Our Leaders Are Not Going To Save Us

A friend of mine invited me to attend the World Ocean Summit
titled “Sustainability and Governance” hosted by The Economist recently
at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Half Moon Bay, CA. Sponsored by Shell,
DNV-GL, and Google among others, it was attended by three hundred people
representing government, intergovernmental bodies, NGOs, and the
private sector – basically a group of self-proclaimed “type-A strong
personalities” who believe in the need for top-down, hierarchical,
control-based solutions. These aren’t the heads of state in attendance,
but they are some of the people who are responsible for advising them.
Each attendee paid (or rather their organizations paid) $3000 to attend
the two and a half day summit whose goal was to confront the many crises
facing the ocean from overfishing to ocean acidification to pollution
and to come up with “practical” (i.e. we still need to make a profit)
solutions.