A Sort of Diet

We’ve all heard it. ‘If you want to lose weight you have to burn more calories than you eat.’ It’s a balance. If you sit around all day reading, drawing, and writing columns for Patch and not walking, running, or otherwise exercising you will get fat (don’t I know it). And this balancing act is everywhere.

If you put more CO2 into the air than it’s had in over 600,000 years it will not have the same temperature balance as before. If you take more water from an aquifer than rain can recharge it the water table goes down. If you kill more animals than a species can reproduce in a year the population will decline. See, it’s not just a carbon footprint at play here.

We- Western Civilization most particularly- have been living in an infant’s fantasy that the world provides everything whenever we want it with no consequence and an insignificant price tag. It is uncomfortable to change and grow out of illusions, I know, but the world is not infinite and never has been. Up to the last six decades or so our population has been low enough that what insults we imposed on the Earth could be repaired by nature. No more.

Charities ask for anything you can give because ‘if everyone gives only one dollar we can cure this disease/save the whales/pass this bill’ or whatever. Back in the sixties we were rightly told ‘every litter bit counts.’ It works for good, but, unfortunately also for evil. It all adds up, and now it’s adding faster than natural processes can subtract it.

There are many species of plants and animals in increasing danger because of global warming, but many times more under threat because of habitat loss. If you fill a wetland where do the frogs live? If you pave a prairie what of the sparrows, prairie dogs, and all the other creatures which share their ecosystem? If you clear-cut a forest do the salamanders, snails and squirrels simply buy a new home and move? The big deal here is that this isn’t a bunch of bleeding-heart tree-hugging. We may not want to admit it, heck, some of us actively deny it, but we are obviously, inextricably, abjectly from and part of nature. What we do to it we do to ourselves in the end (take that as you will).

One side in this ‘debate’ wants to account for everything in dollars. That is, of course, a ludicrous proposition, but let’s try it for the exercise. Janet N Abramovitz, Senior Researcher for the Worldwatch Institute, in an article in 1998, wrote “Last year, an international team of researchers led by Robert Costanza of the University of Maryland's Institute for Ecological Economics, published a landmark study on the importance of nature's services in supporting human economies. The study provides, for the first time, a quantification of the current economic value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. The researchers synthesized the findings of over 100 studies to compute the average per hectare value for each of the 17 services that world's ecosystems provide (an overview of the concept is here in Wikipedia.) They concluded that the current economic value of the world's ecosystem services is in the neighborhood of $33 trillion per year, exceeding the global GNP of $25 trillion.”

Keep in mind, many of the ‘free services’ that nature provides are those we have no technological ability to do for ourselves at any price! Ultimately, this is why I spend such effort applauding the small, incremental changes we can make in our lives: If you take up the old VW philosophy- to constantly improve, irrespective of mere style- we just might have a chance of producing the truly big changes we absolutely must make in the end, while forming an entire new economy that serves us much better in the process.

In Shoreline, we have a leader in that emerging field: Shoreline Community College, which is rebuilding itself to better standards and teaching others how to do the same. I urge everybody to take advantage of educational and technological opportunities and thereby change the world.