Truth Telling

“All of humanity is in peril, if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth and all the truth, and do so promptly – right now.” – Buckminster Fuller

I started posting to this blog in March of 2007.  It’s been as much a journey as a journal and my posts have been the cairns left on the trail of my search for meaning and truth.  The direction of my search has been open-ended, non-directional, and often both troubling and unexpected.  I changed the name of the blog from “The Sustainable Home” to “Sustainable Dwelling” as my vision expanded and my subject matter broadened in scope and reach.

As a result of one my posts, I was asked to make a presentation this summer to the International Association of Public Participation about making sustainable decisions in the context of the four pillars of sustainability.  In preparation, I was compelled to look back on my journey and ask if I really “knew” anything.  Would I be able to humbly “tell the truth” or fail and spew forth some grossly ego-contaminated version of pseudo truth?  As a result,  this blog has been mostly silent as I struggled to  resolve and make peace with what I’ve written and what I’ve learned, including my readings of others who have walked a similar path.

Much like the journey of this blog, the process of preparing the presentation became it’s own journey and I began to question the mythical foundations of humanity and how they shape our actions and beliefs.  How simple things like canvas shopping bags, electric cars, buying local, and recycling give us a false and comforting sense of “going green” that masks the imminent peril of our ecological overshoot.

In the end, my presentation – my humble attempt at the truth, would attempt to ask and answer two questions:

1. Can humanity achieve a sustainable balance within our closed ecosystem, or have we reached the point where that vision is just another example of the hubris of human exceptionalism?
2. Is it time to switch our focus from sustainability to one of resilience in the face of societal collapse and industrial decline?

I’ve posted a copy of the presentation including the speaker notes on SlideShare.net.  You can find it here.

Is a warning about the future a prediction of doom or a call to follow a different path?

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Hubris and Ecological Retribution

I’ve spent the last month painting and re-roofing the house and enjoying the slow emergence of spring in the rockies as the aspen grove turned a vibrant green.  I’ve also been watching the bear market rally in stocks as less bad news leads investors to believe that the fed can induce another debt bubble of false prosperity and growth.  So as the rain falls and temperatures hover in the low 40’s, I’m inspired to comment on the symbolism of the GM bankruptcy.  Amid all the chatter about “Government Motors” I was struck by Dan Neil’s (the L.A. Times) view of the larger lesson within our nation’s largest bankruptcy.

“This is the lesson of GM’s bankruptcy, and it has little to do with market share and miles per gallon.  It’s a rebuff of the notion of exceptionalism.

Any organization that fails to sufficiently safeguard its means of self-correction and reform, that forsakes long-term investment for short-term gain, that piles up debt year after year, will eventually fail, no matter how grand its history, or noble its purpose.  If you don’t feel a tingle of national mortality in all of this, you’re not paying attention.”

Neil doesn’t go beyond the “tingle of national mortality”, but it is no secret that the U.S. is technically bankrupt and avoids default only because of our reserve currency status and foreign purchases of our growing debt.  But the inevitable decline of the American empire only begins to describe Neil’s “rebuff of exceptionalism”.

American hubris, our excessive pride in our specialness or “exceptionalism” was born in ernest as we exited victorious from WWII.  With the rest of the  world’s industrial capacity lying in ruin,  GM and corporate america dominated the world industrial stage and American quickly transformed its vast war economy and productive capacity into a consumer economy that would eventually lead us onto a treadmill of crushing debt.  Post war retail analyst Victor Le Beau best describes the reasoning that would lead to America’s 5% of the world population consuming 30% of the world’s resources.

“Our enormously productive [war] economy…demands that we make consumption our way of life, that we convert the buying and use of goods into rituals, that we seek our spiritual satisfaction, our ego satisfaction, in consumption…. We need things consumed, burned up, replaced and discarded at an ever-accelerating rate.”

Such reasoning rested on the post war belief that American ingenuity and the miracle of science and technology would overcome any limits and endless growth would lead us to a utopian future.  In his forward to William Catton’s “Overshoot”,  Stewart Udall posits the exact date that America’s post war euphoria jumped the Happy Day’s shark.

“It is easy to fix the exact date when our euphoria reached a zenith.  It was the July week in 1969 when the astronauts walked on the moon.  We celebrated this triumph with a mixture of awe and self-congratulation.  President Nixon proclaimed that it was “the greatest week since the creation of the earth.”  A NASA official opined that the feat demonstrated we were “masters of the universe.”  This proves that we can do what ever we decide to do,  Americans concluded from this climax event.”

However the 70’s would mark the first cracks in our shinning edifice of hubris.  Domestic oil production would peak in 1970 and OPEC would give us the first taste of our dangerous dependency on oil.  Honda and Toyota quality and fuel efficiency would begin to threaten the supremacy of GM.  Reacting to the costs of our failed adventure in Vietnam, Nixon would take us off the gold standard and set the stage for massive deficit spending.  Real incomes would begin to decline, saving and thrift would lose favor and combine with debt and two income families in an attempt to keep the consumer economy  alive and growing.  Our post war euphoria would be replaced with the lament, “If we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we ….”

