Nobel Laureate economist: U.S. getting worse off and the future looks bad

See this recent article by Joe Stiglitz summarizing the U.S.'s contemporary economic woes.

He still thinks economic growth is a good thing, but we can forgive him that for now since he's a Nobel Laureate economist. We shouldn't expect someone that eminently respected to have a clue about the real radical transformations that have to take place. He's alright, for a Nobel Laureate, that is!

Conference on process and economics/philosophy/environment etc.

Hey, this looks sweet. I will probably try to go. Contact me if you're interested...

Announcing a long weekend of leisure and conversation entitled "A Colloquial Colloquium: Constructive Postmodernism and Public Policy"
beginning the evening of Friday May 19th, 2006 in Victoria and ending Monday May 22nd.

The content of this conversation will arise from the book, For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future - by H. Daly and J. Cobb Jr.

Dr. John Cobb Jr., Emeritus Professor at The Claremont School of Theology, cofounder of The Centre for Process Studies, and recipient with Herman Daly of The Grawemeyer Award For Ideas Improving World Order, will give a public presentation in Victoria, B.C., on Friday evening May 19, 2006 at St. Ann's Academy in downtown Victoria. This will be the "anchor" event for our ensuing weekend conversations.
Discussions, dinners, dancing and outings will happen on the subsequent days of the long weekend at our local homes. Buffet dinners on Saturday and Sunday will be provided at our homes and will be subject to a fee to cover costs. For those of you less interested in the discourse about Process Thought, Constructive Post Modernism and Public Policy, there will be lots of alternative activities available in Victoria.

John Cobb will be there for the weekend and will speak again on Faith and Process Thought.

PLEASE RSVP! : mrkilt@telus.net. or to Madawaska Institute for process and faith @ geoherm@sympatico.ca

Christian Ecology

A recent email conversation with my good friend Lee prompted me to start this thread to explore concepts of "Christian ecology." A way to do this would be to look at Biblical scripture and theological writings that stress ecocentric philosohpies within Christian doctrine and teaching, for example, the concept of stewardship of creation.

Lee is a worship leader at New Spring Community Church in South Carolina. Historically, he and I have diverged markedly in our approach to Christian faith and philosophy. But a recent New York Times article discussed an initiative by leaders of evangelical Christian churches to recognize global warming as a problem and engage with strategies to understand and mitigate human-induced climate change. I thought this might provide some common ground for Lee and I to reinvigorate our dialog on Christian faith and works in the world.

So to begin, I think this blog thread is a good place for a running repository for discussions, articles, websites, ideas, etc. on the nexus of ecocentric philosophy and Christian faith. I'll start off with some materials off the top of my head and from some very cursory web research:

TREES (Theological Roundtable on Ecological Ethics and Spirituality) is a student group at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley.

Christian Ecology Link,"a multi denominational UK Christian organisation
for people concerned about the Environment."

ARC (Alliance of Religions and Conservation) page on Christianity and ecology.

And a classic paper from Science magazine in 1967 by historian Lynn White: The historical roots of our ecological crisis (Science 155(3767):1203, 1967).

A grassroots initiative: Jesus People Against Pollution. Watch a movie about their work here.

The Evangelical Climate Initiative, and the Evangelical Environmental Network.

An online book by process theologian John Cobb, Jr.: Sustainability: Economics, Ecology and Justice

What Would Jesus Drive? Because: "Our transportation choices are moral choices that for Christians fall under the Lordship of Christ."

From their site:
For ourselves, as we renew our confession of Christ as Lord of every corner of our lives we pledge:

• to walk, bike, car pool, and use public transportation more;
• to purchase the most fuel efficient and least polluting vehicle available that truly fits our needs;
• to educate others about the moral concerns and solutions associated with transportation;
• to encourage automobile manufacturers to produce the most fuel efficient and least polluting vehicles possible that fit the needs of the American people; and,
• to urge government leaders to support public transportation, a significant increase in fuel economy standards, and research and development for promising new transportation technologies that reduce pollution and increase fuel efficiency

Reader contributions:

Thanks to Beth for mentioning the Jubilee movement!

How can we get better?

So my friend Mizuho sent me the book Ishmael by Daniel Quinn a couple of years ago, but I didn't get around to reading it until a couple of weeks ago. It's interesting--definitely stirred up some thoughts in me. I was curious enough after reading Ishmael to get another of Quinn's books, Beyond Civilization. I've almost finished that one, and I guess now's as good a time as any to begin reflecting on some of his ideas, which maybe are pretty powerful. So...

I liked Ishmael but I got kind of annoyed that Quinn was telling all his ideas through a dialog with a gorilla. I wanted to strip the whole gorilla teacher thing out and just get the ideas. Beyond Civilization which is just a bunch of short essays that have all the ideas and with no story concocted around them, which I like better.

I don't know if I am on the same wavelength with Quinn on everything (probably not), but I am real interested in his ideas about how moving things in the right direction doesn't involve sacrifice or cutting back so much as getting what we really want. It's just that our culture has put up all this stuff that we're supposed to want, and so rejecting it seems like a sacrifice, or some kind of pure altruistic act.

