If you crave news today that is not about Iowa, be sure to read Jared Diamond’s article from yesterday’s NYT.

Today, there are more than 6.5 billion people, and that number may grow to around 9 billion within this half-century. Several decades ago, many people considered rising population to be the main challenge facing humanity. Now we realize that it matters only insofar as people consume and produce.

[…]

If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up [with the consumption rates of the United States], world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).

Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.

The whole article is not so disheartening. After all, I believe that gloom-and-doom is a poor motivator. But Diamond offers some compelling evidence that our rates of consumption are not tied to our standard of living, and argues that by meeting the third world halfway the Earth can sustainably support more people at a higher standard of living. He ends with an optimistic note that the political will for sustainable consumption has been increasing of late, especially in Australia and the United States, which have so far stalled the development of an international agreement on climate change. I won’t draw the obvious connections to the current election cycle; you’re smart enough to do that on your own.

How do you not click on this headline?

WANT TO GO GREEN? STAY MARRIED
Divorced Households Have Negative Impact on Environment, Study Finds

[…]

The reason is simple — it's all about efficiency, says Jianguo Liu, lead author of the study who has the Rachel Carson chair in ecological sustainability at the university's department of fisheries and wildlife.

"In the divorced households, the number of people is smaller than in married households," Liu told ABCNEWS.com. "The resource efficiency used per person is much lower than in married households."

This article by Bill Gates was published over a month ago, which might make me seem lazy, but I prefer to think of it as a testimonial to my commitment to filing away any little bit of information that might make an interesting post. Even if it takes me a month to actually bring these ideas to fruition. On to the article:

This week in Seattle, an extraordinary group of people -- scientists, policymakers, and advocates - came together for three days to discuss what can be done to stop malaria. Melinda and I issued a challenge to those attending the meeting. We asked them to begin charting a course to eradicate malaria - not just to control or reduce it, but to work toward a time when no one on earth is infected with malaria, and no mosquitoes carry the disease.

It’s interesting to see Bill Gates so involved with a philanthropic effort. I’m not saying that it hasn’t happened before, just that I’ve never heard about him doing anything similar to this. I’m sure that there’s a great deal to be said about dealing with malaria, but what really caught my attention was this comment, buried about halfway down the thread:

Erdicate [sic] Malaria? What about bio-diversity? Let's hope that if a new virus comes from outer space, our only hope for a cure does not reside in Malaria...

I've been meaning to review Santa Monica's Sustainable City Plan for the last couple of months and I finally did so this past weekend. While I can not know how well the Santa Monica community has responded to the plan, the program itself is terrific.

Kevin McKeown, Santa Monica City Council member, reports that "residential recycling spiked by 11 percent when we instituted easy-to-use commingled recycling in our neighborhoods," so there is some encouraging news at this early stage, but Santa Monica officials will not be able to assess the effects of this comprehensive plan for some time.

Because they can be pursued via city ordinaces, the transportation and land use objectives will be more easily achieved. Economic measures, resource conservation, and "human dignity" considerations, on the other hand, are all addressed at length in the document, but aiming for "an annual increase over baseline" in the "percent[age] of Santa Monica residents who report that vegetable-based protein is the primary protein source for at least half their meals," for example, is not a matter for government regulation. (Can you imagine the furor resulting from proposed restrictions on per capita meat consumption?)

I will definitely be keeping my eye on Santa Monica. I expect to use their Sustainable City Plan as something of a template, wherever I may land. If you are at all interested in encouraging sustainable lifestyles in your own community, I recommend a read. (Find the .pdf here.)

I've been doing a lotta reading lately on books that will help inform a career of helping to create a sustainable economy, one organization at a time. And, it's clear from reading all of this that we've got to change the mainstream environmental thinking because it will NOT work

We've been raised on "reduce, reuse, recycle", which is all fine and good except one problem. It's an approach that tries to fix a fatally flawed model rather than redesigning it to work. That model is "cradle-to-grave". We need an economy based on a "Cradle-to-cradle" system. More below the fold...

