Supporting Sustainable Solutions

The New Economy

2011-11-02T12:51:00.000-07:00

From Here to There

With the "discovery" that 70% of the American economy was based on consumption, the current economic slowdown has hit many of us and effected many parts of our daily lives.

So for me, the questions that seems to rise to the surface are this.

What kind of an economy do we need which will allow us to live within our means (i.e. much less credit) yet still maintain a healthy and vibrant lifestyle?

If we are not in a position to buy so much stuff, we will move our focus to those things we really have to have. And what are they? Well let's start at the very beginning and food and clean water. We will always need food and water, and the healthier the better.

In the years ahead, I expect many Americans to start adding food growing into their lives. I do not see us all heading back to the farm but the expectation of digging in the dirt a few hours every day would not be unreasonable. I also find it therapeutic as long as it is not a grueling all day/every day routine.

But I am speaking about much more than lots and lots of gardens everywhere, I am talking about creating the "industry of small-scale urban farming." This section of the economy includes every task required to maintain a sustainable food production system. This includes Food farmers, market stands, seed growers, animal husbandry, and composters. We will also be reviving the arts of reusing, repairing and refurbishing out possessions. The stuff that is left over can then be recycled in local centers.

I do not believe that we should set up giant corporate networks to capture all this new business, I am more suggesting that as the economy continues to contract, as I think it will, we will see these kind of business networks emerging out of the growing realizations that the "new normal" will look substantially different than the "previous normal."

The City of Berkeley Zero Waste Commission has taken this even further by stating the following:

Reduce – Just use less. We are so use to thinking more is better that we have forgotten that using less is sometimes better.
Reuse - Stop throwing things away. So many items can be used again and again if not by you then by someone else.
Repair – Reclaim the lost art of fixing things. Many items just require a bit of effort to make them usable once again.
Rebuild – Complex items are well worth the effort and can end up better, stronger or more powerful that the earlier generation.
Refurbish – Sometimes it only takes a little sprucing up to be ready for use.
Refinish – Adding a new cover, color, or stain can make all the difference.
Resell – If it has value others may very well buy it from you. Ebay and others are growing rapidly!
Recycle - Send it back to be used again. Support your local recycling center.
Compost – Send it back to the earth – literally!
If this is not possible then the item should be restricted, redesigned or removed from production.

In addition to food and water we need shelter and clothing. The McMansions are on the verge of being converted into large shared homes. When we look back from the not too distant future, will smile to have all these enormous homes. Concepts like cohousing, shared housing, coops and a host of other as yet unnamed living arrangements will fill these voids. Hell an owner and their bank will be happy to get "rent" from a bunch of unrelated folks before letting the house rot away. But new housing will also reemerge in a new and shrunken variety. Katrina cottages have helped to bring the small home back into vogue, right when economic realities offer us little choice.

More to come...

Fix it? Now I am Really Confused.

2009-08-03T20:33:00.000-07:00

I was reading recently about how the various futuristic pundits see how our current economic challenges will be evolving in the months a years to come. Many of these "knowledgeable" folks see the economic contraction we have been experiencing over the past year or so, continuing for at least a while longer. In addition, similar to a post of mine a few months ago, the ongoing promise that at some point in the not-too-distant future, things will "bottom out" and we will be back on the road to financial abundance. I just do not see much real evidence of this at this point in our collective journey.

I am starting to realize that many Americans are being shown a very powerful and perhaps life changing picture right now. For the vast majority of us we have only known the limitless abundance of a consumer culture, and we were convinced it would never need to slow down. But now it appears that the piper is calling and we are loathe to hear what he has to say. I read almost everyday that the economy is gaining strength and we are headed for a rebound. The fact that some Banks are showing profit is ludicrous to highlight since we recently gave them ten's of billions of dollars. And in case no one has noticed they have not been dolling it out very swiftly. It has to make their balance sheet look better!

So if all this economic activity is not filtering itself down to the common folk, what are we to expect? Well, I think it will be fair to say that we can expect to consume less in the years to come. We need some time to start paying off our debt and learning the joys of saving money for a change.

I predict that in the future,when that lawn mover, or drill, or God forbid the DVD player start acting up, instead of just tossing it away, we just might revert to that ancient tactic of fixing it. Huh? I realize this may make no sense to many of you so let me try to explain.

Not all that long ago say in the early 60's, I can clearly remember hanging out with my Dad in the garage which doubled as his personal workshop. We would spend hour after hour with one another while he worked on stuff. I also remember that a significant amount of his effort went into fixing things. In simplest terms it means that when some household or recreational item stopped working as planned, he would take it into his workshop, get out his bright lights and special glasses that made everything look really big, and actually take the object apart and try to see what was the problem. It was truly fascinating and I often emulated him by taking many of my toys apart just to see what was inside.

I remember vividly taking going with my Dad and a shoebox full of glass "tubes" down to the electronics store and plugging them into the tube tester. The ones that register BAD were replaced by new versions. Then we would drive back home, put them all back into their respective sockets, flip the switch, and watch the radio or TV or tape player come back to life. It was almost magical!

The coming years are going to give us the chance, if we take it, to learn both how to fix things as well as make more and more things that can be fixed. Since there is no way we can spend our way out of our predicament, I suspect we will be forced to re-learn how to make things that last and when necessary, fix them when they break.

And maybe, just maybe, we will get to spend a bit more time with one another around the workbench instead of blissed out in front of the 52 inch HD plasma screen that virtually no one knows how to fix.

Read Anything Good Lately?

2009-06-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

Over the past month or so I have found myself engrossed reading a number of very interesting books. While they are all quite different, they all fall under the overarching heading of resource depletion.

The first book, Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate by Pat Murphy, describes in great detail a wide variety of actions we can do as individuals and as communities to deal with the coming challenges posed by the twin issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change. This book is packed full of information and should be required reading for any serious student of resource trends.

The second book which I suspect will become one of my favorites of all time is World Made by Hand by James Howard Kunstler. This near-future fictional depiction of life after the end of the oil age is both touching and disturbing. Because it takes place in the not-to-distant future, the remnants of our overly consumerist society are still very present. His attention to detail brings the challenges and success for the characters right into our hearts.

The third book, and one that is receiving a great deal of coverage these days, is Jeff Rubin's Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. Jeff is the chief economist and chief strategist at CIBC World Markets and was one of the first economists to accurately predict soaring oil prices back in 2000 and is now one of the world’s most sought-after energy experts. Jeff clearly lays out his decades of experience and makes an extremely convincing argument why importing plastic toilet seats from China and caesar salads from across the continent, will be totally uneconomical in the not too distant future.

Recreating Local Economies

2009-05-26T11:26:00.000-07:00

With the growing expectation that abundant and inexpensive fossil fuels are quickly becoming a thing of the past, there is increasing talk about the need to recreate local economies. However, one of the largest challenges facing Americans, is that for almost anyone now alive, understanding exactly what that means is far from clear. We have grown up under the creation of global networks that bring us almost everything from baby bottles to toilet seats from across the globe. A growing circle of experts are sowing doubt about the feasibility of keeping 13,000 mile supply chains strong and financially competitive in the absence of inexpensive oil.

