Ecological Economics

'The Story of Stuff'

Tired of being told to "go shopping" whenever a national or international crisis occurs?

Tired of hearing that "recycling" will save us?
  Note: Recycling is a very good idea, just "not enough."

Want to know how our so-called Consumer Society was manufactured?

Want to know why the linear "produce, manufacture, CONSUME" model is so deeply flawed?

Ever wonder how stuff can be so damned cheap? And wonder who is really paying "the freight"?

Want to know more about the pathway to sustainability?

Then you'll be glad to see/hear how Annie Leonard exposes the dark underbelly of our Consumer Society in a little 20 minute educational video titled The Story of Stuff.

Here is a trailer:

More at storyofstuff.com.

PS.. If I'm the last person on the block (the Planet?) to hear about The Story of Stuff—having heard about it over coffee just yesterday—chalk it up to the fact that I'm an old, retired economist living in Utah, just a small step on the far side of nowhere. But damned good scenery!

Predatory Oligarchy

Hervé Kemph is a French environmental journalist and a student of global capitalism. His book, How the Rich are Destroying the Planet has caused a bit of a stir thus far, and will likely have more impact once translated into English. Some will call Kemph's writing just another extremist environmental rant. Others, like me, will welcome it as an opportunity to examine ourselves and our culture. We will no doubt be hearing more about Kemph as time goes by. In the meantime, we have a couple of Truthout.org articles to draw from. In part:

The Rich Stand Accused, Louis-Rilles Francoeur, Le Devoir, (via Truthout.org, 01/07/07): …"We cannot understand the simultaneity of the ecological and social crises if we do not analyze them as two facets of the same disaster. This disaster derives from a system piloted by a dominant social stratum that today has no drive but greed, no ideal but conservatism, no dream but technology. This predatory oligarchy is the principal agent of the global crisis," writes Kempf. "The present form of capitalism," he adds in an interview, "has lost its former historic ends, that is to say the creation of wealth and innovation, because it has become a financial capitalism, disparaged even by capitalist economists. This capitalism, which destroys jobs by rationalizations, new technologies and globalizations, overall and everywhere increases the disparities between rich and poor within each country and between different countries," the journalist observes.

…This oligarchy he targets is not satisfied with blindly consuming and wasting the planet's material resources with its big cars, its airplane trips, its unbridled consumption of living products, its uselessly vast houses, its unrestrained energy wastage. It has also, adds Hervé Kempf, spawned a model of hyper-consumption that the lower and especially the middle classes now attempt to imitate, just as developing countries try to imitate Western countries - even though, whether instinctively or rationally, everyone clearly knows that "this ideology of waste" and its drain on planetary resources will inevitably come to an abrupt end. …

… Although he does not address the impact of unchecked [human population growth] on the decline of the planet's "biological services" in his essay, Hervé Kempf immediately acknowledges that this factor certainly has an impact that is greater overall than any hyper-consumption by this oligarchy, composed of several hundred thousand millionaires and billionaires who control the bulk of income and of financial capital. However, he explains, it's this oligarchy that creates an unsustainable model for the planet, the indirect impact of which on other social groups exceeds its direct consumption. "And," he says dryly, "not all humans have the same impact on the planet at birth: a Westerner carries more weight in the planet's fate than a baby from Niger or from India."

It's to put an end to this ostentatious consumption that he advocates radical control of wealth through "a ceiling on maximum salaries and on the accumulation of wealth," a sort of matching piece for the minimum wage, but on the upper side.

"Everyone," Kempf comments, "knows that China will never be able to reach a level of consumption per inhabitant comparable to that of the Americans, with two cars per family, three televisions, four computers and cell phones, a house three times too big for its inhabitants, which generates energy consumption that would be sufficient to the needs of ten, even twenty people on other continents." The environmental chronicler proposes that a reduction of its consumption be imposed on this oligarchy that has globalized poverty, so that it no longer feeds this unsustainable dream, which numbs the critical faculties of the entire planet to the point that it closes its eyes to the wall into which it is careening full speed ahead. …

… [K]nown for his rigor and level-headedness, [Kempf] nevertheless concludes: "It is still necessary for ecological concerns to be based on a radical political analysis of present relationships of domination. We will not be able to reduce global material consumption if the powerful are not brought down and if inequality is not combated. To the ecological principle so useful at the dawning of awareness - "Think globally, act locally" - we must add the principle that the present situation imposes: "Consume less, share better."

Ecologists, he adds, have not often conducted an inquiry into the "ecological misery" that parks the poor next to industrial neighborhoods, polluted and at risk, next to highways or noisy activities, in the most insalubrious houses and in sectors generally the least well-served by public services, including public transportation. It is wrong, he says, to act as though the economic system must grow more to bring these people out of poverty or to allow more poor people to attain greater wealth. The economic system works in the other direction, by monopolizing wealth and power at the expense of those who have the least, and of the middle classes that dream - ever more vainly - of hoisting themselves into the cocoon of the present financial oligarchy, Kempf maintains.

That's why, he says, we must "bring down the rich" rather than pull up the poor, in order to begin to respect the thresholds of irreversible deterioration of the planet's resources.

