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Climate Adaptation for Resilient Communities
Howard Silverman , People and Place
“Resilience works,” trumpeted the Seattle PI in a May 2008 editorial, “Climate Change at Home: A Time to Thrive.” The occasion was a workshop hosted by the Center for Clean Air Policy that brought together representatives from eight North American cities to compare notes on adapting to climate change. Next month, on February 21st and 22nd, the Climate Prosperity Project will host similar gathering in San Jose, California.
These two organizations – and a growing list of others – are taking a powerfully strategic approach to climate change work. They are localizing a global issue. And they are reframing it as a challenge to innovation.
In this perspective, I explore the idea and practice of adaptation to climate change, starting with its relationship to mitigation. Along the way, I survey a range of materials that have caught our attention. And then I suggest some areas for further inquiry.
(22 January 2009)
About People and Place:
… What are the ties that draw people together and to place? How have these connections – and our understandings – evolved over time? What social-ecological relationships support a more reliable prosperity? How is meaningful change accelerated?
Part weblog, part web-based journal, People and Place hosts an inquiry on ideas that connect us.
P&P publisher Ecotrust believes that our fundamental challenge is a broader understanding of the intimate relationship between the human condition and the health of all living systems. Although P&P covers topics related to Ecotrust’s work, all P&P writings are solely attributable to individual authors. Howard Silverman is P&P editor. He has worked with Ecotrust since 1999, currently as senior writer and analyst.
Controlling Our History
Carl Etnier, Vermont Commons blog
An article in the 1962 edition of Encyclopedia Britannica leaves the impression that federal policy, or its failures, was the sole determinant of success in meeting food needs of the US during the world wars. We need to control our history, to tell the story of how much food came from people’s own efforts in their backyards.
… [In the encyclopedia there were] no indication that states or local governments had any food policies of their own, nor of actions taken by individuals to secure their own food. Not even the Victory Garden movement, which became an official program of the US Department of Agriculture during World War II, is mentioned. There’s no separate article on Victory Gardens, either.
As we try to rebuild local food economies and backyard food production, it’s important to know our own history. If it’s true that Victory Gardens supplied up to 40% of the produce consumed in the US during World War II, that story bolsters the confidence of today’s gardeners and potential gardeners.
It’s telling that the most prestigious top-down authored encyclopedia had such a top-level view of “War Control of Food” at a time when food production was being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands.
I don’t know what today’s Encyclopedia Britannica says on the subject; I didn’t want to give them my credit card number for a 30-day free trial. For free, I can learn that the world’s most popular bottom-up encyclopedia has at least a short article on Victory Gardens. In addition, it has an article on wartime rationing that is at least as much from the consumer’s perspective as the bureaucrat’s.
We control our future by controlling our history, and projects like Wikipedia help us control our history.
(24 January 2009)
Powerdown Toolkit
Graham Strouts, Zone 5
Over the past year or so I have been working with Davie Philip of Cultivate on the Skilling Up for Powerdown program, a learning resource in support of Transition Initiatives in Ireland.
The course has been run in Dublin and Kinsale a few times already and will be available as a community learning course throughout Ireland. In conjunction with this course, a series of 10 TV shows have been made for Dublin Community TV which are due to be aired starting next month.
Over the next few weeks I will post up the 10 Introductions for the course which I have co-written with David Fleming and edited.
Below is the general introduction.
Cultivate Community Powerdown Energy Use, Carbon Reduction and Resilience
The Cultivate Community Powerdown Toolkit is designed to support communities in their responses to the converging crises of the 21st Century: Climate change and Peak Oil; …
… Community Powerdown is an attempt to show an alternative approach that is at once more sustainable and more fulfilling. By redesigning our lives and adopting a different set of values to those advocated by the industrial growth society over the past 50-60 years, we can learn to live well –but with vastly reduced energy consumption, and therefore, a much smaller ecological footprint.{5}
Meeting the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate change may be the greatest project humanity can undertake; for the community, it provides an unparalleled opportunity for resurgence. Already around the world thousands of communities –such as the Transition Network in the UK and Ireland, and the Post-Carbon Cities movement in North America are planning their Energy Descent Pathways and are finding renewal and a new sense of abundance in their local communities.
As you work through this course and begin to think how much energy permeates our lives, and how vulnerable we are to energy and climate disruption, you will also become aware of the resources you have in your community and of many other possibilities for creating community self-reliance.
(22 January 2009)
