Worldchanging

The Tree House: London's Pioneering Zero-Carbon House

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-21T12:10:18-08:00

Will Anderson was studying for an MA in energy and sustainable design when he began his ambitious self-build, zero-carbon home in Clapham, south London, in 2004. It was completed in 2006 and is a prime example of best practice in green building. His Diary of an Eco-builder catalogues the whole building process and the architecturally stunning final result:

September 30, 2004: Will Anderson found his plot of land in Clapham, south London, in an estate agents. It had planning permission for a house he didn't want to build

November 10, 2004: After the site is cleared for construction and foundations laid on virgin ground, heat pump pipes are inserted into boreholes 25m deep. Coolant is pumped through the pipes, drawing energy from the Earth to heat the house

December 14, 2004: The outline of the house footprint emerges for the first time. A wooden mold is constructed before concrete is poured in.

July 20, 2005: A moisture-permeable air barrier is laid over plywood sheeting. This will let moisture escape from the walls but prevent heat losses from uncontrolled droughts

September 7, 2005: The crucial final layer of the roof is installed: the photovoltaic power station. Installers from Solar Century prepare the specially designed rain screen that the PV modules are fixed to.

Staircase: Tree trunks supporting the staircase were hand-picked by Will Anderson from a sustainable forest floor in Sussex, managed by Timber Resources

Bathroom: The bath was salvaged and Kirkstone slate was used for the walls and floors. Kirkstone quarrymen rebuild the fell behind them to protect the landscape in the Lake District national park. Hot water is provided by a combination of the heat pump and a solar thermal panel and water consumption for the house is low: only 60 litres a person a day compared with an average of 150 litres a person a day.

Study: Huge windows allow maximum daylight to pour into the room at the top of the three-story house. The parquet flooring was salvaged and laid by Will Anderson himself, which he says was a 'nightmare' job.

Garden: The pond in the completed house. Rainwater is collected but only for garden use

Living room: The living area is furnished with secondhand furniture — Will Anderson's four cats particularly appreciate the underfloor heating

The completed house: All the hard work pays off. The sycamore, which inspired the Tree House name and the design for the gates, can be seen to the right.

This piece originally appeared in The Guardian.

Image credits: Will Anderson

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Green Building at 12:10 PM)

Safe and Sustainable: New Sanitation System in Kyrgyzstan

Julia Levitt — 2008-11-21T11:00:23-08:00

With new technological innovations for humanitarian aid – like the solar powered ambulances in Mumbai, or SMS technologies spreading aid and awareness – it can be easy to lose sight of more basic initiatives to address the most basic human needs. An international conference on Ecological Safety, held earlier this month in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, called attention to a dangerous sanitation issue by offering an inspiring and feasible solution.

The problem: international donors are still promoting pit latrines, says Dr. Claudia Wendland of Women in Europe for a Common Future (WECF), but most families can't afford to pay for safe emptying of the pits. In humid climates like those found in Central Asia, Caucasus and Eastern Europe, the latrines can become dangerous as a result, often leaking and polluting puddles in nearby streets and gardens, leaking into streams or even leaching into groundwater. Contamination ruins an already-limited clean drinking water supply, and puts the local community, particularly children, at risk for bacterial disease.

A new and more sustainable sanitation system promises to change the game, if advocates can generate the resources and policy action necessary to support it. According to Sascha Gabizon, executive director of WCEF, dry or low-flush urine diverting toilets, combined with natural filtration ponds to purify grey water from sinks and showers, is a much safer sanitation system that can be implemented at a cost similar to that of the latrines.

One major aim of the conference was to demonstrate the feasibility of this system on a local level, and to push for legislation that supports leapfrogging to this and other sanitation systems that reuse nutrients and save water.

According to a release from the WECF:

The 200 participants of the conference were invited to visit 3 demonstration projects showing how wastewater from kitchens and bathrooms was efficiently cleaned using a "soil filter," a sealed pond in which sand and plants clean the wastewater to achieve the quality of bathing water, The participants also visited 2 different types of dry urine diverting toilets. The cost of the toilets vary between 200 and 450 Euro, including a wash facility and light, this is much cheaper than having to build a flush-toilet and connecting to a sewage system, which in most villages does not exist in any case. The cost of the soil filter for 5 people amounts to about 950 euro, also less expensive than connecting to a sewage system.

"In regions without central water supply ... they can be used without flushing water, are hygienic and safe and reuse the nutrients from urine and faeces in agriculture. Ponds and constructed wetlands are natural systems for treating wastewater in cases where flushing toilets exist," says Wendland.

Gabizon says the WCEF strategy is to first demonstrate the new sustainable sanitation systems "in a variety of small and large scale applications, from households to schools to entire villages." This phase will rely on aid funding. "However, once their efficiency and cost benefits demonstrated, we hope that all countries in the EECCA region will join the water and health protocol, and thus work under a common legally binding framework, where performance based targets will be set, which would mean that pit latrines would no longer be an acceptable solution but that a variety of other solutions would be available. Our aim is that each household and each school or other public building has access to a safe sanitation system."

Photos courtesy of WCEF.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Columns at 11:00 AM)

Headlines from Worldchanging Seattle (11/21/08)

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-21T10:26:05-08:00

This week we're excited to launch the newest installment of our series Seattle to the World: 100 Best Innovations from the Emerald City. We've taken suggestions from readers, and searched on our own, to identify the most game-changing innovations from Seattle's arts community.

Seattle to the World: The Arts
Artists play a crucial role in the development of cities. In order to preserve their influence on the areas that are most special to our city and our unique Seattle culture, we must value the artists and the art that makes such magic happen.

Youngstown Cultural Arts Center: A Resource By the Community, For the Community
A historic Delridge schoolhouse has been revitalized as a resource offering arts education, performance, low-income artist housing, and more.

ArtsCorps: Treating Creativity as a Basic Right
“Education is a social justice issue. I’m always surprised when people don’t see it that way,” says Tina LaPadula, Arts Corps’ Education Director and co-founder.

Mini Mart City Park: Infusing an urban wasteland with hope and imagination
The Mini Mart park is exactly the kind of living, breathing, interactive teaching tool that will instill hope for cleaning up our past mistakes and embarking on a better future.

Intiman Theatre's American Cycle: Preserving cultural heritage, promoting community connection
With its launching of the American Cycle in 2004, the Intiman Theatre has secured its place as a leader in civic engagement.

Are you here in Seattle? We'd like to hear from you! Check out the local blog and leave comments, or contact editor[at]Worldchanging[dot]com if you have ideas or would like to write.

Top photo: A boy examines a street mural in Seattle's Georgetown neighborhood.
Photo credit: flickr/slightlynorth, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in About Worldchanging at 10:26 AM)

Open Thread: Sustainability/Innovation Implications of the Meltdown

Alex Steffen — 2008-11-21T00:52:06-08:00

This morning in Amsterdam the media is reporting a financial "meltdown," with stocks back to the level they were before the Dot.com Boom and international credit markets "seizing."

Question: what are the implications of this meltdown for sustainability and social innovation?

