The NEW YORK TIMES speaks

Here's what the 830,000 subscribers to the New York Times were reading yesterday:

THE EARTH IS FULL

June 7, 2011
By Thomas L. Friedman

You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once?

 

Thomas L. Friedman

"The only answer can be denial," argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World.  "When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the worl, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required."

Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding.

This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity.

“If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.”
It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.”

We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there.
We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet.

But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.”

We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.”

Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist.

“We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.”

I hope he's right.

Solar Highways!

This was sent to me this morning by my sister and bro-in-law. It is absolutely amazing!!! If you don't do anything else today, PLEASE WATCH THIS!

http://www.wimp.com/solarhighways/

I have to believe that the same ingenuity that took us to the moon, invented computers, the internet, Facebook, etc. etc., must have the ability to focus on urgent environmental issues and creatively, ingeniously, solve problems. The implementation of solar highways is a brilliant idea. My brain doesn't work like that! I am in awe of engineers, and chemists, and physicists whose minds can imagine such things...to wake up in the morning with the plan for a solar highway blossoming in my head would be inconceivable. Take this morning, for instance...I woke up knowing that I could roll up old bath towels and make a perfect yoga bolster pillow! That's my mind in a nutshell!

I'm grateful for this video. After immersing myself for weeks in literature that spells out very clearly how we have traumatized and compromised our beautiful planet, this offers a glimmer of hope. It brings a moderate balance to the scales that were tipping dangerously toward the doom and despair side of things. We are what we eat, read, think, and I'm ready to expand my diet to include hope. It makes a healthy dessert.

Peak Oil and Yoga

The challenges our planet faces are three-pronged: decreasing supplies of fossil fuels, increasing temperatures, and overpopulation. As those three progress they bring with them a host of consequences that are mind-blowing. In my quest for enlightenment my path is also three-pronged: reading, writing, and yoga. I am currently reading, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas Friedman, The Flooded Earth, by Peter Ward, and The Transition Handbook, by Rob Hopkins.

One of the concepts in the Friedman book presents a perspective that hadn't occurred to me. Simply put, the United States of America has enjoyed several decades of unprecedented growth, wealth, luxury, and power. We haven't been humble about it either, and other countries have loved us, hated us, and wanted to be us. Until recently the idea that any other country could "be us" was inconceivable. It's a different story now. China, India, and the Middle East are developing at astounding speed with little or no concern for 'going green.' As they race to duplicate the "American Dream" model in their own countries the stress on earth's resources, atmosphere, and economy grows exponentially.

This poses a bit of a moral dilemma. Would you want to be the American who steps in and says, "Oh, pardon me, ummm, it seems that we here in the U.S. have depleted much of the earth's natural resources. We will be needing whatever is left to sustain our superior lifestyle and our position as a global super-power. If you want to grow, you can't copy us or you will destroy any hope of sustainable life on earth."

How utterly presumptious, and yet, how utterly true. I find my mind racing around that one. It's the same out-of-control feeling I have when I awaken from a bad dream, heart pounding, still caught up in whatever nightmarish ordeal I wasn't surviving at the moment. After the nightmare I can slowly calm my fears as I tell myself, "It was just a dream...it was just a dream."

The real-life situation is tougher. As I immerse myself in the facts, the examples, and the numbers, the inevitability of the outcome looms large. Normally rock-solid, emotionally stable, mentally balanced I begin to sense a tilt. I know myself. If I continue to feed on the facts, examples, and numbers I will go into sensory overload and become apathetic. It's a defense mechanism that seems to be epidemic in our culture. So I slide my Raja Yoga DVD into the slot on the laptop. Guided by the soothing voice of Bidyut K. Bose (BK to those who know him) I bring my racing mind back to my own breath. Everything slows down. Shoulders relax. For 40 minutes I am mindful only of the present moment. I am right here, right now, grateful for this life.

Balance restored, I go to my blog and write. There are things I can do and there are things I cannot do. I can become informed. I can inform others. I can buy, eat, work, and play locally. I can grow some of my own food in one of many community gardens. I can consciously consume less of everything. I can buy organic produce to help support those in my area who have devoted themselves to growing and supplying clean food. I can work toward a closed loop lifestyle where I create no waste. And I can learn from my neighbors who have already been doing these things while I was oblivious.

The Price at the Pump

I used to drive a Mercedes ML430 SUV. I liked the fact that it was a quality vehicle and a workhorse, much, I thought, like me. It was functional and at the same time portrayed the appropriate image of a successful business person, supporting my ego appropriately. It was snowy white with tan leather interior and it slurped premium grade gasoline at an alarming rate.

For awhile it didn’t matter. Gas was cheap. I could fill up the tank for under $30. Then things started to shift. I remember the price of gas climbing, first creeping over $2/gallon, then $3. At that point, when the needle on my gauge approached empty my palms would get clammy. My gut would clench and my brow would prickle with tiny beads of sweat.

That was then. This morning I passed the gas station and noticed the price at the pump. My response was familiar, the faint nausea, the expected fear-clench of the gut. But today that response was triggered by a dramatic DROP in the price of gas. Today my reaction came from a different place. Today I have greater concerns than the impact of the price of gas on my pocketbook.

