söndag 22 november 2015

Spotify loves sustainability?

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A few days ago (Friday), my colleague Elina Eriksson and I gave a 45-minute talk about "ICT and Sustainability" at Spotify. They organised a student event during the weekend under the moniker "Make IT Matter" and they wanted a guest speaker to introduce the topic and build up some enthusiasm among the participants.

The event was more specifically organised by the Spotify student "street team tech" (they also have a "street team business" or some such). The street team consists of two students each from three technical universities; KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Chalmers University of Technology (Gothenburg) and Linköping University (Linköping). One of the two KTH students is actually one of our media technology students and she took mine and Elina's course about ICT and Sustainability earlier this term!

I'm not exactly sure what the point of the event was. It was sort of inspired by the hackathon but was rather focused on "product development". There was a schedule for the weekend with workshops, but I'm not quite sure what the students were supposed to accomplish or deliver in the end except that is was supposed to be a product (concept?) of some kind. Me and Elina just helped with the kick-off and then left (Friday evening) before the event properly started the day after. What we do know is that no less 400 students had applied and only 40 were invited to participate. These students were selected based on their skills in programming, (interaction) design, business as well as their interest in sustainability-related topics. Part of their applications consisted of writing a one-page cover letter and  they also submitted a URL to further impress the street team tech (who made the selections).

Before we gave our talk, we had a beer and the chance to schmooze some with the street team tech and the participants and we met no less than three more students from our engineering programme (media technology) of which one other had just taken our course. Some of the information here comes from our conversation with "our" students (Caroline, Niklas, Gabriella and Emil). The forty students came from three different universities and Spotify paid for all their expenses during the weekend including the trip to Stockholm and lodging. I think the setup was interesting and I would definitely have wished to participate in something like this when I was a student!

While Spotify supported and paid for the event, most of the planning and implementation was carried out by their street team tech. This also seems a win-win as the biggest expense for Spotify would be employees' time rather than (monetary) expenses. As it is, Spotify foots the bill but the six students in the street team tech puts in the majority of time needed to organise the event. These students will of course be on the fast track for writing their master's thesis at Spotify or even for later applying for a job there.


As to our talk, it consisted of three parts. The first part was a general background about the challenges humanity faces during the 21st century; climate change, overshoot, species extinction, energy crunches (peak everything) etc. The second part made the connection between these topics and ICT and the third part was totally adapted to the Spotify event. The general theme of the Spotify event was "Make IT Matter" and this was broken down into four themes that were all more or less connected to (ecological, social) sustainability of some kind. The four themes were:

  • How to decrease unnecessary consumption.
  • How to reduce resource use through the Sharing Economy 
  • How to reduce techno-stress
  • How to better integrate immigrants to the community (I wilfully added "and help refugees" to that theme)
The third part of the talk thus consisted of our take on these four themes and some suggestions of ours for how the themes could be understood and interpreted. What we didn't quite understand when we planned the lecture was that it turned out to be us rather than Spotify who unveiled these four themes (challenges) to the students so we really had their attention at that point. See the example slide on techno-stress (including my lecture notes) below.

Except for the four Spotify themes/challenges, Elina and me also had some additional challenges for the students. Notice that we used the term "hacks" rather than "products" below since we thought of the event more in terms of a hackathon than a product-development-thon.

  • How can your hacks change values and norms?
  • How can your hacks strengthen social ties and communities?
  • How can your hacks encourage positive change?
  • How can your hacks help us use less but achieve more?
  • How can your hacks help us to think globally but act locally?
  • How can your hacks avoid rebound effects?
All in all it was great fun and it seemed the students, the street team tech and the Spotify employees that were there were all very happy about out contribution. The only thing missing is a little more information about the outcome of the event! Elina also wrote a short blog post about the event on our team blog.



Notes:
- We spend a lot of time and attention learning how to use, upgrade, troubleshoot, manage technology. That is stressful. 
- Slow technology: ”a design agenda for technology aimed at reflection and moments of mental rest rather than efficiency in performance.”

torsdag 19 november 2015

The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century

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Karin Bradley (from the Department of Urban Planning and Environment at KTH) and me just submitted an 8000-word article to a special issue of the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society. The topic of the special issue is “Sharing Economies? Theories, practices and impacts”.

After having handed in an abstract in the beginning of the summer, we were invited to submit a full paper to the special issue by mid-November. That does however not, as far as I understand, mean that we are in any kind of "fast lane" to get our submission accepted for the special issue ("all papers would be subject to a strict peer review process"). I furthermore don't have any idea of when we will get feedback on our paper, but, we are talking about an almost absurdly drawn-out process. The initial call for abstracts was disseminated in March 2015 and the special issue is scheduled for publication in 2017, i.e. about two years after the call was published!

We have at this point changed (altered) the title of our paper from "Supporting 21st century commons" to the perhaps slightly less ambitious "The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century" when we realised we could not fulfil the promise of the previous titel on such a general level.

The basic idea of our paper is to take Elinor Ostrom's (1990) work on natural resource commons (grazing lands, fisheries, forests, irrigation systems etc.) as a starting point and then think about the differences between these types of commons and the contemporary human-made "sharing economy commons" of the 21st century. 

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The sharing economy as the commons of the 21st century

Abstract: 
This paper aims to make a contribution to the debates on how contemporary collaborative commons, as part of the wider sharing economy, can be understood and supported. Three cases of contemporary commons are analysed: a DIY bike repair studio, a pop-up home office concept and Wikipedia. The paper shows how the design principles developed for governing natural resource commons are only partly applicable for these contemporary commons. The paper illustrates the differences of these types of commons in terms of the nature of the resource being shared, scarcity, barriers to entry, and how rules are formulated and upheld.

Keywordscommons, sharing economy, collaborative economy, digital commons, design principles, for-benefit sharing platforms

Excerpt from the Introduction:
[...] we revisit Ostrom’s (1990) institutional design principles for the governance of long-enduring natural resource commons and explore to what extent these principles are relevant for understanding contemporary collaborative commons – commons that are situated in a globalized, urbanized and digitalized societal context. The aim of this paper is to make a contribution to the debates on how the contemporary collaborative commons, as part of the wider sharing economy, can be understood theoretically and how they may be supported. 

Ostrom’s design principles are based on extensive empirical studies of natural resource commons, situated in localized contexts and where users are reliant on each other and on these commons for their livelihood. In this paper we analyse three different cases of what we will here refer to as “21st century commons”: the Bike Kitchen, Hoffice and Wikipedia. These 21st century commons are types of commons that have grown in recent years, being set in a more globalized, urbanized and digitalized world, and representing different degrees of place specificity, use of digital technologies, and social bonds amongst their users. [...]
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söndag 25 oktober 2015

Student Sustainability Lunch Seminars

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Something pretty unusual happened as our course about ICT and sustainability came to a close one week ago. During the very last week, one student said he didn't want the course seminars to come to an end and suggested we should continue to meet regularly also after the course was finished. I gave him the opportunity to stand up in front of the class and pitch his idea at the very last lecture and more than 25% of the students signed up when a list was circulated. The course is compulsory so we totally understand if not every student loves the course, but, more than 20 students expressed an interest in voluntarily participating in a series of seminars after the course had finished. That's pretty amazing. Here's the deal we worked out with the student in question in advance:

- He (and a couple of friends of his) will be responsible for organising these events. These lunch seminars should be a student-initiated and student-led activity.
- Elina and I will help out by booking a suitable seminar room for each lunch meeting.
- Elina and I will make sure at least one of us will attend each meeting.
- Depending on the theme (see below), we could help by suggesting/selecting some background reading materials.

We kicked this thing off by having a lunch meeting a few days ago where we discussed the format of these meeting. It was decided that:
- We will have lunch meetings with the students every second week (Fridays) for the rest of the term.
- Each meeting will have a specific theme and we will all prepare for the seminar by reading a text (doesn't have to be academic) or perhaps watch a movie.
- Depending on the theme, me and Elina (and Hanna) might also invite suitable guests (most probably experts/researchers from other parts of KTH).
- The first regular lunch seminar will treat the topic "Sustainability and global justice" and will be followed by optionally attending a public seminar on that topic a few days later (more info here and here).

