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

In Bolinas, TDR means transferable water meter

April 22nd, 2010 by Jim Just

If you want to build a house in Bolinas, you first have to buy a water meter – at auction. The last time one came up for bid was in 2005. It went to a stonemason, for $310,000. Now there’s something to think about here in Oregon, where we’re just beginning to tinker with the idea of transferable development rights.

Bolinas is a tiny town at the southern tip of Point Reyes in Marin County just 20 miles north of San Francisco, across the Gold Gate Bridge and either over or around Mount Tamalpias. Its water source is a tiny dam thrown across a narrow creek known as Arroyo Hondo, delivered to town by a pipe described as “no wider than a coffee mug”.

In 1971, the Bolinas Community Public Utility District (CPUD) declared a Water Shortage Emergency Condition and enacted a moratorium on new connections to the municipal water supply. CPUD still warns:

That moratorium is still in effect and should be taken into consideration when contemplating the purchase of undeveloped real estate.

The Pacific Legal Foundation filed legal challenges to the moratorium and the suit dragged on for years, costing the town’s 1,500 residents almost $2 million to defend – but the water shortage in Bolinas is no joke. In January 2009, due to the perilous status of the town’s water supply resulting from two previous years of low rainfall and historic low rainfall in the early 2008-09 winter season, EPUD declared a prolonged drought condition in the district; issued a water supply alert; and enacted immediate, mandatory conservation measures. All customers were required to limit their consumption to no more than 150 gallons (or 20 cubic feet) per service connection per day (average daily household water use in the U.S. is 350 gallons).

Despite the town’s water supply difficulties, some people still insist on blaming the moratorium on anti-development forces – which certainly existed, as evidenced by the history of Bolinas Border Patrol. The Bolinas Border Patrol was famous for taking down signs pointing to the town, until the state finally relented and stopped putting up new ones. The New York Times article says now there’s this sign:

Even now, a sign that should say “Entering Bolinas” says, “Entering a socially acknowledged nature-loving town.”

Heck, there’s always been a sign at the entrance to town, just past the sign advertising the “B & M Septic Service”. It’s just without a sign pointing the way to Bolinas at the turn-off from the two-lane Highway 1 that winds its way along the coast, outsiders will never get to the edge of town.

Suspected members of the Bolinas Border Patrol would congregate at Smiley’s Schooner Saloon and Hotel, perched on the edge of Bolinas Lagoon. There, anybody could buy and wear a “Bolinas Border Patrol” tee shirt. Smiley’s was a haven after a morning of walking mist nets and weighing, measuring, and banding birds at the Point Reyes Bird Observatory (the Birdo, we fondly called it). You could down a beer and a dollar dog with the locals. From the bar, you could watch the local long hairs in tie dyes and sandals meandering up and down the street, going in and out of the co-op (named the People’s Store – what else, in Bolinas?), the bakery, the library.  Of course, everything was right across the street, in Bolinas.

The BirdO was housed just up the mesa in the old buildings of the Palomarin Ranch, run by the Church of the Golden Rule, refuge to draft dodgers during the dark days of World War II. Allergic to female proximity following the explosive dénouement of an ill-fated second marriage, I bunked in my van rather than share a dorm room with a gaggle of youthful postgrads.

Why is EPUD still cautioning the unwary about “undeveloped real estate”? Look no farther than the Bolinas “Gridded Mesa”. This is an area of about 300 acres on a bluff overlooking Bolinas Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The area was subdivided in 1927 into 5,336 20? x 100? lots – lots of less than 1/20 of an acre – in a grid pattern imposed over a former dairy farm without regard to drainage patterns, slope, bluff erosion, or any other natural features. The lots were sold as part of a subscription promotion by the San Francisco Bulletin.  The streets on the gridded mesa were never accepted by the county, and unless maintained by adjoining property owners, many are often impassible. Some have eroded into the sea and some have been abandoned, leaving lots with no public access. Only a few streets are now paved and maintained by the county. The entire area is served by on-site septic systems.

What a freakin’ planning nightmare. No wonder the Bolinas Border Patrol rose up to keep people out. No place in America was ever more in need of a building moratorium.

Now, the Bolinas Border Patrol is no more – at least not in name. The connotations of “border patrol” have become too ugly for counterculture types to stomach.

The shadowy rebel organization that tore down Bolinas road signs, misdirected tourists and confused the media for more than three decades took a politically correct step last month. The Bolinas Border Patrol members, whoever they are, will henceforth refer to themselves as “Bolinas Community,” so as to stop potentially offending Latinos.

