
Ecological Wealth of Nations - schallertd
http://www.footprintnetwork.org/ecological_footprint_nations/index.html
======
carapace
We need to live in harmony with Nature. This kind of awareness (hard metrics)
has to be fed back into our decision making to do it. I believe we can support
current population density with ecological enrichment through "applied
ecology", e.g. Permaculture, etc. but only if we are aware of the need and
priority.

\---

For example see David Blume's concept for small-scale organic alcohol fuel
production integrated with Permaculture food production.
[http://permaculture.com/node/518](http://permaculture.com/node/518)

Not to give away (part of) the punchline, but the on-site extraction and
distillation of the fuel retains all the trace elements, minerals, etc. The
molecules in the fuel have come from the air and water, their energy-holding
arrangement has been paid for by the Sun. The farm exports sunlight in fluid
form.

As part of an integrated agriculturally-productive ecosystem alcohol fuel
production just makes sense. The economics are totally different from large-
scale ethanol, for instance.

~~~
nickff
I have read a few studies on alcohol fuel production, and none of the
facilities studied have been a net-producer of energy. While the idea is an
intriguing one, energy production is difficult. Has Blume actually shown an
ability to produce fuel?

Note: I've always been a fan of using seaside solar-powered electrolysis to
produce hydrogen fuel, though hydrogen storage has its own issues.

~~~
carapace
Yes, Blume has produced fuel. If I recall correctly at one point he had a
number of people with fuel conversions on their vehicles who were buying his
gas through a kind of CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) business. He's
very practically oriented.

Part of what shifts the economics here is that the leftover byproducts of both
fermentation and distillation are returned as inputs to the farm.

I also have to mention, at one point Blume had a contract with a donut bakery
to collect and make fuel from all their old scrap dough. Sugar and carbs...

------
r3pl4y
Very nicely made tool, unfortunately they forgot that red/green colorblindness
is very common, so I can't really see anything in their graphs.

Shouldn't be hard to add a little menu that allows you to choose the color
themes, so color blind people can select one where they actually see a
difference between the regions.

~~~
randyrand
Have you tried the EnChroma color-blindness glasses? It would be an easier
solution than designing data viz to avoid using color blindess color-combos or
requiring dynamic options, IMO.

~~~
extrapickles
Those work best when your color-blindness is from your red/green cones being
too close together in wavelength (most common form) and not for cases like me
where color sensitivity is screwed up. The sensitivity problem can be solved
by filtering the colors working correctly down to the level the bad color
works at, but that doesn't work well indoors as you are effectively wearing
sun-glasses.

The easiest way I found for data viz to accommodate color blindness is to make
sure everything is separated in intensity by a fair amount and have a tool-tip
on the color legend indicating which color it is so if the accompanying text
is referring to parts by color it can be figured out which color on the graph
is being referred to.

------
booli
Just wondering, how can a small country like for example the Netherlands, with
no vast tree wildlife for example, get to a neutral or even positive foot
print? A trading nation by roots, is it even possible to get to 0 deficit?

~~~
Loic
Take a look at Germany, they are steadily increasing their biocapacity while
reducing their ecological footprint (I wonder how they increase the
biocapacity so steadily over such long period of time). So, you may not
achieve a balance, but maybe at the scale of a region like Europe, we can
achieve it.

~~~
saalaa
They have _not_ reduced their ecological footprint. They are relying
increasingly on coal, especially as new bioenergy installations are slowing
down and demand is only growing.

They have never burnt as much coal as nowadays. It accounted to 45% of their
power in 2014 (couldn't find a more recent figure).

They are still building new coal plants and they need so much coal these days
that they raze whole villages to dig it out.

I'm having trouble finding comprehensive sources but their CO2 emissions have
been on the rise from 2012 to 2014 at least and they are set to miss their CO2
reduction goals of 2020 and 2030.

At this point in time, they are the biggest CO2 source of Europe.

~~~
RGamma
One of the stupidest things our government did (in my mind) was to introduce
the accelerated moratorium of nuclear power (this wasn't planned at first but
put into place after Fukushima, except that nuclear power station was built at
the coast in an earthquake area, something the middle of Europe is not exactly
known for). The short term demand will just be met with coal and a bit of
renewables (which might have no local greenhouse gas emissions, but are still
dirty to produce/consume rare earths). Oh, and there are lawsuits worth
hundreds of millions of euros ([1] says there are estimated damages in double-
digit billions of euros overall) in denied profits going on.

I'm really just waiting for fusion power to become viable and solve all of our
earthly power consumption problems once and for all...

[1] [http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-
betreiber-m...](http://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/akw-betreiber-
mit-top-anwaelten-gegen-merkels-atomkurs-a-769213.html)

~~~
sliverstorm
For me, it was the ultimate example of environmentalists shooting themselves
in the foot. Always opposed to nuclear (scary!), wind (birds!), natural gas
(fracking! CO2!), and as a result we keep burning coal, the worst of them all.

