ISBN: 9781933392295 Year Added to Catalog: 2006 Book Format: Paperback Number of Pages: 6 x 9, 256 pages Book Publisher: Chelsea Green Publishing Old ISBN: 1933392290 Release Date: September 15, 2006
The only way to stop us ruining our planet is to give it legal rights, says Stephan Harding
Guardian Unlimited
Tuesday April 3, 2007
It is now beyond dispute that our culture is damaging the world. Many attempts are being made to remedy the situation - most focus either on technical fixes or on reforming existing laws, through such means as the introduction of "green" taxes or the extension of schemes using tradable emissions permits.
These approaches have much to offer, but perhaps it is time to question the very institutions and modes of thought that have lead us into our current predicament so that these can be changed before it is too late.
Our understanding of climate change began with intense debates amongst 19th century scientists about whether northern Europe had been covered by ice thousands of years ago. In the 1820s Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier discovered that "greenhouse gasses" trap heat radiated from the Earth's surface after it has absorbed energy from the sun. In 1859 John Tyndall suggested that ice ages were caused by a decrease in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In 1896 Svente Arrhenius showed that doubling the carbon dioxide content of the air would gradually raise global temperatures by 5-6C - a remarkably prescient result that was virtually ignored by scientists obsessed with explaining the ice ages.
The idea of global warming languished until 1938, when Guy S Callender suggested that the warming trend revealed in the 19th century had been caused by a 10% increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels. At this point scientists were not alarmed, as they were confident that most of the carbon dioxide emitted by humans had dissolved safely in the oceans. However, this notion was dispelled in 1957 by Hans Suess and Roger Revelle, who discovered a complex chemical buffering system which prevents sea water from holding on to much atmospheric carbon dioxide.
The possibility that humans could contribute to global warming was now being taken seriously by scientists, and by the early 1960s some had begun to raise the spectre of severe climate change within a century. They had started to collect evidence to test the idea that global temperatures were increasing alongside greenhouse gas emissions, and to construct mathematical models to predict future climates.
In 1958 Charles Keeling began long-term measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide at the Mauna Loa observatory in Hawaii. Looked at now, the figures show an indisputable annual increase, with roughly 30% more of the gas relative to pre-industrial levels in today's atmosphere - higher than at any time in the last 700,000 years. Temperature readings reveal an average warming of 0.5-0.6C over the last 150 years.
Climate change sceptics have pointed out that these records could have been due to creeping urbanisation around weather stations, but it is now widely accepted that this 'urban heat island effect' is relatively unimportant and that it doesn't explain why most of the warming has been detected far away from cities, over the oceans and the poles.
Since the 1960s, evidence of global warming has continued to accumulate. In 1998 Michael Mann and colleagues published a detailed analysis of global average temperature over the last millennium known as the "hockey stick graph", revealing a rapid temperature increase since the industrial revolution. Despite concerted efforts to find fault with Mann's methodology, his basic result is now accepted as sound. Then, in 2005, just as the Kyoto Protocol for limiting greenhouse gas emissions was ratified, James Hansen and his team detected a dramatic warming of the world's oceans - just as expected in a warming world.
There is now little doubt that the temperature increase over the last 150 years is real, but debate still surrounds the causes. We know that the warming during the first half of the last century was almost certainly due to a more vigorous output of solar energy, and some scientists have suggested that increased solar activity and greater volcanic emissions of carbon dioxide are responsible for all of the increase. But others point out that during the last 50 years the sun and volcanoes have been less active and could not have caused the warming over that period.
By 2005 a widespread scientific consensus had emerged that serious, large-scale disruption could occur around 2050, once average global temperature increase exceeds about 2C, leading to abrupt and irreversible changes. These include the melting of a large proportion of the Greenland ice cap (now already under way), the reconfiguration of the global oceanic circulation, the disappearance of the Amazon forest, the emission of methane from permafrost and undersea methane hydrates, and the release of carbon dioxide from soils.