President Carter attempted to raise the issue of limits and lead us in direction of conservation and renewable energy, but Fed Chairman Paul Volcker’s war on Nixon’s policy induced inflation set the stage for Reagan’s promise of a return to post war euphoria.  Reagan delivered with a “deficits don’t matter” war on the evil empire and launched a 20-year bull market built on a phantom foundation of deregulation, easy credit, and a mountain of government and private debt.  As W added more to the national debt than all previous presidents combined, our national house of cards collapsed in a pool of financial sector greed and overreach.

As GM attempts to pull itself from the ashes of bankruptcy and politicians around the world promise the oxymoron of “sustainable” growth, nearly 7-billion humans are still mostly blind to the reality of ecological limits and harsh retribution of overshoot and collapse.  This is the ultimate hubris—the hubris of human exceptionalism.

“The whole human enterprise is a machine without brakes, for there are no indications that the world’s political leaders will deal with the realities until catastrophes occur.  The rich countries are using resources with extravagant disregard for the next generation; and poor countries appear to incapable of acting to curb the population increases that are erasing their hope for a better future.  In such a world, declarations and manifestos which ignore the imperatives of the limits of growth are empty exercises.  All the available evidence says we have already passed a point of no return, and tragic human convulsions are at hand.” – Stewart Udall, Charles Conconi, and David Osterhout,  The Energy Balloon

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A “Crash Course” in Reality

I recently took the time to wade through Chris Martenson’s (free) online Crash Course and found it to be a brilliant and accessible summary of the economic, energy, and environment forces shaping our very unsustainable future.  If you have that uneasy feeling that the current financial meltdown is much more than just another business cycle, then this course is a must.  Martenson makes the case that a financial system that must grow to survive married to energy and environmental systems that cannot grow is a ticking time bomb that will make next 20 years VERY different from the last.

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Footprints, Limits, and Human Carrying Capacity

Lately, I’ve been thinking about footprints.  I live in the Rocky Mountains near the Pike National Forest and often hike or ride my horse in the forest.  Counting my wife and neighbors about a dozen of us tramp through the woods on a regular basis.  We mostly followed faint game trails that over the years have become miles of well established two foot wide tracks through the Ponderosa, Lodgepole and Aspen environments of the adjacent public lands.

In the grand scheme of things, it’s a relatively small footprint.  A slight loss of carbon sink and still too faint to cause any erosion damage.  Judging by the animal prints and scat, it’s safe to say that that the local fauna also make frequent use of our primitive highway system.  Still, however faint, our impact is still visible, clear evidence of our small tribes foot and hoof fall on the local flora.

Out of the forest, back in the neighborhood, our footprint grows ever larger.  Our homes cast their own footprint on the land.  The roads that serve those homes cast an exponentially larger footprint.  In Colorado, the electricity that serves those homes casts a carbon footprint of 1.8 lbs per kwhr and most of us contribute addition carbon with propane furnaces and supplemental wood heating.  We do a bit better with water.  We draw water from shallow wells that tap into the first water flowing out of the eastern slope of the continental divide and we return 85% of the that water to the local aquifer through our septic systems.   When you factor in some of our 100 mile round trip commutes to Denver and the vast global supply chain that delivers pineapples to our households in mid winter, you begin to just get a glimmer of the immense footprint that our small mountain tribe casts upon the world.

The concept of “footprint” used as a way to measure humanity’s impact on the earth first gained traction in the 1990’s when Rees and Wackernagel introduced the idea of “ecological footprint”.  The ecological footprint was and is an attempt to quantify the amount of land required to supply the world’s population with what they consume.  Recently we have added “carbon footprint” and “water footprint” to our lexicon ecological metrics.

Footprints are a very helpful way to visualize environmental impacts. In essence they are direct or indirect references to limits or to the concept of limits.  They help me to frame my mountain tribe and it’s forest tracks within the context of the 6.7 billion human inhabitants of earth hell-bent for growth and the pursuit of happiness in a closed and limited eco-system.

One way to think about limits is through the concept of carrying capacity.  For example, the carrying capacity of a biological species in a closed environment like an island is the population size of the species the environment can be sustained indefinitely, given the food, water and other natural resources available.  The concept of human carrying capacity is a bit more complex since one has to factor in the possibility of leveraging technology to increase the earth’s carrying capacity.  You also have to consider the equal possibility of unintentionally leveraging technology to decrease the earth’s carrying capacity.  Since the free market does not see any “carrying capacity price signals”, technological impacts on organic or natural carrying capacity tend to be skewed toward the negative.  William Catton, author of “Overshoot: The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change”, defines human carrying capacity not just in terms of population but also in terms of humanity’s “load” on the environment.

[Human] Carrying capacity needs to be understood as the maximum load an environment can permanently support (i.e., without reduction of its ability to support future generations), with load referring not just to the number of users of an environment but to the total demands they make upon it. For human societies, as for populations of other species, the relation of load to carrying capacity is crucial in shaping our future. Public comprehension of the concepts of carrying capacity and load is both vague and inadequate, and the need to correct these deficiencies is urgent.

