I believe this is where the film Thrive receives the most valid criticism, how to achieve rapid collective behavioral and cultural change, essentially "reprogramming" the privileged portion of Humanity mostly in the "developed" world exhibiting wanton consumptive behavior, away from material acquisitiveness and toward inner development within a socio-political framework of less regulatory oversight, as this is what is actually prescribed towards the films end. In essence, undoing the work of cultural architects produced in and influenced by an era (Post WW2) of geo-political primacy and relative energy and resource abundance (i.e. Edward Bernays, the widely recognized father of contemporary consumer culture).
This is the greatest obstacle to surviving the confluence of crises confronting Humanity this century.
Again, this is primarily a crisis of consciousness.
The situation is actually quite serious, with some scientists intimately familiar with the situation issuing extremely dire prognoses, so dire that I have - contrary to a perceived "doomer" vibe or overall message this blog projects - refrained from posting here as they are so fatalistic that they give one a sense of utter hopelessness.
I do not post them not because I do not believe in their scientific and logical validity but because there is another component to our collective predicament that has still to be acknowledged by Mechanistic Reductionism and the general public; an example of the phenomenon has been extensively explored and empirically confirmed within cutting edge physics: the Observer Effect or Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle whereby an observer affects a phenomena just by observing it.
Now, I need to note that we don't just influence phenomena by passively observing it, but that our intent and expectation influences the behavior of it. The issue here is that when you are dealing with such a large and varied meta-phenomenon as the state of the planet, with a multitude of different observers, you don't get coherent results. What may actually lay behind the increasing frequency of catastrophic events (Earthquake in Haiti 2010, Deepwater Horizon Oil Volcano 2010, Fukushima Nuclear Nightmare 2011 etc.) aside from compelling theories indicting HAARP, is an increasingly coherent state of collective consciousness cohering around an expectation of global catastrophe. Blame the Mayan Prophecy, blame the Christian eschatological narrative, blame the deepening sense of bewilderment in response to global economic collapse; we all sense that great change is afoot and as all auto-catalytic processes go - just as surely as arctic methane is contributing to Anthropogenic Climate Change - so too are our perceptions feeding back into shared reality, driving the frequency and severity of the very crises that we are expecting.
So if we collectively believe that we are screwed, then we are truly screwed. But if we believe that we can turn this ship around, then we increase the chances of doing so significantly just by believing we can.
Concurrent with the converging crises threatening Humanity's continued survival is a revolution in science. Cartesian Dualism held that consciousness and matter and energy are separate domains. We now know that thought affects reality, and that we co-create our reality. I need to place utmost emphasis on the qualifier here, we co-create reality; there have been perversions of this truism embodied in consumer culture oriented media such as "The Secret" whereby ritualistically viewing a picture of your dream McMansion you will manifest it out of thin air. The reality of the "magic" is that our desires are in competitive harmony with that of the whole: the rest of life and other sentient beings who may all be desiring something different. So, although you may desire a 5k square foot McMansion with a matching Dodge Viper, the forest that will give up its life, the polar bears and the poor sap down the block (much less the bio-diversity and poor people in the regions of the globe that the required resources are expropriated) may all be desiring something different . And it is particularly insidious that our co-creative potential should be subverted to satisfy unconscious consumer impulses, particularly benefiting those who stand to gain the most by implanting them in our consciousness (the main beneficiaries of our Infinite Growth Consumer Paradigm, in sum 1% of Humanity).
It is hopeful that the predicament Humanity is in is analogous to a patient who, defying a doctors prognosis, recovers completely from a deathly illness or injury. Spontaneous Remission happens frequently and is inexplicable by Mechanistic Reductionism. Or just think of the placebo effect, and extend this phenomena to the super-organism called Earth or Gaia. And I need to make it clear that this isn't wishful thinking, that these "miracles" happen all of the time, and that when Science shows that there is a relationship between consciousness and reality yet this continues to be rejected by "scientists" then I believe the Scientific Establishment needs to be audited for harboring a blatantly religious predisposition, the most egregious sin according to its tenets, that of objective impartiality.
Now this does not mean that the solution is for Humanity to all join hands and form one giant chain around the globe and sing koombaya, no our survival does indeed require real, significant, radical, personal and collective behavioral change for us to see the Twenty Second Century. For although we do influence our reality, we are not the sole arbiters of it. Imagine, if you will, that you are poisoned but do not know that you are poisoned; not knowing that you are poisoned does not negate its effects. But if you know that you are poisoned and believe that you are in a lot of trouble the effects of the poison are magnified, kind of like a placebo effect but with negative consequences. Conversely, knowing that you are poisoned but visualizing a positive outcome, maybe even your very survival - just as cancer patients who live well beyond the life expectancy given them by a doctor - you completely recover. And unfortunately, not knowing that you are poisoned will not prevent your death. Many will say that this is just an auto-catalytic bio-chemical process, that we aren't actually psychically rendering our homeostatic state, but I disagree with this completely, we are psychically influencing physical reality, in this instance our internal physical state.
