The Urbal Fix
The film opens with shots of an eccentric but beautiful Victorian tweed mill- music.
Tom Bliss:
This is Bliss Mill in Chipping Norton. It was built in 1872 by my Great Great Grand Father, William Bliss. Here he made some of the finest cloth ever produced in England - they called it 'Silken Leather.'
William was an enlightened employer, much influenced by reformers like Robert Owen, Titus Salt, and the other Utopian Socialists, so when the original building on this site burned down, he constructed not only this magnificent edifice, but also workers’ cottages, reading room, hospital and so on, because he was concerned for his workers.
One thing he almost certainly wasn't concerned about was the amount of CO2 coming out of that chimney.
As a former Landscape Architect, I've long understood the importance of the environment, but even so, when I first heard about Global Warming, like a lot of people, I assumed this would be a problem for my Great Great Grandson, not me. I feel very differently today.
Chipping Norton is small market town, and in William Bliss's time it could easily feed itself from the local countryside. Apart from coal and a few other resources, it was, use the current term, 'sustainable,' and it could, in theory at least, revert to that state relatively easily today.
Tom by Leeds Civic Hall:
But I live here in Leeds. And if the experts are right, and we now have to make entire cities sustainable, then we've got a massive challenge on our hands.
For some time now, people have been using the word Rurban to describe urban influences on rural areas (in fact many suggest that the whole of Britain is now technically 'Rurban').
But recently, a range of new ideas have sought to achieve sustainability by, effectively, doing the opposite; drawing the countryside and some of its traditional activities back into the heart of our cities.
I think we can combine these into one comprehensive system, which could change our cities from being the root of the problem into the seed of the solution.
Title: The words Urban and Rural conflate to become ‘Urbal’
"The Urbal Fix"
PROBLEMS
Climate Change
Tom in studio:
Before we go looking for The Urbal Fix, we need to get a handle on the problem. So first, how seriously should we really be taking the threat from Climate Change?
Ranyl Rhydwen (Lecturer, Centre For Alternative Technology, Wales):
I lecture on climate change. It’s my job therefore to keep up to date with the science as much as I possibly can, and I do. The cause of the heating at the present is carbon dioxide. The source of the carbon dioxide is man’s activity.
The rate of rise is dramatic. This is going to compromise the planet’s ability to support a rich variety of life, and that will compromise the planet’s ability to support us.
Paul Chatteron (Senior Lecturer, Geography, Leeds University):
99% of sensible scientists agree on a consensus that these things are happening. There’s 1% of dissident scientists who believe it’s not. Now the point is, they’re getting media attention on a 50/50 basis.
Mike Thompson RIBA (Director, Graduate School of the Environment, CAT):
There are those who think it's already too late, the wire is very close.
Professor Greg Keefe (Downing Chair, Sustainable Architecture, Leeds Met):
Certainly in the next 20 years we’re going to see severe problems on the planet. So I think if people are talking about 2050, we’re talking about 2020.
James Copp (Engagement Consultant):
The thing that seems to have most affect on people is the idea of what legacy we’re leaving for the next generations, and the fact that if we’re not careful we’ll leave an environment that is uninhabitable.
Tom in studio:
Could it really be that bad? Well, New Scientist magazine published this map in 2009. It shows how the world will look within my son's lifetime (and possibly in mine), if we carry on as we are. The temperature has risen by 4 degrees, and the whole of this area (latitude Britain to latitude Tasmania) is indeed largely uninhabitable. Then, last November, The Independent predicted a SIX degree rise!
Jonathan Porritt (Environmentalist - addressing The Landscape Institute):
6 degrees centigrade isn’t just a bit worse than two degrees centigrade, or a bit worse than 4 degrees centigrade. 6 degrees centigrade is a death sentence for human civilisation. It doesn’t mean to say there won’t be lots of human beings left over after a 6 degrees centigrade rise, but I assure you they won’t be having much of a time!
Tom in studio:
It looked like the 99% of scientists were winning the argument, but next thing, along comes 'ClimateGate' Parts One, Two, Three and more - and a lot of potential eco warriors went back to being mere eco worriers. By December, when the much vaunted Copenhagen summit proved to be a damp squib, it was starting to look as though the sceptics were winning.
Professor Lord Tony Giddens (Sociologist, Economist, Former Director LSE):
Having pondered it all a lot since Copenhagen, and looked at the views of the sceptics, looked at the mainstream, you know I tend to think you have to give quite a lot of credence to people like James Lovelock, James Hanson, who say that it’s quite a lot worse than mainstream science says, and I’m fairly persuaded by that, it which case there may be an awful lot of change already in the system, which we’re going to have to react to, and it is pretty terrifying frankly.
