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Sustainable San Francisco: special issue
San Francisco Bay Buardian
In honor of our 42nd year printing the news and raising hell, the Guardian imagines a sustainable future for San Francisco, with visions for energy, land use, food, transportation, culture, and the economy.
- A city transformed:Fighting the power structure, and building a sustainable community, for 42 amazing years
- People’s power:A sustainable energy system is well within San Francisco’s reach
- First, do no harm:A sustainable land use plan is about what we don’t allow as well as what we do
- Beyond the automobile:The road to sustainability has lanes for more than just cars
- Just Food Nation:Transforming how we eat will address poverty, public health, and environmental sustainability
- Culture isn’t convenient:Sustaining entertainment and nightlife in San Francisco requires awareness and a policy shift
- The money at home:A sustainable local economy starts with small business – and the public sector
(22 October 2008)
Five great green TED talks
Eoin O’Carroll, Christian Science Monitor
The Technology, Engineering, and Design, or TED, conference announced its 2009 prizewinners Thursday. … In the meantime, I’ll link you to five of my favorite green TED talks. They are, in no particular order:
… Alex Steffen sees a sustainable future. Whenever my mood blackens from contemplating environmental degradation, I visit the online eco-mag Worldchanging. Headed by Alex Steffen, Worldchanging speaks a language of sustainable abundance, not guilty austerity. In his TED talk, Steffen emphasized solutions: electricity-free refrigerators, straws that purify water, and flowers that change color in the presence of landmines.
Steffen is noted for coining the term “bright green environmentalism,” a philosophy that emphasizes technological innovation and well-designed communities. Even though this blog isn’t named for this school of thought – I actually got the name from a quote by Henry David Thoreau – I don’t mind if people think that it is.
James Howard Kunstler dissects suburbia. I like to think of author James Howard Kunstler as the anti-Steffen: Whenever I find myself getting a little too sanguine about how the latest eco-gizmo just might save our collective hide, I tune in Kunstler’s grim vision of a post-peak-oil apocalypse. Both writers, however, tend to emphasize the value of walkable, mixed-use communities.
In this talk, Kunstler serves up a cranky yet devastating rant (expletive alert) about suburban sprawl, which he calls “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of humanity,” and its tendency to create “places not worth caring about.”
After watching this video, step outside and survey your surroundings. No matter where you are, you will see things in a completely different light. …
(20 October 2008)
Two of the writers I follow regularly. Will this attention from the mainstream blunt Kunstler’s fire and acerbic wit?
Probably not. -BA
New Solutions newsletter (PDF)
Community Solutions
Articles include:
- Saving Energy the “Passive Way” –Lessons from a Recent Home Retrofit
- Peak Debt: The true crisis may be the inability to afford the dwindling oil.
- Community Food: A Progress Report
- A New Idea – Locality- Dependent Energy
(November-December 2008 issue)
Former resident Jan Lundberg continues campaign against petroleum dependency
Donna Tam, The Times-Standard (California North Coast)
Jan Lundberg has been in the oil business a long time. For the last 37 years, the life-long activist — who called Arcata home for 12 years — has worked as both an oil industry analyst and in the nonprofit world, championing the campaign against society’s dependence on petroleum and what he calls the “synthetic sea.”
”Some things have to change and it’s not really about policies or better laws or identifying the criminal, it’s more like what is our culture all about? Is it about bowing down to technology?” he said on the phone Tuesday from Portland, where he was scheduled to give a talk on the concept of peak oil.
According to Culture Change’s Web site, peak oil theorizes that the Earth has already reached the halfway point for oil production, and the other half still in the ground is harder to extract and may not fuel the global economy or even provide for a transition to another phase. Lundberg founded the group.
The Bay Area-based nonprofit sets out to change the way people live in an attempt to decrease the use of petroleum, especially in the face of population growth, resource depletion and climate change, Lundberg said.
”We try to get society away from petroleum dependence to a way of living that is more in harmony with nature so that we are able to withstand changes,” he said.
… Lundberg has known about the nuances of the oil market since he was young.
From ages 19 to 36, he worked for his family business, the “Lundberg Survey,” which he said was “known as the bible of the oil industry” at one time.
The company was able to predict when oil prices would shoot up, he said, noting the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, when prices skyrocketed.
