Sustainable Globalism

I had a high school teacher who asked us a simple question one day in class:

"What did it take for you to be here today?"

On the surface you can assume it's a fairly straight forward question. Most likely a parent, friend, bus driver, or you were the one responsible to get you to that class that arbitrary day. On a small enough scale, that is true. You were physically transported to that class through whatever means. That is what it took for you to be there. Most of us live on this scale; it's practical, selfish, reasonable, and completely functional. However, it doesn't answer the question.

I am a part of the most privileged citizenry to have ever walked the Earth. I live in one of the highest standards of living, most well fed, most technologically advanced, and most healthy civilizations to have ever existed on the Earth. I don't have to worry about dying from a disease that just 100 years ago would likely have been my certain death. I don't have to hunt to kill any animals just to survive. I can use a computer to instantly communicate with someone half way around the planet. One could go on and on with how great the times are. 

However, the reasons for this greatness arise from a startling figure. If every person on the Earth enjoyed an advanced western-style of civilization, it is estimated that it would require 2 other planets full of comparable Earth populations and resources just to service the Earth [Wackernagel, 1996]. (3 if the population doubled, and 12 if the standards of living doubled.)  Obviously a statement like that cannot ever be tested.  However, using extrapolations from our planet's energy and human resource usage, that is the figure that you arrive to. 

This figure could be considered a consequence of globalization. It is what happens when my MacBook Air that I'm writing this on was produced by human beings in China. When it's cheaper to manufacture abroad, ship domestically, and finally sell, the global workforce is utilized as a grand plantation. Millions of anonymous foreigners service my daily life. I'll likely never know them beyond their invisible fingerprints on my gadgets, the occasional Foxconn suicide story, or articles exposing human rights or environmental abuse at their work environments. This is the reality of our civilization and its economic structure.

The United States is the apex of the world when it comes to global hectares (biocapacity) per person used. We live in a consumption based economy with quarterly figures reflecting how much accumulation people can endure. Indeed driving around town it would seem that everyone needs a car, a house, and a garage full of stuff. We're continuously mentally programmed to want things, to need them. We're told that success is when you can accumulate more things than your neighbors, and that failure is when you have nothing.

A byproduct of all this consumption can be seen in the gigantic piles of trash in our landfills, the Texas-sized flotilla of plastic in the Pacific, and the smog filled air of large cities. This consumption based economy's bloodline is fossil fuel derived energy. Energy that is invisible to our eyes and mostly invisible to our thinking as well.

Organisms which are not capable of deriving their own energy from the environment (autotrophs) must consume other organisms for their biological energy. In this way, plants and microorganisms derive basic biochemical energy which enables larger organisms to inherit this plant and microorganism energy when they are consumed. The larger organisms provide energy to even larger organisms and so forth forming an intricate food chain (or web) linking nearly all ecosystems and organisms together. In this way of viewing organisms, no larger organisms could survive without a sustainable underlying foundation of smaller organisms upon which to derive energy. It's a peculiar way of looking at species when you consider them as strict energy vessels.

After reading Michael Pollan's book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, I no longer see a cow as anything more than a walking barrel of oil. (tasty oil perhaps) Another post will elucidate why most of what we eat is derived oil, but it isn't hard to think of the general overview: plants are fertilized with petroleum derivatives, delivered with petroleum based vehicles to farms to feed animals, these animals are then grown with this petroleum subsidized food, slaughtered in a factory powered by petroleum or fossil fuel, then their carcasses are transported by petroleum based vehicle to a processing plant powered by petroleum or fossil fuel, and then further to a cooking apparatus most likely powered by petroleum or fossil fuels to be prepared, and then finally eaten by humans [Pollan, 2006].

I’m going to apply this thinking to a typical product that we would buy on any typical day. Lets try a similar chain of logic for a widget made of x raw materials: x raw materials are gathered from an environmental source, these materials are delivered by vehicles powered by petroleum to a refining plant powered by petroleum or fossil fuel, once there they are machined in an appropriate manner, they are then transported to an assembly plant powered by petroleum or fossil fuel, loaded onto a fossil fuel powered cargo ship, sailed halfway around the world to a domestic port, offloaded onto a petroleum based vehicle which then drives the widget to my local store, for me to drive to in my petroleum based car to purchase.

