<bloockquote>But even with all of these aggressive policy measures, Kangasniemi said, they're still coming up with a 27 percent gap for their 2020 target of reducing emissions by a third -- an issue they will continue to address.

27% shortfall with a really aggressive plan. It shows how much work will be happening in this century alone.

At that session and throughout the conference scientists presented indicators that show diminishing habitats, fewer whales, fish and birds and more pollutants.
The conference asked participants to come up with a "call to action." Recommendations included more research, better communication with the public and among scientists and more stringent regulations on human activities, usually business practices. But rather than record and react to ecological disasters, isn't it time to go to the source of our bad behavior?
We all live downstream from a long turbulent flow of human decisions going back centuries. The first major impacts to the Pacific NW began around 1850, with clearcutting, mining and overfishing among the early abuses. More recently we have seen dams and dikes, riparian and wetland disruption, shoreline destruction, chemical dumping and stormwater runoff in ever increasing scale. And of course we have global warming to contend with. This conference documented the declines and suggested some mitigations, but Hugh Shipman is right that natural disasters will drive the human response.
Or, a panel of social scientists could look into the dominant ideas that have directed large-scale human activities for the past 150 years. Beginning with clear-cutting and over-fishing and abusive mining practices, and continuing on to dams, dikes, destruction of wetlands, estuaries and shorelines, chemical dumping, sprawlng impervious surfaces and resultant polluted runoff, all these practices were driven by certain motivations for economic reward, usually in the short term. The over-arching theme of "growth" both in economic scale and human population is fundamental to our support for all those damaging economic practices.
We need to look at the values, personal and institutional, that direct the flow of investment capital, historically, more recently and currently, since these economic decisions plan the settlement and consumption patterns, the disposal of waste and strategies for circumventing government regulatory schemes. We need to look at the influence of business interests on governments, media and schools and universities. We need to examine the dominant players, like bankers, builders and industrial leaders, who make economic choices that are destroying our own habitat. We need to conduct a social science investigation of our own society, rationally and critically, with the value of a healthy ecosystem as our organizing principle.
We have assumed the position of cleaning up after the more powerful economic engines. We have placed ourselves in a subordinate, reactionary role under the dominant culture of exploitation and consumption, so it's no wonder we seem powerless to cease the assaults on our ecosystem. It's time we examined and described those drivers. Effective social controls on bad behavior would likely follow objective analysis.
Of course this is a "radical" proposal because it goes to the root of the problem of ecological devastation, but we really have no other choice, except to increasingly suffer the disasters already destroying the natural world.