Cultural habits – like people – go through stages when they face death. Dr. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross described this process as the “five stages of grief”: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance of reality. In human society, growth economics will eventually collapse in the face of ecological reality. We have witnessed decades of denial and anger about this end of growth, some remain stuck there, but society at large now appears to be entering the bargaining stage.

This bargaining appears in thousands of new corporate marketing strategies that promote “sustainability.” They’ve changed the ink in the printing presses, rolled out green and blue designs, replaced lightning bolts with fern leaves, and stamped images of the earth on plastic containers. We now have “sustainable detergent,” “sustainable events,” “sustainable development,” “sustainable profits,” “sustainable fashions,” and even “sustainable countertops” for the kitchen makeovers of discerning consumers.

The bargaining goes like this: If we call ourselves “green” and “sustainable” can we keep selling stuff? But like a drug addict, the patient has not yet changed the habit that is killing it. That habit is consumption growth. All these sustainable marketing campaigns are designed to sell more products to more people. Meanwhile, every day, we lose forests, exterminate species, erode soil, drain aquifers, and pump more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Eventually, we’ll notice that labeling things “sustainable” doesn’t make it so. That day may signal the “depression” stage.

The foolish king

The bargaining strategy we know as “sustainable growth” gained popularity with the 1987 Brundtland Report (Our Common Future), from the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development. The report recognized that human activity had caused serious ecological degradation, and they sought ways to reconcile economic growth, particularly for the poorer countries, with environmental health. The rich countries, meanwhile, sought ways to allow global corporations to continue plundering the earth for riches.

The Brundtland Report envisioned, “a new era of economic growth … that is forceful and at the same time socially and environmentally sustainable.” This idea represents a noble vision that most people would support: a growing human economy that relieves poverty while sustaining the Earth’s resources. However, in nature, all physical growth eventually stops. There are no exceptions.

To understand why this is so, we must understand what real sustainability means in a biological habitat. For a species to maintain a pattern of energy and material exchange with its environment over a long period of time, it must achieve what biologists call homeostasis or dynamic equilibrium, whereby its consumption remains below the energy input into the system. 

We must also understand the nature of exponential growth. “The greatest shortcoming of the human race,” says physicist Dr. Albert Bartlett at the University of Colorado, “is our inability to understand the exponential function.” Since human population and consumption have been growing for thousands of years, we might assume that we can continue to grow for thousands more, but this is not how exponential growth works. This complex-sounding bit of arithmetic is actually quite simple.

Any material growth (a fixed or variable percent increase per year) eventually yields a huge number over time. You may have heard the story of the legendary king who agreed to pay a clever inventor with one grain of rice on the first square of a chess board, two grains on the next square, then four, eight, sixteen, and so forth. This is a story about exponential growth. All such growth has a doubling time, represented by the 64 squares of the chess board. However, by the time the foolish king reached square number 30, he needed a billion grains of rice. By square 40, a trillion grains, and the kingdom was bankrupt. This is the power of exponential growth.

In one of the more famous cases of delusion about endless growth, American business professor Julian Simon claimed in “The State of Humanity: Steadily Improving,” Cato Policy Report, 1995:

“We have in our hands now – actually in our libraries – the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next 7  billion years.”

Like so many modern business leaders, Simon does not appear to understand ecology or exponential growth. Our current human population, growing at just over 1% per year, will double every 60 years. (To find any doubling time, divide the growth rate into the number 70). These doublings are the “squares” of the chess board. At this rate of growth, the human population on earth would reach an impossible 7 trillion people in 600 years, a tiny fraction of Simon’s “7 billion years.”

Even if we assumed a slower population growth of only 0.1% per year, the population would reach over one trillion people in 5,000 years. A city such as Tokyo or New York would swell to over two billion people. It would not be possible to feed, house, or water, this population on Earth. The processing of waste and sewage would not be remotely achievable. The planet would be a cesspool of human waste. Simon was dead wrong by a factor of over a million.

Bargaining with nature

For the last two centuries, our consumption of critical resources – forests, energy, water, copper, phosphorus – has been growing over three times faster than population, at about 3.5 percent per year, meaning that humanity’s material consumption has been doubling every 20 years. We are now consuming about 8-thousand times as much as humans consumed in 1750. This is already more resources than the earth can supply. Humanity is in habitat overshoot, as evident by forest and soil loss, species extinction, and ocean and atmospheric pollution.

At this rate, in twenty more years, we’ll be consuming 16-thousand times the 1750 level, and by 2050, 32-thousand times. Earth cannot supply this material growth. Like the naïve king, we have bankrupted our kingdom, the Earth itself.

Some growth advocates claim we will save our growth economies with “efficiencies.” The history of human industrial development provides thousands of efficiency examples, which almost never result in less consumption of energy and materials. Rather, efficiency tends to make a resource cheaper, and therefore we consume more. This fact is well known in economics, called the “rebound” effect or “Jevons” effect, after William Jevons, who noticed that coal consumption increased as efficiencies increased.

Others bargain with natural law by claiming that we will “de-materialize growth” with new technologies. However, in every case in history, as economies grow, material and energy consumption grows. Marginal efficiency gains are swamped by population and consumption growth. Remember when people claimed that computers would save paper? It never happened. In 1950, before private computers, the human community used about 50 million tonnes of paper each year. Now, in the full-blown computer age, we use five times as much paper, 250 million tonnes per year.

“Sustainable growth,” Dr. Bartlett reminds us, “is an oxymoron.” In nature, no such thing exists. So growth economists and politicians attempt to haggle with nature, proposing policies that might take us “toward sustainability” to hedge the obvious contradiction. We hear about policies that might make us “more sustainable,” which means what? That we will last a little longer before we collapse?

Our bargaining with nature won’t work. Growth and sustainability are not compatible in the material world. If humanity wants sustainability, we must abandon the belief in endless economic growth. We don’t get to re-write the laws of nature for our own convenience.

Genuine Sustainability

When we get past our denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, when we finally accept the demands of ecology, what will real human sustainability look like?

First of all, when we talk about sustainable human civilization, we mean for thousands of years, not a few decades or until the next election. Sustainability in nature, dynamic equilibrium, allows diversity to increase and relationships to fluctuate, thus “dynamic,” but a species population and its consumption must cease growing, a state of balance we call homeostasis.

When humanity achieves real sustainability, it will no longer be necessary to bulldoze more forests, erode soils, drain aquifers, dam more rivers, deplete non-renewable resources, and fill the atmosphere, land, rivers, and oceans with our waste.

Genuine sustainability will value localized trade over globalization, not relying on fossil fuels – ancient sunlight – to ship food and materials around the world. Real sustainability will solve problems with the simplest, low-technology, whole-systems-based solutions available. Such a system will be aware of scale, and will not assume that “more” and “bigger” are in any way equated with better. We will learn to value a genuinely rich quality of life over mere quantity of stuff, to value a living watershed or mountain over corporate profit.

Real sustainability will include social justice, because our current state of injustice breeds conflict, violence, and additional destruction of nature. Most current economic growth benefits the already wealthy. Real sustainability will reduce total consumption, while closing the gap between rich and poor. We will discover a new definition of wealth: The health of our living world.

As ecologists, we have to help humanity navigate through these difficult stages of grief over the fact that our very economic system is simply unsustainable. According to Dr. Kübler-Ross’s observations, after we finish with our quibbling and bargaining, we may experience depression. We need to help our neighbours realize that accepting reality delivers us finally to the joyful stage of meaningful action.

============== 

“There are many true things that are not useful for the vulgar crowd to know; and certain things, which although they are false it is expedient for the people

to believe otherwise.”

- Augustine of Hippo, City of God, 426 A.D.

Car salesmen and burger tycoons have sabotaged the most important decision of our generation.

As the highly-anticipated Copenhagen climate summit limps toward indecision, the largest money-making corporations on the planet privately celebrate their ability to undermine science and hijack the international political process.

The US – the greatest historic source of greenhouse gases – set the tone of duplicity in Copenhagen by offering “provisional targets” (translation: fantasy targets) and “politically binding” agreements (translation: non-binding) and by replacing the 1990 greenhouse gas baseline with a 2005 baseline (to make the non-binding, fantasy “targets” sound more impressive.) China played along with this deception by offering to “cut emissions … relative to economic growth,” known as “carbon intensity reductions.” (Translation: no reduction at all). China’s actual emissions, and the world’s emissions, will continue to increase through the next decade.

A year ago – as research data showed rates of melting ice and rising methane accelerating faster than the most extreme International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projections – it appeared that Copenhagen represented humanity’s last chance to reverse global warming. Now, decisive action appears to be melting with the ice sheets. Apologists for business-as-usual have forged scientific rigor into “uncertainty,” spun lies into doctrine, offered frivolous quibbling for serious debate, masqueraded corruption as compromise, and finally delivered double-talk for real commitment.

Like Augustine – who sixteen centuries ago rationalized war and torture for his bosses in the Roman state religion – our own modern sophists spin truth, rationalize crime, and scorn genuine science. Like ancient patricians, modern corporate royalty devise evermore extravagant comforts for themselves while banishing dispossessed multitudes to the evaporating elements. And how did the wealthiest captains of industry sabotage the climate action that might have saved our progeny from a century of chaos? As history has taught us: follow the money.

Crime of the Epoch

“ Ecology… if taken seriously as an instrument for the long-run welfare of mankind, would endanger the assumptions and practices accepted

by modern societies.

