Intriguing Plan in Michael Moore’s Home Town: Bulldoze the Ghost ‘Burbs, Return Them to Nature
By Tom Leonard, The Telegraph (UK)
Posted on June 13, 2009, Printed on June 16, 2009

The government looking at expanding a pioneering scheme in Flint, Michigan, one of the poorest US cities, which involves razing entire districts and returning the land to nature.

Local politicians believe the city must contract by as much as 40 percent, concentrating the dwindling population and local services into a more viable area.

The radical experiment is the brainchild of Dan Kildee, treasurer of Genesee County, which includes Flint.

Having outlined his strategy to Barack Obama during the election campaign, Mr Kildee has now been approached by the US government and a group of charities who want him to apply what he has learnt to the rest of the country.

Mr Kildee said he will concentrate on 50 cities, identified in a recent study by the Brookings Institution, an influential Washington think-tank, as potentially needing to shrink substantially to cope with their declining fortunes.

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit, shattered by the woes of the US car industry, there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

“The real question is not whether these cities shrink – we’re all shrinking – but whether we let it happen in a destructive or sustainable way,” said Mr Kildee. “Decline is a fact of life in Flint. Resisting it is like resisting gravity.” Read the complete Post.

One January in Paris, I held a well-wrapped bag of Brie outside my third-floor window.

Street lamps shone on deep green leaves as snow melted in the cool air. I wound my window closed, holding the edge of the bag until it was firmly secured in the protective corner of the outer pane.

With hundreds of students and only one kitchen, leaving food in the communal fridge was like giving it away.

Four years later, in my new apartment in Toronto, I stood in front of what sounded like a fridge with bronchitis. I started to view it less as a useful appliance than as an unneeded annoyance.

In what felt like a radical decision, I unplugged my fridge. Read the complete Post.

The measurement and use of GDP to 21st century economic management is about as useful as driving a Hummer is to fuel efficiency. The new standard that economists, business leaders and policy makers should be paying attention to is called the GPI, which stands for the Genuine Progress Indicator. Compared to the GDP’s Hummer, the GPI is the emissionless vehicle.

The GPI is a measure that incorporates all of the costs to a society of operating an economy, including environmental and social degradation, a methodology much more suited to today’s global environment. GDP focuses on measuring certain aspects of the economy, but externalizes many of the “non-balance sheet costs” that an economy places on society.

Back when the concept was first proposed by Simon Kuznets, and later refined by John Maynard Keynes over 75 years ago, GDP was being proposed as a way to manage resources through the Second World War effort. Specifically, fighting nations needed a way to measure resources and keep a lid on rapid increases in the prices of various consumer staples, a factor that had nearly decimated the lower classes during the First World War.

Like so many things that stemmed from those warring years (pesticides, chemicals, plastics, fossil fuel use and mass production factories) GDP is struggling to remain relevant today.

Read the complete Post.

sent to VPO by Philip Be’er
article by Michael Lardelli

It is fascinating to watch the behaviour of our political and business leaders as they attempt to cope with the world’s deepening financial crisis. It is becoming clear that they don’t have a clue what is actually going on. Their blindness is explained by confusion about what actually enables economic growth. The shared delusion is that money makes the world go round.

As share and asset values crash we hear talk of deflation. Many nations are trying to counter this by expanding their money supply. However, they seem to have forgotten the most basic fact about money that we are taught in school - that it is a medium of exchange. Money allows agreements on relative “value” (how much of one thing will be exchanged for another) but it has no intrinsic value itself. It is simply a mechanism that allows the distribution of real “stuff”. So if the economy is crashing what is this “stuff” that is disappearing? It can be summed up in one word - energy.
Energy is everything

No living or manufactured thing exists on this planet without energy. It enables flowers and people to grow. We need energy to mine minerals, extract oil or cut wood and then to process these into finished goods. Without energy the goods would not exist so we can think of each product as containing “embodied energy”. So the most fundamental definition of money is that it is a mechanism to allow the exchange and allocation of different forms of energy. The economy is energy. Read the complete Post.

Coined the ‘Icon of Consumer Living’, plastic bags are a clear symbol of our throwaway society.

It is time that we examine our old habits and begin making the necessary improvements!

Plastic bags = Cause of major environmental and health concerns
Plastic bags are one of the top items of litter on our community beaches, roads, sidewalks, and parks. Plastic bags are light and hard to contain. Because of their light weight, plastic bags fly easily in wind, float along readily in the currents of rivers and oceans, get tangled up in trees, fences, poles, and block municipal drainage systems. Read the complete Post.

Written by William E. Rees, PhD, FRSC

Sunday, 21 December 2008 10:56 www.ourrivers.ca

Fact: Most public policy directed toward so-called sustainability, including alternative energy, is directly or indirectly oriented toward maintaining the status quo by other means—i.e., it emphasizes growth through efficiency or is geared toward increasing supply rather than reducing demand. This (along with kow-towing to the private sector) is what run-of-the-river hydro is all about.

Problem: Governments (and even most ‘environmental’ organizations) have yet to confront a contrary two-fold reality that demands a very different approach:

1. Scientists, particularly climate-change scientists, have grossly  underestimated the scale and rapidity of climate change.  Arctic warming/melting is 80-100 years ahead of the IPCC’s business-as-usual scenario. The most recent peer-reviewed research suggests that the world will be hard-pressed to avoid stabilizing GHGs at less than 650 ppm CO2e which implies a 50% probability of a catastrophic 4C° of warming.
2. Eco-footprint analysis shows that the world is in over-shoot, using 25-40% more of nature’s goods and services each year than the planet can sustainably produce. We are depleting essential natural capital.

