WorldChanging Canada

Local Food Plus: A Model for Food Citizenship in North America

2009-11-22T07:59:11Z

This article was written by Kathryn Cooper in December 2008. This month, along with our regular fare, we're showcasing some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

The price we pay at the grocery store is not the true cost of our food. Our food systems allow many major costs to be externalized. These externalities include transportation, soil degradation, irrigation-related groundwater depletion, and pesticide and fertilizer misuse. This means that eventually, taxpayers foot the bill for these, without ever making the connection between faux food policy and its social and environmental tolls.

According to the Worldwatch Institute, the value of global trade in food has tripled since 1961, and the tonnage of food shipped between nations has grown fourfold, while population has only doubled. In North America food typically travels between 1,500 and 2,500 miles from farm to plate, as much as 25 percent farther than in 1980. Cheap oil, subsidies, corporate consolidation and technical innovations have tipped the balance in favour of large scale production agriculture. Many people argue that there is no alternative for our rapidly expanding global population.

A new non-profit certification program called Local Food Plus (LFP) is now helping shoppers separate sustainably grown apples, canned tomatoes, eggs, milk and meat from mass-produced, processed imports. According to Rod MacRae (agricultural consultant and Professor at the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University), Local Food Plus is dedicated to rebuilding local, sustainable, supply chains from farmer to consumer. This is done by introducing farmers who produce locally grown, sustainable foods to the food processors, supermarkets and food service companies operating at universities and in cities.

This local food concept got its start with the Toronto Food Policy Council, an organization that brings agriculture into municipal politics. Local Food Plus founder Lori Stahlbrand, formerly a consultant for the World Wildlife Fund, was originally inspired by a number of U.S. and European projects, including the Food Alliance’s approach to sustainable agriculture and food practices. The Food Alliance program, which has been around for more than 10 years, certifies agriculture and processing facilities for labor, animal welfare and the environment.

Local Food Plus has expanded on this model by adding energy and proximity to the list of sustainability requirements. LFP-branded products have a responsible backstory involving production, processing and transportation practices that respect biodiversity; fair and safe labour practices, humane animal husbandry, and conservation of water and soil. The producers are also working to eliminate or reduce synthetic pesticides, fertilizers, hormones, antibiotics, and genetic engineering. Today it is possible to find sustainably and locally grown produce, meat, grains, eggs and milk in a number of local grocery stores, restaurants and institutions. The program has the flexibility to accommodate a fuller range of sustainable production practices than the organic standard. Some LFP farmers and processors are certified organic, but many are not.

Third-party certification provides a new level of transparency and accountability beyond what the government and the marketplace currently provide. LFP's research shows that branded products command up to a 10 percent product premium. The decreased input, transportation and packaging expenses keep the consumer price from skyrocketing.

Independent retailers, restaurants and institutional foodservice customers have been the first to sign onto Local Food Plus products. Public institutions like the University of Toronto and the City of Markham have adopted Local Food Plus products as part of their emerging sustainable purchasing policies. Hometown grocers like L & M Foodland (PDF) have also signed on. According to Dale Dropf, vice President of L & M Foods, LFP certification and marketing helps the grocer answer growing consumer demand for "safe, local, sustainable food."

The best part is that LFP is a model transferable to any jurisdiction. It is, for McRae, a type of food citizenship (see PDF), encouraged by a new model of "organizational ecology." Local Food Plus, through its efforts, is helping to re-balance a current market failure. While this program is still in its infancy and is likely to further evolve, LFP represents an interesting potential precursor to a new economic model: one based on values and sustainability.

Kathryn Cooper is a sustainability practitioner and a researcher in sustainability and education at York University, Toronto, Canada.

Web app helps identify idling hot spots

2009-11-21T01:26:08Z

The city of Prince George BC seems to be one of the first Canadian cities to be using SeeClickFix, a free web application that allows citizens to geo-locate problems in their city. Based on IdleFreePhilly, the app is being used to locate places where people most idle their cars: idling hot spots.

