January 11, 2012 was the 125th anniversary of the birth of author, scientist, ecologist, forester, and environmentalist Aldo Leopold. Leopold is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac.

Leopold professed an ethics founded on the biotic community – a community encompasses and includes humans:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Leopold rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, who pursued a conservationism based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold was instead an advocate of wilderness, and of its conservation for its own sake. For Leopold, the relationship of humans to the land was an ethical one.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Leopold saw that humans are part of an ecological community. He saw that humans can thrive only if the entirety of the larger community of which we a part thrives.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Leopold preached “an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature”, and warned that we should not stray too far from the land.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Leopold was a prophet for our times. We should have listened.

Writer and homesteader Ellen LaConte has a new book titled Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it.

The book first diagnoses our condition . . .

Economic and polar meltdowns, inept, corrupt and bankrupt governments, long-term double-digit unemployment, climate instability, failing social services, collapsing ecosystems, a widening wealth-poverty gap, unprecedented species extinctions, mass migrations, peak fossil fuels, religious, ethnic and resource wars, spreading hunger, poverty, chaos and disease. . .

Why is so much going wrong everywhere at once? The global economy has gone viral. It is ravaging Earth’s immune system, triggering a Critical Mass of mutually reinforcing environmental, economic, social, cultural and political crises that are compromising the ability of Earth’s human and natural communities to provide for, protect and heal themselves.

The prognosis? If we keep doing what we’ve been doing, Life will last but Life as we know it—and a lot of us—won’t.

. . . and then offers a course of treatment:

What should we do instead? We should remember that Life rules, we don’t. The global economy operates as if it were larger than Life. It isn’t. As if it had multiple Earth’s to supply its appetites. It doesn’t. . .

Among the rules written into Life’s Economic Survival Protocol are local self-reliance, intercommunity and regional functional cooperation, non-carbon energy sourcing, resource conservation, sharing and recycling, and organically democratic methods of self-organization and governance. . .

We can learn Life’s rules and adopt lifeways that are at once authentically conservative, deeply green and profoundly liberating.

Robert Jensen interviews LaConte at Energy Bulletin. She reminds us something we seem to have forgotten – that humans are but bit players in a much bigger system.

The largest context – the largest high-functioning complex system within which we live our lives – is not the nation, nation-state system or global economic system but Life itself, the whole-earth, emergent and self-maintaining system of natural communities and ecosystems. That system, the ecosphere, teaches us the physical laws, the relationships and behaviors discovered in physics, biology and ecology and exemplified by the so-called “mystical” spiritual teachers, that we have to obey if we want to remain viable as a species.

The global economy has become pathological and is undermining the ability of human and natural communities to provide for, protect, defend and heal themselves – and here’s where LaConte invokes the analogy of AIDS/HIV:

I think we are presently at the HIV stage of the disease; it hasn’t quite yet become full-blown planetary AIDS. But I insist in the book that doing more of what we’ve been doing to exceed Earth’s physical means as well as our own fiscal ones — in other words, trying to heal and grow the very kind and scope of economy that caused this disease — is akin to injecting a patient who already has HIV with more HIV. That’s precisely what we’re doing.

Lynn Margolis argued in Symbiotic Planet that much of evolution on Earth is better explained by symbiosis – “the living together in physical contact of organisms of different species” – than by competition. LaConte similarly sees life on Earth as a cross-species, communitarian phenomenon. We’re not the “masters of the universe” we’ve come to believe we are, but rather a small part of a larger system. The most important and hardest lesson we will need to learn as a species is self-limitation. We have to stop behaving as if we were larger than or apart from Life and become constructive participants in it. If we fail to do so – if we don’t choose to transform ourselves and our lifeways – Life will force us to. Life rules, we don’t, and Life will not hesitate to rule harshly and even rule us out.

How can we possibly give up on economic growth? LaConte suggests focusing on what we need, as human beings.

