Reports coming from The Guardian are that a whistle blower from the International Energy Agency leaked information that we are much closer to the peak production of oil than anticipated. The whistle blower is staying anonymous so I want to state that it’s still unconfirmed, the IEA is denying what is being stated.
I recently presented a speech on sustainability for a local Unitarian Universalist church in Odessa. The scenery was amazing: it was right near some old horse farms, the wind was blowing and when everyone was silent it was eerily peaceful. I had fun, though feeling a bit unprepared; sometimes I get anxious but my passion keeps me going. Every speech I do I learn something new about myself and about how others feel about sustainability and our future.
Shortly after the speech, I sat and had coffee to speak more personally with some of the dozens of attendees. Many came up to give condolences about how they felt their generation was leaving a world far worst off than it was given to them. Others had anger in their hearts about how the present administration is acting.
Video after the break:
Let us assume for one moment that water was a precious commodity, as rare as gold itself. How would we treat it? Would we bathe our infertile landscape with it? Expend perfectly clean water to dispose of our waste? Throw it away after scantly using it in the sink while doing dishes?
Now let us live in reality. Realize that already this resource is such a thing. For we live way above our means at almost 500 gallons a day for the average American. Most human beings on this planet use less than 100 gallons, and by 2025 water will be a scarce resource for nearly three-quarters of the population due to exponential growth of use and depleting glaciers.
In my previous post about South Central Asia, I spoke also about the resource war that could erupt over water. With recent fires in California as well as sandstorms in Australia, more than ever resilience in a water supply will be crucial for our success in the future. We must adapt to a goal of using less water and utilizing it more efficiently.
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Will you stand? Comment what you’re standing for here locally in Tampa bay.
Parag Khanna’s maps of the South Central Asia around the 12 minute mark in the video below is a great way of understanding our role in Afghanistan. With this map you can assume that we are not leaving Afghanistan for a long time. We need it to be safe to deliver oil from the South Central Asian countries that most Americans don’t even know about. These small countries have great wealth waiting to be shipped overseas for Chinese and American demand. During the fall of Soviet Russia Oil and natural gas was found in the Central Asian countries of Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.
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I intend to describe an emerging tribe that is being formed, not only in the Tampa Bay area, but across the state as well. But while doing, so I want to showcase my own observations of the mindset of a large section of the population that is emerging. I believe and have witnessed the cohesive power of this tribe en mass. This cohesiveness is being brought about with courage from an unknowable source. The people standing up for the changes within our culture are ones that have jumped into a new dark abyss. They go forward with lamps showing the way for others to follow.
Last weekend, I attended the 4th Annual Campus and Community Sustainability Conference and Expo at the University of South Florida’s Tampa campus. One of the first seminars I went to was about a group of young architect students from the USF Center for Community Design and Research designing a sustainable community. These young ladies entered a contest to design a sustainable city, their design being at the heart of Tampa between Ybor and downtown Tampa. They readily valued community supported agriculture as a method of enabling people to consume food, not measured in miles, but in feet. Light rail mixed with walkable communities enabled the commuters to enjoy a short stroll to anything needed in daily living. Driving a bicycle was just about the only vehicle allowed within most of the area. There was a centralized farmers market where hundreds of stands could be set up, bringing in the local community garden’s food, as well as that from local farmers.
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Photographer James Balog shares new image sequences from the Extreme Ice Survey, a network of time-lapse cameras recording glaciers receding at an alarming rate, some of the most vivid evidence yet of climate change in his talk on TED.
Video after the jump:
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Last October, an economy that had been running its course for the past three decades was laid to rest. Our country has been on a nearly 30-year credit bubble where we have binged on cheap credit to buy up homes at ever increasing values. This 30-year ascent made us think it could be forever. But this bubble was based upon unsustainable principles and ecological destruction. We destroyed as much land as we could to produce quickly and consume as much food, building supplies, minerals as we could get from the land as fast as possible. We utilize an extremely dense energy source — fossil fuels — to live lifestyles that are historically similar to those that kings lived before. In order to accomplish all this, we have put ourselves in debt for decades to come. We have borrowed from the future to live in the present for far too long.
