Tread Lightly E-Course:

Transition to a Sustainable Lifestyle with the Earth Charter!

Session 2

Compiled by Jaana Laitinen Earth Charter International Youth Facilitator

“We’ve been taught that we were put here to rule our earth. But the truth is that we need the environment more than the environment needs us.” Jhikolabwino Manyika, Bagamoyo Dialogue

“If we still want to have balance in nature, and if we really want to stop global warming in the coming years, if we want to stop the Himalayan glaciers from melting down; we better start re-looking at our lifestyles. We better begin our way of responding to the whole notion of development.” Mamata Dash, Delhi Dialogue II

“Markets and consumerism have changed the way of doing things on a sustainable basis. We no longer get ghee from milk, manure from animals, use our indigenous knowledge, respect our traditional governance and management systems, and the list is endless. We also promote policies that deny peoples’ access to their livelihood, and infrastructure development that destroys nature. Where is the future?” Martin Simotwo, Nairobi Dialogue

“Man and nature are to be taken as one whole and not in terms of dichotomies. The moment I am told ‘relations with nature’, I am really shocked. As if nature is external to me! Nature is inside me as well! Nature is not outside.” Devdutt, Delhi Dialogue II

• the world is currently divided:

– A large proportion of the world’s people lives well below the levels of consumption needed for tolerable living conditions

– At the same time, another large group of people binge on consumption of the world’s resources with massive harm to ecosystems and other people

– what we have come to define as “The South” and “The North” continue to exist: not so much as groups of countries, but as groups of people within all countries• the number of over-consumers in China already equals the

number in the United States

• The concept of “Class” is back! – But it is not the same “Class” that sparked countless debates

and clashes in the 20th Century

• three global classes in terms of how people use the world’s resources and meet their basic needs

Three global cultural classes of sustainable culture

1. The over-consuming class meets its human needs but not the criteria for sustainability, since it exceeds its environmental space

2. In between these two is the sustainable class that both meets basic human needs and maintains an ecological balance

3. At the other end, there is the struggling class that lives within its environmental space, but does not meet its human needs and suffers from malnutrition and other symptoms of powerlessness

Roughly one-third of humanity belongs to each of these three classes

Over-consuming class

• The justification for this label comes from the idea of climate justice, whereby each person should take equal responsibility for keeping the climate system and other natural processes in balance

– no one should exceed a given amount of resource use or pollution

Struggling class

• although poor people hardly contribute to industrial greenhouse gas emissions, the hardships in their lives reduce their human dignity in such ways that the cultures are not considered sustainable. -> people living in extreme poverty

Sustainable class

• They have their basic needs met by livelihoods that do not cause excessive industrial greenhouse gas emissions; and they lead ways of life that do not consume excessive amounts of energy or non-renewable resources

• This class of people is large, yet it receives very little attention in the debates about environmental sustainability

• If one-third of humanity has made it into this class, it should be very much possible also for the rest! – In reality, this class faces constant challenges, with the appeal of

the ‘consumer paradise’ on the one hand and the precarious existence of people in the lower rungs of the power structures on the other

An important fact to note here is that there are sizeable over-consuming classes in populous industrialising countries such as China and IndiaOn the global scale, nearly an equal number of over-consumers are located in the developed and developing groups of countries!

- Therefore the problem of over-consumption is not limited to the ‘old’ industrial countries

Two features of all modern industrial cultures as the root causes for unsustainability:

– the growth imperative• the idea of ever-increasing economic growth, using Gross Domestic Product

(GDP) as its indicator, is shown to have been a dominant objective of modern cultures and societies

• The imperative to increase GDP is dysfunctional in terms of the environment, welfare and poverty reduction. As an alternative to the growth imperative, achieving a sustainable economy is proposed as a replacement. A sustainable economy rests on understanding and taking into account the complete economy, including the informal economy, and is built on the principles of last-person-first and environmental sustainability.

– hierarchic structures• domination through power hierarchies leads to environmental unsustainability

and lack of human dignity. This is because the elite at the top of the hierarchy have become detached from and ignore the basic rules of nature and humanity, including interdependence and inter-connectedness.

