Landfillharmonic orchestra

God doesn't do waste.
H/T Ruth.

Pissing in the wind: symbolic actions and the dangers of tokenism

There is some debate whether small symbolic actions are a useful "easy" first step to get people taking a little bit more responsibility for the ecological consequences of their consumption, or a distraction that serves to draw attention away from the true scale of changes called for and inoculate people against genuine repentance.

Now perhaps sometimes we need to take the steps that are currently available, while working towards those that are ultimately desirable. Perhaps for some people, learning to recycle is the start of a journey in which they awaken to the fact that there is no "away" to which we can throw things, and that all our actions take place within a finite planet on which the actions of seven billion (one billion of whom live better than ancient royalty) have serious cumulative effects.

Where there is a tension between the short term tactical victories and long term strategic goals, then it can sometimes be difficult to determine whether immediately obtainable harm minimisation ought to prevail or long term hopes. For instance, should we decriminalise the use (not production) of hard drugs and treat addiction as a medical illness in order to reduce the criminalisation of end users, or would this undermine the message that ultimately we hope for a society in which no one is addicted to dangerous substances? Alternatively, would attempting a too stringent ban on smoking tobacco lead to a long term backlash against such regulation and so undermine the short term gains in smoking it may achieve?

Where I'm currently at is that while on many topics the precise balance between tactical, currently possible steps and strategic currently impossible goals may be difficult to navigate, there are elements of the situation with regards to our ecological predicament that seem somewhat obvious (at least to me). As long as we are mainly talking about plastic bags, recycling and more efficient light bulbs, we've already lost.

The goal is not a society free of plastic bags, or one that recycles assiduously and ensures lightbulbs meet the latest standard. That is far, far too small. The goal is a society that is no longer destroying the conditions of possibility for its own existence (and the existence of the biosphere as we know it and all future human societies). Plastic bags are one relatively tiny piece of that puzzle. And so while it is right to wonder whether premature regulation of, say, plastic bags causes a backlash that is counterproductive, there are bigger fish to fry. To return to the smoking analogy, it's a little as though the entire discussion is whether it would be a good idea to raise the legal age of smoking to 18 years and one month (or some other very marginal action that might slightly alter smoking stats). Whether or not this would provoke a backlash may be a relevant consideration, but given the scale of the problem, the fact that so much energy is spent discussing what is ultimately a relatively tiny piece of the puzzle actually serves to leave the status quo intact.

Cultural change does often come in small steps under sustained and creative social pressure, but the long term goals need to be clear from the outset. We don't want to be pissing in the wind.

Why is a raven like a writing desk? Two nice analogies

I like a good analogy. When well designed, they can convey the unfamiliar through the familiar. Of course, they can also mislead if we don't pay attention to the differences as well as the similarities. Here are two I've come across recently. First, one from Australian Sustainable Energy by the Numbers, a useful report from the University of Melbourne into the possibility of getting Australia to 90% renewables (or low carbon) in a short time frame at a decent cost with (hopefully) some more realistic assumptions than this report.

"Our cruise ship is leaking badly. The captain is advised by the engineer to start the bilge pumps but the accountant says this will be too expensive and would cut into profits. The captain makes a tough decision; the passengers will have to bale. An argument breaks out between the staff and the passengers about whether to bale with spoons or glasses. The passengers argue for glasses but the staff for spoons because of the likely breakage of glasses. The hospitality manager comes up with a brilliant solution. The passengers should drink more beer and champagne and pee over the side."

- Peter Seligman, Australian Sustainable Energy by the Numbers, 61.

H/T Dave.

And I couldn't go past this recent letter to the editor in the SMH.

"And what about this great big garbage tax? Why do I have to pay to have my garbage collected when I can dump it in the bush for nothing? My little bit doesn't make any difference to world garbage levels, and when it rolls to the bottom of the gully I can't even see it. Call me a garbage sceptic, but show me the science. If garbage is bad why do we produce so much?

"When I went overseas there was garbage lying everywhere. Other countries don't have great big garbage taxes. They make cheap stuff and we can't compete. Until every country in the world adopts a garbage price, our great big garbage tax is economic suicide. Garbage is crap."

- David Hale Gordon, SMH letters to the editor, 25th March 2011.

What a load of garbage

For Edinburgh residents
If you are ever responsible for creating garbage or live near someone who is, then you're interested in how waste is managed. Edinburgh Council would like five minutes of your time for a survey to help plan for future infrastructure and services. I hope this exercise isn't a waste of time.

