GDP No Real Guide to Wealth or Welfare

Reposted in full from The Australian, 31 March 2011

'After the tsunami slammed the Japanese coast, economists rushed to update their forecasts for Japan's GDP. A major investment bank cut its 2011 growth rate from 1.5 per cent to 1.4 per cent, but ratcheted up its 2012 forecast from 2.1 per cent to 2.5 per cent.

If that forecast turns out to be correct, by 2012 Japan's economy will be bigger than it would have been without the disaster. Sure, the tsunami would retard factory output in the short-term owing to power shortages and crippled infrastructure, but vast rebuilding efforts would stimulate demand for machines and workers, wrenching Japan from its economic slump.

Australia's floods and New Zealand's earthquake have prompted similar expectations.

If disasters like these spur the economy, why not have a more systematic program of destruction, without the human cost? One day each year could be set aside for GDP Day. With citizens out of harm's way, local governments could carefully blow up a bridge or flatten a building. Families could break a household appliance.

GDP Day would create jobs, bolster construction, and promote retail sales. Economic benefits seemingly abound.Clearly this is ridiculous. Yet attributing economic silver linings to disasters like tsunamis and earthquakes is no less so.

The confusion about what makes a country prosper arises from our fixation with GDP, which is a misleading metric of economic performance.

GDP is the estimated total value of final expenditures in a given period. It is gross because it takes no account of depreciation of machines and infrastructure. If a country suddenly loses $200 billion worth of public goods in a day or two, as the Japanese painfully have, GDP is not reduced. The loss of wealth is ignored, but the cost of reconstruction boosts GDP.

Moreover, because GDP adds up the values of expenditures without considering their rationale, it encourages belief in the broken window fallacy - that destruction of goods can stimulate commerce.

As Frederic Bastiat pointed out in the mid 19th century, smashed windows might be good news for glaziers, but they are bad news for the window's owner and everyone else. The owner could have spent his money on a new suit, invested the money in his own businesses, or put it in a bank for another business to use. Likewise, businesses in Japan, Australia and New Zealand that benefit from reconstruction are absorbing funds that would have been directed elsewhere.

Followers of GDP are often considered to be hard-headed free-marketeers, derisive of soppy happiness indices and the like. Yet the national accounts, from which GDP is calculated, were developed to facilitate government control of the economy.

The world wars, the growing welfare state and the arrival of Keynesian economics massively expanded the size and scope of government in the early to mid 20th century. Governments craved a statistical dashboard that they believed would enable them to manage and monitor their economies.

The intellectual justification for government intervention in the economy waned in the 1980s, but the system of national accounts has thrived as a source for economic commentators.

Perhaps its popularity should be no surprise. GDP provides a free, quick and simplistic summary of economic performance. Thousands of bureaucrats, academic researchers and economists rely on it to sustain their jobs.

GDP is not only causing smart people to misdiagnose the economic impact of disasters and fanning fallacies. It has become so entrenched as barometer of growth that policy is being judged not by its effect on prosperity but its ability to boost GDP.

Take the Building the Education Revolution . This entailed borrowing about $16bn and building school halls no-one had asked for in a short space of time. A wasteful use of money, but it increased the almighty GDP.'

What's Happiness Got to Do With It?

Reposted from Sustainable Seattle, February 2011

'

Sustainability is a big word. At its core, it’s about people. It’s about whether you and I and our grandchildren’s grandchildren will be able to live on this planet and enjoy life now and forever.

We often confuse sustainability with the environmental movement. We say it’s all about preserving a tract of land or restoring habitat for another species. Or we say it’s all about local economies and local food systems. Or we say it’s all about human rights and fair labor. Really, its all about all of this. It’s about everything. That’s because we need a healthy just and equitable environment, society and economy. We need it all now and forever so we can live – and enjoy life.

So what’s happiness got to do with it? Happiness is just a word, right? Just a feeling. No, it’s not. At least not when we are talking about sustainability, and sustainability indicators. And it’s with the indicators that we get somewhere. That’s because no matter who or where you are, you get what you measure. In other words, you can’t manage what you don’t measure.

Sustainable Seattle was the first to create a set of regional sustainability measures – or indicators. These indicators inherently asked people to make decisions and take actions so the measurements would change. Hundreds of cities and regions followed suit, and the field of sustainability indicators was born.

But before Sustainable Seattle came along, the country of Bhutan started measuring happiness. They decided to do this instead of measuring gross national product. Now, they included a measure much like GNP in measuring happiness, but they say GNP as just one part of happiness. They decided the happiness of their country was based on 9 domains. These domains are:

Psychological Well-Being: Assesses the degree of satisfaction and optimism in individual life. The indicators analyze self-esteem, sense of competence, stress, spiritual activities and prevalence of positive and negative emotions.

Health: Measures the effectiveness of health policies, with criteria such as self-rated health, disability, patterns of risk behavior, exercise, sleep, nutrition, etc.

Time Balance: The use of time is one of the most significant factors in quality of life, especially time for recreation and socializing with family and friends. A balanced management of time is evaluated, including time spent in traffic jams, at work, in educational activities, etc.

Community Vitality: Focuses on relationships and interactions in communities. Examines the level of confidence, the sense of belonging, the vitality of affectionate relationships, safety at home and in the community, and the practice of giving and volunteering.

Education: Takes into account several factors such as participation in formal and informal education, development of skills and capabilities, involvement in children’s education, values education, environmental education, etc.

Cultural Vitality: Evaluates local traditions, festival, core values, participation in cultural events, opportunities to develop artistic skills and discrimination due to religion, race or gender.

Environmental Quality: Measures the perception of citizens about the quality of their water, air, soil, forest cover, biodiversity, etc. The indicators include access to green areas, system of waste management, etc.

Governance: Assesses how the population views the government, the media, the judiciary, the electoral system, and the police, in terms of responsibility, honesty and transparency. It also measures involvement of citizens in community decisions and political processes.

Material Well-Being: Evaluates individual and family income, financial security, the level of debt, employment security, the quality of housing, etc.

Measuring these nine domains means we make decisions and take actions to improve them. It means we care about our psychological health as much as our economy; about our culture as much as our environment; our community as much as our government. It means we see our own happiness as inextricably tied to our community, environment, and economy. It means happiness is sustainability.'

Growing Concerns as Food Imports Soar

Reposted in full from The Australian, 18 March 2011

'Australia now imports more than a third of its fruit supply and almost 20 per cent of its vegetables, amid warnings of increasing threats to future food supply from population and land-use pressures.

The proportion of imports has alarmed some Australian growers, who yesterday released a report into food security issues and called for a return to 1970s-level funding of agricultural research and development.

Growcom chief executive Alex Livingstone said Australians should snap out of their "complacency", warning that food imports could be threatened by the burgeoning world population - tipped to grow to nine billion by 2050.

He said although exports remained high - about 60 per cent of production - the figures were skewed by Australia's high exports of meats and grains.

"There is also a need to look at how much of the food we eat is imported and consider whether in future imported products will continue to be cheap or even available in the face of forecast burgeoning world populations," Mr Livingstone said.The Gillard government was planning to release an issues paper on the development of the National Food Plan "in the near future", Agriculture Minister Joe Ludwig said recently.

Senator Ludwig said he was still assessing the call for increased research funds, given a Productivity Commission recommendation to halve funding over the coming decade, and emphasised imports were largely highly processed foods, beverages and processed fruit and vegetables.

The Food Security Report, released by Growcom in Brisbane yesterday, found increasing population, urbanisation, land and water degradation, speculative trading of commodities, the clash of resources and agriculture and the growing demand for high-protein foods in developing countries could all contribute to a reduction in future food security.