The transition was announced in the Jan. 20 issue of the Bolinas Hearsay News by Bolinas mutineer and t-shirt designer, StuArt, who left ten phone messages unreturned and refused an interview on the top-secret matter. In his Hearsay story, StuArt credited a “no-bullshit” woman called Hawk with highlighting the unfortunate association between the Bolinas Border Patrol and the “brutal” United States Border Patrol.

“Border Patrol is way too ‘fascist police state’ for me,” StuArt wrote, agreeing with Hawk that the name had to change. “I thought about the Minutemen in Arizona, armed to the teeth, patrolling the U.S. border in SUVs.”

So while the logo remains a bespectacled quail (changed from a black widow spider in 1985), the name on all t-shirts, flyers and bumper stickers will be changed to the less controversial and arguably less virile title, “Bolinas Community.”

In the heyday of the Bolinas Border Patrol, members sawed, plowed and otherwise vandalized some 30 signs indicating the road to Bolinas. It was all part of a backfiring effort to keep the coastal hamlet out of public attention, tourist brochures and yuppie developer hands.

The quote above is from an article in The Point Reyes Light – no ordinary small-town newspaper. In 1979, with a circulation of only 2750, it became one of the few weekly newspapers to ever receive a Pulitzer Prize, winning the Pulitzer gold medal for Meritorious Public Service as a result of a series of exposes and editorials about the Synanon cult, infamous for (among other things) booby-trapping the mailbox of lawyer Paul Morantz with a live rattlesnake.

Bolinas, a truly weird and beautiful place. Here’s a map.  But please, don’t tell anybody else.

Posted in History, Planning | No Comments »

Economic calamity meets political and social turmoil

February 21st, 2009 by Jim Just

The world financial system has effectively disintegrated, and the resulting turbulence is actually more severe than during the Great Depression.

That’s the view of some of the world’s most respected financial figures. Former Fed chairman Paul Volker says the economy falling faster than in Depression:

I don’t remember any time, maybe even in the Great Depression, when things went down quite so fast, quite so uniformly around the world.

Financier George Soros says the Great Depression analogy doesn’t go far enough – the current situation is more like a global version of the demise of the Soviet Union.

Michael Klare writes about a planet on the brink:

Indeed, if you want to be grimly impressed, hang a world map on your wall and start inserting red pins where violent episodes have already occurred. Athens (Greece), Longnan (China), Port-au-Prince (Haiti), Riga (Latvia), Santa Cruz (Bolivia), Sofia (Bulgaria), Vilnius (Lithuania), and Vladivostok (Russia) would be a start. Many other cities from Reykjavik, Paris, Rome, and Zaragoza to Moscow and Dublin have witnessed huge protests over rising unemployment and falling wages that remained orderly thanks in part to the presence of vast numbers of riot police. If you inserted orange pins at these locations — none as yet in the United States — your map would already look aflame with activity. And if you’re a gambling man or woman, it’s a safe bet that this map will soon be far better populated with red and orange pins.

Then there are climate change impacts. British economic thinker Lord Nicholas Stern warns climate change will force mass migrations, setting off mass conflict:

[W]hat we’re talking about then is extended world war.

The global economic crisis is unleashing a global political crisis. In some areas – like Sudan and Somalia – the political crises are linked to an already-changing climate.

The flash points – countries or regions that are poised to either collapse or explode – are proliferating: the Middle East -Gaza, Egypt, Turkey, Israel and its neighbors; Eastern Europe, including new members of the EU, Russia, and former components of the USSR; Africa – Egypt, Somalia, Sudan, Congo, Nigeria, Zimbabwe;  Southwest Asia – Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Southeast Asia – Indonesia, Thailand; Eastern Europe; Mexico.

Harvard historian Niall Ferguson sees us entering “the age of upheaval”:

Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts now.

Throw in climate change impacts, and the situation threatens to become an order of magnitude worse.

Posted in History, International | No Comments »

Compared to panarchy theorist, Orlov’s collapse would be a walk in the park

February 15th, 2009 by Jim Just

Dmitry Orlov is the only person I know who can talk seriously about collapse and make you laugh at the same time. He’s got a new piece posted on his blog, Club Orlov, titled Social Collapse Best Practices.

