Truth to Power
Introducing the Doughnut Model for environmental action
What Got Me Started
I sing with a local community group called Sing United. One of our key characteristics is that we sing “songs with meaning”. In April 2020, we were due to sing a concert called Emergency Planet Earth but — ironically — due to a real planet-wide emergency, our concert was cancelled.
We finally got to present our concert in November 2021. It was our 1st public concert in nearly 2 years. One of the songs in this concert was “Truth to Power” by OneRepublic.
The lyrics of this song haunt me every time I sing them with my friends in Sing United. “Truth to Power” is written as a plea from the Earth to humanity that it’s fragile and needs looking after.
The climatic line, for me, is the Earth saying “I could tell you I’m immune to everything but that’s a lie”. This is a direct reference to the environmental threats that faces us in the 21st century: such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, plastics in the oceans and threats to fresh water supplies.
It’s about more than climate change
I’m confident that you’ll have heard the term climate change. In terms of context, you might remember the COP26 Conference that took place in 2021 in Glasgow. Or you might have come across the Earthshot initiative that Sir David Attenborough, Prince William and others launched to encourage communities and people to innovate across the globe and to participate towards a common set of goals — all in connection with “saving the planet”.
And you might understand the underlying issue as something like this: There’s increasingly too much carbon in the atmosphere causing Earth to heat up and, in turn, causing sea levels to rise potentially creating chaos for many low-lying islands and coastal cities and impacting global weather in ways that will cause loss of life on a potentially huge scale.”
While this is an accurate statement, my worry is that the media and politicians — and therefore most of us — focus only on “climate change” and so don’t have a complete understanding of the situation we’re in.
The Doughnut Model
This is where the so-called Doughnut Model can help us all. It lays out a framework that presents the threats to planetary stability and a necessary and desirable social structure clearly and completely.
I’m going to briefly describe the Doughnut Model in the rest of this article. It summarises both the whole environmental picture and the societal inequalities in today’s world. So it’s a really good way to begin to understand the big picture.
There’s no question that these are huge and almost unimaginably complex issues, but this Doughnut Model explains the whole thing and gives me hope for the future of my grandchildren. And the future of yours too.
Outline of the Model
The Doughnut Model was created by combining a Planetary Boundaries environment model with a Social Foundation model.
The Planetary Boundaries
Developed by a global team of environmental experts and led by Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre, the Planetary Boundaries model presents a set of 9 global processes that we depend on to have a planet that can sustain life.
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These processes are shown on the outer edge of the picture above. Some may be more easy to grasp than others. It may, for example, not be obvious what Nitrogen and Phosphorus Loading is about. I’ll be writing future articles about each of these processes.
The team has defined a set of measurable boundaries for each process and is now tracking our actual global status against those boundaries. If our reality exceeds a boundary, we risk the Earth’s environment tumbling headlong into a chaotic state or, just as worrying, a new equilibrium that locks us into an environment that is potentially uninhabitable.
As a simple example, if the mean global temperature rises above a certain level, Earth’s weather patterns could shift permanently to a new state, creating newly uninhabitable hot and cold zones in places where hundreds of millions of people live today. This might kill a lot of people, cause chaotic movement of whole populations across the planet and reduce the available habitable land dramatically. All highly undesirable outcomes for humanity.
So it’s vital that we understand the boundaries and implement activities to counter all the associated risks. The Planetary Boundary Model provides a foundation on which such work can be based.
The Social Foundation
The Social Foundation Model consists of 11 factors for a fair society; that is, a society in which all humans can have a decent life. These are shown in the inner ring in the picture above.
One aspect of this is the associated economics. In the past, economists have worked mainly with a classical economic model that’s based on things like supply and demand. The classical economic model is a “closed system” in the sense that it doesn’t either take inputs from or return outputs to any external systems.
For example, no account is taken of the impact on the depletion of the natural resources required to deliver economic growth or of the environmental impact of our economic activities (waste products etc).
A new economic model has been developed and is now considered to be a mainstream topic in economics. An excellent book called Doughnut Economics: Seven Ways to Think Like a 21st-Century Economist by Kate Raworth (published 2017) is a key publlication in this field.
So What?
The Doughnut Model gives us a holistic view of the factors that we (“humanity”) need to understand in order to manage and preserve the planetary environment and to create and sustain a fair and equitable existence for future generations.
There really is a genuine global crisis looming and there really are a bunch of clever people working to address it. So for me there is both high danger and a lot of hope.
So I end where I came in. My conclusion in response to the plea expressed in that song Truth to Power is that the “weak and fragile Earth” needs help that can only come from the species that has both done the most damage and has the most potential to intervene in a positive way to “fix the planet”.
The science and economics behind this is complex. I’m researching it all and will return to write about it again soon. In this brief article, I just wanted to introduce the subject and provide a simple explanation of the model in the hope that it sparks some interest in my readers.
What Next?
On a personal level, I struggle to see how I — or you — can help with any of this. It seems like something that only a truly global effort could deal with and I’m personally in despair as far as global politics is concerned.
So this is just the first in what I plan to be a series of articles. And What’s next for me is more and deeper research into this broad subject and more articles soon.
