Sustainability means making sure that the desires of human beings are provided for today without making these desires impossible to fulfil in the future.
here
-- My links -- ed.
Bill Maher:
"... people act like if you say to them, well, you should drive a car that gets better gas mileage, like you're affronting the Bill of Rights. I'm an American and I'll drive whatever I want.
I mean, can you imagine in World War II, when we were saving tin and stuff like that, if somebody said, you know what, I'll use all the damn tin I feel like. I'm an American. This is nonsense that we have to be loyal to our flaws. Yeah, I'm dumb and I don't know much about foreigners and I eat like a pig and I waste a lot of stuff, but that's American. You know, I mean, this silly theory people have that if you do anything differently, "they" (those who use violence to pressure changes in U.S. policies) win. Well, no. If you become less gluttonous, less greedy, less myopic, more savvy about the world in general, they don't win; you win. We all win."
CNN LARRY KING LIVE
Transcript of CNN interview with Larry King
24 MAY 2002
here
Edward Abbey
Quoted here
In the long run there is simply no alternative to an economy based on the use of renewable resources -- the non-renewable resources get used up.
The catch with the oil company "increased demand will create increased exploration and increased supply" advocates and the Bucky Fuller "we will recycle with ever-greater-efficiency" optimists is entropy. You can't win. You can't even break even. And you can't get out of the game.
"the underpopulated countries in Africa are vastly underpolluted; their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles...." —World Bank chief economist, Lawrence Summers
(So quoted. Not knowing anything about Summers,
I'd like to give him the benefit of the doubt.)
"We consume too much when market relationships displace the bonds of community, compassion, culture, and place. We consume too much when consumption becomes an end in itself and makes us lose affection and reverence for the natural world."
a page on this site on / Addiction /
1. A natural capital depiction tax aimed at reducing or eliminating the destruction of natural capital....
2. The precautionary polluter pays principle (4P) would be applied to potentially damaging products to incorporate the cost of the uncertainty about ecological damages as well as the cost of known damages. ...
-- David Friedman has a great response to this concept in his generally great introduction to anarcho-capitalist libertarianism,
The Machinery of Freedom: A Guide to Radical Capitalism. Page 169:"I take off from an airport in a private plane with a cruising radius of a thousand miles. There is some (small) probability that my instruments will fail, or I will fall asleep .... There is some probability that the plane, having gone off course, will crash ....
It follows that by taking off I impose some (small) probability of death and destruction on everyone through whose roof I might crash. "
3. A system of ecological tariffs aimed at allowing individual countries or trading blocks to apply 1 and 2 above without forcing producers to move overseas in order to remain competitive. ...
"...if we get to sustainability, one aspect of that utopia will be people spending a lot more time as kind of high tech nomads. Or people doing a combination of innovative agriculture and hunting and gathering, or almost migrant agricultural workers, except that you own the land..."
"The following statistics are a 1991 comparison of the United States with Northern Europe, Japan and Canada. The comparison is especially revealing because all these nations are more liberal and democratic than we are. Their voter turn-outs are 50 percent higher; their corporate lobbying systems are much less developed; their taxes are higher, their safety nets larger, their societies more equal, their labor unions stronger.
And what may depress many conservatives is that these nations beat us on statistic after statistic after statistic."
"The absurdities of using the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as a measure of national economic well-being has prompted alternative economic think tanks in eight countries around the world (including the USA, UK, Germany and Sweden) to develop an Index of Sustainable Economic Welfare, also known as the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI). Now, the Australia Institute, a think tank based in Canberra, has created a GPI for Australia.
It seems to me that modern civilization produces an enormous amount of trivial goods and services, but I'd be more concerned about the inverse of this -- "Regardless of the utility of the things we produce, some economic forces act to increase production costs".
-- and a way of defining " useful" I'd advocate
"As a measure of economic health, the GDP is badly flawed. First by counting only monetary transactions as economic activity, the GDP omits much of what people value and activities that serve basic needs. For example, it doesn't count free services, such as community volunteer work or caring for children or elderly parents in the home--services that would show up in the GDP if they were paid for. It also ignores the value of leisure time spent in recreation, relaxation, or with family and friends. The GDP omits crucial contributions of the environment, such as pure air and water, moderate climate, and protection from the sun's harmful rays, even though these services, which the earth provides for free, become expensive if they need to be bought instead. It is appropriate that an economic indicator include such measures, because common sense and history tell us that the economy is a tool to address needs and enhance well-being, not an end in itself.
