or geothermal heating and installing the most efficient lighting on the market.

But many of these sustainable building practices are well above and beyond the current building codes. Chambers says not only do those codes have to change, but the government needs to provide incentives to build green.

“Until governments really step forward by providing incentives and write it into the building codes, I think if we leave it up to the individual’s own devices I don’t think they will do it. I don’t think they will expend the amount of money that would be required.”

Chambers points to the solar-powered community of Drake Landing in Okotoks that uses European solar thermal technology to store solar energy underground in the summer and provide 90 per cent of the heat for the community’s 52 homes in the winter. It’s an award winning example of sustainable design and it wouldn’t have happened without $7 million in grants from different levels of government and other partners.

It’s the old economic chicken and egg. New technologies are expensive, but as more people buy them, the costs come down. The organizations and governments that are willing to invest now will make it easier for others later.

“The clients that have really stepped on the green band wagon are municipalities and educational institutions, and surprisingly companies like Walmart because they see that you can make money being green,” says Livesey.

Increasingly, saving energy goes straight to the bottom line.
“We are asleep at the wheel,” says Chambers. “We in Alberta have this tremendous resource and basically we are squandering an opportunity to make an absolutely required transition from this non-renewable resource. We have some time and we have the money to do it because we have the income from this resource.”

Livesey agrees. “We have to start moving ourselves off oil, off our dependency on oil.” As well as calling on governments to beef up building codes and incentives, he also wants more of his peers to step up toward sustainability. “Architecture has to invest in the performance of the environment,” he says.
And that holds true for new buildings, as well as the thousands in Calgary that are already built, says Chambers.
“We have a huge amount of buildings from the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s which are not performing very well and many are in need of major renovations,” he says. “When an owner decides to do something that would be the time to implement a whole bunch of different strategies.”
The Empire State Building is rebuilding each of its 6,500 windows, installing special radiators, automated controls, an efficient cooling plant, addressing air quality, tenant space design and tenant energy use.

When complete, the energy efficient building will have a better, less-expensive work environment which will attract tenants and keep their employees happier.
==================================
Natural Architecture
The natural environment still manages to fill us with a sense
of awe and amazement. despite the amount of scientific
knowledge mankind has gathered, nature still holds great
mysteries that we may never be able to unravel.
this complexity has continually daunted man. in frustration, we
try to control nature by enforcing order. as a result,
we have distanced ourselves from the earth, even though
our survival is completely dependent on it. we are now trying
to regain our close connection to nature.
There is an emerging art movement that is exploring mankind's
desire to reconnect to the earth, through the built environment.
referred to as 'natural architecture', it aims to create a new,
more harmonious, relationship between man and nature by
exploring what it means to design with nature in mind.
The roots of this movement can be found in earlier artistic
shifts like the 'land art' movement of the late nineteen sixties.
although this movement was focused on protesting the
austerity of the gallery and the commercialization of art,
it managed to expand the formal link between art and nature.
this has helped develop a new appreciation of nature in all
forms of art and design.
The 'natural architecture' movement aims to expand on 'land art'
by acting as a form of activism rather than protest. this new
form of art aims to capture the harmonious connection we
seek with nature by merging humanity and nature through
architecture. the core concept of the movement is that
mankind can live harmoniously with nature, using it for our
needs while respecting its importance.
The movement is characterized by the work of a number of
artists, designers and architects that express these principles
in their work. the pieces are simple, humble and built using the
most basic materials and skills. because of this, the results
often resemble indigenous architecture, reflecting the desire
to return to a less technological world. the forms are stripped
down to their essence, expressing the natural beauty inherent
in the materials and location. the movement has many forms of
expression that range from location-based interventions to
structures built from living materials. however all of the works
in the movement share a central ethos that demonstrates a
respect and appreciation for nature.
These works are meant to comment on architecture and provide
a new framework to approach buildings and structures.
they aim to infuse new ideas into architecture by subverting
the idea that architecture should shelter nature. instead,
the structures deliberately expose the natural materials used
in the building process. we see the branches, the rocks and
all the materials for what they are. we understand that these
structures won't exist forever. the materials will evolve over
time, slowly decomposing until no evidence remains.
these features are intentional, provoking viewers to question
the conventions of architecture. the designers aren't suggesting
that architecture must conform to their vision, they are just
providing ideas that they hope will inspire us all to rethink the
relationship between nature and the built environment.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

Business Life Cycle

In 'Corporate Life Cycles,' by Ichak Adizes illustrated the growth cycle of a business. His illustrations related to the process all businesses must pass through and the issues that must be solved to attain profitability and sales growth.