I do want to be clear that creating local economies which supply us with everything we need is both impossible and unnecessary. But shifting the current balance from 95% non-local to more like 75% local is worth the effort and would have a tremendous positive reduction on our usage of non-renewable liquid fuels like oil and natural gas.

The task of first re-imaging and then taking the necessary steps to implement a local economy, is both a necessary and imposing task. Because this is such an important topic these days, I feel a need to begin a series of posts which focus on how this kind of local economy would work and what would be the most critical elements to begin the process.

A concept of this magnitude needs a framework within which to help organize a coherent response. It feels obvious to me that I must lay out what elements are the most important and then drill down into each area over time. The areas I see as most critical include, food, energy, shelter, and clothing. By designing re-localized economies that can consistently provide us with these basics, I believe we can lay the foundation for resilient local economies.

Stay tuned...

Put GM to Good Use

2009-05-25T22:23:00.001-07:00

Now that General Motors has successfully hidden under the protection of Chapter 11, closed thousands of its dealerships and laid off tens of thousands of it loyal employees, it is high time we make them accountable to their new owners - us! If the car companies have any future at all, it should be based on making products we urgently need - starting with public transit. Let the car era wind down gracefully. I project that the program to offer "cash for clunkers" will have a negligible effect on domestic car sales and even less impact on our national carbon emissions.

It is becoming ever clearer that the "Happy Motoring" era is over and we need to rapidly devote our remaining resources to re-localization, walkable communities, and public transit. It obviously requires a very drastic revision of our current collective self-image, of what we aspire to and who we are.

Instead of spending tens of billions of hard-to-justify dollars studying how to implement a high-speed railroad system, the most intelligent choice for us is to fix the existing passenger railroad lines and start cranking out ultra modern passenger cars that will be a joy to ride. We need to prioritize the highway maintenance agenda. Since we will not be able to afford to repave the whole existing system -- and let other nations meet our diminishing demand for cars in the USA.

Preparing for Coming Changes - LEARN

2009-05-25T08:16:00.000-07:00

For those who understand where American's energy use is heading, here is a list five actions which will be necessary to help us prepare for the imminent decline of finite fossil fuels.

Source: www.solarcarandtractor.com

(L)OCALIZE agriculture, energy production, social services, essential manufacturing, etc. All will have to regress to a limited “twenty-mile radius” community. This will not be a choice. The inevitable curtailment of transportation fuel will reduce future travel. Intercity light rail will be impossible without energy. www.postcarbon.org.

(E)DUCATE yourself and others. We passed peak oil in late 2008. Natural gas, coal, and fissionable uranium are not far behind. Without ever-increasing energy, real growth, including a debt-based financial system based on future principal plus interest, cannot continue. Recognize the fallacies of bogus solutions like: “There’s plenty left”; “The scientists will save us”; “We can efficiency our way out of our dilemma (not if we don’t reduce consumption)”; “Biofuels, including waste, cellulosic ethanol, and grease will suffice” (at the expense of food). The honest facts must reach the public, the media, and decision-makers even in the midst of denial. Start with www.peakoil.net, www.theoildrum.com, www.321energy.com, etc.

(A)DAPT to a very limited solar-electric future as our only hope of perpetuating any semblance of the brief fossil-fuel age. This vision could be sustainable, clean, and far superior to our ancestor’s harsh existence. A solar-electric sequel could integrate with waning fossil fuels and all other energy sources such as limited hydro or geothermal into a modern electrically-based system and allow individuals to take control of their own production with PV. Also included are wind and concentrated solar.

(R)ATION all fossil fuels starting immediately with gasoline. This is the only way we can reduce consumption on a controlled basis without increasing price-competition and conflict over the remains. Rationing is probably our best chance to buy time for mitigation and give our kids a chance for the remnants of the party.

(N)EGATIVE population growth. This is the toughest and most critical issue. With peak oil we have passed peak growth. Our short cornucopia of excess resources (including fossil fuels and all natural resources) has ended. We have far too many people in the US and the world for a sustainable civilization. If we don’t get the correct facts out and convince people to begin negative population growth, mother nature will reduce population in her own cruel ways. See www.npg.org, www.optimumpopulation.org, www.worldpopulationbalance.org and others.

L.E.A.R.N. - We all need to understand and project this acronym.

Coming to a Yard Near You

2009-04-29T15:19:00.000-07:00

The average plate of food travels over 1500 miles to get from the field to your plate. In the process it consumes copious amount of fossil fuels and ends up less than fresh the day it lands on your grocery store shelf.

What if there was a way to bring the growing of fresh fruits and vegetables closer to home? What if we were to take the dramatic step of moving the fields right into our own neighborhoods?

Consider Neighborhood Supported Agriculture.

By converting a small portion of the millions of acres of Kentucky Bluegrass that surround our homes with organic vegetable gardens and orchards we have the opportunity to greatly reduce our dependence on the fossil fuels required to plant, fertilize, harvest, process, pack and transport our food.

In Boulder, Colorado an innovative Neighborhood Supported Agriculture model is bringing local food production and distribution into urban settings. A 3 ½ year old urban farming project called Community Roots Farm was created by farmer Kipp Nash, who has successfully converted 13 front and back yards, and church lawns into vegetable gardens for neighbors and CSA shareholders, with surplus for the local Farmer’s Market and food for families in need - while creating increased community connections among neighbors at the same time.

This model which is being studied in order to help replicate it across the nation is at the forefront of the urban agriculture or locavore movement.

As the economic contraction continues and the cost of oil begin to go up again, the ability to eat locally produced organic food may become one of the most important aspects of sustainability.

The Downside of Ecomomic Growth

2009-04-18T15:36:00.000-07:00

With all the talk these days around increasing the flow of money, what would happen if our banks really did start lending in a big way next week?

The stalled economic engine of our country would begin rolling again, we would see a surge in loans to the construction industry, increases in production and (hopefully) sales of autos, large and small manufacturing, people would be called back to work and everything would be great again.

Well... there is one not-so-small problem with that scenario.

For those who have been following the roller coaster ride in the energy industry, you already know how close our current supply and demand is. Since the global economy started to significantly slow last fall, we have reduced our global consumption of oil by over 3 million barrels per day (bpd), to about 83 million bpd. This is about 2.4 million bpd less than in 2008 and the lowest level since 2004. A real reduction, but nothing like the collapse in demand we have been hearing about. On top of that the work to secure both additional sources of oil and investment in alternatives has almost come to a standstill. Billions of dollars of new projects have been delayed or cancelled completely and the oil services industry, those companies actually doing the exploration and drilling, has cut back almost 50% since last year. According to the Rig Count industry website who follows the changing number of active oil and natural gas rigs:

The year-over-year oil exploration in the US is down 42.3 percent. Gas exploration is down 48.0 percent.

So if our economy begins to ramp up again it will not take long for our demand to outpace our supply. When that happens prices go up. Oil has already risen from a low of $35 per barrel to the low $50's while demand has been low. This cycle of economic activity causing higher energy prices is a relationship we have not seen in the past.

