Listen to this short clip from CBC on the heated debate over new proposed fish farms in Shelburne Nova Scotia – June 28, 2011
East Coast Salmon Farm Battle – CBC Radio clip
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Shades of Green: Mechanisms for Making Mistakes
The strange behaviour of the sub-atomic world caused a few physicists to worry that we might be able to invent a particle collider powerful enough to generate a black hole of sufficient mass that it would drag our entire Earth over its “event horizon”, causing our planet to disappear. But calculations in 1999 deemed this impossible. In 2001, other calculations indicate the possibility. In 2003, the threat was once more dismissed because new calculations suggested any black hole we created would immediately vanish. But in 2008, during the construction of the incredibly powerful Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland, a few physicists continued to warn of the possible danger. By 2010, the LHC was functioning near full power and, fortunately, our planet has not yet disappeared into a black hole.
One of the interesting discoveries resulting from this black hole issue – aside from not disappearing into one – was that we learned more about the psychological and sociological mechanisms of our decision making. This non-event created enough worry among a few physicists that social scientists were inspired to examine more carefully how we make decisions and how we may be deceived by a flawed thinking process which we believe to be logical and measured.
The subject also gains relevance every time the world is predicted to end, a non-event that happens frequently. The latest, scheduled by a fundamentalist Christian group in America, was for Saturday, May 21, 2011. If anyone missed it, the next end is due in 2012 when the Mayan calendar reaches its last recordable date. If end-of-the-world events have been not-occurring with historical regularity, why have the predictions been so inaccurate?
Social scientists have identified a number of misleading thought processes “that can skew attempts to reach objective assessments of risk,” notes an article in the New Scientist (May 20/10). “Cognitive dissonance”, for example, “describes the tendency of people to seek information that is consistent with their beliefs and to avoid information that is inconsistent.” “Groupthink”, a second process, describes how intelligent individuals, working in a group, can reach conclusions that are not justified by the facts. And “confirmation bias”, a third process, is our inclination to be optimistic, to select only the information that confirms the conclusions we want.
When these three processes are applied to the environmental risks surrounding us, we get some illuminating insights. Consider, for example, the variety of insidious toxins now infiltrating our land, water and air. These pollutants are created by the same admirable ingenuity that makes miracle products, generates vast wealth, and defines our technological civilization. If this technology is the culmination of who we are, but it is also poisoning us and our planet’s biological systems, the result for us is “cognitive dissonance”, a collision between the technology that defines us and the ecology essential to our existence. Since our image of ingenuity is difficult to abandon, our first impulse is to reduce the tension by denying the seriousness of the pollution.
“Groupthink” is a similarly dangerous process. If a group of like-minded people can be bonded together – think of tobacco corporations rallying pro-smokers to deny the unhealthy effects of cigarette use – then this group can be manipulated to blindly support an idea contrary to scientific evidence. The same dynamic of “groupthink” operates in “brand” marketing where emotional loyalty is cultivated and nourished by advertising. The fan base of professional sports teams is engineered by “groupthink” – the root of “fan”, incidentally, is an abbreviation of “fanatic”. And, arguably, our entire consumer culture functions as a giant “groupthink”, an unquestioning belief that our fulfilment is based on buying and owning – “I shop, therefore, I am.” Even though the evidence is that we don’t get any happier with ever-ascending levels of material possession, and that the ecology of our planet cannot continue to absorb the environmental impacts, we still embrace consumerism – willingly abetted by the corporate advertising that feeds “groupthink”.
The risks associated with “confirmation bias” express themselves in numerous ways. We want oil, so we believe that we can drill safely in ocean bottoms kilometres below the surface. We want jobs, so we believe that a new mine can operate without environmental damage. We want leisure, so we believe exotic vacations are mandatory. Corporations are particularly inclined to the error of “confirmation bias” primarily because their first objective is to convince both investors and the public of the profit and social merits of their projects. Note Enbridge and its pipeline from Alberta’s tar sands to Kitimat, Compliance Energy and its proposal for coal mining in the Comox Valley, or Quinsam Coal and its desire to expand existing operations in a watershed already being compromised by its toxic run-off. Salmon farming uses the same strategy of touting its benefits while minimizing its ecological damage. Conflict invariably results when the “confirmation bias” employed by proponents to under estimate risks collides with those who want a realistic assessment.
And what is the end result of these misleading thought processes? We don’t know – yet. We haven’t reached the end of history. While the present rewards have been incredible technological, material and economic benefits, the optimism that we humans are actually making wise decisions is being shaken as we take stock of the global environmental costs.
The mounting impacts are ominous. And now, as we start the introspective process of examining the wisdom of our collective decisions, we are beginning to realize that the black hole that undoes us, instead of being subatomically small, may be as big as the way we think.
What happened at the g20?
One year later, and still the question stands. What answers we have offer an incomplete image of an event that spanned the largest city in Canada, and directly affected the businesses, homes, and lives of thousands of people in and around Toronto at that time.
The constructed space between those ‘for’ and those ‘against’ the g20 summit left little room for understanding; and the violence, looting, vandalism, and indiscriminate arrests that ultimately occurred only increased the anger and strong emotions on all sides.
In response Ouboum is publishing a collection of articles and artwork from passers-by, politicians, police, protesters — people, whose experiences will paint a more accurate picture of the summit.
