Category: Environment

By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Business, Greenwashing, localism/locavore, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , ,
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fish. Photo by Shel Horowitz

Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fish. Photo by Shel Horowitz
Independent-owned boats like these on the Spanish Costa Brava could be forced out by Big Fishing. Photo by Shel Horowitz
As a vegetarian for the past 42 years, I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about fish. But I went to a talk, “Food Grabs vs. Climate Justice: How capitalists and climate deniers are locking up access to land and sea, and how Food Sovereignty movements are creating real climate solutions,” part of the Center for Popular Economics’ annual summer institute in Western Massachusetts.

Moderated by Sara Mersha (Grassroots International), panelists included Michele Mesmain (Slow Food International), Betsy Garrold (Food for Maine’s Future), and Seth Macinko (Department of Marine Affairs, University of Rhode Island). Both Macinko and Mesmain focused on fish and fisheries.

Both experts agreed on the need to control overfishing–and both said there’s a better way than the current widely embraced privitization “solution”: taking the public resource of the sea held in common, and giving it, for free and in perpetuity, to large corporations who are already catching the most fish. These corporations then can lease fishing rights back to the local fisherfolks, who used to be able to fish them for free–or simply force them out of business.

Macinko said you can manage a resource to prevent overfishing without savaging the historic commons rights, and noted the unholy alliance of environmental groups (including Environmental Defense Fund), academics, corporate-oriented major foundations such as Pew, government and trans-government authorities including the World Bank, the Big Fishing lobby, and, lo and behold, the Koch Brothers’ foundation pushing for this rights grab. Then Mesmain showed three models of successful fisheries management without privitization: a 1000-year-old guild governing France’s Mediterranean coast, a much more recent initiative in the Basque region of Spain–both involving open-sea fisheries, and one through the Okanagan Nations Alliance (8 nations/tribes in Washington State and British Columbia) covering inland river salmon fisheries.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Ethics: General, Green Business, localism/locavore, media-general, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , ,

I’m up to the part of Naomi Klein?‘s This Changes Everything where she talks about the interconnectedness of geolocalized people’s movements opposing “extreme/reckless resource extraction” (e.g., tar-sands oil, fracked gas and oil, mountaintop removal for coal). She dubs the movement “Blockadia.” She also casts very appropriate darts, just before this section, at the crazy idea that we should avoid climate catastrophe by throwing so much pollution into the sky that the sun can’t get through. Talk about a cure worse than the disease! Hard to believe some scientists are actually serious about this.

She points out that these technologies are far more intrusive and polluting and resource-intensive than the old-style mines and wells—and that the opposition often parses out as saving our water from destruction, modeling around the Precautionary Principle of not unleashing technologies we can’t control, and using the positive framing of protecting our water (very similar to the way I framed Save the Mountain 15 years ago—the successful movement to keep a nasty housing development off the Mount Holyoke Range in my town of Hadley, Massachusetts, US). I have said for many years that we have plenty of substitutes for oil, but if the water is gone (or unusable), so are we.

Like everything I’ve ever read by Klein, the book is impeccably researched—including interviewing primary sources directly and even suffering through climate-denier conferences and similar events in person; pursuit of the truth can be painful, sometimes.

And she isn’t afraid to go after the movement’s sacred cows. She scolds some very prominent environmental groups including The Nature Conservancy for betraying their core mission in the service of their large extraction-industry funders—even putting an oil well into one of its nature preserves, where the bird it was set up to protect can no longer be found. And she finds Sir Richard Branson’s proclamations of concern for the planet to be at odds with his actions. (I’m hoping she’s wrong about him. Even if she turns out to be right—and she might well be—he has certainly used his considerable charisma to educate the public on climate change.)

Environmentalists need to take these accusations very seriously. We need to know who we fund, and what they do with the money. And we definitely need to build the movement that insists upon meaningful action to stave off catastrophic climate change—which would have been much easier 20 or 30 years ago, but, I believe, is still possible now.

