Public TV Energy Special Disappointing

The special was on last night and my husband and I couldn’t watch it all because of the slant the producers took. Apparently they had no trouble finding energy experts to take the same stance, which I characterize as, “We’ll all be fine and there’s a lot of us smart people working on an energy miracle, so don’t worry.”

From all the reading I’ve done it appears to me that there are far too many of us consuming far too much, depending on declining resource bases and driving our collective bus at top speed toward the cliff of consequences (dangerous climate change, peak oil, food shortages, etc. You pick.)

I have a friend who is sure that the cosmic energy will shift and we’ll all be fine in some altered reality. I have trouble fully accepting that, as I do the technology will save us solution.
I do hope the doomsayers aren’t right. But I think maybe they are. We’ll see. In the meantime it wouldn’t hurt to curtail consuming and procreating and promote living more simply.

Clueless Experts

My husband was recently asked to meet with some visitors from another country about his work in sustainability. He was provided some background about these visitors (their Ph.D., areas of expertise, etc.) and was given the following as one thing they were interested in:  “sustainable resource exploitation”

There is so much wrong with that phrase and what it implies about values and world view that it’s hard to know where to start. Sticking the word sustainable in front of other words doesn’t conjure a magical change – it just muddles the communication and helps make the ‘s’ word useless. The word ‘resource’ is often used to describe almost any part of the earth, as though the whole planet is ours to chop down, dig up, melt, burn, cut, or otherwise shape to our current uses, in an effort to make more and more money. The word exploit implies a two-ended relationship, with benefit only for the exploiter and not to the exploited. I don’t get the sense that one would choose this word if what they meant was “gentle, no-waste, environmentally friendly, non-toxic use.” No, that isn’t exploitation.

Fracking is exploitation, mining, off-shore oil drilling, and clear cutting forests are exploitation. So is monocultural conventional agriculture. So is nuclear power generation. Exploitation leaves behind a destructive footprint that sometimes lasts forever.

So these experts were like a lot of people, ready to pursue the current version of the good life, hanging the word green on their cars, but flying across oceans for vacations, buying the latest fashions, and living large at the expense of the rest of the biosphere.

More from Chuck Burr’s Culturequake

The human population did not reach 1 billion until about 1820; in the less than two centuries since then it has increased sixfold. This is a rate of growth unprecedented in human history.

The exploitation of fossil fuels created so much new carrying capacity, and so quickly, that much of that new capacity could be translated into increased wealth and a higher standard of living for a small but significant portion of the world’s population. Previously, a parasitic increase of the standard of living for a wealthy few kings, nobles, and lords nearly always entailed a lessening of the standard of living of far more numerous serfs and peasants. Now, with power being liberated from fossil fuels, so much energy was available that the standard of living could be improved for large numbers of people, at least to a certain extent. Even though the majority of the world’s population shared but little in this bonanza and continued to be exploited for cheap labor, virtually everyone shared in the expectation of fuel-fed industrialism could eventually be spread to all. This expectation led in turn to a partial relaxation of the class-based tensions that had plagued complex society since their beginnings….

More from Culturequake

There are now somewhere between two and five billion humans alive who probably would not exist but for fossil fuels. Thus, if the availability of these fuels where to decline significantly without our having found effective replacements to maintain all their life sustaining benefits, then the global human carrying capacity would plummet even below its pre-industrial levels. When the flow of fuels begins to diminish, everyone will actually be worse off than they would have been had those fuels never been discovered, because our pre-industrial survival skills will have been lost and there will be an intense competition for food and water among members of the now unsupportable population.

That seems clear.

Seven Billion

This article by Robert Kunzig is part of a series on population. Maybe the series will feel less soft-pedaled than this article did. I guess it didn’t fit my beliefs exactly, but I’m trying to keep an open mind. Basically the conclusion seemed to be that how all 7 billion of us consume is far more important than how many of us there are, and that the growth rate is dropping. Pardon me for not being convinced. Here are my notes on the article.

In 1952 India was the first country to establish a policy for population control. They have set ambitious goals and missed them ‘by a mile,’ leading to the conclusion that India’s population will exceed the population of China (!) by 2030. One in seven people live in slums.

Kunzig provides lots of stats and charts that show various upward pointing graphs and he discusses the physical space required by seven billion people, the food and water needs (supplies already short in some areas) and the expectation of improved lifestyle and rising consumption by the world’s poor. Meanwhile Russia pays women $11,500 to have a second child due to their dropping birthrate.

Kunzig says it’s not too late to change how we all produce and consume energy and prefers that to telling people to have fewer children. I guess that assumes other potential problems don’t blow up first.

 

What a Way to Go: Life at the End of Empire

I just finished watching What a Way to Go, a 2007 documentary written by TSBennett and produced by Sally Erickson. The title gives a good idea of what you’re in for, and I assume if you’re reading this blog you’ve already absorbed some of the bad news lurking in our near future – BUT, this movie gives a long, clear look at most of them (and lists those they skipped over lightly).

