Consumption, Not Population Is Our Main Environmental Threat


Another great photo by Peter Menzel. Check out his galleries.

Fred Pearce writes that

"It's overconsumption, not population growth, that is the fundamental problem: By almost any measure, a small portion of the world's people — those in the affluent, developed world — use up most of the Earth's resources and produce most of its greenhouse gas emissions."


Go to original article

13 Apr 2009: Yale Environment 360

Consumption Dwarfs Population
As Main Environmental Threat

by Fred Pearce

It’s the great taboo, I hear many environmentalists say. Population growth is the driving force behind our wrecking of the planet, but we are afraid to discuss it.

It sounds like a no-brainer. More people must inevitably be bad for the environment, taking more resources and causing more pollution, driving the planet ever farther beyond its carrying capacity. But hold on. This is a terribly convenient argument — “over-consumers” in rich countries can blame “over-breeders” in distant lands for the state of the planet. But what are the facts?

The world’s population quadrupled to six billion people during the 20th century. It is still rising and may reach 9 billion by 2050. Yet for at least the past century, rising per-capita incomes have outstripped the rising head count several times over. And while incomes don’t translate precisely into increased resource use and pollution, the correlation is distressingly strong.

Moreover, most of the extra consumption has been in rich countries that have long since given up adding substantial numbers to their population.

By almost any measure, a small proportion of the world’s people take the majority of the world’s resources and produce the majority of its pollution. Take carbon dioxide emissions — a measure of our impact on climate but also a surrogate for fossil fuel consumption. Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environment Institute, calculates that the world’s richest half-billion people — that’s about 7 percent of the global population — are responsible for 50 percent of the world’s carbon dioxide emissions. Meanwhile the poorest 50 percent are responsible for just 7 percent of emissions.

Although overconsumption has a profound effect on greenhouse gas emissions, the impacts of our high standard of living extend beyond turning up the temperature of the planet. For a wider perspective of humanity’s effects on the planet's life support systems, the best available measure is the “ecological footprint,” which estimates the area of land required to provide each of us with food, clothing, and other resources, as well as to soak up our pollution. This analysis has its methodological problems, but its comparisons between nations are firm enough to be useful.

They show that sustaining the lifestyle of the average American takes 9.5 hectares, while Australians and Canadians require 7.8 and 7.1 hectares respectively; Britons, 5.3 hectares; Germans, 4.2; and the Japanese, 4.9. The world average is 2.7 hectares. China is still below that figure at 2.1, while India and most of Africa (where the majority of future world population growth will take place) are at or below 1.0.

The United States always gets singled out. But for good reason: It is the world’s largest consumer. Americans take the greatest share of most of the world’s major commodities: corn, coffee, copper, lead, zinc, aluminum, rubber, oil seeds, oil, and natural gas. For many others, Americans are the largest per-capita consumers. In “super-size-me” land, Americans gobble up more than 120 kilograms of meat a year per person, compared to just 6 kilos in India, for instance.

I do not deny that fast-rising populations can create serious local environmental crises through overgrazing, destructive farming and fishing, and deforestation. My argument here is that viewed at the global scale, it is overconsumption that has been driving humanity’s impacts on the planet’s vital life-support systems during at least the past century. But what of the future?

We cannot be sure how the global economic downturn will play out. But let us assume that Jeffrey Sachs, in his book Common Wealth, is right to predict a 600 percent increase in global economic output by 2050. Most projections put world population then at no more than 40 percent above today’s level, so its contribution to future growth in economic activity will be small.

Of course, economic activity is not the same as ecological impact. So let’s go back to carbon dioxide emissions. Virtually all of the extra 2 billion or so people expected on this planet in the coming 40 years will be in the poor half of the world. They will raise the population of the poor world from approaching 3.5 billion to about 5.5 billion, making them the poor two-thirds.