However, I break with Klein over solutions. She has essentially no faith in the business community or in technology, and she seems to think that any time an environmental group partners with a polluter, that group is sullied. Maybe I’m less of a purist than she is. But I’ve just finished another wonderful book, The Necessary Revolution, by Peter Senge et al. Reading the two together was very interesting, because Senge’s book is full of great examples of NGOs and corporations working together to tackle problems in a very meaningful way, while Klein’s is the counterpoint of these partnerships leading to a failure to address the deeper issues.

I also read almost daily reports in the sustainability press (GreenBiz, Sustainable Brands, Triple Pundit, 3BL Media, Rocky Mountain Institute’s Solutions Journal, and Guardian Sustainable Business, to name a few) of the amazing small-scale, eco-friendly technology innovations that give me hope. And I’m painfully aware that we knew all the way back in 1983-84 how to build a beautiful, modern, net-zero-energy home even in extreme environments, and that our failure to make this the norm is inexcusable.

Technology doesn’t have to be about extreme extraction, GMOs designed to absorb more pesticides, nuclear power, or blocking the sun. Science and engineering can actually be the climate movement’s friends. Unlike the crazy unproven schemes requiring billions or trillions of dollars and dozens of years to ramp up, these innovations often combine deep conservation, greater efficiency in harnessing clean renewable energy, and even the fascinating science of biomimcry to slash energy use, carbon footprint, and waste—right now.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Greenwashing, propaganda, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , ,

Like many environmentalists, I have serious issues with fracking: injecting a highly pressurized toxic sew of chemicals and water into shale rock, to blow it apart and release the gas trapped inside. This technology has spread widely in the last 15 years or so, and has been a lot of why fossil fuel prices have actually fallen.

In my mind, the big problem was always the risk to our water. We can live without oil, gas, coal and nuclear; there are plenty of alternatives. But we can’t live without clean, usable water, and fracking puts that at risk. There also seems to be a correlation between fracking and earthquakes, which should make anyone a bit nervous.

Now comes a new report that makes me further question the “wisdom” of fracking. Apparently, the gas is going to run out anyway. According to this article posted on the World Economic Forum website, the US, Norway, and Poland are among the countries where the much-ballyhooed potential for shale gas has turned out to be not so sweet and rosy after all. Norway dropped its estimate from 83 trillion cubic feet in 2011 all the way down to zero two years later. Poland reduced its estimate by 80%. And a new University of Texas study has the US shale boom pretty much ending in just five years.

So why are we investing billions of dollars in infrastructure and putting our water at risk? Why not use that money to push our economy further toward renewables like solar, wind, and small hydro? Why not retrofit every building with deep-conservation insulation, thus reducing the demand?

No wonder people around the country and around the world–including my own area of Western Massachusetts, where a proposal to pipe fracked gas has encountered fierce opposition despite gas company dirty tricks that extend to imposing a moratorium on new gas connections

Ask your utility company these sorts of questions. It’s your right to know.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Eco-friendly, Environment, General Commentary, localism/locavore Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Over the past several months, I’ve been learning more about biomimcry: emulating nature’s designs to solve problems humans need solved. Often, the results are aesthetically pleasing, environmentally friendly, and energy conserving.

While, as far as I know, he wasn’t paying attention to energy use or design challenges like harvesting rainwater in the desert, the famed late-19th/early-20th century architect and artist Antoni Gaudí certainly was a biomimic. Here’s what the Barcelona Tourist Guide says about Gaudí:

Most of Gaudí’s constructions have an organic look to them. This basic concept of using nature as the primary influences for his creativity is reflected in the use of the natural curved construction stones, twisted iron sculptures, and organic-like shapes—all of which are characteristic traits of Gaudí’s architecture.

I just visited Barcelona, where Gaudí left his mark and helped inspire the whole Modernist movement that gives today’s Barcelona so much character—and I found myself thinking often about biomimicry, and how the Modernists used nature forms to create a powerful aesthetic. Many of our other great inventors took inspiration from nature as well; Da Vinci and Buckminster Fuller were also biomimics.

In addition to his world-famous cathedral, La Sagrada Familia Basilica, commenced in 1882 and not yet finished, he did several residential buildings, a palace for his patron, and even a stunning municipal park.

