“But if it is broke, fix it.”
– Engineer’s credo
ONE THING NEEDS to be said, up front and with drum roll: There is a way out.
It needs to be said because what I hear, from a depressing number of people, in a depressing number of countries, and in a depressing number of books and articles and blogs and conversations, can be boiled down to “The system is fucked.” Some put it more genteelly, but they mean the same thing.
The charge-sheet, digested, is essentially this:
How can we fix anything? How can there be a way out?
I recently had lunch with a gaggle of journalists, all of them experienced reporters who have covered the Middle East, Central Asia, all the world’s trouble spots, people who have been around. Every one of them believes that we’re screwed, and that it’s too late to do anything about it.
Well, jeez.
This bleak vision is the secular equivalent of the Christian Rapture. In that view, similarly, the world is going straight to hell in a handcart, though the righteous will be plucked from the handcart at the last moment and taken up to Jesus – Jesus in the sky with diadem. The rest of us will just burn. So long, good riddance, tant pis.
Nevertheless, I believe in neither the handcart nor the selective plucking. If I did, I wouldn’t be offering a book called Our Way Out. I’d be hunkering down, drinking the last of my good wine, living somewhere remote, behind a don’t-mess-with-me razor wire keep-out fence, shotgun on hand to keep the ravening mobs at bay.
It’s true, politics is a swamp and too many politicians lie constantly, without shame or remorse. But there are many honest politicians, and a deep-rooted eagerness exists among voters for something better. Change is attainable, reform within reach. Our economy is a casino for the rich, yes (I give you Goldman Sachs), and estranged from the world most of us live in. But we can use our revulsion to leverage change, and better models do exist. Too many corporations are predatory and without conscience, but they can be tamed and remade, from within as well as from without, and reenlisted in a new cause. We can even make globalization a force for good. Global warming is real, but we know how to fix it. It’s not easy, but it is perfectly doable. There are far too many of us, but we know how to deal with that too.
To borrow a slogan from Barack Obama (before he became mired in the muck of American federal politics), “Yes, we can.”
We are not without our options. I’ve spent years reading about solutions to our problems, and talking to the people who propose and oppose them. Many of these solutions are clever, even ingenious, and eminently practical and affordable. There are technical solutions, political solutions, economic solutions, and solutions through social engineering. Some are commonsensical and some dismayingly draconian. Mostly, though, they are solutions proposed in a vacuum – they are single-issue solutions. Almost all ignore the critical issues of population and economic growth, a lamentable failing.
You can’t solve any one problem on its own. But you can solve many if you solve them together.
Everything is linked, that’s the point. Solutions lie in the linkages.
Let’s try a thought experiment, in the cant phrase of the day. Let little Sable Island, a curious bow-shaped sand dune in the Atlantic, 100 and more kilometers from anywhere, stand in for the planet. Like Earth, Sable Island is a closed ecology, and within its protecting embrace the island’s biosphere has achieved a balance. The population, such as it is – really just birds, a herd of 400 or so wild horses, and a varying number of transient seals – has come to equilibrium. The energy the system uses, the sun and the rain that allow grasses to grow and the population to feed, is constant. It can be diminished, but only marginally increased. Still, the ecosystem is self-sustaining. The horses eat the grass, and their manure encourages more grass to grow. If there are too many horses, the food supply for each animal diminishes, and in a year of poor rain horses die, and the population returns to equilibrium.1
This is not paradise, exactly – too much fog and too cold for paradise, and the whole place is too fragile – but it is stable, held in a durable balance. Imagine, then, what happens if you drop into this not-quite-paradise a curious, energetic, and enterprising animal called the human being.
These humans, as is their nature, start to grow. They build houses and workshops and machine sheds and barns for their newly imported cattle and they cultivate gardens, all of which diminish the food for the horses. Because they love horses, they feed them and look after them – it’s their responsibility, no? So the horse population expands, further diminishing the grass, so fodder must be imported. Meanwhile the humans need more water for cultivation, and drinking and cooking, and sanitation, so the precarious water table begins to drop. Salty water creeps in – the island is only a kilometer wide, after all – and desalination techniques must be employed. Can these be powered with sustainable energy? The sun can’t do the job on its own, but perhaps wind can. So they cover half the island with wind turbines, but it’s still not enough, and demand keeps going up. They import diesel fuel, for which they need docks and pipelines, holding tanks and furnaces and smokestacks. Then they need maintenance technicians, and support staff to look after them – cooks and drivers and other hired labor. The population swells. Tourists want to come and see the wild horses, and they consume water and need sewage facilities, but the water table is too shallow and the sewage must be collected and distributed – somewhere. So the horses, no longer wild, must be paddocked, for their own protection …
This is a concatenation of problems. Each affects the others. You can’t solve one without in some way dealing with them all.
