[Pops]

So here on Earth Day I thought I'd run a little poll to see how many POers consider themselves Earth'ers. My definition of an Earth'er is fairly broad but basically has to do with how much relative importance you give humans vs "the Environment". Put another way, do you come down on the side of the spotted owl or the lumberjack, on hydroelectricity or spawning grounds, clean air or cheap cars, cheap coal-fired electricity or less pollution.

While waiting for the site to load I saw this:

The 1971 Nixon poll found that 63 percent of respondents said that it was "very important" to work to restore and enhance the national environment, with 25 percent saying it was "fairly important" and only 8 percent saying it was "not too important." But in the 2013 HuffPost/YouGov poll, only 39 percent of respondents said it was very important, while 41 percent said it was fairly important and 16 percent said it was not too important.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/2 ... 17003.html

[MD]

Good poll choices. It is expensive to choose sustainability.Therein lies the problem.

[Beery1]

I don't believe it's more expensive to choose sustainability. I do my best to reduce my fossil fuel use, and that has saved me heaps of money in heating, cooling and transportation costs. Never having bought into the car culture has saved me thousands of dollars per year. The only real cost I see is in the need for woolen clothing for winter wear to reduce heating costs.

I think the reason people say sustainability is expensive is that they are trying to live a consumer lifestyle sustainably, but that's not possible - you can't have the big car, the big house, the long commute, etc., etc. and have it be sustainable. The whole point is that such a lifestyle is inherently unsustainable. The only way to do it properly is to power down.

[careinke]

It is expensive to choose sustainability.Therein lies the problem.

No it's not. It just takes a little thought and flexibility to live sustainably. It is expensive to live the way you are living NOW to choose sustainability. Therein lies the true problem.

[SeaGypsy]

MD is exactly correct when it comes to the masses. To run anything like our modern society sustainably would cost megabucks; if it's even possible.

Thinking you live sustainably and actually doing so might be quite different things. Is it sustainable to have every housetop covered in PV, everyone driving a LI battery car, fully nuclearised baseload system, etc?
Could those living somewhat sustainably now do so without the megasystem backing their lifestyle? Is sustainability an illusion?

[dohboi]

"Is sustainability an illusion?"

Pretty much.

A truly sustainable society would use essentially no mined resources, since those cannot be sustainably 'harvested'--they do not pre-produce themselves on anything like human time scales.

(For metals, we are talking about lifetimes of multiple stars to produce, iirc.)

That also goes for any fossil fuel use.

And the things that are left that you CAN use, have to be use very modestly, harvesting them at well below replacement level.

[Tanada]

"Is sustainability an illusion?"

Pretty much.

A truly sustainable society would use essentially no mined resources, since those cannot be sustainably 'harvested'--they do not pre-produce themselves on anything like human time scales.

(For metals, we are talking about lifetimes of multiple stars to produce, iirc.)

That also goes for any fossil fuel use.

And the things that are left that you CAN use, have to be use very modestly, harvesting them at well below replacement level.

To my way of thinking if you are not self sufficient you are not sustainable. Darn few of us could build ourselves a bicycle, even an old fashioned wooden one using a rope drive instead of a chain. Maybe you have a big enough piece of land to pasture a horse, but other than that you are on Shank's Mare, that is to say walking under your own power. It gets worse from there, even with permaculture and good luck in the weather/climate you need a lot of food to live until the harvest, and then what you harvest has to last you until the next one after that. Now that you have so much energy tied up in raising your food and maintaining your transportation you have to maintain your house. Without the aid of outside contractors unless you can sell enough surplus food to pay for those kind of specialists.

It gets worse from there, what happens when your wife goes into labor or your four year old is running a high fever?

Our entire western culture is based on everything being cheap because energy was cheap for a hundred years. My great grand parents saved every scrap of food off the table for leftovers or animal feed, how much did you throw away this weekend? My dad had a pail in the basement half full of bent nails that were straitened out and reused when assembling anything out of soft pine or other soft wood. He had another mess of assorted nuts, bolts, screws and washers so that when something on the farm broke you could put together a patch work job to keep the work going. He was 85 when he passed away last September, but he still had that stuff because it was a lifestyle habit. Never throw away today what you might have a use for tomorrow, never buy new when used will do the job.

People in poor countries still live that way, and IMO they will have a much better chance of surviving the post oil transition than the spoiled generation of westerners alive today.

