The Cowboy, the Spaceman and the Savage.

One vivid way to highlight different approaches to sustainability is to consider the needs and responses of three very different stereotypes.

Noble savages are hunter-gatherers who live by their wits fishing and hunting wild game and collecting berries, seeds and grasses. We were all in this class once. It requires a lot of land, flora and fauna and relatively small and highly mobile populations. They tread lightly on the land, revere the Earth as their Mother and pass down traditions in story and song. They also often sculpted the land with fire-stick farming to create grasslands and hunting large animals to extinction. Their carbon footprint was low as was their GDP. However, their National Happiness Level was probably quite high as few of these native were tempted by the western “advanced” way of life.

Cowboys lived on the vast, seemingly endless open prairie of the American West. They hunted deer, moose, bison and natives (but that’s a different story). They also ate beans and bread and drank coffee and liquor; all products of an agrarian society. What set the cowboy apart from the settlers is that they were the adventurers, the first to move into the new lands, the first to see the enormous wealth of nature, and sadly the first to abuse it. Cowboys see only the bounteous abundance of the environment and ignore their impact upon it. The cowboys’ approach, rooted in selfishness and ignorance, is the very antithesis of sustainability and completely opposite to ideal of the noble savage. The cowboy mentality was, and still is, at the core of the American culture. Nature is just too big, too awesome for humans to damage. Humans cannot control the weather, cannot warm the atmosphere, melt the ice caps, kill the coral reefs, raise sea levels or wipe out fish stocks. It is either not happening or else it must be caused by natural events. Cowboys have a huge footprint on the land. They’ve exterminated entire peoples, driven species extinct including the passenger pigeon whose flocks were once 300miles long and a mile wide. Cowboys are truly dangerous dudes.

Spacemen have a problem, a huge problem. They’re stuck in a little tin can for years with only the supplies they brought along with them. They need to conserve and recycle everything; it’s a matter of life and death. They must recycle their waste, scrub the carbon dioxide from the air they exhale, grow their own food and even generate the own sunlight for their plants. They must also cooperate; arguments could easily result in the end of them all. In many ways spacemen are like the savages. But, savages could afford to move camp in search of better food; spacemen have no such luxury. They must conserve and protect their environment perfectly - absolutely no slip-ups.

While it may be technically possible to live like spacemen for a short time, the sociological pressures would be enormous as was apparent in the Spaceship Earth experiments of the 1970s. Humans are very social creatures; we value the opinion and strive for the respect of others.

Now it is time to respect and care for our mother earth. It is time to learn the lessons that the noble savage can teach us. We may be unable to live like spacemen but we are not in Kansas any more either. It is time to take off the spurs, put down the rifles and appreciate that we have an enormous affect on our environment. If we don’t grow up and act like a civilized society we will leave behind us a barren and bleak landscape in which our children may have to adopt the culture of the savage as they fight for increasingly scarce supplies of energy, water and food. We have made many animals extinct, now it’s time to do the same to the cowboy.

You can read more on this at The Socio-Capitalist 

The African View of Sustainable Development

With creative ambiguity, Gro Brundtland’s, Norway’s Prime Minister, defined Sustainable Development as:

    “Humanity has the ability to make development sustainable – to ensure that it meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

This loose definition fostered an array of programs which, while purporting to be sustainable, reflect the wide variety of interests of the sponsors. It is easy to claim programmes as ‘sustainable’ using the current vague definitions but there is a lack of meaningful targets and accountability.

Brundtland foresaw some of these problems and added the caveat that, using the term ‘environment’ in isolation is seen as naïve by policy makers and that the definition of ‘development’ has been narrowed to mean “what the poor nations should do to become richer”.

The African perspective of sustainable development is more pragmatic, for instance it may simply ask Sudanese citizens whether or not their lives have progressed or deteriorated. The answers reveal that in the 1960’s the overall environment was richer and healthier and sustained them for a better quality of life.
In Africa, complex issues such as international trade, macro-economics, the role of multi-national corporations and climate change are beyond the grasp of the common man and indeed even the policy makers fail to understand problems such as poverty, food insecurity, strife and environmental decay. It is no surprise then that the Developing World has seen an overall deterioration in sustainability when measured in terms of food security, health, education, shelter, the environment and climate change. In fact, African policy makers relate sustainable development to economic performance indicators alone, and hence environmental sustainability isn’t even considered.

Belghis Badri, an African intellectual, uses food security yields to highlight the inter-connectedness of the sustainability factors. Food security sustains a healthy population, a thriving market economy, improved technology, better transport, labour mobility, environmental conservation, and climate change alleviation. It requires clean water, available land, equitable laws, secure national borders, technology, preservation of forest and prevention of desertification, food storage and processing systems, education, population control and peace. For instance, forests of Africa should not be viewed, primarily as a carbon sinks for the North, but rather as a source of food security for the local community and should be afforded equal importance to the rain forests of South America.

Materialism, the highway to hell?

We live under a lot of stress. In the developing nations stress is unavoidable and revolves mainly around just trying to survive. Here in the developed world much of the stress is of our own making and is and should be avoided - "Don't worry - Be Happy"

Death awaits us.

Death awaits us. This is no big deal, nothing lasts forever. We’re pretty short-sighted. Stephen Hawking, the most intelligent man alive today once said that he’d be surprised if mankind lasted another century. But  people often talk about what the human race will do when the Earth gets fried as our sun blows up into a red giant just before it blinks out in the darkness.

Economic growth - part 1 - the economic divide

Ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution society has sought to “improve itself” through economic growth. The inventions of the spinning Jenny led to more efficient production of materials which could then be sold within the country and for export. This in turn fostered international trade