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Writer of 1970s ‘Ecotopia’ makes a comeback in the green era
Anita Weier, The Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin)
In the 1975 cult environmental novel “Ecotopia,” Washington, Oregon and Northern California secede from the United States in the midst of a global financial crisis. Author Ernest Callenbach creates a sustainable society where recycling is required, food wastes are turned into organic fertilizer, and most energy comes from solar, sea, wind and geothermal power.
Sound familiar?
The prescient Callenbach, now 79, is suddenly in demand again as interest in a green society and environmental stewardship is back in vogue. More than three decades later, Callenbach’s book concepts are being taught in English, political science, sociology and environmental courses on campuses across the country, and he is a sought-after lecturer.
His book, which he originally self-published, was just reissued with a new cover by Bantam Books.
“I was pretty lucky in some of the things I wrote about coming true, but the basic thrust is not that original,” Callenbach said in a phone interview from his home in Berkeley. “People then and now look ahead at what a society would be if there was not cheap energy from oil.”
Callenbach says the Midwest-Great Lakes region had best turn its attention to sustainable manufacturing and resource management.
(7 January 2009)
Energy Uncertainty and Community Resilience
Daniel Lerch, Post Carbon Institute
More and more analysts agree that we will pass the maximum point of global oil production – or “peak oil” – within the next few years*, with no viable substitute resource in place. Governments and businesses across the world are racing to find technological and geopolitical responses to this potential economic and social disaster.
A systems thinking frame suggests that the problem posed by peak oil is not simply a matter of declining oil supplies. The larger problem is that our social and economic systems are so overdependent on oil that they lack resilience against oil decline. A systems thinking frame also suggests that some of the most important decisions for improving our resilience can only be made at the level of local communities, and not at the level of national governments or transnational corporations.
What does it mean for our social-economic system to lack resilience against peak oil? The shift in transportation behavior driven by surging oil prices earlier this year highlights some examples. Millions of commuters shifted to public transit, but decades of government funding that prioritized highways and car-dependent suburbs have left most of our transit systems unable to properly serve the new demand. The airline industry quickly hiked fares and cut service, threatening economic hardship for many cities and businesses that have grown dependent on cheap air travel.
In short, our social-economic system risks serious disruption because literally millions of households and businesses are locked into land use and transportation patterns that depend on a cheap and constant supply of oil.
Brian Walker’s “resilience thinking” framework describes some of the key characteristics of resilient systems: diversity, variability, modularity, and feedbacks. These characteristics suggest that resilience in our social and economic systems will rest largely in qualities found at the local level. Indeed, our system of local government already exhibits these qualities in many ways, with 35,000+ town, city and county governments and 45,000+ school, utility and other special districts all locally created and locally controlled. Each of these local agencies is attuned to local needs and resources, and each can experiment with its own way of solving problems.
(7 January 2009)
Two Steps Towards Being Slightly More Sustainable
Julian Darley, blog
In order to cheer myself up from the unbroken stream of bad news arriving through the air waves – from more killing in the Middle East to economic carnage just about everywhere and a meltdown of the very media bringing us all the other bad news, I decided to pursue two strategies towards making life a bit more sustainable.
Firstly I went round (by bicycle) to the local cafe to read and listen to the ukulele class. And very charming it was too, and pretty much free of greenhouse gas emissions, as far as I could tell. It turned out that they were rehearsing for a concert, and the teacher was determined that they would play all the songs one after the other without a break so that he could time the whole thing in advance. No-one broke ranks, even to go to the loo. I fancied that Frederick Taylor would have been impressed.
… Another chapter in the book [I was reading] – Strategies for the Green Economy by Joel Makower – talked about sustainable consumption. It’s quite true that the rest of nature must have been sustainably consuming for about the last 3.5 billion years, but obviously not at the rate we homo sapiens are doing it. Also I think there are some differences in the way we are doing it too. The fossil record does not support the thesis that dinosaurs drove Hummers or built large coal-fired power stations.
One of the most intriguing things that the author mentions is that, paradoxically, the more one owns, the less one wants to share or lend things. In fact, it seems that coveting other people’s things actually appears to increase when you have lots of stuff already, leading of course to owning even more stuff. It would seem that some circuits in the human brain get bootstrapped into unfortunate positive feedback loops when it comes to increasing ownership. There is undoubtedly more to it than this, but it’s an interesting notion.
So I came up with a potential remedy that is both simple and free (at least at the point of use), which I immediately put the test. I pedalled off to the library (located conveniently nearby) and firmly set about borrowing some books, music, films and even a couple of talking books – one by Adam Smith (some ancient history about the wealth of nations – not actually read by him of course) and Stephen Pinker talking about how the brain works, appropriately enough.
And voila! It worked. I had no desire to go and consume anything else and there is no point in covetting most things in a library, since you can borrow them anyway. Well that was the experiment, now all I have to do is come up with a hypothesis.
(5 January 2009)
Julian seems to be branching out from the heavy analysis and technical work he was doing. He seems to be allowing himself to ponder the cultural implications of peak oil, in a lighter and more playful style than one is wont to see in peak oil writing.
This is an interesting direction, one that I’m attracted to myself. I think we’ll see more of it. -BA
The Peer-Polity Peter Principle (Jeff Vail interview) (audio)
KMO, C-Realm Podcast
KMO welcomes energy infrastructure analyst Jeff Vail to the program to talk about how growth-oriented hierarchies start to come unglued when they run up against the energy and resource limitations that prohibit continued growth. Listen in to hear how this idea relates to Professor Laurence J. Peter’s famous principle.
(7 January 2009)
Western prosperity is based on resources that are running out
Hervé Philippe, Nature
p147
… [the prosperity of western societies] is mainly based on the use of non-renewable resources and therefore is probably spurious.
Several hundred million years were needed to form the fossil energy that will be exhausted during a few hundred years. This is roughly equivalent to spending all one’s annual income during the first 30 seconds of a year. In particular, the frenzy to automate processes in order to increase competitiveness leads to rapid exhaustion of available resources, for example through over-fishing or degradation of soils.
All current growth-based economic models imply massive use of non-renewable resources and environmental degradation. These models are not sustainable, even in the short term. …
Département de Biochimie, Université de Montréal, 2900 Edouard Montpetit, H3C 3J7 Montréal, Québec, Canada
(8 January 2009)
Full text is behind a paywall. EB contributor Michael Lardelli writes:
Hervé Philippe the same geneticist who wrote the article in Trends in Genetics, “Less is more: decreasing the number of scientific conferences to promote economic degrowth.”