What are the implications in terms of pursuing sustainability and social innovation? What new approaches are now possible? What new approaches are now necessary? What kinds of unexpected innovations and solutions may we see emerge?

Also, what are the implications for those trying to advance sustainability and social innovation? Clearly, there are many ways in which a business case can be made for various sustainability/S.I. answers, and there are strong arguments to be made for a bright green recovery, but in what ways will the meltdown change how do what we do (and how we sell what we do)?

I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Columns at 12:52 AM)

Campaign Round-Up: Carbon Regulations, Transportation, E-Waste and More

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-20T16:12:30-08:00

Every week, we're amazed by the number of smart contests, campaigns and other initiatives that organizations around the world bring to our attention. These roundup posts are a way for us to shout out the best of what's crossed our desks. -- The WC Editorial Team

FT Climate Change Challenge
The Financial Times and Forum for the Future have teamed up to search the globe for the most innovative new solution to the effects of climate change. That standout innovation could be a new technology, system or service, novel organization or business model. One winner will receive a $75,000 prize to help turn his or her idea into reality. Entries will be accepted from now until January 30, 2009, and the winner will be announced in April 2009.

Time to Lead
On December 11, 2008, European political leaders will decide what their response to global warming is going to be. Last year, they agreed to a 30 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. Now, with the downturn in the economy, that deal is under threat and time is running out. As a result, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace and World Wildlife Fund through the coordination of the Climate Action Network (CAN) formed the campaign Time to Lead. The movement urges European citizens and organizations to act by contacting local legislators and issuing support of the 30 percent reduction in Europe’s own carbon emissions by 2020.

Transportation For America
We need a bold agenda to fix our roads and bridges; build high speed trains; invest in public transit, infrastructure for biking and walking, and green innovation. Through this initiative, Transportation for America -- an impressive coalition of diverse interests -- invites concerned citizens to join them in calling on President-elect Barack Obama to commit to building a 21st Century transportation system. Their letter asks Obama to lead us in building complete streets; repairing our highways, bridges and transit systems; and pushing ahead with ready-to-go rail projects ... and to commit to that plan within his first 100 days in office. (Obama recently responded to the campaign's earlier call for an agenda: read his letter here.)

Take Back My TV
With only three months to go until the U.S. digital TV conversion, the Electronics TakeBack Coalition (ETBC) released its new TV Recycling Report Card, grading the major TV manufacturers on their efforts to establish national programs to take back and recycle their old TVs. ETBC estimates that tens of millions of old-style TVs, each of which includes 4-8 pounds of toxic metals, will be disposed in the near future. They could end up in our landfills, or be dumped overseas in developing countries, as profiled in a recent 60 Minutes report. The EPA estimates that there are 99 million unused TVs in storage in the U.S.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Resource - Politics at 4:12 PM)

Geoengineering 'No Substitute' for Climate Targets, UK Minister Warns

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-20T16:03:38-08:00

Geoengineering is a topic we often discuss here on Worldchanging. And while we encourage careful debate concerning this topic, we are cautiously skeptical of any ideas that support tinkering with the intricate systems and delicate balances of the Earth. (Click here for a collection of Worldchanging discussions on Geoengineering.)

UK climate minister Joan Ruddock is wary of reliance on radical technology that could be used by some as an excuse to avoid meeting targets to reduce carbon emissions.

by James Randerson

Research into drastic solutions to climate change such as cloud seeding, sun shades in space and ocean fertilization risks hampering global climate negotiations by giving some countries an excuse for not agreeing to short-term emissions reductions, a UK government minister warned today.
The remarks by Joan Ruddock, a minister in the Department of Energy and Climate Change, appear to be a thinly veiled dig at the Bush administration, whose delegation attempted to insert a section into last year's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on developing technology to block sunlight and cool the planet. The proposed text referred to it as an "important insurance" against the impacts of climate change.
Speaking to MPs on the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills select committee, Ruddock was defending the government's unwillingness to fund research into so-called geoengineering – large-scale, untested interventions that either soak up carbon dioxide or prevent sunlight warming the planet
"The concern is that people who don't want to enter into agreements that mean they have to reduce their emissions might see this as a means of doing nothing, of being able to say, 'science will provide, there will be a way out'," she said, "it could be used politically in that way which would be extremely unfortunate."
She added that funding research on such projects would deflect engineers away from more pressing solutions to climate change such as carbon capture and storage – extracting carbon dioxide from the emissions put out by fossil fuel power stations and injecting it underground.
The science minister Lord Drayson added that many of the proposals – such as launching huge mirrors into space, adding particles into the atmosphere to deflect light or seeding algal blooms in the ocean using iron fertilizer – were extremely costly and had risks that were poorly understood. "Some of the projects that are being postulated under geoengineering do strike one as being in the realm of science fiction," he said.
But Steve Rayner, professor of science and civilization at the Said Business School in Oxford, pointed out that not all options were expensive. Some such as iron fertilization would be within reach of wealthy individuals - he called them, "a 'Greenfinger' rather than 'Goldfinger'."
Currently, the research councils – which decide how public science funding is spent – do not fund any projects into geoengineering directly, although the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council has allocated £3m for an "ideas factory" into potential projects next year.
According to Dr Phil Williamson at the University of East Anglia, who wrote the Natural Environment Research Council's submission to the select committee hearing, around £50m of the government's research spend is peripherally related to geo-engineering.
The select committee's chair, the liberal democrat MP Phil Willis, said he was disappointed with the government's position of adopting only a "watching brief" over the emerging field. "That seems to me a very very negative way of actually facing up to the challenge of the future," he said. "It's a very pessimistic view of emerging science and Britain's place within that emerging science community."
He said government should support many different avenues to tackling climate change. "There have to be plethora of solutions. Some of which we do not know whether they will work, but that is the whole purpose of science."
But the chief scientific advisor to the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Prof Bob Watson, said that funding should be focussed on the most immediate solutions. "I think the question is whether [geoengineering] is the highest priority at the moment given scarce resources.
"First [priority] is actually putting investment into current technologies and pre-commercial technologies such as carbon capture and storage," he said, "Clearly I think this is something which has to be move quickly. I would call it an Apollo-type programme... we need to go in parallel and try multiple approaches simultaneously." He advocated that the EU, US and Japan work together on research into CCS.
Some scientists and engineers will also be disappointed with the government's dismissal of the field. In the introduction to a collection of scientific papers published by the Royal Society in September on the topic Prof Brian Launder of the University of Manchester and Prof Michael Thompson of the University of Cambridge wrote: "While such geoscale interventions may be risky, the time may well come when they are accepted as less risky than doing nothing... There is increasingly the sense that governments are failing to come to grips with the urgency of setting in place measures that will assuredly lead to our planet reaching a safe equilibrium."
· This article was amended on Thursday November 20 2008 to clarify that the figure of £50m mentioned in the piece is the per annum spend by the UK's research councils, not the total government spend. It covers research on climate modeling, carbon capture and storage and 'geoengineering relevant' research work.
This piece originally appeared on The Guardian, for which James Randerson is a science correspondent.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 4:03 PM)

New Thinkers Series: Joshua Wolfe and the GHG Team

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-20T15:12:31-08:00

On Tuesday, we had lunch with Joshua Wolfe, president and founding member of GHG Photos, a new collaborative organization of leading climate change photographers.

