Sustainable Thoughts

New Home for Sustainable Thoughts

2011-01-23T13:34:00.000-08:00

Please check out my new blog and website: www.SustainableThoughts.org

This new site allows me to highlight my presentation, The American Dream: The World's Nightmare while continuing to blog.

I am working to transfer all of my email subscribers to this new site so you won't have to sign up again....stay tuned, I will let you know if it worked.

Here is a screen shot of the new site:

A Win-Win from Erica

2010-12-14T04:11:00.000-08:00

Today, i thought i would share a great idea from Sustainable Thoughts follower, Erica. First some background. In July 2010 I wrote about some interesting challenges out there to prompt people to be mindful about the tremendous amount of time, money, resources, mental energy, and space that we often waste on clothing. Many of us have closets that are overflowing yet we keep buying more. In the first challenge, the "6 Item Challenge" people try to live for a month using only the same 6 items of clothing (undergarments not included). In the second, the "Great American Apparel Diet" participants try to go for an entire year without buying any new clothing. To catch up on all the details, check out the original post: Nothing to Wear? Try this Challenge.

From Erica:

Hi Michael, thanks for this article. I just spent 3 weeks traveling in Europe and had a wardrobe of about 15 items that could be mixed and matched to fit every occasion from the opera to bike riding. I like the idea of a compact closet partly because it simplifies getting dressed and partly because I don’t like shopping particularly. However, I do like to use fashion to express myself so, for about 11 years now, I get together twice a year with a small group of girlfriends (7 total) and we swap clothes. Sometimes it’s clothes we just don’t want to wear anymore and sometimes it’s clothes that we spent money on and so feel guilty throwing out. The swap lets us get things off our hands guilt-free and our items often look more fabulous on our girlfriends – which is another gift! Plus – it’s become a tradition and our favorite days of the year…we make a whole event out of it! Maybe you can start a men's swap club??

Good luck at the thrift shops!

A brilliant idea - the clothing swap. It intertwines sustainability (consuming less by sharing/reusing clothing) and community (making time to spend with friends).

Thanks again to Erica for sharing. Keep the good ideas coming in folks.

The Siren call

2010-12-01T18:24:00.000-08:00

In Greek mythology Sirens would call out from their island to passing sailors with music and song. Heeding the irresistible calls the seamen would sail to their death as they became shipwrecked on the rocky coast.

The tradition of the Siren is alive and well in our modern world. With each day we are bombarded with the enchanting sounds of fantasy -- that our economy can continue to grow forever. This intoxicating delusion of an infinite world where we expect our every expectation and desire to be fulfilled runs through every facet of our popular culture. It is broadcast endlessly across our media. It permeates our value system and is part of our belief system. It is taught at the highest levels of our education system. It is espoused as dogma in our political system.

It is the defining fiber that makes up the fabric of our society.

As more and more societies around the world heed the siren call towards capitalism and consumerism humanity veers closer and closer to the metaphorical cliffs and true disaster. The allure is so strong that, like the sailors of old, we seem oblivious to the clear signs of danger.

The climate is reeling out of control and within a lifetime may be unlivable for much of humanity.
Other forms of life are disappearing from the planet 1000 times faster than normal
Alienation, depression, and other emotional maladies are chronic, and growing more severe in consumer societies
The earth is reaching its limit in absorbing the pollution and toxic waste produced by exponentially growing consumer societies. The level and number of toxins in our bodies grows with each new day

So, I have to confess that my heart sank when i saw these two headlines in the New York Times Magazine:

In China, Cultivating the Urge to Splurge (November 24, 2010)

Shop, China, Shop (November 30, 2010)

In these stories the writers continue the suicidal mantra -- if we are to prosper the world must encourage China to continue to grow and create millions, many, many more millions of people who consume like we do in America.

As soon as I saw the headlines I knew that I would have to write a blog posting on this. I was heartened to see that even Joe Romm, who normally focuses on climate issues (Blog: Climate Progress), felt compelled to attack this lunacy.

I will close with a copy of his post here:
_______________________________________________________________________

And so the word “sustainable” dies

Killed by the NY Times magazine.

November 30, 2010

The larger idea is to build a more sustainable economy, or what Chinese leaders have called a balanced and harmonious society. In that economy, families would not have to save 20 percent of their income in order to pay for schooling and medical care, as many do now. They would instead be able to afford more of the comforts of modern life — better housing, clothing, transportation and communication. In time, China would become the world’s next great consumer society.

Maybe you thought that the word ’sustainable’ was already dead, but really it was only ill — ill-defined by overuse. But thanks to the NYT magazine and economics columnist David Leonhardt, it has now been officially defined out of existence.

Maybe you thought ’sustainable’ meant something like “capable of being continued with minimal long-term effect on the environment.” How wrong you were. Apparently, to the Times, ’sustainable’ means being the biggest consumers in the world. George Orwell would be proud.

Special props to the NYT and Leonhardt for running a piece that uses the words sustainable, sustain, and sustainability six times — without once mentioning global warming or China’s unsustainable contribution to it — on the day before the big international climate conference in Cancun, a day their op-ed page ran three pieces on global warming, including one explaining the dangers of our unsustainable path (see Farmer in the Times: “Climate change, I believe, may eventually pose an existential threat to my way of life”).

And extra bonus credit to the Times for this head-exploding cover:

Yes, the “health of the world economy depends on” China learning to spend “more like Americans.” As if (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“)

The article is a masterpiece of tortured logic and magical thinking. Here’s the paragraph that follows the one quoted above:

That term may have negative connotations in the United States, particularly after the last decade of debt excess. But the term means something very different for China. A Chinese consumer society would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people. The benefits of the industrial boom that began in the 1980s would spread more rapidly beyond the country’s eastern coast. The service sector would grow, and the economy would no longer be quite so dependent on smoke-spewing factories.

So the only negative connotation the NYT is aware of for the phrase “world’s next great consumer society” is debt excess. No treehuggers at the Times magazine.

And somehow the benefits of the industrial boom would spread rapidly beyond the country’s east coast, but smoke-spewing factories wouldn’t? How exactly are all those mass consumer goods bought by all those new Chinese shopaholics going to be manufactured? By magic?

Note to NYT: If you make a bunch of stuff for hundreds of millions of people, you’re gonna have to build a lot of smoke-spewing factories.

Finally, I’m all for improving the lives of hundreds of millions of people — but somehow I imagine it can be done without “cultivating the urge to splurge” of Americans. Indeed, I am reminded of a piece I wrote two years ago — Chinese Premier: Rich nations should ditch ‘unsustainable’ lifestyles … and stop buying all the crap we make. I cited an AFP story:

BEIJING (AFP) — Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao said Friday that rich nations should alter their lifestyles to help tackle global warming, at the start of a two-day meeting on climate change, state media reported.
“The developed countries have a responsibility and an obligation to respond to global climate change by altering their unsustainable way of life,” Wen was quoted as saying by Xinhua news agency.

Not exactly a view that the NYT felt needed to be part of its piece.

That said, the first thing that popped into my head when I read Wen Jiabao’s admonition was this Onion story: (Note from Sustainable Thoughts: If you are not familiar with the Onion, this "article" is a spoof/parody)

Chinese Factory Worker Can’t Believe The Shit He Makes For Americans
FENGHUA, CHINA–Chen Hsien, an employee of Fenghua Ningbo Plastic Works Ltd., a plastics factory that manufactures lightweight household items for Western markets, expressed his disbelief Monday over the “sheer amount of shit Americans will buy.”

“Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ’salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, ‘There’s no way that anyone will ever buy these,’ …. One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity. How can anyone have a need for such useless shit?”

… “I hear that Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them,” Chen said….

Among the items that Chen has helped create are plastic-bag dispensers, microwave omelet cookers, glow-in-the-dark page magnifiers, Christmas-themed file baskets, animal-shaped contact-lens cases, and adhesive-backed wall hooks.
“Sometimes, an item the factory produces resembles nothing I’ve ever seen,” Chen said. “One time, we made something that looked like a ladle, but it had holes in its cup and a handle that bent down 90 degrees. The foreman told us that it was a soda-can holder for an automobile. If you are lucky enough to own a car, sit back and enjoy the journey. Save the soda beverage for later.”

… Chen expressed similar confusion over the tens of thousands of pineapple corers, plastic eyeshades, toothpick dispensers, and dog pull-toys that he has helped manufacture.

“Why the demand for so many kitchen gadgets?” Chen said. “I can understand having a good wok, a rice cooker, a tea kettle, a hot plate, some utensils, good china, a teapot with a strainer, and maybe a thermos. But all these extra things–where do the Americans put them? How many times will you use a taco-shell holder? ‘Oh, I really need this silverware-drawer sorter or I will have fits.’ Shut up, stupid American.”

Chen added that many of the items break after only a few uses.

“None are built to last very long,” Chen said. “That is probably so the Americans can return to buy more. Not even the badly translated assembly instructions deter them. If I bought a kitchen item that came with such poor Mandarin instructions, I would return the item immediately.”

May Gao of the Hong Kong-based labor-advocacy group China Labour Bulletin said complaints like Chen’s are common among workers in China’s bustling industrial cities.

“Last week, I took testimony from several young female workers from Shenzhen who said they were locked in a work room for 18 straight hours making inflatable Frisbees,” Gao said. “Finally, the girls joined hands on the factory floor and began to chant, ‘No more insane flying toys for Western pigs!’ They quickly lost their jobs and were ostracized by their families, but the incident was a testament to China’s growing disillusionment with producing needless crap for fat-ass foreigners.”

Continued Gao: “As Chinese manufacturing and foreign investment continue to grow, and more silly novelty products are invented, we can expect to see more of these protests.”

And if the NYT magazine has their way, the Chinese can look forward to making their own crap too!

Wild Words

2010-11-07T09:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, it has been a long time. Been having a hard time finding that "life-balance" thing. My life has been consumed by work -- little time to read, ponder, or write......

For a while there I was really in a groove. I was reading quite bit on sustainability and I had lots of ideas for the blog and messages that I wanted to share. I haven't picked up a book in three months. I haven't written a thing in two months. It is so easy to get caught up in the day-to-day routine. The days pass.

Each night as my head hit the pillow I would feel disappointed in myself for failing again to make any progress on the blog. For failing to learn more. Failing to share more. As I would drift off to sleep I would promise that tomorrow I would get up early and do some research and some writing. Didn't happen. At home each night I would be too tired and would find ways to avoid "thinking."

The months pass and little has changed. Our society is hurtling toward disaster and still no real discussion. No serious re-evaluation of who we are, of what we are becoming, and of what we could be. There is system failure all around us (environmental, political, economic, social) but people hang on tighter and tighter to beliefs, ideologies, and values that are simply not valid in the world we now live in. (The increasing "shrillness" of our political system is a clean indicator of this)

There are thousands of people out there creating a new reality. Creating the world of what could be. I will be writing about some of them and their "movements" in the weeks to come. I will be encouraging you to find the one(s) that resonate and figure out how you can make your mark.

But for today, I will leave you with some "wild words." Every day I rack my brain trying to figure out what is the statistic, the turn of phrase, which image, which vision is the one that will enable someone to finally have that "Aha" moment. Do I paint the apocalypse or sketch the milk and honey? What will it take to inspire someone?

Every day more and more people "get it" but that number is still far too small to change the system. So today, an attempt to jar some consciousness:

Herman Daly and John Cobb wrote this in 1994 (15 years ago!)

But at a deep level of our being we find it hard to suppress the cry of anguish, the scream of horror—the wild words required to express wild realities. We human beings are being led to a dead end---all too literally. We are living by an ideology of death and accordingly we are destroying our own humanity and killing the planet… Even the one great success of the program that has governed us, the attainment of material affluence, is now giving way to poverty. …The United States is just now gaining a foretaste of the suffering that global economic policies, so enthusiastically embraced, have inflicted on hundreds of millions of others. If we continue on our present paths, future generations, if there are to be any, are condemned to misery. The fact that many people of good will do not see this dead end is undeniably true, very regrettable, and it is our main reason for writing this book;

(For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future)

This is a great book and one of the first that I ever read on ideas around sustainability. Herman Daly was a World Bank economist who realized that mainstream economic thought was flawed and ultimately unsustainable. He shows why most of what we were taught in Econ 101 is wrong. But this book is much more than economics. Cobb is a theologian. Together they write a fascinating book that maps out what a sustainable society could look like, and they were some of the first to look at the economic and spiritual and philosophical changes needed to create a sustainable society. Pick it up at your library!

I am going to leave you with some selected thoughts from Adam Sacks. In this blog post (shown in blue text) Adam writes a long critique on the environmental movement and its failure to properly communicate the problem of climate change to society. His critique challenges the very core of our history, and challenges how we define ourselves as humans. You can read the full blog post here.

I've already shortened his piece, but if you are really in a hurry, read the selections I highlighted in RED

In the 20 years since we climate activists began our work in earnest, the state of the climate has become dramatically worse, and the change is accelerating -- this despite all of our best efforts. Clearly something is deeply wrong with this picture. What is it that we do not yet know? What do we have to think and do differently to arrive at urgently different outcomes?^[1]

The answers lie not with science, but with culture.

Climate activists are obsessed with greenhouse-gas emissions and concentrations. Since global climate disruption is an effect of greenhouse gases, and a disastrous one, this is understandable. But it is also a mistake.

Such is the fallacy of climate activism^[2]: We insist that global warming is merely a consequence of greenhouse-gas emissions. Since it is not, we fail to tell the truth to the public. I think that there are two serious errors in our perspectives on greenhouse gases:

Global Warming as Symptom

The first error is our failure to understand that greenhouse gases are not a cause but a symptom, and addressing the symptom will do little but leave us with a devil's sack full of many other symptoms, possibly somewhat less rapidly lethal but lethal nonetheless.

The root cause, the source of the symptoms, is 300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations.^[3] This should be no news flash, but the seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

To be sure, global climate disruption is the No. 1 symptom. But if planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry -- to name just a few. (While these symptoms exist independently, many are intensified by global warming.)

We will not change course by addressing each of these as separate issues; we have to address root cultural cause.

[MD: long section on climate science, let's skip that and get to the good stuff]

Bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths. Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always -- but always -- ending in overshot and collapse. Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both. We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization's obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable. We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end. Moreover, there are no "free market" or "economic" solutions. And since corporations must have physically impossible endless growth in order to survive, corporate social responsibility is a myth. The only socially responsible act that corporations can take is to dissolve.

We can't bargain with the forces of nature, trading slightly less harmful trinkets for a fantasied reprieve. Geophysical processes care not one whit for our politics, our economics, our evening meals, our theologies, our love for our children, our plaintive cries of innocence and error.

We can either try to plan the transition, even at this late hour, or the physical forces of the world will do it for us -- indeed, they already are. As Alfred Crosby stated in his remarkable book, Ecological Imperialism, mother nature's ministrations are never gentle.^[5]

Telling the Truth

If we climate activists don't tell the truth as well as we know it -- which we have been loathe to do because we ourselves are frightened to speak the words -- the public will not respond, notwithstanding all our protestations of urgency.

And contrary to current mainstream climate-activist opinion, contrary to all the pointless "focus groups," contrary to the endless speculation on "correct framing," the only way to tell the truth is to tell it. All of it, no matter how terrifying it may be.^[6]

It is offensive and condescending for activists to assume that people can't handle the truth without environmentalists finding a way to make it more palatable. The public is concerned, we vaguely know that something is desperately wrong, and we want to know more so we can try to figure out what to do. The response to An Inconvenient Truth, as tame as that film was in retrospect, should have made it clear that we want to know the truth.

And finally, denial requires a great deal of energy, is emotionally exhausting, fraught with conflict and confusion. Pretending we can save our current way of life derails us and sends us in directions that lead us astray. The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Let's just tell it.

Stating the Problem

After we tell the truth, then what can we do? Is it hopeless? Perhaps. But before we can have the slightest chance of meaningful action, having told the truth, we have to face the climate reality, fully and unflinchingly. If we base our planning on false premises -- such as the oft-stated stutter that reducing our greenhouse-gas emissions will forestall "the worst effects of global warming" -- we can only come up with false solutions. "Solutions" that will make us feel better as we tumble toward the end, but will make no ultimate difference whatsoever.

Furthermore, we can and must pose the problem without necessarily providing the "solutions."^[7] I can't tell you how many climate activists have scolded me, "You can't state a problem like that without providing some solutions." If we accept that premise, all of scientific inquiry as well as many other kinds of problem-solving would come to a screeching halt. The whole point of stating a problem is to clarify questions, confusions, and unknowns, so that the problem statement can be mulled, chewed, and clarified to lead to some meaningful answers, even though the answers may seem to be out of reach.

Some of our most important thinking happens while developing the problem statement, and the better the problem statement the richer our responses. That's why framing the global warming problem as greenhouse-gas concentrations has proved to be such a dead end.

Here is the problem statement as it is beginning to unfold for me. We are all a part of struggling to develop this thinking together:

We must leave behind 10,000 years of civilization; this may be the hardest collective task we've ever faced. It has given us the intoxicating power to create planetary changes in 200 years that under natural cycles require hundreds of thousands or millions of years -- but none of the wisdom necessary to keep this Pandora's Box tightly shut. We have to discover and re-discover other ways of living on earth.

We love our cars, our electricity, our iPods, our theme parks, our bananas, our Nikes, and our nukes, but we behave as if we understand nothing of the land and water and air that gives us life. It is past time to think and act differently.

If we live at all, we will have to figure out how to live locally and sustainably. Living locally means we are able get everything we need within walking (or animal riding) distance. We may eventually figure out sustainable ways of moving beyond those small circles to bring things home, but our track record isn't good and we'd better think it through very carefully.

Likewise, any technology has to be locally based, using local resources and accessible tools, renewable and non-toxic. We have much re-thinking to do, and re-learning from our hunter-gatherer forebears who managed to survive for a couple of hundred thousand years in ways that we with our civilized blinders we can barely imagine or understand.^[8]

Living sustainably means, in Derrick Jensen's elegantly simple definition, that whatever we do, we can do it indefinitely.^[9] We cannot use up anything more or faster than nature provides, we don't poison the air, water, or soil, and we respect the web of life of which we are an intricate part. We are not separate from nature, or above it, or in any way qualified to supervise it.^[10] The evidence is ample and overwhelming; all we have to do is be brave enough to look.

How do we survive in a world that will probably turn -- is already turning, for many humans and non-humans alike -- into a living hell? How do we even grow or gather food or find clean water or stay warm or cool while assaulted by biblical floods, storms, rising seas, droughts, hurricanes, tornadoes, snow, and hail?

It is crystal clear that we cannot leave it to the technophiliacs. It is human technology coupled with our inability to comprehend, predict, and prevent unintended consequences that have brought us global catastrophe, culminating in climate disruption, in the first place. Desperate hopes notwithstanding, there are no high-tech solutions here, only wishful thinking--the tools that got us into this mess are incapable of getting us out.^[11]

All that being said, we needn't discard all that we've learned, far from it.^[12] But we must use our knowledge with great discretion, and lock much of it away as so much nuclear weaponry and waste.

Time is running very short, but the forgiveness of this little blue orb in a vast lonely universe will continue to astonish and nourish us--if we only give it the chance.

Our obligation as activists, the first step, the essence, is to part the cultural veil at long last, and to tell the truth.

What could be...

2010-09-10T06:59:00.000-07:00

An exciting day here at Sustainable Thoughts: our first guest blogger. Josh Foster, a friend and former colleague traveled to Europe over the summer and was amazed at how easy it was to get around, mostly without the need for a vehicle. I asked him to share his experience with us.

Josh is a self-described policy wonk and climate science "groupie" with over 15 years working on adaptation to climate change (working on how to deal with the changes caused by our rapidly changing climate; learn the basics here). He spent 13 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) improving the communication of climate information to decision makers and the public. He now works with local governments to enhance their resilience to climate change impacts and to ensure adaptation is on the national policy agenda.

First, my little prologue:

For most of us in the U.S. it is hard to imagine life without a car. The car is wrapped up in our country's history, our popular culture, and for many, it makes up part of our personal identity. Owning a car is a national birth right. Our landscape is defined by the privately owned vehicle. Thousands of miles of highways. Shopping centers located miles from where we live with massive parking lots. Zoning laws that require us to drive to go from work, to school, to find a loaf of bread. Mile after mile of strip malls and low density development.

This reality did not happen overnight. Our government has invested many billions of dollars since the 1950s to subsidize road building around the country. Our taxation system encourages the discovery and use of massive amouts of oil needed to fuel this system. The military is used with greater frequency to protect oil supply lines.

If you live anywhere outside of a large city in America your life would be very hard without a vehicle.

Using a 1.5 ton piece of machinary to move one person around is stunningly unsustainable. The carbon emissions that are destroying the climate. The pollution that kills thousands each year. Thousands more who die in accidents. The material use. The mining. The toxic chemicals.

Any proposition to reduce the use of cars is seen as an attack on the American way of life. Many can only imagine a life of extreme inconvenience and suffering. A loss of independence and freedom. It is easy to understand why -- public transportation in the US is typically woeful and unreliable.

It doesn't have to be that way.

Many societies have created public transporation systems that are clean, efficient and useful. People get to where they need to go with minimal delay and discomfort. These systems are many times more efficient than the one we have in America.

Cars are not part of a sustainable future. It is that simple.

Below is a view to world that could be. That already is. When do we catch up?
_____________________________________________________________________

From Josh Foster:

It’s mid-afternoon on the Thursday before the Memorial Day weekend May 2010. I am crawling along in pre-Holiday bumper-to-bumper Beltway traffic on my way to Washington Dulles International Airport. My goal is to fly to Bonn, Germany to speak at the Resilient Cities 2010 - 1st World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change. The Congress is a first ever, global gathering dedicated to sharing the latest scientific findings, effective approaches and state-of-the-art programs on climate change adaptation and resilience-building in cities and urbanized areas.

I had left my condo in Cleveland Park, DC three hours before my flight for the 45 minute drive to Dulles Airport—ostensibly to “beat the traffic”, but found my fellow drivers had the same idea regarding their long-weekend vacations—2 days in advance! Reaching the Dulles access road running 17 miles to the airport traffic continues to crawl along behind trucks hauling dirt for the future Silver Metro Line connecting Falls Church to Dulles…hints of a better future. Arriving at the airport I park in the sprawling satellite economy lot full of cars…and board my first public transportation…the shuttle bus to the terminal. On the bus I reflect that it’s still overall cheaper, faster, and more convenient to drive to an airport 35 miles from downtown Washington, DC, park, and fly internationally than to take a cab or bus to Dulles, or Metro to Washington National---the “downtown” DC airport—and connect to Europe via another domestic airport. Essentially the incentives embedded in the design of my hometown’s urban system encourages my less sustainable behavior…and here I am one who has dedicated my career to encouraging better.

Arriving at the check-in line I find 500 of my fellow travelers also waiting to enter the airport system. Needless to say, I missed my flight…reason given, “traffic congestion,” resulting in a sage nod from the rebooking agent -- and the need to return home for the night and do it all again the next day with associated expenditure of time and resources.

The next day, as we are in the glide path into Frankfurt Airport, and I am looking across green farm fields around the city studded with the iconic towers of windmills, blades turning lazily in the available breeze. After clearing customs, I follow signs over a foot bridge directly into the adjacent train station to catch the high-speed rail to Bonn. In about 20 minutes I am cruising along at 232 mph past the same farm fields and windmills I saw from the plane. Near Bonn, some obstruction in the track sends us back to Frankfurt—but redundancy in the dense track system allows an alternate scenic route along the Rhine River -- beautiful towns, castles, and water but also working cargo barges plying their trade. From the train I also notice the ubiquity of individual and community gardens growing vegetables in almost every yard and town.

Arriving at Bonn Station, I exit within a stones throw of dense light tram-rail and bus lines. Running late, I grab a cab to the conference center where food, lodging, and facilities are all centralized around an open-air garden and pond. A nearby 700-acre park allows space for early morning jogs overlooking the Rhine intersecting a miles long foot-path along the river that doubles as a bicycle commuter route. Going downtown for the evening we walk to the nearby subway station for a 20-minute ride. After a fun evening of fine food, drink, and fellowship we return to the conference center in a mini-van taxi that fits our entire group of 8. Upon leaving Bonn, I take a taxi to the nearby city of Cologne to visit a friend, and then a train to the airport…flying to Vienna, Austria.