The report highlighted the anticipated squeeze on horticultural farming land close to Sydney, and Melbourne and in southeast Queensland.

Imports of fruit and vegetables, mostly processed, have steadily increased while the fresh-produce balance of trade is diminishing. Much of the imported produce is seasonal, but also includes cheaper tinned products from Asia or Italy.'

On the Origin of Corporations: From Privateers to Profiteers

'As with the buccaneers and privateers of days past, Wall Street’s major players find it more profitable to expropriate the wealth of others than to find honest jobs producing goods and services beneficial to their communities.'

Reposted in full from YES! Magazine, 7 March 2011

'Like many Americans, I grew up believing that conservative values were about local control and personal responsibility for family, community, and nature. It seemed curious to me that the political alliance that drove a rollback of the Roosevelt-era policies that created the American middle class called itself conservative and dismissed its liberal opponents as un-American.

Eventually, however, I discovered that the term conservative harkens back to a day when conservatives were monarchists who considered democracy a threat to social order and the seas were ruled by buccaneers and privateers. That was a clarifying moment.

Buccaneer is a colorful name for the pirates of old who pursued personal fortune with rules of their own making. They were, in their time, an iconic expression of “free market” capitalism.

Privateers were buccaneers to whom a king granted legal immunity and safe harbor in return for a share of the booty. Their charge was to extract physical wealth from foreign lands and peoples by whatever means—including the execution of rulers and the slaughter and enslavement of native inhabitants.

Hernán Cortés claimed the Mexican empire of Montezuma for Spain. Hernando de Soto made his initial mark trading slaves in Central America and later allied with Francisco Pizarro to take control of the Inca empire based in Peru.

Some privateers operated powerful naval forces. In 1671, Sir Henry Morgan (yes, appreciative British kings granted favored privateers with titles of nobility in recognition of their service) launched an assault on Panama City with thirty-six ships and nearly two thousand brigands, defeating a large Spanish force and looting the city as it burned to the ground.

Eventually, the ruling monarchs turned from swashbuckling adventurers and chartered pirates to chartered corporations as their favored instruments of colonial expansion, administration, and pillage. The sale of public shares enabled a single firm to amass virtually unlimited financial capital and assured the continuity of the enterprise beyond the death of its founders. Limited liability absolved the owners of personal liability for the firm’s losses or misdeeds.

Corporations chartered by the British Crown established several of the earliest colonial settlements in what later became the United States and populated them with bonded laborers—many involuntarily transported from England—to work their properties. The importation of slaves from Africa followed.

The East India Company (chartered in 1600) was the primary instrument of Britain’s colonization of India, a country the company ruled until 1784 much as if it were a private estate. In the early 1800s, the East India Company established a thriving business exporting tea from China, paying for its purchases with illegal opium.

The Dutch East India Company (chartered in 1602) established its sovereignty over what is now Indonesia and reduced the local people to poverty by displacing them from their lands to grow spices for sale in Europe.

It is no exaggeration to characterize these forerunners of contemporary publicly traded limited liability corporations as, in effect, legally sanctioned and protected crime syndicates with private armies and navies backed by a mandate from their home governments to extort tribute, expropriate land and other wealth, monopolize markets, trade slaves, deal drugs, and profit from financial scams.

Wall Street hedge fund managers, day traders, currency traders, and other unlicensed phantom-wealth speculators are the independent, unlicensed buccaneers of our day. Wall Street banks are modern day commissioned privateers who ply a similar trade with state backing and safe harbor. The economy is their ocean. Publicly traded corporations serve as their favored vessels of plunder, financial leverage is their favored weapon, and the state is their servant-guardian.

As with the buccaneers and privateers of days past, Wall Street’s major players find it more profitable to expropriate the wealth of others than to find honest jobs producing goods and services beneficial to their communities. They walk away with their fees, commissions, and bonus packages and leave it to others to pick up the costs of federal bailouts, gyrating economic cycles, collapsing environmental systems, broken families, shattered communities, and the export of jobs along with the manufacturing, technology, and research capacities that go with them.

They seek self-enrichment by plundering wealth they had no part in creating, enjoy substantial legal immunity, and acknowledge no duty or accountability other than to themselves. Legal or not, taking the property of another through deception, fraud, and expropriation is theft. Only tyrannies guarantee the liberty of the few to plunder the wealth of the many.'

Wicked Problems And How To Stop Them Turning Horrid

Reposted in full from OnLine Opinion, 17 March 2011

'Climate change and global warming are what are known in policy circles as 'wicked problems'. Because of their complexity, 'wicked problems' are unlike problems policy makers are used to dealing with. By way of contrast, eradicating smallpox was a simple problem because once an antidote was discovered, a public immunisation program resolved the issue.

Wicked problems or complex problems are much more difficult to tackle. They often have many causes, many interests are involved, they often require social change and are unlikely to have a final or definitive solution. In addition, it is recognised any 'solution' to a wicked problem will have unknown consequences. This daunting list of characteristics of wicked problems – such as climate change and there are many others – raises the obvious question of what to do, since by their very nature wicked problems defy resolution and old methods and approaches are not appropriate.

Valerie Brown, an Emeritus Professor at University of Western Sydney, has developed an approach to tackling wicked problems, focussed on collaboration. Professor Brown argues that each of the different interests affected by and implicated in a 'wicked problem' have their own kind of knowledge. Brown has identified five different kinds of knowledges or disciplines in her work on the Murray-Darling Basin.

These are: individual knowledge, local knowledge, specialist knowledge, strategic knowledge and holistic knowledge.

Brown argues that all these different knowledges need to be brought to bear on the problem in a collaborative enterprise she terms 'the trans-disciplinary imagination'.

Professor Brown is aware that more typically these different kinds of knowledge compete with each other, talk past each other or dismiss each other. We are all familiar with the disparaging critiques of each form of knowledge: individual knowledge is often dismissed as biased; local knowledge as anecdotal; specialist knowledge as jargon; strategic knowledge as self-serving and holistic knowledge as airy-fairy.

The challenge is to orchestrate the different knowledges into a common goal or outcome. Not an easy task, but a necessary one, according to Professor Brown if we are to make any headway on wicked problems. The take-home message is that we have to learn to collaborate with each other and with other interests and knowledges if we are to survive.

This is a profound cultural shift since we have long been taught that competition breeds success, and that we live in a dog-eat-dog world of survival of the fittest. Knowledge production is itself a competitive business. Specialist or expert knowledge has always been at the top of the knowledge tree and thought of as superior to other forms of knowledge. Experts have to fight to become experts (becoming an academic is no push over these days) and so are unlikely to relinquish their status easily. The point is, expert knowledge is still important and necessary, but it's no longer the only or the ultimate form of knowledge helpful to humankind, if it ever was.

Professor Brown's concept of an 'ecology of practice' – different kinds of knowledges working collaboratively towards some kind of accord – is exciting because it provides a legitimate space and role for other kinds of knowledge besides expert knowledge. Local knowledge is important and legitimate, and individual experience and knowledge is too. Holistic knowledge can help keep sight of the bigger questions and issues of how we are going to live and what sort of world we want. The trans-disciplinary imagination is a more genuinely democratic process and procedure than one where experts dispense and impose knowledge on to those with different kinds of knowledge and attachments to the issue. As well as being unequal and hierarchical, in the expert-led arrangement, one party is active and the other parties passive.

Professor Brown's 'trans-disciplinary imagination' which has arisen from her practical work in a number of contexts, has a parallel in the 'collective impact' movement, recently reported on by David Bornstein in the New York Times. 'Collective impact' is really another term for multi-disciplinary collaboration across a range of organisations to address a social problem, such as improving education, rather than tackling it piecemeal. Once we recognise a problem as complex or 'wicked', innovative and daring approaches are needed, if only because technical or expert solutions are ineffectual on their own.

