environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement – Page 6

A Lifesized Lego Set for Farmers and Makers

February 26, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

Open source ecology. Bring it on!

I was invited to visit the Indiana Small Farm Conference this past weekend, and was I ever glad I went. I got to reconnect with some farmer friends and make new connections. I learned about the challenges facing the people who grow our food on a small scale. And of course lunch was delicious, as well it should be with food supplied from local farms and prepared by the stellar whole-foods caterer known as The Juniper Spoon.

But the highlight was a session with a representative from Open Source Ecology. This is a group I’ve had my eye on for a while because of the radical way they are working to take back the building blocks of modern life. The goal is nothing less than a modular, low-cost, DIY “Global Village Construction Set” of 50 machines that would meet the major needs of civilization.

The best part? The plans are…

View original post 358 more words

End Factory Farming; Stop Runaway Climate Change

February 24, 2014February 24, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, food as social action, Local and fresh, Runaway Climate Change

Will Allen, organic farmer ~ Change Your Diet ~ Buy Local

… the largest elephant in the room of climate chaos is our food and farming system. And hardly anyone is talking about it … We need to change our food habits. We need to stop eating factory-farmed meat and milk products. Since over 90 percent of all non-organic meat, dairy and eggs in the U.S. come from factory farms, we need a nationwide boycott and marketplace pressure, in the form of a CAFO labeling campaign.

Will Allen, Ph.D., organic farmer/teacher/activist and author of The War on Bugs, isn’t one to mince his words, and his keynote at the second Healing Our World and Ourselves Conference at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Vero Beach last week, documented exactly what kind of mess we are in and what we have to do to get out of it.

Like Vandana Shiva and the permaculture community, Allen delivers a clear message: since agriculture as it is currently practiced is “the single largest contributor of greenhouses gases,” we must eliminate the products of factory farms and create new markets for local, organic, sustainable agriculture by voting with our food dollars. That such a shift in diet could also eliminate some of the diseases of the so-called rich world is already in the popular culture via books (Michael Pollan. “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.) and television shows (the ubiquitous Dr. Oz). (And yes, it will reduce belly fat.)

Compared to some of the latest techno fixes for “energy shortfalls” (some euphemism!) that come across my desk regularly, e.g. the moon as a solar plant, the switch to organic, locally-sourced crops and humanely-raised livestock seems like a reasonable strategy. The myth that organic food is too costly has been debunked, see my post Externalities. And it wins the taste test, hands down. But it would be naïve to imagine that Big Ag will give up without a fight, any more than Big Oil will suddenly switch to renewables.

What to do? For one thing, you might post the link (see below) to Will Allen’s article to your social media circles. You could pay a virtual visit to Cedar Circle Farms and see how he is training the next generation of farmers. Perhaps you can fund a scholarship or two while you’re at it. Educate yourself on the subject (see More Reading). If you want to join the next march against Monsanto, have at it! But look into your own eating and food-sourcing habits first. With a 4°C warmer world already looming, we can’t afford the decades it took to make cigarette smoking decidedly uncool, or to get folks to routinely recycle.

Here are a few more things you can do today: check labels in your own pantry of staples and make a plan to eliminate all GMOs; don’t eat or minimize consumption of processed foods; ask your supermarket for more organic produce; let the meat and dairy departments know you want products from pastured, humanely raised livestock.

Here are a few things you can do in the coming weeks/months: Go meatless as much as possible (here’s a great recipe for Hummus); grow something, however limited your space. It just feels good; when you buy organic produce, SAVE YOUR SEEDS; compost your vegetable wastes; get familiar with the laws in your community – on the books or unspoken – against backyard vegetables and/or small livestock. You don’t know until you check. For example, most of us think we don’t have the right to solar panels if we live in an HOA. Actually, this is not true. Use your farmers markets to support the farmers and ranchers in your area. Get to know your farmer. Some, like our CSA Kai-Kai Farms, use pesticide-free sustainable methods, but are not certified organic. We trust them. That’s good enough for us.

If you have an idea for a good PSA on this or related topics, let me know. If the idea of using social media to spread the word lights you up, let’s collaborate. Let’s plant some virtual seed bombs around our neighborhoods and get this started.

