To live in peace and sustainability…
Saturday, July 4, 2009
Posted by steve on June 15, 2009
This amazing film gives remarkable insight into how plastic refuse circulates in our oceans. This plastic flotsam is a threat to our Very Beautiful Place and should give us cause to stop and think about the systemic malfunctions that allow release of such valuable materials into the biosphere.
Posted by steve on June 5, 2009
Summer, 2029: Taking a walk around the sustainable city of Porena is like taking a step back in time. Porena is the first city to go sustainable and car-less. Now most cities are walking cities, thanks to the peaking of oil production. As I walk around the city, it is hard to imagine how bold the citizens and developers must have been to have started to transform this mediocre place into a showcase of sustainability –there was nothing like it at the time and back then, it was still the done thing to race around in your little, or big, car.
Seen from above, Porena looks like someone has drawn a mandala- a complex circular design – using houses, paths and buildings. Starting from the park in the centre, encircled by administrative buildings, the city transitions to the residential area stretching to a peripheral canal.
Electric trains/trams cross North/South and East-West. These intersect with a circular line going round the inner part of the residential area.
Not only trams go underground: so does all freight. Porena sits on a network of underground freight pipelines. These carry automated trucks that move continuously under the city.
When you need to send something, you push a button at your nearest loading station and an empty truck appears. You load it and code it with the destination, and it travels around the system until it is ejected at its final stop.
;The idea is to make everything close to everything else. The combination of walking and taking the trains should provide you with nearly all your daily need of 10,000 steps and make sure most journeys are under the hour. And anyway, a freight stop is always located close to your residency or the administrative area.
If you have difficulty walking, there are small electric vehicles of the type found in airports, to help you get around.
And to make it even easier – the central administrative buildings rotate! They sit on large rails, with powerful electric motors driving them. The motors get their power from the solar cells on the roof of the building. For example: if you need a doctor’s appointment, the surgery comes to you during the day! The buildings revolve at walking speed. If it’s raining and you need to go somewhere, you can walk in the direction the building is rotating. In effect you are going at double walking speed.
You might be wondering how large PORENA is – to be a city and for everything to be close to everything else. Well you need some nifty mathematics to understand what I am saying. But before we reveal the maths, remember that some 40-50% of a city’s area is taken up by or for the car. If you remove the care you can make cities much denser.
The mathematics is called radiality, the practice of designing settlements around circles. Porena has nearly one million people! And this is in an area of radius 9 kms.
The population density, on average, would be worked out like this:
The area of Porena is:
?R2 = 254 km2 (22/7 X 9 X9 )
Therefore, population density is
1,000,000/254 = 3,937 per km2
By comparison;
• London inner city 14,000 per km2
• London outer city 5,000 per km2
Multi-functionality Firstly, to make the city as efficient as possible, population density is kept high. For the area to provide comfort and convenience requires the multiple use of land: multi-functionality.Thi s is manifested in several ways, for example all green areas are available both for recreation and growing food. Wetland areas are used for water treatment as well.
Separation There is also the separation of technology and the natural environment. The central part of the city is separated from the effects of technology, thereby allowing the natural environment to, in an uncontaminated way, produce food and cleanse water.
For natural water circulation, run-off and cleansing to function with minimum contamination and obstruction, automobiles and trucks are removed and paved, asphalted roads and paths are replaced with gravel.
For walking to be facilitated as far as possible, buildings are stilted so people can walk under them.
Outer circular canal Water-born transport is effective for heavy loads, one solution to bringing goods to residential areas is to use barges sailing around a peripheral canal.
Circular and Cross-town train A system of trains both circular and cross-town provide fast transport to all urban areas from all urban areas. Again, supporting ‘everything close to everything else’.
Posted by steve on May 28, 2009
As temporary NING-master for the Transition Sweden movement, I was invited to a pre-screening of Franny Armstrongs drama-documentary-animation hybrid ”the Age of Stupid” The film revolves around an archivist in 2055, living in a devastated world, reviewing material from 2008 and asking why people did not react sooner.
The film is a masterpiece of craftsmanship, bringing together the different media, and telling the story through the six separate documentary stories of ordinary people in different parts of the world.
The music, the artwork, the animations all meld together into a film which is obviously a labour of love for all involved.
The message I get from the film is that man-made climate warming is going on, and the signs are all around us. However, we are not doing anything about it. Relying on Peak oil to solve the problem is not good enough, the Earth can still reach a tipping point on the current emissions.
As the film progresses, we come closer to their own involvement in climate change, as victim, as cause, as someone trying to do something about it. In this light, not one of them can be seen to be responsible fully, but it brings it home how everyone on the planet is complicit in the current climate destabilisation.
I felt a growing strong sense of ”do not blame anyone” just take responsibility.
