david taus

The do-gooders current conundrum is that a privileged individual in our society will almost certainly contribute to a decay in the planet despite best intentions. The best solution seems to be live as best you can to improve the status quo or minimise harm (see the challenge), discuss it with your friends over dinner and encourage ideas, get out into nature yourself to encourage its preservation, and unfortunately lobby your representatives. I’d prefer not to become a lobbyist, but its obvious too few have seen the light like your dinner party.

Unfortunately as individuals we tend to have little trust in the leadership of political and commercial vehicles. At that level there is clout, but they have to hear the pressure from the bottom before they will ever act decisively. Worse, society is easily manipulated and I’d argue through ignorance and manipulation is so far away from where we need to be that its difficult for you to drop below your 2.8 planets.

There is hope though… although much of the calculations there are conservative (underestimates!), they use current average values. Often current best practice has enough potential that if it was universally practised it may be possible to support our current demands. The ifs and buts are too many for here…

There is more work to be done, raise your voice.

So reading all this the main problem I see between the lines is the equation of the 2.8 planets.

6 Billion * Taus’s standard of living = 2.8 planets

2.2 Billion * Taus’s standard of living = 1.0 planets

What can you do? Don’t reproduce. It’s something that goes against the very grain of what It means to be alive and that’s why it’s so hard to stop in so many parts of the world. Kids are being born into living with their 0.05 share of the planet and will most likely never get a choice to get more. If they did it would probably mean the death of someone else because in the end we only have the resources produced by 1.0 earths.

So that line of thinking leads me to if we all got rid of petroleum cars and petroleum power plants and moved to renewable energies we’d still hit a population limit at some point, maybe 5 times the current population, maybe 100 times, but there is a limit - even with the ‘greenest’ energy policy possible. At some point we’d be stepping on each other’s toes. At what point are we too many? Who manages this? Right now it’s managed by famine and disease. Maybe someday in the furure we’ll have a global population committee… “I’m sorry, your application must be approved before you can have this child.” It would ease suffering, I guess, but so would a homogenous world where we all sit in front of the TV all day every day.

How many people are too few, if we have 1 Billion people at 6 times Taus’s standard of living is that not enough people in the world. If we have 100 Billion with 1/17th Taus’s standard of living is that too many people?

I don’t know if I have a point. Just thinking really. Creating tangents.

So how do we keep expanding? To the stars and beyond I guess. Start mining other planets rather than our own or something.

It gets pretty philosophical pretty fast. Peet?

i agree with you 1ey-the population piece is important. and yes, there’s too many people on the bus to the airport. nature’s system of checks and balances is thwarted by our technology: modern medicine. amazing really. the implications of population control are frightening and most people won’t hear it: let famine take its course, take out the feeding tube, allow those little kids who are failing to thrive fail. at extreme forms you’re looking at things like increasing capital punishment, widespread euthinasia, even shutting down hospitals. who among us wouldn’t do what we can to extend the time we are given? it’s the first imperatave of biological programming: “survive as long as possible at any cost.”

The second imperative is something like “pass on your genes.” it’s very, very, very hard to tell someone (including oneself) that they can’t have kids, despite the ecological impliciations. Those that have thought about the problem have reduced birth rates, it seems…Peet and I happened upon a study done relating women’s educational level to number of children. here are the stats for women born in 1960-1964 (Ellwood and Jencks, 2005):

EDUCATION LEVEL / MEAN # OF KIDS BY AGE 40
HS Dropout / 2.6
HS Graduate / 2.0
Some College / 1.9
College Grad / 1.6

so it could be that those women who have graduated college either know how many kids they can realistically support, have made some sort of choice about career vs. motherhood, have thought long and hard about overpopulation, or a combination of the above. and if we make the assumption that school achievement here actually cooresponds with general intelligence, then the problem is worse than originally thought. those that are surviving are not the ones most fit to perpetuate the species. Natural selection completely botched. Ol’ Dirty Bastard left 13 kids. do the world really need those genes passed on?