When load comes to exceed carrying capacity, the overload inexorably causes environmental damage; then the reduced carrying capacity leads to load reduction (i.e., a crash). – William Catton

In the world of flora and fauna, a species will sometimes stumble upon an environment rich in nutrients creating a large and temporary surplus in carrying capacity.  The usual result is a sharp increase in population leading to an overshoot and a deficit in carrying capacity.  Tragically, this causes both a sharp degradation of carrying capacity and a total population collapse.

Whether humanity will suffer the same fate is subject to debate.  Some predict extinction while others believe that technology will continue to keep us safely in a state of carrying capacity surplus.  While either extreme is possible, I think the truth will end up somewhere north of extinction.

Our greatest danger today is that we rely too little on natural or organic carrying capacity and too much on borrowed or specious carrying capacity.  To use a quasi-mathematical formula:

Human Carrying Capacity = Organic Carrying Capacity + Specious Carrying Capacity

where (in simplest of terms),

Organic Carrying Capacity is a function of:

• the biosphere
• surface water and hydrologic cycle
• the atmosphere
• solar irradiation
• top soil

and, the Specious or Borrowed (from the past) Carrying Capacity is a function of non-renewable resources such as:

• fossil fuels
• minerals
• groundwater from slow recharge aquifers

In the case of human carrying capacity, both categories are acted on by technology and our economic systems of finance and trade.  The population explosion starting with the industrial revolution was made possible by the massive technological leveraging of non-renewable resources to create a temporary and specious carrying capacity surplus. The same technological advances caused and continue to cause a concurrent and accelerating degradation of our organic carrying capacity.  As a result, human carrying capacity now rests on an unsustainable house of cards.

As our total population and standard of consumption(load) have taken us back into a condition of carrying capacity deficit and we are now on the brink of collapse.  The tipping point will depend on Liebig’s Law which states that “whatever necessity is least abundantly available in an environment sets the environment’s carrying capacity”.

In our case, the Liebig trigger could be the peaking of oil production, food or water limitations, or a myriad of environmental ills that continue to further degrade organic carrying capacity.  It may even be systemic breakdown in our economy – call it “peak debt”.

Whatever the initial trigger, the question is how we will react.  Will we recognize it for what it is and navigate our way to a new state of equilibrium and balance, or frantically cling to “growth” as we compete for resources in a race to extinction?

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The Obama Energy Plan and our Homes

How will Obama’s energy polices affect our homes?  We won’t really know until his proposals are debated and enacted by congress, but we can get a sense of what might happen from his campaign’s position statements.  From his campaign website’s fact sheet his stated position on building energy efficiency is as follows:

“Obama…will establish a goal of making all new buildings carbon neutral, or produce zero emissions, by 2030.  [He] will also establish a national goal of improving new building efficiency by 50 percent and existing building efficiency by 25 percent over the next decade to help us meet the 2030 goal.”

This is straight from the playbook of Ed Mazra’s Architecture 2030 Challenge.  As evidenced by the following quote from the 2030 website, the 2030 Challenge is predicated on climate change and the reduction of green house gas emissions associated with the Building Sector.

“Rapidly accelerating climate change (global warming), which is caused by greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, is now fueling dangerous regional and global environmental events. Data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration illustrates that buildings are responsible for almost half (48%) of all GHG emissions annually. Seventy-six percent of all electricity generated by US power plants goes to supply the Building Sector. Therefore, immediate action in the Building Sector is essential if we are to avoid hazardous climate change.”

I have two issues with the 2030 Challenge.

One is that the 48% responsibility for GHG emissions attributed to buildings is overstated.  The emissions assigned to the building sector are primarily the indirect result of drawing on electrical power generated from coal and natural gas fired power plants, so the question becomes whether to focus our resources on the building “demand” side, or the power plant “supply” side, or some combination of both.  In that broader context, we may find that it is much easier to deal with a few hundred power plants than to transform 150 million residential and commerical buildings.  From a public policy perspective, both the demand and supply side should be considered as a synergistic whole.

My second issue is more fundamental.  Architecture 2030 asks and answers the wrong question.  The question that Architecture 2030 asks is what actions should we take to mitigate the effect of the building sector on climate change.  However, the greater question is what actions should we take to render the building sector sustainable.  Once sustainability is on the table then we have to consider carrying capacity and carrying capacity overshoot at which point climate change is just another canary in the coal mine.

Carrying capacity is all about the ecological limits (capacity) of our planet’s resources and sinks.  By considering GHG emissions as the primary driver for building energy improvements, policy makers are overlooking the much more immediate and serious resource issues of peak oil and gas.  Since both of these peak events will be evident as early as 2010, all buildings should be built or retrofitted to a net zero energy and carbon standard NOW, not 22 years from now.

However, I digress.  Since it will take the actual emergency of these peaking events to mobilize the political will to enact a national zero energy standard, the question is what can we expect when Obama takes office next year.