In the case of Sable Island, however, you could cut through the whole mess. You could simply deport the humans, thus avoiding the whole issue.
In the larger world of our Earth, it’s not so easy. There is no outside from which to import resources, and in which to deposit excess. We must use up our natural capital, and live in our own mess. Which is what we’re doing on and to our small planet.
The answer is simple: Stop breeding, don’t deplete resources, and make no mess. That’s the way out.
How to do that is really the only issue.
The converging crises of global warming/climate change, the continuing (if diminishing) population explosion, and the inevitable termination of the oil-based fossil-fuel economy present not just problems, but also opportunity. With strong incentives to back out of the series of dead ends into which we have so obliviously wandered, and with the will to push through a new road to a reconfigured and sustainable industrial civilization, we can not only avoid disaster but achieve something fine.
Solutions have a cascading effect, just as crises do, and crises become easier to solve once the crucial decision has been reached that we can in fact do something, remembering also that if crises reinforce each other, solutions enable each other. The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 – a crisis of constant-growth capitalism in a regulatory-free environment – only reinforced the argument.
To survive – and profit from – these converging crises, local and global economies and polities have to be remade. Luckily, the goals overlap and reinforce each other.
First, we must confront climate change and peak oil by fixing energy, because planetary warming is a consequence of the massive deployment of energy that fuels the global economy. We cannot solve energy simply by switching fuels. But we can manage the transition to a post–fossil-fuel era by a simple (though expensive) set of policy changes: investing in green infrastructure, rebuilding the grid and electrifying transport, launching an efficiency revolution, penalizing resource extraction while subsidizing alternatives, and many others. These notions have long been commonplace, though they have yet to be acted upon. And we must revisit the essential role of nuclear technology.
Fix the economy. This means more than just heading off (or fixing) economic calamity and punishing the bankers; rather, it means dealing with the economy as system – with its continuing insistence on the notion of perpetual growth, and with its underpinning of consumerism. We need to push all economic activity toward sustainability, to assist in its “dematerialization,” and to come as close as possible to a steady-state economy, an economy that develops without growing – that ceases to grow without falling into stagnation.
Rein in the abuses of corporate capitalism. We must come to grips with the fact that corporations are conscienceless. They may create wealth, but they are also predatory and rapacious, and they’ve become too big.
Fix politics. Fix the democratic deficit: reengage citizens and pry policy loose from special interests. We must deal with the drowning of democracy in the murky flood of special-interest money, and the consequent corruption of legislatures everywhere. We can no longer rely on governments, as presently constituted, for solutions.
Fix globalization by ameliorating its worst aspects and encouraging its best. This means taming multinationals and the international trade regime, while subsidizing the globalization of ideas through open-source, universal, planetwide education.
Eliminate, or at minimum alleviate, extreme poverty, and ensure that foreign aid is used for infrastructure development and education.
Confront the notion of zero population growth, explore the idea of an ideal population number, and stabilize the population. If energy and growth and the attendant problems are the flesh and gristle of our predicament, human numbers are a nerve that penetrates deep, affecting everything we do. It follows that without solving population we haven’t a hope of solving the food crisis, the pollution crisis, and the series of other minor calamities that confront us. A study for the London School of Economics concludes that universally available contraception would be five times cheaper as a means of preventing climate change than conventional green technologies, which suggests that family planning is a primary method of emissions reduction.2 Continuing population growth and unsustainable economic growth are conjoined twins – we must solve them together.
Finally, fix the scale of human activities by reinventing community in a number of ways, including a radical decentralization of industrial and agricultural production (to minimize transportation and maximize local employment and the development of robust local economies) and the inclusion of “distributed” (i.e., decentralized) electricity generation in the energy mix. In other words, implement policies that allow communities to reinvent themselves.
At first glance, the task seems too daunting and global pessimism too deep, especially when our Dear Leaders have proved themselves to be suicidally out of touch. Until the financial crisis hit and drove all thoughts of “the vision thing” out of politicos’ heads, and therefore out of public discourse, it briefly seemed possible that a resurgent America would remake itself once more. But in the aftermath of the financial typhoon, debt has ballooned (except possibly among bankers), and money for any fixes at all seems vanishingly unlikely.
