Future Perfect
"Sustainable development has to be looked at from a global and integrated perspective or it will be doomed to fall into the contradictions among the excessive specializations. The conceptual structure that thermodynamics grants when applied to Earth as a thermodynamic system, to the living being as a conserver of energy and to the social and economic activities are a domain that can also be examined in terms of energy and information fluxes, where the fundamental physical principles are valid and applicable, open up a whole new world of possibilities."
Frederic Coustols
Imagine a future Portugal as strong a leader as that during the Age of Discoveries, as proud, as autonomous, as in control of it’s own destiny. It is all possible, the human ingenuity is always there, we must simply tap into it. But first we must shift our thinking a little.
In a famous sketch, Pierre Desproges the French humorist once said, “to go from barbarism to decadence one must experience civilisation” (and here we will presume civilisation refers to the western model). What Pierre Desproges should have said is, “to go from barbarism to civilisation one must experience decadence”. To fall first, and then rise again, this is the sign of a truly civilised society, raising itself from the ashes like a phoenix.
As westerners we are hurtling along life’s vainglorious highways, allowing the modern assault of advertising to numb us into submission, not wanting to admit to the problems that face the world at large because facing it would mean owning that our comfortable existence has a shelf life.
But active participation can change that. Life is not found in empty words, or time blurred in the pursuit of mindless entertainment, but in action. Through projects of environmental restoration, one’s self can also be restored, as one becomes vital, as part of something more, as part of something generational, and not consumptive.
Donne said, “no man is an island”. Well neither is an island an island. Whether you are concerned about agriculture, water and energy or not, they do concern you! We must start to see our actions, not as isolated incidents but as serving part of the whole.
Since the rise of the Industrial age humankind in the west has enjoyed a life of increasing ease and prosperity, of massively increased mobility, of instant communication, and of seeming abundance, all possible due to an erroneous sense of having dominated nature, nature from which we do not live apart.
This la dolce vita has been such a success, and so well advertised via the global media, that each country now wishes to imitate it, and as fast as possible. But the entire world cannot live like the west. Even the west can no longer afford to live like the west.
The great minds of the Renaissance guided us into this new age of science and thought, although not first without struggle. Their discoveries helped produce the comfortable circumstances in which 10% of the world’s population now live but the techniques used to achieve this comfort are now as obsolete as the world view of those that once tried Galileo.
We are watching a remake of the last days of the Middle Ages, the difference being that the new science and technology springing from Galileo’s era didn’t begin to negatively impact our ecosystem until the 19th century. The minds of the era simply did not foresee it. Whereas now our scientists know that what we are doing is self-destructive madness, but our governments, our corporations and our citizens persist all the same.
Today, the ecological footprint in most of the developed countries, and in the underdeveloped ones copying our model, exceeds their biocapacity. As a planet this means we are making more wastes than we can absorb back into the cycle, and depleting the resources on which we all depend.
According to the last Living Planet Report of 2005 (published in 2008), the USA had a biocapacity per inhabitant of 5 gha (global hectares), but their footprint reached 9.4 gha. So in 2005 the USA were using 4.4 gha outside their own territory to sustain their way of life.
Europe’s biocapacity at this time was 2.3 gha per capita. With a footprint of 4.7 gha Europe was outsourcing 2.4 gha from outside countries.
Looking at the three European nations currently experiencing the most dire economic problems, Greece, Spain and Portugal, one finds that they also have the highest deficit of biocapacity per capita, -4.2 gha, -4.4 gha and -3.2 gha respectively. Using more and more resources beyond one’s borders leads to an economic and biological imbalance, and to economic and biological bankruptcy.
If we look at the overall world figures by type of income we find that the high income countries, representing 1 billion people, have an average ecological footprint of 6.4 gha for a biocapacity of 3.7 gha. The medium income countries, with 3 billion people, have an average ecological footprint of 2.2 gha for a biocapacity of 2.2 gha. And the low income countries, with 2.4 billion inhabitants, have an average ecological footprint of 1 gha for a biocapacity on par with China, of .9 gha.
These figures demonstrate a simple truth. Our current way of living is discordant with what we have to work with. And it’s not just drilling for oil or dumping our rubbish in China, it’s the whole setup; the law, the tax system, the statistical data we work with, the financial and accounting rules, our education and health care, commercial agreements, our agricultural practices and prices, the way that Cities and States grant permission to build and to open factories, the process through which banks grant loans. Our model, our so-called ‘civilisation’, is doomed to collapse if we do not make the necessary changes.
