Caption: "Sadly, the only proven way to achieve global GHG reductions so far has been economic recession." Comment: Fortunately, shifting to 100% renewables would catalyze the global transition to durable prosperity and community well-being in a way that would eliminate GHG production AND grow the economy <<continued>>. (See also: strategic sustainability, natural capitalism, its four strategies, and RMI's Reinventing Fire [energy] Program.)
Quick access to key sustainability resources from an emerging whole systems and critical-path perspective: pioneers, leaders, powerful ideas, path-breaking initiatives, beyond best practices, important events. Comment. Search. Go to the Sust-Clips Index of categories. See also: the State of Sustainability (SOS)TM Journal for commentary.
May 8, 2009 at 10:46PM Welcome! This is a public collection of the work of Donella (Dana) Meadows. Through her writing and speaking, Dana helped people understand global systems with long delays and complex feedbacks, while also inspiring many to think about individual choices in daily living. Here you will find 15 years worth of essays published as the award winning weekly Global Citizen column.
May 8, 2009 at 10:39PM The AIA Sustainability 2030 Toolkit provides distilled and synthesized general understanding of the sustainability challenge useful to anyone seeking a brief and quick understanding, and then a range of tools for the design professional.
How can we begin to understand the impacts of climate change in our daily lives? . . . The American Institute of Architects (AIA) is committed to developing and promoting the means to reach at least a 50% carbon emission reduction by 2010 and carbon neutral buildings by 2030. This exciting challenge offers many opportunities for integrated, high-performance, environmentally-conscious buildings that will become valued assets for future generations. How do we get to carbon neutrality from buildings? The SustAIAnability2030 Toolkit herein is a virtual connection to resources and examples that demonstrate the greening of our built environment.
May 8, 2009 at 10:36PM May 8, 2009 at 10:34PM Inspired by the book Thinking in Systems - A Primer by Donella Meadows this four-session web seminar series is a collaborative effort between isee systems, Pontifex Consulting and the Sustainability Institute. Designed to help you apply Systems Thinking to build sustainable organizations and communities usingiThink and STELLA, each session will be highly interactive and relevant to current headline news.
May 8, 2009 at 10:32PM Excerpt from Which Future? by Donella Meadows, In Context #43, Winter 1995/96. The $1M question of the 21st century: How to get from Scenario A, our current unsustainable business as usual scenario, to Scenario B, a dynamic state of sustainability following the principles of nature, that is, the principles of the prosperous and successful fundamental economy of the planet. Scenario A depends on the invisible destruction and transfer of natural capital, assets, wealth from the natural economy to the human economy, and in so doing, the human economy is invisibly and unwittingly destroying itself, all the while accounting for the process as growth, net value added. Humanity is nearing the end of the invisible consequences and the point of irreparable damage.
May 8, 2009 at 10:28PM Limits to Growth -- 30 Years +
In 2008 Graham Turner at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) in Australia published a paper called "A Comparison of `The Limits to Growth` with Thirty Years of Reality".[5][6] It examined the past thirty years of reality with the predictions made in 1972 and found that changes in industrial production, food production and pollution are all in line with the book's predictions of economic collapsein the 21st century.[7]
May 5, 2009 at 08:35AM Cross-Post from: Issue 1+2, 2009, is now available at: http://www.albaeco.com/sdu/
IS IT THE RICH OR THE POOR WHO OVERFISH CORAL REEFS? A new study shows that it is the level of socio-economic development of coastal communities that determines how intensively nearby reefs will be fished. http://www.albaeco.se/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=44&Itemid
BETTER "GREEN WATER USE" CAN REDUCE FUTURE FOOD CRISIS If overall water resources in river basins were acknowledged and managed better, future food crises could be significantly reduced, according to new findings. http://www.albaeco.se/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=55&Itemid
"PEACEMAKING EFFORTS MUST FOCUS MUCH MORE ON THE ENVIRONMENT" After the Second World War at least 40 percent of all intrastate conflicts have a link to natural resources and the environment, according to a report launched by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).
