Tag: sustainability

The God Species

It’s an arresting title, The God Species: How the Planet Can Survive the Age of Humans. For author Mark Lynas the Holocene, the 10,000 year post-ice age era during which human civilisation evolved and flourished, has given way in industrial times to the Anthropocene, an age in which the human population has undergone extraordinary growth, and become totally dominant on the planet. In the process we have interfered in the planet’s great bio-geochemical processes to the extent that we are threatening to endanger the Earth system itself and our own survival. Things are badly askew and we must help Earth to regain stability. It cannot do so alone. “Nature no longer runs the Earth. We do. It is our choice what happens from here.”

Not that Lynas proposes to shoulder nature aside. Far from it. It’s a question of restoring nature’s balance and working within its limits. His book is about the planetary boundaries which must be respected if we are to avoid very serious environmental damage. He aims to communicate to a wide audience the findings of a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists who a couple of years ago identified nine such boundaries and wrote about them in a notable feature in Nature. Along the way he has his own suggestions for tackling the challenges involved and takes issue with other environmentalists over what he considers wrong-headed stances on many issues, including nuclear power and genetic engineering. This aspect of the book is often argumentative, but the central exposition of the planetary boundaries is straight science, set out with the lucidity apparent in his earlier book Six Degrees.

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Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist

The Ecology of Commerce Revised Edition: A Declaration of SustainabilityIn 1994 Ray Anderson, a captain of industry, founder and CEO of the large and successful carpet tile company Interface, was indicted as a plunderer of the earth.  At least that’s how he describes what happened when he took up Paul Hawken’s The Ecology of Commerce and read it overnight. It marked a turning-point for his petroleum-intensive company which set out on a journey towards a zero environmental footprint, with 2020 as the deadline. The story to date is told in his new book Business Lessons from a Radical Industrialist. I’d seen reference elsewhere to the fresh path the company had taken, and turned to the book with some interest but not expecting the intellectual rigour and full environmental awareness that I encountered, expressed in engaging and energetic prose. It’s a notable book which well deserves wide attention.

The company began with this exacting goal of sustainability which was to inform their journey:

“To operate this petroleum-intensive business in a manner that takes from the earth only that which is naturally and rapidly renewable – not one fresh drop of oil – and to do no harm to the biosphere.”

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The Great Disruption

The Great Disruption: How the Climate Crisis Will Transform the Global EconomyAustralian Paul Gilding straddles the NGO and corporate worlds. A former international head of Greenpeace, he subsequently moved into consultancy with global corporations and others on the transition to sustainability. Transition can sound a comfortingly gradual process, but that’s far from the case with the transition foreseen in his striking new book The Great Disruption: How the Climate Crisis Will Transform the Global Economy.

Gilding stands firmly with those who have been warning for half a century that our economies are pressing environmental limits to breaking point. Their warnings have now become realities. We have passed the limits of the planet’s capacity to support our economy. Ecosystem change and breakdown is now under way globally. Gilding takes his stand on the science, whether of climate change or the many other areas where sustainability is crumbling.

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Believing Cassandra

Believing Cassandra: How to be an Optimist in a Pessimist's WorldThe gift of foresight given to Cassandra was nullified by the accompanying curse that no one would believe her. Her warnings were ignored and ancient Troy fell. It’s a haunting myth which Alan Atkisson harnesses in his book Believing Cassandra: How to be an Optimist in a Pessimist’s World. If we believe Cassandra and take action to avoid the disasters she prophesies we prove her wrong. But the worst and most painful outcome for any Cassandra is to be proven right.

The book was first published in 1999 but has been revised and updated for this 2010 edition. The author comments on how much that was in the future tense in the first edition had to be shifted to the present or past tense, and yet how little of it had to be changed. This is not surprising. The book is rooted in the many warnings that have been sounded for some decades now about the limits of growth, and the dangers that await us as we exceed the boundaries for safety for human civilisation. Those warnings and dangers remain current. Atkisson starts with the dizzying exponential population growth of the past century, is fully alarmed by the level of biodiversity loss, and invites readers to consider the graph of rising global CO2 emissions as they would such horrific paintings as Picasso’s Guernica or Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

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Something changed

The “Signs of Change” conference was held this week bringing together by video conference lecture theatres in Kerikeri, Auckland, Palmerston North, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, and Invercargill [writes Tom Bennion]. Up to 200 attendees in all. The conference was organised by Christchurch engineering professor Susan Krumdeick who has for some time been active in researching ways to manage the risks related to resource limits (eg peak oil) and climate change — at local and national scales.

Susan’s approach is refreshingly upbeat while being entirely realistic and pragmatic about the changes required. The focus is on the need to get serious about the changes needed for the economy, society and infrastructure to cope with these challenges. She advised delegates that, as people who want to do the right thing, the thing to do now is not to buy a solar panel, but rather to understand that technology is not a magic solution, it’s a form of grief and bargaining. The changes required are simpler but more profound, but we can nevertheless all live reasonably comfortable and happy lives.
A kind of manifesto for the conference was produced. I’m not usually one for broad poetic statements of this sort, but I nevertheless found it uplifting.

We have enough
We can share what we have
If we used less, it would be fine
We can move ourselves
The economy does not need to grow in order for us to thrive
Business can be ethical and fair
Business can express and nurture cultural values
Health is the care of humans
Public space belongs to humans
We can meet at the market face to face
We can have humane relationships with the animals we depend on
We can work with Earth’s systems
We can build our homes and buildings to last for 600 years
We look upstream to manage our waste
We derive wealth from our waste
We protect and restore what nature creates
We listen to what Earth’s complex systems tell us
Our leaders listen to us and derive power from the mana of ethical behaviour and decisions
The powerful protect the weak
We are becoming indigenous
We are weaving all the threads together
The most important people in our village are those who will be us some day and we are listening to them.

Presentations covered a wide range of topics, from energy and waste management in cities, health, cycling, local food production, rail and electricity demand management. It was apparent that many initiatives that are happening now are occurring at or below the local government level, and not attracting the politics that affects national initiatives.

[Pulp]