Stories tagged with "sustainability"
Long term agricultural overshoot
Posted by Gail the Actuary on December 28, 2009 - 10:39am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: agriculture, carrying capacity, food, permaculture, sustainability [list all tags]
This is a guest post by Peter Salonius, a Canadian soil microbiologist, that was originally posted in October 2008.
According to Peter, humanity has probably been in overshoot of the Earth's carrying capacity since it abandoned hunter gathering in favor of crop cultivation (~ 8,000 BCE). The problem is that soil needs tightly woven natural ecosystems to properly recycle nutrients and prevent soil erosion. Earth's inhabitants have devised a whole series of approaches to increase the amount of food that can produced, starting first with hand-cultivation and culminating in the last century with the widespread use of fossil fuels. These approaches strip the soil of its nutrients and cause soil erosion. Even Permaculture cannot be expected to overcome these problems. According to the paper, eventually, to reach sustainability, the world will need to reduce its population to that of the hunter-gathers, and go back to living on the resources the natural ecosystems can produce.

Peter's paper begins below the fold.
Scientific American's Path to Sustainability: Let's Think about the Details
Posted by Gail the Actuary on November 9, 2009 - 10:10am
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: hydroelectric, scientific american, solar photovoltaic, solar power, sustainability, wind [list all tags]

Scientific American presents "A Path to Sustainable Energy by 2030" in its November issue. In many ways, it sounds good. But let's think about the details: What would the end result look like? Would it really be sustainable? What would the costs really be? Is there any way we could afford to do what is proposed?
The authors of the article, Mark Jacobson and Mark Delucchi, propose substituting wind, water, and solar (WWS) energy for all other forms of energy by 2030, not for just the US, but for the world. The types of energy sources that would be eliminated include the following:
• Petroelum (including gasoline, diesel, propane, heating oil, etc.)
• Natural gas
• Coal
• Liquid biofuels, such as ethanol
• Wood and other biomass
• Nuclear
All that would remain would be wind, wave power, tidal energy, hydroelectric, geothermal, and solar. Because of the ambitious timeframe, the only techniques that can be used are ones that work at large scale today, or are very close to working.
Dr. Albert Bartlett's "Laws of Sustainability"
Posted by Gail the Actuary on November 6, 2009 - 10:15am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: albert bartlett, sustainability [list all tags]
At the Denver ASPO conference, I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Albert Bartlett. Afterward, Dr. Bartlett e-mailed me some material he had written over the years. The "Laws of Sustainability" were included in this material. They are part of Al Bartlett's contribution to the anthology The Future of Sustainability by Marco Keiner, published in 2006. The document by Dr. Bartlett from which these were excerpted can be found here.
LAWS OF SUSTAINABILITY
The Laws that follow are offered to define the term "sustainability." In some cases these statements are accompanied by corollaries that are identified by capital letters. They all apply for populations and rates of consumption of goods and resources of the sizes and scales found in the world in 2005, and may not be applicable for small numbers of people or to groups in primitive tribal situations.
These Laws are believed to hold rigorously.
The list is but a single compilation, and hence may be incomplete. Readers are invited to communicate with the author in regard to items that should or should not be in this list.
First Law: Population growth and / or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.
Sustainability: Planning from a Base of Zero
Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 30, 2009 - 8:01pm in The Oil Drum: Campfire
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: sustainability [list all tags]
If we want to plan for truly long term sustainability, it seems to me that we need to plan from a base of zero in terms of fossil fuel usage, rather than from present day usage. This is very much a change from most thinking--how we can make tweaks to our current system to use less oil or gas. Over the long term, we know our current system won't work, so at some point we need to be thinking where we want to head, while we still have resources in hand that we can use to make changes.
We are so unaccustomed to thinking local, that it is hard to even contemplate the idea. What can be made with strictly local inputs, besides simple things like baskets and bricks? It is hard to even contemplate the idea, if one has to put all of the necessary steps in place, like transporting the raw materials to an area where they can be worked on, then working on the raw materials, and distributing the finished products to new locations.
The Zero Growth Mind
Posted by Ugo Bardi on September 14, 2009 - 10:44am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Sociology/Psychology
Tags: agriculture, sustainability, zero growth [list all tags]
Ancient peasants lived, mostly, in a "zero growth" world and, perhaps, in the future we'll return to a condition in which the finiteness of resources is an obvious fact of life. We see in this painting a group of 19th century Dutch peasants as painted by Vincent Van Gogh, who had an uncanny capability of showing not just the exterior aspect of things but also their inner reality ("The potato eaters", 1885, the Van Gogh museum, Amsterdam)
Joseph Tainter - Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability
Posted by Nate Hagens on September 9, 2009 - 10:17am
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: complexity, energy gain, joseph tainter, sustainability [list all tags]
Joseph Tainter, a Professor in the Department of Environment and Society at Utah State University, and author of the seminal work "The Collapse of Complex Societies", recently gave a speech on complexity and resource use at the 94th Annual Meeting of Ecological Society of America in New Mexico: (Conference theme: Human Macroecology: Understanding Human-Environment Interactions Across Scales). The speech, 'Human Resource Use: Timing and Implications for Sustainability', based on a forthcoming paper, is reprinted below with the authors permission.
Is Sustainable Development sustainable?
Posted by Luis de Sousa on July 11, 2009 - 10:20am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Sociology/Psychology
Tags: development, exponential growth, original, sustainability, sustainable development [list all tags]
The other day I got an e-mail from someone with The Economist asking me to participate in an on-line forum/discussion on that science fiction figure called Sustainable Development. Someone at this popular economics publication followed the series on the European Elections that was published here and at the European Tribune.
This time, instead of graphs and analysis, I opted for something a bit different.
High altitude wind power: an era of abundance?
Posted by Ugo Bardi on July 6, 2009 - 10:06am in The Oil Drum: Europe
Topic: Alternative energy
Tags: energy, sustainability, wind power [list all tags]
The kitegen concept: high altitude wind power based on kites. In this configuration ("stem"), the kite reaches altitudes of the order of 1000 m; pulling on a power generator located on the ground. High altitude wind power promises to be a low cost and widely available technology able, in principle, to provide amounts of energy comparable, and even superior, to the present production based on fossil fuels. (See here an animated representation of how a stem works)
It's Our Turn to Eat: How Politics Works and Why Activism is So Important
Posted by Prof. Goose on June 30, 2009 - 10:15am
Topic: Policy/Politics
Tags: activism, interest groups, politics, rationality, social movements, sustainability [list all tags]
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Livable Streets and Reclaiming Public Space for People (Instead of Automobiles)
Posted by Glenn on May 13, 2009 - 6:13pm in The Oil Drum: Campfire
Topic: Environment/Sustainability
Tags: livable streets, movie, new york city, ocean city, public space, sustainability [list all tags]
For anyone who is down in the dumps and thinks that nothing can be done to change the car-culture where you are, I hope this post offers a glimmer of hope, optimism and inspiration on what can be done when we re-think our public domain.


k Nation (Jim Kunstler)






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