Midas' Remorse

The story of King Midas has a parallel in our current world situation; we're at the brink of losing all that matters throughout the globe in our lands, seas and living systems for the love of money. A pile of gold locked away in a private retreat. Remember this story?

Once upon a time there lived a very rich King, whose name was Midas. He had one little daughter whom he loved very much, and whose name was Marigold.

King Midas loved gold more than anything else in the world, except his little daughter.

One day Midas was enjoying the sight of gold in his treasure room, when a stranger appeared before him.

“You are a rich man, King Midas,” he said. “You have a lot of gold in this room. Nobody else in the world has as much.”

“Yes, I have,” answered Midas, “but not as much as I wish to have. I wish everything that I touch to be changed to gold.”

“The Golden Touch?” said the stranger. “But are you quite sure that this will make you happy?”

“Of course, I am,” said Midas.

“And will you never be sorry to have the Golden Touch?”

”Never!” cried Midas. “I’ll be very happy”. “Be it as you wish then,” replied the stranger.

“Tomorrow at sunrise you will get the Golden Touch.” In the morning, when the sun rose, the King woke up and saw that his bed had been changed to gold.

Midas was very glad, indeed.

He jumped out of bed and ran about the room touching everything. He took up a book, and turned over the leaves; at once the leaves changed to gold, and the words of the book could not be read.

He put on his clothes and found himself dressed in gold which was very heavy. He took out his handkerchief, and it also became gold.

In the garden he found a great number of beautiful roses. He went from bush to bush touching each one as he passed until every flower was changed to gold. Then, very happy, he went back to the palace to have breakfast.

King Midas sat at table waiting for little Marigold. Soon she came into the room, crying.

“Now, now, my little lady!” cried Midas. “What is the matter with you, this bright morning?”

Marigold held a rose in one of her hands. It was one of the roses Midas had turned into gold.

“Beautiful!” cried her father.

“Ah, dear Father, it is not beautiful. I ran into the garden to get some roses for you. But, oh, dear, dear, there are no more beautiful roses there. They no longer smell sweet, and they are quite yellow.”

“Oh, my dear little girl, don’t cry about it,” said Midas. “Sit down and eat your breakfast.”

Then he took a cup of coffee and wanted to drink it. He was astonished to find that he could not. When his lips touched the coffee, it became gold. Then he put a nice little fish on his plate and carefully touched its tail with his finger. It at once changed to gold.

“I don’t quite see,” he thought to himself, “how I’ll have my breakfast.”

Now he tried one of the hot cakes, and then an egg. Both changed into yellow gold. Hoping that by being very quick he might get something to eat, King Midas then took a hot potato and put it into his mouth. But the Golden Touch was too quick for him. He found his mouth full of hot metal. He jumped up from the table and began to dance about the room, shouting with pain.

“Father, dear Father!” cried little Marigold. “What is the matter? What has happened to you?”

“Oh, my dear child,” answered Midas sadly, “it’s terrible, it’s terrible.”

Pretty Marigold jumped up from her chair, and, running to Midas, threw her arms around him. He kissed her.

“My dear Marigold!” he cried.

But Marigold made no answer. Her sweet, rosy face became yellow. Little Marigold was a child no longer, but a golden statue.

Poor King Midas! He stood still for a moment not being able to say a word. Then he began to cry: “My child, my dear child! Oh, what have I done?”

Suddenly he saw the stranger standing near the door.

“Well, friend Midas,” said he, “how are you getting on with your Golden Touch?”

“I am the poorest man in the world,” said Midas, I have lost all that my heart really cared for.”

“Ah, so life has taught you a good lesson?” said the stranger. “Let us see, then, which of these two things is dearer — the Golden Touch, or one cup of cold water?”

“Oh, dear, cold water!” cried Midas.

“The Golden Touch,” went on the stranger, “or a piece of bread?”

“A piece of bread,” answered Midas, “is better than all the gold on earth!”