Lundberg said members of his family were always activists, despite being in the spotlight of the oil industry.
”The oil analyst business was something we reluctantly did to pay some bills to finance a world sailboat cruise and do other things, like have an organic ranch,” he said of his family’s progressive lifestyle in the 1950s.
… In Arcata, Lundberg tried to convince the City Council to ban plastic bags in the city, but could not get the whole council on board with the idea. The ban on plastic bags, which Culture Change has also tried to initiate in the Bay Area, is important to keeping non-biodegradable plastics from entering the ocean, where they break down into toxics that can accumulate in the ecosystem, he said.
… Currently, Lundberg is in the process of moving onto a sailboat, and promoting another Culture Change project, The Sail Transport Network, which he said is gathering momentum along the West Coast, parts of the East Coast and various parts of the world.
(22 October 2008)
Jan Lundberg has been writing and educating far longer than most of us. He’s been ahead of the curve on oil supplies, plastics and the futility of a car-based transportation system. I have always envied the title of his newsletter, “Culture Change.” I kinda wish he weren’t as doomerish as he is at the moment – “petrocollapse” is a hard sell. -BA
Kentucky doctor says caring for Earth is not an option for Christians, it’s a responsibility
Peter Smith, Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky and Southern Indiana)
In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.”
And the verse was printed in green. And so were more than 1,000 other Bible verses that deal with Earth and all things that live upon it (much like some other Bibles put the words of Jesus in red).
And the Bible was printed on recycled paper, with environmentally friendly soy-based ink.
“The Green Bible,” published by the mass-market religious publisher HarperOne, is interspersed with writings on the environment by such figures as Pope John Paul II, Nobel laureate Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Kentucky author and environmentalist Wendell Berry.
Chosen to write the main introduction to this Bible is a Kentucky doctor who gave up his medical practice to travel and write full-time on the subject.
Dr. J. Matthew Sleeth, who lives in Wilmore, a small college town south of Lexington, is helping spread a message slowly taking root among fellow evangelical Christians, who traditionally have been skeptical of environmental causes — that caring for the Earth is “not an option, it’s a commandment.”
… A decade ago, Sleeth would have been an unlikely candidate to have such a role.
He was a prosperous doctor living on the Vermont-New Hampshire border, with a large house and a fast car with a teak dashboard.
But he was also haunted.
Haunted by the lifeless 8-year-old girl in a green bathing suit who had been playing in the water on a hot, hazy day before succumbing to an asthma attack in an emergency room where Sleeth was working.
And haunted by the preschool girl innocently coloring a get-well card for her mother, who had just died of breast cancer — a disease that has grown so rapidly during the past quarter century that he is convinced by studies suggesting a connection with environmental pollution.
Sleeth said he and his family were vacationing about eight years ago on a remote Florida island when he told his wife what troubled him: “The world is dying.”
That crystallized a long pilgrimage that sent Sleeth, who had rarely attended church, searching various religious texts.
He became a Christian after reading the Gospel of St. Matthew, which he said taught him “not to judge others” — or feel superior to the neighbor who drove a bigger gas guzzler than he did — and to “clean up our own act.”
(22 October 2008)
Related in Chicago Tribune: Is God a tree-hugger? The Green Bible suggests so.
New tool for ‘green’ Christians: ecofriendly Bible
Jane Lampman, Christian Science Monitor
Can a “green” Bible bring more of the Christian community into the growing “creation care” movement? Many people of faith, including young Evangelicals, hope so.
This past weekend, Christian college students from across the US kicked off an effort to become catalysts for environmental action on campuses and in churches. The student-initiated Renewal network, which gathered at Eastern University in Pennsylvania, has a new resource to help them: an ecofriendly version of the Good Book published this month by HarperOne.
Produced with soy-based inks, recycled paper, and a cotton/linen cover, “The Green Bible” highlights in green more than a thousand passages relating to God’s love for creation and the role of humans in caring for the earth.
“It’s beautifully put together. I appreciate that they used sustainable materials,” says Anna Jane Joyner, Renewal’s coordinator. “It’s a great compilation of different resources.”
Along with the biblical text, the book includes a set of essays by theologians and conservationists (including Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Brian McLaren, and Pope John Paul II). There’s a concordance on environmental subjects and a study guide on “green” biblical themes for use by individuals and church or campus groups.
(19 October 2008)