In Professor Brown's schema, all interests concerned with and affected by a wicked problem are co-creating and engaged in working towards an accord, which is as it should be, since all of us have a stake in making sure our world is habitable, sustainable and flourishing.

If we are to make any headway on climate change and have the whole of society engaged, perhaps we need multi-knowledge climate change committees, rather than a multi-party climate change committee and committees of climate change experts.'

Playspent: Understanding the Economics of Poverty

Sourced from Sociological Images, 26 February 2011

'Dolores R., Kelly, and Elyse all sent links to a new website, PlaySpent, designed to help people understand the challenges and trade-offs faced by low-income people with insecure employment. The “game” begins when you’ve been unemployed, have only $1,000 left in your bank account, and need to get a low wage job...

...The site would be an excellent internet field trip for students in sociology classes or anyone who wants to better understand the many trade-offs that poor people are forced to make and the difficulty in making ends meet when you’re part of the working poor.'

Five Things Every Mayor Should Know Before Starting A Bike-Sharing Program

Reposted in full from Shareable, 15 February 2011

'Bike-sharing is a two-wheeled transit service — call it bike transit — which started in 1965 in Amsterdam and has since spread to nearly 250 communities around the world. The service allows individuals to rent a bike from one of many unattended stations, or docking points, and return it to any station. Before implementing a bike-sharing service, it’s important for public officials and staff to consider the following:

1) Be a bike-friendly community first.

Your community should be bike-friendly first with a dense network of bike facilities such as cycle tracks, bike lanes, and trails. This network of bike facilities will enable bicycle riders and your future bike-sharing customers to easily and safely travel through your community by bike. The League of American Bicyclists’ Bicycle Friendly America Yearbook offers examples of what other communities have done to become bike-friendly. Communities with bike-sharing services also have high Bicycle Friendly Community ratings and include: Arlington, VA (silver), Washington, D.C. (bronze), Minneapolis (silver), and Denver (bronze). Before implementing a bike-sharing service, a community should be at least a bronze-level Bicycle Friendly Community.

2) Bike-sharing is not cheap, so secure sufficient funding.

By implementing a bike-sharing service, you’re launching a new transit service. It may be less expensive to purchase and operate than a bus or rail service, but sufficient funding is required to make it successful. While the types of bike-sharing systems vary, costs can be up to $5,000 per bike for capital, and operating expenses can range from $100-200 per bike per year. A service with a couple hundred — or thousand — bikes is pricey. However, while implementing a service is not cheap, bike-sharing can be a cost-effective public transportation option.

3) Size and density matter.

A bus service with a solitary bus or just a couple of stops will only be accessible to a limited number of people — those living, working, or playing near the stops. The same can be said for bike-sharing, as the greater the number of bikes and the wider the network of stations translates into a more successful service. Station density should be such that a customer can find a station every couple of blocks. In fact, a bike-sharing service’s usefulness will increase exponentially with each additional station, as each station expands the reach of your service by better connecting places into this new transit system.

4) Build public-private partnerships.

Bike-sharing lends itself to public-private partnerships. Private organizations can assist the implementing agency by sponsoring the service or purchasing a station for outside their worksite. They also find bike-sharing good for providing their employees a healthy commuting option, making their location more accessible to customers, being environmentally friendly, and promoting a green service. The public benefits by having some of the costs of buying and operating a service covered by private organizations. Whether the implementing agency is a local government or non-profit, both have successfully taken advantage of sponsorship to help expand their service’s reach. Barclays Bank sponsored Barclays Cycle Hire in London to the tune of $40 million; BlueCross BlueShield of Minnesota sponsored Nice Ride Minnesota in Minneapolis with $1.75 million and has offered up to a $1.5 million match for expansion of the service. For bike-sharing implementers, private engagement can expand a service in a cost-efficient way — creating a win-win for both parties.

5) Don’t do it alone, work regionally.

Bike-sharing can produce the greatest benefits when done regionally, which is why the Paris and Washington, D.C. areas have regional services. For commuting trips, bike-sharing is ideal for the first-mile/last-mile challenge of getting folks to and from longer haul transit services. Implementing a service takes a lot of work, but sharing the workload, and expenses among multiple jurisdictions is a great deal. Additionally, it’s important that jurisdictions within a region have the same, compatible service, so riding from one jurisdiction to another is smooth and makes for a pleasant customer experience.

With the number of bike-sharing services in the U.S. and worldwide rapidly increasing each year, bike-sharing has proven effective at serving the public well for short urban trips, as well as complementing other modes of transit. However, like any other transit mode, there are pitfalls — both shared with other transit modes and unique to bike-sharing — which should be avoided to ensure a successful, well-used service. Following this advice will get your jurisdiction rolling in the right direction.'

How To Share A House

I love, love this idea, this ethos - how much easier, kinder - not to mention cheaper - would life be if we created connections and communities this way?

Reposted in full from Shareable, 14 December 2009

'As a companion to her essays "The Slow Homes Manifesto" and "How to Stop Foreclosure through Homesharing," Janelle Orsi offers this nuts-and-bolts case study in the marriage of two households.

The Cast:

Household 1: Jane, and her devoted companions, Buck and Savannah, both German Shorthair Pointers.

Household 2: Regina and Joel, and their daughters, Melia, age 6, and Naia, age 3.

The Setting:

A tiny town in the remote woods of the Santa Cruz Mountains in California.

The Birth of an Idea:

As a young couple with a child, Regina and Joel were in search of a long-term living arrangement. A major priority was to be able to own, rather than rent, their home. They regretted the possibility of leaving the beautiful Santa Cruz Mountains, but the price of land had skyrocketed. They began to explore the potential for moving elsewhere.

Then along came Jane. Jane owned a beautiful home in the Santa Cruz Mountains, which she helped to build herself. Jane is a professional trainer, facilitator and coach, and she travels often. While she loves living in the woods, and generally prefers to live by herself, she recognized certain disadvantages to “living alone in the middle of nowhere.” When she worked from home, she often felt isolated. When she traveled, it was a challenge to find dog-sitters who were willing to make the trek to her remote home. While she values time and space to be alone, she did yearn for occasional company. Jane had long dreamed of forming a land-sharing community arrangement, but had never been able to simultaneously pull together the right ingredients of land, housing, willing people, and compatible personalities.

Since they lived nearby, Regina and Joel began to house-sit for Jane while she was away. As Jane got to know Regina and Joel, she found that they were pleasant to be around, respectful of Jane and her home, and generally good natured and trustworthy people.

When she heard their reluctant plans to move to Vermont, she proposed a radical solution: "How about building your home on my land?"

Making it Happen:

Jane, Regina, and Joel met to discuss the possibilities. Their options were somewhat limited by the local zoning ordinance, which allowed no more than one house on the property. Their solution: build an addition onto Jane’s home that would allow for the feel of two separate units, while sharing a kitchen in the middle.

Planning was the secret to the success of their arrangement. Jane, Regina, and Joel met frequently over the course of several months, often making meals together to find out how it felt to be together in a shared kitchen. Over these meals, they got to know each other and sorted out the details of the arrangement. They discussed their needs, their expectations, their finances, their preferences for household cleanliness, the architectural design of the addition, and so on. The building process itself took another year. As of the date of this writing, they have been living in the shared house for five years.

What They Share:

The two households share a kitchen, hot-tub, and laundry room, and a handful of items, including tools and kitchenware. The washer, dryer, and many kitchen appliances belonged originally to Jane. However, as those appliances have needed to be repaired or replaced, the two households split the costs 50-50.

