A few weeks ago Tim and I attended a highly inspiring talk by Alex Steffen at Town Hall.

We had hoped to go with  Julian of Totcycle (family bike folks represent!), but that fell through. For Julian and others who couldn’t make it, check out  a few of these to get a flavor. Alex is also the keynote speaker at three of the major events during the Copenhagen summit, so if you are in the neighborhood…

The entire evening was magical: introduction by mayor-elect Mike McGinn in his first post-election appearance,  the inspiring and motivating talk by Alex, yummy beer in eco keg cups from Fremont Brewing, followed by hop-lubricated conversation with like-minded Seattleites interested in changing the city. Plus all of this bookended with rides to and from downtown with my favorite cycling buddy.

We left Town Hall filled with hope for positive changes in Seattle. We all have a lot of work ahead of us if we want to grow Seattle into a dense sustainable city designed with people in mind.

How are we going to do this?

A few points Alex made resonated with us:

• Encourage density.  Well planned big cities designed with people in mind are much more sustainable than suburban sprawl. Large cities have everything you need within a short walk, bike ride or bus from home. Cars aren’t needed when you live in a large city. Just look at New York
• Young people are key to the city of the future – do what you can to attract them and keep them here. When young people decide to stay (rather than move to Portland), they reward you with their energy, creativity and enthusiasm to make the city better
• Encourage nightlife. (see young people are key) Part of making a city livable is to make it livable at all hours.  When people are out appreciating art, supporting live music, and yes even drinking at bars, they are sending a message that the city is a safe, exciting, fun place to live.

Portland lives these last two points. Mayor Sam Adams has said he welcomes youth because he knows that they are future resource for the city.  Many of these young people may even be unemployed, but according to Mayor Sam, that’s OK. They can participate in arts, civics causes, and share their youthful enthusiasm. And then when the economy does grow they provide a built-in a pool of talented workers, committed to the community, and ready to help take the city to the next level.

We can go even further here. Steffen has a grand goal for Seattle to be carbon neutral by 2030. To make this admittedly lofty target a reality, everyone must decide to actively bring about change in our community. We at Car Free Days are thrilled say on record that we are dedicated to being part of the solution, and part of Seattle’s brilliant future!

No matter where you live, some things you can do to improve your city or community:

• don’t be a NIMBY , encourage density because well designed compact communities are more sustainable than sprawl
• leave your car at home on occasion. (you don’t have to do it every day, even one or two days a week makes a difference)
• ride your bike (it’s fun and once you try it you’ll want to ride more and more and more)
• take the bus (let someone else do the driving, reduce auto-induced stress during your commute and read a book or work or knit or whatever it is that gives you pleasure)
• get involved (citizens can bring about change and we are much stronger in numbers than we are by ourselves)
• attend public meetings and make your voice heard (see get involved)
• Talk to your neighbors. The power of everyday conversation is amazing. Share, plan, and implement solutions together
• inspire your children to take this to the next level

We’re doing our best to bring about change one bike ride and one conversation at a time. How about you?

– Anne

photo courtesy of Worldchanging

Worldchanging is hosting two events at Town Hall this Wednesday, November 11th  and Thursday, November 12 featuring Seattle’s own –Alex Steffen, executive director and co-founder of Worldchanging,  publisher of best selling tome on sustainability and internationally renowned speaker.

What’s not to like? Food and drinks provided by  Skillet, promises of live music, introduction by mayor-elect, Mike-likes-bikes, McGinn and a free glass of beer from Fremont Brewing Co. We’ll be there on Thursday – come on down and join us!

Click the event link to get the scoop and buy tickets

McGinn: Seattle’s new mayor

Did you think Mike McGinn could pull it off? Tim and I were hopeful but skeptical. Seattle chose grass roots rabble-rouser over corporate executive, Mike Mallahan. He courted the bike constituency from the beginning and even made the missing link in Ballard a campaign issue. We’re hopeful he’ll deliver from the top floor of city hall.

Party for Val Kleitz

News of a party for Val Kleitz has made the rounds on the internet this past week. However, over the weekend we were talking with a friend who knows Val and hadn’t heard anything. We thought it was worth a mention here as well.

Here are the details:

Tuesday, November 17^th, 2009 8 PM at Pike Brewing Company in the Upper Museum Room (1415 1^st Avenue, Seattle (206) 622-6044)

Raffle tickets for a  2010 Redline 925, with proceeds going Val’s medical bills, will be sold at the party.

