22 March 2011
20 March 2011
Dealing With US Deficit: Outdoor Playtime For Kids
Inspiring initiatives to reclaim outdoor play...
Reposted in full from YES! Magazine, 8 March 2011
On a crisp, clear day last October, 50,000 parents and children gathered in New York’s Central Park to play. There was a drum circle and dancing, a giant game of “Simon Says,” and an adventure playground built by kids out of wood, cardboard, and fabric.
The Ultimate Block Party, organized to demonstrate the importance of play, drew five times as many participants as the organizers had expected.
With overbooked family schedules and restrictions on physical freedom, experts in child development worry that many American children are missing out on playtime. According to a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, American children spend an average of 7.5 hours per day in front of a TV or computer screen.
“For a child to reach their full potential, unstructured outdoor play is essential,” says Fran Mainella, co-chair of the US Play Coalition at Clemson University. “Without the opportunity for play, decision-making, creativity, and imagination are restricted.”
The US Play Coalition, an organization of educators, is just one of many groups around the country who are working to correct America’s play deficit. Another is KaBOOM!, a nonprofit that helps parents set up neighborhood playgrounds. Their play campaign has established 1,900 playgrounds so far, often starting with community-building play day events.
Play for Tomorrow, a new coalition of educators, researchers, and businesses, organized The Ultimate Block Party in New York, and is working with other cities to host similar giant play day events throughout North America.'
Enjoy The Ride
A new ad campaign about speeding on the roads, and speed in life in general incorporates all the right elements - links issue to the wider cultural context, tells a story, promotes the benefits instead of the 'shalt nots'.
'Forget the tired old shock tactics of yesteryear. Instead of trying to browbeat or terrify people into driving more slowly by bombarding them with gory images of mangled corpses, bashed up cars and severed limbs, the Enjoy the Ride campaign puts the stress on all the benefits that flow from following the speed limit.
Fewer accidents, to be sure, but also: Less money spent on fuel. Fewer toxic emissions into the environment. A calmness that allows you to take in the scenery, listen to music or talk radio, chat to your passengers or just let your mind wander (not too much, obviously.) Your car becomes a Zen refuge rather than a torpedo of road rage.'
Carl Honore, Slow Movement Author and Speaker, who helped launch the campaign:
'Forget the tired old shock tactics of yesteryear. Instead of trying to browbeat or terrify people into driving more slowly by bombarding them with gory images of mangled corpses, bashed up cars and severed limbs, the Enjoy the Ride campaign puts the stress on all the benefits that flow from following the speed limit.
Fewer accidents, to be sure, but also: Less money spent on fuel. Fewer toxic emissions into the environment. A calmness that allows you to take in the scenery, listen to music or talk radio, chat to your passengers or just let your mind wander (not too much, obviously.) Your car becomes a Zen refuge rather than a torpedo of road rage.'
This approach is incorporating all the elements that could be expected to make it 'sticky' - time will tell, but there is still the underlying 'why people speed' question.
Its often time pressures, which in part is influenced by the distance to cover, particularly in sprawling cities. Can we get Aussies to consider that maybe life *could* be a bit better with a more sensible design than urban sprawl (which causes us to spend more time travelling/rushing) and even slightly higher density living...since we are so keen to fly to the other side of the planet to marvel at walkable, and often car-free towns in Europe!
This links strongly to the University of South Australia's Centre for Life + Work's research eg:
This links strongly to the University of South Australia's Centre for Life + Work's research eg:
People and Planet - David Attenborough
...in which Attenborough refers to 'sustainable growth' as an oxymoron.
'Broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough presents the 2011 RSA President’s Lecture.
The dangers facing the earth’s ecosystems are well known and the subject of great concern at all levels. Climate change is high on the list. But argues Sir David Attenborough, there is an underlying and associated cause – population growth.'
The dangers facing the earth’s ecosystems are well known and the subject of great concern at all levels. Climate change is high on the list. But argues Sir David Attenborough, there is an underlying and associated cause – population growth.'
A Real-Market Alternative
Reposted in full from YES! Magazine, 15 February 2011
'
In America we are taught from birth that capitalism is synonymous with markets, democracy, and individual liberty. Whatever its flaws, the only alternative is communism, or so we are told.
This sets up a false and dangerously self-limiting choice between two economic models both of which create concentrations of power that stifle liberty and creativity for all but the few at the top.
Communism is dead. As we now look for solutions to our current economic crisis, the relevant distinction is not between capitalism and communism, but rather between Wall Street and Main Street.
The Wall Street economy is centrally planned and managed by big banks and corporations for which money is both means and end. The primary goal is monopoly control of markets, physical resources, and technology to maximize profits and bonuses.
Main Street economy is comprised of local businesses and working people who self-organize to provide livelihoods for themselves, their families, and their communities producing real goods and services in response to community needs. Main Street exemplifies the market economy envisioned by Adam Smith; Wall Street is the antithesis.
Smith believed that people have a natural and appropriate concern for the well-being of others and a duty not to do them harm. He also believed that government has a responsibility to restrain those who fail in this duty.
Smith and the political economists who followed in his tradition developed an elegant theory of the market’s capacity to self-organize in the community interest based on a number of carefully articulated assumptions, including the following:
Buyers and sellers must be too small to influence the market price and must honor basic principles of honest dealing.
Income and ownership must be equitably distributed.
Complete information must be available to all participants, and there can be no trade secrets.
Sellers must bear the full cost of the products they sell and incorporate it into the sale price.
Investment capital must remain within national borders, and trade between countries must be balanced.
Savings must be invested in the creation of productive capital rather than in speculative trading.
These are the characteristics of a real market economy. Wall Street capitalism violates them all.
Capitalism is a term originally coined to refer to an economic and political regime in which the ownership and benefits of capital are appropriated by the few to the exclusion of the many who through their labor make capital productive. It describes Wall Street perfectly.
The “free market,” a code word for an unregulated market, is a contradiction.
Markets work wonderfully within a framework of clear rules and a caring community. The stronger the relations of mutual trust and caring and the more equitably power is distributed, the more the market becomes self-policing and the less need there is for formal governmental intervention. An economy comprised of powerful corporations governed by a culture of greed and a belief that their only legal duty is to maximize their profits requires a strong and intrusive governmental hand to limit the abuse and clean up the messes.
