Transcript of talk given at Anima 21, in Berlin, September 1999.

An International Conference organised by the German Federation of City Farms and Adventure Playgrounds in co-operation with the European Federation of City Farms.

There is no question about the fact, that sustainable development ought to be the guideline for the next century and this has a lot to do with the rights of children including of the unborn. We do have the United Nations' Convention on the Rights of Children dated 1959, which is full of excellent ideas about the need to listen to what the children have to say. But then those, who are yet unborn do have very little influence, since they can't really talk to us. We have to anticipate what they want to say. Of course we can assume that they have similar desires as ours, which directly leads us to what is meant by sustainable development: It means that we ought not consume more than what we would expect our grandparents having consumed, so that we face an agreeable place on this earth.

In a way this is a very old or old fashioned demand and I think it is rooted in every culture of this earth. For instance once I read in the Guiness book of records the name of the lake with the longest name and it is: Munchowgagokchungowgagokchowgagagoongamouk (?) Which means: We fish on our side, you fish on your side and nobody fishes in the middle and that means, that the fish population can recover. So in the name of a lake you can discover the principle of sustainable development. Also: Sustainable harvest does not at all mean not to eat, not to enjoy life. It is indeed an enjoyable idea. But the idea is, also for our grandchildren to have an enjoyable life and this is a real challenge.

I'm afraid some cultures and some religions are a little bit oblivious of this whole principle. For instance the culture of the Phoenicians about 2000 years ago, virtually denuded the entire Mediterranean area for shipbuilding and left it in a very unpleasant state. Wherever they came and destroyed the forests, essentially all the rivers and hills were deteriorated and we are still suffering from that today. This behaviour then was truly unsustainable. But then Christianity, perhaps the most influential religion of them all has not been adhering to the sustainability principle, neither in its theology nor in what christians practically did. In Genesis, the first book of the old testament, you can read the demand by God to humankind to dominate the earth. This has been sort of compensated to some extent by certain later pieces in the bible, which we refer to as the golden rule, this is very similar to the principle of sustainable development. But for a long time it seemed to legitimate christians, christian armies and christian emperors to go on dominating the earth and conquering other places of the earth, South America for instance. All the crimes done by Spanish conquerors were done in the name of Christ.

Let me on this occasion tell you a little story from the time of the Vietnam war. I had an opinion poll among Americans, whether the Americans should pull out of Vietnam and there were some 60% who said yes America should withdraw from Vietnam and another 30% said: no we have to stay on. But then there were10% left in certain parts of the United States, mostly in the Northwest who said: The Americans should go out of America! Those were the voices of the indigenous native American peoples. This points to the tragic history of Christian expansionism.

Christianity in the end collapsed under the double pressure of old liberal and later neo-liberal economics, but equally of socialist thinking, which is also very economic. Economics however you can say more or less is the denial of sustainable development, because expansion at any cost is what it is all about.

To economists there are no limits and this is perhaps why modern economists didn't like the report on the limits to growth by the Club of Rome at all. This report was clearly opposed to the dominant new religion of economics and economic expansionism.

When the United Nations picked up what the Club of Rome had been telling of course there were developing countries' voices criticising: "Oh no, now that you are rich and we are poor you industrial nations declare the limits to growth. That's utterly unfair. Now we want to grow. We don't mind if you stop growing, but we want growth!" This was at the United Nations' conference on Human Environment in 1972, at a time, when the East-West-conflict was still dominating most of the international discussions. The socialist countries simply declared that "limits to growth and environmental destruction are problems originating in the capitalist system and socialist countries are clean." In a sense this was true, because they were simply economically underdeveloped. They were very well developed regarding military technology, but the most development in agricultural technology, in road construction, in automobile production, energy and other resource consumption as well as in waste avalanches etc. you would indeed find in the West not in the East. The ambition of the East however, which was never stated in public, was to do exactly the same, if just via different roads.

In Stockholm the East-West-conflict still dominated the minds of the people. In the end the representatives agreed on a compromise formula allowing the poor nations to grow, while passing a mandate to the North to de-pollute industrial growth and then 25 years later we had a wonderful result of this exercise in de-polluting growth. This was referred to as an inverted U-curve in which nations start their development poor and clean, with the first phase of development becoming rich and dirty and then, being able to afford pollution control systems end up rich and clean - the best of all worlds as it seems. This is why people in OECD countries today don't talk about environmental protection anymore, because they feel, they have done their homework.