This new theory of "abrupt climate change" has overturned earlier predictions of gradual change, and has prompted some scientists to warn that unmitigated climate change could lead to the complete collapse of civilisation. Fears have been fuelled by the possibility that smoke, hazes and particles from burning vegetation and fossil fuels could be masking global warming by bouncing solar energy back to space. This "global dimming" effect is diminishing as we clean up air pollution. As a result global average temperature could rise by as much as 10 degrees Celsius by the close of the century - a catastrophic increase.
A more conservative assessment by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001 indicated that with unabated carbon emissions, global temperature could rise gradually to around 5.8C by 2100. An increase of this nature would still threaten the lives of millions of people, particularly in the global south, due to sea level rise and extreme weather events.
Although some people still deny that climate change is a problem we can do something about, last year the UK government indicated that it was on board. The Stern Review showed that without immediate and relatively inexpensive action, climate change would lead to severe and permanent global economic depression by 2050. There is now a strong scientific and economic consensus about the severity of the climate crisis.
· Stephan Harding is Coordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College in Devon, UK. He is the author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. To order a copy for £9.95 with free UK p&p call 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop.
Growing pains
EcologistOnline
by Stephan Harding
July, 2006
At last, mainstream economists are waking up to the fact that climate change is going to cost a lot of money. Recently, the UK government’s Stern Review proposed a series of measures we must implement immediately to "decarbonise" the global economy, including emissions trading, technological cooperation and the reduction of deforestation. Stern concluded that "with strong and deliberate policy choices, it is possible to reduce the emissions in both developed and developing economies on the scale necessary for stabilisation while continuing to grow".
While I was persuaded by some of the recommendations made by the Stern Review, this is where I believe he misses something vitally important. Simply put, growth, of the wrong kind, no matter how decarbonised, will wreck the planet.
I think that we need to distinguish between two fundamentally distinct kinds of growth. There is the suicidal growth that our mainstream culture is so hell-bent on pursuing, predicated on the limitless extraction of our Earth’s wild resources and the continual disabling of her ability to absorb pollution, stabilize soils, regulate the world’s climate and operate a whole gamut of ‘ecosystem services’. The alternative is "intelligent growth", which recognises that we must move towards a global steady-state economy in which the living standards in the south would grow whilst those of the north decline until both converge on a steady and equitable per capita share of whatever benefits the Earth can spare us.
But how to move the global economy from growth to steady state? For many years I thought that this issue was insoluble, for at least two reasons. Firstly, it would clearly be impossible to decide upon and monitor steady state exploitation rates for every single resource needed by society. Secondly, any nation that had made a unilateral decision to implement a steady state economy would immediately be wiped out by competitors that hadn’t.
So are there any feasible means for making the shift happen? After spending time with David Fleming, who recently taught here at Schumacher College, I’m now beginning to think that it can be done. The answer is for a national government – any government in the rich world would do - to adopt David’s ingenious concept of Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs), which is essentially a system for rationing our use of fossil fuels, currently our major source of energy.
TEQs includes every energy-user and every energy-provider in the national economy. They are measured in units, and every adult is given an equal annual allocation. Industry and government bid for their units at a weekly tender. Units can be traded. Anyone who uses less than their entitlement can sell their surplus, and anyone can buy more units if they need them. The total number of TEQs available is set out in a TEQS budget (set by an independent Energy Policy Committee) that looks 20 years ahead. The size of the budget goes down week-by-week, step-by-step, like a staircase.
By rationing energy, the TEQs scheme automatically places limits on our exploitation of nature, since without energy resources cannot be extracted or processed. So, with TEQS, we eliminate, at a stroke, the need to separately monitor our use of a plethora of resources. The final amount of energy available to the nation – the lowest rung of the energy step – is set at a level low enough to ensure that the economy does as little harm to the natural world as possible whilst ensuring that citizens enjoy a simple but comfortable standard of living. For the time being, whilst we still have fossil fuels, TEQs units would be carbon-linked, but if we do one day manage to develop climate-neutral energy sources (such as widespread renewables) the units would be energy-linked – to joules or kilowatt hours.
