Thinking Like an Island

We are a society organized around apparently insatiable consumption of natural resources and products derived from such resources. This drive has created stress on our terrestrial and marine environments. How do we begin to shift our priorities? Change our behaviors? Alter our patterns of consumption? Make different decisions so as to sustain the resources that remain, and assure our future survival? In this episode of World Ocean Radio, host Peter Neill will suggest that we must begin thinking like an island--wherein communities of individuals live and are defined by different limits, different needs and different utilities. Islands are more reliant on things to hand: water locally drawn, food locally raised or harvested from the sea, local skills required to make and fix things for themselves, circumstances which demand a certain standard for living. If we are able to adopt this standard of living and look at our cities and nations as islands, we may yet halt the bankruptcy of over-consumption.
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About World Ocean Radio: Peter Neill, Director of the W2O and host of World Ocean Radio, provides coverage of a broad spectrum of ocean issues from science and education to advocacy and exemplary projects. World Ocean Radio, a project of the World Ocean Observatory, is a weekly series of five-minute audio essays available for syndicated use at no cost by community radio stations worldwide.
 

Image: Peaks Island in Casco Bay, offshore from Portland, Maine.