This publication responds to the concern that only a handful of perspectives on the g20 have been given due consideration in public discourse, and that these few were presented only in opposition to one another. The narrative that remains is one of protestors and proponents – suggesting that anyone else would have remained quietly at home, away from the site of the event.
But the site of the event was downtown Toronto – home to some 2.5 million people whose experiences may not conform to the language of the media. The purpose of this publication is to document the wide range of perspectives held by participants on all sides of the g20 by providing a space where people can tell their own stories on their own terms and in their own language.
Ouboum is a Toronto-based collective of independent writers, artists and publishers inviting individuals, groups and organizations to share their experience of the g20 for publication in a forthcoming journal of social discourse. They are now accepting for publication any form of written, photographic or artistic representation of the individual’s experience of the 2010 g20 summit in Toronto.
For more information please visit www.ouboum.ca
Shades of Green: The Meaning of That Laughter
Moral Ground is a book of environmental essays that contains a chillingly poignant one by Derrick Jensen, “You Choose”, in which he has asked people a simple and fundamental question. “Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?”
Jensen’s question embodies the premise that we live on a finite planet which we have been using as a place of endless resources, with the result that our human population has burgeoned to a crowded 7 billion, we are displacing most other species from their habitats, and we are wrecking our life-sustaining ecosystems in the process. While some people may disagree with this premise, most now recognize the severity of the global environmental stresses we are causing and accept the validity of Jensen’s question. It was their answer that was chilling.
“I’ve asked that question of thousands of people,” writes Jensen, “and almost no one says yes. The answers range from no’s to derisive laughter.”
Jensen’s unscientific sampling is probably accurate – most people know of the problem and its severity, they just aren’t doing much to solve it. The famous British theoretical physicist, Stephen Hawking, said he expects we will “cook ourselves off the planet”. Roger Penrose, the Oxford physicist of comparable calibre, noted that, “We might destroy ourselves… by overheating of the Earth,” before we devise a theory explaining gravity (New Scientist, June 13/09).
Given this kind of assessment, anyone who is trying to raise awareness of this environmental threat to a level that inspires collective concern and action must be mystified by what people are thinking these days. A few worried people are desperate for some kind of corrective measures. But most people really don’t seem to comprehend the significance of the looming threat.
The paramount environmental threat, of course, is the entire issue of greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and climate change. It has not been adequately addressed by nearly three decades of United Nations’ negotiations. And the subject simply disappeared from consciousness during Canada’s recent federal election, as if a collective denial suppressed it or an orchestrated distraction lured attention from this critically important subject. If the feverish mania of hockey’s Stanley Cup finals had been directed to this issue of substance, perhaps the dark musings of Jensen, Hawking and Penrose wouldn’t seem so prophetic.
Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency (IEA) has announced that recovering economic activity has generated a record 30.6 gigatonnes of global greenhouse gas emissions for 2010, an amount 5 percent higher than the previous 2008 record. This is bad news for the pledge of the international community to hold the global temperature rise below 2.0°C, the threshold at which environmental conditions are likely to escalate from serious to dangerous. In addition to “more flooding, harsher storms, rising sea levels, species extinction and reduced food security,” notes Deutsche Welle, (May 31/11), we may also lose human control of the global warming agenda as ecosystems – such as the thawing of massive permafrost areas – move into unstoppable feedback loops. Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA, called the agency’s greenhouse gas measure “another wake up call” (Ibid.).
“Another wake-up call.” We have been getting them for years, each issued with a little more urgency and desperation than the one before. But the inclination of our consciousness is invariably to hit the “snooze button” every time we’re dreaming of another entertaining distraction, every time we’re drifting out of the illusion of perpetual economic growth, every time we come closer to the environmental reality of our day.
With an ingenious blending of evasion and obstruction, we continue to subvert solutions by building the conditions for failure. The IEA’s 2011 report notes that , “The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020 if the 2.0°C target is to be attained” (Ibid.) But, unfortunately, “80 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions projected for 2020 are ‘locked in’ through existing or under-construction fossil fuel power plants” (Ibid.). Meanwhile, we continue to encourage fossil fuel exploration, thereby creating the ironical situation that every successful find of oil, coal, gas or methane subverts the urgent transition we must make toward a carbon-zero economy.
What we are thinking really is mysterious. Years of wake-up calls have not reduced greenhouse gas emissions – except for the Great Recession of 2008, global emissions have just continued to climb. And any time the damaging economic activity falters, governments rush to re-energize it.
No wonder Derrick Jensen’s poignant question, “Do you believe that this culture will undergo a voluntary transformation to a sane and sustainable way of living?”, is met with a chorus of either “no’s” or “derisive laughter”. Well, we all understand “no”. But just what, we might ask ourselves, is the meaning of that laughter?
Japan under fire for failure to implement safeguards at Fukushima – The Guardian
From The Guardian – June 18, 2011
by Staff and Agencies
Japan under fire for failure to implement safeguards at Fukushima
UN report says nuclear regulators ignored warnings that the plant was vulnerable to tsunamis
Japanese nuclear regulators have been criticised by the UN for
failing to implement sufficient tsunami safeguards at the Fukushima
plant despite warnings as early as 2002 that the plant was vulnerable to
a tidal wave disaster.
A detailed assessment by experts from the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) – the first outside review of Japan‘s
nuclear crisis – suggested several shortcomings both before and after a
tsunami crippled the power station on 11 March and triggered the
world’s worst nuclear catastrophe since Chernobyl.
