Who couldn't love a weasel war dance?

Apropos of nothing, this just appeared during a routine search. No disrespect to other bunnies intended, since they insist on not being hypnotised: 

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In the meantime, The old man is teasing the Stoat about the place of ethics in the climate debate/action nexus, which conversation will remain over there, to avoid complicated cross-communication.

More out than in - outside physics, is it possible?

Yesterday in the Guardian, Tim Smedley reports on the forthcoming forum on Natural Capital Accounting. Link to the article here. 

It's an interesting feature, not least for the comments which follow it, which are clearly considered and sophisticated (so far!). Included among which is the response from the group setting up a 'counter forum, in the same city, Edinburgh, at the same time; 'Nature is not for sale'.

Lord Aaron's comment in the feed at the bottom of the article brings up one of the more significant problems in the area of Natural Capital Accounting: that it is placing a financial price on Natural Capital (the article cites the groundbreaking work done by Puma since 2010), and thereby making Nature marketable (in other words, natural assets can be traded, and 'environmental offsets' can become tradeable capital resources. If this were the direction that NCA goes into, it's easy to see that the Environment is likely to lose out again to vested interested/creative accounting, where it substitutes for accountability.

But it seems also that NCA can have a role to play. As the article shows, it becomes possible to place a relative price and cost against a return from exploitation. This in turn allows us to see where resources are being exploited rather than used Resourcefully- in other words, more is lost in the transition from the prime resource to the tradeable commodity, or product, than is gained in the short term. You can see where this could be of benefit, not just to the Corporates who now appear to be recognising that unsustainable exploitation means precisely that they cannot sustain, even in the mid-term, the end product which is the basis of their capital wealth and added value. And losing their core supply, even shifting the balance of Demand/supply, will hurt their businesses moving forward.

For a long time now, Many Environmentalists have been deeply suspicious of moves to subsume the World's natural resources into a discussion of Economy, of 'putting a price on Nature'. What the argument has often boiled down to is that the Value of a Natural Resource lies in more than the dollar signs against it - the price. And this in turn is driven by a division in the ways in which people view Nature and the World: whether it is something for us humans to use (you could call this the 'Genesis' perception), or is something to which we belong and for which we, as the species which can damage it, or unbalance it, have a duty of care (the 'Stewardship perception).

All of which relates to the principle of Resourcefulness. In particular, it serves to demonstrate why Resourcefulness must be about more than resources. It is good that someone is working hard to challenge the implicit presumptions or potential hazards embedded within Natural Capital Accounting, but sadly, for the organisation involved, the brute reality is that, whilst it can be argued that Nature should not be for sale, in fact, as a basis of the means of production, it is.

There is a temporal perspective to be considered here in relation to these matters - for climate debaters, the principle of 'trash now, pay later' is one of the monsters being strongly fought, consistently. Scientists try to tell politicians and the public what they are letting themselves in for, and then get berated for 'alarmism', because narrow focussed eyes don't look far enough down the line to account for the consequences of choosing net present profit over projected loss.

There is also a philosophical/existential principle, but this is a little harder to summarise briefly, so will have to wait for another post. It is about what it means to be human, in the World, with Others, and also about the concept of 'home' and its significance to us.

A parting thought. A while back, someone might have realised that Dodo represented a potentially valuable commodity as a foodstuff, like turkeys, for example, but to make it so, the supply chain would have needed preserving. Hungry sailors didn't tend to think that way.

Being Resourceful; can we fix it?

Recently I suggested that the idea of Sustainability, or Sustainable Development, contains an underlying negativity which can contribute to a resistance to change.

Instead, I suggested that it might be useful to adopt an alternative term; Resourcefulness. Though in retrospect I am tending towards the idea that Resourcefulness might be a subset of Sustainability; we shall see.

So, what do I mean by Resourcefulness?

First, and perhaps finally, this is a state of mind – an attitude towards the World and its component parts which is both responsible and creative – a predisposition towards the things of the World and Society. Resourcefulness explicitly implies that a response to a problem, demand, crisis, need or situation involves the application of intelligence, imagination and creativity. It also contains the assumption that the attitude to the case in point is one of seeking the opportunity in the situation (if there is one), and making the most of it (and the resources involved).

In itself, this is nothing especially original. Business and enterprise are full of examples of exactly this kind of approach (though often driven by necessity rather than disposition). Some commercial services are particularly focussed on this kind of thinking; others, driven by more immediate pressures on performance, seem to avoid it. In this sense, it looks like there could be a relationship between Resourcefulness and the management of Risk which points us towards something useful at a more sophisticated level of development.

