“To live is to choose. But to choose well, you must know who you are and what you stand for, where you want to go and why you want to get there.”

A quote from Kofi Annan, secretary general of the UN for ten years.  A man who thought.(Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/k/kofiannan392687.html#usGBRCILqVBjdAJE.99)

“A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”

A quote from Mahatma Gandhi, who led India to independence and inspired movements for non-violence, civil rights and freedom across the world.  (Read more athttp://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/mahatma_gandhi.html#i7UHsF04h5hrxymw.99)

What do these two men have in common?  They believed in what they did and brought about change.  What kind of life do we want?  Isn’t that the question we should all ask ourselves?  For me this means change.  Not just changing the way I get to college in the morning but choosing how we live our lives and realising the consequences of our actions.  We as a body of people can change our world.  It doesn’t mean getting yourself locked in prison but it does mean thinking about how you do things and being willing to change for the better.

We talked about development education.  This is not about finding the “one truth” but about questioning things we take for granted, i.e., critical thinking.  The process is as important as the end and there is an active participation in this type of learning.

This is our last blog and down through the last 12 weeks it is clear that we have been given many insights into different views on sustainable development.  We all have to do our bit to help progress our lives and to ensure that our future generations have a life to live.

I’ll leave with this quote from Richard Bach, decide what your mission is.

“Here is the test to find whether your mission on Earth is finished: if you’re alive, it isn’t.”

Sustainability Metrics

This week we looked at the different types of sustainability such as weak and strong.  Weak sustainability is based around socio-economic issues whereas strong sustainability is more about the environment and concerns our ecological footprint.  Ultimately both ways aim for one final goal that is to manage for a sustainable future.

But, in order to manage for a sustainable future we need a way of measuring sustainability.  Although it is almost impossible to measure absolutely everything, under certain headings an accurate picture can be portrayed.  Indicators can be used such as recycling, car use, services and health and by using the kite diagrams shown to us in the lectures, we now can see where an area needs to be improved by what we, the people, think.  Link to a blog -> http://nialldalton13.wordpress.com/2011/04/11/sustainability-metrics/

We talked a lot about our ecological footprint in one of our lectures and I was curious as to what mine would be.  So, I decided to take the test.  Now I am an average college student, I don’t own a car and rarely use much public transport.  I rely on getting lifts off friends or family.  I share a house with 7 other students, our heating is on a timer and we recycle as much as we can.  But yet even with all these points that you would think make my ecological footprint go down, it still managed to be too high.  In fact I was living as if we had 2.58 Earths and not just one.  Not a good sign especially if I’m going to be telling other people to change their ways.  The best way of leading is by example and I need to change myself first.

A river was also found under the Saharan desert.  A place that water wouldn’t have been thought to have located.  But this water has the ability to provide water to thousands of people in the Sahara.  Russian scientists found the water using satellites and this find has already been called a world miracle by the papers. Link here -> http://www.indiadivine.org/audarya/world-review/30512-river-found-under-sahara-desert.html.

Organisational Change Project

A Plan For Change

Production and Consumption

The lectures this week on production and consumption gave me loads to think about.  Every slide gave me something to research so this topic is one which interests me.  A question in the first slide asks “why do we consume so much?”  For me it is because we have so much choice, too much if even.  But we, the people living in the western world are some of the lucky ones.  The figures don’t lie.  The wealthiest 20% of the population consume 76.6% of the world’s total consumption with only 1.5% going to the poorest 20%.  A drastic difference.

Every day a new product is put on the shelves with one removed only every three days.  This clearly shows how our consumer choice is growing but what we have to ask ourselves is, “is this choice good for us?”  We as a society are judged by what we wear, (in some cases “who” we where), what we drive, what appliances we use and where we shop.  Society doesn’t care what type of person we are but “what” we are.  But we are all guilty.  Would you stop up talking to someone sitting on the side of the street begging for money even though he could be the friendliest person you may ever meet in your lifetime?  I probably wouldn’t either.

Where does this choice come from?  It comes from the thousands of multi-national companies that are destroying a country’s culture.  Everywhere in the world now looks the same, McDonalds, Starbucks, Sony are the numerous others in every city in the world.  Is globalization destroying culture? I think so.  Something short to read - http://www.subzeroblue.com/archives/2007/01/globalization_vs_cul.html.

