People and The Earth:
Our Changing Relationship

Setting the stage for life on Earth
In the vast reaches of space our blue green planet circles around its star - the sun's energy animates the land and moves the water and the air. For billions of years this process has supported life.

Elementary life forms have prepared the way for us; for eons they've eaten away at the bare rock building up the masses of nutrients needed to maintain more complex forms of life.

Daily and seasonal cycles of heating and cooling helped to break up rocks. Countless rainfalls washed exposed surfaces. Simple forms of life found ways to draw out nutrients and synthesize additional materials which they needed for their living forms. As the process continued, loose material accumulated and various organisms found safe habitat in it. The more organisms that lived and died in the developing soils, the more nutrients there were for plants to feed on. With growing reserves of soil and abundant plant life growing from it, the stage was set for animals, first smaller then larger more complex beings. Practically everything taken from the soil by plants and animals returned to it. The soils became richer and more abundant.

All the nutrient elements readily available for use by living things, along with all the material currently caught up in their physical forms is known as the "biomass." "Biological capital" is the biomass plus the profusion of different ways in which life assembles itself. This is the genetic resource of species.

Van Helmont's experiment
The life process has long been a matter of interest and study for curious minds.

At the dawn of our scientific age, a Dutch biologist, Jean Baptist Van Helmont conducted an experiment. In 1652 he wrote:

"I took an earthen vessel in which I put 200 pounds of soil dried in an oven, then I moistened it and pressed into it a shoot of willow weighing five pounds.

After exactly five years the tree that had grown weighed 169 pounds and about three ounces, but the vessel had never received anything but rain water or distilled water

... in the end I dried the soil once more, weighed it and got the same 200 pounds I started with, less about two ounces."

This experiment provides hope for today, because it showed that most of the substance that made up the willow tree's mass, 169 pounds, came from air and water only, air and water that can be found practically every place on Earth. It means that if what we want from the Earth is a good, healthy life for ourselves and our children, the basic demands we make on the planet are minimal.
The basics of human security need not detract from the health of the living Earth. Food, clothing, shelter, health care, companionship and challenge can all be provided for, within and from the natural cycles of the Earth's substance.

Through our imagination and creativity, however, we have found much else to desire. Some of it can be maintained within the Earth's cycles, some of it can not. If being alive, healthy and secure is not satisfying in itself, satisfaction will always be illusive, and there will be no end to the list of things we want. Feeding such endless desires can easily detract from the ability of others to provide for their own basic needs.

In the wealthy parts of the world, amidst the endless array of brightly packaged consumer goods, we often fail to appreciate the role of natural ecological systems and resources in sustaining our lives. Yet our survival is dependent on a global balance between what the Earth needs to maintain ecological health and the demands we make on it.

Our spirits and our ability to create are thoroughly enmeshed
in the stuff of the Earth.
Our thoughts feelings and imagination have no boundaries. But does our body have a boundary? Most of us would say it does - our skin. However if we consider all the things that cross that boundary in both directions, we would see ourselves in a different light.

In the illustration above, the rope passes continuously into the knot at one end, and out the other. Before long, the material that originally makes up the knot is entirely replaced by new material, yet the basic pattern of the knot does not change. It is the same with our bodies. Bodily materials change completely every seven years, most of them within a single year, but the basic pattern of our bodies, and of ourselves, remains the same. Most of the substances our bodies will be made of, over the courses of our lives, is outside of our skins right now. All that we have been and all that we will be, is in the soil, water and air about us, our environment. Thus we are literally dumping on ourselves when we release toxins into the environment. On the same basis, if we love ourselves we need also to love the environment, which contains the stuff of our transforming physical forms.

Cycles of Water, Carbon Dioxide and Oxygen
The water present on Earth today is, for the most part, the same water that was here when the planet first cooled.

Water which makes up most of our body continuously cycles all over the earth. Every time you drink something, there are molecules in your glass that have been to every part of the globe. They've come from oceans, lakes, quiet swamps and rushing rivers; from glaciers, rain forests, frost, fog and dew. They've been in clouds, high in the atmosphere and in vast reservoirs deep in the Earth.

Most of the water molecules in your glass have also been in and out of countless other living things. In fact, you may well have shared your drink with every form of life that's ever lived on Earth.

Green plants too are an essential part of ourselves. In a complex series of reactions, plants capture the energy of the sun in the bonds that combine carbon atoms into the molecular chains of simple sugars and starches. These sugars and starches then provide all the energy that the plants use as they grow. They are also the source of all the energy needed by animals that eat plants and, in turn, by animals that eat other animals. Even the lives of bacteria and fungi are ultimately dependent on the work of green plants. These decomposers are powered by releasing small quantities of energy still caught up in dead tissues of the things they consume.