It would be easier, given our dysfunctional politics and civic apathy, to go on doing what we’re doing now: cutting back here and there, wherever it is least painful to do so. But we’ll soon face an escalation of the already obvious: an Earth overburdened with too many people, continuing environmental degradation, more extreme weather, increasing food shortages, environmental refugees, and bitter wars over ever scarcer natural resources.
But we’re not faced only with the kind of choice described by Woody Allen (“More than any time in history mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness, the other to total extinction. Let us pray that we have the wisdom to choose correctly”). If we do things right – and we can do things right – the present crisis could be a catalyst for creative thinking. It will mean jettisoning a shopping cart full of entrenched doctrines (theological, political, and economic), but it could also mean uploading new social systems for a new age. Many industries will disappear, but many new ones will be invented, reinvigorating capitalism’s “creative destruction.” The conundrum of job creation in a recession-prone system, and consumerism in an economy that doesn’t grow can be resolved in the same way.
Not a small task, no. But why would a small task be expected?
Changing how we live and how we think will be profoundly disruptive (though not as disruptive as not doing anything). It will be difficult, a massive undertaking – don’t believe those who tell us it will be easy. It will not be cheap. It will cost many fortunes, and trouble even rich economies. But the transformation to sustainability is already happening, in small ways, in many parts of the world. It is time to scale up those efforts. It is beyond time to think big.
If we do, we can succeed. We can emerge with a population that lives as well as, or perhaps better than, the well-off do now, and yet treads lightly on the planet.
That could be exhilarating.
To bring all this off, we first need the facts. But we also need a governing idea – a framework within which we can contemplate those facts. Instead of faith-based science, we need science-based faith, a belief that we can, collectively, make the changes necessary.
We need a political vision, of the kind that the “stimulus packages” passed in most industrialized countries in 2009 lamentably failed to produce. This is the vision that says we can each be a part, a small but recognizably valid part, of the greatest project in the long and often melancholy history of human civilization, the project that saves our lives and the lives of all the wild creatures that live here with us on this small and vulnerable planet. This is the project that can turn human beings aside from their self-imposed task of planetary plunder and renew a sense of wonder at the fecundity and genius of the natural world.
Meanwhile, here’s a place to start:
Even in the wake of the Great Meltdown, economists have still not grasped a simple fact that has long been obvious to scientists: the size of the planet is fixed. Earth is a closed ecology, and a closed system cannot grow – it can only cannibalize itself. Nor can you ever throw anything away in a closed ecology, something that orthodox economics has consistently ignored. The overall size of the system – the amount of land, the extent of the water, the density of the air, the presence deep underground of minerals – these are all fixed. The proposition that follows from this is so simple that it seems embarrassing to have to write it down: The fundamental wealth of Earth is the ability to maintain life itself, and all of economics is merely a subset of the biosphere.
Humans have become what philosopher Brian Swimme calls a “macrophase power,” by which he means that our impact on the planet now rivals the forces that caused the ice ages and mass extinctions, “yet we have only a microphase sense of responsibility and ethical judgment.”3
By way of counterpoint, management guru Peter Drucker personifies the Old Story, which should now, surely, have been discredited – it is, after all, the credo of the plunderer. He believes that it is the entrepreneur who creates value: “Before it is possessed and used, every plant is a weed and every mineral is just another rock.”4 It is this pernicious credo that underpins so much of our current evils.
From these simple notions – and they really are simple – all economic activity and all policy decisions must flow. Exceeding the planet’s energy budget is, except in the very short term, unsustainable.
Over the very long geological haul, the planet has not been stable. It has been subject to catastrophic assault from without – an asteroid, after all, destroyed the dinosaurs. It has been vulnerable to turmoil from within – volcanoes have been responsible for several mass extinctions, and once, nearly 75,000 years ago, one came very close to eliminating our species.5 But for more than 50,000 years, far longer than human civilization has existed, the biosphere, just like Sable Island, has been in balance. Specifically, massive amounts of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide, have been pouring into the atmosphere every year for more millennia than we can count, in amounts far greater than mankind has been able to produce – a point often made by climate-change skeptics. But these natural CO2 emissions have been exactly balanced over the same period by the amount that falls back from the atmosphere to be absorbed by the biosphere and the oceans. So it has never been relevant, or disputed, that natural flows are greater than human flows. The natural flows canceled themselves out. Burning fossil fuels, by contrast, creates a new flow that is not canceled out.
