This page provides a glossary of terms beginning ‘E’. Each term usually provides links to other relevant materials on the FRAW site, and/or to Wikipedia and other on-line sources.
Ecological foot-printing is an accounting process used to estimate and add-up the wider pollution or ecological damaged caused by producing certain products – allowing legislators or consumers to choose the products which cause the least damage. While a useful tool, the foot-printing model has key flaws in relation to the accuracy of the data used, and especially that it focuses on products rather than the wider impacts of the system which creates them – and so cannot compare to other models of production which might give very different results. Ecological footprinting is often used as the basis for blaming the public for consuming certain products, in order to get them to change brands or buy ‘ethical’ alternative. There is scope to use the information produced by ecological footprinting to inform action and policy change, but as yet few campaign groups do so because it requires tackling highly contentious issues of ‘lifestyle change’.
‘Ecological limits’ are the concept that, within a finite Earth system, there are limits to the quantities of energy and resources which may be extracted, or pollution which may be generated, before a resource depletes or critical Earth systems required for the maintenance of human well-being breakdown. Environmental studies estimate the ability of the natural environment to produce resources or absorb pollution. Then ecological footprinting assesses the level of consumption/pollution that the human system is causing in order to approximate our compliance with these limits. Sometimes the limits are expressed as a single issue, such as the ‘carbon budgets’ used to plan the allowable levels of carbon emissions to restrict climate change; sometimes these limits are presented as a multi-faceted measure of the human system, such as ‘planetary boundaries’. The academic research on ecological limits are in turn the basis for the prediction of the human ‘Limits to Growth’ (LtG).
Ecomodernism is a materialist reaction to the challenge posed by ‘deep green’ environmentalism. Rather than stress the need for cutting consumption of limiting development, ecomodernists argue that technological change and innovation can create sufficient changes to the human system without the need for radical changes to lifestyle – or, as in the case of vertical greenhouses or artificial meat, it proposes eliminating certain damaging operations by replacing them with technological processes which, they argue, eliminate damaging ecological impacts. In general, ecomodernist thinkers use a partial analysis of the human system, with tight analytical boundaries which do not consider the inter-linked impacts on other demands – especially energy consumption – in order to make their argument. Their ideas are essentially technofixes, designed to create a Cornucopian vision of a technological future where the Western lifestyle is not only perpetuated, but expanded to all.
It’s impossible to summarize such abroad political philosophy in a paragraph, but… Economics is a social science which seeks to explain the operation of the human economy. In reality it is a highly politicized pseudo-science that, as a quasi-religion, seeks to justify the exercise of power in the modern world by creating a set of arbitrary rules to legitimate the practices involved. The economists of governments and leading corporate and academic organizations promote the Neoliberal economics that has dominated politics and the media for the last fifty years – despite the evidence that its theories promote a highly exploitative economy with growing economic inequality. Likewise, Neoliberalisms core idea, the focus on never-ending economic growth as the solution to society’s ills, is the trend that is driving the ecological crisis. Opposing economic theories, such as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) or Degrowth, are not given any meaningful mainstream coverage despite the growing research evidence supporting their case. Economics is one of the most jargon-ified social sciences, with many terms obfuscating principles that have very little evidence to support their validity. Arguably the political support for Neoliberal economic theory is based on a growing denial of many people’s direct life experience, which is a major part of the polarized political agenda being driven by the Neofeudal tendencies of global oligarchs. However, it is the quasi-religious nature of economic theory within the machinations of the ‘Extreme Centre’ of Western politics, and their indifference to these effects, which is what has driven the rise of populist parties of the Left and Right in recent years.
‘Economic growth’ is a key principle from Liberal, and especially Neoliberal economics which requires that the size of the economy must grow every year in order to make everyone richer. Even the centre-left valorize ‘growth’ as a necessary factor to fund the expansion of public services, when in fact much of the value of ‘growth’ flows to super-rich oligarchs. Currently the annual growth in a nation’s ‘gross domestic product’ (the total amount of money spent in the economy over a period of time) is the basis for measuring economic growth – even though this measure includes objectively bad things such as hospital admissions, family breakdown, industrial accidents, and environmental damage, because those negative effects necessitate more spending in the economy to correct them. In terms of physical laws, never-ending economic growth is an impossibility due to the limitations on resources and environmental capacity in a finite environment; and growth-led economies undergo regular recessions and collapses in order to correct imbalances in the market created by the inability of human and natural systems to accommodate the physical needs of growth. Hence growth economics implicitly requires the majority of the population to bear the costs of growth policies through these regular economic downturns – by privatizing the profits of growth during good times then socializing the losses during downturns. In the West, economic growth is one of the principal ‘uncontested goods’ promoted through politics and the media; when arguably there are alternative economic options which could be taken which would improve the objective well-being of many, but would not result in vast wealth expansion for the few.