[Beery1]

To my way of thinking if you are not self sufficient you are not sustainable. Darn few of us could build ourselves a bicycle...you need a lot of food to live until the harvest... you have to maintain your house... what happens when your wife goes into labor or your four year old is running a high fever?

This is why we live in societies - so that people can specialize and pool resources. No one can be entirely self-sufficient, not even in a hunter-gatherer culture. The whole point of society is to allow specialization. Without it, we become less intelligent as a species, because we cannot all know everything we need to know, and we do better when we bring into the community people who have specialized knowledge. A society with many people who all have different specializations is perfectly sustainable - far more sustainable than one where everyone knows only the basics.

[Ibon]

If sustainability depends on consumption and numbers of humans then it is not hard to imagine that had we never had the population increase of the past 100 years we could all be living like kings today with high consumption levels still falling within sustainability.

The truth of this will one day be a bitter pill to swallow, especially in regards how long we could have stretched out all that sweet crude, burning it just enough for the biosphere to sequester the carbon in equilibrium........that being just one example.

The die-off after overshoot usually leaves behind a habitat whose carrying capacity is below what the habitat was before it was degraded by overpopulation. Apply that to modern civilization.

Some of our grandchildren will be really pissed off.

[Pops]

I think it is really naive of anyone to think they are living "sustainably" and being protective of the environment if they buy anything at all.

The point of capitalism is profit, the key to profit is lower cost and as Sam taught us all if no one else did, the key to lower cost is to offload as much of it onto society as possible. If you buy anything you can bet there are one or more people up the supply chain who actually pay people to lobby against their taking financial responsibility for their product. The more you concern yourself with paying the lowest price I think the more likely you are to be rewarding the producer who is the most successful at transferring the cost of environmental harm onto society.

You name it, from sustainable timber to non-cide food and fiber to smoke stack scrubbers, the cost of environmental sustainability is high and if you aren't paying it society is.

I chose #3 on the poll because I don't consider each of those factors when I buy some plastic chinese chachka and even if I did and I wanted to pay the true environmental cost of doubt I'd be able to find a supplier for each item I purchase who does.

[dinopello]

It seems odd to me to say living sustainability is expensive. What are you buying that is so expensive ? What are you buying at all ? Buying is consuming. Sustainability is cheap. Painful, hard, uncomfortable, (deadly for many/most) but cheap.

Of course it depends on what is meant by sustainability. With our current population, I'd be happy just to make the merry-go-round going round a little longer.

[Graeme]

I wonder whether this is called ethical spending?

[Pops]

It seems odd to me to say living sustainability is expensive. What are you buying that is so expensive ?

I don't know how much better to explain it so I'll just repeat, the cheaper the item relative to others like it, the more likely environmental costs have been shifted onto a future generation. Same with social costs but that's a different thread.

"Free" marketers go on and on about how they can't "be competitive" because of environmental regulation, what they really mean is that they want society to subsidize the cost of their pollution.

The environmental cost to China of unregulated pollution is estimated at nearly 6% of GDP according to this, and who exactly is it that drives that shifting of environmental costs onto the future? That's right, the frugal shopper looking for a good deal.

[dinopello]

Yes, I get that comparing two similar products, the cheaper of the two was probably made with a greater impact on the environment. Even more, the savings the 'consumer' realizes is likely to be applied to buying (consuming) even more stuff. On top of that, the cheap stuff sometimes is more poorly made and wears out sooner and will be replaced.

I remember a friend buying a raft for their kids at the beach at some insanely low price like $5. The thing's seams blew out after less than a day of use. No matter, toss in the trash and buy another one - it was so cheap.

[Tanada]

What Dino said, if you don't buy the cheaper or the more expensive item that you don't really need then you are not encouraging heavy pollution by buying cheap. You also are not encouraging moderate pollution by buying more expensive. You are discouraging pollution because if they don't sell it they won't manufacture it.

I know it is counter to our modern western way of life and things won't change unless something breaks the system.

[Quinny]

We're pretty much in a transition stage at the moment, but we still save anything and throw very little away.

"Is sustainability an illusion?"


Pretty much.

A truly sustainable society would use essentially no mined resources, since those cannot be sustainably 'harvested'--they do not pre-produce themselves on anything like human time scales.

(For metals, we are talking about lifetimes of multiple stars to produce, iirc.)

That also goes for any fossil fuel use.

And the things that are left that you CAN use, have to be use very modestly, harvesting them at well below replacement level.