The first likely step will be to start the process of improving building efficiency by 50% through our building codes.  A significant improvement is already in the works for the residential sector with the IECC 2009. However, at this time, the 30% improvement authored by the Energy Efficient Codes Coalition, will only be a voluntary appendix to the next release of the code.  In addition, once the new code is released, it has to be reviewed and adopted by hundreds of city, county, and state authorities.  In the process, these authorities often dumb down new energy code provisions in response to local politics.  We can also expect a major push back from a decimated housing sector deeply concerned about adding any new code mandated building costs.

My best guess is that under Obama, the voluntary 30% improvement provision authored by Energy Efficient Codes Coalition will be supported by Obama’s Grant Program for Early Adopters policy proposal.  This proposal creates a competitive grant program for states and localities that “take the first steps in implementing new building codes that prioritize energy efficiency, and provides a federal match for those states with leading-edge public benefits funds that support energy efficiency retrofits of existing buildings.”

The grant proposal creates a policy that respects local politics and helps to support those areas of country that have the political will to move forward with improving building energy efficiency.

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Human Carrying Capacity and the 2008 Financial Meltdown

In 1972, a group of researchers funded by the Volkswagon Foundation published a book titled, The Limits to Growth.  Based on a MIT computer model using system dynamics, the book predicted that unless the current trajectory of population and industrial growth was altered, the world would exceed it’s human carrying capacity resulting in a sudden and uncontrollable decline in population and industrial capacity.

By challenging our beliefs in the inevitable rightness and goodness of technical, industrial, and economic growth, the book evoked great controversy and would eventually sell over 30 million copies in more than 30 languages.  Contrary to much of the criticism that the book received, it was neither anti-growth nor did it predict the running out of any specific resource by a date certain.  Noting that it’s research was “preliminary”, the book offered three simple conclusions.

1. If current growth trends continue we will exceed the earth’s human carrying capacity within 100 years.  This overshoot of carrying capacity will result in a sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.
2. These growth trends can be altered to achieve a sustainable, “ecological stability” capable of supporting a given human population far into the future.
3. The longer we wait to begin altering growth trends, the lower the probability of successfully achieving a sustainable future.

The 1972 authors gave us some markers to watch for as warning signs or indicators of our possible overshoot of human carrying capacity.

• Deterioration in renewable resources – surface and ground water, forests, fisheries, agricultural land.

• Rising levels of pollution.

• Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor by military and industry to secure, process, and defend resources.

• Investment in human resources (education, shelter, health care) postponed in order to provide immediate consumption and security demands.

• Rising debt; eroding goals for health and environment.

• Growing instability in natural ecosystems.

• Growing gap between rich and poor – between the powerful and the weak.

I’ll return to these warning signs, but first I think it would be useful to define a few key concepts.

Human Carrying Capacity
In the simplest of terms, human carrying capacity in a closed eco-system like earth is a function of population plus the average rate of consumption of that population.  At a given limit, you have the trade off of a high population and low levels of consumption, or low population and higher levels of consumption.

Human carrying capacity is the maximum rates of resource harvesting and waste generation (the maximum load) that can be sustained indefinitely without progressively impairing the productivity and functional integrity of relevant ecosystems wherever the latter may be located. The size of the corresponding population would be a function of technological sophistication and mean per capita material standards. This definition reminds us that regardless of the state of technology, humankind depends on a variety of ecological goods and services provided by nature and that for sustainability, these must be available in increasing quantities from somewhere on the planet as population and mean per capita resource consumption increase. – William E. Rees

Carrying Capacity Overshoot
To overshoot means to grow rapidly beyond the limits of carrying capacity. When this overshoot occurs, it’s due to a limit or barrier exceeded within the system, and the system (natural and/or economic) corrects and begins to slow, stop, or reverse growth.  In addition, as the limits of our natural systems are exceeded they are degraded, which results in the overall carrying capacity being diminished.   Overshoot leads to a sudden and catastrophe collapse.

As the environment is degraded, carrying capacity actually shrinks, leaving the environment no longer able to support even the number of people who could formerly have lived in the area on a sustainable basis. No population can live beyond the environment’s carrying capacity for very long. – William E. Rees

Humans are hard wired to discount the future, so in the context of carrying capacity, I have often wondered what environmental disaster or resource limit would be the tripwire that would launch us into the kind of collective action required to avoid or mitigate overshoot and catastrophic collapse.  Would our tendency to only react when faced with a crisis, doom us to a fate of too little, too late?  Will we miss our window to achieve a sustainable “ecological stability”?

Perhaps the tripwire won’t be a natural limit like global warming, or peak oil, or fisheries collapse, or soils loss.  Perhaps the tripwire will be a systemic economic collapse.  And if it is, will we see it for what it is, or will we clamor in panic for a return to business as usual?

In the 1992 followup publication, Beyond the Limits, the authors clarified their position relative to growth:

A sustainable society would be interested in qualitative development, not physical expansion. It would use material growth as a considered tool, not a perpetual mandate. It would be neither be for nor against growth. Before this society would decide on any specific growth proposal, it would ask what the growth was for, and who would benefit, and what it would cost, and how long it would last, and whether it would be accommodated by the [natural] sources and sinks of the planet.

