On 7-12 June this year, the Global Footprint Network will hold a Forum just outside Siena, Italy.
The thrust of the Forum is to identify the opportunities presented by ecological limits, discuss how to break the impasse on climate by connecting it to other resource constraints and sustainability issues, and determine how to overcome the barriers to rapid action [including communications challenges] eg.
How do we transform potentially moralizing communication around behaviors, rights, human development, consumption, production and population into pragmatic, engaging communication that is honest, forthright and empowering?
Policy and Technical Training on Ecological Footprint will form part of the event, and there is also a day which is open to the public at no cost.
Presenters at the conference will include Tim Jackson of the UK Sustainable Development Commission and author of Prosperity Without Growth, and Peter Victor, professor in Environmental Studies at York University and author of Managing Without Growth.
Event Overview
www.footprintnetwork.org/en/index.php/GFN
Join Our Global Brainstorming Session
WHAT: The Forum Roundtables are a series of fast-paced, highly interactive conversations on critical topics, designed to move the sustainability agenda forward during a time of increasing resource constraints. The aim of the sessions is to overcome barriers to action, fill gaps in knowledge, and identify strategies that inspire further sustainability investments and bring about systemic change. Footprint Forum will foster the kind of learning and idea-sharing that will support government innovation, strengthen corporate strategy and advance human development.
WHO: Attendees will include international leaders in government, non-profits, development agencies and business, sharing the common mission of creating healthy societies where all people can live well, within the means of our planet. The Forum will allow governments to discuss strategies for maintaining a competitive economy during a time of resource scarcity, corporations to gain an understanding of how to build a robust business strategy that will withstand ecological pressures, and development agencies to explore what is needed to make development gains last while preserving natural capital. The academic side-conference provides a forum for researchers to share the latest in Ecological Footprint science.
WHY: Copenhagen – COP15 – showed us that national governments and political leaders are finding it difficult to act collectively in the global interest. Global Footprint Network is convinced that climate action will only gather momentum once nations see that decisive action is in their own best interest. This compelling self-interest story becomes obvious once we understand climate change in the context of ecological resource constraints, as one of a number of related crises – food, energy, water, biodiversity, and so forth – emerging from humanity’s systematic overuse of available resources. This reframing presents a great impetus for transformation. The focus of Footprint Forum 2010 is on how we can capitalize on this opportunity.
WHEN: June 7-12, 2010. The events of the Forum include:
- Footprint Policy Seminar: Monday, June 7
- Footprint Forum Roundtables: Monday, June 7 – Wednesday, June 9
- Academic Conference:Wednesday, June 9 – Thursday, June 10
- Public Footprint Conference: Thursday, June 10
- Technical Footprint Training: Friday, June 11 – Saturday, June 12
WHERE: Colle di Val d’Elsa, Italy, just outside of Siena
CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: Global Footprint Network is calling for abstracts for presentation at Footprint Forum: Meet the Winners of the 21st Century. Click here for more information.
Early registration rate available if you register by March 31, 2010. For more information contact: Bree Barbeau bree@footprintnetwork.org
Décroissance – no its not French for ‘croissants’!
Its a call for a renaissance of the 21st century…via a conference about to get underway in Barcelona, Spain:
Second International Conference on Degrowth
Barcelona , 26-29 March 2010
The second international conference on degrowth will develop clear policy proposals and strategies for action on degrowth and define the key open questions and research agenda. The conference will foster interaction between participants and put emphasis on the development of cooperative research.
The 2nd international conference on economic degrowth for ecological sustainability and social equity that will take place in Barcelona follows from the first international conference (Paris, April 2008), that took place with the support of the European Society for Ecological Economics, Club of Rome (Brussels/Europe), Telecom Sud-Paris and SERI (Sustainable Europe Research Institute) and was attended by 150 participants, involving presentations by some 90 scientists (see the declaration of the conference).
The Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy (CASSE) has released an entertaining animated short called Add It Up that outlines the conflict between economic growth and a finite planet. The animation, produced by film students at the University of Southern California, is available on CASSE’s website and YouTube, as well as here:
The Daly News
CASSE has also officially launched their new website! Part of their launch is the beginning of a new blog, now known as The Daly News. Named after the award-winning economist and incisive writer who developed the concept of the steady state economy, Herman Daly, The Daly News will have it’s official kick-off post by it’s honorable namesake on March 1.
