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Energetic Students Empower Cal Poly (video and audio)
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment via Global Public Media
The future’s environmental leaders are here now! Student leader Tylor Middlestadt recounts how Empower Poly (San Luis Obispo, CA) is bringing students to the table–with staff, faculty, and local communities — to shape a greener future. Students successfully pushed for environmentally-friendly design for the nation’s largest student housing project. Inspired by the UC Go Solar campaign, students formed Renew CSU to advocate renewable energy projects on campuses statewide. Episode 85.
(11 December 2007)
Peak Proof Music: “in order to make the world dance, one must first turn off the music”…
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
… The idea that life beyond the peak and beyond large globalised record companies will be a musical desert is, of course, nonsense, but this film, for me, gives a delightful image of music-making not being something that only happens in clubs and concert venues, but which wanders through our streets, through our buildings, weaving in and out of our daily lives.
… We have become so distanced from music-making. The musical entertainment in our lives comes usually from some kind of fossil fuel expenditure, be it buying a CD, turning on the TV or driving to see a band playing somewhere. As well as experiencing more live music in our communities, we will turn, as in all aspects of our lives, from being consumers to consumer/producers. When I first moved to Ireland, at any evening get together or party, after the food, people did their turns. They’d tell a story or sing a song, and it was quite wonderful. I very rapidly had to get 3 or 4 songs under my belt for such occasions.
Of course, a lot of modern music, particularly dance music, would struggle to recreate itself in a world with less energy. Samplers, drum machines, all the digital jiggerypokery that making a record requires now would become harder to manage. However, does that mean that we will just go back to only playing acoustic guitars? Does the end of oil mean that all people will manage to come up with round the campfires of the future will be old Oasis songs (heaven forbid)?
I was rather taken with this clip below, and with the idea that the dazzlingly diverse array of modern musical forms are sufficiently deeply ingrained in our culture that they will find expression even without electricity to power them.
(10 December 2007)
Ted Trainer’s Transition Q&A
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
Ted Trainer is author of the essential Renewable Energy Cannot Power a Consumer Society, which is one of the best arguments for the inevitability of energy descent yet to appear. He has spent many years arguing for localisation, reduced consumption and the end of affluence.
He recently received the Transition Primer, and was highly enthused by the whole concept. He sent me a list of 17 questions about it all, which my crap typing has thus far prevented me from launching into. Given the assumption (which I have observed repeatedly as a teacher) that if one person has a question, it is usually the case that it is also a question that lots of other people would like to ask too, and given also that they are great questions, I am going to work my way through them, 2 a day…
1. How many in the most energetic towns are involved; is it a fringe thing or is the whole town more or less working with the cause?
… 2. How did the consciousness get where it is; did this take a lot of work, or was it more or less spontaneous? (Either way it is very encouraging that it has got up such momentum so quickly.)
I have no idea, I guess this is a big question and is one that is more appropriate for other people to answer, I guess I am too close to it to wonder how it grew so fast. My sense, for what it’s worth, is that it emerged into a vacuum. Peak oil is starting to be seen as a big issue, and the Transition approach is the possibly the best thought through response to it. As such, when people find out about it and wonder what to do, unless they plan to head for the hills with their baked beans and their shotgun, then Transition tend to be where they turn.
The answer to “did this take a lot of work, or was it more of less spontanteous?” is both. ….
Trainer’s next two questions are addressed here
3. Are people in Transition Initiatives forming “public” institutions like town banks, business incubators, workshops, working bees, getting-rid-of-homelessness etc committees?
… 4. Are there committees thinking about the needs of youth, aged, disadvantaged in the locality…providing for them more satisfactorily, and harnessing their labour skills and energy?
(11 and 12 December 2007)
An abundance of Ted Trainer’s essays are online at his site, The Simpler Way.
You’d better (not) shop around
Stacy Mitchell, Star Tribune (Minneapolis-St. Paul, Minnesota)
You’d do better by your community this holiday season if you patronized local merchants.
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Whether to patronize locally owned stores or chains is not at the top of the mind for many holiday shoppers. But it should be. It’s a choice that has profound implications for our economy and for our communities.
As the recent rash of toy recalls has made startlingly apparent, shopping at a chain means being on one end of a series of far-flung and anonymous transactions. As customers, we have no contact with the executives who run these companies. They, in turn, source much of what they sell through a murky supply line of subcontractors that usually terminates in a factory somewhere on the other side of the globe.
We know nothing about what goes on in these factories and, as the recalls have revealed, neither do the big retailers. Looking the other way has apparently been more profitable.
Holiday gift-buying offers a great opportunity to step away from this faceless corporate economy and give a much-needed boost to local, independent businesses.
At local stores, we can talk directly to the decisionmakers. These are people who live in our communities. They share our schools and parks and, often, our concerns.
Unlike chains, most local merchants are not in business just to make a living. They are also motivated by a deep love of books or toys or whatever it is that they sell.
As one toy-store owner, a former teacher, explained to me, he opened his store partly out of an interest in childhood development and partly because he loves to play with toys and games. There’s not a toy on his shelves that he has not personally vetted.
This level of care and interest leads many local retailers to get to know their suppliers and, when possible, to stock products made locally or by small, conscientious manufacturers.
(11 December 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
Bottled Water Boycotts: Back-to-the-Tap Movement Gains Momentum
Janet Larsen, Earth Policy Institute
From San Francisco to New York to Paris, city governments, high-class restaurants, schools, and religious groups are ditching bottled water in favor of what comes out of the faucet. With people no longer content to pay 1,000 times as much for bottled water, a product no better than water from the tap, a backlash against bottled water is growing.1213 08
The U.S. Conference of Mayors, which represents some 1,100 American cities, discussed at its June 2007 meeting the irony of purchasing bottled water for city employees and for city functions while at the same time touting the quality of municipal water. The group passed a resolution sponsored by Mayors Gavin Newsom of San Francisco, Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City, and R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis that called for the examination of bottled water’s environmental impact. The resolution noted that with $43 billion a year going to provide clean drinking water in cities across the country, “the United States’ municipal water systems are among the finest in the world.”
While the Mayors Conference fell short of moving to stop taxpayer money from filling the coffers of water bottlers, a growing number of cities are heading in that direction. Los Angeles, which has restricted the purchase of bottled water with city funds since 1987, now has more company. By the end of 2007, purchasing bottled water will be off-limits for San Francisco’s departments and agencies, saving a half-million dollars each year and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. St. Louis is poised to ban bottled water purchases for city employees in early 2008.
(7 December 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
