Towards the end of 2008, a report issued by the National Intelligence Council (summarised here) offered its predictions on what the world may look like in 2025. Among its best guesses are increased conflicts over scarcer resources.

The report has stimulated a lot of reflection on the mechanism we most often use to maintainsecurity and stability; namely, trade. It is frequently said that economic systems are best suited to keep the world at peace. The example of the EU, for one, demonstrates a group of formerly warring states successfully held together by trade and mutual economic interest.

While the trade = peace maxim may be true in times of relative prosperity over the short term, it may not hold up in the long-term—at least not using our current economic model. Prosperous trade ideally creates wealth for all nations involved; however, most trade is based upon unsustainable extraction of natural capital. Economic ties keep the peace only until the fruits of those economic ties (the financially uncounted social and environmental damage we incur to create trade) come crashing down on us.

Once conditions of natural capital and ecosystem services deteriorate, a number of unpleasant scenarios become possible For example, there may be landslides from erosion due to profitable logging, or water shortages from selling or diverting profitable water. With too many converging “natural disasters,” isolated misery turns easily to shared discontent and anger, and social forces can be brought to bear on natural ones. Domestic stability unravels, nationalism gains popular appeal, sabre-rattling begins, and border tensions simmer as a convenient outlet for internal problems. Conversely, a neighbour may decide it is really a regional stability-promoting favour to annex another neighbour in trouble (and, conveniently, its water/natural gas/oil/good cropland).

Most simple of all, trading nations that have been eating up the same forests and water and soil begin to fight over the dregs. A recent article in the UK Times discusses how water shortages have had a more catalytic role in wars over the past 500 years than previously thought. 

 

Once a country is domestically shaky, it just takes one stress that is otherwise manageable in isolation (e.g. a bad crop year, or the breaking point in an economy built on debt and borrowing) to tip the situation towards instability and violence. Domestic upheaval creates regional instability.

There are three critical steps to ensuring peace:

1. Healthy environment and people

2. Stable international trade based on #1

3. Peace based on #2

Yet our international diplomatic efforts typically begin with trade negotiators at the level of #2. We try to base peace on trade as if trade were divorced from healthy environment and people. This is an incomplete picture of where stability actually comes from. And, if the authors of the National Intelligence Council report are correct, we are coming to the point where we will experience more conflict over the resources we diminished trying to generate trade and stability.

Lastly, does it not seem somehow disingenuous to base peace on the desire for profit, on a few more percentage points growth over last year? To base peace on the slippery scare to greed?

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A Stanford University study has concluded that wind is the the most desirable of all renewable energy sources. The ranking of energy sources was based on such factors as greenhouse gas emissions, amount of land consumed, water pollution, human health, availability of required resources, and reliability of the energy form. In descending order of desirability, the energy sources are:

• Wind
• Concentrated solar power (mirrors heating a tower of water)
• Geothermal energy
• Tidal energy
• Solar panels
• Wave energy
• Hydroelectric dams
  

Political favourites such as biofuel, nuclear and "clean coal" are not on the list.

The study's author notes that investing in renewable energy would stimulate job creation, reduce health and environmental costs associated with current energy production, and secure clean power. One hopes that a more science-focused US administration (and their Canadian tag-alongs) will make new energy investments based on such research rather than political patronage.

 

Above: Concentrated Solar Power in Europe

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There has been much applause for President-elect Obama's announcement of $150 billion over the next 10 years for alternative energy development. Not so widely reported has been the steady stream of clean energy funding announced by Gulf States, such as the promise made by the crown prince of Abu Dhabi last January of $15 billion towards clean energy. The crown prince's announcement highlights the massive shift underway in the Gulf States, as they transition from an oil exporting to an energy exporting region. Billion dollar investments in technology and research grants (Stanford, MIT and Cambridge researchers have been happy beneficiaries) are forcibly driving new developments in energy technologies at a pace that was unattainable at previous levels of funding. Such investments may go a long way towards making clean energy technologies more widely available and affordable, as the playing field begins slowly tipping toward equal with the heavily subsidised oil & gas and nuclear industries .