He takes aim, moreover, at the concept of sustainable development and the alibi it now constitutes for governments and companies that use it to justify other drains on resources in the name of this new rationale that is supposedly harmless for the planet. Sustainable development, he writes, has become "a semantic weapon to remove the dirty word, 'ecology.' Moreover, is there any need to still develop France, Germany, or the United States? The concept has meaning, he concluded in an interview yesterday, but only in developing countries, because it can help them to avoid a development as brutal and lawless as the one we have effected in the West. But in the West, he says, the first of our environmental responsibilities "consists of reducing our consumption of material goods" to attain a level of well-being based rather on values, knowledge, in sum on immaterial, but nonetheless very real, riches.

See also: How the Rich Are Destroying the Planet: A Review by Leslie Thatcher, Truthout.org, 03/15/07Cross-posted at Economic Dreams - Nightmares

Global Climate Change Fixes Prove Politically Vexing

(via Naked Capitalism, Yves Smith, 4/18/07)

Gideon Rachman, in "Climate change is not a global crisis — that is the problem," works through the implications of the fact that global warming will create winners and losers. He discusses first order effects – the benefits of warmer weather in Russia, and higher sea levels for Asia — and some second order effects, such as mass migration and increased instability.

It is disheartening as it is to consider that the asymmetrical impact of global warming will lower the sense of urgency and shared sacrifice, particularly since I suspect the impact of climate change could well be worse than is now envisaged. The second IPCC report was negotiated, and China called for some of the findings to be watered down. Moreover, while the report did contemplate the effects of changed weather upon agriculture, it did not consider the effect on other creatures. We are already in the midst of one of the greatest loss of species in planetary history, and at a certain point, the entire ecosystem become precarious. And on a mundane level, I am also not certain enough allowance has been made for the impact of unstable weather patterns on the grain belts, and the resulting lower yield and increased cost of staples.

From Rachman:

Here is another inconvenient truth. Global warming is good news for parts of the world. This is truly awkward. A "planetary emergency" that affected everyone equally would be much easier to tackle. However, climate change that hurts some places but helps others opens the way for dangerous political conflicts.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, issued this month, confirms that global warming puts large parts of the world at risk from the biblical woes of famine, flood and disease. The places most at risk are those that are already poor — sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia.

But in northern Europe, agriculture will become more productive and the climate will improve. From a parochial British point of view, the latest IPCC report sounds like good news. It has taken off the table the single most threatening scenario — the paradoxical threat that "global warming" was going to make Britain much colder by shutting down the Gulf Stream, the ocean current that gives the UK a much warmer climate than its latitude implies. The latest thinking from IPCC scientists is that this is very unlikely to happen during the next century.

Global warming offers a positive bonanza for Russia. The legendary Russian winter gets more tolerable. As the permafrost retreats in Siberia new mineral resources are revealed — and huge new areas become available for settlement and cultivation.

In an irony that will infuriate environmentalists, oil companies are also likely to benefit from global warming. The US Geological Survey estimates that 25 per cent of the world’s known oil and gas reserves are in the Arctic Circle. As the ice melts, they become easier to exploit.

As a new paper in Environment and Urbanization, an academic journal, makes clear, three-quarters of the 634m people deemed to be most at risk from rising sea levels connected to global warming live in Asia.

Coastal cities in the developed world, such as New York and Los Angeles, may be at risk. But wealthy countries are best placed to adapt to the problem. Certainly the Dutch, who have long experience of keeping the sea at bay, are not panicking. They are simply planning to spend billions more on flood defences.

Of course, even countries that may benefit directly from global warming could suffer indirectly — as other parts of the world descend into chaos. Britain is not an island (well, technically, Britain is an island — but you know what I mean). Dealing with refugees and desperate immigrants will only get harder as life becomes tougher in Africa and the Asian subcontinent.

In fact, it is now dawning on the world's politicians that global warming could transform international relations — introducing a range of new issues and conflicts.

The most obvious problems are struggles over refugees and resources. Some argue that the Darfur conflict is partially caused by global warming, as settled farmers and nomadic herders fight over failing land. This sort of conflict could proliferate in the future.

Last month, a conference arranged by the US Army War College heard that: "Within a century, extreme drought will affect 30 per cent of the world, up from 3 per cent today."

Water shortages are a particular threat. They have long been an underlying source of conflict in the Middle East. But as India and China run short of water, their neighbours are worried that struggles may arise over the diversion of rivers and the building of dams.

The idea that the Chinese are oblivious to the threat of global warming is untrue, as I discovered on a recent trip to Beijing. Officials were openly concerned that the Yangtze and Yellow rivers were at their lowest levels for years. Much of the problem is to do with irrigation and industrial use. But the Chinese believe that global warming is also contributing to water shortages because of its effect on rainfall and the glaciers that feed into Chinese rivers.

The government in Beijing faces a dilemma. Terrified of social unrest, it is reluctant to do anything that might slow economic growth — such as stopping the building of coal-fired power stations. Yet, water shortages are already causing social unrest in the countryside and the water table is falling fast in Beijing. One western analyst based in China speculates that the next political upheaval there could come "when people in Beijing turn on their taps in 2009 and find there is no water coming out".

