Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
include intercropping, mulching, and composting. One ambitious agricultural scientist, Wes Jack-
son of the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, has spent the past four decades breeding perennial grain
crops (he points out that our current annual grains are responsible for the vast bulk of soil erosion,
to the tune of 25 billion tons per year).
21
Meanwhile, community resilience efforts have sprung up in thousands of towns and cities
around the world—including the Transition Initiatives, which are propelled by a compelling, flex-
ible, grassroots organizing model and a vision of a future in which life is better without fossil
fuels.
22
Population Media Center is working to ensure we don't get to ten billion humans by enlisting
creative artists in countries with high population growth rates (which are usually also among the
world's poorest nations) to produce radio and television soap operas featuring strong female char-
acters who successfully confront issues related to family planning. This strategy has been shown to
be the most cost-effective and humane means of reducing high birth rates in these nations.
23
What else can be done? Substitute labor for fuel. Localize food systems. Capture atmospheric
carbon in soil and biomass. Replant forests and restore ecosystems. Recycle and reuse. Manufacture
more durable goods. Rethink economics to deliver human satisfaction without endless growth.
There are organizations throughout the world working to further each of these goals, usually with
little or no government support. Taken together, they could lead us to an entirely different Anthro-
pocene.
Call it the
Lean-Green Anthropocene
.
The Techno-Anthropocene has an Achilles heel: energy (more specifically, the failings of nuclear
power). The Lean-Green Anthropocene has one as well: human nature.
It's hard to convince people to voluntarily reduce consumption and curb reproduction. That's
not because humans are unusually pushy, greedy creatures; all living organisms tend to maximize
their population size and rate of collective energy use. Inject a colony of bacteria into a suitable
growth medium in a petri dish and watch what happens. Hummingbirds, mice, leopards, oarfish,
redwood trees, or giraffes: in each instance the principle remains inviolate—every species maxim-
izes population and energy consumption within nature's limits. Systems ecologist Howard T. Odum
called this rule the Maximum Power Principle: throughout nature, “system designs develop and pre-
vail that maximize power intake, energy transformation, and those uses that reinforce production
and efficiency.”
24
In addition to our innate propensity to maximize population and consumption, we humans also
have difficulty making sacrifices in the present in order to reduce future costs. We're genetically
hardwired to respond to immediate threats with fight-or-flight responses, while distant hazards mat-
ter much less to us. It's not that we don't think about the future at all; rather, we unconsciously apply
a discount rate based on the amount of time likely to elapse before a menace has to be faced.
25
True, there is some variation in future-anticipating behavior among individual humans. A small
percentage of the population may change behavior now to reduce risks to forthcoming generations,
but the great majority is less likely to do so.
26
If that small percentage could oversee our collective
future planning, we might have much less to worry about. But that's tough to arrange in democra-
