Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
The ‘pope’ of hope
Riazat Butt, Guardian
Can religion help prevent eco-catastrophe? The leader of the Orthodox Church thinks so – and as the spiritual guide for 300 million people, he has more influence than most politicians.
—
… His All Holiness, Bartholomew I, Archbishop of Constantinople, New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch, is the spiritual leader of 300 million Orthodox Christians and 270th successor to the Apostle Andrew. He is also extremely green, taking heads of church and state to areas beset with environmental problems – the Amazon and Arctic among them – and confronting them with the best science.
After announcing, on an Aegean island, that attacks on the environment should be considered sins, he called pollution of the world’s waters “a new Apocalypse” and led global calls for “creation care”.
… A decade ago, he says, people were puzzled by the links he was trying to establish. Religious people were indifferent, or even hostile, to science. Scientists and ecologists could see little relationship between their world and the world of faith. But there is hardly a religious leader in the world now, he says, who is not preoccupied by problems of pollution and climate change. “Every product we make and enjoy – from the paper we work with, to processed meat and the soy beans that sustain its industry, every tree we fell, every building we construct, every road we travel – definitively and permanently alters creation. This alteration – or perhaps we should characterise it as abuse – of creation is a fundamental difference between human, natural and divine economies.”
Human economy, he explains, wastes and discards, while natural economy is cyclical and replenishes, and God’s economy is compassionate and nurturing.
(18 June 2008)
The article concludes with a few paragraphs on other “Holy eco warriors”: Pope Benedict XVI, The Archbishop of Canterbury, The 14th Dalai Lama, and Fazlun Khalid,.
Why I Love Diggers
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
I guess, as what Albert Bates terms a ‘post-petroleumologist’, you would imagine that I would be philosophically opposed to diggers, earthmovers, and other forms of fossil fuel powered equipment. I think it would be fair to say that until I encountered permaculture, I saw them, mostly due to seeing the extraordinary damage that such machines can wreak on road-building protests, as inherently wicked. When I sat down to read Bill Mollison’s Permaculture, a Designer’s Manual, I was surprised to find that a book on earth repair had an entire chapter dedicated to earthmoving. Seemed somewhat incongruous. Now, however, I am a convert, and I was honoured that my garden was visited by one this weekend.
Mollison states that “earthworks are necessary and ethical where they;
* reduce our need for energy (underground housing in deserts)
* diversify our landscape for food production (fish culture ponds)
* permanently rehabilitate damage (contour banks, interceptor banks)
* save materials (house site design)
* enable better land use, or help revegetate the earth”.
The power of earthmoving is extraordinary, unimaginable for our ancestors, for whom any earthmoving was powered by muscle rather than by the internal combustion engine. Clearly as tools in the hands of those who want to put profit before care of the Earth, they are hugely dangerous weapons. In the hands of those wanting to create sustainable land-based systems, they can be fantastic.
(16 June 2008)
The geography of green consumerism
The Economist
… Matthew Kahn and Ryan Vaughn, economists at the University of California at Los Angeles, wrote a paper analysing the patterns of green consumerism in California. They noticed that Berkeley, California, just a few hours up the coast, has lots of Priuses, organic food, solar panels and public transit-and no Hummers.
Messrs Kahn and Vaughn built a database of every certified green building, sorted by zip codes. They looked at where hybrid vehicles were registered, and constructed a measure of each zip code’s politics based on analysis of party registration and voting records on two binding statewide environmental initiatives.
… When they average their measure of greenery by zip code, across entire cities, and then rank the results, the usual suspects come out top and bottom. Of 349 places in California, the ten greenest are Albany, Berkeley, Fairfax, Belvedere, Piedmont, Mill Valley, Larkspur, Portola Valley, Sausalito and Palo Alto. Folsom and Bakersfield rank near the bottom. And mapping their index by zip code across the entire state gives a graphic representation of where California’s greenies live.
All of this raises the question of why the politically green huddle together in the same sorts of locations. Dr Kahn speculates that small initial differences in spatial attributes, such as being close to a beach or public transport, may create the initial seeds of green communities. “This in turn attracts ‘green businesses’,” he explains, “such as tofu restaurants and bike shops, and this in turn attracts more greens.” The process culminates when greens have enough political clout to elect politicians and enact green regulation that further enhances their community’s attractiveness to environmentalists.
(16 June 2008)
Where We Ought to Be
Hayley Wood, Valley Advocate (Massachusetts)
Western Massachusetts is a friendly place for those who want to shape their lives by finding neighbors of like mind
—
It’s been 15 years since anyone else has taken Total Loss Farm: A Year in the Life by Raymond Mungo out of the Forbes Public Library. The cover has a trippy line drawing of a branched tree with a yellow and green sunburst background. Raymond, on the back cover, flashes a smart-assed twenty-something smile. The prose is an exuberant account of 1969, his second year living on the Total Loss Farm commune in Guilford, Vt. It is also a year in which he, together with the Poet of the Farm, Verandah Porche, recreates Thoreau’s 1839 journey on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and takes a Christmas road trip from Vermont to California, picking up other jolly slackers along the way.
Raymond wrote this account at the age of 24. Raymond thinks that the American public doesn’t have the power to stop an unjust war, that economic collapse in the U.S. is imminent, that petroleum products are best avoided, and that going back to the Stone Age is a virtue. He believes that the best answer to the world’s problems is to live a sustenance lifestyle with friends.
… And what’s stopping me from doing the same? I ask myself regularly. I see the world imploding-endless war and violence, famine, natural disasters, peak oil and a rapidly slimming comfort margin for most adults-and I’m groping for answers. Pampered being that I am, I also want the changes I make to be . . . gentle.
… In search of brotherly and sisterly love, last fall I decided to find out if commune cultures exist today, in Western Massachusetts. They do. Now they’re called intentional communities.
(X June 2008)
Where Are They Now? According to his website, Raymond Mungo “completed a master’s degree in counseling [in 1997] and became a social worker in the LA area, tending principally to AIDS patients and the severely mentally ill.” Many of his books are still available.
I first encountered Mungo’s “Famous Long Ago,” in which he describes the formation of the Liberation News Service (LNS), a backbone of the underground newspaper scene of the 60s. -BA
Energy Task Force Seeks Volunteers (Bellingham/Whatcom County)
David MacLeod, Sustainable Bellingham
City and county officials are accepting applications through June 30 for volunteers to serve on a task force to address local impacts of uncertain energy supplies.
The group, recently formed by resolution of the city and county councils, is charged with examining the energy-related vulnerabilities of local economic, social and environmental infrastructure and recommending strategies to ensure our community’s resiliency during declining energy supplies and rising costs.
Proponents of local-level planning have said that we face a future of increasing uncertainty in energy supplies. Area residents will benefit from greater attention to this topic because declining energy supplies will affect people’s most basic needs, such as food supply, water delivery, health care and home electrical use.
Participants in the 18-member task force will be jointly selected and appointed by Bellingham Mayor Dan Pike and Whatcom County Executive Pete Kremen. The deadline to submit applications is June 30.
(16 June 2008)
