Posts Tagged ‘local action’
Restructuring the World Energy Economy
Posted in Movements, Opinion by Kate Archdeacon on May 10th, 2011
Source: EcoBuddhism
Image: Hepburn Wind via flickr CC
From Let No Man Say It Cannot Be Done by Lester Brown:
We need an economy for the twenty-first century, one that is in sync with the Earth and its natural support systems, not one that is destroying them. The fossil fuel-based, automobile-centered, throwaway economy that evolved in western industrial societies is no longer a viable model—not for the countries that shaped it or for those that are emulating them. In short, we need to build a new economy, one powered with carbon-free sources of energy—wind, solar, and geothermal—one that has a diversified transport system and that reuses and recycles everything. We can change course and move onto a path of sustainable progress, but it will take a massive mobilization—at wartime speed.
Whenever I begin to feel overwhelmed by the scale and urgency of the changes we need to make, I re-read the economic history of U.S. involvement in World War II because it is such an inspiring study in rapid mobilization. Initially, the United States resisted involvement in the war and responded only after it was directly attacked at Pearl Harbor. But respond it did. After an all-out commitment, the U.S. engagement helped turn the tide of war, leading the Allied Forces to victory within three-and-a-half years. In his State of the Union address on January 6, 1942, one month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced the country’s arms production goals. The United States, he said, was planning to produce 45,000 tanks, 60,000 planes, and several thousand ships. He added, “Let no man say it cannot be done.” No one had ever seen such huge arms production numbers. Public skepticism abounded. But Roosevelt and his colleagues realized that the world’s largest concentration of industrial power was in the U.S. automobile industry. Even during the Depression, the United States was producing 3 million or more cars a year.[...]
In her book No Ordinary Time, Doris Kearns Goodwin describes how various firms converted. A sparkplug factory switched to the production of machine guns. A manufacturer of stoves produced lifeboats. A merry-go-round factory made gun mounts; a toy company turned out compasses; a corset manufacturer produced grenade belts; and a pinball machine plant made armor-piercing shells.[...]
The point is that it did not take decades to restructure the U.S. industrial economy. It did not take years. It was done in a matter of months. If we could restructure the U.S. industrial economy in months, then we can restructure the world energy economy during this decade. With numerous U.S. automobile assembly lines currently idled, it would be a relatively simple matter to retool some of them to produce wind turbines, as the Ford Motor Company did in World War II with B-24 bombers, helping the world to quickly harness its vast wind energy resources. This would help the world see that the economy can be restructured quickly, profitably, and in a way that enhances global security. [...]
One of the questions I hear most frequently is, What can I do? People often expect me to suggest lifestyle changes, such as recycling newspapers or changing light bulbs. These are essential, but they are not nearly enough. Restructuring the global economy means becoming politically active, working for the needed changes, as the grassroots campaign against coal-fired power plants is doing. Saving civilization is not a spectator sport.
Inform yourself. Read about the issues. Pick an issue that’s meaningful to you, such as tax restructuring to create an honest market, phasing out coal-fired power plants, or developing a world class-recycling system in your community. Or join a group that is working to provide family planning services to the 215 million women who want to plan their families but lack the means to do so. You might want to organize a small group of like-minded individuals to work on an issue that is of mutual concern. You can begin by talking with others to help select an issue to work on. Once your group is informed and has a clearly defined goal, ask to meet with your elected representatives on the city council or the state or national legislature. Write or e-mail your elected representatives about the need to restructure taxes and eliminate fossil fuel subsidies. Remind them that leaving environmental costs off the books may offer a sense of prosperity in the short run, but it leads to collapse in the long run.[...]
Read the full article by Lester Brown on the EcoBuddhism site.
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Mandela Market Place: Urban Food And Community Initiative in Oakland
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on May 3rd, 2011
Source: Mandela Marketplace via this article on Sustainable Cities Collective
The WYSE Team delivers fresh food to the sales point at the local bottle shop.
Mandela Marketplace is a non-profit organization that works in partnership with local residents, family farmers, and community-based businesses to improve health, create wealth, and build assets through cooperative food enterprises in low income communities. Mandela Marketplace uses a community-driven economic framework to improve health, create wealth and build assets in low-income communities. The organization evolved since 2001, first as a project of the Environmental Justice Institute – Tides Center, until incorporating in 2005 as a stand-alone 501c3 organization. Mandela Marketplace innovates the assessment, development, and application of a community food system economy that strengthens community health, integrity and identity through economic opportunity and empowerment for inner-city Oakland residents and businesses, and local family farms.
