Interesting counter point on the environment this week

In terms of sustainability here's an interesting counterpoint that both turned up this past week: the State of the States report (news article at Treehugger) by the Global Footprint Network and the National Association of Scholars report on Sustainability. The latter arrived in what TPP thought was a missive from the Heartland Institute, perhaps it is sharing its mailing list with other like-minded organizations. The State of the States report concludes that the USA running a natural renewable resources deficit having passed the break even point just this past week (July 14th). TTP had never heard of the National Association of Scholars before even though arguably he are one. The over all goals of the NAS sound OK, and TPP even agrees with some of their positions, e.g., free speech on university campuses. However when you read their report on sustainability you get the idea that this topic has become another political football where devious, lefty academics are brain-washing our college age youth into thinking sustainability is a good idea, just like we do with that nasty evolution stuff. Once you see where the NAS gets its money, their political perspective makes more sense. A quick scan of their advisory board revealed no one TPP has ever heard of.  As far as TPP can tell, the Global Footprint Network tried very hard to offer a fair and unbiased position, and they did it by using something called "data".  The GFN advisory board is another matter; it includes many notable conservation scientists, ecologists, and environmental thinkers. Sort of funny that our conservatives don't like to conserve and they don't worry about deficit spending of renewable resources. Thought they like balanced budgets?  

Water, water everywhere?

We, i.e., most residents of N. America & Europe, tend to take water for granted and use it with abandon.  It’s only when on occasion we have too little water that we briefly take it seriously.  Indeed, if you do not understand this, TPP would be happy to demonstrate by letting you pay his water bill for the past two months (yikes!); can’t retire yet.  So this graphic may help (although it's sort of ironically funny where the water bubble is located!) where all the water has been gathered into one drop.  It doesn't seem right does it?  Earth is considered a “water planet” (Ever see the remarkably silly movie Ice Pirates?  Some pretty famous actors would like to forget this one.) what with 2/3s of its surface covered by oceans.  And then there’s the polar ice caps, although Arctic ice melting this summer set a new record.  It really, really seems like a lot, so it's hard to think of water as a very limited, and widely squandered resourse, especially when seeing a real tropical downpour or the tailend of Issac.   So want to see how much water there is?  The total amount?  Well, there it is, that little blue marble is the total amount of water that the Earth has, the difference between Earth and Mars, between being a planet luxuriant with life and being desolate and (nearly?) lifeless.  Remember too that most of this water is not usable for human needs because of its salt content.  Fortunately the water cycle continues to distill ocean water and dump fresh water upon the land,  where we wantonly waste it with hardly ever a thought about sustainability.  Most people have trouble understanding the fact that one of the world’s most limited resources is water.  And if you are farming or your city relies on an aquafer, it's even worse; mostly it's not a matter of if, but simply when it will be pumped dry.  When are people going to wake up and pay attention? 

Unsustainably stalking the wild asparagus

Some people just don’t get ecology. A local crazy likes to advocate “living off the land” by eating wild plants he’s gathered as if this somehow makes sense and is feasible for more than just one or two crazies per region. The days of a gathering-hunting life-style are long gone and so are the very low human population densities required for this life style to be successful. At our present population density, stalking the wild asparagus is not practical or possible, and asparagus isn’t wild anyways. In this area several plants have become or are becoming rarer because they are over predated by human collectors, in one case (wild ramps) by local foodies, and in the other (ginseng) by people selling to purveyors of herbal medicines. In other places over gathering of wild plants, in this case rooibos, a legume used as an herbal tea, can also threaten populations and negatively affect biological diversity. It may seem like a good idea to harvest wild organisms for “free”, but there just isn’t enough wild left in most places any more to harvest wild organisms sustainably. In the case of rooibos tea and ginseng demand in other places drives over predation, which is a few stealing from everyone in the case of public lands. While trying to study the age structure and reproduction of ginseng locally, plants were disappearing as fast as they could be located, which sort of made our case for over-harvesting. Or like the Phactor, plant and harvest your own ramps from your woodland gardens, but even with plenty of space, harvests have to be limited and propagation encouraged by some intervention to keep the population going.

Ecologically we're all living a Ponzi scheme

In terms of sustainability, David Barash, a psychologist at U. Washington, argues that we're all Bernard Madoffs. Ecologically "you simply cannot keep moving and growing and developing and mining your capital, assuming infinitely available resources and a natural environment of such unfailing elasticity that it will swallow our effluent forever and continue to provide a steady supply of resources into the bargain." And it's true. Yes, old Malthus was right, and yet an economist at our university expressed surprise that biologists still believed in Malthus because he'd been so thoroughly disproven. And that may be part of the problem, economists don't want to deal with ecoogical reality. A story circulated a few years ago about an interdisciplinary conference on energy, and after one of the economists got done speaking, a physicist said, "that won't work because it violates the laws of physics." And the economist said, "Well, who knows what the laws of physics will be in 50 years." But it will be a challenge to live sustainably because our economic system has been built on exploitation of resources and people.

Let the Phactor know what you think.