A three-page
summary issued following the 18-member team’s inspection in May said
Japan underestimated the threat from tsunamis to the Fukushima plant,
and urged sweeping changes to its regulatory system.
Authorities
were criticised for failing to plan for a tsunami that would surge over
the power station’s 5.7m (19ft) wall. The wave that crashed into the
complex after the 9.0-magnitude earthquake was about 14m (46ft) high.
Extra
protective steps were taken as a result of an evaluation after 2002 –
the projected tsunami height was increased – but they were insufficient
“to cope with the high tsunami run-up values and all associated
hazardous phenomena”.
“Moreover, those additional protective
measures were not reviewed and approved by the regulatory authority,”
said the report. It added: “Severe accident management provisions were
not adequate to cope with multiple plant failures.”
However, the
document, obtained by Reuters after it was submitted to IAEA member
states prior to its publication, also praised the way workers on the
ground dealt with the aftermath of the tsunami.
Given the extreme
circumstances it is doubtful “that any better solutions than the ones
actually chosen could have been realistically implemented”, said the
full 160-page report, prepared for a ministerial nuclear safety meeting
in Vienna next week.
At the IAEA-hosted meeting, to be held 20-24
June, some 150 nations will begin charting a strategy on boosting global
nuclear safety, but differences on how much international action is
needed may hamper follow-up efforts, diplomats say.
Japan’s crisis has prompted a rethink of energy policy around the world, underlined by Germany’s decision to shut down all its reactors by 2022 and an Italian vote to ban nuclear power for decades.
In
2007, the IAEA was ignored when it called on Japan to create a more
powerful and independent nuclear regulator, and the report underlined
the need for greater regulatory control. “An updating of regulatory
requirements and guidelines should be performed reflecting the
experience and data obtained during the Great East Japan Earthquake and
Tsunami,” it said.
Japan has a well-organised emergency readiness
and response system, but “complicated structures and organisations can
result in delays in urgent decision making”, it added.
The report
also listed wider lessons for improving nuclear safety worldwide and
help avert any repeat of the disaster, saying that reactors should be
built so that they can withstand rare and “complex combinations” of
external threats.
Read original article
Government using intelligence community to monitor First Nations protesters, researchers say
From Metro – June 14, 2011
by Jessica Smith
Feds monitoring ‘aboriginal hotspots’
Government using intelligence community to monitor First Nations protesters, researchers say
Documents recently uncovered by First Nations researchers show the
federal government, along with the RCMP and CSIS, has been monitoring
aboriginal “occupations and protests” since 2006.
federal government, along with the RCMP and CSIS, has been monitoring
aboriginal “occupations and protests” since 2006.
“A number of us who are involved in First Nations policy issues have
been looking at the criminalization of First Nations activists by the
government, for being involved in protests or political actions,” said
Russell Diabo, who first published the information in his newsletter the
First Nation Strategic Bulletin.
The documents, obtained through an access to information request,
include two presentations made by officials with Indian and Northern
Affairs Canada, the RCMP and Criminal Intelligence Service Canada, on
monitoring “Aboriginal extremism.”
The documents show that as of summer 2006, members of the Privy Council
Office, CSIS, Public Safety Canada, Indian and Northern Affairs and
other federal departments were holding conference calls to share
information about aboriginal protests and occupations.
INAC also began a “Hotspot Reporting System” to spread information about
“existing and emerging risks” to work with intelligence reporting
systems run by CSIS’s Integrated Threat Assessment Centre, Public Safety
Canada and the RCMP.
It included summaries of events in First Nations, including peaceful
pro-tests, highway blockades and seemingly unrelated events such as an
underground oil spill.
They are described as reports “regarding activities that threaten public
safety in relation to issues relating to Aboriginal peoples in Canada.”
In some, the information is attributed to media and “public safety
partners.”
Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development (formerly INAC)
John Duncan did not respond to an interview request, but his staff sent
an email that acknowledged the existence of aboriginal “hotspots”
reports.
Read original article
Nova Scotia Fishermen protest salmon farm decision
From CBC.ca – June 17, 2011
Demonstrators with bags of strong-smelling sludge protested against
the approval of two salmon farms to be located in one of Nova Scotia’s
most productive lobster fishing bays.
About 75 fishermen, environmentalists and concerned citizens gathered
in Halifax on Friday and brought sludge from existing salmon farms in
other parts of the province to the protest outside the legislature.
The Nova Scotia government recently approved the two salmon farms in
St. Marys Bay in the southwestern part of the province. Each farm will
stock about 700,000 fish and is part of a $150-million expansion by New
Brunswick-based Cooke Aquaculture.
The farms will total about 84 hectares.
Demonstrators said they want public consultation and answers to their concerns — which they said were ignored.
Lobster fisherman Sheldon Dixon said he believes the farms will
create residue that will harm the bay’s bottom and one of the province’s
most profitable lobster fishing grounds if the projects proceed.
He told the crowd that about 3,000 traps operated by 60 fishermen would be displaced by the sites.
“Where will we go? We have to go to somebody else’s [ocean] bottom and all the other bottom is covered,” he said.
Many demonstrators had to get up early on Friday morning for the four-hour drive from the mouth of St. Marys Bay to Halifax.