“The Golden Touch”, asked the stranger, “or your own little Marigold – warm, rosy and loving as she was an hour ago?”

“Oh, my child, my dear child!” cried poor Midas.

“You are wiser than you were, King Midas,” said the stranger looking at him. “Your heart, I see, is no longer filled with the love of gold alone. Tell me now, do you really wish to give up your Golden Touch?”

“Of course, of course!” cried Midas.

“Go then,” said the stranger, “and put your hands in the river that runs in your garden. Also take some water from the river and sprinkle it over anything that you wish to change back again from gold to what it had been before.”

King Midas wanted to thank the stranger. But the stranger had disappeared.

Midas lost no time. He went to the river at once and jumped into the water without even taking off his shoes.

King Midas went back to his palace. The first thing he did was to sprinkle the water over the golden statue of little Marigold.

The rosy colour came back to her face. She was astonished to see that she was wet, and that her father was sprinkling water over her!

“What are you doing, dear Father!” she cried, “I put on this nice dress only this morning.” Marigold didn’t know that she had been a little golden statue.

Her father didn’t tell her how foolish he had been; but he led her into the garden, and sprinkled the rest of the water over the golden roses, and changed them back into sweet flowers.

After Rio - Grassroots

Frances G. Beinecke, President of the NRDC and Trip Van Noppen, President of Earthjustice, summarized in an NYT Op-Ed that the lack of representation and agreement at the Rio+20 summit wrapping up on June 21 leaves a vacuum that must be dealt with at the grassroots level:

Collectively, we must force our government leaders and our corporations to do what is right for our planet and its resources. We must press them to implement the commitments they made at Rio+20, and the commitments they made in other international agreements as well. And we must hold them accountable when they don’t. As we learned at Rio+20, government negotiators and thick documents can’t save the planet. But as we also learned, we can, and we must do it now.

A further report-out from Rio is posted here on Reuters. In a nutshell, over 120 nations signed off on general sustainable development goals.

What's being left out of all of these positions is that the fundamental methodologies aren't changing, even though there are resources and funding pledges to the third-world countries. The old technologies and approaches are not being revised to account for the Natural Capital methodology which uses grids and hubs of smaller projects integrated with natural ecosystems. For example, International Rivers points out on June 19 that the World Bank must revise their development strategy and implement a series of small ecosystem improvements instead of the large, destructive projects they have insisted on funding:

 Recent reports have signaled that new renewable technologies are approaching grid parity and will be more effective in meeting the world's energy needs. A 2010 World Bank report found that 65 million people in Africa will gain access to safe and clean lighting through solar by 2015, while a 2012 Bloomberg New Energy Finance report stated that grid-connected photovoltaics in Africa have already become competitive. The International Energy Agency has stated that the energy needs of 70% the world's rural poor could be met by investment in small, decentralized infrastructure technologies.

International Rivers' report finds that the majority of rural poor live closer to local sources of renewable energy and water than to an electric grid and centralized irrigation systems. As a result, decentralized projects that address the needs of the poor directly are more effective at promoting broad-based economic growth and reducing poverty than grid expansion and construction of centralized mega-projects. Small-scale energy and water projects can also strengthen climate resilience, reduce the social and environmental footprint of the infrastructure sector, and strengthen democratic control over essential public services.

Large infrastructure lending has regained focus as world leaders search for ways to stimulate growth. The World Bank has recently indicated it will return to large infrastructure lending, having issued its own new infrastructure strategy in 2011. International Rivers' report calls on Jim Yong Kim, who will take office as the World Bank's new President in July, to replace the institution's top-down approach to infrastructure with a strategy that prioritizes the needs of the poor.

 So, lacking leadership in this issue - particularly from the USA, Germany and Britain - as well as a framework for drastically reducing carbon emissions immediately, the outlook appears bleak for true regenerative processes. One can only hope that these grassroots efforts can ultimately prevail over the iron grip of corporate and Wall Street malfeasance, rather than allow these entities to dress it up as "sustainable growth". This only leads to the inevitable predicted collapse.