http://www.albaeco.se/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&Itemid
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY IMPORTANT FACTOR BEHIND BIODIVERSITY LOSS Socio-economic inequality is an important factor to consider when predicting rates of human-induced biodiversity loss, according to new findings by a group of researchers from Canada. http://www.albaeco.se/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=47&Itemid
EDITORIAL: "TRANSLATE THE AWARD WINNING SWEDISH BOOK 'TYST HAV' NOW!" It conveys its message almost as effectively as the foreign fishing fleets deplete coastal fish stocks of poor African countries. http://www.albaeco.se/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=50&Itemid
SUSTAINABILITY SCHOOL: "GREENHOUSE DEVELOPMENT RIGHTS" How can we solve the climate crisis while supporting development in the South? The GDR framework argues that it is those who are wealthier and have produced higher levels of emissions that must take on the bulk of the costs.
http://www.albaeco.se/en/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=51&Itemid
The Sustainable Development Update focuses on the links between ecology, society and the economy. It is produced by Albaeco, an independent non-profit organization http://www.albaeco.com), in cooperation with the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University; the Beijer International Institute of Ecological Economics; the Resilience Alliance; and the Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI). It is produced with support from Sida, the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency. We welcome comments, questions, and article ideas. Please forward if you find SDU interesting and useful. Editor: Fredrik Moberg (fredrik@albaeco.com)
May 4, 2009 at 11:44AM Cross-Post, From the Buckminster Fuller Institute; click here for more information on the winning proposal, and for idea index to all submissions.
MAY 4, 2009 NEW YORK CITY — Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand Systems (SPM/MoD), submitted by an interdisciplinary team of students at MIT has been selected as the winner of the prestigious 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge. The team will receive a $100,000 prize at a conferring ceremony on June 6th, 2009 at 2pm at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago followed by a reception and celebration featuring a presentation by design innovator Bruce Mau.
"Given the nature of the crises we are facing, from climate change to economic collapse, what is important is to demonstrate that the approach to design and problem solving at the core of the Buckminster Fuller Challenge - while always thinking big - has the potential to bring about changes in the near-term. The winning project is a perfect example of the kind of radical, transformative change that is possible when we reconceive the old ways of doing things and take a systems-based approach to design," said The Buckminster Fuller Challenge jurors in a statement about their decision. "SPM/MoD isn't just about the design of these lightweight, highly efficient, electric vehicles, it is about inserting that technological innovation into the social and cultural environment and designing an intuitive system within which they function."In addition to the winner, the distinguished jury selected a runner up and two honorable mentions from a pool of nearly 200 entries. Dreaming New Mexico (DNM), a Bioneers project with support from Google Earth's Outreach program, submitted by Kenny Ausubel and Peter Warshall was selected as the runner-up. DNM is based on the strategic premise that "dreaming the future can create the future." This project provides a systemic template, methodology and collaborative mapping tools for communities to engage in place-based and bioregional planning. Cycle for Health, submitted by Joseph Agoada, Dr. John Baptist Niwagaba, and Patrick Kayemba and Mukuru BioCentres, submitted by Umande Trust and GOAL Ireland, were awarded honorable mentions for their work in Africa to dramatically improve economic conditions and human health.
April 28, 2009 at 05:08PM Stephen Cohen writes, "In the long run, global warming will cost more than the cost of moving to a fossil fuel free economy." But how to bring that cost differential into the present in a way that generates win-win transformational economic change is the policy challenge humanity faces for sustainability success.
What people don't understand, and that leads them to a correct individual choice but false aggregated societal choice in the present (either consumption or investment), is that the nominally cheaper cost of fossil-fuel-based energy now is an illusion. The only reason it is cheaper is because market failure generates false price-signals that do not fully reflect the economic catastrophe towards which the cheaper fossil fuel prices--like a siren song--are beguilingly and inextricably pulling us at a break-neck and accelerating speed.
However, individual producers and consumers are not entirely to blame. Individuals have limited capacity to buck the system and current prices. One of the real challenges of an effective response to the impending climate-warming-induced biologic and economic systems collapse of the business-as-usual (BUA) scenario is the policy innovation required to stimulate a lightening-fast systems transformation to sustainability. Policy innovation is more critical than technological innovation, although both are required. However, technological innovation without policy innovation will be insufficient.