Projects Include:
- Mandela Foods Cooperative: A worker- and community-owned retail grocery store and nutrition education center in West Oakland that addresses economic empowerment and community health. It offers fresh, affordable produce from local family farms, food preparation classes and healthy prepared foods, as well as profit sharing with the community through community-investment accounts.
- West Oakland Youth Standing Empowered (WYSE): An afterschool program with a mission to teach leadership skills to youth and young adults. WYSE’s goal to advocate for healthy communities focuses on the built environment and food security through projects like: Healthy Neighborhood Stores Alliance, Burbank Garden, and WYSE Streets.
- Healthy Neighborhood Stores Alliance (HNSA): An alliance between store owners, community members and Mandela MarketPlace that works to improve community physical and environmental health by not only improving the affordability and quality of produce in convenience stores, but also by improving the store environment and its relationship in the community.
- Family Farmers: Mandela Foods and Mandela MarketPlace have a strong commitment to local, under-resourced and minority producers. We have long-term working relationships with farmers who use sustainable farming practices from Bakersfield, Fresno, Dinuba, Watsonville, Salinas, Gilroy, Livingston and Modesto. Our Produce Distribution Center supports small, local farms by establishing a local, alternative distribution network that passes on wholesale prices to networks of neighborhood stores and other community based businesses.
- Senior Market Booths: Mandela Marketplace operates weekly fresh produce market booths at area Senior Centers and residential facilities. Seniors are able to purchase farm fresh produce and wholesome basic staples at affordable prices in a convenient, friendly, and helpful atmosphere.
- Burbank Garden East Oakland: Early in 2009 we met a man by the name of Bill Richie, who worked for the city of Oakland. He had been left in charge of the sprawling Burbank Garden. Bill offered WYSE the opportunity to revitalize the garden and reconnect the school and community to the garden. Our goal is to renovate the garden and grow pesticide-free produce there. We plan to organize the community around self-sustainability by growing food locally with their own resources and those available through Mandela MarketPlace.
- Building Blocks Collaborative: The Building Blocks Collaborative (BBC) is a partnership of multi-sector community organizations in Alameda County. We are developing a blueprint to improve community conditions in order to support the well-being of our children, starting from the earliest stages of life.
At the USSF2010, Mandela Marketplace’s Quinton Sankofa and James Berk of Mandela Foods Cooperative presented to a workshop hosted by Permaculture.coop called Pathways to Sustainable Self-Governance. Check out these videos to find out more.
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Employee Training Programs for Local Wind Power: Iowa
Posted in Movements by chareby on April 29th, 2011
Over the past three years, Iowa has led the nation in attracting wind energy manufacturers, in part because of its innovative worker training programs. Through collaboration with the wind energy industry, the state and its universities and community colleges, students are learning the skills needed to succeed in today’s wind industry. Clipper Windpower in Cedar Rapids and Acciona in West Branch are some of the companies that have benefited from these programs that give them access to skilled workers.
Tyler Glass, Pro E Designer at Clipper Windpower and a 2008 Kirkwood Community College graduate, is an example of Iowa’s homegrown training. “The transition from graduating at Kirkwood and coming to work for Clipper was pretty seamless. Within my first week at Clipper, I was able to jump into a project,” Glass said. The availability of a skilled work force and access to wind-industry education and training programs has enabled ACCIONA to build a talented pool of more than 120 employees at its plant in West Branch.
The Wind Energy and Turbine Technology Program at Iowa Lakes Community College is another example of Iowa’s focus on training the wind energy work force of tomorrow. Iowa Lakes’ program is one of only three programs in the nation to receive a Wind Turbine Service Technician Program Seal of Approval from the American Wind Energy Association.
The wind energy industry is just one of many industry sectors to benefit from Iowa’s unique work force training initiatives. The Iowa Department of Economic Development and the state’s network of community colleges have a variety of programs to help new and existing businesses train workers for the jobs of today and tomorrow. Iowa’s employee training programs have evolved from a business expansion incentive tool into a comprehensive, targeted human resource tool available to all Iowa businesses.