The Basics - Water

Inextricably linked, water and power are the fundamental utility systems of every city in the country. Virtually every source of electricity in a typical American home or manufacturing plant - whether it comes from hydroelectricity, coal, natural gas, nuclear, biofuels, or even concentrated solar -- also requires lots of water. City utilities are the foundation of urban infrastructure, which is aging and in need of serious maintenance and repair in order to supply the built environment we already have. This points to a critical need for new kinds of models, both for providing energy and financing these new projects.

In California, we're in a bit of a trap because the existing water supplies are already overtapped, which means we're limited in power production and supplies. Our changing climate is increasing the drought conditions which reduce the previously reliable water supplies, so there's no reserve water supplies with which to produce additional power if the state's population continues to grow (map here). A renewed urban infrastructure is one approach to capturing the natural processes in our habitation areas that were previously driven by city water and power departments. Technologies like permeable pavements and rain gardens can capture, naturally treat and filter stormwater back into the ground, preventing overflows and reducing reliance on treatment centers. This can be done for far less cost than the old existing infrastructure. This involves UnPaving a lot of concrete and asphalt, as well as restoring landscape in industrial infill areas, known as "brownsfields".

Alternative energy supply development in the western United States is another viable option that's already underway. Solar power supply is a natural for the hot, dry desert areas that were previously degraded by wartime military operations. Geothermal sources are an additional well-established means of generating power from existing natural processes.

The water equation is crucial, so planning for natural system restoration provides about the only option in the balance of water and power. Hopefully this approach will take place as the State of California plans its future strategies aligned with a natural capital approach.

The Shrinking Pie

The contentious climate change debate about reversing the human impact on the globe resolves into three basic issues: energy demand and carbon emissions, resource depletion and global ecological deterioration, and air/water resources compromised by pollution and sewage. The fundamental driver of all of these problems is the simple and obvious fact that the human population has exceeded the ability of the planet to support this level of consumption, and so it's the prime controlling factor in reducing human impact on global ecology and focus on its restoration. There's no other path; Malthus is right. The Mechanical Engineers in the UK have summarized this succinctly.

After thousands of years of unfettered human expansion, we've hit the wall. Humanity has to develop a different paradigm than endless growth and the rape-pillage-and-burn approach to extracting materials, energy and resources, which represents the current corporate push to "grow". Changing this requires a different kind of accounting system and a shift in values. Key to this is reversing the equation with respect to population levels, done in an intelligent fashion. This immediately raises the specter of overarching bureaucracy, violation of individual rights and invasion of privacy. These reactions are valid if governmental control is used indiscriminately to abuse individuals on the basis of reactionary, brute-force methods. But there's a better way, through consensus.

Interestingly, this consensus can be forged out of the current blowback to the UN protocols that have engendered the "smart growth" strategies for urban development. In the US, the state of Alabama has just outlawed this approach in order to protect private property from eminent domain and undercut pollution controls and ecological preservation; it has effectively prohibited the UN Agenda 21. The Agenda 21 document says the world is one world; that its resources are finite; that environmental problems in one country affect its neighbors and the world at large; that over-population imposes a great strain on the world's finite resources; that a concerted, global response is more likely to be effective than a disjointed one; and that every nation had to find its own way to live up to the resolution. Further discussion of this political impact is here in an article from Huffpo.

If it's understood that development must be curtailed, as do the scientists who most recently stepped up to take a public position, then a very obvious way to preserve our remaining open lands, natural areas, lakes, rivers, oceans and forests is to relieve population pressure. You can't have both, there's a limit to the budget, it's very simple. So a global public policy needs to be leveraged in a way that preserves the quality of life and the natural resources in all countries at the same time as it rewards negative population growth. There's many positive ways to accomplish this, as the Sierra Club points out.