Here's some examples of what I mean:

For a while when I became a vegetarian, I was like "It's wrong to eat animals because they are treated bad, and it's bad for the environment, and the slaughterhouse workers work in dangerous and exploitive conditions..." and so on--a moral admonition against eating meat. So I could say to people, "You shouldn't eat meat because it is morally wrong for the following reasons..." which didn't go very far, as you might imagine.

People are conditioned by our culture that eating meat is the proper, civilized, decent, and essential thing to do. To not eat meat would be this major sacrifice--you would be denying yourself the accoutrements of an enviable and successful lifestyle. At first when I became a vegetarian I agreed with this -- that yes, you must sacrifice the accoutrements of the mainstream lifestyle because to accede to them is morally wrong.

Well, maybe that's right, but I didn't get much traction for transforming the world from that line of argument. And besides, I myself wasn't that much transformed, since I was still adhering to the mainstream idea that eating meat is the "natural" thing to do, and to not do so was "unnatural" but required in order to avoid moral or ethical contradiction.

I was relying on my own sense of "pure altruism," and hoping to stimulate this in others, to make an appeal for giving up something "natural" and making an act of personal sacrifice in effort to attain a higher common moral status.

Quinn seems to believe, and I agree in this case, that people have both selfish and altruistic tendencies. It's important that both of these aspects of "human nature" are recognized, in some sort of dialectical sense. Dualistic philosophies that take the side of one or the other tend to produce bad outcomes.

For example, the present dominant neoclassical form of economics (sometimes called "neo-liberalism") vastly overstresses the selfish side of humans, based upon a decontextualized and perverted reading of a few sentences out of Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations. Neoclassical economics either denies that altruism exists or deprecates it by calling it a "market distortion," like in the case of taxes or tariffs intended to redistribute wealth to the poor or protect fledgling businesses.

Anyway, without too much of a digression into classical versus neoclassical economic theory, the point I want to make about dualistic philosophies of either pure altruism or pure individualistic selfism is that that they are failures. And if I expected people to become full altruists and sacrifice eating meat and accept the "hard life" of vegetarianism, then I would fail to recruit many (or any) fellow vegetarians.

Then I read some passages from Beyond Civilization in which Quinn stresses doing what you want to do. And I realized then that no, I am not this dietary saint, taking the moral high ground and refusing to eat animals even though I would be "better off" if I did--I actually don't want to eat meat! I just prefer not to!

I would rather get all my necessary calories and nutrition from plant-based foods, and from animal products that can be derived without killing the animal (e.g. eggs, milk, yogurt, cheese...). Now there is a whole constellation of reasons why I prefer this diet, including that it's better for the environment than a meat-based diet, and that I feel sympathy for the way animals are treated--so I buy free-range, cage free, organic, etc. animal-derived products--and so on. But the bottom line is, for a variety of reasons I am better off--not worse off--for not eating meat.

This may seem like a trivial shift in attitude on my part, but I wonder if it's actually a huge clue about identifying effective strategies for changing the world. The default mantra from our culture is that to be "sustainable" we have to "cut-back," "consume less," "stop driving," "give up" all sorts of things, "tighten our belts", etc. These things all sound bad--like we're giving up good things for some vague greater moral common good. Well, in today's hyper-individualized and selfism-stressing world (a la neoclassical econ.) these sentiments are roundly rejected. Proponents of these moral admonitions to sacrifice are generally ridiculed or ignored.

And why shouldn't they be? When has that tactic ever worked to get people to change? Why not ask the Catholic Church if it's admonitions against sexual congress really prevent people from "doing it"? Another point Quinn makes several times is "if it didn't work last year, or the year before, or the year before that...why expect it to work this year, or next year, or the year after that?"

So skinny hipster geeky environmentalists like me can wag our fingers at SUV drivers all we want--but, and let's be honest, is that really going to change anything? Probably not. In fact, almost definitely not.

You know what will change things though? People wanting to bike to work instead of driving the Hummer. People wanting not to eat meat, or to eat less of it. People wanting to work less and consume less and spend more time with their families and friends.

The epiphany is this: when you make a change away from mainstream culture, your life gets better, not worse. You are not giving up, sacrificing, cutting back, biting your lip while taking the moral high ground. You have stopped acceding to what mainstream culture tells you to want, and you are getting more of what you really want. This isn't pure altruism. It's not pure selfism either. It's a much more complex dialectical relationship between the two, where feelings of self-interest and feelings of other-interest commingle to produce a strategy that is better for the individual and better for the community simultaneously.

And this, I realized, provides the basis for a much more effective strategy for changing the world--helping people to see that these types of changes will make them better off, not worse off. No moral admonitions here. Just a facilitation of the awakening of peoples' knowledge of themselves and their preferences, and some helpful guidance and support for them to realize them. Helping people to change in a way that's in accordance with their values and that gives them more of what they really want sounds like a much more effective strategy for changing the world than admonishing people to stop doing destructive things that (they believe) they want to be doing.

