Last weekend, the world stood tall. What I saw on
the streets of Australian cities, in pictures from New York and from
around the world, was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in its
scale, unity and beauty.
This past week, over 125 world leaders met at the UN for the big
climate summit. The headline was that more leaders than ever had
gathered to talk about this particular issue - but here is what I think
is just as important:
When those heads of state walked into the UN, they had the
sounds of the largest climate mobilisation in world history still
ringing in their ears.
A huge number of our allies were still
in the streets in New York, laying out a strong vision for a transition
away from fossil fuels, bringing the fight to polluters, and identifying
solutions that are already in progress. The politicians themselves
spoke to our power in the opening statements of the summit.
World leaders gathered in New York City didn’t plan to sign a new
agreement this week. The next important UN gatherings will be in Lima in
December 2014 and in Paris in December 2015.
Our hope is to use
people-power to ratchet up the pressure on these talks, to channel the
voices of millions around the world to increase the accountability and
ambition of world leaders in these negotiations.
If they are serious at all about doing their democratic and
moral duty, they will need to be ambitious - committing to
transitioning from fossil fuels to clean energy which benefits everyone,
and quickly.
The struggle is not around these summits alone. We’ll have to keep
pressure on climate polluters and those who invest in them; we’ll have
to turn our communities into models for solutions; and we’ll have to
convince politicians that their careers are on the line if they don’t
act.
Our purpose in marching around the world last weekend was to
show that, without a doubt, there is a mandate to act at the level
science and justice demand. Our purpose was also to build the global
network of people needed to work together to do what we can do - at
home, with our investments, in our coummunity and internationally.
After
this weekend, we can look world leaders in the eye and insist that they
join us on the march towards action in the months and years ahead.
Thank you, so many times over. It’s an honour to fight alongside you.
Blair
P.S. Just this week, we got news that 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben won the "right livelihood award," which is known as the 'alternative Nobel Prize' - click here to watch a video from him thanking you all.
Community involvement in the environment is a people,
planet and place-enriching strategy that has gained currency in planning
and environmentalism circles in recent years, but how does one
translate popular theory into lasting change? Practically Popular
The mounting interest
in community involvement in the environment from think tanks,
universities and government is matched by enthusiasm from communities
themselves.
There are many organisations that are ‘just getting on with’ this
work, without legislative backing or strong political support. The community food enterprise sector, for example, though bolstered by funding schemes and political interest in recent years, was formed by an assortment of grassroots citizens’ initiatives.
From food- co-ops to distribution hubs to community farms, sustainable squats or urban guerrilla gardening,
it was small, practical organising and action amongst local communities
that brought ‘popular environmentalism’ to life in this instance. Even
in the face of obstructive policies ordinary people are not just calling
for change, they are creating it.
This kind of direct action is shifting practice amongst landowners,
too. For many public landowners, the pressure of austerity is cause for a
re-think about the best methods available to manage the spaces they
own.
Despite legislative
support for these difficulties, change often takes place outside of the
suggested framework, through new partnerships or ways of working. So it
was when Wycombe District Council leased its woodlands to the Chiltern Rangers,
a social enterprise that now manages the woods and runs educational,
training and rehabilitation programmes onsite.
Shifts in approach,
culture and practice can be highly effective tools for igniting local
environmental participation. Indeed, as previously argued on this blog,
the one-size-fits-all approach of national legislation may fail to take
into account, and could even inhibit, the diversity and creativity that
makes local environmental participation innovative, effective and
enjoyable.
Making It Last
This patchwork of shifting practice is becoming integrated into broader frameworks for change. Movements for ‘social enterprise’ and a ‘social economy’
have gained traction in recent years. Proponents are working to
construct political, financial and legislative conditions that can help
create ‘a UK economy that is better for society’.
Greater community access to, involvement in, and gains from land are often discussed as a part of this agenda,
which recognises the importance of the UK’s natural assets to its
people.
As with the Chiltern Rangers, social enterprises such as Hill Holt Wood-
making an annual turnover of £1.2m and running educational programmes,
sustainable design practice and hospitality services on their woodland
site - integrate conservation with fundamental societal needs: food,
fuel, jobs, knowledge and shelter.