With all this choice you have to ask yourself, are you happy?  Can we all truly say yes to this simple question?  The fact is that happiness doesn’t mean more goods.  A video that may help in understanding this - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CERfoDIU2Yw.  We only compare ourselves to people who are similar to us and try to be better than them.  That’s not what happiness is.  But then again who am I to say what your happiness is?  Happiness to each person is different.  Yet, I don’t think it means more choice because with that comes greed.

This greed has set in amongst these big name companies and they thrive for more money and to do this they make their object to fail.  Planned obsolescence.  This is not a sustainable way forward.  A main component of their products and yet this isn’t biodegradable.  The impact of all these products means more waste, destruction to landscape, ecological damage and depletion of resources.  A product’s life cycle requires a lot of energy from the extraction of raw materials to the packaging to the incineration of non biodegradable parts.  Something which has appealed to me is the eco-friendly toothbrush (first pic).  What does everyone use every morning and night and is made of this non biodegradable material?  The toothbrush.  Replacing it with a recyclable one or even one taken straight from the tree (literally) is a major step forward (second pic).

If we all could change our toothbrush the amount of waste we reduce would be enormous.  But then again we would be cutting down trees at the same time so trying to find the choice that is environmentally better is hard.  The choice is yours.

Corporate Social Responsibility

I’ll start by first explaining the term corporate social responsibility and it is easiest to break it down.  Corporate relates to companies or any group as such.  The social side is that it involves everybody and it puts responsibility in the hands of these people.  A better definition is that CSR is about how companies manage the business processes to produce an overall positive impact on society.  It is depicted in the following image.

A story that came up in the weeks lectures is the Foxconn scandal in China.  A link posted on the sustainable development blog tells on one part of the story.  So I decided to read into this dilemma.  A link that I found very interesting indeed is http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/foxconn-suicide-scandal-deeper-in-the-fox-hole-36798.html which shows a different side to the story.  Not only are employees committing suicide over the low pay they may also have been murdered.  This whole scandal can have a rippling effect on the world as Foxconn promises to increase pay to employees in an attempt to reduce suicides and unhappiness amongst the public.  The question we all want to know is how will this effect the price of the iPod and the likes.

Something that will help in building trust between employers, employees and customers is by using the edelman trust barometer.  This analyses the trust between these groups and helps in building trust where there is little.  Trust can benefit a company hugely as employees will be happier with the work they’re doing and asking employees to do overtime wont be as hard for employers.  The following video might help.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwHzqHhQRtY&feature=player_embedded#!

Law and Public Policy

This week we looked at Law and Public Policy.  What interested me was how environmental policies come about.  Luke’s 3 dimensions of power state how some countries and governments can influence the decisions of other countries.  The following link should help.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Lukes#The_Three_Dimensions_of_Power

In recent years sustainable development has played a role in the way government works.  Policy elites have to rethink the way they perceive the world so that environmental implications are integrated.  I believe this is a step forward as now powerful countries are leading by example and thinking about the future by the way we live today.

It is not only the governments that get a say in the world we live today.  Power is always in the hands of the people as we put our government together and decide who stays and who goes.  By putting certain people in government positions we are voicing our concerns about the world in which we live today.  The image below captures what i’m trying to say.

The Environment DG Mission statement states that the EU is :

“Protecting, preserving and improving the environment for present and future generations, and promoting sustainable development.”  This is a big change from back in 1957 when there was no concern at all for the environment.  I believe that the changes in laws have improved the world for now and for generations to come.

Economics

Our topic this week was on economic development and the environment.  We looked at the reason for growth and development in richer countries and the reasons for this.  But also looking at the way things are today.

We have been shown a quote many times in this course, one which is supposed to be the basis for sustainable development but from the lectures this week relating to economics and development I find it hard to see how the quote below is true.

“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”.  But can we really believe this quote or definition of sustainable development?  In practice this means lower global production and consumption and therefore lower economic growth.  The reason for the richer countries’ growth is because of there ability to find cheap energy sources, mainly being oil.  But now with new regulations being put in place it is not possible for developing countries to grow and develop as they cant release as many greenhouse gases as developed countries once used in order to  get where they are today.   The question was raised, “is this fair on developing countries?”  I don’t think it is.