Global warming will not just provoke conflicts over scarcity. It may also cause struggles over the emergence of new resources — in particular, the oil and gas that lies underneath the Arctic. Outstanding territorial disputes between Canada and the US, between Russia and Norway, and between Denmark and Russia have taken on a new urgency in recent years, as these countries develop a new interest in hitherto unpromising stretches of ice.

Struggles over territory and borders are, at least, familiar ground for politicians and diplomats. But the new diplomatic world will increasingly be dominated by debates over the environment and international regimes for combating climate change.

The argument over global warming could quickly turn into the latest and bitterest struggle between the traditional industrialised countries and the developing world.

Any successor to the Bush administration is likely to be much more concerned about global action on climate change. And in 2009, just as a new administration settles down in Washington, China is likely to surpass the US as the world’s leading source of carbon dioxide emissions.

Although rich northern countries are best placed to cope with global warming, domestic public opinion means they are also likely to be the countries pushing hardest for new international regulations to tackle carbon dioxide emissions. In the US and Europe, climate change is becoming a new issue to berate China about — merging with protectionist concerns about exports from Chinese companies that practise "environmental dumping".

But the Chinese will not lack allies in any struggle over who bears the costs of global warming. The Russians — with an economy based on fossil fuels, and a society that benefits from a warmer climate — may well stand with them. So could India and much of the developing world. Global warming presents a formidable environmental and scientific challenge. The political consequences may prove just as vexing.

IPCC and the Politization of Climate Science

Yesterday, as I was running around trying to better understand the "junk science" debates, I ran into Kerry Emanuel's Phaeton’s Reins: The human hand in climate change, Boston Review, January/February 2007. Long fascinated with complexity theory, I was captured by Emanuel's contrast of "stability myths" to complexity, chaos, complex systems, dynamics, feedback loops, etc., and to the modeling of complex systems—in this case climate- and weather-change modeling.

Toward the end of the article, Emanuel turns his attention to the contemporary dilemma of what some call "the science wars", wars of words that are really more the stuff of media, politics, and social activism than of science. Here is a snip (with some red highlights from me):

Science, politics, and the media
Science proceeds by continually testing and discarding or refining hypotheses, a process greatly aided by the naturally skeptical disposition of scientists. We are, most of us, driven by a passion to understand nature, but that means being dispassionate about pet ideas. Partisanship—whatever its source—is likely to be detected by our colleagues and to yield a loss of credibility, the true stock of the trade. We share a faith—justified by experience—that at the end of the day, there is a truth to be found, and those who cling for emotional reasons to wrong ideas will be judged by history accordingly, whereas those who see it early will be regarded as visionaries.

The evolution of the scientific debate about anthropogenic climate change illustrates both the value of skepticism and the pitfalls of partisanship. Although the notion that fossil-fuel combustion might increase CO2 and alter climate originated in the 19th century, general awareness of the issue dates to a National Academy of Sciences report in 1979 that warned that doubling CO2 content might lead to a three-to-eight-degree increase in global average temperature. Then, in 1988, James Hansen, the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, set off a firestorm of controversy by testifying before Congress that he was virtually certain that a global-warming signal had emerged from the background climate variability. At that time, less was known about natural climate variability before the beginning of systematic instrumental records in the nineteenth century, and only a handful of global climate simulations had been performed. Most scientists were deeply skeptical of Hansen’s claims; I certainly was. It is important to interpret the word “skeptical” literally here: it was not that we were sure of the opposite, merely that we thought the jury was out.

At roughly this time, radical environmental groups and a handful of scientists influenced by them leapt into the fray with rather obvious ulterior motives. This jump-started the politicization of the issue, and conservative groups, financed by auto makers and big oil, responded with counterattacks. This also marked the onset of an interesting and disturbing phenomenon that continues to this day. A very small number of climate scientists adopted dogmatic positions and in so doing lost credibility among the vast majority who remained committed to an unbiased search for answers. On the left, an argument emerged urging fellow scientists to deliberately exaggerate their findings so as to galvanize an apathetic public, an idea that, fortunately, failed in the scientific arena but which took root in Hollywood, culminating in the 2004 release of The Day After Tomorrow. On the right, the search began for negative feedbacks that would counter increasing greenhouse gases: imaginative ideas emerged, but they have largely failed the acid test of comparison to observations. But as the dogmatists grew increasingly alienated from the scientific mainstream, they were embraced by political groups and journalists, who thrust them into the limelight. This produced a gross distortion in the public perception of the scientific debate. Ever eager for the drama of competing dogmas, the media largely ignored mainstream scientists whose hesitations did not make good copy. As the global-warming signal continues to emerge, this soap opera is kept alive by a dwindling number of deniers constantly tapped for interviews by journalists who pretend to look for balance.

While the American public has been misinformed by a media obsessed with sensational debate, climate scientists developed a way forward that helps them to compare notes and test one another’s ideas and also creates a valuable communication channel. Called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, it produces a detailed summary of the state of the science every four years, with the next one due out in February 2007. Although far from perfect, the IPCC involves serious climate scientists from many countries and has largely withstood political attack and influence.

