Guest blog #28: Scott Wagnon's thoughts on population

(My last post generated a lot of activity on Facebook.  I also received an email from my labmate Scott Wagnon, whose detailed response to the post is below as a guest blog post.)

 

I feel as if Darshan downplayed the role population plays on environmental issues.  Where I wholeheartedly disagree with the unnamed professor (and I know Darshan does, too) is that race is a factor in the interconnection between the environment and population.  Environmental impact is something that is caused and felt by all age, race, gender and socioeconomic demographics.  I know and recognize that certain slices of the demographic pie contribute and/or are impacted more significantly than other slices, as Darshan mentioned in his post.  

 

From any perspective, it is just and right to advocate on behalf of people whose rights have been impacted, whose voice cannot reach a broad audience, or whose voice may not have the same impact as ourselves as wealthy, "educated" people.  But the simple fact remains that we--all of humanity--cannot have tens of billions of people consuming a few resources, as much as we--all of humanity-- cannot have a few people consuming tens of billions of resources.  Population control via family planning through various birth control options, abstinence, and education (see Darshan's post on the "entitlement" of having children, and the short discussion generated); increases in efficiency; and reduced consumption of resources are three equally important ways to reduce the impact of the choices we make.    

 

Those of us, such as Darshan and myself and likely you, who have been empowered with the means to make and enact such choices, should especially look at every aspect.  As Darshan pointed out in his post, wealthy, "educated" people--us--often consume the most.  (On a side note, I use "educated" because I wonder how smart we really are based on certain decisions that we make as a society... having to look no further than our collective treatment of the environment.)  If we--the large consumers, including myself :/--choose not to have large families, use less resources, and use resources more efficiently, we're fostering a culture where the environment is valued not as a commodity, but as something for all of humanity to enjoy.  We live in a finite world, so barring our expansion beyond this beautiful planet, all of humanity must always remain mindful that Earth can only sustain a finite population at even the smallest necessary levels of resource consumption.  We are all effectively one family altering our common home, for better or worse, through the choices we make.  I hope we all continue to make better choices.

 

~Scott Wagnon

Guest blog #27: Adrianna Bojrab's thoughts on little city nudges

Nestled in the heart of a culturally rich and active local community, the University of Michigan’s goals seem to mirror the objectives of local Ann Arbor.  Ann Arbor is a buzzing hub of innovation; start-up entrepreneurial enterprises, and cutting edge technology and research firms seem to make up the nucleus of the local economy. As such endeavors prove costly, efficiency seems to be a priority amongst local people, a primacy that is reflected in their business approaches.  Efficiency can be achieved on a variety levels: capital allocation, minimal time and energy expenditure and strategic business structures that minimize costs and boost profits.  Such efficiency standards can be met with numerous approaches; however, Ann Arbor companies seem to set the standard by equating efficiency with green sustainability, and considering local options and mindful environmental practices to reach the bar.

While residing in Ann Arbor for four years, I noticed incentives for reducing waste around the city.  Many food businesses receive base ingredients from local farmers, and donate leftovers to the homeless population.  Local farmers' markets are highly publicized and well frequented by students and locals alike.  Clothing and product drives reallocate excess, and a noticeable shift towards biodegradable materials for disposable products has become widespread in University and local business food and product packaging. A new wave of businesses promoting increased accessibility to public transportation has emerged.  Through the means of more expansive bus routes and initiatives to provide larger capacity cabs, Ann Arbor is moving more people and burning less fuel simultaneously.  Within the community, there is a strong biking population and more recently, an emerging skateboard culture.  Governmental regulations have rejected proposals for increasing parking accessibility, and this has proved to deter individuals from driving--a positive for fuel conservation.  Additionally, the physical layout of Ann Arbor makes walking or alternative transportation an easy, viable and reasonable option, along with the construction of new dormitories, co-ops and apartment buildings on Central Campus; people are being brought closer to their destinations.  Ann Arbor makes it easy to be environmentally conscious by providing the means to promote desired actions.  

Recently, I have moved to a neighborhood just north of downtown Chicago, Illinois.  My fascination with urban living and sustainability was redefined.  Generally speaking, subways and buses are the predominate mode of transportation for many city dwellers.  As a graduate student, I have the option to purchase an unlimited public transportation card for six months.  My commute to school on the subway has opened my eyes to the amount of fuel, finances, energy and time allotment that is being saved per person. Calculate $2.50 per one-way ticket, the price of a car, gas, parking and time in the context of city, and number is likely astounding. Chicago utilizes public transportation in a way unlike most other big cities, by utilizing both above ground and underground subway transport.  By doubling the expansive public transportation network, Chicago transports more people and employs more individuals to service and maintain the tracks and trains.   Read: Public transportation is quick, efficient, expansive...and arguably entertaining. 

Additionally, the state of Illinois encourages and provides a number of incentives for renewables and efficiency efforts--a mixture of grants, shorter permit process timelines and tax cuts.  These opportunities are available for commercial, industrial, residential, educational and institutional interests, and help to further the employment and adoption of new technology and environmentally beneficial practices.  Some of these practices involve: green building designs, geothermal heat pumps, solar space and water heaters, photovoltaics, hydroelectricity, LED lighting, renewable fuels and biomass.  The implementation and employment of new technology through state and federal incentives encourages a healthier environment and provides a financially feasible way to reduce operation costs and conserve valuable resources, materials and energy.  Such information for your own city is available through DSIRE, an online database funded by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy.

