HOME Yann Arthus-Bertrand

Sourced from YouTube, 13 January 2011

'We are living in exceptional times. Scientists tell us that we have 10 years to change the way we live, avert the depletion of natural resources and the catastrophic evolution of the Earth's climate. The stakes are high for us and our children. Everyone should take part in the effort, and HOME has been conceived to take a message of mobilization out to every human being. For this purpose, HOME needs to be free. A patron, the PPR Group, made this possible. EuropaCorp, the distributor, also pledged not to make any profit because Home is a non-profit film. HOME has been made for you : share it! And act for the planet.'

Boom or Bust for Our Planet?

Dick Smith: "We have a real problem as our economic system is built on perpetual growth, when everyone knows you can't have perpetual growth," he says. "One day it has to stop." << That's it. That is all there is. Can we get on with addressing this instead of whining about it like a bunch of over-indulged children?!

Reposted in full from Adelaide Now, 29 April 2011

'A crowded planet, with more people taking more of the Earth's resources, does not sound appealing. We have seen water shortages, fuel price rises, congested roads and a crisis in housing affordability. Questions are now being asked on our capacity to feed an extra two billion people - in just two decades.

Millionaire Dick Smith has just finished writing a book on the topic. Expect to hear more from the man at the centre of the population debate in Australia. "We have a real problem as our economic system is built on perpetual growth, when everyone knows you can't have perpetual growth," he says. "One day it has to stop."

The United Nations Population Division says the world will hit seven billion this year. We may double that by the end of the century. The UN offers scenarios based on different fertility rates. Under the medium scenario, the population peaks at 9.4 billion in 2070 and starts to decline. If fertility remains high in developing countries, we may have a population of nearly 30 billion in 2300.

How could we feed and house that many people? Something has to give.

Smith says Australia's growth rate, at 2.1 per cent last year, is "totally irresponsible". "That means we double every 30 years," he says. "By developed world standards we're one of the highest, above India, above Bangladesh, above America."

Twice as many people means each person would have access to half the amount of resources we are consuming, he argues.

There must be a better way, an economic system not based on growth, not just about "having more people and using more resources".

The UN Environment Program has released a guide for policy makers. Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication explains how a green economy can generate as much growth and employment as the existing world order.

This, however, "will require world leaders, civil society and leading businesses to engage in this transition collaboratively".

"It will require a sustained effort on the part of policy makers and their constituents to rethink and redefine traditional measures of wealth, prosperity and wellbeing," the authors write.

"The biggest risk of all may be remaining with the status quo."

University of Adelaide Environment Institute director Professor Mike Young contributed to the chapter on water resources.

"At the global level, finding ways to feed all these people and to supply the water they need is really challenging," he says.

"If we can be really clever, we can both water the world and feed it, but we're going to have to do a lot of really smart innovative stuff. If not we're going to have massive famines, water shortages and crises in many parts of the world. That's the big picture."

Wealthy nations have extra responsibility as they consume far more of the world's resources per person.

"Policies designed to increase population have to be examined very, very carefully - until we get all of the resource management, environmental issues sorted out - particularly carbon, water and controlling land degradation," Prof Young says.

Several factors contribute to population growth. The number of babies born on average to each woman, is just one. People are also living longer.

"The big question is whether we should make Australia an environmental fortress in a degrading world, or take our global share of responsibility and allow populations to increase in Australia to take pressure off the Western world," Prof Young says.

The Australian Population Institute has a vision for a "greater Australia", with a "robust population" of 30 million. President Jane Nathan says the group is convinced Australia needs to grow to maintain a high quality of life.

The Urban Development Institute of Australia agrees. President Peter Sherrie says there are 5.1 working Australians to every retiree. Unless we maintain strong population growth, by 2030 this will reduce to 2.9 working Australians for every retired person.

"We're going have to severely increase taxes to maintain the standard of living we're used to, or we need to increase our population," he says.

"Our whole economy is based on growth, it has been since the start."

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd's "Big Australia" has given way to a commitment to sustainability, though what that means is not clear.

"The focus of this policy is on the distribution of population across Australia rather than setting arbitrary targets or caps," says the Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities, Tony Burke.

The Government released an issues paper last year and has been "going through an extensive community consultation process in which a whole range of groups and organisations have put forward their views for the future of our nation".'

Thought Bubbles on Population and Growth - Dick Smith

Reposted in full from Online Opinon, 20 April 2011

'

I read with interest and not a little dismay the recent On Line Opinion article by Ross Elliott. Mr Elliott is a property developer and his views are consistent with those few who stand to benefit from ever-increasing population growth in Australia: developers, media companies and of course retailers. But for most Australians, the advantages would be few and the negative effects would be many.

I don't mean to be unkind to the developers. In fact, I suspect secretly many of them agree with me that our headlong rush for crude population growth is undermining the quality of life of many Australians and doing nothing to help the rest of the world either. Recently I addressed a gathering of the Property Council of Australia, and privately many of the attendees said they agreed with me. We simply haven't thought through the negative consequences of population growth for Australia or the world.

Far from being a mere 'Thought Bubble' as Mr Elliot suggests, I have given the question a great deal of thought in recent times, and will be expanding on them at length in a book, The Population Crisis, to be published next month. Let me give you a hint of what it contains. But first, I would like to dispel a myth or two.

Firstly, Mr Elliot repeats a whopper first put out by the Murdoch Press which deliberately misreported my recent comments on the subject. I have never called for a 'two-child policy' as if there should be some kind of government edict setting a limit on the number of children Australian families should have.

Quite the contrary. I believe that once they are well-informed, Australians will make up their own minds about what they believe to be the right number of kids they have. What I do believe however is that it is high time we dump the wasteful baby bonus and other tax measures which currently cost us well in excess of $1 billion annually in artificially encouraging Australians to have three or more children. There are many good reasons to drop this silly scheme, not least of which is that it disadvantages those who choose to have small families, or none at all. Governments should get out of people's bedrooms full stop.

Again and again as I tour Australia discussing our failure to have a sensible plan for population, I ask simple questions: Why would we want to rapidly increase our population? What's so great about constant growth? What are the advantages for average Australians? I fail to ever get a convincing answer. The best the "pro-growthers" come up with is "because we can", and that of course, is no answer at all.

It's often claimed by the pro-growth lobby that Australia can never run out of land, because we have very low population density compared to our land mass. This is a really useless concept for making decisions about Australia's future. As has been well-established in report after report, Australia is best looked upon as two geographical nations: one a vast and arid interior with little value for settlement or agriculture; the other a narrow coastal strip with limited resources of soil, water and a fragile ecosystem. Necessarily it is this thin strip we must inhabit and it is far from being in endless supply.

Most mainland Australian capitals are now building highly expensive desalination plants just to supply drinking water for our existing population. Much of Australia is only just now emerging from a decade long drought that brought devastating consequences to our agricultural system. The history of climate in Australia - and the predictions of climatologists – suggest it is only a matter of time before drought returns and we must sensibly consider ourselves to be in a more-or-less permanent state of water scarcity. Dreams of turning back the northern rivers are nothing more than wishful thinking.

A lack of certainty with water means we must always be cautious about ensuring food security, not only for Australians, but for the millions of people around the world who depend on Australian grain and meat for their livelihood. For those who scoff at the idea of Australia one day running short of locally produced food, or having little or nothing to export, I urge you to read the report on our food security recently released by the nation's top scientific advisory body, the Prime Minister's Science, Engineering and Innovation Council.

The report sums up the challenge neatly, and makes it clear that our future is inextricably linked to population decisions:

The likelihood of a food crisis directly affecting the Australian population may appear remote given that we have enjoyed cheap, safe and high quality food for many decades and we produce enough food today to feed 60 million people. However, if our population grows to 35-40 million and climate change constrains food production, we can expect to see years where we will import more food than we export. We are now facing a complex array of intersecting challenges which threaten the stability of our food production, consumption and trade.

Like many developers, Mr Elliott sees our thin coastal strip as an abundant resource fit for exploitation. He has even previously written on the benefits of urban sprawl.

Yet such thinking never seems to account for the loss of prime agricultural land involved in building new outlying suburbs. I believe we have now reached a crisis point, concreting over our richest soils and most productive land. Just how long can we sustain the equation of increasing population and diminishing agricultural capacity? Once again the "pro- growthers" are silent.

