...due to my absence, posting a bit late for the 40th anniversary of Earth Day, but better late than never!
Reposted in full from the Global Footprint Network newsletter, April 2010
'On April 22, 1970, the first observation of Earth Day took place, a massive series of gatherings, demonstrations and discussions across the U.S. that many credit as the birth of the modern environmental movement. An oil spill off the California coast was the event that triggered U.S. Senator Gaylord Nelson to launch Earth Day – but concerns about environmental health and the detrimental effects of industrialization were growing, over issues such as pesticide use, oil spills, poor air quality, pollution, loss of wilderness to development and declining biodiversity.
Heralded as a resounding success, the first Earth Day resulted in the implementation of a number of U.S. environmental policies, and the movement quickly went global.
Yet today, the environmental challenges we face dwarf those that touched off that first celebration. And the planet we honor on Earth Day is a far different place from that of just four decades ago.
World population has almost doubled, from 3.7 billion to 6.9 billion. The amount of land paved over to build houses, cities and roads has increased 75 percent, from 228 million global hectares to 400 million global hectares, according to Global Footprint Network’s 2009 National Footprint Accounts. The amount of productive forest land required for fuelwood, paper and timber products, has gone up 53 percent to close to 2 billion global hectares. The productive land and sea area we need for food – for fishing, crops and grazing our livestock – has increased 69 percent, to 5.6 billion global hectares.
But the most staggering increase is reflected in our carbon Footprint: the amount of productive land area that would be needed to absorb our carbon emissions. Since 1970, our total carbon Footprint has more than tripled, from 2.9 to 9 billion global hectares. Carbon has also gone from being a smaller part of humanity’s total Footprint than cropland, to outstripping every other area of demand by a significant margin.
The result of this ecological overspending is clear from the crises we are confronting now – most prominently climate change, but also biodiversity loss, deforestation, fisheries collapse, soil erosion and other problems. Earth has changed from a place where we could operate as if resources were limitless, to one in which resource constraints are becoming a pressing and increasingly decisive concern.
Growing Footprints on a Small Planet
In 1970, the world still had significant ecological reserves. Humanity used resources and produced carbon emissions at a rate that the planet’s ecosystems could keep up with. By the time Earth Day was 15 years old, however, humanity was in ecological overshoot: using resources and producing CO2 at a rate that exceeded what the Earth could regenerate and reabsorb.
Today, it would take the resources of 1.4 Earths to renewably produce all the resources we consume and absorb the carbon dioxide emissions we create. Global Footprint Network research shows that if we continue at the current rate, by the time we celebrate Earth Day’s 60th anniversary, we will require the resources of two Earths to sustainably meet human demands. Reaching this level of demand may well be impossible.
(Use our newly expanded personal calculator and determine your own Ecological Footprint.)
The good news is, we can change our trajectory.
Infrastructure, because of its long life, will play an especially important role in determining whether the sustainability challenge will be successfully met.
Just as the choices we made in 1970 still shape the way we live today, the energy, transportation, housing and manufacturing systems we build today will chart the course for our future.
If we invest in systems that can operate on a small Footprint, that do not have negative impacts on biocapacity, and that are flexible and resilient in the face of changing resource constraints, they will provide lasting benefits. If, on the other hand, we design infrastructure that is dependent on a high level of resource throughput, or that damages or depletes the ecological services that make its operation possible, any benefits gained will be at best short-lived.
Similarly, the way we manage agricultural, water and forestry systems will determine whether they will be able to provide an ongoing stream of renewable resources and carbon sequestration services.
In countries with rapidly expanding populations, education—especially of women— along with improved health care and access to family planning options, can help mitigate the contribution of population growth to local and global overshoot.
(Download our recent report: The Ecological Wealth of Nations: The Earth’s biocapacity as a new framework for international cooperation.)
Confronting the FutureThe first Earth Day showed that major public movements can have significant effects in shifting policies and values.
As we note its 40th anniversary, we have a choice. Do we continue with business as usual, careening toward critical limits not just in atmospheric carbon build-up, but in biodiversity, freshwater, fisheries, soil quality and other systems? Or do we begin the rethinking and retooling we need to change the arc of human demand, and bend it toward living within nature’s means?'
06 July 2010
From Greenwash to Whitewash
...more from 'the world's gone mad' files...
Reposted in full from The Age, 30 June 2010
'In a remote corner of the Peruvian Andes, men in paint-daubed overalls diligently coat a mountain summit with whitewash in an experimental bid to recuperate the country's melting glaciers.
It's a rather bizarre sight at 4756 metres above sea level.
The man behind the idea is not a glaciologist but an inventor, Eduardo Gold, who hopes to regrow a glacier with the right climatic conditions.
His non-governmental organisation, Glaciares de Peru, was one of 26 winners of the World Bank's ''100 Ideas to Save the Planet'' competition in November last year.
His plan is to paint a total of 70 hectares on three peaks in the Andean region of Ayacucho, in southern Peru.
The workers use jugs - rather than paintbrushes - to splash the whitewash onto loose rocks around the summit.
''A white surface reflects the sun's rays back through the atmosphere and into space. In doing so, it cools the area around it too,'' explains Mr Gold.
''In effect, it creates a micro-climate. So we can say that the cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat.''
The idea is based on the simple scientific principle that changing the albedo (a measure of how strongly an object reflects light) of a surface by whitening it means that it does not absorb so much heat and emit infra-red radiation which takes time to leave the earth's atmosphere and warms trapped greenhouse gases.'
05 July 2010
Imagining Ecocities
Reposted in full from Ecocity Builders newsletter, June 2010
'In many ways, cities are the main things we human beings build: the homes, offices, factories, schools, streets and parks gather there, as do the vast supply lines pumping in water, food, lumber, gasoline - and pumping out waste. And yet, the way cities are built, the logic of their internal functions and their connections with resources and natural environment are virtually ignored - they are not seen as potentially whole, living organisms. We can see houses as homes, and so it should be with cities, but even more so.
Yet even many conscientious environmentalists, reacting to the negative impacts of our present cities, fail to see the great creative, social, cultural, even spiritual good that cities can facilitate.
Perhaps most people give up on building the good city before they even consider it seriously because of the sheer scale of the task, perhaps because technology and "Progress" have failed to give us a secure, humane world and we have lost confidence in the idea that we can shape our own destiny. In any case, with the exception of war, there is no issue more important for the future of our species than making cities ecologically healthy.
The City Past And Present
Imagine yourself five hundred years ago standing on a hill overlooking town - almost any town, anywhere. In Europe you see a cluster of buildings two to five stories high: houses, apartments over stores, small handicrafts shops. There's a walled section in the middle of town and surmounting it all is the church or cathedral spire, a symbol of the community's heaven-oriented religious cosmology. Overlooking the Indian pueblo in the American Southwest there is again the clustered pattern of mixed living and working habitats - this time revealing an earth-focused and seasons-conscious religious bent: kivas spotted around the communal dance floor, openings in the architecture facing south to receive - even celebrate - the warmth of the winter sun.
Now imagine looking over a good-sized present-day city or large town. There's almost no comprehensible form at all, save the tangle of streets and freeways we all know go somewhere and link some things (while also separating and dividing). The whole scattered amalgam is probably cast in a yellow-brown haze of auto emissions over which rise a few scattered, sometimes clustered tall buildings, most of them banks and insurance companies.
Towering above even the symbols of money and security, transmission antennas flash sci-fi red lights to ward off giant buzzing aluminum gnats full of jet powered people. The antennas, we all know, are beaming images directly into the houses sprinkled widely in almost random patches about the landscape. Therein people worship at the altar of diversion from nature and diversion from deeper confrontation with themselves. The altar, of course, is television, which constantly implores them in their isolation to make offerings to the giant companies, financed through the tall buildings (nobody else can afford television time). Looking over this town we again see the values and cosmology revealed in the city structure, or lack thereof, in this case.
For those few that are students of both ecology and city planning and design, standing on these fictitious hills viewing these cities reveals something way beyond, say, the benefits of solar energy, or the value of scrupulous recycling. The lessons run deeper than the significance of life- styles based on minimizing consumption and maximizing conservation. What comes to the mind of the urban ecologist looks more like this:
Lesson #1. The city must gather people for some worthwhile reasons or it would not persevere these hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Lesson #2. But the shape of the city looks connected in some way to the disastrous condition of the air, farm lands, nature in the modern city; that is, flat and sprawled seems to be a problem.
Lesson #3. If we can build cities with millions of acres of concrete and asphalt, 100 story buildings, giant metallic insects and mysterious remote control communications, then we can build anything - even a healthy, exciting, vital future replete with cities that serve both people and nature.
The City Future
Walk back up that imaginary hill again and try to picture a city that selects the best of what we have learned from science and art, a city that regains consciousness of place and conscience toward nature.
Each city according to its location and climate is unique, but many patterns are similar to each other and similar to the older towns we looked down upon earlier in this article. In radically de-emphasizing the automobile and bringing together again a cluster of many different functions - urban planners call it "mixed uses" - the city begins again to take on a more comprehensible form, more three-dimensional than the sprawled flat city. The gigantic megalopolises have broken up into smaller cities linked by speedy public transit, though far more people work and live in the same town rather than commute from one to another. Where the giant city used to cover the countryside like a one- story thick carpet with a few areas of tall buildings, now nature and agriculture has crept back in and pushed the city into a spot pattern of development, rather than a sprawled two-dimensional or strip one-dimensional pattern.
Ernest Callenbach in ECOTOPIA portrays the San Francisco Bay Area megalopolis (which includes Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Richmond and dozens of smaller, physically contiguous towns) as breaking up into a necklace of separate towns linked by very high speed public transportation, each town with its own particular economy, products and character.
Something like our view from the hill top. If we zero in with binoculars we begin to see the details. We notice creeks and small rivers removed from their underground culverts, restored to their earlier state between the inhabited "spots" and running open through cities, their courses bounded by parks and orchards, gardens and playgrounds, foot and bicycle paths. The intimate human scale is everywhere in evidence with great diversity of detail, but the human scale also includes tall buildings. But these buildings are radically different in form and environmental and social effect. The severe simple boxes of an earlier era are broken up with terraces and design features that permit the sun to warm in winter and prevent winds from becoming excessively difficult.
Most large buildings are mixed use, many apartments and condos, many work places. People live here. The kinds of places that need little natural light: theaters, photo labs, warehouses, etc., are located in the lower stories, lifting the downtown activities higher into the sun. The views are breathtaking. Occasional covered streets have the grandeur of cathedrals. Unlike their predecessors, the larger buildings of the ecocity's downtown, provide workplaces for non-commuters mainly. The hundreds of thousands who once poured into downtowns over billions of dollars of freeway in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cars, now quietly zip in and out by foot or bicycle from nearby, with a minority coming in by bus and rail. No car parking downtown except for emergency delivery and construction/maintenance vehicles.
The larger buildings sport multi-story solar greenhouses and rooftop gardens that compete with local private and communal gardens for food production and horticulture. Solar collectors and windmills glint and twinkle in the sun. The streets hum with human activity - rather than rumble and scream with mechanical noise. No air pollution or soot, and no deaths under rubber tires. Bridges link many buildings and make the rooftop cafes as lively as those below on the streets and along the water courses. Arcades, awnings and covered walkways make downtown streets negotiable in all kinds of weather. Transit shelters and posted schedules make easy work of bus, trolley and street car travel.
Night time is a great time to be outside moving about and socializing in the many lively spots - TV looks too passive and dull to these people who can barely believe that in 1983 the average American family watched more than seven hours a day. At night the sky is absent of pollution and almost all glare - stars are everywhere, astronomical observatories have begun to function properly again. In the day, song birds and hummingbirds fill the fragrant air of the "carfree zones" and neighborhoods.
In the lower-density areas that remain, streets are made narrower - almost no parking is needed since these neighborhoods are within bicycling distance of employment and walking distances from transit. The streets are generally narrowed from the north side so that gardens can be planted with minimal shading from the buildings on the south side of the street. South-facing houses frequently have retro-fitted greenhouses, north-facing ones are often peeking out from fruit trees - many of these homes have backyard greenhouses and vegetable gardens. Some streets in low density areas are removed entirely, replaced by foot paths and bicycle routes. The local "fruit and nut brigade" cares for, plants and harvests many of the street trees, making the city almost as productive as straight-forward conventional orchards, but here the distribution costs are exceptionally low.
Some lower density areas have also been transformed by the integral neighborhood idea, in which village scale arrangements function for most practical matters: workspaces approximately balance adult residential space, considerable food is produced, recycling approaches 100%, stores for everyday merchandise and handicrafts are on hand - and the rest of the city, its colleges, hospitals, movie houses, street theater, art galleries, larger employers and specialized markets are a short bicycle or transit ride away.
From the top of the hill, television and radio towers are less conspicuous. But knowing something of what goes on in town, we also know more about the quality and style of communication. Information storage and retrieval technology, once worshipped in the declining years of the industrial age, is now seen as a useful filing system in certain circumstances, but information per se isgiven no particular status. People have learned to select far more carefully the information that helps preserve and explore life. There is more discretion, less tolerance for irrelevant and degrading information and images. The whole society in deciding to build ecocities, made a commitment to bringing lifestyle into harmony with the biosphere - the process of making meaningful choices has rubbed off on everyone.
Ecocity Principles
The ecocity functions according to certain principles, which, if understood by many people, could begin influencing cities in positive directions immediately.
