Re-examining

our approach to ecology

Rex Weyler

July 2012

"The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think."

Gregory Bateson, An Ecology of Mind  

Piecemeal ecology isn’t working.

Forty years have passed since the founding of Greenpeace and the first UN environment meeting in Stockholm, fifty years since the groundbreaking Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and 115 years since Svante Arrhenius warned that burning hydrocarbons would heat Earth’s atmosphere.

Today, we have more environmental groups and less forests, more “protected areas” and less species, more carbon taxes and greater carbon emissions, more “green” products and less green space. These failures are not necessarily the fault of environmental groups, who have helped slow down the destructive impacts the industrial juggernaut, but the failures do demonstrate that all our collective efforts are not yet remotely enough.

For example, observing the “Living Planet Index” of species diversity, we find that after 1980 – even with the creation of new endangered species regulations, parks, and protected areas – terrestrial and marine species have declined. For the last thirty years, even with a massive increase in wilderness groups, species diversity has plummeted and the rate of decline has accelerated.

Likewise, as we gain 30% energy efficiency in heating buildings, we double the average space-per-person and then add more people, resulting in 300% more space to heat. The Rio+20 Conference proved once again that government conferences change nothing. After thirty years of climate deals, we have more CO₂ emissions each year, not less. After forty years of international ocean dumping bans, the oceans are more toxic and more acidic, not less.  

Why?

Paper parks & false hopes

“… leave a margin, a sanctuary, where some of life’s beauty can take refuge.”

Roman Gary, The Roots of Heaven

In July 2011, Camilo Mora, from University of Hawaii and Dalhousie University, and Peter F. Sale, from the UN University in Ontario, Canada, published “Ongoing global diversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas.”

Their report shows that since 1965, land based “Protected Areas” (PAs) have grown by 600% to 18 million square-kilometers. Marine PAs have grown by 400% to about 2.1 million sq-km. However, in both cases – on land and in oceans – biodiversity has declined, and the rate of decline has increased.  Since 1974, terrestrial biodiversity has plummeted by about 40% and since 1990, in twenty years, the marine index has declined by 21%.

Mora and Sale site problems with the size and management of the protected areas, failure to protect enough area for home ranges and dispersal, and growing threats to large scale ecosystems. Such threats trace back to human growing human populations and consumption demands on environments.

The authors support the establishment of protected areas but warn that these areas alone will not stop biodiversity decline without larger, systemic programs. Mora points out that most protected areas are really just “paper parks” in name only, but not truly protected.

Sale says flatly, “Protected areas are a false hope in terms of preventing the loss of biodiversity.” He points out that the 2010 global biodiversity protection agreement signed in Nagoya, Japan pledged to preserve 17 % of land area and 10 % of oceans. Sale says it is “very unlikely those targets will be reached,” due to the growth of human demand for every available resource. Furthermore, “Even if those targets were achieved, it would not stop the decline in biodiversity.”

In “paper parks,” plants and animals disappear to poachers, development, and industrial pressure for logging and mining. Often, without adequate enforcement, industrial developers simply ignore protection rules. Similarly, in the 1980s, environmentalists fought for and won international bans on pelagic whaling and toxic dumping, yet we continue to fight to enforce the bans as they are routinely ignored by whalers and the toxic waste industries.

Furthermore, park boundaries cannot restrain pollution and global warming impacts. Typically, when a forest or coral reef is protected, the neighbouring area is overharvested by industry and often decimated, breaking natural ecosystem links. Finally, this study points out that ecosystems require appropriate scale to allow for variations in ecological diversity, richness, abundance, synergies, and co-dependence.

Even so, Mora, Sale and many other biologists and ecologists have warned that we cannot stop biodiversity decline without putting limits on human population and consumption growth. “There is a clear and urgent need for additional solutions,” the authors warn, “particularly ones that stabilize … the world’s human population and our ecological demands.”

Ecosystems

“The hard part about change is, well …

you actually have to change.”

