Earth Hour? Try Earth Lifestyle

Awareness is the first step, I suppose, towards effecting a change in behaviour. So I probably should keep my inclination to pooh-pooh the whole "Earth Hour" thing in check.

Suffice to say: the amount of energy saved by switching off lights for one hour a year is going to make no noticable difference to the Earth or our continued existence on it, and giving people the idea that caring for the Earth requires us to give up electric light could backfire badly.

I pretty much ignored Earth Hour last night. Continued playing chess with my daughter, listening to some music. Our household energy meter said we were using around 200W total power - though admittedly the meter is rather inaccurate at those low levels.

My point? Conserving energy needs to be a core value that drives behaviour each and every day, not a once-a-year stunt.

What chicks want

While I'm on the subject of chickens... In the past six months I've learned some things about chook psychology.

During the day time, chooks seem to like resting on the ground, especially in the dirt, but they want a good long view at ground level - presumably so they can see any potential dangers coming. Ideal spots include hedges and low shrubs. Cool, loose dirt or leaf litter provide comfort, interest and sometimes a hidden snack.

At night it's a different story. Chooks want to climb as high as they can get and will go to extraordinary lengths to find a good perch. I guess the logic is that when it's dark they can't see things coming to eat them, so they might as well just try and get out of the way. Chickens aren't smart at the best of times but once the sun goes down their brain really switches off. They'll flap and squark like crazy if you pick 'em up while sleeping, but they'll go right back to sleep wherever you put 'em down. If they haven't been eaten everything must be OK. Funniest thing is when their head slips out from under their wing and hangs down limp below the level of their feet.

All of that is useful when you're thinking about building a home for chickens. This day/night dichotomy is why I'm trusting a four-foot-high wire fence to keep out chickens which even with clipped wings made it up onto a six-foot fence to sleep. Fingers crossed.

Too much to say

Ironically, it's been quiet here because there's too much to talk about. Or maybe it's because there's been too much talk about.

Since I started doing this the world's attention has been brought quite sharply to bear on most of the issues that concern me. There's so much high profile discussion and activity going on that my little blog seems rather superfluous. Which is great!

I just want to highlight a couple of local bits of good news.

1. Brisbane folk are now habitually conservative with their water. We managed to meet the 140L/person/day target under extreme restrictions and even now that the dams are heading towards 50% capacity we're still sitting well under the 170L revised target. I just read my water meter for the first time in 201 days, and our total household usage over that period averaged only 194L per day - actually less than the previous six months when we were watching like a hawk.

2. Politics is (generally) swinging in the right direction for sustainable civilisation. The election of Obama is of course globally significant, but even here at home we've seen the Traveston Dam project put on hold, willingness to regulate agriculture in order to protect the Great Barrier Reef, plans for floating desalination plants shelved, proactive measures from government to promote energy efficiency and GHG reductions, community gardens... heaps of stuff.

3. The combination of environmental/sustainability concerns and the economic crisis is driving a swing away from "consumerism". I so hate being thought of as a "consumer". I want to be a "contributor". But anyway, it seems that I'm far from alone in my back yard garden tinkering, chook raising, material recycling and "waste not, want not" attitude. Newspaper articles are even using words like "frugality" in a positive lifestyle sense!

So here's hoping that 2009 continues in this trend. There will certainly be bad news this year (I predict a sudden resurgence in the price of oil at some stage, going even higher than the peaks of last year) but there is also an atmosphere of hope. As I heard it said on a BBC radio interview yesterday, a crisis is an opportunity for change.

Heeeere, chook chook chooky!

We want chickens.
Chickens need somewhere safe to live and lay their eggs.
I avoid buying new materials.
I pretty much refuse to use concrete.
I use hand-powered tools whenever it's an option.
There was some junk lying around the yard and the shed.
My mate (Mr S) had some even cooler junk in his yard.
We're not stuck-up about the appearance of our garden.
It's a work in progress.
I'll post some pics once I complete the walls.

Fad or Fundament?

Have you noticed that the world is changing fast? For once I'm not talking about the biosphere - it's human society and politics I mean. Words based on "environment" and "sustainable" are starting to pervade the mass media, turning up in just about every political message at all levels of government and peppered through corporate communications. Advertising budgets are increasingly being spent on pointing out the "green" attributes of some product or service.

It seems that environmental groups have succeeded in using the greenhouse effect as a kind of lever to shift the massive inertia of social consciousness and direct it towards the long-term liveability of this planet. And the result has not just been all talk.