The trouble comes in when you start to ask, what does rich and clean mean in ecological terms? At first glance you may say: "Oh that's fine. That is what we all have been aspiring to. But there are other ways to talk in ecological terms about rich and clean. There is for instance Mattise(?)Wackernagel, a Swiss born researcher who once worked with William Reeves(?) in Canada and now lives in California. Together with Reeves he developed the concept of what they call "ecological footprints". This term refers to the area that you need to grow your food, the cotton for your nice white shirts, the grazing of the sheep that provide wool for your suits, the space for the cattle, as a source of the meat that you eat, for the roads, the areas for amusements etc, in general: for working and living. So when you define the ecological footprint of a person like me it will turn out to be close to 4 hectares . That means: For my own living I need a space as big as 40,000 square metres. Now lets do a little calculation: In Germany we have some 80 million people, multiplied by 4 hectares you end up with 3.2 million square kilometres, which is about nine times the size of Germany. That means, we are using nine times more space than there is available to us. The situation is even worse in the Netherlands and not much better in the United States of America, which is a huge country, because the ecological footprint of the average American is about 8 hectares. Even North America is too small to accommodate for all the ecological footprints. So what do we do about this? The answer is: we export the problem. We export it for instance to Papua-New Guinea or to Siberia; those areas of the world, where consumption is still lower than the space available, because there are not so many people. 98% of the export earnings of Papua-New Guinea are related with selling nature, be it ground wood, be it copper, with all the mining and pollution attached to it, be it tropical fruit being exported to Japan. So much of the ecological problems connected to our lifestyle today you can see in the developing countries and the strategies of the North is to put the blame on the South saying for instance: "You people better take care of your virgin forests!" This is utterly unfair, because we are the ones who have exported the problem in the first place and diplomats are not very successful in conveying this idea to Brazil or Thailand or other countries: they simply don't like it.

The question remains, what can we do? Of course you could tell the German people "You better do with just half a hectare!" or "One woollen suit is enough for you" or "don't drink Orange juice, because that uses too much space in Brazil or in Morocco", or perhaps "One car for every 10 people should be enough, as it used to be in 1960". It is true, we were not starving then and we were not significantly less happy than today. But now imagine realistically, what a political party would look like recommending this to the people. It doesn't fly somehow. On the other hand we could say: "We have a strong military power, so lets tell the people in Brazil or Thailand to stop growing or we will come with our military to stop you from growing." Well this doesn't fly either. So what else? Do you have any idea?

Well at the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, where I come from, we are working on that challenge and essentially what we say is. That we have to re-invent technological progress. During the last 150 years of technological development this was characterised by increasing labour productivity, which was fully compatible with economic expansionism and the desire of poor people at that time, because it would also allow for higher wages and therefore based on a big consensus of capital and labour. But the third partner in the game, which is nature was not asked. Only when the limits to growth became more and more visible we at least began to think in new dimensions of productivity. This is what we now ought to develop further. What we are thinking of today is increasing resource productivity by something like the factor of ten. That means taking out ten times as much wealth from kilogram of copper ore or one kilowatt hour or 1 hectare of soil. And surprise, surprise: This is possible!

Let's talk for a moment about the potential, that lies in one kilowatt hour. Today we think a kilowatt hour is maybe worth a dime and it doesn't seem to have much effect. Being trained as a physicist I have been taught, how much you can lift from sea level, lets say, to the top of Mount Everest. What do you guess? Perhaps half a gramme or three grammes or half a kilogramme? Well I will tell you the answer: 10 kilogrammes. Isn't it unbelievable? It is a fantastic amount of energy, but if you tell this to a modern manager, he will tell you: "Oh no, that's nothing, we can waste that, because it doesn't cost anything and with liberalized electricity markets it gets worse: The prices are collapsing by as much as 30% and this is ridiculous. We've got to reverse this, we have to make the kilowatt hours more expensive. I recently attended a centenary celebration of a Swiss electricity company Landis & Gier (?) which is now taken over by the Siemens Corporation. They were involved in electricity measurements and they told me, that when the company was founded in 1896 the cost of one kilowatt hour was four times the cost of one hour of human labour. Now relate that to todays economy: It would make one kilowatt hour cost something like 50 Euro. Well that is not what I am suggesting. I'm just suggesting to give the right incentives to todays engineers. Tell them to be inventive, so we can accomplish more with one kilowatt hour, or with your acre of land and come up with solutions. Tell politicians to arrange the incentive structures accordingly.