Small Scale - Highly Qualified
Equal population areas of Los Angeles and New York are radically different in physical size. Despite its large buildings, New York covers a much smaller amount of land, uses about 1/3 the energy per capita (despite its far more extreme weather), and has very few cars and much smaller square footage per person in asphalt and concrete streets, freeways, interchanges, parking structures, vehicles. The issue of optimum or maximum size of an ecocity has hardly been broached because most thinking on ecologically healthy alternative communities has focused on villages and small towns, while people contemplating future cities have generally not dared to believe they could be radically reformed.
The key question in issues of scale: what is the final cultural and ecological impact? If it is possible to have a high population, say one million people in a city or cluster of cities, and use considerably less resources than conventional small towns of the same population total, then that's not such a bad arrangement. But at whatever population, the scale of material consumption and waste should be much smaller than in today's cities and villages.
Paolo Soleri takes the idea of the small city to its paradoxical conclusion. This architect who is building Arcosanti in Arizona, is promoting the building of whole towns in a single structure or a tightly interlinked cluster of stylistically consistent tall buildings. In these structures, land area for human society would reach its absolute smallest with cities of 100,000 or 1,000,000 covering only tens or hundreds of acres, using almost no energy at all once built (save solar energy and human waste heat energy) and producing virtually no pollution - almost all wastes would be recycled as new resources. It would be very informative to learn how such a city would work - or why it would not, and in which ways. Unfortunately this smallest of all cities (and potentially largest of all buildings) is so enveloped in narrow criticism and so plagued with operational problems and lack of money at the one location it is being attempted, it's unlikely to be actually built within the decade or so. The price for a town-sized "arcology" as Paolo calls his ultra- compact cities, would be less than an aircraft carrier.
Access by Proximity
[This] is an important principle of ecological city building. If enough diversity is close enough, you don't need to travel a lot for life's basics: residence, job, school... The idea is to design maximum access right into the city structure. Mixed use zoning again, but the principle goes further than this. Proximity access policies could also include local hiring practices, renting apartments to people who don't own cars and who work nearby, making bank loans available in the neighborhoods from which the savings come (very often low income urban areas have accumulated savings in great excess of the loans made in those same areas, while suburban developers use those funds for anti- ecological construction). Another proximity policy: ordinances permitting increased residential construction in activity centers and prohibiting it in farther-out areas. Land trusts and public bond issues, as in Stockholm, could purchase structures in car-dependent areas and convert suburbia back to nature, agriculture, or ecologically stable villages.
Small Scale Recentralization
We hear a great deal about decentralization - but it has to be thought out well or it quickly falls into serious contradictions. Suburbia is perhaps the most decentralized form of human development behind scattered farms and ranches. But suburbia supports the most centralized establishments conceivable: giant automobile manufacturers and oil companies. The suburbanite sits decentralized in his or her little home watching a communications medium so big and centralized only a handful of companies in the whole country can afford to advertise (and decide what goes) on it. From the ecocity point of view, cities, towns and even villages should be recentralized physically and decentralized in terms of participation in community life and politics.
Diversity is Healthy
This is perhaps the largest, broadest principle of all. In cities, as in agriculture and most natural ecological areas, diversity is healthy. Some call diversity complexity and shy away from it in many aspects of life. Some are fatigued by life in today's cities and think it's because the environment is complex. but how complex is sitting in one position driving to work in a car hours each week, doing a repetitive job or conforming to dress codes and social expectations? It's far more complex to be deeply involved in your neighborhood or tending a large garden than doing most of the tiring things of life in the present city. With a closer look, the simple life isn't so simple either and the most complex activities of all are probably the choices people have to make about important moral issues. If we look toward ecology and evolution we see that the tendency toward complexity, toward environments and situations involving great diversity, are precisely those environments and situations that cause individuals and species to survive, grow and diversify. War is exactly the opposite: a convulsion that wipes the slate clean of its messy little details and leaves the ravaged place simplified. The implication of all this is that cities built with the mixed use notion are on the right track.'
'In many ways, cities are the main things we human beings build: the homes, offices, factories, schools, streets and parks gather there, as do the vast supply lines pumping in water, food, lumber, gasoline - and pumping out waste. And yet, the way cities are built, the logic of their internal functions and their connections with resources and natural environment are virtually ignored - they are not seen as potentially whole, living organisms. We can see houses as homes, and so it should be with cities, but even more so.
Yet even many conscientious environmentalists, reacting to the negative impacts of our present cities, fail to see the great creative, social, cultural, even spiritual good that cities can facilitate.
Perhaps most people give up on building the good city before they even consider it seriously because of the sheer scale of the task, perhaps because technology and "Progress" have failed to give us a secure, humane world and we have lost confidence in the idea that we can shape our own destiny. In any case, with the exception of war, there is no issue more important for the future of our species than making cities ecologically healthy.
The City Past And Present
Imagine yourself five hundred years ago standing on a hill overlooking town - almost any town, anywhere. In Europe you see a cluster of buildings two to five stories high: houses, apartments over stores, small handicrafts shops. There's a walled section in the middle of town and surmounting it all is the church or cathedral spire, a symbol of the community's heaven-oriented religious cosmology. Overlooking the Indian pueblo in the American Southwest there is again the clustered pattern of mixed living and working habitats - this time revealing an earth-focused and seasons-conscious religious bent: kivas spotted around the communal dance floor, openings in the architecture facing south to receive - even celebrate - the warmth of the winter sun.
Now imagine looking over a good-sized present-day city or large town. There's almost no comprehensible form at all, save the tangle of streets and freeways we all know go somewhere and link some things (while also separating and dividing). The whole scattered amalgam is probably cast in a yellow-brown haze of auto emissions over which rise a few scattered, sometimes clustered tall buildings, most of them banks and insurance companies.
Towering above even the symbols of money and security, transmission antennas flash sci-fi red lights to ward off giant buzzing aluminum gnats full of jet powered people. The antennas, we all know, are beaming images directly into the houses sprinkled widely in almost random patches about the landscape. Therein people worship at the altar of diversion from nature and diversion from deeper confrontation with themselves. The altar, of course, is television, which constantly implores them in their isolation to make offerings to the giant companies, financed through the tall buildings (nobody else can afford television time). Looking over this town we again see the values and cosmology revealed in the city structure, or lack thereof, in this case.
For those few that are students of both ecology and city planning and design, standing on these fictitious hills viewing these cities reveals something way beyond, say, the benefits of solar energy, or the value of scrupulous recycling. The lessons run deeper than the significance of life- styles based on minimizing consumption and maximizing conservation. What comes to the mind of the urban ecologist looks more like this:
Lesson #1. The city must gather people for some worthwhile reasons or it would not persevere these hundreds, even thousands, of years.
Lesson #2. But the shape of the city looks connected in some way to the disastrous condition of the air, farm lands, nature in the modern city; that is, flat and sprawled seems to be a problem.
Lesson #3. If we can build cities with millions of acres of concrete and asphalt, 100 story buildings, giant metallic insects and mysterious remote control communications, then we can build anything - even a healthy, exciting, vital future replete with cities that serve both people and nature.
The City Future
Walk back up that imaginary hill again and try to picture a city that selects the best of what we have learned from science and art, a city that regains consciousness of place and conscience toward nature.
Each city according to its location and climate is unique, but many patterns are similar to each other and similar to the older towns we looked down upon earlier in this article. In radically de-emphasizing the automobile and bringing together again a cluster of many different functions - urban planners call it "mixed uses" - the city begins again to take on a more comprehensible form, more three-dimensional than the sprawled flat city. The gigantic megalopolises have broken up into smaller cities linked by speedy public transit, though far more people work and live in the same town rather than commute from one to another. Where the giant city used to cover the countryside like a one- story thick carpet with a few areas of tall buildings, now nature and agriculture has crept back in and pushed the city into a spot pattern of development, rather than a sprawled two-dimensional or strip one-dimensional pattern.
Ernest Callenbach in ECOTOPIA portrays the San Francisco Bay Area megalopolis (which includes Oakland, San Jose, Berkeley, Palo Alto, Richmond and dozens of smaller, physically contiguous towns) as breaking up into a necklace of separate towns linked by very high speed public transportation, each town with its own particular economy, products and character.
Something like our view from the hill top. If we zero in with binoculars we begin to see the details. We notice creeks and small rivers removed from their underground culverts, restored to their earlier state between the inhabited "spots" and running open through cities, their courses bounded by parks and orchards, gardens and playgrounds, foot and bicycle paths. The intimate human scale is everywhere in evidence with great diversity of detail, but the human scale also includes tall buildings. But these buildings are radically different in form and environmental and social effect. The severe simple boxes of an earlier era are broken up with terraces and design features that permit the sun to warm in winter and prevent winds from becoming excessively difficult.
Most large buildings are mixed use, many apartments and condos, many work places. People live here. The kinds of places that need little natural light: theaters, photo labs, warehouses, etc., are located in the lower stories, lifting the downtown activities higher into the sun. The views are breathtaking. Occasional covered streets have the grandeur of cathedrals. Unlike their predecessors, the larger buildings of the ecocity's downtown, provide workplaces for non-commuters mainly. The hundreds of thousands who once poured into downtowns over billions of dollars of freeway in hundreds of billions of dollars worth of cars, now quietly zip in and out by foot or bicycle from nearby, with a minority coming in by bus and rail. No car parking downtown except for emergency delivery and construction/maintenance vehicles.
The larger buildings sport multi-story solar greenhouses and rooftop gardens that compete with local private and communal gardens for food production and horticulture. Solar collectors and windmills glint and twinkle in the sun. The streets hum with human activity - rather than rumble and scream with mechanical noise. No air pollution or soot, and no deaths under rubber tires. Bridges link many buildings and make the rooftop cafes as lively as those below on the streets and along the water courses. Arcades, awnings and covered walkways make downtown streets negotiable in all kinds of weather. Transit shelters and posted schedules make easy work of bus, trolley and street car travel.
Night time is a great time to be outside moving about and socializing in the many lively spots - TV looks too passive and dull to these people who can barely believe that in 1983 the average American family watched more than seven hours a day. At night the sky is absent of pollution and almost all glare - stars are everywhere, astronomical observatories have begun to function properly again. In the day, song birds and hummingbirds fill the fragrant air of the "carfree zones" and neighborhoods.
In the lower-density areas that remain, streets are made narrower - almost no parking is needed since these neighborhoods are within bicycling distance of employment and walking distances from transit. The streets are generally narrowed from the north side so that gardens can be planted with minimal shading from the buildings on the south side of the street. South-facing houses frequently have retro-fitted greenhouses, north-facing ones are often peeking out from fruit trees - many of these homes have backyard greenhouses and vegetable gardens. Some streets in low density areas are removed entirely, replaced by foot paths and bicycle routes. The local "fruit and nut brigade" cares for, plants and harvests many of the street trees, making the city almost as productive as straight-forward conventional orchards, but here the distribution costs are exceptionally low.
Some lower density areas have also been transformed by the integral neighborhood idea, in which village scale arrangements function for most practical matters: workspaces approximately balance adult residential space, considerable food is produced, recycling approaches 100%, stores for everyday merchandise and handicrafts are on hand - and the rest of the city, its colleges, hospitals, movie houses, street theater, art galleries, larger employers and specialized markets are a short bicycle or transit ride away.
From the top of the hill, television and radio towers are less conspicuous. But knowing something of what goes on in town, we also know more about the quality and style of communication. Information storage and retrieval technology, once worshipped in the declining years of the industrial age, is now seen as a useful filing system in certain circumstances, but information per se isgiven no particular status. People have learned to select far more carefully the information that helps preserve and explore life. There is more discretion, less tolerance for irrelevant and degrading information and images. The whole society in deciding to build ecocities, made a commitment to bringing lifestyle into harmony with the biosphere - the process of making meaningful choices has rubbed off on everyone.
Ecocity Principles
The ecocity functions according to certain principles, which, if understood by many people, could begin influencing cities in positive directions immediately.
Small Scale - Highly Qualified
Equal population areas of Los Angeles and New York are radically different in physical size. Despite its large buildings, New York covers a much smaller amount of land, uses about 1/3 the energy per capita (despite its far more extreme weather), and has very few cars and much smaller square footage per person in asphalt and concrete streets, freeways, interchanges, parking structures, vehicles. The issue of optimum or maximum size of an ecocity has hardly been broached because most thinking on ecologically healthy alternative communities has focused on villages and small towns, while people contemplating future cities have generally not dared to believe they could be radically reformed.
The key question in issues of scale: what is the final cultural and ecological impact? If it is possible to have a high population, say one million people in a city or cluster of cities, and use considerably less resources than conventional small towns of the same population total, then that's not such a bad arrangement. But at whatever population, the scale of material consumption and waste should be much smaller than in today's cities and villages.
Paolo Soleri takes the idea of the small city to its paradoxical conclusion. This architect who is building Arcosanti in Arizona, is promoting the building of whole towns in a single structure or a tightly interlinked cluster of stylistically consistent tall buildings. In these structures, land area for human society would reach its absolute smallest with cities of 100,000 or 1,000,000 covering only tens or hundreds of acres, using almost no energy at all once built (save solar energy and human waste heat energy) and producing virtually no pollution - almost all wastes would be recycled as new resources. It would be very informative to learn how such a city would work - or why it would not, and in which ways. Unfortunately this smallest of all cities (and potentially largest of all buildings) is so enveloped in narrow criticism and so plagued with operational problems and lack of money at the one location it is being attempted, it's unlikely to be actually built within the decade or so. The price for a town-sized "arcology" as Paolo calls his ultra- compact cities, would be less than an aircraft carrier.