But the Sagrada Familia is probably the single best reason to visit Barcelona. It’s just magnificent. The interior and exterior are completely different experiences. The exterior is almost like it was done by an out-of-control cake decorator with a compulsion to sculpt every available surface; the interior is serene and calm, yet soaring and spiritually uplifting. It feels almost like some of the great mosques in Istanbul.

The exterior is iconic; you’ve surely seen photographs.

Exterior shot, Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona
Arch and four towers of the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona, designed by Antoni Gaudií

But to me, the deeper experience of this building is the sacred space within the walls. This brief movie clip gives at least a little taste of the Sagrada Familia interior experience. 

 

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, Technology Tagged with , ,

A sobering—but not at all surprising—story on the Associated Press wire this morning: the more we drill for oil, the more accidents we have.

Consider these stats, all of them taken from that article:

  • More than 2000 “significant accidents” on pipelines since 1995, causing $3 billion in property damage
  • A single pipeline company, Plains All American Pipeline LP (operators of the line that spilled over Santa Barbara, California this week) has had 223 accidents $32 million in structural damage, 864,300 gallons spilled, and 25 federal enforcement actions just since 2006
  • A 60 percent increase in the number of accidents annually since 2009—and, not coincidentally, also a 60 percent increase in US oil production

Causes? Corroding pipes, failures in welds—aging infrastructure, in other words—with a generous helping of natural disasters and careless backhoe operators.

These accidents leak toxics, cause a  risk of severe fires, and of course, drive up the price of energy.

Isn’t it time we stopped relying on fossil and nuclear for our energy needs? We already have the technology to switch to save, reliable, renewable sources such as solar, wind, geothermal, magnetic, tidal…and deep conservation, which just by itself could cut our energy use in half.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Eco-friendly, Environment, Green Business, Green Living/Green Lifestyles, language, Media Ethics, Politics, propaganda Tagged with , , , , ,

A couple of Facebook friends (both well-known marketers based in Canada, as it happens) posted a link to an article called “FDA to Crack Down on Home-based Soap Makers.”

Having seen government overreach in such areas as raw milk, I clicked over and took a look. And found very little information. Rather than spend my morning following links on a Google search, I merely posted this response:

But the article says very little about what the proposal actually would do. European cosmetics standards are a GOOD thing, and, as I understand them, would make it far harder for big corps to sell us harmful “personal care” products. Which doesn’t mean this law isn’t overreaching–just that I don’t know because the article doesn’t tell us. Seems like an easy way around this would be a minimum number of bars per year underneath which producers would be exempt. But even artisanal soapmakers *should* disclose ingredients.

Artisanal organic soap bars
Would small-batch organic soaps be affected? No.

Later, I saw another comment from someone who did take the time to do the research; businesses with less than $100,000 in sales are exempt.

In short, this article is an attempt to stir up hostility with a nonexistent controversy. And it seems that Senator Dianne Feinstein is not an evil tool of the personal care companies after all.

I wonder, if we dig deep enough, if we would find some of the big chemical-based personal care products companies—or perhaps an opponent of Senator Feinstein—have a hand in this disinformation campaign. The list of industry giants supporting the new legislation (and thus, imposing tougher standards for themselves) is a long one but it’s certainly not every company.

Incidentally, I’ve said for years that the tough European Union rules on personal care products were a huge marketing opportunity for companies that meet the standards. Whether based in the US or Europe, the first few companies that demonstrate they meet the tougher standards ought to go be very successful in the stores.

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By Posted on Posted in Branding, Business Ethics, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, Green Marketing, Innovation, language, Social and Economic Justice, Socially Responsible Investing, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

I just took a first stab at writing an Environmental and Social Change Business Bill of Rights. Adopting these principles would level the playing field and enable green, socially conscious businesses to compete as equals—and in that competition, they will win almost all the time.

But this should not be just me spouting off. I got the discussion started, but I want to learn what others would be important in that kind of a campaign (and who has energy to work on it.

Also, I’ve got seven points here. If we continue to model it after the US Bill of Rights written by James Madison (who later became President of the United States), we need ten What did I leave out?