Like everyone else, I need food, clean air and water, clothing, some sort of shelter, preferably warm in winter, occasional medicine or medical care, spiritual and physical exercise, colleagues, friends, family, if possible books, lots of quiet, a garden to work in, woods and wild not too far off. To love and be loved. To carry no debt. To believe there is some sort of livable, desirable future for the next seven generations. . . . To be happy, I need good work to do, work that I feel is, in my late mentor Helen Nearing’s terms, “contributory.”

We could all agree to get to work to fulfill that vision.

The Little Book of Life’s Rules for Surviving Critical Mass, a pocket version of key economic survival principles and practices culled from Life Rules, is soon to be serialized in posts at LaConte’s website.

The ecosystems and biodiversity which underpin all economic activity depend largely on ‘wild land’ – very much a poor relation in the competition with agriculture and urbanisation, both of which have massive economic forces in their favour.

Agriculture is driven by the demand for food. This demand is growing because of the rising population and more demand for meat, which requires more land than crops. Urbanisation is backed by the economic power of manufacturing, and the influx of economic migrants from countryside to towns and cities.

Wild land has no such strong purchasing power to defend its position and, therefore, is set to decline, affecting biodiversity and ecosystems with disastrous consequences leading to reduction of tropical forest area, loss of species, and reduced capacity for absorbing carbon.

It is not essential for land to be left wild to be productive ecologically: agriculture and urban areas can be designed in ways which maintain ecosystems. But whether land is left wild or combined with other uses, the survival of the services ecosystems provide – such as genetic resources, good quality soil, available water, pollination - is an essential underpinning of the world economy and people’s livelihoods.

Anderson’s article is a good reminder that land use as we practice it in Oregon is – or should be – about preserving land solely for economic exploitation. It’s about more than saving farm land for agriculture, saving forest land for timber production, and making the best use of urban land. It’s about saving the world that sustains us all.

We forget at our peril: God is great; humans, insignificant.

In Oregon, the land use wars are never over. Activists struggle mightily to reduce the amount of farm land set aside for eventual development in urban reserves, and celebrate when a greedy Washington County land grab is temporarily slapped down. An over-ambitious Bend urban growth boundary (UGB) expansion unexpectedly gets remanded by the Land Conservation and Development Commission (LCDC), and we rejoice. An exceptions or a nonresource lands application gets remanded by the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA), saving a few or a few hundred acres of farm or forest land from the real estate developers, and we congratulate ourselves on a hard-fought victory. The Department of Land Conservation and Development (DLCD) proposes tightening up the rules to make it harder to argue that land is not really farm or forest land, and years of behind the scene groundwork pays off.

But the war is never won. There’s always another UGB expansion, another application to destroy farm or forest land. The best that can be said is that in Oregon the flood of “development” has been slowed, compared to what would otherwise be, as seen in other states – California, Washington, Texas, Georgia – where growth has gone completely unchecked and its devastation has spread, a cancer metastasized across the landscape.

Land use activists have never dared, still do not dare, to admit that we’re against growth. Lacking the courage to take on the zeitgeist and admit what we really think and believe, we instead dissemble that we’re for smart growth – an oxymoron if there ever was one, as the phenomenon of global warming is making clear.

Land use activists are not alone in their error. Tim Murray observes that the environmental movement as a whole has failed to identify and grapple with the real enemy, and asks: What if we stopped fighting for preservation and fought economic growth instead?

Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.

Despite occasional setbacks, the growth machine continues more furiously, and finally, even lands which had been set aside “forever” come under pressure. As development gets closer, the protected land becomes more valuable, and more costly to protect. Then government, under the duress of energy and resource shortages and the dire need for royalties and revenue, caves in to allow industry a foothold, then a chunk, then another. Yosemite Park, Hamber Provincial Park, Steve Irwin Park… the list goes on. There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet. . . .

Environmental watchdogs bark, but the growth caravan moves on.

Murray argues the practice of designating hallowed places as nature reserves must no longer be seen as “victories,” but rather as concessions. The same holds true in the land use arena: there’s no victory in limiting the amount of land lost to UGB expansions, to urban reserves, or to real estate development.

Aldo Leopold ‘s vision of the land was ecological, encompassing the entirety of the community which the land embraces:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Saving what’s left of the land requires an explicit recognition of the ethical premises to which we hold, that humans are members of the land community.

