Grief comes from one discovering that they have lost something they value and knowing they can’t get it back. The 5 stages of grief are described as anger, sorrow, negotiation, denial, and acceptance. We see in the world today all those symptoms to various degrees. So that leads us to the question – what is it that the human world is in mourning for? What have we discovered we have lost?

When my wife and I had a child that was born with special needs, we experienced a complex sense of joy and grief. Joy for the presence of new life and the infinite possibilities that implies, and grief, for the loss of some poorly understood dreams and aspirations. That grief can interfere with developing a loving relationship with a child, but by discovering what has been gained from the loss, we could reach acceptance, healing, and ultimately, growth.

By seeing our child for who she is, rather than who she is not, we could find that elusive hope and use it to champion her. Our role, as her parents, is to teach her how to get past the obstructions that prevent her from meeting her needs, wants, and dreams.

It is no different when looking at the world today – the grief we are expressing is preventing us from having a healthy relationship with our future generations. All around the world, the loss of a dream is creating conditions that are troubling, at best. We see anger projected out to rage, sorrow to depression, negotiation extended to a lack of purpose, denial to madness. We hope that acceptance will lead to healing, but that hope is elusive – we don’t trust it, because that hope is tied to the dreams that have been lost.

Those dreams have an origin in the Industrialization and the Green Revolution. The dreams come from the promise of a rising tide floating all boats, of technological innovation, of inexpensive mobility, and a better life for all.

But there are now cracks showing in the dream. The huge progress we have seen over the last 100 years or more has slowed, though, and the idea that the next hundred years will see similar economic growth is held by only the most optimistic of people. We are beset by Wicked Problems – with systemic poverty, global ecological degradation, and the end of economically viable fossil carbon.

And so, we begin to grieve the loss of the dream, a potential that won’t be realized. We collectively dread what could happen, and we variously deny, negotiate, and rage against reality. I suggest that we should take another look, to find a path to renewal, so that we can have a healthy relationship with our future. I would ask what we can gain from this loss of hope?

And the answer, at the community scale, is going to be fairly unique to each community, but the underlying core of all the answers will be ‘We can gain Sustainability’. We can, as individuals and communities, find ways to make ourselves resilient, and ensure we can achieve both “Needs Security” and “Regeneration”.

“Needs Security” like food security or energy security, but extended to encompass all needs, is the capacity of the people of a community to meet all of their needs using their time and skills, and the resources, energy, and ecological functions of the land/air/water that they are stewards of, in perpetuity. It is not a requirement that all people must meet all their needs all of the time, but they must not be obstructed by some agency or pressure from meeting their needs.

“Regeneration” is the co-evolution of the community and the ecosystem such that each supports the other to allow for a greater biocapacity on the land and quality of life within the community.

Needs Security is the minimum threshold of Sustainability in an absolute sense. Regeneration allows us to get to and past that threshold. Growth, as we have recognized it thus far, becomes a side effect of doing things right, but that is incidental to the elimination of poverty, reversing ecological damage, and adapting to the changing energy system.

So, how can I help you find out what you have yet to gain? What can I do to help your community achieve your Needs?
 

I’m not sure these are finished, but they are well underway.

Sustainability = the capacity of the people living in a community to meet all their needs, using the time and skills of the population and the energy, resources, and ecological functions from the land/air/water that they are stewards of, in perpetuity.

Development = the increase in quality of life within a community between two points of time

Sustainable Development = an increase in quality of life of the population of a community between two points in time, using the time and skills of the population and the energy, resources, and ecological functions from the landmass they are stewards of, in a manner that can be maintained in perpetuity.

Economy = the use of trade to access critical resources otherwise unavailable to the individual, industry, and government; to disburse wealth throughout the community; and to facilitate the creation and use of infrastructure of all kinds.

Infrastructure = an investment of time and resources with an expectation of a return on that investment in the form of time and/or resources into the future.

Economic Sustainability = the capacity of the people of a community to meet their needs through internal trade arrangements and co-management relationships with other communities, so that no skills, resources, or ecological services are required to be purchased from outside of the community and its partners, to meet needs, in perpetuity.

Sustainable Economic Development = an increase in the quality of life between two points in time by increasing specialization and productivity of the population, while reducing the internal barriers to trade of critical resources and the external barriers to co-management of critical resources, and retaining a sufficient financial reserve to address economic disruptions.

