Thinking global, living local: Voices in a globalized world

Read all posts from ‘Growth vs. Sustainability’

  • Itaipu Dam. Photo by Angeloleithold on WkimediaCommons. CC BY-SA 3.0

    Brazil and the limits of the possible

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    Meet Marina Silva. A former senator and minister of the environment for the ruling party, PT (the Brazilian Workers Party), in 2009 she left to joing the PV, Brazil’s small green party. Next year she finished third in the presidential race, with almost 20 million votes – an astonishing feat […]

  • Turkey’s Construction Economy and its Environmental Impact

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    Last summer, I went to pick up a backpacking German friend in Ankara’s busy bus station. After exchanging greetings and talking about how life had been, I asked about his initial impressions of Turkey. “The countryside is impressive,” he said, “but the cities are quite weird”. When I asked him […]

  • ITER reactor

    Malthus and Climate Change

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    In 1798, Thomas Malthus published An Essay on the Principles of Population in which he famously argued that the population increases in a geometric ratio, while the means of subsistence increase arithmetically. This means that if unchecked, population growth will inevitably lead to crises. Malthus wrote his theory when the population […]

  • Mexico-China Official Meeting

    Project Dragon Mart: the Collateral Effects of Economic Growth

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    After a series of contentious legal disputes, in August 2013 Cancun will finally know whether the Chinese “Dragon Mart” will ever come into existence along the coast of Mexico’s most important tourist destination. The construction of the Dragon Mart business complex (similar to a shopping mall where many huge and […]