A manifesto of sorts

We have enough.
We can share what we have.
If we used less, it would be fine.
We can move ourselves.
The economy does not need to grow in order for us to thrive.
Business can be ethical and fair.
Business can express and nurture cultural values.
Health is the care of humans.
Public space belongs to humans.
We can meet at the market face to face.
We can have humane relationships with the animals we depend on.
We can work with Earth's systems.
We can build our homes and buildings to last for 600 years.
We look upstream to manage our waste.
We derive wealth from our waste.
We protect and restore what nature creates.
We listen to what Earth's complex systems tell us.
Our leaders listen to us and derive power from the mana of ethical behaviour and decisions.
The powerful protect the weak.
We are becoming indigenous.
We are weaving all the threads together.
The most important people in our village are those who will be us some day
and we are listening to them.

- From a statement adopted at the Signs of Change conference.

Are there any of these that particularly stand out to you? Any with which you violently agree or politely disagree (or vice versa)?
H/T Tom.

Over budget and getting worse

Too much of a good thing: "In fact, no phenomenon has probably impacted the nitrogen cycle more than human inputs of nitrogen into the cycle in the last 2.5 billion years".

Another threat to coral: algal blooms, caused by excess nitrogen, found to kill large areas of coral within weeks.

Plane danger? It turns out you are more likely to die from plane exhaust than in a plane crash.

Water, water everywhere: more water flowing into the ocean due to climate change, an 18 percent increase between 1994 and 2006. Another good summary and some discussion on Skeptical Science.

Birds could signal mass extinction: "Biodiversity loss is arguably much more serious and more permanent than climate change". Which is saying something, since anthropogenic climate change is likely to redefine the planet's living systems and geography for millennia.

Loss of old growth forests continues, albeit a little more slowly: where biodiversity and climate converge (one of many places, but this is perhaps the most critical).

Economy vs ecology? Ecological damage estimated to currently cost the global economy US$6.6 trillion (with a "t") each year.

Drying up: unexpected shift in evapotranspiration across large parts of the southern hemisphere.

Finish your plate: 27% of food in the US is wasted. I assume that is not even calculating all the excess calories that are actually consumed.

A second planet by 2030: current trends in consumption are drawing down on the natural capital of the earth. We're currently about 50% over "budget".

And some good news: deadly virus eradicated in "the biggest achievement of veterinary history".

"We'll eliminate wasteful spending"

No tax hikes, no service cuts: eliminating wasteful spending is the get out of gaol free card of politicians. It is also a load of rubbish.

Ecological and resource crises facing industrial civilisation

Some threats to life as we know itSince my research involves responses to the perception of threats to life as we currently know it, I thought it might be useful to compile a list of some the serious ecological and resource difficulties that have resulted from the spectacular success of industrialism. This is not an exhaustive catalogue (I'd appreciate further suggestions), nor an attempt to rank the various issues, many of which are deeply interconnected. Some of these issues are more pressing than others.

• Climate change: including global warming, precipitation shifts (floods, droughts and shifting agricultural patterns), sea level rise, intensification of extreme weather events, cryosphere shrinkage, and more, including the subsequent risk of various geoengineering attempts (like this one by Bill Gates).

• Fresh water use (aquifer depletion, equity of access, water-borne diseases, local water stress, etc.). Thirty-six US States are predicted to have water shortages by 2015 and rainy London is building a desalination plant.

• Peak oil (and perhaps further off, peak gas and coal): the end of cheap energy. Note that warnings are coming from more and more credible/mainstream sources.

• Biodiversity loss (including extinction, functional extinction, decline in ecosystem complexity and resiliance and loss in genetic diversity within species)

• Destruction of natural habitats (especially forests, wetlands and coral reefs)

• Desertification

• Soil degradation (erosion, depletion and salinisation)

• Ocean acidification

• Fisheries decline and collapse

• Phytoplankton decline

• Toxic pollution: plastics, heavy metals, hormones and other chemicals in the soils, air, oceans, aquifers, rivers and lakes

• Alteration of the nitrogen cycle (with many consequences, including marine hypoxia - "dead zones")

• Invasive species

• Increasing human share of global photosynthetic capacity (primary production), which is also in modest decline

• Radioactive waste

• Pollinator decline

• Peak phosphorus (and a number of other minerals, though phosphorus seems to be the most pressing and crucial)

• Stratospheric ozone depletion and tropospheric ozone pollution

• Antibiotic-resistant microbes (a.k.a. "superbugs")

Are there any here which you hadn't heard of? Any that I've missed? Part of the point of this list is to stress that climate change is but one of many threats, though it is a multiplier of a number of these problems (water access, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, ocean acidification and so on). The root cause of most of them is the combination of global population growth coupled with growth in per capita ecological footprint, though it is particularly the consumption patterns of the developed world over the last six decades that bear the lion's share of the blame.

