OzHarvest to the Rescue of Wasted Food!

Ronni Kahn was interviewed today about how OzHarvest Sydney rescues surplus fit-for-consumption food from retailers and caterers and gets it to those in need - particularly relevant in light of today's revelation that Australians throw out $5 billion of unconsumed food [just in the home!] each year

http://switzer.com.au/video/kahn

'Founder of Oz Harvest, Ronni Kahn, is an Australian success story of the most admirable kind. Oz Harvest is a non-denominational charity that rescues excess food which would otherwise be discarded. Watch Ronni discuss the Oz Harvest story with Peter Switzer.'

What A Waste - Analysis of Household Expenditure on Food - The Australia Institute

Excerpt from The Australia Institute, 5 November 2009

Research shows Australians are throwing away food worth $5.2 billion a year, which is more than it costs to run the Australian Army every year, and is enough to meet the shortfall in the United Nations Emergency Relief Fund!

Similar research exists for UK and US, in essence one bag in every three of groceries goes straight to the bin...

'Australian households are throwing out $5.2 billion worth of food each year, which exceeds the amount they spend on digital equipment such as flat screen TVs, according to new research by The Australia Institute.

"To put this into context, the $5.2 billion worth of food that Australians throw out each year is enough money to meet the shortfall in the United Nations Emergency Relief Fund," said report author David Baker.

The Australia Institute is a partner in Do Something's 'FoodWise' campaign, which aims to reduce this high level of waste.

...despite a majority of households being concerned about food waste, they throw out mountains of food nonetheless. Respondents also expressed guilt about discarding food, which is likely to mean their assessment of the amount they waste is an understatement.'

Carfree Cities - An Idea With Legs

Excerpt from Worldchanging, 2 November 2009

'A quarter of households in Britain – more in the larger cities, and a majority in some inner cities – live without a car. Imagine how quality of life would improve for cyclists and everyone else if traffic were removed from areas where people could practically choose to live without cars. Does this sound unrealistic, utopian? Did you know many European cities are already doing it?

Vauban in Germany is one of the largest car-free neighbourhoods in Europe, home to more than 5,000 people. If you live in the district, you are required to confirm once a year that you do not own a car – or, if you do own one, you must buy a space in a multi-storey car park on the edge of the district. One space was initially provided for every two households, but car ownership has fallen over time, and many of these spaces are now empty.

Vehicles are allowed down the residential streets at walking pace to pick up and deliver, but not to park. In practice, vehicles are rarely seen moving here. It has been taken over by kids as young as four or five, playing, skating and unicycling without direct supervision. The adults, too, tend to socialise outdoors far more than they would on conventional streets open to traffic...

Car-free areas of this kind, with anything from a couple of hundred to more than a thousand residents, exist in Amsterdam, Vienna, Cologne, Hamburg and Nuremberg, among others. There is even a small one in Edinburgh...

Groningen, the Netherlands' capital of cycling, has the largest car-free centre in Europe: half-pedestrianised, entirely closed to through traffic, with 16,500 residents, three-quarters of whom have no car in the household. Forty percent of all journeys within the city are made by bicycle.

Carfree UK...was set up to promote European-style car-free development in this country. We are not anti-car, we are pro-choice. We have recently run public meetings in London to set up a new car-free association for London, which is beginning to look at areas of the city from which traffic could be removed. We know considerable potential demand exists for traffic-free housing in London, and probably in a number of other major cities. Where else do you think might be suitable?'

Business As Unusual - Redefining Prosperity

Excerpt from The Ecologist, 2 November 2009

'Economic growth is supposed to deliver prosperity. Higher incomes should mean better choices, richer lives, an improved quality of life for us all. That at least is the conventional wisdom. But things haven’t always turned out that way.

Growth has delivered its benefits, at best, unequally. A fifth of the world’s population earns just 2 per cent of global income. Inequality is higher in the OECD nations than it was 20 years ago. Far from improving the lives of those who most needed it, growth let much of the world’s population down. Wealth trickled up to the lucky few.

Fairness (or the lack of it) is just one of several reasons to question growth. As the economy expands, so do its ecological impacts. In the last quarter of a century an estimated 60 per cent of the world’s ecosystems have been degraded. Global carbon emissions have risen by 40 per cent since 1990. Significant scarcity in key resources – such as oil – may be less than a decade away.

On the other hand, when growth stalls, as it has done over the past year, things go quickly from bad to worse. Firms go out of business, people lose their jobs and a government that fails to respond appropriately will soon find itself out of office. Dynamics are vital here. Continuous improvements in technology mean that fewer people are needed to produce the same goods from one year to the next. So if output doesn’t expand, there is a downward pressure on employment and a spiral of recession looms. Growth is necessary within this system just to prevent collapse.

In short we find ourselves locked between the horns of an uncomfortable and deep-seated dilemma: growth may be unsustainable, but ‘de-growth’ – a contraction in economic output – appears to be unstable. Questioning growth in these circumstances is deemed to be the act of lunatics, fanatics or idealists.

Business as unusual

The prevailing wisdom calls instead for a ‘decoupling’ of economic activity from material throughput. Since efficiency is one of the things that modern capitalist economies are good at, decoupling has a clear appeal as a solution to the dilemma of growth...

But efficiency improvements are continually offset by increases in scale. Global carbon emissions rose by 40 per cent even as the carbon intensity fell. We need to be decoupling much much faster...

Rethinking basic assumptions

In this context, simplistic assumptions about capitalism’s propensity for efficiency are nothing short of delusional. A much deeper re-examination is called for. A different kind of economics is needed. The balance between consumption and investment, the split between the public and the private sector spending, the nature of productivity improvements, the conditions of profitability: all of these are likely to be up for re-negotiation in the new economy...