It’s easy to see how a problem arises. If water runs through a funnel, with inflows exactly balancing outflows, the funnel will never overflow. But if the inflow is increased even slightly while the outflow remains the same, the funnel will gradually fill then overflow, leaving a nice mess on our hands. Human-produced carbon dioxide is like that slight extra flow – even a little is enough to unbalance the system, and if not rectified soon, the atmospheric funnel will overflow – with, yes, a nice mess on our hands.
From this it follows that policy prescriptions should be aimed at keeping the planet in its natural balance. How to do this, at what cost and through what mechanisms, are the essential issues. If you trawl through the literature and rhetoric of the climate-change debate you will find endless iterations of the phrases “sustainable development” and “sustainable growth.” These, too, sound like simple terms, but here the simplicity is deceptive. The two phrases are often used as though they were synonyms, though they are very different. After all, except in the cant of the self-improvement industry, where growth seems to mean making you a more fulfilled person, the verb to grow means to get bigger, not better. The word development, on the other hand, is a slippery term with many definitions. It can imply growth, but it can surely also mean improving quality, not quantity, and thus imply fulfilling or realizing potential. If sustainable growth is impossible, sustainable development is at least plausible. Our planet’s closed ecosystem cannot grow, but it can develop.
Sustainable development, as first defined by the Brundtland Commission (the 1983 World Commission on Environment and Development, under the leadership of Gro Harlem Brundtland), and by Maurice Strong’s Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, means just that: balancing human needs while protecting the natural environment so our needs can be met not just in the present but also in the future. However, the term remains ambiguous and widely abused. In 2005, for example, the UN’s World Summit Outcome document amplified the point, suggesting that sustainable development includes the “interdependent and mutually reinforcing pillars of economic development, social development, and environmental protection.” But, alas, the document became fuzzy, once again confusing growth and development by declaring that “development [should not be] understood simply in terms of economic growth, but also as a means to achieve a more satisfactory intellectual, emotional, moral and spiritual existence.”
The Canadian government, among others, has traditionally compounded this error and fudged the results, so that we end up with the comforting notion that sustainability means more of the same. The Department of Finance actually defines sustainable development as “long-term sustainable economic growth based on environmentally sound policies and practices.” In the view of the finance technocrats, therefore, environmental degradation matters only if it undermines economic growth. Department documents then add, just in case you didn’t get the point: “Economic growth remains the policy objective against which all others must be judged.”6
Of course, these technocrats are economists, and identifying the innocent-seeming misconceptions of economists has recently become something of a blood sport among the commentariat. As The Economist wryly put it, “Of all the economic bubbles that have been pricked, few have burst more spectacularly than the reputation of economics itself … A few years ago, the ‘dismal science’ was briefly glamorous, acclaimed as a way of explaining ever more forms of human behavior, from drug-dealing to sumo-wrestling … John McCain joked that Alan Greenspan, then chairman of the Federal Reserve, was so indispensable that if he died, the president should ‘prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him.’ ” In the wake of the biggest economic calamity in 80 years that reputation has taken rather a beating, and the profession itself is suffering from guilt and rancor. In a recent lecture, Paul Krugman, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics in 2008, argued that much of the past 30 years of macroeconomics was spectacularly useless at best, and positively harmful at worst. Barry Eichengreen, a prominent American economic historian, says the crisis has “cast into doubt much of what we thought we knew about economics.”
One of the concepts that explains sustainability is that of the “ecological footprint,” first proposed in an Earth Council study by Mathis Wackernagel. He defined a footprint as “that land and water area necessary to support a defined human population and material standard of living indefinitely,” and suggested footprints could be developed for individuals, regions, nations, and the global economy. His data suggested that since the late 1980s humans have been using more of the planet’s resource production each year than could be generated, and that the “ecological footprint of global society” has therefore overshot Earth’s capacity to provide.
A more technical way of describing the footprint, and more useful because more flexible, is the IPAT formula, or I=PAT, where P stands for population, A for level of affluence, T for technology, or the extension of human labor through machines; the sum of these three being I, which stands for impact.
