Greenworld

Thinking With the Ecological Thought

2011-04-14T08:31:00.003-04:00

So what am I learning from this encounter with Tim Morton's Ecological Thought?

That a thought unrelated to practice is empty. That the relation to practice, too, must be thought and developed. That practice necessarily makes room for embodied others (and not just strange strangers), who need their own room to breathe (la partage du souffle), and that the provision of such room within the text--within the practice of style--is an ethical matter.

An ethical text--one I can live with, in a strong sense of the phrase--provides a map of the positions it seeks to engage, a sketch of how they're related to one another and therefore how I expect to engage them. Such a map should allow the reader to assess both the terrain and my map, to come to an independent judgment of how persuasive or effective the engagement has been.

For instance: there are plenty of places in the literature of ecology/environmentalism that resemble, in some ways, the lines of thinking that Morton pursues. Why doesn't he engage with them, if only to elaborate differences? His thinking crosses paths with ideas about ecological modernization, and with Tim Ingold's work in The Perception of the Environment. Would it do damage to his thought to tarry awhile in the vicinity of such texts?

Traditional scholarly convention distributes the map of its engagements between primary texts, worked into the body of the text, and secondary references, confined to the foot- or end-notes. Such spatial distinctions establish, as it were, the kinship terms for academic work. Morton has endnotes, but they act more like links than references; his text is a field of wild cross-pollination. This enacts the idea that ecology means the loss of the foreground/background distinction, the evaporation of distance, but it also collapses the distinction between map and territory and, indeed, just about any epistemic distinctions whatsoever (this despite his claim to distinguish between, say, environmentalism and the ecological thought.).

Alongside these concerns, there is a question about the time of reading, an issue related to practices of attention. Traditional reading takes time, with the text being an artefact designed to orchestrate time (I think of David Miller's phrase about the Victorian novel as a "drill in the rhythms of industrial society"). It may be that virtual reality dissolves such artefacts, suspending reading in a space of lateral associations and an environment of optionality (I currently have a dozen tabs open in my browser, and can readily skip between them: the fabric of this writing is riddled with those possibilities, and the awareness that they affect the reader as well. ). In this informational space, reading "takes" no time: it is pock-marked with points, constellated but not connected. Having grown up breathing, following the marked paths, the vacant, interstellar spaces frighten and disorient me, leave me infuriated. But perhaps those raised in the upper atmosphere are acclimatized: this is what ecologists call "shifting baselines."

THE Ecological Thought?

2011-04-12T10:13:00.002-04:00

It's been some time since I was as provoked by a book as I've been by Tim Morton's The Ecological Thought (2010)--probably since reading his last one, Ecology Without Nature (2007) (also the name of his blogsite). Not that being provoked is necessarily bad, but my irritation risks overwhelming what is actually interesting about Morton's text. Like Slavoj Zizek, whom he cites and thanks, Morton goes out of his way to deride other people's icons ("Wilderness areas are giant, abstract versions of the products hanging in mall windows"--p.9; "These fake landscapes are the original greenwashing"-10), to caricature the thought he critiques by associating it with Things We All Despise ("Environmentalist ideology ... ruthlessly immediate, aggressively masculine, ruggedly anti-intellectual, afraid of humor and irony"--p.8), and to make off-hand counter-intuitive remarks as if they were self-evident ("Some people simply don't want to know that their water is recycled excrement"--9: a zinger too good too pass up, even though it flies in the face of basic chemistry: the All-is-connected Ecological Thought can't be bothered with petty distinctions).

Some of this can be chalked up to being an entertaining lecturer; some of it stems from the habitus of Grand Theory, where outrageous assertions are coin of the realm, always deferred for later development; some of it has the whiff of academic self-marketing, where claims to Big Think, even if under-realized, pave the way to promotion. But as a whole it feels like cybergenic ADD: it establishes an affective field of breathless association ("You could see turbines as environmental art"-9; "Ecology is a matter of human experience"-12). Although he SAYS that "We shouldn't be afraid to withdraw and reflect," this is not a contemplative text: it has only two speeds, fast and faster. And remember, "The ecological thought permits no distance" (39)

More to the point, its version of "thinking" feels radically individualized, closer to the Egotistical Sublime than to the Congress of All Beings. Morton's "Ecological Thought" seems untroubled by politics, being more intent on establishing My Correct Views on Everything (to cite Kolakowski) than on cultivating alliances or thinking in context. Its tone is, fundamentally, ungenerous ("Heidegger's environmentalism is a sad, fascist, stunted bonsai version"--27, presumably because he cherished place and home). No one else, it seems, is entitled to a voice, or a view worth respecting, at least not within the precincts of My Text: no ethics of hospitality here.

(Reading Morton brings to mind Jane Bennett's remarks in "The Moraline Drift:" what gives a text that moralistic flavor? Self-certainty, a quest for purity, punitiveness: being caught in the rip-tides of one's own judgment. Bennett calls for ethical tactics to cultivate a humbler stance, preferring to present one's "world-view as an onto-story rather than an ontology," for instance: "Weak ontologists do aim to persuade others of the value, meaningfulness, or ethical advantages of their onto-stories. But they seek to balance the moraline drift of this project with a courageous admission of weakness"--17.)

The lack of generosity, of hospitality, feels somehow connected to the formlessness of the text, its headlong quality or precipitate flight. As a reader of poetry and an aspirational asthmatic, I tend to be sensitive to the rhythm of reading, the space it allows for companionable breathing. Morton's staccato observations, patterned on Zizek, make no room, take no time, give no quarter, have no mercy-- a condition they then describe as the true existential condition. This is partly temperamental, I suppose, but it is also deliberately cultivated--no, as they say, accident.

And yet, and yet...

I have great sympathy for the open-ended, essayistic quality of the text. Beyond the verbosity, there are some interesting thoughts--I can't call them insights--into the unboundedness of ecosystems, and how acquaintance with some texts can move us towards engaging their dynamics. On his blog, Morton mentions some affinities with William Jordan's Sunflower Forest, where a related "onto-story" about the incompleteness of nature (and the psychic costs of relatedness) proposes to resolve itself into restorative ritualization. Jordan's project draws on Frederick Turner, and aims at collective action: so far as I can tell, by contrast, thinking the Ecological Thought is its own reward.

OSU Grad Students Sustainability Summit

2011-04-02T12:37:00.000-04:00

April 1, 2011: OSU Grad Students hosted their first (annual?) sustainability summit, to unveil a resolution to establish a set of sustainability goals--by 2015--for the university. After introductions, the event centered on a set of presentations--by James deFrance, Aparna Dial, Joseph Fiksel and Rattan Lal--covering some basics points about sustainability, including concepts like sources and sinks (Lal), natural capital, feedback loops and systems thinking (Fiksel) and the basics of OSU's planning process.

Rattan Lal spoke of the need to establish baselines for emissions and resource use, as the basis for establishing goals. Aparna noted the challenge of aging infrastructure, and the initiative to meter all the buildings, a $3.5 million project. Joseph talked in general terms about the limits of the traditional model of economic growth, and the overshoot generated by failure to take account of natural capital. One of the few moments of argument surfaced when someone asked whether capitalism needed to be reined in, and both Joseph and Aparna extolled market mechanisms as an efficient way of coordinating responses. Both of them have been trained as engineers.

The event was well-attended and promising, but had its limits as a learning opportunity, in part because it assumed a homogeneous audience, all starting from a common baseline. In future years, I hope the organizers consider how to better integrate the summit into the rhythm of the academic year, and to choreograph diverse stakeholding groups. Coordinating such an event with Earth Week activities, for one, would open out the process to a larger context. Similarly, it would be useful to have breakout sessions geared towards different constituencies (There was a stylistic microdrama in the division between the suit-and-tie reps of Student Government and the t-shirted insurgents from Free the Planet and the grass-roots types.). It was, for instance, testimony to the limitations of the political imagination that, when asked how we can make sure the goals are implemented, the primary response was to "pressure' the administration.

At an organizational level--because sustainability is an organizational problem--it would be helpful for those working on the various dimensions of the issue (operations, student life, curriculum, research, community engagement) to meet semi-regularly to share goals, questions and learnings from the year. We need to create a field--a community of practice--that can "hold" the question of sustainability and how to approach it on an ongoing basis. Holding the question, creating a container for conversation, differs from a hierarchical performance review, in that it establishes a supportive environment, one which aims to renew and deepen commitment by making room for reflection and appreciation. It should, as well, ease the burden of individualized action, which often leads to moralism and resentment.

Psychologically, the challenge of sustainability is the need for enthusiasm, the desire for "more life." How to invest what can seem like compulsory austerity and self-discipline with symbolic and affective satisfaction? From sacrifice to communion.

The Long Death of Environmentalism

2011-03-09T10:47:00.003-05:00

Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger went to Yale last month, for a retrospective on their ideas about the "death of environmentalism." I spent a lot of time on their book in the early days of this blog, so I felt obligated to look pretty carefully at their current views.

There's a lot of cogent and provocative analysis here, obviously a challenge to greens to do some hard thinking about values, priorities and strategies. As a resident of the coal-dependent Midwest, I'm keenly aware of the hole we've dug for ourselves and what it's going to take to dig ourselves out.

But while I have a lot of misgivings about "An Inconvenient Truth," I can't tell whether Nordhaus and Shellenberger think Gore was substantively mistaken about the need to "change our lives" or whether they see it simply as a strategic error. Is Gore wrong to think we need to change, or is he wrong just in saying so out loud?

This matters because N & S--no doubt in the interest of being provocative--tend to reduce environmentalism to the issue of climate change, and then to find the key to climate change in energy policy. The policy debate then gets overshadowed by the need for pragmatic action. End result: the future lies with industrial agriculture and nuclear power--the only two substantive proposals I can find in N & S's 12 Theses.

In other words: if environmentalism isn't dead, it should prove it by committing suicide. Give up your fantasies about protecting nature. Oh, and don't worry, be happy. :-) Is that the sort of "breakthrough" N & S are looking for?

N & S are certainly right to emphasize that the link between science and policy is immensely problematic, with no direct lines to be drawn. And I'm sure that grass-roots greens are at fault for harboring naive views about the scale and pace of any transition to a post-carbon economy. But I wonder whether N & S are not unnecessarily narrowing the argument, and sacrificing the trees in the name of a global view of "forest strategy."

"System justification" can be a useful concept, but it has a functionalist bias and shouldn't be used to discredit politics. Look around: lots of people are talking about change, and about how other people are afraid of change. We disagree about what needs to change, and why, but one way or another, it's happening.

Art Dept Discussion: What are We Eating?

2011-02-17T14:18:00.002-05:00

Thanks to Jesse Hemminger for an invitation to today's Topics Table at Hopkins Hall, to talk about Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food and what we're eating.

Pollan's argument is that "nutritionism is the ideology of industrial agriculture," and that, as such, thinking in terms of "nutritional value" (rather than eating food) has led us astray. Pollan himself notices how hard it is to escape from nutritionism, since he keeps drawing on it to explain why the "Western diet" (too broad a term?) is so unhealthy. (In fact, thinking of diet in relation to health is already to slight the cultural meanings of food, to downplay pleasure, taste and sociality.) This ineluctable pull says something about the nature of ideology: it's not just a distortion, but has its own structural necessities. It is fitted to, and makes somewhat intelligible, a certain reality.

Pollan also emphasizes that food--eating--is a relationship. From this perspective, "nutritionism" is the symptom of a relationship: to industrial agriculture, but also to science and to media. A relationship, that is, to a particular way of understanding relationships, namely, through the vocabularies of scientific reductionism and industrial production. It is important to us to know the latest about diet and health, and thus to acknowledge that professional authority.

At the same time, the development of industrial agriculture in the United States is not exclusively profit-driven, but also has a particular, historical path-dependency. It was historically justified by the need to "feed the world," which was born out of the experience of WWII and the emergence of the postcolonial world (famine in India, starving children in Biafra). Even know, the prospect of demographic apocalypse--feeding the 9 billion--continues to drive the development of GMO foods and to deride romantic localism. Industrial producers and nutritionists think on large scales, ultimately in terms of calories and nutrients and energy-efficiency, rather than in terms of local cultures. From the deracinated scientific standpoint, foods ought to be fungible, rather than culturally embedded: rice is, finally, rice. This way of thinking is premised on the background of famine or catastrophic deprivation, in which hunger and survival ultimately erase and override all other, meaningful considerations.

As a goal, feeding the world means feeding it indifferently. It locates agency all on one side, leaving the "receiving end" to be fed, passively. This is monocultural thinking with a vengeance (as it were). The prospect of climate change requires a more flexible, elaborated and localized approach to resilience. For instance, here's a link to discussion of what a sustainable food system might look like.

Water Footprints

2010-08-24T16:10:00.001-04:00

Next step in eco-awareness: calculating "water footprints."

Food Fight: Grist weighs in

2010-08-24T08:44:00.001-04:00

Last week, the NYT ran a provocative op-ed by self-proclaimed "Liberal Curmudgeon," Stephen Budiansky. In "Math Lessons for Locavores," Budiansky looks to debunk the "misleading and often bogus" statistics deployed to explain why eating locally is environmentally friendlier. Writes Budiansky:

The real energy hog, it turns out, is not industrial agriculture at all, but you and me. Home preparation and storage account for 32 percent of all energy use in our food system, the largest component by far.

A single 10-mile round trip by car to the grocery store or the farmers’ market will easily eat up about 14,000 calories of fossil fuel energy. Just running your refrigerator for a week consumes 9,000 calories of energy. That assumes it’s one of the latest high-efficiency models; otherwise, you can double that figure. Cooking and running dishwashers, freezers and second or third refrigerators (more than 25 percent of American households have more than one) all add major hits. Indeed, households make up for 22 percent of all the energy expenditures in the United States.

While locavoracity may have acquired something of a self-righteous halo recently, especially among the coastal trend-mongers, some of Budiansky's own calculations struck me as suspiciously ad-hoc, mustered to score points rather than to advance understanding of the pros and cons of our current food system. Partly it was using the club of "efficiency" to bludgeon the arguments about localism ("The best way to make the most of these truly precious resources of land, favorable climates and human labor is to grow lettuce, oranges, wheat, peppers, bananas, whatever, in the places where they grow best and with the most efficient technologies"); partly it was the smugly contrarian conclusion ("The relative pittance of our energy budget that we spend on modern farming is one of the wisest energy investments we can make, when we honestly look at what it returns to our land, our economy, our environment and our well-being.") that pretends that the interests of land, economy and environment are somehow naturally aligned under industrial monocultures. In the role of curmudgeon, Budiansky reduces complex and textured arguments about diversity, resilience, seasonality and ecological scale to a choice between virtue and efficiency.

