planted city

An image from an ad that caught my eye… human systems

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:

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)

Tools for Change | Sustainable Communities: ‘Planning for Turbulence: Shock, Resilience & Innovation’ (Part 1 of 6)

In this keynote talk to the Canadian Association of Planning Students complex systems expert Thomas Homer-Dixon explains some of the dynamic and interconnected issues facing our communities and offers strategies that will help them (and us) thrive in the face of changing conditions. He also cautions that what worked in the past is no longer working.

Homer-Dixon is the CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs, director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation, and a professor in the University of Waterloo’s School of Environment, Enterprise, and Development. His books include Carbon Shift (2009), The Upside of Down (2006), which won the 2006 National Business Book Award, and The Ingenuity Gap (2000), winner of the 2001 Governor General’s Non-fiction Award. His recent research has focused on threats to global security in the 21st century and how societies adapt to complex economic, ecological, and technological change.

You can check out more of his work here.

Related:

• ‘Future city planners told stakes are high’ (The Record)

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)

Thinking Sustainability: ‘Last Call: The Documentary’ (Trailer)

From Last Call:

Present system crisis, both environmental and economical, matches with the reference scenario outlined in the 1972 book “The Limits to Growth”, by a group of researchers of the MIT. Climate change, natural disasters, wars, natural resources reduction, economic and financial crisis, democracy and political, systems crisis, poverty, hunger and famines, over population… While these crisis are acknowledged by almost everybody there is a tendency to consider them separately. The Limits to Growth team’s approach, in 1972 and in 2012, shows that all these crisis are different parts of a single big problem… The documentary “Last Call” shows the urgency to listen to this message of warning, in order to pursue a new model of equity and sustainability, before it’s too late.

(Graphic source: PBL Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency via Scientific American)

Related: 

• ‘We can have safe, sustainable energy’ (The Guardian)
• ‘The truth about renewable energy: Inexpensive, reliable, and inexhaustible’ (Grist)
• ‘Newsflash: solar power costs are falling below fossil fuels’ (The Conversation)

(Infographic source: PV Magazine)

Leaders in Sustainability: RIP Dr. Elinor Ostrom, First Female Recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics

In this short video for the Stockholm Resilience Centre Dr. Ostrom: 

explains how people can use natural resources in a sustainable way based on the diversity that exists in the world.

Related:

• ‘Elinor Ostrom 1933-2012’ (Slate Magazine)
• ‘Elinor Ostrom obituary’ (Guardian)
• ‘Green from the Grassroots’ by Elinor Ostrom (Project Syndicate)

An important first line from the recent Time Magazine article, ‘How Climate Change Is Growing Forests in the Arctic’. 

Related:

• ‘The Other Arab Spring’ (New York Times)
• ‘A Planetary Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste’ (Yale e360)
• ‘The Environmental and Economic Crises Share the Same Cause’ (UNEP)
• ‘Issues’ (Post Carbon Institute)
• ‘Anthropocene’ (Welcome to the Anthropocene)