I think this is the beginnings of an economy based on perpetual growth and fossil fuel energy running headlong into geological energy constraints. Basically I see an undulatory downward path for the rest of my life. From here out, I think any rallies in our economic condition are going to be met with spiking commodity prices that knock us right back down.
GELLERMAN: Sustainable development is one of the Holy Grails of the environmental movement, even though there's no general agreement on what the term actually means. But there's a new definition of sustainable development, devised by researchers at Global Footprint Network. That's an international nonprofit organization dedicated to creating tools for sustainable living. In a paper published in Ecological Economics, they've identified which countries are measuring up. And the results may surprise you.
Mathis Wackernagel is the executive director of Global Footprint Network. Welcome to Living on Earth.
WACKERNAGEL: It's wonderful to be with you.
GELLERMAN: So what is sustainable development?
WACKERNAGEL: Sustainable development, we would say, is one of the most specific policy concepts around. Essentially it has two parts; one is development, the other one is the sustainable. Let's start with the development. Development can be measured with the United Nations human development index, which summarizes three key components that make good lives possible. One is to have long lives. The other one is to have access to education and literacy. And the third one is to have access to some minimum income. However, we call it sustainable development because there's only one planet. So we have to provide this development within the means of one planet. And that's what we can measure with the ecological footprint.
GELLERMAN: So as we advance we can't be eating our seed corn because future generations won't be able to advance?
WACKERNAGEL: That's exactly right. So, essentially we claim let's live on the income rather than dipping into our assets.
GELLERMAN: So you looked at what—93 countries on the sustainable development index. How many countries are measuring up?
WACKERNAGEL: Among all the 90 countries we looked at, we only found one country that meets both minimum criteria, which doesn't mean that they are necessarily sustainable but they are providing long lives and high education and minimum income without using more than what is available globally worldwide per person. And this country is called Cuba.
GELLERMAN: Cuba? That's a surprise.
WACKERNAGEL: To be totally honest, Cuba would probably like to have a larger footprint; it would like to have access to more resources. They were forced to be much more resource efficient than they probably would like to be because of the trade embargo they're under and so their footprint has shrunk a little bit since, in particular the Soviet Union collapsed back in the early 90s. However, they have still been able to maintain high human development in terms of still increasing longevity and maintaining very high access to educational success.
GELLERMAN: I was in Cuba soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and things were terrible there. I mean, people were really suffering. There was no gas for cars. People were pulling cars down the street with horses. I went back a few years ago and things had dramatically improved. One of the things that I found was that they were doing sustainable agriculture. They weren't using inputs like pesticides and chemicals because they couldn't afford them. And other things had improved but they had suffered mightily.
WACKERNAGEL: Yes. If we say Cuba meets the sustainable development criteria, we don't say that's the nirvana, the most beautiful life you could imagine. I mean, actually, I have quite a large footprint and that makes my life quite comfortable as it is. But it's a contradiction I totally acknowledge, but if everybody lived like me, it would take about five planets. We don't have five planets. So, it's like a budget question. We have to be creative and find out how can we have the best outcomes recognizing there's a budget limitation?
GELLERMAN: What country was number two behind Cuba?
WACKERNAGEL: Many of the Caribbean nations and Latin American nations are pretty close to the quotient—the sustainability quotient, which is defined by low footprint and high human development.
GELLERMAN: What about the United States?
WACKERNAGEL: The United States may be one of the countries furthest away from the box. The United States has one of the largest footprints per person worldwide and it would take about six planets like Planet Earth to support the world population if everybody assumed current American consumption patterns.
GELLERMAN: If Cuba is the only nation that measures up according to your sustainability development index, that doesn't bode well for the rest of the planet.
WACKERNAGEL: The sustainable development challenge probably is the defining challenge of the 21st century: will we be able to provide well-being within the means of one Planet Earth, or not? If not, we'll be seeing more and more collapses around the world. We have seen them now in, let's say Haiti, with very severe resource constraints and extreme social misery implications. What we saw in Rwanda and Darfur right now is a kind of manifestation of the resource crunch leading to quite tragic human breakdowns. However, there's another path and I believe, a much more attractive one, which the World Wildlife Fund calls 'one planet living.' And the idea is: how can we live well within one planet?
GELLERMAN: What about my life? Can I live an American lifestyle and yet have a sustainable lifestyle? Or are the two incompatible?
WACKERNAGEL: Right now, infrastructure how it's built in the United States makes it very hard to live very low-footprint lifestyles. We can dramatically reduce our individual footprints. Can we get to one-planet living on our own and still kind of participate in mainstream society? Probably, that's still a bit of a challenge. But there are big decisions that you make in our life. We call that 'slow things first.' We should look at the stocks that we invest in—are they putting us in a better place or are they traps? These big decisions that we make in our lives—how many offspring we have, for example, what kind of housing we buy into, and what kind of cars we buy if we depend on car transportation—majorly determine resource consumption for the next decades to come. It just shows that building infrastructure right and making sure we have attractive, well-functioning, resource-efficient, high-performing cities is really the key to the future.
GELLERMAN: Well Mr. Wackernagel, thank you very much. I appreciate you taking the time.
WACKERNAGEL: It's wonderful being with you. Thank you.