It’s time to make our ethics explicit: the land is sacred, and is the ground of our being. It’s time to direct our energies into stopping the economic growth that is destroying the land – and inexorably, ourselves.

Real wealth has intrinsic value. Examples include fertile land, healthful food, knowledge, productive labor, pure water and clean air, labor, and physical infrastructure. The most important forms of real wealth are beyond price and are unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy, happy children, loving families, caring communities, a beautiful, healthy, natural environment.

Real wealth also includes all the many things of intrinsic artistic, spiritual, or utilitarian value essential to maintaining the various forms of living wealth. These may or may not have a market price. They include healthful food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, education, health care, fulfilling opportunities for service, and time for meditation and spiritual reflection.

The fact that in the U.S. it’s mainly phantom financial wealth that is idolized and protected by our political system is a measure of how far the U.S. empire has already fallen from the heights of its glory days.

Think of the trillions spent propping up the financial system, while the ecological and social systems that sustain us remain ignored and untended. Faced with a crisis and limited resources, our leaders threw the real economy overboard, believing that the illusory wealth of Wall Street was what really mattered.

The first hint that something was very wrong with our civilization was in the early 1970s (corresponding with peak oil in the U.S.). That crisis was dealt with by jettisoning the dollar’s link to anything real, and by selling our souls to the Saudis and Middle Eastern oil. The crisis appeared to have been averted, and was followed by 30+ years of stability. But below the surface, the economy was rotting out, and for the first time millions of Americans were growing poorer rather than richer. John Michael Greer pinpoints the beginning of the first wave of catabolic collapse at 1974:

[T]he question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

The current crisis is the beginning of the second wave of catabolic collapse.

At some point, we’ll have to let it all go: the far-flung military bases, the carrier groups, the manned space programs, the financial superstructures that girdle the globe, the freeway networks with potholed pavement and crumbling bridges, maybe even the creaking electrical grid that powers our TVs, computers, video games, and air conditioners.

But we’ve already seen who will be getting screwed. The financial bailout confirms that it won’t be any different this time around.

Greenhouse gases are not the cause of global warming. They are but a symptom of:

300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. . . [T]he seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

Global warming isn’t the only symptom:

[I]f planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few.

Sacks says the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions is absolutely over, and we have lost – and that we need to find the courage to tell this hard truth.

Because of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide, there’s a lag of several decades between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. The starting changes we are already seeing today are thus the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of well under 340 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is 387.81ppm and increasing at almost 2 ppm per year.

Then there are positive feedback loops, which we don’t understand and which haven’t been included in our climate change models.

And then there are “tipping points,” points at which change becomes non-linear. We don’t know where these tipping points may be, where Earth’s climate may suddenly shift into a different state as it has many times before in Earth’s history.

As Sacks says, these bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths.

Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

I think the course of action urged by Sacks is the only sane and honorable one:

The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Scientists have unearthed striking evidence that an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels 200 million years ago led to a sudden collapse in plant biodiversity. At 900 parts per million, ancient biodiversity crashed.

Until this research, the pace of the extinctions was thought to have been gradual, taking place over millions of years.

Carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has now risen to about 387 ppm – its highest level in at least 2.1 million years and probably 20 million years. If current rates of emissions continue, carbon dioxide levels could reach as high as two and a half times today’s level by the year 2100 – leading not only to hell and high water, but to global ecosystem collapse.

We’re truly playing with fire. And the best we can manage is the disastrous Waxman-Markey? Our political efforts, measured against the enormity of the challenge before us and the consequences of failing to act responsibly and decisively, are so feeble as to be laughable.

What else to do but laugh, faced with a catastrophe that is all but inevitable? Lucky for humanity that there will be no day of judgment.

You might expect those most responsible for creating a mess should be the ones to take the lead in cleaning it up. So much for American exceptionalism. Some example for the rest of the world.

Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community – values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.

“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values – which place “the economy” above all else – are ultimately destructive of life itself.

Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:

“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”

So what was the G8′s bold response? To “move towards a low-carbon society” by endorsing the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 while failing to set a short-term goal for actually getting their. And by the way, the 50% cut is from current levels, not from the 1990 levels that served as the baseline in Kyoto.

In other words, they set a target that guarantees catastrophic climate change and then failed to adopt any steps to actually achieve that grossly inadequate goal.

The G8 statement says: “Achieving this objective will only be possible through common determination of all major economies[.]” What ever happened to countries, to peoples, to polities? “Economies” don’t make decisions.

Hansen’s letter points out that responsibility for global warming is a physical fact, not an ethical statement; and is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, not to current emission rates. This is a result of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2.  Responsibility of the United States is more than three times larger than that of any other nation. The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are responsible for most of the fossil fuel CO2 in the air today. Looking at per capita emission, the United States and Canada are the largest emitters, while per capita emissions of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom are about half that large.

The main concerns of the G-8, as laid out in the group’s joint statement, are to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming by cutting emissions, but only by guaranteeing “sustainable economic development” and “energy security.” Again paraphrasing, we’re willing to tackle global warming, but only if we don’t have to give up on our belief in unlimited growth.

Wendell Berry has a great article in Harpers exploring the Faustian bargain we have made. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. Our problem is more than prodigal extravagance – it’s also an assumed limitlessness, a trait reserved for the gods. Yet we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness.

As the ancient Greeks knew, the inevitable consequence of transgressing limits is tragedy. In Greek tragedy, an important function of the chorus was to ensure that the audience does not forget things, to put the actions of the actors in context. Let’s hope that the audience is paying attention, that the end has not already been written, and that the only thing left for the chorus to do is lament.

“Cheap oil provided an energy subsidy that defined the wars, economies, settlements, values, and lifestyles of the 20th century. The result was a century of wasteful extravagance and inefficiency that encouraged us to squander virtually all Earth’s resources — including water, land, forests, fisheries, soils, minerals, and natural waste recycling capacity. We are now waking up to the morning-after consequences of a brief but raucous party. These include depleted natural systems, unsustainable economies, an obsolete physical infrastructure, and a six-fold increase in the human population dependent on the diminished resources of a finite planet.”

“Remember those scenes in Star Trek. Scotty to Captain Kirk. Life support is failing. Kirk to Scotty. Shut down all nonessential systems and direct all available resources to life support. There it is — the order for our time. No resources for war or extravagance. Focus all attention on the health of the crew and the life support system.

“No more throwaway stuff. No more economic growth for the rich. Our priority must be to grow our well-being rather than our consumption. Invest in peace, education, and health care rather than war. Invest in compact communities rather than suburban sprawl. Invest in local economies and environmental rejuvenation rather than in shipping toys around the world and speculating in the global financial casino. Invest in sidewalks, bicycles, bicycle paths, and public transportation rather than cars and highways. Invest in education for living rather than advertising to get us to consume more.

“Here is the kicker. We must eliminate exactly those forms of non-essential production and consumption that our economic and political systems are designed to promote.

We need to redesign the way we live – but we can’t because our world, even our own nation, is not governed by democratically elected governments but rather by global financial institutions.

“We need to grow strong caring communities in which we get more of our human satisfaction from caring relationships and less from material goods. We will need to end war as a means of settling international disputes and dismantle our military establishment. We need to reclaim the American ideal of being a democratic middle class nation without extremes of wealth and poverty. And we need to encourage and support the rest of the world in doing the same. To do all this we will need to create democratically accountable governing institutions devoted to the well-being of people and nature.”

Our biggest problem is neither bad people nor bad institutions, but a bad story that keeps running on an endless loop in our heads – that competition rather than cooperation and compassion ultimately works to the benefit of everyone.

It is time to start filling our heads instead with the story that it is our nature to be caring and giving and that this is all for the good, and therefore we properly set our sights on perfecting our capacity for love and caring and create the world of our dreams. It isn’t a particularly new story. It’s the story of all the world’s great religions.

“if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.”

This stark warning is from the abstract of a recent report by James Hansen’s team of scientists.