Transition and Occupy

February 10, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, Occupy, Rob Hopkins

Transition and Occupy * Rob Hopkins responds * Can We All just Get Along?

Is Transition like Occupy? A good question can raise the stakes; inject some excitement, into any presentation. I’ve experienced this fewer times than I would like. But last Saturday, I was the person on the receiving end during my presentation on Transition to Ashley Moore’s permaculture course at Gray Mockingbird Community Garden in Lake Worth.

It’s always helpful to say, Good question! and in this case, I meant it. The answer is, No, and … Occupy and Transition have some obvious similarities. Both are grassroots movements; both emerged from a conviction that the economic/political system was broken; both were rooted in action: Occupy, in the physical occupation of public spaces to demand change; Transition in community projects to make change. Occupy is against business-as-usual; you could say Transition is focused on a better way to do business.

Many in my liberal religious congregation were very supportive of Occupy. We have a strong tradition of social justice and our own martyrs of the Civil Rights Movement. So in no time, there arose a cadre of people willing to demonstrate regularly on the sidewalks in front of our property. We held a Saturday workshop on Occupy, including a session on Single Payer and another on songs of protest. Protesting can produce a high, no doubt. And, whatever happens to the Occupy movement now, we will not soon forget its identification with the 99%.

Although it’s not my thing, I have supported and/or engaged in protest actions for a specific goal: equal rights for women, Move to amend, stopping the KXL pipeline. So, although I agree that business-as-usual is in great need of a major course correction, I decided to remain on the sidelines of Occupy, and have happily found a home in the Transition movement.

Attempting to differentiate between Occupy and Transition led to some lively conversation and I’m very grateful that the question was raised. But there is no more articulate spokesperson than Rob Hopkins himself in how the movements differ. Here’s a response after he visited as a speaker during the Occupy London action in 2011. Here are some key quotes (links to the entire article and others follow).

First, like the appreciative enquirer that he is, Hopkins gave tribute to the value of Occupy:

What Occupy is doing that matters so much is that it is holding a space. It is holding a space where the discussions can take place on their own terms about what is broken and what needs fixing. It is underpinned by a realisation that this is a crucial time of change where everything is on the table, where business-as-usual is no longer an option. It isn’t making demands because that would put the power in the hands of the people in power to decide whether or not to respond to them. It is holding the space for the conversations, and is doing so on its own terms. I admire that.

And here were some key divergences:

You can’t … just base deep change on an analysis of what is wrong.

Transition says to people “take this model and do it where you are”, whereas Occupy suggests coming together to suspend your life while you explore, with others, the question of what’s the best thing to do now. Transition is about building that into your own life, right now.

…what everyone can do, in a time when it is increasingly clear to anyone who thinks about it, that business as usual is no longer a runner and that new thinking is needed and soon, is to occupy, in their own lives, that sense of possibility, that space for asking the questions that matter.

You might say that Occupy suggests occupying, for example, Wall Street, while Transition suggests occupying your own street, putting up runner beans and solar panels rather than tents.

Can We All Just Get Along?

That is the bigger question. What would it look like if we reached beyond our differences and found common cause? Sometimes, it seems possible, see: Fissures in G.O.P. as Some Conservatives Embrace Renewable Energy. And A Green Tea Party?

So whether you are a 20-something in a tent city demanding change in the current system that rewards wealth at the expense of everyone else, or a 70-something grandmother who believes that we have to live with less so that others – including future generations – can simply live, we have to work together. Because putting to rest the notion that we can grow or technologize ourselves out of this unprecedented planetary crisis, is too big a job for any one movement.

A Day at Occupy London
Comments are interesting, too.

How to Engage Occupy Movement

The Green Tea Coalition

In Search of a Transition Town

February 3, 2014February 6, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement, Local and fresh

This week, I was out meeting with people to talk about the Transition movement, none of them in my home community. Why is that? You may ask, and I’ve asked myself. Some answers.

First, though mine is a pedestrian- and bike-friendly town, we drive far more than we walk or bike. Whether or not one is conscious of it, cars make us feel rushed and busy. Most drivers tear up to a red light. Our 25 mph speed limit is routinely broken. I’m no social scientist, but from my observations, people who depend on their cars for every errand, do not make good neighbors or stronger neighborhoods. In my townhome community, it is the dog-walkers and the young parents out with a stroller who get to know each other. We don’t have to become best friends, but friendlier and more helpful would go a long way.