However, some animated cartoon sequences do put the blame squarely on capitalism and the oil industry. And they accuse the US, through the words of Alan Greenspan, of gong to war in Iraq for oil.
At this point, a couple of people left, maybe because the working day was over and they were not getting paid anymore, or they had a hard time with the negativity.
In terms of solutions, they come later in the film, around the last 20 minutes.
If you have seen every film on Peak Oil and climate change, go see this one anyway. We need to be moved emotionally by what is going on, and this film speaks to the heart as well as the head. If you want to understand the issues more clearly, go see the film: it lays it out clearly.
If you are new to climate change and oil, be prepared for a hard-hitting documentary.
And do see the Making Of film on the Guardian site!
The question arises: shall Transition Town initiatives show this film? We had quite a debate afterwards. My response ( and I am keen to do some transition activism in my new home town of Flen, Sweden) is to treat people like adults, and set up film and info/debate meetings before you even talk about transition. Just arrange a series of ”Climate and Oil” film showings and let it take its course.
Posted by steve on May 16, 2009
POWER DOWN… the main business challenge of the 2010’s. What organizations need to know about the impact of liquid fuels on communities as oil prices hike and availability wanes. For officers in the public and private sector alike, this paper describes 16 main aspects of the coming energy situation. Organisations need to consider these 16 in order to begin to craft energy depletion management strategies.
Posted by steve on May 15, 2009
Imagine it were possible to, instead of just consuming, invest your money in local sustainable enterprises. As long as your money is with these enterprises, they provide you with your daily needs at a lower cost. You would need to work less and less as time goes on, with more time over to do what you love doing. If you like the video, do download the White Paper.
Posted by steve on May 11, 2009
The concept of the Half-Farmer/Half-X lifestyle was first proposed in the mid-1990s by the Japanese Naoki Shiomi, who now lives in the city of Ayabe in the north part of Kyoto Prefecture. The basic idea is that people pursue farming, not so much as a business but to grow food for their own family, while being constructively involved in society by realizing their own personal passion — something he called their “X” factor.
The “X” represents the questions each person must answer to find out what they really prefer to do, what they really want to do, and what they can do for others, while discovering their personal mission, their life’s work, or their “true” calling in life.
Mr. Naoki Shiomi
Shiomi himself began pursuing this lifestyle years ago, and now helps many people find their own “X.” He said that through these practices, he keenly sensed that this type of lifestyle is a way of making the most of each person’s talent and abandoning the twentieth-century style of mass production, mass consumption, mass and long-distance transportation, and mass disposal, while pointing the way to making happier lives and a sustainable Earth more possible.
Shaomi’s ideas work very well with the concept of the Eco-Unit. The entrepreneur’s centre situated on site allows people to work close to home. Having agriculture surrounding the eco-unit means residents are involved in food production on a daily basis, even if the overall management of food production is under the control of a professional permaculture market gardener.
His ideas also speak well to our ongoing thinking about harmonising who we are/what we do in our lives. Many people find themselves at odds with both aspects in the way they live their lives and are searching for alternative. If you live ecologically then who you are - a responsible citizen of Earth - can manifest with with what you are good at, meaning what you do and who you are come closer to harmony.
Posted by steve on May 1, 2009
My recent visit to England shows a country nose-diving into a new kind of recession: one that has no end.
As the reams of newspaper articles laying out dismal prospects for 2009 appear before us, there is an underlying belief in that the recovery will come in a few or at most ten years, and 2008 will fade into memory as a year unremarkable. Not so from the perspective of Oil Peak. We are looking into the tangled guts of a system that has stopped working because the cheap and easy oil that feeds it has peaked. We are looking over the precipice into the long decline, aptly called the long emergency by James Howard Kunstler.
The logic of this is almost too simple, but not anything you will find explained in the mainstream media.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by steve on April 27, 2009
Sometimes I can’t get things out of my head. It felt like a long shot, but as I stepped onto the plane to Berlin to attend a Words of Peace conference with Prem Rawat, I couldn’t ignore my intuition telling me that peace and sustainable development were linked somehow and that maybe the journey and time with him was going to provide some insights.
Berlinfor the first time in my life, old images of the war, the division of the two countries and its uniting cropped up. But there was no wall, no division. I strained to work out if I was in the East or West, but no. Just people. This is the way it should be. No divisions. No wars. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
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The sustainable city of Porena is the result of about 15-20 Imagestreaming sessions . I had asked a simple question: “what would a sustainable society, with the knowledge we possess today, look like?” WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Acting in gratitude, appreciation and using all our gifts - intelligence, innovation, hope and determination - we can create a life for ourselves that is truly, inwardly and outwardly, a very beautiful place.
Components of an Eco-Unit