The Sound of a New Green Economy

From the Green for All team, a video that sums up the argument for the new Green Collar Economy:

Plan B Updates – 99: A Fifty Million Dollar Tipping Point? | EPI

A bright  bit of happy news burning through the sooty smokestack emissions:

At a press conference on July 21, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that he was contributing $50 million to the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal Campaign. Michael Brune, head of the Sierra Club, called it a “game changer”. It is that, but it also could push the United States, and indeed the world, to a tipping point on the climate issue.

It is one thing for Michael Brune to say coal has to go, but quite another when Michael Bloomberg says so.

via Plan B Updates – 99: A Fifty Million Dollar Tipping Point? | EPI.

Ripple effects from big action by such a major player could include vast reductions in GHG emissions, improved health and environmental conditions due to drops in other pollutants from burning and mining, preservation of wilderness with the reduction or elimination of mountain-top removal mining… the list of reasons to “Quit Coal” are long indeed.  Yay team!

“My bet is on the hairless monkey.”

From the Center for Pattern Literacy (Permaculture visionary and Gaia’s Garden author Toby Hemenway’s site) comes this refreshingly sober and calm blog entry on the realities of Peak Oil: Apocalypse, Not | Pattern Literacy.  It emphasizes the flexibility of our species (our ability to embrace the Anthropocene?) and the responsiveness and resilience of human eco-cultural systems, even in the face of TEOTWAWKI (“The End of the World as We Know It”).  The author may not know the difference between a monkey and an ape, but this post has some interesting things to say about shifting the idea of employment, economics and the “need” for work.

Humanity has reached the stage, finally, where basic survival is not in doubt for many people. We have not yet grasped that the struggle for survival is essentially over, and we have overshot. Instead of noticing that as a species we no longer need to labor all our waking hours for the basics of food and safe shelter, and to fight off disease and predators, we cannot get off the survival treadmill. So we just keep making more stuff, rather than looking up, taking a breath, and enjoying all the wonders possible from being a conscious, intelligent animal that has mastered survival. Perhaps Peak Oil, and a return to a time when resources are dear and labor is abundant, will remind us that there is much more to life than the manufactured desire to have more toys. Perhaps we can lose our small-minded obsession with getting and spending, and finally grow into maturity as a species. (Read this: Apocalypse, Not)

Embracing the Anthropocene

Embracing the Anthropocene – NYTimes.com.

An important look at our capacity to change our home planet, and how we choose to think about it.  Revkin’s thoughtful comments include:

Earth is what we choose to make of it, for better or worse.
Taking full ownership of the Anthropocene won’t be easy. The necessary feeling is a queasy mix of excitement and unease. I’ve compared it to waking up in the first car on the first run of a new roller coaster that hasn’t been examined fully by engineers.

What, you may ask, is the Anthropocene?  It’s a term coined in 2002 for the geologic epoch we find ourselves in, where humans have made sufficient changes to atmospheric and ocean chemistry, not to mention caused or contributed to the extinction of such a large number of species, that it will be detectable later in the geologic and fossil record.

“The Apocalypse?  You’re soaking in it.”
– Lindsay, Angel

Only, it’s up to us to decide how to cope.  We can even choose to build something better.  Or, as Stewart Brand once said:

We are as gods; we might as well get good at it.

To learn more about it, check out what National Geographic had to say on it – complete with photos!

Environmental Justice and Sustainable Communities

As part of Cabrillo College’s 5th Annual Social Justice Conference, I’m hosting a discussion of issues of environmental justice and the connections between social justice, environmental health, the rights of indigenous peoples, social equity and sustainability.

Here are some videos that speak to this topic:

1. Global Climate Change: Indigenous Leaders Speak! (2010, ~5min)

2. Erica Fernandez,¡Si, Se Puede! Yes, We Can! (2008, ~4min)

“Erica Fernandez, a remarkable eighteen-year-old environmental justice activist and Brower Youth Award winner, helped mobilize her diverse community in Oxnard, California to defeat the placement of a liquefied natural gas facility just offshore.”

3. Clayton Thomas-Muller and Democracy NOW!’s Mike Burke discuss Canadian Indigenous Tar Sands  (2010, ~5min)

“ Tar sands mining emits three times more greenhouse gas pollution than traditional oil and has come under heavy criticism from environmental and indigenous groups.”

4. Resistance to a proposed coal-fired power plant on Diné (Navajo) reservation (2006, ~8min)

This Earth Week: Taking America Back From the Polluters — Green For All

This Earth Week: Taking America Back From the Polluters — Green For All.