The Red Zone

2009-11-19T07:49:04Z

This article was written by Rod Edwards in December 2008. This month, along with our regular fare, we're showcasing some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

A few years ago, I wrote a post about the prairies, their massive scale, and how the challenges facing them mirror their size. Much of the same could be said about the other geographical feature that defines my home province of Manitoba—Lake Winnipeg. “The Lake,” as it is simply referred to, is a home to many thousands, and a totem for thousands more: it represents summer, good times, history and adventure, as well as jobs, industry, and tourism. Its waters, shorelines, and sunsets provide the background of many Manitoban’s family photos—it is a part of our shared mythology, as it has been a part of the First Nations mythology for millennia.

But: the Lake is not without its troubles. The product of glaciation, Lake Winnipeg represents all that remains of the once ocean-sized Lake Agassiz. The slow shrinking since the last ice age has resulted in a lake that is still vast (the fifth largest lake in North America, behind the Great Lakes), but one which has an even vaster watershed. Lake Winnipeg's watershed stretches west to the Rockies, East to the shield along the Manitoba/Ontario border, and south into the Dakotas and Minnesota. It drains almost a million square kilometers of North America. Water flows into the lake through several key rivers (the Saskatchewan, Red, and Winnipeg among them), and out of the lake through only one, in the far north: the Nelson, which flows into Hudson’s Bay.

The problem, of course, lies in what flows in with the water—and the “eutrophication” that results. Eutrophication is the addition of nutrients to an area (a body of water, in this case) that causes an increase in biological activity and resulting secondary effects. In the case of Lake Winnipeg, the nutrients are phosphorous and nitrogen, and the “biological activity” is provided by a host of cyanobacteria (algae) that thrive on them. The algae blooms that result are exacerbated by the lake’s depth: averaging only twelve meters deep, the lake hits bathtub-like temperatures annually, providing an ideal bacterial breeding ground. The secondary effects from the over-population include oxygen depletion and “dead zones,” mephitic, toxic, un-swimmable waters, and shorelines covered in a knee-deep, pulsating, quivering masses of jellied algae.

From: Lake Winnipeg Foundation

In many ways, what’s happening to Lake Winnipeg is not different from what is perhaps the most famous victim of eutrophication, Lake Erie. The “death” of Lake Erie in the 1960s, and its subsequent resurrection in the 1970s, was a huge environmental victory, spurred the passing of the Clean Water Act, and validated of the ability of business, governments, and citizens to work together to achieve environmental goals. While a similar process of phosphorous/nitrogen eutrophication is now at work in Lake Winnipeg, the solutions will be very different. Lake Erie was the victim of pollution from a number of controllable “point sources”—factories and municipal waste water. The sources impacting Lake Winnipeg, in contrast, are diverse and distributed. These sources include run-off from millions of acres of prairie, containing all manner of industry. They span multiple provinces and states, as well as waste water from hundreds of cities and towns.

So—the solution to Lake Winnipeg’s issues is of enormous scope, involving changes across provinces, regions, and countries, as well as industries and homes. Grassroots organizations, businesses, and government are already working together to find solutions. Organizations like the Lake Winnipeg Research Consortium coordinate research between government, corporate, and university labs, and operate a research vessel on the lake. The Lake Winnipeg Foundation, with which I am involved, represents grassroots citizen interests. It organizes awareness raising events, as well as sponsoring research and projects such as the construction of experimental bioremediation sewage lagoons. And, the Manitoba Water Stewardship Department represents the provincial government, conducting research, monitoring, and reporting activities, as well as making policy and enforcing regulations.

From all of these organizations and their members, consensus as to underlying causes is beginning to emerge and solutions are beginning to take shape. There are no simple questions, or answers: Where does the phosphorous come from, for example? Agriculture? Industry? Homes? The Devil’s Lake Diversion? How do phosphorous, nitrogen, and the lake interact to give rise to algae blooms? Can one remove either phosphorous or nitrogen, or is the ratio of the each to the other the key? The answer to each of these questions depends on complex interactions between chemistry, geology, climate, hydrology, industry, and species behaviors that are not yet fully understood. But research is proceeding, and thanks to events like the Lake Winnipeg Foundation and University of Winnipeg’s “Red Zone” conference, the right people are talking to each other. And as that conversation takes place, progress continues to be made: regulations are keeping phosphates out of detergents, sewage treatment plants are being upgraded, and basic research into everything from algae bloom behavior to fertilizer spraying techniques and soil tillage continues.

