Tag Archives: sustainability

Today's podcast guest is bioecologist and ecological economist Dr. William Rees, professor emeritus of the University of British Columbia’s School of Community and Regional Planning. Rees is best known for his development of the "ecological footprint" concept as a way to measure the demand a particular population places on the environmental resources it needs to survive.

Since the beginning of modern agriculture (around 1800), human activity has increased demand on planetary resources at an exponential rate. More energy has been expended — and more resources consumed — in the past 40 years than in all of human existence beforehand. That is placing a greater and greater strain on ecosystems that are now dangerously depleted.

Click the play button below to listen to Chris' interview with Dr. William Rees (67m:45s).

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Modern society is addicted to and engineered for perpetual economic growth.

Now, a fourth-grader can tell you that nothing can grow forever, especially if you have finite resources. But that simple realization is eluding today's central planners, despite multiplying evidence that growth is becoming harder and harder to come by.

This week's podcast guest is Professor Tim Jackson, sustainability advisor for the UK government, professor of sustainable development at the University of Surrey and Director of CUSP. Tim is also a full member of the Club of Rome.

He explains why the exponential growth rates of today's economies, and their associated rates of resource extraction/consumption, will not be able to continue for much longer — and why a pursuit of "prosperity" (defined much more broadly than simple consumerism) is a much healthier goal for humanity.

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Younger generations that are being asked (goaded?) to step into an increasingly flawed future begin to resist. Which is completely understandable. They have nothing to gain if the status quo continues.

At the same time, the older generations mostly just settle into a stubborn insistence that everything will be fine if everyone will just do more of precisely what got us into the mess in the first place. Younger people should step up to make sure Medicare/Social Security/pensions remain fully funded, and buy the financial assets and homes of downsizing seniors at top dollar. The boomers have everything to lose if the status quo changes.

What happens when a culture’s dominant narratives are not just unsatisfactory, but entirely unworkable? 

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By popular demand, we welcome Joseph Tainter, USU professor and author of The Collapse Of Complex Societies (free book download here).

Dr. Tainter sees many of the same unsustainable risks the PeakProsperity.com audience focuses on — an overleveraged economy, declining net energy per capita, and depleting key resources. 

He argues that the sustainability or collapse of a society follows from the success or failure of its problem-solving institutions. His work shows that societies collapse when their investments in social complexity and their energy subsidies reach a point of diminishing marginal returns. That is what we are going to be talking about today, especially in regards to where our culture is today, the risks it faces, and whether or not we might already be past the tipping point towards collapse but just don’t know it yet.

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After watching the Crash Course, who among us hasn't felt insecure with where we live?

The idea of a sustainable community has a powerful allure. Imagine a resource-rich property mapped out with a plan for sustainable self-sufficiency, populated with a community of like-minded folks that already "get" the importance of cultivating resilience….  Sounds pretty good, right?

But what exactly is a "sustainable community" anyways? How do you find one? What's it like to live there? How do you know if it's all going to work out in the long run?

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When you buy a piece of clothing, how much thought do you give to how it was made?

Few shoppers do. But they should. In many respects, where our clothes comes from is nearly as important as where our food comes from.

The recent tragedy in Bangladesh, where over 1,000 sweatshop workers died in a building collapse, provides a stark reminder of this. 

In this podcast, I talk with retail entrepreneurs Scott Leonard and Matt Reynolds, co-founders of Indigenous Designs, to get a better understanding of the notoriety the textile industry has earned (much of it well-deserved) and learn about new business models that promise to transform it for the better.

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Adam Werbach has been at the vanguard of the sustainability movement since high school when he founded a national organization of over 30,000 student volunteers who mobilized around environmental projects. A few years later, at the age of 23, he was elected the national President of the Sierra Club – the youngest in its 100+ year history.

In 2004, Adam turned the environmentalism movement on its head by publicly decrying its outdated thinking and lack of progress, given the scope of its mission. He challenged its followers to link their goals to other broad social and economic ones in order to have more impact.

He led the way, controversially, by working with Wal-Mart in 2006 to help them integrate sustainable practices into their supply chain and operations – a model he subsequently brought to many of the world's largest multinational corporations in over 80 countries.

In this interview, Chris and Adam discuss the "sustainable business" movement and its future prospects, including such questions as What does sustainability really mean? What are the key success requirements? What models show the most promise today?

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Under the general topic of growing some (or all) of our own food, we have broken the larger topic down into several knowledge areas.  We think you should understand why growing your own food is a good choice to make, and so “Understand It” is our first general topic.  Following that, “Grow It,” “Save It,” and “Use It” will help you think about the critical topics of how to get food into the ground, how to get it out, how to keep it from spoiling, and what to do with it once you’ve got it on the shelf, in the freezer, or in the root cellar.  Introductory notes in each section will help you choose which books, publications or websites to read first.  We’ve included links in the text, so you can click for more information as you read. Some of the material that follows is fairly basic; other material is more advanced.

Don’t let something supposedly “advanced” keep you away.  Everyone has to start at the beginning.  We all did.  Whether you choose to grow food against possible shortages, or as an economic decision or as part of changing your lifestyle in healthy and rewarding ways, we hope you find this annotated bibliography of the books that have helped us will help you as well.  We’ve included full citations for each book, to help you locate them.

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I’m updating from Reykjavik, Iceland, where I will soon have the pleasure of participating in a conference on sustainability.

The conference is a private event, but fortunately I can now share that I will be offering a separate Crash Course presentation and discussion at the University of Iceland, which is open to the public.  This is a recent development, and I am awaiting further details on location, but for now I know that the event will take place on Tuesday, September 14 at 5:00PM somewhere on the University of Iceland campus.  If you live or will be near Reykjavik that day and would like to join us, please check back to this blog post or to the event announcement page for location details before you head to the talk.  You can email Megan Walsh if you have questions about the event.

I’m grateful to have the opportunity to meet readers from Iceland and hope many of you can find your way to the talk on Tuesday.  More to come soon.  See you then.

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