If a good return on investment considers full cost accounting, sustainability of the return, and long-term intergenerational legacy issues, the wise investments should by now be apparent.

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Sorry, kids. You’ll have to look elsewhere for the definitions of "heron," "acorn" and "otter." The Oxford English Dictionary for children has decided that many “nature words” are no longer particularly relevant for our urbanised youth. Even the venerable and iconic Canadian “beaver” could not escape the editorial ousting.

You remember the beaver? The little mammal whose pelt drove massive intercontinental travel and birthed Canada’s oldest corporation? Not relevant.

Instead, the dictionary is focussing on developing the techno-linguistic capacities of impressionable young minds by replacing the nature entries with “blog,” “MP3 player” and “broadband.”

Anyone who has ever needed help from a five-year old to fix their computer can agree that kids do not need more help grasping the finer points of technology. On the other hand, kids who admit, “I like to play indoors better ‘cause that’s where all the electrical outlets are,” need all the nature entries we can give them.

 

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A hierarchy of options is intended to guide actions from most to least effective, from best to slightly less good, to really not-so-great-at-all. “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle” is a case in point for waste management. I have often wished these options had been explicitly numbered before their release:

1. Reduce
2. Reuse
3. Recycle

 

Too often we  fixate on the lower echelons of the scale. In the case of our dogged yet somewhat misguided devotion to recycling, we focus very hard on sorting waste into the proper bin, but fail to re-examine why we use so much packaging in the fist place. Regarding land stewardship, we plant a tree rather than protect an existing forested area. Various forces draw us to the bottom drawer option. It is usually easier, cheaper, more expedient, flashier and more media-worthy, and has a less disruptive effect on business as usual—in the short term.

 

So which of these reasons underlie the continued insistence that carbon capture and storage technology will solve the problem of what to do with our greenhouse gas emissions?

 

Canada and the Government of Alberta are collectively spending $2.5 billion on carbon capture and storage technology, primarily in an effort to deal with oilsands emissions. This mammoth investment in R&D continues despite advice from scientists that carbon capture technology is unsuited to deal with oilsands emissions. Secret ministerial briefing notes obtained by CBC show that the Conservative government has long known its keystone strategy in greenhouse gas management is unsound, even as it continues to announce more funding for carbon capture and storage projects.

 

With all our investment in mitigation technologies, we are still drawing blanks on what to do with oilsands emissions (and with the changed landscapes of northern Alberta ). Our eyes remain firmly glued to the solution at the bottom of the options list, the one headed by “Avoid” and “Reduce.” Thus we arrive at “Carbon Capture and Storage,” which essentially absolves us of our greenhouse gases so long as we can stick them safely underground for infinite periods of time. Is it comedy or tragedy that billions of dollars promises, yet does not deliver, an elaborate way to bury still more of our trash?

 

In the words of Einstein, “the significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking with which we created them.”

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One might say it is a sign of terrible times when Big Three Auto go hat in hand asking taxpayers for a bailout. After all, only six years ago GM posted its biggest ever profit, an astounding $1.7 billion. Now they are on life support.

One might also say, with a slight incredulous shake of the head, that it is a sign of possibly better, saner times when a solar company is the one feeding them a drip line.

Germany’s SolarWorld recently aired its intention to bid on four of GM’s plants, home to GM’s subsidiary Opel, and transform them into facilities that make electric and hybrid vehicles. SolarWorld also plans to bid on Opel’s development centre and headquarters, part of a vision to develop Europe’s first “green” auto company.

(Insert note of caution given that greener cars don’t solve development patterns encouraging urban sprawl, or alleviate gridlock, or reduce road rage)

What kind of company would GM be today if it had invested that $1.7 billion differently? And should a bailout come with strings attached? This article has a couple of ideas on conditionalities.