In this case, a "bright green future" would suggest an algae-choked lake. Instead, I’ll close by saying that thanks to the combined efforts of government, researchers, businesses, and citizens, the future of The Lake is looking brown—the lovely, dull brown of healthy Lake Winnipeg.

Images: Lake Winnipeg Foundation

Walk Score Adds Transit

2009-11-17T06:00:00Z

By Clark Williams-Derry.

Popular walkability ranking now includes bus stops and rail stations.

Walk Score, which has become the most widely-used measure of pedestrian friendly neighborhoods in North America, has added a new trick: they're now incorporating transit data into their walkability ratings. So in addition to stores, restaurants, parks, and the like, Walk Score now treats nearby bus stops and rail stations as key ingredients of a walkable neighborhood.

What makes this extra nifty is that Walk Score has already partnered with a bunch of national real estate websites to incorporate walkability rankings into real estate listings. So now, all those real estate sites will have data on transit access, too.

Sadly, Walk Score's new transit ranking only works in places where transit agencies have made their "transit feeds" -- the data on transit locations and schedules -- freely available to the public. So if you live and walk in Portland, OR, you're in luck. Same goes for a handful of smaller transit agencies around the Northwest -- Island and Jefferson counties in Washington, Tillamook County in OR, and Humboldt County California. But even though King County Metro and Vancouver, BC's Translink publish their transit data for Google's use, their transit feeds are kept private--so third parties like Walk Score can't get access to them.

So the good folks behind Walk Score have set up an online petition to ask local transit agencies to release their transit service data to the public. (I've signed the petition -- and if you care about walkability and transit, you should too!)

This piece originally appeared on Sightline Daily, and appeared on WorldChanging on November 6, 2009.

Image Credit: kworth30 via Flickr, Creative Commons License.

Walk Score | John Lewis
Coming Together: A Nuit Blanche Retrospective | Jon Booren
Have canoe, will cycle: world heritage sustainable commuting | Mark Tovey

Walk Score

2009-11-15T22:51:12Z

This article was written by John Lewis in June 2009. This month, along with our regular fare, we're showcasing some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

Ever wondered what kinds of amenities were in your area but you were too busy driving in your car to really pay attention? A new website might help you figure out how easy it is to use your feet instead of your wheels.

Walk Score is an innovative online tool that allows people to measure “how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle.” The user enters an address and the website provides a score out of 100 ranking an address’s walkability. The Walk Score algorithm calculates the score based on the proximity of amenities like stores, restaurants, schools and parks to the entered address. If you’re in an extremely walkable location, your score will end up in the “Walkers’ Paradise” range, while if you need your car just to get a haircut, you’ll be in the “Car-Dependant (Driving Only)” score range. Much more upbeat than “Walkers’ Hell.”

Walk Score also did an interesting “walkability heat map” analysis on the largest 40 U.S. cities to determine the walkability of these locales. It’s no surprise that at the top of the list were San Francisco, New York, and Boston. The least walking-friendly locales in the analysis were Charlotte, Nashville and Jacksonville. The image below shows the map for San Francisco. Green is walking-friendly; Red is vehicle-dependant.

Walk Score is also a good introduction to the environmental, social, economic and health benefits of walking. The website has a real estate services section that allows realtors to identify the Walk Score of locations as part of the information on the property. Finally, their blog provides some interesting stories and videos on all things walking.

As a self-described urbanite who is focused on location as the primary criteria for my decision on where to live, I was curious to see how my house fared. I live in the Kensington area of Calgary – one of the most walkable inner communities in the city. I scored a 77 out of 100, which puts me in a “very walkable” location. Not bad. It seems I have taken a step backwards from the condo I moved from last year in Calgary’s Beltline, which scores a very respectable 89 out of 100. Either way, in these two locations, I have been able to grab a coffee, get my groceries, rent a movie or most importantly during Calgary’s glorious 4 days of summer, have a choice of multiple locations to enjoy a beer on a patio – all by foot. These are the day-to-day interactions that are most important to have within walking distance as they add up so quickly over time.