6CO2 + 6H2O + energy <-> C6H12O6 + 60 2
To release the energy bonding the carbon chains together, living things have to take in oxygen. The oxygen helps disassemble the carbon compounds. Carbon dioxide is formed in the process and energy is released. The energy provides life force, and the carbon-dioxide returns to the atmosphere, where it can again be used by plants as they capture the power of the sun.

Through the cycles of carbon, oxygen, water and other materials, the substances that nourish all living things are shared.

Gaia, the living Earth.
The flow of material substance between organisms binds them together in much the same way that the cells of our organs and limbs are bound together by the flow of our blood. From this perspective, all life on Earth can be seen as one single living organism.

Recent studies of the atmosphere have enriched our understanding of the fascinating relationship between our planet and the life it supports. It seems that the atmosphere acts like the feathers of a bird or an animal's fur in that it makes adjustments which maintain a suitable and protective environment for the life it enfolds.

The Gaia hypothesis, as it has come to be called, after the Greek Goddess of the Earth, was formulated by James Lovelock. Dr. Lovelock had been working for the North American Space Administration on a project that sought to develop equipment for detecting life on other planets. They did this by studying the Earth to find signs of life that could be sensed from a distance. The atmosphere, under this investigation, revealed some interesting behavior. The physical nature of the gases found in the atmosphere has been extensively tested. Their behavior in various combinations can thus be predicted by the rules of steady state chemistry. In studying the Earth's atmosphere, however, scientists discovered that it extensively violates the laws of chemistry. The predicted behavior of the gases in the atmosphere should make our planet too hot for any but the most primitive of life forms.

Closer investigations have indicated that the gases of the atmosphere are only a part of the global eco-system. Apparently the rock of the Earth's crust, the oceans, the atmosphere and the life forms they encompass have evolved as a single, tightly-integrated system. The system compensates for changes in the global climate by adjusting the rates at which gases such as oxygen, methane and carbon-dioxide are produced and removed from the atmosphere. This effectively maintains the Earth's climate within the bounds favorable to life as a whole. The observation of this "self-management" has led to the Gaia hypothesis - the hypothesis that the Earth actively maintains conditions suitable for the growth and well-being of living things.

Could it be that all the interconnected life forms on Earth, along with the air, water and soil, have some form of collective life beyond that of the "independent" organisms? For some of us, viewing the Earth as a single living organism is a retrieval of ancient wisdom. But for others it's a new concept with the power to change the way we treat the planet and ourselves.

More detail is available in The Gaia Hypothesis, by James Lovelock.

Long standing chemical stability leaves us unprepared
for the new chemicals that we make
and introduce to the environment.
In the beginning, the Earth was a mass of elemental substances. When life started to build its physical forms, it found much of what it needed already present, and what it didn't find, it learned to make.

Life forms have a greater capacity to synthesize compounds than they actually use. Enough different metabolic tricks are in the repertoire to enable any sort of development that life is inclined to. With few exceptions, the number of chemical substances present on the planet came to a stable state a billion years ago. The substances living things had to deal with were the same for countless generations and effective ways were developed to deal with them when they arrived in places where they were not supposed to be.

Today, however, human beings create thousands of new substances every year that have never before been present on Earth. Some are of no consequence and some present serious problems. Because of the continuous cycling that takes place all over the globe, anything we produce, unless handled with extreme care, will eventually confront life of all sorts. Some products of human creation, like pesticides and ozone-depleting substances, have already caused much harm. It is important that we become responsible with our creative abilities and limit irreversible damage.

To find the consequences of your lifestyle,
start by multiplying what you do by 5.8billion.
Each one of us does very little to harm the environment, but very little multiplied by very many is very much. By the same token, when large numbers of people take positive action, enormous problems can be reversed.

The Collective Human Organism
In the study of ecology, there is a field that deals particularly with populations of organisms. A flock of birds for example, will have behavior patterns that are significant and beyond anything that individuals of the species might exhibit. One wolf eating rabbits would have little effect on rabbit populations or the things that rabbits eat and do. But a population of wolves will effect the very nature of rabbits. It is in the context of populations that balances in ecosystems and impact on the environment are observed.

Considering the human family as a collective organism is even more appropriate because our activities are much more interconnected than those of other organisms. Our interconnected activities are felt by the living world as if they were the actions of one being.

We are found in every inhabitable place on Earth. Millions of acres of our crops mine the nutrients of the soil. We consume whole forests, and mountains. Oil wells are like drinking straws in our mouths.
Viewing the human population as one gigantic whole is helpful as we try to grasp how we little humans can have a significant impact on the life of this enormous planet. It is the size to which humanity as a whole has grown, coupled with the might of the mechanical and chemical technologies we use, that have brought us into confrontation with the natural world.

How big have we grown?

How big can we become?

To answer these questions we need to understand something called exponential growth.