Here in Florida the Ponzi scheme of real estate flipping ended as well. As my carpenter friend remarked: “We worked ourselves out of a job.” The University of Florida released a demographic report showing that 58,000 people left the state of Florida this year, ending our over 60-year growth pattern. This is a turnaround for a state that based its economic model on perpetual growth. An economy strictly based upon tourism and building is falling apart. We are already witnessing the vast decline in state resources and even our own governor is leaving for Washington D.C. But I’m here, and I’m a native of Florida and I’m not leaving my state any time soon. I’ve been researching a green economy for the past year and a half and I believe it’s the way to move forward for this state and our country. It’s based upon ethics, entrepreneurship and decentralization — a return to a local living economy.
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Editor’s Note: This event has been postponed with the new event date TBD. Please see contact information below for more information.
Holiday Lake West Civic Association has been working on a community garden with Code Green Community’s help for the past 8 months. Since it’s inception we have modeled ourselves to seek water conservation techniques to ensure our garden used the least amount of water during the drought months.
We want to take that a step further by only using rain water from now on. Introducing Holiday Lake West’s Rain Barrel Workshop. This rain barrel workshop costs $55 and will be a fundraiser for our garden hosted at the Civic Association on August 22nd, from 10 – 11:30 am. You will receive a barrel and all the parts needed to construct your rain barrel. Afterwards a water conservation class will be taught as well regarding water saving techniques such as drip irrigation and soaker hoses.
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Sustainability is the ability to meet present day needs without jeopardizing the future’s ability to provide for their needs as well. In order to have a sustainable system such as this it must be created equally in a democratic way. If sustainability is built only for the extremely rich the poor and middle class will be left out with ever rising costs of living. A green revolution is needed most from the bottom up, not the top down.
Social justice and peace are necessities for a sustainable society. The resources and manpower devoted to war are all we would need to combat global climate change and transition our economy from a fossil fuel dependent one to a cleaner/renewable energy/decentralized system. What would this story look like?
In 1992 a little girl named Severn Suzuki spoke at the Rio Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero:
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In previous posts, I declared the problems that our country faces. The point was not to be pessimistic but to maturely point out the weak points so we can find solutions. We face mounting debt, a dependence on a finite power source stored beneath the Earth that may have peaked production, the baby boomer generation about to enter retirement, a lack of savings, and a consumer culture built upon a dominator society that depends entirely from receiving it’s inputs of materials and things from far away. This society is unsustainable and will need to transition to something different by choice or by collapse.
This society arose when we began valuing things, more than people. It is not a recent event, but an event that has playing itself out for thousands of years. I spoke of a permaculture path. A path to improve our economy to be environmentally friendly and get us off our addiction to fossil fuels. As a by-product of utilizing these permaculture design principles we will have healthier food, cheaper costs of living, meaningful work repairing the Earth all as we return to the community way of thinking and away from individualism. We must create a partnership society, partnering with the Earth and one another to repair the damage.
What does this look like though? It’s easy to state abstract ideas on digital paper, but how about an example locally?
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Our economy is unsustainable. That means at some point in the future it will cease to be sustained. People will lose homes and jobs, and lifestyles will change. Sound familiar to our present day scenario? In my previous post I added a link to the Crash Course, a video series about the challenges America faces over the coming 10 years from our oil addiction: our generation gap of baby boomers retiring and not enough workers to pay for their retirement, our incredibly increasing debt, our lack of savings, and our exponential growth due to fossil fuel consumption resulting in a degrading supply of resources as well as destruction of the ecology we depend on for life. Peak Oil was another issue I brought up in a recent blog. All of these issues will bring about future scenarios that can play in multiple ways. (You can watch these videos from my post here.)
