The world is running out of a lot of raw resources.
From fish in the sea and old-growth forests to minerals, conventional energy and freshwater, ours is a planet needing great care.
While scientists and environmentalists warn us that we have to preserve and protect the natural world with more local, sustainable food and industrial production and more local, alternative energy sources, most of our governments are pursuing free trade agreements that promote faster and bigger transportation grids, carve up more wilderness for exploitation, increase the volume of sheer "stuff" coming from ever-farther-away places, and tear through declining energy and water supplies.
Like Obama, the Harper government is aggressively pursuing trade agreements with developing countries in the wake of failure at the WTO's Doha Round.
Canada has shamefully beaten the U.S. to the punch with its FTA with Colombia, where coal and other mining, and plantation agriculture, continue to displace communities and wreak havoc on ecosystems, and where more union leaders are now murdered annually than anywhere else in the world.
Both Harper and Obama have their eyes set on Panama, a notorious tax haven of little real economic value to either country. But none of these deals are bigger or potentially more damaging to the Canadian environment than the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.
Full Article
Source: Rabble.ca
From fish in the sea and old-growth forests to minerals, conventional energy and freshwater, ours is a planet needing great care.
While scientists and environmentalists warn us that we have to preserve and protect the natural world with more local, sustainable food and industrial production and more local, alternative energy sources, most of our governments are pursuing free trade agreements that promote faster and bigger transportation grids, carve up more wilderness for exploitation, increase the volume of sheer "stuff" coming from ever-farther-away places, and tear through declining energy and water supplies.
Like Obama, the Harper government is aggressively pursuing trade agreements with developing countries in the wake of failure at the WTO's Doha Round.
Canada has shamefully beaten the U.S. to the punch with its FTA with Colombia, where coal and other mining, and plantation agriculture, continue to displace communities and wreak havoc on ecosystems, and where more union leaders are now murdered annually than anywhere else in the world.
Both Harper and Obama have their eyes set on Panama, a notorious tax haven of little real economic value to either country. But none of these deals are bigger or potentially more damaging to the Canadian environment than the Canada-EU Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.
Full Article
Source: Rabble.ca