Rachael this accounting view of responses to injuries created by past and present human activity suggests that nothing but a contraction of human activities below natural regeneration rates will pay back the debt accrued. This is maybe the most important thread you have produced. Jack Alpert www.skil.org
I agree with so much here and in the episode - but am also conflicted over a few things.
Dumping the idea of "Conservation" and reserves. While I love National Parks etc, did you know they suck at maintaining their biodiversity? They're just too big for biologists and park rangers to 'police' effectively. Australia has a horrible history of species extinction etc because of all our feral cats and dogs and pigs and camels etc running amok in our ecosystems, wiping stuff out. National Parks don't fix that. NGO's are having better outcomes - and it is precisely BECAUSE they fence off an area, remove all the feral species, set up the right ecosystem in there, and create the right conditions for the threatened species to grow.
If everything is "nature" - nothing is. If 'everything is rewilding' - what does that actually mean? Good intentions and a 'paradigm shift' and having 'appreciate nature' classes more do not save various species from going extinct. While I love National Parks and WANT Wilson's 50% of nature protected - I have to admit that we have already let loose pollutants, predators, pests (both fauna and flora) etc and basically messed up the global ecosystem. It's too late. We are already on "Spaceship Earth" and wishing we were not is not going to fix the situation. We now have a globally artificial ecosystem - and pretending we can just rewild it will ENSURE various species go extinct. Read the link above.
Another case in point - New Urbanism teaches that we need our towns to be MORE like cities, and could house the same number of people on 10% of the land with fantastic parks and walkable communities and access to nature just a short train ride away. But thinking we're going to mix the functions of the town and country together is how we got traffic dependent suburbia - so spread out that many public transport systems are not really that economically viable. With nearly 10 billion of us by 2050 - we're going to need more New Urbanism. It's going to be a very HUMAN space. Pretending it isn't may just miss the point!
So much more to say - but I have to sleep on it. A very thought provoking conversation - it's making me work hard!
Thank you for this clear-eyed accounting. On my hopeful days, I can see that more people are awakening to the necessity of restoration in all areas - our relationship with the natural world, with each other, and with ourselves. I agree with you that “Policies designed around accountability” are necessary. Given the hyper-individualism and dysfunctional that (mostly) infects our politics, how do you see this happening? I’m always interested in local restorative examples, as proof of concept.
Weaning off fossil fuels was impossible before today.
(Unless very nation did what the French did with the Mesmer plan and basically nationalised a MASSIVE national build out of Gen 2 reactors. They had a nation-wide production line and were building 15 standardised reactors a year at one point!)
But wind and solar were just too expensive back then. It was NOT just a matter of a lack of imagination - but an inability to feed people without fossil fuels. In a sense we eat fossil fuels - because every calorie of that dirty hamburger we might have had on the weekend took 10 calories of gas and coal energy to grow it. It's the Haber-Bosch process that suck the nitrogen out of the air. The fertilisers take that much energy to create and mine and ship around the planet.
Basically - if we had weaned off fossil fuels too fast back in the 1990's - billions may have starved. (There were lost opportunities to explore better Ecocity and New Urban design - but that only lowers transport fuels.)
Climatologist Johan Rockstrom is famous for recently publishing data that concludes we CANNOT push the climate past 1.5 degrees. He’s also appeared on David Attenborough’s “Breaking Boundaries” series all about how many planetary boundaries we are close to breaking. He writes for “Earth4All” - a sister organisation to the Club of Rome. But ultimately - even though we seem to have left it a long time to deal with climate change - he explains why. The Montreal Protocol is the famous time the world came together and just banned CFC’s because of the threat to the Ozone layer. Within a few years of discovering the threat, the job was done! But the difference with climate change is that CFC’s had an easy and affordable alternative. There were no cheap and politically easy alternatives to fossil fuels. But after decades of scaling now wind and solar are super-powers of energy, doubling every 5 years. Johan says we are at our climate “Montreal Moment.” https://youtu.be/7KfWGAjJAsM?t=1191
The "accounting" problem, such as carbon offsets are driven by corporations' relentless profit seeking in order to "goose" stock prices so their upper management can take home even bigger gains in their stock option plans. As you point out, this "accounting" problem simply pushes the cost of this profit seeking onto society (externalities) in general in terms of climate degradation, increased amounts of trash and overflowing landfills, air pollution, lower product quality (which requires more frequent purchases of all types of products, including durables), product obsolescence, more plastics in the environment, more usage of fossil fuels. Not to mention higher educational costs, higher health care costs (especially with pharmaceuticals), the ever-increasing size of cars and trucks which makes driving and walking more dangerous. I could probably come up with hundreds of more examples of the externalities of the relentless profit seeking if I thought about it even longer. I believe that ultimately consumers in developed countries will have to reduce their overall consumption levels in order to materially reduce the externalities listed above.
Rachael this accounting view of responses to injuries created by past and present human activity suggests that nothing but a contraction of human activities below natural regeneration rates will pay back the debt accrued. This is maybe the most important thread you have produced. Jack Alpert www.skil.org
I agree with so much here and in the episode - but am also conflicted over a few things.
