Sustainable Development A Worthy Goal?

As Bob pointed out at our last meeting, the world’s heads of state are heading to New York this week to attend the UN’s Sustainable Development Summit.  Part of the summit will be the signing off on the Sustainable Development Goals that are hoped to be achieved within 15 years.  These laudable goals include 17 topics that include the likes of: (  https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/topics )

1.       End poverty in all its forms everwhere

2.       End hunger, achieve food security and improved nutrition and promote sustainable agriculture

3.       Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages

4.       Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all

5.       Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls

6.       Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all

7.       Ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all

8.       Promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth, full and productive employment and decent work for all

9.       Build resilient infrastructure, promote inclusive and sustainable industrialization and foster innovation

10.   Reduce inequality within and among countries

11.   Make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable

12.   Ensure sustainable consumption and production patterns

13.   Take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts*

14.   Conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas and marine resources for sustainable development

15.   Protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss

16.   Promote peaceful and inclusive societies for sustainable development, provide access to justice for all and build effective, accountable and inclusive institutions at all levels

17.   Strengthen the means of implementation and revitalize the global partnership for sustainable development

On the surface, these all seem like good goals to strive for.  But as anthropologist Jason Hickel points out in his recent Guardian piece titled “Forget 'developing' poor countries, it's time to 'de-develop' rich countries” (http://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2015/sep/23/developing-poor-countries-de-develop-rich-countries-sdgs?CMP=share_btn_tw  ), a continued focus on growth, as highlighted in goal 8, is likely to get us to the same place our current growth has, which is an increase in the problems the goals are trying to eliminate. 

Per Hickel –

The main strategy for eradicating poverty is the same: growth.

It will take 100 years for the world’s poorest people to earn $1.25 a day

Growth has been the main object of development for the past 70 years, despite the fact that it’s not working. Since 1980, the global economy has grown by 380%, but the number of people living in poverty on less than $5 (£3.20) a day has increased by more than 1.1 billion. That’s 17 times the population of Britain. So much for the trickle-down effect.

Orthodox economists insist that all we need is yet more growth. More progressive types tell us that we need to shift some of the yields of growth from the richer segments of the population to the poorer ones, evening things out a bit. Neither approach is adequate. Why? Because even at current levels of average global consumption, we’re overshooting our planet’s bio-capacity by more than 50% each year.

In other words, growth isn’t an option any more – we’ve already grown too much. Scientists are now telling us that we’re blowing past planetary boundaries at breakneck speed. And the hard truth is that this global crisis is due almost entirely to overconsumption in rich countries.

Either we slow down voluntarily or climate change will do it for us. We can’t go on ignoring the laws of nature. But rethinking our theory of progress is not only an ecological imperative, but also a development one. If we do not act soon, all our hard-won gains against poverty will evaporate, as food systems collapse and mass famine re-emerges to an extent not seen since the 19th century.

This is not about giving anything up. And it’s certainly not about living a life of voluntary misery or imposing harsh limits on human potential. On the contrary, it’s about reaching a higher level of understanding and consciousness about what we’re doing here and why.

So what do you think - can we keep on growing and eventually outgrow our problems?  Or is it time for us to grow up and learn how to live a meaningful life on our finite planet? 

What is Permaculture?

Permaculture is an ecological design process that integrates landscape and people to provide their food, energy, water, shelter and other material and non-material needs in a sustainable way.


The concept brings together whole-systems thinking inspired by lessons from nature and creative design processes. A wide range of technologies and techniques are fed into specific designs as appropriate to individual projects. Starting from a mostly land-based focus, it is now being applied to all aspects of human habitation, from agriculture to architecture, from technology to education and even economics.

Permaculture started in the late 1970s and was initially adopted and tested by people at the margins of society – innovators, back-to-the-land smallholders, ecologists and radical development workers. It has spread rapidly ever since via grassroots education and a lot of practical implementation. From small beginnings in Australia, it is now a worldwide movement spanning 135 countries, with more than 250 national, regional and international organisations and many tens of thousands of local projects and practitioners.

From the article by Andy Goldring available here:  Designing The World We Want

"

Local, self-sufficient, optimistic: are Transition Towns the way forward?

"The Transition network was founded in 2005, as a response to the twin threats of climate change and peak oil. Unlike other campaign groups, the Transition network never set out to frighten people, but seemed resolutely upbeat, determined to find opportunity in what most regard with dismay.

One of the movement's most fundamental ideas was to ask what the world might look like in the future "if we get it right" – then work out backwards how to get there. Generally speaking, the Transition vision is of a move towards self-sufficiency at the local level, in food, energy and much else, but the specifics of what "getting it right" might look like were never handed down from above."

For more on the Transition Initiative see the article in the Guardian available here: 

 http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/jun/15/transition-towns-way-forward 

How Our Economy Doesn't Work and Some Alternatives

A great 12 minute video illistrating how our economy works (or actually how it is failing) along with some ideas close to our Transition group on human alternatives can be seen below.

Growing, Growing, Gone!

Growing, Growing, Gone:  Reaching the Limits.  Some interesting quotes from an interview of Dennis Meadows, one of the authors of the study of “The Limits Of Growth”.    

"Continual physical growth of population and economic activity eventually reaches the point where the globe simply cannot accommodate anymore. Biophysical systems press back, whether through disease, scarcity, climate, or other response mechanisms. These pressures are danger signals, indicating overshoot of some aspect of the planet’s physical limits."       