Paul Sears (1964)

Four years ago, in December 2005, the IPCC published an upbeat “Report on demonstrable progress under the Kyoto Protocol,” showing European nations on course, as promised, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by eight percent from the 1990 baseline levels.

Meanwhile, in the United States, polls conducted by the University of Maryland and Chicago Council on Foreign Relations showed that over 70 percent of US citizens supported the Kyoto Treaty and carbon emission reductions. The developed nations, responsible for the scale of global warming, appeared ready to act.

However, behind the scenes, in private board rooms and industry front groups, a powerful cadre of fossil fuel executives had a different and darker plan: Sabotage Kyoto and undermine the best scientific minds of our era. Like any other corporate project, these executives began by striking a budget.

In 2008, the U.S. oil and gas industry added $46 million to its existing $82 million lobby budget, specifically to undermine climate action leading up to Copenhagen. This massive crusade – $128 million, 770 companies, and 2,340 lobbyists – set out to control the U.S. Congress and confuse the unsuspecting public. Meanwhile, American coal companies invested $40 million to sell the illusion of “clean coal,” while failing to install sequestration technology in even one single power plant.

The campaign to deny human-based global warming and spread misinformation about climate science has been documented by hundreds of journalists, including David Adam and George Monbiot at the UK Guardian, Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker magazine, and Andrew Revkin at The New York Times. Internet sites such as The Royal Society, OpenSecrets, PR Watch, DeSmogBlog, and Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets have exposed the denialist tricks and tracked money back to the corporations that funded them. A new book by DeSmogBlog writers James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore, Climate Cover Up, documents the historic facts of this dark crusade.

The campaign to sow confusion about global warming has been funded by ExxonMobil, Shell Oil, BP, Texaco, the American Petroleum Institute, the Western Fuels Association, coal companies, and automobile companies such as General Motors, DaimlerChryler, and Ford. According to records kept by Bob Ward at the London School of Economics, Exxon has continued to subsidize lies about global warming for three years since promising to stop.

The attack on modern science resembles Seventeenth Century attempts to deny the cosmological observations of Copernicus and Galileo, and Nineteenth Century attempts to deny the biological observations of Lamarck and Darwin. Whereas the status quo once burned annoying scientists at the stake, they now bury them under a tsunami of public relations hype. 

Science by slogan

“… one of the most disgusting stories ever hidden about corporate disinformation …proof of an intergenerational crime.”

Dr. David Suzuki, geneticist, ecologist on Climate Cover-Up

Rather than use their resources to support data collection, the denial campaign invested in advertising slogans and public relations pitch artists. They created phony “citizens” groups, fake “green” astroturf organizations such as the Greening Earth Society (Western Fuels); the Global Climate Coalition (Exxon, Shell, GM); and the Natural Resources Stewardship Project (Canadian Gas Association) with the stated goal to “counter the Kyoto Protocol and other greenhouse gas reduction schemes.” They hired anyone who could pass as a “scientist” or “environmentalist,” as long as they repeated the industry talking points.

Frank Luntz – a U.S. public relations mercenary, who once concocted slogans for embattled pharmaceutical companies, fast food chains, and the U.S. Republican Party – became one of the chief script writers in the crusade against global warming science. In 2007, after being accused of being “Orwellian,” Luntz told Terry Gross on National Public Radio that “to be Orwellian is to speak with absolute clarity,” a lie typical of Orwell’s “doublespeak.” Luntz advised the fossil fuel industry that the term “global warming … connotes catastrophic consequences,” and he taught spokespersons to say “climate change,” which presented “less of an emotional challenge.” He tutored them to call oil drilling “energy exploration” and to exploit common scientific dialogue as “uncertainty,” and to “portray the scientific community as divided.”

Key early denialist sloganeers – S. Fred Singer, Frederick Seitz, and industry front groups Heartland Institute and Competitive Enterprise Institute – had previously worked in tobacco industry campaigns to help conceal the health effects of cigarettes. There, they pioneered the tactics of creating phony “citizen” groups, avoiding real science journals, and sowing public confusion by parading hired “scientists” before sympathetic journalists.

Certain media began to restate oil industry slogans to cast doubt on global warming. On February 15, 2009, Washington Post columnist George Will repeated in print the falsehood that global sea ice was expanding. In Canada, Lawrence Solomon – in the National Post on January 12, 2007 – misrepresented the views of Cambridge University scientist Dr. Nigel Weiss, a past president of the UK Royal Society. Even Burger King fast-food restaurants got into the act. In the state of Tennessee in the U.S., a dozen Burger King restaurants displayed signs proclaiming, “Global warming is baloney.” In this crusade, science appeared unnecessary wherever slogans could confuse the gullible public.

Real science

For almost two centuries, human scientists have known that carbon-dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere warm the earth. Joseph Fourier hypothesized the effect in 1824, John Tyndall proved it true thirty years later, and Svante Arrhenius predicted global warming from industrial carbon emissions in 1894, during the coal era.

In the 1950s, Roger Revelle and James Lovelock possessed the data about human carbon heating the atmosphere. Greenpeace had the data in the 1970s, when we first raised the issue. Science demonstrates that the current impact, or “forcing,” caused by human greenhouse gases is equal to about two and a half watts of energy per square-metre of Earth’s surface. James Hansen at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies compares this heat force to stringing six 0.4-watt coloured light bulbs over every square meter of the earth’s surface, 3-million-billion bulbs burning year around, giving off heat, 24 hours a day. This represents the heat generated by human carbon in the atmosphere, melting the ice sheets, releasing methane, and generating forest loss, drought, and increased fire.

The November Scientific American provides a special issue on climate science, including “Seven Answers to Climate Contrarian Nonsense,” as “evidence for human interference with Earth’s climate continues to accumulate.”

A report this year from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology shows:

1. Global greenhouse gas emissions rising faster than previously expected

2. Ocean and forest absorption of carbon dioxide is weaker than hoped

3. Self-reinforcing warming from methane, deteriorating forests, and other feedback effects is now occurring.

The World Meteorological Organization reports that in 2008, human CO₂ levels in the atmosphere grew at a record pace, 2 parts per million (ppm) over 2007 reaching 385.2 ppm.

The Standing Committee on Antarctic Research – comprised of over 100 scientists from 13 countries – has issued their 2009 report, showing CO₂ and Methane levels higher and increasing faster than at any time in the last 800,000 years. The loss of Antarctic sea ice is directly affecting krill and penguin populations.

Meanwhile, 26 of the world’s most imminent scientists from Germany, France, Switzerland, Austria, Canada, U.S., and Australia – including Dr. Robert Bindschadler at NASA; Dr. Hans J. Schellnhuber from Germany’s Potsdam Institute; Dr. Richard Somerville, Distinguished Professor Emeritus at Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Dr. Konrad Steffen, director of the Swiss Institute of Technology; and 22 other impeccable, senior world scientists – released the Copenhagen Diagnosis: An update of the latest climate science. The report shows that ice is melting faster than previously predicted and that claims of recent global cooling are wrong. These scientists warn humanity:

1. Surging greenhouse gas emissions: CO₂ emissions in 2008 are nearly 40% higher than 1990.

2. Recent warming trends demonstrate human-based warming: The temperature increase rate over the last 25 years is 0.19°C / decade, matching predictions. Despite a recent decrease in solar forcing, the warming trend continues and short-term fluctuations do not change this underlying trend.

3. Accelerated melting of ice sheets, polar caps, and glaciers: Satellite measurements show “beyond doubt” that the Greenland & Antarctic ice sheets are losing mass at an increasing rate.

4. Rapid sea-ice decline: Summer melt of arctic ice has accelerated to 40% beyond the average of predictions from IPCC climate models.

5. Sea level rise greater than expected: The global average sea rise of 3.4 mm/yr over 15 years is 80% above previous IPCC predictions. The scientists now expect at least 1-2 meters of sea rise this century. (A complete runaway ice melt would raise sea level by over 75 meters.)

6. Action delay risks additional deterioration of ice sheets, forest, and rain patterns. A business-as-usual scenario increases the risk of runaway global heating.

7. Turning point needed soon: To avoid catastrophic heating, average annual per-capita emissions must shrink 80-95% below developed nations emissions in 2000.

Human industrial fossil fuel burning has already triggered hotter global temperatures, forest die-off, drought, fires, and methane releases. These and future disasters remain the legacy of the denial crusaders. Future generations living with the consequences will judge these anti-science miscreants as we now judge those who once denied that the earth orbited the sun or those who argued that slavery was necessary for the economy. The climate deniers will go down in history as traitors to the planet.

In the 1970s, during the early years of Greenpeace, we used to light-heartedly describe the emerging environmental movement as “a 2000-year post-industrial mop up operation.” That now sounds like optimism.

The average global temperature increase of human

industrialism, caused primarily by the burning of

coal and oil and secondly by the destruction of the

world’s carbon capturing forests.

Note that short term fluctuations — up or down —

do not significantly change the modern warming trend.

============= 

Most people I talk to support “sustainability” and “social justice” goals. Ecology teaches us that we need to frame these human aspirations in relation to the biological capacity of the earth: the energy, and resources that support our burgeoning populations and economies.

As human society sets out to achieve ecological sustainability and social justice on earth, we face two serious challenges: One, humanity already over-consumes the biological capacity of the planet; and secondly, humanity suffers from a vast gap between rich and poor.