Access by Proximity
[This] is an important principle of ecological city building. If enough diversity is close enough, you don't need to travel a lot for life's basics: residence, job, school... The idea is to design maximum access right into the city structure. Mixed use zoning again, but the principle goes further than this. Proximity access policies could also include local hiring practices, renting apartments to people who don't own cars and who work nearby, making bank loans available in the neighborhoods from which the savings come (very often low income urban areas have accumulated savings in great excess of the loans made in those same areas, while suburban developers use those funds for anti- ecological construction). Another proximity policy: ordinances permitting increased residential construction in activity centers and prohibiting it in farther-out areas. Land trusts and public bond issues, as in Stockholm, could purchase structures in car-dependent areas and convert suburbia back to nature, agriculture, or ecologically stable villages.
Small Scale Recentralization
We hear a great deal about decentralization - but it has to be thought out well or it quickly falls into serious contradictions. Suburbia is perhaps the most decentralized form of human development behind scattered farms and ranches. But suburbia supports the most centralized establishments conceivable: giant automobile manufacturers and oil companies. The suburbanite sits decentralized in his or her little home watching a communications medium so big and centralized only a handful of companies in the whole country can afford to advertise (and decide what goes) on it. From the ecocity point of view, cities, towns and even villages should be recentralized physically and decentralized in terms of participation in community life and politics.
Diversity is Healthy
This is perhaps the largest, broadest principle of all. In cities, as in agriculture and most natural ecological areas, diversity is healthy. Some call diversity complexity and shy away from it in many aspects of life. Some are fatigued by life in today's cities and think it's because the environment is complex. but how complex is sitting in one position driving to work in a car hours each week, doing a repetitive job or conforming to dress codes and social expectations? It's far more complex to be deeply involved in your neighborhood or tending a large garden than doing most of the tiring things of life in the present city. With a closer look, the simple life isn't so simple either and the most complex activities of all are probably the choices people have to make about important moral issues. If we look toward ecology and evolution we see that the tendency toward complexity, toward environments and situations involving great diversity, are precisely those environments and situations that cause individuals and species to survive, grow and diversify. War is exactly the opposite: a convulsion that wipes the slate clean of its messy little details and leaves the ravaged place simplified. The implication of all this is that cities built with the mixed use notion are on the right track.'
Love Food, Hate Waste Launches in Australia
Reposted in full from Warmer Bulletin e-news, 2 July 2010
'The Government of the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) has teamed up with retailer Woolworths, households, businesses and local councils to slash food waste - under a programme called Love Food Hate Waste, based on the original UK concept.
Council waste audits show that each year, NSW households generate 800,000 tonnes of food waste and businesses generate 300,000 tonnes. This means A$2.5 billion worth of food a year is thrown away or about A$1,000 a household.
Minister for Climate Change and the Environment, Frank Sartor, has launched Love Food Hate Waste - an internationally successful campaign to help thousands of households and businesses reduce growing amounts of food waste.
"Food waste makes up a massive 40 per cent of the total rubbish in our household bins; that is 315 kilograms a home," Mr Sartor said."It is a tragedy that we are wasting so much food - when others around the world are starving or struggling to buy the food needed to survive. There are also major consequences for the environment when we throw away food - it goes directly into landfill where it turns into methane - a gas 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide. There are simple things we can all do to waste less food, including buying only what we need, preparing and cooking correct amounts, and storing food items properly".
Love Food Hate Waste is a partnership programme based on a successful campaign in the United Kingdom which supports households to adopt simple and easy behaviours that work to reduce food waste.The three year campaign includes an awareness program and a partnership with business to help change behaviours. Woolworths is involved because it has more than 20 million consumers pass through its stores each week in Australia.
The NSW Government is also partnering with the Australian Food and Grocery Council and the Local Government and Shires Association.Under the programme business and households can access:
- a portion calculator to help them to decide on the best amounts of food to buy for their families to minimise waste
- tips on what to buy and when
- how best to store food
- tools and resources to help raise awareness and adopt new behaviours to better manage food
- nutritional recipes
- a dedicated website www.lovefoodhatewaste.nsw.gov.au
For every tonne of food waste prevented from going to landfill, 0.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide can be saved.
To better understand community knowledge, attitudes and behaviours about household food waste 1,200 NSW households were surveyed as part of the Food Waste Avoidance Benchmark Study 2009.The survey was delivered online in December 2009 and was completed by NSW residents, aged 16 and older, who were mainly or equally responsible for buying and managing food in their household.
The Food Waste Avoidance Benchmark Study 2009 represents the most comprehensive and up to date analysis of community knowledge, attitudes and behaviours conducted about food waste in NSW.Who wastes the most food?
While we all waste some food, the top three food wasting groups in NSW are young consumers (aged 18-24), higher income households (incomes more than $100,000 per year) and families with children. On average these groups waste $24.90-$26 worth of food per week.Young consumers are:
- more likely to feel that a busy lifestyle makes it hard to avoid wasting food
- more likely to throw away food that has passed its 'best before' date (regardless of quality)
- less likely to consider whether food will be eaten (at time of purchase)
- less likely to shop to a set budget
Households with incomes more than A$100,000 per year are:
- more likely to make extra just in case
- more likely to use leftover food for other meals
- less likely to have members of the household eat the same meal
- less likely to consider portion sizes when cooking
- more likely to do one large shop
- more likely to buy items on special and in bulk
- less likely to check 'best before' and 'use by' dates when shopping
- less likely to make meals from assorted ingredients that need using up
This Side of Paradise: Discovering Why the Human Mind Needs Nature
Excerpt from Ecocity Builders newsletter, May 2010
'...As awareness of humanity's relationship with the environment has increased in the past few decades - buoyed of late by the larger popular concern about climate change - so has empirical evidence for nature's psychological benefits. Back in 1865, Olmsted thought exposure to natural environments would prevent a "softening of the brain," "irascibility," and "melancholy." Nearly 150 years later, scientists now know that nature has a remarkable ability to restore attention, that it soothes aggression, and that it may even ease mild depression.
Reinvigorating the Brain through A.R.T.
The most significant understanding of nature's salutary effect on the human mind has come through studies of attention. The foundation of this work is the attention restoration theory, or A.R.T., set forth by APS Fellow Stephen Kaplan of the University of Michigan. The theory originated in the 1980s, says Kaplan, when he, APS Fellow Rachel Kaplan, and some of their students noticed that people had an astounding preference for scenes depicting natural environments. Kaplan and his collaborators soon discovered there was much more to nature than just a pretty face - they found that exposure to these scenes had a profound restorative effect on the brain's ability to focus.
The tenets of A.R.T were established in a 1995 paper by Kaplan. Briefly put, a person can engage in two types of attention: involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention is a rather effortless form of engagement with the world. Voluntary (or directed) attention, in contrast, requires a good deal of focus and energy - it plays a central role in problem solving, for instance - and is therefore susceptible to fatigue. Voluntary attention can be restored through sleep, but it can also be restored during waking hours when a person's involuntary attention becomes highly engaged, essentially giving direct attention a breather. Kaplan and his collaborators found that nature is especially conducive to our involuntary engagement.
Nature's ability to restore human attention has since been supported by a wide range of psychological studies. In a study coauthored by Kaplan and led by Marc Berman, for instance, the researchers compared the restorative effects of natural environments with those of the city (Berman, Jonides, & Kaplan, 2008). In one trial, 38 study participants were given the "backwards digit-span task" - an established test of voluntary attention. The participants then performed a task that fatigued their voluntary attention and were randomly assigned to walk through either downtown Ann Arbor or the city's arboretum, a substantial haven of trees and wide lawns. Afterwards, the participants took the backwards digit-span task again. Sure enough, the scores were significantly higher after the walks through the arboretum, as the researchers reported in Psychological Science."The way I think of it is that our ancestors evolved in a nature-filled environment," says Kaplan. "[Such places] should feel more comfortable, more relaxed, more like home. It's not a big leap between that and being more competent, less distracted."
In the January 2010 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Kaplan and Berman summarize 13 of the most influential A.R.T.-related papers (Kaplan & Berman, 2010). The findings (some of which will be discussed below in more detail) show nature’s impact on a wide variety of cognitive activity, from dampening road rage to boosting the spirits and attentional capacities of cancer patients. The authors also explain why nature does a better job restoring directed attention than another stimulus that might seem suited to distracting the mind: television.
Rather than lightening the load on direct attention, television actively captures it in an attempt to prevent the viewer from changing the channel (Mander, 1977). As a result, Kaplan and Berman report, researchers have found a direct correlation between the amount of time someone spends in front of the television and that person’s irritability. In the short-term, TV shows provide an escape from everyday trials, but over the long-term such escapism prevents the mind from engaging in much-needed reflection. “The fascination that seems to be important in the recovery of attention is nothing like what happens on television,” Kaplan says. “Since nature is not only fascinating in this soft and gentle way but is also pleasurable, that means you can more effectively think about things that are not comfortable.”
Positive Pockets of Green
A logical extension of attention restoration theory is that people deprived of nature will display behaviors caused by weary minds. Shortly after his influential paper on A.R.T. appeared in 1995, two of Kaplan’s disciples decided to test this conclusion. The hypothesis laid out by Frances Kuo and William Sullivan of the University of Illinois was a marvel of logic and sequence: If fatigued attention is related to irritability, and irritability leads to aggression, then perhaps people deprived of nature’s restorative qualities would be overly aggressive (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001).
Kuo and Sullivan tested their premise on 145 female residents of a public housing complex in urban Chicago. The complex provided natural control and study groups: Some residents lived in buildings that overlooked “pockets of green,” while others had a view of only bleak concrete. The researchers reported significantly lower levels of aggression and violence in residents with apartments near nature than in those who looked onto barren lands. When handling disputes with their partners, women in the nature group used fewer “psychologically aggressive conflict tactics” and fewer “mildly violent conflict tactics” than those whose randomly assigned housing unit was denied exposure to nature.
Aggressiveness has been linked to impulsivity, so it’s not surprising that in a contemporaneous study, Kuo, Sullivan, and Illinois colleague Andrea Taylor found a relationship between exposure to nature and self-control (Taylor, Kuo, & Sullivan, 2002). In studying 169 girls living in the same housing complex, the researchers found that those with greener views performed better than those deprived of nature on several tasks related to discipline. The former group scored higher on tests of concentration, inhibited impulsivity, and ability to delay gratification. “Those data are astounding,” says Kaplan of the series of public housing studies performed by Kuo and Sullivan. “That’s a miserable environment, and for [nature] to make a difference in it, that was awesome.” The findings on aggression and self-discipline appear to transfer out of the home and onto the road. In a 1998 paper, a group of Texas A&M researchers led by Russ Parsons compared the physiological responses of subjects who watched a video of driving through nature with those who watched a drive through more built-up environments (Parsons et al., 1998). Not only did the nature-road group display lower levels of stress, they also recovered more quickly from the stress they did experience.
A related study of road rage tested the ability of subjects to tolerate frustration in various roadside settings (Cackowski & Nasar, 2003). Subjects watched one of three driving videos — one with dense roadside vegetation, one with sparse roadside vegetation, and one mixed — then were asked to solve an unsolvable anagram. The task was designed to enhance frustration, and indeed, subjects whose road trip had taken them through dense vegetation worked on the aggravating task for roughly 90 seconds longer than those in the other groups.
Virtual Nature
The recognition of nature’s psychological value has informed broader discussions on public health and even inspired practical applications. Building on studies showing the psychosomatic benefits of green space, a U.K. research duo reported that populations living near natural environments had less income-related health inequality than groups living away from green space — prompting calls for greener infrastructure and community planning (Mitchell & Popham, 2008). The design of Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, an Oregon hospital rebuilt in 2008, was informed by a now-classic paper that appeared in Science in 1984: Researcher Roger Ulrich found that patients whose hospital window overlooked nature recorded shorter postoperative stays, required less potent pain medication, and evaluated their nurses more positively after gall bladder surgery than patients who looked onto a brick wall (Ulrich, 1984).
The heightened awareness of nature’s health benefits is tempered by threats to the environment posed by modernity — from the clearance of green space for buildings to the destruction caused by global climate change. To see how such changes might affect future well-being, several psychologists have begun to study whether technology can salvage some of nature’s healthful properties. Three researchers from the University of Washington, led by Peter Kahn Jr., review some of this work in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Kahn, Severson, & Ruckert, 2009). One of the outlined studies, led by Kahn, compared three types of nature interactions available in a modern office. Kahn and his coauthors conducted tests on three groups of 30: In one group, subjects sat near a glass window that overlooked a nature scene; in another, they viewed a similar scene on a high-definition plasma television; and in a third, they sat near an empty wall. The researchers measured heart-rates to gauge how quickly subjects in each setting recovered from stressors. Predictably, Kahn and his colleagues found the glass window to be significantly more restorative than the blank wall (Kahn et al., 2008). When the researchers compared the results of subjects in the plasma and blank wall groups, however, they found no significant differences in recovery to stress. This came as something of a surprise. In a previous field study involving Kahn and led by Batya Friedman, plasma screens depicting a natural scene were installed on walls in real-life offices, and workers asked about the experience over a 16-week period reported higher well-being, cognitive functioning, and connection to the environment.
