People and Food

Anderson's article was by far the most controversial piece that we read for Thursday.  The article discussed how technology can be tailored to create "ideal humans".  The article reminded me of much that I recall from Holocaust literature.  People can choose what sort of children to have, and they can pick the characteristics that they deem "best" and delete (in one way or another) those children that do not have those desired characteristics.  For example, someone who favors the environment might choose to have shorter children that have an aversion to meat and great empathy for others around the globe who have to suffer through the effects of their Earth pollution.  One other suggestion broached in the article is that people could be limited to one or two offspring.  However, as China's one-child policy has illustrated, if people are forced to only have one child, they tend to get rid of female offspring (in one way or another).  If the same could be done for other characteristics, think of how the world would look.  It would lack the diversity of phenotypes and genotypes that makes the world such a cool place to live and reproduce in.

Somerville's article addressed how developed countries try to institute their own morals on developing countries, often by insisting that they not follow their practices.  Now, we are trying to get our own pollution down, and we are also realizing the errors of pollution in general.  However, the pollution problem mainly stems from Western greed, in one way or another.  Western greed has led to a massive number of new power plants and factories, putting out waste that has resulted in greenhouse gas pollution.  Western greed has turned rainforests into banana plantations, logging land, and cattle farms, resulting in more greenhouse gas pollution.  Through this, we have gotten rich, at least some people have, and these rich people are now trying to pass international laws to make sure that others don't follow their example.  However, they have already reaped the benefits of this, and they are not willing to share any of the wealth that they have earned at great environmental costs.  It seems like, and is indeed, a double standard.

FOOD
The Chicago food pamphlet highlighted that many neighborhoods, particularly the poor and minority communities, have unequal access to local grocery stores and non-fast-food restaurants.  These people are at an extreme disadvantage, and suffer negative health consequences.  In fact, these people, through obesity, diabetes and other diseases, can even have their life shortened. In the US, 6 in 10 people are overweight, and 1 in 3 are obese.  In addition, an average American consumes half of their meals outside their home (i.e. in restaurants).  Finally, race, education level and income are the biggest indicators of future health.  These statements alone define how much class distinction really effects America.  As I told my students while discussing Hinduism, the US has a far more stringent class system than most Americans realize, particularly those privileged enough to attend the U of I as an undergrad.

Pollan discussed the changing food culture of our world, particularly the change from hunter-gatherer society, where food was an integral part of life and we had to work and care for each meal, to one where food is a by-product, something that is disposable, we take for granted, and never see the origin of.  The closest we get to gathering and hunting food is shopping for food in one of the supermarkets in town.  These establishments provide many different food options, regardless of the season, all in one location.  We no longer have a relationship with wild animals and plants, instead we crave McDonalds french fries and TV dinners.  Through this, most Americans have distanced themselves even from the raw ingredients through which their food emerges.  Finally, corn plays too important a role in the US food economy.  We have basically become a monocropped society, where everything from flour to animal feed to syrup and starch comes from corn.

Climate and Market Solutions / Collapse

Climate and Market Solutions

These readings encompassed a lot of discussion on how markets impact the climate change discussion, and how they influence emissions and policy decisions as well.  Rood and Thoumi discussed how the economy influences carbon emissions, specifically discussing the "carbon market".  Carbon production seems to indicate economic success, at least in the minds of economists.  Carbon emissions indicate a thriving energy system.  All of the articles seemed to emphasize a cap on emissions, which would allow companies that are regular emitters to have a certain amount that they can emit, and if they use under their allotted amount, they can sell their emission credits to bigger emitting companies.  One of the drawbacks to any change in the policies, especially those that just limit emissions without trying to stop it in total, is that the effect of cutting emissions is not realized until years after the action is taken, making companies and countries delay action until their reign is over.

Jasanoff reading:

This reading emphasized the problems with climate science.  One issue with it, is that it goes against social institutions and ethical commitments in four different concrete ways: (1) communal, (2) political, (3) spatial, (4) temporal.  It tends to deny anything to do with social science, focusing instead on graphs and diagrams and predictions that distance itself from anything that a lay person would be able to relate to.

Science used to mirror nature, but now it has become impersonal, distanced from meaning.  Those meanings would have been derived from shared experiences and glimpses of a shared environment.  However, science paints the environment as a system that seems to need science and technology, while distancing itself from social and cultural settings, thus creating a dichotomy between natural and cultural worlds.

Climate change, as mentioned in the economic papers, does not exist over lenths of time that we perceive.  

(1) Community: Science does not relate to human existence, or living.  Instead, it distances itself from everything to do with social sciences.

(2) Politics: People live in defined territorial boundaries, with different governments, different regulations that have different rates of production, power, pollution, etc.

(3) Space: People have gradually come to realize private property, spawning the "not in my back yard" movement.  However, climate change encompasses whole earth, not bending or dividing itself between nations, spaces or political factions.

(4) Time: People seem to only think in near-future, and short-term time increments, not in longer, earth-like times.

Rees:

The ability of planet to sustain life should not be taken for granted.  This article emphasized that humans are products of evolution, with ingrained behaviors that we evolved to solve problems, which also end up not being helpful to todays world.  Genetically, we are inclined to expand to occupy all habitats and use all available resources.  Through energy use, biomass consumption, etc. we have exceeded our original constraints and taken over the planet in remarkable and destructive ways.  We have exercised our evolved need to keep up with others, using evolving technology.  Now, everything is accessible, we are beyond carrying capacity.  The article ended with the dichotomy of a conflicted humanity: reason/moral justifications for saving the earth and inborn, destructive survival mechanisms. 