In terms of a global agreement that allows countries to preserve their natural resources and individual freedoms, it is necessary to establish a baseline population standard that gives incentives for people to preserve their way of life in a manner that regenerates their land resources, hence their wealth. Self-interest in happiness and abundance for individuals is then governed by limitations on population through public policy and taxation measures that make it clear that lower populations will benefit all of society and provide the necessities of life for everyone. One way this can be accomplished is laid out here.

An agreement around these issues, hopefully during Rio+20 this month (download a draft here), is imminently needed before Nature collapses the pie for all of us.

A Real-Time Map of Births and Deaths
This simulation gives an eerily omniscient vantage on the world as it fills.

A Fair Consensus

In support of the Contraction and Convergence submission to the UN Climate Negotiations (UNFCCC) in February of this year by Aubrey Meyer (in video above, click to play) of the Global Commons Institute, I'm dedicating this post to the implementation of its framework. Many other signatories to this submission are listed here.

This climate agreement model is a very transparent and fair methodology for setting the framework for convergence of carbon emission containment and regenerative ecological habitation by all countries. It is a very clear and rational approach based upon per capita allowances. It's a necessary step because the timeline to reduce human carbon emissions to zero is only 50 years, due to recent documented changes in the climate system.

Double-Jeopardy of unsustainable growth of human population demands and concomitant increased costs of climate damage is a very clear risk model, and it's shared by every country on the globe. It's the limit to growth problem, and the methods by which this risk is contained are grounded in the rapid evolution of renewable energy, conservation and ecological recovery. These things are eminently doable, as is evidenced by the rapid development of net-zero strategies by the building industry, and the capability for rapid energy production transformation as outlined by the Rocky Mountain Institute. Many regional projects around the globe have already regenerated their rivers, forests and resources as part of their development.

The costs of the impact of climate change, as the financial community has observed through its re-insurers, are running well ahead of rate of growth of the global economy. This creates destructive economic as well as physical vectors and generates a future of great uncertainty for all countries. Destabilization of climate, food and water supplies, energy and resources come as an ultimate price of unchecked growth, placing this huge cost upon every country on the planet. Thus the argument that carbon emissions can continue going forward is shown to be utterly destructive to all human societies and living systems by the projections in this model.

Therefore the choice is not whether to agree, but how swiftly this method needs to be put into place. The sooner it is achieved, the better the future is for all countries, and the damage to human life, as well as to all life and ecological systems can be minimized both economically and in terms of resources.

This is a shift in the idea that human existence requires continuous expansion; rather it focuses on the quality of life on earth and the idea that a less mechanistic existence requires fewer resources and fosters the regeneration of that which supports life for all. Human suffering and extinction of natural processes are not rational choices under this model, which is something that can be agreed to in principle very quickly by all countries; the stakes are clear.

How this is achieved is left up to individual countries and fostered by ability of low-emission countries to create value for their renewal strategies and low carbon levels. This creates an incentive game where this value is sought after, thus creating a market for non-emission of carbon. It's the inverse of how fossil-fueled capitalism works now, but uses the same kind of fiscal incentives, and creates an entire new paradigm for human existence within the natural world that stabilizes the future and allows the earth to regenerate.

Again, Bay Delta

The Bay Delta Water Plan is once again in the forefront of a major statewide debate about how to manage water infrastructure for a state that is already on the brink of its ability to supply water and manage it in a way that preserves the environment. I've covered this issue in several posts, along with concerns that the plan is grounded more in politics and money than science and ecology that would regenerate the natural processes that the entire state relies upon.