To my way of thinking if you are not self sufficient you are not sustainable. Darn few of us could build ourselves a bicycle, even an old fashioned wooden one using a rope drive instead of a chain. Maybe you have a big enough piece of land to pasture a horse, but other than that you are on Shank's Mare, that is to say walking under your own power. It gets worse from there, even with permaculture and good luck in the weather/climate you need a lot of food to live until the harvest, and then what you harvest has to last you until the next one after that. Now that you have so much energy tied up in raising your food and maintaining your transportation you have to maintain your house. Without the aid of outside contractors unless you can sell enough surplus food to pay for those kind of specialists.

It gets worse from there, what happens when your wife goes into labor or your four year old is running a high fever?

Our entire western culture is based on everything being cheap because energy was cheap for a hundred years. My great grand parents saved every scrap of food off the table for leftovers or animal feed, how much did you throw away this weekend? My dad had a pail in the basement half full of bent nails that were straitened out and reused when assembling anything out of soft pine or other soft wood. He had another mess of assorted nuts, bolts, screws and washers so that when something on the farm broke you could put together a patch work job to keep the work going. He was 85 when he passed away last September, but he still had that stuff because it was a lifestyle habit. Never throw away today what you might have a use for tomorrow, never buy new when used will do the job.

People in poor countries still live that way, and IMO they will have a much better chance of surviving the post oil transition than the spoiled generation of westerners alive today.

[basil_hayden]

by Pops » Thu Apr 25, 2013 2:07 pm

I met a guy in a bar once who pumped septic tanks, his business card read:
"It may be shit to you but it's my bread and butter."
LOL

Interesting Pops would post this in the "Price of Collapse" thread.

As far as the poll choices, it's tough for me to choose.

I'm an environmental hydrogeologist by occupation, that's a geologist that DOES NOT exploit the Earth, as opposed to almost every other form of geologist.

So officially, my mortgage payments depend on poll option #1 above.

But in my own life, I'm more of a #3, except when I'm out of work, then I'm a #4.

I'm hardly ever a #2 and never a #5.

Recently, as my state is changing regulations and standards, and increasing the allowable concentration of petroleum carbons in groundwater from 100 ug/l to 250 ug/l, I have been overcome by complete and total apathy and hope everyone in this crappy state drinks straight gasoline from their tap.

But my well will remain crystal clear, until it's taken away by the bankers for mortgage non-payment. Then I'll be drinking gasoline from the tap like everyone else.

For me, it also depends upon the specific issue - I like electricity so I dig coal plants, but I wouldn't live near one.
I dislike pharmaceuticals, so I'll avoid swimming in Long Island Sound.
I like trees, so I've kept most of them on my property for 23 years and burned oil for heat.
I dislike asphalt, so I've never paved my driveway.

[dohboi]

"- I like electricity so I dig coal plants, but I wouldn't live near one."

Pretty much where most people are, whether they admit it or not.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r3n-69DIvkM

[Plantagenet]

The 1971 .... poll found that 63 percent of respondents said that it was "very important" to work to restore and enhance the national environment, with 25 percent saying it was "fairly important" and only 8 percent saying it was "not too important." But in the 2013 ....poll, only 39 percent of respondents said it was very important, while 41 percent said it was fairly important and 16 percent said it was not too important.

Interesting that 45 years after the first Earth Day in 1970, support for the environment has fallen so dramatically.

The first Earth Day family had participants and celebrants in two thousand colleges and universities, roughly ten thousand primary and secondary schools, and hundreds of communities across the United States. More importantly, it "brought 20 million Americans out into the spring sunshine for peaceful demonstrations in favor of environmental reform."[6] It now is observed in 192 countries, and coordinated by the nonprofit Earth Day Network, chaired by the first Earth Day 1970 organizer Denis Hayes, according to whom Earth Day is now "the largest secular holiday in the world, celebrated by more than a billion people every year."[7] Environmental groups have sought to make Earth Day into a day of action which changes human behavior and provokes policy changes.[8] ---from Wikipedia

You know what they had in 1970 the we don't have now? HOPE. In 1970 folks believed that if 20 million demonstrators marched for Earth Day that it would bring attention to environmental problems. In 1970 there was still hope that reasonable people could talk and look at the data and consider problems together, realize that change was needed, and then take the needed steps so that things could actually be improved.


1970---The first Earth Day

[Timo]

Good poll choices. It is expensive to choose sustainability.Therein lies the problem.

I haven't found that to be the case. It's actually cheaper to live sustainably, but MUCH less convenient, too. Comforts are extremely hard to give up.