On the glide path into the airport in Vienna, I again see the green farmland around the city studded with windmills. I am staying with a friend in a suburb surrounded by vineyards and walking trails…each vineyard with it’s own local restaurant. Groceries and many other amenities line the local dense network of streets and houses. An urgent trip to his daughters school to deliver a science project means a 5-minute walk to a light rail-tram, followed by a bus ride, and a short walk to the school. His kids ride public transit to school daily and children as young as 5 ride unsupervised. Going downtown from the school we board a bus, to a subway station, and exit in the heart of the city. Adjacent to the subway exit is a trash to energy incinerator that is high-tech, clean, and a local icon having been designed as a work of art. Walking around the Viennese “old city” it is nearly carless…and I notice that parking necessitates a special permit at $10s per hour. We return home hopping a bus, to tram, and walk in the door a few minutes later. When we go hiking the next day a bus that passes every 10 minutes takes us to the top of a nearby range of hills with great views and networks of trails through miles of parkland that are all still inside the city limits.

My next stop is Helsinki, Finland. Exiting the airport terminal I board a bus (leaving twice per hour) for the 50-minute ride downtown. The bus arrives at the center city train station surrounded by light tram-lines and bike paths with streets sparsely crowded with cars. After a fine dinner near the train station we hop a frequent bus out to his apartment in the suburb. He does not have a car. His apartment complex is near the ocean and surrounded by forest. It has a grocery store, a child-care center, and a health-care clinic -- most apartment complexes have these facilities. And these are the “cheap” apartments. My friend’s wife was in the hospital for 2 months—and they only paid $500 out of pocket. In the morning, I notice numerous pedestrian bridges over roads and bike paths in and around the complex. Buses passing through leave for downtown every 10 minutes. A short walk takes us to nature trails threading through woods, across cliffs with great views of the ocean, and through estuaries full of waterfowl. He rides the bus to work—an office building overlooking the water.

Upon leaving my friend’s on the way home to the US, I continue on downtown by bus. I kill time at a sidewalk café in the sun with a coffee and pastry overlooking a parkland running between main thouroughfaries. I reflect that skillful urban design, public transportation, and a willingness to pay collectively to provide for the common good are a real kind of security. It is also gratifying to know that there are countries in the world that are seeking a path toward sustainability while also providing a high quality of life. There are those in the US that would call it Socialism as if it was a pejorative…but as I board the bus to the airport, I think it feels like freedom…and that there is a different way to live…

Disconnect to reconnect

2010-08-29T03:15:00.000-07:00

When you wake up in the morning, what is the first thing you do?

Can you remember the last time you were not even a little bit tired?

I thought I would share this article that I read a few days ago -- it really resonated with me. As we find more and more ways to "stay connected" or be entertained we have less and less time for ourselves and our own thoughts. Last year I used to take the metro into work each day. I always took an issue of Newsweek magazine along so I could do some of my "current events" reading. Heaven forbid I should waste the 40 minute one-way ride. After a while I decided to not do any reading during the morning ride -- I "allowed" myself the luxury of just sitting and thinking. I loved it. I have so many things I feel that I should be doing, reading this, writing that, working on something else, I grant myself very little time to do nothing. In our culture, that is wasted time. I feel that stress every day, to not waste a minute. I am working hard to move away from technology and more towards nature and flesh and blood people. I highly recommend it.

Despite what our culture says, doing more, does not equal living more.

New York Times
August 24, 2010

Digital Devices Deprive Brain of Needed Downtime

By MATT RICHTEL

SAN FRANCISCO — It’s 1 p.m. on a Thursday and Dianne Bates, 40, juggles three screens. She listens to a few songs on her iPod, then taps out a quick e-mail on her iPhone and turns her attention to the high-definition television.

Just another day at the gym.

As Ms. Bates multitasks, she is also churning her legs in fast loops on an elliptical machine in a downtown fitness center. She is in good company. In gyms and elsewhere, people use phones and other electronic devices to get work done — and as a reliable antidote to boredom.

Cellphones, which in the last few years have become full-fledged computers with high-speed Internet connections, let people relieve the tedium of exercising, the grocery store line, stoplights or lulls in the dinner conversation.

The technology makes the tiniest windows of time entertaining, and potentially productive. But scientists point to an unanticipated side effect: when people keep their brains busy with digital input, they are forfeiting downtime that could allow them to better learn and remember information, or come up with new ideas.

Ms. Bates, for example, might be clearer-headed if she went for a run outside, away from her devices, research suggests.

At the University of California, San Francisco, scientists have found that when rats have a new experience, like exploring an unfamiliar area, their brains show new patterns of activity. But only when the rats take a break from their exploration do they process those patterns in a way that seems to create a persistent memory of the experience.

The researchers suspect that the findings also apply to how humans learn.

“Almost certainly, downtime lets the brain go over experiences it’s had, solidify them and turn them into permanent long-term memories,” said Loren Frank, assistant professor in the department of physiology at the university, where he specializes in learning and memory. He said he believed that when the brain was constantly stimulated, “you prevent this learning process.”

At the University of Michigan, a study found that people learned significantly better after a walk in nature than after a walk in a dense urban environment, suggesting that processing a barrage of information leaves people fatigued.

Even though people feel entertained, even relaxed, when they multitask while exercising, or pass a moment at the bus stop by catching a quick video clip, they might be taxing their brains, scientists say.

“People think they’re refreshing themselves, but they’re fatiguing themselves,” said Marc Berman, a University of Michigan neuroscientist.

Regardless, there is now a whole industry of mobile software developers competing to help people scratch the entertainment itch. Flurry, a company that tracks the use of apps, has found that mobile games are typically played for 6.3 minutes, but that many are played for much shorter intervals. One popular game that involves stacking blocks gets played for 2.2 minutes on average.

Today’s game makers are trying to fill small bits of free time, said Sebastien de Halleux, a co-founder of PlayFish, a game company owned by the industry giant Electronic Arts.

“Instead of having long relaxing breaks, like taking two hours for lunch, we have a lot of these micro-moments,” he said. Game makers like Electronic Arts, he added, “have reinvented the game experience to fit into micro-moments.”

Many business people, of course, have good reason to be constantly checking their phones. But this can take a mental toll. Henry Chen, 26, a self-employed auto mechanic in San Francisco, has mixed feelings about his BlackBerry habits.

“I check it a lot, whenever there is downtime,” Mr. Chen said. Moments earlier, he was texting with a friend while he stood in line at a bagel shop; he stopped only when the woman behind the counter interrupted him to ask for his order.

Mr. Chen, who recently started his business, doesn’t want to miss a potential customer. Yet he says that since he upgraded his phone a year ago to a feature-rich BlackBerry, he can feel stressed out by what he described as internal pressure to constantly stay in contact.

“It’s become a demand. Not necessarily a demand of the customer, but a demand of my head,” he said. “I told my girlfriend that I’m more tired since I got this thing.”

In the parking lot outside the bagel shop, others were filling up moments with their phones. While Eddie Umadhay, 59, a construction inspector, sat in his car waiting for his wife to grocery shop, he deleted old e-mail while listening to news on the radio. On a bench outside a coffee house, Ossie Gabriel, 44, a nurse practitioner, waited for a friend and checked e-mail “to kill time.”

Crossing the street from the grocery store to his car, David Alvarado pushed his 2-year-old daughter in a cart filled with shopping bags, his phone pressed to his ear.

He was talking to a colleague about work scheduling, noting that he wanted to steal a moment to make the call between paying for the groceries and driving.

“I wanted to take advantage of the little gap,” said Mr. Alvarado, 30, a facilities manager at a community center.

For many such people, the little digital asides come on top of heavy use of computers during the day. Take Ms. Bates, the exercising multitasker at the expansive Bakar Fitness and Recreation Center. She wakes up and peeks at her iPhone before she gets out of bed. At her job in advertising, she spends all day in front of her laptop.

But, far from wanting a break from screens when she exercises, she says she couldn’t possibly spend 55 minutes on the elliptical machine without “lots of things to do.” This includes relentless channel surfing.

“I switch constantly,” she said. “I can’t stand commercials. I have to flip around unless I’m watching ‘Project Runway’ or something I’m really into.”

Some researchers say that whatever downside there is to not resting the brain, it pales in comparison to the benefits technology can bring in motivating people to sweat.

“Exercise needs to be part of our lives in the sedentary world we’re immersed in. Anything that helps us move is beneficial,” said John J. Ratey, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and author of “Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain.”

But all things being equal, Mr. Ratey said, he would prefer to see people do their workouts away from their devices: “There is more bang for your buck doing it outside, for your mood and working memory.”

Of the 70 cardio machines on the main floor at Bakar Fitness, 67 have televisions attached. Most of them also have iPod docks and displays showing workout performance, and a few have games, like a rope-climbing machine that shows an animated character climbing the rope while the live human does so too.

A few months ago, the cable TV went out and some patrons were apoplectic. “It was an uproar. People said: ‘That’s what we’re paying for,’ ” said Leeane Jensen, 28, the fitness manager.

At least one exerciser has a different take. Two stories up from the main floor, Peter Colley, 23, churns away on one of the several dozen elliptical machines without a TV. Instead, they are bathed in sunlight, looking out onto the pool and palm trees.

“I look at the wind on the trees. I watch the swimmers go back and forth,” Mr. Colley said. “I usually come here to clear my head.”
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some of my favorite comments on this article:

Rob New York August 24th, 2010 4:06 pm

I was out to dinner with some current and former colleagues. I had put the evening together hoping for some interesting conversation. The only participant in those conversations seemed to be me. The others kept glancing (nervously) at their phones. They missed out on a lovely evening and I vowed never to dine with such idiots again.

Rage Baby NYC August 24th, 2010 4:06 pm

I click on things to avoid the pain of thinking

Steve St-Laurent Vancouver, BC August 24th, 2010 4:06 pm

The end result of this self-absorbption is that everyone else becomes, well, just traffic – stuff that distracts you or gets in your way. Then we wonder about the epidemic decline in empathy. What a sorry state and pathetic waste of our humanity!

T.R. New York August 24th, 2010 3:35 pm

I do not find this news surprising. As a high school English teacher, I blame this lifestyle on my students' inability to think. I see it among adults as well. Nobody discusses ideas because nobody has any.

Matt New York City August 24th, 2010 3:35 pm

Yes, our passion for connectivity is disconnecting us from ourselves.

jesus.christ Newark, NJ August 24th, 2010 4:57 pm
Ball-and-Chain nation. That's what I tell my students who can't seem to let go of their cell phones. Slot machine mentality, they await for some event that will change their lowly lives. That event won't come from a cell phone though, yet they continue to fixate on this little device. It's all they need, and in many ways I must agree that many of these minions will die waiting to live their lives. Such is youth

MT Rhode Island August 24th, 2010 4:57 pm

Articles like this inspire me to remove myself from my digital devices. I myself turn on my itouch and check my email before I put on my glasses in the morning, listen to my ipod while working out, and spend more time on the computer daily than I do reading a book. From now on,I will make a pledge to myself to use less of my digital devices, and spend more time living in the present, appreciating and acknowledging my surroundings and the natural world. Thank you for motivating me to live my life! :)

Walking Lightly (er)

2010-08-08T11:33:00.000-07:00

I thought I would share some of the changes and/or choices we (me and my partner) have made to try and reduce our impact on the planet. We are always looking for new ways to reduce the amount of energy that we consume, to reduce the amount of materials that we use and for ways to extend the life of the goods we already have.

Why is this important? Well, if everyone on the planet consumed the way we do in the United States we would need FIVE earths. We have one (for those of you keeping score). We use up materials as if trees, water, and minerals were unlimited. In just 100 years we have wiped out much of the earth's stocks of natural resources.

In order to avoid catastrophe we must fundamentally change how we live our lives. Few people are prepared for this message. It challenges everything we think we know about life. It challenges and calls into question the very core of our national and personal identities'. Some very heavy emotional and intellectual lifting indeed, but for today, let's focus on the "easy" stuff. Let's focus on reducing energy use, consuming less, and looking at diet.

There are LOT's of links in this posting. Take your time and work through them if you can. Lot's of good information and ideas to be explored.

Reduce Energy Use

Drive Less: In America 30-40% of all energy use, and climate change inducing carbon emissions, come from the transportation sector. That is because our society is so dependent on the private automobile. Do everything you can to drive less.

Car: We have made a commitment to being, at most, a one-car family. We have a small car which at times is inconvenient and we have considered getting a larger second-hand car for those times when more space is needed. In the end we decided that if a larger car is needed, we will trade in the first car. If and when public transportation improves in this country I would love to have no car and just rent a vehicle from time to time.

Location: When we moved to Washington DC we very consciously chose an apartment that is within walking distance of a metro station. This allows us to use public transportation to go to work each day and for any excursions into the city (In fact, with my new job, I can actually walk to work - even better!). Our apartment is within walking distance to two grocery stores (Giant and Whole Foods). We have a cart that we use to carry our groceries back and forth. We get some exercise and we don't use the car. Love it.

Facilities: We also specifically chose an apartment complex that has tennis courts and a gym. Finding tennis courts in this semi-urban area can be difficult and can require driving 5 to 45 minutes to public courts depending on the location and time of day. I save a tremendous amount of time and fuel by having courts that I can walk to. We can go weeks at a time without using the car.

Promote Integrated Communities: In many communities across the U.S. we passed zoning laws that separate our schools from our homes and from our work place. We spend much of our lives cut off from the world as we drive from one errand to the next. Get involved in your local political scene and get those zoning laws changed to create a move livable environment. Arlington Virginia did just this and it is thriving. (Read about it here and here.) If you are looking to move to a new area use this site to find a "walkable" community.

Reduce Home Energy Use: (here is a good list also)

Choose a smaller home: A smaller space requires less energy to heat and keep cool.
Get an Energy Audit: The best way to find out where you are losing energy (and money). Focus on the biggest energy hogs in your home (good list here)"

Insulate your home
Get triple pane windows
Get a more efficient Refrigerator (the fridge is a major energy hog)
Get a more efficient water heater
Get low flush toilets

Use Efficient Technology:

Use compact fluorescent bulbs. They can reduce your energy use by 80%.
Only use appliances with the Energy Star symbol. Energy Star approved products can use 2 to 10 times less energy than non-approved models! (Find energy star appliances here)
Use smart power strips that cut off power to appliances when not be used. Many appliances drain energy even when off ("Energy Vampires"). Anywhere from 5-10% of all energy use in the U.S. is from these vampires. Unplug!!

Appliances: Although our rent includes the cost of electricity and water we do as much as we can to reduce our use of these resources.

All light bulbs are low energy.
We use power strips that cut off the current to appliances when not in use. We unplug appliances not on power strips.
When buying appliances we make to purchase the most energy efficient model currently available.
Laundry: We wash all our clothes in cold water.
Dish washer: If used properly a dish washer can save in water and energy. We fill the machine to the maximum before each load is started.

Consume Less
Our entire society is set up to promote consumption. We are bombarded by messages every day that create the "need" to buy, buy, buy.

Reduce the Temptation

Turn off the TV ( research shows that for each extra hour of TV watched, a person spends an extra $220/year).

Stop Mail Order Catalogs

Over the years I ended up on the mailing list of many mail order shopping catalogs (LL Bean, Eddie Bauer, etc). I rarely needed anything but I would just page through them for the fun of it. Invariably, from time to time I would find something that caught my eye and I would buy it. I have stopped all the catalogs and save all that paper and avoid impulse buying. I don’t miss it. You can stop catalogs by calling the company directly or by using this free website.

Stop/Reduce Paper use

Stop using paper towels
Use tissues from recycled paper
Use toilet paper from recycled paper

Paper Towels: I love the convenience of paper towels but cutting down virgin forests for such convenience is too high a price to pay. We now have a collection of dish towels that do the same job and can just be thrown in the wash.

Paper Napkins: Same idea. We have cloth napkins that we wash and reuse.

Toilet Paper: Only from recycled paper.

Water bottle: We each have a durable water bottle that we take with us everywhere. We never need to buy bottled water. We use a water filter at home. Watch this fun video on bottled water.

Tailor: We take clothes when they have small tears or don't fit so well to the tailor and for $1 to $10 we can extend the life our otherwise perfectly fine clothes.

Paper: We normally print on both sides of paper. We reuse all single side printed sheets. I also save all paper from work (I get a lot of memos, handouts, draft documents, etc. that are printed single sided) and reuse them at home.

E-statements: I have converted all my financial statements (bank, credit cards, mutual funds, etc) to electronic statements. It has cut down significantly on the amount of mail I receive. I used to have binders and binders of all these statements that I never looked at. Saves me time in filing and saves trees.

Receipts: I have boxes and boxes of receipts that I never used. If you buy online or use a credit card then you already have an electronic receipt. I no longer ask for receipts at the gas station. When I have choice, I normally decline getting a receipt.

Recycle: We separate our trash and recycle as much as we can.

Avoid Plastic: Every piece of plastic ever made still exists. In the US we buy about 30 Billion plastic water bottles each year!! Most end up land fills. Not to mention all that other plastic we consume every day as packing materials for the stuff we buy, Ziploc bags, shopping bags, etc, etc. Plastic doesn't go away easily -- it can take 500 to 1000 years for plastic to break down. Nobody knows for sure. And every day we learn of more risks associated with the chemicals that leach out of these plastic products. Plastic burned in incinerators emit carcinogenic fumes into the air. Plastic is evil. Do everything you can to remove plastic from your life.

Plastic shopping bags: We have a collection of canvas bags that we use for all shopping. We keep a set in the car. We have small portable ones that we keep in our backpacks or travel bags. It took us a while to get in the habit of remembering to take the bags with us but now it is second nature and now we never use plastic bags.

Ziploc bags: We try and use as little as possible and if we must, we gently wash and reuse to extend their life. To replace ziploc bags we have purchased small Pyrex containers to protect our food. Works great.

Reduce exposure to chemicals

Cleaning Products: We have experimented with a range of “Green” cleaning products. After trial and error we have managed to find products that get the job done using less toxic chemicals. We like Method products for:

Diet
The nature of our diet has a tremendous impact on the planet. Our industrial food system is heavily dependent on fossil fuels and is unsustainable on many levels. Watch the great documentary "Food Inc" to learn about how our food system fails us. The American diet is rich in meat, a very inefficient way to feed a growing population. It takes 2,500 gallons of water to make a one-pound steak in the U.S.! More than 50% of the entire corn harvested in the U.S. is fed to cows to make beef. Fast food is also becoming a staple of the American diet with disastrous effects on our personal and planetary health. Read more on this here.

Eat less Meat:

We eat red meat very rarely and when we do we buy only organic, grass fed beef or grass fed buffalo meat.
We try and have at least a few "meat free" days each week.
We buy eggs that are free-range and organic and endorsed by the Humane Society
We buy organic chicken (free range) and pork
We buy fish according to environmentally friendly list (printable version here) - avoiding sea bass, farmed salmon etc... focusing on tilapia, wild salmon....

Buy Local

We buy as much of our vegetables from local farmers and we go to the farmers market regularly. We buy organic vegetables and fruits as much as possible.

Well, that is a start. Drop me a line if you have some other good ideas or examples of steps that you have taken to reduce your footprint.

The longest journey begins with a single step....

Shameful, Part 2

2010-07-28T20:27:00.000-07:00

At the risk of being tiresome I will continue my rant from Tuesday (July 27, 2010). On Thursday the US Senate decided that it will not debate the climate bill sitting in its docket this year. So our society again takes no action on the greatest threat to life on the planet. I, like Thomas Friedman, am left speechless as to how to understand our indefensible intellectual, ethical, and moral failure.

Proud to be an American?

Thomas Friedman's take on it all:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

July 24, 2010

We’re Gonna Be Sorry

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

When I first heard on Thursday that Senate Democrats were abandoning the effort to pass an energy/climate bill that would begin to cap greenhouse gases that cause global warming and promote renewable energy that could diminish our addiction to oil, I remembered something that Joe Romm, the climateprogress.org blogger, once said: The best thing about improvements in health care is that all the climate-change deniers are now going to live long enough to see how wrong they were.

Alas, so are the rest of us. I could blame Republicans for the fact that not one G.O.P. senator indicated a willingness to vote for a bill that would put the slightest price on carbon. I could blame the Democratic senators who were also waffling. I could blame President Obama for his disappearing act on energy and spending more time reading the polls than changing the polls. I could blame the Chamber of Commerce and the fossil-fuel lobby for spending bags of money to subvert this bill. But the truth is, the public, confused and stressed by the last two years, never got mobilized to press for this legislation. We will regret it.

We’ve basically decided to keep pumping greenhouse gases into Mother Nature’s operating system and take our chances that the results will be benign — even though a vast majority of scientists warn that this will not be so. Fasten your seat belts. As the environmentalist Rob Watson likes to say: “Mother Nature is just chemistry, biology and physics. That’s all she is.” You cannot sweet-talk her. You cannot spin her. You cannot tell her that the oil companies say climate change is a hoax. No, Mother Nature is going to do whatever chemistry, biology and physics dictate, and “Mother Nature always bats last, and she always bats 1.000,” says Watson. Do not mess with Mother Nature. But that is just what we’re doing.

Since I don’t have anything else to say, I will just fill out this column with a few news stories and e-mails that came across my desk in the past few days:

Just as the U.S. Senate was abandoning plans for a U.S. cap-and-trade system, this article ran in The China Daily: “BEIJING — The country is set to begin domestic carbon trading programs during its 12th Five-Year Plan period (2011-2015) to help it meet its 2020 carbon intensity target. The decision was made at a closed-door meeting chaired by Xie Zhenhua, deputy director of the National Development and Reform Commission ... Putting a price on carbon is a crucial step for the country to employ the market to reduce its carbon emissions and genuinely shift to a low-carbon economy, industry analysts said.”
As we East Coasters know, it’s been extremely hot here this summer, with records broken. But, hey, you could be living in Russia, where ABC News recently reported that a “heat wave, which has lasted for weeks, has Russia suffering its worst drought in 130 years. In some parts of the country, temperatures have reached 105 degrees.” Moscow’s high the other day was 93 degrees. The average temperature in July for the city is 76 degrees. The BBC reported that to keep cool “at lakes and rivers around Moscow, groups of revelers can be seen knocking back vodka and then plunging into the water. The result is predictable — 233 people have drowned in the last week alone.”
A day before the climate bill went down, Lew Hay, the C.E.O. of NextEra Energy, which owns Florida Power & Light, one of the nation’s biggest utilities, e-mailed to say that if the Senate would set a price on carbon and requirements for renewal energy, utilities like his would have the price certainty they need to make the big next-generation investments, including nuclear. “If we invest an additional $3 billion a year or so on clean energy, that’s roughly 50,000 jobs over the next five years,” said Hay. (Say goodbye to that.)
Making our country more energy efficient is not some green feel-good thing. Retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who was Gen. David Petraeus’s senior logistician in Iraq, e-mailed to say that “over 1,000 Americans have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan hauling fuel to air-condition tents and buildings. If our military would simply insulate their structures, it would save billions of dollars and, more importantly, save lives of truck drivers and escorts. ... And will take lots of big fuel trucks (a k a Taliban Targets) off the road, expediting the end of the conflict.”

The last word goes to the contrarian hedge fund manager Jeremy Grantham, who in his July letter to investors, noted: “Conspiracy theorists claim to believe that global warming is a carefully constructed hoax driven by scientists desperate for ... what? Being needled by nonscientific newspaper reports, by blogs and by right-wing politicians and think tanks? I have a much simpler but plausible ‘conspiracy theory’: the fossil energy companies, driven by the need to protect hundreds of billions of dollars of profits, encourage obfuscation of the inconvenient scientific results. I, for one, admire them for their P.R. skills, while wondering, as always: “Have they no grandchildren?”

Shameful

2010-07-27T06:56:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, July 22, 2010 the Senate decided to not move forward on climate change legislation this year.

Shame on our leaders for failing to lead. Shame on us for not making them lead.

this blogger captures it best for me:

...if the current generation fails to take action to prevent dangerous or catastrophic climate change, that failure is what history will remember us by. We will be remembered as the people who had all the necessary information, but who were so selfish and dysfunctional that they couldn’t step up and take even the first small step.