Excerpts from a stirring speech by Green for All’s CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins on the 1 year anniversary of the BP Deepwater Horizon disaster, the oil spill that was like a knife in the gut of our Mother Earth.  It’s time to get over our oil addiction, and make the world a safer place for all the children, of all the species, for all time!  Happy Earth Week.

Second Nature: Sustainability in Higher Education

Share the Second Nature story!. – Excellent little video about why we can’t wait to make sustainability THE priority at colleges and universities.

Prevention, Unsung Heroes, and the Big Picture

I heard an NPR piece this afternoon about awards for outstanding work by air traffic controllers.  When they do their best, it doesn’t make the news.  Perhaps even the passengers in the planes are unaware of their close brush with disaster.  One assumes the pilots are aware of the tragedy-narrowly-averted.  At least in this instance, the near-miss is recorded and the one who prevented it can be recognized later.

I had earlier had a brief chance to talk with my friend Judy, sharing the news of an upcoming panel engagement at Bioneers, where I will be speaking as a representative of a “minority-serving institution” about how we are using the American College and University Presidents Climate Commitment to foster sustainability at Cabrillo College.  I mentioned the unfortunate fact that the students and staff most engaged with sustainability on campus are probably the least diverse groups around.  Judy noted that sustainability issues are simply not a priority for people facing the kinds of challenges and injustices that minority students attending community colleges frequently face.  She’s not wrong.

I recall a similar conversation with another dear friend more than a decade ago.  When faced with such evident, day-to-day injustice and suffering amongst people, it’s nearly impossible to take a step back and see the more distant problems as being all that important.

And yet… the problems are still there, looming in the middle distance.  There are good reasons to believe that the arrival of food and water shortages, increasingly disruptive storms and floods, and the economic upheavals resulting from a failure to transition to more future-minded and sustainable ways of producing energy, food and basic necessities are going to create even more injustice, inequality, war and violence.  That’s what needs preventing.  That’s why we need to be changing things better, faster and smarter than we are now.  And that’s everybody’s issue.

So the challenge is to find a way to say that, a way that isn’t terrifying to the point of paralysis, a way that focuses on all the good we can gain from doing things differently.  At least, that’s what I’ve been working on for the last decade or so.  Green jobs, better health, stronger communities, all the positives that are part of doing things better and smarter.  And that seems to have some appeal in that LOHAS demographic (the folks who can “afford” to care) – it’s stylish and sexy to them.

It also has appeal in low-income communities of color, the folks served by People’s Grocery and Green for All.  They are overcoming injustice and building community, while nurturing the seeds of the kind of change that just might prevent the worst of the problems.  I think it’s sexy.  I think it’s heroic.

But nobody’s gonna listen to a white chick from the ‘burbs on this topic.  I want to foster that kind of change in the diverse communities where my students grew up… I just don’t have the street cred.

Aftershocks

The immense human tragedy of the earthquake and tsunami in Japan is just starting to fade from the headlines.  The crisis of the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear facility is at a plateau, but still far from resolved.

As I reflect on the enormity of what happened on the other side of the ocean we share, I see some cause for my usual Cassandra-esque blend of gloom and repressed rage tinged with the darkest glimmers of optimism, some small bright linings to the heavy smog.

First,  the prevailing winds.  While there does seem to be radiation coming to ground on Japan, most of it is blowing to sea.  That’s the half-full. The half-empty is that… it’s going to sea.  Yes, as long as there are no major fires like Chernobyl, it shouldn’t be enough to pose an immediate threat to human health, at least in the short term.  But how will it affect small sea life (algae, krill, etc.) and the bigger things that feed on that and might concentrate it?

And the silvery glimmer… this was a wake-up call about Black Swan events and nuclear power plants.  In the last several years, I’ve been discouraged to see more greenthinkers turning to nuclear power as an option to prevent the worst effects of climate change.  Not only did they seem to be overlooking the high carbon price we pay to get the damnable things built out of concrete and keep them operational (and we still don’t know exactly what it will take to decommission them since we don’t have a good way of doing it yet), but they apparently forgot a basic tenet of the Precautionary Principle – if the outcomes of a mishap are intolerable, even if the perceived likelyhood of such a mishap is small, just don’t do it. “If the Japanese can’t build a safe reactor, who can?“ James Lovelock, Stewart Brand, et al. – what do you have to say for yourselves now?

