[MD] growth and sustainability

[ml]

Gav,


Thanks for the link to the 6 part lecture by David Suzuki.

Even though I've been aware of and generally involved in
environmental concerns, mostly from the cleanup, 
emission reduction, and modeling end of things, I'd never
heard of David.  He is a compelling speaker and very
entertaining.  (Would love to have dinner with him sometime.)

However,  he did one thing that made me wince in his
speech.  FIrst he confessed a lack of understanding of 
economics, took a 101 level course, and then using
apallingly faulty logic, blamed economics for the way
in which people behave contra-to-sustainability, although
he didn't actually use that word.    He does his own 
argument and his cause damage by doing such a thing.

This was analogous to blaming medicine for the existence
of cancer.  Although he COULD make the case that medicine
bears a large responsibility for overpopulation. :-)

I wonder what his response might be to someone who 
pointed out that with a population of 6 billion we cannot 
afford to treat the earth as heavily per acre per person
as the third world subsistence low tech agriculture 
practitioner does.  Per acre yield of food is low and the
soil depletion is high.  Often when such farmers are done
in an area, they've so exhausted it that even the native
plants have difficulty recolonizing the area.

Places on the planet that applied a more systematic, and
sustainable technology, a deliberate economic step, have 
no such problem.  China has large areas in their traditional 
agricultral zones where the top soil has continually grown in 
thickness and richness.  France has similar areas.  These 
were not accidental occurences, but deliberat decisions
by farmers to support the land that supported them, not
as anything but the realization of ther survival, the origin
of economic practice.

Through the eighties, American farm operations in the 
arid portions of the country pushed land to produce that 
would normally not support agriculture.  They poured 
chemical nitrogen onto what was often all but bare sand,
silt, and mineral soil--nearly lacking the loam-creating
organic breakdown material that defines good soil.
This threatened to ultimately leave soils effectively sterile.
Today, one can often see the shift away from strictly
high-soluble chemical fertilizer and the inclusion of more
organic debris.  Manure and composted material is 
'chunked out of trucks and turned into the active later.

Again, a deliberate economic decision, in lieu of the 
abandonment and prarie busting that used to be done.  
Economics taught to freshmen at university is not something
he should confuse with the actual economic behavior of 
people in the world outside the Ivory tower.

The depth and complexity of economic behavior is something
he might have better understood in the term he used early
in his lecture of 'emergent.'   It is also would be more clear to 
him if the comparison was made of economys with ecosystems.

He stated that the economy, as if it were a single thing and not
just an aggregate of aggregate behaviors, could not keep growing.
In one sense he may be right, the load of potential resources is
limited, but that is not an accurate consideration of how economy
works.  Just as niches in an ecosystem multiply with species 
radiation, deepening and enriching it, so to do niches within 
economy multiply with more and greater complexity making 
greater use of the same resource flows.

In effect, rather than dividing economics from biology and 
environmental concern it might be more to the benefit of
progress to utilize economics in a more complemental
relationship.

thanks--mel

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