Anchorage in general is in a sulk. Three or nine inches of snow fell yesterday and today, depending on where you live in the Anchorage bowl. This snowfall gives Anchorage a new record for the longest snow season on record, 232 days long. Bike to Work Day on Friday was rainy and then snowy. Gardeners are frustrated, and even the skiers are tired of winter. We seem to be experiencing a cooling trend for Alaska due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and changes in the winter ice patterns–more in the Bering Sea and less in the Arctic. Alex DeMarban at Alaska Dispatch summarizes the study:
BTW Day Anchorage AK May 17, 2013 photo by Loren Holmes
“The state’s overall temperature dipped 2.4 degrees during the first decade of the new century, a notable shift from the previous 100 years, which had generally trended warmer, according to a study published last summer by the Alaska Climate Research Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. The authors suggested that growing winter ice in the Bering Sea — the result of cooler surface temperatures — led to lower temperatures across nearly all of Alaska. Meanwhile, thinning ice in the Arctic Ocean led to warming in one slice of the state: the North Slope atop Alaska. Those trends are continuing, according to follow-up papers released by Wendler, Blake Moore and Kevin Galloway” (DeMarban, 2013).
Arctic Entries
An earlier post on community storytelling described Arctic Entries, a storytelling organization which is not only still going strong, but is now dealing with capacity issues. Arctic Entries has expanded this month yet again to Anchorage’s Performing Arts Center, and it still sold out in less than two hours with new online ticket sales. Todd even told a story this month, about an outing that “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Here are some recent 7-minute audio files from Arctic Entries, beginning with Saskia Esslinger’s permaculture talk on Eating Local in Alaska.
And here is Bree Kessler, who is pursuing a degree in environmental psychology, talking about going really local, in Bettles, Alaska, in I’m an Urbanist.
Here is Kyle Stevens on the adventures of just doing your job in Living the Dream is Chasing the Dream.
And Angela Gonzales on Growing Up in Fish Camp.
And SJ Klein on Building a House is a Neighborhood Affair.
We had a lot of trees fall in several sequential storms last fall. Here’s Todd storing wood for future winters.
Our chickens suffered through the long winter we’ve just had, henpecking each others’ feathers in a neurotic attempt to deal with their frustrations. Here’s Todd, or should I say Chicken Van Gogh, painting their rumps so that they’ll stop.
Growing things
Our vegetable garden and greenhouse are evolving. This is year number two for our greenhouse. Lesson learned from year one–don’t over-plant! We warmed up the greenhouse to 50F mid-March, put in lettuce starts, and began enjoying nightly fresh salads on April 25. In mid-April we set the thermostat to 60 degrees and added tomato plants, peppers, squash, cucumbers, and egg-plant. All are doing well. This year we are especially grateful for the greenhouse, and I’ve noticed many hits on the website from Alaskans and Canadians curious about how to build one.
Here in Anchorage our average “last frost” date is May 4, and our “safe planting” date – when there is a 90 percent chance of no more frosts – is May 15. Traditional knowledge dictates waiting until Memorial Day. And here we sit on May 19 with 3″ of snow on the ground and a temperature of 26F. Fortunately, this cold snap and snow was forecast a week ago, so the garden was not planted last week as originally planned. Next week we should be good to go.
Alaskan garden pest
While we haven’t planted the garden yet, we have gotten it ready. This began by shoveling and snow-blowing 18″ of snow off of the raised beds and big garden (1200 sq. ft) on April 22 so that the sun could start thawing the soil. The anti-moose electric fence had to be restrung. Last fall a young bull moose apparently discovered that he could break the wires with his antlers and not get shocked. He and a friend browsed garden residue repeatedly late fall.
This will be year number three for our main garden, and we are transitioning from full-till to minimum-till. We rented a tiller and deeply tilled our raw rocky/sandy/clay soil the first two years to loosen it up, remove rocks, and add organic material and nutrients. A soil test last fall was quite revealing. We had achieved a good pH balance, good organic matter content, and best levels of phosphorous and potassium. We now lack only nitrogen for good growing. Previous seasons we fertilized with locally produced fish bone meal (5-6-1) and then added ash from the wood furnace for potassium. This year we just hand tilled in some blood meal (12-0-0) and we should now be good to go. Minimum till reduces disturbance of the amazing ecosystem of healthy soil. We will rotate crops from last year’s locations, though it will be less than perfect in that so much of what we grow are Brassica (cabbage family) – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, and turnips.
Anchorage summers, at least at times, can be sunny and warm. Gardens do need some watering. In years past we’ve put our garden sprinklers on a timer. This works great when it’s sunny and warm, but you over water if you are not around and cool, cloudy rainy weather settles in. Over watering has many downsides: it leaches away nutrients, it encourages one of our few garden pests – slugs, it wastes energy, and it slows growth by chilling both plants and soil (our well water is 42F). So as a pre-gardening season project, Todd assembled a more sophisticated timer system that includes a wireless moisture sensor. With this new set-up, we’ll set the timer for warm-sunny conditions. A moisture sensor, with probes in the garden soil, measures moisture and cancels scheduled watering when moisture is good. We expect this will be a better watering system. Time will tell.
I’ve stayed away from politics pointedly in posts, because voting for either party is still just voting for growth, with different labels applied. I do not believe that the current corporate giveaway that we call a political system is fixable unless we elect a leader who is ecologically and energetically literate. I doubt that will happen. That said, here is an earth day wish for real servant leadership which would fix our problems. The post is directed at a specific leader, Obama, since the United States is the worst offender in terms of extreme behavior and unsustainability.
As your president, I can set the agenda for what needs to be done, but I am relatively powerless unless I have the backing and the will of the people behind me, to mobilize the other two branches of government–the legislative Congress and the judicial Supreme Court. Increasingly, the checks and balances in this country are creating a stalemate, which only the powerful corporate lobbyists can overcome, and only in their favor. I am asking now for your help in averting a major crisis in this country, one that we have never faced before.
The energy basis of society
We have gotten ourselves in a real fix over the past four decades. In 1970, America’s oil production peaked, and turned down, so that there was less oil being produced each year afterwards. This affected our ability to grow as a nation. In the mid-1970s, we suffered an oil shock when the Saudis restrained oil exports to our country. That caused an oil crisis in America, where we worried about energy, turned down our thermostats, bought small cars, out of respect for our limits. And in 1979, the per capita oil consumption globally peaked. That means that the energy basis for every person on the planet has been declining ever since, even though some countries were able to lasso more oil than others, and gain advantages in the short-term as a result.
But in 1980, the oil crisis eased, and we decided that we could overcome our limits by using debt and borrowing from the future. Ronald Reagan declared a “new morning in America.” We then proceeded to behave like spoiled children, and took the solar panels off of the White House, in favor of McMansions, sport utility vehicles, and exotic vacations paid for with credit cards. We behaved the same way as an aggregate country, too, by expanding debt to pay for the running of the country, while we borrowed resources from other countries to expand our footprint to the globe. We were able to do all of this because we gained early opportunities in using oil and coal. Those early advantages led to expanded science and technology, which led to more fossil fuel production and importation, which led to more technology, and so on.
What are our biggest problems?
Many have identified climate change as the most important problem of the future. But our problems go further than that. Our problem is that our entire economic system is designed to run on more energy than we will have in the future, because of peak production of oil. As a result, it will be especially hard for Americans to adapt, since we now use almost 25% of the world’s oil, for 4% of the world’s population. And we import most of it, since we’ve already produced most of our own easy oil. That’s not right, it’s not fair, and it can’t last.
Our current economic crises has its roots in declining energy production. Instead of adapting our society to a contracting economy, we decided to just paper over reality. Currencies are just the monetary grease that lubricates the economic flywheel. Money makes things run smoothly. But when money becomes the end instead of the means, we lose all rationality about who we are as a country. We have taken the individualism and competitive ethic too far—we will not be able to continue in this way with fewer resources available to our country.
Our expectation is that the finite fossil fuels are infinite. That is not true. We also think that supposedly renewable energy technologies such as ethanol, solar photovoltaics, shale oil and gas, natural gas can replace fossil fuels and allow us to keep our current society. That belief or hope is also not true. We must cut our voracious appetite for fossil fuels through economic contraction and redesign, or we will collapse. Those are our choices for the future. We need to do the right thing, so that our children and grandchildren can thrive. We can no longer count on continued expansion to take care of our descendants. Which values or principles from our past are sustainable into our future? And what do we need to do now? How do we live within our means as a country and as people?
Over time, we will need to cut our non-renewable energy use. We will not be able to replace the high-quality, dense fossil fuels with non-renewables, which are more dilute, less dense, and less portable. We can no longer afford an all-of-the-above energy policy. We will subsidize development of tidal, hydropower, wind, and geothermal technology in locations that are proper. We will no longer subsidize ethanol, solar photovoltaic, shale gas, or other technologies that are negative net Emergy. I was wrong to pursue nuclear–its time has passed. We will shut nuclear power in this country to protect the environment from our antique plants, and we will begin to cask the fuel. We will promote taxation of luxury or wasteful uses of fossil fuels, so that we can become more efficient as an economy, using our precious fossil fuels instead for building a new economy that is sustainable during descent.
And if that doesn’t conserve enough energy, I propose rationing or taxing of excessive fuel usage for all. We must redesign our economies now around less gasoline usage, so that oil shocks do not stun or collapse our national economy. This cannot happen overnight, so if we will not do this willingly, a little rationing will force wiser use of fuel. We need to be using surplus fuels to help build a new, lower-energy economy. The only energy independence we can achieve will be through more efficient use of current production, expansion of renewables, and reduction of imported fuels. We need to do the right thing for a change, and begin to leave some of our resources in the ground for our children and grandchildren. We need a national mobilization of skills and know-how to rebuild our society from the ground up.
What do we do about our currency and the debt?
Printing money is not the answer. Thomas Jefferson said,
“If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation then by deflation, the banks and the corporations will grow up around them, will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered. The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs” (Jefferson, 1809).
So we will do just that. The too-big-to-fail banks are finished. We will reinstate the Glass-Steagall Act, and break up the big banks. Government guarantees will be reduced so that insurance such as FDIC only insures reasonable, working bank accounts. I am removing the revolving door in the Executive Branch that allows financial company managers to lead in this administration. The Federal Reserve will be dissolved, and we will make other arrangements using publicly-controlled entities and not private interest groups.
Our government should not own the housing stock in this country, and neither should powerful, private, for-profit companies. We will get the people their houses back. We will take the mortgages and mortgage-backed securities from the failed banks and from our semi-governmental sponsored enterprises (GSEs) such as Freddie Mac (FRMC), Ginnie Mae (GNMA) and Fannie Mae (FNMA) and unpackage them, retooling the GSEs to create an agency to lease back homes to foreclosed lower-income families, with option to buy. We will turn back the voracious Housing Bubble and let people earn their houses back at a reasonable cost, over time.
Our currencies only work when the value of the currency reflects the underlying assets. Our currency must contract as the energy basis contracts, or risk losing all relevance. In order to do so, I propose relocalized monetary experiments using Emergy and other metrics. I also propose redesigning our economic metric away from the measure of growth through GDP. At the national scale, we can use Cumulative Gross Emergy Product (CGEmP) to calculate well-being of countries and their citizens in terms of population density, renewable and non-renewable resource availability, and other indices of sustainability. Our international debt can be controlled through fair trade that values international resources appropriately, again using emergy indices.
Local communities can also use socially oriented metrics to measure their progress using other simple metrics that are right to a sustainable society, such as the Happiness Index or other quality-of-life metrics. We can no longer measure our quality of life on the basis of economic growth.
What do we do about our unemployment?
I’m going to work on turning taking back the power of the corporations that they got through the United rulings by the Supreme Court, the Congressional lobbies, and campaign funding. We cannot do this anymore with the system we have in place, though, after 40 years of deregulation. If we’re going to treat corporations as people, then the corporations need to be treated like people, who can go bankrupt and be liable. Our free markets are no longer free, and the corporate Big Brother is in danger of taking over the show. Too big to fail companies will no longer be bailed out, starting with the banks, insurance companies, and automakers. Preventing bankruptcy creates moral hazard and (give public blessing) to systemic bloat, waste, costs, and ensures eventual collapse. We can no longer afford the brain drain where the brightest minds go into genetics, medicine for profit, and high finance.
I am starting here, by saying that taking money and counsel from corporations is wrong. Since I have no power as President in returning us to the old ways without a ground swell of support, I am asking you to vote for change with your feet. Stop buying stuff, and snuff the large corporations who are exerting too much control. Towards that goal, I am mandating a limit on salaries today so that corporate managers can no longer skim gross profits from their companies. Managers can make no more than 100 times the pay of the lowest paid worker. That should equalize pay scales quickly.
Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex has also come to pass. Our military is too big, and it is engaged in too many countries. The associated private companies that profit from war and disaster have become too big and too powerful. War is wrong, unless we are being threatened. No longer will we go to war over oil. I am pulling back our military, closing bases overseas, including Guantanamo, and we will place more emphasis on building a new society and not trying to destroy the old one.
People who need a job can pay their rent and build equity by becoming part of a new century’s Civilian Conservation Corp (CCC). A public works relief program could help to add jobs that are needed to make us sustainable. We can rebuild public transit for trains and improve access for human-powered transport. We can reinstate a natural resources conservation program in every state and locality. We can reforest America (again), and recover our wetlands and fisheries. We can teach millions how to garden, and we can reclaim our soils, through organic processes. Those who are retired can also work part-time in the CCC. We will measure our progress by how we cherish and restore the biosphere.
I’m reining in TSA, and cutting its funding. Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” Americans need to understand that as energy wanes, we can either use more and more of our energy for martial law, or we can rebuild a safer, saner, more local society. I am plan to cut the bureaucracy in DC, beginning with programs that do not promote sustainability.
As Americans, you haven’t been asked to do anything significant in 40 years except to go out and shop. We were given permission to behave like children, and we did so. As a country, we have grown selfish and narcissistic. But consumption and the pursuit of wealth will not make you happy, and you can’t take it with you. What matters is how we live on this earth, and how we will be remembered is in a large part due to how we behaved to our community and the planet. What can you do as people to contribute to living within our means as a country?
The first thing is to live within your own means. Decide how to live without debt, and pay down the debt you do have. Save money so that you have a buffer, and so that you can pay for things you need in the future. We can no longer foist our debts on our children, who will not be able to pay them. If your family has two incomes, live on one and save the other (or pay off debt). If you can’t afford the home you have now, find one that you can afford. Small is beautiful.
Secondly, build personal resilience and security by growing a victory garden. We can no longer safeguard everyone everywhere against everything. If there is a catastrophe, you may need to be able to feed yourself for a while, without relying on help from the government. There are just too many people for that. Recent catastrophes have illustrated what happens when there are too many people and too much complexity, and too much dependence on a very advanced lifestyle.
Third, begin thinking about how you can improve your personal energy budget. Is your car or house too big? Do you shop too much? Do your throw out too much trash? Where you can, cut back on these things. Could you withstand a power outage? What do you need to become more independent in terms of food, water and heat?
This is just a start on what needs to be done. But we need to tackle the big picture first, by living within our energy means by reexamining our energy basis. We need to bring our currency under public control, and we must transform our economy by transitioning towards people working and living sustainably. If we keep trying to tweak what we’ve already got, which doesn’t work in the first place and is too complex and unwieldy, we’ll end up in big trouble. We’ve got to start over, and I want you to help me turn things around. We need a new dialogue, with new values, and new goals.
“For twelve years this Nation was afflicted with hear-nothing, see-nothing, do-nothing Government. The Nation looked to that Government but that Government looked away. Nine mocking years with the golden calf and three long years of the scourge! Nine crazy years at the ticker and three long years in the breadlines! Nine mad years of mirage and three long years of despair! And my friends, powerful influences strive today to restore that kind of government with its doctrine that that Government is best which is most indifferent to Mankind.
For nearly four years now, you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. And I can assure you that we will keep our sleeves rolled up. We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace–business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering. They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. And we know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob. Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me–and I welcome their hatred” (FD Roosevelt, 1936).
I am working on a policy post, but it is still cooking. So I will instead post a link to the best description of hyperinflation in Weimar Germany that I have ever read, that was written in 1970 when we went off the gold standard for good. Forty-three years later, our currency sins are finally beginning to catch up with us. What will penance for currency abuse look like? Since I have never received an answer to the question, “what would you do if your money becomes worthless,” I’ll ask it again. Dead silence on this topic implies big blind spots.
While inflation in most countries is still manageable, the rate of inflation is increasing. That means that the amount of money relative to the underlying worth of the economy is expanding, through expansion of debt and money printing. Currently the debt in wealthy countries is mostly sequestered in the financial iron triangle loop, with little escaping into general circulation except where corporate salaries and graft trickle down to wealthy managers. At some point the sequestration will end, and the trickle down will turn into a rush. The jockeying that we are seeing now between countries attempting to balance their devaluation with the devaluation in other countries will become a race, and inflation will increase. How will our inflation race play out, and how will it be different from the description of the German Nightmare linked here? Another longer descriptions of the process is linked here. Might we segue into a new currency without pain and defaults for too-big-to-fail entities? Can we escape hyperinflation, given our bankrupt political processes?
Header: Slave Market with Disappearing Bust of Voltaire, Salvador Dalí, 1940; Dalí describes his work on the painting “to make the abnormal look normal and the normal look abnormal.” While Dalí apparently disagreed with Voltaire’s philosophies, Voltaire had several relevant quotes on money that may apply here; “Dont think money does everything or you are going to end up doing everything for money” and “Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value — zero.”
This is a repost from TheEmergist on April 21, 2013. Brian runs the twice-monthly blog The Emergist. He is a stay-at-home dad of two young children and one very young six-acre forest garden. He became enthralled with HT Odum’s theories after reading Environment, Power, and Society in the 21st Century (EPS) and uses his blog as an outlet for the strange stream of consciousness that EPS induces in its readers.
Key questions
What are the reasons civilization maybe more prone to frequent collapse? Cancer? Complexity? Something else?
What do models of autism tell us about the “disorder”?
How should/has humanity combat/ed autism?
H/T to Mary and Jan for helping me parse this post out. I don’t think they necessarily agree with this idea, but their resistance helped make it much better. Further, I apologize if anyone takes issue with my usage of the term pathology or autism. They just happen to be most succinct words I can think of for this topic.
Emergist definition
Autism-/’ô – tizem/ - Using high quality energy to do a task that can be performed with lower quality energy to gain control by simplifying a subsystem. The resulting effect is waste, which feeds back to disorder the overall complexity of a system.
Cancer and civilization
Odum explains cancer well in EPS (pp. 58-59), so this will be just a brief overview. Cancer from a systems perspective is when one component/organism/cell in a system is severed from its control circuits and uses another component of the system as “excess resource.” In ecosystems, this generally happens when either an organism is introduced from a different ecosystem into a new ecosystem (zebra mussels), organisms controlling another organism are removed (wolves removed from Yellowstone National Park that control mouse populations), or energy flows become excessive leading to overgrowth (fertilizers released into a stream causing algal blooms). There is no doubt that humans and civilization have been engaged in cancerous activities as we have used other planetary subsystems as excess resources.
Complexity
Some authors have tried to put forth complexity as some kind of problem that civilizations run into that create their downfalls. In self-organized biological systems, ordered complexity arises time and time again after massive extinction events, which suggests complexity is evolutionarily advantageous and a consequence of energy flows. While it is true that complexity is not enough for maximum long-term empower or energy flows, it is absolutely necessary. Civilizations are also self-organizing systems and therefore benefit and depend on ordered complexity for long-term survival. Further when looked at from a total systems perspective, civilizations that survive crisis run to complexity when confronted with problems, such as environmental degradation (Imperial China or Edo Japan) or hostile neighbors (any insurgency past/present). The reason that complexity is often misunderstood by anthropologists, archeologists, and historians is that their system boundaries stop at the energies and functions controlled by humans. In EPS there is a great table demonstrating this very fact:
The above table suggests that when ordered complexity is understood by either transformity (amount of energy turned into higher quality forms) or emergy store (the amount of ordered energy embedded in a system), ecosystem information on regional and global levels are multiple orders of magnitude higher in ordered complexity than anything humans have learned (on the table above) or have even dreamed of (a bad emergy joke that our dreams are often beyond what can be learned). In simple comparative terms, nature is complex and civilizations are not yet.
