It’s not my fault

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Every man and his dog has written an ebook and not even those by the dogs sell all that well. So rather than let one of mine languish in the vaults of Smashwords, here is a chapter from Environmental Issues for Real for your reading pleasure.

Chapter 11

Environmental Issues For Real

It’s not my fault

“I am a weapon of massive consumption. It’s not my fault it’s how I’m programmed to function.”

The wonderful Lilly Allen wrote this profound lyric in her song The Fear and it sums up our situation perfectly. This is our way and always has been. We have been successful because at our core we are driven to more making and we cannot help it. It should be no surprise that over time western society has shunned Dickensian poverty and the conservatism of the Victorians for a more generous way of life. We aspire to live like kings, always have and always will.

Innately we are fearful of lack and this explains our conservatism, but we also believe that there is plenty. We default to the notion that even if it is tough now, tomorrow will be much better and good for making hay.

An observation made by a friend of mine who recently retired from a distinguished career as a public servant in agricultural policy gave me pause. After observing the agricultural community in Australia for several decades his comment was that farmers take up practices that improve productivity and sustainability only when times are good. When it’s tough they just do what it takes to stay viable.

One implication of this logical and insightful observation is that future food production is dependent on how well farmers are doing now, in the immediate.

Another is that sustainability is a challenge. Frugality is a learned response for times of hardship and we don’t like it. Despite our best intentions we don’t show restraint naturally.

This collection of essays on environmental issues with their peculiar takes on what we understand by environmentalism came together because we are missing something.

Our debate has been about how the environment is hurting, that we are to blame and only we can do something about it. Only the environment does not hurt, it just responds. Evolution has come about in spite of all the disturbances, atmospheric upheavals and changing climate. And evolution will be ongoing with or without us and the environment will always be there doing its thing.

Real environmental issues are about us. They are about how we will cope with the notion that perhaps we are reaching the limit, that unlike the experience of our ancestors, today, here, there is not a new fertile valley to exploit just across the next ridge, because today that valley already has people in it.

Of course we have been told about all the environmental issues many times. The natural wonders of the world have come into our lounge rooms to inspire us. Vocal advocates for the environment have shouted at us for our excesses. We are even being forced to dip into our pockets to pay for the hidden cost of resource use (what the economists call externalities) through a carbon price. So we know all about the issues.

What we are missing is the awareness of this reality. We have chosen to ignore the consequences of our success.

Fortunately awareness is just a yoga class or two away. But that is another story.

Confused Confucius questions | #1 In the beginning

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confused confucius questionsSocial media is a great tool to explore the wonders of human nature.

As billions of smartphones, pads and tablets beep or jingle to alert the world to a new message so each owner in a reflex action picks up and responds. It is now so natural to comment, post and message that nobody even thinks about it.

What has amazed me is how liberated our online talk is, far more so than if we were chatting in the pub or over the cooler in the office. We have no qualms at all about saying what we think online, and usually it is the first thing that comes into our heads.

This growing fondness for telling the ether our deepest thoughts and feelings creates a whole new opportunity for cheeky folk like myself to prod and provoke a reaction.

As an experiment in testing this ability of people to bare their souls via a digital device, I started asking some random questions on the online articles platform HubPages where there is an alloporus profile with a few articles.

Rather than the usual “How to” and “What is” type questions, I settled for the “Why do we” type under the tag

Confucius confusions | Do you have any answers to this modern question that would have baffled the wisest sages of old?

The first observation was that this particular online community seems to view questions and then write answers more than they read articles. I received more views of questions in a week that I have for my articles in 6 months. Not surprising though considering the audience is primarily would be writers who like to voice their opinion.

The next thing that struck me was the topics that get people excited. So far the most viewed questions are

Why is elegance so rare?

Why are business suits dark?

The more tax you pay the more money you earn, so why are we obsessed with paying less tax?

Why do we take so many photographs?

These ‘random’ questions with no real bearing on anything seem to fire people up. Many write short essays to get their message across. And maybe this is a good thing. Since it is now far too expensive to go and have a chat in the pub every night, maybe we can get into discussion online.

Not all questions get people going and alloporus will monitor the questions that drift away into the ether without a spark as closely as the ones that get noticed.