When the two studies are considered together, “the plasma nature window appears better than no nature but not as good as actual nature,” Kahn and his coauthors concluded in Current Directions. Humans will “adapt to the loss of actual nature,” they continued, but in doing so they’ll suffer “psychological costs.” This conclusion was recently supported in a study led by F. Stephan Mayer, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College, on whether exposure to nature aided the ability to reflect on life’s troubles (Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecal, & Dolliver, 2009). Mayer and his colleagues asked subjects to consider a relatively minor problem in their lives, then split them into one of several groups. Over the course of three separate tests, some subjects reflected on their “loose end” while strolling through either natural or urban settings, and others did so while viewing videos of these settings.
The researchers concluded that exposure to nature increased a subject’s ability to resolve a minor personal problem, but that actual nature aided this resolution more than virtual nature.
“It’s not as if you can replace actual nature with virtual nature,” says Mayer, who interprets the results to mean that people have an innate kinship to the natural world. “At the same time, it does seem as if virtual nature can have benefits. Some of those benefits could be very useful, in terms of people who are hospitalized — if they’re not able to be outside, they could benefit from exposure to virtual nature.”
From Social Movement to Science
The type of work done by Mayer and Kahn falls at least partially under the umbrella of ecopsychology. Largely embraced by therapists, ecopsychology has been considered more of a social movement or worldview than a scientific discipline. But a so-called “second-generation” of ecopsychologists have emerged with a desire to ground the movement’s theories in an empirical foundation.
“As I see it, it seems as if ecopsychology had clinical aspects to it initially, maybe even to some extent a philosophical aspect,” says Mayer, who runs the Ecopsychology Research Project at Oberlin. “Then you have people coming out of a more social psychology tradition with a strong empirical basis, trying to take these general ideas and test them in a more systematic way.” This progression is apparent in a forthcoming book coedited by Kahn and Patricia Hasbach, a clinical therapist in Oregon. The volume’s title, Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species, was chosen as a deliberate announcement of ecopsychology’s empirical “re-visioning,” says Hasbach. “In sandwiching the word totems” — a reference to ecopsychology’s symbolic, experiential roots — “between science and technological species,” she says, “we’re embracing … the recognition of the place of science for furthering the field.”
Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Oregon, who co-teaches an ecotherapy class with Hasbach at Lewis & Clark University, seconds ecopsychology’s push to embrace empirical methods. Editor of the year-old, peer-reviewed journal, Ecopsychology, Doherty says his goal with the publication is to “move away from the stereotype” of ecopsychology being a non-scientific endeavor. In the lead editorial of the inaugural issue, he wrote that the new generation of ecopsychology “recognizes that tending data sets and tending souls are not mutually exclusive” (Doherty, 2009).
Doherty would like to see more controlled studies on ecotherapy’s efficacy. “I’m primarily a clinician,” he says, “but I can’t function without research.” To date, such studies have been limited. The most promising was released in 2007 by Mind, a mental health organization in England that commissioned researchers at the University of Essex to study the therapeutic influence of “green exercise” on people suffering from mild depression. The researchers found that activities like nature strolls and gardening projects benefited several aspects of well-being more than did exercise in a shopping mall (Mind, 2007). In other words, a walk in the park does a body good — just as Olmsted said...'
'...As awareness of humanity's relationship with the environment has increased in the past few decades - buoyed of late by the larger popular concern about climate change - so has empirical evidence for nature's psychological benefits. Back in 1865, Olmsted thought exposure to natural environments would prevent a "softening of the brain," "irascibility," and "melancholy." Nearly 150 years later, scientists now know that nature has a remarkable ability to restore attention, that it soothes aggression, and that it may even ease mild depression.
Reinvigorating the Brain through A.R.T.
The most significant understanding of nature's salutary effect on the human mind has come through studies of attention. The foundation of this work is the attention restoration theory, or A.R.T., set forth by APS Fellow Stephen Kaplan of the University of Michigan. The theory originated in the 1980s, says Kaplan, when he, APS Fellow Rachel Kaplan, and some of their students noticed that people had an astounding preference for scenes depicting natural environments. Kaplan and his collaborators soon discovered there was much more to nature than just a pretty face - they found that exposure to these scenes had a profound restorative effect on the brain's ability to focus.
The tenets of A.R.T were established in a 1995 paper by Kaplan. Briefly put, a person can engage in two types of attention: involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention is a rather effortless form of engagement with the world. Voluntary (or directed) attention, in contrast, requires a good deal of focus and energy - it plays a central role in problem solving, for instance - and is therefore susceptible to fatigue. Voluntary attention can be restored through sleep, but it can also be restored during waking hours when a person's involuntary attention becomes highly engaged, essentially giving direct attention a breather. Kaplan and his collaborators found that nature is especially conducive to our involuntary engagement.
Nature's ability to restore human attention has since been supported by a wide range of psychological studies. In a study coauthored by Kaplan and led by Marc Berman, for instance, the researchers compared the restorative effects of natural environments with those of the city (Berman, Jonides, & Kaplan, 2008). In one trial, 38 study participants were given the "backwards digit-span task" - an established test of voluntary attention. The participants then performed a task that fatigued their voluntary attention and were randomly assigned to walk through either downtown Ann Arbor or the city's arboretum, a substantial haven of trees and wide lawns. Afterwards, the participants took the backwards digit-span task again. Sure enough, the scores were significantly higher after the walks through the arboretum, as the researchers reported in Psychological Science."The way I think of it is that our ancestors evolved in a nature-filled environment," says Kaplan. "[Such places] should feel more comfortable, more relaxed, more like home. It's not a big leap between that and being more competent, less distracted."
In the January 2010 issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, Kaplan and Berman summarize 13 of the most influential A.R.T.-related papers (Kaplan & Berman, 2010). The findings (some of which will be discussed below in more detail) show nature’s impact on a wide variety of cognitive activity, from dampening road rage to boosting the spirits and attentional capacities of cancer patients. The authors also explain why nature does a better job restoring directed attention than another stimulus that might seem suited to distracting the mind: television.
Rather than lightening the load on direct attention, television actively captures it in an attempt to prevent the viewer from changing the channel (Mander, 1977). As a result, Kaplan and Berman report, researchers have found a direct correlation between the amount of time someone spends in front of the television and that person’s irritability. In the short-term, TV shows provide an escape from everyday trials, but over the long-term such escapism prevents the mind from engaging in much-needed reflection. “The fascination that seems to be important in the recovery of attention is nothing like what happens on television,” Kaplan says. “Since nature is not only fascinating in this soft and gentle way but is also pleasurable, that means you can more effectively think about things that are not comfortable.”
Positive Pockets of Green
A logical extension of attention restoration theory is that people deprived of nature will display behaviors caused by weary minds. Shortly after his influential paper on A.R.T. appeared in 1995, two of Kaplan’s disciples decided to test this conclusion. The hypothesis laid out by Frances Kuo and William Sullivan of the University of Illinois was a marvel of logic and sequence: If fatigued attention is related to irritability, and irritability leads to aggression, then perhaps people deprived of nature’s restorative qualities would be overly aggressive (Kuo & Sullivan, 2001).
Kuo and Sullivan tested their premise on 145 female residents of a public housing complex in urban Chicago. The complex provided natural control and study groups: Some residents lived in buildings that overlooked “pockets of green,” while others had a view of only bleak concrete. The researchers reported significantly lower levels of aggression and violence in residents with apartments near nature than in those who looked onto barren lands. When handling disputes with their partners, women in the nature group used fewer “psychologically aggressive conflict tactics” and fewer “mildly violent conflict tactics” than those whose randomly assigned housing unit was denied exposure to nature.
Aggressiveness has been linked to impulsivity, so it’s not surprising that in a contemporaneous study, Kuo, Sullivan, and Illinois colleague Andrea Taylor found a relationship between exposure to nature and self-control (Taylor, Kuo, & Sullivan, 2002). In studying 169 girls living in the same housing complex, the researchers found that those with greener views performed better than those deprived of nature on several tasks related to discipline. The former group scored higher on tests of concentration, inhibited impulsivity, and ability to delay gratification. “Those data are astounding,” says Kaplan of the series of public housing studies performed by Kuo and Sullivan. “That’s a miserable environment, and for [nature] to make a difference in it, that was awesome.” The findings on aggression and self-discipline appear to transfer out of the home and onto the road. In a 1998 paper, a group of Texas A&M researchers led by Russ Parsons compared the physiological responses of subjects who watched a video of driving through nature with those who watched a drive through more built-up environments (Parsons et al., 1998). Not only did the nature-road group display lower levels of stress, they also recovered more quickly from the stress they did experience.
A related study of road rage tested the ability of subjects to tolerate frustration in various roadside settings (Cackowski & Nasar, 2003). Subjects watched one of three driving videos — one with dense roadside vegetation, one with sparse roadside vegetation, and one mixed — then were asked to solve an unsolvable anagram. The task was designed to enhance frustration, and indeed, subjects whose road trip had taken them through dense vegetation worked on the aggravating task for roughly 90 seconds longer than those in the other groups.
Virtual Nature
The recognition of nature’s psychological value has informed broader discussions on public health and even inspired practical applications. Building on studies showing the psychosomatic benefits of green space, a U.K. research duo reported that populations living near natural environments had less income-related health inequality than groups living away from green space — prompting calls for greener infrastructure and community planning (Mitchell & Popham, 2008). The design of Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, an Oregon hospital rebuilt in 2008, was informed by a now-classic paper that appeared in Science in 1984: Researcher Roger Ulrich found that patients whose hospital window overlooked nature recorded shorter postoperative stays, required less potent pain medication, and evaluated their nurses more positively after gall bladder surgery than patients who looked onto a brick wall (Ulrich, 1984).
The heightened awareness of nature’s health benefits is tempered by threats to the environment posed by modernity — from the clearance of green space for buildings to the destruction caused by global climate change. To see how such changes might affect future well-being, several psychologists have begun to study whether technology can salvage some of nature’s healthful properties. Three researchers from the University of Washington, led by Peter Kahn Jr., review some of this work in Current Directions in Psychological Science (Kahn, Severson, & Ruckert, 2009). One of the outlined studies, led by Kahn, compared three types of nature interactions available in a modern office. Kahn and his coauthors conducted tests on three groups of 30: In one group, subjects sat near a glass window that overlooked a nature scene; in another, they viewed a similar scene on a high-definition plasma television; and in a third, they sat near an empty wall. The researchers measured heart-rates to gauge how quickly subjects in each setting recovered from stressors. Predictably, Kahn and his colleagues found the glass window to be significantly more restorative than the blank wall (Kahn et al., 2008). When the researchers compared the results of subjects in the plasma and blank wall groups, however, they found no significant differences in recovery to stress. This came as something of a surprise. In a previous field study involving Kahn and led by Batya Friedman, plasma screens depicting a natural scene were installed on walls in real-life offices, and workers asked about the experience over a 16-week period reported higher well-being, cognitive functioning, and connection to the environment.
When the two studies are considered together, “the plasma nature window appears better than no nature but not as good as actual nature,” Kahn and his coauthors concluded in Current Directions. Humans will “adapt to the loss of actual nature,” they continued, but in doing so they’ll suffer “psychological costs.” This conclusion was recently supported in a study led by F. Stephan Mayer, a professor of psychology at Oberlin College, on whether exposure to nature aided the ability to reflect on life’s troubles (Mayer, Frantz, Bruehlman-Senecal, & Dolliver, 2009). Mayer and his colleagues asked subjects to consider a relatively minor problem in their lives, then split them into one of several groups. Over the course of three separate tests, some subjects reflected on their “loose end” while strolling through either natural or urban settings, and others did so while viewing videos of these settings.
The researchers concluded that exposure to nature increased a subject’s ability to resolve a minor personal problem, but that actual nature aided this resolution more than virtual nature.
“It’s not as if you can replace actual nature with virtual nature,” says Mayer, who interprets the results to mean that people have an innate kinship to the natural world. “At the same time, it does seem as if virtual nature can have benefits. Some of those benefits could be very useful, in terms of people who are hospitalized — if they’re not able to be outside, they could benefit from exposure to virtual nature.”
From Social Movement to Science
The type of work done by Mayer and Kahn falls at least partially under the umbrella of ecopsychology. Largely embraced by therapists, ecopsychology has been considered more of a social movement or worldview than a scientific discipline. But a so-called “second-generation” of ecopsychologists have emerged with a desire to ground the movement’s theories in an empirical foundation.
“As I see it, it seems as if ecopsychology had clinical aspects to it initially, maybe even to some extent a philosophical aspect,” says Mayer, who runs the Ecopsychology Research Project at Oberlin. “Then you have people coming out of a more social psychology tradition with a strong empirical basis, trying to take these general ideas and test them in a more systematic way.” This progression is apparent in a forthcoming book coedited by Kahn and Patricia Hasbach, a clinical therapist in Oregon. The volume’s title, Ecopsychology: Science, Totems, and the Technological Species, was chosen as a deliberate announcement of ecopsychology’s empirical “re-visioning,” says Hasbach. “In sandwiching the word totems” — a reference to ecopsychology’s symbolic, experiential roots — “between science and technological species,” she says, “we’re embracing … the recognition of the place of science for furthering the field.”
Thomas Doherty, a clinical psychologist in Portland, Oregon, who co-teaches an ecotherapy class with Hasbach at Lewis & Clark University, seconds ecopsychology’s push to embrace empirical methods. Editor of the year-old, peer-reviewed journal, Ecopsychology, Doherty says his goal with the publication is to “move away from the stereotype” of ecopsychology being a non-scientific endeavor. In the lead editorial of the inaugural issue, he wrote that the new generation of ecopsychology “recognizes that tending data sets and tending souls are not mutually exclusive” (Doherty, 2009).