The “free market,” a code word for an unregulated market, is a contradiction. A market without rules facilitates and encourages the unlimited concentration and abuse of corporate power unconstrained by market discipline and democratic accountability.
Market fundamentalists selectively cull bits and pieces of market theory to argue that the public interest is best served when economic power is concentrated in unregulated globe-spanning mega-corporations engaged in monopolizing resources and externalizing costs for short-term financial gain. They distort market theory beyond recognition.
Like cancer cells that attempt to hide from the body’s immune system by masking themselves as healthy cells, Wall Street institutions attempt to conceal themselves from society’s immune system by masquerading as agents of a healthy market economy.
The credit collapse penetrated the facade to reveal the inner workings of Wall Street capitalism as a criminal syndicate engaged in counterfeiting, predatory lending, usury, tax evasion, fraud, and extortion. It may be legal because Wall Street buys the politicians and writes its own rules, but it should be illegal and treated accordingly.
A criminal syndicate is “fixed” by shutting it down through the enforcement of laws that protect the public interest. You “fix” a cancer by removing it and rebuilding the healthy tissue. Main Street is the healthy tissue from a healthy real market economy can be built.'
The Social Animal
Everybody in government needs to watch this!
'Tapping into the findings of his latest book, NYTimes columnist David Brooks unpacks new insights into human nature from the cognitive sciences -- insights with massive implications for economics and politics as well as our own self-knowledge. In a talk full of humor, he shows how you can't hope to understand humans as separate individuals making choices based on their conscious awareness.'
19 March 2011
Growers Fear for Australian Food Security
Echoes the concern of The Food Forest's Graham Brookman and a similar article about Selling Off The Farm last November...
'A farmers body said Australia needs to protect produce and start a national food security body.
The assessment of Australia's horticulture industry has been delivered in a report by Queensland-based Growcom.
Chief executive Alex Livingstone said yesterday there was a misconception that Australia's food supply was secure because 60 per cent of its agricultural production was exported.
"The devil is in the detail," Mr Livingstone said. "Most of the exports are beef and grain. Australia is actually a net importer of horticulture produce. The trend is for that trade imbalance to rise."
Mr Livingston said fruit and vegetable imports could dry up as the world population rocketed to nine billion by 2050.
The report said land availability was a major threat to horticulture in Australia.
There were particular concerns over urban sprawl, coal seam gas mining and foreign governments buying up Australian farmland to secure their own food security.
Mr Livingston said not enough was being done to protect prime agricultural land from mining interests.
"The industries need to co-exist, but there is a difference between open cut ... where land can be rehabilitated," he said.
"Of more significant danger is coal seam gas extraction where the results are unknown ... we do know it will affect the water tables under a lot of agricultural land (like) the Great Artesian Basin. Given the dangers associated and the lack of science around the impacts, we would say that should be put on hold."
The report said other factors affecting horticulture production included climate change, decline in farm profitability, decline in research and development, red tape and supply interruptions from natural disasters.
The report's major recommendation was for the Federal Government to set up a national food security agency.
"The other thing this agency would need to do is to deal with the predatory end of the retail market," Mr Livingston said. "All the power in the supply chain resides at the retail end."'
18 March 2011
17 March 2011
Is Environmentalism Failing?
Absolutely worth the hour and a half of your time watching...
Sourced from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, 15 March 2011
'The environmental movement in Australia was the first in the world to become a political movement and Australia was home to the world's first Green Party. Australian public opinion and policies have been swayed in the past on crucial issues such as land conservation and nuclear power, but what about climate change?
What is the environmental movement doing right and where is it failing? At a packed theatre at Melbourne's "Sustainable Living Festival", an extraordinary line up of panellists debate how the environmental movement can best negotiate the most critical global issue it has faced to date... climate change.
This event was moderated by the wickedly funny host of the SBS TV show "Rock Wiz", Julia Zemiro.
PANELLISTS:
David Suzuki is a world-renowned Canadian academic, scientist, TV broadcaster and environmental activist. Suzuki co-founded the David Suzuki Foundation in 1990 to work "to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world that sustains us". Suzuki was a professor in genetics at the University of British Columbia from 1963 until his retirement in 2001. He is best known, though, for his hit television and radio programs that examine and explain the natural sciences, including "A Planet for the Taking" and "The Sacred Balance". He has written over 48 books, his latest being "The Legacy: An Elder's Vision for Our Sustainable Future". He was recently in Australia to promote his latest documentary, "Force of Nature".
Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics and the founder and former director of left-wing think tank, "The Australia Institute". Hamilton is well known as a climate change advocate and a public intellectual, regularly appearing in the Australian media and contributing to public policy debates. He has published a number of best-selling books including, "Affluenza" (2005) and "Requiem for a Species" (2010). In December 2009 he was the Greens candidate in the by-election for the federal seat of Higgins.
Ian Lowe is President of the Australian Conservation Foundation and Professor of Science, Technology and Society at Griffith University. For 13 years, Lowe wrote a regular column for New Scientist and has also authored a number of books including "Living in the Hothouse" (2005).
Senator Christine Milne is an Australian Senator and deputy leader of the Australian Greens. She was first elected to the Tasmanian House of Assembly in 1989 as a member of the Tasmanian Greens in the electorate of Lyons, after being prominent in the blockade opposing the Franklin Dam and the building of the Wesley Vale Pulp mill in Tasmania. After her career in state politics, she was an advisor to Senator Bob Brown from 2000 until she was elected to represent Tasmania in the Senate at the 2004 federal election.
Anna Rose is co-founder of the Australian Youth Climate Coalition and is a member of the Environment Minister's Advisory Council on Environmental Education. She co-authored the book "Future by U"', is a former editor of Australia's largest student paper and a regular speaker, blogger and opinion writer on climate and energy issues.
Philip Sutton is convener of the "Greenleap Strategic Institute", a non-profit environmental strategy think tank and advisory organisation promoting the very rapid achievement of global and local ecological sustainability. Sutton recently co-authored "Climate Code Red", which puts forward a case for emergency action on climate change.'
16 March 2011
Hans Rosling: Visualizing Mortality History
Part Minority Report, part storyteller, part magician - the brilliance of Hans Rosling
Sourced from the BBC and Cool Infographics, 15 March 2011
'Hans Rosling, known for some of his famous TED Talks, here tries a little augmented reality with his animated charts showing life expectancy and wealth all over the world for the last 200 years. 120,000 data visualized in this 4 minute video clip from his The Joy of Stats documentary for the BBC.Hans Rosling’s famous lectures combine enormous quantities of public data with a sport’s commentator’s style to reveal the story of the world’s past, present and future development.