In other words, they meant that qualitative growth was still possible, and only quantitative growth was limited….more quality of life, less stuff.  The 1992 authors also remained hopeful and stated that:

The decline [overshoot and collapse] is not inevitable. To avoid it two changes are necessary. The first is a comprehensive revision of policies and practices that perpetuate growth in material consumption and in population. The second is a rapid, drastic increase in the efficiency with which materials and energy are used.

The 2004 follow up publication, Limits to Growth: The Thirty Year Update, would not be so optimistic. Based on thirty years of additional data and refinements in their computer modeling, the authors would be forced to conclude that the world was in a dangerous state of overshoot.  Consider again the list of warning signs from the original 1972 publication.

ECONOMIC SYSTEMS:
Rising debt; eroding goals for health and environment.

• In the last eight years the U.S. National Debt has grown from $5.7-trillion to over ten trillion dollars. However, that only begins to tell the story.  If we use generally accepted accounting procedures (GAAP) to determine the nations financial obligations and include the net present value of the unfunded liabilities in social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare, then the total federal obligation exceeds $59-trillion dollars.

• According to David Greenlaw, Morgan Stanley’s chief economist, the 2009 budget deficit could be close to $2 trillion, or 12.5 percent of gross domestic product, more than twice the record of 6 percent set in 1983.

• U.S. household debt as a percentage of GDP has risen from a low of 12% at the beginning of WWII to over 90% in the year 2006.

• U.S. credit card currently exceeds $950-billion, 30% of which is carried by “high risk” borrowers.  Innovest estimates that banks will write off $41- billion in credit card debt in 2008, and $96-billion in 2009.  The American consumer is “tapped out”.

• In 1970, the world’s poorest countries (roughly 60 countries classified as low-income by the World Bank), owed $25 billion in debt.  By 2002, this debt had grown to $523 billion.  Basically, the more the developing countries stay in debt, the more they will feel that they need to milk the earth’s resources for the hard cash they can bring in, and also cut back on social, health, environmental conservation, employment and other important programs.

“Pushing debt has become the easiest and the most profitable business in the U.S. over the past few years. Who wants to take the risks of a producer when financing has become so lucrative? Look at the largest “industrial” corporations in the U.S. over the past decade, or two, and what you see is that they are lot more into financing business than in production business.” – Jas Jain, December 2006

Growing gap between rich and poor – between the powerful and the weak.

• In 1998 more than 45 percent of the globe’s people had to live on incomes averaging $2 a day or less. Meanwhile, the richest one- fifth of the world’s population has 85 percent of the global GNP.  And the gap between rich and poor is widening.

• At the beginning of the 19th century, average incomes in the richest nations were about 4 times greater than those in the poorest nations.  100 years later at the turn of the 20th century, average incomes in the richest nations are 30 times larger.

• An analysis by economists Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Saez found that despite several periods of healthy growth between 1973 and 2005, the average income of all but the top 10 percent of the income ladder — nine out of ten American families — fell by 11 percent when adjusted for inflation.

• Americans have the highest income inequality in the rich world and over the past 20–30 years Americans have also experienced the greatest increase in income inequality among rich nations.

• The share of income held by the top 1% in America was as large in 2005 as it was in 1928.

• In the U.S., between 1979 and 2005, the mean after-tax income for the top 1% increased by 176%, compared to an increase of 69% for the top quintile overall, 20% for the fourth quintile, 21% for the middle quintile, 17% for the second quintile and 6% for the bottom quintile.

“…income variance is a long-term (multi-year) indicator of economic activity. The more extreme it gets, the worse the economy and the financial markets eventually will become. Looking at two simplified markets with one man making $100,000,000 per year or 1,000 men making $100,000 per year, there will tend to be more speculative financial markets in the first case, but more automobiles will be sold in the second case. The system tends to be self-adjusting when income variance reaches an extreme, with the speculative market bubble eventually bursting and income and economic activity tending to get redistributed.” – John Williams, Shadow Government Statistics

Investment in human resources (education, shelter, health care) postponed in order to provide immediate consumption and security demands.

• More than half a million people, mostly children, died from measles in 2003 even though effective immunization costs just 30¢, and has been available for over 40 years.

• Since 2003, discretionary spending in the U.S. has declined by 9% for education and 17% for health.

Growing demands for capital, resources, and labor by military and industry to secure, process, and defend resources.

• World military expenditures have increased 45% since 1998 to $1.34-trillion in 2007.

• The USA’s military spending accounted for 45 per cent of the world total in 2007, followed by the UK, China, France and Japan, with 4–5 per cent each.

• Defense accounts for over 50% of the U.S. discretionary budget.  This does NOT include the costs of the Afghan and Iraqi wars.

“Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes … known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.… No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.” - James Madison, 1795

Growing instability in natural ecosystems.

• Sea level has risen 10–20 cm since 1900. Most non-polar glaciers are retreating, and the extent and thickness of Arctic sea ice is decreasing in summer.

• Vertebrate species populations have declined by about one-third in the 33 years from 1970 to 2003

• Global extinction of species occurred in the 20th century at a rate that was a thousand times higher than the average rate during the preceding 65 million years. This is likely to destabilize various ecosystems including agricultural systems.  This will threaten food supplies for hundreds of millions of people.