We simply do not have the option to just re-start our economy in the same fashion we have been doing for the past 100 years. We are being forced to re-structure our economy to be more resilient to these supply constraints while increasing our local self-sufficiency. This will result in reducing our dependence on massive amounts of energy from faraway countries in order to bring us our food, to heat our homes, and to manufacture the items we truly need for a high standard of living.

Eight Steps to a Bountiful Vegetable Garden

2009-04-06T14:43:00.000-07:00

You’ve decided that you want a vegetable garden to lower your grocery bills. But, where do you start? There are eight essential steps to successful vegetable gardening.

Step 1. Pick an appropriate area for your garden. When you choose your site, consider these important factors:

- Sunlight. Most vegetables grow best in full sunlight. Choose an area that gets at least six hours of sunlight a day.

- Soil. The best soil for growing vegetables is a dark soil, rich in nutrients, that has good drainage but will still hold sufficient moisture for the plants. Don’t plant your garden too close to trees and shrubs whose roots will steal nutrients and water from the vegetables.

- Water. Place your garden near your water supply — faucets that can be reached by no more than two hose lengths.

Step 2. Create your site plan. Make a plan before you purchase your seeds or plants. It will help you decide how many you need to buy to best fit the available space. Base your plan on the vegetables that your family likes, how much work you want to do on the garden and how much room there is in the garden. Create a quick sketch to follow while you are planting.

Step 3. Buy your plants and/or seeds. Be sure that the plants you get will grow well in the area where you live. Buy young, healthy plants that are not limp or straggly or that have been over-crowded in pots. On seeds, look at the date stamp on the package to make sure they are not too old.

Step 4. Prepare your soil for planting. This is one of the most important things to do for a successful garden. To prepare the soil, add a layer of compost or fertilizer over the top of the soil. Then till (or spade) this layer into the existing soil. Rake the soil into rows or mounds, depending on the type of vegetables you’ll be planting.

Step 5. Sow your seeds. If some of your vegetables will be planted from seeds, plant them first. Sometimes seeds are started indoors or in a greenouse to give them a good start. When seedlings appear, thin them to the distances recommended on the seed packets.

Step 6. Plant your plants. Plant young plants following the directions given by the plant nursery where you purchased them. Planting times can be tricky. You want to plant early, but not so early as to stunt their growth in cooler weather. Some plants will require netting or wire forms for best results.

Step 7. Care for your growing plants. Once your vegetables are all planted, you need to care for them by watering, weeding, pruning, and protecting them from insects.

Step 8. Harvest your garden. Different vegetables are harvested at different times. Vegetables should be carefully watched and picked at their peak. You may eat them immediately after harvesting or you can freeze or can them for later use.

The Future of the Auto Industry

2009-04-02T14:56:00.000-07:00

As the administration looks for ways to help out the failing auto industry, I agree with Mr. Wipple quoted below, that this is the time to take an "out-of-the-box" look at the situation to see what makes the most sense as we move forward.

- Zev

The Peak Oil Crisis: Seize the Moment

by Tom Whipple

Earlier this week the Obama administration, now the effective owner of the U.S. automobile industry, put Detroit on notice that it has 30-60 days to come up with a believable plan to "restructure" itself or it goes into bankruptcy.

This action makes it a good time to step back and ponder just where America's industrial base is going. With $2 gasoline and some incentives, recession-wracked American consumers seem willing and able to absorb another 8 or 9 million new gasoline and diesel powered cars and trucks this year --- but does this make any sense? The "restructuring" plan seems to be one of trimming overhead, shutting some factories, abrogating labor agreements, and stiffing shareholders, bondholders and debtors to the point where the manufacturers might be able to limp along with a minimal infusion of taxpayer dollars.

This plan might be fine except for one glaring fallacy. In the next few years, oil prices are going up so high that ownership and use of the automobiles and trucks in their present form will be a totally uneconomic proposition. How many of the current flavor of cars and trucks is Detroit going to sell with gasoline at $10 a gallon or higher?

full story

One Million Gardens

2009-03-22T13:30:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T13:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-20T12:58:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-13T10:49:00.001-07:00

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

2009-03-05T20:37:00.001-08:00

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.

Transition Town Introduction

2009-02-03T09:32:00.000-08:00

Here is a 30 minute video introducing the Transition Town Movement by Jennifer Grey one of the founders.

Another Word (or two) About Skiing

2009-02-03T07:42:00.000-08:00

I do applaud the efforts by a number of Colorado ski mountains to reduce their environmental impacts. Programs to purchase wind power to power the lifts, bio-diesel to run the snow cats, and even recycling programs to handle waste and even compost are impressive. But no matter how hard the various mountains work at these efforts, by far the largest impact from skiing is out of the hands of the resorts.

I am talking about the tens of thousands of cars, trucks, SUV's and numerous airplanes which carry the skiers from their homes to the mountains and back. In some places the traffic generated by these trips causes traffic jams miles and miles long.

The bottom line is that we are being forces to look at our lifestyles in all areas and reinvent how we can still have fun and do our work while generating a much smaller ecological footprint in the process.

Sustainable Sports ... Not!

2009-02-02T08:31:00.000-08:00

This past weekend I had the chance to visit a local ski slope with my family. Since I am not a skier, I spent some of my time hiking the trails bordering the ski mountain. As I walked by the homes scattered in the trees I was hit by the total unsustainability of it all. I could easily see how in the next few years, how this lifestyle enjoyed by many will become so difficult to maintain.

These large homes with gas-guzzling SUV's parked in the driveway and snowmobiles in the garage, will become too costly for many owners as the price of oil (and everything else made with and from oil) continues to rise. On top of that, their distance from any services such a food shopping, car service and almost all forms of entertainment, makes their location a major challenge when resources become harder to get.

All of this impressed up me how important it will be for us to learn how to live and organize ourselve more sustainably in the coming years.

Time to End the 1500 Mile Ceasar Salad

2009-01-29T11:13:00.000-08:00

"Food Miles" refer to the distance that your food has been transported between its source farm and where you buy it. Food miles are one measure of the amount of energy used to transport your food and the consequent pollutants released by that transport. Estimates vary but transport may account for 20% or more of the total energy use associated with the provision of a given food item. As such, Food Miles are a relatively simple statistic that can be used to demonstrate the ecological importance of local foods.

Seventeen percent of this nation’s petroleum consumption is dedicated to on-the-farm food production. Add on processing, packaging, refrigeration and transport of edibles and food takes a big bite out of affordable oil supplies and contributes to pollution. Domestic food as basic as lettuce we could grow in front yards most of the year, and green houses in winter, travels up to 3,000 miles from field to table.

http://www.lifecyclesproject.ca/initiatives/food_miles/calculating_food_miles.php explains how this takes into effect greenhouse emissions.

Sustainable Table: Buy Local: http://www.sustainabletable.org/issues/buylocal/

Do food miles matter? | ES&T Online News: http://www.nrdc.org/health/foodmiles/

Creating Sustainable Communities

2009-01-26T20:39:00.000-08:00

Alan Hoffman the Town Founder of Oshara Village in Santa Fe New Mexico, offers a compelling development option for new communites.

-Zev

The Obama Future is Here Today

Our new president Barack Obama has announced his intention to move our nation from oil dependency toward renewable energy, efficiency and sustainable innovation. Are there existing examples of how this new paradigm might look and work today?

