Transcript GEOG 352: Day 3

Housekeeping Items
0 The Geography Department is having a welcome back
social in the map library/ lounge (next door) at 10:30
tomorrow. Please come out and meet faculty and your
fellow students. Another example of social capital…
0 We will be having a field trip likely in the week of
October 5th. Would you like to go to Nanaimo
Foodshare or to Makerspace Nanaimo?
0 The hasty e-mail I sent about the review of the
Nanaimo Heritage Plan represents a possible case
study. Their first meeting is tonight, and it focus on
cultural capital.
0 Did everyone get a chance to look at “The Story of
Stuff”?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLBE5QAYXp8
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Housekeeping Items
0 Please put two checkmarks per
week.
0 We need to start signing people up
for specific discussion topics and
dates.
0 I will put the instructions for the
major assignment on the web site
this week, but I will walk you
through it today if you would like
that.
0 Any other questions or concerns?
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Introduction to Resilience
0 The authors start off with a nice quote: “Our
job is to make hope more concrete and despair
less convincing.”
0 The paradigm of Western society, capitalist
(and former communist) for the past two
hundred years is that growth is the greatest
good, as reflected (more recently in the GDP).
Only a few voices – amongst them John Stuart
Mill, John Maynard Keynes, and Kenneth
Boulding – have been able to conceive of a nogrowth economy.
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Introduction to Resilience
0 The human race has gone through numerous
challenges to its existence through its history –
surviving against predators who were bigger or
stronger, coping with the Pleistocene Ice Age,
making the transition from hunting and
gathering in many parts of the world to
agriculture and, from there, to industrialism.
0 Today we face a transition which is every bit or
more challenging: the transition to a
sustainable society.
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Key Stages in Human Evolution
Evolution of homo sapiens approx. 400,000 years ago
Still exists in some places
Hunting &
gathering
8000-10,000 years ago to present
Agricultural
Revolution
Late 1700s to present; coincides with
use of fossil fuels
Industrial
Revolution
Will make it or not in
the 21st century
Sustainable
Revolution?
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Specific Challenges
0 Climate change (carbon dioxide now above 400 ppm)
0 Peak oil and rising costs of fossil fuels
0 Population growth
0 Decline in biodiversity
0 Overfishing of the oceans and degradation in general
0 Decline in availability of and competition for
freshwater
0 Erosion and degradation of soil, increasingly
widespread drought, and potential threats from
herbicides, pesticides, fertilizers, and GMOs.
0 Volatility of the global economy
0 Other??
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Specific Challenges
0 Has anyone seen the film, “The Inside Job”? It
explains how the widespread defaults on housing
mortgages occurred as a result of the invention of
collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) on Wall
Street, and how the proliferation of these financial
instruments led to a domino effect that had huge
impacts on the global economy, bringing it
dangerously close to a second Great Depression.
The economy has still not fully recovered.
0 The authors cite statistics that the speculative
financial economy is surpassing the economy of
good and services production as the motor of the
economy and the source of its profits.
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Specific Challenges
0 The book suggests that, unless
we change course, demand for
fossil fuels will increase by 22%
and carbon emissions will
increase by 40% in the next 20
years. And yet the media doesn’t
alert people to the dire
consequences of the status quo.
VS.
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Specific Challenges
0 Can we have “Prosperity Without Growth,” as Tim
Jackson and others argue? Jackson redefines
prosperity as “our ability to flourish as human beings –
within the ecological limits of a finite planet.”
0 This relates back to the distinction mentioned last
week between growth, throughput, and development.
0 To achieve an economy where growth is not the goal
will involve a revolution as profound as the Copernican
– of no longer believing that the cosmos revolves
around the Earth. Our whole economy, social system,
political institutions, cultural expectations, and
dominant ideology are all based on continuing growth.
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Specific Challenges
0 Is such a society possible? If so, how? If not, why
not?
0 What would it look like? What would be different?
0 What are your thoughts?
GDP/ energy use
population
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Specific Challenges
The definition of resilience cited by the authors is “the
amount of change a system can absorb (its capacity to
absorb disturbance) and essentially retain the same
functions, structure and feedbacks.” One of the originators of
the concept is a former university professor from UBC
(Buzz Holling) who now lives in Nanaimo.
0 What does this concept mean in the real world? What are
some examples and what can it be applied to?
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Resilience
0 The authors offer seven resilience principles:
Diversity (biological, landscape, social, cultural and
economic). This is a variant of the old axiom: “Don’t put
all your eggs in one basket.” What would be some
examples?
Modularity- The ability of systems to function somewhat
independently of others. Why would this be desirable?
Innovation- Encouraging learning, experimentation, local
models, and being open to change. Examples?
Overlap- Encouraging redundancy (i.e. some duplication
of function). Why would this be desirable?