Now he explores stats in a way he has never done before - using augmented reality animation. In this spectacular section of ‘The Joy of Stats’ he tells the story of the world in 200 countries over 200 years using 120,000 numbers - in just four minutes. Plotting life expectancy against income for every country since 1810, Hans shows how the world we live in is radically different from the world most of us imagine.'
Ecocity Economics - An Economics Built on What We Build
Reposted from Ecocities Emerging, March 2011
Infinite growth is impossible
Our newsletter readers all know that infinite growth in a limited environment is impossible so I’ll mention here, without trying to prove the case, an interesting fact: life depends on energy, 99.97% of which arrives in the thin zone of life on Earth from the sun. Only .025% oozes up from the crust as geothermal energy and the thin slice of .005% comes from tidal energy, cosmic rays, meteor friction with the air and most interestingly I think, residual heat from the originally birth of the planet in accumulating bombardments from asteroids, comets and space dust.
Life, of course, also depends on climate, local or regional soils and/or waters and the interaction between living organisms. Carrying capacity in the case of human presence on Earth has components that multiply one another in a manner similar to that identified by Paul Ehrlich in his famous formula: I = PAT, meaning Impact (on the environment and everything in it) is equal to Population multiplied times Affluence (or consumption) times particular Technology. One technology may be almost totally benign, solar energy for example, and another definitely risky, such as nuclear with its unsolved waste problems and necessity for massive insurance and investment subsidies.
In my opinion Ehrlich is missing the pervasive and powerful role of the built environment or the “land use and infrastructure” pattern our cities, towns and villages embody physically, the anatomy of our cities, towns and villages. Our collective constructed habitat is a gigantic creation at the foundation of human economy and, you might say, a meta-product made up of many other products. The city orders and supports – or confounds – practically all other of our technologies and ways of living in their efficiencies – or inefficiencies. For example, once you build the city designed for the convenience of cars you are stuck for decades with dependence on cars and all their supporting technologies, space and energy demands, climate change and violent accidents. Build a city for people mainly on foot and the technologies that work with that built community include solar electric power plants, bicycles and streetcars and their supporting technologies. I sometimes contract “land use” and “infrastructure” into the one physical thing itself, as “landustructure,” the physical built community itself. Thus I have propose I = PLAT. Coincidentally, “plat” in its common usage means the layout of a set of uses on the land. Impact = Population times the kind of Landustructure they occupy times level of Affluence times particular Technologies.
Presently the “ecological footprint,” a concept that was detailed first in the doctoral dissertation of Mathis Wackernagel working with Bill Rees at the University of British Columbia in 1994, is probably the best measure of human overshoot. Wackernagel as President of Oakland’s Global Footprint Network, with offices also in Zurich and Brussels, keeps track of the worsening degree of overshoot for our whole planet, which at this point is consuming more than 30% more resources than can be utilized and stored by the Earth’s biological systems powered by sun, chlorophyll and soil. In economics terms this might be called using up the planet’s capital while maxing out humanity’s income allotment all at the same time, digging rapidly into the geological energy savings account, the only one that exists. The fossil fuel savings account was accumulated over close to 100 million years during the Carboniferous geological period ending a little less than 300 million years ago. The accumulation was slow – especially relative to the rate at which we are using it up now: at around 500,000 years worth of deposition literally burned up every year. Basically, the biofuels that compete for soil and sun with food and wood, which provides also building materials and paper plus maintains most terrestrial biodiversity, is the only source of energy we can depend on other than direct renewable solar energy and its derivatives, wind and hydropower, and a tiny fraction from geothermal.
To get a sense of the implications of the problem of overshoot in terms of metals and non-metallic minerals, it is instructive to step back and contemplate a powerful image of our situation from the point of view of minerals already mined out of the surface of the earth. The McGraw Hill text book by Fellmann, Getis and Getis, Human Geography – Landscape of Human Activities, Tenth Edition, provides a perspective on that situation that should concern us all.
The extractive industries depend on the exploitation of minerals unevenly distributed in amounts and concentrations determined by past geologic events, not by contemporary market demand. In physically workable and economically usable deposits, minerals constitute only a tiny fraction of the earth’s crust – far less than 1%. That industrialization has proceeded so rapidly and so cheaply is the direct result of an earlier ready availability of rich and accessible deposits of the requisite materials. Economies grew fat by skimming the cream. It has been suggested that should some catastrophe occur to return human cultural levels to a pre-agricultural state, it would be extremely unlikely that humankind ever again could move along the road of industrialization with the resources available for its use. (2008, p. 282)
The fact is that massive quantities of metals and other minerals are in the form people can use, are in circulation right now, in many cases in near 100% pure form. And many of these can be recycled essentially forever. But, the amount per person on average has to be divided by the population of humanity and some is inevitably lost through rust or dispersion to concentrations unrecoverable by any economically available means. As energy resources become more expensive economic availability becomes much more problematic. I call this “the Rust Factor” and it needs to be seen as compounding the problems of “Peak Oil.”
In other words, far from an imminent return to normal growth that politicians and economists are claiming will materialize in a few years if not sooner, what we are more likely to see is better revealed by thinkers who for a long time now have been trying to asses society’s longer term trajectory on the planet. Jonas Salk discussed in his book “Survival of the Wisest” in 1972 the graphing of growth curves representing living organisms in finite environments, including us on Earth.
“S” curve, bell curve, collapse or just permanent downturn?
In broadest terms, Salk compares human impacts on the planet to any living organism living and reproducing in a limited environment with a steady supply of incoming nutrient. A petri dish with a colony of bacteria, for example, starts out with plenty of food per individual bacterium and increases population geometrically as represented by a line on a graph as it reproduces, producing an upwardly accelerating “C” shaped curve. At a certain point resources become more scarce per organism and the environment becomes crowded. It starts filling up with the contamination of the bacteria’s waste. At a certain point the upward “C” shape begins to decelerate in its growth rate and begins to describe an “S” shape. Where the line changes its direction representing accelerating growth to decelerating growth we have the “point of inflection.” The line at that point instead of curving ever more toward the vertical begins to curve to the right and toward the horizontal. Salk suggests that the wise person realizes from an assessment of the major needs and resources of living organisms and the realities of their environment that we need to slow growth before arriving at the point of inflection else we suffer, shall we say, swimming in a crowded pool of scarce food and our own organic and industrial excrement. In theory we could arrive at a high top population in miserable circumstances as the line on the graph takes a horizontal path to the right indefinitely.