Cooke Aquaculture is a New Brunswick company that bills itself as North America’s largest producer of farmed salmon.
The company said its aquaculture operations will create hundreds of jobs and put millions of dollars into the local economy.
Nell Halse, a spokeswoman for Cooke Aquaculture, said her company is
trying to persuade local residents that the farms can operate without
damaging the ocean bottom.
The pens, which Halse described as being smaller than an 18-hole golf course, can co-exist with fishermen, she said.
“It’s not like we’re trying to fill the whole coastline of Nova Scotia with salmon farms,” said Halse.
Farm and fishing can co-exist: Cooke Aquaculture
She
said she believes the environmental movement is attempting to polarize
fishermen and aquaculture operators, despite evidence suggesting they
can co-exist.
“We have had an open policy to accommodating lobster fishermen to set
their traps around the farms and in fact they choose to do so,” Halse
said.
Cooke Aquaculture said the pens will comply with local environmental
regulations, including camera scans of the bottom looking for signs of
damage or degradation.
Greg Roach, the associate deputy minister of Fisheries and
Aquaculture, said there will be third-party monitoring of the fish farm
and the waters will be protected.
“There’s confidence the lobster fishermen won’t be negatively impacted by the footprint of this farm,” he said.
But residents of Long Island, at the mouth of St. Marys Bay, overwhelmingly oppose the salmon pens.
St. Marys Bay is the heart of the most lucrative lobster fishing
grounds in Nova Scotia, an industry valued in the hundreds of millions
of dollars a year, providing hundreds of local jobs.
Opponents say the sewage produced by more than one million salmon,
combined with the drugs needed to keep those fish healthy, endangers
prime fishing grounds — underwater nurseries for lobster as well as
scallop beds.
They say the practice of huge open-net salmon farms has already
caused ecological damage in other parts of the world and that Nova
Scotia should not head down that road.
Read original article
Why De-Growth? Rex Weyler Answers Key Questions
“GDP, the so-called measure of economic growth, does not separate costs from benefits.”
-Herman Daly, World Bank Economist, author of “Steady State Economics.”
In 2008, economists and scientists met in Paris to discuss “Economic Degrowth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity.” The Degrowth (Décroissance) movement grew out of this economic revolution in France. In 2010, a similar conference convened in Barcelona. For the last two years I have helped organize the Degrowth Conference in Vancouver, Canada. I have been asked by journalists and traditional economists why degrowth is necessary. Here are the answers:
Why focus on ending growth? Isn’t growth natural?
Yes, growth is natural, but even in nature, growth is limited.
The Degrowth movement addresses consumption growth, which historically linked to economic growth, population growth, and the impacts of resource extraction – oil spills, polluted rivers, atmospheric carbon – and complicated by system feedbacks such as melting permafrost and methane releases. We call this consumption and resulting waste “throughput.”
We now hear talk of “decoupling” economic growth from material and energy throughput, which would be desirable, but must be realistic about decoupling because we possess very few actual examples. Historically, all economic growth leads to increased energy and materials throughput. For example, some people once claimed that computers would “save paper” but this did not happen. Human society today uses six-times more paper than we did in 1960. Computers accelerated economic growth, and although this yielded benefits to certain sectors of society, the growth required consumption, resulting in ecological devastation and social inequity.
But don’t we want certain economic sectors to grow, like renewable energy and developing economies?
Yes. But to achieve ecological balance and social equity we need to respect the limits nature places on material and energy throughput. A social transition can take place without total system growth, but even solar panels and windmills require materials and energy, rare-earth metals, copper, steel, silicon and so forth. We don’t mine silicon with solar energy, we mine it with hydrocarbons.
We need to appreciate the magnitude of the transitions we contemplate. Today, the richest 15% of Earth’s people consume about 85% of the resources. Meanwhile, our population grows and nations expect their economies to grow by 3-4% annually. Projecting these growth rates to 2050, a world of 9 billion people with social justice and better living standards, powered with renewable energy would require about 30 times more resources than we consume today. We would be fair and wise to ask: Is that possible?
Furthermore, energy systems – windmills, solar arrays, dams – have fixed life-spans, so even if we built enough renewable energy to power a world of 9 billion people, that infrastructure would have to be built again, and again, forever. In nature, desire does not equal capacity. We have to start with Earth’s real capacity and design our cultural transition based on that capacity.
The key policy of any ecological energy plan must be conservation, the only solution that does not require material growth. Conservation has to start with the wealthy nations. If rich consumers reduced energy consumption by half – possible since rich consumer economies waste so much energy – then the rest of the world could double energy use, and we could reduce total world energy use closer to a sustainable level. But if we attempt to power the wasteful, consumer culture built on fossil fuel for 9 billion people, we encounter some inconvenient laws of physics, thermodynamics, and ecology.
But can we not become more efficient through innovation?
Yes, but we will need to question our assumptions. Historically, humans have made millions of industrial efficiency gains, without reducing consumption. When society achieves efficiency with a resource, it becomes cheaper, so we tend to use more, not less. This phenomenon, documented by William Jevons during the coal era, is known in economics as the rebound effect. Efficiency could reduce consumption, but humanity has a poor track record of doing so. Efficiency gains have historically increased profits or reduced consumer costs, not saved resources. We can change this but we should not be naive.