There are some great local examples, starting with the response to the water shortage of recent years. Not only have the residents of south-east Queensland succeeded in reducing their average per-capita consumption to one of the lowest rates in the developed world, we've maintained that discipline even with the rain of the past two months more than doubling the amount of water in our dams. Moreover, the sentiment of the majority of people I've spoken to is in line with official policy which says that conservative water use has become a permanent feature of life in this region!

Continuing with the theme of sustainable water use, one of the two main candidates standing for election to the office of Lord Mayor of Brisbane in a few weeks time is making a very big deal of his policies for minimising water wastage from leaking pipes and increasing the rebates for people who connect rainwater tanks for internal use in the home.

On the other side of politics, the incumbent mayor is earning a rare cheer from me for the spirit behind his latest announcement of funding to assist residents equip their homes with instantaneous energy meters of the type I've written about here in the past. I'm not totally thrilled with that particular approach (I'd rather see a loan/rent scheme) but I am thrilled with the stated objective of reducing the city's electricity consumption.

Both candidates are straining to one-up each other when it comes to public transport. Brisbane isn't large enough to have any direct control over railways but the next few years appear certain to see a very large number of new natural-gas powered buses on the city's roads and an expansion of the CityCat ferry fleet. Mr Incumbent is also touting a spending spree on bicycle paths and facilities.

I offer these examples as evidence of a major and accelerating shift in the public awareness of and concern for sustainability. I've written in the past about my belief that changing values is what brings about changes in behaviour, and I'm starting to become hopeful that values are indeed shifting in the right direction. Heck, I've even listened to speeches from federal parliament this week exhorting the nation to embrace the aboriginal peoples' attitude towards "the land", seeing oneself as literally a part of the environment and being always mindful of the need to care for it.

The question is whether this "trend" will continue. Are we really witnessing the early stages of the transformation of our wasteful, destructive, economically and ecologically irrational society into a responsible, efficient, ecologically-integrated civilisation with advanced culture and traditional wisdom as well as high technology? Well I hope so... because that's what it's probably going to take to avoid catastrophe.


So here's a litmus test for us to monitor our progress as a nation. The Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics (ABARE) published a report in December 2007 which predicts that, on the basis of the policies and trends in effect at that time, Australia's energy use will grow by 1.6% per year through to 2030 (that's up about 44% compared to today) with around 92% of that energy being sourced from fossil fuels. Let me suggest that if these projections match our future reality, then we're in very big trouble. But...

If society is in fact changing, embracing values of sustainability, we will necessarily see our energy use grow by a smaller amount than predicted and possibly even declining by 2030. We must also see an major decrease in the proportion of our energy derived from fossil fuels. I'll be keep an eye out for future releases like this one from ABARE to see where we're headed.

In the meantime, we all need to support those politicians who are promoting reduced energy consumption, increased efficiency and a transition to renewable energy sources.

Political Quotes

"You show me pollution and I will show you people who are not paying their own way, people who are stealing from the public, people who are getting the public to pay their costs of production. All environmental pollution is a subsidy."— Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

"The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment, not the other way around."—Gaylord Nelson

Regarding baseload power

Just following up on my last post where I briefly mentioned that the reason we can get such cheap power on off-peak rates is that coal-fired power stations can't be shut down overnight and the energy they produce has to go somewhere.

Found an interesting article today (via EcoGeek) from which I take the following quotes:

"Baseload is what those older technologies provided, not what we need... We need something that follows the natural load."

In other words, the grid is currently constructed to accommodate capital-intensive fossil fuel plants that need to run 24/7 to be most efficient and economical. The natural load, on the other hand, is the demand for electricity created by people's and the economy's daily rhythm. That demand naturally peaks when people are up and about and falls at night when they're asleep. Renewable energy sources, Mills argues, more closely mirror human behavior. Solar electricity production soars when demand does during the day. At night, stored solar energy and other renewable sources like wind, which tends to blow strongest in the evening, can more closely match lower demand as people and machines wind down.

Those of us who wish to support the expansion of the renewable energy industry need to counter the argument that renewables cannot supply sufficient baseload power. Perhaps we should be pointing out that the demand for such high power consumption overnight has been artificially generated to suit the coal-fired power stations.

But I'll also take that as justification for my decision to invest in a solar water heater even though it doesn't appear to make economic sense under current conditions. By reducing our night-time electricity consumption I'm ever so slightly changing the demand curve and eroding the argument that we need technology which can provide such large amounts of energy 24 hours a day.

Imagine (not quite) all the people

A really, really long post but one which means a lot to me.

