Ils sont fous ces économistes !

"Mon premier contact avec le problème de la consommation d'énergie globale remonte à la fin des années 1950. L'un de nos enseignants, Philip Morrison, professeur de physique à l'université Cornell aux États-Unis, est arrivé brandissant, furieux, une copie du New York Times : « Ils sont complètement inconscients ces économistes : ils annoncent fièrement la progression prodigieuse et prolongée du produit national brut de la nation. À ce taux, disent-ils, nous doublerons notre consommation d'énergie à l'échelle mondiale en moins de dix ans ! Ils n'ont pas l'air de réaliser qu'à ce rythme nous consommerons dans cent cinquante ans autant d'énergie que le Soleil et dans mille ans autant que toutes les galaxies de l'univers ! »

Hubert Reeves, Mal de Terre, chapitre "Quelles énergies pour demain ?"

L'esprit obtus

"Je trouve que j'ai l'esprit obtus. Il me faut plus de temps qu'à d'autres pour comprendre certaines choses, mais cela m'est égal. Il y a des limites au développement de l'intelligence d'un homme. Mais il n'y a pas de bornes au développement des qualités du coeur."

Mohandas Gandhi, Tous les hommes sont frères, chapitre "Sur des sujets divers".

Limiter ses besoins

"La civilisation, au vrai sens du terme, ne consiste pas à multiplier les besoins, mais à les limiter volontairement. C'est le seul moyen pour connaître le vrai bonheur et nous rendre plus disponibles aux autres.

Il faut un minimum de bien-être et de confort ; mais, passé cette limite, ce qui devait nous aider devient source de gêne. Vouloir créer un nombre illimité de besoins pour avoir ensuite à les satisfaire n'est que poursuite du vent. Ce faux idéal n'est qu'un traquenard. Il faut savoir imposer une limite à ses propres besoins, physiques et même intellectuels, sinon la nécessité de les satisfaire devient recherche de la volupté. Nous devons nous arranger pour que nos conditions de vie, sur le plan metériel et culturel, ne nous empêchent pas de servir l'humanité, mission qui doit mobiliser toute notre énergie."

Mohandas Gandhi, Tous les hommes sont frères, chapitre "La maîtrise de soi".

De plus cela nous éviterait d'épuiser les ressources de notre planète trop rapidement !

Hope (2)

"Business must change its perspective and its propaganda, which has successfully portrayed the idea of "limits" as a pejorative concept. Limits and prosperity are intimately linked. Respecting limits means respecting the fact that the world and its minutiae are diverse beyond our comprehension and highly organized for their own ends, and that all facets connect in ways which are sometimes obvious, and at other times mysterious and complex. If our economy is "limited" by inclusion as part of the greater closed system of nature, those limits are no more necessarily constricting to a sound economy than a blank canvas was to Cézanne or a flute to Jean-Pierre Rampal. The natural world of sunlight, rainfall, and photosynthesis, of topsoil and coral reefs, of raptor birds and tropical fishes, of stamens and pistils and genes is a limit which can be circumvented only at the cost of the world itself. It is precisely in the discipline imposed by the limitations of nature that we discover and imagine our lives. It is only in the fullest context of the world as it is presented to us, and not as we manipulate it, that we may celebrate our humanity and create true prosperity. Such perspectives can lead us to a very different type of economy and way of doing business, one that will be healthier for all species, not only the butterfly and the owl, but our own."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "The death of birth").

Survival of the fittest

I think it is worth pointing out this misconception of the capitalistic interpretation of Darwin's theory:

"Business often invokes the Darwinian maxim of "survival of the fittest" to defend its competitive actions. The phrase is, in fact, a misinterpretation of Darwinism. Darwin did not speak of survival of the fittest; rather, he described those who survived as fittest for a specific ecological niche. There is a big difference between those two ideas.
But this is the way of industrialism -- "the survival of the fittest" as it has been incorrectly interpreted. The "winners" are the companies that consistently overstep and exceed carrying capacity. Corporate capitalism recognizes no limit; has no habitat."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability. (Chapter "The death of birth").

