But the US isn’t a self contained and separate entity. ‘Sustained’ doesn’t mean (at least not IMHO) that the US is cut off from the rest of the world and makes everything we need within our own borders, irrespective of what the rest of the world is doing. At least that’s not how I view the question…YMMV
-XT
Not everyone is gonna have the walnuts to take a pro-littering stance. But I will not rest until every inch of our fair state is covered in garbage.
“Sustainable” does not really have meaning when applied to a single country. If Alien Space Bats suddenly shut the USA off from the rest of the world, our standard of living would fall drastically, but it would then start to recover as we replaced imports with domestic products. The USA is large enough that we could be self-sufficient if we had to.
Our civilization, which basically includes everyone, is not sustainable in that we are using up fossil resources, including both oil and water. When those are exhausted, our standard of living will fall, across the globe–and will then recover as we replace those resources with other ones.
“Sustainable” is one of those words used to mean whatever a person wants it to mean to push their agenda.
To play devil’s advocate, why are you defining sustainability as being a state whereby the United States doesn’t have to import anything? What about external trade is unsustainable, but internal trade is? What’s special about a product used in Milwaukee that is produced in Laval, instead of in Louisville?
Suppose tomorrow the 50 U.S. states all declared themselves independent nations, but somehow did so peacefully, agreed to maintain a free trade zone, and didn’t start a war over it. Would their economies suddenly become less “sustainable” because now all interstate trade is defined as international trade?
As to oil, how would it be “sustainable” if, by some weird geological miracle, all the world’s oil suddenly moved to a spot underneath Nevada? Now it’s no longer an import, but is it not still going to run out sooner or later?
You could quite easily find places to dump garbage that would almost never be seen by a single human being who wasn’t actually in the business of operating the landfill. I don’t think people have an appreciation of how big the world is.
To be sustainable our economy has to become a closed loop. Look at a simplified view of Earth’s carbon cycle. The plants use CO2 from the air, the animals eat the plants, the animals emit CO2. Round and round it goes, driven by the energy from the sun.
If we could come up with a system where finite materials could be reused indefinately and we had an unlimited energy source, like the sun, we could have a closed loop economy.
Can we close the loop and become sustainable? I think we can. It will mean a shift in our view of the world and require new technology. Still, we yanks have changed our outlook before and we are pretty good at coming up with new ideas.
What, like the way that standards of living consistently rose when we ran out of trees, whale oil, copper etc. and replaced them with other resources?
Where does this idea come from that the transition from a scarce resource to a novel alternative must result in a reduction in standard of living? Has there ever been a time in human history when such a transition resulted in even a stagnation of standard o living, much less a decrease? It seems form historical accounts that such transitions are invariably accompanied by an increase in standards of living. But you’re welcome to give counterexamples if you can think of any.
Huh?
Where do you think we are getting these resoucres at teh moment? Mars? If not then in what way is the economy not a closed loop? Where does the loop open to? Tatooine?
Blake We get resources from the ground and the biosphere. Materials are extracted, used and disposed of. The economy is not a closed loop in that once materials, such as oil or copper are used they are not replenished or recycled 100%.
Where does the loop open to? Well in the case of oil it opens to the atmosphere. The oil is burned and turned into heat and carbon compounds. The heat and carbon do not get turned back into oil, at least not in a time-frame that is meaningful to us.
Some of the sources of materials like forests can be replenished and made sustainable. Other materials such as copper are not renewable and will eventually run out. My idea of a closed loop economy would be one in which everything is recycled and reused and the energy to make and recycle the products comes from an outside source, the sun or fusion.
That is the best explanation I can come up with now. Maybe someone else can explain it better, or given time I can come up with better examples.
Ummm, we have more area in parkland than most countries in Europe. Not the parkland of those countries. Those countries. That’s not even counting National Forest or BLM land, which is controlled with an eye toward business utilization mostly, but that would more than double the area as well.
But who am I to judge? If we had the population density of Europe, we’d probably have less open space as well.
So you want copper to be recycled and reused. Well, okay - it IS recycled and reused. Copper’s one of the most recycled things we use, actually.
Things that currently make economic sense to recycle get recycled (as well as some things that make no sense at all, like paper.) As they become harder to extract in their original form, recycling will become increasingly attractive.
It’s a closed loop no matter how you slice it. We have one planet’s worth of stuff to use. We’re currently using some of it in some ways, and eventually we’ll use different stuff, or use the same stuff in new ways. It’s always been that way.
The distinction between extracting materials from the ground, e.g. mining, and recycling is not really meaningful in the long term. The resource is either reusable (as is the case with copper) or it isn’t (oil) or it’s renewable (wood.) In all three cases, in the long term, changes will be made to accomodate the usage and available of the resource.
As to energy, the amount of energy available to us is effectively infinite; there will be many sources of energy to replace oil.
Obviously, nobody wants landfills, especially in treasured areas. But you say this like the US consumes consumer-society shit and Europe doesn’t. But that’s not true (although I wouldn’t be surprised if Europeans had less landfill per person than in the US).