The two households have also casually evolved certain sharing routines. For example, Jane and Regina are often in the kitchen at the same time in the morning. Jane sometimes makes extra breakfast for Regina, who is occupied by various morning routines with her children. Other times, she’ll simply butter Regina’s toast when it pops out of the toaster. To Jane, this is a small gesture and takes little effort, but to time-pressed Regina, this means a great deal. At the other end of the day, when Regina or Joel makes dinner for their family, there’s often more than enough to include Jane, who thoroughly appreciates the gift of an effortless meal. They all alert one another if there are extra leftovers to share, an open jar of salsa, and most importantly, a fresh batch of cookies.

In addition, the two households casually collaborate on shopping trips, spurred by the fact that their home is a 40-minute round trip from the nearest grocery store. There is an ongoing shopping tab posted in the kitchen that tracks what each has spent on the other’s groceries. Commonly used items like spices, oils and dish soaps are shared; for these, a loose unspoken arrangement has evolved around who buys what, depending on stores they each frequent. A huge boon for Jane has been Regina and Joel’s willingness to do the Costco and Trader Joe’s shopping—she gets the prices and variety without the overwhelm of actually shopping there.

They have also evolved into a loose division of various household duties. For example, Jane typically manages all the household repairs, and she is “more than happy” to let Regina and Joel manage the household compost.

The Benefits:

For Regina and Joel: An opportunity to live and own a home in a beautiful place at a very reasonable price. Occasional childcare from Jane.

For Jane: Built-in dog care. Less isolation. “Someone to play cards with when we lose power and the rain washes out our roads.”

For Everyone: Shared cookies, the security of having extra people around, pleasant companionship in the kitchen, reduced expenses, pooling of resources to reduce environmental impact, help with shopping, cooking, and other tasks, and relief from certain household duties, such as composing. In addition, by enlarging the existing house, everyone has ended up with a higher property value; this is because the average price-per-square-foot of a 5-bedroom house is higher than that of a 3-bedroom house.

Regina explained: “One of the things that I am most pleased with is the fact that we have been able to simplify our lifestyles through the art of sharing. I feel good knowing that this living arrangement has a much smaller negative impact on our planet than if we all lived in our own separate homes without the benefits of combined appliances, energy, and space.”

Regina noted: “We have created a sense of community in our home. Although small and nowhere near being a village, we do indeed enjoy the fact that we are not all alone in our mountain home. We would be much more limited if we did not have a housemate like Jane with whom to share household chores, expenses, food shopping and preparation, as well as occasional child/dog care. I think that by living more communally, a greater sense of ease is achieved for everyone.”

What Makes it Work?

Personal space. Aside from the shared kitchen, hot tub, and laundry room, all other areas of the house are divided between the two households. Everyone has the ability to retreat to their personal space when they’ve had enough social stimulation. Even the kids understand this; On one occasion when Jane got up to leave the kitchen, Melia (then three years old) asked, “Are you going to retreat now?” Within the kitchen, the need for personal space is also reflected in the fact that each household has their own refrigerator, designed to eliminate any hassles over shelf organization and leftovers (yummy or funky).

A basic attitude of generosity. Jane, Regina, and Joel generally give and share with no strings attached. There is no score card kept on who cooked, who shopped, who waited on the repair man or helped carry heavy items. They each understand that they are benefiting in different ways from the shared arrangement, and thus don’t always expect all things to even out. Jane explains that she thinks things work so well between them all because everyone is focused on the question of “What can I do for you?” instead of, “What’s in it for me?” She explains, “I’d rather take care of what’s important to me and do it as a gift. If I want the sink clean, I clean it. I notice and appreciate when someone else is motivated to clean the stove. As soon as you develop an attitude of ‘he never ________ [e.g. takes out the trash] and she always ________ [e.g. eats my bananas],’ then you are headed down a bad road.”

A few good rules and a lot of good communication. According to Jane, Regina is an “excellent communicator,” who has even taken workshops in Non-Violent Communication. “A key component to our living situation is healthy, clear communication," Regina told me. "I am extremely grateful for the fact that Jane is such a clear communicator. I would strongly recommend some sort of communication class or study group to anyone planning a co-housing situation.” Through her work in facilitation and coaching, Jane herself is a professional communicator. They have all encouraged one another to speak up and consequently everyone feels comfortable voicing their needs and concerns without fear of conflict or defensiveness. As a result, no one has felt the need to have any written household rules. At the same time, a few useful rules have evolved over time, including: 1) You can use my eggs, so long as you don’t take the last two; and 2) No children in the walkway between the stove and the sink.

Planning. By meeting frequently for nearly a year, the three were able to discuss many things in detail and plan even for the unforeseeable. They asked each other questions such as: “What happens if we don’t want to be good friends? Will we have the courage to tell each other when we don’t want to spend time together?” “What happens in the event of one of the ‘3 Ds: death, divorce, or disability, and what would we do in a worst-case scenario?” They also planned the housing design in great deal. For example, using tape on the floor, they simulated a full-sized floor-plan of their kitchen and did a “butt test.” They simulated various kitchen tasks to ensure that one person could be washing dishes, while another was preparing food on the island and they wouldn’t bump into each other. They discovered, for example, that putting the stove at the end of the counter would allow two or three people to stand around the stove at once, if necessary. As Regina noted, “If the majority of details and ideas are sorted out before actually living together, then the transition into co-housing will be much smoother overall.”

Mutual respect, shared values, and other personal qualities that make a difference: Everyone in the two households values protection of the environment; they all generally eat organic foods, strive to reduce/reuse/recycle, and share resources in the spirit of reducing their impact on the planet. Jane confesses that her own standards of cleanliness are likely higher than those of her housemates, but that Regina and Joel have consistently respected this in their shared spaces, even with two young children to clean up after. “They are very thoughtful and have good attention to detail,” she notes.

Jane also appreciates her housemates’ parenting style. “In the middle of a party here, a dear long-time friend who was visiting for the first time announced loudly, ‘Hell has frozen over. Jane is cooking in the kitchen and living with children!’ She’s right—I’m way out of my comfort zone living with kids. And I can do it because of Regina and Joel’s amazing parenting—completely low stress for me to be around.”

Additionally, Jane recognized that Joel and Regina have a solid relationship, which makes them easy to be around and which assures Jane that their shared housing arrangement is unlikely to be torn apart by a divorce. Finally, Jane says it is important that Joel and Regina are primarily her housemates, not close friends, lovers or co-workers. She appreciates the simplicity of that connection. “There are no outside arenas of potential conflict. It’s just about living together,” she says.

Legally Speaking

The legal arrangement between the two households might cause the average lawyer to sweat a little bit. With the exception of a recorded property deed showing their respective ownership percentages, and the joint property tax, mortgage, and insurance bills, there is no other signed document providing the details of the arrangement.

Fortunately, the verbal and unsigned written agreements between the three have been consistently followed, and everyone trusts that they are getting a good deal from the arrangement. They have all agreed on the division of monthly expenses, and sort out most issues and additional expenses as they arise. They have all loosely committed to continue living together for 10 years, after which they will discuss the possibility of selling the whole property all at once.

They all three admit, however, that they should have a Tenancy in Common Agreement drafted at some point, primarily to delineate the rights of all three owners in the event that someone needs to move or sell out before the end of 10 years, or in the event of anything unforeseen that could significantly change their arrangement. However, until and after such agreement is put into writing, Jane explains their arrangement is primarily governed by the law of generosity. '

Fire and Ice: Melting Glaciers Trigger Earthquakes, Tsunamis and Volcanos

'Ha, an earthquake and tsunami, that'll show all those greenies, just wait, they will try to blame THAT on global warming...!'

