What if the ongoing economic recession is not just a regrettable temporary setback in the never-ending march of growth-fuelled prosperity, but the beginning of a painful but ecologically necessary process of scaling back our footprint to a more sustainable level?

How would we manage the decline so as to ensure the burdens are shared out equitably? How would we go about reorganizing our society and economy around conservation and community well-being rather than economic growth and short-term profit?

The revolution envisioned above would require a fundamental transformation in every aspect of our lives — our jobs, our homes, our food system, our arts and entertainment, etc. At the risk of biting off more than we can chew, these are the questions we set out to answer in our July/August 2009 issue: “Briarpatch Unplugged, Or How I Learned to Stop Destroying the Planet and Love the Global Recession.”

To subscribe or order a copy of this issue, call 1-866-431-5777 or visit our secure online shop.

features

kick-starting the environmental movement
An interview with Noam Chomsky
By Dan Mossip-Balkwill

the myth of the wealthy environmentalist
Connecting Finnish innovation & Mongolian degradation
By Chris Benjamin

envisioning ecological revolution
Why ecological transformation requires a social revolution
By John Bellamy Foster

salt & earth ( a photo essay)
A year and a half in the life of an ecovillage
A photo essay by Jonathan Taggart

old growth, new approach
Learning from the Haida Land Use Agreement
By Erik Haensel & Justine Townsend

why less is more
A conversation with six visionary thinkers about a scaled-down future
By Mark Brooks

six big ways to work for a smaller world
Small actions that add up
By Stephanie Dearing, Brittany Shoot, Anuradha Rao, Candace Hodder, Tim Rourke & Dalia Levy

online exclusive:
Resources & tools for powering down

departments

letter from the editor
How I learned to stop destroying the planet and love the global recession

reviews

Peter Victor’s Managing Without Growth: Smaller by Design, Not Disaster
Reviewed by Brett Dolter

E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
Reviewed by Yarika Rose

luz: girl of the knowing
“Luz makes a refrigeration basket” by Claudia Dávila

quotes from the underground
Susan Sontag, Edward Abbey, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Motherwell, CrimethInc., Maximilien Robespierre, Peter Ustinov, Michael Stone & John Berger

parting shots
Generation LESS comes of age
By Jessica C. Y. Wong

To subscribe or order a copy of this issue, call 1-866-431-5777 or visit our secure online shop.

Books

Mark Anielski, The Economics of Happiness: Building Genuine Wealth (2007)

Sharon Astyk, Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front (2008)

John Bellamy Foster, The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet (2009)

Peter Brown and Geoffrey Garver, Right Relationship: Building a Whole Earth Economy (2009)

Thomas Homer-Dixon, The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity & the Renewal of Civilization (2006)

Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (2008)

Dmitry Orlov, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects (2008)

Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy; Justice, Sustainability, and Peace (2005)

Graeme Taylor, Evolution’s Edge: The Coming Collapse and Transformation of our World (2008)

Peter Victor, Managing Without Growth: Slower by Design, Not Disaster (2008)

Articles

Murray Dobbin, “Imagine: Prosperity Without Growth,” Rabble.ca, June 19, 2009

George Monbiot, “This crisis demands a reappraisal of who we are and what progress means,” The Guardian, December 4, 2007

Blogs

The Automatic Earth

Casaubon’s Book

Other

Center for the Advancement of the Steady State Economy

The Story of Stuff

De-growth resources

Questioning Business

Sustainable Living Guide

Natural Step toolkits

Economic De-Growth for Ecological Sustainability and Social Equity

Living on Earth as if We Want to Stay

And all of the crew they were brave men,
But the Captain he was braver.
He said ‘Never mind the ship me boys
There’s none of us here can save her.

Let her go down. Swim for your lives!
Swim for your children, swim for your wives
But let her go down.’

Knight, sung by Steeleye Span

This ship may not yet be going down, but it’s certainly heading straight for the rocks.

How do we change course? Or failing that, where are the lifeboats that can preserve us and carry us back to shore? In less nautical terms, these are the sorts of questions with which this issue of Briarpatch is concerned.

The effort to unplug or power-down the global economy is emerging as the single greatest ecological challenge of our time. Increasing numbers of activists, visionaries and sympathizers of all ages are coming out of the woodwork to articulate the challenge and begin to address it.

Establishment pundits, however - on those rare occasions when they admit the need to do something about climate change, peak energy, declining fisheries and other natural limits rising before us - persist in their assurances that we can solve these problems without fundamentally changing the way we sustain ourselves, unshakable in their faith that endless economic expansion is both possible and desirable.

George Monbiot would respond that this is utter folly. The eight sentences it takes him to explain why bear repeating in their entirety:

“In a lecture to the Royal Academy of Engineering in May, Professor Rod Smith of Imperial College explained that a growth rate of three per cent means economic activity doubles in 23 years. At 10 per cent it takes just seven years. This we knew. But Smith takes it further. With a series of equations he shows that ‘each successive doubling period consumes as much resource as all the previous doubling periods combined.’ In other words, if our economy grows at three per cent between now and 2040, we will consume in that period economic resources equivalent to all those we have consumed since humans first stood on two legs. Then, between 2040 and 2063, we must double our total consumption again. Reading that paper I realized for the first time what we are up against” (emphasis added).

Continued economic growth is, quite simply, not an option. For the sake of our children, for the sake of life on this planet, we must find another way. And individual lifestyle choices may be a good start, but they’re not nearly sufficient. As Chris Benjamin points out in this issue, “only 20 per cent of [Canadians] say we’re doing anything to reduce our environmental impact. And only 10 per cent of us feel any guilt about that.” Atomized individuals making changes - even major changes - in their purchasing patterns can do little more than scratch the surface of this problem as long as growth remains the core economic principle. Making the necessary changes will require bold and audacious actions from individuals, organizations, businesses, and from all levels of government.

The good news is that there’s no shortage of opportunities to participate. Nor is there any shortage of books, articles, blogs and other learning tools to guide and inspire us along the way. Lifeboats, to return to the waterlogged metaphor with which I began, come in many forms, and we don’t all need to agree on any particular design before we start building them.

It is my hope that the following articles can serve as a catalyst for further engagement in this issue. Among them you’ll find a few conceptual frameworks for understanding the situation, analyses of the challenges and opportunities ahead and profiles of initiatives already underway.

Our situation may indeed be daunting, but consider this: has there ever been an historical moment more ripe, or a population better informed and better equipped, for radical experimentation, innovation and transformation? How fortunate we are to be alive and plugged-in at this particular moment in time.

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Subscribe to Briarpatch.

Illustration: Nick Craine

By John Bellamy Foster
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009

This essay is excerpted with permission from John Bellamy Foster’s The Ecological Revolution: Making Peace with the Planet, Monthly Review Press, (2009).

Underlying the goal of ecological revolution is the premise that we are in the midst of a global environmental crisis of such enormity that the planet’s entire web of life is threatened and with it the future of civilization.

This is no longer a controversial proposition. To be sure, there are different perceptions about the extent of the challenge that it raises. At one extreme, there are those who believe that since these are human problems arising from human causes they are easily solvable. All we need is ingenuity and the will to act. At the other extreme are those who believe the world ecology is deteriorating on a scale and with a rapidity beyond our means to control it, giving rise to gloomy forebodings.

Although polar opposites, these views nonetheless share a common basis. As Marxist economist Paul Sweezy observed, they each reflect “the belief that if present trends continue to operate, it is only a matter of time until the human species irredeemably fouls its own nest.”

Warning bells

The more we learn about current environmental trends, the more the unsustainability of our present course becomes clear to us. There are a number of warning signs:

• There is now a virtual certainty that the critical threshold of a 2°C (3.6° F) increase in average world temperature above the pre-industrial level will soon be crossed due to buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Scientists believe climate change at this level will have portentous implications for the world’s ecosystems. The question is no longer whether significant climate change will occur, but how great it will be.

• Experiments at the International Rice Research Institute and elsewhere have led scientists to conclude that with each 1°C (1.8°F) increase in temperature, rice, wheat, and corn yields could drop 10 per cent.

• It is now increasingly believed that the world is approaching peak crude oil production. The world economy is, therefore, confronting more constrained oil supplies, despite a rapidly increasing demand. All of this points to a growing world energy crisis and mounting resource wars.

• The planet is facing global water shortages due to the drawing down of irreplaceable aquifers, which make up the bulk of the world’s fresh water supplies. This poses a threat to global agriculture, which has become a bubble economy based on the unsustainable exploitation of groundwater. One in four people in the world today do not have access to safe water.

• Two thirds of the world’s major fish stocks are currently being fished at or above their capacity. Over the last half-century, 90 per cent of large predatory fish in the world’s oceans have been eliminated.

