Welcome back.
Today we will be talking about an introduction to sustainability, looking at some of the
core concepts of sustainability that lay the groundwork for a lot of the other discussions
we will be having over the course.
So, what is sustainability?
Lots of different organizations have different opinions about what sustainability is.
One of the most commonly accepted definitions is from 1987.
Gro Brundtland from the UN defines sustainability as "Meeting the needs of the present generation
without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs."
So, that’s one of the most commonly accepted.
There’s another one that is used quire a bit as well from Serageldin.
"Sustainability is giving future generations as many opportunities as, if not more than,
we have had ourselves."
Another one that I would like to mention comes out of the National Science Foundation here
in U.S. which suggests that "a sustainable world is one where human needs are met equitably
without harm to the environment or sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet
their own needs."
So, this one is a little bit different.
It uses the word equitably which wasn’t in either of the other two.
Equitably presumably across different human populations, different human communities.
It also mentions the word environment which is often a contentious word in discussions
of sustainability because first of all how do you define the environment?
That’s another word that is tricky like sustainability.
Another aspect of it is just using the word environment creates this separation of being
humans on one hand and the environment on the other, rather than seeing humans as part
of the environment.
The Australian Government has their definition of environmental sustainability that includes
a variety of different aspects that people want to maintain.
So, human life.
The capabilities of the natural environment to maintain the living conditions for people
and other species.
The aspects of the environment that produce renewable resources such as water, timber,
fish and energy.
The functioning of society despite nonrenewable resource depletion.
The quality of life for all people, the livability and beauty of the environment.
So, this one I think is interesting because it mentions other species.
It's the first of the definitions we’ve discussed that explicitly calls out other
species.
Maintaining the living conditions for nonhuman species.
Later on it only says the quality of life for all people.
It doesn’t say the quality of life for all species, but nevertheless I thought it was
interesting that Australia acknowledges other species as part of this issue.
The U.S. President's Council on Sustainable Development defines environmental sustainability
in the following way.
They say, "America’s challenge is to create a life-sustaining Earth, a future in which
prosperity and opportunity increase while life flourishes and pressures on the ocean,
Earth and atmosphere diminish."
So, here we have some interesting terminology about prosperity and opportunity that sound
much more political than some of the earlier ones which sounded a little bit more scientific.
One way of conceiving about sustainability that is often used is the model of a 3-legged
stool where there are 3 different major categories that underpin sustainability.
One which is environmental, the second which is social, and the third which is economic.
Various people propose that sustainability can only work if all three of those aspects
are attended too.
That if you just focus on environmental and social without focusing on economic the system
won’t work.
Similarly if you focus on any other two or any one of them without all three the system
will collapse.
However, there is some contention about whether or not the 3-legged stool is the best model
for this.
One that I prefer is a nested model like this one where economy is inside of society, and
society is inside of an environment, and this is going back to the question of whether or
not humans and the environment are separate things, or whether humans are a part of the
environment.
In this model we have the environment which is the entire world and within that there
are human societies, and within that again the economy is just a subset of human societies.
So, this is another way to think about how these three topics fit together in a sustainable
way.
Ultimately this like so many other topics there are different stakeholders, and each
of those stakeholders has a different opinion about how to think about the world.
This goes back to what we’ve been chatting about in terms of taxonomies, the ways people
organize the issues in their world.
Ultimately just as a taxonomy is really important, there is a lot of value in the definition
of terms.
Defining the term in a specific way allows others to understand your argument and determining
whether or not they agree.
It helps to avoid miscommunication and ultimately helps to distill a person's thoughts.
If you have a clear definition it means that you have thought through the various aspects
of a term rather than just using it glibly without knowing quite what it means.
Nevertheless, definitions are easy to get kind of obsessed with and worry a lot about
the exact wording of them, and definitions aren’t necessarily critical.
So for example, Mt.
Everest, the tallest mountain in the world.
Everybody agrees that that’s the case.
However, it is hard to define Mt.
Everest exactly.
At some point there is a rock, and that rock may be in Mt Everest or it may be in the mountain
next door, and it’s hard to put a perimeter around which exact pieces of dirt and rock
are Mt.