In growing, highly competitive businesses, the life cycle's predictable patterns help CEO's and their managers develop insight as to what problems need to be corrected first. These problems may be both operational and cultural, which is very normal during the growth side of the cycle. These "conflicts" are akin to a natural process, much like growing up through the terrible 2's or teen years. Management's ability to problem solve and create new market opportunities differentiates successful from unsuccessful businesses. To understand the value of the Life Cycles graph depicted below, an explanation of the terms is required.

The 'P' in PAEI stands for "Producer", 'A' stands for "Administrator," 'E' means "Entrepreneur," and 'I' refers to "Integrator." These are the four roles of management. That is: To produce a result, administer or control to doing things right, create new ideas, not fixing old ones, and to ensure the organization has the values to sustain itself.

In the early stages of a business, entrepreneurs create products and services that should result in sales. As the business rises out of creating new products from the COURTSHIP stage it transitions into the INFANT STAGE, where producing more sales and orders to generate cash becomes the utmost focus. Passing through that stage, the company either creates cash or dies an early death. Once the cash situation is under control the company moves into the GO-GO stage, where it expands its product lines to acquire market share.

With growth, comes the problem of consistent profitability. Thus during the ADOLESCENCE stage the company tries to professionalize management and develop consistency, training and service by using more ADMINISTRATIVE elements. If the company can survive these processes successfully, it will enter the PRIME stage, during which it will create many new infants or growth opportunities.

In further stages of the life cycle, the focus is much less on the entrepreneurial skills that are the future of sales growth, and more on profitability and the status quo, which emphasizes INTEGRATION, not results. The loss of this entrepreneurial edge, which is the company's long term ability to create markets and later the sales production capacity, causes the organization to age quickly.

The ability to change a culture and rebuild a business requires a return to the "basics" or INFANT AND GO-GO stages, thus revitalizing the entrepreneurial and essential sales efforts of the business.

I was asked by a client to assist his management team in a turnaround of his ailing company. I learned that the company had grown rapidly over the last 7 years, from start-up with 5 employees to over $100 million in sales and 300 employees. As the company grew, the people who started with the CEO grew in responsibility and authority.

There were also new managers who came from larger, more experienced companies who were trying to make improvements that the "old guard" would not support. The company had had three different chief operating officers in two years, all selected by the CEO with all but the last being from the "old guard." The new COO inherited a company with plummeting sales, new competition, very low morale and the same problems the company fixed years ago.

Through our assessment process, We determined that the company was in the PRE-MATURE AGING stage, and prescribed a series of action plans to halt the aging process and move it back to the growth and excitement of the INFANCY stage. Those action plans resulted in a stabilization of employee turnover, an increase in sales and improved profitability.

Only one person was fired during this process and it wasn't the original person they thought to fire when we were asked to help them. Had they shown any other stage's symptoms, we would have prescribed a very different approach. The result was to rebuild the entrepreneur side of the business, and move it back to some of the issues of INFANCY or GO-GO stage in the life cycle.

Any change towards INFANCY can be exhilarating, rewarding and very difficult. The reason the process is very painful is that it causes members of the organization to rethink their roles and skills. Corporate restructuring can sometimes be the result of this process and the development of good managers requires training and education.

Developing owners requires business experience, an understanding of risk and strategic vision. The CEO's fundamental charge is to assemble a management team that clearly understands the challenges of the company and has the ability to work to correct them with little involvement from the CEO. That's called structure and delegation. Small companies with dynamic, visionary CEOs who came from the sales area will have a very different approach to problems than a small company where the CEO was the CFO or administrator. The key to success is surrounding the CEO with people who can problem solve faster than the competition.

