It is clear that in order to adopt an eco-friendly life-style and build environmentally sustainable societies, we need to slow down. Slow down implies reducing the rate of consumption of natural resources. I will discuss some of the aspects methods of slowing down.
Main focus is to move away from consumption. There is an urgent and immediate need to reduce consumption. We need to look for ways to enjoy life without consuming a lot of energy or wasting a lot of materials. How do we start on this journey?
First and fore-most, we need to buy only the abolute minimum things in life. Never should we spend a dollar or an Euro more for something that we can live without. When we buy less things we do use less things. This reduces our energy consumption during usage. In turn it leads to producing less number of things and thus reducing the overall stress on the environment.
Some of the most difficult concepts that one needs to come to terms with, especially in the western world, are the following: that we don't have to buy everything possible and possess them as personal belongings and that we don't have to visit all possible destinations on planet earth or that do and enjoy all possible things.
Al Gore illustrates the following point in his film, "An Inconvenient Truth" very beautifully.
Old Habits + Old Technology = Predictable Consequences
Old Habits + New technology = Completely Altered Consequences
The scientific and engineering knowledge that we have gained so far coupled with the technologies available today only needs to be used with a lot of maturity. It calls for a lot of self-restraint. As Al Gore illustrates we see such a restraint with the use of Nuclear weapons. The reason being that the damage is immense and immediate. We have already seen the damage and learnt albeit after just a single use! On the other hand much of the adverse impact of much of the "fruits of modern technology" is invisible and is spread across time and space. The cause and effect are not obvious and immediate. For example the melting of the Glaciers near the north pole might lead to wide spread draught in Africa after several months or years.
Another key aspect to examine is to go into the root causes as to why we are constantly looking at ways to automate things and eliminate physical work from our dialy living. With increased automation we spend more and more energy to run these machines. Then we end up enrolling in a fitness program to "spend" our body calories. In spite of that the energy that we consume in the form of food doesn't get utilized fully and in most cases leads to obesity and other problems.!!
Why are we so hesitant to do physical work in our dialy routine? Let us take the simple case of house hold chores. like cooking, washing clothes, watering plants, cleaning, decorating, etc. Instead of doing these manually we take pride in using washing machines, dish washers, kitchen makers, vaccuum cleaners and so on. Each of these equipments consume a lot of energy. In majority of cases they also consume excessive water, chemical agents and so on. Thus we consume energy, water and put out a whole lot of chemicals which cause damage to the natural habitat around us. Why do we adore, foster and admire this lifestyle so much?
Using automated equipment comes with its tag of being chik, fashionable and progressive. Not using them is ancient and out-dated. Everyone wants to be modern and no one wants to become ancient!
A bigger reason is our money-centered culture. Household work doesn't generate any "income". These activities, therefore, have no regard in the modern world. The modern economic theory only looks at them as "necessary evils" or at best as "over-heads". On the other hand this economic policy glorifies the lifestyle based on consumerism and calls it progress. How rational is this approach?
Irrespective of what the economic theorists says, for the sake of the environment, for the sake of other living beings on earth and above all for the sake of humanity's future we are required to slow down!
Sunday, March 8, 2009
Why should we slow down?
In this article I would like to appeal for a slow down of "consumption" in order to lessen the damage to the environment and sustain the ecology. I would like to define consumption as the rate at which non-recyclable materials and resources, or to be more precise, materials which cannot be easily replenished in nature, are utilized to staisfy people's needs.
Firstly, one might argue as to why we should reduce consumption since we are having more and more products in the market with the "Recycling" symbol on it. What we need to consider is the fact that the products which are marketed as "Recyclable" truly never meet that intent. Let me illustrate what is meant by this by taking as simple a product as paper used for printing. To get a glossy, white paper a whole lot of chemicals are added to the paper. Over this, one uses exotic printing chemicals to print all that the paper is intended to communicate to the reader. At the end of it all the paper material is so much "polluted" with all sorts of chemicals which cannot be seperated out. At least presently we don't have techniques to get back the original pure wood pulp from nature and return it to the environment. What is done in most cases is to use this paper after some processing steps to make a low quality recycled paper. Of course, this new "recycled" paper in most cases can be used again only making something of much lower quality. As per William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of the book, "Cradle to Cradle" argue that majority of the so-called materials which are used today are at best "down-cycled" and never "re-cycled".