We started the kick-off meeting by going round the table so that the students could present themselves and state why they wanted to participate in this activity. Only six students showed up at the inaugural meeting (since next week is exam week and most students opted for staying home to study and prepare for their exams). The testimonies of the students that were present were hearth-warming for us teachers though. I took notes and here are some of the reasons the students offered:
- "My goals and visions for my future has changed [after I took the course]. From getting rich and driving an expensive car to something totally different."
- "It's not just a XXX [incomplete notes] but also about the future, about what jobs I want to apply for [after I finish my degree]. I'm not interested in the same jobs I was a year ago."
- "[Taking the course has] led to an internal paradigm shift, a new world view for me."
- "I know that a lot of the students who took the course were looking forward to the [weekly] seminars."
- "I'm looking forward to these seminars. I've been to other courses with the same structure but with seminars that gave me nothing."

Another great outcome of giving the course this year has been the massive student interest in writing their master's thesis on a topic relating to sustainability. half the class (≈ 40 students) will write their master's theses this coming spring and around five students have been in touch with me and an equal number have gotten in touch with Elina in regards to this issue (there might be an overlap though). Some of these students might drop off, but there might also be other students who haven't yet gotten in touch with us - including 4th year students who will get in touch with us next year instead. To inspire and help our students, we have listed no less than 30 thesis proposals on our team blog and we will hopefully get at least get a healthy bunch of student to write their master's theses on "our" topics during the spring term. There are also potential synergies with the upcoming Sustainability Student Lunch Seminars as it will be possible to choose themes for these meetings that are related to topics that our students will write their theses about. We have in fact already found several other spin-off benefits of having these lunch seminars and I might write more about these spin-offs during the spring if they pan out.


It is highly irregular to "continue a course" after the course finishes and we teachers are absurdly thankful for the students' enthusiasm and interest in the topics we teach - especially taking into account the (for the most part) lukewarm student interest in sustainability before this compulsory course started. It is at the same time a little absurd that we feel so thankful and blessed to have students who are genuinely interested in the subject we teach since that does not bode well for the rest of the education we provide them with (including all the teaching I've done during the previous decade at KTH...). Aren't students in fact supposed to study at the university based on a genuine interested in a variety of topics that we (the faculty) can help them explore and master? Or are we just cramming courses down their throats on a 5 year long conveyor belt?


Our course has obviously been very successful this year. Elina and me have asked ourselves why, or rather "why now?". We can't know for sure but have tried to find possible reasons for why things seems to have taken off this year but not before:
- It might be because this was the fourth time we gave the course and we have finally mastered how to teach this course, including planning and tweaking the contents and in various ways honing in on the delivery.
- It might be because sustainability, resource challenges and climate change are timely topics (for example with the Paris COP 21 meeting coming up at the end of this year).
- It might also be that this could equally well have happened last year and that the only difference was that one student actually stood up and suggested it this year but not last (a sort of "social dynamics tipping point").

To sum up, we just don't know why the course was more successful this time around, but it definitely seems there has been a qualitative difference between this and the three previous rounds. It's fun to note that me and Elina have written two academic papers together about our course and the the titles of these papers are "’It’s not fair! – Making students engage in sustainability" (pdf file) and "ICT4S reaching out: Making sustainability relevant in higher education" (pdf file). It definitely seems like we have succeeding on both those accounts and we hope to write a third paper too not too long from now.
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onsdag 21 oktober 2015

KTH Sustainability Research Day

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KTH has many activities around sustainability and I have just attended the annual KTH Sustainability Research Day (which is organise by KTH Sustainability). I also attended last year's event, but did for some reason not write anything about it. My colleague Ulrica wrote about it in our team blog though.

Selected KTH researchers (many are acquaintances of mine) presented their cutting-edge sustainability-related research and discussed different topics (including the promises of various research areas) with industry representatives and politicians. This year's program was divided into three parts around the topics "Mobility (beyond transportation)", "Materials in production and circulation" (i.e. circular economy and recycling) and "What does society want from KTH?".

Or vice-chancellor with responsibility for sustainability, Göran Finnveden, started by presenting the new (September 2015) UN Sustainable Development goals. Thes goals are divided into no less than 17 topics like for example "end poverty in all its forms everywhere", "ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all" and "ensure access to affordable, reliable, sustainable and modern energy for all".

An interesting talk by KTH researcher Fredrik Lundell discussed possible implications of their research on nano-structures based on wood (it's probably related to this wikipedia article about nanocellulose). The resulting materials are strong and durable but also biologically degradable. Fredrik mentioned the possibility of building a wind turbine from these materials and later "have the cows eat it" after it is decommissioned. The research in question was definitely at the basic research stage at the moment and far, far away from being applied. When asked about time frames, Fredrik stated that when you have no idea of the time frame (10 years? 100 years? never?), researchers tend to say "10 years from now" which he too did.


I enjoyed the event but will not cover the program in detail in this blog post. I will instead adopt a meta-level analytical approach to the event and develop a few of my thoughts here. Despite my quite critical comments below, I still think it's great that KTH organises this event. It's a pity I personally used the event mostly to network with people I already know instead of meeting new people!

1) Most research that is conducted at KTH is nerve-wrackingly incremental. While it is clear to me that the problems we face are monumental, the proposed solutions are small and slow and assumes that we can and for the most part will live "like today" also in the future. This has, in my opinion, less to do with realism and more to do with (I'm guessing here) wishful thinking and lack of imagination when it comes to thinking about futures that are not linear extrapolations of (real or wished-for) current trends. I'm thinking of quote I recently read in a text by John R McNeill:

"Soon after the World War II ended, the global economy entered its most remarkable era, growing 6-fold between 1950 and 1998. ... Taken as a whole, this era is the most unusual in the history of economic growth, although many people, having experienced nothing else, now imagine it is normal."

Those "many people" who according the the quote can be regarded as wearing blinders include every single persons who attended the KTH Sustainability Research Day event! Some of the effects of this historically unrivalled - and probably anomalous - period of unprecedented economic growth are of course the growth of science and technology - including many different kinds of technical research that we conduct at KTH. Almost all the research presented at an event like this will assume that funding for (at least their specific and very very promising) research areas will either continue at current levels or perhaps further grow. The idea that we could have less resources at our disposal in the future (including resources for conducting research) is either taboo or invisible at KTH and at an event like this. I find this fascinating and it flies in the face of some of the things that were said during the day regarding the role of universities for thinking and communicating thoughts and ideas that can not be thought or said in other places and by other actors in society (corporations, politicians etc.).

2) This makes me realise how radical the discussions and literature that me and Elina put in our students' hands is in our course on Sustainability and ICT. We don't gloss over the seriousness of various societal and global predicaments (energy, food, water, population, resources, economy, pollution, greenhouse gas emissions etc.). It might be that all other sustainability courses at KTH will seem like they are discussing different varieties of "vanilla" sustainability in comparison to our course (we coined the term "vanilla sustainability" in a paper of ours that we wrote a few years ago). We on the other hand don't shy away from suggesting that our way of life is unsustainable and that we will experience large-scale disruptive changes during this century. This implies that small, incremental change probably won't cut it. An event like this is also like a science fair or a beauty pageant. Different researchers tell the audience that "I do this" and "I do that" while simultaneously extolling the virtues and the potential of their approach and their research (implicitly stating that "the research I do is really important so please give me more money"). An event like this makes different voices heard but it's still not so much of a conversation about difficult issues as it is advertising for different real or imagined techno-fixes. With some exceptions. My colleague Teo presented the project "car-free year" where they took the cars from three families with kids and replaced them with light electric vehicles in order to study problems that then appeared in different everyday practices. This could be great source of knowledge for politicians who want to facilitate car-free lives in a compact city like Stockholm with great public transportation.

3) Following from the text above and from my impressions from this day, KTH and its research outcomes are regarded as a cornucopian horn that provides an endless stream of potentially useful results and inventions that politicians and corporations can pick and choose from - like plucking mature fruit from a tree. The role of KTH is to "deliver the goods" or at least deliver the promise of being able to deliver the goods that will solve any and every present and future societal problem. It's an alluring promise and great position for us to be in. All we ask for in return is to be fed some resources in terms of the money that will (primarily) buy researchers' time so that they (we!) can look into the problem in question (almost any problem, that is). Sometimes we also need some money to buy some advanced and expensive equipment too (the MAX IV particle accelerator that is currently being built in Lund was for example mentioned during the day).

The day ended with a comedian, Al Pitcher, doing a 20-minute skit. He was funny but he had to fight against the tiredness of an audience that had sat down for too long. He was pretty good but I would have thought that his show could have been a little more geared towards sustainability at an event like this.
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torsdag 18 juni 2015

Supporting 21st century commons

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Karin Bradley and me submitted an abstract to the Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy & Society and a special issue on the topic of "Sharing Economies? Theories, practices and impacts". The call to the special issue is in itself interesting and it is appended further below.