• The species extinction rate is the highest it’s been in 65 million years, with the prospect of cascading extinctions as the last remnants of intact ecosystems are removed. Already, the extinction rate is in some cases (as in the case of bird species) 100 times the benchmark or natural rate.

• According to a study published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2002, the world economy exceeded the earth’s regenerative capacity in 1980, and by 1999 had gone beyond it by as much as 20 per cent. This means, according to the study’s authors, that “it would require 1.2 earths, or one earth for 1.2 years, to regenerate what humanity used in 1999.”

• The question of the ecological collapse of past civilizations from Easter Island to the Mayans is increasingly seen as extending to today’s world capitalist system. This view, long held by environmentalists, has been popularized by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse.

These and other warning bells indicate that the present human relation to the environment is no longer sustainable. The most developed capitalist countries have the largest per capita ecological footprints, demonstrating that the entire course of world capitalist development represents a dead end.

The main response of the ruling capitalist class, when confronted with the growing en­vironmental challenge, is to fiddle while Rome burns. To the extent that it has a strategy, it is to rely on revolutionizing the forces of production, i.e., on technological change, while keeping the existing system of social relations intact. Today’s vested interests are counting on this built-in process of revolutionary technological change, coupled with the proverbial magic of the market, to solve the environmental problem when and where this becomes necessary.

In stark contrast, many environmentalists believe technological revolution alone will be insufficient to solve the problem and that a more far-reaching social revolution aimed at transforming the present mode of production is required.

Great transition scenarios

Historically addressing the question of the ecological transformation of society means that we need to ascertain: (1) where the world capitalist system is heading at present; (2) the extent to which it can alter its course by technological or other means in response to today’s converging ecological and social crises; and (3) the historical alternatives to the existing system. The most ambitious attempt thus far to carry out such a broad assessment has come from the Global Scenario Group, a project launched in 1995 by the Stockholm Environment Institute to examine the transition to global sustainability. The Global Scenario Group has issued three reports: Branch Points (1997), Bending the Curve (1998), and their culminating study, Great Transition (2002). I will focus on the last of these reports, Great Transition.

As its name suggests, the Global Scenario Group employs alternative scenarios to explore possible paths that society caught in a crisis of ecological sustainability might take. Their culminating report presents three classes of scenarios: Conventional Worlds, Barbarization, and Great Transitions. Each of these contains two variants. Conventional Worlds consists of Market Forces and Policy Reform. Barbarization manifests itself in the forms of Breakdown and Fortress World. Great Transitions is broken down into Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. Each scenario is associated with different thinkers: Market Forces with Adam Smith; Policy Reform with John Maynard Keynes and the authors of the 1987 Brundtland Commission report; Breakdown with Thomas Malthus; Fortress World with Thomas Hobbes; Eco-communalism with William Morris, Mahatma Gandhi, and E. F. Schumacher; and the New Sustainability Paradigm with John Stuart Mill.

Within the Conventional Worlds scenarios, Market Forces stands for naked capitalism or neo-liberalism. It represents, in the words of the Great Transition report, “the firestorm of capitalist expansion.” Market Forces is an unfettered capitalist world order geared to the accumulation of capital and rapid economic growth without regard to social or ecological costs. The principal problem raised by this scenario is its rapacious relation to humanity and the earth.

The main assumption of those who advocate a Market Forces solution to the environmental problem is that it will lead to increasing efficiency in the consumption of environmental inputs by means of technological revolution and continual market adjustments. Use of energy, water, and other natural resources will decrease per unit of economic output. However, the central implication of this argument is false. As the Global Transition report puts it, “The ‘growth effect’ outpaces the ‘efficiency effect.’”

This can be understood concretely in terms of what has been called the Jevons Paradox, named after William Stanley Jevons, who published The Coal Question in 1865. Jevons, one of the founders of neoclassical economics, explained that improvements in steam engines that decreased the use of coal per unit of output also served to increase the scale of production as more and bigger factories were built. Hence, increased efficiency in the use of coal had the paradoxical effect of expanding aggregate coal consumption.

The perils of the Market Forces model are clearly visible in the environmental depredations during the two centuries since the advent of industrial capitalism, and especially in the last half-century. “Rather than abating” under a Market Forces regime, the Great Transition report declares, “the unsustainable process of environmental degradation that we observe in today’s world would [continue to] intensify. The danger of crossing critical thresholds in global systems would increase, triggering events that would radically transform the planet’s climate and ecosystems.” Market Forces leads inexorably to ecological and social disaster and even collapse. The continuation of “‘business-as-usual’ is a utopian fantasy.”

A far more rational basis for hope, the report contends, is found in the Policy Reform scenario. “The essence of the scenario is the emergence of the political will for gradually bending the curve of development toward a comprehensive set of sustainability targets,” including peace, human rights, economic development, and environmental quality. This is essentially the Global Keynesian strategy advocated by the Brundtland Commission Report in the late 1980s - an expansion of the welfare state, now conceived as an environmental welfare state, to the entire world. It represents the promise of what environmental sociologists call ecological modernization.

The Policy Reform approach is prefigured in various international agreements, such as the Kyoto Protocol on global warming and the environmental reform measures advanced by the Earth Summits in Rio in 1992 and Johannesburg in 2002. Policy Reform would seek to decrease world inequality and poverty through foreign aid programs emanating from rich countries and international institutions. It would promote en­vironmental best practices through state-induced market incentives. Yet, despite the potential for limited ecological modernization, the realities of capitalism, the Great Transition report contends, would collide with Policy Reform. This is because Policy Reform remains a Conventional Worlds scenario - one in which the underlying values, lifestyles, and structures of the capitalist system endure. “The logic of sustainability and the logic of the global market are in tension. The correlation between the accumulation of wealth and the concentration of power erodes the political basis for a transition.” Under these circumstances, the “lure of the God of Mammon and the Almighty dollar” will prevail.

The failure of both of the Conventional Worlds scenarios to alleviate the problem of ecological decline means that Barbarization threatens: either Breakdown or the Fortress World. Breakdown is self-explanatory and to be avoided at all costs. The Fortress World emerges when “powerful regional and international actors comprehend the perilous forces leading to Breakdown” and are able to guard their own interests sufficiently to create “protected enclaves.” Fortress World is a planetary apartheid system, gated and maintained by force, in which the gap between global rich and global poor constantly widens and the differential access to environmental resources and amenities increases sharply. It consists of “bubbles of privilege amidst oceans of misery. . . . The elite[s] have halted barbarism at their gates and enforced a kind of environmental management and uneasy stability.” The general state of the planetary environment, however, would continue to deteriorate in this scenario, leading either to a complete ecological Breakdown or to the achievement through revolutionary struggle of a more egalitarian society, such as Eco-communalism.

Arguably, naked capitalism and resource wars are already propelling the world in the direction of Fortress World. With the advent of the War on Terror unleashed by the United States against one country after another since September 11, 2001, an Empire of Barbarism is making its presence felt. Still, from the standpoint of the Global Scenario Group, the Barbarization scenarios are there simply to warn us of the worst possible dangers of ecological and social decline. A Great Transition, it is argued, is necessary if Barbarization is to be avoided.

Theoretically, there are two Great Transitions scenarios envisioned by the Global Scenario Group: Eco-communalism and the New Sustainability Paradigm. However, Eco-communalism is never discussed in detail, on the grounds that for this kind of transformation to come about, it would be necessary for world society to pass through Barbarization first. The Global Scenario Group authors see the social revolution of Eco-communalism as lying on the other side of Jack London’s The Iron Heel. The discussion of Great Transition is thus confined to the New Sustainability Paradigm.

The essence of the New Sustainability Paradigm is that of a radical ecological transformation that goes against unbridled capitalist hegemony, but stops short of full social revolution. It is to be carried out primarily through changes in values and lifestyles, rather than the transformation of social structures.

In the explicitly utopian scenario of the New Sustainability Paradigm, the United Nations is transformed into the World Union, a true global federation. Globalization has become civilized. The world market is fully integrated and harnessed for equality and sustainability, not just wealth generation. The War on Terrorism has resulted in the defeat of the terrorists. Civil society, represented by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), plays a leading role in society at both the national and global levels. Voting is electronic. Poverty is eradicated. The giant corporations have become forward-looking societal organizations, rather than simply private entities. They are no longer concerned exclusively with the economic bottom line, but have revised this to incorporate environmental sustainability and social ecology as ends irrespective of profit.

Four agents of change are said to have combined to bring all of this about: (1) giant transnational corporations; (2) intergovernmental organizations such as the United Nations, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization; (3) civil society acting through NGOs; and (4) a globally aware, environmentally conscious, democratically organized world population.

