Environ 207 Midterm
Sustainability
"A condition where economic, political, cultural and ecological practices operate to enable succeeding generations to receive a stock of equitably distributed natural capital to meet their needs that is no less per capita in quantity and quality than that utilized by preceding generations to meet their own needs."
Paul R. Erlich
- 1968 book The Population Bomb predicted mass starvation due to overpopulation - Inaccurate, but framed overpopulation as a major global threat
Pragmatism
- A branch of philosophy concerned with the practical consequences of theory - More inclusive environmentalism is needed to push through reform - Economic drivers, political forces, and institutional impasses all barriers to individual action - Environmental pragmatists argue environmentalists have created unnecessary theoretical divisions (thick vs. thin sustainability, deep vs. shallow ecology)
Utilitarian Ethic
- An ethical theory that posits that the value of a good should be judged solely by its usefulness to humans (society) - Usefulness is often equated with maximizing pleasure and minimizing pain - Constraints: 1) An individual should not take more than he/she can use before it would spoil or go to waste 2) No individual should appropriate more land than he/she can work. - connected to John Locke's theory of property: an individual's property begins with his physical body. Beyond the body, an individual's physical labor is also part of his property.
Animal Liberation
- Animals (wild or domestic) are worthy of moral consideration or moral standing - Equal consideration to minimize or eliminate their suffering. Should be part of any ethical decision. - Peter Singer: calls for fundamental and radical restructuring of society + freeing of all animals from use by humans, whether those uses are for food, medical testing, industry, personal adornment, entertainment or anything else
The Biggest Commons: Earth
- Atmosphere as global commons - Incentives to free ride for countries *cough* USA *cough* - Few incentives to stop polluting - Cooperation becomes difficult with more actors - Uneven power distribution between commoners - Can't own property - Can't make decisions - Can't negotiate rules - Often ruled by elite menWeak authorities lead to discrimination and oppressive rules - Montreal Protocol was a success of common property management - CFC's banned totally
Types of Consumption
- Background consumption: things needed to live - Overconsumption: consumption that undermines a species (aggregate) life support system - Misconsumption: Individual consumption that affects the person's lifestyle but not the species' survival
GHG
- Carbon Dioxide (biggest sources: Electricity + heat and transportation). - Methane: Agriculture. More potent than CO2, less of it. - Nitrous Oxide
Penny (2018)
- Climate change is caused by capitalism, not overpopulation - Around 100 companies are responsible for 71% of the world's greenhouse gas emissions
McKibben (2016) 942 > 800 > 353
- Coal mines and gas and oil wells currently in operation worldwide contains 942 gigatons worth of CO2 - To have ⅔ chance of staying below a global increase of 2 degrees, we can only release 800 gigatons more CO2. - To have a 50-50 chance of staying below a global increase of 1.5 degrees, we can only release 353 gigatons more CO2.
Late 19th/Early 20th Century Industrialization
- Conservation - concerned with resource sufficiency (Pinchot, Roosevelt), science of resource use - Preservation - focused on protecting wilderness (Thoreau, Muir) - Pollution - degradation of ambient environment (local reformers)
Zencey (2010)
- Criticizes the dominant paradigm - Nature will decide what is sustainable - Nature is malleable
Kuznets Curve
- Development over time radically lowers environmental impact - High GDP = low impact - Med GDP = highest impact - Low GDP = low impact - Industrialization increasing environmental impact then reaches a threshold, when regulation, affluence, and economic transition take over. - Critiques: So - no limits to economic growth? Do service-sector based (e.g. highly industrialized) countries follow this path? What about our ecological "shadow"? Loss of land, biodiversity, GHGs, ecosystem services are not addressed
Tragedy of the Commons
- Difficult to enclose systems that invite free-riding and defection - Type of Prisoner's Dilemma - Everyone is selfish with their use of common resources. Resources diminish
Biblical Environmental Ethics
- Dominion: humans have total control to use resources however - Stewardship: humans must take care of environment
McKibben (2010)
- Eating meat has caused greenhouse gas emissions - from raising the cows, to transportation, to production of feed for the cattle - Need to shift from feedlot farming (overgrazing) to rotational grazing to scale global warming - Manure goes into soil and so do the greenhouse gases
Herman Daly
- Ecological economist - Toward a Steady-State Economy (1973) - "The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the reverse."
