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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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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Beyond GDP – Measuring American Well-being after the Economic Collapse of 2008

“The Gross National Product includes air pollution and advertising for cigarettes, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors, and jails for the people who break them. GNP includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior…And if GNP includes all this, there is much that it does not comprehend. It does not allow for the health of our families, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It is indifferent to the decency of our factories and the safety of our streets alike…It measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”  — Bobby Kennedy

When FDR was elected president in the midst of the Great Depression, the economic data  available to help him engineer a recovery was limited to stock price indices, freight car loadings, and a few incomplete indices of industrial production.  As a result, in order to get a handle on whether the New Deal programs were having the intended stimulus effects, economist Simon Kuznets of the National Bureau of Economic Research was tasked to develop a new set of national economic metrics.

Kuznets would win the Nobel prize in economics for his efforts and the invention of Gross Domestic Product [GDP] would become the primary measure of economic health for the U.S. and the developed world for decades to come.  As a macro-economic indicator GDP would receive universal praise as an essential tool to help manage the economy and moderate the effects of the “business cycle”.  Although merely quantitative in nature, it would take on a qualitative veneer in hands of economists and politicians who would paint GDP growth as “good” and any contraction as “bad”.

In a presentation to congress explaining his invention, Kuznets would warn that, “the welfare of a nation can … scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income …”, and yet GDP wrapped around a universally accepted “value of growth as progress”, would evolve to become our de-facto measurement of national well-being.

There have been many comparisons of the economic situation faced by president-elect Obama to the one that FDR faced in the Great Depression.  Although the specifics may differ, the gravity and systemic nature of the economic failures of these two era’s cannot be disputed.  It could also be argued that much like FDR, the Obama administration needs a new set of metrics to engineer a sustainable and equitable recovery.  A set of metrics that measures improvements in our collective well-being as accurately as GDP measures the churn of money through our economy.

GDP is no longer sufficient to measure our nation or any nations progress.  The U.S. economy leads the world in the measure of GDP and yet in many ways our economy and nation acutely lags in the provision of our collective well-being.

• One in six Americans goes without health insurance (around 47 million people).

• The U.S. ranks 24th among the 30 most affluent countries in life expectancy – yet spends more on health care than any other nation.

• The U.S. infant mortality rate is on par with Croatia, Cuba, Estonia, and Poland; if the U.S. infant mortality rate were the same as that of top-ranked Sweden, every year 21,000 additional American babies would live to celebrate their first birthdays.

• One American dies every 90 seconds from obesity-related health problems.

• One in seventeen Americans (about 6 percent of the population) suffers from severe mental illness.

• Fourteen percent of the population – some 30 million Americans – lack the literacy skills to perform simple, everyday tasks like understanding newspaper articles and instruction manuals.

• More than one in five Americans – 22 percent of the population – have “below basic” math skills, making it impossible to balance a checkbook, calculate a tip, or figure out from an advertisement the amount of interest on a loan.

• Nearly one in five American children lives in poverty, with more than one in thirteen living in extreme poverty.

• The real value of the minimum wage has decreased by 40% in the past forty years and wages have been essentially stagnant since the 1970’s

• More families with children are homeless today than at any time since the Great Depression.

• The U.S. has 5% of the world’s people – but holds 24% of the world’s prisoners.

• The U.S. ranks 42nd in global life expectancy and leads the world’s twenty-five richest countries in the percentage of children living in poverty.

“To be a leading democracy in the information age means producing objective, independent, scientifically grounded, and widely shared quality information on where we are and where we are going, on both an absolute and relative basis, including comparisons to other nations.” — David Walker, Former Comptroller General of the United States

“Happiness is very serious business … the dogma of limitless productivity and growth in a finite world is unsustainable and unfair for future generations.” — Bhutan Prime Minister Jigme Thinley

If GDP is not a meaningful measure of a nation’s well-being then what is?  What metrics are needed to gauge the actions and deeds of our elected officials so that we can objectively measure whether government policies add to or subtract from our well-being?  Where would the U.S. stand when compared objectively with the rest of the world?

