What does green mean?

This is funny, not least because it shows how sensible the guy is:

When he was preparing for them (debates) during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, “I don’t consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, ‘You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.’ So when Brian Williams is asking me about what’s a personal thing that you’ve done [that’s green], and I say, you know, ‘Well, I planted a bunch of trees.’ And he says, ‘I’m talking about personal.’ What I’m thinking in my head is, ‘Well, the truth is, Brian, we can’t solve global warming because I f—ing changed light bulbs in my house. It’s because of something collective’.”

via.

This also brings up a great point about the costs associated with going more sustainable: mainly, that they are huge and we’ve got to get creative. I won’t even get into the weeds about the car-buying precipice upon which Mrs. Green and I have recently perched. Suffice it to say that while the options for hybrid, diesel, mpg and room (sedans only) are truly pathetic, fortunately they are also all ridiculously expensive.

So think about doing something to your house, like installing solar panels, or even roofing it with nano-solar material. You might as well double-plate your house in copper. But as others point out, there’s always room outside of the box.

it’s worth checking out what the city of Berkeley’s doing: As the mayor’s former chief of staff, Cisco DeVries, explains over at Grist, the Berkeley FIRST initiative, which gets underway next week, will let property owners install solar systems without paying the hefty upfront cost—instead, the city will issue a municipal bond to cover the installation, which is then paid back over 20 years via a new line item on the property owner’s tax bill. (If the property is sold, the tax is just transferred to the new buyer). The beauty of the thing is it’s entirely voluntary—no taxes, no mandates; it’s just that, if you do want solar power, it’s easier to finance. If Berkeley’s scheme ends up being popular, I’ll be curious to see if the private sector starts cobbling together similar offers.

I’m always thinking local, local, local in terms of our food and where it comes from. But switching our energy sources – directly using the sun for power in your house – will also be about scale, as the materials become commonplace, and public/private innovation on making the transition sufficiently affordable that it’s use can become widespread. A massive scale is necessary for all sustainability measures in concert – conservation, innovation, imagination. It’s only a paradox when we try to fit it into the way we have been doing everything.

I guess Time Magazine is the gorilla canary in our national coal mine. So they, of course, sit right on the curve and ask the question on this day before election, will green progress be stalled by the bad economy?

Let me be as clear about this is as possible, as clear as we all should be: Yes, if all green progress means is a new investment trend. The trend is over before it started, in effect, if it is one that must wait for proper allocation of capital and can be overtaken by events like a stock market crash or a credit crunch. Green, as it were, can and will be pushed to the backseat.

But because the long term condition underlying these events is the inherently unsustainable path on which they have been built, actions taken in the service of Green – that is, sustainability – must overturn this construct. Underlying factors of climate change, fossil fuel depletion and the resulting resource shortages are not going to be put on hold until we can deal with them. They are the events by which economies and societies are being overtaken. We’re just still choosing to see them through the prism of market factors and predictive indices. Green is a word that’s been made into a label, that some of us may think will, given sufficient time, be able to trickle down to and effect great change in the way we live.

We will have missed a great opportunity to change, not least by shunning the mother of invention, if we continue to think this.

It took a while, but finally I can post one of several upcoming installments of a recent interview with eminent systems ecology theorist and professor, Bernie Patten.

>

The new Flagpole column is out and up, depending of what kind of reading you do.

This was my starting point, but didn’t make it past the first draft:

If you’ve ever had any near-life experiences, you know that forever indelible is the sensation that there was something almost wrong about the very right thing that was happening. If it was beautiful, maybe it was the larger injustice in which the beauty swirled; if was horrifying, maybe it was the fact that others elsewhere in the world were carrying on, completely unbothered and oblivious. Whatever it was, this contradictory awareness, of the within and the without, added to the bite and by elevating the experience, keys us into one of the great dichotomies: destroying what we love.

The poetry of the cutting room floor.

The new Flagpole column is out and up, depending of what kind of reading you do.

This was my starting point, but didn’t make it past the first draft:

If you’ve ever had any near-life experiences, you know that forever indelible is the sensation that there was something almost wrong about the very right thing that was happening. If it was beautiful, maybe it was the larger injustice in which the beauty swirled; if was horrifying, maybe it was the fact that others elsewhere in the world were carrying on, completely unbothered and oblivious. Whatever it was, this contradictory awareness, of the within and the without, added to the bite and by elevating the experience, keys us into one of the great dichotomies: destroying what we love.

The poetry of the cutting room floor.

There are some forms of optimism that make pessimism redundant.

Oil companies engaging in a charm offensive ahead of announcements of record profits would be one of these; another would be the way we calculate, and revere, GDP even though we count some negatives and costs as positives for growth. Go figure.

The Environmental Protection Agency’s multi-billion dollar Superfund Clean-up Program of waste and toxic sites will take over 3 decades to complete, during which time the economic activity generated and expenditure for the clean-up will be added to the GDP. The initial economic activity used to generate the waste was added to the GDP, the ensuing clean-up will again add to the GDP. Thus, polluting the environment is seen as an economic benefit through the prism of GDP.

Information pollution is not a little connected to this problem. And yet power laws and fractal geometry tell us that non-local, indirect effects are the most common, most powerful, and most problematic for us. Understanding the dynamics of our economic networks, or any networks, is crucial to acting rationally within them. We consult and consort with bogus information (Consumer Price Index, anyone?) at our peril, but it’s not the case that it helps no one. Historical knowledge is a prerequisite to present understanding. Developing a true relationship to complexity, its costs and benefits, is fundamental to problem-solving in sutainable societies. To the extent that we want to become one, leveling with ourselves becomes more or less important.

Along the lines of James Fallows’ subversive panda, consider the (still) evolving love affair between money and feeling. How we spend/invest is tied to our general mental well-being, and realizing this is simply a part of becoming cognizant about the world. This extends to how we feel about the world and what we are doing to it. Theodore Roszak’s The Voice of the Earth concerns the state of the psychology needed to support our mental-eco-state:

What the modern cultural environment has required of us is an enormous extroversion of attention and energy for the purpose of reshaping the Earth into a global industrial economy. For two centuries we have been subordinating the planet and our deepest personal needs to that project. This great act of collective alienation, I have suggested, lies at the root of both the environmental crisis and individual neurosis. In some way, at some point, a change of direction, a therapeutic turning inward, had to take place within a culture as maniacally driven as ours has been by the need to achieve and conquer.

Many artists and writers have touched on this, from Adorno to Tarkovsky, who was very explicit about how there is in fact no freedom except internal freedom – it’s just that no one is interested in that kind. We’ve gotten ourselves to a place where we lavish a string of empty experiences on ourselves and call them riches; then find ourselves foraging in the most unlikely places for some meaning beyond these so-called riches. Most fools could see that these aren’t riches at all. Poverty is not about what you have or do not have, but about social status. The lack of civilizing elements to our daily life is poverty that cannot be overcome with a million shopping sprees. Civilize your mind, find solace in the power of knowledge to liberate your impulses from feeding among the merest desires to soaring among the highest and most noble. You might notice that these will conform not to buying and excess but, oddly, a kind of conservation that can save more than just the planet.