Hm.

Reposted in full from About.com, March 2011

'Climatologists have been raising alarms about global warming for years, and now geologists are getting into the act, warning that melting glaciers will lead to an increasing number of earthquakes, tsunamis and volcanic eruptions in unexpected places.

People in northern climates who have been looking south and shaking their heads sadly over the plight of people living in the path of Atlantic hurricanes and Pacific tsunamis had better get ready for a few seismic events of their own, according to a growing number of prominent geologists.

Less Glacial Pressure, More Earthquakes and Volcanic Eruptions

Ice is extremely heavy—weighing about one ton per cubic meter—and glaciers are massive sheets of ice. When they are intact, glaciers exert enormous pressure on the portion of the Earth’s surface they cover. When glaciers begin to melt—as they are doing now at an increasingly rapid rate due to global warming—that pressure is reduced and eventually released.

Geologists say releasing that pressure on the Earth’s surface will cause all sorts of geologic reactions, such as earthquakes, tsunamis (caused by undersea earthquakes) and volcanic eruptions.

"What happens is the weight of this thick ice puts a lot of stress on the earth," said Patrick Wu, a geologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, in an interview with the Canadian Press. "The weight sort of suppresses the earthquakes, but when you melt the ice the earthquakes get triggered."

Global Warming Accelerating Geologic Rebound

Wu offered the analogy of pressing a thumb against a soccer ball. When the thumb is removed and the pressure released, the ball resumes its original shape. When the “ball” is a planet, the rebound happens slowly, but just as surely.

Wu said many of the earthquakes that occur in Canada today are related to the ongoing rebound effect that started with the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But with global warming accelerating climate changes and causing glaciers to melt more quickly, Wu said the inevitable rebound is expected to happen much faster this time around.

New Seismic Events Already Happening

Wu said melting ice in Antarctica is already triggering earthquakes and underwater landslides. These events aren’t getting much attention, but they are early warnings of the more serious events that scientists believe are coming. According to Wu, global warming will create “lots of earthquakes.”

Professor Wu is not alone in his assessment.Writing in New Scientist magazine, Bill McGuire, professor of geological hazards at University College in London, said: "All over the world evidence is stacking up that changes in global climate can and do affect the frequencies of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions and catastrophic sea-floor landslides. Not only has this happened several times throughout Earth's history, the evidence suggests it is happening again."'

Melbourne Growth Got Away From Us: Labor

Excerpt from The Age, 18 March 2011

'Daniel Andrews has conceded Labor lost government because it failed to meet community expectations as Melbourne's runaway population growth ''got away from us''.

The Opposition Leader said Labor needed to face the fact ''we could have done more and we could have done better'' to boost services and help households tackle daily challenges.

''People across the community have expectations about quality of services, about pressures on them in their own household, and I think clearly we failed to meet those expectations,'' Mr Andrews told The Age.

He said a failure to properly manage Victoria's strong population growth contributed to Labor's defeat at last year's state election, as services failed to keep pace with Melbourne's expansion.

''We just couldn't keep up,'' he said.

Melbourne's population growth has outstripped other state capitals for the past eight years. Cost-of-living concerns, public transport and law and order were key issues in the lead-up to November's election...'

Star Wars Imperial Walker Made From Recycled Computer Parts

Sourced from Planetsave, 16 February 2011

'The artist behind this great masterpiece is Sage Werbock better known as the Great Nippulini. Sage is a retired sideshow performer who now works as a professional body piercer. Sage is self-taught in the art of metalworking and has excelled at hand-forging steel and iron. He is also very proficient at stick, mig and tig welding. He tries to use recycled materials on all his sculptures, this is just his way of helping out the environment. He is selling his art piece on Esty with an asking price of $450.00. Which I’m sure some aspiring Jedi will grab soon!'

From the original article at Etsy

This is an Imperial Walker sculpture I made from recycled computer parts and other scrap metal materials. The Imperial Walker, also known as the AT-AT is an iconic figure from the original Star Wars trilogy movies. It is a static sculpture, meaning there are no moveable parts although the piece appears to be in mid-stride.

The main body is composed of power supply boxes from old computers, the head from floppy drive housings, legs and feet from various scrap metal. The entire piece has been welded together using the MIG welding process. Two coats of cold galvanizing primer are applied followed by a coat of varied grays and finished with two coats of protective gloss. The whole sculpture was randomly “attacked” with the welding arc to simulate battle scars.

This AT-AT stands over a foot high and over a foot long. He weighs about 15 pounds.

A quick note: this is NOT a toy! Not only is it heavy, but it is made of metal and has sharp edges and corners. Please do not let children play with it!'

Peak Oil Angst and the Lure of Techno-Utopia

'Latest 'Zeitgeist' Documentary Mixes Sound Critique and Goofy Futurism' — Transition Voice

I must concur – the film’s diagnosis is pretty much on the money, but the prescription? I am highly suspicious of technological master plans that deny the diversity of humanity, and don’t really address the internal dysfunction that brought us to this point.

Excerpt from Transition Voice, 30 March 2011

'...to many who are disgusted by party politics and corporate greed, the dispassionate world of science, with integrity built right into the experimental method, looks appealing by comparison...

2011′s Moving Forward is actually the third film in the series, which began with Zeitgeist in 2007, a film roundly attacked for promoting conspiracy theories on 9/11, Christianity and the international banking system. A second film, Zeitgeist: Addendum came out in 2008, focusing again on the financial system.

Clearly, these documentaries and the political movement behind them (the Zeitgeist Movement has a separate Facebook page with 95,089 friends) have tapped into a trend.

With a hard-hitting critique of market economics and corruption in politics by such visionary thinkers as Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky and Vancouver physician Gabor Maté, the film’s got a lot that a thinking person can agree with. I was glad to see that director Peter Joseph gave plenty of time to peak oil, featuring both Michael Ruppert and Colin Campbell.

But this impressively produced film is wracked by a split personality. On the one hand, it’s as cynical as can be about the difference between Democrats and Republicans (none that matters), the health of the financial system (poor to critical) and the consequences for the future of the market economy (bleak, bleak, bleak).

On the other hand, Zeitgeist’s solutions are not merely uncompelling and unconvincing. They seem to rely on the very thinking that got us into today’s problems in the first place.

Here’s what the Very Smart People behind Zeitgeist think will save civilization: The peoples of the world should rise up simultaneously in revolt and demand an end to the current world order. The film imagines a scenario where demonstrators mass peacefully in the major cities of the world and dump the life-savings they’ve just withdrawn from the nearest ATM into huge piles of cash on the street in front of the offices of their nation’s central bank.

What’s next? Somehow, an enlightened regime of brainiacs, chosen in some unspecified manner entirely free of either party politics or moneyed interests (oh, right, there’s no more money), will revamp world civilization according to a blueprint from the world of — get ready for it — systems engineering.

Resources will be sourced from where they’re produced anywhere on Earth to wherever they’re needed anywhere else on Earth. Shopping will be a thing of the past as people simply “check out” any goods that they need for temporary use from the local lending library.

And the world’s cities? Somehow they’ll all become completely rational, with concentric circles of high-tech building complexes designed to maximize land use and energy efficiency, all fed by hydroponic agriculture and with transportation provided by monorails apparently borrowed from Disney World.

Apparently gone will be narrow Renaissance alleys and Victorian brownstones, Manhattan high-rises and Stalinist low-rises, Qing Dynasty hutongs and Meiji Era courtyards. How will we get there? Again, details TBA.

I don’t fault a documentary that’s already pushing three hours for skipping over all the steps of how such a wondrous transformation could occur. I’ll trust that the super-smarties at the Venus Project, a clearly well-funded group behind Zeitgeist, have some ideas on how to pull the old stuff down, reuse the materials and rebuild everything to look like a set from Logan’s Run.