Extending this analogy out further, if people pretend that nothing is wrong with the health of our planet, that Anthropogenic Climate Change is not rendering many previously habitable areas of the planet uninhabitable, that non-renewable energy and other critically important resources are not being depleted at an unsustainable rate, that bio-diversity loss will not culminate in a world that no longer supports life, that we are not actually well into a Mass Extinction Event, this self-delusion does not nullify these very real processes, nor does refusing to become familiar with them.
But our thoughts and intent do have a profound effect on our shared reality, and this is something that we need to explore, nurture and integrate into our scientific/secular worldview.
If you are interested in learning more about this revolution in science and our true power and relationship to the Universe then I cannot recommend more highly both Biocentrism by Robert Lanza and Spontaneous Evolution by Bruce Lipton.
Biocentrism: How Life and Consciousness are the Keys to Understanding the True Nature of the Universe
Spontaneous Evolution
See also:
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/11/thrive-story-is-wrong-but-spirit-is.html
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2011/12/response-to-charles-eisensteins.html
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/06/thrive.html
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/06/911-decade-later-whole-new-ball-game.html
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/06/sir-martin-rees-5050-chance-of-humanity.html
http://philosophersbunker.blogspot.com/2012/03/open-letter-to-my-father-republican.html
The Way Forward: Survival 2100
References
Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD). Getting Eco-Efficient. Report of the BCSD First Antwerp Eco-Efficiency Workshop, Geneva (November 1993).
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). World scientists’ warning to humanity [online] (UCS Cambridge, MA, 1992). www.ucsusa.org/about/1992-world-scientists.html.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Living beyond our means: natural assets and human well-being (statement from the board) [online] (2005).www.maweb.org/en/BoardStatement.aspx.
Glikson, A. Trends and tipping points in the climate system: portents for the 21st century (draft report) [online] (2011). www.countercurrents.org/glikson241111.pdf.
Anderson, K & Bows, A. Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A [online] 366, 3863–3882 (November 2008). doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138.
Rees, WE in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity 2nd edn (Levin, S, ed), Ecological footprint, concept of (Academic Press, San Diego, in press).
WWF. Living Planet Report 2010. (World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, Switzerland, 2010).
Rees, W. 2010. What’s blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy [online] 6(2), 13–25 (2010).http://sspp.proquest.com/static_content/vol6iss2/1001-012.rees.pdf.
Daly, HE. Steady-State Economics 2nd edn (Island Press, Washington, 1991).
Roberts, N. Paranoid GOP sees global conspiracy in U.N. and small nonprofit.Care2 [online] (February 7, 2012). www.care2.com/causes/paranoid-gop-sees-global-conspiracy-in-u-n-and-smal....
Tainter, J. The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988).
Originally published at Solutions Journal
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
Posted Jun 22, 2012 by William Rees
Credit: European Environment Agency
A man and child garden in Ireland’s first ecovillage. The village aims to be self-sufficient in food, with residents growing their own fruit and vegetables. The author’s Survival 2100 plan calls for the continued pursuit of local resilience and the diversification of local economies.
"Industrialised world reductions in material throughput, energy use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet’s ecological means." — Business Council for Sustainable Development.1
It’s not as if we’re unaware of the problem. Symptoms were already so persistent two decades ago that a proclamation by many of the world’s top scientists warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”2 This assertion was echoed a dozen years later by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s no less urgent warning that “human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of the earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”3
One might think that humanity’s best science would be enough to stimulate a decisive policy response, but the feeble effort so far has done little to stem the cumulative cascade of dismal data. No national government, no prominent international agency, no corporate leader anywhere has begun to advocate in public, let alone implement, the kind of evidence-based, visionary, morally coherent policy responses that are called forth by the best science available today.