Things aren’t looking good. Two weeks ago came the news that atmospheric carbon dioxide levels are rising faster than ever – and methane, an even more potent greenhouse gas, is soaring as well as the frozen north begins to thaw. If the Arctic ice disappears as feared, the white reflector that sent 80% of incoming solar radiation back into space will have turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. We’re already seeing feedbacks taking over. What humans have started, Earth may finish.

If we do everything right, we could see carbon emissions start to fall fairly rapidly and the oceans begin to pull some of that CO2 out of the atmosphere. Before the century was out, we could be on track back to 350. We might stop just short of irreversible tipping points.

Bill McKibben has an op-ed at the LA Times containing a great summary of what “doing everything right” means:

“[It] means that political systems around the world would have to take enormous and painful steps right away. It means no more new coal-fired power plants anywhere, and plans to quickly close the ones already in operation. (Coal-fired power plants operating the way they’re supposed to are, in global warming terms, as dangerous as nuclear plants melting down.) It means making car factories turn out efficient hybrids next year, just the way U.S. automakers made them turn out tanks in six months at the start of World War II. It means making trains an absolute priority and planes a taboo.

“It means making every decision wisely because we have so little time and so little money, at least relative to the task at hand. And hardest of all, it means the rich countries of the world sharing resources and technology freely with the poorest ones so that they can develop dignified lives without burning their cheap coal.”

As McKibben says, this the most obvious duty humans have ever faced.

To effectively allow for natural adaptation to climate change, size matters.  A substantial core habitat must be present for the migration of species across landscapes and to buffer zones with human development. But our approach to environmental protection has so far been seriously flawed. In protecting wilderness and other resources, we’ve created “islands.” That makes wilderness areas and other protected resources and habitats susceptible to climate change.

DeLuca argues that large-scale land conservation is required, and efforts must extend beyond traditional government management to involve society as a whole. We need a restoration of the land ethic.

But we’ve got far to go. As DeLuca puts it:

  “The efforts being conducted by our government are laughable.”

“is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life.”

Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. We’re now witnessing the collapse of the world’s fisheries, the loss of billions of tons of topsoil to erosion each year, the over-exploitation of water supples, the destruction of vast tracts of forests in the tropics and temperate zones alike. Yet we call it “progress.”

Cobb calls this unquestioned belief in progress a “cult of continuity”:

“The word “cult” in its simplest sense means a system of religious worship. In many cults nothing is more important than the acceptance of certain beliefs without the requirement of evidence. And, because cult members require no evidence (in the scientific meaning of the word) to confirm their beliefs, these members are remarkably immune to evidence that might also challenge their beliefs.”

This blind faith is dangerous because it relieves us of the responsibility to make wise decisions, decisions which might enable us to avoid disaster and actually achieve a sustainable civilization.

In recent decades, economic thinkers have suggested ways to make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. A “green” economics would consider:

• Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem? This is crucial, because the economy resides totally inside the global ecosystem. Economic activity is basically converting bits and pieces of the ecosystem to human uses: trees and forests into lumber and houses, grasslands and other habitats into farms to feed the billions of humans, and so on. Our focus on economic growth has resulted in exceeding ecosystem limits. Symptoms include climate change, species extinctions, dwindling rainforests, water shortages, etc.
• Stress development over growth – that is, make the economy better at satisfying human needs, not simply bigger. The global economy simply cannot keep growing forever. And, beyond a certain and fairly modest point, there’s no correlation between material wealth and happiness. There is a correlation between happiness and things like social relationships, family life, and a sense of community.
• Make prices tell the ecological truth. The reform would be actually applying this rule to the ecosystem through measures such as carbon taxes. Other ecosystem services we’re not accounting or paying for include such things as the pollination performed by honeybees, air and water purification, soil generation, pest control, seed dispersal, and nutrient recycling. Not properly accounting for these services results in destruction of ecosystems and the undermining of these services.
• The precautionary principle. This is just the age-old wisdom of “first, do no harm” and “look before you leap.” It’s just good risk management.
• Commons management. People generally believe that there are only two workable regimes for managing resources: private property or government control. But commons management regimes are a third way, one that taps the strong human impulse toward cooperation and the common good. Commons management has proven itself over centuries of experience.
• Value women. All over the world, women earn less than men for equivalent work, they lack access to land and credit, and they do more than their share of child- and elder care, volunteer work, and other unpaid labor. This gender bias actually suppresses economic activity.

