Posts Tagged ‘Clean and green’
Sir Paul Callaghan speaking at Telecommunications Day 2011 last week indulged in some well directed myth busting – saying “some harsh things about the country I love”.
#1. We are an egalitarian society – in income disparity we actually rate very poorly.
#2. We are clean and green – too often we are not.
Sir Paul said something “we do incredibly well in New Zealand is egregious hypocrisy”.
We have protests about palm kernels used for dairy farming but “we kinda forget what we did as a country to our environment. We turned two thirds of our native forests into greenhouse gas…
“Were we wrong to do that? Well we would have had very little prosperity if we had not done so.
“We have to say that is a reasonable use of our resource.
“But I don’t think we have any moral high ground from which to tell other countries – particularly countries poorer than us – what right they have to use their resources.
“We didn’t plant palm oil trees, we planted grass and put a whole lot of animals on it and pumped out more greenhouse gas.”
How many workers does it take to mow a road-side grass verge?
Four. One to mow the grass and three to drive trucks with warning signs to alert approaching motorists.
For sure the driver of the tractor is at some risk on busy highways, but is the danger so high they need such heavy duty protection? Do motorists have such short memories they need three reminders to take care?
When was the last time a vehicle hit a someone mowing a roadside verge?
I’m no expert in the Health and Safety Act that apparently drives this type of behaviour, but the chairman of NZ Society for Risk Management, Geraint Bermingham says in a Dominion Post column (sorry can’t find the link) that the act’s “apparently rational ideas are being translated into what is rapidly becoming an attitude that we must not do anything unless it is ‘absolutely safe’ (even if it is questionable that such a state can exist).
“If we do not quickly treat our own shrinking view of risk taking, we are on the road to paralysis and with it, potential descent into economic decline.”
To fix this Bermingham says we need a “clear sighted view of the future and what we can achieve.
“This means having clear priorities and good planning while understanding the hazards and taking sensible and intelligent precautions.
He says this is not hard and perhaps could tap into “the attitudes that brought humans to these shores”.
We need to be “bolder and more long sighted when envisaging the future”.
Bermingham doesn’t mention the mining and oil exploration debates, but I reckon these comments apply here too. Among the masses there just doesn’t appear to be:
a) any clear priorities – the Green movement and the Government have laid out their polar opposite priorities, but what about the rest of us? Is there a willingness to to make some compromises, as we do in everyday life, between the ‘restrainers’ and ‘expanders’?
b) understanding of the risks – this looks to have been lost in the absolutist nature of the opposition. Exploration, which would give some sense of the value of the other side of ledger, wealth generation, can’t be countenanced by the risk mongers.
c) intelligent precautions – no consideration can be given to these because of b).
Bermingham says that managing risk “requires first a wish to strive for a greater future, and then foreseeing the challenges before boldly taking action.
“It is not about finding reason not to take action.”
Pattrick Smellie has written a great piece in today’s Dom Post – “Nobody wants energy makers as neighbours.” [Sorry no link available now]
Whether it be clean energy (wind, hydro and tidal) or dirty (oil and coal), many Kiwis are saying no.
Something has to give and most of the time, in these energy strapped times, it won’t be the energy makers.
Should NZ be worried? Walmart in the US says it will double sales of locally sourced produce.
It’s part of what ING says is a revolution in marketing and sales.
And it’s being led by supermarkets which have become defacto regulators of the products on their shelves, across a raft of issues from water use to carbon emissions.
The Walmarts of this world do this because that’s the way they see consumer demand heading. I’m picking Walmart, for one, is not doing this out of any deep-held sustainability principles – they just want to sell more product.
NZ farm leaders grizzle like hell about this, but they are picking a fight they won’t win.
Walmart’s global sustainable agriculture strategy gives you an idea of what in many cases will soon be standard purchasing practices in our food and beverage markets. The supermarket giant will by the end of 2015:
Support farmers and their communities -
• sell $1 billion globally in food sourced directly from small, medium and local farmers;
• provide training to 1 million farmers and farm workers in such areas as crop selection and sustainable farming practices – the company expects half of these farmers to be women; and
• raise the income of farmers it sources from by 10 to 15 percent.
Produce more food with less waste and fewer resources -
• invest $1 billion in its global fresh supply chain to help deliver fresh, quality food with a longer shelf life to its customers
• reduce in-store food waste by 15 percent in our emerging markets and 10 percent in all other markets, using 2009 as the baseline year; and
• develop a Sustainable Produce Assessment for producers in our Global Food Sourcing network; launch pilot in 2011, to better understand energy, water, fertilizer and pesticide use per unit of food produced.
