environment: economics sustainability
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 30: Ka-Ching!
The Chicago Tribune appears to have discovered that sustainability is good for business.
What is mind-boggling is that this epiphany is not rewarded with a resounding, “Well, duuuuhhhh.”
But I guess everybody has to start somewhere.
It should not seem counterintuitive that ecologically sensible practices are good business practices as well. Environmental destruction is the worst possible corporate strategy — because ultimately all wealth is a function of our relationship to the natural ecosystems of which we are a part. Most contemporary economists assert that infinite economic growth is both possible and desirable, ignoring the fact that we live on a finite planet. As Edward Abbey famously said, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
The survival of our economic system is predicated on the survival of our species; even the largest multinational cannot outlast humanity. That’s why it makes absolute sense for business to embrace the disciplines of sustainability at every level, whether it’s implementing a careful recycling policy, adhering to green building practices, or supporting strong legislation to fight global climate change. Can someone tell the U.S. Chamber of Commerce?
Warren Senders
Education environment: Bill McKibben book reviews economics Juliet Schor sustainability
by Warren
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Two Good Books About The Future
We modern humans sure do love our conveniences. Most things in our lives are so convenient we’ve forgotten there ever was such a thing as inconvenience.
Look at some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten:
Having to procure our own food from start to finish.
Having limited quantities of untrustworthy water.
Being at the mercy of the climate.
Being at the mercy of the weather.
Having no easy access to large quantities of energy.
Assuming that some of our children won’t live to adulthood.
Living in a world where death is always immanent.
These are some of the big ones. Many of the conveniences we know and love are resolutions of one or another of this list, scaled to fit circumstances. Having to replace the steam nozzle on your cappuccino-maker is a tiny inconvenience to one person (you); the collapse of a coffee crop is a major inconvenience with repercussions all the way from farmer to consumer.
In the coming years, times are going to get harder. Some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten about are going to re-enter our lives. Weather-related mortality is going to increase (it already has). Our infrastructure is going to deteriorate (it already has). Our water supply is going to be less reliable (it already is).
Our current economy is built around convenience. Having ready credit is a convenience, as is having ready cash available at any ATM. Being able to fly anywhere in the world, is a convenience, as is having a place to stay when you get there.
You get the picture.
Education environment Politics: Bill McKibben economics Julliet Schor sustainability
by Warren
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Inconvenient Futures: Two Books You Should Read
We modern humans sure do love our conveniences. Most things in our lives are so convenient we’ve forgotten there ever was such a thing as inconvenience.
Look at some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten:
Having to procure our own food from start to finish.
Having limited quantities of untrustworthy water.
Being at the mercy of the climate.
Being at the mercy of the weather.
Having no easy access to large quantities of energy.
Assuming that some of our children won’t live to adulthood.
Living in a world where death is always immanent.
These are some of the big ones. Many of the conveniences we know and love are resolutions of one or another of this list, scaled to fit circumstances. Having to replace the steam nozzle on your cappuccino-maker is a tiny inconvenience to one person (you); the collapse of a coffee crop is a major inconvenience with repercussions all the way from farmer to consumer.
In the coming years, times are going to get harder. Some of the inconveniences we’ve forgotten about are going to re-enter our lives. Weather-related mortality is going to increase (it already has). Our infrastructure is going to deteriorate (it already has). Our water supply is going to be less reliable (it already is).
Our current economy is built around convenience. Having ready credit is a convenience, as is having ready cash available at any ATM. Being able to fly anywhere in the world, is a convenience, as is having a place to stay when you get there.
You get the picture.
Traditional cultures have social rituals and mechanisms for coping with the procurement and preparation of food, the climate and weather, the difficulty of large tasks, the death or sickness of a community member. You could make a pretty strong case that a culture’s identity and uniqueness is encoded in its response to difficulty, to hardship, to inconvenience.
And we humans crave community. We are social creatures, and our cultures provide us with meaningful ways to relate in a wide variety of contexts. We need one another most when times aren’t good.
Which is part of the reason our communality has eroded concurrently with our inconveniences. An unintended consequence of the development of a quick-satisfaction consumer culture in which anything we want is available is the gradual disappearance of the things we really want: one another. Until pretty recently most human beings were always there for one another. Now, not so much.
Which brings me to two books I’ve been reading recently.
environment Gardening Personal: DIY Gardening sustainability vegetables
by Warren
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My Big Fat Garden Project
It’s Independence Day! And I’m just going to brag on my garden a little.
Our little household will never be able to get off the food grid entirely (can’t grow rice in the Boston suburbs! No room for the spaghetti trees!) but we’ve been getting better at it every year.
Let me describe our layout. We live on the side of a hill. 47 steps lead from street level to our front door. When we bought the house, the front yard was a very steep slope, covered with weeds and debris. There is a garage at street level, inset into the hill. When we bought the house, the garage had a peaked roof in wretched condition.
I started a garden four years ago. It took a lot of work. The weeds and debris had to go — and individual planting beds had to be made out of rock, rubble, and concrete. I mastered the technique of building a leaky stone structure (dig shallow ditch & fill with gravel; plop rocks and rubble on top of gravel; slap concrete on top of rocks and rubble; allow to dry; add more rocks and rubble; add more concrete; repeat until you’re at the height you want, then add soil) and at this point have fifteen or sixteen fully operational planting beds in my front yard.
My front yard during the off-season. Note the drip-irrigation hoses.
Education environment: consumerism corporatism sustainability
by Warren
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Month 2, Day 8: Help! I am Trapped in a Consumerist Fortune Cookie Factory!
I just sat down and wrote this thing, and then spent the next hour wondering who to send it to. For the moment, faute de mieux, it’s going to my local newspaper. If anyone has any suggestions, please pass them along.
If humanity as a species is to survive, we must change the way we treat our environment. But for this to happen, we must recognize that the ongoing destruction of our planet’s biodiversity, atmosphere, and oceans is the result of a disastrously misguided conception of economic values. Americans have been told over and over again that our contribution to the common good is to consume. After September 11, then-President Bush famously instructed Americans to go shopping.
When we go shopping, what do we do? We buy thousands of dollars’ worth of plastic merchandise, manufactured in the Third World and packaged in vast quantities of plastic armor which is immediately torn off and thrown away. The products themselves are likely to get used up, destroyed and discarded before too many months have gone by; a trip through an American suburb on “garbage night” shows innumerable trinkets and appliances destined for the landfills. From this perspective, our economy appears to be entirely based on buying things and turning them into trash as quickly as possible.
And, obviously, this economic model is bad for the long-term health of our society. Aside from the fact that ultimately we’ll run out of resources to destroy (the most immediate of which is “peak oil,” the point where our store of hydrocarbon fractions begins to dwindle inexorably), a consumerist model is bad for our mental health. We exhort our children to give back as much as they take, but unless we exemplify these values in our own lives, it’s just moralistic prattle for the youngsters — another example of grownup hypocrisy.
The next few decades will determine whether we live in a world that offers our children and their children the hope of a meaningful future, or a blighted, poisoned landscape clogged beyond recognition with toxic trash. We can’t fix the climate unless we transform our economy. And the way to transform the economy is to focus all (that’s ALL) our power and attention on living in ways that give back more to the Earth than we take out. Americans are woefully ignorant of how to do this; I know I am. But for our grandchildren’s sake, we’d better start learning.
Warren Senders