He told us a lot about his job as a climate change photographer, which from what we could tell, is one of the more fascinating jobs around. Whether he's climbing mountains with 90 lbs of sensitive equipment and a stash of protein bars; gazing down dizzily through the lens from the window of a prop jet; or performing yet another death-defying feat to get that perfect glacial shot, Wolfe's work has put him face-to-face with more of the changing landscape than most people will ever see. His heartbreakingly beautiful photographs are proof.

But Wolfe and the other GHG photographers have a larger mission. Through their photographs, they hope to help accelerate the conversation about climate change. The photographers routinely look to climate scientists, like those from Columbia University's Earth Institute, and veteran environmental journalists, like Andrew Revkin and Elizabeth Kolbert, to help tell the story of climate change more clearly through science. With images, science and words, they aim to give thousands of new people a better grasp of what is really happening, and why.

One of the biggest obstacles to the debate about climate change, Wolfe says, is the inequity in basic background knowledge of the issue. "If you're a reporter covering climate change, you always have to start at Point A," he says, and it's tough to introduce really intricate concepts when you're always explaining the basic idea. As a result, he worries that stories about climate change seem to many like a series of catastrophic and overwhelming events – like major hurricanes and other natural disasters – but it's harder to explain how they're all related, and to reveal the more insidious creep of planetary symptoms.

By seeking out images of a warming world, and of the science behind understanding and combating climate change, Wolfe and GHG hope to raise the bar of universal understanding, and to make knowledge not only more accessible, but more vivid.

Worldchanging's New Thinkers Series is our way of calling attention to the emerging leaders in a changing world. If you know of an individual or group that we should profile, send an email to Sarahk [at] worldchanging [dot] com.

Image credit: GHG Photos

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Interviews at 3:12 PM)

Ecosystem Services of Tropical Forests to be Protected with Precedent-Setting Memorandum

Sarah Kuck — 2008-11-20T13:11:09-08:00

Earlier this week California, Illinois and Wisconsin joined forces with six states in Brazil and Indonesia to fight climate change in an unprecedented way: the states will develop programs that will protect and restore tropical rainforests to ensure the safety of these essential carbon sinks.

According to a recent release from Marshall Maher of Conservation International, by signing the memorandum of understanding (MOU), the governors are stating that they are willing to pay for the service the tropical forests are providing: storing and absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide.

"When a tropical forest is destroyed, it hurts everyone, no matter where they live," said Peter Seligmann, the chairman and CEO of Conservation International (CI)…The US governors' leadership in this area will help stabilize the Earth's climate by providing effective incentives to conserve these threatened tropical ecosystems that are so critical for supporting the livelihoods of forest-dwelling communities and indigenous peoples."

Governments and institutions around the world are seeing the MOU as a hopeful sign that legislatures are finally willing to take action at the state level, and are optimistic that this proactive measure will encourage others to do the same.

"This would open the door for carbon credits derived from protecting forests to be used for compliance purposes under US climate legislation," said Toby Janson-Smith, the senior director for forest carbon markets in CI's Center for Environmental Leadership in Business. "International negotiators will see that it can be done in a credible and robust way, and that reducing emissions from deforestation should finally be included in the global climate change framework."

The Kyoto Protocol only allows for emissions trading for new or replanted forests. As far as carbon markets go, this has mostly resulted in voluntary financing for forest conservation. Last year’s U.N.-led negotiations in Bali, Indonesia, looked into forest protection as a possible strategy for climate change mitigation, but they have not yet agreed upon such a measure. This measure is unparalleled, for now. Many hope that this effort will provide a model for success that the U.N. can look to during next year's negotiations in Copenhagen.

Thanks to the Environmental Media Alliance for bringing this story to our attention.

Image credit: Flickr/Andy Hadfield.

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(Posted by Sarah Kuck in Biodiversity and Ecosystems at 1:11 PM)

In Construction. Recipes from Scarcity, Ubiquity and Excess

Regine Debatty — 2008-11-20T11:30:26-08:00

No proper building. Not even an architecture project that would give a hint of what its future headquarters would be like. That didn't prevent El Bòlit, a brand new Contemporary Art Center, from opening its borrowed doors a few weeks ago in Girona.

For many Europeans used to flying on the cheap, Girona equals Barcelona or the Costa Brava. Ever since one of the most famous 'no frills' airlines chose the airport as one of their hubs, hordes of travelers land there, grab their luggage on the rotating belt and hop on an hour bus ride that brings them directly to Barcelona centre. They never get to see Girona. They miss a lovely medieval city. Its cathedral is celebrated as one of the finest specimens of Gothic architecture in Spain, there's a local tradition of climbing steps to kiss the butt of a stone lioness and people will invite you to eat chocolate flies. And now there's that new contemporary art space called El Bolit.

The Bòlit was a game popular among children in Catalonia until the middle of the XXth century. "It's a metaphor for a dynamic center, one that is constantly moving and is pushed forward by people", explained its Director, Rosa Pera, to Spanish newspaper El Pais. The opening exhibition of the center proves that, if the center is still waiting for a proper building, it certainly doesn't lack a strong personality, a dauntless attitude and a very promising exhibition programme.

As the introduction to its current show, In Construction. Recipes from Scarcity, Ubiquity and Excess, states:Beyond the construction of a building, the creation of a contemporary art centre involves first and foremost the construction of a discourse, relationships and dialogue. This is why the first exhibition at the new centre focuses on processes that explore new methodologies to articulate narratives with the context as a starting point.

Retrospective Cirugeda. Image courtesy El Bolit

Heading the party is Santiago Cirugeda whose Recetas Urbanas (Urban recipes) are lined up for a retrospective made of models, videos and a brand new intervention. The work of the Sevillan architect fosters the dialogue between institutions and citizens in order to come up with better ideas susceptible to solve the issue of housing and public space management.

Retrospective Cirugeda. Image courtesy El Bolit

Santiago Cirugeda has sometimes been labeled as a "guerilla architect", "a subversive artist", "a urban hacker". His action/constructions are always adapted to the situation. Because his home town, Sevilla, would not authorize him to build a playground, Cirugeda obtained a dumpster permit and installed a playground on top of a dumpster container. In another intervention, he built and occupied a rooftop crane that passersby believed was there only to move building materials. He even posted on you tube a video to demo how to build a temporary flat in your rooftop. Cirugeda's recipes are cheap, fast, accessible to everyone and one of their key ingredient is that some of them exploit the gaps in administrative structure and official procedures. They intervene where the law falls short.

Santiago Cirugeda, Niu. Images courtesy El Bolit

Cirugeda also developed a site specific architectural intervention on the roof of Girona's Sala de La Rambla (where half of the exhibition is hosted.) The temporary infrastructure has been designed with the aim of hosting artistic activities as well as providing a working space for Spanish and international artists invited to work at El Bolit. El Niu (the Nest in catalan) is made of several containers and covered with branches and leaves.