Sounds nasty, but based on Pacala’s calculations — and if we assume for the purposes of the argument that per-capita emissions in every country stay roughly the same as today — those extra two billion people would raise the share of emissions contributed by the poor world from 7 percent to 11 percent.

Look at it another way. Just five countries are likely to produce most of the world’s population growth in the coming decades: India, China, Pakistan, Nigeria, and Ethiopia. The carbon emissions of one American today are equivalent to those of around four Chinese, 20 Indians, 30 Pakistanis, 40 Nigerians, or 250 Ethiopians.

Even if we could today achieve zero population growth, that would barely touch the climate problem — where we need to cut emissions by 50 to 80 percent by mid-century. Given existing income inequalities, it is inescapable that overconsumption by the rich few is the key problem, rather than overpopulation of the poor many.

But, you ask, what about future generations? All those big families in Africa begetting yet-bigger families. They may not consume much today, but they soon will.

Well, first let’s be clear about the scale of the difference involved. A woman in rural Ethiopia can have ten children and her family will still do less damage, and consume fewer resources, than the family of the average soccer mom in Minnesota or Munich. In the unlikely event that her ten children live to adulthood and have ten children of their own, the entire clan of more than a hundred will still be emitting less carbon dioxide than you or I.

And second, it won’t happen. Wherever most kids survive to adulthood, women stop having so many. That is the main reason why the number of children born to an average woman around the world has been in decline for half a century now. After peaking at between 5 and 6 per woman, it is now down to 2.6.

This is getting close to the “replacement fertility level” which, after allowing for a natural excess of boys born and women who don’t reach adulthood, is about 2.3. The UN expects global fertility to fall to 1.85 children per woman by mid-century. While a demographic “bulge” of women of child-bearing age keeps the world’s population rising for now, continuing declines in fertility will cause the world’s population to stabilize by mid-century and then probably to begin falling.

Far from ballooning, each generation will be smaller than the last. So the ecological footprint of future generations could diminish. That means we can have a shot at estimating the long-term impact of children from different countries down the generations.

The best analysis of this phenomenon I have seen is by Paul Murtaugh, a statistician at Oregon State University. He recently calculated the climatic "intergenerational legacy" of today’s children. He assumed current per-capita emissions and UN fertility projections. He found that an extra child in the United States today will, down the generations, produce an eventual carbon footprint seven times that of an extra Chinese child, 46 times that of a Pakistan child, 55 times that of an Indian child, and 86 times that of a Nigerian child.

Of course those assumptions may not pan out. I have some confidence in the population projections, but per-capita emissions of carbon dioxide will likely rise in poor countries for some time yet, even in optimistic scenarios. But that is an issue of consumption, not population.

In any event, it strikes me as the height of hubris to downgrade the culpability of the rich world’s environmental footprint because generations of poor people not yet born might one day get to be as rich and destructive as us. Overpopulation is not driving environmental destruction at the global level; overconsumption is. Every time we talk about too many babies in Africa or India, we are denying that simple fact.

At root this is an ethical issue. Back in 1974, the famous environmental scientist Garret Hardin proposed something he called “lifeboat ethics”. In the modern, resource-constrained world, he said, “each rich nation can be seen as a lifeboat full of comparatively rich people. In the ocean outside each lifeboat swim the poor of the world, who would like to get in.” But there were, he said, not enough places to go around. If any were let on board, there would be chaos and all would drown. The people in the lifeboat had a duty to their species to be selfish – to keep the poor out.

Hardin’s metaphor had a certain ruthless logic. What he omitted to mention was that each of the people in the lifeboat was occupying ten places, whereas the people in the water only wanted one each. I think that changes the argument somewhat.

* * * * *

Gary Peters strongly objects, "Nothing in human nature bodes well for cutting consumption levels in the short run — people want more, whether they need it or not, and billions on Earth really do need more."


Fred Pearce has done us no favors by downplaying population numbers and growth then pretending that only overconsumption by a small minority is the real force behind the growth in greenhouse gases and climate change.