Dumping the idea of "Conservation" and reserves. While I love National Parks etc, did you know they suck at maintaining their biodiversity? They're just too big for biologists and park rangers to 'police' effectively. Australia has a horrible history of species extinction etc because of all our feral cats and dogs and pigs and camels etc running amok in our ecosystems, wiping stuff out. National Parks don't fix that. NGO's are having better outcomes - and it is precisely BECAUSE they fence off an area, remove all the feral species, set up the right ecosystem in there, and create the right conditions for the threatened species to grow.
https://theconversation.com/the-new-major-players-in-conservation-ngos-thrive-while-national-parks-struggle-199880
If everything is "nature" - nothing is. If 'everything is rewilding' - what does that actually mean? Good intentions and a 'paradigm shift' and having 'appreciate nature' classes more do not save various species from going extinct. While I love National Parks and WANT Wilson's 50% of nature protected - I have to admit that we have already let loose pollutants, predators, pests (both fauna and flora) etc and basically messed up the global ecosystem. It's too late. We are already on "Spaceship Earth" and wishing we were not is not going to fix the situation. We now have a globally artificial ecosystem - and pretending we can just rewild it will ENSURE various species go extinct. Read the link above.
Another case in point - New Urbanism teaches that we need our towns to be MORE like cities, and could house the same number of people on 10% of the land with fantastic parks and walkable communities and access to nature just a short train ride away. But thinking we're going to mix the functions of the town and country together is how we got traffic dependent suburbia - so spread out that many public transport systems are not really that economically viable. With nearly 10 billion of us by 2050 - we're going to need more New Urbanism. It's going to be a very HUMAN space. Pretending it isn't may just miss the point!
So much more to say - but I have to sleep on it. A very thought provoking conversation - it's making me work hard!
Thank you for this clear-eyed accounting. On my hopeful days, I can see that more people are awakening to the necessity of restoration in all areas - our relationship with the natural world, with each other, and with ourselves. I agree with you that “Policies designed around accountability” are necessary. Given the hyper-individualism and dysfunctional that (mostly) infects our politics, how do you see this happening? I’m always interested in local restorative examples, as proof of concept.
Weaning off fossil fuels was impossible before today.
(Unless very nation did what the French did with the Mesmer plan and basically nationalised a MASSIVE national build out of Gen 2 reactors. They had a nation-wide production line and were building 15 standardised reactors a year at one point!)
But wind and solar were just too expensive back then. It was NOT just a matter of a lack of imagination - but an inability to feed people without fossil fuels. In a sense we eat fossil fuels - because every calorie of that dirty hamburger we might have had on the weekend took 10 calories of gas and coal energy to grow it. It's the Haber-Bosch process that suck the nitrogen out of the air. The fertilisers take that much energy to create and mine and ship around the planet.
Basically - if we had weaned off fossil fuels too fast back in the 1990's - billions may have starved. (There were lost opportunities to explore better Ecocity and New Urban design - but that only lowers transport fuels.)
Climatologist Johan Rockstrom is famous for recently publishing data that concludes we CANNOT push the climate past 1.5 degrees. He’s also appeared on David Attenborough’s “Breaking Boundaries” series all about how many planetary boundaries we are close to breaking. He writes for “Earth4All” - a sister organisation to the Club of Rome. But ultimately - even though we seem to have left it a long time to deal with climate change - he explains why. The Montreal Protocol is the famous time the world came together and just banned CFC’s because of the threat to the Ozone layer. Within a few years of discovering the threat, the job was done! But the difference with climate change is that CFC’s had an easy and affordable alternative. There were no cheap and politically easy alternatives to fossil fuels. But after decades of scaling now wind and solar are super-powers of energy, doubling every 5 years. Johan says we are at our climate “Montreal Moment.” https://youtu.be/7KfWGAjJAsM?t=1191
The "accounting" problem, such as carbon offsets are driven by corporations' relentless profit seeking in order to "goose" stock prices so their upper management can take home even bigger gains in their stock option plans. As you point out, this "accounting" problem simply pushes the cost of this profit seeking onto society (externalities) in general in terms of climate degradation, increased amounts of trash and overflowing landfills, air pollution, lower product quality (which requires more frequent purchases of all types of products, including durables), product obsolescence, more plastics in the environment, more usage of fossil fuels. Not to mention higher educational costs, higher health care costs (especially with pharmaceuticals), the ever-increasing size of cars and trucks which makes driving and walking more dangerous. I could probably come up with hundreds of more examples of the externalities of the relentless profit seeking if I thought about it even longer. I believe that ultimately consumers in developed countries will have to reduce their overall consumption levels in order to materially reduce the externalities listed above.
How NGOs even get access to UN business and the effects of their compromises, is illustrated by this scenario of trying to raise a pressing topic with the UN Committee on Human Rights in Geneva - https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2024/03/assange-truth-and-un-shenanigans/