And a more general question **to the OP **-- why is the question aimed at the US? This question could be aimed at any country as no country has purely “sustainable” consumption.
Why were the personal observations about consumerism and the car culture of the US a prelude to the question? Is this included because you think it’s a more difficult goal in the US, or is it because you don’t mean *sustainable *sustainable but rather *more *sustainable, perhaps at the level it is in your country of residence?
I’m not trying to deflect the focus of the question, I’m just curious as to the origin.
I assume the question is directed at the United States because we are a populous and relatively prosperous (subject to change) country and because the paths that the U.S. chooses to address resource issues and sustainability will impact the rest of the world, both directly and as example (or counter-example, as the case may be). It’s not that unsustainability is only an American problem.
The definition of a sustainable system (of production, consumption, life) is one that can continue in its present modes of operation indefinitely, within the context of a given planetary environment. A system which depends on the depletion of irreplaceable resources isn’t sustainable, nor is a system which creates changes in its own environment which render the system inoperable. A system involving imports and exports could be sustainable, if the trade was conducted by means which were themselves sustainable.
Pretty much agree with everything you, except this. I don’t believe we are in a closed loop at all. I think we’ll be able to ‘slice it’ in such a way that we’ll effectively have infinite resources, since we have an entire solar systems worth of stuff at our disposal, if we choose to make use of it.
Anyway, other than that I pretty much think you hit the nail on the head with this post wrt the OP’s question.
-XT
I’ve lived in Florida a long time, and walking around is not normal. Even walking from your job to lunch is a problem unless you happen to work in a downtown area with the same street layout it had before WWII.
I guess you were in different parts of the state than I was. I walked around a lot when I was there on vacation (which I presume the OP was too). Perhaps it’s different if you actually have to work there, however.
At any rate I’ll take my skeptical reply back, especially since while I have gone to Florida for pleasure I’ve not spent a great deal of time there, and I’ve never been there on business at all, except as a layover flying to somewhere else.
-XT
By this argument the carbon or oxygen cycles aren’t a closed loops either. Order of magnitude more carbon and oxygen have been lost from the biosphere than all the oil ever use by man. So why did you use these as an examples of closed loops?
I get the impression that you have some hippy type idelaised view of the way the mineral cycles actually work. It isn’t correct.
Right, so the carbon lost to limestone is turned back into biomass in a time-frame that is meaningful to us is it? Because if it isn’t it’s gonne be hard to sell your concept that “nature” has these wonderful “closed economies”. And if it is then the carbon must be turned back into oil in a meaningful timeframe as well, since it is shorter than the residence time in limestone, so we have a perfect closed fuel economy and you should be happy.
:dubious:
Can you possibly explain where the copper is going to go to when it all runs out?
I think you had better try, because as you’ve explained it here it doesn’t make sense even upon cursory consideration. I assume this is s concept you’ve invented yourself, so I doubt anyone else can take up the cudgel for you.
The question originates from my visit to the US and the ensuing “culture clash”. I was surprised that the differences were so vast and to me it seemed as the culture I was visiting wasn’t constructed sustainably, had no awareness of sustainability and was based on driving forces that work toward exploitation rather than sustainability. The mentality seemed very similar to the one we had here in the 80’s. The responses to this thread seems to confirm this, although awareness here is much higher.
I’ve seen the question “Why are you asking this about the US…” in different forms here before and it surprises me. This is a forum based around an American newspaper, most of the people here are American. It makes sense to ask it here.
I hate to tell you this, but you are suffering from a common tourist’s observation bias.
At home we hang around with a group of people who all share our views. It doesn’t matter whether it’s at work or during leisure time, people tend to cluster with like people, and the older, the richer and the more educated you are the more likely that is to be true. We also learn to read subtle clues about people’s likely affiliations and outlooks and avoid them, albeit subconsciously.
When you travel abroad you lose that ability and you are exposed to a random cross section of society. As a result every tourist that has ever travelled anywhere has found that them [foreigners] are more [anything we dislike] than people back home. This has been well documented in research and has been going on for millenia. Even in cases where it can be objectively proven that the foreigners are less [anything we dislike] than the home culture they are universally perceived as being more [anything].
There is also, oddly, a favourable version of this. If you hold views that you don’t share with your social circle at home then you will universally find that view to be much more widespread amongst [foreigners].
It’s all about ability to selectively mingle, (Side note: by all accounts Europeans are worse at this than Americans, though Americans are rapidly catching up). When you went abroad you lost that ability to selectively mingle, so of course people were more likely to look at you askance for certain behaviour. But don’t fool yourself. Had you exhibited the same behaviour to a Swedish Methodist pig farmer or a Parisian Moslem dishwasher you would have got the same reaction. The only difference is that you never associate with Methodist pig farmers or Moslem dishwashers back home, they aren’t in your social circle and you never go to areas they frequent or vice versa. (NB, these are random examples).
