Recently in Environment Category

The facts of climate change have entered the public consciousness to an unprecedented degree over the past couple of years. But to date there hasn't been a strong, coherent campaign around which masses could organise. Effective campaigns need clear targets and, ideally, clear deadlines.

I'm hoping that that is what the recently announced 100 Months can offer. Introduced by Andrew Simms, writing in the Guardian, the campaign is based on the idea that 100 months is a very good bet for how long we have until the cascade effects of climate change take us past the final tipping point.

It suggests a series of integrated policies, promises monthly actions for its supporters, and hints that a powerful, deadline-driven coalition may yet emerge. We can only hope (and click, act, lobby, and all the rest).

I may well have mentioned this here before, but living in the US I was frequently surprised by the number of people who, when hearing I was from europe confided in me their desire for the US to have good public transport. I wasn't just surprised because as a Brit I'd been trained to think of our public transport system as very poor (it looks a lot better to me now than it used to), but also because I kept wondering how something so many people wanted could still seem so far off.

There's a lot of ways to approach that question that I'm not going to go into here; deep discussions to be had about the nature of contemporary political discourse. But that recurring conversation kept coming back to me as I read Do Good Lives Have to Cost the Earth?.

Though the book's various authors touch on dark themes, and the potential for environmental and/or economic collapse is very real, it maintained the sense that those steps we can take to be more conscientious might also take us closer to the planet we would like to live in. In that, it reminds me quite a bit of Generous (on which more, later).

The book has its weaknesses. For the most part it's a volume for people who have access to the resources to make significant changes (whether simple or radical) in their lives, and a safety net to fall back on. But for those of us who are in that boat, it's a good and helpful read.

Saturday saw us out in the rain for the National Climate March. Given the appalling weather and the minimal level of publicity the turn out of 7,000 or so was respectable, and the rain didn't seem to prevent people from turning out in plenty of costumes and high spirits. It's probably too optimistic to think that the march had anything to do with this announcement, but it's still good to hear it so soon afterwards.

I spent most of the time taking photos, but between the grey skies and my fear of getting too much water in my camera, the results are rather lacklustre. There are still a few shots I'm pleased with, and I think they capture something of the event. You can find them over on flickr.

Back in the UK for a few meetings and some flat hunting, I've been experiencing first hand the way that Fair Trade has become a mass consumer movement over here in the few years since I left. As a long-time supporter of fair trade it's gratifying to see such a plethora of products readily accessible, but a discussion at my parents' church this weekend also got me thinking about the trade-offs involved in such a movement going mainstream.

Several years ago, your average fair trade coffee drinker was a committed activist relatively well-versed in the outline of global finance and reading stories about (or even visiting) the producers of the coffee in their mug. That was a fundamental component of the fair trade approach. Since the industrial revolution we have become increasingly detached from the food (and other) systems that bring us what we need to survive, and since World War II (as globalisation of such consumption has really taken hold) few of us have had any real connection with those systems. Fair trade didn't do much to re-localise those systems, but it did try and foster understanding of and involvement in them.

Once the fair trade label becomes a commodity, those relationships once again begin to break down. There is still a core—quite possibly a significantly larger one#8212;of supporters who will seek to be engaged in the systems of production that fair trade works through, but there is a much larger grouping that are simply making an isolated consumer decision. It's arguably a better consumer decision as the money is more equitably distributed, and it may model better practice for businesses that support a sustainable standard of living, but it still doesn't address the core problem that in a globalised society we need new ways of connecting production and consumption.

This issue is, to my mind, more fundamental than the political change that also needs to follow from fair trade if it is to have any serious impact. Political change can begin to undo the injustice that is currently sewn into the fabric of global trade, and perhaps to address the significant distortions and inefficiencies introduced when IMF advice to developing countries not only pushed them towards an unsustainable emphasis on cash crops, but also to a reliance on the same cash crop (compare the collapse in the price of coffee with the timeframe in which such advice was given to see how disastrous such intervention was). Political change can begin to redress the balance, but building a more sustainable approach cannot occur purely on a political level.

