Sustainability

Unless they’re being offered by gap-toothed late-night comedians, I’m generally not a big fan of top ten lists. Or bottom ten lists for that matter. Or really rankings of any kind. What rates, why doesn’t, and why is so subjective that most attempts to order a given subject from best to worst quickly devolve into exercises in abject absurdity for one reason or another, not the least of which is who can really know?

Still, sometimes we can learn a few general things from such lists, especially if they’re based on some kind of objective methodology (though the sceptic can always argue these, too!) So it is that we find Forbes magazine with a new ranking of the greenest states in which our fair state of Vermont ties with Oregon for the number one position. Here in the Green Mountains we’ve got a really low per-capita carbon footprint, which helped vault us to the top of this particular heap.

I’m guessing Vermonters are winning the greenstakes because so many of us heat with wood, and we’ve got to have one of the highest rates of Prius ownership in the world. (Those things are so everywhere here that my daughter and I are able to amuse ourselves on the road with a spot-the-Prius game.) We also have an official state office dedicated to promoting energy conservation that spends more per citizen on the task than any other state. And we are second only to Hawaii in terms of the least amount of toxic waste produced.

See where your state ranks and then see if you can beat us next year…

Peter Senge, MIT lecturer and sustainability systems thinker (Fifth Discipline) was at 7th Gen recently and spoke candidly about the fervorishly growing sustainability movement. WR

Sometimes a guest post arrives which needs nothing extra added from anyone here. This is one, and here it is…

Okay, here goes. My name is Judy Johnson and I am an ordinary-type person of no particular importance to anything or anyone outside of my own circle of family and friends. I do all in my power to do the things necessary to save our planet for the generations to come and to lengthen my life and its enjoyment, but doing that is so much more expensive than the alternative and I am a senior on a fixed income. My frustration is as follows.

This interesting chart floated my way the other day from an equally intriguing website called Permatopia.

Here’s what its creators have to say about it:

Permatopia Patterns is a new way of thinking about permaculture. Historically, most permaculture guides and analyses have been focused on individual properties, often rural homesteads. Zones and sectors are key concepts in permaculture analysis, examining how to locate components of a permaculture system based on distance from the house and ecological factors. These are incredibly powerful tools for the personal level, but are far too limited in their scale for a society wide transformation to cope with Peak Oil and climate change.

This page shows how the concept of zones can be extended to the goal of "permaculture for nine billion people." Learning skills at the more local levels can help with efforts to extend to bigger levels, since effective solutions at the biggest levels depend on understanding how the solutions work at smaller levels.

The sectors concept reflects how there are many paths needed to move away from overshoot and collapse. Different people have different skills and interest, no individual or group could possibly address all of the various facets that are needed. The concept of interdependence between these issues (and levels) is one not normally promoted in our hyper-individualized society, but it is the type of path most likely to accomplish common goals.

Whether you are expanding a local community garden, installing utility scale wind power, teaching environmental education to second graders, starting up a community currency barter system, operating a bicycle shop, creating manufacturing cooperatives, campaigning for accountable elections, or any of thousands of other positive things is irrelevant - the key point is that you are doing something that is a piece of the puzzle.

Living in Vermont surrounded by Vermonters, it’s hard to know what the rest of the world thinks of our little state. My sense is that everyone else considers ours to be a kind of quaint little place, a somewhat odd anachronism in the modern world populated by slightly old-fashioned, slightly wacky, fairly far left-leaning folk just crazy enough to send socialists to Congress, endure unspeakable winters, and live miles from the nearest anything unless you count the farm down the road, the weekend chicken pie suppers, the general store, and, of course, the forests and mountains, which we here all definitely do.

Fair enough, I suppose. In Vermont we do often find ourselves a bit out of step with the rest of the world and quite contentedly so. You can drive for hours through nothing but bucolic scenes of pastoral paradise that seem like relics from a lost age. And it’s true that we Vermonters are, for the most part, quite happy living in relatively simple and traditional ways in a rare landscape where humanity and nature have learned to peacefully coexist. But if you pull off the highway and start poking around, you’ll find something else: people young and old forging the future for the rest of the world.

