Worldchanging.com writes:
"If we're going to check the appalling destruction of nature around the world, we need to quickly and widely redistribute knowledge about how to preserve and restore natural systems. We need a lot more people working to save forests and rivers, grasslands and reefs, and using the best available tools to do it. But can the best scientific standards and management practices used to guide ecological restoration and preservation work be compiled, made available and open to all?"
The folks at the The Conservation Measures Partnership -- a coalition involving a number of wildlife groups you'd recognize -- seem to think so. They've adopted an explicitly open source approach, and their goal is to evolve a non-proprietary, best-practices framework of standards and methods for planning and monitoring conservation projects.
As a member of R.E.E.F., I know that open source conservation can work. More details over at worldchanging.com.
Good ... cause you know TNC could use a little transparency.
The easiest way to stop the appalling destruction of nature is to eliminate the evil men from the world. All of them.
=========================================The the appalling destruction of nature is caused by not burning enough oil. If we burnt more oil we would be burning fewer trees. If we did more intensive agriculture (as opposed to "organic") less land would be required. (It is happening in America. We have more forrested land now than we had in 1900 when production was way more organic).
So you see (for the time being) Saudi Arabia is the key to ecological preservation.
==========================================For me the troubles in the westen world arise because we do not have enough general system thinkers.
In the West the best place to look for general systems people is in the Navy. Land, sea, under sea, air, space. Requirements. Logistics. Production. Design. Anticipation.
Our last uber systems guy was Bucky Fuller who was led a bit astray by the rampant socialism of his era. He actually thought socialism was the wave of the future. Well, he got a couple of other things right.
"If we did more intensive agriculture ..."
Never mind that agriculture is the number one cause of water pollution ...
M. Dimon,
Evil men have done a lot of ecological damage... but systems where those making environment-related decisions are insulated from accountability is the bigger threat IMO.
This is, of course, why socialism as a cure for the environment is a doomed proposition - and the record bears that out. But capitalist systems where the environment is allowed to be a pure externality also have a terrible record, and it's for the same reason.
Meanwhile, harnessing the power of the open-source model to build a better conservation mousetrap strikes me as a great idea. The environment in the West may be in better shape than it has been for a while, and the socialist uber-polluters may be gone in many other places, but there's still no shortage of work to be done, projects to tackle, and issues to figure out.
Templates and best-practices can help... and if they're truly open source, the world's free-market greens will be able to pick them up and build their own solutions et. al. that much faster. It may also help some disciplines and ideas that have only been implemented in scattered pockets (but successfully) get wider application.
Win - win - win.
M. Simon. Dude. Are you serious, or are trying to look like an idiot?
Two words:
peak. oil.
Don't be stupid. Economics operates within the environmental. What happens when we run oil of oil, huh?
Not to mention how many extra trees are being burnt because of increased risk of forest fire, due to climate change, caused by burning oil (and other fossil fuels).