Rio Earth Summit (1992)
- Effort to move the environment to the center of development policy - Degradation of nature should be accounted for in terms of its costs - loss of natural environment reduced GNP - Third World environmental problems due to First World development policies, so First World should subsidize Third World to redress past inequities and reverse cycle of resource depletion ★ global partnership for sustainable development
Kondratiev Waves: Fordism/Post-Fordism
- Every ~50 years, there's a change in the techno-economic paradigm - EX: Fordism (producing all parts of car in one place) and post Fordism (parts manufactured in different places then assembled)
Moral Extensionism
- Extending our sphere of moral consideration beyond the human realm. - Most commonly, it is argued that intelligent or sentient beings are worthy ethical subjects.
Club of Rome
- Global think tank - Sought a "sustainable feedback pattern" (altering growth rates of variables so natural and human systems can coexist into perpetuity)
Deep Ecology (Devall and Sessions)
- Harmony with nature - All nature has intrinsic value - Elegantly simple material needs - Earth "supplies" limited - We can live well and decrease population. - Our interactions with nature are excessive and worsening, we must change policy. - Critiques shallow ecology for question root causes of CC.
Maniates (2002)
- How to get away from "individualizing" major environmental problems? IWAC and a mental paradigm shift. - IPAT "obscures the exercise of power" - IPAT ignores agency, institutions, political power or collective action - IWAC: Quality of Work, Meaningful consumption Alternatives, Political Creativity
Results of Climate Change:
- Increased drought - Rising sea levels and flooding - Increasing risk of catastrophic fires - Increased storm frequency and storm intensity - Increased hunger and poverty - Threatening life at the poles
Types of Technological Change
- Incremental innovations:Small-scale, progressive modifications of existing products and processes - Radical Innovations: Discontinuous events that drastically change existing products or processes; a cluster of such innovations - Changes of technology system: Extensive changes in technology that impact several parts of the economic system - Changes in techno-economic paradigm: Large-scale revolutionary changes, embodied in new technology systems
Devall & Sessions (1985)
- Looking at the environment through an ecocentric view; injects an element of traditional wisdom/spirituality into the debate (Arne Naess) - Humanity and the environment as a cohesive "whole". - Supports deep skepticism of technology, decline in population, and that nature is intrinsically valuable. - Deep ecology
18th/19th century
- Malthus: population growth could outstrip resources - George Perkins Marsh: Man alters nature - Nature is finite
Rachel Carson
- Marine biologist - Published Silent Spring in 1962 (Chronicled harmful effects of DDT onbirds) - Credited with launching the popular environmental movement
Keeling Curve
- Measuring the carbon concentration in the atmosphere over time; fluctuations between spring and fall due to plant activity - Peaks in May (Spring) and troughs in October (Fall)
Wicked Problems
- No stopping rules: no clear solution or endpoint. - Difficult to define: scope - Many interdependencies, multi-causal - Socially complex: many stakeholders - Require changing behavior. ex. CC, water resource management, urban planning, GMOs, etc. SUSTAINABILITY (no central authority, lack of time, multi-causal, value of reward is discounted).
Biodiversity
- Number, variety and variability of living organisms. Multi-level, interlinked concept: Ecosystems, Species, Genes - Key drivers of biodiversity decline are overexploitation and agriculture. Secondary to that are invasive species, pollution and disturbance, and climate change. - Biodiversity loss occurs rapidly in low income countries, which often are "biodiversity hotspots" - Leads to unknown consequences for people and the planet - We have identified ~10% of existing species.