Free-market fundamentalists claim we’ll close this gap, and restore the planet, by growing our economies, perhaps with “green” jobs, but this business-as-usual approach fails to account for ecological reality.

Do the Math

According to data compiled by the UN, the Global Footprint Network, and Dr. William Rees at the University of British Columbia, total human consumption already exceeds the earth’s capacity by 30 percent. This is known as biological “overshoot.” The UN estimates that most natural services to human societies – forests, fish, fresh water, and clean air – are now declining annually. As human population and consumption grow, our collective overshoot increases.

Meanwhile, the wealthy 15 percent use about 85 percent of the resources – the total energy and materials, the “stuff,” that Earth provides. The “wealthy” includes anyone who has a home, job, transport, access to education, hot showers, convenient fuel, and food every day: people in the so-called “developed” world. If you have those things, you live among the wealthy 15 percent, who use most of the world’s resources.

There is more to social change than the biophysical numbers, but any serious ecologist or justice advocate needs to know how resource overshoot limits our choices to achieve sustainability and social equality. Let’s do the math.

Nature’s rules

Start with these facts:

1. Total human consumption =

     130% of Earth’s capacity

2. The rich 15% use 85% of the stuff;

     while the poor 85% use 15% of the stuff

If we define the sustainable, equitable consumption per person as “1 unit” of stuff, the facts above mean that an average 100 people use 130 “units.” To be sustainable, the total consumption of 100 people needs to be 100 “units” of stuff. And to achieve social justice, each person would use 1 unit. But of course, that’s not how our world works.

Total human consumption of a 100 average people equals 130, not 100, and since the rich 15 use 85% of everything, they use 110 units (130 X 85%). The poor 85, meanwhile, use the other 20 units of stuff.

Therefore:

The average rich person uses:

    110/15   =    7.333  units of stuff

The average poor person uses:

     20/85    =    0.235  units of stuff

How are we doing? Not too well. The average person in the developed nations consume 30-times more than the average working poor, dispossessed, and starving multitudes. And meanwhile, we already use more energy and materials than Earth can annually supply.

So if we want a world of ecological sustainability and social justice, then we must face some difficult facts. To start with, humanity must consume less stuff.

We must reduce the total human consumption for 100 average people from 130 to 100, and then, we must share those 100 units of stuff that the earth can provide.

If we were able to achieve that, then everyone would simply use 1 “unit,” the ecologically sound, socially equitable amount of energy and materials. As we know, in our current situation, we consume more than the earth’s capacity and the rich take almost everything.

Another way to understand this is to imagine humanity as a family of seven people, that earns $100,000 per year but spends $130,000, and one member of the family alone spends $110,000. This family is going broke because one person, 15% of the family, is pigging out.

Dysfunctional? Yes.

Sustainable? No.

Reality bites

By these figures, we see that to achieve sustainability and social justice, the rich would have to consume about 1/7 of what they currently consume. If that happened, the world’s poor could increase their consumption by about 4-times.

That’s the straightforward, biological and physical reality we now face.

Under our current economic system, achieving sustainability and social justice might appear impossible. However, using less and sharing represent nothing more than common decency, the sort of behaviour we supposedly teach our children.

We hear from our alleged leaders, of course, that this is politically and logistically impractical. So, instead, we labour under the delusion that we’ll make the world “equitable” by growing all the economies until the poor, developing countries achieve greater wealth. We’ll make our economies “sustainable” by creating “green” products, hybrid cars, and renewable energy.

If the earth was an infinite storehouse and could provide infinite sinks for our garbage, that would be a reasonable plan. But the earth is not infinite. It remains unequivocally finite.

And Nature doesn’t really care about our social theories, economic presumptions, or our whining about wanting more. Humanity is now like a clever but obsessive adolescent, who must be warned: "Sorry, this will sound really annoying, but there are real limits to your freedom to consume."

Suppose we soften the blow for the rich world, the spoiled child of humanity. We could live within the earth’s capacity if the rich simply cut their consumption in half and the poor could then double their current consumption. Here is how that would work, by the numbers:

The average rich person would use 3.67 units of stuff, instead of 7.33. And then, the average poor person could use 0.53 units of stuff (slightly more than double), instead of 0.235. This equation alone would feed the 1-billion starving, and end world hunger.

Our equation for 100 average people would then look like this:

Rich consumption:  

    15   X   3.67   =   55 units of stuff

Poor consumption:  

    85   X   0.53  =   45 units of stuff  

Total  =  100 units of stuff for 100 average people.

In this scenario we would be sustainable and the world’s poor could grow their economies to the point of doubling their use of energy and resources.

If we achieved this simple change in human consumption patterns, we could exist within the carrying capacity of the Earth.

Is this difficult to imagine? Is it fair? The ratio between the average rich and poor would then be about 7-to-1, far more equitable than the current 30-to-1 ratio. To achieve this, the rich only have to give up half their consumption. That could be achieved primarily by eliminating wastefulness, planned obsolescence, plastic packaging, exotic holidays in jet airplanes, and the most wasteful of all human inventions: cars.

Growth fundamentalists will grumble at this because they imagine a world in which they can look forward to being richer, consuming more, not less. However, biophysical reality sets the limits. We do not get to rewrite the laws of biology and physics for our own convenience.

Two problems remain

Even if humanity could make this simple change – the rich cut consumption by half, the poor double their consumption, and we achieve sustainability – we still face two problems.

First of all, we currently add 75 million new people to the planet every year. What stuff are they going to use?

To live decent lives, these new humans would need the infrastructure services roughly equal to a nation such as France, Germany, or Egypt. And then again, every year.

Human population growth proves to be both an ecological and social justice issue. The planet is finite. I’m mystified that some people find this so difficult to accept. Since we have already reached biological overshoot, human population growth pushes us farther out over the cliff.

For example, we now face declining oil and fish yields, but few people realize that oil and fish yields per capita peaked in the 1970s, thirty years ago. Each day, as we add more people and degrade our ecosystem, the average human – regardless of stock market paper wealth – becomes biophysically poorer.

Like the over-spending family, having a new baby every year, and spending more, while degrading their assets, every year we have less to go around and more mouths to feed.

To achieve sustainability and social justice, we must stabilize human population. We are breaking the back of the natural world with our insistence on endless growth of both population and consumption.

Fortunately, we could stabilize human population with three simple and socially beneficial policies worldwide: Women’s rights, contraception, and education.

The second challenge we face is that we share this planet with millions of other species. These non-human earthlings possess a right to life and habitat as much as we do. Furthermore, humanity relies on the benefits of biological diversity and symbiosis within the ecosystem.

We cannot design human culture to devour every last niche of the planet, every river and forest, the last corner of the ocean and stretch of grassland. We need to preserve every acre of wilderness that still exists on the earth.

Living within Earth’s budget

Growth is not evil, it just isn’t permanent.

In nature, all growth stops. New organisms may replace the old, diversity can increase, but there exist no cases in nature of endless growth. As Dr. Albert Bartlett at the University of Colorado points out, “After maturity, continued growth is either obesity or cancer.” In a finite world, we cannot grow ourselves out of overshoot.

Years ago, Canadian master ecological logger, Merv Wilkinson, came to our small, island community in British Columbia to show us how he had managed to earn a living for over 50 years, selectively logging the forest he grew up in, and still retain a healthy forest with more standing timber than the day he started logging. As we walked through the woods, he explained the nuances of soils, natural seeding, tree growth rates, cutting rates, and selection criteria for harvest. Then, he stopped, thought for a moment, and said: “It’s simple really: Just cut below the annual growth rate.”

That is now the lesson for humanity on a global scale. We simply have to learn to live within the capacity of our single island in space, planet Earth. To achieve this, the wealthy must find peace with a lower-consumption lifestyle.

A reporter from Dubai phoned last week and asked, “Can Dubai become a sustainable city?” and specifically, “could the tourism industry be sustainable?” In age of global warming and declining fossil fuels, the entire airline industry is probably not sustainable. Dubai, of course, is not even remotely sustainable.

Dubai is a city built with oil cash, but the global economic recession brought construction schemes to a sudden halt. Many entrepreneurs fled the city, abandoning some 3,000 cars, found with keys in the ignition and maxed-out credit cards in the glove compartment

Between 2002-2008, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and partners invested $600 billion in Dubai, creating the world’s tallest building and largest shopping mall, man-made islands, and an indoor ski hill. Dubai has a beach “designed” by Versace, with chilled sand. Meanwhile, sections of the city have no sewage system, so sewage is collected by truck convoys and driven into the desert, where it seeps back through the sand and reappears on the Versace beaches.

On the artificial islands, $20 million villa properties sit empty, without power or sewer systems. Developers will eventually have to protect the faux-island real estate from the rising seas caused by global warming. So, no, Dubai is not sustainable, but neither is any other city.

The sustainable cities are small, modest, usually poor, semi-rural centres, closely linked to local food and energy sources. One of the most ecological western consumer cities is Lingköping, Sweden. In the 1980s, Lingköping’s seven political parties agreed to pursue a non-partisan “Environment Path.” They replaced oil and coal heat with electricity from municipal waste and reduced city CO2 emissions by 40 percent. The city offers free recycling, public transportation that runs on electricity and waste-biogas, bicycle paths, and reduced taxes due to income from the public waste-energy utility.