Me and Karin started to cooperate quite some time ago and submitted a couple of applications for research grants for study the sharing economy back in 2012. These applications were unfortunately turned down so Karin later lightly adapted our ideas in an application for personal grants that were available for recent PhDs - and she got those funds. This means that Karin has conducted research on the sharing economy for a few years but we have never done (written) anything together until now.

The submission process for the special issue is organised as a two-stage process. The first step was to submit a 500-word abstract by June 15. Based on these abstracts, the editors will then decide which authors will be invited to submit full papers to the special issue. Below is our abstract for the proposed paper our ours.


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Supporting 21st century commons

There are diverse understandings of the role and performance of sharing economies. Schor (2014) argues that for-profit as well as for-benefit sharing platforms tend to exacerbate precariatization of work, deregulation, and homophily. Kostakis and Bauwens (2014), on the other hand, argue that the spread of for-benefit collaborative platforms – be it community gardens or open source software – constitute a great potential for democratization.  The spread of for-benefit sharing platforms nevertheless face a number of difficulties as they are often reliant on a small number of engaged persons, have little funding and often lacking the critical mass necessary to fuel larger societal change. What factors then are crucial for understanding the dynamics of success and longevity of for-benefit collaborative platforms as the 21st century commons?

To answer this question we revisit Ostrom’s (1990) institutional design principles for the governance of long-enduring commons and explore to what extent these principles are relevant for understanding contemporary forms of commons – commons that are situated in a globalized and digitalized societal context.  The aim of this paper is to make a theoretical contribution to the debates on how contemporary commons, as part of the sharing economy, can be understood theoretically and how they can be supported.

Ostrom’s design principles are based on extensive empirical studies of natural resource commons, situated in localized contexts where users are reliant on each other and on these commons for their livelihood. The contemporary sharing economy commons differ in a number of respects and represent different degrees of place specificity, fluidity, reliance on digital tools and social bonds amongst their users. Three categories are set up, using the following emblematic examples: the Bike Kitchen, Hoffice and Wikipedia. The Bike Kitchen, with its origins in Los Angeles, is an open non-profit DIY bike repair studio exemplifying a locally anchored analogue form of commons, but with a set of general principles that can be easily copied and that has helped spread the concept across the world. The Bike Kitchen hence serves as an example of a form of localized physical commons, similar to community gardens or Fab labs.  

The second example, Hoffice, is an open concept for arranging temporary “home offices”, i.e. a set of principles for how to transform a private kitchen table into a one-day shared office space where community members can reserve a seat. With the help of digital technologies, Hoffice events are easily coordinated and the concept has rapidly spread internationally. Hoffice serves as an example of temporary, pop-up commons, similar to the ‘restaurants at home’ or peer-to-peer ride sharing services that have gained ground with the spread of digital technologies. The third example is Wikipedia, serving as an example of an entirely digital commons with a global reach.

In the paper we outline a typology of contemporary commons, using the three categories described above, and constrast them to the Ostromian natural resource commons. The typology is structured around questions such as: what is being shared, to what extent is the resource rival, who shares the resource, what are the principles for sharing, and to what extent are the commoners reliant on the resource. Based on this typology, we revisit and develop Ostrom’s analysis of commons and outline factors for understanding how 21st century commons can promote democratization of access to resources and conviviality. 


Below is the call for papers to the special issue:

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Special Issue Editors: Anna Davies, Betsy Donald, Mia Gray and Janelle Knox-Hayes

Participation in so-called ‘sharing economies’ has been reinvigorated by the enabling features of accessible, smart and mobile ICT technologies. This socio-technical enabler is working in combination with the constraining impacts of economic austerity, worker precarity and increasing awareness of resource constraints. Media attention meanwhile has been attracted to the rapid rise of a few high-profile sharing companies and the seemingly endless new opportunities to reconfigure the ways in which goods, skills and experiences are circulated. Advocates for these neo-sharing economies suggest they have the capacity to disrupt mainstream business models, forge new social relationships and redefine human relations with materials, yet these claims are weakly theorised and based on limited empirical data. As previous academic claims about the disruptive potential of technology and cultural change have often remained unrealised, it is an opposite time to reflect critically on the form, function and future potential of sharing economies.

This special issue will open up popular analyses of sharing economies to greater academic scrutiny including conceptual, methodological and empirical pieces analysing the socio-technical architectures of sharing across different sectors and spaces. More specifically, we invite papers that focus on one or more of the following questions;
• Is there a geography to sharing economies - how does sharing differ across space, time or with the type of product, skill or experience being shared?
• What new developments might sharing cities bring to urban transition debates?
• What new theoretical frameworks are necessary to fully comprehend sharing economies?
• In what ways, and to what end, do sharing economies forge new social relationships?
• To what extent does the sharing economy affect ownership patterns, access to resources, and/or the structure of participation.
• What impact do sharing economies have on resource efficiency, resource distribution, and consumption?
• To what extent can sharing economies transform mainstream business models?
• What impact will sharing economies have on employment and the nature of work?
• What is the sustainability impact of sharing economies and how might such impacts be conceptualise d or measured?
• What new approaches will be required to govern sharing economies?
• To what extent do we need a new regulatory framework for the sharing economy?
• To what extent is sharing an additional means of consumption rather than a substitute for mainstream consumption practices?
• What are the commonalities and differences between calls for a circular economy and those for a sharing economy?
• What is the potential role of the state in sharing economies?
• What are the limits to expanding sharing economies?
• Are sharing economies the logical extension of neoliberalism or an exemplar of diverse economies in practice?
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onsdag 6 maj 2015

ICT and sustainability - an introductory module

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KTH Sustainability Council (KTH-S) announced that they will fund a number of smaller projects during the next academic year (2015-2016) under the banner of "Environment and sustainability without boundaries". I very much like that KTH at different times and on different levels supports smaller, more action-oriented projects in this way (smaller shorter applications focused on carrying out smaller more practical projects). I wrote a blog post half a year ago where I in greater detail explained exactly why I like these calls for smaller projects. In that blog post I also mentioned that my colleague Elina Eriksson had handed in an application to last year's call for sustainability-related projects (her application was successful).

This time around I handed in an application of my own, "ICT and sustainability – a summarising module". A requirement is that the application points at some kind of cooperation beyond my own department/school, so this application is joint application between my department (me, Elina Eriksson) and two teachers at the school of Architecture and the Build Environment (Anna Kramers, Anna Björklund). What we have in common is that we are responsible for teaching three different courses about "ICT and sustainability" on three different ICT-related educational programmes.

The basic idea of the application is to cooperate in the creation of a smaller 1.5 credit module about ICT and sustainability that could be adapted to slot in to different courses on different levels in different educational programs in different schools at KTH. The module would constitute an intensive one-week (40 hours) primer on ICT and sustainability to be taught to students who do not study an ICT-related programme.

Despite the ambition to develop a generic module that can later be adapted to specific contexts, we also want to have a "procurer" involved in the process. This would be someone who can place some demands on the module (to fit a specific context) and who would hopefully also have us actually teach the module when it is finished. We have already initiated discussions with two different schools about this and the proposed implementation that we sketch out in our application looks like this:

Spring 2015:
- Recruit at least one procurer (who would be a person responsible for a course or an educational programme).

Early autumn 2015:
- Interview the procurers and discuss proposed adaptations.
- Draw on and discuss experiences from having given three different courses on ICT and sustainability.
- Brainstorm ideas and choose ideas that are useful for initial planning of the module.

Autumn 2015:
- Develop the module

Calendar year 2016:
- Give the module at least once but preferably twice in two different schools at KTH.

I think we put together a strong, realistic application and I think we have good chances to get it funded. Since these are small, lithe projects, the procedure for reviewing the applications is also lithe and we will get to know if our project is funded already in the beginning of next month.
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söndag 3 maj 2015

After after work

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I wrote a blog post last month about the seminar I have helped organise, "After work". The seminar was held 10 days ago and these are a few post-seminar reflections about it. We had booked a large lecture hall with 285 seats and we were out of seats some days in advance!

Two very timely articles were published in the two largest Swedish newspapers during the weekend just preceding the seminar:
   - "What happens when the jobs disappear?" (SvD, April 18)
   - "The technologies that take over your work" (DN, April 19)

Do note that while this text is written in English, most of the links that lead to texts and other resources in Swedish.