Doherty would like to see more controlled studies on ecotherapy’s efficacy. “I’m primarily a clinician,” he says, “but I can’t function without research.” To date, such studies have been limited. The most promising was released in 2007 by Mind, a mental health organization in England that commissioned researchers at the University of Essex to study the therapeutic influence of “green exercise” on people suffering from mild depression. The researchers found that activities like nature strolls and gardening projects benefited several aspects of well-being more than did exercise in a shopping mall (Mind, 2007). In other words, a walk in the park does a body good — just as Olmsted said...'
What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs
Excerpt from Ecocity Builders newsletter, May 2010
New Village Press and The Center for the Living City have teamed up to bring you the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, a collection of original essays by leading thinkers that honors the late Jane Jacobs. Here are fresh and timely ideas to springboard public dialog, community activism and celebration of what's local.
On the What We See website you'll find news of forums led by the book's contributing authors, guidelines for starting study circles or conducting informal neighborhood (Jane's) walks, plus ideas for block parties, mapping community assets, and many creative forms of community sharing.
Contributing Authors:
Janine Benyus, Hillary Brown, Robert Cowan, David Crombie, Pierre Desrochers, Samuli Leppälä, Matias Sendoa Echanove, Nan Ellin, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Jan Gehl, Arlene Goldbard, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Ken Greenberg, Nabeel Hamdi, Chester Hartman, Sanford (Sandy) Ikeda, Allan Jacobs, Daniel Kemmis, Jaime Lerner, Elizabeth Macdonald, Clare Cooper Marcus, Richard Register Mary Rowe, Janette Sadik-Khan, Saskia Sassen, Ron Shiffman, Robert Sirman, Rahul Srivastava, James Stockard, Ray Suarez, Deanne Taylor, Alexie M. Torres-Fleming, Susan Witt, Peter Zlonicky
Richard Register's essay for What We See entitled "Jane Jacobs Basics".
New Village Press and The Center for the Living City have teamed up to bring you the book What We See: Advancing the Observations of Jane Jacobs, a collection of original essays by leading thinkers that honors the late Jane Jacobs. Here are fresh and timely ideas to springboard public dialog, community activism and celebration of what's local.
On the What We See website you'll find news of forums led by the book's contributing authors, guidelines for starting study circles or conducting informal neighborhood (Jane's) walks, plus ideas for block parties, mapping community assets, and many creative forms of community sharing.
Contributing Authors:
Janine Benyus, Hillary Brown, Robert Cowan, David Crombie, Pierre Desrochers, Samuli Leppälä, Matias Sendoa Echanove, Nan Ellin, Mindy Thompson Fullilove, Jan Gehl, Arlene Goldbard, Roberta Brandes Gratz, Ken Greenberg, Nabeel Hamdi, Chester Hartman, Sanford (Sandy) Ikeda, Allan Jacobs, Daniel Kemmis, Jaime Lerner, Elizabeth Macdonald, Clare Cooper Marcus, Richard Register Mary Rowe, Janette Sadik-Khan, Saskia Sassen, Ron Shiffman, Robert Sirman, Rahul Srivastava, James Stockard, Ray Suarez, Deanne Taylor, Alexie M. Torres-Fleming, Susan Witt, Peter Zlonicky
Richard Register's essay for What We See entitled "Jane Jacobs Basics".
Ecocities: Setting the Standards
Reposted in full from GreenMoney Journal , Summer 2010
'Google the word "ecocity" and you'll get over a half million hits, ranging from "Ecocity Vehicles" to "Sex and the Ecocity." Ecocity is fast becoming a buzzword among urban greenies, both on- and offline. With climate change front and center in our public discourse, this sudden interest in urban planning and development comes as no surprise: Home to over half of the world's population on less than one percent of the earth's surface, cities consume over two-thirds of the world's energy and account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. There is growing consensus that the path to reversing climate change must lead through cities. In many ways, this is a welcome acknowledgment of the tremendous role urban design can and must play in changing our wasteful ways and reducing our global carbon footprint.
However, as with the terms "green" and "sustainable," the rising popularity and widespread use of "ecocity" has brought with it the need to define what it actually means and what it should be used for. Not unlike greenwashing, "ecocity" used as a feel-good word for any town with a bike lane or a recycling program can hurt the cause of building and reclaiming an integrated urban ecosystem more than it helps. At what point then, does a city graduate from boasting a collection of "eco-scores" to becoming an actual ecocity?
Fortunately, a lot of footwork (pun intended) has already been done in answering this question: from when Ecocity Builders President Richard Register first coining the term in 1979 to the current development of International Ecocity Standards, the ecocity model is a well-seasoned concept already being applied in cities around the world and is on its way to becoming a globally recognized metric. After twenty years of fine-tuning and eight international ecocity conferences, urban planners and governments worldwide are poised to submit their cities to an evaluation process comparable to the USGBC's LEED ratings system for buildings.
But let's back up just a bit... What is an Ecocity?
"Eco" is derived from "Oikos," the ancient Greek equivalent of a household or family, in which everyone works together to create a functioning unit. Similarly, eco cities are conditional upon a healthy relationship of a city's parts and functions rather than just a laundry list of random "green features." While there are single categories such as transportation, buildings or industries that play important roles in defining a city, ecocities' complex living systems interact three-dimensionally and in relatively close proximity, not unlike our human bodies. The key word here is proximity. If there is a single defining feature of a lean and functioning eco-city, it would be the ability of its residents to access basic goods and services by foot, bicycle or public transportation, preferably in that order. While a complete phase-out is not realistic at this point, the staggering environmental costs associated with the automobile (ranging from the extraction of raw materials to production, road building, disposal, petroleum depletion, and CO2 emissions) should keep driving at the very bottom of this inverted pyramid. Using the analogy of our human body, the automobile is like a 5000-calorie daily diet, a burden on the system that negatively impacts all other organs and our overall health; any serious attempt at establishing an ecocity must keep car-free, pedestrian designs at its core.
“Density done well” has been a description used by many municipalities who have been working on implementing ecocity principles into their city plan. Brent Toderian, Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver, Canada, also calls it “The Power of Nearness,” expressing a changing shift in perception about urban living. While a century of unimaginative urban planning has branded cities into our collective consciousness as drab and anonymous concrete jungles, a new generation of planners and architects are showing how rich and fulfilling city life can be when vital services and cultural offerings are within walking or biking distance. Think of it as a network of walkable urban villages, each one reflcting its own community’s needs and aesthetics, linked to each other and to a strong downtown by public transit, with room for urban agriculture, creek corridors and greenways.
Good for the Triple Bottom Line
In the past, a common obstacle for ecocity advocates was the conventional wisdom that anything less than direct automobile access would be bad for business. The mere suggestion of replacing a parking space with a sidewalk cafe would be enough to draw the ire of merchants and chambers of commerce. Over the last decade or so this perception has been changing drastically: With more and more cities embarking on pilot projects to close streets for traffic, businesses are seeing the benefits of car-free commerce.
For example, according to the SF Chronicle, the response to a recent daylong trial in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in which merchants could place extra tables and chairs in the parking space in front of their businesses was ecstatic. “People loved it,” said Hanna Suleiman, who owns Caffe Greco on Columbus near Vallejo Street. “There are a lot of merchants in North Beach who would like to see this happen. Having more sidewalk tables will bring more people to the neighborhood, make it even more lively,” he added. Down the street, Caffe Roma owner, Anthony Azzollini, chimed in: “My business was up 30 percent – talk about economic stimulus.” Across the bay in Berkeley, the city council has moved beyond trials and recently voted to endorse a downtown Eco-Plaza covering an entire city block between the UC campus and BART, the main metro station. After almost 20 years of planning processes backed by Ecocity Builders, the wheels are now set in motion to “daylight” native Strawberry Creek and create a pedestrian-oriented gathering space integrated with local businesses and major upcoming projects such as the Berkeley Art Museum. Councilmember Jesse Arreguin calls what could become one of the greenest corridors in the U.S. “a visionary proposal that will not only help revitalize our Downtown but will bring nature into the heart of our city and serve as a model for the region and the world.”
Instead of viewing integrated ecological design at odds with economic development, city planners worldwide are increasingly promoting urban density with a focus on community and people’s connection with nature as an automatic boost to small business and local commerce. From Freiburg, Germany to Tianjin, China to Curitiba, Brazil, this new urbanism combines the strengths of the market with the strengths of good planning and basic ecological and social principles. “We don’t let the market dictate our planning,” says Vancouver’s Toderian, a strategy that enables the city to pour money into the kind of projects that make urban living desirable, like public art and cultural facilities. What this means, of course, is not that the market is being ignored or rejected, but expanded from a one-dimensional entity based on short-term profits to a living breathing organism attuned to the triple bottom line.
With bold opportunities around sustainability, creativity and architectural risk taking, ecocities are positioned to shape policy and enact the needed structural change for transition into a post- carbon economy. With stakes this high, it is crucial then to have a comprehensive ratings system that is able to discern and reward cities’ progress toward becoming ecocities.
International Ecocity Standards
Imagine the USGBC’s LEED rating system (http://www.usgbc.org/) applied not only to buildings, but entire cities, integrating factors as diverse and complex as energy conservation, biodiversity restoration, and social justice. A set of standards and criteria so comprehensive that it would measure factors such as wealth and economic security of an entire urban area in accordance with the needs of all stakeholders, including the environment and the community; a rating system in sync with human values, rewarding collaboration and synergy as much if not more than competition. Enter the International Ecocity Standards (IES).
Currently being developed by Ecocity Builders and a host of partner organizations from around the world, IES will evaluate and judge new and existing cities’ progress towards becoming ecocities. Similar to LEED, it will rate urban development at various levels of attainment, from small neighborhoods to entire regions, using basic principles of ecologically healthy systems and designs. From ecocity mapping to human development, from urban fractals to building codes, IES measuring categories will be as integrative and multi-dimensional as the complex living systems it aims to evaluate.
For anyone familiar with the challenges of creating a fair, effective and universal ratings system for buildings, the idea of expanding the metrics to entire urban areas may at first appear daunting. However, as mentioned above, the reason for IES’ ambitious scope is that cities have the potential to become not just less damaging but “net contributors” to restoring global biodiversity, productive agriculture, and energy independence. By including larger structural indicators such as net energy and materials input/output, appropriate locations, and impact of external trade, IES will emphasize the foundation upon which an ecologically balanced and healthy city must be based.
Some countries and municipalities have already put into place initiatives that are good first steps toward creating more and better ecocities. Good examples are The Living Building Challenge (http://ilbi.org//the-standard/version-1-3), which gives certiification only after buildings have been performing for a year, One Planet Communities (http://www.oneplanetcommunities.org/), or Vancouver’s EcoDensity Initiative (http://www.vancouver-ecodensity.ca/). IES will also incorporate existing indicators of urban health established by the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI), including poverty rates, food and water security, infant mortality, longevity, and basic literacy. The United Nations has expressed interest in partnering with Ecocity Builders to integrate HDI with IES.
In order to meet the potential for truly transforming urban landscapes around the world, an internationally acknowledged, comprehensive, and binding set of standards is needed, and that is the aim of International Ecocity Standards. Ecocity Builders and associates have been laying the foundation for this transformation for over twenty years; with the upcoming 2020 Global Climate Leadership Forum in Salvador, Brazil and Gaining Ground Conference in Vancouver, Canada slated to integrate these groundbreaking standards into a streamlined track, 2010 promises to be a landmark year for the rise of true ecocities. The seeds have been planted; it is now time to water them.'
'Google the word "ecocity" and you'll get over a half million hits, ranging from "Ecocity Vehicles" to "Sex and the Ecocity." Ecocity is fast becoming a buzzword among urban greenies, both on- and offline. With climate change front and center in our public discourse, this sudden interest in urban planning and development comes as no surprise: Home to over half of the world's population on less than one percent of the earth's surface, cities consume over two-thirds of the world's energy and account for more than 70 percent of global CO2 emissions. There is growing consensus that the path to reversing climate change must lead through cities. In many ways, this is a welcome acknowledgment of the tremendous role urban design can and must play in changing our wasteful ways and reducing our global carbon footprint.
However, as with the terms "green" and "sustainable," the rising popularity and widespread use of "ecocity" has brought with it the need to define what it actually means and what it should be used for. Not unlike greenwashing, "ecocity" used as a feel-good word for any town with a bike lane or a recycling program can hurt the cause of building and reclaiming an integrated urban ecosystem more than it helps. At what point then, does a city graduate from boasting a collection of "eco-scores" to becoming an actual ecocity?
Fortunately, a lot of footwork (pun intended) has already been done in answering this question: from when Ecocity Builders President Richard Register first coining the term in 1979 to the current development of International Ecocity Standards, the ecocity model is a well-seasoned concept already being applied in cities around the world and is on its way to becoming a globally recognized metric. After twenty years of fine-tuning and eight international ecocity conferences, urban planners and governments worldwide are poised to submit their cities to an evaluation process comparable to the USGBC's LEED ratings system for buildings.
But let's back up just a bit... What is an Ecocity?
"Eco" is derived from "Oikos," the ancient Greek equivalent of a household or family, in which everyone works together to create a functioning unit. Similarly, eco cities are conditional upon a healthy relationship of a city's parts and functions rather than just a laundry list of random "green features." While there are single categories such as transportation, buildings or industries that play important roles in defining a city, ecocities' complex living systems interact three-dimensionally and in relatively close proximity, not unlike our human bodies. The key word here is proximity. If there is a single defining feature of a lean and functioning eco-city, it would be the ability of its residents to access basic goods and services by foot, bicycle or public transportation, preferably in that order. While a complete phase-out is not realistic at this point, the staggering environmental costs associated with the automobile (ranging from the extraction of raw materials to production, road building, disposal, petroleum depletion, and CO2 emissions) should keep driving at the very bottom of this inverted pyramid. Using the analogy of our human body, the automobile is like a 5000-calorie daily diet, a burden on the system that negatively impacts all other organs and our overall health; any serious attempt at establishing an ecocity must keep car-free, pedestrian designs at its core.
