Dr. Albert Bartlett's "Laws of Sustainability"

[GliderGuider]

I hadn't seen these before. While some of us may quibble with some aspects of some of his conclusions, they're all worth thinking about.

Dr. Albert Bartlett's "Laws of Sustainability"

First Law: Population growth and / or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

Second Law: In a society with a growing population and / or growing rates of consumption of resources, the larger the population, and / or the larger the rates of consumption of resources, the more difficult it will be to transform the society to the condition of sustainability.

Third Law: The response time of populations to changes in the human fertility rate is the average length of a human life, or approximately 70 years. (Bartlett and Lytwak 1995) (This is called "population momentum.")

Fourth Law: The size of population that can be sustained (the carrying capacity) and the sustainable average standard of living of the population are inversely related to one another. (This must be true even though Cohen asserts that the numerical size of the carrying capacity of the Earth cannot be determined, (Cohen 1995))

Fifth Law: One cannot sustain a world in which some regions have high standards of living while others have low standards of living.

Sixth Law: All countries cannot simultaneously be net importers of carrying capacity.

Seventh Law: A society that has to import people to do its daily work (“We can’t find locals who will do the work,”) is not sustainable.

Eighth Law: Sustainability requires that the size of the population be less than or equal to the carrying capacity of the ecosystem for the desired standard of living.

Ninth Law: ( The lesson of "The Tragedy of the Commons" ) (Hardin 1968): The benefits of population growth and of growth in the rates of consumption of resources accrue to a few; the costs of population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources are borne by all of society.

Tenth Law: Growth in the rate of consumption of a non-renewable resource, such as a fossil fuel, causes a dramatic decrease in the life-expectancy of the resource.

...

Twentieth Law: The addition of the word "sustainable" to our vocabulary, to our reports, programs, and papers, to the names of our academic institutes and research programs, and to our community initiatives, is not sufficient to ensure that our society becomes sustainable.

Twenty-First Law: Extinction is forever.

The rest of the laws and the reasoning behind them are in the article.

[NNadir]

1. There is a nice video of Richard Feynman's somewhere wherein he dismisses so called

"social science" on the grounds that they don't formulate mathematical laws.

None of these "laws" are expressable in purely mathematical terms.

[GliderGuider]

2. Does that make them any less useful?

Not everything is (or needs to be) reducible to mathematics.

A "law" can be a scientific law, a rule codified in a legal system or any cause and effect relationship that is logically correct or appears never to be violated (e.g. "fish cannot live out of water"). To insist that the scientific/mathematical definition be given pride of place only indicates that the speaker has a scientific/mathematical bias.

[NNadir]

3. Well, apparently Richard Feynman had this bias.

So do I.

In my view a non-mathematical formulation does not have the status of predictive law. The less mathematical, the more we lapse into soothsaying.

The "laws" of economics, for instance, may have gotten Milton Friedman a Nobel Prize, but their predictive value was entirely nonsense.

[GliderGuider]

4. I prefer to avoid bias and find value where it exists.

I agree that Chicago School economics doesn't fall into this category.

Keep in mind that Dr. Bartlett has a PhD in physics from Harvard, so it's entirely possible that he and Feynman have met. It's a sure bet that Bartlett knows the definition of "law" that you're clinging to.

[OKIsItJustMe]

8. Not a scientific/mathematical bias

A discrete mathematical bias.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic#Linguistic_variables

Fuzzy logic

---

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
…

Linguistic variables

While variables in mathematics usually take numerical values, in fuzzy logic applications, the non-numeric linguistic variables are often used to facilitate the expression of rules and facts.

…

Fuzzy logic is not any less precise than any other form of logic: it is an organized and mathematical method of handling inherently imprecise concepts. The concept of "coldness" cannot be expressed in an equation, because although temperature is a quantity, "coldness" is not. However, people have an idea of what "cold" is, and agree that there is no sharp cutoff between "cold" and "not cold", where something is "cold" at N degrees but "not cold" at N+1 degrees — a concept classical logic cannot easily handle due to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_bivalence">principle of bivalence. The result has no set answer so it is believed to be a 'fuzzy' answer. Fuzzy logic simply provides a mathematical model of the vagueness which is manifested in the above example.

…

[IrateCitizen]

6. So, you're saying that we can only engage in quantification...

... but qualification holds no value? If it cannot be expressed in mathematical terms, it should be dismissed?

Personally, I think that the overriding obsession with quantity to the complete exclusion of quality is one of our blind spots in coming up with ways out of our current predicaments. It's a part of the reason that I left a career in engineering for one in history and teaching.

[Jim__]

14. An approximation of the 1st law in mathematical terms.

This could be stated much more clearly with the proper mathematical notation, but ...

Let P_sub_i be the population at the beginning of the ith year.

Let R_sub_i be the rate of growth in the ith year with the stipulation that R_sub_i is always positive (easily adjustable to sum(R_sub_i) is positive for any 100 year interval).