Second, we have no walkable downtown or town center with the mix of diverse small merchants to draw residents in for those casual encounters and conversations that connect us. Manufactured downtowns are no substitute, no matter how many musicians they hire or networking events they sponsor. (I’ll save my riff on networking vs. community for another time.)

Shoppers conditioned to the mall atmosphere with mind-numbing music are not generally interested in other people. We are a fairly affluent town dominated by the largest shopping mall in the region. Big Box stores, fast food and restaurant chains, line a major thoroughfare, offering impersonal service, at best. I would trade them all for a friendly chat with the guy at my local hardware store about which hose won’t kink up on me.

In a sense, we’ve designed for things like privacy, personal space and comfort, and security – the number of gate-secured communities here is astounding given the relatively low crime-rates —when, the truth is, what the world needs is people who are more trusting, capable of sharing (e.g. the Open Source revolution), creative and flexible.

On Wednesday, I had lunch with a young permaculture teacher who was about to launch a four-week course. We agreed that we both do our best thinking outdoors, so although it was a day of heavy rain, we sat in a Tiki hut in an environmental education center where she is a graduate assistant. As you may know, the Transition movement was founded by Rob Hopkins, a permaculture teacher himself. It draws on many of the principles of this nature-centered discipline, so I am excited by her invitation to talk about Transition with the students in the course and to learn from them.

That I had to drive nearly a half-hour to have this meeting wasn’t lost on me, of course. I live in a county the size of Rhode Island, with a population perhaps even more socio-economically diverse. Also like RI, much of our wealth is a fact of location: the Atlantic Ocean washes both our shores, bringing us tourism and high-end real estate, and all the services that support both. To have the two major sources of our wealth at risk from a rising sea should be a fact that brings us together to search for solutions, right?

My next meeting with a veteran community organizer took me to a town also some distance from mine. I was there to explore the possibility of introducing the ideas of Transition. This community more closely resembles the small towns and cities where the Transition movement has caught on, all around the world. It is walkable, with a vibrant downtown, many festivals, an up-and-coming community garden, and a lot of civic pride. As an outsider, albeit an enthusiastic and frequent visitor, I am at something of a disadvantage here as I would be anywhere I don’t have roots (though I do have friends). So I was really grateful for the honest assessment I took away, that the Transition message might not be welcomed by all, that is could be controversial. I couldn’t help but remember Rob Hopkins’ caveat: there were no guarantees that Transition will work everywhere…or at all.

I decided this morning to research sources other than my Transition texts on what makes a community respond to climate change with action, rather than denial in one form or another. The answers (from a NASA study) may surprise you. In some cases, a community gets activated because of an obvious problem like flooding or drought or a Sandy-size storm. The 911 response, you might say, where people who may not agree on what the underlying causes of the crisis are, can still come together to rebuild smarter and prevent or mitigate future crises. In other words, they are not waiting for action from the government.

” Successful groups take action against climate change even though they don’t completely understand everything that might be needed to reach their long-term goal. They proceed by trial and error to make progress step by step. “— Dr. Ron Brunner, University of Colorado

But in many others, economic opportunity is the impetus. There are numerous examples, but one of my favorites is the Danish island of Samsø which began working on reducing its carbon foot print in 1998 (via locally-funded wind turbines) and today produces excess energy it can sell. Closer to home (and pre-Transition movement), there is the Ithaca Hour, a form of currency invented in 1991 in Ithaca, NY, that keeps money circulating in the community, about $100,000 at the moment.

Communities that support local businesses, grow (or raise) much of their own food, find ways to save money on energy, and clean up their air, water and soil, are not only better positioned to withstand future uncertainties. They are places most of us want to call home.

Visit Samsø

Creating Economic Democracy

Seeking Balance

January 27, 2014January 27, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

As a yoga devotee and Libran, I understand the importance of balance. These days, it is especially challenging to find mine. On Saturday, I gathered with a diverse group of artists, scientists, teachers, entrepreneurs, and community organizers in what I hope is the first of meetings that will breathe new life into the Transition movement in our area. Flip the coin. Today, I started a free, 4-week online course called Turn Down the Heat: Why a 4°C World Must Be Avoided, designed by The World Bank and with a multi-national enrollment of over 15,000.