The folks over at Grist have taken up Budiansky's challenge and organized a series of responses, including this one from Elanor Starmer of Food & Water Watch. I'm curious to see how the debate unfolds (nothing in the NYT yet, as far as I can tell); let's hope it generates a bit more light.

Fish Stories

2010-08-05T12:00:00.001-04:00

A review by Sam Sifton (restaurant critic for the NYT) of Paul Greenberg's book Four Fish--salmon, cod, tuna, and sea bass--that are pillars of the global fishing industry. Wild stocks are dwindling fast, and aquaculture poses its own significant risks and challenges. A telling complement to Caroline Fraser's book on Rewilding.

August 1, 2010

Photo from NYT

Fish Stories

2010-08-04T13:07:00.002-04:00

How the Climate Bill failed in the Senate

2010-07-30T10:15:00.001-04:00

Insider analysis from the NRDC on why climate legislation collapsed in the Senate. Failure has many fathers, success is a virgin birth.

Sustainable Cities

2010-07-22T14:13:00.001-04:00

Interesting site (apparently out of Denmark) dealing with sustainable urbanism. This page includes a sequence of links to declarations, going back to the Brundtland Report, that have developed principles of sustainability in relation to high-density cities.

Two articles

2010-07-07T20:49:00.000-04:00

The American Prospect has a cover story on "Why Local Food Doesn't Stand a Chance," by Heather Rogers. It's an implicit rebuttal to Michael Pollan's NYT piece, which was more optimistic about the chances of extricating ourselves from corporate monoculture. Rogers, who authored a book called Green Gone Wrong, focuses on the way Big Ag is entrenched in the USDA under Tom Vilsack, and the continuing obstacles to small and sustainable farming. The story is framed by anecdotes about virtuous organic farmers who still can't make it and are about to leave their land: it's a classic feel-bad story, which I've come to suspect but which is hard to dismiss. The core thesis is that Vilsack, and the whole USDA structure, still looks at commodity farming and biofuels as the twin pillars of farm policy; the "urban locavore" market is no more than a niche. There's a whiff of self-flagellation there, despite the fact that there are plenty of battles to be fought (notably--a fact Pollan emphasized--that cheap "fast food" has subsidized the impoverishment of rural America). The way Rogers sets up the argument, though, suggests that there's a need to think through the idea of "post-industrial agriculture," perhaps along the lines suggested by Hugh Raffles on urban beekeeping.

The other significant article is John Terbrogh's review of Rewilding the World, by Caroline Fraser, an extended explanation of why the return of "top predators" is key to restoring biodiversity. It's essentially a justification, backed by decades of new research, of Aldo Leopold's insight in "Thinking Like a Mountain," about why wolves matter. Terbrogh is good on the coming conflict, especially in developing countries, between conservation and meat-farming, and the need to figure out compromises and coexistence. But as a survey of conservation science, it's fascinating and lucid.

Global Warming Games

2010-06-06T16:48:00.002-04:00

Thinking about teaching for sustainability, I've come around to the view that it's going to take all sorts of techniques, tools and contexts in order to indigenize approaches to the environment across the curriculum. So one of the things I'm flirting with is how to use environmental simulation games, models of decision-making and policy analysis that will enable students to witness the effects of assumptions, actions and consequences. Wikipedia has an entry listing "global warming games" that I'm going to start looking into.

At the same time, I'm inspired by some remarks of Michael Maniates, prefacing a book on Encountering Global Environmental Politics. "Muddling towards sustainability," Maniates writes (invoking Kai Lee)

is messy work--it means, at times, coloring outside the lines, in imaginative, unanticipated ways.... This suggests that education for sustainability, rather than training experts and rewarding passive acceptance of facts, should be about reproducing this messiness in the classroom (at least some of the time) in order to acclimate students conditioned by years of sitting in neat rows and raising their hands before speaking....higher education should be training students to patiently cope with ambiguity , to systematically evaluate conflicting expert claims about the state of the environment, to dissect the ways in which competing interests mask risk and highlight uncertainty to their advantage, to cultivate a passion for civic engagement, and to roll up their sleeves and set to work on local and regional causes of environmental decline that sum to global environmental degradation (10)

I like this very much as a pedagogical aspiration, though it's undoubtedly hard to do. A mess can be instructive, but it's always frustrating; teaching can be about tolerating frustration--one's own as well as students'--but there has to be some sort of narrative recuperation towards "the end."

Making Connections

2010-04-27T14:30:00.002-04:00

Walking over to the 4-H building this morning for the first-ever USO Sustainability Conference, I was captivated by what looked like a solar-powered aluminum-frame pirate ship--red sails flapping in the wind, solar panels outstretched to catch the early morning light--parked outside the center. Its relation to the proceedings was unclear--no explanatory signage--but it perched on the lawn as if it had just landed from some extraterrestrial expedition, a cross between the Kitty Hawk and a cyborg. At its heart, drawing power from the solar panels, was...an ice chest, stocked with popsicles.

Turned out to be the Trickster Project, brainchild of Ohio University's Duane McDiarmid, designed to turn up in various out-of-the-way hiking spots in the Southwestern deserts (Diablo Canyon, Antelope Island, the Yampa River), dispensing icy treats to weary travelers. We fell to talking about the place of art in the sustainability conversation, and the necessity of wit, whimsy and humor in enlivening visions of a green future ("It can't all be austerity and efficiency"). What art brings, Duane suggested, was the capacity for self-reflection and self-criticism embedded in an occasion for conversation, a way of gaining ironic perspective on the work of the angels.

Earth, Air, Fire, Water

2010-04-25T16:23:00.002-04:00

Earth Day, 2010: Gathered at noontime outside Hopkins Hall, in the shadow of the Constitution Tree (a sycamore, growing in the 1780's), for conversation about "environmental art." I laid out three questions:

What roles do you see (let's call it) environmental art playing in the world today?
What role can a conversation about environmental art play in Columbus over the next two years?
How can art (or: the arts) clarify and support OSU's commitment to sustainability

On the questions, first: "roles" are multiple, running from visual communication and illustration to vehicles of community-formation or renewal to expressions of anger and mourning. The work of art: to release imagination--intuition, empathy, affect, understanding--from its self-enclosure, from its attachment to habits grown meaningless or self-destructive, to glimpse new meanings on the horizon, new mythologies.

Information, Walter Benjamin tells us ("The Storyteller"), is the enemy of wisdom. Traditional wisdom, layered into stories that have gone from hand to hand, tells us "how to go on." Information shocks, leaving us none the wiser; today, we are awash in a rising sea of information, shocked but struggling. Appearing as information," our "environment" appears as an "issue"--already covered, already inscribed in controversy and power. Art can amplify our relation to "the issue," immerse us in, connect us to, facts we (or is it just you?) would rather avoid. And then?

"(Let's call it) environmental art": For some, "environmental art" is a historical label, taking us back to the 1970's, with Land Art and such. Do those labels get in the way? that is: are they part of the meaningless habits that art works to undo? Or might they have a special resonance today, resources for new ways of working? What if they were the ruins of a still-born civilization, a consciousness that never quite emerged? Could we look at them again?

"In the world today:" let's say, the climate for environmental art has changed. Let's say that, in our post-natural world, "the environment" has grown meaningless, even as the degradation of the earth's ecosystems proceeds apace, "Apocalypse as a Way of Life," as Frederick Buell puts it. Eaarth, Bill McKibben calls our "tough, new planet." What roles, what routes can art take? Recall, for instance, how reminiscent Land Art was of heroic modernism, with its extravagant scales. How are we to imagine now?

Like "the environment," "sustainability" is a parking lot, a place everyone uses but few of us linger. We can't do without it, but it's not exactly hospitable to our best thinking. It's paved with information from here to the horizon. So, what if we take it back to the elements? Orient ourselves to the fourfold: earth, air, fire, water? What could art disclose?

In our conversation, Michael Mercil brought up Jonathan Lear's book Radical Hope, subtitled "Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation." Lear's starting-point is a cultural dead-end, the collapse of the Crow nation's way of life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground. ... After this nothing happened." How, then, did they go on? Reinventing themselves, reinventing what it meant to be meaningful. Lear focuses on the testimony of Plenty Coups, the Crow chief, steering his people toward a different way of being, a reinvented tradition.

Downsizing Nature

2010-03-16T21:13:00.000-04:00

How reducing biodiversity impacts species size.

What the World Needs Now: Green Humor

2010-02-22T06:46:00.001-05:00

Thanks to Andrew Revkin's Dot.Earth blog for linking to this cartoon site:

Rigorous Scientific Debate.

When the moment is right, the vision appears:

2010-02-05T16:11:00.000-05:00

Vision for an eco-village at OSU, incubator for imagining a sustainable future.

On the Idea of Climate Change

2010-02-02T15:01:00.002-05:00

Mike Hulme's Why We Disagree About Climate Change is by far the most thorough, engaging and thought-provoking survey of the contests around the global climate that I've read, a welcome antidote to the post-Copenhagen blahs. Hulme is a Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia (home of the notorious "climategate" emails) and an advisor to the EU on climate change policy. But the book is something like a deconstruction of the concept of "climate change," turning repeatedly on the question, "So why DO we disagree" about this vexed topic. In brief: because we study, imagine, value, fear, believe, govern and understand differently.

Hulme takes pains to declare that he's not a climate skeptic--he thinks the dangers are all too real--so it's surprising to see him embrace a constructionist position in the end, one that calls for re-embedding the idea of climate into our "mythic" meaning-making narratives. In particular, he disputes the construction of climate change as a "problem" calling for a "solution:"

If we continue to talk about climate change as an environmental problem to be solved, if we continue to understand the climate system as something to be mastered and controlled, then we have missed the main lessons of climate change. If climate means to us only the measurable and physical dimensions of our life on Earth then we will always be at war with climate. Our climates will forever be offering us something different from what we want.
Rather than placing ourselves in a 'fight against climate change' we need a more constructive and imaginative engagement with the idea of climate change. (360-1)

Whatever we do, Hulme suggests, ACC (anthropogenic climate change) is not going to just go away: there is no end in sight. Let's make it an opportunity to think more deeply, creatively, wisely about life on earth.

Ten Sustainability Trends

2010-01-31T12:09:00.001-05:00

The Post-Carbon Institute is in the process of evolving from a virtual to a real-world think-tank, drawing together some of the leading figures in the sustainability movement while making interesting use of new-media crowd-sourcing techniques. Warren Karlenzig, one of PCI's Fellows, made some start-of-the-decade predictions here. Among the trends he's watching: the new biking culture, urban agriculture, drought preparations, resiliency planning, cellulosic biofuels, the use of ICT (information and communications technologies) to enhance sustainable cities. Columbus has some skin in a number of these games, but my sense is that we're still hedging our bets.

Peer Pressure Works

2010-01-21T14:19:00.000-05:00

Robert Cialdini interviewed in Grist:

"If we send people in San Diego a message saying the majority of your neighbors are conserving energy on a daily basis, that has more effect than telling them to do it for the environment or to be socially responsible citizens or to save money. If your neighbors are doing it, it means it’s feasible. It’s practicable. You can do it—people like you.

It was very important that we say “people in your neighborhood.” If we said “the majority of Americans,” that wasn’t effective. If we said “the majority of Californians,” that was more effective. If we said “the majority of San Diegans,” that was more effective. But the most effective was “the majority of your neighbors.” That’s how you decide what’s possible for you: what people in your circumstance are able to do.

What's in it for the spooks?

2010-01-04T20:43:00.001-05:00

"The nation’s top scientists and spies are collaborating on an effort to use the federal government’s intelligence assets — including spy satellites and other classified sensors — to assess the hidden complexities of environmental change. They seek insights from natural phenomena like clouds and glaciers, deserts and tropical forests." the NYT reports.

Learning From COP15

2009-11-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

The UN Climate Change Conference upcoming in Copenhagen Dec 7-18 has already spawned a lot of activity, activism and reflection, including the International Wake-Up call sponsored by Avaaz.org and the Bill McKibben-inspired Oct 24 Day of Action sparked by 350.org. Both of these actions were largely directed at political leaders and governments, urging them to sign on to binding and equitable emissions targets at the conference. Most of the coverage of the conference has been pessimistic, and leaders have now officially announced that no agreement would emerge from the meeting. (Andrew Revkin at DotEarth suggests, somewhat paradoxically, that there may be a bright side here, since it will free up those actually involved in the negotiations--as distinct from national leaders--to address some of the tougher questions).

The lack of a binding treaty has got to be disappointing, but it may be worth exploring a different angle. The format of the international conference developed in the age of newspapers and mass media: a centralized "summit" event, designed to focus all eyes on the actions of world leaders. That ceremonial framing was always a bit misleading (there were always "backstage" negotiations), but as the complexity of world issues, and the number of actors involved, increased, the conceit of a single "event" making news--let alone History--started to seem pretty threadbare, unconvincing even to those committed to reporting it. Disappointment became part of the expectation, and cynical observations began to be built into the parade ("Look, the emperors have no clothes!"). In this scenario, all the associated hoopla is literally beside the point, a "pretext" doomed to irrelevance.

But what if the associated hoopla were--or became--the main event? What if the parallel organizing enabled something unforeseen to emerge, an alternative mode of cooperation that bypassed the official channels of representation? The model here is the World Social Forum, which developed out of anti-globalization protests, as a counterweight to the World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland. (The latter was never an official gathering, but still....) From protest to coordinated action: there is already a People's Climate Action network in place in Copenhagen alongside the official conference, designed partly to defuse and partly to harness grassroots activism/protest (Disruptive protest is expected, but PCA is trying to channel creativity). From negotiation to open-ended conversation: all sorts of initiatives are linking up, or in, or to, this network, outpacing the leadership and starting to learn from, and inspire, each other.

Such activism doesn't lend itself to traditional media "coverage" and definitions of "news." Rather than letting itself be passively "covered," it seeks to use media to enhance involvement. It is relatively uncoupled--for both good and ill--from the narratives of interstate relations, and the imagined communities of nations. It has been theorized in academic terms as "global civil society," and envisioned in leftist circles as "the multitude." Both phrasings inherit overtones of the political spaces they mourn (the corridors of power, the streets of cities), but those spaces box in what is better considered as emergent practice.

Sustainability Dictionary

2009-11-11T12:46:00.001-05:00

Thanks to the Yale Sustainability Group for forwarding this reference: The dictionary of sustainable management.

Connecting the dots--finally.

2009-10-27T21:43:00.000-04:00

Preview of a paper from the Post-Carbon Institute that starts to draw urban planning implications from the conjuncture of the financial crisis and climate change. It's obvious, really: suburban sprawl is a bubble, inflated by burning fossil fuel and financed by the home-ownership dreams of the American middle class. Given the entrenched synergy between corporate power and the consumer economy, we'll be spending some time struggling to preserve or reconstruct some of these spendthrift patterns: despite the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies, car ownership will likely continue to be a badge of adulthood, at least for American teenagers. But the financial implosion has also created some room for rethinking and reworking, edged perhaps by despair (there's a bit of the survivalist tinging the Transition movement) but also buoyed by social hope.