The 3-hour seminar was divided into three parts (one hour each);
   - 1) Current state of technical and economical factors (driving forces)
   - 2) The new and the lost jobs
   - 3) Effects on society and humans

The whole 3-hour seminar was fast-paced and each part of it had several guest speakers. The whole event was videotaped and is available on the web. Do also note these excellent resources in the form of newspaper and journal articles about the future of work (mostly in Swedish though)

The first part had two speakers:
   - Mikael Haglund, Technical Director at IBM Sweden presented technical drivers in his talk "The era of cognitive systems - Real expert systems and brain-mimicking chips"
   - Anna Breman, Senior Macro Analyst at Swedbank presented economic drivers in her talk "The future labor market - full of possibilities or just challenges?"

The second part had two new speakers:
   - Lars Ingelstam, Professor Emeritus from Dept. of Technology and Social Change at Linköping University talked about long-term labor market trends (e.g. historical developments) in his talk ""We live in a post-industrial society": Both right and wrong".
   - Darja Isaksson, digital strategist, concept developer and founder of Ziggy Creative Colony talked about the same topic but more oriented towards the present and the future in her talk "Sustainable growth is possible (but different)".

Lars and Darja were then joined in a panel discussion by two other guests:
   - Sara Modig, a consultant in innovation policy and former Senior Adviser at the Ministry of Industry
   -  Christofer Gradin Franzén, an economist and psychologist and the founder of "Hoffice" - a concept for pop-up offices.

The third part had three new speakers
   - Per Johansson, a human ecologist/historian has looked at the relationship between humans, technology and nature and gave a talk called "Why should the computer (not) do the job?".
   - Christina Andersson, a psychologist and researcher at the Centre for Social Sustainability at the Karolinska Institute talked about "Belonging - a prerequisite for human well-being and value creation".
   - Joel Halldorf, a church historian and lecturer at the School of Theology discussed existential perspectives on work in his talk "The Benedictine work policy".

I was a co-moderator of the second part together with Jonas Andersson Schwarz and I did thus not really have the luxury to relax and actually listen and think about what the speakers said. During the first part I instead listened attentively and searched for questions that I could ask our panelists and during the second part I was fully concentrated on monitoring, livening up and trying to tighten up and steer the discussion. The guests and us organisers finished the evening by having dinner together and it seemed like the speakers themselves were happy about the evening. Several persons have afterwards told me that the varied mix of speakers really added to the event. I even got a spontaneious e-mail from an acquaintance who wrote that the seminar was great and very relevant to the research project she is currently working in. It seems the whole event was a resounding success, people even raved about it when I tried to shoo that back in to the lecture hall after the break between the second and the third session.

The whole seminar (3 hours) is now available on the web. Do also note that the largest Swedish morning newspaper have published a series of articles of which heading of the most recent article was exceedingly similar to the title of our seminar, "After work - when computerisation takes away the jobs" (Roland Paulsen). Here's another great text (from the second largest newspaper) that was published a few weeks before the seminar, "Computers will take half the jobs 20 years from now" (Simon Winther).

The emphasis of the seminar was on width so it is inevitable that depth suffered some. It is hard to discuss and analyse a topic when there is a new speaker waiting for his/her 10 minutes to speak. I however thought it was remarkable that almost all speakers looked at the future with sanguinity. Despite may apocalyptic predictions (e.g. the newspaper articles above), most speakers thought this challenge (robots taking our jobs) will be solved in the medium- or the long term. It sounds like a cliche but one speaker mentioned how hard it would be to explain some of the jobs that are around today to people who lived 50 or 100 years ago; web developer, user experience architect, search engine optimiser etc. It is therefore equally hard for us to imagine what jobs our children and grandchildren will have a few decades from now. I personally thought there must be more to worry about and asked my four panelists if anyone harboured an "inner pessimist" we hadn't heard from yet - but no one chopped at that bait.

Still, I think all speakers agreed there is a problem in the short term (i.e. right now) since the people who lose their jobs to robots don't have the sought-after skills that are or will be in demand. Anna Breman used statistics that showed that highly skilled high-paying jobs have exploded during the last few decades while primarily middle-income jobs have been squeezed and while the "new normal" for unemployment would have been seen as unacceptable only a few decades ago, unemployment among those without a high-school degree is, at 20% open unemployment, four times higher than unemployment among those with a university education. It is hard to imagine that the labour market will not continue to become even more polarised in the near future.

Several speakers mentioned "the sharing economy" as a possible solutions. That's good news for me, but it's not clear of the sharing economy represents a purely positive development (sharing resources is good for the environment) or if it also represents a defensive position against "hard times" (people have to share more or become poor). I think it's fair to say that the majority of speakers imagined that wealth would exist and that the challenge would be how that wealth would be distributed. Will some (capitalists) be immensely rich while other are poor and belong to the lumpenproletariat or the precariat? Or will we find ways to "share nicely", e.g. an unconditional citizen's income/basic income? Another suggestion was that we should not strive to increase our salaries but rather decrease our work week and share the jobs more equitably. An issue that was raised repeatedly but not really discussed in depth was thus what our societies can do to prepare and to navigate the changes we go through. Several of the suggestions that are on the table and semi-revolutionary and not really something that can be fixed with little effort and in the short run as they go to the heart of what we believe about work, effort, rewards, justice etc.

Even though the organisers were busy organising, presenting and mediating discussions, I think we had many things we could have added to the discussion but this was of course not the time or the place to do that. Still, we have met regularly for some months and planning sessions have inevitably also veered into discussions about these and other issues. We will have a post-seminar meeting this coming week to discuss if and how we could continue to promote a discussion around these topics.

While this seminar was very central to discussions about social sustainability, my final comment here is that the perspective that I am primarily interested in, environmental sustainability, was not really discussed at all. There are definitely touch points between environmental sustainability, the sharing economy, basic income and a shorter work week, but there are also many touch points between environmental sustainability and the current economic system (built on continuous economic growth) that we did not touch upon at all. All speakers and all the future scenarios we discussed assumed a continuation of current trends, but what about climate change and resource scarcity? Would the trend of automatisation and robots continue to replace humans also in a steady-state or a shrinking economy? This would be personal number one question to discuss if the current conversation was to not only be continued but also expanded. Still, when all has been said and done, I think I and the other organisers can be very happy about the event.
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söndag 19 april 2015

Books I've read (February)

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This blog post concerns the books I read in February. The theme that unites these books is that they are all part of the Worldwatch Institute's series of "State of the World" books. I regularly write about books that I have read on the blog and here is the previous blog post. The asterisks below represent the number of quotes from the book that can be found further below.

The Worldwatch institute was formed in 1974 by Lester Brown and they have published State of the World reports since 1984. "The series attempts to identify the planet's most significant environmental challenges". Each of the reports (books) has a theme and since I bought the three books below, three new books have been published in this series: the 2013 report "Is Sustainability Still Possible?", the 2014 report "Governing for Sustainability" and the 2015 report "Confronting Hidden Threats to Sustainability". I didn't fully realise that each book would have a specific distinct theme when I bought State of the World 2010, 2011 and 2012 at the same time. If I buy more of these, I will probably be more discerning and choose books based on their themes. I'd have to say I found the 2011 report less interesting than the other two and that my favourite was the 2010 report. All in all, the books are excellently sourced, backing up their claims by referring to published research literature in the area. I find it curious that almost all of the numerous authors in these books are unknown to me. I guess many of them are activists or working for NGOs rather than academics and researchers at universities. Each books consists of around 15-20 chapters and despite being less than 200 pages each, they are also very compact and fact-filled so it's an effort to read 25 pages per day (which is my regular book-reading pace). 



**************** Beside the two editors, "State of the World 2010: Transforming cultures from Consumerism to Sustainability" also has a project director, Erik Assadourian. It is hard to understand the role of the project director in relation to the editors. I actually met Erik - the project director - at the "3rd International Conference on Degrowth, Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity" that I attended 2.5 years ago. He gave a keynote that was good and we also ended up in the same group of people having dinner together. In his keynote, he showcased the "Catan: oil springs" expansion for the game Settlers of Catan that Erik had co-designed. The expansion "was developed by the Transforming Cultures Project of the Worldwatch Institute for the purpose of creating awareness about the effects that the usage of oil has on the environment". Erik also wrote the very hard-hitting introduction to the book, "The rise and fall of consumer cultures".