Wise words from Paul Krugman on our failure:

July 25, 2010

Who Cooked the Planet?

By PAUL KRUGMAN

Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.

Of course, you can’t infer trends in global temperatures from one year’s experience. But ignoring that fact has long been one of the favorite tricks of climate-change deniers: they point to an unusually warm year in the past, and say “See, the planet has been cooling, not warming, since 1998!” Actually, 2005, not 1998, was the warmest year to date — but the point is that the record-breaking temperatures we’re currently experiencing have made a nonsense argument even more nonsensical; at this point it doesn’t work even on its own terms.

But will any of the deniers say “O.K., I guess I was wrong,” and support climate action? No. And the planet will continue to cook.

So why didn’t climate-change legislation get through the Senate? Let’s talk first about what didn’t cause the failure, because there have been many attempts to blame the wrong people.

First of all, we didn’t fail to act because of legitimate doubts about the science. Every piece of valid evidence — long-term temperature averages that smooth out year-to-year fluctuations, Arctic sea ice volume, melting of glaciers, the ratio of record highs to record lows — points to a continuing, and quite possibly accelerating, rise in global temperatures.

Nor is this evidence tainted by scientific misbehavior. You’ve probably heard about the accusations leveled against climate researchers — allegations of fabricated data, the supposedly damning e-mail messages of “Climategate,” and so on. What you may not have heard, because it has received much less publicity, is that every one of these supposed scandals was eventually unmasked as a fraud concocted by opponents of climate action, then bought into by many in the news media. You don’t believe such things can happen? Think Shirley Sherrod.

Did reasonable concerns about the economic impact of climate legislation block action? No. It has always been funny, in a gallows humor sort of way, to watch conservatives who laud the limitless power and flexibility of markets turn around and insist that the economy would collapse if we were to put a price on carbon. All serious estimates suggest that we could phase in limits on greenhouse gas emissions with at most a small impact on the economy’s growth rate.

So it wasn’t the science, the scientists, or the economics that killed action on climate change. What was it?

The answer is, the usual suspects: greed and cowardice.

If you want to understand opposition to climate action, follow the money. The economy as a whole wouldn’t be significantly hurt if we put a price on carbon, but certain industries — above all, the coal and oil industries — would. And those industries have mounted a huge disinformation campaign to protect their bottom lines.

Look at the scientists who question the consensus on climate change; look at the organizations pushing fake scandals; look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

Or look at the politicians who have been most vociferously opposed to climate action. Where do they get much of their campaign money? You already know the answer.

By itself, however, greed wouldn’t have triumphed. It needed the aid of cowardice — above all, the cowardice of politicians who know how big a threat global warming poses, who supported action in the past, but who deserted their posts at the crucial moment.

There are a number of such climate cowards, but let me single out one in particular: Senator John McCain.

There was a time when Mr. McCain was considered a friend of the environment. Back in 2003 he burnished his maverick image by co-sponsoring legislation that would have created a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions. He reaffirmed support for such a system during his presidential campaign, and things might look very different now if he had continued to back climate action once his opponent was in the White House. But he didn’t — and it’s hard to see his switch as anything other than the act of a man willing to sacrifice his principles, and humanity’s future, for the sake of a few years added to his political career.

Alas, Mr. McCain wasn’t alone; and there will be no climate bill. Greed, aided by cowardice, has triumphed. And the whole world will pay the price.

Nothing to Wear? Try this Challenge

2010-07-25T11:11:00.000-07:00

As i push myself to lead a more sustainable lifestyle I try to buy less stuff. For example, on the clothing front I try to see how many months I can go without buying any new clothing. The next phase of the experiment for me is to explore second-hand stores and see how much of my wardrobe that I can buy there. I am also using a tailor more to extend the life of clothes I currently have. What percentage of the clothes in our closets do we actually wear? How much mental energy and time do we spend each day pondering what to wear? Is this really how we want live our lives?

Below is an interesting article on two clothing related challenges that really promotes mindfulness on this issue.

Check out this slide show of people who tried the 6 Items challenge. And the observations and testimonials from the Great American Apparel Diet (no new clothes for a year) are thought provoking. An example:

By KatherineS

I just found this program through a story that ran in the New York Times-- which I think goes well with this program. . I actually started my own “diet” in May (didn’t realize there was a program). I had set out to do 6 months with no new clothes, beauty products, accessories for both me and my 2 year old daughter, but I fell off the wagon after a month when I was on vacation in Hawaii and discovered my bikini top was useless for surfing. I need a support group and glad to have found one now! Why does the diet makes me feel liberated? I realize how much more is less. A few perfect pieces is Nirvana. An over-stuffed closet is soul-crushing. My husband has had the right balance since I’ve known him: A uniform of black pants and shirts for work, and a uniform of jeans and t-shirts for play: he expresses himself creatively with hats, belts and sunglasses, but rarely adds anything to his basics. I have always been secretly jealous, but couldn’t put my finger on how to do it myself until I learn about the 6 items for a month plan. I realize more and more, that the more clothes I buy, the harder it is to value what I already have, and the more I want to buy to find something even better, and then what I already have starts looking pretty worthless or I can’t even see it in my closet..let’s end this vicious cycle !

If you try either of the challenges please let me know -- I would love to hear your insights. Perhaps you could be a guest blogger and tell us about your experience!

New York Times, July 21, 2010

Shoppers on a ‘Diet’ Tame the Urge to Buy

By ERIC WILSON

IMAGINE that horrible though all-too-familiar feeling: You are standing before a fully stuffed closet and yet have nothing to wear.

Now, imagine something worse: Your closet contains only six items, and you are restricted to wearing only those six items for an entire month.

Now, if you can bear it, imagine something unspeakable:

No one notices.

Nearly a month into what amounted to just such a self-inflicted fast of fashion, Stella Brennan, 31, an insurance sales executive from Kenosha, Wis., realized last week that not even her husband, Kelly, a machinist, had yet figured out that she had been wearing the same six items, over and over, since June 21. The sad punch line is that Mr. Brennan is the one who actually does the laundry in the family.

During her experiment — something called a “shopping diet,” actually — which ended on Wednesday, Ms. Brennan made do with the following: a black blazer and pants from H & M; two button-down shirts, one black and one pink; a pair of Old Navy jeans; and one well-worn pink T-shirt.

How she settled on those items was complicated by the fact that she has two young children, a golden retriever and three cats, and that she was starting a new job last month with an hourlong commute. She said she needed “six items that are animal-hair-, kid-, food- and wrinkle-resistant. I need these items to be professional, but also work for playing football with my son and tea parties.”

She agonized the longest over the T-shirt — the button-down shirts and suit separates were for work, but the right T-shirt could be worn casually with jeans or dressed up with the blazer. Her revelation at the end of 31 days, after her husband still had not noticed, even when she wore her floral-printed pajamas to do yard work: “Obviously, I didn’t need all of these clothes.”

This self-imposed exercise in frugality was prompted by a Web challenge called Six Items or Less (sixitemsorless.com). The premise was to go an entire month wearing only six items already found in your closet (not counting shoes, underwear or accessories). Nearly 100 people around the country, and in faraway places like Dubai and Bangalore, India, were also taking part in the regimen, with motives including a way to trim back on spending, an outright rejection of fashion, and a concern that the mass production and global transportation of increasingly cheap clothing was damaging the environment.

Meanwhile, an even stricter program, the Great American Apparel Diet, which began on Sept. 1, has attracted pledges by more than 150 women and two men to abstain from buying for an entire year. (Again, undies don’t count.) And next month, Gallery Books will publish a self-help guide, called “The Shopping Diet,” by the red-carpet stylist Phillip Bloch. (“Step 1: Admit You’re an Overshopper”... “Step 9: Practice Safe, Responsible Shopping”... “Step 10: Make the Diet a Way of Life.”)

Though their numbers may be small, and their diets extreme, these self-deniers of fashion are representative, in perhaps a notable way, of a broader reckoning of consumers’ spending habits. As the economy begins to improve, shoppers of every income appear to be wrestling with the same questions: Is it safe to go back to our old, pre-recession ways? Or should we? The authors of these diets — including some fashion marketing and advertising executives, interestingly enough — seem to think not.

Sally Bjornsen, the founder of the Great American Apparel Diet (thegreatamericanappareldiet.com), said she was prompted to stop buying clothes for a simple reason: “I was sick and tired of consumerism,” she said.

Last summer, Ms. Bjornsen, 47, said she was thinking about how years of easy credit had led to overspending on cars, homes and luxury goods. Then, looking in her own closet, she realized that she was part of the problem, she said. For her job, as a representative of commercial photographers in Seattle and before that as a marketing executive at fashion companies like Nike and Nordstrom, she’d spent $5,000 to $10,000 a year on clothes.

“I was buying in an egregious way,” Ms. Bjornsen said. “I was just kind of grossed out by the whole thing.”

Independently, the “six items” experiment was conceived by two friends, Heidi Hackemer, 31, a strategic business director at the New York advertising agency BBH, and Tamsin Davies, 34, the head of innovation at Fallon London, after an informal discussion about their desires to pare down their wardrobes. The idea snowballed into a creative challenge, Six Items or Less.

The rules were not hard and fast. If a person owned, for example, several similar black blazers — as Ms. Brennan, the Wisconsin executive, did — she could count them as one item.

“Our whole thing was not to put a philosophy behind it, and not be too preachy,” Ms. Hackemer said. The challenge has proved so popular that she said it would be repeated this fall.

Her six items were a black dress, a pair of black jeggings (a jeans-leggings hybrid), a black tank top, a black blazer, a gray skirt and denim shorts. The combinations she came up with were surprisingly diverse enough to get her through the month, “but once you hit Week 3, you think, You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Sixers, as Six Items or Less enthusiasts call themselves, have formed something of an online fashion support network, especially when they feel tempted to fall off the wagon.

Ms. Brennan did sound ripe for some kind of fashion intervention. In a recent interview, she spoke of a rack of clothes in the back of her closet that still had the tags on them, and clothes that she has not worn in 15 years but that she cannot stand to part with, and her 72 pairs of “active” shoes (meaning those that she actively wears, not the ones still in the boxes), and a closet full of clothes for her 3-year-old daughter, and, lest she forget, a wardrobe of clothes for her dog.

“My daughter doesn’t care what she wears, and I’m turning her into a monster,” Ms. Brennan said. “We’re ruining the next generation of girls with fashion.”

THE dieters’ comments reflect the complicated and sometimes confused relationships between consumers and their closets — which perhaps was to be expected in a nation where women, on average, own seven pairs of jeans but wear only four regularly, according to the September issue of Consumer Reports’ ShopSmart magazine. One in four women asked by the magazine said she owned 10 pairs or more.

Still, the month has been grueling. One Sixer from Venice, Calif., confessed online to splurging on T-shirts at a James Perse sample sale. Addy, from Milwaukee, wrote that she had become so bored with her six items “that I don’t even have a desire to get up in the morning,” and she complained of mood swings.

But others describe a life-changing experience. Sneha Lakshman, 32, a founder of Dig Design, a Web and mobile products company in Bangalore, said by phone that she had decided, “That’s it, I’m going to wear only black from now on.”

Kelli Bauman, 24, a visual communications student from Indianapolis, said she was facing up to her compulsive-shopping habits. She described herself as the type who gets excited about buying cleaning products; a thrice-weekly shopper at Target. “I feel like I am programmed to want to buy new things,” she said. “When my jeans got a hole in them, I wanted to buy new jeans that instant.”

Just look at how far she has come. “I’ve only been to Target twice this whole time.” On one visit, she bought wasp spray and toothpaste for herself, but splurged on gifts for a bride-to-be — buying for someone else was like a “gateway drug,” she said.

Another Sixer, Dean Kakridas, 42, the director of business development at Frog Design, an innovation firm in Austin, Tex., said that he was obsessed with efficiency. “I kind of question everything,” he said, including why he was spending 20 minutes every morning figuring out what to wear.

He wanted to identify the clothes that made him happiest and fit his lifestyle. He chose a pair of G-Star jeans, two button-down shirts, two short-sleeve polo shirts and, cleverly, a pair of shorts from Life After Denim that are reversible (one side is solid charcoal; the other is plaid). Speaking like a programmer, he said: “Anything that removes complexity or cycles from your day is really valuable. I have freed a lot of bandwidth in my head.” (After three weeks on the program, however, he was quoting Coco Chanel: “I don’t do fashion. I am fashion.”)

The most interesting thing to many of the Sixers was how few people noticed what they were doing. Except, that is, for those who did. Mr. Kakridas said that his wife disapproved.

“My wife jabs at me almost on a daily basis,” he said. “She tries to get me to waver from the commitment and get me to cheat. She hid my Febreze from me.”

As with any diet, abstinence is not for everyone.

Of the 150-plus-people who signed up for the Great American Apparel Diet, about half have given up. Ms. Bjornsen’s own sister quit after four weeks. And she has herself cheated twice, once when she realized she had forgotten to bring her workout clothes to the gym, a second time when her husband told her that her pajamas looked worn out and gross. Though she said she feels no guilt about those indulgences, Ms. Bjornsen said that she was looking forward to the end of the diet on Aug. 31.

She had thought about ways to make money off the diet, she said, but instead she plans to pass on the management of the Web site to continuing and future participants.

“It’s taken about 10 to 20 years to build up the idea that nothing is good unless it is new,” Ms. Bjornsen said. “Five years from now, if the diet is still going, it would be interesting to see how that changes.”

When your tooth hurts, who do you listen to?

2010-07-21T08:32:00.000-07:00

Recently a reader sent me a note explaining that they don't believe in climate change. I responded and tried to enter into a discussion on the issue -- you know where two people exchange ideas and offer evidence for their respective position. The reader took ombrage at this. From their perspective we were each entitled to our point of view and the other should respect that. I tried to make the case that climate change is about science, and not all opinions are created equal. If your tooth hurts, who are you going to listen to? Your dentist or your cousin Larry who is handy with a pair of pliers?

And then just a few days later I came across this interview of Stephen Schneider on Climate Progress who does a great job of making the same point but by using good science. It gets a bit geeky at times, but give it a shot as his insights are exceptional.

Here is the short version: The scientists who most strongly support the theory of man-made climate change are also the researchers that have produced the largest body of credible, peer-reviewed studies on the topic. The people who speak out most against climate change have virtually no scientific standing; they have produced few to no peer reviewed studies on climate related topics.

If nothing else skim down to the end of the interview. Schneider does a nice job of explaining the role of scientists and where opinion fits in. I highlighted this paragraph in red for easy finding.
And a couple of terms that appear below that you may not be familiar with:

ACC = Anthropogenic Climate Change (man-made climate change)

IPCC = Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The IPCC is a body created by the UN (at the request of the United States and other members) to study climate change. The IPCC issues a summary report about each 7 years. The most recent report was in 2007. The IPCC report is considered THE defining word of the scientific community's view on climate change. ( A great, easy to read summary about the IPCC can be found here.)

The remainder of this posting is from Joe Romm at Climate Progress:

Interview with scientist Stephen Schneider on his “Expert Credibility in Climate Change” study

July 14, 2010 Last month I wrote about the new study that reaffirmed the broad scientific understanding of climate change and questioned the media’s reliance on a tiny group of less-credibile scientists for “balance.” The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences study “Expert credibility in climate change,” was predictably attacked and misrepresented by the disinformers as part of their ongoing efforts to promote their fringe anti-science views.
To set the record straight, ClimateScienceWatch.org talked with one of the article’s coauthors, Stanford University Prof. Stephen Schneider. The video and transcript of the interview are below. First, let me repost the study’s main conclusion:

Here, we use an extensive dataset of 1,372 climate researchers and their publication and citation data to show that 1) 97-98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field support the tenets of ACC outlined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and 2) the relative climate expertise and scientific prominence of the researchers unconvinced of ACC are substantially below that of the convinced researchers.
That is the conclusion of an important first-of-its-kind study published today in the

Here is the CSW interview with Stephen H. Schneider, Melvin and Joan Lane Professor for Interdisciplinary Environmental Studies, Professor, Department of Biology, and Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, at Stanford University
Note: The transcript “contains more extended text from the interview, in addition to what is included in the video.”

CSW: The article on climate science expert credibility that you co-authored, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) – what prompted this study?
Schneider: There are so many claims out there from all kinds of interests, about how climate change is ‘the end of the world,’ or ‘good for you,’ and people – policymakers and media – are understandably confused. Part of the problem is that over time the media has fired so many of its specialists that there aren’t a lot of people left to sort out the relative credibility of all the claims. So, since a lot of those people who deny that humans have any impact on climate are claiming that they have scientific expertise, we said let’s just put it to a test.
There’s a very well-known and widely used independent index, which is: how many papers have you published and how many times have people cited them in the scientific literature? Those people who chose to put themselves on lists and petitions denying that there was a human impact on climate, let’s see how many papers they’ve published, and how many citations they have. Those people associated with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), let’s check them and see if there’s a difference.
CSW: In terms of how you defined the groups in the study, you have one category that you refer to as “convinced by the evidence” – convinced by the evidence for anthropogenic climate change. The other group is the “unconvinced by the evidence.” Are you defining them by scientific perspective, or are you defining them by policy positions?
Schneider: It’s a bit controversial how you define anyone in categories like “convinced” and “unconvinced” since none of us – I hope – are 100% convinced of anything, or 100% unconvinced, but we can have a vast preponderance of evidence. There are lists where groups have organized themselves into pro, basically, and con human impacts on climate. Most of the ‘pros’ work on the IPCC, mainstream science, and most of the ‘cons’ do not. Only two or three are in common. They wrote petitions saying they didn’t think there was much likelihood of anthropogenic change, and we put them in the unconvinced category. That is, they put themselves in the unconvinced category. As far as those who spent much of their life working at IPCC, there’s a very high probability they are convinced this problem is real or they wouldn’t be putting in all this time. The bottom line is that we let people self-define and then we let the numbers fall where they were, in terms of the relative credibility of each of those groups – and the credibility was vastly different. Not surprisingly, those people who do work daily in climate science have a much, much higher citation count and more published papers than those who just claim it isn’t true but really, for the most part, are not prime workers in climate change.
CSW: Well then, what about the charge that the study, in effect, is creating a ‘blacklist’ of certain scientists? It’s saying that these are the skeptics, the unconvinced by the evidence, but they don’t have any credibility and so you shouldn’t pay any attention to them.
Schneider: Well it’s laughable that it’s a blacklist. A blacklist is what somebody like Joe McCarthy did back in the 50’s, or Senator Inhofe is doing now, when we all know it’s the senator who is deliberately distorting. How could we be doing a blacklist when we’re using the names that they gave? All we did was test it. The fact that they don’t publish very much is not our issue. This is a fact check.
It really matters what your credentials are. If you have a heart arrhythmia as I do, and I also have a cardiologist, and you also have an oncological problem as I do, I’m not going to my cancer doc to ask him about my heart medicine and my cardiologist to ask about my chemo, I’m going to the experts. Who’s an expert really matters. People with no expertise, their opinion frankly does not matter on complex issues. And in my opinion shouldn’t even be quoted when we’re talking about the details of the science.
When we’re talking about what to do about it, then every citizen’s opinion is just as important as anybody else’s, and everybody should be quoted. But not about how many degrees of warming there is – that takes a lot of knowledge, to be able to know what you’re talking about. That knowledge is very well reflected in the counts of the number of times people’s scientific papers have been cited by their colleagues. That’s where the mainstream climate scientists have a major advantage over those who are unconvinced. We feel that’s a robust conclusion, that most of the claimants that there’s no anthropogenic climate change are very weak scientists – by and large – and most of their comments are really not very scientifically credible.
CSW: I believe Judith Curry argued that, on your various lists, under “convinced of the evidence” you were including people who are ecologists and biologists, and who aren’t really experts in the climate change detection and attribution research. So that somehow skews your notion of how to sort people out in terms of credibility. What’s your response to that?
Schneider: Well, there are two responses. First of all, there are a couple dozen people in the world that work in ecology – that includes people like Terry Root, Camille Parmesan, and myself, among others – who actually look at the bloom dates of roses in your grandmother’s back yard and when birds come back. We do detection and attribution studies. Those people are in the IPCC and they are legitimate experts and they have published research in Science and Nature and PNAS and places like that. There was an entire chapter on it in [IPCC] Working Group II and those people, again, like Cynthia Rosenzweig, were included in the IPCC database.
But she does have a point, that not everyone in IPCC is an expert in detection and attribution. That’s certainly true. But when she said that the IPCC group that we used in our PNAS study should be cut down to something like 20% of the original. That’s hundreds of people, that’s still quite a lot of people. If you look at the “unconvinced of evidence” group, virtually nobody in it has ever published a paper on detection and attribution. So, by Judy’s own logic, that means it’s virtually a null set. That means there’s almost nobody in the unconvinced category who has any expertise whatsoever in detection and attribution. So, if you take her logic, and apply it symmetrically to the “convinced” and “unconvinced” you narrow the “convinced” group down to a smaller but still clear and robust population and the “unconvinced” has virtually no expertise, and their opinion becomes completely irrelevant.
CSW: What about the argument that some of the people critical of the study have made, that there’s something wrong with the metric of counting numbers of publications and counting how often your work is cited by other scientists. Some people will say that just the number of your publications doesn’t necessarily tell what the quality of your science is, and of course people of similar viewpoints will cite each other, or some articles have 10 or 12 authors and that racks up a lot of totals for some people, so using the publication and citation metrics doesn’t necessarily represent a scientifically correct perspective. Rather, it’s an elitist appeal to authority claiming that one group is more credible on the basis of these questionable metrics.
Schneider: Well, first of all, there’s no perfect metric. What we’re trying to do is find out, in the spirit of risk management, where is the preponderance of evidence? Where is the preponderance of skill? We didn’t make [these metrics] up, which is the number of papers people publish and the number of times colleagues cite them. There is a very widespread belief, built on evidence, that those people with stronger publication records, getting themselves published many more times in peer reviewed literature – which is not easy – and the number of times you’re cited, the number of times other people are quoting you, is a very good metric as to whether you just published a meaningless paper about something irrelevant, or whether that paper has real clout.
The only way you can get citation and not have quality is if you have made a big error. In fact, one of the things we did to try to eliminate that is we didn’t just look at the average number of cites, we looked at the top four or five papers each person published, and then we tried to check and see whether one of them was massively cited. We’d cut that out, saying either that was their one brilliant shining star or they made so many mistakes that everybody caught them. As it turns out it made almost no difference in the statistics. We feel that these statistics are pretty robust in giving you the strong preponderance of evidence that those people who publish more and have more citations are much more scientifically credible.
About the ‘elitist’ part: Scientists are really stuck. It’s exactly the same thing in medicine, it’s the same thing with pilot’s licenses and driver’s licenses: We don’t let just anyone go out there and make any claim that they’re an expert, do anything they want, without checking their credibility. Is it elitist to license pilots and doctors? Is it elitist to have pilots tested every year by the FAA to make sure that their skills are maintained? Is it elitist to have board certification on specialities in various health professions? I don’t think so. I think it’s the way we have safety. We have an FDA, which analyzes food and drugs.
We’re talking about planetary life support. People who are special interests in making money in the fossil fuel industry, who are ideologues, who are so deeply opposed to government regulation or international agreements, will just make any wild claim to support their ideology or special interest. They’ll find some hired gun PhD, or they’ll pick weak scientists for the most part – and should they really be afforded as much credibility? Can you tell me that a hundred institutions around the world, that have been working for 40 years, that have had dozens and dozens of carefully reviewed assessments, are somehow no more credible – even if they’re more elitist – than petroleum geologists funded by an oil company? They’re as knowledgeable about climate science as I would be about how to fix the leak in the Deepwatergate problem. I mean, they’re really not experts, and it really does matter what people know. If we do not do the due diligence of letting people understand the relative credibility of claimants of truth, then all we do is have a confused public who hears claim and counter-claim.
That’s why there’s a National Academy of Sciences: it has to sort out the relative credibility of claims. Why is there an IPCC? Because the average person is not trained in what cloud feedback is, nor is the average geologist, just as the average climate scientist is not trained in how to find oil! So, let’s stay where we have our expertise. Science is a meritocracy. You have to have evidence. When somebody says I don’t believe in global warming, I ask, “Do you believe in evidence? Do you believe in a preponderance of evidence?”
CSW: What about the charge that there is a sort of commingling of science expertise with policy prescription here, in that, to say “convinced by the evidence for anthropogenic climate change,” that takes in most of the science community but it would also incorporate people who have a range of views on what kind of a climate policy would be desirable. There may be people who accept anthropogenic climate change but don’t support legislation for a strong mitigation policy. Or don’t support strong government regulation to limit greenhouse gases. Does it seem to you that real credible expertise in climate science points in the direction of a particular type of policy prescription, that we need a strong mitigation policy? Can you disconnect the two – and should we?
Schneider: I think it’s very difficult to disentangle them, without looking up every statement everyone has ever made. But most of people that signed the petitions saying they do not believe anthropogenic global warming is very likely, and they’re not convinced, are also making very strong statements that we shouldn’t have climate policy. Actually, very often people who say they aren’t convinced by the climate science are saying that simply because they do not want regulations, because they are anti-regulation ideologues, or special interest in the fossil fuel industry, or have a world view about private rights being more important than collective protection. Now, we aren’t going to be able to specifically separate them one by one unless you can find petitions that separate them – and those petitions don’t exist. But there’s a very, very high correlation between people who are convinced that there’s anthropogenic climate change and their argument that something should be done to slow it down to protect the planetary life support system. And there’s a very very high correlation between those who are unconvinced and saying “why should we have climate policy if we aren’t even convinced this is going on?” So, I think our conclusions are quite robust, though I have no doubt there could be 10 or 20% exceptions.
We have a database of over 1,000 people. Only a small number of them are going to fit into those ambiguous categories, and therefore do almost nothing to the statistics. So these are nitpicks, designed to discredit the overall preponderance of evidence we found. So while we feel that it is not a perfect measure, it’s a very close fit to the basic preponderance of thinking of the convinced and unconvinced. And if they don’t believe that, let them do their own study.
They also make a claim, which we haven’t discussed yet, that the reason the mainstream scientists have more papers and citations is because the “unconvinced” scientists have been systematically blocked by the peer review system, which is a cabal of government-funded scientists who are trying to eliminate the opinion of the contrarians. Now, this is pure assertion. They have absolutely no data. Have they ever shown us how many papers they’ve submitted, relative to the others?
I edit a journal called Climatic Change and I can tell you that the number of submissions I get from people with completely unconventional views is trivial, a tiny fraction of the hundreds and hundreds of submissions where people are not convinced of every detail, but they’re convinced the problem is real enough that it has to be studied and looked at and we have to take a look at the implications. So there are very few of them that are submitting. Now, they could come back and say, well that’s because we know that we’ll never get through the peer review process. Now they’re imputing that we’re some dishonest community who’s not going to give them a fair shake. When I get those papers, I often publish them, but I publish them with editorials that have opposite points of view. Just as, if I get a new radical idea in saying that climate change is going to be worse than the mainstream now thinks, I’ll probably publish it in Climatic Change, but then I’ll get an editorial from someone who is a little more conservative.
So they make this assertion that they’re being systematically excluded, because they have no other argument, they no have evidence for the assertion. Let them do a study. Let them show us the letters of all the papers that have been rejected. What we did is look at real evidence, independently collected: How many papers, and how many citations. That’s independent, and the only way you can claim it isn’t true is to invoke some massive conspiracy that is frankly laughable.
CSW: One critic, I believe it was Roy Spencer, called attention to your use of the term “tenets” –“the basic tenets of anthropogenic climate change,” or “the basic tenets of the IPCC.” He said that the term tenets belongs in religion, not science.
Schneider: Roy Spencer ought to know about religion since he publishes on creationist blog sites and I don’t, so I’ll give him expertise on religion that I don’t have. However, the word tenet has been used since I can remember being in 8th grade referring to a set of conditions and beliefs and criteria. So, in the sense that it’s criteria, or underlying aspects of a problem, I don’t have any difficulty using that word. I mean the tenets of those people who are unconvinced about climate change is that as long as there are loose ends anywhere, they don’t accept it.
The tenets on the side of the IPCC? Well it’s that greenhouse gases have increased. They trap heat. A significant fraction, almost all recent increases, are from human activities. And so forth. Each one of those is a component of the knowledge base. ‘Tenet’ is perfectly legitimate, it’s a standard word. The religion does not come from the side of the mostly convinced.
CSW: Last thoughts to leave us with?
Schneider: The main thing I want people to remember is that when we’re talking about expertise, we’re not talking about expertise in what to do about a problem. That is a social judgment and every person has the same right to their opinion as any person in climate. However, we are talking about the relative likelihood that there could be serious or even dangerous changes. Because before you even decide how you want to deploy resources as a hedge against a wide range of important social problems, you have to know how serious the problems are. All we’re trying to do in science is give the best estimate that honest people with a lot of evidence can, about the relative risks, so they can make wise decisions in their own lives and in who they elect about how we should deal with it.
If you have no idea about the risk, it’s very hard to rationally do risk management. And we feel that there many people deliberately muddying the risk waters because of a combination of ideology and special interest. We have every right to point out that they have weaker credentials in science than those who are convinced on the basis of the forty year record and longer that the scientific community has been successively examining, year after year after year. That is how we make decisions in medical, in health, or in business. We operate on the basis of preponderance of evidence. The same thing must be done for the planetary life support system. That’s why it’s so important to understand who’s credible.