Probably more famous to the new media art community, Michelle Teran opens the second chapter of the exhibition, the one dedicated to Ubiquity. The artist is showing her recipes for making and re-making narratives out of everyday experience inside Girona's intimate Capella de Sant Nicolau.

Screening of videos by Michelle Teran inside the Capella de Sant Nicolau. Image courtesy El Bolit

In her performance series titled Life: A User's Manual, the artist applies potential literature methodologies and uses video scanners to pick up images recorded on wireless security cameras (inside hotel lobby, private home, bank entrances, etc.) Scenes thus recorded in 17 cities around the world are projected in the exhibition space. I had seen the work of Teran in countless exhibitions but it was the first time i had the opportunity to see displayed next to one another not only the videos of her performances, but also the wide range of devices she uses to host the video scanners. Suddenly i realized the breadth and complexity of her work. I was particularly struck by A20 Recall, a collective exercise in cultural memory carried out by the artist over the course of three weeks with the help of residents of Quebec City. The result of the experiment is an online map of made of texts and images documenting situations that arose in response to the fortification of Quebec City during the FTAA Summit of the Americas in 2001.

Technology is used as a tool to discover the significance of the trivial and to re-endow hidden stories with meaning, while fostering a critical spirit among citizens from their immediate surroundings. This is active, collective voyeurism used to combat indifference and oblivion.

The third part of the exhibition is From excess, recipes for an architecture of accumulative thought by Catalan artist Jordi Mitjà. The Catalan artist defines himself as an 'image collector'. He has carefully compiled and slightly edited images recorded by amateur film-makers in the 1970s in order to create a singular portrait of Empordà County in Catalonia.

Installation of Jordi Mitjà. Image courtesi El Bolit

Mitjà has also composed a large-scale installation for El Bòlit. An accumulation of old photos, fragments, left-overs, video, and findings, the piece builds up the foundations of argumental architectures that welcome and rebuff those who, trapped perhaps between illness and therapy, dare to enter.

The smart-looking little man up here isn't very concerned by the exhibition but i'd nevertheless like to introduce you to him. He is Sant Narcís (St Narcissus), Girona's patron saint, famous for having defeated French invaders by throwing swarms of flies at them.

More images from Girona and El Bòlit.

In Construction. Recipes from Scarcity, Ubiquity and Excess runs until January 11, 2009 at El Bòlit, Girona (SP).

This piece originally appeared on Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art.

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(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 11:30 AM)

Image of the Day: Food Security in Japan

Julia Levitt — 2008-11-20T08:26:54-08:00

If you haven't yet seen this video from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (MAFF), you're missing out. One of the cooler PSAs I've ever seen, it offers an entertaining animated rundown of food security, though the concept is never mentioned in so many words (at least in translation).

The dilemmas: Japan's food culture is slipping away; it depends dangerously on imports from a very small group of nations; Japan's agriculture economy is suffering; and Japanese citizens are unhealthy from eating too much meat and greasy food.

The solutions: Japanese citizens should think before they eat; supermarkets should buy healthy, locally produced foods and label them as such; farmers should produce more of what people need to eat.

What's missing from the minimal dialogue, I think, is a mention of the substantial changes in policy needed to help make all of these good things happen (for a background on that, I recommend Michael Pollan's recent essay).

But effective public education like this very viral video is a great first start. And the dancing cows are wonderfully, weirdly mesmerizing.

Thanks to Worldchanging staffer and resident food-sustainability guru Mayling Chung for scouting this one.

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(Posted by Julia Levitt in Food and Farming at 8:26 AM)

New Web Tool: The Solutions Are Waiting

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-19T16:47:24-08:00

Click to load video

Worldchanging ally Michael Schmitz from Berlin sent this terrific video our way earlier this week. He and several friends produced the animation, which reviews (in a weirdly soothing way) the process of climate change, and offers a glimpse of a grim future in which we've done nothing about it. But the main point of the video is hope and education: the animators describe a variety of solutions that will be needed to transform the way our national and social systems operate.

The video underscores some important points: the need for smart policy to support and hasten the development of clean forms of energy, and for regulations that will limit the amount of carbon dioxide that corporations and individuals can create. As the video explains it, implementing the right policies around the best alternative energy options will allow us to drop the worst options – like nuclear power and carbon capture and storage – from our energy portfolio.

At the end of the animation is an interactive tool that allows you to explore solutions for curbing our carbon emissions. You can click around to learn about the efficiency measures, alternative energy options, and various regulation tools that could be used take us from the disastrous 14 gigaton CO2 future we are now facing to the 3 gigaton CO2 future we need.

This brilliant example of citizen media is just one example of a handful of new tools helping to create a base of knowledge necessary for understanding climate change. Though it's designed specifically to address solutions for the Geneva-based NGO Noe21, this video has enough worthwhile info to help many people understand and seek their own answers.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Climate Change at 4:47 PM)

The Last Viridian Note

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-19T15:18:20-08:00

By Bruce Sterling

Recent events have clearly established that the character of the times has changed. The Viridian Design Movement was founded in distant 1999. After the years transpiring – various disasters, wars, financial collapses and a major change in political tone – the world has become a different place.

It remains only to close the Viridian episode gracefully, and to conclude with a few meditative suggestions.

As I explained in the first Viridian speech, any design movement – social movements of any kind, really – should be designed with an explicit expiration date. The year 2012 would have been the extreme to which Viridian could have persisted. Since the course of history has grown quite jittery, this longer term was spared us.

Some Viridian principles can be lightly re-phrased, buffed-up and likely made of practical use in days to come. Others are period notions to be gently tossed into the cultural compost. I could try to describe which are which – but that's a proper job for someone younger.

I'm following current events with keen interest. There's never been a better time for major political and financial interventions in the green space. However, Viridian List is about design interventions, it was not about politics or finance, so a decent reticence is in order at this juncture.

I would like to cordially thank Viridian readers and contributors and advisors for their patience and their generous help over nine years. I hope you feel you derived some benefit from it. I did my best with the effort, I learned a lot by it, and I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I can't say what Viridian may have done for you; that's up to you to judge. Since this is last Viridian note, however, I'd like to describe what Viridian did for me.

Since the halcyon days of 1999 my life has changed radically.

Rather than "thinking globally and acting locally," as in the old futurist theme, I now live and think glocally. I once had a stable, settled life within a single city, state and nation. Nowadays, I divide my time between three different polities: the United States, the European Union and the Balkans. With various junkets elsewhere.

The 400-year-old Westphalian System doesn't approve of my lifestyle, although it's increasingly common, especially among people half my age. It's stressful to live glocally. Not that I myself feel stressed by this. As long as I've got broadband, I'm perfectly at ease with the fact that my position on the planet's surface is arbitrary. It's the nation-state system that is visibly stressed by these changes – it's freaking out over currency flows, migration through airports, offshoring, and similar phenomena.