In 1972 when his book was published and I had the pleasure of talking with him about it we may well have been at approximately his point of inflection. Obviously we didn’t act as wisely as he might have wanted. It’s one thing for literally billions of people to have been saved from polio with a shot of Salk’s vaccine. It’s quite another for those same to achieve wisdom.
In reality, the “S” curve doesn’t end there in a horizontal trajectory since the steady availability of incoming nutrient – and on the whole Earth 99.97% of that income would be the steady flow of solar energy – may be there, but when maximum population arrives it is not just that the environment is polluted and crowded but that pathologies that began multiplying as the curve approached the top produce conditions in the organisms themselves and in the contaminated soup of their environment such as diseases. And those conditions of “diseases” have their own growth curves and negative cumulative effects that may not kick in until well over the maximum number of our subject organisms are alive and the “S” curve line is topped out and tending toward the horizontal. In the case of us humans, dangerous psychological and social/political reactions are guaranteed as well as actual diseases. This has been historically demonstrated in cases of civilizations that have collapsed throughout history and even prehistory.
But as far as human society is concerned, by far the greatest source of energy in use and which we depend on almost absolutely is not of the steadily arriving solar variety, but fossil fuel reserves topping out sometime right about now. Add that to the delayed action of those independent “diseases” just mentioned that exert their degenerating effect after the ”S” curve tries to top out and move horizontally. Students and Paul Reveres of Peak Oil have been warning us for more than a decade now that peak oil production portends a great deal of dislocation not only by prices rising as oil becomes scarce, as it must sometime as a finite resource, but also because of the degree to which it has permeated our economy in the form of plastics and hundreds of chemicals that turn up in a vast number of products. They suggest a bell curve, rather than an “S” curve, one that rounds over the top and heads down with a rapid drop. Richard Duncan a systems engineer studying Peak Oil has pointed out, however, that peak oil per person was actually passed in 1979 with no dire crisis after that point. Some of the early 2000s peak oil authors expected the beginning of the collapse of absolute quantity of consumption of oil in the 2007-2010 period and perhaps they were right or perhaps society is at a kind of ragged top “plateau” that will slide more slowly away with oil use tapering off more gradually as other energy systems come on line. The only trouble is, other source of energy from the Earth’s surface are either almost as scarce as oil, natural gas in particular, or even worse in terms of climate changing CO2 and pollution levels, coal in particular, or more expensive in terms of energy, technology and clean up needed in procurement, such as shale oil, tar sands and nuclear. The Great Downturn, the Great Recession, the Crash of 2008 or whatever it becomes known as eventually, illustrates that policies (government deregulation on one hand and the personal policies of greed in high investment and speculative circles) and societal factors that are not tracking resources that closely can have immense impacts as well. But perhaps what is important to say at this juncture is simply that even if slow in terms of years the patterns are getting clear in terms of decades and in those time periods our children’s lives are deeply implicated by the slowdown in energy available in a world getting crowded and heating up.
Leaders and the public show few signs we know what to build
It’s not quite that we never ask what to build, it is that we are afraid to look at the question in its fullest implications. Around the world we have no problem in 2011 with looking into building the green building. We can all imagine that – at least for those who are interested. But to inquire into building the right kind of city or town, that affects us all in our neighborhoods, in our everyday transportation situation and in many other aspects of our life styles – that is another thing entirely. I’ll explain this in a little more detail but first I want the reader to look at my chart entitled “The Illustrated Realconomics Chart.”
Studying it you will see solar energy providing almost all the energy available on the planet, both as a flow of arriving energy and as a store in the form of the fossil fuels. The chart shows our dependence on the layer of chlorophyll and soil for making almost all of our useful products, prominently featuring our built environment, as, after all, the built environment is the largest of our creations. You will also see I have placed human economics completely within nature’s economy and have shown the speculators’ economy as a black hole of profit that, whenever economic “bubbles” develop, accrues as gambling winnings for the very few but has zero product or service to the larger economy – and often impoverishes millions of people when the bubble bursts, taking down many unlucky speculators as well.
I have noticed that even high finance economists who deal in derivatives and buy and sell disastrously overpriced subprime mortgages occasionally use the term “the real economy.” Alerted to what it might be and investigating some I concluded they were talking about the economy not of speculative finance that has no physical product or service but the economy that does, the economy of material, energy, strategic thinking and good hard work. Still, that economy may operate as both capitalist and socialist economists have advocated for exploitive drawdown of nature’s resources and thus it is not the real real economics because it is lost in its delusional fantasy of infinite growth and independence from nature. Therefore I’m suggesting constructing an economics that understands that edge between nature’s economics and ours, that thin green and brown line of chlorophyll above and soil below. I’m suggesting we give it a new name to distinguish it even from the human economics seen as the economists’ “real economics” plus “nature’s economics” in their dynamic interrelation – another kind of economics. I’m suggesting “realconomics.”
The Illustrated Realconomics Chart
Economist speak of “real” economics as the economics of productivity, consumption and recycling utilizing Earth’s resources and whatever energy is available to power the system. They do this because often the manipulations of finance and speculation dominates much of economic theory, circulating largely around stock markets and their regulation – or deregulation.
The Realconomics Chart puts forward the idea that there is a natural economics based on the Earth’s minerals and solar energy income translated into useable food and fuel by photosynthesis in plants. Products of photosynthesis are stored in soil fertility, wood, fruits and vegetables and animal protoplasm and some is stored in the Earth’s sediments as fossil fuels.
The human economy taps into the larger natural economy and has its own particular dynamics having to do with resources, invention, capital, labor, planning, interest manipulation, supply of currency, rules of contract and so on.
A subsection of the chart is speculative economics, the economics of physically non-productive investment and return – or betting for win or loss – that may or may not facilitate the larger human economy. The human economy is dependent on the materials and energy flows of the natural economy. And if we can devise an economics that effectively integrates nature’s economics and human economics in one total economics system, I’m proposing calling it “realconomics.” Only if the system includes all crucial parts could it be considered “real,” thus the proposed name.
Chlorophyll in plants creates a thin membrane on the Earth’s surface that transforms solar to chemical energy for practically all organic functions of living things. The chemical residues of the work of this membrane are geologically stored as a one-time supply of energy in the fossil fuels.