“Expert Credibility in Climate Change” (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, published online before print, June 21, 2010)

Stephen Schneider’s website

Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate

I’ll repeat what I wrote a month ago: The disinformers are upset with this study since it exposes just how phony the entire disinformation campaign is.
Ironically, the best defense that some of the disinformers seem to have is, “I am not a skeptic.” But that label was originally pushed by the disinformers themselves — in fact, all serious scientists are skeptics. The issue is not whether someone is skeptical of the supposed ‘consensus’ — another ill-defined term that is it not terribly useful (see “Disputing the ‘consensus’ on global warming“). The issue is whether folks are actively spreading disinformation, especially disinformation that has been long debunked in the scientific literature. As I’ve said for many years now, it is time for the media to stop listening to, quoting, and enabling those who spread anti-science and anti-scientist disinformation.

Check Out Melibee Global

2010-07-17T09:11:00.000-07:00

I was recently interviewed by a friend of mine who runs a great blog on International Education: Melibee Global

See the full interview here.

This is all you need to know. (Between a Rock and a Hard Place)

2010-07-12T15:08:00.000-07:00

Here it is. This all you really all you really need to know:

Humanity is facing two megatrends, the impacts of Peak Oil, and the limits imposed by Exponential Growth on a finite planet. How we respond to these challenges during the next 20 years will define the quality of life for your family tree over the next millennium.

Peak Oil

Within the next ten years the world as we know will change forever.

Such a statement doesn't carry much of a punch these days in our era of 24 hour news cycles where we hear bombastic headlines on a daily basis. Real issues, like this one are rarely discussed and when they are they slip under the surface quietly, drowned out amongst the din and clamor of banality (American Idol update, anyone?).

Why should you care?

If you are reading this blog you, like me, have existed during the unique era of human history defined by cheap oil. We have never experienced a day when the supply of oil was insufficient to meet the demand. For the last 150 years we have acted as if we had an infinite supply of the stuff. It took hundreds of millions of years for the planet to produce the oil that is in the ground -- it has taken humanity less than two hundred years to use up 1/2 of that amount. (try graphing that statistic if you want to get a sense of the magnitude of that last sentence)

Cheap oil defines every fiber of the American society. We created a transportation system based on the privately-owned automobile -- thousands of pounds of steel to move, typically, one person around. We built suburbs further and further from where people work. We passed zoning laws that separate our homes from where we work, from our schools, and from our stores. You must drive to do everything. On average Americans drive about 1 hour a day back and forth to work (does this article ring true?). The shopping malls are far from where we live. We created a network of large department stores with acres of parking lots that can only be reached by car. How will people in the suburbs survive when it costs $10/gallon for gasoline?

Our industrial food system is drenched in oil -- we burn about 10 calories of energy in fossil fuels for every 1 calorie we produce in food. Think about those huge combines, the tractors, and all the equipment used in the creation, storage, and movement of food. Don't forget the massive amounts of fossil fuel based fertilizers that are sprayed on the fields each year. Much of the food on our plates travel an average of 1,500 miles before we dine on it.

Remember the impact of the "high" fuel prices experienced in 2008? Food prices also shot through the roof in the US and around the world. Remember the images of food riots from around the world? Now, think bigger, much, much bigger.

A mere 5% decrease in oil production in 1970 caused fuel prices to rise 400%. Think about the impact such a price jump would have now as it rippled through our economy.

E-v-e-r-y facet of our lives is based on cheap fuel. How much plastic do you have in your life? How much plastic is there in you car? TV? House? In the products you use day in and day out? All made from oil. Most of our consumer products are made in factories many thousands of miles from here (China, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, etc.) Forget 12,000 mile product supply chains once Peak Oil hits. The foundation of the global financial system is based on a growing supply of readily available cheap energy. Banks create new money in our economy by giving loans to new businesses or to existing business to expand. That debt, when paid back in the form of the interest rate paid on the loan, allows the economy to grow. All that new economic activity is based on a growing supply of cheap energy. The system most grow every day or it collapses. Yes, our financial system is a massive ponzi scheme -- watch it fail the day there is not enough oil to fund new economic growth to pay back all those loans. Think house mortgage bubble crash that we recently had, plus the bank collapse, now multiply by 1000.

I could go on and on but I can see your eyes glazing over. The demand for oil is growing exponentially while the supply is flat and will soon be decreasing. Oil is one of the most energy dense substances on the planet and is unique. Our world will change very soon. What are we doing to prepare for this new reality?

Exponential Growth
If Peak Oil is the "Rock" then Exponential Growth is the "Hard Place." (See the title of this posting if you are confused)

We live on a finite planet. The number of people on the planet is growing exponentially. The amount of resources each person is using is also growing exponentially. The amount of water we have is fixed. Trees can be replaced only at a certain rate. Fish can reproduce only so quickly. The earth can absorb pollution and clean the air and water at a certain speed. Our demands for the earth's resources are growing exponentially and will soon reach their limits.

Read my post here to see more details.

This graph summarizes the situation (source):

In the late 1970s humanity's demand surpassed the earths ecological capacity. This means that we are currently living as if we have 2 planets. Every day we stay above that horizontal line we are eating way the earth's natural capital. With each day we reduce the earth's capacity to support life on the planet. The impacts of this are becoming more and more apparent with each day at fish stocks collapse around the world, as water tables go dry, as the forests disappear, as the temperature rises, and so forth and so on.

So you can stop reading the news. Can certainly stop watching the "news." Stop reading the magazines. Background noise. Soon there will be wild accusations, emergency actions, demands for investigations, military actions to protect the national interest, a rush to invest in research and magical technology to solve our problems. It will all be for naught unless the debates and calls for action are to address the root causes, and not the symptoms.

What are you doing to ensure a livable future for your children? Grandchildren? Nieces? Nephews?

Learn the issues.

Teach others.

Take action.

If you don't, who will?

More Information can be found here:

Great list of sources on peak oil here.

Good website dedicated to peak oil here.

Wake up, America. We're Driving Toward Disaster (Washington Post)

Imagining Life Without Oil, and Being Ready (New York Times, June 10, 2010)

Note:
This is posting was inspired, and based on a speech I heard Bill Mikibben give at a Slow Money conference held in Vermont in June 2010. I liked the way he framed the idea so much that I thought I would try and share the main ideas here.

Wanna Play the Lottery? (Risk Analysis and Climate Change)

2010-07-06T05:37:00.000-07:00

Have your doubts about climate change? Know some friends or family members that are still skeptical? Given the overwhelming scientific evidence (see my blog post on this here) I find this mind blowing, but let's forget the science for a moment.

Let's talk about risk management. What are the potential risks if we take action to mitigate against global warming? What are the risks if we do nothing? What would a prudent/reasonable person then do?

Watch this video and then ask your skeptic friend/family member to rationalize how we should not take action.

Let the Revolution Begin....in Detroit?

2010-06-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

Today I am off to Detroit to attend the U.S. Social Forum. What's that? It is more or less a regional version of the World Social Forum. Not very helpful, huh? Try this (from Wikipedia):

The World Social Forum

The World Social Forum (WSF) is an annual meeting, based in Brazil, that defines itself as "an opened space – plural, diverse, non-governmental and non-partisan – that stimulates the decentralized debate, reflection, proposals building, experiences exchange and alliances among movements and organizations engaged in concrete actions towards a more solidary, democratic and fair world....a permanent space and process to build alternatives to neoliberalism".[1]

It is held by members of the alter-globalization movement (also referred to as the global justice movement) who come together to coordinate world campaigns, share and refine organizing strategies, and inform each other about movements from around the world and their issues. It tends to meet in January at the same time as its "great capitalist rival", the World Economic Forum's meeting in Davos, Switzerland. This date is usually picked in hopes that having a meeting that promotes alternative answers to world economic problems opposite the World Economic Forum will help the WSF's ideas get better coverage in the news media.

Seth Freed Wessler gives a nice summary of what it will look like (full article here):

as many as 20,000 of these progressives—lefties, radicals, liberals, agnostic independents and the rest—are expected to arrive in Detroit this week for the second U.S. Social Forum. It’s the domestic outgrowth of the the World Social Forum, which can be understood as Davos for those not convinced that markets alone can solve the globe’s problems.

The gathering will run all week and will consist of panels, workshops, marches, mixers and work on the ground in Detroit. It promises to pull people from across movements, generations and regions and will be about as multiracial as the country it’s about. It’s raison d’être: To “declare what we want our world to look like and … start planning the path to get there.”

More on the US Social Forum (from their website):

The purpose of the USSF is to effectively and affirmatively articulate the  values and strategies of a growing and vibrant movement for justice in the United States. Those who build towards and participate in the USSF are no  longer interested in simply stating what social justice movements  “stand-against,” rather we see ourselves as part of new movements that reach  beyond national borders, that practice democracy at all levels, and understand  that neo-liberalism abroad and here in the US is not the solution. The USSF  provides a first major step towards such articulation of what we stand for.

Why Detroit?

To win nationally, we must win in places like Detroit. The Midwest site of  the USSF marks a fierce resistance movement for social, racial, gender, and  economic justice. Detroit has the highest unemployment of any major city in the  country—23.2% (March 2009)—with nearly one in four Detroiters unable to find  work. Michigan has had the highest number of unemployed people in all 50 states  for nearly four years. Thousands of living wage jobs have been permanently lost  in the automotive industry and related sectors. Some think that it will take at  least until 2025 for Michigan to recover from the economic collapse and social  dislocation.

What is happening in Detroit and in Michigan is happening all  across the United States. Detroit is a harbinger for what we must do in our communities!  As grassroots activists and organizers, we work to address the indignities  against working families and low-income people, and protect our human right to  the basic necessities of life. In Detroit, we can make change happen!

The US Social Forum provides this space—drawing participants from  different regions, ethnicities, sectors and ages across the U.S. and its  colonies. Community-based organizations, Indigenous nations, immigrants,  independent workers organizations, unions, unemployed, youth, children, elders,  queers, differently-abled, international allies, academics, and advocacy organizations will be able to come together in Detroit for dialogues,  reflection and to define future strategies.

This is my first time attending a social forum gathering. It brings togethers the leaders of movements from all around the world as people begin to organize to create a different world. A world where peopole do not abdicate all reasoning to "market forces." A world beyond capitalism. A world where people have equal rights, true political power....basically the world that we all dream about but the one that most of us gave up as fantasy upon reaching adulthood. These are the people out there standing up to the corporations, fighting unfair economic and political systems, and fightring for environmental, economic, and political justice one community at a time.

I imagine that I won't find to many Tea Party members at these sessions, unless they are there to protest against them.

My beret is packed; let the revolution begin!

Learn more about the US Social Forum Here

Here is the Program that will be explored during the 5 day event: ( A detailed summary can be found here)

USSF 2010 - 14 Major Program Tracks

1. CAPITALISM IN CRISIS: TEARING DOWN POVERTY, BUILDING ECONOMIC ALTERNATIVES & A SOLIDARITY ECONOMY

a. Poverty on the rise: Un- and Under-employed, Underpaid, and Underground
b. Privatization and Failures of Public Goods: Health Care, Education, Water, Electricity
c. Debt-based Economy: Foreclosures and Credit
d. What is a Solidarity Economy? Bringing together international and domestic economic strategies to create models based on solidarity, equity, and justice.
e. Fighting for New Economic Practices: Green Jobs, Living Wage, Fair Trade, Community Land Trusts, and Cooperative Solutions
f. 21st Century Socialism, the Commons Movement, and others

2. CLIMATE JUSTICE: SUSTAINABILITY, RESOURCES AND LAND
a. Building Power, Resiliency and Sustainability through Ecological, Social, Energy and Environmental Justice Movement
b. Transition from Oil and Fossil Fuel Economy towards Ecologically Clean, Renewable and Sustainable Alternative Energy.
c. Food security, Agriculture & Small Farms
d. Water Rights & Access
e. Waste and Toxics/ Corporate Polluting & Regulations
f. Exploitation of Natural Resources, Climate Change and Environmental & Community Destruction (disaster and loss of biological and cultural diversity)

3. INDIGENOUS SOVEREIGNTY
a. Domestic and International Movements for the Rights of Indigenous People’s, Self-Determination, Treaty Rights and Sovereignty.
b. Struggles for land, forests, water, and economic, social and environmental justice.
c. Indigenous movement and leadership in social movements.

4. DISPLACEMENT, MIGRATION AND IMMIGRATION
a. Gentrification and Housing
b. Displaced Peoples: Internal Domestic Displacement (i.e. as a result of crises liek Katrina), People without citizenship and Environmental Refugees
c. Detention, Deportation and Sanctuary
d. Forced Migration: Human Trafficking, Migrant Work, Sex Slavery
e. Domestic and International Movements for Reparations and Landless Peoples

5. DEMOCRACY AND GOVERNANCE
a. Relationship between social movements and electoral politics
b. Rebuilding Society: current experiments and future alternatives
c. Federal and state takeover of local governance
d. Radical Democracy

6. TO THE RIGHT: INTERNATIONALLY AND DOMESTICALLY
a. Exposing Right wing strategies, diverse interests, and structure; use of Left tactics and racist responses
b. Dividing communities with a Moral Agenda: Against LGBT rights, Reproductive Rights and Gender Justice
c. Attacks on the Left domestically and internationally
d. Right-wing on the rise internationally: electing fascist leaders and parties
e. President Obama: What it means & what it doesn’t; what does Center forces mean for social movements

7. TO THE LEFT: BUILDING A MOVEMENT FOR SOCIAL JUSTICE: INTERSECTIONS AND ALLIANCES ACROSS RACE, CLASS, GENDER, SEXUALITY, AGE, ABILITY
a. Building Alliances and Leadership in all generations, culture, race, genders and other differences
b. Confronting & Undoing Systemic Oppression: Racism, White Supremacy, Patriarchy, Class Oppression, Heterosexism, Ableism and other systems
c. Building alliances across locations and political borders (local, national, rural, urban, nations, Indigenous Nations)
d. Creating healthier relationships between people, inside organizations and in movements

8. STRATEGIES FOR BUILDING POWER & ENSURING COMMUNITY NEEDS (Housing, Education, Jobs, Clean Air…)
a. Non violent Direct Action
b. Grassroots organizing
c. Electoral organizing
d. Left/revolutionary organization building
e. Education Organizing, Popular Education and Consciousness Raising
f. Using Human Rights framework
g. Self determination struggles
h. Faith based organizing
i. Advocacy, Legal Strategies, Policy

9. ORGANIZING A LABOR MOVEMENT FOR THE 21ST CENTURY: CRISIS AND OPPORTUNITIES
a. U.S. Workforce: Job Elimination, Cutbacks and Layoffs
b. State of Organized Labor Movement
c. Independent Worker’s Movements, Centers & Radical Labor Organizing
d. Building A Movement for All Workers: Alliance Building amongst Organized Labor, Workers Excluded from Labor Protections, Unorganized Labor, Immigrant Workers, Undocumented Workers, and others.

10. MEDIA JUSTICE, COMMUNICATIONS, & CULTURE
a. Culture as resistance and resilience
b. Art Activism and Cultural Events
c. Generating our own media, sharing our stories, popularizing our messages
d. Corporate Media and Media Consolidation
e. Communications and organizing

11. TRANSFORMATIVE JUSTICE, HEALING, AND ORGANIZING
a. Liberatory approaches to ending violence
b. Converging personal and political transformation in social movements
c. Creating effective organizing models based in transformative values
d. Prison and abolition: alternatives to prison, transformation of communities most impacted by prison industry, and building political power of ex-offenders
e. Spirituality and healing for renewal and resistance

12. ENDLESS WAR: MILITARIZATION, CRIMINALIZATION AND HUMAN RIGHTS
a. Prisons, policing and military recruitment of poor communities & young people
b. Homeland security: detention, rollback of civil rights, and repression of social movements
c. War and Occupation and US Intervention
d. Mobilizing Fear to Justify Endless War & Intervention: Islamophobia, sanctions, red-baiting, moral values
e. Building a strong anti-war movement

13. INTERNATIONAL SOLIDARITY AND RESPONSIBILITY: BUILDING A UNIFIED RESPONSE TO GLOBAL CRISES
a. From Detroit to Dakar, 2011 – Building Solidarity and Movement Nationally and Internationally
b. Palestine: Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
c. Building Alternative Poles of Power (for example, Latin America bloc or other alliances in countries & continents)
d. Global Justice versus Free Trade
e. Challenging US roles in international bodies (i.e. United Nations, NATO, WTO, G20 and others)

14. DETROIT AND THE RUST BELT
a. Race and Class Oppression in Detroit
b. Technology and the Decline of the Manufacturing Industry
c. Community and Labor responses: labor organizing, converting condemned manufacturing facilities
d. Revitalization of Detroit and other communities
e. Take Action: work brigades, solidarity projects

Time to get off the bench...

2010-06-17T19:41:00.000-07:00

Many of us have been captivated as the largest ecological disaster in our history slowly unfolds in the Gulf of Mexico. The days pass as man struggles to put the cork back in the bottle and ebb the eruption of oil from the ocean floor. The images are heartbreaking.

The reality is that fossil fuels have been wiping out life in the Gulf of Mexico for many years. Our industrial food production system is heavily reliant on fertilizers that are produced from fossil fuels. Most of the fertilizer used in the Midwest washes off the crops and fields and eventually is deposited in the Mississippi River which empties out into the Gulf of Mexico. (here is a animated explanation)

The nitrogen in the fertilizer spurs the rampant growth of algae in the water which eventually sucks the oxygen out of the water -- no oxygen, no life.

The size of the dead zone varies but it can be as large as the state of New Jersey, or about 7,000 square miles. (more here)

We have simply added a killing zone to the dead zone.

While the anger towards BP is warranted the opportunity presented by this catastrophe will be wasted if yet again we only focus on the symptoms. Or worse, if we simply do nothing.

The use of coal causes a myriad of health problems and thousands of deaths across the country. Thousands of US soldiers are continually put in harm's way to ensure adequate access to oil fields. Contamination by leaks from oil tankers and oil wells destroy entire ecosystems around the world every year. The burning of fossils fuels are the driving force behind climate change that threatens to create an unlivable planet.

When do we start acting like adults and acknowledge the simple facts? When do we start to make changes in our society? Want a livable planet? Want a few other life forms to survive with us? Want to revive the American economy? Then do the following:

Write/Call your senator (Yes, really): Demand that we put a price on carbon. Demand that they take action to stop global warming. The true cost to society of burning coal and oil is not yet reflected in the prices we pay. Once costs rise for these dirty fuels, industry will rapidly shift to renewable energy. Renewable energy is LOCAL energy....local jobs, local manufacturing....what's not to like?

You can find your senator's contact information here.
Live a sustainable life style: Each week look for a new way to reduce the amount of energy you use. Drive less. Get an energy audit for your home. Weatherize your home. Install some solar power on your roof. Buying a new appliance? Do your homework and get the most energy efficient model you can. Buy less stuff. Avoid plastics. Re-use. Recycle.

Life is not a spectator sport.

