GEOG 353: Day 7

1
GEOG 353 Day 7
2
Housekeeping Items

• The Chemistry Club is sponsoring a talk on 'The
  Science of Climate Change' at 6 p.m. tomorrow,
  followed by a discussion of possible actions.
  It's in Building 355, Room 203.
• I managed to persuade world-renowned (now
  retired) ecologist , C.S. Buzz Holling to come
  to my Environmental Geography course tomorrow
  (same room as above) at 1 p.m. Come if you're
  really interested. He's going to be talking about
  ecosystem resilience and adaptive management.
• A reminder about the web site recommended by Dan
  http//www.ted.com/

3
Housekeeping Items

• Anyone who hasn't chosen a book report date?
• One of the readings didn't get assigned to a
  week the chapter from Diamond Week 9.
• When I said I wanted the debate articles back, I
  meant after the debates are over. Please take
  them and decide how you want to divide them up.
  Also look into other resources.
• We have book reports today, and then I would
  like to cover Chapters 3 and 4 of the textbook.
• Any other housekeeping items or announcements?

4
Porritt Chapters 3 4

• Chapter 3 engages with the issue of economic
  growth, which is one of the sacred cows of
  capitalism. In this context, he recommends Limits
  to Growth The 30-Year Update (so named for the
  original 1972 report) by Jorgen Randers and
  Dennis Meadows. I have the charts that illustrate
  the models on a CD, if you would be interested to
  see them some time.
• In essence, they are arguing that there will not
  be one big collapse, but a situation where more
  and more capital will have to be diverted to
  coping with the ecological impacts of an
  expanding population and economy that eventually
  there won't be enough to sustain continuing
  growth in food and industrial production, and
  population growth will also be forced to cease.

5
The Limits to Growth

• Just look at the table on p. 44 of my edition
  you dont have this table regarding increases in
  various factors from 1950 to 1975, and then again
  from '75 to 2000. The percentage changes are
  quite extraordinary. The size of the global
  economy is now doubling every 25 years, and trade
  has increased more than 12 times since the end of
  World War II.
• The issue is do we want a soft landing or a hard
  landing? The choice is up to us, and even more
  importantly up to our decision-makers.
• In essence the constantly growing economy, as a
  sub-system of the biosphere, is bumping up
  against the fact that the biosphere and its
  resources are finite. It can only grow by
  devouring its host.

6
The Limits to Growth

• Although this is a heretical idea for mainstream
  economists, the scale of the economic subsystem
  will eventually be determined by the overall
  scale of the ecosystem, by its ability to provide
  high-grade resources and to absorb low-grade
  waste, and by the inter-dependency of all
  interlocking elements (p. 47 these page numbers
  dont apply to your edition).
• In other words, economics has to deal with the
  first and second laws of thermodynamics the
  first stating that energy can neither be created
  nor destroyed, merely transformed into another
  state, and the second that it loses its capacity
  to do useful work with each transformation. Only
  the sun's incoming energy prevents the Earth from
  completely running down. With matter, entropy
  expresses itself as the loss of ability to serve
  as useful raw material.

7
The Limits to Growth

• The productivity of the economy and of the
  biosphere is limited by the amount of solar
  energy captured (all non-renewable resources will
  eventually be depleted). Therefore, economic
  growth can only continue to occur to the extent
  that it 'decouples' itself from
  entropy-producing throughput. Not only has
  economic growth been occurring continually, it
  has been occurring exponentially see text box
  for examples of how quickly seemingly innocuous
  exponential growth can spin out of control.
• Ekins therefore makes a distinction between
  growth in biophysical throughout, growth in
  economic value, and growth in economic and social
  welfare, each of which needs to be distinguished,
  rather than collapsed together.

8
The Limits to Happiness

• Porritt then reviews some of the literature on
  happiness and its links to income and shows see
  also the URL for John Helliwell in the reading
  list that beyond a certain point in income
  growth, life satisfaction levels off. Indeed, he
  also cites Fred Hirsch and others that much of
  people's happiness or unhappiness is relative to
  how well off we see ourselves in relation to
  other people.
• As far back as the 1920, advertisers have
  directly sought to cultivate dissatisfaction and
  thereby to create new needs. Without the creation
  of new needs, the economy would largely grind to
  a halt. Can you think of significant new demand
  that has been created in recent years? Which
  products and services have genuinely enriched our
  lives and which not?

9
The Limits to Happiness

• Stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and other
  mental health issues are all on the rise.
• Helliwell, Richard Layard (see p, 56) and others
  are creating a new 'science of happiness' which
  shows that much of what we think of as subjective
  has an objective basis for instance, people who
  are of service to others tend to be happier, as
  are people with a richer community life and a
  slower pace of life. And yet we make increasing
  incomes and economic output the measure of
  society's success, not whether people's happiness
  is increasing.
• In line with this, Herman Daly makes the
  important distinction between quantitative
  expansion and qualitative improvement. Even in
  the steady-state economy he advocates, life
  quality can improve.

10
The Limits to Growth

• Suggesting to mainstream economists that there
  are limits of growth is like suggesting to the
  Catholic Church back in the Middle Ages that
  the Earth was round and is not the centre of the
  universe.
• Economists counter that we can substitute
  man-made capital for natural capital. However,
  there are some things that can't be substituted
  for. Moreover, we can't rely on rising prices to
  always ensure conservation either. It hasn't
  worked with many fisheries or with the now
  illegal trade in ivory, or with other resources.