Not seeing the forest from the cultivated field
An often cited example of humans “adding” complexity is the human penchant for replacing forests with cultivated fields. The anthropocentric viewer will often presuppose that a cultivated field is more complex than a forest, because of all the off-site functions and energies are carried out by humans. While the same viewer thinks the forest is simple because it must rely on on-site solar and geological energy inputs. The ultimate idea embedded within the anthropocentric view is that current/recent energy use determines the complexity of the system. On a universal scale, energy certainly is a measure of complexity and order, but within each system a specific form or concentration of energy can be either ordering or disordering, ex. the energy that orders stars and galaxies, like a supernova or black hole, is not necessarily ordering to carbon based life forms. The truth is that a lot of human technologies are simplifying in nature. While Odum describes this simplification process of agriculture in-depth in EPS (pp. 179-183), he most succinctly describes it in Odum and Odum, 2001: “Networks may be simplified, causing energy to concentrate in fewer pathways.” Put another way, agriculture concentrates energy for only human use by removing complexity.
Overgrowth of control circuits and the withering of complexity
Note: Most of this section is from memory of a talk I heard about 6 years ago and I was able to fact check about 60% of it. I am not sure if the other percentage is unpublished or a figment of my imagination.
Aesop’s fables-Country mouse makes a social call
Mouse models have recently shed some light on the pathology of autism. A researcher, Prof. Lousi Parada, has found different gene knockouts in mice that act very much like humans with autism. The mutant mice will generally sit independently far away from the other mice in a cage and rarely interact or make social calls. Prof Parada and his group tracked the behavior down to the part of the brain called the dentate gyrus. The dentate gyrus is part of the hippocampus and is responsible for controlling stress responses, novelty-seeking, and memory formation. They noticed that the dentate gyrus of mutant mice had an over-proliferation of neuronal cells and also dendrites that projected from the dentate gyrus were elongated and projected further into other regions of the brain. Interestingly, the proliferation of the dentate gyrus was not significantly different from normal mice until four to six weeks, which would be about two to six years old in humans, and maybe consistent with some findings of the disease progression in humans.
Many of the dentate gyrus functions are modulating or controlling in nature. For instance, the size of the dentate gyrus would suggest that it is not the site for memories because it is not large enough to encode the necessary information, but oblating the dentate gyrus disrupts long-term memory formation. For the sake of illustration, the brain will be demarcated into the brain stem and cerebellum, the limbic system (site of the dentate gyrus) and the neocortex. These three brain areas were developed into the triune brain theory, which although no longer scientifically supported, will be used as a proxy for transformity and ordered complexity, since Odum did not leave a table of transformity for different areas of the brain in EPS. The important point is that the brain is most likely hierarchical in nature and some areas are involved in bulk processing and information storage (neocortex in mammals), while other areas are involved controlling where and how information is processed (hippocampous and the dentate gyrus). In Figure 1, the different areas of the brain have been color coded and then placed into the triune hierarchy. In Figure 1, the normal hierarchy of the brain is in the middle and the hierarchy of the autistic brain is on the right. The pathology of the autistic brain arises because of the over-growth of the dentate gyrus in the limbic system, which in real terms is an over-growth of controlling circuits/neurons in number and length. The dentate gyrus with high transformity in the autistic brain participates in functions that would be better left to the neocortex with a lower level of transformity, which has the effect of feeding back to impair certain social aspects in affected people.
Identifying autism in society
My proposed definition for autism differs from cancer in the fact that autism does not use other parts of the hierarchy as “excess resource”, but instead replaces these parts with simplified independent analogs to natural systems. Compounding the problem of simplification is that Odum noticed that when high quality energy was used to do processes that could be done with lower quality energy this creates waste. This waste then feeds back into the system and creates disorder in the system. When humans/civilizations simplify systems and then use high quality energies to do processes that can be done with lower quality energies, this lowers complexity both below and above on the energy hierarchy (Figure 2). This creates a situation whereby near-term collapse is almost certain.Modified from Odum 1996.
Examples of societal autism (wasteful = using high quality energy to do a task with the ultimate effect of creating disorder)
Human excrement. My brother-in-law called me on the phone about four months ago. This is that conversation:
Me- “You wouldn’t believe this. I was listening to NPR and some foundation had a prize for the person who could come up with the best way to deal with human excrement in third world countries. Guess what type of system won the prize.”
Brother-in-law- “Humanure!
Me- “I know. Right! But no. Na-No-Technology!”
Brother-in-law- “Utilizing bacteria and leaf litter is less wasteful than manufacturing some small particle in a factory with a huge energy and land footprint.”
Agriculture and reproduction. I was watching talking political heads on TV and one said that the U.S. congressional republican stance amounted to, Every ejaculation deserves a name. At which point I began laughing and my wife happened to asked me, Are we still saving paw paw seeds from the fruit? To which I responded, Yes. Every paw paw seed deserves to be grafted to a named variety! While I was being silly, my uncles’ farming equipment today is fitted with GPS and uses weather radar information, topography information, and can even take into account farmer’s willing drought risk assessments to determine seed planting rate and row distance and “proper” amount of chemical application when needed. I imagine it is only a hop away from being able to geo-cache every seed, so that investment banks can sell tranches of seed risk. Fukuoka showed that broad casting seed in a relatively diverse plot can achieve a high rate of return without large-scale waste. Industrial agriculture almost does not care about complex interactions of indigenous species or using them as excess resource, but wishes only to create its own wasteful independent system using high quality energy inputs.
Modern warfare. Reported lately in the news press is the fact that the President of the U.S. might be engaged in the execution of drone strikes. This bypasses almost the entire command structure of the military. And the question must be asked: Does the president (supposedly the highest transformity citizen in the U.S.) really change the course of the war on terror? Again, a case of simplifying the entire command and control structure of the military and wasting energy.
The fox, raccoon, possum, or hawk that klls a chicken. Often when I tell someone that I have been a horrible chicken keeper and have losses to any of these predators, the response from others revolves around some version of shooting a gun or setting a trap. My mind then wanders to thinking about how I then become responsible for controlling the mouse population. And then since I am then now killing mice, I become responsible for controlling whatever mice eat. And then since . . . . Or instead I learned to let my chickens out after 11 a.m. and I have yet to lose a chicken (knock on wood). The choice is to kill predators or live in a complex world. Though in a high population density situation, one might try to go down the path of simplification.
Conclusion
The point of this post is to create a way of understanding a certain aspect of human civilization through the lens of autism, much like Odum and many other ecologists have understood over-growth through the lens of cancer. Agriculture and fossil fuels have expanded human abilities of creating control and independent systems (Figure 3), but when we use these energies to do functions that would best be left to other organisms then we can disrupt the complex biological system that we ultimately depend on to live. It is not to say that humans cannot use agriculture and fossil fuels or that using them appropriately will lead to “sustainability.” The point is to say that humans should use agriculture and fossil fuels appropriately in the context of supporting complex systems at every level of the hierarchy and not try to create independent less tested energy dependent systems. If humanity works to do this then it will not be subject to collapse as often or severely. Humans must step back and evaluate where to act to support or increase system complexity. Technologies like Fukuoka-Bonfils agriculture, forest gardening, coppicing, and water storage in swales might be possible ways to conserve resources at the same time that we out-compete energy flows coming from independent simplified technologies and thereby shift to long-term complex systems.
Individual action
Try to get a humanure system going.
Try to leave as many subsystems intact when interacting.
Next time on Brian’s blog
I gas up the fossil fuel time machine and things get weird. By the way, I will be watching my favorite time travel movie, Primer, at least once to get me into the proper mindset before writing the post.
From David M. at Integral Permaculture; “Howard Odum was of the opinion that all systems on all scales pulse. Storages gradually accumulate, consumers consume and develop, and eventually decline, and then dispersing materials that will be used in the next pulse.” And if “energy flows, storages, transformations, feedbacks, and sinks” are central to any system, man-made or otherwise, we can see that the peaking of world oil production is going to have a huge effect.”
Also from David’s post, a quote from Holmgren; “…If there is a single most important insight for permaculture from Odum’s work it is that solar energy and its derivatives are our only sustainable source of life. Forestry and agriculture are the primary (and potentially self-supporting) systems of solar energy harvesting available. Technological development will not change this basic fact. It should be possible to design land use systems which approach the solar energy harvesting capacities of natural systems while providing humanity with its needs. This was the original premise of the permaculture concept. While available solar energy may represent some sort of ultimate limit to productivity it is other factors which primarily limit it.”
“El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta” (Socialism will only arrive by bike) —José Antonio Viera-Gallo, Assistant Secretary of Justice in the government of Salvador Allende (from Illich, Energy & Equity, 1973)
What is the relationship between social justice and resource sustainability? Many authors have tackled this subject from many directions, including Illich (1973), and O’Riordan (1976). In the developed world, freedom includes emancipation from nature, where freedom does not occur until we escape our limits. The spiritual is separate from the material, and energetic limits are not a consideration. Adequate society means that everyone else attains the first world countries’ level of development (Mies & Shiva, 1993).
Various authors have attempted to categorize environmental ethical thought. In a recent issue of Green European Journal, Boulanger included a useful figure adapted from Hopwood, Mellor & O’Brien (2005) that places various groups within a framework of two different criteria; how focused are we on the importance of equality versus our orientation towards environmental concerns? The implied question Boulanger is asking is, what are the proper politics for a world that is reaching its limits, and where do your values fit within this spectrum? Is this the best way to view the issue of social justice, and is the diagram inclusive enough in considering our limits? Can we have our equality cake and our environment too?
Boulanger, from Hopwood, Sept. 2012 Green European Journal
Origins of social justice
Social justice as an ethical right is a modern phenomenon, having evolved out of religious values in the 1800s, during the coal and oil-based industrial revolution. The idea of social justice evolved further with the systems-oriented utilitarian ethics of Bentham, Mills, Locke (privatization of property), and Kant. In utilitarianism, societal ethics value the greater good. In the 1900s, ethics evolved further, into a more deontological and less systems-oriented approach that was probably a sign of the times of great surplus energy.
We derive our ethical views from our cultural systems. Culture evolves to fit available energy patterns. Soddy (1911) said that “the laws [thermodynamics] that express the relation between matter and energy, govern the rise and fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of societies, the movements of commerce and industries, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of a people.” During the last two centuries, in a system with gross surpluses of energy, relative freedom and bondage of societies shifted as a result of surplus energy. Society couched the moral good in moral, absolutist terms of right and wrong, because we could. Anything was possible. Cultural values shifted as a result of the surplus, so that personal freedom was no longer connected to the natural system of limits. Much of modern medical ethics evolved from deontological roots, where the goal is to do everything possible for people, because we had no limits. We have treated people perhaps as a way of furthering the economic growth engine, denying the idea that people live within environments where there are connections and limits. Our western culture reflects an extreme outlier in terms of competitiveness, independence, and perhaps anthropocentrism, too, as a result of the dramatic surplus energy, leading to a WEIRD culture (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic). Western culture has the most changing to do in order to adapt to a lower-energy society.
Until we understand the driving force of our energetic basis, our ideas about social justice will not change. We will believe what the economists have told us about fairness–that everyone can have everything they want, plus more over time, as growth expands infinitely into the future. Instead, we are more likely to view the idea of equality and freedom from a very limited two-dimensional, anthropocentric political perspective such as the figures above that fail to consider nature at all. Politics that does not consider the ecological basis for society is no longer adequate.
All of these ideas deny the ongoing depletion of the environment over time if we do not contract our economy physically and culturally. So basing our ideas about our societal culture within the environment (internalizing the externalities) is essential in describing what type of social justice can occur. We must understand energetic limits before reasonable dialogues about social justice can occur. What are the limits of societal ideas about justice, and how will they change as our national economies contract, especially those in the developed world, where the change will be greatest? What are the energetic limits of social justice? Can everyone have more?
In contrast to Boulanger’s figure, a different figure produced by Holmgren below uses the collective identification axis along with an anthropocentric /ecocentric axis that better incorporates our blindspot about the importance of the environment and energy. If we are ignorant of the energetic basis for society, we will choose an anthropocentric focus that ignores or devalues nature.
From David Holmgren’s Money vs Fossil Fuels lecture 2010 http://www.holmgren.com.au/DLFiles/PDFs/Money_vs_Fossil_Energy.pdf
Equal ights only exist as a subset of greater rights within a functional culture, which resides within a functional economy, which then depends on the environment. In order to depict this idea, we really need a 3-dimensional map that includes the biosphere as the system boundary for the discussion, or even a 4-dimensional map that includes the passage of time, showing cycles and pulsing over time, to frame the discussion adequately. Individual rights have varied over time in different cultures and settings, depending on a number of factors, including perhaps most importantly the availability of resources. As Boulanger points out, populations must adjust their lifestyles to the limits of resource availability. So what does that mean in the pursuit of equality, as resources wane?
Solar equity–what is your solar share of the world?
Renewable vs Nonrenewable Flows Emergy Basis M.T. Brown, S. Ulgiati / Ecological Modelling 223 (2011) 4–13
First, what is the long-term carrying capacity for humans on the earth? Odum suggested that the eventual carrying capacity would be far under 1 billion. Odum suggested that about 70% of whole earth empower comes from fossil fuels, so we will eventually have to eventually live on about one-third of current emergy (Odum & Odum, 2001). And Brown and Ulgiati (2011) suggest that “while 97% of global production was based on renewable emergy flows in 1900, today only about 16% of total emergy use is from renewable emergy sources” (p. 7,, discussion also available here without firewalls). This complete turnaround in energy basis for society over the last century suggests a future with waning fossil fuels will result in a much decreased carrying capacity. During the current decade, we are the furthest from sustainability as a society as we have ever been, due to our reliance on fossil fuels. In the same paper by Brown and Ulgiati, the authors ask:
“In the transition from a quantity to a quality-based growth, we will also have to address the question of how to adjust the current consumptive way of life to make things more egalitarian between the haves and have-nots. Qualitative growth does not fully address this disparity. How do we address it in a way that is sustainable?” (Brown & Ulgiati, 2011, p. 12).
We can illustrate this discussion the equality cake with the simple analogy of dessert (be it a cake or pie, either will work). We will eat all the pie, because of the maximum power principle, that suggests that available resources will all be used when possible. As resources wane, and the pie gets smaller, we have four choices then. First, we can escalate the making of pies so that everyone can keep their share, thus damaging the environment even more—that is what we are doing now. This option is the least sustainable of the options. Or secondly, we can divide the shrinking pie unfairly, with some who are in power now keeping their share while the rest get less. Over time as we descend, we will have to revert to renewable energies as the main drivers for our society. We will have to decide what our personal solar share of society is. When we use Emergy to calculate ecological footprints, we can derive a relative sense of the inequities involved in our consumption. For instance, on average, Americans consume 19 times their personal solar shares of the world’s annual global renewable energy income that is equitable. If I eat a Big Mac, that act alone consumes 3.3 times the average daily per capita global renewable solar income (Brown & Ulgiati, 2012). Is that fair?
The third option is to reimagine the world more locally, and more equitably, by working within the constraints of a sustainable biosphere. That will only happen if people universally understand that there is not an infinite supply of energy and resources. If we don’t arrive at that understanding then we default to our fourth option, extreme collapse, leading to extinction. An argument for dealing with inequity, beyond the obvious ethic of doing what is right, is that an even playing field reduces the chances of global pandemics and war. From a systems perspective, not dealing with inequities in a world in overshoot means that wars and epidemics are more likely to lay waste to humanity. Better to have population attrition come from natural causes and a more humane medical system that prioritizes healthcare away from sick care for the wealthy to basic, equitable healthcare for all. There comes a tipping point when life for the haves becomes so uncomfortable from the inequities and strife that the system changes–are we there yet? When people and countries have their basic needs met, they are less likely to abuse the environment or each other in politics of necessity and not politics of choice (Neuhaus, 1971).
Trade imbalances and global equity–practical solutions
Hans Rosling talks below about wealthy countries and equity with the rest of the world, drawing three global lines about social equity; the poverty line, the wash line, and the air line. Where do we draw the line on the level of prosperity that everyone will share that can be supported sustainably by our biosphere?
Population growth occurs mostly with the poor, while economic growth occurs with the rich. Both increase use of energy in unsustainable fashion, with autocatalysis increasing the rate of growth over time. As Rosling points out in the video above, the rich blame the poor, and the poor blame the rich. But all of us are at fault, and the answer lies somewhere in the middle, between the poorest and the richest in the world. Rosling suggests that the dividing line should be the washing machine, since women who are freed from grinding human labor, then they have time to educate their families. If we provide for basic needs that allow for social justice, equity, happiness, and economic productivity, then we can begin the discussion about how to protect the environment in adaptation to descent. But none of that can occur until there is a general understanding that descent is inevitable and imminent. So the first step is education about our ecological, energetic basis for society. Ryan (2012) emphasizes the importance of ecological literacy education, so that we can understand the value of enough in “cultivating sustainable and ethical prosperity with basic income”, so that economies can move forward into the new era of descent.
Because of trade imbalances and vastly different rates of resource use in developed versus less developed countries, the mechanisms that will promote both social justice and solar equity vary. If Americans get solar panels, is there enough cake to go around that Bangladesh can have basic health care? How much commerce can we produce while still maintaining public safety, especially when the commerce produces environmental pollution that crosses public borders? How do we calculate and compare the damage to the biosphere between the consumption of the rich countries or the population growth of the poor countries, and what causes the worst unsustainability? Is electricity a basic need? How do we avoid returning to human slavery as our energy slaves leave? How do we enact green governance that values nature appropriately? These are the types of global discussions and cooperative behaviors that need to occur as countries attempt to set up realistic policies for descent. In the short-term, justice could be distributed more equitably on a global basis, while fossil fuels still allow it. Later on, equity will be a much more local concept, dependent on the cooperative behaviors, local resources and renewable energy availability. We will need to abide by the African proverb; if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.
In developed countries, especially for Americans who use a quarter of the world’s energy, the changes will need to be more drastic. Initial policies for descent could provide incentives to cut luxury and waste through high horsepower uses of fuels, cars, and electric power. We could place limits on personal income, and introduce campaigns such as those that limit the power of private cars, public funding of extreme healthcare and other gross wastes of energy.
Several economic principles that could help in clarifying social justice and its relationship to solar equity follow:
http://philoforchange. wordpress.com
Wars have historically helped organize the landscape into units appropriate to available resources. Current imbalances in international trade are based on market valuations and unfair international exchange. Perhaps energy valuation can evaluate products, goods and serves for trade to balance the equity and energy
Holding back on resources does not maximize economic vitality, and the best national economic policy is the symbiotic sharing with neighbors for stability. Developed nations should not limit fuel imports because these stimulate their economies with a 6 to 1 amplifier effect. There is a 6 to 1 negative amplifier effect on the economy when energy use is curtailed, so taxation of energy sources should be avoided.
Setting prices of fuels below market prices depresses sources of supply, creates shortages, and inhibits economies
If one sector of the economy is either neglected or overemphasized, the economy will suffer
When a developed country borrows money from outside, its economy is stimulated temporarily but later it is inhibited by its debt
It hurts a less developed country more to repay borrowed money
In less developed countries, use resources to make wealth; don’t sell them to make money. Market prices are not a fair basis for international trade. Human services from less developed nations are worth more in Emergy terms than is paid for them. Raw products contribute 5 to 50 times more to urban centers than is received for them (Odum, 1987, Brown & Ulgiati, 2012)
Full employment maximizes an economy
An economy is hurt by raises in pay at the expense of jobs (Odum, 1987)
Develop international partnerships and peace by balancing Emergy of exchanges between nations, including trade, migrating people, foreign aid, loans, and culture
Do not attempt to exert military influence beyond the power of the country’s resources
What happens if we don’t?
