Last night my Envi 101 Nature and Society class and I heard an wonderful talk by David Orr, Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College. Orr discussed ‘Black Swans and the US Future’.
Noting that infrequent and unpredictable events, so called ‘Black Swans’, can drive change in both human and natural systems, he discussed the urgent need for climate action to reduce greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Runaway global warming and its consequences for human and ecological communities underpins his worry that we risking making Earth uninhabitable for people and our civilizations.
The idea here is that the melting of the permafrost in the arctic will release large amounts of methane gas, twenty times more potent than the carbon that is the current focus of concern. And this is to say nothing of the synthetic greenhouse gases that are starting to build in the atmosphere, some of which have a warming capacity tens of thousands of time greater than carbon, and do not degrade for centuries.
Most of Orr’s talk, however, was given over to the creation of sustainable and resilient societies. Such societies are able to absorb the unpredictable disruptions of human action (e.g. terrorist attacks on the electric grid or food distribution system) or ecological change associated with global warming (e.g. changing agricultural belts, coastal flooding, environmental refugees).
To create these societies, Orr advocates the scaling up what we already know about sustainability in design, construction and technology, and marrying that with efforts to build local and regional self-reliance. This is not a nostalgia for a bucolic past, but a view towards what Kirkpatrick Sale termed a ‘human-scale’ future.
Local and regional food production, distributed and redundant energy sources, and regionally focused economies would supplement and then replace the vast, fragile and vulnerable national and transnational systems currently in place. Global trade would still thrive, but only for those things that only global trade can really provide. For instance, instead of Williams College getting its garlic from China, the garlic would be grown and harvested in the Berkshires. As importantly, environmental policy would readjust the incentive structure for living sustainably. Accounting for the true and full cost of, say, nuclear power as opposed to renewables, and then letting markets sort out better from worse forms of energy production.
Overall, his idea is that we can live more fulfilling lives, shift to much less carbon intensive social and economic systems, and preserve the habitability of the planet. His work reminds me of the Transition Movement, which Steve Chase (Environmental Studies, Antioch University New England) spoke about in his visit to Williams last year.
Orr is currently working on a demonstration project of these ideas in conjunction with Oberlin College and the city of Oberlin. The project is supported not only by the Clinton Foundation’s Climate Change Initiative, but by the US Military. The military is well aware of how vulnerable our infrastructure has become, and is seeking to learn ways of make its own bases and operations more ‘resilient’ in the face of such disruptions.
I met David years ago as a graduate student at the University of Minnesota. I’ve always admired his technical and policy sophistication, passion for sustainability, and attention to the importance of environmental knowledge and values in higher education. You can read more about Orr’s thoughts on the causes and consequences of climate change in his book, Down to the Wire. There is also an interesting set of interviews with him on sustainability and resilience at the Post Carbon Institute.
Cheers, Bill