In addition to Professor Daly, the core rotation of authors at The Daly News includes Brian Czech (wildlife biologist, ecological economist, and author of Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train), BrentBlackwelder (former president of Friends of the Earth and founder of American Rivers), and Rob Dietz (environmental scientist and executive director of CASSE). There is even a rumor that yours truly might be privileged enough to post along side these greats as a guest contributor! (I hope I can measure up!) You can access the blog on CASSE’s website or via RSS feed.
According to Clay Shirky, my filter is failing. Let me explain: as a relatively well-off (in global terms, anyway), 21st century guy, I, like everyone else who fits that bill, is surfing daily on a tidal wave of emails, tweets, news stories, RSS feeds, blogs, YouTube videos, instant messages, text messages and a whole bunch of other stuff. It’s an information overflow. And I’m not just surfing – sometimes it feels like “drowning” is the more accurate verb. Have you ever tried taking a sip from a gushing fire hydrant – only to get blasted in the face by the jet stream? You get the picture.
But if one were to bring up this observation with Clay Shirky, the prolific and consistently surprising web and social media guru, he’d tell you that you don’t, in fact, have an information overload problem. You have a filter failure.
According to Shirky, one of the things the internet is best at is giving us a window to more raw information about the world than we’ve ever had before. More than we know what to do with. He’d agree, I think, that if one were to graph the amount of data that flows onto our desks each day, the line would start hockey-sticking skyward with the arrival of the personal web browser. But, he says, we’ve had more data than we can digest since the age of the printing press. There came a time, long ago, when more books were published than a single person could read in a lifetime: the dawn of information overload. So don’t blame the enabler, says Shirky. The internet just allows us to access more of this information faster and easier. His suggestion? Develop a better data filter for determining what kind of information you really need, and when you need it.
Fair enough – but I have a feeling that there’s even more to the story. Say I follow Shirky’s advice and I build a better filter: cut out all but the most necessary magazine subscriptions, sign up for only the RSS feeds that really keep me informed about the things I care about, open my email at only pre-planned times. Filter or not, I think I’d still be feeling overwhelmed – on a visceral level – by the growing heap of things that vie for my attention. After all, won’t the density of what gets squeezed through that filter increase right along with innovations in web technology? And what about when the developing world and a growing population begin creating content at the pace of the global North? And what about the stiffer work expectations for employees in down economies – where hanging on to your job means cranking up productivity, and more emails, more trends to track, more data…
I’d like to add to Shirky’s observation and suggest that maybe “filter failure” is what our culture is experiencing currently, at a macro-scale. The overwhelming cultural message (in the West at least) is: “Be more and do more. And get moving!” We don’t really have a filter, which in one definition in the Merriam-Webster dictionary is “something that has the effect of…holding back elements.” A filter, in other words, is something that says: “That’s enough.”
Of course, the analogy doesn’t quite work perfectly because there’s usually no connection between the filter and the constellation of things to be filtered. But if the analogy to culture is any good, there’s also a hugely important feedback loop baked into the system: if our cultural filter won’t say “enough”, our economy – the thing that generates a large amount of our information flood – will have no reason to arrive at a comfy “steady state.” It’ll keep growing bigger and moving faster. Just like that monster in the shape of an email inbox.
Note from Scott: What do you think of this analogy? Is it accurate? More importantly, is it helpful? I’m thinking it might be time to identify the kinds of cultural changes we might make for sustainability – that matter at least as much as the economic and technological ones. Critique away!
Never Mind Peak Oil, When Do We Get To Peak Sleep?
In conjunction with global warming, peak oil is a major concern for policy makers around the world – and if not, it should be!
But does the average punter out there trying to keep up the pace with work, kids, jobs that need doing around the home and trying to find time for fun and relaxation in today’s hyper culture really connect with the somewhat abstract idea of running out of dead dinosaurs, the associated slow-motion time lag between cause and effect, and what this might mean for them?
What if we could show how sustainability and a postgrowth world connects with something of more immediate interest?
Like – who is getting enough sleep these days?
Sleep vs the Gamut of Gadgets and the Cacophony of Choice
I’ve seen stats floating around on the web that medieval peasants worked less than many modern day folks – whether this is accurate or how they measured this I don’t know.
