Collide-a-scape

Libertarians may be dubious about global warming, but they seem to be in agreement that ocean fisheries are nearing collapse. The mothership is not one to sound the foghorn on anything related to the environment, so this passage over at Hit & Run caught my eye:

Overfishing threatens to destroy most of the world’s fisheries within a matter of decades. But while it’s proven difficult to save the gulf or save the whales, we know how to save the fish: Stop treating the ocean like a public bathroom, says Christopher Costello, a professor of natural resource economics at UC Santa Barbara.

The post goes on to laud a market solution that is also heralded by the Environmental Defense Fund.

Readers in the comment thread are on board with both the threat to the oceans and the suggested fix, though some can’t resist taking potshots at environmentalists for their “latent socialism.” It seems every group talks in caricatures.

I have a modest proposal: let’s get Paul Ehrlich and Stewart Brand on tour. If we want to have a real debate on how to address climate change, decarbonize energy, feed the world, etc., let’s get these two icons of environmentalism together, on the same stage, at college campuses, town halls, and YMCA’s.

Because Ehrlich and Brand, each who helped popularize environmentalism when the movement was in its early 1970s heyday, now offer two very different paths to sustainability. Ehrlich, in a recent PloS Biology essay, says overconsumption is dooming the human race and the earth. The larger problem, though, he argues, is that we’re like addicts who can’t stop the self-destruction. So we need help.

To that end, Ehlrich lays out the rationale for an intiative called the Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior. In PloS, he writes:

The admittedly ambitious aim is to change human behavior to avoid a collapse of global civilization.

That is indeed ambitious. What we’re talking about here is a re-engineering of the human mind. Whereas Stuart Brand, in his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto, advocates a re-engineering of the earth to make it more habitable for ourselves. To that end, Brand offers four “environmental heresies,” which he laid out in this July 2009 TED talk.

What I like most about Ehrlich’s Millennium Assessment of Human Behavior project is that it intends

to generate a global discussion of the human predicament, what people desire, and what goals are possible to achieve in a sustainable society.

So let’s have that discussion. A great way to fuel it would be to bring two of the biggest legends in environmentalism together on a speaking tour, where they can debate their respective approaches to sustainability.

The social/ecological relationship is one that fascinates me. It seems to have been the theme of this year’s annual Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) symposium, which Piper Corp reports on at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) blog. For those unfamiliar with LTER’s, this gem of a program is in its third decade and is overseen by the National Science Foundation. In 1999, I wrote in Science magazine about some surprising findings from the Phoenix LTER–one of two urban study sites.

The ESA post interested me because of a thorny dilemma highlighted by new research from the Phoenix LTER, which Corp lays out here:

Ecologists frequently consider how to preserve the resilience of ecosystems—how to make sure that they will continue to produce important services as they face stresses like climate change and water shortages. But we can’t have it all. At some point, said Kelli Larson (Central Arizona– Phoenix LTER), we’ll have to make some tough tradeoffs, depending on which services we value the most. Larson’s work looks at residential landscaping in the Southwest, where traditional lawns use more water but homes with pebble-covered yards use more energy to keep cool and more chemicals to control pests artificially. Sustainable living, it seems, begins not with a to-do list but rather with a question: what do we most want to sustain? (And, importantly, what do we need to sustain?)

As recent controversial developments involving renewable energy suggest, the path to sustainability will require us to make all kinds of uncomfortable tradeoffs. Inevitably, those last two questions–what do we most want to sustain and what do we need to sustain will be decided by human values.

On Tuesday, a front page NYT story by David Sanger on President Obama’s proposed budget for 20011 scared the hell out of me. Diving deep into the numbers, Sanger wrote:

By President Obama’s own optimistic projections, American deficits will not return to what are widely considered sustainable levels over the next 10 years. In fact, in 2019 and 2020 — years after Mr. Obama has left the political scene, even if he serves two terms — they start rising again sharply, to more than 5 percent of gross domestic product. His budget draws a picture of a nation that like many American homeowners simply cannot get above water.

For Mr. Obama and his successors, the effect of those projections is clear: Unless miraculous growth, or miraculous political compromises, creates some unforeseen change over the next decade, there is virtually no room for new domestic initiatives for Mr. Obama or his successors.

