A complete overview of all lectures provided in the course Global Challenges, part of the minor Future Planet Innovation Studies (FPI) at the rug. Lectures were given in the academic year 2022/2023.
Global Challenges: All Lectures
5/9/2022: Global Challenges: Introduction
Source to sink systems → sources are emptied, and waste products are wasted. Contrary:
circular systems, in which the waste products are recycled. Innovation is needed to yield a
higher percentage of recycling.
Global agriculture flows → from everything that is put into agriculture, only a little of the
resources are accumulated into food. Lots of resources end up in energy or waste products.
IPCC: Intergovernmental panel on climate change → organization that is responsible for
investigating what is happening with climate change and its future of it. Future predictions are
really bad → different scenarios are predicted, with for example differences in energy use. The
Red line is the line to which we will head if nothing is changed → really bad. The blue line is the
only line that can result in a sustainable long-term future plan. However, this is only a small part
of all the predictions.
Doomsday clock: only 100 seconds left before the doomsday train is gone. The gap becomes
smaller every day, but the gap is still open.
Sustainability is very complex. It is a multidisciplinary, multi-stakeholder problem. Different
people think differently about sustainability. It is multi-scale, in both spatial and temporal scales.
Elements associated with sustainability are plentiful and systematically connected. Finding your
way requires a broad view.
Sustainability by the triple bottom line, also known as “people, planet, profit”:
- Society
- Economy
- Environment
Weak sustainability is when the economy is loosely connected to society and the environment.
There is strong sustainability when the economy is embedded. When a solution is profitable,
we can look at how it fits in society, with the possibility to tweak it so it fits in society. When it is
fitted in society, it can be looked at as how it fits in the environment. But at the core is money.
Without a profitable solution, it is a weak solution for sustainability.
,6/9/2022: Global Challenges Lecture 2: Environmentalism
2 stories/ideas about humans and their environment:
- Humans have conquered nature
- Humans have destroyed nature
Can be connected → after conquering nature, it leads to the destruction. However, different
people believe different stories.
It is important to understand these ways of thinking, what their value is, and where we should be
skeptical. If we believe we have conquered nature, we can continue to tweak it until we have a
perfectly organized world. If we believe we have destroyed nature, it could be thought that there
is nothing left to save.
Nature has had different meanings over time:
- 1700s: What you can see in the world → the way that the world is; the state of the world
before societies were formed. Could be better or worse, depending on who you ask.
- 1800”s: Enlightenment: start of industrial revolution → human influence on environment
increases → lead to wealth. Increased influence on the environment resulted in a
decrease in nature. This gradually resulted in the definition of nature in the 19th century:
- 1900”s: Those things and places not touched by humans, where there are no people.
Humans and nature have only recently become seen as separate. Conquest or destruction of
nature by humans as an idea has only recently become popular.
Wilderness: wild or uncultivated land. It is the only place on earth that stands apart from
humanity (this definition originated in the 19th century).
C18/C19: developments in culture and science:
- Increased sense of separation between humans and nature, due to mixed influences of
humans on their environment
- Search for places that were unaffected by human influence → this was popularised by
artists, that wanted to paint wilderness rather than the influence of humans.
“There is nothing natural about the concept of wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture
that holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to deny” → before Yosemite became a
national park, people (Indians) lived there with great influence. They used controlled forest fires,
cultivated, etc. This indigenous society was removed from newly formed parks and protected
areas → the removal of Indians to create an ‘uninhabited wilderness’ (uninhabited and never
before in the human history of the place) reminds us of how invented/constructed the American
‘wilderness’ is.
Project of Armstrong et al. → compare sites of forest gardens in pacific northwest Canada.
Wilderness: biodiversity is often stimulated by indigenous people’s use.
- Forest gardens are distinct from periphery forests even 15- years after the displacement
of indigenous people
, - Some plant species are only found in the first garden, others only in the periphery forest
- All plants found only in the forest garden are used by people.
The ecosystem functions in a different way → different species lead to different ecosystem
functions:
- Resilience to invasive species
- Resilience to succession
- More mammals
Biodiversity is richer in forest gardens since there is no space for invasive species since all the
niches are already occupied. However, in the area not touched by human invasion, species can
enter, because fewer niches were inhabited. However, human land use is often not considered
as a biodiversity driver.
In the Netherlands, wilderness can be said to end in the 2nd-century bc, when people started to
drain the land. However, in the last ice age, people hunted animals, causing extinction.
Therefore human influence can be said to influence nature, causing an end to the wilderness.
Why is history important? History is crucial in understanding the complexity of environmental
issues and crises:
- How we think about our role as humans in our environment
- How we could think about it differently
- Not to take what we see at face value
- Helps to consider who we think of as part of an environment and who we don’t, who we
have historically thought about as part of an environment, and who we haven’t.
What is narrative? → foundation of how we understand the world as if it is a story. We
experience our life as a story.
- Narrative is present in every age, in every place, and in every society; it begins with the
very history of mankind, and there nowhere is nor has been a people without narrative.
- Narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself.
Different narratives may be needed in cases of environmental crisis. What models are unable to
do is perform the experience of the climatic encounter.
Concept of Slow violence → environmental crises are difficult narrative topics:
- Stories need pace and drama → environmental crises occur too slow, almost
imperceptibly → “spectacular” vs “unspectacular time”.
- Therefore, we need new types of narrative
We need to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular, nor
instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, that is placed out across a range of
temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational, narrative, and
strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence → we need a narrative to
reckon with the long-term effects of practices → “Stories that are not told are not known”.
, The narrative shows how we understand the world → it connects, motivates, and activates
people. When we understand what stories are told and what stories aren't, what we can imagine
and what we can’t, we can start imagining a different world, and work to make it happen.
Coming back to the 2 stories at the start:
- Humans have conquered nature → we often mess things up, even when we think we are
doing the right thing
- Humans have destroyed nature → not specifically humans, but the specific actions,
attitudes, and systems cause problems, so we can fix those!
Takeaway lesson
- Humans have always used the environment and extracted its resources
- There have always existed, there are still to exist, and there always will exist vastly
different ways of thinking about humans and their place in their environment.
Part 2: Essential concepts
First essential concept: I = P x A x T
Impact = population x affluence x technology
Ecological footprint (ordinary) numbers global hectares unitless efficiency indicator
P is meant as the population, which is the most prominent factor.
A is meant as a hectare of surface area that is needed. More hectares means a higher impact.
T is meant as an efficiency indicator → if technology is improved, e.g. more energy extraction,
then T becomes lower.
The critique of IPAT is that it is too simplistic, that it depends on assumptions and it is ignoring
systemic effects. Population influences affluence and technology and is influenced as well. This
is ignored by the formula.
ImPACT: a proposed adaptation that includes actors affecting forces:
- Parents modify P, workers modify A, consumers modify C, producers modify T
After the industrial revolution, no cap on how many people can support because energy was
infinite. Or at least, that was thought. This resulted in the peak that can be seen in the image.
Carrying capacity: the number of people, animals, or crops that a region can support without
environmental degradation. That means; consumption within regeneration capacity.
We are approaching limits: as a result of increasing pressure on resource systems:
- Increasing population growth
- Increasing affluence
- Insufficient technology improvement
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