------
exratione
The fundamental problem with Malthusianism is that it is static thinking. It
projects on the basis of no change in technology, as if the present moment
continues eternally. This is why all statements to date on running out of X or
Y at time T in the future have proven false. What actually happens is that
people look ahead, forecast increased prices for X, and then the more
adventurous go and build a better way of getting X, or create a different
resource X1 that can be used instead.

It is never different this time.

Arguably alarmism that fails to consider technological process is a necessary
part of the signaling mechanism by which realistic price forecasts are
established, an example of the market performing its usual strange alchemy in
turning (often willful) ignorance into something useful, but that doesn't stop
it from being frustrating.

~~~
legulere
The problem with your argument is that it assumes technical progress
continuing eternally. For instance Malthus himself was mostly preoccupied with
the idea, that the population might increase faster than the agricultural
output. Through the use of chemical fertilizers there has been a breakthrough
in how much food we can produce, so the malthusan catastrophe was averted.
Agricultural output is still growing, but there are physical limits.

~~~
daniel-cussen
Malthus was aware of increasing agricultural progress, but the argument he
made was that it would increase arithmetically (linearly f(x+1)=f(x)+c),
whereas population would increase geometrically (exponentially,
f(x+1)=f(x)*c).

It's a hugely important, contentious, and complicated issue (here's a thought:
populations can't actually grow exponentially even given unlimited resources,
with a loose, but strict, upper bound at the speed of light. The tight upper
bound is unknown, probably multifaceted, but I don't see how anything beyond
cubic growth is possible). Anyway. When speaking of grey whales, for instance,
we say that the population is limited by the "carrying capacity." OK. But they
aren't inventing new ways of getting fat nearly as fast as we are.

It boils down to there being a very real Malthusian limit on population.
"History" (which is code for "1929 to 2007 or so" because for many economists
history began that year, with a vague notion of there being time before that
when Americans lived in some sort of Garden of Eden in which nothing ever
happened), "history" proved Malthus wrong. Well, yeah, definitely, the food
supply didn't grow linearly, which you figure it could have, nor did
population increase exponentially, because it can't. But at any rate, he had a
point in that there is a Malthusian limit at any given time, and there is a
world population level at any given time, and humanity can move them up or
down independently. And that's what the article is about, is unwittingly
moving the limit down, by, say, turning whales into butter until they're
barely any left. For much of the 20th century, we've been so successful at
moving it up faster than the population level that we've come to think there
is no such limit. And hey, what about Mars?

Just because we haven't hit the Malthusian limit recently doesn't mean it's
not there.

~~~
hx87
I don't think people here (or anywhere) dispute that here is a hard upper
limit on the maximum population the Earth can support at any given time. The
dispute is in the proposition that population is fated (or probabilistically
likely) to grow faster than agricultural production. That may have been true
when pro-natalist dogma held sway and agricultural technology was stagnant,
but that's no longer the case--people who advocate having as man kids as
possible no matter are seen as crazy in most parts of the world today, and for
good reason.

Birth control is likely and is effective if you don't try to actively suppress
it.

------
eudox
>Singapore: 16000%

So the takeaway from this is you should aim for high biocapacity deficit,
right?

I mean, I live in a deep green country, and it's a filthy dump.

~~~
redthrow
That's my take away too. I won't name names but there are a lot of
"ecologically wealthy" countries that nobody in the right mind wants to live.

People should aim for maximum human flourishing, not minimising human impact
on the planet.

~~~
eudox
A better way to read this map: countries in the deep red are places where
people have tamed this inhuman, unforgiving Earth, and people can lead happy
and self-defined lives.

Countries in the deep green are where people are at the mercy of nature and
die of 20th century causes.

People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial",
occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in
misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that
supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.

~~~
pyre
> People in the former complain that it is too "antiseptic" or "artificial",
> occasionally gawk at the latter and chastise everyone for not living in
> misery, always from the comfort of a city where the vast infrastructure that
> supports their lives is perfectly out of sight and out of mind.