Even so, Dubai, Lingköping and all cities rely on goods, services, energy, and resources from around the world, delivered by fuel-guzzling transport. We hear a lot these days about “sustainable cities,” but let’s look at the reality.

Cities in history

Hunting and gathering is a sustainable lifestyle. We know this because all animals live this way, and humans lived this way for several million years. Early human fire-making hunters caused local extinctions and disturbed natural habitats, but the real problems with sustainability began with urban concentration.

Four thousand years ago, Sumerian cities on the Euphrates River plains required intensive agriculture and irrigation, causing erosion and salt accumulation. Sumerian texts describe barren soils and “earth turned white.” The communities migrated north along the river seeking new fertile soils, leaving abandoned cities to disappear under the sand.

By 500 B.C., deforestation and soil erosion had left most cities gasping for food and resources. In 460 BC, as the population of Athens swelled with war refugees, filth piled up, and a plague (probably typhus) killed over a third of the population. Cities everywhere began to experience similar plagues, and the human population growth rate began to decline for the first time in history.

Forty thousand years earlier, in Cro-Magnon communities, human population growth remained extremely slow, a few thousandths-of-one-percent each year. But this rate climbed steadily, and by 500 B.C., the growth rate reached 100-times higher, over a tenth of a percent, about 0.13%, per year. However, cities became population drains, and by about 200 A.D., the population rate had dropped below zero, and total human population decreased for the first time in history.

This growth rate did not recover to the 500 B.C. level, for two thousand years, until about 1750 A.D. During those two millennia, cities – centres of filth, disease, toxic smoke, and conflict – killed off more people than they produced. Lewis Mumford explains in The City in History that small, rural Medieval towns remained relatively clean and functional, but between 1200 and 1500 A.D., large cities became centres of death, and human population dropped incessantly. Meanwhile, burgeoning empires required ever more resources from distant lands.

The forests of Europe had been devastated by 1550, which provoked the use of coal fuel and an industrial boom in Europe. Burning coal increased urban air pollution, causing more death and disease. In 1661, John Evelyn described sections of London as “suburbs of Hell.”

Smoke inhalation, typhus and cholera killed urban citizens everywhere. In the twentieth century, with the additional toxic effect of leaded gasoline exhaust, thousands perished from “killer fog” in London, and U.S. cities, including Pittsburgh, Chicago, and St. Louis. Four thousand died in London in December 1952 and hundreds died in Los Angeles in 1954. But modern industrial empires, like their ancient predecessors, still sought more resources from greater distances.

The biophysical city

Dr. William Rees at the University of British Columbia, who developed the “ecological footprint” analysis, points out that most cities require the environmental services from a land base 300 to 1000-times the city area. Rees points out that a city is a “biophysical entity” that includes the complex of land, water, atmosphere, resources, and waste sinks required to support the human population.

Rich consumer cities of Europe and North America require the most ecological space, but all modern cities carry an ecological debt to nature. I live in Vancouver, Canada, which prides itself as being a fairly “green” city with bike paths and urban gardens, but even so, Vancouver requires a global biophysical area about 390-times the city itself.

In the study, Ecosytem Appropriation by Cities," published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Carl Folke and colleagues estimate that the 29 largest Baltic cities – including Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, and Helsinki – appropriate for their resource consumption and waste an area of forest, agricultural, marine, and wetland ecosystems over 560-times the area of the cities themselves. New York requires a total eco-footprint almost 1000-times the city’s geographic area. Tokyo requires twice the entire domestic biocapacity of Japan.

The Folke study shows that the 744 largest cities worldwide require more CO2 sequestration than the entire world’s forests could provide. “If the goal,” write the authors, “is sustainable human settlements, the increasingly limited capacity of ecosystems to sustain urban areas has to be explicitly accounted for in city planning and development.”

Meanwhile, human activity continues to degrade the ecosystems that keep cities alive. Each year, we loose about 13 million hectares of forests and 6 million hectares of arable land, while adding some 75 million new humans – the combined populations of Mexico City, Mumbai, Seoul, and Sao Paulo.

“These data show that, in material terms, ‘sustainable city’ is an oxymoron,” says Rees. “Modern cities are entropic black holes sweeping up the productivity of a vastly larger and increasingly global resource hinterland and spewing an equivalent quantity of waste back into it."

Reduce consumption

Dubai may be one of the more obvious examples of reckless urban consumption, but it is not alone. Most Modern cities remain vulnerable to distant food supplies, degraded cropland, declining fossil fuel resources, and climate change impact, including rising seas and human migrations.

“To act consistently with our best science may well require a planned economic contraction,” says Rees. He believes the wealthy nations “should plan to reduce their ecological footprints by almost 80 percent” to consume only an equitable share of global biocapacity.

Peter Victor, in the book Managing without Growth, believes this is possible, that human society can dump its untenable economic ideas about growing consumption. The only way out of our dilemma – ecosystem “overshoot” – is to consume less stuff. There is no magic technology that will allow us to continue consuming at current rates, much less a growing rates. But Victor, Rees, and others believe we can live higher quality lives with less consumption, particularly if we turn urban density into an advantage.

Here are some things we need to do to make cities less destructive and more sustainable. Many modest, small rural communities already do these things, which is why they are already more sustainable:

·        Reduce per capita demand for land and water resources (consume less stuff).

·        Reduce fossil energy consumption, and all energy consumption.

·        Preserve farmland and grow local food for local consumption.

·        Share: create co-housing, public transport, and food cooperatives.

·        Be satisfied with second hand clothes and furniture, and make simplicity, modesty, justice, and ecology your fashion statement.

·        Improve urban infrastructure, water, sewage systems, and recycling.

·        Gain efficiencies with neighbourhood scale technologies, such as heat pumps, electricity co-generation, district heating/cooling, using industrial waste heat systems.

·        Create low throughput and closed loop industries, in which waste energy is captured and waste materials become feedstocks for other uses.

·        Eliminate planned obsolescence in product design; build things that last.

We have to rethink cities as complete ecosystems that fully account for their consumption. “The aggregate effect,” says Rees, “would be global sustainability.”

Critics regularly accuse environmentalists of being ‘doom and gloom’ prognosticators who complain of endless problems, but offer ‘no solutions’. However, if we check the record, we’ll discover that serious ecologists have been offering solutions for centuries.

Real Economic Solutions

Economist John Stuart Mill realised the limits of nature 160 years ago, as he witnessed British factories multiplying across the landscape, spoiling woodlands, mowing down hedgerows, and turning rivers into sewers.

Mill proposed that nations achieve a “stationary state”, at which point economic growth would stabilise for the sake of environmental preservation. “If the Earth must lose that great portion of its pleasantness,” Mill wrote in 1848, “I sincerely hope, for the sake of posterity, that they will be content to be stationary long before necessity compels them to it.”

Mill’s solution did not imply that we cease developing qualitatively. “A stationary condition of capital and population,” he insisted, “implies no stationary state of human improvement.” He understood that we might improve the quality of life, even as we reduce our destruction of the Earth.

In the 1920s, as securities traders like Goldman-Sachs engineered a stock bubble that resulted in a decade of mass poverty, Nobel laureate Frederick Soddy proposed an economics rooted in physical reality. He pointed out that a perpetually growing economy pursuing infinite wealth was doomed to fail. Debt – an intangible claim on future wealth – could approach infinite size, he noted, but real wealth had limits. This systemic flaw, said Soddy, would result in financial scams, defaults, and crashes. His solution – “Stop creating money from nothing.”

In the 1960s and 1970s, others – Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, Howard Odum, Hazel Henderson, Donnella Meadows, Herman Daly – described realistic economic models based on living systems, accounting for energy transfer and physical limits. “Biology, not mechanics, is our Mecca,” said Georgescu-Roegen. Daly’s Steady State Economics described realistic solutions that would allow for qualitative development without economic growth.

Systemic, steady state, or biophysical economic models recognise that all growth in ecological systems eventually stops. The economic visionaries offered realistic solutions, but their realism limited the accumulation of phony “wealth.” so they were ignored or even mocked by conventional voices.

Plans B, C, D …

Our modern ecological crises – global warming, species loss, water shortages, soil depletion – are all symptoms of a larger problem: Human overshoot. When a species overshoots its habitat, there are only two results – (1) crash and perish, or (2). stabilise consumption and discover ecological balance with the environment. Growing bigger is not a solution; it’s the problem.

Ecologists, environmentalists and planners have offered thousands of solutions. Visionaries such as Jon Todd, Janine Benyus, and Wes Jackson have shown how ‘biomimicry’ and ecological resource harvesting can create genuinely sustainable systems. Benyus writes in Nature’s Operating Instructions: “… we are nature. … life’s adaptations spell out a pattern language for survival. … the hummingbird manages to pollinate its energy source, ensuring that there will be nectar next year. .. These organisms have had about 400 million years of R&D.” Copying natural systems provides real solutions, but it doesn’t necessarily create billionaires.

Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia and Mathis Wackernagle with Earth Council in Costa Rica developed the ‘Ecological Footprint’ analysis to help nations, regions, and cities properly account for their consumption. Rees concludes that humanity’s resource consumption is now about 30 per cent beyond the Earth’s capacity to replenish. Typical cities require somewhere between 300 and 3000 times their area to supply the resources they consume.