On a smaller scale, I have noticed a number of changes within my two short months of residence: public restrooms are beginning to remove paper towel dispensers and replace them with strong air current dryers. Inner city farmers markets are extending their hours of operation to weekdays, specifically lunch hours, providing an alternative for the working world’s lunch break and grocery run.  Recycling containers are found on every corner and clothing dispensaries for the needy are numerous.  Water bottle fillers that provide a “number of bottles saved” to users are engineered into many of the public water fountains, becoming a city norm. By providing such numbers for users, individuals are tangibly made to feel as though they are furthering change, thus encouraging usage.   A number of restaurants provide cloth napkins, regardless of their level of formality.  Chicago provides easy ways for people to minimize waste and reuse or reallocate resources.  Small incentives and practices add up, and the collective result could be major.   

We are the generation that will turn the tables.  We will change and revitalize the American culture by using innovative ways to introduce and implement sustainable and efficient business regimes into our communities.  Our health, safety, and happiness derive from our atmosphere.  If we focus on sustainability, and intentionally challenge ourselves to reuse materials in innovative ways, we will revitalize our communities.  Look at your lifestyle, identify the source of waste, start small scale and take an active role within your community to further new practices and become a catalyst for reform. 

~Adrianna

For more of Adrianna's thoughts on this blog, click here, here, and here.

A changed relationship with materials

I have spent the better part of this past semester thinking about technology and materiality. We live in a material, dualistic world, one in which we think of ourselves as separate from the world we inhabit, and one in which materials are a source of happiness. We have structured entire cultures and economies on this philosophy, and while it would be wonderful to live in a culture that was non-dual and less materialistic, it is difficult to see inroads into how that culture would be spawned. Such a drastically different culture is necessary, although it may not be possible.

Humans are no longer only homo sapiens sapiens. We are now homo faber--man that makes. We make little toy trinkets for children and we erect mega dams that can block silt and water from following gravity. We build infrastructures, some in space like the GPS system, and some under ground and under water like the oil distribution network in the Gulf of Mexico. We technologise and we valuate materials.

But these technologies and materials are not valuable in and of themselves. Rather, it is how we perceive them, the politics imbued in them, how we are sold on them that lends them their power. These materials and technologies shape our world, our views of the world, and our views of ourselves as human beings. They lend many people a great deal of power, and allow people to affect politics in their interests. For example, no one can disagree that fossil fuels have lent the Western world a great deal of power, many times to the detriment of those people living in the Middle East. It is clear then that our cultural identities are tied to materials. We will go to any length to gain access to these materials. We will wage all sorts of wars, physical and those guised under "diplomacy". A competitive material world is the race to nowhere of megalomaniacs.

A similar picture can be painted for our individual lives. A broad survey of television advertisements and street corners during move out days in a college town seems to say that the value of our lives is proportional to the materiality of them. We are judged by our materials--the more the better it seems. We thus fill our homes and fill our lives with stuff we buy from our weekly trips to the mall. We line up to get the newest cell phone just because our service provider says that we are "eligible" for a new one. We brag about the time we will spend suspended off of the slide of a shear cliff with a new set of modular crampons from Petzl. Materials lend us status and power in small and intricate ways, whether it is bragging rights or whether it is climbing a rock.

It is difficult to separate ourselves from our materials. It seems that everywhere you look, you find someone interacting with some manufactured material. While we did interact physically with the world millenia ago, power and control now form the foundation of material use in our daily lives, and for our governments. And so, I understand that our views of ourselves are shaped by what we have--infrastructures such as roads just cannot be done without now, it seems, for everything from our daily commutes to our food makes use of such an infrastructure. Our cell phones become tied to our capacity to communicate with loved ones.

But I still feel that there is something we are forgetting about ourselves in all of this--that our fate cannot be tied to our ability to constantly change our world materially in the way that it currently does. My contention is that no amount of solar energy or wind energy or new efficient technologies will address ecological problems. They will indeed create their own problems of an even larger magnitude, of that I am certain. Our demands will change from wanting wind energy in the first place to wanting wind energy to provide enough energy so we can drive our Hummers.

Can we imagine a different relationship with the materials of daily life? How might this unfold in our communities and in our governments? Part of it surely comes from changing the framework from thinking about how newer things are more efficient to how newer things out to be more sufficient. But can this be taken a step further to make what we already have sufficient?

A veil of morality

In the last two posts, I did no writing whatsoever. Instead, I typed up a memo that Larry Summers had passed around to other World Bank colleagues about how polluting "poor" countries is in the interest of these countries, as pollution can be welfare maximising. In response, The Economist, calls Summers's arguments "morally callous," yet, in the end, agree with Summers's suggestion.

I find this very sad for several reasons. It is unfortunate that this is what we have been taught--that the environment, the biophysical world that supports our very breaths and lives, can and ought to be polluted, at least to a certain extent, for human "welfare." (This of course comes from the human-environment dichotomy.) But, as we've seen in the US and Western Europe, it takes massive amounts of pollution and burning rivers and acid rain for even slightly effective laws to be put in place that reduce pollution, at least in the areas where the laws are enacted.