A few months ago there was a bit of a controversy about Wal-Mart’s proposed plan to buy and protect 312,000 acres of forest in Maine. Was it a legitimate effort to be a more socially responsible corporation, or just so much corporate greenwashing?

Here’s instance numero dos:

The world's largest retailer was scheduled to open a 206,000-square-foot building Wednesday that will include features such as a 120-foot tall wind turbine that will produce about 5 percent of the store's energy and a rainwater harvesting pond designed to provide 95 percent of the water needed for irrigation.

[...]

Wal-Mart wants some of the features in the store's design to one day be viewed as standard, including waterless urinals in customer bathrooms, saving about one gallon of water per usage; recycled cooking oil from the store's deli and engine oil from the auto center that will be used to help heat the building; and climate control measures and alternative refrigeration units that are projected to save enough electricity to power 135 single family homes for one year.

An analyst quoted near the end of the article points out that this is an unexpected step from a company traditionally focused on keeping expenses low, since none of these measures are cheap to implement, and any reduction in cost to Wal-Mart will be in the long run.

It’s unfortunate that Wal-Mart isn’t releasing cost figures for the project – a comparison of the construction cost and annual operating costs of this new facility and a traditional Wal-Mart store would tell us (1) just how much it’s costing Wal-Mart to improve their environmental reputation and (2) what the long-term cost-benefit calculus really looks like. In short, is this just another greenwashing effort, or is Wal-Mart really turning from the annual bottom line toward a more forward-looking approach to corporate management?

Apropos to the final link in my post earlier today (technically yesterday, but who’s counting?), there is a wonderful article in this morning’s New York Times that demonstrates precisely the problem with managing fisheries in a sustainable manner:

In just the last 35 years, exploding markets for sushi-grade tuna, combined with intensifying industrial-scale hunts aided by satellites and spotters in airplanes, have devastated not only the fish but also many fisheries. [...]

The threat to the bluefin was underscored last week by researchers who have tracked hundreds of the fish on their ocean-spanning journeys using electronic tags. They found that the tuna that spawn in the west, which are most severely depleted, are further threatened by an ever-broadening gantlet of hooks, seines, harpoons, traps and now farm-style pens, in which netted fish are raised and fattened - all to supply the Japanese sushi trade. [...]

In all, 330 tags provided unparalleled records of fish as they repeatedly dove thousands of feet, traversed the ocean in a few weeks, and routinely crossed imaginary lines drawn nearly 25 years ago by tuna-fishing nations to divvy up what were thought to be separate eastern and western populations.

The Gristmill has a nice piece about the potential for [more] sustainable development in China. The introductory snark is delicious, but the links are where the real meat is.

The answer is not to try to stop China from developing -- as if such a thing were remotely in the realm of possibility -- or to demonize it. The answer is to do everything we can to try to make China a showcase for every sustainable development trick in the book. The Chinese want prosperity, just as we do, so let's help them leapfrog, get there without sucking up the rest of the world's oil and accelerating climate change. Given its closed political system, there's a limit to what Western greens can do, but at the very least we should be paying attention and doing what we can. There's evidence that China's government gets this, anyway.

I saw Jared Diamond speak last night about his [relatively] new book Collapse. He talked about ecological criteria for a sustainable society and offered examples of societies that overcame serious environmental problems, such as deforestation in Tokugawa Japan and the shogunate development of more sustainable forestry techniques. He also talked about societies that failed to meet the requisite ecological criteria for sustainability, and eventually collapsed.

The most interesting story Diamond told, and the one to which he devoted the largest amount of time, was that of Easter Island. Most people have seen pictures of the massive statues erected by Easter Islanders, a people with no metal tools, no large domesticable animals, and no access to the outside world. These statues weigh between 10 and 270 tons, and were erected with nothing but ingenuity, manpower, and trees.

Lots and lots of trees.