The IPCC reports are fairly candid about what we collectively know and where the uncertainties probably lie. In the first category are findings that are not in dispute, not even by les refusards:

Economists as Story Tellers

Phillip Ball's Financial Times' critique of economics, titled Baroque Fantasies of a Peculiar Science caused quite a stir recently in the economics blogs (particularly here and here). But last week the bickering subsided with Dave Altig (macroblog) and Phillip Ball seeming to have reached an accord.. At one point Altig said, "If you want, call economics an attempt to construct coherent stories about social phenomenon..." Sounds about right to me. We economists are indeed story tellers. Following this discussion, it seems clear that economists need to be much more open and honest about our assumptions and the linkages, such as they are and often are not to the real world of policy and action. No argument from me on that score. I've been arguing similarly for years.

For more critique, see Steve Cohn's August 2002 Telling Other Stories: Heterodox Critiques of Neoclassical Micro Principles Texts [PDF] wherein Cohn attacks the "'rhetoric' of neoclassical theory, …critiquing many of the stories told, the metaphors used, the analogies drawn, and the framing language deployed"

In addition, there have been many book-form critiques arguing that economists, particularly neoclassical economists have over-driven their headlights in much the same way that Bell argues. Here are six of my favorites (arranged by date of publication):

• J. de V. Graaff. Theoretical Welfare Economics. 1957
  

• Guy Routh. The Origin of Economic Ideas. 1975
  
• Mark Blaug. The Methodology of Economics: Or How Economists Explain. 1980
  
• Robert L. Heilbroner. Behind the Veil of Economics: Essays in the Worldly Philosophy. 1988
  
• Mark Sagoff. The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law and the Environment. 1988
  
• Andrew Bard Schmookler. The Illusion of Choice: How the Market Economy Controls Our Destiny. 1993

Global Warming Problem Political, Not Economic

"...It is about politics—the politics of getting America to lead a global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change....

The Economist, Global Warming, Economic Cooling [10/30/06]: SIR NICHOLAS STERN, the head of the British Government Economic Service, has produced the world’s first big report on the economics of climate change. But his 700-page effort, although stuffed with figures, is not really about economics. It is about politics—the politics of getting America to lead a global effort to mitigate the effects of climate change.

The purpose of Sir Nicholas’s report—commissioned by Tony Blair—is to deal with the argument of people who accept that climate change is happening, but who say that trying to do anything about it would be a waste of money. This argument is heard occasionally in Europe and frequently in America, where, for added potency, it is combined with the notion that European attempts to tax carbon are part of a conspiracy by socialists determined to undermine the American way of life.

Sir Nicholas’s argument is that, far from undermining the American way of life, attempts to mitigate climate change may help preserve it. He argues this by setting the costs of allowing climate change to happen against the costs of mitigating climate change.

Previous estimates of the costs of climate change—as a result of more hurricanes, more floods and rising sea levels, for instance—have been somewhere between nothing and 2% of global GDP. But Sir Nicholas says those figures were wrong, for two reasons. First, the science has changed, and global warming seems to be happening faster than was previously believed. Second, those estimates have looked only at the likeliest outcomes from climate change, not at the outlying catastrophic possibilities. As a result, Sir Nicholas maintains that if greenhouse gas emissions go on increasing at their present rate, global output is likely to be between 5% and 20% lower over the next two centuries than it otherwise would have been.

Compared with those figures, the costs of mitigating climate change look quite moderate. Sir Nicholas reckons that stabilising concentrations of greenhouse gas equivalent at 550 parts per million (ppm) is a reasonable objective (current levels are at around 380ppm). He reckons that, partly because of falling alternative energy costs, the world could achieve that at a moderate cost. Global output is likely to be around 1% lower by 2050 than it otherwise would have been.

The choice does not look like a difficult one: costs of 5%-20% of global GDP versus costs of 1% of global GDP. Unfortunately, that’s not the difficult bit. The difficult bit is the politics. Climate change is an exceedingly hard issue. It is uncertain: nobody really knows how much it is going to cost. It crosses generations: this generation will have to bear some of the costs while the benefits will accrue to future generations. It crosses boundaries: no one country can solve the problem.

But there is one country towards which Sir Nicholas gestures when he writes of the need for “demonstrating leadership” and “working to build trust”, without which all efforts to deal with the problem will fail: America. (China may well become a bigger polluter than America, but persuading it to do something about climate change will be near impossible if America does not act first). Sir Nicholas does not explain how to solve the difficulty of getting America on board. But if he succeeds in persuading policymakers that the American way of life is better preserved by dealing with climate change than by ignoring it, he himself might be part of the solution.

New Economist adds: The Stern Review's earlier discussion paper, What is the Economics of Climate Change? (PDF) ... argues climate change is a serious and urgent problem, global in its cause and consequences. Current actions are not enough "if we are to stabilise greenhouse gases at any acceptable level". The "economic challenges are complex", and will require a long-term international collaboration to tackle them.