Now if you have some objective evidence that Americans are more [anyhting you dislike] than Europeans we might have something to discuss. But what you have posted here is the archetypal tourists confirmation bias. You obviously value “environmental consciousness” highly. I will bet pounds to pence that all your friends and co-workers do as well. And when you went abroad ou found, shocklingly, that [foreigners] are less environmentally conscious than the people you know back home.
Perhaps the most telling bit is that in your youth you found that people back home were just like that as well. But as you became older, richer and better educated you found that you met fewer and fewer people like that. Obviously more and more people were coming around to your viewpoint, right? They must be, because you met fewer and fewer people who disagreed with you. Once again, this is a fairly well documented aspect of this particular observation bias.
You misunderstand.
people aren’t questioning why you are asking it here. They are questioning why you are asking this about the US. Why not ask it about humanity in general? Without any actual evidence that the US is any better or worse than your home state all you have appears to be a textbook observational bias.
Imagine if someone had asked when Jews would stop being so greedy and start considering others, what would the reaction be? What would your reaction be? Well you just did exactly the same thing, but to Americans rather than Jews. You’ve made an accusatory and derogatory post playing upon a bigoted stereotype of the group concerned. Yet you present no actual evidence for what you claim. None at all. So yeah, of course you raised a few hackles.
I’m no great fan of the US, but I also don’t believe that it’s fair to make racist, sterotypical remarks about anybody. Just because the race in question happens to be the richest and most powerful in the world doesn’t make the statement less racist, ignorant or hurtful.
I fail to see why it’s better to love cooking, gardening or hiking more than to love your collection of ceramic cats, your car or your golf clubs.
As to the landfill fear-mongering, according to an interviewee on P&T’s:BS! a landfill thirty miles across on each side could sustain our trash output for a thousand years. That’s a little blip on a map. That’s not to say that we should actually build a thirty mile wide landfill, but it puts things in perspective. The largest landfill in the United States is being buried underground layer by layer and the methane gas the decomposing waste produces is used to power entire nearby cities. Parks, complete with lakes and forests, are build over the completed sections.
I think we’re doing fine.
Not very accurate in my case unfortunately. Right now I am sitting with a physisicst, earlier today I was hanging out with a football coach and yesterday I spent most of my time with two Arabic artists after having a meeting with a somalian refugee. Over the last 24hr the income differential between the people I’ve been around has gone from bottom ten percentile to the top ten percentile, education level from basic reading skills to post graduate in physics. I agree that people in general hang round people who are more like them, I don’t.
It’s not that there isn’t evidence, I just didn’t cite any in my OP because frankly I didn’t think anything I said was controversial. For example I thought everyone knew that the US produces a lot of waste. But here we go:
The US is #1 in municipal waste production per capita
The US produces more carbon dioxide from fossil fuels per capita than any other nation and is second only to the United Arab Emirates when it comes to ecological footprint per capita
Are you saying that I made racist and stereotypical remarks that were hurtful to you?
The research has also found that everybody says that too. But it is almost never actually true. or example, how much of your discussion with the Solmalis was political? And what jobs did the Somalis hold back hoe? The fact they they are now penniless refugees won;t change their views if they were a dentist and lawyer back home.
Apparently everybody knows somebody the associate with that is outside their self-percieved “type”, but in reality such interactions are usually limited in some way, or less divergent than they think, or else very minimal. Maybe you really are the exception, there’s no way of knowing, but it would be statistically unlikely that you really are one of the very, very few rich, middle aged people who mix widely.
At this stage the best evidence says that you’ve just fallen into the common tourists observational bias.
What exactly do you think that tells you? For the top tier countries the ranks run from Sweden at 360 to the US at 720, with a perfectly uniform distribution between. Can you answer the following questions please:
Is the difference between these countries statistically significant, and if so what test was used to determine this?
What is meant by "Municipal Waste per capita "? Is it a measure of material placed into landfill or all material disposed of? Because if it’s the latter then all it tells us is that the US has less capacity for recycling or other use. That is hardly surprising, the US has a much more dispersed population and that makes recycling of almost everything impractical. It certainly does not indicate that Americans actually generate less waste or have a different mindset, which is what you are trying to present evidence of.
What factors were taken into account when generating these figures? For example was the mean temperature (which affects spoilage) or population density (which affects recycling capacity) taken into account?
What are we to read into the fact that the Norway ranks in the top 5, while neighbouring Sweden ranks 25th? Doesn’t that tell us that the US isn’t in fact any worse than most of Europe?
Until you can answer those questions (and I have others) then you haven;t actually provided any evidence at all for your contentions. All you have is a meaningless table of figures.
Ecological foot print is a meaningless term, so it can be ignored.
The CO2 emissions per capita is, once again, a meaningless metric. How did you factor in the effects of distance on there? If you didn’t then it’s once again totally irrelevant to your claims about the American mindset.
What you need is facts to support your contentions, not just random unadjusted figures. If you can provide them we can have a debate. If you can’t then all we’ve really got is a vaguely offensive racist screed.
Any racist and stereotypical remark is hurtful to me.