Secondly, one might argue that there is nothing much to fear about non-recyclable materials or resources because soon our scientists and engineers will do "break-through" research and provide us with new materials and energy sources that help us to continue in a normal way. This is the point I would like to analyze further.
Let us look around us and assess the rate at which we are consuming natural resources. There are a large number of indices that point out to exponentially increasing patterns of consumption. Crude oil, overall energy consumption, metals and minerals, water and so on and so on. Other indices for exponential growth patterns are population, carbon-dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, global temperature, depletion of ice-shelves near the poles, elimination of species, reduction of forest areas, waste generation, etc. All of these are on an exponential trajectory. To quote M. King Hubbert, who studied these patterns and gave a mathematical structure to this, says, "Our prinicipal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth." How powerfully it has been articulated!
The question is how can these growth patterns be sustained when the source of the natural resources are finite on earth? At leats it wuld call for creating multi-ple earth like planets to live this lifestyle! There are a large number of elitist thinkers and majority of the leaders in politics and financial circles who exuberate the hope that science and technology will rapidly develop to solve the problem of "shortage" of resources. They are very hopeful that "very soon" we will have a range of eco-friendly products and infinetly sustainable energy sources and therefore there is no need to panic. These technologies are christened as "green technolgies". Life as usual is thus justified in these people's arguments since we will have green technologies in the coming years. Is it really so?
The point to closely examine is how soon can the green technologies be developed? How soon will these green technologies be put to wide-spread use? The key point is will these be developed and adopted "in-time" and before it is too late.
One analogy to draw at this stage is to compare this to playing a computer game. Let us assume that we are playing a game against the computer. As we do well at a certain level typically the game takes us to the next level, w.r.t. difficulty. At each successive level we are required to play with increased resources, in this case our reflex time, analysis, time, speed of reaction, etc. At each higher level our body needs to put in much higher effort to paly the game. Typically in a computer game either the player wins the final level, since our computers are limited in their capability or the player loses out since it was too fast for him/her!
In the real world we seem to be playing such a game and we are in a race against nature! However unlike a computer game, nature has no limits as far as we can tell. As the game continues the natural world around us morphs in all sorts of unpredictable ways to cope up with the so-called game. Can we hope to win in this 'rcae against" nature game? Isn't it likely that we hit head-on with "GAME-OVER" rather than winning it to our satisfaction?
The point I would like to drive at is that it is not realistic to expect that we can invent green technologies and adopt them at such a rapid pace that it can offset the present trends completely. If we just look around us and measure how long it typically takes for us to adopt scientific ideas, it is clear that it is not a matter of few years. It typically happens over decades.
I am optimistic that as human beings we will invent and discover a lot of things towards green technologies. However in order to develop these technologies and adopt them suitably, one of the very precious natural resource is decreasing exponentially. That is Time! We need time to invent and discover. We need time to develop technologies. We need time to adopt them in daily life. However with the present rate of consumerism time is essentially running out.
How do we "make or produce" more time? Only way we can do this is to slow down the rate of consumption. How do we reduce the rate of consumption? There are many options and one of them could be the use of tremedous force (violence) and kill as many people as possible since when we have less number of people, we can possibly sustain better! Is that moral? Is that humanitarian? Can this be ever celebrated as humanity's progress?
Instead of a barbaric approach of wars and genocides we need to look for higher intelligent ways of addressing this problem. There is an urgency to look for non-violent methods. Non-violent methods calls for adopting simpler life styles. It calls for abhorring greediness in life. As part of simpler life styles we need to use less energy, we need to reduce our carbon footprint and above all we need to buy less things every day. The focus of life needs to some extent move away from being material-centric and place higher emphasis on spiritual values and ideals. If we all want happiness and content in life we need to adopt spiritual gratification at an equal footing to material comfort.
A simple life style necessarily calls for Slowing down!
Firstly, one might argue as to why we should reduce consumption since we are having more and more products in the market with the "Recycling" symbol on it. What we need to consider is the fact that the products which are marketed as "Recyclable" truly never meet that intent. Let me illustrate what is meant by this by taking as simple a product as paper used for printing. To get a glossy, white paper a whole lot of chemicals are added to the paper. Over this, one uses exotic printing chemicals to print all that the paper is intended to communicate to the reader. At the end of it all the paper material is so much "polluted" with all sorts of chemicals which cannot be seperated out. At least presently we don't have techniques to get back the original pure wood pulp from nature and return it to the environment. What is done in most cases is to use this paper after some processing steps to make a low quality recycled paper. Of course, this new "recycled" paper in most cases can be used again only making something of much lower quality. As per William McDonough and Michael Braungart, authors of the book, "Cradle to Cradle" argue that majority of the so-called materials which are used today are at best "down-cycled" and never "re-cycled".