Fixing the economy is only part of the problem. Addressing the social logic of consumerism is also vital. This task is far from simple – mainly because of the way in which material goods are so deeply implicated in the fabric of our lives. But change is essential. And some mandate for that change already exists. A latent disaffection with consumerism and rising concern over the ‘social recession’ have prompted grassroots initiatives to seek out ‘alternative hedonisms’ – sources of identity, creativity and meaning that lie outside the realm of the market.

For at the end of the day, prosperity goes beyond material pleasures. It transcends material concerns. It resides in the health and happiness of our families. It is present in the strength of our relationships and our trust in the community. It is evidenced by our satisfaction at work and our sense of shared meaning and purpose. It hangs on our potential to participate fully in the life of society.

Prosperity consists in our ability to flourish as human beings – within the ecological limits of a finite planet. The challenge for our society is to create the conditions under which this is possible. It is the most urgent task of our times.'

'Culture Of We' Buffers Genetic Tendency To Depression

Excerpt from Science Daily, 30 October 2009

'A genetic tendency to depression is much less likely to be realized in a culture centered on collectivist rather than individualistic values, according to a new Northwestern University study.

In other words, a genetic vulnerability to depression is much more likely to be realized in a Western culture than an East Asian culture that is more about we than me-me-me.

The study coming out of the growing field of cultural neuroscience takes a global look at mental health across social groups and nations.

Depression, research overwhelmingly shows, results from genes, environment and the interplay between the two. One of the most profound ways that people across cultural groups differ markedly, cultural psychology demonstrates, is in how they think of themselves...

Collectivist cultures may give individuals who are genetically susceptible to depression a tacit or explicit expectation of social support...

The study compared genetic frequency information and cultural value data across 29 countries (major European countries as well as South Africa, Eastern Europe, South Asia, East Asia and South America). The serotonin transporter gene (STG) that the researchers studied has two variants - a short allele and a long allele. In Western populations, the short allele leads to a phenotype of major depressive episodes when people who carry it experience multiple life stressors.

Previous research shows that nations in the East Asian region have a disproportionate number of short allele carriers, and the Northwestern researchers replicated that finding. They also replicated cultural psychology research demonstrating that nations within East Asia are typically more collectivist.

What surprised them was the robust association they found between the degree of collectiveness of a particular nation and the degree to which a disproportionate number of people carried the short allele of the STG. Collectivistic nations were found to have significantly more individuals who carry the short allele of the STG. Even more remarkably, they found, collectivistic nations, such as East Asia, where nearly 80 percent of the population is genetically susceptible to depression, the actual prevalence of depression is significantly lower than in individualistic nations, such as the United States and Western Europe.

This research strongly suggests that medical doctors need to work with basic scientists to better understand the complex dance that biology and culture play in both mitigating and causing mood disorders, such as depression...

These research findings suggest that culture-based treatments may be equally if not more effective at reducing the risk for depression. Medical doctors who embrace scientific findings of global health trends and human cultures may gain invaluable insights about how our genetic heritage and cultural environments affect human behavior...'

The Lava Project: Date-Stamping the Emerging Lithosphere

...love The Long Now! [the White Elephant Design Lab, hehehehehe!]

'Audience members at Arthur Ganson’s Seminar on September 14, 02009 were among the first viewers of The Lava Project Documentary, which premiered in our new Long Shorts series – short videos that explore, explain, or exemplify long-term thinking and responsibility.

The Lava Project Documentary was created by White Elephant DesignLab, a group of designers who explore natural phenomena and experiment with various materials and their external influences.

Earlier this year, the group created a piece at the Kilauea volcano on the Big Island of Hawaii that was inspired by our promotion of long-term thinking through use of the five-digit date. Using a “02009″ stamp made of hardwood and aluminum, they imprinted the congealing surface crust of Pāhoehoe lava in order to equip the emerging lithosphere with its date of origin...'

Go Home On Time Day - 25 November

An initiative of The Australia Institute, Go Home On Time Day encourages people to sign up and get a reminder on the day that they have a 'leave' pass to go home on time! [US readers might be interested in a similar initiative, Take Back Your Time].

GHOT Day is also a page on Facebook

'We can all find it tricky to leave the office or finish work on time. That’s why this November 25th is national Go Home on Time Day. It’s your opportunity to postpone all those “one last thing” tasks, emails and late meetings, and leave work on time for a change. What you do next is up to you!

The latest research from The Australia Institute finds that Australians work more than 2 billion hours of unpaid overtime every year! Around half of all employees work more hours than they are paid for. On average, a typical employee works 49 minutes of unpaid overtime per day. For full-time workers, the average daily amount of unpaid work takes more than one hour.

Overwork can have negative consequences for your physical and mental health, your relationships with loved ones and your sense of what is important in life.'

Living Building Challenge - A Growing Idea

Excerpt from GreenBiz, 22 October 2009

'...The Living Building Challenge is...a voluntary third-party program of sustainable building certification that was launched by Cascadia in 2006. Its creators see it as the next step beyond LEED and a precursor to the kind of regenerative design ultimately needed...

Rather than scoring credits, the program requires that simple prerequisites be met. Simple, in this case, does not mean easy. For a building to qualify it would have to be a zero-net energy and water user, and introduce no new toxins from an established “red list” into the environment.

Additionally, it could not be built on undeveloped land. In all there are 16 requirements for such a building and the list includes a category for “beauty and spirit” that includes “education and sharing." All the prerequisites are mandatory, criteria are performance based, and that performance must be actual and documented rather than projected.

The program's developers freely admit that the bar has been set higher than current practices achieve, and have identified the biggest roadblocks to its wider adoption: Building codes and upfront costs. In some places, for instance, it is illegal to recycle water on site for drinking, and controlling the cost of sustainable materials is subject to market pathways that are still maturing.

