The Environment-A Solution?
Introduction
If you were go into business today, you might heed the advice my late father, Professor O. J. Firestone, who told me back in the 1970s: "If I were a young man today, I would move west to Calgary and go into the oil business."
My Dad could see the future and despite all the ups and downs in the oil sector since then, it would have been pretty good advice if making money was the prime motivator for you.
Recently, I was asked to provide advice about which industries might be ones where 'all boats are rising'. I am nowhere near the prescient person that OJ was but here is my best guess as to what industries will grow fastest over the next half century:
-education-based firms that specialize in continuing education and training,
-bio-tech and health,
-nfo-tech and the Internet,
-infotainment,
-tourism and entertainment,
-organic foods,
-transportation,
-financial services,
-energy, clean-tech and new related services.
While this essay intends to deal with the place of environmentalism in the panoply of future endeavours, let me first give you my reasons why I chose the above:
1. Life long learning and training will be the one of the major ways that North Americans will be able to increase their productivity and successfully compete with nations like China, India and other emerging states. I went back to school at age 53 to get my real estate license. I have a PhD in Urban economics and have taught real estate development but I still had to go back and do eight OREA College courses and exams to get by Brokers license at 56! The courses were pretty good too, I must say. Certainly, REALTORS today are much better trained than a couple of generations ago-if your cheque cleared, you got your license. (I am exaggerating for effect here. It was more like getting your Learner's Permit for an Ontario Driver's License.)
2. Health technologies and services will simply boom as populations age.
3. The Internet is in its infancy. It will eat radio, TV, newspapers, telecommunications networks, libraries, software, video games, film, telephones, cell phones and much, much more. It is probably about as far along in its development as electrification was when that technology was 15 years old. Lots of room for growth and innovation.
4. Whether we like it or not, the news business is dead. It has been replaced with infotainment. It used to be that newspapers wanted two independent sources before publishing anything. Now many of them run on the slogan: 'Comfort the Afflicted and Afflict the Comfortable.' If you are an amateur videographer, there is lots of scope today to find places for your work and get paid for it too. Celebrity worship is the new religion.
5. Even if Mr. Bush is asking Americans to look under their beds each night to see is Mr. Bin Laden is hiding there, tourism will eventually recover. Humans need to explore new worlds and boldly go where few have gone before. (See the film, The Beach with Leo DiCaprio, for example.) Entertainment is a big part of the human condition-hey, humans are not the only creatures who like to be entertained. African elephants know that if they eat certain types of fruit under certain temperature conditions and let the results ferment in their digestive track, they can get drunk. Apparently, watching tipsy elephants dance is both moving and wondrous to behold. Entertainment may one day involve stereoscopic space so you can meet your pals from all over the world without leaving your home. (CNN did a great job demonstrating a precursor technology on the eve of President-elect Obama's victory. They beamed in Obama-supporter and creator of the YES WE CAN Music Video Will.I.Am as a hologram to speak with CNN anchor Anderson Cooper: you can see the video on YouTube at: http://video.google.com/videosearch?hl=en&q=will+i+am&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=video_result_group&resnum=4&ct=title#. Unbelievable future in this industry.)
6. The demand for organic foods or near to organic foods is surging. I am not sure if we can convert to fully organic farming practices but with cancer rates surging, people are certainly concerned about what they put in their mouths. Industrial farming (farming indoors) and other methodologies must be found to improve on the existing system which is not only using huge amounts of pesticides, fungicides and chemical fertilizers as well as large amounts of energy not only in production but also in transportation to distant markets while producing prodigious amounts of pollution. The local farm, I am sorry to say, is a large source of thousands of chemicals added to the soil, water table, streams and rivers and to the atmosphere as well.
7. The transportation industry uses a fantastic amount of energy, much of it inefficiently. We will not only have to retool the car and trucking industry but also shipping and rail and aviation. The current infrastructure is not sustainable-either economically or environmentally. Lots of opportunity here for innovation and growth. People are not going to give up individual transportation for point to point travel even if they have to go back to the horse and buggy.