Individual actors can only go so far. They can only incrementally change the status-quo, but can't transform the system. Incremental change alters little aspects of a basic pattern. Transformation changes the pattern itself; it fundamentally alters the pattern. We no longer can afford incremental change. No matter how much the current pattern of economc tools, processes, materials, formulas, products could be incrementally changed, the current pattern IS the problem and no amount of incremental change will be sufficient to avoid systems disequilibrium and collapse.
The time has come for systems transformation. Nothing else will work. For the market, for individual actors, to drive the needed systems transformation empowerment is required at the system level. That empowerment will come from new, innovative policies that will bust the entrenched-interest-status-quo head lock on needed change; that will ennervate the innvoative entrepreneurs of a new ecologically-based economy in a new bout of capitalistic creative destruction that will redeploy society's resources for a a win-win solution instead of the traditional lose-win.
We need to drive the system towards its own win-win transformation within 20 years. That is the sustainability challenge humanity faces.
Pardoxically, long before we run out of gas, the higher cost of increasingly limited supply will put a choke hold on our outmoded fossil-fuel-based economy adn therein lies the achilles heal of the feet draggers, those who say there's plenty of supply out there, even a 100 years or more. Well that may be the case in terms of stock, but not in terms of its increasingly accelerating relative value and scarcity in a globablizing world that will add almost 50% population growth of 3 BILLION people by 2050, an unheard of historic first. No one really knows if the biological system could handle it, but one thing is for sure, the humn economy likely can't AND the planet's biological life-support system, the biosphere, cannot handle the economy trying to meet the demand given its current ecologicaly/natural economy/capital/environment-destroying tools, processes, and effects.
Unfortunately, that scenario is far longer than the dramatically harsher and more costly climactic conditions that global "warming" will usher in over the next 10-20 years. Those harsher conditions will generate dramatic ecological transformations from radically altered hydrologic (water) regimes, extreme temperature variations (of the mile one or two or three degree increase in mean earth surface), increasingly frequent and normalized extreme, life-threatening, and destructive weather events. These new "exogenous" conditions will produce periodically frequent and permanent disruption, dislocations, and crises for our local human economies leading to a lot of uncertainty, anxiety, deprivation, suffering, death, and destruction.
Global warming is a misnomer. It lulls one into a false sense of lethargic security.
It should be called Human-Economy-Induced Climate-Warming-Induced Unrecoverable Biospheric and Economic Systems Crash and Collapse. But THAT's too long for a sound bite. How about simply Climate Burning or Climate Collapse?
We have approximately 10-20 years to reverse course, avoid the unrecoverable crash and collapse, suffer through some major biologic and economic dislocation, crises, and crashes, and rebuild the human economy in a way that stabilizes and reverses the climate-induced biologic and economic crises and produces a higher level of economic prosperity than humanity has been able to produce to date. How likely is success? Probably low, but the do-nothing scenario is unacceptable and the historic reward of success woudl be huge, so why not try?
The transition to--the production of--the wealthier more powerful ecologically sustainable and based economy and society is humanity's last true frontier, last long-wave of economic development, and last opportunity for prosperity.
Let's get going! The incipient, effective, whole-systems, and critical-path response has begun. Stay tuned to S-2030 for understanding, resources, solutions, and initiatives that move individuals and the system to sustainability systems transformation and success.
April 27, 2009 at 11:48AM Population basics and links in a short article on the Earth Forum.
April 27, 2009 at 08:51AM Review the entries in the Buckminster Fuller Challenge 2009 for breakthrough ideas to current crises.