Deterioration in renewable resources – surface and ground water, forests, fisheries, agricultural land.

• The first global assessment of soil loss, based on studies of hundreds of experts, found that 38 percent, or nearly 1.4 billion acres, of currently used agricultural land has been degraded.

• In 2002, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN estimated that 75 percent of the world’s oceanic fisheries were fished at or beyond capacity. The North Atlantic cod fishery, fished sustainably for hundreds of years, has collapsed, and the species may have been pushed to biological extinction.

• The Science journal has warned that commercial fish and seafood species may all crash by 2048.

• Global water consumption rose six-fold between 1900 and 1995 – more than double the rate of population growth – and goes on growing as farming, industry and domestic demand all increase.

Rising levels of pollution.

• 40% of America’s rivers and 46% it’s lakes are too polluted for fishing, swimming, or aquatic life.

• The Mississippi River carries 1.5 million ton of nitrogen (fertilizer) pollution into the Gulf of Mexico each year creating a marine dead zone the size of Massachusetts.

• Pollution of freshwater (drinking water) is a problem for about half of the world’s population. Each year there are about 250 million cases of water-related diseases, with roughly 5 to 10 million deaths.

• China already uses more coal than the United States, the European Union and Japan combined. And it has increased coal consumption 14 percent in each of the past two years in the broadest industrialization ever. Every week to 10 days, another coal-fired power plant opens somewhere in China that is big enough to serve all the households in Dallas or San Diego.

• We can measure CO2 levels in the atmosphere going back over 450,000 years by analyzing polar ice cores.   Prior to the industrial revolution they had never been higher than 300ppm.  They are now in excess of 380ppm.

We were in the beginning of an unprecedented global financial meltdown and when I started writing this post, and I was curious as to whether the current financial crisis is just another economic cycle, or is somehow associated with the overshoot and collapse predicted by the authors.  I cannot say it is or is not with any certainty, but there are too many other warning signs (many more than I have listed) to not be very alarmed.  Just as this financial crisis was sudden and severe, so will be the consequences of overshoot.

I think the greatest contribution of Limits to Growth and the follow-on publications was to bring the concepts of human carrying capacity and overshoot into the public discourse.  The consequences of overshoot are many times more troubling than either global warming or peak oil.  Unfortunately, overshoot, like peak oil, may only be evident to policy makers and the general public by looking back from the context of fear, chaos, and crisis, much like we are doing today with the current financial meltdown.

A  year ago I would have bet that peak oil would be the key triggering event of overshoot.  As I watch the daily spectacle of the financial world imploding, I am no longer so sure.  I’ll leave you with a “some day” vision from one of the original authors of Limits to Growth.

It seems to me a powerful message, worth repeating and repeating, that people want peace, simplicity, beauty, nature, respect, the ability to contribute and create. These things are much cheaper and easier to achieve than war, luxury, ugliness, waste, hate, oppression, manipulation. Some day, when everyone understands that nearly all of us truly want the same kind of world, it will take surprisingly little time or effort to have it. – Donnella Meadows

More about human carrying capacity.

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.” – Thomas Friedman, March 7, 2009

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Adam Smith and a Steady-State Economy

The world we have created is a product of our thinking, it cannot be changed without changing our thinking. – Albert Einstein

Properly functioning markets allocate resources efficiently, but they cannot determine the sustainable scale; that can be achieved only by government policy. – Herman Daly

Human beings are the strangest of creatures. We make observations about our surroundings or about our behaviors, these observations become cast into theory, and then these same theories feedback to shape both our behavior and our surroundings.

In 1776, Adam Smith made some ground breaking observations about economic behavior and published An Inquiry into the Nature of Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith would argue that individuals, working in unfettered freedom for their own self interest, would collectively and via an “invisible hand” provide for the greatest common good. His work would provide the foundation for much of today’s economic theory and would father the concept of the “free market”.

Adam’s work coincided with the birth our nation, and it is ironic, but not surprising that this Scottish moral philosopher, would become the patron saint of Wall Street. For many, the belief in the invisible hand of an unfettered free market would take on religious overtones and it would become the dominant sub-text in our American political discourse.

Theories about our world only survive until a new observation fractures the old beliefs and takes us forward to a new way of seeing. Caught up in our current ways of seeing the world, we find it hard to believe that what we believe today might be the equivalent of thinking that the “world is flat”. It has been over 200 years since Adam Smith fathered the science of economics and mainstream economic theory has evolved into a highly regarded science wrapped in the respectability of sophisticated and complex mathematics. However, emerging resource limitations and ecological observations are beginning to cause fractures in the old belief system. An belief system that blindly assumed that the world economy operates on an infinite resource base with infinite waste sinks, and that infinite economic growth is a self evident truth.

The gapping hole in mainstream economic theory is scale. In other words, the size of the economy relative to the closed ecosystem on which it relies for resources and waste sinks. This means that there are limits to growth, and that to live within those limits, the economy needs to find an optimum or steady-state condition. However, free markets and their invisible hand are blind to these limits and will continue to grow out of self interest until the invisible hand of the underlying ecosystem adjusts out of its own self interest. Unless we collectively wake up to this gapping hole in our world view, this adjustment will be both painful and harsh. Think massive population die-off and a pre-industrial standard of living.