If we have seven times the number of people that the biosphere can support without fossil fuel support, how to we get down to less than 1/7 of the current population without catastrophe? Is there a prosperous way down at this time? Radical change in the entire system is needed. Odum wrote his first draft of the Prosperous Way Down in the early 1980s, with some optimism that there was still reasonable hope that we were capable of heading off full-blown collapse. That optimism was in spite of his understanding that, because of the Maximum Em/Power Principle, while there was net energy to burn, we would burn it. It is pretty clear at this point that we are marching towards full-blown disaster, without the will to change the current system on a grand scale, at least. It also seems clear to me that collapse sooner rather than later will be less painful in the long run. If that is the case, what form of collapse will move us to radical change, and which form is the least painful, without environmental catastrophe?
Foster and Clark (2012) suggest that there is no way to head off ecological catastrophe without “breaking with the underlying logic of the accumulation of capital”:
“Ironically, it is in the very waste and destructiveness of what Odum called the ‘cancerous capitalism’ of today that we are able to discover the potential for a more rational, just, and sustainable society. Looking at the explosive growth of finance, already visible in their time, together with ‘advertising, product differentiation, artificial obsolescence, model changes, and the other devices of the sales effort,’ Baran and Sweezy observed: ‘The prodigious volume of resources absorbed in all these activities does in fact constitute necessary costs of capitalist production. What should be crystal clear is that an economic system in which such costs are socially necessary has long ceased to be a socially necessary economic system’”(Foster & Clark, 2012).
Fortunately, we will be forced to break with the current methods of capital accumulation when our currencies fail. Embedded system dynamics, the Ponzi nature of debt and a failure to understand the inappropriately valued energetic basis for our currency dictate that our global currencies will eventually fail.
When the petrodollar currency fails it would be a good time to consider a new plan arising from a regained cooperative ethic centered around discussions of solar equity. What is fair in sharing diminishing world resources? Smaller steps that people are willing to take such as buying a Prius may be a symbolic first step, if only because thoughts evolve over time, and if the current most progressive thinking and green efforts are the beginning of an evolution to what really needs to be done in the form of major change. Those efforts can build into cooperative behaviors, but not if we blow ourselves up first.
“Ubuntu, how can one of us be happy if all the other ones are sad?”Ubuntu in the African Xhosa culture means “I am because we are.” We had better get started in building a more cooperative culture, at the smaller and the larger scales. We have too many people and weapons in the world now, paired with a lack of understanding. Our expectations of growth may become our most dangerous foes. In one way or another, our expectations for growth may be the death of us.
Rudolf Mates, 1929 50watts.com-A-Forest-Story- by-Josef-Kozisek-(Czechoslovakia–1929)_900
The empire was an amazing time to be alive, dearie. I was what they call a professor. That meant that when I got up in the morning, I would take a hot shower, drink coffee that had been automatically brewed, get in a car that was parked in a heated garage, and drive through traffic for half an hour to a building in the middle of the city. Sometimes I would ride my bike instead, but I was considered a great renegade for doing so. There, I would park, and go in to an office, which was a series of rooms with fancy furniture and lots of computers and telephones. There I would sit, in a room by myself with my computer, and write things in response to others’ messages. That was kind of boring. We sent the messages around to each other, and
sometimes (rarely) we submitted accumulated wisdom to something called a journal, where other professors looked at what we had written, and they weighed in on what we had written. No one else could read the articles, because the articles were hidden behind something called a “firewall” which meant that big companies made money off of the journals, and kept the public out unless you paid a lot of money for it. After a while, everyone thought alike, which eventually became a problem when circumstances changed and times got hard. The articles were meant to advance science. Because we were trained to use methods that were focused as narrowly as possible on very specific questions, the results often conflicted with each other and ended up being difficult to use in life. One week the mood of science would swing one way, and another week, the mood would swing in a radically different direction, depending on what was getting funded that week.
In addition to spending time in our little offices, we would spend lots of time in meetings with each other. Afterwards, we would send lots of messages around on the internet. As the university grew, there were more and more staff, in addition to the professors. Those staff found many things to do, which added to the meetings, and the duties. Towards the end of the academy, there were a lot of hires from the military and corporate world. After a while, the university began to look more like a business than a hall of learning.
There was even a room in this building for what they called videoconferencing, with fancy custom cabinets and granite countertops. We could have meetings with students or with other colleagues around the world. But we didn’t use it much. Everyone preferred to meet face to face. Sometimes that meant the university would send us on a trip to a meeting in another state or country. That was called networking. We got to see new places, and didn’t have to pay for it. Some people liked to fly because they got special treatment the more they flew, and got to go on free personal trips using something called “mileage plan.”
A lot of the work was done over the internet. Some classes took place online, and after a while, the course content was molded by the method of teaching. We taught in a way that was useful for online delivery. But the students missed face to face learning, and seemed more and more distant, and more a part of the process and not the goal. Even the textbooks were online by the end. When the electricity started to blink out in various cities, the internet went poof. In no time, we were back to reading real books, at least what was left after everything went digital. There wasn’t much extra energy left to print new ones after the collapse. That was true of a lot of things—when the dollar went, a lot of other things went, too. It was almost as though we had climbed two rungs too high on the ladder, while sawing the rungs below off every time we climbed. In the end, we fell back more rungs than would have been necessary if we had retained some kind of support lower down.
Twice a week I would take my students into a hospital to learn how to take care of patients and their associated technology. In intensive care, many of the patients were at the end of their lives, so we might spend weeks trying to keep a corpse painfully alive as it mouldered and decomposed slowly in the bed, with wailing relatives at the bedside, slowly breaking family budgets and throwing the families into penury with surreal hospital bills. Sometimes families lost their home because of the bills, even when their elder died. Maybe they should have made a rule that hospitals and doctors only got paid when the patient lived. Then maybe we wouldn’t have tried so hard to keep people at the end of life alive.
Much of the focus was on the technology and not patients. Patients got carved up into things called specialties. After a while, no one listened to the patient anymore, as cure became more important than care. Nurse servers were stocked full of goodies in every room, and when anyone expired, we would load everything in a red bag and throw it in the garbage. Most everything was disposable–bedpans, wash basins, syringes, lines, everything. Contact isolation gowns, gloves and masks were all disposable, although few used the contact gowns, because no one had time for the basics such as washing hands adequately. We were so busy nursing the technology that if we had washed our hands every time that we were supposed to, it would have taken half of our shift. No wonder the Great Epidemic finally surfaced.
Some of my friends worked as bureaucrats for the government in conservation agencies. While the workers paid lip service to conservation, when it came down to changing business practices or lifestyles–when it actually came down to changing things for real, then people either couldn’t be bothered if it created the slightest inconvenience, or if it was seen as a step backwards from progress. Ardent conservationists would drive to a coffee shop every morning and buy and then throw away a paper cup, every day. Our school and work cafeterias used big piles of Styrofoam to serve each person, and the food we ate was shipped from all over the world. No one grew anything, at school or at home. The parking lot was half-filled with big trucks. There were a lot of Priuses too. Other than costing a little more, those cars really didn’t change much. They required zero effort on the part of their owners, and the batteries and gizmos may have actually used more resources than a regular car. The government and the university both fully subsidized public transit for use, but almost none took advantage of the free buses, because it was less convenient. My friend’s building had heated sidewalks. Managers at the upper end of things got to fly all over to meetings, burning your oil to take needless meetings in vacation spots. In some sort of religious ceremony at the end of the meeting, they would throw some greenbacks on the table, in some sort of gesture to the god of what they called “carbon credits.” That appeased the carbon gods and made the travel okay.
In the end, though, they just locked the doors on the buildings of the conservation agency and walked away. All of those meetings and all of that travel didn’t make any difference. And it turns out nature can run itself, as long as it’s not over-run by people. Oh, the energy we wasted, that we could have saved for you, so that you could have a simple but decent life! Our green illusions just promoted more consumerism. We knew it was wrong, but the good life was too enticing and easy. Why go looking for a life that requires more work when the life we had in the short-term was so plush? Especially when doing so required swimming against a tide that sucked us ever upwards into more and more technology, consumption, and growth, no matter what we called it.
When the collapse in the American petrodollar finally came, it was mighty to behold. We’ll never be sure what caused it–there were so many crazy things going on then, and it was blamed on a lot of different things, depending on how people thought about the world. Some people decided that the problem was a thing called debt. Others thought it was the weather that caused our downfall. And others blamed it on whoever was president at the time–I can’t remember his name anymore. When the money stopped working, we lost about four levels of complexity right off the bat, because we were so overly reliant on the gasoline for transport and the electricity and the digital everything. Places without nuclear power and a functional electric grid hung in there for a while, with working economies and even local internets in places with hydropower. We had hopes that what we had would return, but there wasn’t enough functional grid to support the old ways, and not enough fossil fuels to get some renewable energy technology in anything more than small, local uses. The planes stopped flying, and airports went away except as private airports for the very rich. Trains were overwhelmed, and the roads decayed quickly. The military-industrial complex (MIC) turned in on itself. The screeners turned to screening the roadways, and travel got difficult. And “if you see something, say something” turned into “we have a voice, and feet, and we’re walking away from this”. Without the people, the national government just fell apart. People couldn’t afford the lifestyle anymore, anyway.
With the spotty grid, eventually some of the nuke plants in the northeastern part of the US blew up, and the densely populated northeast started to thin out through various means. We got our nuclear explosions, it just wasn’t how we thought it would roll out as nuclear war. We shut down the nuke plants, and some of the waste got moved, and some of it we’re still trying to cool on location. There are a lot more down-winders these days. I wish we had done something while we still had the extra energy to burn. I’m not sure if the radiation had a part to play in the Great Epidemic or not–it’s all so hard to sort out now. The healthcare system was so focused on genetics as the cause of everything that the doctors completely missed the dangers of environmental contaminants in the form of radiation, pesticides, and heavy metals. We were too far removed from our environment, and we had been taught to believe that it was unnecessary–what they called an “externality.” Well, a lot of people ended up externalized in the Great Epidemic, all right.
We learned how to grow food, we stopped having so many offspring, and we learned to live below our means, not so high on the hog. But only after we were forced to. Families live together again, and I get to see my family every day, and we’re all happier for the slower pace and closer ties, just the way we were meant to live in the first place.
International School on Emergy Accounting, Venice Italy, 17-21 June 2013
The International School on Emergy Accounting is organized by the Department of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems together with the Department of Economics of Ca’ Foscari University, and in collaboration with Parthenope University of Naples. Aimed at building unifying perspectives for effective analysis of complex systems through the concept of Emergy, it is open to PhD and postdoctoral students. In particular, it will focus on the potential of emergy accounting in problems related to sustainability, offering a unique opportunity to merge scientific and economic aspects within research.
Directors:
Francesco Gonella, Dept of Molecular Sciences and Nanosystems, Ca’ Foscari University, Italy
Sergio Ulgiati, Dept of Environmental Sciences, Parthenope University, Naples, Italy
Main lecturers:
Mark T. Brown, Dept of Environmental Engineering Sciences, University of Florida, Gainesville, USA
Sergio Ulgiati, Dept of Environmental Sciences, Parthenope University, Naples, Italy
Five day workshop stressing emergy concepts, theory, and principles. Each day is composed of 4 sessions, two in the morning and two in the afternoon. One or two sessions each day is devoted to a case study that includes “hands-on” computation of emergy or simulation of models to reinforce lecture material and extend understanding of systems concepts.
Day 1 – What are Energy, Emergy, Exergy? Primary, secondary and tertiary global renewable sources
Morning 1 – Systems and Systems Diagrams Systems concepts
Introduction to energy systems diagramming language
Quantitative diagramming and picture mathematics
Morning 2 – Emergy & Exergy
Introduction to emergy, transformity, specific emergy, Maximum Empower Principles, hierarchical organization
Introduction to Exergy, quality, exergoecology,
thermoecological costs, extended exergy analysis
Afternoon 3 – Computation of primary, secondary and tertiary global renewable sources
Global webs, material cycles, & biogeochemistry
Afternoon 4 - Case Study: Computing energy and UEV’s of global renewable flows
An article on the difficulty of building truly green buildings and recent discussions about the healthcare system triggered thoughts about a major transition problem that is occurring over and over again—the problem of a complex hierarchy that demands feeding with extra energy. Previous posts about the added complexity that digitization brings are pertinent here, but this post is about the general problem of how we respond to limits by adding complexity, and what it might take to remove complexity at the top of the hierarchy without collapse.
Green buildings within a growth economy
The article that triggered this post was Mehaffy and Salingaros’ article on why green often isn’t and their observation that attempts to build green often results in energy and material-wasting buildings for several reasons. The authors ask, “What’s going on? How can the desire to increase sustainability actually result in its opposite?” First, green components are “bolted-on” to existing wasteful 21st century structures, resulting in even more energy and material use. Second, the buildings exist within a larger system, with goals and rules that they are subject to. Those rules are part of the feedback that promotes the goals of the existing system. The main goal in the US system is promotion of growth and profit for existing powerful players. Codes and existing contractors make new ways of thinking and doing difficult in many ways. This goal of profit is inescapable, so any building must first address the existing profit incentive of powerful players. The authors appropriately blame the unsustainable nature of high density fossil fuel-designed buildings operating:
“. . . almost entirely within the industrial assumptions and engineering methodologies of the ‘oil interval’. . . . The eye-catching novelties of one era will become the abandoned eyesores of the next, an inevitability lost on a self-absorbed elite fixated on today’s fashions. Meanwhile the humble, humane criteria of resilient design are being pushed aside, in the rush to embrace the most attention-getting new technological approaches — which then produce a disastrous wave of unintended failures. This is clearly no way to prepare for a ‘sustainable’ future in any sense” (Mehaffy & Salingaros, April 2013).
Instead what is needed is buildings at a lower level of hierarchy, buildings that do not rely on consistent electricity, water plumbed from hundreds of miles away, and density that can only be supported with an energy basis of high quality fossil fuels. Once fossil fuels become expensive or unavailable, we will need a different form of construction, that is supported instead by passive, renewable energies and local materials, with less density to allow for human-powered transport needs.
Both major principles of transformity and autocatalysis are in play here. In many parts of the economy, as energy inputs plateau and start to recede, bureaucratic responses to energy scarcity and resulting economic problems are to add complexity rather than remove it. People do not see the added cumulative energy and materials that are required to sustain what is already there, and then to add even more technology. This is the principle of transformity–adding complexity on top of what is already there requires more energy and materials through transformations. The only way to cut the inputs is to move back down the hierarchy in design to a more ecological approach that works with nature instead of fighting nature through added technology. But backing down the hierarchy is difficult, because of autocatalysis, or the positive feedback loops that feed the complexity, which are solidly in place. In Mehaffy and Salingaros’ example of green building above, the idea of components being bolted on is an example of the principle of transformity, while the inability to run outside of the rules of the construction system is an example of how autocatalysis sometimes traps us into systems that respond poorly to the need to change, resulting in overshoot.
Wasserman, 3-13, in ADN.com, 3-25
The players that are now attached to the system and making a profit demand and protect the system as it is. The financial system at this point acts as a voracious funnel to continue to funnel profits upwards towards profit. As the financial power at the top expands, it promotes further inequities and further resistance to change. So any change must come by adding added complexity, rather than removing rigid, powerful vested interests such as insurance companies, corporations, the legal system, and so on. The policy arena becomes resistant, and then atherosclerotic. Finally it ruptures. The choice is to try to create local experiments or demonstration projects in some of these more fossilized profit-centers in anticipation of failure of the system, or just wait until it collapses and begin again. Waiting for collapse doesn’t seem to be an ideal solution, so how do we approach doing things differently?
Healthcare’s death grip on the current system
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com L’ obstination
The healthcare system is another example of unsustainability and resistance to change. Our western healthcare subsystem is part of the economy at the very top of the hierarchy, with many transformations required to build its complexity. Because of the strong profit incentives, creating change by backing down from complexity is difficult. Attempts to limit extreme over-treatment such as intensive care at the end of life are hard to avoid, due to embedded ethical and legal rules and the systemic goals that drive diagnostics and treatment. Basic preventive care and health promotion are basic assumptions of a functional complex, high-energy economy, while the emphasis in healthcare has shifted to extreme, life-prolonging treatments for covered or wealthy clients, with inadequate care for the uninsured or inadequately insured. Those assumptions of basic health provision, including clean food and water, adequate plumbing, healthy immunity within the population, and other assumptions are being hollowed out as populations grow, energy inputs wane, and health maintenance of the population diminishes. Much like the construction example above, healthcare’s existence at the top of a hierarchy but still operating within the current oil-interval makes it almost immune to change. Medical ethics advocate maximum testing and treatment, while the legal system solidifies the status quo, and the insurance system promotes whatever increases its own profits—more insured people getting inappropriate, excess, expensive care that allows skimming. Physicians and well-paid healthcare managers have expensive debt such as large home mortgages to pay, which requires maintenance of the status quo. This autocatalysis promotes perpetuation of the system, even when everyone agrees that the system is broken.
Attempts to change the system result in incremental changes that do not disturb the status quo, for the most part. Powerful insurance companies that skim profit from the beginning of the money pipeline are allowed to stay and to set prices–they are even promoted through laws that mandate that everyone must pay these private, wealthy companies. The rest of the healthcare system must struggle with the leftovers after profits are skimmed, with hospitals and consumers getting the dregs. As long as the financial system stays afloat, the insurance companies will keep their grip on the system, with prices for consumers and other weak players becoming higher or even out of reach.
What might green healthcare look like?
Any new experiments in descent will have to arise organically out of descent, either through local collapses in the healthcare and/or economic system (Fuchs, 2010). Attempts to begin something new in healthcare outside of the insurance and legal systems will not work. The financial system at this point acts as a voracious funnel to continue to funnel profits upwards towards profit. So how do we remove the profit motive and dodge the corporatocracy, abandoning the premise that more is better that has fostered our careers, forming the basis for our society?
I’ve highlighted construction and healthcare here, but other subsystems of the economy are similarly entrenched in the goals of a high-energy growth economy. Education is increasingly relying on technology, expansion of bureaucracy and testing, and encroachment of the profit-motive. Government relies increasingly on corporations and other organizations that promote profits for one group of lobbyists or another. Everyone promotes digitization as a solution for problems, at a time when consistent operation of electronic information systems is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up.
So barring collapse, how do we work outside the current system to develop demonstration projects for buildings, for healthcare, for renewable energy, and other sustainability goals? I think we have to answer that question first, to change some of the really rigid profit-making systems in capitalist society such as government, education, and healthcare. If we’re not going to wait until everything collapses before we pick up the pieces, how do we describe and carry out a demonstration project such as a health care clinic that operates outside the limits and constraints of America’s extreme healthcare system, that are not subject to the rules and ethics of the current system? Perhaps the first step is to imagine it. Individuals are circumventing building codes and creating small houses out of sustainable materials. But healthcare seems trapped within the larger system. If I want less healthcare, or ecologically oriented healthcare, I have to abandon the system for the most part.
What would a healthcare system that really promoted Health Care instead of Sick Cure look like? We have forgotten what those words mean. A Health Care system would have to be divorced from the insurance payment system, and the emphasis would need to be on prevention. A bioethicist and environmental medicine expert would be needed, and there would need to be some way to bypass and make toothless the current emphasis on high-tech cure and end-of-life treatments. Basic preventive care and health promotion could be provided for all at low-cost, with tertiary or extreme cures only available elsewhere through referral, for more cost (if people can pay). Health promotion would need to include assessment of food relocalization, measures of resilience such as community/social supports, general stress levels, transportation, food security, and other basic needs, all weighed against higher order needs. Tools could be devised, people could be counseled, those at the end of life could be encouraged to weigh quality of life against extreme measures, and so on. Geriatric patients could be assessed for polypharmacy, social isolation, and other problems of aging and our high-tech culture. Children could be assessed for nature deficit, computer addiction, over-treatment for medicalized diagnoses such as attention deficit disorder and other disorders of modern life. Home assessments of water and food purity would be available. Families could be examined as systems, and extended families could be encouraged. Classes on financial frugality, growing your own food, eating lower on the food chain, and so on could be a part of the clinic. Some of these ideas are portrayed in the book, God’s Hotel, by Victoria Sweet, if you’re interested in reading more about this.