8. Despite the doom and gloom at the time of writing, the need for financial services has never been greater. Not only do aging populations need good quality financial services and advice, emerging states with their new found wealth have to do something with it. With so many financial services firms faltering, there will be plenty of opportunity for honest, trusted financial advisors who are not selling hugely risky, impossible to understand financial products like hedge funds, derivatives, etc. under the guise that they are sound as the Rock of Gibraltar!
9. Certainly, one of the greatest challenges is how to produce enough energy without killing the planet we live on. No one has yet come up with the anser to this and maybe there is no one answer…
Protecting the Environment
I have thought long and hard about this for a period of years. I don't think there really is such a thing as living in harmony with nature. We are part of nature and have always had an impact on the environment, just as all living species of plants and animals have had.
So creating a sustainable economy is probably not possible if it means having no impacts on the environment. Perhaps we ought to be looking at a future where the impacts we do have on the planet are not so large as to:
a) depopulate and cause other species to go extinct;
b) cause permanent damage to oceans, rivers, streams and lakes as well as soils, the atmosphere and the water table-damage that can not be easily absorbed by the environment through dilution;
c) deplete the earth's resources to the point where future generations end up on 'The Road' (if you want to be depressed read: The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) about a bleak future after some huge catastrophe has overtaken the planet-ash is blowing everywhere, the world is a freezing place and a man and a boy are struggling to survive in place of total lawlessness and rampant cannibalism).
If you think about North America, say 500 years ago, there were perhaps two million people living on this continent. When things got polluted and people started getting sick from their local environment in those times, they could just move on. The environment could absorb their wastes fairly quickly and, a few years later, they could safely return.
It is harder to do that today with more than 100 times as many people here and some of our wastes likely to around for and be dangerous for at least 100,000 years (such as our nuclear power plants which are storing their wastes nearby, an incredibly foolish thing to do. If you want to understand how dangerous this can be, read a great book: The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, 2007.)
I think that keeping in mind the above three principles, here are some things we might consider doing:
1. Cities can save us. The Khmer Rouge rousted over 3 million Cambodians out of Phnom Penh in a matter of a few days. The Khmers were enamored with the idea that the proletariat and the peasant were the ideal state of being for a human culture. The forced evacuation of the capital of Cambodia killed millions of their citizens not to mention that the resulting deforestation as desperate people tried to live, cook and survive in a forest environment.
2. Preserve the wilderness. Many of my former architecture students used to think that an urban park is an environmental issue or that chopping down a diseased tree is also an environmental issue. An urban park is no oasis for wildlife. It is a place where many cities use 2, 4-D to get rid of weeds, where our kids play in a soup of potentially harmful chemicals, where lawn tractors spew huge amounts of CO (2) and other chemicals into the atmosphere to create playing surfaces, where the only living creatures other than kids are rodents and other pests (aka, squirrels, chipmunks, skunks, bats, mice, rats, raccoons, etc.) Do you know where wilderness truly exists-it exists in the DMZ between the Koreas and in the no go area around Chernobyl. You know why it exists there? Because humans are not allowed to enter. We should be reserving 80% of the planet (I would guess) for connected wilderness areas where people NEVER, EVER go. (To learn more about the DMZ and the area around Chernobyl, again I refer you to Alan Weisman's book.
3. Reform agricultural practices.
4. Look for new forms of energy that pollute less.
5. Someone ran a series of TV commercials with Comedian Rick Mercer in Canada called: "Take the One Tonne Challenge." The challenge was to save one tonne of CO (2) in a year. Trouble was Rick didn't tell you how to do this. I suppose if you turn your thermostat down in winter and up in the summer that would help. One home builder in Ottawa has an "All Off" button located near to your daily exit from your home. So instead of running around the home every day turning off your kids' PCs or their lights, you can hit one button before you get in your car and kill everything except essential things like your furnace.
