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How to save the planet – did they get it right?
Leo Hickman, Guardian
The Environment Agency has asked a panel of experts to compile the ultimate to-do list – in order of priority. Leo Hickman assesses whether they got it right
See the full top 50 here (pdf)
Just where do you start when you want to “save the planet”? And in which areas should you focus most of your efforts? In a rather brave thought experiment, the Environment Agency has assembled a group of the country’s leading environmental experts to draw up a list of actions that we should all undertake if we are to try to avert the environmental horrors so often forecast if we continue with our “business as usual” lifestyles. This list contains suggestions for government, companies, councils, religious leaders, scientists and others to consider, but it also includes actions that individuals can attempt. More unusually, though, it lists the actions in order of priority.
Many of the suggestions are now so well aired that most of us are probably growing a little weary of hearing them: putting on a jumper instead of turning up the heating (ranked a lowly 49 out of 50 on the list); cycling more (31); and growing your own vegetables (23). But the list offers a few surprises too. For example, for a government agency to publish a list that ranks “buying less” in the top 10 appears quite a bold statement, given that we are constantly told that avid consumption improves our lives and fuels the economy.
“My hope is that we come to see consumption as slightly naff, something you do only when you have to,” says Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, and one of the expert panellists.
In other areas, though, the panel attempts to tread carefully and not upset sensibilities. One of the greatest environmental dilemmas is the issue of the world’s rapidly growing population.
(1 November 2007)
Big Gav points out that many of the items on the list “could all be wrapped up in to 1 concrete action – institute carbon taxes.”
A Code of Ethics for Sustainability Professionals
Alan AtKisson,, WorldChanging
….A DRAFT
Professional Code of Ethics for Sustainability Professionals
FIRST WORKING DRAFT – Dated 1 November 2007
1. Walk your talk.
We cannot promote change in others if we are not striving to exemplify that change in our own personal and professional lives.
2. Keep up to date.
As professionals, we have a responsibility to keep learning and constantly informing ourselves about the emerging science and practice of sustainability — both what is happening to our world, and what can be done about it.
3. Tell the truth about the trends, as you see it.
In a world of great media noise and confusion, where sustainability issues and global concerns must compete for attention, we have a responsibility to our clients to keep them informed. Be clear to your clients about what you believe to be the most important trends affecting our world and their future, and why.
4. Share information, and credit, with other professionals.
While client confidentiality must always be respected, it slows down progress in the field and change for sustainability if we hoard information regarding new ideas, the development of new methods, and relevant activity in the market. It also damages overall progress when we use the work of other people without appropriate permission or citation.
5. Prioritize cooperation over competition, and impact over income.
In the community of sustainability practice, seek first for opportunities to work together with others and build on complementary strengths, rather than to compete for primacy; and weigh the chance to make change as more important than making money.
6. Make referrals to other professionals whenever appropriate.
If someone else, or a different methodology, would be significantly more effective at meeting a specific client’s needs than what you can offer, make the client aware of that option.
7. Tithe to the volunteers.
Donate some fraction of your revenues to voluntary or non-profit initiatives that are advancing the practice of sustainability.
8. Explain your ethical choices.
Be transparent about the criteria you use for structuring your practice and for choosing your professional engagements.
9. Consider the systemic impacts of your advice and actions.
Sustainability professionals have a special obligation to think systemically, and to take into account the potential impacts of what they recommend or do, including impacts beyond the boundaries of the system they are operating in.
10. Seek to do no harm.
In working with clients and promoting change, seek to avoid actions and interventions that may cause lasting damage to people, nature, community, and organizational health.
(1 November 2007)
What future Brighton?
Sarah Lewis, Rocks Magazine
“I have become increasingly concerned about climate change and sustainability over the years,” says John Bristow, a selfemployed psychologist who lives on the Brighton and Hove border. “Particularly in the last five years, and it’s a kind of hell. It leads to despair. What can I do? There is such a sense of powerlessness.”
With ever-increasing references in the media to climate chaos, catastrophic tipping points and irreversible climate change, who can blame him?
The language of climate change is not just that of unusual weather patterns, it is a glimpse into the future, not 100 years from now but a much more immediate time when, worryingly, we might actually be here to see it. As the language we use becomes ever more doom-laden and panic stricken, so too our hopes begin to fade.
And it was from this feeling of powerlessness that John discovered the Transition Town project. “I thought, ‘my goodness, this is exactly what is needed,’” he says.
Transition Towns are a rapidly growing network of places – towns, cities, villages, even a forest in one instance – which have decided they cannot wait for governments to take action on peak oil – the moment oil production peaks and goes into irreversible decline – or climate change, but nor can people do it alone.
The idea is that through workshops, meetings and education, the whole community can be gathered together to work towards a gradual reduction in fossil fuel dependence, based on a 12-step programme developed by permaculture and sustainability teacher Rob Hopkins.
(31 August 2007)
Contributor Ben Brangwyn writes:
Linked to from Rob Hopkins’ blog, an accurate outline of the transition process as experienced in a city of 250,000 on the South Coast of the UK.
Agape community – a radical call
Eileen Markey, National Catholic Reporter
Lay Catholic community Agape lives off the land, following gospel of nonviolence with no compromise
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Amid the hum of crickets and tree frogs, at the end of a rocky lane deep in the New England countryside, more than 200 people are gathered on folding chairs on the knobby grass on a surprisingly warm October Saturday. The crowd is a mix of gray-haired grandparents and tattooed college students, full-time peace activists and middle-class homeowners who believe Christ’s central message was a radical call to nonviolence.
They all trekked into the woods of Hardwick, Mass., Oct. 6 to mark the feast of St. Francis of Assisi and to celebrate the 25th anniversary of Agape, a lay Catholic community committed to living and teaching a philosophy of radical Christian nonviolence. The community lives off the land, growing its own food and generating most of its own electricity in a conscious rejection of what it considers the life-destroying values of modern American society.
Agape — it means selfless love in Greek — is a mixture of lay monastery, retreat center and commune. In the course of the day Agape’s sup- porters will hear Arun Gandhi, the Mahatma’s grandson, lecture on the meaning of nonviolence; discuss the best forms of resistance to a violent culture; tour Agape’s environmentally friendly houses; perform a meditative Native American dance to heal the Earth; and pray for healing with an Iraqi boy grievously burned by an American bomb.
Christianity has always hosted a tension between withdrawal from the unholy world and engagement with it: John the Baptist eating honey and wearing animal skins in the desert or Christ breaking bread around a crowded table in the city; cloistered monks making jam in silence or Jesuits educating the elites in the corridors of power; the yearly retreat or the daily grind. Agape lives in that tension. It is deep in the woods, 20 minutes from a small town, but it is sustained by and performs service for the madding crowd.
(2 November 2007)