Management training is part of the continuous improvement process. Peter Drucker wrote in his 1954 book, "The Practice of Management," that the purpose of a business is to "create customers," not profits. The purpose of management is to keep the business alive. Profit is a measurement system on management performance. Eli Goldratt's book, "The Goal," supports this premise, stating that the goal is to make money, not product. And W. Edward Demming's chain reaction, which begins with improving quality, is a focus on change from the customer's point of view. Therefore, change is driven as a result of focusing on the creation of customers.

It is very important that future managers be sales or customer oriented. This is not about taking the best salesperson and making him/her a manager. It is about taking corrective action or solving problems based on the customer's point of view; not the income statement. If a change does not improve customer relations, sales or gross margins with new products, why do it? Cutting expenses is not a part of the growth or rising side of the cycle; it is in the downward side where the business is approaching DEATH. Management must be clear about the critical need to create customers and be measured on customer creation as well as profits.

If a marketplace is ripe with new entrants and competition, then management must continually improve, by creating new INFANTS and adding them to the product mix. Expanding existing product lines is one example of the types of ideas the management and ownership team should be reviewing. If a company is forced to reduce costs, they will have to shake up the status quo to do it and if that company is in the aging side of the lifecycle, flexibility and adaptability are not its strengths. As Peter Senge wrote in "The 5th Discipline," successful problem solving requires a deep understanding of the causes of the problem, not the symptoms.

A business lifecycle analysis such as the one those PTFCO performs though the Life Cycle Insight™ and the Strategic Snapshot™, in conjunction with a strategic planning process, provides a company with a plan that focuses management on growth and entrepreneurial characteristics rather than the status quo and reducing costs. In short, this process provides a management team with a game plan to prosper in today's competitive environment.

===========================

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Deep Economy reads as a response to two very influential economic works: Adam Smith's The Weath of Nations (alluded to in McKibben's subtitle: The Wealth of Communities) and Thomas Friedman's much more recent work, The World is Flat. McKibben argues that economic theory and political doctrine valuing growth above all has led us to debase the environment. Moreover, since increasing wealth provides diminishing returns, we are not even becoming happier through this destructive growth. In fact, people in developed countries (particularly America) are becoming less happy. McKibben's urges us to return to community values and local economies. Doing so, he says, is the only way we can regain happiness and avert environmental disaster. Actually, he presents the latter as all but inevitable and asserts that we will need to rediscover local economies because working together in communities will be the only way we will be able to survive the effects of global warming and environmental degradation.

The most interesting thing about this book for me was the conscious dialogue McKibben had with the field of economics. He is very consciously responding to the religion of economics that he traces back to Adam Smith. Importantly, his argument is not with Smith's book itself. He notes that Smith believed that community structures would enable markets to function properly. Smith assumed, for example, that people would know the merchants selling them their goods, and this would prevent dishonest behavior and prevent consumers from making uninformed choices. Today, however, as McKibben argues, markets have gotten so big that they no longer work in our best interests. His most compelling arguments probably center on food. He demonstrates that the food we eat increasingly travels immense distances to reach us, and he argues that this is the result of the economic doctrine: it is less expensive to have one farmer manage a huge monoculture crop than to have many small farmers. The tragedy is that those many small farmers would grow crops in a more environmentally sustainable manner, they would grow a greater variety of food (thus supporting the varied tastes of local consumers), and small farms would actually grow more food per acre.

I also find it incredibly problematic how McKibben addresses the third world without addressing the reasons that they are poor, undernourished, and living in (according to a first world perspective) dire predicaments. Never are the effects of colonialism or global capitalism or free trade really explored in detail.

Finally, McKibben always ends with a message that revolves around personal change instead of radical action. It's easier to swallow his message that if people in the US just acted more community-oriented and less individualistic then global climate change could totally solve itself! But that's not really going to help anybody in the long run. He completely misses the big picture, that global capitalism is screwing things up, not individual people. Voting with my dollar, or at the ballot box, won't change anything if the people in power aren't disrupted in wreaking havoc for an extra buck.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are communities that wonderful?

