Sustainability (Is) Central
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Tagged: climate change, denial, economic growth, environment, logic, market, population, response
- This topic has 8 replies, 4 voices, and was last updated 10 years, 11 months ago by William Dowling.
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October 15, 2013 at 12:01 am #5999Erika GavenusMember
Please use this space to discuss Graham H. Pyke’s MAHB Blog post Sustainability (Is) Central. Click on the links below to read more.
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October 15, 2013 at 6:32 am #6091Dave GardnerParticipant
I’m glad to see activity picking up at MAHB, and Graham Pyke’s post is very useful. I’ll be lauding it later this week at http://www.growthbiasbusted.org. Two tiny nits, in my view, about the 3rd paragraph from the end, which in no way detract from the value of this post:
1. It’s not that “there is little incentive to do the right thing.” There is PLENTY of incentive. Access to food, water, and a comfortable climate – survival, even – are big incentives. What’s lacking is a rational assessment and response on the individual level.
2. Likewise, I don’t believe the threats are “external” to the market-based system. They are very real and will impact the system. The problem, in my view, is again one of human perception, compounded by how slowly the threats unfold and how dispersed. They will without a doubt have profound impacts on every business.
Finally, I believe good information is an essential part of the solution, but it appears that is not adequate. I support the concept and project being announced, but I believe MAHB members need to also continue work to understand the emotional and psychosocial mechanisms that are also at work here. After all, as Graham Pyke points out, we’ve had the information for a long time, and done virtually nothing with it. Our worship of economic growth has trumped reacting rationally to the information we’ve had.
Dave GardnerDirector of the documentaryGrowthBusters: Hooked on Growth -
October 15, 2013 at 7:08 am #6093Les KaufmanMember
Thanks to UTS and Stanford for stepping forward on this.
A step that we can take to address the third goal of building sustainability science, is to network the research teams actively engaged in this area. One important subdiscipline is the search for lawfulness in coupled human and natural systems (CHANS), supported by the development of analytical tools for scenario analysis. We have created the Landscape Analysis Partnership for Ecosystem Services- a useful, though still loose, network among four teams practicing spatially explicit analysis of ecosystem service flows and tradeoffs. These are based at Boston University (using the MIMES platform); Stanford (NatCap project, InVEST); UCSB (Bren School, ESTA); and Conservation International (Betty and Gordon Moore Center for Ecosystem Science and Economics, ARIES). The institutions happen to be US, but their allied practitioners are all over the world. I suggest that LAPES grow in vigor and function as a working group in association with MAHB.
What minimum number of other working groups could we add to constitute a core virtual facility for sustainability science? I wish we still had Steve Schneider here, but I think we can still manage on our own.
Les Kaufman, CHANS Task Force lead, Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future, Boston University and Conservation International
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October 16, 2013 at 12:25 am #6095Erika GavenusMember
On behalf of Paul Harris:
“If people are left to their own devices, there is little incentive to ‘do the right thing’, thus alleviating any broad-scale threat, and often much reason to ignore the threat altogether.”
I think this reveals a fundamental flaw in thinking and advice from experts. Why is there little incentive? All the evidence shows that living simpler lives, consuming less “stuff” and spending more time socializing is what makes people happier and healthier. Aren’t health and happiness incentives? What’s more important? To be sure, looking at the problem this way doesn’t fit the obsession with economic growth, but it can lead to growth in happiness that is far less harmful to the environment. If even experts don’t see this, can’t escape the consume-to-grow paradigm themselves, how can we possibly expect everyone else to do it? Maybe what is necessary is to first get the environmental experts to change the way they live, individually, and then to advocate for this — rather than expecting governments, which are locked into the growth model, to solve provide solutions. (Of course we need governments, too.)
-Paul Harris
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October 16, 2013 at 12:27 am #6097Erika GavenusMember
On behalf of Tim Hicks:
I find myself questioning the concept of sustainability as a state in which we have existed in the past and that we have somehow lost. It is, rather, perhaps the case that humans have never lived sustainably but have always drawn from the resource bank account at a rate greater than renewal. The problem has only become starkly apparent at this point in history when the account balance, so large to begin with, has become sufficiently depleted.
If this is the case, then we will find ourselves barking up the wrong tree looking for answers to the problem with an inaccurate perception of the situation as it is and its causes. In this understanding, sustainability is not under threat. Sustainable behavior, in this understanding, has never been a species characteristic over the course of millennia. With this understanding, that we have begun to see the consequences of our millennial-old patterns of behavior during the past and brief 60 or so years and have not changed those behaviors is not cause for surprise.
Within the system we call “nature”, unsustainable behavior is “corrected” by definition. The point beyond the availability of continued deficit “cash flow” (resource contribution) is limiting. The behavior must end, typically with a reduction of population.
We seek an alternative to the systemic governor. That is, we seek an internal adjustment to patterns of behavior that have been species defining. Not an easy shift. Such an adjustment will require incentives and structural constraints. Those in positions to institute effective incentives and constraints will have to perceive and believe, or, ultimately, experience the problem as worse than the solution, the alternative to action as worse than the remedy. It appears that we haven’t quite reached that point, though the equation is daily being recalculated. Efforts are being made. This is not a turn-on-a-dime circumstance, even as the point of no-return bankruptcy (however that is defined and might look) presses upon us.
