Being a “green” person nowadays means that you compost, ride your bike everywhere, eat organic and local, drink tap water, and try to consume less. Visions of this person generally conjure the image of the urbanite, however, sometimes spilling into other aspects of life such as an activist job and vegan diet. Never do we think of the poor rural citizen either as the target of “greening” or as someone who might already be green.
A growing number of scholars now say that we live in an era known as the Anthropocene. Yes, this means that something fundamental about how the earth and its ecosystems function has shifted because of human activities. A quick history of the term shows that admitting to this shift also means admitting to the blame that humans arguably deserve. However, step away from that finger-pointing blame stance for a minute. If humans have fundamentally changed the earth’s geology, doesn’t that mean we’re looking at all sorts of new habitats and opportunities for evolution to create new critters? Yes, yes it does.
Sustainability is as much about personal decisions as it is about broad social movements or top-down government rules. Those personal decisions are rooted deeply in how we behave as human beings, and that is something that science is far from understanding.
Adam Smith once said “we are not ready to suspect any person of being defective in selfishness (Smith 1804). In many neoclassical economics studies, humans are assumed to act rationally – that is, they act in their own self-interest (known as rational choice theory. Self-interest is generally calculated by financial gain, but more progressive economists will include other factors in the formation of their utility curves such as time resources. The idea spreads beyond economics, however, into other disciplines such as evolutionary biology. For example, Richard Dawkins has argued for the “selfish gene”(2006) attributing all animal behavior to propagation of their genes. He goes so far as to say that any observed “altruism” is actually benefitting individuals with shared genes, so is still essentially selfish behavior.
Hardin's original example: cows sharing a field, cred.columbia.edu
Perhaps the most cited example of the rational actor is Garrett Hardin’s “Tragedy of the Commons” (1968). Hardin describes the scenario of a common field in which people have the opportunity to graze their cows. Each person adding an additional cow degrades the field a little more, but the costs are split among all users while the benefits go solely to the owner of the cow. According to the rational choice model of human behavior, people then have the incentive to add more and more cows until the field is no longer useable. He concludes his analysis by implying only two solutions – privatization or strong central governmental control.
A small news article from Science has been taped above my desk for the last few years. I don’t remember who originally gave it to me, or why I even hung it up, but there it is, nestled between a couple XKCD cartoons. The article is titled “The Wine Divide” and it raises many questions about sustainability, inherent biases in conventional wisdom, and what the term “local” means in a global economy. And it’s about wine.
It’s the second week of Science and Sustainability month, and this time we want to know what you have done to lead a more sustainable life. Be as specific or as general as you want. Do you reuse items that you’d normally throw away, bike instead of drive, compost your trash? Have you made dramatic … Read More “What steps have you taken to lead a more sustainable life?” »
We launched Science and Sustainability month with an open thread, asking our readers “What does sustainability mean to you?” We received several truly stellar comments, but can, unfortunately, only choose one to be our comment of the week. Congratulations to Mark Gibson, who said:
Hans Rosling has an important and often overlooked message about how the decisions made by the wealthiest affect the poorest and where we need to focus our goals when we talk about sustainability.
As part of our month of Sustainability and Science, we’re raising money to help complete Bonehenge. Bonehenge is the skeleton of a Sperm Whale that stranded on Cape Lookout several years ago. Over the last three years, Keith Rittmaster and an army of volunteers from the North Carolina Maritime Museum have been working to re-articulate the skeleton for a display at their Gallants Channel campus.
The protect is a shining example of outreach and community engagement. School groups tour the assembly facility regularly and get a first hand look at the process of reconstructing a full sized whale. Over the course of the project, several new discoveries about sperm whale physiology have been made, including the extreme degree of asymmetry that results in one side of the whale have fewer and smaller bones than the other.
During this month we will match all donations up to $250. There is a widget to your left to make donation through paypal. Even a couple of dollars goes a long way towards making this exhibit a reality.
The pig to clean the pipeline, http://www.fotopedia.com/items/flickr-3906190629
Every time I see the slogan “drill baby drill” appear as a response to recent rises in gas prices, I think back to the short time I lived in Alaska. Spanning the summer of 2007, my short adventure in Fairbanks left me with much to think about. One of the most surprising was the lessons learned from $5.30 gas prices – in a state that pays its residents dividends from its large oil production.
Long story short, Alaskan oil isn’t the cleanest – in fact, refineries in the U.S. don’t touch the stuff. Alaskan oil is thick and heavy, to the point where the pipeline has a special cleaning tool known as a pig to keep the oil flowing. Most of the oil is then shipped to relatively nearby markets in Japan and Korea, while oil in Alaska itself is either put through a more rigorous processing or shipped from elsewhere in the world.
Being a “green” person nowadays means that you compost, ride your bike everywhere, eat organic and local, drink tap water, and try to consume less. Visions of this person generally conjure the image of the urbanite, however, sometimes spilling into other aspects of life such as an activist job and vegan diet. Never do we think of the poor rural citizen either as the target of “greening” or as someone who might already be green.
A small news article from Science has been taped above my desk for the last few years. I don’t remember who originally gave it to me, or why I even hung it up, but there it is, nestled between a couple XKCD cartoons. The article is titled “The Wine Divide” and it raises many questions about sustainability, inherent biases in conventional wisdom, and what the term “local” means in a global economy. And it’s about wine.
As part of our month of Sustainability and Science, we’re raising money to help complete Bonehenge. Bonehenge is the skeleton of a Sperm Whale that stranded on Cape Lookout several years ago. Over the last three years, Keith Rittmaster and an army of volunteers from the North Carolina Maritime Museum have been working to re-articulate the skeleton for a display at their Gallants Channel campus.
