Articles
The following is a collection of articles by leading thinkers and innovators across many fields related to sustainability.
What is a Sustainable Community?
The term is often defined as having an equal balance of the three Es: Environmentalquality, Economic vitality, and social Equity. Building sustainable communities requires careful integration of environmental, social and economic strategies. If we can focus on all three – not just one – these strategies create a sense of place, personal responsibility, and social well-being that together foster improvements in quality of life.
How many new trees would we need to offset our carbon emissions?
As trees grow, they take in carbon from the air and store it in wood, plant matter, and in the soil, making them what scientists call “carbon sinks.” In this way, forests play an important role in the global carbon cycle by soaking up lots of carbon dioxide that would otherwise live in the atmosphere. Could we plant enough trees to absorb the amount of CO2 that Americans create and, in theory, cancel out our carbon emissions?
Climate Change: The Least We Can Do
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amounts of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentrations of greenhouse gases have increased. Limiting climate change will require substantial and sustained reductions of greenhouse gas emissions.
Who says a better world is impossible?
Despite a long history of the impossible becoming possible, often very quickly, we hear the “can’t be done” refrain repeated over and over — especially in the only debate over global warming that matters: What can we do about it? Climate change deniers and fossil fuel industry apologists often argue that replacing oil, coal and gas with clean energy is beyond our reach. The claim is both facile and false.
Energy, Ethics and Civilization
In 1922 Alfred Lotka (1880–1949) formulated his law of maximized energy flows: In every instance considered, natural selection will so operate as to increase the total mass of the organic system, to increase the rate of circulation of matter through the system, and to increase the total energy flux through the system so long as there is present and unutilized residue of matter and available energy.
Growing, Growing, Gone: Reaching the Limits - An interview with Dennis Meadows
The Limits to Growth, released in 1972, has profoundly influenced environmental research and discourse over the past four decades. Allen White of the Tellus Institute talks with Dennis Meadows, one of its co-authors, about the genesis of the report and its lessons for understanding and managing our uncertain and perilous global future.
Six (NOT EASY) key lifestyle changes can help avert the climate crisis
Research carried out by academics at Leeds University, UK and analyzed by experts at the global engineering firm Arup and the C40 group of world cities, found that making the six commitments could account for a quarter of the emissions reductions required to keep the global heating down to 1.5C. The study found that sticking to six specific commitments – from flying no more than once every three years to only buying three new items of clothing a year – could rein in the runaway consumption that is partially driving the climate crisis.
CLIMATE CRISIS: The Really Big One
The global—and local—response to the pandemic is in a sense a testing ground for the capacity of communities to deal with the biggest and most complex challenge of all—the climate crisis. It has not gone away.
Sobering Wisdom from the Elders - Book Review
All Americans hoping for population sanity will find stirring essays and insights of longtime advocates of population reduction in the just-released book “Facing the Population Challenge: Wisdom from the Elders”. Edited by Marilyn Hempel, the book is a project of Blue Planet United – a nonprofit environmental group and publisher of Population Press.
Hempel says the anthology brings together the responses of fifteen giants in the field of human population and development, who were asked how they would advise an assemblage of the world’s leaders on the future of humanity and the biosphere.
From Vicious to Virtuous Cycles: The Great Turning
Fifteen-hundred miles west of Seattle, in the middle of the North Pacific, a mass of plastic debris and chemical sludge is caught in ocean currents known as the North Pacific Gyre. It is estimated to be the size of the lower 48 states at a depth of 100-1000 feet. But no one knows for certain how large or how deep, only that it is massive and growing. Some of the most amazing things humans have ever made float in what has been renamed the “North Pacific Garbage Gyre.” They are made primarily of oil extracted from deep below the surface of the Earth, which is another remarkable story. The impact on marine organisms and sea life is poorly documented but it is between disastrous and catastrophic. Some of the debris is ingested by birds and fish who mistake floating plastic doo-dads for food. Some of it breaks down into long-lived toxic compounds. Despite its size and ecological effects the North Pacific Garbage Gyre is distant enough to be out of sight and out of mind.
If the World Were a Village of 1,000 People
Originally published in 1992 by Donella H. Meadows. A pioneering environmental scientist, author, teacher, and farmer widely considered ahead of her time. She was one of the world's foremost systems analysts and lead author of the influential Limits to Growth. She was Adjunct Professor of Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College, the founder of the Sustainability Institute and co-founder of the International Network of Resource Information Centers.
Selective Moral Disengagement: Hiding Behind Good Intentions
The Population Bomb is Still Ticking
Selective moral disengagement, with the denial it fosters, enables people to pursue harmful practices freed from the restraint of self-censure. This is achieved by investing ecologically harmful activities with worthy purposes through social or economic justifications; enlisting exonerative comparisons that make damaging practices appear righteous; using sanitized and convoluted language that disguises what is being done; reducing accountability by displacement and diffusion of responsibility; ignoring, minimizing, and disputing harmful effects; dehumanizing and blaming the victims, and derogating the messengers of ecologically bad news. These psychosocial mechanisms operate at both the individual and social systems levels.
The Beauty of Native Plants: Designed by Mother Nature to Thrive
The essence of living green is working with nature, not against it. I can think of no better example than planting your garden and yard with plants that are native to the place you live.
The beauty of these species is that they know in their genes how to defend against local pests and diseases, deal with the climate and get by with conditions on the ground. Their ancestors have seen it all—and evolved to cope. As a result, native plants don't need your daily ministrations to survive. Once established, they don't even need regular watering.
18 Laws Relating to Sustainability
The Laws that follow are offered to define the term "sustainability." They all apply for populations and rates of consumption of goods and resources of the sizes and scales found in the world in 1998, and may not be applicable for small numbers of people or to groups in primitive tribal situations.
The lists are 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 these lists.
Top 10 Policies for a Steady-State Economy
Here are ten policies for ending un-economic growth and moving to a steady-state economy.
Overpopulation and the Collapse of Civilization
A major goal of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB) ais reducing the odds that the “perfect storm” of environmental problems that threaten humanity will lead to a collapse of civilization.