As it turns out, there is growing interest in providing indexes that transcend economic output and measure the ultimate objective of a nations economy — the well-being of it’s citizens.

The Human Development Index
One of the first metrics to challenge the supremacy of GDP was the Human Development Index [HDI].  The HDI was developed in 1990 by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq and was immediately adopted by the United Nations Development Program [UNDP] in its annual Human Development Report.

The HDI index combines the normalized measures of life expectancy, literacy, educational attainment, and GDP per capita for countries worldwide. It is a standardized means of measuring human development – a concept that, according to the UNDP, “refers to the process of widening the options of persons, giving them greater opportunities for education, health care, income, employment, etc.”

The HDI combines three basic dimensions:

1. Life expectancy at birth, as a proxy measure of a population’s health and longevity
2. Knowledge and education, as measured by the adult literacy rate (with two-thirds weighting) and the combined primary, secondary, and tertiary gross enrollment ratio (with one-third weighting).
3. Standard of living, as measured by the natural logarithm of gross domestic product (GDP) per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP) in United States dollars.

The basic use of HDI is to rank countries by level of “human development”.  This has evolved into a way of classifying whether a country is a developed, developing, or underdeveloped.

According to the 2007/2008 U.N. Human Development Report the U.S. ranked 12th based on the HDI among the “developed” nations.  More troubling is that the U.S. ranking has steadily declined since 1980 when we were ranked 2nd.  This decline happened during a period in which U.S. annual GDP grew from about $5.2-trillion to over $14-trillion dollars.

The Happy Planet Index
In 2006, the U.K’s New Economics Foundation [NEF] published the Happy Planet Index [HPI].  One should not be put off by the somewhat tongue-in-cheek title of this index.  This is a very serious and well researched metric with a serious objective.  In the words of the NEF:

“This report takes a very different look at the wealth and poverty of nations.  It measures the ecological efficiency with which, county by country, people achieve long and happy lives.  In doing so, it strips our view of the economy back to its absolute basics: what goes in (natural resources), and what comes out (human lives of differing length and happiness).”

The HPI combines three indicators to achieve a measure of how well a given country converts the earth’s finite resources into the well-being experienced by their citizens.  As an equation the index can be expressed as:

HPI = (Life Satisfaction x Life Expectancy) / Ecological Footprint

where,

• Life Satisfaction is derived primarily from the World Values Survey
• Life Expectance data is taken from the U.N. Development Report
• and, Ecological Footprint is based on data from the Global Footprint Network

The NEF did not intend the index to be a happiness scorecard.  They stress that:

“It is important to recognize from the outset that the HPI is not an indicator of the happiest country on the planet, or the best place to live.  Nor does it indicate the most developed country in the traditional sense, or the most environmentally friendly,  Instead, the HPI combines these notions, providing a method of comparing countries progress towards the goal of providing long-term well-being for all without exceeding the limits of equitable resource consumption.”

Since the U.S. casts such a huge ecological footprint relative to it’s population, it is not surprising that based on HPI, the U.S. ranks 150th in the world just behind Lithuania.  America’s HPI ranking underscores just how out of sync our nation’s outsized GDP is with our actual well-being and our inefficient stewardship of natural resources.

What Metrics are Needed for a New American Century – A New New Deal?

“If the people cannot trust their government to do the job for which it exists – to protect them and to promote their common welfare – all else is lost.” — Barack Obama

The U.N.’s HDI index and the New Economic Foundation’s HPI index provide excellent alternatives to GDP.  These indexes can easily be used in comparison with other countries and help to underscore some of our nation’s weaknesses, but they do not provide the kind of detail needed for policy makers at the local, state, and national levels to make decisions and for citizens to hold those policy makers accountable.

There are two privately funded American initiatives that are aimed at meeting those local, state, and national goals and to forging a more meaningful way of measuring our nation’s progress.

