It is no coincidence that the genuine progress indicator an alternative to gross national product , which measures quality of life, has also been decreasing since the s Kubiszewski et al.
The humans of the Anthropocene are changing the climate, decimating the biodiversity, and reducing the productivity of the biosphere. Can these trends be reversed? Unfortunately, the answers depend on objective scientific analysis, which is missing from this book. It is not enough to recognize the problems and suggest optimistic solutions. It is necessary to do a rigorous scientific evaluation: Assemble the relevant data; do the arithmetic to estimate the energy, material, and socioeconomic costs; and draw the logical conclusions.
It is not enough simply to assert what should be done; one must show quantitatively what needs to be done and how it could practically and politically be accomplished in time to avert catastrophe.
The problems are compounded, because in our complex, interconnected world, actions to address some SDGs will make others worse. We know that anthropogenic climate change could be reversed if we stopped burning fossil fuels.
But such energy deprivation would have a devastating impact on all of Sachs's social objectives. Politicians and economists would have to abandon the holy grail of economic growth and prepare for a rapid, drastic reduction in the global population and standard of living.
Those in the first category might actually be accomplished. These include reductions in disease and poverty and increases in health services and education. Recent progress toward these goals might be continued as long as the global economy holds up. But consider the reason: These SDGs do not call for major sacrifices by most people, and they profit individuals and corporations in developed countries that sell goods, services, and information to the developing world. The SDGs in the second category are biophysically impossible, because they violate the laws of nature.
Following Sachs's graph 6. This is clearly impossible in the foreseeable future. China currently uses more than 20 percent of global energy production. In the next few decades, renewable energy sources will make increasing but only modest contributions. The global economy will continue to be fueled by burning diminishing reserves of fossil fuels, with the attendant emission of carbon dioxide and the exacerbation of climate change. The increasing impacts of cultivating crops, harvesting fish and wood, extracting minerals, and dispersing pollutants are damaging ecosystems and decimating biodiversity.
The SDGs in the third category are unrealistic, because they ignore realities of human behavior. Humans are constitutionally incapable of making the necessary sacrifices. Doing so would violate the Malthusian—Darwinian dynamic, the biological imperative that causes all organisms to favor themselves and their family, social group, and nation state over all others Nekola et al.
This is mostly a picture book, but its photographs show a grim reality that contrasts with Sachs's misleading optimism. Brown JH et al.
Macroecology meets macroeconomics: Resource scarcity and global sustainability Ecological Engineering 65 24 Google Scholar. Google Preview. Ultimately, at the intellectual level, the North is a mind-set that is very much present in the South. But this doesn't detract from issue of poverty and starvation. How do we tackle this problem? The lesson of the last four or five decades -- the development decades -- is that if a dignified and secure lifestyle has to be increased, growth has to handled very carefully.
Growth that undercuts the very security of life has to be avoided. Are you suggesting a zero growth rate? By this reckoning, quantitative measures of growth are not as important as the quality of the growth that is achieved. What kind of quality would you like? I would hesitate to answer because I am not entitled to comment on Southern economies. However, even within the North, growth is based on a catch up, keep up principle, which leads to lifestyles that are restricted to a few people.
For instance, in Germany, not everyone owns a car because if everybody did, the whole country would be transformed into a parking lot.
Any new form of growth produces new forms and layers of relative poverty. Therefore, growth has to be handled very carefully. What's happening in Germany, and I suspect in many Southern countries, is that by pushing growth, a continuous modernisation of poverty is taking place. Basically, a minimum level of growth is necessary to ensure a minimum quality of life.
There is a lower limit to equality, which requires a minimum level of technological development to achieve social justice. But the experience of the North shows that there is an upper limit to justice and equality. Once you go beyond this, the possibility of an equal and just society is excluded. Can you cite any examples of this? The most conspicuous example is that of automobile use in Germany.
Though most households have a car, it is normally available only to the male in the family, the one who goes to work. In the past years, the quality of life for women, children, the elderly and those with less money has deteriorated continuously because of this.
Mobility may have grown, but it has also been accompanied by the immobility of a large majority. But in India, the problem is 40 per cent of the population is below the poverty line. In addition, one set of Northerners tells us that development and growth is the solution, while you, another Northerner, tell us that it is bad. What does one do? In that sense, there's no North or South -- both are full of conflicts and both have people with different views and ideals.
History is ultimately the story of these different aspirations, these competing conceptions of good and bad. There is no final Northern standpoint or Southern standpoint. What I am talking about is a minority Northern point of view. I have taken on the challenge of trying to conceptualise a world that is sustainable and just. Townsend have proven that we can't grow our way out of poverty and environmental degradation.
Sustainable economic growth is impossible, since the economy is an open subsystem of the Earth's ecosystem, which is finite, non-growing, and materially closed. As the economic subsystem grows, it engulfs more and more of the ecosystem in which it exists and is bound to reach a limit when it 'incorporates' their word percent of the ecosystem, if not before. Thus, the economy's infinite growth is by Nature not sustainable.
And some plant species are actually at war with others," says author Rene Bersma, observing an arrangement by his wife, Atsuko Bersma, Ikebana Sensei. There are selective things we would do well to invest in, like traveling with our minds instead of our bodies. Virtual meetings are where it's at. Buying a round trip ticket for one seat in an airplane from New York to London puts as much CO2 into the atmosphere as a house does in a whole year, so we should look hard for ways to meet virtually, rather than flying around.
If you want to know what the next big trend is, ask kids. They're usually on to something. The virtual book tour is the same concept as flying from city to city doing readings in bookstores, but instead of flying around, the author tours from blog to blog.
That smacks of so much common sense, it's no wonder so many older adults are turning to the honor and purity of YA literature--the average age of a YA reader is now between 30 and 44 years old.
Authors on virtual book tours can stop for an interview with LitPick Co-founder Gary Cassel, where they talk about everything from what inspires them to write books to sharing the Earth with their animal friends. LitPick even has an environmental shelf with over great pre-teen and teen books on it. This unique site allows students to read new and advance books they get for free and then write and publish their opinions about the books.
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