Orlov grew up as a child of both the Soviet Union and the U.S., and has come up with his own “comparative theory of superpower collapse.” His theory is currently being quite thoroughly tested. The theory states that the United States and the Soviet Union will have collapsed due to the “superpower collapse soup,” which contains four main ingredients

Orlov’s recipe also calls for non-essential “spices” such as:

  • The inability to provide an acceptable quality of life for its citizens.
  • A systemically corrupt political system incapable of reform.

We’ll soon see about these. The chances of real change happening isn’t looking good, and people’s lives are increasingly unraveling. Anyhow, these last ingredients aren’t necessary components of Orlov’s recipe. They don’t automatically lead to collapse because they do not put the country on a collision course with reality.

Obama spoke of change – but he is, of course, a politician. Orlov says politicians in reality are terrified of change and want to cling with all their might to the status quo. But this game will soon be over, and they don’t have any idea what to do next.

So, what should we do? What realistic new objectives should politicians espouse? I think Orlov nails it:

Forget “growth,” forget “jobs,” forget “financial stability.” Well, here they are: food, shelter, transportation, and security. Their task is to find a way to provide all of these necessities on an emergency basis, in absence of a functioning economy, with commerce at a standstill, with little or no access to imports, and to make them available to a population that is largely penniless. If successful, society will remain largely intact, and will be able to begin a slow and painful process of cultural transition, and eventually develop a new economy, a gradually de-industrializing economy, at a much lower level of resource expenditure, characterized by a quite a lot of austerity and even poverty, but in conditions that are safe, decent, and dignified. If unsuccessful, society will be gradually destroyed in a series of convulsions that will leave a defunct nation composed of many wretched little fiefdoms. Given its largely depleted resource base, a dysfunctional, collapsing infrastructure, and its history of unresolved social conflicts, the territory of the Former United States will undergo a process of steady degeneration punctuated by natural and man-made cataclysms.

Orlov thinks the Soviet Union was much better prepared for collapse than the U.S. is – ironically, because it was much less efficient. Because it didn’t work well, people had learned to get by on their own. In the U.S., people are dependent on industrial agribusiness for their food. Our suburban single-family houses will prove to be unaffordable millstones. Once fuel shortages develop and the transportation system falls apart, people will find themselves stranded in places that aren’t survivable. As for security – well, you really have to read Orlov himself to get the flavor of the hilarity.

Orlov says it’s important for our sanity to just let go of everything.  And there’s a bright note:

While at work, do as little as possible, because all this economic activity is just a terrible burden on the environment. Just gently ride it down to a stop and jump off.

And because money is likely to become worthless, trade it in while you have the chance and “stockpile useful stuff.”

However distopian Orlov’s vision of collapse seems, it’s really pretty mild stuff. Orlov’s collapse would involve only the U.S. and its economy.

Buzz Holling, one of the world’s great ecologists and a originator of “panarchy” theory, sees a global, systemic collapse approaching, one involving the world’s climate and all the world’s continents. Panarchy theory’s core idea is that systems naturally grow, become more brittle, collapse, and then renew themselves in an endless cycle within a grand hierarchy of cycles.

Holling fears that rapidly rising connectivity within global systems – both economic and technological – poses an increasing risk of deep collapse, a collapse that will cascade across adaptive cycles, a kind of pancaking implosion of the entire system as the collapse of higher-level adaptive cycles causes progressive collapse at lower levels.

Holling thinks the world is reaching “a stage of vulnerability that could trigger a rare and major ‘pulse’ of social transformation.”

The immense destruction that a new pulse signals is both frightening and creative. The only way to approach such a period, in which uncertainty is very large and one cannot predict what the future holds, is not to predict, but to experiment and act inventively and exuberantly via diverse adventures in living.

Posted in History, Transition | No Comments »

History as drama: our moment on stage has arrived

December 26th, 2008 by Jim Just

The biggest obstacle to coming to grips with our energy and climate situation is our faith in progress: “Oh, they’ll think of something.” No matter what, the future will be richer, better, brighter than today. Ironically, our faith in progress relieves us of responsibility to act.

We believe that history as a whole moves inevitably in a single direction, and we call that direction “progress.” The ideologies of our time – capitalism, communism, socialism, liberalism, progressivism – share this underlying faith, the latter even encapsulating the myth in its name.

John Michael Greer points out that this miasma has a name: historicism. This is the belief that history as a whole moves inevitably in a single direction that can be known in advance by human beings. We are captives of historicism. It is so pervasive that we are unaware of its existence. Blind to its existence, we are blind to reality.

