1

Indigenous and western perspectives on global warming, entropy and Mother

Earth

Bob Thomson, Ottawa, 10 March 2010

“To those who will not have the benefit of 2 billion years accumulated energy reserves”David MacKay,

2

The source of the following graphic is http://www.grida.no/publications/vg/climate/

3Note: The carbon cycle is a complex process. For a readable

description of it and whole earth systems, see Chapter 2 of James Lovelock's “The Revenge of Gaia” 2006

4

What is Entropy?

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that the total amount of energy in the universe is fixed, and that new energy cannot be

produced.

Entropy is a measure of the amount of energy no longer able to be converted to work.

Energy can only be transformed from one form to another, and in one direction only, i.e. from useful energy to energy that is no

longer available for “work”.

For example, burning coal or falling water can be transformed into motion or electricity, but ashes and lower level water cannot

be reused again without using other sources of energy – i.e. “there's no free lunch”

5

Evolving energy/entropy paradigmsIt took millions of years for Homo Sapiens as hunter-gathers to largely

exhaust the supply of wild animal and vegetable food sources using progressively more efficient tools, a period during which world population

grew and grew.

Populations pressures generated a new energy paradigm in the transition to sedentary agriculture, which permitted storage of food energy and led to

specialization and increased complexity within the human population.

It took several thousand years before the human population outgrew the agricultural energy paradigm. The reduction of forests and wood sources in Europe in the Middle-Ages, the limits of domesticated animal energy on land utilization, population pressures and other factors pushed the development of new but still finite energy sources such as coal to satisfy changing and

growing human “needs”.

The industrial “revolution”, after a few short centuries, has expanded the consumption and transformation of finite energy to the point where the by-products and waste of energy are now serious limits on productivity and

further growth, not to say toxic and disruptive of the climate and environment of the entire planet.

6

The food chain from an entropy perspective

It takes 9 calories of vegetable food “energy” to produce 1 calorie of animal food “energy”

An average person needs 2000 calories per day to survive. In our industrial society, this takes 200,000

calories of energy to produce.

Hunter gathers took only 15 hours a week to meet their needs, i.e. 180 calories a day to produce 2000

calories a day!

300 fish

90,000 frogs

27,000,000 grasshoppers

1000 tonnes of grass – up to 50 hectares per person

1 person

7

Our ecological footprints

•The area available to produce our resources and capture our emissions is 2.1 ha. average or “global” hectares per person

•The average per person footprint is 2.7 global ha. while only 2.2 global ha. are available

•US citizens each require an average of 9.4 global ha (or nearly 4.5 Planet Earths if the global population had US consumption patterns)

•Chinese citizens use on average 2.1 global ha per person (one Planet Earth)

•http://www.panda.org/news_facts/newsroom/news/?uNewsID=148922

8

The energy/entropy history of the planet and Homo Sapiens' impact on it are the subject of a number of new and not so new western studies and

reviews:

Ester Boserup: “The Conditions of Agricultural Growth: The Economics of Agrarian Change under Population Pressure” 1965

Nicolas Georgescu-Roegen: “The Entropy Law and the Economic Process” 1971

Meadows, Randers and Behren: “The Limits to Growth” 1972

Herman Daly, “Steady-State Economics” 1977

Jeremy Rifkin: “Entropy: A New World View” 1980

Jared Diamond: “Guns, Germs & Steel: The Fates of Human Societies” 1997

Lester Brown: “Plan B: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress & a Civilization in Trouble” 2003

James Lovelock: “The Revenge of Gaia” 2006

Thomas Homer-Dixon: “The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity & the Renewal of Civilization” 2007

Alan Weisman: “The World Without Us” 2007

Herman Daly: “A Steady State Economy” 2008

Peter Victor: “"Managing without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster" 2008

9

In Latin America, particularly in Bolivia and Ecuador, a new perspective on energy, culture and “development” is coming alive, even in the form of a proposal for a UN

Charter of Rights for Mother Earth, led by indigenous peoples.

Xavier Albó: "To Live Well = To Coexist Well", CIPCA Notas 217, 10 February 2008

Leonardo Boff: "The Rights of Mother Earth", IPS, Rio de Janeiro, 1 March 2010

Monica Chuji G.: ““Modernity, development, interculturality and Sumak Kawsay or Living Well but not Better”, Uribia, Colombia, 23 of May 2009

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui: “Aymara Past, Aymara Future” NACLA Vol 25 No 3, December 1991

Pablo Davalos: “Reflections on Sumak Kawsay (good living) and theories of development” ALAI, 5 August 2008

François Houtart:"Interview with François Houtart: For a general well being of humanity", Sally Burch, ALAI, February 2010.

Mignolo, Walter: "The Communal and the Decolonial", Turbulence, No. 5, December 2009& "Indigenous De-Colonial Movement in Latin America" Wikipedia

See the bibliography at http://www.web.ca/~bthomson/degrowth/draft_degrowth_bibliography.html

For links to these references

10

Western responses to the climate crisis tend to reformation of the industrial or market systems, i.e. green capitalism (all can be fixed by making the price of carbon “right”)

The failure to negotiate new binding carbon emission targets in Copenhagen in December 2009 is a good indication that the green market approach is unlikely to bring results fast enough to counter the upcoming climate crisis. For a good overview of the

critique of carbon markets, see http://www.carbontradewatch.org

Other western responses have called for different economic paradigm(s):voluntary simplicity, post-development, deep ecology, degrowth

Latin American indigenous responses are now gaining international attention:Vivir Bien / Sumak Kawsay / Suma Qamaña

This will undoubtedly grow following Evo Morales' mid-april 2010 Peoples' Climate Change Conference in Bolivia, where alternatives to the corporate dominated talks in

Copenhagen will be presented, including a proposal for a UN Charter of Rights for Mother Earth, following on the UN General Assembly's acceptance of April 22nd as

International Mother Earth Day

11

Where to from here?

Some synthesis is needed of both the indigenous and western approaches which incorporates the best of aboriginal wisdom,

respect for all of nature, relationships of reciprocity and complementarity, with the best of western science, yet avoids the

pitfalls of the romantic "noble savage" or indigenous fundamentalism and the compartmentalization and individualism

of western industrial and consumer culture.

What are the best and worst of these approaches that could go into this synthesis?