It is hardly a secret that the industrialized West, led by the United States, grotesquely bloats the global footprint. Canadian philosopher and writer Ronald Wright phrased it neatly in A Short History of Progress, “We have excluded environmental standards from trade agreements … like sex tourists with unlawful lusts, we do our dirtiest work among the poor.”7
How much we exceed the planet’s generative capacity is still a matter for debate – and for polemic. The Global Footprint Network’s 2010 analysis asserted that “our footprint exceeds the world’s ability to regenerate by about 25 percent,” implying that we currently need 1.25 Earths to sustain present patterns of consumption.8 The World Wildlife Federation, in its 2008 Living Planet Report, asserted that two planets would be required to sustain current lifestyles within a generation, and that more than three-quarters of the world’s population already lives in countries whose consumption levels are outstripping environmental renewal. (Regionally, only non-EU Europe, Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean remain within their “biocapacity.”) David Korten, an American economist and former Harvard professor, adds a slightly different spin: “A sustainable mode of survival at our present level of economic wellbeing in the industrialized countries is hardly possible … it would require two or three planets.”
Whatever the conclusion, everyone agrees that the largest national footprints are those of China and the United States, and the worst offenders on a per capita basis are the United States and Australia, along with the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and Denmark. Canada is not far behind.
Humans have made many mistakes, that we now know. Half the world’s forests are gone – an even greater percentage in China. Forests are disappearing at about a hectare every two seconds. Half the wetlands and a third of the mangroves are gone. About 90 percent of the world’s predator fish are gone, and 75 percent of marine fisheries are in decline. Species are disappearing a thousand times faster than normal. We naively believed that nature’s bounty was unlimited, and that it could absorb endless pollution. We thought technology could simply replicate what nature made. We were wrong.
This book is what we do about it. We don’t lack for prescriptions. The economist Jeffrey Sachs, founder of the Millennium Promise organization, suggests three fundamental changes: develop and adopt globally the sustainable technologies that combine high levels of prosperity with lower environmental impacts; stabilize the global population; and help the poorest countries escape the poverty trap.9
John Holdren, Barack Obama’s science adviser, also likes the number three, though he ignores population: “Human well-being rests on a foundation of three pillars, the preservation and enhancement of all three of which constitute the core responsibilities of society.” The three keys to the kingdom, he suggests, are, first, “economic conditions and processes, such as production, employment, income, wealth, markets, trade, and the technologies that facilitate all of these”; second, “sociopolitical conditions and processes, such as national and personal security, liberty, justice, the rule of law, education, health care, the pursuit of science and the arts, and other aspects of civil society and culture”; and, third, “environmental conditions and processes, including our planet’s air, water, soils, mineral resources, biota, and climate, and all of the natural and anthropogenic processes that affect them.” Holdren suggests that arguments about which of the three pillars is most important are pointless, because all are indispensable: “Just as a three-legged stool falls down if any leg fails, so is human well-being dependent on the integrity of all three pillars.”10
“Sociopolitical conditions,” “globally sustainable technologies,” “anthropogenic processes” are all worthy, all necessary, all important, but there’s nothing there to lift the spirit, is there? Important concepts, but juiceless. Sustainability as a savior is a very dull child. I like Chris Turner’s summary of sustainability: “[It’s] not very much, is it? If you described your marriage that way … you wouldn’t be very happy with it.”11
We need a vision bigger than this.
Despite all our best efforts, human environmental impacts are increasing. The slowing of the world economy has simply meant that things are getting worse more gradually than before.
“How much is too much?” is the political question. The nub is not whether we can grow – we can. The nub is what the effects of growth will be on the quality of life. Novelist and ecologist Frank Herbert, best known for his books set on the desert planet Dune, has written: “In any ecology, beyond a critical point within a finite space, freedom diminishes as numbers increase. This is as true of humans in the finite space of a planetary ecosystem as it is of gas molecules in a sealed flask. The human question is not how many can possibly survive within the system, but what kind of existence is possible for those who do survive … The highest function of ecology is the understanding of consequences.”12
We need to attain an emotional understanding of Spaceship Earth, of its awesome complexity and its utter uniqueness, and of its vulnerability. Then we can finally move beyond the lists of don’ts (don’t use of all the resources, don’t undermine the delivery of ecological services; don’t overwhelm the planet’s waste-absorption capacity, don’t breed). We can move beyond the scolding.
Jeremiahs are useful, and their excoriations have been necessary, but we don’t want them anymore. We don’t want to just stop making things worse. We want to make things better.