The real question is, after dozens of compelling visions of techno-dystopia, why anyone today would still find appealing a future in glass domes and Modernist towers that look like the theme restaurant at LAX.

If the only way to free ourselves from the Koch brothers, Goldman Sachs and Michelle Bachmann is to wipe away the glorious mess that is 5,000 years of civilization and replace it with a Version 2.0 that’s all metal and perfectly aerodynamic, then there doesn’t seem to be all that much point to human survival.

What the hell would we do in those damn domes all day anyway?

Fortunately, if for energy and resource depletion alone, not to mention human psychology, a future in geo-domes eating hydroponic asparagus picked from the glass balcony is about as likely as seeing George Jetson as president or Buck Rogers as Secretary of Defense.

The appeal of a cerebral version of urban renewal — tear down the slums of history and replace them with shiny new stuff that’s approved by science — is worrisome.

Clearly, too many people still think we have to destroy civilization to save it.

And if you want to point your finger at dirty politics and the greedy market as the root of all evil, can you really claim that science still has clean hands?

From eugenics to Auschwitz, from the Manhattan Project to Fukushima, from physicists flocking to Wall Street to design complex financial derivatives to Monsanto’s latest genetic engineering horror, science has shown little scruple about ethics when money and power came a-calling.

Why should next time be any different?'

Rio+20: Toward a New Green Economy - or a Green-Washed Old Economy?

'...20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises...those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual.''

Reposted in full from Grist, 24 March 2011

'I've got good news and bad news about the future of the planet.

Good news first. Next year, a honking big global Earth Summit is coming our way - one with a proud heritage. Formally titled the U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, the meeting is known as RIO+20 because it will come 20 years after the first Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. That original Earth Summit (itself 20 years after the equally important Stockholm Convention on the Environment and Human Development) gave us an embarrassment of policy riches: the Climate Convention, the Convention on Biological Diversity, Sustainable Development Commission, the Precautionary Principle, a long and ambitious list of promises called Agenda 21, The Forest Principles, and much more. Over a hundred heads of state turned up to Rio Di Janeiro last time amidst intense global attention. This time, the reunion party is going back to Rio again on June 4-6 2012. Chances are it will all be a big deal again.

At a recent preparatory meeting in New York, the agenda for this next Earth Summit became clear. The leaders will issue a "focused political document" tackling the transition to a global "green economy" and reform of the international institutions responsible for sustainable development. This second "reform" strand could feasibly restructure everything ranging from the U.N. Environmental Program (UNEP) and the U.N. Development Program to the 500 different multilateral environmental treaties and agreements currently in place. These cover toxic chemicals, ocean conservation, biodiversity, desertification, climate change, ozone depletion, forest protection, and more. Given the rising trends of global temperature, hunger, water scarcity, and biodiversity loss, the existing mishmash of eco-governance is clearly failing to deliver. RIO+20 is a precious chance for decision-makers to take stock of where the world went wrong in the last 20 years and plan intelligently for the next 20. Hopefully RIO+20 will deliver a jolt of political will to the global environmental agenda, as well as a smart plan to get the planet back on track.

Or at least that's the theory. And now we come to the bad news: Far from cooking up a plan to save the Earth, what may come out of the summit could instead be a deal to surrender the living world to a small cabal of bankers and engineers - one that will dump the promises of the first Rio summit along the way. Tensions are already rising between northern countries and southern countries over the poorly defined concept of a global "Green Economy" that will be the centerpiece of the summit.

What is a global green economy? That, of course, is the multi-trillion dollar question. We can all spell out the problems of our current polluting and unjust economy (thoughtlessly dubbed the "brown economy" by less-than race-sensitive commentators). Yet suspicion is running high that the proposed prescriptions for a "green economy" are more likely to deliver a greenwash economy or the same old, same old "greed" economy. The color-coded theory on offer goes like this: We can move from a brown economy to a green economy by investing more greenbacks in the white heat of technology and PINC (Proactive Investment in Natural Capital) including innovative market mechanisms such as REDD+ (Reducing Emissions through Deforestation and Degredation). Just to round off the color palette, ocean states are further arguing that the green economy also needs to be a blue economy.

Confused? The key words to focus on here are "markets" and "technology." Just as the global climate negotiations, most recently in Cancun, have veered away from the difficult job of agreeing to slash emissions and lurched instead toward politically easy gestures on carbon trading and solar panels, so the green economy brigade would like to steer the RIO+20 summit away from addressing the root causes of our ecological crises. They would like the emphasis to be on a "forward looking" effort to establish new financial arrangements based on so-called "ecosystem services" while liberating funds for iconic "green technologies."

Two heavyweight reports from UNEP, on "The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity" (TEEB) and a "Green Economy Report" (GER) set the tone for this plan. They argue that nature, like an industrial contractor, should be precisely measured and valued according to the natural "services" that it provides - such as water cleaning, carbon sequestration, and nitrogen cycling. Such services can then be paid for, offset, or securitized in the form of invented credits that can be traded to raise conservation money. Meanwhile new "eco-efficient" technologies can be developed and deployed increasing the value of these ecosystem services while also generating revenue. If it sounds more like a business plan than an agreement to protect the Earth that's because business is firmly in the driving seat. The lead author of both the TEEB and GER is an investment banker on sabbatical from Deutsche Bank, and the most vocal cheerleaders are the Davos crowd of Fortune 500 companies and G8 diplomats.

Most alarmingly, some of these voices are positioning the "green economy" as an upgrade or replacement to the "outmoded" concept of "sustainable development" that was agreed on 20 years ago. They seem content to throw out Rio's "baby" of sustainable development out for new green bathwater just as the baby reaches the age of maturity. While "sustainable development" has its problems as an approach, it at least explicitly attempted to enmesh environmental goals in larger social and economic goals such as reducing poverty and creating a just and equitable society. By contrast, the idea of a green economy is sustainable-development-lite - long on technical fixes and band-aid solutions, short on confronting the root causes of poverty, inequality, and oppression that drive environmental destruction.

At a packed side event in New York last week entitled "Whose Green Economy?," Bolivian Ambassador Pablo Salon charged that this repackaged green capitalism was a distraction from the real issues and commitments that RIO+20 needs to address to realize sustainable development. He warned that the new forms of mercantilism and speculation being proposed could further despoil nature while entrenching existing injustices. Indigenous peoples and social justice movements who have fought against land displacement brought about by the REDD+ provisions of the recent Cancun agreement are particularly alarmed that the same commodification approach is now being proposed to extend to soils, oceans, and more. As Uruguayan activist Silvia Ribeiro points out, "In the wake of the largest financial crisis in history, the same bankers who can't even keep their own house in order now claim they can manage the planet. Excuse us for not believing them."

The focus on ill-defined "green technologies" is also problematic. The UNEP Green Economy report bullishly includes biomass incineration and biofuels as possible ingredients in a "green economy" - rising food prices, land grabs, and toxic air pollution aside. The report is agnostic on nuclear power and stops short of endorsing genetically modified crops as part of the green package.

Meanwhile the next suite of technological silver bullets are already being reframed as part of the green economy. Synthetic biology, which makes artificial microbes with unknown biosafety impacts, is being touted as the source of green fuels and green plastics. Nanotechnology, whose toxicity problems raise the specter of a rerun of the asbestos fiasco, is being embraced for solar panel production and water cleanup. Meanwhile geoengineering - the idea of re-engineering the entire planet with clouds of sulphur dust or dumps of iron and charcoal - could easily end up in the broad definition of "green technologies."