I know that, by the cultural standards of the 20th century, my newfangled glocal lifestyle ought to bother me. I ought to feel deracinated, and I should suffer from culture shock, and I should stoically endure the mournful silence and exile of a writer torn from the kindly matrix of his national culture. A traditional story.

However, I've been at this life for years now; I really tried; the traditional regret is just not happening. Clearly the existence of the net has obliterated many former operational difficulties.

Furthermore, my sensibility no longer operates in that 20th-century framework. That's become an archaic way to feel, and I just can't get there from here.

Living on the entire planet at once is no longer a major challenge. It's got its practical drawbacks, but I'm much more perturbed about contemporary indignities such as airport terrorspaces, ATM surchanges and the open banditry of cellphone roaming. This is what's troublesome. The rest of it, I'm rather at ease about. Unless I'm physically restrained by some bureaucracy, I don't think I'm going to stop this glocally nomadic life. I live on the Earth. The Earth is a planet. This fact is okay. I am living in truth.

Another major change came through my consumption habits. It pains me to see certain people still trying to live in hairshirt-green fashion – purportedly mindful, and thrifty and modest. I used to tolerate this eccentricity, but now that panicked bankers and venture capitalists are also trying to cling like leeches to every last shred of their wealth, I can finally see it as actively pernicious.

Hairshirt-green is the simple-minded inverse of 20th-century consumerism. Like the New Age mystic echo of Judaeo-Christianity, hairshirt-green simply changes the polarity of the dominant culture, without truly challenging it in any effective way. It doesn't do or say anything conceptually novel – nor is it practical, or a working path to a better life.

My personal relations to goods and services – especially goods – have been revolutionized since 1999. Let me try your patience by describing this change in some detail, because it really is a different mode of being in the world.

My design book SHAPING THINGS, which is very Viridian without coughing up that fact in a hairball, talks a lot about material objects as frozen social relationships within space and time. This conceptual approach may sound peculiar and alien, but it can be re-phrased in a simpler way.

What is "sustainability?" Sustainable practices navigate successfully through time and space, while others crack up and vanish. So basically, the sustainable is about time – time and space. You need to re-think your relationship to material possessions in terms of things that occupy your time. The things that are physically closest to you. Time and space.

In earlier, less technically advanced eras, this approach would have been far-fetched. Material goods were inherently difficult to produce, find, and ship. They were rare and precious. They were closely associated with social prestige. Without important material signifiers such as wedding china, family silver, portraits, a coach-house, a trousseau and so forth, you were advertising your lack of substance to your neighbors. If you failed to surround yourself with a thick material barrier, you were inviting social abuse and possible police suspicion. So it made pragmatic sense to cling to heirlooms, renew all major purchases promptly, and visibly keep up with the Joneses.

That era is dying. It's not only dying, but the assumptions behind that form of material culture are very dangerous. These objects can no longer protect you from want, from humiliation – in fact they are causes of humiliation, as anyone with a McMansion crammed with Chinese-made goods and an unsellable SUV has now learned at great cost.

Furthermore, many of these objects can damage you personally. The hours you waste stumbling over your piled debris, picking, washing, storing, re-storing, those are hours and spaces that you will never get back in a mortal lifetime. Basically, you have to curate these goods: heat them, cool them, protect them from humidity and vermin. Every moment you devote to them is lost to your children, your friends, your society, yourself.

It's not bad to own fine things that you like. What you need are things that you GENUINELY like. Things that you cherish, that enhance your existence in the world. The rest is dross.

Do not "economize." Please. That is not the point. The economy is clearly insane. Even its champions are terrified by it now. It's melting the North Pole. So "economization" is not your friend. Cheapness can be value-less. Voluntary simplicity is, furthermore, boring. Less can become too much work.

The items that you use incessantly, the items you employ every day, the normal, boring goods that don't seem luxurious or romantic: these are the critical ones. They are truly central. The everyday object is the monarch of all objects. It's in your time most, it's in your space most. It is "where it is at," and it is "what is going on."

It takes a while to get this through your head, because it's the opposite of the legendry of shopping. However: the things that you use every day should be the best-designed things you can get. For instance, you cannot possibly spend too much money on a bed – (assuming you have a regular bed, which in point of fact I do not). You're spending a third of your lifetime in a bed. Your bed might be sagging, ugly, groaning and infested with dust mites, because you are used to that situation and cannot see it. That calamity might escape your conscious notice. See it. Replace it.

Sell – even give away– anything you never use. Fancy ball gowns, tuxedos, beautiful shoes wrapped in bubblepak that you never wear, useless Christmas gifts from well-meaning relatives, junk that you inherited. Sell that stuff. Take the money, get a real bed. Get radically improved everyday things.

The same goes for a working chair. Notice it. Take action. Bad chairs can seriously injure you from repetitive stresses. Get a decent ergonomic chair. Someone may accuse you of "indulging yourself" because you possess a chair that functions properly. This guy is a reactionary. He is useless to futurity. Listen carefully to whatever else he says, and do the opposite. You will benefit greatly.

Expensive clothing is generally designed to make you look like an aristocrat who can afford couture. Unless you are a celebrity on professional display, forget this consumer theatricality. You should buy relatively-expensive clothing that is ergonomic, high-performance and sturdy.

Anything placed next to your skin for long periods is of high priority. Shoes are notorious sources of pain and stress and subjected to great mechanical wear. You really need to work on selecting these – yes, on "shopping for shoes." You should spend more time on shoes than you do on cars, unless you're in a car during pretty much every waking moment. In which case, God help you.

I strongly recommend that you carry a multitool. There are dozens of species of these remarkable devices now, and for good reason. Do not show them off in a beltpack, because this marks you as a poorly-socialized geek. Keep your multitool hidden in the same discreet way that you would any other set of keys.

That's because a multitool IS a set of keys. It's a set of possible creative interventions in your immediate material environment. That is why you want a multitool. They are empowering.

A multitool changes your perceptions of the world. Since you lack your previous untooled learned-helplessness, you will slowly find yourself becoming more capable and more observant. If you have pocket-scissors, you will notice loose threads; if you have a small knife you will notice bad packaging; if you have a file you will notice flashing, metallic burrs, and bad joinery. If you have tweezers you can help injured children, while if you have a pen, you will take notes. Tools in your space, saving your time. A multitool is a design education.

As a further important development, you will become known to your friends and colleagues as someone who is capable, useful and resourceful, rather than someone who is helpless, frustrated and visibly lacking in options. You should aspire to this better condition.

Do not lug around an enormous toolchest or a full set of post-earthquake gear unless you are Stewart Brand. Furthermore, unless you are a professional emergency worker, you can abstain from post-apocalyptic "bug-out bags" and omnicompetent heaps of survivalist rations. Do not stock the fort with tiresome, life-consuming, freeze-dried everything, unless you can clearly sense the visible approach of some massive, non-theoretical civil disorder. The clearest way to know that one of these is coming is that the rich people have left your area. If that's the case, then, sure, go befriend the police and prepare to knuckle down.

Now to confront the possessions you already have. This will require serious design work, and this will be painful. It is a good idea to get a friend or several friends to help you.