As we know, however, if our demands for the things that cause pollution don't die down, the pollution just migrates elsewhere under neoliberalism. Under this economic framework (the economy that the United States and powerful organisations such as the World Trade Organisation and the World Bank and most of the world subscribes to), the economic calculations that are the taken into account in these "environmental" laws result in the migration of polluting industry; such results are "logical," as Matthew and Andrew and Ethan have discussed with me. Summers wishes that pollution such as air pollution was indeed fully tradeable, just like "commodities" and material "resources." In neoliberal thinking, in a thinking that tends to maximise profit of money under a monetary economic framework, it is to the advantage of people to be able to trade as much as they can in the name of economic efficiency. Consequently, pristine environment and the value of human lives do not go hand in hand. Rather, the environment must be degraded to bring any value into the world, and, once we are rich enough, we will magically buy back what we've lost.

But what bothers me more, though, is The Economist's response. Indeed, it is patronising and debasing to anyone who truly cares about the Earth we live on. They go so far as to justify pollution, because the control of it is expensive. The response is industry's dream, and endorses wholeheartedly the legal and cultural framework we've created for ourselves. And if given all of laws in the US have only stopped three chemicals from being used, ever, of the many thousands, what chance would there be for the countries we dump these chemicals on to understand what they are trading away for their supposed "welfare"? In the end, from a neoliberal standpoint, it is the rich who stand to benefit, and the poor that stand much to lose--their clean air and water, their environment. Pollution is dangerous, especially because it is demonstrably unregulated, even in the so-called "rich countries," as The Economist calls them. (Think of the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Safe Water Drinking Act, and the toxins present in our bodies, which I wrote about here.)

The Economist's arguments are elitist, condescending, and patronising. When the magazine states that "Those who insist on 'clean growth everywhere' must either deny that there is ever a trade-off between growth and pollution control--or else argue that imposing rich-country standards for clean air worldwide matters more than helping millions of people in the third world to escape their poverty," they fail to recognise that it is the policies of imperialism and colonialism of the very nations that The Economist calls "rich" that have led to poverty and conflict in the global south.

What The Economist is arguing for is effectively a continuation of policies that have led to climate change and pollution and unsustainability, under a veil of moral superiority. The magazine says that we ought to be more humane and ethical, while at the same time promoting a way of thinking that systematically throws out ethical considerations. To Larry Summers's credit, at least he is unabashed and open about what he thinks: "I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."

FRACK YOU: The tyranny of energy

As an engineer, you are trained to think about the flow of energy. Efficiency, a key concept in engineering and design, is basically an accounting of energy. But energy isn't only something that is confined to engineering. Rather, it is a basic feature of all of nature. We live because of the energy of the sun. Food provides our bodies with energy to keep us alive, breathing and warm. Weather is Earth's response to the flow of solar energy. The fossil fuels we burn is stored energy from eons ago. To live, energy must flow through us. But for the past few hundred years, we've wanted more and more of it, and our living has been conflated with how much energy we can use.

This world is using more energy than ever before, and we're looking for newer and newer ways to extract it from this Earth. The less abundant it is, the more we have to search for it, and the more we are compelled to do whatever it takes to find it. As you can imagine, none of this is benign. For all the hullabaloo, natural gas, which "clean" burning, is in no way cleanly obtained. Fracking has been the latest type of energy extraction to tyrannize this Earth and its people. Here are some responses to Sandra Steingraber's recent piece in Orion, When Cowboys Cry.

"While reading Sandra Steingraber's column, I thought of a recent visit to my father's ranch in Montana, where I confronted the aftermath of hydrofracturing. The land had an alkali sheen to it; little pipe installations were everywhere, and the ranch and road had obviously been flooded many times. I had seen this place once before - when it was a retreat for the coal company that owned it - and it was beautiful. Now, my father would cry to see it." ~Iris Blaisdell, Gardnerville, Nevada

"Sandra Steingraber is right to point out the threat hydrofractuing poses to groundwater. The implications are especially worrying in the Upper Peninsula of my state, Michigan, which is crisscrossed by spring-fed waterways from west to east. All through the state - along roadsides and deep in the woods, where people stop to collect water in containers - an amazing number of these clear, drinkable fountains erupt from hillsides. Others babble forth from smaller openings in the earth and join together to make drinkable creeks and tannin-colored rivers - all of which end up in the Great Lakes, which hold almost one quarter of all the fresh water on the planet. In the midst of this network are hundreds of old farms whose owners and families straddle poverty, and whose acreage is targeted by energy companies for fracking. What dispossessed farmer could resist the cash?

