Greenwashing Debunkers Club

Julio F. Campos I have been quite often asked questions about pollution. What it is, it's different types, what products are considered to be pollutants, how the environment deals with it or what can we do to prevent it. Here I'll briefly answer those questions explaining what pollution from the ecological perspective is. How, why, when an ecosystem is considered polluted and what can it do about it. But first, it is necessary to bring two fundamental ecosystem structural characteristics. A) The carrying capacity Carrying capacity is the capacity of any ecosystem to sustain a number of individuals of a given species. That could the number of different species, the number of predators, the volume of human use of its resources and, as we will see, the quantity of waste that it can process through its recycling species. As such, every ecosystem has an intrinsic set of carrying capacities for its innumerous species which are derived from its complex internal inter...

Julio F. Campos Recently I was asked about which environmental friendly technologies or products we need to invent for a more sustainable society . Although a simple question, with a simple answer but complex explanation, it is indeed the single most important question that one could ask. The answer is plain simple: none. The reason behind both the question and the answer, however, demands a not so simple explanation.   Let's start with the question that is the root of what was asked:    Why do we need more technology? The concept that the technology development could improve human society development was introduced in the first two decades of the twentieth century and later used to describe the works of the economist Thorstein Bunde Veblen.   Its idea was resumed by the engineer William H. Smyth with the introduction of the technocracy concept, which was could be resume to  "the rule of the people made effective through the agency of their serva...

Julio F. Campos After my last post , I received a most interesting reader comment about why everything about sustainability is so complicated and formal. As an example, the reader presented the example do Stephen Hawking, (hence the post title), to which I could add an enormous list of other scientists that are able to translate their most complicated researches into easy to understand way for the scientific illiterate community. However, the problem is that being a multidisciplinary field, sustainability demands the explanation of a series of concepts from a large number of scientific fields. Which is time-consuming when considered the vast range of knowledge levels of the audience. It's not impossible though. Paradoxically sustainability, or better, what to do to be sustainable can actually be put through only two sentences. Here they are: To explain sustainability to corporations: "There is no such thing as sustainable growth" To explaining sustaina...

Julio F. Campos Após a minha última publicação , recebi um comentário do leitor muito interessante sobre o motivo de tudo sobre a sustentabilidade é tão complicado e formal. Como exemplo, o leitor apresentou o caso de Stephen Hawking (daí o título do post), ao qual eu poderia adicionar uma lista enorme de outros cientistas, que é capaz de traduzir suas pesquisas mais complicadas para uma forma fácil de entender para a comunidade cientificamente analfabeta. R espondi que, sendo um campo multidisciplinar, a sustentabilidade exige a explicação de uma série de conceitos de um grande número de campos científicos. O que é demorado e complexo quando considerado a vasta gama de níveis de conhecimento do público. N o entanto, não é impossível. Paradoxalmente, a sustentabilidade, ou melhor, o que fazer para ser sustentável, pode ser apresentada em apenas duas frases. Aqui estão eles: Para explicar a sustentabilidade às empresas:   "Não existe crescimento sustentável" Para expli...