Designing Ecological Habitats - Gaia Education

20 Designing ecological Habitats
The Annual Deficit
becomes an Ecological
Debt.
Billion Hectares
24
20
16
12
8
4
0
1961-2003
Footprint vs.
Biocapacity, in
Land Area
Ecological Footprint
Earth’s Biocapacity
2003-2100
Projected Footprint (Business as
Usual) vs. Diminishing Biocapacity,
in Land Area
Accumulated
ecological debt
by 2050 is 34
planet years
1960 1980 2000 2020 2040 2060 2080 2100
probably halve the First World’s standard of living. It would certainly halve
the value of many currencies and economies. If the decline were a mere 3.5
percent, the halving time would extend out to 2040, but resource depletion
being exponential, the curve inevitably steepens as time goes on. Descent
might also be marked by stair-step plateaus, ‘green shoots’ to use the current
parlance, punctuated by more breathtaking drops.
Our collective challenge is not gardening, bioregional reinhabitation
or even restoring the climate. We know now that all of those are do-able.
The challenge is to reform an economy based on exponential growth so
that it functions well in an unrelenting pattern of decline and descent, a
pattern that is at odds with our evolutionary experience and perhaps even
our biological meta-program.
The Conclusion
All of the necessary changes are not only do-able, they are being done in
myriad ecovillages around the globe. A sustainable future, as best we can
divine it, provides each requisite for human survival – food, shelter, heating
and cooling, cooking, the daily activities of commerce and ennobling
pursuits – but with a new, added mandate to separately or in combination
sequester more greenhouse gases than we emit.
The suite of village self-audit tools provided by the Global Ecovillage
Network offers helpful guidance and monitoring metrics. 8 District heating
from a local biomass or waste product, employing pyrolysing kilns that cogenerate
electricity while producing biochar, are already in prototype,
marking a path to renewable, carbon-negative community housing, food
and power supplies. Anticipating climate change, ecovillages on six
continents are constructing and occupying self-heating and self-cooling
buildings, using materials with low embodied energy that absorb carbon
from the atmosphere and provide more than mere warmth and shelter, but