#eileen crist

[forbidden-sorcery]

Social justice is not achievable as long as the natural world continues to be stripped of its intrinsic standing and reconfigured as a collection of resources. By virtue of the sorts of entities they are, resources not only encourage but also largely create the acquisitive mindset that undergirds human conflict, corruption, and injustice. On the other hand, should people achieve greater material equity—while sustaining the anthropocentric representation of nature as made-for-humans—then social justice will come to pass at the price of planetary colonization, thereby evacuating the very concept of justice of any meaningful sense.

Eileen Crist

[exhaled-spirals]

« One day, when I was eleven, I heard heavy machinery and looked out the front door. A bulldozer was scraping the trees off the undeveloped land on the other side of our street. I asked my dad what they were doing, and he replied that the workers were going to build houses in the woods [...]. I asked why they had to build the houses. Dad answered, “People need houses to live in, and there are always more people.” I think I surprised both of us when I heard myself say, “Why do there always have to be more people?” and “Where are the animals supposed to live?” [...]

What actions would be necessary to implement a species legal right to continued existence? The most important would be to preserve sufficient habitat for other species. Only 11.5% of Earth's land area is presently within protected areas. [Science] predicts that if 90% of worldwide habitat is lost for wildlife—roughly the same percentage now outside protected areas—then approximately half of Earth's species will be driven extinct. [Meanwhile] species-area theory predicts that placing 50% of every major habitat type in protected area status—and sufficiently limiting pollution and climate change so that this habitat remains useful to wildlife—should ensure that approximately 85% of existing species survive into the twenty-second century. An additional benefit of moving quickly to greatly increase designated wildlife habitat is that limiting the land available for development would force people to confront limits to growth that much more quickly.

As a start toward operationalizing a species legal right to exist, we would propose [...] (1) a 50/50 sharing of Earth's terrestrial and marine ecosystems, including its most productive ecosystems, between human and nonhuman beings, with half of such landscapes set aside for biodiversity protection and evolutionary viability [...]. Boundaries [should be] drawn around the human presence, not around wilderness. [... W]e also need to make sure that we preserve habitat and resources for other species over the long term. It is hard to imagine people restraining their conversion of terrestrial and marine habitats, when they will need to expand the number of houses, grow and harvest more food, produce more energy, and satisfy the many other demands an ever-growing population will make. Hence we further propose that (2) human societies transition from endless growth economies to steady-state economies and (3) humanely stabilize and then gradually reduce the human population. 

It is not clear that humanity can escape enacting proposals (2) and (3) even if it chooses to write off other species' rights. Ever more people and ever more human economic activity are impossible to square with sustaining the resources and ecosystem services necessary for people to lead comfortable and enjoyable lives in the future. That is the clear, if largely unacknowledged, lesson of climate change and other examples of planetwide environmental degradation. So even on a selfish, anthropocentric definition of sustainability, where we ignore proposal (1), we likely will have to move on proposals (2) and (3). Humanity must face up to limits to growth.

This is no cause for lamentation. We believe acknowledging other species' right to exist and adopting proposals (1)-(3) would create a better world than the one we are constructing by blindly pursuing the demographic and economic status quo. It would be a world where people are less likely to suffer hunger, sickness, resource wars, and other ills stemming from the overuse and collapse of ecosystems. It would be a world where the human right to experience and celebrate wild nature is more widely ensured. It would be a world with significant room for human activity, but also one where we set aside places where such activity is largely absent; where we cultivate wisdom as well as cleverness, and self-restraint as well as self-development. Thus it would be a world with happier, freer, more just—and fewer—people; one where, when children asked their parents, “Where are the animals supposed to live?” they could answer, honestly and proudly: “Right here, next to us, forever.”

— Philip Cafaro, “For a Species Right to Exist” in Life on the Brink, ed. Eileen Crist

[forbidden-sorcery]

The establishment of human domination—with the penetration of anthropocentrism’s myriad tendrils into the lifeworld, not to say into economic, political, and institutional power structures—means that those who question its legitimacy cannot be given audience but will invariably, for the time being, be written off. For it comes down to this: The ideational and institutional schemata of human privilege have long been championed by a dominant civilization, which has carved planetary reality to reflect the cult of human specialness, such that between the Scylla of anthropocentric ideas and the Charybdis of global terraforming, the human mind has virtually zero degrees of freedom to think outside the box of Earth takeover and self-arbitrated rule.

Eileen Crist

[exhaled-spirals]

Sustainable growth, a phrase beloved by politicians, is an oxymoron. In a world of finite size, with limited resources, sustained growth of any material thing, such as a population or an economy, is not possible. Physical objects or processes cannot grow forever in a finite world. Understanding this simple fact is central to any understanding of sustainability.

Life on the Brink, ed. Eileen Crist and Philip Cafaro

[exhaled-spirals]

Taking the long view offers solace, for the power of wildness to rebuild life's richness and diversity following previous mass extinction episodes is undeniable. While the loss of beauty and complexity precipitated by humanity's demographic explosion is cause for sadness beyond words to communicate, those of us who love self-willed lands and creatures and who fight the tyranny of mindless growth at least surely recognize that the bumper sticker oracle spoke sagely when she proclaimed, Nature Bats Last. Ultimately, wild freedom will prevail.