Food for Thought

2010-06-11T04:14:00.000-07:00

It was an amazing day at the Slow Money National Gathering today here in Burlington, VT. This movement is about creating an alternative to our unsustainable industrial food system. The presenters were humble, good-natured, and stunningly intelligent and pragmatic. I challenge anyone to not be inspired by the stories of their efforts to create healthy food in a way that is both profitable and ecologically sound. Their efforts to figure out how to allow people like you and me to invest in our local communities and support our local farmers and artisans. Or current legal system actually makes it very hard to do this. Despite all the odds people are making it happen. It is real. An odd mix of financial gurus, social entrepreneurs, and farmers are working together to create this new future. What's all the fuss about? Well, here is a great article that was in Time Magazine about our current food system and its trappings.

Friday, Aug. 21, 2009

Getting Real About the High Price of Cheap Food

By Bryan Walsh

Correction Appended: Aug. 20, 2009
Somewhere in Iowa, a pig is being raised in a confined pen, packed in so tightly with other swine that their curly tails have been chopped off so they won't bite one another. To prevent him from getting sick in such close quarters, he is dosed with antibiotics. The waste produced by the pig and his thousands of pen mates on the factory farm where they live goes into manure lagoons that blanket neighboring communities with air pollution and a stomach-churning stench. He's fed on American corn that was grown with the help of government subsidies and millions of tons of chemical fertilizer. When the pig is slaughtered, at about 5 months of age, he'll become sausage or bacon that will sell cheap, feeding an American addiction to meat that has contributed to an obesity epidemic currently afflicting more than two-thirds of the population. And when the rains come, the excess fertilizer that coaxed so much corn from the ground will be washed into the Mississippi River and down into the Gulf of Mexico, where it will help kill fish for miles and miles around. That's the state of your bacon — circa 2009. (See TIME's photo-essay "From Farm to Fork.")
Horror stories about the food industry have long been with us — ever since 1906, when Upton Sinclair's landmark novel The Jungle told some ugly truths about how America produces its meat. In the century that followed, things got much better, and in some ways much worse. The U.S. agricultural industry can now produce unlimited quantities of meat and grains at remarkably cheap prices. But it does so at a high cost to the environment, animals and humans. Those hidden prices are the creeping erosion of our fertile farmland, cages for egg-laying chickens so packed that the birds can't even raise their wings and the scary rise of antibiotic-resistant bacteria among farm animals. Add to the price tag the acceleration of global warming — our energy-intensive food system uses 19% of U.S. fossil fuels, more than any other sector of the economy.
And perhaps worst of all, our food is increasingly bad for us, even dangerous. A series of recalls involving contaminated foods this year — including an outbreak of salmonella from tainted peanuts that killed at least eight people and sickened 600 — has consumers rightly worried about the safety of their meals. A food system — from seed to 7‑Eleven — that generates cheap, filling food at the literal expense of healthier produce is also a principal cause of America's obesity epidemic. At a time when the nation is close to a civil war over health-care reform, obesity adds $147 billion a year to our doctor bills. "The way we farm now is destructive of the soil, the environment and us," says Doug Gurian-Sherman, a senior scientist with the food and environment program at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). (See pictures of what the world eats.)
Some Americans are heeding such warnings and working to transform the way the country eats — ranchers and farmers who are raising sustainable food in ways that don't bankrupt the earth. Documentaries like the scathing Food Inc. and the work of investigative journalists like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan are reprising Sinclair's work, awakening a sleeping public to the uncomfortable realities of how we eat. Change is also coming from the very top. First Lady Michelle Obama's White House garden has so far yielded more than 225 lb. of organic produce — and tons of powerful symbolism. But hers is still a losing battle. Despite increasing public awareness, sustainable agriculture, while the fastest-growing sector of the food industry, remains a tiny enterprise: according to the most recent data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), less than 1% of American cropland is farmed organically. Sustainable food is also pricier than conventional food and harder to find. And while large companies like General Mills have opened organic divisions, purists worry that the very definition of sustainability will be co-opted as a result. (See pictures of urban farming around the world.)
But we don't have the luxury of philosophizing about food. With the exhaustion of the soil, the impact of global warming and the inevitably rising price of oil — which will affect everything from fertilizer to supermarket electricity bills — our industrial style of food production will end sooner or later. As the developing world grows richer, hundreds of millions of people will want to shift to the same calorie-heavy, protein-rich diet that has made Americans so unhealthy — demand for meat and poultry worldwide is set to rise 25% by 2015 — but the earth can no longer deliver. Unless Americans radically rethink the way they grow and consume food, they face a future of eroded farmland, hollowed-out countryside, scarier germs, higher health costs — and bland taste. Sustainable food has an élitist reputation, but each of us depends on the soil, animals and plants — and as every farmer knows, if you don't take care of your land, it can't take care of you.
See 10 things to buy during the recession.
See the top 10 food trends of 2008.
The Downside of Cheap
For all the grumbling you do about your weekly grocery bill, the fact is you've never had it so good, at least in terms of what you pay for every calorie you eat. According to the USDA, Americans spend less than 10% of their incomes on food, down from 18% in 1966. Those savings begin with the remarkable success of one crop: corn. Corn is king on the American farm, with production passing 12 billion bu. annually, up from 4 billion bu. as recently as 1970. When we eat a cheeseburger, a Chicken McNugget, or drink soda, we're eating the corn that grows on vast, monocrop fields in Midwestern states like Iowa.
But cheap food is not free food, and corn comes with hidden costs. The crop is heavily fertilized — both with chemicals like nitrogen and with subsidies from Washington. Over the past decade, the Federal Government has poured more than $50 billion into the corn industry, keeping prices for the crop — at least until corn ethanol skewed the market — artificially low. That's why McDonald's can sell you a Big Mac, fries and a Coke for around $5 — a bargain, given that the meal contains nearly 1,200 calories, more than half the daily recommended requirement for adults. "Taxpayer subsidies basically underwrite cheap grain, and that's what the factory-farming system for meat is entirely dependent on," says Gurian-Sherman. (See the 10 worst fast food meals.)
So what's wrong with cheap food and cheap meat — especially in a world in which more than 1 billion people go hungry? A lot. For one thing, not all food is equally inexpensive; fruits and vegetables don't receive the same price supports as grains. A study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition found that a dollar could buy 1,200 calories of potato chips or 875 calories of soda but just 250 calories of vegetables or 170 calories of fresh fruit. With the backing of the government, farmers are producing more calories — some 500 more per person per day since the 1970s — but too many are unhealthy calories. Given that, it's no surprise we're so fat; it simply costs too much to be thin.
Our expanding girth is just one consequence of mainstream farming. Another is chemicals. No one doubts the power of chemical fertilizer to pull more crop from a field. American farmers now produce an astounding 153 bu. of corn per acre, up from 118 as recently as 1990. But the quantity of that fertilizer is flat-out scary: more than 10 million tons for corn alone — and nearly 23 million for all crops. When runoff from the fields of the Midwest reaches the Gulf of Mexico, it contributes to what's known as a dead zone, a seasonal, approximately 6,000-sq.-mi. area that has almost no oxygen and therefore almost no sea life. Because of the dead zone, the $2.8 billion Gulf of Mexico fishing industry loses 212,000 metric tons of seafood a year, and around the world, there are nearly 400 similar dead zones. Even as we produce more high-fat, high-calorie foods, we destroy one of our leanest and healthiest sources of protein. (See nine kid foods to avoid.)
The food industry's degradation of animal life, of course, isn't limited to fish. Though we might still like to imagine our food being raised by Old MacDonald, chances are your burger or your sausage came from what are called concentrated-animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are every bit as industrial as they sound. In CAFOs, large numbers of animals — 1,000 or more in the case of cattle and tens of thousands for chicken and pigs — are kept in close, concentrated conditions and fattened up for slaughter as fast as possible, contributing to efficiencies of scale and thus lower prices. But animals aren't widgets with legs. They're living creatures, and there are consequences to packing them in prison-like conditions. For instance: Where does all that manure go?
Pound for pound, a pig produces approximately four times the amount of waste a human does, and what factory farms do with that mess gets comparatively little oversight. Most hog waste is disposed of in open-air lagoons, which can overflow in heavy rain and contaminate nearby streams and rivers. "This creek that we used to wade in, that creek that our parents could drink out of, our kids can't even play in anymore," says Jayne Clampitt, a farmer in Independence, Iowa, who lives near a number of hog farms.
To stay alive and grow in such conditions, farm animals need pharmaceutical help, which can have further damaging consequences for humans. Overuse of antibiotics on farm animals leads, inevitably, to antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and the same bugs that infect animals can infect us too. The UCS estimates that about 70% of antimicrobial drugs used in America are given not to people but to animals, which means we're breeding more of those deadly organisms every day. The Institute of Medicine estimated in 1998 that antibiotic resistance cost the public-health system $4 billion to $5 billion a year — a figure that's almost certainly higher now. "I don't think CAFOs would be able to function as they do now without the widespread use of antibiotics," says Robert Martin, who was the executive director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production.
See more pictures of what the world eats.
See photos from a grocery store auction.
The livestock industry argues that estimates of antibiotics in food production are significantly overblown. Resistance "is the result of human use and not related to veterinary use," according to Kristina Butts, the manager of legislative affairs for the National Cattlemen's Beef Association. But with wonder drugs losing their effectiveness, it makes sense to preserve them for as long as we can, and that means limiting them to human use as much as possible. "These antibiotics are not given to sick animals," says Representative Louise Slaughter, who is sponsoring a bill to limit antibiotic use on farms. "It's a preventive measure because they are kept in pretty unspeakable conditions."
Such a measure would get at a symptom of the problem but not at the source. Just as the burning of fossil fuels that is causing global warming requires more than a tweaking of mileage standards, the manifold problems of our food system require a comprehensive solution. "There should be a recognition that what we are doing is unsustainable," says Martin. And yet, still we must eat. So what can we do? (See pictures of an apartment outfitted for goat-milking.)
Getting It Right
If a factory farm is hell for an animal, then Bill Niman's seaside ranch in Bolinas, Calif., an hour north of San Francisco, must be heaven. The property's cliffside view over the Pacific Ocean is worth millions, but the black Angus cattle that Niman and his wife Nicolette Hahn Niman raise keep their eyes on the ground, chewing contentedly on the pasture. Grass — and a trail of hay that Niman spreads from his truck periodically — is all the animals will eat during the nearly three years they'll spend on the ranch. That all-natural, noncorn diet — along with the intensive, individual care that the Nimans provide their animals — produces beef that many connoisseurs consider to be among the best in the world. But for Niman, there is more at stake than just a good steak. He believes that his way of raising farm animals — in the open air, with no chemicals or drugs and with maximum care — is the only truly sustainable method and could be a model for a better food system. "What we need in this country is a completely different way of raising animals for food," says Hahn Niman, a former attorney for the environmental group Earthjustice. "This needs to be done in the right way."
The Nimans like to call what they do "beyond organic," and there are some signs that consumers are beginning to catch up. This November, California voters approved a ballot proposition that guarantees farm animals enough space to lie down, stand up and turn around. Worldwide, organic food — a sometimes slippery term but on the whole a practice more sustainable than conventional food — is worth more than $46 billion. That's still a small slice of the overall food pie, but it's growing, even in a global recession. "There is more pent-up demand for organic than there is production," says Bill Wolf, a co-founder of the organic-food consultancy Wolf DiMatteo and Associates. (Watch TIME's video "The New Frugality: The Organic Gardener.")
So what will it take for sustainable food production to spread? It's clear that scaling up must begin with a sort of scaling down — a distributed system of many local or regional food producers as opposed to just a few massive ones. Since 1935, consolidation and industrialization have seen the number of U.S. farms decline from 6.8 million to fewer than 2 million — with the average farmer now feeding 129 Americans, compared with 19 people in 1940.
It's that very efficiency that's led to the problems and is in turn spurring a backlash, reflected not just in the growth of farmers' markets or the growing involvement of big corporations in organics but also in the local-food movement, in which restaurants and large catering services buy from suppliers in their areas, thereby improving freshness, supporting small-scale agriculture and reducing the so-called food miles between field and plate. That in turn slashes transportation costs and reduces the industry's carbon footprint.
A transition to more sustainable, smaller-scale production methods could even be possible without a loss in overall yield, as one survey from the University of Michigan suggested, but it would require far more farmworkers than we have today. With unemployment approaching double digits — and things especially grim in impoverished rural areas that have seen populations collapse over the past several decades — that's hardly a bad thing. Work in a CAFO is monotonous and soul-killing, while too many ordinary farmers struggle to make ends meet even as the rest of us pay less for food. Farmers aren't the enemy — and they deserve real help. We've transformed the essential human profession — growing food — into an industry like any other. "We're hurting for job creation, and industrial food has pushed people off the farm," says Hahn Niman. "We need to make farming real employment, because if you do it right, it's enjoyable work."
See pictures of the global food crisis.
See pictures of the world's most polluted places.
One model for how the new paradigm could work is Niman Ranch, a larger operation that Bill Niman founded in the 1990s, before he left in 2007. (By his own admission, he's a better farmer than he is a businessman.) The company has knitted together hundreds of small-scale farmers into a network that sells all-natural pork, beef and lamb to retailers and restaurants. In doing so, it leverages economies of scale while letting the farmers take proper care of their land and animals. "We like to think of ourselves as a force for a local-farming community, not as a large corporation," says Jeff Swain, Niman Ranch's CEO.
Other examples include the Mexican-fast-food chain Chipotle, which now sources its pork from Niman Ranch and gets its other meats and much of its beans from natural and organic sources. It's part of a commitment that Chipotle founder Steve Ells made years ago, not just because sustainable ingredients were better for the planet but because they tasted better too — a philosophy he calls Food with Integrity. It's not cheap for Chipotle — food makes up more than 32% of its costs, the highest in the fast-food industry. But to Ells, the taste more than compensates, and Chipotle's higher prices haven't stopped the company's rapid growth, from 16 stores in 1998 to over 900 today. "We put a lot of energy into finding farmers who are committed to raising better food," says Ells. (See pictures of the effects of global warming.)
Bon Appétit Management Company, a caterer based in Palo Alto, Calif., takes that commitment even further. The company sources as much of its produce as possible from within 150 miles of its kitchens and gets its meat from farmers who eschew antibiotics. Bon Appétit also tries to influence its customers' habits by nudging them toward greener choices. That includes campaigns to reduce food waste, in part by encouraging servers at its kitchens to offer smaller, more manageable portions. (The USDA estimates that Americans throw out 14% of the food we buy, which means that much of our record-breaking harvests ends up in the garbage.) And Bon Appétit supports a low-carbon diet, one that uses less meat and dairy, since both have a greater carbon footprint than fruit, vegetables and grain. The success of the overall operation demonstrates that sustainable food can work at an institutional scale bigger than an élite restaurant, a small market or a gourmet's kitchen — provided customers support it. "Ultimately it's going to be consumer demand that will cause change, not Washington," says Fedele Bauccio, Bon Appétit's co-founder. (See pictures of two farms in Nebraska.)
How willing are consumers to rethink the way they shop for — and eat — food? For most people, price will remain the biggest obstacle. Organic food continues to cost on average several times more than its conventional counterparts, and no one goes to farmers' markets for bargains. But not all costs can be measured by a price tag. Once you factor in crop subsidies, ecological damage and what we pay in health-care bills after our fatty, sugary diet makes us sick, conventionally produced food looks a lot pricier.
What we really need to do is something Americans have never done well, and that's to quit thinking big. We already eat four times as much meat and dairy as the rest of the world, and there's not a nutritionist on the planet who would argue that 24‑oz. steaks and mounds of buttery mashed potatoes are what any person needs to stay alive. "The idea is that healthy and good-tasting food should be available to everyone," says Hahn Niman. "The food system should be geared toward that."
Whether that happens will ultimately come down to all of us, since we have the chance to choose better food three times a day (or more often, if we're particularly hungry). It's true that most of us would prefer not to think too much about where our food comes from or what it's doing to the planet — after all, as Chipotle's Ells points out, eating is not exactly a "heady intellectual event." But if there's one difference between industrial agriculture and the emerging alternative, it's that very thing: consciousness. Niman takes care with each of his cattle, just as an organic farmer takes care of his produce and smart shoppers take care with what they put in their shopping cart and on the family dinner table. The industrial food system fills us up but leaves us empty — it's based on selective forgetting. But what we eat — how it's raised and how it gets to us — has consequences that can't be ignored any longer.
— With reporting by Rebecca Kaplan / New York
The original version of this article mistakenly referred to the Bon Appétit Management Company as the Bon Appétit Food Management Company
See the top 10 green ideas of 2008.
See TIME's Pictures of the Week.
The Tale of Two Cattle
How did your hamburger get to your plate — and what did it eat along the way? The journey of beef illustrates the great American food chain
ORGANIC (1% of all cattle)
This is the way all beef used to be raised — and how some people still imagine it is. Bill Niman tends a small herd with one of the lightest hands in the business and produces what Bay Area chefs swear is unparalleled beef
Diet: Grass
Niman's cows eat only grass, along with a smattering of hay. That's the normal diet for cattle. Their rumen, a digestive organ, can break down grasses we'd find inedible
Supplements: None
Niman gives no supplements whatsoever to his cattle — no drugs, no hormones, no additives. That's not ironclad for organic beef — some companies might use antimicrobials — but generally the animals are supplement-free
Environmental Impact: Living with the Land
To prevent his ranch from becoming overgrazed, Niman shifts his cattle around the land, ensuring that the grass has time to recover between feedings. The result is a surprisingly low-impact hamburger, since grass doesn't need chemical fertilizer to grow and its presence helps prevent soil erosion. There's no need to clean up manure — with Niman's low cattle density, the waste just fertilizes the land
Human Impact: The Omega Effect
Beef has a bad rep among nutritionists, but that might be partly unfair for grass-fed steaks. According to research from the University of California, grass-fed beef is higher in beta-carotene, vitamin E and omega-3 fatty acids than conventional beef
CONVENTIONAL (99% of all cattle)
The vast majority of all American cattle start off on open ranges, but that's where the similarity to their organic cousins ends. They're shifted after a few months to the tight quarters of an industrial feedlot, to be fattened up as fast as possible
Diet: Grass and corn
Conventional cattle feed off grass pasture for the first several months, but at the feedlot, they're switched to a heavily corn-based diet, which makes them gain weight faster but also makes them get sick more easily
Supplements: Chemicals
In part to help them survive the crowded conditions of feedlots, where infections can spread fast, conventional cattle are given antibiotics in their feed, and sometimes growth hormones, bloods and fats
Environmental Impact: Waste
A 1,000-head feedlot produces up to 280 tons of manure a week, and the smell can be powerful. All that feed corn requires millions of tons of fertilizer and, ultimately, a lot of petroleum
Human Impact: Fat Attack
Feeding corn to cattle for the last several months of their lives doesn't just get them fatter faster; it also changes the quality of the beef. Corn helps produce that marbled taste many of us love, but it can result in beef that is higher in fat — helping to fuel the obesity epidemic

Slow Money....

2010-06-09T19:35:00.000-07:00

* What would the world be like if we invested 50% of our assets within 50 miles of where we live?
* What if there were a new generation of companies that gave away 50% of their profits?
* What if there were 50% more organic matter in our soil 50 years from now?

Yeah, I don't know either. But I hope to have a better sense of the answers to these questions by the end of the week. I just took a 12.5 hour train ride to Burlington, VT to attend a "Slow Money" conference on Thursday and Friday. (I figured the train was better for the planet than driving, plus I could use all that time productively)

What is the Slow Money movement all about? From their website:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
About Slow Money
BusinessWeek calls Slow Money "one of the big ideas of 2010." NPR calls us "a movement." ACRES USA calls us "a revolution."

Founded by Woody Tasch, a pioneer in merging investing and philanthropy, Slow Money's mission is to build local and national networks, and develop new financial products and services, dedicated to:

investing in small food enterprises and local food systems;
connecting investors to their local economies; and,
building the nurture capital industry.

Soil fertility, carrying capacity, sense of place, care of the commons, cultural, ecological and economic health and diversity, nonviolence -- these are the fundamentals of nurture capital, a new financial sector supporting the emergence of a restorative economy. And these are the fundamentals of the Slow Money Principles.

Slow Money's goal is: a million Americans investing 1% of their assets in local food systems within a decade.

Because the first step is a fundamentally new way of thinking about money, our first step is a campaign to obtain signatories to the Slow Money Principles. Our next step is growing the Slow Money Alliance into a major national network that provides strategic and financial assistance to local initiatives around the country. The Founding Members of the Slow Money Alliance includes many recognized leaders in organic food, sustainable agriculture, philanthropy and social investing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
I am excited because they have a great list of speakers. One of them I have met in person, a few were highlighted in Food Inc (if you have not seen this film, go rent it NOW), and/or a few have inspired me with their writing or speaking.

Learn more about Slow Money here. And the program for the gathering can be found here.

Confirmed Speakers

Alisa Gravitz, Executive Director, Green America

Eliot Coleman, Founder, Four Season Farm and Author of The New Organic Grower

Joel Salatin, Owner, Polyface Farm

Bill McKibben, Founder, 350.org and Author of Deep Economy

Gary Hirshberg, CEO, Stonyfield Farm

Will Raap, Founder, Gardener’s Supply

Erika Allen, Chicago Project Manager, Growing Power

Robert Zevin, President, Robert Brooke Zevin Associates

Tom Stearns, Founder, High Mowing Seeds

Michelle Long, Executive Director, BALLE

Chris Martenson, Founder, The Crash Course

Woody Tasch, Founder, Slow Money

A Timely Thought

2010-06-08T09:52:00.000-07:00

It has been over a week since my last blog posting. Hopefully, you noticed and perhaps even lamented the omission. So, what kept me from writing? Did I run out of things to say? Been traveling? Bed-ridden with illness?

Alas, nothing so major -- I just didn't have time. I recently started a new job so that has greatly cut into my blogging time. On Wednesday I traveled to New York do a talk on sustainability ("The American Dream, The World's Nightmare") for an organization. Most of my nights leading up to this event were spent working on adding new slides and revamping the presentation. So, just not much time.

In our current society most of us are asset rich and time poor. We have so much stuff in fact that the self-storage industry is one the fastest growing sectors in America. You know the places, those little sheds that many of us rent each month to hold all the extra stuff that doesn't fit in our current home. This is especially ironic given the average house size has grown dramatically during the same time period while average household size has shrunk! (so bigger and bigger houses, with fewer and fewer people in those houses, and we still don't have enough space for all our stuff)

To pay for all this stuff Americans work longer hours than workers in just about any other industrialized country.

We work longer hours than the English, the French, and much more than the Germans and the Norwegians. We take less vacation. We retire later.

The more time we spend working the worse the impact on the planet and our souls. Why?

With rising incomes we have more and more money to buy things. Bigger homes. Bigger TVs. More TVs. Bigger and fancier cars. Multiple cars. More and more clothes. More gadgets. You know the drill.

But with all those extra hours at work we have less time for ourselves. Less time to spend with our families. Less time to engage with our communities. Less time for the things that actually make us human. We are are social beings. Our well-being, our happiness is fundamentally rooted in our connection to others. We are becoming more and more isolated, more individualistic, and less connected to others. Depression rates are 10x higher than 50 years ago. We have the highest divorce rate in the world. We have the highest incarceration rate in the world. Drug use is a constant problem.

To fill the void we consume more. The buzz is nice, but it soon wears off. That new ipod will never fill the void left by a disenfranchised family, distant friends, and no sense of belonging to community. But we keep trying. "Retail Therapy" anyone?

In a sustainable world we will be asset poor but time rich. We will work less, perhaps 20 hours a week. Maybe 3 days a week. With less income we will consume much less, reducing our burden on the planet. Imagine living in a place where you now have time. Time to really play with your children. Time to go on a long walk. Time to walk to the store. Time for a bubble bath. Time to actually cook and taste a meal. Time to plant food and harvest it. Time to tinker around the house. Time to read all those books you've wanted to read. Time to, gasp, re-read the same book. Time to learn to play the guitar. Time to spend with your grandmother. Time to improve your tennis serve (I need a lot of time for that one). Time to nap. Time to help your friends. Time to volunteer. Time to sing. Time to dance. Time to walk the dog. Time to write your senator. Time to read great blog posts. Time to write great blog posts. Time to do, well, nothing at all.

