The High Line, an elevated freight spur that runs along the West Side of Manhattan and overlooks the Hudson River, was nothing more than a crumbling eyesore 10 years ago. But since it opened as a park last year, its plantings and vistas, tasteful design and intricate weave through the redbrick bastions of New York’s meatpacking past have been a hit. Though the High Line is not fully completed more than two million people have already visited.

New York’s High Line

Many of these visitors are interested in the potential for using outmoded infrastructure to add green space and transportation options as well as to promote cultural and commercial revitalization. The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.

In Chicago, the old Bloomingdale Rail Line is envisioned as a 3-mile greenhouse containing a 100-acre urban farm and, underneath, a hydrogen-powered generator. The energy source, dubbed the “HYDROGENerator,” would be placed along an old aqueduct that runs under the railway, and would be used to power local schools.

Just across the Hudson from the High Line, The Embankment Preservation Coalition has been advocating for the preservation of an elevated stonework structure that runs through downtown Jersey City. The Embankment is part of what was once a freight railroad line comprising seven tracks. It’s envisioned as part of the 2,600-mile East Coast Greenway: a traffic-free path spanning from Florida to Maine.

Philadelphia’s Reading Viaduct is another project in the pipelines. Built in the 1890s, the Viaduct’s four elevated tracks run 10 blocks, offering spectacular views of the Philadelphia skyline. In 2003, local residents formed The Reading Viaduct Project for the purpose of advocating for the transformation of the Viaduct into an elevated linear park.

Chicago’s Bloomingdale Rail

Consider Texas. Long the leading U.S. oil-producing state, it is now also the leading generator of electricity from wind, having overtaken California in 2006. Texas now has 9,700 megawatts of wind generating capacity online, 370 more in the construction stage, and a huge amount in the development stage. When all of these wind farms are completed, Texas will have 53,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity—the equivalent of 53 coal-fired power plants. This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 25 million people, enabling Texas to export electricity, just as it has long exported oil.

Texas is not alone. In South Dakota, a wind-rich, sparsely populated state, development has begun on a vast 5,050-megawatt wind farm (1 megawatt of wind capacity supplies 300 U.S. homes) that when completed will produce nearly five times as much electricity as the 810,000 people living in the state need. Altogether, some 10 states in the United States, most of them in the Great Plains, and several Canadian provinces are planning to export wind energy.

The government of Scotland is negotiating with two sovereign wealth funds in the Middle East to invest $7 billion in a grid in the North Sea off its eastern coast. This grid will enable Scotland to develop nearly 60,000 megawatts of off-shore wind generating capacity, close to the 85,000 megawatts of current electrical generating capacity for the United Kingdom.

We are witnessing an embrace of renewable energy on a scale we’ve never seen for fossil fuels or nuclear power. And not only in industrial countries. Algeria, which knows it will not be exporting oil forever, is planning to build 6,000 megawatts of solar thermal generating capacity for export to Europe via undersea cable. The Algerians note that they have enough harnessable solar energy in their vast desert to power the entire world economy. This is not a mathematical error. A similarly remarkable fact is that the sunlight striking the earth in just one hour is enough to power the world economy for one year.

Turkey, which now has 41,000 megawatts of total electrical generating capacity, issued a request for proposals in 2007 to build wind farms. It received bids from both domestic and international wind development firms to build a staggering 78,000 megawatts of wind generating capacity. Having selected some 7,000 megawatts of the most promising proposals, the government is now issuing construction permits.

In mid-2008, Indonesia—a country with 128 active volcanoes and therefore rich in geothermal energy—announced that it would develop 6,900 megawatts of geothermal generating capacity, with Pertamina, the state oil company, responsible for developing the lion’s share. Indonesia’s oil production has been declining for the last decade, and in each of the last five years the country has been an oil importer. As Pertamina shifts resources from oil into the development of geothermal energy, it could become the first oil company—state-owned or independent—to make the transition from oil to renewable energy.

These are only a few of the visionary initiatives to tap the earth’s renewable energy. The resources are vast. In the United States, three states—North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas—have enough harnessable wind energy to run the entire economy. In China, wind will likely become the dominant power source. Indonesia could one day get all its power from geothermal energy alone. Europe will be powered largely by wind farms in the North Sea and solar thermal power plants in the North African desert.

The goals for developing renewable sources of energy by 2020 that are laid out in my book Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization are based not on what is conventionally believed to be politically feasible but on what I think is needed. This is not Plan A, business as usual. This is Plan B—a wartime mobilization, an all-out response that is designed to avoid destabilizing economic and political stresses that will come with unmanageable climate change.

Implementing Plan B entails cutting net carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions 80 percent by 2020. This would keep atmospheric CO2 levels from exceeding 400 parts per million (ppm), up only modestly from 387 ppm in 2009, thus limiting the future rise in temperature. To make this ambitious cut, the first priority is to replace all coal- and oil-fired electricity generation with renewable sources. Whereas the twentieth century was marked by the globalization of the world energy economy as countries everywhere turned to oil, much of it coming from the Middle East, this century will see the localization of energy production as the world turns to wind, solar, and geothermal energy.