• it is considered necessary that human relationships in all these areas should be balanced and equal, since together they create a coherent structure and foundation for human cultures and society

• there is the ethical difference of causing emissions for survival needs compared to emissions caused for luxury consumption

– Give examples of survival needs and luxury consumption

• food, shelter and clothing are universal survival needs, whereas excessive meat eating, large air-conditioned houses, and sizeable wardrobes, fall into the category of luxury

Is change possible?

Cultural Transformation Is Possible

• Making the required changes for this transformation can be compared to a revolution, a religious awakening, or the collapse of the Soviet Union

• Such things do happen, and can also take place in the context of environmental sustainability

• Cultural changes can be slow and gradual, but they may also be rapid and transformative

What could trigger the change from over-consumption to a sustainable culture?

• giving up the growth imperative and hierarchies• drastically reducing and eventually eliminating overconsumption• strengthening democracy with the goal of an egalitarian society• moving from a modern worldview towards a traditional

For a sustainable future, all these changes would ideally take place simultaneously

The future scenarios

1. degrowth for the over-consuming class 2. steady-state for the sustainable class, 3. empowerment for the struggling class

Recommendations for civil society movements

1. Demand radical democratisation of the society

Through true democracy, it will be possible to have non-violent change of the balance of power in favour of the marginalised majorities belonging to the struggling and sustainable classes. The systems of governance can become more democratic only when there is strong popular demand for such change. Therefore, all participants in the global justice and solidarity movements everywhere should put democratisation at the top of their agendas, both within the movements themselves and within the society at large. The best ideas and practices of democratic conduct and governance should grow and spread from the movements to a force that will democratise the whole society, starting from equality within families and moving all the way up to national governments and international organisations.

2. Seek, through dialogue, mutual support, joint action, and convergence among the many, diverse movements that are all aiming at an equal society free of violence, exploitation and oppression, be it on the basis of economic class, gender, ethnic traits, species or knowledge

Past decades have been a golden age for single-issue movements. In many cases, their campaigns have been effective, but they have still not been able to change the foundations of the society and remove the root causes of the problems. Therefore, it is vital to start connecting the issues and actors of the movements so that they may combine to become a transformative force that can grow and eventually rebuild a more just, equitable, and sustainable society. Democratisation and transformation must be done as a joint creative effort of many movements combined since monolithic ideologies and authoritarian leadership are unlikely to satisfy the democratic urges of the people. Organic networking and unity in diversity are natural principles for organising today’s popular movements.

Watch this video

http://www.youtube.com/ECInternational#p/f/109/N1fiubmOqH4

• To avoid climate catastrophe, humanity must decrease its greenhouse gas emissions very rapidly. This is not possible with technical fixes alone

• What is defined as production and consumption in the official economy must be cut down. This, however, is not possible within the present social system because it is based on the growth imperative.

• Therefore, basic social structures must be rapidly changed by social movements. This may be possible, because analogous changes have occurred in history without large scale violence.

• In such a process of social change, abandoning the consumer society may turn out to be surprisingly painless, because modern consumption is inherently dissatisfying. Economic growth and the consumption utopia have been used as excuses and surrogates to prevent consumers from realising the values of democracy and equity shared by the majority of people. Hence, there is a chance that out of the transformation, in addition to a rescued climate, an equitable economy and a genuinely democratic polity would also emerge.

My own contribution?

• Earth gives us more than we need

• Its time to look into our lifestyles

• All of us leave traces wherever we go - everyone leaves an ecological footprint during their time on Earth: some are large, others are small

• Our ecological footprints depend on our lifestyles. In other words, they depend on how much water and energy we use and whether or not we acquire large quantities of unnecessary things

• For example, if we consume a lot of styrofoam and plastic things, we leave a larger footprint than someone who consumes things made of paper or cloth. This is because making things out of plastic and styrofoam requires a lot more energy, and they have a much slower decomposition rate.

The Earth Charter refers to this theme in the following excerpts:

Preamble: We must realize that when basic needs have been met, human development is primarily about being more, not having more. We

have the knowledge and technology to provide for all and to reduce our impacts on the environment.

• What are our basic needs? • What does “being” more mean compared to “having” more?

Principle 7f: Adopt lifestyles that emphasize the quality of life and

material sufficiency in a finite world.

• What does “quality of life” mean? • What is your lifestyle?

