Paul Gilding | |
|---|---|
 Gilding giving a TEDx talk, 2009 | |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, environmentalist, consultant |
| Website | PaulGilding.com |
Paul Gilding is an Australian environmentalist, consultant, and author, known for The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (2011).
Gilding started his career as an activist in his early teens, focusing on South African apartheid and Indigenous land rights in Australia. While serving in the Australian Air Force, he also became involved in the nuclear disarmament movement. According to an interview on AlterNet , Gilding's experience in anti-nuclear politics led to a greater awareness of environmental issues and led him to join Greenpeace in the 1980s, becoming involved in direct actions against corporate polluters. [1] Between 1989 and 1994, Gilding served as the executive director of Greenpeace Australia and, later, Greenpeace International.
He has served in the Australian military, and was a global CEO of Greenpeace International. [2]
In 2012, Gilding delivered a presentation on the thesis of his book at the 2012 TED conference titled The Earth is Full. [2]
As of 2016 [update] Gilding served on the advisory board of The Climate Mobilization, a grassroots advocacy group calling for a global economic mobilisation against climate change on the scale of the American home front during World War II, with the goal of 100% clean energy and net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. [3]
He is a fellow of the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership, [4] and has led residential seminars convened by its The Prince of Wales's Business & Sustainability Programme in Melbourne. [5]
In The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World (2011), [6] Gilding posits that the financial crisis of 2007–2008 is a symptom of human civilization growing beyond Earth's ability to support it, and is tied to the threat posed by climate change and other forms of environmental degradation. Because of this, Gilding calls for an end to the whole concept of exponential economic growth, which he blames for the consumption and waste that has led to both the economic and ecological crises facing mankind and modern civilisation.
Contrary to many environmental writers (including James Lovelock, Clive Hamilton, Richard Heinberg, and James Howard Kunstler) Gilding argues that people will work together through the climate crisis and that humanity as a whole will eventually act in time to save civilisation, albeit too late to prevent catastrophic consequences. He bases this argument on the ingenuity of past generations in the midst of crisis, particularly World War II. Gilding also believes that the global economy will fully embrace sustainable energy when societies fully accept the reality of climate change and abandon fossil fuel resources.
Greenpeace is an independent global campaigning network, founded in Canada in 1971 by a group of environmental activists. Greenpeace states its goal is to "ensure the ability of the Earth to nurture life in all its diversity" and focuses its campaigning on worldwide issues such as climate change, deforestation, overfishing, commercial whaling, genetic engineering, anti-war and anti-nuclear issues. It uses direct action, advocacy, research, and ecotage to achieve its goals.
Patrick Albert Moore is a Canadian industry consultant, former activist, an early member and past president of Greenpeace Canada. Since leaving Greenpeace in 1986, Moore has criticized the environmental movement for what he sees as scare tactics and disinformation, saying that the environmental movement "abandoned science and logic in favor of emotion and sensationalism". Greenpeace has criticized Moore, calling him "a paid spokesman for the nuclear industry, the logging industry, and genetic engineering industry" who "exploits long-gone ties with Greenpeace to sell himself as a speaker and pro-corporate spokesperson".
A green economy is an economy that aims at reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities, and that aims for sustainable development without degrading the environment. It is closely related with ecological economics, but has a more politically applied focus. The 2011 UNEP Green Economy Report argues "that to be green, an economy must not only be efficient, but also fair. Fairness implies recognizing global and country level equity dimensions, particularly in assuring a Just Transition to an economy that is low-carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive."
Global change in broad sense refers to planetary-scale changes in the Earth system. It is most commonly used to encompass the variety of changes connected to the rapid increase in human activities which started around mid-20th century, i.e., the Great Acceleration. While the concept stems from research on the climate change, it is used to adopt a more holistic view of the observed changes. Global change refers to the changes of the Earth system, treated in its entirety with interacting physicochemical and biological components as well as the impact human societies have on the components and vice versa. Therefore, the changes are studied through means of Earth system science.
Mark Lynas is a British author and journalist whose work is focused on environmentalism and climate change. He has written for the New Statesman, The Ecologist, Granta and Geographical magazines, and The Guardian and The Observer newspapers in the UK, as well as The New York Times and The Washington Post in the United States; he also worked on and appeared in the film The Age of Stupid. He was born in Fiji, grew up in Peru, Spain and the United Kingdom and holds a degree in history and politics from the University of Edinburgh. He has published several books including Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet (2007) and The God Species: Saving the Planet in the Age of Humans (2011).
