CONTENIDO DEL ASUNTO

Three factors make the pursuit of growth very dangerous and achieving the challenge of global sus- tainability essential. The first is the character of growth itself, namely: ‘exponential growth’, the second is ‘over- shoot’ and the third are ‘tipping points’ which make the challenges we face especially dangerous if we continue on a course of “business as usual”. Lets consider each of these three factors in turn so we can understand how dangerous they are.

Exponential growth

Exponential growth occurs where a quantity grows by being multiplied by the same value at regular intervals. When represented graphically growth is expressed as an exponential (geometrical) or ‘hockey-stick’ curve. (In contrast, linear growth which occurs where a quantity grows by having the same value added to the sum at regular intervals). We can understand how serious ex- ponential growth can be by the French riddle adapted from Meadows and colleagues (1974). Supposing your friend owns a pond for which he buys a prolific species of water-lily. The water lily doubles in size every day. Your friend explains that were he to let the lily grow without any maintenance that it will quickly cover and choke the pond in 30 days. In the beginning the lily seems small and an unlikely threat but he tells you that he will cut it back when it has covered half the pond. On which day will the lily cover half the pond? The answer is on day 29. Your friend has one day to save his pond. (Meadows et al.,1974). The lesson that this simple rid- dle illustrates for us is the danger of apparently endless supply to increasing numbers of consumers accelerates the arrival of resource exhaustion and simultaneously exponentially diminishes the time for adaptation.

Steffens and colleagues (2007, 2015) describe 12 socio-economic and 12 Earth system trends in our ex- ploitation of the Earth as “The Great Acceleration” in which our consumption of resources and energy, emis- sions and pollution is marked by exponential growth. The same growth curve describes population, total real GDP, foreign direct investment, damming of rivers, water use, fertilizer consumption, urban population, paper consumption, McDonald’s restaurants, motor vehicles, telephones and international tourism. Much of this growth has occurred since 1950. Obviously, it will not be able to continue.

Overshoot

We can understand the second factor: ‘overshoot’ with the analogy of driving a car towards a road junction with traffic lights. Normally, we are able to see well ahead to the junction and take the appropriate action of slowing down before reaching the lights so that when they are red we can bring the car to a halt at the line. However, Meadows and colleagues (1974) suggest, suppose one were blindfolded and had to drive by following instruc- tions given by a passenger. Naturally, there would be a delay in our reactions and we would need to drive more

3.8 The deadly pursuit of growth

slowly. However, suppose we drove at the normal speed which, together with our delayed response, would prob- ably mean we would ‘overshoot’ the line and enter the junction and the dangers of the cross traffic.

The overshoot principle translates into systems, such as the biosphere, which has a finite carrying ca- pacity for our species due to its finite resources. Add to the system an exponentially growing population and at some point it will cross (the junction lights) the line of the system’s carrying capacity (if it does not slow down before hand at the lights). If the population continues to grow and continues beyond the system’s capacity to sustain the population then disaster will follow. This does not mean disaster is inevitable since appropriate action can be taken, however, if the ‘business as usual’ model is followed then collapse will occur.

The key to survival is to recognize the limit of the biosphere’s carrying capacity (the red lights) and slow- ing down and stopping on reaching the crossing. So far we were not able to do this for the cod and other fisher- ies whose populations have collapsed. This would not have happened had they been managed sustainably. However, we were able to save the ozone layer although the hole will take a long time to repair.

Tipping points

The third factor are “tipping points” when a system flips from one state to another. A simple example of a tipping point occurs when water freezes to ice at 0°C. However, in geophysical systems tipping points are more complicated and reinforced by feedback mecha- nisms. Some scientists consider that the Arctic ice cap passed a tipping point due to the melting of the ice cap beyond a certain area caused by global warming. Unfortunately, the exposed sea surface brings an ad- ditional force into play. The increasing surface area of the dark sea additionally absorbs the sun’s energy and, acting as a positive feedback mechanism, the sea now warms accelerating the meltdown of the ice cap. The Arctic ice cap apparently passed a tipping point in 2007 due to combination of global warming and the positive feedback of the warming sea. However, the crossing of a tipping point causes the system to enter a new re- gime unlike the old one. The North Pole ice cap existed throughout the year rhythmically contracting and ex- panding with the seasons. Now scientists think that by about 2030 the Arctic ocean will be completely ice free

in summer and only be covered with a thin sheet of ice during the winter.

