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Andres Bucio

From: William E. Rees [wrees@interchange.ubc.ca]

Sent: 09 July 2007 23:05
To: Andres Bucio
Subject: RE: Your thoughts
Follow Up Flag: Follow up
Flag Status: Red

Andrés – 
 
Good question on a complicated issue. Here’s my best guess. 
 
1) Our work on the human eco-footprint has succeeded in making it one of the best-known indicators
of (un)sustainability; 
2) In industrialized countries, the major source of energy is fossil carbon and carbon dioxide is the
greatest waste product by weight. Therefore, carbon assimilation lands/ecosystems constitute the
largest single component of the total per capita eco-footprint (over 50% in some cases);  
3) Climate change (thanks to Al Gore, the Stern Report, the latest IPCC report and the media [which
generally prefer simplicity to reality]) is the best-known physical manifestation of unsustainable
global trends, and one that many people may be, or think they may be, personally experiencing.
Climate change is driven, in part, by increasing carbon dioxide emissions.  
4) This translates naturally into a call to reduce our “carbon footprint.”  
5) All the above is reinforced by increasing concern about the possibility of “peak oil,” worries over
the increasing dependence of advanced high-income countries on unstable Mid-Eastern countries
and Russia, and the somewhat uncritical scramble to develop alternative energy sources with smaller
“carbon footprints” (despite the fact that some of these, such as corn ethanol, have no such thing).  
 
That’s the superficial answer. My deeper concern is that all this plays to the felt human need for
simplicity (e.g., simple problems with simple solutions) in the face of complexity.  
 
Here’s my reasoning: The (un)sustainability conundrum is caused by aggregate over-consumption —
global total resource throughput and waste discharge exceed the regenerative and waste assimilative
capacity respectively, of the earth — plus a large and widening income gap between rich and poor
both within and among countries. The world community has chosen economic growth as the means
to solve both problems, mislead by something called the environmental Kuznets curve (which
purports to show that increasing wealth eventually enables people to afford ‘cleaner environments’
but which is actually irrelevant to resource depletion and global pollution trends) on the one hand,
and innate selfishness on the other. (The latter is exacerbated by the market-based growth paradigm
itself, which essentially sanctions individualism and greed. The already wealthy don’t want to
entertain policies to redistribute the world’s biophysical or economic wealth. We would prefer that
the poor grow their way into consumer nirvana.) Regrettably, economic growth — or better, income
growth per capita — is so far invariably accompanied by increased material consumption, and is
therefore unsustainable (it actually deepens the crisis). Of course, we don’t want to face this reality
or otherwise confront the fundamental problem because, as suggested above, fixing it would mean
significant adjustments to our material lifestyles. Instead, the world has simplified the entire crisis by
conflating it into a single symptom, climate change, which seems to have a number of potential
technological solutions (non-carbon renewable alternatives). We favour technological solutions
because they: a) relieve us of individual responsibility, b) delude us into thinking we can maintain
the status quo (read “our consumer lifestyles) by other means and, c) have worked so far. 
 
Net result? We lose sight of the fundamental problem — it’s really ugly, so better out of sight and
mind anyway — and pour enormous resources into techno-fixes that address the favoured single

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symptom (and not coincidently enrich certain favoured corporate entities). Much of the population is
lulled into thinking a solution is within reach. Meanwhile most of other symptoms of
unsustainability, from the loss of biodiversity to rampant soils degradation, fade from consciousness
so the crisis deepens — indeed, both my examples of soil degradation and biodiversity loss are being
accelerated by the mad scramble for biomass fuels.  
 
I’m not sure of the point of your question but I hope this helps. 
 
Cheers,  
 
Bill Rees 
aka 
William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC 
University of British Columbia 
School of Community and Regional Planning 
6333 Memorial Road 
Vancouver, BC,  CANADA 
V6T 1Z2 
  
Tel: 604 822‐2937;  Fax: 604 822‐2787 
SCARP Web‐site: www.scarp.ubc.ca/ 
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Andres Bucio [mailto:A.Bucio@uea.ac.uk]
Sent: July 9, 2007 1:13 PM
To: wrees@interchange.ubc.ca
Subject: Your thoughts 
  
Dear Professor Rees  
 
Do you have an opinion on why and how carbon footprint has become the ‘de facto’ sustainability
indicator?  
Your thoughts will be much appreciated 
 
Regards  

Andrés Bucio
Postgraduate Researcher (PhD)
School of Environmental Sciences
University of East Anglia
Norwich
Norfolk
NR4 7TJ
UK

Location: ZICER 01.02.30

e-mail: a.bucio@uea.ac.uk
Landline: +44 (0) 01603-591346
Mobile: +44 (0) 79074-64311

  

03/08/2007