I'd like to start this thread, since it seems to be where McKibben sings his full praise of communities, which is the main point of my disagreement with the solution he puts forward. Not that I don't believe that humans are social beings and that we can only survive and flourish when cooperating with each other, but I think communities require a deeper analysis than that. Isn't this forum of ours a kind of community? I think McKibben advocates for a narrow definition of community which reminds me very much of the traditional kind of community, one I would not like to live in.

I do agree with him that our individualism has become so extreme that it sometimes plays against us, and that we should find a solution, or rather, find each other again. But there are many positive sides to this individualism which has developed over the last half of the last century. It has allowed people whose lifestyle is not 'mainstream' to live their lives in freedom, and that is no small achievement.
I was born in a Hindu country, where family and community ties are much stronger . Luckily I was also born in a big city, and as a city dweller I have always be thankful for the freedom that comes along with living anonymously. I know the tale of many residents of Delhi or Mumbai who came from their smaller towns or villages because they couldn't have developed fully in a close-knit community. That is so because communities favour certain behavioural patterns in individuals and relationships of power, and the coertion of the group to conform to their rules can be suffocating.

McKibben puts it nicely:

Living in a community comes with drawbacks, small societies can be parochial, gossip-ridden, discriminatory. There was something liberating about escaping them, about being on your own. That's the story of much of American literature, with Huck lighting out for the Territory.

But that is his only reflection so far (I have read over 3/4 of the book) about the negative side of living in small-sized communities), the rest of his writing is decidedly advocating for this kind of life as the solution to our energetic/environmental problem. He criticizes repeatedly Smith's argument of the 'invisible hand' of economy, but I think he relies too heavily on the 'invisible hand' of communities, and sometimes that hand slaps hard.

McKibben's main argument in favour of communities relies on the fact that they allow a sustainable economy and they have a positive influence on our mental health. To some extent or other both assertions are true.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Toxic Cleaning Products, Environmental Pollution, and Negative Externalities

So you might read those labels (many of us don’t) on toxic products like oven cleaners and dishwashing machine detergent, etc., where you find out that they can cause birth defects, you shouldn’t get them on your hands, you should always wear rubber gloves (many people don’t) when using them, they can damage your eyes or cause respiratory damage, etc.
The problem here is one of transaction costs and negative externalities: in terms of transaction costs, most people are too busy to read labels, or figure products can’t be that harmful, etc., alternative natural cleaning products haven’t reached critical mass yet, many people don’t shop at Whole Foods, Trader Joes, etc yet; in terms of negative externalities, potential harm comes not just to them but to neighbors, future generations, their children, etc, they don’t bear the full brunt of the potential negative effects and thus have less incentive to find safer, natural alternatives to toxic cleaning products.
So what to do? Tax the makers of toxic cleaning products to make up for the negative externalities and make them invest in production of less toxic cleaning products, and to make them more expensive relative to natural cleaning products to make the natural cleaning products more competitive price-wise, etc.
One step at a time… Bono, step up to the plate on this one!!! (just kidding…kind of?)
This problem may be an example of problems of collective action, where air quality is a public good, and we all mostly free ride on others’ efforts to ensure clean and safe air, and incentive-wise view ourselves as having little marginal utility to gain in comparison with the effort we might exert towards pushing for some sort of stricter environmental legislation and regulation regimes…

Also it seems to be a classic “tragedy of the commons” situation:

The Tragedy of the Commons is a type of social trap, often economic, that involves a conflict over resources between individual interests and the common good. It is a structural relationship between free access to, and unrestricted demand for, a finite resource. Such situations have occurred in the context of fishing (eg, the overfishing and destruction of the Grand Banks, and the destruction of salmon runs on rivers on which dams have been installed for power production), and in terms of water supply (eg, limited water available in arid regions as in the area of the Aral Sea, the Los Angeles water system supply, especially at Mono Lake and Owens Lake. The term derives originally from a comparison noticed by William Forster Lloyd with medieval village land holding in his 1833 book on population. It was then popularized and extended by Garrett Hardin in his 1968 Science essay “The Tragedy of the Commons.” However, the theory itself is as old as Thucydides and Aristotle, the latter of whom said “that which is common to the greatest number has the least care bestowed upon it._______________________________________________________