Traditionally ‘imperialism’ is viewed as the political and cultural domination of one state or people by another, more powerful one. In fact the basis of historic European colonialism, and today’s trans-national corporate empires, has never been political; it is fuelled by the privatized economic benefits rich states gain dominating poorer states. If anything, the political debate ignores these realities, and leaves them to private corporate interests to decide, and to take the blame if and when their excesses are discovered, in order not to be drawn into the moral and legal liabilities these relationships create. For example, both the English and the Dutch empires were not based created by invading armies directed by governments, but by the English and Dutch corporations who first traded, and then overthrew local governments to exploit the resources of poorer states with mercenary soldiers. Significantly, these organizations were created as ‘bodies corporate’, and so today’s global corporations work exactly like the former European empires, except they are freed from the direct control of governments through globalization – answering instead to the ideology of global capital. This leading role of corporate forces within global economic exploitation mean that at the global level of trade agreements, or treaties on technical standards or property rights, corporations are given a special and protected role over that of ordinary citizens – including the right to sue nation states through secret courts to enforce their historic economic rights.
When manufactured goods, or food, are imported into wealthy nations the ‘embodied’ ecological footprint is not added to that state’s national emissions reported to the United Nations. In Britain successive politicians talk of the large reduction in emissions since 1990. What this doesn’t take account of is the closure of Britain’s heavy industry and manufacturing businesses, and the importation of those goods without counting them as our own emissions. The Government’s own research suggests that Britain’s total ‘supply chain emissions’, including all those imports, is perhaps three times greater than the figures widely quoted. Unless ‘embodied’ consumption or emissions are included it is not possible to demonstrate that the UK is making ecological progress.
Green consumerism represents the rationalization of the ‘deep ecological’ and ‘social justice’ messages that emerged from environmental and social movements of the Nineteenth and Twentieth centuries, with the imperatives of economic Neoliberalism operating across Western economies under the framework of ‘consumerism’. Consumers are encouraged to use their ‘consumer power’ to buy certain products and not others in order to favour the causes or principles they wish to promote. However: Studies show that green or ethical consumption does not overall lessen environmental impacts significantly enough to address the ecological crisis; such options are largely a pursuit of the affluent middle class consumer, whose awareness of the implications of consumption creates a disturbing cognitive dissonance over their participation in the Western economic model; but more significantly, because this option is strongly influenced by Neoliberalism’s focus on technological innovation and efficiency, these messages drive ongoing consumption impacts at a higher level than if the rationality for consumerism/Neoliberalism policy were empirically challenges through the political process. Ethical/Green consumption is arguably better than ordinary forms of lifestyle consumption; but it is unable to proportionately address the scale of the problems created by the global minority of affluent individuals – who consume the majority of the world’s goods, services, and resources, to the long-term detriment of everyone.
Exponential growth (or decay) occurs when the initial value of a quantity increases at a steady growth rate, raised to the power of the elapsed time. Most people innately understand linear growth because that is how humans live their lives – at a constant rate, such as 1 - 2 - 3 - 4, or 2 - 4 - 6 - 8. Humans are far worse at perveiving the effects of exponential growth, and how quickly the magnitude can change – such as 1 - 4 - 9 - 16 (N2), or 1 - 8 - 27 - 64 (N3). In nature and the physical sciences exponential rates of change are commonplace, which is what the mathematics of Calculus was invented to solve. The most common exponential measure which people see, but do not necessarily understand in their everyday life, is economic growth; where an initial value (X0) increases at a steady growth rate, raised to the power of the elapsed time – Xtime = X0 × (1 + rate)time. Where exponential growth over time increases by a constant percentage in each time interval the value can be estimated using the ‘doubling time’: Divide 70 by the percentage increase and it produces the amount of time it takes for the value to double. E.g., at 5% per year the value doubles every (70 ÷ 5) 14 years, or at 20% the value doubles every (70 ÷ 20) 3½ years.