At about this point in the piece, I stopped chewing my morning cheerios, looked over at my two young boys still in their pajamas on the couch, and said, huh. Then it was time to fix them breakfast, get them dressed for school, keep them from whacking each other upside the head, etc. The little flare that went off in my head about the future was quickly extinguished by the kinetic activity of my daily morning routine. That’s the way it is if you’re a parent–the immediate present always seems to knock the distant future out of mind. It really doesn’t matter what time of day. (I wish climate change advocates could appreciate this more. And I’m somebody who’s engaged with the issue.)

Anyway, here it is Thursday and I come across this cheery morsel at The Energy Bulletin:

For many years now, people in the peak oil scene – and the wider community of those concerned about the future, to be sure – have had, or thought they had, the luxury of ample time to make plans and take action. Every so often books would be written and speeches made claiming that something had to be done right away, while there was still time, but most people took that as the rhetorical flourish it usually was, and went on with their lives in the confident expectation that the crisis was still a long ways off.

We may no longer have that option. If I read the signs correctly, America has finally reached the point where its economy is so deep into overshoot that catabolic collapse is beginning in earnest. If so, a great many of the things most of us in this country have treated as permanent fixtures are likely to go away over the years immediately before us, as the United States transforms itself into a Third World country. The changes involved won’t be sudden, and it seems unlikely that most of them will get much play in the domestic mass media; a decade from now, let’s say, when half the American workforce has no steady work, decaying suburbs have mutated into squalid shantytowns, and domestic insurgencies flare across the south and the mountain West, those who still have access to cable television will no doubt be able to watch talking heads explain how we’re all better off than we were in 2000.

Yep, sometimes I’m grateful the present is so insistent that I can’t spend much time dwelling on the future.

I’m starting to feel bad for No Impact Man. He’s not getting much respect lately from NY media elites. Several weeks ago, Elizabeth Kolbert dissed him in The New Yorker, prompting his eloquent and polite rejoinder here.

Today, with the release of the movie that chronicles his widely publicized environmental stunt, (he must hate that word by now), he and the film get whacked by the Times lead movie reviewer:

Taken as a polemical documentary championing environmentally conscious action, “No Impact Man,” directed by Laura Gabbert and Justin Schein, is of little interest and less utility. It provides no new scientific insights or political arguments, and celebrates various behavioral changes without assessing their value or importance. Mr. Beavan’s evangelical, self-congratulatory demeanor has the effect, especially early in the film, of playing to the unfortunate perception that what drives many environmentalists is, above all, the need to feel superior to their neighbors and fellow citizens.

Later in his review, Scott the environmentalist/film critic warms up to the movie and its star, but can’t resist a few final jabs:

I remain unconvinced that the cause of planetary rescue will be advanced very far by what is, in the end, an elaborate stunt. But as a professional writer, a New York husband and a man with a compost bin, an organic-produce fetish and a guilty conscience, I can’t, in the end (all appearances to the contrary), judge Mr. Beavan or this film too severely. Making an impact is easy. Making a difference is hard.

It has been said that the sensitive soul in No Impact Man has taken all the mocking criticism to heart. Spare me the crocodile tears. If the book and movie are hits, he can cry all the way to the bank.

That’s probably the best we can do, says Joseph Tainter, in a forthcoming paper. Here’s the passage that will make environmentalists bark at their computer screens:

Contrary to what is typically advocated as the route to sustainability, it is usually not possible for a society to reduce its consumption of resources voluntarily over the long term. To the contrary, as problems great and small inevitably arise, addressing these problems requires complexity and resource consumption to increase.

Anyone seriously engaged in sustainability can’t ignore Tainter’s scholarship on collapse.

Andy Revkin muses on whether the recession has chastened Americans into becoming de facto minimalists, perhaps unwittingly embracing a more sustainable way of life. Sorry, but it’s way too early to tell.

When I see people socking away napkins and ketchups from Wendy’s, the way my grandfather was still doing forty years after the depression (even though he had built a successful business), then maybe I’ll believe there’s a cultural shift afoot.

