It was of Dan Glibert, a Harvard professor in psychology, on why we as humans have failed to respond in any meaningful way in the face of  Global Warming.

At the time, I wrote a review for it on Crossroads that elicited some comments from a good friend (and GW skeptic) that made me think about a wider picture of Dan’s core argument.

With Shanghai currently experiencing some of the most fantastic weather (23 degrees C), his point that humans are not reacting to global warming are pretty much dead on.  That causes aside (for now), that humans have failed to take the personal steps that are going to be required to correct some of the imbalances in our world.

Now, where I want to take this wider, is that global warming aside, we as humans have just come to mismanage about every resource possible and that in the greater conext of things, this is the problem.

Sure,  global warming is a problem that is environmental in nature, but in the realm of sustainability it is only one issue.

We are seeing huge issue on water and land management in China right now, poor energy demand and resource management, China has become the #1 car market, and so on.

All issue that in many ways are just as important as the “global warming” issue, are actually core reasons for why climate change is occuring, but because we cannot see the impacts of ourselves on these resources, and we are not really thinking critically about those things that are visible, we are still not changing our core behaviors.

Do you think of solar panels?  hybrid cars?  Clean Coal? air pollution?

If you are in the US or EU, chances are that you think of those issues (which are legitimate) as that is what the green movement has been able to push into the psyche of consumers.

With 1.3 billion citizens to manage, for China though it is the issues of food and water.  they are not the sexy venture capitalist topics, but for China’s 1.3 billion citizens it is simply about having access to resources … and that those resources are clean (clean enough).

So when reading 40% of China’s territory suffers from soil erosion and Land erosion ‘threat to food supply’, it becomes adundantly clear that China’s food and water problems are going to be a large large problem:

If soil erosion continues at this rate, grain production on the 14 million mu of farm land in northeastern China, one of the country’s most productive areas, will be reduced by 40 percent in 50 years, experts warned.

and

In the southwest, over the next 35 years, about 100 million people will be at risk of losing their land, if desertification continues at the same rate.

the solutions will be complex, will involve the topics of land, water, industrial, and people management, and for those involved in cleantech the opportunities will be vastly larger than a signle wind farm or solar field.