“The economics profession is based on the assumption that continual growth is possible and desirable. Likewise, most politicians have a predisposition for growth because it makes the problems they address—unemployment, poverty, diminished tax bases—more tractable. Instead of having to divide a fixed pie, which gets you in trouble with some constituents, you can grow the pie so that nobody has to make a sacrifice or compromise. So there was—and is—a set of vested interests in the notion of growth.“

“White water rafting provides a useful analogy here. When you are going down the river, most of the time it is placid, but every once in a while, you hit the rapids. When it is placid, you can sit back and think where you want to be, how you should time your journey, where you want to stop for lunch, etc. When you are in the rapids, you focus on the moment, desperately trying to keep your boat upright until you return to quiet waters. During the placid moments, it is very useful to have a discussion about where you want to be tomorrow or the day after. When you are in the rapids, you don’t have the luxury of that kind of discussion. You are trying to survive. Our society has moved into the rapids phase.”

“ Conventional oil production peaked around 2006. Unconventional oil production, e.g., fracking and tar sands, has continued some degree of growth, but it is a totally different matter. Conventional oil is inexpensive and yields a relatively high energy return on investment. Unconventionals don’t do that. They are expensive, and the net energy return on investment is quite low.”

“When you don’t have conventional energy sources like oil, you cannot sustain the kind of economic growth rates that we have seen in the past. As a practical matter, then, there is now very little real wealth generation. Most of the economic activity these days consists of those who have more power getting richer by taking away from those with less. This is why we see widening gaps between rich and poor.”

“Many of the futures, including some of Tellus’s, presume large-scale energy consumption of one kind or another. It is energy intensive to coordinate and motivate large assemblies of people and organizations. Absent abundant, cheap energy, this becomes more difficult. I expect that the trend towards global integration is going to stop and then start to recede.”

Read the entire interview here:  http://www.greattransition.org/publication/growing-growing-gone

Feeling Full?

Herman Daly, an ecological economist, provides a nice explanation for what is wrong with our current economic system in the essay “Economics for a full world”.   Daily’s essay explains how our current economic model was designed from the vantage point of the world being mostly empty (of humans and their impacts).  Economic growth has gotten us to a place of fullness, and it may be time to change our economic models to become more in line with the real world, while we still can. 

The introduction to the essay states:

Because of the exponential economic growth since World War II, we now live in a full world, but we still behave as if it were empty, with ample space and resources for the indefinite future. The founding assumptions of neoclassical economics, developed in the empty world, no longer hold, as the aggregate burden of the human species is reaching—or, in some cases, exceeding—the limits of nature at the local, regional, and planetary levels. The prevailing obsession with economic growth puts us on the path to ecological collapse, sacrificing the very sustenance of our well-being and survival. To reverse this ominous trajectory, we must transition toward a steady-state economy focused on qualitative development, as opposed to quantitative growth, and the interdependence of the human economy and global ecosphere. Developing policies and institutions for a steady-state economy will require us to revisit the question of the purpose and ends of the economy.

Read the entire essay at the following link for more insights on the inherent problems with the current economic model and some suggestions for a revised more realistic model.   http://www.greattransition.org/publication/economics-for-a-full-world

De-comfortzoned.

Thoughts for the week come from an article titled “What is needed to get us out of our comfort zone and fight for our children’s future?” by Christiane Kliemann available here:  http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-06-10/are-we-prepared-to-change-to-prevent-climate-change .  Some highlights follow:

If it’s the way we live, consume and produce that causes climate change, why don’t we simply stop it and start doing things differently?

[…] despite the tremendous efforts that are being invested to convince us that energy efficiency, renewables and new technologies will do the trick, decoupling in absolute terms remains highly unlikely if not impossible in a growing economy.

[…] following the logic of homo economicus that individual profit and competition are the best means to achieve the higher common good. But what if this system logic itself was the root cause of our environmental and social crises—climate change above all—and needed to be replaced by something new to secure our survival on this planet? What if we have constructed a whole system of theories, models, technologies and defence mechanisms just to deny the simple truth?

[…]  despite the tremendous efforts that are being invested to convince us that energy efficiency, renewables and new technologies will do the trick, decoupling in absolute terms remains highly unlikely if not impossible in a growing economy.

Given the vast financial and political power of the global players in these and other sectors, it is no wonder that governments are usually putty in the hands of their interest groups. These play with our fears and assure us that their profitability is essential for keeping our jobs—knowing that politicians fear nothing more than rising unemployment rates.

And indeed, in the current system, this fear of losing one’s job often forces people to choose between a secure livelihood and ethical principles – and to continue to work in jobs that are obviously damaging for the environment.

Aren’t most of us quite happy in our comfort zones enjoying all the superficial pleasures the globalized consumer culture can provide?

We have to bring across that we are really serious about changing the economy and changing our lives, and that we won’t accept any excuse. Otherwise they can rely on us being too deeply attached to our cars, fancy holidays and long-haul flights, globalized supply chains and ever more electronic gadgets—even at the expense of the millions of deaths, increasing violence, wars on resources and ever stronger environmental disasters.

The widespread belief that the white male hypocrites from Silicon Valley and their likes will save us through technological innovations is yet another symptom of our collective denial. These will neither be ecologically sustainable, nor democratic; they will just tighten our dependence on increasingly complex technologies from large monopolist corporations.

Consume less, share more and stand up against fossil fuels, urban sprawl, destructive infrastructures and resource extractivism. And, above all, fight for an economy that can fulfil everyone’s basic needs within the natural boundaries of a healthy planet.