You _do_ realize that there is a sliding scale here, right?

~~~
eudox
Probably not.

------
shoo
Great visualisation. It's good to focus on the stocks instead of the flows.

"to feed the continued growth in industrial output there must be ever-
increasing use of resources. But resources become more expensive to obtain as
they are used up. As more and more capital goes towards resource extraction,
industrial output per capita starts to fall [...]

As pollution mounts and industrial input into agriculture falls, food
production per capita falls. Health and education services are cut back, and
that combines to bring about a rise in the death rate" [1]

"Broadly stated, most ecological problems reduce to a single problem of
balancing supply and demand." [2]

[1]
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/02/limits-
to-growth-was-right-new-research-shows-were-nearing-collapse)

[2]
[http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html](http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/info/quotes.html)

------
miloshadzic
"Ideal" growth of an economy is 3%. Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore,
etc). Compound growth takes more and more resources over the whole planet.
Free market fundamentalism means we're not investing so heavily into
alternative sources but burning what we've got. Compound that 3% and it's just
a metter when we'll be fucked unless things change a lot.

~~~
bpodgursky
> Growth takes resources(fossil fuels, ore, etc).

This is simply wrong. We produce vastly more GDP per unit of energy than we
did a century ago, and will do the same a century from now.

The size of an economy is a measure of what people will pay for a good. It's
not a measure of how big a pile of steel you can make. The most expensive
goods nowadays, services and computing, do not take vast piles of resources.
In fact, the most expensive computers use the LEAST energy per unit of
computation.

~~~
dredmorbius
While GDP/energy ratios have improved in some countries:

1\. Total energy usage has increased.

2\. There's been significant increased inequality _within_ those nations.
Particularly the US, also major industrial countries (G-7, OECD, etc.).

3\. Many of these countries are exporting heavy manufacturing, with energy and
other resource utilisation, and pollution generation, particularly to China
and India.

"The material footprint of nations ", Thomas O. Wiedmanna, Heinz Schandl,
Manfred Lenzenc, Daniel Moranc, Sangwon Suhf, James Westb, and Keiichiro
Kanemotoc. doi: 10.1073/pnas.1220362110. PubMed ID24003158.
[http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110](http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2013/08/28/1220362110)

"The true raw material footprint of nations ", September 3, 2013. "The study,
involving researchers from UNSW, CSIRO, the University of Sydney, and the
University of California, Santa Barbara, was published today in the US journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. It reveals that the
decoupling of natural resources from economic growth has been exaggerated."

[https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.u...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130906063246/http://newsroom.unsw.edu.au/news/science-
technology/true-raw-material-footprint-nations)

------
skylan_q
"We are fucked" For constantly being alarmist and crying wolf? Yes.

Anyways, what happened to the editorial rule here where the title was supposed
to match TFA's title?

EDIT: Title has been appropriately edited. Thank you.

------
devy
So what are the real options of survival?

a) accelerate migration to Mars

b) population control?

Anything else we can do to prevent "fucked"?

~~~
rplnt
A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are far
superior to Mars as a place where we could expand in foreseeable future. Maybe
someone knowledgeable could chime in?

~~~
cubano
> A friend of mine is a big advocate of space habitats. Apparently they are
> far superior to Mars...

Interesting...did he work at NASA working with real space habitats? I was a
summer hire at NASA many moons ago in the medical/habitat programs and there
sure wasn't much their that looked superior to anything.

~~~
zardo
Current space habitats probably aren't what he had in mind.

------
hosh
Many of the countries marked deep green (having higher biocapacity than
ecological footprint) have been trending downwards for the past twenty years.
The rate at which the biocapacity is diminishing appears to be slowing. But it
makes me wonder if there is a way to visualize rates of decline as well.

I also wonder if there is a way to divide this up into spatial buckets so we
could see say, the footprint of a metropolitan area versus other parts of the
country. While national policies have affect on this, ecological impact is not
necessarily confined to political borders.

------
unclesaamm
One of the issues with ranking by percentage is it biases in favor of smaller
nations because they're more likely to be anomalous. Notice how the countries
at the top and bottom are both small.

------
partycoder
Consider this: In 1950, population was 2.5 billion.

In 2000, 6 billion (i.e: 2.4x in only 50 years)

In 2010, 7 billion (16% growth in only 10 years)

Is this sustainable? clearly not the way things are right now.

~~~
overcast
The population growth rate is steadily declining. The last hundred years, is
not going to be reflective of the next hundred.
[http://www.worldometers.info/world-
population/#growthrate](http://www.worldometers.info/world-
population/#growthrate) As the bigger countries like India get more and more
industrialized, they will level off too.

------
amelius
France seems to be doing a little bit better than the rest of Europe. Is that
because of their nuclear plants?

~~~
saalaa
Yes.

Edit: I forgot to mention we have French Guiana which is essentially untouched
forest and which offsets most comparison maps (biodiversity is a famous
example).