In the New Sustainability Paradigm scenario, the basic institutions of capitalism remain intact, as do the fundamental relations of power, but a shift in lifestyle and consumer orientation mean that the economy is no longer geared to economic growth and the enlargement of profits, but to efficiency, equity, and qualitative improvements in life. A capitalist society formerly driven to expanded reproduction through investment of surplus product (or surplus value) has been replaced with a system of simple reproduction in which the surplus is consumed rather than invested. The vision is one of a cultural revolution supplementing technological revolution, and radically changing the ecological and social landscape of capitalist society without fundamentally altering the productive, property, and power relations that define the system.

There are both logical and historical problems with this projection. It combines the weakest elements of utopian thinking (weaving a future out of mere hopes and wishes) with a practical desire to avoid a sharp break with the existing system. The failure of the Global Scenario Group to address its own scenario of Eco-communalism is part and parcel of this perspective, which seeks to elude the question of the more thoroughgoing social transformation that a genuine Great Transition would require.

The result is a vision of the future that is contradictory to an extreme. Private corporations are institutions with one and only one purpose: the pursuit of profit. The idea of turning them to entirely different and opposing social ends is reminiscent of the long-abandoned notions of the soulful corporation that emerged for a short time in the 1950s and then vanished in the harsh light of reality. Many changes associated with the New Sustainability Paradigm would require a class revolution. Yet, this is excluded from the scenario itself. Instead, the Global Scenario Group authors engage in a kind of magical thinking - denying that fundamental changes in the relations of production must accompany (and sometimes even precede) changes in values. No less than in the case of the Policy Reform Scenario, as pointed out in the Great Transition report itself, the God of Mammon will inevitably overwhelm a value-based Great Transition that seeks to escape the challenge of a revolutionary transformation of society as a whole.

An ecological-social revolution

Put simply, a global ecological revolution worthy of the name can only occur as part of a larger social - and I would insist, socialist - revolution. Such a revolution, were it to generate the conditions of equality, sustainability, and human freedom worthy of a genuine Great Transition, would necessarily draw its major impetus from the struggles of working populations and communities at the bottom of the global capitalist hierarchy. It would demand, as Marx insisted, that the associated producers rationally regulate the human metabolic relation with nature. It would see wealth and human development in radically different terms than capitalist society.

In conceiving such a social and ecological revolution, we can derive inspiration, as Marx did, from the ancient Epicurean concept of natural wealth. As Epicurus observed in his Principal Doctrines: “Natural wealth is both limited and easily obtainable; the riches of idle fancies go on forever.” It is the unnatural, unlimited character of such alienated wealth that is the problem. Similarly, in what has become known as the Vatican Sayings, Epicurus stated: “Poverty, when measured by the natural purpose of life, is great wealth; but unlimited wealth is great poverty.” Free human development, arising in a climate of natural limitation and sustainability, is the true basis of wealth, of a rich, many-sided existence; the unbounded pursuit of wealth is the primary source of human impoverishment and suffering. Needless to say, such a concern with natural well-being, as opposed to artificial needs and stimulants, is the antithesis of capitalist society and the precondition of a sustainable human community.

A Great Transition, therefore, must have the characteristics implied by the Global Scenario Group’s neglected scenario: Eco-communalism. It must take its inspiration from William Morris, one of the most original and ecological followers of Karl Marx, from Gandhi, and from other radical, revolutionary and materialist figures (including Marx himself) stretching as far back as Epicurus. The goal must be the creation of sustainable communities geared to the development of human needs and powers, removed from the all-consuming drive to accumulate wealth (capital).

As Marx wrote, the new system “starts with the self-government of the communities.” The creation of an ecological civilization requires a social revolution, one that, as Roy Morrison explains, needs to be organized democratically from below: “Community by community. . . region by region.” It must put the provision of basic human needs - clean air, unpolluted water, safe food, adequate sanitation, social transport, and universal health care and education, all of which require a sustainable relation to the earth - ahead of all other needs and wants. “An ecological dialectic” along these lines, Morrison insists, “rejects not struggle but the endless slaughter of industrial negation” in the interest of unlimited profits.

Such a revolutionary turn in human affairs may seem improbable, but the continuation of the present capitalist system for any length of time will prove impossible - if human civilization and the web of life as we know it are to be sustained.

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Finnish summer: Birch trees through a sauna window

(Click an image to enlarge.)

Words and photos by Chris Benjamin
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009

Conventional wisdom tells us that because Finland is wealthy, its citizens have the necessary resources to take action on environmental issues - that prosperity and a healthier environment go hand in hand. Unfortunately, the world doesn’t work this way.

The mercury hit 99^oC. The steam hit my eyes and Uncle Reijo started talking about snow.

The European Union (E.U.), Uncle Reijo explained as we sat and sweated in a Finnish sauna, had recently devised a standardized set of planting guidelines for all 8.6 million of its farms, stretching from Portugal to Finland. Corn, the guidelines stipulated, was to be planted in early spring. A stubborn farmer he knew responded by planting a corn seed in the Finnish snow at the proper date, snapping a photo and sending it to the E.U.

We shared a laugh at the universal depths of bureaucratic myopia. In the silence that followed, I decided to try my one Finnish phrase.

Kylla, luonto on kaunis, I said, looking through the sauna window. Nature sure is beautiful. Uncle Reijo nodded.

Finnish environmentalism…

Finns take great pride in their country’s vast tracts of wilderness. Seventy-six per cent of Finland is forested; 10 per cent, comprised of nearly 190,000 lakes, is inland water. Finns are fond of quantifying their values with a simple comparison: “In Finland, there are more saunas than cars.”

That love of nature is evident in the country’s enviable environmental policies. In a recent Report on Business article, Canadian writer Konrad Yakabuski raved about how Finland’s forest industry, supplied mainly by individual woodlot owners, was putting its boots to the behind of Canada’s old-fashioned, big-money clear-cutters. Finns are also preparing for a lower-carbon future by switching to cleaner-burning peat-based fuels, which currently account for 27 per cent of primary energy production. An incredible 90 per cent of Finnish farmers have signed up to reduce pesticide and chemical fertilizer use.

The Finns I’ve spoken to (both in Finland and expatriates living in Canada) attribute their homeland’s strong environ­mental policy framework to that love of nature. Elise Sahivirta, legal advisor for the Finnish Ministry of Environment, sums up the equation nicely: “Finns value a healthy, clean environment, and so its protection through the setting of laws and limits is easy to accept.” As a result of such regulations, Finland was ranked the greenest nation on earth in a 2007 Reader’s Digest study.

If the Finnish environmental policy framework has a fatal flaw, however, it is the overconfidence born of its relative successes compared to other countries. In national and international surveys, only one in five Finns sees environ­mental problems as a “very serious issue,” one of the lowest rates in the world. Finns are generally unwilling or unable to see automobile use as an environ­mental risk. There may be more saunas than cars, but that’s more a testament to the popularity of saunas than the unpopularity of cars. Finland ranks 21st in the world in cars per capita, higher than the U.K. Finns love their cars as much as the rest of the western world.

Finns are also among the most reluctant to pay higher taxes or prices for sustainability, or accept “polluter pays” policies. Finland’s corporate taxes are extremely low. In return, corporations create, adopt and market trendsetting technologies to tech-savvy Finns. The Finnish economy is proudly driven by Finnish innovation, and Finns have understandably become obsessed with cell phones, satellite hookups and time-saving devices. In the April 2009 issue of The Atlantic, travel writer Trevor Corson claimed that the Finnish love of simplicity shines even as modern house-sized and fully equipped cottages replace the old-fashioned, off-grid red shacks that pepper the landscape.

The truth is, with prosperity comes heavy consequences for the nature Finns love, even though most of them will never face those consequences. The point of impact is too far away, in what might seem to Finns like the middle of nowhere. Finns, like most of us living in rich nations, don’t see the damage their consumerism exports to poor supplier nations desperate to cut, slash, drill and assemble whatever commodities they have for some much-needed foreign currency.

…meets Mongolian ecology

A few months after leaving Finland, I found myself 4,000 kilometres and hundreds of ecosystems away, in Mongolia’s Gobi desert, more struck by the parallels than the differences between the two countries. Mongolia and Finland have a surprising number of things in common. There is a shared linguistic heritage, a shared fear of the Russians, state-driven egalitarianism, a small and scattered population and a cultural identity that is tied to the land.

A guide’s camel rests en route to the Gobi desert.

As B. Chimed-Ochir, head of World Wildlife Fund’s Mongolian office, once wrote, “Mongolians do not need to be told that their well-being depends on a healthy environment. We are a people whose ancestors lived close to the land, dependent on nature for daily needs for countless generations. The idea of environmental conservation is deeply embedded in the national identity.” The record supports Chimed-Ochir’s claim: Mongolia boasts what is likely the world’s oldest protected land, Khentii Khan Mountain, a revered holy mountain that Genghis Khan declared free from human exploitation. The explorer Marco Polo noted that hunting in Mongolia was taboo during mating season, an effective conservation measure still practiced.