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Whether you see it as a rough week in the markets or a great opportunity to buy stocks, the best guess is that Wall Street has to date lost an estimated $1-$1.5 trillion.

 

If it's hard to wrap your brain around those kinds of numbers, then it may be difficult to appreciate this next estimate: an EU-commissioned study places the cost of deforestation between $2-$5 trillion...annually.

 

These costs are tied to the ecosystem services that forests provide for free: erosion and flood control, carbon storage, air filtration. When we clear forests that provide these essential services, we either need to invest heavily in human-built facsimiles, such as retaining walls, dams or underground carbon storage facilities, or we have to manage without the services altogether.

 

The staggering financial market losses have incited governments to pump billions of dollars into their economies as a rescue measure. Ecological restoration of degraded natural systems is also extremely costly. On average, the cost of conservation to ecological restoration is estimated to be about 1:2000. In other words, ecological restoration is a (prohibitively) expensive business.

 

And still, these are systems tipping points we don't know how to tip back, or can't tip back, for all our investment. We are starting to witness how unexpected positive feedback loops intensify and accelerate human-induced ecological change. Example: global warming melts sea ice, which exposes more ocean, which absorbs more heat and melts more sea ice. For some things, there is no bailout package.

 

In the case of the market and the planet, there are disastrous consequences to unsustainable borrowing. Given that natural capital underlies all financial capital, we definitely don't want to find out what happens when Nature falls 900 points.

 

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We draw on nature for any number of technological innovations. Usually these fits of inspiration come from looking at the level of the individual organism and deriving a product of benefit to humans. Using a shark fin design for underwater energy generation is one example; exploring the elastin in the knees of high-jumping fleas for use in spinal disc prostheses is another.

Beyond the mimicry of organisms, we sometimes achieve limited mimicry of ecosystems. A well-known example is the use of constructed wetlands to treat wastewater. Here a template (the wetland) for providing a critical ecosystem service (effluent treatment) already exists in all its elegant, evolutionarily-tested efficiency.

(Rather large constructed wetland, Columbia Regional Wastewater Treatment Plant)

 

A wetland, though, is part of a larger system, a finely integrated network of ecosystems that keeps the planet running--and us breathing, drinking and eating. The immensity of it, of the ecosystem services we use as humans, has been estimated at $33 trillion dollars annually . That’s a sum almost double the GNP of all nations of the world combined.

Our own human systems, though they pale by comparison in magnitude or dollar value, are still formidable, so much so that they wreak havoc with the natural systems on which they are founded. Given that natural system templates are all around us, it is perhaps puzzling that our human systems do not more closely emulate them. In fact, the systems of nature and modern business couldn’t be more different. Business is for the most part linear: we extract, refine, consume, and dispose. Nature is cyclical: one species’ waste is another one’s food. In effect, the concept of waste does not exist in nature. Waste is not just wasteful, it’s perilous. Inefficiency will, over the short and long term, get you bumped off.

In The Ecology of Commerce, Paul Hawken suggests we ought to take a sheet from nature’s book and start modelling business on basic principles in ecology:

1. there is no waste

2. everything functions symbiotically

3. products are non-toxic and life-giving

He writes:

“We humans have yet to create anything that is as complex and well-designed as the interactions of the microorganisms in a cubic foot of rich soil. No ecologist would claim to fully understand the workings of an ecosystem, but all praise the minutiae within, the economy that governs, and the wondrously designed interaction and diversity that marks that cubic foot of soil, that produces the maximum amount of life with the absence of waste” (103).

It may be a long time, if ever, before we can understand or mimic the functioning of a cubic foot of soil, but there is no reason we can’t begin to use the concepts of no waste and symbiosis in industrial design.

