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Lifestyle changes prepare locals for energy changes
Cindy Sutter, Boulder Daily Camera (Colorado)
Michael Brownlee wants to help you change your life.
The head of Boulder Valley Relocalization has a radically different view of the future, one in which the daily gridlock on U.S. 36 would be a thing of the oil-guzzling past, where farms would dot large swathes of Boulder County open space, Kentucky bluegrass would give way to food crops in suburban yards and businesses would plant rooftop gardens. Solar panels and other renewable energy would supply a large portion of the community’s energy. Local businesses would meet many more of the citizenry’s daily needs, and customers could even choose to use a local currency.
“We advocate a reduction of energy consumption of about 80 percent,” Brownlee says.
While the festival — billed as a nearly zero waste event — is designed to be fun with music and food, its intent is serious: to help the community reorganize in a more sustainable way. Brownlee and others like him are not working out of sunny idealism, but rather out of a grim conviction that the world’s oil supply will at some point begin an inexorable decline that will necessitate huge changes in the way we live our lives.
The catch phrase for this point of view is “peak oil.” Brownlee defines peak oil as the point at which every barrel of oil that comes out of the ground will be more difficult and expensive to extract. Brownlee calls it a watershed moment in modern history as oil grows more scarce and expensive than before.
“(After the peak), fossil fuel will no longer be so cheap and so widely available. Probably this era of very rapid industrial growth will come to an end.”
A peak, but when?
Virtually everyone recognizes the concept of peak oil. The disagreement is over when the peak will occur and what it will mean. Some believe the peak has already happened, something the world will only know in retrospect. Brownlee says many analysts put the peak at about 2010 to 2012.
(28 September 2007)
Contributor Rick Dworsky writes:
Local post peak lifestyle teach-in fairs — an autogenic grass roots response that will increase in importance and popularity as food and energy costs rise beyond means. This appears to be the genesis of a new re-localized economic social system.
Shut up about the deckchairs!
Jonathan Dawson, New Statesman
One of the ports of call during the last two weeks that I have been away was the 6th international conference of ASPO (the Association for the Study of Peak Oil) in Cork. This is the body, founded by former oil geologist Dr Colin Campbell, which more than any other has brought to public consciousness the imminent peaking in the availability of cheap fossil fuels.
‘Fun’ was hardly the word for it, but it was good to be in the company of people who have clearly understood the pivotal role of cheap energy in creating the highly abnormal and completely unsustainable global society in which we live today. Unsustainable precisely because the cheap energy on which the whole edifice is built is getting more expensive by the month – and is set, bar the odd blip, to do so indefinitely.
Within the peak oil community, the experience of realising this very simple but paradigm-altering truth is coming to be called ‘peak moments’. People at the conference were exchanging stories about their own peak moments, when their focal point suddenly shifted from the pattern of the deckchairs on the fore-deck (the stuff of political and philosophical discourse over the last couple of centuries) to the iceberg of resource (and especially energy) depletion towering over the ship.
It is within the context of this radically altered understanding of what the current moment of history is all about that the eco-village phenomenon comes to make sense. It is lovely to arrive back in Findhorn to see the wind turbines cheerfully twirling to the tune of the brisk, autumnal northerlies; the vegetables being taken from the gardens to kitchens, passing the food-scraps from the last meal making the reverse journey; self-builders working away on their energy-efficient homes; hand-carts coming in from the forest laden with logs being put in for the winter.
However, the point is that these are not primarily the cute and eccentric behaviours of over-privileged urbanites who have chosen to escape the grind of the cities (though there may just be a touch of that as well!)
Rather, the whole experience – here and in a growing number of eco-villages around the world – can only be understood as a profoundly sane response to the imminent energy crisis.
(28 September 2007)
Gaviotas: The village that could save the planet
Paul Kaihla, Business 2.0 Magazine via CNN Money
How two men plan to extend the ecological miracle that is Gaviotas, Colombia, across the rest of the Third World.
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…Gaviotas, the ecovillage Lugari launched in 1971. It’s one of the most improbable field experiments in the annals of science and engineering: a freewheeling center of innovation devoted to building a sustainable society in one of the globe’s least hospitable climates.
