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(pp. 648-650;

25.3aLiving More Simply and Lightly on the Earth

On a timescale of hundreds of thousands to millions of years, the earth is resilient and has survived many wounds. Mostly because of human actions, we are living on a planet with a warmer and sometimes harsher climate, less dependable supplies of water, more acidic oceans, extensive soil degradation, higher rates of extinction of species, degradation of key ecosystem services, and widespread ecological disruption. Unless we change our course, scientists warn that these and other harmful environmental changes will intensify.

Figure 25.10 lists 12 guidelines—the “sustainability dozen”—developed by environmental scientists and ethicists for living more sustainably by converting environmental concerns, literacy, and lessons from the earth into environmentally responsible actions for current and future generations. Significant scientific and other evidence indicates that human activities are degrading the earth’s life-support system at an increasing rate. Reversing this path to unsustainability means creating a society that lives within the earth’s ecological limits. In doing this, time is our scarcest resource.

Figure 25.10

Sustainability dozen: Guidelines for living more sustainably.

Some analysts urge people who have a habit of consuming excessively to live more simply and sustainably. Seeking happiness through the pursuit of material things is considered folly by almost every major religion and philosophy. Yet, today’s avalanche of advertising messages encourages people to buy more and more things to fill a growing list of wants as a way to achieve happiness. As American humorist and writer Mark Twain (1835–1910) observed: “Civilization is the limitless multiplication of unnecessary necessities.” American comedian George Carlin (1937–2008) put it another way: “A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. It is a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.”

However, to others, the more stuff we possess, the more we are possessed by stuff. According to research by psychologists, what a growing number of people really want, deep down, is more community, not more stuff. They want greater and more fulfilling interactions with family, friends, and neighbors. Some people are adopting a lifestyle of voluntary simplicity. It should not be confused with poverty, which is involuntary simplicity. Voluntary simplicity involves learning to live with less stuff, using products and services that have smaller harmful environmental impacts, and creating beneficial environmental impacts. These individuals view voluntary simplicity not as a sacrifice but as a way to have a more fulfilling and satisfying life. Instead of working longer to pay for bigger vehicles and houses, they are spending more time with their loved ones, friends, and nature. Their goals are to consume less, share more, live simply, make friends, treasure family, and enjoy life. Their motto is: “Consume less. Shop less. Live more.”

Living more simply and sustainably starts with asking the question: How much is enough? Similarly, one can ask: What do I really need? These are not easy questions to answer, because people in affluent societies are conditioned to want more and more material possessions and to view them as needs instead of wants. As a result, many people have become addicted to buying more and more stuff as a way to find meaning in their lives, and they often run up large personal debts to feed their stuff habit. Figure 25.11 lists five steps that some psychologists have advised people to take to help them withdraw from this addiction.

Figure 25.11

Five ways to withdraw from an addiction to buying more and more stuff.

Critical Thinking

1. Make a list of your basic needs. Is your list of needs compatible with your environmental worldview?

Throughout this text, you have encountered lists of ways we can live more lightly on the earth by reducing the size and impact of our ecological footprints. Figure 25.12 lists eight key ways in which some people are choosing to live more simply and sustainably.

Figure 25.12

Living more lightly: Eight ways to shrink our ecological footprints.

Critical Thinking

1. Which three of the eight steps in Figure 25.12 do you think are the most important? Which of these things do you already do? Which of them are you thinking about doing? How do your answers to these questions relate to

1. the six principles of sustainability, and

2. to your environmental worldview?

Living more sustainably is not easy, and we will not make this transition by relying primarily on technological fixes such as recycling, changing to energy-efficient light bulbs, and driving energy-efficient cars. These are, of course, important things to do. They can help us to shrink our ecological footprints and to feel less guilty about our harmful impacts on our life-support system. However, these efforts cannot solve the environmental problems resulting from excessive consumption of and unnecessary waste of matter and energy resources (see Case Study that follows).

Some analysts have suggested that the environmental movement has focused too much on bad news and laying blame, which has then led people to feel guilty, fearful, apathetic, and powerless. They suggest that we can move beyond these immobilizing feelings by recognizing and avoiding the following three common mental traps that lead to denial, indifference, and inaction:

· Hoping we can move to another planet (see Science Focus 25.1)

Avoiding these three traps helps us to be inspired by empowering feelings of realistic hope and action, rather than to be immobilized by feelings of despair and fear.

