Classroom Connection

“Are we polluting too much? Yes, if the marginal benefits of reduced pollution (both today and in the future) exceed the marginal costs of reduction.” –Economics and the Environment, Goodstein, pg. 142

My Economics of Resources class has focused on environmental protection for the past several weeks, however, it is vastly different from sustainable environmental decision.  As it is an economics class, everything is viewed from the bottom line – will this affect profits?  The class places value on how much we can destroy our Earth while keeping a company afloat.  Why is this perspective even necessary?  We can easily run a company while being sustainable, rather than trying to calculate exactly how much a company can pollute.  By supply and demand, if more companies invest in clean, sustainable technology, the cost will go down and eventually, the investments will make the companies more profitable.  Above all, our descendants will thank us for not viewing their Earth as waste bin that can be valued and itemized like any other capital.

Catherine Caldwell

Call Me Ishmael

The major tone of the book was based off of two questions: ““With man gone, will there be hope for gorilla?” and “With gorilla gone, will there be hope for man?”  Quinn switched between the points of views of teacher and pupil, giving insight into each of these questions.  From the book, one can come to the conclusion that the two species are intensely intertwined.  The earth’s rapid species lost is a grave warning for the fate of man – if the Earth cannot sustain its species, how will it be able to sustain the most harmful species of all, man?

As I read, I questioned how Quinn developed the idea for this book.   Why did he choose to make Ishmael a gorilla?  Were they truly communicating or was the pupil delving into his subconscious and projecting his thoughts onto his teacher?

Catherine Caldwell

Farb, Malthus, and Ishmael v. the Population

“Peter Farb calls it a paradox: ‘Intensification of production to feed an increased population leads to a still greater increase in population.’” –Quinn, 109

Thomas Malthus, an eighteenth century economist , once predicted that because our population size increases exponentially while our food supply increases arithmetically, our population will one day exceed our ability to sustain it. While this has now been disproven with the creation of processed foods and genetically modified organisms, Farb’s paradox may hold true.   Because Earth’s population is growing, we increase our food production.  Then, because we have a surplus of food, people are more well-nourished, leading to higher life expectancies and lower infant mortality rates, and people are able to have more children.  This cyclical paradox is not healthy for our planet because while we may be able to sustain our growing population’s appetites, our other important resources, such as water and oil, are dwindling.  To have a sustainable population size, we should be reproducing at a replacement rate, much like Denmark and Japan are.

Catherine Caldwell

H2Oh No

“Water is life.  Without it, neither human beings, nor virtually any other species on earth, could survive.  Fresh water is a quickly dwindling resource.  There is no continent, with the possible exception of Antarctica, and virtually no country, that does not face regional water scarcity.” –Thiele, page 153

Water is one of the resources that is most frequently exploited by society.  We take advantage of this precious resource because we’re surrounded by it – after all, the Earth is seventy percent water, why shouldn’t we take advantage of it?  Often, people don’t realize that while we have a large supply of water on our planet, not all of it is usable.  Freshwater supplies are being drastically depleted, a frightening situation as freshwater is essential to life.  Water is an especially scarce resource in developing nations; in fact, the World Health Organization estimates that one-third of the world’s population faces water scarcity and by 2030, this problem will be faced by one-half of the world’s population. (Thiele, page 153)

Despite this harrowing data, our nation lives as if water is nothing to worry about.  We constantly waste water, whether it’s with unnecessarily long showers, running faucets, or inefficient clothes washing.  However, according to the World Watch Institute, “If 1 billion consumers each bought two fewer new cotton shirts a year, the water savings would be sufficient to meet the annual dietary needs of 4.6 million people.”  This fact doesn’t even account for the massive amount of change that could occur if we all simply shortened our showers or made small changes to our daily routines.  Freshwater is a necessity to life and we must make an effort to protect it, for today’s people and for generations to come.