To continue with looking at the built environment, when one goes from making buildings more land-conserving and energy-conserving and designed for more positive environmental impact in general, then on to making the city greener, we suddenly get into the issues of changing neighborhoods, confronting automobile dependence, the need to remove buildings if they promote automobile dependence or if they are in the way of restoring ecologically healthy functions such as through opening up small waterways, shorelines, ridgelines and so on. Ultimately the very uncomfortable issue comes up for many people that living in a multi-unit apartment or condominium without a car in a mixed-use center is far healthier in ecological, climate and resource terms than living in a house with a car in a low density residential area. Oddly, living in a house in a high density mixed use neighborhood might be the worst of all since it keeps out many people who could be leading “greener” lives there.
Our leaders and the vast majority, even of climate scientists and environmentalists are averse to looking this problem in the eye. It seems far too daunting but look we must or we simply will not solve the major crises of our times. The Obama Administration in my country doesn’t know what to build. To use an Oakland example again, the Federal Government has funded a “shovel ready” project as part of its economic recovery program to drill a fourth bore through the hills to the east of Oakland and Berkeley – at a cost of $420 million (before cost overrides – who knows what the final figure will be!). This will make four tunnels where there are now three linking the San Francisco Bay Area with the suburbs on the far side of the hills – for cars. This is precisely the wrong time in history to be promoting and serving yet more cars and sprawl development. A half billion dollars could do good instead of damage if it were for ecocity development near an existing rail station or serving development in vitality centers that could be moving toward ecocity design and development.
In simplest terms, we have built a city for cars instead of people. We have done this almost as if we are in automatic, that is, just reacting our way into the future picking up on whatever short-term technological future plops in our laps. Cars have been fun but… Interestingly the world automobile means something that moves (is mobile) on its own (auto). It is automatic in a sense too, just like our reflexive adopting of the automobile with little thought to its implications. The city built for the automobile, we could call the autocity (as compared with the ecocity), meaning not only built for the car but built almost automatically without serious forethought. If you want to know how we got here to climate change, rapid resource depletion, paving farmland and species extinctions, that’s the lion’s share of the explanation.
Even most conscientious promoters of renewable energy, energy conservation, recycling and non-toxics have failed to notice that slice of history, don’t get it. They almost uniformly promote subsidizing electric cars and putting solar electric panels on suburban houses which works to maintain the suburbs we should be moving away from, continues covering farms and killing people and animals in tens of millions of accidents around the world every year. Jobs supporting expansion or perpetuation of the car/sprawl/paving/massively energy consuming autocity shouldn’t be seen as green jobs at all. Their “greenness” is more than nullified by supporting exactly the wrong infrastructure. However if we do know what to build – the ecocity of compact, highly diverse centers from neighborhood centers and district centers to revitalized downtowns as complete small cities in their own right – then we will see people have learned “what to build.” Then we discover we have a much broader definition of “green jobs” which includes the iron worker constructing apartment housing in an area where the preexisting imbalance is toward the commercial, the waitress providing café services, for example, to people who arrive there on foot and so on. Almost any job, in the right location is a green job, whereas jobs in a location supporting the disastrous urban infrastructure that dominates the world and causes many of its worst problems today, is anything but a green job.
So what should we be building? Not only the more compact neighborhood, district and city centers of real diversity but seen in the thoroughly “ecocity” way with high levels of integration, with features and detailing appropriate to the location. The basic principle here is so important it should be seen as one of the foundation stones of realconomics. That is that complex living systems, such as our own human bodies, function best as lean, three-dimensionally arranged entities. Similarly, the healthy city functions best as a lean, energy and land conserving entity that is also essentially three dimensional, not flat and spread out like modern, high energy and high land consuming suburbia. This is because lines of supply and communications are much shorter and quicker when they cross over and below one another instead of scattering out away from one another over large areas. Architect/philosopher Paolo Soleri put forward this paragraph’s observations in the early 1960s – they’ll be relevant and instructional forever.
This notion of “leanness” through compact complexity, that is, great variety well organized close together, is not only what is conventionally considered more “efficient” it also means there is more energy and material, land and time left over after essential maintenance activity to relish for relaxing, more time and energy for creative personal or collective activity. The city of health and options is the one that doesn’t trap the person on his or her way to work in a traffic jam or force the consumption of 500 gallons of gasoline a year, typical in the United States, but let’s the “commuter” get to work by just bicycling or walking a short distance. The three-dimensional lay out of the city is that basic – and such physical organization is common to all complex living things including the living (as compared to dying or killing) city.
If we can understand the city as a three-dimensional living organism and see that as a major insight for a realconomics of true sustainability we can suddenly see that many architectural features of clusters of buildings appear as if by magic from that realization. Suddenly bridges between buildings roof-to-roof or terrace-to-terrace and mid block ground level passageways such as cozy alleys, sky lit hallways and grand gallerias, make perfect sense for high pedestrian permeability. Rooftop gardens, shops and restaurants linked by those bridges and rooftop parks and promenades, multi-story solar greenhouses and exterior glass elevators all become part of the rich architectural palate people have to date barely noticed. You, dear readers are the exception of course, hearing this list of ecocity features from my many times over the years. When we actually try them out and put them all together I believe we’ll only then realize what a powerful and healthy finally complete design for living actually is.
Getting building
Now that we have a better idea of what to build, how to get started? Ecovillages in the country have the opportunity to express these ecocity features and take the lead if they feature the kind of elements mentioned in the paragraph immediately above. They would have to involve bridge-linked buildings of probably seven or more stories to fully illustrate full-bodied ecocity design and would have to relate to adjacent agriculture and natural habitat restoration. Attached food producing solar greenhouses ascending part of the sunny side: absolutely necessary.
Such projects could grow up from a neighborhood centers too. This in the ecocity movement we call an “integral project” or an “ecocity fractal,” which is a fraction of what could be a whole ecocity with all essential parts and functions – housing, work, commerce, learning, farming, restoration of nature and connection to other centers with bicycle or rail routes – present and well arranged. Understanding the “full spectrum” or “complete” center in this way informs us about the components of the ecocity and fills out the notion of what we need to build for a truly sustainable natural and human economics, my proposed realconomics.