Secondly, one might argue that there is nothing much to fear about non-recyclable materials or resources because soon our scientists and engineers will do "break-through" research and provide us with new materials and energy sources that help us to continue in a normal way. This is the point I would like to analyze further.
Let us look around us and assess the rate at which we are consuming natural resources. There are a large number of indices that point out to exponentially increasing patterns of consumption. Crude oil, overall energy consumption, metals and minerals, water and so on and so on. Other indices for exponential growth patterns are population, carbon-dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere, global temperature, depletion of ice-shelves near the poles, elimination of species, reduction of forest areas, waste generation, etc. All of these are on an exponential trajectory. To quote M. King Hubbert, who studied these patterns and gave a mathematical structure to this, says, "Our prinicipal constraints are cultural. During the last two centuries we have known nothing but exponential growth and in parallel we have evolved what amounts to an exponential growth culture, a culture so heavily dependent upon the continuance growth for its stability that it is incapable of reckoning with problems of non-growth." How powerfully it has been articulated!
The question is how can these growth patterns be sustained when the source of the natural resources are finite on earth? At leats it wuld call for creating multi-ple earth like planets to live this lifestyle! There are a large number of elitist thinkers and majority of the leaders in politics and financial circles who exuberate the hope that science and technology will rapidly develop to solve the problem of "shortage" of resources. They are very hopeful that "very soon" we will have a range of eco-friendly products and infinetly sustainable energy sources and therefore there is no need to panic. These technologies are christened as "green technolgies". Life as usual is thus justified in these people's arguments since we will have green technologies in the coming years. Is it really so?
The point to closely examine is how soon can the green technologies be developed? How soon will these green technologies be put to wide-spread use? The key point is will these be developed and adopted "in-time" and before it is too late.
One analogy to draw at this stage is to compare this to playing a computer game. Let us assume that we are playing a game against the computer. As we do well at a certain level typically the game takes us to the next level, w.r.t. difficulty. At each successive level we are required to play with increased resources, in this case our reflex time, analysis, time, speed of reaction, etc. At each higher level our body needs to put in much higher effort to paly the game. Typically in a computer game either the player wins the final level, since our computers are limited in their capability or the player loses out since it was too fast for him/her!
In the real world we seem to be playing such a game and we are in a race against nature! However unlike a computer game, nature has no limits as far as we can tell. As the game continues the natural world around us morphs in all sorts of unpredictable ways to cope up with the so-called game. Can we hope to win in this 'rcae against" nature game? Isn't it likely that we hit head-on with "GAME-OVER" rather than winning it to our satisfaction?
The point I would like to drive at is that it is not realistic to expect that we can invent green technologies and adopt them at such a rapid pace that it can offset the present trends completely. If we just look around us and measure how long it typically takes for us to adopt scientific ideas, it is clear that it is not a matter of few years. It typically happens over decades.
I am optimistic that as human beings we will invent and discover a lot of things towards green technologies. However in order to develop these technologies and adopt them suitably, one of the very precious natural resource is decreasing exponentially. That is Time! We need time to invent and discover. We need time to develop technologies. We need time to adopt them in daily life. However with the present rate of consumerism time is essentially running out.
How do we "make or produce" more time? Only way we can do this is to slow down the rate of consumption. How do we reduce the rate of consumption? There are many options and one of them could be the use of tremedous force (violence) and kill as many people as possible since when we have less number of people, we can possibly sustain better! Is that moral? Is that humanitarian? Can this be ever celebrated as humanity's progress?
Instead of a barbaric approach of wars and genocides we need to look for higher intelligent ways of addressing this problem. There is an urgency to look for non-violent methods. Non-violent methods calls for adopting simpler life styles. It calls for abhorring greediness in life. As part of simpler life styles we need to use less energy, we need to reduce our carbon footprint and above all we need to buy less things every day. The focus of life needs to some extent move away from being material-centric and place higher emphasis on spiritual values and ideals. If we all want happiness and content in life we need to adopt spiritual gratification at an equal footing to material comfort.
A simple life style necessarily calls for Slowing down!
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