GELLERMAN: Mathis Wackernagel is executive director of Global Footprint Network.
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:13 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
I admire a lot of what the Cubans have done toward self sufficiency, particularly in growing food without chemical fertilizers, their medical work, and fuel conservation. A tough lot they are. We could learn a lot, if we pay attention to them. _________________ Local fix-it guy..
In record amounts of dollars or actual food (calories)?
Do doubt Cuba has lot of problems, but the point here is, according to some criteria (don't know how ecological footprint is actually calculated) Cuba is sustainable, while US ef is six planets. Personally, I don't consider Cuba really sustainable. Just much closer to sustainability than the rest.
Joined: Apr 12, 2007 Posts: 1185 Location: Central NC
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:57 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
patience wrote:
I admire a lot of what the Cubans have done toward self sufficiency, particularly in growing food without chemical fertilizers, their medical work, and fuel conservation. A tough lot they are. We could learn a lot, if we pay attention to them.
Regardless of how close to 100% sustainability the Cubans are, they are showing the rest of us what can be done.
Thanks for posting the articles Mr. Bean. _________________ "The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to a close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences…"
Sir Winston Churchill
Joined: Apr 09, 2007 Posts: 6285 Location: Alaska (its much bigger than Texas).
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 9:42 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
The bad news is it took Cuba 50 years to go from the wealthiest country in Latin America to among the poorest.
The good news is that once you are too poor to buy cars or use gas or have more then two sets of clothes, much less import luxuries like computers, you are living a sustainable lifestyle.
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:04 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
There's certainly a lot of truth in the original article: Cuba's agriculture and food production sectors were largely sustainable, but only because necessity forced them to implement the models on which they are based.
No Cuban likes this state of affairs. That is why, for the first time in decades, Raul Castro has redefined the farming law and has allowed private farming again, for the first time since the 1960s. The state no longer dictates who has to grow what kind of crop and on which type of land.
Raul has also started a program aimed at revitalising the sugar sector, with an eye on producing and exporting ethanol (Venezuela is investing as a partner).
The sugar sector in Cuba went from world leading to total catastrophy. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba lost the sugar-for-oil deal which had kept it prosperous for so many decades. So since the 1990s, more than 75% of the mills have gone kaput, and output has declined 10-fold.
Now, with Castro gone, Raul wants to revive the sector. Projections show Cuba has a capacity to produce 10 billion gallons a year of dirt-cheap sugarcane ethanol.
In short, Cuba's miserable current state of affairs may be "sustainable" and fun for those who don't have to live there, but luckily for the Cubans it is going to change for the better.
By the way, Cuba's model is not really sustainable, because it has led to hundreds of thousands of refugees. To have a full view of Cuba's sustainability, you have to take into account the life-style of the Cubans living in Florida.
Anyone can create a paradise in which nobody wants to live. _________________ The Beginning is Near!
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:21 am Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Plant, you are not paying attention (or you just want to be snarky, perhaps?).
"the sustainability quotient, which is defined by low footprint and high human development."
There are many, many poor countries that can't make it into the sustainability quotient because of their poor performance on human development.
The really sad thing about the US is that we use the equivalent of 6-7 earths, but for all that, we still have a piss-poor record of actually taking care of people--ranking lowest among industrialized countries in health, infant mortality, literacy and many other criteria. Even the wealthiest fifth in the US have worse health on average than the poorest fifth in the UK.
It is possible to at least approach one earth in America. I'm down to about 1.5. But you have to pretty much quit flying, cut driving back to about ten miles a week, go vegetarian (or better vegan) and local, grow an extensive garden, and generally live humbly--all the things we should be doing to get ready for a post-peak world.
The cooperative spirit in Cuba has helped them move to a society that does not unduely trample the earth as they manage to care for basic needs of its people. Such a spirit is almost completely absent from the US, thanks to a constant drum beat of the virtues of capitalism and the "market place" over the last few decades.
We will have to turn our backs on the "greed is good" mantra if we are going to have anything close to a sustainable society. The chances of this, as far as I can see, are next to none.
Best to all. Having reached the 1000 mark for posts, I'm signing off for a while.
Joined: Feb 20, 2005 Posts: 2880 Location: Uppsala, Sweden
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 4:22 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
A picture says more than a thousand words, but for those who stll don't get it, Cuba is a horribly unsustainable Communist Hellhole. _________________ Peak oil is not an energy crisis. It is a liquid fuel crisis.
Joined: Dec 18, 2004 Posts: 4883 Location: One Mile From the Columbia River
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 7:03 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
Few countries have managed to achieve a decent lifestyle with such a low carbon footprint. Cuba should be applauded for this effort and emulated by other poorer nations.
Part of their success in this is due to the fact they don't squander wealth on wasteful personal vehicles and senseless plastic trash like most wealthy nations do, especially Europe and N. America where people have set themselves up for a catastrophic disaster. _________________ Got Dharma?
Posted: Mon Jun 30, 2008 10:04 pm Post subject: Re: Cuba only country developing sustainably
There are for sure lots of countries which I would prefer to live but amongst the Latin American Countries Cuba is not that bad
Maybe Colombia is much richer but who is richer? Some wealthy and children in slums have to eat newspaper. Who is richer then?
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