------
maehwasu
It's pretty revealing that almost everyone in the world would far prefer to
live in the red countries.

~~~
agentgt
Seriously? Did you not see Canada, Argentina, New Zealand, Australia. For me
it was relatively balanced and mainly the US really throws it off. There are
also some red countries that I would seriously not want to live in.

~~~
schoen
I would also have mentioned Uruguay, Finland, and Norway as developed
countries that are pretty green on the map.

Edit: although it looks like a way to be a green developed country by this
ranking is largely to have extremely uneven population density.

------
vegabook
There is a high negative correlation between ecological and monetary wealth.
Time to choose.

btw southern hemisphere looks good on this measure. As a bonus, zero nukes,
and low likelihood of being an attractive target.

------
jogjayr
67% of Japan is covered by forest. How come they have an ecological deficit?

~~~
dredmorbius
127 million people, in an advanced industrialised country.

I was shocked to see that Japan has a net out-migration:

[http://metrocosm.com/global-immigration-map/](http://metrocosm.com/global-
immigration-map/)

(Metrocosm -- a/k/a Max Galka -- is an absolutely amazing data resource.)

------
ArkyBeagle
This is just a human population XKCD heatmap with a handful of exceptions.

------
schallertd
I'm pretty sick of all that hype around Tesla for example, pretending to be
the real solution for independence of oil and gas. That is simply not the
case. Tesla hasn't solved any of those issues so far, they only shifted the
problem once again. Of course they design very beautiful electronic cars, but
this isn't a solution for our energy and resource problem either.

~~~
ericd
How is it not a solution? It decouples transportation from fossil fuels. Yes,
the energy can still come from fossil fuels, but it no longer _has_ to. The
entire transportation fleet could now be nuclear powered, for example.

~~~
dashundchen
Because it doesn't address the ridiculous amount of energy and resources spent
on private transportation to begin with.

I see many people excited about the fact that electric cars can be powered by
renewables, and efficiency gains automation can bring, without acknowledging
the downsides of an auto-dominated society.

What it does not solve is:

* The energy spent producing a 2000kg+ car (there's 255 million cars in the US alone, 797 for every 1000 people) [1]

* That that 2000kg+ car in the US is moving on average less than 2 people per trip [2]

* The energy spent moving single commuters on hour long commutes (average of 25minutes each way [3]). I see many comments discussing how drivers will be productive on long automated commutes, while not addressing the inefficiency of that commute to begin with

* The destructive and wasteful development patterns of auto-oriented cities - (sprawl, destroyed agricultural lands, the enormous health costs of sedentary lifestyles)

* The resources required and pollution generated for the production/maintenance/powering of all these vehicles, renewable or not - renewables only produced ~13% of all electricity in 2015 [4]

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_Unit...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passenger_vehicles_in_the_United_States)

[2]
[http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicl...](http://energy.gov/eere/vehicles/fact-613-march-8-2010-vehicle-
occupancy-rates)

[3]
[https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=...](https://www.google.com/search?q=number+of+cars+in+the+us&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8#q=average+commute+time+us)

[4]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renewable_energy_in_the_United_States)

~~~
ericd
I totally agree that it's be nicer if we could eliminate cars and build more
pedestrian friendly cities. A cultural shift like that is much harder to pull
off than a simpler technical solution. Don't let your idealism blind you to
the fact that this is a large improvement to the status quo.

------
DominikR
> A national ecological deficit means that the nation is importing biocapacity
> through trade, liquidating national ecological assets or emitting carbon
> dioxide waste into the atmosphere.

Before we had this trade and industrial activity that outputs all of this
carbon dioxide waste life spans of humans were 3 times shorter than today.

And by the way the world population was also 8 times smaller, meaning that we
today by altering the ecosystem of the world can feed a population that was
unfathomable a 100 years ago.

I'm not a proponent of producing waste that harms us without any limits or
regulations, but these people that simply cannot accept that human activity
changes the worlds ecosystem for human benefit seem like fanatics to me.

If we give in to this then I can assure you that we in the West will be
conquered by others and rightly so, because our culture has become retarded to
a degree that it inhibits our ability to develop technologically, economically
and culturally.

I'm pretty sure the Chinese will not stop developing to save some frogs, if we
go down this path they'll simply slaughter us. (not physically but from an
economic and technological perspective)

~~~
hx87
> if we go down this path they'll simply slaughter us

Not before they "slaughter" themselves with pollution.

~~~
FooHentai
The impact of that pollution is felt much wider, even primarily, by those
outside of the countries producing the pollution.

See: Chernobyl fallout carried west on the wind across Europe, and sea-level
rises caused by human-accelerated global warming disproportionately impacting
poor island nations not responsible for said global warming.

There are of course still very local, direct harms from pollution, but the
most severe, long-term effects eventuate globally.