Testing the Waters

2009-09-13T21:57:00.001-04:00

Here's why we need strong, independent newspapers, capable of sustained investigative reporting. Sunday's NYT has a major (as in 3 full pages) article about the deteriorating state of our rivers and streams, after almost a decade of lax enforcement of the Clean Water Act.

The Times obtained hundreds of thousands of water pollution records through Freedom of Information Act requests to every state and the E.P.A., and compiled a national database of water pollution violations that is more comprehensive than those maintained by states or the E.P.A. (For an interactive version, which can show violations in any community, visit www.nytimes.com/toxicwaters.)
In addition, The Times interviewed more than 250 state and federal regulators, water-system managers, environmental advocates and scientists.
That research shows that an estimated one in 10 Americans have been exposed to drinking water that contains dangerous chemicals or fails to meet a federal health benchmark in other ways.
Those exposures include carcinogens in the tap water of major American cities and unsafe chemicals in drinking-water wells. Wells, which are not typically regulated by the Safe Drinking Water Act, are more likely to contain contaminants than municipal water systems.

The scary hook--illustrated by a front-page picture of a kid whose teeth have been corroded by water full of heavy-metals from mine slurry--is West Virginia, where EPA regulators have been regularly intimidated and even fired, in the name of a more "cooperative" relationship between industry and government. But the whole report, including the searchable database, is a great public service, allowing us to see local trends and larger patterns. Alongside the data, it includes state-by-state responses from the EPA to the Times requests, variously reasonable and defensive in the spotlight.

The Global Food Chain

2009-09-10T20:59:00.001-04:00

The Nation has a new issue on the politics of food, including this challenging review by Brent Cunningham of two books about food aid and famine in Africa. Cunningham argues that the "good food revolutionaries" (Pollan, Schlosser, Alice Waters, etc.) need to think hard about what it will take to confront Big Ag, whose fortunes are built on arguments about the need to feed the world. Even apart from what cheap calories have done to the American diet, the books document the way food aid subverts agricultural markets in Africa, and so undermines the continent's ability to feed itself. During the Ethiopian famine of 2003, millions of tons of locally grown grain--unsellable during previous years bumper harvests--rotted in warehouses even as millions of tons of American surplus was flown in. Why? Because, by law, US food aid cannot be in the form of cash, only commodities.

This requirement, Cunningham argues, speaks volumes about the entrenched power of Big Ag, and the challenge that the local food movement faces. Another eye-opening moment: why it's so hard to undo government subsidies:

The legislation behind farm subsidies had been structured to make it unusually hard to undo. Unlike many laws, which automatically expire on a predetermined date, the laws underlying subsidies weren't programmed to end. Instead, if Congress didn't craft and enact a new farm bill every five years or so, the law reverted back to the Agricultural Adjustment Act of 1938 and the Agriculture Act of 1949, which contained even sweeter payments to some farmers.

The point is that global agricultural markets go back to the 1950's, and have structured farm policy in the US for half a century. Developing more sustainable growing, buying and eating habits will be the work of decades, even if we take seriously Michael Pollan's recent argument that taking on Big Ag is a public health issue: so much of rising health care costs are attributable to chronic conditions (like diabetes) rooted in obesity.

Is Consumerism Dead?

2009-09-08T20:59:00.001-04:00

McClatchy News Service (via HuffPost) offers this overview of the fallout from the Great Recession: credit to be tight for years, maybe decades, to come, signalling the end of consumer-led economic growth. Even forecasters for the US Chamber of Commerce are expecting growth rates in the neighborhood of 2%, much lower than the "average" rate of 3 -3.5%. The reason? The effective shutdown of the securitization market, those exotic packages that bundled sub-prime loans into attractive, ostensibly "risk-free" investments, thereby freeing up all sorts of credit.

"I think this financial panic and Great Recession is an inflection point for the financial system and the economy," said Mark Zandi, the chief economist for forecaster Moody's Economy.com. "It means much less risk-taking, at least for a number of years to come — a decade or two. That will be evident in less credit and more costly credit. If you are a household or a business, it will cost you more, and it will be more difficult to get that credit."

A lot depends, however, on whether this tightening of credit--and the prospect of continuing high unemployment--gets coded as deprivation and a threat to the standard of living, or as a potentially welcome opportunity to strengthen the common wealth and to work with the tools of conviviality. In other words, we'll have to see whether social-networking technologies can support genuine community, or whether they're offshoots of market research and the virtual mall.

Going Greener

2009-08-31T08:11:00.001-04:00

The NYT reports this morning that some LEED certified buildings--including the Federal Building in Youngstown--aren't as green as advertised. The reason? Certification is based on design and construction, rather than on actual carbon-reduction performance. You can collect green points by including native landscaping and bamboo floors, but up to now you haven't had to track how energy-efficient the building actually is. The rules are changing, though; new buildings are going to have to provide energy bills for the first five years of operation, with the possibility of having their LEED status revoked or downgraded. The standard should be continual monitoring and retrofitting as technologies evolve.

Meanwhile, on the retrograde side of things, the Dispatch reports that business and building groups are opposing EPA efforts to protect streams and wetlands, even as 477 acres of wetlands and 106 miles of streams have been lost since 2006. The builders prefer being allowed to buy into mitigation banks, often located miles away from the sites they're filling in; when they do mitigate on site, the replacement wetlands are often shallow and unvegetated, decorative rather than functional. Oddly enough, although opposition to the new EPA regs goes back to 2006, a VP for the Home Builders Association cites the "economic depression" as a reason not to move on them now. If not now, Mr. Squillace, when?

I guess I should feel good, though, that Delaware County--one of the fastest-growing counties in the US over the past decade--held a "GreenWise" fair over the weekend, teaching kids how to recycle and homeowners about organic lawn-care products. It's good to promote rainbarrels and provide information about how to dispose of dead batteries; I wonder, though, whether understanding land-use patterns and wetlands lost to overdevelopment would have put too much of a damper on the festivities.

This past Saturday, I did attend the opening of the long-awaited Grange Audubon Center on the Whittier Peninsula, a spectacularly reclaimed brownfield site, cheek-by-jowl with the Columbus Auto Impound Lot. Kudos to Heather Starck and crew for seeing it through.

A Cold Look at a Warmer Future

2009-08-28T12:19:00.001-04:00

Seven Myths About Alternative Energy: A bucket of cold water on dreams of a painless transition to green. Urgency means that we need to make decisions now, and efficiency is our best hope for direct and measurable impact.

Turning Point 2030

2009-08-24T14:08:00.001-04:00

John Beddington, the chief scientist of the UK, looks to a series of trends converging in 2030, foretelling a global crisis. Commenting scientists don't dispute the trends, although they note that the date is rhetorical and the convergence represents a worst-case scenario.

Some progress

2009-08-12T20:30:00.001-04:00

Looks like conditions in the Ohio River may be looking up. Of course, as one comment points out, it may just be because the industrial economy is declining (someone's silver lining, anyway).

After GDP

2009-08-10T11:34:00.001-04:00

A good op-ed in the NYT this morning by Eric Zencey, arguing that it's time we dispensed with the idea of a Gross Domestic Product as a plausible measure of the national economy: "it’s a deeply foolish indicator of how the economy is doing. It ought to join buggy whips and VCRs on the dust-heap of history."

Central to Zencey's argument is that GDP has a built-in perverse incentive to replace "natural-capital" services (sunlight, wetlands, fertile soil) with "built-capital services" (electricity, dams and treatment plants, fertilizer). The latter are counted as adding to GDP, the former taken for granted (or written off) as "free," i.e. non-productive. So if I care for the land I add nothing to GDP, whereas if I pump depleted soil full of chemical fertilizers, I've supposedly added to the nation's wealth, by engaging in an economic transaction.

In summing all economic activity in the economy, gross domestic product makes no distinction between items that are costs and items that are benefits. If you get into a fender-bender and have your car fixed, G.D.P. goes up.

A similarly counterintuitive result comes from other kinds of defensive and remedial spending, like health care, pollution abatement, flood control and costs associated with population growth and increasing urbanization — including crime prevention, highway construction, water treatment and school expansion. Expenditures on all of these increase gross domestic product, although mostly what we aim to buy isn’t an improved standard of living but the restoration or protection of the quality of life we already had.

"Natural capital" is a bit of a misnomer, however, since nature includes values irreducible to economic calculation (ethical and aesthetic values, for instance). GDP is deeply flawed, Zencey points out, but abandoning it poses difficulties of its own:

Several alternatives to gross domestic product have been proposed, and each tackles the central problem of placing a value on goods and services that never had a dollar price. The alternatives are controversial, because that kind of valuation creates room for subjectivity — for the expression of personal values, of ideology and political belief.

More evidence of the limits of purely economic thinking: in order to get values right, we have to be able to make substantive judgments, decisions about what's good. These look "subjective"--someone has to make them--even if they're grounded and reasonable. What we need, then, are social and political structures and processes that can develop these evaluations: a culture of environmental citizenship.

Environmental Citizenship as Sense-Making

2009-08-07T10:42:00.004-04:00

Thursday's NYT had a piece on the hot job prospects for statisticians, consequence of escalating computing capacity. It included the following intriguing quote:

“We’re rapidly entering a world where everything can be monitored and measured,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist and director of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Center for Digital Business. “But the big problem is going to be the ability of humans to use, analyze and make sense of the data.”

In other words, we can generate cascades of data tracking changes in everything: what we don't know is what to make of it. The new statisticians can refine algorithms to search for hidden patterns, to discern occult correlations and intricate loopings. But without the capacity to grasp what we're monitoring, and why, the data streams remain tantalizing and opaque.

The openness to inputs from a variety of sources needs to be complemented by a repertoire of patterns, a metaphoric toolbox for arranging and organizing data. Let's call the work of using those tools environmental citizenship.

The New Skepticism on Climate Change

2009-08-04T14:54:00.000-04:00

From Sharon Begley of Newsweek, via Orion.

In an insightful observation in The Guardian this month, Jim Watson of the University of Sussex wrote that "a new breed of climate sceptic is becoming more common": someone who doubts not the science but the policy response. Given the pathetic (non)action on global warming at the G8 summit, and the fact that the energy/climate bill passed by the House of Representatives is so full of holes and escape hatches that it has barely a prayer of averting dangerous climate change, skepticism that the world will get its act together seems appropriate. For instance, the G8, led by Europe, has vowed to take steps to keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius by reducing CO2 emissions. We're now at 0.8 degree. But the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is already enough to raise the mercury 2 degrees. The only reason it hasn't is that the atmosphere is full of crap (dust and aerosols that contribute to asthma, emphysema, and other diseases) that acts as a global coolant. As that pollution is reduced for health reasons, we're going to blast right through 2 degrees, which is enough to ex-acerbate droughts and storms, wreak havoc on agriculture, and produce a planet warmer than it's been in millions of years. The 2-degree promise is a mirage.

Gone Fishin'?

2009-07-31T13:10:00.000-04:00

I've been on Cape Cod for the past few weeks, and realizing just how much has been written about this narrow spit of glacial till jutting into the North Atlantic. From Thoreau's walks to Henry Beston's The Outermost House, to the Brewster-based essays of John Hay (especially his book The Run, about alewives) and Robert Finch, modestly passing by Mark Kurlansky's Cod: The Fish that Changed the World and Annie Dillard's oddly ecstatic novel The Maytrees, the literary waves keep on rolling in.

A recent installment is Tim Traver's Sippewissett, a set of essays about the salt marsh just north of Woods Hole (home to the Oceanographic Institute), the site, since the days of Louis Agassiz in the mid-19C, of pathbreaking research into the eco-systemic functioning and contributions of salt marshes. Traver grew up going to a marsh-facing summer house, spent some years as a commercial fisherman, and now writes as a conservation-minded science-journalist: the book juggles the different perspectives lightly, meditating on how they might come together: "How can different ways of knowing places--through science, through memory and history, and through self-discovery and spirit--become synthesized into stewardship, which is the work of sustaining the world?" (13). How does caring about a place translate into caring for it? How can the different demands of the soul be satisfied? or even brought to speak to one another?

In spite of excellent science, the oceans are going to hell in a handbasket, and it's the journey from good science to good management and policy--a minefield of unexploded stakeholder ordnance and political razor wire--that gets us every time (24).

So, as Travers discovers, we know more and more--down to the microbial level--about how the delicate web of micro-niches woven together in the salt marsh, the feeding- and breeding-grounds, the filtering and purifying functions, help sustain the health of the oceans, but find that fish stocks and marshlands continue to decline.

Comes now a report in the NYT--with credit to NPR, which may yet save the world--about overcoming the barriers (or rather: the differing premises) between ecologists and fisheries managers:

In a research paper in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, the two groups, long at odds with each other, offer a global assessment of the world’s saltwater fish and their environments.
Their conclusions are at once gloomy — overfishing continues to threaten many species — and upbeat: a combination of steps can turn things around. But because antagonism between ecologists and fisheries management experts has been intense, many familiar with the study say the most important factor is that it was done at all.
They say they hope the study will inspire similar collaborations between scientists whose focus is safely exploiting specific natural resources and those interested mainly in conserving them.

Turns out the two fields have different understandings of what "depletion" means in relation to "sustainability," based, it seems, on different starting-points and assumptions about population-cycles.

Dr. Hilborn said he and Dr. [Boris] Worm now understood why the ecologists and the management scientists disagreed so sharply in the first place. For one thing, he said, as long as a fish species was sustaining itself, management scientists were relatively untroubled if its abundance fell to only 40 or 50 percent of what it might otherwise be. Yet to ecologists, he said, such a stock would be characterized as “depleted” — “a very pejorative word.”
In the end, the scientists concluded that 63 percent of saltwater fish stocks had been depleted “below what we think of as a target range,” Dr. Worm said.
But they also agreed that fish in well-managed areas, including the United States, were recovering or doing well. They wrote that management techniques like closing some areas to fishing, restricting the use of certain fishing gear or allocating shares of the catch to individual fishermen, communities or others could allow depleted fish stocks to rebound.

It's good to hear that US waters count among the "well-managed areas" (there's a good crop of lobsters on the Cape this year, oysters are making a comeback, and, I hear, the whales are feasting on abundant krill). Elsewhere, though, the conflicts between market-values and sustainable management are much sharper: witness the recent news that Chile uses 350 times more antibiotics (718,000 lbs) in its farmed salmon than Norway. The information was released by the Chilean Ministry of Agriculture following a request by the environmental group Oceana.

As I discovered, Oceana also offers some helpful hints for sushi lovers.