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Changing Habits: Making Energy Consumption Visible
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on April 14th, 2011
Source: guardian.co.uk
Image: nora* via flickr CC
From “Tidy St: Shining a light on community energy efficiency” by Flemmich Webb:
[In Tidy Street in Brighton, UK], residents who volunteered for a new energy-saving initiative have been given electricity meters so they can monitor their daily energy use, and identify which devices are using the most power, and when. For the past three weeks, they have been entering daily meter readings on tidystreet.org, to build up a picture of each household’s energy use. Once people started measuring – 17 of the street’s 52 households signed up straight away – local street artist Snub was commissioned to paint the street’s average energy use against the Brighton average in a graph on the road outside their homes.
“It’s a great way to do it,” says Paul Clark, a software developer who has lived on Tidy Street for 10 years. “It engages people – passers-by often ask what it’s all about – and for those of us that live here, it’s something to be proud of.” Open-source software designed specially for the project allows each household to compare their energy use not only with the Brighton average, but also with the national average or even that of other countries.
Involving the community was key to getting the project off the ground, says Jon Bird, the project co-ordinator and designer of the software. “I went along to the residents’ annual street party last year, and explained what we were trying to do; that it was voluntary and that no one was trying to impose anything on anyone,” he says. “Then it was a case of identifying the ‘champions’ in the street – those who were going to tell their neighbours about the project; those who were going to be doing the measuring in the individual households.”
Each household has chosen its own icon to mark the data points on the street and online graphs and residents’ input helps foster the sense they own the project. Ruth Goodall, 70, who has lived on Tidy Street for 30 years, says she wasn’t interested in her electricity use before the initiative but measuring it every day has inspired her to change her behaviour. “I always used to fill up my kettle to the top but having seen how much extra power that uses I’m careful to just boil what I need,” she says. Strikingly, over the three weeks the project has been running, the street’s average energy use has dropped by 15%, with some people cutting usage by as much as 30%. Much of this has been achieved by simple behavioural changes such as turning of lights and devices on standby. “Now the challenge is to see if those reductions can be maintained,” says Bird.
Phase two of the project is about to be launched, during which 10 households on Tidy Street will for the first time measure their gas usage over the next six months. “We are also looking at working with community groups based in the city, such as Brighton and Hove 10:10, to encourage other streets and organisations in the city, to start measuring their energy use,” says Bird, who has recently been approached by one school, keen to set up an electricity-use measuring project with its pupils.
Perhaps energy companies should take note. Next year sees the introduction of the “green deal”, a scheme whereby people can invest in energy efficiency improvements to their homes, community spaces and businesses at no upfront cost, instead paying through installments on their energy bills. Community engagement will be key to their ability to deliver the programme.
This article was posted by Flemmich Webb on the Guardian.
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Adelaide’s Urban Orchard: DVD
Posted in Models, Research by Kate Archdeacon on April 7th, 2011
Source: Friends of the Earth (Adelaide) via Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network
Tracing the history of food gathering and production on the Adelaide Plains, from the Kaurna Aboriginal nation to present day backyard gardens, An Urban Orchard is a celebration of growing and sharing good food.
In the inner southern suburbs of the city of Adelaide, South Australia, local residents meet to share the bounty of their backyards. Around the table of the ‘Urban Orchard’ produce exchange, people from diverse backgrounds share their knowledge of food production and preparation. While deceptively simple, the exchange is a rich opportunity for building community, reducing waste and powerful element in emerging local food systems, where the talk is more often of ‘food metres’ than ‘food miles’. Focusing on the emergence of homegrown fruit and vegetable exchanges, the film follows the journeys of local gardeners involved in the exchange and offers inspiration for other communities to build more just, sustainable and local food systems in their neighbourhoods.
Check out the Urban Orchard trailer here, and visit the Friends of the Earth’s website to purchase a copy. DVDs cost $15, plus $5 postage.
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OpenIDEO Challenge for Australia: Local Food
Posted in seeking by Kate Archdeacon on March 28th, 2011
Image: robstephaustralia via flickr CC
How might we better connect food production and consumption?
The Challenge asks design thinkers and people in the food sector to consider ways to improve and enhance the relationships and interactions between producers and consumers, rural and urban communities, growers and retailers. At the heart of this challenge lie issues of food security, global sustainability and local happiness.
Help us close the gap between rural food production and urban food consumption to create more sustainable, happy and healthy communities. OpenIDEO has partnered with the Queensland Government in Australia and the IDEAS Festival 2011 to create a closer connection between local food production and consumption that can make a dramatic impact on sustainability efforts.
