The roaring twenties, again. - by Robb

In a recent interview with Bill Moyers, Holly Sklar, columnist and author of the book "Raise the Floor" and director of "Business for Shared Prosperity", made the following points.

• US Wages adjusted for inflation are lower than they were in the 1970's

• US Minimum wage adjusted for inflation is lower than it was in the 1950's.

• The US has the highest spread of financial inequality of any industrialised nation.

• The US has the highest rates of poverty in the developed world.

• 39 other countries in the world have lower child mortality rates than the US.

• Lack of universal health care is killing small businesses.


She goes on to say,

"We've been living the American dream in reverse.....income and wealth inequality have gone back to the 1920's, back at levels we saw right before the great depression."

Here are some more points I noted from that interview. This reversal is the result of the significant gains made in worker productivity going not to the workers but to the wealthy. The richest get richer as the poor working class struggles harder to make ends meet. The middle class is disappearing.

Leaner and meaner has not led to making the US more competitive, rather the US economy has been driven into the dirt, corporate raider style, to enable the rich to skim off every last ounce of value for themselves. Infrastructure is crumbling, R&D is declining, education is failing, adequate health care is only for the elite. Much of this is due to the union busting strategies created by Ronald Reagan and improved upon ever since. The political system now accepts that hourly wage jobs keep people in poverty rather than lifting them out of poverty. By keeping the minimum wage down the politicians are keeping all the hourly wages above that level down as well. 80% of the workers in the US are hourly wage workers. In 1968 the minimum wage adjusted for inflation was $9.88, it is now $5.85.

Americans have compensated for this situation by increasing personal debt. The credit crunch is proving that practice unsustainable.

Now here are some thoughts of my own. The US can bounce back. The US can move toward sustainability, here are just a few things you can do; first increase your own resiliency by leading a more sustainable life, get out of and stay out of debt, build local economy, then get active on a national scale. Support the adoption of universal health care, support your local union, bring in a reasonable and just minimum wage. Support investment in the infrastructure of the country, including renewable energy to create low carbon jobs. Help the country shift away from unsustainable business/corporate practices that encourage war, global warming, and the plundering of the commons by the wealthy. Demand campaign finance reform. Get involved.

Get government out of the pocket of the corporations and give it back to the people.

James Hansen is the man! - Robb

He warned congress about global warming and climate change in 1988.

He's dealt with the Bush administration's attempts to muzzle him and the truth he speaks.

He has remained a shining light of rationality and scientific veracity attempting to illuminate our dire situation for over 20 years.

He continues to draw attention to the folly of coal fired power plants as well as the failure of the IPCC to call for strong enough steps towards mitigation of climate change and resultant sea level rise.

He maintains that the safe level of Co2 in the atmosphere is 350ppm. We are now at 385ppm.

Yesterday he told congress that Big Energy executives who have waged a war of disinformation and caused delay in dealing with this issue, much the same as the tobacco industry blurred the connection between cancer and smoking, should be put on trial for crimes against humanity.

This puts me in the difficult position of disagreeing with George Monbiot who agrees with Hansen on most things but not that these executives should be prosecuted. See his article at the Guardian. Read his book Heat.

People will die as a direct result of human caused climate change, they are already dying in the poorest countries on earth due to drought, a large factor in the conflict in Darfur, brought on by global warming. Hundreds of millions will be facing drastic water shortages, and the conflict this brings, as the himalayan glaciers disappear, likely by 2030. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi's, thousands of Americans, and over a hundred Brits have died due to our lack of response to our addiction to oil. Had we accepted our impact on the climate through our burning of oil back in 1988 as James Hansen suggested, we would likely never have gotten involved in a war for oil.

Until the developed world accepts that it's levels of consumption are destroying the foundations human survival and culture rest on we will continue to kill. We are not likely to accept it as a people as long as we are subjected to the sustained campaign of disinformation driven by the big energy companies. Even the US intelligence agencies view climate change as a security threat as reported on NPR.