Let's not for a minute underestimate the massive costs of sustaining our ever-expanding cities. The infrastructure costs of transports, and retrofitting the connections between the centre and the outer suburbs are immense. The newly elected State Government in Victoria has discovered that the costs of extending rail services to it new western suburbs has blown out to $5 billion and will be years behind schedule - if it is ever funded at all. All this for a couple of new stations.

These massive costs, faced by all our cities, will be borne by generations of taxpayers, yet any benefits will soon be swamped by increased numbers. As ever, we will continue to chase our tails on critical infrastructure as long as we remain addicted to growth.

Mr Elliott blames planning controls for restricting the release of new land for development, and in turn says this is to blame for Australia's precariously high property prices. He is surely being disingenuous, knowing full well that our massive population growth of recent years - close to 500,000 in 2010 alone – is the real reason for our unsustainable housing costs. We are now faced with another trap – needing more growth to maintain prices for fear of a vicious (and now probably inevitable) crash. It's this Ponzi Scheme economics that lies at the heart of most pro-population thinking.

The biggest one of course is the concerns about aging Australia and the costs of future pension payments. Never mind that in fact Australia has one of the youngest age profiles of any developed nation and studies by the Productivity Commission show the threat is exaggerated. Mr Elliot argues we must bring in more and more migrants to effectively pay the pensions of the retiring Baby Boomers or else we face ruin. Yet of course those migrants will in turn become elderly too one day, leaving us with an even bigger problem down the track.

The truth is most Boomers did pay their taxes in order to ensure a minimum pension and have been putting money away for their retirement. The problem is that governments, under pressure to supply the infrastructure to keep pace with the ever-expanding population, did not keep their end of the bargain. They have consistently failed to put tax receipts away at the necessary level to provide for pensions. And the reasons for this are pretty clear. Politicians are vulnerable to the pleadings of well-organised special interest groups, and one of the most effective has certainly been the pro-growth lobbyists and their willing accomplices in the media.

Mr Elliot claims Japan has suffered economically for failing to deal with its demographic challenges. In fact economists know the real cause of Japan's stagnant economy of the last decade: it is still reeling from the collapse of an unsustainable asset bubble, especially in property. The warning signs are there for Australia if we care to look. Now Japan must deal with a further massive blow, but at least its cohesive society is pulling together. One wonders if such a recovery from disaster would be possible if the nation was not held together by a common culture.

Yes, we could build a dozen Dubais along Australia's east coast, tear out every last piece of coal to power it, and import our food, at least for a while. Yes we could open the gates and bring in young migrant workers to pay for our current profligacy and prop up the property sector with no thought for the future. But the question remains, why? Who really benefits from such policies?

Later this year global population will pass seven billion. Mr Elliott may be relaxed by the slowing of absolute growth, but we are still adding nearly 80 million people to the planet every year and will certainly add at least two billion people more by mid century. With current trends in consumption, that means we need to find twice the energy and food we currently produce to supply the world's ever spiralling demands.

Can anyone really feel relaxed about the prospects of feeding, housing and powering a world that is already stretched to the limit? As we make the necessary and unavoidable transition from an oil-based economy, these demands will stretch our ingenuity to the limit - and perhaps beyond.

We have seen how fragile our growth-based economic system is. A collapse of the financial markets, followed by ghastly natural disasters have shown that we are just one unexpected shock away from crisis. It is foolish to expect that Australia will not be affected by these dangers, and we must prepare now for an uncertain future. The pursuitof endless growth is the least intelligent response we can make. We need a sensible discussion about the options and that means dispensing with the old myths that continue to cloud our thinking.'

The Great Disruption - Paul Gilding

Paul Gilding's talk on his new book, 'The Great Disruption', to the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce in London (audio only)

Sourced from the RSA, 13 April 2011

www.thersa.org/__data/assets/file/0004/396994/20110413PaulGilding.mp3 (1 hour)

'Paul Gilding is an independent writer, advisor and advocate for action on climate change and sustainability.

An activist and social entrepreneur for 35 years, his personal mission and purpose is to lead, inspire and motivate action globally on the transition of society and the economy to sustainability. He pursues this purpose across all sectors, working around the world with individuals, businesses, NGOs, entrepreneurs, academia and government.

He has served as CEO of a range of innovative NGO’s and companies including Greenpeace International, Ecos Corporation and Easy Being Green. He has also helped to establish and served on the board of a number of new NGOs including Inspire Foundation, the Australian Business Community Network and Climate Coolers. His speaking and work has taken him to over 30 countries including the Philippines, Papua New Guinea, South America, Europe, South Africa, the USA and Mexico.

Paul believes we are now in a global ecological and economic crisis that will lead to a period of major global economic transformation. As he advocated in his 2005 letter Scream Crash Boom and his 2008 update The Great Disruption, he sees this crisis driven change as an enormous opportunity to build a new approach to economic and social development for humanity.'

Requiem for a Species

Sourced from Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 2 November 2010

'At the Byron Bay Writers' Festival 2010, Clive Hamilton and Ian Lowe speak with passion, and without doubt, about Australia's bleak future in the face of global warming, about their time rallying against the sceptics in the hope of bringing about societal change.

Both professors go straight to the heart of the matter, addressing the fact that society in general is to blame, for its inner consumer-capitalist denial of our environmental destruction, with Hamilton warning that we need to reach a 'tipping point' of realisation within the next five years to avoid disastrous consequences.

According to Clive Hamilton, coming to terms with the fact that the climate change horse has bolted was the main driver behind his new book "Requiem For A Species" and, in the process of writing it, he went through his own complex process of mourning for our lost future.

Lowe is more optimistic about "the defining moral issue of our time", as he calls for a 'mutiny' of sorts from the public to rally against political and corporate players showing no concern for the undeniable science involved.

The discussion is moderated by ABC tv journalist, Chris Masters.

Unfortunatley there were technical problems on the day, so the audio is poor quality.

Clive Hamilton is an Australian author and public intellectual. In June 2008 he was appointed Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics, a joint centre of the Australian National University, Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne. For 14 years, until February 2008, he was the executive director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank he founded.
He has published on a wide range of subjects but is best known for his books, a number of which have been best-sellers. They include "Growth Fetish", "Affluenza", "What's Left: The death of social democracy", "Silencing Dissent and Scorcher: The dirty politics of climate change" and "The Freedom Paradox: Towards a post-secular ethics" along with his most recent book, "Requiem for a Species". In June 2009 he was made a Member of the Order of Australia for his service to public debate and policy development, and in December 2009 he was the Greens candidate in the by-election for the federal seat of Higgins.

Professor Ian Lowe AO is president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, emeritus professor of science, technology and society at Griffith University in Brisbane, as well as being an adjunct professor at Sunshine Coast University and Flinders University. "A Voice of Reason: Reflections on Australia's Future" is Lowe's latest book. It profiles Lowe's essays and opinion pieces on the environment, culture, science, politics, education, technology and Australia's economy, along with new pieces on Copenhagen 2009 and Australia's chance for survival in this new century. His previous books include "A Big Fix and Living in the Hothouse". Lowe has been a referee for the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change, attended the Geneva and Kyoto conferences of the parties to the Framework Convention on Climate Change and was a member of the Australian delegation to the 1999 UNESCO World Conference on Science. He attended the UN convention in Copenhagen in December 2009.

Christopher Masters is a multi-Walkley Award winning and Logie Award winning Australian journalist and author. He commenced working on ABC television's flagship public affairs program Four Corners in 1983 and has since become the program's longest serving reporter. His first program was the landmark "Big League", a 1983 investigation of judicial corruption, which helped bring about the Street Royal Commission. Masters is a Gold Walkley Award winner, for his 1985 Four Corners report "French Connections" about the infamous sinking of the Rainbow Warrior. Another famous Four Corners report by Masters, "The Moonlight State" from 1987, led to the Fitzgerald Inquiry into corruption in Queensland. Masters has written three books to date. His first "Inside Story", published in 1992, told of the stories behind some of his Four Corners programs. His second, "Not for Publication", published in 2002, again dealt with his television work.'

The End of the Growth Ethic

Sourced from YouTube, 18 March 2010

'UBC Professor William Rees argues that the current growth ethic has put us into ecological overshoot, citing his ecological footpr UBC Professor William Rees argues that the current growth ethic has put us into ecological overshoot, citing his ecological footprint analysis tool he developed, and may result in a breakdown in civil order and conflict over scarce resources - with Iraq only the first shot in the wars of the future.'