The sea-floor methane hydrates appear now to be destabilizing, methane hydrates are a frozen mash of ice bearing methane lying below the surface of the sea- bed. Normally, due to the pressure of the water and the icy cold temperatures the methane hydrates are stable. However, global warming has warmed the waters of the Atlantic and the Gulf Stream so that the methane hy- drates “… are currently destabilizing beneath a sea-floor

area of ~10,000 km2 _{off the US eastern seaboard” along}

the Carolina Ridge (Phrampus & Hornbach, 2012; Skarke, et al, 2014). The methane entering the seas will add to ocean acidification, atmospheric methane and de-oxygenation.

Tipping points also occur in biological systems but are difficult to anticipate due to our lack of experience and knowledge and could “transform Earth rapidly and

irreversibly into a state unknown to human experience”

(Barnosky, et al, 2012) possibly within a few generations. What we know is that incremental human activities and demands on biological systems can apparently have no effect whilst they may be gradually destabilizing, furthermore, the threshold value of the tipping point is generally unknown.

A biological system can quickly change when a tipping point is reached shifting from its initial state to a very different state and possess a variable range off characteristics beyond those of the initial state. Fur- thermore, it is nearly impossible to return to the initial state. Our greatest danger is that we might trigger a global state shift. Previous examples of such state shifts occurred over millions of years during 4 of the 5 ear- lier mass extinctions (Barnosky, et al, 2012). However, we are concerned with shifts occurring over a couple of generations; a time-span within which, scientists now recognize, we are already causing the current 6th _mass

extinction.

The “Amazonian forests have a substantial influence

on regional and global climates. Hence their removal by deforestation can itself be a driver of climate change …“

(Mahli, et al, 2008) and could be a dangerous tipping point.

In 2001 the Amazonian rainforest had been re- duced to 5.4 million km2 _{or about 87% of its original ex-}

tent (Mahli, et al, 2008) due to the clearance of 837,000 km2_{. Although there has been a slowdown of deforesta-}

3.9 Conclusion

to a range of demands for more roads, timber, and agri- cultural land for soya beans, sugar-cane, bio-fuels and free range beef.

If, for example, deforestation were to reduce the rainforest down to 3.2 million km2 _{(53%) of its original}

size scientists believe that this would most probably overstep the tipping point for the current system’s rain- fall maintenance and cause the emission of 32 ± 8 Pg of carbon (1 Petagram = 1,000,000,000 tonnes) into the atmosphere. The fear is that deforestation will cause some of the sub-regions to ‘tip’ “into a permanently dri-

er climate regime and greatly weaken the resilience of the entire region to large scale drought driven by SST [sea sur- face temperatures] changes.” (Mahli, et al, 2008). It will

be crucial to limit deforestation to between 30 - 40% clearance of the original Amazon rainforest’s extent if climate changing tipping points are to be avoided. The danger is that without a pan-Amazon rainforest man- agement strategy coordinated between all the member nations the tipping point could be reached as a “trag-

edy of the commons” phenomenon (Hardin, 1968). The

current record breaking droughts occurring simultane- ously in both Brazil and the south west USA may be the result of Amazonian deforestation.

A lethal combination

The exponential growth of our population, hauling along with it the exponential curves of all our demands on resources and production of wastes, including: GDP, paper consumption, average surface temperature, de-forestation, motor vehicles production, CO₂ emis- sions, ozone depletion, species extinctions, exploita- tion of fisheries, habitat transformation, destruction & fragmentation, water use and foreign investment etc. (New Scientist 2008) are leading us towards overshoot situations and tipping point changes and an unknown world. As a species we seem unable to curb our needs while danger stares us in the face! This was dramatical- ly published by Will Steffen and his colleagues firstly, in 2007 and again most recently 2015 in a paper enti- tled: The trajectory of the Anthropocene: The Great Ac-

celeration in The Anthropocene Review and in the journal Science, entitled Planetary boundaries: Guiding human development on a changing planet. The news is not good

because Steffen and his team write in Science that: “The

human enterprise has grown so dramatically since the mid-20th _{century that the relatively stable, 11,700-year long}

Holocene epoch, the only state of the planet that we know

for certain can support contemporary human societies, is now being destabilized” (Steffen, et al., 2015). “There- fore, the plausibility of a future planetary state shift seems high, even though considerable uncertainty remains about whether it is inevitable and, if so, how far in the future it may be” (Barnosky, et al, 2012).