Have a good week

– Anne and Tim

Mindre CO2 avtryck, äta närproducerat, dvs tänka globalt agera lokalt.   Helt rätt, eller?

Alex Steffens debattartikel på WorldChanging

We are becoming more aware of the consequences of our actions as a species, and that is good news for actually making some changes and reacting to the world around us we have created.  We are at a time when we are using the planet’s bio-capacity so quickly that we risk a catastrophic collision with ecological reality.  Yes, extinctions can be a natural part of evolving ecosystems, and left unchecked and unchanged our species will destroy itself.

I prefer to be the optimist and think our society does have the will to change, although if we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to not just do fewer bad things:  we need to do different things altogether.

In an article written by Alex Steffan (GOOD magazine, State of the Planet 2009), he makes some great quotes which I will pass on to you here:

“We need people to actually step up and do big things.  We need people to change their thinking and not just their lightbulbs.”

“The biggest political difference on the planet right now iw what time frame you define moral responsibility in.  Most politics is really all about hoping the good times last until the rich old people die”

“But there is another political force growing fast and that’s the politics of optimism.  It’s a politics that says transformation is not just a duty, it’s an amazing opportunity.  We might, instead of doing nothing and leaving our kids a ruined planet, decide to build them an awesome future and spend the rest of our lives enjoying it.  That is a choice we wake up to every day: cynicism or change.”

Personally changing our own habits and purchases and reducing our energy consumption and waste will make a difference, but we also have to ask our neighbors to also do the same and we have to ask our businesses and politicians to do the same.  We have to take responsibility for where we are as a whole on this planet and work together as a whole to save it.

The word is spreading across ideology because it transcends it. Enviro-blogger Alex Steffen grasps onto the idea–innovation in governance takes off when cities can experiment with different rule sets–and riffs. He sees Romer’s Charter Cities as an opportunity to create a renaissance for green cities:

In many ways, the Global North is as hamstrung in the face of bright green challenges as China was in the face of capitalism. What if the answer is a sustainability and social innovation equivalent of China’s answers: a sort of “Special Innovation Zone”?

Imagine a place — perhaps a shrinking city, or a badly savaged brownfield neighborhood — where laws were set up to strip rules and regulations down to a do-no-harm minimum (maintaining criminal laws and protecting health, safety, workers’ rights and civil liberties, but perhaps limiting liability and certainly slashing red tape and delays) allowing for wild deviations from existing patterns for buildings, systems and operations. Imagine a free-fire zone for sustainable innovations, where new approaches could be iterated and tested rapidly, and, when they work, sent to proliferate outside the Zone. Conversely, some of the freedom might paradoxically come from imposing boundary limitations that can’t yet be made practical or survive politically outside the Zone, such as bans on broad classes of chemicals or strict greenhouse gas emissions limits.

Fabulous lecture on Ted by Alex Steffen about sustainability and the future. Founder of World Changing, a nonprofit media organization in Seattle, Washington. He talks about some amazing advancements in technology, like land mine flowers… you scatter them, and they grow up and detect the chemicals in the land mines and turn red, so you know where to avoid the area.

It’s so very encouraging to hear someone speak positively about the possibilities for sustainability. Instead of saying things are impossible, he sees the future as limitless… totally the attitude we need to take about the challenges facing our planet.

And speaking of limitless… here’s an article about how Twitter can be used in energy conservation. The really cool thing about social media is that it is free (for the most part) and doesn’t require printing, which in turn produces waste. I think it definitely fits into the whole “cradle-to-cradle” concept… which I’m just learning about.

I have a confession…according to myfootprint.org, it would take five planets to support my lifestyle. When I found this out, I told my friend and he jokingly called me an “environmental monster.”

I laughed at my friend’s joke, but I have to admit, it kind of stung. A monster, really? Okay, so I don’t recycle everything…I don’t always carpool…and I occasionally forget to bring my cloth bags to the grocery store. Sometimes I choose convenience over sustainability.

But I am trying to get better. And maybe that’s why it’s hard for me to have my own personal definition of sustainability. It’s evolving. 

However, I did find a good starting point for my personal definition: Meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.

This definition was created in 1987 at the World Commission on Environment and Development. Robert Gilman, former editor of In Context magazine, simplifies this definition – “do onto future generations as you would have them do onto you.”

