ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

This is a guest post by John Foster.

Corvallis has embarked on a community wide sustainability project that could serve as a model for other communities. The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition seeks to:

• Reduce waste and end fossil fuel dependence.
• Eliminate the use of persistent chemicals and synthetic substances.
• Ultimately eliminate the community’s contribution to encroachment on nature.
• Support people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.

The coalition is supported by about 90 organizations including the City government.  It is not, however, a government body.

At the coalition’s first Town Hall meeting, on 31 March, about 600 participants, meeting in small groups, discussed more specific goals for the community.  During the following weeks volunteer working groups held meetings  to refine these goals.   There were 12 groups covering subjects ranging from Cultural Diversity to Waste Disposal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Roberts has a great interview with Gus Speth at Gristmill. Speth has been a major insider in the modern environmental movement. Now, he says that movement is failing – because it has failed to challenge the economic system that is the underlying cause of our planetary deterioration.

Capitalism isn’t an idealized, theoretical system of a textbook – it’s a system of political economy dedicated to the production of profit for reinvestment and growth. The expansion of the world economy since World War II has been accompanied by a devastating deterioration of the natural environment. Projecting that out into the future is, as Speth understates, “not promising.”

Speth summarizes how our economic system works to destroy the commons. Corporations

“are driven to externalize their environmental costs and seek environmentally destructive subsidies from government. And they basically succeed at keeping costs off their books and keeping subsidies on the government’s books. The result is that the prices that we pay are wildly out of whack. They’re environmentally dishonest, because they don’t include the cost of production, they don’t include the environmental subsidies. This fabulously large economic system is running without the most basic environmental controls.”

Speth says we desperately need to challenge the goal of growth.

We need to challenge consumerism. We need to challenge the way corporations are chartered and the structures within which they operate today. We need to challenge growth itself and ask, is it really benefiting us at this stage in our economic development? Or is growth imposing more costs on us than it is creating real benefits?

Speth points out that growth isn’t an end in itself. We’ve just always assumed that good things would be a by-product of growth.  That’s proving to be a horrendous mistake. We need to make happiness or well-being a first-order goal of public policy rather than a hoped-for side effect. Social issues and values are what politics should be all about.

Speth is guardedly optimistic that we can reform our economic and political systems.

“There’s no reason to think we can’t make major change. It’s just going to take a struggle. People have to see how serious the environmental and social conditions are.”

WorldChanging has an interview with Mark Anielski, author of The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth. Anielski nails what’s wrong with our economic accounting system, which measures only “cash flow” – and incredibly, we count both income and expenses as GDP:

“my message is that what we lack right now is a balance sheet for the nation. We basically have an income statement, and are only looking at the revenue line in the income statement, or the expenditure line. So we have no capital accounts for natural capital – for trees, and all the other things that nature provides for free.”

We don’t have a human capital account. We don’t have a social capital account. In other words, we don’t have a balance sheet.

Anielski says a lot of the necessary data is already being, although some of it is incomplete. He advocates for creating a consolidated accounting system, so that we can tell a story that’s more than just financial performance.

Imagine if government officials had to report on what’s happening in air quality and water quality, whether water aquifers in the nation are healthy, income inequality which is the biggest indicator of society’s human health. Suddenly the conversation – the news in the morning – is different than simply listening to the stock market report.

If we start measuring what matters, then people may be more engaged. They become more conscious, and they start bringing that consciousness into their workplaces, to the dinner table, with their family and with their neighbors.

Anielski, an Albertan, is working on an initiative to develop the Canadian Index of Well-being, to provide Canadians with a way of measuring what matters. It’s an attempt to measure the quality of the natural environment, economic well-being, health, and community well-being and vitality. He calls it “probably the most ambitious project we know on the planet right now to measure well-being at a broad societal level, and ultimately get Canadians to expand the conversation.”

Oil prices climbed to a record $115.54/barrel on Thursday, propelled by shrinking inventories and a collapsing dollar. The dollar fell to a record $1.5983 against the euro.

Update: on Friday at 11:52, oil was trading at $116.10.

