Order ID | 53563633773 |
Type | Essay |
Writer Level | Masters |
Style | APA |
Sources/References | 4 |
Perfect Number of Pages to Order | 5-10 Pages |
Contrast Between Credit Unions and Business Banks
What is a real contrast between credit unions and business banks?
-banks’ contributors are called clients. Customers have no possession enthusiasm toward the establishment. Banks are claimed by speculators who might possibly be contributors.
What is risk-based pricing?
Risk-based pricing happens when loan specialists offer distinctive customers diverse investment rates or other credit terms, based on the evaluated risk that the buyers will neglect to pay back
In common with Marxist, feminist, Afrocentrist, and multiculturalist antecedents, Second Nature views sustainability as central to the entire academic enterprise, rather than as compartmentalized within a single discipline or department:
Our work toward this vision embraces interdisciplinary learning and includes the community as a whole. By reinforcing the concept that the educational experience of all students must be aligned with the principles of sustainability, we help ensure that the content of learning embraces interdisciplinary systems thinking to address environmentally sustainable action on local, regional and global scales over short, medium and inter-generational time periods.
With relatively little public visibility, Second Nature has gradually secured the support of senior administrators and other academics through a series of conferences, seminars, and international gatherings that promote its vision of sustainability. Its most signal success is undoubtedly the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment. Signatories—now more than 650 college and university presidents, representing about a third of American college students—have committed their respective institutions to political, social, and educational activism, often at significant expense, in immediately addressing the “challenge” of climate change:
We, the undersigned presidents and chancellors of colleges and universities, are deeply concerned about the unprecedented scale and speed of global warming and its potential for large-scale, adverse health, social, economic and ecological effects. We recognize the scientific consensus that global warming is real and is largely being caused by humans. We further recognize the need to reduce the global emission of greenhouse gases by 80% by mid-century at the latest, in order to avert the worst impacts of global warming and to reestablish the more stable climatic conditions that have made human progress over the last 10,000 years possible.
A college president’s commitment to sustainability virtually assures that academic deans, support staff, and department chairmen will do likewise. Newly-hired junior faculty members will also eagerly queue up, understandably believing that support for “sustainability” will enhance “professional development” and bolster their prospects of gaining tenure or promotion. They will also pass the good word to their students.
Beyond the tentatively informed enthusiasm of college and university presidents, the sustainability movement has been buoyed and promoted by the torrent of publications that has appeared since the Brundtland report. Typically, these works view higher education as the critical agent in service of the massive social, economic, and ideological reorientation necessary to ensure the “survival” of humanity and life on Earth. One of the earliest and most influential campus proponents of sustainability, Oberlin College environmental studies professor David Orr, sees the reform of higher education as paramount to sustainability’s success. Reflecting the once marginal tenets of deep ecology, Orr fixes the wellsprings of ecological distress at the conceptual level:
The crisis we face is first and foremost one of mind, perception, and values. It is an educational challenge. More of the same kind of education can only make things worse. This is not an argument against education but rather an argument for the kind o f education that prepares people for livelihoods suited to a planet with a biosphere that operates by the laws of ecology and thermodynamics.
Echoing the ideas of Arne Naess and other deep ecologists (as well as Afrocentrists, feminists, and post-colonialists), Orr accuses the Western philosophical tradition, especially the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, of providing the basis for devaluing nature and making mankind its master rather than one constituent part among The Whole. The catastrophic consequences of this mindset require comprehensive social, economic, and political reorganization, a task Orr
6 assigns to higher education. Those who are “educated,” in Orr’s view, must stabilize world population, cut greenhouse gases, grow forests, conserve soils, use energy-efficient materials and solar energy, eliminate waste, and pretty much undo “200 years of industrialization.”
It doesn’t stop there. With Orr, we encounter the feature of sustainability that distinguishes it from the earlier forms of environmentalism: the triumvirate established via the merger with economic redistribution and social justice. So, along with undoing the Industrial Revolution, Orr also charges this educated elite with overcoming “social and racial inequities.”
Orr has successors, among them Andres R. Edwards, who explicates sustainability as the “holistic” approach entailing the Three E’s: “ecology/environment, economy/employment and equity/equality.” The Three E’s, however, must be addressed as a single entity, a “revolution of interconnections,” once again invoking the master trope of the environmentalist movement, Commoner’s mystic “everything is connected to everything else.” Edwards declares: The Sustainability Revolution provides a vital new approach to tackling the issues confronting the world today. By taking a comprehensive look at the interconnections among ecological, economic and equity issues ranging from global warming to pollution, health and poverty, we are more likely to seek and implement lasting solutions.The Sustainability Revolution marks the emergence of a new social ethos emphasizing the web of relationships that link the challenges we currently face.
The “web of relationships” encompasses an apparently limitless range of political and social issues, all of which, in Edwards’s view, fit neatly under the “sustainability” umbrella:
Sustainability encompasses a wide array of issues including: conservation, globalization, socially responsible investing, corporate reform, ecoliteracy, climate change, human rights, population growth, health, biodiversity, labor rights, social and environmental justice, local currency, conflict resolution, women’s rights, public policy, trade and organic farming. These issues cross national boundaries, socioeconomic sectors and political systems, touching every facet of society and driven by life-affirming values that influence policies and initiatives at the local, regional, national and international levels.