Rees has proposed real solutions that take advantage of dense urban population: full accounting, urban and rural unification, public transport, electricity co-generation, closed circuit industry, and reduced per capita demand for materials and energy. In Linkoping, Sweden, the city powers its industry and buildings by burning its waste, rather than creating landfills.

Richard Register’s EcoCities proposals offer similar solutions. In Managing without Growth, Peter Victor offers sound policies – shortened workweeks, cap on resource extraction – to improve public welfare without consuming more of the planet. Harvey Wasserman in Solartopia and Lester Brown in Plan B (now in version 3.0), Jeffrey Sachs in Common Wealth, and hundreds of other research papers, books and practical projects have outlined sensible solutions to human overshoot. Most urban and regional plans, however, want to grow their populations and consumption, the exact antithesis of genuine sustainability.

A Good Solution

In 1980, farmer and author Wendell Berry wrote a short essay, "Solving for Pattern," which outlined the features of “a good solution.” He showed that many problems we face today are the consequences of previous ’solutions’ that failed to think beyond an isolated short-term gain. Toxic pollution, dying rivers and nuclear waste provide examples. Other alleged solutions, such as an arms race or a ‘war on drugs’, make the problems worse.

Berry demonstrated, using farming examples, how a good solution preserves the ‘integrity of pattern’, improves balance and symmetry, and addresses the health of the whole system rather than treats symptoms. All problems are parts of a whole, and all systems are contained in larger systems. A good solution maintains the integrity of the larger systems.

In this way, a good solution solves multiple problems and avoids ‘magic bullet’ solutions that fail to account for their full impact. For example, a nuclear ’solution’ to an energy need creates new problems: radioactive fuel transport, public health, waste, security, decommissioning, accidents, insurance costs, evacuation plans, radiation exposure, and so forth. "In a biological pattern," Berry writes, "the exploitive means and motives of industrial economics are immediately destructive and ultimately suicidal." A genuine solution does not pollute or destroy a watershed, for example, to mine gold or generate power.

Real, integrated solutions tend to localise, accept limits and use resources at hand. However, genuine solutions exist only in actual proof and cannot to be expected from absentee owners and absentee experts. People who will benefit from success or suffer the consequences of failure should guide local solutions with real work that fits the scale of their communities, and in a specific place, with local knowledge. A solution, says Berry, "should not enrich one person by the distress or impoverishment of another." The scale of a solution proves critical. Solutions that require massive, expensive, imported infrastructure often cause more problems than they solve.

Healthy, integrated solutions distinguish biophysical order from mechanical order. A mechanistic plan often works ‘on paper’ by ignoring related systems. In crafting solutions, consider wisdom, not just calculation. Well-designed solutions maintain natural, organic pattern. Human communities exist only within large-scale layers of organic systems, with natural cycles and laws of material and energy exchange.

Systemic solutions satisfy multiple criteria and consider form as well as function; they are healthy and pleasant to live around. Large-scale industrial solutions have a history of addressing only one criteria – profits for shareholders – without considering toxic waste, full energy costs, habitat disruption, carbon emissions, or depressing work environments.

Rather than ‘going for broke’ with a single large-scale plan that serves business interests, good solutions consider many diverse, small-scale applications that may scale up and down and prove out over time. Small-scale solutions are easier to replace when something doesn’t work as planned, and easier to multiply when they do work well.

A good solution does not assume ‘more is better’. The growth solutions that do make this assumption destroy communities, families, cultures, and environments. Large-scale centralised solutions allow wealth to be concentrated but do not necessarily achieve optimum, systemic health.  "The illusion can be maintained," Berry points out, "only so long as the consequences can be ignored." Thus, a series of village-scale power systems that can be operated by village skills is more stable and more sustainable than a massive corporate industrial power system with invasive environmental disruption and long transmission lines that cut through wilderness ecosystems.

Human solutions do not endure without human input, energy, organisation, maintenance and so forth. Wendell Berry points out that the integrity of human artifacts depends on human virtues: accurate memory, rigorous observation, insight, inventiveness, reverence, devotion, fidelity and restraint. Here Berry emphasised ‘restraint above all’. We must learn to resist the temptation to ’solve’ problems by accepting ‘trade-offs’ and bequeathing those to posterity. A good solution, Berry wrote three decades ago, is "in harmony with good character, cultural value, and moral law."

So yes – ecologists, farmers, environmentalists, workers and simple people in common communities have all proffered thousands of realistic solutions. Ecologists are not ‘doom and gloom’ pessimists. They are realists.

Integrated, healthy solutions may present opportunities for business, jobs, and community enterprise, but since the human community has already overshot the sustainable productive capacity of the planet, genuine ecological solutions demand less consumption, not more. And since over a billion people remain hungry and in need of water, and since our soils and forests are in decline, the wealthy nations will have to share the Earth’s resources. Less consumption and sharing aren’t going to make anyone fabulously wealthy, but it may provide us with a viable future.

As a global community, we often appear as a dysfunctional family. We bicker constantly, the strong abuse the weak, and alleged leaders behave like addicts, unwilling to change the destructive habits that are destroying our home. As in any abusive relationship, the powerful proclaim a taboo against protest and vilify those who cry out as the crazy ones.

Ten million people in our human family starve to death every year. Children serve as slaves and wither in factories, making trinkets for the rich. On top of this horrific injustice, we daily devastate the only source of real wealth: the earth itself. We lose fertile soil, discharge CO2 into the atmosphere, scatter toxins, turn grasslands into desert, and create islands of plastic garbage in the sea.

Our governments and captains of industry shrug off the signs of dysfunction, and promise to “change,” to become “more sustainable,” like the alcoholic parent who promises to reform, but never does. Marketing geniuses dress up business-as-usual in a “green” disguise – printing pictures of the Earth on plastic containers of detergent – to ease our worries. The sanctioned voices of the status quo assure us that all is well. As rivers die and species vanish, some in our global family watch in horror, others in denial.

Ecological psychology:

A person today, whose senses remain alive, will experience trauma when witnessing the abusive exploitation of nature. They will cry out and try to fix the dysfunction. However, some people may suffer the trauma unconsciously, may not know what is missing in their life, may work in a technological environment for 50 weeks each year, and then flee into nature, where they can feel alive again, for a two week holiday.

Modern neuroses, so prevalent in industrial nations, can be traced to our separation from nature. The marvels and conveniences of technological society provide only a thin veneer over our natural being. We remain biophysical animals akin to ants and raccoons. Millennia ago, certain clever primates overwhelmed all other species by controlling fire and developing tools, winning hegemony over planet Earth, but in our fundamental instincts, desires, and reactions, we reflect a long evolution in the lap of nature.

Regardless of prevailing conceits, we retain learned patterns from 50 million years of primate evolution, 5 million years of hominid development, and 500,000 years of fire-bearing, tool-making hunter-gatherer culture. During this long genesis, humanity grew within the comfort and constraints of an intact ecosystem that supplied sustenance, vital lessons, wonder, and a home. Watching that home fall under the blade of industrialism shocks our system, whether we know it or not.

Although modest and physically challenging, primal life offered benefits and shaped our nature. Early humans, like all animals, matured in stable communities with relatively secure food supplies. For millennia, families remained intact and children grew up watching parents work, surrounded by nature – the ultimate parent – learning lessons from the wilderness and from all creatures.

These natural comforts nourished us for 99.99 percent of our ancestral development. Then, only a few thousand years ago, some humans began living in urban environments, relying on remote agriculture, specialist skills, and the wiles of moneychangers. Within the last few hundred years, industrial culture has widened this separation from nature, divided families, and destroyed communities, creating alienated individuals clinging to scarce jobs and rewarded with packaged food and entertainment, the “bread and circuses” that Roman emperors bestowed to the peasants.

In spite of our civilized ways, human psychology remains linked to our primal origins. As a result, we suffer the trauma of witnessing ecological abuse, watching wilderness obliterated, other creatures eradicated, and the earth diminished.

The capacity of feel

According to Kathy McMahon, a clinical psychologist, who posts stories of environmental trauma on her Peak Oil Blues website, “We live in an insane culture. Rather than marginalize the cries for reform, we need to normalize the pain. Protest and concern are healthy reactions to loss and grief.”

Psychologist Chellis Glendinning – in the book Off the Map and essays such as “Recovery from Western Civilization” – describes the “original trauma” of living in industrial society, the failure of technology and globalization to provide essential comforts that nature and community once supplied. This loss, she explains, leads to addictive behaviour as people fill the void with consumption, drugs, and fashions. She describes a “desperate coping” manifested as addiction, anger, numbness, and attempts to appear “normal” by the standards of an insane culture.

A quarter century ago, ecological pioneer Paul Shepard examined natural alienation in Nature and Madness and other books. Shepard proposed that the deficient development of modern citizens has led society to the destruction of its habitat. Ancestral humans, he believed, acquired a healthy reciprocity with nature because young children experienced a mother always present, fathers with comprehensible roles, non-human beings in a primordial terrain, and deliberate adolescent initiation into adulthood.

On the other hand, Shepard explains, industrialized cultures have abandoned nature and divided families, leading to an arrested development. Poorly matured adults, Shepard says, harbour an infantile duality between themselves and nature, fear the organic world, and attempt to fulfill childish fantasies with patriotism, fundamentalism, or social status. Like Glendinning and McMahon, Shepard saw the symptoms of this “childhood botched,” in massive therapy, escapism, and intoxicants. He described our “increasing injury to the planet” as a “symptom of human psychopathology.”