“Density done well” has been a description used by many municipalities who have been working on implementing ecocity principles into their city plan. Brent Toderian, Director of Planning for the City of Vancouver, Canada, also calls it “The Power of Nearness,” expressing a changing shift in perception about urban living. While a century of unimaginative urban planning has branded cities into our collective consciousness as drab and anonymous concrete jungles, a new generation of planners and architects are showing how rich and fulfilling city life can be when vital services and cultural offerings are within walking or biking distance. Think of it as a network of walkable urban villages, each one reflcting its own community’s needs and aesthetics, linked to each other and to a strong downtown by public transit, with room for urban agriculture, creek corridors and greenways.
Good for the Triple Bottom Line
In the past, a common obstacle for ecocity advocates was the conventional wisdom that anything less than direct automobile access would be bad for business. The mere suggestion of replacing a parking space with a sidewalk cafe would be enough to draw the ire of merchants and chambers of commerce. Over the last decade or so this perception has been changing drastically: With more and more cities embarking on pilot projects to close streets for traffic, businesses are seeing the benefits of car-free commerce.
For example, according to the SF Chronicle, the response to a recent daylong trial in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood in which merchants could place extra tables and chairs in the parking space in front of their businesses was ecstatic. “People loved it,” said Hanna Suleiman, who owns Caffe Greco on Columbus near Vallejo Street. “There are a lot of merchants in North Beach who would like to see this happen. Having more sidewalk tables will bring more people to the neighborhood, make it even more lively,” he added. Down the street, Caffe Roma owner, Anthony Azzollini, chimed in: “My business was up 30 percent – talk about economic stimulus.” Across the bay in Berkeley, the city council has moved beyond trials and recently voted to endorse a downtown Eco-Plaza covering an entire city block between the UC campus and BART, the main metro station. After almost 20 years of planning processes backed by Ecocity Builders, the wheels are now set in motion to “daylight” native Strawberry Creek and create a pedestrian-oriented gathering space integrated with local businesses and major upcoming projects such as the Berkeley Art Museum. Councilmember Jesse Arreguin calls what could become one of the greenest corridors in the U.S. “a visionary proposal that will not only help revitalize our Downtown but will bring nature into the heart of our city and serve as a model for the region and the world.”
Instead of viewing integrated ecological design at odds with economic development, city planners worldwide are increasingly promoting urban density with a focus on community and people’s connection with nature as an automatic boost to small business and local commerce. From Freiburg, Germany to Tianjin, China to Curitiba, Brazil, this new urbanism combines the strengths of the market with the strengths of good planning and basic ecological and social principles. “We don’t let the market dictate our planning,” says Vancouver’s Toderian, a strategy that enables the city to pour money into the kind of projects that make urban living desirable, like public art and cultural facilities. What this means, of course, is not that the market is being ignored or rejected, but expanded from a one-dimensional entity based on short-term profits to a living breathing organism attuned to the triple bottom line.
With bold opportunities around sustainability, creativity and architectural risk taking, ecocities are positioned to shape policy and enact the needed structural change for transition into a post- carbon economy. With stakes this high, it is crucial then to have a comprehensive ratings system that is able to discern and reward cities’ progress toward becoming ecocities.
International Ecocity Standards
Imagine the USGBC’s LEED rating system (http://www.usgbc.org/) applied not only to buildings, but entire cities, integrating factors as diverse and complex as energy conservation, biodiversity restoration, and social justice. A set of standards and criteria so comprehensive that it would measure factors such as wealth and economic security of an entire urban area in accordance with the needs of all stakeholders, including the environment and the community; a rating system in sync with human values, rewarding collaboration and synergy as much if not more than competition. Enter the International Ecocity Standards (IES).
Currently being developed by Ecocity Builders and a host of partner organizations from around the world, IES will evaluate and judge new and existing cities’ progress towards becoming ecocities. Similar to LEED, it will rate urban development at various levels of attainment, from small neighborhoods to entire regions, using basic principles of ecologically healthy systems and designs. From ecocity mapping to human development, from urban fractals to building codes, IES measuring categories will be as integrative and multi-dimensional as the complex living systems it aims to evaluate.
For anyone familiar with the challenges of creating a fair, effective and universal ratings system for buildings, the idea of expanding the metrics to entire urban areas may at first appear daunting. However, as mentioned above, the reason for IES’ ambitious scope is that cities have the potential to become not just less damaging but “net contributors” to restoring global biodiversity, productive agriculture, and energy independence. By including larger structural indicators such as net energy and materials input/output, appropriate locations, and impact of external trade, IES will emphasize the foundation upon which an ecologically balanced and healthy city must be based.
Some countries and municipalities have already put into place initiatives that are good first steps toward creating more and better ecocities. Good examples are The Living Building Challenge (http://ilbi.org//the-standard/version-1-3), which gives certiification only after buildings have been performing for a year, One Planet Communities (http://www.oneplanetcommunities.org/), or Vancouver’s EcoDensity Initiative (http://www.vancouver-ecodensity.ca/). IES will also incorporate existing indicators of urban health established by the United Nations’ Human Development Index (HDI), including poverty rates, food and water security, infant mortality, longevity, and basic literacy. The United Nations has expressed interest in partnering with Ecocity Builders to integrate HDI with IES.
In order to meet the potential for truly transforming urban landscapes around the world, an internationally acknowledged, comprehensive, and binding set of standards is needed, and that is the aim of International Ecocity Standards. Ecocity Builders and associates have been laying the foundation for this transformation for over twenty years; with the upcoming 2020 Global Climate Leadership Forum in Salvador, Brazil and Gaining Ground Conference in Vancouver, Canada slated to integrate these groundbreaking standards into a streamlined track, 2010 promises to be a landmark year for the rise of true ecocities. The seeds have been planted; it is now time to water them.'
29 June 2010
Live Aid - 25 Years On
UPDATE 13/7/10: there are a heap of links, clips, photos and memories going up on the LIVE AID Facebook group wall, check out www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5881628521
A mighty lot of thanks to actor Stephen Fry and journalist/writer Neil McCormick of the UK Telegraph [who was actually at Wembley!] for helping to promote the Twitter/Band Aid single download campaign.
Stephen accepted our 'Tweet request' and sent out the campaign tweet to his Twitter followers - over 1.6 million people!
Despite Stephen and Neil's much-appreciated assistance with publicity, its true to say that the Twitter/download campaign did not 'catch fire' as much as we'd hoped in terms of becoming a trending topic. Whether something goes viral or not is unpredictable - but then, the Twitterverse trending topics are biased in that they reflect what is already out there in the mass media, so this little campaign did pretty well starting from one point, and being retweeted as often as it was.
Follow Stephen & Neil on Twitter:
www.twitter.com/stephenfry [@stephenfry]
www.twitter.com/neil_mccormick [@neil_mccormick]
And read Neil's reflections on Live Aid here:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/culture/neilmccormick/100044869/live-aid-wasnt-a-fantastic-concert-but-it-didnt-need-to-be/
'Live Aid worked because it was an urgent, emotive, simple, single-issue event aimed at achieving immediate, tangible results. It had an uncomplicated spirit of universal charity that corresponds with the ethos of popular music, and it was run with a haphazard, devil-may-care approach that tapped into rock’s favoured anti-establishment pose. Live Aid evoked a sense of manning the barricades, not preaching from a podium. Maybe (when you take away the sentimentality of nostalgic recollection) Live Aid really wasn’t such a great concert. But it didn’t need to be. It worked because it risked failure for a genuinely humanitarian cause, and people responded to that sense of risk.
I am proud to say I was there but in a sense everyone was there. It really was a pioneering moment, a revelation of the global village, presaging the connected world to come. Two billion people took part in Live Aid. It worked because we wanted it to.'
Live Aid's very innocence (contrast it with the rather contrived events that have grasped at emulating it since) is what makes it easy for today's cynics to attack yesterday's innocence - but it is also the reason so many people remember it with great nostalgia and affection as a seminal moment in music history.
Live Aid Twitter/Band Aid download campaigner Jenny Eden was also interviewed on BBC radio today, where the campaign was mentioned!
*************************************************************************************************
13 July 2010 marks the 25th anniversary of the cultural touchstone that was Live Aid.
Christmas in July?!
One idea to commemorate this date is to run a Twitter campaign to push #liveaid into Twitter's trending topics, and drive downloads of the 1984 single 'Do They Know Its Christmas?', which benefits the Band Aid Trust.
*************************************************************************************************
Message to LIVE AID Facebook group from John Kennedy - Trustee, Band Aid Trust, 29 June 2010
“It is certainly amusing to think that 25 years on in the middle of July there should be people buying the Band Aid single and trying to make a Christmas hit a hit in July! However as Trustees we can promise that the proceeds of the downloads will be very well spent.
Even now we get regular requests for funding from very deserving activities and whilst we have spent an awful lot of money over the years there are always great causes for any additional monies raised. Good Luck in your efforts.”
And from BDO (Band Aid Trust accountants)'s Joe Cannon, Senior Tax Manager / Corporate International Tax Services, 5 July 2010:
'The Band Aid Trust was registered as a British Charity in January 1985.
By July 1985, over $6 million had been spent on buying and transporting food, shelter, medical supplies, water equipment and other essential items to famine victims in Ethiopia and Sudan.
The Live Aid concerts on 13th July 1985 raised over $80 million world-wide, which was spent on programmes designed to address some of the underlying causes of hunger in the famine.
In total, Band Aid has raised in excess of $180 million.
In recent years the Charity has supported projects designed to make a lasting difference to the lives of people in and around Ethiopia. This includes:
- the construction of schools, hospitals, boreholes, wells, rain-water harvesting facilities and latrines
- food security, hygiene, sanitation, livelihood diversification and income generating activities
- training in-country for teachers, doctors and nurses
- assistance for those living with HIV/AIDS
- emergency interventions such as nutrition screening programmes
- seed and animal distribution
- procurement of emergency food aid to treat severely malnourished children and adults'
*************************************************************************************************
In July 2010, it will be the 25th anniversary of this landmark event, and hopefully there will be some reflection and remembering in the mainstream media.
Why should we care about Live Aid? Because remembering brings the spirit of the event into the present, and on building pressure for the change the world still needs - to ensure that a large part of humanity is not needlessly suffering.
What simple things can we do with social media to mark this milestone, to keep the issues it raised front of mind and help continue the work of Geldof and Ure's Band Aid Trust?
Twitter
Participate in the Twitter campaign to commemorate Live Aid - send out the following Tweet each day (or as often as you can) up until 13 July:
Mark the 25th anniversary of Live Aid by downloading the 1984 Band Aid single #liveaid http://bit.ly/aBbDQ4Ask for the tweet to be retweeted, and use the hashtag #liveaid
Can we get #liveaid to be a trending topic on Twitter, drive downloads and support the Band Aid Trust?
Download
Download the original 1984 Band Aid single 'Do They Know Its Christmas?' sometime between 1 and 13 July.
All royalties go to the Band Aid Trust, which continues to support relief from hunger and poverty in Africa (specifically, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Niger, Sudan, Uganda). Sir Bob Geldof and Midge Ure remain trustees.
At the time of the 20th anniversary in 2004, it was noted that almost 100% of downloads would go to the trust, so this is the ideal way to contribute:
'...unlike CD singles, there is no manufacture and delivery process so almost every penny goes to charity...The Band Aid Trust has been going since the original single was released, handing out $144m (£75m) to famine relief projects across Africa between January 1985 and November 2004...'
Can we get 'Do They Know Its Christmas?' back into the charts 25 years on - in July?!
Look, its not so crazy: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christmas_in_July
Facebook
Join LIVE AID on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5881628521
By building this group we contribute to keeping the memory of Live Aid alive - not only to remember the cracking good event that it was musically and the performers (some of whom are no longer with us), but in terms of the issues it was seeking to put onto the international agenda.
A swag of photos, clips and memories have been posted to the group, many from people who were at Wembley or JFK on the day, as audience members, crew, medics, media.
Can we double the number of members in the LIVE AID Facebook group?
Involve
There are a number of effective campaigns and groups you can get involved with who are working to end extreme poverty via programs of direct engagement, or advocacy and education (or both) - here are two:
Global Poverty Project
www.globalpovertyproject.com
The Global Poverty Project is a community education group that aims to increase awareness and action in regards to extreme poverty. Supporting the eight Millennium Development Goals set out in 2000, the project aims to raise awareness of extreme poverty and facilitate global action. They describe the project as “catalysing the movement to end extreme poverty.”
One (incorporating DATA: Debt, Aid, Trade for Africa)
www.one.org/international
ONE is a campaign and advocacy organisation with more than 2 million members committed to the fight against extreme poverty and preventable disease, particularly in Africa. We hold world leaders to account for the commitments they've made to fight extreme poverty, and we press for better development policies, more effective aid and trade reform.
Can you lend your voice, your skills, your time or your energy to these or similar organisations?
Remember
Tell someone who was too young to remember Live Aid what it was all about.
Reminisce with someone who does remember...
...and crank up the music of those who played on the day!
How will you remember?