Catherine Caldwell

Two Heads Are Better Than One

“And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people’s hunches. That’s what often happens. You half of an idea, somebody else has the other half and you’re in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts.”  – Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from. 11:38

Upon hearing this statement, I immediately thought of the “practiple” of collaborate, compete, and co-evolve.  So often in the university system, we fixate on the competition aspect; we compete for research positions, graduate programs, internships, even for the best shower in a residence hall.  Our education system, with the use of class ranks and the titles of valedictorian and salutatorian, hard wires us to compete over the course of our years in grade school.  Even society proclaims “it’s a dog-eat-dog world,” and “survival of the fittest,” ignoring the fact that we will live much more peacefully if we learn to help each other survive and succeed.  Because of this, we often ignore the majority of the “practiple” – the aspects of collaboration and co-evolving.

Collaboration is necessary for our species to co-evolve, especially when facing the challenge of climate change.  In order to combat climate change, our world must present a unified front, lest we stumble into a “tragedy of the commons” situation.  If one country were to strive to be the most efficient, environmentally country in the world, that would be awesome.  However, as our atmosphere is not stagnant nor restricted by national boundaries, air pollution would still affect the nation.  However, if we hold each country accountable to reach the goals of the Kyoto Protocol and the UN’s Convention for Climate Change, that is when we will make a difference.

Competition can be efficient and lead to major successes for humanity, however, it will always have a time and a place.  Rather, we should shift our focus to collaborating so that, as a species, we can co-evolve.

Catherine Caldwell

Bob the Sustainable Builder

“About half of all materials extracted from the earth go into the construction and maintenance of buildings.  Buildings also consume more than forty percent of all energy generated and produce over forty percent of all carbon dioxide emissions.” Thiele, pg. 90

This rate of consumption is highly unsustainable.  Alternate building materials and renewable, clean energy sources are cheap and plentiful and make this data inexcusable, especially in developed nations where we can afford to invest in environmentally-friendly materials.  GIVE, which is a volunteering abroad opportunity for students, institutes sustainable building at its mission centers.  For instance, in Tanzania, volunteers and villagers used old two-liter bottles of soda and a natural mortar to build a schoolhouse for the local children.  The project was extremely inexpensive and reduced the village’s waste by reusing what they already have.  Not only is the building environmentally friendly, the construction of it was also sustainable.  Rather than simply building the school for the village, the volunteers taught the villagers how to build it so that they can continue to expand their village in the future.  If we can institute clean building practices in one of the poorest regions of the world, why not in the US?  Some steps have already been taken towards sustainable building in Europe.  One of the world’s first sustainable night clubs just opened in the Netherlands; the floors capture the dancers’ kinetic energy and transfer it into usable energy to power the club.  If we could institute techniques like this in the US, the reduction of waste would be astronomical.

Catherine Caldwell

Twelve Billion People

“The population could grow to as much as 12 billion people by 2100” –Dr. Stephen Mulkey, Crisis and Opportunity in the Environmental Century

During his lecture today, Dr. Mulkey delivered this startling figure.  While other estimates have been more conservative, the thought of twelve billion people being on this planet is frightening, if we continue “business-as-usual.”  At our current rate of consumption, we will need two Earths to sustain our population and this amount is bound to grow exponentially if our population was to balloon to twelve billion people.  According to Hardin’s Lifeboat metaphor, we already lack enough resources for our current population, or we at least lack the morality to change our lifestyles to sustain the helpless.  Gary Yourofsky, while standoffish and brute, made the point that we could easily feed more people with the cropland in the US alone, if that land wasn’t already devoted to animal feed cultivation.  Despite this, people are slow to change their lifestyles as we treasure and protect the “near and dear,” rather than making sacrifices for humanity as a whole.  However, we could disprove Hardin’s metaphor – and possibly sustain 12 billion people – if we give up our reliance on fossil fuels and change our consumption.  Unity College sets an excellent example for schools around the world with its divestment from fossil fuels, and if larger institutions followed in Unity’s, we would have a massive impact.   For example, if UF were to divest from fossil fuels and move to more renewable and sustainable energy sources, 50,000 less people would be relying on fossil fuels for their time at the university.  This could also promote research into renewable energy for national and global purposes and make Hardin’s lifeboat completely irrelevant.  We may be able to support 12 billion people if we don’t continue “business-as-usual.”