6. Simple things, like move closer to where you work. I did a quick calculation that you could save more than 1.5 tonnes of CO (2) per year if you move closer to work (the assumptions and spreadsheet are online at: http://www.ottawarealestatenews.ca/GoGreenLiveCloserToWhereYouWorkb.xls.
7. Get rid of one way streets and no left turns. It only makes trips longer.
8. Get rid of traffic calming-speed bumps and the like use a lot of energy in braking and accelerating, vehicles make a lot more noise too.
9. Use traffic circles like they do in Canberra rather than signal lights.
10. Do a lot more with design to reduce heat loads in summer and reduce loss of heat in the winter. There are thousands of things we can do to improve the built form of the city.
11. Produce more goods and services locally.
12. Allow work from home and businesses to locate in or closer to residential areas.
13. Get rid of newspapers. Can you imagine a dumber industry? Did you know that every country that has ever deforested itself in recorded history has ended up poor? Look at what has happened to Haiti compared to the Dominican Republic. One side of the island is prosperous, safe and delightful; the other is a very scary, very poor place. One side preserved their national forests. The other side, every time it rains, 100s perish from floods. The denuded hillsides can't absorb the moisture and killer mudslides result. In Canada, you want to tackle a REAL environmental problem? Then don't worry about a developer who has taken down 40 trees to build a dozen homes. Go see what the industry is doing to our boreal forests-we're talking million upon millions of trees. They destroy wildlife habitat, use huge amounts of energy to take the logs out of the area to pulp and paper plants who use huge additional amounts of energy to turn the raw logs into newsprint that is then transported to printers who print the daily newspaper which is then trucked or flown to distribution points where it is transferred to other vehicles so it can be dropped at your door so you can read it for 20 minutes or less then either thrown away or re-transported back to re-processing plants and the cycle starts again. If you want to read you newspaper, find one online that you like (I read Digg.com, for example).
I am sure there are about 10,000 more things that we can and should be doing. But one thing I am certain of is: we have to be careful. I have already said that for a thing to be environmentally sustainable it also has to economically sustainable. Did it make sense to take cropland out of food production to make more ethanol? Perhaps, but I am not convinced. I suspect the cost of producing ethanol this way might not only cost more to produce than it is worth in the marketplace, it is a disaster for the poorest humans on the planet because basic foodstuffs have become more expensive plus the CO (2) balance might actually be worse anyway not better.
I like things like the idea of adding solar hot water, roof-top systems even in a northern shelf city like Ottawa. Believe it or not, we get quite a bit of sun here and there seems to be a decent return on investment for these systems. What worries me is that people hawking solar cells that generate electricity for, say, 75 cents per kw-hr are not necessarily selling you something that makes environmental sense; it certainly makes no economic sense.
The economic value of a thing reflects its inputs: capital, labour, energy, management. In principal, the higher the cost of a thing, the more capital, labour, energy and management went into producing that thing. So power production from a natural gas fired turbine at around 8 cents per kw-hr is probably more environmentally friendly than power at 75 cents from solar panels.
Energy balance and eco balance calculations are fiendishly complicated, especially if you are doing whole lifecycle calculations that includes decommissioning a product at the end of its economic life. What I am trying to get at here is that we can not make assumptions based on hearsay evidence or because we happen to like the sound of solar cells better than the sound of natural gas.
I completely understand the argument that economic calculations may not take into account all environmental impacts; but that doesn't mean we throw out 10,000 years of marketplace behaviour. It does mean that we have to price-in the costs of decommissioning and the costs of using the natural environment, in my view.
Maybe you use solar cells because, for you, price is no object. But remember, the manufacture of solar wafers entails the use of a lot of highly toxic chemicals. The number of mother boards and computer wastes littering dumps all over the world is scary.
