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Recently in The Psychology of Sustainability Category
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(Worth the full 9 minutes.)
"We are a species of unlimited appetites living on a planet with limited resources."
- National Geographic Earth Pulse: State of the Earth 2010, November 2009 (See also: Straining Our Resources, Satisfying Our Demands, and Crowding Our Planet.)
Also, check this out:
Thomas Hayden has written a compelling introduction to the National Geographic special addition (Earth Pulse). In the article, called "Making Sense of It All," he speaks eloquently on living with in our means,. Read it tree-less, online.
At last, a Michigan State University study was just released to support what I've suspected all along: behavioral changes likely to be cheaper and faster, in the short term, at reducing carbon emissions than developing new technologies.
Thomas Dietza, Gerald T. Gardnerb, Jonathan Gilliganc, Paul C. Sternd and Michael P. Vandenbergh, of the Department of Sociology and Environmental Science and Policy Program, explored a short-term, high-potential solution for carbon emissions reduction. In the study, policy and behavioral intervention were considered for their ability to promote adoption and usage of existing carbon-emission reducing technologies in national residential buildings and for non-business travel in the U.S..
The study reports that household reductions via behavioral changes such as those recommended could result in US emissions reductions equivalent to the entire emissions of any country in the world outside of China and the U.S.
"Direct energy use by households accounts for approximately 38% of overall U.S. CO2 emissions...This is approximately 8% of global emissions and larger than the emissions of any entire country except China."
The study notes that the potential benefits have potential of cutting emissions in the United States by nearly 8% nationwide, and:
• Avoid overshoot of emissions targets
• Create demonstration effect
• Provide extremely, low-cost emissions reduction
• Buy time to explore other reduction and adaptation solutions
"National implementation could save an estimated 123 million metric tons of carbon per year in year 10, which is 20% of household direct emissions or 7.4% of U.S. national emissions, with little or no reduction in household well-being."
Notably, the study quantifies the carbon emissions reductions of these policy- and intervention-based behavioral changes as being greater than the amount of emissions reductions that would occur if all petroleum refining for steel and aluminum processing (the largest industrial emitter) in the US were to cease.
"We find that the national reasonably achievable emissions reduction (RAER) can be approximately 20% in the household sector within 10 years if the most effective nonregulatory interventions are used. This amounts to 123 MtC/yr, or 7.4% of total national emissions--an amount slightly larger than the total national emissions of France. It is greater than reducing to zero all emissions in the United States from the petroleum refining (69 MtC), iron and steel (38 MtC), and aluminum (13 MtC) industries, each of which is among the largest emitters in the industrial sector. The cost of achieving such a reduction through behavioral change may be far lower than the cost of many alternatives."
Read the findings at the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences site.
Today there is a Ford Expedition parked on my street with Save Mono Lake on its bumper. (Nasty-thought bubble: if the driver truly cared about Mono Lake, then why drive a gas-guzzler like that? Well, maybe it's impractical to pedal one's bike over the the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the winter, to see Mono Lake?) But why dwell on the ironic contradictions of others? Here, in Climate of Change, you will find this very writer's dilemma revealed as sustainably-minded consumer.
The inherent hypocrisy of a climate activist who loves to cozy up with a toasty fire on a winter night (or of a mountaineer who drives an SUV) gives rise to one of the realities we must address if we are to truly become sustainable. How does a well-meaning individual, raised on the conveniences of a rich nation, learn to go with out?
"Less is more," a slogan oft attributed to architects Buckminster Fuller or Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, (but apparently first used by a German poet 1774, Christoph Martin Wieland,) describes a philosophy of minimalism. The principle is easy enough to apply to sustainability. (Use less fossil fuel for a more sustainable future.) However simple, when it comes to putting "less is more" into practice, the realities are complex.
How might an SUV driver put less-is-more into practice where the lake is concerned? How should a travel-loving, renewable energy advocate get to India?
Must I turn in my urban flat for a cave, my holiday to Tanzania for a bicycle camping trip to nearby John Muir Woods, and my Macbook Air for paper and pencil? In a recent TED talk, "3 warp-speed architecture tales," Bjarke Ingels suggests otherwise as he explains how his architectural firm has designed a carbon-neutral building modeled on a mountain in Azerbaijan.
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels rockets through photo/video-mingled stories of his eco-flashy designs. His buildings not only look like nature -- they act like nature: blocking the wind, collecting solar energy -- and creating stunning views.
In a recent post, I questioned, "If less is more, does being sustainable mean replacing indulgence with sacrifice?"
In answering myself, I wouldn't be the first to say, "No!" Carl Safina, in the Orion magazine article, "The Moral Climate," decries our not using the free market to develop renewable energy solutions:
"...Energy competition would mean innovative, diverse, agile, and decentralized energy sources....The unborn, who did not choose it, come saddled with all conceivable consequences. Shame because the poor, who likewise did not choose it, will be hit first and worst."
I recommend, in addition to the page-long Safina article, the comments are well worth the time. Here are a couple noteworthy examples: Robert Riverstrong boils it down when he says, "We need to STOP sacrificing our long-term well-being for short-term convenience." Elizabeth Guss restates it from another angle, "The chief cause of unhappiness in the world is giving up what we really want for what we want at the moment."
In other words, we are sacrificing already. Consider the sea life lost in the Great Pacific Floating Trash Heap; human lives sacrificed in the U.S.-Afghan and U.S.-Iraq occupations and wars for oil; thirst and hunger in the face of the monopolization of water in Bolivia or drought in Tanzania; and cultures lost in island nations like Tuvalu due to climate change, to mention but a few examples of what we lose as we uber-consume to meet the latest trend, demand for convenience or personal whim. But, Carl Sarfina in the same article best articulates the implication of sacrifice, as it relates to sustainability, like this:
"...You are made to believe solution is sacrifice, and that sacrifice for a just cause is not noble but, rather, out of the question. The moral density of this social climate is wafer thin....This refusal to "sacrifice" is actually a pathological refusal to change for the better.... Of all the psychopathology in the climate issue, the most counterproductive thought is that solving the problem will require sacrifice.... We think we don't want to sacrifice, but sacrifice is exactly what we're doing by perpetuating problems that only get worse; we're sacrificing our money, and sacrificing what is big and permanent, to prolong what is small, temporary, and harmful."
Sacrifice isn't my not being able to fly back East to see my nephew. Sacrifice in my nephew's not being able to bike through John Muir Woods some day because it's been destroyed by climate change, deforestation, pollution or habitat encroachment.
To properly motivate myself for sustainability, therefore, perhaps the question I should be asking isn't, "What do I have to give up?" But rather, "What have we given up already?"
P.S., Business Folk take note: Daniel C. Esty and Andrew Winston show how to treat the environment better, reduce costs, increase revenue and improve brand value in their book "Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value and Build Competitive Advantage."