Certainly the goodies on offer then which could divert your time away from sleep were far fewer then than now – given that TV, internet, mobile phones, Wii/Xbox and the compulsion to blog one’s thoughts at all hours, I wouldn’t mind wagering that medieval peasants slept a lot more than us too!
There is a Facebook group called ‘People who don’t sleep enough because they stay up late for no reason’ which has over FOUR HUNDRED THOUSAND members (and yes I am one of them)!
It’s 5am, you’re still up. You have no good reason to be up. You have to wake up at 8:30 in the morning. You know you’re going to be tired as hell the next day but you just can’t bring yourself to go to sleep like everyone else. You’re not really an insomniac, you just have some mental block when it comes to going to bed.
That’s a lot of people who identify with not enough sleep.
Now its true that no one is making them stay up, people can choose to go to bed, right? Sure. But I’ll bet they are not up contemplating the meaning of life or stargazing.
They will be foofing on the computer or watching telly. Its the consumer culture gadgets – hithero unavailable to all previous societies – that are keeping them from sleep. This technology is of course amazing and it is a privilege to have and use it, but it does have consequences in terms of the time it consumes.
We all only have 24 hours in our time budget a day to spend.
How much of it is being siphoned off by the cacophony of choice and the media through which that choice is transmitted? How much is this eating into our sleep?
Obama Could Deliver Us From Growth-Driven Disaster
I recently attended the NCSE’s New Green Economy Conference in Washington, DC. Since my travels home I have been trying to let everything from the conference settle, but I wanted to bring up on great part that gave me hope for a post growth society: the Chafee Memorial Lecture given by James Gustave “Gus” Speth, author of The Bridge at the Edge of the World.
I commented in a previous post on my blog that Speth’s lecture was inspiring, though long-winded, but this particular portion of his speech gave me goose-bumps. He started by tipping his hat at the previous speaker, Herman Daly, who accepted his (much deserved) Lifetime Achievement Award and then invited the crowd of nearly 1100 conference attendees to take a journey of the imagination… with a great twist in the end!
“As the new decade begins in this world, the President, early in his first term, stands before Congress to deliver his State of the Union address. He says the following:
‘In the next ten years we shall increase our wealth by fifty percent. The profound question is – does this mean that we will be fifty percent richer in a real sense, fifty percent better off, fifty percent happier?
‘The great question is, shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, our land and our water?
‘Restoring nature to its natural state is a cause beyond party and beyond factions… It is a cause of particular concern to young Americans – because they more than we will reap the grim consequences of our failure to act on programs which are needed now if we are to prevent disaster later…’
The program I shall propose to Congress will be the most comprehensive and costly program in this field ever in the nation’s history.
‘The argument is increasingly heard that a fundamental contradiction has arisen between economic growth and the quality of life, so that to have one we must forsake the other. The answer is not to abandon growth, but to redirect it…
‘I propose, that before these problems become insoluble, the nation develop a national growth policy. Our purpose will be to find those means by which Federal, state and local government can influence the course of … growth so as positively to affect the quality of American life.‘
And Congress acts. To address these challenges, it responds with the toughest environmental legislation in history. And it does so not with partisan rancor and threats of filibusters but by large bipartisan majorities.
In this world that we are imagining, the public is aroused; the media are attentive; the courts are supportive. Citizens are alarmed by the crisis they face. They organize a movement and issue this powerful declaration:
‘We, therefore, resolve to act. We propose a revolution in conduct toward an environment that is rising in revolt against us. Granted that ideas and institutions long established are not easily changed; yet today is the first day of the rest of our life on this planet. We will begin anew.’
Meanwhile, the nation’s leading environmental scholars and practitioners, and even some economists, are asking whether measures such as those in the Congress will be enough, and whether deeper changes are not needed.
GDP and the national income accounts are challenged for their failure to tell us things that really matter, including whether our society is equitable and fair and whether we are gaining or losing environmental quality. A sense of planetary limits is palpable. The country’s growth fetish comes under attack as analysts see the fundamental incompatibility between limitless growth and an increasingly small and limited planet.
Advocacy emerges for moving to an economy that would be ‘non-growing in terms of the size of the human population, the quantity of physical resources in use, and [the] impact on the biological environment.’