Shifting the Burden by Flemming Funch

When one is familiar with certain standard templates for how systems might work, they tend to reveal themselves much more readily in real life. I've noticed that recently, how systems templates jump out at me.
With "templates" I mean what can be expressed in the so-called "Causal Loop Diagrams", that is, simple stylized diagrams of different types of dynamics in a system. Peter Senge calls them "Systems Archetypes" in the book "The Fifth Discipline".
A very common one is the "Shifting the Burden" template. It goes like this:

*----------------------*
         (+) | Symptomatic solution | --------------\
       /---> *----------------------* -----\        |
       |                                   |        |
       |          Balancing Loop           |        |
       |                                   |        |
       |      *--------------------*  (-)  |        |
       \----- |                    | <-----/   Reinforcing
              | Problem situation  |                |
       /----- |                    | <-----\      Loop
       |      *--------------------*  (-)  |        |
       |                                   |        |
       |          Balancing Loop         Delay      |
       |                                   |        |
       |                                   |        |
       \---> *----------------------* -----/        |
         (+) | Fundamental solution | <-------------/
             *----------------------*   (-)

There is a certain Problem Situation. That might apply to one's personal life, to a company, or to the ecology of a planet. Something somehow sticks out as something unwanted that should be dealt with.
There is a Fundamental Solution that would really handle the problem, but it is a somewhat long-term solution that only gets to be effective through a delay, that is, it takes time to work.
There is an easier Symptomatic Solution that alleviates the appearance of the Problem in the short term. Since it is easier and appears to get results faster it might often be preferred over the more thorough Fundamental Solution.
The appearance of the Problem Situation creates a push for a solution, either symptomatic or fundamental. That is the two arrows with a (+) originating from the Problem Situation box. The (+) means an increasing influence, causing MORE of whatever it is that is pointed at.
Either the Symptomatic or the Fundamental Solution will lessen the Problem Situation, at least the appearance of it. That is the arrows with (-) going from the solutions to the Problem Situation. They signify an decreasing or weakening influence.
When the Problem Situation decreases there will be less of a drive to do something about it. It looks like it is being handled, so one doesn't think much about doing anything about it.
The appearance of the problem and the execution of a solution forms a balancing loop. The solution is applied when the problem goes above a certain level of discomfort or alarm, which will then bring the problem appearance down.
However, if it is just a Symptomatic Solution that is being applied, the Fundamental Solution might be ignored. No pressure is building up to undertake the deeper, more far-reaching Fundamental Solution.
The fact that one uses a Symptomatic Solution that appears effective will in itself decrease the chances that a Fundamental Solution is ever done. The long-term solution goes further and further out of reach the more one gets used to short term solutions. That is a reinforcing loop, the more you do it the worse it gets (or the better it gets if run the other way).
If you have a headache and you take an aspirin and the headache goes away, then you might just be happy with that and not worry about why you had a headache in the first place. Next time you get a headache, you just take another, because it worked in the first place. Pretty soon you will get used to it and always keep aspirin around and never look for a more fundamental solution to headaches. Taking aspirin will make it less and less likely that you actually adjust your health so that your body works right in the first place. To actually reverse the process and find and apply the fundamental solutions would probably mean that you would suffer through some headaches while the fundamental solutions are worked out and start taking effect. That might mean a change in lifestyle, as in eating or sleeping habits.
I spend part of my time doing personal counseling sessions with clients, and that is a good chance for noticing principles like that at work in people's lives. Yesterday I had a client who had the problem of being overworked at work, getting more and more to do. She didn't know what to do about it, and thought she just had to work harder and hope it got better. Her situation was roughly like this:

*----------------------*
         (+) | Work harder & suffer | --------------\
       /---> *----------------------* -----\        |
       |                                   |        |
       |          Balancing Loop           |        |
       |                                   |        |
       |      *--------------------*  (-)  |        |
       \----- |                    | <-----/   Reinforcing
              |   Too much work    |                |
       /----- |                    | <-----\      Loop
       |      *--------------------*  (-)  |        |
       |                                   |        |
       |          Balancing Loop         Delay      |
       |                                   |        |
       |                                   |        |
       \---> *----------------------* -----/        |
         (+) | More people hired.   | <-------------/
             | Teach others to do   |   (-)
             | the jobs needed.     |
             *----------------------*

