March 18, 2011

Instructions for saving our butts in a Post Oil low energy future.

Co-written by VPOE Richard Balfour and Eileen Keenan
Cost $10.00 for full color pdf downloadable file or $35.00 for a hardcover edition.

Want one? Click here to go to Plan Canadahttp://plancanada.com/

While focused on Vancouver as an example this is about global impacts on any city or culture from peak oil and climate change, and in an effort to deal with cultural adaption, not cultural melt down.
• Peak Oil
• Sustainability Workshops
• Canadian Institute of Planners
• Narrow Streets and Houses
• City Lands opportunities
• Farmland
• Miscellaneous – you won’t believe the topics covered in this section
• Links

For agreements for multiple use for education uses, please contact oldcityfoundation@telus.net.

Thanks to Charles Dobson in help making this alternate access available.
Richard Balfour and Eileen Keenan

Richard Balfour Architect & Co.
Balfour & Associates • Strategic Planning
Vancouver  6047310206
balfourarch@telus.net
www.plancanada.com

Posted by Dave Gardner on Dec 14, 2010

Metro areas in the U.S. with a stable population are proving growth is not the path to prosperity. Eben Fodor, community planning consultant and author of Better, Not Bigger, has just released a study comparing the fastest-growing metro areas of the U.S. with the slowest-growing, to test conventional wisdom that cities benefit from growth. This study ought to put the final nail in the coffin of the “grow or die” myth that misinforms public policies in many cities. Unfortunately, in most areas this myth is very much alive and well.

According to Fodor, “The slowest-growing MSAs (Metropolitan Statistical Areas) outperformed the fastest-growing in every category. The 25 slowest-growing MSAs averaged almost 1% lower unemployment rates, 2.4% lower poverty rates, and a remarkable $8,455 more in per capita personal income in 2009. They also had larger income gains from 2000 to 2009 and saw significantly lower declines in income from the recession (2007-09). “ 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.

Fri – Sat December 4 – 5
9 am – 5 pm

Langara College, 100 West 49 Avenue, Vancouver

Co-sponsored by:
Langara College Continuing Studies, Village Vancouver and the Canadian Centre for Community Renewal

Join leaders of the transition movement in Vancouver for a 2-day workshop and dialogue introducing the principles, steps and lessons of the successful Transition Town model of local response to global challenges.

· What are the lessons for activists and concerned citizens?

· How can we increase resilience in every neighbourhood?

· What are the ways we might collaborate to get the impacts that are needed? Read the complete Post.

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

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

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 Tom Engelhardt, Tomdispatch.com
Posted on February 19, 2009, Printed on February 19, 2009

http://www.alternet.org/story/127625/

It turns out that you don’t want to be a former city dweller in rural parts of southernmost Australia, a stalk of wheat in China or Iraq, a soybean in Argentina, an almond or grape in northern California, a cow in Texas, or almost anything in parts of east Africa right now. Let me explain.

As anyone who has turned on the prime-time TV news these last weeks knows, southeastern Australia has been burning up. It’s already dry climate has been growing ever hotter. “The great drying,” Australian environmental scientist Tim Flannery calls it. At its epicenter, Melbourne recorded its hottest day ever this month at a sweltering 115.5 degrees, while temperatures soared even higher in the surrounding countryside. After more than a decade of drought, followed by the lowest rainfall on record, the eucalyptus forests are now burning. To be exact, they are now pouring vast quantities of stored carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas considered largely responsible for global warming, into the atmosphere.

In fact, everything’s been burning there. Huge sheets of flame, possibly aided and abetted by arsonists, tore through whole towns. More than 180 people are dead and thousands homeless. Flannery, who has written eloquently about global warming, drove through the fire belt, and reported:

“It was as if a great cremation had taken place… I was born in Victoria, and over five decades I’ve watched as the state has changed. The long, wet and cold winters that seemed insufferable to me as a boy vanished decades ago, and for the past 12 years a new, drier climate has established itself… I had not appreciated the difference a degree or two of extra heat and a dry soil can make to the ferocity of a fire. This fire was different from anything seen before.”

Australia, by the way, is a wheat-growing breadbasket for the world and its wheat crops have been hurt in recent years by continued drought. Read the complete Post.

No longer the purview of anti-social types, experts warn we must embrace a massive lifestyle change

Feb 15, 2009 04:30 AM
The Toronto Star
Cathal Kelly
STAFF WRITER

While panic is not the prescription, experts are warning that the time to begin taking Peak Oil seriously is past.

“It’s not about believing. It’s about facts,” said Gord Miller, Ontario’s environmental commissioner. Miller has been warning about Peak Oil for years. He thinks we hit peak around early 2007.

“If we’re not there, we’re awful close,” said Dave Hughes, a geoscientist who once ran Canada’s national coal inventory.

Peak Oil doesn’t mean we have run out of the stuff. It means that we have crested the top of a bell curve of supply. Then it’s a roller-coaster ride down. Depending on who you ask, that ride will either be slow and uncomfortable or teeth-rattling and destructive.

“Depletion is taking somewhere between 5 and 6 per cent of (existing) world oil production per year,” said Hughes. “The reason that oil price is where it is today is that the economy has reduced demand.”

No one has found a major new oil field since the 1960s. It’s getting harder and more expensive to bring up the oil we know is there. All these signs point toward the peak.

What happens now? Read the complete Post.

Feb 15, 2009 04:30 AM
The Toronto Star
by Cathal Kelly

For millennia, doomsayers have been predicting the end of the world as we know it. These days, theory dovetails with fact: oil is disappearing. Should we be listening?

After the planes hit the towers, Paul added a to-do to his long survival list.

At the time, he was working on the eighth floor of a west-end office tower. So he convinced a guy at the local outdoors supplier to teach him to rappel. Then he bought 60 metres of rope and packed it, along with some climbing gear, into a briefcase. Then he tucked the briefcase under his desk.

“It seemed like the intelligent thing to do,” he shrugs.

Three years ago, Paul heard about Peak Oil. This is the millenarianism of our recessionary time, a doomsday scenario with a wrinkle – scientific backing. In essence, Peak Oil states that the world’s supply of crude will soon go into permanent, inexorable decline. This is widely accepted amongst experts. The main points of debate are exactly when this will happen, how quickly oil will deplete and what happens next. Read the complete Post.