UPDATE: Dissenters are beginning to weigh in:

Samples from a New Blog: Transdisciplanary Journeys

Last night via email Roderic Gill, who directs the Centre for Ecological Economics and Water Policy Research (CEEWPR), introduced me to the new Transdisciplinary Journeys Blog. Gill suggested that our blog journeys seemed to be on parallel paths. After looking at their introductory posts, I agree. Here's a sampler. I also linked them up on our sidebar. Nice to see this thinking getting more air time.

Transdisciplinary Thinking, posted by Roderic Gill

In my view, there is a general tendency in the ecological economics community to spend little time with its core and underlying philosophy of transdisciplinarianism. To me, the transdisciplinary focus is at the heart and root of ecological economics. Little attention though, seems to be devoted to really coming to grips with what the word really means and implies. It is a very powerful concept. And a major challenge for application and procedure. In essence, the ecological economics transdisciplinary focus implies a synergistic alliance between and across conventional disciplinary boundaries. Transdisciplinary is more fundamentally participative than multi-disciplinary (where the agenda for problem definition and the management of cooperation still resides with a disciplinary instigator). The transdisciplinary approach implies cooperation from beginning to end; cooperation at the problem or issue interpretation stage through to the cooperative implementation of results. …

Sustainability and Resilience, posted by Leo Dutra

The goal of sustainable development is to create and maintain ‘prosperous’ social, economic, and ecological systems. These systems are intimately linked: humanity depends on services of ecosystems for its wealth and security and humans can transform ecosystems into more or less desirable conditions. Ecosystem services include provision of clean water and air, food production, fuel, and others. Yet human action can render ecosystems unable to provide these services, with consequences for human livelihoods, vulnerability, and security. Such negative shifts represent loss of resilience.

In operationalising resilience, managing for sustainability in socio-economic systems means not pushing the system to its limits but maintaining diversity and variability, leaving some slack and flexibility, and not trying to optimise some parts of the system but maintaining redundancy. It also means learning how to enhance adaptability, and understanding when and where it is possible to intervene in management. These ‘soft’ management approaches are necessary because ‘hard’ management approaches involving quantitative targets for resource production often do not work. Linear models on which ‘hard’ management depends tend to be incomplete or even misleading in the management of the ecosystems of the world. Equilibrium-based predictive models do not perform well with complex social-ecological systems.

This particular view of resilience is in accordance with the Ecological Economics thinking on sustainability. Sustainable futures are inherently unpredictable and reinforce the idea (proposed by CEEWPR researchers Tony Meppem and Roderic Gill) that sustainability cannot be planned in a rational fashion. In the absence of a linear, mechanical universe that would have permitted simple, rational measures, the best bet for sustainability involves capability for self-organisation and capacity for learning and adaptation.

More resilient social-ecological systems are able to absorb larger shocks without changing in fundamental ways. When massive transformation is inevitable, resilient systems contain the components needed for renewal and reorganisation; they can cope with, adapt to, or reorganise without sacrificing the provision of ecosystem services. Resilience is often associated with diversity—of species, of human opportunity, and of economic options—that maintains and encourages both adaptation and learning.

Social-ecological systems are constantly changing and the design of sustainable futures should encompass this changing nature. Resilience emphasises systems including ‘humans-in-nature’, describing, therefore, a more holistic approach toward sustainability.

Resilience is a useful sub theme of sustainability in that it focuses on bringing together thinking about human systems (short time horizons) with long-term outcomes (ecological systems such as coral reefs). Management that builds resilience can sustain social-ecological systems in the face of surprise, unpredictability, and complexity. Resilience-building management is flexible and open to learning. It attends to slowly changing, fundamental variables that create memory, legacy, diversity, and the capacity to innovate in both social and ecological components of the system. It also conserves and nurtures the diverse elements that are necessary to reorganise and adapt to novel, unexpected, and transformative circumstances. Thus, it increases the range of surprises with which a socio-economic-ecological system can cope.

The concept of resilience shifts policies from those that aspire to control change in systems assumed to be stable, to managing the capacity of social-ecological systems to cope with, adapt to, and shape change. Resilience emphasises adaptability of systems and is thus a useful focus for sustainability. Impacts on ecological resilience will affect socio-cultural and economic resilience as well. The decline of cod fisheries in Newfoundland and Labrador (North America) is an example of the resilience links among ‘panarchical’ cycles of socio-economical and ecological variables. The elimination of the cod stock in the North Atlantic led to the collapse of the economy of the region. After 600 years of profitable fishing in that region, local fishermen nowadays rely on government help for livelihood. The traditions around cod fisheries and the techniques utilised by traditional fishermen may be lost when (and if) the cod stock recover.

Resilience is, therefore, not only an issue of sustainability and options for development, in the present and future, but also an issue of environmental, social and economic security.

Building social-ecological resilience requires understanding of ecosystems that incorporate the knowledge of local users. Thus, the ecological ignorance of some contemporary societies undermines resilience. Technological developments and economic activities based on the perception of decoupled social and ecological systems further contribute to the erosion of resilience. This can be counteracted by understanding the complex connections between people and nature, which create opportunity for technological innovations and economic policies aimed at building resilience.

