By Fran Korten and Elinor Ostrom, YES! Magazine
Posted on March 14, 2010, Printed on March 20, 2010


For one thing, she is the first woman to receive the prize. Her Ph.D. is in political science, not economics (though she minored in economics, collaborates with many economists, and considers herself a political economist). But what makes this award particularly special is that her work is about cooperation, while standard economics focuses on competition.

Ostrom’s seminal book, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, was published in 1990. But her research on common property goes back to the early 1960s, when she wrote her dissertation on groundwater in California. In 1973 she and her husband, Vincent Ostrom, founded the Workshop in Political Theory and Policy Analysis at Indiana University. In the intervening years, the Workshop has produced hundreds of studies of the conditions in which communities self-organize to solve common problems. Ostrom currently serves as professor of political science at Indiana University and senior research director of the Workshop. Read the complete Post.

March 11, 6:30-9pm
Rocky Mountain Flatbread Co
1255 Lynn Valley Road, No. Vancouver

Writer-producer-activist Jon Cooksey will mix humor, credit crisis metaphors and hard-hitting facts to show how climate change is only one symptom of an even messier problem: overshoot. “Overshoot means too many people using up too little planet. So in the end, we either need fewer people, more planets, or we’re going to have use less stuff. Or all three. I dib Mars.” As Antoine de Saint Exupery said, “if you want to get people to build a boat, make them yearn for the sea”; with humor and hope, Jon shows not only the water rising, but also the fun to be had sailing the seas of social change.

FORMAT:
6:30 Mingling and appetizers
7:00 presentation & Dialogue
8:50 Socializing and connecting

To register, please invite a friend and send names and emails to: registration@coolnorthshore.ca
Please bring $5 to cover admission and appetizers.

For more information: http://www.coolnorthshore.ca/action/cool-drinks-jon-cooksey

Cool Drinks is a monthly social and learning gathering to connect and inspire individuals interested in climate change in our community. On the third Thursday of each month, we invite a ‘provocateur’ to share knowledge and perspective on a climate change-related topic. Supported small group dialogue and informal networking allow participants to push the ideas further, and get the information and support they need to act.

MORE DETAILS:

BC - Award-winning writer and producer Jon Cooksey will speak about the impact that humans are having on the planet – including global warming, energy issues, and other light topics.

Cooksey is currently at work on a feature-length eco-comedy called How to Boil a Frog (HTBAF), which chronicles his personal, four-year adventure as a filmmaker, activist and, above all, a father driven, as he puts it, “to make sure my daughter’s going to have a future beyond living on a raft with the last polar bear.”

HTBAF mixes humor, credit crisis metaphors and hard-hitting facts to show how climate change is just one symptom of an even messier problem: overshoot. “Overshoot means too many people using up too little planet,” says Cooksey, “so in the end, we either need fewer people, more planets, or we’re going to have use less stuff. Or all three. I dib Mars.”

Cooksey plans to explore not only the facts about the mess we’re in, but the psychological effect it’s having on us. “We talk to people about these subjects like they’re rational – like they’re calculators – but who among us isn’t already being driven around the bend by daily life?” Cooksey asks. “Pay my bills, raise my kids, deal with my relationship – or find me one – then talk to me about changing my lightbulbs to keep the world from bursting into flame. People feel the disconnect.”

HTBAF seeks to paint a better future than the one we have now, and as Cooksey puts it, “a lot better than the one we’re going to have if we keep doing what we’re doing.” But he doesn’t feel more facts will do the job. “Antoine de Saint Exupery said, if you want to get people to build a boat, make them yearn for the sea. There’s a fantastic ocean out there, full of friends and fun and meaning and great music. I’d rather be sailing on it than drown in it. How about you?”

By Andre Piver - VPOE
Feb. 28, 2010

We have more stuff and less time, connection and beauty, while living at the speed of our fossil-fueled machinery. No longer knowing the source of our stuff, we have lost the blessing, the skill and the satisfaction of quality and craft. We have allowed a whole life to be torn apart and marketed back to us needing to go to the gym, the nutritional supplement store, the daycare  centre and eventually the nursing home.

