Pacific EnvironmentEssay Preview: Pacific EnvironmentReport this essay“Pacific Environment protects the living environment of the Pacific Rim by promoting grassroots activism, strengthening communities and reforming international policies.”
– Pacific Environment Mission StatementPacific Environment is an environmental organization concentrating on the environmental issues surrounding the Pacific Rim. Putting the mission of the group into action, Pacific Environment dedicates one third of its budget each year to funding grassroots organizations that are out there in the forefront of the environmental movement. They confront the many taxpayer-funded banks that back fossil fuel extraction on their policies and procedures. A third way they put the mission into practice is by promoting best practices as far as putting environmental protection and communities first. Finally, they constantly attempt to build, maintain and grow a global environmental movement to unite all movements into one single force to deal with all the current global issues we face today.
Pacific Environments main and constant focus has been to work with grassroots facilities and organizations that are local and community-based. Their obvious main area of responsibility is that of the Pacific Rim. From China up to the Bering Strait and back down to California, Pacific Environment is committed to promoting responsible fisheries management and protection for forest and steppe ecosystems in Russia, strengthening Chinas own environmental movement, bringing together Russian and American scientists to help protect the Bering Sea and to creating cleaner and more affordable means of energy production in California.
A brief history of Pacific Environment, the organization began in 1987 under a different name, Pacific Energy and Resources Center. They started with their sights on international energy and resources issues, while gaining the respect necessary to promote the use of international environmental law. Four years later, in 1991 they became the first international organization to bring the spotlight to the threats facing the Siberian taiga, which began a long history of work in Russia. A couple of years later, Russian partners of Pacific Environment along with Pacific Environment, led a campaign that created the Botchi Nature Preserve, protecting valuable forests in the Russian Far East, forests that were already marked for logging.
In more recent years, Pacific Environment with help from their grassroots partners have been able to protect tens of millions of acres of wilderness along the Pacific Rim as well as leading efforts to protect several endangered species such as the Siberian Tiger, Amur Leopard and the Western Pacific Gray Whale. Pacific Environment has also stopped the construction of oil pipelines, mines and dams that were harmful to the environment. Another recent achievement and one that really shows how broad this organizations influence is, is that they have forced several international financial institutions to adopt higher standards for lending with regard to social and environmental knowledge.
What Pacific Environment calls a central tenet of theirs is that they want local and community-based organizations to have just as much of an influence on environmental decision making as that of a larger international organization. In order to achieve this goal, Pacific Environment has already begun by listening to its partners so that they can come up with new approaches to international environmental work and so they can find new ways to provide direct support to community groups around the Pacific Rim. All this is done aside from the direct involvement with international affairs. Pacific Environment sees this as an important facet of their work, bringing together the smaller, community-based organizations together
This leads to a critical question. What is the most reliable way to use public funds to promote those initiatives? How would the government or State, for example, respond to the demand for the International Organization for Cleaning Energy? Where would the country put its energy resources?
Unfortunately there are no reliable ways to determine which of these ideas is what. In many cases you would just need to look up countries that have developed this way of looking at their resources and ask, “Are there countries in Asia or North America that have developed this method?” However if you look back, these are often countries where they are not in the top 15 countries out of the group of 15 countries that were at the top 5 in 2011. These countries include the U.S. where the United States spent 2.4 percent of its 2011 budgets on fossil fuels, China (2-2.5%), Japan (2 percent), U.K. the U.R. (4 percent) and many others.
Finally there is the question of whether public money would really be more than what we see as the best interest of most of the population at best. Are social services being used to “protect” the environment, in these cases they want public money to be used to fund environmentally sustainable activities? Of course not. Are the programs necessary to advance those goals? Is it clear how one-time assistance will be used to maintain the existing level of public service and how are those savings going to be reinvested back in the public realm of the local level or through other ways?
In order to be successful, the answer is still not clear.
There are many issues surrounding this issue but most will be related to public issues about the environment more broadly.
While the question of funding for public environmental projects is really a national one, it is not limited to just governments and states. It is still more international in scope than many are used to, involving various countries. In fact, almost all of these issues are the subject of public diplomacy in many ways, including some that focus on other nations, whether they are nations like Malaysia or Australia or Indonesia.
This is why so many are looking for ways to address the public’s desire to develop a healthy environment, including an international environment, but also the use of local government resources with the goal of saving money and increasing economic vitality.
To find out more about international environmentalism, get involved, and learn about public policy, see: https://www.pacificenvironmental.org/projects/international-environmentism/
The Pacific Environment has raised a lot of money through the crowdfunding campaign. More than half of it has already been paid via private donations. More than 30 of those who received donations are people who helped us by doing interesting things but are reluctant to come forward because they do not want to be considered politically correct. It is important for those who participate to understand if or how this campaign has