Today, about half of Mongolia’s population is directly dependent on the land. With a million nomadic herders and their 32 million animals, Westerners might imagine a troubled landscape. Yet, the consensus among Mongolian environmental specialists is that only seven per cent of pasture land is degraded by human activities. The Asian Development Bank, however, estimates that 70 per cent of Mongolia’s pasture land is degraded. To explain this discrepancy, Cambridge University’s David Sneath argues that the Bank’s figure has been vastly inflated in order to justify land privatization policies that radically depart from Mongolia’s 800-year-plus history of systematically sharing the commons. In a practice that mimics the symbiotic relationship that has evolved over millennia between grasslands and grazing herds, nomadic family groups move four times a year with their animals, inhabiting one piece of steppe, desert or mountain until it has been fully grazed, then moving on to let it regenerate.

Yaks roam freely by day across the Mongolian steppe.

Whether the actual rate of degradation is seven per cent, 70 per cent or somewhere in between, more serious trouble has now befallen Mongolian lands. Since the fall of Soviet-style communism in 1990, Mongolia has attempted a slow transition to individ­ualized, settlement-based land ownership. Newly appointed landowners have been assigned single plots of land for year-round grazing. The consequences include depletion and contamination of water sources, deforestation and overgrazing, and increased poaching of wild animals after the land has gone barren. Those barren lands are also more susceptible to severe weather. As a result, the desert is expanding, eating into land that has sustained life for thousands of years.

Then there are the mines: eye-straining swaths of barren lands criss-crossed by some of the country’s few paved roads. These barrens have replaced the people, animals, rivers and hillsides that once existed there. The land has been blasted away by water cannons; the rivers have been dredged or diverted. Many of Mongolia’s rivers have been run dry by mining operations, and much of the groundwater that herders rely on has been contaminated by mercury and other mining chemicals. This is where the interconnectedness of Finnish innovation and Mongolian degradation is most evident.

The Gobi’s moving sand dunes sometimes reach 200 metres in height.

The greatest thing separating Finland and Mongolia is neither distance nor culture, but money - or the lack of it. In its game of debt-driven catch-up, seeking to pay for the advice of consultants from the Asian Development Bank and other international lending bodies, Mongolia has become heavily dependent on its environmentally destructive mining industry.

Mineral exploration and extraction licences now claim almost a third of Mongolian territory, threatening existing and proposed protected areas and wildlife. Mined resources like copper (Mongolia boasts the largest copper mine on the planet), silver, gold, tin, fluorspar (commonly used in camera lenses) and tungsten (commonly used in the energy-efficient light bulbs environ­mentalists love) are Mongolia’s only major export and its most stable source of revenue. Mining drives the growth of the capital city of Ulanbaatar, where Mongolia’s limited financial district is concentrated. Canada’s own mining giant, Ivanhoe Mines, has staked its future on mining Mongolia’s sensitive Gobi Desert. Another Canadian mining giant, Cameco, is active there, along with several Canadian joint-venture extraction companies partnered with Malaysia and China.

This settlement of ger (yurts) is open for business, selling hot meals to travellers.

Under pressure from international lending groups like the Asian Development Bank, Mongolia has racked up enormous debt (75 per cent of gross national product) in its efforts to shift away from the pastoral life and toward urbanism. Mining is driving this change, and the industry is growing at around 10 per cent a year, increasing output 1,500 per cent in the last decade. Mongolia’s largely unregulated mining industry is destroying buffer zones, depleting endangered wildlife habitat and severely polluting land and water, gradually destroying what had been a sustainable and vibrant pastoral economy spanning 800 years of nationhood.

Enter the dragon

Although many Finns will never see or even think about such far­away environmental destruction, they are active participants in it. Finland imports more than $10 billion in minerals and related products a year, and is highly dependent on imports of raw materials. Increasingly, these products come from mines throughout Asia, which supply more than 80 per cent of Finland’s imports from developing nations. As part of its policy of enticing developing nations to provide its raw materials, Finland recently granted Mongolia “most favoured nation” trading status, reducing tariffs and committing to a long-term trade relationship between the two nations.

A horse herder heading for supper as sun finally sets.

Still, Mongolia’s capital-city capitalists have their eyes on an even bigger prize. China is Finland’s third-largest trading partner and its largest in Asia. China accounts for more than half of Asia’s total exports and is becoming an increasingly important supplier of Finland’s electronic and motorized devices. Largely driven by China’s growth, Asia has overtaken the European Union as the biggest provider of high-tech imports in the world.

Finland designs products, China puts them together and Mongolia provides the copper to Chinese factories that produce the wires, computer parts and motors. China has surpassed the United States as the biggest user and importer of copper in the world. Home to some of the largest copper finds in recent years, Mongolia has become, in the words of Canadian Robert Friedland, Chairman of Ivanhoe Mines, the “holy grail of low-cost copper” for China. To ensure Mongolia’s co-operation, China provides aid in the form of multi-million-dollar infrastructure projects. Mongolia has responded with investor-friendly mining laws and multiple exceptions within its once-protected lands.

A herd can easily consist of hundreds of yaks, goats and sheep.

Why the twain will never meet

Conventional wisdom tells us that because Finland is wealthy, its citizens are more concerned with environmental issues, and as a result, the environment presumably wins. But when viewed through a global lens, it is apparent that this is a fantasy that only fuels ongoing environmental devastation. Now more than ever, economic development and its consequences transcend national borders.

Of course, my beloved Finnish cousins are not unique in this regard. Every time I return to Canada from poorer countries, I am shocked by our conspicuous wealth and consumption, and by how our houses have tripled in size in the past 50 years to hold all the new things we work so hard to acquire. Canada is a far bigger exporter of environmental problems than Finland, even though Canadians express more concern over environmental problems than do the Finns. Until this recession, according to National Geographic’s Greendex polling, Canadians were the only people in the world identifying, unprompted, the environment as a higher priority than the economy. Canadians consistently rate protecting the environment as one of our most important public policy goals.

However, like Finland, we love our cars, our gadgets, our big houses and the things we fill them with. Canada ranks second-to-last on the Greendex in four areas of consumer behaviour: housing, transportation, food consumption and goods. Only 20 per cent of us say we’re doing something to reduce our environmental impact - and only 10 per cent of us feel any guilt about that.

Meanwhile, as former Canadian trade minister David Emerson has boasted, “we have a substantial number of Canadian mining companies that are involved in Mongolia.” Our involvement drives the mining of Mongolia’s protected and ancient lands. We often employ Finnish engineers, but rarely Mongolian ones, in the process. At the same time, we have exported much of our manufacturing sector and its toxic environmental impact to China, quadrupling our Chinese imports in less than a decade.

In a place that boasts vast wilderness areas and vast monetary wealth, it’s deceptively easy to argue that increased prosperity results in reduced environmental destruction. It’s easy to ignore the fact that, as is the case in so many other developing nations, Mongolia’s desperate efforts to feed the economic machinery of richer countries have wrought its first genuine ecological crisis.

The environmental policies of rich nations and international lending institutions fail to account for what matters most in sustaining the environment. It’s not money; it’s not exports or imports, and it is not the empty platitudes of wealthy environmentalists professing their love for nature while destroying it from afar. What matters most is the nature of our relationships with the lands and waters that sustain us, however near or far they may be. Those closest to the land, including Mongolian herders, know this best. Any policy, educational campaign, or investment in trade, development, or sustainability that fails to account for this situated knowledge is not part of the solution, but part of the problem.

In other words, until we stop exporting our environmental impact to poor countries while importing their natural wealth, we can hardly call ourselves green.

Winds shape the Gobi’s sand dunes into sculpted masterpieces.

An ovoo: a pile of stones and other offerings left in places with strong spiritual energy.

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Mishka, 2, plays with Fiza, a volunteer with Canada World Youth, on the floor of the communal kitchen while his mother sweeps. Members of Whole Village share community housekeeping responsibilities such as cleaning, cooking and child care. (All photos: Jonathan Taggart)

(Click photos to enlarge.)

“I first visited Whole Village in April 2007; over the course of the next 18 months, I lived on the farm in installations, working the land to earn my keep while photographing the community.”

Whole Village is an ecovillage and biodynamic farm founded in response to a perceived loss of genuine community, increased urban­ization of rural areas and impoverishment of farmland. A self-described intentional community, Whole Village is located on a 200-acre tract of land an hour north of Toronto’s city centre. The community is made up of 30 educators, professionals and farmers who live in a 15,000 square-foot co-operative residence and share sustainability as their ultimate goal. I first visited Whole Village in April 2007; over the course of the next 18 months, I lived on the farm in installations, working the land to earn my keep while photographing the community.