Wal-Mart Sustainability Index

2009-07-29T21:22:00.000-04:00

New American Dream sent me to this analysis of Wal-Mart's much-hyped sustainability index--a promising initiative, but still more promise than product.

Rivers in the news

2009-07-16T10:16:00.002-04:00

Monday's NYT had a couple of revealing articles about the fate of waterways. One was an account of efforts to rethink Bombay/Mumbai's perennially vexed relation to the water, thanks to a couple of UPenn-based landscape architects, Dilip da Cunha and Anuradha Mathur. Their book-and-exhibit project is called Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary: "Ms. Mathur and Mr. da Cunha ... said they set out on their work in part to provide an alternative interpretation of Mumbai — to have it be recast as an estuary where salt and fresh water coexist rather than as an island that has to be protected from the water."

Their findings show that a series of natural features like mangrove swamps and interconnected creeks once protected and shaped Mumbai, just as the bygone swamps of the Mississippi River delta once protected New Orleans. But those defenses were weakened over the years, dating to the days of British rule, as swamps were filled in, land was reclaimed from the sea and creeks were narrowed or diverted.
The historical maps and documents show little appreciation for those long-lost natural features. Most old maps make no mention of swamps, which were often labeled simply as “badlands.” There are few images of the trees and plants that made up these areas.
Moreover, boundaries between land and sea were never drawn as they existed during the monsoon, when the wetlands of the estuary expanded, only as they stood during the summer or winter. “The monsoon was seen as foul weather,” Ms. Mathur said. And “all of the planning is based on fair weather maps.”

Mathur and da Cunha have a series of fascinating suggestions for how to deal with an estuarial landscape, short of trying to restore it to its primordial status. Needless to say, their proposals have not yet had an impact on official planning in Mumbai, where proposals for flood control continue to dominate.
From abundance to scarcity: the other article reports on the drying-up of the Euphrates in Iraq, consequence of a prolonged drought and up-stream damming projects by the governments of Turkey and Iraq.

Strangled by the water policies of Iraq’s neighbors, Turkey and Syria; a two-year drought; and years of misuse by Iraq and its farmers, the river is significantly smaller than it was just a few years ago. Some officials worry that it could soon be half of what it is now. The shrinking of the Euphrates, a river so crucial to the birth of civilization that the Book of Revelation prophesied its drying up as a sign of the end times, has decimated farms along its banks, has left fishermen impoverished and has depleted riverside towns as farmers flee to the cities looking for work.

The water-shortage exacerbates Iraq's cultural and political identity-crisis. In a region where massive hydro-projects--from Nasser's Aswan dam in Egypt to Saddam's draining of the marshlands--have always been testimonies to political power, the current scarcity testifies to the weakness of the Iraqi state, both internally and in relation to its neighbors. Any effort to think through the future of development in the region has to be linked to reworking the hydro-regime.

Encouraging post-script: I'd just finished this post, when I glanced over at my blogroll to discover this gem on Dot.Earth: "A River Runs Under It." "A community’s relationship with its waterways is a reflection of its stage of development.," Andy Revkin writes, spotlighting worldwide efforts to daylight buried streams.

Friendly Whales

2009-07-13T20:13:00.001-04:00

Sunday's NYT Magazine brings a bit of wish-fulfillment: the story of a group of whales in Baja California who seem to be encouraging humans to study them. The whales come in close for a careful look, give scientists a ride on their backs, and generally seem to be welcoming a human presence. The writer, Charles Siebert, goes so far as to use the term "forgiveness" to evoke the sense of emergent, restored interspecies trust. There's also a nice description of apparently spontaneous outbursts of ecstasy on the part of human observers--bursting into song, or tears, on contact with the whales.

Collaborative Urban Design Strategies

2009-06-19T12:52:00.002-04:00

Thanks to Joe Recchie for pointing me to this link, for the C.L.E.A.R Village project. It looks to be something of an open-source design project to develop a sustainable community over the next five years. It includes an open lab, a forum for public critiques and discussion, a blog linking to and commenting on other sustainable design projects and a host of other interactive features. A fascinating experiment.

Sustainable Consumption

2009-06-13T13:53:00.001-04:00

Boston's New Dream Foundation is one of the most consistently informative and interesting green organizations around. Rather than cause-oriented activism, they take a big-picture approach, seeing the need to change deeply ingrained habits and practices (rather than "awareness" in general). Drawing on the work of scoiologist Juliet Schor, NDF offers fine-grained analyses, thoughtful commentary and practical advice. One of their recent studies looks at Americans' patterns of consumption, and tries to think about what more sustainable consumption might look like.

Meanwhile, Andrew O'Hagan in the London Review of Books takes a look at three recent books about car culture (mostly in the US) and explains why governments--not just the US, but world-wide--are deeply reluctant to let the carmakers go under. In O'Hagan's view, the issue is much more than economic, but goes to the heart of modern (male) identity, especially as its been made in the image of Americanism:

"In American fiction, a great number of epiphanies – especially male
epiphanies – occur while the protagonist is alone and driving his car.
There are reasons for that. One may not have a direction but one has a
means of getting there. One may not be in control of life but one can
progress in a straight line. When your youth is over and definitions
become fixed, even if they are wrong, it might turn out that the
arrival of a car suddenly feels like the commuting of a sentence. It
may seem to give you back your existential mojo. That is the beauty of
learning to drive late and learning to drive often: it gives you a
sense that life turned out to be freer than it was in your childhood,
that time agrees with you, that your own sensitivities found their
domain in the end, and that deep in the shell of your inexpensive car
you came to know your subjectivity."

O'Hagan is not an apologist, merely honest about the deeply visceral experience of highway driving. (Not one I share, incidentally, but I can appreciate the perspective). That sense of personal power is a key promise of modernity, and not easily restrained or displaced. The private automobile is one of the linchpins of the current consumption regime, which perhaps suggests how much work a serious transformation is going to take.

Environmental Citizenship at OSU

2009-06-06T14:39:00.004-04:00

Last year, we've had a small group of people interested in promoting environmental citizenship at Ohio State University meeting periodically to share notes and ideas about what OSU is doing, could do or should do about advancing the cause. The composition of the group has changed from time to time, but it's been gratifying to start making connections and to see how much work is actually going on.

We'll be meeting again this Weds to take stock of this year's activities, and to look forward a bit, perhaps to lay some plans for what things we can do together. I sent out an invitation with these questions:

--What has been the most satisfying development at OSU this year, in the area of environmental awareness/citizenship?

--What would you like to see happen over the next year or two?

--How can our group best support the work you want to do in this area?

I hope these can kick off a good conversation. I'm also inviting anyone who can't make the meeting to leave comments below.

Experiments in Sustainability

2009-06-04T09:14:00.001-04:00

We all know getting to sustainbility is going to take creativity, innovation, experimentation and research--not just on isolated topics, but in ways of life. What better role for artists than to explore the cultural--physical, psychological, aesthetic, political--dimensions of new life patterns.

The NYT reports on The Waterpod, an experiment in sustainable aquatic living.

Humanities and Sustainability at FGCU

2009-05-10T20:45:00.005-04:00

I was down in Florida over the weekend for a conference on the Humanities and Sustainability at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers. It's a fairly young institution (founded mid-1990's), with a commitment to sustainability built into its mission statement. One way they've found to realize that commitment is a required junior-level course ("Colloquium") on sustainability, with a common syllabus. So roughly 2500 students a year are enrolled in 30-40 sections of the course, covering some of the basics of environmental awareness. Some of the sections are locally-focused (conservation); others more global (climate change); some science-intensive, others political.

FGCU also has a Center for Sustainability and Environmental Education, whose director, Peter Blaze Corcoran, was involved in drafting the Earth Charter back in the 1990's. The Earth Charter and its uptake have become central to a number of courses, as students are asked to discuss its language and concepts--ethics of care for the earth--as well as being introduced to the global civil society movement that acted as the matrix for the Charter, after a more nation-centered approach faltered. The genius of this is that it brings students to think critically about both the international legal framework of the UN and alternatives to it, as well as concepts like sovereignty and "national interest" that underpin right-wing critiques of the UN. The Earth Charter also serves as a document in a course on "eco-spirituality," involving not only critical consideration of the premises and process but also contemplative exercises (silent meditation, walking, focused visualization) that elaborate on the practice of care.

I'll admit that eco-spirituality makes me more than a little nervous; Bron Taylor, who gave the conference keynote, claimed that a naturalistic spirituality and reverence for life is entirely compatible with science, except for the part about enthusiasm, which sidles up to proselytzing. But in explicitly foregrounding ethical practice (even in the form of contemplative practice) and care, it fills in a palpable gap in my thinking about environmental citizenship: the affective, moral dimension that gives juice to rationalist argument and responsibility. As one of the participants said, care is transitive; it can't just be the self-directed emotivism ("I care") that comes too easily to late adolescence. An ethic of care is a virtue-ethic, one of character and sacrifice.

Spring on the OSU Oval

2009-05-05T20:26:00.000-04:00

Columbus Local Foods Panel

2009-04-29T22:11:00.001-04:00

Excellent panel on local foods down at the Columbus Metro Club today, featuring Michael Jones of Local Matters, Catherine Girves of the University District, and Liz Lessners, one of our great home-grown restaurateurs. Moderated by Amalia Liebestreu, the Sustainable Agriculture coordinator for Governor Strickland's Food Policy Council (good news: you can now get an Ohio Sustainable Agriculture license plate).

The panel covered the gamut of local food issues, from the statewide foodsystem (Amalia's office has undertaken what it apparently the first systematic study of a state's food systems in the nation) to community gardening (Cathy Girves has a network of 12 community gardens throughout the University District, ranging from median plantings to farmer's-market plots). Among the key points: the importance of human capital, i.e. passionate and committed advocates, with enough savvy and connections to get things done. Cathy emphasized the importance of volunteers linking up with established non-profits, to avoid city worries about the vanishing volunteer syndrome.

Michael talked about the importance of building demand within the city, so that farmers can be sure there's a market, especially for smaller-scale specialty crops. Restaurants fit in here, but also special requests at the supermarket, which is increasingly attuned to local produce as cheaper and fresher (fewer shipping costs). He also described the VeggieVan project--the green-foodie answer to the ice-cream truck.

There was a clear sense that there's a lot going on in Columbus, and someone mentioned how impressed the editor of Organic Gardening magazine was by all the initiatives. By comparison, there's this account of San Francisco. I think we come out pretty well, although there's miles to go before we're fully localized.

The Struggle to Consume

2009-03-31T22:27:00.001-04:00

Readers of Sunday's NYT were--I speak from experience--surprised to confront a two-page in-your-face ad from Harley-Davidson "We don't do fear. Screw it. Let's Ride"--all wrapped in an American flag.

It's a rhetorically cunning strategy, tapping post-9/11 populist defiance to beef up the prospects of a luxury-market item as down-home as a Hummer. What it says, among other things, is that consumerism won't go down without a fight, that--at least for the marketing and PR departments--it stands for Americanism, the death-defying, don't-bother-me freedom to buy. Given that Harleys are already associated with denial and mid-life indulgence, partaking of the same cowboy self-image that brought us the financial crisis, it's probably not surprising that they would take this road.

In the same vein, the NYT reports, the "first great song of the bailout era," John Rich's Shutting Detroit Down. A bit more authentic, perhaps--a bit more grief, not quite so much swaggering denial--but no less attached to an image of consumer sovereignty. There will need to be some mourning, some working-through and readjustment, before less consumption is not encoded as "lower standard of living," deprivation and a loss of freedom.

Cornell economist Robert H. Frank, long a critic of excessive consumption (he wrote Luxury Fever back in the 1990s) has a suggestive article in The American Prospect on what "post-consumer prosperity" might mean. Sensible as it sounds, though, it will take a while--and quite a few cultural struggles--before it translates into common sense.

Encyclopedia of Earth

2009-03-25T17:21:00.002-04:00

Here's another interesting site: the Encyclopedia of Earth. A combination of on-line reference, science-education and activist portal, it's edited by some people at Boston University and boasts an impressive-looking community of scholars and writers.

I found the EoE while searching for ways to think about bioregionalism in Ohio. There's not much out there. Like some other powerfully suggestive concepts, it seems best adapted to particular regions--like the Pacific Northwest--where the distinction between different regions is sharply marked: geography itself there seems to call forth conceptual work. Elsewhere, the gradations are subtle and somewhat arbitrary: what should count as a bioregional marker? An encyclopedic mind--one that wants to have everything covered--would look for a uniform labeling system, by disembedding our knowledge of bioregions from our lived awareness and embodied practices. To be effective, I think, there must be something directly compelling about our vision of the earth: it may be refined by experience, but it has to be grounded.

Sustainability Myths and the Green Agenda

2009-03-24T13:18:00.001-04:00

Thanks to Maria Manta Conroy for pointing out this Scientific American article, the Top Ten Myths About Sustainability. Among other things, it points out the difference between being "green" and working on sustainability--probably a key distinction for defining what responsible environmental citizenship might entail.

Sustainability is not an identity-category, for one thing, so while it might involve lifestyle choices and decisions, it's necessarily a social goal, only achievable collectively and by being embedded in institutional decision-making. Sustainability originally comes out of the development agenda of the Brundtland commmission, meaning that global justice issues are rather more significant than a green reading might allow.

Food and Fuel--the gathering revolutions

2009-03-22T10:02:00.000-04:00

The door to significant change in the American food system is starting to open. As the NYTimes reports, between the new White House vegetable garden, the new Agricultural Sec'y's surprising openness to organics, and Congressional interest in local initiatives, a critical mass seems to be gathering. The Danton of the Food Revolution, Michael Pollan, worries that the movement may not be quite ready to take advantage of the moment, and it's unclear whether the economic winds are favorable or the contrary, but after years of percolating, there looks to be something promising brewing.

Of course, the promise is punctuated by an even bigger question mark about how to make the transition from a carbon economy to a more sustainable, diversified energy system. As usual, Ohio sits squarely in the middle of this national question, with Sherrod Brown puzzling about how to square a commitment to the future with the realities of the state's dependence on cheap energy, i.e. coal. The Dispatch's Jonathan Riskind has been following the Senator's deliberations as well as efforts to persuade him, and reported on Friday that the Environmental Defense Fund has weighed in with a website detailing the Ohio companies that stand to benefit from a serious investment in green technology. That's pretty savvy, but Brown's worry is whether companies looking to reduce costs wouldn't move out more quickly than the new companies could ramp up.

There's an interesting parallel with the food debate, too. The NYT article quotes a spokesman for the National Corn Growers Association: "We think there's a place for organic, but don't think we can feed ourselves and the world with organic. It's not as productive, more labor-intensive and tends to be more expensive." (Jeffrey Hollender of Seventh Generation remarks ruefully: "The idea of the true cost of food? That's the last thing consumers want to hear right now.").