As Paul Ehrlich and others have noted for decades, human impact on the environment is multiplicative. In his I = PAT equation he gave weightings to population, affluence, and technology as they impact the environment. From a climate change perspective we could rewrite this in different ways, but it would be moronic to leave population out of the equation.

Let's start with this rewrite. GGE = PCF That is greenhouse gas emissions (GGE) = population (P), per capita consumption (C), and energy produced from fossil fuels (F). We could diddle with this, but it contains the basics. Now let's consider Fred's notion that population doesn't matter, a view held by many economists among others, but a view held by no ecologist that I can name.

Greenhouse gas emissions are going to continue to grow so long as any one of these three variables continue to grow, P, C, or F. P continues to grow at about 80 million per year and has increased from 1.6 billion in 1900 to 6.8 billion today. C continues to grow virtually everywhere where that is possible because few if any people anywhere are "satisfied" with their current levels of consumption. Barring disaster, then, C will continue to grow as well. With both P and C growing, reductions in GGE will have to come from sharp reductions in F, fossil fuel usage.

That may happen, but not soon enough to keep the Earth's atmosphere from having a CO2 level in perhaps the 500-600 ppm range (or more), up from close to 390 ppm today and perhaps twice the 270 ppm that prevailed at the beginning of the industrial era.

Because their supplies are finite, fossil fuels sooner or later will face declining production, probably with concomitant rising prices, and GGE will finally level off, then drop.

Is that enough? Not if the vast majority of climatologists, including those at the IPCC, are right, or even close. Because much of the increase in productivity that has allowed rapid population and consumption growth to occur over the last century has come directly from our discovery and use of fossil fuels, we should expect productivity declines to set in as fossil fuels become scarcer unless we can truly replace them at a sufficient scale, which right now looks unlikely.

Nothing in human nature bodes well for cutting consumption levels in the short run — people want more, whether they need it or not, and billions on Earth really do need more. However, as the EROEI for fossil fuels, first for oil and natural gas, then for coal, falls, the likelihood of production decreases will rise. At that point, with ever more people, we will start to see declines in the standard of living. By then, cutting people may no longer be an option, so population declines will set in, mainly in poor countries.

Would it not be much easier to start now to curtail future population growth, so that if production declines do set in we could decrease consumption growth and not cut population numbers? As Kenneth Boulding observed several decades ago, "Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist." We cannnot pretend that population growth is not part of the problem, though I would be happy to admit that the additional 3 million plus added to the U.S. population each year is more problematic for the environment than 3 million additional people in Bangladesh or Sub-Saharan Africa, but that is not the whole point, Fred. More people are going to provide more environmental stress, no matter where they are born or where they subsequently move to.
(Comment posted by Gary Peters on 17 Apr 2009)

Go to original article for more discussion

And Andrew Revkin's Dot.Earth exploration of The Endless Pursuit of Unnecessary Things is a must read.

My personal strongly-held non-scientific speculation is that, while it is absolutely true that both population and consumption are problematic, it is consumption that drives destruction. As development and improved quality of life delivers the impoverished from wretchedly oppressive conditions, it also increases the cumulative ecological footprint. The riddle of combining sustainability and social justice has yet to be solved. This is THE work of the 21st Century.

HEADS UP



The ostrich is taking its head out of the sand.
E.P.A. to Clear the Way for Regulation of Warming Gases

The denial days of the Bush Administration are ending. FINALLY, the US is preparing to confront the reality of green house gases. This begins a long process which will undoubtedly include much controversy and many pitfalls but, as with Iran and Cuba and Immigration and Family Planning Assistance and Torture Memos and more, the Obama Administration is opening the door to change.

How welcome it is to receive some whiffs of fresh air into the stuffy old white-no-longer-house!


