Everyday ecology

The ecological paradigm is gaining more and more admirers.  Proper eating, clothes from natural (“environmentally friendly”) materials, food security, energy conservation, energy-efficient technology, renewable energy sources…  Today, the majority of people in one way or another are keen on at least one of the above topics.  Ecology, and Green industries, legislation, and ecotechnology – all of these concepts have become familiar terms, but they are still poorly understood: in large part, ecology implies clean air and water; the Green economy – cleaner facilities; and ecotechnology – any new thing the cranks can think up.  Interesting, amusing, perhaps even right—but it all exists somewhere in the depths of science, in the industrially developed countries, among the incomprehensible “Greens.”

But in this life, people don’t change: just as before, few people really turn out the light when they leave a room, turn off the faucet when they brush their teeth, check the ingredients and expiration date when they buy groceries, buy appliances with energy economy in mind, and so on.

The word “ecology,” itself, literally means “concept” or “study” (logos) about one’s place of locality, habitation, or dwelling (eco).  Ecology cannot be “bad” or “good”: the study of one’s dwelling, home, or surrounding environment either is or isn’t.  Only the state of one’s living environment can be good or bad.  And what determines this state?  Why are more and more places on this planet becoming uninhabitable?  Why are there more deserts, shallower rivers, and more weather anomalies?  Why is the climate changing? 

But, here there arises an interesting detail.  If we begin from very long ago—that is, from the creation of the World—we will immediately notice that despite the external didactics of the previous paragraph, the world has a purely practical nature. 

The consumption of resources (not just of energy, but of resources themselves) began practically from the moment that humankind appeared: dwellings must be kept warm, food must be prepared, and various everyday demands must be satisfied.  Simply put, any “way of life” is directly connected with—if you will—the culture of consumption. 

Now this is what’s interesting.  From the beginning, it is taught in practically every world philosophy or religion (be it Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, or various other schools of thought) not to take from nature in excess.  And excess is that which does not make humankind better off.  In other words, wastefulness, greed, and extravagance in one’s consumption was considered an obstacle on the path towards Divine being.  Without going into the philosophy of this, we will note only that free time from righteous labor was supposed to be spent serving God, although this service took many various forms, as in all religions, God was not only the “Higher mind,” Parabrahman, Allah, or Jehovah.  God was that which is highest within the human being, that Divine hypostasis which makes a human “in the image and likeness of God.”  Within this paradigm, there is a solid foundation from which humankind is falling into an abyss.  It is founded in a simple physical law: the more humans take, the more they should give back—in its own way, a type of Law of Conservation of Energy.  Humans, and humankind as a whole, are by definition responsible for their own surrounding environment.  And if the surrounding environment becomes unfit, then the blame for this lies completely and wholly with the human community. 

To many, it still seems that this is philanthropic reasoning, all well and good as long as it doesn’t interfere with “money matters.”  If the question should arise—philanthropy or profit?—then there is only one answer: in the business world, there is no place for philanthropy. 

But, we return to our present topic.  The formation of our consumer relationship with the world went on for centuries.  There arose the idea of comfort, the idea of luxury, there arose banks and credit, and profit and percentage rates soon took possession of peoples’ minds…  And along with this (practically simultaneously!), there loomed up the phantom of natural resource exhaustion: it became clear that unbounded cutting leads to deforestation, dehydration, and desertification; that the only right way to avoid floods is not to build dams, but to preserve forests and ban settling on the flood zone; that hydrocarbons (oil, gas, coal) are not limitless; that swamps and marshes are not just a storeroom for peat, but a fragile water catchment system…a lot of things became clear.  It is enough to mention the sad case of Italy, whose environment could not be restored after the destructive clear-cutting of its mountains: the forest on Italy’s rocky shores never grew back.

But, back to business.

The limits of natural resources were also noted by Malthus in his celebrated work, “Essay on population,” in which his founding thesis was that population grows in a geometric progression, while the ability of nature and of the State to satisfy the demands of the population, grow in an arithmetic progression.  Therefore, sooner or later, the planet’s resources will begin to limit population growth, which will cause social complications…  As a matter of fact, this exact thesis laid the foundation for the so-called “golden billion” ideology. 

Here we should add that what is important in this process is not so much population growth as the fact that the appetite of a certain part of this population (that “golden billion” which constitutes about 1/6 of the humanity) is growing with ever-increasing speed, incommensurably outstripping population growth.  This became especially clear in the 19-20^th Centuries. 

Mathus’ theory has many opposition, as well as many followers.  You can agree with it or contest it, but on one point in particular, Malthus was absolutely right: the planet’s resources are limited.  One example is this: anti-consumerist activists calculated that if every citizen of China could simultaneously increase his consumption to the level of a resident of Europe or North America, then the planet’s resources would completely disappear within days.  And this is only 25% of the population of the planet.  It turns out that if the population of the entire Earth suddenly reached European consumption standards, then the planet’s resources would last for about six hours.  Six!...  But humanity continues, just as before, to strive towards overindulgence.  

It’s understandable that the planet’s resources are not limitless.  And the theory of “ecological capacity,” developed by the Canadian ecologist, William Rees, convincingly illustrates this obvious statement.  The theory poses the Tolstoyan question: how much land does one person need to satisfy his basic necessities, absorb his bodily wastes, and achieve the self-restoration of its resources?  It is necessary to also account for those factors, which allow an ecosystem to self-regenerate, without which its “capacity” will experience steady decline.  A publication of the World Wildlife Fund—the Living Planet Report—calculated this land area (Rees called it an “ecological footprint”) for different countries of the world.  The results were very curious. 