Michael Tobis obviously sees himself as a thinker of big, serious thoughts. And it is obvious that on matters of climate change and sustainability, Tobis would like his voice to have greater reach.

So because he works hard to be serious and thoughtful, where others are hyperbolic and calculating, I can’t understand why he belittles people who do much to advance environmental debate. This is especially peculiar because one of his pet issues is the communication of climate change and its projected impacts. In a recent post, Tobis examines the case for a certain type of “framing” made by Matthew Nisbet, in Seed Magazine:

The point is not to “sell” the public on climate change, but rather to use research on framing to create communication contexts that move beyond polarization, promote discussion, generate partnerships and connections, and that accurately convey the objective urgency of the problem. If the public feels like they are being marketed to, it will only continue to fuel additional polarization and perceptual gridlock. In shifting the frame on climate change, the goals should not be to persuade, but rather to start conversations with the public that recognize, respect, and incorporate differences in knowledge, values, perspectives, and goals.

In one prominent example of re-framing the debate, strategists Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger have led the way by advocating that climate change should not be defined as a pollution problem that requires additional regulation but as an energy problem that provides an opportunity for growing the economy and creating jobs around clean technology. This reframing moves the debate beyond a narrow constituency of environmental advocates and opens the doors for a broader climate movement that includes labor, business leaders, and the investor class. The frame was a major emphasis by both presidential candidates in the past election, is emphasized in Al Gore’s “Repower America” television ads, and continues to be a dominant focus of the Obama administration.

A second framing strategy to move beyond perceptual gridlock is offered by scientists such as E. O. Wilson and Evangelical leaders such as Richard Cizik who frame environmental stewardship in terms of morality and ethics, engaging an Evangelical audience who might not otherwise pay attention to appeals on climate change. This frame is more than just a talking point or a rebranding of the issue: When scientists and religious leaders join together around shared values to work on a common problem, it builds bonds of trust that enables long-term collaboration and that breaks down prejudices.

This strikes me as a reasonable argument. Nisbet is essentially suggesting a way forward through plurality. What does Tobis think?

Sorry, a shallow appeal to the fading paradigm of personal greed as one example, and a scolding from an evangelist on the other? Out of the frying pan and into two fires? What sort of help is that?

That’s how he sums up Shellenberger and Nordhaus–to him, they are peddling an environmental credo masked as “personal greed,” and Cizik, who has become a pariah among the retrograde wing of the Christian right for his tireless environmental advocacy, is waved off as a scold. Anyone familiar with Cizic’s work in the evangelical community also knows how he was fired for challenging the real old-guard scolds of the Religious Right.

I have a suggestion for Tobis. Instead of disparaging environmental advocates that come at the climate change issue with a different orientation than his, instead of conveniently blaming journalism for not waving a magic wand over humanity’s blind spots, he should train his critical eye on contemporary environmentalism.  One of the reasons climate change can’t get traction as an actionable concern among the general public is that it is a niche cause of a niche movement, whose main constituents are liberal, upper-middle class whites.

To put it another way, the concerns of the typical Grist reader or Sierra Club member are not shared as passionately (if at all) by many others in society. That’s an obvious thing to state. But why is that? Is it because journalism has failed to beat the climate change drum hard enough or is it because the environmental movement has failed to diversify?

So I applaud anyone who tries to make environmental stewardship an appealing idea to people who are not card-carrying environmentalists, such as African-Americans, Hispanics, blue collars, and tens of millions of evangelicals.

If Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus want to put a sunnier face on environmentalism, which means aligning it with economic prosperity, I’m okay with that. It might behoove the core of the environmental movement–affluent, liberal whites–to remember that much of the rest of the world would like to achieve a similar degree of affluence.

If Richard Cizik wants to be the James Hansen of the evangelical community, I’m okay with that. If someone like E. O. Wilson, who represents my approach to the natural world, wants to make common cause with Cizic, I’m okay with that.

All four of these people share the same goal as far as I can tell, and that’s to help others not environmentally inclined buy into the notion of a sustainable planet. They just offer different paths.

