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Albuquerque: Why are we planning for growth when we need to cut back?
V.B. Price, Albuquerque Tribune
Population predictions for greater metro Albuquerque over the next l8 years seem delusional. If we top a million people by 2025, it will be a double-edged miracle.
On the good side, it will mean New Mexico had done something no place in the country has managed to do – solve its water, energy, transportation and sustainable agriculture issues. It also means that global warming and peak oil declines had somehow reversed themselves.
On the bad side, this part of the Middle Rio Grande Valley, overgrown as it already is, will have been suburbanized beyond all recognition and become more of a generic, unsustainable urban landscape than ever.
But neither situation will come to pass. A very different future is ahead, unless Albuquerque gets some visionary local and national leadership and begins to plan realistically for a time of chaotic and rapid change.
If we don’t stop wasting public resources on growth that could well end up impoverishing us all, I see a systems breakdown caused by bad water, water shortages and aquifer depletion, traffic congestion, air pollution, astronomical fuel prices, global warming, drought and increasingly expensive trucked-in food.
(12 October 2007)
First Oil Vulnerability Audits in Totnes Report Back
Rob Hopkins, Transition Culture
In talks I give and in other places, such as this website, I often enthuse about Oil Vulnerability Auditing, the tool developed by Simon Snowden at Liverpool University, but haven’t yet written much about it. I thought you might find it interesting to read the following short report by Fiona Ward of Transition Town Totnes who co-ordinated the OVA work in Totnes. Two pilots have so far been done, and in the report, Fiona reflects on the process and on what emerged from them.
The team has now completed the first stage of the pilot OVAs for two Totnes businesses: Rumour Wine Bar & Bistro in the High Street; and Coloursworks Print & Design Ltd on the Industrial Estate. This work has seen Simon, Fiona & team work closely with the companies to (1) understand the business (2) identify its activities and business processes (3) establish the resources used in each activity including staff, consumables, raw materials, utilities, overheads etc and (4) calculate the costs of each resource.
The resources, and their associated costs, are then tagged as being ‘oil vulnerable’ if they fall into one of the following categories: direct use of energy (for power or heat); liquid fuel (for transport); are made directly from petrochemicals (such as chemicals); are man-made (nylon, plastics etc.); or if they are a finished good or component that includes products from previous categories (e.g. rubber gloves, or plastic window frames). Then within an activity, the % of those costs that are tagged as vulnerable indicate the Oil Vulnerability Ratio of an activity or a business process.
(15 October 2007)
England’s countryside ‘set to vanish in decades’
David Langton, UK Independent
The English countryside is set to vanish by the end of the century under a mass of brick and tarmac, campaigners warn.
The ever-growing need for more homes, more airport runaways, more motorways and more power stations, will see bulldozers tear up the green belt as space becomes scarcer, it is claimed.
Fifty per cent of the land in England already suffers from noise disturbance, ruined views and, at night, light pollution, maps published today by the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) show.
The South-east is all but disappearing under development, with 70 per cent of the region affected and the remaining 30 per cent set to be blighted in just 45 years under current rates of growth, the CPRE said.
(10 September 2007)
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