Ecocity Economics - An Economics Built on What We Build

Reposted from Ecocities Emerging, March 2011

'...The ongoing economic crisis that began with the unraveling of wildly inflated real estate prices and the Wall Street derivatives bubble in 2007 and the crash into near depression in October of 2008 resulted in trillions of dollars of public bail out money for banks and other institutions around the world. Other banks and businesses collapsed or went bankrupt and many individuals lost their homes and/or their jobs. Talk of recovery and getting back to where we were with continued world economic GDP growth, back to "normal," based on improving stock prices and with a stabilizing of real estate prices in the United States averaging almost 40% less than what they were in 2007 is highly unlikely to be correct. That is because of the high unemployment rates, lost value in retirements, far more expensive costs for education and health insurance than before, cuts in public services from closed swimming pools, parks and libraries, streets wearing out without maintenance, immense debts and deficits in all but two state governments in the United States and hundreds of cities and so on and on. Our police force here in Oakland, California where I live, for example, a city with an extraordinarily high murder rate, has had to fire 80 police officers five months ago due to enormous city government deficits. The same is the situation for the State of California where Jerry Brown the new Governor (who was also governor 30 years ago) is cutting deeply into almost all services the state provides and has proposed the elimination of all California Redevelopment Agencies in an effort to balance the budget. But there is a much more profound reason not to expect "full recovery" of the economy if, as almost always implied, that means a return to all those comfortable economic indicators of on-going growth. In this regard there are two big problems: 1.) infinite growth in a finite environment is impossible and 2.) you have to know what to build to thrive and all evidence is that humanity has a very ill-considered and dangerous notion of what to build at this time in history.

Infinite growth is impossible

Our newsletter readers all know that infinite growth in a limited environment is impossible so I’ll mention here, without trying to prove the case, an interesting fact: life depends on energy, 99.97% of which arrives in the thin zone of life on Earth from the sun. Only .025% oozes up from the crust as geothermal energy and the thin slice of .005% comes from tidal energy, cosmic rays, meteor friction with the air and most interestingly I think, residual heat from the originally birth of the planet in accumulating bombardments from asteroids, comets and space dust.

Life, of course, also depends on climate, local or regional soils and/or waters and the interaction between living organisms. Carrying capacity in the case of human presence on Earth has components that multiply one another in a manner similar to that identified by Paul Ehrlich in his famous formula: I = PAT, meaning Impact (on the environment and everything in it) is equal to Population multiplied times Affluence (or consumption) times particular Technology. One technology may be almost totally benign, solar energy for example, and another definitely risky, such as nuclear with its unsolved waste problems and necessity for massive insurance and investment subsidies.

In my opinion Ehrlich is missing the pervasive and powerful role of the built environment or the “land use and infrastructure” pattern our cities, towns and villages embody physically, the anatomy of our cities, towns and villages. Our collective constructed habitat is a gigantic creation at the foundation of human economy and, you might say, a meta-product made up of many other products. The city orders and supports – or confounds – practically all other of our technologies and ways of living in their efficiencies – or inefficiencies. For example, once you build the city designed for the convenience of cars you are stuck for decades with dependence on cars and all their supporting technologies, space and energy demands, climate change and violent accidents. Build a city for people mainly on foot and the technologies that work with that built community include solar electric power plants, bicycles and streetcars and their supporting technologies. I sometimes contract “land use” and “infrastructure” into the one physical thing itself, as “landustructure,” the physical built community itself. Thus I have propose I = PLAT. Coincidentally, “plat” in its common usage means the layout of a set of uses on the land. Impact = Population times the kind of Landustructure they occupy times level of Affluence times particular Technologies.

Presently the “ecological footprint,” a concept that was detailed first in the doctoral dissertation of Mathis Wackernagel working with Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia in 1994, is probably the best measure of human overshoot. Wackernagel as President of Oakland’s Global Footprint Network, with offices also in Zurich and Brussels, keeps track of the worsening degree of overshoot for our whole planet, which at this point is consuming more than 30% more resources than can be utilized and stored by the Earth’s biological systems powered by sun, chlorophyll and soil. In economics terms this might be called using up the planet’s capital while maxing out humanity’s income allotment all at the same time, digging rapidly into the geological energy savings account, the only one that exists. The fossil fuel savings account was accumulated over close to 100 million years during the Carboniferous geological period ending a little less than 300 million years ago. The accumulation was slow – especially relative to the rate at which we are using it up now: at around 500,000 years worth of deposition literally burned up every year. Basically, the biofuels that compete for soil and sun with food and wood, which provides also building materials and paper plus maintains most terrestrial biodiversity, is the only source of energy we can depend on other than direct renewable solar energy and its derivatives, wind and hydropower, and a tiny fraction from geothermal.

To get a sense of the implications of the problem of overshoot in terms of metals and non-metallic minerals, it is instructive to step back and contemplate a powerful image of our situation from the point of view of minerals already mined out of the surface of the earth. The McGraw Hill text book by Fellmann, Getis and Getis, Human Geography – Landscape of Human Activities, Tenth Edition, provides a perspective on that situation that should concern us all.

The extractive industries depend on the exploitation of minerals unevenly distributed in amounts and concentrations determined by past geologic events, not by contemporary market demand. In physically workable and economically usable deposits, minerals constitute only a tiny fraction of the earth’s crust – far less than 1%. That industrialization has proceeded so rapidly and so cheaply is the direct result of an earlier ready availability of rich and accessible deposits of the requisite materials. Economies grew fat by skimming the cream. It has been suggested that should some catastrophe occur to return human cultural levels to a pre-agricultural state, it would be extremely unlikely that humankind ever again could move along the road of industrialization with the resources available for its use. (2008, p. 282)

The fact is that massive quantities of metals and other minerals are in the form people can use, are in circulation right now, in many cases in near 100% pure form. And many of these can be recycled essentially forever. But, the amount per person on average has to be divided by the population of humanity and some is inevitably lost through rust or dispersion to concentrations unrecoverable by any economically available means. As energy resources become more expensive economic availability becomes much more problematic. I call this “the Rust Factor” and it needs to be seen as compounding the problems of “Peak Oil.”

In other words, far from an imminent return to normal growth that politicians and economists are claiming will materialize in a few years if not sooner, what we are more likely to see is better revealed by thinkers who for a long time now have been trying to asses society’s longer term trajectory on the planet. Jonas Salk discussed in his book “Survival of the Wisest” in 1972 the graphing of growth curves representing living organisms in finite environments, including us on Earth.

“S” curve, bell curve, collapse or just permanent downturn?

In broadest terms, Salk compares human impacts on the planet to any living organism living and reproducing in a limited environment with a steady supply of incoming nutrient. A petri dish with a colony of bacteria, for example, starts out with plenty of food per individual bacterium and increases population geometrically as represented by a line on a graph as it reproduces, producing an upwardly accelerating “C” shaped curve. At a certain point resources become more scarce per organism and the environment becomes crowded. It starts filling up with the contamination of the bacteria’s waste. At a certain point the upward “C” shape begins to decelerate in its growth rate and begins to describe an “S” shape. Where the line changes its direction representing accelerating growth to decelerating growth we have the “point of inflection.” The line at that point instead of curving ever more toward the vertical begins to curve to the right and toward the horizontal. Salk suggests that the wise person realizes from an assessment of the major needs and resources of living organisms and the realities of their environment that we need to slow growth before arriving at the point of inflection else we suffer, shall we say, swimming in a crowded pool of scarce food and our own organic and industrial excrement. In theory we could arrive at a high top population in miserable circumstances as the line on the graph takes a horizontal path to the right indefinitely.

In 1972 when his book was published and I had the pleasure of talking with him about it we may well have been at approximately his point of inflection. Obviously we didn’t act as wisely as he might have wanted. It’s one thing for literally billions of people to have been saved from polio with a shot of Salk’s vaccine. It’s quite another for those same to achieve wisdom.