Tight feedback loops- How does this contrast with what
we have now and what other principle is it linked to?
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Resilience
0 The authors offer seven resilience principles
(cont’d):
Ecosystem services- Making sure a full-cost
accounting occurs for such services and the
economy does not disregard them. Efforts have
been made to put dollar values on them.
In 1997, ecological economist, Robert Constanza,
and his colleagues estimated the annual value of
ecosystem services at $33 trillion dollars, almost
twice the value of global GNP ($18 trillion).
As is indicated by the illustration on p. 21, the
seven principles reinforce one another.
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Source:
Wikipedia
Supporting services: ecosystem services "that are necessary for the production
of all other ecosystem services"
• nutrient dispersal and cycling
• seed dispersal
• primary production (role of plants in supporting food chains)
Provisioning services: "products obtained from ecosystems"
• food (including seafood and game), crops, wild foods, and spices
• water
• minerals (including diatomite)
• pharmaceuticals, biochemicals, and industrial products
• energy (hydropower, biomass fuels)
Regulating services: "benefits obtained from the regulation of ecosystem
processes"
• carbon sequestration and climate regulation
• waste decomposition and detoxification
• purification of water and air
• crop pollination
• pest and disease control
Cultural services: "non-material benefits people obtain from ecosystems
through spiritual enrichment, cognitive development, reflection, recreation, and
aesthetic experiences"
• cultural, intellectual and spiritual inspiration
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• recreational experiences (including ecotourism)
• scientific discovery
Internalizing the Externalities
(Full-Cost Pricing)
0 “The cheap plastic junk you buy at big-box stores is
cheap only because the externalities have not been
priced in…” – Thomas Friedman.
0 He insists that radical revisions in prices are the key
to changing individuals’ and societies’ behaviours, but
will people go for that?
0 Throughput concept is central to ecological
economics:
Raw material extraction/ pollution manufacturing/pollution
consumption
waste
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Reclaiming the Commons
0 “Humans arguing over private property rights is like two
fleas arguing over who owns the dog.” – Crocodile Dundee
0 The authors argue that private property and commercial
markets are quite recent in origin, or at least played a
marginal role. Part of why settlers and indigenous people got
into conflict in North America and Australia was because the
natives thought they were agreeing to share the land base –
the commons – not hand it over as private property.
0 Any ideas as to when and why private property and markets
arose?
0 Garrett Hardin, in his famous essay, “The Tragedy of the
Commons,” argued that commons will always be
overexploited because of personal greed. Ayn Rand thought
greed was in the collective interest. This is similar to Adam
Smith’s notion of “the invisible hand.”
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Reclaiming the Commons
0 The case of the Pakistani fisheries shows that declining
fisheries may not be explained by the ‘tragedy of the
commons’ notion (see pp. 22-23). Some would argue that
the high seas are an open access resource system, in
contrast with the coastal fishery which was a commons
enclosed by government and corporations.
0 Co-operative resource management institutions (see
example of Chilean fishery on p. 23) often seem to work
well. We will likely have a speaker in to address this issue
in a Canadian context.
0 Some say what has been occurring for the past several
hundred years, and is still occurring today, is “the
enclosure of the commons.” What does the term mean and
can you think of contemporary examples?
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Reclaiming the Commons
0 The authors raise the issue of whether there can be
true political democracy without economic
democracy.
0 Are there examples of where the lack of one seems
to inhibit the other?
0 Goldman Sachs executives were Secretaries of the
Treasury under both Bush and Obama, a Sachs man
recently became the U.S. ambassador to Canada, a
Sachs man took over the prime minister’s office of
Italy for a time, and the company has been heavily
involved in the Greek financial crisis and in helping
to run the European Central Bank.
0 What would economic democracy look like?
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Reclaiming the Commons
0 Healthy societies have often had a strong civil society (or
third) sector, with rich social capital.
0 In some countries, the private and public sectors are
balanced effectively by the civil society sector, creating a
synergistic relationship, where no one sector
predominates. Examples?
0 See detailed charts on pp.
30-31, with the third system
economy consisting of social
enterprises, voluntary organizations, and the family
economy. Such societies
often have different values.
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Reclaiming the Commons
0 From “cowboy economy” to “spaceship Earth” and the
“spaceman economy” (Kenneth Boulding).
0 From seeing the economy as autonomous to seeing it as
embedded in the yolk of society and the white and shell of
the biosphere.
0 Achieving ecological, social, and economic sustainability.
0 Major barriers?
0 One way to smooth the transition is through Victor and
Jackson’s hypothesized scenarios – particularly #3 (see
pp. 36-37)
0 Capitalism has been dominant for 5-600 years. What are
its strengths and weaknesses? What kind of future does it
have? Any viable alternatives?
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