By John Ivanko •
January 7, 2009
If The Long Emergency and An Inconvenient Truth sounded the alarm for us to wake up and change course, Pat Murphy’s hard-hitting Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change (New Society, 2008) presents a compelling case for joining together to implement plan C: revitalizing community and curtailing our consumption culture.
For the record, Plan A is our present course: more oil drilling, more growth, more carbon dioxide emissions, more consumption, more of a gap between the haves and have-nots. Plan B suggests that we can shop our way out of climate change and peak oil, if only we consume “green” products and services. But Plan C advocates a drastic reduction in consumption as the necessary ingredient for a sustainable, equitable world. Replacing competition with cooperation and materialism with meaningful human relationships, Plan C makes an appealing case for unique places where neighbors care for each other and communities work cohesively to achieve a common wealth that has little to do with money.
Plan C provides a vivid analysis of our present predicament of peak oil (and rising energy prices), climate change and the growing social and economic inequity both in the US and globally. It’s paired with timely solutions addressing food, transportation, and the built environment within the context of revitalizing our communities (read: turn off the TV and invite your neighbors over for lemonade) and curtailment that might even involve some personal sacrifices. Is a plasma TV, using about as much electricity as a refrigerator, really necessary in order to watch the evening news? Why not ditch the clothes dryer and line-dry laundry instead?
Could this be what President-Elect Barack Obama alluded to during his acceptance speech in Chicago? President-Elect Obama called it a “new spirit of sacrifice” and asked Americans to summon “a new spirit of patriotism, of responsibility” and called on us to look after ourselves and each other. This definitely doesn’t sound like an appeal for us to go vacationing at Disney World, or hit the malls.
By Lucille Chi •
January 2, 2009
In full bloom at the National Building Museum this year, is a Green Community exhibition. The interactive show shares detailed information on how the “health of our communities, our planet, and ourselves depend on how we plan, design, and construct the world between our buildings. Green Community explores the origins of our precarious ecological situation and introduces communities large and small where citizens, political leaders, planning and design professionals, developers, and government agencies are working together for a more sustainable future.”
The exhibit poses the question “What makes a community green?” and answers by stating “A green community conserves its land, offers multiple options for transportation, provides open space for recreation and cultivation, and uses its natural and cultural resources wisely.”
By Caroline Savery •
November 24, 2008
This article marks the first in the author’s series on Sustainable Communities, in which she investigates theories and examples of how we might organize ourselves toward sustainability. This introductory article examines why it is crucial to focus on the viability of sustainable community prototypes, the likes of which are popping up in both urban and rural settings across the world. Such efforts look humble and localized at first, but they may contribute more to the structural evolution of a global sustainable society than it seems.
From a humble sprout, a fragile orchid grows. Not all of the seeds of its parent plant were pollinated. Not all were strewn, and not all began to grow. Some did. Of those that did, one blossomed. The orchid blossomed, a realized vision of the parent orchid’s design.
Not all efforts toward organizing ourselves for a better future have blossomed. Communism fell to the stresses of maintaining an absolutist ideology among many individuals. At this moment in our very own country, capitalism is finally beginning to buckle beneath its own design oversights (infinite growth within a finite planet). If one examines the human political legacy, it seems that there never will be a final, best solution to our social woes.
But there may be an evolution.
Totalitarianism is better than a monarchy. Representative democracy is an improvement over a totalitarian society. Direct democracy is probably even better than representative democracy. Having civil rights, women’s rights and gay rights satisfied feels much better than widespread injustice. The only exception here may be class stratification in the U.S., which is apparently justified by the fundamental theory of our economic system.
But maybe capitalism is on its way out too. New Scientist magazine features in its October 18 2008 issue a section of a half-dozen contributors, entitled “The Folly of Growth: How to stop the economy killing the planet“–which contains a thorough picture of the frankly unpalatable situation we’re in, and yet how appealing alternatives to U.S. capitalism seem. Tim Jackson’s article “Why Politicians Dare Not Limit Economic Growth” speculates about the social worth of pumping hundreds of billions of dollars into floundering corporations when social trends and urgent environmental trends indicate that the money would be best spent otherwise–such as on the sincere development of green jobs or industry standards and incentives to proactively bring our greenhouse gas emissions within manageable levels (the famous “350″ movement). According to a chart in Bill McKibben’s article “The Most Important Number on Earth” (Mother Jones, November 2008), it would take just $33 billion to update our major energy providers, reducing our carbon emissions by almost 20% annually. “Just $33 billion” is not a phrase I would have imagined myself saying, prior to the Wall Street bailout.
Congratulations to Will Allen, whose work with the urban farming organization Growing Power has just won him a no-strings-attached $500,000 award from the MacArthur Foundation.
One of 25 MacArthur Fellows for 2008, Allen will receive the $500,000 over the next five years. The financial award is designed to give Fellows a level of financial independence so they can “accelerate their current activities or take their work in new directions,” according to the MacArthur Foundation.