Why are we still thinking we need more bridges over the Columbia in Portland, over the Willamette in Salem, and new flyovers in Eugene? Maybe we should instead be investing in establishing land use patterns and a transportation system with a future.

As Aaron Newton points out at The Oil Drum, during that last 60 years we here in America have transformed our manmade landscape in a way that is fundamentally different from any form of human habitation ever known. Cheap oil and the mass-produced automobile resulted in a level of mobility never before experienced by humans. The outgrowth was a sprawling pattern of living that changed the rules about how and where we live, work, and play and how we get there and back. We are now more spread out than ever before, mostly getting back and forth from one place to another by driving alone in our cars. The end of cheap oil means this could turn out to be a really bad thing.

Newton speculates that suburbia at least has resulted in lots of people owning small plots of land which could be utilized for food production. He neglects to note that people don’t live on food alone. People rely on communities and the variety of specialized services communities provide – at that people are social creatures, dependent on the presence of extended family, friends, and acquaintances for companionship and interaction. People simply could not stand being isolated on a little plot of land, struggling to survive on subsistence agriculture, even if they had somehow developed the many skills and acquired the necessary tools and supplies to make the attempt.

Dr. Glen Barry at his blog Earth Meanders compares our ecological crisis the financial bubble that is now bursting around us. He reminds us of what should be obvious but can never be even whispered in our politics: endless growth is impossible in a finite world. He calls for a new global dream: that all have their basic needs met, even as individuals are free to pursue their passions and fortunes, as long as they do not undermine common ecological systems.

His essay is so compelling it’s worth repeating here in its entirety.

“Ecological overshoot whereby humanity exceeds the Earth’s carrying capacity is the mother of all “bubbles”. Within the current sub-prime mortgage and financial bubbles, and food and energy price increases, we are witnessing the logical and inevitable economic consequences of over-population, resource scarcity, inequitable and unreasonable consumption, and unsustainable economic growth. Growth and livelihoods based upon unreasonable presumptions of continued resource outputs from dwindling ecosystems are a dangerous, unprecedented “ecological bubble” that threatens civilization and mass apocalyptic death.

“The global growth machine is seizing up because it is hitting ecological limits, and as a result of its own greed. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Steffen at WorldChanging reminds us:

“if we’re going to avert ecological destruction, we need to not only do things differently, we need to do different things.”

Drive a Prius instead of a Hummer, living in an EcoMansion instead of a McMansion, and shopping at Gaiam rather than the Gap won’t cut it.  It’s  the systems that support and enable those choices that are unsustainable.

“Highways are destructive, even when full of hybrids; sprawl is unsustainable, even when the individual houses are green; we don’t even know what sustainable clothing would look like, much less how to make conventional retail green.”

Steffen reminds us that to change those systems, we’ll have to re-learn how to be good neighbors, how to build friendships, how to share, how to our enlightened self-interest in public goods, how to be a good citizen.

Community organizers, teachers, scientists, businesspeople, students and others filled the main hall and an overflow room at Oregon State University’s CH2M Hill Alumni Center to brainstorm big-picture goals and strategies for making the city a leader in sustainability.

Three town hall meetings are planned to create an action plan that will direct city planning, projects and community activism. City leaders are supporting the effort. The City Council has provided $30,000 for the town hall meetings and has promised to use the plan to develop city policy.

Future town hall meetings are scheduled for June 25 and Oct. 7. An action plan is expected by the end of the year.

Corvallis has become a hotbed of energy and climate activism. The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition has teamed up with Energy Trust of Oregon in the Corvallis Energy Challenge, a year-long campaign to help Corvallis residents and businesses boost energy efficiency, control energy costs and build a cleaner future with renewable energy. OSU has a Sustainability Office which oversees conservation projects on campus and supports both on- and off-campus efforts to become more sustainable.

Great Britain has a Secretary of State for Communities, one of whose charges is to develop standards for ten new “eco-towns” – new communities to contain populations of up to 20,000 each. Proposed standards have just been released, and their scope makes Oregon’s planning efforts seem shamefully unambitious and unimaginative.