This kind of deep integration of the
social with the environmental moves beyond traditional environmental
volunteerism and conservation based on enclosure, even highlighting a
pathway for the short-term creative interventions of ‘place-making’ to be cemented into long term change that builds with current local populations, rather than drawing in newcomers that transform areas in excluding ways.
Forging connections between communities and place through fundamental
needs can chain popular environmentalism to everyday life. The challenge
is for the social economy and place-making agendas to work beyond the
surface here, installing frameworks that create robust, lasting changes
for our society.
Common Barriers:
There are a host of barriers, however, to realising this dream. Most land- based projects remain informal.
Structures and processes to move forward are all too rare. For many
‘popular environmentalists, the lack of established protocols amongst
landowners - be they public, charitable or private - leads to broken
promises.
With staff changes, budget cuts, or in instances when land
management is fragmented across departments, even the best ideas for
community involvement in the environment can fall apart as individuals’
commitments fail to materialise. Consolidating frameworks is key.
A connected issue is that of ownership. Much interest in community environmental involvement, the Localism Agenda included, is focused on communities owning
the spaces they are to care for. These models may be useful in some
cases.
Yet land and environmental assets are often not suitable for sale
or transfer of ownership, and the added value that sharing management between an owner and the community can provide are rarely specified in green space management contracts.
Local authorities and the planning system, as well, play a pivotal
role in shaping the UK’s land situation. In local planning, land is
regarded simply as ancillary to buildings, protected for leisure or
biodiversity, designated as agricultural, or seen as ‘green
infrastructure’, often meaning a route for cycling or walking.
This
prevents the flexibility and mixture of activities that many
environment-focused community projects rely on, restricting the
diversity, and potential viability, of projects.
Lastly, as our research into the management of local authority owned woodlands
demonstrates, there is rarely good quality information on the land
local authorities own and its management is often fragmented across
departments. This results in a planning system that gives little
consideration to community use of land or productive shared management
arrangements.
It’s great to see excitement building around community involvement in
the environment, but we’ve a long way to go before the vision of
popular environmentalism is realised. Let’s get to work.
With barely any fanfare, an enormous transfer of land is currently
under way in Australia. The vast Cape York peninsula is the setting for a
steady, determined handover that is repairing a historical wrong.
Huge tracts of Cape York’s landscape are being returned to
traditional owners under a process that started in 1996. In the past
decade, the Queensland government has spent more than $50m on pastoral
land to return it to traditional owners.
At the latest tally, 2.2m hectares of land has been returned to
people who often had it forcibly ripped away from them. Traditional
owners were previously banished to work in towns or farms far from their
country.
The returned land includes about a million hectares of national park,
with Indigenous rangers bringing back ancient but largely ignored
techniques on how to control feral pests and weeds and protect
endangered species.
Just one group, the Olkola
people, is set to become the largest non-government landholder in the
region later this year, with the handover of five former pastoral slabs
of land in south-central Cape York totalling 800,000 hectares.
Part of the 800,000 hectares that is Olkola country.Photograph: Kerry Trapnell/Kerry Trapnell
Michael Ross, a traditional Olkola owner, says he is proud of how
Alwal has been tended since it was handed back. He’s now looking forward
to doing the same with the five new properties.
“There are historical and cultural values there,” he says. “We have
our burial grounds in there, you can see them from the air, placed in
circles. We want to get the cattle and feral pigs off there because they
are shifting the stones around.”
Dr Jeff Shellberg, a Griffith University academic, has been working
with the Olkola and the Kunjen, a neighbouring tribe, on land
management.
Shellberg says that once traditional owners are let back on the land,
the fire regime changes. Land managers burn patchworks of landscape
early in the fire season, to prevent huge bushfires that can destroy
habitat and threatened species.
“This will really benefit small mammals such as the sugar glider and
northern bettong, which are in huge decline in northern Australia,” he
says. “Traditional owners know a huge amount about the land and some of
that cultural knowledge is held quite tightly. They don’t want to give
it up.
“That’s fair enough really because after getting their land back
after forced removal, they don’t always want outsiders telling them what
to do.”
A creek in Olkola country. Michael Ross wants ecotourism on the land and other nature-based activities.Photograph: Kerry Trapnell/Kerry Trapnell
Ross could have pushed for a land use agreement that would allow
mushrooming development on the Olkola land, but he would rather it be
conserved.