This synthesis, of course, has now become axiomatic to the intellectual supporters of sustainability. It purports to state a self-evident social and biological truth. But is it true?
Discovering connections between apparently unrelated phenomena is surely one of the keys to scientific discovery, but also to literature, art, and religion. We are, as humans, deeply oriented to seeking out patterns, and uncovering ways in which the universe fits together is among our most satisfying accomplishments. Such discovery often requires, however, that we first break things down to their underlying components. Simply asserting that everything exists in a “web of relationships” doesn’t get us very far and may well impede the search for real connections. “Everything is connected to everything else” isn’t science or philosophy. It is a declaration of faith. Sometimes the important thing is the discovery of non-relations. Magical spells don’t make it rain. The evil eye doesn’t cause sterility. Childhood vaccines don’t cause autism. Some connections, no matter the grip they have on our imaginations, aren’t real. Is it possible that carbon emissions don’t cause global warming? When we hear such declarations from people grounded in the “everything is connected to everything else” approach to inquiry, we ought to approach the hypothesis warily.
Orr and Edwards, as leading and typical spokesmen for sustainability, also recall Charles A. Reich’s Greening of America, that archetypal 1960s text invoking a new kind of knowledge one would gain through a vague, holistic “consciousness.” Like his contemporary Herbert Marcuse, Reich established the “interconnections” between American consumer capitalism and all existing social evils by simple assertion. He believed this not because of compelling evidence, but as matter of “insight,” and convinced those disposed to believe, almost as a matter of faith.
The sustainability movement proceeds in the same mysterious way, asserting a comprehensive theoretical understanding of the world, but rarely checking its propositions against the facts, and often furious when anyone dares to look beyond the conclusions to the supposed data. The movement espouses a peculiarly potent distillate of political and religious enthusiasm, even in precincts one might think would resist any rush to judgment. Within sustainability, “modeling” typically trumps evidence—models being infinitely adjustable and never actually falsifiable. The late Michael Crichton observed tellingly that:
Today, one of the most powerful religions in the Western World is environmentalism. Environmentalism seems to be the religion of choice for urban atheists….Increasingly, it seems facts aren’t necessary, because the tenets of environmentalism are all about belief. It’s about whether you are going to be a sinner, or saved. Whether you are going to be to be one of the people on the side of salvation, or on the side of doom. Whether you are going to be one of us or one of them.
Physicist Freeman Dyson, a professed environmentalist but also a skeptic with regard to global warming, recently lamented the shrill intolerance and crude contempt directed toward dissenters like himself and MIT meteorologist Richard Lindzen by mainstream academic and scientific societies, for whom they have become apostates:
The United Kingdom has made up its mind and takes the view that any individuals who disagree with government policy should be ignored. This dogmatic tone is also adopted by the Royal Society, the British equivalent of the US National Academy of Sciences….In other words, if you disagree with the majority opinion about global warming, you are an enemy of science.
Like Crichton, Dyson attributes this puzzling hostility to the fact that environmentalism has evolved into a new and fervent religion:
7
There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. The ethics of environmentalism are being taught to children in kindergartens, schools, and colleges all over the world. Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion.
Thus, Dyson concludes, even though the impact of environmentalism had been highly salutary and the movement unquestionably “[held] the moral high ground,” the detached, scientific evaluation of global warming had been seriously impeded by the fact that some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. That is one reason why the arguments about global warming have become so bitter and passionate. Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warmin g is an enemy of the environment.
Crichton and Dyson speak of the “environmental movement,” but their words apply even more aptly to sustainability. What exactly is the difference? Environmentalism focused on the environment and went in search of how environmental issues connected to other matters of concern to social activists. Sustainability simply assumes all those connections and reduces environmental issues to one leg of a three-legged stool. The credo of sustainability is that the earth, humanity, and life itself will be extinguished by human greed and folly unless we truly repent. Reducing your carbon footprint is not enough. We must also submit to new structures of authority in which those who possess the wisdom of “interconnectedness” will make the right decisions for us. We must relinquish capitalism, with its endless need for consumption and growth. We must reorder human society to rid ourselves of the age-old scourges of hierarchy, racism, and sexism.
Sustainability can put on different hats at different times, sounding as if it is sternly scientific at one moment, enchanted with mystical unities the next, and down in the street fighting for social justice and cut-rate mortgages the moment after that. Like most ideologies, it can be amorphous when it is tactically useful to its proponents to blur the issues. But it does have core ideas, and “interconnectedness” writ large is the most important of these.
From its origins in the intellectual contortions of the 1960s, sustainability has emerged as the newest missionary ideology within higher educational institutions in the United States. With an ever-expanding conceptual reach and touting the authority of “science,” its influence is manifest in every aspect of campus life. It embodies the omnipresent sense of emergency long characteristic of environmentalism and the aggressive intellectual imperialism of the 1960s, and confers an automatic aura of moral obligation and concomitant moral superiority. Sustainability provides, to borrow Robert Conquest’s term, “The Idea”—the thing, the system, the beliefs that encompass and explain everything—pursued by secularized intellectuals of the West since the late eighteenth century. And it is now ascendant in academic institutions that have long since been transformed into citadels of ideological indoctrination, postmodernism, and political correctness.
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