Half of all households in eco-towns will have to live without a car, and those that have one will find their speed limited to 15 mph. Large parts of the towns of up to 20,000 homes each will be car-free. Homes will instead be built no farther than 400 meters from a bus or tram stop, and car-sharing schemes will replace car ownership.

By capturing rainwater and reusing waste water, eco-towns will also have to be “water-neutral”, which means there should be no overall increase in water demand as a result of the development.

Other proposed initiatives include staff in every eco-town to offer residents and businesses personalized travel planning to adapt to the largely car-free environment.

The German town of Freiberg, home of Europe’s largest car-free development, serves as a model. In Freiberg, bike lanes, light rail and buses have replaced cars and anyone who owns a car has to pay £12,500 for the parking space as well as a monthly management fee.

Developers in eco-towns will also have to make room for allotments – community gardening plots. The objective:

“Giving people the opportunity to grow their own vegetables and plant fruit trees will . . . turn passive consumers into active producers.”

Jeffvail at The Oil Drum attacks our enshrinement of “growth” from a novel direction.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”: Read the rest of this entry »

Doug Paul Davis writes at California Progress Report that the concept of “food miles” cannot be separated from land use.

“There are actually two issues that important in food miles. First the distance that the food travels to stores. Second, the distance that we travel to stores to get the food.”

Locally grown food purchased in season is fresher, more healthful and requires less energy to produce and transport to market. But equally important is how we get to the market to buy the food. It’s best if we can walk or bike to the store. Of course, that requires a food store near where we live.

He reflects on what has happened in his home town of Davis:

“Not too long ago, there was a food store within a half-mile of every resident in Davis. The trend to larger stores has been one cause of the closure of several of these “neighborhood stores.” As the effects of climate change and “peak oil” make themselves felt in our economy and our daily lives, having essential services such as a grocery store accessible to each neighborhood will be an important element in reducing the number and distance of vehicle trips in the community.”

I suspect that we all share his experience. Where I grew up in Sacramento there was a Stop-N-Shop three blocks from our home, within easy walking or biking distance. That store was hopelessly small by today’s standards – but in my memory it was huge compared to the small markets that still dot every neighborhood in Irina’s home town of Darmstadt. Our friend Tony recently pointed out the rotting carcasses of corner markets that used to serve Lebanon neighborhoods. Safeway and Roth’s used to have small stores downtown. Safeway first moved to the edges of downtown, Roth’s later out to a strip mall on the highway south of town, Safeway then built even a bigger store with a bigger parking lot, then Wal-Mart trumped them all with a SuperCenter on the edge of the UGB. Nobody walks to these stores.

We’ve moved away from the neighborhood grocery store model and towards a centralized model with large supermarkets. This model then imposes a transportation model – the habits that people will have to undertake to get there, to get merchandise there, to work there, and to purchase products there.

And at the same time these stores are harmful for the environment, they’re harmful for local economies. Food isn’t purchased from local suppliers, and profits don’t remain in the community.

Confronting the global warming crisis will require that we change our consumption habits. We will not get the deep cuts in carbon and greenhouse gas emissions without changing our behavior. This is something that local governments have the power to do. All that’s needed is the will and the policy tools.

All of us who have showed up at public hearings arguing before our local governments know from experience how far we have to go.

Greg Cox of Boardman Hill Farms and a small group of citizens in South Central Vermont are re-making their community through their locally-owned and operated food co-op, featuring locally-grown produce, and a year-round farmer’s market.

In a post at Speaking Truth to Power, Carolyn Baker reports on her interview with Cox and talks about relocalization efforts in Rutland, specifically around agriculture and food.

It seems every town in Vermont pays lip service to agriculture, but there’s rarely an action plan. Because of his reputation as an organic farmer, Cox was actually contacted by a member of the planning commission and a planning staff person. Together, they began strategizing about how to recreate a vibrant agricultural community.