Jon Cooksey, director, “How to Boil a Frog”

In practice, human efforts to protect and restore Earth’s ecological health have focused on a “species” or a “habitat” or some thing that needed protection. But this has failed to account for the fundamental nature of living systems. Earth’s ecology is not a collection of things. Rather, Earth’s ecology operates as interlocking, co-evolving systems, driven by feedbacks and interactions. The systems remain always dynamic, never completely stable, and always correcting for instability, the way a hummingbird adjusts in flight or a human bicycler maintains balance.  

Every subsystem in Nature interacts with others. Nothing exists alone in nature. Nothing survives alone in Nature. We talk about a “tree” and “soil” and “atmosphere,” for convenience, but none of these exist as they do without the others. There is no absolute division among these elements of the system. Indeed, biological and physical sciences do not describe “things.” Science describes relationships. “All division of the world into things,” warned Gregory Bateson, “is arbitrary.”

Global environmental strategies to date reveal isolated efforts but systemic failures. As planners and implementers of ecological wisdom, we have not yet grasped the complexity of systems, the rules, demands, and feedback mechanisms of complex living systems.

In short, human environmentalism has yet to embrace Earth’s biosphere as a living process. The biosphere itself exists nested in a geosphere and solar system, which generate materials and energy and information for all the subsystems. Deep within the biosphere, communities, families, organisms, organs, and cells represent finer subsystems.

An ecosystem represents a living system at the highest level of complexity we can imagine, and far beyond our ability to fully describe, manage, or predict. An ecosystem is not a thing. It is a web of relationships, a dynamic co-evolution of systems and subsystems, all nested within each other. Each subsystem draws matter, energy, and information across boundaries from more fundamental systems; decodes information and makes decisions; and passes new information, products, and waste, back into the larger systems. Nature works as a continuum. Ecosystems are not “managed” by any of the parts, and as far as human science knows, no ecosystem ever will be.

Ecosystems evolve patterns of relationship, which we call “rules,” but do not pre-determine outcome. Rather, the rules of nature’s “game” create trends and variations on themes. The variations and patterns that can repeat and replicate themselves become “alive” but they are never just “things.” Every subsystem within an ecosystem – from cell to society – remains a co-dependent process, interconnected with other dynamic processes.

In living systems, the continually altering flows of matter, energy, and information, reach states that ecologists call “dynamic equilibria” during which system instabilities oscillate within mutually supportive limits – a body, a forest, a neighbourhood of species –  for long periods of time. During such equilibria, randomness among the interactions give rise to new patterns, radical novelty, called by systems analysts “emergent behaviour,” a new pattern, which can influence the system to new directions.

Since co-evolving systems include random factors – as do chess games or hurricanes – they are not entirely predictable, even if one knows the rules. Thus – and this our society needs desperately to embrace – systems themselves evolve, and new relationships almost always include unintended consequences. Each subsystem – organ, body, society – within an ecosystem co-creates a complex web of processes with its neighbouring subsystems. Nature is a web of relationships. Our ecological efforts need to recognize and protect these complex relationships.

One strength of the human species is our acute ability to learn. Our society appears steeped in denial, but we can learn from our ecological mistakes. Our “solutions” to the challenges of ecology on a crowded planet have not yet been successful. “We’re winning a lot of battles,” Greenpeace Executive Director Kumi Naidoo said at the 40th anniversary of Greenpeace, “but we’re still losing the war.” Sadly, this is true. Every day, our planet is poorer, with less forests, less species, less fresh water and arable soil, and more desserts, more toxins, and more CO2 in the atmosphere. To reverse this, we need to learn about the systems in which we live.

A recent ad campaign from International Business Machines (IBM) imagines innovations to create “a smarter planet.” But Nature has news for IBM. The planet is already far smarter than any human engineer. We cannot manage Nature. Rather, we need to apprentice ourselves to Nature, to learn how Nature solves dilemmas and sorts out imbalances.  

For every species other than humans, the biggest environmental issue on Earth is Humanity. If we don’t change our ways, seriously and thoroughly change, then nature will eventually leave us behind and carry on without us.