Society = the use of community by its citizens to encourage the conditions that allow people to have their needs met more efficiently and effectively than is possible as a family.

Social Sustainability = the capacity of the people of a community to ensure they can operate as a cohesive group by having a sense of mutual respect, equity, and belonging, and generally agreed-on goals and aspirations, past any planning horizon.

Sustainable Social Development = an increase in the quality of life of a community between two points in time, by encouraging the unique customs, arts, and social institutions of those people that provide them with a sense of mutual respect, equity, and belonging while ensuring that no subset of the community receives a greater burden than benefit from any development initiative.

Ecology = the ecological capital and functions of the land, water, and air that the people of a community are stewards of.

Ecological Sustainability = the capacity of the people of a community to maintain the ecological functions of the land, air, and water that they are stewards of, in perpetuity.

Sustainable Ecological Development = an increase in the quality of life of the people of a community between two points of time by restoring or enhancing the ecosystem services that provide resources and absorb waste from the land/water/air that they are stewards of, while ensuring that a non-declining portion of each biome is maintained as a ‘wilderness’ that is neither a sink for wastes nor a source for resources.

Quality of life is dependent on how needs are met.  There is no concensus on a specific exclusive definition of Quality of Life.  I will introduce two concepts that are expected to cover the range of the term.

Potential Quality of Life = the time available within a community for activities other than those that are expected to meet needs, while considering the impact of the eventual loss of overconsumed resources

Actualized Quality of Life = the time available within a community for activities other than those that are expected to meet needs, while considering the impact of the eventual loss of overconsumed resources, as if all needs were met.

Meeting Needs = activities that prevent the degradation of the self, family, or community.  Needs themselves are aspects of being human and are universal and invariant. 

Technological Development = the creation or enhancement of systems of infrastructure with an expectation of an improvement in the actualized quality of life of a community.

Sustainable Technological Development = the creation or enhancement of systems of infrastructure with an expectation of an improvement in the quality of life of a community, focusing on the needs of the community and the resources available in perpetuity.

Human Development = the identification and removal of the obstructions that prevent people from being able to meet their needs, and the education, encouragement, and advocacy for people to take control of their lives and social environment, such that freedoms, choices, and capabilities are enhanced.

Sustainable Human Development = the identification and removal of the obstructions that prevent people from being able to meet their needs and the education, encouragement, and advocacy for people to take control of their lives and social environment, such that freedoms, choices, and capabilities are enhanced, in a manner that can be maintained in perpetuity.

Community Development = the reduction of disparity and the increase in social integration, allowing people to meet more needs by working better together.

Sustainable Community Development = the reduction of disparity focused around the resources and ecological functions that are available in perpetuity, and the increase in social integration at a greater scale.

Critical Resource = any of a renewable or non-renewable resource or an ecological function that is used to meet needs.

We face an unfortunate list of existential threats – climate change, antibiotic resistant diseases, collapse of open ocean fisheries, peak conventional agriculture, peak fossil carbon, etc. The only way to address all of these threats in a manner that doesn’t create new (potentially worse) ones is to embrace sustainability whole cloth. But that begs the question – what do we mean by that?

I suggest that sustainability is the ability of a community to ensure that it’s population is able to meet all of its needs, using only the resources that come from the land/water/air that they are stewards (or co-stewards) of, and using only their skills, in 24h/d/ca or less, beyond any planning horizon.

The rest of this quick note is support for that suggestion.

The first two sentences of the Wealth of Nations can be paraphrased to read, “People use their time to meet their wants and needs.” In a world that is significantly beyond capacity, and possesses both complex ecological services and technology, that statement must be more fully explored.

People use their time to meet their wants and needs directly (sleeping, self-care, child care, care for the infirm/elderly, etc.), and they use their time to convert resources into the means to meet their wants and needs (processing and eating food, making houses, making clothes, etc.). In addition, people use ecological services to meet our wants and needs without requiring any meaningful time use (breathing oxygen, for example) – I colloquially refer to this as ‘manna from heaven’. And people use technology to process resources into the means to meet our wants and needs without any meaningful time use (self-driving cars, for example) – I call this ‘robots making robots’.

If we are considering sustainability, we have to focus on those activities that are used to meet people’s needs, those ecological services and resources that we use to meet our needs that can be stewarded/managed to be available beyond any planning horizon.

