Ecological sustainability through advancing technology [Eugene Odum, ISSS 1998 Plenary Session, July 21/98]

These notes are a rough transcription, prepared as each individual presenter and/or commentator spoke at the ISSS 1998 conference. Gaps and errors have likely occurred. For more accurate citations, please consult the original presenters. These notes have been contributed to the ISSS by David Ing, of the IBM Advanced Business Institute (sabi@systemicbusiness.org).

Chaired by Howard Odum, U. Georgia

Eugene Odum (Howard's brother!), Callaway Professor of Ecology, U. Georgia at Athens

A lot of current technologies are not sustainable.

• Most of it is organized piece-meal: it's a quick fix.
• e.g. beach erosion solved by putting up a wall, which ultimately fails.
• How do we get larger scale technologies, or a number of related technologies to really solve problems.
• We suffer from the tyranny of small technologies: each which fixes a part, not the big picture.
• Have a book coming out, to try to get the ideas out to the layman
• An Ecological Vignettes to Dealing with Human Predicaments: soundbites.

• A paradox of our time: the mixed blessing of almost every technological development (Paul E. Gray)
• Human prosperity and technology have dark as well as bright sides.
• e.g. food production -- machinery, pesticides, means growing more per hectare, but agriculture as excess nitrogen, etc. is poisoning the new.
• Another dark side: sociological -- has put the small farmer out of business, worldwide.
• Grandfather had 150 acre dairy farm, and made a living; now can't make a living anymore, unless you have several thousand acres.
• Asians who used to live on an acre of rice paddies, now have to go to the city -- unsustainable.
• In nature, natural selection takes care of the dark side.
• Human society is not under natural selection, so we have to take counter actions (i.e. negative feedback).
• e.g. counter-technology in agriculture: conservation tillage, residue farming

• Jesse Aussabal in American Scientist: "Can Technology Spare the Earth?"
• Daedalus issue: "The Liberation of the Environment", Sprint 1996
• Claim: If we link together some technologies, we can save the earth.
• Suggest
1. hydrogen economy
• Problem: takes a lot of energy to break the hydrogen bond in water.
• OTEC: Ocean Thermal Generation System -- solar power to run a Rankin engine to create electricity. Is there enough net energy to do this? (Solar power is diffuse).
2. Wasteless industries, e.g. liquidification of coal, which is being done in California.
• Probably feasible.
3. Landless agriculture: doubtful.
• Grow on rooftops, instead of on the ground.

• The only market good for the African family is the bicycle.
• Technology stocks don't impact the entire population of the earth.

• A functional natural ecosystem is an open system.
• Before the industrial revolution, humans were hunters and gatherers.
• A human-dominated techno-ecosystem (e.g. a city)
• Fossil fuels and natural resources (some sustainable) with technological conversion to support cities, circulates money to and from urban-industrial society (i.e. market system)
• (Diagram) Combine the natural ecosystem with the human-dominated techno-ecosystem.
• How do we get two systems to work on mutualistically, rather than parasitically.
• Sun --> biosphere -- life support --> humanity (loops back to biosphere as service)
• As the biosphere dies, the parasite (humanity) will also die.
• Service ==> e.g. grazing cows have peptides which break down grass, which enhances fertilization.

• Showed U.S. and Germany, but all industrialized countries are the same.
• When you stop getting bigger to getting better?
• Economic growth is different from economic development.

Many engineered devices are reliable on the short term, but not in the long term; nature is the reverse.

• e.g. dunes on a beach.
• Cartoon: saving a house with a seawall causes the pounding of the ocean to take the beach away.
• In North Dakota, disasters a man-made, as engineers built dikes so that people build houses on a flood plain.

• The solution to pollution must be source reduction.

Questions

• No
• What we suffer from right now is "too much of a good thing".
• e.g. automobiles.
• When things get tough, it pays to cooperate.
• e.g. coral reef, very prosperous on limited resources
• Can learn from nature.
• It's time for quality to deal over quantity.

• Count on scientists to find problems, not to solve them.
• At UGA, there's two hills: l
• North hill law school and business school, decision-makers
• South hill is science
• C. P. Snow: The Two Cultures: the lack of communication between humanities and sciences.
• Systems are third culture?
• From the bible, "taking dominion", but then new testament, message of stewardship.
• No press people here today. Why? Aren't we discussing the world problems?

• See the next change as social change.
• Also Inuit -- one person on 6000 square miles.

• See marriage of disciplines.
• There's a local business called Interface: they lease a carpet to you, and then recycle.