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Dr. Dirt
October-November 2010

Life Cycle Analysis

Dr. Dirt explores the unexamined life-style

Good morning, Class. I hope you all had a productive and interesting summer. I'll enjoy getting to talk with each of you about your experiences, but now it's time to get back to the grind. To review where we left off, the operating manual for Planet Earth has four essential instructions:

1. substances extracted from the earth cannot become more concentrated in natural systems (pumping out mercury, uranium, asbestos, oil, etc. - not a good idea);
2. artificial substances produced by society must not be increased in natural systems (dioxin, creosote, red dye no. 2, PCB's - nope);
3. degradation of natural systems must not occur (soil erosion, loss of biodiversity, desertification, overfishing, acidification of the oceans, etc. - nope again); and
4. people must not be subjected to conditions that systematically undermine their capacity to meet their needs (social injustice, tyranny, loss of food and shelter, etc. - nope cubed).

These are the "four systems conditions," as developed twenty years ago by Dr. Karl-Henrik Robert, upon which our planet's (and our human) health and survival depend. If we fail to maintain these conditions, what is happening now will continue: rapid degradation of a livable and regenerative biosphere. Buckminster Fuller's "Spaceship Earth" is a perfect metaphor: we live in a sealed system and need to be careful to ensure that our human inputs and outputs are sustainable.

Human activities at present are not sustainable, and many humans already are far from having their basic needs met. If sustainability can be defined as a balance of ecological health, economic viability, and relative social equality, the world is seriously out of balance. The economic piece in particular has expanded hugely in the past two hundred years, at the expense of ecological and social health.

This enormous growth in the economic sector has been made possible by extensive "transfusions" from the ecological and social sectors. As a simple example that is at the forefront today, the mining and use of oil generates hundreds of billions of dollars worldwide each year (oil and gas products, plastics, fertilizers, etc.). But the costs to the ecological and social sectors are enormous, and are not charged against the economic side of the account sheet: oil spills with attendant ecosystem loss, smog and lung disease, acid rain and lake and crop death, carbon dioxide and climate change - the massive costs of oil use are not added to the price of oil but to our fairly ineffectual attempts to restore ecosystem health, to clean the dirtied air-soil-water, to cure or ameliorate related diseases.

This is where "life-cycle analysis" comes in, assigning the true costs of our produced things, including the hidden ecological and social costs of extraction, production, use and disposal. The true life-cycle cost of a plastic bag, for example, would include added fees for the broader costs of petroleum used in manufacture, transportation-related pollution, litter on the land, marine life disruption in the sea, and eventual disposal or recycling. Life-cycle analysis - or life-cycle costing, or cradle-to-grave accounting - attempts to place the total price on products and actions, including the hidden costs to extract, produce, use and clean up. If oil companies paid for the costs of spill clean-up, ecosystem restoration, smog-related disease and death, and climate change, oil would not be affordable for most current uses. Oil is not affordable now, but it is used in everything we do because the related ecological and societal costs are put on totally separate balance sheets.

As arable land decreases, as the oceans acidify, as glaciers cease to supply fresh water to most of Asia, as polar ice melts and sea levels rise, as radical weather events increase…..in short, as the waste hits the fan, I get the feeling we are starting to pay the balance.

Stay tuned next month to find answers to the questions: How bad do your feet smell? Are you Big Uncle Sasquatch or Little Ms. Tippytoes???

Dr. Dirt has given up trying to perform life-cycle analysis on John Hart, Professor of Horticultural Technology at the Thompson School of Applied Science, University of New Hampshire, Durham.