On the climate front, the first six months of 2010 were the warmest ever recorded, and 2010 tied with 2005 and 2008 for hottest year in the instrumental record. (This while we should have been experiencing modest cooling—the world is just emerging from the longest solar minimum in decades.) Earth and paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glikson posits that the world may be experiencing the fastest climate change in 34 million years. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are rising at 2+ parts per million by volume per year (ppmv/yr) and the rate is increasing. Already, at 392 ppmv CO2 and 470 ppmv CO2 equivalent (CO2e) (read: a level of greenhouse gases equivalent in climate forcing to 470 ppmv of CO2), the atmosphere/ocean system is just below the 500 ppmv CO2e upper stability limit for the Antarctic ice sheet.4
Some climate scientists are now stepping into the policy arena. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows argue that the world will be hard-pressed to stabilize greenhouse gases at 650 ppmv CO2e, which implies a 50 percent chance of a catastrophic 4°C increase in mean global temperature, the desertification of much of the world’s habitable land mass, dramatically rising sea levels, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees by the end of the century. Indeed, unless we can reconcile economic growth with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6 percent per year), avoiding this increase will require a “planned economic recession.”5
Of course, climate change is just one symptom of generalized human ecological dysfunction. A virtual tsunami of evidence suggests that the global community is living beyond its ecological means. By one measure, the human “ecological footprint” is about 2.7 global average hectares per person (gha/capita), yet there are only 1.8 gha/capita on earth. The human enterprise has already overshot global carrying capacity by about 50 percent and is living, in part, by depleting natural capital and overfilling waste sinks.6,7
Coming to Grips with Reality
In theory, Homo sapiens is uniquely equipped to confront this self-made crisis. Four critical intellectual and emotional qualities distinguish people from other advanced vertebrates. Humans have an unequaled capacity for evidence-based reasoning and logical analysis; the unique ability to engage in long-term forward planning; the capacity to exercise moral judgment; and an ability to feel compassion for other individuals and other species.
As noted above, despite decades of hardening evidence, mainstream global society nevertheless remains in policy paralysis, stymied by cognitive and behavioral barriers to change that have deep roots in both human nature and global society’s culturally constructed economic growth fetish.8
But what if mounting public pressure (think Occupy Wall Street) or a series of miniclimate catastrophes finally overwhelms these barriers? Assume the world community becomes fully motivated to deal effectively with biophysical reality. Now the question becomes, What would truly intelligent, forward-thinking, morally compassionate individuals do in response to available data, the historical record, and ongoing trends?
Survival 2100
In a more rational world, political leaders might come together in a special forum to acknowledge the nature and severity of the crisis and to establish the institutional and procedural basis for a worldwide “Survival 2100” project.8 This initiative would formally recognize (a) that unsustainability is a global problem—no nation can achieve sustainability on its own; (b) that unsustainability springs, in part, from the failure of a global development paradigm that is based on integration and consolidation of the world economy (globalization), deregulation, and unrelenting material growth; (c) that the failed paradigm is a social construction, a product of the human mind; and (d) that this is good—it means that the model can be deconstructed, analyzed, and replaced. In effect, the metagoal of Survival 2100 would be to rewrite global society’s cultural narrative to achieve greater social equity and economic security in ways that reflect biophysical reality.
Credit: CoCreatr (via Flickr)
Workers from Nitten Solar install 15 solar panels on the roof of a Yokohama City home in Japan in January 2011. The Survival 2100 plan would call for new job-training and job-placement programs for employment in emerging “sunrise” industries such as solar energy.
The major elements and themes of the new story are, in some respects, self-evident. The practical goal of Survival 2100 would be to engineer the creation of a dynamic, more equitable steady-state economy that can satisfy at least the basic needs of the entire human family within the means of nature. (“Steady-state” implies a more or less constant rate of energy and material throughput compatible with the productive and assimilative capacities of the ecosphere.9 Contrary to simplistic criticisms, a steady state is anything but static. Innovation will be more necessary, and necessarily more creative, than ever.)
Clearly the economic policy emphasis would have to shift from efficiency and quantitative growth (getting bigger faster) toward equity and qualitative development (getting truly better). Indeed, the steady-state economy would be a smaller economy. Eliminating overshoot requires a 50 percent reduction in global fossil energy and material throughput. And to address egregious inequity, wealthy countries will have to reduce their consumption by up to 80 percent to create the ecological space necessary for justifiable growth in developing countries. Implementing an equity-oriented planned economic contraction in turn requires that the underpinning values of society shift from competitive individualism, greed, and narrow self-interest—all sanctioned by the prevailing narrative—toward community, cooperation, and our common interest in surviving with dignity.
