(Un)Sustainability and Eco-Footprints or ‘ Re-Writing Our Cultural Narrative’

1. (Un)Sustainability and Eco-Footprintsor ‘Re-Writing Our Cultural Narrative’ William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC Mountain Sky Guest RanchEmigrant, Montana 9 October 2008

2. Starting Premise: H. sapiens is inherently biased against sustainability(Remember Malthus?) • ‘Unsustainability’ is an inevitable emergent property of the systemic interaction between techno-industrial society, as presently conceived, and the ecosphere. • Unconscious predispositions (‘genetic presets’) leading to unsustainability are evident in human behavioural ecology. • This biological predisposition is currently being reinforced by cultural factors (meme complexes).

3. The Universal Biological Driver • Unless or until constrained by negative feedback, all species populations tend to: • expand to fill all the ecological space accessible to them and • use all available resources (in the case of humans, to the limits of contemporary technology).

4. H. sapiens is no exception • Humans have the greatest geographical range among ecologically similar vertebrates. • “Although there is considerable variation in detail, there is remarkable consistency in the history of resource exploitation: resources are inevitably overexploited, often to the point of collapse or extinction” (Ludwig, Hilborn and Walters 1993).

5. A Fisheries Example:Canada’s Shame

6. Humans: The Outlier Species(from C. Fowler and L. Hobbs. 2003. Is humanity sustainable? Proc. Royal Soc. London)

7. The (bio)socio-cultural Factor: Humans need shared stories, ‘cultural narratives’ and myths • Myth-making is a universal property of human societies and plays a vital role in every cultureincluding our own. • Myths should be seen “…not as mistaken views but as comprehensive visions that give shape and direction to life” (Grant 1998, Myths We Live By).

8. Cartesian DualismToday’s dominant cultural myth sees economy and ‘environment’ as all but separate systems.

9. The Expansionist Myth(weak sustainability through techno-substitution) • “If it is very easy to substitute other factors for natural resources, then… the world can, in effect, get along without natural resources, so exhaustion is just an event, not a catastrophe” (R. Solow 1973). • “Technology exists now to produce in virtually inexhaustible quantities just about all the products made by nature…”, and: “We have in our hands now… the technology to feed, clothe, and supply energy to an ever-growing population for the next seven billion years…” (J. Simon 1995).

10. The modern myth—continuous growth with no ecological problems! According toLawrence Summersthen Chief Economist, World Bank (1991) “There are no... limits to the carrying capacity of the earth that are likely to bind any time in the foreseeable future… The idea that we should put limits on growth because of some natural limit, is a profound error [with] staggering social costs.”

11. Deep Denial in the Face of Contrary Data • “The masses have never thirsted after truth. They turn aside from evidence that is not to their taste… Whoever can supply them with illusions is easily their master; whoever attempts to destroy their illusions is always their victim.” Gustave le Bon (1896). • “For us to maintain our way of living, we must… tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves… [the lies] are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities” (D. Jensen 2000).

12. The Cognitive Mechanism During individual development, sensory experiences and cultural norms literally shape the human brain’s synaptic circuitry in patterns that reflect and embed those experiences. Subsequently,people seek out compatible experiences and, “when faced with information that does not agree with their [preformed] internal structures, they deny, discredit, reinterpret or forget that information”(Wexler, 2006).

13. Lakoff on The Human Capacity for Self-Delusion • A “fundamental finding of cognitive science is that people think in terms of frames and metaphors, conceptual structures [cultural memes]. The frames are the synapses in our brains, physically present in the form of a neural circuitry. And when the facts don’t fit the frames, the frames are kept and the facts ignored”(George Lakoff).

14. Cause and Effect: An Anomalous Period of Geometric GrowthDuring the 20th Century: Population quadrupled to 6.3 billion Energy use increased 16-fold Industrial production grew 40-fold Water use increased 9 times Fish catches rose by a factor of 35 Carbon Dioxide emissions increased by a factor of 17 Sulphur emissions increased 13-fold Other air pollutants rose by a factor of 5 Tropical deforestation and desertification accelerated (etc.)

15. Estimated Human Population over the Past Two Millennia (Cohen 1995) 2008 Population: 6.7 billion In the 19th Century, fossil fuels took the lid off population and economic growth. Continuous growth—population and economic—is an anomaly. The growth spurt that recent generations take to be normal is the single most abnormal period of human history.

16. Alternative Vision: Ecological Holism

17. The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Nested Dissipative Structures In ‘second law’ terms, both the ecosphere and the economy are ‘self-producing, far-from-equilibrium dissipative structures. However, the economy is a wholly-contained subsystem of the ecosphere. • The ecosphere evolves and maintains itself by dissipating exogenous solar energy. • The economy grows and maintains itself by dissipating the ecosphere. In short,… • The human enterprise is thermodynamically positioned to consume the ecosphere from the inside out. (This is almost a sufficient physical explanation for the depletion and pollution of the planet by the growth-based human enterprise.)