Conventional economics considers the ownership of resources and the sale of those resources as the foundation of our economy.   While ecological services may be considered in Ecological Economics, the approaches taken attempt to distill the ‘value’ to a fiscal calculation. I would argue that a fiscal approach cannot truly addresses sustainability – that we have to focus specifically on the time used at activities expected to meet needs, the efficiency of using time to convert resources into the means to meet our needs, and the effectiveness of how our needs are being met.   And then consider how that will change as over-consumed resources and over-exploited ecological services cease to be available in the future.

A sustainable community would be able to show that in the absence of over-consumed resources and ecological services, all of the people would be able to meet all of their needs in perpetuity. In the First World, this would generally mean a decrease in consumption, and an increase in resilience. It would generally mean a little technological development, and a lot of human development. It would generally mean degrowth to increase quality of life and a reduction of affluence to eliminate poverty. It would mean that we would consume resources and ecological services like the poorest of us today, while having a quality of life like the richest.

While this is a monumental goal, I think it is all doable. It means not thinking that our economy is based on a fiscal system, but rather it requires a realization that our economy is based on the time we use to meet our wants and needs, and how efficiently and effectively we are able to use that time.

 

Adam Smith says that people use their time to meet their wants and needs, and that is the basis of the wealth of a nation.

Max Neef says something similar, but it is said a little more profoundly.

I have said that people either use their time to meet their wants and needs directly, or they use their time to convert resources into the means to meet their wants and needs.

I’m not sure that is the whole picture:

• There are needs that are addressed by using time; sleep, education, governance. The resources required are nominal. This can be enhanced through Human Development.
• There are needs that are addressed by using time and resources – the resources come from, and wastes go to, natural capital; homeostasis, food, mobility. This can be enhanced through Technological Development.
• There are needs that are addressed by resources alone – these are from natural services; breathing air, gravity, sunlight. The time required to meet these needs are nominal in places that support human life. These can be degraded, and enhanced only with great difficulty.
• And there are needs that are addressed by neither time nor resources; love, respect of our peers, emotional work as a group, hope. These are addressed as a part of our other activities, but cannot neglected without causing harm.

Thus, governance is required to create hope, and labour for others is required to ensure we generate the respect of our peers. This is why institutionalization is able to meet the immediate physical needs of the inmates, but why kids in orphanages die from being un-loved.

It also explains the importance of those natural services. They can have no measurable economic value (since one cannot buy and sell gravity, for example), but that doesn’t mean they have a value of 0.  They must be protected from ‘development’, since degrading them in any way must cause more harm than good.

Engineers can address how efficiently people use their time and resources to meet their needs. We need to found a profession that addresses how effectively people meet their needs.

I wonder if it is possible for communities to display signs of stress differently from individuals. Since ‘mob mentality’ is different from individual behaviours, especially in times of stress, it may be that groups will have behaviours that are distinctly unique from individuals. We may be able to monitor stress in individuals, and from that determine what their stressors are, and from that identify the actual obstructions that prevent their needs from being addressed – how do we do this in groups?

A sense of community is built by doing emotional work together as a group.  Since our culture tries to avoid emotional work in general, community is a fragile thing, but provides immense resilience.  Perhaps the lack of a sense of community can be used as an indicator of underlying community obstructions?

And would there be a parallel in families?  Is there a sense of family that can be disrupted when there are obstructions at a family scale?

 

Recently, I read about Chronic Stress, and the effects it has on human psychology and physiology.  CSHS says there is a simple recipe for stress (NUTS, being Novelty, Unexpected, Threat to Ego/Self, and loss of Sense of control), and the stress response is generally good.  It’s the long term exposure to stress that is the problem, because it changes you.  I wonder, and I’m investigating, if Chronic Stress is a good indicator that needs aren’t being met, and thus it should be possible to detect if people are stressed, and then identify what the stressors in the community are.  This is sounding suspiciously like Human Development (exploring the Capabilities, Freedoms, and choices of the population), but I am seeing this a little more truncated that that.  I’m trying to see what impact alternative designs will have on a community based on what is currently preventing their needs from being met.  No sense making time available if it will only be used to feed addictions (for example, like workaholism, or Starbucks, or promiscuity) that won’t ultimately raise the actualize quality of life within the community.

Perhaps there is a way to use stress as a means to identify the obstructions within a society that prevent needs from being met.  Perhaps it can be quantified by measuring the fraction of time that people use to meet each of their needs, and the time weighted fraction of needs that aren’t met.