Week 1 has begun with a series of videos and texts taken from a report for the World Bank by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics. That this report by such an organization exists at all should be enough to stop the insanity of climate change denial. But I live in Florida where fundamentalism infects politics and business-as-usual is everywhere evident in rampant coastal development, so I’m not holding my breath.

I’ve been reading extensively about climate change for the last two years, and watching it move from bad to much worse in the same time frame. Turn Down the Heat has not yielded any big surprises so far. It has just provided more statistics – presented in the level tones of academia – to better understand the catastrophe that is coming if we continue to live (eat, transport ourselves, consume) as we have been. And if that ‘we’ gets bigger as more of the developing world enters the home- and car-owning status we consider our birthright in the wealthy world.

As I told the group of eight on Saturday (during our go-around), being introduced to the Transition movement by a friend pulled me out of a tailspin of despair that began with the Deep-Water Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It drew me toward activism in a way that all the reading (Limits to Growth, 1972 and its sequels, George Monbiot’s Heat, 2006) and films like Food, Inc., and Gasland, Part II, had not. So I beg to disagree with the course presenters that knowledge alone can bring about a transformation in society. It will take a village, small town, and city — everyone in: one conversation, vegetable plot, eye-opening documentary, potluck, book group, vote, policy changed — in short, a movement. Our grandchildren deserve a revised standard of prosperity, a slower, kinder, more mindful way of life, even if the future at 4°C were not so horrifyingly unthinkable. The truth is, we all do, and many of us long for it.

Transition appeals to so many people because becoming more resilient as a community – supporting local businesses, growing our own food, sharing our tools and skills more widely – is just that kind of revision, a welcome remedy to hyper-consumerism and outsourcing jobs and wealth, even if climate change were not a growing threat. That was, I sense, what made our newly-forming group feel so exciting and full of promise. We have so much to offer each other and our communities. Gaining traction may not be easy, but it’s worth the effort. May we be able to move ahead with a shared sense of urgency. May we attract more people into the process itself, the fun of making new friends and learning new things, the power of just doing stuff.

Want to know more about Transition? Start here:

http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-11-11/rob-hopkins-introduces-new-yorkers-to-the-transition-movement

Free pdf of The Transition Handbook by Rob Hopkins, http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/CSC2600/transition-handbook.pdf

Rob Hopkins’ The Power of Just Doing Stuff, widely available and a book group possibility.

Why Transition? Five Good Reasons

January 20, 2014February 6, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

Some things are so forehead-slapping obvious, you can miss them. (From my journal entry, Sunday, January 19.) A year ago, I had put together a tour of Just One Backyard, Dr. John Zahina-Ramos’ amazing urban edible garden project. Everyone who attended was excited by the possibilities. In the interim, my core Transition group of ‘mullers’ — that is, people who are thinking about what we need to do to launch a movement in our community — lost membership (to relocation) and momentum. Other projects, e.g. a vegetable patch at my congregation, First UU of the Palm Beaches, the Walk for Our Grandchildren last summer, Symphony of the Soil in the fall, came my way and claimed my attention.

Clearly, the time for a self-administered Transition booster shot has arrived. Obvious choice: back to basics — the ideas and practical tools of the Transition Movement, shared as widely as possibly. Yesterday I began posting direct quotes from Rob Hopkins’ The Transition Companion in the Transition Palm Beach Startup Facebook page and other FB groups to which I belong. Think of them as seed-bombs (another tool about which more in a forthcoming post).

Here are five reasons for investing in Transition that speak to me strongly, mostly quoted from The Transition Companion. In some cases, I’ve cited the original source to facilitate tracking it down. If you are uncertain about what the Transition Movement is, this list will help, and so will the links that follow. If enough of us clear-thinking individuals really grasp the fact that the climate has already changed, we could stop confusing social media for action and find the thing we can do together.

So Why Do Transition?

1. Because it’s fun! Transition is a community-building response to climate change and looming resource inequality that is “more exciting, nourishing and rewarding than not doing it.” ~ Rob Hopkins, The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times. (You could make some new friends and learn some new skills.)

