theroomwhere.com

Just testing out a new plug-in for my WP site called WordPress Wiki. This allows collaborative editing of posts. Let’s see how it goes.

I was a little worried about th security of this plugin but to edit the post users need a username and password. Phew.

3% annual growth in economic activity per annum and associated consumer spending to fund the 3% growth was until recently seen as a good thing. In fact it was seen as the best thing since sliced bread in fact there was so much bread that everyone was starting to put on too much weight. This was seen as a bad thing, people in the media started to ask embarrassing questions about our increasingly obese friends and relatives like who’s going to pay their health care bills and do all the work that people in the media don’t like to do and how irritating it is that the mortality rate will start be greater in children than adults.

Then there is the question about sustainability. Sustainability? A word with many definitions:

From Wikipedia:

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity of maintaining a certain process or state. It is now most frequently used in connection with biological and human systems. In an ecological context, sustainability can be defined as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future.

From the University of Reading

Brundtland (1987): This is the most commonly quoted definition and it aims to be more comprehensive than most:
Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations to meet their own needs.

It contains within it two key concepts:

The concepts of needs, in particular the essential needs of the worlds poor, to which overriding priority should be given, and:

The idea of limitations imposed by the state of technology and social organization on the environments ability to meet present and future needs.

Harwood (1990):
Sustainable agriculture is a system that can evolve indefinitely toward greater human utility, greater efficiency of resource use and a balance with the environment which is which is favourable to humans and most other species.
etc. etc. etc.

Now our heroic advertisers and marketers picked up on the issue of sustainability and decided that it is eminently possible to continue to increase sales of things, products, artefacts and other consumer goods and still have a sustainable future. How was this going to be done, by what amazing alchemy? It turns out that the answer was for organisations to… write a policy. The policy would be a statement of the actions that the new caring organisation would take in order to carry on doing exactly what they had always done but at the same time saving the planet.

Most of the action plans in the policies included items such as increasing existing or starting a new  recycling programme and/or putting up posters (made from nice fresh crisp recycled paper) telling staff to turn off their lights when leaving their office.

Consumers at home also engaged with this whirlwind of conflicting activities, buying and saving the planet by buying more stuff but also recycling more and putting all the new stuff into ‘bags-for-life’.

What a lovely world we had created, everyone getting richer and buying more stuff and saving the planet. What could go wrong?

What could go wrong? Well for a start all the banks turned out not to be running sustainable businesses at all. No money to fund the manufacture of things like cars, bags-for-life, good farm produced food, houses etc. etc. This in turn has resulted in the ‘greening’ of business suddenly becoming an aspiration for the future when all the money starts to flow again. The bottom line is we just can’t afford the luxury of being green any more. We need to re-engage with Kentucky Fried Chicken, Jamie Oliver and Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall will have to wait a bit longer for consumers to start buying the £2.00 organic free range chicken.

The interesting thing is all the bad news on the financial front may actually be good news for the environment. There is a simple relationship between extracting raw materials, processing them and making them into things and the amount of money available to do this. If there is no money there is likely to be less consumption, less demand and less raw materials extraction. Where is the evidence for this?

At the moment there are less cars being made, less production in China of all sorts of items, less theft of metals for the scrap market, less shops and less overall consumption. It will be interesting to see if at the end of the current financial crisis if the environment has benefitted. Maybe if there is less mining there will be less polluted water and more Otters?

Meat. Meat is not just murder for cattle, pigs, poultry, lambs etc. but for humans as well and not because of it’s impact on health. The more meat that is consumed the more beef is needed and more arable land is needed. Where’s all this land going to come from? One good place to get it is South America. And what’s big in South America? Yes, the Amazon rain forest. One of the results of cutting down a lot of trees to get a lot of cattle is an increase in CO2 and another is a reduction in the amount of fresh water. Again, less money hopefully means less demand for meat and less cutting down of rain forest.

There is one other issue that needs to be tackled though, population oh that’s human population by the way. There are just too many people around. Hopefully the economic climate will also result in people deciding against having children or at least less children. This is particularly important in the ‘rich’ developed countries. More rich children equals more consumer demand.

The way forward to save the planet? Reduce demand even more and sustain the economic downturn for as long as possible and stop having so many kids. A bit more radical than using a bag-for-life I admit. Come on lets not go shopping…

Shoppers an endangered species…