"The principal factors affecting climate change are the growth of human population and consumption, according to research by WSU sociologist Eugene A. Rosa and his colleagues Richard York, of the University of Oregon, and Thomas Dietz, of Michigan State University." --Energy Bulletin Post; July 7, 2007Recently I have begun more than ten books dealing with subjects of sustainability, peak oil, Natural Step principles, and other subjects of the day. Yet I can't seem to get more than a third of the way through any of them without throwing the book down with disgust. None seem to be cognizant of the complexity of our cultural predicament. Each offers a seemingly simple recipe for better living through simplification or organics or pedestrian power. Who couldn't support such high-minded principles? But these prescriptions ignore the balances and vacuums that naturally evolve in response to our actions.
As a first example, we generally are aware that our corporate consumer-based economy needs citizens to buy things. We mostly buy tangible objects with a physical presence as they become added to the collection of possessions that make up our wealth and sense or worth. Any responsible corporation (responsible to shareholders) is finely attuned to the winds of cultural direction related to their fine products. Any possibility that the PDA or phone or plastic piece of shit currently on top of global sales will be growing stale or the commodity that keeps their board members fat and happy is being conserved or avoided causes stirrings of discontent. New wants and "needs" must be manufactured to replace these current wants growing stale or the petroleum being conserved. Why are plastics and corn sweeteners so ubiquitous in our lives? Not only because they are versatile and cheap, but also because the producers of petroleum and maize wanted to expand their markets. These new wants and "needs" will use, in general, the same feedstock of commodities that manufactured the prior models. If conservation leads to less petroleum or coal consumption, other markets will be devised for these commodities. It is the very responsibility of the corporate entity to ensure that the product that the company is based on and that pays out dividends to shareholders finds a market for its product. At least until it can acquire or develop another product to replace the current primary product. How many times in history has that happened where a corporation founded on one profitable product replaced that product and was later focused on another? Not many. Oldsmobile? Where are they now?
Thus, your individual efforts at conservation will likely fail....at least in the short run. If you don't consume the oil or natural gas, your counterpart in China or India or Russia surely will. If it can't be sold as fuel, it can be manufactured into a sofa or basketball or above ground swimming pool that someone will buy. Certainly a complete societal collapse will preclude these substitutions but any less rapid descent will always give companies a chance to anticipate and adjust.
A second example relates to population and consumption. I'm certain that an economist has a more formal term and set of principles for the following, but this will have to suffice. It seems intuitive that conservation behaviors lead to an increase in supply of any commodity, all other things being equal (the number of consumers, etc). As supply grows, price declines, commodity or product becomes more attractive to consumers generally, and is in demand again (I am filling my gas tank again these past few weeks). These fluctuations delay and sometimes prevent the type of quick and decisive action necessary to shift from a fossil fuel based system to something less damaging. But as many now suggest, even the most rapid shift will not be enough to prevent some form of collapse. There are just too many of us to be able to collectively move to a sustainable society without some serious interim pain.
The continual growth in population, exponential with a huge lag or bubble, is generally imperceptible unless we take stock of our present circumstances and compare them with years past. Then of course we revert to that tried and true old crank who is often quoted as saying "Things just aren't the same as when I was young." Any behavioral changes, technological fixes, and policy adaptations or global treaties will most likely be overwhelmed by the sheer momentum of the demographic tidal wave.
The stark fact in regard to our current economic system is that it pits each of us against each other as consumers (rather than against the company which makes the product). Adam Smith's rational self-interest may work well with the population of his day but it creates huge tensions of the type and degree that he could have never foreseen. We do not often see our power as consumers and revert to the most basic competitive behaviors to obtain what we need and want. Just observe what we purchase for confirmation of this claim (e.g. items that satiate primal urges for food, sex, etc).
As the population continues to grow, behaviors that at one population level were benign (consumption and settlement at specific rates) are toxic at higher levels. What are considered green behaviors now will be considered criminally immoral levels of consumption at a higher population level (say 12 billion). So where do we stop? Without a global, regional, and local population policy, our targets for green living will be ever elusive and our quality of life will continue to erode. The odd consolation is that human beings are amazingly adaptable and will find a way to adapt to the effects of climate change, aquifer depletion and contamination, crowding, loss of wild nature, etc. and consider tomorrow's degraded landscapes to be "normal" and fail to recall what we even have today. Add to that the lead and mercury we're all accumulating in our bodies, and maybe we all won't even remember these problems and certainly will no longer have the ability to address them.
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Population growth in third world countries, those with (relatively) low per capita consumption levels, depends on women. Specifically, it depends on the education level, work opportunities, and birth control measures available to women in those countries. Maybe the comparative effectiveness of non-profits dedicated to empowering women in the third-world could be determined using the fractional change in birthrate (relative to the stable 2.1/family) that each nonprofit generates.