Exponential Growth
Throughout history, we have been a tiny presence on Earth. To a large extent, our images of reality are rooted in customs and traditions which originated when our impact was inconsequential. A look at the accelerating nature of exponential growth helps us to comprehend and eventually feel what our cultural heritage has not prepared us for - that there are limits to what we can do to the Earth.

Exponential growth is the growth of something in size or numbers, in proportion to its increasing size or number. You may have observed in the growth of a plant that the more leaves it has catching sunshine, the faster the rate at which it can grow more leaves. Similarly with human populations, the more people there are, the more babies can be born.

One classic example of exponential growth comes from a legend. The King of Persia offered the inventor of the game of chess anything he wanted as a reward. The reward requested was one grain of wheat for the first square on a chess board, two grains for the second, four for the third, eight, sixteen and so on, doubling for each square.

The King agreed, thinking it a modest request that would cost him little. But . . . the amount of grain for the last square alone would have filled a train of box cars wrapped around the Earth at the equator 25 times.

The King simply didn't understand exponential growth and would have had to give away his entire kingdom!

The reason we are so easily deceived and subsequently astonished by exponential growth is because, at first, the increases seem very small and sustainable. After all, quantities can double hundreds, maybe thousands of times before they become significant. However, at a certain point it takes only a few more doublings for the numbers to become very significant.

Clearly anyone telling you that our growth in material consumption or population can be sustained, is (like the King of Persia) unfamiliar with the nature of exponential growth.

* * *

Notable to exponential growth patterns is the length of time it takes for something to double in quantity. The larger the exponent (the rate by which something is growing), the faster the doubling time.

At a growth rate of: Doubling time is:
1% per year 72 years
3% per year 24 years
5% per year 15 years
10% per year 7 years

Doubling time can be roughly calculated by
dividing 72 by the percentage rate.

In the basic exponential progression of 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc., we can see that each successive doubling produces a number that is equal to the sum of all the proceeding numbers less one. This makes the point that the next doubling of our population for example, will involve about as many new mouths to feed as have needed to be fed throughout the entire history of human kind.

Think now of what continuous economic growth means. If the economy grows at 5 percent per year, it will double in 15 years. Even at a 3 percent rate of growth, requiring 24 years to double, most individuals would see the doubling of economic activity. Over that 15 to 24 year period, we would have to conduct as much business as has been conducted between the time of the industrial revolution and today. If that isn't staggering, imagine the production necessary to accomplish the next doubling after that. The environment is reeling at today's levels of production. How will it cope if we continue to follow this basic pattern of development?

Particular caution is necessary in a case where something of limited size is being filled or consumed at an exponential rate, such as the Earth's capacity to support human beings or our use of fossil fuels. Just three doublings before further increase or use becomes impossible, only 1/8 of the total capacity has been involved. One eighth appears insignificant, but it is followed by 1/4, 1/2 and then, all the faith in the world will not make further growth possible.

In the 1986 publication Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis, Vitousek, Erlich, Erlich and Matson calculated that human beings were already using 25 percent of the energy captured by plant life world wide. This figure, they say, rises to 40 percent if we only consider land-based vegetation, which makes up the vast majority of human consumption.

It's hard to believe we've reached such levels of activity. However, the very thing that brought on the industrial revolution makes these levels of activity possible - mechanization. The production of goods is no longer tied directly to the physical capability of people. We can spend our time and resources making tools to take over production and then leave the tools to work, while we go on to make more tools to add to the work already being done. We can even set up machines to make machines to make the goods and so multiply the effects of human effort again and again. Assuming they are maintained, all these machines will run as long as they are provided with energy. And energy reserves, although diminishing, are still vast. Unless there is a change of political will to adopt a goal other than growth, we can and will continue to grow until we overshoot some limitation and collapse.

When the possibility of perpetual growth is so obviously impossible, one might wonder why our established orders stick to it so religiously. Herman E. Daly, a Senior Economist from the Environmental Division of the World Bank, expressed it beautifully:

"The growth ideology is extremely attractive politically because it offers a solution to poverty without requiring the moral disciplines of sharing and population control."
In a rather rough shod fashion this strategy has worked for centuries, accounting for the faith that many modern leaders still put in perpetual growth as a solution to our problems. As increasingly severe social and ecological problems testify however, we are going to have to be more imaginative and possibly even morally responsive, in the future.

A Fundamental change has come about in our relationship with the Earth
Exponential growth in production and population over the last several generations has changed our relationship with the Earth. Considering that less than a century ago human activities were scarcely one percent of what they are today, we can get some idea of why the social and economic institutions which served us well for the last 100 years and more, are not prepared for the new circumstances.

Throughout history the limits of the Earth were seldom considered because they were far beyond our reach. Suddenly, with the last few doublings of our activities, we are encountering those limitations in numerous places. Now it matters what we do and how we do it. How long will it take to evolve our customs and institutions to accommodate this new reality?