2. “…because a more local economy in which assets and key enterprises are owned and managed by and on behalf of the local community, offers a better route to social justice, as well as local economic resilience than business-as-usual does.” ~ Rob Hopkins, ibid. (Commit 10% of your purchases to your local businesses as a start.)

3.a Because of climate change. “It may seem impossible to imagine that technologically advanced society could choose, in essence, to destroy itself, but that is what we are now in the process of doing.” ~ Elizabeth Kolbert, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: A Frontline Report on Climate Change. (Kolbert is of course speaking from the perspective of an overwhelming majority of scientists.)

3.b “It is clear that the challenge of climate change is about far more than low-energy bulbs, solar panels and slower driving speeds. It is about a profound shift in what we do and how we do it; a complete adjustment of what we imagine to be lying in front of us, of our expectations of the future.“ Rob Hopkins, ibid.

4. Because of economic crisis. “Conventional economic growth and cheap oil have marched hand-in-hand for the best part of 60 years; within a few years, it will have become increasingly apparent that both are on their last legs.” Jonathan Porritt, Capitalism: As if the World Matters.

5. Because it gives me hope. “We often underestimate the power of hope – what in Transition we call ‘engaged optimism’. Getting started and making change in our lives is a hopeful activity that touches people deeply.” Rob Hopkins, ibid. (Change is easier in the company of friends.)

You can find more reasons and longer excerpts here: The Transition Network Sign up for Rob’s blog while you’re at it. And check out the latest news about Transition: http://www.transitionnetwork .org/transition-free-pres s

Will The People Who Need to Read it, Read it?

January 13, 2014January 13, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

This question, from my Book Group last Saturday, has haunted me — someone who writes regularly about my response to climate change with the certainty that I am (mostly) preaching to the choir, and a small one at that. As Winston Churchill famously asserted, Americans are a people ‘divided by a common language.’ Of course, it is much larger issue than regional dialects and accents. Miscommunication among diverse groups who do not understand each other (or attempt to) is a commonplace of a multicultural society and one that deserves more attention than it gets.

Failure to communicate is but one strand in the weave of Flight Behavior, which Kingsolver’s official site describes as: “… a heady exploration of climate change, along with media exploitation and political opportunism that lie at the root of what may be our most urgent modern dilemma.” But it is an important theme. Who is not reading this book is as important as who is, because a good story like this one has the power to convince when facts alone fail (and we are talking about an alarmingly high percentage of skeptics), and to motivate those who are informed and have yet to act in any meaningful way, no small number.

With her trademark empathy for the people she writes about, Kingsolver shows us what one impact of climate change looks like to a community in rural Appalachia that is 1. Out of the loop, and therefore deeply suspicious of outsiders (climate scientists, media, environmentalists toting ‘sustainability pledges”), and 2. Likely to be upended by its effects. She describes what happens when the larger world – researchers, media, logging interests, climate activists, the curious public — comes to fictional Feathertown, Tennessee. We begin to see, as the wisdom traditions teach, there is no Other.

“Cultural differences are really exciting territory,” Kingsolver said in an interview, “not just for the literature but for learning in general, because sparks fly when there’s friction among different viewpoints. People invest themselves differently in the same set of truths.” So to Rev. Bobby and his congregation, the unprecedented migration of monarch butterflies takes on religious significance. To scientist, Ovid Byron, and his research team, it is another distress signal from a world out of whack. For the Womyn group of knitters, it is an opportunity to speak for nature. With whom do we identify?

Like the other strong female characters of Kingsolver’s best-selling fiction, Dellarobbia Turnbow, is the voice of Flight Behavior. We are sympathetic witnesses as her understanding of what the butterfly phenomenon means, catches up with ours. When our Book Club leader asked what we had learned from the novel, there was a thoughtful silence. We only know what we can know. So it comes as no surprise that the media will manipulate the protagonist’s story and ignore the experts. We are familiar with the power of YouTube to save (or wreck) reputations. We know Dellarobbia is smart, but it is the unexpected changes within her that make this a compelling narrative, and provide a drop of hope. There is her growing self-respect and newfound passion for research, her appreciation for the quiet strength of her husband, and for her mother-in-law, whose rich knowledge of native plant life provides an unexpected bond. And here was a big takeaway for me: in Kingsolver’s Feathertown, despite difficult physical labor, limited career options, crushing debt, and abysmal schooling which guarantees more of the same, we find a community with admirable habits of generativity, interdependence and thrift. Valuable lessons, all.