Sustainably source key agricultural products -
• require sustainably sourced palm oil for all Walmart private brand products globally;
• and only source beef from Brazil that does not contribute Amazon deforestation.
Some of this may look a lot like greenwashing, and contradictory, but as they say, “fake it til you make it”.
Our “dirty” farmers should do the same.
More from the economic naturalist Robert H Frank .
He says critics of economic growth argue against it because of the alleged threat to the planet’s survival.
“Yet is not growth per se that threatens, but certain kinds of growth.
“Driving more SUVs causes harm, but taking more piano lessons does not. “
Fair enough, but do we have the wit and guts to change our ways.
I was in Timaru this weekend for the funeral of an old school friend’s mother.
As usual at funerals there was a bit of philosophising. Fuelled by the second “cup of tea’ we got into discussing the passing of the generation – including my friend’s mum, my mum but not my father who is still going strong and is 90 this year – who had lived through the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The Depression’s impacts are disappearing from our family lives. Do the maths. To actually remember the Depression you’d need to be at least in your late 70s.
This generation was heavily into recycling long before it became fashionable. Old “perfectly good” household items were kept and reused with the aid of a bit of knitting, darning (darn – verb: To mend by stitching across a hole), a couple of nails, sticking plaster…
This was not out of any concern for the environment, but to save money. During my childhood, which was during the fair weather days of the 1960s, pretty much every family I knew lived like this.
You didn’t spend what you didn’t have.
The bearers of this philosophy in politics and business started to disappear from public life during the 1980s. In politics you can be precise – 1984, the year Muldoon was defeated by Lange’s Labour.
The Depression era men were whipped by the Baby Boomers. (Lange was actually born in 1942 but was a Baby Boomer in spirit. Most of the rest of his Cabinet were real boomers).
Muldoon’s political reason for existence was to protect New Zealanders from the privations that would accompany any repeat of the Depression. Probably less so for Holyoake (PM from 1960-72) and Holland (PM 1949 -57) before him, but certainly the case for Fraser (PM 1940-49).
Muldoon’s Think Big, and its associated high levels of debt, stands out as bit of an anomaly but I figure it’s had a positive effect because those failed energy projects left behind a strong distaste for high levels of public debt.
Not so much back in the suburbs and farms. Now its our low levels of public debt that are saving us from jumpy world financial markets.
So I guess in a funny way the lessons of the Depression have lived on in politics long after they been forgotten in our daily lives where the Zombie economy rules.
Anyway this is by way of a long introduction to a quote from a story in Saturday’s Timaru Herald. In a speech to a local business summit, BERL’s chief economist Ganesh Nana said:
“If we are not clever enough to earn an income out of what we’ve been given, then we really don’t deserve the lifestyle we think is our birthright.”
Cue applause from the grave.
Among the random links I have saved up was one to a post headed: Does Beauty Drive Economic Growth?
Now can’t find where it came from, so sorry no Hat Tip to whoever led me to it.
Anyway, does it? Is there a connection between beauty and economic growth?
Umm a little bit I think. However, it does make a good headline. Sucked me in.
But behind this beauty myth are some solid ideas about what drives economic growth. And some good news for NZ.
Where there is a connection is between our passion (or attachment) for a community and growth.
And yeah, some of that passion relates to beauty – to the splendour of the parks, the majesty of a harbour, the leafiness of neighbourhoods etc.
But it’s not all about beauty. There’s lots of innovation and rapid growth springing out of less than beautiful surroundings – from inner city warehouses and lofts through to Silicon Valley.
The evidence for all this a Soul of the Community study, commissioned by the Knight Foundation covering 26 US cities.
What the study actually showed was that there are three main qualities that drive people’s attachment to place:
• social offerings, such as entertainment venues and places to meet,
• openness (how welcoming a place is) and
• the area’s aesthetics (its physical beauty and green spaces).
You’ll notice that money, materialistic-type qualities are missing here.
“Instead, attachment is most closely related to how accepting a community is of diversity, its wealth of social offerings, and its aesthetics. This is not to say that jobs and housing aren’t important,” say the authors.
“Residents must be able to meet their basic needs in a community in order to stay. However, when it comes to forming an emotional connection with the community, there are other community factors which often are not considered when thinking about economic development.
“These community factors seem to matter more when it comes to attaching residents to their community.”
Attachment is “an important metric for communities, since it links to key outcomes like local economic growth (GDP)”.
The survey found the places with the lowest levels of attachment were car-wreck cities like Detroit and Gary, Indiana, while they were highest in places like Boulder, Colorado.
So you’d think, if the above is true, that countries and cities looking to attract investors, talent and skills should concentrate on their boosting their social offerings, their welcome mats and travelogue posters.