No limits

We used to say "Over the limits" as a greeting ritual every time we meet with my friend Davy. But I won't any more, sorry Davy... I just can't stand any more the overall philosophy from which this concept comes from !
Here is why, which is a follow up on the previous post:

"If capitalism has one pervasive untruth, it is the delusion that business is an open, linear system: that through resource extraction and technology, growth is always possible, given sufficient capital and will. In other words, there are no inherent limits to further expansion, and those who wish to impose them have a political agenda. This cornucopian paradigm asserts that the limits before us are irrelevant, that finiteness is a Malthusian misconception, and that economic growth can be extended indefinitely into the future. Such a position would be analogous to the reindeer on St. Matthew Island having a leader who proclaimed, when the population hit 4,600, "We've proved the ecologists and doomsayers wrong: We've doubled the estimates given by the limits to growth crowd and are continuing to grow."
This counter myth of "no limits" is so powerful that it appears ironically to be gaining ground, in a reflexive, psychological reaction of denial, even as knowledge of the carrying capacity of the earth becomes more evident. Ever-expanding abundance is not a theory based on science, or history, or nature. It is based solely on self-interest. Whether willfully ignorant or unabashedly hypocritical, at some point we must ask business to look candidly at the real world and see the skull-and-crossbones posted alongside ecological pathways, so that we can begin to create real solutions instead of illusory techniques of evasion."

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability.
(Chapter "The death of birth").

St. Matthew Island reindeer

The following example is for me one of the most important to keep in mind when considering whether we should believe in the predictions of the scientists concerning the future evolution of our environment, or whether we should listen to the skeptics. I initially read it in 80 Hommes pour changer le monde, where Sylvain Darnil and Mathieu Le Roux quoted it from Paul Hawken's book, which is why I wanted to read this book in the first place.

"Natural and human history are full of examples in which animals or humans exceeded carrying capacity and went into steep declines, or extinction. A haunting and oft-cited case* of such an overshoot took place on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea in 1944 when 29 reindeer were imported. Specialists had calculated that the island could support 13 to 18 reindeer per square mile, or a total population of between 1,600 to 2,300 animals. By 1957, the population was 1,350; but by 1963, with no natural controls or predators, the population had exploded to 6,000. The original calculations had been correct; this number vastly exceeded carrying capacity and was soon decimated by disease and starvation. Such a drastic overshoot, however, did not lead to restabilization at a lower level, with the "extra" reindeer dying off. Instead, the entire habitat was so damaged by the overshoot that the number of reindeer fell drastically below the original carrying capacity, and by 1966 there were only 42 reindeer alive on St. Matthew Island. The difference between ruminants and ourselves is that the resources used by the reindeer were grasses, trees, and shrubs and they eventually return, whereas many of the resources we are exploiting will not."

* William R. Catton, Overshoot, The Ecological Basis of Revolutionary Change (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1982, pp. 216-217).

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability.
(Chapter "The death of birth").

Ecological emergency (2)