Yet, on the other hand, I fear we’re much harder on those with whom we share at least some common ground than we are on our avowed opponents.

I think we need to step back and take a broad look at the situation that confronts us. It’s no longer good enough to work to save an endangered species, a stand of old-growth forest, a breeding ground for fish. The entirety of Earth’s ecosystem is now at risk. Uncounted myriads of species are threatened with destruction, including humans and human civilization as we know it.

Averting catastrophic climate change will require massive, rapid, and global action. Is the required response even conceivable?

James Hansen has said that it’s too late – we’ve already gone too far:

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.”

The reticence of scientists and of the IPCC itself has become part of the problem, as today’s widely advocated 2ºC warming cap is demonstrably too high and would be a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species as positive feedbacks work through the climate system.

The report Climate Code Red finds that hitting a target of 350 ppm wouldn’t be nearly enough climate catastrophe. The report argues that a crash program to implement policies needed decarbonize our economy and achieve the necessary reductions in atmospheric CO2 levels, over a time period of a few years, is not a choice but a necessity for life.

Yet carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, not even a significant downtrend, in fossil fuel consumption.

What would it take, now and everywhere, to reduce atmospheric CO2 to safe levels? As Sally Erickson says at Speaking Truth to Power, it would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. Forget hybrid cars – they take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels.

When Bill McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization. Who really thinks that’s going to happen, voluntarily or involuntarily, by political compulsion?

The stark reality is we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore. It is too late.

We’re not going to save the world, so we need to stop trying to fix a dying system. We should rather focus on new growth, on healing.

We won’t get anywhere or achieve anything by accusing those who don’t yet share our vision of lack of integrity. People have the capacity for a good heart, even if we may see them as ignorant or even corrupt. As Gandhi said, if we are to change the world we first need to purify our own thoughts, to aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. And as Buddha said, kindness is key. When words are both true and kind can they change our world.

It’s time to move beyond the traditional rivalries which are based on our attachment to the world as it was. We need to open our hearts to compassion, as it is only through compassion that a new community can emerge from the wreckage of the old.

“What’s going on? Are we experiencing one of those major shocks to life on Earth that rocked the planet in the past?”

And the answer?

“More than a decade ago, many scientists claimed that humans were demonstrating a capacity to force a major global catastrophe that would lead to a traumatic shift in climate, an intolerable level of destruction of natural habitats, and an extinction event that could eliminate 30 to 50 percent of all living species by the middle of the 21st century. Now those predictions are coming true. The evidence shows that species loss today is accelerating. We find ourselves uncomfortably privileged to be witnessing a mass extinction event as it’s taking place, in real time.”

All of Earth’s species live together in tightly networked ecosystems responsible for providing the habitats in which even we humans thrive. The double whammy of climate change combined with fragmented, degraded natural habitats is the real threat to many populations, species and ecosystems, including human populations marginalized and displaced by those combined forces.

And it’s the poor countries of the world who will suffer first and most.

A new analysis concludes that the environmental damage caused to developing nations by the world’s richest countries amounts to more than the entire third world debt of $1.8 trillion. The world’s rich countries – including especially the U.S. – owe the world’s poor countries a huge environmental debt.

The planning program as a realization of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic never made it out of the legislature. Senate Bills 100 & 101 as they emerged from the sausage-making machine 1973 had already been captured by the development interests. And it’s been downhill ever since. Bit by bit, piece by piece, the planning program has been chipped away, until now nothing’s left. With the promotion and passage of Measure 49, progressive forces are now complicit in its demise.

Emmons calls for a new paradigm based on Thoreau’s counsel that “a man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.” With the catastrophic consequences of the faith in unlimited growth becoming ever more evident, it’s obvious that the imperative to live in a respectful relationship with the rest of creation can be ignored only at our own peril.