“The only society more frightful than one run by children, as in Golding’s Lord of the Flies,” Shepard wrote in Nature and Madness, “might be one run by childish adults.” 

The enablers 

Addicts and abusers typically deny their actions, make promises about changing, and reward adult enablers, those intimidated into silence or enticed into support by a share of power’s rewards. 

McMahon believes that “normal” acceptance, denial, and even support for ecological destruction “isn’t just misguided silliness, but financial self-interest. Most citizens are invested in or dependent on the lie,” she says. “A lot of money is riding on the insanity of depleting and destroying the biosphere.”

The status quo resists change by marginalizing and ridiculing the whistle-blowers. “Thus the media stereotypes of people concerned about ecological issues,” explains McMahon, “calling them names such as ‘Carborexics” or ‘gloom and doomers,’ creating a phony disorder in people driven to fear because they witness the abuse of the earth.”

Bush administration lawyers Jay S. Bybee and John C. Yoo, who crafted rationalizations for torture, are typical enablers. For their contributions, Bybee earned a lifetime federal judge appointment, and Yoo a professorship at the University of California. When the American Psychiatric Association published a statement against torture, the American Psychological Association “decided” against such a statement. The U.S. military rewarded the psychologists with grants and contracts denied to the outspoken psychiatrists.

The U.S. “Waxman-Markey” climate bill demonstrates how an addict creates the impression of change while feeding the habit. The bill, just passed by the US House of Representatives, features free pollution permits for the biggest polluters and loopholes to help avoid genuine emissions reductions. Although scientists now estimate humanity must cut emissions by 50 to 80 % of 1990 levels to avoid climate disaster, the U.S. legislation suggests cuts of 4 %. Even so, the New York Times praised the bill as, “the most ambitious energy and global warming legislation ever debated in Congress.” To the extent this is true, it only exposes the deplorable record of the US Congress, but the statement in the New York Times attempts to make this sound like a success, concealing the failure and superficial pretense of this legislation.

Al Gore applauded the bill as “a crucial step.” Joseph Romm, a physicist and climate expert, wrote, “How can I reconcile my climate science realism, which demands far stronger action than the Waxman-Markey bill requires, and my climate politics realism, which has led me to advocate passage of this flawed bill? The short answer is that Waxman-Markey is the only game in town.” Romm adds, “If Waxman-Markey becomes law, then I see a genuine 10% to 20% chance of averting catastrophe.”

Would you accept a 10% chance of avoiding catastrophe for your children? Romm, Gore, and the journalists at the New York Times are smart people, and perhaps they think this slim chance is the best they can do for the human family. However, they are also deeply invested in the status quo. Like the abused wife who makes excuses for her alcoholic husband, they appear afraid of a divorce from the domineering power structure.

Al Gore, for example, is a principal in the venture capital fund, Generation Investment Management, along with David Blood and other alumni from Goldman-Sachs, the company that engineered the junk mortgage derivatives bubble and every other major pump and dump scam in America since 1920. They are positioned to make a lot of money from carbon trading deals, the next big stock market bubble. Will the company do any good. Maybe. Will it save the earth? Probably not. It will make a few very wealthy people wealthier and stimulate consumption. The point is, these enablers are invested in the status quo power structure and economic system responsible for reckless consumption and ecological overshoot of the planet. They will protect the abusers. Their support for the watered down, corporate-friendly, reality-denying Waxman-Markey bill shows their loyalty to the dysfunctional power brokers.

In practical fact, the U.S. legislation will sabotage efforts to establish meaningful change at the Copenhagen climate conference later this year. A ten-percent chance of averting catastrophe provides scant comfort to our children.

Recovery

Chellis Glendinning writes, “the ultimate goal of recovery is to refind our place in nature … to feel, to come alive, to come out from under the deadening of the machines and the mechanistic worldview.” Paul Shepard found hope in the fact that, “Beneath the veneer of civilization … lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human.”

Shepard saw recovery through rediscovering “this full and natural human.” He wrote that to rebuild healthy adults, children must be born in gentle surroundings and grow up exposed to a rich nonhuman environment. A healthy youth must experience juvenile tasks, use simple tools, and learn “the discipline of natural history.” Finally, adolescents must learn the “metaphorical significance” of natural phenomena and experience the “ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship.”

Humanity, on a path to destruction, requires an intervention. As Jiddu Krishnamurti wrote in the 1970s: “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

rw. July 2009.

========================== 

Most species, when confronted with abundant food and no predators, will outgrow their environment. Locusts or pine beetles will devour their hosts and crash. Bacteria in a petri dish will exhaust the food capacity and breed themselves to death. This is overshoot. 

In 1944, the US military brought 29 reindeer to St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea as food for soldiers. However, the war ended, the Americans abandoned the island, and the reindeer remained. With no predators and lots of lichen, the herd grew to over a thousand reindeer in fifteen years. Biologists estimated that the island might have sustained this herd of a thousand reindeer, munching moderately within the Island’s carrying capacity. However, the herd grew to 6,000 reindeer by 1965, then, in one winter, with the lichen obliterated, the herd crashed back to 44 animals. This is overshoot.

Humans at Earth Scale

The Rapanui on Easter Island, with a population of only a few hundred in 900 AD, had already degraded the island’s capacity by cutting down trees to transport giant stone statues. As the Rapanui population grew to over 7000 by 1350 AD, their forest disappeared, they splintered into sects, and fought over the remnants. When Europeans arrived in the eighteenth century – seeking resources to solve their own overshoot problems in Europe – only a few hundred Rapanui remained, scraping for survival on a depleted landscape.

Throughout human history, settlements and cities have overshot local environments in Pleistocene watersheds, Mesopotamian floodplains, or the American dust bowl. In these cases, communities could migrate, relocate, or shift food sources. Now, in the twenty-first century, the human enterprise has reached the scale of the planet. This time, we cannot abandon our watershed. We will not sail away to a new island or discover a new hemisphere. We’re flat out of hemispheres.

The new dream for sustaining human consumption is “innovation.” Our alleged leaders – political and corporate – denied global warming for decades. Then, they blamed it on sunspots or claimed it might be a good thing that would allow us to grow avocadoes in Norway and drill for oil in the arctic.

Now, we hear claims that industrialists take global warming seriously. Witness the tsunami of proposals to create a “green economy,” cool the planet with sulfate aerosols, fertilize the dying oceans with iron, build hybrid cars, and construct giant “green energy” systems.

Some so-called “green ” projects may indeed play a role in a human future, but not if we rush to treat the symptoms while ignoring the disease. A friend in Los Angeles told me: “You used to see Porsches everywhere. Now everyone has a Prius.” In Washington D.C., hip lobbyists drive $100,000 electric Tesla sports cars. Did trading in the Porsche for a Prius or Tesla help the planet? No. It cost the planet in metals, plastics, toxins, energy, and CO2, the burgeoning throughput of human overshoot.

“Customers who embrace green products,” says Sandy Di Felice of Toyota Canada, “don’t want a radical change to their lifestyle.” Therein lies the problem: The world’s most voracious consumers cling to a hope that technology will rescue them from having to change their lifestyles. Tech-fix entrepreneurs, their academic apologists, and political cheerleaders scramble to create new “green” products, but fail to address the cause of the fever: reckless human consumption of Earth’s natural bounty. We need to produce and consume less stuff, not more.

The tech trance

The builder, who only has a hammer, treats everything as a nail. In the US, the earnest Obama administration has leapt to solve global warming with the tools they know: money and engineering. In a world addicted to a growing energy supply, they seek a cleaner, greener strain of the drug, while simultaneously and contradictorily launching “shovel ready” highway projects and applying Band-Aids over the inevitable consequences.

Obama science adviser, John Holdren proposed blasting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to block the rays of the sun. In fairness to Holdren, he acknowledged, “It would be preferable by far to solve this problem by reducing greenhouse gas emissions.” However, in April, Holdren claimed, “global warming is so dire, the Obama administration is discussing radical technologies to cool Earth’s air.”

In 1971, scientist Paul Crutzen first proposed the idea of cooling the atmosphere with sulfur particles, mimicking a volcanic eruption, to reflect solar energy and offset the effect of greenhouse gases. This plan treats the symptoms while ignoring the disease. Global warming is caused by burning hydrocarbons and depleting forests, not by the sun. The sun is not our enemy.

A program to launch sulfates into the atmosphere will burn more fossil fuel energy, the source of the problem, risk depleting the ozone layer, and would likely dry the Mediterranean and Mideast climates. Blocking the sun is going backwards to sustain the unsustainable.

Engineers at Columbia University are developing a “carbon scrubber” that could remove over 300 tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year. The challenge with this approach is that humanity is currently emitting over 20 billion tons of carbon annually, and increasing at 3% per year. Capturing even half of this carbon in scrubbers would require over $6 trillion in initial costs, plus operation, maintenance, and eventual replacement of the scrubbers. If the public pays this, it amounts to a bailout of the energy companies on the scale of the current banking bailouts, and would contribute to another global recession.

More significantly, as Herman Daly pointed out decades ago in Steady State Economics, these “geo-engineering” mitigations actually make us more vulnerable. Once we prop up our unsustainable habits with counter-technologies, we are trapped. We build up a dependence on the tech-fix, and when future generations can no longer maintain the fix, the impending crash will be worse.