If RIO+20 is not to become a handy loophole for every technological wolf to assume green clothing (and funds), governments are going to need to get specific about what is and what isn't a "green and just" technology and to resurrect the precautionary principle first agreed at Rio 20 years ago. The green economy needs some trusted gatekeepers. One proposal, backed by several major groups at the U.N., is the establishment of a formal mechanism to evaluate new and emerging technologies -- such as an International Convention for Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). Such a convention might provide an early-warning function to governments on pitfalls of technological options before they are deployed. An ICENT might have warned against backing ethanol before food prices spiked, or challenged the wisdom of a risky energy technologies long before the wellhead explodes or the tsunami hits the reactor's cooling system. Tragically, governments agreed to a version of such a technology assessment mechanism back in Rio 20 years ago and then never delivered - an act of negligence we are paying for today in human lives, hunger, and environmental damage.

And there's the rub: 20 years ago, governments at Rio were bold enough to lay out a set of commitments that might credibly have rescued us from some of the dire predicaments we are now in but they never fulfilled their own promises. With under 13 months to go, it's now up to all of us in global society to demand that those promises, however belated, be fulfilled. Most importantly those promises should not be abandoned for a hollow "green economy" that amounts to a Trojan horse for ongoing destruction-as-usual. The bad news on the road to Rio is that the hijackers are already seizing the reins. The good news is that we have time to organize massive campaigns to get the Earth Summit back on course - not just for a green economy, but for a green, equitable, and just future.

You Can Change The World

Sourced from Duarte Design, 3 March 2011

Nancy Duarte's TEDx East talk on story structure in presentations:

'This talk reveals the hidden structure that the greatest communicators and persuaders have used over thousands of years. Insights from literature and cinema helped reveal why the greatest communicators are riveting.'

Hospital Food With Intensive Care

Reposted in full from The Telegraph, 23 March 2011

'Mike Duckett doesn’t seem like an obvious revolutionary. Softly spoken and grey-moustached, he has a year to go before retirement from his job as catering manager of the Royal Brompton Hospital in west London. But his approach to food could destabilise the received wisdom about feeding people in large organisations, through a truly radical concept. Provide freshly cooked, locally sourced, seasonally appropriate meals – yes, the sort of food anyone would like to eat. It sounds an impossibility: the equivalent of a farmers’ market brought to the hospital bedside every mealtime. Mike has shown that this miracle can be achieved, even within the cash-strapped NHS, where yesterday it was disclosed that patients’ meals can cost little more than £1.

To understand the immensity of this innovation, you need to know the way that mass catering has gone in recent years. When the flagship NHS Chelsea and Westminster Hospital, a few streets from the Royal Brompton, opened in the 1990s, it had no kitchen. This was not an oversight but part of a trend – other hospitals have been closing their kitchens to provide linen rooms and other services. ''Efficiency’’ dictates that food should be prepared on the airline principle, perhaps in a factory in South Wales, and merely ''regenerated’’ on site.

This system, which must delight the bean counters, has only one drawback: the end product is – how shall I put it? – disappointing. ''How can you regenerate fish and chips and peas?’’ cries Mike, indignation throbbing in his voice. If there is one category of person who needs proper, sustaining food, it is the hospital patient, for whom good nutrition is an aid to recovery. Fortunately for the heart and lung cases in the Royal Brompton, Mike has his own kitchen. Every meal served in the hospital is prepared and cooked in it.

That, however, is only where the revolution begins. With its 300 beds, staff canteen and hungry visitors, the Royal Brompton is a prodigious consumer of food. Every year, 50,000 eggs, 9,000kg of sausages and 40,000kg of potatoes will pass through the kitchen. Mike realised that he could buy better if he bypassed the NHS supply chain (which he uses only for dry goods such as flour) and went straight to farmers in the South East. This was partly a matter of conviction: ''Public catering should support regional British food,’’ he told the Aldeburgh Food and Drink Festival stoutly last year. But it also ensures freshness and quality. The eggs from Kent are free range. The milk from Bedfordshire is organic. The sausages from north London and Bedfordshire are bespoke recipes. While most government-procured bacon comes from Denmark, Mike buys his from farms in Essex and Hertfordshire. Each year, orchards in Kent crush enough apples and pears to provide him with 250,000 litres of pure juice. It sounds too much like traditionally based common sense to be true of a modern bureaucracy.

There is a modest cost implication. Mike’s meals work out as slightly more expensive than the NHS average, although still within the budget set by the Royal Brompton and Harefield NHS Foundation Trust. The nutritionists in the hospital evidently think that the price is worth paying. Besides, there are other advantages. Many more people are eating in the staff canteen, which is also open to visitors. Mike’s changes have therefore increased revenues, while also contributing to the welfare of staff, some of whom rely on the canteen for their main meal each day.

The menus will surprise anyone familiar with government catering. Venison is served. ''We weren’t sure about wild rabbit to begin with,’’ remembers Mike, ''but it proved so popular we had to put it on again. It’s cheap.’’ Unlike Jamie Oliver, he doesn’t expect to tempt children out of their food comfort zones. “We offer them additive-free burgers and chicken nuggets made from 100 per cent breast meat, rather than skin and feet. In the burgers, we replace salt with herbs. They love them.’’

The loss of Mike’s menus would surely be a sadness to the young patients of the Royal Brompton’s children’s heart surgery unit, currently threatened with closure as part of major NHS reorganisation.

As Mike admits, there is nothing complicated in what he does. The techniques are those used when he started his career with the NHS, 44 years ago. ''Then, patients were served only one meal option, and if they didn’t like cabbage, it was bad luck. Now, budgets are stretched by the number of choices you have to provide, not least because of allergies. Nobody seemed to have allergies in the old days.’’

Clearly, it takes passion and commitment to break the mould. Mike loves visiting his suppliers. He is proud of having saved 60,000 road miles a year. He is thrilled that the Royal Brompton food waste is composted, rather than put down a waste disposal unit. But could other catering managers lift their eyes from the 120-page government rule book on food procurement and do likewise?

Yes, and more, is Mike’s answer. Why don’t groups of hospitals collaborate on menus and buy in greater bulk, with concomitant savings? The Swedish government has noticed what has happened at the Royal Brompton: it has asked him to speak at a conference in Malmo. If only British institutions could pick up on it too, we would be a happier nation.'

The End of the Growth Ethic

Sourced from YouTube, 18 March 2010

'UBC Professor William Rees argues that the current growth ethic has put us into ecological overshoot, citing his ecological footpr UBC Professor William Rees argues that the current growth ethic has put us into ecological overshoot, citing his ecological footprint analysis tool he developed, and may result in a breakdown in civil order and conflict over scarce resources - with Iraq only the first shot in the wars of the future.'

Don't Worry, Be Happy

I wonder what Mao would think of the Bobby McFerrin-ing of The Middle Kingdom?!

Reposted in full from The Economist, 17 March 2011

'The pursuit of happiness, runs one of the most consequential sentences ever penned, is an unalienable right. That Jeffersonian sentiment seems to have influenced even China’s normally strait-laced, rubber-stamp legislature, the National People’s Congress (NPC), which has just wrapped up its annual session. Increasing happiness, officials now insist, is more important than increasing GDP. A new five-year plan adopted at the meeting has been hailed as a blueprint for a “happy China”. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, however, appeared downright miserable as he described the challenges he faces.

At the end of the ten-day meeting, Mr Wen told journalists that his remaining two years in office would be “no easier” than the preceding eight. Keeping the “tiger” of inflation in its cage would be hard enough, he said (the NPC approved a target of 4% this year, compared with inflation of nearly 5% in February). But corruption was the “greatest danger”. A few days before the session began, the railways minister, Liu Zhijun, had been dismissed in connection with a huge bribe-taking scandal.