So far most questions were asked under the category ‘Religion and Philosophy’ so as to suggest they were thoughtful rather than deliberately controversial. The interesting thing though was how passionate people can be over these random questions. What seems to happen is that answering allows feelings to flow.

So far any overtly environmental questions seem to get only a fraction of the views of the esoteric conundrums and only an occasional answer. This is bad news for this wannabe best-selling author who writes about the travails of the dance between humans and the environment. Clearly the topic is not often on our minds.

More to come on this exploration of human awareness.

Once in a lifetime

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Cyclone_Yasi_QueenslandIf you play sport then one day you will achieve your lifetime personal best.

You will catch a 3 kg bream, swim 400m in 5 minutes, make 122 not out on a green wicket or score 34 goals in the season. Every sporty person has their personal best, the one they talk about modestly to their grandkids and boast about after a few beers with mates.

It is also true that in your lifetime you will witness your hottest, wettest and coldest day, and your biggest storm.

Now that most of us go beyond the three score years and 10, there are upwards of 25,000 days for us to experience extremes.

Hurricane Sandy was devastating, as was Katrina, events that should only occur once in a lifetime and preferably not at all.

Sandy was a confluence of events, each one quite severe but devastating together, yet it happened. And we know that that equally perfect storm has happened before in previous lifetimes and will again in our children’s lifetime.

Even events that skip a generation or two and occur on average every 100 years are possible. The rank amateur can fluke a hole in one and have his day.

Given time Sandy will be followed by Samantha, Sybil and Susan. And she was preceded by literally thousands of equally severe storms in times past witnessed by settlers, indigenous peoples and before them, various species of now extinct megafauna.

The difference was there were no subways to flood, houses on wooden piers to collapse and substations to explode.

If we understood this fully then we would not blame Sandy or her sisters even if climate change means they happen more often that they did before.

We would realize what we have changed. We are present to witness and put flimsy things in the way of the storms.

We happen to be around for that meteorological PB.

After Katrina, and again after Sandy, there was much courageous talk of rebuilding clearing up and starting it over — inspiring stuff from leaders who know how to tap into the spirit humans have that makes them feel good even in hard times.

So the flooding will be drained and cleared up, the millions of dead rats ground up for fertilizer, the house rebuilt in readiness for Samantha and Shona. Although I suspect not built with too much more care than before.

This is what humans do. It is as innate as any cravings for salt and sugar. We will get to work, repeat what we did before and complain that it wasn’t our fault. So be it, it is our endless love affair with risk and opportunity

Some families will witness tragedy and have to mourn the loss of loved ones and of property, but society will shake off Sandy, even use her as a motivator and fiscal stimulus.

And later, remember her as that once in a lifetime storm.

Biodiversity | Google Trends #2

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Ever since the heady days of the first Rio Earth Summit in 1992 when we came up with the Convention on Biological Diversity I have had this feeling that we had invented a fad.

For a while though I could push that niggle aside as the new term biodiversity entered our lexicon and the sound bites of politicians.

Books on biodiversity were written for the populace and texts for students. I even got hired to develop an undergraduate course in this new subject. That it was just a logical amalgam of ecology, evolution and conservation biology was no matter — this was a great new hook to catch the awareness and maybe persuade people to do something about what was happening to the natural world under the increasing weight of human numbers.

Not too many politicians talk about it anymore, at least not to the press. There are a few stalwarts, notably in the conservation NGOs, who still hold a candle for it and a residual trickle of public funding goes toward environmental interventions with a biodiversity theme. Mostly though we seem to be back where we started talking about conservation and preservation of endangered species.

So am I correct in this hunch? Have we really forgotten about biodiversity?

Here is what Google Trends has to say about the popularity of the word in searches from 2004 to present relative to the peak search volume that happened in October 2004.

GTBiodiversityJan2013

Well it would appear I was at least partially right.

Peak search volume was at the start of the data run in 2004 to be followed by a steady and consistent decline through the rest of the noughties.

In the current decade we are running at an average of 47% of that 2004 peak.

It is a pity that we don’t know how much search activity the 1992 Rio Earth Summit might have generated [1998 was Google’s first official year]. In fact the steady increase in overall search volume makes that 47% more measly given that todays daily total search volume is more than 7x that of 2004.

Biodiversity may not have disappeared as a search term but it has waned.