If population growth can be reversed, then the political resource problem becomes one of inequal living standards between countries. Responding to that problem requires Americans to reduce their consumption and living standards. Taking effective conservation measures will guarantee that right now. No more hot showers, long-distance flights, machine laundering clothes, white chocolate, poached eggs, ah , poached eggs.
Suppose that changing your diet makes you grumpy. Lets say that you used to eat up to 12 egg whites a day, which, over 10 years, would make you personally responsible for 47 years (using Gail Eisnitz's numbers) of cumulative chicken life in a battery cage. Out of guilt, you stop eating eggs as a permanent (not interim) change. Why didn't you switch to cage-free hens, or eggs from a coop in your backyard?
Your answer might be externalities and shifting baselines. If you continue to provide an input (chicken eggs) from a desirable source (cage-free hens) to the sink (the mouth and brain), the sink will treat the source (caged hens) as an externality. This will happen faster if nonexternalized costs ($/egg) rise for input (eggs) from the desirable source (cage-free hens). The relative cheapness of input(eggs) from the undesirable source (cage-free hens) will gradually shift your baseline of acceptable input (buying cruelty-free eggs) to include the undesirable source (caged hens).
In other words, if you kept eating cage-free eggs, then after a while, you would go back to eating caged eggs, and do so even faster if cage-free egg prices rose sooner. Your alternative is not to eat any eggs. Not that you crave eggs like this. In fact, I do.
On the one hand, conservation efforts serve as personally meaningful acts (for example, saving chickens from pain). On the other hand, conservation efforts also establish new baselines for personal behavior (for example, avoiding cruelly-produced eggs).
If this pattern of externalizing and shifting baselines holds for discretionary consumption determined by pleasure and subjective preferences (rather than nutritional need, for example), then discretionary consumption must cease in order to prevent baseline shift of personal values.
Reducing the complexity and overlap of available products for consumption (for example, removing coffee and leaving tea and soda) could reduce overall consumption or it could increase consumption of the remaining products (tea and soda). Regardless, the best way to conserve a resource is to stop using it. Therefore, an immediate and voluntary end to discretionary consumption is one direction for conservation efforts (for example, substituting water for your tea, coffee, and soda, even though coffee consumption is your initial conservation target).
With respect to peak oil, negotiating the introduction of alternative energy infrastructures looks like a costly, distracting, and error-prone political process. Retaining oil and coal as principle energy sources might allow overall decline in per capita resource consumption to progress faster without harm to our level of well-being and existing infrastructure, provided we accept the sacrifices required.
Like you say, continuing increase in population will erode the success of any conservation effort, so addressing population growth politically could help us more than any infrastructure upgrade.
I haven't any doubt there's "no way out". I came to that conclusion some time ago. Whether the human animal survives is up for grabs. Actually who cares? We do but in the grand scale of things, what does our opinion matter? I think we believe we have become gods and ANY problem can be solved. I read the blogs with the endless discussions about is it happening or not, I see the disinformation/misinformatution, I see the outright lies and most of all, I see simplistic solutions for an incredibly complex, intertangled set of problems. So each group breaks down the TOTAL problem into something they can handle like water or energy or climate or population or food. Something that's not so overwhelming and they can feel hopeful about.
Perhaps its about perspective.
If you take Buddha’s advice and live in the moment, with loving-kindness and compassion for everyone (because we are all connected), you will make decisions that encompass all scales of environment (you in your cube, your family, your community, the earth). Your “reward” is to have lived each moment in harmony, doing “right actions” and free of attachments to things (consumption). Our “reward” will be that you will free up abundant energy and will to help yourself and others (something we each need to cultivate).
If you take a longer view and make decisions based on our realities as you anticipate them to be in 10 or 100 years from now you will likely become completely overloaded by: uncertainty (there is no other rational response due to the immense number of potential realities), guilt, fear, and a whole host of unproductive feelings that have no real relationship with what is because what “is” is not 10 years or 100 years, its now.
If you take the yet longer view and think out 1,000 or 10,000 or even 100,000 years, you may imagine several outcomes (a borg like world where our technology and waste have covered the earth with mechanical solutions and pollution; a human-free world where our residues like nuclear and chemical waste have escaped containment and wrecked havoc on nature; or some powered down reduced human population world that has worked out the human proclivities for consumption and conquest). These imaginings will feel disconnected and perhaps out of reach. I think that may have something to do with the fact that it is well beyond the lifetimes of our children and their children and their grandchildren – like strangers.
The truth of living today when our massive populations depersonalize just about everything about our world is that the only rational and humane outlook is one approximating the one I mention above.
To survive with resilience one has to choose relocalized active hopeful living over negative paralyzing nihilism.
Having said all of this, I admit to vacillating between all of these and feeling hopeless on occasion. Our monkey brains only THINK there is continuity from one moment to the next. The reality is that our moods shift. What is ok today could be crushing tomorrow.