While it currently doesn’t include important factors such as community design, topography and public transit, Walk Score provides an interesting perspective on your neighbourhood and the relative level of ease to take advantage of the services and spaces nearby. For those that are inclined to drive, it shows the places where it makes sense to stroll to. For those that already use their feet, it can also highlight some things in your area you didn’t even know about. I just found a coffee shop in the neighbourhood I’m going to have to check out this week.

What’s so interesting about Walk Score is that it puts walking at the forefront. Often, locational discussions are centered on the availability of parking spaces. In all likelihood, the higher the Walk Score a location gets, the worse the parking situation will be. That’s OK, while they easily win the parking discussion, no one ever accused big box stores of being vibrant and interesting.

What is your city, neighbourhood, and Walk Score? Post it below and share the best thing about your area to make it walkable.

Interview with Gregory Greene, Documentary Filmmaker

2009-11-14T18:37:49Z

Gregory Greene is a documentary filmmaker based in Toronto, who directed "The End of Suburbia" and "Escape from Suburbia". (Interview transcribed by Najam Tirmizi).

Hassan Masum: What motivates you personally to spend your time making films?

Gregory Greene: When we first started doing “The End of Suburbia” back in May 2003, I lacked a focus. I’d been shooting travel shows and documentaries on a variety of different subjects, but I always felt that I hadn’t found my true path. When we first started doing “The End of Suburbia”, I really felt it resonate.

I had always been into ecology since I was in university, but peak oil brought all of these things into sharper focus, and actually gave us a timeline, and a real sense of immediacy that, at least for me, climate change as a motivator never really did. It does for other people, but never really did for me. It sort of got lost in a bunch of different issues, and mixed around.

And the fact that we were the first film to start exploring peak oil in any depth - being involved in that first iteration of it made me more interested, and kept bringing me in deeper and deeper. So my motivation is just a constant fascination with going deeper, and trying to figure out how we’re going to get through it.

]]> HM: Now, a lot of people have these ideas in their mind, but few people actually make the step from thought to action. So what actually made you take action and make the movies?

GG: Well, the first one... I mean, it just happened. The first documentary just happened. I collaborated with another fellow who is an editor, I was a director-cameraman, and so we just came together and we did it. It took about a year, and we were looking for a producer and we were looking for a broadcaster, and everybody kept saying to us, “What’s the answer? You’ve presented the problem; what’s the answer?” We kept saying, “Well, there is no answer!” I mean, there’s different answers, but there’s no one answer.

We stayed very independent. And I think being independent kept it fresh for us, and keeping it fresh keeps you motivated to go on to the next documentary, because you haven’t been trampled down by executive producers, or by bureaucrats, or whatever. So having the freedom to keep exploring and going in the direction you want to go kept motivating us to do the first film, and the second film, and now the third film.

HM: What has your biggest challenge been?

GG: The biggest challenge for me has been to keep positively focused in the moments of greatest need - mostly financial. Lacking the resources to do all the different things you need to do to make a large documentary. It sounds cliché, but it really is the biggest hurdle for us. I’ve got lots of energy and lots of ideas and I just want to keep going and going and going, and you keep hitting these walls, where you just don’t have the resources to do it. So, yeah, I guess the answer to that must be money. [Laughs.]

HM: [Laughs.] Like so many of us.

GG: Yeah, there’s no difference between me, in that sense, and just about anybody else who’s trying to do this stuff.

HM: What are your thoughts on the explosion of documentary-like short videos online these days? I’m thinking of things like "The Story of Stuff" and so forth. Those have had huge reach, in the range of millions in some cases. Obviously the cost is much less. So, is there a route there to help people overcome the cost barrier?

GG: Yeah, I think making short docs and short little clips is both more cost-effective, and in the age of ADD, it’s where people’s attention spans are. We’re actually basing our online component for the new project on short clips, but we’re going to be mounting it in an open source environment...so anybody can go onto it, download the clips, or edit them together on our site. So we’re going to be able to create a site for mostly young people to create their own short videos, based on our media and media that other people upload.