“It’s on the backbone of the great dividing range where the east and
west waters come out,” he says, joining his fingers to form a pyramid.
“You can’t do much there. You’ve got a lot of cultural values there and
you’ve got Alwal himself there. That’s his home and he plays a major
part there as one of our totems.
“You’ve got to keep that backbone in place. Mining is coming close
but you have to leave it where it is. I really don’t want mining because
I know what it does to country.”
Instead, Ross is eyeing more incremental goals. He wants ecotourism
on the land and other nature-based activities. Crucially, the land
hand-backs also allow Indigenous people to return to their ancestral
home, to tend to the land and the rivers.
It’s a pattern being replicated across Cape York. Rather than seize
the chance to cash in via mining, traditional owners are focusing on
land management and species conservation.
It is, potentially, a whole new way of generating economic, as well
as cultural, rewards for Australia’s first people - rewards that aren’t
harmful to the environment or dependent upon a fluctuating commodity
price.
“I think we could offer tourists something different,” Ross says,
warming to his theme. “I mean, the cape changes all the time as you
travel it.”
Larissa Hale is also in search of a viable business for the area handed back to her people in 2006. Archers Point, a wedge of undulating hills, bluffs and coast 20km south of Cooktown, is Yuku Baja Muliku land.
Before the handover, Archers Point was a place “people came to get
lost in”, as Hale puts it. Squatters tried to blend in among the trees.
Some tried to build houses without planning permission. It took about
three years to clean up the rubbish they left.
Government funding has delivered about 12 Indigenous rangers, who have mapped the area. To their surprise they found Bennett’s tree kangaroos
and started eradicating weeds. Hale, who heads things up, wears a
number of hats - there’s an environmental education program for visiting
schools and a sea turtle hospital for injured animals.
Larissa Hale and some of the Indigenous rangers of Yuku Baja Muliku country.Photograph: James Norman/James Norman
Things have, generally speaking, improved. The land is in better
shape and the regular poaching sorties that picked off sea turtles and
led to ugly confrontations with traditional owners have dwindled.
“It’s been a learning process of bringing in the knowledge of the
older people who know this land and how to burn it [for fire
management],” Hale says.
“I’d talk to my aunties to ask how they’d do the traditional burns,
how to watch the wind patterns and see what’s flowering. If the
government had its way we’d burn 90% of it each year, but we want to
leave some of it to protect the wildlife.”
But not everything is perfect. Hale says she is unhappy because the
local council is ramming a new road through the edge of her people’s
land in order to access a quarry.
The area is rich in cultural significance for Hale’s people, yet the
road is going ahead regardless. We later visit the spot and can see a
strip of flattened trees, ready for the diggers.
“They said they had a walk around and couldn’t see anything
important,” Hale says. “I said ‘you wouldn’t even know what you’re
looking for, you’re a white man, not a traditional owner, you don’t know
the stories for this area.’”
The issue is a raw one for Hale. Her grandfather was removed from
Archers Point to work for a family when he was eight years old. Other
family members were sent to look after racehorses.
“Sometimes when we’re sitting by the fire my grandmother will open up
a little bit until she gets too emotional and then stops,” says Hale.
“It was pretty full on.
“We know families were buried here. I wasn’t meant to know that, as
it wasn’t women’s business. But a lot of families were massacred,
starved to death or moved. I’d love to bring the families back so they
could see this country again.”
Right now, there’s a struggle to get funding from state and federal
governments keen to cut back on such things. Ultimately, Hale wants, in
the politician’s vernacular, to stand on her own two feet, to run a
viable business. Balkanu, a non-profit organisation that facilitates
such things, may be able to help her get there.
Until then Hale has to deal with issues it’s hard to imagine that
non-Indigenous landowners in the southern states would have to grapple
with.
“The council complains that we are shutting up all the beaches and
that they want access for everyone, but we’ve said we want a camping
resort down there so it will be open,” she says.
“Hopefully someone can take my job so I can just be a ranger for a while. I’m sick of all the arguing.”
A bone of contention is the level of protection that the land tenure
provides to traditional owners. While Ross doesn’t want mining on Olkola
land, he admits that he can’t do much about the exploration licences
that are strewn across the properties his people are set to receive.
