Summary Report Describing the Preparation of Hydrologic Data Bases for Pacific Northwest HUC4 Watersheds Used to Identify Basin Hydrologic Type and Quantify Temperature Sensitivity
-Prepared by Alan F. Hamlet, University of Washington for CLI

"Quick action key in climate change"

Books

Global warming is not, at its core, an energy, technology, or policy problem. It is the greatest failure of thought in human history. In his new book, Resource Innovations and the Climate Leadership Initiative director Bob Doppelt shows that since the dawn of the industrial revolution people in the West have based their economic and social systems on fatally flawed beliefs and reasoning. People have thought that they could continue to take resources from the Earth's crust and make them into goods and services with little concern for the environmental or social impacts of those activities. People have also thought that the massive amounts of usually highly toxic waste produced by this system, including greenhouse gases, could be continually released back into the same environment that humans, and all other species on Earth, rely on for life. Our 'Take-Make-Waste' thinking has increased atmospheric greenhouse gasses to dangerous levels and brought the world to the precipice of disaster. We have been blind to the ecological and social systems we are part of.

Doppelt says that global warming and today's other environmental, social, and economic problems therefore cannot be resolved merely through more efficient technologies, or cap-and-trade and other policies. Fundamental changes in thinking will be needed: We must all begin to think sustainably. This means a shift to a 'Borrow-Use-Return' mind frame where people understand that humans only temporarily borrow resources from nature, briefly use them as goods and services, and then must return them to the natural environment through a continuous circular process that is life on Earth. As you would with anything precious you borrow from a neighbor, every step of the process must be taken with great care to ensure that no damage occurs to the environment or other people.

If we begin to think sustainably, Doppelt says the technologies and clean energy resources needed to stabilize the climate, and the policies required to foster them will naturally follow. The Power of Sustainable Thinking: How To Create a Positive Future for the Climate, The Planet, Your Organization and Your Life shows how our flawed thinking led to today's climate crisis, outlines the elements of a sustainable mind frame, and describes in great detail how individuals, organizations and society as a whole can make the changes needed to think and act sustainably.

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