Markets and Solutions

As the articles we read for this section emphasized, most significantly in Klein's piece, climate change does not jive with a right-wing worldview.  In fact, decreasing numbers of conservative voters even acknowledge the existence of global warming.  Klein's reasoning behind this increasing ignorance is the defense of capitalism and the free market.  These ideologies emphasize the jobs created through free market enterprises, while ignoring the negative impacts of the raw material mining, the energy usage, and the emissions behind these enterprises.

Companies that export products like oil, food, and other necessities are making money off of the ever increasing price of these resources.  Since the prices continue to climb, the eventual result of this inflation will either be to exploit increasing areas to extract these resources, or that these resources will run out, leaving the world without its raw resources (NY Times).

Lovins and Hawken's chapter 12 discussion focus on the significance of fossil fuels and the possibility of energy efficiency.  Hawken specifically emphasized co and tri-generation, which are different levels of energy reuse.  Co-generation makes use of heat, instead of adding that to the atmosphere, increasing the global temperature.  Tri-generation reuses the heat and uses it to provide a number of services.  Hawken further emphasized that, from a capitalist perspective, these new forms of energy efficiency would create new jobs instead of just killing old ones that fueled deleterious energy economies.

Chapter 5 of Superfreakonomics discussed the movements behind climate change arguments.  They argue that the climate change movement feels like a religion of sorts: that people are the source of this problem and the solution is to repent of our energy sins and return to a minimalist lifestyle.  One of the main arguments of the chapter is that too little is being done too late and that we are too optimistic about the outcomes.  One example of this is that people buy more energy efficient cars, and drive them to the supermarket to buy meat and dairy products, that are obtained from animals that emit methane gases on a massive scale.  People need to internalize the external costs of energy use.  These costs are not easily perceived, and might not be immediately felt, but they are present nonetheless.

Economics and Environment

Constanza:
      Constanza looked into the value of ecosystems, and how ecosystem functions are a natural capital source.  The article examined how people attempt to place values on nature and ecosystems, mostly by solely seeing them as categories of services and supply and demand curves.  The given estimate was $33 trillion.  However, this estimate does not consider how much nature plays a role in our lives beyond the economic value.  Ecosystems deserve to exist independent of human need or want, and they deserve the respect and care that every organism also needs.  Humans are not the sole inhabitants of this planet, and the sooner we realize this, the easier life will be.  When other life forms are allowed to live and exist in harmony and symbiosis with us, our own life will improve.

Wackernagel:
     Wackernagel discussed how much humans depend on nature.  The major focus of this article was on the ecological footprint of populations, specifically the national footprint.  In some cases, most notably in the U.S., the national footprint exceeds what is available for this nation.  This excessive use of resources and excess in waste production forces other nations to compensate for this usage.

Daly (whole book):
     Daly's book was neck-deep in economic jargon, making it difficult for me to wade through.  The beginning and ending arguments (the flow from North -> South, and the influence of religion) were easier for me to grasp, in contrast to the formulas and theories presented in the middle of the book.  The economic flow from North to South has been documented across different disciplines with different interested parties taking note of different angles of this flow.  For the purposes of this book, Daly focused on how this economic flow puts the South at an extreme disadvantage.

Daly also discussed how the economy interacts with the ecosystem, and how models focus more on either the economy or the ecosystem and usually not on both equally.  Daly discussed the pre-analytic vision of the economy as a subsystem of the ecosystem.  Nature really doesn't care too much if, through a hurricane for example, it destroys the economic center of a country (such as what happened in Belize for years until they moved the capitol city inland).  Another example of the economy being a subsystem of the ecosystem is that the economy is often shaped by resources, such as oil/natural gas/coal, that are natural products of the earth.  Again, nature does not depend on economics, but economics on the ecosystem.

In terms of ethicosocial limits, he outlined four different options: (1) desirability of growth, financed by geological capital, is limited by the cost to future generations, (2) desirability of growth, financed by the takeover of habitats, is limited by extinction or restriction of species, (3) desirability of growth is limited by self-canceling effects on welfare, (4) desirability of growth is limited by corrosive effects on moral standards.

The GNP (gross national product) is a distorted measure based on the value of some services + the value of throughput + the value of change in accumulated stocks and funds.  This is not a good test of overall wealth, but it is what has been used to measure this, via economics, for years.

The Plimsoll Line is the absolute optimal scale of a load, or a load that does not result in a sinking ecosystem.  This is built on allocation, distribution and scale.  Scale refers to the size of the economy relative to the ecosystem.  Welfare is the service of want satisfaction.  Often nations do not realize that their natural capital, or ability to satisfy population welfare, is based on a source that is taken for granted.  This allows some nations to prosper and others to fall into the debt of other nations.  However, nations need to realize that the natural capital comes in both renewable and non-renewable resources.

Finally, the book discusses family planning and religion in relation to environmental challenges.  Population pressures weigh on natural resources, reducing what might already be a limited source.  In addition, religion could help environmental causes, since their sources often insist that God has credited them with sustaining and maintaining the environment.