We, the people of Planet Earth, hereby declare that every nation and the planet as a whole have certain inalienable rights, including Life, Sufficiency, Peace, and Planetary Balance. To these ends, we call upon the governments of the world, at all levels, to establish these rights through mandating the following policies:
1. Manufacturers shall take full responsibility for their products at all stages in the product lifespan, including manufacturing, distribution, use, collection, reuse, disassembly, recycling, and disposal. Retail and wholesale channels shall accept used products and convey them back through the supply chain to the manufacturers.
2. Passing off costs to others, as externalities, is not acceptable. Pollution, waste, destruction of others’ property, etc. will be paid for by the entity that causes it.
3. All new construction or major renovation shall meet minimum standards of energy, water, and resource conservation, as well as fresh air circulation. Such standards shall be incorporated into local building codes, meeting or exceeding LEED silver or stretch codes.
4. All newly constructed or significantly renovated government buildings shall be Net Zero or Net Positive in energy and water use, producing at least as much energy and water as the building uses. Private developers shall receive incentives to meet this standard.
5. All subsidies for fossil (including but not limited to oil, diesel fuel, airplane fuel, natural gas, propane, and coal), nuclear, or other nonrenewable energy sources shall be phased out as soon as practical, to be completed within a maximum period of three years.
6. All subsidies that promote fossil-fuel-powered vehicles over cleaner alternatives, including subsidies to infrastructure exclusively or primarily for their use, shall be phased out as soon as practical, to be completed within a maximum period of ten years.
7. Average fleet vehicle mileage standards shall be increased to 70 MPH for passenger vehicles carrying up to six people, and to 40 MPH for trucks and buses within ten years. Non-fossil-fuel vehicles shall be designed to make a contribution to stationary power needs.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Business-general, Eco-friendly, Energy & Sustainability, Entrepreneurship, Environment, Green Business, localism/locavore Tagged with , , , , , , , ,

Yesterday, two long-awaited and seemingly unrelated milestone events occurred in the Connecticut River Valley of Massachusetts (where I live) and Vermont.

  1. Passenger train service was restored to Northampton and Greenfield, MA. The first commercial passenger trains since 1987 to use the Connecticut River tracks between Springfield, MA and Brattleboro,  VT made initial northbound and southbound runs between New York City and St. Albans, VT (a tiny village at the Canadian border). While only one train per day in each direction will make this run, it marks a rare expansion of long-distance passenger rail service in the US. Plans call for adding a stop at Holyoke, MA once that station is rebuilt in 2016, and there’s discussion of running several commuter trains a day at some point in the future—which would allow people to actually substitute train travel for driving.
  2. The Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant, opened in 1972,was taken off the grid and permanently shut down. This GE Mark I plant, which uses a reactor design nearly identical to Fukushima’s, has been operating unsafely since its earliest days—I’ve seen an excerpt from the long, long official government safety issues report of March, 1974, and it isn’t pretty—and illegally under Vermont law for nearly three years (since March, 2012).

The forces that created these two events were very different: government efforts for the train, a combination of citizen activism and market conditions for the shutdown. But several common threads across the wider map of society show that these victories are actually linked. Both were responses to growing perceptions that:

  • We need to think bioregionally
  • We have to create energy and resource sustainability
  • Both of these milestones will create the kind of economic impact we want to see: moving toward conservation, renewable, safe energy sources and transit-oriented development boosts, smaller, local businesses and encourages changes in consumer use patterns
  • Both are better for the environment (do NOT let anyone try to tell you that nukes are environmentally benign—the claim of lower carbon footprint is false if you count the entire fuel cycle, and the environmental consequences of an accident are catastrophic)
  • Citizens, individuals, can make a difference—in our use patterns as well as our advocacy
  • Change is possible, even when it looks hopeless

Of course, there’s more work to be done.