Here's more about the EPA decision from Bloomberg

THE GREAT BIOCHAR DEBATE (con't)

Planting trees for a carbon offset project in Kenya. Growing trees is one way of stocking carbon out of the linked ocean-atmosphere system. Photograph: Tony Karumba/AFP/Getty

Peter Read says, The emissions reductions gospel is failing – we need something more. NGOs who oppose geo-engineering are running the risk of climatic catastrophe.

by Peter Read in the Guardian.UK

Go to Original Article

Interviewed last week, John Holdren, President Obama's chief scientific adviser, said that drastic measures should not be "off the table" in discussions on how best to tackle climate change and that geo-engineering could not be ruled out. Making clear these were his personal views, he said: "It's got to be looked at. We don't have the luxury of taking any approach off the table."

He's right. We don't have that luxury – not only because the Kyoto protocol's first phase, running to 2012, is manifestly failing, but because the emissions reduction approach that it embodies cannot succeed. It is manifestly failing because emissions are going ahead faster than even the worst scenarios considered by the IPCC, which provides scientific assessments to the UN Climate Convention and because many rich countries are on course to fall short of their emissions reductions commitments.

Research since the IPCC's last assessment reveals that the threat of climatic disaster is more serious than previously supposed. Several threats exist but the most imminent is probably a collapse of substantial areas of land-based ice into the oceans, as studies of ancient climates show happened in previous warming phases. This seems likely to be due to the lubrication of Greenland's ice floes by water that accumulates year after year, with warmer summers melting the surface and rivers of melt-water flowing down crevasses to the bedrock, making the underside of the ice increasingly mushy and prone to slip down towards the ocean. Reports from Greenland, of increased frequency of "ice-quakes", suggest that areas of the ice cover have slipped and bumped into other areas that are still stuck. When the last bit gives way there may be an unstoppable rush of ice into the ocean, as with ancient warming phases, raising ocean levels by several metres over a few decades.

"Probably"? "Likely"? "Suggest"? "Maybe"? Yes, all is uncertain and the models are inadequate. But you don't drive full-speed down a twisty lane on a foggy winter's night hoping there's no ice round the next bend. A measure of the threat is the accumulation of warmth from successive summers, which is making the glaciers' undersides increasingly mushy. Even a deeply implausible reduction of emissions to zero in 25 years sees that measure treble over the next half-century with no end in sight.

So something more than emissions reductions is needed. We must take CO2 out of the atmosphere or prevent some of the sun's radiation from reaching the surface. But geo-engineering is usually thought of as shielding the earth from solar radiation by whitening clouds and by putting reflectors in space between earth and sun. The latter seems difficult to reverse and perhaps a very last resort. But whitening clouds can be quickly halted. It involves putting sulphur aerosols into the clouds in amounts that are trivial compared with the effects of either volcanic eruptions or coal burning worldwide. Or injecting saltwater micro-particles into ocean clouds which, whitened, then rain slightly salty water back into the oceans.

Amazing though it may seem, these apparently hopeful options are opposed by NGOs that seem more willing to run the risk of climatic catastrophe than deviate from the emissions reductions gospel. Their concern seems to be that geo-engineering will result in relaxed pressure to reduce emissions, which neglects the reality that more ambitious commitments will obviously go with increased capability to mitigate. They even oppose research, unlike Holdren's "it's got to be looked at".

The British researcher Tim Lenton uses the term geo-engineering to mean any way of cooling the earth that is not emissions reductions (even growing trees, which is included under the Kyoto protocol). His definition puts me – somewhat to my surprise – among the ranks of geo-engineers, as I have long advocated widespread tree-planting programmes, such as those initiated by the Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Muta Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, which has planted more than 30m trees across Kenya.

Growing trees is one way of stocking carbon out of the linked ocean-atmosphere system. Others advocate fuelling power stations with energy crops and capturing CO2 from flue gases and piping them into deep saline aquifers. A third option is biochar, current darling of the policy community, which promises not only to store carbon in the soil but to provide rural energy supplies and raise soil productivity as the basis for sustainable rural development. Yet even this win-win-win prospect is rejected by 129 NGOs who have declared "Biochar – a new big threat to people land and ecosystems". I would rather listen to the 1,500 poor subsistence farmers in Kumba, south-west Cameroon, who are already experiencing its benefits and who deny rich-country NGO claims that civil society in the developing world rejects biochar.