*************************************************************************************************
Bob Geldof on the concert (reproduced in Live Aid DVD liner notes)
'Please remember this day all of your lives. It's important.
Remember the day you wanted to help.
Remember the bands and crews who did it. The professionals who made it an extraordinary technological feat.
Remember the dying who were allowed to live.
Remember the day *you* die, there is someone alive in Africa 'cos one day you watched a pop concert.
Remember your tears and your joy. Remember the love.
Remember that on that day for once in our bloody lives WE WON.
Remember the dying goes on, and remember so that as time passes you can tell others 'its possible, I know'.
What a day, what a lovely day.'
Bob Geldof, July 1985
Live Aid was twenty five years ago - 13 July 1985
And we still need to feed the world.
*************************************************************************************************
What was Live Aid?
Evolving from the 1984 charity single initiated by Sir Bob Geldof 'Do They Know Its Christmas?', Live Aid brought together the cream of the world's rock and pop musicians in a multi-venue concert.
Excerpt from Wikipedia
'The event was organised by Bob Geldof (Boomtown Rats) and Midge Ure (Ultravox) in order to raise funds for famine relief in Ethiopia.Live Aid is a cultural, musical and historical treasure trove of some of the greatest and most influential rock/pop musicians ever.
Billed as the 'global jukebox', the main sites for the event were Wembley Stadium, London (attended by 72,000 people) and JFK Stadium, Philadelphia (attended by about 90,000 people), with some acts performing at other venues such as Sydney and Moscow.
It was one of the largest-scale satellite link-ups and television broadcasts of all time: an estimated 1.5 billion viewers, across 100 countries, watched the live broadcast....'
It is also arguably the single biggest charity and cultural change event in terms of both scale and impact. In an era before the internet and mobile phones, it was a major technical achievement of its time with an estimated 1.5 billion viewers, across 100 countries, watching the live broadcasts from Wembley and JFK Stadiums.
The original record and the ensuing concerts were a 'band aid' - the point of the event was to raise emergency relief money, but also to put the issue of extreme poverty on the political agenda.
Bearing in mind that these kinds of immense social changes can take decades, it is safe to say that Live Aid has been critical in sowing some important seeds of change.
28 June 2010
New Prime Minister, Queensland Councils Reject "Big Australia"
Reposted in full from Government News, 28 June 2010
'Queensland councils have joined with Prime Minister Julia Gillard in reconsidering Australia’s population growth.
Ms Gillard has revealed that she does not believe in a “big Australia”, signalling a shift in policy on population growth.
“Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population,” Ms Gillard said.
“I don't support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia.
“We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia.”
Ms Gillard said the shift in policy was not intended to ignite an immigration debate.“This is not about bringing down the shutters in immigration,” she said.
“It is a debate about planning affected by many factors - water supply, open space, infrastructure, ensuring the appropriate tax base to support our ageing population, the need for skills and the need to preserve a good quality life.”
The Intergenerational Report released earlier this year predicted that Australia’s population could reach 35.9 million by 2050. In response to the report, Tony Burke was appointed as Australia’s first Population Minister, responsible for developing a national strategy on population growth. Ms Gillard announced over the weekend that Mr Burke would now be known as the Minister for Sustainable Population.
The Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) has welcomed the Federal Government’s policy shift.LGAQ president Paul Bell said local government concerns on sustainable population levels were a “major driving force” behind the establishment of an independent inquiry into the need for a Queensland Government population policy.'
'Queensland councils have joined with Prime Minister Julia Gillard in reconsidering Australia’s population growth.
Ms Gillard has revealed that she does not believe in a “big Australia”, signalling a shift in policy on population growth.
“Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population,” Ms Gillard said.
“I don't support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia.
“We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia.”
Ms Gillard said the shift in policy was not intended to ignite an immigration debate.“This is not about bringing down the shutters in immigration,” she said.
“It is a debate about planning affected by many factors - water supply, open space, infrastructure, ensuring the appropriate tax base to support our ageing population, the need for skills and the need to preserve a good quality life.”
The Intergenerational Report released earlier this year predicted that Australia’s population could reach 35.9 million by 2050. In response to the report, Tony Burke was appointed as Australia’s first Population Minister, responsible for developing a national strategy on population growth. Ms Gillard announced over the weekend that Mr Burke would now be known as the Minister for Sustainable Population.
The Local Government Association of Queensland (LGAQ) has welcomed the Federal Government’s policy shift.LGAQ president Paul Bell said local government concerns on sustainable population levels were a “major driving force” behind the establishment of an independent inquiry into the need for a Queensland Government population policy.'
China Plans to Put Out its Coalfield Fires
um...yeah...extinguishing those fires would help...
Reposted in full from the New Scientist, 18 June 2010
'Is this, finally, the end for the gigantic coal fires that have been burning in Inner Mongolia, China, for 50 years?
The province's government announced earlier this month that it would spend 200 million yuan ($29.4 million) a year through to 2012 on extinguishing over 60 fires that burn, unchecked, at seven of its coalfields.
The fires can be ignited naturally by lightning or forest fires but more often are lit by sparks from mining equipment or burning waste. Some are at the surface, but they can also burn below ground, making them hard to spot and control. The fires are difficult to extinguish, as oxygen can seep into cracks and reignite hot coal several metres below the surface.
China has the worst underground coal fires. Each year, around 20 million tonnes of coal go up in smoke, emitting up to 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. As China's main coal-producing area, Inner Mongolia is home to the severest fires.
"If Inner Mongolia invests 200 million yuan, another 400 million can be expected from the central government," says Jianzhong Zhang of the German Aerospace Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, who studies the fires. "That will be enough to put out almost all the fires in Inner Mongolia."
This is the first time that the regional government has made a concerted effort to control its fires. It plans to remove nearby coal to stop fires spreading and bury burning coal in sand and slurry. The plan's low-tech nature makes some environmentalists wonder why it didn't happen earlier.'
Reposted in full from the New Scientist, 18 June 2010
'Is this, finally, the end for the gigantic coal fires that have been burning in Inner Mongolia, China, for 50 years?
The province's government announced earlier this month that it would spend 200 million yuan ($29.4 million) a year through to 2012 on extinguishing over 60 fires that burn, unchecked, at seven of its coalfields.
The fires can be ignited naturally by lightning or forest fires but more often are lit by sparks from mining equipment or burning waste. Some are at the surface, but they can also burn below ground, making them hard to spot and control. The fires are difficult to extinguish, as oxygen can seep into cracks and reignite hot coal several metres below the surface.
China has the worst underground coal fires. Each year, around 20 million tonnes of coal go up in smoke, emitting up to 100 million tonnes of greenhouse gases. As China's main coal-producing area, Inner Mongolia is home to the severest fires.
"If Inner Mongolia invests 200 million yuan, another 400 million can be expected from the central government," says Jianzhong Zhang of the German Aerospace Centre in Oberpfaffenhofen, who studies the fires. "That will be enough to put out almost all the fires in Inner Mongolia."
This is the first time that the regional government has made a concerted effort to control its fires. It plans to remove nearby coal to stop fires spreading and bury burning coal in sand and slurry. The plan's low-tech nature makes some environmentalists wonder why it didn't happen earlier.'
Virtual Gold Farming
Excerpt from New Scientist, 29 May 2010
The world has truly lost it, when this is where human attention and ingenuity is being directed...article on technology activist Cory Doctorow's novel For the Win:
'Many people will have never heard about the "gold farming" of your novel. What is it?
Gold farming describes a real-world activity: it's all the things people, mostly in poor countries, do to amass things of worth in the online gaming world. These range from amassing gold to collecting rare, expensive items like weapons or ingredients for a magic spell or stuff that a player can use to get up to the next level in the game. These things are sold to rich players who don't want to have to do the work themselves. Gold farmers are seen as akin to hackers.
When did gold farming start?
First reports were in Central America and Mexico in about 2003. Most of the trade has now moved to China, or at least into the Chinese language. In China, the get-rich-quick story runs like this: find 10 boys who just want to play video games around the clock, stick them in a room with 10 computers and then watch the money roll in.
How is the "gold" in the gamers' world exchanged for hard cash?
One player will meet another and do the exchange, or drop gold at a preassigned location on a server where another player will pick it up. The money exits the game and enters the real world via brokers. One reason for this is linguistic. If you are a kid from Sichuan province who only speaks five words of English it's going to be hard to sell gold to a kid from Los Angeles.
What do gold farmers think about their lot?
The gold farmers are a lot less worried about being exploited in real life than they are about being hunted mercilessly in the game. They encounter an awful lot of racism when they move around in games. Anyone with a Chinese name or talking in Chinese is immediately accused of being a gold farmer. If you are on a server where players can attack each other, people will try to kill you. They did have stories about being exploited, too, but a lot of them are 17 and still can't believe they're being paid to play video games all day....'
The world has truly lost it, when this is where human attention and ingenuity is being directed...article on technology activist Cory Doctorow's novel For the Win:
'Many people will have never heard about the "gold farming" of your novel. What is it?
Gold farming describes a real-world activity: it's all the things people, mostly in poor countries, do to amass things of worth in the online gaming world. These range from amassing gold to collecting rare, expensive items like weapons or ingredients for a magic spell or stuff that a player can use to get up to the next level in the game. These things are sold to rich players who don't want to have to do the work themselves. Gold farmers are seen as akin to hackers.
When did gold farming start?
First reports were in Central America and Mexico in about 2003. Most of the trade has now moved to China, or at least into the Chinese language. In China, the get-rich-quick story runs like this: find 10 boys who just want to play video games around the clock, stick them in a room with 10 computers and then watch the money roll in.
How is the "gold" in the gamers' world exchanged for hard cash?
One player will meet another and do the exchange, or drop gold at a preassigned location on a server where another player will pick it up. The money exits the game and enters the real world via brokers. One reason for this is linguistic. If you are a kid from Sichuan province who only speaks five words of English it's going to be hard to sell gold to a kid from Los Angeles.
What do gold farmers think about their lot?
The gold farmers are a lot less worried about being exploited in real life than they are about being hunted mercilessly in the game. They encounter an awful lot of racism when they move around in games. Anyone with a Chinese name or talking in Chinese is immediately accused of being a gold farmer. If you are on a server where players can attack each other, people will try to kill you. They did have stories about being exploited, too, but a lot of them are 17 and still can't believe they're being paid to play video games all day....'
27 June 2010
Japanese Pubs and Restaurants Display Green Lanterns to Promote Local Produce
Reposted in full from Japan for Sustainability, 15 May 2008
'More pubs and restaurants in Japan have started hanging green lanterns outside their establishments, instead of the traditional red ones, to let people know that they use grown-in-Japan ingredients in more than half of their dishes. The idea was launched in Hokkaido in the spring of 2005 by Kiyoaki Maruyama, the Director-General of the National Agricultural Research Center in the National Agriculture and Food Research Organization, with the aim of revitalizing Japan's agricultural sector, responding to concern that the country's food self-sufficiency ratio had fallen below 40 percent. The voluntary campaign by the people has spread nationwide since then. Over 1,000 restaurants will be displaying the green lanterns in the end of May 2008.
Establishments that support the campaign and use as much domestic produce as possible in their dishes display green lanterns bearing words stating the Japanese equivalent of "We use produce grown in Japan" and showing one to five stars. The green color was chosen to indicate safe-to-eat vegetables and green fertile fields. The number of stars indicates the percentage of domestic ingredients contained, based on calorie content. One star indicates domestic produce is used in more than 50 percent of the food served. Each additional star indicates that a further 10 percent of domestic produce is used, with five stars meaning the use of 90 percent or more.
Restaurants are invited to join the campaign, and consumers are encouraged to be "green lantern supporters." They are then expected to dine at establishments displaying the green lanterns and promote the campaign to their favorite restaurants. In this way, participating restaurants can increase the number of regular customers, grow their sales, increase the demand for domestic produce, and thus help to increase Japan's food self-sufficiency.'
26 June 2010
Fast Food Curry Footprint Same As 140 Million Car Miles
GOLD! love it that someone has done the Footprint of a curry!!
Reposted in full from Warmer Bulletin, 4 June 2010
'Lamb curry ready-made meals eaten in the UK amount to an annual carbon footprint equivalent to 5,500 car trips around the world or 140 million car miles.
The figures were calculated using a new carbon footprinting tool developed by researchers at The University of Manchester.
The estimates are based on the figure of 30 per cent of adults in the UK who eat ready-made meals at least once a week. Curry is one of the nation's favourites, accounting for up to 10 per cent of ready-made sales - which have soared during the recession.
The academics found that the fast food meal generates the equivalent of 4·3 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per person.
The meal's ingredients are responsible for 65 per cent of the carbon footprint, with lamb contributing half of the total. Meal manufacture contributes on average 14 per cent and packaging 4 per cent of the total carbon footprint. The contribution of transport is small at 2 per cent. However, storage at the retailer contributes 16 per cent.
The £1m project is led by Adisa Azapagic, Professor of Sustainable Chemical Engineering at The University of Manchester, and funded by the Carbon Trust, the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council.
The previous work by the same research group showed that, surprisingly, the Christmas turkey meal prepared at home is a greener offering, coming in at only 2·5 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per person.
One of the reasons for this, they say, is that preparing food at home can help to reduce the carbon footprint.
"The same lamb curry prepared at home has a 20 per cent lower carbon footprint, mainly because of the elimination of the refrigeration stage at retailer needed for the ready-made meals," said Professor Azapagic.
In addition to food products, the CCaLC carbon footprinting tool can be used for estimation of carbon footprints of other products, including packaging, biofuels and various chemicals.