A deleted scene (which I’m glad I saw) explained that estimates for global temperature rise now are actually higher than what scientists found happened during the previous mass extinction (during which 95% of all life was wiped out). This has somewhat reduced my plans for writing about gardening in hard times, since the times look like they may be harder than I had imagined – much harder than most people imagine, if this piece of info turns out to be right.

Bless those far-sighted Mayans, eh?

Here are some of my notes on What a Way to Go:

Chinese Proverb: If we don’t change our direction, we’re likely to arrive where we’re headed.

This culture is killing everything and we’re in deep denial about it. The scam of progress…We are less able to provide for ourselves, less able to think for ourselves…

Quote from Woody Allen (paraphrased slightly due to memory glitch): Extinction or utter despair and hopelessness: hope we have the wisdom to choose correctly.

We are headed toward the smackdown at the end of the universe. The dominant culture can’t change – it has to be replaced.

Check out the website at www.whatawaytogomovie.com

For me the ending was too metaphorical to be useful. I’ve already done much of what I know to do and don’t currently see how I – or even a lot of us – will manage to pull down the dominant culture and rebuild with something better in anything like the time we have. We’re all embedded – to some degree – in the system’s economy, laws, corporations, taxes, etc. Our economy is built on growth and even if millions of us found ways to reduce our footprints to the level of the average Banglashi (a suggestion I’ve read), we would then have much more massive failures of  banks, mortgages, businesses, and governments than we do now. Fine. Maybe that’s what needs to happen, but I look at the suffering of people living in their cars and I wonder… The movie suggests building a boat, which may be handy when oceans rise, but that isn’t a very complete solution. Wish I had a better one.

Chris Jordan – Am I the Last to Know?

Over three years ago Seattle artist Chris Jordan was featured on Bill Moyers Journal (see http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/09212007/profile4.html) and I’ve just watched it this week. He’s done remarkable pieces that take us to a new view of the global consumer lifestyle and it isn’t easy to look at – amazing and inspiring though.

The thing is, he’s been featured in the NY Times, Grist, Orion, and a zillion other places and I’ve been really slow to find and appreciate his work. Go look at it. Images of a moment’s use of plastic bags, aluminum cans, or electricity are just a few topics he’s taken on. I think he has found a way to communicate to us how vast our waste and consumption is and I thank him for it.

Check Out Global Warring

Global Warring is a book by Cleo Pascal; in it she leads the reader around the world looking at the probable impacts of climate change, primarily in the areas of economic infrastructure and the political shuffle to come. I’ll write more on this in days to come. Government officials should be reading this!

Living in a Cave?

I love archeology. Maybe I wouldn’t be so keen if I were the one on my knees, patiently brushing the debris from generations of dead peoples homes, but I love what archeologists bring to light.

For instance, a recent PBS show told of a cave in France that is being studied by archeologists and they have found the remains of 40,000 years of continuous occupation. Wow! That’s 2,000 generations in the same cave: ice ages and in between, these people stayed put, not changing the way they lived, and not, apparently, wearing out the local ecosystem. That spells sustainable in a big way, certainly far bigger than anything we oh-so-smart 21^st century humans are likely to attain.

In this public TV program Alan Alda was pursuing the ‘spark’ that made us human, and he dismissed these long-lasting relatives of ours as not having that spark – the inventiveness that causes us to keep changing things. He wanted to find archeological proof of change, to prove when we became “truly human.” He didn’t trip over the part of this search that I did, and that is that our drive to invent has kept us from having the stability and continuity these people had. The land provided for them millennium after millennium (isn’t that extraordinary?), but we destroy soil with agriculture, pollute the air and water, use up forests, and generally foul our nests, forcing repeated migrations. Ten thousand years of ‘civilization’ and we’ve about run out of space, land, water, and food.

We, those of us presumably with the ‘spark,’ don’t know how to stay in one place for 40,000 years. Now that there are nearly 9 billion of us, there isn’t room for us to move on to undisturbed, fertile land.

You might say that the spark that made us human was not just change, but innovation to fuel big time reproduction. We innovated our way into overpopulation, resource exhaustion, species extinction, etc. How great is that spark, Mr. Alda? I think that stodgy crowd in the cave may look pretty smart to us as we start paying the piper for all of our spark-supported growth.

Too bad we didn’t develop some wisdom, self-control, and the ability to live for the long view: acting for the next seven generations, as some Native Americans did.

A Day Without Mexicans

I seem to be reviewing a lot of movies here, and this one was really a surprise. I happened to glance at the title in a library near home – one I don’t usually go to – and was intrigued. It’s filmed as what a friend called a mockumentary, and follows several characters through the disappearance of every Hispanic person in California.

The film never explains how the vanishing happens, but rather follows the personal, economic, and political impact of instantly losing a huge, productive, and often invisible segment of the population. One of the actors asks how a filmmaker can focus on people who are invisible – and the answer is that you take them away. As people try to understand the situation, a politician has a somewhat strained conversion and a journalist faces a secret from her past.

Maybe this format should be done for any number of groups: women, Native Americans, Blacks, under-appreciated workers, and, hey! How about oil? All the oil in (pick a place) disappears, plus all its bi-products. Hmmm.