It hasn’t always been so. Cultures have more often seen history as cyclical rather than linear. Just as the seasons follow each other year after year, years of plenty are followed by years of privation – so don’t ever get too full of yourself in the good times, prepare for the worst which is sure to follow. On a larger scale, civilizations rise, peak, and then decline and even disappear. We see theories seeking to explain the rise and fall of civilizations related in the works of Tainter and Diamond.

America’s founders were well versed in the history of Rome, of its theme of decay from its peak as a republic, to empire and corruption, then to decay, defeat and dissolution. They were under no illusion that this new country, which aspired to the glory that was Rome’s, was immune to Rome’s temptations or fate. But as Tainter pointed out, there is only a tenuous connection between any concept of “progress” and the rise and fall of a civilization. Most of the people who lived within the bounds of the Roman Empire were either unaffected by or were actually better off as a result of its demise.

History has no direction, at least none that can be foreseen. At best, like evolution, any “direction” can be discerned and described only in retrospect, and it makes no sense whatever to describe that direction as “progress” – or even “decay.” It simply is what it is.

Where we are in history can never be known. This civilization which we think so inevitable, so real, will inevitably vanish – as will humans as a species, the Earth, the universe itself. How the future unfolds – at least our little piece of it, our time on Earth – is our story, our history. The author of that story – the “they” in “they’ll think of something” is us. We’ll see.

Posted in History, Philosophy | No Comments »

Reduction in energy leads to simplification

December 18th, 2008 by Jim Just

Richard Heinberg has posted a really interesting piece at Post Carbon Institute on the relationship between energy and societal complexity. He ponders the consequences of the fact that reduced energy will inevitably result in simplification – a reduction in societal complexity or, more ominously stated, collapse.

Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies is the touchstone work. As Heinberg summarizes:

Tainter saw societal complexity as a strategy for solving problems (too many people, not enough food, warlike neighbors, changing climate, and so on). But investments in complexity yield diminishing returns, so eventually the strategy always fails and the society must simplify again. This simplification typically manifests as political and economic crisis, abandonment of urban centers, declining population, or war.

One of the reasons that returns on complexity begin to decline is that growth in exploitation of energy sources cannot be sustained: soils erode, forests disappear, fossil fuels deplete, the climate changes around us.

Heinberg poses the questions that we will be forced to confront: How will that simplification occur? How simple will society become?

Heinberg says adaptation strategies are likely to be more successful if we can organize the simplification process. But as we are seeing in the reactions to the multiple crises we’re facing, our automatic response is ever more complexity:

[W]e labor instead under the belief that our current problems can be solved with ever more complexity in the forms of technology (genetically modified crops and hybrid cars) and government bailouts for failing companies.

Will we as a society continue doing what we have been doing until it simply doesn’t work any longer and we’re compelled to do something else? Time will tell.

Heinberg helpfully lists others who have been exploring in their works the phenomenon of collapse and what it means for us: Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed; Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization; John Michael Greer, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age; and Dmitri Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects.

Posted in Art & Entertainment, Energy, History, Psychology, Sociology | No Comments »

We’re already in a “fast crash”

April 23rd, 2008 by Jim Just

Sharon Astyk at Casaubon’s Book observes that the debate about whether we are in for a “fast crash” or a “slow grind” is over – we’ve been in a “fast crash” since the beginning of 2008.

Here’s an abridged version of the evidence she compiles. Note she hardly mentions the implosion of the global financial system – only the housing collapse, which is only a symptom of the systemic crisis.

“In early 2008, the world’s food and energy train came off the rails. . .

“It started with biofuels and growing meat consumption rates. They drove the price of staple grains up at astounding rates. . .

“Haiti was an early canary in the hunger coal mine. Desperately poor, by early 2008, tens of thousands of impoverished Haitians were priced entirely out of the market for rice and other staples, and were reduced to eating “cookies” made of nutrient rich mud, vegetable shortening and salt . . .

Read the rest of this entry »

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The specialization trap

April 16th, 2008 by Jim Just

John Michael Greer at The Archdruid Report (also at the Energy Bulletin) looks back at the history of the Roman Empire for a cautionary tale: in economics (as in evolution), specialization can be a trap.

The implosion of the western empire turned mass production and specialization – which had previously been massive economic advantages – into fatal vulnerabilities. As the networks of transport and exchange came apart, the Roman economy went down with it. The economy had relied on centralized production and specialized labor for so long that there was nothing left to replace it.

