ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

LandWatch Lane County president and Goal One Coalition board member Bob Emmons has an opinion piece in this week’s Eugene Weekly recapping the sorry history of land use in Oregon.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, argues in an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times that rising population alone isn’t the main challenge facing humanity. People are a problem only insofar as they consume and produce.

What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate. The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

Cornucopians promise that developing countries could achieve a first-world lifestyle if they only would install honest governments and adopt free-market economies. But this is impossible, a cruel hoax. We are having ever-increasing difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people, and at the cost of threatening  climate and ecosystem stability.

Americans would object mightily to sacrificing our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

But living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts.

Diamond concludes:

“Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.”

Hans Noeldner at The Oil Drum:  Local writes that our plutocratic caste is particularly fond of the fiscally-based resource entitlements program.  It is deemed essential that we “remember” the distribution of natural resources is not – and cannot be – a moral issue. Rather, the solution is to “internalize” those costs somehow. Of course, this means that when gas prices or other prices go up, other people will conserve.

The combination of our economic paradigm with our willful ignorance of finite realities is a curse upon future generations. Treacherous slopes lie beyond the extraction peaks for all of our major energy resources, but we-the-people have not begun to assemble the ropes and belays we will need to descend them securely rather than tumbling into catastrophe. And so long as we remain silent and allow money to do the talking, we never will.

A fitting topic for a Sunday: Charles Sullivan writes that our relationship to the land is a sacred one, a matter of morality and ethics.

It is impossible to commodify the sacred bonds that exist between the human animal, and the non-human animal—a bond that extents into the landscape that spawned them. To claim ownership of another living being, whether wild forest, or domesticated canine, is to break the sacred bonds and reduce them into commodities—mere objects for use. It is to make them our property and force them into slavery; objects for economic exploitation.

So it is with the land itself.

Earth’s ecological systems have evolved over billions of years, with humans emerging only recently. The idea that humans are apart from and superior to nature, that humans have dominion over the land and the earth, is a dangerous and foolish notion that requires unfathomable hubris and stupidity. With global warming, we are now beginning to see just how dangerous and foolish. We’ll soon see if humans can summon the humility and the wisdom to step back from the brink of catastrophe.