The American Human Development Project
The American Human Development Project  [AHDP] was founded in 2006 and is modeled on the U.N.’s global Human Development Report.  The AHDP’s American Human Development Index [AHDI] combines indicators for the three domains of a long and healthy life, access to knowledge, and a decent standard of living.

With their 2008-2009 Measuring America Report we get a first look at the AHDI index in application and can begin to compare various regions of the country.  At the state level, we find that Connecticut ranks first and Mississippi ranks last.  Among the nation’s 436 congressional districts, New York’s Fourteenth District, in New York City, ranks first, and California’s Twentieth District, around Fresno, ranks last. The average resident of New York’s Fourteenth District earns over three times as much as the average resident of California’s Twentieth District, lives four and a half years longer, and is ten times as likely to have a college degree.

The report’s rich volume of data provides a baseline to measure future progress and a new set of benchmarks for state-to-state and region-to-region comparisons.

The State of the USA
The State of the USA, Inc. [SUSA] is a non-profit founded in 2007 dedicated to providing easy access to anyone interested in finding relevant data about the true state of the nation.  SUSA’s new website will launch in 2009 and include data on an array of topics including:

• Animals, Plants, and Ecosystems
• Business
• Civic Involvement
• Crime and Safety
• Ecosystem Goods, Services
• Education
• Employment, Labor Markets
• Families & Children
• Health
• Housing
• Immigration
• Income & Wealth
• National Security
• Population
• Prices & Inflation
• Production & Output
• Research & Development
• Soil, Water, & Air
• Values & Culture

SUSA does not provide a new index but rather a high quality public data hub intended to promote informed citizen involvement in government.

A Model Metric for a New American Beginning
If I were going to choose a model for our new government to use as a benchmark for a new American metric of citizen well-being, it would be the Canadian Index on Well-Being [CIW].  Conceived in 1999, the CIW is a partnership of Canadian national leaders, organizations, and grass root efforts across Canada in consultation with international experts.  the CIW’s visions is:

“…to enable Canadians to share in the highest well-being status by identifying, developing and publicizing measures that offer clear, valid and regular reporting on progress toward that goal and well-being outcomes Canadians seek as a nation.”

The CIW challenges us to imagine an index that:

• Distinguishes between good things like health and clean air, and bad things, like sickness and pollution;

• Promotes volunteer work and unpaid care-giving as social goods, and overwork and stress as social deficits;

• Places a value on educational achievement, early childhood learning, economic and personal security, a clean environment, and social and health equity;

• Values a better balance between investment in health promotion and spending on illness treatment.

After nearly ten years in the making, the CIW index is scheduled to launch in the spring of 2009 and will combine eight indicator domains into a composite index to provide a quick snapshot of whether overall Canadian well-being is improving or declining.  Detailed reports will flush out the composite index and provide trend data and additional information about each of the individual domains.  The eight domains will provide a comprehensive view of Canadian well-being.

• Living Standards are defined as the quality and quantity of goods and services, both public and private, available to the population, and the distribution of these goods and services within the population.

• Community Vitality is characterized by strong, active and inclusive relationships between residents, private sector, public sector and voluntary organizations that work to foster individual and collective well-being. Vital communities are those that are able to cultivate these relationships in order to create, adapt and thrive in the changing world and thus improve well-being of citizens.

• Healthy Populations measures the health of a population in its fullest expression – being alive and well, experiencing disease, disability and delaying death, lifestyles we lead, and care we receive.

• Educated Populace measures the literacy skills required to function effectively in society, and is aware of contextual situations and systems, social and economic interconnections, current world events, the processes of the natural world, and the influence of current lifestyles on population health and on the choices and quality of life of future generations

• Time Use measures the use of time, how people experience time, what controls its use, and how it affects well-being.