For the last thirty years, single decades have seen more growth and more consumption than have previous centuries and even millennia. Today we influence practically everything on Earth, even the life processes on which we depend.

Our tremendous growth has brought relative prosperity and abundance of human life at the expense of the environment. We overuse and deplete our resources; forests, minerals, soil fertility - we're living on environmental capital, by depleting that capital we steal from future generations.

The difference between living on "capital" and living on the "interest derived from capital" makes the analogy of environmental capital useful. The interest on "environmental capital" would be the regenerative capacity of renewable resources or the repeated utility gained from the cyclic use of non-renewable resources. We deplete environmental capital when: we use non-renewable resources in ways that make them unavailable for further use, when we use renewable resources faster than they can regenerate and when we cause the extinction of other species.

Ecology
In 1869, Ernest Haeckel coined the word "Ecology" to represent the study of the relationships between different organisms and between organisms and their surroundings. Studies of these relationships had been going on before then, but they had not been identified as a collective science. Ecology includes the flow of materials between organisms, mutual dependencies and the factors that limit growth. Of particular interest are two categories of limitations:

The first are the limitations of resource supplies, caused by the depletion or absence of some nutrient or other material needed to maintain a way of life.

The second are the limitations of tolerance - tolerance to climatic differences, tolerance to toxic substances, and tolerance to competition.

These limitations determine why some creatures can live in one place and others can't, why a particular life form is abundant in one location and only occasionally found in another and why they sometimes pass from existence altogether.

Past civilizations unable to accommodate these limitations either succumbed to them or were forced to move elsewhere. For today's global civilization, accommodation is the only answer, moving elsewhere is no longer an option.

Archaeologists investigating the disappearance of a civilization that once thrived on Easter Island suspect a progression of events that contains a lesson for us all. It appears that the Island's population had been growing for some time. When they became over crowded, two factions emerged and warred with each other. The winning faction continued to grow in numbers until they exhausted the island's resources. Having over-taxed their environment's capacity to support them, most of the island's population died out, leaving little but monuments to attest to their former greatness.

Economics is three fifths of ecology
Although ecology and economics are both derived from the Greek word "oikos" (meaning living place), it has been said that economics concerns itself with only three fifths of ecology. Economics can be boiled down to the three stages of:
1. assembling materials;
2. production of a product from the materials;
3. the distribution of the product.
To these activities, acknowledged by our accounting systems, ecology adds:
4. the effect on the resource base from which the materials are taken; and
5. the effect which by-products of production and used goods have when they become waste.
These two additional concerns correspond to the categories of limitations outlined above.

The principle of diminishing resources can be easily understood by anyone who has seen a big bottle of peanut butter or jam slowly diminish over the weeks. Eventually there is only enough left for one more sandwich - then it's gone. In spite of the simplicity of this principle, until recently, high-level policy decisions dealing with resource development have not taken it into account.

The limitation of tolerance is well illustrated in the making of wine. Yeast eats the sugars in fruit juices and excretes alcohol as a by-product. When the level of alcohol reaches 14 percent, the yeast can no longer tolerate it and dies. This is why the alcohol content of wine is never more than 14 percent. Drinks with a higher alcohol content have to be refined by people.

The idea that economics is three fifths of ecology and that our lack of consideration for the other two fifths is the root of the environmental crisis is presented in more detail in Chapter 4, Environmental Issues: A Pattern to Remember.

War as a means of overcoming limitations
One of the most dangerous responses to resource depletion is the tendency for nations faced with shortages to make war on other nations to supplement their supplies.

Resource control has long been a driving force in armed conflicts. History speaks of innumerable peoples who, having grown to the capacity of their territories, set out to conquer the people and territories around them. Often this would be in order to collect and control resources in the forms of slave labor, riches, land and or taxes.

With the advent of industrialization, the first nations that utilized mechanized production to make weapons had a great advantage over everyone else. They carried on the tradition of empire building and carved up almost the entire planet into colonies to enrich their respective states.

It was easy for colonial empires, with guns and navies, to conquer non-industrialized peoples but the conflicts between industrial powers were major contests. The stakes were high. To defeat another colonial power was to take over established colonies, already organized for the extraction of wealth.

Industrialization itself was developing, and the participating nations were no doubt feeling great surges of strength as their factories found more and more effective ways to produce increasing quantities of guns, ammunition and other instruments of power. The two World Wars can be seen as all-out applications of industrial might, seeking to control the spoils of global empire.

Because the industrial powers were fairly equally matched, the grandest of imperial adventures, the World Wars, led to no particular gains. In fact, the outcome of the Second World War was an international moral condemnation of direct colonial rule. Any further advantage to be taken of other countries had to be maintained in much subtler ways.

