1. GEOG 353: Day 7

2. Housekeeping Items The Chemistry Club is sponsoring a talk on 'The Science of Climate Change' at 6 p.m. tomorrow, followed by a discussion of possible actions. It's in Building 355, Room 203. I managed to persuade world-renowned (now retired) ecologist, C.S. “Buzz” Holling to come to my Environmental Geography course tomorrow (same room as above) at 1 p.m. Come if you're really interested. He's going to be talking about ecosystem resilience and adaptive management. A reminder about the web site recommended by Dan: http://www.ted.com/ http://www.ted.com/

3. Housekeeping Items Anyone who hasn't chosen a book report date? One of the readings didn't get assigned to a week: the chapter from Diamond – Week 9. When I said I wanted the debate articles back, I meant after the debates are over. Please take them and decide how you want to divide them up. Also look into other resources. We have book reports today, and then I would like to cover Chapters 3 and 4 of the textbook. Any other housekeeping items or announcements?

4. Porritt – Chapters 3 & 4 Chapter 3 engages with the issue of economic growth, which is one of the sacred cows of capitalism. In this context, he recommends Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (so named for the original 1972 report) by Jorgen Randers and Dennis Meadows. I have the charts that illustrate the models on a CD, if you would be interested to see them some time. In essence, they are arguing that there will not be one big collapse, but a situation where more and more capital will have to be diverted to coping with the ecological impacts of an expanding population and economy that eventually there won't be enough to sustain continuing growth in food and industrial production, and population growth will also be forced to cease.

5. The Limits to Growth Just look at the table on p. 44 [of my edition – you don’t have this table] regarding increases in various factors from 1950 to 1975, and then again from '75 to 2000. The percentage changes are quite extraordinary. The size of the global economy is now doubling every 25 years, and trade has increased more than 12 times since the end of World War II. The issue is do we want a soft landing or a hard landing? The choice is up to us, and even more importantly up to our decision-makers. In essence the constantly growing economy, as a sub- system of the biosphere, is bumping up against the fact that the biosphere and its resources are finite. It can only grow by devouring its host.

6. The Limits to Growth Although this is a heretical idea for mainstream economists, “the scale of the economic subsystem will eventually be determined by the overall scale of the ecosystem, by its ability to provide high-grade resources and to absorb low- grade waste, and by the inter-dependency of all interlocking elements” (p. 47; these page numbers don’t apply to your edition). In other words, economics has to deal with the first and second laws of thermodynamics – the first stating that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, merely transformed into another state, and the second that it loses its capacity to do useful work with each transformation. Only the sun's incoming energy prevents the Earth from completely running down. With matter, entropy expresses itself as the loss of ability to serve as useful raw material.

7. The Limits to Growth The productivity of the economy and of the biosphere is limited by the amount of solar energy captured (all non- renewable resources will eventually be depleted). Therefore, economic growth can only continue to occur to the extent that it 'decouples' itself from entropy-producing throughput. Not only has economic growth been occurring continually, it has been occurring exponentially [see text box for examples of how quickly seemingly innocuous exponential growth can spin out of control]. Ekins therefore makes a distinction between growth in biophysical throughout, growth in economic value, and growth in economic and social welfare, each of which needs to be distinguished, rather than collapsed together.

8. The Limits to Happiness Porritt then reviews some of the literature on happiness and its links to income and shows – see also the URL for John Helliwell in the reading list – that beyond a certain point in income growth, life satisfaction levels off. Indeed, he also cites Fred Hirsch and others that much of people's happiness or unhappiness is relative to how well off we see ourselves in relation to other people. As far back as the 1920, advertisers have directly sought to cultivate dissatisfaction and thereby to create new needs. Without the creation of new needs, the economy would largely grind to a halt. Can you think of significant new demand that has been created in recent years? Which products and services have genuinely enriched our lives and which not?

9. The Limits to Happiness Stress, anxiety, depression, addiction and other mental health issues are all on the rise. Helliwell, Richard Layard (see p, 56) and others are creating a new 'science of happiness' which shows that much of what we think of as subjective has an objective basis – for instance, people who are of service to others tend to be happier, as are people with a richer community life and a slower pace of life. And yet we make increasing incomes and economic output the measure of society's success, not whether people's happiness is increasing. In line with this, Herman Daly makes the important distinction between quantitative expansion and qualitative improvement. Even in the steady-state economy he advocates, life quality can improve.

10. The Limits to Growth Suggesting to mainstream economists that there are limits of growth is like suggesting to the Catholic Church – back in the Middle Ages – that the Earth was round and is not the centre of the universe. Economists counter that we can substitute man- made capital for natural capital. However, there are some things that can't be substituted for. Moreover, we can't rely on rising prices to always ensure conservation either. It hasn't worked with many fisheries or with the now illegal trade in ivory, or with other resources.