As usual Google trends tells us that we can easily put aside any challenging or technical issues in order to enjoy Christmas and New Year celebrations and we are also not too worried about them when school is out for the northern summer.

The Rio+20 Earth Summit came and went without much fanfare last year. It prompted a bit of a spike in searches but not enough to catch up with those 2004 scores. It does not seem that biodiversity got a fillip from Rio+20 as any pickup was short-lived — maybe because they called it the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development.

Climate change | Google Trends #1

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You have to hand it to Google. They are just all over business development. They have found something that everyone needs, perfected it quickly and delivered it so effectively that nobody else can hope to compete.

Then whilst they continue to improve the core offering they find a great way to make money without most of their customers even realizing it.

Not resting on this success they invest in both the core offering and start to add bells and whistles. At some point along the way they get big enough and powerful enough from unprecedented popularity to start changing and then setting the rules [it used to be that a Panda was just an endangered species].

One of the many bells is Google Trends, a neat tool that spits out data on search behavior for a key word from 2004 to present.

Here is a graphic of what Google trends says about the keyword ‘climate change’

 

GTClimateChange

 

The numbers here are all proportional to the peak of search activity over the period — in this case the peak searching occurred in December 2009. So low numbers represent less interest in the term relative to the peak and trends in the data show if the term is growing or waning in popularity. It is also possible to pick seasonality or specific events that trigger a spike or trend in search activity.

What can we say about climate change?

On the graphic I have added a few select events, particularly the various UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) that have been an end of year staple for a few years now

We didn’t really bother too much about it until An Inconvenient Truth tweaked our curiosity in 2006. Then we got really excited around the time of the COP in Copenhagen when then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was calling climate change ‘the greatest moral challenge of our age’.

And what has happened since those heady days? Well, we have had three more COPs in Cancun, Durban and Doha with progressively more pathetic efforts at tackling the greatest moral challenge, accompanied by a downward trend towards pre-Al Gore levels of interest in the topic.

In a few more years we will have forgotten about it altogether.

Trends also suggests that regional interest in the topic now comes exclusively from the developing world with 8 of the top 10 countries by search volume from Africa. Only these are the places with the least resources to do anything about it.

Stats can also be a hoot. You’ll notice that after each COP there is a trough in search volume as everyone in the northern hemisphere tucks into their Christmas turkey and a regular annual dip in traffic in the northern hemisphere summer when its warmest!

No doubt that many equally critical challenges await and will trend upwards to their moment in the spotlight only to fall away again. Such is that nature of our attention span. It would just be nice if things went away because they were fixed.

On the upside, thanks Google for what will be endless hours of statistical fun.

Last rhinoceros

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This picture I have used before in an optimistic post on Rhinos.

It was taken in 1988 in the Mana Pools National Park, Zimbabwe — 24 years ago. The skulls are from black rhinos shot by poachers.

At the time the conventional wisdom was that the main market for rhino horn was in the Yemen where the many princes required the matted hair as raw material for artisans to carve ornate dagger handles.

This year a new wave of poaching has hit the species that since the losses in the 1980’s is now spread far and wide, mostly in smaller reserves that are heavily protected. This time the story is that the market is Asia where ‘medicinal’ use is setting high demand.

Maybe it was Asia back in the late 1980’s too as there can only be so many Yemeni princes, but whatever it was then there seems little doubt that today it is a large and powerful market that seeks rhino horn. And market forces are hard to stop. High demand and limited supply generates prices that make for good business and, for some, small fortunes.

But there is something more. Scarcity seems to trigger something primal in us.

As consumers we go to great lengths to sooth that feeling, paying whatever it takes to be in possession of that limited commodity.

The real worry for anyone with empathy for the rhinoceros is that these markets are newly flush with dollars thanks to two decades of double-digit economic growth in many parts of Asia. This economic growth has brought many benefits and it has also dramatically increased the proportion of people with disposable income. There is vastly more money in the system than there was in the 1980’s and as we know it matters little if you come from Chengdu, Chennai or Chicago consumers want to spend their surplus cash on themselves.

Chengdu at a tick over 14 million is the 4th largest city in China and is home to 5 times the number of people living in Chicago. Given there are currently 22 cities in China with more residents than the 2.7 million that live in Chicago, there is no shortage of potential customers for medicinal products.