This century will also see the electrification of the economy. The transport sector will shift from gasoline-powered automobiles to plug-in gas-electric hybrids, all-electric cars, light rail transit, and high-speed intercity rail. And for long-distance freight, the shift will be from diesel-powered trucks to electrically powered rail freight systems. The movement of people and goods will be powered largely by electricity. In this new energy economy, buildings will rely on renewable electricity almost exclusively for heating, cooling, and lighting.

Can we expand renewable energy use fast enough? I think so. Recent trends in the adoption of mobile phones and personal computers give a sense of how quickly new technologies can spread. Once cumulative mobile phone sales reached 1 million units in 1986, the stage was set for explosive growth, and the number of cell phone subscribers doubled in each of the next three years. Over the next 12 years the number doubled every two years. By 2001 there were 961 million cell phones—nearly a 1,000-fold increase in just 15 years. And now there are more than 4 billion cell phone subscribers worldwide.

Sales of personal computers followed a similar trajectory. In 1980 roughly a million were sold, but by 2008 the figure was an estimated 270 million—a 270-fold jump in 28 years. We are now seeing similar growth figures for renewable energy technologies. Installations of solar cells are doubling every two years, and the annual growth in wind generating capacity is not far behind. Just as the communications and information economies have changed beyond recognition over the past two decades, so too will the energy economy over the next decade.

There is one outstanding difference. Whereas the restructuring of the information economy was shaped only by advancing technology and market forces, the restructuring of the energy economy will be driven also by the realization that the fate of civilization may depend not only on doing so, but on doing it at wartime speed.

- Lester R. Brown, Earth Policy Institute

350.org is an international campaign that’s building a movement to unite the world around solutions to the climate crisis–the solutions that science and justice demand.

350 parts per million (ppm) is, according to leading climate scientists, the safe upper limit for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Accelerating arctic warming and other early climate impacts have led scientists to conclude that we are already above the safe zone at our current 392ppm. The 350 campaign is focused on making the connections between our actions and climate change easier to understand so we can turn this around.

This year, 10/10/10 is the 350 Global Climate Work Party. Thousands of groups across New Zealand, and in over 180 countries, will join together and get to work on climate change. From holding a tree planting day to installing solar hot water heating on local buildings, we’ll be sending a call to leaders that they have our support in getting us back to 350ppm.

With more than 1300 global events registered already, there is plenty to get involved in. More information on actions taking place in Aotearoa can be found at 350.org.nz, or why not organise your own event – for details and suggestions go here, or register your event here.

Watch this video from last year’s 350 day to be inspired:

With their 1994 battle cry, “Ya basta!” (“Enough already!”) Mexico’s Zapatista uprising became the spearhead of two convergent movements: Mexico’s movement for indigenous rights and the international movement against corporate globalization.

Skip to 2010: the movements for indigenous rights and against corporate globalization have converged again, this time globally, in the climate justice movement. Following the widely acknowledged failure of the climate negotiations in Copenhagen last December, the greatest manifestation of these converging movements took place this past April at the World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba, Bolivia.

While political forces have conspired to make the Zapatistas largely invisible both inside Mexico and internationally, their challenge has always been to propose a paradigm of development that is both just and self-sustaining. It seems fair, then, to see if Zapatismo can shed any light on the muddle of politics around the climate crisis. Can the poetic riddles of Zapatista spokesperson Subcomandante Marcos serve as signposts on the rough road toward just climate solutions?

One No and Many Yeses

Soon after the Zapatistas appeared to the world in 1994 as an armed insurgency, they put down their weapons and revealed that alongside their “One NO” — the rejection of imposed authority, whether by the Mexican government or by the global institutions that govern trade, investment, development and security policy — they stood for “Many Yeses.” Yes, for the Zapatistas, signified the careful, conscious, and painstaking development of alternative forms of governance and resource use: multilingual schools, community clinics, seed banks, sustainable agriculture, accessible and affordable water and basic sanitation, and, above all, organized experiments in direct democracy.

When 30,000 members of civil society from 140 countries, including 56 government delegations, gathered in Cochabamba in April, they asserted clearly and forcefully that the climate crisis, with its attendant impacts of drought, flood, crop loss, increased disease burden, displacement, and widespread instability, has one essential root cause. In the words of the People’s Agreement forged in Cochabamba, “The corporations and governments of the so-called ‘developed’ countries, in complicity with a segment of the scientific community, have led us to discuss climate change as a problem limited to the rise in temperature without questioning the cause, which is the capitalist system.”

Whatever climate solutions we consider, the Southern social movements say, they must be rooted in the acceptance of social and ecological limits to growth. Recognition of such limits is what the Zapatistas would call “the No.”

The many “yeses,” meanwhile, come in the form of the best demands of the climate justice movement: strengthening local economies, practicing ecological agriculture and rights-based governance; drastically reducing consumption and waste by Northern countries and Southern elites in order to improve quality of life for the billions of marginalized and exploited; protecting forests, biodiversity, culture, and those among us who are most vulnerable; investing in and attending to women, youth, and those who’ve earned the right to be called “elders.” The many yeses, for climate justice, are the manifold paths toward mitigation and adaptation, equity and justice. The “yeses” are embodied in a notion that has recently gained currency in development circles: grassroots resilience.

Justice with Dignity

Implicit in the surging forth of the indigenous people is their demand to be approached with the respect due to all human subjects. As Subcomandante Marcos wrote over a decade ago, “The powerful with all their money don’t understand our struggle. The power of money and pride cannot understand, because there is a word which does not walk in the understanding of the great sages who sell their intelligence to the rich and the powerful. This word is dignity.”