HM: Choose-your-own-story kind of thing.

GG: Create your own story!

HM: Fantastic! What kind of options are there for people to take action based on your film? In other words, in the ideal case, what would you most want people to do after watching your film?

GG: I think right now, the most ideal thing watching any of the first two films would be to join a transition town group. Transition town groups are just growing so quickly - I’m not sure what the secrets of their success are, but I’m going to be exploring that, so I could hopefully answer that in the next film. But I think getting involved in the transition town movement, and bringing in new people - especially people who don’t identify traditionally with the green movement.

HM: What has the experience of meeting all of these people who are front-runners or pioneers or experimenters been like at a personal level?

GG: At a certain point, when I was getting the third documentary started, I realized that somehow over the last six years I’d met, not everybody, but almost everybody - and people that I hadn’t met yet, there were people eager to introduce me to those people. So that was quite a momentary revelation, and that’s hugely exciting, and inspiring.

HM: One content question: If you think about the film itself, there are a lot of local-scale ideas in there, things like food gardens and so forth. There’s also some degree of discussion of larger-scale issues; things like economic resilience, tax shifts, and so forth. What do you see as being the key actions required to take the local ideas to scale?

GG: This is the subject of our third film, “Resilient City”. It’s to take all of these very small, quaint, bucolic ideas and see if we can create a new sort of urban avant-garde with that, that can help start to prepare cities for the effects of resource depletion, and climate change, and the real elephant in the room is urban migration, in the next few years.

I think two billion people are set to move into cities in the next thirty-odd years. Can we create waste systems that are closed-loop, and don’t damage our bio-region? Can cities and bio-regions grow a majority of their own food? Can we create distributed energy, so that when parts of the grid go down like they did in 2003, we can keep the lights on, and keep things powered up? Can we create transit-oriented development in our cities fast enough to deal with the population influx and again, the concomitant decline in resources?

HM: If you actually plan to talk about entire cities making these changes, you are obviously going to have to build coalitions of quite diverse partners. Diverse in all kinds of ways. Ethnically, diverse class-wise, economically and so forth, so... Let me just push you a little bit, because to make a movie, and have people come to the movie, and talk about it afterwards, that’s an easy step. How will you personally become part of the coalition that actually pushes people to make change, or acquires actual investment to build change?

GG: This is a really weird thing that happened to me after we released “The End of Suburbia”. It became the best-selling Canadian independent documentary ever. Two guys in a basement spent eight thousand dollars to make the doc, and...

HM: Eight thousand dollars!

GG: Eight thousand bucks.

HM: Wow.

GG: It was more by the end of the time, but the actual cash to make the documentary initially was eight thousand dollars. We were funded by Visa and Mastercard, as we’d joke about it.

I used that success of our first documentary. It started to open up networks, which is what we used to shoot “Escape from Suburbia”, and create discussions or participate in discussions around the media that we’d created. We want to do the same with the third film, but we want to do it a bit more proactively. We want to use the promise of us shooting a documentary on transition towns to start more transition towns, because everybody wants to be on TV. [Laughs.]

So the prospect of actually being in the official story of this activist movement that is becoming global very, very quickly, and being in the middle of that by virtue of the fact that we’ve created the documentaries that have really helped that movement to grow - we hope to push it. We hope to actually help set the agenda a bit.

For me, it’s sort of reaching out into parts of the community that white, middle-class green people aren’t thinking about enough. We have to think about social justice. We have to think about economic justice. And I know green people think about that all the time, but when I point out at a lot of green meetings that “Everybody is white, middle-class, and has anybody noticed that?”, everybody looks around and they’re all kind of surprised, in a pleasant way, but... that and a few other things that I hope we can influence in not only the distribution of our documentary, but in the creation and the telling of that story.