Next, all that other stuff.  Videos show the tsunami grabbing and tossing things – heck, even the little one that tore through Santa Cruz harbor did that – and as it receded it pulled lots of those big and small things out to sea.  Now, my students in the Cabrillo Sustainability Council have been planning an event focusing on plastic waste and its impact on our oceans, so I’ve been thinking a lot about the gyre in the Pacific that lead to the formation of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  The big ocean current comes right off northern Japan, and moves across the central Pacific, and that’s where things that float just get stranded in the doldrums. Affluent, convenience-minded Japan had an awful lot of plastic to go around.  How much is this adding to our already awful mess in the middle of the mighty Pacific, and how will that affect marine ecosystems?

Finally, there are the economic ripples that will spread from this latest shock.  In our globally interconnected system, the disruption to Japan’s mighty industrial output is going to cause shivers and shudders worldwide.  Our ridiculously long and convoluted supply chains will experience gaps, though I’ll admit that they’re actually embedded in networks that provide some resilience – if you can’t get your widget from Japan, if you look around you can probably get one from India or Belgium or Argentina or Singapore or…  Now, economists say Japan’s economic woes won’t be big enough to derail overall global growth, especially when they consider all the GDP boosts from reconstruction in the coming months (yet another example of the twisted logic of money culture economics – horrific disasters are good for the economy!).  But I still have hope that Japan’s unexpected plunge into the Ω-phase of release and destruction in regards to their energy-intensive industrial economy might open the way for a very creative re-emergence in the α-phase.  After all, one of the seminal books on permaculture philosophy – The One-Straw Revolution – was penned there back in the 1970′s, so the seed of a new approach is already present.  And if permaculture gets big in Japan…

See, hope amid the rubble.  It’s not all gloom and doom, all the time.  As we begin the work to heal Japan, perhaps we can learn ways to heal some other world wounds, too.

The Money Culture, Part 3

“We are at the point in history where the infinite growth paradigm collides with something that is more powerful than money is…”  - Michael Ruppert, Collapse (2009 movie)

The more-powerful something Michael Ruppert was referring to is the finite limit to energy available for our civilization under the current paradigm – more specifically, the coming of Peak Oil.  In the 1950s, M.K. Hubbert predicted that US oil production would peak by about 1970 and then taper off, which – of course – it did.  Hubbert’s peak for world oil production was a little fuzzier, but there are many indications that it will happen is happening… right about now.   Globally, as a species, we are consuming known oil reservoirs at a faster rate than we are discovering new ones.  The expectation is that demand will continue to rise (due to both population growth and the expansion of economic growth/energy consumption in places like China).

In Collapse, Zeitgeist I and II and Money as Debt, the claim is made that the current monetary system – with fiat currency, fractional reserve banking and compound interest – is a kind of pyramid scheme that requires continual growth to prevent failure.  But continual growth is rarely seen in nature, and the places where it does occur (cancers, black holes) aren’t generally considered hospitable.  While I’m not sure about the demise of black holes, cancers are eventually limited by the death of the host.  So the argument has been made that the economy will die when it kills its host.   I for one don’t think the economy is resilient and voracious enough to live until the biosphere itself dies – it won’t kill the planet.  It might, however, kill the civilization, if it consumes vital resources faster than they can be replenished.

So, if money is power, and power is energy, energy is the real money.  And, big-picture-wise, there’s plenty of energy available to us Earthlings.  It’s radiating down on us, it’s captured by green things that grow in the fields and forests (using photosynthesis to defy the Second Law of Thermodynamics).  So in that sense, it’s not really limiting or limited in a way that humans are likely to need to worry about (in the next few centuries, anyway).  But in the money culture that we currently inhabit, everything depends on continual growth, and the basis for growth in the last century has been petroleum, and our use of that is not going to keep growing much longer.

The good news is, there’s actually plenty of solar energy available (including the energy that causes wind), if we can figure out how to harness and utilize it.  What’s holding us back?  Right now, it’s cheaper to just keep using oil. The reluctance to change has everything to do with money.  But if the economy isn’t weaned off oil very quickly, it might kill civilization before we can make the switch.

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.  ~Cree Proverb

So crisis is coming, that dance of danger and opportunity.  In the terminology of resilience thinking (a.k.a. panarchy), we at the point where the K-phase of conservation and ordered efficiency ends, and the Ω-phase of release and creative destruction begins.  Our challenge is to nurture the seeds of what comes next, so that when all of the resources and constraints are released, the new stuff that begins to grow is what we want to grow.

…Part 3 in a series of indeterminate length…