The scope of the book is very comprehensive and as it is a book about "cultures" and cultural transformations - which are large topics. The book is divided into six parts and the first part, "Traditions old and new" consists of five chapters treating religions, rituals and taboos, childbearing, elders and agriculture. The other five parts of the book treats education, business, government, media and social movements. From the back cover of the book:

"Many of the environmental and social problems we face today are symptoms of a deeper systemic failing: a dominant cultural paradigm that encourages living in ways that are often directly counter to the realities of a finit planet. This paradigm, typically referred to as 'consumerism,' has already spread to cultures around the world and has let to consumption levels that are vastly unsustainable. If this pattern spreads further there will be little possibility of solving climate change or other environmental problems that are poised to dramatically disrupt human civilization. It will take a sustained, long-term effort to redirect the traditions, social movements and institutions that shape consumer cultures towards becoming cultures of sustainability. ... Bringing about a cultural shift that makes living sustainably as 'natural' as a consumer lifestyle is today will not only address urgent crises like climate change, it could also tackle other symptoms like extreme income inequality, obesity and social isolation that are not typically seen as environmental problems."



************ "State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet" looks at food production with an emphasis on the rural population in poor, typically African countries. It is very impressive to realise that many of the authors either live or have travelled extensively in these countries. Many have also worked with a number of different practical projects. The authors are thus people who are in the known compared to us armchair scientists sitting in our comfortable armchairs and having an absolute belief in our "solutions" to what ails the world (e.g. a black-and-white picture of ecological vs industrial agriculture). The issue of food turns out to be very complicated the more you know about it. We usually only think of food in terms of quantity (sufficiency) and its opposite - famine. After having read this book I however understand that there are many more factors that are important, including land ownership, power, corruption, the status of women, education, the quality of storage facilities and access to markets (including basic transportation infrastructures), cultural preference and habits, nutritional value of different seeds, hunger, farmers' views of risks vs rewards (you are very conservative and risk-aversive is you are responsible for feeding your family and there is little surplus), the individual vs the collective, urban farming and so on. Despite my new understanding of the complexity of the issues, this is not a topic I know a lot about and not something I plan to become an expert in so while useful as a primer, the book was not of a particular interest to me. From the back cover:

"The world's food system has come to a crossroads. Nearly half a century after the Green Revolution, people are still chronically hungry. At the same time, investments in agricultural developments by governments, international lenders, and foundations are at historical lows. Over the last two years, the Worldwatch Institute's Nourishing the Planet team has traveled to 25 sub-Saharan African nations - the places where the hunger is greatest and rural communities have struggled the most - and uncovered a rich and diverse treasure trove of innovations from farmers' groups, private voluntary organizations, universities, and even agribusiness companies. What's more, there are global lessons and benefits to be gleaned from Africa - from the continent's role in preventing disastrous climate change to the way urban farmers are feeding people in cities"



*************** "State of the World 2012: Moving towards sustainable prosperity" is a little all over the place, treating topics such as increasing inequality, governance, the greening of the economy, how businesses operate, on the balance between shareholder vs societal interests etc. Erik Assadourian was again one of the two project directors and he wrote a great chapter in the book, "The path to degrowth in overdeveloped countries". The book was however very focused on the then-upcoming Rio+20 meeting so despite being only a few years old, the book unfortunately already felt partly dated. From the back cover:

"In 1992, governments at the Rio Earth Summit made a historic commitment met sustainable development - an economic system that promotes the health of both people and ecosystems. Twenty years and several summits later, human civilization has never been closer to ecological collapse, one third of humanity lives in poverty, and another 2 billion people are projected to join the human race over the next 40 years. How will we move toward sustainable prosperity equitably shared among all even as our population grows, our cities strain to accommodate more and more people, and our ecological systems decline? To promote discussion around this vital topic at the Rio+20 U.N. Conference and beyond, State of the World 2012 ... showcases innovative projects, creative policies, and fresh approaches that are advancing sustainable development in the twenty-first century."



                                                           

----- On consumer culture as "natural" but unsustainable  -----

"Human beings are embedded in cultural systems, are shaped and constrained by their cultures, and for the most part act only within the cultural realities of their lives. The cultural norms, symbols, values, and traditions a person grows up with become "natural." Thus, asking people who live in consumer cultures to curb consumption is akin to asking them to stop breathing - they can do it for a moment, but then, gasping, they will inhale again. Driving cars, flying in planes, having large homes, using air conditioning ... these are not decadent choices but simply natural parts of life - at least according to the cultural norms present in a growing number of consumer cultures in the world. Yet ... these patterns are neither sustainable nor innate manifestations of human nature. ... Preventing the collapse of human civilization requires nothing less than a wholesale transformation of dominant cultural patterns. This transformation would reject consumerism - the cultural orientation that leads people to find meaning, contentment, and acceptance through what they consume"
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.3


----- On the human footprint vs sustainable levels of resource consumption  -----

"it is the rich who have the largest homes, drive cars, jet around the world, use large amounts of electricity, eat more meat and processed foods, and buy more stuff - all of which has significant ecological impact. Granted, higher incomes do not always equate with increase consumption, but where consumerism is the cultural norm, the odds of consuming more go up when people have more money, even for ecologically conscious consumers. ... Indeed, if everyone lived like Americans, Earth could sustain only 1.4 billion people. ... But even at middle-income levels - the equivalent of what people in Jordan and Thailand earn on average today - Earth can sustain fewer people than are alive today. These numbers convey a reality that few want to confront: in today's world of 6.8 billion, modern consumption patterns - even at relatively basic levels - are not sustainable."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.6



----- On leverage points for changing a (cultural) system  -----

"In an analysis on places to intervene in a system, Donella Meadows explained that the most effective leverage point for changing a system is to change the paradigm of the system - that is to say, the shared ideas or basic assumptions around which the system functions. In the case of the consumerism paradigm, the assumptions that need to change include that more stuff makes people happier, that perpetual growth is good, that humans are separate from nature, and that nature is a stock of resources to be exploited for human purpose. ... Yes, altering a system's rules (with legislation, for instance) or its flow rates (with taxes or subsidies) can change a system too, but not as fundamentally. These will typically produce only incremental changes. Today more systemic change is needed.
...
Just as a consumerism paradigm encourages people to define their well-being through their consumption patterns, a sustainability paradigm would work to find an alternative set of aspirations and reinforce this through cultural institutions and drivers. ... It should become "natural" to find value and meaning in life through how much a person helps restore the planet rather than how much that individual earns, how large a home is, or how many gadgets someone has."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.16



----- On creating modern rituals to decrease flying  -----

"Peter Sawtell, a minister in Colorado ... explores the link between spirituality and environmentalism. He has proposed that long-distance travel, especially flying, become a ritualized experience, with the Muslim ritual of the Hajj - the once-in-a-lifeime pilgrimage to Mecca - being the gold-standard model. ... while a once-in-a-lifetime trip may be too strict a standard for most people, Sawtell suggests that once a decade or "once a life-stage" (adolescence, adulthood, retirement) might be helpful in thinking about long-distance travel. In the process, he suggests, people may find that less is more: they might appreciate travel and use it more meaningfully than when it was cheap and the environmental impact was ignored."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.35



----- On globalization being a one-way street, shifting values from us to them but never the other way  -----

"One negative consequence of globalization is that western individualistic, consumer-oriented, youth-focused values - communicated through multiple international and national media and institutional channels - are undermining positive traditions and values of more collectivist sociocultural systems. In many cases, these traditions and values provide the basis for the society's sustainable use and development of both natural and human resources. ... In western individualist societies ... attitudes toward elders are generally tainted by negative images of ageing. Within the globalization of culture, increasingly ageist attitudes are being disseminated and slowly permeating non-western cultures as well. ... Globalizaiton involves a virtually one-way dissemination of western cultural images and values toward non-western societies."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.41-43



----- On improving the capacity of the land to produce as a worthy goal  -----

"Twentieth-century agriculture has badly degraded nearly every ecosystem it has encountered while consuming roughly 20 percent of world energy production. The style called "conventional" depends for nearly all of its workings on a dwindling and increasingly expensive supply of fossil fuels. Sustainable agriculture, in contrast, can be pursued indefinitely because it does not degrade or deplete the resources that it needs to continue. Since most of Earth's arable land is already under cultivation and human populations are continuing to expand, an even better goal would be to actually improve the capacity of the land to produce."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.50