In Toronto, I pushed a couple of people that I know, talking about the transition town movement, and now they’re starting a transition town. I started talking with friends of mine in Ohio and said I was interested in shooting a documentary, and now each of those friends are with a bunch of other people, starting transition groups in Ohio. So I’m in a really privileged place of being in the middle of a lot of the really influential people in the movement, if you want to call it that. I want to keep pushing those people to start transition groups.

I think that’s not a direct answer to your question, because that’s still the easy part, and still part of the making of our own documentaries about this. I think the tough part is going to be when... At least for me, over the next few years involved in transition groups, it’s to try to bring people together and keep them together.

The one thing I learned after “Escape from Suburbia” is that the democratic movement is by nature democratic, so it’s very fractious, and people don’t listen to each other very well sometimes. So I hope I can rise to that challenge of being a bit of a diplomat - helping people to hear each other, and listen to each other, and work together. And I think being a media worker, it’s easier, because I’m not trying to set any particular agenda, or I’m not seen as doing that. I’m seen as a storyteller, telling their story. I don’t know if people put more faith in me that way or trust me more, but it’s a privileged position that can be used to help people succeed and keep groups together, and...

HM: It sounds like you’re acting as a real catalyst.

GG: That’s the word. I hope that that’s exactly what we do. Our documentaries have acted as a catalyst, and no one’s been more surprised at how that panned out than we are. We never thought that this would become what it’s become.

Yeah, I hope with the third film we could be a catalyst on a global level, and reach out beyond the sort of green, white, middle-class groups and start to bring more people in - because that’s the story we want to tell.

HM: Greg, thanks so much!

Random Hacks of Kindness

2009-11-13T22:23:01Z

An event currently underway in Mountain View, California, brings coders together with experts in disaster relief for a three day code-jam. The problem definitions, use-cases, and descriptions of proposed apps make for fascinating reading. This is a model worth watching that could be replicated in other domains.

Oil 101

2009-11-13T12:00:00Z

By Milan Ilnyckyj.

Written essentially in the style of a textbook, Morgan Downey’s Oil 101 moves systematically through the major areas of knowledge required for a basic understanding of the global petroleum industry. These include:

The history of oil use, including predictions about the future
The chemistry of crude oil
Exploration for and production of oil
Refining
Petrochemicals
Transporting oil
Storing oil
Seasonal demand variation, pricing, and oil markets

Downey covers each in a clear and informative manner, though he sometimes delves into a greater level of detail than most amateurs will prefer. For instance, some of the forays into chemistry are at a level of sophistication well above what casual readers are likely to retain. That said, the book is laid out in a highly structured way, so it is easy to gloss over technical portions without losing track of the overall structure of the text.

One thing the book strongly demonstrates is the enormous amount of expertise and capital that have been developed within the petroleum industry. For instance, the section on how offshore oil platforms are constructed and operated shows what an astonishing number of things can be executed deep underground, from a steel platform above the ocean’s surface: everything from horizontal and vertical drilling to the assembly of steel pipes (cemented in place), the use of explosives, the installation of automatic or remote-controlled valves, the injection of acids and chemicals, etc. The discussion of refining and transport technologies and infrastructure is similarly demonstrative of sustained investment and innovation. While it is regrettable that all of this effort has been put into an industry that is so climatically harmful, it does suggest that humanity has a great many physical and intellectual resources to bring to bear on the problem of finding energy. As more and more of those are directed towards the development of renewable energy options, we have reason to hope that those technologies will improve substantially.

The final portion of the book, about oil prices and forward oil markets, was the least interesting for me, as it deals with complex financial instruments rather than matters of chemistry, geology, etc. Still, for those who are seeking to understand how oil prices are established, as well as what sorts of financial instruments exist that relate to hydrocarbons, these chapters may be useful. Downey does provide some practical advice to those whose organizations (companies, countries, etc) are exposed to changes in oil markets: “The decision not to hedge [Buy financial products that reduce your exposure to a risk of major price changes] should be an active decision. Management should clearly inform investors why they decide to face the full volatility of the oil market when they have an opportunity to manage the risk.” Managing such risks on an individual level has been discussed here before.