Falling gas prices indicate a culture oblivious to its precarious place in its own history. We are on the descending side of petroleum production. Let me say that again. We are on the DESCENDING SIDE OF PETROLEUM PRODUCTION. Simply put, the world's supply of oil is running out. Yet we continue to demand more, more, more...cheaper, cheaper, cheaper.

I find it deeply disturbing that the powerful entities we depend upon to protect our interests, (government of the people, by the people, for the people) are madly scrambling to scrape the remnants of incredible wealth from the earth. They are doing so with full knowledge of the consequences. The oil summits, the energy conferences, the sustainability briefings, point to the immediacy of the threat. But the warnings are falling on power hungry deaf ears. The government has a huge investment in keeping the capitalistic, consumer driven money machine grinding. For all we, "the people" know, it is business as usual. All is well.

It’s not that there isn’t a plan of sorts. According to the U. S. Energy Information Administration’s Annual Energy Outlook – 2011, our growing demand for oil will be “…offset by the increased use of biofuels (much of which are produced domestically), demand reductions resulting from the adoption of new vehicle fuel economy standards, and rising energy prices. Rising fuel prices also spur domestic energy production across all fuels—particularly, natural gas from plentiful shale gas resources—and temper the growth of energy imports.”

So basically, if I understand this correctly, we can rest assured that our lives will continue undisturbed. Biofuels and natural gas extracted from shale on our very own turf will save us. I wonder what we will eat if it becomes more lucrative for farmers to grow biofuel crops. As far as extracting natural gas from shale, in 2010, CBS aired an expose on 60 Minutes indicating that "the process for extracting natural gas from shale is a difficult and costly endeavor." And what is this about “demand reductions resulting from new vehicle fuel economy standards and rising energy prices”? To me that sounds like demand for oil will be reduced because only the wealthy will be able to afford to buy gas.

All that is alarming enough, but the Energy Outlook report goes on to say that in 2011 we will continue to rely on coal, another fossil fuel, as the largest source of electricity generation with no additional constraints on CO2 emissions. So what if the polar icecaps melt? So what if the temperature of the atmosphere exceeds the tipping point? We, the people, will be plugged in and turned on.

These days I drive my hybrid as little as possible. I intentionally plan trips to accomplish my errands in a small radius. I’m getting to know my neighbors and my neighborhood. I have a feeling in the days ahead we are going to need each other. And I watch the price of gas with different eyes.

Beyond the yellow brick road...

The eight acres where I grew up had three distinct landmarks: The Grove, The Meadow, and The River. The Grove was a lush stand of deciduous tree life sprung from a carpet of feathery fern fronds. We picnicked there. Treeless, The Meadow stretched over six acres of natural prairie grasses and wildflowers. In early spring native asparagus grew at its border. In summer the sweetness of wild strawberries lured us to comb its bounty for those juicy mouthfuls. The Mississippi River ran the length of the property line to the south. Like a living thing, its constant motion and ever-changing face thrilled us through childhood. Those places anchored us. The land supported us.

At first there was a small garden behind the house. As years passed it grew into an acre of raspberries, several beehives, and prolific apple trees. An enormous vegetable plot provided massive amounts of organic produce that we ate, canned, froze, and preserved for long winter months. Planting defined spring; canning defined fall.

In addition to the eight acres near town, we also had a 300 acre farm 30 miles away. When my friends were going with their families on summer vacations I was going with my family to The Farm. Haying defined summer. After weeks of mowing the hay, raking it into windrows, converting it into tight, 100 pound bales, and hoisting them from the field onto the hay wagon, our arms were strong and our faces were freckled and tan.

As the chill and long darkness of winter settled upon our acres, we rested. The pantry was stocked with row upon row of gleaming jars of honey gold, carrot orange, bean green, pickled beet burgundy, and apple red. Packed to the lid, the mammoth chest freezer housed raspberries, corn on the cob, venison (from The Farm,) and fish (from The River).

My family’s self-sufficient lifestyle was the norm for many not that long ago. Now I have about a week’s supply of food in the fridge. The grocery stores in my city could feed the population for about three days if suddenly the trucks stopped coming. I’ve heard it said that, as a culture, we are about 72 hours away from starvation.

Maybe for this generation, the twenty and thirty something’s, it is hard to picture a simpler life. All they have known is an oil dependent existence. Addictions are hard to break and we are addicted to the oil rich life. But I am here to tell you that there is another way. It is kinder, gentler, a way of being in the world that cooperates with the changing seasons, integrates life with earth and sky, and is sustainable. I’m thinking of the words from the Elton John song:

“So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can't plant me in your penthouse
I'm going back to my plough

Back to the howling old owl in the woods
Hunting the horny back toad
Oh I've finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road”

CO2 and the myth

You know how it is when an idea begins to germinate in your head? At first it is prenatal, just a seed, small and undefined. Then as you turn your attention to it, imagining different possibilities, it begins to take on an identity. If it is a really good idea and the potential it holds is appealing, excitement builds and more and more energy is poured into the story around the idea. Over time the story becomes believable. You essentially begin to mentally occupy the scenario you have envisioned and take action to bring it about.