Landrigan (2015)
- Offers her view on the ethics of eating meat - Being a vegan or vegetarian doesn't necessarily mean you are preventing the support for big name industrial farms - All food choices come with consequences and it may be more beneficial to support farms that raise animals naturally - "Ethical omnivorism"
Preservation and Wilderness Ethic
- Preservation - The management of resource or environment for protection and preservation, usually for its own sake (e.g. wilderness preservation) - Wilderness - A natural parcel of land, more of less unaffected by human forces - Non-utilitarian environmental ethic
Aldo Leopold and the "Land Ethic"
- Put new insights of ecology into an ethical framework - Land Ethic: Use of the Land guided by knowledge about ecological connections and ecosystem health. - key "ecocentric" environmental ethic - Involved moral extentionism - humans should realize that not only are they, as a species, part of the natural order, but that they are also wholly dependent on their environment
20th Century
- Rapid economic growth - Dependence on non-renewable resources - Increasing awareness of pollution, loss of biodiversity, ozone hole, and eventually, climate change
M. King Hubbert
- Shell geoscientist - In 1956, accurately predicted US oil production would peak in 1970 (Hubbert curve)
Orr (1991)
- Technological sustainability - Ecological sustainability - We need both to first stop our active symptoms, then address the roots of our ills. Both have a place.
Conservation
- The efficient and sustainable use of natural resources, always for "the greatest good for the greatest number." - Typically associated with scientific management of public goods like fisheries or forests - Pinchot: Centrist between corporate interests who wanted free reign and preservationists - Utilitarian environmental ethic - ex. hech hechy valley
Ecology
- The scientific study of interactions amongst organisms and the habitat or ecosystem in which they live. - Fostered Environmental Ethic broader in scope than narrow confines of (1) anthropocentric conservation and (2) wilderness preservation.
Burg (2015)
- University of Michigan has a natural gas cogeneration plant that produces 40% of the energy used on campus. - We aren't the #1 university, but we are doing well, especially for a huge campus. Considers that we might have different goals than a small school.
IPCC
- We are practically certain that observed changes are anthropogenic and mainly due to GHGs. - Human activities are estimated to have caused approximately 1.0°C of global warming above pre-industrial levels. - Global warming is likely to reach 1.5°C between 2030 and 2052 if it continues to increase at the current rate. - Climate-related risks for natural and human systems depend on the magnitude and rate of warming, geographic location, levels of development and vulnerability, and on the choices and implementation of adaptation and mitigation options. 1.5°C vs 2°C changes
Common pool resources
- air, water, land, etc. - Dominant narrative is that they're doomed to fail because people are selfish - The solution lies in privatizing property because people take better care of the things they own than common goods Alternative narrative states common pool resources are the key to resource management IF there are norms, rules, and regulations associated with the INSTITUTIONS (Unofficial rules and social norms) that manage them
UM
- currently U of M has Gold ranking. We're great with research and public outreach -areas in need of improvement: food, investments green architecture and reduction of carbon emissions, groundskeeping
Challenges of a Planet
- population growth - Consumption - Economic Disparities: Richest 20% hold ¾ world income. Inequality linked to environmental degradation and conflict - Urbanization: Increasing materials used over time/GDP - Pollution : Air & Water, Soil, Light & Noise, Waste generation - Biological stress: deforestation, desertification, habitat loss, fishery collapse - Climate change: CO2 emissions up, temperatures rise.
E. F. Schumacher
- sustainable development - Small is Beautiful (1973) argues for better management of nonrenewable resources, sustainable development - Challenges traditional notions of "eternal growth", "bigger is better"
Ehrlich and Ehrlich (2008)
-Population AND affluence contribute to our disastrous environmental impact (P and A in IPAT). "Revision" of argument in Population Bomb -Homo sapiens evolved by being smart; we originally developed our most productive land and now are wasting more and more energy on poorer quality resources
Collective action
1. Institutions manage common property, not individuals Res Nullius Not owned by anyone, open to everyone (air) 2. Res Communes Common property owned collectively, only the owners have access (Native American Reservations) - Individuals have incentive to participate if they have the ability to negotiate the rules - Kropotkin: cooperation is important for evolution as competition
Ecocentrism
An ethical stance that argues that ecological concerns should, over and above human priorities, be central to decisions about right and wrong action.
Anthropocentrism
An ethical stance that views humans as the central factor in considerations of right and wrong action in and toward nature
The Prisoner's Dilemma
Behaving selfishly ends up badly for one or both parties, cooperation → best outcome
Greenhouse Effect
Characteristic of the earth's atmosphere, based on presence of important gases to trap and retain heat.