That's the argument from scale: organic (and alternative fuels) can't "feed the world." The local can't be global. Pollan's response--and it's not clearly worked out yet--is to think regionally. Meanwhile, at a moment when we're facing rising unemployment, the idea that a process is "labor-intensive" is not necessarily a strike against it. The new Census of Agriculture reports more than 100,000 NEW small farmers in the past decade, and Vilsack wants to help them grow into regional networks. Is there a parallel in the energy field?

Tom Friedman says, Enough.

2009-03-08T11:06:00.001-04:00

NYTimes columnist Tom Friedman has long been one of globalization's great cheerleaders, riding to the commanding heights of punditry with catchy titles like The Lexus and the Olive Tree and The World is Flat. More recently he's been turning a shade of green (more in nausea than out of a sense of conviction, I'd say). Even so, it's remarkable to see him raising some fundamental questions about the whole growth model in his March 8th column:

Let’s today step out of the normal boundaries of analysis of our economic crisis and ask a radical question: What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall — when Mother Nature and the market both said: “No more.”

We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese ...
We can’t do this anymore.

When the prime exponent of economic coupling--the prophet of what Niall Ferguson called "Chimerica"--sees the writing on the wall, there's reason to think we're at or close to a cultural tipping point.

Green Networking

2009-03-03T21:58:00.003-05:00

A basic premise of Web 2.0--social networking--is that certain tools and techniques become more valuable the more people use them. When only a few people had email, you couldn't count on reaching anyone and its uses were limited. Once it became widespread--a default option--the possibilities and importance increased. Facebook, MySpace, Ebay, Twitter--all examples illustrating this expansion.

Greenies and environmental groups have been trying to figure out how to operate through these new media; Grist, for instance, is doing a great job building communities around environmental issues. A somewhat newer initiative is WiserEarth, which has some unique features, including map-based searching that identifies groups and agencies in a particular area. Enter your zipcode, for instance, and there's a Googlemap pinpointing, by street address, a whole range of activist institutions. WiserEarth also has interest-areas and discussion groups that allow you to follow out topics, connect with others and learn as you go. It's a Creative Commons initiative, so open to all. It should be better known, larger and more valuable.

No-Flush Future?

2009-02-28T20:39:00.000-05:00

I think this falls in the category of oddities rather than serious proposals, but if there's a push to rethink indoor plumbing and the treatment of human wastes, there may be more room for change than we usually assume.

consider that since at least 135,000 urine-diversion toilets are in use in Sweden and that a Swiss aquatic institute did a six-year study of urine separation that found in its favor. In Sweden, some of the collected urine — which contains 80 percent of the nutrients in excrement — is given to farmers, with little objection. “If they can use urine and it’s cheap, they’ll use it,” said Petter Jenssen, a professor at the Agricultural University of Norway.

A friend’s grandmother remembers the man coming round for the buckets 60 years ago in Yorkshire, which were then sold to the tanning industry. The flush toilet ended that, and no one — my friend’s nan included — wants outside privies again. “Any innovation in the toilet that increases owner responsibility is probably seen as downwardly mobile,” said Carol Steinfeld, of New Bedford, Mass., who imports NoMix toilets into the United States.

Efficiency vs. Resiliency

2009-02-19T16:20:00.001-05:00

I've written about Thomas Princen's critique of efficiency-thinking in the name of self-restraint or sufficiency. Sufficiency involves not pushing systems to their economic or ecological limits, and limiting patterns of exploitation and consumption to within moderate, sustainable ranges.

Here's another perspective on alternatives to efficiency: resiliency, redundancy, and diversification. Chip Ward argues that efficiency-measurements are the conceptual armature of monoculture--the logic of specialization that allows for controlled-variable parameters. Ideas about resiliency (e.g. crop rotation that allows time for soil renewal) assume longer-term planning horizons, figure on the occurrence of catastrophic events, and consider ways to ensure sufficient slack in the system to allow it to bounce back.

OSU Starts to Move Towards Green

2009-02-18T20:51:00.001-05:00

Good news from the CIO's office at OSU: an initiative to cut power usage by 30% within the year. They're also publicizing a variety of other activities and initiatives, including the Earth Hour on March 28. Get the word out!

FLOW up for RiverNetwork Grant

2009-02-13T16:28:00.001-05:00

My local watershed group--the Friends of the Lower Olentangy Watershed, led by the wonderful Heather Dean--is in the running for a grant from the RiverNetwork and MillerCoors (yes, they're finally concerned about preserving water quality--now if they can get people to pick up those cans!).

The proposal is for a collaboration with the First UU Church in Clintonville, to build a stormwater management demonstration project, including substantial rain gardens (Franklin County has an ongoing rain garden initiative called CORGI). The UU has a large site, fronted by Panera, with a large parking lot, so this would be highly visible and could have a great effect.

In typical Web 2.0 fashion, they have to mobilize to get the grant: go to the RiverNetwork site and look for the MillerCoors grant window. They're up against seven other projects. Vote for FLOW--and pass the word along to friends.

Urban Life Bites Back

2009-02-10T20:39:00.001-05:00

No one said (though we all hoped) it would be easy. The BBC is reporting that Paris' popular bike-rental program Velib ("bikefree") is in trouble. Although it has had over 42 million uses since its inception 18 months ago, the bikes themselves are taking a beating, with more than half of the 15,000 getting stolen.

Hung from lamp posts, dumped in the River Seine, torched and broken
into pieces, maintaining the network is proving expensive. Some have
turned up in eastern Europe and Africa, according to press reports.

Since the scheme's launch, nearly all the original bicycles have been replaced at a cost of 400 euros ($519, £351) each.

Various videos have appeared on YouTube showing riders taking the bikes
down the steps in Montmartre, into metro stations and being tested on
BMX courses.

Geo-engineering (yes, it's what you think)

2009-02-09T20:15:00.002-05:00

The Gristmill has a breathtaking but informative piece on geoengineering by a futurist named Jamais Cascio. That's large-scale human intervention with the goal of reducing global warming. There are, apparently, two major types under consideration: albedo management (which deals with the earth's reflectivity) and carbon management. Cascio sees these as last-resort, inevitably controversial and rife with unintended consequences--but probably in the cards. Yikes.

Food Deserts and Sustainable Agriculture

2009-02-08T15:46:00.002-05:00

Greg Plotkin has an informative discussion of food deserts and how local agriculture initiatives can help address the issue, at the Sustainable Food blog over at Change.org. (Note: a different site than the official Obama Change.gov website).

Bush Legacies, Obama Choices

2009-02-07T13:03:00.002-05:00

Today's NYT has a run-down of the policy landscape Obama has inherited--land, air, water and climate change. The summary of Bush's major conservation achievement is telling:

When Mr. Bush designated as national monuments almost 400,000 square miles of ocean, reefs, atolls, seamounts and surrounding waters, Elliott Nourse, president of the Marine Conservation Biology Institute, called his action “statesmanlike.”
The monuments, set aside in 2006 and 2008, are home to thousands of species of rare plants, birds and fish. But perhaps their most important characteristic is that they contain few exploitable resources and just about nobody lives there, so there were no major political or commercial objections.

In other words, do what's easiest, and kick the rest down the road (Kyoto, air pollution, clean energy, etc). That's "statesmanlike"?

Open Forums on Environmental Science

2009-02-06T08:32:00.000-05:00

Environmental Sciences Task Force open forums

Faculty, researchers and graduate students are invited to attend one of three open forums to help define future directions for the environmental sciences at Ohio State. The forums are sponsored by the Task Force on the Environmental Sciences, an initiative that came out of the doctoral review assessment process. A summary of its efforts to date will be available before the forums, to be held: Wednesday (2/11), 3-4 p.m. 333 Kottman Hall; Monday (2/16), 3-4 p.m. 1080 Smith Lecture Room, Physics Research Bldg; and Thursday (2/19), 8-9 a.m. 104 Aronoff Lab. Registration is requested. Contact: Susan Reeser, 247-7413

Green Jobs and the Consumer Economy

2009-02-04T19:38:00.003-05:00

Dave Leonhardt, the NYT economics correspondent, had a long article in Sunday's magazine exploring the dimensions of the economic crisis and Obama's efforts to address it. Along the way, he had one of the best explanations of how the consumer economy drives investment decisions towards short-term profits and away from long-range investments such as infrastructure. Elsewhere, Leonhardt says, the government keeps its eye on the long term, putting money into bullet trains and broadband; in the US, antipathy to government spending has blinded us to the ways private consumption depends on the common wealth. Privileging individual consumption overburdens the commons, both natural and social.

Leonhardt also reports on the difficulty we're going to have in transitioning from the consumer economy to a green-investment model, which will take nothing less than recalibrating our time-horizons and, consequently, our individual and social expectations.

Sometimes a project can give an economy a lift and also lead to transformation, but sometimes the goals are at odds, at least in the short term. Nothing demonstrates this quandary quite so well as green jobs, which are often cited as the single best hope for driving the post-bubble economy. Obama himself makes this case. Consumer spending has been the economic engine of the past two decades, he has said. Alternative energy will supposedly be the engine of the future — a way to save the planet, reduce the amount of money flowing to hostile oil-producing countries and revive the American economy, all at once. Put in these terms, green jobs sounds like a free lunch.
Green jobs can certainly provide stimulus. Obama’s proposal includes subsidies for companies that make wind turbines, solar power and other alternative energy sources, and these subsidies will create some jobs. But the subsidies will not be nearly enough to eliminate the gap between the cost of dirty, carbon-based energy and clean energy. Dirty-energy sources — oil, gas and coal — are cheap. That’s why we have become so dependent on them.
The only way to create huge numbers of clean-energy jobs would be to raise the cost of dirty-energy sources, as Obama’s proposed cap-and-trade carbon-reduction program would do, to make them more expensive than clean energy. This is where the green-jobs dream gets complicated.
For starters, of the $700 billion we spend each year on energy, more than half stays inside this country. It goes to coal companies or utilities here, not to Iran or Russia. If we begin to use less electricity, those utilities will cut jobs. Just as important, the current, relatively low price of energy allows other companies — manufacturers, retailers, even white-collar enterprises — to sell all sorts of things at a profit. Raising that cost would raise the cost of almost everything that businesses do. Some projects that would have been profitable to Boeing, Kroger or Microsoft in the current economy no longer will be. Jobs that would otherwise have been created won’t be. As Rob Stavins, a leading environmental economist, says, “Green jobs will, to some degree, displace other jobs.” Just think about what happened when gas prices began soaring last spring: sales of some hybrids increased, but vehicle sales fell overall.

Re-regionalizing Food

2009-02-02T20:01:00.001-05:00

Talking recently with Michael Jones of Local Matters, I realized once again how counter-intuitive our agricultural policies have been for the past forty years or so. (dating, for convenience sake, from Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz's advice to American farmers: "Get big, or get out--the starting point for Wendell Berry's polemical classic, The Unsettling of America). Michael reminded me that, policy-wise, food is a "specialty crop;" what most farmers produce are commodities, links in an industrial supply-chain. In fact, until quite recently, the Ohio DoA didn't have anyone on staff working on sustainable agriculture.

Turning that around is a key part of the sustainability challenge, leveraging social needs and public goods out of the great conceptual glacier that is Economic Growth. Over at the Gristmill, Tom Laskawy has an interesting discussion looking at the infrastructure for local food and why "food miles" isn't necessarily the critical tool we need, since locales still need to be linked:

But as we explore ways to reform industrial agriculture and its
reliance on fossil fuels in food production, more, smaller farms
inevitably come up as an alternative -- and for that sort of system to
work, they would need to be proximate to population centers. Speaking
of the food miles argument, it's likely that, using our existing
infrastructure, exclusively procuring produce from farms within, say,
75 miles of urban centers would cause the transportation component of
agricultural carbon emissions to go way up.

On the bright side, Tom reports that a major organic farm in Florida, long accustomed to shipping to the Northeast, has re-opened a greenmarket in the Miaimi area to respond to local demand.

Enough Work (Sufficiency Part 2)

2009-02-01T11:49:00.001-05:00

Thomas Princen's book The Logic of Sufficiency tries to develop some of the concepts we'll need in order to slip the stranglehold of the growth machine. There's a critical element--a hard look at the rhetoric of efficiency and the political work it does--and a constructive one--figuring out how self-regulation at a social level might rein in fantasies of infinite consumption.

Among the ideas Princen offers is the concept of a 'working rationality." Inspired by"the backward bending supply curve for labor," in which, traditionally, workers labored only as much as they wanted (rather than according to the demands of a time clock: hence the great old tradition of Saint Monday), Princen wants to break out of the straitjacket of "consumer sovereignty." The idea, Princen argues

rejects the neat consumption-is-good/work-is-bad dichotomy..[and] allows individual consumption to follow work, not drive it. It would be an economy where individuals optimize between work and consumption, where choice is, in the first instance, made by individuals themselves in the context of their broader commitments--family, neighborhood, nation. A working rationality would, in short, build in limits in work and hence, limits in consumption. It becomes one more step to make those limits congruent with ecological rationality. ... a working rationality puts a brake on excess throughput of material and energy ...that brake is released when workers specialize, resource groups exceed a manageable scale, and sovereign consumers rule (130).

It looks like the aim is to undo Adam Smith's division of labor, and return the figure of the self-employed artisan--be your own boss--to the center of the economy. This resonates with other proposals to return the economy to a more human scale, although Princen is working on conceptual innovation rather than utopian blueprinting.

But this description, at least, sounds all too individualized: insufficiently sociological or political. Choices are relational, and while there ways to steer individual choice--see the work in behavioral economics summarized in Sunstein and Thaler's book Nudge--the connection between policy and individual decisions is deeply problematic.

Geographies of Power

2009-01-31T11:04:00.003-05:00

N&S's Breakthrough Institute has a piece noting the challenge posed by the "Technology Fifteen"--mostly Midwestern Senators (our own Sherrod Brown gets the lead photo), from coal-dependent states--to climate legislation. They're commenting on the same NYT article I linked below, pointing out how the "green economy" agenda really has to kick in.

Less is the new more

2009-01-31T10:41:00.003-05:00

Last Saturday, I mentioned that energy companies have traditionally priced their products like other commodities--trying to sell more, offering discounts to large consumers, etc. How to turn that business model around, so that there's an economic incentive to conserve?

Well, today's NYT reports on efforts in Sacramento to use status competition to encourage conservation among domestic consumers, by letting them know how they stack up against their neighbors.