There are a whole litany of serious environmental and resource-depletion crises besetting this amazing Earth. We're fairly well aware of Climate Change and Peak Oil because of media exposure and their direct impacts on us, but there's also the destruction of habitats and the resulting mass extinctions, the over-exploitation of fisheries leading to ecosystem collapses... and on and on it goes. At some level we can frequently find links between these issues and purely human problems like war, poverty and disease.

Everybody in the developed world knows all of this. Most of us care to some degree but are generally too involved in our immediate, day-to-day concerns to try and do anything serious about alleviating these problems. Most of the time it all just seems overwhelming. But in the backs of our minds lurks one simple, indisputable, dangerous fact which offers a solution to all of these woes and at the same time is almost anathema:

The Earth would be far better off if there were not so many people living on it.

It doesn't sound so scary on the surface, but let's scratch at it a little. Arbitrarily, let's say we think that three billion of us would be a nice sustainable number. That's a bit less than half the number of people living today. How do we get from here to there?

If it would save the world, would it be justifiable to deliberately kill off half of humanity? I don't think so. But not everybody would agree with me. White supremacists, for example, would be very quick to suggest which half of the population should inherit the Earth. Still, simply halving the population is a foolish notion anyway because the real long-term problem is with population growth.

Pretend that our current world population of six-odd billion is sustainable in environmental and resource availability terms. Then ponder for a moment (a long moment, preferably) how we might keep the population at that level and no higher.

This is the really hard bit. Remember my recent post about how values drive behaviour? (Here) As far as I can recall, Maslov didn't explicitly talk about humans having a "need" to have children. Perhaps he should have, or perhaps it's just so obvious it didn't need to be mentioned. But I believe that as clever and "evolved" as we are, we are still deeply driven by instinctive, natural forces to go forth and multiply. Every single one of your ancestors, right back to Adam or the Amoeba (depending on your world view) did exactly that. It's who you are. It's intrinsic to the nature of every living thing.

Over time that instinct has been reinforced by the natural law of strength in numbers. Species which have more offspring tend to have a survival advantage whether it be through simply playing the numbers game (like sea turtles) or through group behaviours (like ants or bees).

Getting back to that simple, indisputable, dangerous idea... I think we find the notion of population limits so troubling because it's unnatural.

My wife and I have three children, each of them deliberately conceived and dearly loved. It's natural and wonderful and I delight in my family. But in choosing to have a third child I have become part of the overpopulation problem.

(In my defense let me note that Michelle was about five months pregnant already when I had the emotional breakdown which resulted in me taking up the cause of sustainability. We won't be having a fourth.)

I get to wondering about what possible hope there might be for the future. It seems obvious to me that if we continue on our present and entirely natural track we're going to repeat the Easter Island story on a global scale, or something similarly catastrophic. Somehow we must become self-limiting not only in our consumption of resources (which we are actually starting to do!) but also in our reproduction.

Pause there and take a breather before I try and condense all of the above into a single paragraph...

We're bringing calamity upon ourselves and the rest of the world as a result of us simply doing what comes naturally. It's not ethical (or in any way practical) to try and cull the existing population. Saving the world will require nothing less than all six billion of us agreeing to deliberately limit the number of descendants we have, in direct defiance of nature itself. Failure to do this could result in the extinction of humanity and possibly of most or all life on Earth.

It's an impossibly daunting idea.

But just imagine if it could be done. What would such a society be like to live in? If we're going to succeed in the long term I suspect we'll see well-established pockets of this kind of society by 2050.

By definition I'm not talking about a "one child policy" such as exists in China. That's a strategy for reducing population rather than maintaining a steady one. In a steady-state population each adult would have exactly two children, on average.

Perhaps a "two child policy" will form the basis of our future civilisation. For the sake of human rights I don't think it's something which should be in any way enforceable by law - if a couple wanted fourteen children I feel it would be morally wrong to forceably prevent them from having them (assuming that the children would be properly cared for). But at the same time if birth numbers were carefully monitored then a system of "voluntary allocation" could be devised to help keep the population steady.

Start with the notion that beyond the inherent right to reproduce, it's reasonable for every person to have two children. Of course you need two people to make a child so this is not a doubling process. Each child represents two combined "rights" from two parents.

I suspect that in a society with a strong philosophy of sustainable population there would be an increased number of people who would choose to remain childless. It may be that they wish to live a life of rich experience without parental responsibility. Or they may feel that the best way for them to contribute to society would be by devoting themselves to professional or philanthrophic endeavours. Such a person could notionally "give up" their right to have two children and in doing so make it reasonable that another couple somewhere might have one more. (Remember that individuals don't have children - couples do. Making one child requires two "rights" to come together.)