Food, glorious food: a fundamental need yet how often do we take it for granted? We’ve come to expect the convenience of plucking the very best in fresh produce from our supermarket shelves or local markets all year round – but at what cost to our farmers, our environment and future generations?
The Challenge asks us to consider ways to improve and enhance the relationships and interactions between producers and consumers, rural and urban communities, growers and retailers, retailers and consumers. We’d like the community to consider issues such as energy use, transportation, biodiversity, food security, nutrition, obesity, the health of rural economies and the strength of inter-generational and intercultural knowledge sharing.
At the heart of this challenge lie issues of global sustainability and local happiness to improve life for rural and urban communities. We hope to cast a wide net for inspirations and concepts that will address the challenge in a holistic way. Think about new services, campaigns, policies, products, systems that could address these issues.
The concepts that we create together through this process will be as good or as bad as the community that gets involved. Please do share what we’re up to in your social networks and if you’re on Twitter you can use our hashtag #oi_localfood
For more information or to get involved, visit the challenge page at: http://openideo.com/open/localfood/inspiration/
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Temporary Occupations for Urban Renewal
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on March 25th, 2011
Renew Newcastle was founded to help solve the problem of Newcastle’s empty CBD. While the long term prospects for the redevelopment of Newcastle’s CBD are good, in the meantime many sites are boarded up, falling apart, vandalised or decaying because they are is no short term for use them and no one taking responsibility for them. Renew Newcastle has been established to find short and medium term uses for buildings in Newcastle’s CBD that are currently vacant, disused, or awaiting redevelopment.
Renew Newcastle aims to find artists, cultural projects and community groups to use and maintain these buildings until they become commercially viable or are redeveloped. Renew Newcastle is not set up to manage long term uses, own properties or permanently develop sites but to generate activity in buildings until that future long term activity happens.
Renew Newcastle has been set up to clean up these buildings and get the city active and used again.
Find out more about the project and the collaborators (snapshot below) on their website http://renewnewcastle.org/
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Lighter Quicker Cheaper: A Method For Localised Place-Making
Posted in Models, Tools by Kate Archdeacon on March 24th, 2011
Source: Project for Public Spaces (PPS)
Image: Carl MiKoy via flickr CC
From Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper: A Low-cost, High-Impact Approach on PPS:
As cities struggle to do more with less and people everywhere cry out for places of meaning and beauty, we have to find fast, creative, profitable ways to capitalize on local ingenuity and turn public spaces into treasured community places.
Interestingly, many of the best, most authentic and enduring destinations in a city, the places that keep locals and tourists coming back again and again and that anchor quality, local jobs, were born out of a series of incremental, locally-based improvements. One by one, these interventions built places that were more than the sum of their parts.
The time is right to rethink the way that we do development, using an approach called “Lighter, Quicker, Cheaper” (LQC). This approach is based on taking incremental steps, using low-cost experiments, and tapping into local talents (e.g. citizens, entrepreneurs, developers, and city staff). These smaller-scale projects are being implemented in a variety of environments, including on streets, squares, waterfronts, and even parking lots.
The Benefits of an LQC Approach
LQC projects quickly translate a community’s vision into reality and keep momentum moving. Ideas can be efficiently implemented, assessed, then tweaked and customized based upon a community’s response. Although a lighter, quicker, cheaper approach is not for every situation, it can be a creative, locally-powered alternative to capital-heavy, top-down planning. Lighter, quicker, cheaper projects:
- Transform underused spaces into exciting laboratories that citizens can start using right away and see evidence that change can happen.
- Represent an “action planning process” that builds a shared understanding of a place that goes far beyond the short term changes that are made.
- Leverage local partnerships that have greater involvement by a community and results in more authentic places.
- Encourage an iterative approach and an opportunity to experiment, assess, and evolve a community’s vision before launching into major construction and a long term process.
- Employ a place-by-place strategy that, over time, can transform an entire city. With community buy-in, the LQC approach can be implemented across multiple scales to transform under-performing spaces throughout an entire city.
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Using Placemaking and a Lighter Quicker Cheaper Approach to Create the City of the Future
LQC offers the potential to create profound positive change in the future of cities around the world. By changing the way we think about development to include small scale, incremental changes, an immediate impact can be made on local economies, transportation, architecture and in how destinations are created.
[...]
Click through to read the rest of this excellent article from Project for Public Spaces. It goes on to explore (with real-world examples) Public Markets and Local Economies, Building Communities through Transportation, Creating Public Multi-Use Destinations, Toward An Architecture of Place. (An Australian example referred to in the article is Renew Newcastle.)