Driving today, shrouded in a voluminous cloud of deadly emissions spewing from the bus in front of me, I wondered what my city would look like without snarls of cars, trucks, and buses on the freeways. I imagined how quiet it would be...how clean the air would smell. I thought about people biking or walking and how friendly that would feel. So safe. Of course if we were all peddling or on foot we would have to live near our workplace. How convenient.

Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute calls this an "alternative story field." What I began to imagine while I was driving behind the bus is a myth. It is a situation that doesn't exist here. But I started wanting it to. It represents a simpler, more leisurely and connected way of life. It feels more appealing than this frenetic existence we create for ourselves going compulsively fast, accomplishing unprecedented amounts of work, and consuming voraciously.

Is it possible to plant an idea seed that could generate enough excitement to effectively change the way we live? Rob Hopkins asked that question and found an answer. He tried his method in Totnes, England, and was so successful that in 2008 he published The Transition Handbook - From Oil
Dependency to Local Resilience, so other cities could follow his lead and begin their Energy Descent. The plan is brilliant in its simplicity. Basically he helps a town envision life without oil. Then the people in the town begin to tell stories about what that would look like. Pretty soon, given enough energy and attention, the stories they have fabricated feel more true and desireable than their current way of life and they begin to implement the changes they have envisioned.

Blasting people with gloom, doom, and destruction is not an effective motivator. Offering a carrot that is sweeter and more carroty than the alternative, however, seems to be highly motivational. As of Sept. 2010, because of Hopkins' Handbook, over 300 Transition Communities have come into existence world wide. As I scour the web for information I see there are Transition groups meeting in neighborhoods just blocks from me. It baffles me no end how I could not have heard of peak oil, permaculture, energy descent...! But the blank looks I get when I start to talk about these subjects confirms that I am not alone in my ignorance. The more I learn the more deeply rooted is my conviction that, in the scheme of things, there is nothing more urgently worthy of our attention than this.

We are the Privileged Ones

There are many places to go in the mind when considering the future. I think we all know on some level that change is the only constant. Look at the past 60 years! We went from black and white TV with two networks to…you fill in the blank. We went from ringing an operator who then connected us manually to our party (on a party line where 5 or 6 other families could pick up and listen in any time) to cell phones.

Think of the evolution of the cell phone from the monster device with pull-out antenna to the pocket portable machine of today that includes a calculator, address book, camera, internet, music, apps…! The first human to be propelled into space happened just 50 years ago. The first home computer introduced by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak hit the marketplace 35 years ago. That computer was the first Apple and it cost $25.

What made this unprecedented progress possible? Cheap energy. When petroleum first became available, more was produced than needed. It was used for oil lamps and medicine but little else. Then in 1878 Karl Benz patented the first combustion engine which became the miracle machine that powered the automobile. Thirty years later, in 1908, Henry Ford designed the Model T which quickly became so popular that they sold faster than Ford could produce them. In 19 years Ford produced 15 million cars.

As of this moment, as I write this article, 19,430,360 cars have been produced already this year, with 4 more rolling off assembly lines worldwide every second. These statistics are available at www.worldmeters.info which also informs us that “…over 600,000,000 passenger cars travel the streets and roads of the world today.” It’s important to note that passenger cars make up only 87% of petro guzzling vehicles. The additional 13% adds another 78 million vehicles to that already staggering figure.

The automobile is a good example of what miracles cheap energy has wrought in our lives. But it is only one example. There are thousands of similar “leaps” in technology which, moment by moment, devour the liquid gold we are pumping out of the earth at an alarming rate.

What does this mean? It means that we are the privileged ones who have enjoyed the benefits of the blinding progress oil has afforded us over the past 60 years. It also means we are the ones responsible for ensuring “life after oil” for the next generations. Our mindset as we proceed is crucial. On this note Tom Atlee of the Co-Intelligence Institute writes:

“Whether I expect the best or the worst, my expectations interfere with my will to act.

I've started viewing both optimism and pessimism as spectator sports, as forms of disengagement masquerading as involvement. Both optimism and pessimism trick me into judging life and betting on the odds, rather than diving into life with my whole self, with my full co-creative energy. I think the emerging crises call us to transcend such false end-games like optimism and pessimism. I think they call us to act like a spiritually healthy person who has just learned they have heart disease: We can use each dire prognosis as a stimulant for reaching more deeply into life and co-creating positive change.

And so I've come to conclude that all the predictions -- both good and bad -- tell us absolutely nothing about what is possible. Trends and events only relate to what is probable. Probabilities are abstractions. Possibilities are the stuff of life, visions to act upon, doors to walk through. Pessimism and optimism are both distractions from living life fully.”

We have before us an unprecedented opportunity to creatively design a future for ourselves and our children’s children. We can be tremendously excited or immobilized by fear. We can employ the same creative genius that spawned the evolutionary leaps ahead of the past 60 years toward formulating plans for the new reality approaching. Or we can bury our heads in the sand and go about business as usual. For a little while longer we still have that choice.