At the end of empire, the economic system at large has a death grip on profit-making subsystems, preventing the radical change that is needed. How do we begin to imagine what is really needed, rather than proposed incremental changes that only add to complexity and hasten collapse? Any ideas?
If not a stupid paradigm, then, as previously described, what might a smart paradigm include?
Many people who live in societies that embrace the western industrial dominant social paradigm don’t subscribe to that paradigm in whole or in part. Many realize, or sense, that our current paradigm threatens our ability to survive long-term. Our current paradigm tells us that the economy must continuously grow; that the role of government is to enforce contracts and keep it’s regulatory hands off of business; that technology will save us, particularly from our environmental sins; that humans are the most important forms of life; and that competition is the best way to manage systems and people.
Because this paradigm shapes the way most people think about how the world works and even shapes our living space (for example, with an emphasis on roads and driving) it won’t be easy to change. But since not changing it will clearly impact whether we survive into the future and what future life for our children and grandchildren will look like, changing the paradigm, or trying, is a moral imperative. First we need to consider what a new paradigm should look like.
There are many different paradigms to choose to live by. Humans lived on this Earth without significant impact for eons. We can use paradigms that have supported human and ecosystem health over thousands of years as examples from which to build a new and more resilient paradigm.
The paradigms that have supported long-term human adaptation and survival have some common characteristics – they use or used myth, ritual and mores to enforce limits of the biophysical system (ecosystem) on human actions, enhance the understanding that humans are embedded in (not separate from) their ecosystem, encourage humility and caution of human activities and foster respect for (not dominance of) the animals and plants that make up the ecosystem in which we are embedded. These paradigms support the recognition that there is no separation between humans and their environment and that every human action generates a response from the ecosystem and has consequences. They require reverence for what the Earth provides to us; what we are now calling “ecosystem services.”
The water temples range from mountains to seacoast and were the Balians’ solution to the problems of sharing common resources (in this case, land and water) described by Garrett Hardin in Tragedy of the Commons. On Bali, farmers were motivated to plant rice continuously and use as much water as they needed for their crop to maximize their return. Other farmers had the same goals. However, the limiting factor was water – there was not enough to supply all the farmers all the time. Also, continuously planting rice results in an explosion of the populations of pests that feast on rice. The most effective means of controlling the pest population is for all farmers to suspend planting rice at the same time so pests starve.
The temple system included symbolic ritual activities such as food offerings to the Goddess of Crater Lake and other deities. Due to the rigorous social coordination orchestrated through the water temples, led by temple priests, pest levels were minimized and water sharing optimized in the rice paddies. As a result, for over a thousand years, the system maintained a delicate balance, allowing farmers to plant land that remained fertile because it lay fallow for periods of time, and to control pest populations.
During the Green Revolution, the Indonesian government convinced farmers to use fertilizers and pesticides and to abandon the water temples. The government pressured farmers to plant rice as often as possible and ignore the irrigation schedules of neighboring paddies. The first production increase was short-lived as water shortages and pest infestations reduced rice production much below levels obtained with the water temples. Despite, and because of, massive application of pesticides, insects evolved, became resistant and prospered.
Although the farmers wanted to return to the water temple system, the government resisted until Dr. Lansing collaborated with ecologist/computer modeling expert Dr. James Kremer to study various crop management scenarios. Incorporating historic rainfall data into their computer models, they demonstrated that the water temples were far more effective at maximizing yields and reducing pest infestations than the government’s policy. The government then encouraged farmers to return to using the water temples.
This is only one example of a different paradigm that has worked for at least a millennium; there are many others. In India, research on groves considered to be sacred by communities suggests that these areas are particularly rich in biodiversity and other ecosystem services that are essential for survival of the community (see, e.g., Bhagwat, et al., 2005; Gadgil, Hemam, & Reddy, 1998; Waghchaure, et al., 2006). The links between people, their social institutions, and the physical environment are complex, diverse and redundant in these communities. Additionally, people living in these communities appear to use social institutions to enhance and increase these links and to manage their behaviors in relation to the ecosystem (Berkes, et al., 2000).
Berkes (1998) describes a story of caribou hunting in a resource-dependent community in Canada. Caribou had been absent from the community for over a decade. When the caribou returned, they migrated close to a road and were easily accessible. The local people harvested more caribou than they needed. The following year, the caribou did not return to this area in great numbers. The elders of the community explained to the people who, because they had disrespected the caribou by taking more than was needed, were punished by the caribou who did not offer themselves to be eaten. People living in the western world might scoff at this as a misunderstanding of caribou population and migration patterns.
In this example, a social institution was used to remind people of the link between humans and caribou and the results of overuse of the caribou. This illustrates an understanding of the role of humans in this complex socio-economic system. It also illustrates use of social institutions to mitigate the impact of humans on the environment. The interactions can be understood as a complex system, with the need to manage human actions as they impact the environment, rather than managing the environment to meet human needs.
Paradigms that work are adapted to local social and economic conditions, not to scales as large as (most) countries and especially not to scales on a global level. These paradigms require humans to have an intimate knowledge of the workings of the ecosystem in which they are embedded. Obviously, this requires abandonment of our myth that we are separate from nature. It also requires that we carefully observe, which means that we live woven into our ecosystem.
What that also means is that answers to how we develop a new paradigm can have only broad outlines, not specific answers because each paradigm will have to be uniquely adapted to its ecosystem. Specific adaptations to a southern United States ecosystem will not work in the north. It means that people will have to reacquaint themselves with their local ecological conditions and adopt strategies that balance what their ecosystem can offer with their social goals.
On a broad scale, a social paradigm that makes us more resilient will require us to recognize that we are part of a complex system and that we may never understand the intricate interconnections and responses of all the parts of that system. In turn, this dictates that we should be humble; that we are cautious of our abilities and the unintended and potential long-term consequences of our actions. It will mean adoption of the precautionary principle and looking long-term into the future rather than just next year or the next five years. Very importantly, it will require that we acknowledge that there are limits to what we may do, and that we strive to understand and remain within those limits. To foster our resilience, a new paradigm will require an understanding that socio-economic and ecosystems are intricately connected and creation of closer links among us and our ecosystems. We must acknowledge that we are not separate from nature, but an integral part. Perhaps when we are better connected, we will be glad knowing that we are woven into the web of this beautiful world.
Ed. note: Additional reading on ecological engineering:
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com Le dilemme – Dilemma
Flip the script on the cubicle – Alaskan day at the office
Myra Canyon conference
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com La prison
Winter biking Anchorage
Kettle Valley Rail Trail, BC
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com Les temoins indifferent – indifferent witnesses
Carper’s involved community
Natural Resources, Klara Maisch, Anchorage Museum
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com S’y retrouver – Finding the way
pathfinding, backcountry
paddler Bear Glacier
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com L’ambitieux – The driven ambition
Garden ambitions-Kohlrabi
Ecolutionary egglayers
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com Une vie de château – The house of cards
cabin porn, Barber cabin Kenai
Missoula house with pumpkin patch
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com Sauver la nature – Saving nature
Nature saving us – geologic time
Arctic midnight sun
http://www.gilbert-garcin.com/chrono/photos/photo_1999_18.php La vie (résumé) – Life (sinopsys)
snow skirt class Seams Like Home
Mark Carper’s OK garden
Gilbert-Garcin.com – La tour d’ivoire – Ivory tower
20 Mile, human-powered travel
Bike-love.org http://momentummag.com
If kids grow kale, kids eat kale. If they grow tomatoes, they eat tomatoes. But when none of this is presented to them, if they’re not shown how food affects the mind and the body, they blindly eat whatever you put in front of them. . . . We gotta’ make this sexy. I want us all to become ecolutionaries, renegades, gangstas. We gotta’ flip the script on what a gangsta is. . . . Be gangsta with your shovel, and let that be your weapon of choice.— Ron Finley, A guerilla gardener in South Central LA, Ted.com
The picture above is a metaphor for our contracting society in an era of declining nonrenewable energy. What is the emergy basis of an electric bike powered by a solar power battery that the bike and rider tows? How do we use technology while our horizons of available yet marginal net energy recede? The award-winning bike/solar bob is touted as every environmentalist’s dream, where I can have my cake and eat it too. If I tow a solar panel behind my electric bike, I can boost my power and range to go longer distances at higher speeds. I can even charge electronics and power LED lights. What Is the true value to society of the electric panel towed behind on a bob, and is it worth it? Is the time we save worth the expenditures of energy? Can high-tech boosters augment or be layered on top of human-powered technology in a lower energy world? How much tech is too much? In our struggle to extract usable energy from the surrounding environment to maintain our society based on high-quality fossil fuels, our highly transformed society uses energies of varying qualities in substitution for each other, without an understanding of the Transformity involved in different types of energy.
Transformity
Odum, 2000
Transformity is the idea that energy creates a hierarchy where at each level, transformations convert different kinds of available energy to produce a smaller amount of energy in another form. “Transformity is a measure of the hierarchy of energy and is apparently applicable to all quantities of matter, energy, or information. Transformities have as many orders of magnitude as there are energy levels in the universe. For example, the solar transformity within the geobiosphere ranges from 1 for sunlight to 1 X 1032 sej/J for some categories of genetic information” (Odum, 1996, p. 19). Most energy transformations in society involve four or more kinds of energy. The higher the transformity value, the more available energy of another kind that is required to make it. Transformity and thus emergy basis increases with each transformation, so it measures the increasing quality of energy or as it passes up the food chain or hierarchy. These can be depicted through graphs of power (energy flow) and empower (emergy flow) in order to view the position and relative importance of different types of energy (Tilley & Brown, 2001). Transformity is typically represented on a logarithmic scaled graph, because losses from entropy are so great at each stage that a plot on a normal graph would be hollow and cover a very small range (Odum, 2007, p. 75).
The solar transformity of electricity is one or more magnitudes of order greater than the original fuel, be it from peanut butter with the electric bike transformation, or from gasoline with the electric car transformation. The use of electricity to transform materials into solar panels is an even greater obligation of available energy, beyond electricity, which uses high-emergy human labor, high-tech, and highly refined materials. Those added steps of transformation, from peanut butter, to electricity, to solar panel are highly wasteful of energy for a society that can’t afford it. Making all of those leaps across the energy hierarchy drain energy from society, from the person riding the bike to people’s household budgets, and to countries’ trade imbalances that drain resources from our biosphere.
I will admit to owning an electric bike as an experiment. It is useful for plowing through unplowed trails during mid-winter, and for heavy loads, or those big hills I have to pedal on the way home that might otherwise force me into a car. An electric bike is also useful for those with disabilities. But the electric bike’s range may be limited due to the need to recharge, or we may travel to a place where electricity is not available for charging. Initial costs and maintenance/replacement costs for the battery add more energetic costs–we are on our second costly battery with this bike. And ultimately, the limiting factor from multiple emergetic inputs is the power in our legs. Uneven matching from a solar panel and human power results in more production but less efficiency. “As nonrenewable resources have enriched the economy, more feedbacks have passed to environmental interfaces, thus increasing the production, increasing the Emergy investment ratio, and producing with less efficiency” (Odum, 1996, p. 166). China has 120 million electric bikes already. Is an electric bike or an electric velomobile a good transition from a car to human-powered transportation? Is it really worth it, when an electric bike battery adds complexity and has energetic and material costs that may not be affordable or sustainable in a lower energy world? Emergy investment ratios of free environmental resources versus purchased inputs can help to gauge whether some economic-environmental use will be economical relative to the ratio of the prevailing region. In other words, this bike bob from the Netherlands, with its high emergy investment ratio (users must buy much of the emergy from trade instead of getting it free from the environment) may not be competitive in global markets.
Energy matching
Best Transport Alternatives Odum, McGrane, Brown, & Bastianoni 1995 (Florida Policies)
When we add a heavy solar panel and its associated bike-bob towed behind the bike, we are stacking tertiary economy technology on low-tech, human-powered transport. The bike bob illustrates the concept of energy matching–high quality energy such as electricity is best used when paired with larger, low quality fuels. Electricity should not be used for cars, or bikes or electric heat when there is a lower quality fuel that will suffice. The electric mechanism has to engage more to accommodate for the extra weight of the bob and the panel, and we’ve extended the footprint of the humble bicycle to China’s dirty, cheap-labor solar panel factories. We are matching the high-transformity solar panel to the low-transformity of a human-powered bike, which might be successful if the solar panel was net positive, with an emergy yield that does not drain yield from society. But a solar bike bob takes the place of more efficient electricity, and it only works in first-world countries for consumers with surplus wealth–how long will that last in our contracting economies? As discretionary income wanes, people will choose simpler, less expensive efficiencies. We are just rearranging the deck chairs while the band plays on.
We trial marginally yielding technology using surplus wealth, not seeing the added layers of energy transformity that become circular reasoning. It is like raising yourself by your own bootstraps against gravity, or like the Ouroboros eating its own tail. We spend more, but get less. At some point, the cost of this labor-saving device gets too expensive for my personal budget, if it isn’t already! Or I crash the bike and break the solar panel, or it needs repair, or someone steals the panel–how do I lock that up! Or a string of cloudy weather limits recharging. Or, as a form of energy cannibalism, I just get tired of dragging half of China around behind me just so that I can make it easier to pedal up that last big hill to the house, or get somewhere a little faster. Or I find that the electric bike makes me lazy, and I’ve started to get fat. I opt for the simpler solution, which is to go back to my simple cruiser. The added complexity ends up being just not worth it. A bike is the most efficient form of transportation.
Code Green Stephanie McMillan
The same process occurs with electric cars. We add technology and thus added emergy to cars with no real increase in function, to use different energy sources that gasoline. In a form of energy cannibalism, we use more energy in factories in China and military efforts in Afghanistan to produce electric cars and batteries that are less efficient than a small, low-horsepower car with an internal combustion engine, or a bike. And we put more demands on an overburdened electrical grid. Because we cannot see the transformed energy, or we have not valued it properly with our false monetary systems and inefficient markets, we may reach for technology as the solution when faced with limits. Even our inefficient, false money markets have rejected electric cars and even hybrids. We have empirical evidence now of the high emergy basis of electric cars.
Paul Kingsnorth calls this “the myth of progress manifested in tool form. Plastic is better than wood. Moving parts are better than fixed parts. Noisy things are better than quiet things. Complicated things are better than simple things. New things are better than old things. We all believe this, whether we like it or not. It’s how we were brought up.” In a growing society with surplus energy, these beliefs were true, because surplus energy allowed us to heap transformed energy into technological bells and whistles that promoted a consumer society and profits, which maximized power. We are compelled to create something out of available surplus energy by the system, and to design lower energy amplifying circuits in the form of cultural feedback loops that tell us that consumption is a good thing. In a world of planned obsolescence, we must continue to buy new versions of products to pay the debt and keep companies growing. If we accept that the economy will have to contract back to a level of technology compatible with mostly renewable supports, then we will start to make wiser choices that use the emergy basis for society more wisely.
Solar share
If solar panels have a marginal net emergy yield, then dragging one behind my bike means that I’m dragging a very large footprint with me, with origins in China, Afghanistan, and the Netherlands, just so that I can go a little faster. On average, a US citizen consumes 19 times his personal solar share of the world’s annual global renewable energy income that he is entitled to. If I eat a Big Mac I consume 3.3 times the average daily per capita global renewable solar income (Brown & Ulgiati, 2012). I can only imagine how much of my personal solar share that a solar panel bike bob consumes. In a future with less fossil fuels, this wealth inequity will be resolved either willingly or unwillingly, peacefully or violently. A functional low energy economy means that everyone will have smaller, more equitable personal solar shares. What is the relationship between social justice and solar equity? That question will have to wait until later.
Brown & Ulgiati, Tesla Conference, July 2012
Referring to the table above, electric power has a transformity of about four times that of fossil fuels. The emergy basis of an electric car (or bike) includes the initial outlay of complex technology, resources such as rare earth metals and human labor, and the recurring costs of high quality electricity required to run the car. Why would we use energy in the form of electricity that costs society four times as much to produce than the original gasoline form of energy? The different forms of energy–gasoline for an internal combustion engine versus electricity for an electric or hybrid car–are not valued properly by society, so we waste energy in our search for alternatives. The contributions are from multiple levels of hierarchy with varying qualities of energy contribution. Because there is a surplus of energy in society, and we cannot see the energetic contributions, and since we do not understand the difference in energy quality, the system allows us to waste energy by encouraging superfluous technology for profit that does not really add value. Profit incentives of capitalism dictate that added technology begets more sales, so technology is added whether it is needed or not. Our imperfect market and currency mechanisms fail to value environmental and human contributions appropriately, so we layer environmental degradation on top of the wasted energy in our pursuit to maximize power. Can our society support that extra load? Electricity is not free, electric grids are maxed out, coal creates mercury and other kinds of air and water pollution. How do we calculate those costs to society? Complexity of electric cars requires extra maintenance, less sustainability, and more rare earth metals mining such as lithium from places like Afghanistan—calculate those costs of sustaining our empire through war in hopes of expanding our battery production in the US from 2% to 40%, as Obama proposes. Why are we even considering electric cars, much less putting them into production? Because we haven’t done the math, we’re only looking at pieces of the problem, and we’re asking the wrong questions. Short-term systemic goals of profit instead of sustainability drive the system, at least for now. “The auto age will come to an end when alternate needs for the fuels running the personal autos become more important than the time saved by having individual cars” (Odum & Odum, 2001). A simpler society in the future will have to begin to revalue the calculus that values human labor/time and energy expenditures.
When we try to use technology to eke out extra efficiencies or improve on Nature through technology, marginal energy sources (and our economy) begin to look more and more like a Rube Goldberg diagram as we try to add technology to improve borderline processes and make them functional. Designing artificial leaves to do Nature’s work of photosynthesis and respiration demonstrates our ignorance of the thermodynamic laws, the energy hierarchy, and the variation in differing energy quality. Or we make claims that some countries are powered entirely by renewable energy, not seeing the large footprints of modern societies powered by global trade and advanced technology that would be impossible without fossil fuels. The same holds true for any situation where we try to salvage unsustainable problems with high tech solutions such as geoengineering, carbon sequestration, biofuels, high-tech healthcare and other high-tech, add-on solutions that oppose nature rather than working with her. Nature knows best, and there’s no free lunch.
If we use environmental accounting such as Emergy synthesis, then we can weigh the relative merit of electric cars, solar bike bobs, and other high-tech gadgets with incremental impacts against low-tech options such as human-powered bicycles. Are solar-powered bike bobs more valuable to society than sharing information? Those choices may need to be made in our future. And money is not the answer in valuing these choices. Money is a poor measure of the true value of a complex electric car or bike. Money does not value the associated resources required for its production and operation. A resource is generally worth more than it costs according to the calculus of emergy. We’re wasting time and energy going down energetic dead ends. What are better uses for this energy?
Recent news about Hanford leaks, a flurry of news surrounding the two-year anniversary of Fukushima, and today’s news about breast cancer rates in the US center my thoughts on blind spots in health research. I will use ionizing radiation again as an illustration of environmental linkages to disease, beginning with the trigger for this post, which was a new World Health Organization (WHO) report. Previous posts about nuclear hazards are linked here and here.
This week, the WHO published a preemptive report on Fukushima, only two years after the disaster. The WHO concluded that “for the general population inside and outside of Japan, the predicted risks are low and no observable increases in cancer rates above baseline rates are anticipated.” This conclusion is from the same organization that has been muzzled on the topic of ionizing radiation contamination of our environment since 1959, when they agreed to misinform the public in subordination to the global nuclear governing body, the IAEA, to protect civil and military nuclear interests. If you believe that Fukushima has not increased background risk and there will be no increases in cancer rates, I have a bridge to sell you. Mark Twain’s maxim about lies, damn lies, and statistics can be applied here. The point of this post is to examine western medicine’s epistemology of disease, specifically examining how we select the risk factors that are involved in cancer and other diseases.