The lesson: that colonialism was successful because the colonizers had greater productive strength than their victims, rather than because their race was any better, has been slow to sink in. However, we have seen its repeated proof in the efforts to control Vietnam and Afghanistan. Try as they might, the two most powerful nations on Earth were unable to control much smaller nations who had access to industrially-produced weapons and were familiar with and loved their homelands as well.

The Vietnam War marked the end of an era in which nations could acquire new resources by forcefully maintaining control of other territories. Did anyone notice that the oil crisis first came to public attention within a month of the U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam? The Soviet retreat from Afghanistan simply confirmed the end of traditional colonialism and eliminated the possibility of the lesson being confused by differences in the ideologies promoted by intruding powers.

Of the conflicts taking place today, practically all are contests for control of resources - minerals, land, labor, markets - or the security of supply routes that make resources accessible. These conflicts are frequently instigated by peoples who lost control of their territories in colonial times and are trying to reestablish their rights to them. Such uprisings would be short-lived and successful, if it weren't for generous contributions of money, military training and weapons provided by previous colonial powers in exchange for continued access to these countries' resources.

Showdown in the Middle East
Old habits are hard to change.

There have been some encouraging signs indicating that world powers are starting to realize their security depends less on huge military preparations than on the well-being of their peoples and the environment. However, the amount of weaponry prepared and ready to be used tomorrow amounts to some six thousand times the total of all weapons used during the entire Second World War, including the two atomic bombs used near the wars end. Perhaps the greatest danger of these weapons being used is the potential for a conflict over the diminishing supplies of oil, the greatest reserves of which are located in the Middle East. Already, military preparedness in that territory amounts to 40 percent of the world's $1,000,000,000,000-a-year "defense" spending. Will we be able to make the changes necessary to live without oil before some industrial power attempts to seize control of the last oil reserves? The recent shoot-out in Kuwait and Iraq was largely a cooperative venture among industrial powers against Iraq. Such assertions of control might proceed differently if the spoils were seen as too limited to go around.

If Armageddon is to be fought, it may well be between large non-sustainable economies trying desperately to control disappearing oil supplies.

Control of resource supplies is not the only security issue we face, however. Security institutions could contribute significantly to environmental recovery. Human beings have survived because of our ability to work together to overcome common obstacles. Traditionally, the greatest threat to a nation's security has come from other groups organized to invade and take over. To guard against this, standing armies have long been maintained, through contributions of money and labor from the general population.

In the meantime, a new and greater threat to our security has arisen: environmental disruption. To meet this threat, all sectors of society have to respond, but defense institutions in particular have a responsibility. After all, they are well-paid by tax revenues to guard our security.
Think of what departments of defense could do if they clearly included environmental security in their mandates. The military is accustomed to developing and conducting training courses. They have scientists and engineers familiar with designing specialized equipment and they have hundreds of thousands of people organized and disciplined to take on any tasks they are ordered to. Imagine the European Community, Japan and the United States engaging in a competition to see whose forces could establish the most extensive tree covers in desert and deforested regions. Military assets could be used effectively to clean up polluted areas, monitor environmental indicators and aid in the reorganization necessary to become sustainable.

Social awakening to environmental problems
The environment has ranked among the top concerns of a majority of the population for many years now. It is no wonder, given the long list of serious environment related issues that have come to public attention.

The rise of popular awareness can be traced back to the publication of Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, in 1962. Ms. Carson had noted a significant decline in the number of birds where she was living. She traced this occurrence to the application of pesticides that not only poisoned insects, but also the birds that ate the insects. This connection is now widely understood, and in many parts of the world the use of some of the most serious poisons is severely restricted, or banned altogether. However, at the time, the established order discounted the analysis, condemned Ms. Carson for disturbing the public and ostracized her from the scientific community.

Nevertheless, the alarm had been sounded, and other individuals started to look into the effects of human activities on the life of the Earth. More books and articles were written, and more people became concerned. Add to this the increase in people directly affected by one problem or another: increases in respiratory ailments, rates of cancer, and serious allergy problems; mass evacuations due to industrial accidents, climatic change, disappearing wilderness and a host of other indicators. All of these have attuned people to the enormous threat environmental imbalance poses to our collective security.

As the 1990s progress, popular sentiment is approaching critical mass - the point where a clear majority of people can demand that sustainability become the mandate of our social institutions.

Governments recognize this concern enough to pay extensive lip service to it. However, as long as only a tiny portion of our tax money is being used to address environmental problems, compared to the billions of dollars that are being funneled into military spending and industrial expansion, we have to be wary of our governments' sincerity and make every effort to convince them that they must respond to our concerns. If they do not, we must replace them with people who will.