Oystein Dahle, former Esso Vice President for Norway and the North Sea observed, “Socialism collapsed because it did not allow the market to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow the market to tell the ecological truth”
An image comes to mind, of a sea captain who knows his position, the port he is making for, his velocity and his inertial force and yet does not change course when all his calculations demonstrate that he will hit the wharf and destroy his ship and all the people in it.
People have been fighting for democracy for years and in many countries are still fighting for it, but when we look at the actions taken by world leaders and their respective parliaments it seems they are not fighting for us, and that their attempts to bring harmony to the lives of their people are often hollow promises.
Our governments, despite individual politicians’ best intentions, run our nations not for the good of the citizen but for the corporations and big interest groups, who hijack the political process with kick backs and re-election funding. How many in positions of power really look to long-term solutions? If the flap of a butterflies wings can make waves around the world surely the rumbling gas-guzzling engine of a Hummer should have been banned long before GM’s bankruptcy.
Certainly the challenge we face is a great one. For a paradigm shift in our thinking, our way of teaching, our way of living and consuming, will be at odds with the profit-seeking portfolio of shareholders and patent holders, as well as with the ethos of the world’s top companies themselves.
Nevertheless, numerous signals suggest that these changes are possible today and can/will/must be implemented. The cost to us will vary exponentially, depending on the time it will take to make these changes.
The continuing growth of our modern economies over the past seventy years slowed dramatically during the last ten, causing our leaders to borrow funds in order to maintain the standard of living and consequentially, social peace. In doing so they have impoverished their nations for decades if not more.
Under the supervision of the World Trade Organization international agreements to liberalise trade have been signed by 153 countries representing 97% of world trade, giving access worldwide to money, people and goods. These agreements, combined with the rules in force, have had positive returns on the balance sheet of international groups and banks, and did, in the beginning, increase the employment rate in the service sectors, but they have also increased dramatically the deterioration of the environment and the autonomy of billions of people.
When these agreements were signed the west was strong and less mindful of the ingenuity of it’s Asian neighbours. Today, with many western nations in debt to the hilt, the western service sector is endangered by the willingness of companies to send services offshore, and of those in outside nations that are prepared to do work that westerners aren’t. As a consequence the unemployment level in the domestic service sector is reaching new highs, and is increasing steadily.
In the past 20 years numerous new statistical indexes have been built, more concerned with the quality of life than of the quantities we consume. Some of these indexes, whilst not yet perfect, show that quality of life often decreases, even as GNP increases. If, however, our nation’s leaders use the GNP to solely judge their nations health, then decisions that are biased toward production, consumption and thus growth are bound to follow, even if these despoil the quality of life. Because policy extends from these indicators it’s time to make some new ones.
Here are some ways in which quality of life has been reduced:
• Voters are becoming more and more absent from the polls, both in local government and national elections. This lack of engagement fuels further distance between the needs and desires of citizens and those in government.
• This absenteeism could be in part because there is a perceived lack of difference between left and right wing political policy and to vote for a minor party, or independent with a different point of view is to “throw away one’s vote”.
• In the past 10 years 7% of the Portuguese population, mostly well educated citizens, have emigrated seeking a better life. This trend, which effects many western nations, has to be compared with the huge number of highly educated Chinese scholars that have returned home in the same period.
• In another comparison between east and west, the police force per capita is much higher in western nations, almost ten times higher than that in China.
• With an aging population in many countries, the deficit of Social Security is quite high and unsustainable, whilst retirement plans are both hard to finance and subject to the whims of the traditional investment markets. When a large section of society retires, the young will be further taxed to prop up government coffers.
• Low salaries for the majority of people, coupled with unsatisfying work, provide little incentive for those who could instead live on Welfare and choose not to work.
• With tax payer’s money governments subsidise water, electricity production, highways, and public transportation systems and then give away control of those investments to private companies instead of keeping them for the common good. Whilst governments make some money in the initial sale those private contractors will go on to make many times more for their businesses, and their shareholders also. Meanwhile those services are fragmented, from one into many, with loss of efficiency a common problem.
• Some of the more obvious by-products of a reduced quality of life are the negative effects on health. Stress, obesity, behavioural problems, over medication, sedentary lifestyles, drug use, all of these stem from lives lived in a world of polluted food and environment, where drug companies profit from our tendency to “pop a pill to make it better” instead of looking at a holistic way toward health.
Some very important laws, the laws of thermodynamics, have been ignored in the way we behave on earth. They remain the exclusive field of our physicists. Our politicians and governments have not thought to use those laws as a framework to shape our society, though they should.