Financial markets can, at their best, do a decent job of representing a certain monetary value placed on goods and services, but their models are rife with externalities, concerns which are not accounted for in the price. Whether that be the carbon or other environmental impact of the production process, the human conditions of the workers, or the social impact of that particular mode of production. We can begin to address that with carbon taxes, clearer labelling, and other structures but none of them will be sufficient, and at some point consumers run out of time to examine every label of every product.

To resolve the situation we need a combination of methodologies: new rules for global trade are vital, at the very least to level the playing field, but also to provide protection for nascent or fragile economies; clearer information for consumers to enable us to at least have a rough idea of what the implications of our purchases are; taxes which take into account not just capital flows but also resource usage. Most vital is real engagement in the systems of production and consumption of which we are a part.

I'm hesitant to make a full throated call for entirely local economies. When a true price is derived, with all the social and environmental factors included, locally produced food is often the most responsible choice, but we also have a responsibility to producers in other countries who are dependent on the west for markets. Besides, there is nothing wrong with wanting to enjoy the products of those cultures if we do so in moderation and are striving to find technologies that will make shipping them much less of an environmental misstep.

For a few years I've been trying to weigh up whether I want to place more emphasis in my thinking on farmers' markets or on fair trade. I'm not going to abandon fair trade, but as time goes on I'm realising that the human connection of farmers' markets is probably a much more powerful long-term investment than the ability to pick a label marked 'fair trade.' If we get the local connections right, perhaps that will show us how to make the global ones a bit better?

Tags: Fair Trade

With concerns over global warming finally having reached a critical mass in 2006, this year has seen a deluge of blog posts on the subject. A couple of interesting contributions this week have come from "Lunch Over IP", such as this piece covering a speech on urban design by Sir Norman Foster, and a follow-up to last week's announcements by Tescos and Marks and Spencers: the "emission labels" and other carbon footprint news.

In the latter, Bruno Giussani raises one of the most significant questions facing those working on poverty reduction in a climate change challenged world:

reducing food miles poses a big ethical and political dilemma: the case for lowering trade barriers with developing countries so that their products can more easily get into northern developed markets is a strong one. Climate change and the rise in CO2 levels completely re-opens it. As Terry Leahy, the CEO of Tesco, poses it: "should we shun fair trade horticulture from East Africa to save CO2, or champion it as an important contribution to alleviating poverty?"

While the concept of 'lowering trade barriers' has far too many connotations to be simply supported or opposed, whatever your take on trade regulations this is an issue that needs to be addressed.

Perhaps a good starting point would be for wealthy countries to begin to repair the damage we've done by encouraging/forcing developing world farmers to focus on cash crop production over self-sufficiency? If we in affluent communities want to enjoy locally grown food, we need to own up to our own mistakes in using Structural Adjustment and related mechanisms to strip the developing world of that option.

The details will be difficult to work out, but we should look beyond the useful stepping-stone of fair trade, and begin to do more to support farmers and governments who want to return to economic models that feed their people first, and export surplus second.

Tags: structural adjustment, cash crops, climate change, global warming

Being the concerned citizens that we are, we've been trying to work out how much of our travelling next summer can be completed by public transport.

Good sources of train information are hard to come by, so I was very pleased to discover Seat 61, an impressive resource with details of train and ship travel for more than eighty countries. Well worth a look if you're trying to plan some travel without the carbon cost of airfare.

(via Andrew Turner)

Tags: train travel, seat 61

This weekend saw me making my first proper foray into Canada, having previously not been further across the border than Windsor, Ontario, and that only for lunch after having my green card approved. This time we headed to Cameron, Ontario on the far side of Toronto for Culture Is Not Optional's Practicing Resurrection conference.