Paperbarks line a creek in Olkola country.Photograph: Kerry Trapnell/Kerry Trapnell
Andrew Cripps, as Queensland’s minister for natural resources and
mines, signs off on the indigenous land handovers. He has around 1.5
million hectares set to go through the lengthy process of identifying
land, legitimate owners and sale conditions.
“Once it is handed over there are opportunities that can be unlocked,
such as grazing and tourism,” Cripps says. “Where there’s a proposal
for resource projects, landholders have the right to be informed and
object. There are plenty of chances to object.”
Cripps says the process is going well and that he’s “personally very
satisfied” by further measures brought in by the Queensland government
that allow Indigenous people to apply for freehold land and own their
own home.
Further, sustained support is required from state and federal
governments if the land handovers are to fulfil their glittering
promise, according to groups who work with traditional owners.
The Working on Country
Indigenous ranger initiative may have survived the axe, but with $500
million removed from Indigenous programs in this year’s federal budget,
nervousness abounds.
“The return of land to traditional owners on Cape York is one of the
most progressive land tenure initiatives in the country,” says Andrew
Picone, northern Australia campaigner at the Australian Conservation
Foundation.
Sign of ownership.Photograph: James Norman/James Norman
“It rights a wrong from past injustices, delivers social and
economic outcomes, while ensuring cultural and environmental management
of the landscape.
“It is absolutely critical that the successes of the Working on
Country program are built on and not undermined by changes in funding
priorities and approaches.”
For Olkola traditional owner Ross, the land handovers are crucial,
but he’s reticent to dwell on the dispossession and trauma that requires
the ledger to be settled.
“Every now and then I drift back to the past with my young ones, to let them know that this can’t happen again,” he says.
“But we want to build this country up together. I don’t want to go
back on old times. My mum used to tell me ‘don’t worry about it, it
happened and we can’t fix it up’. It’s like a scar. You look down at it,
it’s there, but you move on.”
[T]he People of Scotland have an opportunity to extricate
themselves from the socio-psychopathic global corporatists and the
temple of outrageous and excessive abject materialism.
However, it is
not going to be an easy ride . . .
If Alex Salmond and the SNP [Scottish National Party] are serious
about keeping the Pound Stirling as the Currency of Scotland, there will
be no independence.
Likewise if Scotland embraces the Euro, Scotland
will rapidly become a vassel state of the Euro-Federalists, who will
asset strip the nation in the same way that, Greece, Ireland, Portugal
and Spain have been stripped of their entire national wealth and much of
their national identity.
To achieve true independence, Crane suggests the following, among other mandates:
Establish an independent Central Bank of Scotland.
Issue a new Scottish (Debt Free) Currency.
Settle any outstanding debt with new Scottish Currency.
Take Scotland out of the EU.
Take Scotland out of NATO.
Establish strict currency controls for the first 3 years of independence.
Nationalize the Scottish oil & gas industry.
Re-take control of the National Health Service.
Establish a State Employment Agency to provide work/training for all able-bodied residents.
Arguments against independence include that Scotland’s levels of
public spending, which are higher than in the rest of the UK, would be
difficult to sustain without raising taxes. But that assumes the
existing UK/EU investment regime.
If Scotland were to say, “We’re
starting a new round based on our own assets, via our own new bank,”
exciting things might be achieved. A publicly-owned bank with a mandate
to serve the interests of the Scottish people could help give the newly
independent country true economic sovereignty.
I wrote on that possibility in December 2012, after doing a
PowerPoint on it at the Royal Society of Arts in Edinburgh. That
presentation was followed by one by public sector consultant Ralph
Leishman, who made the proposal concrete with facts and figures.
He
suggested that the Scottish Investment Bank (SIB) be licensed as a
depository bank on the model of the state-owned Bank of North Dakota.
I’m reposting the bulk of that article here, in hopes of adding to the
current debate.