For example, lets imagine…

• PTSD obstructs around 10% of the population from being able to meet their needs effectively.
• Imagine that these people are express the symptoms of ‘trouble sleeping’, ‘distant from people’, ‘unable to relax’, and ‘not feeling physically safe’, and this relates to the needs of ‘Rest’, ‘Child-care’, and ‘Security’.
• Imagine that these activities would normally take 550 min/d/ca, while total needs take 880 min/d/ca. Imagine also that the symptoms are observed 25% of the time, and there are no other obstructions.
• Thus, the Effectiveness would be [(880-550)*100% + 550 * (100%-25%)]/880 = 84%
• Obstructed time use would be 880/0.84 = 1042 min/d/ca.
• Across the population, this would be (880×90% + 1042*10%)=896 min/d/ca., or the equivalent of an additional 16 min/d/ca.
• 16 min/d/ca is 1.1% of a day.
• The slope of the time/resource curve at capacity is 9.5 min/d/ca/gHa.
• To get the same improvement in the Actualized Quality of Life, the Community Managed Ecological Footprint would have to be increased from 7.6 gHa to (7.6+ 16/9.5=) 9.3 gHa, an increase of 22.5%.

In this example, activities affecting the Effectiveness of a community will have 20x the impact of activities affecting the resource availability of the community.

The US is vastly over capacity – I don’t have the numbers precisely, but they have a footprint that is about twice their biocapacity.  If we tried to address this through ‘efficiency’ alone, we’d have to increase the time it take people to meet their needs by roughly 80 minutes per day – that’s more than all the time spent in paid employment that meets needs in Canada, and that would be politically impossible to achieve (either wages would have to drop significantly, or age of retirement would have to rise significantly, or both).  By combining efficiency with effectiveness, though, a fraction of the time that isn’t being used effectively to meet needs (say 400+ minutes per day) could be reduced by that 80 minutes per day, and there would be no need to eliminate retirement, or accept 3rd world wages.  People would have fewer unmet needs, and the total wealth in the community would increase.

 

So, all pages here so far talk about the efficiency by which people use their time to meet their needs – either directly, or by converting resources into the means to meet needs. Nothing talks about effectiveness, and that’s where this all has to go.
The poorest people in Canada use around 900 minutes per day to meet their needs. The rest of their time is not spent meeting needs. I don’t believe that everyone in the poorest decile of household income have all of their needs met, so that means that even if they have 1/3 of their time available to meet needs, for some reason they can not use the time to meet needs. Something prevents them from doing so.
Perhaps it is an obstruction from inside their self, or their family, or their community, but there is some obstruction.  Perhaps it’s racism, or addiction, or domestic violence.  Perhaps it’s cultural baggage, or a lack of education.  But whatever it is, I think it makes people not completely effective at using their time to meet their needs.

I think:

• People use their time to meet their wants and needs, or they use their time convert resources into the means to meet their wants and needs.
• And at the same time, people act at all times (there will be some specific exceptions) to meet their perceived needs.

Which implies that the perception of needs for most people is part of the obstructions.  Perhaps the difference between ‘surviving’ and ‘thriving’ is knowing when your needs are met and thus when you can meet wants at your leisure?

This ‘effectiveness’ would provide a perpendicular dimension to the Time/Resource curve already discussed, and may look something like this:

This curve would be generated by asking community members about their consumption habits, time use, and what symptoms they experience that predicts what obstructions they experience.  It would be a time-weighted average across each sub-set of the community, and all of the aggregated data is plotted together (average for the group, plus really should show distribution bars).

So, if a respondent demonstrates that 70% of their needs are met, the data would include which 70%, so there would be like Table B1 in my paper here – except that it would be the average values of how much of each need isn’t met within the community.   The community as a whole can then be checked to see how it would end up responding to any given alternative design, based on the obstructions that prevent the population from making full use of the development.

In all economic transactions, the value of a product or service is perceived by the vendor to be less than the selling price, while the value perceived by the buyer is greater than the selling price. Or rather than the price, the value of the money equal to the selling price, although that distinction is not truly relevant.

But then, it is asked, what is the value of ‘Green’? Or, what is the value of the ecological systems that surround us and provide us with ecological benefits?

