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.

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.

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.

BLUE NORTH FESTIVAL OF ART AND SUSTAINABLE CULTURE presents - How to save Civilization with a Movie - an eco-workshop with:

Teri Woods McArter - Co-Producer, How To Boil A Frog (documentary film by Jon Cooksey)
Rick Balfour- Architect, Urban Planner; Balfour and Assoc., Metro Vancouver Planning Coalition
Vandy Savage - Animation Supervisor, How to Boil a Frog; Communications Vancouver Peak Oil Executive

Join us for a FREE Illustrated lecture and discussion.

Get a sneak preview of the new film, How to Boil a Frog, created and produced on the North Shore. Get informed about strategies to transition into New Normal by building resilient communities from author, architect, urban planner, Rick Balfour. And find out how we won the People’s Choice Award for our 1 minute animated film teaser.

Date: Saturday, April 4th, 2009
Time: 10:00 am - 11:30 am (registration onsite at 9:30am)
Location: John Braithwaite Community Centre - Anchor Room ground level
145 West 1st Street, North Vancouver

Cost: FREE

www.howtoboilafrog.com
www.plancanada.com

For more information visit: www.bluenorthfestival.ca

There is no doubt that the wealthy have become wealthier and that the poor have remained poor.

By Toby Reid VPOE

In human history, the gap between the rich and the poor has never been wider. While this imbalance among our species is currently at its peak, it is happening precisely as our long-term viability and sustainability appears in its darkest hour.

Some have suggested that the wealthier part of the human spectrum are ‘hoarding for the apocalypse’, a grim future of depleted resources that will turn humans on themselves, ultimately collapsing our species, and likely precipitating the collapse of thousands of other species in the process.

The apocalyptic part may very well prove to be true, but to suggest that the wealthier people are somehow foreseeing this calamity and acting in a way to get ready for it is simply giving them too much credit (plus, you can’t eat gold).

We are in this evolutionary mess because we have been hell bent on amassing as much wealth as we can. We have falsely bought in to the ideology that more is better and that growth, no matter the cost, is good. It’s our state of being that has brought about a devastatingly harsh looking world, not the other way around. Read the complete Post.

I can’t help but feel frustrated when I read Newsweek articles like that one below that only go as far as advocating a Business As Usual (BAU) or a Technofix just-in-time-to-save-our-asses solution (In religious jargon – False Messianic promise) to Climate Change and Peak Oil.

By Philip Be’er VPOE

In his Hierarchy of Needs, Abraham Maslow laid out in a graphic format, what human beings need to thrive http://www.businessballs.com/maslow.htm

Try to find the need for nuclear, fossil or even “low carbon” energy sources, for cars or of any other kind of mechanised transportation in the pyramid and you’ll see that they simply play no role in what human beings require to be healthy, wealthy and happy.

According to Professor Abraham Maslow, we do need Clean Air, Food, Water, Sleep and Shelter to survive. When we also get our safety and security needs met this creates a stable environment conducive to developing socially and emotionally. When we set up our societies in ways that allow us to have our Esteem Needs met, then we also have a shot at realising our personal potential.

Read the complete Post.

by Mike Thomas on March 9, 2009

This week I received a response to my Freedom of Information request to the Ministry of Transportation in British Columbia. My request read:

Under the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act, I am requesting information including Ministry staff and/or consultant reports, Ministerial briefings, memorandums, emails, or other records on the topic of peak oil (declining fossil fuel availability, the price of oil, gas and diesel, and other related topics) and the impact on highway traffic volumes, traffic design standards, alternative transportation options and road maintenance and construction funding.

My intention in asking for this stemmed from a search on the Ministry of Transportation website for the phrase “Peak Oil” to which there are no results. I thought that surely it is in the public’s best interests to know what the Ministry intends to do with its assets worth billions of dollars (that are still being expanded), and can be maintained only with cheap, plentiful oil - not the likely situation in years to come, so I went through the Freedom of Information channel…

Apparently I bit off more than I can chew, and received an estimate that the cost of retrieving and photocopying this information was going to be $805.00. Click on the image to the right for an excerpt of the response. Read the complete Post.

Our hope is that people all over the Lower Mainland will start their own peak oil meetups, to lower their carbon footprints & costs for travel to the meetings, but more importantly to begin the process of localization by getting together with others in their community to come up with local solutions - every city and neighborhood will have its own unique challeges and assets, and there’s no substitute for sitting down with those who live near you.

As a way to make it easier for people to start meetings, VPO has come up with a standard meeting format, available for download. The format addresses many of the conundrums that every meeting faces:

Who’s in charge? (Answer: Nobody - we’re all equals - though some members will always have more experience and knowledge than others, and can be of service to those who are just catching on to peak oil and its consequences.)

How do we balance the needs of newcomers, who have questions, and regular attendees who want to move on to solutions?

What’s involved in getting ready for peak oil? (We suggest a 3 part program.)

How will the individual meetups keep in contact with the larger VPO organization? (We suggest each meeting have a VPO rep who will represent the group at periodic intergroup get-togethers.)

How do we integrate speakers and group members who want to share particular knowledge and expertise?

How do we collect dues to pay for our expenses?

What sorts of volunteer positions need to be filled to keep the group running, and how long would any one person need to commit to a position?

How will we keep in touch with each other between meetings?

And so on. Download the format and accompanying Co-secretary sheet, and write us at to let us know how your meeting is doing!