• Ecosystem Health measures the state of well-being and integrity of our natural environment.  This includes the sustainability of Canada’s natural resources and the capacity of our ecosystems and watersheds to provide a sustained level of ecological goods and services for the well-being of Canadians and other species in nature. This domain examines both the current state of Canada’s ecosystems and changes over time.

• Civic Engagement measures the health of our democracy. It addresses three aspects of our public lives and the governance of our society: How engaged are citizens in public life and governance?; Do our governments function in an open, transparent, effective, fair, equitable, and accessible manner?: and Are Canadians, our governments and our corporations good global citizens? Civic engagement includes our electoral processes, and the policy and decision-making processes at all levels of government.

• Arts, Culture, and Recreation measures culture as a general term covering all forms of human expression. People’s culture is uniquely expressed in their language, and the contours of our multicultural society can be sketched with measures of linguistic usage. What matters to Canadians sometimes matters in different ways to those observing events from different cultural perspectives. Art is a particular type of culture. Art includes performing arts; visual arts; media arts; and facilities like galleries and all kinds of museums, historical and heritage sites.

As we face the greatest economic challenge since the Great Depression, the citizens of America will be poorly served if as a nation, we continue to rely solely on GDP as a measure of our progress.  Obama has promised change, he has promised to “promote our common welfare”, he will need more than GDP to point the way.

“The true test of the American ideal is whether we’re able to recognize our failings and then rise together to meet the challenges of our time. Whether we allow ourselves to be shaped by events and history, or whether we act to shape them.” — Barack Obama, Jun. 4, 2005

See Remodelling GDP, Financial Times March 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 LEED Narrative – Going Beyond

I received an email this morning from Scot Horst , who chairs the LEED Steering Committee. He describes the behind the scenes narrative that has been going on since work began on LEED 2009.

Person A: “Global warming doesn’t give us much time.”
Person B: “But we can’t address much of anything, let alone global warming, if we’re only dealing with a small fraction of the entire built environment. We need to get everyone involved.”

Person A: “Yes, but why get them involved in a system that doesn’t take them far enough to save us from ourselves? We need our buildings to be restorative.”
Person B: “LEED can’t save us from ourselves. LEED, as a tool, can engage the market in transformation. That transformation is about people. It is not about LEED credits.”

Person A: “You’re missing the point. We have to be tougher. We have to go beyond.”
Person B: “No, you’re missing the point. We have to find ways to engage a market that has never thought about these issues before.”

Persons A and B: “Let’s find a way to do both.

”This is an engaging and very important narrative and perhaps the most important point for me is that LEED is a “tool” that helps to raise consciousness and “engage the market in transformation.” My personal view is that we must “go beyond” and that much of what we currently do in the green building movement, however well intentioned, is nothing more than rearranging the deck chairs on the titanic. The global warming mentioned in Horst’s narrative has provided the catalyst for both LEED and Architecture 2030, but focusing solely on warming misses the point. Warming is a symptom and not a cause. It has prompted us to take some action, but not to “go beyond”. As a premise for action it has been useful, but is easily attacked on it’s “scientific validity”. It is one of the canaries in the coal mine, but there has been is very little discussion of the coal mine. We need to expand the narrative and take a broader view.

Taking a page out of ecological economics, once you picture the built environment as a mere subset of our closed ecosystem, then your conceptual framework regarding sustainable building is forever changed. It means you have to accept that there are limits, and that we are not going to be able to grow forever. It implies the built environment must have some optimal size and level of consumption relative to the larger ecosystem. It means you cannot grow beyond that optimum without threatening man’s survival within that ecosystem. Out of this stream of thought flows a list of very troubling questions?

• How do we stop growing?

• What are the limits? What is optimal?

• Does climate change tell us they have already been exceeded?

• Do we face a kind of built environment armageddon when fossil fuel production peaks and begins to decline?

• Is a zero energy standard imperative now?

• What do we do? How do we do it?

Our very survival depends on how and when these questions are answered. LEED does not provide the answers, but it does help us to prepare.

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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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