A sustainable footprint

We know about carbon as carbon dioxide, the driver of possible long-term climate change.

Nitrogen is the sleeper: he’s carrying the drinks. It is the fertiliser that keeps our world cropping systems going. Without it we could feed only three billion people. Its over-use acidifies soils and pollutes water bodies, but we keep using more and more of it.

For sustainability we have to reduce use of this bunch of global elements to about half, or some say even a quarter for elements like carbon.

Basing economy and society on flows rather than stocks is about living off the interest rather than continually eating into the capital base. Australia is a great consumer of capital, both renewable and non-renewable. The move to wind farms for electricity is a welcome start, but it is just that, a small start in a mammoth reconstruction and refurbishment of the nation’s metabolism.

Shortening the supply chain is about three things.

The first is the recycling of water, nitrogen and phosphorus out of the cities’ effluent back to their food production heartlands. The second is physically connecting both the body and the mind of urban Australia to the sweat and toil of food production, and helping us see more plainly that you are what you eat. If you have crook soils then you will have crook human health. The third is about reducing reliance on extended supply chains that might get broken if world oil supply becomes constrained.

Engineering society for durability and resilience is about pulling back from the edge of the high-revving motor, that is today’s society and economy. Durable infrastructure and widgets are things that last a long time and can be repaired.

It is also about industrial ecology, where we join all of our industrial processes so that one man’s waste is another man’s feedstock, and overall we get little or no waste.

Society resilience is somewhat similar. Communities living well within their capability rather than continually being on the edge, worrying about interest rates, the school and the hospital. It’s all about a lower-revving design for the economy, and the society that depends on it.

It’s about playing cricket in the backyard, maybe training the next Ricky Ponting, instead of buying our children a new computer game.

Finally the X factor, the team magic, that brings all those together, the requirement for a new economics where taxes tell the truth. When science uses life-cycle analysis to look at the physical content of our personal consumption budgets, we find that the more money we spend, then the more energy, water, greenhouse gas and land disturbance is included, or embodied, in the consumption dollar.

It’s what we scientists call a linear or straight-line function, the more we spend, the more we use over the full production chain or life cycle.