- Addressing the limits to rationality
- acknowledge our limits
- actively seek information that promote sustainable behavior/complex issues in general
- proactivity to understand more
- receive further information with an open mind
Becoming Environmentally Informed
- knowledge is the first step, finding academic literature
- social, economic, and environmental dimensions
- ecological footprint
- measure of the environmental impact of a person's daily activities
- environmental consumption i.e. transportation, home expenditure, food consumption
- calculators have been devised to keep track of
- sources of energy used
- land, water resources
- vary in detail but useful as rough guidelines
- carbon footprint
- amount of greenhouse gases produced
- fails to account for differences in social groups as they are statistical averages
- Paul Ehrlich's IPAT equation
- (I) Ecological Impact
- (P) Product of Population
- (A) Affluence
- (T) Technology
- attempt to think systematically about how factors combine to affect processes and resources
- overgeneralization
- environment is tied to wealth, per capita resource used increases with affluence, wealthier nations have larger footprints than poor ones
- link not always straightforward, some wealthier nations are greener than less wealthy ones
- i.e. Europe's footprint is smaller than United States
Becoming Socially and Economically Informed
- Integral measure of factors can't be measured by just environmental impacts
- Fair Trade practices
- products made by non exploitative practices
- tries to ensure employees reap stable socioeconomic benefits
- Sustainability involves balancing ecological, social, and economic factors and weighing the relative importance of one another
- Intergenerational communities vs familial communities decision making
Systems Thinking
- (CAS) Complex adaptive systems
- systems that are rapidly changing, large and hard to model
- vital to choose attention to vital information not just vivid
- Most states include critical thinking as a core aspect of education
- solve disconnect of memorization and understanding
- in general the public's critical thinking skills is not at a high enough level to process information in long term ways
- Synthesis
- standard practice
- Divide problems into smaller more manageable components and view them separately
- education system reflects this, division of subjects i.e. arts, mathematics, sciences, etc
- Long term decisions are often multi disciplinary
- acknowledge that we have to sometimes view problems as a whole instead of breaking them down
- Scale
- think of the scale of consequences
- effects globally
- effects community
- effects personally
- Stocks and Flows
- Recall from Georgescu-Roegen's distinction between stock resources and fund resources
- stock resources - draws from a limited reserve
- fund resources - near infinite, or self replenishing
- stocks
- immediate effects of an event
- flows
- consequences of events/effects of a stock
- apply to global climate change
- minimize greenhouse gas
- gas emissions is the stock
- side effects of global warming such as climate change is the flow
- Must consider timeframe, there is delay between when gas emissions are released and when effects occur
- consider additional actions such as heating cycle of earth, to figure out when heat gets capture from gas emission and held for longer than normal
- Feedback loops
- presence of feedback loops
- negative feedback loops
- systems tend towards equilibrium through loops that return the system to normality
- positive feedback loops
- systems grow uncontrollably
- more likely to cause problems as it destabilizes equilibrium
- catastrophe can occur when it hits a boundary or limiting condition
- i.e. bacterial growth
- unrestrained bacteria growth increases population of bacteria
- bacteria consumes resources in the area
- causes drain on resources, death of host area
- Resilience
- ability to respond to change
- fail safes implemented
- system archetypes
- common patterns of loops/behavior of a system
- helps to understand what fail safes will be effective
No comments:
Post a Comment