On the other hand, there is wide latitude for innovation because the rating is performance driven. There are many different ways to achieve the general goals, and the CGBC does not concern itself with dictating best practices, reasoning that rigorous results will ensure good methods...

Three years on, McClennan says the challenge has four built structures that are completing the required 12-month performance review period and about 60 projects that have declared their intention to apply. Cascadia is also about to launch a 2.0 version of the Challenge that will include landscape and infrastructure, renovation and neighborhood-scale criteria.

One of the...candidates for certification is the Phipps Conservatory in Pittsburg...

To reach their zero-net energy and water goals, the designers have resorted to a wide combination of techniques: passive heating and lighting design, building mass, geothermal heating and cooling, dessicant dehumidification, smart building management system, photovoltaics and solar hot water collectors, wind turbines, demand controlled ventilation, sustainable materials, green roof, native landscaping, rainwater harvesting and natural stormwater collection and treatment, and constructed wetland sanitary waste treatment.

These techniques embody some of the biomimetic concepts that I have written about in this column: substituting information for energy, in the case of demand controlled ventilation where CO2 levels from occupants trigger HVAC response and therefore prevent the heating of empty rooms; surfing for free, in the case of using geothermal, where the temperature gradient between the ground and air is used to both heat and cool the building; and substituting structure for energy, in the case of all the passive forms, from shading to trombe walls to filtration beds, that harvest light, heat or clean water without the use of power...

It remains to be seen if this will hold true for the next tier of applicants with more diverse missions, but the conventional wisdom that sustainable construction always has to cost more is being challenged with the clever ways that designers are saving money...

The importance of integrating building systems was also a shared critical component, and that integration seems, by necessity, to have been forced beyond the buildings' walls. In order to close the loop on water, for instance, one has to both capture it outside from the air and return it to the earth for filtering. Landscape architects and civil engineers were important members of these teams because of their expertise in these kinds of systems. Finally, because of this, the very forms of the buildings themselves were determined by the demands of this integration and the collaborative design process necessary to achieve it.

While some of the techniques used to achieve certification in the Challenge were clearly using biomimetic concepts, with a few exceptions, such as bio-filtration system design, most have come from a strictly engineering tradition. Nevertheless, the trend toward more bio-innovation is evident...'

Parahawking

From Mother Nature Network, October 2009

Himalayan Raptor Rescue offers special paragliding sessions that come complete with specially trained birds of prey companions.

Transition Towns or Bright Green Cities?

Both local and systemic approaches are needed, but some good points made in this piece...

Reposting in full from Worldchanging, 27 October 2009

'What can any of us do in the face of planetary catastrophe?

Staring into the ecological abyss, it's easy to feel small and unimportant. Edward Abbey wrote truly, "Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul." But it's often hard to see how any actions we might actually take, as individuals, will have any meaningful effect, whatsoever: leaving aside the pablum about small steps and each doing our part, we all know in our hearts that taking out the recycling will not do much to slow the melting of Greenland.

The best thing, the really hopeful thing, about the Transition Town movement is that it breaks the emotional isolation privatized responsibility inflicts on us, and makes us part of a group working together towards change.

1) What are Transition Towns?

Transition Towns are communities in which some citizens have gotten together to follow a twelve-step process to make their towns more resilient despite energy shortages, climate change or economic collapse. At its best, "Transition thinking" offers participants a chance to do something direct and hopeful while the storm clouds gather on the horizon.

That volatile emotional mix of fear and hope has made it the most rapidly growing dark green movement in the world. Since we first wrote about the transition towns almost four years ago, the movement has taken off, with people in perhaps as many as 250 towns now actively taking part.

Those people are mobilizing the solutions readily available to them, from farmers' markets to skills swaps. There's just no way to see it as anything other than terrific that people are coming together, recognizing the magnitude of the problems we face, and looking for paths to more resilient prosperity. (Further explorations of transition efforts can be found in the extremely interesting Transition Initiatives Primer [PDF] and in The Transition Handbook).

2) The Limits of Transition Town Approaches

Yet, ultimately, the Transition Town approach stifles its own potential impact.

The Transition movement seems saturated with what Michael Lerner called "surplus powerlessness" disguised as practicality. All over the world, groups of people with graduate degrees, affluence, decades of work experience, varieties of advanced training and technological capacities beyond the imagining of our great-grandparents are coming together, looking into the face of apocalypse... and deciding to start a seed exchange or a kids clothing swap.

Transition thinking seems obsessively focused on coordinating individual actions (like helping people barter their free time or connecting people who want to garden); even at its most ambitious, it generally focuses on building alternative systems (say, starting a local currency scheme) rather than reforming the larger systems that shape life all around us (say, starting an actual credit union or rewriting banking regulations).

Part of this is the legacy of the counter-culture out of which it emerged. Part of this is that Transition Towns aim to offer a way to step out of emotional paralysis by saying "just go ahead and do something, anything." Part of it is intentional: groups spread more rapidly when the demands placed on their members are minimal. However, the approach also betrays a far darker mindset.

3) The Dark Side of Transition Thinking

The movement's founder, Rob Hopkins, talks almost cheerfully about passing peak oil, widespread food shortages and the idea of globalization crashing suddenly. Jennifer Gray, the founder of Transition U.S. (the American wing of the movement) told a New York Times reporter that she expects “a big population die-off." Board member Richard Heinberg says that central governments will "have to self-destruct in favor of local autonomy" and that "overpopulation will eventually be solved by starvation and disease."

That sort of casual eagerness for the death of others is appalling. Worse, the strategy implicit in this vision of transitioning - that there can be local soft landings in the event of a global hard crash, that indeed the only proper scale at which to prepare for a soft landing is at the local level, and that perhaps collapse will solve some of our problems - is delusional.