“Knowing what to build” means we also know that there can be plenty of work for everyone. The ecocity foundation of realconomics provides a very full and vibrant economy even if it is an economy of a city shrinking in footprint and total size, that is, actual size in terms of volume of physical built infrastructure for any particular population, and shrinking in terms of quantity of land, materials and energy needed for its construction and maintenance. This is a paper about economics of an ecological nature so it is highly relevant to point out that the Great Depression was put to an end by Keynesian economics in the hands of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Administration between 1932 and 1945. Struggling to figure out what to do about more than two years of a depression getting deeper and deeper when the new president took over, Roosevelt began experimenting with dozens of initiatives to enliven the economy. Things actually got worse for a while. His administration followed the deficit spending formula of John Maynard Keynes putting everyone to work on clearly defined projects in not only new infrastructure construction – airports, hospitals, bridges, highways, dams, post offices, libraries and so on – but ecological projects such as reforestation and soil reclamation. Conservative capitalists, whose hands-off government philosophy let economic conditions sink rapidly from the Crash of 1929 until the Roosevelt years, considered the new president leading the country to socialism and many did not believe in his attempted solutions. While good projects were happening, they weren’t being embraced completely whole-heartedly. But when the Second World War started, there was no doubt at all what needed to be built, for better or worse, and the whole country went into gear behind the war effort. Deficit spending, targeted for a particular outcome – victory over fascism and slavery – was seen as a strategic investment in future prosperity and tapping into that prosperity at a later time to pay down the expenses of winning the war.
It was perhaps the largest experiment in application of an economic theory with the most clear lesson – if anyone bothers to pay attention – that we’ve had in a century or more or maybe ever. What it means for us now is that if we could decide we need to build the ecocity civilization and invest in it vigorously we could win this war against our planet by turning it around and making it instead a war to save our planet. What we most need then is realconomics and its physical manifestation: ecocities.
The Big Five
Alas, that is not enough! Our cities, towns and villages are collectively the largest thing our species creates but then we are too large ourselves. That is, human population is enormous and without massive use of energy and material, probably even in the context of an ecocity future, it would in all likelihood be far more than a healthy ecology of real diversity on the planet could tolerate. I see, in fact, five big items we have to deal with, all of which most people are very resistant to facing. Much less do many seem to be able to summons the courage, commitment and personal energy to engage realistically with good hard work. To me they seem to be lacking a clear idea of what is needed and an outline of how to proceed. Maybe that would summons the courage and hard work. This leads to the following thinking:
Axiom 1.
The City is the engine of prosperity.
This is the gigantic economics lesson I’ve been writing about to this point in this paper. And the ecocity is the type of city that contributes to soil and biodiversity buildup as well as prosperity while demonstrating how the city can grow smaller in land and energy consumption. By the way, in a world stuffed with computers that get more valuable as they get smaller per function, this should sound about as normal as things can get, and a very good idea.
Axiom 2.
The Big Five
If we wish to build a healthy economics, there are “Five Big Areas of Action” we need to engage which society has been avoiding, of which the built environment is one. They are:
Physical actions
1. Deal with overpopulation
2. Reshape the agriculture/diet nexus to be far less land and energy consuming
3. Build ecocities
Detailing the above two not already covered in this paper is material for another paper.
But we can see at a glance that in dealing with religious dogma, family habits, old age security, education and reproductive rights for women and business prejudices for maximum growth we are up against a very large problem in trying to solve the population problem. Yet we need to do this and can, reducing human numbers gradually, steadily and peacefully to a level where each of us in some future time can thrive in a world where nature thrives too. In addition it should be stressed that the idea of infinite growth translates into an economics absurdity that the larger the population on a limited planet the more for each of us, “the more of us the larger our slice of the pie.” (Could economists really mean this?!) The reverse is closer to the truth, “the fewer of us the more for each,” down to at least, enough of us to provide for the variety of experience for genuinely full, creative, compassionate lives. We need in other words workers, organizers of work, teachers, artists and scientists for insight and knowledge, children for inspiration and continuity of our species into the future and so on, population enough for a truly prosperous human presence. We don’t know the best approximate number because we have yet to honestly address the situation, but seven going on nine or ten billion?!…
Regarding the agricultural/diet nexus we have another enormous problem that starts with modern agriculture taking up so much land. This is the only enterprise humanity engages in that is on a scale comparable to building cities, towns and villages. Agriculture is different in that it takes place in a thin layer in two dimensions rather than in three-dimensional volume. Even before its ecologically damaging chemicals and massive demand for energy is factored in, it eliminates vast areas of natural habitat that is needed if we want long-term healthy biodiversity on this planet. The answer is largely to move toward organic agriculture and move away from diets heavy in meats.
Reshaping the autocity impacts agriculture in two very significant ways right of the top. First, reversing sprawl would liberate millions of acres presently covered in concrete and asphalt for the cars, and second, more and more farmland is being appropriated for fueling cars instead of feeding people. Says Lester Brown, if all the farmland in the United States were dedicated to biofuel production for the country’s cars, there would be none left for food production for people. In fact there would not be even enough for all the cars. That’s how much energy a 3,000 pound object accelerating to and decelerating from ten times the speed of a person consumes. Another way of looking at it, filling the typical car’s gas tank once takes about as much agricultural land for biofuel production as feeding a person for an entire year.
Mental actions among the Big Five
4. Act on generosity, invest in ecological health and peace via the above three
This means paying taxes, seriously graduated income taxes, and being, as all democracies are rightly said to be required to be, ever vigilant to prevent corruption in both government and business. The percept also has another dimension: that we try much harder to put an end to violent conflict as in the stealing and killing in war and wasting of vast treasure in preparing for war. That is the absolute antithesis of generosity.
5. Education strongly emphasizing the above four
Axiom 3.
If we want to actually engage building the physical solutions to our growing economic debacle it is instructive to notice what I call the “Three Sacred Cows” of US Capitalism. If you want to build anything you have to go to where the money actually is. And where it actually is happens to be is 1.) hoarded by the super rich, 2.) locked into military spending and 3.) invested in the (presently very badly) built environment. Those are the three big areas of the resource called money and areas constantly generating more and more waste that instead could be turned to our salvation in crucial times.