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References, Links in this essay:

Gregory Bateson Film: An Ecology of Mind

http://www.anecologyofmind.com/thefilm/

Living Planet Index:

J. Loh, et. al., Royal Society, Biological Sciences, 

http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/360/1454/289.full.pdf+html

UN, graph, from Loh, Goldfinger

http://maps.grida.no/go/graphic/the-living-planet-index-measures-trends-in-the-abundance-of-species-for-which-data-is-available

C. Mora & P.F. Sale, “Ongoing global biodiversity loss and the need to move beyond protected areas.” http://www.int-res.com/articles/theme/m434p251.pdf

How to Boil a Frog, the movie.

http://howtoboilafrog.com/themovie/

Our modern industrial society remains stuck on growth and does not know how to stop. Like the runaway Toyota, we are headed for a crash. The automobile, however, is more than a metaphor. The car is one of the prime forces of destruction on our planet, among the most harmful social design decisions in history.

As a means of moving people around, the car is inefficient, deadly, and toxic. Most North American cities offer few transportation options, making citizens dependent on automobiles. Today, certain developing nations with traditionally sound public transportation, are subsidizing automobile industries. Will these nations make the same tragic mistakes that western nations made?

In 1991, English poet and playwright Heathcote Williams published Autogeddon, a long invective poem about the automobile’s trail of death and devastation, which Williams called “a humdrum holocaust … the third world war nobody bothered to declare.” How did private, expensive, dangerous, dirty automobiles come to dominate North American transportation?

Killing the public option

In 1922, some 1,200 thriving urban railways operated in North America, accounting for ninety percent of urban travel. No one complained or demanded more cars and roads. However, General Motors president Alfred P. Sloan saw a “great opportunity” to replace public transportation with private cars. To achieve this, he established a “task force” to “motorize” North America. Sloan coerced railroads to abandon urban transport and used his influence to discouraged banks from making loans to urban rail projects. Sloan’s secret cabal used advertising and lobbying where it worked, and where it didn’t, they used bribes and intimidation. In Detroit and Minneapolis GM’s “task force” employed mobsters to intimidate politicians. In Florida they gave away complimentary Cadillacs to city councilors.

Then, in 1936, General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil (Exxon-Mobil), formed a holding company, National City Lines, which bought urban transport systems and systematically destroyed them. They bought the Pacific Electric system that carried 110 million passengers in 56 communities. They increased fairs, cancelled routes, reduced schedules, cut salaries, allowed trains to decay, ripped up over 1800 kilometers of track, and closed the entire network. By 1956, over 100 rail systems in 45 cities had been purchased and closed. Meanwhile, GM ran ads claiming that electric trains were “old fashion,” and that private cars represented “the wave of the future.”

In 1946, public railway supporter Commander Edwin Quinby wrote a report to city governments, describing, a “deliberately planned campaign to swindle you out of your electric railway system.” GM used their media influence to accuse Quinby and his supporters of being a “lunatic fringe of radicals and crackpots.”

Quinby’s report caught the attention of U.S. federal prosecutors, who indicted General Motors in Chicago for “criminal conspiracy to monopolize ground transportation,” and destroy public transit. They won their case, and the court convicted GM of criminal conspiracy. GM paid a $5,000 fine. Otherwise, nothing changed. Over the next 25 years, U.S. prosecutors attempted to limit GM’s influence on public transportation, but in the end, GM had more money, lawyers, and influence. They succeeded in sabotaging public transportation throughout North America.

Going global

We often hear globalization promoters claim that the “free market” system allows “free choice.” But the destruction of public transportation in North America was not a public choice. It was a corporate scheme for monopoly, power, and profit, preying on human ego and gullibility.

In the 1970s, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher joined the chorus and proclaimed “nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of the great car economy.” Under Thatcher, British engineers built the M25 motorway around London, designed for 30 years of vehicle growth, but traffic jams clogged London within six months.

Today, 17 companies –  Toyota, GM, Honda, Volkswagen, Chrysler, BMW, Mazda and others – produce about 60 million vehicles each year. Meanwhile, some fifty emerging global automobile companies – Harbin Hafei, Mahindra, Anhui Jianghuai, Great Wall, China National, and others – make about 10 million vehicles each year. These emerging companies intend to grow to rival the big automobile makers.

About 1 billion motor vehicles now exist on Earth, a fleet growing at about 3% per year. At this rate, within 25 years, Earth will support 2 billion vehicles, and within fifty years, by 2060, 4 billion vehicles. 

