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Walking for Mother Earth
Swiss doctor brings awareness of climate protection, renewable energy
Cindy Yurth, Navajo Times
… Meet Martin Vosseler: retired physician, Guinness Book record-holder, climate crusader.
Meet him, please – that’s what he’s here for. Or at least check out his Web site, www.martinvosseler.ch.
Vosseler is walking across the United States- and, at the moment, the Navajo Nation – to promote awareness of climate protection, renewable energy and energy efficiency.
… A few years ago, Vosseler and four buddies crossed the Atlantic in a boat powered entirely by solar panels. They were the first humans to do so, landing a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records.
The secret, he says, is very, very efficient motors.
“We crossed the Atlantic on 1,700 watts,” he said. “That’s about the power of a hairdryer.”
Vosseler is counting on American engineers – whom he considers the world’s most innovative – to come up with ultra-efficient engines to harness the wind and the sun.
“If we could get every engine to 90 percent efficiency,” he maintains, “there would be more than enough renewable energy to power the world.”
(21 February 2008)
Contributor J writes:
The author refers to Martin Vosseler as a bilagáana, in the Diné language it means white man.
First, Step Up
Bill McKibben, Yes! Magazine
… Because the problem [of climate change] is so big, and coming at us so fast, those steps will need to be large. And even so, they won’t be enough to stop global warming-at best they will slow it down and give us some margin. But here’s the deal:
We need to conserve energy. …
We need to generate the power we use cleanly. …
We need to change our habits-really, we need to change our sense of what we want from the world. …
We need to stop insisting that we’ve figured out the best way on Earth to live. For one thing, if it’s wrecking the Earth then it’s probably not all that great. …
Most of all, we need a movement. We need a political swell larger than the civil rights movement-as passionate and as willing to sacrifice. Without it, we’re not going to best the fossil fuel companies and the auto-makers and the rest of the vested interests that are keeping us from change.
Some of us have spent the last couple of years trying to build that movement, and we’ve had some success. With no money and no organization, seven of us launched StepItUp in January 2007. Before the year was out, we’d helped organize 2,000 demonstrations in all 50 states-and helped take our once-radical demand for an 80 percent reduction in U.S. carbon emissions by mid-century into the halls of power.
(29 February 2008)
Swiss people power prepares to fight global warming
Isobel Leybold-Johnson, swissinfo
A people’s initiative calling for the government to slash greenhouse gases by 30 per cent by 2020 is set to come to a nationwide vote.
Pressure is mounting on the authorities to do more to fight global warming in Switzerland, especially after the government’s latest package of measures met with a mixed response.
Green groups and centre-left parties handed in their initiative to the Federal Chancellery in the capital, Bern, on Friday.
They managed to collect more than 150,000 signatures in just a year. To force a vote, 100,000 signatures have to be collected in 18 months under Switzerland’s system of direct democracy.
(29 February 2008)
One Nation Under Elvis
Rebecca Solnit, Orion Magazine
An environmentalism for us all
—
… I grew up surrounded by liberals and leftists who liked to play the idiot in fake southern accents, make jokes about white trash and trailer trash, and, like the Canadian enviros, made gagging noises whenever they heard Dolly Parton or anything like her. If Okies from Muskogee thought they were being mocked, they were right, in part. This mockery was particularly common during the 1970s and 1980s, but it has yet to evaporate altogether …
… The reason why it matters is because middle-class people despising poor people becomes your basic class war, and the ongoing insults seem to have been at least part of what has weakened the environmental movement in particular and progressive politics in general.
… The result of all this has been a marginalized environmental movement-more specifically, an environmental movement that has alienated the people who often live closest to “the environment.”
Of course dreadlocks and ragged clothes weren’t exactly diplomatic outreach tools either. I spent some of the 1990s with and around activists in the public forests of the West, and a lot of the supposedly most radical had a remarkable knack for going into rural communities and insulting practically everyone with whom they came into contact.
… THE SOCIALISM AND PROGRESSIVISM that thrived through the 1930s saw farmers, loggers, fisheries workers, and miners as its central constituency along with longshoremen and factory workers. Where did it go?
…Today, rural citizens see themselves in an unappreciated, fast-shrinking middle zone between wilderness and development (even though agriculture is often the best bulwark against sprawl). In many ways, rural culture is dying, and that seems to push many rural people into near-paranoia. During the water-scarcity crises in the Klamath River region on the California-Oregon border, farmers spoke of “rural cleansing” and seemed to believe that environmentalists wanted to empty out the countryside. Some of them do.
… Wallace Stegner wrote forty-seven years ago that “Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed,” and something else will go out of us if the resourcefulness, rootedness, and richness of rural culture disappears. It’s why the environmentalist-rancher coalitions are so noteworthy, and the new alliances forged to resist the Bush-era oil and gas leases across the arid West. But they are only a small part of a culture and a movement that need to do a lot more.
…The anti-environmentalist right has shot itself in both feet in the past few years, losing credibility and constituency, and a smart and fast-moving left could make hay out of this, to mix a few fairly rural metaphors. It would mean giving up vindication for victory-that is, giving up on triumphing over the wickedness of one’s enemies and looking at them as unrecruited allies instead. It might mean giving up on the environmental movement as a separate sector and thinking more holistically about what we want to protect and why, including people, places, traditions, and processes outside the wilderness. It might even mean getting over the notion that left and right are useful or even adequate ways to describe who we are and what we long for (or even over the notion of rural and urban, as food gardens proliferate in the latter and sprawl becomes an issue in the former). We must also talk about class again, loudly and clearly, without backing down or forgetting about race. This is the back road down which lie stronger coalitions, genuine justice, a healthier environment, and maybe even a music that everyone can dance to.
Rebecca Solnit, a recipient of the Lannan Literary Award, is an Orion columnist and a contributing editor to Harper’s. She is the author of twelve books, most recently Storming the Gates of Paradise, and lives in San Francisco.
(March/April 2008 issue)
Long essay.