It's almost certain that there will always be premature deaths. If an adult dies before having produced any offspring then "their" children could reasonably be had by somebody else. Should a child die, I imagine the bereaved parents would be considered to have the right to bear another should they so desire - but if they chose not to then it seems reasonable that another couple might have an additional child to make up for the one lost.

On the other side of the equation there are those who become parents of more than two children by accident or who simply desire a larger family. In a voluntary steady-state population there would ideally be enough people making deliberate family planning decisions on the basis of the overall population balance that a zero growth rate could be maintained.

I reckon I could live in a world like that. One more thing before I wrap this up: could it possibly work in real life on a global scale?

Honestly, I have no idea. On the positive side I do know that people can choose to alter their behaviour if their values demand they do something other than what's "natural". Witness suicide bombers...

The negatives are pretty big though. Avoiding pregnancy requires either contraception or sexual restraint - already a big challenge in the developing world for several reasons. As far as I know the world's system of economics considers population growth to be necessary thing. And in strategic military terms a larger population is generally more powerful than a smaller one (the old strength in numbers thing) and there's more than enough national, racial and religious tension in the world to make that a current concern.

Yet again for me it comes down to a question of values. If humanity wanted to maintain a sustainable population, I believe it certainly could do so.

What do you think? If you agree with me, what can we do to bring about this kind of change in the world?

Thanks so much for reading.

Tell me what you want, what you really really want

This is something I've been struggling to write for a couple of weeks now. I'm not entirely happy with it but it's hopefully better than nothing. With the caveat that I'm not trained in psychology or sociology or anything like that, let's dive right in...

The basic idea is this: all of the greenies, the conservationists, the environmentalists, the reduce/reuse/recyclers, the peak oilers, everybody who wants everybody else to voluntarily change their behaviour in some way, has to understand that their struggle is not primarily with behaviours but with values.

Value decisions drive behaviours. I wrote this about six weeks ago:

It seems to me that the primary driver for personal behaviour must surely be personal values. If so, that would imply that my failure to change behaviour in personal matters (such as limiting my Ice Break consumption as I had committed to do) comes down to a question of my own values. That I value the experience of drinking coffee-flavoured milk more highly than the environmental benefits gained by reducing my consumption. And that would probably be because the benefits of drinking it are personal, immediate and known whereas the benefits of reducing consumption are dispersed, delayed and unknown.

There's a famous TV psychologist who nailed the issue with his often-repeated question, "What's in it for you?" People don't just do random things. They tend do the things which they believe will meet the needs or desires which are most pressing within them.

Needs and desires is a tricky subject. Another famous guy by the name of Jeremiah is purported to have written, "The heart is deceitful above all things... who can understand it?" Well, a bloke called Maslov took a good stab at it with A Theory Of Human Motivation (here) from which is derived his Hierarchy of Needs (here with illustration).

We get even more complicated when we consider that we can, with varying degrees of effectiveness, redefine and reprioritise our needs and desires by adopting just about any other moral, ethical or value principle you could possibly conceive of.

The majority of these are older than we are and are imparted to us through our family, friends and broader society. Sometimes a new or derivative principle comes along, like the famous "land rights for gay whales" slogan, which we might see fit to adopt.

Some of these ideas - especially religious ones - become almost as deeply ingrained as the needs which Maslov described, and can take such a high priority that people are literally willing to die for a cause.

Let's get visual here for all you right-brainers with a diagram I just whipped up...

I hope that's making some kind of sense. People do stuff because of what they care about. If you want people to do different stuff you need to either get them to care about the same things you do, or convince them that what you want them to do is somehow aligned with their own most pressing needs and desires.

Now to bring this all back into context and finish up...

I started with a statement about attempts to bring about voluntary changes in behaviour. That's really directed at anybody (myself included) who wishes to inspire "grassroots" or community-based action regarding climate change or sustainability. It's a really tough job and we need to be clear what we're up against.

The other aspect to bringing about widespread change is the use of the law. The law is (supposed to be) a codification of the agreed values of a society and has a couple of unique strengths in regarding to upholding values:
- laws can be designed to counteract our bias towards personal, immediate and known benefits
- any value written into law is reinforced by Maslov's safety needs which incline most people towards civil obedience

Changing laws in a democratic society is generally achieved by demonstrating that a certain set of values is held in common by a majority (or an influential minority) of the people. It's a different fight.

As I think about the year 2050 and what kind of civilisation I hope we will have, I see a society in which the core values associated with environmentally sustainable (or even beneficial!) human society are broadly accepted and expressed in law so as to guide individuals as well as commerce and industry in behaviours which will meet our most important needs not only today but for the very long term.


And maybe a world in which I never ever ever quote the Spice Girls again.