Dignity, it turns out, is central to the climate negotiations. “Development,” with its implicit assumption that the health of a society is best measured by its level of consumption, comes, precisely, at the cost of human dignity. Southern climate campaigners make clear that the North, burdened by overconsumption to the point of obesity, needs to reduce consumption, while much of the South, in the face of perennial scarcity, needs to increase it. Sara Larrain, director of an NGO called Chile Sustentable, writes, “The objective of human dignity surpasses the objective of overcoming poverty, and refers to the negotiation of environmental space and social equity between the North and South.”

The “Line of Dignity” that Larrain formulated, in concert with groups from Brazil, Uruguay and Chile, is essentially a proposal to replace the poverty line — an austere and denigrating economic metric based on only the most fundamental human survival needs — with a measure that takes into account cultural, political, and environmental rights. “The Line of Dignity,” Larrain writes, “is a convergence point that fosters lowering the consumption of those above, and raising that of those below. This permits the assurance to the population of the levels of access to environmental space necessary for subsistence and dignity.”

The Line of Dignity proposes that equity between North and South can only be reached when the Northern notion of environmental sustainability (preservation of resources for planetary needs and future generations) is matched with the Southern demand for social sustainability (equity, and full social, environmental, political and cultural rights). Thus, in order to raise the standard of living of the billions who currently live below the line of dignity, a certain measure of environmental space (carbon sinks, fisheries, and open grazing land, for example) must be surrendered by the North. The wealthy must reduce their use of resources. They must commit to degrowth.

Rather than manage the climate catastrophe, as the neoliberal establishment is attempting to do, the climate justice movement chooses to use the crisis as an opportunity — perhaps the last opportunity — to construct dignity.

Everything for Everyone, Nothing for Us

Probably the most commonly asked question of people just arriving at a deep concern for the ecological crisis is, “What can I, as an individual, do to make things better?” The simple answer, which I learned from living among Zapatista villagers, is nothing. Because we have to stop acting as individuals if we are to survive; the Earth won’t be affected by our individual actions, only our collective impact.

The Zapatistas’ slogan, “Para todos todo, para nosotros nada” (“Everything for Everyone, Nothing for Us”) rang true in the mid-1990s and still rings true today. But this slogan has a certain mystery. The demand “nothing for us” runs so counter to anything any of us — the resource-hungry individuals of the so-called First World — would ever think of demanding. As the saying goes, no one ever rioted for austerity. Yet, without feeling cheated, we need to build our capacity to live by another old saying: Enough is better than a feast.

The proposals of Bolivia’s President Evo Morales for a Climate Debt Tribunal and a Universal Declaration of the Rights of Mother Earth put equity and ecology (as opposed to, say, technical fixes or market-based solutions) at the center of climate negotiations. Such proposals are, at bottom, radical expressions of an ethic that demands everything for everyone, nothing for us. Such proposals also require a radical rethinking of what “development” means. Inspired by the Andean notion of “el buen vivir” — living well, as opposed to living better — the emerging climate justice movement posits that, this close to the brink of ecological collapse, development and progress should be understood not in terms of accumulation, but in terms of sharing.

A World in Which Many Worlds Fit

The Mexican establishment perceives the Zapatista project as a threat to the very integrity of the nation-state. This threat lies in the Zapatistas’ demand for the formal recognition, within state boundaries, of diverse ethnic, cultural, linguistic, and religious groups. In the Andean region, and in Bolivia in particular, this is called (in its cultural dimension) pluriculturality, or (in its political dimension), plurinationality — a nation in which fit many nations. The notion of pluriculturality differs significantly from the U.S. concept of “multiculturalism,” for it goes beyond multicultural education to include respect for collective claims to territory and for collective rights.

The world is in the middle of the greatest mass extinction since the twilight of the dinosaurs. Half of all species on Earth are expected to vanish within 100 years. The major ecosystems (including the Amazon), the world’s freshwater systems, and the coral reefs are all approaching a “tipping point” from which they may never recover. As such, scientists and social movements tend to agree: Diversity as a basis for decision-making is at the heart of both ecological and cultural survival. The Zapatista push for “A World in Which Many Worlds Fit,” much more than a call for mere “tolerance,” is a clear recognition that what science has recently come to call “biocultural diversity” is a bottom line.

Rather than seeking to divide resources to serve an atomized multitude, the climate justice movement envisions multiplying resources to serve the common good. For peasants and indigenous peoples, by and large, this means merging age-old traditions and systems of ownership and authority with the modern practices that complement, foster, and enhance them. In other words, a just transition to a post-carbon world requires precisely the kinds of strategies that have sustained land-based peoples for millennia, accompanied by the best sustainable technologies current science has to offer: organic subsistence agriculture plus fair trade; seed sovereignty ensured by genetic testing of seed stocks; locally produced electricity via wind, solar, and biogas; collective (public) transportation powered by waste oil; zero waste practices and small-scale, clean production; and local water stewardship enhanced by low-cost water treatment. To respond to a crisis with diverse, local manifestations in a way that achieves a world in which many worlds fit demands diverse, local, people-powered solutions.