To make the train viable, they really need extend service to Montreal, as was true in the distant past. Reasonably priced service between NYC and Montreal  (also serving population centers en route: Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford, CT; Springfield, MA; Burlington, VT) will keep a lot more of the seats occupied and create economic viability that will be hard to find if the train ends in nowheresville. Even from NYC, when you count time driving to the airport, time at the airport, and time getting from the airport to an inner-city final destination, train travel within a few hundred miles would not be that much slower than flying, and a good deal more pleasant. From Northampton or Greenfield, MA, it’s a no-brainer. Rather than drive 40 or 60 minutes south to the airport and getting there 90 minutes before a flight, ride the comfortable train in the direction you want to go. By the time you would have boarded the plane, you could already be in central Vermont, half-way to Montreal.

And to really boost the economy without Vermont Yankee, we need even more activity on solar, wind, geothermal, deep conservation, etc. We have to make up the loss to the power grid, and replace the jobs the plant had provided. The good news? Investment in these technologies creates a lot more jobs—22 times as many if you count construction jobs, and 148 times as many permanent jobs—than the same expenditure in nuclear, and a lot of that filters down to the more economically marginal who can get good jobs in these sectors.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Environment, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

I rather hoped we’d won the clean air vs. smokers fight. There’s certainly been huge improvement, but it crops up all over the place.

We were just in Panama, and were greeted at the airport with an optimistic sign announcing that it’s a smoke-free country. Not a reality, but I must say smoking was a very small inconvenience there. Far, far worse in many other countries I’ve visited.Welcome to Panama: Country Free of Tobacco Smoke (Sign in Panama City International Airport)

One of the things I’m really proud of in my life is that I initiated the first nonsmokers’ rights regs in Northampton, Massachusetts, back in 1983. We made restaurants set aside 25% of seating area for nonsmokers, and within a few years, not only had most restaurants gone nonsmoking, but a whole lot more had opened and they were drawing from a 50 mile radius–because once they didn’t have to gag on other people’s smoke, a whole lot more people started going out to eat! Actually, the very first bit of activism that I can remember engaging in, at age THREE (yes really), was taking cigarettes off the coffee table and breaking them in half, during a party my parents were throwing. It wasn’t out of malice but out of a very clear sense of self-protection.

From there came a lifetime of social and environmental activism. I just turned 58 this week, so I’ve been at it for 55 years! It;s nice to be able to claim a few victories, one of which was that nonsmoking law more than 30 years ago.

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By Posted on Posted in Activism, Democracy, Environment, People Helping People, Politics, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

I saw “42” when it came out and liked it a lot.

It is hard to stay focused on changing the world when you look around and see not only the same battles all over again, but in many cases the same increasingly elderly activists joining those battles. For me, the wave of youth activism that started with Seattle in 1999 and crested with the Occupy movement–and will return when we least expect it—is very exciting, because it means there IS a critical mass for social change one and two generations younger than us.

I also avoid burnout by regularly thinking about all the areas where we HAVE made progress. And while police violence is an area that needs a LOT of work (since the 1960s, I haven’t understood why they reach for bullets instead of stun guns first), I think about what it was like for blacks in South Africa, Rhodesia, and the American South in my own lifetime…the way the environmental movement has gone from fringe to mainstream…the shattering of the idea common when I was a kid that the only appropriate careers for women were teaching and nursing and domestic work…the relatively new understanding that domestic violence and hate speech and school bullying are crimes we don’t have to tolerate…the string of fallen-dictator dominoes around the world, from throwing off the shackles of colonialism in Africa to the Arab Spring. (We may not always find the replacement governments an improvement, but the truth is, when the people say ENOUGH, governments topple and there is a brief space for something better. Once in a while, as in Mandela’s South Africa, that better thing actually emerges victorious.)

In other words, I look around and I see that within the brief span of my own lifetime (I turn 58 on Wednesday), we’ve made very real change on many fronts, even if it feels like we’re running in place or even backsliding.

These are what gives me hope and keeps me working for peace, justice, and the planet.

The above is my response to a friend posting her response to the movie, “42,” about Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball. She wrote,

Black Lives Mattered in that struggle against racism in baseball–perhaps the beginning of the civil rights movement…Sixty years later, same struggle. Oh, God help us win this time ’round. Does the arc of justice bend?

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