Zernike (2008)
Colleges compete for sustainability rankings, but may not truly grow "sustainable"
Vos (2007)
Distinguishes between thick and thin version of sustainability through the seven archetypes: Ontology of nature, Substitution of natural capital, Economic growth, Population growth, Role of technology, and Social equity.
Evolution of term "Sustainability"
Ecological sustainabilty→what's being sustained→creating alternate systems to protect natural capital and equality→emphasis on "bottom-up" ★ Understanding + reworking the relationship between nature and society. ★ Priorities of 3 Es changes with discipline
IPAT
I = impact on the environment P = population A = affluence (GDP or Consumption per capita): Wealthier people tend to consume more resources T = technology (energy consumption per capita): The processes used to obtain resources and transform them into useful goods and wastes. - Research Goal: measure the impact of human beings on the environment - Ehlrich and Holdren - The most important factor of IPAT depends on the place - Highlights relationships and the importance of population - Not multiplicative, relationships vary - Examines impact and thinking of sustainability, but is apolitical and simplistic
where is carbon held bich
In the earth's crust (specifically the ocean) cumulatively over 4,000,000 gigatons - 38,000 in ocean - 1,500 in soil - 560 in plants
Critiques of Environmental Ethics
Land Ethic's Holism: Protection of wholes (e.g. ecosystems) more important than protection (and rights) of the parts (e.g. individual animals, including humans) Social Ecology: environmental problems and crises are rooted in social structures and relationships. Problem is hierarchical, state-controlled, and predicated on dominating people and nature. We need egalitarianism.
Ecological Footprint
Measure of both resources and energy needed to support a person, city, nation or the world, and the capacity to absorb their physical and gaseous wastes. Varying levels of Ecological Footprint are due to different lifestyles and consumption patterns
Photosynthesis
Process through which plants use sun's energy to convert C02 into organic compounds.
Princen
Production: - Produce better and everything will be fine - Individual action doesn't matter - Efficiency is priority Consumption: - Views all consumption as environmental degradation - Realization that resources are finite - People distance themselves from production, thus making it not their problem - Rethinking how humans relate to nature
Assadourian
State of the World 2010 Thesis: - For humanity to thrive long into the future, we'll need to transform our cultures, making it feel as natural to live sustainably as living as consumers feels today. - Consumption that actively undermines well-being needs to be discouraged. - Replace private consumption of goods with public consumption of goods. - Goods that are necessary should last a long time and be cradle-to-cradle.
Sustainable Development
Sustained: Nature, community, life support (resources, environment) Developed: People, society, economy
Carbon Cycle
System through which carbon circulates through earth's geosphere, atmosphere, and biosphere, including exchanges between carbon in the earth (e.g. petroleum) and the atmosphere (as CO2).
Carbon Sequestration
The capture and storage of carbon from the atmosphere into the biosphere or the geosphere through either biological means, as in plant photosynthesis, or engineered means
The Great Acceleration
The increasing rates of change in human activity since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Unique event, with exploding human population and economic growth driving unprecedented planetary change through the increased demand for energy, land and water
Hardin
Two solutions to the tragedy of the commons 1. Coercion and "top-down" enforcement of regulations 2. Privatization
Sustainable Campus Paradox
Universities are conservative institutions vs. Universities have a moral responsibility to create a sustainable future. - conservative because they acknowledge that sustainability is a problem but are slow moving and reluctant to do much about it.
Environmental Ethics
What are the right and wrong ways of acting toward the non-human world?
Ecological Overshoot
footprint>carrying capacity
Living Planet Index
measures biodiversity by gathering population data of various vertebrate species and calculating an average change in abundance over time
Malthus
population tends to increase at a faster rate than its means of subsistence and that unless it is checked by moral restraint or by disease, famine, war, or other disaster widespread poverty and degradation inevitably result.
Carrying capacity
the population of human or non-human organisms that could be sustained in an area over time. Determined in part by the ecological footprint of the organisms.