Environmental problems are economic, political and social.
In the economic sphere, there is danger arising from different ways of assessing value. Take a forest, for example. Through a straight-forward investment in labour and equipment, a forest can be clear cut and turned directly into a large amount of money. The value of the forest is less clear in terms of its role in stabilizing soils, absorbing carbon-dioxide and providing habitat for other creatures. Along with recreational uses and even the sale price of forest products selectively removed for generations to come, this sustainable value is many times greater than the value of cashing in the whole forest with one cutting. In this broader context, the forest's worth is divided between the businesses using the forest over the next seven (or seventy) generations, and the money that doesn't have to be spent from the public purse in order to clear up silted water ways, combat global warming and revive the species diversity that make for a healthy ecosystem. In the long run the forest is worth far more when managed sustainably, but the company that clear cuts has the money in hand and can use that money now to promote its goals and interests.

The economic system is clearly stacked in favor of short term gain. Significant counter-balances have to be agreed upon and implemented if market forces are to be part of the solution to the environmental crisis.

The political sphere, which is the most likely source of economic discipline, is unfortunately very responsive to money and, by association, to the forces that turn environment into wealth. Governments need money to provide services for all of us, and the individuals that make up governments also need money in order to get re-elected.

The social sphere is where the buck stops. Only a clear majority demand will surpass the influence of money and produce a society committed to sustainability. Our governing bodies must institute programs with this goal in mind and with enough incentives and deterrents to make it in the interest of businesses to accommodate the same ends. With the institutions addressed, we must also realize what aspects of our lifestyles add to the problems and where they add to the solutions. What we know in our minds must effectively make its way to the action center of our hearts. We must develop a strong love for our planet, for future generations and for ourselves so that we enthusiastically choose sustainable ways, rather than choosing what the persuasive forces of consumer culture tell us we should want.

Before the Second World War, Rudolf Steiner expressed concern that all the power and resources of society were concentrating in the hands of the economic sector. He saw the rise of industrial militarism as a serious consequence of this trend. As an alternative, he proposed that: although the economic sector produces the wealth, the use of that wealth should be evenly distributed for allocation between the social, cultural and economic sectors. The activities and services of government and other social agencies should use their portion in accordance with their mandate. Similarly, the cultural sector should promote values, the arts and entertainment for the well-being and enrichment of society, according to the criteria of the people involved. Of course, the economic sector would continue to direct its affairs in its own interests.

Steiner's work received insufficient attention to deter the power concentrations that led to World War Two. We may consider reviving the ideas in his book, Towards Social Renewal, as we seek balance in society today.

Our Common Future
On April 27, 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) - also known as the Brundtland Commission - presented its report, Our Common Future, to the United Nations. Their observation, after a three-year, world-wide investigation into the relationship between the environment and human development practices was that:
"Many present efforts to guard and maintain human progress, to meet human needs, and to realize human ambitions are simply unsustainable - in both the rich and poor nations. They draw too heavily, too quickly, on already overdrawn environmental resource accounts to be affordable far into the future without bankrupting those accounts."
Their message was not a message of doom. Rather, it was an "urgent notice" that we must take these matters seriously and correct the situation. They are hopeful that it is indeed within our ability to avoid disaster, providing we get on with the task.

It had been said before, but never with such authority. The members of the Commission were highly experienced and respected representatives from 21 nations. They carried out their investigation in such a comprehensive manner that conventional wisdom now recognizes we are facing a crisis. Before the report became public, as any long-standing environmentalists will testify, calls for action were easily dismissed or ignored. Since the report, this is no longer the case.

There is more on the Brundtland Commission and its report in Chapter 6.

Sustainable Development
The Brundtland Commission advises that the solution to our pressing crisis is sustainable development. Sustainable development they define as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." It is interesting to compare this with the Native American notion that making decisions must take into account the needs of the next seven generations. In further explanation the Commission states:
At minimum, sustainable development must not endanger the natural systems that support life on Earth: the atmosphere, the waters, the soils, and the living beings.
The Guideposts for a Sustainable Future
Does any doubt remain that our relationship to the environment is the most pressing issue of our times?

If you agree that heedless development is a threat to the future, there are guidelines to help us identify the activities we must ease up on, those we must stop and the areas with abundant opportunities for sustainable growth.

This book revolves around the principles known as the Guideposts for a Sustainable Future. They are called Guideposts because they indicate directions. They are design criteria for finding sustainable ways to live.

Sustainability can be defined as the ability to stay alive over the long run. For human kind, this means a period of time longer than any individuals can expect to live, for seven generations, a thousand years, or perhaps until the sun expires.

Activities which are sustainable:

1 Use materials in continuous cycles.
Pictures from space show our blue and green planet as a small sphere orbiting with its moon in a vast emptiness. A closer look reveals that the layer of materials actually of use to living things on the Earth is only a very thin film over the planet's surface.

