Friends of the Earth International
FoEI is the world's largest federation of environmental groups, with nearly 1 million activists worldwide.

Greenpeace International
Greenpeace activist are currently involved in disputes over Artic oil exploration, ancient forests just to name a few.

Defend the Earth
Defend the Earth is an alliance between Amnesty International and the Sierra Club whose mission is to ensure that governments and corporations uphold international human rights and environmental standards.

World Wildlife Fund
WWF is the world's largest and most experienced independent conservation organization who's main mission is to protect nature and biological diversity.

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The New New Economy by Alan AtKisson (souce: Newsweek)

W herever you look, there are increasing signs of serious movements to rethink, reorganize and re-engineer our economies so that they perform more efficiently, more ecologically - and more profitably.

Item: The introduction of the world's first mass-produces hybrid gas/electric cars - with fuel-cell vehicles predicted to debut by 2004 - signals the beginning of the first real revolution in the automobile industry since the dawn of the Model T.
Item: The World Economic Forum, a Who's Who of top government and business leaders, chose global climate change as the most urgent issue facing humanity at its January conference in Davos, Switzerland.
Item: The organic-food selection in grocery stores in many countries around the world is growing rapidly, as consumers vote with their cash for natural health and quality.

Profits for the Planet
All over the planet, leaders of business and government are reassessing the value of nature, and factoring it back into their balance sheets, reinventing a sustainable version of progress. If you ignore the portents, and continue to resist the rising tide of awareness and innovation fueling what can be called "The New New Economy," you will fall farther and farther behind.

But if you see the greening of the world's economies as a golden opportunity, you will prosper. One of the rewards, for those with the foresight to understand what's happening, will be windfalls of revenue. Simply put, sustainable business will make money, and lots of it.

The trick is in separating out two kinds of growth: so called economic growth, on the other hand, from growth in the amount of stuff we use and discard on the other. These are two very different phenomena, and they have been falsely - and dangerously - confused for too long.

Economic growth, remember, is nothing more than an increase in the flow of money. That's what we're measuring when we look at the gross domestic product, which economists use as the key indicator of whether a country's economy is "growing."

The Notorious GDP
The GDP is a famously successful indicator of economic activity, and a notoriously bad way to measure progress. The GDP measures every dollar or yen or euro that changes hands, without bothering to ask whether that money went to purchase computer chips or to clean up oil spills. Because GDP growth has all too often been correlated with the destruction of nature, it's a measurement environmentalists love to hate, and with good reason.

Yet contrary to what many environmentalists belive, there's nothing inherently "unsustainable" about economic growth - as long as it gets decoupled from the flow of stuff. Money flow (value) can increase, even as material flow (resource use and waste) decreases.

In fact, indicators suggest this decoupling is already starting to happen. Even the U.S. economy, for example, has been "growing" in GDP terms for years at a much faster rate than growth in overall energy consumption. The "materials intensity" of many industrial economies is getting more efficient, generating more money per unit of stuff every year. These are trends we should be celebrating - and accelerating - if we want to pass a worthy and beautiful world on to the next generation.

There is every incentive to make the conversion to sustainability, and not just for the environmental reasons (critical though these are). All materials are costs, all energy is a cost, all waste is a cost. Reducing such costs raises profits, and not incidentally lightens the load on Mother Earth, and improves life for humans. Everybody wins.

That's also the great challenge of the 21st century: to re-create our economies so that they are vital, prosperous and capable of providing everyone with the necessities, comforts and luxuries of life, without stripping the earth of resources and wild habitat, or filling it up with molecular garbage in the form of poisons, radioactive waste or greenhouse gases.

As challenges go, this is huge. But the alternative is horrible to consider: who wants to die knowing that one's grandchildren will grow up in a world of desperately poor people, plagues by toxins, reeling from climate change, without hope of ever seeing a wild animal or an unpolluted sunset? Why even entertain the possibility?

More Articles:
Going for the Green by Will Nixon and Jason Forsythe (souce: Newsweek)

Driving Concerns by Paul Elsenstein (souce: Newsweek)

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