Epistemology is the study of the nature and scope of knowledge. Our society lacks a broad understanding of how ionizing radiation behaves once it is accidentally released into the environment. There are two main reasons for this. Bednarz (2010) describes Mitroff and Silvers’ discussion of Type 3 errors, where we unintentionally solve the wrong problems through our narrow worldview and reductionist focus in science, and Type 4 errors, where we intentionally solve the wrong problems, because we are pursuing goals such as profit that subverts the science. In our western system of medical research, we commit both Type 3 and Type 4 errors as a result of our narrow worldview and our economic mandate for profit and growth. These type 3 and 4 errors result in blind spots, especially regarding environmental linkages to disease.
In another medical report this week, a new epidemiological study of breast cancer reports increasing rates of breast cancer in young women (Johnson, Chien, & Bleyer, 2013). The pattern of increased incidence in younger patients would be compatible with the epidemiology of radiation-caused cancers, which are more common in the young who have faster cell division/turnover. The increased incidence could also be compatible with many other accumulating environmental toxins.
“The number of American women ages 25 to 39 diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer — which has already spread to other organs by the time it’s found — rose about 3.5% a year from 2000 to 2009, according to a study in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association. The trend began in the 1970s, although the most rapid increases occurred in about the last decade, the study says. The study doesn’t provide any clues about what might be driving the increase, says study author Rebecca Johnson, a pediatric and adolescent oncologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital. . . .
The number of women in this age range diagnosed with advanced disease rose from about 250 a year in 1976 to about 850 a year in 2009, Johnson says. The largest increases were in the youngest women, from ages 25 to 34, the study says. There were also slight increases in metastatic diagnoses among women ages 40 to 54, but no increase in older women” (USA Today, 2/27/13).
Western medicine’s emphasis on treatment and pharmaceuticals, with abandonment of science that is focused on prevention and risk factors in fields such as epidemiology, public health, and environmental medicine points to reductionist science and the influence of money in directing the focus of research. Recently, Dr. Susan Love said that “. . . her experience [of a recent diagnosis of acute myelogenous leukemia] has emboldened her in her quest to focus on the causes of disease rather than new drugs to treat it.” This aha! moment from a well-known breast cancer researcher illustrates our blind focus on research oriented towards treatment with increasingly costly drugs that may not cure. These days, our science is often directed by funding, and funding increasingly is directed by large corporations whose incentives are to increase profit. This research emphasis leads to a focus on tertiary treatment in high-tech healthcare centers, while blind spots develop about the causes of illness, especially environmental ones, including PCBs, heavy metals, radiation, and pesticides. In Love’s case, her leukemia is even more likely to be attributable to radiation exposure than other diseases. Strontium-90 is a bone-seeker, playing havoc with bone marrow. Should we be focusing on and funding genetic testing and treatment as the future of medicine, or should we be widening our view to encompass better science about preventive care and attention to burgeoning environmental risk factors? Especially since the cost of healthcare in America is now at 18% of GDP, and rising without brakes.
There is a sea change coming in our satisfaction with medicine and the focus for our research. The environmental risk factors of many of our diseases may be a driver for that shift. Evidence-based medicine values randomized, controlled clinical trials that use reductionist methods of statistics, so there can be blind spots in what we view as causation. Potentially, heart attacks and strokes, Type 1 Diabetes, thyroid disease in women, stress ulcers, many cancers, and some other immunodeficient-related disorders are at least in part caused by or made worse by the increasing problem of radioisotopes in the food chain, for example. The hazards take years to accumulate, and do not create immediate health effects. Our food safety organizations are increasingly helpless or avoidant about the risks. The corporate nuclear lobbies make sure that science is subverted. It is important to understand the risks and to protect yourself where possible. This post is a plea to healthcare scientists to begin considering radiation as a risk.
While most healthcare professionals think in reductionist terms of single causes to illness, I can’t help but take a more integrated approach. Could radiation be a contributing cause to many of our modern diseases? I was recently discussing the impacts of radiation on the body with a good friend who is a pathology professor (MD-PhD). The professor was unaware of most of them, including the nature of “cesium heart” which is well documented in Chernobyl victims. He wasn’t buying it.
As a side note, disturbingly, Bandazehvsky’s research on the topic of cardiac effects of cesium landed him in a Russian jail shortly after he published reports critical of official research. There is a long tradition of locking up scientists who threaten the status quo. For example, Dr. Semmelweis discovered in 1847 that childbed fever could be prevented by good handwashing. For his discovery, he was ridiculed, dismissed from his post, and committed to an asylum where he died shortly thereafter. And Galileo was threatened with torture and committed to house arrest for the last decade of his life for his heresy of heliocentrism. Bandazehvsky is in good company, and his imprisonment is suspicious–was his research was too threatening?
If you look at the long arc of many modern chronic diseases over time, Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), heart attacks, and other diseases became more common in the general population after the start of above ground nuclear testing around 1950. While correlation is not causation, when one examines epidemiology studies, radiation is nowhere in sight as a risk factor. These diseases have been commonly blamed on the stress or diet of our modern lifestyles or on genetics. Study after study where I search for radiation as a potential risk factor and find . . . nothing. We have rewritten the official party line about contributors to disease and what is important in medicine. Impacts from the environment are not a threat in this new storyline.
Biomagnification and the hierarchy of energy
Where is our vaunted western healthcare system on this issue of environmental pollution? Health professionals’ training regarding environmental pollutants is minimal. For example, during our education, physicians and nurses receive a brief lecture on radiation safety during radiotherapy cures, and the impact of some of our high-tech radiation treatments and diagnostics on tissues. That’s it. We are taught to believe that the formula Dose = time X distance X shielding = protection from radiation. Medical students only get detailed knowledge of radiation sources and tissue impacts if they go on to pursue residencies in things like radiology, radiation oncology, or nuclear medicine. Most Emergency Departments have a Geiger counter in their disaster inventory closet, but most healthcare professionals would have no idea what do with it or what the numbers mean. And instead of being taught ecological medicine, research dollars promote the wonders of small-scale genetic
TR Frieden April 2010, 100(4)Am Jo Public Health Genetics science is at the top of the pyramid, while ecological medicine is at the bottom.
technology and our ability to manipulate genetic cures. In my doctoral program in the mid 1990s, genetics was hailed as the future of healthcare. As usual, we look inwards at smaller and smaller pieces of the puzzle, never looking up from the microscope to see the bigger picture looming on the horizon. The dangers from radiation are very real, and they arise from accumulation of isotopes in the food chain. Western medicine pursues high-tech cures at the top of the emergy pyramid that only perpetuate the problem of environmental pollution, as technology requires expanding power use. Instead we should be teaching our healthcare professionals an entire course on environmental medicine. Ironies abound. We are spending considerable efforts to extract the last bit of cure from our advanced health care system, while ignoring the basic socioeconomic factors such as clean food, air, and water that gave us our longevity to begin with. We are hollowing out the base of the pyramid that supports our health while continuing to pile on technological complexity at the top. We need to do the best we can to learn how to protect ourselves.
From NativePerspectives.net
Unfortunately, protecting yourself from radiation food hazards is an ever-expanding threat requiring the use of expensive technology. A decent Geiger counter costs about $500. Your regular Geiger counter will detect a part of the range of isotopes, which will give you a relative feel for contamination. But internal contamination is ten to hundreds of times as dangerous as external exposure, depending on the isotope involved and the age of the victim. The dangers of radiation are primarily from ingestion of internal emitters which have been concentrated in the food chain over time. Nuclear promoters discount this danger by suggesting that internal exposure from hot particles is the same as external exposure. Yet logic and physics dictate that if you internalize a cesium, strontium or plutonium hot particle, you may carry that particle around permanently if it is not excreted, subjecting you to continuous bombardment. External exposure means walking by an isotope with brief exposure–that isotope may or may not emit. But when we breathe, drink, or eat an isotope, it gets absorbed and taken up into different organs depending on the type of isotope and other factors, and is then carried around for months, years, or decades, while it continues to bombard tissues. So detection of contamination in food and water needs to be much more sensitive, and limits need to be much lower. Proper measurement is performed in a lab, by drying and ashing the food and using a high purity germanium detector (HPGED). The process is time-consuming and costly, and is better suited to research than to personal protection.
So if we will be exposed anyway, despite our best efforts, why try? While Japanese food exports are relatively negligible, some people will be exposed, either from Fukushima, or from future events. In November of 2012, the US reopened food imports from Japan. And while recent reports suggested that Fukushima fallout was gone with the wind, spent fuel has some very long half-lives in its make-up, so the isotopes are not gone with the wind. The isotopes have been dispersed by wind and water, with heavy isotopes settling close-by and the lighter stuff dispersed widely. Food chain dangers will most likely accumulate over time through biomagnification in the food chain, as more and more isotopes are released from more and more disasters. We need to try to limit our exposure, because short-term health effects will kill some of us, via leukemias, cancers, and weakened immune systems. Limiting our exposure limits longer term impacts to our children and their children.
Odum & Barett, 2006, p. 205, after Ophel, 1963 How come we have to go back to 1963 for a diagram of radiation in the food web?
Each isotope has different rates of biomagnification and then uptake and also different impacts in the body. Strontium follows calcium pathways in the body, so it settles in bone marrow, replacing structure and weakening bones and teeth, and causing leukemia. Cesium follows potassium pathways, lodging in muscle such as the heart. Many other isotopes act in other damaging ways in the body.
The dangers are probably still small for most foods, but hazards are tenfold to a hundredfold for children, infants, and fetuses, who have the fastest rates of mitosis and development. Rapidly dividing cells in the young are most sensitive in any organism. Similarly, organs with rapidly dividing cells are affected (bone marrow, digestive tract, skin). So risk avoidance is most important for the young.
Some of the list of long-term impacts for human health include the following:
Circulatory damage (high blood pressure, rhythm disturbances, MI, stroke, cardiomyopathies, rhythm disturbances artery spasm, especially during cardiac stress such as temperature extremes, physical/emotional stress) (Bandazhevsky, 2001)
Hematologic problems (leukemias especially)
Endocrine problems (especially Hypothyroidism, thyroid nodules/Cancer, and Diabetes)
Immune system
Uro-genital system
Musculoskeletal system
Dental problems as cesium replaces calcium in teeth and bones
Central nervous system and psyche
The eye (cataracts and retinopathies)
Increase in congenital malformations
Increase in cancers
Accelerated aging
Increased frequency of mutations
Fertility problems and Change in secondary sex ratio (Yablokov, 2012)
http://www.epa.gov/radnet/radiation-monitoring/index.html (UNSCEAR, 2000, 1945-1996 rates of SR90 in milk)
Because exposure to radiation is invisible and difficult to detect, it is far under-represented as risk factor for disease. Causes of mortality for radiation exposure are difficult to track beyond the obviously linked leukemias and cancer. Manmade radiation from above-ground testing beginning in the 1950s has been added to by military depleted uranium from expanding use in the Middle East and expanding failures in the 435 nuclear power plants (NPPs) around the world, along with the reprocessing plants. Radiation is often ignored as a reason for immunosuppression, various cancers, and perhaps even endocrine dysfunction, especially thyroid. Because radiation impacts have not been measured in the general population, radiation’s contribution to cancers and other diseases go unnoticed. Women are more vulnerable than men, and children are at least times as vulnerable as adults, because of the rapid mitosis of their cells as they grow. Fetuses are even more vulnerable.
(Gale, 2002) Incidence of diabetes in children under age 10 years in Norway, 1925–1995
I would be very interested in seeing an epidemiological study that examines the relationship between Type 1 Diabetes, which typically appears in children, and radiation. Anecdotal reports from physicians at Fukushima of a big increase in T1D in their pediatric patients (Fernex, Independent WHO, 2012) set me to looking for evidence. A recent epidemiology describes T1D as “environmentally triggered autoimmune destruction of pancreatic beta cells occurs against the background of genetic risk, although alternate hypotheses exist” (Maahs et al., 2010). Yet if you look at the long-term epidemiology of T1D, a sharp upturn in the incidence occurred around 1950, at about the same time that above-ground nuclear testing began (Gale, 2002). Maahs et al. make no mention of radiation as a risk factor. It is simply off peoples’ radar. Instead, we’ll blame Diabetes on climate change, since we’re blaming everything else on climate change.
Similarly, there has been a rash of sudden deaths recently in young athletes during athletic events. It will be interesting to watch trends in cardiovascular mortality post-Fukushima. Cesium has an affinity for cardiac muscle, and stroke, aneurysms, and early heart attacks are sequelae of bioaccumulation. Instead we focus on cholesterol as a cause, at least as long as cholesterol drugs are the highest-profit patented drugs in the world. Now that most statins are off patent, the guidelines are suddenly deemphasizing cholesterol control–a clear example of a Type 4 error. One only needs to look at the history of cholesterol discovery and treatment, and the correlation between patented drugs and treatment guidelines to understand the direct relationship between corporate pressures and medical evidence.
Stomach cancer has been common in Japan specifically during the last 50 years, commonly associated with diet and place of birth. Stress ulcers have increased after Fukushima independent of common risk factors such as H. pylori and drugs such as aspirin. Might internal isotope ingestion be an unseen risk factor in both? Similarly, an increase in celiac disease is being blamed on gluten. From a recent New York Times article, “All of which may explain a curious historical phenomenon — an “epidemic” of celiac disease that struck Sweden some 30 years ago. Anneli Ivarsson, a pediatrician at Umea University, recalled a sudden wave of “terribly sick” infants.” Wasn’t that the same time that a wave of radiation from Chernobyl impacted Scandinavia? If we can’t see it, and don’t measure it, can we pretend that it isn’t there? From the same article, the author notes that Finland ranks first in the world for precedence of T1D–another connection to Chernobyl fallout? Who’s to say–I would really like to see an epidemiologist tackle some of these relationships.
The best science we have on the medical effects have come from Chernobyl, but very little of the information crosses over into western medicine–a combination of reductionist thinking, taboos, and growth memes where technology equals progress. We find explanations that fit our world view. We are now discovering that inflammation is a probable cause of coronary disease, in contrast to earlier theories. What if the idea that obesity as a risk factor for heart attacks is in part related to accumulation of background radiation and fallout? These things are not on practitioners radar.
Bioaccumulation will get worse over time
Bioaccumulation will be variable and patchy depending on rainout, and the impact beyond more cancers will be on general immunity of the population at large, probably eventually causing some large epidemic that overwhelms the healthcare system. Food and water security are going to become increasingly important, and food from a distance will be increasingly viewed as suspect, and we will need to know if the soil we grow on is safe; just one more reason for relocalization. Organic will need to be redefined. There is a rumor that uranium tailings are sometimes added to organic fertilizers–I do not know if that is true. Babies will need to be protected strenuously as a precautionary principle. In systems with limited resources, there will eventually be stigmas, taboos, or other cultural mechanisms that feedback to control family and population size, and radiation and other environmental pollutatnts may impact these behaviors. Toxic impacts on fetuses could also create hesitancy in childbirth, along with reduced fertility. Sexual taboos such as spaced births and limits on casual sex may also reemerge, limiting procreation (Osei, 2006).
The rate of change in our world is accelerating. For the US, we’ve got to mothball our clunker NPPs and cask the spent fuel in our spent fuel pools now, while we still have the fossil fuel supports. Otherwise we’ll end up just like Japan–what are the odds? And unless you’re wealthy and privileged, there is no place to run. Eventually, there will be no ‘there’ there anymore to run to, as countries clamp down on migration and the pollution effects from a number of sources multiply.
There is too much unquestioning acceptance of current reductionist, piecemeal science funded by the military-industrial complex in this country and globally. Focused science that examines pieces of problems but misses the big picture needs balance with better, less biased funding for environmental or ecological medicine so that we can learn how to protect ourselves. Traditional ecological knowledge will be helpful in accumulating wisdom about new values for working and living within nature’s limits.
Public health and a safe, adequate food supply are arguably an uphill battle against the limits of natural selection and population control–one that we’ve been winning for the past two centuries with the help of fossil fuels. Radioisotopes in our food may be one form of natural selection as we progress. Someone has to say it–those who stay in contaminated areas or have habits of eating food from a distance or processed food may become part of that natural selection process as our economies and populations contract. Instead of keeping everyone alive as long as possible, we need to be preparing a whole new way of caring for people that allows people to die gracefully when their time comes. Our current system of medical ethics attempts to keep everyone alive at all costs, no matter what the pain, as it is embedded in a system where more care creates more profit. In a future with much less healthcare, we will need a different form of bioethics, embedded in a new system of ecological medicine with different goals.
Header art: Salvador Dali, The Three Sphinxes of Bikini, 1947
By Austin Johnson, essay written Dec. 2012 for UAA Honors 192 course, Limits to Growth
Le moulin de l’oubli (Mill of oblivion), Gilbert Garcin, 1999 Value added modern business?
“There is no business to be done on a dead planet.” The legendary Sierra Club executive director David Brower spoke these words. I have found no quote that ties business and earth together with such profound simplicity. I will use the inspiration from this quote to look at our current system of business and give examples of more sustainable practices. To conclude this UAA Honors course on limits to growth, I revisit my earlier definition of our system as one based solely on the production, consumption and exchange of goods
L’atelier de Sisyphe – Sisiphus’ workshop, Garcin, 2001 The business cycle
tied to a free market, whereby anyone can envision, develop and deliver products as long as the end cost is competitive. In the market place, the consideration of “good” or “bad” in products is seldom distinguished. This has led us to a place where missiles and solar panels are evaluated using the same economic metrics. Both items have a purchaser and can be produced competitively within their own markets. Both count as forms of economic growth. Companies playing the economic game continually search for the edge that will maximize profit at other’s expense. We live in a society that constantly reminds us that at the end of the day the person who profits is the “winner”. When profit is of utmost importance, we ignore other values like happiness and spirituality that offer new ways to measure wealth. It is clear that this current economic system has major flaws that render it broken.
I prefer a different definition of economics that, if followed, could change the way we act toward each other and the environment. This new definition reintroduces the root of the word economics, which is “loving care of the household”. This new term encompasses the stewardship role of humans to the global household known as earth. Economics should not be a business term used to calculate the bottom line but a holistic idea that encompasses the well-being of the person and his community. In order to adopt this new term, we must change the way we think and act.
There was a time when people had relatively equal resources. Many people could gather food from the same tree and drink from the same river. This condition was set by the lack of agricultural techniques and tools. But lo and behold, the wheels of the resource economy were set in motion. First, the land, which held the tree and the river, was claimed. This land was used as a leverage point to get power, resources and materials. So the landlord turned capitalist became wealthy in the society while the men working under him remained poor. This gave rise to the class system still seen today. In this system, a few men were stronger, smarter and quicker than the others. Over time the “few” became extremely wealthy. They made all their money off the work of others. The gap between the rich and poor has now arrived at a point where the bank CEO can receive a fifty million dollar bonus while countless other people are in a mortgage crisis.
Changer le monde – Change the world, Garcin, 2001 A new order?
The most radical idea in a new economic system where the “household” is cared for is the possibility of achieving abundance for all. The potential of humans cannot be measured and thus the idea of prosperity cannot be either. This abundance would feed, clothe, house and educate all who wished for the simple things of a decent life. The true wealth among us would surpass that of today’s lonely billionaire. There should be a collective goal to build tremendous wealth in communities by liberating citizens from the cold grip of the Exxon Mobils and Cargills of the world. Let us be clear that corporations are the pervasive, wealthy, powerful, and influential organizations on earth. They are also the current instruments of destruction. Fortunately, the people on this earth are capable of great turns in thought. I am optimistic because of the potential that an engaged mind can have and the speed at which change for the better can happen.