“Since its inception 35 years ago, Oregon’s land-use program has been under attack from the same forces that brought us Measure 37. Little by little, lot by lot, timber and real estate interests, developers and their enablers in legislatures, commissions, councils and land management divisions have been busy night and day eviscerating the system.

“In 2004, taking advantage of a pro-growth governor, an ignorant, inattentive and greedy public and anemic opposition, self-serving, anti-government opportunists transformed Oregon from a positive to a negative model of land use protection. Ironically, the passage of Measure 37 helped defeat similar measures in other states.

“To ‘fix’ M37, Measure 49 supporters delivered to posterity one of the most extreme property rights laws in the country. They undermined the foundation of Oregon’s land use program by reaffirming the premise of Oregonians in Action and (other) Republicans that government takes away people’s rights rather than creates and protects them, that people must be paid for following the law or the law must be eliminated.

“As temperatures rise, water and oil supplies drop, and a recession lurks behind the next stock report, voters fast-tracked sprawl of up to three houses on prime farm and forest land and even on groundwater-restricted land and conceded as many as 10 houses if loss of value can be substantiated. As if these provisions were not generous enough, M49, unlike M37, allows development rights to be transferred and even offers an ombudsman to grease the skids. Around 7,500 M37 claims have been staked statewide, with additional claims possible under M49.

“Adding insult to injury, the governor and his fellow Democrats in the Legislature are eager to revive the Big Look Task Force to “reform” Oregon’s land-use laws. With its first look, this development-biased committee found that “Oregon’s land use system has protected the agricultural and forestry land base” and “has contained sprawl.” Little wonder that a committee so near-sighted faulted the land use program for accommodating too little growth. The Big Look should take another look only if the Legislature appoints new members with 20-20 vision.

“Not to be upstaged, The Register Guard, in a recent editorial, urged state and local governments to go easy on “vested rights” of M37 claimants and “to allow some subdivisions or commercial and industrial development.” Perhaps the editor had in mind the owner of 41 acres of farmland in Yamhill County who “vested” by hastily cobbling together 41 10′ by 10′ cabins on the 41 one-acre lots of his M37 claim.

“Instead of the fix it was touted to be, M49 adds more cogs to an economic engine long overheated by the unlimited use of limited resources. Accumulating and rapidly accelerating environmental crises have made it abundantly clear, however, that growth – smart or otherwise – cannot be accommodated and that a new paradigm is in order.

“We can begin by re-prioritizing Oregon’s 19 land use goals. Presently, economy is king and the natural environment and farm and forest resources are its abused servants. Under Goal 5: Natural Resources, for example, gravel industry needs trump the protection of farms, forests, wetlands and riparian corridors regardless of the ecological imperative to reduce or eliminate the markets that industry supplies.

“State goals must be amended so that clean air and water and abundant productive soils are the foundation of a fertile local economy. An economy that recognizes and develops within natural limits could maintain and sustain indefinitely at a steady state in a closed resource, product and waste loop.

“Statewide, I believe we must and we will see the emergence of groups like Lane County’s Willamette Farm and Food Coalition (WFFC) as key players in the effort to create a secure and sustainable local food economy. This year the WFFC formed a Farmland Preservation Committee that, among other tasks, will ask Lane County commissioners to inventory and map Lane County’s farmland as a first step in establishing agricultural reserves both within and outside urban growth boundaries.

“This grassroots, on-the-ground, in-the-ground renaissance reminds us that the true meaning of economy – to economize – is to be frugal, to bring our wants closer in line with our needs, to reduce the size of our carbon footprint. No better place to begin than our own backyards.

“It’ll be a tough row to hoe, however, with the governor recently saying that slow growth is not acceptable, and the Big Look Task Force looking for ways to help him accelerate growth.

“For a governor and Legislature seeking more money for more jobs to build more houses and more roadways for more people to produce more waste, more pollution and fewer resources – and more opportunity to do so under M49 – a few words from Walden provide counsel: “A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone.”