The conference seemed to go extremely well and was a great time away with friends and meeting new people. It took place on a farm owned and operated by Brian Walsh, Sylvia Keesmaat and Henry and Sarah Bakker. Their experiment in sustainable farming provided a great location that was also appropriate for the conference which, whether purposefully or not, ended up adopting an agrarian theme.

That theme was largely implicit as talks focussed on design, fashion, food, fair trade, place, and more, but emerged consistently as discussion raised questions about how to maintain awareness of our impact on and interconnectedness with others as we go about our daily lives. Much of that came back to maintaining a commitment to a physical space, not only through the now familiar refrain of purchasing locally but also through a commitment to understanding your place's history and nature.

That discussion became (al)most heated after the second keynote address by Norman Wirzba. Whilst I'm assured that Wirzba is most definitely not anti-city or anti-technology, it was possible to hear his keynotes as such, and that revealed a tension that runs right through the 'sustainability movement' between agrarianism and urbanism.

As most attendees seemed to agree, true rural and urban settlements are usually complementary and it is the sub- and ex-urban spaces that tend to have an abrasive effect on their surroundings, but coming to an understanding of what it means to appreciate the beauty of urban spaces and commit to environments that are so often transient is difficult, and hopefully future events will be able to address that more directly. With Wendell Berry being so frequently quoted, I found myself wishing for a similarly wise and articulate writer to speak into the conversation from an urban life.

The key question I was left with was what it means to commit to place in the context of an innately displaced lifestyle, such as that of a transatlantic marriage. While ideals of young people returning to their place of origin after studying are noble, I'm not sure I'm willing to accept that they're the only way or even necessarily more good than alternatives. Even if they were, it's too late for us! We will always have one eye on another place, and I wonder what, given that, commitment to the one place means.

Tags: culture is not optional, practicing resurrection, cameron, ontario, norman wirzba, agrarianism, urbanism, wendell berry

When I was looking for options to offset our airmiles I noted and commented on a significant difference between the carbon production estimates, and the cost to offset it, from NativeEnergy and Carbonfund.org.

I remarked on this in the comments box when placing my order with NativeEnergy and today received the following response from Lauren Aldrich at NativeEnergy, which she has said I'm welcome to post here:

Thank you for asking about the CO2 emissions and price discrepancies between NativeEnergy and Carbonfund. It's important to us that our customers understand why these differences exist, because there are good reasons.

Regarding CO2 emissions from air travel: Carbonfund assumes a conservative emissions scenario, using a rate of 0.6393 lbs of CO2 per passenger mile. This industry-accepted rate describes the emissions caused by 'short haul' flights - flights up to 281 miles long - that are energy intensive because of the amount of altitude gained compared to the cross-country distance. NativeEnergy allows customers to place their flight mileage into the 'short haul', 'medium haul', or 'long haul' categories. It seems that you placed your miles in the 'long haul' category - for flights greater than 994 mi long - and our calculator applied the correct emissions factor of 0.3903 lbs of CO2 per passenger mile. Long distance travel is less energy intensive per mile than short haul travel. This explains why your NativeEnergy travel footprint was almost half of what Carbonfund calculated. (Note also that Carbonfund footprints are given in metric tons, while NativeEnergy uses short tons. 1 metric ton = 1.1023 short tons).

Regarding the price difference: Carbonfund buys low-cost offsets from existing renewable energy projects and from the Chicago Climate Exchange, a carbon trading super-market. On occasion we purchase offsets from existing projects, and offer them at rates comparable to and often lower than Carbonfund. In the normal course, however, we choose what we and our customers believe are much higher value offsets, for which we pay a much higher price, and so must charge a higher price. So when you buy offsets from NativeEnergy, you do pay more, but you also get more — instead of just subsidizing existing projects owned and operated by large corporations, you get to help a Native American tribe or a family farm to build a truly new renewable energy project, creating environmental benefits while helping build sustainable economies in communities in need. We are proud that our customers value the difference.

I hope I have answered your questions sufficiently, and again, thanks for asking.

Tags: environment | carbon offset | carbon offsetting | carbonfund | nativeenergy