What about the issue of competitiveness? David Fleming points out that any nation that adopted TEQs would give itself a massive competitive advantage in the international market for energy-efficient products that is now blossoming as the severe implications of both climate change and peak oil become more and more apparent. The gradually descending energy ‘staircase’ would give industry time to develop the new low-impact technologies that will be required in a steady state world. The first nation that embarked on its energy descent by adopting TEQs would trigger a domino effect as other nations scrambled to cash in on the huge profits being made in the new low-energy economy.
Perhaps David Fleming really has found the leverage point that can transform the global economy from an all-consuming monster to an ecologically viable presence on the planet. We had better try it before time runs out.
Stephan Harding is coordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at the Schumacher College in Devon. He is author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, published by Green Books.
It's time we learned to live in peace with our planet
The Guardian
by Stephan Harding
September 27, 2006
I believe it is now blindingly obvious that our lust for endless economic growth is seriously destabilising the climate of the Earth and wiping out the astounding biodiversity that enfolds us. As the ice caps collapse and the great forests burn, we are at last waking up to the fact that we are at war with nature - a war that only she can win.
So why is our civilisation so destructive of the natural world on which we utterly depend? Some say that it's merely a matter of technology, that any culture with access to chainsaws and bulldozers would have done the same. But I disagree. I am convinced that we see the world in an utterly mistaken way, that something malicious is eating away at the core of our view of the world. For us, the Earth is nothing more than a vast, dead machine to be exploited without hindrance by focusing only on what can be measured and quantified.
All of us go about with this idea deliberately planted in our heads by our educators, by the media, by politicians and by scientists. It was Descartes, Bacon and the other pioneering scientific geniuses of the 16th and 17th centuries who sold us this line, and for the past 400 years this understanding has contaminated every aspect of our lives.
Our efforts to solve the massive ecological and social crises we now face will come to naught unless we remedy this unbalanced perspective. So if "world as machine" only alienates, disconnects and makes us destructive, then what is the alternative? Here it is: that our Earth is palpably and deliciously alive; that our turning world is a vast living creature of planetary proportions within which we are immersed and which supports and nourishes our psyches every bit as much as our physical bodies.
This is an ancient understanding with a profound pedigree. Plato called it the "anima mundi" - the soul of the world. For the ancient Greeks, and indeed for most indigenous people to this day, mountains, forests, the great oceans and the wide-open sky are full of an ineffable communicative power that we are capable of perceiving spontaneously with our intuition and our senses and to which we respond with a profound sense of awe and innate respect.
These are the qualities so cruelly banished by science for so many centuries. They teach us that the whole of nature has value because it exists, irrespective of its usefulness to us.
The good news is that this alternative, more holistic perspective is at last moistening and dissolving the desiccated scientific heart of our culture, at first through the astonishing discoveries of quantum physics, and more recently through James Lovelock's Gaia theory. Both imply that nature is far more creative, far more animate than we ever dared suppose.
How would things be if we achieved this? Limits to material growth would be rationally determined through our best science and then accepted as we took up our rightful space within the community of life. Only things of real value would grow - love of place, simplicity, self-sufficient local communities and economies, ecological restoration, renewable technologies, sustainable artifacts - and time for contemplating and celebrating the qualities of this astonishing Earth.
Stephan Harding is coordinator of the MSc course in holistic science at Schumacher College, Devon. His book, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, is published by Green Books (£10.95).
Lost connection to animate Earth
BBC News
Stephan Harding
June 29, 2006
Modern humans have lost a vital connection to "animate Earth", says ecologist Stephan Harding in this week's Green Room. Re-connecting with the natural world and the true place of humans in the cosmos is the best route, he argues, to sustainable societies and economies.
There is now little doubt that our culture is unleashing a vast and accelerating crisis upon the world.
We have set in train changes to our climate that seem certain to become very dangerous indeed during the next 50 years or so.