Collapse is not a tool for social change. It's essentially impossible to look at history and find a case where large-scale collapse has lead to anything other than lots of destruction, hunger, disease, suffering and a decline into widespread violence and warlordism. If you want to see what happens when large numbers of urban people encounter situational collapse, look at what happened in Liberia. Anyone who thinks an energy descent plan prepared by a community group future-proofs them against people like Charles Taylor has simply taken a vacation from reality.

Local efforts can't protect against the violence of a systemic breakdown. The same thing is true of public health and epidemiology, of disaster response and trauma care, of famine protection and crop insurance, and so on and so on. To plan for the collapse of large-scale systems is to plan for widespread evil and suffering; ethical planning for the collapse is impossible: post-collapse idealism is oxymoronic.

Indeed, if anything, places that are by global standards rich and well-educated need to be preparing to be bulwarks of stability in a chaotic world, to be more deeply invested in making things work for everyone.

4) What We Need Instead: Bright Green Citizens

What we need is a movement of local efforts aimed at changing things that matter at scales that matter, based on the politics of optimism. The first step in those efforts is to stop seeing the systems we depend on as out of our control. They aren't, and that we're so convinced they are is a testament to the dedication of the powers that be to shoo us away from interfering in their profits.

Cynicism, boredom and fear are their tools. They reinforce, at every opportunity, the idea that government is broken, that civic engagement is for dupes, that real rebellion involves shutting up, making money and spending it. They craft public process to sap the will of the public to engage: as Richard White writes, bureaucracies use boredom the way a skunk uses smell. They make an effort to keep us in a state of constant economic and social anxiety undermining our willingness to connect with and trust each other. Whether these tools are used consciously or unconsciously is completely beside the point - you can apply whatever degree or lack of conspiracy theory you like: the effects are observable, and well-documented.

The great secret here is that we are more powerful than any of us usually admits. While it is true that organized greed beats unorganized democracy every time, it's also true that organized, educated, passionate democracy is the most powerful political force ever seen, and we live amidst an exploding proliferation of tools for organizing our communities, sharing our knowledge and connecting our passions.

What is more, we live in a time where transparency and collaborative insight give ad hoc groups the capacity to understand the vast, complex systems we depend on, but which the powers that be have cloaked in layers of exclusionary expertise, regulation and jargon. We are not only capable of understanding the systems around us, but of imagining and inventing their replacements, and mobilizing the constituency to make that happen.

5) Designing a Movement with a Future

Transition Town efforts are engineered, like almost all modern movements, but they're engineered to solve the wrong problems.

What would it take to design a movement that actually changed what needs to be changed? How can we design a networked movement that aims to forestall and undo catastrophe, by building bright green regions and sharing innovation?

Here are a few of the larger design challenges involved:

• Finding places where a system has been draped in complexity, and revealing it in clear, beautiful, interesting ways. How things work is of inherent interest to many people. How can we reveal the workings of the systems around them in ways that help them see the usefulness of change?
• Making public life exciting where boredom has dampened people's enthusiasm, if not simply driven them completely out of civic involvement. How can we simultaneously reject needless process in favor of quick, transparent and measured decisions and enliven participation? Being part of democracy ought to feel exciting, and invigorating: we should view every part of it that's boring with deep mistrust.
• Launching a counter-attack on pervasive cynicism and finding fresh ways to call it what it is: cynicism is obedience. The very origins of the word mean "like a dog." Stripping cynicism of its rebelliousness, making it looks as entirely whipped an attitude as it is, is a huge step towards reclaiming the public realm. Indeed, I think we need to deploy our full battery of humorists, satirists and artists on looking at what part of us makes us so ready to accept the idea that all is sham and we're beaten before we start.
• Reaching out to people have been made afraid of participation, and spreading enthusiasm and a delight in civic life. How can we make civic participation more welcoming, and jam the manufactured reactionary anger that conservatives use to gum up our public processes (through tea-bagging and astroturfing)?
• Reclaiming the media sphere by supporting local journalism that actually reveals, informs and educates. How can we develop means to support reporting, writing, filmmaking and public discussion that advances our understanding of what to do, leaving behind the tired debates of the last generation?
• Reinventing or replacing the kinds of civic institutions - the university departments, think tanks, research labs, planning agencies - that democracies need to make informed decisions, in the wake of 40 years of work by the right wing to either destroy these institutions or overwhelm them with new, better-funded ideologically-conservative versions.
• Diffusing innovation through our local businesses and industry groups. Unsustainable business is bad business, even in the fairly short run: sound economic strategy in times like ours is to get in the business of replacing the broken systems around us. How do we build local business cultures that support transformation as the opportunity it is?
• Above all else, reimagining the future. Since we can't build what we can't imagine, and visions of the future dominate our ability to understand the present, how can we embrace future-making tools to redefine the possible in our communities? Because the powers that be have one gigantic weakness: they offer us no future, none at all, and every time we shift the debate to be about where we're going, we win.

We don't yet know how to do all this, but we can iterate our way into it through experimentation, exploration and innovation, consciously practicing ally etiquette to link efforts across a spectrum of systems into a collaborative whole. Indeed, since the whole thing starts with vision, simply sharing our visions for what this looks like is a huge step in the right direction.

We don't need to wait for some mythical cultural awakening, either. There are more than enough of us, already. In most cities around the world, a fraction of one percent of the citizens getting energized and turning out - using new tools to learn together, coordinate strategy and exert public pressure - would feel like a tsunami of democracy and creative engagement.

And hidden allies can be found everywhere. Public life is full of people who want to see change, but need political cover. Change agents await activation in our government agencies, businesses, schools, political parties and media. If we can begin to engage the systems in which they've been quietly laboring at the systems level, we can expect unseen helpers in unexpected places.