Hoffman (2015)
ways culture shapes the climate debate - Distrust of the messengers - Distrust of the process that created the message - Distrust of the message itself - Distrust of the solutions that come from the message - Science behind climate change vs. the political implications of climate change - Climate change challenges many traditional belief systems or philosophical notions of humanity's place in the world
Chapter 9
• Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has changed over millennia and that the conditions for global life can be altered by living things and people on the Earth. • The rise of industrial production meant a parallel rise in an entirely carbon-dependent economy and society. • Carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere (along with other greenhouse gases) contribute to serious but unpredictable global climate change. • Institutional approaches to the problem stress achieving international cooperation through careful compromise and effective rule-design. • Market approaches to the problem stress the efficiency of green consumption and transferable rights to the atmosphere. • Political economy perspectives stress the inherent limits and undemocratic implications of economic carbon reduction solutions to carbon production problems ultimately rooted in the economy itself.
Chapter 5: Environmental Ethics
• Competing ethical systems have influenced human treatment of non-human nature for thousands of years, including especially systems that are anthropocentric versus those that are ecocentric. • In the contemporary era, priorities of conservation have competed with those favoring preservation. • More recently, the land ethic has been forwarded as a way to value nature from an ecological standpoint without eliminating a role for humanity. • More radically, deep ecology represents an ethic that staunchly asserts the value of nature in, of, and for itself. • Other critical traditions view environmental problems as fundamentally rooted in contemporary social structures.
Chapter 2: Population and Scarcity
• Human population growth holds serious implications for sustainability of environmental systems, especially as growth tends historically to be "geometric" or exponential. • Environmental impacts of individual people and groups can vary enormously, owing to variations in technology and affluence. • Population growth has often led to increased carrying capacity, owing to induced inten- sification and innovation. • Carrying capacity and ecological footprint analysis can be used as indices to think about impacts of human individuals and populations. • Malthusian thinking has severe limits for predicting and understanding human- environment relations, since population is an effect of other processes, including development and the rights and education of women.
Chapter 4
• Many environmental problems appear intractable because they are prone to problems of collective action. • Coordination around such problems fails owing to the "Prisoner's Dilemma," a metaphor describing the tendency of individuals to rationally seek their immediate gain at the expense of greater gains that might have been made through cooperation. • Such failure to cooperate around environmental problems typically leads to a "Tragedy of the Commons" where collective goods (e.g., air, water, biodiversity) are degraded. • Evidence exists from around the world, however, that people succeed at cooperating to preserve common property. • Theories of common property have therefore emerged, which stress that Hardin's tragedy might occur where there are absolutely no owners or responsible parties, but most commons are owned and controlled by groups as common property. • By crafting and evolving social institutions that direct cooperative behavior on common property, communities can overcome commons tragedies. • Barriers to institutional formation and collective action emerge from social, political, and economic inequities, which make cooperation difficult or impossible.
Key points
★ "Wild Card" in IPAT Equation ★Dematerialization of individual products, but not overall reduction in environmental impact over the past fifty years. ★In fact, it has been increasing. ★As our ecological/sustainability consciousness evolves will "gales of creative destruction" change accordingly?
Key points
★ In "Western" Civilization the concept of environmental ethics is relatively recent ★ Influenced by passages in the Bible related to "dominion" and "stewardship" and more recently by ideas of "property" ★ Debates over 20th Century development led to ethical ideas of preservation, wilderness, and conservation. ★ In the late-1950s, we have discussions about the rights of animals.
Key points
★ Sustainability is an idea that has evolved through a series of thinkers and, more recently, international meetings and actions ★ However, sustainability isn't necessarily "new" ★ Becoming familiar with the history and development of sustainability can provide current insight; tackling environmental problems requires attending to past, present, and future
Key Points
★ There is a gulf between how we think about sustainability through values, and how we operationalize sustainability ★ Operationalizing sustainability requires action and measurement; campus sustainability illustrates these requirements ★ The next section deals with the challenges we face to live sustainably
Key Points
★Biodiversity: The number, variety, and variability of living organisms ★Challenges of the planet are resulting in biodiversity loss ★Currently, this loss is occurring most rapidly in lower income countries ★These losses come with unknown consequences for people and planet