"This is the ecological perspective of the industrial age; we cannot hold onto it indefinitely, in fact, industrialism itself may not last for even one more human lifetime. At present, to compensate for the limitations placed on production by the carrying capacity of the environment, we are speeding up the rate at which we fish, farm, deforest, and extract. In other words, rather than facing the creative challenges posed by ecosystem limits, we are temporarily bypassing the problem by harvesting resources more rapidly, by driftnetting, mechanical deforestation, and factory farming. Science and common sense both dictate that such extravagance must eventually lead to disaster. It not only borrows from the future, thus threatening human societies in the long term, but it also puts intense pressure on other species in these ecological niches which depend on the same resources. As a consequence, habitats are destroyed, species become extinct, and in the process, the productive health of the environment is compromised and decreased.
Human populations are already being severely affected by damage to the environment due to depletion and degradation of resources. For decades, scientists and experts such as Robert Heilbroner, Paul Ehrlich, and Jessica Tuchman Matthews have predicted that resource shortages would engender widespread social discord, but there were no studies to support or refute those views. Recently, however, a team of thirty researchers, assembled under the auspices of the University of Toronto and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, formed the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict. This group examined a number of societies and countries where resource shortages were already occurring, and their findings were disturbing: «Scarcities of renewable resources are already contributing to violent conflicts in many parts of the developing world. These conflicts may foreshadow a surge of similar violence in coming decades, particularly in poor countries where shortages of water, forests and, especially, fertile land, coupled with rapidly expanding populations, already cause great hardship.» Land shortages in Bangladesh, for example, have led to mass migrations to India involving as many as 15 million people. These migrations have in turn led to fierce ethnic clashes. To those who discount such theories by arguing that resource conflicts have been an enduring element of human history, the authors warn: «We maintain ... that renewable-resource scarcities of the next 50 years will probably occur with a speed, complexity and magnitude unprecedented in history. Entire countries can now be deforested in a few decades, most of a region's topsoil can disappear in a generation, and acute ozone depletion may take place in as few as 20 years.»"

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability.
(Chapter "The death of birth").

It is worth noting that the Project on Environmental Change and Acute Conflict was taking place in 1990-1993, just after the Montreal Protocol, which regulated the emissions of ozone-depleting substances worldwide, entered into force (on January 1, 1989). Since then, the atmospheric concentrations of the most important ozone-depleting substances have either leveled off or decreased, resulting in a stabilization of the global average amount of ozone depletion, and the ozone layer is expected to begin to recover in coming decades, assuming full compliance with the Montreal Protocol (according to the wikipedia article on ozone depletion).
This is a good example when proper international coordination and regulation can solve a problem generated by human activities but detected and warned-against by science, and finally taken care of by public and political will.
Why would we not be able to do the same for the green-house gases and the environmental degradation our economy is inflicting to our world ?
Are the above-mentioned threats perceived as more benign than the skin cancers associated with the ozone hole ? That would be a very short-term perception !

Ecological emergency (1)

"Another measure of our wholesale plunder of the ecosystem is provided by estimating the net primary production (NPP) of the planet, defined as the sum of all photosynthetic production minus the energy required to maintain and support those plants. The annual figure arrived at is in the area of 225 billion metric tons of wood, grass, fiber, and food. Of this total, 60 percent is produced on land and 40 percent in the oceans. An oft-quoted study* suggests that our human economy currently utilizes, consumes, converts, burns or clear cuts annually 40 percent of the total NPP on land. In short, one species - our own - out of 5 to 30 million species (no one is sure how many there are) is directly and indirectly claiming 40 percent of the earth's production for itself. This fact alone should give businesspeople pause when they think their taking of water, forests, land, or minerals has minimal impact. If, as predicted, our population doubles sometime in the next forty or fifty years, we will usurp 80 percent of the primary production of the planet, assuming no increase in the standard of living. If our standard of living doubles in the next forty years - the accepted projection - we will quadruple our impact, a physical impossibility.
In fact, we may have already reached the diminishing point. We are already seeing many dangerous signs of this usurpation of planetary production, foremost of which is the loss of other forms of life - extinctions. Before we reach 60 or 70 percent utilization of the NPP, we will witness an ecological crash. Hundreds of thousands of species will vanish, because they will not be able to compete with us for food. These newly depleted ecosystems will be reduced to soil substrates into which we will have to force increasing amount of chemicals to grow decreasing amounts of food."

* P. Vitousek, P. Ehrlich, A. Erhlich, and P. Matson, "Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis", Bioscience, June 1986, 36-6.

Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce. A Declaration of Sustainability.
(Chapter "The death of birth").