Greer uses pottery as an example. A single generation of social chaos and demographic contraction was enough to break the transmission of the complex craft traditions of Roman pottery-making, leaving the survivors with only the dimmest idea of how to make good pottery.

Economic specialization and centralized production, the core strategies of Roman economic success, left Rome’s successor states with few choices and fewer resources in a world where local needs had to be met by local production. Caught in the trap of their own specialization, most parts of the western empire came out the other end of the process of decline far more impoverished and fragmented than they had been before the centralized Roman economy evolved in the first place.

The parallels and implications for today are ominous. As Greer points out:

“In modern industrial nations, the production and distribution of goods are far more centralized than anything Rome ever achieved. Nearly all workers at every level of the economy perform highly specialized niche jobs, most of which only function within the structure of a highly centralized, mechanized, and energy-intensive global economy, and many of which have no meaning or value at all outside that structure. If the structure falters, access to even the most basic goods and services could become a challenge very quickly.”

The principle holds for every necessity of life, including food. Greer argues that our situation is far more precarious than Rome’s was – but that we have one advantage. We’re aware of the possibility of collapse, and can take preventative action if we can muster the will.

In evolutionary biology, humans succeeded because they were generalists. It would be ironic indeed if we were to fail socially because we neglected the lessons of our biology.

Posted in Economics, History | No Comments »

Zoning: an anachronism in urban design

April 9th, 2008 by Jim Just

Jim Kunstler in an interview at KunstlerCast points out that “zoning” as we have come to know it was a rational response to a set of difficult circumstances which arose at the beginning of the 20th century. What follows is a summary – but be sure to read the original.

The problem was how to manage, to regulate industrial activities which were taking our cities and making them really unpleasant in a way never experienced before? The scale issue was also a new thing because of the size of the factories.

After World War II we really start to get going on the refinements of zoning – and started to enter ‘territory of the absurd.’ And among the absurd things that we do is decide that shopping is now classified as an “obnoxious industrial activity” that nobody should be allowed to live anywhere near. So not only does that create huge problems for traffic now—by doing that you basically mandated that everybody has to get in their car 11 times a day to make a trip for every little thing they need. But you’ve also now eliminated the most common kind of affordable housing that is found virtually everywhere else in the world, except the United States after 1950, which is people living above retail establishments, people living above stores—normal urban typologies of buildings that are more than one-story high.

And after 1950 we built very few commercial retail buildings that are more than one story high. And so that then engenders this unanticipated consequence of having an affordable housing crisis. We’re now obliged to provide this artificial commodity called ‘affordable housing’ because we were too stupid to provide it organically by allowing buildings to be more than one-story high.

Towns across America just adopted the same generic vanilla zoning codes, which is part of the reason why every development, housing development in America looks almost the same. There was also a very, very firm and strong level of consensus among the people who are delivering suburbia about how things should be done – the traffic engineers, the developers, the real estate salespeople all agree that this is the way we should do it. The streets should all be 80 ft. wide, and the houses should all be on a half-acre lot, and the shopping centers should all be far away from this so that people aren’t bothered by grocery shopping.

Urban planning has no design component anymore. It’s simply about administering the codes, and about the minutia and trivia of measuring the width of the curb cut, and making sure that the signage is exactly within a centimeter of the specifications, and having nothing to do with excellence in design or having standards of excellence, or having a consensus for excellence, or least of all any consideration for how the buildings will behave in their relations with the other buildings so that we have some kind of a coherent urban structure.

This is as close as Kunstler gets to optimism:

“So incrementally I think we’ll get back to a place where we’re going to recover some sanity. But it may not be a very coherent kind of reform process; it may be, by default, the abandonment of practices that have proved to be unsustainable.

Posted in History, Land Use, Planning | No Comments »

Building resilient communities that can withstand collapse

April 2nd, 2008 by Jim Just

Richard Heinberg gave a talk at a recent conference sponsored by the Findhorn Foundation titled “Resilient Communities – Paths for Powering Down, An Exercise in Strategic Thinking.”

He laid out eight “assumptions” – although “conclusions” seems like a better word, as they are not unfounded assumptions but are firmly grounded in inescapable reality.

  1. Global oil production is nearing an all time maximum and will begin to decline within the next 18-24 months, with gas and coal peaks not far behind.
  2. The consequences, as identified in the Hirsch Report, will be severe (A Wikipedia article about the Hirsch Report is available here).
  3. There will be no technofix, no silver bullet that will enable business as usual to continue.
  4. Therefore we will have to power down.
  5. In the meantime, climate change poses thorny policy challenges, but enormous economic interests stand in the way.
  6. Climate change makes global powerdown necessary, whereas peak oil means it is not only possible but unavoidable.
  7. The powering-down process will be complex, lengthy, and perilous.
  8. These are not the only looming crises –or even necessarily the most imminent. It may well be that a financial crash, already beginning, will affect us first.