In reality, the “S” curve doesn’t end there in a horizontal trajectory since the steady availability of incoming nutrient – and on the whole Earth 99.97% of that income would be the steady flow of solar energy – may be there, but when maximum population arrives it is not just that the environment is polluted and crowded but that pathologies that began multiplying as the curve approached the top produce conditions in the organisms themselves and in the contaminated soup of their environment such as diseases. And those conditions of “diseases” have their own growth curves and negative cumulative effects that may not kick in until well over the maximum number of our subject organisms are alive and the “S” curve line is topped out and tending toward the horizontal. In the case of us humans, dangerous psychological and social/political reactions are guaranteed as well as actual diseases. This has been historically demonstrated in cases of civilizations that have collapsed throughout history and even prehistory.

But as far as human society is concerned, by far the greatest source of energy in use and which we depend on almost absolutely is not of the steadily arriving solar variety, but fossil fuel reserves topping out sometime right about now. Add that to the delayed action of those independent “diseases” just mentioned that exert their degenerating effect after the ”S” curve tries to top out and move horizontally. Students and Paul Reveres of Peak Oil have been warning us for more than a decade now that peak oil production portends a great deal of dislocation not only by prices rising as oil becomes scarce, as it must sometime as a finite resource, but also because of the degree to which it has permeated our economy in the form of plastics and hundreds of chemicals that turn up in a vast number of products. They suggest a bell curve, rather than an “S” curve, one that rounds over the top and heads down with a rapid drop. Richard Duncan a systems engineer studying Peak Oil has pointed out, however, that peak oil per person was actually passed in 1979 with no dire crisis after that point. Some of the early 2000s peak oil authors expected the beginning of the collapse of absolute quantity of consumption of oil in the 2007-2010 period and perhaps they were right or perhaps society is at a kind of ragged top “plateau” that will slide more slowly away with oil use tapering off more gradually as other energy systems come on line. The only trouble is, other source of energy from the Earth’s surface are either almost as scarce as oil, natural gas in particular, or even worse in terms of climate changing CO2 and pollution levels, coal in particular, or more expensive in terms of energy, technology and clean up needed in procurement, such as shale oil, tar sands and nuclear. The Great Downturn, the Great Recession, the Crash of 2008 or whatever it becomes known as eventually, illustrates that policies (government deregulation on one hand and the personal policies of greed in high investment and speculative circles) and societal factors that are not tracking resources that closely can have immense impacts as well. But perhaps what is important to say at this juncture is simply that even if slow in terms of years the patterns are getting clear in terms of decades and in those time periods our children’s lives are deeply implicated by the slowdown in energy available in a world getting crowded and heating up.

Leaders and the public show few signs we know what to build

It’s not quite that we never ask what to build, it is that we are afraid to look at the question in its fullest implications. Around the world we have no problem in 2011 with looking into building the green building. We can all imagine that – at least for those who are interested. But to inquire into building the right kind of city or town, that affects us all in our neighborhoods, in our everyday transportation situation and in many other aspects of our life styles – that is another thing entirely. I’ll explain this in a little more detail but first I want the reader to look at my chart entitled “The Illustrated Realconomics Chart.”

Studying it you will see solar energy providing almost all the energy available on the planet, both as a flow of arriving energy and as a store in the form of the fossil fuels. The chart shows our dependence on the layer of chlorophyll and soil for making almost all of our useful products, prominently featuring our built environment, as, after all, the built environment is the largest of our creations. You will also see I have placed human economics completely within nature’s economy and have shown the speculators’ economy as a black hole of profit that, whenever economic “bubbles” develop, accrues as gambling winnings for the very few but has zero product or service to the larger economy – and often impoverishes millions of people when the bubble bursts, taking down many unlucky speculators as well.

I have noticed that even high finance economists who deal in derivatives and buy and sell disastrously overpriced subprime mortgages occasionally use the term “the real economy.” Alerted to what it might be and investigating some I concluded they were talking about the economy not of speculative finance that has no physical product or service but the economy that does, the economy of material, energy, strategic thinking and good hard work. Still, that economy may operate as both capitalist and socialist economists have advocated for exploitive drawdown of nature’s resources and thus it is not the real real economics because it is lost in its delusional fantasy of infinite growth and independence from nature. Therefore I’m suggesting constructing an economics that understands that edge between nature’s economics and ours, that thin green and brown line of chlorophyll above and soil below. I’m suggesting we give it a new name to distinguish it even from the human economics seen as the economists’ “real economics” plus “nature’s economics” in their dynamic interrelation – another kind of economics. I’m suggesting “realconomics.”

The Illustrated Realconomics Chart

Economist speak of “real” economics as the economics of productivity, consumption and recycling utilizing Earth’s resources and whatever energy is available to power the system. They do this because often the manipulations of finance and speculation dominates much of economic theory, circulating largely around stock markets and their regulation – or deregulation.

The Realconomics Chart puts forward the idea that there is a natural economics based on the Earth’s minerals and solar energy income translated into useable food and fuel by photosynthesis in plants. Products of photosynthesis are stored in soil fertility, wood, fruits and vegetables and animal protoplasm and some is stored in the Earth’s sediments as fossil fuels.

The human economy taps into the larger natural economy and has its own particular dynamics having to do with resources, invention, capital, labor, planning, interest manipulation, supply of currency, rules of contract and so on.

A subsection of the chart is speculative economics, the economics of physically non-productive investment and return – or betting for win or loss – that may or may not facilitate the larger human economy. The human economy is dependent on the materials and energy flows of the natural economy. And if we can devise an economics that effectively integrates nature’s economics and human economics in one total economics system, I’m proposing calling it “realconomics.” Only if the system includes all crucial parts could it be considered “real,” thus the proposed name.

Chlorophyll in plants creates a thin membrane on the Earth’s surface that transforms solar to chemical energy for practically all organic functions of living things. The chemical residues of the work of this membrane are geologically stored as a one-time supply of energy in the fossil fuels.

To continue with looking at the built environment, when one goes from making buildings more land-conserving and energy-conserving and designed for more positive environmental impact in general, then on to making the city greener, we suddenly get into the issues of changing neighborhoods, confronting automobile dependence, the need to remove buildings if they promote automobile dependence or if they are in the way of restoring ecologically healthy functions such as through opening up small waterways, shorelines, ridgelines and so on. Ultimately the very uncomfortable issue comes up for many people that living in a multi-unit apartment or condominium without a car in a mixed-use center is far healthier in ecological, climate and resource terms than living in a house with a car in a low density residential area. Oddly, living in a house in a high density mixed use neighborhood might be the worst of all since it keeps out many people who could be leading “greener” lives there.

Our leaders and the vast majority, even of climate scientists and environmentalists are averse to looking this problem in the eye. It seems far too daunting but look we must or we simply will not solve the major crises of our times. The Obama Administration in my country doesn’t know what to build. To use an Oakland example again, the Federal Government has funded a “shovel ready” project as part of its economic recovery program to drill a fourth bore through the hills to the east of Oakland and Berkeley – at a cost of $420 million (before cost overrides – who knows what the final figure will be!). This will make four tunnels where there are now three linking the San Francisco Bay Area with the suburbs on the far side of the hills – for cars. This is precisely the wrong time in history to be promoting and serving yet more cars and sprawl development. A half billion dollars could do good instead of damage if it were for ecocity development near an existing rail station or serving development in vitality centers that could be moving toward ecocity design and development.

In simplest terms, we have built a city for cars instead of people. We have done this almost as if we are in automatic, that is, just reacting our way into the future picking up on whatever short-term technological future plops in our laps. Cars have been fun but… Interestingly the world automobile means something that moves (is mobile) on its own (auto). It is automatic in a sense too, just like our reflexive adopting of the automobile with little thought to its implications. The city built for the automobile, we could call the autocity (as compared with the ecocity), meaning not only built for the car but built almost automatically without serious forethought. If you want to know how we got here to climate change, rapid resource depletion, paving farmland and species extinctions, that’s the lion’s share of the explanation.

Even most conscientious promoters of renewable energy, energy conservation, recycling and non-toxics have failed to notice that slice of history, don’t get it. They almost uniformly promote subsidizing electric cars and putting solar electric panels on suburban houses which works to maintain the suburbs we should be moving away from, continues covering farms and killing people and animals in tens of millions of accidents around the world every year. Jobs supporting expansion or perpetuation of the car/sprawl/paving/massively energy consuming autocity shouldn’t be seen as green jobs at all. Their “greenness” is more than nullified by supporting exactly the wrong infrastructure. However if we do know what to build – the ecocity of compact, highly diverse centers from neighborhood centers and district centers to revitalized downtowns as complete small cities in their own right – then we will see people have learned “what to build.” Then we discover we have a much broader definition of “green jobs” which includes the iron worker constructing apartment housing in an area where the preexisting imbalance is toward the commercial, the waitress providing café services, for example, to people who arrive there on foot and so on. Almost any job, in the right location is a green job, whereas jobs in a location supporting the disastrous urban infrastructure that dominates the world and causes many of its worst problems today, is anything but a green job.