In Santa Fe, New Mexico, a 450-acre environmental New Urbanist community offers a solution to Obama's call to action. Oshara Village is a mixed-use town designed for people not cars. It's a neighborhood where residents can walk to the central plaza and will be able to shop, visit a healthcare provider, drop their child off in day care, and go to work within a five-minute walk of their home. The design allows people to exercise more, drive less, and easily interact with their neighbors and live in passive solar homes with low energy use.

"We utilize many of the sustainable elements the Obama team espouses to help reduce consumption and emissions that cause global warming," said Alan Hoffman, town founder of Oshara Village. "At Oshara, the first 40 homes are super-insulated, oriented for passive solar gain, use solar hot water heating, and have energy-efficient appliances and lighting. The town also has an operational water purification plant that recycles all water from homes and businesses to be reused for all the town's landscaping and commercial uses," added Hoffman.

A study commissioned by the non-profit New Village Institute found that a family could save as much as 58.7 percent of its energy costs and reduce its carbon footprint by 26,000 pounds of CO2 per year in these kinds of energy-conscious walkable towns. Today, over 100 New Urban towns are complete in the United States and some like Oshara Village also emphasize energy-efficiency.

"We believe that by investing in conservation, “smart growth,” renewable energy and well-designed mixed-use towns, the United States will produce millions of new jobs, make us safer at home, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and increase the quality of our lives," said Hoffman.

For more information visit OsharaVillage.com and see the Oshara Model Video.

Alan Hoffman

4 Willow Back Road
Santa Fe, New Mexico 87508
505-316-0449

Visions of a Post Oil World

2009-01-22T08:01:00.001-08:00

Greetings!

Bill McKibben the author of a dozen books including "The End of Nature," was recently interviewed and asked about what he felt the world could look like after the dust had settled and we successfully navigated these changes.

This sounds familiar...

- Zev

McKibben: I think it will look different depending on where you are. The economy will be much more localized. Many commodities, food, energy, entertainment will be much more likely to come from your neighbors or from people in your region than at present. I don’t think food will be traveling 2,000 miles. I think it will be traveling 20 miles. In a post-fossil fuel economy, energy will be coming from solar panels on your neighbor’s roof and your roof.

Not only will that provide good, clean power, but it will do that without your having to send your daughter or son off to the Persian Gulf to defend a 10,000-mile-long straw through which we suck hydrocarbons. We won’t have to blow the tops off any more mountains to mine coal. The most important parts of our standard of living, good food and good friends, will be strengthened by a more energy efficient economy. I look forward to its advent.

Now the Work Really Begins

2009-01-20T12:05:00.000-08:00

With the inauguration of Barak Obama complete I feel a need to hunker down and really get to work. His leadership will only succeed if he has tens of millions of American working along side him through these increasingly challenging times.

For this reason I offer a short piece from STEPHANIE BERCHT Staff Writer for the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah , Georgia.

- Zev

The term “sustainability” can be confusing, as it is often related to a broad range of disciplines, usually associated with human development and its effect on the environment. The buzzword comes from “sustainable development”, which is defined as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” This term was coined in 1987 by Dr. Brundtland, the first appointed chairperson of the UN World Commission on Environment and Development. However, sustainability is not a new concept. The Great Law of the Iroquois long ago stated that “in our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decision on the next seven generations.” It relates to human development in terms of economy, culture as well as the environment.

Our way of life that thrives on excessive consumption is unsustainable – that is, we cannot maintain our lifestyle indefinitely because we are quickly depleting the resources that support it and consequently deteriorating the quality of our lives. The concept of sustainability is to continue development through wise choices in the way we use our natural resources. This includes reassessing where we get our energy from, how we use it and what we use it for, what type of food we eat, how we harvest it, what materials we use – for anything – and how we get all of this as well as what we do with the byproducts from our actions.It is not just about keeping the Earth green and clean for woodland creatures: we must take care of the environment for our race to continue. Once humans deplete every resource on this planet, who is really going to suffer? Once we are gone, Earth will bring itself back. That deserves some respect. And if we want to stick around, we should start showing some of that respect right now.

The Advantages of Community

2009-01-08T09:38:00.000-08:00

It has become increasingly obvious, that when times are challenging, having the security of a strong community becomes very important. Unfortunately for the vast majority of Americans, we know almost no one who lives near us. This poses a great challenge as we attempt to build increasingly resilient and self reliant communities.

After a recent home owners meeting, I realize our neighborhood has a distinct advantage because I live in one of 115 cohousing neighborhoods in the U.S. These collaborative communities imported from Denmark, offer the advantages of home ownership plus the benefits of community and shared resources. Because of our intention to create a neighborhood with increased community, all of our neighbors have extensive experience working, playing, and making decisions together. Over the past 11 years, when issues come up, we have the ability to quickly connect with each other and make intelligent and long-lasting decisions.

For those of you who are not already connected to your neighbors, I strongly suggest taking steps to find out who lives around you, what skills they have, and begin to set up events where you can get together and begin the process of building a social network right where you currently live. One resource I suggest is the book Superbia: 31 Ways to Create Sustainable Neighborhoods by Dave Wann. Here you can find a wealth of ideas from simple to bold that will assist you to connect with your neighbors.

Only by connecting with one another can we move rapidly in this direction. Go out and knock on some doors. You may be pleasantly surprised who you meet.

Forecast for 2009

2008-12-29T09:19:00.000-08:00

This posting, written by James Howard Kunstler, provides a helpful overview to the issues facing us as we work to recreate our economy to include the challenges of Peak Oil.

Zev

Introduction (Full Text)

There are two realities "out there" now competing for verification among those who think about national affairs and make things happen. The dominant one (let's call it the Status Quo) is that our problems of finance and economy will self-correct and allow the project of a "consumer" economy to resume in "growth" mode. This view includes the idea that technology will rescue us from our fossil fuel predicament -- through "innovation," through the discovery of new techno rescue remedy fuels, and via "drill, baby, drill" policy. This view assumes an orderly transition through the current "rough patch" into a vibrant re-energized era of "green" Happy Motoring and resumed Blue Light Special shopping.

The minority reality (let's call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the "consumer" era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we've come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.

My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.

Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can't be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won't care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization.

While the public supposedly voted for "change" this fall, I maintain that they underestimate the changes really at hand. I voted for "change" myself in pulling the lever for Barack Obama. I regard him as a figure of intelligence and sensibility, but I'm far from convinced that he really sees the kind of change we are in for, and I fret about the measures he'll promote to rescue the Status Quo when he moves into the White House a few weeks from now.

The Best Holiday Gifts

2008-12-27T08:43:00.000-08:00

While reading my local paper this morning, I saw that while purchasing was slow at a local mall, the line at the massage chair was huge and all the tables at the food court were full causing people to sit on ledges and stairs to enjoy their food.

This simply underlines that people deep down inside are not just looking for stuff to console themselves but are enjoying the company of others and the gentle touch from a stranger. Community planners of past understood this and created central squares, plazas, and other gathering spots for its citizens. It is obvious to me that people go where people are, and it does not require spending huge sums of money to provide the motivation.

