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Climate change and Green Economy in Abu Dhabi conference
Frank Kane, The National (United Arab Emirates)
Professor Jacqueline McGlade has been the executive director of the European Environment Agency (EEA) since 2003. She is in Abu Dhabi this week attending the emirate’s first UN global conference, the Eye on Earth summit, under the patronage of Sheikh Khalifa, President of the UAE. She explains why the environment is a matter of concern for us all, but especially for business and finance.
Q: You believe there is a connection between financial crisis and environmental problems. Can you explain?
A: The links are many. Climate change and water availability affects food production. Competing demands for land (for example, for food and biofuels) have increased prices. Oil and energy prices themselves underpin food and other commodities. And the consumption of such fossil fuels contributes to climate change.
The cause of the current financial crisis is not directly linked to environmental issues. However, growing demand for energy, especially from emerging economies such as China, has contributed to peak oil prices. This in turn has created inflation fears and caused interest rates to increase. High oil and energy prices have coincided with the debt crisis. This has led to the so-called triple “f” crisis: food, fuel and financial.
The idea of the Green Economy is a way forward. The Green Economy will improve the efficiency of the natural resources we are using as well as utilising more of the natural resources available. For example, we will use more renewables and less fossil fuels, or we will consume more of the hundreds of thousands of edible species instead of relying on only a small fraction of these. This helps improve resilience in tandem with efficiency. A lack of resilience is a major characteristic of the current financial crisis.
(X December 2011)
Report recommends ways for Lawrence (KS) to fight ‘peak oil’
Chad Lawhorn, Lawrence Journal Herald
The city of Lawrence now has a plan to deal with the problem of “peak oil.”
City commissioners unanimously agreed to receive the final report from the city’s Peak Oil Task Force. The report provides a series of recommendations on how the community should react to the rising price of oil and possible disruptions in availability as world oil supplies fail to keep up with worldwide demand.
Among the recommendations are:
• Continue planning for “complete streets” that promote pedestrian and bicycle uses
• Commit to a growth pattern that supports mixed-use developments that promote biking and walking
• Reduce Lawrence’s water consumption by changing city water rates
• Add edible landscape features such as fruit trees, nut trees and community gardens to city parks
• Redraw the city’s urban growth boundaries to preserve high-quality soils for agricultural uses
(14 December 2011)
Peak oil task force web page for Lawrence
Final report (PDF)
Soul in the Soil
Lee Ann Cox, University of Vermont
Historian’s new book examines the roots of America’s longing for the land
—
Maybe you can you make your own soup. But can you grow the onions and garlic for its aromatic beginnings? Can you darn a sock or even imagine why you would consider it? There are some around who will tell you, like it or not, to have your hoes and needles at the ready with the coming of peak oil and climate destruction, but the truth is that many Americans have yearned to return to their rural roots almost from the time they left for the city.
So ingrained is the association between back-to-the-landers and sprout-eating hippies of the 1970s that discovering two early, distinct waves of the movement was a surprise to history professor Dona Brown, author of the new book Back to the Land: The Enduring Dream of Self-Sufficiency in Modern America. “Like most people I had no idea about it,” she says. “I didn’t know they existed. I fell into documents.”
Falling into documents sounds like a historian’s wonderland, but it upturned her original idea for the book which was to investigate the nostalgia for rural life in a country that was so invested in the image of itself as an agrarian nation. But while there are invariably touches of that, it became clear to Brown that people were – and still are – driven by ideas far more pragmatic and steeped in the fundamentals of individual character.
The strongest link between the movements, she found, is the desire for self-sufficiency. “It’s an old idea,” Brown says, “that people are valuable in proportion to how they can provide for themselves, how they can stand on their own two feet, how they can be independent of other people and the exigencies of fate or of the government.”
Country road
By the late nineteenth century, along with the influx of European immigrants moving into cities and taking industrial work, there were smaller yet significant numbers of native-born Americans coming to look for more interesting, less back-breaking professional jobs, as well as night life notably missing on the farm. But that shifted.
… The most famous of these books may be Scott and Helen Nearing’s Living the Good Life, an account of their living off the land in Vermont in the 1930s. The book came out in the ‘50s but didn’t attract much attention until it was republished in the 1970s, “catching that wave,” of the resurgent movement. They eventually moved to Maine and to visit them there became something of a pilgrimage for the new back-to-the-land generation.
The Nearings, according to Brown, were vital for a historian seeking a narrative to link the back-to-the-land movements. “(Scott) is actually a cool smoking gun across the whole century. He’s old!” Brown says. “He was already blacklisted (as a communist) during World War I, went back to the land in the ’30s and then lived long enough to influence the third wave of back-to-the-landers.”
(7 December 2011)
Mixed media
Guy McPherson, Nature Bats Last (blog)
I delivered two TED-style talks at the 2011 International Conference on Sustainability, Transition and Culture Change in Bellaire, Michigan. The presentations embedded below were delivered to the few dozen people remaining at the conference on its fourth day, Sunday, 13 November.
The first video clip describes my personal journey in the usual, self-indulgent manner, and the program allowed no time for subsequent questions. The second clip humorously describes the efforts we’ve made at the mud hut, and the formal presentation is followed by my answers to a few softly spoken questions.
Also on 13 November 2011, during a break from the conference …
(13 December 2011)