While working at the homeless café where the poor come for food, I noticed an oversized check on the wall made out to the café. It was written by Wal-Mart to the order of twenty thousand dollars. This was a generous donation to say the least, a donation that made me think. Is that not a small price to pay for the 1.5 jobs lost for every job created when Wal-Mart comes to town? And what about the Wal-Mart employees who work for poverty wages? The corporation, no matter how pleasant its façade, will do unconscionable things to make money, please the stockholders and keep the end price low for the consumer. Cargill, the largest private corporation in the world (in terms of revenue), and Monsanto are responsible for about 100,000 Indian farmers committing suicide because they fixed the price of grain and cotton lower than the farmers could grow it. This put them into a state of extreme poverty, where death was a better option than life.
There are a handful of companies that are considerably clean with only a small environmental impact. They are the renewable energy companies that sell only clean power to the grid as well as clothing companies like Patagonia who are continually striving to respect their workers and the environment.
In order to rethink the way our economic system operates, there needs to be a shift in thinking about the systems of this planet and the people on board. We must acknowledge the mistakes that we have made while operating as if the earth is at our disposal. From this place, we must begin to understand that we are sharing the fruits of the land among all creatures. This is an educational opportunity for all of society. The clearest reason to invest in education is because the returns are exponential. As a group of learners becomes wiser they are more apt to handle the world’s complex affairs. This new intelligence could be passed on for generations to an incredible number of people.
Currently, much of our energy is wasted through luxury and inefficiency. With a newfound understanding of our earth’s systems, civilization can work to streamline the use of energy. With the efficient use of energy, the competition and selfishness of capitalism will become obsolete. There will be abundance for all. Humanity will soar to new heights where all can live and prosper. The inefficiency of our society is partly due to the technological premise used to invent and construct weaponry. Destruction is waste! We must turn weaponry into livingry (Fuller, 1981).
Connaître ses limite – Knowing one’s limits- Garcin
After World War II, the munitions plants had an excess of ammonium nitrate. They decided to spread it on the American crops. A great increase in production was realized but at a tremendous cost. Now soil erosion has become a problem because farmers no longer have diversified farms. We cannot invent soil. Once it is gone we can only help nature replenish its fertility. Along with all other chemical products that hinder the environment more than help it, it is clear that weaponry does not belong in our lives due to its profound negative effect on the environment. Livingry will always be associated with ethical products and services. Livingry aids in the survival of man. We have shown the world that overnight our factories can retool and begin producing new products. Our wartime efforts need to be mimicked by the sustainability industry so that it can expand rapidly and become a staple in our lives (Orr, 2006).
Many things are driven by economics. Business is one of them. While greed of money and power exist around every corner in the current economic system, the future system could support more people on a level where poverty, starvation and sickness do not exist. This is why we must lovingly care for the global household in every business action. It is in our best interest and the best interest of the earth.
Ed note: We just need to get started, self-organizing from the bottom up on small, local projects for descent. Next week, part II on Green Business Incubators.
Surrealist photos by Gilbert Garcin; header is L’avenir n’est plus ce qu’il était The future was not what it was, 2006
But to every mind there openeth,
A way, and way, and away,
A high soul climbs the highway,
And the low soul gropes the low,
And in between on the misty flats,
The rest drift to and fro.
But to every man there openeth,
A high way and a low,
And every mind decideth,
The way his soul shall go.
One ship sails East,
And another West,
By the self-same winds that blow,
‘Tis the set of the sails
And not the gales,
That tells the way we go.
Like the winds of the sea
Are the waves of time,
As we journey along through life,
‘Tis the set of the soul,
That determines the goal,
And not the calm or the strife.
HT Odum, Branford, CT
The AtLast, Boynton Beach FL, 1982
Sailing Canoe-Camping SW FL
The Aquila, a Rhodes 19, Branford, CT
The Maverick, a 1935, 76-foot gaff-rigged Brixham Trawler
Horn Island, MS Gautier Yacht Club
Snow-kiting, Eklutna Lake AK
Risk for Injury, Eklutna Lake
Late summer Eklutna Lake
By Mary Logan
We’re sailors. Sailboats have been part of our lives for decades, beginning with my husband Todd’s 17-foot sloop, the AtLast, so titled because his mother finally got her garage back when he finished building the boat in high school. Eventually we sold the small sloop when we developed competing interests such as family, and I refused to help my husband paint the wooden boat, yet again. Ever since then, we’ve had various small boats, from small catamarans, windsurfers and even a sailing canoe, to a snow-kite and an ice boat here in Anchorage. Todd built the ice boat in our garage here in Anchorage in an attempt to accommodate his need to sail in the subarctic winter–I christened it Risk for Injury, because those were the first words on page one of the design plans. The ice boat can hit speeds of up to 60 mph if unencumbered by various limits. Todd is not allowed to take the craft out alone (that’s another story). Sailing on ice in winter does not really feed our fix for sailing, and sailing in the summer up here has to compete with many other interests during a very short summer. We generally wait until we head to warmer climes to sail.
This month, we have burned through many people’s allotments of fossil fuels to come to the cruising grounds of the British Virgin Islands (BVIs) to warm up and to sail. We have done this trip many times before, typically during the off-season in the summer when we lived in Florida, in order to unplug from high-pressure jobs. But I am sensing that traditional vacations where we fly somewhere far away to go sailing may be on the way out. We have some discretionary income this year, and who knows how long it will hold its value/meaning? So this is one last fling in the BVIs, with a flotilla of two boats and thirteen sun-starved Alaskans–the winter has been grim this year in Alaska, with lots of dark but little snow.
Sailing can be a cheap vacation if we rent a boat that we share with friends while provisioning, cooking, and sailing ourselves. Americans often feel that we must buy our own things, but renting a boat for the occasional use is far cheaper than owning. We have watched many friends and family members struggle with boat ownership, and the old maxim, a boat is a hole into the water into which one pours money, is really true. Over the years, the charter boat industry has become a monopolized industry, paralleling the development in many other industries. There are fewer but larger companies to charter from. This year, during high season, the charter docks for those companies were full of boats, and it was easier to find anchorages alone. The charter industry appears to be hurting from the global economic recession.
Sunrise, Anegada
I’m writing this post organically this time, using pen and paper, sitting with my coffee in the quiet mornings, before the trades freshen for the day in response to the heating sea and land, watching brown boobies and pelicans feed on schools of fish in quiet anchorages. My thoughts circle the idea of sailboats as a slice of life that demonstrates on the small-scale the limits of energies, materials, and wastes, the importance of teamwork, and how technology changes over time as surplus energy continues to flow.
Energy, materials, and limits on a boat
Sailboats are a microcosm, a small system that shares the same characteristics as larger, more complex systems. The most noticeable feature of a sailboat is the limit of both renewable and non-renewable energies. We cannot control the wind, but we can direct the sails to capture the renewable energies. When the wind is up, sailboats jump along wave tops, within limits. They can’t head directly into the wind–to go to windward, we have to tack, and that takes more time and effort. Sometimes we sail fast, and sometimes we sail more slowly. We wring added speed from the boat using larger sails such as genoas and spinnakers, and through the development of knowledge and skill in tuning the sails. The wind is variable but unlimited over time, with daily and seasonal pulses, and occasional larger pulses from storms. Otherwise we must fall back on the non-renewable energies of a diesel engine, which provides steady, invariable power if our technology through engines and the entire edifice of global supply continues to run. Over the long-term, our diesel fuel is limited in accessibility and control of the source, through a complex system that is dependent on marina supply, cost, political and military might of a country, global trade, and other vagaries.
Boats can be designed for efficiency and comfort or for speed, but attempts to maximize both usually fail. If our charter company rigs our boat for maximum speed with large sails and a stripped hull and ballast, then we will need more skillful crew who must scramble frequently to change and manage sails to prevent the boat from broaching or capsizing during changes in available energy due to changing weather. “During self-organization, these systems reinforce (choose) pathways with the optimum load for maximum output”(Odum, 2007, p. 38). Our charter boat in the Virgin Islands was rigged for optimum load for maximum output with inexperienced sailors, which means it was under-canvassed. With inexperienced sailors, too much rigged sail on a catamaran may result in the use of costly boat insurance and a ruined vacation.
Modern boats also have limits of materials such as water and food, and places for waste to go. If we don’t provision adequately in port, we run out of various things while under way that Americans may view as essential. Our large catamaran had two, large 125-gallon water tanks whose levels were visible. But the Water Information Program suggests that the average American uses 176 gallons of water per day, compared to 5 gallons per day for the average African family (that may be an underrepresentation of the problem of embodied water use). As Americans, we are not used to water or other restrictions. My daughter reacted to the idea of limits (especially on vacation) with an air of insult, calling me a water nazi when I suggested that perhaps we could do better on water conservation when eight of us burned through the first 125 gallons of water in 3 days. From habit, I tried to limit my own water use, and I use very little since I’m a sailor habituated to sailing on small boats with tiny supplies of water. But what I didn’t use got used instead by others without awareness of our limits and customs of heavy water use. Experience helps–any swabbie who has previously run out of water behaves differently on a boat. Having clear, visible limits also results in better awareness of inputs and outputs to a system. Our boat this time allowed us to see how fast we were using water. On earlier boats there was no water gauge, and so the gurgling, sucking noise attached to a dry water pump was a rude surprise, especially to the uninitiated.
When drinking water runs out, it is a sharp reminder that even though we are surrounded by water, fresh water is a precious commodity that we waste amazingly on land. Fortunately for us on vacation, we avoided conflict over water by paying for easily accessible refills at marinas during our gunkholing. If we were cruising sailors attempting to cross an ocean, our boat culture would have needed to evolve quickly into a much more efficient, restraint-based, cooperative culture or risk strife with threat of failure to complete our journey, or worse. That transition would have required development of rules and respect for the commons of water, food, and labor. Americans may assume that it is our manifest destiny to pump our wells dry, and then go find some more from elsewhere and use that too, since that is all that we’ve known how to do for the past 40 years in this country.
Outputs are clearly visible on a boat. Removal of a bag of trash in the dinghy to someplace on shore is a visible cost, $3 per bag. On larger boats, when there is no place to send trash away, it remains aboard somewhere, in a lazarette or locker, as a stinky reminder. If our boat is small, it may be towed aft in the dinghy if there is no room aboard, as a visible, odorous decoration following us about. In the old days, the trash went overboard, and it still does in some places and situations. But Americans on vacation in a pristine sailing ground are new to the idea that their trash and waste actually have to go somewhere. Holding tanks from the heads fill up while anchored. People are rather appalled at the holding tanks that open into the ocean after we get underway–the waste stream is a visible reminder in the azure Caribbean Sea. Trash and waste removal on a large cruise ship is a different matter–cruise ships have gotten away with dumping it overboard for many years because people do not see it and the costs are borne over the longer term by the ocean, not the vacationer–out of sight, out of mind.
As we sail about the ocean, we are by ourselves, free to sail about in many directions, with wind direction and shoals as the main limits. But when we come into a crowded harbor, suddenly there are many boats, moorings, shoals, traffic, and other complexities. A harbor is an analogy to a city. We used to sail on and off of our mooring ball or anchor, but the anchorages have become more crowded over the years. So now we must use the motor to navigate crowded harbors, especially with a large boat. Costs go up in anchorages; there are no overt costs on the open ocean. We run from storages of food, water, and batteries, and from renewable energies of sun, wind, and waves. But in city centers, we pay for a mooring ball, we go out to eat onshore, we reprovision, we pay for someone to remove trash from the boat, we might buy something to fix something on the boat, and so on. The wallet comes out, and expenses go up in city centers.
What benefit technology?
With our large, modern sailboat, we have to run the engines for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening to charge the battery bank. Over the years, the technology on sailboats has evolved to the point that the electronics and twin diesel engines on a catamaran need three batteries–one for each engine and one for the house of electronics, lights, and other technology. Electronics have expanded from a simple depth finder to sophisticated GPS, autopilot, charts, and so on. Similar to the expanded technology in cars, while the basic mode of transportation hasn’t changed in terms of sails and sheets, the accessories have expanded profusely. How much of this is necessary or desirable? I still like the organic feel to a chart spread on my knees as I (wo)man the tiller. Private cruising boats may be equipped with wind vanes or solar panels to augment battery charging, so they are less reliant on the engine. But the bulk of recharging on most vessels, even those with renewable systems, is still dependent on diesel engines. Sailors accustomed to cruising use less of everything, as they are much more attuned to their limits, in terms of inputs and outputs of food, water, and energy.
When we started sailing down here, the stove was a simple single-burner alcohol stove, the water tank was very small, and the ice box was a block of ice in an insulated box with a drain. Now we have a two-burner, gimballed propane stove, a refrigerator, and a freezer. The single toilet with no holding tank has evolved into two to four heads, all with holding tanks, hot water showers, and sinks. Extra accoutrements make sailing easy–lazy jacks on the mainsails that automatically fold and cover sails at the end of the day, electric windlasses to raise anchors, two-speed self-tailing winches, and dinghies with motors rather than oars. Because of technology, we need less skills and less strength. I can no longer slam my fingers or toes in a hatch cover, as the hatches have high-tech preventers on them. Large biminis and dodgers protect our fair skin. If we dive, we no longer have to worry about buddy breathing, as our regulators have octopus rigs and other safety features. Similar to the technology that has expanded on land, our use of technology at sea makes sailing easier and safer, but also makes us soft, less skilled and perhaps a little stupid, too. We need less physical and intellectual muscle, and fewer calluses develop.
Some things haven’t changed over the years. On a boat, paperbacks beat Kindles when inverters are scarce, and pen and ink beat the laptop for writing when exposed to spray and limited battery life. The rum is still plentiful and cheap, as long as we have provisioned enough (heaven forbid). As the trip progresses, we fall into timeless rhythms of day and night, storm and sun, gaiety and calm.
Working as a team
The human culture on a sailboat is a microcosm of life too. Traveling in a group of eight is a lesson in how teams form. Various business models exist that explain teamwork, and I am not current with the latest theories. But many of the theories describe the importance of top-down control and emphasize the importance of leadership in what gets done. In a world of gross excesses in managerial salaries, business theories that emphasize the importance of the leader rather than the entire system may also give too much credit to the role of managers in what eventually gets done. This focus on leadership may be part of a business culture whose goal is expanding bureaucracy, perpetuation and expansion of the status quo, and unfair pay scales for those at the bottom and top of the hierarchy. Spencer and Marx both suggested that the times produce the person and not the other way around. Our times have produced leaders who resemble pirates rather than effective captains of industry.
I like Hersey and Blanchard’s situational leadership model that describes a more self-organizational model where teams develop over time within different systems at varying paces, through stages of forming, storming, norming, and performing. In this model, leaders change their styles as teams develop over time, based on the needs of people and development of the team, from telling and selling activities, to participating and delegating for high-performing teams.
Boats are notorious for requiring both teamwork and good leadership, especially when rapid decisions need to be made. During the first few days on the boat, as people find their sea-legs, everyone focuses on their own needs as they orient to the boat and begin to develop as a team. Communication is crucial here if leaders are to describe safety rules and shape functional roles for quick team development.
A group forms when there is a need–for sharing, gathering food and eating, for sailing a boat, for security, and so on. The more the need for group work, the more the need for cohesive teamwork. Groups go through an initial formative stage of introductions and getting to know each other. Teamwork develops either slowly or quickly on a boat, depending on dynamics and the need for cohesion. Rules are required on a boat that relate to conservation, since there are limits.
During the storming stage, strengths and weaknesses are revealed, conflicts are hammered out, and the group self-organizes or comes together through leadership to work on chores surrounding sailing, eating, and play. Leadership and communication can make a difference in how quickly and smoothly the process of bonding happens. If leadership is too strong, cohesion can devolve into a hierarchy dependent on tight control from the top, for better or worse. And if there are few tasks for the group to perform, groups may fall apart or never form properly for lack of need. With less tasks, such as a vacation where paid employees do the work on a cruise ship, either group cohesion never forms, or it develops through artificial means such as games from a social director who works to create an artificial sense of bonding. The best teams develop by overcoming significant challenges–smooth seas never make skillful sailors. I would add that diesel engines and twin props don’t help much in skill-building, either. The social culture of team work is part of our social DNA–without significant or challenging work to do within the system, it is hard to form bonds and to develop a sense of community.
Once groups form and storm, they norm. Culture develops on a boat as conflicts start to wane and groups develop a sense of camaraderie and social cohesion around tasks. A specific group culture may develop, with rules that fit the skills of the people involved, the tasks that need to be performed, and the level of commitment of those involved. Eventually, over time, teams become high-performing, with less direction and communication needed. Recognition of limits may become part of that culture, but only if the team is small enough and experienced enough to recognize and support values of respect for the commons.
Americans have developed a highly specialized hierarchy of labor. We are a nation of specialists accustomed to paying others instead of learning to do a lot of general tasks ourselves. Does the habit of specialization interfere with the ability to form teams? American business hierarchy has developed during a time of security and energy surplus, which allowed fossilized, complex hierarchies to form where too much emphasis was placed on leadership, and not enough on resilient teamwork from the bottom up. On a boat, when bad things happen, while strong leadership from a knowledgeable captain is helpful, a functional team that knows what to do and how to respond without direction from above is even more valuable. A team of generalists who can fluidly perform each others’ jobs if necessary adds to that resilience. What happens in a complex, rigid, specialized business hierarchy in a real crisis, I wonder? We can probably throw most of the current business theories out of the window when that happens.
Closer to nature
Since we are closer to living in nature on a boat, respect builds for the wind, the weather, and mother Ocean. Where do these islands stow their trash? How much of their water is through catchment versus aquifer? The accessible coral reefs are suffering from too much tourist love, a heating, acidifying ocean, and overfishing. The beach bar proprietors insist that the lobster are fresh and locally caught, but the lobsters, conchs, and grouper are increasingly absent from the close-in reefs and grass beds. Tarpon are prolific, perhaps in part because they are not very edible, and we see less other small reef fish. There are less birds, and very few fish pots are now found in the islands, either through regulation or scarcity of fish, as a sign of depletion.
Cultural change over time
I lived in Puerto Rico during the mid-1960s, when my father, HT Odum, was chief scientist for an Atomic Energy Commission-funded project to explore the impact of radiation on Luquillo rain forest (Lugo, 2004). I first came to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands around 1966 by ferry. The shops were quaint and local, with subsistence crafts for sale made of coconut and other plants and flowers, local seafood in the restaurants, and local village cultures concentrated round harbors and boat transport. Jets were rare, and prop planes were for the rich. Charlotte Amalie was still a relaxed, quaint tourist town with a lot of rum and t-shirt shops, friendly steel drum bands, and a lively night life. Now, St. Thomas revolves around big daily pulses of multiple, massive cruise ships, and the shops have changed from island crafts to international jewelry, perfume, and boutique culture for the very wealthy during the day, with the poor scrounging through the dumpsters at night. There’s more crime, and our proprietor warned us not to walk down certain streets unless we were in a large group. Eating out is very expensive. Each year there are more navigation lights in the harbor, more cruise ships, and more houses on the hillside. There is less music, less joy, and less room for a garden, a locally based job, or other resilient forms of living. The islanders don’t look as happy as they used to.
How big is too big when the oil becomes more valuable?
Private boat sizes in the BVIs have become bigger on average over time. We see few 20 and 30-footers these days in the cruising grounds–aspirations and the wealth-effect have increased boat charter sizes to the 40 and 50-foot size. And at Christmas, the rich descend in their 100 to 200-foot boats. People with smaller boats eye the larger boats and are envious. Older people with more access to surplus resources, symbolized in our society by money, aspire to more status, comfort, or power. Those without an electric windlass or the convenience of an extra shower on the aft deck want one, whether the additions are truly useful or not. As long as there is surplus energy fueling the bareboat charter industry, the trend is towards ever larger and more complex vessels, even though there are many advantages to smaller boats in terms of flexibility, less reliance on nonrenewable energies, and less waste of resources such as water.