When people left the company for one reason or another, she would naturally take over their work and make sure everything got done, without ever complaining. Also, when others didn't quite know what to do she would just do the job for them, thinking that it was better that she worked harder than that the others would have trouble.
Thus it became that she was now doing the work that was before done by three people. Management probably being very happy with her. The other employees were leaving stuff on her desk that they didn't know what to do with, and she would just quietly do it.
She didn't realize that by her behavior she was actually creating the whole cycle. She would do the work, so she wouldn't appear TOO overworked, and people would bring her more work. Management realized that it didn't seem to matter that they fired a couple of people, the work still got done, so no reason to bother hiring somebody new. And really, what she was doing was not just being "nice". She was postponing the actual solution of her problem, which would be that she let her supervisors know that more people were needed, and she started delegating some of her skills to others. It was, paradoxically, "easier" for her to just "suffer quietly and work harder" than to deal with the issue and talk with others about the organization of work.
By realizing to her great surprise how the system worked, she enthusiastically went back to work to act differently and to work on the more fundamental solution.
The "Shifting the Burden" pattern is pervasive on many levels of our society. It is also a key ingredient in ecological matters. We have often avoided confronting the underlying issues because there are quick short-term fixes.
For example, the fact that a garbage truck arrives every week to take away your garbage is a Symptomatic Solution that tends to keep you from getting very worried about what really is going on:

*----------------------*
             |   The garbage truck  |
         (+) |    takes it away.    | --------------\
       /---> *----------------------* -----\        |
       |                                   |        |
       |          Balancing Loop           |        |
       |                                   |        |
       |      *--------------------*  (-)  |        |
       \----- |      There is      | <-----/   Reinforcing
              |  Garbage in your   |                |
       /----- |      kitchen.      | <-----\      Loop
       |      *--------------------*  (-)  |        |
       |                                   |        |
       |          Balancing Loop         Delay      |
       |                                   |        |
       |                                   |        |
       \---> *----------------------* -----/        |
         (+) | Viable management of | <-------------/
             |     the resources    |   (-)
             |      of society.     |
             *----------------------*

Imagine if there were no garbage truck coming every week, if nobody were invisibly carting away your refuse and stacking it up in landfills to be a problem for future generations. You would become VERY motivated to create a more permanent solution and you would be very inspired to manage your own resources better. The existing short-term solution (garbage trucks, landfills) keep attention away from the true solutions, because the smelly garbage in your kitchen keeps disappearing.
By participating in a "Shifting the Burden" pattern, and by continuously choosing the simple, short-term, symptomatic solution, you are in effect CAUSING the perpetuation of the pattern as much as any other part of it is.
Only by becoming exposed to the whole set of cycles will you start taking responsibility for the whole system and start working on more fundamental solutions to the issues involved.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Bill McKibben - Downsides to Economic Growth
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5YVXnnfS28&feature=related
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Wealth of Community
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4RB5Gq_1QI

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Buddhism and Ecology

Dharma, for Buddhists, is the sacred law, morality and the teachings of the Buddha. It is also all things in nature. Cats, dogs, penguins, trees, humans, mosquitoes, sunlight, leaf dew are all dharmas. So at its very essence, Buddhism can be described as an ecological religion or a religious ecology.

The principles of love, compassion and respect for all life, are familiar to the Western mind but in recent centuries, we have restricted them to humans only. Even the law of karma (cause and effect) has some place in our thinking although without the universal and inescapable power it is given in Buddhist thought. The law of karma ultimately places mind as the first cause. It is the maker and the shaper of our personal and global destiny.

Our birth and existence is dependent on causes outside ourselves, inextricably linking us with the world and denying us any autonomous existence. Indeed when we think deeply enough, the borders between our self and the world wash away like water in water. We and all of nature are inseparable, entwined, one. Compassion for others should be as natural and instinctive as compassion for us and our own bodies.

This is perhaps the most striking and difficult idea of Buddhism and the one most misunderstood – that there is no independent individual self. Yet the individual self is one of the western world's most cherished beliefs and greatest source of suffering. It is what separates us from the world and causes us to cling to it with the stranglehold of the drowning. To be enlightened is to awaken from this delusion.