Let Q be the maximum sustainable population.

Then, since P_sub_i is a monotonic increasing sequence, there exists an n such that:

P_sub_n + R_sub_n * P_sub_n > Q

A similar statement can be made for continuus growth in consumption.

[joshcryer]

5. Josh Cryer's "Two Laws of Sustainablity"

LAW ONE: Thermodynamics are unavoidable. No population of entities can use more energy than that which is effectively constantly available in their environmental system, without catastrophic failure. Sustainable entity populations therefore only use as much energy as is constantly available in their environmental system.

LAW TWO: The conservation of mass is paramount. No population of entities can destroy matter or environmental resources on which their society lives, only change its form. Sustainable entity populations therefore only utilize chemical processes that can be reused indefinitely as long as they do not ignore law one.

The Second Law: An Introduction to Classical and Statistical Thermodynamics

The Principles of Chemical Equilibrium

[Nederland]

18. And I like to combine

Your "LAW ONE" with your sigline :)

[HamdenRice]

7. Overall he seems to be saying: "What you see as reality cannot actually have happened"

He also gets Hardin completely wrong.

[joshcryer]

9. Most of them are rather obvious repetitions.

What it fails to do is the math. Humans use less resources than are available in the environment, therefore humans are capable of being sustainable.

[HamdenRice]

10. The lesson of "The Tragedy of the Commons"-He's stating almost the opposite of what Hardin said

Ninth Law: ( The lesson of "The Tragedy of the Commons" ) (Hardin 1968): The benefits of population growth and of growth in the rates of consumption of resources accrue to a few; the costs of population growth and growth in the rates of consumption of resources are borne by all of society.

Hardin posited a world of completely open resources and complete equality as a hypothetical and deduced that the costs of increased production were borne by the open resource and the benefits of increased production were enjoyed by each individual privately and equally -- not by the few.

How can anyone get such a simple article so spectacularly wrong and then have the nerve to disseminate it?

Sorry, but when someone writes something so preposterous, it makes me not give much credibility to the rest of the article. Makes it sound like the writer is a loon or has reading comprehension problems.

[GliderGuider]

11. The differential accumulation and consolidation of power and wealth

Is much better understood as a consequence of the human tendency to create and defend social hierarchies. I share your misgivings about imputing this consequence to TotC, even if I don't share the vituperative phraseology.

On edit: I also think "Law" 5 is bogus: it doesn't define "high" or "low" standards of living and contains no hint of why the simple existence of disparity axiomatically creates an unsustainable world. The human tendency to create hierarchies presents a convenient mechanism for those who want to "own it all, at any cost" to realize their desires, but (disparity != hierarchy).

[HamdenRice]

12. "vituperative phraseology"

I hope you realize I was referring to Bartlett, not you.

Hardin did not address accumulation in that essay. In fact, the essay is somewhat elitist and although somewhat indirectly addressed is a critique of allowing poor people to "breed."

Also, Hardin is typically seen today as advocating only "statist," top down means of addressing environmental degradation. That's why his essays are seen as justifying the environmental regulatory schemes that followed.

Around the time Hardin wrote, a U. of Chicago professor, Harold Demsetz, wrote an essay on his view of the origin of private property as a means of reducing environmental degradation. Demsetz's article is usually paired with Hardin's, and the contrast is presented of Hardin coming up with a state solution and Demsetz coming up with a free market solution.

Ostrom and several others are seen as proposing decentralized, democratic solutions to resource degradation.

[GliderGuider]

13. Yes, I realized that.

I don't think either state or free market solutions are "the answer" in all cases. In the absence of enlightened individuals, some degree of regulation seems to be necessary in most cases, though it needs to be applied in the context of each particular situation lest it become ideological.

[Jim__]

15. Do you know the neme of Demsetz' article?

And, do you know if it is available?

[HamdenRice]

17. "Toward a Theory of Property Rights"

I've read it too many times to count. I'm hoping to publish an article critiquing it.

The basic idea is that Demsetz claimed that a group of Native American Indians in Canada who hunted beaver spontaneously created a property system in beaver lodges to internalize externalities. He discusses how pollution is an externality and that it can be internalized through property rights.

The problem is that he faked his data -- something I discovered, but I don't think anyone is aware of. It's easy to prove because his essay is a review of already published literature, and that literature is available in archives.

http://homepage.newschool.edu/het//profiles/demsetz.htm

[Jim__]

19. Thanks.

[joshcryer]

20. Thanks for this, very good stuff, if you do critique it please post it here for us to see.

I think I see where you'll go with it.

[BeFree]

16. Huh?

You mean there's not plenty to go around?

That not all of us can live high on the hog, damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead?

That there are limits? That's not good news. What we need is good news.
Good news will make us happy. Happy, happy, happy. I hope.