Critical Thinking

1. Have you fallen into any of these traps? If so, are you aware that you have, and how do you think you could free yourself from either of them?

Science Focus 25.1

Biosphere 3: Can We Move to Mars?

Some people suggest that if the earth is too crowded and polluted, we can move to another planet such as Mars (Figure 25.A). The atmosphere on Mars is about 95%  and has no oxygen, compared to the earth’s atmosphere which is 78% nitrogen  and 21% oxygen .

Figure 25.A

Mars: the red planet.

Nerthuz/ Shutterstock.com

The United States has the world’s third largest population and the highest population growth rate of any industrialized country. It also has one of the world’s largest per capita ecological footprints (Figure 25.12, bottom)—mostly because of high resource use per person. If everyone in the world used resources equal to what the average American uses, we would need about five planet Earths to support them, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Global Footprint Network. China has the world’s largest population and total ecological footprint (Figure 25.13, top). However, it has a much lower ecological footprint per person than the United States has because of its much lower rate of use of resources per person (Figure 25.13, bottom).

Figure 25.13

Comparison of total and per capital ecological footprints of the United States and China.

(Compiled by the authors using data from the Global Footprint Network 2018 and World Atlas 2017)

Since the 1960s, China has cut its birth rate in half and its population is growing at a rate slower than that of the United States. However, if its middle class continues to grow and consume more resources as projected, China could have the world’s largest per capita footprint within a decade or two.

Because of their economic power and high and growing levels of resource use, the United States and China will play the key roles in determining whether and how we can live more sustainably on the planet that keeps us alive and supports the world’s economies.

In the 1970s, the United States led the world in developing laws and regulations designed to improve environmental quality. However, since 1980 the U.S. environmental community has had to spend most of its time fending off attempts to weaken or repeal the country’s major environmental laws—many of which need updating.

At the federal level, many members of the U.S. Congress think that climate change is a hoax or that it is not caused by human actions and want to weaken or overturn environmental laws and regulations, reduce funding for climate research, and get rid of the Environmental Protection Agency. Thus, the country that led the world into concern for the environment is now reducing its global environmental leadership. Under pressure from coal, oil, and utility companies, certain legislators have blocked efforts to reduce fossil fuel use (especially coal), use a carbon tax or a carbon-trading system to reduce  emissions, shift to greater dependence on renewable energy from the sun and wind, and build a modern smart electrical grid to make this shift possible.

China’s leaders have plans to become more environmentally responsible over the next few decades for two reasons. One is to maintain their political power by heading off growing citizen unrest over the country’s severe pollution, as the U.S. government did in the 1970s. The other is to dominate the world’s rapidly growing and profitable green energy and low-carbon businesses. If successful, China could become the world’s leader in making the shift to more sustainable economies and societies and reduce its total environmental footprint.

China produces and sells more wind turbines and solar cell panels than any country in the world and is building a smart electrical grid to distribute electricity produced by the sun and wind throughout the country. It has also developed a growing network of bullet trains that can help reduce car use.

Over the next few decades, the Chinese government plans to depend more on cleaner energy systems and become the global leader in developing a low-carbon economy. It has plans to tax carbon pollution from the burning of fossil fuels and to use the income to shift away from fossil fuel use before the United States does. The goal is to make money by becoming the global leader in making the shift to the new energy transition (Section 16.1). However, China burns coal to provide 65% of its electricity and reducing its dependence on abundant and cheap coal is a major economic and political challenge.

The United States and China face similar problems. They have large reserves of coal that can be burned to produce electricity at a low cost, as long as the price of such electricity does not include the harmful environmental effects of burning coal. According to critics, global efforts to reduce air pollution, slow climate change, and rely more on renewable energy from the sun and wind depend heavily on whether China and the United States decide to leave much of their coal reserves in the ground. This is a difficult economic, political, and ethical decision.

