Makes sense unless there are other questions beside growth rates and per capita income we might like to ask?

Bach, boat and BMW? Can anyone say out of touch?

Moreover, I would need some evidence that faster economic growth would result in a more equitable society rather than making the rich richer and poor more marginalised before I accept it as a Holy Grail.

The economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the environment. The articles I heard and read today seemed to accept economic growth as a good in and of itself without talking about anything mediating it, or even talking about the goal of growth and whether that goal could be achieved another way.

I found the tone of these articles totally bizzar. There is so little talk of ‘enough’ or being ‘content’ nowadays. Surely the last thing we need is an attacks on some residual of ‘enough’ in the kiwi mentality and branding that as the thing holding us back.

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11 November Dr John Peet formerly Department of Chemical and Process Engineering, Canterbury.
Talking past each other – the physics and economics of climate change

13 November Dr Geoff Bertram Institute of Policy Studies, VUW
How not to design an Emissions Trading Scheme: Lessons from New Zealand

18 November Launch of Climate Change 101 a book by Dr Andy Reisinger

18 November Dr Andy Reisinger  NZ Climate Change Research Institute, VUW
Targets versus reality

25 November Ambassador Dr Beat Nobs Embassy of Switzerland
Prospects for Copenhagen

2 December Judy Lawrence NZ Climate Change Research Institute, VUW
New Zealand emission reductions and global agreements:
Lessons from the last 20 years

9 December Dr Morgan Williams former Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment
The relationship between climate change and other global sustainability issues

16 December Dr David Eng Philosophy Programme, VUW
Allocating the burdens of dealing with climate change

18 December Peter Wilson Vector Ltd
The case for an independent advisory committee on climate change

22 December Panel discussion: the outcome and implications of COP 15
Chair: Professor Jonathan Boston Institute of Policy Studies, VUW
Panel members: • Associate Professor Ralph Chapman School of Geography,
Environment and Earth Sciences VUW • Professor Martin Manning NZ Climate
Change Research Institute, VUW • Peter Neilsen, NZ Business Council for Sustainable
Development •Dr Beat Nobs Embassy of Switzerland • Phil O’Reilly, Business NZ
• Professor Ralph Sims Massey University• Cath Wallace School of Government, VUW

For further information visit www.ips.ac.nz/events or download the flyer copenhagen-ver7

I have put together a podcast of the forum. Each speaker has been cut down to 10 minutes so the entire forum is here for your listening pleasure in only 1 hour. If that isn’t enough for you the entire forum has been video taped. Copies have been sent to each ministry unit so you can put off the next 5 films you were going to hire and rush off to watch Te Kotahitanga 2009

Click the link below to listen to the presentation online, or right click ‘save link as’ to download to your computer

te-kotahitanga-2009

Community gardening on church lawn space also helps build community resilience – preparing for upcoming challenges from a decline in cheap oil. In a small way it also begins to address one of my great sadness-es with our social services. Don’t get me wrong here. I love our social services. The more I have got to know the hearts of the people involved in running the Anglican Care and Anglican Action programmes the more impressed I have become. What makes me sad is that our professional social services (and they do have to be professional) must increasingly fill a gap that would once have been sorted out simply by a functioning healthy community. At one time if someone was hungry, lonely, struggling, needed budget advice, an advocate, or short term support, the community would rally around and support them. Not in every case at all times in any way needed, but certainly a lot more than now. We need our social services, and I am glad we are in a country with official safety nets, but making intentional steps towards re-energising healthy, resilient local communities may reduce some of their work load. Social services don’t let the rest of us off the hook. Community gardens in a myriad of forms, stretching through the back sections of suburbia, is a step in this direction.

However, there are church grounds gardens and church grounds gardens. If you dig over the church lawn, plant it out, then invite the community to come and take part, that is not really a community garden. It’s a church garden using the same attractional model we apply to our services. If we go and talk the community, our neighbours, local groups, the local Transition Town people and others already engaged in our communities, discuss our needs, offer the land, and dig the lawn over with the community, that’s a community garden. Both of these models are happening in various parts of the country at the moment. Both are better than lawn – but one is better than the other.

Justice isn’t about giving someone a fish, or teaching them to fish. But about asking who ownes the pond? Who makes the decisions? Who has the power?

1. We admit we are powerless over consumerism—that our lives have become unmanageable.
2. We believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
3. We make a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God. (we do not assume we have already done this because we are in a church or faith community, but come to this conviction afresh, over this specific issue)
4. We will make a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
5. Admit to God, to ourselves, and to another human beings the exact nature of our addictions.
6. We are entirely ready to have God remove the hold this power has over us.
7. We humbly accept God’s grace in overcoming our shortcomings.
8. We will make a list of all persons we have harmed – such as sweatshop workers, slaves, and those marginalised by our buy-in to a system that absolves us from social responsibility by shifting responsibility onto a welfare state – and became willing to make amends to them all.
9. We will attempt to make direct amends to such people wherever possible.
10. We will continue to take personal inventory and when we are wrong promptly admit it.
11. We will seek through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God, praying for knowledge of God’s will for us and the power to carry that out.
12. Having had a spiritual awakening, we will try to carry this message to our communities, and to practice these principles in all our affairs.