On the surface, Whole Village offers a solution to the frustrations faced by environmentally conscious urbanites. In contrast to the free-love and tarpaper-shack stereotypes associated with communes of the 1960s, Whole Village is highly organized and surprisingly modern. The farm’s main residence set a zoning precedent with a green design that prioritizes personal space while preserving communal eating and recreation areas. The consensus leadership model that helped administer the group’s farm purchase now ensures a level of social and financial accountability among community members. The way of life the com­munity supports is one that blends traditional family values with modern ecological practices. The result is what one member describes as being more like a “condo on a farm” than a contemporary commune.

As an agricultural collective, Whole Village’s success can be measured largely by the community’s ability to meet its own food requirements. Food production fluctuates between 20 and 40 per cent of the total need - a figure largely determined by the quality of the growing season, but nonetheless impressive for a community founded only a few years ago.

Any produce that the community cannot consume or preserve is sold to members of the surrounding townships through a Community Shared Agriculture (CSA) program, an increasingly popular offshoot of the local food movement. Employing biodynamic farming practices that incorporate all the animal, plant and land components of the farm into a closed, self-nourishing system, Whole Village’s CSA program gives shareholders access to local and sustainable organic produce, as well as the opportunity to know where and by whom their food was grown - an elusive luxury within today’s model of decentralized, high-output food production.

While the success of Whole Village demonstrates that the environmental and social actions increasingly seen as necessary can in fact be put into practice, the project is not without challenges. If the elder generation has shown it is forward-thinking and environmentally progressive, the community’s youth struggle with the same stigmas faced by the flower children of the ’60s and ’70s.

Home-schooled and largely isolated from their peers, the children may face the challenge of not being able to affect change on a system they have grown up largely removed from. A further challenge is the financial burden placed upon those middle-aged members who do not have the benefit of a lifetime of equity with which to put their values into practice. Land purchases and building costs may be the most obvious expenses, but hidden and ongoing costs related to simple pieces of farm equipment or complicated legal fees to navigate zoning restrictions can leave community members financially drained.

The pressures of contributing to community life, in addition to the need for many to seek full-time employment off-property, have led a number of members to engage in the difficult and heavily bureaucratic process of selling or withdrawing their equity. In the last year, several members have left the community, citing economic or social stress as their primary motivation, but an influx of seasonal volunteers and the increasing appeal of a sustainable rural lifestyle mean that Whole Village’s population is never depleted for long.

Ninety per cent of ecovillages and intentional communities don’t make it past the planning stage, or fail within the first year, and it is easy to see why: environmental ideals come in a variety of strengths and focuses, and the shared goals that initially unite members can later widen the rifts between them. While Whole Village has moved steadily towards its goal of sustainability, the success of the community rests as much on achieving social sustainability as it does environmental sustainability.

(Click photos to enlarge.)

Whole Village members Bev and Mary open the barn door after a morning milking session. Whole Village keeps a number of heritage breed livestock (animals bred for hardiness rather than increased milk or meat production), and there has been much internal debate over whether or not animals are to be reared for meat.

Whole Village volunteer Taka sorts blight-stricken potatoes from healthy ones after a heavy rainfall. While Whole Village has made steady progress towards producing 100 per cent of its food requirements, alternating drought, downpour and disease in Ontario over the last few years have caused heavy setbacks.

Potatoes free of 2008’s blight are weighed and divided into shares for Whole Village’s CSA program. The CSA provides residents of nearby towns the opportunity to buy their produce directly from local farmers, and is becoming increasingly popular as the local food movement gains momentum.

Friends Thomas and Alisha rest against a bale of hay while playing near one of Whole Village’s fields. The community takes significant guidance from the Montessori method of education, and the community’s children are home-schooled by a diverse group of adults.

Whole Village volunteers Taka and Douglas pick beans from vines growing around cornstalks in one of the community’s fields. Whole Village relies heavily on volunteers, often from organizations like Canada World Youth and World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms, for assistance with the fall harvest. Room and board are provided in exchange for a day’s labour.

Bob Bowers sits in front of the fireplace in the old farmhouse. One of the community’s oldest residents, Bob suffers from schizophrenia, and lives on the farm in the care of his daughter, Julie. A social worker, Julie has struggled to find a balance between employment outside of Whole Village and the many responsibilities associated with community living and elder care.

Whole Village volunteer Zack uses a hatchet to test the ice on the community’s pond while McKenna, the farm dog, jumps for flying ice chips.

Departing members of Whole Village carry bags to a waiting vehicle late one evening in December in preparation for leaving the community. With limited internal employment in the community, many of Whole Village’s younger members struggle to find a balance between their jobs in the surrounding townships and their ongoing community responsibilities. Without a lifetime of accumulated equity, such members may find the financial commitment of community life too difficult to meet.

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The view from Mount Moresby (Photo: Erik Haensel)

By Erik Haensel and Justine Townsend
Briarpatch Magazine
July/August 2009

In December 2007, the Council of the Haida Nation and the Government of B.C. ratified a Strategic Land Use Agreement for Haida Gwaii, also known as the Queen Charlotte Islands, off the north coast of B.C., following four years of participatory planning in island communities. The agreement is a bold challenge to traditional economic policy, representing a major shift from an export-driven, resource-based economy to an ecologically grounded approach to a sustainable economy on Haida Gwaii.

Yet, for the Haida this paradigm shift is not novel, but rather a belated recognition of the values deeply rooted in their culture and their traditional relationship to the land, and encoded in Haida law.

It is a rare sunny day in August 2007 in Old Massett. Children play in front of Haida artist Christian White’s handcrafted longhouse facing the beach, which is a mosaic of kelp, stones, broken shells and, occasionally, old trading beads and glass Japanese buoys. White has lent out his space for a special public event: one of a series of open houses hosted by the Council of the Haida Nation (the elected leadership of the Haida) and the Government of British Columbia throughout the villages of Haida Gwaii. The purpose of these open houses is to solicit community input on the Strategic Land Use Agreement before it is finally ratified. The land-use plan is a legally binding accord between both governments that determines how the islands’ resources will be used from the present into the distant future.

Distracted by the woes of the global economy and disintegra­ting Kyoto Protocol, the media has almost completely overlooked this historic step towards community-based sustainability. Yet it is one of the most innovative examples of an ecologically sound economic plan. In the years to come, it will stand as an inspiring example of successful ecological governance.

The highlights of the land-use plan, ratified in December 2007 by the Council of the Haida Nation and the Government of B.C., are impressive: an increase in protected areas from 23 per cent to 50 per cent of the total land base, all to be co-managed by both governments; a drastic drop in the annual allowable cut (the minimum rate of logging set annually by the Chief Forester of B.C. on a regional basis) for Haida Gwaii from approximately 1.8 million cubic metres to 800,000 cubic metres, including 100,000 cubic metres to be locally managed by Haida and non-Haida communities in a community forest tenure; a 1000-year old-growth cedar management plan; and the implementation of what promises to be a more sustainable form of “ecosystem-based” resource management, which seeks to balance community, economic and environmental well-being.

Following the signing of the Land Use Agreement, Guujaaw, the charismatic, elected President of the Council of the Haida Nation, stated that “after 50 years of intensive forestry without holistic planning, this land-use agreement now starts to bring cultural, environmental, and economic interests into balance.”

It is precisely this balance that has eluded national, regional and municipal governments around the world as they seek to respond to increasing environmental degradation while continuing to focus on economic growth.

At the open house in Old Massett, detailed maps cover the walls of the longhouse. The maps depict various types of land use, from logging operations to endangered species habitat. Thick research documents are laid out on the tables alongside display boards that explain the various stages of participatory planning and the proposed outcomes. These are just some of the results of the hard work of both governments, and community planning tables. What is so significant about this particular land-use planning process is that the Council of the Haida Nation insisted they co-host the process with the Government of B.C. on a “government-to-government” basis. This is in stark contrast with past land-use planning in which the Province ignored First Nations’ interests, or merely consulted First Nations as “stakeholders” in a competitive environment with other, much more powerful stakeholders.

Since contact, successive generations of colonial administrators and developers, privileging Eurocentric notions of progress, have denied the relevance of Haida systems of resource management and created immense political and economic challenges for Haida governance. Following contact, Haida population fell by over 90 per cent within one hundred years as a result of smallpox and other introduced diseases. In an attempt to extinguish Haida culture, missionaries established a residential school and the state banned the potlatch. Colonization brought intensified commercial fishing and industrial forestry, depleting resources and denuding land that had been stewarded under Haida governance for thousands of years.

Haida history

Long before Captain George Dixon named the archipelago after his ship, the Queen Charlotte, the Haida had mapped their own intimate relationships to this place. According to their oral history, the Haida emerged as a people on the northernmost point of the islands, where Raven roused the first slumbering Haida from a clamshell.Then, Haida Gwaii was known by another name: Xhaaydla Gwaayaay, “the Islands on the Boundary between Worlds.” Along this boundary, the intertidal zone that connects the land, sea, and sky, the Haida people thrived, understanding themselves as but one element amongst a vast interconnected web of natural and supernatural beings.