Everest and which are not.
However, despite the fact that it is hard to have a precise definition of Mt.
Everest, it’s pretty clear that Tenzing Norgay and Sir Edmund Hillary climbed it in
1953.
They were the first to summit 5:45.
So, that’s a point I would like to make is that while the definitions are really important
and thinking through your definition is a critical factor, they shouldn’t get too
bogged down in definitional fights.
So, this gets to another point which is called strategic essentialism.
The idea that several groups might be able to work together despite differences in how
they define terms, and this happens a lot with different environmental groups, who might
have subtly different approaches.
One may think that it’s just about humans, another may think that it’s about all the
different species, and yet they are after a similar goal and so they are able to work
together despite some differences in exactly how they define various terms.
Now I am going to talk a bit about global climatic disruption.
This is a term that has gone through a variety of phrasing.
So, at one point it was largely referred to as global warming.
Then there was some concern that global warming didn’t accurately reflect what was happening
in the world.
It then moved on to be called global climate change.
So, there was a realization that it is not just that the average is getting warmer, but
while the average is getting warmer that some places are getting more extreme in terms of
heat, and other places getting more extreme in terms of cold, and some places are getting
more extreme in terms of rainfall, and others are getting drier.
This caused another sort of smaller group to think about this as global weirding.
This term didn’t really catch on, but the weather is getting weird was their premise.
John Holdren, who is Obama’s Chief Science, and Technology Advisor, had suggested that
the best term that he thinks is appropriate for this is global climatic disruption.
The idea that our climate is being disrupted by these transformations, and that’s one
of the key reasons that disruption is in the title of this course.
So, here we see a graph that describes atmospheric CO2 concentrations at an observatory in Hawaii.
This is in parts per million.
You can see that the graph is going up.
I guess it would be that way on the screen.
The graph is going up year by year, and you can see the fluctuations within each year
because at one time of year it goes up a bit, and then at the next time of year goes down
a bit, but the trend is continuously upward.
This suggests that CO2 concentrations are growing more and more, getting higher and
higher around the world.
So, on the one hand CO2, like what’s the big deal?
Like we breathe out CO2 all the time as part of our respiration.
However, if you look at the concentrations of CO2 across geologic time, which you can
do by looking at ice core samples and seeing how much CO2 is in the bubbles in them, they
correlate that CO2 levels correlate very strongly with temperature, the temperature of the earth
at that time.
So, here we see two graphs and you can see they track pretty closely with each other.
However, if you look at the far end of the graph, the far side of the graph, you can
see the current level of CO2 has gone way above what it has ever been in the last 800,000
years, and the fear of climate change is that this will then lead to a similar change in
temperature as a result of the higher CO2, the greenhouse effect of CO2 in the atmosphere.
So, now I want to talk a bit about biodiversity which is another major environmental issue
related to this class.
So, I want to take you through a little tour, a thing called the interactive tree of life,
and here is the URL.
You can get to it and explore it more if you like.
So, this is a map of all of the biodiversity currently existing in the world.
Each time there is a branch that is a different section of animals, plants and other organisms
branching off from each other.
So, zooming in a bit here we see it in pink.
Here we see all of the animals and plants.
Zooming in even more here we see a variety of species.
So, on the far extreme on one side we see the anopheles mosquito, and at the far extreme
on the other side we see pan troglodytes, the chimpanzee, and homo sapiens is next to
there.
So, what I find interesting is here we have chimpanzees, and humans, and mice, and rats,
and chickens, and all the way down to mosquitos occupy this little tiny piece of the broader
circle.
So, zoom back out and you can see that is just a chunk of the biodiversity around the
world.
So, I think that is important to realize that the things that we consider most prominently,
these things that are plants and animals that affect our lives, are ultimately just a very
small part of the bio diversity that exist in the world.
So, most of the biodiversity is in these, sometimes they’re called charismatic megafauna.
So, big animals that people like to think about.
Things like whales, and dolphins, and tigers and stuff, and ultimately most of the money
goes to preserving that biodiversity, but a huge amount of biodiversity exists in bacteria
and other organisms like that, and that’s an open question.
Is it relative to preserve that biodiversity?