Daly also pointed out that these are “costs” of running society, not “benefits,” and these two get confused in our GDP analysis of economic health. We must return to authentic quality of life rather that put hope in stimulating more unsustainable growth, more stuff, and more activity.

Reviving the oceans

Carbon emissions increase ocean acidity, devastating coral reefs and contributing to ocean species die-off. Adding powdered limestone to the oceans could theoretically reverse acidity. Fertilizing the oceans with iron could stimulate phytoplankton photosynthesis, absorbing more CO2.

These “solutions” could help, but they represent patchwork mitigations with added costs. Adding iron and limestone to the oceans mimics the natural process of wind carrying fine sand over the ocean, but there are problems. For phytoplankton to sequester the CO2, the organisms have to die and sink to the bottom. A study recently published in Nature magazine showed that the projects sequestered far less carbon than predicted.

Likewise, iron fertilization tests conducted by the Alfred Wegener Institute “dampened hopes on the potential of the Southern Ocean to sequester significant amounts of carbon dioxide and thus mitigate global warming.” The iron helped Phaeocystis phytoplankton increase slightly, less than natural blooms, but copepods quickly consumed the shell-free, soft algae. Then, the copepods became food for shrimp-like amphipods, which provided additional food for squid and whales. This was a positive result, but the experiment did not result in tons of CO2 safely sequestered on the ocean floor.

Grasping at tech straws

The American conservative think tank, Enterprise Institute, which once denied global warming, has now joined the bandwagon and proposed building “artificial trees,” giant towers that suck carbon dioxide from the air and store it. Like the carbon scrubber plan, this scheme requires more materials and fossil energy, the source of the problem.

Others propose fertilizing trees with nitrogen to stimulate CO2 absorption, but high nitrogen concentrations create nitrous oxide emissions (a greenhouse gas), groundwater contamination, and water demands, since trees that consume larger amounts of nitrogen also require more water.

An episode of Discovery Project Earth tested a scheme to drop tree seedlings from the air, encased in biodegradable containers, rather than plant trees traditionally by hand. The project failed. On Earth Day this year, Obama’s Special Advisor for Green Jobs, Van Jones, promoting the social benefits of environmental mitigation, said live on CNN, “trees don’t plant themselves.” Mr. Jones appears to be a nice person and well intentioned, but he exposes a fundamental misperception about natural systems ecology. News flash: Trees do plant themselves. They only require an intact forest. Dropping trees from airplanes and building giant “artificial trees” represents industrialism gone mad.

The presumed tech-fix solutions suffer from fundamental errors because their designers do not understand ecology. They attempt to preserve a wealthy life-style that is not sustainable. They fail to perform necessary net-energy and carbon-cost accounting. They demand an ever-growing supply of material and energy, and they fail to account for total ecosystem analysis.

Humanity is in overshoot. Every day, without much comment from our “news” media, we degrade the carrying capacity of the planet, add more humans, and extend ourselves farther out over the edge of the sustainability cliff, with nothing below to stop our fall.

Worse, the tech-fix proposals avoid genuine solutions: Humanity must consume less, not more. We should replace our petroleum-guzzling car cultures with light rail transport. We should be localizing agriculture, preserving farmland, conserving energy, recycling everything, creating resilient communities, and developing a steady state economic system. If we are serious about global warming and preserving natural wilderness, we should be stabilizing human population with non-evasive means such as women’s rights and contraception. We should be leaving remnant wilderness alone to recover through natural processes.

These genuine remedies require the wealthy nations and consumers to drastically change their lifestyles, not buy hybrid sports cars. These changes prove politically difficult, but they represent the inevitable path back to paradise.

rw.

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This cycle of forest collapse represents a critical feedback loop that will likely drive warming for centuries and usher in a sweeping transformation of human civilization.  

Worldwide forest destruction – due to logging, human habitat sprawl, and clearing for crops such as soybeans and palm oil – continues at a net loss of about 13 million hectares each year. Many cleared forests are burned on the site. Meanwhile, trees die or grow slower due to global warming. Declining forests absorb less CO₂ and release more carbon.

Guarani activists Noemi Cruz in Argentina forest, homeland of the Wichi and Guarani indigenous people, destroyed for soya agribusiness. 

Drought, heat, and fires

Drought and heat are making forests more susceptible to insects and fire. David Gilbert, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia will publish a study this year that shows forests have less biomass and increased mortality in warmer earth conditions.

Due to warmer temperatures, bark beetles have attacked boreal forests in the US, Canada and Russia. In western Canada, where I live, over nine million hectares of pine forest have been decimated by beetles, due to warmer conditions. Stands of simply dryer trees make forests more vulnerable to fire. Carbon, sequestered by forests over centuries, can be released in a few days by wildfires, as experienced in southern Australia in recent years. Fires are increasing worldwide and now contribute about a third as much atmospheric carbon as burning fossil fuels.

Previous climate projection models expected forests and oceans to absorb much of humanity’s carbon pollution. The data now shows, however, that oceans and forests are less effective than the models predicted. The oceans’ ability to absorb carbon dioxide has weakened since 1981, due to increased warmth and carbonic acid buildup. Research published this year shows that forests absorb less carbon due to industrial deforestation and forest death caused by the warming.

Deforestation is already responsible for 20 percent of global warming, and some boreal forests are now transforming from carbon sinks to carbon sources. Dr. J. Michael Waddington at McMaster University in Canada says, “Forests we once hoped would sequester carbon, now appear to be a ticking carbon bomb.”

Biofuels and soybeans

Climate scientists emphasize the importance of preserving tropical forests, the world’s most efficient storehouses of carbon. Unfortunately, tropical forests are being cleared daily to grow biofuels, palm oil, and soybeans. Peter Frumhoff, head of the Union of Concerned Scientists’ climate program equates replacing tropical forests with biofuel plantations to “weatherizing your house while keeping your windows open.”

In Brazil, soybean cropland has been doubling every five years. In Argentina, I have witnessed bulldozers operating like Panzer divisions, leveling and burning forests at the rate of about 200,000 hectares each year. In Indonesia, palm oil production tripled during the 1990’s and has tripled again in the last decade. In all cases, forests are destroyed, species go extinct, and indigenous forest communities are displaced into urban slums, all to supply cattle feed, food, and biofuels to rich consumers in industrialized countries.

Holly Gibbs, at Stanford University’s Woods Institute for the Environment has analyzed satellite images to track deforestation and climate change. Gibbs’ data show that between 1980 and 2000, over 80 percent of new cropland came from rainforests, most from intact forests, “contrary to what some biofuel proponents have suggested. This is a major concern,” Gibbs said.

“If we run our cars on biofuels produced in the tropics,” says Gibbs; “we are effectively burning rainforests in our gas tanks.” She believes that environmental disaster looms “just around the corner without more thoughtful energy policies that consider the ripple effects on tropical forests.” Tropical forests and their soils harbor over 340 billion tons of carbon, equivalent to more than 40 years worth of global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Tipping points

The world’s leading climatologists met in Copenhagen in March and urged governments to act decisively next December, when they attempt to replace the Kyoto climate treaty. Scientists have observed that global warming and ice melting are proceeding faster than the most extreme scenarios had predicted. The scientists expressed concern that deforestation and shrinking forests could aggravate this trend and lead to runaway global warming.

Climatologists, who once warned that humanity must limit global warming to 2°C to avoid risk of runaway feedback cycles, now believe that such hope is a lost cause. The average earth climate has warmed by 0.75°C already, and climatologists expect we will reach the 2° threshold by 2050. According to Chris Jones at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, that increase could result in a loss of 20 to 40 % of the Amazon rainforest.

Furthermore, research shows that the impact of climate change is non-linear. After the 2°C threshold, we will experience not a steady decline, but a dramatic shift in ecosystem damage, forest dieback, species loss, and permafrost melt, releasing CO₂ and methane. A 5°C warming would likely trigger ecosystem collapse and conditions uninhabitable by present human civilization.

A recent scientific paper, shows that this non-linear response is due to the perilous interaction between tipping point elements. The climatologists predict that when one element tips – forest die-off or methane release, for example – other critical factors can be pushed beyond their tipping points. Scientists in Copenhagen also revealed that drying peat bogs add to the problem by increasing respiration, oxidising the peat, producing heat, and releasing CO₂, another dangerous tipping point and feedback loop. 

Fragmentation

Janet Cotter, with the Greenpeace Science Unit at Exeter University attended the meetings and reported that climate models still do not adequately link human deforestation with forests dying from fires, heat, and drought. Researchers are attempting to put these factors into their models now, and to make educated predictions. Keep in mind, past predictions have been too conservative, underestimating the rates of climate change.

Some forestry scientists expressed the opinion that there may be no point in conserving forests destined to disappear with climate change. This view suggests we might be better off to concentrate on protecting forests that are climate resilient.

“The forest science community is still dominated by foresters rather than ecologists,” says Cotter, “and the opinion of not protecting forests may be biased in favour of logging these regions.” On the other hand, forest ecosystem science shows that fragmentation by logging makes forests more vulnerable to drought. “Preserving healthy forest ecosystems,” says Cotter, “regardless of their decline due to warming, makes these forests less vulnerable. The analysis of abandoning certain forests was challenged.”

A scientific paper from the Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences (Malhi, et. al. 2009) examines the likelihood of an Amazon forest die back and conversion to grassland, a scenario that may be averted by preventing deforestation and associated fire.