They believed that if they could create an incubator farm with an infrastructure that included education and have the viability of enough farmers to create a community, they could attract young folks with new ideas from all over the nation and the world. Their intention was to create an economic engine with an agriculture base. The objective was to see that the money as well as the food remains in Rutland County.

Cox talks about how he grows food, even in the dark and cold of a Vermont winter, and about how the Saturday winter farmers market helped revitalize the town:

“Farmers markets bring one thing wherever they go: foot traffic. That’s what downtown areas are-and what they need. Cities used to be alive-people lived and worked there. We need to re-establish that. We need to make downtowns vital. Not only do we need new businesses, but we need to have residents in the downtown area.

“People understand outsourcing and don’t like it, but they don’t understand that when they spend dollars outside of their town, they’re outsourcing their dollars. Jobs follow the money. Every dollar that stays in the community enriches it. So in the discussion of revitalizing communities, agriculture may be the introductory sentence, but it goes way beyond that.

“The winter farmers market now occurs every Saturday in what used to be an old theater, adjacent to the co-op . . .

“City officials and downtown business could have resisted the co-op/ farmers market venture, but they didn’t.”

In summing up, Baker observes that relocalization transcends our old political categories:

“I came away from my conversation with Greg Cox with two profound realizations:

1. All the stereotypes of Rutland, Vermont as “backward” and “too conservative” to relocalize its economy through local agriculture were fading into the dustbin of history, and
2. Any region in America can affect the transformation that the forward-thinking folks in Rutland are making happen with their passion, commitment, and incredibly hard work as they engineer local economic solutions and give new meaning to the word “community.”"

For the last several months I’ve been thinking about how we might go about revitalizing our local land use activist organization (Friends of Linn County), and around the issues that are most important for our future – global warming and peak oil. Land use is a primary driver of fossil fuel consumption and resultant emissions – so the connection between land use, climate change and energy is or should be readily apparent.

We used Oregon’s land use planning program as a proxy to get at what we really cared about – maintaining an ethical relationship with the land and all of its inhabitants, keeping “development” from devouring it bit by inexorable bit. It was really a pretty lousy tool for that job, but it’s all we had. Now after the passage of first Measure 37 and now Measure 49, the air is completely out of that balloon.

Focusing on land use as a tool had one benefit: we could use law to challenge and sometimes overturn or thwart bad local decision-making. But the connection between our means and our objective was tenuous at best, and difficult to explain. In the absence of a direct and obvious ethical and emotional chord, it’s proved hard to expand beyond a core group into the larger community.

We don’t care about and do land use just for the sake of land use. We do it because it furthers a moral and ethical vision of what it means to live in this world – and because using land badly (as we do now) will have catastrophic and irreparable consequences for this country, for humanity, and for all of creation.

So the first step is to bring the moral and ethical basis for good land use to the forefront. This means laying out the consequences of continuing our bad land use practices – which are becoming more evident with each passing day.

The second step is to move the movement beyond the historic land use community into the broader community.

Sharon Astyk at Causabon’s Book has written a provocative piece about what it will take to move the “peak oil” and “climate change” groups from their present role – as thinly spread “special interest” groups and towards becoming a larger, and more powerful network. Her observations seem particularly relevant to our experience throughout rural Oregon. Read the rest of this entry »

An article by Eric Reese in the Louisville Courier-Journal provides evidence that awareness of the unsatisfactory nature and unsustainability of our profligate way of life is becoming ever more widespread around the country.  Reese writes that 2007 will be remembered as the year when Americans finally realized we can no longer doubt or delay action on our global environmental crisis:

“There are three things that keep me up nights: the threat of climate change, peak oil and the mountaintop removal strip mining that is destroying Appalachia. And I have reached the conclusion that, here in the United States, there are three major causes of these problems: Our homes are too big, our food travels too far, and our entire economy is built around the automobile. American homes are twice as big as they were 30 years ago, though fewer people actually live in them. The average item on a supermarket shelf has logged 1,500 miles to get there. And the homogenous suburb has ensured that we must drive everywhere, destroying at once the traditional, walkable city and the surrounding rural landscapes. Thus we have created a consumer culture that much of the developing world – most ominously, China – wants to emulate. But the problem is that this culture is based entirely on carbon-emitting fossil fuels, and it is therefore a culture that has no future.