Within this limited stock of materials, any substances needed regularly must, over time, be used again and again. The cycles which bring the needed materials back for reuse must either occur naturally, like the cycles of water and carbon, or they must be maintained through mindful recycling programs.

2 Use continuously reliable sources of energy.
As vast as current supplies of coal and oil are, we are consuming them far more quickly than they are created. The dangers of releasing all the carbon in these resources aside, their massive use cannot be our custom if civilization is to be a permanent presence on Earth. The same is true of energy from nuclear fission. The troubles of enormous cost and danger may be overcome, but the raw fuel is also limited in supply.

Usable power from nuclear fusion, which has practically unlimited fuel, is only theoretical at this point. Should it be harnessed, extensive testing would be necessary before claims of safety and reliability could be established and dependency on it considered.

This leaves heat from the Earth's core, the sun (actually nuclear fusion at a safe distance) and the wind and the water which the sun sets into motion. These power sources are abundant, and can be harnessed practically anywhere. With the exception of the problems associated with large dams, renewable sources of energy have little or no negative environmental impact.

3 Come mainly from the potentials of being human.
Once we have secured the food and shelter necessary for healthy life, worlds of opportunity open up for personal growth and satisfaction. The 3 L's - learning, love and laughter - as well as friendship, art, music, dance, sport, communication, service and appreciation of the universe within and around ourselves, can all make life worthwhile. They can provide pleasure, purpose and meaning to our lives without harming the Earth.

Activities which are not sustainable:

4 Require continual inputs of non-renewable resources.
Non-renewable resources are resources available only in limited quantity. Metals, coal and oil are notable examples. They can be very useful, even essential, for building a sustainable society, but if our way of life always requires that more and more of these materials be extracted, we will eventually run out. Dependency at that point would be disastrous.

5 Use renewable resources faster than their rate of renewal.
Renewable resources are resources which grow and increase through natural processes. Some examples are forests, fish stocks, ground water and soil fertility. As long as the rate at which they are used is not greater than the rate at which they grow or accumulate, the situation can remain viable. When the rate of use exceeds the rate of renewal, the stock will become depleted and problems will follow.

6 Cause cumulative degradation of the environment.
Certain amounts of pollution are cleansed by natural processes. When we create waste which nature cannot handle, or which cannot be absorbed as fast as we create it, the pollution builds up causing problems which become more and more serious as the activity continues.

7 Require resources in quantities that undermine other people's well-being.
The cooperation needed to build a sustainable world order will not come about as long as some groups of people take unfair advantage of others. Inequity often leads to social strife and armed conflict. Furthermore, the people at the bottom of the pyramid of exploitation are often forced by desperation to overexploit the environment around them for day to day survival. The degradation of their territories not only makes life worse for them, it undermines the global systems which provide for those at the top of the pyramid as well as those below.

8 Lead to the extinction of other species.
The web of life is intricate and mutually supportive. Many species have passed from existence and the web still holds. However, it is weakened with each life form lost. If we maintain patterns of development which regularly destroy other forms of life, we progressively undermine our own existence as a part of the global ecosystem. With the loss of species we also lose genetic possibilities for fighting disease in people and in food crops, as well as potential new sources of food.
Do you think these eight points are accurate? Or, do you think a sustainable society can exist within other boundaries? It is important to clarify the design criteria if we hope to focus our collective potential.

One possible deficiency has been pointed out in this frame of reference. Some people contend that it will be impossible to achieve sustainability until people affected by a decision have the right to be involved in making that decision. How can the delicate choices necessary to develop a sustainable balance be made without involving the eyes, ears and minds of the people directly involved in a situation? Much of the hope we have for solving today's crisis comes from the enormous potential of the concerned population. This potential is lost if people are not involved in the decisions and the work that shape our world. Essentially we are talking about democracy. Not just the occasional opportunity to have a say in who will wield authoritarian power for the next four or five years, but actual involvement of people in the decision-making of governance.

Opponents of this notion foresee dictatorship by a population with values and beliefs shaped by mass media, which for the most part is controlled by rich commercial interests. Nonetheless, as the information age unfolds and more and more people become able to distribute their thoughts, the possibility of a broadly informed population is quickly rising. Community involvement in decisions effecting the community may yet become another Guidepost.

One-quarter of the World's population
consumes three-quarters of the World's goods.
Perhaps the most difficult point for people in affluent countries to accommodate from the Guideposts framework is the notion of living in a way that doesn't impoverish others. Nevertheless, our well-being depends on this. As long as one quarter of the world's population consumes 3/4 of the world's goods, billions of people in poorer countries will be forced by poverty to over stress their environment in order to supply us and scratch out a living for themselves.

Some of the excessive pressures on the global environment would be alleviated with the end of poverty, but developing nations aspire to do more than just end their desperation. They have been presented with countless expressions of our consumer values by companies eager to sell to the fortunate few who can buy imported goods.