So what should we be building? Not only the more compact neighborhood, district and city centers of real diversity but seen in the thoroughly “ecocity” way with high levels of integration, with features and detailing appropriate to the location. The basic principle here is so important it should be seen as one of the foundation stones of realconomics. That is that complex living systems, such as our own human bodies, function best as lean, three-dimensionally arranged entities. Similarly, the healthy city functions best as a lean, energy and land conserving entity that is also essentially three dimensional, not flat and spread out like modern, high energy and high land consuming suburbia. This is because lines of supply and communications are much shorter and quicker when they cross over and below one another instead of scattering out away from one another over large areas. Architect/philosopher Paolo Soleri put forward this paragraph’s observations in the early 1960s – they’ll be relevant and instructional forever.

This notion of “leanness” through compact complexity, that is, great variety well organized close together, is not only what is conventionally considered more “efficient” it also means there is more energy and material, land and time left over after essential maintenance activity to relish for relaxing, more time and energy for creative personal or collective activity. The city of health and options is the one that doesn’t trap the person on his or her way to work in a traffic jam or force the consumption of 500 gallons of gasoline a year, typical in the United States, but let’s the “commuter” get to work by just bicycling or walking a short distance. The three-dimensional lay out of the city is that basic – and such physical organization is common to all complex living things including the living (as compared to dying or killing) city.

If we can understand the city as a three-dimensional living organism and see that as a major insight for a realconomics of true sustainability we can suddenly see that many architectural features of clusters of buildings appear as if by magic from that realization. Suddenly bridges between buildings roof-to-roof or terrace-to-terrace and mid block ground level passageways such as cozy alleys, sky lit hallways and grand gallerias, make perfect sense for high pedestrian permeability. Rooftop gardens, shops and restaurants linked by those bridges and rooftop parks and promenades, multi-story solar greenhouses and exterior glass elevators all become part of the rich architectural palate people have to date barely noticed. You, dear readers are the exception of course, hearing this list of ecocity features from my many times over the years. When we actually try them out and put them all together I believe we’ll only then realize what a powerful and healthy finally complete design for living actually is.

Getting building

Now that we have a better idea of what to build, how to get started? Ecovillages in the country have the opportunity to express these ecocity features and take the lead if they feature the kind of elements mentioned in the paragraph immediately above. They would have to involve bridge-linked buildings of probably seven or more stories to fully illustrate full-bodied ecocity design and would have to relate to adjacent agriculture and natural habitat restoration. Attached food producing solar greenhouses ascending part of the sunny side: absolutely necessary.

Such projects could grow up from a neighborhood centers too. This in the ecocity movement we call an “integral project” or an “ecocity fractal,” which is a fraction of what could be a whole ecocity with all essential parts and functions – housing, work, commerce, learning, farming, restoration of nature and connection to other centers with bicycle or rail routes – present and well arranged. Understanding the “full spectrum” or “complete” center in this way informs us about the components of the ecocity and fills out the notion of what we need to build for a truly sustainable natural and human economics, my proposed realconomics.

“Knowing what to build” means we also know that there can be plenty of work for everyone. The ecocity foundation of realconomics provides a very full and vibrant economy even if it is an economy of a city shrinking in footprint and total size, that is, actual size in terms of volume of physical built infrastructure for any particular population, and shrinking in terms of quantity of land, materials and energy needed for its construction and maintenance. This is a paper about economics of an ecological nature so it is highly relevant to point out that the Great Depression was put to an end by Keynesian economics in the hands of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration between 1932 and 1945. Struggling to figure out what to do about more than two years of a depression getting deeper and deeper when the new president took over, Roosevelt began experimenting with dozens of initiatives to enliven the economy. Things actually got worse for a while. His administration followed the deficit spending formula of John Maynard Keynes putting everyone to work on clearly defined projects in not only new infrastructure construction – airports, hospitals, bridges, highways, dams, post offices, libraries and so on – but ecological projects such as reforestation and soil reclamation. Conservative capitalists, whose hands-off government philosophy let economic conditions sink rapidly from the Crash of 1929 until the Roosevelt years, considered the new president leading the country to socialism and many did not believe in his attempted solutions. While good projects were happening, they weren’t being embraced completely whole-heartedly. But when the Second World War started, there was no doubt at all what needed to be built, for better or worse, and the whole country went into gear behind the war effort. Deficit spending, targeted for a particular outcome – victory over fascism and slavery – was seen as a strategic investment in future prosperity and tapping into that prosperity at a later time to pay down the expenses of winning the war.

It was perhaps the largest experiment in application of an economic theory with the most clear lesson – if anyone bothers to pay attention – that we’ve had in a century or more or maybe ever. What it means for us now is that if we could decide we need to build the ecocity civilization and invest in it vigorously we could win this war against our planet by turning it around and making it instead a war to save our planet. What we most need then is realconomics and its physical manifestation: ecocities.

The Big Five

Alas, that is not enough! Our cities, towns and villages are collectively the largest thing our species creates but then we are too large ourselves. That is, human population is enormous and without massive use of energy and material, probably even in the context of an ecocity future, it would in all likelihood be far more than a healthy ecology of real diversity on the planet could tolerate. I see, in fact, five big items we have to deal with, all of which most people are very resistant to facing. Much less do many seem to be able to summons the courage, commitment and personal energy to engage realistically with good hard work. To me they seem to be lacking a clear idea of what is needed and an outline of how to proceed. Maybe that would summons the courage and hard work. This leads to the following thinking:

Axiom 1.

The City is the engine of prosperity.

This is the gigantic economics lesson I’ve been writing about to this point in this paper. And the ecocity is the type of city that contributes to soil and biodiversity buildup as well as prosperity while demonstrating how the city can grow smaller in land and energy consumption. By the way, in a world stuffed with computers that get more valuable as they get smaller per function, this should sound about as normal as things can get, and a very good idea.

Axiom 2.

The Big Five

If we wish to build a healthy economics, there are “Five Big Areas of Action” we need to engage which society has been avoiding, of which the built environment is one. They are:

Physical actions

1. Deal with overpopulation

2. Reshape the agriculture/diet nexus to be far less land and energy consuming

3. Build ecocities

Detailing the above two not already covered in this paper is material for another paper.

But we can see at a glance that in dealing with religious dogma, family habits, old age security, education and reproductive rights for women and business prejudices for maximum growth we are up against a very large problem in trying to solve the population problem. Yet we need to do this and can, reducing human numbers gradually, steadily and peacefully to a level where each of us in some future time can thrive in a world where nature thrives too. In addition it should be stressed that the idea of infinite growth translates into an economics absurdity that the larger the population on a limited planet the more for each of us, “the more of us the larger our slice of the pie.” (Could economists really mean this?!) The reverse is closer to the truth, “the fewer of us the more for each,” down to at least, enough of us to provide for the variety of experience for genuinely full, creative, compassionate lives. We need in other words workers, organizers of work, teachers, artists and scientists for insight and knowledge, children for inspiration and continuity of our species into the future and so on, population enough for a truly prosperous human presence. We don’t know the best approximate number because we have yet to honestly address the situation, but seven going on nine or ten billion?!…

Regarding the agricultural/diet nexus we have another enormous problem that starts with modern agriculture taking up so much land. This is the only enterprise humanity engages in that is on a scale comparable to building cities, towns and villages. Agriculture is different in that it takes place in a thin layer in two dimensions rather than in three-dimensional volume. Even before its ecologically damaging chemicals and massive demand for energy is factored in, it eliminates vast areas of natural habitat that is needed if we want long-term healthy biodiversity on this planet. The answer is largely to move toward organic agriculture and move away from diets heavy in meats.

Reshaping the autocity impacts agriculture in two very significant ways right of the top. First, reversing sprawl would liberate millions of acres presently covered in concrete and asphalt for the cars, and second, more and more farmland is being appropriated for fueling cars instead of feeding people. Says Lester Brown, if all the farmland in the United States were dedicated to biofuel production for the country’s cars, there would be none left for food production for people. In fact there would not be even enough for all the cars. That’s how much energy a 3,000 pound object accelerating to and decelerating from ten times the speed of a person consumes. Another way of looking at it, filling the typical car’s gas tank once takes about as much agricultural land for biofuel production as feeding a person for an entire year.