I agree with James Hansen on this one.

LIVING FOR CHANGE By Grace Lee Boggs

This was posted on the community gardens listserve. It is so good I couldn't resist re-posting it here. Here is a bit of bio on Mrs Boggs from the Milwaukee Renaissance blog,

"Grace is 92 and still going strong. She won a PH.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1938, partnered with C.L.R. James in a highly signficant “anti-communist” left tendency in the 1940s, married renowned Detroit auto worker/philosopher Jimmy Boggs in the 1950s, was a major leader in the labor, civil rights, peace, black power, Asian American women’s and environmental movements in the 1960s and 1970s, and, since the 1980s, has been a major planetary actor of the permaculture movement."

Look for her interview on Bill Moyers on PBS.

LIVING FOR CHANGE: A (NEARLY) CARFREE SOCIETY IS POSSIBLE
By Grace Lee Boggs
Michigan Citizen, June 22-28, 2008

A lot of people are angry these days about the high price of gas. But one hundred years from now our posterity may bless this period when soaring gas prices finally forced Americans to bike or take public transportation to work and to start dreaming of neighborhood stores within walking distance.

An interview with Enrique Penalosa by Deborah Solomon in the June 6 New York Times Magazine inspired this thought. My eye was caught by his statement that "The 20th century was a horrible detour in the evolution of the human habitat. We were building much more for cars' mobility than for children's happiness."

Never having heard of Penalosa, I googled him and discovered that he was a journalist born and educated in the United States. Elected Mayor of Bogota Colombia, on his third try in 1998, he served until 2001 when he was forced out by term limits. Since then he has become a senior fellow at the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy and is advising other world cities on transportation.

Penalosa believes that "We need to walk, just as birds need to fly. We need to be around other people. We need beauty. We need contact with nature. And most of all, we need not to be excluded. We need to feel some sort of equality."

To make Bogota a city that could be enjoyed by the carless majority, he closed 120 kilometers of roads to motor vehicles for seven hours every Sunday. This enabled a million and a half people of all ages and incomes to come out and ride bicycles, jog, and simply gather with others in the community.

Penalosa views children as a kind of "indicator species." "A quality city is not one that has great roads but one where a child can safely go anywhere on a bicycle. If we can build a successful city for children, we will have a successful city for all people."

"When we tell a three-year-old child anywhere in the world, 'Watch out -- a car' the child will jump in fright -- and with good reason because more than 200,000 children are killed by cars every year? In any month today there are more children killed by cars than were eaten by wolves all through the Middle Ages. But we have come to think that that's totally normal. As soon as our children come out of their houses, we are afraid they might get killed. 5,000 years of cities, is that where we are?"

Penalosa learned from Jaime Lerner, who was the maverick mayor of Curitiba Brazil, for 3 four year terms between 1971 and 1992. The three keys to a livable city, according to Lerner, are Mobility, Sustainability and Diversity.

Believing that a livable city begins with children respecting the city, Lerner gave Curitiba children the responsibility for separating and recycling garbage. He gave the Curitiba homeless a stake in a clean city by offering them a bag of food in exchange for a bag of litter. He speeded up the buses by building stations where riders could pay fares before boarding.

You don't need a lot of money to come up with measures like these What you need is the courage to think outside the box of "economic development" or trying to catch up with the cities of the Global North which are in deep trouble.

After the splitting of the atom, Einstein warned that we were drifting towards catastrophe because we had changed everything but the way we think. Imagination, he said, is more important than knowledge.

Penalosa quotes a Danish urbanist, Jan Gehl, who says that a good city is like a good party ? people don't want to leave. It is a city where people want to be out of their houses. The good city is the one where people want any pretext to be in the parks, on the sidewalks, in the cafes.

We have a choice: between a city that is friendlier to cars or a city that is friendlier to people, especially children.