Joined with this is a call from many sources for us to break from our consumerist and materialistic ways – to seek simpler lives in harmony with nature and each other. These advocates recognize that, with growth no longer available as a palliative, ‘one problem that must be faced squarely is the redistribution of wealth within and between nations.’
They also recognize the need to create needed employment opportunities by stimulating employment in areas long under-served by the economy and even by moving to shorter workweeks. And none of this seems likely, these writers realize, without a dramatic revitalization of democratic life.
Digging deeper, some opinion leaders, including both ecologists and economists, ask, ‘whether the operational requirements of the private enterprise economic system are compatible with ecological imperatives.’ They conclude that the answer is ‘no.’
Environmental limits will eventually require limits on economic growth, they reason. ‘In a private enterprise system, ‘they conclude, ‘[this] no-growth condition means no further accumulation of capital. If, as seems to be the case, accumulation of capital, through profit, is the basic driving force of this system, it is difficult to see how it can continue to operate under conditions of no growth.’ And thus begins the thought: how does society move beyond the capitalism of the day?
You can see that the world we are imagining is one of high hopes and optimism that the job can and will be done. It is also a world of deep searching for the next steps that will be required once the immediate goals are met. Now, at this point, I suspect there may be a generational divide in the audience. Those of you of my vintage have probably realized that this is not an imaginary world at all. You do not have to imagine this world – you remember it.
It is the actual world of the early 1970s. That is really what President Nixon said to the Congress in 1970.
Congress really did declare that air pollution standards must protect public health and welfare with an adequate margin of safety and without regard to the economic costs. The revolutionary Clean Water Act really did seek no discharge of pollutants, with the goals of restoring the physical, chemical and biological integrity of the nation’s waters and making our waters fishable and swimmable for all by the mid-1980s.
Many scientists, economists and activists supported the longer term thinking about growth and consumerism that I just mentioned, and they recognized the ties to social equity issues. They saw the challenge all this posed to our system of political economy. I have quoted John Holden, Paul and Anne Ehrlich and Barry Commoner, opinion leaders in this era, but there were many others, including Kenneth Boulding who famously noted, ‘Anyone who thinks exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist.‘”
Today the problems faced in the 1970s are even more paramount, pressing our society into a “triple crunch,” as the new economics foundation calls it. We’ve set out to do it before, we can do it again. We can pick up where we left off in the 1970s, using the last 40 years of growth and consumption as a lesson of what went wrong.
Read the entire lecture online here (pdf)
Most of us – especially here in the US – like to think we’re good at solving problems. We’re a nation of self-described fixers: when waterways weren’t cutting it for transportation, the steam engine emerged. When horses clogged the streets of New York City, Henry Ford and his Model-T redefined mobility. And when we needed something to run an enormous string of calculations, somebody showed up with a supercomputer and then a PC and then a laptop and then a smartphone and then…Yes. We’re proud of ourselves.
This culture of problem-solving is usually framed in terms of progress: a linear evolution of solutions that, as the story goes, will boost us higher and faster toward some kind of techno-utopian space age. And it’s hard to knock that story, because it has produced some incredible outcomes related to health, freedom, education, all the things listed above and more. But I think the world in which this mechanistic, linear, “if this, then that” thinking works is quickly coming to a close. Or, at least, that thinking may need to be applied in a different way. Because as human activity more closely influences ecological systems, and as globalization and our wired-ness weaves our fates closer to the people around us (and across oceans), everything gets more complicated. And connected. And systemic.
Band-Aids vs. Solutions
The problem with linear and mechanistic solutions is that when things get complicated – when the world becomes a dense ball of complexity and interconnection – those kinds of solutions often become Band-Aids that treat the symptom, but miss the root cause.
Here’s an example: I notice my daily to-do list getting longer, but I don’t feel like I’ve spent any less time working. My Band-Aid solution: Buy an iPhone, get a bluetooth headset, and become one of those guys who looks like he’s talking to himself in public. According to the linear philosophy, I’ve stepped up my work efficiency with a needed technological advance. But that’s just one piece of the puzzle, because the causes of my slow workflow are complicated and interconnected. A systemic approach might have me improve my focus, weed out distractions and prioritize. If I buy an iPhone and neglect the real time management issues, I’ve mistaken the root of the problem for the symptom – and possibly even introduced new problems that show up later, like the distractions that come with a mobile internet connection.