It's time to make ourselves into the people who can do what's needed. To fight the powers that be, we need to see ourselves as the powers that will be, building the future we want.'

Sowing the Seeds of a Good Food Revolution

Image from Growing Power Inc

Excerpt from GreenBiz, 21 October 2009

'...Our nation is grappling with the daunting challenges of health care and global warming. Another change is coming as well. It's called the good food revolution.

By bringing locally grown, organic, nutritiously rich food to a table near you, the good food revolution can help us tackle these larger societal issues, and benefit us all.

We need a revolution in our food delivery system because the global $3.2 trillion processed-food industry is undermining our health and significantly contributing to our carbon footprint.

Let's take a quick look at how produce in Massachusetts makes it to our grocery store shelves. Quite likely it was picked in California's Central Valley, the mother of all breadbaskets. The produce journeyed across the country from the field to the wholesaler to a retailer and finally to your dinner table. Total travel time, about 12 to 14 days.

Have you ever wondered how much nutrition is left after that voyage? Not much. You're largely eating vacuous cellulose - even if you buy it from Whole Foods. This long journey also exposes it to multiple handlers and contaminants that create health scares - recalled meat, tomatoes, peanuts - that are regular features on the nightly news.

Have you ever wondered how many greenhouse-gas-emitting-food miles it took for that nutritionally leached meal to arrive on your plate? The answer is about 3,000 miles. Figure you eat produce from California every day. That means 365 days a year, your food travels 3,000 miles across the country, adding almost 1.1 million food miles to your personal carbon footprint. Ouch!

If this system seems unsustainable to you, it is. It would collapse if it were not for the tremendous state and federal subsidies that big agribusiness receives.

The impact of our industrial food system takes an even greater toll on poorer inner-city residents. Redlining in these districts doesn't just apply to the banking industry. It's as hard to get a mortgage in these neighborhoods as it is to get fresh produce. Often residents have to drive miles to get to a full-scale grocery store. This nutritional wasteland is particularly devastating on children.

The good news is that we can turn this around. Already, more privileged households are increasingly buying locally grown organic foods and getting the best nutrition possible. Ten million people will or have planted food gardens this year, including one on the White House lawn.

It's time to bring this revolution to the rest of America. We need to make this a choice that more of us will be able to make regardless of our socioeconomic status.

Organizations like Growing Power, which I founded and direct, are cutting health care costs and greenhouse gas emissions by promoting programs so people can grow organic, culturally appropriate food close to economically distressed urban populations. By engaging the local community, Growing Power produces $250,000 worth of organic food in a working-class neighborhood in Milwaukee's Northwest side - less than a half-mile from the city's largest public housing project. Local residents work and volunteer at the farm, creating a stronger, more economically viable and healthier community.

This revolution is taking place in Massachusetts, too. Organizations like the Marion Institute work with urban schools to bring nutritiously rich food to city neighborhoods in the state. For example, the institute recently helped build 17 raised vegetable beds at the Global Learning Charter Public School in New Bedford, providing children the opportunity to eat well, learn, and experience a bit of greenery on an otherwise wall-to-wall concrete campus.

The good food revolution cannot stop at farmers' markets or natural food stores in suburban or wealthier urban neighborhoods. For the revolution to be complete, people in poorer neighborhoods must have access to it, too.

Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power Inc., is an urban farmer based in Milwaukee who is transforming the cultivation, production, and delivery of healthy foods to underserved, urban populations. His post, which appeared in the Boston Globe, is reprinted here with permission...'

Green Cities California Unveils Best Practices Website

...urban form and design are paramount [see Ecocity Builders] - these decisions 'choice edit' a lot of other sustainability considerations

Excerpt from GreenBiz, 21 October 2009

'Green Cities California, the collaborative of 10 cities and counties acknowledged as sustainability leaders, launches a website today that's to serve as a resource for other communities striving to go green.

The website, www.GreenCitiesCalifornia.org, is designed as a repository of best practices and other tools for policymakers who are trying to improve the environmental performance of their locales.

"Certain cities have already blazed a trail (toward sustainability) and it would be so much easier if that information were available to others," said David Assmann, who is the deputy director of San Francisco's Department of Environment and a member of Green Cities California's steering committee.

"There are obstacles and issues you have to look at," he said.

"In virtually every area there are stumbling blocks, and the site enables everyone to learn from each other." The site addresses seven key areas identified by the United Nations Urban Environmental Accord: energy, waste reduction, urban design, urban nature, transportation, environmental health and water.

Say you're trying to develop a zero-waste policy for your town and you want to know what other local governments have done to wipe out waste, but you don't have a big budget for research or a lot of time to do it. The Green Cities California site summarizes zero-waste efforts in Oakland and San Jose - and provides 15 documents that can be used as templates as well as links to sites that can serve as models for your efforts.

Access to the site and downloads of its material are free. And though focused on California, the site is intended to be replicable and expandable, Assmann said.

The online resource currently has 50 best practices posted. The organization is working on the next 65, which will include some from out of state, he said.

Green Cities California was established in October 2007 with eight founding members. The group has since grown to 10 cities and counties: Berkeley, Los Angeles, Marin County, Pasadena, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Barbara and Santa Monica. Each member has adopted a sustainability plan, the U.N. Urban Environmental Accord and the U.S. Conference of Mayors Protection Agreement. Representatives work with their governing bodies to adopt the organization's Sustainability Accord, and each member city or county pays membership dues that range from $3,000 to $11,000 a year.

The group's best practices website was about a year in the making and in active development for six months, Assmann said. The Full Circle Fund, 11th Hour Project and Blackstone Ranch Institute provided funding and technical help for the project.Earlier initiatives by the group have saved their local governments more than a $1 million and have helped avoid millions of pounds of CO2 emissions...'