Some research suggests that more information is not sufficient or effective. Decision makers face economic and political pressures that counter bold and wise action. Individual and group actors behave in response to perceived self-interest, geographically and temporally local. Nevertheless, more information and continuing educational efforts seem necessary. All efforts to shift humanity’s behavioral patterns will contribute to whatever change will happen as the future unfolds. Of this we must be confident, even though efforts to date seem to have led to insufficient change. (Better to be an optimist and wrong than a pessimist and right.) But, it seems to me important that we face the truth of our behavior from earliest times. The primary thrust of human behavior, whatever exceptions might be identified, has always been to live beyond sustainability, with, until so very recently, the extravagant means to do so. Is there any meaningful difference, in this regard, between early pottery industry kilns and modern coal-fired power plants? If we mislead ourselves into believing that the solution is easier or more obvious than it is, we may make it more difficult to achieve the solution we seek.
-Tim Hicks
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October 16, 2013 at 12:28 am #6099Erika GavenusMember
On behalf of Jenny Goldie:
Congratulations on this excellent initiative i.e. Sustainability Central. I hope that resource depletion will be central to its thinking, along with population, affluence and technology. At the recent Fenner Conference in Canberra, we not only heard about peak oil, but peak mining. The only way supplies are being maintained of some minerals, such as copper, is by digging deeper and wider but the point of diminishing returns is not far off as the energy and water required for extraction are ever greater. Peak Energy will probably hit around 2017. This has to be central to the whole issue of sustainability if we are to retain any semblance of civilisation.
-Jenny Goldie
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October 22, 2013 at 7:52 am #6221Erika GavenusMember
On behalf of Tamra Engelhorn Raven:
Sustainable development is local. Humans are selfish. Buffering climate change can only be done locally. See #10km3x2 imagine #opendata #global #citizenscience #K12 #educategirls.
See GEOCODED SPATIAL TRANSPARENT METRIC global metric for the Anthropocene
Map fires, carbon, water, EID, #VAW ( http://youtu.be/wz8craTfLz0 )
NEW LOCAL METRC 10km3x2
1/2:SEVEN=3.5billion<25years old think #YOUTH
http://youtu.be/QI0XTbT7hM0
VEGETATION BIODEPTH
http://youtu.be/-Bbh_gAs5pU
VERIFICATION CBD UNFCCC UNCLOS POPs.
http://youtu.be/6rDIjXNTSkc
SHIFT EXPOENTIAL TIMES
http://youtu.be/kFOPGilwiB4-Tamra Engelhorn Raven
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October 23, 2013 at 8:11 pm #6237Erika GavenusMember
On behalf of Maria Cohen:
The environmental discourse today is about climate change and Sustainability : full of managerial expressions :stakeholders, mission, civil society, and others, which confuse a rather simple issue.
“Health Sustainability”,or Famine or any other problem named in this otherwise informed article are to be traceabled to a growing population.
The “threats to sustainability are not being adequately dealt with.” Of corse they ARE NOT, if the “lack of sufficient response……is resulting almost entirely from human activities” , but ignores the fact that these human activities are multiplied by the number of the People , no matter what their behaviour .
We should instead reflect on the words of WWF’s co-founder, Sir Peter Scott, on a visit to an elephant project in Zambia: “You know, I have often thought that at the end of the day, we would have saved more wildlife if we had spent all WWF’s money on buying condoms.”-Maria Cohan
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November 11, 2013 at 4:43 am #6499William DowlingMember
I’ve just joined this Forum, but may I be so bold as to make a constructive suggestion? This is a frustrated and heartfelt plea for MAHB to become a signatory to this document : http://europeanpopulationalliance.org/documents/position_statement.pdf I feel I must stress that everything in Section 1 contains only irrefutable facts. The conclusion is inescapable, and the recommendations are perfectly logical and reasonable in the light of the foregoing. The only thing causing all our environmental woes on this planet is too many of us humans, and of those far too many are consuming far too much. More of us can only make matters worse. If only every organisation behind running environmental forums, every environmentally concerned think tank, every environmentally concerned NGO and every “green” political party in the world, and maybe even some “green” inclined businesses were to sign up in support of a Joint Position Statement on Population and the Environment, such as this – Perhaps it would then be seen, by the powers that be that run this world and by many more members of the public, that we are “all singing from the same hymn sheet” – and loudly, in unison, and in a powerful, clear, concise and unequivocal fashion? Then – we might actually really start to get things done about the state of our planet; instead of just chiefly talking amongst ourselves and banging on our own particular drums about what needs to be done! If MAHB cannot sign up to this, please tell me why not ? What is wrong with it? And, If MAHB can come up with a better “Joint Position Statement on the Environment”, an “Accord” that every purportedly environmentally concerned or “green” body can be persuaded sign up to – please can it do so ASAP? In my view, an International Accord such as this is sorely needed. I do hope I can persuade MAHB to agree.
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