The dismal economic times are forcing us to choose methods of giving and entertaining ourselves that are not dependent on spending money we do not have, or collecting more stuff we do not really need.

My New Years wish is that we deepen this realization and refocus our time, energy, and resources toward creating neighborhoods and communities which encourage us to spend time together and allow the ancient benefits of strong community connections to make our lives rich and exciting.

Creating the Green Economy

2008-12-15T13:09:00.000-08:00

The constant economic news makes it sound like everything is coming to a screeching halt when it comes to the engine of business. On the contrary, the coming green economy will turn out to be far larger than we ever expected.

On the face of it we are now seeing a scaling back of the kind of wasteful and over consumptive economy based on the availability of ever-growing supplies of cheap energy. Despite the recent plunge in oil prices, over the next years and decades to come we will see dramatic increases in these costs.

So the question before us is how do we create an economy which does not require Americans to purchase ever growing quantities of unnecessary and wasteful items. The answer is to support and enhance those industries which are designed to recycle materials and extend the life of the things we use. It will require and shift from a "throwaway" society to a "sustainable" society.

For example, we can increase the reuse of many items. Businesses and industries that repair and help us to reuse items. We need to reclaim the lost art of fixing things. Many items just require a bit of effort to make them usable once again.

We need to rebuild, refurbish, refinish and renovate our homes, offices, public buildings, machines, tools and furniture in ways that increase their lifespan, reduce their energy use and improve their efficiencies

Trade and bartering systems can be encouraged to allow us to resell items we have finished with, but are still valuable to others

We need to create a domestic recycling industry. We must not be dependent on countries such as China to buy our used paper, glass,aluminum and cardboard. We need to support the development of these industries right here in the United States.

As part of our move to grow as much of our own food locally, we must support the creation of local sources of organic compost while diverting all that material from our already over burdened landfills.

Taken together, these industries have the potential to create millions of home grown jobs while reducing our consumption of raw materials all at the same time.

The Power of Feedback Loops

2008-12-09T08:39:00.000-08:00

When historians look back over time, it is clear that many of our large scale natural and man made systems have a cyclical aspect to them. However, it is also becoming evident that there are times when these cycles speed up way beyond what would normally be expected.

This is partially due to a phenomena called "Positive Feedback Loops." We are seeing this happening in the realm of Climate Change and it is requiring the prediction experts to continually change their estimates of how quickly we can expect to see things like the rate of polar ice melt.

One of the stabilizing aspects of the polar ice cap is that the huge expanses of ice reflect the sunlight and keep the temperature stable. As the earth warms and ice melts, it exposes additional water and bare land. Instead of reflecting the suns rays, the water and land absorb the heat and continue to warm, accelerating the melting and adding to the warming process by exposing even more water and land. Because of this effect, we are now hearing that the north pole may be ice-free in as little as five years instead of the 10-15 years scientists were predicting only a year or so ago.

It is fair to expect that this trend will continue to accelerate into the near future and we will need to adjust our estimates and our actions to meet that reality.

The Green New Deal

2008-12-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

by Richard Heinberg

(Entire Text) Our continued national dependence on fossil fuels is creating a crippling vulnerability to both long-term fuel scarcity and catastrophic climate change.

The current economic crisis requires substantial national policy shifts and enormous new government injections of capital into the economy. This provides an opportunity for a project whose scope would otherwise be inconceivable: a large-scale, coordinated energy transition away from fossil fuels and toward renewable energy.

This project must happen immediately; indeed, it may already be too late. We have already left behind the era of cheap and plentiful fossil fuels, with a permanent decline of global oil production likely underway within three years. Moreover, the latest research tells us we have less than eight years to bring carbon emissions under control if we hope to avoid catastrophic climate change. Lacking this larger frame of understanding and action, a mere shift away from foreign oil dependence will fail to meet the challenge at hand.

We need to reduce our overall energy consumption, and restructure our economy to run primarily on renewable energy—and the federal government must lead the way. This energy transition should have five components: a massive shift to renewable energy, and a retrofitting of the four key systems of electricity, transportation, food, and buildings.

Wal-Mart Jumps on the Sustainability Bandwagon

2008-12-04T11:13:00.000-08:00

Bentonville, Ark., Dec. 2, 2008 (Entire Text)-- Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (NYSE: WMT) has established a partnership with many of its leading sustainability suppliers to facilitate the creation of green jobs in the United States. The Wal-Mart Green Jobs Council is comprised of representatives from throughout the retailer's divisions, including store operations, real estate, logistics and sustainability, and representatives from suppliers across a variety of industries.

As part of its company-wide sustainability goals, Wal-Mart is committed to being supplied 100 percent by renewable energy, creating zero waste and selling environmentally-friendly products. The company is moving toward these goals by using sustainable sourcing practices including energy efficiency, waste reduction, renewable energy and lifecycle management. These initiatives are making Wal-Mart a more sustainable company and helping create a favorable environment for green job creation.

For example, Wal-Mart recently announced its first substantial purchase of wind energy in the U.S. which will lead to the creation of green jobs in Texas. The wind power will supply up to 15 percent of the retailers' total energy load in approximately 360 Texas stores and other facilities. This is one example of the dozens of projects Wal-Mart is implementing across its operations with green job creation potential.

Peak Oil Has Arrived

2008-12-03T10:26:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I attended a presentation by Matt Simmons held at the world renowned Colorado School of Mines in Golden, Colorado. His topic was "Peak Oil" and the room was filled with 50+ extremely interested petroleum engineers, faculty, and oil industry representatives.

His presentation was extremely sobering and focused on the lack of actual data being used to determine how much oil is in the ground and the rates that oil fields are declining. The bottom line of his presentation was that "the age of cheap oil is over."

One fact that Matt passed on is that it is expected that oill exports from Mexico will be eliminated in the next 18 months. This is important to the U.S. because we receive almost 8% of our imported oil from Mexico.

To adapt to this and other Peak Oil challenges America will need to make a number of fundamental changes in the very near future.

Dear President Elect Obama

2008-11-19T13:41:00.001-08:00

Congratulations on your recent election. I do hope you and your staff have all fastened their seat belts, and are all ready for the ride of your lives ... smile.

Thank you so much for providing this opportunity to gather input from the American people. It continues to strengthen my confidence that this administration, will indeed, be able to muster the creativity required to steer us through the next decade.

My most important suggestion for the energy and environment policy team is to watch the video "The End of Suburbia."

It is both facinating and well done. It introduces the concept of "Peak Oil" and "Climate Change" in a very clear manner, and provides an overarching context within which to evaluate our energy and environmental policies. It is what people call a "must see." Shifting to renewables is critical and will end up being very profitable for those industries who actively participate. But, we need to understand that in an ever growing global population, the United States will need to figure out how to keep our quality of life while using less energy. A very doable task considering the numerous successful existing examples we can use as models.

If I can in any way be of further service in policy issues of sustainable development, urban planning, or creating the "America 2020 Vision," please contact me.

In Service,

Zev Paiss
Boulder, Colorado
303-413-8066

What is an Ecocity?