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Local Food Systems Put To The Test During QLD Floods
Posted in Models, Movements by Kate Archdeacon on March 18th, 2011
Source: Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network
Photo of Rocklea Markets by Marty 1989 via flickr CC
From “Where big food fails in the floods, Food Connect connects“ Emma-Kate Rose reports from Brisbane:
“The resilience of this local food system: being small, nimble, armed with local knowledge – really showed itself up through this event.”
As we all clean up after the floods, we’re also now hearing about the difficult times ahead – rising costs, rising expenditure, inflationary pressure, higher rates, etc. One of the major shortages ahead will be food. Not only have the farms been wiped out, but it’s going to take them years to re-establish crops and plantations. We’ve all heard about the problems at the Rocklea markets, but we haven’t heard about how food supplier, Food Connect, has been faring. Food Connect is a social business which aims as much as possible to put the face on farmers’ food, act as a facilitator between farmers and city folk, create drop off spots called City Cousins for city people to pick up fresh produce, get to know their farmer and get a connection with the land in their bioregion.
Mainstream suppliers go under but Food Connect keeps its head above the floodwaters
The Rocklea Markets were taken out during the floods, and they are the major distribution point in SEQ [South East Queensland]. Food Connect were also on tender [sic] hooks on the Thursday night because they couldn’t deliver on Thursday. But by Friday, the Produce Coordinators Reuben and Luke gave the thumbs up. They were worried because most of the farmers are located within the flood-prone areas… the farmers were ready to supply and they’d worked out alternative transport arrangements for some badly affected farmers. Food Connect went through unabated and actually ended up with excess produce and, in the process, also managed to supply 3,000 meals over the weekend and delivered ice to all the areas with no power. Over the course of the weekend, chefs and volunteers turned up to the warehouse, in non-flood affected Salisbury, to cook up all the excess produce. On the Friday many trucks turned up all through the night and it soon became clear that the humble Food Connect warehouse acted as THE transport hub, because Rocklea was completely under. Robert Pekin, the founder of Food Connect, found that living without power at his home in West End was losing its attraction, so he, his family and a few staff took refuge at the warehouse to receive goods for many small businesses and restaurants who’d heard about them and used them as an interim pick up spot. During the floods, Gympie’s supermarket shelves were empty but the little guys had plenty of stock. It surprised even Robert, and he’s been on about a local food system for 15 years now. He thought, “Here we go, this is the test”. Pretty much all of SEQ was wiped out and Food Connect has about 120 farmers in that area. Astonishingly, only five farmers required help and working bees were organised to help them out with mending fences and other clean up jobs. This shows the strength of local family farms having a direct network to their consumers and the advantages in by-passing the major supermarkets. The sheer power of the major logistics chains, owned by the big supermarkets, clearly didn’t cut it in times of emergency.
Not Far From The Tree: Urban Orchard Network
Posted in Models by Kate Archdeacon on March 9th, 2011
© Not Far From The Tree
Not Far From The Tree puts Toronto’s fruit to good use by picking and sharing the bounty.
When a homeowner can’t keep up with the abundant harvest produced by their tree, they let us know and we mobilize our volunteers to pick the bounty. The harvest is split three ways: 1/3 is offered to the tree owner, 1/3 is shared among the volunteers, and 1/3 is delivered by bicycle to be donated to food banks, shelters, and community kitchens in the neighbourhood so that we’re putting this existing source of fresh fruit to good use. It’s a win-win-win situation! This simple act has profound impact. With an incredible crew of volunteers, we’re making good use of healthy food, addressing climate change with hands-on community action, and building community by sharing the urban abundance.
With our first full season in 2008, Not Far From The Tree has grown quickly:
- We transport all of our equipment and fruit by bicycle, keeping our carbon footprint low.
- We were an official part of Nuit Blanche with our all-night cider-pressing art installation, City Cider.
- We participated in 40+ fairs, festivals, and community events across the city this year.
- We ran 12 preserving workshops to extend the harvest year-round and share local food skills.
- We harvest maple syrup from city trees, too, to demonstrate a local winter crop from Toronto trees (see Syrup in the City)
- We will be starting a public fruit tree mapping initiative to be launched in 2011.
- We helped Toronto’s first community orchard become established.
Visit the website to find out more about this very active project http://www.notfarfromthetree.org/
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