You will need to divide your current possessions into four major categories.

Beautiful things.

Emotionally important things.

Tools, devices, and appliances that efficiently perform a useful function.

Everything else.

"Everything else" will be by far the largest category. Anything you have not touched, or seen, or thought about in a year – this very likely belongs in "everything else."

You should document these things. Take their pictures, their identifying makers' marks, barcodes, whatever, so that you can get them off eBay or Amazon if, for some weird reason, you ever need them again. Store those digital pictures somewhere safe – along with all your other increasingly valuable, life-central digital data. Back them up both onsite and offsite.

Then remove them from your time and space. "Everything else" should not be in your immediate environment, sucking up your energy and reducing your opportunities. It should become a fond memory, or become reduced to data.

It may belong to you, but it does not belong with you. You weren't born with it. You won't be buried with it. It needs to be out of the space-time vicinity. You are not its archivist or quartermaster. Stop serving that unpaid role.

Beautiful things are important. If they're truly beautiful, they should be so beautiful that you are showing them to people. They should be on display: you should be sharing their beauty with others. Your pride in these things should enhance your life, your sense of taste and perhaps your social standing.

They're not really that beautiful? Then they're not really beautiful. Take a picture of them, tag them, remove them elsewhere.

Emotionally important things. All of us have sentimental keepsakes that we can't bear to part with. We also have many other objects which simply provoke a panicky sense of potential loss – they don't help us to establish who we are, or to become the person we want to be. They subject us to emotional blackmail.

Is this keepsake so very important that you would want to share its story with your friends, your children, your grandchildren? Or are you just using this clutter as emotional insulation, so as to protect yourself from knowing yourself better?

Think about that. Take a picture. You might want to write the story down. Then – yes – away with it.

You are not "losing things" by these acts of material hygiene. You are gaining time, health, light and space. Also, the basic quality of your daily life will certainly soar. Because the benefits of good design will accrue to you where they matter – in the everyday.

Not in Oz or in some museum vitrine. In the every day. For sustainability, it is every day that matters. Not green Manhattan Projects, green moon shots, green New Years' resolutions, or wild scifi speculations. Those are for dabblers and amateurs. The sustainable is about the every day.

Now for category three, tools and appliances. They're not beautiful and you are not emotionally attached to them. So they should be held to keen technical standards.

Is your home a museum? Do you have curatorial skills? If not, then entropy is attacking everything in there. Stuff breaks, ages, rusts, wears out, decays. Entropy is an inherent property of time and space. Understand this fact. Expect this. The laws of physics are all right, they should not provoke anguished spasms of denial.

You will be told that you should "make do" with broken or semi-broken tools, devices and appliances. Unless you are in prison or genuinely crushed by poverty, do not do this. This advice is wicked.

This material culture of today is not sustainable. Most of the things you own are almost certainly made to 20th century standards, which are very bad. If we stick with the malignant possessions we already have, through some hairshirt notion of thrift, then we are going to be baling seawater. This will not do.

You should be planning, expecting, desiring to live among material surroundings created, manufactured, distributed, through radically different methods from today's. It is your moral duty to aid this transformative process. This means you should encourage the best industrial design.

Get excellent tools and appliances. Not a hundred bad, cheap, easy ones. Get the genuinely good ones. Work at it. Pay some attention here, do not neglect the issue by imagining yourself to be serenely "non-materialistic." There is nothing more "materialistic" than doing the same household job five times because your tools suck. Do not allow yourself to be trapped in time-sucking black holes of mechanical dysfunction. That is not civilized.

Now for a brief homily on tools and appliances of especial Viridian interest: the experimental ones. The world is full of complicated, time-sucking, partially-functional beta-rollout gizmos. Some are fun to mess with; fun in life is important. Others are whimsical; whimsy is okay. Eagerly collecting semifunctional gadgets because they are shiny-shiny, this activity is not the worst thing in the world. However, it can become a vice. If you are going to wrangle with unstable, poorly-defined, avant-garde tech objects, then you really need to wrangle them. Get good at doing it.

Good experiments are well-designed experiments. Real experiments need a theory. They need something to prove or disprove. Experiments need to be slotted into some larger context of research, and their results need to be communicated to other practitioners. That's what makes them true "experiments" instead of private fetishes.

If you're buying weird tech gizmos, you need to know what you are trying to prove by that. You also need to tell other people useful things about it. If you are truly experimenting, then you are doing something praiseworthy. You may be wasting some space and time, but you'll be saving space and time for others less adventurous. Good.

If you're becoming a techie magpie packrat who never leaves your couch – that's not good. Forget the shiny gadget. You need to look in the shiny mirror.

So. This approach seems to be working for me. More or less. I'm not urging you to do any of this right away. Do not jump up from the screen right now and go reform your entire material circumstances. That resolve will not last. Because it's not sustainable.

Instead, I am urging you to think hard about it. Tuck it into the back of your mind. Contemplate it. The day is going to come, it will come, when you suddenly find your comfortable habits disrupted.

That could be a new job, a transfer to a new city, a marriage, the birth or departure of a child. It could be a death in the family: we are mortal, they happen. Moments like these are part of the human condition. Suddenly you will find yourself facing a yawning door and a whole bunch of empty boxes. That is the moment in which you should launch this sudden, much-considered coup. Seize that moment on the barricades, liberate yourself, and establish a new and sustainable constitution.

But – you may well ask – what if I backslide into the ancien regime? Well, there is a form of hygiene workable here as well. Every time you move some new object into your time and space – buy it, receive it as a gift, inherit it, whatever – remove some equivalent object.

That discipline is not as hard as it sounds. As the design of your immediate surroundings improves, it'll become obvious to you that more and more of these time-sucking barnacles are just not up to your standards. They're ugly, or they're broken, or they're obsolete, or they are visible emblems of nasty, uncivilized material processes.

Their blissful absence from your life makes new time and space for something better for you – and for the changed world you want to live to see.

So: that summarizes it. Forgive the Pope-Emperor this last comprehensive sermon; it is what I learned by doing all this, and you won't be troubled henceforth.

Now. If you've read this far, you're a diehard. So you may be interested in my next, post-Viridian, project. And yes, of course I have one. It's not so direct, confrontational and strident as the Viridian Movement; instead, it suits a guy of my increasingly scholastic and professorial temperament.

Viridian "imaginary products" were always a major theme of ours, and, since I'm both a science fiction writer and a design critic, I want to do some innovative work in this space – yes, the realm of imaginary products. Conceptual designs; imaginary designs; critical designs; fantastic and impossible designs.

This new effort of mine is a scholarly work exploring material culture, use-value, ethics, and the relationship between materiality and the imagination. However, since nobody's easily interested in that huge, grandiose topic, I'm disguising it as a nifty and attractive gadget book. I plan to call it "The User's Guide to Imaginary Gadgets."

My first step in composing this new book is to methodically survey the space of all possible imaginary gadgets. It's rather like the exploratory work of "Dead Media Project."