All told, this book is well worth reading for all those who are curious about the energy basis for global civilization, why it is established the way it is, and some of the key factors that will determine which way it goes. Downey is a low-key proponent of the peak oil theory. He argues that reserves, especially in OPEC, are inflated and that a peak and bell-shaped drop-off in production are inevitable: probably between 2005 and 2015, provided depletion occurs globally at about the same rate as it did in the United States following their peak in 1970. For those hoping to grasp the implications of that projection, as well as those hoping to plan for a world based on other forms of energy, the information contained in this book is both valuable and well-presented.

Article copyright Milan Ilnyckyj. sindark.com.

Some WorldChanging Canada articles related to oil include:

Mapping US Oil Imports Over Time | Garry Peterson
Gauging 21st Century Environmentalism | Simon Donner
WorldChanging Canada Interview with Lester Brown | Mark Tovey

Europe offers 95% by 2050

2009-11-12T17:00:00Z

There's an exciting deal on the table leading up to Copenhagen. Europe has offered 95% GHG cuts by 2050, and 30% cuts by 2020 if other countries sign up for similar targets at Copenhagen.

Stemming the tide of greenwashing

2009-11-12T14:18:00Z

This article was written by Peter ter Weeme in May 2008. We were delighted when this article was re-published in a B.C. textbook as a way to teach high-school students environmental and media literacy. This month, along with our regular fare, we're showcasing some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

This past week, I was again struck at all of the attention the media is placing on all things “green”. Green really is the new black (though have you noticed that lots of companies are now touting blue as the new green?).

I don’t know about you, but some days I feel like I’m drowning in a green tsunami that’s engulfing the world. With Earth Day behind us, I had hoped for a break from more waves of environmental cheerleading. Not so. Companies continue to rush in with green claims.

The media is taking notice. On one day this past weekend, I read three articles in three different newspapers about greenwashing. In one of those articles in the Boston Globe, the reporter, Beth Daley, recounts how the Chevy Tahoe was recently named the "Green Car of the Year." This for a vehicle that gets 20 miles per gallon!

The irony of this award is not lost on others. Daley quotes David Champion, director of Consumer Reports’ Auto Test Division as saying, “How a 6,000-pound behemoth can be the green car of the year is beyond me. It's a marketing exercise rather than reality."

To add fuel to the fire, many of you will have heard about a recent study by TerraChoice Environmental Marketing called the Six Sins of Greenwashing. In that study, TerraChoice reports that all but one of the environmental claims being made on more than 1,000 reviewed products were either false or misleading.

Some of those claims were most likely stretching the truth on purpose. However, others were simply the product of uninformed or naïve and overenthusiastic marketers. But, lest you despair that all of this’ll go unchecked, there’s lots going on to wrestle greenwashing to the ground.

For example, new online watchdogs like www.greenwashingindex.com draw attention to the most egregious greenwashers. As well, if you want a website that delivers the straight goods on (primarily) British companies, George Monbiot’s Turn up the Heat does an admirable job.

Governments are also stepping up to address greenwashing with some urgency. The Canadian, US, UK and Australian governments have all fast-tracked efforts to address false environmental claims within the past six months. New regulations are on the horizon.

To complement this work. on June 5, the Canadian Centre for Policy Ingenuity and a Vancouver-based company called Big Room are convening an influential group of Canadian leaders from the advertising, public relations, non-governmental, and environmental standards sectors. The goal of this half-day session is to build an understanding of the current “eco-marketing” landscape and begin exploring a common set of principles that will guide the industry on appropriate green product claims.

For those who are more discerning, along with websites, there are a range of product verification marks—respected eco-labels such as EnergyStar, the Forest Stewardship Council FSC mark and the USDA “organic” logo. Those marks can help you make more informed choices.

But how can you trust these ecolabels to have integrity? The old adage of “buyer beware” continues to be as relevant as always. It’s up to you to do the research and identify the ecolabels you can trust.

To help you with that, the folks at Big Room provide another great resource with their www.ecolabelling.org website, a global, independent database of ecolabels. The site profiles and categorizes more than 400 of them, dozens I never knew existed. Plus, Big Room has more plans to really make the site the indispensable resource on ecolabels. If they can help us compare “apples to apples”, they’ll have a winner.

