Time to End the 1500 Mile Ceasar Salad

"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

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

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

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

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

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

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.