Mental actions among the Big Five

4. Act on generosity, invest in ecological health and peace via the above three

This means paying taxes, seriously graduated income taxes, and being, as all democracies are rightly said to be required to be, ever vigilant to prevent corruption in both government and business. The percept also has another dimension: that we try much harder to put an end to violent conflict as in the stealing and killing in war and wasting of vast treasure in preparing for war. That is the absolute antithesis of generosity.

5. Education strongly emphasizing the above four

Axiom 3.

If we want to actually engage building the physical solutions to our growing economic debacle it is instructive to notice what I call the “Three Sacred Cows” of US Capitalism. If you want to build anything you have to go to where the money actually is. And where it actually is happens to be is 1.) hoarded by the super rich, 2.) locked into military spending and 3.) invested in the (presently very badly) built environment. Those are the three big areas of the resource called money and areas constantly generating more and more waste that instead could be turned to our salvation in crucial times.

About the first, which has everything to do with generosity, #4. among the Five Big Ones, it’s hard to tax the rich with all their power to buy politicians. But by law or persuasion and conscience of the sort that occasionally produces real philanthropy, it must be done if we have any hope of building our way out of economic, I’d say, realconomic collapse. Serious graduated income tax with no loopholes would solve many problems. Unfortunately people are too categorically fixated – dare we not call them stupid – to lump the super rich in with the middle class and the financially more challenged under the slogan “no more taxes!” This is a cry that makes no sense at all when a few million people have thousands of times what those billions on the lower rungs of society have. The question is tax whom? If the vast majority can’t figure out that tax breaks for the rich are not in their interest, one is tempted to say they are fools enough to deserve financial ruin. Except that at this point in history when we need to spend money on building right to solve deadly problems, the children of those who can’t figure out this simple math, all the other species, and no doubt even the children of the rich, are the ones who will suffer catastrophically.

The military budget – colossal! We all know we need to work on conflict resolution, honest diplomacy and cooperation instead of lying for advantage and using secrecy and competition to the point of killing one another and overrunning each other’s countries. We all know it would help getting to know and appreciate one another better. I won’t undertake here how to do that, but I will suggest that lower budgets for “defense” would release salvation-scale investments if we knew what to build, and I’m claiming this paper knows what to build.

As to the automobile city infrastructure getting in the way, remember the misallocation of money for the Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Bore and go from there: not just billions but trillions of dollars for building nothing less that a thriving future as an alternative to collapse.

Axiom 4. Work Hard – China is proving it works.

That is the last very basic word of guidance and requirement in my realconomics list, as if it really needed to be said, though people don’t like thinking about this one, another very big issue, either. But hard work really works.'

The Natural Debt Crisis: Learning to Live Within Our Planet's Means

Excerpt from TIME Magazine, 22 February 2011

'Ask any Republican — from the Speaker of the House to a local sheriff — what the biggest problem facing the country is today and you're sure to get the same answer: Debt. Conservatives believe a public debt of $14 trillion and growing is crippling the economy and condemning future generations to penury. In Wisconsin, new Republican governor Scott Walker says that a $137 million deficit leaves him no choice but to force public unions in the state to accept drastic benefits reductions and curtailed bargaining rights — a stance that has brought tens of thousands of protesters to the streets of Madison. In Congress, the Republican-controlled House has passed a budget that would slash $60 billion in government spending, most of it from discretionary programs. "We're broke," Speaker John Boehner told Meet the Press last week. "It's time to get serious about how we're spending the nation's money."...

Now, I'm not a political reporter — thankfully — but I've heard that sort of rhetoric before, this warning that we're living beyond our means, running up a tremendous debt that will one day cause catastrophe. It's the call of the environmentalist, and it was on display just a few blocks away from the Capitol in Washington this weekend at the annual summit of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Speaker after speaker took the podium in stuffy halls around the Walter E. Washington Convention Center to warn that we had exceeded the planet's carrying capacity — with too many people, too much pollution and too much carbon dioxide — and that unless we cut back drastically on consumption, our world would collapse, and us with it. "Right now we're living at about 1.5 planets' worth of consumption," says Jason Clay, senior vice president for market transformation at the World Wildlife Fund. "We are living beyond what is sustainable. That can't go on forever."

Even the terms we use to describe our two debts are similar, as the language used in finance bleeds over into ecology. Conservationists like to talk about "natural capital" — the stuff provided by the planet that underpins prosperity. Clean air, clean water, soil, forests, fish, biodiversity — this is the natural capital in our balance sheet, and without it there would be no life, let alone business. One study done in the mid-1990s estimated that the total value of such ecosystem services was approximately $33 trillion — considerably more than the global GDP at the time. The business of the planet is the environment.

If we act sustainably — if we live within our means, as conservatives might put it — our natural capital will regenerate and sustain us, like a bank account delivering interest. But we're not living within our means — not even close...

Admittedly, there are economists who argue that these fears are overblown, that humanity has been able to keep growing through technological innovation that has multiplied the carrying capacity of the planet. There were doomsayers in the 1970s who predicted imminent global starvation; instead, we've thrived economically, pulling hundreds of millions of human beings out of poverty. That's exactly how most conservatives talk about the natural debt, if they talk about it all. We'll keep growing, keep innovating our way out of anything nature throws in our path. And if that doesn't work, there's always divine intervention. "God is not capricious," Minnesota Republican Mike Beard said recently. "He's given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything."

But the truly scary possibility is that the collapse could come quite suddenly, after what may seem to be a long period of global prosperity. It would only be in retrospect, after the fall, that we would see that what we thought was success was built on eating into our capital, like a consumer maxing out his credit cards to buy a second house. The global rise in food prices, which have hit their highest level globally in several decades, might be an early sign that the agricultural system that sustains (some more than others) nearly 7 billion people with the help of fertilizers and irrigation may be hitting its limits. "When the crisis hits, we'll act rapidly, but by then it might be too late for hundreds of millions or even billions of people," says William Rees, an ecologist at UBC.

What's amazing to me, though, is that the very politicians who are so worried about the public debt — and who want deep spending cuts now to save our future, whatever the cost — utterly dismiss the idea that we could face an equal crisis of natural debt. Politicians like Boehner and Ryan order us to tighten our belts immediately, but they utterly deny the climate and resource crisis the world faces. In fact, the Republicans in Congress are going well beyond simple denial — they're now using their budget to erode America's ability to prepare for that very scary future.

The Republican budget would cut the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) budget by one-third — $3 billion — and would prevent the agency from setting any limits on CO2 and a number of other pollutants. It would eliminate U.S. funding for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — which would save all of $12.5 million. It would cut Department of Energy budgets that promoted renewable energy by $1.7 billion — a 23% reduction at a time when the U.S. is in a clean-energy race with China. The National Science Foundation budget would be cut by $395.5 million. "This is probably the single most irresponsible bill I have seen either Chamber of Congress pass in the more than 20 years I have been in Washington," wrote Dan Lashof, the director of the Natural Resource Defense Council's climate center.

To which the Republicans would respond, We face an unprecedented fiscal crisis, and tough choices have to be made. All right — but if you believe public debt is such a potential catastrophe that it must be defused now, no matter the short-term pain, it only seems right to take our natural debt just as seriously. Either way, we're broke — and it's time we acted like it.'

Hong Kong Ecological Footprint Report

Download the pdf

Sourced from Global Footprint Network news, 21 January 2011

'Hong Kong residents are living beyond the Earth’s means, according to a report released Sunday by Global Footprint Network and WWF.

As a society that relies extensively on resources from abroad, Hong Kong is particularly vulnerable to growing global constraints on resources, the report says. But in spite of its unsustainable consumption, there are a number of readily available measures that would enable Hong Kong to reduce its pressure on ecological services, and enable it to achieve a one-planet Ecological Footprint.

The Hong Kong Ecological Footprint Report, which WWF plans to issue every two years, aims to provide a benchmark to track Hong Kong residents’ shifts in consumption, from which trends can be identified and actions proposed.