The Earth Is for They Who Work It

The Zapatistas’ struggle has been, above all else, for territory. They want the simple right to work the land that they consider historically to be theirs. In this, their struggle has many parallels throughout the indigenous world.

While fighting for the Earth, the Zapatistas have never identified themselves, even incidentally, as “environmentalists.” Nor do they talk much, in their voluminous decade-and-a-half of communiqués, about “ecology” or “conservation.” And yet, as poet Gary Snyder once said, “The best thing you can do for the environment is to stay home.” As indigenous peasant farmers struggling for territorial autonomy, the Zapatistas’ struggle is precisely to “stay home.”

One of the controversial topics in the UN climate negotiations, hotly contested in Cochabamba and denounced outright by many segments of the climate justice movement, is the program called Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD). REDD seeks to reward governments, companies, or forest owners in the South for keeping their forests standing, to act as carbon sinks, instead of cutting them down. Liberal NGOs tend to support the essentially corporate REDD program because it provides a mechanism for protecting forests. But this mechanism also provides polluting industries with the right to continue polluting. In addition, REDD’s version of “forest protection” may well be one of the largest land grabs in history.

Tom Goldtooth, director of the U.S.-based Indigenous Environmental Network, calls REDD “a corruption of the sacred.” Forests, especially for those who live in them, are not mere carbon sinks. “Lungs of the Earth” or not, they are forests first. The Earth, as Emiliano Zapata urged, is for its true stewards. Yes, urges the climate justice movement, keep forests standing — and pay to do so if necessary. But rather than putting distant economic interests in charge of forests in order to save them, as REDD proposes, why not encourage the kind of valuation that land-based peoples have always practiced? We should reduce the pressures on forests by keeping out those who don’t directly steward them — that is, most of us.

In denouncing REDD and other carbon offset schemes, climate justice activists argue that the market can’t resolve a crisis of its own making. The Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, released in Britain in 2006, described climate change as “the biggest market failure in history.” Yet, at the same time, carbon markets became the only solution advocated by governments and the corporations and NGOs close to them. When the European carbon market failed, with the price of a ton of carbon dropping dramatically below the range at which renewables can compete with fossil fuels), there was barely a whisper. The Obama administration continued to push for cap-and-trade, the UNFCCC continued to press for REDD and other offsets, and the atmosphere continued to be for those who wanted to pay to pollute it.

Walk by Asking Questions

In many of his communiqués, Subcomandante Marcos uses stories of the old gods, those who were there before the world was the world, to show how the struggle to reinvent society is linked to the moment of creation. One lesson these stories return to time and again is that those who created the world did so by “walking while asking questions.” It is a powerful poetry.

Yet, in the midst of growing climate crisis, we barely have time to ask the questions. Can the massive numbers of landless, small landholders, fisherfolk and indigenous peoples be given incentives — and support — to stay on their land rather than migrate to overcrowded and overheated cities? Can we reasonably stop the burning of coal, oil, crops, and waste, and still live well? Is another development possible? These questions don’t have easy answers. But in asking them as we walk, quickly, we may — we must — find the answers emerging.

In The Value of Nothing, Raj Patel cites “walking by asking questions” as a fundamental principle of democracy. “The mistakes that get made along the way are part of the process,” he nevertheless acknowledges. In challenging a broken system, it’s essential to enter uncharted territory. Actually engaging the most affected people in the process of fixing the climate disaster is part of this territory. And yes, mistakes will be made.

But in order to prevent mistakes from becoming disasters, interventions must be made at a human scale. It was mistakes — big ones — that got us here. Oil companies like BP, for instance, drilled far beyond their capacity to prevent or clean up accidents. More spectacular failures are in the pipeline, such as geo-engineering. When BP Vice President David Eyton announced in 2008 that BP was getting onboard with geo-engineering, he said, “We cannot ignore the scale of the challenge.” Unfortunately, we also cannot afford the scale of the disaster to follow. If anything goes wrong (and it will), it will go wrong, like the BP experiment in deepwater drilling, in a big way.

As we walk by asking questions, we should repeat the following mantra: big questions, small mistakes.

Ya Basta!

As profound as any of their other poetic slogans, the Zapatistas’ initial battle cry of “Enough already!” defines the urgency with which we must approach the climate crisis. This year will likely mark the hottest summer on record. The hurricane season is predicted to be more catastrophic than ever. The BP spill is now recognized as the worst environmental disaster of all time. And the latest predictions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show that the Arctic could be free of summer ice in 30 years. Governments play politics as usual, and corporations eye huge profits from carbon markets. But scientists and activists agree: We can’t alter the physical limits of climate devastation with market fixes.

In 1994, the Zapatistas clearly told the world that we had exhausted all other options. In the teeth of climate catastrophe, every living thing on the planet is now backed against the same wall. Change takes time, argues every prudent voice. But after centuries of toxic industry, decades of climate change denial, and years of playing politics as if there were winners and losers, time has run out. In a drawn-out competition against the climate crisis, there can be only losers. As Bolivia’s ambassador to the UN, Pablo Solón, said recently at the U.S. Social Forum in Detroit, “We are only going to have one chance in this century to fight climate change. And that time is now.” In these words can be heard the echo of the Zapatistas: Ya Basta!