He’s optimistic because he doesn’t believe our current culture embodies the future we want.

“Social scientists have found that today’s Americans are no happier than they were 30 years ago, though we consume twice as many resources. In fact, the opposite appears to be true. We feel increasingly anxious and isolated, depressed and over-worked. Thus I think an alternative to this consumer culture would not only decrease the damage we are inflicting on the natural world, I think it would make us a happier people.”

Reese invokes Frank Lloyd Wright’s personal manifesto, The Living City, written 50 years ago. The book is a renunciation of cities shaped by “sordid, ugly commercialism” and a call to rebuild communities on a human scale, based on “organic” principles whereby nature and culture reclaim a more symbiotic relationship. “Decentralize and reintegrate!” Wright exhorted.

Reese laments the extreme centralization that has come to dominate American life, and calls for decentralization as the key to a better way life: Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Roberts at Gristmill points out:

“[W]ith today’s technology, we know how to make new buildings net energy generators, and we know how to retrofit existing buildings to reduce their energy consumption by well over 50%, in some cases 90-95%. We just need someone to pay for it.”

He notes that an investment in green construction or retrofit is capital intensive up-front and the payoff is slow and modest – but it’s a sure thing. But capitalism being what it is, the first two factors suffice to discourage green investment.

His solution?

“[I]t seems like an obvious place for government and civil society to step in. Figuring out financing mechanisms for such investments is a public policy with guaranteed payback, considerable social benefit, and built-in political support – a gimme.”

He asks:

“Why doesn’t every city [or county] do what Berkeley, Calif. is doing? The city loans money to homeowners to add solar panels; the homeowner pays the city back over 20 years via a small addition to their property tax. The city makes a modestly profitable loan, the homeowner pays nothing, and all owners of the home from the 20-year mark on get a permanent reduction in energy costs. Oh, and let’s not forget you get a reduction in greenhouse gases and a homeowner who can strut around his neighborhood bragging about his solar home.”

Anne Marie Slaughter in an opinion piece in the New York Times reports that she saw real action on climate change in Japan.

“After a day of meetings at the Foreign Ministry, a young diplomat escorted me to the entrance just after 5:00. We walked through a darkened hallway; I assumed that we were in a part of the building under renovation. Not so – my guide explained to me that all non-essential lights were turned off “to save energy and the environment.” We came to the elevator bank, where 5-6 people were waiting in front of an elevator even though the elevator next to it was there and empty. I gestured toward it, and my guide again explained that after 5:00 only one elevator ran – the others were blocked.

“The next day in the train station I commented on the waste-bins with three or four different compartments for different kinds of waste. Our Japanese escort, Eiko-san, explained that at home Tokyo residents are required to separate out 7 different kinds of products for recycling, and that in some other cities in Japan the categories go as high as 19. These distinctions make it possible to readily recycle different materials; indeed, Eiko-san mentioned that the governor of Tokyo was doing everything possible to avoid creating another major landfill.”

She emphasizes that it’s going to take a wide array of solutions, big and small, to begin reversing the damage we have already done, much less avoiding even greater catastrophe.

Last week I mentioned to a post by Stuart Staniford at The Oil Drum exploring how energy usage and emissions were related to household size – per capita energy usage (and resulting emissions) increase as average household size decreases.

There are several reasons for this. Increased household size increases the density of population, reducing the amount of transportation energy required for that population to get around. Per capita, the energy use for heating, cooling, and lighting decreases as the same space is used by more people. And less energy is expended building and making stuff, like more housing and cars.

Increasing household size means sharing our space with other people. This is hard enough with family.  But think of sharing a house with strangers. Sharon Astyk does just this at Causabon’s Book, talking about the risks of inviting more people to share our lives. While there are risks, there are rewards, too – the sharing of work, the intimacy and community that adds richness to our lives.