Last April, it began sending out statements to 35,000 randomly selected customers, rating them on their energy use compared with that of neighbors in 100 homes of similar size that used the same heating fuel. The customers were also compared with the 20 neighbors who were especially efficient in saving energy.
Customers who scored high earned two smiley faces on their statements. “Good” conservation got a single smiley face. Customers like Mr. Dyer, whose energy use put him in the “below average” category, got frowns, but the utility stopped using them after a few customers got upset.
...
Competition among homeowners is still rare, but is becoming more widespread. In Massachusetts, the BrainShift Foundation, a nonprofit that uses games to raise environmental awareness, recruited towns to compete in a reality series, called “Energy Smackdown,” which is shown on a local cable station.
At the start of this year’s season, 10 families from Cambridge, Medford and Arlington formed teams and competed against one another in conservation categories that included waste, heating fuel, electricity and food. Patty Nolan, 51, who lives in Cambridge with her husband and two children, agreed to participate because, she said, although family members thought of themselves as “environmentally conscious,” they knew they could be doing more.
But her motives shifted after eight months of trash weigh-ins and comparative meter readings.
“At the beginning, the competition wasn’t what interested me,” Ms. Nolan said, “but then when we lost a challenge to Arlington by one pound of carbon, I realized I really wanted to win.”

This still isn't quite the shift we need: it's still about individualized savings, rather than pricing mechanisms. But it does move towards making consumption levels a social project.

JFF: GreenWalls and Vertical Gardens

2009-01-30T11:01:00.004-05:00

Check out French landscape-art designer Patrick Blanc's Vertical Garden--the next step beyond green roofs. These are to ivy-covered walls what Jeni's ice cream is to Dairy Queen. Blanc has planted the facade of the Quai Branly anthropology museum in Paris, and it's spectacular: a (green) thumb in the eye of high-modernist sterility. I'd love to see something similar on Columbus's City Center, taking green urbanism to new heights. I got this image from the Landscape+Urbanism blog --thanks.

Sustainability and the Commons

2009-01-28T20:36:00.003-05:00

Alongside principles of sufficiency, the toolkit for environmental citizenship should include a concept of the commons. Economists and environmental studies majors probably learn about this idea through Garrett Hardin's paper on "The Tragedy of the Commons." Many probably come away thinking it's also the last word on the issue, even though a lot of work has been done since then, including the Creative Commons response to the "intellectual property" enclosures. But there's obviously a lot more to be done to make the concept vital and relevant to a society built around ideals of individualized consumption.

Proposals for expanded notions of service, whether on the local/state level (Gov. Strickland yesterday called for including a service project as part of graduation requirements for Ohio high schools) or at the national level (e.g. in Obama's inaugural, or in Robert Reich's column in the American Prospect) are steps towards a renewed appreciation of the commons. Another useful tool are the games and models developed by the Sustainability Institute, including the Fish Banks game discussed by Peter Senge in The Necessary Revolution. By getting players to confront the consequences of competitive and collaborative strategies, such games may help us loosen up the bias towards self-seeking maximization, the default strategy of the last three decades.

Sustainability: A Big Idea

2009-01-27T19:51:00.004-05:00

"Sustainability is a "big idea," a global concept that has arisen to meet a contemporary challenge, one unlike anything humanity has faced in the past: global ecological crisis. ... For those of us deeply concerned about environmental trends, especially those entailing irreversibilities, the task is not to get the right definition. It is to continually refine the idea to meet the threats, especially the novel threats, those like overpopulation and overconsumption that human society has not faced in the past...and does not fully face now. The central task is to take what is self-evident at two extremes of scale--the limits of ever-expanding activity for the individual and for the planet--and to locate limits in human organization"(31)

Thomas Princen, The Logic of Sufficiency.

Princen develops the principle of sufficiency--enough--against the idea of efficiency, driver of endless growth and limitless consumption. It is a principle of self-regulation and satiety, linchpin of a conception of ecological rationality.

The book as a whole sets out to develop and defend this conception, and performs a valuable service in theorizing what "self-regulation" might mean when scaled up from individual to society. Among the key points I've identified so far:

"human decisions must be framed in a time scale that spans many generations of humans" (32)

"Decisions aimed at sustainable practice must, on a daily basis, from the individual to the collective, from the citizen to the polity, be risk averse with respect to the biophysical underpinnings of life. The long term as indefinite future is a necessary ingredient, and thus a first-order criterion of ecological rationality" (33)

The third defining feature of sustainability is decision making that aims at the intersection of the biophysical and social systems. Conservation, preservation and pollution control [three plausible ways of conceptualizing environmental goals] have typically treated the environment as "out there." ... But when the environment "out there" is brought "in here," when decision making is as much about managing human behavior as it is about managing biophysical dynamics, questions of excess become legitimate. (33)

"Change is inherent in complex adaptive systems. But to have integrity, to be self-sustaining, systems must find that middle ground, that in-between position of enough--but not too much. ... A system has integrity, resilience and adaptiveness when each factor varies within a comfortable range, only rarely exceeding that range." (35)

"systems must have built-in mechanisms of restraint to keep in the safe range, to operate in the middle ground. Such mechanisms depend on a system's ability to store and channel information" (36).

Bringing the environment "in here"--and making human behavior part of the definition--is key to gaining a sense of sustainability as a social project.

Today, tomorrow, and the long haul

2009-01-27T10:16:00.005-05:00

Lots of environmental news today.

Top of the list is Obama's decision directing the EPA to allow California and other states to mandate tougher-than-national emissions standards. The NYT's "Room for Debate" section has a number of experts commenting on the decision, including this interesting point from William K. Reilly:

Only California has the right to seek such waivers to set stricter standards than what federal laws require. It has to demonstrate, however, that it has seriously studied an issue before it seeks such waivers, and indeed California has been the most pioneering and imaginative state in seeking ways to reduce air pollution. In fact, it has more people than E.P.A. does working on clean air issues — not only in Sacramento but in Los Angeles and elsewhere around the state.

This news comes on the same day that a paper dispells hopes that global warming would be reversible, even if we cut CO2 emissions immediately.

Because of the way carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere and in the oceans, and the way the atmosphere and the oceans interact, patterns that are established at peak levels will produce problems like “inexorable sea level rise” and Dust-Bowl-like droughts for at least a thousand years, the researchers are reporting in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
... The researchers describe what will happen if the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide — the principal heat-trapping gas emission — reaches 450 to 600 parts per million, up from about 385 p.p.m. today. Most climate researchers consider 450 p.p.m. virtually inevitable and 600 p.p.m. difficult to avoid by midcentury if the use of fossil fuels continues at anything like its present rate.

So drought is on its way, as are rising ocean levels. Questions about resilience, and proposals for adaptation, are going to be arriving on policy-makers desks in fairly short order, requiring whole new orders of expertise, democratic tact and political skills. Arguments about relevant scale--local, regional, national, hemispheric--are in the offing, and will need to be in every planners toolbox.

But it's the time-frame that raises the most interesting challenge: scientists may be able to extrapolate "for at least a thousand years," but it's hard to see how that can be a humanly relevant time-scale. Theorists of sustainability have made a good case that the welfare of "future generations" should be a factor in decision-making, against the utilitarian assumption that only living individuals can have preferences. But how many generations? Is it plausible to stretch policy decisions out on the rack of centuries? Tribal societies could embody social memory in a council of elders, who could act as intermediaries between the ancestors and the unborn: longevity as a measure of the horizon of relevance. Science breaks with this human measure, however, and opens unimaginable perspectives: a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred-thousand years out (or back) are easily programmable.

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck is, to my knowledge, one of the few people to have thought about this challenge, under the label "risk society." The basis of policy, Beck argues, is no longer knowledge but probability: all significant decisions rely on models and extrapolations, based on contestable assumptions and variable parameters. There are trade-offs--not between goods, but between unknown and perhaps incommensurable sorts of risks. This has to change our practice of deliberation.

From time to space: meanwhile, back in today's news, the NYT reports a rift within Congressional Democrats about how fast to move on climate-change legislation.

There’s a bias in our Congress and government against manufacturing, or at least indifference to us, especially on the coasts,” said Senator Sherrod Brown, Democrat of Ohio. “It’s up to those of us in the Midwest to show how important manufacturing is. If we pass a climate bill the wrong way, it will hurt American jobs and the American economy, as more and more production jobs go to places like China, where it’s cheaper.”
This brown state-green state clash is likely to encumber any effort to set a mandatory ceiling on the carbon dioxide emissions blamed as the biggest contributor to global warming, something Mr. Obama has declared to be one of his highest priorities. Mr. Obama has said he intends to press ahead on such an initiative, despite opposition within his own party in Congress and divisions among some of his advisers over the timing, scope and cost of legislation to curb carbon emissions.

Once again, it's the coasts against the heartland: California (Barbara Boxer, Henry Waxman) and the East Coast pushing for stronger regulations, coal- and manufacture-dependent Midwest states proposing a go-slow approach. Already, Detroit is complaining that they'll have to cut back on their largest, most profitable models in order to meet the new standards--the same line they've offered for the past quarter-century.

OSU Green Build Policy

2009-01-26T09:13:00.001-05:00

Ohio State strives to become benchmark for green building

Ohio State is leading the way in sustainability in higher education by creating a Green Build Policy that will set the bar for green design and construction. The principles and practices governing campus building now includes conserving resources and incorporating green design principles, while balancing initial and long-term operating costs. In the future, all applicable projects over $4 million will have U.S. Green Building Council Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design silver certification, at a minimum. The Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4-H Center was the first campus building to receive LEED certification. Read more >

Sustaining Cleveland

2009-01-25T16:22:00.005-05:00

A serious case of site-envy: Cleveland's GreenCityBlueLake site looks to me a like a model for generating an inclusive green vision for a city/region as a whole. There's a clean look to the site, with a list of categories ranging from arts and culture through economy, energy and education, all the way down to water. Each of the dimensions seems to have--or be generating--its own community, with participants committed to developing a common vision of how to move the area towards sustainability. The site serves a coordinating function--hosting discussions, reporting on initiatives and developing plans.

No doubt it helps to have a partnership with an established institution like the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which helps stabilize what was initially the work of a non-profit organization called EcoCity Cleveland. There's also, clearly, a dedicated group of activists who know how to work together. But it leaves me wondering whether we can develop something comparable for Central Ohio: a site/group that would promote analysis of regional policy issues from a green perspective.

E-Democracy does sponsor a Central Ohio discussion group, to which a number of folks from MORPC contribute, but it's incredibly austere and uninviting and hasn't, in my experience, generated significant discussion. Surely, though, there's enough informed talent around here to come up with a comparable effort.

Debating Strategies for Reducing Carbon Emissions

2009-01-24T11:08:00.001-05:00

How best to move quickly to reduce carbon-emissions? Today's NYT has an op-ed arguing in favor of a cap-and-trade system (whereby industries would have quotas for emissions, which they could sell to each other as they cleared the bar) and against the "renewable portfolio standards" (which Ohio and other states have adopted), mandating that a certain percentage of energy production come from renewables by a certain date.

Portfolio standards emerged because the Bush Administration blocked action on a national level, and states could direct their investments to support renewables. A cap-and-trade system requires a national--if not a worldwide--market, and the Times also reports that the European Commission will ask the US to move in that direction.

Here's what J. Wayne Leonard says:

A renewable portfolio standard is said to be needed for creating and
improving renewable energy technologies. In practice, however, it does
little to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and makes energy production
excessively expensive.
Coal-fired power plants produce more
than 83 percent of the electricity sector’s carbon dioxide emissions.
But because coal is cheaper than natural gas or oil, it is the least
likely to be displaced by solar or wind power.

Natural gas has
a relatively low carbon content. But it is likely to be the first to be
displaced by renewable sources of energy because it is more expensive
than coal. That means that even a renewable portfolio standard as high
as 20 percent would reduce emissions by only a small fraction of what
is needed to lower the risk of catastrophic climate change.

I don't know enough to evaluate the arguments offered, although "excessively expensive" sets off my
skeptic-o-meter. Strategically, the push for cap-and-trade moves the
struggle to Washington, terrain that favors industry, and I wonder
whether the targets wouldn't be set too low. On the other hand,
uniform national standards would sweep in states that haven't moved towards greener energy.

But what should energy cost? For years, critics have pointed out that utility companies--energy and water--price their products like other commodities, so that the more you consume, the less you pay (volume discounts). Turning that model around--so that customers would have an incentive to conserve, rather than waste, energy--would be a key step in getting price-incentives right.

Leadership Changes in the Movement

2009-01-23T19:12:00.001-05:00

Gristmill's Kate Sheppard reports: "The Sierra Club announced today that long-time executive director
Carl Pope is stepping down. He'll be taking on a new role as chairman
of the Sierra Club, focusing primarily on climate change.
...

This makes the Sierra Club the third major green group currently in
search of new leadership. John Passacantando, who lead Greenpeace USA
for eight years, stepped down
on Jan. 1 to start a green investment consultancy. Longtime
environmental activist Mike Clark is currently serving as Greenpeace's
interim executive director as the group seeks a replacement. Friends of
the Earth U.S. is also searching for a new president, as current president Brent Blackwelder is planning to retire.

Food and Ag

2009-01-23T14:09:00.002-05:00

Nice overview of the politics of food policy and agricultural subsidies over at the Gristmill. I wonder whether the OSU Students for Food Sovereignty are tuned into this issue.

From Greed to Green

2009-01-23T13:02:00.002-05:00

From Green America, via the New American Dream blog (see the link to the right),
six green-economy solutions to today’s economic mess:

1. Green Energy—Green Jobs
A crucial starting place to rejuvenate our economy is to focus on energy. It’s time to call in the superheroes of the green energy revolution—energy efficiency, solar and wind power, and plug-in hybrids—and put their synergies to work with rapid, large-scale deployment. This is a powerful way to jumpstart the economy, spur job creation (with jobs that can’t be outsourced), declare energy independence, and claim victory over the climate crisis.

2. Clean Energy Victory Bonds
How are we going to pay for this green energy revolution? We at Green America propose Clean Energy Victory Bonds. Modeled after victory bonds in World War II, Americans would buy these bonds from the federal government to invest in large-scale deployment of green energy projects, with particular emphasis in low-income communities hardest hit by the broken economy. These would be long-term bonds, paying an annual interest rate, based in part on the energy and energy savings that the bonds generate. During WWII, 85 million Americans bought over $185 billion in bonds—that would be almost $2 trillion in today’s dollars.

3. Reduce, Reuse, Rethink
Living lightly on the Earth, saving resources and money, and sharing (jobs, property, ideas, and opportunities) are crucial principles for restructuring our economy. This economic breakdown is, in part, due to living beyond our means—as a nation and as individuals. With the enormous national and consumer debt weighing us down, we won’t be able to spend our way out of this economic problem. Ultimately, we need an economy that’s not dependent on unsustainable growth and consumerism. So it’s time to rethink our over-consumptive lifestyles, and turn to the principles of elegant simplicity, such as planting gardens, conserving energy, and working cooperatively with our neighbors to share resources and build resilient communities.