The emotive rationale for such a developmental about-face is captured in the last phrase above. Global change is a collective problem requiring collective solutions. Individual actions produce inadequate, even trivial improvements; no individual, no region, no country can succeed on its own. Perhaps for the first time in history, individual and national interests have converged with the collective interests of humankind. Governments and international organizations must therefore work with ordinary citizens to devise and implement policies that serve the common good on both national and global levels. Evidence abounds that failure to act in ways that reflect humanity’s shared interest in survival with dignity will ultimately lead to civil insurrection, geopolitical tension, resource wars, and ecological implosion.
The magnitude of the required value shift is daunting but manageable given sufficient resources. The world community will have to agree to fund worldwide social marketing programs to ameliorate “pushback” and bring the majority of citizens on board. Public reeducation is necessary both to inform ordinary citizens of the nature/severity of the crisis and to advance a positive vision for the future that will be more attractive than the future likely to unfold from maintaining the status quo. (Those who dismiss such broad-scale social learning as social engineering should remember that the denizens of today’s consumer society already represent the most thoroughly socially engineered generation of humans ever to walk the planet, and billions are spent every year to ensure that they remain wedded to the status quo.)
Essential Steps Forward
One thing that has passed its “best before” date is the contemporary cult of consumerism. The material ethic is spiritually empty and ecologically destructive. A sustainable society, by contrast, will cultivate investment and conserver values over spending and consumption.
A sustainable conserver society would also abandon predatory capitalism with its unbridled confidence in markets as the wellspring and arbiter of all social value. Unsustainability is quintessential market failure. Society must relegitimize public planning at all levels of government. We need selective reregulation and comprehensive extramarket adaptation strategies for global change.
A necessary first step would be to acknowledge that globalization encourages the externalization of ecological and social costs (think climate change). Many goods and services are therefore underpriced in the marketplace and thus overconsumed. As any good economist will acknowledge, government intervention is legitimate and necessary to correct for gross market failure. Indeed, resistance to reform makes hypocrites of those who otherwise tout the virtues of market economies. Truly efficient markets require the internalization of heretofore hidden costs so that prices tell consumers the truth.
Consistent with the concept of true-cost economics, Survival 2100 would recognize the need to
end perverse subsidies to the private sector (e.g., to the fossil fuel sector, the corn ethanol industry, and private banks “too big to fail”); reregulate the private sector in the service of the public interest; introduce scheduled ecological fiscal reforms—tax the bads (depletion and pollution) not the goods (labor and capital)—which might require a combination of pollution charges/taxes on domestic production and import tariffs on underpriced trade goods; and tie development policy to the “strong sustainability” criterion (i.e., maintain constant, adequate per capita stocks of critical natural, manufactured, and human capital assets in separate accounts).
This final point requires that we learn to live on sustainable natural income, not natural capital liquidation. Society must therefore implement “cap-auction-trade” systems for critical resources such as fossil fuels (i.e., place sustainable limits on rates of resource exploitation, or waste discharges; auction off the exploitation rights to available capacity; and use the rents captured to address subsequent equity issues); revise systems of national accounts to include biophysical estimates of natural capital stocks and sinks in support of such a system; and replace or supplement gross domestic product with more comprehensive measures of human well-being.
NOAA Fisheries Service
The U.S. sea scallop fishery is the largest wild scallop fishery in the world. In 2009, U.S. fishermen harvested 58 million pounds of sea scallop worth more than $382 million. Survival 2100 calls for investment in rebuilding local/regional natural capital stocks such as fisheries.
Survival 2100 would also require that society unravel the increasingly unsustainable eco-economic entanglement of nations induced by globalization. Without becoming isolationist, nations should strive for greater self-reliance. In the service of “efficiency,” unconstrained trade allows trading regions to exceed local carrying capacity with short-term impunity, while increasing the risk to all by accelerating waste generation and depleting remaining reserves of natural capital. In the process, this creates mutual dependencies that are vulnerable to accelerating global change, energy bottlenecks, and geopolitical instability. The world and individual nations should therefore revise or abandon World Trade Organization rules and similar regional trade treaties (e.g., NAFTA). In place of these agreements, we instead need economic plans and accords that also foster local economic diversity and resilience. “Trade if necessary, but not necessarily trade” is a suitable mantra. Nations should therefore develop deglobalization plans to reduce their dependence on foreign sources and sinks (i.e., reduce a nation’s ecological footprint on other nations’ ecosystems and on the global commons); simultaneously relocalize (i.e., reskill domestic populations and diversify local economies through import displacement); generally increase national self-reliance in food, energy, and other essential resources as a buffer against climate change, rising scarcity costs, and global strife; and invest in rebuilding local/regional natural capital stocks (e.g., fisheries, forests, soils, biodiversity reserves, etc.) using revenues collected from carbon taxes or resource quota auctions.