25.3bBringing About a Sustainability Revolution in Your Lifetime

The Industrial Revolution, which began around the mid-18th century, was a remarkable global transformation. Now in this century, environmental leaders say it is time for another global transformation—a sustainability revolution. Figure 25.14 lists some of the major cultural shifts in emphasis that could help bring about a sustainability revolution in your lifetime.

Figure 25.14

Solutions: Some of the cultural shifts in emphasis that scientists say will be necessary to bring about a sustainability revolution.

Critical Thinking:

1. Which of these shifts do you think are most important? Why?

The sustainability movement is a decentralized global movement arising mostly from the bottom up, based on the actions of a variety of individuals and groups throughout the world. One of the leaders in the movement to develop and promote detailed plans for making the shift to more sustainable ways of living is Lester R. Brown (Individuals Matter 25.3).

Individuals Matter 25.3

Lester R. Brown: Champion of Sustainability

KFEM/Earth Policy Institute

Lester R. Brown served as president of the Earth Policy Institute, which he founded in 2001 until his retirement in 2015. The purpose of this nonprofit, interdisciplinary research organization has been to provide a plan for a more sustainable future and a roadmap showing how we could get there.

Brown is an interdisciplinary thinker and one of the pioneers of the global sustainability movement. For decades, he has been researching and describing the complex and interconnected environmental issues we face and proposing concrete strategies for dealing with them. The Washington Post called him “one of the world’s most influential thinkers,” and Foreign Policy named him one of the Top Global Thinkers.

Brown’s Plan B for shifting to a more environmentally and economically sustainable future has four main goals:

1. stabilize population growth,

2. stabilize climate change,

3. eradicate poverty, and

4. restore the earth’s natural support systems.

Brown has written or coauthored more than 50 books, which have been translated into more than 40 languages. He has received numerous prizes and awards, including 25 honorary degrees, the United Nations Environment Prize, and Japan’s Blue Planet Prize. In 2012, he was inducted into the Earth Hall of Fame in Kyoto, Japan. He also holds three honorary professorships in China.

Despite the serious environmental challenges we face, Brown sees reasons for hope. They include his understanding that social change can sometimes occur very quickly. He is also encouraged by improvements in fuel efficiency, the emerging shift from using coal to using solar and wind energy to produce electricity, and a growing public understanding of our need to live more sustainably.

A growing number of people call for us to change the way we treat the earth and thus ourselves by living more gently on the planet that sustains us. Figure 25.15 lists a number of agents of change that can help us shift to a more sustainable path within your lifetime. These seedlings of change, which have been discussed in this book, can break out of their position of slow growth on the bottom of the curve of change in Figure 25.15 and round the bend on the J-curve of rapid exponential growth toward more sustainable living. Supporting and encouraging these agents of change can help us to make the shift to a more sustainable path much faster than you might think.

Figure 25.15

Seedlings of environmental change and hope. The agents of change in this figure are growing slowly. However, at some point, some or all of them could take off, grow exponentially, and help bring about a sustainability revolution within your lifetime.

Critical Thinking:

1. Which two items in each of these four categories do you believe are the most important to promote?

NASA

Here are two pieces of good news about the possibility of bringing about a sustainability revolution over the next few decades. First, social science research reveals that for a major social change to occur, only 5–10% of the people in the world or in a country or locality must become convinced that the change must take place and then act to bring about such change. Second, history also shows that we can bring about change faster than we might think, once we have the courage to leave behind ideas and practices that no longer work and to nurture new trends such as the rapidly growing seedlings of sustainability listed in Figure 25.15.

We have the knowledge to shift from our current unsustainable path to a more sustainable one. Within this century, a small but dedicated group of people from around the world can bring about a sustainability revolution. They will likely understand three things. First, we have been borrowing from the earth and the future and our debt is coming due. Second, as a species we are capable of great things, if we choose to act. Third, once we start on a new path, change can spread through our web-connected global social networks at an amazing pace.

· Biosphere 2 ( Figure 25.1 ) was designed to be a self-sustaining life-support system like Biosphere 1—the earth. Instead, numerous unexpected problems occurred. As a result, Biosphere 2 was not able to support eight people for 2 years.

·

· Joseph Sohm/ Shutterstock.com