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Start time by time zone
12 Noon PDT (BC) / 1 PM MDT (AB, SK) / 2PM CDT (MB) / 3PM EDT (ON, QB) / 4PM ADT (NB, NS, PEI)
The global community is fixated on climate change as the existential threat facing civilization. Bill Rees argues that this focus misses the point entirely. Global heating is only one symptom of an over-riding meta-problem: ecological overshoot (where societal impacts now exceed the Earth’s capacity to recover) . Overshoot is the inevitable result of excessive material growth on a finite planet driven by industrial capitalism and its hand-maiden, neoliberal economics. Politically acceptable solutions to global heating are not fixing the climate, are causing considerable additional environmental damage and are worsening overshoot. Unattended, overshoot is a terminal condition. What can communities do to increase self-reliance, enhance food security and otherwise cushion themselves against the coming contraction?
NFU climate committee member, Rick Munroe, will provide extra context to this conversation about overshoot and growth by presenting on his research on government awareness of this issue. Rick will present about the level of awareness among Government of Canada’s research on this topic and whether or not our federal government has ever analyzed the contradiction between two competing goals: constant economic growth versus ecological health & long-term resource requirements
Bill Rees is a bio-ecologist, ecological economist, former Director and Professor Emeritus of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. His early research focused on environmental assessment but gradually extended to the biophysical requirements for sustainability and the implications of global ecological trends. Rees is perhaps best known as the originator and co-developer (with his graduate students) of ecological footprint analysis—the expanding human eco-footprint is arguably the world’s best-known indicator of techno-industrial society’s unsustainability and worsening eco-predicament, overshoot.
Rick Munroe and his wife farm on Howe Island near Kingston, Ontario. He is also an active member of the NFU’s Climate Change Committee. Rick has actively researched the topic of research depletion and other long term environmental issues on behalf of NFU for decades. His interest in the topic was spurred by publication of the landmark Limits to Growth study in 1972. Rick has served as the NFU’s representative at several conferences on Sustainable Development following the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development report in 1987.