Economic contraction and massive structural change inevitably have adverse social effects. Consistent with the principles of community solidarity and cooperation, as well as society’s shared interest in the peaceful resolution of the sustainability conundrum, Survival 2100 would explicitly renew the social contract and repair holes in the social safety net. This would include a return to more progressive taxation policies encompassing income, capital gains, and estate and corporate taxes; recognition that a negative income tax may be necessary to assist low-income families through the transition; using the tax system and related policies to promote a cultural shift from private capital accumulation to investment in public infrastructure (e.g., transit, community facilities) and human development; designing and implementing new forms of social safety nets to facilitate peoples’ transition to the postcarbon economy in which obsolete, unsustainable “sunset” industries are phased out (e.g., coal-based electricity generation); implementing job-training and job-placement programs to equip people for employment in emerging “sunrise” industries (e.g., solar energy technologies); capitalizing on the advantages of a shorter work week and job sharing to improve work-life balance (self-actualization); and implementing state-assisted family-planning programs everywhere to stabilize/reduce human populations.
Conclusions: Can Survival 2100 Fly?
The forgoing is only an introduction to the kinds of policies implicit in a Survival 2100–type project, but it is sufficient to show that sustainability does, indeed, demand what many scientists (and even politicians) have been asserting for decades. We are engaged in a genuine paradigm shift—the abandonment of the beliefs, values, assumptions, and behaviors underpinning the status quo and their replacement by an alternative development paradigm. The good news, of course, is that the alternative offers a more economically secure, ecologically stable, and socially equitable future for all than does staying our present course.
The bad news is that there will be strident resistance from those with the greatest stake in the status quo, from people who reject global change science, from extreme libertarians, from those who worship at the altar of the marketplace, and from anyone who regards regulation and government—particularly in the international arena—as the spawn of the devil (e.g., factions of the U.S. Republican and Tea Parties who “repudiate sustainable development and describe the global effort to achieve it as ‘destructive and insidious’” and who regard UN agencies and various NGOs as anti-American conspiracies).10 More generally, planned economic contraction hardly resonates with the times. Indeed, if the basic science of global change is correct, resistance to change may well be the greatest threat to the future of global civilization and overcoming it a more difficult task than implementing the transformation itself.
And failure is possible. As anthropologist Joseph Tainter reminds us, the most intriguing thing about complex societies is the frequency with which their ascent to greatness is interrupted by collapse.11 Collapse on a global scale, however, would be unprecedented. Should H. sapiens fail in efforts to implement something like Survival 2100, evolution’s great experiment with self-conscious intelligence will have finally succumbed to more primitive emotions and survival instincts abetted by cognitive dissonance, collective denial, and global political inertia.
But if we succeed … !!
source: http://www.postcarbon.org/article/970523-the-way-forward-survival-2100
Credit: European Environment Agency
A man and child garden in Ireland’s first ecovillage. The village aims to be self-sufficient in food, with residents growing their own fruit and vegetables. The author’s Survival 2100 plan calls for the continued pursuit of local resilience and the diversification of local economies.
"Industrialised world reductions in material throughput, energy use, and environmental degradation of over 90% will be required by 2040 to meet the needs of a growing world population fairly within the planet’s ecological means." — Business Council for Sustainable Development.1
It’s not as if we’re unaware of the problem. Symptoms were already so persistent two decades ago that a proclamation by many of the world’s top scientists warned that “a great change in our stewardship of the earth and the life on it is required if vast human misery is to be avoided and our global home on this planet is not to be irretrievably mutilated.”2 This assertion was echoed a dozen years later by the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment’s no less urgent warning that “human activity is putting such a strain on the natural functions of the earth that the ability of the planet’s ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted.”3
One might think that humanity’s best science would be enough to stimulate a decisive policy response, but the feeble effort so far has done little to stem the cumulative cascade of dismal data. No national government, no prominent international agency, no corporate leader anywhere has begun to advocate in public, let alone implement, the kind of evidence-based, visionary, morally coherent policy responses that are called forth by the best science available today.
