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The greening of 10mph suburbia
Hugh Pearman, Sunday Times
A BLUEPRINT for a “sustainable suburbia” has mapped out a future in which cars glide along at 10mph, children play in the streets and back gardens are reduced to tiny yards.
The government-backed plan stipulates in minute detail the green requirements developers will have to fulfil before they are given planning permission for new estates.
These include an elaborate system of “green points”, in which builders must install features to encourage biodiversity, from ponds and climbing creepers to nectar-laden flowers and bat boxes.
Electricity will have to come from street-corner stations powered by wind, ground heat or other renewable sources.
Ministers in John Prescott’s department, the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, are pushing for the plan, drawn up by Essex county council, to be adopted by other local authorities as they try to accommodate the 1.2m new homes the government has said must be built in southeast England by 2021.
(20 November 2005)
America’s green zeitgeist
Joel Makower, WorldChanging
I’ve just been given a sneak peek at the findings of the 2005 “Green Gauge Report,” and it has implications for anyone seeking to promote sustainability, climate action, green consumerism, clean technologies, or any other worldchanging product, service, or cause.
Since 1990, the Green Gauge has been a signature service of the Roper Organization, the polling arm of what is now the market research firm GfK NOP. Every year (except for 2004), Green Gauge has tracked the environmental attitudes and belief systems of five market segmentations of American consumers. It is based on 2,000 face-to-face interviews that are “balanced to the most recent U.S. census,” according to Roper. I’ve been tracking Green Gauge results since the beginning and find them an interesting, and sobering, look at Americans’ environmental Zeitgeist.
This year’s, the first since 2003, shows that Americans are still reasonably concerned about environmental issues (though arguably not necessarily the critical ones), but they remain relatively ignorant of key environmental issues and solutions. No surprise there. But what is surprising is how much Americans seem to be shifting their search for solutions to an unlikely source: the federal government.
That’s right: the more-energy-at-any-cost, drill-in-the-Arctic, efficiency-is-for-wimps, blood-for-oil, nuclear-powered feds.
(20 November 2005)
A return to tribes
Jan Lundberg, Culture Change Letter #114
…The only model of sustainablility the world has is native, traditional cultures. The dominant culture of commercialism calls them “primitive.” Would you rather be part of a tribe that lives for ten thousand years or more, or be part of a technological consumer culture that appears to have a limited span of perhaps 150 years at most? The Oil Age has been going for about a century. No one knowledgeable puts the oil age past the middle of the 21st century. Some of us see it ending much sooner.
…When I was trying to stop urban sprawl and convince people to use bicycles and grow their own food, I was not going all out to learn Indian ways as a daily routine without computers, publishing, motorized travel, etc. But in my observing petroleum civilization and anticipating changes afoot, I am now able to say that our inevitable direction would appear to be a reinvention of Indian cultures.
(18 November 2005)
Gobble it up
Three paths toward a green — and tasty — Thanksgiving
Tom Philpott, Grist
Of all the crimes against nature Thanksgiving inspires — SUVs clogging the highways, planes shuttling fliers around the country, factory farms churning out millions of frozen turkeys — the most grievous may be culinary. First, the above-mentioned turkeys typically taste like sawdust; cranberry “sauce,” a gelatinous goo that ominously retains the shape of the can it slipped out of, doesn’t help much. The standard vegetarian response — a factory-shaped soybean log — may be a case of the cure trumping the disease in terms of sheer horror.
What, then, must you do, Grist reader? Here are three options for minimizing the environmental, and banishing the aesthetic, depredations of our fall holiday.
(17 November 2005)