Paula Ellis, a Knight Foundation vice president says the significant ‘takeaway’ of the survey is “to design interventions to increase residents’ attachment to the place they live”.
“Our theory,” says Jon Clifton from the pollsters Gallup “is that when a community’s residents are highly attached, they will spend more time there, spend more money; they’re more productive and tend to be more entrepreneurial”.
And the good news for NZ? We are a place where the people of the world want to live because we have an open and friendly society and a beautiful and relatively clean environment. Though we are a bit of a cultural and entertainment backwater.
So all this is further reason to protect our clean green image. Also we need to be more worried about stories in the international media that indicate we are not a welcoming society.
And please find some way of delivering us more great live music.
Love this description of what we export – “agricultural integrity”.
For the Kiwi food and beverage industry, this is both the biggest and most basic value add available.
The quote is from chef Robert Oliver, who was based in the US where he created a number of restaurant ventures including Mandalay Bay in Las Vegas one of the largest restaurants in the US. He now works out of the New Zealand business centre in downtown Shanghai.
The centre includes a demonstration kitchen and bar area for food and beverage promotions and a multi-purpose function and event space. Oliver is also working in a number of other China cities including Beijing, Guangzhou and Shenzhen.
Anyway in his blog The prodigal chef he says, “I know that the New Zealand ‘story’ is that of a small nation of producers with agricultural integrity, and I saw quickly here in Shanghai that this is also what we exporting.
“New Zealand offers not only fine product, but a sense of trust. A small producer nation, a good environment, products with genuine integrity.
“In short, everything that bigger nations do not.”
A couple of months ago I posted on a similar theme with Geoff Ross saying: “Provenance matters in brands more than ever”.
The founder of 42 Below, who has now also gone into the beer business with Moa, says: “In two weeks time I will be in the US selling Natural Home Fragrance and Bath products. I can tell you, in doing this, I am glad I am from NZ and not China or India. NZ’s environment gives us an advantage. It’s time to make this advantage bigger.”
What would a future in which we changed our ways and didn’t trash the planet look like?
How about a 1960s lifestyle where we consumed less but had computers and the benefits of clean technology? But it’s hard to get a handle on how this, or alternative liveable futures, would look.
In part this is because the world’s filmmakers have been totally crap at depicting desirable and believable future worlds.
They’ve favoured dystopian (ie repressive ugly worlds) a la Mad Max and my old fav Blade Runner, rather than anything approaching utopian, or if utopian then it’s only on the surface, hiding an ugly truth lurking below (eg. Logan’s Run when life is all fun and games till you turn 30 then…).
And it’s when you start thinking about what the future should look like that Tim Jackson’s ideas, at least for BigCake, start to come unstuck.
Re-reading my last post on Jackson, I think the guts of the parting of ways is in Jackson’s portrayal of mankind’s choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.
Is it an either or? Or is it I’m in some form of denial about what needs to be done, like an alcoholic who realises they have a problem with drink, but figures they can manage it?
For sure we are in danger of trashing the planet. But do we need to trash the system to stop this happening?
Not convinced.
We need to do more (a hell of a lot more) to save our beloved planet, but Jackson’s argument reminds me a lot of the old expanders versus restrainers argument.
UK Guardian correspondent George Monbiot sees climate change as the first great battle (a battle to “redefine humanity”) between these two camps.
Framing the world this way is both useful and a waste of time. Useful because at simplistic level it captures the guts of the debate. But in the end it’s about as much use as capital versus labour, left v right, good v evil, black v white.
In the real world there are grays. Like BigCake you can be a restrainer and a expander at the same time..
So trash the planet or trash the system? Don’t think so, maybe trash the planet a whole lot less and trash the system a whole lot more.
Anyway this is by way of a (long) introduction to the final part of the Tim Jackson talk on TED where he looks at solutions.
He asks: What’s the point of living?
Are we “these novelty-seeking, hedonistic, selfish individuals? Or might we actually occasionally be something like [a] selfless altruist…”
Psychology says there is a tension between self-regarding behaviours and other regarding behaviours. And these tensions have deep evolutionary roots. So selfish behaviour is adaptive in certain circumstances – fight or flight.
A look at the map of the human heart reveals the crux of the matter. “What we’ve done is we’ve created economies. We’ve created systems, which systematically privilege, encourage, one narrow quadrant of the human soul and left the others unregarded.
“And in the same token, the solution becomes clear, because this isn’t, therefore, about changing human nature. It isn’t, in fact, about curtailing possibilities. It is about opening up.
“It is about allowing ourselves the freedom to become fully human, recognizing the debt and the breadth of the human psyche and building institutions to protect [the] fragile altruist within.”