The market cannot determine a sustainable scale for our economy. Because it is based on individual self interest, the free market’s inevitable path is one of ecological overshoot and catastrophic collapse. Government is the only economic player capable of acting in our common interest and of setting a sustainable economic scale. Unfortunately we are hard wired to discount the future and the government is …. well …. us. So short of a major mind altering crisis, it is unlikely that we will hear any our politicians call for an end to growth. It is more likely that the end of our belief in the goodness and rightness of growth will be imposed on us by peak oil. Many observers agree that oil production, as measured by flows, has already plateaued. The market forces of demand destruction have initially maintained a fragile supply-demand equilibrium, but its only a matter of time before oil consumption becomes completely supply driven and economic growth is stopped and then reversed.

This will likely result in a kind of economic armageddon. However, the vested individual interests of the free market will continue to fight the notion of a steady-state economy until we hit some kind of alcoholic bottom. That’s unfortunate, because a steady-state economy scaled to our planet’s ecosystem may not be able to grow quantitatively, but it can grow qualitatively. In other words, rather than more stuff, we could produce better stuff. We could measure gross domestic happiness instead of gross domestic product. We could aspire to a true standard of living rather than today’s GDP driven standard of consumption. Think more time, less hassle and stress, and a healthier population.

In the world of housing, a sustainable, steady-state economy means the end of low density single family housing. It means smaller, multi-family housing. Dwelling patterns will evolve to be more tribal than individual. Think urban village versus suburban wasteland. It means a healthier walkable lifestyle. It means healthful indoor air quality, and buildings that are self sufficient in energy. Since our mono-cultured, industrial food system is unsustainable, expect food to be grown locally and our children to relearn its source and value.

It will be a world in which the common interest finds parity with the individual interest. A world on which Adam Smith, the moral philosopher, would smile.

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The End of a 200 Year Resource Binge

“For 200 years, the material wealth of the world has improved because of increased access to ancient stores of energy. We are mining the Devonian Era, the Pennsylvanian, the Permian, the Jurassic…hundreds of millions of years of stored energy [released] within a span of two centuries or so…. And the whole concept of ‘economics’ rests on that upward…trend….cheap oil made it all look easy. ”
Byron King, The Daily Reckoning, April 2008

Consuming hundreds of millions of years of stored energy in a 200 year binge of economic and population growth has allowed us to give little or no thought to what might be sustainable. It has given us the illusion of easy progress and fed a cheap pursuit of happiness.

Neo-classical economics turns a blind eye to the accounting of our planet’s fossil fuel energy assets, tacitly assuming that their supply is infinite. As a result, the developed world operates with massive off-book ecological deficits and maintains it’s economic growth by importing carrying capacity from the third world. Planet earth is about to call in that debt.

China, Brazil, and India have joined the party just as the festivities have started to unwind and we collectively begin to stagger into a future defined by the geological limits of fossil fuel and mineral depletion. Demand for coal, oil, natural gas, water, food, steel, copper, uranium are no longer being driven by the U.S. They are being driven by these newcomers to the party, and the economics of supply and demand are being felt in the pocket books of America. This is not going to be a short term economic cycle. The combination of emerging market demand and the world wide peak production of fossil fuel and mineral resources will continue to drive up the price and availability of energy and food.

The suburban dwellers of America should be asking themselves some very difficult questions:

If you knew gas would cost $10/gallon within five years:

• what kind of car would you buy today?
• would you wait for plug-in hybrids to arrive on the market in 2010?
• would you move closer to work?
• will you carpool, ride an electric bike, get a scooter?
• would you move closer to public transportation?
• would you find telecommute employment?

If you knew the price of natural gas and electricity would triple in five years:

• would you cancel the kitchen remodel and spend the money on energy upgrades?
• would you downsize to a smaller home?
• would you move to multi-unit, shared-wall housing?
• would you move to a different climate?
• would you buy a solar hot water heater instead of granite counter tops?

The “free resource” party is winding down and time is not on our side. As homeowners, what will we do? What will be sustainable? How will we dwell in a post peak world without abundant and cheap natural resources?

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The Politics of Personal Virtue, Sustainability, and Population Growth

“Conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”
Vice President Richard Cheney, 2001

I have begun wonder lately whether anything I personally do can be considered sustainable. I live at 9,000 feet in the Colorado Rocky Mountains and I’m in the process of converting my home to a zero energy standard powered completely off-grid with a hybrid wind and solar system and transforming my 3 acres into model of permaculture capable of providing all of our food requirements. At a personal level that seems “sustainable” and at least provides a sense of satisfaction and security, however from a global perspective of 6.7 billion people it amounts to nothing more than a personal fortress. A fragile island of self-sufficency, in a world racing toward ecological overshoot and collapse.

Is Cheney right about conservation being no more than a virtue? Is what we do at a personal level no more than a greener than thou ego fantasy? Is nothing we do personally sustainable in the larger context of a growing pop of 6.7 billion people and the equivalent 2 to 3 more earths required support a Chinese, Indian, and Brazilian population determined to achieve the American standard of consumption?