Tom Butler, “Colossus versus Liberty”, in Life on the Brink, ed. Eileen Crist

[exhaled-spirals]

« Most thinking people support the concept of a sustainable future. After all, given the possible harms involved, it seems only rational to try to avoid potentially disastrous ecological overshoot. But a big part of rationality is numeracy, which is the mathematical equivalent of literacy, and this kind of numeracy seems to be absent from our policy decisions.

Bacteria grow by doubling. One bacterium divides to become two, the two divide to become four, the four become eight, sixteen, and so on. Suppose we had bacteria that doubled in number this way every minute. Suppose we put one of these bacteria in an empty bottle at 11:00 in the morning and then observe that the bottle becomes full at precisely noon. [...]

Here are three questions. First: at what time was the bottle half full? Answer: at 11:59, one minute before 12:00, because with steady growth the bacteria double in number every minute. 

Second: if you were an average bacterium in that bottle, at what time would you first realize you were running out of space? Well, consider the last few minutes in the bottle. At 12:00, it's full; one minute before noon, it's half full; two minutes before noon, it's a quarter full; before that, an eighth; then a sixteenth. At five minutes before noon, when the bottle is only 3% full and is 97% open space, just yearning for development, would you realize there might be a looming problem?

Now suppose that at two minutes before noon some of the bacteria realize they are running out of space, and they launch a great search for new bottles. They search offshore on the outer continental shelf and in the overthrust belt and in the Arctic, and they find three new bottles. That is an incredible discovery; it's three times the total amount of resource they had ever known about. They now have four bottles, where before their discovery there was only one. Surely this will help them create a sustainable society, won't it?

Now for my third question: how long can growth continue as a result of this magnificent discovery? Well, look at the score; at 12:00, one bottle is filled, there are three to go; 12:01, two bottles are filled, there are two to go; and at 12:02, all four are filled, and that's the end of the line.

You do not need any more arithmetic than this to evaluate the absolutely contradictory statements that we have all heard from politicians, who tell us in one breath that we can go on increasing our populations, our effluents, our rates of consumption of fossil fuels or water, and in the next breath they say, “Don't worry, we will always be able to discover the new resources and technologies that we will need to meet the requirements of that growth.”

A little arithmetic is all that is needed to show that “sustainable growth” is an impossibility. But this seems beyond most politicians and most sustainability “experts,” who advocate all manner of efficiency improvements which, taken together, cannot achieve sustainability, because they do not include stopping growth in population and rates of consumption. »

— Albert Bartlett, “Reflections on Sustainability and Population Growth” in Life on the Brink, ed. Eileen Crist

[exhaled-spirals]

« Here is an example from my own career in river conservation. After thousands of dams had been built through the 1960s, people began to realize the tremendous detrimental effects on rivers, fish, and whole landscapes, and a movement grew to protect the best rivers that remained. [...] Rather than make more water available via new dams or take it from other people, a strategy was pursued to make improved use of the water we already had. These efficiency efforts paid off—[...] in California, per capita use was halved during a forty-year period. But here's the catch: population growth has rendered the savings almost meaningless. [...] In California's last forty years the population nearly doubled. Water shortages have increased and require unpopular adjustments [that] still spell ruin to whole ecosystems [...].

Beyond the space we directly occupy, each of us needs a predictable amount of area for food production, water supplies, transportation systems, energy sources, and so forth. [...] Imagine yourself, for a moment, on the side of the people who want unrestricted economic growth and typically resist environmental protection. What would you do if you wanted to make sure that unlimited amounts of land were available for development no matter what the [biodiversity] loss, that every drop of oil and bucket of coal would be extracted and burned no matter what the consequences, that every rule for the environment would be stretched, ignored, or rescinded? 

If you wanted to win [this] war—plus along the way, enjoy a perpetual source of cheap labor based on an oversupply so large that it makes bargaining or unionizing impossible—[...] then all you would need is an ever-increasing population. You wouldn't have to do anything except make sure that population growth did not stop. In the end, people will demand to be accommodated; endangered frogs are no match against human suffering, real or imagined. The losses might be resisted for a while, but not for long. A growing population is, in fact, so important to anti-environmentalists' success that they would be well served if there were a taboo on even discussing population growth and the ways to limit it. »

— Tim Palmer, “Beyond Futility”, in Life on the Brink, ed. Eileen Crist

[carolkeiter]

We Need To Clean up Our Oil Act and Introduce Transportation Alternatives - Bicycle-Pedestrian Infrastructure, Trains, Trams, Battery Operated Public Buses 

We Need To Clean up Our Oil Act and Introduce Transportation Alternatives – Bicycle-Pedestrian Infrastructure, Trains, Trams, Battery Operated Public Buses 

I was reading this article in the New York Times about the massive oil that has leaked in the Gulf of Mexico after hurricane Ida, and the regularity of leaks springing from both active and inactive/abandoned oil pipelines and platforms there. After Hurricane Ida, Oil Infrastructure Springs Dozens of Leaks By Blacki Migliozzi and Hiroko Tabuchi Sept. 26, 2021 “There are some important caveats.…

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