The context of this post will follow the future energy descent scenarios created by David Holmgren, one of the founders of Permaculture, as per his website Future Scenarios. These scenarios deal with the responses we can go forward with after the peak production of oil arises. Our country imports nearly 70% of its oil - how can our country continue this path of exponential growth if other countries deteriorate in oil exports?
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This is the playlist for Chris Martenson’s “The Crash Course”. It is a brief rundown of the number of simultaneous issues affecting America in its energy, economy, and environmental areas. The road map that Chris Marteson presents is one that I will refer back to in coming blog posts. He does a wonderful job of tying together everything. Knowing what walls we’ve reached will allow us to determine a course of personal and community action that is most relevant to the future we will probably head towards. Will we truly see a great green energy investment bubble from cap and trade? Can we take on more debt to convert our livelihoods into a new energy transition?
Video after the jump.
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For the next century, my generation’s greatest challenge will be dealing with our energy sources. Energy is what drives everything in our society. The food we eat, the gas we put in our cars, as well as the electricity we use to turn on our lights - all originating from fossil fuels that were created from condensed sunlight millions of years ago. For millions of years, the Earth only had the available energy source of the sunlight to feed our societies’ advancement.
During the 18th century that situation changed when the Industrial Revolution began using coal to fire industry and machinery to do the work of thousands of men. Shortly after the Civil War in the 1860s, oil was first utilized in this new industrialized society. America became the current day Saudi Arabia of oil exports up until the 1970s. Unfortunately for us, becoming the biggest exporter also made us the biggest user of oil. We currently have 5% of the population of the planet but utilize 25% of all the oil that the world consumes – roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day (though less since the recession).
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The Iranian revolution underway is a sign of the times. Millions of oppressed people Twittering and linking up forging networks to create and topple a system that’s in need of reformation. Women have been the very foundation of this movement. Moussavi the leader of the resistance’s wife spoke at one function this quote:
“I hope freedom of the speech, freedom of the pen, freedom of thought will not be forgotten” – Zahra Rahnavard
We, too, in America are in the mist of an revolution. A transformation from a domination culture that views the world as fleeting and open to exploitation, to a partnership culture that wants its society to be permanent and seeks to partner with the world to create harmony.
The example for a domination culture is one of a pyramid. The vast base is dictated and controlled from a smaller point. Our oligarchy style of government in the United States best represents this culture. The very fact that nearly 60% of our Federal government’s budget goes to the military exemplifies this notion. We dominate the world with our military - over 750 bases in over 150 countries. 2% of the worlds population owns 80% of all the wealth. How has all that wealth migrated to the very top of this pyramid for so long? Through domination of course.
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As a young man growing up in this wonderful state I’ve seen the growth of the local area around me. I still recall the farmlands when I first moved to Pasco county nearly 10 years ago. Now they are all gone, replaced by rolled out lawns of Bermuda grass, cul de sacs, and neat rows of similar looking houses. I recall as a young man building some of those homes: installing windows, replacing dishwashers with custom brand new dishwashers, adding water softeners to neighborhoods far away from any development, with the closest road being I-75. Yes I grew up in the boom that was the post 9/11 years.
I’m 24 years old now, recalling the remarkable growth that I’ve seen over those years working on the growth in Pasco gives me reflection. Reflection on George W. Bush’s speech where he mentioned for America to go shopping. Yes I, too, got caught up into the fantasy of an easily accessible credit card line and a brand new plasma screen TV. We Americans consumed to our hearts content on easily borrowed money, second mortgages, and home equity loans. I don’t know how many times I’ve recalled seeing ads for debt consolidating or a new book proclaiming how to get out of debt. Easy money creates easy consuming. Now looking back I notice the hypocrisy. We are still currently at war in two nations for a greater length of time than even World War II. Yet at home, we bought up brand new homes and filled them with brand new things only to turn around and get rid of them when a brand new thing of another product came out. We became gluttonous as a nation.
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