From Revolving Fund to Credit Machine: What Scotland Could Do with Its Own Bank
The SIB is a division of Scottish Enterprise (SE), a government body
that encourages economic development, enterprise, innovation and
investment in business. The SIB provides public sector funding through
the Scottish Loan Fund. As noted in a September 2011 government report
titled “Government Economic Strategy”:
[S]ecuring affordable finance remains a
considerable challenge and further action is needed to ensure that
viable businesses have access to the funding they require to grow and
support jobs. The recovery is being held back by limited private sector
investment - indeed, overall investment in the UK remains some 15% below
pre-recession levels. Evidence shows that while many large companies
have significant cash holdings or can access capital markets directly,
for most Small and Medium-sized companies bank lending remains the key
source of finance. Unblocking this is key to helping the recovery gain
traction.
The limitation of a public loan fund is that the money can be lent
only to one borrower at a time. Invested as capital in a bank, on the
other hand, public funds can be leveraged into nearly ten times that sum
in loans. Liquidity to cover the loans comes from deposits, which
remain in the bank, available for the use of the depositors.
As
observed by Kurt Von Mettenheim, et al., in a 2008 report titled
Government Banking: New Perspectives on Sustainable Development and
Social Inclusion from Europe and South America (Konrad Adenauer
Foundation), at page 196:
[I]n terms of public policy, government banks can do more
for less: Almost ten times more if one compares cash used as capital
reserves by banks to other policies that require budgetary outflows.
In 2012, according to Leishman, the SIB had investment funds of £23.2
million from the Scottish government. Rounding this to £25 million, a
public depository bank could have sufficient capital to back £250
million in loans.
For deposits to cover the loans, the Scottish
Government then had £125 million on deposit with private banks, earning
very little or no interest. Adding the revenues of just 14% of
Scotland’s local governments would provide another £125 million,
reaching the needed deposit total of £250 million.
The Model of the Bank of North Dakota
What the government could do with its own bank, following the model
of the Bank of North Dakota (BND), was summarized by Alf Young in a
followup article in the Scotsman.
He noted that North Dakota is currently the only U.S. state to own its
own depository bank.
The BND was founded in 1919 by Norwegian and other
immigrants, who were determined, through their Non-Partisan League, to
stop rapacious Wall Street money men foreclosing on their farms.
Young observed that all state revenues must be deposited with the BND
by law. The bank pays no bonuses, fees or commissions; does no
advertising; and maintains no branches beyond the main office in
Bismarck.
The bank offers cheap credit lines to state and local
government agencies. There are low-interest loans for designated project
finance. The BND underwrites municipal bonds, funds disaster relief and
supports student loans. It partners with local commercial banks to
increase lending across the state and pays competitive interest rates on
state deposits.
For the past ten years, it has been paying a dividend
to the state, with a quite small population of about 680,000, of some
$30 million (£18.7 million) a year.
Young wrote:
Intriguingly, North Dakota has not suffered the way much
of the rest of the US - indeed much of the western industrialised world -
has, from the banking crash and credit crunch of 2008; the subsequent
economic slump; and the sovereign debt crisis that has afflicted so
many. With an economy based on farming and oil, it has one of the lowest
unemployment rates in the US, a rising population and a state budget
surplus that is expected to hit $1.6bn by next July. By then North
Dakota’s legacy fund is forecast to have swollen to around $1.2bn.
With that kind of resilience, it’s little wonder that twenty American
states, some of them close to bankruptcy, are at various stages of
legislating to form their own state-owned banks on the North Dakota
model. There’s a long-standing tradition of such institutions elsewhere
too. Australia had a publicly-owned bank offering credit for
infrastructure as early as 1912. New Zealand had one operating in the
housing field in the 1930s. Up until 1974, the federal government in
Canada borrowed from the Bank of Canada, effectively interest-free.
. . . From our western perspective, we tend to forget that, globally,
around 40 per cent of banks are already publicly owned, many of them
concentrated in the BRIC economies, Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Banking is not just a market good or service. It is a vital part of
societal infrastructure, which properly belongs in the public sector.
By taking banking back, local governments could regain control of that
very large slice (up to 40 per cent) of every public budget that
currently goes to interest charged to finance investment programs
through the private sector.
Recent academic studies by von Mettenheim et al. and Andrianova et al. show
that countries with high degrees of government ownership of banking
have grown much faster in the last decade than countries where banking
is historically concentrated in the private sector. Government banks
are also LESS corrupt and, surprisingly, have been MORE profitable in
recent years than private banks.
