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.

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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