11
The Limits of GDP As A Measure

• One of the main arguments against the usefulness
  of GNP/ GDP as a measure of economic health and
  we will get into this more later is that we
  should subtract the loss of natural capital that
  occurs through economic activity each year, plus
  the various defensive expenditures that represent
  'collateral damage' from economic activity
  environmental protection and restoration, car
  accidents, poor health and rising crime rates,
  etc. Can you think of current examples in Canada?
• The main point is that development (qualitative)
  is not the same as growth (quantitative).

12
Peak Oil and The Limits to Growth

• Since so much of the growth economy has been
  premised on abundant supplies of fossil fuels,
  the arrival of peak oil (the point at which
  demand exceeds supply) some time between last
  year and 2020 will change all the rules
  economically, and socially as well.
• Already the energy recovered to energy expended
  ratio has gone from 281 to 21, and is still
  declining.
• Unfortunately, in the immortal words of our own
  Tim Naegele, we hit the collective snooze
  button back in the late '70s when oil prices
  started going back down and, as a result, we lost
  the opportunity of a 30-year head start on
  deflecting the current crisis in peak oil and
  climate change.

13
Chapter 4 of Porritt

• In this chapter, Porritt engages with what are
  the defining characteristics of capitalism, and
  whether what some people have called killer
  capitalism can be tamed for purposes of
  sustainable development.
• He notes that leftists tend to reject the profit
  motive and free markets as being inherently
  unsustainable, whereas right-wingers tend to see
  more privatization of natural capital and less
  government intervention as the key to success.
• While Porritt has little time for either of these
  positions, he does strongly suggest that
  capitalism, as we know it today would, indeed,
  appear to be incompatible with anything vaguely
  resembling sustainability (p. 67).

14
Capitalism vs. Communism?

• He cites multi-billionaire, George Soros, on the
  capitalist threat. He also cites statistics on
  the growth inequality in the U.S. where the
  average wealth of the richest 400 Americans saw a
  one-year increase from 1998 to 1999 was 655
  million dollars while the average wage-earner has
  seen a 12 in their salaries from the1973 to
  1998.
• At the same time, he notes how ecologically
  destructive communist societies such as the
  USSR and China have proven to be even worse in
  many cases than their capitalist rivals.
• For many 'Greens' the solution now lies not in
  opposing socialism to capitalism but in creating
  economies that utilize markets, but on a smaller,
  more local scale.

15
Markets vs. 'Market Society'

• This ties in with Karl Polanyi's distinction
  between markets, which have existed for
  millennia, and market society a distinct form
  of society in which the nation-state has aided
  and abetted the rise of the corporation.
• According to George Monbiot, an economy with
  markets that are effectively regulated in the
  interests of workers, consumers, and ecosystems
  is the kind of model we should be striving for.
• Originally, when corporations were first
  chartered, their charters were supposed to be
  subject to being revoked if they proved guilty of
  malfeasance, but this been quietly forgotten and,
  by virtue of being 'persons' under the law,
  corporate boards are largely protected from
  prosecution.

16
Corporations as Psychopaths?

• Citing Joel Bakan (author of the book and film,
  The Corporation) corporations have a fiduciary
  responsibility to their shareholders to maximize
  profits, and thus they are often very willing to
  externalize their costs onto others and onto the
  environment in order to do so, unless this is
  against the law, and even that is sometimes an
  insufficient deterrent.
• Porritt argues that, rather than being mediators,
  between society and corporations, governments
  have tended to become their partners, helping
  them to achieve their objectives domestically and
  internationally.
• Financial irregularities have become common
  amongst the leading companies, and CEO rewards no
  longer seem linked to company performance.

17
Private Property and Free Trade

• So far, Porritt has looked at markets and profit.
  He next looks at the issue of private property,
  noting that while there may be situations where
  giving the poor more private property rights may
  assist in sustainability, in general attempting
  to privatize natural capital and ecosystem
  services seems to hold little promise.
• It also ignores the many successful communal
  property management systems that have existed
  around the world.
• He notes that when David Ricardo advocated free
  trade in the early nineteenth century, neither
  capital nor labour were mobile. Nowadays, both,
  but especially the former are, and it tends to
  flow to countries with the cheapest labour and
  the lowest environmental standards.

18
Scale, Needs and Competition

• On the issue of scale, he notes that Peter
  Vitousek, et al. in 1986 estimated that human
  appropriation of net primary productivity (NPP)
  was 40. The global economy has doubled since
  then. Does that mean that we now appropriate
  80?!
• On the issue of meeting human needs, he suggests
  that there has proven to be a disconnect between
  economic growth, as generated by current patterns
  of capital allocation, and increases in human
  welfare, thus raising questions about trickle
  down vs. gush up.
• He questions unbridled competition, citing Lyn
  Margulis and others that in nature, one observes
  'competitive exclusion,' cooperation, and
  interdependence.

19
Chapter 4 of Porritt Concluding Section

• On inequality, he notes that developing countries
  spend 375 billion a year on servicing their 2.5
  trillion debt more than the combined
  expenditure on health and education, and 20 times
  what they receive in foreign aid. Moreover, the
  top 1 of all households in those countries
  receive between 70 and 90 of all the wealth.
• In the U.S., household debt as a percentage of
  income rose from 58 to 85 from 1973 to 1998, and
  the top 1 now earns more than the bottom 95.
• In the final section of the chapter, Porritt
  suggests that while we need effective pricing
  mechanisms to internalize the true value of
  ecosystem services, capitalism will remain a
  corrosive system unless it is buttressed with
  wisdom and values that transcend the purely
  economic.