The 2010 report reveals that if everyone in the world lived a similar lifestyle to that of Hong Kong residents, we would need the equivalent of 2.2 Earths. In 2007, the most recent year for which data are available, Hong Kong residents had an average per person Ecological Footprint of 4.0 global hectares (hectares with world-average productivity). This level of demand is more than double the 1.8 gha that was available per person globally in 2007 to produce renewable resources and absorb CO2.

“Unsustainable demand on a global scale means that countries and regions such as Hong Kong will find it increasingly harder to meet their resource needs simply by relying on ecological services from abroad,” said Dr. Wackernagel. “The more it can provide a high quality of life for its residents on a smaller Ecological Footprint, Hong Kong will not only address global risks, but more directly, it will make its economy more resilient facing the future.”

The largest portion of Hong Kong’s Ecological Footprint—60 percent—comes from carbon dioxide emissions. Hong Kong’s carbon Footprint per person has grown 24-fold since 1962. While 26 percent of its carbon Footprint comes from CO2 emitted from within Hong Kong itself (for example, from vehicles and electricity use), the majority, 74 percent is embodied in goods and services produced abroad. Some 58 million tonnes of CO2 are emitted elsewhere to supply imports to Hong Kong.

Other major factors in Hong Kong's resource demand are seafood and timber products, which are mostly from unsustainable sources.

But there are reasons for optimism. In contrast to the rest of China (where the Footprint has been increasing), Hong Kong’s Ecological Footprint per person has declined 25 percent and leveled off since it peaked in the late 1990s. While it is no doubt benefiting from some increased efficiencies in the city, the decline appears largely due to vagaries in the trade of embodied carbon of goods and natural resources, and of cropland products. The decrease is most likely not the result of sustainable development policies.

One key way Hong Kong could reduce its Footprint is by boosting the market for sustainable goods. “Consumers can demand that the seafood and timber products we consume are produced sustainably,” said Dr Andy Cornish, Director, Conservation at WWF-Hong Kong. “In this way we can leverage Hong Kong’s buying power and act as a regional catalyst to drive natural resource producers towards sustainability. In turn, this will create an increased and reliable supply of sustainable products for Hong Kong.”

With 70 percent of the average carbon Footprint coming from household consumption (as opposed to businesses or public infrastructure and services), individual choices have a key role to play. The report calls on Hong Kong to reduce excessive, inefficient and wasteful consumption. It also calls for transforming its modest agriculture, aquaculture and fisheries industries to minimize their impact to the environment.

“Solutions are readily available, and Hong Kong is a city used to reinventing itself,” the report concludes. “Reducing Hong Kong’s Ecological Footprint per person by half would approximate the biocapacity that is available globally and, therefore, make it a logical and sustainable objective.'

The Tyranny of Entitlement - Derrick Jensen

Reposted in full from Orion Magazine, January 2011

'I’m continually stunned by how many seemingly sane people believe you can have infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Perpetual economic growth and its cousin, limitless technological expansion, are beliefs so deeply held by so many in this culture that they often go entirely unquestioned. Even more disturbing is the fact that these beliefs are somehow seen as the ultimate definition of what it is to be human: perpetual economic growth and limitless technological expansion are what we do.

Some of those who believe in perpetual growth are out-and-out nut jobs, like the economist and former White House advisor Julian Simon, who said, “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.” And showing that, when it comes to U.S. economic policies, insanity is never out of season, are yet more nut jobs, like Lawrence Summers, who has served as chief economist at the World Bank, U.S. secretary of the treasury, president of Harvard, and as President Obama’s director of the National Economic Council, and who said, “There are no...limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind at any time in the foreseeable future...The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit is a profound error.”

Others are a bit more nuanced in their nut-jobbery. They may acknowledge that, yes, physical limits might possibly exist, but they also believe that if you just slap the word sustainable in front of the phrase “economic growth,” then you can still somehow have continued growth on a finite planet, perhaps through so-called “soft” or “service” or “high-tech” economies, or through nifty “green” innovations like a really neat nanotech gizmo that can be woven into your clothes and when you dance it generates enough electricity to power your iPod, ignoring the facts that people still need to eat, that humans have overshot carrying capacity and are systematically destroying the natural world, and that even something as groovy as an iPod requires mining, industrial, and energy infrastructures, all of which are functionally unsustainable.

Alongside the nut jobs, there are an awful lot of people who probably just don’t think about it: they simply absorb the perspective of the newscasters who say, “Economic growth, good; economic stagnation, bad.” And of course if you care more about the economic system than life on the planet, this is true. If, however, you care more about life than the economic system, it is not quite so true, because this economic system must constantly increase production to grow, and what, after all, is production? It is the conversion of the living to the dead, the conversion of living forests into two-by-fours, living rivers into stagnant pools for generating hydroelectricity, living fish into fish sticks, and ultimately all of these into money. And what, then, is gross national product? It is a measure of this conversion of the living to the dead. The more quickly the living world is converted into dead products, the higher the GNP. These simple equations are complicated by the fact that when GNP goes down, people often lose jobs. No wonder the world is getting killed.

Once a people have committed (or enslaved) themselves to a growth economy, they’ve pretty much committed themselves to a perpetual war economy, because in order to maintain this growth, they will have to continue to colonize an ever-wider swath of the planet and exploit its inhabitants. I’m sure you can see the problem this presents on a finite planet. But in the short run, there is good news for those committed to a growth economy (and bad news for everyone else), which is that by converting your landbase into weapons (for example, cutting down trees to build warships), you gain a short-term competitive advantage over those peoples who live sustainably, and you can steal their land and overuse it to fuel your perpetual-growth economy. As for those whose land you’ve stolen, well, you can either massacre these newly conquered peoples, enslave them, or (most often forcibly) assimilate them into your growth economy. Usually it’s some combination of all three. The massacre of the bison, to present just one example, was necessary to destroy the Plains Indians’ traditional way of life and force them to at least somewhat assimilate (and become dependent upon the growth economy instead of the land for their very lives). The bad news for those committed to a growth economy is that it’s essentially a dead-end street: once you’ve overshot your home’s carrying capacity, you have only two choices: keep living beyond the means of the planet until your culture collapses; or proactively elect to give up the benefits you gained from the conquest in order to save your culture.

A perpetual-growth economy is not only insane (and impossible), it is also by its very essence abusive, by which I mean that it’s based on the same conceit as more personal forms of abuse. It is, in fact, the macroeconomic enshrinement of abusive behavior. The guiding principle of abusive behavior is that the abuser refuses to respect or abide by limits or boundaries put up by the victim. As Lundy Bancroft, former codirector of Emerge, the nation’s first therapeutic program for abusive men, writes, “Entitlement is the abuser’s belief that he has a special status and that it provides him with exclusive rights and privileges that do not apply to his partner. The attitudes that drive abuse can largely be summarized by this one word.”

The relevance of this word applies on the larger social scale. Of course humans are a special species to whom a wise and omnipotent God has granted the exclusive rights and privileges of dominion over this planet that is here for us to use. And of course even if you subscribe to the religion of Science instead of Christianity, humans possess special intelligence and abilities that grant us exclusive rights and privileges to work our will on the world that is still here for us to use. Growth economies are essentially unchecked and will push past any boundaries set up by anyone other than the perpetrators: certainly the fact that indigenous cultures already are living on this or that piece of ground has never stopped those in power from expanding their economy; nor is the death of the oceans stopping their exploitation; nor is the heating of the planet stopping the exploitation; nor is the grinding poverty of the dispossessed.

And the truth is, you cannot talk abusers out of their behavior. Perpetrators of domestic violence are among the most intractable of all who commit violence, so intractable, in fact, that in 2000 the United Kingdom removed funding for therapy sessions designed to treat men guilty of domestic violence (putting the money instead into shelters and other means of keeping women safe from their attackers). Lundy Bancroft also says this: “An abuser doesn’t change because he feels guilty or gets sober or finds God. He doesn’t change after seeing the fear in his children’s eyes or feeling them drift away from him. It doesn’t suddenly dawn on him that his partner deserves better treatment. Because of his self-focus, combined with the many rewards he gets from controlling you, an abuser changes only when he feels he has to, so the most important element in creating a context for change in an abuser is placing him in a situation where he has no other choice.”

How do we stop the abusers who perpetrate a perpetual-growth economy? Seeing oiled pelicans and burned sea turtles won’t move them to stop. Nor will hundred-degree days in Moscow. We can’t stop them by making them feel guilty. We can’t stop them by appealing to them to do the right thing. The only way to stop them is to make it so they have no other choice.'