“The biotic consequences of climate change tax the descriptive powers, not to mention the courage, of those who know most about it,” Kingsolver writes in her Author’s Note. With Flight Behavior, her training as a scientist and narrative gift nudge her readers in the right direction if we are willing to go. I would like to believe that there are hundreds of readers, like the members of the Second Saturday Book Club, who having read and discussed Flight Behavior, are on to the more important question: what then shall we do?

It’s Complicated, Part I

January 6, 2014 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

$gas flare fracking site Bradford County Pennsylvania$ When you hear a scientist call fracking* “complicated,” you don’t know whether to be reassured or scared out of your natural mind. Complicated is a word like “debate” which has been so successful in sowing doubt in the minds of many people, a cadre of fence sitters, about climate change. When the scientist also happens to be your beloved, respected, meditation teacher, well, the reaction is probably too complicated to be contained in a single blog post. So here’s Part I.

I was reporting that I had viewed the HBO screening of Josh Fox’s Gasland, Part II (on New Year’s Day, no less). The documentary is a sequel to Fox’s Gasland, and both have been attacked by oil and gas industry-funded operations such as Energy in Depth, which exists to defend the technology. (A favorite EID target is environmentalist, Bill McKibben.)

If you spend even a few minutes reading any of the material put out by this organization, you’ll notice some tactics. First, it will attempt to discredit critics on the basis of personal behavior, e.g. McKibben was sighted leaving a climate rally in a gas-guzzler. Second, it seeks to cast doubt about the impacts of fracking on the environment. In this case, it argued that methane (the gas that ignited from the end of a water hose in an iconic scene of the film) was naturally occurring in the water in the area, independent of fracking. (And the Earth is just going through a warming phase, independent of human contribution.)

A day after the HBO screening, The Diane Rehm Show invited Josh Fox and EID spokesperson, Steve Everley, to duke it out. As a landowner in Pennsylvania with some personal exposure to fracking, Rehm’s bias was evident. Here’s the transcript. Like Ms. Rehm, I found Gasland, Part II, convincing, especially the documentation of scientists from the academic community about the high risk of ground water contamination and gas leaks into the atmosphere. You don’t have to be an expert to figure out that with thousands miles of pipeline to maintain – not unlike our highway and bridge system — something is likely to go wrong. And then there’s that Halliburton Loophole. Why the exclusion if the chemicals used in the fracking process are really safe?

It doesn’t really matter who did a better job defending their positions (I give it to Josh Fox, by a wide margin). Hydraulic fracking currently has the support of President Obama who has hailed it as energy for 100 years. The elephant in the room question for future generations: And then what? The infrastructure already exists to exploit every shale deposit in the country and ship liquid natural gas around the world. In this race, renewable energy is a distant also ran. It’s not easy to imagine what could arrest this momentum with so much power and money (read campaign contributions) behind it. But we must try, because gasland is coming to your neighborhood.

According to a Palm Beach Post article from March 2013, fracking the Everglades is on the table. Even if you think the jury is still out on the safety of fracking, and you’re not fazed by noisy drilling rigs in your backyard, no one denies the technology requires vast amounts of water – Florida’s most precious commodity. So it behooves you to learn as much as you can about it, as I plan to do.

*BTW, Spellcheck doesn’t recognize “fracking.” Perhaps by the time I get to Part II, it will.

Some resources to start with:

Huffington Post
The New York Times, Drilling Down Series
Op-Ed Piece re: leaks

Seeing the Light

December 23, 2013 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

To be an environmental activist these days and keep your balance, you have to be, or be willing to become, bipolar. It also helps to be relentlessly interested in the subject, even if it can be the love that dare not speak its name in some circles.

So, it’s nearly the end of 2013 and rather than look back in anguish, though there are reasons for that, I want to look forward with hope, in the Emily Dickinson, thing-with-feathers, sense. I had a short list of items for the year’s thumbs up column, but knew there were many I had overlooked. And that’s how I stumbled upon Mongabay.com to my delight, and I trust to yours.

