alienating everyone they know. We need to make our government change this law in order to force corporations to be responsible, caring "citizens", and/or we need to strip corporations of citizenship and hold shareholders and executives responsible with tougher laws. See or read The Corporation for more background and solutions and ideas. Listen to Robert Reich's speech to the Commonwealth Club for ideas that will help us take back our democracy.

The other main problems causing negative environmental impacts in California (and everywhere), as I see it, are:

1) too many people in too small a place, and 2) people using too many resources and creating too much waste and pollution The way to do something about this is to 1) limit growth and not have tons of kids and 2) reduce, reuse, recycle, restore. Easier said than done. But look at the alternative. If we don't control ourselves now, we will run into nature's limits at some point, just as sure as sediment accumulates behind Hoover Dam and 5% of the Colorado River evaporates from the reservoir's surface into the desert air each year. Technology will buy us time, but let's use that time wisely!

Additional problems include people not respecting the land or ourselves, and not being careful. The overuse of toxic, dangerous, or poorly-tested materials falls into this scary category. The best ways to deal with this are education and regulation. Education can focus on Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

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