Protecting the rhino is now a much harder problem than it was in the 1980’s. When you live far away from the rhino and have probably not even seen one, except maybe on television, you don’t even ask the fundamental question: rhino or me?

You just say, “me, thanks”, just like every consumer has done since commerce was invented. And, as the Lilly Allen lyric in her song ‘The Fear’ so profoundly puts it: “I am a weapon of massive consumption, it’s not my fault, it’s how I’m programmed to function.” We simply cannot help it.

So, if you are fond of a bet there would be very short odds on the only living rhino in 2036, another 24 years after the picture was taken, being in a zoo. And maybe this is necessary. Loss on a scale large enough and scary enough will probably be what it takes to change the knee-jerk “me, thanks” to…

“me, once I have thought carefully about the consequences of my choice”.

Here is an idea for the rhino problem.

Why not ban all false advertising across the entire globe.

Any claims made by an advertisement of any kind in any media must be falsifiable according to a strict set of international rules. And the onus of the proof falls on the advertiser, the company or individual who runs the ad.

So you cannot say that rhino horn powder cures any number of ailments and promotes everlasting life unless you have evidence — good, old-fashioned falsifiable evidence.

Failure to comply would result in an on-the-spot $1 million fine payable into a national environmental fund.

This edict need not just apply to wildlife products, but any product where the seller claims it to be what it is not.

Now there’s a thought.

Obama wins

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President Obama is returned to office, quite comfortably in the end; only he looked anything but comfortable.

The oratory in the Presidents victory speech was familiar, right down to the repetition of phrases and anecdotes that have worked well for him many times before. Only they seemed out of place and at odds with his countenance. That slim youthfulness wears the strains of office and endless campaigning easily, but there was no joy in him. It felt like the passion had gone, drained away by four years of political reality.

Obama couldn’t arouse the faithful with a “let’s finish what we started” message because not much has started and what was finished [Obamacare] turned out not to be as popular as it should have been. Best he could do through the first term was to hose down fires with no surety that they would go out [jobs, deficit, war].

You could see it all  in his speech. All the issues that he really wanted to speak about truthfully but couldn’t mention replaced with things he had to say but only half believed.

Nothing about reigning in the banks and the profit driven end of town.

Nothing about deficit being debt and that debt can readily become living beyond your means.

Nothing about how war might start out as an economic stimulus but over time is crippling to both treasury and psyche.

Nothing to say about the idea that incomes may not always need to rise for voters to be happy.

Obama did say thank you because he is a polite man and was clearly grateful for avoiding failure. He didn’t manage to inspire hope and didn’t look like he was invigorated to start anew. And this is a pity because the only way to tackle those unmentionables is head on making sure to bring the people with you.

There is still a chance because hope never dies, even if in Obama it seems to have been drained and jaded by the magnitude of the task.

Leadership really is a tough gig in a modern world of individual entitlement.

When 24% is really 0.8%

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According to the 2010 World Public Opinion Poll, the average American thinks the US spends 27% of the federal budget on foreign aid.

The actual figure is close to 1%. Even with the fickle nature of survey data this is a huge discrepancy, unbelievable really.

Does the average person on the sidewalks of US towns and cities really think that the US government gives a quarter of its money away in foreign aid? One dollar in four, leaving three to pay for everything else at home. Surely not.

Perhaps the perception is there because the US is by far the biggest single contributor to overseas development aid.

In 2010, the OECD reported the US spent $30 billion on aid, more than half as much again as the next most generous country, the UK ($14 billion), and 23% of the global total.

As a percentage of gross national income that $30 billion is just 0.21% and well below the average country effort (0.4%). It is also half a percentage point below the UN target of 0.7%. As it happens only five countries meet the UN target (Norway, Luxemburg, Sweden, Denmark and Netherlands).  The US would need to up the ante to $100 billion to catch up with the Scandinavians.

So the reality is that most countries give away less than half a cent in the dollar of national income to assist other countries develop. And the cynic would chirp that even this tiny percentage is not entirely altruistic as often the money is spent on goods manufactured at home plus some of the recipient countries will become trading partners in the fullness of time.

$30 billion was 0.8c in the dollar of the $3.6 trillion US federal budget of 2010.

Why the huge discrepancy? I must say I am at a loss. It could be because the average person has little notion of just how big the US budget is and so easily thinks that the donor part must be substantial. Or maybe people just don’t realize the huge cost of services at home.