(I realize that my chain of logic in the above paragraph is not normalized across any particular industry, nor supply chain. In some instances, a vertically integrated company can achieve remarkable efficiencies. Also, regarding my qualitative look at a single product, I recognize that this energy usage is averaged across all the products produced in the various supply chain and then further in all transportation chains.)

Lets also assume that this widget comes in a typical packaging of high-density plastic, which is bagged in a low-density plastic bag. (A whole other problem entirely.) Plastic is a product derived from petroleum jelly. Indeed many of your everyday products are derivative of this amazing energy rich amalgam of organic molecules called petroleum: household chemicals, rubber, aspirin, crayons, to name a few. All told, walking away from the store with the widget you just bought carries with it many consequences regarding the amount of fossil fuels required to produce and transport it.

In light of this, can the biological principle of energy consumption be applied to human economies, what would the consequences of that application be? If energy was the underlying reserve of our currencies, what would the price of food represent? I'll begin by discussing the latter question and inadvertently answer the first. If food was grown with a zero energy summation, then when you grew a crop, selling that produce would be equal to the amount of energy input into it. You would have to quantitatively analyze the external energy input into the crop, ignoring the natural input such as the sun. (Only inputted energy such as drilled oil would be human economic capital.) With this amount of energy in mind, you would be able to tie the amount of physical energy to the amount of energy output you could purchase [Batie, 2001].

Retying the economy to a reasonable rate of physical energy would cause incredible damage, as most of our economic activity is based on our artificial monetization of petroleum and fossil fuels [Arrows, 1995]. (Farming and fuel extraction are both governmentally subsidized activities.) I am not an economist, and thinking of civilization in light of a biological model is somewhat ridiculous in our societal context. But our current economic model assumes unlimited upward mobility and growth, which is ridiculous in a biological model. 

I understand the economic constraints that our society is currently under. With high unemployment, high income and wealth disparity, the need for industry to produce things, sell them, and thus provide work is critical. But quite frankly, based on the current petroleum-based economy, unequivocally unsustainable. [Raven, 2002] I'm not debating globalization as a manifestation of economic reality, I'm criticizing it on it's manifestations to our environment, and ecology. With both our food and product chains repackaging barrels of oil for our sustenance or enjoyment, what happens when we outpace Hubbert’s petroleum extraction model? (Peak oil)

The answers aren't straight forward, nor are they easy. I want to believe that technology can outpace our creation of our problems and provide solutions. No more trash, no more pollution, no more climate change. But the reality of these discussions is often more unsettling. As we saw this week with the closing of a major California solar power company, Solyndra, the footing of an ecologically friendly economy may not be feasible within the current economic context.

The Earth has seen its share of incredible disasters. It was likely completely frozen. At another point in its 4.5 billion years it was hit with an asteroid which killed off 99% of (my favorite) species. We have emerged billions of years after its molten inhospitable surface cooled, and we are here for an incredibly short period of time. Considering the previous calamities, the Earth will not care if we kill ourselves off or ruin the ecosystem at large by being carelessly wasteful. 

I was once told that delusion is doing or believing something despite rational argument or evidence. Utilizing a finite natural resource as it were infinite is delusional. Humanity must realign the way in which it considers itself within a natural context in order to live sustainably in that context. The so-called "problem triad" of population, development, and environment, now has consumption joining the intertwined grand global problems [Myers, 1997]. A sustainable world may represent nothing less than a new industrial revolution, and new agricultural evolution, but that may just be what is necessary. 

Future posts will be devoted to the policies of food production and its ecological consequences, climate science and Oklahoma's esteemed senator, evolution and a party of theorists, as well as many more to come.


Update: Poor post, so eclectic and wandering that no one wants to talk about you. Sorry brother. *laments*

REFERENCES:

Arrow, K. et al. (1995). Economic growth, carrying capacity, and the environment. Science, 268(5210), 520-521.

Batie, Sandra S. (2001) Sustainable Development: Challenges to the Profession of Agricultural Economics. American Journal of Agricultural Economics, 71(5), 1083-1101.

Myers, N. (1997). Consumption: challenge to sustainable development. Science, 276(5309), 53-56.

Pollan, M. (2006). The omnivore's dilemma: a natural history of four meals. Penguin Pr.


Raven, Peter H. (2002). Science, sustainability, and the human prospect. Science, 297(5583), 954-959.

Wackernagel, M, et al. (1996). Our ecological footprint: reducing human impact on the earth. New Society Pub.