Hamilton planning committee hears from sustainability expert

CATCH News – March 8 2011

The city’s planning committee heard last week from Mike Nickerson, the author of Life, Money and Illusion: Living on Earth As If We Want to Stay. Excerpts from his presentation are reproduced below. The full transcription is on the CATCH website.

“…The really fundamental change between human beings and the earth has been well illustrated by the east coast fishery, because when Europeans came to North America you could drop a bucket into the ocean and pull up codfish. They were so dense in the water they couldn’t escape from a basket. And for 400 years, they were the foundation of the maritime economy. Anybody could go fishing and make a living.

“If somebody was ambitious, they fished a little more than they needed to for their immediate needs, they make some extra money and they could invest that in their boat or their net and catch more fish, and make more money. And that more money – more fish – more money – more fish process went on for 4 centuries. It just got better, and better and better and better and then it collapsed. And there’s something about better and better and better that doesn’t naturally need to collapse.

“There is something important going on that wasn’t being paid attention to. And that was the fish stock. And the reason it wasn’t being paid attention to is that for four centuries there was nobody that could even imagine that we would dent this incredible volume of fish let alone bring them to the status of endangered species. But because of the expansion of the number of fish and people fishing and particularly because of the power of the equipment we were using for fishing, you could no longer support yourself fishing cod on the east coast.

“And what we did with the fish we’re doing with the forests. We’re doing it with fossil fuels; we’re doing it in some places with fresh water, with soil fertility; with the ability of the environment to absorb our waste. These are all wake-up calls to the human family. They’re all telling us one thing. They’re saying we’re grown up now. We’re no longer a young offender; we’re fully responsible for the laws of nature, and we will be tried in the court of natural selection.

“There are only two laws in nature that we have to obey. One is the law of the minimum. How much resources do we need compared to what the planet offers – which is what the fish and the fossil fuels is about. And the other is the law of tolerance. How much of our waste can we tolerate – can the environment which supports us tolerate?

“A good example of that is that if you put yeast into fruit juice it starts to digest the sugars in the juice and it produces alcohol as a by-product. As time goes by, the level of alcohol rises in the juice and as it approaches 14%, yeast can’t tolerate alcohol at 14% and it dies. So you’ll never find a naturally occurring alcohol greater than 14 %. Anything more potent has been refined in some ways.

“So when the human family recognizes that we’re responsible to these same two laws that affect everything else that lives on the planet and resolves to live within the law, then we can be here for hundreds of thousands of years to come. But I don’t suspect that there’s anybody in this room that doesn’t suspect that we’re in some problems currently with our society in term of natural resources that are being diminished and pollution problems and so on….

“…How much would we pay for oil if it actually came down to a bidding war? I want you to imagine being in your car at the bottom of the hill and you’ve run out of gas, and you want to be up the hill and home. There are a lot of people around willing to help you. Now to give you some context of what fuel is worth currently – if we had $150 a barrel, which is what the highest price ever was, and you add a hundred for transport – so it’s $250 for a barrel; that’s about a penny per hour of human labour – the equivalent of energy in the barrel of oil compared to what you can produce as a human being.

“So there’s all these people around willing to help you up the hill. Would you pay them a penny an hour to get you and your car home? That would be inexpensive energy to get you up the hill. If you paid 10 cents and hour, that would be $2500 for a barrel of oil. If you were to pay them minimum wage, a barrel of oil is worth a quarter million dollars. So how high would we bid that price up? And we’re getting to that point where it’s a potential problem. So anything that has to do with energy needs to be reconsidered….

“…The second largest consumer of energy in our society is the production and transport of food. And if Hamilton is anything like the other cities that I’ve seen statistics for in Canada – if the transport stops bringing food in, you have enough food to last you about four days. That s a problem – that puts your entire population at risk in a world where energy disruptions are possible….

“…any opportunity you have to support local agriculture is highly important. Again it takes time to get these systems, to get the knowledge to get the processes going so that they can supply what you need. Any other sort of local provision – anything that people can do to provide what other people in their community need – means that the money that changes hands stays in the community. If you have a lot, you can produce the food, you can fix up the shelters, maintain the various things that you need – that money can circulate around and around getting used again and again. You pay the money on fossil fuels and it leaves the community and it’s gone. And you’ve got to find something that you can trade to get money back to if buy more of the fossil fuels. So if you can make that run around, you’re doing a good job, and it provides employment which means you’ve got taxes and all sorts of things that maintain the community plus the viability of being a participant….

“… we’re stretching the planet’s limits, and the long childhood and adolescence of the human species is coming to an end. We’re in that awkward adolescent stage where we’ve reached physical maturity. We’re pretty well filling the planet’s capacity – in some ways we’re overstretching the capacity. So we’ve got to admit that we’re grown up now. But we haven’t taken that responsibility and dealing with the others that we share the planet – other humans, other creatures in a responsible way. And that’s an enormous task that has to be undertaken….”

Councillors didn’t ask any questions of Nickerson, but two of them purchased his book. His presentation was one of eight given in Hamilton on March 1 and 2, sponsored by the Hamilton 350 Committee on climate change and OPIRG McMaster.