I was out recently at my favorite hillside water fountain, lively with frogs and trillium and jack-in-the-pulpit. The beech trees, too, are still there, along with their store of nuts that feeds nearly everything in that forest. I approached the water, and I drank. I still can - but for how long?" ~Bob Vance, Petoskey, Michigan

"The tyranny of energy corporations described the Sandra Steingraber has also visited my community in rural Ohio. The township where I live has more signed leases for hydrofracturing than any other in the state, and local politicians and lease signers are happy to believe the claim that fracking has been going on harmlessly for decades. Nothing seems to matter except quick cash. My neighbors have signed leases, and as a result, the spring-fed pond and well from which I drink are in peril. When my well and all those surrounding me are fouled, none of us will have the "opportunity" to sell our homes and farms and move elsewhere - no one, after all, wants to live in a toxic dump." ~Karen Kirsch, Marlboro Township, Ohio

The more we have, the more we waste

Our society has created for us an illusion of plenty (to borrow the title of Sandra Postel's book on water scarcity). Indeed, if we were to look at the lawns of the households in Phoenix, we would think that there is plenty of water to go around for all of us, and plenty to spare, so much so that everyone can own uncovered swimming pools in the driest and hottest parts of the country. (Given even a rudimentary understanding of thermodynamics, you would think that there would be a massive amount of evaporation and loss.) When we go to a grocery store, we see plenty of food, so much so that we buy food not only for today, but for tomorrow, and the next week. Much of this food goes to waste; Americans throw away more than 25% of their food. Based on calories, the National Institutes of Health put this number close to 40%. When you walk into an electronics store like Best Buy, you would think that metals and plastics will continue to be abundant, so much so that you don't mind adding another LCD TV to the one you already have. A stroll through the corridors of Home Depot make you feel insignificant compared to the amount of wood neatly stacked. There must be plenty of trees out there. So plenty, in fact, that cutting one down shouldn't matter. Maybe cutting down two shouldn't matter..or three, or four...

But the issue is a serious one - not only are we maybe over-producing food, or not equitably distributing it, but we are spending massive amounts of energy, and using so many chemicals and so much water to produce that food, and that waste. As I mentioned previously, one quarter of freshwater used in the US goes into food that is thrown away. Electronics are thrown away as soon as new models appear, with little regard to what goes on to produce each cell phone in our pockets, each computer on our desks.Our society has surrounded us with the illusion of copious, even infinite amounts of things we can burn or throw away. When you have a lot, you don't mind spending it, losing it, or throwing it away. Indeed, the value of a small amount is lost. If I've bought four radishes, one radish going bad won't make me lose sleep.

Professor Princen has written at length about the idea of sufficiency, which is a huge step forward from efficiency. When we look at the Earth from space, what we see is not an overflowing, unbound teeming of life, but the finiteness of the space in which all life as we know exists - the thin layer of atmosphere, the brown of the land and the blue of oceans. Yet for some reason we think that within the finiteness of our Earth, we can grow, materially and monetarily, unboundedly. We have founded everything we rely on on finite sources, on ever scarce sources. But we (or the corporations and government...you can always blame them =)) have put on blinders to that finiteness. I encourage you to think about scarcity and finiteness. One thing that each one of us can do is value what we have, and treat each and every thing we have as precious. Whether it is a cup of water, or a dollar bill, or a drop of oil. Many of these things are never coming back. The least we can do is appreciate.

Changing the system, or navigating it with integrity

"The task of the activist is not to navigate current systems with integrity. The task of the activist is to take down systems of oppression." ~Derrick Jensen

I keep coming back to Jensen's talk the other day, because it was just full of fascinating ideas, thoughts and encouragement, but also replete with cynicism and a sense that we are just running out of time. I must agree that we are running out of time, in the biggest sense, first and foremost. With something like climate change for example, it doesn't seem like the world is gung-ho on making sure Mauritius doesn't drown. There are other deeper issues that do need to be dealt with, though, such as a redefinition of norms and ethics, which I think Jensen is trying to get at, too.

(When I say "technology," I mean the technology that has been brought into the world in the past few decades, the rate of whose introduction has followed something like Moore's law.) As I have alluded to with several posts on technology and progress (here, here, here, here, here), while I am not against technology altogether, the trend of techno-optimism are rather worrying, particularly because it has redefined what "sustainability" means. It has now come to mean "sustainable development," which fundamentally assumes that a Western-derived ethic of technological development will free us from our current society's ecologically-degrading behaviour. Instead of actually questioning our behaviour and what drives it, we come up with geo-engineering solutions that are just bound to make things worse. Now, it seems that much of our education system is set up such that it produces people to further entrench this technologically-driven, ecologically-degrading economy as the norm. And while it may be possible to engineer our way out of environmental disaster (I do not believe so), what Jensen is saying that it would be a major breakthrough if we were to take a step back and realise that our quest for ever-increasing technology has led us to where we are.

There are two ways then that Jensen says we could use our power - either we could all be techno-optimists, and make technologies that are "efficient" and "less harmful" to the environment, rather than come up with technologies that will have a degrading influence on nature and people, or we can say that the problem is our dependence on technology itself. We can get a job with BP, and try to "green" it from the inside, or we can make BP obsolete. We can try to convince people in the Department of Defense that we should have weapons that target only the intended target and minimise collateral damage, or we can stand in solidarity against everything that drives us to use violent force, and make the need for something like the Department of Defense a thing of the past. These are difficult things to do, but things that each and every one of us can influence. By saying no, we do not patronise, and we do not in any way insure the future of the system.

Reflections on the year: The importance of the journey

There has been much to write about for the past two days, and I apologise for not having done so. I am on a small trip to Georgia Tech for a conference, a trip which Paul and I decided to do by car; we decided not to fly.