11. The Limits of GDP As A Measure One of the main arguments against the usefulness of GNP/ GDP as a measure of economic health – and we will get into this more later – is that we should subtract the loss of natural capital that occurs through economic activity each year, plus the various defensive expenditures that represent 'collateral damage' from economic activity – environmental protection and restoration, car accidents, poor health and rising crime rates, etc. Can you think of current examples in Canada? The main point is that development (qualitative) is not the same as growth (quantitative).

12. Peak Oil and The Limits to Growth Since so much of the growth economy has been premised on abundant supplies of fossil fuels, the arrival of peak oil (the point at which demand exceeds supply) – some time between last year and 2020 – will change all the rules economically, and socially as well. Already the energy recovered to energy expended ratio has gone from 28:1 to 2:1, and is still declining. Unfortunately, in the immortal words of our own Tim Naegele, we hit the collective “snooze button” back in the late '70s when oil prices started going back down and, as a result, we lost the opportunity of a 30-year head start on deflecting the current crisis in peak oil and climate change.

13. Chapter 4 of Porritt In this chapter, Porritt engages with what are the defining characteristics of capitalism, and whether what some people have called “killer capitalism” can be tamed for purposes of sustainable development. He notes that leftists tend to reject the profit motive and free markets as being inherently unsustainable, whereas right-wingers tend to see more privatization of natural capital and less government intervention as the key to success. While Porritt has little time for either of these positions, he does strongly suggest that “capitalism, as we know it today would, indeed, appear to be incompatible with anything vaguely resembling sustainability” (p. 67).

14. Capitalism vs. Communism? He cites multi-billionaire, George Soros, on the “capitalist threat.” He also cites statistics on the growth inequality in the U.S. where the average wealth of the richest 400 Americans saw a one-year increase from 1998 to 1999 was $655 million dollars while the average wage-earner has seen a 12% in their salaries from the1973 to 1998. At the same time, he notes how ecologically destructive communist societies – such as the USSR and China have proven to be – even worse in many cases than their capitalist rivals. For many 'Greens' the solution now lies not in opposing socialism to capitalism but in creating economies that utilize markets, but on a smaller, more local scale.

15. Markets vs. 'Market Society' This ties in with Karl Polanyi's distinction between markets, which have existed for millennia, and market society – a distinct form of society in which the nation- state has aided and abetted the rise of the corporation. According to George Monbiot, an economy with markets that are effectively regulated in the interests of workers, consumers, and ecosystems is the kind of model we should be striving for. Originally, when corporations were first chartered, their charters were supposed to be subject to being revoked if they proved guilty of malfeasance, but this been quietly forgotten and, by virtue of being 'persons' under the law, corporate boards are largely protected from prosecution.

16. Corporations as Psychopaths? Citing Joel Bakan (author of the book and film, The Corporation) corporations have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders to maximize profits, and thus they are often very willing to externalize their costs onto others and onto the environment in order to do so, unless this is against the law, and even that is sometimes an insufficient deterrent. Porritt argues that, rather than being mediators, between society and corporations, governments have tended to become their partners, helping them to achieve their objectives domestically and internationally. Financial irregularities have become common amongst the leading companies, and CEO rewards no longer seem linked to company performance.

17. Private Property and Free Trade So far, Porritt has looked at markets and profit. He next looks at the issue of private property, noting that while there may be situations where giving the poor more private property rights may assist in sustainability, in general attempting to privatize natural capital and ecosystem services seems to hold little promise. It also ignores the many successful communal property management systems that have existed around the world. He notes that when David Ricardo advocated free trade in the early nineteenth century, neither capital nor labour were mobile. Nowadays, both, but especially the former are, and it tends to flow to countries with the cheapest labour and the lowest environmental standards.

18. Scale, Needs and Competition On the issue of scale, he notes that Peter Vitousek, et al. in 1986 estimated that human appropriation of net primary productivity (NPP) was 40%. The global economy has doubled since then. Does that mean that we now appropriate 80%?! On the issue of meeting human needs, he suggests that there has proven to be a disconnect between economic growth, as generated by current patterns of capital allocation, and increases in human welfare, thus raising questions about “trickle down” vs. “gush up”. He questions unbridled competition, citing Lyn Margulis and others that in nature, one observes 'competitive exclusion,' cooperation, and interdependence.

19. Chapter 4 of Porritt – Concluding Section On inequality, he notes that developing countries spend $375 billion a year on servicing their 2.5 trillion debt – more than the combined expenditure on health and education, and 20 times what they receive in foreign aid. Moreover, the top 1% of all households in those countries receive between 70 and 90% of all the wealth. In the U.S., household debt as a percentage of income rose from 58 to 85% from 1973 to 1998, and the top 1% now earns more than the bottom 95%. In the final section of the chapter, Porritt suggests that while we need effective pricing mechanisms to internalize the true value of ecosystem services, capitalism will remain a corrosive system unless it is buttressed with wisdom and values that transcend the purely economic.