Time to imagine the world we really want.

It's time to make it happen. Work Less. Buy Less. Live More.

A fun (but serious) take on Drill, Baby, Drill...

2010-05-28T04:34:00.000-07:00

For the cartoon lovers,

Good Deed for the Day: Fight Coal

2010-05-27T05:24:00.000-07:00

People often ask me what they can do to create a sustainable society. It all seems so overwhelming at times. The issues and forces are so large what can I do as a single person? Some days I feel that way too, but remember these wise words:

"Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can
change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead

Each week look for a new way to change your life to make the world a bit more sustainable. Find a way to use a bit less energy. Buy a bit less stuff. Talk to a friend and help spread the word about what we can do. Pick up the phone and call your senator. Sign a petition.

With email and the internet it is easier than ever to stay connected and learn about issues and spread the word. I have signed up with a range non-profit organizations that are fighting to make the world a better place. Many of these organizations send out action alerts on important issues. They often provide an easy way to send a letter to your elected official or sign a petition that will be used to persuade decision makers.

One of my favorites is Green America. In their own words:

What Makes Green America Unique

We focus on economic strategies—economic action to solve social and environmental problems.
We mobilize people in their economic roles—as consumers, investors, workers, business leaders.
We empower people to take personal and collective action
We work on issues of social justice and environmental responsibility. We see these issues as completely linked in the quest for a sustainable world. It’s what we mean when we say “green.”
We work to stop abusive practices and to create healthy, just and sustainable practice

Their current action is on sending letters to the shareholders of Southern Company -- the company that owns the largest, single most-polluting coal plant in the country. Please follow this link to send a letter voicing your concern. Shifting away from the burning of coal should be a national priority as the pollution from this dirty energy source kills thousands every year and the carbon dioxide produced from the combustion of coal is the driving force of global warming.

They make it super easy to allow your voice to be heard. They write the letter for you, though you can personalize the text if you like, and with a few clicks off it goes. Being an activist has never been easier!
Here a few screen shots to give you an idea of what it all looks like:

Find groups that you believe in and let them help you stay informed on key issues. Use them to expand your impact by letting our elected officials and business hear what we expect from them. You don't have to make a contribution to join their action alert lists. (Of course if you believe in the work they do, by all means make a donation -- that is how they survive)

At least once a week, commit to signing a petition. Sending a letter. Making at least one phone call. Ask 5 of your friends to do the same. Before you know it, we've got a movement going here....

"Never doubt that a small group of concerned citizens can
change the world. Indeed it's the only thing that ever has."
- Margaret Mead

A Great, GoodGuide

2010-05-24T04:42:00.000-07:00

Any life form based on exponential growth on a finite planet is doomed. Most economies around the world are now some form of capitalism. The foundation of capitalism is exponential growth. The driving engine of capitalism is the corporation. Corporations are now the epicenter of economic and political power around the world. The cornerstone of any attempt to create a sustainable society must address the anti-social and anti-democratic behavior of these organizations. It will require efforts at the highest level -- revamping corporate law, passing national level legislation, enlightened decision-making by the supreme court, and perhaps even an amendment to the constitution. It will likely require massive public outcry and sustained grassroots action to overcome the corporate center of gravity that currently overwhelms our political system.

So, yes, sharpen your pens and write your elected officials. Get those protest signs painted and get out on the street. Vote, and vote often.

There is also much we can do in our daily lives to point corporations in the right direction. Corporations do respond to the demands of consumers. Look at the morphing menu found at the fast food giant Mcdonald's. Due to rising pressure the chain did away with the "super size me" gimmick given the health implications. Mcdonald's also responded to the public's demand for healthier foods by adding more salads, fruit, smaller sandwiches and oatmeal to the menu. I had stopped going to Micky D's years ago but began going again (occasionally, usually when traveling) since I could now get a decent salad there or at least a lower calorie meal.

Currently, corporations are rewarded only for providing the lowest price. The success of Walmart is the clearest indicator of this. Many of us buy our clothes there, or our TVs, or our groceries even though we know that walmart treats it employees poorly, and that some (many?) of the products are made by people working under deplorable working conditions. As a consumer it is very hard to know which products were made with safe ingredients, or if they employees were paid a livable wage, or if the product was produced in a way that is damaging to the environment. At the moment there is no easy way to reward companies for good behavior - in fact these companies are often penalized because their products may carry a higher price.

Well, help is on the way. There is a growing movement afoot to bring this type of information to the consumer at the point of sale. So when you are standing at the store you will instantly, and easily compare products on their social impact, their health impact, and their environmental impact. As a first step in this direction check out the GoodGuide here. At this website you can find the social/health/environmental rating on a growing list of products.

I went to this website and looked up most of the personal hygiene products that I use -- toothpaste, shampoo, soap, etc. My entire life I have used Crest Toothpaste but based on the information I found here I decided to switch.

In these screen shots I only showed the summary. The website has detailed information for each category to indicate how the score was determined.

After I switched to my new brand of toothpaste I went to the Crest website and sent them a message explaining that I had switched and the reason why. I mentioned that I had used their product most of my life and would be happy to switch back if they could improve their product score. I sent them a link to their product at the GoodGuide website. I explained that I am looking to support companies that produce products that are safe, environmentally responsible, and made by companies that treat their employees well.

I received a response from a Crest representative who explained that she will pass my concerns on to the management team.

There is another great website that focuses on cosmetics called Deep Skin, that rates skin care, makeup, hair care, nails, eye care, feminine hygiene, dental and oral hygiene, and fragrance products based on their risk to your health.

Start the revolution today. Don't shop.

When you must buy, look beyond price, and consider the true cost to society when making a purchase. Use your purchase to reward responsible companies and help create a world we can be proud to live in.

Looking for Leaders

2010-05-20T10:09:00.000-07:00

Sage words from Thomas Friedman. Where is the leadership? Have we forgotten how to be bold? How big of a disaster do we need before we dare to take action?

Obama and the Oil Spill

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN

President Obama’s handling of the gulf oil spill has been disappointing.

I say that not because I endorse the dishonest conservative critique that the gulf oil spill is somehow Obama’s Katrina and that he is displaying the same kind of incompetence that George W. Bush did after that hurricane. To the contrary, Obama’s team has done a good job coordinating the cleanup so far. The president has been on top of it from the start.

No, the gulf oil spill is not Obama’s Katrina. It’s his 9/11 — and it is disappointing to see him making the same mistake George W. Bush made with his 9/11. Sept. 11, 2001, was one of those rare seismic events that create the possibility to energize the country to do something really important and lasting that is too hard to do in normal times.

President Bush’s greatest failure was not Iraq, Afghanistan or Katrina. It was his failure of imagination after 9/11 to mobilize the country to get behind a really big initiative for nation-building in America. I suggested a $1-a-gallon “Patriot Tax” on gasoline that could have simultaneously reduced our deficit, funded basic science research, diminished our dependence on oil imported from the very countries whose citizens carried out 9/11, strengthened the dollar, stimulated energy efficiency and renewable power and slowed climate change. It was the Texas oilman’s Nixon-to-China moment — and Bush blew it.

Had we done that on the morning of 9/12 — when gasoline averaged $1.66 a gallon — the majority of Americans would have signed on. They wanted to do something to strengthen the country they love. Instead, Bush told a few of us to go to war and the rest of us to go shopping. So today, gasoline costs twice as much at the pump, with most of that increase going to countries hostile to our values, while China is rapidly becoming the world’s leader in wind, solar, electric cars and high-speed rail. Heck of a job.

Sadly, President Obama seems intent on squandering his environmental 9/11 with a Bush-level failure of imagination. So far, the Obama policy is: “Think small and carry a big stick.” He is rightly hammering the oil company executives. But he is offering no big strategy to end our oil addiction. Senators John Kerry and Joe Lieberman have unveiled their new energy bill, which the president has endorsed but only in a very tepid way. Why tepid? Because Kerry-Lieberman embraces vitally important fees on carbon emissions that the White House is afraid will be exploited by Republicans in the midterm elections. The G.O.P., they fear, will scream carbon “tax” at every Democrat who would support this bill, and Obama, having already asked Democrats to make a hard vote on health care, feels he can’t ask them for another.

I don’t buy it. In the wake of this historic oil spill, the right policy — a bill to help end our addiction to oil — is also the right politics. The people are ahead of their politicians. So is the U.S. military. There are many conservatives who would embrace a carbon tax or gasoline tax if it was offset by a cut in payroll taxes or corporate taxes, so we could foster new jobs and clean air at the same time. If Republicans label Democrats “gas taxers” then Democrats should label them “Conservatives for OPEC” or “Friends of BP.” Shill, baby, shill.

Why is Obama playing defense? Just how much oil has to spill into the gulf, how much wildlife has to die, how many radical mosques need to be built with our gasoline purchases to produce more Times Square bombers, before it becomes politically “safe” for the president to say he is going to end our oil addiction? Indeed, where is “The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act”? Why does everything have to emerge from the House and Senate? What does he want? What is his vision? What are his redlines? I don’t know. But I do know that without a fixed, long-term price on carbon, none of the president’s important investments in clean power research and development will ever scale.

Obama has assembled a great team that could help him make his case — John Holdren, science adviser; Carol Browner, energy adviser; Energy Secretary Steven Chu, a Nobel Prize winner; and Lisa Jackson, chief of the Environmental Protection Agency. But they have been badly underutilized by the White House. I know endangered species that are seen by the public more often than them.

Obama is not just our super-disaster-coordinator. “He is our leader,” noted Tim Shriver, the chairman of Special Olympics. “And being a leader means telling the rest of us what’s our job, what do we need to do to make this a transformative moment.”

Please don’t tell us that our role is just to hate BP or shop in Mississippi or wait for a commission to investigate. We know the problem, and Americans are ready to be enlisted for a solution. Of course we can’t eliminate oil exploration or dependence overnight, but can we finally start? Mr. President, your advisers are wrong: Americans are craving your leadership on this issue. Are you going to channel their good will into something that strengthens our country — “The Obama End to Oil Addiction Act” — or are you going squander your 9/11, too?

The Corporate Challenge

2010-05-18T05:53:00.000-07:00

We will never succeed in creating a sustainable society until we overcome the death-star like power, and evil, represented by the modern corporation. Seem a tad extreme? Let's look at a few facts.

Corporations only make up 20% of US firms but they account for 85% of all US business revenue.

The economic power of the largest corporations boggles the mind -- of the100 largest economies in the world, 53 of them are corporations!

There are only 10 COUNTRIES that have economies larger than Exxon Mobil. Or to put it another way, Exxon Mobil is economically larger than 180 countries in the world.

We now have 63,000 multi-national corporations in the world -- huge monoliths that transcend national boundaries and operate beyond the legal jurisdiction of any national legal system.

The massive economic wealth of corporations overwhelms most political systems, including ours, and weakens democracies around the world. Our political process moves, or is blocked, at the whim of corporate sponsors and lobbyists.

We have no one to blame but ourselves -- we are the mad scientists that have created these economic Frankensteins. How so?

First, we made it LAW, that the directors and managers of a corporation have a duty to act in the best interest of the corporation, which has been interpreted as an obligation to do whatever it takes to maximize the wealth of shareholders. This, the "best interest of the corporation" principle is one of the greatest obstacles in allowing corporations to become more socially responsible institutions.

If polluting the nearby river maximizes profit, the managers are obliged to do it. If the corporation can maximize dividends by closing a factory and moving to another country, shut her down. If carcinogenic ingredients help keep costs down, and therefore profits up, well, then a bit of cancer is the "price" of doing business.

Under our current system, a corporate manager is being UNETHICAL if they consider policies that would promote positive social, health, or environmental impacts if they would reduce profits. Really. No, really, that is the system that we created.

If an individual acted this way we would call him or her a sociopath, but if a corporation does it, it is "just business."

Second, we further encourage such diabolical behavior by limiting the liability of shareholders for the action of their companies. Limited liability is why corporations must be chartered by a government authority -- in the US the states do this. They are supposed to supervise and regulate the corporations but it is rarely done in practice. Shareholders might take more care if they were held financially accountable for the misdeeds of their companies (think BP and the oil disaster for a current example).

Third, in the US we have granted corporations "personhood" allowing them protection under the constitution just like a flesh-and-blood person. Corporations are now allowed to spend as much money as they like to influence elections.

Corporations have become not only the most powerful economic force on the planet, but the dominant political force as well. This concentration of power is increasingly unaccountable to you and me, to our government, or the planet.

How do we fix this? A few ideas:

Revoke corporate charters of companies violating the public trust
Roll back limited liability
Corporate directors and top managers should be personally liable for gross negligence
Extend liability to shareholders under certain circumstances
Eliminate corporate personhood (Learn more here)
Change the legal mandate that requires the corporation to strictly pursue its own self-interest and to give primacy to maximizing shareholder wealth.

(Maryland has taken a step in the right direction by creating the legal framework for the "Benefit Corporation." (Learn more here))

Ultimately, we need to rethink the whole nature of the corporation and its role in society. It is clear that the mindless pursuit of short term profits, regardless of consequences, is ultimately doomed to failure -- not only for the company but for society at large.

What if?

2010-05-13T08:08:00.000-07:00

The nature of our society can often make it difficult to live a lifestyle that is in balance with nature. We develop bad habits. Sometimes we need a jolt to think differently about how we see the world, to imagine a different way. Most of us are inclined to resist change. But if we are open to revisiting our assumptions, open to trying a different way, we can often make positive discoveries about ourselves, and the world. Here is a simple tale, from a real person on the possible.
-------------------------------------------------------------------

Making Do Without the Minivan

Why do I love the high price of gas? It's helped my family stop being so dependent on our cars.

By Jennifer Perrow | NEWSWEEK

Published Aug 9, 2008

Aug. 18-25, 2008 issue

The gas pump shuts off automatically when you hit $100, or so my sister-in-law tells me. I'm pleased to report I haven't experienced that problem. However, I hit $66 when I partially filled my Honda Odyssey, and last month our family's gasoline expenses were well over $400. My husband's 2006 Ford Explorer gets 13 miles per gallon; my minivan runs at about 16 miles per gallon around town.

As transportation expenses rose, I cut back in other ways: fewer indulgences at the grocery store, not as many trips to Starbucks. We decided not to take a family vacation to Disneyland, although explaining this to our two school-age kids was less than pleasant. We're opting instead for an in-state trip to visit relatives, assuming gas prices continue to (finally) decrease.

In spite of all this, however, I've got to say: I love the high cost of gas. It's forced our family to rethink our spending habits and our carbon footprint, and we're finding we can do much more on much less than we thought.

As a working mom with a half-time job, two kids and a busy social life, I spend a lot of time in the car. The minivan is truly our "home away from home." In the car we eat meals, do homework, make phone calls, watch movies and even change clothes. Last year I read about a prototype "car of the future" equipped with a microwave and laundry facilities, and wondered how soon I could acquire one. Last month, however, I asked myself a different question: how could we reduce our dependence on the minivan we already own?

I challenged the kids to join me in a quest to see how long we could go between tanks of gas. They were surprisingly enthusiastic. Right away we realized that while we've always carpooled on the way to school, we've never done so on the way home. When I asked my friend if she'd like to carpool in both directions from now on, she eagerly said yes. One small step.

Next up: I told the kids I was no longer providing car rides to swim practice. Yes, I'd still take them, but from now on it would be on foot or bike. I calculated that each round trip to the pool was costing 50 cents, and we often make two to three trips per day. Although their bikes were handy and ready for use, mine was dusty, and I had lost my helmet years ago. So I borrowed an extra helmet from my husband, and off we went. Added benefits: quality time with the kids, plus a decent workout.

Once we started the challenge, there was no stopping us. Why drive downtown for dinner when we have several great restaurants less than a mile from home? When I needed a book to read last week, I almost drove to the bookstore—until I remembered that my neighbor would probably lend me some books. The dog and I took a pleasant walk down the street and came home with a splendid stack of novels.

The more success we had, the more we wanted. This was getting fun. Why drive to the gym and get on the treadmill when I could go for a run in my own neighborhood? Why drive to meet my friend for coffee on Monday when I would be near her house on Tuesday and could easily stop in to see her? Why take two cars to church when we could all ride together if we coordinated departure times a bit better?

We're only beginning the adventure, but already the payoff has been huge. Gasoline usage for the minivan is down by 50 percent. I've lost nearly five pounds. The dog is happier and getting more exercise. I'm having great conversations with the kids as we walk and bike together. Perhaps best of all, life feels simpler. All along I thought my car was an essential tool for navigating my busy life; it turns out that hopping in the car every time I wanted something was making my schedule more complicated. Eliminating a few trips around town, and replacing them with a walk or run, has reduced my stress immeasurably.

Do I still need my minivan? Of course. I want to visit my grandmother 10 miles away, and I can't carry a week's worth of groceries on my bike. When the rainy season begins in earnest I'm sure I'll find the car more pleasant than the bike. Still, we're making permanent changes in our transportation habits. The high cost of gas has been nothing but good for our family.

Perrow lives in Seattle.
Find this article at http://www.newsweek.com/id/151739

A world full of Americans?

2010-05-12T07:02:00.000-07:00

Many in the US believe that the rest of the world should follow in our economic footpath and if they do, they can benefit from the "American Dream." Philosophical questions aside, is this even possible? Can the planet support a world full of people who consume in the same way as a typical American?

How do Americans consume? This slide will give you a sense.

We represent about 5% of the world population which is indicated by that blue piece of the pie. That is our fair share of resources from the planet. The amount we actually consume is shown in blue + purple. As you can see, we consume much, much more than our fair share.

Although 1/20th of the world's population we consume
     1/4 of the world's fossil fuel;
     1/3 of the world paper
     1/5 of the worlds minerals

And America, 5% of the world's population produces 75% of the worlds toxic waste.

So, how many "Americas" can the planet support?

The United States, at 5% of the world population (about 300 million people) consumes about 25% of the worlds resources. Let's imagine that another 300 million people develop in the same manner and live a similar lifestyle. Now we have 10% of the world consuming 50% of the world's resources. Add another 300 million people and we have 15% of the world consuming 75% of the world's resources. One more time and we have 20% of humanity using 100% of the worlds resources.

Hmmn. So 1.2 billion people are living very well. But the current global population is 6.8 billion. What happened to the other 5.6 billion people?

Well, they are dead. We are using up all their resources.

Following our Lead
It is clear that the world cannot even support 4 "Americas." Turns out that the world is now following in our footsteps. Most societies have some form of capitalism in place and they are succeeded in creating millions, and millions of new consumers. People who are now living the same type of lifestyle we do in the US.

Let's add them up:

Unites States
Europe (that is about 300 million people who live about as well as we do)
China (china's economy has been booming for the last 30 years...now have at least 300 million middle class consumers)
India (India's economy has been booming for the last decade or so, and have created roughly another "America")
Asian Middle Class (Add up the middle class from Singapore, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, Korea, Japan and you get another 300 million consumers)
Russia/Central Europe (Add up the growing wealthy elite in these countries and you get another 300 million)
China@2030 (At the current rate of growth, China will add another 300 million to their middle class in the next 20 years)
India@2030 (At the current rate of growth, India will add another 300 million to their middle class in the next 20 years)

Sooooo, in the next 20 years we are going to have 8 Americas come on line. There is nothing subtle about this. No room for negotiation. There is no technology, or "greater efficiency" or production improvement that can deal with this.

For the current population to live like Americans, we would need five Earths. We don't have five earths but we are hurling ahead as if we do.

This last graph says it all. Somewhere in the 1980's we passed the carrying capacity of the earth. The longer we stay above that horizontal line the more we are eating away at the earths natural resource capital.

Every day above that line we reduce the earths ability to support life on the planet. For future generations to survive and flourish, we cannot take resources from the planet faster than the planet can regenerate them.

Our sense of what is a "realistic" lifestyle is simply off the charts. We need to dramatically change our lives before mother earth does it for us.

Buy Less
Work Less
Drive Less (get rid of one of those cars)
Reduce, Re-use, Recycle
Buy local (when you must)
Live more. Family. Friends. Self

Check out:
Simple Living.net

When you are in a hole......stop digging

2010-05-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

Remember that pithy ditty, what was it again, all yeah, "Drlll baby, Drill"? Michael Steele, the current head of the Republican National Committee came up the phrase and the party faithful chanted it gleefully at the 2008 Republican National Convention. It made for good TV and it was kind of catchy.

It is also one of the f*%$# stupidest things I have ever heard in my life. ( I tried to find a more eloquent way to phrase my disdain, but after sitting here for 10 minutes I gave up.) For any elected official to say such a thing reveals that s/he is unfit for any office of responsibility because s/he is either criminally incompetent or completely corrupted by special interests.

And the fact that any person, government official or just your average American can be so gleefully unaware of how the world works is, well, terrifying.

Why is the expansion of off-shore drilling such a bad idea? Let us count the ways:

Climate Suicide
Global warming represents a profound threat to the survival of most life forms on the planet. We need a "Man to the Moon" sense of urgency in stopping the burning of ANY fossil fuels. ANY law, program, activity, incentive, tax break, or subsidy that promotes the continuation, or worse, the expansion of the use of fossil fuels is insane. It represents societal suicide.

For me, that is a slam dunk, argument over. But if you want more:

Energy Independence
Proponents argue that the United States should tap into all domestic reservoirs of oil so we can rely less on foreign oil and reduce the price we pay at the pump. For this to make sense the US domestic oil supply would have to represent a significant percentage of the world oil supply to have any impact on price. Here is the reality:

Do you think that little yellow slice is going to change our reality?

Simple Fact: If you drilled EVERYWHERE in the United States that might have oil (on land, in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge, and at all off-shore sites) the US, might be able to produce 3% of the worlds oil.

And remember, this doesn't happen overnight. It would take 10-20 years before that oil would come online.

And this oil is sold on the world market, not uniquely in the United States. So the world market determines the price.

The United States consumes 24% of all the worlds oil.

So, we invest billions, wait 10 to 15 years, to add a sliver to the world's oil supply. Saudi Arabia simply shuts off a tap or two and the world market is now down by whatever amount we just added. Nothing changed. Drilling would have no impact on the price of gasoline.

Drilling does nothing to improve our energy independence. And I would argue that following this path makes us much worse off. Drilling is a costly and dangerous diversion. While the rest of the world is racing ahead and creating the energy technology of the future, solar technology, wind technology, battery technology, we are investing our time and money in last century's technology. During testimony before the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works venture capitalist John Doerr stated: “If you list today’s top 30 companies in solar, wind and advanced batteries, American companies hold only 6 spots. That fact should worry us all.” (Read his full, crisp, powerful testimony here).

Wasting time on more drilling ensures that we will simply trade one energy dependence, oil, for another -- solar, wind and battery technology.

Peak Oil
Any oil executive will tell you that the world has already reached peak oil or will do so within a decade. Every aspect of our society is based on the premise of cheap oil. Our food production system is incredibly oil intensive. Our transportation system relies on the private automobile -- think about our towns and suburbs where you must use your car to go get a loaf of bread, or take the kids to soccer practice, or get to work. Most of our "cheap" products travel up to 12,000 miles from factories in China and other countries. The world's demand for oil is growing exponentially -- the day there is not enough oil to meet demand, our deck of cards economy will be devastated. The financial crisis of 2008 will look like a quaint garden picnic.(Think about what happens to a company when their rate of profit INCREASE is less than expected -- their stock price can plummet. Not a drop in profits, not a loss, but just less growth in profits than expected -- chaos!). A mere drop of 5% in oil supply can cause a global economic meltdown. More data and details on peak oil can be found here.

Life as we know is about to change forever. The sooner we shift away from relying on oil, the better chance we have of surviving the day of reckoning from peak oil.

Human Imperfection
Stubbornly, even maniacally i would argue many still believe that we can create perfect technology. That we can control all the risks associated with our increasingly complex world. Get over ourselves. The BP oil spill may not be contained for 3 months. It may represent the greatest ecological disaster seen in modern history.

It only takes one mistake to wipe out years of perfection.

Drill, baby, Drill, is the rant of an ~~drug~~ oil-addict --delirious and disconnected from reality as any heroin addict.

Given these facts, how could a rational person support expanding drilling for oil?

Think, Baby, Think! (Now that is a ditty with a future.)