Solution: There is nothing for it but to GIVE UP GROWTH. The era of material exuberance in the First World is over. Public policy that does not reflect this reality merely accelerates  ecosystemic—and ultimately societal—collapse.

In this light, the mad scramble by governments everywhere to re-establish ‘normal’ growth after the recent implosion of the world’s greed-driven financial markets is tragicomedy on a global scale. Sustainability requires that we should, instead, be planning a stable way down for everyone while we still have the capacity to do so. Governments should be negotiating a global treaty on ‘contraction and convergence’ by which the First World would shrink its per eco-footprints to converge, at a sustainable level, with justifiably growing per capita EFs in the Third World. We should aim to de-carbonize the global economy completely by 2025. All this implies an 80% reduction in per capita consumption and waste production by North Americans.

The good news is that the implicit serious conservation effort would generate more energy from existing sources than can be derived by supply-side approaches. Ecologically hazardous run-of-the-river hydro is an unnecessary growthist strategy.

By the way, ‘zero growth’ may be blasphemy today, but within a decade or so it will have become holy doctrine.

The inventor of the “eco-footprint” concept, Dr. William Rees is one the world’s foremost  ecological and sustainability experts.  He teaches at the UBC School of Community and Regional Planning.

Check out this cool video starring our own VPOE Justin Tilson.
http://100mile.foodtv.ca/webisode/guerrilla-gardening

When some imaginative neighbours get together to transform the space around some abandoned railway tracks into an improvised community garden, they are taking part in a global phenomenon called guerrilla gardening. Author David Tracey explains how to look at the whole city as a potential garden… a garden that needs tending.

Credits
Director/Editor: Hart Snider
Camera: Hart Snider, Galit Mastai
Coordinator: Galit Mastai

Special thanks to David Tracey and Lisa and Justin Tilson

by Rex Weyler
Deep Green, March 2009

Deforestation contributes to global warming. Rising earth temperatures kill forests. Dying forests release more carbon. Atmospheric carbon increases planet temperatures.

This cycle of forest collapse represents a critical feedback loop that will likely drive warming for centuries, change life cycles on Earth in general, and usher in a sweeping transformation of human civilization.

Worldwide forest destruction – due to logging, human habitat sprawl, and clearing for crops such as soybeans and palm oil – continues at a net loss of about 15 million hectares each year. Many cleared forests are burned on the site. Meanwhile, forests die or grow slower due to global warming. Declining forests absorb less CO2 and release more carbon.

Drought, heat, and fires

Drought and heat are making forests more susceptible to insects and fire. David Gilbert, with the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation in Australia will publish a study this year that shows forests have less biomass and increased mortality in warmer earth conditions.

Due to warmer temperatures, bark beetles have attacked boreal forests in the US, Canada and Russia, killing mature trees and making forests vulnerable to fire. Carbon, sequestered by forests over centuries, can be released in a few days by wildfires, as experienced in southern Australia in recent years. Fires are increasing worldwide and now contribute about a third as much atmospheric carbon as burning fossil fuels. Read the complete Post.

By Kathy Freston, Huffington Post
Posted on April 2, 2009, Printed on April 4, 2009
http://www.alternet.org/story/134650/

I’ve written extensively on the consequences of eating meat — on our health, our sense of “right living”, and on the environment. It is one of those daily practices that has such a broad and deep effect that I think it merits looking at over and over again, from all the different perspectives. Sometimes, solutions to the world’s biggest problems are right in front of us. The following statistics are eye-opening, to say the least.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save:

● 100 billion gallons of water, enough to supply all the homes in New England for almost 4 months;

● 1.5 billion pounds of crops otherwise fed to livestock, enough to feed the state of New Mexico for more than a year;

● 70 million gallons of gas — enough to fuel all the cars of Canada and Mexico combined with plenty to spare;

● 3 million acres of land, an area more than twice the size of Delaware;

● 33 tons of antibiotics.

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would prevent:

● Greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as produced by all of France;

● 3 million tons of soil erosion and $70 million in resulting economic damages;

● 4.5 million tons of animal excrement;

● Almost 7 tons of ammonia emissions, a major air pollutant. Read the complete Post.

This is an invitation to help build a movement–to take one day day and use it to stop the climate crisis.

On October 24, we will stand together as one planet and call for a fair global climate treaty. United by a common call to action, we’ll make it clear: the world needs an international plan that meets the latest science and gets us back to safety.

This movement has just begun, and it needs your help.

Here’s the plan: we’re asking you, and people in every country on earth, to organize an action in your community on October 24.

http://www.350.org/oct24

There are no limits here–imagine bike rides, rallies, concerts, hikes, festivals, tree-plantings, protests, and more. Imagine your action linking up with thousands of others around the globe. Imagine the world waking up.

If we can pull it off, we’ll send a powerful message on October 24: the world needs the climate solutions that science and justice demand.

It’s often said that the only thing preventing us from tackling the climate crisis quickly and equitably is a lack of political will. Well, the only thing that can create that political will is a unified global movement–and no one is going to build that movement for us. It’s up to regular people all over the world.  That’s you.

So register an event in your community for October 24, and then enlist the help of your friends. Get together with your co-workers or your local environmental group or human rights campaign, your church or synagogue or mosque or temple; enlist bike riders and local farmers and young people. All over the planet we’ll start to organize ourselves.

With your help, there will be an event at every iconic place on the planet on October 24-from America’s Great Lakes to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef–and also in all the places that matter to you in your daily lives: a beach or park or village green or town hall.

If there was ever a time for you to get involved, it’s right now.

There are two reasons this year is so crucial.

The first reason is that the science of climate change is getting darker by the day. The Arctic is melting away with astonishing speed, decades ahead of schedule. Everything on the planet seems to be melting or burning, rising or parched.

And we now now have a number to express our peril: 350. Read the complete Post.