• Peter Read is an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Energy Research, Massey University, New Zealand

[Note: My thoughts (submitted as a comment) are:

Peter,

I agree that tree plantations for charcoal feedstock is an excellent idea with one IMPORTANT caveat — there must be a firm incontrovertible rule against cutting natural forests for feedstock and/or triggering land use changes that result in increased deforestation. If this is not done, the sequestration gains of biochar will be negated by losses in the natural forest carbon sink.

Geo-engineering is a scary term because because it often focuses on single variable in reductionist and non-holistic ways. This might be corrected if the the grand schemers were to demonstrate how they are going to preserve natural ecosystem services such as those provided by remnant standing forests.]

[NOTE: This post with the comment has been syndicated at re:char which is a great site for keeping up with biochar developments. So, check it out.]

OBAMA'S LOVE FOR LULA



Well love maybe over-doing it...

but it surely was at least a brilliant media ploy because Lula (though incredibly popular) is regularly trashed by the Brazilian mainstream media.

Thiana Biondo of global-voices-on-line asks, "Brazil: Does the country play a new role in the world?" and gives an excellent round-up of Brazilian reactions.

OBAMA DOES THE RIGHT THING

Today, US President Barack Obama released the memos that the Bush/Cheney Administration relied on to justify torture (with only the proper names censored). These are not all the memos. The American Civil Liberties Union is asking for more releases but the damaging information that was only known in "leaked versions" before has now been officially revealed.

Andrew Sullivan describes the memos "... as chilling an artefact as you are ever likely to read in a democratic society, the work clearly not of a lawyer assessing torture techniques in good faith, but of an administration official tasked with finding how torture techniques already decided upon can be parsed in exquisitely disingenuous ways to fit the law, even when they clearly do not. This is what Hannah Arendt wrote of when she talked of the banality of evil.

To read a bureaucrat finding ways to describe and parse away the clear infliction of torture on a terror suspect well outside any "ticking time bomb" scenario is to realize what so many of us feared and sensed from the shards of information we have been piecing together for years. It is all true. These memos form a coda to the Red Cross report, confirming its evidentiary conclusions, while finding exquisite, legalistic and preposterous ways to deny the obvious.

I do not believe that any American president has ever orchestrated, constructed or so closely monitored the torture of other human beings the way George W. Bush did. It is clear that it is pre-meditated; and it is clear that the parsing of torture techniques that you read in the report is a simply disgusting and repellent piece of dishonesty and bad faith. Read more from Sullivan



President Obama declared that the main purpose of these revelations was to put an end to the practices. He further declared that the CIA officials who conducted the procedures would not be prosecuted but it is still unknown as to whether the policies will be traced to higher-level officials and if they will be held accountable for war crimes.

Read President Obama's Statement

Read the memos

Human Rights groups are criticizingCIA immunity on interrogations.

Sullivan's Daily Dish is a great site for following many further developments and reactions.

THE GREAT IMMIGRATION DEBATE



"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"


Some of the core elements of America's global archetype are about to be tested as the US enters the great immigration debate.

Tim Egan -- one of my favorite writers at the NY Times -- offers a very interesting story followed by some challenging comments.

O CONSERTO DO GATO



The title is a joke in Portuguese. O Concerto do Gato means "the concert of the cat" but O Conserto do Gato means "the fixing of the cat." (Thanks to Ana for this insight.)

I love this cartoon and I'm posting it for its pure fun. If you run across videos that tickle or otherwise impress you let us know so that they can be spread around.

BOTTLED WATER BLUES



It seems that buying bottled water is not very good for the planet.