The five-year plan called for 7% annual average growth in GDP between now and 2015, compared with a far-exceeded target of 7.5% set in 2006-10. Mr Wen said lowering growth without raising unemployment would be an “extremely big test”. But, he said, China had to change its pattern of economic growth, because it was (using a hallmark phrase) “unbalanced, unco-ordinated and unsustainable”.

The idea of promoting happiness spread over the country like a huge grin early this year when provincial governments began laying out their own five-year plans. Guangdong province declared it would become “happy Guangdong”. Beijing (which is a province-level administration) said it wanted its citizens to lead “happy and glorious lives”. Chongqing municipality, another province-level area, said it wanted its people to be among the happiest in the country. Officials now often talk of setting up “happiness indices” by which government performance should be judged.

The word’s popularity among bureaucrats is more an attempt to please leaders in Beijing and show sympathy for the less well-off than a sign of any real determination to change their ways. Many lower-level governments have continued to set investment-driven GDP-growth targets that are far higher than Mr Wen’s. Some of his goals, such as building another 36m subsidised homes by 2015, will require the co-operation of local governments. They are adept at evading such tasks.

Mr Wen does not see political freedom as having much to do with happiness. In August last year he raised hopes among some liberal-minded intellectuals when he made a flurry of statements about the importance of political reform. Since then, the repression of dissidents has been stepped up. Dozens have been rounded up or put under surveillance in order to prevent them from responding to anonymous internet-circulated calls for an Arab-style “jasmine revolution” in China. To deter any protests, police security during the NPC was even heavier than usual.

At his press conference, Mr Wen repeated some of the language he had used last August on the need for political reform. This included a warning that China’s economic gains could be wiped out if the country failed to reform politically. He also said people needed to be able to “criticise and supervise” the government. But he offered no guide to how this should happen, and stressed the need for change to be “gradual”, “orderly” and “under the leadership of the party”. He said it would be wrong to draw comparison between the situations in the Middle East and north Africa and that of China.

The NPC’s chairman, Wu Bangguo, went further, telling delegates that the country faced an “abyss of internal disorder" if it strayed from the “correct political orientation”. He also declared China had achieved its goal of setting up a “socialist legal system with Chinese characteristics”. The Communist Party said in 1997 that it would do this by 2010, but never made it clear how progress would be assessed. China’s struggling band of independent lawyers, who are often spurned by courts and harassed by police for trying to defend victims of official wrongdoing, are probably not celebrating.

The government’s crackdown on dissent apparently includes a strengthening of China’s internet firewall to make it more difficult to use software to evade blocks on sensitive foreign websites. Some websites in China recently carried a report that 11% of respondents to an opinion poll believed national happiness is boosted when they express themselves freely on the internet. If only they could.'

Bring on the Participatory Sensing

Crowdsourcing environmental protection with IT...

Reposted in full from Shareable, 15 March 2011

'For decades, Congress has delegated the fate of our public lands, the air, water, and wildlife to federal agencies, where a familiar dynamic of regulatory capture and corruption quickly takes root. It’s depressingly routine: Industry foxes are appointed to guard the chicken house; they make politically motivated judgments about scientific data; they engage in legalistic subterfuges and throw blankets of secrecy over the data and decisionmaking. A complicit Congress cuts budgets in order to cripple regulatory effectiveness.

So here’s an interesting idea for changing the political ecosystem of regulation: Use Web 2.0 platforms to let citizens participate directly, and let the data be seen by everyone, in near-real time, on the web. Reinvent regulation as an open-source project, as it were, so that everyone can participate, and industry money and interventions cannot so easily corrupt the process.

This is the implication of a series of experiments in “participatory sensing,” or “eco-crowdsourcing.” The rise of online social networks, wikis, smart phones, and other digitally networked devices and platforms are enabling dispersed bits of information to be aggregated and sifted in amazingly fast and complex ways. Marketers already comb through vast databases of web traffic, cell phone geo-location data, and credit card purchases to make highly specific inferences about you and your behavior.

Why not use these same capabilities to improve environmental regulation? All you need is a cell phone, laptop computer, or wireless device, and enterprising regulatory agencies willing to reach out to the public and change their procedures in innovative ways.

The idea is to take the Wikipedia model of distributed participation to new levels, and give people the chance to make a difference. Already the North American Butterfly Association invites people to submit counts of butterflies in their locality in order to monitor the health of various butterfly species. The result is a rich databse of empirical, on-the-ground, timely data. Similarly, Rarebirds.com invites volunteers to submit data to a location-based database of rare bird sightings.

Some of the possibilities for using Web 2.0 platforms to improve regulation are detailed in a short report called “Participatory Sensing: A Citizen-Powered Approach to Illuminating the Patterns That Shape Our World,” published by the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in 2009. The report notes that, with the proliferation of cameras on inexpensive mobile phones, motion sensors, and GPS systems — and with pervasive connectivity to telephone and Internet systems — it is possible for new forms of collective knowledge to be gathered and analyzed.

This has enormous implications for how distributed communities of people can help monitor natural systems in direct, reliable, and real-time ways, facilitating rapid identification of patterns and trends affecting the environment.

Citizen-scientists (as they are often called) have collected valuable environmental data for such events as the Audubon Society's Christmas Bird Count, World Water Monitoring Day, and the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research's Project BudBurst, a national field campaign to harness the power of citizen-scientists to observe plant responses to climate and record environmental conditions. In one study, participants took cell phone photos of plants at the fruiting stage of their life-cycle, which on a large scale can yield important information about the state of climate change.

“Using people’s everyday mobile phones to collect data in a coordinated manner could be applied to scientific studies of various sorts, such as accessing fishermen’s extensive knowledge to identify and locate fish pathologies in the field,” the report notes. It could document the spread of an invasive species. GPS-equipped mobile phones might be used to photograph diesel trucks as part of a campaign to understand community exposure to air pollution.

WeTap is an Android application that enables people collectively to contribute to a map of public drinking fountains and other free water sources. The idea is that people should be able to find free water supplies, and rate them, instead of having to buy wasteful and expensive bottled water. The information could also help improve the public infrastructure for water foundations.

In India, the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library is a repository of traditional knowledge about medicinal plants and formulations used in Indian systems of medicine. The website invites people to contribute to the Library in order to document the existence of various traditional remedies, and classify them. Once they are so documented, no one will be able to use the international patent system to claim proprietary intellectual property rights in the knowledge. The database serves as a massive body of “prior art” that can be used to challenge patent applications that seek to privatize traditional knowledge.

The problem with centralized bureaucracies is that they think they know everything and can control everything. They don’t and they can’t. They are often inefficient, and they simply cannot be as versatile and responsive as decentralized networks. If they could, then the recording, broadcasting, book publishing, and newspaper industries would not be in such bad shape. The State Department would not be surprised by insurgent movements in Egypt.

So why not leverage the power of distributed networks and invite citizens to participate in abating environmental harms and protect the commons? The U.S. Government is constantly consulting the high tech giants to develop new forms of surveillance and national security systems. Why not use these technologies to remake the regulatory system and take advantage of some powerful eco-crowdsourcing?

Types of data that were once too expensive or unreliable to collect, could be gathered and applied in conventional policymaking and standards enforcement. New types of wiki-style knowledge could be conjured into existence. Citizens could even self-organize their own commons' management systems to assert some measure of control over a local stream or mountain or lake. They could identify and call out corporate polluters through social shaming, and pressure regulatory agencies that fail to do their jobs.

Oops. Now I understand why there might be little enthusiasm within regulatory agencies for some of these innovations — they just might work too well.'