As well as the obvious change from the original, all the ‘I” statements have been changed to ‘we’ statements recognising that the need for a community, group, or church to move together.

Adapted by Jolyon White – confessed recovering consumer, trying to stay on the wagon.

By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 27, 2009

Every once in a while I feel despair over the fate of the planet. If you’ve been following climate science, you know what I mean: the sense that we’re hurtling toward catastrophe but nobody wants to hear about it or do anything to avert it. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)

Paul Krugman
And here’s the thing: I’m not engaging in hyperbole. These days, dire warnings aren’t the delusional raving of cranks. They’re what come out of the most widely respected climate models, devised by the leading researchers. The prognosis for the planet has gotten much, much worse in just the last few years.
What’s driving this new pessimism? Partly it’s the fact that some predicted changes, like a decline in Arctic Sea ice, are happening much faster than expected. Partly it’s growing evidence that feedback loops amplifying the effects of man-made greenhouse gas emissions are stronger than previously realized. For example, it has long been understood that global warming will cause the tundra to thaw, releasing carbon dioxide, which will cause even more warming, but new research shows far more carbon locked in the permafrost than previously thought, which means a much bigger feedback effect.

The result of all this is that climate scientists have, en masse, become Cassandras — gifted with the ability to prophesy future disasters, but cursed with the inability to get anyone to believe them.
And we’re not just talking about disasters in the distant future, either. The really big rise in global temperature probably won’t take place until the second half of this century, but there will be plenty of damage long before then.

For example, one 2007 paper in the journal Science is titled “Model Projections of an Imminent Transition to a More Arid Climate in Southwestern North America” — yes, “imminent” — and reports “a broad consensus among climate models” that a permanent drought, bringing Dust Bowl-type conditions, “will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.”
So if you live in, say, Los Angeles, and liked those pictures of red skies and choking dust in Sydney, Australia, last week, no need to travel. They’ll be coming your way in the not-too-distant future.

Now, at this point I have to make the obligatory disclaimer that no individual weather event can be attributed to global warming. The point, however, is that climate change will make events like that Australian dust storm much more common.

In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. But it manifestly isn’t. Why not? Part of the answer is that it’s hard to keep peoples’ attention focused. Weather fluctuates — New Yorkers may recall the heat wave that pushed the thermometer above 90 in April — and even at a global level, this is enough to cause substantial year-to-year wobbles in average temperature. As a result, any year with record heat is normally followed by a number of cooler years: According to Britain’s Met Office, 1998 was the hottest year so far, although NASA — which arguably has better data — says it was 2005. And it’s all too easy to reach the false conclusion that the danger is past.
But the larger reason we’re ignoring climate change is that Al Gore was right: This truth is just too inconvenient. Responding to climate change with the vigor that the threat deserves would not, contrary to legend, be devastating for the economy as a whole. But it would shuffle the economic deck, hurting some powerful vested interests even as it created new economic opportunities. And the industries of the past have armies of lobbyists in place right now; the industries of the future don’t.
Nor is it just a matter of vested interests. It’s also a matter of vested ideas. For three decades the dominant political ideology in America has extolled private enterprise and denigrated government, but climate change is a problem that can only be addressed through government action. And rather than concede the limits of their philosophy, many on the right have chosen to deny that the problem exists.

So here we are, with the greatest challenge facing mankind on the back burner, at best, as a policy issue. I’m not, by the way, saying that the Obama administration was wrong to push health care first. It was necessary to show voters a tangible achievement before next November. But climate change legislation had better be next.

And as I pointed out in my last column, we can afford to do this. Even as climate modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the threat is worse than we realized, economic modelers have been reaching consensus on the view that the costs of emission control are lower than many feared.
So the time for action is now. O.K., strictly speaking it’s long past. But better late than never.

It seems to me that both are required. Big corporations would not do what they do if it were not profitable, and it is profitable because we buy the end product. Individual action may not change a system that creates a situation in which individual action is required. But the people who are concerned enough to act and change their own lives become conscientised and empowered. They are more likely to be those who engage at a political level to change what is unjust. There is also a question of credibility. To cry out for systems to more fair while living in a way that exploits your global neighbour doesn’t have a lot of integrity and is unlikely to attract followers. To try to draw a line between individual action and systemic change is unhelpful.

Perhaps a better way to reflect on what is required is that of community change. We are not called to act individually to make society better; or to individually act for political change. Becoming a christian is about inclusion into a community, about a new way of life. To be in Christ, to be one body, to be in and not of… however you want to word it being a christian isn’t about individually believing a set of statements about God, it is about being caught up into God and becoming a part of a community. It isn’t easy to know how to function and live and decide and act as a called and gathered community in the midst of a fractured and compartmentalised culture. And a lot of the time I’m not even sure I want to. But it seems a more helpful direction to struggle in than trying to decide between individual or political action. To live a different and peculiar life with a community of people is far easier and more sustainable than trying to do it alone, and there is little that is more political than a large community of people that insist on living out a radically different story than the one they are surrounded by.

Read the rest of this timely article from Orion Magazine: http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/4801/

I think this article missed some critical links, but it is well worth thinking about. Do you agree? Anything that needs adding?