Australia's Food Waste Bill Tops A$5 Billion

Reposting in full from Warmer Bulletin e-news, 16 October 2009

'Australians are estimated to waste more than A$5 billion worth of food and drink every year - and that figure is predicted to rise.

ABC reports that from uneaten takeaway to fresh vegetables that never quite make it to a meal, the waste bill for Australia's largest city is hitting new highs.

Sydney wastes about A$1 billion worth of food per year, and about 60 per cent, or more than A$600 million worth, is fresh food, according to Professor Phillip O'Neill from the University of Western Sydney.

"We throw out about A$130 million of uneaten takeaways," he said. "The things that we actually cook, that's after the fresh food is brought into the house, the value of what we throw out in leftovers is about A$180 million.

"The reality is we are throwing out more than we are prepared to pay the farmers in the Sydney basin who grow it."

Professor O'Neill says he believes the waste is a product of good intentions to buy fresh food and cook it at home.

"I think by the end of the week our good intentions have been eroded by our busy lives, about the ease of a takeaway or an eat-out," he said.

The Australia Institute conducted a similar study analysing Australia's wasteful ways. Dr Richard Dennis says the latest research is consistent with that of 2005.

"We found across Australia that people wasted around A$5 billion a year in food," Dr Dennis said.

"All states exhibited a high degree of waste, relatively consistent, but we certainly found that the ACT was the biggest waster in the country per capita.

"That's because average incomes in the ACT are really quite high, so perhaps not surprisingly the more we earn, the more we waste."

Dr Dennis says he is not optimistic there have been behavioural changes in recent times that may cause people to be less wasteful.

"We hear a lot more about environmental sustainability these days. Governments talk about reduce, reuse and recycle," he said.

"There's a lot of reasons to expect that the numbers would have changed, but I guess I'm not terribly optimistic that they will have."

Professor Phillip O'Neill presented at the Feeding Sydney Conference on 24 September:

Sydney's food value chain: A discussion paper
A presentation to the Hawkesbury Foundation Conference

This one day interactive Conference focused on the issues associated with feeding a growing world population at a time when available agricultural land and water supplies are declining and there is increasing pressure regarding sustainability of farming systems.'

Executive Order Commits US Federal Agencies to Sustainability

Reposting in full from Warmer Bulletin e-news, 16 October 2009

Executive Order 13514, Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance

'Federal agencies must set 2020 greenhouse gas emissions reduction goals within 90 days and devise a string of plans to soften their environmental impacts, President Barack Obama has ordered.

Greenbiz.com reports that the Executive Order is intended to jumpstart a transition to a clean energy economy as climate change legislation moves through Congress, saving taxpayers a substantial amount of money in the process. The impact of the order promises to be huge, considering the Federal government's sheer size: It occupies nearly 500,000 buildings and operates more than 600,000 vehicles.

Another key component of the Executive Order - a green procurement policy to cover 95 per cent of new contracts and acquisitions - will also carry a lot of weight due to the government's mammoth buying power, which exceeds more than a half trillion dollars spent on goods and services annually.

"As the largest consumer of energy in the U.S. economy, the Federal government can and should lead by example when it comes to creating innovative ways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, increase energy efficiency, conserve water, reduce waste, and use environmentally-responsible products and technologies," President Obama said in a statement.

"This Executive Order builds on the momentum of the Recovery Act to help create a clean energy economy and demonstrates the Federal government's commitment, over and above what is already being done, to reducing emissions and saving money."

Other environmental targets in the order include a 30 per cent reduction in fleet gasoline use and 26 per cent boost in water efficiency, both by 2020, and a 50 per cent waste recycling and diversion rate by 2015. The 2030 net-zero-energy building requirement must also be implemented under the order.

In a move that echoes Walmart's Sustainability Index initiative, which will seek environmental impact data from the retailer's 100,000 suppliers, the Executive Order charges the General Services Administration with exploring the feasibility of tracking vendor greenhouse gas emissions.

Recommendations could include requiring vendors to register with a voluntary greenhouse gas emissions registry and disclose their efforts to reduce emissions. Preference or other incentives could be given for "products manufactured using processes that minimize greenhouse gas emissions."Each agency must appoint a senior sustainability officer from among senior management to be accountable for complying with the order. The Chair of the Council on Environment will report agency goals and results directly to the President.'

Future Generations Ombudsman & Rights for Nature

Excerpt from Identity Campaigning, 30 September 2009

'Hungary [has established] an Ombudsman for Future Generations, the first office of its kind. The independent but state-funded department, headed by a Parliamentary Commissioner, is made up of a team of scientists and lawyers responsible for holding to account the decisions and strategies of the Hungarian government, representing the voice of future generations in any decision. This is an extraordinarily creative legal step, and one that in one fell swoop has the potential to shift the mindset of a country, by making an explicit statement that the future matters....

Almost a year ago to the day, Ecuador became the first country to write rights for nature into the national constitution. This intervention works in a fairly similar way to the Hungarian concept, by allowing representation for an otherwise unrepresentable entity. Any Ecuadorian citizen now has the right to bring a lawsuit on behalf of nature. This is signficant for its practical implications of course; but again, what a statement, what a shift in mindset!...'

Climate Change: What’s Suicide Got to Do With It?

More nitwittery from the American right...

Reposting in full from Worldwatch Institute blog 'Dateline: Copenhagen, 22 October 2009

'Predictably, the growing debate about the connections of population growth to climate change is growing ugly. The ever-provocative US radio commentator Rush Limbaugh has publicly suggested that New York Times reporter Andrew Revkin take his own life to help out the environment.