“The dieback of the forests of E. Amazonia in the 21st century is far from inevitable but remains a distinct possibility,” the authors report. They suggest that reducing global greenhouse-gas emissions represents the first priority to minimize this risk, but add, “Just as human activity and the spread of fire may be critical in triggering a breakdown of forest resilience and consequent dieback, direct intervention to maintain forest area and limit the spread of fire offers the potential to maintain forest resilience and avoid any such tipping point. … Such intervention may be enough to navigate E. Amazonia away from a possible tipping point, beyond which extensive rainforest would become unsustainable.”

The report concludes, “Maintaining forest cover would not only be a strategy for climate-change mitigation, regional development, and biodiversity conservation but also a potential strategy for adaptation,” as the Amazon climate inevitably changes.

This is it

Forests represent vast stores of carbon. Forest destruction releases that carbon, increases global warming, and leads to forest dieback, a vicious cycle. Deforestation magnifies climate change impacts by fragmenting forests, making them drier and more vulnerable to drought-induced fire. The ultimate risk is runaway climate change, leading to loss of biodiversity and vital ecosystem services.

Last fall, Deutsche Bank economist Pavan Sukhdev, in a European study on ecosystems, reported that deforestation reduces the value of Earth’s natural capital – carbon sequestration, biodiversity, water filtration, and so forth – by up to $5 trillion every year. That’s five thousand billion dollars of value lost every year, compared to the recent global financial crash that eroded about $1.5 trillion in paper wealth.

Intact primary forests require priority protection at the UN Climate Summit in December. This meeting in Copenhagen may be humanity’s last chance to take climate change seriously. Human civilization is teetering on the brink of the greatest natural disaster in our history: runaway global warming. Seventeen years of Kyoto drafts, conferences, dithering, and handshakes has produced zero net decrease in human carbon emissions. Even with some notable successes in Europe, humanity as a whole has not yet even reduced the growth rate of emissions or forest destruction. We can’t afford another dud or more climate change denial.

It is already too late to avoid some chaos caused by our reckless consumption of Earth’s biophysical systems. We may avoid absolute disaster, but only if we are absolutely serious. Our decisions now must be wise and courageous. We must drastically reduce carbon emissions immediately, and we must preserve every square centimetre of our planet’s forests.

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Climate & Forests: Research links:

Hadley Centre research presented at the Copenhagen Science conference.

Report of the Copenhagen Science Congress including threats to Amazon forest: Kintisch, E. 2009. Global warming: Projections of climate change go from bad to worse, scientists report Science: 1546-1547. 20 March. [Science website requires subscription or fee per article].

Abstracts from the Copenhagen Science Congress

Naess, one of the most influential philosophers of his generation, died in his sleep at the age of 96 in Oslo, Norway. The avid mountaineer founded the Deep Ecology movement, drawing inspiration from Buddhism, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and above all from nature itself. Greenpeace can be proud that he served as the first chairman of Greenpeace Norway in 1988. His personal story illuminates the path of ecology in the 21st century.

Arne Naess at the opening of the Greenpeace office in Oslo, 1988
(c) Henrik Laurvik NTB/Scanpix – used under licence

On the Mountain

Naess was born in 1912, in Slemdal, near Oslo, and his father, banker Ragnar Naess, died the next year. Naess later recalled that his mother, Christine Dekke, appeared preoccupied with raising his two older brothers, so he often wandered alone into nature for companionship.

In How My Philosophy Seemed to Develop he revealed, at the age of four, "I would stand or sit for hours … in shallow water on the coast, marvelling at the overwhelming diversity and richness of life in the sea."

At the age of 17, while climbing on Norway’s Hallingskarvet massif, he met a kind Norwegian judge, who also adored nature. This mentor advised young Arne to read Dutch Jewish philosopher Spinoza, who equated the ‘highest virtue’ with knowledge of nature. For Spinoza, Naess learned, all thinking about truth and human society begins with recognising the basic ’substance’, the diversity and magnificence of the natural world.

In his 20s, Naess built a life-long writing cabin, Tvergastein, high on this mountain. "In the mountains," Naess once said, "you are small compared to the surrounding view, so you more easily and more intensely feel that you are a part of something greater. You find that your idea of your ’self’ is more vast and deeper." This depth he felt in vast nature – mountains, sea, forests – inspired his use of the word ‘deep’ to describe his understanding of ecology.

Ecology in Action

After graduation from the University of Oslo, Naess studied in Austria where he met the famous Vienna Circle of philosophers and psychoanalysts influenced by Sigmund Freud. Although inspired by the Vienna group, Naess found their philosophy too disembodied and intellectual. He pointed out that their understanding of the ’self’ failed to include nature, and was therefore ‘dead wrong’. Based on the notion from Spinoza that all being exists wholly in nature, he expanded the Freudian idea of ’self’ and ‘ego’ to include our place in nature. Thus began one of the most influential traditions of modern ecology, Naess’ development of ‘Deep Ecology’.

Naess returned to Norway, became Oslo University’s youngest professor, and during World War II joined the Norwegian resistance, helping prevent the shipment of Norwegian students to German concentration camps. After the war, he led a UNESCO project to improve communication between the East and West by exploring how various cultures use similar words. The resulting report sold out, but UNESCO never reprinted it, according to Naess, "due to the politically dangerous character of its items." During the Cold War, listening to each other was not a high priority in Washington, Moscow, or London.

In the meantime, by learning about Buddhism and Gandhi, and by reading Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Naess realised that his love of nature had to be put into action if his ideas were to matter. In 1969, at the age of 57, he resigned his position at the University of Oslo and became active in environmental protection, "to live," he said, "rather than function." In 1970, he joined rural farming families near the town of Myvatn, Norway to stop a dam on the Laxá (‘Salmon’) River that threatened to flood their farms. This successful campaign, along with the Chipko movement in India, marks the beginning of environmental action that inspired the early Greenpeace movement.

The names of things

In the early 1970s, members of the nascent Greenpeace group in Vancouver, Canada began to hear about the Norwegian activist, Arne Naess, and his ideas about ‘deep ecology’. As Greenpeace evolved from peace protests to full-fledged ecological action, Naess served as one of our inspirations. We agreed with his belief that other beings in nature – whales, seals, insects or trees – had their own ‘intrinsic value’. We protected whales or seals not just to preserve the environment for human purposes, but for their own sake. This fundamental respect for nature became an important distinction in the environmental movement.

I met Arne Naess in Los Angeles in the mid-1980s and later at a conference convened by Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme in Northern California. I discovered that the best way to engage him in conversation was to walk with him in whatever natural setting was close by. I recall his genuine sense of curiosity about species of trees, birds, or being engulfed in what he called ‘the total-field’ of nature. He never seemed intellectual, but rather spoke with a humourous, teasing quality that appeared to be always searching for some fresh, new understanding. He said his ideas were not ‘philosophy’ in the classic sense but rather ‘intuition’ gained from observation. We once pondered whether a particular sparrow was a ‘Fox’ or ‘Song’ sparrow, and I recall how he laughed that humans believe they understand something because they have named it. We talked about seeing an ‘individual’ in an animal, not simply a ’species’.

In 1988, we felt honoured when Naess agreed to serve as the first chairman of Greenpeace Norway. Upon hearing of his passing, Greenpeace Nordic’s Truls Gulowsen remarked, "Naess’ ecological philosophy is still important to Greenpeace." So, what is that philosophy?

Deep Ecology

Deep ecology starts with accepting the intrinsic value of all beings in nature and of the ecosystem itself. Naess challenged environmentalists to think beyond ‘humans in nature’ to recognise that the ecological system is not something separate that we are ‘in’. Nature made us, made our eyes to see, made our limbs, tastes, and even our thoughts. He taught ‘diversity and symbiosis’, both in nature and in human ideas. A rich culture, he said, like nature finds stability in diversity and recognises how distinct parts and points of view serve the larger whole. This did not invite, he insisted, lazy thinking, but rather required precise language to express observations and experiences.

Naess believed that humanity has no right to reduce the richness and diversity of nature except to meet vital needs of health and survival. He taught that our current impact on the world was excessive, perhaps obvious today, but a radical idea in the 1960s. He believed that the human population was too large, and that we should stabilise population growth and eventually allow human population to decrease. He believed this might take a century or more, but he believed humanity could eventually achieve a state in which our technology was non-invasive and "children could grow up in nature".

"Then," he said, "we are back in the direction of paradise."

Some environmentalists and human rights activists thought Naess’s ideas were ‘anti-human’, but his compassion remained universal. "Appreciating a forest or mountain does not diminish anything humans do," he said. "We don’t say that every living being has the same value as a human, but that it has an intrinsic value … it has a right to live and blossom."

He challenged the common psychological notion that the ’self’ develops from childish ‘ego’ to an adult social-awareness and finally to spiritual awareness. "Nature is left out of this formula," he noticed. "Humanism displays a certain arrogance, as if we are somehow separate or superior to nature." He believed that with enough attention to the world around us, "we cannot help but identify our self with all living beings; beautiful or ugly, big or small, sentient or not."

He insisted that through this sort of maturity, we will discover that genuine quality of life has very little to do with consumption, wealth, and power. He summarised this in a proverb for the ages, and certainly for our time, about living lightly on the earth:

                 "Simpler means, richer ends."

 rw. February 2009