Though not constituting a complete reply, I find this to be very fitting…

http://www.onlineconversion.com/world_population.htm

Over 6.5 hours sleep I decided to comment that Taus’ question is best answered by committing to sacrifice waste.

Examples: We throw away far more food than we give as aid. We individually use hundreds of litres of drinking water every day… but go to the shops and you can buy spring water: taken from a spring far away which is then damaged, packaged in energy intensive chemical plastics and bright labels (probably chlorine bleached, non-recycled paper), transported, and placed on brightly lit supermarket shelves. What a waste. Ban it. (If a place can’t support drinking water, don’t live there)

As for the population thing… exponential growth is by definition unsustainable. Currently I think the world population increases by 3% a year. This means population will double every 23.45 years.

Hope requires:
1) Manage Consumption (Demand/Waste)
2) Manage population
3) Manage distribution (Fairness)

We don’t need to sacrifice advancing technology. We have to stop advancing use of raw materials, pollution and exploitation.

I think the challenge is to market approaches where this can be achieved without sacrifice. Unfortunately our economics and politics sell us on the potential of more more more. The system exploits the disadvantaged and the planet and encourages waste. Processes like natural capitalism lead to large enough improvements. But within the current system the small successes won’t fulfil the three requirements above.

damn, I sound like I’m on a bloody pulpit… sorry.

I wish i had more time to join the response party, but at the very least I wanted to thank you for your entry, taus. there’s a reason why, at our very souls, we are brothers, and this entry is a testament to that.

We will better this world; jah help me so…

The other day I wanted to blog about my silly gesture of putting my groceries into my buttpack and refusing the little disposable plastic bag, this discussion (and the plastic jacket comments) reminds me of that thought process again.

I refuse the plastic bag and then I go home and I book a flight to go be in touch with nature in Utah. How does that plastic grocery bag I didn’t use offset the fuel that’s used on the flight.

I keep entertaining the idea of getting a car, get out of the city and all, go see the redwoods, tour wine country, hike in the Sierra Nevada. Then I look at a highway and think about all the gasoline that’s consumed and I can the idea for another week. How do I do this, BioDiesel? Hmmmm…

I know I know, it’s one step to be conscious of these issues, to think some in the face of ignorance, but I still don’t really feel like I’m pulling my own weight…

yeah, we’re sort of a walking contradiction, we heady outdoorsy nature lovers. in our plastic jackets and our vacations to national parks involving all sorts of jet fuel. almost sickening, really. i put 13,000 miles on my car with AJM this summer for godsakes, but i can’t really say i regretted it. and when i think about getting on over to the other side of the great divide in a year or two (pretty much an inevitability at this point), i can’t imagine not having a car. getting out to yosemite, sequoia, crater lake, the cascades…olympics…glacier…the desert…oh geez…that’s sort of the point of moving out there. but that means gasoline. how utterly selfish of me.

at the original dinner conversation i said something about wanting to not live in a big city (which is true) but it was pointed out to me that numbers-wise, it makes more ecological sense to live in a big city. even if that were true, i would put more weight in the fast-food-disposable-on-the-go-i-me-me-mine mental philosophy that city living breeds and argue that in the long term being more removed from the natural world decreases one’s sense of responsibility because it decreases one’s awareness that they are part of this planet’s natural order. urban centers are swelling and sucking resources dry. given our world population and land area available, it’s a necessary to have big cities. fine, but the complete consumption and scant production that comes with a city is a model that itself is unsustainable. brad talked about how we just have to control consumption, distribution, and population. it’s too late to manage that in some cases-the damage is already done and we have to figure out, best case scenario, how to minimize that damage. they dammed the colorado river to make “lake” powell such that cities like las vegas, phoenix, and los angeles can exist. the natural resources in those geographical locations couldn’t even support a city 1/10th the size of any of those places. same with food supplies for places that can’t grow enough to feed the population. we’ve removed nature’s checks and balances by shipping food into such places, but all that really does is prolongs the sustainable solution. some do-gooder asking me for a dollar to feed the kids in africa will be asking me for two dollars in six months when the first shipment of food runs out and there are more mouths to feed. but it’s hard to go back on los angeles now. it’s hard to take out the glen canyon dam and let that huge city dehydrate. it’s hard to stop trucking food into manhattan island because even though no food grows there five million people live there and they’d starve.

