From Kate Raworth on sustainable living

 More from Kate Raworth, the originator of Doughnut Economics theory.

The Planet's Economist: Has Kate Raworth found a model for sustainable living?

This rather long article looks at lots of things important to consider with our ecological approach to life on earth. It begins...

Consider the electric car. Sleek and nearly silent, it is a good example of how far the world has progressed in fighting the climate crisis. Its carbon footprint is around three times smaller than its petrol equivalent, and unlike a regular car, it emits none of the greenhouse gases that warm the planet or noxious fumes that pollute the air. That’s the good news. Then consider that the battery of an electric car uses 8kg of lithium, likely extracted from briny pools on South America’s salt flats, a process that has been blamed for shrinking pasturelands and causing desertification.

The 14kg of cobalt that prevent the car’s battery from overheating have probably come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where cobalt mines have contaminated water supplies and soil. As the demand for electric vehicles grows, the mining and refining of their components will intensify, further damaging natural ecosystems. By 2040, according to the International Energy Agency, the global demand for lithium will have increased more than fortyfold."

" ... After three years in Zanzibar, Raworth moved to New York to begin work as a researcher on the UN’s annual Human Development report, a project that ranked the world’s nations not by their GDP but by their citizens’ quality of life. While working on a report about consumption, Raworth read a book called How Much Is Enough? by Alan Durning, an American environmentalist. The book posed an urgent question: “Is it possible for all the world’s people to live comfortably without bringing on the decline of the planet’s natural health?” The only way to achieve this, Durning contended, was by buying less stuff – fewer fridge-freezers, tumble dryers, hair lotions and television sets. But few would be willing to accept the reduction in living standards that this would entail. “I remember reading about the data – our use of plastics, our use of materials – and I was like, this is what I’ve been missing,” Raworth told me."

"... “Doughnut Economics is all about action. We’re not sitting having academic debates back and forth about the meaning of words,” Raworth said ... “It’s time to be propositional, and sometimes the best form of protest is to propose something new.” To her supporters, the fact that no national government has adopted the doughnut as a substantive policy agenda is not an indictment of Raworth’s ideas, but of our governing classes. Despite plentiful evidence that the pursuit of growth has accelerated the climate crisis, contributed to rising inequality and failed to secure decent living standards even for many people in rich countries, politicians of all varieties still treat it as a panacea.

WHY  THIS NEW MODEL ACTUALLY COULD WORK!

"... Raworth gently suggested that new, less doom-laden words and images [are] needed to describe the future. Because there are so few models for a low-growth economy that do not entail returning to an era before industrialisation, it has been easy for critics to portray any attempt to shrink our ecological footprint as an assault on social progress.... “There is a phrase I really like, which is ‘public luxury and private sufficiency’,” she told [Antoine Back, Amsterdam's deputy mayor,] pointing to Amsterdam’s generous bike lanes and tram system as examples of the luxuries that could be part of the solution to the climate crisis.

Antoine Back ".... told me the absence of solutions in Raworth’s work was one of its strengths. “I don’t use the word ‘solution,’” he told me. “It suggests that there is a magic bullet; that technology will come along and save us.” He feared that our tendency to search for irrefutable answers where there are none produces inertia, leading people to believe that it was always someone else’s responsibility to solve the climate crisis.

"...The week after we met in Amsterdam, Raworth travelled to Birmingham [UK] to give a talk at a community centre about putting the doughnut into practice. ... The event in Birmingham was hosted by Civic Square, a social enterprise that works with low-income local communities and hosts coffee mornings and community festivals organised by people with enticing job titles such as Doughnut Storyteller and Dream Matter Designer. “You can’t just keep shouting from the parapets, or relying on governments to legislate,” Imandeep Kaur, the founder of Civic Square, told me. “You have to put people at the forefront of the story, so they can actually take part in it.” In the future the enterprise intends to repurpose empty high-street spaces for the use of local communities, and to build a new public square. For now, they make do with a floating barge where visitors can read copies of Doughnut Economics over free coffee and cake; on the banks of the canal, they host regular events and a gardening club. "