We are wiping out so many species that biologists speak of a mass extinction faster and possibly more fatal than any other in our Earth's long history.
Our social fabric is also unravelling, and as it does so crime and massive psychological problems increase apace.
As the Earth gears up to pay us back for waging our unwitting war against her, it is critically important that we discover what has made our culture so uniquely destructive.
Some believe that our inherently "sinful" human nature is to blame, that any culture with our technological might and prowess would have done the same thing; but I subscribe to a different understanding.
I believe that we are suffering from a world view so dangerously pathological that it is leading our civilisation to the brink of suicide.
'Dead machine'
The fatal flaw is this: that for us, the entire cosmos, including the Earth and all her living beings, her rocks and air and atmosphere is no more than a dead machine that we are free to exploit without limit in the furtherance of our own interests.
This notion of a mechanistic universe comes in part from the great thinkers of scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th Centuries, from men such as Descartes, Bacon and Galileo.
There is no doubt that their creation, modern science, is a brilliant and fabulously powerful intellectual achievement that has given us many significant benefits; but it has also deluded us into believing that only pure analytical reasoning can give us reliable knowledge about the world.
No wonder then that we have ended up in a "dead" cosmos, for science has taught us to be deeply suspicious of our sensual, intuitive and ethical sensibilities.
I believe that we must quickly develop an expanded science that recognises the validity of all four ways of knowing in equal measure if we are to avert the looming disaster.
When we do this, we enter the ambit of a different, more wholesome perspective in which our spontaneous, sensual experiences of the world, our deepest intuitions, our sense of what is right, and our reasoning work together to inform us, in the words of "geologian" Father Thomas Berry, that the world is a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects.
This is no new idea. Plato spoke of the anima mundi , the soul of the world, and many of the great philosophers, including Spinoza, Leibniz, and more recently AN Whitehead, considered matter itself to be sentient in its deepest roots.
Could it be that anima mundi , banished from our consciousness for 400 years, now cries out to be heard in this time of deep crisis?
Within science, she manifests in quantum theory, systems thinking, complexity theory, and, more concretely, in James Lovelock's Gaia theory.
Here we learn that far from being a dead machine, the Earth is more like a living organism in which the tightly coupled interactions between the sum of all life and the rocks, atmosphere and oceans give rise to the stunning emergent ability of the Earth as a whole to maintain habitable conditions on her ancient crumpled surface despite an ever brightening Sun and the vagaries of tectonic events.
When approached simultaneously through our four ways of knowing, Gaia theory teaches us that we live symbiotically within a vast evolving sentient creature of planetary proportions - that we are just plain members of the Gaia community, not its masters or stewards.
Animate image
What would society look like if we lived according to this more animistic understanding?
We would recognise that other species, and indeed the Earth herself, have intrinsic value irrespective of their value to us.
We would deeply question our mainstream economic model, for the great wild sentient personality of our planet calls out to us to reject the endless and ever-increasing plundering of her material substrate.
Instead we would develop a "steady state" economy in which the things that grow are love, spirituality, creativity, depth of community, simple living, and the healing of the Earth, but in which our use of her "resources" is kept at levels that she can cope with.
We will never know enough about the complex dynamics of our planet to justify a solid pessimism about the future. Fear is a good motivator, but love is best of all.
So the most important task for us all now is to re-discover our sense of belonging to our animate Earth. Only then will we feel our sense of self expanding outwards to embrace the vast more-than human-world that enfolds us.
Just try it. Spend time outdoors - gazing at the sea, or laying on the ground and feeling the great spherical body of our turning world at your back as she dangles you over the infinite expanse of the cosmos.
I guarantee that you'll find an unexpected wealth of happiness and connection in that simple act. Only then will you encounter the most durable motivation for engaging in genuinely sustainable actions.
Dr Stephan Harding is resident ecologist and coordinator of the MSc in holistic science at Schumacher College in Devon, UK. His book Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia is published by Green Books
The Green Room is a series of opinion articles on environmental issues running weekly on the BBC News website
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