On the climate front, the first six months of 2010 were the warmest ever recorded, and 2010 tied with 2005 and 2008 for hottest year in the instrumental record. (This while we should have been experiencing modest cooling—the world is just emerging from the longest solar minimum in decades.) Earth and paleoclimate scientist Andrew Glikson posits that the world may be experiencing the fastest climate change in 34 million years. Atmospheric CO2 concentrations are rising at 2+ parts per million by volume per year (ppmv/yr) and the rate is increasing. Already, at 392 ppmv CO2 and 470 ppmv CO2 equivalent (CO2e) (read: a level of greenhouse gases equivalent in climate forcing to 470 ppmv of CO2), the atmosphere/ocean system is just below the 500 ppmv CO2e upper stability limit for the Antarctic ice sheet.4
Some climate scientists are now stepping into the policy arena. Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows argue that the world will be hard-pressed to stabilize greenhouse gases at 650 ppmv CO2e, which implies a 50 percent chance of a catastrophic 4°C increase in mean global temperature, the desertification of much of the world’s habitable land mass, dramatically rising sea levels, and hundreds of millions of climate refugees by the end of the century. Indeed, unless we can reconcile economic growth with unprecedented rates of decarbonization (in excess of 6 percent per year), avoiding this increase will require a “planned economic recession.”5
Of course, climate change is just one symptom of generalized human ecological dysfunction. A virtual tsunami of evidence suggests that the global community is living beyond its ecological means. By one measure, the human “ecological footprint” is about 2.7 global average hectares per person (gha/capita), yet there are only 1.8 gha/capita on earth. The human enterprise has already overshot global carrying capacity by about 50 percent and is living, in part, by depleting natural capital and overfilling waste sinks.6,7
Coming to Grips with Reality
In theory, Homo sapiens is uniquely equipped to confront this self-made crisis. Four critical intellectual and emotional qualities distinguish people from other advanced vertebrates. Humans have an unequaled capacity for evidence-based reasoning and logical analysis; the unique ability to engage in long-term forward planning; the capacity to exercise moral judgment; and an ability to feel compassion for other individuals and other species.
As noted above, despite decades of hardening evidence, mainstream global society nevertheless remains in policy paralysis, stymied by cognitive and behavioral barriers to change that have deep roots in both human nature and global society’s culturally constructed economic growth fetish.8
But what if mounting public pressure (think Occupy Wall Street) or a series of miniclimate catastrophes finally overwhelms these barriers? Assume the world community becomes fully motivated to deal effectively with biophysical reality. Now the question becomes, What would truly intelligent, forward-thinking, morally compassionate individuals do in response to available data, the historical record, and ongoing trends?
Survival 2100
In a more rational world, political leaders might come together in a special forum to acknowledge the nature and severity of the crisis and to establish the institutional and procedural basis for a worldwide “Survival 2100” project.8 This initiative would formally recognize (a) that unsustainability is a global problem—no nation can achieve sustainability on its own; (b) that unsustainability springs, in part, from the failure of a global development paradigm that is based on integration and consolidation of the world economy (globalization), deregulation, and unrelenting material growth; (c) that the failed paradigm is a social construction, a product of the human mind; and (d) that this is good—it means that the model can be deconstructed, analyzed, and replaced. In effect, the metagoal of Survival 2100 would be to rewrite global society’s cultural narrative to achieve greater social equity and economic security in ways that reflect biophysical reality.
Credit: CoCreatr (via Flickr)
Workers from Nitten Solar install 15 solar panels on the roof of a Yokohama City home in Japan in January 2011. The Survival 2100 plan would call for new job-training and job-placement programs for employment in emerging “sunrise” industries such as solar energy.
The major elements and themes of the new story are, in some respects, self-evident. The practical goal of Survival 2100 would be to engineer the creation of a dynamic, more equitable steady-state economy that can satisfy at least the basic needs of the entire human family within the means of nature. (“Steady-state” implies a more or less constant rate of energy and material throughput compatible with the productive and assimilative capacities of the ecosphere.9 Contrary to simplistic criticisms, a steady state is anything but static. Innovation will be more necessary, and necessarily more creative, than ever.)
Clearly the economic policy emphasis would have to shift from efficiency and quantitative growth (getting bigger faster) toward equity and qualitative development (getting truly better). Indeed, the steady-state economy would be a smaller economy. Eliminating overshoot requires a 50 percent reduction in global fossil energy and material throughput. And to address egregious inequity, wealthy countries will have to reduce their consumption by up to 80 percent to create the ecological space necessary for justifiable growth in developing countries. Implementing an equity-oriented planned economic contraction in turn requires that the underpinning values of society shift from competitive individualism, greed, and narrow self-interest—all sanctioned by the prevailing narrative—toward community, cooperation, and our common interest in surviving with dignity.
The emotive rationale for such a developmental about-face is captured in the last phrase above. Global change is a collective problem requiring collective solutions. Individual actions produce inadequate, even trivial improvements; no individual, no region, no country can succeed on its own. Perhaps for the first time in history, individual and national interests have converged with the collective interests of humankind. Governments and international organizations must therefore work with ordinary citizens to devise and implement policies that serve the common good on both national and global levels. Evidence abounds that failure to act in ways that reflect humanity’s shared interest in survival with dignity will ultimately lead to civil insurrection, geopolitical tension, resource wars, and ecological implosion.