I just learned at GRIST -- see Avoid the bottled water blues -- that “Production of plastic water bottles requires three times the water the bottle will eventually hold. That’s not even getting into the 17 million barrels of oil or the 2.5 million tons of carbon dioxide resulting from plastic bottle production.”

What's the solution? Use a home filter and carry your own water as you travel about. Buying bottled water is a convenience habit.

Read the full GRIST story here.

PERILS OF PORKY



In real time, we've got some pigs at Fortaleza and no wolves. And here is Paz meeting some Porcos in Pando, Bolivia which is across the Xipamano River from us.

MARIA FLOR
SOUZA NASCIMENTO



Born on 11 April 2009 bringing a new generation to the line of Mestre Conselheiro Luiz Mendes do Nascimento.

Daughter of Suzi and Neto



Granddaughter of Luza and Saturnino



Great Granddaughter of Padrinho Luiz and Madinha Rizelda



With great joy and gratitude,

we say

WELCOME MARIA FLOR

I'M GUILTY

Andrew Sullivan speculates that narcissism may explain blogging.

Kudos to him for unearthing this gem:

"Subclinical narcissists are happy. They are less likely to be depressed, sad or anxious, and rate their subjective well-being more highly. They're less reactive to stress, and recover more rapidly from it. Mild narcissism also seems to help people recover from accidents or other trauma—it gives them an unrealistic sense of their own invulnerability, and they believe that they will be able to handle whatever else life throws at them."

Or, as Ted Turner put it, "If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect."
Read the full fascinating article in Carl Vogel's,A Field Guide To Narcissism. It's pretty funny even if you see traces of yourself.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Paul Krugman writing about Republicans in his NY Times column says,

"... it doesn’t feel right to make fun of crazy people."

'nuff said!

Full Krugman column is here. It's a good read.

HAPPY EASTER FROM BUJARI



The extended family of Luiz Mendes maintains two spiritual centers in Acre -- one in the municipality of Bujarí near Rio Branco and the other at Vila Fortaleza in the municipality of Capixaba. This year Easter was celebrated at both locations.



When the spiritual works are a bit smaller, Padrinho Luiz often calls them "festinhas grandissimas" (GREAT little festivals) because the strong energy of a few people who really know how to perform together in spiritual union can really rock and send a marvelous light into the world.

And this was certainly the case last night at Bujari as people celebrated the continuing rebirth of the Master with love and joy.

First we sang the hymns of Francisco Ribero (a contemporary of Mestre Irineu)



And then the hymnal "Pequenininho" of Saturnino



The energy seemed particularly special because, in addition to the spirit of the risen Christ, a new generation of the Luiz Mendes family had been born. Earlier in the day Maria Flor arrived -- daughter of Suzi and Neto, granddaughter of Luza and Saturnino, and great granddaughter of Padrinho Luiz and Madrinha Rizelda.

There are more photos (and a good story) of an earlier "work" at Bujari here.

A CARBON TAX?

I've been focused on "cap-and-trade" as a way to address greenhouse gas emissions and filter funds to preserving forests and restoring soils with biochar but Tom Friedman is beginning to convince me that a carbon tax integrated with a true energy-and-environment policy may be the better way.

The problem is that while this may be a GREAT domestic policy, it does not channel funds from the developed industrial world to the developing world where the heaviest new environmental damage is taking place. In the final analysis it's gonna be a nation's politics -- one-by-one -- that determines whether to sustain or deplete its natural resources.

Here's how Costa Rica addressed the issue and became one of the world's most inspiring examples.

April 12, 2009

Go to Original

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

Liberia, Costa Rica

Sailing down Costa Rica’s Tempisque River on an eco-tour, I watched a crocodile devour a brown bass with one gulp. It took only a few seconds. The croc’s head emerged from the muddy waters near the bank with the footlong fish writhing in its jaws. He crunched it a couple of times with razor-sharp teeth and then, with just the slightest flip of his snout, swallowed the fish whole. Never saw that before.