But growth is a natural biological and evolutionary impulse…
Yes, growth is not innately evil. However, growth is not innately “good,” and can become destructive even in nature. When cells don’t stop growing, we call that cancer; if our bodies don’t stop growing, that is obesity. Successful species grow until they overshoot their habitat capacity. Growth can become a liability.
Throughout history, certain dominant societies grew until they depleted their habitats. A few learned to simplify, degrow, and endure. Modern advocates of degrowth are not against social diversity or innovation. The degrowth movement is simply cautioning society about the historic link between economic growth and ecosystem destruction. Wishful thinking won’t change this.
Diversity and complexity grow continuously. Does Nature really have a limit on growth?
The word “growth” does not mean the same thing in different contexts. The growth of non-material qualities – species diversity, innovation, or human ideas – is quite different from the growth of material things such as populations, cell phones, or power plants.
Non-physical qualities – beauty, love – can grow, but even these require physical foundations with limits. Nature can produce five species of finches or fifty species but nature imposes limits on the total biomass of finches, or forests, humans, or human technical artifacts. Forests reach a limit we call “maturity” at which point the forests reaches dynamic homeostasis, roughly stable biomass with growing diversity.
Humans can create virtually unlimited musical styles, but only a limited number of maple cellos with ebony fingerboards. A massive biophysical supply chain makes “non-material” social innovation possible. Dreaming up innovations may require near-zero material throughput, but the practical application of innovation requires energy and materials.
The infrastructure of knowledge – education, books, Internet, conferences – that nurture an environment of ideas, requires throughput. For this reason, cultures that have dominated in technical innovation also dominated in resource consumption. The Internet may feel like “free” information but requires massive materials, energy, and waste sinks. Growth of difference (diversity) is not the same as growth of stuff. We’ll need to be precise about claims that economic growth can avoid throughput growth.
But the biosphere has grown its energy and material throughput for billions of years with no sign of stopping...
This needs to be qualified for two reasons: Growth rates and natural collapse events.
Nature’s growth rates remain tiny compared to human economies. Nations typically attempt to grow their economies at 3-4% annually. Since about 1750, this equates to a doubling of human consumption every 20 years. On the other hand, over the last 500 million years, Earth’s biomass has doubled about every 50 million years, 2 million times slower than human economic and consumption growth. Growth is natural, but not at the rate of return our bankers and neoclassical economists want to grow.
Secondly, collapse appears frequently in the fossil record and in human history. Biological diversity reached capacity limits not only during the famous “five extinctions” but in thousands of minor extinctions. About 600 million years ago (mya), free oxygen allowed cells to extract more energy from the ecosystem, unleashing tremendous diversity growth. However, this growth reached the limits of habitat capacity many times between 550mya and 200mya, as species diversity crashed, recovered, and crashed again. Growth does stop in nature, and reverses. The rate of diversity growth peaked during the Cambrian era, 500-550mya, and has never been equalled since. Diversity is not a one-way progression; it grows, stutters, collapses, and recovers based on environmental conditions.
Today, human sprawl reduces Earth’s biological diversity. Humans occupy and impact habitats, replacing and obliterating species. If natural growth was unlimited, then these other species could survive human expansion, but human expansion yields ecological decline, exposing nature’s limits.
Likewise, we witness some cultural diversity growth and simultaneous cultural loss. Dominant cultures displace smaller, unique cultures. Industrial growth has diminished cultural diversity as well as species diversity. Economist Kenneth Boulding called these ecological and cultural losses the “metabolic costs” of growth. Donella Meadows, and others simply pointed out the “Limits to Growth.”
Historical anthropologist Joseph Tainter has shown that when societies grow, they inevitably face problems related to habitat capacity. To solve these problems, they develop new technologies, but these solutions tend to create new problems (irrigation causes salinization, nuclear energy causes leukemia, and so forth.) Highly complex societies eventually experience “diminishing returns” on their innovations, which Tainter explains in The Collapse of Complex Societies. A few societies overcame this dilemma by simplifying their systems, but most overshot their habitat and collapsed. Growth is not a solution for societies in overshoot, including our modern industrial societies. Rather, solutions to overshoot involve reduced consumption, simplification, and a return to fundamental rules of ecology.
Human social complexity has grown over the last 100,000 years, punctuated with collapses and ecosystem decline. Human success clearly incurs ecological and social costs. Since human impact now threatens global ecosystem balance, we don’t know if human complexity will continue to grow.
Degrowth advocates claim that the best strategy to ensure maximum human diversity is to stabilize our consumption and expansion. Dynamic homeostasis, nature’s genuine sustainability, makes demands on growing things, and simplicity proves as important as complexity. The notion of degrowth is not intended to destroy human society, but to preserve it.
If our growth economy recycles as nature does, are we not more sustainable?
Yes, of course, but we need to understand nature’s costs and limits regarding recycling. Human economies should attempt to approach 100% recycling, but recycling itself requires energy and materials. The laws of energy transformation teach us that there is no such thing as 100% recycling, even in nature. Recycling is a cost of growth and complexity, and it consumes energy.
Attacking growth is counter-productive because people expect growth, and want to find hope…
In the autumn, when leaves fall and the air turns cold, it is not “pessimism” to point out that winter is coming. If hope is delusional, it is useless.
The degrowth movement does not “attack” growth, which has its appropriate place in nature. The degrowth movement simply exposes the pretence of our culture that celebrates the benefits of economic growth but ignores the costs.
