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HELLO! Our final Chester Green Drinks event for 2009 was a green-themed pub quiz in the Brewery Tap at the beginning of December.   Keep checking back here for information about the schedule for 2010.

 

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Recession And Recovery:  It’s the ecology stupid…

The one-time director of Friends of the Earth gave a lecture staged as part of a series by the University of Liverpool to celebrate the city’s Year of Environment. Mr Porritt, who has just finished nine years’ work leading the Government’s Sustainable Development Commission, talked about being green in a recession.

He started by setting the scene to bring into stark focus the challenge that we all face:

1. Pen Haddow’s[1]recent study which demonstrates that Arctic Sea summer ice will be ‘ice free’ within 10 years. That’s well within all our lifetimes everyone!
2. Recent evidence that has demonstrated that due to the increasing acidification of the oceans[2](as a result of the increase in greenhouse gases) the shells of molluscs are actually beginning to be dissolved (in addition to them finding it increasingly difficult to make shells in the first place)

On that note you would think he would be packing his bags and as he indicated …seeing some of the things that are on the list of ‘100 places to see before global warming destroys them’.  Instead however his seminar focussed on the thorny issue of how we humans re-adjust our view that GROWTH is good. He pointed out that the current recession is not just a blip from which we can bounce back to the same kind of consumption driven economic growth, but that it is a symptom of system failure. 

You will be pleased to learn that despite 9 years at the SDC he hasn’t given up hope that we can change the system.  To put a value on environmental externalities and have growth within environmental limits, recognising the interdependence of humans on every living system.  As he acknowledges this requires some tectonic shifts from economists and politicians and the whole human population, not least because we have considered ourselves separate from the natural world since biblical times.

The two most challenging questions were asked right at the very end of the seminar, allowing a suitably brief response from Jonathon:

Population – there are too many people in the world aren’t there? His response in summary – yes[3].

Growth – perpetual growth is by its very nature unsustainable .. theoretically, mathematically and practically … discuss…[4].

To sum up, his view is that the only thing that threatens our current way of life is….

‘our current way of life’ !!

¹http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6326446/Arctic-will-be-ice-free-in-a-decade-according-to-Pen-Hadow.html

²http://oceanacidification.wordpress.com/2009/03/23/

³http://www.optimumpopulation.org/releases/opt.release16Feb09.htm

⁴Capitalism as if the World Mattered – Jonathan Porritt Earthscan 2007.