That’s ok, as long as we remember that we chose to forget.
@anonymous: If the problem is so complex, then maybe its elements will solve the problem through interaction of cause-effects that, when taken in isolation, cannot solve the problem. All a systemic solution requires is that the system's elements remain in interaction. All resource consumption problems require is that consumption reduction efforts build on each other.
Inside a community, individual conservation efforts can snowball into a larger movement making bigger changes. If you want to throw a snowball here about how communities can work together on conservation to make even bigger changes, please do.
@nika: A wise woman told me that being OK helps you accept and then transform and enrich your life, but that the easiest way to become OK is just to step into the state of being OK first. To me, that is as spiritual as it gets.
Noah - The empowerment of women, particularly in developing countries, has been desirable in relation to population control for decades. Yet I see the cultural influence of the most gender repressive societies growing ever more powerful as their coffers fill with petrodollars. I fear that this solution cannot occur naturally fast enough to make a difference. Should we strive for equality? Of course. Will it be a panacea? No.
Your argument about discretionary consumption is an interesting one. After pondering it for a bit, I concluded that there are two primary factors at play. First, discretion can be manipulated significantly by the “hidden persuaders” (Vance Packard book by that name) based on the self-interest of those who these entities work. Second, consumption is only pathological when it does not conform to Natural Step system conditions. If we could construct a system of consumption based strictly on these principles, then it could approach sustainability. However, this would be met with great resistance and would take years to implement, particularly in the U.S.
And on population, with the strength of spiritual communities that oppose birth control and promote large families, I don’t see this side of the equation falling into place any time soon. While collapse would be acutely harmful to scores of people, a lesser economic stagnation on par with a depression might buy some time. After all, during these times, people delay having more children and resources are consumed at a slower rate.
Anonymous – I would agree that breaking down what is essentially a systems-based problem into manageable parts is the best solution. How to jump start these subgroups and then coordinate their actions is the issue. It should be a Manhattan Project scale effort and supported by the highest levels of our society. Barring that, the growth and maturation of the relocalization movement would likely do very well, hopefully in time.
Nika – I agree that we all have to live in the moment and not let the momentous weight of these problems overwhelm us. To work together as a community cooperatively and collaboratively is key. Also, we must speak out about what the issues are and be damned the repercussions. The more of us who speak our minds, the less likely we will be stigmatized, isolated, and sanctioned.
Ryan, a 2004 IHT article reflects some of what you say about reducing overpopulation. It is comforting to know that the solution is there (empowering women in the third world) and all that remains is for the solution to be properly implemented.
The Natural Step principles make sense, and they address ecological concerns relevant to each step of a product's life cycle.
In contrast, my egg avoidance principles work like this:
I must avoid:
* eating eggs.
* purposeful or intended exposure to advertisements of or access to eggs when I crave eggs unless I valued eating eggs prior to the exposure/access or unless I feel too sick to eat eggs during the exposure/access.
* accidental or unintended exposure to advertisements of or access to eggs unless that circumstance will necessarily precede my avoiding those eggs if I did not value eating eggs prior to the exposure or access.
Eggs are valuable for their high protein content, and cravings can represent legitimate body demands for protein. Nuts (particularly cashews) relieve me of that cause for craving eggs, but other causes might remain.
The egg-avoidance principles account for my tendency to follow my cravings. The Natural Step principles do not account for societal tendency to exploit natural resources to depletion, so the Natural Step principles are incomplete.
Noah: hmm, interesting. In some ways, being OK for me might be radically different from your OK :-) It might also be different for me from one day to the next. Perhaps its my bias but OK can lead to sentience for me whereas when there is a lack of OK, I get up and do things, get things done.
I think real calm comes from not grasping for OK and also finding a balance that keeps one up and acting. For example, I know that I would find greater “OK-ness” or inner calm standing on my feet serving food at a homeless shelter than sitting at home alone dithering over some personal pre-occupation.
CJR: Yeah speaking out is definitely key. This is a hard one to talk about because it stirs feelings deep in people that are painful and frightening. People do not like hearing that the consensus reality is an illusion (it always is anyways but it is impolite to speak of this in mixed company) and that our living in this illusion is having devastating effects that REQUIRE us to awaken and not cocoon as we have been raised to do. We like to think we are modern rational people but when the illusion is stripped away, people can become atavistic or at least feel groundless. There are no real structures in most western religions to deal with this sort of psychological crisis. God doesn’t say anything about climate change or how to live without time’s arrow pointing forever forward on our progress. It builds character for some people and unmoors others.
@nika: OK, Nika. I can't think of a better way to stop grasping at something then stepping into it, but we're getting off topic.
These Natural Step principles are interesting, and make me think of products like Amish built homes and plastics derived from carbohydrates, including hemp. Presumably those products are closer to Natural Step than homes that rely on concrete and metal or plastics made from petroleum.
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