It is likely that we have already exceeded the carrying capacity of the earth. The point at which the combination of the world’s population and that population’s average level of consumption exceeds the capability of the earth to provide sustenance. Individual actions to achieve a sustainable level of consumption are no longer meaningful. Actions and policies of entire countries are only slightly more meaningful.

I don’t agree with world view embedded in Cheney’s cynical quote, however one word speaks to the truth. Our continued survival on this planet will depend on a comprehensive world policy of sustainability and living within our planet’s carrying capacity and that policy must address and include the politically explosive issue of population growth.

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A Ponzi Scheme Wrapped in a Three Piece Suit of Respectability

“Once you sit down and draw a little picture of the economy as a subset of the larger ecosystem, then you’re halfway home as far as ecological economics is concerned. That’s why people resist doing that. That means you would have to say well, there are limits, we’re not going to be able to grow forever. That means the economy must have some optimal scale relative to the larger system. That means you don’t grow beyond the optimum.
How do we stop growing? What do we do?
These are very threatening questions.”
Dr. Herman Daly, Former World Bank economist and author of Ecological Economics

Fantasy Economics

I’m an architect and engineer by training, so when I began to write seriously about sustainability, I had no idea that the storyline would begin with a discussion of economic theory. Yet when one asks the question of what is sustainable or not sustainable relative to housing you are very quickly tossed into the stormy seas of “growth” and “limits”, and the conflict between neo-classical and ecological economics.

When it comes to our mainstream economic theory, it seems that we are not much removed from our ancestors who thought the earth was flat or at the center of the universe. The neo-classical economics currently taught in all of our major universities dominates both our world view and governmental policy making. Developed in a time of abundant natural resources, it assumes that non-renewable natural resources are infinite and ignores the environmental costs of their production and consumption. It is an economic theory that worships at the church of growth and blindly disregards it’s own existence within a closed ecosystem. Much like the 16th century catholic church that believed that the earth was the center of the universe, neo-classical economics believes it is the tail that wags the ecosystem. Herman Daly, the father of ecological economics, likens the current situation to a chain-letter swindle or ponzi scheme in which “The current beneficiaries of the swindle, those at the beginning of the chain, try hard to keep up the illusion among those doubters at the end who are beginning to wonder if there are really sufficient resources in the world for the game to continue very much longer.” This ponzi scheme would eventually play itself out in the U.S. housing sector in the form of energy guzzling McMansions, and mind numbing suburban sprawl.

The American Church of Growth
The concept of growth in America would be enshrined in our national psyche when Thomas Jefferson penned the words “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” into our declaration of independence. As the country migrated west, growth and development would take on a patina of virtue and goodness and become the religion of the land. Our pursuit of happiness would not always be as pure as the words of Jefferson, and our migration west would be equal parts courage, individual initiative, greed, and genocide. As we moved west we would both take and rape, arrogantly taking land from the native population and casually raping the environment of it’s natural resources.

The discovery of oil and the invention of the automobile would eventually morph our cities and towns into massive developments comprised of weak centers surrounded by a web of suburban wasteland anchored by multi-lane highways as each generation tapped into our balance sheet of natural resources in a mad pursuit of growth and prosperity. The happiness we sought in the rapid growth and development of our built environment would not be defined by Jefferson’s liberty, but by long commutes, road rage, pathological consumption, crushing debt, an epidemic of obesity and national dependancy on anti-depressants.

The impact of neo-classical economics on housing would and continues to be profound and pervasive. This ponzi scheme wrapped in a three piece suit of respectability would provide the hidden intellectual foundation for growing home sizes, suburban sprawl, and countless “cost benefit” studies that would shape the regulations that formed the basis of our inadequate energy codes. However we are now approaching an ecological tipping point and the current generation will find themselves the recipient of the scheme’s inevitable collapse.

Ecosystems self-correct with Unbiased Indifference
Ecosystems are naturally self-correcting and treat all populations that overreach with equal and unbiased indifference. It matters not whether the population is human, animal, plant, insect or microbe, any population that exceeds its natural carrying capacity is either forced to reduce its numbers or its level of consumption. The 2002 Limits to Growth report estimates that human “growth and development” has already exceeded the earth’s carrying capacity by more than 20% and it is evident that the earth’s ecosystem has already begun the process of adjustment and rebalancing. The economic theory and policy decisions that brought us to our current state will be quietly trumped by the natural processes that we have ignored.

The signs and warnings of this natural rebalancing are everywhere. Climate change, rapid species extinction, fisheries collapse, depleted aquifers, loss of arable land, $100/barrel oil, and monthly heating costs that equal mortgage payments are all evidence of natural limits in action. As the world’s largest per-capita consumer of natural resources, the U.S. has become the poster nation for ecological overreach and collapse. As a result we currently face an especially painful and traumatic transition to a more sustainable future.

“Future generations are always free to make themselves miserable or content with whatever we give them. We do not owe the future their happiness, but we do owe them an intact resource base.”
Dr. Herman Daly

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