Now if I was in the audience, Tim would be losing me. He’s turning all utopian.
He asks what would economies look like if they had a vision of human nature at their heart?
One example he gives is the 4000 community-interest companies that have sprung up in the U.K. over the last five years and a similar rise in B corporations in the United States enterprises that have ecological and social goals written into their constitution. He gives an example a company that gives 80 percent of its revenues to a rainforest protection project in the Amazon.
It’s a different kind of enterprise for a new economy. Investment isn’t about the relentless and mindless pursuit of consumption growth. Investment has to be a different beast, protecting and nurturing the ecological assets, investing in low-carbon technologies and infrastructures.
We have to invest, in fact, in the idea of a meaningful prosperity, providing capabilities for people to flourish with prosperity meaning more than having food, clothing and shelter. It has social and psychological aims — family, friendship, commitments, society, participating in the life of that society.
And this too requires investment, investment, for example, in places, places where we can connect, places where we can participate, shared spaces, concert halls, gardens, public parks, libraries, museums, quiet centres, places of joy and celebration, places of tranquility and contemplation…
All things the bad old system does, but yeah could do more.
Sometimes I get scared that the hardcore greenies might be right.
There’s a challenging talk up on my old fav, TED.com, by Tim Jackson who studies links between lifestyle, society and the environment. Basically he’s an economic growth sceptic.
In the talk he has a great line: “This is a story about us being persuaded to spend money we don’t have on things we don’t need, to create impressions on people we don’t care about.”
And that’s a modern economy in a nutshell. Debt, free markets, consumerism, advertising etc simply help keep the show on the road.
The TED talk also touches on a number of BigCake themes:
• The growing gap between rich and power
• The coping mechanisms of more debt and more work to maintain living standards and
• The allure of the ‘zombie’ economy’.
But it also confronts another belief – that the human race is smart enough to recognise that modern economies have created a hole and that we are clever enough to dig our way out.
BigCake’s always believed we can do this within the current system.
But Jackson reckons the human race has a choice: Trash the system or trash the planet.
What follows is an edited version of the first 10 minutes of his 20-minute TED talk. Part 2 to come.
Imagine, he says a world in 2050 of 9 billion people all aspiring to Western incomes.
How fast do we have to move – how clever do we need to be – to deliver our carbon targets?
Our current carbon intensity of economic growth [that is emissions per dollar of real gross domestic product] is about 770 grams of carbon.
In 2050 it has to be 6 grams of carbon – a 130-fold improvement.
That is 10 times faster and further than anything we have ever achieved in industrial history.
May be we can do – who knows.
Believing these numbers is crucial if you want to buy into Jackson’s argument. I haven’t been able to find any arguments to the contrary and anyway, he’d have to by way out to be wrong, so I’ll go with them for now.
Also as he writes elsewhere “efficiency improvements are continually offset by increases in scale”.
Back to TED Jackson says the only thing that has remotely slowed down the relentless rise of carbon emissions over the last decade is recession.
We are caught in a trap – a dilemma – of growth. We can’t live with it; we can’t live without it.
Our best avenue to escape from this is a kind of blind faith in technology, in our cleverness and in efficiency.
But shouldn’t we just check first that the economic system we have is remotely capable of delivering this kind of improvement.
The system works thus: Firms produce goods and provide us with incomes and then we can spend those incomes on goods and services.
This look harmless enough. The key feature is investment which equals a 5th of national income in most economies. It stimulates further consumption growth.
It also seeks out novelty – a process of creative destruction, continually chasing expanding consumer markets.
Human beings apparently love new stuff (and ideas and experiences). In every language, stuff is a symbolic language we use to tell each other stories, for example how important we are.
This ties in with the posts I’ve been writing about growing inequality based on the book ‘The Spirit Level’ which roughly says problems in rich countries are not caused by people not being rich enough, but by the scale of material differences.
So, says Jackson here’s a system that is locking economic structure with social logic. It’s an engine of economic growth driven by a sense of anxiety, what Adam Smith called “a life with shame”.
Now you need the hybrid car, the HDTV, two holidays a year in the sun, the net book, the ipad…[The zombie economy]
And even if we don’t want them, we need to buy them because if we don’t buy them the system crashes.
To stop it crashing over the last decades we have expanded the money supply – expanded credit and debt so we can keep buying stuff.
But is this really how people are?
We run up against a couple of anomalies.
In the crisis what do people want to do – they want to look to the future, they want to hunker down. Spend less and save more.
But saving is exactly the wrong thing do from the system point of view.
The system is at odds with who we are as people.
[More to come]
Hat Tip – NZ Institute