Haida oral history describes a vast network of villages, fronted by exquisitely carved houses and mortuary poles, alive with song and dance, carving and basketry, stories and poetry. It was a society supported by hunting, fishing and gathering, where Haida knowledge of what plants and animals were useful to them was complemented by their understanding of careful stewardship.

The Haida continue to see themselves as part of nature, and as such their ecological vision has focused less on the preservation of wilderness outside of human involvement and more on re-establishing the symbiotic relationships between humans and the rest of the living world. Ensuring the integrity of the ecosystems of Haida Gwaii means ensuring the continued flourishing of Haida culture - and vice versa. The Council of the Haida Nation states that “we have always used the land and ocean in careful, cautious ways that provided for present and future generations and protected the ecosystems that sustain us. We focus on what to leave, not what to take.”

This vision is reflected in the main goal that the Council of the Haida Nation brought to the planning process: “[To] protect and restore the land and ocean ecosystems of Haida Gwaii - the basis for Haida culture.”

Yah’Guudang: Practical implications

The Land Use Agreement was the hard-earned result of four years of negotiations between the Council of the Haida Nation and the Government of B.C., with input from a participatory Community Planning Forum composed of 29 representatives from interest groups that ranged from forestry to tourism development. The guiding philosophy for the entire process was the Haida principle of yah’guudang, respect for all living beings. The Haida Land Use Vision states that “a land use plan must adequately address certain priorities, beginning with the well-being of the land. We need to clearly understand the changes that have occurred to ecological conditions and our culture, and then provide directions for restoring and maintaining balance.^“

The damage Haida Gwaii has endured is extensive. The Gowgaia Institute estimates that in the past century 168,750 hectares of old-growth forest - the equivalent of 101,033,929 telephone poles - have been cut. Many of these trees have been the 1,000-year old cedar trees central to Haida culture. In an effort to safeguard remaining cedars, the Haida have completed a sample inventory to estimate available and future Culture Class Five cedar trees necessary for pole carving, as well as Class Four and Three trees that will become suitable in time. Furthermore, they have mapped areas containing culturally modified trees, and sought to evaluate the health and future sustainability of all traditional and medicinal plants.

Beyond these stewardship initiatives, the agreement also deals with tough issues such as forestry, historically the prime engine of the island economy. Logging has long been a divisive and explosive issue in the local politics of Haida Gwaii, where festering tensions between differing values and economic visions have sometimes erupted into conflict amongst the island’s communities. While the Council of the Haida Nation are committed to slowing down and changing the approach to forestry, they recognize that it will continue to be a part of the economy. “There always will be people working with forestry extraction, but we want to do it sustainably and for islanders, by islanders at a rate that the land could bear,” says Kevin Brown, Assistant Land Use Plan Coordinator with the Council of the Haida Nation.

Frank Collison, the chair of the Council of the Haida Nation’s Forestry Committee, agrees: “Keep the land strong, keep it decent, keep the water clean, and make sure that there is habitat for the fish and habitat for the birds. Do what we have done traditionally - which is take what we need.” Collison recognizes that although the Haida live differently today than they used to, their philosophy is the same: “Right now we all have electricity and iPods and CDs. We all need a little bit more but it doesn’t mean that we have to take twice as much. . . . We don’t have to give in to corporate greed. . . . You can do [it] on a small scale that’s workable and sustainable for all of us.”

The Haida recognize that many aspects of the plan will be difficult to implement and that many new problems will surface. But they believe that, by reorienting the economic development of the island to bring it back in line with their traditional ecological vision and rich culture, the future will reflect the sustainability of the Haida past. That the Government of B.C. and the non-Haida islanders are supportive of this vision and willing to collaborate to enable major transformations in the island economy and resource management systems is exciting and hopeful. As the ecosystem-based management objectives and other outcomes of the land-use plan continue to be implemented, the rest of the world should watch this unprecedented social and ecological experiment and follow on the heels of its successes.

Through the plan, Guujaaw believes the Haida are “creating a future where our own kids would know that they could go out and experience the land the way our ancestors had.” And in a world that is changing so rapidly, this is no small feat.

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#1. Become a freegan
By Stephanie Dearing

Thank goodness for freegans, who have excelled at showing us how much food we waste every day. Freegans do for wasted food what the 100 Mile Diet has done for eating locally grown food. People who practice freeganism are also showing us how we can pinch pennies and save money in this recession.

Freegans, according to Freegan.info, “are people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. Freegans embrace community, generosity, social concern, freedom, cooperation, and sharing in opposition to a society based on materialism, moral apathy, competition, conformity and greed.”

The word freegan is a mix of free and vegan, although you do not have to be a vegan to be a freegan. Freeganism is both a philosophy and a way of life, and it is adopted far and wide in a variety of ways by diverse people. Take Ginger, for example. She has been calling herself a freegan, but says she now wants to move away from the name because she’s realized that freegans are against things, such as capitalism. Ginger said that she’s for things, so she doesn’t identify strictly with the freegan point of view. On the other hand, Ginger has embraced one practice common to most freegans - salvaging food from dumpsters.

Ginger was inspired to become a freegan after seeing an Oprah show on February 28, 2008 that featured a segment depicting a group of people on a “trash tour,” gleaning good food from the waste stream. After seeing the show, Ginger said that she thought she would just “go and look.” And so she did, and found a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables, all perfectly good, in the dumpster.

She was hooked. Ginger said that she now regularly obtains food from grocery store dumpsters. She figures the food she obtains is worth about $600 per trip. She takes some food home, gives some to friends and neighbours, and the balance goes to homeless shelters. Ginger might not call herself a freegan, but she is engaging in the premiere freegan activity.

As Ginger noted, freegans are “against” things, most particularly the capitalist system. Freegans are horrified by the amount of waste generated by capitalist activities, so they seek to reduce their resource consumption by reclaiming food, clothing and furniture from the waste stream. Many people say that they eat better as freegans than they would if they purchased their food. Extreme freegans will not pay for things such as housing and transportation either, preferring to share a squat with other freegans while getting around by hitchhiking, walking or bicycling. Freegans in New York City have even established a free shop.

“More than half the food produced today is either lost, wasted or discarded because of inefficiency,” the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) announced earlier this year. The UNEP points out that we could easily feed every single person in the world today if we did not waste all this food. This is borne out by Ginger’s experience. “I asked some of the grocery store staff to estimate the value of the food they throw away every day,” she said. “And they said it was at least $1,000 a day, if not more.” The Toronto Star reported last spring that households throw out an average of 210 million kilograms of food each year - and most of that food is still edible.

If you are interested in adopting some or all freegan principles you can learn more at freegan.info. Join up with a freecycle group in your area at freecycle.org to swap your perfectly good but unwanted items with other people, or post your swaps on craiglist’s swap page, craigslist.org. You can ramp things up a step further and organize a “frock swap” or book exchange, or even a “really free market.” And check out Ginger’s blog at savethefood.com.

#2. Promote bicycle transportation in your community
By Brittany Shoot

North Americans could learn much from Danish efforts to promote bicycle usage.

The idyllic stories of life in Denmark are becoming better known as Danes are increasingly dubbed “the happiest people in the world” by various North American media outlets. But in the land of wind turbines and six-week paid vacations from work, bicycle-friendly laws and lanes are among the most notable commitments to a better lifestyle. Large numbers of Danes have learned to reconceptualize transportation by relying solely on their physical strength and mental resolve to pedal to their destination - which has had the added benefit of reducing their carbon footprint.

North Americans could learn much from Danish efforts to promote bicycle usage. For decades, some of the biggest cities in the United States and Canada have struggled to make their streets safer for bicycles, even as bicycle popularity has continued to rise. While DIY non-profit repair shops and events like Critical Mass and Bike To Work Week are springing up in cities like Montreal, Portland, San Francisco, Victoria and Toronto, a larger problem of how to radically change minds and infrastructure still exists. Denmark’s bicycle laws serve as an excellent template here: these laws treat bicycles as equal to other forms of transportation, are easy to understand and often provide inspiration for city planners and activists in other places that are seeking to make their own communities more bike-friendly.

In Copenhagen, almost 40 per cent of city traffic is from bicycles, due in part to the high cost of owning a car and the relatively low cost of purchasing or renting a safe, efficient bike. Copenhagen has the highest number of bicycles per capita in the world, and Denmark has incredibly high green taxes on automobiles, which can double or triple the purchase price of a car. Copenhagen has also committed to reducing public parking facilities to encourage two-wheeled transit in the city, making biking an obvious alternative for reasons relating to health, cost and convenience.