Really inappropriate...

So, I work at Global Footprint Network, where we promote the Ecological Footprint as an accounting tool that tracks the (un-)sustainability of the human economy. We work with countries NGO's and businesses around the world to get ecological limits to human activities recognized and respected.

As you might guess, the news is pretty bad, so far as humans wrecking our environment is concerned. Most people have at least a sense of this, I think, if not the precise and quantitative understanding of the ecological crisis that we have at GFN.

But every now and then I run across something so ridiculous, so obscene, so ecologically stupid, it stands up as an emblem of how completely screwed human "civilization" is unless we make some serious changes in our attitudes and practices right away.

I ran across one such emblem today. My colleague Mathis sent some photos of an "architectural wonder," an "engineering masterpiece," recently completed in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. UAE is a tiny country on the Arabian peninsula-- and, as it turns out, the only country in the world with an average Ecological Footprint per capita greater than the United States (they are 9.9 global hectares per person, versus our 9.5).

So how insane is this little country, that oustrips our Footprint by a full 0.4 gha? Well, here's how crazy you have to be to beat the U.S.A. at a contest to see who can wreck the planet the most and the fastest.

Here's the "engineering masterpiece" under construction...


...and the finished view. Notice the palm trees, and remember, this is a desert. It's like 120 degrees F there all the time.

So what is this thing--this giant silver phallus in the desert? A ski slope.

How ridiculous is that?

This goes to show that just because you can do something doesn't mean you should do it. Just because the market suggests that building something like this is "economicall rational" (i.e. profitable) doesn't by any stretch make it ecologically rational.

And most of all, with billions of people living on $1 or $2 dollars per day, without access to clean water, basic sanitation services, or basic health care, it is criminal to spend ungodly sums of money, energy and resources so that rich people can go snow skiing in the middle of the desert.

I find this project offensive, and indicative of the moral bankruptcy of the social, political, and economic system that permits this type of thing to happen.

I do what I do at Global Footprint Network out of a great sense of love and compassion for humanity and all of nature. I dream of a world without war, exploitation, violence, and ecological devastation--a world with community, love, health, intellectual stimulation, wonder, awe, and a sense of harmony and resonance between humans and the rest of creation.

But seeing projects like this thing in Dubai hurts my hope for a peaceful, sane and sustainable future. It makes me wonder what the hell I am fighting for--why should I work for a sustainble human society when we do stuff like this? Do we really deserve not to go extinct? I hope so, but ski slopes in the desert make me worry otherwise.

Why growth is bad

Here's a nice article from the Guardian summarizing some arguments put forth in a recent New Economics Foundation report on why ecnomic growth is not the solution to poverty and environmetnal devastation.

Doing what needs to be done, regardless...

So, the point of this thread is to make a running list of stuff that just ought to happen, despite whatever scenario plays out over the coming years and decades.

Wait, let me back up.

The Earth is facing ecological catastrophe. It's not coming--it's here. What can we expect to happen, when is it going to take place, and what do we do about it?

Those are real hard questions, and I don't have the answers. This thread is an attempt to identify activities, endeavors, forms of knowledge, behavior, etc. that are valuable and worthwhile no matter what happens. For example...

Permaculture. No matter what, fossil fuels will run out and we are going to have to figure out how to poduce food in an ecologically sustainable manner. (I am indebted to my workmate Justin for pointing out this example, which initiated the thread.)

Folk arts. We want more than just subsistence--something better than just scraping by. We'll depend on the folk arts to produce not just necessary and utilitarian artifacts, but things of innate and creative beauty. Beautiful and well-made things are essential in my opinion--not just a luxury. They make life worth living, not just possible for living.

Community. "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is." Gotta learn to live together, love each other.

And some counter-examples (things we don't need, and probably ought to get rid of)...

Hummers and other decadent, extravagant and wasteful status symbols. I pick on Hummers a lot--they're just a convenient target. There are so many ridiculous, anti-social, anti-environmental, wasteful objects of conspicuous consumption. I encourage you to subsitute your own favorite symbol for these if you don't want to pick on Hummers.

War and war-making devices. No room for this in a world organized around principles of ecological sanity. No purpose for them, and no one should want them. So work we do now to resist war and diminish the stockpiling of armaments is right on.

An economic mandate to grow--to grow exponentially for an undefined (infinite?) time into the future. This mandate comes out of the idea that more is better, that bigger is better. That richer is better. Totally not true. We don't get better of as we get materially richer beyond a pretty basic subsistence level. Development and growth are not the same thing. We gotta work out how to develop (get better) without the contniual increase in demands on Earth's ecosystems (growth).

Fundamentalism, of any sort. I've yet to meet a fundamentalism I like. They're all nuts as far as I can tell--three sheets in the wind. (I guess I am just an anti-fundamentalist fundamentalist.)

OK, I'll leave it there. Let's add to the list-- maybe it will give us some insights about what to do now, in anticipation of an uncetain but likely difficult future.

My first blog

Hey, first post. This is hella cool.