Young wrote:
Given the massive price we have all paid for our
debt-fuelled crash, surely there is scope for a more fundamental
re-think about what we really want from our banks and what structures of
ownership are best suited to deliver on those aspirations? . . .
As we left Thursday’s seminar, I asked another member of the
audience, someone with more than thirty years’ experience as a corporate
financier, whether the concept of a publicly-owned bank has any chance
of getting off the ground here. “I’ve no doubt it will happen,” came the
surprise response. “When I look at the way our collective addiction to
debt has ballooned in my lifetime, I’d even say it’s inevitable”.
The Scots are full of surprises, and independence is in their blood. Recall the heroic battles of William Wallace and Robert the Bruce
memorialized by Hollywood in the Academy Award winning
movie Braveheart.
Perhaps the Scots will blaze a trail for economic
sovereignty in Europe, just as North Dakotans did in the U.S. A
publicly-owned bank could help Scotland take control of its own economic
destiny, by avoiding unnecessary debt to a private banking system that
has become a burden to the economy rather than a pillar in its support.
Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books, including the best-selling Web of Debt. In The Public Bank Solution, her latest book, she explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 200+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.
Want to get a city-wide ban on plastic bags going? Or stop aerial
spraying in your suburb?
Grass roots activism is challenging
governments and corporations. And it’s happening everywhere.
Grass roots
activism creates a strong sense of community and place, connectedness
and belonging, as well as a vibrant local economy and a healthy diverse
environment that’s sustainable.
One of the best examples of grassroots activism is the collaborative
economy, a global trend to make sharing something far more economically
significant than a primitive behaviour taught in preschool.
A confluence
of the economic crisis, environmental concerns, and the maturation of
the social web has created a new generation of businesses like Airbnb, which lets people rent out their spare rooms, or Uber and RelayRides,
which allows other people to rent your car. Other businesses allow the
sharing of items like clothes, couches, tools, meals, and even skills.
As The Economist tells
us, the Internet makes it cheaper and easier than ever to aggregate
supply and demand. Smartphones with maps and satellite positioning can
find a nearby room to rent or car to borrow. Online social networks and
recommendation systems help establish trust; internet payment systems
can handle the billing. All this lets millions of total strangers rent
things to each other.
“It is surely no coincidence that many peer-to-peer rental firms were
founded between 2008 and 2010, in the aftermath of the global financial
crisis. Some see sharing, with its mantra that ‘access trumps
ownership’, as a post-crisis antidote to materialism and
overconsumption. It may also have environmental benefits, by making more
efficient use of resources.”
CERES farm
In Australia, a number of new and green collaborative consumption web sites are springing up. One is GoGetCars.
Companies and individuals simply book a GoGet
car for as little as one hour over the Internet. They book it whenever
they need a car. These cars are located in “pods”, car parks or garages
in close proximity to the office. People swipe smart cards to access the
cars. Each car comes equipped with a sophisticated black-box style
system that monitors fuel consumption, duration of trip and kilometres
covered. The data is matched to the swipe card.
The pods are now located
in business and industrial areas. Business parks such as Australian
Technology Park in Sydney’s Redfern now host GoGet pods. The pods have
to be in walking distance of where people are located, otherwise,
they’re not going to use them.
It’s cheaper too. If you run a business, you pay $6.25 an hour and 40
cents a kilometre. Every month, you get an invoice. You don’t have to
pay for registration, insurance and service costs.
It’s much cheaper
than maintaining a company car which can cost the firm up to $20,000 a
year. And better still, the cars are only used when you need them.
GoGetCars has 20,000 members Australia-wide, and it’s growing.
An alternative is Drive My Car Rentals.
It’s simple: people basically make money by renting their car out when
they’re not using it. They register online for free, list their vehicle
for free, enter their car details, and calculate the rental return.
People looking for a car for a short while get in touch with you by
email or SMS and you decide whether to accept the deal or not. There’s a
similar sort of arrangement with Car Next Door.
Or take Landshare.
It’s a horticultural matchmaking service, connecting those who lack
access to land, with those who have land to share. Almost 70,000 people
have become “landsharers” in the UK, and a sister scheme in Australia
has almost 2000 members.
In effect, it’s a social networking service
that connects people who want to grow their own fruit and vegetables but
have nowhere to do it with those who have spare land and who are
willing to share.