We arrived in Atlanta last night, after taking a couple of days to do the drive through Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee and the northern part of Georgia. Along the way, we stopped in Dayton and had sandwiches in the Oregon district. We stopped in Lexington and explored the University of Kentucky; the campus was quiet because all of the students were on spring break. But Paul and I decided to throw a Frisbee around and see where the Frisbee took us; it took us to little nooks with wooden benches and daffodils, large expanses of lawns, and a beautiful wide pit in front of the library. As we continued to drive south through Tennessee, we saw weeks of spring progress in minutes and hours right before our eyes.

I feel like Paul and I could have missed all of this very easily had we decided to fly down to Atlanta. Yes, we would have "saved" six hours of travel time each way and we could have "gotten on" with our lives. But it seems nowadays we have become so accustomed to flying over small and vast expanses of the country, rather than exploring it and observing the gradients and differences. The drive gave me a better understanding of the landscapes this country is made of. The journey is as important as the destination.

Oregon District, Dayton, OH

Where will you take us?

University of Kentucky

Spring in KY

Library, University of Kentucky

Beautiful tree

The drive made me think about this past year. We live in a world where many want answers and solutions now, and to do that, we build ever faster computers with greater and greater computing power, we try to maximise the efficiency of everything we do. The challenges that face our world socially and environmentally, however, have no quick fixes. It would be nice if we were to come up with quick and easy ways to empower people everywhere to put all of these problems behind us. We may be able to cope with top-down approaches to solving these problems and understand them. But maybe not. Any durable change that fills our lives cannot come from anywhere else but from within. I feel that if people aren't involved in the journey of struggle and learning, any quick fix will not be a durable one. The journey allows a deeper understanding of the fundamental issues that can be easily overlooked when we look for quick fixes. We shouldn't forget that our quest to make each one of our lives less impactful is a journey. What is more important to realise though is that such a journey doesn't require being an engineer or doctor or social worker. We have all been endowed with all we need - hearts and minds and souls. All we need to be is open to the possibilities that will present themselves along the way.

I can't believe it has been three hundred and fifty-eight days since this my project started; it has been the start of a wonderful journey, a long journey whose conclusion is uncertain (one thousand points to the person who figures out which movie this is from). 

On the human scale

The way our society is structured is such that we try to maximise "efficiency." (I, as well as a guest blogger, have written about this concept of efficiency, and what we lose because of it, here, here, here, here, here and here.) What this leads to, under current notions of economics ("free-market" capitalism with its baseless assumptions of perfect competition, no barriers to entry, perfect information, etc. etc.) and building, is called economies of scale. What this basically results in is the ability to produce the most amount of something for the maximised possible monetary profit. What this also ends up doing, however, is something that is a shared story across the country, and most of the world - the conglomeration of smaller entities into bigger and bigger and bigger and meaner entities - corporate takeovers, industrial farms, massive financial companies too big to fail, etc. We have "globalised" almost everything imaginable - companies, manufacturing, growing, and disease. What we end up creating are entities with "lives" of their own, so big and powerful that smaller humans can get trampled along the way, without redress and remorse. In many places across the country, our buildings have shown similar trends over time. Take a look at this picture of the built environment in downtown Detroit, and how it has changed over time.

 

Apart from the obvious increase in vacant land, we observe that the size of structures, in general, has increased over time. We have ended up building bigger and bigger structures that have a tendency to make one walking through it or standing beside it insignificant. Of course, many of these structures are visual manifestations of institutions and organisations I just described. What this tells me is that we value the lives of careless institutions and organisations over the lives of the humans, plants, animals and nature that guarantee their existence.

Such scales are seen in landfills, too. Here are some pictures and numbers about some of the largest landfills in the nation (you can read the articles here and here).

What I think is necessary to address when talking about issues of our impact on the environment is a look at scale. It is absolutely not possible to tread lightly with big things. Big tractors compact soil, oxen do not. Big power plants require massive amounts of fossil fuels, while living with less energy wouldn't necessitate the rape of mountains. Big buildings take a lot to erect, while smaller ones recognise our place in the world and the grander scheme of things.

On risk

After a wonderful discussion about food in class last night, Lydia and Samantha stayed after class to keep me company while I ate (the students brought in wonderful food for a potluck). After Samantha left, Lydia and I talked for an hour about, of course, the environment and government, she being in the School of Public Policy. She used a term that was insightful, and one that we don't necessarily think about in our daily lives, and one that I have not used at all in the last year - risk.

We take risks all day, every day. Many of us don't realise that some actions are risky, but that doesn't stop us from doing them. Some of us decide to get into cars, and drive ourselves around. We put our complete faith in other people, hoping that they won't drive, from the other oncoming lane, into your lane, at fifty miles per hour. As a cyclist, you are even more vulnerable, and several people I know have been hit by cars. When we decide to heat food up in the microwave in plastic containers, we accept, whether we want to or not, the risks of plastics and plasticisers leeching into our food. When we decide to pass through a full-body scanner at the airport, there are risks to developing some complication, no matter how small those risks may be. In fact, the standards that are set by the government, be they for car crash safety, whether or not a plastic is microwavable, or for X-ray imaging, are set by evaluating the risks for all of these actions. There is nothing that is not risky with these sorts of standards. Someone, somewhere, will experience side effects of medication - we run that risk. Risk is inherent and calculated into whether or not an oil exploration company will decide to drill into an exploratory oil well - I am absolutely sure those at BP, Halliburton and Transocean had some conversation about the risk. Whether they decided to do something about it or not, that is a different story.