For a partial list of some arresting statistics, try this post.

New every morning: novelty, imperialism and cataclysm

Continuous Cities • 1
The city of Leonia refashions itself every day: every morning the people wake between fresh sheets, wash with just-wrapped cakes of soap, wear brand-new clothing, take from the latest model refrigerator still unopened tins, listening to the last-minute jingles from the most up-to-date radio.

On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic bags, the remains of yesterday's Leonia await the garbage truck. Not only squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, but also boilers, encyclopedias, pianos, porcelain dinner services. It is not so much by the things that each day are manufactured, sold, bought that you can measure Leonia's opulence, but rather by the things that each day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurrent impurity. The fact is that street cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of removing the residue of yesterday's existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that inspires devotion, perhaps only because once things have been cast off nobody wants to have to think about them further.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely; but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's talent for making new materials excels, the more the rubbish improves in quality, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fortress of indestructible leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains.

This is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the more it accumulates them; the scales of its past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed. As the city is renewed each day, it preserves all of itself in its only definitive form: yesterday's sweepings piled up on the sweepings of the day before yesterday and of all its days and years and decades.

Leonia's rubbish little by little would invade the world, if, from beyond the final crests of its boundless rubbish heap, the street cleaners of other cities were not pressing, also pushing mountains of refuse in front of themselves. Perhaps the whole world, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is covered by craters of rubbish, each surrounding a metropolis in constant eruption. The boundaries between the alien, hostile cities are infected ramparts where the detritus of both support each other, overlap, mingle.

The greater its height grows, the more the danger of a landslide looms: a tin can, an old tyre, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls towards Leonia, is enough to bring with it an avalanche of unmated shoes, calendars of bygone years, withered flowers, submerging the city in its own past, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the past of the neighbouring cities, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range, cancelling every trace of the metropolis always dressed in new clothes. In the nearby cities they are all ready, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory, expand, and drive the new street cleaners still farther out.

- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities, 114-16.

Gardening and faith 101

Postprandial ruminations
As I mentioned back here, Jessica and I have taken up gardening - at least as much as it is possible to do so on a small, south-facing, third-floor balcony. For the last few months, we've been enjoying quite a harvest: scores of cherry tomatoes, handfuls of capsicums and chillis, dozens of beans and snow peas, even some carrots, corn and potatoes, as well as a constant supply of basil, thyme, sage and mint.*

One of the most fun bits has been our worm farm, which takes nearly all our kitchen scraps and peelings (not to mention a little paper and even hair clippings) and turns them into high quality fertiliser. I think part of the delight for hardened urbanites like us has been to witness the full cycle of growth, production, consumption and decomposition. Living in a city, it is easy to forget the connections between all these things, especially the truth that there is no "away" to which we can throw things. "Garbage" is just something that belongs somewhere else - often in the worm farm!

Perhaps even more thrilling than watching worms gorge themselves has been the experience of seeing seeds grow and turn into recognisable and edible produce. Although I studied agriculture from year 7 until the HSC, this remains a surprising delight. A simple pleasure, but it's true that there's something special about eating what you've grown yourself. Could it be that part of what's special about growing your own food is that this experience powerfully brings home the reality that you didn't grow it yourself?

Let me explain. So much of our urban environment is the result of human manufacturing and ingenuity. From pixels to plates to polystyrene, we constantly and subtly receive the message that we are the fashioners of our own space and the makers of our own destiny. But the mystery of a growing seed explodes the myth of self-sufficiency, either individual or human. We rely on others all the time: not least to grow, harvest, transport, store, (often) cook and dispose of our food; we rely on the non-human all the time: the rains in season, the sunlight that freely bombards our planet twenty-four seven, the soils ground up or belched forth from the earth. Growing food yourself reveals that we don't grow our own food.

Jesus once told a story:

"This is what the kingdom of God is like. A man scatters seed on the ground. Night and day, whether he sleeps or gets up, the seed sprouts and grows, though he does not know how. All by itself the soil produces grain—first the stalk, then the head, then the full kernel in the head. As soon as the grain is ripe, he puts the sickle to it, because the harvest has come."             – Mark 4.26-29

What is true of our lives and basic sustenance is also true of our hope in God's kingdom: we are primarily audience, recipients, beneficiaries. In the life of faith we are simply surprised and delighted farmers, dole bludgers on God's grace, children receiving his fatherly care. And thank God for that!
*If you compare this list to the one back here, you'll be able to work out all the things that sadly didn't make it.

"God doesn't do waste"

A message for the new year from Rowan Williams, nicely linking our attitudes towards the world and one another.