“Sustainability
is an inherent component of collaborative consumption. If you need to
share a car, you’ll think twice about whether or not you need it. Every
car share vehicle on the road replaces 7-8 privately-owned vehicles. When items are shared multiple times, reused or resold, it means more
use of products already in the market, and less need to create new ones,
resulting in a much more sustainable form of commerce. By combining the
principles of business efficiency and eco saving, we can make real and
meaningful progress towards sustainability.”
Gardens and food
Another trend is the development of local and community food systems
where food is grown and shared. It’s nothing new. Their history dates
back as far as the early agricultural systems when people lived a
connected life. Unfortunately, our current food production systems bear
little resemblance to the systems of our forebears.
The beauty of community gardens is that they bring together people
from all walks of life, backgrounds and ages. Gardening might be the
main focus but they become community hubs other activities like for
example learning and education, playgroups, arts and creative
activities, preparing and sharing food, community events, celebrations
and social enterprise.
Community gardens have become a way of living
sustainably in an urban environment. Community gardens feature waste
minimisation, composting and water usage techniques that can be used by
people in their own homes.
Want to set up a community garden? A good place to start is the Australian City Farms & Community Gardens Network. As the people at Ceres
say, while people are voting with their wallets, their feet and at the
click of a mouse, they are also increasingly voting with their shovels.
Fair foodsters from all over are supporting community agriculture
projects - food box schemes, co-operatives and farmers markets. But
they’re also increasingly growing their own produce at home and in
community gardens, reappropriating public land for community food
forests, and getting involved in food foraging and food swap activities.
Uber is just one car share business taking off
Energy
Also, in an era of ever rising electricity prices and global warming,
more Australian households are choosing to generate their own renewable
energy - and not rely on the main grid.
A CSIRO study
last year suggested that one in three consumers could go off-grid by
2050, based on the prospect that it would be economic for households and
businesses to do so from around 2030 onwards.
A recent Alternative Energy Association study
found that stand-alone micro-grids are likely to be viable by 2020.
This will also lead to a drop in the price that people will pay for
electricity. Another report from the Alternative Energy Association, What Happens When We Unplug says this could transform the market, and the way we use electricity.
“Today, new technologies - specifically solar power and energy
storage - have created a vastly different rationale for energy market
design. They are factory built, and modular. Increasing or decreasing
their installation size has a minimal impact on their installed cost.
They can be located close to where energy is consumed, with no impact on
air quality or health. These new technologies, combined with
complementary advances in energy metering, data management and
communications, are the building blocks for a very different energy
market".
“The potential for a more customer-centric, resilient energy system
is now very real. Stand-alone power infrastructure can be locally owned
and locally managed, with positive flow-on affects for local economies,
particularly in regional areas that may suffer from poor power quality
or unreliable supply".
"The risk of high energy prices for regional
customers, which can be the result of more cost-reflective tariff
structures, can also be proactively managed by transitioning to
stand-alone power solutions or micro-grids. This will also help unwind
historical cross-subsidies from city to regional customers, reducing
upward pressure on power prices for all.”
Then there are some who are building their own power plants. According to Energia this requires the use of micro-scale Combined Heat and Power (mCHP) technology.
“Personal power plant technology could cost effectively provide most
of Australia’s gas connected residential premises with all of their
electricity and hot water heating needs at 23 per cent to 39 per cent of
the carbon emissions of today,’’ the report says. This will result in
50 per cent to 25 per cent lower emissions than hot water and grid power
alternatives".
“Energeia’s technical and economic analysis has found a positive mCHP
investment case will emerge for larger households in NSW and VIC by
2015, assuming the removal of current regulatory barriers. By 2021, we
see technology make financial sense for 1.5 million households.”
The Christian Science Monitor
tells that in Japan, more than 30,000 homeowners have installed
micro-CHP systems driven by quiet, efficient internal-combustion
engines, each housed in a sleek metal box made by Honda. Japan is ahead
because gas utilities have been subsidising and promoting the systems.
In Britain, where the systems look like dishwashers and sit under
kitchen counters, 80,000 systems made by a New Zealand company are on
order.
Grassroots movements can effect real political change. With the
latest sustainability-driven grass roots movements, the combination of
technology and people’s passions about the environment can make change
happen.