2008-11-18T10:58:00.000-08:00

by Richard Register (orginal post)

An ecocity is a city or town that is compact - "high density" - and complete with a good balance of housing, jobs, commerce, culture and other of society's and economy's essentials. This is sometimes called - "high diversity." The objective of ecocity design is largely to place people, natural resources and human-created resources, products, services and knowledge in close proximity. This general arrangement, also informed by local climate, soils, resources and historic conditions, by sun angles, wind or other renewable energy resources is connected by rail and bicycle, both externally and internally. Watercourses are celebrated and nature is restored adjacent and to some degree inside of such built communities. Very fundamentally, the ecocity is simply small enough in its appetite for land and resources that it makes possible the expansion of farming and restoration of nature. It makes possible the very high ratios of cultural and natural return for investment in material and energy use. This amounts to the most effective means available to humanity for solving climate change and biodiversity loss problems and attaining a new kind of prosperity that can endure forever into the future.

The Transition Town Movement

2008-11-17T07:29:00.000-08:00

From The Times (UK)

November 17, 2008

Transition: gearing up for the great power-down

Climate change is upon us and the oil is running out. Is mankind's darkest hour really approaching? If so, a growing army of local heroes is determined to turn it into our finest

Luke Leitch (orginial post)

In Sandpoint, Idaho - birthplace of Sarah Palin, who really wouldn't approve - residents have prepared the community garden for its first winter and plans are under way for a local biomass-fired power plant.

In Bell, a district of Geelong, Victoria, Australia, they are making wood-fired pizza ovens in each other's gardens and have negotiated bulk-buy discounts on solar power equipment for local residents. They have also planted more than 150 trees in a push to become the “fruit and nut tree area of Geelong”.

Viewed in isolation, these well-intentioned community efforts are laudable, yet insignificant. But Sandpoint and Bell are two examples of something much bigger - the Transition Initiative, a movement barely two years old that claims to have the answer to sustainable living in a world without oil.

In some 700 towns, villages and cities worldwide, Transition is under way, and more communities are signing up every day. Most of the groups are “mulling” - Transition-speak for gearing themselves up - but 114 have launched publically, or “unleashed”.

Of those, 83 are in the UK, as are a further 486 “mullers”. One, Lewes in East Sussex, has just launched its own currency, the Lewes pound, in an effort to encourage townsfolk to reject Tesco and spend their money at purely local shops.

All the 8,500 £1 notes - bearing a handsome picture of Lewes castle on the back - were snapped up in 24 hours. The project was only slightly undermined when notes were put up for sale on eBay by currency speculators.

At the unleashing in Brixton, South London, last month, the Transition Initiative drew about 300 people to Lambeth Town Hall. Fuelled by organic vegan stew (made from Brixton-grown ingredients), reflective jackets tucked safely into their bicycle helmets, they settled down to listen. “This is a historic moment,” said the co-ordinator, Ben Brangwyn, from the stage: “Perhaps in a few years people will ask each other ‘were you there?'” A few seats down from me, a woman gently ululated her accord.

Even Ambridge, as listeners to The Archers will know, has toyed with Transition. Now, say its supporters, is the time to start thinking about it yourself, because it could make your future much more comfortable.

“In all respects - every waking hour - this has completely taken over my life,” says Rob Hopkins, the Englishman who started all this and whose central text, The Transition Handbook (printed in Cornwall on recycled paper, some 15,000 copies sold since May) is converting so many, so quickly.

Hopkins was a lecturer at a college in Kinsale, Co Cork, when he first saw The End of Suburbia, a documentary about the notion of “peak oil”. Put simply, the idea is that, while the world's supply of oil is finite, our demand for it is growing all the time, and at some as-yet-undetermined point - which some people believe has already been reached - demand will overtake supply. There won't be enough oil to go round, so we will either have to pay a lot more for what remains, or learn to get along without it. As Hopkins says in his handbook: “Climate change says we should change, whereas peak oil says we will be forced to change.”

Since it was first drilled by Edwin Deakin 159 years ago in Pennsylvania, oil has revolutionised our lives. Your toothbrush is made of oil, your car and easyJet flights run on it, and it is thanks to oil that cheap food from Britain and the rest of the world is delivered from farm and factory to your nearest supermarket.

Without oil, Hopkins realised, Kinsale would have to become a very different place. So, helped by his students, he worked out something called an Energy Descent Plan: a series of measures that the town could implement to anticipate declining oil supplies. Then the town council had a eureka moment and adopted them as policy.

The key to whether your town survives or thrives after peak oil, Hopkins maintains, is what Transitioners term “resilience”, defined as “its ability to function indefinitely and to live within its limits, and able to thrive for having done so”.

To become resilient, a village, town or city needs to be able to depend on its own resources to as great an extent as possible: the more food, power, and other necessities you can produce in your area, the less you rely on imports.

Hopkins defines the essence of Transition as the idea that “the future with less oil could be preferable to the present - but only if sufficient creativity and imagination are applied early enough in the design of this transition”.

He is determinedly upbeat in the face of Armageddon, and scathing about those who are not. “The environmental movement has been enormously naive for 40 years in assuming that the way you make people change is to give them depressing, distressing information,” he says. “Take that approach and all it does is to breed apathy, or it feeds a sense of powerlessness. At this time in history the last thing you need is people feeling powerless.”

Hopkins moved to Devon and, in September 2006, started Transition Town Totnes - the world's first Transition Initiative. Since then, the Totnes Transition trainers, Naresh Giangrande and Sophy Banks, have given their three-day course to more than 400 people - sometimes in Totnes but more often in the towns where their willing pupils live. This month Giangrande is off on a four-month US tour to train still more people. “We couldn't possibly train everyone who wants to be trained,” he says, “so we are starting to train other trainers.”

For all its global reach, the Transition movement has only modest enough premises: a rickety set of rooms above an optician's shop. Despite its reputation, Totnes is not populated entirely by middle-class hippies. Yes, there are plenty of crystal outlets (credit crunch deal: half-price amethysts) and a notable smattering of ponchos, dreadlocks, VW camper vans and the rest. This being Devon, there are also plenty of elderly inhabitants in beige, tearooms laden with moist cake and, when night falls, teenagers boom up and down the high street in sportswear and souped-up hatchbacks. Lou Brown of Transition Town Totnes reckons that there are about 200 people there “really quite involved”, while the group's events attract many more. “There's bound to be some people here who've never heard of us, though,” he says. “Environmental groups rarely get to everybody.”

Certainly the town is full of traffic. Hopkins, 38, mentions a recent pilgrim who turned up, unannounced, from Germany: “He said that he'd come all the way to Totnes expecting to find an eco-Shangri-La and was horrified that we still had cars.”

Yet if reliance on the internal combustion engine persists in Totnes for now, Transition is slowly changing things. Early successes include a garden-share scheme - those with gardens but who don't tend them are partnered with people who are garden-less but want to grow food, and both parties share the proceeds. The Totnes Food Guide is a comprehensive directory of food producers within five miles of the town: buy groceries from them and you are using minimal oil. A scheme with an epic sobriquet, The Great Re-Skilling will teach you how to make your own paint, knit with recycled materials, master clay plastering and build straw bales. And a drive to plant walnut trees - which apparently yield 7 to 11 tonnes of carbohydrate per hectare - around the town has gone well, even though the first saplings were vandalised (“the mistake was to plant them near where teenagers hang around and get drunk,” says Hopkins).