But in our daily lives, how much do we think about the risks of our actions ruining the environment? There almost seems to be a tacit acceptance of those risks in favour of "progress" (1, 2, 3) and "development" (1, 2). Any acceptance of how we have behaved so far only legitimises the acceptance of these risks. On the other hand, what do we risk if we change our behaviour? What do we risk if we did choose to live under the paradigm of sufficiency, rather than efficiency (1, 2, 3) and neoliberal economic growth? We risk the staggering and unquantifiable - we risk living with and within the limits and capacity of Earth rather than forcefully and violently against those boundaries. We risk being better to other people and animals. We risk not filling up landfills to their created capacity. We risk preservation and conservation. Are we willing to take that risk?

Guest blog #11 - Dr. Jack Edelstein's thoughts on conservation and entropy

"What do we mean by the term ‘energy conservation’ or more generally ‘resource conservation?’  At first thought, the answer seems obvious:  conservation means using less stuff, thereby making a smaller environmental footprint than would have otherwise been made, and avoiding a certain disruption to the resource base (e.g. biodiversity) that would have otherwise occurred.  What, exactly, is it that needs to be conserved, and how does conservation actually work?

From a practical point of view, absolute conservation would completely preserve the current status of the earth’s biodiversity -- by neither depleting any natural resource (e.g. wildlife, trees, water), nor by depositing any man-made matter onto the environment (e.g. trash, smog, and carbon).

There are four ways that we can conserve energy, and any other [non-renewable] resource -- 1) consume less, 2) eliminate waste, 3) increase efficiency, 4) substitute renewable.  We will describe each of these four conservation methods through the simple example of a shower. 

The first way to conserve is to actually consume less water by reducing the shower time, and/or by reducing the flow of the showerhead.  Another way to consume less is to lower the water temperature, thereby reducing the amount of energy used (in heating the water).

The second way to conserve is to eliminate or reduce waste.  We distinguish waste from excess by defining the former as the act of consuming resources without deriving any value -- as in the case of a dripping showerhead. Excess is much more subjective than waste -- e.g. taking a very long shower is not wasteful in the strictest sense (since some marginal benefit or utility is being derived), but at some point it becomes excessive in that the derived benefit is miniscule.

The third way to conserve is to increase efficiency by utilizing less resources in the creation of a given unit of output.  In the case of a shower, improved efficiency can be a low-flow showerhead, or a more energy-efficient water heater.  However, efficiency by itself does not lead to conservation, due to the Jevon's paradox (as explained in an earlier post by Darshan).

The fourth way to conserve is to substitute renewable resources for non-renewable ones.  An example is utilizing solar collectors to heat the water (instead of fossil fuel), and harvesting rainwater instead of drawing water from an underground aquifer.


                    Reduce         Eliminate     Maximize      Substitute   
               consumption        waste         efficiency      renewables   
Cost               Zero             Low       High          ???    

The expenses associated with these four conservation strategies range from zero to high cost -- depending on the level of technology required. Reducing consumption costs nothing since it is entirely a behavioral strategy.  Similarly, eliminating waste generally entails a behavioral approach augmented by a low input of technology. The ‘efficiency’ approach is generally technology-intensive and therefore expensive, and often risky.  Finally, the cost of substituting renewable for non-renewables is quite variable.  It is generally high in that it usually involves an advanced technology component, but it can also be low, as in the case of rain-water collection discussed above. 

A review of the academic literature as well as the general media reveals a strong bias toward energy conservation strategies that are based on the efficiency and renewable options -- the two more expensive options.  In other words, the two conservation approaches that cost the least and could have the most immediate impact -- i.e. to use less and to eliminate waste -- are the ones that are least supported, and often outright ignored. (There are a number of reasons for this, which will be addressed in a future post)

The power of Darshan’s project is that it represents by far the most cost-effective approach to conservation --  simply using less (though it may not actually be that simple to do).  By using absolutely less matter, Darshan is impacting the entire production chain associated with the consumption of physical goods.

Perhaps that’s why the name of this project is “Entropy”. If I understand the 2nd law of thermodynamics, one of the ideas it posits is that the physical world is constantly seeking a state of equilibrium, through a process defined as entropy.  As an outcome of the forces of entropy, the planet attained a state of equilibrium many millions of years ago, and this equilibrium was maintained until homo sapiens started roaming the earth.  The activities of humanity are increasingly disturbing this equilibrium, and the newly resultant equilibrium may become (or already is) inhospitable to sustained life.

The essence of conservation, then, is to understand that the equilibrium into which humanity entered was ideally suited to the evolution of homo sapiens and all other life.  Conservation entails respecting that equilibrium, and reduces our interference with it. Using less is the most powerful way we as individuals can conserve the planet."

~Dr. Jack Edelstein.


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I love his last paragraph.