How big is too big? How much of our technology becomes counter-productive if diesel fuel is not available to recharge the batteries and run the props? On our 40-foot cat, we could still sail the boat without diesel, but we would need more workers to sail on and off anchors, and to raise the anchor, for example. Old sailing vessels had many smaller sails and a very large crew to make them manageable. How big is too big, in either boats or cities?
Once the surplus energy stops, small boats may come back into fashion. What will happen to the huge cruise ships (and the ports that they frequent) as economies stutter and vacations fashioned on buying luxury stuff in air-conditioned shops falls out of favor? Can we retool those big boats into old-fashioned ocean liners used for transport, or are they too reliant on fossil fuels? The drama that resulted this week when a Carnival Cruise ship was stranded with limited water and generator power after a fire in the engine room suggests that our large cruise ships, or at least their passengers, are too reliant on electric technology and luxury. And how secure will smaller, private boats be in an ocean with more pirates and less available resources? How much complexity is too much in boats, and in society? Our freedoms are based on energy slaves, and before that, on the backs of real slaves, as Newman suggests in his song below, Sail Away. What happens when we can’t use energy slaves anymore?
How did this post get so long? I must be on island time. This may be the last time we can make this trip–in the future, flights and charters may become more expensive, or inaccessible, or dangerous. We may end our sailing days where we began, gunkholing on small boats up and down the coastline of southwest Florida, the Keys, and the Tortugas.
Americans’ level of concern for the environment waxes and wanes, depending on how the economy is faring, as illustrated in the 2011 Gallup chart below. The chart shows responses to the question whether the economy or the environment should be given preference asked from 1985 through 2011. Note the trending decline in concern for the environment starting in 2001 with a precipitous drop in 2008 when the economy hit the skids. It’s a truism that our environmental behaviors and our understanding of causes of environmental degradation always lag behind the level of our environmental concern. Why?
The question asked by Gallup is really not fair because the economy and the environment are not separate (contrary to the claims of many economists). Everything that we make comes from the physical environment – clothing, food, computers, vehicles, . . . Nothing we make is independent of the environment – and when we finish using it, it gets discarded back into the environment.
Research suggests that our behaviors are a reflection of the story we tell ourselves about how the world works. This is commonly referred to as a social paradigm. Nash and Lewis define a social paradigm as “common-sense beliefs about the world rooted in culture and history. Citizens adopt ideological values as they become socialized in their environments – values that become so ingrained that they are taken as reflecting objective reality.”
What are the beliefs that make up our social paradigm? One main belief is in the need for continuous growth of the economy. This is a message we heard daily from both Presidential candidates, and now hear regularly from our elected politicians. Another belief is that the governmental regulation of business is ill-advised (because it will stunt growth of businesses). Collectively, Americans also strongly believe that we will be able to rely on technology to resolve our problems, particularly our environmental problems. Foremost of our beliefs is that humans are more important than anything else on the planet (anthropocentrism).
William Kilbourne and his colleagues at Clemson University have studied these beliefs. Their research suggests that people who have high scores on belief in the western industrialized dominant social paradigm (WISP) are negatively correlated with concern about the environment and do not believe there is a need to change their behaviors. They are also highly materialistic. People in the United States score higher on this social paradigm than any other country tested.
How do we reasonably assess whether these ideas are good or bad without adding a political component? We can ask two questions:
Will this make humans more adaptable to change? and,
Will it support long-term existence of humans?
If the answer to these questions is no, then the idea is maladaptive, and we should reject the idea because it makes us less resilient – less able to live a long time into the future.
Let’s assess the idea of continuous growth using these criteria. If you ask whether continuous growth in a finite system is possible, most people will answer no. It’s just common sense that infinite growth cannot happen. If you then ask if the Earth is a finite system, most people will acknowledge that it is. Yet, people fail to understand the conflict between the Earth being a finite system and a continuously growing economy, or unregulated, continuously growing businesses. The answer to the question of whether continuous growth of the economy and of businesses will support long-term existence of humans seems obvious since continuous growth in a finite system is not possible. Thus, these ideas are maladaptive and should be abandoned.
Economic modeling suggests that without innovation, which usually means technological advances, business growth stops at the point where increased investment in new machines equals the number of machines breaking down (depreciation). As a result, companies must innovate to keep growing. There is, therefore, a very close link between growth of companies and technology.
Will technology save us? Humans have done some pretty amazing things with technology. We are healthier, we produce more food, and many of us are able to live comfortably almost anywhere we choose on the planet. All of these are arguments that technology has made us more resilient (meaning more adaptable and tending to have a longer existence). Are we good at assessing the potential future consequences of technology? I don’t think that Henry Ford (or most other people alive at that time) would have dreamed of the pollution, gridlock and energy use problems that automobiles now cause. The green revolution brought us increases in food production, but nobody anticipated the dead zones produced in the Gulf of Mexico from all the nutrients washed down the Mississippi River, or the crash of fish populations caused primarily by increased fishing efficiency brought about by technology. We have a tendency to embrace most technologies (with a few notable exceptions, including nuclear and nanotechnology) without even assessing potential negative consequences. Technology will probably help make us more resilient, but our current technology is heavily fueled by and reliant on fossil fuels – another limited resource. Human resilience will require that we abandon blind acceptance of technology and develop a method to better assess and weigh the positive and negative consequences of technology.
Probably the single most dangerous idea that humans have embraced, in my opinion, is anthropocentrism – that we are more important than anything else on the planet. If you can’t grow continuously in a finite system, then it follows that you can’t grow human population continuously in a finite system. Yet, because anthropocentrism is so entrenched in our psyche, suggestions that human population growth should be discouraged and not subsidized, or, dare I say, regulated, leads to outrage, including death threats to people who make such suggestions. We are clearly a biological species, and if we overshoot the capacity of our environment to supply us with air, food, water and shelter, we will become extinct, just as other species do.
It is well established that humans ignore information that we receive that contradicts our values and beliefs, and that we pay special attention to messages and information that support our values and beliefs. This makes the messages of our social paradigm even more problematic. We are socialized from the time we are young to believe the ideas of our social paradigm. Our parents, teachers, our peers, and the media repeat these ideas over and over to the point that we take them as true without question and they become our values and beliefs. Thus, when we hear that continuous growth is not possible, we might agree that it sounds logical, but it conflicts with what we have learned growing up, so we feel an uncomfortable tension (psychologists call this cognitive dissonance). Common human response to this tension is not to change our behaviors, but to discount, ignore, or twist the information that conflicts with our beliefs. Sound familiar?
It is time that we question these ideas and start thinking about their implications for our long-term survival. We are not the most important species on the planet, cannot grow either our population or our economy infinitely and we need to acknowledge our limits before our limits confront us. If we are truly as intelligent as we think we are, we can do this.
La dottoressa Williams ha scritto la sua tesi su ‘Il ruolo del paradigma sociale nella percezione umana e la risposta ai cambiamenti climatici’. È direttrice dell’Office of Sustainability allo Unifersity of Alaska Anchorage.
Il livello di preoccupazione americano per l’ambiente cresce e cala a seconda di come sta andando l’economia, come illustrato nel grafico qui sotto (Gallup 2011). Il grafico mostra le risposte date dagli americani alla questione se si deve dare priorità alle problematiche ambientali o economiche, in un periodo che va dal 1985 al 2011.
Notate come dal 2001 la preoccupazione legata all’ambiente abbia visto un repentino declino con un ulteriore caduta nel 2008, proprio quando l’economia subì un brutto colpo.
É una verità il fatto che i nostri comportamenti e la nostra comprensione verso il degrado ambientale siano sempre in ritardo rispetto al nostro livello di preoccupazione verso di esso? Perché?
La questione sollevata da Gallup è in realtà sbagliata nel principio, dato che l’economia e l’ambiente non sono due entità separate (contrariamente a quanto sostengono gli economisti).
Tutto quello che produciamo arriva direttamente dall’ambiente – vestiti, cibo, computer, veicoli… niente di quello che facciamo è indipendente da esso – e quando abbiamo finito di utilizzarlo, addirittura ce lo ributtiamo.
Studi e ricerche ci suggeriscono che i nostri comportamenti riflettono le storie che raccontiamo a noi stessi sul modo in cui il mondo funziona. Comunemente, quando si parla di questo lo si indica come ‘paradigma sociale’.
Nash eLewis definiscono il paradigma sociale come “il senso comune e le credenze sul mondo radicate nella nostra cultura e nella nostra storia. I cittadini adottano questi valori non appena entrano a far parte della vita sociale e ambientale – valori che si radicano così profondamente che sono presi come il riflesso della realtà oggettiva”.
Quali sono le credenze che costruiscono il nostro paradigma sociale? Una delle maggiori credenze è quella della necessità di continua crescita economica.
Questo è un messaggio che sentiamo quotidianamente dai candidati politici e dai futuri politici eletti. Un’altra credenza è che l’intervento dello stato nell’economia è un male per il business – perché non permette alle aziende di crescere.
Collettivamente, gli americani credono anche fermamente che potremo risolvere tutti i nostri problemi con l’aiuto della tecnologia, in particolare i problemi ambientali.
Ma forse la primissima delle nostre credenze è che gli esseri umani siano la cosa più importante che esista sul pianeta (antropocentrismo).
William Kilbourne e i suoi colleghi della Clemson University hanno studiato queste credenze. Le loro ricerche dicono che le persone che mostrano i livelli più alti di fede nel “paradigma sociale dell’occidente industrializzato” (WISP) si relazionano negativamente con la loro preoccupazione per le sorti ambientali, e non credono quindi nella necessità di dover cambiare i loro comportamenti.
Sono anche persone altamente materialistiche. I cittadini statunitensi hanno mostrato i punteggi più alti nei test [in tal senso] rispetto a tutte le altre nazioni prese in considerazione.
Come possiamo ragionevolmente valutare se queste idee sono buone o cattive senza aggiungerci una componente politica o ideologica?
Possiamo porci due domande:
Queste idee renderanno gli esseri umani più adattabili al cambiamento?
Riusciranno a sostenere la sopravvivenza dell’essere umano nel lungo termine?
Se la risposta a queste domande è no, allora l’idea non è buona e dovremmo scartarla perché ci rende meno resilienti – ovvero meno in grado di vivere a lungo nel futuro.
Proviamo a valutare l’idea di continua crescita con questi criteri: se si chiede a qualcuno se una crescita continua in un sistema finito è possibile, la maggior parte delle persone risponderà di no. Basta il buon senso per capire che una crescita infinita non è possibile. Se poi si chiede se la Terra è un sistema finito, molte persone riconosceranno che in effetti lo è. Eppure, le persone ancora non riescono a capire il conflitto tra la finitezza della Terra e un sistema economico in continua crescita.
La risposta alla domanda se la continua crescita economica supporterà la sopravvivenza a lungo termine dell’essere umano sembra ovvia dato che la crescita continua in un sistema finito non è possibile. Tuttavia, queste idee non sono buone e devono essere abbandonate.
I modelli economici ci dicono che senza innovazione, che significa generalmente avanzamento tecnologico, la crescita del business si ferma nel momento in cui i crescenti investimenti in nuovi macchinari sono uguali al numero dei macchinari che si fermano (ammortamento).
Il risultato è che le industrie devono innovarsi per continuare a crescere. Vi è quindi un legame molto stretto tra crescita economica delle aziende e tecnologia.
La tecnologia ci salverà? Gli uomini hanno fatto delle cose veramente fantastiche con la tecnologia. Siamo più sani, produciamo più cibo, e molti di noi possono vivere confortevolmente in qualsiasi posto scegliamo sul pianeta. Tutte queste sono argomentazioni a favore del fatto che la tecnologia ci ha resi molto più resilienti (più adattabili e con una speranza di vita maggiore).
Siamo però in grado di valutare le possibili conseguenze future della tecnologia? Non credo che Henry Ford (o molte altre persone della sua epoca) avrebbe mai sognato l’inquinamento, gli ingorghi e i problemi energetici che l’uso delle automobili ora sta causando.
La rivoluzione verde ci ha portato un incremento della produzione di cibo, ma nessuno ha predetto le zone morte prodotte nel Golfo del Messico per colpa di tutti i fertilizzanti riversati nel fiume Mississippi, o il collasso della fauna ittica causata principalmente da un aumento dell’efficienza nella pesca portata dalla tecnologia.
Abbiamo la tendenza ad abbracciare la maggior parte delle tecnologie (con alcune eccezioni, tra cui il nucleare e le nanotecnologie) senza nemmeno valutare le possibili conseguenze negative.
La tecnologia ci renderà probabilmente più resilienti, ma la tecnologia attuale è pesantemente alimentata da combustibili fossili, che sono risorse limitate. La resilienza umana richiederà l’abbandono dell’accettazione cieca verso nuove tecnologie e lo sviluppo di migliori metodi di valutazione che diano peso sia alle conseguenze positive sia a quelle negative.
Probabilmente l’idea più pericolosa che gli esseri umani hanno abbracciato, secondo me, è l’antropocentrismo – cioè che siamo più importanti di qualsiasi altra cosa sul pianeta. Se non si può crescere continuamente in un sistema finito, allora significa che non si può far crescere continuamente la popolazione umana in un sistema finito.
Inoltre, dato che l’antropocentrismo è così radicato nella nostra psiche, l’idea che la crescita della popolazione umana debba essere scoraggiata, non sussidiata o, oso dire, regolata, è oltraggiosa, al punto che le persone che suggeriscono una simile idea arrivano a essere minacciate di morte. Siamo chiaramente una specie biologica animale, e se superiamo la capacità del nostro ambiente (overshoot) di sostenerci con aria, cibo, acqua e riparo, ci estingueremo, proprio come fanno le altre specie.
È ben noto che gli esseri umani ignorano le informazioni che ricevono quando contraddicono i propri valori e credenze, mentre pongono particolare attenzione ai messaggi che invece li supportano. Questo rende il messaggio del nostro paradigma sociale ancora più problematico.
Abbiamo interiorizzato fin da quando eravamo giovani le idee del nostro paradigma sociale. I nostri genitori, maestri, insegnanti, coetanei e i media ripetono incessantemente questi valori fino al punto che li prendiamo come veri senza chiederci se siano veramente “nostri”.
Così, quando sentiamo dire che la crescita continua non è possibile, potremmo essere d’accordo perché suona ovvio e logico, ma va in conflitto con tutto quello che abbiamo imparato crescendo, tanto che ci sentiamo in tensione e in disagio (gli psicologi la definiscono dissonanza cognitiva).
La risposta umana comune a questa tensione non è quella di cambiare il proprio comportamento, ma quella di non darle credito o ignorarla, distorcendo le informazioni che vanno in conflitto che le nostre convinzioni. Vi suona familiare?
È il momento di mettere in discussione queste idee e cominciare a pensare alle loro implicazioni per la nostra sopravvivenza nel lungo periodo. Non siamo la specie più importante del pianeta, non possiamo far crescere la popolazione o la nostra economa all’infinito e abbiamo bisogno di conoscere i nostri limiti prima che i nostri limiti si rivelino con tutta la loro irruenza.
By Saara J. Alatervo, College of Business and Public Policy and Honors College, University of Alaska, Anchorage. Saara J. Alatervo is an undergraduate business major and honors student.
America is a disposable nation. Each person on average produces more than 1,600 pounds of trash each year. In total, over 230 million tons of trash accumulates in landfills yearly in the United States. Seventy percent of the trash that makes its way to landfills could be recycled (Annenberg Foundation, 2012). Recycling is one of the 6 Rs of sustainability. The 6 Rs include: reinvent/rethink, refuse, reduce, reuse/repair, recycle, replace/rebuy. When we apply the 6 Rs to their lives we promote sustainable practices. But we must make the conscious effort to do so.
On November 15, 2012 at the University of Alaska, Anchorage, my UAA Honors Limits to Growth class and the University’s Office of Sustainability hosted an event called “Trash the Cuddy.” Outside the Lucy Cuddy Hall, a common meeting place for students and faculty, we put a majority of the day’s garbage across campus on display. We piled dozens of bags several feet high. The amount of trash accumulated in one day was astonishing to onlookers. The students hosting the event greeted spectators and asked them to take a survey, while answering the questions they had. Inside, students ran an information booth while enticing others with pizza and reusable water bottles. We shared the story behind the creation of aluminum cans, provided information on how to recycle and encouraged people to be environmentally conscious. This event was intended to help raise awareness of sustainability issues. Through awareness, people can make a conscious effort to behave in such a way that their actions have a reduced impact on the environment.
In just one year, UAA accumulates enough garbage to fill an entire football field 4.5 feet high. However, the Office of Sustainability is working to divert the amount of trash away from landfills towards recycling centers. Last year alone they were able to recycle about 245,000 pounds of material. UAA redirected about 34,600 aluminum cans, 70,000 20-ounce plastic bottles and 22,043,100 sheets of paper away from the landfills. It is astonishing to think that UAA salvaged these vast quantities of materials. This raises the question, how much does the average person throw away and how much could be recycled as well?
On average, Americans throw away about 4.5 pounds of trash each day. While this figure may seem small at first, over the course of a year that amount accumulates to roughly 1,642 pounds of trash (Clean Air Council, n.d.). United States as a whole produces over 230 million TONS of trash each year. Less than 25% of this trash is being recycled, while over 70% of the total trash that makes its way to landfills could be recycled. That’s over 120 million tons of material that could be recovered left to waste (Annenberg Foundation, 2012). It is undeniable that the US is a disposable nation but what can we do about it? UAA alone produces football fields worth of garbage after all and it’s impossible to produce zero trash altogether. If we do nothing, the current trend of mass consumption and disposal will ultimately harm the environment and result in growing economic costs. Disposing of trash is not a free process. City municipalities and states bear this burden which falls back on the citizens (Kazmeyer, 2012). However, the average consumer can make a difference in this process by applying the 6 Rs to their lives: rethink/reinvent, refuse, reduce, reuse/repair, recycle, replace/rebuy, (Green Triangle Blog, 2012).
Rethink/Reinvent: consider and question consumption habits
To make a difference, people must make a conscious effort to do so. That begins by questioning our actions. We must ask ourselves, do we really need these things? Is there another use for this? Can this be recycled? (Green Triangle Blog, 2012). These are just some of the basic questions that we should consider every day. By investing more time in understanding personal consumption habits, people will become increasingly self-aware of their effect on the environment. This self-awareness may influence their behavior, values and consumption habits.
Refuse: make the choice to not generate waste
The most direct method of reducing the amount of trash is by refusing to consume. This does not mean to stop generating trash altogether but rather to stop consuming particular products. A person may decide not to buy certain items that generate more waste than benefit. For example, a person may feel the need to buy apples every time he goes to the store. However he may not eat them and often they go to waste. Knowing this, one may decide to quit purchasing apples which will result reduces the amount of waste they produce.
Of course, there are other reasons why people may choose to make a conscious effort to refrain from buying certain products. A person may decide to refuse a product either because of the quality, a short shelf life or it cannot be easily repaired, the company’s ethics, the chemicals involved, and so on. Whatever the rationale behind declining product purchases the result is less trash. This lifestyle operates from the value of learning to do without, to make do with what you have.
Reduce: make decisions that decrease the amount of waste produced
To cut trash, simply consume less. It is the idea that less is more. We can reduce the amount of material, toxins and waste sent to landfills through various means:
Buy only what we need, by avoiding impulse shopping or purchasing too much of an item.
Buy reusable or refillable items. An example of this is using a shopping bag rather than plastic bag, a coffee mug and not wax paper cup.
Buy in bulk or economy-size. An example of this is by purchasing economy size cereal bags and not several smaller bags of cereal which would result in more waste.
Avoid single-serving sizes. An example of this is by making pudding in a large bowl rather than purchasing single serving plastic cups of pudding.
Products with less packaging. An example of this is by selecting a product in a smaller cardboard box and not a product enclosed in plastic. (EPA, 2012). Check this
By taking these tips to heart, people will cut the amount of trash they generate.
Re-Use/Repair: expand the shelf-lives of products
By reusing what you already have or by reinventing new uses for the item, you can extend the item’s product life. Before rushing out to the store to buy an item make the decision to buy as a last recourse. For example, we can use pickle jars for storage rather than buying a brand new container. It’s the idea of being creative with the things you have, to extend the life of a product. Even perishable items can be reused through compost (LaPado-Breglia, 2011).