Rich nations typically ignore the costs of growth is by exporting those costs to poor nations and to nature, sending city garbage to the country, dumping toxic waste at sea, exploiting workers to make consumer products cheap, or devastating the landscape with mining. A large portion of China’s CO2 emissions, for example, are really European and American CO2 emissions, because those nations consume the products of that pollution.
Naturally, people resist the idea of limits on their consumption. These instincts to grow were forged in natural evolution. But our instincts don’t make limits disappear. Even in non-human nature, instincts can become counter-productive. Aggression, for example, exists because it had survival value, but in certain contexts aggression becomes destructive. When the context changes, instincts can be harmful. Once a species reaches its habitat limits, the instincts to grow and expand become a liability.
Aren’t ecosystems destroyed just as thoroughly in poor nations as wealthy ones?
Yes, but usually because those nations are plundered and exploited by the rich. Sheer numbers of habitants anywhere can deplete an environment, but wealthy-nation industrial expansion is the leading source of global ecological destruction. Many cultures were sustainable for thousands of years, and could have endured many thousands more, until colonized by industrial nations, which took their resources, took slaves, waged war, practiced genocide, and so forth. In the industrial era, rich nations export destructive resource extraction, waste disposal, and social costs to the poor nations. Africa is not ecologically depleted and poor because Africans consumed too much stuff; it is depleted and poor because Europe and North America plundered it to fuel their economic growth. Now, China, Japan, and other industrialized nations have joined the plunder of poor nations and the global commons. Wealthy consumption and economic growth remain the primary causes of ecological destruction.
Rather than degrowth, should we not focus on preserving ecosystems?
If our social, political, and economic planners actually understood ecosystems, we might avoid a lot of problems we face.
But degrowth not just a rallying cry or a trivial idea. Degrowth is an important concept that our society needs to understand, whether we call it Degrowth, Limits to Growth, Costs of Complexity, Overshoot, Carrying Capacity, Metabolic Costs of Evolutionary Success, Diminishing Returns on Innovation, Entropic Limits, “The Meek Shall inherit the Earth,” or “Richer lives, simpler means” as Arne Naess said.
The problem for our society is not that these ideas are too complex or wrong, but that they are annoying and inconvenient for the wealthy and powerful. Millionaires wants to be a billionaires. The more that individuals grab and horde, the less there is for everyone. On the other hand, as we learn to share and live modestly, our ecosystems can recover and provide us with nature’s bounty.
The Degrowth movement advocates richer, more rewarding lives with less material stuff. Our economic efforts should focus on providing basic needs to everyone in the human family, rather than enriching a few, while others starve. Beyond basic necessities, happiness does not come from consuming more stuff. Happiness comes from friends, family, community, creativity, leisure, love, and companionship. These things can grow without much material throughput. These are the qualities of life we should be helping to grow.
This topic may be the most important public dialogue of the next century. We better get it right, because humanity may not get many more chances.
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Useful resources:
Degrowth Research: Recherche & Décroissance
Albert Bartlett on Exponential Growth: “Arithmetic, Population, and Energy” video lecture
William Catton: Overshoot
Donella Meadows, et. al., Limits to Growth (D. H. Meadows, D. L. Meadows, J. Randers, W. Behrens, 1972; New American Library, 1977)
Herman Daly: Steady-State Economics (1977, 1991)
Mark Anielski: Genuine Wealth
Lourdes Beneria: Gender, Development and Globalization: Economics as if People Mattered
Kenneth Boulding, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth (1966)
Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, 1973, Le Monde also discusses the negative social and ecological impact of high-energy society.
Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (1971).
T. Gutowski, et. al., “Thermodynamic Analysis of Resources Used in Manufacturing Processes,” Environ. Sci. Technol. 43(5) pp1584-1590, 2009).
K. De Decker, (2009) “The Monster Footprint of Digital Technology” tracks the embodied energy and material resources of silicon based technology.
Arne Naess: Ecology, community and lifestyle
Wendell Berry: Solving for Pattern, on appropriate solutions
BBC Video & Story: Mafia sank ships of toxic nuclear waste
From the BBC – June 14, 2011
by Duncan Kennedy
Watch video and read original story
A shipwreck apparently containing toxic waste is
being investigated by authorities in Italy amid claims that it was
deliberately sunk by the mafia.
An informant from the
Calabrian mafia said the ship was one of a number he blew up as part of
an illegal operation to bypass laws on toxic waste disposal.
The sunken vessel has been found 30km (18 miles) off the south-west of Italy.
The informant said it contained “nuclear” material. Officials said it would be tested for radioactivity.
Murky pictures taken by a robot camera show the vessel intact and alongside it are a number of yellow barrels.
Labels on them say the contents are toxic.
The informant said the mafia had muscled in on the lucrative business of radioactive waste disposal.
But he said that instead of getting rid of the material safely, he blew up the vessel out at sea, off the Calabrian coast.
He also says he was responsible for sinking two other ships containing toxic waste.
Experts are now examining samples taken from the wreck.
Other vessels
An
official said that if the samples proved to be radioactive then a
search for up to 30 other sunken vessels believed scuttled by the mafia
would begin immediately.
For years there have been rumours that
the mafia was sinking ships with nuclear and other waste on board, as
part of a money-making racket.