3.9 Conclusion

We can understand that completing the paradigm shift to the new sustainable design paradigm will not be easy. Indeed, it will be an exciting and enormous chal- lenge to change, develop, design and adapt our social infrastructures for a sustainable future and in the pro- cess to discover greater satisfaction than consumerism could ever provide.

This enormous task is not made easier by a num- ber of politicians and industrialists who do not want the economic system to change for fear of reducing their personal wealth and profits or loosing their polit- ical influence etc. Prof Brulle (2013) has revealed that in the US a 118 climate denial organizations have been funded, for example, by such donors as Koch Affiliated Foundations and ExxonMobil and many anonymous donors. The funding, which amounts to about $900 million per year (at least from 2003 to 2010) in support of the climate counter-change movement (CCCM) and used to create climate denial literature and conferences (e.g. The Heartland Institute) and other mis-informa- tion to confuse the public and delay appropriate politi- cal action to stop global warming.

In a letter to Nature 3 scientists were concerned to distinguish skeptics from deniers. Open minded skepti- cism makes a productive contribution to a debate. How- ever, “Denialism is motivated by conviction rather than

evidence. It has been applied to a wide range of issues, including evolution and the link between HIV and AIDS. Deniers use strategies that invoke conspiracies, quote fake experts, denigrate genuine experts, deploy evidence selec- tively and create impossible expectations of what research can deliver. They rely on misrepresentation and flawed log- ic (P. Diethelm and M. McKee Eur. J. Public Health 19, 2–4; 2009)” (Kemp, Milne & Reay, 2010).

The one-time English Chancellor, Nigel Lawson, is a denier who has neither a scientific education nor published a single scientific paper on climate change (accessed 5.3.2014: http://www.desmogblog.com/ni-

3.10 References and further reading

gel-lawson). Yet, he promotes his unsubstantiated opin- ions denying climate change through his organization the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). The Foundation masquerades as an ‘educational’ charity working against UK government policies to mitigate global warming.

On the one hand the Internet has made informa- tion readily available, on the other hand, there is now not only a wealth of information available but also mis- leading information, some of it intentionally misleading and designed to deceive. This means that education now has an additional responsibility to teach students to distinguish between charlatanism and authentic knowledge. This charlatanism has reached new heights with the industrially promulgated deceitful misinfor- mation denying climate change financed with billions of dollars throughout the first decade of the 21st cen- tury (Brulle, 2013). There is no doubt that the deniers of climate change have substantially hindered political action to limit global warming by a decade (Monbiot, 2006). Indeed, many scientists now consider that lim- iting average global warming to 2°C is now unlikely and the projection has been extended to embrace a tem- perature range of somewhere between 1.5 - 4.5°C by the end of the century (IPCC, 2013).

Noreena Hertz (2014) draws attention to the prob- lem of false information on the internet. For example, one estimate is that one third of online consumer re- views are fake and furthermore “astroturfing,” (fake grass) as it is called, is now big business with, for exam- ple, specialist companies paid by hotels to write fake reviews. Hertz advises researching and verifying who is the source the information? how are they funded? how do they get their information? where are they located? what is the source saying – opinion or fact? is there an- other source which could verify the information? etc. In view of the gravity of the revelations by Brulle (2013) knowledge authentification now needs to become a component of the educational curriculum.

In spite of the confusion, design and design edu- cation are one of the best equipped fields to meet the challenge for creating the changes needed to achieve a sustainable future. Its enormous potential lies with bottom up grass-roots innovation, strongly motivated and driven by young people, but they must be sure to identify the facts so that they can create design and communicate information which is accurate and which will bring us closer to a sustainable future.

3.10 References and further reading

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