Transition's widest-known wheeze, local currency, came about when Hopkins saw an old Totnes pound framed on somebody's wall: “I thought, what would happen if we printed 300 of these? The idea is that if you shop in mainstream shops with mainstream money, when those shops close at the end of each day 80 per cent of your money - according to the New Economic Foundation - leaves your town. If you shop at local businesses, that proportion is reversed: 80 per cent stays in the local economy and only 20 per cent goes. A currency that cannot physically leave is a powerful tool to make that happen.”

Ten thousand Totnes pounds are in circulation and some 70 businesses, from Roly's Fudge Pantry to Stoned Jewellers, display the sticker signifying that they accept it. Lewes emulated it, and there are plans under way for the “Brixton brick”.

These initial schemes to raise the resilience of Totnes are comparatively easy to achieve. Others, such as car-sharing schemes, will take longer: “If you want to set up a locally owned and managed energy company which hooks up to wind turbines on the edge of town, well, by the time you get funding, planning permission and set up the company, that's seven years, probably,” says Hopkins.

The Transition Initiative sometimes appears like a well-intentioned, 21st-century version of The Good Life. As yet there is more talk than action - most of the groups in various countries that I contacted were still firmly at the planning stage. Slowly, though, people with more power are taking note. South Somerset District Council has come out in support of the movement, declaring its intention to become the world's first “Transition district”. This month a government climate-change fund in Scotland granted £184, 000 to a Transition group in Moray - and, surprisingly, The Transition Handbook popped up in joint fifth place, along with Barack Obama's autobiography, the new Robert Harris and John Prescott's My Story: Pulling No Punches, in a Waterstone's survey of MPs' summer holiday reads.

The concept of peak oil, like that of climate change, was widely pooh-poohed at first but is slowly gaining credence. Last week the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimated that to compensate for the depletion of existing oilfields and meet a projected rise in world demand from 85 million barrels a day in 2008 to 106 million in 2030, the world will have to find new production equal to the output of ten Saudi Arabias. Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, said: “Current trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable environmentally, economically and socially. They can and must be altered.” Which reads like a line from The Transition Handbook.

Between 1939 and 1944, food imports to Britain halved - and the nation responded, nearly doubling domestic food production. Peak oil does not concentrate the popular imagination in quite the same way as Hitler did, but at least the Transitioners will be prepared when, as they predict, an energy crisis occurs.

In Hervey Bay, Queensland, Australia, people started readying themselves in June. Their two-year low-carbon diet is under way, they have met state Anna Bligh, the state premier, and are consulting on a Queensland Government report entitled Towards Oil Resilience. Bush tucker trees are to be planted around the city.

Maggie Johns, a Hervey Bay Transitioner, signed off her e-mail to me thus: “Before, it all seemed so futile. What was the good in changing a few light bulbs? There are ice-shelves breaking off, for goodness sake! But when you know that more and more towns are coming online with Transition, and each has an army of dedicated volunteers, it seems much more do-able.”

10 Steps to Sustainability

2008-11-06T08:29:00.000-08:00

With all this talk about the importance of increasing our individual and societal sustainability the question always comes up - What Can We Do? Here is a short list of 10 items we can all do to help.

1. Plant a Garden – Being able to grow some of your own food is not only a way to suppliment our diet but working with the soil can also be very grounding.

2. Learn to Cook – Eating out is one place where households can reduce their spending. By learning how to cook we not only reduce the cost of food but gain the enjoyment of making fresh healthy meals with our own hands.

3. Make Things – Participating in this consumerist society is not only expensive but reduces our opportunity to give of ourselves. Birthday, holiday, house warming gifts made by hand are greatly appreciated and can often cost little or no money.

4. Ride, Walk, and Bus Wherever You Can - Using single person cars to get around is the least efficient way to get around.

5. Eat Less Meat – Our food system is one of the most energy and water intensive on the planet. By making changes in this area we can have a significant reduction in the overall energy we use.

6. Meet Your Neighbors – Old fashion community. Humans not only know how to do this but it has been the way we have lived for 95% of human history. We have lived in extended families, and tribes for thousands of years, villages and small towns for many hundreds and only the last 100 or so years have we experimented with the idea of rugged individualist.

7. Wear a Sweater – Household energy use comprises over 20% of our nations overall energy use. What ever we can do to reduce the amount of energy we use in our homes, can have a substantial effect on our national dependence on foreign sources of energy. Steps we can take are numerous from turning down our heat a few degrees and putting on a sweater to adding insulation, replacing light bulbs and adding renewable energy systems to our homes.

8. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle – In our “throw-away” culture we have become accustomed to tossing almost everything into the trash. By reducing how much trash we generate, we can have a substantial positive effect.

9. Live Local – As the famous saying goes ... Think Globally, Act Locally. By increasing the amount of our needs that are satisfied locally we can build resistance to the ever growing shocks from global changes.

10. Be Casual - The assumption that we "need" fancy homes, clothes, cars, and lifestyles leads us to increasing consumption. Shifting to a more casual lifestyle will allow us to consume less and enjoy life more.

Take the No-Waste Challenge

2008-11-05T08:38:00.000-08:00

For most people the proposition of a "waste-free" week sounds pretty impossible. No waste, how do I do that? You'd actually be shocked at how a few little steps can drastically reduce your waste. Why not take the challenge and see how much you can reduce your waste.

Here's how you can have a waste free week:

• Cut the convenience foods. While convenience foods might be, well, convenient, they also come with a ton of packaging. Those prepackaged mash potatoes come in a plastic carton. That box of Chinese takeout comes with loads of Styrofoam trash, plastic forks, and paper napkins. Takeout boxes and convenience foods can fill up your trash can super fast. Instead, take your canvas bag to the farmers' market or grocery store and fill it will tons of wholesome foods like fruits, vegetables, fresh bread, and grains.

• Compost all your used food matter like veggie, fruits, eggshells and some meats. This week, skip on the foods that you can't compost. You can drastically reduce your waste by turning your waste into nourishing soil.

• Curb the consumption. Only buy what you need and don't buy excess. What you do buy should be as locally and sustainably produced as possible.

Good luck and let us know how it goes in the comments.

Sustainable alternative to disposable water bottles

2008-11-04T10:43:00.000-08:00

After learning that 26 billion water bottles or 85% of discarded plastic water bottles in America are not recycled, I was excited to learn about the Wellness H2O Water Bottle made by Wellness Enterprises. The novel idea: an efficient, walnut-sized filter inside of a portable, 22-ounce recyclable water bottle. The water filter has a one-year life (150 gallons) before needing a replacement, and the bottle can be reused for years.

This is an environmental and health solution I can get behind. I am not contributing to landfills where plastic bottles take between 400 to 1,000 years to biodegrade. I am saving money with a $50 purchase and not repeatedly buying bottled water at the store. (The average American buys 1,100 disposable water bottles per year). And I can safely drink fresh-tasting water from any source (municipal tap water, streams, etc.) with heavy metals and other contaminants having been removed.