Car destruction

Over a million people die each year in traffic accidents. Throughout history, over 50 million people have died, comparable to the death toll of World War II. Over 2 billion people – drivers, passengers, and bystanders – have been injured in vehicle accidents. Most of these deaths and injuries could have been avoided with public transport. Accidents happen with trains and buses, but at a fraction of the automobile rate. Good public transportation in place of automobiles would have saved about 42 million of the 50 million traffic deaths due to cars.

However, these unnecessary deaths and injuries account for only a fraction of the destruction caused by cars and trucks. In an automobile culture, cars consume about 40 percent of the urban landscape for roads, highways, parking lots, gas-stations, body shops, and so forth. This represents a massive public asset, land, paved over to serve an inefficient, dangerous transport system.

Worldwide, motor vehicles emit about one billion metric tons of CO2 each year, 15 percent of global carbon emissions. Meanwhile, modest “efficiency” gains – hybrids and mileage improvements – are swamped by the shear growth of the car culture.

The social costs of car culture include the destruction of neighborhoods, unsightly urban landscapes, fear, stress, and “road-rage.” One of the greatest social costs is lost time and squandered human productivity. Commuters on streetcars and trains can be productive with work, reading, relaxing, eating breakfast in the dining car, or talking to colleagues and friends.  

Hybrid fallacy 

The ecological and social destruction caused by cars goes far beyond carbon emissions and ensnarled cities. The harvesting and mining of resources – rubber, iron, rare-earth metals for hybrid batteries, copper, plastics and so forth – plus the energy-intensive manufacturing process – comprise a massive “embodied” energy and resource demand. Some 20-40% of energy an automobile uses in its lifetime is “embodied energy” consumed before it is purchased. None of this is solved by building hybrid cars. The car culture is a resource pig.

Currently less than 2% of new vehicles are hybrids. If these few vehicles improved fuel efficiency by 25%, that would translate into one-half of one-percent for the entire global fleet of vehicles, which meanwhile is growing six-times faster, at 3%. Historically, mechanical efficiencies do not translate into less consumption, but more. Why? Because when we gain efficiencies, consumer items become cheaper, so people consume more. Apple Computer founder Steve Wozniak, for example, owns four Priuses, perhaps thinking that he’s solving global warming. New hybrid owners will drive more and feel comfortable living farther from their work. It is counter-intuitive, but efficiencies increase consumption. In economics, this is well known as the “rebound effect.”

Car promoters love to show oil consumption per capita declining in certain regions. What they don’t tell you is that per-capita petroleum consumption has been declining since 1979 as population has outstripped oil production. Global oil production has been flat since 2005, so per-capita consumption is now declining everywhere, not because of hybrid cars, but because of oil field depletion.

A recent ad for the Honda Insight hybrid proclaims, “Theoretically, it seats 6.75 billion,” implying that they could build a new hybrid car for every person on the planet. This is a deceit: 6.75 billion people, driving hybrids with 40 miles-per-gallon efficiency, driving 10,000 miles a year, would require 40 billion barrels of oil annually, over 5 times the current demand for automobile fuel, and the difference is greater than the entire current world oil production. There is not enough gasoline – or other resources – to build and fuel 6.75 billion hybrids, or even half that many.

Buying a new hybrid car will not reduce global petroleum consumption. It will increase consumption by adding a new vehicle to the road. The growing automobile culture requires infrastructure, highways, service, and parking spaces, all costing more space and more energy.

From the North American experience with cars, we should have learned that we cannot trust corporations to design our cultures. Car companies may find it profitable to repeat the crime of North America, destroy public transportation, deplete the planet of resources, mine every last scrap of rare earth metals, burn the declining oil, and dam rivers for electricity to grow and feed more cars. For the people and the planet, this would be a disaster.

Nations who want to achieve genuine sustainability should follow the example of cities that have designed and built excellent public transportation, cities such as Stockholm, Oslo, Moscow, Helsinki, Barcelona, Munich, Tokyo, Seoul, and Sao Paulo.

The motor vehicle, including the Toyota hybrid with its stuck accelerator and faulty brakes, should fade away into the dustbin history’s bad ideas.

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.

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“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.

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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.

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