The magnitude of the required value shift is daunting but manageable given sufficient resources. The world community will have to agree to fund worldwide social marketing programs to ameliorate “pushback” and bring the majority of citizens on board. Public reeducation is necessary both to inform ordinary citizens of the nature/severity of the crisis and to advance a positive vision for the future that will be more attractive than the future likely to unfold from maintaining the status quo. (Those who dismiss such broad-scale social learning as social engineering should remember that the denizens of today’s consumer society already represent the most thoroughly socially engineered generation of humans ever to walk the planet, and billions are spent every year to ensure that they remain wedded to the status quo.)
Essential Steps Forward
One thing that has passed its “best before” date is the contemporary cult of consumerism. The material ethic is spiritually empty and ecologically destructive. A sustainable society, by contrast, will cultivate investment and conserver values over spending and consumption.
A sustainable conserver society would also abandon predatory capitalism with its unbridled confidence in markets as the wellspring and arbiter of all social value. Unsustainability is quintessential market failure. Society must relegitimize public planning at all levels of government. We need selective reregulation and comprehensive extramarket adaptation strategies for global change.
A necessary first step would be to acknowledge that globalization encourages the externalization of ecological and social costs (think climate change). Many goods and services are therefore underpriced in the marketplace and thus overconsumed. As any good economist will acknowledge, government intervention is legitimate and necessary to correct for gross market failure. Indeed, resistance to reform makes hypocrites of those who otherwise tout the virtues of market economies. Truly efficient markets require the internalization of heretofore hidden costs so that prices tell consumers the truth.
Consistent with the concept of true-cost economics, Survival 2100 would recognize the need to
end perverse subsidies to the private sector (e.g., to the fossil fuel sector, the corn ethanol industry, and private banks “too big to fail”); reregulate the private sector in the service of the public interest; introduce scheduled ecological fiscal reforms—tax the bads (depletion and pollution) not the goods (labor and capital)—which might require a combination of pollution charges/taxes on domestic production and import tariffs on underpriced trade goods; and tie development policy to the “strong sustainability” criterion (i.e., maintain constant, adequate per capita stocks of critical natural, manufactured, and human capital assets in separate accounts).
This final point requires that we learn to live on sustainable natural income, not natural capital liquidation. Society must therefore implement “cap-auction-trade” systems for critical resources such as fossil fuels (i.e., place sustainable limits on rates of resource exploitation, or waste discharges; auction off the exploitation rights to available capacity; and use the rents captured to address subsequent equity issues); revise systems of national accounts to include biophysical estimates of natural capital stocks and sinks in support of such a system; and replace or supplement gross domestic product with more comprehensive measures of human well-being.
NOAA Fisheries Service
The U.S. sea scallop fishery is the largest wild scallop fishery in the world. In 2009, U.S. fishermen harvested 58 million pounds of sea scallop worth more than $382 million. Survival 2100 calls for investment in rebuilding local/regional natural capital stocks such as fisheries.
Survival 2100 would also require that society unravel the increasingly unsustainable eco-economic entanglement of nations induced by globalization. Without becoming isolationist, nations should strive for greater self-reliance. In the service of “efficiency,” unconstrained trade allows trading regions to exceed local carrying capacity with short-term impunity, while increasing the risk to all by accelerating waste generation and depleting remaining reserves of natural capital. In the process, this creates mutual dependencies that are vulnerable to accelerating global change, energy bottlenecks, and geopolitical instability. The world and individual nations should therefore revise or abandon World Trade Organization rules and similar regional trade treaties (e.g., NAFTA). In place of these agreements, we instead need economic plans and accords that also foster local economic diversity and resilience. “Trade if necessary, but not necessarily trade” is a suitable mantra. Nations should therefore develop deglobalization plans to reduce their dependence on foreign sources and sinks (i.e., reduce a nation’s ecological footprint on other nations’ ecosystems and on the global commons); simultaneously relocalize (i.e., reskill domestic populations and diversify local economies through import displacement); generally increase national self-reliance in food, energy, and other essential resources as a buffer against climate change, rising scarcity costs, and global strife; and invest in rebuilding local/regional natural capital stocks (e.g., fisheries, forests, soils, biodiversity reserves, etc.) using revenues collected from carbon taxes or resource quota auctions.