Two useful tools for resilience-building in social-ecological systems are: (i) structured scenarios and; (ii) active adaptive management. People use scenarios to envision alternative futures and the pathways by which they might be reached. Active adaptive management views policy as a set of experiments designed to reveal processes that build or sustain resilience. It requires, and facilitates, a social context with flexible and open institutions and multi-level governance systems that allow for learning and increase adaptive capacity without foreclosing future development options.

Managing for resilience embraces sustainability outcomes in relation to the social-ecological system. A changing, uncertain world in transformation demands action to build the resilience of the social-ecological systems, which embrace all of humanity.

New Online Journal: International Journal of Transdisciplinary Research!

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International Journal of Transdisciplinary Research! A journal in favor of an economic paradigm shift and for research on society, economy, and ecology.

Current Issue: Volume 1, Issue 1

1. Transdisciplinary Research: Moving Forward [PDF]
   John M. Polimeni
   
2. The Need for a New Biophysical-based Paradigm in Economics for the Second Half of the Age of Oil [PDF]
   Charles A. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard
   
3. Production Theory and Peak Oil: Collapse or Sustainability? [PDF]
   John M. Gowdy
   
4. Knowledge Representation and Mediation for Transdisciplinary Frameworks: Tools to Inform Debates, Dialogues & Deliberations [PDF]
   Ângela Guimarães Pereira and Silvio Funtowicz
   
5. Can Biofuels Replace Fossil Energy Fuels? A Multi-scale Integrated Analysis Based on the Concept of Societal and Ecosystem Metabolism: Part 1 [PDF]
   Mario Giampietro, Kozo Mayumi, and Jesus Ramos-Martin
   
6. Systems Thinking and Common Ground [PDF]
   John Peet
   
7. Economic Efficiency in Fisheries and Aquaculture [PDF]
   Paul Molyneaux

Global Warming Blamed for Increasingly Destructive Wildfires

Global Warming gets tagged for increased frequency and destructive character of wildfires:

Science News Online
Week of July 8, 2006; Vol. 170, No. 2 , p. 19

The Long Burn: Warming drove recent upswing in wildfires
Ben Harder

Major forest fires in the western United States have become more frequent and destructive over the past 2 decades. The trend has occurred in step with rising average temperatures in the region.

WILDFIRE WEST. Rising temperatures and earlier snowmelts have intensified forest fires.    AP/Wide World

… Western snow packs now typically melt a week to a month earlier than they did half a century ago, recent studies have shown.

The northern Rockies have borne the brunt of the shift in fire patterns. In 1988, midsummer infernos torched 600,000 hectares in and around Yellowstone National Park; 25,000 firefighters battled the blaze, which continued until that winter's first snows fell.

About three-fifths of the largest U.S. wildfires since then have struck the same region. Government agencies spend up to $1.7 billion per year on wildfire control, and annual damages sometimes exceed $1 billion.

To understand the factors behind this mounting hazard, Swetnam and three colleagues examined fire, weather, and snowmelt data from 1970 to 2003.

For each year, the number and total area of major forest fires closely correlated with average spring and summer temperatures and with the date on which snowmelt peaked, reports the team, which was led by Anthony Westerling of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif.

Since 1987, fires have burned 6.5 times as much area per year as they did between 1970 and 1986, the researchers report in an upcoming Science. The average temperature increased 0.87°C between the two periods, and the average length of the fire season grew by 78 days.

"Warmer temperatures seem to be increasing the duration and intensity of the wildfire season in the western United States," comments ecologist Steven Running of the University of Montana in Missoula. …

… Fire-control efforts need to be adjusted accordingly … says Constance I. Millar of the U.S. Forest Service in Albany, Calif.

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Science Express
Published Online July 6, 2006
Science DOI: 10.1126/science.1128834

RESEARCH ARTICLES
Submitted on April 17, 2006
Accepted on June 28, 2006

Warming and Earlier Spring Increases Western U.S. Forest Wildfire Activity
Anthony Leroy Westerling, Hugo G. Hidalgo, Daniel R. Cayan, Thomas W. Swetnam
[Abstract and link to PDF]

Inconvenient Truth

Last Thursday night, my wife Karen and I saw Al Gore's new movie, An Inconvenient Truth.  It is, in my opinion, a very clear, compelling, and heartfelt documentary that profiles one man's authentic effort to educate people around the world about the need to deal with the global warming crisis. 

   

Thanks to the superb direction of Davis Guggenheim, the film offers an unexpectedly pleasant balance and interweaving of technical and factual analysis, moral and ethical challenges, and personal introspection and disclosure, with Al Gore speaking through all three of these voices in a manner that sounds completely authentic and genuinely above the deplorable politics of this controversial issue.  In philosophical terms a la the universal pragmatics of Jurgen Habermas, there is in this film a very effective differentiation and integration of validity claims in the three domains of what is true, what is right, and what is sincere--the critical ingredients of the shared understanding and coordinated action that is the apparent goal of this film.

Blogging the Sustainable Energy Forum

Today Ethan Heitner at TomPaine.common sense wrote a post about last weekend's Peak Oil and the Environment forum.