To encourage bicycle commuters, the Danish government has long supported bicycle-friendly infrastructure and policies in cities and suburbs alike. Wide bike lanes are often equipped with their own traffic signals. The light rail metro and diesel trains, which connect the city’s vast suburbs, are also well equipped for bicycle transport: bike riders can buy inexpensive tickets and load their bikes into racks on board the trains for safe and efficient transport, though folding bikes are also increasingly common. Bicycle insurance is standard, which greatly reduces the burden of theft. Vandals are often deterred, and when they do strike, bikes are retrieved with impressive diligence and easily returned to their rightful, registered owners. For safety, lights and reflectors are required by law.

Copenhagen’s support for bicycle traffic isn’t just for the locals, either. Tourists and visitors to Copenhagen can borrow bikes courtesy of the city. For many who visit Denmark, bicycles provide a memorable way of seeing the sights. With over 10,000 kilometres of bike paths in this small country - many of which take cyclists into forest areas and on paths never travelled by motor vehicles - it’s no wonder the Danes stay slim and healthy with seemingly little effort.

While there are certainly criticisms of Denmark’s efforts to get more people onto the saddle - among them the absence of helmet laws, which are believed to discourage ridership - the trade-off is a culture more tolerant of alternative transportation. The fight, for now, is not to make helmets mandatory; it is instead a refocused effort to raise awareness about the importance of alternative transportation. While cyclists in many of the most bike-friendly North American cities still anxiously manoeuvre around cars and potholes, hoping motorists remember to share the road, many bike enthusiasts would gladly trade strict safety laws for wider lanes and greater motorist awareness.

If cities that are thousands of years old can adapt and accommodate the demand for increased bicycle infrastructure, the younger cities of North America have no excuse. With more bicycles on the road, cyclists and car drivers alike are likely to become more alert and responsive to safety regulations. Studies and practical experience have long shown that diversified roads are safer for all. It’s time to demand safer, greener streets for everyone.

#3. Work or volunteer for a conservation initiative
By Anuradha Rao

The Kommetjie Environmental Awareness Group turns environmental activism into economic opportunity.

Lorraine Hendricks and fellow KEAG crafters paint horns made from kelp. (Photo: Anuradha Rao)

Lorraine Hendricks lives in the South African township of Ocean View. It is a poor community made up mostly of people from the “Coloured” ethnic group: people of mixed ancestry who were separated from other racial groups during the apartheid era. Although many people in the community are unemployed, for the last nine years Hendricks has been employed by a group called KEAG - the Kommetjie Environmental Awareness Group.

KEAG is a small non-profit organization located south of Cape Town. The organization employs people from poor communities to do work that protects or rehabilitates the local environment.

Hendricks spoke with pride of her work and the doors it has opened for her. “There are lots of opportunities. I learned a lot of things from KEAG, things I didn’t know [such as] first aid, customer care and skills to run a business.”

During its 18 years of operation, KEAG has employed hundreds of people in work as varied as beach cleanups, monitoring of coastal and marine activities, looking out for sharks near popular beaches to prevent human-shark conflict and invasive alien plant removal.

As is the case with many environmental organizations in Canada, KEAG’s funding is entirely project-based and comes from a variety of external donors. It is striving to become more financially secure through revenue generated by its longer-term, larger-scale projects.

One of KEAG’s financial successes has been its craft-from-waste project, which employs artisans from local townships to create useful and decorative objects out of mostly plastic garbage. This project is nearly to the point of being self-sustaining.

Hendricks remembers how the idea for that project developed. “We were doing the Coastcare project, cleaning the beach. We were finding lots of rubbish on the beach, and we found out we can make something from that rubbish. We started to make curtains and some necklaces out of plastic.” Other crafts include chandeliers made out of plastic bottle caps, and wall-mountings such as cow heads made from detergent bottles. Orders for these crafts have come from as far away as Europe.

Driving from the airport into Cape Town, one passes row upon row of tiny, haphazard shacks in the sprawling township of Khayelitsha. Difficult conditions in surrounding countries such as Zimbabwe have led to a massive influx of refugees to these townships.

Environmental problems are on full display in such high-density areas. Litter clogs waterways and municipal infrastructure is often inadequate to fully service formal settlements. For example, raw sewage enters a river that flows through Ocean View. Informal settlements are unserviced.

In a place where so many people live hand-to-mouth in crowded and often dangerous townships, how do you not only foster conservation efforts - often seen as the luxury of the wealthy environmentalist - but do so in a way that provides direct and tangible benefits to those most in need?

There are no easy answers, but KEAG’s strategy is to undertake environmental stewardship projects that bring both economic and environmental benefits to the community. These projects provide people from local townships with training and meaningful jobs from which they can not only see and appreciate the environmental benefits of their labour, but can afford to support their families as well.

“The joy of KEAG’s projects,” explains the organization’s director, Wally Petersen, “is that they create employment for people to address and deal with real environmental needs. In an area where we have considerable under- and unemployment and pressing environmental needs, it really does make a difference.”

KEAG creates environmental work opportunities for people who don’t get many opportunities to begin with. Drug use in Ocean View township is rife, for example, with the myriad social problems that come with it. Many children are not in school because their parents cannot afford to pay their school fees. For six hours a day, dozens of young men stand on the road near Masiphumelele township and wait - often in vain - for someone to drive by and offer them work.

Nancy Phanginxiwa, who has been working on coastal restoration projects with KEAG, describes the daily struggle of life in Masiphumelele. “We are staying in shacks. There are no jobs. There’s no housing.” She appreciates the training that KEAG has provided her. “If the job expires I can go look for another job.”

Daniel Dwashu, also from Masiphumelele, has been working for KEAG since 2000. He emphasizes the importance of the investment that KEAG makes in its employees. “Many people are not skilled,” he explains. “That is why many people cannot get a job. [At KEAG,] we do different trainings so that after a project we can go and get jobs.”

Whereas many environmental organizations in Canada find it frustrating when they lose staff they have trained to other, higher-paying institutions, KEAG celebrates this phenomenon.

“Although a lot of our projects are short-term,” says Petersen, “we take great pride in enabling people to use them as stepping stones for better and longer-term employment. We’ve been successful in placing a number of our employees in full-term positions as park rangers and coastal monitors.”

There are plans for Lorraine Hendricks to expand her role in the organization to become the shopkeeper at the store where KEAG sells its crafts. The store’s name is Ilitha Lomsa, which means “A New Dawn” in the local Xhosa language.

Can Canadians learn from KEAG’s example and turn our own economic crisis into a “new dawn”? Doing so will require looking upon environmental projects as an opportunity for social enrichment, an investment not only in the future but also in the present day.

For more information about KEAG’s projects, go to
www.keag.org.za.

#4. Start a garden on a wall near you
By Candace Hodder

The Urban Farming Food Chain shows that even the walls that divide us can be used to sustain us.

In downtown Los Angeles, residents of Rainbow Apartments gather in front of their new living wall. (Photo courtesy Urban Farming)

If there is one thing our cities already have in abundance, it’s walls. Far more scarce, however, are ideas for putting these walls to productive use.

In 2008, the U.S.-based non-profit organization Urban Farming put one such idea into action by setting up four vertical, food-producing gardens in underserved neighbourhoods across Los Angeles. The goals of the project, called the Urban Farming Food Chain, are to introduce gardening to urban communities and create a source of fresh food in areas where local, organic produce tends to be in short supply.

Green or “living” walls are becoming well-known in environmental circles, as are the benefits they provide. You may have seen them on, or in, office buildings across North America; they’re commonly made up of rugged green plants that don’t require a lot of maintenance. Not only aesthetically superior to blank concrete walls, green walls also serve import­ant environmental functions such as collecting rainwater runoff and cooling the ambient temperature, mitigating the “‘urban heat island” effect.

The food wall takes green walls one step further by providing a source of fresh, local produce for urban areas. In the case of the Urban Farming Food Chain, the organizers decided to build the first food walls in and around L.A.’s infamous Skid Row, where “fresh” is a foreign concept.

Edible wall gardens are actually fairly simple to set up. Vegetables, fruits and edible flowers are grown in the same manner they would be in any other scenario - either hydroponically or using soil. The Food Chain green walls use a soil mix containing a coconut substrate that will keep the soil tightly packed and help it to resist crumbling. The “walls” are actually made up of any number of steel or aluminum panels which are two feet long by three feet tall, and six inches deep. These panels are broken into a number of smaller (four inch by six inch) planting cells, aerated on all sides.

The panels are hung up on brackets like pictures on a wall, side by side. The green walls can be as big or small as the space permits; the Food Chain walls are all about six feet high and 30 feet wide. Ideally, the wall will be south-facing to allow for adequate sunlight. Once sprouted, plants on a green wall will react like they would in any other environment, reaching upwards towards the sun.

