Date: Sunday March 29th 2015

Participants (from 11 countries):

Team A: (Yes) Rick, Marwa

Team B: (No) Miranda, Haru, Oscar, Masato, Ripon, Evgeniy, Maria, Daniel, Amine

Team C: (On the fence) Sara, Selly

Moderator: Tata

As part of the future effort to better organize these chats, make them both more effective and professional, roles will be assigned to a Chat Host (in this case Rick) and a Chat Moderator (in this case Tata). The future debate structure will include time limits on each person’s presentation, as well as other rules to make it a more effective forum. Johny (Argentina) will be transitioning into a Group Chat Team Lead role and will work with other members to implement these steps. The three basic categories of group chat include: Open Discussion, Debates and Competitions.

Team A Summary:

Current and future technology offer the opportunity for economic success while minimizing the impact to the environment. There will always be some impact, some footprint that humans leave on the environment, but it can be managed more effectively if we use clean energies or other technology to minimize that footprint
Economic success at the price of degrading the environment has been a “necessary evil” because it has taught us what the impacts are, provided data and other ways to measure the impact so that future economic prosperity does not have to come at the cost severely degrading the environment. Without the data from past experience, we would not be able to educate the future generations on how to balance the two goals and find initiatives that provide solutions.

Team B Summary:

Economic growth without regard to the consequences to the environment has resulted in impacts to the soil, air, water, forestation, wildlife and other aspects of the natural world. This affects us in many areas of our lives: more diseases, higher mortality rates, extinction of wildlife species, desertification, and unsustainable agriculture.
Corporate and other industrial activities, when not managed with regulations and environmental standards, have a large impact on the environment, with waste discharge and other negative effects to the natural environment. Due to the additional cost associated with implementing these standards (high labor rates, less profit) many companies, corporations and industrial activities seek to find places in the world where there is often lower environmental standards and regulations, in order to maximize profit, and this is often the case in developing countries.
We have one home, called Earth. Without proper stewardship at a global level, there will not be a home for future generations.
One member brought up an example where in the country he is currently at, coal mining was a primary industry. Most recently, a significant portion of the coal mines have been shut down in favor of using other cleaner/greener energies.

Team C Summary:

Team C stated that there needs to be a balanced approach, that there needs to be investment into business activities, and economic growth encouraged, but done in a managed way that considers the priorities of the environment impacts. They also believed that it was important to have historical data, in order to understand the consequences and educate future generations. For this reason, no Team was identified as a winning the debate.

Below are the links to listen to our chat

For people who did not join the live discussion, feel free to contribute the ideas in comment blanks below.