----- On creative play as an anti-capitalist/countercultural activity?  -----

"Among the most troubling ramifications of allowing marketers unfettered access to children is the erosion of creative play, which is central to healthy development. ... Babies are born with an innate capacity to play. When commercial interests dominate a culture, however, nurturing creative play can become countercultural: it is a threat to corporate profits. Children who play creatively are not as dependent on consumer goods for having fun. Their playfulness, as well as their capacity for joy and engagement, rests mainly within themselves and what they bring to the world rather than what the world brings to them."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.62-63



----- A worthy goal for us educators  -----

"The scientific evidence suggests that the years ahead will test coming generations in extraordinary ways. Educators are obliged to tell the truth about such things but then to convert the anxiety that often accompanies increased awareness of danger to positive energy that can generate constructive changes. Environmental education must be an exercise in applied hope that equips young people with the skills, aptitudes, analytic wherewithal, creativity, and stamina to dream, act, and lead heroically. To be effective on a significant scale, however, the creative energies of the rising generation must be joined with strong and bold institutional leadership to catalyse a future better than the one in prospect."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.82



----- Our institutions and laws are still adapted to a 19th century "empty" world  -----

"Today's dominant worldviews and institutions emerged during the early Industrial Revolution, when the world was still relatively empty of humans and their built infrastructure. Natural resources were abundant, social settlements were more sparse, and the main limit on improving human well-being was inadequate access to infrastructure and consumer goods. Current ideas about what is desirable and what is possible were forged in this empty-world context [but] the world has changed dramatically over the past two centuries. It is now a "full" world, where increasingly complex technologies and institutions, mounting resource constraints, and a decreasing energy return on investment have made human society more brittle - and hence more susceptible to collapse. Laws and policies that incorporate the empty-world vision are legion. The 1872 Mining Act in the United States, for example, was designed to promote minerals mining and economic growth. It did this by essentially giving away the right to mine on public lands while collecting no royalties and requiring no environmental protection. The act is still in force, even though conditions have changed dramatically. The consequence has been massive environmental destruction and a giveaway of public wealth to private interests.
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.85



----- On Scandinavia leading the way towards a more sustainable world  -----

"The ecological capacity of Earth is not expanding, while humanity's footprint is. ... The challenge in terms of our fixation on growth is how to get started on a new course. Obviously nobody can expect the Chinese or the Indians to take the initiative on non-growth thinking. At the moment, it looks rather unlikely that any major industrial country will lead the way. But maybe a rich, well-educated country could - a country like Norway or Sweden. With a small population and ample resources, perhaps Scandinavia could lead the way and demonstrate the feasibility of a vision of what the good life in a steady state economy would look like: less hours worked, less stuff, less stress, more time with family and friends, more time for civic engagement, more leisure. It will not be easy, but it is necessary."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.87

Comment: The text above is written by Øystein Dahle, ex-vice president of Esso Norway from 1985 to 1995.



----- On time as a substitute for natural resources and vice versa  -----

"to a great extent, time and natural resources are substitutes for each other: doing things faster usually takes a greater toll on Earth. So time-stressed households and societies tend to have heavier ecological footprints and greater per capita energy use. In the transition to sustainable cultures and economies, people are going to have to adapt to new schedules and temporal rhythms. The culture of long working hours and excessive busy-ness that characterizes a number of wealthy countries will need to be replaced by more sustainable patterns of time use."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.91



----- On "choice editing" (ex. nudging) vs product labels  -----

"he asks "why should the consumer be the one left in the supermarket aisle to agonize over complex issues such as animal welfare, carbon footprints, workers' rights and excessive packaging, often without any meaningful data on the label to inform their decision-making?' Why, in other words, don't producers and governments shift their current choice-editing practices so that consumers choose only among a range of environmentally "good" products? ... Product labelling is an important component in the transformation of consumer societies into sustainable ones. Yet experience suggests that when product information is made available ... it influences no more than a minority of shoppers - and not nearly enough, not fast enough, and consistently enough to drive the transformation of consumer life required by a planet under stress."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.123



----- On reasons for dying  -----

"The major contributors to global mortality today are for the most part preventable. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), childhood and maternal malnutrition cause an estimated 200 million "years of life lost" annually, followed by physical inactivity and obesity (150 million years), unsafe sex (80 million years), and tobacco (50 million years). A study of the "actually causes of death" in the United states in 2000 lists tobacco as the number one killer, with poor diet and physical inactivity coming in a close second. ... The two principal therapies in medicine's black bag - surgery and pharmacy - are largely irrelevant to the new disorders of ageing and poor lifestyle choices. ... From a financial perspective, prevention pays poorly, while sickness pays."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p. 138-139



----- On nature (not) having any rights  -----

"most contemporary legal systems do not recognize that any indigenous inhabitants other than humans are capable of having rights. The law defines land, water, other species, and even genetic material and information as "property," which entrenches an exploitative relationship between the owner (a legal subject with rights) and the property (legally speaking a "thing" incapable of holding rights). ... current legal systems are designed to perpetuate human domination of nature instead of fostering mutually beneficial relationships between humans and other members of the Earth community. ... In fact, environmental laws mainly regulate how quickly natural communities are destroyed rather then preventing the destruction."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p. 144-146



----- On the gap between knowing and doing  -----

"Moving beyond facts and information alone is critical because when it comes to taking action, humans tend not to be rational actors. In the wake of the 1970s energy crisis, researcher Scott Geller demonstrated this when he exposed research participants to three hours of slide shows, lectures, and other educational materials about residential energy consumption. The result? Participants were more aware of energy issues, understood more about how they could save energy in their homes, but failed to change their behavior."
L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p. 154-155



----- A definition of ecovillages  -----

"The commonly accepted definition of ecovillages, provided in 1991 by [...] Robert Gilman, is "human-scale, full-featured settlements in which human activities are harmlessly integrated into the natural world in a way that is supportive of healthy human development and can be successfully continued into the indefinite future.""

L. Starke, & L. Mastny (Eds.) (2010). "State of the World 2010", p.185





----- On producing more food but having more hunger at the same time  -----

"We live in a world in which we produce more food than ever before and in which the hungry have never been as many. There is a reason for this: for too many years we have focused on increasing food availability while neglecting both the distributional impacts of food production and their long-term environmental impacts. We have succeeded, remarkably, in increasing yields. But we must now realize that we can produce more and yet fail to tackle hunger at the same time ... In agricultural and food policies ... we realize how fragile our current food systems are. As a result of both demographic growth and a lack of investment in agriculture in a number of developing countries, particularly i sub-Saharan Africa, many countries' dependence on international markets has increased significantly. That represent a heavy burden, particularly when prices spike as a result of speculative bubbles forming on the markets for agricultural commodities - and especially since higher food bills are typically combined with higher prices for oil."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.xvii-xviii



----- On the effects of the Green Revolution  -----

"we now understand that increasing the production of food and eradicating hunger and malnutrition are two very different objectives - complementary perhaps, but not necessarily linked. It took a generation to understand that the "Green Revolution" package of irrigation, mechanization, high-yielding seed varieties, and chemical fertilizers may have to be fundamentally revised in order to be more sustainable, both socially and environmentally. ... The Green Revolution did not reach the poorest farmers working on the most marginal soils. It largely bypassed women, because women had less access to credit than men, received less support from extension services, and could not afford the inputs on which the technological revolution was based. It sometimes locked cash-strapped farmers into a dependence on high-value external inputs. It switched from labor-intensive forms of production to a capital-intensive agricultural model, accelerating rural flight in the absence of alternative jobs."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.xviii



----- On ecological vs industrial farming in the rest of the world  -----

"The debate on whether agroecological production practice in ecoagriculture landscapes will be able to meet the entire global food demand is misplaces. ... Globally, only a minority of agricultural lands are in large contiguous areas of intensive, high-yield monocultures on the industrial model, though these account for a large share of total production and international trade. A majority of farms are in mosaic landscapes with considerable opportunity to use uncultivated areas for conservation purposes and to help farming communities sustain or restore ecosystem values while increasing agricultural yields and achieving broader rural development goals. Moreover, only 10 percent of the world's food production enters international trade. ... domestic production for domestic consumption will still ... remain dominant in terms of land area and total output, especially in low-income countries with large rural populations. Thus most countries will need to learn how to grow more food while doing better at protecting ecosystem services and sustaining rural communities.
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.23