Jeremy Leggett is a British social entrepreneur and writer. He founded and was a board director of Solarcentury from 1997 to 2020, an international solar solutions company, and founded and was chair of SolarAid, a charity funded with 5% of Solarcentury's annual profits that helps solar-lighting entrepreneurs get started in Africa (2006–2020). SolarAid owns a retail brand SunnyMoney that was for a time Africa's top-seller of solar lighting, having sold well over a million solar lights, all profits recycled to the cause of eradicating the kerosene lantern from Africa.
Tom Burke CBE is a co-founder of E3G, Third Generation Environmentalism and former Chair of its Board. He is also a visiting Honorary Professor of Imperial and University Colleges, London and a Senior Associate of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL). He has a long track record of experience with international environmental organisations working with and for both non-governmental and official bodies. Burke has been a professional environmentalist for 50 years and was formerly Executive Director of Friends of the Earth. and of The Green Alliance. He was a Special Advisor to three Secretaries of State for the Environment from 1991-97.
Jørgen Randers is a Norwegian academic, professor emeritus of climate strategy at the BI Norwegian Business School, and practitioner in the field of future studies. His professional field encompasses model-based future studies, scenario analysis, system dynamics, sustainability, climate, energy and ecological economics. He is also a full member of the Club of Rome, a company director, a member of various not-for-profit boards, a business consultant on global sustainability matters and an author. His publications include the seminal work The Limits to Growth (co-author), and Reinventing Prosperity. He served, between 1994 and 1999, as deputy director general of the World Wildlife Fund International.
Philip David Radford is an American consumer and environmental leader serving as Chief Strategy Officer of the Sierra Club, and who served as the executive director of Greenpeace USA. Radford started his career working for the nonpartisan organizations Public Interest Research Group and Public Citizen, working for consumer protection, fair trade, and public health. He was the founder and President of Progressive Power Lab, an organization that incubates companies and non-profits that build capacity for progressive organizations, including a donor advisory organization Champion.us, the Progressive Multiplier Fund and Membership Drive. Radford is a co-founder of the Democracy Initiative. He has a background in grassroots organizing, corporate social responsibility, and clean energy.
Barry William Brook is an Australian scientist. He is an ARC Australian Laureate Professor and Chair of Environmental Sustainability at the University of Tasmania in the Faculty of Science, Engineering & Technology. He was formerly an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide, Australia, where he held the Sir Hubert Wilkins Chair of Climate Change from 2007 to 2014. He was also Director of Climate Science at the Environment Institute.
The Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership (CISL), formerly the Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership and the Cambridge Programme for Industry, is part of the University of Cambridge.
Peter Taylor is a UK environmentalist, public activist on issues ranging from nuclear safety, ocean pollution, biodiversity strategies, renewable energy and climate change. He is the author of five books: Beyond Conservation: A Wildland Strategy (2005), Shiva's Rainbow, Chill: A Reassessment of Global Warming Theory (2009), Questions of Resilience: Development Aid in a Changing Climate (2010), and Rewilding: ECOS Writings on Wildland and Conservation Values (2011).
The Breakthrough Institute is an environmental research center located in Berkeley, California. Founded in 2007 by Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus, The institute is aligned with ecomodernist philosophy. The Institute advocates for an embrace of modernization and technological development in order to address environmental challenges. Proposing urbanization, agricultural intensification, nuclear power, aquaculture, and desalination as processes with a potential to reduce human demands on the environment, allowing more room for non-human species.
Philippe Joubert, is a French Brazilian business executive.
The climate movement is a global social movement focused on pressuring governments and industry to take action addressing the causes and impacts of climate change. Citizens and environmental non-profit organizations have engaged in significant climate activism since the late 1980s and early 1990s, as they sought to influence the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate activism has become increasingly prominent over time, gaining significant momentum during the 2009 Copenhagen Summit and particularly following the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2016.
The Climate Mobilization (TCM) is a grassroots environmental advocacy group working toward large-scale political action against global warming. It believes that the crisis of climate change requires a national economic effort on the scale of the American mobilization of the home front during World War II., in order to transform the USA economy speedily.
Sandrine Dixson-Declève is an international climate change, sustainable development, sustainable finance and complex systems thought leader. She is currently the co-president of the Club of Rome, together with Mamphela Ramphele, the first women to lead the organization in its history.
