musings

My mum, a benevolent economist, doesn’t get why biodiversity is important to humanity. She thinks its about being kind to the fish. The problem is I have never been able to convincingly explain the importance of biodiversity to her. She won’t buy the argument that nature is beautiful, awe inspiring and a source of joy. My mum is Indian and has seen a lot of poverty. There is no point of having a joyful landscape if a person can’t feed and educate themselves. Her point is valid and highlights the commonly perceived contradiction between sustainability and economic prosperity. Or does it?

I always thought that if I was able to explain to my mum why biodiversity matters, maybe I will begin to understand how the conflict between sustainability and economic prosperity can be overcome. In my view, cradle to cradle (C2C) philosophy offers just that possibility, that shift in paradigm that is so badly needed.

I won’t go into C2C philosophy here because although it is simple (all waste = food) there are many points of nuances. I would instead like to highlight what C2C says on biodiversity. In an ecosystem, all biological waste can only be used as food back into the system if the system is diverse enough -different organisms have differing food requirements. These diverse interdependent links between various wastes / foods and the ecosystem is only possible if the ecosystem is biodiverse in the first place. So, biodiversity is important to allow waste or useless materials (from a human’s perspective) to be converted back into food or useful materials (from a human’s perspective). Biodiversity is nature’s way of converting waste into resources. Beautiful.

 McDonough and Braungart (2002), founders of C2C philosophy, compare biodiversity to a tapestry – “(…) a richly textured web of individual species woven together with interlocking tasks. In such a setting, diversity means strength, and monoculture means weakness. Remove the threads, one by one, and an ecosystem becomes less stable, less able to withstand natural catastrophe and disease, less able to stay healthy and to evolve over time. The more diversity there is, the more productive functions – for the ecosystem, for the planet – are performed” (p121-122).

The argument for nuclear power tends to be two fold:

1) Climate change argument - If we want to stop runaway climate change, we need to switch to low carbon fuels FAST and nuclear, a “bridge” technology, is economically and technically more viable than renewables (that remains debatable).

2) Energy security argument - Renewables alone cannot meet all our energy needs.

And this is why I think once-been environmentalists such as Mark Lynas and George Monbiot have turned to the dark side.

But consider this:

Carbon dioxide and greenhouse gases are waste products from burning fossil fuels. In relatively small amounts CO2 and GHG aren’t that harmful but in large concentrations the planet is unable to successfully assimilate these into the biosphere. This creates a potentially catastrophic problem for climatic regulation. If our generation is finding it nearly impossible to deal with a relatively benign waste product like CO2 and other GHG what the hell are future generations supposed to do when the amount of nuclear waste becomes an unmanageable problem? It is precisely this kind of short term thinking that landed us in our current soup in the first place - is nuclear waste truly the legacy we want to leave behind? Besides land is a valuable and finite resource - is digging holes and burning toxic waste really the best use for land?

And who says energy demand is fixed? The UK has one of the worst building stock in Europe in terms of energy efficiency. We have many technical options to increase efficiency in buildings. If we applied this building by building, street by street, might it not result in less energy demand and more comfortable indoor climate? High building energy efficiency will open up possibilities for biomass district heating systems (all that wood waste that currently goes to landfills may come to good use). If every south facing building was lined with solar panels, would buildings and communities begin to become energy self reliant? Small scale renewable energy generation also cuts down on efficiency loss that occurs due to long distance transport. The possibilities are many. The issue remains finance. Big banks are used to investing in large scale capital infrastructure projects and financial models have evolved to enable this.

We can choose the easy option and build nuclear power plants or we can channel our creativity into creating financial models that will allow small scale, community owned renewable energy to flourish. In the end, our energy path is a political choice not a technical certainty.