In 2009, carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in China—the world’s leading emitter—grew by nearly 9 percent. At the same time, emissions in most industrial countries dropped, bringing global CO2 emissions from fossil fuel use down from a high of 8.5 billion tons of carbon in 2008 to 8.4 billion tons in 2009. Yet this drop follows a decade of rapid growth: over the 10 previous years, global CO2 emissions rose by an average of 2.5 percent a year—nearly four times as fast as in the 1990s. Increasing temperatures and the resulting melting ice sheets and rising sea levels demonstrate the destructive effects of the carbon accumulating in the atmosphere.

Emissions in many wealthier countries fell in 2008 and 2009 as the global recession took hold. In the United States, CO2 emissions shrank by nearly 10 percent from 2007 to 2009, from a high of 1.58 billion tons of carbon to 1.43 billion tons, the lowest level since 1995. Emissions from oil, which is largely used for transportation, declined by nearly 11 percent, while those from coal, which is mainly burned to generate electricity, fell by over 13 percent.

The United Kingdom’s CO2 emissions fell by over 10 percent from 2007 to 2009. German emissions dropped by 8 percent, and French emissions dropped by 5 percent. Japan saw its emissions decline nearly 12 percent over the two-year period.

At the same time, CO2 emissions in the world’s most populous countries, China and India, continued to grow rapidly. China’s emissions rose to 1.86 billion tons of carbon in 2009, representing nearly a quarter of global emissions from fossil fuel burning. With average annual emissions growth of 8 percent over the past decade, China overtook the United States in 2007 as the world’s leading CO2 emitter. India’s emissions grew by close to 5 percent a year over the past decade; the country passed Russia in 2007 to become the world’s third largest emitter.

Still, emissions per person in developing economies remain far below those of most of the industrial world. The tiny nation of Qatar ranks highest in per capita emissions, at 11.5 tons of carbon per person in 2009, followed by several other oil-rich countries. Australia, the United States, and Canada lead the major industrial countries, emitting 4–5 tons of carbon per person in 2009. Per capita emissions in these countries are three times those in China and nearly four times the world average. At the same time, many European countries, such as the United Kingdom, Germany, and France, have comparable standards of living to the United States but emit only half as much carbon dioxide per person.

Emissions totals for individual countries include all fossil fuels burned within their borders. For manufacturing giants like China, this means that their total emissions include those resulting from the production of goods destined for other countries. A recent study by researchers at Stanford University found that 22 percent of Chinese emissions resulted from the production of goods for export. The study also found that the manufacture of goods imported by the United States was responsible for 190 million tons of carbon emissions per year. If emissions totals were adjusted to account for Chinese exports and U.S. imports, the United States would again be the world’s leading emitter.

While fossil fuel use is responsible for the majority of carbon dioxide emissions, changes in land use, such as clearing forests for cropland, also emit a substantial amount of CO2. In 2008, the most recent year for which data are available, global emissions from land use change were estimated at 1.2 billion tons of carbon. The vast majority of these emissions were from deforestation in the tropics; Indonesia and Brazil alone represent over 60 percent of land use change emissions.

More than half of the carbon dioxide emitted annually is absorbed by oceans, soils, and trees. The rapid rate at which carbon dioxide is pouring into the atmosphere is overwhelming these natural systems, posing a particular threat to ocean ecosystems. The large amounts of dissolved CO2 alter ocean chemistry, making seawater more acidic, which makes it more difficult for organisms such as reef-building corals or shellfish to form their skeletons or shells. The world’s oceans are now more acidic than they have been at any time in the past 20 million years. Experts have estimated that if CO2 emissions continue to rise on their long-term trajectory, coral reefs around the world may be dying off by 2050.

Recent research has also indicated that the oceans’ capacity to absorb carbon dioxide may be unable to keep up with the rising level of emissions. The CO2-absorption ability of both the Southern Ocean, which surrounds Antarctica, and the North Atlantic Ocean has decreased in recent decades.

Continue reading

“A dyed-in-the-wool vegetarian, I had always assumed that when it came to sustainability, my diet would beat the leather pants off that of my burger-crazy friends. But as I wrote in “Get Behind Me, Seitan,” July/August 2010 issue of Mother Jones some environmentalists and farmers claim that eating responsibly raised meat can actually be good for the planet. So whos right? I posed the question to four smart people: Farmer and writer Joel Salatin, Diet for a Hot Planet author Anna Lappé, Bard College geophysicist Gidon Eshel, and food-waste expert Jonathan Bloom.”

via Is Vegetarianism Always Better for the Planet Than Eating Meat? | Mother Jones.

Twenty-five years ago Saturday, two bombs planted by secret agents working for the French government sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland Harbor, New Zealand, killing Fernando Pereira, a photographer and father of two. This was a desperate move by France to stop the activists on board from bearing witness to its nuclear testing in the South Pacific.

I remember hearing about the attack over my father’s transistor radio in our township outside Durban, South Africa. The apartheid government had recently imposed a state of emergency and it was not often that international news made its way to us. What had happened with the Rainbow Warrior was so outrageous that even we heard about it.

As a young anti-apartheid activist, I was particularly taken with two elements of the event.

The first was that a powerful, democratic government could feel so intimidated by a small group of peaceful men and women holding up banners on a boat that it would resort to violence. It was my first exposure to the Quaker-inspired tradition of bearing witness in order
to shine a spotlight on injustices or crimes that might otherwise go unnoticed.

