The Future of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle

You can breathe a sigh of relief, this will be my last post on Sustainability and hopefully we can return to the topic at hand - development.
The follow excerpt is from another article I wrote (for my church newsletter of all things) which tries summarize the ideas I've put forward in previous posts.

Reduce
It seems to me that the main theme in this latest era of environmentalism is “reduce”: we need to reduce what we use, our global footprint, what we pump into the atmosphere, etc. Although there are scientific reasons why we may need to protect the environment, for many people it has not hit home; environmental actions we take are done voluntarily, out of a gut feeling of altruism rather than from a real understanding of how dependent we are on the environment. As such, The Environment is often not as important to the populace as The Economy or Society issues. In the recent Ontario election debates I didn’t hear a single candidate put the environment ahead of the economy with the possible exception of Mike Schreiner of the Green Party, but even he usually went on to mention jobs and the economy in the same breath. Influential people, such as David Suzuki, have tried for years to demonstrate how inextricably linked humanity is with the natural environment, hoping to give us the ‘wake-up call’ we need to change our ways and put the environment first. They may finally get their wish.
We are now at a point where Mother Earth does not cough up her resources so freely and so, on top of reducing what we use, it is often cheaper to reuse and recycle that which we have already extracted. Increasingly we see many “green” endeavors undertaken for economic reasons. For example, I have little doubt that the recent FIT program here in Ontario (which encourages people to install solar or wind generators) was largely an economic wager to offset the cost of significant upgrades to our electrical system.

Reuse
It seems to me that we are now entering an era of ‘reuse’, a time when the ‘reduce’ no longer needs to be preached but is a natural way to protect our pocket books. We are beginning to reuse and to some extent recycle in ways previous generations never thought possible or necessary. In this age, the true value of our natural resources begins to emerge and we can no longer afford to take them for granted.

Recycle
In the future, another era may begin to emerge -one of recycling. At this time our society will be in a much different place than it is now. People will not have the resources (economic or otherwise) to extract and create what they want; reducing and reusing will be unquestionable aspects of daily life. In order to get ahead people will begin to recycle and recover resources that past generations have discarded as worthless.

Era of	System at the Forefront	Spokesperson
Reducing	Environment	David Suzuki, enough said
Reusing	Economy	Hermann Scheer has a book called “Energy Autonomy” in which he moves the case for environmentalism beyond the environment and begins to talk about the economy and society.
Recycling	Politics and Society	Thomas Homer-Dixon talks about how complex systems need energy to sustain them. He provides a convincing argument that, unless a source of energy can be found to replace fossil fuels, our economy and society are in for some big changes.

Complex Systems

Here’s another way of looking at this progression. I have attended some presentations about ‘complex systems’ and often the speaker introduces the talk about how the environment, the economy or society, are all examples of complex systems. One perspective is that in reality there is only one complex system, the natural environment, and it is the foundation for these other complex systems for which we like to take credit. If we accept that the economy and even our society and politics are simply extensions of the environment then it logically follows that if we destroy or neglect the environment, these other systems risk collapse. It may be too early to say, but possibly someday people will be able to demonstrate how the current economic crises in the United States and Europe are early indicators of damage to the natural environment - but that’s another conversation. Unfortunately, in the name of the “economy” I think governments, most notably our own, are looking to extract even more natural resources in a flailing attempt to prop up our fiscal systems.

In summary, I am not saying the end of the world is near, but rather I hope to help people (and I include myself) cross over to a solid understanding of why we need to protect the environment. If we can reach that understanding on our own, rather than having it forced upon us, we’ll be far better off.

How does this relate to development. Most people in the developing world live in fairly sustainable manner but are largely unaware of this. The irony is that we are increasingly aware of how unsustainable our lifestyle is and yet don't (or can't) do anything about it. I said it before in other ways but development work needs to include a component of helping people understand the broader implications of how they live which implies doing development work in the developed world.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

ps I'm just starting to read Thomas Homer-Dixon's, "The Upside of Down" and I think he's going to say all that I've been trying to say in a much clearer way.

Perspectives on Fragile States

I would like to take a step back from linking fragile states to our [the western world] security. Searching for lists of fragile states I realized that a good number of these failed states would also show up on historical lists of being recipients of western intervention and aid. This is right back to this blog's namesake, Easterly's "White Man's Burden", since this is exactly the analysis that he performs on a number of countries.

So we have the situation where governments and/or other international bodies, such as the IMF, exerted external pressures on a government in order to get it to "shape up" and become just like the rest of the, fairly homogenous, western world. Then a few years down the road, when those pressures and expectations simply do not mesh well with the traditions and cultures of the country, we distance ourselves from the situation, wag our finger and say, "Woah, stay away from them, they are a fragile state. They're insecure, relating with them could be unsafe." (Who else sees the analogies to current socio-economic stratification between individual people here in North America?)

Encouraging internationally a generic form of government, which the US is so keen to do in the form of democracy, is exactly like imposing outside technology when doing development work. (On a side note, I just got news that my work from the past three years has unraveled even faster than I thought possible, which was already pretty fast.) So as aid agencies "discover" that local problems have local solutions, when are we going to make the jump to political institutions?

Please watch this four minute BBC interview with Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, a former British Ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Israel. The last 30 seconds of this clip say it all... (apologies to those with slow internet.) In summary, Cowper-Coles says the key to a stable Middle East is to provide the youth with education and jobs as well as a representative government, not necessarily a Western liberal democracy.

Without promoting a no-government influence Tea-Party type perspective, I think we have to come to the realization that when trying to unnaturally influence and cajole extremely complex systems to move in a direction we feel at the time is the right direction, then the end result is often very undesirable, even in the rare instances when the system did move where we wanted. Science has begun to see this in ecological systems (an introduction of foreign species has unintended consequences), development studies are beginning to understand this (the real development or progress rarely results from the planned activities), and I think one could even find historical examples in the Roman empire or the Catholic church.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, this could even be the case for economic and political systems. We have yet to understand the full effects of all the bail-outs going on around the world whether it's GM in North America or Greece in Europe. Similarly, we simply have not learned from our history of trying to influence politics in Afghanistan and yet we still are sticking our noses in there. Just like unnaturally preventing forest fires annually resulted in massive, unpreventable fires every few years, falsely supporting or even toppling governments will continue to have some unintended consequences, including possibly making this world more insecure for the rest of us.

Kurtis (in Waterloo)

ps. This is a fairly laissez-faire perspective. Ie, hands off, things will sort themselves out, which I tend NOT to agree with, I think there are a number of strong anti-laissez-faire examples from complex systems which I have not mentioned at all. Please, comment away!