One Million Gardens

Given that the first days of Spring have officially arrived, I wanted to let you know about a an exciting national campaign to help stimulate the national move towards growing more of our food closer to home. As the economic challenges continue to grow, more and more Americans are considering getting involved in local food production. A spokesperson from the National Gardening Association recently mention that they expect Americans to plant up to 7,000,000 new food gardens this year.

As a way to help to accelerate this trend, just last month, the "One Million Gardens" campaign was launched.

The campaign's simple goal is:

To identify, encourage, and document the creation of at least 1,000,000 food gardens throughout the U.S. in 2009.

It is a 21st Century version of the Victory Garden campaign the Federal Government encouraged during World War 2 when over 20,000,000 gardens were planted as part of the War effort and associated rationing.

Please take a look at the site, add your garden to the list, and let others know about this campaign. It is also our hope that we can show the Obama administration the growing numbers of people involved in this work and help shift national policies to help encourage the production of more food closer to home.

Let's Get Growing!!!!!

While We Were Sleeping

As the current economic realities continue to unfold, it is critically important that Americans understand that what we are experiencing is a global interrelated challenge.

Over the past year or so, while America slept, China went on a shopping spree. According to the March 17th issue of the Washington Post,

Even as global financial flows have slowed sharply overall, China has dramatically stepped up its outbound investment. In 2008, its overseas mergers and acquisitions were worth $52.1 billion -- a record, according to the research firm Dealogic. In January and February of this year, Chinese companies invested $16.3 billion abroad, meaning that if the pace holds, the total for 2009 could be nearly double last year's.

On Feb. 12, China's state-owned metals giant Chinalco signed a $19.5 billion deal with Australia's Rio Tinto that will eventually double its stake in the world's second-largest mining company.

China is now actively in the process of insuring their future by buying up mineral and oils rights all across the planet. They are moving down the path of material abundance which we have been modeling for the past 30 years; and very little we say or do is going to change this anytime soon. The challenge for us is that with 1.3 billion people in China if they want to play the consumption game, that will put unimaginable stress on our ability to do the same.

Americans will be faced with the necessity of a different sort of future when it comes to energy. As these massive Asian countries lock up resources for their future, we will be forced to either fight them... which is not very realistic, or seriously begin to re-organize our energy demands so we are not as effected by these huge global shifts in control of resources.

If we can be successful in building the systems to provide for our needs much closer to home, we can help assure a less stressful transition from an oil dependent society to one with built-in resilience from the coming environmental and financial shocks.

For cities and states who enact legislation to encourage these changes, they will find themselves in a far better position than those who doggedly hold to the fading dream of ever growing economies full of more and more stuff.

Huge Tracks of Land

It was not until 2010 that the world really began to aggressively deal with its energy issues.

As it began to truly sink in that we were approaching an end to the "Age of Fossil Fuels" and moving into the beginning of the "Age of Renewables," individuals, groups, businesses and eventually governments, significantly ramped up their renewable energy planning.

Gazing over the acres and acres of shiny solar panels in the valley below, it was easy to see why it made sense to capture the energy that shines down upon this land. It was an added benefit that the landowners made the construction conditional on their ability to interplant shade-loving coffee between the long lines of sleek panels. Not a bad place for a renewable energy power plant.

It is just too bad we did not start all this a few years sooner...

Shining Examples of Sustainable Development

Americans are searching for a clear picture of what the future will look like given the tremendous force that is about to be exerted by the Obama Stimulus Package. This spending is not only a stimulus package but an effort to change economic and industrial direction for our nation from one that we know is depleting to one that we hope is sustainable. Like when a rock hits a wall it changes direction, so our economy has "hit the wall" and is certainly changing direction.

So what could this new model look like? How can we use less energy and still live a more fulfilling life? That is the question many Americans are asking and when a writer, Neshama Abraham wrote a little piece exploring this and looking at Oshara Village in Santa Fe New Mexico as a model, the internet picked up on it and made it the top pick for the Google search "Obama Future Today"

Oshara Village has super energy efficiency and mixed-use design that will provide homes, jobs and schools in walking distance. The Plaza and the first 40 homes are complete and a new line of Gold Certified, more cost efficient homes have emerged as a result of this economic change in direction. The first 20 families, the Oshara Pioneers are quickly becoming a community and more are moving in every month. Google "Obama Future Today" and see what the future might look like.

Totally Uncharted Territory

The news these days is sometime hard to hear. The trend is ever downward for so many. The mantra seems to be "we have never seen this before," and it is true for anyone less than 80 years old. What I find so interesting is the continual expectation that these challenges will eventually smooth out and we will get back to some semblance of order.

My intuition tells me something much different.

A recent column by Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Thomas Friedman said the following.

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...

We can’t do this anymore.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog ClimateProgress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

What we are experience these days is nothing short of a re-structuring of what we have called normal for the past 60 to 80 years. We are now faced with an unprecedented combination of challenges including climate change, the end of inexpensive energy, and the unraveling of the economic fabric is crating a global situation we had NEVER experienced in our lifetimes, a culture changing perfect storm so to speak.

I firmly believe we will not "get back to normal" but that instead, we are in the early stages of moving to a new normal. As a species, we have had to make significant changes before so I am confident we have the ability to transition our culture to the next stage.

Deep, deep in our social and possibly genetic coding we know what to do. And we also know it takes great focus and perseverance. I do not assume it will be a smooth ride for everyone, transitions never are. But we have the opportunity to come through this with an American culture that is far more sustainable, reliant on the use of more local sources and having a high or higher overall quality of life.

We may very well consume far less stuff, but by refocusing ourselves towards those things that make live deeply rich and satisfying, we can replace what some may feel as "lost." These include a significant increase of interaction with people and the advantages of resilient and more self-reliant communities.