WEDESDAY, JAN 11, 2023: NOTE TO FILE
Module 1-6
A short 8-week course in ecological design, module 1, lesson 6
Eric Lee, A-SOCIATED PRESS
TOPICS: SUSTAINABILITY, FROM THE WIRES, LANGUAGE GAMES
Abstract: As I have sustainability concerns and concerns for posterity's and the biosphere's future, I will start a course in Ecological Design tomorrow, which is one of four 'dimensions' of the offering. Subnotes to file will likely follow.
COOS BAY (A-P) — The 6th lesson. [My comments are in brackets.]
Ecological Economics
While it rightly belongs in the Economic Dimension, Ecological Economics is mentioned here because it is underpinned by ecological design principles. The whole systems framework of ecological economics distinguishes four fundamental capitals or resources. In the past, “built” capital was increased at the expense of “natural” resources and often our “social” capital, through political activities. From a balanced, whole-systems perspective we have to optimise the health of the whole system including the four types of capital. The intention now is to create sustainable human settlements and wellbeing by increasing or at least not diminishing any of the capitals, while building others. Ecological design at its best is regenerative, not just sustainable. It aims to regenerate all vital resources in ways that ideally leave the system as a whole richer, healthier and more abundant. In the design of sustainable communities, it is particularly important to pay attention to how proposed designs beneficially affect all four types of capital. [In the past capital was built overtly on planetary resources including human resources and still is. Adding obfuscating concepts and pretenses changes modern techno-industrial society only at the margins, just as ecological economics seeks (has sought and failed) to change the MTI serving economic hegemon. The only possibility for change would involve recognizing conventional economics, sustainability narratives, and pretend alternatives as incompatible with humanity's persistence as a species as evidence by no longer teaching these consensus narratives and replacing them with better stories.]
Sustainable Human Wellbeing is created by optimising the contribution of four basic types of capital. Source: Gund Institute for Ecological Economics
Four types of capital:
• Built (infrastructure and buildings)
• Natural (environmental)
• Social (quality of interactions)
• Human (skills - education)
[As there is no 'planet for the taking' out there other than perceived, there is not 'capital' out there. There are systems that are subsystems made up of subsystems as perceived by best guess, i.e. through our primate concepual glass darkly. We humans can no more claim to understand complex systems than a dog can claim to understand calculus. Our verbal behavior is more complex than a dog's, such that we can claim to understand complex systems.]
Watch the short video of Robert Constanza explaining how human beings can flourish on Earth if we apply the lessons of ecological economics to the way we design new ways of meeting human needs within planetary boundaries and opportunities. [Constanza was a notable student of H.T. Odum who failed to understand the implications of Odum's 'better view'. I could point out the fatal flaws in his envisoning, in his consensus narrative all right thinking denizens of modern techno-industrial society can agree to, but pointing out that 2+2=5 is not quite right (or not even wrong) is ineffective when all educated humans know that 2+2=5.]
He highlights the importance of a clearly defined vision of a sustainable and regenerative human future in the process of creating a strategy to implement such a vision.
"So, if we want to assess the “real” economy – all the things which contribute to real, sustainable, human welfare – as opposed to only the “market” economy, we have to measure the non-marketed contributions to human well-being from nature, from family, friends and other social relationships at many scales, and from health and education. One convenient way to summarize these contributions is to group them into four basic types of capital that are necessary to support the real, human-welfare-producing economy: built capital, human capital, social capital, and natural capital.
The market economy covers mainly built capital (factories, offices, and other built infrastructure and their products) and part of human capital (spending on labor), with some limited spillover into the other two. Human capital includes the health, knowledge, and all the other attributes of individual humans that allow them to function in a complex society. Social capital includes all the formal and informal networks among people: family, friends, and neighbors, as well as social institutions at all levels, like churches, social clubs, local, state, and national governments, NGO’s, and international organizations. Natural capital includes the world’s ecosystems and all the services they provide. Ecosystem services occur at many scales, from climate regulation at the global scale, to flood protection, soil formation, nutrient cycling, recreation, and aesthetic services at the local and regional scales."
Robert Constanza, 2006 [Accepance of the market economy as being out there, is foundational to neoclassical and doughnut economics, and allows resource constraints to be discounted as the market will provide substitutes should and resouce come into short supply. Energy and matter flows are out there. The financial subsystem is the externality that is utterly dependent on energy flows.]
Sound ecological design meets human needs in ways that do not degenerate and ideally regenerate the healthy functions of ecosystems and in a global world we impact on ecosystems across the planet for the materials and other inputs we require for the built environment. If we take Ecological Economics as a model for evaluation across the four capitals globally, and from an energy-descent perspective, we can ask the right questions about our building projects; where we can afford further urbanisation, or whether green retrofitting is more appropriate. We will deal with this in module 5. [Error, ignorance, and illusion 101: Designs do not meet human needs. Mass and joule flows do. Designs, provide they are based on how the world really works, can modify the flows to select for different outcomes, some potentially viable.]
As you set out to design any specific project, ask yourself the question how your design might serve to optimise the impact on all four types of capital, no matter which capital the original design brief might be focused on. We will revisit this topic in the Economic Design dimension of this course. [I can guess as to what might work, then test.]
"Ecological economics is a transdisciplinary field of study that broadly examines the relationships between ecological and economic systems. Ecological economists understand that the economy is a subsystem of a larger ecological life support system, and they strive for an ecologically sustainable, socially equitable, and economically efficient future.” [A viable ecological design for a civilization would included excluding the non-viable, e.g. the MTI economic, political, religious, educational, and other social control systems so the failing paradigm can be replace, perhaps with a less viable one... or not. I was once a member of ISEE and was at the international conference near Mexico City in 2018 with the 'I' 'SEE' meme was adopted.]
ISEE is a not-for-profit, member-governed organisation dedicated to advancing understanding of the relationships among ecological, social, and economic systems for the mutual well-being of nature and people.
Module 1, lesson 7