As there is no vendor, there is no value to the vendor, and thus the selling price may be zero. In the concept of Environmental Economics, the ‘Government’, as the steward of The Commons, is able to set a price that reflects the price of those environmental benefits.  Of course, the concept also assumes the government is effectively omniscient, omnipotent, and wise, three conditions that are not supported by the evidence.

Likewise, there really isn’t a buyer. Why would you pay for air?  No one can stop air from reaching me for free.  But imagine if one could, then I would pay anything I owned to get my next-to-last gasp.

So, in the case of a commodity such as air, the value is less than the selling price, which is therefore nothing, and also greater than the purchase price, which could be anything. The concept of value must be uncoupled from price for at least some environmental features.

Perhaps value of the environmental feature can be estimated from a replacement cost. Thus, while I can’t estimate the value of sunlight, I can estimate the economic value of providing a similar quantity of heat and light.  But that only works when there is a technological replacement for that environmental feature.  So, while the case study of the New York City water supply would suggest that clean land will save about 0.5 cents/acre/ca., some environmental features cannot be replaced.

{New York Water supply case: The US EPA ordered the City of New York to upgrade its water treatment plant to the tune of an extra $8 B, plus $300M per year.  The City chose instead to institute $2 B of stewardship programs in the upstream watershed, and provided the same water quality benefit.  That worked out to an up-front savings of $50,000 per acre, divided through 10M people, or about 0.5 cents per person per acre, not considering the operational savings.}

This introduces a concept that usually would have no place in a discussion of economic value. There are environmental features that cannot be replaced by current technology, are not avoidable or controllable, and are therefore not buyable or sellable.  Thus, the only value they could have is measured by the cost of their absence.  So, what is Gravity worth?  If Gravity ceased to operate tomorrow, there would be no life on the planet by the end of the day.  So arguably, the value of Gravity is infinite.  Rather than that, I would introduce the concept of ‘Sacred’ – any feature that is not replaceable, not avoidable/controllable, and/or not sellable, is Sacred, and cannot have a value that can be measured in something as vulgar as money.

 

For example, sunlight, by that definition, is Sacred. Even if the fraction of the Sunlight that goes to photosynthesis is considered, it is effectively Sacred, as there is no way to replace it.  If this is pared down further to the sunlight that is used to produce food, the economic value is so large (eg, all economic activity on the planet has the same value as all food production on the planet, since we all work for food) that it is effectively Sacred, even if it doesn’t precisely meet the definition (replaceable, just not at that scale).

Weather is Sacred – it moves energy, air, and water around the globe, in a way that cannot be replaced, controlled, or sold. It may be that HAARP attempts to make weather mundane, but that is just conjecture.

Wilderness is Sacred, even if the term of Wilderness is somewhat ill defined and subjective.

This list is quite abbreviated, but it is clear that one could find many environmental features that meet the concept of Sacred. This illustrates that there is a need for the concept, and that there is a weakness in any financial argument, because many ‘things’ have some very high intrinsic values that cannot be reflected in financial terms.  Another unit of measure is required.

So, I will introduce another concept. Natural Services are processes that reduce the amount of time required for communities to meet their needs, without an investment of time and/or resources on the part of the community. Thus a volcano adding ash to soils, and thus increasing crop productivity, is a natural service.  Weather, sunlight, tides, etc all are natural services.  Natural services renew renewable resources, assimilate wastes, and in many other ways allow people to live on the world in relative comfort, because we gain disproportionately to the effort required to utilize these services.

The value of the natural service is, at an absolute minimum, the replacement time cost for the community to either do without the natural service, or to substitute the natural service with an alternative. In many cases, the natural service will not be replaceable or avoidable and is therefore Sacred.  This does not invalidate this argument, rather it demonstrates that some things are not and should not be for sale.

Thus, the value of ‘Green’ is, at a minimum, the aggregate time cost of the incremental absence of the natural services associated with ‘Green’. Due to synergistic effects, this apparent value must be conservative, and possibly very much so.

To compare to monetary values, one would have to add the life-cycle time benefit of the ‘Green’, and produce the financial cost to purchase this much time in the community. So, if a particular ‘Green’ feature saved the community 20 minutes per day per person, the economic value of the feature is 20 minutes of labour per day per person, multiplied by the value of each minute of that labour and the population affected.  And this would be making the assumption that we understand the ecology sufficiently and the functioning of the community sufficiently to include all time costs accurately.

Understanding the value of ‘Green‘ is the first step in exploring Sustainable Technological Development.