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Sustainable consumption

As usual, Joel Makower has got the good stuff. The Journal of Industrial Ecology that he points to is, in a word, fascinating. It's full of great articles, all tied together with the theme of "sustainable consumption."

I haven't had time (yet) to read all of the articles, but there is one that jumps out as a real jewel, Tim Jackson's piece, "Live Better by Consuming Less? Is There a Double Dividend in Sustainable Consumption?"

When it comes to sustainability, Jackson notes that

Purely technological approaches fall short of addressing the crucial dimension of human choice in implementing sustainable technologies and changing unsustainable consumption patterns.

With that, Jackson is off and running. I think he's absolutely right. We can have all the technology in the world to make living more and more efficient and low-impact. But it won't do any good if people don't use it.

The two elements of technology and choices, production and consumption, are intertwined, and I think that improvements have been made in both respects. For example:

• I would say that people have shifted values (choices) to place a very high value on order, or organization, or lack of entropy, or whatever term you'd like. Economically speaking, it is now possible to rack up huge amounts of GDP by sitting in front of a computer punching keys if you are doing it in a highly ordered way; society places a high value on, say, a flawless computer program or a sophisticated data model.


• Society also has evolved the infrastructure (technology) necessary for these endeavors to be sustainable; someone can now write the program without commuting at all even though her colleagues are half a world away. So in terms of the impact that someone actually needs to have in order to live, we are quite rapidly minimizing this impact to such an extent that we might be able to fit all 6 billion of us on this planet sustainably.

That may be overly optimistic, and there are reasons to believe that materialistic choices are somewhat necessary and ingrained in human nature, which Jackson discusses in depth. The article is extremely well-researched and just peppered with references.  I challenge anyone to get through it without being taken off on at least one tangent (one of my own tangents resulted in an addition to my list of books to read).

Update [2005-6-11 8:7:2 by Andy Brett]:
Some excellent further reading on the subject, with some surprising answers, courtesy of Jon Christensen:
"Are We Consuming Too Much?" from the Journal of Economic Perspectives, by Paul Ehrlich and others
"Are We Consuming Too Much?" by Jon Christensen

The first paper is somewhat technical, but very worth it. Christensen's article is less technical and has some valuable points about the role and value of "natural" systems such as wetlands.

Subaru’s new line.

Dan Neil, transportation writer for the LA Times, talks with Steve Inskeep of NPR's Marketplace about Subaru's newest model, and the possibility that it might not be more of the same from Subaru. The B9 Tribeca, which Neil reviewed last week, is slightly more "sexy" than previous Subaru lines, and Neil thinks that it might be getting a little bit astray of the traditional Subaru image, which he compares to both Thoreau and the Unitarian church.

C'mon, it's a short interview: Go give it a listen.

Pat Burns writes on the uncertain fate of conservation easements and the millions of acres they prot

One of the developments I've been watching out of the corner of my eye, but not following very closely (or writing about), is the current kerfuffle over land trusts. It's an important issue, though. Land trusts protect an immense amount of land in the U.S., and their very existence has recently been in question.

Luckily, there's an excellent blog -- Nature Noted -- devoted entirely to land trusts. If you want to follow the unfolding developments, that's the place to go.

I invited its proprietor, Pat Burns, to join us here with a rundown on the issue, the recent developments, and what's at stake. His essay follows. (Thanks, Pat.)

---

One of the most successful environmental movements of the last fifty years is about to change the way it does business. And if it doesn't do it on its own, the government will step in and force it to change.

That's the headline on the recent investigation of the nation's land trusts by the Senate Finance Committee.

Wednesday, the Finance Committee held hearings ostensibly aimed at tightening the tax code on the use of conservation easements, which have become a prime tool in conserving land from development. It's also become a prime tool for evading taxes. The Finance Committee began its investigation three years ago after a series of embarrassing articles in the Washington Post about the practices of the country's biggest trust, The Nature Conservancy.

The staff released the results of its investigation Tuesday, outlining a series of abuses by TNC, including:

Critics of new urbanism’s grid street pattern miss the point.

One of the defining characteristics of sprawl is a branching street pattern -- one in which cul-de-sacs feed residential streets, which feed local arteries, which feed thoroughfares, which ultimately feed freeways. It's a design that can work fine for cars, but not so well for people. I spent (or misspent) part of my childhood in that sort of neighborhood. There were houses that were literally 100 yards from my house as the crow flies, but nearly a mile by the road network. That sort of thing discourages, you know, walking and stuff. Which is one reason why people who care about promoting walking and biking as transportation prefer an interconnected street network to a hierarchical one.

