Outright bans on plastic bags may not be the best solution, but education and incentives to get people to stop using them are necessary.
More than a billion people lack adequate access to clean water.
Conserving energy and thus saving money, reducing consumption of unnecessary products and packaging and shifting to a clean-energy economy would likely hurt the bottom line of polluting industries, but would undoubtedly have positive effects for most of us.
The damage that climate change is causing and that will get worse if we fail to act goes beyond the hundreds of thousands of lives, homes and businesses lost, ecosystems destroyed, species driven to extinction, infrastructure smashed and people inconvenienced.
Although it's difficult, if not impossible, to put a dollar value on the numerous services nature provides, leaving them out of economic calculations means they are often ignored.
For the sake of our health, our children and grandchildren and even our economic well-being, we must make protecting the planet our top priority.
Rapid population growth and technological innovation, combined with our lack of understanding about how the natural systems of which we are a part work, have created a mess.
My earliest memory from childhood is of fishing with my father. And I remember vividly we were in a store, and we were buying a pup tent to go on our first camping trip.
Beyond reducing individual use, one of our top priorities must be to move from fossil fuels to energy that has fewer detrimental effects on water supplies and fewer environmental impacts overall.
The voluntary approach to corporate social responsibility has failed in many cases.
We must pay greater attention to keeping our bodies and minds healthy and able to heal. Yet we are making it difficult for our defences to work. We allow things to be sold that should not be called food. Many have no nutritive value and lead to obesity, salt imbalance, and allergies.
If we have any hope of finding ways for seven billion people to live well on planet with finite resources, we have to learn to use our resources efficiently. Plastic bags are neither efficient nor environmentally friendly.
One of the joys of being a grandparent is getting to see the world again through the eyes of a child.
Water is our most precious resource, but we waste it, just as we waste other resources, including oil and gas.
Our beliefs, our values shape the way we look out at the world and the way we treat it. If we believe that we were here, placed here by God, that this - all of this creation is for us, it's for us to go and occupy, dominate and exploit, then we will proceed to do that.
Some solutions are relatively simple and would provide economic benefits: implementing measures to conserve energy, putting a price on carbon through taxes and cap-and-trade and shifting from fossil fuels to clean and renewable energy sources.
Planting native species in our gardens and communities is increasingly important, because indigenous insects, birds and wildlife rely on them. Over thousands, and sometimes millions, of years they have co-evolved to live in local climate and soil conditions.
Too often, governments are quick to use excessive force and even pervert the course of justice to keep oil and gas flowing, forests logged, wild rivers dammed and minerals extracted. As the Global Witness study reveals, citizens are often killed, too - especially if they're poor and indigenous.
The whole sector of public dialogue has been totally contaminated, deliberately, by the corporate sector. The whole purpose is to sow confusion and doubt, and it's worked.
Many countries - as well as cities, states and provinces - are taking global warming seriously and are working to reduce emissions and shift to cleaner energy sources.