Founded in 1999 by Rhett Butler (he credits the name to his parents’ sense of humor and a brief family connection to Clark Gable), Mongabay is one of those sources that are so rich and thorough about its subject – The Rainforest and its inhabitants – you wonder how you have not encountered it before. And there I did find a list of Top Ten Happy Environmental Stories of 2013. Enjoy and cheer for them all! Not the least because not one of them includes mention of the ubiquitous Pope Francis, leaving that for me. Read on.

1. Warren Buffet is investing big in wind energy. I’ve been an admirer of Buffet for some time, because he is a member of the 1% who refuses to live or behave like one in his personal life. And for his smart investments, this being one of them. Kudos to the State of Iowa, too.

2. China’s solar boom – competition will drive innovation and lower prices. I live in a state that gets enough sunshine in a year to fuel itself and sell the extra to, um, Bellingham, WA. Here’s China, with terrible pollution problems thanks to its race to the top, doing something different that will change the game. Another culture and continent: Scotland’s energy now 40% renewables. We can do this.

3. Pope Francis gets it. From the many examples of the style and substance of his radical leadership, let me chose his phone call to Carlo Petrini, founder of Slow Food, in which the Pope said: There is much need for people and organizations that encourage the cultivation and protection of Creation. Cultivating and protecting Creation is an instruction from God given not just at the start of history (see Genesis 2:15), but to each of us, in order to responsibly make the world grow, transforming it into a place habitable for everyone.

4. While I’m on the subject, Slow Food International did some amazing work during 2013, including a new partnership with the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN) in support of small farmers. This is the kind of leadership we need. Join Slow Food and The American Farmland Trust in this country. Make a donation and get your own No Farms, No Food bumper sticker.

5. Rob Hopkins is no jetsetter, but his US tour gave Transition USA a big boost, practical in some places (here’s his Letter#5 from Milwaukee to sample) and inspirational for those of us who could not catch up with his schedule. Keep up with the work of Transition, including training and stimulating teleclasses, here.

6. How many ___ does it take to change a light bulb? Ask no more. As of January, your little hoard of 60- and 40-watt bulbs will become the relics they deserve to be. We owe this phase out, which will reportedly save Americans $13 billion on their annual energy bills, to none other than George W. Bush’s Energy Independence and National Security Act of 2007. OK, it’s more symbolic than substantive, but any sign of sanity from any quarter gets my attention. Curl up with the new technology. You have to start somewhere.

Externalities

December 10, 2013 by Marika Stone, posted in environment, activism, localizing, Transition Movement

An interesting word I’m betting we’ll be hearing a lot more. Merriam Webster definition: A secondary or unintended consequence <pollution and other externalities of manufacturing>.

Externalities are not necessarily negative, though the current usage implies that they are. Example: today the Supreme Court will hear a case about air pollution caused by burning coal for electricity generation blowing across state lines. Who pays, is the issue. The underlying idea is that with an externality, neither the cost (or benefit, for that matter) is accounted for in the event, whatever it might be. So if you are barbecuing in your yard (in the example from Marketplace) and the smoke drifts across into your asthmatic neighbor’s yard, who is responsible for the harm done? It’s akin to the irrational notion that in the interdependent web of life that is our world, there is such a thing as ‘away.’

In terms of our current food system, unaccounted for costs include everything from the impacts on the environment (transportation, farming methods), to waste (1/3 of all food), to the healthcare impacts from poor nutrition, e.g. the obesity epidemic that comes from a diet high in cheap fats and sugars, that is, processed and fast food and sodas.

If these externalities were included in the actual cost of our food, we might be surprised to find that local, organic and sustainably-farmed food is actually cheaper. What are the chances externalities will become part of the business equation any time soon? It may be trending, but I’m not holding my breath. However, a new report from Harvard School of Public Health, see the article in Smart Planet, indicates we don’t have to wait for the powers that be to act in our behalf. It found that although a diet rich in fruits, vegetables, fish and nuts costs more than one based on processed foods, the difference is about $1.50. The difference in your well-being: beyond calculation.

For an even more complete discussion on this important topic, check out: How Different Would the World Be If We Paid the True Cost of Food and Farming.

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