The second was the idea that there existed people who would eschew personal gain and dedicate their lives to the greater good of our planet. Coming from a place where the struggle was inherently personal, the fact that the Greenpeace crew was planning to sail out to the middle of the ocean to oppose nuclear testing, which would not touch them anymore than it would touch anyone else, was an epiphany.

Of course, Greenpeace is not alone in its struggle to save the planet. Nongovernmental organizations and civil society — trade unions, faith-based organizations, school groups and others — have been working
independently or together for decades to promote the cause of social justice and fight the great threats of the day.

A couple of years after the sinking of the first Rainbow Warrior, Greenpeace volunteers bought a used trawler and transformed it into a new Rainbow Warrior. Many of the same crew then continued their
struggle against the French government until it finally gave up its nuclear testing program in 1996. The saying of the day became: “You can’t sink a Rainbow.”

While the threat of nuclear destruction is not over, a danger barely recognized at the time has taken its place as the No. 1 threat to our planet. Climate change has now become the biggest threat to security and peace in the future. Kofi Annan’s Global Forum estimates that in 2008 alone, 300,000 people died of the consequences of climate change.

Unlike nuclear testing, climate change is difficult to “bear witness” to because its causes (carbon emissions) lie in so many different factors and its resolution will require major, international cooperation of business leaders, politicians and other decision-makers. This does not mean civil society can or should stop trying to hold leaders accountable for changes they are unwilling to make.

History tells us that whatever injustice we face — whether it was apartheid in South Africa, civil rights in the United States, a woman’s right to choose — it was only when determined men and women were
willing to stand up and say, “Enough is enough, I am prepared to peacefully break the law and even go to prison to get our message across,” that change finally happened.

When all other attempts at discussion or negotiation have faltered, these organizations must have the option of turning to civil disobedience and nonviolent direct action.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have witnessed a dramatic shrinking of democratic space, with civil rights being curtailed beyond measure. In the past 9 years, 65 countries have passed laws cutting the rights of
NGOs and dictating what they can and can’t do.

Speaking last week at an international conference on the promotion of democracy and human rights, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton put it well when she said, “Democracies don’t fear their own people. They recognize that citizens must be free to come together, to advocate and agitate.”

At Greenpeace we find that even the peaceful act of hanging banners now often comes with greater consequences. After last December’s failed U.N. climate talks, four of our activists were detained for 22 days after holding up a banner at a head of state dinner reading, “Politicians Talk, Leaders Act.”

Much has changed in the quarter century since the first Rainbow Warrior was bombed. Fortunately, the two elements that so impressed me at the time, are just as valid today as they were back then: the power of people to change the will of governments, and the dedication of those committed to saving the planet for future generations.

According to all those who knew him, Fernando Periera did not consider dying for his cause. Nor do the great majority of those who speak out against injustice today. All they ask is a space in which to be heard, a place to speak truth to power, when those who have the capacity to make the changes necessary to save our planet seem unwilling to do so.

Greenpeace was founded on a prophecy from Canada’s First Nation peoples which reads: “There will come a time when the Earth grows sick and when it does a tribe will gather from all the cultures of the world who believe in deeds and not words. They will work to heal it…they will be known as the ‘Warriors of the Rainbow.”’ If we are to be successful in our fight against catastrophic climate change then perhaps we all need to become Rainbow Warriors.

From guardian.co.uk

The world is going to get hungrier this century, and on a scale that will make the famines of the 1980s look paltry. The maths are simple and devastating: in 40 years’ time the global population will be 9.2 billion people – a third larger than it is now. But to feed us all, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization says, we will need to produce twice as much food.

That’s because, despite the threats of this century, most developing countries will get richer. At present 350m households in the world live on £8,000 a year or more. That figure is projected to increase to 2.1bn by 2030. And the richer they are, the more wastefully people eat. Generally the poor eat vegetables, while the rich eat food that eats vegetables. Lots of it. To produce 1kg of beef takes 10kg of grass or soya-based feed. A farmed fish will have eaten three times its weight in wild fish. And the rate at which the richest consume these things is amazing: Americans consume 120kg of meat each per year; in the developing world they eat 28kg.

If the world develops as economists predict, it is hard to see how we can possibly meet these demands: environmentalists like to say that the 2050 population would require the resources of two earths to sustain it. No wonder the British government’s chief scientific adviser John Beddington says: “Food security represents a greater threat to mankind than climate change itself.”

There lies the other big problem. While we look for ways to produce that extra food, the rapidly changing climate is going to make the earth a less efficient piece of farmland. Large swaths of the tropics and the equatorial regions will get hotter and drier, and while that won’t leave them unable to grow things, what they can grow will change radically. The 2°C increase in average temperatures that is accepted as the likely minimum this century is enough to cause major shifts in the seasons and in what crops work where.

The great irony of this change is that, initially at least, most of us in the richer parts of the world will benefit. It’s in the tropics, where most of the world’s poor live, that climate change is damaging agriculture, and will continue to do so. Essentially, the belt round the centre of the earth will get hotter and drier, while those of us who live in the north of the northern hemisphere will see more warmth but also more rain. This will extend our growing seasons and increase the geographical area where it’s possible to grow crops. Canada and Russia are among the countries expected to do well, as are northern China and northern Europe. But the Mediterranean countries, southern American states and California don’t look comfortable at all. Spain, for one, is painted a nasty red on all the maps showing where water will be short come 2050.