Third world economies are developing. If, by example, we maintain the ethic of growth for growth's sake, in both production and consumption, it will lead to disastrous consequences in terms of competition over resource supplies and a multiplication of the already unacceptable levels of environmental contamination. For the developed world to have any credibility in our efforts to secure the environment, we will have to set an example that promotes equal opportunity for all people.

Not a return to the 1800's
Some people think becoming sustainable means returning to some pre-electric darkness. Not so. We have learned to do a great deal in modern times that improves our lives without stressing the Earth. Now that we have reached the limits of our planet, however, we must be discriminating about what techniques we use. Some technologies and ways of living present mortal dangers, but other modern innovations can give us more healthful, secure and enjoyable lives. Better understanding of nutrition and health care can make our lives longer and stronger. Great strides have been taken in the efficiency and cleanliness of many technologies. The production of durable, easily repaired goods would reduce resource consumption and free up much personal time that would otherwise be spent making, buying and paying for disposable goods. Similarly, the end of population growth will lighten our loads, in that we will only have to maintain housing stocks and other infrastructure, rather than having to double their capacity every 20 years.

Conventional economics needs modification here. Presently, when people have enough and are not buying more, others go without work and meet hard times. Let us remember that the productive capacity of one person has multiplied a hundred fold in the last century or two. Even so, people managed to raise their children to maturity long before that. We have to somehow realize that with our modern ingenuity and productive capacity we can provide for everyone without everyone working all the time. As long as there are people in need, there will be work to do. When there is no work to do, it will be time to celebrate. An attitude recognizing this would balance work and leisure and contribute to a sustainable world. However, at this point a great deal of work is necessary to clean up the mess from the last 50 years. There is no shortage of work to be done; it is only a shortage of good will and imagination, among the leaders in our society, which keeps people who want to work away from the tasks at hand.

In his book, The Frontiers of Being, Duncan Blewett identifies what he calls the "Law of Feeling." In essence, it says that when we do something for someone else, we tend to feel good about ourselves and consequently about the world. In this context the opportunity to work, to provide for human needs, in a situation where there are not endless volumes of work available, might come to be an indulgence we look forward to.

There have been other developments in the understanding of human character: how to raise children while preserving a maximum of their natural potentials; how to make peace with our personal pasts so as to meet the future with confidence and clarity; and how to relieve stress and see life as something to be enjoyed, rather than just existing to be stimulated by an endless progression of consumer items. Such developments can provide enormous improvements in the quality of human existence. In so doing, they can make it much easier for us to let go of the activities we are coming to realize are destructive to the environment.

We can meet all the requirements for a full healthy life without stretching the planet beyond its limits.

Becoming sustainable is the new definition of progress.
To develop non-sustainable projects is to be going backwards.
"Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know." M.K. Hubbert

"Our only enemy is our unwillingness to adapt our pattern of living to our environment." Raymond Dasman
By facing ecological reality we learn that some kinds of growth are life-supporting and others are life-threatening. Some doors to development will close as we discover unacceptable dangers.

Other doors, to activities which are sustainable, will remain open.
As the will to become sustainable grows and priorities shift, a whole new range of activities will arrive to provide work.
Global Communications Access
Communications services are a popular example of modern technology that can likely be maintained in a sustainable manner. It has become possible over the last hundred years to provide an ever greater capacity for communications using ever smaller amounts of materials and energy. Already this capacity has caused great changes in our world. The extension of its potential could be as significant to human beings as brains were for the organisms that developed nerve communications between individual cells.

Global communications access would mean that any human being - rich or poor - would have the right to use a network of wires and satellites to communicate with any other human being on the planet. The advantages of such a right are many: small businesses would become more viable, information about world events could be gathered directly, relationships could be developed between people in different countries, and bonds could be maintained between family members and friends wherever they happen to roam. With propaganda subject to anyone's verification, international understanding promoted by direct contact and a strong web of unbroken relationships encircling the globe, communications access could contribute much to a peaceful world. The technology necessary for this to be possible is far less complex than some new weapons systems, and the cost would be only a fraction of what is currently spent on arms.

Life-Based Pursuits
Life-based pursuits are activities based on resources that do not diminish with use. They require little more than our capacities as human beings and include friendship, love, art, music, dance, sport, recreation, looking, listening, smelling, touching, tasting, thinking, meditating, learning and anything else that comes from developing and using the capabilities which being human offers.

These capabilities tend to become stronger and more rewarding through use. Furthermore, one person's participation in one or another of these activities does not diminish anyone else's opportunities. In fact, the better someone gets at a life-based activity, the greater their ability to entertain others and to teach them to grow in a similar manner.

It is interesting, even exciting, to contemplate how our society would be different if life-based pursuits were encouraged instead of the conventional values of accumulation and con