A Solution
So what can we really do if we want to improve the situation? Is their a real solution that we can be sure will reduce human impacts on the planet to a manageable level?
I think there is one way and maybe only one.
What is the one way we can be pretty sure that we can follow the three principles I elaborated on above-a) that we would not crowd out other species, b) cause permanent damage to the planet (damage that can not be healed by the biosphere in a relatively short period of time through dispersion and natural processes), or c) deplete the resources of the planet?
REDUCE THE HUMAN POPULATION TO ONE BILLION TWO HUNDRED MILLION.
I am guessing that if the species were to act to reduce its head count to about 1.2 billion (around where it was in the year 1850), we would be able to: a) still have a post modern economy with all the bells and whistles (good health care, good economic prospects for ourselves and our children, cool tech, decent education, etc.), b) reserve 80% or more of the planet for connected wilderness zones where people never go, c) achieve a sustainable economic equilibrium, d) maintain and improve our political and cultural institutions, e) make demands on the planet's resources that are responsible.
I think that humans may be suffering from a too-may-rats-in-cage psychosis. There isn't a square foot on this planet that is not claimed by one government or another (and often by many as is the case of Antarctica). What if we suddenly decided to somehow depopulate the planet from a total of nearly seven billion to one (not quite like in the book, The World Without Us, where the hypothesis is that ALL of the people mysteriously disappear one night-possibly they get whisked away by aliens or go off to visit Jesus)?
I am afraid that power abhors a vacuum and that we would be more likely to end up like the survivors in Stephen King's The Stand, at war in no time at all.
So I decided to see what might happen if every nation adopted the one child policy of China (actually in my model I used 1.1 and 1.2 children per adult human female), how long would it take to go from a population of 6,600,000,000 to 1,200,000,000?
Voyage To Earth Population of 1.2 Billion Souls
The calculation is surprisingly difficult and I must apologize in advance to demographers for: a) the many assumptions I made and b) any errors in the calculations which are wholly my own.
Here are some of the assumptions I made:
-World Population is now around 6.68 billion.
-Under certain assumptions, it will grow to 9.4 billion by 2050.
-Average life spans will continue to increase, eventually reaching 93.
-The mortality rate will thus be around 1.08%.
-Females make up 50.5% of the population.
-Females will have on average 1.1 children during their lifetimes.
You can see my spreadsheet in .xls format. You can download it yourself and play around with my assumptions. It is posted at: http://www.dramatispersonae.org/WorldPopulationApril2008.xls.
Unbelievably, it will take more than 440 years to reduce the population from today's level to get to a point not seen since 1850 even with a 'one child' policy!
We won't see a world population of 1.2 billion until the year 2450. The reason is that when a society goes to a one child policy, their population tends to continue to increase simply because of the sheer number of females that can reproduce. Eventually (in my model by 2050), populations begin to fall. But even then, it falls slowly.
Think about it this way (here is a super simple model):
-You have an isolated tribe of 100 people lost on a deserted desert island because of a recent plane crash.
-Miraculously, none of them suffer a scratch from the crash.
-Another miracle, they are a bunch of nice looking people who happen to be the perfect breeding material needed to start a human colony.
-They are never rescued.
-They are on their own for all time.
-They decide to be environmentally conscientious and only have one child per adult female.
-How long will it take until their population is down to say 50?
Let's assume out of the 100, 10 are kids and 10 are elders and there are 40 breeding couples. In the next 25 episodes (excuse me, 25 years), they each have one kid. The ten elders all die, either of natural or supernatural causes, we're not entirely sure.
But in any event, 25 years later, their population = 100 + 40 - 10 or 130. So even with a one kid per adult female, 25 years later, the population is more not less. But wait a minute, the kids during that time (10 of them) have grown up and have formed 5 more breeding pairs. (Again, another miracle-an equal number of males and females). Maybe all of those young couples have had kids of their own as soon as they reached puberty or shortly thereafter. (After all, it's a hot sweaty place with cute guys and girls running around without much in the way of clothes.) So maybe by 2033, the island has a population of 135 not 130. It's even higher than we thought!
