Just how easy is it to hoof it in your ‘hood? A Seattle software company called FrontSeat created WalkScore.Com. The programmeers claim the site indicates whether a neighborhood offers residents enough amenities to get out of their cars. They hope people will consider the site’s “walkability” scores when choosing a place to live. (Photo by Shawn Allee)
Picking a place to live can be a huge environmental decision. Some people argue if you can walk to everything you need, you’ll stay out of your car, and that will cut air pollution. But how do you compare how ‘walkable’ one place is to another? Shawn Allee looks at a Web site that aims to make that a breeze:
‘Think Less………Act Locally’
The Rise of Localization
By Russell Precious
VPO note: the author refers to “localization” vs. “relocalization” because he doesn’t believe we’re returning to something that existed in the past, but rather moving towards something entirely new.
“The most personal reaction to landscape, to people, to ways of living, is that which is rooted in the local.” Wallace Stegner
In recent years it has been increasingly presumed that civilization was firmly entrenched on the path to some sort of nirvanic global village, a vision held equally by those representing both the ‘left’ and the ‘right’—albeit based on different principles and expected outcomes. The right viewed it more as an economic paradise of ever expanding markets and greater prosperity while the left saw it as a truly democratic world wide web of shared information and a diminishing gap between wealth and poverty.
Few have been willing to address the herd of elephants in the room that are poised to derail these presupposed outcomes. What are these elephants, and how did they (and we) get here? Read the complete Post.
This is the link to a video of Bob Williams, a member of the Vancity Board of Directors, speaking at an even at the Rhizome Cafe, Vancouver, March 22 2007 entitled: “The Possible City: Cooperatives in a Sustainable Economy”. about co-operatives in 2007. This excerpt is specifically about the need to make the bureaucracy of our city back into the meritocracy it once was.
The full presentation can be heard and seen here. Note the scrolling table of contents immediately underneath the video player window. When clicked upon, will redirect the video playback to the corresponding point in time of the video archive associated to that chapter. Kind of handy. Useful for one paragraph summaries, quotes for media and groups, and the like.
And campaigns of any kind.
As the era of cheap liquid fuels draws to an end, everything about modern consumer society will change. Likewise, developing societies pursuing the benefits of globalization will struggle to grow economies in an era of scarce liquid fuels. The most localized, self-reliant communities will experience the least disruption.
Oil is a fixed asset of the planet, representing stored sunlight accumulated over a billion years as early marine algae, and other marine organisms (not dinosaurs) captured solar energy, formed carbon bonds, gathered nutrients, died, sank to the ocean floors, and lay buried under eons of sediment. Like any fixed non-renewable resource, oil is limited, and its consumption will rise, peak, and decline.
World oil production increased for 150 years until the spring of 2005, when world crude oil production reached about 74.3 million barrels per day (mb/d), and total liquid fuels, including tar sands, liquefied gas, and biofuels reached about 85 mb/d. In spite of the efforts since, and tales of “trillions of barrels” of oil in undiscovered fields, liquid fuel production has remained at about 85.5 mb/d for three years, the longest sustained plateau in modern petroleum history. Discoveries of new fields peaked 40 years ago. Read the complete Post.
Climate Change is the worst environmental crisis ever. It is a problem of fossil fuel dependency, and solving it requires reducing that dependency quickly and dramatically.
But from a policy standpoint, Climate Change is hard to address. Because the worst of its impacts may come decades from now, its solution is framed as a moral imperative: we should reduce fossil fuels for the environment and future generations. Many policy makers genuinely want to do the right thing, but when a choice arises between climate protection and economic growth, growth wins nearly every time. Because 85 percent of world energy comes from fossil fuels, it is hard to find a way to quickly end their use without a severe reduction in available energy, and a resulting contraction of the economy. Any politician campaigning for economic contraction faces a tough battle.
The peaking in production rates of oil, coal, and natural gas presents a different problem. Again, it is one of fossil fuel dependency; but in this case, instead of a sink (or pollution) dilemma, it is one of source (or scarcity). Fossil fuels are finite. Depletion ensures that the rate of extraction of these substances will soon start to decline, wreaking havoc on industrial economies, perhaps leading to societal collapse. Read the complete Post.
How to implement Al Gore’s recent energy proposal
By Julian Darley Original post
Below is a conceptual plan for achieving the goal of 100% renewable energy by 2018. We will be updating this document with specific recommendations and additional resources in the near future.
1. Reduce 6. Reinvest
2. Share 7. Relocalize
3. Diversify 8. Reengineer
4. Distribute 9. Reskill
5. Store 10. Remobilize
1. Reduce consumption and reduce waste—not just of fossil fuels but of energy overall and of raw materials, almost all of which require energy to exploit and transport. Reducing consumption is vital in making the goal of 100% renewable electricity achievable, both to reduce the amount of renewable power we need to generate and because it will greatly reduce the cost of installing it. Such reduction will need to be planned in order to make sure that new jobs and opportunities demanded by renewable energy are brought on even as jobs dependent on cheap, abundant energy are removed by depletion. Americans need to become energy smart and self-reliant again—these were once defining aspects of the American character, and need to be revived. Read the complete Post.
I’ve been alluding to a BC startup company that has developed a process to convert organic material into bio-fuels. CBC’s The National filmed the story in May and aired the story July 14th, 2008. It’s taken awhile to get the video, convert, and post to YouTube, but here it is.
Two things to note, 1) the 6 second sound bite of fame is about the only part of a 5 min. interview that I said rather reluctantly. It’s corny and somewhat misleading, but I guess it sounds sensational (two guesses on who is BC_EE). And, I feel somewhat vindicated as another member of the renewable energy industry made the same comparison; 2) we know biomass energy is not going to solve our problems of an oil depleted world. It’s just another “silver BB” in the multitude of methods and solutions.
U.S. farmland values are at a record high even as the rest of the country suffers the worst housing crisis since the Great Depression, with the highest crop prices ever pushing up agricultural real estate.
The value of all land and buildings on farms averaged $2,350 an acre at the start of this year, up 8.8 percent from a year earlier, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said today in an annual report.
Surging corn, wheat and soybean prices boosted values in the Northern Plains, which includes Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota and South Dakota, by 15.5 percent, the biggest increase in the country, according to the report.
The report also tracks rates for land that’s rented for farming. Rents for farmland rose 13 percent last year to $96 an acre while pasture fees rose 8.3 percent to $13 an acre. Because of high demand for additional farmland and the high cost of buying, farm-rental prices may rise 20 percent to 30 percent in 2009, said Murray Wise, chief executive officer of Westchester Group Inc., a farm-asset management company based in Champaign, Illinois.
– Bloomberg
********
Of course the denialists laughed when we said farm land would rise and urban land would drop in price.
But given a new realization that you cannot eat your lawn and food needs to be grown nearby, the relocalzation and peak oil impacts do kick in here.
Agricultural Land Reserve loses 632 hectares in 2007, the third year of reductions since 2003
Derek Penner, Vancouver Sun - Published: Tuesday, August 05, 2008
Original article
British Columbia’s Agricultural Land Reserve experienced its biggest net loss of land in the last 10 years in 2007, with property carved off to satisfy needs for industrial developments in the north and desires for resort and residential subdivisions in the south.
The B.C. Agricultural Land Commission, according to its annual report, approved applications to take 1,220 hectares of farmland out of the 4.76-million-hectare reserve but only approved the addition of 588 hectares of non-farmland, leaving a net loss of 632 hectares.
It was the third year in the last five that the commission approved net reductions in the province’s protected farm base, eroding the last big addition made to the ALR in 1999.