One would expect Resourcefulness to include, specifically, an attitude to Resources. Examples of this might be Resource efficiency (making more from less), Natural Resource Economics, or more closely observed, the Circular Economy concept (I profess to admiration of the work of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation in this field). All of these, and other existing practises in Sustainability, such as Waste Management, can be included in the remit of the Resourceful Society, Business or Individual, but Resourcefulness should not be seen as being limited to an attitude to Resources alone.

This is because there are other kinds of Resources than simply the ‘stuff’ of the World. And there are approaches to all resource types which do not imply a relationship of use or exploitation; this is particularly important to understand, since Resourcefulness (the ‘creative’ predisposition) expects of us that we see the worth, or value of things and actions, not just in ‘net benefit’ or ‘utility’ terms, but also in terms of the ‘Goodness’ or ‘Rightness’ of these. This means that Resourcefulness goes beneath issues covered by Consequentialism, to the core Human Social values of Equity, Justice and (probably) Liberty.

This leads us to a fairly fundamental point of ‘Resourceful’ Action: it should be non-exploitative both in terms of resources, and also in terms of people. In other words, Resourceful Actions do not serve to take from one person or group in order to give to another. This runs counter to so much of modern Economic and Social theory that considerable effort must be spent to demonstrate that personal or commercial Wealth need not come at the cost of exploitation of Labour or Markets. For some, this will read as an impossibility, for others, akin to heresy (or Social Democracy), but it is the intention to undermine the model of ‘Competitive Advantage’ as best practice and seek, instead, a model of ‘Collaborative (Mutual) Advantage’.

One special strength of the concept of Resourcefulness is that it is Action-oriented, in other words, a Resourceful approach, instead of asking ‘what’s going wrong?’ or ‘who is to blame?’, asks ‘How do we make it better?’

It may seem to some experienced and knowledgeable observers that this appears to be a somewhat trivial and simplistic idea, but I believe that, in common with many important principles, Resourcefulness is both simple to grasp and put into action, but also deep and meaningful – the one does not exclude the other.

I’ll finish today with a reference to a childrens’ TV character. It is a statement of affirmation and intention, of predisposition to make things better:

“Can we fix it? YES WE CAN!”

Down-the-line class action risks increase cost of inertia on climate and environment

Not sure whether to frame this comment as an enquiry or a proposal, but it's a thought...

Looking at a range of phenomena: 

1. The tendency of political and corporate interests to focus on the economic costs and benefits of Environmental action/inaction
2. The unbelievable costs sustained by BP as a consequence of litigation following their gulf oil spill disaster
3. The intriguing mechanism used by James Morrow in his book (which I featured a couple of weeks ago) to draw attention to our present responsibility for future events

It occurs to me that at some time in the foreseeable future, the consequential damage to both individuals and social groups from CO2 - stimulated climate shifts, in the first instance, and environmentally unsustainable practices such as the deforestation of the Peruvian Amazon or the harsh exploitation via UK institutional funding of Borneo's habitats, in the second, will represents a material and measurable harm to substantial number of people (well, all of us, in effect).

It also occurs that there is therefore a quantifiable risk that corporate, or indeed governmental institutions responsible for decisions which permit the causes of these harms to occur, will be the subject of potentially vast law suits (possibly class actions) from potentially vast numbers of people whose utility will have been materially damaged.

So, it follows that, since I'm just an average Joe, at least some of the clever people who work for insurance companies, law firms, in Government and corporate social responsibility, will have already realised that at some point the s**t is going to hit the fan, and legal fingers will be pointed.

This implies that some of the institutions currently responsible for the most dramatic examples of Planet Abuse (maybe one day this will be taken as seriously as other forms of abuse) will face very big bills for the actions derived from their present decisions.

So, here is the question: is this risk (of expensive future litigation) factored in to the analysis of costs and benefits which are so popular amongst the political and corporate entities when climate/environmental indecision is 'justified'? If the answer to this is 'Yes', has anyone calculated the cost impact in real terms? If the answer is 'No', is this potentially another tool to use in the arsenal of those who wish to see action rather than words from those principally responsible for the Abuse of our Planet?

Finally, if this potential cost to Abusers is not already factored in to current analyses of envrionmental costs, isn't it about time that it was?