Built from scratch in a treeless corner of the country, this community of scientists, tinkerers, and refugees – now numbering more than 200 – has created a verdant rainforest where once there was nothing but scrub grass. It has also devised and deployed dozens of inventions with a frequency and success rate that puts some of America’s most storied technology companies to shame.
Its products include a hydroelectric microturbine that generates 30 kilowatts and thousands of RPMs from a mere 1-meter drop in a low-fall dam; a system of solar panels, spherical boilers, and tanks that can provide hot water for housing projects as large as 30,000 units; and a remote-controlled zeppelin that uses videocameras to spot forest fires.
Unlike the startups that dot Silicon Valley, Gaviotas has done all this and more with virtually no funding, no well-endowed university backing, no incubators or venture capitalists, and no access to a national power grid, airport, or freeway system. In fact, Gaviotas lies 15 hours east of Bogotá, the nearest city of note, by a two-lane road that traverses the estates of narcotics traffickers and disappears occasionally into sloughs of mud.
Gaviotas has been occupied from time to time by guerrilla bands. Lugari himself is a perennial kidnapping target who was captured once and let go only after the president of Colombia intervened and pleaded for his release.
The magic of Gaviotas is in the corporate counterculture that Lugari has fostered. It eschews formal meetings and time-management conventions, promotes jacks-of-all-trades over specialists, and conjures the kind of devotion to discovery that produced great mathematicians in the villages of ancient Greece.
(27 September 2007)
Families bond over green choices
Emma Gilchrist, CanWest News Service (Vancouver Sun)
Mom and dad can lead the way to being environmentally conscious kids
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CALGARY – Rob Sinclair vowed to live an eco-friendly lifestyle when his daughters were born. It’s not that he didn’t make healthy choices before, but having children took Sinclair’s quest for sustainability to a new level.
“[The girls] were the biggest catalyst because now we didn’t want our kids growing up with all those disorders,” says Sinclair, 37, referring to the choices he made to avoid health issues linked to everything from toxic household cleaners to pesticide-laden foods.
As a result, Luna, 5, and Tia, 3, have never known anything but an environmentally friendly life. They wore cloth diapers and ate homemade organic baby food from the start. Now, Sinclair says, about 90 per cent of the food the girls eat is organic.
…They could be voted the ultimate green family: Not only does Sinclair make healthy choices for his children, he also helps them make conscious decisions about the environment.
“They’re involved in most of what we do: cooking, gardening, cleaning,” says Sinclair. “We make a lot of stuff. We play outside. I have a yard that’s about a third of an acre, with 45 trees, so we’re outside a lot of the time looking for fairies or playing in the tree house.”
“Kids are actually a lot more capable than people give them credit for,” says Randi Cruz, a community relations specialist for the David Suzuki Foundation. “Empowering them with information and informing them about the impact of their choices is a great first step.”
Cruz’s foundation has found that the best way Canadians can make a difference is by making conscious choices in three areas: transportation, food and home energy use.
“Kids have an amazing opportunity to make a contribution in these areas,” she says. She suggests introducing your children to sustainable transportation by riding the bus together.
It’s not about sacrifice, it’s about making healthy choices that will help the environment — and that can actually be a lot of fun, she adds. “Kids love to go to local farmers’ markets. And it connects them with the cycle of life.”
Sinclair, meanwhile, says there’s a fine line between making sound eco-friendly choices and being fanatical.
(29 September 2007)
Sustainable Connections – Transforming a Community Through Local Business
Peak Moment via Global Public Media
Michelle Long enthuses about how their highly successful local independent business network has transformed Bellingham, WA and inspired other communities as well. From an initial “Think Local First” program, they have expanded to business peer mentoring, and support for local food producers, sustainable buildings, and green energy. An astounding sixty percent of their community are aware of “Think Local, Buy Local, Be Local” campaigns and have changed buying habits. Episode 75.
Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment, a television series emphasizing positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action. How can we thrive, build stronger communities, and help one another in the transition from a fossil fuel-based lifestyle?
(22 September 2007)
