GEOG 352: Day 8GEOG 352: Day 8

Housekeeping ItemsHousekeeping Items I highly recommend a film being shown tonight at

Worldbridger: “Fierce Light” at 7 (by donation) in Building 356, Room 109.

A reminder that next Monday in Room 217, Geography is sponsoring a Career session from 11:30 to 1, featuring alumni and major employers.

I have some literature about a local co-housing/ ecovillage development, and we also need to set dates for the debates. In general we will be pushing the course contents back, but we have some room for adjustment.

Bethany will present on the Cowichan Valley as a case study today.

Membership on TeamsMembership on Teamsdate topic names

Property rights Elissa, Yasmin, Paul S, , Karly

Markets vs. regulation Estella, Leah, Emma

Sprawl or affordable housing

Sarah, Brittany, Paul S.,

Rising tide lifts all boats?

Karen, Tara, Cheymus, Rebecca

Hard work rewarded? Nick, Andrea, Paul L., Shane

Carbon markets Doug, Jeff, Bryan, Derek

How to promote healthy eating

Bethany, Bethany, Meagan, Kris

Whose missing? We need someone in the sprawl and market groups

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)The term sustainable development was first

coined by Barbara Ward and then deployed by the World Conservation Union in 1980.

Porritt makes a distinction between sustainability (the “capacity for continuance into the long-term future”) – which science is telling us we are undermining – and sustainable development (the means for getting there), sometimes treated in the business world as synonymous with triple-bottom line accounting, corporate social responsibility, or stakeholder strategies.

He cites the Brundtland definition, but says...

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)that it does not sufficiently address biophysical limits nor question whether conventional growth and development will 'deliver the goods.‘ (One might also add that it is anthropocentric.)As an alternative, he cites the definition produced by the UK Forum for the Future: “Sustainable development is a dynamic process which enables all people to realize their potential and to improve their quality of life in ways which simultaneously protect and enhance the Earth's life-support systems.” (Any better?)He cites Amartya Sen's belief that conventional development does necessarily provide freedom, which he defines as freedom from poverty, repression, lack of opportunity, etc.

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)He contrasts Sen (one could fill in here many

others) with the institutions representing the 'Washington Consensus' (the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, etc.) as embodying two radically different visions of development.

He suggests that sustainability as an end goal is not hard to specify. It has to embody the preservation of nature's ability to provide resources, its ability to assimilate wastes through various sinks, and to provide services (climate regulation, soil replenishment, pollination, etc.). One could define sustainability as preservation of a constant stock of natural capital, at least overall.

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt cites The Natural Step approach

developed by Swede Karl-Henrik Robert, and deployed in Whistler and Canmore, and elsewhere:

decrease, don't increase the extraction of substances from the Earth's crust;

replace persistent and unnatural compounds with biodegradable ones;

minimize the degradation of natural systems in the course of resource extraction and land use activities;

ensure that human needs are met worldwide.

He also discusses Jared Diamond, whose book Collapse we will talk about later.

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)He notes that Tony Blair's government

talked a good line, and had good policies on paper, but caved into the status quo on all the tough issues.

He also notes the tendency of social justice and development organizations to treat environmental issues as a frill, and for environmental organizations to depoliticize such issues as if real people were not affected.

Fortunately, that is beginning to change as both sides realize that the issues are inextricably interwoven (examples?). Nonetheless, the 'new agenda' has not been able to make much of a dent at election time.

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)He notes with alarm the situation in the U.S.

where, as of 2002, 59% of all American adults believed in the prophecies of the Book of Revelations and that they are imminent. As broadcaster Bill Moyers has said, “the delusional is no longer marginal.”

Since, if one is one of God’s elect, the end of the world is to be welcomed, why worry about environmental decay?

Not only are close to 50% of all Congressmen funded and supported by the evangelical right, but under Bush there was an attempt to dismantle every major piece of environmental legislation since the 1960s – not to mention tamper with and rewrite the findings of scientists.

Whether that will change under Obama remains to be seen. He has already re-opened drilling in the Gulf without additional safeguards.

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt is very critical of traditional

environmentalists. He argues that they haven't (at least in the past) built coalitions, addressed economic issues, spoken to the disenfranchised, have tended to be technocratic, and have focused on what they are against instead of what they are for, and thus have failed to inspire. Is this true of David Suzuki and others that you can think of?

He claims that sustainability proponents need to win 'hearts and minds' in the way that Martin Luther King did in the '60s. Any examples of where this is occurring?

Porritt (Chapter 2)Porritt (Chapter 2)He finally suggests that the struggle has

to be carried into the taboo territory of traditional economics, whose doctrines and dogmas must be held up to close scrutiny.

It seems that, while many economists are well-meaning individuals, their ideology has provided the intellectual varnish and justification for the status quo in the same way that the Catholic Church sanctioned feudalism as constituting the “natural order.” Economics has done the same for a socially and ecologically destructive form of capitalism.