I'm not yet sure what form this new research effort will take. There will likely be a mailing list. I may be turning my Wired blog into something of a gadget site. There might be a wiki or a social network, depending on who wants to help me, and what they want out of that effort. Still: "design fiction," "critical design," "futurist scenario design," and the personal, individual, pocket-and-purse sized approach to postindustriality: this is something I need to know a lot more about.

If you want to play, send email.

Bruce Sterling
bruces [at] well.com

Originally distributed to the Viridian email list and posted at the Viridian Design web site.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 3:18 PM)

The Hot Spot

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-19T13:04:54-08:00

Climate scientists wonder why people don’t do more about global warming. Social scientists have some tough answers

By Lisa Bennett

Three years ago, I became obsessed with global warming. Practically overnight, my worries about its potential effects outstripped my worries about so many other national and global issues, even personal ones.

Indeed, as the mother of two young boys, I began to think it a bit crazy that I attended to every bump and scrape of my children’s little bodies and budding egos, but largely ignored the threat likely to put sizeable areas of the world underwater within their lifetime.

That year, 2005, marked a turning point for many people. After decades of observation, speculation, and analysis, the world’s climate scientists had reached a consensus, and increasingly the general public was accepting it. As USA Today reported, “The Debate is Over: Globe is Warming.”

The next step, scientists advised, was action. We needed to take significant and urgent steps to cut our dependence on fossil fuels by 25 percent or more, something NASA’s top climate scientist, James Hansen, said we had only a decade to do if we were to avoid the great global warming tipping point – that level at which increased temperatures would unleash unprecedented global disasters.

Since then, surely some things have changed. Sales of hybrids have skyrocketed. Many of us have converted to the new energy-saving compact fluorescent light bulbs. A flood of books are hitting the market offering tips about how to save the Earth. And there is a frenzy of advertising about everything from “eco-friendly” houses to “green” hair salons.

Yet, none of this adds up to the significant action scientists have called for, which raises the question: Why don’t more of us respond more seriously to the most serious threat to the planet in human history?

“Many climate scientists find the response to global warming completely baffling,” says Elke Weber, a Columbia University psychologist and the chair of the Global Roundtable on Climate Change’s Public Attitudes/Ethical Issues Working Group.

But a growing number of social scientists are offering some explanations. Among the factors they point to: the way we’re psychologically wired and socially conditioned to respond to crises makes us ill-suited to respond to the abstract and seemingly remote threat posed by global warming. Their insights are also leading to some intriguing recommendations about how to get people to take action, including the potentially dangerous prospect of playing on people’s fears.

Our misleading emotions
“Risk-analysis scholars” believe there are, in general, two ways people assess a risk. One is through our analytic abilities, by which we examine the scientific evidence and make logical decisions about how to respond. Climate scientists, for example, used this process when they concluded that the risks of global warming are momentous.

But most of us do not rely on our analytic abilities, but instead on the more common way of perceiving risk: our emotions.

“For most of us, most of the time, risk is not a statistic. Risk is a feeling,” says Weber. We are swayed by our feelings, and those feelings – while an essential part of the decision-making process – can be misleading guides, depending on the type of risk involved. “If I feel scared,” adds Weber, “that overshadows any amount of pallid statistical information.”

Moreover, as decades of behavioral decision research has shown, most people have to feel a risk before they do something about it.

And this presents a particular challenge in the case of global warming, says Weber, because our emotions are shaped by past experience, either personal or evolutionary. But we have no past experience that tells us that when we burn too many fossil fuels, it will lead to catastrophic changes to the Earth.

“Global warming doesn’t make evolutionary sense to us,” says Weber. “Our minds haven’t adjusted to the much more complex technological risks that are removed in space and time.”

A second factor: Global warming is not a clear and present danger but, rather, something that is projected to reveal its most dramatic consequences decades from now.

Finally, worldviews shape how we perceive and respond to risk. A group of scholars from Yale and elsewhere have found, for example, that egalitarians, or people who prefer a society where wealth, power, and opportunity are broadly distributed, are more concerned about global warming, whereas hierarchists, who prefer a society with leaders on top and followers below, tend to be less concerned.

More to the point, the researchers discovered that when proposed solutions to global warming clash with people’s worldviews, those people are more likely to reject evidence of the problem altogether. “People spin the information to keep their worldview intact,” says Paul Slovic, founder and president of Decision Research.

Fearful futures, hopeful actions
With such significant obstacles in play, what can social scientists recommend about how to inspire the response we need to global warming?

First, several suggest, messaging needs to reach people’s emotions and trigger fear about the dramatic consequences to come. Specifically, this means making future hardships vivid, personalized and credible, says Slovic. For example, he suggests addressing: “How will it change the whole economy and whole quality of life in a particular region? Will the forests die out? Will the summers be so hot and dry that the Earth will be uninhabitable?”

But where one sets out to evoke fear, one must tread judiciously. “If people are being scared without seeing a way out, it makes them dysfunctional and freeze,” says Weber, which leads to a second recommendation: People need to be offered a set of actions they can take.

Finally, there needs to be a greater effort to address the large-scale lifestyle changes that will make a significant difference. “I don’t want to have to make a zillion little decisions,” says Baruch Fischoff of Carnegie Mellon University and former president of the Society for Risk Analysis. Rather, “I’d like to see people working out for me some alternative ways of organizing my life where it will really be a sustainable way to live.” This, Fischoff suggests, is the practical work that now lies ahead for both climate and social scientists.

As for ordinary Americans like myself, I believe that significant collective action on global warming will come from a very personal place – such as love for our kids, who will, after all, be among those most likely to experience its greatest consequences. But perhaps even more significantly, I’m finding hope in knowing that the drive to protect our children is another universal desire for which most of us are, in fact, hardwired.

Lisa Bennett is communications director at Center for Ecoliteracy, a Berkeley-based non-profit dedicated to education for sustainable living, and former Harvard fellow. She is writing a book about parenting in the age of global warming and can be reached at LisaOBennett@gmail.com

This essay is reprinted, with edits, from Greater Good Magazine, Vol. IV, Issue 4 (Spring 2008), pp. 43.

Photo credit: flickr/mon1que, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 1:04 PM)

Resource: Into a Warming World

Alex Steffen — 2008-11-19T12:25:53-08:00

The world is awash in climate change books, many of them bad, boring or both. It's all too common to see these books repeating the same ideas and arguments, often scattering facts (or supposed facts) around to make themselves look researched, often mixing exhortations and haphazardly explored solutions. I have piles of these books a few yards high.

So when I got Worldwatch's latest State of the World report, Into a Warming World, I feared the worst. This year's offering, after all, departs from Worldwatch's tried-and-true survey formula to focus in solely on climate change and its implications. I worried that instead of great ideas across a range of subjects, I'd find more of the same ideas and insights I've read so often before. I feared that Worldwatch was grasping at relevance.

I was wrong. State of the World 2009 is a research masterpiece, the single most important reference guide to climate change yet published.