4. Go Green and Local
When we do buy, it is essential that those purchases benefit the green and local economy—so that every dollar helps solve social and environmental problems, not create them. Our spending choices matter. We can support our local communities by moving dollars away from conventional agribusiness and big-box stores and toward supporting local workers, businesses, and organic farmers.

5. Community Investing
All over the country, community investing banks, credit unions, and loan funds that serve hard-hit communities are strong, while the biggest banks required bailouts. The basic principles of community investing keep such institutions strong: Lenders and borrowers know each other. Lenders invest in the success of their borrowers—with training and technical assistance along with loans. And the people who provide the capital to the lenders expect reasonable, not speculative, returns. If all banks followed these principles, the economy wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.

6. Shareowner Activism
When you own stock, you have the right and responsibility to advise management to clean up its act. Had GM listened to shareholders warning that relying on SUVs would be its downfall, it would have invested in greener technologies, and would not have needed a bailout. Had CitiGroup listened to its shareowners, it would have avoided the faulty mortgage practices that brought it to its knees. Engaged shareholders are key to reforming conventional companies for the transition to this new economy – the green economy that we are building together.

Forcing the Spring

2009-01-22T11:17:00.001-05:00

Scientists: Seasons creeping forward

Warming shifts stand out among data, 2 studies find

Thursday, January 22, 2009 3:19 AM

By Robert Mitchum

Chicago Tribune

CHICAGO -- The news might seem welcome in the middle of a long, cold winter: Scientists have shown that the start of spring has moved almost two days earlier in the past 50 years.

But scientists say the finding, one of two papers released yesterday on climate change, actually is a warning sign. Together, the studies bolster the argument that the planet's temperatures have shifted significantly during the past half-century, with many of the potential consequences likely to be negative.

More Greentexts

2009-01-22T10:58:00.000-05:00

Reading Breakthrough led me to another recent (2007) book, Ignition: What You Can Do to Fight Global Warming, in which N&S have a chapter ("Irrationality Wants to Be your Friend"). It's the record of a conference at Middlebury a few years back, and has some pretty interesting contributions from a range of figures. Among the most helpful is a chapter on "Shaping the Movement" by Mary Lou Finley, which includes a typology of the different roles that you can play in social movements--Citizen, Rebel, Social Change Agent, Reformer--depending on temperament and location within the power structure.

Breakthrough, Part 3

2009-01-21T20:14:00.000-05:00

In what was surely a calculated provocation to right-thinking liberals, N&S contrast the environmental movement--unfavorably--to Rick-Warren-style Christian evangelicals (another link to Obama--coincidence? I think not).

Throughout this book we have criticized the ways in which environmentalists treat nature and science as a religion, which we believe lies behind environmentalism's ideological orthodoxies--its pollution paradigm, its politics of limits, and its policy literalism--and which prevents environmentalists from achieving their goals. But here [in a chapter called "Belonging and Fulfillment"] we consider the ways in which environmentalism doesn't work enough as a church. ... Outside of giving money and buying green products, few among even the most serious environmentalists ever actually do anything to manifest their environmentalist identities or to recruit others to join them. In short, while the evangelical identity is thick, the environmentalist identity is thin.
To the extent that environmentalists have meetings at all, they are more depressing than inspiring, focused more on stopping development than creating a beloved community (203)

Again, you've got to admire the shrewdness of this rhetorical gambit: too much religion, not enough church. Or better--since the chapter is a version of what Bill Clinton once called a "politics of meaning," and turns on a discussion of Robert Putnam's ideas about social capital and Richard Florida's notions of the creative class--it's an invitation to imagine environmentalism as community-building, as constructive and meaningful. It is, in some ways, what the folks at Orion have been trying to do for years--only, perhaps, too solemnly. Or maybe it's just another way of proclaiming the power of networking.

Efficiency

2009-01-21T11:12:00.000-05:00

Over at the Gristmill, Peter Meyer gives us a taste of the new environmental pragmatism:

"Yes, we can have economic revitalization that serves long-term sustainability in the process. But we need to transition carefully and to avoid generating unnecessary economic, political, social, and environmental costs as we change. Like it or not, that means:

Not closing all coal mines and coal and nuclear generating plants tomorrow, or next week, or next year (Yes, we can stop building them, but we need to be building their alternatives.)

Not calling for federally mandated congestion pricing or anti-sprawl measures or other actions as conditions for federal aid to states and cities (at least not yet ... the time will come)

Not telling people to drastically change their lifestyles now (though eventually they will)

Not spiking CAFE standards for auto fuel efficiency as far as we'd like and know to be technologically feasible, because U.S. manufacturers will find it harder to jump that high than will their competitors, and we can't afford more U.S. job losses right now

Not taxing carbon or oil or gas anywhere near where it should rationally be taxed to include their externalities (economic as well as environmental), unless we can protect households and businesses from those additional costs when they don't have the capital to invest in avoiding them

Recognizing that equity breeds efficiency by, at a minimum, lowering resistance from possible allies.

Change is coming, folks, and I'm all for that ... but it won't be easy, and ideological -- or environmental -- purity won't get us where we need to go, not without autocratic control. (Do you want that? We had a taste of tendencies in that direction for the past eight years.)

More on Breakthrough, Part 2

2009-01-20T20:30:00.000-05:00

It is time for us to draw a new fault line through American political life, one that divides those dedicated to a politics of resentment, limits and victimization from those dedicated to a politics of gratitude, possibility and overcoming. The challenge for American liberals and environmentalists isn't to convince the American people that they are poor, insecure and low status but rather the opposite: to speak to their wealth, security and high status. It is this that motivates our higher aspirations for fulfillment. The way to get insecure Americans to embrace an expansive, generous and progressive politics is not to tell them that they are weak but rather to point out all the ways in which they are strong (187)

Listening to Barack Obama's inaugural address today, I can't help thinking that Breakthrough must have been on his reading list. Passages like this sound as though they were written with Obama in mind--with at least one eye on forging on a new liberal-environmental coalition. I like the politics of gratitude and possibility as good coalitional cement. If Obama and N&S can give environmentalism an upbeat green makeover--can make the green economy work--that would really be something.

It's not naysaying to note that this has to be a utopian vision--a rhetorical goal--rather than an agenda for action. (It's interesting to note that N&S take issue both with eco-spiritualism (Thomas Berry) and scientific biophilia (E.O. Wilson) as essentially undemocratic, invoking an authority (The Earth, Science) outside ourselves to ratify a position.) The financial crisis has already put a damper on transitional plans, and there will--inevitably--be tradeoffs, bargaining and compromise. With climate change in their sights, N&S seem willing to countenance nuclear energy as part of the package--with all the implications for centralized energy generation that that implies.

What's interesting, though, is that Breakthrough is essentially a political, not an environmental, tract. It does not put "saving the earth" first and measure progress against that messianic task. It does not address "the public" at large--the isolated reader--but is basically an in-house argument with environmental leaders. So it assumes a basic agreement on goals, and focuses its energy on tactics and strategy. Shrewd.

More on Breakthrough

2009-01-20T10:17:00.000-05:00

Americans today aspire as much to uncommon greatness as they do to the common good. They aspire to be unique, not common. None of this undermines empathy, compassion or generosity. On the contrary, it is only when people are feeling in control, secure and free to create their lives that they behave expansively and generously toward the collective.
The new social contract must thus provide a basis for people to seek individuation and self-creation.

The second half of N&S's book is called "The Politics of Possibility," and I must admit to genuine ambivalence on seeing how they develop their argument. I am, on the one hand, startled and pleased to see that they invoke some of the theorists that I find most interesting: Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Bill Chaloupka--all of whom argue persuasively against the sanctification of Nature and for a much more mixed "post-natural" conception of the relations between the human and the non-human world. The ability to shake off the resentful moralism--what Bennett and Chaloupka called the "moraline drift"--behind some environmental positions does seem to allow for some fresh thought.

On the other hand, I'm made uneasy by their embrace of self-actualizing liberalism as the basis for environmental policy-making. "Farewell to the common good" seems like shaky ground for politics. N&S are, it seems, primarily political strategists, conversant with the latest in values research and public opinion polling, and there's something vaguely opportunistic about the way they smack around the old environmentalist religion and its acolytes. On the most generous reading, they're motivated by the need to address global warming/climate change, which--in their analysis--makes the "pollution paradigm" obsolete. It's not a local problem, but a global one, going to the heart of the industrial system: it's a life-politics issue. But, like George Lakoff, they seem pretty quick to declare that paradigms are "merely" about rhetoric, rather than having cognitive and ethical value in themselves.

Most persuasive--to me, anyway--is their analysis of "insecure affluence" as the problem confronting American politics: it's not material deprivation we suffer from most, but rather a pervasive insecurity (consequent on what Jacob Hacker called The Great Risk-Shift). As a result, N&S diagnose a "post-materialist materialism," where the desire for goods is driven more by status anxiety and lack of meaning than by material need (this is their response to Thomas Franks' idea about people voting against their material interests).

Zero-Waste

2009-01-20T09:34:00.000-05:00

Austin, TX has set itself a goal of going Zero-Waste by 2040, reports Earth 911.

“Zero Waste is a design principle that goes beyond recycling to focus first on reducing wastes and reusing products and then recycling and composting the rest. Zero Waste works to redesign the system to mimic natural systems, recognizing that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure and everything is a resource for something or someone else. Currently, Austin is estimated to lose over $40 million annually by sending materials that could be recycled or reused to area landfills.”"

Took about four years to develop and approve the policy--a nice example of long-range thinking.

Consumption vs. the Green Economy?

2009-01-19T13:15:00.000-05:00

Shout-out to Michael Maniates, for being the first to leave a comment and remind me that there might actually be some readers out there. Michael teaches at Allegheny College in Meadville, home to my old grad-school friend Ben Slote.

Soon after cracking Confronting Consumption, almost by coincidence, I picked up Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger's book Breakthrough, which offers a startlingly different vision and conception of green politics. N&S are best known for their controversial essay "The Death of Environmentalism" (2004), and for backing the new Apollo Project, which calls for massive investment in a new energy infrastructure. Full of attacks on icons of the environmental establishment (including Robert Kennedy, Al Gore, place-based politics and the environmental justice movement), Breakthrough advances a starkly contrarian argument:

We may achieve some greenhouse gas emission reductions by lowering our overall consumption, but the largest reductions will come from energy efficiency and shifting to cleaner energy sources--strategies that don't require drastic changes in the way we live our lives. What's needed, in short, is not so much less as different consumption. (126)

Strong stuff--exaggerated, perhaps, for arguments sake--but ... wow. N&S represent an updated version of what's been called Prometheanism: the idea that technological creativity and ingenuity are the best way to solve environmental problems. Or, as they put it, that prosperity is not the problem, but the solution. That environmentalism can only progress by offering itself as an instrument of progress, creativity and a better future:

"The anti-ecological logic of contemporary environmentalism reduces the cause of global warming to a single thing: humans emitting too much greenhouse gas. Their goal is thus to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But what if we define the causes of global warming more expansively--as the consequence of our failure to create new economies, new patterns of development, new housing, and a new consumer culture, which together are far better able to meet our material and postmaterial needs?(127)

We can see here the influence of George Lakoff's discourse on re-framing ("what if we define..."), popular, amid much liberal soul-searching, right after the 2004 election. The starting-point is the same: greens (or liberals) have failed to win the political battles because they've presented their message in the wrong terms. We need to change the terrain. Let's stop talking about "the politics of limits"--sacrifice, Collapse, doom-and-gloom--and tap into a better vision.

There's political wisdom here--N&S are strategists, after all--and it's obvious that Obama & Co. have been paying attention. (Interestingly, though, Obama is able to combine the "green infrastructure" talk with a call for sacrifice and service). The gambit is to shift the discourse from crisis to opportunity, to which even the likes of Boone Pickens can rally.

The sticking-point, though, is the suggestion that moving towards a greener economy won't require drastic changes in the way we live. That, somehow, combatting global warming is compatible with--not in conflict with--suburban development and the transit and energy-use patterns it fosters. It may not be smart to trumpet the need for sudden, drastic change--as, for example, the Transition Network or the "post-carbon" relocalization folks do--but I'm not sure it's wise to say that the road to Green Acres is an extension of Easy Street.

GreenTexts

2009-01-19T10:07:00.001-05:00

NYT Monday Jan 19

"The plain truth is that the United States is an inefficient user of
energy. For each dollar of economic product, the United States spews
more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than 75 of 107 countries
tracked in the indicators of the International Energy Agency. Those
doing better include not only cutting-edge nations like Japan but
low-tech countries like Thailand and Mexico.

True, energy
efficiency has improved, especially in states like California. But
American drivers, households and businesses still use more energy than
those in most other rich countries to do the same thing. The United
States spends more energy to produce a ton of cement clinker than
Canada, Mexico and even China. It is one of the most energy-intensive
makers of pulp and paper, emitting more than three times as much carbon
dioxide per ton as Brazil and twice as much as South Korea.

Per-capita
carbon dioxide emissions by households in the United States and Canada
are the highest in the world — in part because of bigger homes. And the
energy efficiency of electricity production from fossil fuels is lower
in the United States than in most rich countries and some poor ones,
mainly because of the higher share of coal in the mix.

Transportation
tells the same story. The United States uses the most energy per
passenger mile among the 18 rich economies surveyed by the energy
agency. In 2006, the American auto fleet used, on average, a little
less than five gallons of gas to travel 100 miles. The Irish went the
same distance with under four gallons, the Italians with less than
three, basically because they use smaller cars that get better mileage.

Mindstretching scenarios

2009-01-15T17:10:00.001-05:00

Great site here from the European Environment Agency, including this Mindstretcher about Land-use Planning scenarios.

In Memoriam Arne Naess

2009-01-15T07:59:00.001-05:00

This morning's NYT reports the death of Arne Naess, philosopher of deep ecology. He will be among the mountains.

21stC Transportation and Sustainability

2009-01-14T16:28:00.000-05:00

Down at the MetroClub today, listening to a presentation by the Task Force on Ohio's 21stC Transportation Priorities, a Strickland-appointed commission charged with developing a vision for an integrated "multi-modal" transportation system for the state. Big task, and I don't envy Ty Marsh the challenge of trying to herd 61 members into a consensus. Still, it was disappointing to see that their vision statement--by design a bumper-sticker slogan--was the tepid "Moving Ohio to a Prosperous New World."

The Task Force worked for more than 7 months, so it's unfair to point out the irony of releasing a report touting "prosperity" at a moment when the reigning economic model is being held together with glue, staples and wads of cash. Given the make-up of the TF--I count maybe 3 people with a environmental commitments--I doubt whether there was much discussion of what "prosperity" might truly mean these days; the discourse is all about competitiveness, jobs and growth. That's understandable, given the parlous state of Ohio's economy, but it also doesn't qualify as visionary: it's the old-time religion, buffed-up and given a fresh urgency. What sort of jobs? where and when?