With respect to application to the chemicals sector, the version of the tool for estimating the carbon footprints of PVC is available for free on the CCaLC website.
The CCaLC tool will be launched in London, where the team will introduce the tool and demonstrate on a number of case studies how it can be used and what benefits can be gained.
The research was carried out as part of the Carbon Calculations over the Life Cycle of Industrial Activities (CCaLC) project at The University of Manchester.
Professor Azapagic said, "Measuring carbon footprints of industrial and other human activities is a first step towards a better understanding of our impacts on climate change. Because, what can be measured, can be managed.
"But the devil is in the detail - measuring carbon footprints is not a trivial task. Industrial and human activities are notoriously complex, so capturing that complexity is a challenge.
"It is particularly so if we expect businesses - and consumers - to make everyday decisions based on the estimations of carbon footprints of their activities.
"And yet this should be the ultimate aim, as only then can we hope to make a real contribution towards mitigating the effects of climate change.
"We have considered all life cycle stages in estimating the carbon emissions - including long-distance transportation for imported food and short distances related to food shopping.
"Food production and processing are responsible for up to three quarters of the total carbon footprint for most food products - so this sector is an important part of our work."'
Reposted in full from Warmer Bulletin, 4 June 2010
'Lamb curry ready-made meals eaten in the UK amount to an annual carbon footprint equivalent to 5,500 car trips around the world or 140 million car miles.
The figures were calculated using a new carbon footprinting tool developed by researchers at The University of Manchester.
The estimates are based on the figure of 30 per cent of adults in the UK who eat ready-made meals at least once a week. Curry is one of the nation's favourites, accounting for up to 10 per cent of ready-made sales - which have soared during the recession.
The academics found that the fast food meal generates the equivalent of 4·3 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per person.
The meal's ingredients are responsible for 65 per cent of the carbon footprint, with lamb contributing half of the total. Meal manufacture contributes on average 14 per cent and packaging 4 per cent of the total carbon footprint. The contribution of transport is small at 2 per cent. However, storage at the retailer contributes 16 per cent.
The £1m project is led by Adisa Azapagic, Professor of Sustainable Chemical Engineering at The University of Manchester, and funded by the Carbon Trust, the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council and the Natural Environment Research Council.
The previous work by the same research group showed that, surprisingly, the Christmas turkey meal prepared at home is a greener offering, coming in at only 2·5 kg of carbon dioxide emissions per person.
One of the reasons for this, they say, is that preparing food at home can help to reduce the carbon footprint.
"The same lamb curry prepared at home has a 20 per cent lower carbon footprint, mainly because of the elimination of the refrigeration stage at retailer needed for the ready-made meals," said Professor Azapagic.
In addition to food products, the CCaLC carbon footprinting tool can be used for estimation of carbon footprints of other products, including packaging, biofuels and various chemicals.
With respect to application to the chemicals sector, the version of the tool for estimating the carbon footprints of PVC is available for free on the CCaLC website.
The CCaLC tool will be launched in London, where the team will introduce the tool and demonstrate on a number of case studies how it can be used and what benefits can be gained.
The research was carried out as part of the Carbon Calculations over the Life Cycle of Industrial Activities (CCaLC) project at The University of Manchester.
Professor Azapagic said, "Measuring carbon footprints of industrial and other human activities is a first step towards a better understanding of our impacts on climate change. Because, what can be measured, can be managed.
"But the devil is in the detail - measuring carbon footprints is not a trivial task. Industrial and human activities are notoriously complex, so capturing that complexity is a challenge.
"It is particularly so if we expect businesses - and consumers - to make everyday decisions based on the estimations of carbon footprints of their activities.
"And yet this should be the ultimate aim, as only then can we hope to make a real contribution towards mitigating the effects of climate change.
"We have considered all life cycle stages in estimating the carbon emissions - including long-distance transportation for imported food and short distances related to food shopping.
"Food production and processing are responsible for up to three quarters of the total carbon footprint for most food products - so this sector is an important part of our work."'
Australia's Waste Report
A lot of useful info, facts and figures...
Reposted in full from Warmer Bulletin, 7 May 2010
'Australia's first comprehensive report on waste and resource recovery has been released - the National Waste Report 2010.
The National Waste Report brings together for the first time a wide range of information on waste management and resource recovery. It draws on a range of published sources, commissioned research and information from states and territories. It is a first step towards establishing baseline data and developing a comprehensive account of waste issues which can be used by industry, government and the community to make informed and timely decisions.
As well as presenting national and state and territory waste data, the report discusses the impacts of landfill, recycling, hazardous waste, organic waste and litter, and describes how Australia managed its waste in the past, the current arrangements, and emerging issues and trends. The report also examines the quality of our data on waste and recycling.
The National Waste Report details trends in waste and resource recovery and is the first step in providing baseline data to inform policy.
Key findings from the National Waste Report 2010 are:
To download a copy of the National Waste Report 2010, visit the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC) website.'
Reposted in full from Warmer Bulletin, 7 May 2010
'Australia's first comprehensive report on waste and resource recovery has been released - the National Waste Report 2010.
The National Waste Report brings together for the first time a wide range of information on waste management and resource recovery. It draws on a range of published sources, commissioned research and information from states and territories. It is a first step towards establishing baseline data and developing a comprehensive account of waste issues which can be used by industry, government and the community to make informed and timely decisions.
As well as presenting national and state and territory waste data, the report discusses the impacts of landfill, recycling, hazardous waste, organic waste and litter, and describes how Australia managed its waste in the past, the current arrangements, and emerging issues and trends. The report also examines the quality of our data on waste and recycling.
The National Waste Report details trends in waste and resource recovery and is the first step in providing baseline data to inform policy.
Key findings from the National Waste Report 2010 are:
- 43,777,000 tonnes of waste were generated in Australia in 2006-07
- Per capita, Australia generated around 2.08 tonnes of waste in 2006-07, of which 1.08 tonnes was recycled
- The recycling and waste sector is valued at between $7 billion and $11.5 billion
- In 2006-07, 22,707,000 tonnes or 52 per cent of Australia's waste was recycled. Of this 42 per cent was from the construction and demolition waste stream, 36 per cent was from the commercial and industrial waste stream and 22 per cent was from the municipal waste stream
- Organic material made up 62 per cent of waste disposed to landfill
- 99 per cent of households undertake recycling
- 80 per cent of employees would like to see more recycling in the workplace.
To download a copy of the National Waste Report 2010, visit the Environment Protection and Heritage Council (EPHC) website.'
BP and the 'Little Eichmanns'
Pulls no punches!
Reposted in full from TruthDig, 17 May 2010
'Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.
The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide - men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume'' - are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves.
These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.
"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem."
"No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force - a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences - the depressions, wars and totalitarianism - that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism - and a Mafia political system - which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed.
Reposted in full from TruthDig, 17 May 2010
'Cultures that do not recognize that human life and the natural world have a sacred dimension, an intrinsic value beyond monetary value, cannibalize themselves until they die. They ruthlessly exploit the natural world and the members of their society in the name of progress until exhaustion or collapse, blind to the fury of their own self-destruction.
The oil pouring into the Gulf of Mexico, estimated to be perhaps as much as 100,000 barrels a day, is part of our foolish death march. It is one more blow delivered by the corporate state, the trade of life for gold. But this time collapse, when it comes, will not be confined to the geography of a decayed civilization. It will be global.
Those who carry out this global genocide - men like BP's Chief Executive Tony Hayward, who assures us that "The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume'' - are, to steal a line from Ward Churchill, "little Eichmanns." They serve Thanatos, the forces of death, the dark instinct Sigmund Freud identified within human beings that propels us to annihilate all living things, including ourselves.
These deformed individuals lack the capacity for empathy. They are at once banal and dangerous. They possess the peculiar ability to organize vast, destructive bureaucracies and yet remain blind to the ramifications. The death they dispense, whether in the pollutants and carcinogens that have made cancer an epidemic, the dead zone rapidly being created in the Gulf of Mexico, the melting polar ice caps or the deaths last year of 45,000 Americans who could not afford proper medical care, is part of the cold and rational exchange of life for money.
The corporations, and those who run them, consume, pollute, oppress and kill. The little Eichmanns who manage them reside in a parallel universe of staggering wealth, luxury and splendid isolation that rivals that of the closed court of Versailles. The elite, sheltered and enriched, continue to prosper even as the rest of us and the natural world start to die. They are numb. They will drain the last drop of profit from us until there is nothing left. And our business schools and elite universities churn out tens of thousands of these deaf, dumb and blind systems managers who are endowed with sophisticated skills of management and the incapacity for common sense, compassion or remorse. These technocrats mistake the art of manipulation with knowledge.
"The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else," Hannah Arendt wrote of "Eichmann in Jerusalem."
"No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such."
Our ruling class of technocrats, as John Ralston Saul points out, is effectively illiterate. "One of the reasons that he is unable to recognize the necessary relationship between power and morality is that moral traditions are the product of civilization and he has little knowledge of his own civilization," Saul writes of the technocrat. Saul calls these technocrats "hedonists of power," and warns that their "obsession with structures and their inability or unwillingness to link these to the public good make this power an abstract force - a force that works, more often than not, at cross-purposes to the real needs of a painfully real world."
BP, which made $6.1 billion in profits in the first quarter of this year, never obtained permits from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The protection of the ecosystem did not matter. But BP is hardly alone. Drilling with utter disregard to the ecosystem is common practice among oil companies, according to a report in The New York Times. Our corporate state has gutted environmental regulation as tenaciously as it has gutted financial regulation and habeas corpus. Corporations make no distinction between our personal impoverishment and the impoverishment of the ecosystem that sustains the human species. And the abuse, of us and the natural world, is as rampant under Barack Obama as it was under George W. Bush. The branded figure who sits in the White House is a puppet, a face used to mask an insidious system under which we as citizens have been disempowered and under which we become, along with the natural world, collateral damage. As Karl Marx understood, unfettered capitalism is a revolutionary force. And this force is consuming us.
Karl Polanyi in his book "The Great Transformation," written in 1944, laid out the devastating consequences - the depressions, wars and totalitarianism - that grow out of a so-called self-regulated free market. He grasped that "fascism, like socialism, was rooted in a market society that refused to function." He warned that a financial system always devolved, without heavy government control, into a Mafia capitalism - and a Mafia political system - which is a good description of our corporate government. Polanyi warned that when nature and human beings are objects whose worth is determined by the market, then human beings and nature are destroyed.
Speculative excesses and growing inequality, he wrote, always dynamite the foundation for a continued prosperity and ensure "the demolition of society."
"In disposing of a man's labor power the system would, incidentally, dispose of the physical, psychological, and moral entity 'man' attached to that tag," Polanyi wrote. "Robbed of the protective covering of cultural institutions, human beings would perish from the effects of social exposure; they would die as victims of acute social dislocation through vice, perversion, crime, and starvation. Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted, military safety jeopardized, the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed. Finally, the market administration of purchasing power would periodically liquidate business enterprise, for shortages and surfeits of money could prove as disastrous to business as floods and droughts in primitive society. Undoubtedly, labor, land, and money markets are essential to a market economy. But no society could stand the effects of such a system of crude fictions even for the shortest stretch of time unless its human and natural substance as well as its business organizations was protected against the ravages of this satanic mill."
The corporate state is a runaway freight train. It shreds the Kyoto Accords in Copenhagen. It plunders the US Treasury so speculators can continue to gamble with billions in taxpayer subsidies in our perverted system of casino capitalism. It disenfranchises our working class, decimates our manufacturing sector and denies us funds to sustain our infrastructure, our public schools and our social services. It poisons the planet. We are losing, every year across the globe, an area of farmland greater than Scotland to erosion and urban sprawl. There are an estimated 25,000 people who die every day somewhere in the world because of contaminated water. And some 20 million children are mentally impaired each year by malnourishment.
America is dying in the manner in which all imperial projects die. Joseph Tainter, in his book "The Collapse of Complex Societies," argues that the costs of running and defending an empire eventually become so burdensome, and the elite becomes so calcified, that it becomes more efficient to dismantle the imperial superstructures and return to local forms of organization. At that point the great monuments to empire, from the Sumer and Mayan temples to the Roman bath complexes, are abandoned, fall into disuse and are overgrown. But this time around, Tainter warns, because we have nowhere left to migrate and expand, "world civilization will disintegrate as a whole." This time around we will take the planet down with us.
"We in the lucky countries of the West now regard our two-century bubble of freedom and affluence as normal and inevitable; it has even been called the 'end' of history, in both a temporal and teleological sense," writes Ronald Wright in "A Short History of Progress." "Yet this new order is an anomaly: the opposite of what usually happens as civilizations grow. Our age was bankrolled by the seizing of half the planet, extended by taking over most of the remaining half, and has been sustained by spending down new forms of natural capital, especially fossil fuels. In the New World, the West hit the biggest bonanza of all time. And there won't be another like it - not unless we find the civilized Martians of H.G. Wells, complete with the vulnerability to our germs that undid them in his War of the Worlds."
The moral and physical contamination is matched by a cultural contamination. Our political and civil discourse has become gibberish. It is dominated by elaborate spectacles, celebrity gossip, the lies of advertising and scandal. The tawdry and the salacious occupy our time and energy. We do not see the walls falling around us. We invest our intellectual and emotional energy in the inane and the absurd, the empty amusements that preoccupy a degenerate culture, so that when the final collapse arrives we can be herded, uncomprehending and fearful, into the inferno.'
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