then again, should we feel guilty about the actual damage that we as individuals do by flying in planes and using plastic bags? shouldn’t we take a hint from Jojo and start going after the industries and corporations that produce geometrically more waste? is the guilt about our personal practices more out of philosophy (“live as you think others should” -Franti) and less out of empirically measured damage done? i don’t know. but i still experience a lot of dissonance over this. awareness is a start, but not a solution. instead of working in more programs to modify the existing vision, i think the vision itself has to change. and at this point, because we’ve nicely dug a hole for ourselves we can’t easily get out of, that vision change will probably come against the will of many and at a great price. pessimistic, yes, but that’s my gut reaction to this mess.

Any small improvement is an improvement, step by step. Say no to that bag. Go to Utah.

Suzuki commented that he flies a lot (necessary for the good work he does, but fun too) which pollutes. To achieve net 0 greenhouse gas emissions (something they’ve managed for the last year or two), his institute plants trees. Unless richer anizers down the track club together and buy some land, thats not likely to happen for us.

We in this discussion are all travellers. Flying is bad. The only way to fix it is to lobby aircraft manufacturers, airlines and governments to reduce emissions. I’m not familiar with any technologies in this area… but fuel is such a huge cost for them I’d have thought they’d look into it. If you took the time, you can bike to all your National Parks. Hey a friend of mine biked all the way from north Alaska to south Chile. (We don’t all have the time and quads he does) I don’t know what the communal train/bus options over there are like. Otherwise try getting a smaller engine car and carshare. Can you hire a (low consumption) Prius?

The consumer-supplier, individual-corporation-government power cycle we’re in means we’ve got to look at ourselves and go after the big boys. For example, it should be illegal to sell overpackaged stuff in supermarkets. Companies should know better and not do it (saves them money too). Customers should not buy stuff that way. We need people encouraging all 3, but any one will pay off. Right now people perceive a convenience/marketing advantage and everybody does the wrong thing.

So many of these environmental issues are like a tower of playing cards. Holistic approaches tell us they make no sense (stack the cards instead). Transportation is one of the most serious, but technology wise, we’re nowhere near what we’re capable of.

You guys should check out Winning the Oil Endgame . Hopefully many of the plans in there get adopted ASAP. Some of the players behind that previously developed Hypercar which I recall was capable of 200mpg. We’re early on this road, sustainable transport may yet happen. The average car sold in the US, uses more mpg than a Model T Ford. 1)Make it illegal, 2)Stop making it, 3)Stop buying it. The third option takes the most effort.

PS comment #9: is that an anize record?

mr. t-
We have pretty different experiences of the city. I feel much less self absorbed when surrounded by thousands and millions of minions going about their daily business. It makes me feel like one of the many little worker ants doing his little part. But being out in the country (where I grew up, where I escape to every third or forth weekend to visit my folks) or the wilderness (I dream about Yosemite and Glacier on a weekly basis, and the photos pass by me daily on my screen saver) is indulgent. You can stand on top of that 14K rock and crow because no one else is around and all you can see is craggy peaks around you and it’s like that, er, commercial for the military. I am powerful. I can succeed. That is the rejuvenating message that I hear when I go to recharge some place where no one is around. And I need to hear that message sometimes. But revolution doesn’t begin in the country. You need the masses of people to be behind you. There’s an internal and personal strength to be derived from wearing your carhardts and plastic jacket and climbing up Half Dome, but you won’t find the communal strength, the power of the people, on a lonely mountain crag.

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