The price for all of these dubious rewards is that Climate Change is in runaway mode.  e.g. melting permafrost represents 20% of the fixed carbon on the surface of the planet and is composting and liberating methane  which is 21 times more potent of a greenhouse gas than CO2.;  the warming oceans are less able to hold dissolved CO2; both of these cause the temperatures to rise more which causes both of them to occur even faster and so on.

The greatest global impact for all life is accelerating drought which is already occurring and running up against depleted aquifers and the predicted flooding of low lying areas with sea level rise affecting the most fertile lands. For humans the most devastating repercussion is crop failures. So yes re-localizing the capacity to grow food is an absolute necessity. Existing and predicted local impacts of CC include the loss of our glaciers, more of our precipitation in the winter mostly as rain with diminishing seasonal snowpack and earlier run-off ,this  eventually combined  with increasing burn-off of our highland tree cover. All of these  are reducing creek flow during our increasingly hotter and drier summers and climate modelers predict migration to this region by drought refugees from at least two directions.

We have already extracted most of the easily accessed oil and what remains is ever more difficult, and expensive to procure. Depletion of known reserves stopped being matched by the finding of new ones as early as 2005 while the pace of increasing consumption in the developing world has accelerated wildly.  In his book “Why Your World is going to get a Whole Lot Smaller”, Jeff Rubin who was the most quoted economist in all Canadian media as head of CIBC World Markets predicts $2.00 per liter gas around the corner as just the beginning of where it is headed. Read the complete Post.

Sunday, March 7, 2pm
The Unitarian Church of Vancouver
949 West 49th Ave, at Oak St., near 49th Ave Station on Canada Line

Suggested donation: $5-10 (no one will be turned away for lack of funds)

Featuring two speakers on the fight for climate justice after Copenhagen:
-Pablo Solon, Bolivia’s representative at the United Nations, lead spokesperson on climate change at the Copenhagen Summit
-Federico Fuentes, a participant in the revolutionary process in Venezuela and writer for Venezuelanalysis.com, Green Left Weekly and BoliviaRising.Blogspot.com.

The recent international summit on climate change hosted by the United Nations on Copenhagen ended in disappointment and recrimination. Greenpeace called it a “crime scene, with the guilty parties fleeing to the airport.” While Obama, Harper and other leaders of the rich countries stood accused, two heads of state in particular made connections with the tens of thousands of climate justice activists in the streets. Evo Morales of Bolivia, and Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, spoke for the world’s majority when they condemned global inequality and capitalism as the root causes of the climate crisis. Read the complete Post.

As some of you may know, the City of Vancouver has now given complete permission to create a community garden on the east wing of the land we call Crows’ Point (Near the Nanaimo Sky Train station). The community garden will be developed under the guidance of the Environmental Youth Alliance (EYA).

The City will now install water access at the furthest east point of the land; they will also provide a large pile of soil and all the wood chips we can handle. The city has already cleared the east wing for garden plots.

In preparation for longer warmer days, we are encouraging anyone that wants to join us to meet at Crows’ Point at 10:30AM this coming Sunday, Feb. 7^th, 2010 to embark on two separate plant salvaging missions.

Read the complete Post.

Posted Jan 29, 2010 by Tom Whipple

Last weekend, one of the more out of the ordinary meetings in recent memory took place out in Berkeley where some 30 people gathered to begin planning for the world’s transition from the industrial age to whatever is to come.

They were a diverse group, coming from all over North America and representing an array of disciplines. Most had grey hair and among them held many advanced degrees and had written stacks of books and papers.

There was, however, a common thread that held them together. Not a person in the room needed to be convinced that the world is entering upon a great paradigm shift that will sweep away much of industrial civilization, thoughts of economic growth, and the lifestyles that have grown up in the age of ubiquitous fossil fuels.

To the agreement of those present, speakers quickly outlined the problem. In a nutshell, the world is dangerously close to “peak everything” - oil, coal, natural gas, water, minerals, soil, phosphorous, fish, and perhaps the most important of all, the capacity of the atmosphere to absorb more carbon without triggering off life-destroying phenomena. Problem two is the financial collapse from efforts by too many governments to spend their way out of recession. The final phenomenon that will force changes, is that there is no sign that mankind is about to make the efforts required to stop spewing carbon into the already saturated atmosphere. Without at least some moderation, it is likely that the atmosphere eventually will have its revenge by raising global temperatures so much that there will be no higher forms of life left. Read the complete Post.