Then again, we all tend to think that we are more generous than we actually are.

Whatever the reason, the numbers suggest there is huge difference between what people think is happening and reality.

100th Post

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Well here we have it.

After more than 52,000 words on topics from potatoes to washing machines, here is the 100th post on alloporus | ideas for healthy thinking.

It is a milestone of sorts and a good excuse to take stock.

I started blogging in 2010, only so did quite a few others. There are now more blogs on the net than voters who will turn out for the upcoming US presidential elections [staggering but true]. So many bloggers means a scramble for readers and at times it seems people are more interested in writing than reading the ramblings of others.

Visions of a large and growing readership on alloporus fell away soon enough.

On the upside blogging is good practice for any would be author. There is great discipline in always trying to say something interesting, a few hundred words at a time. So what have the previous 99 posts tried to say?

Rather than get all wordy on you I thought I would try to strip it all back to sound bites, so here goes.

Leadership sucks.

That’s it. 99 posts and a whole heap of words that try to explain it, when, in fact, two words suffice.

Leadership sucks.

It would seem that a theme running through just about all those 99 little ditties is that leadership is very hard to do well.

It requires more than force of personality to rise above the general chatter of all the mini-demagogues running around leading their band of one. Leaders need smart, attractive ideas that are strong enough to cut through the noise and then persist for long enough to take hold. This requires extraordinary tenacity even when you have a great idea.

And it seems we have a dearth of true leaders around who are even prepared to give it a go. Instead we are saddled with the egoists, chatterers, and wannabes trying to fill the gap.

Bless ‘em for trying but really our leadership sucks.

And, in the modern world, leadership itself sucks. Sticking your neck out is a risky business given the multitude of tools available to all and sundry to knock it off.

That’s assuming that you can even be heard. Ironically the information revolution has also made it easier for us to ignore the important stuff. We are far too busy texting, tweeting, posting on our wall and, well yes, blogging, to listen to real ideas. So breaking that big one through to enough minds is a huge challenge. So leadership sucks too.

Having simplified all those posts penned with great angst and care to two words, it begs the serious question of what to do with the next 100 posts?

I am tempted to type ‘leadership sucks’ in a ribbon across the page and keep posting that every day until flames consume me. Only that would be the ultimate avoidance; the head in the sand that I subconsciously railed against in the first 99 posts.

I could produce more of the same. A regular 500-word whinge about how terrible it all is. But this risks perpetual sadness and the likelihood of becoming a drunkard with his glass always half empty. And yet I have come to realize that this is my default condition. Not the drunkard bit but I too easily land close to despair at the ways of the human world, a state of mind I can tolerate only because my passion is readily aroused by good ideas and natural wonders.

So to continue to post yet more thinly veiled complaints about lack of leadership seems to have me running away again.

I could go all ‘ra, ra, ra’ on you and just talk everything up.

It would be easy enough to find ideas in the environmental good news stories that pepper the websites of green groups, NGOs and even some of the government departments. From there it would just be a matter of seeing the glass as half full. Yes we can and all that

Of course regular alloporus readers will be laughing at this point. They know me too well. Half empty to half full would require a change equivalent to spontaneous combustion. Rare indeed.

So I am going to try something else.

My idea is to see if I can make the next 100 posts about a more fundamental requirement. The theme is already a category tag on alloporus, suggesting that I have tried it already, only now I will try to make it stick.

It also happens to be the theme of my next ebook that is currently with the editor and will be available at a huge discount to loyal alloporus readers in time for their Christmas stocking.

So here is my new theme, and again two words are enough.

Awareness matters.

The last loaf of bread

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Consider the situation if this delicious crusty loaf was the only one on the planet.

More than that, it is the very last loaf of bread there will ever be.

After thousands of years of grinding grains into flour, adding yeast, a little salt and some water, kneading the mixture and applying some heat, the making of bread has stopped. And this loaf is now the last of its kind.

What would you do?

What should you do?

A while ago I wrote a story about Joe who was prescient enough to realize that he had this very conundrum.

You can download Joe’s story from the free downloads page of my Climate-change-wisdom site.

If you like it, why not download my ebook Stories for a change to read some more adventures and anecdotes that will tweak your environmental imagination.

You can get a copy in your preferred ebook format at Smashwords for less than the price of a cup of coffee.