If I no longer have a use for the item I can give away the item instead of throwing it away. I can donate unwanted equipment, furniture, supplies, clothes to a nonprofit organization, schools, a shelter or charity. Also, I may able to reclaim some of the value of my items through consignment stores or pawn shops. If there is no other use for the product, then recycle.
Recycle: reclaim the raw materials
By separating items such as aluminum cans and plastic, we can reclaim the raw materials from these items which would have otherwise been thrown away. While recycling takes added effort compared to simply throwing the item in the garbage, there are many benefits in doing so. Recycled materials typically require less energy to process compared to developing new materials altogether (National Recyling Coalition, 2011). These items are not left in the landfill to rot and decompose resulting in reduced air and water pollution (Thibault, 2008). Helps conserve natural resources and sustain the environment for future generations. What can be recycled, though? There is an array of items, including paper, aluminum, yard trimmings, glass, and plastic, used motor oil, steel and batteries. Consumers can recycle these materials by disposing of them in separate trash bins at home, work and school. These items can then be dropped off at local recycling collection sites and processing plants. Many cities, through their municipality waste management programs, offer curbside recycling option as well. By taking the time to separate these items, diverting them away from landfills through recycling, we can cut our impact on the environment.
Replace/Rebuy: next time consider recycled and green content
Inuit suit, pre 1927, Liverpool Museums
Consumers can promote recycled products by purchasing items that incorporate recycled materials (Wake Forest University, 2012). We make these items in whole or in part from material recovered from the waste stream. Consumers can look for labels on packages that include a percentage of recovered materials. If the demand for these products is present, businesses have an incentive to continue producing items that are more environmentally friendly. In addition, consumers can choose to replace a majority of their goods with green products. These products often contain fewer harmful chemicals, reduced emissions in production and/or incorporate renewable materials into their production (Vermeer & Michalko, 2010). By reviewing green certifications and recovered material percentage labels, consumers can make better informed buying decisions that promote sustainable practices.
In order for any change to take place, people must first make a conscious effort to do so. The final five Rs are dependent on the first, rethinking. It is that moment of pause, that hesitation to throw out something that still has value; it’s the recognition of that value that creates change. While it may take practice, as most habits don’t develop overnight, over time an individual’s conscious efforts may become part of her character. Living a life that supports sustainable practices may influence others to do the same as there are many long-term benefits in doing so. In order to reap the benefits though, it takes the willingness to change for the better.
By Anel Quiroz, a student in UAA’s Honors 192 course on Limits to Growth
A small island in the Caribbean that people usually associate with an evil dictator is one of the most sustainable countries in the world. This little island is the island of Cuba where the people might not have it all, and they may dislike their ruler but they have a healthier environment than most third world countries or first world countries. The island of Cuba has achieved a goal that most successful countries are too developed to reach in a lifetime. Cuba has learned how to sustain its people to succeed even if that success is slow. Cuba is a role model for all underdeveloped and developed countries to follow.
As a young child I lived in Mexico, a country where most of the people don’t have riches and where people mostly live off the land. In the state of Veracruz, where my family is from, the people flourished by growing their own basic crops and other plants such as tomatoes, avocados, cilantro, fruits as well as other needed plants for a daily meal. I remember that we bought the rest of needed crops in the markets where the best fresh fruits and vegetables were available. Aside from growing their crops in small home gardens, some people are lucky and own small plots of land that they use not for building great expensive houses but for growing crops. One such person is my grandfather, Guillermo, who to this day in his old age grows coffee plants and sugar canes as well as oranges or limes and sometimes mangoes. He does not grow these crops for a source of food; he grows them to sell to the state which sends the food off to a distant land where the crops are sold for much more than what the worker is paid. Although I live far from my home state of Veracruz and I am now accustomed to the American ways of living. I still try to remember that there is a simpler much more sustainable way of life, where people grow their own fresh food and where life is much simpler.
Another Latin American country where people live a simple yet happy life is Cuba. This small island was once on its way to a success then it was stopped in its tracks when the Soviet Union, its ally, crumbled to the ground. Cuba no longer had any help; the oil embargo isolated it from rich countries. According to Peters (2010), “prior to the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba’s agricultural system was largely monocultural, highly mechanized, and dependent upon petrochemicals, oil, and machinery, similar to the present U.S. agricultural system” (p.231). Without the Soviet Union, Cuba was all alone and no longer prospering like it once had, since it no longer had its hands on oil to produce products for the people to thrive. The people feared and suffered while food and basic resources ran scarce making the government take action towards helping its people. Most importantly the people started helping themselves to live beyond the stage of crisis. The problems Cubans faced had to do with food, energy, transportation and the economy to name a few. This problem that had just started with a loss all soon developed into a problem with peak oil. The time in which this crisis occurred was called the special period.
The way that the Cuban people began to get out of this crisis was by starting to farm their own food on any available land that was capable of growing crops. They did this to eat enough calories in their diets so that people would stop losing weight and so that people would find a way to help others who had no food at all. The people saw that if they did not start acting that they would soon die off from starvation or from other sanitation problems from the lack of proper electricity. According to Peters (2010), “independent of government action, Havañeros spontaneously began to plant food crops in the yards, patios, balconies, rooftops and vacant land sites near their homes”(p. 232). By planting food in whatever small area of land they could find it is obvious that the people were extremely desperate for food. This also shows that they were in no means ready for a crisis as such. With the history of political problems that Cuba has faced in the past, the people were only ready for political protests or other type of government related problems not unexpected food shortages. “In agriculture, organic fertilisers and pesticides, crop-rotation techniques and organic urban gardens were developed. Tractors were replaced with human and animal labour” (Yaffe, 2010, par. 13). All that the Cuban people needed was a kick-start to use things that they made within their country instead of using much more expensive things from others.
Cuba is a great example of what could be in store for the rest of the world, or at least some countries that would be very affected by peak oil. If the U.S. were to go into a food crisis along with an economic crisis it might not survive past a few months since in comparison to Cuba its population is larger and the land is in no condition to be farmed to extremes. The U.S. would have a small chance of making it like Cuba did because people in the U.S. are dependent on the government to solve every problem or at least to tell them what to do. Cubans in this case started acting alone then small Agricultural Groups helped which then forced the government to make laws that would help the people with their gardens.
This wasn’t the only problem that Cuba faced in this time of crisis. They also lacked means of transportation with the limited and expensive resources of oil along with the economic situation of most of Cuba’s population. According to the documentary The Power of Community- How Cuba Survived Peak Oil (2006)“When taking a bus, people had to wait 3 to 4 hours, when the bus arrived at work often there was no power, even if there was power sometimes there were no spare parts or raw materials . . . .” When there is no power even just in transportation people lose time and they might even lose their jobs. The basic functions of a house are disrupted and people may become overheated, with spoiled foods and limited entertainment. Cubans got lucky because their government provided bikes for them to be able to transport themselves to work and other appointments that they had. Little by little the problems that Cuba had due to this crisis started to slowly diminish and they are still in the process of getting back to normal or accommodating to the new normal. The only good thing to come out of this was that Cubans owned their own homes so they did not have to make extra payments of mortgages. Also they received free healthcare and education so that everyone would be healthy and educated for future references on gardening and how to take care of themselves.
Wiki: Human Welfare and ecological footprint–Cuba is the only country with relatively sustainable lifestyles
In the U.S. if there was no means of transportation people would have to walk everywhere or catch rides with those who can afford the gas. People would go insane because, unlike Cuba, having a car is not a luxury—it is part of the American life. In America there would only be bikes in winter if people owned weather-appropriate bikes because so many states have snow seasons. People in America don’t own their homes completely until they pay off their loans and the government does not offer free health care. This all might change in the future when America does come close to a peak oil crisis.
Cuba is a great role model to follow in becoming sustainable after a time of extreme crisis. The world can only take what happened to Cuba, learn from it and prepare for what could happen if we run out of oil and out of trading partners. Cuba still has a long way to go and so does the rest of the world in becoming sustainable but as long as we use new methods in everyday life the planet might last enough to survive another crisis.
EMergy–yes, that word is spelled correctly. Emergy with an EM, means the Energy Memory of something. What is Emergy, and how do I learn more about it? I have been getting requests for suggested readings about EMergy–so here is a brief explanation and some suggested links.
Science proposes to describe, explain, predict, and control. But when we talk about global problems of the biosphere, science often fails in explanation, prediction, and problem-solving. Many scientific disciplines have reduced themselves into specialized, competitive silos, protected from each other by separate terminology and reductionist theories. The lenses through which many scientists view the world are microscopic in nature, focusing on analysis and application, using statistical tools that break things down into smaller and smaller pieces. This focus makes it difficult to even define the problems, much less find solutions. While analysis is a useful and important subset of the overall process, synthesis and evaluation of policies requires using an instrument such as a macroscope to view the world from a systemic perspective. Our lack of synthesis prevents us from seeing and evaluating the relationships, processes and structures inherent in the whole. And our grasp of the holistic big picture is what frames our view of society’s trajectory and the problems society faces.
How does one find a coherent way to grasp the big picture of how man exists on this planet? If we use a macroscope to analyze energy flows using Emergy Synthesis, then we can capture the essence of complex, global systems, since a continuous flow of energy is the central issue to maintaining our complex civilization (or not). Understanding the nature of our energy basis is essential to understanding where we are headed as a civilization.
Originally H.T. Odum used the term embodied energy, but he transitioned to the term EMergy, as a short form of Energy Memory.
”Emergy is the available energy of one kind previously used up directly and indirectly to make a product or service. The energy required for the transformations is no longer in the product or service, but energy carries the memory of the availability that was used up. Emergy is a new kind of state variable. The units of energy are defined with the prefix em- (e.g., emcalories, emjoules, emBtus)” (Odum, 2007, p. 69).
Flows of energy carry emergy. The emergy transforms hierarchically in a series of steps in complex systems, in a sort of energetic food chain, from natural systems, on into human economies. This transformation occurs due to the principle of Maximum Power. Over time, the Maximum Power Principle dictates that all systems maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production and efficiency. Maximum power creates feedback loops that concentrate and organize energy into increasingly complex systems, as long as the surplus energy is available to create long chains, thus combatting entropy. These long chains of increasingly complex hierarchy are what has created our complex global economy as a result of the vast amounts of fossil fuels we accessed in the 19th and 20th centuries. A series of quotes from the Wikipedia link on Maximum Power Principle elaborates further.
Odum et al. viewed the maximum power theorem as a principle of power-efficiency reciprocity selection with wider application than just electronics. For example Odum saw it in open systems operating on solar energy, like both photovoltaics and photosynthesis (1963, p. 438). Like the maximum power theorem, Odum’s statement of the maximum power principle relies on the notion of ‘matching’, such that high-quality energy maximizes power by matching and amplifying energy (1994, pp. 262, 541): “in surviving designs a matching of high-quality energy with larger amounts of low-quality energy is likely to occur” (1994, p. 260). As with electronic circuits, the resultant rate of energy transformation will be at a maximum at an intermediate power efficiency. In 2006, T.T. Cai, C.L. Montague and J.S. Davis said that, “The maximum power principle is a potential guide to understanding the patterns and processes of ecosystem development and sustainability. The principle predicts the selective persistence of ecosystem designs that capture a previously untapped energy source.” (2006, p. 317). In several texts H.T.Odum gave the Atwood machine as a practical example of the ‘principle’ of maximum power.
Maximum EmPower, then, is the measure of emergy flow up the hierarchy or food chain over time, according to the energetic instigation of organisms attempting to maximize power.
“The energy that was required [to make the product] is no longer a part of the product, but emergy is a property that represents its history and implies its importance. It remains with the product and the product’s products until the available energy is gone. Emergy disappears when the available energy is used up (degraded) (Odum, 2007, p. 69).
Systems organize to increase feedback loops and high quality storages to increase energy flows. Systems also develop exchanges with other systems for needed inputs to grow. The systems match high quality energy with low-quality energy to provide maximum intermediate power efficiency. If energy sources become limiting, systems increase their efficiency as a secondary response (after maximizing power).
By using Emergy Synthesis to value things, energies of differing qualities such as sunlight, fuel, electricity, and human service can be put on a common basis by expressing each of them in the emjoules of solar energy that is required to produce them. If solar emergy is the baseline, then the results are commonly reported as solar emjoules (abbreviated seJ). Emergy synthesis is a biophysical approach to measuring human activities that considers the indirect and direct contributions of ecological processes using equivalents of solar energy rather than monetary metrics to consider differences in quality of energy. It approaches valuation from a donor-based or supply side independent of the more usual economic demand-based approach that is dependent on subjective values of willingness to pay. The goal of the method is to capture the contributions of nature in economic evaluations. Advocates of a prosperous way down propose that policy decisions can be more deliberate by basing the decisions on quantitative Emergy Evaluation/Synthesis, with better evaluation of market processes.
Energy quality varies, and not all forms of energy have the same ability to do work, depending on the system and the intensity of energy required. Net energy contributions of any process or object within the economy, including energy production, can be calculated using an Emergy Yield Ratio (EYR) (Odum, 1976, Brown & Ulgiati, 1997).
David Scienceman recently explained the emergence of the word Emergy. In the 1980s, Odum was using the term embodied energy. But Russian scientists appropriated that term for their own theories. So, as was common with Odum’s ideas, Odum had to move on and name his idea something else, as society mainstreamed and modified his ideas. Scienceman explains his linguistic contribution:
I was aware with my background in general physics and engineering of the historical importance of the new words. The word embodied was already in common use to mean storing stuff in a body, or to turn stuff into a body, and then to leave it there. But Odum was referring to embodied energy as stuff stored and then transformed, which was therefore not embodied. I therefore suggested the word Emergy to contrast with and to replace the phrase embodied energy because it uses a different algebra, as does energy and exergy. The photograph below displays most of my thoughts at the time. The photograph introduced the new words Emergy (to contrast with energy); Empower ( a noun, to contrast with ‘to empower’, a verb; Transformity (to quantify energy quality); the phrase Emergy Synthesis to contrast with Energy Analysis; the prefix EM to imply energy memory of anything, such asEmformation, to mean the energy memory of information, and Emmonity to mean the energy memory per money unit. And that was the end of embodied energy (Scienceman, 2012).
David Scienceman, Oct. 1984, CFW, UF
Do you know the emergetic basis for an electric car versus an internal combustion energy car? Do you believe that the US can transition to an information-based society in a low energy world? Do you understand the emergy basis for our society? If not, do you want to know more?
The Emergy bible is Environmental Accounting, but it is pricey, costing $130 US at Amazon. The best place to start is actually the Wiki. Then, Odum’s last book is inexpensive and comprehensive, giving a broad overview of ecosystems thinking. Free online, you can also start here. If you want to read more, here’s an extensive bib, some of which are available as free PDFs. And these series of slide shows of Mark Brown’s are really helpful–look at them in order if you’re still interested. Once you do that, if you’re still interested, try tackling Dan Campbell’s short course.
Since we’re talking about linguistics here, Brian, @TheEmergist coins a new label for Emergy researchers–I like it.
Emergist-/’enərjist/-noun-a person who tries to see everything through an energy hierarchy. Like the carpenter who only had a hammer so everything looked like a nail, the emergist saw a world ruled by energy hierarchies.
Once we view the world through an energy lens, there is no going back. Similarly to the heroes in movies The Matrix and Avatar, once our small-view blinders are off, and we can see the energy flowing through the system, it is as though a whole new way of viewing and interpreting the world opens up. As Frederick Soddy said:
The laws expressing the relations between energy and matter are, however, not solely of importance in pure science. They necessarily come first in order … in the whole record of human experience, and they control, in the last resort, the rise or fall of political systems, the freedom or bondage of nations, the movements of commerce and industry, the origin of wealth and poverty, and the general physical welfare of the race. (Soddy, 1912, pp. 10-11).
Brian has written a nice introduction to the idea of Emergy within information systems. Here is a snippet. You can find the rest of Brian’s post here.
Information systems have two key features. The first is that they take large amounts of energy to create the first copy, but additional copies take significantly less energy to make. This allows for information to spread rapidly. The second is that since information systems take so much energy to create, it is higher in the energy hierarchy and has the ability to massively impact other systems. Further, the more energy that is used to make the specific information system, the larger the impact it has on other information systems. This has important ramifications for how we perceive the impacts of human information systems. It often can appear humanity’s prowess creating technology is endless, because of its ability to work outside the natural DNA/RNA information system (genetics) and how rapidly it spreads while failing to realize there is an initial high energetic cost for information innovation (Brian@TheEmergist).
Anchorage in general is in a sulk. Three or nine inches of snow fell yesterday and today, depending on where you live in the Anchorage bowl. This snowfall gives Anchorage a new record for the longest snow season on record, 232 days long. Bike to Work Day on Friday was rainy and then snowy. Gardeners are frustrated, and even the skiers are tired of winter. We seem to be experiencing a cooling trend for Alaska due to the Pacific Decadal Oscillation and changes in the winter ice patterns–more in the Bering Sea and less in the Arctic. Alex DeMarban at Alaska Dispatch summarizes the study:
Here in Anchorage our average “last frost” date is May 4, and our “safe planting” date – when there is a 90 percent chance of no more frosts – is May 15. Traditional knowledge dictates waiting until Memorial Day. And here we sit on May 19 with 3″ of snow on the ground and a temperature of 26F. Fortunately, this cold snap and snow was forecast a week ago, so the garden was not planted last week as originally planned. Next week we should be good to go.
This will be year number three for our main garden, and we are transitioning from full-till to minimum-till. We rented a tiller and deeply tilled our raw rocky/sandy/clay soil the first two years to loosen it up, remove rocks, and add organic material and nutrients. A soil test last fall was quite revealing. We had achieved a good pH balance, good organic matter content, and best levels of phosphorous and potassium. We now lack only nitrogen for good growing. Previous seasons we fertilized with locally produced fish bone meal (5-6-1) and then added ash from the wood furnace for potassium. This year we just hand tilled in some blood meal (12-0-0) and we should now be good to go. Minimum till reduces disturbance of the amazing ecosystem of healthy soil. We will rotate crops from last year’s locations, though it will be less than perfect in that so much of what we grow are Brassica (cabbage family) – broccoli, Brussels sprouts, cabbage, kohlrabi, cauliflower, and turnips.
O livro O Declínio Próspero já está disponível em Português!
On average, Americans throw away about 4.5 pounds of trash each day. While this figure may seem small at first, over the course of a year that amount accumulates to roughly 1,642 pounds of trash (Clean Air Council, n.d.). United States as a whole produces over 230 million TONS of trash each year. Less than 25% of this trash is being recycled, while over 70% of the total trash that makes its way to landfills could be recycled. That’s over 120 million tons of material that could be recovered left to waste 
The most direct method of reducing the amount of trash is by refusing to consume. This does not mean to stop generating trash altogether but rather to stop consuming particular products. A person may decide not to buy certain items that generate more waste than benefit. For example, a person may feel the need to buy apples every time he goes to the store. However he may not eat them and often they go to waste. Knowing this, one may decide to quit purchasing apples which will result reduces the amount of waste they produce.
Another Latin American country where people live a simple yet happy life is Cuba. This small island was once on its way to a success then it was stopped in its tracks when the Soviet Union, its ally, crumbled to the ground. Cuba no longer had any help; the oil embargo isolated it from rich countries. According to 
This wasn’t the only problem that Cuba faced in this time of crisis. They also lacked means of transportation with the limited and expensive resources of oil along with the economic situation of most of Cuba’s population. According to the documentary 
or catch rides with those who can afford the gas. People would go insane because, unlike Cuba, having a car is not a luxury—it is part of the American life. In America there would only be bikes in winter if people owned weather-appropriate bikes because so many states have snow seasons. People in America don’t own their homes completely until they pay off their loans and the government does not offer free health care. This all might change in the future when America does come close to a peak oil crisis.