As an example of how cloudy the vision of the "new world" is, take the remark at today's forum that the "agricultural industry" is one of the key stakeholders in the transportation plan. Fair enough. But we're told that "agriculture is fundamentally about getting products to market," and that we have to make sure Ohio producers have access to ports so that we can ship more products overseas. Now, it's obvious that Ohio has a huge stake in commodity crops, and it's unlikely that world trade in soybeans and corn is going to evaporate overnight. But it boggles the mind that agriculture is defined in such a way as to exclude the land itself, not to mention the question of food: it is merely one economic sector among others.

Here we have one way in which the call for "prosperity" stands actively in the way of any approach to a "new world." Prosperity is defined in terms of "global competitiveness," and not in terms of local community, cultural vitality, or ecological sustainability. As a result, the vision is simply of more of the same, only improved. As usual, "growth" is taken to be the single, neutral measure of the good, with no questions asked about what sort of growth, or the trade-offs entailed by particular choices.

At the start of the presentation, there was much fanfare about "game-changing strategies," but a certain reticence about what the game is, and how we might want to change it. But suppose, for instance, that we gave a little substance to our conceptions of prosperity, and suggested that developing resilient, sustainable local food systems is one key to prosperity and should figure in the way we approach agriculture. That means support for small-scale, specialized and family farms, more diversified and local markets, and transportation systems geared towards timeliness of delivery rather than distance. The argument here is that post-industrial farms are more environmentally sensitive, local foods more ecologically sustainable, and vibrant rural communities a vital part of the state's social and cultural identity. These are green jobs, and they're local.

What stands in the way of such a commitment? Well, the power of the agricultural lobby, for one. The preference for large-scale investment over diversification. The segmentation of thinking, so that the needs of industry--the logistics of long-distance shipping--colonize the way we talk about agriculture. Long-standing urban bias against farm work--now, hopefully, starting to fade. And, at bottom, a moral cowardice: a reluctance to follow through on our declared vision of the good.

Confronting Consumption

2009-01-13T20:47:00.001-05:00

Just started what looks to be a challenging and important book, Confronting Consumption (2002), edited by Princen, Maniates and Conca. Its key insight is the need to challenge the productivist model of the economy--the idea that, because goods are good, more are better. Questioning the assumption that we can "produce" our way out of environmental degradation--by finding newer, cleaner technologies--the authors develop what they call the "consumption angle:

"When production creates problems such as pollution, the productive answer is to produce correctives such as scrubbers, filters and detoxifiers. So goes the logic of production, productiveness, productivity, and products--construing all things economic as producing, as adding value, as, indeed, progress. The consumption angle turns this around to self-consciously construe economic activity as consuming, as depleting value, as risking ecological overshoot, as stressing social capacity. (17)"

The aim here is to open up the "black box" of consumption and what economics brackets off as the "demand function," to pose the question--more pressing now than ever--whether the global North (more pointedly: the US) consumes too much. Can we start to dismantle the consumer economy?

There are risks, of course: notably the potentially heavy hand of moral prescriptivism, the politics of asceticism and renunciation (think Scrooge). These spring to mind, defensively, when the question of consumption is personalized too quickly, narrowed into the problem of individual responsibility: in fact, one of the key essays in the book, Michael Maniates' "Individualization: Plant a tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?" takes on precisely this impetus (the Lorax syndrome, he calls, after Dr. Seuss), the drive to simplify or "pastoralize" the question of consumption. What's at issue is not personal decisions, but analytical biases with political consequences: the fetish of "growth."

Princen's other book, which I haven't started yet, is called The Logic of Sufficiency (2005), and it echoes Bill McKibben's Enough. It's an effort to re-conceptualize economics around questions of satisfaction, rather than demand and desire. Can't wait.

RAFT's Map of North America

2009-01-11T10:50:00.000-05:00

I've been reading a lot about sustainable agriculture and food recently, and one of the most interesting projects I've come across is Gary Paul Nabhan's RAFT: Restoring America's Food Traditions, which works along with the SeedSavers Alliance and Slow Food's Ark of Taste, to identify and bring back indigenous foods. (Nabhan recorded his own experiences in this area in his book Coming Home to Eat).

RAFT's work is informed by a bioregional vision of what constitute's local food--what they call "place-based food traditions." It gives a quite interesting picture of what North America would look like from an indigenous-diet perspective. (The recently published book adds a "Crabcake nation" on the East Coast down from the Chesapeake.)

TVZombies invade

2009-01-10T10:56:00.001-05:00

Undead TV zombies invaded the consumer electronics trade show in Las Vegas:
http://www.takebackmytv.com/pages/breaking_news_ces?source=20090109tl2

Sustainable OSU?

2009-01-07T13:42:00.000-05:00

Good session last night with students from the Environment and Natural Resources Scholars program. Brett Mayo (Student Life), Scott Potter (IEE), Kristen Arnold (OSU 1st year) and I on a panel, talking about sustainability--or was it environmental stewardship?--at the university.

What struck me most was Scott's remark that he had counseled Gordon Gee not to sign the President's Climate Commitment because, unlike other signatories, OSU had already cut its emissions by some 70% with the last third being the most difficult. Once he heard the objections, Scott said, Gee promptly signed on anyway, saying it was the right thing to do. So, starting from last April, OSU has two years to produce a plan for climate neutrality.

Of course, as Scott also said, a lot depends on how you draw the boundaries around the university. Do those of us who drive to work count on the university's carbon account? How do offsets work? And so on.

What this suggests, of course, is that definitions of sustainability are politically contested, and all the more as we strip away the low-hanging fruit of efficiency. "Sustainability" simply marks the current state of the conversation about how we relate to the environment, with the need to reduce carbon footprints a consensus position at the moment. Other dimensions--agriculture, for instance, or watersheds--do not figure immediately in the discussion, except insofar as they contribute to carbon savings. The question of scale--localization, bioregionalism--has not yet emerged as a topic in mainstream discussions: space has not yet become political.

Sustainable Development

2009-01-06T12:43:00.000-05:00

Wikipedia has a nice Sustainable Development portal, linking to ideas, issues and organizations.

Students and sustainability

2009-01-05T11:14:00.000-05:00

Thinking more about Connie's question on the way in to work this morning.

How do you see students fitting into this disccusion of sustainability at OSU and playing a role in campus initiatives? How can students get involved now?

I'd have to stress the importance of understanding the situation: at OSU, in the state of Ohio, in the United States right now. Given that sustainability is not something we can achieve alone, we need to work hard to know how we relate to other actors, and what's possible now.

At OSU, I want to say that students should know what's in the President's Climate Commitment and should publicize that commitment. In particular, they should learn what the timetables are and how the university has established its goals. Who's responsible for meeting those goals, and whom are they responsible to? What does accountability mean in this context?

But we need to grapple with the fact that Ohio gets most of its electricity from coal-burning power plants, and that the demise of the auto industry threatens to cripple the state's economy. Ohio has been a cornerstone of the way of life that we now call unsustainable, because its environmental costs are too great. The university, too, has been one of the drivers of that social model. So how can we break out of that loop? What impact is the university having on Central Ohio (ecologically, economically), and what impact could it have? How do we shift institutional directions?

The expansion of the US consumer economy has been one of the drivers of the global economy for several decades at least; the current economic crisis has exposed the limits of that model. As the US teeters on the brink of a depression, it risks dragging the rest of the world along with it. But in trying to address the crisis in the short term, political and economic leaders are tempted--in fact, they're being pushed--to restore the status quo ante as quickly as possible:

"Rather than tackle the source of the problem, the people running the bailout desperately want to reinflate the credit bubble, prop up the stock market and head off a recession. Their efforts are clearly failing: 2008 was a historically bad year for the stock market, and we’ll be in recession for some time to come. Our leaders have framed the problem as a “crisis of confidence” but what they actually seem to mean is “please pay no attention to the problems we are failing to address.” (NYT 1/3/08)

The fact is, we don't have an economic model that takes sustainability seriously--and, for the past several decades, we've done our best to ensure that nobody else does, either. So the crisis, while it presents an enormous opportunity, also presents a huge risk that we'll simply put off the difficult choices, go for a quick fix rather than a fundamental restructuring.

2009-01-05T06:32:00.000-05:00

A couple of articles this morning on watershed protection in Central Ohio.

Delaware County stretch of Olentangy river

Volunteers hope to name streams

Monday, January 5, 2009 3:02 AM

By Spencer Hunt

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

Conservationists plan to study and name as many as 20 small streams that feed a scenic stretch of the Olentangy River in Delaware County in hopes that the state will better protect the waterways from development.

and in the Big Darby:

Big Darby protection plan stalled

Monday, January 5, 2009 3:03 AM

By Mark Ferenchik

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

A plan to pay for environmental protection for land near Big Darby Creek was on the fast track until the Columbus City Council slammed on the brakes. The reason: At least one council member wanted to see a traffic study for the 84-square-mile watershed. ...

In 2006, when the council approved the Big Darby Accord, detailing how the area will develop, the legislation said that a traffic analysis "should be an early priority" to determine responsibility for road and infrastructure financing.

Meanwhile, in the NYTimes, Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry--sustainable agriculture's dynamic duo--have a proposal for a "50 Year Farm Bill," the kind of long-term thinking that really deserves to be called "sustainable."

...Agriculture has too often involved an insupportable abuse and waste of soil, ever since the first farmers took away the soil-saving cover and roots of perennial plants. Civilizations have destroyed themselves by destroying their farmland. This irremediable loss, never enough noticed, has been made worse by the huge monocultures and continuous soil-exposure of the agriculture we now practice.
Any restorations will require, above all else, a substantial increase in the acreages of perennial plants. The most immediately practicable way of doing this is to go back to crop rotations that include hay, pasture and grazing animals.
But a more radical response is necessary if we are to keep eating and preserve our land at the same time. In fact, research in Canada, Australia, China and the United States over the last 30 years suggests that perennialization of the major grain crops like wheat, rice, sorghum and sunflowers can be developed in the foreseeable future. By increasing the use of mixtures of grain-bearing perennials, we can better protect the soil and substantially reduce greenhouse gases, fossil-fuel use and toxic pollution.
Carbon sequestration would increase, and the husbandry of water and soil nutrients would become much more efficient. And with an increase in the use of perennial plants and grazing animals would come more employment opportunities in agriculture — provided, of course, that farmers would be paid justly for their work and their goods.

And finally--this verges on copyright infringement, but I'm linking, too--here's a lovely piece from Verlyn Klinkenborg:

Editorial: The Rural Life

Heronry

By VERLYN KLINKENBORG

Sometimes on the train north to the country, I catch a glimpse of a heron rookery in a swamp by the tracks. To call it a rookery, now a general term for a breeding colony, is to catch a linguistic glimpse of the great colonies of rooks’ nests — raucous, brawling places — that dot the English countryside. What I see from the train should really be called a heronry, a village of well-built heron nests high in the trees. In winter, they stand out against the sky like dense clouds or puffs of dark smoke caught in the uppermost branches.

The recent ice storm left a lot of shattered trees behind, including many in the swamp. But as far as I could tell, none of the nest trees had broken. Nor had the high winds pitched any of the heron nests to the ground. I began to wonder about all the intersecting decisions that go into a heronry.

It begins with the presence of water, which is where great blue herons feed. It requires a certain height in the trees, which means trees of a certain age and branch structure. But do those qualities also give resistance to wind and severe ice storms? Or do the birds prefer certain species of tall, well-branched trees over others? After all, no respectable heron would nest in a birch.

I am used to thinking of evolution doing the selecting — blind, impassive adaptation over millions of years. That is a dispassionate way of understanding behavior. But a heronry embodies a system of knowledge present in these herons, a complete, successful and highly inventive understanding of this world around them. Grasping how it came to be does not make it any less marvelous.
The train rumbles past that swamp a couple dozen times a day. Who knows how many humans have looked up at that heronry? The hard part is learning to see nature as a dense web of interconnected knowledges. We see the dimensions of the landscape, but we miss seeing the fullness of the understandings that inhabit it. I look up at the heronry and the question that stays in my mind is this: What do herons learn from living together?

New Year, New Blog

2009-01-03T20:16:00.000-05:00

It's 2009, and time to get serious with the commitment to --what should I call it? Environmental awareness? Ecological citizenship? Green culture? Whatever it's called, Greenworld is going to be a place to organize my thinking and invite discussion about the large-scale changes that are going to be necessary if we're to make any progress towards sustainability.

Connie Rice of the Environment and Natural Resources Scholars at OSU has asked me to be part of a panel on Tuesday evening, talking about sustainability at OSU. Here are the questions she offered:

Describe your involvement in environmental initiatives at OSU.
What does "sustainability" mean to you? In your mind, what would a sustainable campus look like?

President Gee has said that OSU will be the "Greenest Campus on Earth" and just a couple months ago Gee signed the Presidents' Climate Commitment. From your perspective, is this leading to changes in how OSU is run, and if so, in what way?

Do you know of any universities that are successfully "greening" their campuses? What can we learn from our peer institutions?
What are some of OSU's strengths that we can use to create a greener campus and what are some of OSU's weaknesses in accomplishing this? What can we do, if anything, to use these strengths for positive change and make these weaknesses less of a hindrance?

How do you see students fitting into this disccusion of sustainability at OSU and playing a role in campus initiatives? How can students get involved now?

These are great questions, and will take some thought.

The first think [sic] I want to say is is to consider the strangeness of making "sustainability" an explicit social goal. We don't usually think about whether or not our society, with its values and habits, will be able to exist indefinitely: the continuation of life--by which we mean, life as we know it--is something we tend to take for granted. To say, then, that we need now to "become" sustainable implies that we can't just keep going, that something has to change. But what? how? and who's going to decide?

The second point, then, that sustainability is--by definition--not an individual project. It has to be a social project, set in a global-ecological context. It makes no sense to think of one place, one institution, one country, becoming "sustainable," as if its destiny could be uncoupled from the rest of the earth. Sustainability is not survivalism.

A third point, then, is that sustainability is necessarily a long-range project, a multi-generational project. There's no finish-line, no end-zone: we won't know whether we're genuinely sustainable for decades to come. Science can provide us with certain parameters: so, for instance, NASA's Jim Hansen can tell us we need to cut carbon emissions by 80% by 2050, or risk having a drastically different climate by the end of the century. But how we should do that--who's going to do it, at what cost--that's going to have to be a political decision. Or better, a series of tough political decisions that will reflect struggles over our values, our culture and our society--the way we put our life together together. The struggle over sustainability is going to be with us for the foreseeable future.

What would a sustainable campus look like under these circumstances? Given that it's neither an individual nor a single-generational goal, the question needs to be: how can the university--and Ohio State in particular--most effectively advance the general understanding of sustainability? That is, how are we going to reconstruct higher education in the face of the sustainability challenge?