What we lose through "efficiency" - Jevon's Paradox and complexity

My previous posts (here and here) focused more on the less quantifiable aspects of "efficiency," such as taste and flavour, as well as balance in nature. Today's post is a more technical post, primarily focusing on energy and economics, following up on my last two posts. Humans have always had a tendency and will to make things more "efficient" - we would rather our shopping be done at one place, we would rather a computer simulation take half as long as it currently does, we would rather pay half of what we do for our heating bill. What we believe is that making things and activities more efficient will allow us time to do other things, or allow us to do more for less. In practice however, this has a perverse feedback associated with it - we may end up using more by making things more "efficient."

A recent article in The New Yorker by David Owen was titled, "The Efficiency Dilemma: If our machines use less energy, will we just use them more?" Owen writes about Jevon's Paradox, which was first written about by a young English economist, William Stanley Jevons, in 1865. The paradox states that instead of using less by making things more efficient, we end up using more. This phenomenon is called "rebound." When the savings through efficiency are canceled out and overwhelmed by increased consumption, the phenomenon is called "backfire." When something becomes more efficient, the implicit price of it drops from a neo-classical standpoint (and we all know that the world runs, unfortunately, on neo-classical economics), thus spurring increased demand.

Owens gives a most wonderful example about refrigeration and air-conditioning, both energy-hungry processes. As refrigerators have become more efficient, refrigeration capacity in the world has increased multi-fold. Furthermore, the effects of better refrigeration are not limited to refrigeration only. We are tempted to buy more food to store in refrigerated conditions, and by the time we get to eating them, much of the food is spoiled anyway. Here, not only do we waste the energy going into refrigeration, we waste and throw away all of the energy, chemicals and resources that went into food production, through transportation, storage and agriculture. In fact, (and this was incredibly shocking to me), one quarter of US freshwater use goes into food that is eventually thrown away. As you may be able to tell, after a certain point, it becomes difficult to know what the true effects of efficiency gains are when moving to studying small systems to larger systems; issues only become more complex, becoming much more difficult to address. (I have written about complexity here, here and here.) Owen makes the point that, along with advocating for "efficiency," there must be other measures adopted simultaneously to make sure gains are not canceled out by increased consumption. Indeed, without further measures, you may be left in the boat of the United Kingdom, which has seen marked increases in "efficiency," but only increased greenhouse gas emissions.

There are several questions worth thinking about here: Do we need things to be more efficient? What is so wrong with things being inefficient, especially from a personal time standpoint? What are we going to do with any efficiency gains that will come our way?

Trash, to me, seems like a natural outcome of this "efficiency," "centralisation," and "convenience" mentality.

What we lose through "efficiency" - feedback

Tim told me this morning that in yesterday's post, I have confused industrialisation with efficiency. He says that we choose and want to be efficient in everything, including non-industrial agriculture and food production. I see what he is saying, and I agree with him. Maybe I have confused or not delineated between the two concepts thoroughly enough. What I am trying to get at is the notion of trying to get more for less (or more for the same amount of input), which is exactly what industrialisation is, and which is exactly what efficiency is. When we choose to apply fossil-fuel based energy and chemicals to agriculture, we think that we may be able to increase "yield," or the amount of output per area of land (which, I emphasise, is not true in practice). But the concept of "efficiency" is also the foundation behind genetic modification and the development of seeds and crops that are better able to survive given inputs of industrialisation. Through this process of increasing "efficiency," we deplete the natural balances of nutrients in soil and water, resulting in poorer tasting food. What is then lost is the experience of food - no one can deny that better tasting food makes you feel better, mentally and physically. If the notion of "efficiency" is to be applied to non-industrial agriculture, it would entail treating the land and what feeds it in a way that doesn't overburden it (exactly the opposite of industrial agriculture), and respecting the land enough so as to get the best tasting food.

To Eleanor's point that efficiency and industrialisation has allowed us to taste foods that only exist in other parts of the world, and that industrialisation feeds the world. There is a grain of truth in what she says, but I think what industrialisation is good at doing is underestimating the costs of itself. "Economies of scale" applied to industrialisation are good at providing "low-cost" food to people, but the costs, especially environmental and social, are completely neglected. When we go to Wal-Mart or Kroger, we do not pay for the costs of petroleum or lost livelihoods of small farmers. (Those costs are indeed covered by subsidies.) Furthermore, even though Americans have continued to spend less and less on food, and it is possible to get entire "meals" at fast-food restaurants for $2, the number of people going hungry locally and globally is still remarkable, and nothing that industrialisation "promises" can address that. It is also undeniable that industrialisation leads to a decrease in the quality of food, and it is debatable whether you can call industrial, fast food "food."

With the issue of flavour, I am speaking to the mental and social impacts that good tasting food can have. Maybe people will eat bad-tasting food if a gun was put to their head, or that was all that was available on a particular day. But once you have tasted good food, the smell, flavour and experience stay with you lifelong. I do not believe we have to sacrifice the quality of food for quantity - Cuba has resisted this sacrifice since petrochemical exports to the country stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union, through innovative approaches of biodynamism and organic urban agriculture.