About the first, which has everything to do with generosity, #4. among the Five Big Ones, it’s hard to tax the rich with all their power to buy politicians. But by law or persuasion and conscience of the sort that occasionally produces real philanthropy, it must be done if we have any hope of building our way out of economic, I’d say, realconomic collapse. Serious graduated income tax with no loopholes would solve many problems. Unfortunately people are too categorically fixated – dare we not call them stupid – to lump the super rich in with the middle class and the financially more challenged under the slogan “no more taxes!” This is a cry that makes no sense at all when a few million people have thousands of times what those billions on the lower rungs of society have. The question is tax whom? If the vast majority can’t figure out that tax breaks for the rich are not in their interest, one is tempted to say they are fools enough to deserve financial ruin. Except that at this point in history when we need to spend money on building right to solve deadly problems, the children of those who can’t figure out this simple math, all the other species, and no doubt even the children of the rich, are the ones who will suffer catastrophically.
The military budget – colossal! We all know we need to work on conflict resolution, honest diplomacy and cooperation instead of lying for advantage and using secrecy and competition to the point of killing one another and overrunning each other’s countries. We all know it would help getting to know and appreciate one another better. I won’t undertake here how to do that, but I will suggest that lower budgets for “defense” would release salvation-scale investments if we knew what to build, and I’m claiming this paper knows what to build.
As to the automobile city infrastructure getting in the way, remember the misallocation of money for the Caldecott Tunnel Fourth Bore and go from there: not just billions but trillions of dollars for building nothing less that a thriving future as an alternative to collapse.
Axiom 4. Work Hard – China is proving it works.
That is the last very basic word of guidance and requirement in my realconomics list, as if it really needed to be said, though people don’t like thinking about this one, another very big issue, either. But hard work really works.'
The End of Growth - Richard Heinberg
Leading peak oil educator and author Richard Heinberg explains how the harnessing of fossil fuel energy gave us economic growth - and what this now means in the face of peak oil and the end of the fossil fuel era.
Australia's National Television and Computer Product Stewardship Scheme
Sourced from Department of Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population & Communities, March 2011
The Australian government is about to start consultation on a national product stewardship regulatory framework for e-waste - it's not the whole solution (which is to address ever-increasing demand), but it will go a long way to recovering materials like coltan, rare earth minerals.
This law would demand that companies, importers and manufacturers of TVs, computers and related technology finance/operate a national collection and recycling scheme under product-stewardship legislation, designed to encourage manufacturers to recover & recycle more resources contained in products sent to landfill.
Lost City Of Atlantis, Swamped By Tsunami, May Be Found
Ole! I do believe there was some kind of ancient - as in, ANCIENT (mega thousands of years ago) super-smart civilisation, and that some catastrophic event almost destroyed it, but seeds of that knowledge lived on and found its way into cultures all over the world. That could have been Atlantis.
Reposted in full from Planet Ark News, 15 March 2011
'A U.S.-led research team may have finally located the lost city of Atlantis, the legendary metropolis believed swamped by a tsunami thousands of years ago in mud flats in southern Spain.
"This is the power of tsunamis," head researcher Richard Freund told Reuters.
"It is just so hard to understand that it can wipe out 60 miles inland, and that's pretty much what we're talking about," said Freund, a University of Hartford, Connecticut, professor who lead an international team searching for the true site of Atlantis.
To solve the age-old mystery, the team used a satellite photo of a suspected submerged city to find the site just north of Cadiz, Spain. There, buried in the vast marshlands of the Dona Ana Park, they believe that they pinpointed the ancient, multi-ringed dominion known as Atlantis.
The team of archeologists and geologists in 2009 and 2010 used a combination of deep-ground radar, digital mapping, and underwater technology to survey the site.
Freund's discovery in central Spain of a strange series of "memorial cities," built in Atlantis' image by its refugees after the city's likely destruction by a tsunami, gave researchers added proof and confidence, he said.
Atlantis residents who did not perish in the tsunami fled inland and built new cities there, he added.
The team's findings will be unveiled on Sunday in "Finding Atlantis," a new National Geographic Channel special.
While it is hard to know with certainty that the site in Spain in Atlantis, Freund said the "twist" of finding the memorial cities makes him confident Atlantis was buried in the mud flats on Spain's southern coast.
"We found something that no one else has ever seen before, which gives it a layer of credibility, especially for archeology, that makes a lot more sense," Freund said.
Greek philosopher Plato wrote about Atlantis some 2,600 years ago, describing it as "an island situated in front of the straits which are by you called the Pillars of Hercules," as the Straits of Gibraltar were known in antiquity. Using Plato's detailed account of Atlantis as a map, searches have focused on the Mediterranean and Atlantic as the best possible sites for the city.
Tsunamis in the region have been documented for centuries, Freund says. One of the largest was a reported 10-story tidal wave that slammed Lisbon in November, 1755.
Debate about whether Atlantis truly existed has lasted for thousands of years. Plato's "dialogues" from around 360 B.C. are the only known historical sources of information about the iconic city. Plato said the island he called Atlantis "in a single day and night...disappeared into the depths of the sea."
Experts plan further excavations are planned at the site where they believe Atlantis is located and at the mysterious "cities" in central Spain 150 miles away to more closely study geological formations and to date artifacts.'
Mapping Africa
The audio slideshow cannot be embedded, so watch it here:
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-12675464
Sourced from the BBC, 14 March 2011
'From one of the earliest depictions of the continent - to the colonial scramble for land - the maps of Africa reveal a great deal about the people who have lived there through the centuries.
To try to shed new light on the African archives held by the Royal Geographical Society, London-based African community groups were asked for their views on the documents.They spoke to Cliff Pereira and Zagba Oyortey - both African-born - who explain here how the maps tell the story of a changing continent.'
11 March 2011
Journalism in the Age of Data
Sourced from Datajournalism, Stanford University
'Journalists are coping with the rising information flood by borrowing data visualization techniques from computer scientists, researchers and artists. Some newsrooms are already beginning to retool their staffs and systems to prepare for a future in which data becomes a medium. But how do we communicate with data, how can traditional narratives be fused with sophisticated, interactive information displays?'
The Ecologist Guide to Data Activism
Reposted in full from The Ecologist, 4 March 2011
'You don't have to be a web geek to join the growing ranks of activists who have told powerful stories using data visualisation. Christine Ottery outlines how you can use data as a powerful tool to press for change
Isabell Long was 16 years old and with little previous computer programming experience when she created GovSpark, an application that influenced government departments to reduce their energy consumption.
At the time, the government's real time energy data had just been released, allowing ordinary citizens, like Isabell Long, to hold the government accountable to meet its target to slash energy use by 10 per cent.
