DevPolitics

Video: human rights and the environment

In advance of Thursday's class, I came across this video on YouTube.  It is the head of Human Rights Watch speaking at a university in California on the link between the environment and human rights.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=JwNISdT86jA

The Death of Development?

Our discussion during the IPSA reading group on Friday seemed to parallel the debate we addressed in class the night before.  In the IPSA group, we discussed The Death of Environmentalism, an essay written in 2005 that sparked a lot of debate among environmentalists.  One of the main points throughout the essay is that the environmental community needs to forget the idea of ‘environmentalism’ – scrap the term altogether – and reframe environmental issues as part of a larger progressive movement that has an effect on much more than just the environment.   This echoed the argument that we heard from W. Sachs and others, stating that we should scrap the term ‘development’ in order to focus on the true issues and reframe the movement.  The essay actually links this death of environmentalism to development, stating that development is a large problem in the international environmental movement.  Oil and coal are still seen as successes and as positive economic advances for ‘developing’ countries – the very nature of how development is framed is harmful to the environment.  Sachs puts it perfectly when he writes: “the challenge is to embark upon growth patterns that are both pro-environment and pro-poor, without going through all the stages of industrial evolution as Northern countries did.”