Now, Wendell Cox, a smart-growth skeptic and fellow of the Heartland Institute, writes in defense of the cul-de-sac:

But the hispanic portion is growing like gangbusters.

U.S. population grew by slightly less than 1 percent from 2003 to 2004, according to new Census Bureau figures. In both 2003 and 2004, annual U.S. population growth was slower than it was from 1990 to 2002, when the annual rate averaged more than 1.2 percent. (In the big scheme of things, 1 percent may not sound like much, but it's enough to double the population every 70 years. If the U.S. continues to grow at 1 percent per year, the country will number almost 600 million people by 2076.)

But none of that stuff made headlines like the news that Hispanics comprised half of the nation's growth. People who identify themselves as being of Hispanic origin now make up about 14 percent of U.S. residents -- about one in seven.

Lots more on the document-editing scandal.

As Lisa and Andy note below, the fuss du jour is over Philip Cooney's editing of scientific gov't reports on climate change to exaggerate the appearance of uncertainty. Two of the finest science bloggers going, Roger Pielke Jr. and Chris Mooney, have a wealth of interesting material on the subject.

First, Pielke argues that the whole thing is a case of manufactured controversy -- another attempt to play "gotcha" with government documents that just distracts attention from substantive policy debate.

The author of the NYT piece, Andy Revkin, emailed Pielke a congenial response, including this amusing bit: "Sadly, the White House is so hermetically sealed on such matters that it has essentially created such stories by making scraps of tea-leaf-like information noteworthy." It's true -- by playing footsy with the public, with a long history of contradictory and ambiguous statements on climate change, the Bush administration has created a situation where every official word or document on the subject is examined and parsed like the friggin' Zapruder film.

Chris Mooney unearths this tidbit from Cooney's past, revealing that his opposition to CO2 limits is longstanding. He also has an amusing rundown of White House flack Scott McClellan's typically opaque and evasive performance this morning. McClellan made a big deal out of a 2001 National Academy of Sciences report that praised the administration's 10-year climate plan. Mooney points out that the report also "seriously faulted" the plan, and oh yeah, is four years old.

And finally, in a post on The Huffington Post (who doesn't post there? oh, right, me.) Mooney lays out Revkin's history of uncovering Bush administration interference in climate science -- the same story over and over again, just the names and details change. And yet every time the larger media act like it's an isolated event, and the administration goes back to doing it. Sigh.

New Apollo Energy Act introduced

FYI: The New Apollo Energy Act, which Rep. Jay Inslee (D-Wash.) discussed in the pages of Grist, has been introduced. From Inslee's press release:

U.S. Rep. Jay Inslee and fourteen other Members of Congress today introduced the New Apollo Energy Act as a comprehensive clean energy policy for the 21st century. Inslee's legislation will use new and innovative tax incentives and market-based assistance, along with energy performance standards to address three challenges to America: creating clean energy manufacturing jobs, decreasing dependence on foreign oil, and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. As the most comprehensive and technologically visionary energy program proposed in Congress, New Apollo seeks to solve America's energy problems and high energy costs through technological innovation much in the same way that President Kennedy channeled the resources of the American people to meet the challenges of the race to the Moon.

I hasten to add: It has a snowball's chance in hell of passing. But it's nice to see debate on these issues being stoked.

Walking octopus inspires robot design

In the vein of marine animals inspiring design, I offer today the octopus-cum-robot. I kid not.

After discovering in March that some octopus species use two of their eight arms to "walk" along the seafloor bipedal style (it's true! see footage here and here), scientists at the University of California at Berkeley were inspired to develop an entirely new field of robotics involving soft, muscle-like machines that would walk much like the octopus.

"Each arm rolls along the suckers and pushes the animal back, and then the other arm touches down, rolls along the suckers, and pushes the animal back again," says biologist Chrissy Hufford.

"They flatten part of their arm like a tank tread, and roll backwards on it. They make a functional foot, even though they don't have an anatomic foot."

Scientists are hoping they will be able to mimic this fluid movement and flexibility in robots built without hard parts, and a prototype -- essentially a tube with a spring inside -- has already been constructed. The advantage of soft robotics, says biologist Bob Full, is that the robot could squeeze through tiny spaces, much like the octopus, and could function in a search-and-rescue capacity, moving into tight areas no other robot could reach.

Pretty cool, though the idea of robots in general kinda freaks me out.

Commencement speech

Good God.

Barack Obama. That's all I can say.

Barack Obama.

Tender Loving Scare

Babies in intensive care endangered by hormone-altering plastics Infants in hospital intensive care units have much higher levels of a hormone-altering chemical in their bodies than other newborns, according to a new study. The chemical, a phthalate called DEHP, is often added to vinyl — including some medical devices commonly used in natal intensive care […]