HIIary Benn (Then Secretary of State DEFRA, MP; Leeds Central):
It depends really in whether countries actually do what they promised, and what it shows is that we’ve got further to go. We didn’t get a legally binding agreement and you’re right, in the end the scientists have to listen to people going round the table putting their offer down and then say, Well this is what it means in terms of temperature change, are you OK with that? And the fact is, we’ve got some way to go.
Lord Giddens:
Some countries involved, like the United States, have offered targets which are way too low, but I wouldn’t say that necessarily will add up to what the United States will contribute because the US is such a big and vital society and there are so many other things going on below the federal level, so I think we might get strongly different from the US but not necessarily at the federal level.
Tom in studio:
And strong leadership from the US would be welcome - not least because their emissions are currently the highest in the world - as is their consumption. And that bloated mapwarns us that the climate is not the only potential threat we're facing.
Peak Resources
Lord Giddens:
It’s generally accepted now I think that most of the oil that’s left in the earth is going to be difficult to get out.
Dr Rachael Unsworth (Lecturer, Geography, Leeds University):
When we look back we’ll probably see that we’re about at peak oil now, which of course doesn’t mean that the oil is about to run out, but it means that every next barrel is more expensive to get out of the ground. Basically we’re past the era of cheap energy and the lifestyle that it supported.
Lord Giddens:
Oil gas and coal are now essentially sunset industries, and that is going to create enormous pressure on innovation for other forms of energy
Rachael Unsworth:
It’s not just fossil fuels, and of course they link to climate change issues, but also the trace metals and so on that we think we’re going to be able to do all the techno-fixes with. So many of those are in short supply. We think we’re going to be able to invent ourselves out of trouble, but we’re going to hit by resource shortages in many ways.
Tom in studio:
And it's not just mineral resources that are running out, as the RSA heard recently in a debate on Food in a World without Oil.
Professor Tim Lang (Food Policy, City University, London - addressing the RSA):
Agriculture is both about energy but also has now become reliant upon energy in the form of oil. But probably the single issue, that’s going to bring the current model to its knees quicker than oil, is water.
Jonathan Eyre (Ecologist):
Water is quite a big threat because even the UK is suffering problems from place to place.
Tim Lang:
Land use - soil structures - any assessment of soil structure shows the world’s soils in distress. Not everywhere, some are wonderful, but in distress generally, even in rich Europe, even in rich Britain.
Lord Giddens:
We might get 9 billion people on the face of the earth and I think we know that we don't have enough resources simply to have a model of development for that number of people.
Overshoot
Tom in studio:
So really it's irrelevant whether we can do anything about climate change or not. We have to do things differently anyway. Ecologists call the problem 'Overshoot.' and it works like this.
This line is the world's carrying capacity; the total amount of life that the planet can support. And this is consumption - still growing strongly at the moment.
If we're very lucky, mankind will see where it's heading in time, and ease off before we hit the limit - then keep consumption at a steady state, just within the planet's support system.
But if we overshoot by trying to consume too much, we'll actually damage the system. So, when consumption finally starts to fall, the carrying capacity drops with it - a potentially catastrophic situation.
And there's another factor. The depletion of natural resources is often shown as a bell shape. Extraction, in this case of oil, starts slowly, then increases to a peak - around about now, then declines in roughly mirror image, as the resource runs out.
Some experts suggest we should draw the graph the other way up, to show that the early stages are an easy downhill ride, and there's an increasingly steep climb out, as reserves get harder and harder to extract. But even this doesn't tell the full story.
André Angelantoni (PostPeakLiving.com):
Oil importers can only purchase the oil that the oil producers don’t use themselves. Oil subsidies by the oil producers to their populations give them little reason to conserve. Their internal use will continue to grow, leaving less for the rest of the world. Brown and Foucher’s work shows that net oil exports will be squeezed from both sides - top line production will decline and the exporting country consumption will increase. Oil importing countries will not get all the oil they do now. To them, world oil production will look closer to the white line.
Tom in studio:
And the closer we get to 2040, the more problems we'll have. A major price hike, or some other interruption in supply, and suddenly we'll find we can't grow or deliver food - or, indeed, function at all.
Paul Chatterton:
I think one of the key things we need to confront is a global moratorium on fossil fuel extraction.