… The Sustainable Energy Forum … represented a convergence—the top minds of environmental science, economics, and geopolitics discussing the same problem, with a few politicians, businessmen, historians, and journalists, from a wide variety of angles. Peak oil, the term used to describe the problem of running out of the main fuel of our economy for the past hundred years, and climate change—the description of the costs of that economy. … There was a consistent message: our current way of life is neither desirable nor sustainable. The environment is not a luxury good.

Of course, within that consensus, there are debates. Brian Schweitzer, the Democratic governor of Montana, was there to plug coal-to-gas liquification and carbon sequestration as solutions. He's frequently vilified by those who argue convincingly that simply replacing one fossil fuel for another is not viable. Yet even he agreed that the only solution available to us right here, right now, immediately to mitigate the alarming effects of our problems is to sharply, dramatically reduce not just oil consumption, but energy consumption. "Make conservation cool. How low can you go?"

Meanwhile, straight-up economists like Herman Daly argued that our underlying economic goals need to be rethought [PDF, Brian Czech and Herman Daly]. The "American dream" as defined by Enron’s Ken Lay as "living a very expensive lifestyle" doesn’t work any more.

... Jack Santa Barbara … summed up the conference's agreements:

A full environmental impact is needed for all solutions ... Whatever we do now will be scaled up and done by others, repeated again and again ... Even renewable energy sources can be used unsustainably ... It's not an oil addiction—it's an addiction to high per-capita energy consumption ... We have to get the goals right. Is it a high GDP or high human wellbeing?

His optimistic advice?

We already have many of the tools available to us now ... A theory of a steady-state economy ... We already ban substances that are harmful ... we already have a system of ecological taxes ... all that is needed is political will. ...

Also: The Oil Drum has several posts on the conference: here, here, here, (lots of comments too) with more to come. Stay tuned!

Peak Oil: Problem Overblown?

The Economist recently ran a story airing Peak Oil concerns from "pessimists" and counters from "optimists." NPR ran a similar spot May 2.

FINANCE & ECONOMICS
The oil industry
Steady as she goes [$]
Apr 20th 2006 | BAKERSFIELD, CALIFORNIA, AND CALGARY, ALBERTA
From The Economist print edition

Why the world is not about to run out of oil
…For years a small group of geologists has been claiming that the world has started to grow short of oil, that alternatives cannot possibly replace it and that an imminent peak in production will lead to economic disaster. In recent months this view has gained wider acceptance on Wall Street and in the media. Recent books on oil have bewailed the threat. Every few weeks, it seems, “Out of Gas”, “The Empty Tank” and “The Coming Economic Collapse: How You Can Thrive When Oil Costs $200 a Barrel”, are joined by yet more gloomy titles. Oil companies, which once dismissed the depletion argument out of hand, are now part of the debate. Chevron's splashy advertisements strike an ominous tone: “It took us 125 years to use the first trillion barrels of oil. We'll use the next trillion in 30.” Jeroen van der Veer, chief executive of Royal Dutch Shell, believes “the debate has changed in the last two years from 'Can we afford oil?' to 'Is the oil there?'”

But is the world really starting to run out of oil? And would hitting a global peak of production necessarily spell economic ruin? Both questions are arguable. Despite today's obsession with the idea of “peak oil”, what really matters to the world economy is not when conventional oil production peaks, but whether we have enough affordable and convenient fuel from any source to power our current fleet of cars, buses and aeroplanes. With that in mind, the global oil industry is on the verge of a dramatic transformation from a risky exploration business into a technology-intensive manufacturing business. And the product that big oil companies will soon be manufacturing, argues Shell's Mr Van der Veer, is “greener fossil fuels”.

The race is on to manufacture such fuels for blending into petrol and diesel today, thus extending the useful life of the world's remaining oil reserves. This shift in emphasis from discovery to manufacturing opens the door to firms outside the oil industry (such as America's General Electric, Britain's Virgin Fuels and South Africa's Sasol) that are keen on alternative energy. It may even result in a breakthrough that replaces oil altogether.

To see how that might happen, consider the first question: is the world really running out of oil? Colin Campbell, an Irish geologist, has been saying since the 1990s that the peak of global oil production is imminent. Kenneth Deffeyes, a respected geologist at Princeton, thought that the peak would arrive late last year.

It did not. In fact, oil production capacity might actually grow sharply over the next few years (see chart 1). Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA), an energy consultancy, has scrutinised all of the oil projects now under way around the world. Though noting rising costs, the firm concludes that the world's oil-production capacity could increase by as much as 15m barrels per day (bpd) between 2005 and 2010—equivalent to almost 18% of today's output and the biggest surge in history. Since most of these projects are already budgeted and in development, there is no geological reason why this wave of supply will not become available (though politics or civil strife can always disrupt output).

Peak-oil advocates remain unconvinced. A sign of depletion, they argue, is that big Western oil firms are finding it increasingly difficult to replace the oil they produce, let alone build their reserves. Art Smith of Herold, a consultancy, points to rising “finding and development” costs at the big firms, and argues that the world is consuming two to three barrels of oil for every barrel of new oil found. Michael Rodgers of PFC Energy, another consultancy, says that the peak of new discoveries was long ago. “We're living off a lottery we won 30 years ago,” he argues.