----- On staple crops vs vegetables  -----

"the sad fact is that while Africa may be adequately fed by staple crops, it will not be nourished until diets improve. Otherwise, millions of people, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, will remain vulnerable to ailments that compromise their mental and physical fitness. Worldwide, diseases related to imbalanced diets, especially insufficient vegetable and fruit consumption, cause 2.7 million deaths annually and are among the top mortality risk factors ... Staple crops, with their long cropping cycles, tend to be more vulnerable to environmental threats and the risk of crop failure. In contrast, vegetable crop species have shorter cycles, are faster growing, require little space, and thus are very dependable. ... Vegetables are the sustainable solution for a diversified and balanced diet."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.28



----- On food self-sufficiently and food security  -----

"One strategy put forth for water-stressed countries is that they should import water indirectly through grain to help balance their water budgets and meet their food needs. On average it takes about 1,500 tons of water to produce one ton of grain, so it can make sense for water-scarce countries to import more of their staple foods and save their water for manufacturing and other higher-valued enterprises. But for poor, food-importing countries, this is a risky proposition. Most cannot afford the imports, and even if they can, the imported grains rarely make their way to the table of the hungry. One of the most important lessons of the last half-century of global agriculture is that food security rarely trickles down to the very poor. Moreover, the food riots that erupted in Senegal, Mauritania, Haiti, and some half-dozen other countries as grain prices soared in 2007 and 2008 are likely a harbinger of what is to come. With global grain and oil markets increasingly uncertain, a degree of food self-sufficiency may be crucial for food security."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.47



----- On the connection between fuel, food and fertilizer  -----

"The world has now used up all its cheap energy ... The problem here is that most of the price of the nitrogen in a bag of fertilizer - and nitrogen is the element that African farmers most need - pays for the energy required to turn that nitrogen into fertilizer. Thus when energy prices rise, the price of the chemical fertilizer most needed in Africa also rises. And at today's prices, nitrogen-based fertilizer is no longer feasible for Africa's small-scale producers of basic grains. Farmers who spend $40 on chemical fertilizer will probably not increase their harvest of basic grains by even $35. As an investment, fertilizer no longer pays. So within the next year or two, the vast majority of Africa's subsistence farmers who use chemical fertilizer will have to give it up, which will cause a one-time drop in productivity of anywhere from 30 to 50 percent.
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.61



----- On the failure of traditional agricultural methods to cope with impoverished fields  -----

"Throughout Mali, farmers 20 years ago routinely fallowed their land for 10-15 years. Now ... they cannot fallow it more than 2 years. If they do, farmers without any productive land will ask for permission to farm the fallowed fields, claiming that the owners must no longer need them. In some countries, fights over land have erupted, sometimes resulting in deaths.
...
The villagers of Africa, as always, have a series of traditional coping mechanisms. One respons to soil infertility has always been to move somewhere else. Whole villages would pick up and move to a new site where the soils were more fertile. But the population explosion has pushed people onto most previously unpopulated lands. Except for small bits of forest, very little land is left in the subhumid and semiarid areas that is not in use. Even the forests are rapidly being converted to farmland."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.63



----- On the "unnatural" supply chains of the modern world  -----

"Both consumers and producers in Africa would be less vulnerable if they depended on the local market ... rather than the international market, conditioned by speculation and external interests. ... African supermarkets typically contain very few products that have been domestically produced. Instead, they sell products imported from Europe, the United States, Asia, and even South America: fresh and powdered milk, baguettes and mayonnaise, lettuce that has been flown thousands of kilometres. Even staples like rice or corn are sometimes imported and, incredibly, they usually cost less than the locally grown products. Yet the traditional products are almost always better from a nutritional perspective, as in the case with local grains like fonio in Senegal compared with white rice from Thailand. Meanwhile, poor-quality imported processed foods, heavy in salt, fat, and sugar, are unbalancing diets, particularly in the cities, and leading to health problems."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.79



----- On institutionalised food waste  -----

"cornucopian abundance ... has fostered a culture in which staggering levels of "deliberate" food waste are now accepted or even institutionalized. Waste is now an unfortunate - and unnecessary - corollary to wealthy nations' burgeoning food supplies. Throwing away cosmetically "imperfect" produce on farms, discarding edible fish at sea, disposing of breadcrusts in sandwich factories, overordering stock for supermarkets, and purchasing or cooking too much in the home are all examples of a profligate negligence toward food."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.99-100



----- On why poverty and hunger can not be reduced to agricultural yields  -----

"Too often, the issue of food security gets reduced to a sound bite to "feed 9 billion by 2050" that in turn is wrapped around a new and possibly genetically modified seed. But while magic bullets are enticing, they are far from a comprehensive solution. Indeed they amount to a simplistic, even misguided, approach if divorced from the larger context of agriculture: where and how the farmer gets seed and inputs and how much he or she pays for them; whether there is ample labor and equipment; whether timely extension advice is available; whether there are viable markets to sell the crop; whether prices are transparent; and whether, at the end the day, the farmers have made enough money to buy food and send their kids to school, and perhaps even to lift themselves out of poverty. A seed and a sound bite do not address these problems, nor will the single-minded aim of more production without attention to these details"
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.144



----- On low-tech vs high-tech solutions in African agriculture  -----

"It is striking how few of the development success stories described in this book depends to any significant degree on cutting-edge scientific and technological breakthroughs. Indeed, access to simple, low-cost, durable, easy-to-maintain tools and techniques to accomplish everyday tasks is a far more common ingredient in successful projects than cutting-edge technologies or system changes made possible by science breakthroughs.
...
GE [genetic engineering] technology and input-intensive systems generally focus one intervention on one problem, with the goal of keeping in check the damage caused by pests or problems arising from imbalances in a farming system. ... Western societies have been able and willing to contain and deal with such collateral damage through complex and costly regulatory programs and ongoing research and surveillance. Is it realistic to expect African and Asian countries to do the same?"
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.169-171



----- On why large companies have little incentive in solving the problems of poor small-scale farmers  -----

"Until recently, governments, universities, multilateral organizations, and other public institutions have set priorities and paid for most science and technology development in the area of agriculture and food systems. The private sector accepted a significant degree of dependence on and guidance from public institutions in pursuing food system R&D. The transition to private-sector dominance of agricultural R&D began in the 1970s, accelerated in the 1980s as the profit potential of genetic engineering came into focus, and was essentially compete by the turn of the century. ... Private companies are bound by law in most countries to maximize economic returns to their investors. It is a stretch for a major corporation to deliver the customary profit margin ... when the company is a partner in a development project serving the needs of small-scale farmers in poor regions of the world."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2011). "State of the World 2011", p.170




----- Money wasn't made for the poor  -----

"The global consumer class, about a billion people or so, mostly lives in western industrial countries, but the last two decades have witnessed the emergence of growing numbers of high consumer in countries like China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Indonesia. Another 1-2 billion people globally aspire to the consumer life and may be able to acquire some of its trappings. But the remainder of humanity - including the "bottom of the pyramid," the most destitute - have little hope of ever achieving such a life. The global economy is not designed for their benefit. .. it would be a mistake to regard the steady expansion of the global consuption-intensive industrial economy as a surefire path toward overcoming poverty and social marginalization. ... In many cases, growth has been accompanied by increased inequality.
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.5



----- On "the green economy"  -----

"While the term "green economy" has gained currency, its meaning is still up for interpretation among governments, corporations, and civil society groups. UNEP defines a green economy quite broadly as one that results in "improved human well-being and social equity, while significantly reducing environmental risks and ecological scarcities. In its simplest expression, a green economy is low carbon, resource efficient, and socially inclusive." UNEP argues that "the greening of economies need not be a drag on growth. On the contrary, the greening of economies has the potential to be a new engine of growth, a net generator of decent jobs, and a vital strategy to eliminate persistent poverty." The extent to which a green economy and economic growth are compatible is open to question, however. ... Making a difference in the quest for sustainability will require an absolute decoupling of economic performance and materials use.
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.7-8



----- On productivity and (green) jobs  -----

"One problem with the current economy is that it relies too much on limited and polluting resources such as fossil fuels and too little on an abundant resource - people. While greater labor productivity has undoubtedly been an engine of progress over time, its single-minded pursuit is turning into a curse. From here on, progress requires a greater focus on energy, materials, and water productivity instead. Employment at adequate incomes is key to making an economy work for people, and therefore the transition to a green economy requires particular attention to good-quality jobs that contribute to preserving or restoring environmental quality."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.10-11