Lord Giddens:
I don’t think we have the right to use up all the oil we can find. What gives us that right compared to subsequent generations?
Tom in studio:
The root of this entire problem is growth.
Economic Growth
Nick Green (Incredible Edible Todmorden):
The model of economic growth is not sustainable. You can’t have anything over zero% growth year on year without coming to some kind of crisis, so sustainability is essential. You can’t keep growing the population on one planet for ever and ever. Something’s going to go crunch.
Paul Chatterton:
The problem with a growth-based economic system is that it’s based on the ceaseless demand for new goods which creates more and more production which creates more and more consumption. And that consumption is base on our constant desire for novelty and newness. So we’ve had debt bubbles emerge, easy credit has lead to more consumption. More consumption has lead to more production, more production leads to more consumption. The banks lend more money because people are buying more. So we see this virtuous cycle of growth between debt, credit, production and consumption. All that leads to is more CO2 and more global warming.
Tom in studio:
That destructive cycle is driven by a linear consumption system, in which resources are inefficiently extracted, wastefully processed, carelessly used and then casually discarded, with waste and pollution all along the line.
Jonathan Eyre:
The greatest environmental impact is in the extraction of the raw material in the first place. So as soon as you start to capture materials that are about to be discarded and recycle them or reuse them, you’re immediately having a huge impact, not just the energy saving there, you’re stopping all the impact at the beginning of the process. It’s about changing a linear progression into a circular one.
Tom in studio:
Changing from a linear to a cyclical system requires a complete rethink on how we do things. This is how the economists explain it.
In the current model, the economy, society and the environment are treated as separate entities. Problems created by the economy which affect society, such as poverty, ill health, deprivation and injustice, as well as those that affect the environment, like pollution, extinctions, water depletion and global warming, are externalised, in other words not included in any financial calculations. So the economy grows while the other two suffer.
They call this the Mickey Mouse model, for obvious reasons. (Economy 1) So an increasing number of economists, and many governments, are now trying develop a second system.
In this, the economy, the environment and society are seen as overlapping - and when they're in balance then 'sustainable development' can take place. It’s also sometimes described as the three-legged stool.
The control mechanism here is the market.
Hilary Benn:
We’ve fuelled our economic growth on the back of carbon but we know we can’t do that any more, so the first thing we’re trying to do is count the cost of carbon to re-orientate the investment supertanker. The second thing is, we’ve got to start to count the things we don’t count at the moment, the extent to which we take from the natural world, natural resources, with no thought of the consequence at all.
Tom in studio:
So costs are applied to externalities - pollution, waste and so on, and as people don't want to pay the extra, they favour the less wasteful processes, so with luck, the polluters go out of business. Sorted, you might think..
But this is still a growth-based, profit-driven system, and there are many activities still outside of that safe central zone, not least poverty, injustice and deprivation which remain uncontrolled.
So the third model takes financial growth out of the equation - to create what's known as a 'steady-state' solution. Here, the economy is subservient to society (and so the social issues are resolved), and society is subservient to the biosphere (which resolves the environmental issues.) The only externality is sunlight. They call this one the Target.
Paul Chatterton:
Essentially, the way a steady-state economy differs from a high-growth economy is that there is much less throughput of natural materials. So what we have is a zero-waste economy where all the waste produced from different parts of the economic system are put pack into that economic system, which reduces the environmental impact on various ecosystems, but it also reduces basic things like landfill and pollution.
Lord GIddens:
Well I think it’s not only viable, it’s necessary. One has to separate the developed and the developing countries. Developing ones have the right to become richer, and for a certain period that probably means following quite traditional growth models. If you look at the example of China, those things work, at least up to a point. There are a lot of unfortunate consequences too. In the developed countries, I think we can talk of overdevelopment in some areas. I’m not sure I’d call it a steady state model, but certainly I think we’re looking for a different way of assessing what growth actually is.
Paul Chatterton:
We need to measure new things and value different things in our society. Not just economic growth. So we need to move away from Gross Domestic Product, GDP, and measure other things that are important to us: well-being, human happiness, sustainable environments, good education: those kind of things.
Daniel O’Neill (Centre for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy):
If we look at surveys of happiness and life satisfaction, over the past 50 or so years in a country like the UK, what we find is that while average incomes have increased by about a factor of 3, happiness has not increased. If we do surveys, we ask people how happy are you on a scale of 1 to 10, those types of data, we find they haven’t increased. So economic growth is hurting the planet, and it’s also not helping us.