Economic contraction and massive structural change inevitably have adverse social effects. Consistent with the principles of community solidarity and cooperation, as well as society’s shared interest in the peaceful resolution of the sustainability conundrum, Survival 2100 would explicitly renew the social contract and repair holes in the social safety net. This would include a return to more progressive taxation policies encompassing income, capital gains, and estate and corporate taxes; recognition that a negative income tax may be necessary to assist low-income families through the transition; using the tax system and related policies to promote a cultural shift from private capital accumulation to investment in public infrastructure (e.g., transit, community facilities) and human development; designing and implementing new forms of social safety nets to facilitate peoples’ transition to the postcarbon economy in which obsolete, unsustainable “sunset” industries are phased out (e.g., coal-based electricity generation); implementing job-training and job-placement programs to equip people for employment in emerging “sunrise” industries (e.g., solar energy technologies); capitalizing on the advantages of a shorter work week and job sharing to improve work-life balance (self-actualization); and implementing state-assisted family-planning programs everywhere to stabilize/reduce human populations.
Conclusions: Can Survival 2100 Fly?
The forgoing is only an introduction to the kinds of policies implicit in a Survival 2100–type project, but it is sufficient to show that sustainability does, indeed, demand what many scientists (and even politicians) have been asserting for decades. We are engaged in a genuine paradigm shift—the abandonment of the beliefs, values, assumptions, and behaviors underpinning the status quo and their replacement by an alternative development paradigm. The good news, of course, is that the alternative offers a more economically secure, ecologically stable, and socially equitable future for all than does staying our present course.
The bad news is that there will be strident resistance from those with the greatest stake in the status quo, from people who reject global change science, from extreme libertarians, from those who worship at the altar of the marketplace, and from anyone who regards regulation and government—particularly in the international arena—as the spawn of the devil (e.g., factions of the U.S. Republican and Tea Parties who “repudiate sustainable development and describe the global effort to achieve it as ‘destructive and insidious’” and who regard UN agencies and various NGOs as anti-American conspiracies).10 More generally, planned economic contraction hardly resonates with the times. Indeed, if the basic science of global change is correct, resistance to change may well be the greatest threat to the future of global civilization and overcoming it a more difficult task than implementing the transformation itself.
And failure is possible. As anthropologist Joseph Tainter reminds us, the most intriguing thing about complex societies is the frequency with which their ascent to greatness is interrupted by collapse.11 Collapse on a global scale, however, would be unprecedented. Should H. sapiens fail in efforts to implement something like Survival 2100, evolution’s great experiment with self-conscious intelligence will have finally succumbed to more primitive emotions and survival instincts abetted by cognitive dissonance, collective denial, and global political inertia.
But if we succeed … !!
source: http://www.postcarbon.org/article/970523-the-way-forward-survival-2100
References
Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD). Getting Eco-Efficient. Report of the BCSD First Antwerp Eco-Efficiency Workshop, Geneva (November 1993).
Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). World scientists’ warning to humanity [online] (UCS Cambridge, MA, 1992). www.ucsusa.org/about/1992-world-scientists.html.
Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Living beyond our means: natural assets and human well-being (statement from the board) [online] (2005).www.maweb.org/en/BoardStatement.aspx.
Glikson, A. Trends and tipping points in the climate system: portents for the 21st century (draft report) [online] (2011). www.countercurrents.org/glikson241111.pdf.
Anderson, K & Bows, A. Reframing the climate change challenge in light of post-2000 emission trends. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A [online] 366, 3863–3882 (November 2008). doi:10.1098/rsta.2008.0138.
Rees, WE in Encyclopedia of Biodiversity 2nd edn (Levin, S, ed), Ecological footprint, concept of (Academic Press, San Diego, in press).
WWF. Living Planet Report 2010. (World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, Switzerland, 2010).
Rees, W. 2010. What’s blocking sustainability? Human nature, cognition, and denial. Sustainability: Science, Practice, & Policy [online] 6(2), 13–25 (2010).http://sspp.proquest.com/static_content/vol6iss2/1001-012.rees.pdf.
Daly, HE. Steady-State Economics 2nd edn (Island Press, Washington, 1991).
Roberts, N. Paranoid GOP sees global conspiracy in U.N. and small nonprofit.Care2 [online] (February 7, 2012). www.care2.com/causes/paranoid-gop-sees-global-conspiracy-in-u-n-and-smal....
Tainter, J. The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1988).
Originally published at Solutions Journal
Get The End of Growth http://www.postcarbon.org/eog | Watch the animation Who Killed Economic Growth? http://bit.ly/whokilledgrowth
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.