Catherine Caldwell

Vive la France; Vive Sustainability

“Local, regional, and global air and water pollution; accumulation and distribution of toxic wastes; destruction and depletion of forests, soil, and water; depletion of the ozone layer and emission of ‘greenhouse’ gases threaten the survival of humans and thousands of other living species, the integrity of the earth and its biodiversity, the security of nations, and the heritage of future generations.”  -Taillores Declaration

The location of the signing of the declaration is also an excellent example of sustainable living.  Taillores, located in the French Alps and on the shore of Lake Annecy, the cleanest lake in Europe, is a very environmentally friendly town.  I was able to spend a summer here studying international relations with Tufts University and can attest to the sustainable practices of the citizens.  The streets are incredibly clean and there is nearly no litter; the town only houses one national grocery store, a small corner market called 8 à Huit, and people purchase most of their food at local shops; residents grow much of their produce in private gardens; as water rates are high in France, people are very cautious of how much they use; people rarely use their cars – rather, they walk, ride their bikes, or use the public buses.  Perhaps it is easy to implement such sustainable practices because Taillores is a small town (the population hovers around 1,000), but these techniques could easily be used at a university, especially because the Taillores Declaration promotes the creation of “an institutional culture of sustainability.”  With their time at a university being very developmental, it is the perfect time to instill sustainable practices in students.  If students learn these practices at the beginning of their adult lives, they can easily continue them and implement them in their families and careers.

Catherine Caldwell

Call me Ishmael

“I hear people talking in the Laundromat about the end of the world, and they’re no more excited than if they were comparing detergents.  People talk about the destruction of the ozone layer and the death of all life.  They talk about the devastation of the rain forests, about deadly pollution that will be with us for thousands and millions of years, about the disappearance of dozens of species of life every day, about the end of speciation itself.  And they seem perfectly calm.” –Ishmael, page 44

In my opinion, a lack of passion has always been one of the greatest hindrances of progress.  The suffrage movement of the early twentieth century, the civil rights and anti-war protests of the 1960s, and the modern LGBTQ rights movement would have changed nothing were it not for their impassioned and dedicated supporters.  Despite this, indifference is still the major attitude towards important issues, especially climate change.  People treat it as if it’s a normal occurrence, like a thunderstorm, and even argue that the climate has always been changing, while ignoring how drastic these changes have been since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution.  For the fight against climate change to truly be successful, we need to revitalize our passion and fervor that invigorated past protests.  While some speakers, such as Gary Yourofsky, maybe be aggressive towards opponents and use “in-your-face” tactics to convey their points, they are still spreading their message and leaving a lasting impression on their audience; as Gary said, “it’s about the message, not the messenger.”  If such tactics are able to propel change and bring important matters to light, I am in full support of them.  This generation has been proclaimed by our predecessors as being unorganized and unenthusiastic but we should not let these terms define us; instead, we should be actively seeking to disprove them.  Thanks to social media, we are now the most interconnected generation ever and could easily spread our message and passion to the rest of the world, now we just have to have the courage to follow through.

Thinking Like An Ecosystem

“Thinking like an ecosystem, no one is bereft of power.”

–Scarcity-Minded or Eco-Minded: Where Do They Lead; Frances Morre Lappe

Despite the difference in terminology, Lappe’s article, Scarcity-Minded or Eco-Minded: Where Do They Lead, is a great example of “thinking like a mountain.”  The author compared two vastly different mental maps, scarcity thinking – which is rooted in separateness, staticness, and concentrated power – and eco-thinking – which focuses on connections, continuous change, and co-creation – and implored the audience to adopt an eco-minded way of thinking.  Much like “thinking like a mountain,” the eco-minded mental map recognizes all the connections in the environment, as recognized in John Muir’s statement “When you try to pick up anything by itself, you find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”  Scarcity thinking is detrimental to society and is hindering progress.  In contrast, a society which practices eco-thinking would be transparent, promote accountability,and have distributed power.  A shift to an eco-minded society would promote the idea that “there is no away” and create a more sustainable society.