The entries to the 2009 Buckminster Fuller Challenge [152] are now available for view in the Idea Index [153], an open-source database of solutions to the world's most pressing problems.The entries listed in the Idea Index range from a radical solution to human transportation in the world's largest cities to a strategy to dramatically increase crop yields and economic development in remote African villages. While the entries cover a broad range of topics, the common thread among them is a highly integrated approach to design - one that is simultaneously comprehensive, anticipatory and aligned with nature'sfundamental principles. This focus on an integrated design strategy is what distinguishes the Challenge and the innovators who have submitted their work from other prize programs.These new additions to the Idea Index represent a growing pool of knowledge about how to tackle some of the most inexorable problems facing our global society - ready to be picked up and put into action by investors, philanthropists, designers, artists, policymakers, and anyone who wants to change the world. To read the full press release, visit the Challenge website [154] http://challenge.bfi.org/press/2009_idea_index
[151] http://challenge.bfi.org/ideaindex
[152] http://challenge.bfi.org
April 25, 2009 at 11:44AM Stephen Cohen's Weekly Column in the New York Observer
Understanding the Climate Policy Debate.
Developing a Sustainable Planet--The Basics.
Stephen Cohen is a professor at Columbia University and it's the Earth Instittue.
April 25, 2009 at 11:35AM National Council for Science and the Environment, Climate Change-Science & Solutions, 8th National Conference on Science, Policy, and the Environment
Now Available:
8th John H. Chafee Memorial Lecture
John P. Holdren
President and Director, Woods Hole Research Center
Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Enviornmental Policy, Harvard University
Meeting the Climate Change Challenge
Report (PDF)
6:00pm, Thursday, January 17, 2008
Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center
April 25, 2009 at 11:29AM State of the Planet Blog - Cities at a Turning Point (Earth Institute)
Scientists warn that manycities around the world may soon face big climate-change challenges: rising seas; shrinking water supplies; killer summer heatwaves;rises in water-borne diseases as temperatures go up and sewers are swamped. No one is predicting that, say,London orMiami will simply drop beneath the waves–but these and other citieswill probably have to be redesigned if they are to maintain their viability and vitality. A new book, Urban Climate Change Crossroads, explores what it might take to keep these places going. Published by the Earth Institute’s Urban Design Lab, with chapters by 18 contributors, the book was launched at this month’s Ecopolis conference in Rome.
In the lead chapter, architectRichard Plunz, head of the UDL, writes: The gamble for ecological survival has always been reliant on technology and design–and when the technological limits are obvious, the design adaptation has to be made. ... The design imperative appeared with Katrina in New Orleans. Now New York faces a moment of truth with hurricanes and sea-level rise. So does Bangkok, which is sinking as the sea rises. So does Quito, which is losing its water supply as the glaciers melt (fifteen years out). ... [but] how adaptation occurs goes beyond building seawalls; moving from flood plains; inventing more robust infrastructures.
April 23, 2009 at 04:48PM http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/. ABOUT: With close to a thousand scientists,
researchers and staff representing the Earth Institute on every ocean and
every continent, the full scope of our work is practically impossible to
grasp in any single medium. But that doesn't mean we can't try. From
expeditions through the Southern Ocean to cramped labs in Manhattan,
something new is being discovered each day. We'll try to capture stories,
opinions and thoughts of how the Earth works and how we can sustainably make
our lives here better. We will do it by tapping the best minds in climate,
geology, oceanography, ecology, sustainable development, global health,
energy, food and water, and more. We hope you will continue to check back
with us on this site to learn, debate and spread the word about how you can
be a part of the critical work that is shaping how we live.
April 20, 2009 at 10:38AM GiveAway-New Business Model. Entrepreneur Blake Mycoskie has, to date, given away 140,000 pairs of shoes in the U.S., Argentina, Ethiopia and South Africa. This year, Mycoskie expects to donate 300,000 pairs of shoes, bring in $13 million in sales and work toward his goal of eradicating podoconiosis in Ethiopia, a deforming foot disease caused by walking barefoot in silica-rich soil.
April 19, 2009 at 07:21PM Masters in International Environmental Policy
The first and largest of its kind, the Monterey Institute’s MAIEP program bridges the gap between the academic and policy worlds. We provide in-depth core courses in Environmental & Natural Resource Economics, International Environmental Law & Politics, Quantitative Methods for Environmental Science & Policy, and Natural Science Foundations for Environmental Policy. The MAIEP curriculum prepares students with the interdisciplinary skills needed to craft effective policy solutions.
Stop Using Mountain Streams as Waste Dumps
SEND YOUR NRDC Biogems letter to stop coal companies from using mountain streams as waste dumps.