In fact that was the main reason for me to move from the scientific "Eldorado" to cold and unpleasant politics, where I am now, because this is the place, where the next technological revolution is going to be designed. It is not in the engineering laboratories. It is the incentive structure, which dominates the direction of technological developments. In a book called "factor 4" which I wrote together with my friend Amory Lovins as a report to the club of Rome we give 50 examples of quadrupling resource productivity. Amory Lovins for example suggested what he calls a hyper-car, which can cover 150 miles per gallon of gasoline, which is equivalent to 1.5 litres per 100 km. That's fantastic, isn't it? Or take the model of car sharing as a system solution: It can solve transport problems four times more efficiently than today's fleet. Take a look at food: If you eat beef, for every kilo-calorie you eat, 20 kilo-calories have been invested beforehand in stables, in fodder that comes in from Brazil or Malaysia, the slaughter house etc the whole production chain consumes a lot of energy, which is not necessary. Consuming from organic farms in your region you can lower energy consumption by the factor ten at least. The same is true for vegetables. For every kilo-calorie of tomatoes grown in Dutch greenhouses 200 kilo-calories are invested, which is quite a sizeable loss of energy.

Well I cannot open up the whole universe in front of you, but let me assure you, that if we had had more space it would have been 200 examples instead of just 50. To summarise this: What we really suggest is that the 21st century should be dominated by those factor four technologies, which are available now or can be developed within the next five or ten years, or in some extreme cases maybe 20 years. Let's be generous and give these technologies some 20 more years for market introduction and spreading that means that by the middle of the next century we can reach a civilisation, which can do the job at least four times better than today, preferably 10 times better and all of the sudden Germany or the Netherlands would be large enough again. We wouldn't have to export our problems anymore and still have a very prosperous life. But as I said before, without any political influence this is not going to happen.

Now let me come from here to your own interests and aspirations. As far as I understand you are working on the aspirations of children and young people living in cities and still not being separated from life, from encounters with animals and adventures, which according to my experience being father of five children and having two grand children now is what children want. Now present day economy tells us, that this is not the job of the cities, because the cities' job under the premise of division of labour is to provide space for manufacturing, for office buildings while the countryside is supposed to be for agriculture, amusement and perhaps nature conservation.

The ideology of the division of labour has led to the development of two separate sectors in our landscape and makes our cities almost uninhabitable for children. It is dangerous, it is unpleasant it is not inspiring, except maybe for criminality. This has got to be changed. Again some of the solutions to these problems come from technology. A friend of mine Ignazi Sachs (?), from Poland and living in France but spending much of his life in Brazil has done some research at the United Nations University on self reliance in cities. What he found is, that you can feed the population of Sao Paolo - some 10 million people - on the grounds of Sao Paolo. There is no need to make use of the countryside. You can use intensive gardening and high service agriculture. Furthermore you can do all the repair work of your tools within the cities, you can create jobs by the millions within the city. You can still have countryside agriculture for certain things if you like, things like rubber plantations for instance which maybe you would not like in the city, but most of the people's needs can in fact be fulfilled within the city.

Now I wouldn't go to such extreme solutions, but what I certainly suggest is to have some kind of useful, touchable animals within the city and plants - no end - useful most of them and not just orations of a military statue or something like that, which is what most of the public green looks like today. You could have cherry trees or strawberries or raspberries and invite people to come and pick them. That is adventure. Or you could design competitions in the city, for instance discovering bio-diversity within the city and perhaps not only discovering and maybe taking pictures of this diversity, but also eating diversity in the wild city. This wilderness can be an orchestrated wilderness like a melody rather than a sterile non-organism designed only to meet the demands of cars, which is what we mostly have today.

Let me close with something like a philosophical consideration, picking up from what I said about the golden rule, sustainable development and christianity. We are talking today much about the "contract of generations" as we say in German - Generationenvertrag, which essentially is the golden rule. It means we should leave the earth and economic affairs in a state that is agreeable to future generations. This has to be made a core agenda for public politics. It means, that we have to put our public budgets in order and we have to put our pension systems in order. Today we are essentially living on debts, which the next generations will have to pay back. We have to put the ecological situation in order again. There is something like half a dozen strong reasons, why we should stop the violation of the contract between the generations. If we make this a core theme of politics, national and international, I would think that our children and grand children will find us good parents and grand parents.

Translation, EFCF, October 1999