It is true that the big firms are struggling to replace reserves. But that does not mean the world is running out of oil, just that they do not have access to the vast deposits of cheap and easy oil that are left in Russia and members of the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). And as the great fields of the North Sea and Alaska mature, non-OPEC oil production will probably peak by 2010 or 2015. That is soon—but it says nothing of what really matters, which is the global picture.

When the United States Geological Survey (USGS) studied the matter closely, it concluded that the world had around 3 trillion barrels of recoverable conventional oil in the ground. Of that, only one-third has been produced. That, argued the USGS, puts the global peak beyond 2025. And if “unconventional” hydrocarbons such as tar sands and shale oil (which can be converted with greater effort to petrol) are included, the resource base grows dramatically—and the peak recedes much further into the future. {emphasis added}

Upcoming Forum: Peak Oil and the Environment

Sustainable Energy Forum 2006 Peak Oil and the Environment
May 7-9, 2006
Marvin Center, Washington, D.C.
Sponsor: The University of Maryland’s Sustainable Development and Conservation Biology Program

Sustainable Energy Forum 2006 will bring together scientists, policymakers and advocates from government, environmental NGO's and civil society groups to identify the challenges and opportunities for a sustainable energy future.

Our recently diagnosed "addiction to oil" has reignited interest in energy independence:

Global warming, geopolitical instability, and high oil prices have focused awareness on our need for energy alternatives. However, resource constraints may pose more proximate threats to human well-being on a global scale.

The Department of Energy, US Army, major oil companies, and the NY Times have recognized the widespread implications of reaching the maximum rate of global oil production: Peak oil will present unprecedented challenges to ecological sustainability and economic resilience, regardless of the peak’s timing.

These are a few of the key issues regarding peak oil and its implications that will be addressed during SEF 2006:

• What are the geologic and production constraints implicit in peak oil?
• What are the geopolitical implications of reaching the peak?
• What are some options for transportation fuel alternatives and their viability?
• What are the environmental implications of the energy alternatives being pursued?
• How much time do we have to implement alternatives?
• What does net energy have to do with how we respond?
• How much energy is needed for human well-being?
• What options do we have for reducing demand?
• What policy approaches are critical to moving forward?

Our current energy trajectory is unsustainable: How the world responds to peak oil will determine how much energy is available to meet human well-being in the future.

Addiional background information:

SPEAKERS & PANELISTS:

Roscoe Bartlett    U.S. Congressman, 6th District Maryland

Roger Bezdek   President, Management Information Systems, Inc

David Blittersdorf   President, NRG Wind Systems

Lester Brown President, Earth Policy Institute

William Catton   Professor emeritus, WSU; Author, Overshoot

Cutler Cleveland   Director, Energy and Environmental Studies, Boston U

Robert Costanza   Director, Gund Institute for Ecological Economics

Herman Daly   Professor, Public Policy, University of Maryland

Julian Darley   Founder, Post Carbon Institute; High Noon For Nat. Gas

Kenneth Deffeyes   Professor, Geology, Princeton University

Claudio Filippone   Director, Center for Advanced Energy Concepts, UMD

Charles Hall   Professor, Environmental Science, SUNY Syracuse

James Hansen   Director, NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies

Richard Heinberg   Author, The Party's Over, Powerdown

Michael Klare   Professor, Peace & World Security, Hampshire College

Daniel Lashof   Deputy Director, NRDC Climate Center

John Marano Adj. Professor, Energy Systems, University of Pittsburgh

Bill McKibben   Author, The End of Nature, Enough

Pat Murphy   Executive Director, The Community Solution

David Pimentel   Professor, Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University

Megan Quinn   Outreach Coordinator, The Community Solution

Mona Sahlin   Minister for Sustainable Development, Sweden

Jack Santa Barbara   Director, Sustainable Scale Project

Brian Schweitzer   Governor, State of Montana

Art Smith   CEO, John S. Herold, Inc

Joseph Tainter   Author, The Collapse of Complex Societies

Everything is connected: wetlands and bird flu

(Cross-posted at the Oikos Blog)

Here's another reminder that things are connected in ways we don't always understand and the environment isn't just something "out there" that we can ignore: environmental problems far away can have surprising impacts on us.

A United Nations (UN) report just released says restoring the world's wetlands may be critical to preventing outbreaks of avian flu, as their revival will keep migratory birds from mixing with domesticated fowl. It says the degradation of wetlands has forced wild birds, some carrying the deadly H5N1 strain, into alternative habitats. That increases the risk of the spread of the disease to poultry and, in turn, humans:

"The loss of wetlands around the globe is forcing many wild birds onto alternative sites like farm ponds and paddy fields, bringing them into direct contact with chickens, ducks, geese and other domesticated fowl," the report said.

The report, which has been presented at a two-day conference at the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program (UNEP), notes that contact between migratory birds and their domesticated cousins is a major cause of the spread of avian flu.

That includes the H5N1 strain, which is potentially deadly to humans. "We know there is a very tight link between the conditions of ecosystems and the likelihood of threats to human health," David Rapport, a Canadian professor of ecosystem health and the lead author of the study, said.