An example of early-stage industrial ecology cited by Hawken already exists in Kalundborg, Denmark. There, a coal-fired power plant sends its waste heat to an oil refinery, a pharmaceutical company, greenhouses, a fish farm, and homes of local residents (making 3,500 oil burning residential heating systems redundant). Excess gas produced by the refinery is sold to a sheetrock factory and to the coal-fired plant (which saves 30,000 tons of coal). The refinery retrieves sulphur and calcium sulphate from its gas: the sulphur is sold to a chemical company, and the calcium sulphate to the sheetrock factory. Waste heat from the refinery heats a local fish farm, whose sludge is used as fertilizer by local farms. The farms also receive refined sludge from the pharmaceutical company. Fly ash from the coal plant is used in road construction and concrete production.

 

As a prototype of industrial ecology, the system has a few bugs to work out. Does it operate within the carrying capacity of the ecosystem? Can locally-available materials sustain the processes indefinitely? Are the products non-toxic? There is always room for improvement. However, the incredible part of the Kalundborg model is that the industrial symbiosis evolved organically, without planning or legislation. Industries saw cost-saving opportunities and pursued them – environmental benefits were realized as a side benefit. Consider the potential economic and environmental benefits of a symbiotic model that was intentionally designed, of mutually-beneficial industries that were coevolved.

In ecology, it is understood that species which are coevolved—that is, change over evolutionary time in response to each other and their environment—are more efficient at partitioning available resources. This is why waste in nature does not exist – some organism has evolved to use it as a resource. There is no reason why industries could not also coevolve and learn to partition the resources available to them in the most efficient way possible. As in nature, such industrial symbiosis could eliminate waste. And if, in our full capacity as creative beings, we cannot find a productive use for certain types of waste, then perhaps it is time to reevaluate why we produce these wastes in the first place.

As for the future of a symbiotic industrial model, we can once again look at the frontiers of ecological research. The current holy grail of that field is the question of biodiversity and ecosystem function: do more species make an ecosystem work better? If yes, would a high diversity of symbiotically-functioning industries also be more efficient?

Understanding, rather than mimicking, highly diverse natural systems is still the order of the day. A landmark biodiversity study cited in The Ecology of Commerce details a 1983 experiment in a Panamanian rain forest. Researchers collected 163 species of beetles from a single species of tree – beetles exclusive to that tree species. In an expanded study of 19 trees, 80% of the 1,200 beetle species discovered were new to science. Given 50,000 tree species in the rain forest, the researchers calculated that 8 million new-to-science species were busy going about their various beetling business.

Bearing in mind that we cannot even estimate the nearest order of magnitude of life on this planet – is it 2 or 100 million?—we should be humbled by the scale of interrelatedness we find, by the natural systems in existence, by how they all fit together with such parsimony. Humbled, awed, and inspired by these models of what we must strive for in a sustainable, no waste, symbiotic and life-giving community. Inspired also to not destroy the very models we are striving to become.

 

recommended reading:

The Ecology of Commerce  by Paul Hawken

 

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Biomimicry is the art and science of casting an inquiring eye on living organisms and natural systems, and from them drawing inspiration for efficient new technologies.

One of the most common examples of biomimicry is Velcro, which was developed by a Swiss engineer who arrived home from a walk covered in burs. Upon examining the burs under a microscope and noting the hooks that caught at his coat fabric, he developed a new fastening technology that is indispensable to those of us who can’t keep our shoelaces tied.

Recently, a researcher at the University of Sydney produced an oceanic energy collector modeled on the tailfins of tuna and sharks. The device--created by the appropriately named Tim Finnigan--is anchored on the ocean floor and undulates in response to ocean currents, driving a magnet generator for energy production. Another device inspired by kelp beds rests on the ocean surface and generates power from the rolling action of waves.

Says Finnigan, “I realized the systems that function the best are the ones that already exist there.”

Yet another reason (if we needed one) to value this planet’s biodiversity.

Full story

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