18. Revisiting Human Carrying Capacity Traditional ‘carrying capacity’ asks how large a population could be supported in a given area without permanently damaging the relevant local productive ecosystems. ‘Eco-footprinting’ asks how large an area (land and water ecosystems) is required to support a specified human population wherever on Earth the relevant land/water is located.

19. The Human Ecological Footprint The ‘ecological footprint’ of a specifiedpopulation is the area of land and water ecosystems required to produce the resources that the population consumes, and to assimilate the wastes that the population produces, wherever on Earth the relevant land/water may be located. Eco-footprints are exclusive areas—people compete for Earth’s limited biocapacity.

20. Thermodynamic Interpretation • A population’s eco-footprint is the area of ecosystems (bio-solar collector) required to generate the photosynthetic equivalent of the contemporary and fossil exergy that must be dissipated continuously to sustain that population.

21. Population E-Fs are Based on Consumption Eco-footprint calculations for a specified population are based on final demand for goods and services(consumption). Consumption data should be trade-corrected. Thus the population’s consumption of wheat can be represented as follows: consumptionwheat = production wheat + imports wheat exports wheat

22. Eco-Footprints Vary with Income Average EFs/capita in high-income countries range between four and ten hectares (10 to 25 acres). The poorest people live on a third of a hectare.

24. Ecological Deficits: A Problem of Excessive Economic Scale Many high-income regions and even entire countries ecologically ‘occupy’ a land-base scattered all over the planet that is much larger than their domestic territories. Such countries are running an ‘ecological deficit’ with other countries and the global commons. The total human eco-footprint is in deficit with the ecosphere.

25. All countries that run eco-deficitsare dependent on ‘surplus’ biocapacity (exergy) imported from low density countries (like Canada) and the global commons.

27. Missing: Four Phantom Planets If today’s entire world population enjoyed the same consumer lifestyles as residents of North America, it would take four additional Earth-like planets to accommodate everyone sustainably! Problem: “Good planets are hard to find.”

28. Competitive Exclusion Principle: Humans vs Other Species, Rich vs Poor • Current rate of biodiversity loss is approximately 1000 times the pre-industrial rate. • With increasing resource scarcity and global change, the rich are also increasingly excluding the poor.

29. Competitive Exclusion: The expansion of the human enterprise… Human Ecological Footprint1961-2003

30. …necessarily depletes nature. (Vulnerable ecosystems collapse before the human onslaught.) Living Planet Index1970-2003

31. Ecological Inequity and Food Most of the world’s nearly 200 nations are partially dependent on food imports. Even some very wealthy countries such as the Netherlands and the UK have food eco-footprints several times larger than their domestic cropland area. Historically, just five countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, France and Argentina—have accounted for 80% of cereal exports and most of the safety net in global food markets. Is there any real possibility of extending a high quality diet to the entire human family given prevailing trends?

33. On the Entanglement of Nations • Trade theory assumes that: • efficiency (gained through specialization and the exploitation of ‘comparative advantage’) is society’s over-riding socio-economic goal. • both parties invariably benefit from exchange. • both ecological and geopolitical stability are assured. • None of these assumptions apply in today’s world.. • For example, hundreds of millions of people have become dependent on food imports from ‘elsewhere and are increasingly at risk from global change. Meanwhile: • They receive no feedback on the current state of the ecosystems that support them and have no management control over those ecosystems.

34. Example: The Increasing share of Canadian agriculture going to exports

35. s

37. Even the US is becoming a significant land importer Average over study period = 133,956,200 ha; an area of land equivalent to the area of Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United Kingdom combined.

38. Questions re: Globalization of Food(Is the increasing entanglement of nations always wise?) • Given accelerating global ecological (including climate) change, widespread landscape and soils mis-management, incipient resource scarcity (e.g., petroleum, phosphates) and potential geopolitical chaos : • does it make sense for countries to undervalue their own agriculture and increase their dependence on potentially unreliable distant food sources? • does it make sense for countries to commit an increasing share of domestic agricultural biocapacity (that may be needed locally in the future) to supplying foreign markets? • is there not a strengthening argument for enhanced local/national food security and self-reliance (i.e., for a ‘modular’ approach to global development.)

39. The Really “Inconvenient Truth” “Industrialized world reductions in material consumption, 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.” (BCSD 1993; ‘Getting Eco-Efficient’) For sustainability with equity North Americans should be taking steps to reduce our ecological footprints by at least 80% to our equitable Earth-share (1.8 gha) (Rees 2006).

40. It shouldn’t be painful: There is little gain from continued GDP growth in rich countries (Siegel 2006)

41. The Good News The Bad News “The ecologically necessary is politically infeasible but the politically feasible is ecologically irrelevant.” We have the technology today to enable a 75%-80% reduction in energy and (some) material consumption while actually improving quality of life. Yet we do not act. Privileged elites with the greatest stake in the status quo control the policy levers. Ordinary people hold to the expansionist myth. Society remains in eco-paralysis.