Herein I provide some notes for a course (initially presented Saturday, 2011-02-26 as a SatCo) with the same name.
We see claims of sustainability attached to many things, often without any justification. We have a general sense that sustainability has something to do with ecological balance, but what does it really mean? What is sustainability?
This course will offer a meaningful definition for that idea, and will argue why this definition is meaningful and gravely important. In addition, it will build a mechanics of sustainability to both help you understand the world around you—including culture, economics, history, and of course the environment—as well as to evaluate existing claims to sustainability.
Peak oil?
Sustainability?
Exponential growth
Professor Albert Bartlett's Arithmetic, Population and Energy
Voluntary homework: explore the references presented in this course.
Growth proportional to size (colloquially "steady growth", "% growth")
Source of growth? Beneficiary of growth
Doubling time?
Current examples:
Professor Tom Murphy's Galactic-Scale Energy (alternative location) and part 2, Can Economic Growth Last? (alternative location)
Effects of growth
Technical effects
Byproducts
Pollution, waste
Climate Change
Resource depletion
Decreasing resilience with decreasing diversity
Diversity is a survival factor for the community itself. A community of a hundred million species can survive anything short of total global catastrophe. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature drop of twenty degrees—which would be a lot more devastating than it sounds. Within that hundred million will be thousands that could survive a global temperature rise of twenty degrees. But a community of a hundred species or a thousand species has almost no survival value at all. | ||
--[Qui1992] |
Societal effects
Robert Newman's History of Oil
Sustainability
Sustainability is meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
Technical mitigation
Alternate sources of energy
Renewable energy
Efficiency
Sequestration
Geoengineering
Saul Griffith: Climate Change Recalculated (50 minutes in)
Mitigating effects, not growth
Cultural mitigation
Shift in values
Consciousness of sources and sinks (ecosystems)
Community
Food?
Energy?
Water?
Shelter?
Reasons for growth
Investment and debt
Prosperity?
Culture (The Yes Men Fix the World)
Language
Goals and values
How did we get here?
Growth?
Morality
What to do?
Lester R. Brown. Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. Earth Policy Institute, 2008.
Richard Heinberg. Peak Everything. New Society Publishers, 2007.
Professor Tim Jackson. Prosperity without Growth?: The transition to a sustainable economy. Sustainable Development Commission, 2009.
Derrick Jensen. Endgame. Seven Stories Press, 2005.
Professor David MacKay FRS. Sustainable Energy – without the hot air. UIT, 2008.
Richard Manning. The oil we eat: Following the food chain back to Iraq. Harper's Magazine, 2004-02.
Daniel Quinn. Ishmael. Bantam, 1992.
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