The environmental campaign group
Greenpeace and others have compiled lists over the past few decades of
ships that have disappeared off the coast of Italy and Greece.
Processing waste is highly specialised and is supposed to be an industry where security is the top priority.
If
tests show that there is nuclear material on the seabed it will prove
that the mafia has moved into its dirtiest business yet.
Watch video and read original story
Collaborative Consumption: The End of Consumerism?
From The Guardian – June 14, 2011
by Leo Hickman
In November 2008, a 34-year-old security guard called Jdimytai
Damour was trampled to death at a Wal-Mart store in Valley Stream, New
York, by what local papers described as an “out-of-control” mob of 2,000
“frenzied” shoppers who had queued overnight in the promise of a
slash-price sale. With the crowd outside chanting, “Push the doors in”,
staff climbed on to vending machines to escape the resulting stampede.
Even when police later declared that the shop was closed because it was
now a crime scene, angry shoppers remonstrated with officers. One
yelled: “I’ve been queuing since yesterday morning.” The bargains on
offer included a 50-in plasma HDTV priced at $798.
Rachel Botsman,
a “social innovator” who has presented her ideas at Downing Street and
before Microsoft and Google executives, retells the event in her book,
What’s Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption is Changing the Way
We Live. “It’s a sad and chilling metaphor for our culture at large – a
crowd of exhausted consumers knocking down the doors and ploughing down
people simply to buy more stuff.”
Botsman rails in the book
against the excesses, futility and contradictions of mass consumption,
but she doesn’t rehash the usual tropes of anti-consumerism. Rather,
her book is a cry for us to consume “smarter” by moving away from the
outdated concept of outright ownership – and the lust to own – towards
one where we share, barter, rent and swap assets that include not just
consumables, but also our “time and space”.
The notion of
“collaborative consumption” is not, she notes, new – it has been around
for centuries. But the arrival of internet-enabled social networking,
coupled with “geo-located” smart phones, has super-charged a concept
that was already rapidly gaining primacy owing to the twin pressures of
our environmental and economic crises. Echoing the Japanese concept of muda
– the relentless hunt for, and eradication of, inefficiencies in any
system – collaborative consumption aims to exploit previously ignored or
unnoticed value in all our assets by both eliminating waste and
generating demand for goods and services that are otherwise “idling”.
Botsman
uses the example of motoring to show where collaborative consumption
already makes sense. “Cars are 90% under-utilised by their owners,” she
tells me from her home in Australia. “And 70% of journeys are solo
rides. So we now see car club companies such as Streetcar
proving very popular in cities. In Munich, BMW now has a scheme where
it lets members pay for a car by the minute rather than by the hour. And
websites such as ParkatmyHouse.com
are allowing people to make money from unused space outside their
properties. A great example is a church in Islington, London, which was
facing financial trouble. But it started renting parking space out front
and it now makes £70,000 a year from doing so.”
If the internet
and social networking act as lubricants for collaborative consumption,
then trust is the glue that binds it together. None of this would work
if we didn’t have faith that the invariably anonymous person at the
other end of the transaction will do what they promise; namely, pay for
your goods or services, or deliver what they have advertised.
“Really
interesting things are happening with trust at the moment,” says
Botsman. “We don’t trust centralised monopolies, but we do trust
decentralised systems. So we see peer-to-peer money-lending sites such
as Zopa proving
popular, in stark comparison to banks. ‘Trust circles’ are being built
online for things such as skill-sharing, space rental and task-running.
eBay has shown us that trust-based transactions work online. The US is
about 18 months ahead of the UK at the moment with all this, but sites
such as TaskRabbit and Hey, Neighbor! are redefining what a neighbour is.”
One
of Botsman’s most radical ideas is that the rise of collaborative
consumption in coming years will see the advent of “reputation banks”.
In her book, she writes: “Now with the web we leave a reputation trail.
With every seller we rate; spammer we flag; comment we leave; idea,
comment, video or photo we post; peer we review, we leave a cumulative
record of how well we collaborate and if we can be trusted.”
Soon,
Botsman argues, our reputation rating will be as, if not more,
important than our credit rating. “It is only a matter of time before
there is some form of network that aggregates your reputation capital
across multiple forms of collaborative consumption. We’ll be able to
perform a Google-like search to see a complete picture of how people
behave and the degree to which they can be trusted, whether it’s around
products they swap and trade or money they lend or borrow or land or
cars they share.”
Botsman’s advice for anyone considering diving
into the world of collaborative consumption is to begin by drawing up an
inventory of your assets. Gumtree.com
estimates that the average UK home has nearly £600 worth of unused
items – old gadgets, books, clothes etc – collecting dust. But Botsman
says to think more laterally: consider the spare storage space you might
have under the stairs or in a garage; the electric drill you could rent
to neighbours; your unique skills – dog-walking, accountancy,
shelf-fitting – you could hire by the hour, or exchange for someone
else’s skill.
Like many people, I’ve dabbled with some of these
concepts before. I’ve flogged unwanted items on eBay. I’ve signed up to
lift-sharing websites and joined a car club. I’ve looked into how TimeBank
works. I enjoy eking out extra value from my “idling assets”, but I
also hate waste so relish any opportunity to see a resource fully
utilised.
But critical mass seems to be just as an important an
ingredient to collaborative consumption as trust and the connectivity of
the internet. If there aren’t enough people “out there” offering or
demanding these goods and services, then these systems quickly wither.