But this is nothing compared with the changes that are happening or imminent in the tropical world. Rice production, the staple food of most of Asia, is already moving northwards, forcing millions of people to change ways of living that have sustained them for centuries. Along the coastal fringes of Asia, people’s lives are changing radically, as a huge increase in storms coupled with a rise in sea levels (which is now predicted to be a metre this century) brings salt to their fields and makes growing rice impossible.

Half of the poorest billion people in the world live in South Asia, as do many of the 5 million children who die every year of diseases caused or exacerbated by malnutrition. According to a report by the Asian Development Bank, 1.6 billion south Asians will find their food security at risk because of climate change.

In Africa and parts of Latin America predictions are just as hair-raising. Maize is one of the world’s four most important food crops and the staple of more than a quarter of a billion east Africans. It’s a hugely important food for animals as well. Maize is vulnerable to water problems and to temperature changes. As Andy Jarvis, an award-winning crop scientist, puts it: “When you look at the graph, under even small average heat rises, the line for maize just goes straight down.” It’s estimated that maize production will drop in sub-Saharan Africa and much of India by 15% in the next 10 years alone. By 2080, according to government scientists in South Africa, the region can expect to see a 50% drop in crops of all the cereals.

Among the luxuries of living in our comfy corner of the world, is the fact that climate change still seems to be a problem of the future, something that we need to worry about less for ourselves than our grandchildren. But for many millions of people the devastation caused by changing seasonal patterns and unpredictable weather is already a clear and present danger. First-person accounts collected by Oxfam from agricultural workers around the world all say the same. Whether they’re in the east African savannahs, the Peruvian altiplano or the fertile coastal wetlands of Indonesia, all complain that the seasons have become less certain, rainfall unpredictable and that their crops or their animals have suffered. There are new pests and diseases.

While it is still not possible to say with certainty that this is caused by human beings burning fossil fuels, it is undeniable that catastrophic changes are going on in the climate system. Filter the news with a climate change alert for a few months, and you watch a stream of worrying official statistics trickle in – all of them bad news. The southern Indian state of Karnataka reports a drop in rainfall of 6-8% since 1990. Tanzania and other east African countries report already an average warming of 1.5°C since 1990. Chinese meteorologists say that parts of their country have experienced the same. These figures may not seem enormous, but their effect is dramatic. According to the research of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, just half a degree of average temperature increase will reduce the yield of India’s wheat crop by 20%. And India is the world’s second largest producer of wheat. …

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At a time when excessive pressures on the earth’s land and water resources are of growing concern, there is a massive new demand emerging for cropland to produce fuel for cars—one that threatens world food security. Although this situation had been developing for a few decades, it was not until Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when oil prices jumped above $60 a barrel and U.S. gasoline prices climbed to $3 a gallon, that the situation came into focus. Suddenly investments in U.S. corn-based ethanol distilleries became hugely profitable, unleashing an investment frenzy that will convert one fourth of the 2009 U.S. grain harvest into fuel for cars.

The United States quickly came to dominate the crop-based production of fuel for cars. In 2005, it eclipsed Brazil, formerly the world’s leading ethanol producer. In Europe, where the emphasis is on producing biodiesel, mostly from rapeseed, some 2.4 billion gallons were produced in 2009. To meet its biodiesel goal, the European Union, under cropland constraints, is increasingly turning to palm oil imported from Indonesia and Malaysia, a trend that depends on clearing rainforests for oil palm plantations.

The price of grain is now tied to the price of oil. Historically the food and energy economies were separate, but now with the massive U.S. capacity to convert grain into ethanol, that is changing. In this new situation, when the price of oil climbs, the world price of grain moves up toward its oil-equivalent value. If the fuel value of grain exceeds its food value, the market will simply move the commodity into the energy economy. If the price of oil jumps to $100 a barrel, the price of grain will follow it upward. If oil goes to $200, grain will follow.

From 1990 to 2005, world grain consumption, driven largely by population growth and rising consumption of grain-based animal products, climbed by an average of 21 million tons per year. Then came the explosion in grain used in U.S. ethanol distilleries, which jumped from 54 million tons in 2006 to 95 million tons in 2008. This 41-million-ton jump doubled the annual growth in world demand for grain almost overnight, helping to triple world prices for wheat, rice, corn, and soybeans from mid-2006 to mid-2008. A World Bank analyst attributes 70 percent of the food price rise to this diversion of food to produce fuel for cars. Since then prices have subsided somewhat as a result of the global economic downturn, but they are still well above historical levels.

From an agricultural vantage point, the world’s appetite for crop-based fuels is insatiable. The grain required to fill an SUV’s 25-gallon tank with ethanol just once will feed one person for a whole year. If the entire U.S. grain harvest were to be converted to ethanol, it would satisfy at most 18 percent of U.S. automotive fuel needs.

Projections by Professors C. Ford Runge and Benjamin Senauer of the University of Minnesota in 2003 showed the number of hungry and malnourished people decreasing steadily to 2025. But their early 2007 update of these projections, which took into account the biofuel effect on world food prices, showed the number climbing rapidly in the years ahead. Millions of people living on the lower rungs of the global economic ladder, who are barely hanging on, are losing their grip and beginning to fall off.