The same goes for sustainability issues: we hear “fishery collapse” and frequently start thinking GMO’s and fish farms. Or, in the case of climate change, we look to solar panels, carbon capturing and oceanborne cloud-makers to erase our carbon emissions. But I think these fixes, while contributing to a solution, might cloud the real issue. We’re operating our economies and societies at a scale that’s colliding with natural systems in myriad ways. And the tech fix – while possibly very cool – really only puts off the ways we might need to address that scale issue: reverse overblown consumption, untangle confused price signals, and transform a culture that’s increasingly wired but decreasingly connected.
Toward Systems Thinking
This much is obvious: the society-environment relationship is a complex system. It might even be the most complex system, period. When problems within the system come to our attention, they deserve some serious thinking – not just a wave of the hand, followed by “Eh, technology’ll take care of it.”
Here in the US, many folks trying to formalize that serious thinking are part of an academic field called system dynamics. MIT’s System Dynamics Group, who might be the field’s leading light here in the States, have this to say about systems thinking: “What makes using system dynamics different from other approaches to studying complex systems is the use of feedback loops. Stocks and flows help describe how a system is connected by feedback loops which create the nonlinearity found so frequently in modern day problems.” Stocks, flows and feedback loops. They’re the academic’s way of describing the elements of our massively interconnected world.
The system dynamics approach to thinking about sustainability raises questions about the desirability of infinite economic growth – and connects environmental and social issues, like climate change and a fraying sense of community, back to a misguided sense of progress. System dynamics also puts a finger on inappropriate economic indicators and flawed tax/subsidy flows as structural causes of overshoot – rather than simply a lack of innovations in green tech.
A big part of making a move to systems thinking happen, I think, is to overhaul the notion that our societies and economies exist outside of ecological systems, and re-establish ourselves as citizens within those systems. The physicist/writer/systems theorist, Frijtof Capra, calls that shift “ecological literacy.” Here’s a video of a brief lecture by Capra outlining this “systems nested within systems” view:
Resources
There’s a lot happening around system dynamics these days. It can get a little dry – so beware – but without getting into the technicalities (and I’ve steered clear, mostly), the biggest lesson I’ve taken away from the system perspective is simply that the world is complicated place. There’s rarely a neat and discrete cause of any of our current problems – causes are usually both many and messy. And when a simple explanation is offered, I usually try to dig deeper.
Ok. On to the resources:
A great, great blog about applying system thinking to everyday problems. Topics explored are many – from obesity to personal motivation to Thomas Friedman. I’d check this one out first.
From Donella Meadows, a darling of environmentalism and one of the bright lights of system dynamics. Gets a little dry at points, but a great primer for understanding the systems perspective.
Modern environmentalism was kicked off, at least in part, by this well-known report from members of the System Dynamics Group. The message within the title hinges on the results of computer models that used information about natural resource stocks, ecological functions, human energy and material use, and population growth to predict a kind of complicated collision between human growth and the natural world – which informs our perspective here at PostGrowth.org.
Web page of the founders of system dynamics; contains current papers, a blog, explanations, a cool climate interactive climate model, and helpful links.
Image credit: Flickr/noahsussman. Creative Commons license.
It took virtually all of human history for our numbers to reach 1 billion in the 1800s. It took only about a century to add the second billion in 1930. We added the third billion in just 30 years and the fourth in only 15 years. We are now at 6.7 billion with projections of over 2 billion more to come in the next 40 years.
Creating a postgrowth world means moving beyond the growth consensus, which depends on more and more people consuming more and more stuff.
Once growth becomes uneconomic – hurting people and the environment, even if it seems to be desirable in the short term – then its drivers and the assumptions behind them should be open to debate.
To move beyond growth, we need to address how much we are consuming [and why], and how many of us there are consuming. Both are equally important factors in the equation of human impacts on the earth.
However, challenging either consumption or population is fraught with pitfalls, as there are currently social and political taboos associated with both.
Politicians of all flavours champion growth and encourage consumption at every opportunity – at the same time as people are being encouraged to reduce their greenhouse emissions, water use and other resource use. Which is it to be – the ‘eat more’ message or the ‘eat less’ message?
But if you think trying to talk about consumption – how people spend their money – is taboo, try starting a conversation about population.