Energy can neither be created nor destroyed nor disappear, it can only be transferred from one form to another. The total energy of the universe is constant and the total entropy is constantly increasing. Entropy is bound energy, no longer available for use in the system, like the exhaust, noise and heat produced by car in use.
When we mine material, like oil, from the Earth’s crust and it is altered for use in our world of technology, there is usually no proper way of processing the used materials, the waste, that is left behind. Our world, and the living systems in it are not adapted to systematically increasing concentrations of materials that were earlier stored deep underground. This is also true for most other non-natural materials created by man.
In a word, we have no room for our junk! When our waste emissions exceed our environments capacity to re-assimilate them we have chaos. “Chaos or disorder is the opposite of harmony, as competition is the opposite of cooperation”. Bill Mollison Imagine if you will, that your home is encased inside a glass dome. Now imagine everything in your life, everything you have ever purchased, eaten, worn, read, watched, driven and thought destroyed, accumulating with you in that dome. Now you can imagine how polluted our world is. Because that dome is the Earth. We only have one of them and it’s a closed system.
If we consider that everyone on this planet is entitled to the same privileges we have, and that is only fair surely, then life is truly and definitively unsustainable on Earth. We simply do not have the natural resources at our disposal to match the current and growing needs of the world population. Continuing on with our ‘civilised’ western way is thus pure suicide. If the majority of the world’s nations follow our lead and adopt our ways then we are heading for a violent crisis.
The changes needed cannot be made by the elected bodies of countries alone. They need the help and active participation of all citizens, and equally importantly, if not even more so, of corporations and industry.
When we look at Greece, Spain and Portugal, the three European nations suffering most from the economic downturn, we see a decrease in the quality of life of their citizens, and several hardships confronting them. The various fiscal measures voted for in their parliaments will not be enough to save these nations. Their problem is not only in fighting for competitiveness on the world stage, but simultaneously in evaluating what they have at home and making the best use of it. So far only the Canadians have had the sense to make an inventory of their natural resources. In Greece, Spain and Portugal the sun is the obvious source of a new growth engine.
In 1994 Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman published a paper in Foreign Affairs Magazine entitled Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession.
“Let’s start telling the truth: competitiveness is a meaningless word when applied to national economies. And the obsession with competitiveness is both wrong and dangerous.”
The present situation shows how right Paul Krugman was.
In Energy, Environment and Development, Professor Jose J Delgado Domingos, IST, Lisbon published a very thorough analysis that should to be studied in schools and given to politicians, given a leave of absence from office until they understand it’s full meaning and subsequently propose a right-minded plan for our countries.
“Sustainable development has to be looked at from a global and integrated perspective or it will be doomed to fall into the contradictions among the excessive specializations. The conceptual structure that thermodynamics grants when applied to Earth as a thermodynamic system, to the living being as a conserver of energy and to the social and economic activities are a domain that can also be examined in terms of energy and information fluxes, where the fundamental physical principles are valid and applicable, open up a whole new world of possibilities. Portuguese scientific, engineering and political community has underestimated this concept of an integrated vision which, in fact, is the source for leadership and progress, finding justifications that discard too easily the specific aspirations that others may have envisioned.”
“If a company that overspends its capital goes bankrupt, what will the consequences be for a society that over dilapidates its natural resources? Economic growth has been synonym of accumulation of capital gathered by man, suggesting the idea that this capital will substitute for the natural capital, which are the Natural Resources; This, however, cannot happen!”
“What we are talking about is the integration – of what science in its time was unaware – and of what, today’s science, is aware. Although, politicians and economists seem to want to discard in their continued ignorance of these facts.”
Hence, there is only one course of action, the one that we believe everyone is waiting for, a collective course. Using the principles of sustainable design we can integrate a new systemic approach to social and economic challenges. This new approach could be orchestrated in the manner of a 10 year Marshall Plan.
The plan would be clear and precise about what resources each country has to live on, which natural assets they are missing and what resources need to be improved upon, in quality and where appropriate, quantity, be it air, water, energy or agricultural production.
Nations need to serve themselves through their own agriculture, to not only lower imports, but to improve the quality of soils and bring back the biodiversity necessary for successful land stewardship.
Clean energy solutions must be made the standard, from the way we generate electricity to the way we run our cars. To live sustainably we need to design systems that create more energy than they require to build, to run, to maintain and to be replaced. If the future is the electric car, then a universal plug and socket system needs to be agreed upon, and powering up and battery switching stations built. Public transportation systems and our biking lanes must be improved so that we rely less on cars in the interim.