Welcome to Thursday and this inspired guest post from global protagonist Veronica Bach

Watching with horror the latest in the series of fatal mine worker deaths, I was thinking that we should be able to provide these wonderful people alternative jobs that would produce energy, but would allow them to work above ground in a safer environment. Stopping the use of coal in our energy systems would save many lives in every area of the production of it, including the final result of a coal plant. My idea is to begin with the states where coal mining is the predominant part of the economy, and start recruiting their workers to be retrained for solar panel making and wind power jobs. We could begin in our country, and then take it global, including China and Australia.

For what it's worth.

While researching an article on Green Chemistry for the upcoming Non-Toxic Times (which, keep your fingers crossed, will come out next week), I stumbled across an entry on the same subject in the ever amazing Wikipedia that contained something I didn’t know existed: a set of principles to guide chemists in greening their labs and the things those labs create.

Principles, of course, are always a good thing because they set certain benchmarks and establish concrete guidelines for whatever it is we’re trying to do. Whenever a decision comes up as we proceed, we can compare all our possible choices to the principles at hand. When we do, we often find that there’s no decision to be made at all. The principles make it for us. They may even suggest that we drop the current operation entirely and try something else.

In the case of green chemistry, the 12 principles were created to steer chemists away from toxic substances and processes, and encourage healthier alternatives. I can’t for a moment pretend to know what some of these are about. (“Stoichiometric reagents, for example, is a pretty scary term. I think I had a beaker or two of that at a really ugly frat party once…), but than again why should I? They’re not for me. They’re for the people who are actually out there mixing up the molecules. The people who need to stop messing with nature and start working with it instead. They’re only for you and I in the sense that as they ripple through the chemical community, they’ll eventually trickle down to us in the form of safer, healthier, non-toxic alternatives to today’s hazardous products and processes. You’ll never use them yourself, but you will someday end up using the stuff they lead to, and we’ll all be a lot healthier for it.

White Rhino, who currently is lost in the woods of the Left Coast, forwarded this post from the Cool Hunter about Dongtan, a new 100% eco-city being built in China. The pedestrian-oriented city will get all its energy from renewables, and the only greenhouse gases it will produce will come from its exhaling residents. All waste will be reused, composted, or otherwise recycled.

Today is International Ecological Debt Day. That is, today marks the day of the year when the world's annual demands for earth's natural resources outstrips the planet's annual ability to sustainably provide them and our annual impacts on the biosphere exceed the annual ability of the planet to absorb them. From this point in the year onward, according to data assembled by the Global Footprint Network, we're living on "natural credit" and borrowing against our future by using more than the earth can produce each year and leaving behind more than it can take back.

To illustrate just how quickly things are mushrooming, the date of the world's first ecological debt day in 1987 was December 19th. But economic growth around the world has seen the day fall earlier and earlier each year. The sustainability clock is ticking and apparently it's ticking faster all the time, all of which which strongly suggests that we not wait until its alarm goes off to start spinning its hands forward. If we hesitate, a metaphor may be the only thing we're left with...

Sorry we couldn't post until now. We were hoping to get an audio log entry out last night, but as you can imagine, 20th century communications are a spotty proposition in a place as far removed from the beaten path as the Amazon basin.

We had perhaps the most incredible day yesterday that it's possible to have in this life. Like Marlow in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, we have gone far upriver into a world you can't imagine unless your own eyes take it in. Extraordinary sights and sounds met us around every bend in the river. This is a place primeval, a realm of deep and unfathomable beauty nature has taken millions of years to create. We have never seen or experienced anything even remotely like it.

That this riotous crucible of life is profoundly precious is a dramatic understatement. So it is that we were heartened by the other half of our experiences these past 24 hours: our encounters with Greenpeace projects and the people who are working with unwavering dedication to preserve the Amazon rainforest and make sure that it forever remains a place of wonder.

powered by ODEO

Download this podcast