What path does Tobis offer? It’s hard to tell in his post, but in order to hammer home his message of imminent catastrophic climate change, he suggests a “24 hour doomsday channel.”

Sure, let’s make it an endless loop of Soylent Green. If that doesn’t scare us into sustainability, nothing will.

What happens when you cross John Nash’s view of human behavior with Isaiah Berlin’s concept of human freedom? You get the reason why we may never chart an environmentally sustainable course.

This is the interesting argument that Kurt Cobb lays out over at The Oil Drum. His conclusion is dispiriting:

The way to win any battle for the public mind is to focus on the so-called “persuadables.” These are the people who haven’t really made up their minds about an issue, and they tend to be the largest segment of any population. On this count my worry grows exponentially. As Robert Rapier has explained on this site previously in a piece entitled “We Won’t Stop Global Warming,“  most people say they want to do something about global warming. But when one places a price on actually doing something, say, raising the cost of gasoline $1 a gallon through taxes, support for action drops precipitously. People see themselves as maximizing consumers first, and citizens with duties to a greater society second.

In that essay, Rapier also notes the classic global warming conundrum:

the disconnect is that people don’t see any immediate consequences, and they know that mitigation is going to cost them money. So, they figure “Let’s just wait and see what happens.” The average person just doesn’t see this as a problem serious enough to make meaningful sacrifices over.

Cobb argues (using Nash and Berlin) that this mindset is behaviorally and culturally rooted:

Any public-spirited sacrifice–even for people who believe there is a problem–seems out of a question in societies whose entire politics and culture are dominated by the idea that personal wants are the equivalent of the public good.

This would especially seem to be the case for Americans. Recall, for example, George W. Bush’s injunction immediately after 9/11–to go shopping. He was widely ridiculed for the shallowness of this gesture. But perhaps Bush knew human behavior and contemporary America’s essential trait better than we give him credit for.

Some months ago, Joseph Tainter published a withering essay entitled, “Collapse, Sustainability, and the Environment: How Authors Choose to Fail or Succeed.”

The title is a clever play off of Jared Diamond’s 2005 best-seller. Anyone interested in an overview of collapse literature and a counter-perspective to the current popularizing of the concept should read Tainter’s essay. As he writes at the outset,

There is a long history, within anthropology and other social sciences, of scholarly interest in the environmental dimensions of social life…In general the literature of this strand postulates that collapses result from shortages of resources, brought on by normal environmental variation, abrupt climate shifts, or human damage.

More recently, Tainter notes, contemporary scholars have fueled “discussions of our own sustainability and sustainable development,” which

postulate that ancient societies collapsed because they degraded their environments, justifying the concern that today’s socieites could collapse for the same reason.

A parable that many have latched on to is the case of Easter Island.  As demonstrated yesterday in this post by my colleague Tom Yulsman, scientists and science journalists join environmentalists in viewing Easter Island as a cautionary tale for our times.

The true “collapse” of Easter Island, however, is more complex than ecological degradation via over-exploitation. Even Wikipedia offers a more nuanced perspective than is commonly known:

A series of devastating events killed or removed almost the entire population of Easter Island in the 1860s. In December 1862, Peruvian slave raiders struck Easter Island. Violent abductions continued for several months, eventually capturing or killing around 1500 men and women, about half of the island’s population. A dozen islanders managed to return from their slavery, but brought with them smallpox and started an epidemic, which reduced the island’s population to the point where some of the dead were not even buried. Contributing to the chaos were violent clan wars with the remaining people fighting over the newly available lands of the deceased, bringing further famine and death among the dwindling population.

Tainter discusses this history in his essay, as well as other complicating factors, such as the possible role of the Polynesian rat (introduced by islanders) on the decline of the Palm forest. (Tainter is not a lone critic, either. See here, for more on those rats.)

Diamond’s use of Easter Island and other case studies in “Collapse” strike Tainter as too convenient:

Jared Diamond is a man with a message. At least that was his intention. Collapse (2005) was meant to tell how anthropogenic environmental degradation doomed past societies and, on a grander scale, will undermine us if we don’t change.

That last point may well prove true, but trumpeting Easter Island as a cautionary lesson appears to rest on scientifically shaky ground.