Word: robinsons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...main interest was discovering how life might be changing for Irish women, who have been all but invisible in what may be Europe's most repressively patriarchal society. She found some hopeful omens in interviews with three of Ireland's leading feminists: the country's first woman President, Mary Robinson; poet Eavan Boland; and abortion-rights activist Ruth Riddick, who inspired the book's enigmatic title. (One conservative Catholic lady is quoted as saying of Riddick and her ilk: "Oh, those women! Those women encourage whoredom in Kimmage" -- a lower-class Dublin neighborhood...
Ireland's President, Mary Robinson, had a private tea with Queen Elizabeth. It's the first time an Irish chief of state has met with a British monarch since the founding of the Republic of Ireland...
...however, scientists are beginning to acknowledge that theories of sustainable use and development almost never work in practice. "What we are seeing is that conservation and development are not the same process," says the Wildlife Conservation Society's John Robinson, a leading revisionist on sustainable use. "If you are interested in development, you cannot get there by doing conservation, simply because the most diverse ecosystems are usually not the most productive in human terms." This means that development almost always brings losses of biological diversity. Instead of preserving the variety of a rain forest, for example, humans have the urge...
Environmentalists cling to the idea of sustainable development because it enables them to present themselves as advocates of economic progress and, as Robinson puts it, "the concept allows them to play with the big boys and have an impact on huge development projects." If sustainable development proves illusory, environmentalists will be left with a huge problem: there is no big idea ready to fill the void. With human numbers expected to double in the next 60 years, policymakers must now find some new trail map that will enable humanity to walk the ledge between rising material expectations and the wholesale...
...Robinson believes environmentalists will have to embrace anew the politically incorrect concept of pure preservation for some vital areas. For their part, policymakers must try to guide development away from sensitive ecosystems and toward regions where inevitable losses of diversity are more "acceptable." An economics that accurately accounted for the costs of destroying species would also help. Most likely, though, a sustainable future will not come from policy wonks, but rather from a broad change in values as ordinary people react to ecological disasters around them...