Story of Stuff

2010-05-08T05:38:00.000-07:00

This great animated film offers some powerful insight into the nature of the society we created and the impact it has on ourselves and communities far from our own. In just 20 minutes Annie hits all the key notes in a fun and creative way. Check it out. Send it on to your friends and family. And check out her website to see other great videos and tons of education information.

If you can only read one book...

2010-05-06T13:57:00.000-07:00

make it this one:

The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability

In just 320 pages you will get the whole package. The book explores all of the key topics you need to understand the problems we face and the pathways toward solutions.

I think this review captures it well:

"In The Bridge at the Edge of the World, James Gustave Speth gives us new lenses with which to see what we have done to our environment and, more important, to see what we can do to restore it. He challenges us all to act not for ourselves, but for our children and grandchildren. In particular, he takes on the most powerful guardians of the status quo -- our mindsets. The bridge he hopes to construct has its bridgehead firmly based in today, because Speth asks us to think about it and then to use our creativity, imagination, and the power of common purpose to act to restore the environment and create a healthier world."

-Honourable Gordon Campbell, Premier, Province of British Columbia

This book might just change your life....and if we are lucky, your grandchildren's lives.

Dying to Grow....

2010-05-05T13:14:00.000-07:00

What represents the greatest threat to mankind? Climate Change? A massive earthquake? An asteroid from space? Believe it or not the most likely candidate is this:

This is a graph of exponential growth and it represents one of the most powerful forces on the planet. If nothing else, remember the shape of it. Growth is exponential when it grows at a fixed rate.

Let’s say we have $1000 in savings and this amounts grows at 7% each year. After one year our savings have grown to $1,070 (7% x $1,000 = $70). In year two we now multiply 7% by $1,070 (7% x $1,070 = $75) and our new total is $1,145. In year 3 we will multiply 7% by $1,145 and add $80 and our new balance will be $1,225. Notice that although the rate is fixed the amount we add each year is getting bigger. Anything that grows at a fixed RATE will follow this pattern. If the growth rate is relatively small (say 1%) the flat part of the graph on the left will extend over a longer period of time. But eventually, all exponential functions will make a dramatic turn and skyrocket upwards. Again this is because with each year the function is adding a larger and larger amount so eventually the amounts added become gargantuan. In the world of mathematics the function heads toward infinity. There is no infinity in our world, and that is where the danger comes in. Let me give you some examples of exponential growth happening right now.

Population Growth

It took humanity millions of years before, finally in 1804, we reached 1 billion people on the planet. Miiiilllions of years. We added another 1 billion people in just another 123 years! We added another billion people in just 33 years. In a mere 200 years we added 6 billion people to the planet.

Say hello to the power of exponential growth.

The Great Collision

These graphs are from this book.

Just back away from your computer a few feet and take it all in. James Gustave Speth refers to this as the Great Collision -- the global economy is crashing against the earth. We are obliterating the planet's resources and life support systems.

Half of the world's tropical and temperate forests are gone. In the tropics we are losing about an acre a second.
Half of all wetlands and third of mangroves are gone
90% of all predator fish have been wiped out
Every 20 minutes a new species goes extinct (about 1000 times the normal rate)
Water use is skyrocketing. The water tables in the United States, India and China are dropping rapidly -- these are the three major food producers in the world.
We are losing 24 billion tons of top soil each year.
Fertilizer use is growing exponentially (much of it runs off into our rivers and streams causing massive destruction)
Carbon dioxide concentrations are growing exponentially in the atmosphere driving global warming.
The number of cars on the highways is growing dramatically. China is now adding 14,000 new cars to the road EVERY DAY.
In just the United States we used almost 30 billion (with a "B") plastic bottles in one year. And growing.

Pick just about any material or resource that you can think of and I get you a graph that looks those above. Pick a toxic waste, chemical or pollutant and I will find a graph that shows how we are dumping exponentially more every day. Exponential growth is happening all around us.

In 1992 (18 years ago), 1,500 of the world's leading scientists, including a majority of living Nobel Prize winners issued a warning (the full statement can be found here)

The earth is finite. Its ability to absorb wastes and destructive effluent is finite. Its ability to provide food and energy is finite. Its ability to provide for growing numbers of people is finite. And we are fast approaching many of the earth's limits. Current economic practices which damage the environment, in both developed and underdeveloped nations, cannot be continued without the risk that vital global systems will be damaged beyond repair.

Kenneth Boulding said it best:

Anyone who believes that exponential growth can go on forever in a finite planet is either a madman or an economist.

Our economy is based on exponential growth. Just listen for the word. Growth. In the news, in magazines, on TV. Profits must grow. Sales must grow. Gross Domestic Product must grow. Stock prices must grow. Everything must grow for our system to function. We have to sell more. We have to build more factories to make more stuff for us to buy. We have to cut down more trees, use more water, mine for more minerals...all on a planet that is not getting any bigger. You don't need a PhD to see the folly in this.

That is the path we are on. If we keep living our lives like we did yesterday. If we do nothing to change this trajectory, the earth will solve the problem for us.

Solutions?

Learn about the issues that really impact your life
Discuss and share with others
Take action

Ask you elected leader what they are doing about this. Demand action.
Buy less.
If you must buy, buy local
Work fewer hours.
Drive less. Not feasible? Demand public transportation so it is possible.

Watch this GREAT video explaining why exponential growth is so important. (it gets a little geeky at times, but watch till the end, it has some great visuals)

Give Earth a Hand

2010-05-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

What do we really want?

If you like this video, consider supporting the creators.

Climate Chorus Growing Every Day

2010-05-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

Short on time today but I figured I would post a short follow up to last week's post Why Al Gore Doesn't Matter. In that missive I tried to demonstrate why it doesn't matter what I think or what Al Gore thinks about climate change. We should be listening to the experts, and if you cut through all the propaganda, lies and mistruths, 99% of the world's leading scientists are to put it technically, freakin out.

And the chorus of support for this concern is growing every day. Many of the worlds business leaders are lining up demanding action. It makes sense if you think about it. In the business world those who thrive are the ones who do the best job of deciphering trends and predicting the future operating environment. Some are driven by concerns over the environment while others see that the future "industrial revolution" will be an "energy revolution." The country that makes that shift first will lead the world.

Below are several articles. Make sure to follow the links in RED to really see who is speaking out. You might be surprised....

Here is an article that highlights how more and more business leaders want the US government to pass climate legilsation.

BUSINESS
APRIL 27, 2010

Business Groups Say Climate Impasse Undermines Clean Energy

By IAN TALLEY

WASHINGTON—The Capitol Hill politics bogging down a climate bill in the Senate are also hobbling investments in low-carbon energy and prompting calls from some business groups for action.

President Barack Obama is scheduled to travel Tuesday to a Siemens Corp. wind turbine facility in Fort Madison, Iowa, Tuesday as part of the White House effort to tout the economic, environmental and national security benefits of clean energy investments. The company expanded the plant, adding more than 600 jobs with capital from the stimulus package and tax credits.

Siemens, a unit of the German parent company Siemens AG, is representative of thousands of companies looking to capitalize on a carbon-constrained economy. It is building a range of products that would be attractive if there was a cost for emitting carbon. Besides efficient motors and generators, they are also developing technology to capture emissions from coal plants, have a retro-fitting business that installs energy-efficient equipment in buildings, and plan to expand their solar power unit in the U.S.

Nearly every sector of the energy industry is in some way affected by Congressional deliberations on climate and energy policy, whether it is makers of wind turbines and solar plants, utilities planning nuclear power projects or companies that make natural-gas generators and clean-coal technology. While some want to see a carbon market that will create demand for their products, others say they want to get clarity on how the new emission rules will affect their plans.

"The U.S. faces a critical moment that will determine whether we will be able to unleash billions in energy investments or remain mired in the economic status quo," the U.S. Climate Action Partnership said after the meltdown in negotiations over the weekend. USCAP represents nearly two dozen Fortune-500 companies that have urged Congress to pass a climate bill, including General Electric Co., Duke Energy, and NRG Energy.

The American Business for Clean Energy, a group representing 3,000 businesses that support passage of a climate bill, urged lawmakers to keep pushing it as a legislative priority. "American businesses, large and small, are urging Congress to act in order to make the United States a world leader in clean energy technology, reduce our dependence on foreign energy sources, and create millions of new jobs," the group said.

Portfolio managers, investment firms and businesses have been betting that Congress would act this year on legislation that would put caps on greenhouse gas emissions, and offer incentives to companies investing in technology to produce or use energy without heavy carbon dioxide emissions.

But the latest effort to craft legislation that could pass the Senate appears to have foundered after the lone Republican working on the bill, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.) said he will pull out of the talks because Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid could move a controversial immigration bill to the floor before the climate bill. Mr. Reid has suggested Mr. Graham's real problem is pressure from other Republicans to stop working on the climate measure. Sens. John Kerry (D., Mass.) and Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) say they will continue to work for a bill.

The impasse leaves utilities that have worked with the Senate trio to craft climate legislation, such as Exelon Corp., American Electric Power Co. and FPL Group, flummoxed.

"We are disappointed by this temporary setback. We remain hopeful that the issues will be resolved quickly, and that the U.S. Senate will make passage of an energy and climate bill an urgent priority," said Exelon spokeswoman Judy Rader.

A senior lobbyist that works for a large utility said the political intervention is frustrating because, "We thought progress had been made and we were moving in the right direction."

With businesses fearing their work on the bill will have been in vain, he said there is "an effort to try to get many people to weigh in with Graham, and say, 'please go back to the table.'"

The setback—which some say may be fatal for the bill this year—happens as the White House has been ramping up the rhetoric about how vital passing the climate bill is to invigorate the U.S. economy and compete with China. Obama administration officials have been hitting the public-speaking circuit to fan support for putting a price on carbon to stimulate clean energy investment.

Write to Ian Talley at ian.talley@dowjones.com

And this:

175 Companies Urge Senate to Move Forward with Climate Legislation

On April 28, 175 U.S. companies sent a letter to Senate leadership, urging them to continue working to enact comprehensive climate and energy legislation this year. The letter was brought together by the We Can Lead coalition, a project of the Clean Economy Network (CEN) and Ceres. The businesses come from some of the nation's largest electric power, manufacturing, and clean tech companies, including Nike, Exelon, PG&E and eBay. "Today, the United States is falling behind in the global race to lead the next global industrial revolution. U.S. businesses need strong policies and clear market signals to deploy capital, harness innovative technologies, and compete in the global marketplace," the letter stated. "Every day the Senate fails to pass comprehensive climate and energy legislation is a day our economy falls another step behind and delays our ability to create millions of new American jobs. America's energy future is not a partisan issue. Now is the time to bring the parties together and finish what we started."

For additional information see: We Can Lead Letter

And another addition to the choir are leaders from our armed forces. Many of the top brass in the US military now understand the profound threat climate change represents to the future of our country. This community is not typically considered card carrying members of any tree hugging group.

Check this out:

33 Retired Military Leaders Call for Climate Legislation

On April 28, 33 retired military leaders issued a statement, calling on “Congress and the administration to enact strong, comprehensive climate and energy legislation to reduce carbon pollution and lead the world in clean energy technology.” The statement goes on to note that the “Pentagon and security leaders of both parties consider climate disruption to be a ‘threat multiplier’ – it exacerbates existing problems by decreasing stability, increasing conflict, and incubating the socioeconomic conditions that foster terrorist recruitment.” The statement, released in conjunction by The Truman National Security Project and Operation Free (OPFREE), is another attempt by the military community to inform the public about the national security issues connected to climate change. OPFREE says America’s dependence on oil puts money into the hands of dangerous enemies. In January, the United States imported 506,000 barrels of oil each day from Iraq, 911,000 from Venezuela and 463,000 from Russia, according to the Energy Information Administration. “At the same time, the climate change caused by carbon pollution is destabilizing nations like Somalia, Yemen, Sudan, Nigeria and Afghanistan — creating safe havens for terrorists,” Operation Free campaign manager Jonathan Murray said.

For additional information see: Truman Project Press Release
Why aren't our leaders, leading?

This Story Will Put Wind in Your Sails

2010-04-30T12:04:00.000-07:00

Creating a sustainable society will require many things. At the broadest level it will require us to stop doing those things that are killing us, and begin doing those things that will allow us to prosper for generation after generation. The burning of fossil fuels is the primary cause of global warming and we need to shift away from these technologies urgently. What does that mean?

Means never building another coal plant starting today.

Means telling your elected officials to end the dozens of tax breaks and incentives still offered to the oil industry. Why are tax payers subsidizing the wealthiest corporations in the world?

Means stop driving cars. Means bringing public transportation to towns and cities all across the country. Means changing zoning laws so we can integrate our communities so we can walk or bike to school, to work, to the store, or wherever we need to go.

Means investing in renewable energy. Tax incentives for people like you and me to add solar panels to our homes. Tax breaks to encourage investors to expand the wind energy industry

A sustainable society will be powered on solar and wind and some geothermal.Sound crazy? Did you know that if we built a solar farm in Nevada that was 100 miles by 100 miles it would create enough electricity to power the entire country? You math types will think wow, but that is 10,000 square miles, that is huge. It is big, but it would only cover about 10% of the surface area of Nevada (really big desert out there). Now, no one is seriously proposing such a massive farm but it does give you a sense of perspective. Actually, if we tapped into all the solar potential found in our country, we could produce 7X all the amount of electricity we use now. Same for wind power. If we tapped into all the reasonable sites, we could produce another 7X all the power we currently use.

All those farms would be in the United States, creating American jobs. One windmill turbine has 6,000 parts. All those parts could be made in America....think of how many manufacturing jobs that would create. At the moment most of those parts are made elsewhere. Why?

I have only scratched the tip of a huge energy iceberg of options that are out there. And what are we doing as a country about this. Virtually nothing. Big oil has too much power and keeps our leaders in grid lock.

We need to transform our entire energy infrastructure. We need to change our lives and the demands we place on the planet. We need imagination and ingenuity. Our country has a wealth of both, but at the moment much of it seems to be wildly misplaced in developing credit default swaps and other soul and earth destroying ventures.

Check out the article below. It is about the potential offered by wind energy, well only in the smallest of ways. But more importantly it is a story about what we can achieve when we dare to dream and see our world in a different way. About what can happen when we simply get on with it, not aware that what we are attempting is impossible. It is one of the most inspirational stories I have read in a long time. A great way to start the weekend...

Malawi windmill boy with big fans

William Kamkwamba educated himself in his local library

By Jude Sheerin
BBC News

The extraordinary true story of a Malawian teenager who transformed his village by building electric windmills out of junk is the subject of a new book, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.
Self-taught William Kamkwamba has been feted by climate change campaigners like Al Gore and business leaders the world over.
His against-all-odds achievements are all the more remarkable considering he was forced to quit school aged 14 because his family could no longer afford the $80-a-year (£50) fees.
When he returned to his parents' small plot of farmland in the central Malawian village of Masitala, his future seemed limited.
But this was not another tale of African potential thwarted by poverty.
Defence against hunger
The teenager had a dream of bringing electricity and running water to his village.

Many, including my mother, thought I was going crazy - people thought I was smoking marijuana

William Kamkwamba

And he was not prepared to wait for politicians or aid groups to do it for him.
The need for action was even greater in 2002 following one of Malawi's worst droughts, which killed thousands of people and left his family on the brink of starvation.
Unable to attend school, he kept up his education by using a local library.
Fascinated by science, his life changed one day when he picked up a tattered textbook and saw a picture of a windmill.
Mr Kamkwamba told the BBC News website: "I was very interested when I saw the windmill could make electricity and pump water.
"I thought: 'That could be a defence against hunger. Maybe I should build one for myself'."
When not helping his family farm maize, he plugged away at his prototype, working by the light of a paraffin lamp in the evenings.
But his ingenious project met blank looks in his community of about 200 people.
"Many, including my mother, thought I was going crazy," he recalls. "They had never seen a windmill before."
Shocks
Neighbours were further perplexed at the youngster spending so much time scouring rubbish tips.

William Kamkwamba's achievements with wind energy show what one person, with an inspired idea, can do to tackle the crisis we face

Al Gore

"People thought I was smoking marijuana," he said. "So I told them I was only making something for juju [magic].' Then they said: 'Ah, I see.'"
Mr Kamkwamba, who is now 22 years old, knocked together a turbine from spare bicycle parts, a tractor fan blade and an old shock absorber, and fashioned blades from plastic pipes, flattened by being held over a fire.
"I got a few electric shocks climbing that [windmill]," says Mr Kamkwamba, ruefully recalling his months of painstaking work.
The finished product - a 5-m (16-ft) tall blue-gum-tree wood tower, swaying in the breeze over Masitala - seemed little more than a quixotic tinkerer's folly.
But his neighbours' mirth turned to amazement when Mr Kamkwamba scrambled up the windmill and hooked a car light bulb to the turbine.
As the blades began to spin in the breeze, the bulb flickered to life and a crowd of astonished onlookers went wild.
Soon the whiz kid's 12-watt wonder was pumping power into his family's mud brick compound.
'Electric wind'
Out went the paraffin lanterns and in came light bulbs and a circuit breaker, made from nails and magnets off an old stereo speaker, and a light switch cobbled together from bicycle spokes and flip-flop rubber.
Before long, locals were queuing up to charge their mobile phones.

WINDS OF CHANGE

2002: Drought strikes; he leaves school; builds 5m windmill

2006: Daily Times writes article on him; he builds a 12m windmill

2007: Brings solar power to his village and installs solar pump

Mid-2008: Builds Green Machine windmill, pumping well water

Sep 2008: Attends inaugural African Leadership Academy class

Mid-2009: Builds replica of original 5m windmill

Mr Kamkwamba's story was sent hurtling through the blogosphere when a reporter from the Daily Times newspaper in Blantyre wrote an article about him in November 2006.
Meanwhile, he installed a solar-powered mechanical pump, donated by well-wishers, above a borehole, adding water storage tanks and bringing the first potable water source to the entire region around his village.
He upgraded his original windmill to 48-volts and anchored it in concrete after its wooden base was chewed away by termites.
Then he built a new windmill, dubbed the Green Machine, which turned a water pump to irrigate his family's field.
Before long, visitors were traipsing from miles around to gawp at the boy prodigy's magetsi a mphepo - "electric wind".
As the fame of his renewable energy projects grew, he was invited in mid-2007 to the prestigious Technology Entertainment Design conference in Arusha, Tanzania.
Cheetah generation
He recalls his excitement using a computer for the first time at the event.
"I had never seen the internet, it was amazing," he says. "I Googled about windmills and found so much information."
Onstage, the native Chichewa speaker recounted his story in halting English, moving hard-bitten venture capitalists and receiving a standing ovation.

William Kamkwamba and Bryan Mealer (left) spent a year writing the book

A glowing front-page portrait of him followed in the Wall Street Journal.
He is now on a scholarship at the elite African Leadership Academy in Johannesburg, South Africa.
Mr Kamkwamba - who has been flown to conferences around the globe to recount his life-story - has the world at his feet, but is determined to return home after his studies.
The home-grown hero aims to finish bringing power, not just to the rest of his village, but to all Malawians, only 2% of whom have electricity.
"I want to help my country and apply the knowledge I've learned," he says. "I feel there's lots of work to be done."
Former Associated Press news agency reporter Bryan Mealer had been reporting on conflict across Africa for five years when he heard Mr Kamkwamba's story.
The incredible tale was the kind of positive story Mealer, from New York, had long hoped to cover.
The author spent a year with Mr Kamkwamba writing The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which has just been published in the US.
Mealer says Mr Kamkwamba represents Africa's new "cheetah generation", young people, energetic and technology-hungry, who are taking control of their own destiny.
"Spending a year with William writing this book reminded me why I fell in love with Africa in the first place," says Mr Mealer, 34.
"It's the kind of tale that resonates with every human being and reminds us of our own potential."
Can it be long before the film rights to the triumph-over-adversity story are snapped up, and William Kamkwamba, the boy who dared to dream, finds himself on the big screen?

Why Al Gore Doesn't Matter

2010-04-29T12:45:00.000-07:00

From time to time I meet someone who tells me that they don’t believe in climate change. Usually, about 70% of the time, within the next 2 to 3 sentences after making this proclamation, said person will argue that it is all a conspiracy orchestrated by Al Gore. He might add that the issue is just something made up by Al Gore so he and a few scientists can make a lot of money, etc. Some have heard a rumor that he has this really big house with a huge energy bill so that just proves that he is a hypocrite so global warming must be a lie.

Al Gore? Who the hell cares what Al Gore has to say? What do climate scientists say about all this? Deniers argue that there is no clear scientific consensus on the topic. They claim that the scientific community is widely split and many doubts remain. This is beyond ludicrous. Let me give you a visual representation of how the camps are divided.

A photo taken at a climate scientists' recent flag football game. ;-)

Ok, the photo is a joke but the message is accurate -- the vast, vast majority of the science community accepts that climate change is happening and that it is caused by humans. This is may be shocking to some, especially if you only occasionally follow the issue or catch sound bites from Fox News or if you only catch the headlines from articles and columns from the major newspapers. Yes, the media has done a terrible job of explaining the story. And it turns out, not surprisingly, that scientists are poor communicators. (I will deal with that issue at a later time.)

So, who exactly is saying that climate change is real? And when did they start saying it? Is it just a couple of hacks that Al Gore found somewhere?

The Experts
Scientists around the world started to notice the effects of climate change in the 1980s. In response the United Nations (at the request of the United States and other concerned countries) created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 to look into the issue. The IPCC is made up of the top climate scientists from around the world. The IPCC does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data. So what does it do? Every few years they produce an assessment report based on a review of the latest technical data and peer-reviewed published reports related to climate science. The purpose of the assessment report is to offer guidance to policy makers (e.g. world leaders and politicians). Four reports have been produced to date: 1990, 1992, 2001, and 2007.

The IPCC Assessment Report represents THE official view of the scientific community on climate change. Is this document credible? Let’s look at the 2007 report. The document was written after 6 years of work involving 130 countries, 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors. The validity of each topic section was checked, critiqued, and verified by the leading experts for that field. The document was reviewed by 2,500 expert reviewers. I am not sure if you fully appreciate how unbelievably rigorous this review process is.

A bit of background. How does science move forward? Well, normally a scientist does research and then s/he submits the findings to a peer-review journal like the Lancet (health related) or Science, or Nature, etc. The journal would then search out 1 to 3 experts in that field and ask them to review the study for scientific validity. If the reviewers feel the methodology and calculations look fine, the study is accepted by the journal for publication.

The IPCC report is reviewed, and re-reviewed by THOUSANDS of the very best scientists of the world. And the entire submission process is completely transparent – all submissions to the IPCC, all comments, and all responses to comments are available for anyone to review.

Hang on, we are not done yet. The IPCC then submits the report to the world’s governments to review. Each country has the right to critique the document and make edits. The main recommendations and language are NEGOTIATED with the world’s political leaders. The final document is then submitted to the United Nations where each country has the option to sign on in support of the findings. If a country does not agree, they simply don’t sign.

The latest report has declared:

Warming of the climate system is unequivocal.
Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-20^th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.

Wow. For science-speak this is like screaming from the roof-top. Try getting a scientist to say anything is “unequivocal.” And as defined in the report, the term “very likely” indicates a >90% probability. The scientists are saying that they are more than 90% sure global warming is happening and it is caused by humans.

So who has signed on in support of the IPCC findings?

EVERY scientist who participated in producing the document has signed on. Signature does not mean that a scientist necessarily agrees with every statement in the report but that s/he agrees that the content is fair and credible.
EVERY country in the world, including the United States has signed on in support of the document. Yes, George Bush signed his support for the 2007 report.

Anybody Else?

Has anyone else signed on in support of the findings of the IPCC report? In the United States the National Academy of Sciences has said:

“The IPCC's conclusion that most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations accurately reflects the current thinking of the scientific community on this issue"

Should we listen to the Academy? It is home to about 2,100 of America’s top scientists with close to 200 of them having won Nobel Prizes for their work. Only the finest scientists our country produces are elected to join this body and membership is considered one of the highest honors that can be accorded to a scientist or engineer. Don't sound like hacks to me.

I got more.

