Concepts from the readings for you

to think about!Mickey Glantz

IAFS 3000April 14, 2009

Is there a human right to water?Or, is it just a commodity?

• SUBJECT: Make Water a Human Right

• As your constituent and as a supporter of water rights for all, I am writing to you to ask you and the United States to stand with other allied nations in recognizing the human right to water.

• During recent negotiations of the 5th World Water Forum ministerial declaration, our country's representatives played a key role in removing language that supported the “human right to water,” replacing it instead with the “human need for water.”

• This is a step backward for all those who have worked to establish the legal precedent in international law to affirm the human right to water.

• It is time to declare water a human right and a public good. The global water statistics are heartbreaking:

• * 1.4 billion people live without clean drinking water.• * Two-fifths of the world’s population lacks access to proper sanitation.• * Every eight seconds a child dies from drinking dirty water.• * Half of the world’s hospital beds are occupied by people with an easily preventable waterborne disease.• * 80 percent of all sickness and disease worldwide is related to contaminated water, according to the World Health

Organization.• * Dirty water kills more children than war, malaria, HIV/AIDS and traffic accidents combined.

• http://food.change.org/actions/view/world_water_day_protect_the_universal_human_right_to_water

Agenda 21 from the Rio Earth Summit 1992

Check the google image search for Agenda21.

Most entries are from and for other countries, NOT the USA!!

The Commons

• Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons”

Unintended Consequences

• “For want of a nail a kingdom was lost”

• Bees and pollen

Using analogies• Metaphors and Analogies are powerful learning tools because they can be a ”

bridge between the known and unknown” and act as cognitive catalysts or “spark plugs” to help generate novel insights, increase comprehension of abstract concepts and improve creativity.

• “Analogy is a basic human reasoning process used in science, literature, art, education, and politics. Analogy can be used to make predictions, provide explanations, and restructure our knowledge. Analogy is also used to influence public opinion, fight battles, win wars, start and finish relationships…”

• “Analogy is properly the domain of higher order thought because it requires fluency - lots of ideas - and integration across multiple representations. Analogy is also more simply thought of as flexible pattern recognition, the process involved in all those good things that should be emphasized in education - critical thinking and deduction, inference, and solutions by insight”

• Policy responses to ozone depletion and the response to global warming; can the same process work?

MDGs (Millennium Development Goals)

Can new technologies undo or overcome the adverse impacts of old technologies?

• Is technology neutral?

Local vs National: Who leads? Who follows? Who cares?

• Do people have power?

• Bush vs. Obama Administrations

Muddling Throughhttp://earthsystems.blogspot.com/2003/05/muddling-through-

in-1959-charles.html• Beyond the simplest, and not very interesting, policy problems Lindblom argues that this

commonly articulated approach to policy making is not even possible. Herbert Simon's bounded rationality and his work with James March on the work of organizations point out that what in fact happens is that people use a limited amount of the information that they have available at any given time to actually make decisions.

• In Muddling Through, Lindblom contrasts the fully rational approach with one in which the policy maker chooses one objective that is of primary importance and then, making choices from a small portfolio of policy approaches that she has experience, designs a next step in the evolution of the policy history of her agency. Lindblom argues that in making these choices the policy maker is choosing from differences at the margin.

• The failure of a given analyst to consider all possible values is addressed by the fact that there is a portfolio of policy making agencies, each with its own primary values; interactions at the margins works to protect undue impacts of one policy on values that are not within its immediate scope. Muddling through recognizes that policy problems will never be solved comprehensively and thus policy solutions will advance toward better states by an ongoing process of iteration.

• Policy agents interact in a loosely couple ways that ensure that a wide range of values are represented and advanced in aggregate.

Up and Down With EcologyThe "Issue-Attention Cycle"

• American public attention rarely remains sharply focused upon any one domestic issue for very long - even if it involves a continuing problem of crucial importance to society.

• Instead, a systematic "issue-attention cycle" seems strongly to influence public attitudes and behavior concerning most key domestic problems.

• • Each of these problems suddenly leaps into prominence, remains there

for a short time, and then - -though still largely unresolved - gradually fades from the center of public attention.

• 1. The pre-problem stage. 2. Alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm. 3. Realizing the cost of significant progress. 4. Gradual decline of intense public interest. 5. The post-problem stage.

Anthony Downs, In Public Interest, Volume 28 (Summer 1972), pp. 38-50

2 degree vs 3 degree maximum

• OBAMA said: “Delay is no longer an option”• And,• “Denial is no longer an acceptable response”

Precautionary Principle• Under a precautionary decision-making structure, evidence of harm is considered, as well as

evidence of alternatives and the magnitude of possible harm from an activity.• The latter two are considered just as important in the decision-making process as the

determination of causality. In this regard, if there is information about safer alternatives or if the magnitude of potential harm from an activity is great, it may be possible to partially or entirely bypass the costly and often contentious determination of causality that is central to current decision-making structures.

• For example, if an activity could cause wide-spread, irreversible harm or it could harm sensitive members of a population (for example children), it might be prudent to take action, even before reasonable evidence of harm has been accumulated.

• At any rate, harm to a small number of people or a limited geographic area should be prevented before causal links are established, especially if alternatives are available.

• It is also necessary under a precautionary decision-making structure to consider uncertainty, indeterminacy (large scale uncertainty) and ignorance (what we might not know), which are rarely thoroughly evaluated under current structures.

• Large uncertainty about cause-effect relationships would favor action to prevent harm while further studying the problem. That is action taken in advance of certainty.

• www.sehn.org/pppractc.html