Tag: Sustainability

Posted on

The Tyranny of Small Decisions

How did we get to where we are today?

William Odum highlighted the importance of small decisions effects on wider environmental issues and management — the “tyranny of small decisions” as it is has been called. When the accretion of small decisions give rise to broader scale events and phenomena, the results that emerge are not necessarily optimal for society or the environment.

In the case of my PhD study area an important issue is the sustainable maintenance of the relationship between fire, vegetation and human activity across landscape, as a result of land use decisions made by individual humans within that landscape. To ignore the potential effects of these small decisions on the wider environment could prove costly.

Equally, when studying these effects of these individual decisions, the reciprocal effects of changes in the wider environment (e.g. the wildfire regime) upon them shouldn’t be omitted. The tyranny of small decisions means that any model of landscape change in needs to represent the feedbacks between individual decisions and the landscape consequences. Agent-based modelling, integrated with a cellular automata is one way I’m attempting to do this.

But these feedbacks don’t only happen in space across landscapes, they happen over time through one’s life. All the small minute-by-minute decisions that have led me to be where I am now. Individual minute-by-minute decisions made now, with an eye to future based on past experience. If making a decision at the current time is dependent upon one’s situation at the present time, which in turn has arisen due to past decisions, have those past decisions reduced the viable options one has open at the present time? Or have as many new doors opened as closed?

The tyranny of minute decisions. Why every minute counts. Any why we’ll never know whether a decision was the right or wrong one to make until all our minutes have gone…

Reference
Odum, W.E. 1982 Environmental Degradation and the Tyranny of Small Decisions Bioscience 32:9

Categories:
, , , , , ,

Posted on

Lester Brown: Plan B 2.0

We went straight from the pub to Lester Brown’s lecture at MSU this evening so I didn’t have a pen or pad of paper with me. I need to jot something down before I forget so why don’t I blog it…

President of the Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown’s talk was based largely around his recently updated book Plan B 2.0. Essentially this was an ecological economics discussion, and many of his examples echoed what I heard at the THEMES summer school earlier this year (did I blog that yet? I should). For example, one clear message was that biofuels (ethanol) is NOT a viable alternative to gasoline for running cars; the resources and area demanded to grow the products to produce the biofuel are to great to ensure it’s economic or ecological viability. A more sustainable alternative presented was wind power; the US could satisfy its annual electricity needs by installing wind turbines in just the three windiest states (I forget which they are). If the number of hybrid electricity/gasoline cars increased this wind power could be efficiently harnessed, stored and used for travel.

Orders for wind turbines globally are so high that waiting lists for production currently stretch to 2008. Why not use the infrastructure already in place in the form of automobile factories to constuct these wind turbines? Unfeasible? Not possible? The example of the shift from automobilie manufacture to arms manufacture in the US during the second World War shows that “where there’s a will there’s a way”.

But do we want have the will? Are we in denial? Why is it so easy to persuade ourselves that there isn’t a problem? Lester Brown suggests that one reason is that we’re not doing our economics properly; we’re hiding many of the costs of the products we produce just as Enron did before their collapse. It may only ‘cost’ $3 to produce a packet of cigarettes (at least that’s the cost they could sell at before tax), but when you factor in ecological and human health into the equation we find that it actually costs $7 in terms of ecosystem and health services.

Echoing Al Gore in his recent movie (still need to blog about that), unless the environmental question is on the lips of the constituent when they meet their political representative, these issues can get swept under the carpet. We need to have the will to make the necessary changes, and we need to let our politicians know we want that change.

And I need to get some sleep so that my presentation tomorrow doesn’t collapse into farce…

Categories: , , , , , , , ,

Posted on

Bill Cronon: Secular Apocaplyse


I saw this photo a couple of days ago. It’s a comparison of the state of a Chilean glacier in 1928 with 2004. The glacier is retreating by 14 metres per year, attributed by scientists to a warming of the global climate. At that rate of retreat the it could be gone in 25 years. Look at that panorama though – would’t it be great to go and see that before it’s gone? Imagine if you were stood there confronted by this awesome sight, what would you be thinking? Greenpeace have been pretty sneaky though (as they have a right to be). Using those beautiful photos that would stick in my mind; when I arrived at that vista I might just think, “I contributed to this”.

I made a point of going to see Bill Cronon at the Thursday morning plenary “Narrative of climate change” at the RGS conference. He suggested that narratives of climate change have been used as both prediction AND (secular) prophecy. This idea of a secular prophecy comes from recent intonations of Nature as a secular proxy for God. Prophecies are often told as stories of retribution that will be incurred if God’s laws were broken. If Nature is a proxy for God then Climate Change is portrayed as a retribution for humans breaking the laws of Nature.

Cronon suggests that Global Narratives are abstract, virtual, systemic, remote, vast, have a diffuse sense of agency, posses no individual characters (i.e. no heros/villains), and are repetitive (so boring). These characteristics make it difficult to emphasise and justify calls for human action to mitigate against the anthropic influence on the climate. Cronon suggests these types of prophetic narrative are ‘unsustainable’ because they do not offer the possibility of individual or group action to reverse or address global climate problems, and therefore are no use politically or socially.

Coronon went on to discuss the micro-cosms (micro narratives) Elizabeth Kolbert uses in her book “Field Notes from a Catastrophe” to illustrate the impacts of global change in a localised manner. She uses individual stories that are picked because they are not expected, they are non-abstract and the antithesis of the unsustainable global narratives. He concluded that we need narratives that offer hope, and not those tied to social and political models based on anarchic thought that do not address the systemic issues driving the change itself. This is the political challenge he suggests – to create narratives that not only make us think “I contributed to this” when we see evidence of glacier retreat, but that offer us hope of finding ways to reduce our future impact upon the environment.