Now there are a total of 45 kids who have been born on the island. Let's assume that 23 of them are women and 22 are men-that is pretty typical, women outnumber men anyway in the 'real world'. So over the next 25 years, each woman has one child, so there are 23 children in the next generation. And let's assume that 25% of the first generation (G1) breeding pairs die in the next 25 years after G2. So now we have a simple table:
G1
Year: 2008
Pop.: 100
G2
Year: 2033
Pop.: 135
G3
Year: 2058
Pop.: 135 + 23 - 20 = 138
So even 50 years later, gosh, the population is still growing!
Now in the next 25 years, the rest of the first breeding couples pass away. Now there are only 23 kids from G3 (again more females-12 of them), so there are 12 kids born in G4. So we have:
G4
Year: 2083
Pop.: 138 + 12 - 60 = 90
Finally, the population is starting to fall. But it took 75 years before the Island's population started to show a meaningful decrease!
I will leave it up to the keen reader to figure out how long until the population falls to half the original complement of Oceanic Flight 815 but you can see, it takes a long time.
Productivity and Living Standards
To me a world future with 1.2 billion souls on the planet is not very interesting if we have to go back to having short, brutish lives with economic and governmental systems based on, say, medieval practices.
So part of my calculations entailed asking a second question: What would the growth rate in personal productivity have to be so that by the year 2450, we not only had a population of 1.2 billion but that population was capable of producing the same volume of goods and services as we do today?
Again, I refer you to my spreadsheet to examine how I estimated this. I used PPP (Purchasing Power Parity) to calculate the true state of welfare in the world today. (It is not fair to compare, say, the welfare of someone living in a pricey state like Switzerland with someone living in a low cost/low wage country like Namibia where one Namibian Dollar presumably buys more goods and services in Namibia than it would if converted to Swiss francs and used there.)
Now understand, I am not saying that the world would produce the same goods and services in 2450 as it does today. I am saying the total value would be the same-but the mix of goods and services would be vastly different. Presumably, there would be a much lower energy and labour content and a much higher content of capital and management and it would be infinitely more environmentally friendly.
But it turns out that productivity over the next 400+ years would only have to increase by 0.4526% per year to maintain current volumes. Non farm productivity growth in the US from 1947 to 1973 grew at 2.88% per year. It slipped to 1.30% from 1973 to 1995 but accelerated to 2.8% from 1996 to 2001. So for the world to produce the same volume of goods and services even with the population falling, we would only need to see less than a 0.5% increase in world productivity over the next 440 years. Easily achievable for super smart creatures like Homo Sapiens.
And that would mean an incredible increase in the welfare for humans living on this planet in 2450-1.2 billion people would enjoy a lifestyle with more than 5.5 times the PPP of a person living in 2008.
Now I think that we are likely to see this happen even without government dictat. Reproduction rates are falling practically everywhere approaching the one child per adult female. So maybe the future isn't quite so bleak for our planet.
And it sure is worth saving. To understand better what a truly miraculous thing life is, I would refer you to Bill Bryson's excellent general science book: A Short History of Nearly Everything, 2005. For example, the probability of spontaneously forming the basic proteins of life is such an incredible long shot as to completely boggle the mind. If you think about the systems we humans build, their complexity and reliability are nothing compared to the self correcting systems of the Earth which have had to work continuously for 4 billion years, otherwise life would have perished long ago. What would you rather rely on to pump blood through your veins and arteries-your human heart or a human-made sump pump that you bought from the local hardware store?
Copyright. Dr. Bruce M. Firestone, Ottawa, Canada. Nov. 2008.
ps. Full disclosure- my wife and I have five kids in an under populated part of the planet- the great northern expanse of Canada.