Some amazing photographs of abandoned buildings in Detroit by Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre Photography.

via Joyengine.

Really interesting film coming shortly from Lauren Greenfield exploring the culture of wealth and excess and it affect on children. The film focuses specifically on LA. Put out by Wholphin.

Beautiful and disturbing photography of the evidence of our pollution from around the world here.

Informative piece on Fair Trade Labeling from Katarzyna Kijek in Warsaw.

An article in Business Week caught my attention recently, one on ‘The Girl Effect.’

First a bit on the concept: the phrase is one of practical wisdom well known by many on the outer edges of economics, social sciences, and human rights movements, but it has been recently codified, organized, and brought to the the mainstream of the business world by, of all groups: Nike.

A lot of ill can be said of Nike, in both their business practices and their human rights effects, but a lot of good can be said of their efforts in sustainable design as well, and so too of this: their efforts with the Girl Effect. (The company would seem to be one of deep ambivalence about it’s place in the global community. But i would argue that that’s better than the alternative of completely disregarding the good that the company can do, as so many do.)

A video from the organization, explaining the concept:

And an excerpt rom the article:

There are 600 million adolescent girls in developing countries, but they are largely invisible to the world at large. Included among them are girls affected by armed conflict, domestic violence, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, and internal displacement, as well as girls in child-headed households or locked in early marriages. To ignore them is to miss the “girl effect,” which could be an unexpected answer to the global economic crisis.

Consider the situation in Kenya. Some 1.6 million girls there drop out of high school every year. If they finished their secondary education, they would make 30% more money and contribute $3.2 billion more to the Kenyan economy every year. Instead, many take their place among Kenya’s 204,000 adolescent mothers and cost the economy $500 million a year.

[ . . . ]

In Ethiopia, if you are a 15-year-old girl, you have a 43% likelihood of being already married. A pilot program run by the Population Council gave families a $25 goat as an incentive to allow their daughters to go to school instead. Within two years, some 11,000 girls, or 97% of the participants, had stayed in school, gained confidence, and delayed marriage and childbirth.

The article mentions another organization, BRAC (an NGO founded in Bangladesh in 1972), a group offering, among other things, micro-finance opportunities for us in the affluent west, to support our friends in the south. Remember that estimates (by the likes of Ashraf Ghani) are that 1 dollar invested in the ‘developing world,’ can be roughly equal to 20 dollars of ‘foreign aid.’ That is, with a minimal investment, each of us, can have a major impact.

Back at the Girl Effect website, they have a 72 page PDF you can download, for more information.

Björn Lomborg here talks about the ideas his organization brings to the world-wide debate of global warming, and our various other “boring” problems. The organization he represents is copenhagen consensus center, about the work of which he discusses in the first video below. In the first and the second video, he mentions what would be the abysmal failure of the kyoto protocol and hints at the reasons why. Those reasons are many and complex, but can be represented metaphorically in the following quote by William McDonough:

If you want to go to Mexico, and you’re driving toward Canada, even if you slow down you’re still going to Canada.

The kyoto protocol is probably the only thing I and certain politicians can ever agree about, in that I believe it to be greatly flawed, as does Lomborg. He suggests from this starting point that climate change should be worried about once people have food, heat, health and (relative) wealth.

I think he is wrong, but only because his starting point is too narrow. His estimation of the importance of global warming is based on a pragmatic outlook, which is good, but also based on currently proposed solutions, which I feel is too nearsighted. Further, he focuses on efficiency toward (relatively) narrow (though still huge) goals, rather than effectiveness toward all goals.

He is important among the celebrities of this movement, because he reminds us that there are other problems to address. I believe, however, that it’s equally important to remind people that multiple problems can have the same solution; that addressing a whole system can have effects beyond those of many separate bandages.

He talks about looking at solutions first, out of a rational optimism, but I argue for looking at the interconnectivity of a possible solution’s effects before deciding on solutions. Killing birds with fewer stones (I don’t condone killing birds, but exhausting our supplies of stones and energy in the process would be particularly shameful).

To continue McDonough’s metaphor of driving in the wrong direction, let’s slow down, then stop the car, and maybe take the train going the opposite way, so we can tell other people about why we’re doing what we’re doing.

It might even be good to walk.