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Failed ecological leadership  (link)

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Your failure to attend Rio+20 is inexcusable

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Dear President Obama, Prime Minister Cameron and Chancellor Merkel, As global ecosystem collapse causes abject human suffering, a large part of international environmental leadership is just showing up. It is deeply troubling that each of you has chosen to not attend the Rio +20 Earth Summit. Your nations continue to obstruct implementation of action-based policies adequate to sustain global ecology – putting your narrow parochial economic interests before shared responsibilities to maintain our one shared biosphere that makes life possible. Nearly every week the degree to which global ecosystems and our biosphere are threatened with collapse - bringing further abject suffering to the world’s non-elite - becomes more evident. I am writing to demand that each of you make your way to Rio immediately, or barring that, instruct your nation's negotiators to end their obstruction of an action-based agenda to sustain global ecology and achieve sustainable development for all. Without ecology there can be no economy – the latter is a subset of the former. Many of the international financial difficulties we face are directly linked to the impossibility of maintaining infinite economic growth on a finite planet, and inequitable resource scarcity. We know that global ecological sustainability will require sacrifices based upon common but differentiated responsibilities. Ecological science clearly informs humanity what must be done if we are to survive – much less thrive. They include commonsense policies such as: Earth’s primary forests must be fully protected, abrupt climate change averted with dramatic emissions cuts, over-fished fisheries allowed to recover, water carefully husbanded, global inequitable growth and population increases reversed, and Earth’s dwindling natural abundance sustainably shared. The way citizens in your nations live in opposition to these global ecological needs is literally killing those in not-yet-over-developed nations. You each lead great countries at a time of immense ecological risk to our species, all kindred species, and the biosphere’s very survival. Collapsing ecosystems wait for nothing – neither economics nor elections – your leadership commensurate with the urgency of the global ecological emergency is needed NOW. I demand that you get on the plane to Rio immediately, and bolster negotiations with your proactive and positive presence. If you refuse to demonstrate your responsibility to sustain a habitable Earth by doing so, at least free your negotiators to meaningfully seek action-based solutions, and not status quo obstructionist rhetoric. Failure to exert leadership as Earth’s life, ecosystems and our one shared biosphere collapse on your tenure will haunt your legacy – and Earth and humanity’s future – for all time remaining. Shame on the three of you for together dawdling as Earth burns. With grave concern,

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