To transform the world, we must begin by transforming ourselves ... by discovering our true Buddha (enlightened) nature.

As the primacy of the individual and individual desire has continued to grow exponentially in the shadow of the industrialising world, two questions have arisen, says Timmerman: 'How can we deny people their right to self-fulfillment? Yet how can we survive on a planet of ten billion points of infinite greed? This is the point at which the more challenging aspects of Buddhism present 'a serious alternative basis for environmental thought and action'. Timmerman argues that to be a Buddhist today is a geopolitical act, taking us away from the ethos of the individual and its bondage to the consumer ethic and providing us 'with a working space within which to stand back from our aggressive culture and consider the alternative. This working space, with its ways of carefully considering and meditating on what we do, is part of what can be called 'non-violent thinking.'

His Holiness the Dalai Lama, in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech said: "We must develop a sense of universal responsibility not only in the geographic sense, but also in respect to the different issues that confront our planet. Responsibility does not only lie with the leaders of our countries or with those who have been appointed or elected to do a particular job. It lies with each of us individually. Peace, for example, starts within each one of us. When we have inner peace, we can be at peace with those around us. When our community is in a state of peace, it can share that peace with neighbouring communities, and so on.

It is my dream that the entire Tibetan plateau should become a free refuge where humanity and nature can live in peace and in harmonious balance ... Tibet could become a creative centre for the promotion and development of peace."

__________________________________________________________________________________

From Holocene to Anthropocene

Our planet is 4.5 billion years old and will outlast even an enormously destructive climate crisis, one that provokes the end of a geological era. Of course, that is not true of the biosphere as we know it. Our hominid ancestors diverged from the common ancestral lineage we share with chimpanzees, somewhere between 5 and 7 million years ago. The relatively young human species to which we belong is about 200,000 years old.

As we ponder those time-frames, we must also consider that recent UN reports are calling for urgent protection of the planetary life support systems for humans and most other living species. [1, 2] Because while the planet can do without us, we humans cannot do without a particular set of ecological conditions on Earth.
The regional climates of the Earth vary greatly from its equator to its poles, because the parallel rays of the Sun fall unevenly across the curve of the planet's surface. Global average climate is the average of all those climatic regions. It showed little variation during the last 10,000 years, the Holocene (geological) epoch that gave rise to human civilization.

What preceded it was 140,000 years of extreme climate variation, conditions that did not allow humans to settle anywhere for long, so that we could live only as hunter-gatherers. A stable global average climate permitted us to develop agriculture—and with it city life, culture and civilization. It was in this context, 2550 years ago, that an Indian prince, Siddhartha Gautama, attained fully awakened awareness. In Athens at the same time, extraordinary masterpieces of classical Greek art were being created, as was the first democracy in human history.
The stable Holocene climate was produced by a self-regulating atmospheric system; one with finely-balanced concentrations of greenhouse gases (GHGs) (principally carbon dioxide and methane). Greenhouse gases partially block radiation of the sun’s heat from the plant back to space. Global climate is continuously re-created by interdependent cycles of carbon, nitrogen and water between the environment and living beings. Prior to the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the Holocene atmosphere was stable, at 280ppm (parts per million).

200 years ago, the Earth entered a new geologic epoch, where human economic and industrial activity has come to dominate the biosphere and evolutionary path of the planet. Nobel Prize-winning scientist Paul Crutzen termed it the Anthropocene. As we see in the graph above, burning fossil fuels to power the industrial revolution dramatically increased carbon gas concentrations in the atmosphere. A resultant ‘forcing’ of the greenhouse effect has increased global average temperature by 0.8C since 1880. This might sound like a small increase, yet it has initiated momentous change across all climatic regions of the Earth. The polar ice caps and terrestrial glaciers have begun to melt. Extreme weather events (hurricanes and typhoons, floods, heat waves and droughts) have quadrupled in frequency since the 1950s.
Some 80% of global energy supply still comes from fossil fuels, creating an enormously powerful economic lobby of business corporations who extract and burn them, as well as related industrial users. We may call this the Fossil Carbon Complex. Oil, coal and gas are doing three remarkable things at the same time: generating the greatest profits in human commercial history, causing climate breakdown and rapidly running out.