SotW2009 is argued comprehensively, moving from an outstanding overview of the state of climate science to individual chapters on various solution spaces: accelerating the transition to clean energy, providing green jobs, transferring technology to the developing world, saving the international climate negotiations and so on. Like other Worldwatch work, the book is somewhat dry and technical, but that allows for exhaustive footnoting and a clear intellectual framework for building an understanding of many of the key issues. It's like a terrific interdisciplinary academic seminar, distilled into a single volume.

Which isn't to say that it's perfect. Several of the shorter chapters don't meet the quality standards of the rest of the book. The editors include a lame chapter on geoengineering that largely ignores the politics of the geoengineering debate and concludes "geoengineering schemes have the potential to make things better, but they could also make things worse." For such an important and charged debate, milquetoast equivocation is not a helpful contribution to the discussion.

And there are some glaring omissions. Several key innovation pathways are largely ignored. The vital role of cities and urban planning is more or less ignored. The critical leverage points offered by information technologies are completely missing (though there's some good discussion of smart grids). The human components of change -- from new finance models to the importance of transparency and battling corruption -- get short shrift. But I was perhaps most disappointed by a common element of carbon blindness in the chapters. It's one thing to focus on climate change; it's another to largely lose sight of our other equally critical environmental and social needs, without which no sustainability solution will work. Worldwatch has been such a leader in comprehensive, holistic visions of sustainability that I expected more.

But no book is perfect, and this one's faults don't ultimately detract from its excellence. The Worldwatch team has a hell of a lot to be proud of here. If you are looking for a single-volume education in what it means to live in a changing climate, you can do no better than the latest State of the World.

Front page photo credit: flickr/hyperboreal, Creative Commons license.

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(Posted by Alex Steffen in Features at 12:25 PM)

Cutting Emissions in Rural China

WorldChanging Team — 2008-11-19T09:02:41-08:00

by Jiang Gaoming

Mobilizing farmers to use readily accessible, traditional bioenergy sources -- like straw -- may go a long way toward helping the country reduce its carbon footprint.

Coal-mining efforts have recently been shifting from China’s northern Shanxi province to an even more vulnerable ecosystem: the grasslands of Inner Mongolia. Many worry that if this area becomes the next big provider of energy and chemical products, large amounts of its natural resources will be destroyed beyond the point of restoration, as we have seen in Shanxi. We must remember that no amount of money can replace the soil carried off by sandstorms.
China’s population is mainly rural, and if that population (all 800 million of them) were to realize their full potential for consumption, we will have no way to control continually increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Many wealthy farmers are already using energy-hungry appliances such as air conditioners, refrigerators and microwave ovens, as well as coal for heating and cooking. Yet, they typically ignore the traditional bioenergy sources at their doorsteps -- like straw – by simply burning them off in the fields.

To break out of the vicious circle of using fossil-fuel energy, China must shift its reliance to clean energy sources such as bioenergy, solar power and wind power. Rural communities have the means to contribute to this transformation by developing their own energy, which would reduce their toll on their immediate environment and decrease their collective greenhouse gas emissions.

So what if the millions of villages in China were mobilized? For answers, let us look at the experimental data collected by the Institute of Botany at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and Shandong Agricultural University.

The experiment entitled “Using straw as livestock fodder to promote circular energy use in rural areas” was carried out in the village of Jiangjia in Shandong province. The village is home to 923 people, and has 68 hectares of land – an average of 1.097 mu (.073 hectares) per person. Farming is the main industry in a typical village. The experiment was aimed at making full use of the straw that farmers discard.

This straw fodder can be fed to cows, thus turning straw into dung. The dung could then be converted into methane gas for energy and organic fertilizer, which could replace 50 percent of chemical fertilizer use. Energy for heating and cooking would come entirely from methane gas, replacing coal, natural gas and electric ovens. This improvement would make the villagers self-sufficient in energy, with a small surplus that could be sold to urban areas.

In 2005 and 2006, the village had only two or three cows. Since the study started in 2007, the village has raised and sold 50 head of cattle. The village currently has 99 cows in the cattle pens, and by 2009 may have raised a total of 200. With the help of the experts, the village has increased its stock of cattle fifty-fold. These animals have been fed almost entirely on previously discarded straw, with only 10 percent of their fodder coming from purchased grain.

Using dung as an energy source has allowed the researchers to persuade the county agricultural authorities to install methane generators in 100 households, with 93 installations already complete. In addition, 30 households installed the equipment at their own expense. This brings the total installations to 123 households, which signifies that more than half of the entire village are now producing methane.

Each household produces an average of 1.3 cubic meters of methane per day. Using methane for cooking saves 339 kilograms of coal annually, reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by a little over one tonne. The entire village saves 41.6 tonnes of coal, reducing emissions by 133 tonnes. International carbon prices put the cost of one tonne of CO2 emissions at US$200. Using these calculations, this project has earned 244,000 yuan (US$35,882).

China has 3.2 million villages. If similar methane projects were undertaken in each one, 853 million tonnes of CO2 emissions would be avoided every year (current annual emissions are seven billion tons annually). If one takes into consideration the 50 percent reduction in use of chemical fertilizer and the carbon returned to the fields via organic fertilizer, the emission reductions are even larger.

During the summer, more methane was produced than could be used. If this gas was collected and compressed, it could be used in place of liquefied natural gas to supply the village’s energy needs during the winter. Unfortunately, there currently is no investigation of the potential for reduced carbon emissions in Chinese rural areas, and carbon trading in these locations is non-existent. This study shows that there is a huge potential for energy-generation in rural areas, and recommends that this prospect be given full attention.

In addition, the farmers made significant profits from the energy substitution. It costs 6,152.50 yuan (US$904) to raise a cow, which is then sold for 7,924.50 yuan (US$1,165) leaving a profit of 1,772 yuan (US$261). This represents a 50 percent annual return on investment, and net profit of between 2,500 yuan (US$367) and 3,000 yuan (US$441) per cow over eight months. If the proposal of “three cows per household” were implemented in straw-rich areas, the farmers would no longer need to migrate into cities to work. The farmer’s income while working at home would then be over 10,000 yuan (US$1,470).

Solving the energy crisis will require a multi-pronged approach. Reducing the country’s dependence on fossil fuels must include our rural residents. Chinese policies should encourage them to use the energy sources naturally available rather than force rural locations to compete with cities and industry for fossil fuels. If China pays some attention to rural energy and makes full use of biological converters such as cows, sheep and methanogenic bacteria, 700 million tonnes of straw can be converted to energy and high-quality fertilizer.

In this scenario, food production will no longer turn fields white with agricultural membrane, but dark with rich fertilizer. The government will not only be closer to its goals of reinvigorating its villages, but China also will save energy, reduce emissions and increase food production.

Jiang Gaoming is a professor at the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Botany. He is also vice secretary-general of the China Society of Biological Conservation and a board member of the China Environmental Culture Promotion Association. Jiang is known for his concepts of "urban vegetation" and allowing damaged ecosystems to recover naturally.

This article originally appeared on the ChinaDialogues, and was produced in association with Rutgers Climate and Social Policy Initiative.

Photo credit: Flickr/.micki., CC License

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(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Columns at 9:02 AM)