Monthly Archives: August 2017

Fire and Fury and the Environment

The media at present is full of comments about having a war that will stimulate the economy, at least in reconstruction. And this concern over war and the costs of war prompted me to investigate the relative costs of military funding and environmental funding. So here is a very coarse look at the relative positions of military funding and environmental funding in a few western countries. All the numbers are approximate and refer to 2016 and possibly 2017 budgets, and all are in billions of dollars.

Military expenditures by countries are easiest to obtain, and here are a few for the most recent years I could find:

United States:         $ 611 billion
China:                       $ 216
Russia:                      $ 69
Saudi Arabia:           $ 64
Australia:                  $ 24
Canada:                    $ 15.5

Environmental funding is much more difficult to decompose because different countries amalgamate different agencies into one Department. Consequently, comparisons are best made within one country rather than between countries. Here are a few details for particular agencies:

USA            Department of the Interior     $ 13.4            1 military year = 46 Dept. years
NOAA                                                             $ 5.77             1 military year = 106 NOAA years

Canada      Environment Canada              $ 0.987            1 military year = 16 EC years

Australia     CSIRO                                       $ 0.803            1 military year = 30 CSIRO years

Clearly there are many problems with these simple comparisons. NOAA for example includes agencies covering Marine Fisheries, Weather Service, Environmental Satellites, Aviation Operations, and Oceanic Research among other responsibilities. CSIRO includes divisions dealing with agriculture, climate change, and mining research. I am sure that someone has done a more detailed analysis of these comparisons, but the general message is very clear: the environment is a low priority among western nations, and if you want a rough number one might say the military is about 30 times more “important” than the environment when it comes to funding. If you look for example at the Australian budget for 2017 (http://budget.gov.au/2017-18/content/glossies/overview/download/Budget2017-18-Overview.pdf ) and search for the word ‘environment’ as in the real biophysical environment, you will find not a single case of this word appearing. It is as though the biophysical environment does not exist as a problem in 2017.

I am not clear if anyone worries about these simple facts. The general problem is that federal government budgets are made so complex and presented so poorly that it is nearly impossible to separate out different equivalent expenditures. Thus for example the military argues that it does scientific research with part of its funding, and universities fail to point out that some of their basic research focuses on military questions rather than questions that might benefit humanity (Smart 2016).

I hope that others might look into these expenditures in more detail, and that in the long run we might be more aware of where our tax dollars go. The simple suggestion that the last page of our tax file should give us a choice of what general areas we would like to support with our taxes would be a start. On the last list I saw of 25 ‘items of interest’ to taxpayers who might like more information, the words ‘environment’, ‘conservation’, or ‘sustainability’ never appeared. We should demand this be changed.
Smart, B. (2016). Military-industrial complexities, university research and neoliberal economy. Journal of Sociology 52, 455-481. doi: 10.1177/1440783316654258

On Ecology and Economics

Economics has always been a mystery to me, so if you are an economist you may not like this blog. Many ecologists and some economists have written elegantly about the need for a new economics that includes the biosphere and indeed the whole world rather than just Wall Street and brings together ecology and the social sciences (e.g. Daily et al. 1991, Haly and Farley 2011, Brown et al. 2014, Martin et al. 2016). Several scientists have proposed measures that indicate how our current usage of natural resources is unsustainable (Wackernagel and Rees 1996, Rees and Wackernagel 2013). But few influential people and politicians appear to be listening, or if they are listening they are proceeding at a glacial pace at the same time as the problems that have been pointed out are racing at breakneck speed. The operating paradigm seems to be ‘let the next generation figure it out’ or more cynically ‘we are too busy buying more guns to worry about the environment’.

Let me discuss Canada as a model system from the point of view of an ecologist who thinks sustainability is something for the here and now. Start with a general law. No country can base its economy on non-renewable resources. Canada subsists by mining coal, oil, natural gas, and metals that are non-renewable. It also makes ends meet by logging and agricultural production. And we have done well for the last 200 years doing just that. Continue on, and to hell with the grandkids seems to be the prevailing view of the moment. Of course this is ecological nonsense, and, as many have pointed out, not the path to a sustainable society. Even Canada’s sustainable industries are unsustainable. Forestry in Canada is a mining operation in many places with the continuing need to log old growth forest to be a viable industry. Agriculture is not sustainable if soil fertility is continually falling so that there is an ever-increasing need for more fertilizer, and if more agricultural land is being destroyed by erosion and shopping malls. All these industries persist because of a variety of skillful proponents who dismiss long-term problems of sustainability. The oil sands of Alberta are a textbook case of a non-renewable resource industry that makes a lot of money while destroying both the Earth itself and the climate. Again, this makes sense short-term, but not for the grandkids.

So, we see a variety of decisions that are great in the short term but a disaster in the long term. Politicians will not move now unless the people lead them and there is little courage shown and only slight discussion of the long-term issues. The net result is that it is most difficult now to be an ecologist and be optimistic of the future even for relatively rich countries. Global problems deserve global solutions yet we must start with local actions and hope that they become global. We push ahead but in every case we run into the roadblocks of exponential growth. We need jobs, we need food and water and a clean atmosphere, but how do we get from A to B when the captains of industry and the public at large have a focus on short-term results? As scientists we must push on toward a sustainable future and continue to remind those who will listen that the present lack of action is not a wise choice for our grandchildren.

Brown, J.H. et al. 2014. Macroecology meets macroeconomics: Resource scarcity and global sustainability. Ecological Engineering 65(1): 24-32. doi: 10.1016/j.ecoleng.2013.07.071.

Daily, G.C., Ehrlich, P.R., Mooney, H.A., and Erhlich, A.H. 1991. Greenhouse economics: learn before you leap. Ecological Economics 4: 1-10.

Daly, H.E., and Farley, J. 2011. Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications. 2nd ed. Island Press, Washington, D.C.

Martin, J.-L., Maris, V., and Simberloff, D.S. 2016. The need to respect nature and its limits challenges society and conservation science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113(22): 6105-6112. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1525003113.

Rees, W. E., and M. Wackernagel. 2013. The shoe fits, but the footprint is larger than Earth. PLoS Biology 11:e1001701. doi: 10.1371/journal.pbio.1001701

Wackernagel, M., and W. E. Rees. 1996. Our Ecological Footprint: Reducing Human Impact on the Earth. New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, B.C. 160 p.