In 2008 the National Academies of 13 countries (United States, United Kingdom, Russia, Canada, China, Germany, France, Italy, Brazil, Japan, India, South Africa, and Mexico). put out this statement:

“….climate change is happening and that anthropogenic warming is influencing many physical and biological systems.” Among other actions, the declaration urges all nations to “(t)ake appropriate economic and policy measures to accelerate transition to a low carbon society and to encourage and effect changes in individual and national behaviour.”

So, the most prestigious scientific bodies, including most of the top scientific minds on our planet, from some of the most advanced societies in the world support the findings of the IPCC.

Oh, I’m not done.

These organizations have signed on in support of the IPCC findings:

U.S.

Agency for International Development

United States Department of Agriculture

National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration

National Institute of Standards and Technology

United States Department of Defense

United States Department of Energy

National Institutes of Health

United States Department of State

United States Department of Transportation

U.S.

Geological Survey

U.S.

Environmental Protection Agency

University Corporation for Atmospheric Research

National Center for Atmospheric Research

National Aeronautics & Space Administration

National Science Foundation

Smithsonian Institution

International Arctic Science Committee

Arctic Council

African Academy of Sciences

Australian Academy of Sciences

Royal Flemish Academy of Belgium for Sciences and the Arts

Academia Brasileira de Ciéncias

Cameroon Academy of Sciences

Royal Society of Canada

Caribbean Academy of Sciences

Chinese Academy of Sciences

Académie des Sciences, France

Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences

Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina of Germany

Indonesian Academy of Sciences

Royal Irish Academy

Accademia nazionale delle scienze of Italy

Indian National Science Academy

Science Council of Japan

Kenya National Academy of Sciences

Madagascar

’s National Academy of Arts, Letters and Sciences

Academy of Sciences

Malaysia

Academia Mexicana de Ciencias

Nigerian Academy of Sciences

Royal Society of New Zealand

Polish Academy of Sciences

Russian Academy of Sciences

l’Académie des Sciences et Techniques du Sénégal

Academy of Science of South Africa

Sudan Academy of Sciences

Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

Tanzania Academy of Sciences

Turkish Academy of Sciences

Uganda National Academy of Sciences

The Royal Society of the United Kingdom

National Academy of Sciences, United States

Zambia Academy of Sciences

Zimbabwe Academy of Science

American Academy of Pediatrics

American Association for the Advancement of Science

American Association of Wildlife Veterinarians

American Astronomical Society

American Chemical Society

American College of Preventive Medicine

American Geophysical Union

American Institute of Physics

American Medical Association

American Meteorological Society

American Physical Society

American Public Health Association

American Quaternary Association

American Institute of Biological Sciences

American Society of Agronomy

American Society for Microbiology

American Society of Plant Biologists

American Statistical Association

Association of Ecosystem Research Centers

Botanical Society of America

Crop Science Society of America

Ecological Society of America

Federation of American Scientists

Geological Society of America

National Association of Geoscience Teachers

Natural Science Collections Alliance

Organization of Biological Field Stations

Society of American Foresters

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics

Society of Systematic Biologists

Soil Science Society of America

Australian Coral Reef Society

Australian Medical Association

Australian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

Engineers Australia

Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies

Geological Society of Australia

British Antarctic Survey

Institute of Biology, UK

Royal Meteorological Society, UK

Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric Sciences

Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society

European Federation of Geologists

European Geosciences Union

European Physical Society

European Science Foundation

International Association for Great Lakes Research

International Union for Quaternary Research

International Union of Geodesy and Geophysics

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

World Federation of Public Health Associations

World Health Organization

World Meteorological Organization

Damn, that Al Gore guy is goooooood.

But doesn’t it seem like there are a lot of people saying that climate change is not happening or that the science is far from done. Yes, it does seem that way. I will write on this later but for now think of it this way.

Remember when everyone thought smoking was honky dory? Then a few scientists started producing evidence that smoking was linked to lung cancer. The tobacco industry created a research consortium called the U.S. Tobacco Institute and within a few years some scientists and “experts” appeared with studies showing that there was no credible data linking smoking to cancer. The tobacco industry bought off scientists, hired PR firms to spread disinformation, and lobbied heavily with government officials. The whole goal of the campaign was to create doubt in the public mind. We all know how it turned out. The body of evidence became overwhelming and the tactics and fraud of Big Tobacco were revealed to the public. We now all accept as common knowledge that smoking can kill you.

That is our reality now. The illusion of doubt around climate change is simply the output of a well-funded campaign orchestrated by the fossil-fuel industry (because it threatens their profits) and right-wing political parties (because the solutions threaten their world view).

The evidence however is overwhelming, and climate change can kill you. We need action now.

Learn more here.

Change your life to reduce emissions that cause climate change.

Demand political action now. Call your elected official and tell them you want action.

Want to learn more?

Here is great summary of how the IPCC works.

Here is a report that shows how Exxon Mobil has funded over 40 organizations to spread disinformation on climate change.

whew...i am exhausted....gotta write something shorter tomorrow

To Dire to Inspire?

2010-04-27T19:46:00.000-07:00

"The American Dream - The World's Nightmare" is a presentation I that conduct at high schools, colleges, universities, churches and at just about any venue where people are willing to come to hear me speak. (If you would like to have me come speak before your group, or want to learn more about this presentation email me at americandreamworldsnightmare@gmail.com )

Before one presentation was about to begin someone asked me if the talk was going to be all “doom and gloom.” I understand the question. I get it. Really. There is already so much bad news in the world why would someone want to hear my presentation or read these missives?

Many of the postings on this blog, especially in the early days and weeks, may seem to fall into this category. Lot's of dire predictions and depressing facts. Doesn’t seem like a recipe for success does it? (or in this case, wide readership).

And of course, if you speak to anyone who knows anything about teaching, or about social change, or about behavior modification, they will tell you that the way to get someone to take action or change a behavior in their life is to inspire them. Create a vision of a reality that will pull them in that direction. Fear rarely works as a motivation force.

Martin Luther King inspired a generation with his "I Have A Dream" speech. He helped change a nation by enabling people to imagine what America could look like; by pushing the young and old alike to envision what the country could achieve; and by helping people of all walks of life to grasp how America could fulfill its founding essence and promise if it truly enfranchised people of color as equal citizens. He helped people understand how acknowledging and codifying the rights of African Americans would, in fact, enable us all to be more truly human.

Martin Luther could leap right into the dream part because blacks in America were already living the nightmare -- everyday they lived the reality of being a second class citizen. No need to flesh that part out.

My challenge is quite different. We are all living the dream while few seem to grasp the full horror of the nightmare that awaits us once awakened. If I leap into the dream part now, and offer a cascade of "radical" ideas and "solutions" before you buy into the fact there is a problem, before you really begin to grasp the depth of the problem before us, you will simply find this to be the ravings of a mad man. You will not find the courage to consider the changes we need unless you fully begin to grasp the nightmare head.

I need some time to paint the landscape, to draw the connections and peel away the façade. Time to explore the facts, figures, and predictions that rarely see the light of day. But for me it is not about doom and gloom.

Just the opposite, actually.

These insights are essential to allow the birth of a sustainable dream. They hold the potential for the first step along a path with no ending. We can only begin to create a new path by first understanding the folly, the insanity, the wretched horror of what awaits us at the end of our current path.

Then, THEN, my friends, we can delve into the nuts and bolts, the wild visions and bold proclamations. There are solutions for every problem, issue, or predicament that I will present. There are glorious opportunities for human prosperity, and for creating a world where we can thrive in ways only pondered in our wildest dreams.

Stay tuned, the best is yet to come....if we can just wake up in time.

Note: This posting was inspired by a much shorter, but not dissimilar discussion found in James Gustave Speth's book "The Bridge at the Edge of the World: Capitalism, the Environment, and Crossing from Crisis to Sustainability."

Houston, We Have A Problem....

2010-04-26T14:54:00.000-07:00

Few realize it, but most of us in

America

are amongst the wealthiest people who have ever inhabited the planet. Yep, even you and me. We live far, far better than the Pharaohs of Egypt or the Emperors of the Roman Empire. We live more comfortably, we are healthier, and we live longer than any King of Kings who came before us. Since the industrial revolution many millions of people have been lifted out of crushing poverty and live reasonably easy lives. Does anyone sense a “but” coming soon?.....

The “but” is that this material wealth has exacted a staggering toll on the environment. The way we raise our food, the technology we use to extract resources, and the processes we use to create products are profoundly destructive. And now, the sheer scale of these processes are overwhelming the planet’s life support systems that keep us, well, alive. We are a victim of our own success.

Let’s look at a few flashing lights to make it more real.

Food Production:

We all need food to survive and we need soil to grow that food.

In 1900 we had 4,000 ton of topsoil/person. In less than 100 years that figure had dropped to about 80 tons of topsoil/person. Each year we are adding about 100 million people to the planet while erosion wipes out about 24 billion tons of topsoil from our farmlands each year.

It takes Nature 100 years to produce 1 inch of topsoil. (An interesting article on this here.)

More people to feed each year, with less topsoil to grow food. Sure, science and technology can help increase productivity, but at some point, basic laws of physics will take over.

Fisheries

Fish and other sea life provide much of the protein for about 1 billion people on the planet. There are 17 major fisheries in the world. We are sucking the life out every one of these fisheries at unsustainable rates. 13 of these fisheries have already either collapsed or are on the brink of collapse. There

are dozens of examples all around the world where fisheries are collapsing. A couple for you:

40,000 fisherman in Newfoundland, Canada have been out of a job for the last 20 years. They over fished the waters off their coast and the Cod population collapsed. Two decades later the population has not recovered.
In the Chesapeake Bay the oyster catch has dropped from 6 million bushels/year in the 1960s to less tha n 25,000 bushels now. (In the 1800s this yearly haul was 20 million bushels). So in less than 100 years the oyster population was reduced by 99.6%!
Most large predator fish, tuna, marlin, swordfish have been wiped out. Only 10% remain in the oceans now. The tuna population was cut 80% in just the last 15 years.

Water

Five days without fresh water and I am dead. The planet has the same amount of water now that it had a couple of million years ago. It is not making any new water.

In less than 100 years we went from 25,000 cubic meters of water/person to 6,000 cubic meters/person. Why? Well, we have added about 6 billion people to the planet in the last 200 years. And our m odern farming techniques are very water intensive and few people realize that our factories and industries require tremendous amounts of water to make the goods we use every day.

Everything we need to survive comes from the planet. Clean air to breath. Adequate amounts of food and clean water. Protection from toxins and pollution.

In fact there are 8 global major environmental crises brewing around us:

Climate Change
Deforestation
Land Loss
Loss of Fresh Water
Loss of Marine Fisheries
Toxic Pollutants
Loss of biodiversity
Over fertilization w/nitrogen

I have touched on three of them today and we will visit the others at a later date. The point is, how many of these issues are you aware of? Why don’t we hear more about these issues? These are the issues the media should be discussing. These are the issues our politicians should be working on.

These are the issues our children and grand-children are going to ask us about because these are the megatrends that will have an impact on their lives.

And it is just a hunch, but I think that they are going to be rather difficult and rather angry questions indeed.

How about "ALL MY GOD, WE ARE ALL GOING TO DIE" - Day?

2010-04-23T05:31:00.000-07:00

Here it is only day two on the job and I am already letting someone else pinch hit for me. Below is a posting (from yesterday) from one of my favorite bloggers, Joe Romm who writes Climate Progress, one of the best blogs out there on climate change. I like Joe’s writing style, it is clear and it is in your face. He doesn’t pull any punches. I don’t agree with everything he says but it is always a fun read.

Joe is suggesting that we need to change the name of “Earth Day” (which was Thursday ) because if we don’t deal with climate change, it is the human species that is at risk, not the planet earth. For me, global warming is just a symptom of a much more ominous, much more profound problem. It just turns out that this one symptom is a doozy -- this one side effect of our developmental path could single-handedly knock most of humanity off the map or at least make life very, very unpleasant for a few thousand years.

We are part of the environment. We are not above it. We do not control it (well, not for long). We are not separate from it. What happens to nature, happens to us.

Enjoy Joe’s provocative wit…….

Let’s Rename Earth Day

Affection for our planet is misdirected and unrequited. We need to focus on saving ourselves.

April 21, 2010

In 2008, I wrote a piece for Salon about renaming ‘Earth’ Day. It was supposed to be mostly humorous. Or mostly serious. Anyway, the subject of renaming Earth Day seems more relevant than ever because this is the 40th anniversary.

In a 2009 interview last year, our Nobel-prize winning Energy Secretary, Steven Chu, said:

I would say that from here on in, every day has to be Earth Day.

Well, duh! Heck, we have a whole day just for the trees — and we haven’t finished them off … yet. So if every day is Earth Day, than April 22 definitely needs a new name. So I’m updating the column, with yet another idea at the end, at least for climate science advocates:

I don’t worry about the earth. I’m pretty certain the earth will survive the worst we can do to it. I’m very certain the earth doesn’t worry about us. I’m not alone. People got more riled up when scientists removed Pluto from the list of planets than they do when scientists warn that our greenhouse gas emissions are poised to turn the earth into a barely habitable planet.

Arguably, concern over the earth is elitist, something people can afford to spend their time on when every other need is met. But elitism is out these days. We need a new way to make people care about the nasty things we’re doing with our cars and power plants. At the very least, we need a new name.

How about Nature Day or Environment Day? Personally, I am not an environmentalist. I don’t think I’m ever going to see the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I wouldn’t drill for oil there. But that’s not out of concern for the caribou but for my daughter and the planet’s next several billion people, who will need to see oil use cut sharply to avoid the worst of climate change.

I used to worry about the polar bear. But then some naturalists told me that once human-caused global warming has completely eliminated their feeding habitat — the polar ice, probably by 2020, possibly sooner — polar bears will just go about the business of coming inland and attacking humans and eating our food and maybe even us. That seems only fair, no?

I am a cat lover, but you can’t really worry about them. Cats are survivors. Remember the movie “Alien”? For better or worse, cats have hitched their future to humans, and while we seem poised to wipe out half the species on the planet, cats will do just fine.

Apparently there are some plankton that thrive on an acidic environment, so it doesn’t look like we’re going to wipe out all life in the ocean, just most of it. Sure, losing Pacific salmon is going to be a bummer, but I eat Pacific salmon several times a week, so I don’t see how I’m in a position to march on the nation’s capital to protest their extinction. I won’t eat farm-raised salmon, though, since my doctor says I get enough antibiotics from the tap water.

If thousands of inedible species can’t adapt to our monomaniacal quest to return every last bit of fossil carbon back into the atmosphere, why should we care? Other species will do just fine, like kudzu, cactus, cockroaches, rats, scorpions, the bark beetle, Anopheles mosquitoes and the malaria parasites they harbor. Who are we to pick favorites?

I didn’t hear any complaining after the dinosaurs and many other species were wiped out when an asteroid hit the earth and made room for mammals and, eventually, us. If God hadn’t wanted us to dominate all living creatures on the earth, he wouldn’t have sent that asteroid in the first place, and he wouldn’t have turned the dead plants and animals into fossil carbon that could power our Industrial Revolution, destroy the climate, and ultimately kill more plants and animals.

All of these phrases create the misleading perception that the cause so many of us are fighting for — sharp cuts in greenhouse gases — is based on the desire to preserve something inhuman or abstract or far away. But I have to say that all the environmentalists I know — and I tend to hang out with the climate crowd — care about stopping global warming because of its impact on humans, even if they aren’t so good at articulating that perspective. I’m with them.

The reason that many environmentalists fight to save the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the polar bears is not because they are sure that losing those things would cause the universe to become unhinged, but because they realize that humanity isn’t smart enough to know which things are linchpins for the entire ecosystem and which are not. What is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? The 100th species we wipe out? The 1,000th? For many, the safest and wisest thing to do is to try to avoid the risks entirely.

This is where I part company with many environmentalists. With 6.5 billion people going to 9 billion, much of the environment is unsavable. But if we warm significantly more than 3.5°F from pre-industrial levels — and especially if we warm more than 7°F, as would be all but inevitable if we keep on our current emissions path for much longer — then the environment and climate that made modern human civilization possible will be ruined, probably for hundreds of years (see NOAA stunner: Climate change “largely irreversible for 1000 years,” with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). And that means misery for many if not most of the next 10 to 20 billion people to walk the planet.

So I think the world should be more into conserving the stuff that we can’t live without. In that regard I am a conservative person. Unfortunately, Conservative Day would, I think, draw the wrong crowds.

The problem with Earth Day is it asks us to save too much ground. We need to focus. The two parts of the planet worth fighting to preserve are the soils and the glaciers.

Two years ago, Science magazine published research that “predicted a permanent drought by 2050 throughout the Southwest” — levels of soil aridity comparable to the 1930s Dust Bowl would stretch from Kansas and Oklahoma to California. The Hadley Center, the U.K.’s official center for climate change research, found that “areas affected by severe drought could see a five-fold increase from 8% to 40%.” On our current emissions path, most of the South and Southwest ultimately experience twice as much loss of soil moisture as was seen during the Dust Bowl.

Also, locked away in the frozen soil of the tundra or permafrost is more carbon than the atmosphere contains today (see Tundra, Part 1). On our current path, most of the top 10 feet of the permafrost will be lost this century — so much for being “perma” — and that amplifying carbon-cycle feedback will all but ensure that today’s worst-case scenarios for global warming become the best-case scenarios (see Tundra, Part 2: The point of no return). We must save the tundra. Perhaps it should be small “e” earth Day, which is to say, Soil Day. On the other hand, most of the public enthusiasm in the 1980s for saving the rain forests fizzled, and they are almost as important as the soil, so maybe not Soil Day.

As for glaciers, when they disappear, sea levels rise, perhaps as much as two inches a year by century’s end (see “Sea levels may rise 3 times faster than IPCC estimated, could hit 6 feet by 2100” and here). If we warm even 3°C from pre-industrial levels, we will return the planet to a time when sea levels were ultimately 100 feet higher (see Science: CO2 levels haven’t been this high for 15 million years, when it was 5° to 10°F warmer and seas were 75 to 120 feet higher — “We have shown that this dramatic rise in sea level is associated with an increase in CO2 levels of about 100 ppm.”). The first five feet of sea level rise, which seems increasingly likely to occur this century on our current emissions path, would displace more than 100 million people. That would be the equivalent of 200 Katrinas. Since my brother lost his home in Katrina, I don’t consider this to be an abstract issue.

Equally important, the inland glaciers provide fresh water sources for more than a billion people. But on our current path, they will be gone by century’s end.

So where is everyone going to live? Hundreds of millions will flee the new deserts, but they can’t go to the coasts; indeed, hundreds of millions of other people will be moving inland. But many of the world’s great rivers will be drying up at the same time, forcing massive conflict among yet another group of hundreds of millions of people. The word rival, after all, comes from “people who share the same river.” Sure, desalination is possible, but that’s expensive and uses a lot of energy, which means we’ll need even more carbon-free power.

Perhaps Earth Day should be Water Day, since the worst global warming impacts are going to be about water — too much in some places, too little in other places, too acidified in the oceans for most life. But even soil and water are themselves only important because they sustain life. We could do Pro-Life Day, but that term is already taken, and again it would probably draw the wrong crowd.

We could call it Homo sapiens Day. Technically, we are the subspecies Homo sapiens sapiens. Isn’t it great being the only species that gets to name all the species, so we can call ourselves “wise” twice! But given how we have been destroying the planet’s livability, I think at the very least we should drop one of the sapiens. And, perhaps provisionally, we should put the other one in quotes, so we are Homo “sapiens,” at least until we see whether we are smart enough to save ourselves from self-destruction.

What the day — indeed, the whole year — should be about is not creating misery upon misery for our children and their children and their children, and on and on for generations (see “Is the global economy a Ponzi scheme?“). Ultimately, stopping climate change is not about preserving the earth or creation but about preserving ourselves. Yes, we can’t preserve ourselves if we don’t preserve a livable climate, and we can’t preserve a livable climate if we don’t preserve the earth. But the focus needs to stay on the health and well-being of billions of humans because, ultimately, humans are the ones who will experience the most prolonged suffering. And if enough people come to see it that way, we have a chance of avoiding the worst.

We have fiddled like Nero for far too long to save the whole earth or all of its species. Now we need a World War II scale effort just to cut our losses and save what matters most. So let’s call it Triage Day. And if worse comes to worst — yes, if worse comes to worst — at least future generations won’t have to change the name again.

As a penultimate thought, I suspect that many environmentalists and climate science advocates will have their own, private name: “I told you so” Day. Not as a universal as “Triage Day,” I admit, but it has a Cassandra-like catchiness, no?

Finally, perhaps we should call it “science day.” We don’t have a day dedicated to celebrating science, and don’t we deserve one whole day free from the non-stop disinformation of the anti-science crowd?

As always, I’m open to better ideas….

Why this blog?

2010-04-22T11:44:00.000-07:00

With this blog I will attempt to contribute, in my own little way, towards promoting a sustainable society in the US. In this space I will at times offer my own thoughts on how we can create a society that can meet our current needs without sacrificing the quality of life for future generations and other life forms. Other times I will simply share selected insights, data, or analysis from authors, columnists, or from just about anyone I can find with good ideas on all things sustainable.

Why is this even necessary?
The reality is that humanity is hurtling toward disaster as the scale of human society begins to overwhelm the planet’s life support systems. We have almost 7 billion people on the planet who increasingly are living like Americans. More and more societies are following in America’s developmental footpath which is based on exponential growth and consumerism. Exponential growth of this kind on a finite planet is simply not possible. I am motivated to try and get this information out there since these megatrends, the issues that will impact our lives, and certainly the lives of this generation’s children and grandchildren simply are not talked about in the mainstream media, are rarely broached by teachers, nor are they highlighted by our elected officials.

This blog is not all about gloom and doom. It is rather about becoming aware of the choices we make every day and their consequences. Consequences that most of us have managed to ignore until recently. It is about realizing that we are on a certain path and the consequences of that path. It is about realizing that there is in fact an alternative path.

We can create a future that many of us only currently dare consider in our wildest dreams. Imagine a society where everyone has access to a good education and health care. Imagine a society where everyone works at a job that pays a livable wage. Imagine a place where each of us has the essentials for a comfortable life while having ample time to spend with family and friends and time to spend in our community. Imagine a place where we have the time to focus on developing our minds, our spirituality, or our emotional well being. Imagine a place where people are valued for who they are, for what they contribute to building our community rather than for what they have. Imagine a place where nature and other life forms flourish and we have the time and space to be part of nature.

Sound ludicrous? It is – at least given the world we have now, the world that we created. But we can create a far different world. And in fact, we have no choice but to profoundly change our world if we want to survive as a species. In this blog I will attempt to offer the facts, sometimes very harsh facts, about the damage we are doing to ourselves, our society, and to our planet. Other times I will provide examples of the awe inspiring efforts and successes of sustainability pioneers all around the world as they offer real world examples of another, better way.

How did I get interested in this topic?
At an early age I was struck by the fact that it seemed that those of us living in the United States had won some “cosmic lottery.” We got to live incredibly well while much of the world didn’t. After college I joined the Peace Corps (Gabon, 88-90) to find out for myself how most of the world lived to try and understand it all a bit better. From this experience I got the “international bug” and lived overseas for the next 17 working in international relief and development in Africa. Many of the models for development we used were based on the United States and Western Europe, and intuitively I sensed that these societies were not sustainable. This nagging sense of doubt is what led me to strike out on a life-long journey of reading and researching issues around environmental science, energy science, climate science, economics, physics, consumerism, and other topics on sustainability. While I loved living overseas, and working to support vulnerable communities in their efforts to develop, I knew that I was only working on a subset of the larger problem. The models were flawed. So, in 2007 I returned to the US to try and make my contribution at moving the US toward becoming a truly sustainable society. This blog is part of that effort.

I offer this blog with the utmost humility. Virtually everything I know about sustainability is based on the readings from those with minds far superior to mine.

Who is this blog for?
This blog is not just for tree huggers. If you live on planet earth, these are issues that you will want to know about. This blog is not about saving polar bears, though that would be nice. This is about saving ourselves. If you are worried about the quality of life the world will be able to offer your children or grandchildren then stay tuned. Care about your health? Interested in living a life that is not so chaotic and stress filled? Have a nagging sense there could or should be much more to life?

Give it a read. Try it for awhile. See if it resonates. If yes, embrace it, share it widely and do something about it. If not, well, send me your comments and let me know why. I love a healthy debate.