A high school, a local food bank, and two low-to-no-income housing associations became the first organizations to host the edible walls of the Urban Farming Food Chain. Starting with the installation process and throughout their lifecycles, these walls have been the hosting organizations’ to care for and maintain, with some green thumb expertise provided by volunteers from a local college’s gardening program.

Because these wall gardens promise so many benefits, the members of these organizations have really rallied around them. At one of the locations - a single-occupant apartment complex - a group of residents became so invested in the project that they sought formal training from the green wall manufacturer, Green Living Technologies, on wall installation and maintenance. After receiving training, they became the primary installation staff for this project’s three other vertical food gardens.

It’s not all coming up roses, however. Much like ordinary gardens, these wall gardens won’t always look beautiful. Plants will burst forth from some cells while dying off in others. The crops can be affected by insects and animals, and plants in L.A. face the added challenge of being surrounded by hot, reflective asphalt. But as with any garden, a bit of expertise, a good deal of elbow grease, and more than a small amount of love can help great things to bloom.

#5. Work for the introduction of a Citizens’ Income
By Tim Rourke

Why ensuring everyone has enough is the first step in powering down.

The idea of a guaranteed income - eliminating poverty by simply giving everybody enough money to live on - is gaining traction in this time of transition. The idea comes by a variety of names. Some prefer Citizen’s Income because it links the idea with democratic political reform, suggesting that the one idea will not work without the other.

Most people still assume that the present economic crisis will work itself out. “Growth” will resume. However, nothing can expand indefinitely in a finite world. Our demands upon the natural environment must be reduced to what it can support.

This will require a different type of society from that which the capitalist order has built. This could be a feudal type of order with a rigid stratification of society, or a democratic and egalitarian one. If a more democratic order prevails, such a system should allow everyone the freedom to participate in governance and in making decisions about what to produce, how to produce and how to distribute the results of production. In this way, most people will come to see the results of redistribution as fair and guaranteeing everyone a decent livelihood. They will more easily accept limiting consumption to what is sustainable.

It should be no problem to produce enough for everybody’s well-being while giving everybody enough leisure to participate in the governance of society. Estimates of the amount of time spent in paid employment that produces nothing useful range from one third to three quarters. This is how far working times could be reduced with no negative effects on living standards.

Citizen’s Income is a simple concept. Advocates are agreed on three principles: universality, unconditionality and adequacy. The income must go to each individual, rather than to each family unit, for reasons understood by any feminist. It must be without conditions or attempts to categorize and stigmatize people. It must be adequate to meet all basic needs.

Within these parameters, there are intense debates about the amount of the income, how it should be delivered, how it should be financed and so on.

No country has implemented a true guaranteed income, but experiments such as the Canadian Manitoba Mincome and the American SIME/DIME during the 1970s, and the current BIGNAM project in Namibia, have had encouraging results. A guaranteed income in Canada would cost little more than do present income maintenance programs. (Other social programs such as medicare, addiction services, children’s aid, etc. would of course be unaffected.) The impacts of a Citizen’s Income on wages, working hours, labour force participation, volunteerism, housing rents and family stability are unpredictable. Problems arising from these factors would need to be resolved as they occur.

History shows that societies under the rule of elites who exploit others for their own profit will eventually outstrip their resources and fail. Societies that develop an egalitarian and communal structure, however, tend to achieve ecological balance and endure over time. Now is a good time to put forward ideas like a Citizen’s Income, which can help lead us toward a peaceful, egalitarian, sustainable order.

#6. Start a Transition Town Initiative
By Dalia Levy

Imagine the majority of food you consume being produced locally, using small-scale, sustainable farming practices. Imagine your town operating under a local currency that fosters a vibrant, local, living economy. Imagine that the energy you consume is produced locally and efficiently.

Sounds a little utopian, doesn’t it? Far too old-fashioned and anti-progress for this day and age?

Well, think again.

The compounding threats of climate change, peak oil, infectious disease and global economic instability leave humanity with an ultimatum: do we continue to cling to our fantasies of a techno-cure for all our environmental woes or do we face this noxious beast as citizens of communities, armed with simple, sustainable solutions?

The Transition Town Initiative thinks it’s time for the latter. Because it focuses on harnessing local resilience to create an oil-independent future that won’t self-destruct the moment the lights go out or the world economy folds, the initiative is resonating with people around the globe.

As Rob Hopkins, the movement’s co-founder, says, scaling back doesn’t have to involve the surrendering of life’s pleasures. Indeed, it might even enhance our quality of life. “It’s more like a party than a protest march.”

Hopkins launched the first Transition Initiative in his hometown of Totnes, England. A permaculture designer by trade, he was introduced to the wonders of healthy, adaptable community almost 20 years ago while visiting the Hunza Valley of northern Pakistan.

“Here was a society which lived within its limits and had evolved a dazzlingly sophisticated yet simple way of doing so,” says Hopkins. All waste was composted, water ran through a centuries-old irrigation system from the glacier above to the fruit trees below, and the people were happy, full of laughter, with time to talk and spend with their children. “Hunza is quite simply the most beautiful, tranquil, happy, abundant place I have every visited before or since.”

This profound example stuck with Hopkins and in 2006 he assembled an “Energy Descent Action Plan” for Totnes that looked at wide-ranging creative adaptations in areas such as energy production, health, education, economy and agriculture to serve as a road map to a sustainable future. Over the next two years, Hopkins and others collaborated on how best to refine the plan. Self-sustenance was their aim - a resilient system of local production and consumption that could endure the cataclysmic effects of the converging catastrophes of the 21^st century while fostering a sense of place and community.

In The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience (2008), Hopkins offers a 12-step model for citizens interested in initiating a process of transition in their communi­ties. First, set up a committed, reliable steering committee. Then move on to raising public awareness and next lay the foundation by drawing other like-minded organizations and community groups into the initiative. Steps four to six involve laying further groundwork for your local movement: organizing a “Great Unleashing” event, forming groups to carry out the central aspects of the transition (like food security) and introducing the use of Open Space Technology, a cutting-edge approach to collaborative communications technologies.

From here, focus on tree plantings, solar panels, erecting natural buildings and structures such as sheds and bus shelters - all of which are highly visible projects that allow people to see that you mean business. “When [people] start to see infrastructure going in, it becomes infectious, they want to be a part of it,” says Hopkins. In steps eight to twelve, Hopkins directs us toward “Facilitating the Great Reskilling,” “Building a bridge to local government,” “Honouring the elders,” “Letting it go where it wants to go,” and lastly, “Creating an Energy Descent Plan.”

Canada has 27 different locales developing Transition Initatives, and one official Transition Town in Peterborough, Ontario. Launched in late 2008, Transition Town Peterborough has followed Hopkins’ guidelines and now include a number of interesting local transition initiatives such as permaculture-inspired community gardens, energy descent ideas such as retrofitting wartime housing to near-zero-emission use for heating, and an energy descent subcommittee to work on two renewable energy efforts.

This timely movement isn’t some hippie rainbow trip. Nor is it the green lifestyle chic of the latest corporate greenwashing fad or some unconscionable sham like hydrogen or ethanol. No, this is something different. It’s regular people coming together to make positive changes in their communities that will empower and nourish a sense of community and solidarity, now and into the future. Thankfully so, because as Hopkins reminds us, “given the scale of the coming changes . . . the idea that we can navigate a safe way [to survive] through merely changing our light bulbs and turning the heat down is completely insufficient. . . . We stand, potentially, on the cusp of many things, one of which is an unprecedented economic, cultural and social renaissance.”

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Subscribe to Briarpatch. ]]> http://briarpatchmagazine.com/six-big-ways-to-work-for-a-smaller-world/feed/ http://briarpatchmagazine.com/six-big-ways-to-work-for-a-smaller-world/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/BriarpatchMagazine/~3/z8wJnl1uw10/ http://briarpatchmagazine.com/kick-starting-the-environmental-movement/#comments Sat, 04 Jul 2009 23:44:27 +0000 dave http://briarpatchmagazine.com/?p=933 By Dan Mossip-Balkwill Briarpatch Magazine July/August 2009

Briarpatch: Any observations about the current state of the environmental movement?

Noam Chomsky: I don't think there is an organized, centralized movement. There's a general range of agreement, including from scientists, that the problem is extremely serious, and while there are a lot of uncertainties with regards to what could happen, there's a consensus that the longer we wait, the greater the cost to future generations.

Some serious socio-economic changes have to be made. We've got this unsustainable way of life, particularly in the Western world, particularly in North America. The atomization of the population and the drive towards unwarranted consumerism and indebtedness have created very serious social, economic and cultural problems which have to be overcome. There are no structures around where people can integrate and begin to organize themselves; those have to be rebuilt anew. There are many people involved in environmental issues but they are very separate from one another. People in one corner of town don't know what's happening in the other corner, and that has to be overcome.