We may not have a choice, as the cheap energy that underlies our present way of life disappears. But we may be surprised to find we’ll be better off and that life will be more fulfilling. Read the rest of this entry »

Kelpie Wilson at Truthout has a powerful message for this Thanksgiving:

“Remember as you give thanks for the bountiful Earth, that back of the bread lies the oil. We should acknowledge that our food production system and every other aspect of our lives are utterly dependent on fossil fuels. We should also remember that before World War II, this was not the case. We may even have relatives who remember those days. We should take a look at the children sitting around the table. They will not live in a world of cheap, abundant oil. Give thanks for that too.”

“Why should we give thanks that the future holds no cheap oil? There are several reasons, but the first is that cheap oil has fueled a 50-year-long party in the industrialized West that has left us with an unsustainable economy that is wrecking the planet. The recent awareness of global warming is beginning to put a damper on our out-of-control binge, but not fast enough to slow the heating of the planet. Rising oil prices will force a cutback in consumption. Rising oil prices will also chill the fantasy of endless growth and force us to confront the reality of planetary limits.”

Carolyn Baker has premonitions that our lives are about to change:

“I’d be willing to bet almost anything that next Thanksgiving season will be dramatically different from this one.

She warns that confronting the crises that face us will require confronting ourselves.

“Americans not only refuse to accept the limits the earth is pounding them with, but demand that their response to those limits be effortless, cheery, hopeful, and above all not require them to change anything about their lives. Any suggestion that introspection, dramatically altering one’s lifestyle, and pondering one’s values, priorities, and life’s work are as important, if not more important, than voting for Green Party candidates, consuming less energy, or purchasing environmentally-friendly products is met with blank stares or my favorite response, the accusation of “fear-mongering.”"

Our situation calls upon us to recover our lost spiritual bearings. We should be thankful for the opportunity to redeem ourselves in our relationship with Earth.  Let’s pray that we have the strength, the courage, and the integrity to see it through.

The ideal of getting “off the grid” – that is, living independently of the electrical power grid – has been popular for a long time.  But as Glenn writes at The Oil Drum:  Local,

 Getting “off the grid” this way is as dumb as it was thirty-five years ago, and for the same reason. Why? TRANSPORTATION! Hippies and yuppies love mobility far more than we hate oil companies and superhighways and the parking lots that pave Paradise; we have racked up far, far more miles per capita than any prior generation. Along the way we have become critically dependent on a vast, enormously expensive grid of publicly funded highways. If any “grid” is strangling our nation, it is the grid of low-density sprawl that leaves us 99.9% dependent on oil, automobiles, and millions of life-suffocating acres of pavement.

Yes, there are smart ways to get “off the grid” – starting with getting OURSELVES off the highways more often! That means walking, bicycling, and using public transit – modes that are incompatible with living in an isolated house on a big chunk of land. So getting “off the grid” of highways will entail getting “on the grid” of streets! OK, we’ve known for a while that God is not making the Earth any bigger, so let’s get used to living closer together.

The World Cancer Research Fund has released the most rigorous study on cancer ever.  Its conclusions?

 To avoid cancer, don’t eat too much. Stay lean. Avoid red meat. Walk.

As Alan AtKisson at WorldChanging points out, these recommendations are on every list of virtues one should cultivate if one is also to help save the planet by maintaining planetary biosphere’s climatic stability, ecosystem resilience, and biological diversity.

AtKisson remarks,

It turns out that “being good,” you might say, is good for you, good for your sex life, good for the environment.

The Green Store has opened in the historic Farmer’s Union complex at West Fifth Avenue and Olive Street in downtown Eugene.

The Green Store carries a variety of solar energy equipment, wind generators and other environmentally friendly products, including air and water filters, personal and household cleaning products, and natural-fabric clothes.

Tom Bowerman and partners Tom Scott, David Wollner and Doug Railton are  striving for what Wollner — the store’s manager — describes as a “small, environmental department store concept.” Every item in the inventory is chosen for its potential to change the way customers live, or to lessen the environmental impact of a consumer-driven society.