The Fossil Carbon Complex owns most of society's energy generation, distribution and infrastructure, and still receives annual taxpayer subsidies of hundreds of billions of dollars. Its political influence is maintained by lavishly-funded PR and advertising, and it is enormous. At the present stage of global society, we see a chronic, ongoing failure to confront and redirect Big Coal and Oil, embodied in the failure of the Copenhagen Climate Conference in December, 2009.

How has such a dangerous existential and inter-generational challenge come about? Can we transform energy systems and energy use rapidly enough to avoid climate chaos? Are we to be so comprehensively deceived that we destroy our climate, agriculture and civilization for the short-term profit of some dominant business corporations?

Mainstream media coverage of current events is contaminated by PR disinformation, funded and relentlessly pushed by the wealth of the Fossil Carbon Complex. Its aim is to manufacture doubt about climate science, conceal the causative role of fossil fuels in global warming and reinforce our addictive relationship to oil and coal. The power of this "permanent PR campaign" is so great that many people have abandoned reason and science, choosing to "believe" there is no problem to address. But climate change, like gravity, is a scientific fact. One does not change gravity by not believing in it.

The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

Challenging the prevailing wisdom that the goal of economies should be unlimited growth, McKibben (The End of Nature) argues that the world doesn't have enough natural resources to sustain endless economic expansion. For example, if the Chinese owned cars in the same numbers as Americans, there would be 1.1 billion more vehicles on the road-untenable in a world that is rapidly running out of oil and clean air. Drawing the phrase "deep economy" from the expression "deep ecology," a term environmentalists use to signify new ways of thinking about the environment, he suggests we need to explore new economic ideas. Rather then promoting accelerated cycles of economic expansion-a mindset that has brought the world to the brink of environmental disaster-we should concentrate on creating localized economies: community-scale power systems instead of huge centralized power plants; cohousing communities instead of sprawling suburbs. He gives examples of promising ventures of this type, such as a community-supported farm in Vermont and a community biosphere reserve, or large national park-like area, in Himalayan India, but some of the ideas-local currencies as supplements to national money, for example-seem overly optimistic. Nevertheless, McKibben's proposals for new, less growth-centered ways of thinking about economics are intriguing, and offer hope that change is possible.

We May Live to See Another Day After All

2010 is a remarkable year. There is a groundswell of initiatives underway to address the climate change crisis from advocates and grassroots movements, but also from companies, industry and government agencies that should be making you smile, at least just a little bit.
2009 was the year of doom and gloom. The recession created doubt in the stability of the global economy. The cause of the recession was after all the unchecked pursuit of profit of a few men of power working behind the scenes, aided by a system that put profits ahead of any other consideration. And while we all knew Obama’s arrival at the White House was the best thing to help put prestige back to the US on the world scene, we saw little commitment and support to the pressing environmental issues of the day. Witness Copenhagen’s failure.
But Copenhagen did not fail ultimately. There has been a subtle but permanent change in our society, worldwide. Green has become an operative word, one that lends direction to strategic planning. Companies are asking themselves where they fit in and taking action. Mayors are working with their constituents to offer local food, farming and composting programs. Industry is pondering its future and trying to green its image, through means other than green washing. The EPA is considering dumb-proof labels for fuel-efficient cars.
But most significantly, green has become mainstream. We want green products, we watch green shows, we read about green lifestyles, we take commitments to be greener, eat less meat… I’m not know for my optimism, but in this case, I’ll make an exception. It seems we have gone from little hope for global societal change in 2009 to a concerted movement for progressive, but far-reaching, green action.
It’s about time, given this year’s droughts, floods and fires. The question now is: Can we keep it up, and can we change fast enough?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbtp2B-IFmw&feature=related

Eco Talks

The Ecology of Business

WHAT IS BIOMIMICRY?

==================================

Natural Architecture

Business Life Cycle

Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Toxic Cleaning Products, Environmental Pollution, and Negative Externalities

Shifting the Burden by Flemming Funch

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------