• In order to be happy, we need to enjoy a good quality of life. However, we must first understand what this means

• Quality of life is the satisfaction level of basic needs and not the quantity of goods one possesses. This means that if a person or family has sufficient food, shelter, clothes, access to education and medical care, and time to rest and do other things, this person has “quality of life”

• Quality of life is misunderstood when it is related to the quantity of goods possessed by someone (big house, new car, brand name clothes or unnecessary things). On the contrary, this implies greater consumption. Advertising has instilled in the public the idea that “the more goods someone possesses, the more important or happier he or she will be”

Ecological Footprint

• provides a global assessment of the environmental burden put on the Earth

• The Ecological Footprint measures the amount of biologically productive land and sea area an individual, a region, all of humanity, or a human activity requires to produce the resources it consumes and absorb the waste it generates, and compares this measurement to how much land and sea area is available

• The largest components of the ecological footprint are the amount of land used to grow food, trees and biofuels for the population to sustain its present levels of their consumption, and the size of the areas of ocean used for fishing, as well as the amount of land required to support the plant life needed to absorb and sequester CO2 emissions from fossil fuels being burned by the population in question

The Ecological Footprint takes account of the fact that in a global economy people consume resources and ecological services from all over the world. The footprint of a country is thus best understood as a measure of the worldwide environmental impact of that country’s consumption.

“[The] Ecological Footprint is not about ‘how bad things are.’ It is about humanity’s continuing dependence on nature and what we can do to secure Earth’s capacity to support a human existence for all in the future.”Mathis Wackernagel and William E. Rees, Our Ecological Footprint

• A metric that allows us to calculate human pressure on the planet and come up with facts, such as: If everyone lived the lifestyle of the average American we would need 5 planets

• Since the 1970s, humanity has been in ecological overshoot with annual demand on resources exceeding what Earth can regenerate each year

• It now takes the Earth one year and six months to regenerate what we use in a year

• Moderate UN scenarios suggest that if current population and consumption trends continue, by the 2030s, we will need the equivalent of two Earths to support us

• Turning resources into waste faster than waste can be turned back into resources puts us in global ecological overshoot, depleting the very resources on which human life and biodiversity depend– The result is collapsing fisheries, diminishing forest cover,

depletion of fresh water systems, and the build up of carbon dioxide emissions, which creates problems like global climate change. These are just a few of the most noticeable effects of overshoot

– Overshoot also contributes to resource conflicts and wars, mass migrations, famine, disease and other human tragedies—and tends to have a disproportionate impact on the poor, who cannot buy their way out of the problem by getting resources from somewhere else

• We maintain this overshoot by liquidating the Earth’s resources. Overshoot is a vastly underestimated threat to human well-being and the health of the planet, and one that is not adequately addressed

Ending Overshoot• The Earth provides all that we need to live and thrive.

What will it take for humanity to live within the means of one planet?

• Individuals and institutions worldwide must begin to recognize ecological limits. We must begin to make ecological limits central to our decision-making and use human ingenuity to find new ways to live, within the Earth’s bounds

• This means investing in technology and infrastructure that will allow us to operate in a resource-constrained world: – It means taking individual action, and creating the public

demand for businesses and policy makers to participate

• Knowing how much nature we have, how much we use, and who uses what is the first step, and will allow us to track our progress as we work toward our goal of sustainable, one-planet living

Personal Footprint

How much land area does it take to support your lifestyle?

http://calculator.bioregional.com/step01.php http://www.myfootprint.org/

• Think and describe what your community is like today. • What will it be like in ten years? • What actions could you take to improve your community? • How could you contribute to the wellbeing of others?

Tread Lightly Teacher Toolkithttp://treadlightly.tigweb.org/

Sustainable FuturesReplacing Growth Imperative and Hierarchies with Sustainable Ways Edited by Marko Ulvila & Jarna Pasanenhttp://www.sustainablefutures.fi/

Teaching a Sustainable Lifestyle with the Earth Charter Mirian Vilela de Araujo, Elizabeth Ramirez Ramirez, Lidia Hernandez Rojas, Cristina Briceño Lobohttp://www.earthcharterinaction.org/invent/details.php?id=802

Global Footprint Networkhttp://www.footprintnetwork.org/