Heinberg talked about emerging responses, including both bottom up approaches such as transition initiatives, relocalization efforts, and so on; and top down responses such as Post Carbon cities and local government efforts such as peak oil task forces. But Heinberg thinks these kinds of responses may not be adequate to cope with a crisis. He suggests we work to make our communities more resilient by developing a disaster response plan to deal with peak oil and economic or environmental collapse that draws on the skills and knowledge of the alternatives movements.

Which leads me to Dmitry Orlov, who has written extensively about the collapse of the Soviet Union and who has been warning us that the U.S. is far less resilient than Russia ever was. He’s written a new book – Reinventing Collapse – that argues the entire country should embrace the notion that collapse is inevitable and that it must prepare for it. Of course, he recognizes that won’t happen – but it’s possible for “small groups of capable and motivated individuals to succeed where governments fear to tread.”

Unlike most of us, Orlov has seen a collapse first hand and has described to process of collapse in detail in The Five Stages of Collapse. As Joseph Tainter in The Collapse of Complex Societies and William Kötke in The Final Empire argue, collapse can actually result in ordinary folks being better off, if not the ruling elites.

Posted in Energy, History, Peak Oil, Permaculture | No Comments »

Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism

February 5th, 2008 by Jim Just

The new book Bad Samaritans: The Myth of Free Trade and the Secret History of Capitalism by Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang takes on and demolishes the  neoliberal consensus.

Throughout the golden age of capitalism, from the Marshall Plan (1947) to the first oil shock (1973), the United States was a Good Samaritan and helped developing countries by allowing them to protect and subsidize their nascent industries. The developing world has never done better, before or since. But then, in the 1970s, scared that its position as global hegemon was being undermined, the United States turned decisively toward neoliberalism and its policies of free trade, privatization, and protection of intellectual property to bring the developing countries to heel.

Chalmers Johnson’s review of the book at Alternet concludes:

“With “Bad Samaritans,” Chang has succinctly and comprehensively exposed the chief structures of economic imperialism in the world today. What is now required is the leadership to undermine and dismantle the barriers that keep so much of the world so poor.”

Posted in Economics, History, International | No Comments »

Al Gore wins Nobel Peace Prize

October 12th, 2007 by Jim Just

Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Tragically, the greatest step for world peace would simply have been for Gore not to have had the presidency stolen from him in November 2000. By every just measure, Gore won the presidency in 2000 only to have George W. Bush steal it from him with the critical assistance of the US Supreme Court.

And by the way, where are the calls for the Supreme Court to pay the price for its perfidy?

Dave Roberts at Gristmill thinks Gore won’t run for President because he has “transcended politics.” And Roberts nails the sorry state of American political life:

What many Americans don’t realize is that the rest of the world is not distracted by the serial, lurid distractions that compose our political dialogue. Our national conversation is dominated by the resentful bile of core of nationalist, reactionary, authoritarian ding-dongs, but it’s not like that when Gore goes overseas. In other countries, they don’t care about his electrical bills or his waist size or his clothing choices or his lack of that most important qualification for leader of the free world, the ability to act like a regular guy. . .

We are at an inflection point in history. These are times of immense consequence. The world will either unite around the problem of climate change and start pulling as one in the direction of survival and sustainable development, or grim years lay ahead for all of us. We must learn, as a species, how to share our collective resources more equitably and how to become happier without using more stuff and creating more waste. We must decouple our health and fulfillment from our ecological impact.

Posted in Global Warming, History, International, Politics | No Comments »

An environmental history of Seattle

August 26th, 2007 by Jim Just

Alex Steffan at WorldChanging has posted a review of Matthew Klingle’s new book, Emerald City: An Environmental History of Seattle He writes:

Klingle crafts a straightforward but engrossing story about how in the late 1700s, Europeans encountered Native Peoples living in an ecosystem of almost staggering natural abundance — “the most lovely country that can be imagined” — and, over time, in fits and starts, aided by the Klondike Gold Rush and industrialization, intentionally and yet with profound ignorance, changed that place into a city that today is prosperous, high-tech, scenic and teetering on the edge of ecological disaster. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Environment, History | No Comments »