It is shown that the populations of the developed countries have such big feet—that is, they consume so many resources and produce so much waste—that the “ecological capacity” required by one person (taking into account natural regeneration) is calculated to be between five and ten hectares, depending on where they live.  Meanwhile, in developing countries, the ecological footprint is a more modest 0.5 hectares. 

And how much “ecological capacity” does humanity as a whole have at its disposal?  According to the calculations in the Living Planet Report, by today’s population, this “capacity” comes to 1.9 hectares.  If people consumed and polluted the ecosphere at levels which would not exceed the regenerating capacity of this land area, then the Earth would be able to replenish its resources and provide for the entire current population.  So by these calculations, consumption and pollution are already such that an average of 2.3 hectares per person is needed to replenish resources.  It’s clear that this position is the fault of the developed countries.  But, what does it mean that humanity is using a greater “ecological capacity” than the planet actually has?  The answer: the ecosphere as a whole simply is not restoring itself up to previous levels.  And with each year, by measures of the growth of consumption of each country and population growth as a whole, the resources available for safe human use of the ecosphere are becoming fewer.

We are “eating up” that which must stay in the ecosphere for our descendents.  So, today there is no need to ask the old classic, “How much land does a person ‘need?’”  The answer is well-known: more than nature will allow. 

We should specify that here, the word “need” does not imply the actual necessities of a human, but his or her desires and whims.

At the very least, this is illustrated by the example of fresh water: its supply has decreased by a third in the last 20 years, and at current consumption rates, will decrease by at least this much again in the next 20.  People have learned to desalinate water, but at the expense of emitting waste into the atmosphere.  All of this, concludes Professor Riis, presents science and technology of the 21^st Century with the urgent task of finding ways to restore and increase the vitally necessary resources of the ecosphere—and faster than the population is growing.  There are examples in history of sharp population growth leading to the disappearance of major resources of one region or another.  The result was always crisis and the crumbling of entire cultures and even civilizations.  If something similar were to occur now, humanity would stand before an unprecedented ecological crisis of global scales.  It could begin with war for water or oil, for example, but how it would end, no one can say. 

The reasons for such avaricious growth in consumption lie in the foundations of those same philosophical systems.  Without being able to lay out here all of the anti-consumerist aspects of the world religions, we will just note one aspect: if a person allows himself excess and does not subsequently give anything back, he is violating far more than one commandment.  If he happens to believe in reincarnation and karma, then he would have to take responsibility for this extravagance and would be severely punished.  If he believes in a unique life and the existence of Purgatory, then he would be dooming himself to eternal suffering for that same extravagance, by God’s grace.  And if he is an atheist, then he would simply become a common criminal, since he has robbed future generations, and not only his own children. 

How did such a pernicious passion for consumption become the rule?  Why has consumerism (the ideology of consumption), like rust, eaten away at practically all religious and philosophical teachings?  How did our lives come to depend on the abundance in our economy of specific, but absolutely not necessary, and even harmful things? 

This process is directly related to the informational campaign, as a result of which the consumerist paradigm, like a swarm of locusts, has begun to devour our senses, time, and resources.  It is always trying to convince us that the most important thing in a person’s life is the size of his or her shopping cart.  And so it happens that the opportunity and volume of consumption have become a philosophical foundation for the majority of our citizens…

And here there arises another interesting detail.  The process of devouring the planet with our society of consumption has brought us to a certain threshold of human environmental impact.  In the middle of the 90s, humanity passed a so-called “point of no return”: the destruction caused by humans’ desire to consume became irreversible. 

You could argue endlessly about the role (and share) that humans have taken in desertification, dehydration, and climate change, but the fact that human activity has resulted in less and less remaining land suitable for human habitation is a tangible fact.  Supporting this is the growth in the number of anthropogenic natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, different types of erosion, and so on. 

With such stress inflicted on the planet by anthropogenic means, it is simply not in any condition to satisfy the needs of humanity and break down its wastes: humans demand too much.

Furthermore, it has “suddenly” become clear that someone has to pay for this incessant devouring of the planet.  It turns out that all of these catastrophes have fully defined commercial costs.  Not hypothetical, not from the point of view of one or another religion, but in real numbers, out of monetary returns.  The question is simply whether humanity will succeed in at least applying the brakes in its downfall. 

We have borrowed too much from nature and from future generations: greedily using resources, and creating and satisfying unwarranted and exorbitant “needs.”  The time has come to return this debt.

How can we change this situation?  And, more importantly, what can any single person do in his or her apartment?  Or any single staff in its office?  Or workshop?  Or factory?  Or any single city neighborhood?  Or any single…and so forth.

Answers to these questions fall into three categories.

The first category is “Ecology in everyday life.” This consists of recommendations and advice for the “environmentalization” of the life of each individual person – how to reduce one’s “ecological footprint.”  And fundamental to such an individual “environmentalization” are denying oneself a relationship of consumption with nature,  resource conservation, reduction of energy use, and so on. 

Another group of ecological answers, we call “Technology of the 21^st Century.”  By this, we mean that such technologies conform to more harmonistic human coexistence with the environment.  As a rule, such harmonistic technology is based on many centuries of human experience, which are emerging as new technological solutions in our age (say, the evolution of windmills into wind turbines). 

The uniqueness of technology of the 21^st Century is that it can be applied by private users in their summer home, or by large industrial enterprises.  The Fund for 21^st Century Altai is also involved in projects promoting the use of new, resource-conserving technologies.