When the moment is right, the vision appears:

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

On the Idea of Climate Change

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

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

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?

"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

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

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