What we lose through "efficiency"

As an engineer that works in a combustion laboratory, I am constantly surrounded by the miracles of modern machinery. Let me tell you about some of the things around my lab. There exists a vacuum pump that can pull a large volume to near vacuum, to a pressure lower than exists at the higher reaches of the atmosphere. There exist fast-acting solenoid valves that have an open-shut cycle time of 2 milliseconds to capture with high accuracy and precision small volumes of gas to understand how fuels break down. There exist computers that can solve systems of very stiff differential equations to understand chemical kinetics. There exists lasers that emit photons with high spatial and temporal coherence. All of these gadgets, gizmos and machinery are made to operate as "efficiently" as possible - use the least amount of energy to get a certain amount of work out. This seems wonderful - planes now fly on 40% less fuel per kilometre than they did 40 years ago. Efficiency can work marvels with engineering, and in some sense, "save" the environment. But it can also wreak havoc on the environment and more primal attributes of our world.

My thoughts are flowing at this moment primarily through food, but one may apply this thought process to other forms of human behaviour. In our attempt to increase output of food, we have turned to fossil fuels and chemicals and genetically modified seeds to allow increased yields (although this is completely debatable, and more likely than not false) given the size of a plot. Wendell Berry and Michael Pollan eloquently speak to the degradation of land, the waste of farming operations, and the lives of ecosystems that are ruined because of industrial agriculture. But Chef Dan Barber lends another perspective to the voices speaking out against industrial agriculture. On Being, he speaks to something food has lost over time due to excessive chemical and biological modification - flavour. Indeed, flavour, an essential quality of food, is nowhere talked about amongst large scale agribusinesses and farmers. As I have written about previously, food, when cooked with love and thought, using the right ingredients, can open up minds and hearts, and remind people of days gone by. In our quest to produce large amounts of food for increasingly lower costs to the customer (although the true costs are not billed, nor are calculable), the social aspect of food surrounding thought, smell, taste and emotion has been systematically neglected and carelessly snipped out of the DNA, both of the food and of our culture. With the loss of native species of crops, plants and animals, these things no longer survive in our collective memories. In the end, bland tasting tomatoes are shipped thousands of miles to be served as poor substitutes to the miraculous tastes of nature...generating trash along the way.

Cities

"As recently as 1950, only 30% of the world's population was urbanised. Today, more than half live in urban centres. The developed world is now about 80% urban and this is expected to be true for the entire planet by around 2050, with some 2 billion people moving to cities, especially in China, India, southeast Asia and Africa."

This came from a commentary article, "A unified theory of urban living" in Nature, on the 21st of October, 2010. Of course, when we think of cities, we think of concentrations of people, culture, money and energy. Cities, interestingly, share many "universal features," claim authors Luis Bettencourt and Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos National Laboratory. "Doubling the population of any city requires only about an 85% increase in infrastructure, whether that be total road surface, length of electrical cables, water pipes or number of petrol stations." This is because of efficiency gains and higher quality services that aren't necessarily available in smaller places. We can view this in a neoclassical economic sense - economies of scale.

Paul today pointed me to the latest Radiolab, which is about Cities. In this episode, Bettencourt and West discuss the "economies" of living beings - as animals grow larger and more complex, the amount of energy it takes to maintain cells and live is actually less than it would be if you linearly scaled up the resources needed for smaller animals. In that sense, cities are kind of like animals...or are they? What we fail to realise, say Bettencourt and West, is that as cities grow, and people continue to move to cities, their access to resources increases, as do their wages, and interactions with people with different ideas. This can lead to, counterintuitively, more consumption of resources, although the efficiency with which those resources are consumed is higher than say a suburban area. At the same time, it is very rare that cities die. Now, there are of course, shrinking cities (like Youngstown, Cleveland, St. Louis and Detroit), as John Gallagher talks about in his book, Reimagining Detroit. But if we continue to move to cities, as is the trend noted by Bettencourt and West, will our use of resources decline?

Some more thoughts on the definition of the problem

In my last post, I talked about the ever-growing amount of "e-waste" being shipped overseas. I can attribute this growing amount of e-waste to a few things:

1) Electronics are intentionally made to not last more than a couple of years.
2) Everything is being "upgraded" - you might be perfectly happy to use your old computer (which works well), but other people, companies, organisations, etc. use new versions of various software that require newer versions of hardware to process. In the end, you have to "upgrade" if you want to be a part of the majority of society.
3) There is a social pressure for people, especially the young, to have newer versions of perfect functional products, take for example the new iPhone.
4) We think that what is new is better than what is old, not only from a functional standpoint, but also from the standpoint of materials, efficiency and "environment."

The fourth point is what I would like to elaborate on in this post. I previously have elaborated on what is embodied in products that we have already. When we purchase something, we have agreed to all that has gone on to make that product (whether we like to think about it or not), including the societal, cultural, ecological and economic impacts. Materials are permanently extracted, from the earth, and tons of energy and freshwater are used to morph and shape these elements and compounds into something "useful" and "usable." When we buy something "more efficient," you also agree to all that has gone on to make that product. There is a certain amount of "life" that you purchase, and it is up to us to make sure we make full use of the products while they still function. I like to take the example of buying a new Toyota Prius as opposed to buying an older, used car. This article from Wired makes it very clear - you will be doing less harm to the environment by either keeping your old car, or buying another used car, than by purchasing a new Prius. Here is another article to think about...

In the end, it is up to us to decide whether to buy into the fads, fashions and branding. But hopefully we can make our decisions using some common sense and thoughtfulness.