Is it all just Doom and Gloom?

“Why isn’t everyone as scared as we are?” – from the Population Explosion by Ehrlich (1990). 

There is something to be said about sticking your head in the sand, putting on blinders, ignoring the world.  I know that young children can often play hide and seek by merely closing their eyes.  If they cannot see you, you cannot see them, right?  Well, when you look at the state of the climate crisis, one certainly would like to just close their eyes and believe that it is not there.  Still, I cannot take up the stance that Ehrlich phrased in the chapter title above.  I cannot believe that there is no reasonable way forward anymore.  If everyone were as scared as they, there would be no sense in going forward, and we may as well just off each other. 

From this, I am an admitted technocratic optimist.  I know that our ambitions and innovations have brought us to this point, likely beyond the tipping point.  I see also the potential of humankind, and that we will find a way out. 

I offer this story… I heard it long ago and found it in many places online


There is an old Jewish story about a rabbi who was talking with God about heaven and hell. "I will show you what hell is like," God said. They went into a room where there was a large bowl of soup. The smell was delicious, but around the bowl sat people who were very thin and starving and hungry. They were all holding spoons with very long handles which reached to the pot. The handles were longer than their arms. So it was impossible for them to get the soup into their mouths. "That is what hell is like," God said.

      Then God took the rabbi to another room where He said, "Now I will show you heaven." There was a similar pot of soup. And the smell was just as delicious as the first room. And the people had the same size spoons. But these people were all well-fed and were smiling and laughing. Everyone could eat. "I don't understand it," said the rabbi. "Why are they happy here when they were miserable in the other room?" The Lord smiled," Ah, don't you see?" He asked. "It's simple. Over there everyone only tries to feed himself. Here in heaven, people have learned to feed each other."


The hope and inspiration here is that we find that way to feed each other

Common Stewardship or Common Suffering.

Is it that we need to come out of the ashes of a disaster, or find vision to safegueard our own interests?  Living sustainably will involve collaboration and innovation to find a way forward, especially with our already stressed ecosystems.  Somehow, we need to stop focusing on the doom and gloom of today and tell stories of new potentials, of hope and a plan for the future.  There is already interest in the world for this, and capitalizing on it will be the way forward.  The benefits of economic reform will happen with the intent of safeguarding our lifestyles, food security, and natural resources.  They must be seen as something that benefits our individualities directly, actually making our lives better and more enjoyable.  Just because it will also benefit the environment and planet as a secondary thought is fine – as long as it happens.

The key to consider is that we do not need to go forward alone.  The individual who makes the decision to ride transit to work is making a change, just as the government to use more buses is making a change.  The answers are out there, monumental and everyday decisions will be made, and we will move forward from the smallest community garden to the IPCC.  This addresses people value systems, more than their wallets.  Once you change their values, the dollars will follow.  This is a polycentric approach (Ostrom) that can be the sustaining element that supports change. 

And going forward, we see situations of opportunity, not of constraint.  Human creativity and innovation has brought us to this point, and it will bring us out – or at least it can if given the support it needs.

More than the money...

Ostrom seemed to give credence to values-based considerations, but with a caveat.  My perception is that great weight can be placed on the approach if needed as a tiebreaker.  If no other measure can make a decision for a committee, if all economic measures indicate a balance between accepting a project and not, then values can be used to make the decision.  This seems to take the wind out of values-based thinking, placing it more as an afterthought rather than a controlling factor.  

Does this all-still work in today's society?  For example,  on one hand we may have people from an oil company talking to first nations. They are speaking a different language.  Whereas the exec may be able to code the language of the FN individual to something they can understand and place a quantitative, monetary value on, the FN individual may have a more difficult time taking the monetary understanding from the oil exec and place a value that they can understand on it.  

Sure, there is a sense that one can bring these externalities into the equation with the inclusion of values-based decision-making, but they are vulnerable to misinterpretation and misappropriation.  

I guess ultimately, we need to have an inclusion of values-based impacts in decision making as they are the true test of the system.  The sole inclusion of quantitative and economic measures limits the scope of decision makers, predisposing their decision making to those that present information in a specific manner.  There is more than merely money that drives the world.  What should also be included are facets that look at culture, spirituality, and identity.  There are many different perceptions of what has value, of what should be valued, which must be considered in any environmental decision making. 

A Shrimp Salad of International Environmentalism

The international environmental movement, as embodied in the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment which brought together many of the formerly present but disparate schemes, is in place to balance the resource-based view of the world which is extractive in nature, with more current (post-WWII) views of a more holistic respect for nature, and even a reverence for it.  And what a job it is.  The extractive nature of the resource ideology has been ingrained for 250 years, placing a value of the natural world in terms of monetary value.  This value is not present solely on the extractive and resale value of the resource, but also has been to place social, scientific, and spiritual values to resources.  It is utilitarian in nature, and one we can relate to, as we see the need for an extractive nature to our existence (let’s face it, we do not generate energy from the sun directly as plants do).  So, not only do we see this thought on an individual level, we see it in effect on a local, national, and even global level.  Clear cutting Brazil rainforests for biodiesel sold in the UK to purchase prawns from Thailand hits so many environmental issues – grossly the rainforests, fuel consumption, and mangrove trees. 

Ecosystems thinking becomes the tool to challenge this system, the supportive world view, and so in does the Salad metaphor lie.  The advantage to using ecosystems thinking and servicing is that it can enable and facilitate discussion towards a truly sustainable future.  This future may actually be one of sustainable lifestyles, so that we can still have our shrimp salad, to reach our full potential.  The troublesome thought around this, especially in the arena of international environmentalism, is the notion of executive democracy where a select and elite group, under the guise of democratic process, dictate our environmental future.  As a newer stream of thought, perhaps it will indeed be this ecosystems thinking that supplants this executive democracy, bringing (environmental) internationalism back to all people.