“Yes, you’ve got to have critical mass for this to work,” says Botsman.
“Not just geographical, but across subject categories.”
So, to stress-test the hypothesis of collaborative consumption myself, I trialled three popular examples.
Clothes ‘swishing’
Early
last year, Anna Dalziel, an HR executive from Truro in Cornwall,
decided to channel her “addiction” for car-boot sales and eBay into a
public-spirited hobby. She approached the owners of a cafe in a
converted grammar school in Redruth and asked if she could host a
clothes-swapping “swish” in one of the school’s disused corridors. She
now holds weekly events across west Cornwall and has attracted nearly
600 attendees.
“Sometimes it can get a bit scary,” says Dalziel
ominously, as I arrive clutching a bag containing a skirt my wife has
sent me to swap “for something nice”. (No pressure, then.) “It’s often a
case of having to sharpen your elbows if you really want something.”
Swishing
rules vary according to the organiser, but Dalziel operates a system
whereby women (I am very much the lone male) earn a single swap credit
for every item they bring with them. Some other swishes sort clothes
into higher and lower value piles, with, for example, a designer label
item being worth 10 credits compared to a single-credit Topshop top. To
pay for the time it takes to do all this sorting, organisers charge up
to £20 at the door. However, Dalziel just charges £3 to cover her costs –
fuel and venue hire – and operates a strict all-items-are-equal rule.
Clothing
racks marked with sizes have been lined up along a corridor. Around 15
people are waiting in the adjacent cafe for “kick-off”. Dalziel says
it’s normally double that, but the rain might have kept people at home.
As
the women stream in, I stand back. “Many women treat swishing like a
clothes library,” says Dalziel, as she takes the entrance fee. “You
sometimes see the same items rotating week to week. Some people come
before they go on holiday just to stock up and I know some women who
have swapped around 500 items over the past year. I think people find
they have less commitment to an item than if they had bought it so have
an attitude that they can just bring it back next week.”
I finally
go to the clothes racks and tentatively let my fingers walk along the
hangers. I don’t know what I’m looking for and Dalziel kindly realises
this so comes over and holds up some brand new bikinis. I just take one
to avoid any further awkwardness. The inevitable questions from my wife
about why I’ve come home with a bikini await.
“Facebook has been
brilliant for us,” says Dalziel. “I just announce to everyone who has
signed up when the next event is and it goes from there. The most we’ve
ever had is about 90 people at an event we held at Penryn which attracts
lots of students. That got a bit scary, but I would say 30-40 people is
the ideal number. After each swish I sort through the remaining clothes
and sort a pile for the charity shop or recycling. The rest I store at
home and take to the next event. Some people treat us a bit like a
charity shop and then want lots of credits. But that’s not how it works,
so we have a ban on things like underwear. I don’t do this to sort
through women’s old bras.”
I’m curious to know whether she thinks a
male-orientated swish would work. “I don’t think so really. We did try a
kids swish once thinking parents would like to swap toys, baby
accessories and clothes. But it just didn’t take off for some reason. It
was also much harder to organise and manage the stock. And I’m just not
sure whether, say, a tool swap for men would work as well. I sometimes
wonder whether my swishes are more about the chance to socialise than
they are about the clothes. Perhaps that’s the secret?”
Local swapping
In my hunt for a swapping service that isn’t limited to clothes, I turn to the internet. The first I try is U-Exchange, which seems to mimic the popular TV show of my childhood, Swap Shop.
I
type in my location, but the results are far from encouraging. The
nearest person to me is offering a football table in exchange for “SAS
war books”. I’m unsure what I find less appealing: the items to be
traded, or the thought of meeting up with this person.
Ecomodo
is a far bigger site, probably because it doesn’t limit itself to
swapping, but also allows users to give or, for a fee set by the owner,
rent items to anyone who might want them.
Again, I type in my
location. And, again, I’m disappointed. All that is returned is someone
15 miles away renting their cross-trainer for £4.34 a day.
It is
patently obvious that these sites work best when you live within or
close to a high-density population, not in a rural setting such as my
home county of Cornwall. This is borne out when I type in my old London
postcode to find more than 200 items offered, ranging from a tennis
racket (free) and chocolate fountain (free), through to wellies (£2.27 a
day) and a lawnmower (£4.34 a day). I can easily see how this could be a
fantastic – and somewhat addictive – resource.
Postal swapping
Botsman recommends Bookhopper,
which lets users swap books much in the same way as a swish for clothes
but facilitated through the post. Swaps are limited by national
boundaries (to keep postal costs down) and you must offer at least 10
books before you can request one. This way there is always a fluid stock
of books in the system.
My wife warns me that all her books are
out of bounds. She employs a strangely possessive attitude to novels, so
much so that she doesn’t like to lend them “in case they bend the
spine”. I find 10 books that I’m happy to never see again, but the
challenge is harder than I thought. I suffer from “you never know when
you might need it”, especially when it comes to non-fiction, which
doesn’t exactly match the spirit of collaborative consumption.
As
it happens, after a week no one has requested any of my books. Adding my
unwanted copy of The Da Vinci Code to the 167 Dan Brown novels already
on offer has probably earned me the karma I deserve. An early lesson of
collaborative consumption is that it mimics Newton’s third law of
motion, namely that you tend to get out of it what you put in.
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