Emma Mulqueeny, digital media expert and director of hack day events organizers Rewired State, tells me that GovSpark was part of a ‘really effective strategy' to reduce the government's energy use because it showed at a glance how departments were competing. 'We were calling up the press officers from different departments and saying you could do something about what is causing the spikes in energy,' she says.
According to Mulqueeny, 'The government energy and carbon emissions data is still very much an underused resource.' This is because data can differ in file format or even units of measurement from one department to the next, creating a hefty amount of work before it can be compared meaningfully.
Could another reason be technical knowledge barriers? If you want to work at the coalface of data activism the best thing to do it roll your sleeves up and learn a programming language.
Otherwise, there are free programmes that can carry out at least parts of the process - but you might have to rely on developers as well. One example of open source software you can use is the data visualization tool Many Eyes, which can display your data attractively in bubbles, graphs or maps.
Here are some tips that will help you get started, whether you decide to learn to code or not:
Identify sources
Data can be numbers or text. The first thing to do is identify the data sources that you want to analyse or cross-reference. In the UK, public data is released on Data.gov.uk, which is licensed by the National Archives and paid for by UK taxpayers. Other sources could include international governments, quangos or the UN.
It is worth considering making a Freedom of Information (FOI) request if the information you want to use is not already publicly available. You can use WhatDoTheyKnow.com to help you generate emails to the relevant government department's FOI office.
Be careful, however, with commercial data. 'You have to abide by their licensing laws otherwise that's just nicking,' says Mulqueeny. Needless to say, data theft is illegal.
Sometimes you can get permissions to use private data, however. For example, Premasagar Rose, founder of web apps company Dharmafly, created a game called Carbon Copies to raise awareness of carbon footprints with data from Mike Berners-Lee's book ‘How bad are bananas?'. This was as part of a climate hack day run by Rewired State.
Digging for data
When web developers run programming language code to pull data with specific criteria from websites, it is called data scraping, data mining, or data hacking.
ScraperWiki is one platform for scraping data. Developers can write code into ScraperWiki browsers to get started. Those who can't code can use the data from the database, or request new data scrapes. Aine McGuire, director of Scraperwiki, describes ScraperWiki as 'a social network for data prospectors' - there are 1,700 developers in the community and numbers are increasing by 20 per cent each month.
However, be cautious when you are drilling down into cross-referenced geolocation data because you risk identifying individuals, which can have legal ramifications. Mulqueeny recommends consulting a statistician to be on the safe side - contact the Royal Statistical Society to find an expert.
Tell the story
Data visualization can be powerful. David McCandless' graphics and animations, for example, are renowned for their ability to put a perspective on large numbers in comparative datasets.
One of the simplest ways to visualize data is if you have geolocation information. For example, 38 Degrees used a Google map to pinpoint forests endangered under the government's recently proposed (and retracted) sell-off. You can do something similar with Mapalist. Other visualization tools include: Google Charts, Many Eyes, Wordle, Tableau Public and Open Heat Map.
Interactivity is a hot new field, led by Hans Rosling's Gapminder Foundation, which animates global statistics. "Trying to find a way to engage a human with hard data is the challenge," says Rose.
James Darling, a developer at designers Berg London, says, 'Telling stories with the data is the crucial part, and the bit that's often missing is a really good narrative.' He recommends reading Ben Griffiths' history hack blogpost to check out masterful storytelling with statistics.
Also, ‘Journalism in the Age of Data' is a brilliant video on the challenges of telling stories with data.
Learn to code
By now, you might want to learn how to code so you can scrape data and build your own applications and visualisations. But how hard is it to pick up?
'If you have good skills in Excel then it is relatively easy to pick up a computing language like Ruby. You would then be able to take the data out of your spreadsheet and turn that into a mobile application or web application that you can visualize,' says Mulqueeny.
It is time to choose a programming language. Ruby is considered the easiest. Darling says he prefers Ruby because it is more readable as a kind of 'semi-English', which can help you to learn it. Rose, however, calls JavaScript 'liberating' because every browser, mobile phone and increasingly servers are running Javascript.
Mulqueeny says that the best way to learn coding is get a developer to talk you through it. She days: 'There are lots of informal developer's communities who meet in pubs across the UK who welcome newbies, for example Ruby in the Pub. You can find them on Twitter.' Alternatively, Rose recommends starting your own group of nascent data hackers to learn together and collaborate together.
To learn off your own steam, you can try O'Reilly books. Darling suggests: 'Hackety hack is written for children and will teach you the basics in a fun way.''
09 March 2011
China Bans Reincarnation Without Government Permission
This story is a few years old, but is as funny as a fit!!! I just want to know how they are going to enforce it? It is completely daft.
Reposted in full from the Huffington Post, 22 August 2007
'In one of history's more absurd acts of totalitarianism, China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission. According to a statement issued by the State Administration for Religious Affairs, the law, which goes into effect next month and strictly stipulates the procedures by which one is to reincarnate, is "an important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." But beyond the irony lies China's true motive: to cut off the influence of the Dalai Lama, Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, and to quell the region's Buddhist religious establishment more than 50 years after China invaded the small Himalayan country. By barring any Buddhist monk living outside China from seeking reincarnation, the law effectively gives Chinese authorities the power to choose the next Dalai Lama, whose soul, by tradition, is reborn as a new human to continue the work of relieving suffering.
At 72, the Dalai Lama, who has lived in India since 1959, is beginning to plan his succession, saying that he refuses to be reborn in Tibet so long as it's under Chinese control. Assuming he's able to master the feat of controlling his rebirth, as Dalai Lamas supposedly have for the last 600 years, the situation is shaping up in which there could be two Dalai Lamas: one picked by the Chinese government, the other by Buddhist monks. "It will be a very hot issue," says Paul Harrison, a Buddhism scholar at Stanford. "The Dalai Lama has been the prime symbol of unity and national identity in Tibet, and so it's quite likely the battle for his incarnation will be a lot more important than the others."'
07 March 2011
America is NOT Broke
An emotional Michael Moore speaks in Madison, Wisconsin, 5 March 2011
'Contrary to what those in power would like you to believe so that you'll give up your pension, cut your wages, and settle for the life your great-grandparents had, America is not broke. Not by a long shot. The country is awash in wealth and cash. It's just that it's not in your hands. It has been transferred, in the greatest heist in history, from the workers and consumers to the banks and the portfolios of the uber-rich.'
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