The article following highlights the REAL Green Deep Adaptation basis that fake green will not save the planet. This means REAL green. REAL Green says do what you can relatively speaking in regards to your status quo position. Go local with your efforts and you will naturally see a reduced footprint. This is not going to save the planet but it has the potential make you as an individual more sustainable. Focus your eco efforts locally and you can make an impact. The bigger picture is lost but the local is wide open for improvements. This is significantly about attitude as well as actions. It is about leaving the denial of fake greens. REAL Green admits we are trapped in ecological decline as well as the decline of the human civilization. Deep Adaptation based upon the realization that mankind will not fake green itself out of this ecological decline means a collapse process is unstoppable. We can degrowth but that also presents a collapse variable. Economic decline means less resources to combat ecological decline so at least initially this means worse ecological decline. A poorer world is a dirtier world. We cannot degrowth without initiating a collapse process. Degrowth is inevitable because that is the result of a collapse process. Deep Adaptation says begin preparations for a less affluence personally and with your community.
This is a classic catch 22 trap that is adapted to instead of fought. Deep Adaptation says collapse now and in place in a relative manner. Use the status quo to leave it. Take the best of the current modern way of life and leverage it to leave it. This means efficiency efforts, conservation, and renewables. It means education, community building, and spiritual preparation for hard times ahead. The REAL Green is about triage, salvage, and hybridization. Combine the best of the old and new. REAL Green is about harvesting and gathering of solar energy through farming, gardening, and renewables. This part of the effort is difficult because it is more expensive with less return than the status quo. You can save money and make more money with the status quo but you will be less resilient. There is a price to be paid for resilience and that is less affluence and more hard work. The benefit is meaning and satisfaction but the tradeoff is less comfort and affluence. The status quo is cheaper and easier. The difference concerns going local and a return to the old ways of low energy harvesting through biomass. It is about utilizing the modern with some of the excellent tech available like renewables and efficiency efforts.
REAL Green says this will be a relative effort. Many people do not have the money or the time to do this fully but they can do something. The minimum is about the attitude of why you should be REAL Green and do Deep Adaptation. If you have the money and the time then you should be doing this for the planet, your local, and your significant others. REAL Green says get out of the finger pointing because it does not matter. Avoid the conflict of protest that only puts you in harm’s way. Don’t look for trouble because plenty of it will be around anyway. Yield to the greater powers that are striving to increase control and manipulation. Try to remove yourself from the corruption cycle. REAL Green says make an effort to leave bad behavior and embrace the good. This is in regards to your own piece of mind and what is better for the planet. Stop discretionary travel for leisure and curiosity. Find leisure and educational growth locally. Stop high energy activities that do not support your local effort at sustainability and resilience. REAL Green says to do this in a relative way since many of your significant others will remain embodied in the status quo narrative of growth and techno optimism. Teach them without telling them and lead by silent example. Show REAL Green wisdom by saying “No” to more status quo but don’t be extreme about it. REAL Green says live the status quo both materially and with relationships but opt out where you can and utilize the rich resources available where you can.
Build up your REAL Green monastery of tools, supplies, and a library of knowledge for the coming dark ages. This is where your doomstead and prep efforts are realized as your own personal work of art and meaning. You can be a small beacon of sanity and meaning once irrationality and dysfunction become the dominant forces. As economic abandonment proceeds your low energy harvesting of biomass will then have greater economic value. Do Deep Adaptation in regards to lifeboats and hospices. We do not know when this huge self-organizing system of globalization that has delocalized the world will fail. It is failing now so climb on the gradient and ride it down naturally and locally. At some point people are going to die sooner that are close to you. Medicine and the safety nets we have become reliant on will be diminished or gone at some point. This means live healthy and exercise in preparation for tough times. Prepare yourself for this so you can assist them in this unfortunate transformation of the coming collapse process. The planet and the web of life will support you because that is where real meaning is.
‘Green growth’ is not enough
Nick Meynen | 12th July 2019
The concept of green economic growth has gained political acceptance. But a new study shows this policy choice has little or no scientific basis.
The empirical data and theoretical literature is both overwhelmingly clear and sobering: there is no evidence supporting the existence of a decoupling of economic growth from environmental pressures on anywhere near the scale needed to deal with environmental breakdown.
This is the conclusion of the new report, Decoupling debunked: Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability.
The authors also explain that there are at least seven reasons to be sceptical about the occurrence of sufficient decoupling in the future: rising energy expenditures, rebound effects, problem shifting, the underestimated impact of services, limited recycling potential, insufficient and inappropriate technological change, and cost shifting.
The fact that decoupling on its own, without addressing the issue of economic growth, has not been and will not be sufficient to reduce environmental pressures to the required extent is not a reason to oppose decoupling (in the literal sense of separating the environmental pressures curve from the GDP curve) or the measures that achieve decoupling.
Quite the contrary, without many such measures the situation would be far worse. In other words, decoupling shifts us from racing down the fast lane to cruising along the slow lane, which is an improvement. But to get off the highway, we need to do more.
The true cause for concern is the predominant focus among policy-makers on green growth as a panacea, with this focus being based on the flawed assumption that sufficient decoupling can be achieved through increased efficiency without limiting economic production and consumption.
Sustained growth is not sustainable
This scientific finding is strongly at odds with the eighth Sustainable Development Goal (SDG8), which aims to “promote sustained, inclusive and sustainable economic growth”.
While almost all SDGs have very important goals and targets that humanity desperately needs to achieve, SDG8’s pursuit of the economic growth is undermining the possibly of achieving the others.
The question now is whether governments will be willing to act upon the best available scientific evidence when they review SDG8 on 10 July in New York.
Countries such as Finland have already reacted to this contradiction within the SDGs by downgrading the importance of GDP growth in their plan to achieve the SDGs, but the EU as a bloc has yet to admit that there is a problem with target 1 in SDG8.
Researchers have some ideas about the truly sustainable way forward. The main conclusion of ‘Decoupling debunked’ is that increasing efficiency only makes sense if it is part of a wider pursuit of sufficiency, which is the direct downscaling of economic production and consumption in those sectors where it is needed most.
In the view of the authors and based on the best available scientific evidence, only sufficiency strategies respect the EU’s ‘precautionary principle’.
This Author
Nick Meynen is policy officer for Environmental and Economic Justice at the European Environmental Bureau. He authored several books on the environment and he comments on global environmental and economic issues on Facebook and Twitter.
The report, Decoupling Debunked. Evidence and arguments against green growth as a sole strategy for sustainability, was produced by the EEB, with the support of the German Alliance for Nature Conservation (Deutscher Naturschutzring), in the context of the EEB’s work on economic transition in the context of the Make Europe Sustainable for All (MESA) project. It was released on 9 July and can be downloaded at https://eeb.org/library/decoupling-debunked/
REAL Green Adaptation 