----- On the materials flow of the linear throwaway economy  -----

"At the base of the brown economy is the large-scale extraction of natural resources. Mining of ores and minerals grew a staggering 27-fold during the twentieth century, outstripping the rate of economic growth. Now that easily exploited deposits have largely been exhausted, environmental impacts of mining are bound to worsen. Already, about three times more rock and other material needs to be removed now than a century ago in order to extract the same quantity of ore. A throwaway economy means that waste streams keep expanding along with mining. ... More than 1 billion tons of metals, paper, rubber, plastics, glass, and other material are recycled each year. But that is only one tenth the amount of waste collected."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.16-17



----- On green growth vs more radical transformations of the global economy  -----

"society is so committed to growth that even many environmentalist and sustainable development experts still advocate for "green growth," or just the decoupling of growth from material consumption. As Harald Welzer, author of Mental infrastructures: How growth entered the world and our souls, notes, "The current debated on decoupling ... serves above all to maintain the illusion that we can make a sufficient number of minor adjustments in order to reduce the negative environmental consequences of economic growth while leaving our present system intact."
...
Indeed, when adding up all indirect and direct forms of consumption, in 2000 the average American used 88 kilograms of resources a day and the average European 43 kilograms a day - numbers that need to contract tremendously to be sustainable, especially in the context of growing consumption demands by developing countries."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.24-15



----- On the global transport sector energy use  -----

"Global transport sector energy use has been growing steadily by about 2-2.5 percent a year since 1970 and is forecast to grow even more quickly in the future. Although the average fuel economy of vehicle engines has improved over time, increases in average vehicle weight, vehicle kilometers traveled, and vehicle fleet size have all led to continued growth in the transport energy consumed and related social costs. In 1990 there were 500 million cars in the world; today there are nearly 800 million, and the IEA forecasts that by 2050 there will be between 2 billion and 3 billion. That means that for every car struck in traffic today there will be three or four in 2050. The additional energy use by the transport sector from such rapid growth in vehicles and vehicle activity would far outstrip any reductions from vehicle fuel efficiency improvements"
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.56-57



----- On the costs and the benefits of motorization  -----

"Without a good public transportation system, the urban poor are further marginalized by their location. This social exclusion affects many aspects of a city-dweller's life, including access to employment, health care, education, markets, and social and cultural events. ... Investments that increase car dependence tend to also increase average trip lengths and to put more jobs and opportunities out of reach of the poor. ... Today road accidents are the ninth leading cause of death worldwide, but by 2030 they are expected to be the fifth leading cause. ... Nearly half of these deaths will be of pedestrians and cyclists killed by drivers. ... the costs of motorization are disproportionately borne by the poorest segments of society, even though these groups often have little or no access to the mobility benefits from motorization."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.58-59



----- On the primacy of shareholder values  -----

"By the early nineteenth century, two major innovations in corporate form emerged as the dominant architecture ... The dual forces of the joint stock and limited liability became the pillars of unprecedented growth in the size, complexity, and profitability of large corporations. The corporation as a remote, tradable asset held by anonymous investors decoupled from management, operations, and community took root. At the same time, labor as a factor of production akin to raw material whose cost should be minimized became deeply embedded in the world's surging industrial economies. These attributes put in place the defining characteristic of the modern corporation, namely the primacy of capital (that is, shareholder) interests. ... shareholder primacy created conditions that would spur many of the social movements that pitted the rights of capital against the rights of labor ... a central feature of advanced economies to this day."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.89



----- Due for later this year but don't hold your breath just yet  -----

"Imagine the following scenario: In 2015 ... an alliance of global business leaders forges an improbable coalition with civil society and labor organizations. ... the alliance steps forward to say: We are here to declare that business-as-usual is not an adequate response to the expectations, risks, and opportunities for corporations in the twenty-first century. We therefore are advocating a change in the rules governing corporations, a new social contract that recognizes that companies exist at the pleasure of citizens expressed through democratic government processes that provide the rule of law, the stability, and the physical and technological infrastructure upon which all companies depend. The mantra of shareholder value is antithetical to the core values of sustainable development, which is the only long-term pathway to build the prosperous companies and prosperous societies upon which our collective well-being depends. We commit to creating new global, national, and local governance mechanisms with the authority and resources to encourage and enforce a new generation of corporate accountability and adherence to a new set of principles for corporate design. These principles will provide the beacon for an emergent view of the corporation built on a partnership between people and the biosphere."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.93-94



----- On the ideal relationship between corporations and society  -----

"Corporation 20/20 ... has explored the challenges of repurposing and redesigning corporations. ... the network developed six Principles of Corporate Redesign as the pillars of its research, advocacy, and public communications. ...
Principle 1. The purpose of the corporation is to harness private interests to serve the public interest. Why does society create laws that allow corporations to exist? To serve the public interest, the paramount purpose of all democratic systems. The license to operate is not an entitlement; it is a privilege. It should be granted with terms and conditions aligned with the vision of a just and sustainable society and be subject to periodic review and renewal based on adherence to such vision. ... Where private and public interest conflict, the public interest must prevail. Principle 1 rejects the characterization of the corporation as an insular entity freely marketable without constraints and detached from the broader society in which it operates. Instead, it positions the corporation as inseparable from, and ultimately accountable to broader society interests."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.96



----- The case against pets  -----

"Today, the large population of dogs, cats, and other companion animals is having a serious impact on the world's environment. ... Just in terms of food, a large dog uses 0.36 global hectares of resources per year, a small dog 0.18, and a cat 0.13 hectares. For comparison, a person in Bangladesh uses on average 0.6 hectares of resources a year in total. ... an American dog owner typically spends anywhere from $4,000 to $100,000 on a dog over its lifetime. ... policymakers should recognize that pet ownership is a luxury and should make it costlier to own pets, perhaps through a steeper pet license fee or a tax on dog and cat food. ... there should be better oversight of the pet industry, which has an industry strategy of "humanizing" pet populations so that people will seek out pets to fill companion gaps and spend more on them. ... This may curb some pet purchases and may also reduce excessive purchases for current pets - whether that is extra food (many pets are overweight due to overfeeding), clothing, fancy toys, pet spa treatments, and end-of-life medical care that is more sophisticated than many people in developing countries have access to."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.124



----- On women's and men's varying preferences for how many children they want  -----

"men, free of the physical hazards and discomforts of child-bearing and usually investing much less time than women do in childrearing, tend in ost countries to want more children than their partners do. ... women in almost all developing countries express a desire for fewer children than they end up having, as well as fewer children than men want. The more children a woman has, the more likely she is to want fewer additional ones than her partner."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.125



----- On the proportion of retired vs working-age people in society  -----

"Higher proportions of older people in any population are a natural consequence of longer life spans and women's intentions to have fewer children, neither of which societies should want to reverse. The appropriate way to deal with population aging is to make necessary social adjustments, increasing labor participation and mobilizing older people themselves to contribute to such adjustments, for instance, rather than urging or offering incentives to women to have more children than they think best. Population aging is a short-term phenomenon that will pass before the end of this century, with impacts far less significant and long-lasting than ongoing population growth, a point policymakers need to understand better."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.127



----- On the need for going from empty-world to full-world economics  -----

"In pursuit of unending material growth, western society has increasingly favored institutions that promote the private sector over the public and commons sectors, capital accumulation by the few over asset building by the many, and finance over the production of real goods and services. ... This view of what "prosperity" means emerged when the world was still relatively empty of humans and their built infrastructure  Natural resources were abundant, social settlements were sparser, and inadequate access to infrastructure represented the main limit on improvements to human well-being. Much has changed in the last century, however. The human footprint has grown so large that in many cases real progress is constrained more by limits on the availability of natural resources and ecosystem services than by limits on build capital infrastructure."
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.177



----- On what should be part of the commons  -----

"We need institutions that use an appropriate combination of private, state, and common property rights systems to establish clear property rights over ecosystems without privatizing them. One such category of institutions is the commons sector, which would be responsible for managing existing common assets and for creating new ones. Some assets should be held in common because it is more just; these include resources created by nature or by society as a whole - for example, a freshwater environment created by nature or common knowledge created by society. Others should be held in common because it is more efficient; these include nonrival resources for which price rationing creates artificial shortages (information) or rival resources (goods that are used up through consumption) that generate nonrival benefits, such as trees filtering water to make it drinkable. Others should be held in common because it is more sustainable; these include essential common pool resources and public goods such as clean air.
L. Starke (Ed.) (2012). "State of the World 2012", p.180-181
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