Populations in marginal areas are not doomed to despair. On the contrary, it is in these very regions that the people, forced by circumstance, manage to cope most creatively with their harsh and unpredictable environment, and to diversify their resource use strategies over space, season and sector. They capitalize as much as they can on biological diversity - most pronounced in these regions and constituting a core of their survival. They are responsible for most appropriate technological and institutional innovations which depend minimally on costly and external inputs. This is particularly true in the conservation of rainwater, notwithstanding the saline soils common in those regions. It is also true for the institutions which developed for the collective management of very scarce common resources, such as water points, grazing land and forests. From: Combating Environmental Degradation
Fuel-efficient vehicles. Renewable energy (energy which comes from natural resources such as sunlight, wind, rain, tides, and geothermal heat). Protecting threatened forests. These common sense solutions won't only reduce global warming, many will save us money and create new business opportunities. Best of all, these solutions exist now. We just need to insist that business and government take the necessary steps to make them available and affordable. Then we have to let consumers know what to do and provide incentives to help all of us make better choices. From: Common Sense on Climate Change: Practical Solutions to Global Warming