Revkin had floated the idea of carbon credits for one-child families as “purely a thought experiment, not a proposal.” (Elena Marszalek of Worldwatch helped spread the idea by immediately blogging about it, an assist Revkin duly credited.) It could hardly be anything but a thought experiment, given that no country on earth has come close to instituting carbon credits of any kind for families or individuals. And for reasons that Limbaugh’s tasteless suggestion helps clarify, no government negotiator headed for the Copenhagen climate conference will touch population with a pole the length of a wind turbine rotor blade. The whole idea that human numbers have anything to do with the world’s climate change dilemma remains too prone to Limbaugh’s level of discourse for most of the over-stressed climate-change negotiating community even to contemplate.

Which is exactly why Revkin performed a public service in putting out the idea of carbon credits for small families - non-starter though it is. The public interest in the population connection to climate change is growing fast, and for understandable reasons. Obviously human beings, and no natural or non-human phenomenon, are responsible for the dramatic rise in the concentration of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution began. And just as obviously, the fact human population has grown well into the billions since then has a lot to do with the magnitude of the subsequent buildup of these gases. This is worth discussing, and was touched upon in State of the World 2009, but the conversation still has a long way to go before most climate negotiators and policymakers take it seriously. If Revkin can stand a call for his suicide, the rest of us can welcome more people thinking about the obviousness of the human and population connections to environmental degradation.

Revkin’s non-proposal is likely to be irrelevant anyway, once the world grapples seriously with climate change. The cost of living will probably rise as we phase out carbon-based energy, and even more so if we don’t—and we’ll suffer the climatic consequences as well. Modern parents respond to tough times by seeking to postpone childbearing. They’ll get plenty of economic incentives from life to want just one or maybe two children. What they’ll need—as Revkin recognizes - is good family planning services to make sure pregnancy happens only when a child is wanted.

If Limbaugh weren’t so hungry for attention of any kind, he’d concede that none of this has anything to do with suicide.'

Protecting Ourselves from a 4 Degree World

Excerpt from The Guardian, 22 October 2009

'The British government today raised the political stakes on climate change when it published a new map of the world that details the likely effects of a failure to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

The map shows the impact of an average 4C rise in global temperature, which John Beddington, the government's chief scientist, said would be "disastrous". A study by the Met Office last month said that such a 4C rise could come as soon as 2060 without urgent and serious action to reduce emissions.

The map was launched to coincide with the London Science Museum's new Prove it climate change exhibition by David Miliband, foreign secretary and his brother Ed Miliband, energy and climate change secretary. It comes in advance of key political talks on climate change in December in Copenhagen, where British officials will push for a new global deal to curb emissions....

The map's release marks a significant shift in political discourse on climate change, with many politicians until recently unwilling to discuss the possibility of a failure to hit the 2C target.
David Miliband warned today that the Copenhagen talks were "the most complicated international negotiations ever attempted". He predicted that unless climate change was slowed there would be "high pressure" on water and food shortages...

Ed Miliband said: "Britain's scientists have helped to illustrate the catastrophic effects that will result if the world fails to limit the global temperature rise to 2C. With less than 50 days left before agreement must be reached, the UK is going all out the persuade the world of its need to raise its ambitions so we get a deal that protects us from a 4C world."

The map, produced by the Met Office Hadley Centre, is based on temperatures between 2060 and 2100 if current rates of climate change are not slowed. It shows that the rise will not evenly be spread across the globe, with temperature rises much larger than 4C in high latitudes such as the Arctic. Because the sea warms more slowly, average land temperature will increase by 5.5C, which scientists said would shrink agricultural yields for all major cereal crops on all major regions of production.

A 4C world would also have a major impact on water availability, with supplies limited to an extra billion people by 2080. It could also be very bad news for the Amazon, with some computer models predicting severe drying and subsequent die-back. One of the biggest, more subtle, effects could be on the way the world's oceans and ecosystems absorb carbon. About half of our carbon emissions are currently soaked up in this way, which helps put the brake on global warming. In a 4C world, scientists say the amount of emissions re-absorbed in this way could shrink to just 30%.'

Carbon Reductionism & Canine Conundrums

Excerpt from Planet Ark, 23 October 2009

'They're faithful, friendly and furry - but under their harmless, fluffy exteriors, dogs and cats, the world's most popular house pets, use up more energy resources in a year than driving a car, a new book says.

In their book "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living," New Zealand-based architects Robert and Brenda Vale say keeping a medium-sized dog has the same ecological impact as driving 10,000 km (6,213 miles) a year in a 4.6 liter Land Cruiser...

Calculating that the modern Fido chows through about 164 kg of meat and 95 kg of cereals a year, the Vales estimated the ecological footprint of cats and dogs, based on the amount of land needed to grow common brands of pet food...constructing and driving the jeep for a year requires 0.41 hectares of land, while growing and manufacturing a dog's food takes about 0.84 ha - or 1.1 ha in the case of a large dog such as a German shepherd. Meat-eating swells the eco-footprint of canines, and felines are not that much better, the Vales found...'

*************************************************

Every single activity has an impact - it is important to know what those impacts are to enable us to make good decisions, but the carbon cost-benefit analysis that only counts carbon is as myopic as a conventional cost-benefit analysis that only counts dollars.

A world without dogs? Those critters that lower blood pressure, provide security, love and companionship and serve human beings in a myriad of ways from customs, to police work to people with a disability?

Is this where we are heading? A world of constant trade offs and eco-martyrdom?

Do dogs have a right to exist like wild species? If we are going to do this by ranking how 'bad' a carbon impact is, how about we cull elephants instead? After all, what use are they? [devil's advocate, all species have intrinsic worth and the right to exist].

And what - as a dog lover, who has always had a dog in my life and knows the joy they bring - of my own eco-hypocrisy? What about people who love cars and not dogs?

Carbon reductionism is not the most sensible approach, but if people insist on it, why can't we get rid of 'boomerang trade' [exporting and importing like goods] first before doing away with dogs?