With that, I believe that sustainability is living in a way that ensures that the world not only survives, but thrives, for future generations.

More important than defining sustainability is living by it. In order to ensure that future generations have a safe and healthy environment to live in, we must have a united strategic vision for sustainability. Let’s set goals that can be achieved and focus on the things that are necessary for a healthy, sustainable future.

I think Alex Steffen does a great job in outlining his vision for a sustainable future. In addition to the amazing innovations he presents, such as the LifeStraw, he provides hope and encourages me to want to be more sustainable.

A LifeStraw filters enough water for one person for one year. (image from touchafrica.info)

Steffen’s closing remarks are particularly inspiring, “the tools we use to change the world ought to be beautiful in themselves. Not just what we need to survive.” We need to see beyond survival – we need to create a world that thrives. What will it take to do this?

~Pauline H

This TED Talk was Fabulous. Alex Steffen shows and discusses several wonderfully inspirational sustainable ideas to decrease our ecological footprint on our planet. Alex Steffen is the founder of Worldchanging.com. I loved his talk and I loved his ideas. I actually gave up my car not to long ago, and I don’t plan on buying one again. I hope to work on the rest of these ideas and many others throughout my life. I just hope I can make a difference.

For those of you who don’t know, TED Talks is a conference that brings together people from the technology, entertainment and design fields. It gives them the opportunity to present and discuss important issues and innovation concerning their industries and the world.

Just as I was beginning to enjoy Wired again, they pulled a horrendous bait-and-switch with one of those overdone “everything you thought you knew about environmentalism is wrong” feature assemblage of featurettes. Stark reverse text is scrawled over a safety orange and lime cover.

The premise: In the fight against Global Warming, only carbon matters. So, ahem, “Screw the spotted owl” the subhead bawls.

Well, slow down. I mean, even the climate lags.

Consider, the enormous levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere today have been building for some time. Likewise, the changes now underway won’t stop even if we cut all carbon emissions tomorrow. We’re in for at least 200 years of the current industry-prescribed meltdown.

So, yeah, while there is time to make intelligent change, our policies have dragged so long that CO2 actually increased in the U.S. last year, according to the Department of Energy.

Wired would have us signing on not only with nukes, but taking down old growth forests, eschewing organics, and embracing genetic engineering. That’s the bait.

The switch comes (offering supposed balance to the weight of shock already tilting grocery store lane captives, where the cover does all the talking) with a well-drawn, counter-weight of argument by Alex Steffen, editor of Worldchanging.com, appropriately titled “It’s Not Just Carbon, STUPID.”

Steffen dismantles some of the more egregious errors in the stirring staff offerings:

No one with any scientific sense now disagrees about the severity of the climate crisis. But some people — and some magazines — believe that climate change trumps every other problem. If we take this argument to its extreme, we should ignore any environmental concern that gets in the way of reducing emissions. And that’s just plain wrong.

Make no mistake: Tackling climate change is vital. But to see everything through the lens of short-term CO₂ reductions, letting our obsession with carbon blind us to the bigger picture, is to court catastrophe.

Climate change is not a discrete issue; it’s a symptom of larger problems. Fundamentally, our society as currently designed has no future. We’re chewing up the planet so fast, in so many different ways, that we could solve the climate problem tomorrow and still find that environmental collapse is imminent. Myopic responses will only hasten its arrival.

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So this increasing pro-nuclear slant invading a misguided media empire (Discover had another recently), we are finding ourself forced to ask such questions as: Is there an “environmental” agenda to nuke the Southwest again?

Hugh Gusterson writing for the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists:

Chris Paine of the Natural Resources Defense Council pointed out that, in 1995, shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed, the U.S. nuclear weapons complex consisted of eight sites in seven states. By 2020, Energy’s preferred weapons complex “will still consist of the same eight sites in the same seven states, but this complex will be maintaining a stockpile that could well be one-tenth to one-twentieth the size.” (The eight sites are Livermore in California; Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico; the Nevada Test Site in Nevada; the Pantex Plant in Texas; the Kansas City Plant in Missouri; the Y-12 National Security Complex in Tennessee; and Savannah River Site in South Carolina.)

Paine particularly criticized plans to maintain “two nuclear weapons design laboratories and an active test site almost 20 years after the end of the Cold War.” He advocated retrenching to a “Southwest Triangle” complex located around Amarillo, Albuquerque, Los Alamos, and the Nevada Test Site. This complex would have a small plutonium pit production capability.