These days, visitors can still see amazing biodiversity all over Costa Rica — more than 25 percent of the country is protected area — thanks to a unique system it set up to preserve its cornucopia of plants and animals. Many countries could learn a lot from this system.

More than any nation I’ve ever visited, Costa Rica is insisting that economic growth and environmentalism work together. It has created a holistic strategy to think about growth, one that demands that everything gets counted. So if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

The process began in the 1990s when Costa Rica, which sits at the intersection of two continents and two oceans, came to fully appreciate its incredible bounty of biodiversity — and that its economic future lay in protecting it. So it did something no country has ever done: It put energy, environment, mines and water all under one minister.

“In Costa Rica, the minister of environment sets the policy for energy, mines, water and natural resources,” explained Carlos M. Rodríguez, who served in that post from 2002 to 2006. In most countries, he noted, “ministers of environment are marginalized.” They are viewed as people who try to lock things away, not as people who create value. Their job is to fight energy ministers who just want to drill for cheap oil.

But when Costa Rica put one minister in charge of energy and environment, “it created a very different way of thinking about how to solve problems,” said Rodríguez, now a regional vice president for Conservation International. “The environment sector was able to influence the energy choices by saying: ‘Look, if you want cheap energy, the cheapest energy in the long-run is renewable energy. So let’s not think just about the next six months; let’s think out 25 years.’ ”

As a result, Costa Rica hugely invested in hydro-electric power, wind and geo-thermal, and today it gets more than 95 percent of its energy from these renewables. In 1985, it was 50 percent hydro, 50 percent oil. More interesting, Costa Rica discovered its own oil five years ago but decided to ban drilling — so as not to pollute its politics or environment! What country bans oil drilling?

Rodríguez also helped to pioneer the idea that in a country like Costa Rica, dependent on tourism and agriculture, the services provided by ecosystems were important drivers of growth and had to be paid for. Right now, most countries fail to account for the “externalities” of various economic activities. So when a factory, farmer or power plant pollutes the air or the river, destroys a wetland, depletes a fish stock or silts a river — making the water no longer usable — that cost is never added to your electric bill or to the price of your shoes.

Costa Rica took the view that landowners who keep their forests intact and their rivers clean should be paid, because the forests maintained the watersheds and kept the rivers free of silt — and that benefited dam owners, fishermen, farmers and eco-tour companies downstream. The forests also absorbed carbon.

To pay for these environmental services, in 1997 Costa Rica imposed a tax on carbon emissions — 3.5 percent of the market value of fossil fuels — which goes into a national forest fund to pay indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them. And the country imposed a water tax whereby major water users — hydro-electric dams, farmers and drinking water providers — had to pay villagers upstream to keep their rivers pristine. “We now have 7,000 beneficiaries of water and carbon taxes,” said Rodríguez. “It has become a major source of income for poor people. It has also enabled Costa Rica to actually reverse deforestation. We now have twice the amount of forest as 20 years ago.”

As we debate a new energy future, we need to remember that nature provides this incredible range of economic services — from carbon-fixation to water filtration to natural beauty for tourism. If government policies don’t recognize those services and pay the people who sustain nature’s ability to provide them, things go haywire. We end up impoverishing both nature and people. Worse, we start racking up a bill in the form of climate-changing greenhouse gases, petro-dictatorships and bio-diversity loss that gets charged on our kids’ Visa cards to be paid by them later. Well, later is over. Later is when it will be too late.

INDIGENOUS INTERNET


Photo by Tatiana Reis at the digital inclusion area of Campus Party 2009.

Brazil's rich diversity of indigenous groups now has a a new set of cyber-tools to communicate with each other and the world. At a time when indigenous peoples, their cultures and their places are threatened world-wide, blogging has provided a new way to drum up support.

Deborah Icamiaba at Global Voices Online has a fascinating article along with lots of great photos here.






And here is the rest of it.