The last plus is the quality of the water itself. The filter contains two rare volcanic mineral from Japan. One has been revered in Japan for centuries for its natural resistance to bacteria and fungus. The other stone is certified by the Japanese Ministry of Health for its medicinal qualities to accelerate healing of damaged skin and reduce inflammation. According to David Fowler, President & CEO of Wellness Enterprises, when we drink water that has passed through the filter's medium the water gets enhanced with nutrients that make the water more alkaline. The more alkaline the water we drink, the better nutrients can penetrate and be absorbed by our blood cells. An alkaline internal terrain in the body has been linked to enhanced immunity, increased energy production, and brain function. More at: endbottledwater.com.

One Cup at a Time

2008-11-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

Living a more sustainable life includes both large and small changes we can do. Americans purchase 30,000,000 (30 million) cups of coffee every day! And for most places that includes a paper cup, a plastic lid, and a cardboard holder to protect us from the heat. If, instead we were to bring our own cups to our local coffeeshops, we could eliminate 1,875,000 pounds of garbage every day!

Make a difference and bring your own cup to the coffeeshop!

The Emergence of the Green Economy

2008-10-28T15:47:00.000-07:00

The financial roller coaster we have been seeing for the past month or two is, I believe, foreshadowing the deep shift beginning to emerge. The growing challenges of peak ion, climate change and population growth are increasingly being felt in our days to days lives.

What I and others believe is happening in the economy is a renewed look at what is being called the emerging "Green Economy." This includes all the R&D and early manufacturing and sales of things like renewable energy systems, alternative transportation, health related businesses and green construction. It is estimated at a 100 billion dollar movement. Since it is known that we are at the end of the "cheap oil" stage of our societies development, we will be forced to adopt these new technologies. This way the early adopters have much to gain.

The world of sustainable development encompasses all these things. Essentially moving ahead with an eye to maintaining our high quality of life while learning to live on much less energy and dependence on foreign sources of energy. It will usher a life much more focused on things local for the most part. Things that can easily be done at a distance that are low energy, phone, email, 3-d virtual worlds, will continue under this new arrangement, but many other things like energy, food and transportation will become much stable close to home.

My grand parents grew up in small villages, my parents in large cities. I live in a mid-sized town, and I suspect my children will grow up in small villages. If humanity is able to look back on this period in our history, they will rightfully describe it as "the great awakening." We will have successfully re-learned how to live without non-renewable and sustainable forms of energy production.

This will be a time to celebrate fully.

Make it so...

Stop Buying Plastic Water Bottles

2008-10-02T11:32:00.000-07:00

Every year, more than 26 billion bottles are thrown away and 16.5 billion gallons of water are wasted to provide Americans with "convenient" access to water. And despite the fact that it costs up to 5,000 times more than tap water, bottled water standards continue to be less than tap water.

One of the most powerful changes we can make is to stop buying bottled water and filter the tap water ourselves. Enjoy the following video.

Using Paper Wisely

2008-09-25T08:29:00.000-07:00

You can reduce the environmental footprint of your office if you think before you print and choose the paper that's right for the job. As one of the world's largest suppliers of papers for office printers and copiers and a long-time advocate of sustainable operations, Xerox is sharing five simple tips for using paper smartly.

Education for Sustainability

2008-09-25T07:31:00.000-07:00

It is becoming clear that we must rethink and redirect education to address the problems of the 21st century.

The challenges of climate change, peak oil, urban sprawl and population growth will require a fundamental change of philosophy in how we live our lives.

Establishing an education program based on sustainability will offer us the knowledge and skills we’ll need if we’re willing to make this change. We must acquire the abilities needed to “green” our economy and create just, vigorous communities that support a high quality of life for all people. Learning spaces should integrate the ecological, social and economic facets of sustainability into the school program drawing on nationally recognized models of education proven to raise academic achievement and engagement for all students.

Environmental studies in our schools will drive real social and economic youth leadership initiatives in the community. Learning will be inquiry-based, driven by the questions that emerge as we grapple with real problems in our community and bioregion. The curriculum needs to illuminate the interdependence of human and natural systems as a foundation for sustainable education. An emphasis on systems thinking, a unique approach to problem solving, across the curriculum will support students in developing a sophisticated, multifaceted understanding of the world they live in.

As Gandhi said so well ... "We must be the changes we want to see in the world." Let's get going!

Some Basic Reasons We Need a New Energy Policy

2008-09-14T19:42:00.000-07:00

Thank you to Keith Schneider, the Communications Director for the Apollo Alliance for this.

1. America can’t drill its way out of addiction to oil.
2. Efficiency and conservation are consequential pieces of a comprehensive energy strategy.
3. Scaling up wind, solar, geothermal, clean fuel made from grass, and other renewables reduces the triple-barreled risk to our security, economy, and environment.
4. New technology – especially in the development of clean next-generation vehicles, and in dramatically reducing CO2 pollution from burning coal for electricity – is essential.
5. These steps will produce a blossoming economy and millions of good jobs that people can count on, reduce the risk of climate change, curb the $700 billion a year bill for foreign oil, and dramatically improve national security.

The choice is clear and the sooner we all act on it the better our chances of making a smoother transition for all of us.

Lets do it......

Calm Before the Storm

2008-09-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

The following 27 minute video with Richard Heinberg, author of “Peak Everything”, reviews the accelerating events since mid-2007, including the credit crunch and fossil fuel price volatility, noting that we’ve missed most of the best opportunities to manage collapse.

High Speed Trains

2008-09-07T00:46:00.000-07:00

Watch this exciting video showing what is now being planned in California using high-speed trains.

Urban Agriculture

2008-09-07T00:37:00.000-07:00

Here is an excellent video showing what people are already doing to bring agriculture back into our neighborhoods and into our lives.

LOHAS Forum Spurs Sustainability Blog

2008-07-01T16:37:00.000-07:00

Welcome. This online forum was born after attending a recent gathering of Colorado writers, several of whom are members of the Society of Journalists and Authors. I shared with the group my desire to write a regular column about sustainability for a national magazine. I credit fellow writers with the idea to launch my column as a blog on sustainable ideas. Thanks Josh, Clair, Cathy, Jan and Evelyn for your support!

Being positive by nature, I will be devoting this blog to solutions, both those found in "green" companies and consumer products, to societal solutions affecting our transportation, housing and food supply. The first entries will be based on a series of in-person interviews I conducted in Boulder, Colorado, from June 19th-21st, with CEOs and founders of companies attending the LOHAS Forum - Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability. The LOHAS market is approximately 20% of American consumers who will seek out product that are green, according to the Natural Marketing Institute.

Posts to follow will include insights about companies whose mission has included sustainability from the onset. I will pull directly from conversations with Zhena Muzyka of Zhena's Gypsy Tea, Wayne Zink of Endangered Species Chocolate, Erk Schuchhardt of Weleda North America, David Fowler of Wellness Water, Horst Rechelbacher of Aveda and Intelligent Nutrients, Dixon de Lena of Integral Partnerships, Jeff Mendelsohn of New Leaf Paper, Ellen Ornato of Eco-Bags, Barbara Close of TerraCycle, Jenn Wood of NativeEnergy, and David Miller of Playa Vida. As this new blog is born, I welcome your comments and feedback!