7 Billion - National Geographic Magazine

...although the perpetual use of non-Western faces to illustrate population is not telling the whole story...if those of us in high-consuming nations wish to keep consuming at the rate we do, perhaps it is we who are over-populated?

Sourced from YouTube, 27 December 2010

The Economics of Happiness

Sourced from the producers of The Economics of Happiness documentary, International Society for Ecology & Culture (ISEC).



'Economic globalization has led to a massive expansion in the scale and power of big business and banking. It has also worsened nearly every problem we face: fundamentalism and ethnic conflict; climate chaos and species extinction; financial instability and unemployment. There are personal costs too. For the majority of people on the planet life is becoming increasingly stressful. We have less time for friends and family and we face mounting pressures at work.

The Economics of Happiness describes a world moving simultaneously in two opposing directions. On the one hand, government and big business continue to promote globalization and the consolidation of corporate power. At the same time, all around the world people are resisting those policies, demanding a re-regulation of trade and finance—and, far from the old institutions of power, they’re starting to forge a very different future. Communities are coming together to re-build more human scale, ecological economies based on a new paradigm – an economics of localization.'

UN Development Programme Adds Footprint to Suite of Indicators

Sourced from Global Footprint Network newsletter, 8 December 2010

'Sustainability is an intrinsic part of people’s ability to live satisfying lives according to the United Nations Development Programme—which is why, for the first time it has included the Ecological Footprint in its annual Human Development Report.

The Human Development Report reveals countries’ latest rankings according to the Human Development Index, a measure that scores countries according to attainment of health, education and income. But, the report explains, “human development is much broader. Empowerment, equity and sustainability are among the intrinsic parts of people’s freedom to lead lives they have reason to value.” The report points out that Norway ranks highest in terms of HDI, but consumes 3.1 times what would be consistent with global sustainability (based on global biocapacity) while the US, which ranks 4th in HDI, consumes 4.5 times that of global biocapacity.'

Japan's Ecological Footprint

Sourced from Global Footprint Network newsletter, 8 December 2010

'A report on Japan’s Ecological Footprint, which identifies leading areas of ecological demand and offers policy recommendations to address them, has generated considerable interest in the country. The Japan Ecological Footprint Report was released this August in Tokyo to an audience of journalists and environment ministry representatives. Findings have been covered by more than 50 print and online news outlets, including a feature in Asahi, a daily newspaper with a circulation of 8.22 million.

Among the report’s findings (based on 2009 National Footprint Accounts data):

Japan’s Ecological Footprint in 2006 was 4.1 gha per capita, about one and a half times the global average, placing it within the highest 25 percent of countries.

Compared with the four countries closest geographically, only Russia’s Footprint exceeds Japan’s (by a small margin). Japan’s per capita Footprint is 10 percent higher than South Korea’s and more than double that of China. However, Japan is the only country in the group to have shown a significant decrease in the Footprint over the last decade. If trends continue, 2010 may well see South Korea’s Footprint surpass that of Japan.

Japan’s production of fisheries products exceeds the available biocapacity from Japan’s continental shelf by more than a factor of three. This strongly suggests that Japan may be at risk of collapsing its fisheries, and with effects that will be felt worldwide.

Japan’s demand on forest products is well within the rate of what its forests can regenerate. At the same time, it places a high demand for wood products on countries that are experiencing deforestation, such as Indonesia. Replacing imports with domestic supply would have positive international impacts.

Read the report in English (15 MB download)

Read the report in Japanese (18 MB download)'

Why Self-Interest Can Save the Climate Debate (And Waiting for Consensus Might Waste Your Future)

Great words from Global Footprint Network Founder & Ecological Footprint co-creator Mathis Wackernagel

Reposted in full from Footprint Network News, 10 November 2010

'As world leaders prepare for the next round of climate talks in Cancun, it is time to put to right a misperception that for too long has shackled our approach to this vital issue. The error is simply this: Taking action is a burden some nations will need to shoulder for the good of the world – rather than the single best action each nation can take to further its own long-term interests.

The question by governments of “What’s in it for me?” has up to now been a major stumbling block to international agreement. But if leaders and their administrations truly understood the underlying resource dynamics, they would have the exact opposite approach. They would see it is in their self-interest to act quickly and aggressively, whatever the actions taken by their global neighbors. In fact, each country’s own actions will become more urgent and valuable the less others do.

Why would it be in any individual country’s interest to address a problem whose costs are ultimately born by all of humanity? Consider the nature of the carbon problem.

Climate change, first and foremost, is a consequence of high fossil fuel dependence. Even though climate change is a global problem, the fossil fuel dependence that contributes to it carries growing economic risks for the emitting country. Working our way out of this addiction takes time, and the longer we wait to radically rethink and retool our societies, the less chance we will have to alter course.

But there is another important piece of the picture beyond fossil fuel. Climate change is not an issue in isolation, but rather, a symptom of a broader challenge: humanity’s systematic overuse of the planet’s finite resources.

Our natural systems can only generate a finite amount of raw materials (fish, trees, crops, etc.) and absorb a finite amount of waste (such as carbon dioxide emissions). Global Footprint Network quantifies this rate of output through a measure called biocapacity. Biocapacity is as measurable as GDP – and, ultimately, at least as significant, as access to basic living resources underlies every economic activity a society can undertake.

Up to now, we have treated biocapacity as an essentially limitless flow, to the point that our demand for nature’s services now outstrips biocapacity by 50 percent, according to Global Footprint Network’s latest research . This approach has been an integral part of the climate crisis, as with every hectare of forest we clear for raw materials, built-up land or other land-uses (such as grazing or cropland), we reduce the Earth’s ability to absorb CO2 and regulate climate.
Ecological trends suggest, however that we will soon be facing another crunch: biocapacity.

Consider this: No matter which way the future goes, whether we avoid climate disaster or we continue with business as usual, increasing consumption, population and CO2 emission, the pressure on biocapacity will escalate— and having access to biocapacity will earn ever higher premiums.

The Climate Accord vs. the Runaway Scenario

The US President, European heads of state and other G-20 leaders have affirmed the need to stay within a 2º Celsius climate alteration (at a minimum) to avoid widespread calamity. Some climate models point to a 350 ppm limit for CO2 in the atmosphere in order to achieve this – less than the carbon concentration we have today. Yet even if we aim for the more conservative target of 450 ppm, this would call for shifting out of fossil fuel, and a wholesale restructuring of the way we produce and use energy. But hardly anybody admits this mathematical truth.

Even with significant development of wind and solar power technologies, if we want to have the amount and ease of choice around energy availability we have enjoyed up to now, we will need to rely to some extent on fuels from biological sources. Add to that the resources needed to provide for a growing population, a swelling middle class, and the two billion alive today who lack enough to meet basic needs. It is clear, even with a strong climate accord, biocapacity will be under pressure as never before.

And what if we don’t succeed in heading off climate change? Biocapacity will become even more vulnerable and, in all likelihood, subject to staggering declines. With crops failing and drought widespread, the failure of international cooperation to have met the climate challenge will set a poor stage for negotiating the distribution of dwindling resources. Those countries whose economies depend most on access to massive amounts of resources – especially resources from abroad – will find themselves particularly vulnerable.

Winning – or Losing – the Earth Race

In a world facing a biocapacity crunch, the winning economic strategies will be preserving biocapacity on the one hand, and reducing demand for it on the other. And here’s a bit of good news: those also happen to be leading strategies for minimizing climate change.

Many believe the race to develop green technology – what columnist Thomas Friedman has dubbed the “Earth Race”— will bring the spoils of the future to the early movers and adopters, and secure innovative nations and enterprises with positions of advantage on the global stage. This is the carrot pushing green innovation. But there is an even more powerful stick. Those countries and cities trapped in energy- and resource-intensive infrastructure will not be able to adapt in time to meet the emerging resource constraints.

In the face of a failure to reach agreement at Cancun, individual countries will have to do more to curb their resource demand in order to assure their long-term stability and security. The lack of agreement won’t give us a break from taking action—on the contrary, it will force us to work significantly harder.

If our leaders understood this, the discussion at global climate talks would take an entirely new direction. We are not asking leaders to go to Cancun simply ready to do what’s needed for other nations. Rather, we are asking them to come to the table mindful of what they must do to responsibly serve their own.'