Sounds like a lost ally, to me. Remember, we down here are still being inundated with uranium mines, threat of new nukes, a uranium fuel processing plant, and new plutonium pit plans for the next generation of warheads – and it’s all centering around the Panhandle of Texas and into New Mexico.

Perhaps, it’s time we simply declared the region a nuclear sacrifice zone and launch a federal mass relocation program. That would seem to follow the Wired Way. Why does Wallace’s Infinite Jest come to mind and an odd passage about the annexation of a chunk of Canada for the U.S. toxic load.

Anyway, I fall in with Wired’s prognosis that climate change is inevitable and that we should “be prepared for the worst,” but not the notion that we should be unleashing bio- and geo-scale sciences with brooding oceans of turbulence residing in each thesis.

To start scattering sulfur dioxide clouds across the skies to shield us from continued warming, or dumping massive amounts of iron into our seas, is to suggest that this new era of uncertainty is one to be “solved” by exponentially increasing our impact on the global systems – systems the mainstream of our scientific community didn’t even know we were influencing until three short decades ago.

The moment we start seeing planetary systems as something we can master our way through, the less likely it is we will ever throttle back our destructive inputs where they need to be and thereby allow Mother Earth to heal herself and get back to regulating, protecting, and guiding life on this planet.

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Top image is from Wired, by Yann Arthus-Bertrand; Graph courtesy of DOE; Gusterson illo from the Union… I’ll try to get back to my our photos, etc., soon… almost train time.

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Darren over at ProBlogger has pronounced today, April 14th, as the [unofficial] Blogger Appreciation Day.

I show my appreciation for the following bloggers/blogs.

• Alain Wong – Alain got the idea of blogging about dancing into my head with his blog and I’ve since grown quite a considerable readership (for a tiny niche blog) and networked with a number of other bloggers who I would never have had the chance if not for my inspiration from Alain.  We are now working on a collaborative blog project that will launch this summer.

• Alex Steffen – Alex is a wonderful writer in the eco and sustainability blogging community as the executive editor of WorldChanging.com.  I began reading this blog a year or two ago and it definitely helped shape my goals and aspirations for the future.  I keep up with his blog and many other eco and sustainability blogs on a regular basis.

• Lifehacker – Organization has never really been my strong suit.  Pair that with my ability to get sidetracked and you’ve got a definite prevalence to get off topic, lose track of time and much more.  Lifehacker is a great blog that includes articles and links to great efficiency tricks and tools.

• Arstechnica – I have a fascination with all things technologically-related whether it is laws, the latest developments, gadgets or games.  Arstechnica keeps me up-to-date on all of these topics with exceptional reporting and writing.

This is a non-exclusive list but these are my highlights.

Alex Steffen over at WorldChanging writes the post that I’ve been thinking about for a while. Titled “My Other Car is A Bright Green City” Steffen argues that while it is great that higher fuel efficiency from cars is being achieved (despite some of Sightline’s research that calls into question the benefits of ultra high-mileage vehicles), the solution, ultimately, can’t depend on cars. Instead it is a radical rethinking of our patterns of living that needs to be retooled. Compact, liveable cities are at the heart of his call. The solution isn’t to drive less, or ride transit more, the solution is to live where you work, and get there on foot. Not only does it help the planet, but it also builds community, helps human health, etc etc.

It’s why I’m involved with SGCI, contribute to the Green Infrastructure Wiki and why we’re advocating for the ProParks renewal…

Num post anterior abordei (por alto) os problemas de fundo que a humanidade enfrenta, com foco no aquecimento global e a explosão demográfica, e como podem ser reduzidos a dois problemas fundamentais: tornar o estilo de vida do mundo desenvolvido sustentável, e acelerar o desenvolvimento em regiões desfavorecidas (em termos de economia, direitos fundamentais e nível de vida).

Tomei entretanto conhecimento de um site muito interessante dedicado a estes vectores de acção, WorldChanging.com, que aborda inovações, desde a tecnologia de ponta a simples ideias engenhosas, que mostram como os grandes desafios da humanidade podem ser transpostos com um pouco de boa vontade. Uma boa introdução foi dada por Alex Steffen, o fundador deste site, numa palestra na TED de 2005 publicada no início deste ano: Inspired Ideas for a Sustainable Future.