A viable question must be answered, “should developed countries contribute to emission reduction in developing countries?”   A question that may help in the development of the world as a whole.  Two ways of measuring the economic growth of a country are GDP and GNP.  Using measures of economic growth can give distorted pictures of the level of income in a country.  The income distribution is not taken into account.  A small proportion of the population can own a large amount of the wealth in a country.  The level of human welfare for the majority could therefore be very limited.

There is a fundamental difference between economic growth and development that was made clear to me this week.  Economic growth is a measure of the value of output of goods and services within a time period.  Whereas economic development is a measure of the welfare of humans in a society.  For me I feel measuring economic development is a better way of measuring the state of a country as it clearly portrays how its natives are living and to what standard they can live their lives to.

Food

This week we talked about food and how much energy goes into making the food.  For this we used a simple apple orchard as an example.  Planting an apple tree in the ground letting it grow and then pucking them off the tree.  An easy task.  O, how I was wrong.

Once again I have been shocked at the amount of energy needed to run an apple orchard.  Agrochemicals, farm buuildings, machinery and equipment are all needed in the production of apples and all of these use up energy and emit CO2 into the air.  We were given figures for the amount of energy needed to produce apples and I was amazed by the results.  Around 7400 MJ of energy is needed to run this production.  Thats enough energy to drive a diesel car over 3500 km.  If you go as the crow flies, thats like driving from Athlone to Ankara in Turkey!!

But, not only is there energy used in the production but also in the distribution of the apples.  And on top of that there is nearly 580 kgs of CO2 emitted during this production.  You may look at this and think it isnt too bad but these figures are per hectare.  Orchards can be many times the size of these figures and when everything is added up there is serious damage done to the environment.

When these input figures are compared with output figures there is a big difference.  With 7300 MJ of energy needed in production of the apples per hectare, only 2.5 MJ of energy is in 1 kg of the apples.  2920 kgs of apples are needed per hectare to breakeven on energy costs.

We were told in our lecture that if current land was operated using maximum inputs then, theoretically, productivity could be ten times higher then now.  But with emphasis on the “theoretically”.

An unrelated point that i was thinking about myself during the week was how are we going to live on?  A stupid question but let me explain.  Down through the years we have always invented or discovered new things that created jobs and progressed our lives.  But what if we hit a time where there are no discoveries or inventions, that they are all gone.  Without new discoveries we will have no more energy sources.  This makes it all the more important to find a way to harness renewable energy so that if we hit that slump we at least have time to think about our next step.  A phrase my irish teacher always said to me, “Fail to plan, plan to fail”.

Personal Change Project

Personal Change Project

Energy

This week was a shock for me.  The way I looked at climate change before was thrown out the window.  Our lecturer Professer Richard Moles gave us a new way of looking at climate change.  That we are not solely responsible for the way our world is and the way it will be.  For thousands of years our world has been changing its climate wthout any human intervention.

Climate is the amount of heat coming from the sun and the effects of this.  This occurs on a 30 year average. The fact that countries are at various latitudes means that they have different climates.  Low latitudes mean more heat taken in than is reflected.  For high latitudes, more heat is reflected than taken in.  But, this keeps changing, the climate doesnt stay the same in an area year after year.  Means of dating plants and animals have been discovered such as dendrochronology, carbon dating, frost impact and from gases trapped in ice layers.  Core samples can be taken to learn more about our past as can written records such as reliable scientific records and diaries from reliable sources such as captains of ships.

Something that stood out for me in the lectures is the Milancovitch Cycle, (shown above), where the earth doesnt rotate in a erfect circle but changes between an ellipse and a circle ove thousands of years.  This causes drastic changes in climate such as the ice age and global warming.  Sometimes we cant do anything about it cause thats just the way the world works.

Although the world changes the climate by itself, we also do a lot to effect the world in which we live.  The more greenhouse gases and CO2 emissions we release into the atmosphere the hotter the world gets.  These gases block the heat being released back into the atmosphere causing the world to heat up.  A 3 degree change in heat in a country around the equator wont make much difference but at the poles it means ice caps melting and the worlds sea level increasing.

Since 1870 the world has been releasing over a hundred more CO2 parts per million and it is still rising.  This is causing the world the heatup more than it should.  There is clearly a link between the amount of greenhouse gases being enitted and the increase in global temperature but the worlds natural cycle plsys just as much a part as we do, if not more.

“Control your fate or somebody else will.” – Heinrich Von Pierer.