Taxes must be organised to benefit those citizens and companies who act with sustainability in mind. In Denmark the government has promised not to impose the vehicle registration tax on electric cars (until at least 2012) and also provides free parking in downtown Copenhagen. The Danish government also sets petrol prices very high by design, to dissuade the use of cars that produce the most pollution. Ahead of the Copenhagen talks on climate in December 2009, Anders Eldrup, CEO of Dong Energy said, “I think the one most important thing would be to have a price, and I’m saying a significant price, on carbon, because if you have a high price on carbon that will divert the investments towards the new technologies and that is what is needed to make this transformation, which we must do”. By this example all polluting factors need to be rolled into the prices of all products. Companies will soon find environmentally agreeable solutions in their bid to avoid the higher taxes.
In an extension of this point on complete costs, the decisions of all cities, governments and banks must also take into account the environmental cost of their investments. Planning permission must only be given to projects which are not only green by building standards but harmonise with the environment and with the community at large.
The Earth’s natural resources are not spread equally and this has caused, and will continue to cause, inumerous conflicts unless we do something about it. Why not put in place a world fund to control those resources, split according to an equalised system by which countries have access to those resources according to their population.
The technology to exploit those resources is mostly in the hands of private companies for the benefit of a few shareholders. Neither the structure of the ownership nor the split of the profits really matter as long as environmental costs would be covered exclusively by these companies.
That we need to move beyond purely economic motives is obvious but we also need to move beyond sheer apathy. In terms of putting the environment first, we often think of those things we’ll lose, but not to those we’ll gain. With the knowledge we now have we can overhaul our production methods so as not to harm the living environment in which we all live. New technologies will create new and exciting industries and areas of employment, as well as areas of enjoyment. And because statistical methods drive our actions, let’s put in place ones that measure quality, not just quantity. A double accounting system could be put in place until the new format is tested and approved.
Trade and the flow of information has been global for centuries now but with the further relaxing of tariffs and costs it has helped to bring millions into total dependency, has helped destroy traditional cultures, means of survival and biodiversity at large. If an American farmer is subsidised $900 per head of cattle, he is able to sell that meat to African nations at a cheaper price than those indigenous cattlemen can raise their own meat. So African farmers are left with little do do. Their way of life is destroyed. Their heritage is lost. And because they have lost their incomes they must sit and wait for subsidies themselves.
Of course it is very convenient to have worldwide access to goods that improve our quality of life but one condition should prevail, the impact of those imported goods on the environmental well being of the country should be reduced to zero through a simple tax system, essentially an ecological goods and services tax. The ‘real’ cost of the goods then acknowledged, the tax dollars must then be used to offset the pollution caused. And if we implement this tax system on a sliding scale, over a period of ten years, we allow the producers of these goods time to put in place cleaner production methods and use more environmentally friendly raw materials, before they lose their customers through the price increase.
Another area that requires a rethink on ‘real’ cost is patents. Often the result of huge investments, patents are privately owned and zealously guarded. The confidentiality accorded them tends to privatise all means of production. In the case of patents related to natural assets, any rights granted to any company or private group should integrate any costs to the environment and a special Natural Assets Fund should be set up to offset those costs. In the case of air, water, energy, seeds and cells, these patents should belong to the world community.
If all nations were to come together in this way, sharing a single vision for a sustainable future, then the action would be swift and effective. Fear is the price we pay for the unknown, but all these issues are known, they only lack the right and full exposure, a deliberate agenda, precise control and reporting procedures.
Separate governments and corporations have already started working in these directions, but by working in isolation they lack the single, grand vision. Because we all share the Earth we need to do this together. The path needs to be designed and the project articulated. Educational programs need to be implemented to train responsible and healthy young citizens. Village by village, town by town we will procure the seed money and then enjoy the results of progress made by all citizens. And best of all, when smart sustainable systems are put in place there will be more leisure time for us to enjoy life again, to enjoy the quality that has been lost.
We do not live apart from nature, we cannot be blind to our connectedness with her.
So let's start a new Age of Discoveries. But this time let the discoveries be not beyond the seas but local, concentrating on what we have here now and expanding on that with creativity. Opportunities for improved agriculture, for increased energy generation, for less competition and more community, for better health, for more happiness, for more beauty in life. The choice is yours. We will either lose our current lifestyle through our failure to see it's deficiencies, or gain a richer one by meeting the challenge with relish. Surely, with your children's children in mind, there is only one option. And it is the more exciting one for sure!
art work (sculpture) by Michel Batlle