• '5,000 tonnes of toilet paper from the UK to Germany, but then the UK imports over 4,000 tonnes back again from Germany
  


• 22,000 tonnes of potatoes imported from Egypt to UK and then the UK exports 27,000 tonnes back to Egypt
  


• 4,400 tonnes of ice cream gets exported from the UK to Italy, and 4,200 tonnes is then imported back
  


• 116 tonnes of ‘sweet biscuits, waffles and wafers, gingerbread and the like’ comes into the UK, rumbling past 106 tonnes headed in the opposite direction
  


• Ships, lorries and planes wastefully carrying often identical goods from city to city across the globe and back again...'

The Vales point out:

"Once you see where (cats and dogs) fit in your overall balance of things - you might decide to have the cat but not also to have the two cars and the three bathrooms and be a meat eater yourself.'

Exactly - so how is the overall impact reduced? How many people will use their 'carbon savings' ['I don't eat meat'/'I don't fly'/'I'm not having kids'] to 'spend' on other consumption ['...then I can fly'/'then I will eat that steak'/'then I will have two dogs']?

I have seen some mind boggling comments on this issue in recent times - from a post in response to an online article in which a woman said she would not be giving up eating red meat so people in the third world could 'continue to breed', to the idiocy articulated by right wing commentator Rush Limbaugh today, in which he suggested a journalist who is expressing concerns about population growth and climate change commit suicide as his contribution!

Carbon reductionism and blame games are not the best approach.

We need to think much more robustly, beyond carbon, and how we can envision quality of life within ecological limits - but while we are arguing about this and figuring it out, could we please start with designing out wastefulness and existing nonsensical activity like boomerang trade and the hideous waste of food?

Maggie: "...but I don't even eat potatoes..."

The Wealth of Africa - Securing Human Well Being in an Ecologically Constrained World

image from Vita [Ireland]

“Development that ignores the limits of our natural resources ultimately ends up imposing disproportionate costs on the most vulnerable.”

Mathis Wackernagel, Ph.D., President Global Footprint Network

Global Footprint Network [GFN] has just released the Africa Factbook 2009, which charts Africa’s Footprint & human development trends:

www.footprintnetwork.org/images/uploads/AfricaFactbook_2009.pdf [15 MB]

"Many low-income countries have an abundance of natural resources, yet their populations often suffer first and most tragically when humanity’s demand on nature exceeds what nature can renewably provide...[we need to] focus on how to advance human development that works with, rather than against, the Earths ecological budget constraints."

GFN are also hosting a free Webinar, 'The Wealth of Africa: Securing Human Well-being in an Ecologically Constrained World', Tuesday Nov. 10th at 14:15 GMT. The Webinar, moderated by Global Footprint Network President, Dr. Wackernagel, will feature renowned panelists including representatives of the African Development Bank, UNIDO, OECD and Kofi Annan's African Progress Panel. Participation is free.

There will also be an event in Siena in June 2010 focusing on bringing these two storylines together: quality of life for all [ending extreme poverty, the humanitarian question] within the means of nature [the ecological limits question], The Opportunity of Limits.

Time Isn't What It Used to Be - Book Review

Excerpt from review of Eva Hoffman's book 'Time', New Scientist, October 2009

'Time is not what it used to be. Once a flowing river whose current we passively monitored, time is now more properly understood as something constructed by the brain and personalised by culture. We have relationships with time; we fight it and manipulate it.

Into this arena steps Eva Hoffman with her poetically scientific and austerely titled Time. Hoffman is on an exploration to become intimate with time, motivated by her sense that our interaction with time has changed.

Our societies have become obsessed with time and timekeeping, both in the workplace and at home. Jet travel manipulates our experience of day-night cycles and seasons, while biomedical science races to increase our lifespan yet further. At the other end of the spectrum, new technologies adapt our minds to the ever-briefer scales of micro and nano.

Hoffman covers a lot of ground, from physics (why time flows in only one direction) to biology (the circadian rhythm and sleep) to neuroscience (how temporality is constructed by the brain). She addresses questions of time and consciousness, including the uniquely human ability to envision large vistas of past or future.

Perceived time is illuminated by disease states such as Alzheimer's disease or Korsakoff's syndrome, in which one's time narrative becomes disorganised, and by fantasies and dreams, in which the unconscious brain does not necessarily commit to a temporal narrative at all.

Hoffman also investigates individual differences in how people treat time (those who leave parties early versus those who have to be shooed out at the end) as well as cultural differences (communities in which haste amounts to a breach of ethics, for instance).

A recurring theme is that the human capacity to manipulate our environment ushers in new complexities to the basic biology of time. For example, while other animals age and die on a strict schedule, humans do everything in their power to control that timing. And the book is full of interesting thoughts: consider the different temporal experience of wild blueberry bushes, which live 13,000 years, and mayflies, which fulfil their earthly purpose in a lifespan of hours...

One gap in the book involves the perception of very short time scales - of less than a second - which neuroscientists refer to as time sensation: did he catch my glance at his name tag? Which event happened first, my footfall or the snapping twig? Sub-second time sensation is a fertile area in modern brain research, one that is unlocking fundamental mysteries about perception...

The book argues convincingly that our relationship with time is changing drastically, portending real consequences for our quality of life. These considerations lead Hoffman to state that our changing relationship with time amounts to a "paradigm shift comparable to the Copernican or Einsteinian revolutions"...

The author describes her childhood in Eastern Europe as slow-tempo, and one suspects that only an immigrant's eyes could so clearly detect the "American nervousness" with time: the way Americans squeeze time and fret about it in their "perpetually renewing newness". But she's not necessarily opposed to the American tempo. She acknowledges that the strict, efficient management of time has its merits - for example, knowing how much one's time is worth and asserting one's "temporal rights".'