Since the budgets of international food aid agencies are set well in advance, a rise in food prices shrinks food assistance. The World Food Programme, which is now supplying emergency food aid to more than 30 countries, cut shipments as prices soared. Hunger is on the rise, with some 18,000 children dying each day from hunger and related illnesses.

The emerging competition between the owners of the world’s 910 million automobiles and the 2 billion poorest people is taking the world into uncharted territory. Suddenly the world is facing an epic moral and political issue: Should grain be used to fuel cars or feed people? The average income of the world’s automobile owners is roughly $30,000 a year; the 2 billion poorest people earn on average less than $3,000 a year. The market says, let’s fuel the cars.

For every additional acre planted to corn to produce fuel, an acre of land must be cleared for cropping elsewhere. But there is little new land to be brought under the plow unless it comes from clearing tropical rainforests in the Amazon and Congo basins and in Indonesia or from clearing land in the Brazilian cerrado. Unfortunately, this has heavy environmental costs: a massive release of sequestered carbon, the loss of plant and animal species, and increased rainfall runoff and soil erosion.

While it makes little sense to use food crops to fuel cars if it drives up food prices, there is the option of producing automotive fuel from fast-growing trees, switchgrass, prairie grass mixtures, or other cellulosic materials, which can be grown on wasteland. The technologies to convert these cellulosic materials into ethanol exist, but the cost of producing cellulosic ethanol is close to double that of grain-based ethanol. Whether it will ever be cost-competitive with ethanol from grain is unclear.

There are alternatives to this grim scenario. The decision in May 2009 to raise U.S. auto fuel efficiency standards 40 percent by 2016 will reduce U.S. dependence on oil far more than converting the country’s entire grain harvest into ethanol could. The next step is a comprehensive shift to gas-electric plug-in hybrid cars that can be recharged at night, allowing most short-distance driving—daily commuting and grocery shopping, for example—to be done with electricity. An even more fundamental need is to restructure transportation systems to provide far more options than the personal automobile.

As the leading grain exporter and ethanol producer, the United States is in the driver’s seat. It needs to make sure that efforts to reduce its heavy dependence on imported oil do not create a far more serious problem: chaos in the world food economy. The choice is between a future of rising world food prices, spreading hunger, and growing political instability and one of more stable food prices, sharply reduced dependence on oil, and much lower carbon emissions.

“The world’s cities are facing unprecedented challenges. In Mexico City, Tehran, Kolkata, Bangkok, Beijing, and hundreds of other cities, the air is no longer safe to breathe. In some cities the air is so polluted that breathing is equivalent to smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. Respiratory illnesses are rampant. In many places, the number of hours commuters spend sitting in traffic-congested streets and highways climbs higher each year, raising frustration levels.

In response to these conditions, we are seeing the emergence of a new urbanism, a planning philosophy that environmentalist Francesca Lyman says “seeks to revive the traditional city planning of an era when cities were designed around human beings instead of automobiles.” One of the most remarkable modern urban transformations has occurred in Bogotá, Colombia, where Enrique Peñalosa served as mayor for three years. When he took office in 1998 he did not ask how life could be improved for the 30 percent who owned cars, but for the 70 percent—the majority—who did not.

Peñalosa realized that a city with a pleasant environment for children and the elderly would work for everyone. In just a few years, he transformed the quality of urban life. Under his leadership, the city created or renovated 1,200 parks, introduced a highly successful bus-based rapid transit system, built hundreds of kilometers of bicycle paths and pedestrian streets, reduced rush hour traffic by 40 percent, planted 100,000 trees, and involved local citizens directly in the improvement of their neighborhoods. In doing this, he created a sense of civic pride among the city’s 8 million residents, making the streets of Bogotá in this strife-torn country safer than those in Washington, D.C.

In espousing this new urban philosophy, Peñalosa is not alone. Jaime Lerner, when he was mayor of Curitiba, Brazil, pioneered the design and adoption of an alternative transportation system that is inexpensive and commuter-friendly. Since 1974 Curitiba’s transportation system has been totally restructured. Although 60 percent of the people own cars, busing, biking, and walking account for 80 percent of all trips in the city.

When 95 percent of a city’s workers depend on cars for commuting, as in Atlanta, Georgia, the city is in trouble. By contrast, in Amsterdam 35 percent of all residents bike or walk to work, while one fourth use public transit and 40 percent drive. In Paris, fewer than half of commuters rely on cars, and even this share is shrinking thanks to the efforts of Mayor Bertrand Delanoë. Even though these European cities are older, often with narrow streets, they have far less congestion than Atlanta.”

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Contrast this with the Public Health Committee’s April report to the NZ Minister of Health, Healthy Places, Healthy Lives: Urban environments and wellbeing, which highlights the range of negatives caused by urban planning in NZ, particularly with reference to health impacts. It urges alternatives to create a healthy urban environment:

If designed appropriately, urban form and transport can increase physical activity, improve air quality, reduce road traffic injuries, increase social cohesion, and achieve maximum health benefits from services and facilities. Urban form can also help create a sense of place. This is important for the health and wellbeing of all populations living in urban areas, especially Maori.

You can access the full report here.