As a new water agency, the Delta Stewardship Council, formed by the 2009 California Water Legislation, is tasked with developing a Delta Plan.  As stated in their website, "The Delta Stewardship Council is charged with protecting the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the critical role it serves in the water supply for millions of Californians and its unique ecosystem and way of life." A draft Delta Plan is online here, and can be reviewed and commented on by the public. There's already a major backlash from the Restore the Delta folks, who are angry that a conveyance canal is built into this plan, as well as insufficient development of the critical levee system in the Delta. Another issue, the critical costs and actual ratepayer bill for this plan, is being challenged via AB 2421. Food & Water Watch, Southern California Watershed Alliance, and Green LA Coalition challenged the Metropolitan Water District (MWD) for its opposition to an independent cost-benefit analysis of the proposed multibillion-dollar Peripheral Canal or Tunnel project which is incorporated as part of this plan.

The water agencies and the farming community are in favor of the plan as presented, since the proposed canal is considered the only way to provide adequate water for the planned future development in the southern part of the state, as well as to the agriculture in the central valley.

Cal Watchdog has a more critical view of what may be considered absent issues in the report, including the documentation of kinds of water available and where these water supplies should be transported to. Unfortunately the plan still relies upon the "plumbing model" of water management. It basically follows the money, not science or ecology. Alternate strategies such as using the storage capacity of existing underground water basins are also suggested by the same author in another article, published this January. It's a political history of the Bay Delta situation.

The big question here is, can more growth be accommodated? It's the historic engine of California's prosperity that right how has taken a massive hit due to the Wall Street boondoggle of leveraging debt. So the political climate right now may preclude a more enlightened set of strategies around the water supply issues. California will very likely end up being a very dry state with extremely high water and power rates due to a lack of vision in water management, and absent conservation based upon ecological principles. This could prove to be the demise of the state's capability to provide a fundamentally sound ecosystem supported by the natural systems which were formerly so abundant.

Regeneration

The idea that human habitation can be used as a tool to regenerate ecology is finally coming into its own after experimentation with projects all over the world. It's not a zero-sum game, it's a way of bringing together all the environmental and engineering factors together in a place such that it renews natural processes instead of destroying them. It takes a great deal of skill, knowledge and experience to work out the systems that result in the creation of place that interconnects all these factors. Many major corporate engineering, design and development firms are investing in think tanks to take this to the next level, such as Arup, a global design, planning and engineering firm.

Jerry Yudelson's moderation of a panel at Greenbuild 2011, hosted by the Green Building Council in Toronto, centered on a discussion of Ecodistricts. An ‘ecodistrict’ is an urban planning term for a specific section of an urban area, whether a neighborhood, school campus, industrial park, etc. that can operate as a self-contained and self-sufficient entity, while remaining connected to other adjacent ecodistricts. This concept is widely used throughout Europe and parts of Asia, but is still relatively unknown here in North America. The ecodistrict concept brings technologies such as district heating, decentralized wastewater treatment, and local food production down to a manageable scale, both for construction and financing.

Howver, many of our college, university and school campuses in the USA are designed with this fundamental concept as a basis for infrastructure design because of the efficiencies involved. The use of ecology as part of its inherent function is the more advanced and recent application of the "green" ethos. Shared resources and local sourcing go beyond just the idea of energy conservation or LEED buildings, since systems and supply chains are integrated with biological systems to regenerate the local ecology. Major firms have developed this expertise, for example the Bioengineering Group, which is entirely about solving these kinds of challenges.

Urban areas are capable of tremendous regeneration, as well as becoming a node for this kind of intelligence in managing ecologies for the better. These nodes of density can also be nodes of regeneration given that the systems are synergistic and balance off of each other. The World Futures Council has developed an outline policy that can be used as a template for this kind of organic, metabolic pattern of habitation.

Thus regeneration is necessarily the paradigm of the future, and it doesn't need to be a bleak vision of dense boxes and rigid limits. Life is abundant if it is handled intelligently and reverently, something our mechanistic societies have taken thousands of years to figure out. Limits are the fount of creative thinking and living, and decisions made by a society for its best integration with natural systems and bounds will provide the needed resources and balance with natural environments. Our best engineers and designers are entirely capable of creating these systems if the will to make regeneration a priority exists in our societies.