Small farms are better

The quote I used in the last post is from an excellent article, "Small is Bountiful" over on celsiasº
from George Monbiot. Thanks to Dave Oxford for the link. Click on the word celsiasº above or the title of the post.

Quote from George Monbiot

"Big business is killing small farming. By extending intellectual property rights over every aspect of production; by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all, it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate." -George Monbiot

Thanks to the Greenhorn website, the irresistible fleet of bicycles, where I found it. Increase your personal sustainability, find a way to purchase your food from small local non corporate non GM family farmers. Here's another tip, the animal agriculture industry does more harm to the atmosphere than all the worlds transport combined. Eat less meat! Particularly red meat and dairy. Pledge to have a meat and dairy free day once a week. Here's a link to a more detailed report on the topic from EarthSave

Greenhorns Trailer video

I ran across this blog for the Greenhorns film and watched the trailer. It is a film about young farmers in America. I'll be keeping an eye out for it. Good stuff!

Rob Hopkins Transition video #3

From the International Forum on Globalisation September 12 2007
Rob Hopkins - Transition Town

Rob Hopkins Transition video #2

From the International Forum on Globalisation September 12 2007
Rob Hopkins - Transition Town

Rob Hopkins Transition video #1

From the International Forum on Globalisation September 12 2007
Rob Hopkins - Transition Town

Simple solutions to the food crisis - video

In the midst of a commodity prices boom, high volatility in the oil marker, and record high food prices, the International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) sets a new agenda for global food production. Al Jazeera's Tanya Page says a new report will suggest that modern agriculture will have to change radically if the world is to avoid social breakdown and environmental collapse.

Vertical farming w/video - By Robb

If the population continues to grow as predicted, something I don't personally believe is possible, we will have nine billion humans, give or take half a billion, by 2050, mostly in cities. How will we feed them all? It is obvious the current methods of food transport are unsustainable and we would need 10 billion more hectares of farmland to do the job. So would we cut down all the remaining forest, the only effective carbon sequestration we have and are likely to have in the next fifty years, and plow under an area the size of Brazil with all the attendant water pollution, loss of diversity, and global warming effects of current industrial farming? I don't think so. Even if we hold the population at current levels cities need to become sustainable just as a households do. This means local food for one thing, closing the nutrient cycle by recycling waste for another.
I don't tend to favor high tech solutions but this urban farming concept, a 30 story tower that could feed 50,000 people is all organic, provides local food, recycles waste, and provides jobs is attractive. I wonder, could it be retrofitted to appropriately situated towers already in existence? Even if purpose built it would certainly be a better allocation of resources than some multinational headquarters full of computers. Here's a more in depth article on this concept over at Plenty magazine.

Transition towns......in the US?! - by Robb

The transition town movement is a UK based intiative that aims to bring towns and cities into a sustainable and more self sufficient way of living. Utilizing careful planning, a locally specific energy descent plan, local food production, and an inclusive non political approach to organizing, this permaculture based movement is growing rapidly. From their website,

"A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

'for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?'

The resulting coordinated range of projects across all these areas of life leads to a collectively designed energy descent pathway."

The list of towns involved include over 50 communities across England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, some large like Nottingham and Bristol, as well as small villages and towns like Ottery St. Mary and Mayfield. There are transition towns in Australia, New Zealand, and now even 2 in the US. Boulder Colorado and Sandpoint Idaho have become transition towns.

As more folks realize that gasoline isn't going to get significantly cheaper, water is going to get more precious, food is going to get more expensive, and the natural systems that support our excessive way of life are going to continue to collapse, cities and towns will need coherent plans to provide for their citizens and prevent chaos. The transition town movement is a functioning model of communities working together to deal with the twin threats of climate change and peak oil. It will provide those that pursue it a level of resiliency and flexibility in the face of hard times to come that those who pursue business as usual will not have.

Perhaps it is time to dredge up the old 60's chant "United we stand, divided we fall". Check it out, think about it, could your town become a transition town? The time is now to get started.