planted city

I recently stumbled upon this article from Postmedia’s award-winning national science writer, Margaret Munro. It was written in advance of June’s Rio+20 summit, which was widely viewed to have achieved limited results. That said, the article offers a good summary of some of the big systemic changes that we’re likely going to have to pull off on the long road to building a sustainable and resilient future. In other words, it’s going to take a whole lot more than riding a bike, recycling, and using cloth shopping bags.

The article has a bit of a Canadian focus, but the steps are universal:

1. Start a revolution

2. Energy game change

3. Put a price on carbon

4. Overhaul corporate motives and mindsets

5. Green Canada’s blackened record 

6. Transform cities

7. Connect the dots before you buy

8. Eat less meat

9. Embrace education (and contraception)

10. Get politically active

You can read the rest of the article and an explanation of each of the steps here, but I’ll post the first one here as an example:

“For most of the last century, economic growth was fuelled by what seemed to be a certain truth: the abundance of natural resources. We mined our way to growth. We burned our way to prosperity. We believed in consumption without consequences,” UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last year. He went on to describe it as a “recipe for national disaster. It is a global suicide pact.”

“We need a revolution,” he said. “Revolutionary thinking. Revolutionary action. A free-market revolution for global sustainability”.

Related:

Urban Metabolism: ‘Cities, Scaling and Sustainability’ (Video)

From The Santa Fe Institute via YouTube:

Humanity’s greatest social innovation remains the city, says an article in the October 2011 issue of The Atlantic mentioning SFI research that finds surprising statistical regularities among cities, patterns the researchers relate to an underlying “urban metabolism.”

Related:

• ‘A physicist turns the city into an equation’ (New York Times)
• ‘Geoffrey West: The surprising math of cities and corporations’ (TED Talks)

(Infographic: World Bank)

From The Tyee:

Fifty years of ‘environmentalism’ and we’re less sustainable. So what do we do now?

Click here to read the article. 

(Infographic source: MV)

From Triple Pundit:

Janine Benyus, noted biologist and author of the book Biomimicry, describes nine laws that nature seems to consistently follow in developing sustainable ecosystems. Modern designers, in their desire to create sustainable products are increasingly becoming aware of examples from nature, which has so often displayed the most elegant solutions to problems of design. These laws include:

• Nature runs on sunlight.
• Nature utilizes only the energy it needs.
• Energy fits form to function.
• Nature rewards cooperation.
• Nature banks on diversity.
• Nature demands local expertise.
• Nature curbs excess from within.
• Nature taps the power of limits.
• Energy recycles everything.

This last one can be rephrased to say that, in nature, all waste, either directly or indirectly, becomes food. For example, leaves falling from a tree, if they are not raked up and put in plastic bags, decompose and enrich the soil, with the help of earthworms and soil microbes, eventually feeding the tree from which it fell or perhaps a different one.

The folks in the Brazilian city of Jundiai, north of Sao Paulo, have found a unique way to apply this law. Their program, “Delicious Recycling,” provides food to residents when they bring in recycling. The food comes from a community garden which boasts more than 30,000 plants. Now, instead of streets and waterways strewn with trash, they have healthy, well-fed residents. The program, a brainchild of the city’s Municipal Utilities department, has been running successfully for ten years.

As long as we’re talking trash today, another Brazilian city, Curitiba, near the coast, has run a similar program for twice that long. This city, which won a UN Environmental Program Award in 1990, exchanges transportation passes for the recycled materials. The program, which employs shantytown people to collect the trash, uses proceeds from the sale of the recyclable material for social programs to further assist those in need.

Check out the rest of the article here.

(Photo source: Cities Without Hunger)

An important reminder of the bigger picture from Annie Leonard in the New York Times article, ’Individual Actions Just Don’t Add Up’. You can check out the rest of the article here.

Leonard is the author and director of the ‘Story of Stuff Project’. Their new animated film is ‘The Story of Change: Why Citizens (Not Shoppers) Hold the Key to a Better World’.

(Image source: The Story of Stuff Project)

Thinking Sustainability: ‘Surviving Progress’ (Trailer)

From The National Film Board of Canada:

Surviving Progress is a stunning new feature documentary that connects the financial collapse, growing inequity, and the Wall Street oligarchy, with future technology, sustainability, and the fate of civilization. Inspired by Ronald Wright’s bestseller A Short History of Progress, filmmakers Mathieu Roy and Harold Crooks dig deep into human nature and patterns of history to challenge and redefine the very idea of progress.

(Poster source: First Run Features)

Ecological Footprint creator William Rees on ‘Why We’re in Denial’  

From The Extra-Environmentalist:

Dr. William Rees is a professor emeritus at the University of British Columbia and former director of the School of Community and Regional Planning (SCARP). He is the originator of the “ecological footprint” concept and co-developer of the method… We ask Bill about the reasons we’re in denial and how we could start adapting to our ecological challenges through a new cultural narrative.

Panel: Confronting the Climate Disinformation Campaign

from Sustainability Now Radio:

Here is the video for the free presentation given on April 30, 2012 on Penn State’s University Park Campus. Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.

Some recent water themed shots from around Vancouver

Thinking Globally: ‘Living Planet Report 2012’ - Ecological Footprint Index

From WWF:

‎”The Living Planet Report is the world’s leading, science-based analysis on the health of our only planet and the impact of human activity. Its key finding? Humanity’s demands exceed our planet’s capacity to sustain us.” 

You can find your country and see how it compares to others using the interactive Eco Footprint calculator above. 

Related:

~ ‘How to be a conscious consumer’ (WWF)

~ ‘Earth’s environment getting worse, not better, says WWF ahead of Rio+20’ (The Guardian)