More significantly, the GDP fails to distinguish between monetary transactions that genuinely add to well-being and those that diminish it, try to maintain the status quo, or make up for degraded conditions. Much that contributes to economic growth is perceived by most people as losses rather than gains: fixing blunders from the past, borrowing from the future, and shifting activities from the unpaid household or community sector to the monetized economy. For example, the GDP treats crime, divorce, legal fees, and other signs of social breakdown as economic gains. Car wrecks, medical costs, locks and security systems, and insurance are also pluses to the GDP.
Further, the GDP ignores the environmental costs of economic activities. It takes no account of the depletion of natural resources used to produce goods and services: For example, the harvesting of ancient redwood trees adds the market value of the wood to the GDP. The GDP counts pollution as a double gain to the economy: The production of oil that creates pollution adds to the GDP; then the clean-up of toxic waste sites or the Exxon Valdez oil spill ups the GDP even more. In treating the depletion or degradation of our natural resources as income rather than depreciation of an asset, the GDP violates both basic accounting principles and common sense.
To the GDP, every transaction is positive as long as money changes hands. No wonder the GDP rises continuously, adding everything as a gain, making no distinction between costs and benefits, well-being or decline. And no wonder that, while media and politicians crow about economic growth, many Americans feel strangely ambivalent or left out.
To address the inadequacies of the GDP as a guide for public policy, the Genuine Progress Indicator was developed in 1994 by Redefining Progress, a nonprofit, nonpartisan public policy institute designed to stimulate public discourse on the type of future that Americans desire and how to achieve it."
"British Environment Minister Michael Meacher called on Tuesday for a radical rethink of farming practices once the authorities succeed in controlling the wildfire foot-and-mouth epidemic. ... Meacher told a news conference "We need a fundamental rethink of what we expect farming to produce. It will certainly be more localized, it will be less internationalized, less dependent on chemicals and fertilizers... more organic."
"after the crash, there will be fewer resources, fewer products, less advertising... and fewer designers. there will be no more sumptuous coffee table annuals, no more mass-mailings on creamy paper inviting members to attend gala events in distant cities. phone messages will be left unanswered, email unreturned, websites unsurfed. there will be less paper and more trees, fewer cars and more walkers, less airtime and more air. people will feel less assaulted by images and products and more attentive to the spaces between them. and they will begin to call these undesigned spaces "nature."
Whoah!! Pulling no punches!!
"Founded by Jay Lehman in 1955 to serve the local Amish and others without electricity, Lehman's ships old-fashioned, high-quality merchandise all over the world.Full of products for practical low-tech, low-impact living. Highly recommended. This is for the people who are not only already living a low-impact sustainable lifestyle today -- but have been doing so for hundreds of years.
Jay's vision was to preserve the past for future generations. 'I was concerned that some day the Amish would not be able to maintain their simple ways of life because these products would no longer be available', he said. His goal was, and still is, to provide authentic, historical products to those seeking a simpler life."
"In 1900, there were only a few thousand cars in the world. Today there are over 500 million. From a few thousand barrels of oil per day in 1900, we have increased our appetite for oil to 72 million barrels per day in 1997. Human population has increased exponentially, from 350 million at the turn of the last millennium, to 1.6 billion at the turn of the 20th century, to almost 6 billion today. And just about every single one of them wants a car.
If the world follows the Western model of one car for every two people, we will have 5 billion cars by the mid-21st century, boosting our fuel consumption to one trillion barrels per year. Ironically one trillion barrels is the current estimate of the total amount of oil remaining to be extracted from the Earth. No one really expects oil to be around by 2050. 80% of the oil produced today comes from fields discovered before 1973, and the U.S. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment estimates that all known oil reserves will dry up by 2037."
"You cannot buy a base Cobalt XFE (Xtra Fuel Economy) LS model with power windows and locks. Perhaps this is a sign of our austere times. ...
Hand-cranking the windows on the 2009 Chevrolet Cobalt XFE, which gets a very impressive 37 miles per gallon on the highway and 26 m.p.g. in town, I exercised muscles I’d forgotten I owned. (Um, pathetically out of shape much?) (I actually don't think that that was a cheap shot under the circumstances, but in the interest of fairness I Googled for a photo of author Motavalli and no, he's actually slim and trim. However, as for the U.S. population on average...)
In 2006, the American International Automobile Dealers Association predicted that buyer expectations would result in the total demise of the hand-cranked car window, but now this distant cousin to the butter churn appears to be making a comeback. A steep learning curve may be necessary to relearn this once-basic skill." (Okay, yes, this is rhetorical humor, but humor only works when it has some actual point of convergence with the real world.)