Does it count as much as things that are a little bit more like us?
I don’t know.
That’s something to give some thought to.
Ultimately biodiversity breeds robustness.
So, if you have a system that has lots of different species in it the chances that all
of those species are going to go extinct at the same time is much smaller than if you
have a thing called a monoculture.
A monoculture is what happens in a lot of farming around the world.
So, you’ll see a field that is just corn from one end to the other, or you’ll see
there are palm oil plantations in some parts of the world, and while monocultures are much
more efficient in terms of producing the resources that they use, they run into a variety of
problems.
So for example, if a disease starts in a particular part of a monoculture it’s very easy for
that disease to sweep through the rest of the monoculture, and that’s much less of
a problem if you have a diverse ecosystem.
Ultimately one of the main goals is to prevent the extinction of species.
So, once a species goes extinct you can’t recreate it, and you can’t also know about
all that has been lost, all of the characteristics of that species and how it interacts with
the world, and the benefits that might be drawn from the species.
So, there is a discussion by Dr. Richard Leakey who is one of the world’s most famous paleoanthropologists,
and he has studied the rate of species extinction that happens around the world.
He suggests that the species are going extinct much, much faster than they have at points
in recent eons, and he suggests we should be calling this the sixth great extinction.
So, there were extinctions along human history.
Here we see a chart of that where at various different points, like there’s the extinction
of the dinosaurs is one of these, and he suggests that we are now entering a period where humans
are causing another extinction on the scale of the extinctions of the dinosaurs, or on
the scale of a great meteor hitting the earth, and while we’re not feeling that because
it doesn’t really happen on a human time scales, it’s nevertheless over hundreds
or a few hundred years we are putting many, many species out of existence.
Nevertheless, certain species are thriving in part because they’re taking place in
monocultures that serve humans.
So cows, soybeans, palm trees, rats, cockroaches and dogs are all doing really well while other
species are going extinct.
Humans too are doing well.
There are over 7 billions humans now, and I wanted to point out a couple of ways you
could write 7 billion.
So, here is 7 billion with a bunch of zeros.
You could also do it in scientific notation, 7 times 10 to the 9th power.
I want to draw your attention to worldometers.info that has ongoing counters of lots of different
aspects of the world.
Things like human population, and births, and deaths, and healthcare costs, and species
existing, and all sorts of things like that.
So, here’s a graph looking at the population of humans as well as the energy per capita,
the amount of energy we use, and these are multiplied together to show total energy that
is being consumed by humans.
You can see over the last 50 years it has really skyrocketed.
Over the last 100 years it has been going up dramatically, and really over the last
50 years it is growing quite a bit.
This goes to an equation that is an essential part of the way that some groups think about
sustainability.
It's called the IPAT equation.
That the impact of a community is the population x the affluence x the technology that they
use.
So population, we talked about there are 7 billion people in the world.
Affluence is the amount of resources used per person.
So, here we see a person that was in front of me on a plane a few months ago.
This person is not just flying on an airplane, but they are using two electronic devises
simultaneously.
So, it’s like they are in a contest to see who can use the most resources at once.
Then there is the impact of technologies.
So, some technologies enable an increase in population, and others enable a decrease in
population.
Some enable an increase in affluence and others a decrease in affluence.
But this question of what is the impact, and what is the effect of human activity on the
impact that we have on the environments that we live in lead to a variety of possible outcomes.
One outcome over the next several hundred years is we can figure out how to live sustainably.
Unfortunately, another possibility is that we can undergo massive population reduction
and the suffering that would accompany that if we don’t succeed in figuring out a way
to live sustainably.
There is a distinction that is made by a guy named John Michael Greer, and it’s a distinction
between a problem and a predicament.
A problem is something to which there is a solution, and a predicament is something to
which there is not a solution, and Greer has suggested that we don’t have environmental
problems.
People talk a lot about environmental problems.
He says we don’t have environmental problems, we have environmental predicaments.
We have things that are not solvable.
So, this talks about why we think a little bit about collapse and other topics in this
class is it’s not 100% clear that sustainability is achievable by humans in a relevant amount
of time.
Thank you very much.