In the meantime, it’s good to have a healthy dose of skepticism, access to the Internet and other people in your life you can trust. Jointly, those tools will help you avoid being misled on your good intentions.

Front page photo credit: Benjamin Dudoit

For more on greenwashing, see:

Green Leadership Overcomes Greenwashing | Kathryn Cooper
The Missing Link | Jordy Gold
Selling Sustainability the Mr. Clean Way | Chris Turner

Edmonton prepares urban forest plan

2009-11-11T17:00:00Z

With inspiration from the one-tree-per-child model in Calgary (which now has half a million trees under its management), Edmonton is preparing an urban forest plan to manage its "green infrastructure", citing the many services trees provide.

New Resource: The Living Planet City

2009-11-11T09:50:00Z

By Christa Morris.

“Welcome to the Living Planet. It’s clean, it’s efficient — and it’s doable. Today.” This blurb appears on the front page of WWF Canada’s new website, the Living Planet City, which launched in September. The Living Planet City’s bright animation of thriving urbanism (pictured right, in a screen shot) illustrates 20 big ideas to make any city more sustainable.

In the “west end,” a combined heat and power plant uses “waste” heat energy to provide chilled water for a nearby supermarket. In the “east end,” a municipal waste station feeds into a biofuel plant, complete with solar, green roofs on top. At the waterfront, wave, tidal and wind energy power the city while a rapid transit station ferries people back and forth: all this with plenty of park space.

Clicking around brings up summaries of the technology and provides links to learn more. Once properly informed and inspired, visitors are encouraged to get the ideas out there by sending a link to elected officials, friends, and business owners. You can even send a suggested message to your slated Copenhagen representative.

Good start! But is it good enough?

Maybe, maybe not. Take away the windmills, dull the colors, and it looks just like my pollution-steeped hometown. On one hand, it’s important that WWF wants to promote the Living Planet City as “doable,” suggesting that every city, without changing drastically in function or appearance, can be sustainable and clean. Normal city-dwellers can get behind it, and that is the point.

On the other hand, the Living Planet City could be bigger, bolder, and more beautiful. For instance, although promoting EVs, the cityscape is still a maze of roads. Where are the bike lanes? Where are the inner-city walking-only zones? With 350 ppm as our goal, we have to completely re-imagine our way of life, not simply find alternative ways to power our current one.

As one of the first people on the comment board pointed out, there's no single right answer out there. Toronto is a whole lot different than Copenhagen, the commenter says, and so its future of sustainability will look a whole lot different, and maybe include more cars. How do you adapt and perfect a Living Planet City when there are so many varying starting points, and thus, varying challenges? One solution would be to make the city as interactive as its sister site, “the Living Planet Community.”

In the Living Planet Community, you can commit to any number of thousands of climate-friendly actions or add your own, and the site will calculate the GHG reduction you achieve. You can even create groups—of friends, coworkers, or strangers—and set a goal for GHG reduction while engaging in planet-friendly competition.

Why not merge this community and the city? Why not provide a menu of tools, such as wind farms, solar panels, green roofs and bike-sharing programs with which you can remodel your own city? Why not allow users to add their own tools, such as third-place studios or greywater systems? Why not take it further, with a sustainable Sim City-esque program, where, after creating your city, you get realistic feedback on its CO2 output? A well-designed simulation could train leaders (and future leaders) to see the changes necessary to achieve emissions reduction goals in their unique cities.

The Living Planet City is a great idea that will no doubt serve to spread knowledge and inspiration, and for this reason, WorldChanging applauds WWF Canada: it’s only a matter of taking a great idea to its full potential.

This article by Christa Morris originally appeared on WorldChanging on September 4, 2009.

Learn more about sustainable cities in the WorldChanging Canada archives:

City Changing: Re-mixing Built Environments | Madeline Ashby
Toronto's Tower Renewal | Madeline Ashby
Walk Score | John Lewis
Vancouver Makes Bright Green Future its Official Goal | Julia Levitt
Localizing Roadmaps | Mark Tovey
Sustainable Sanitary Sewer for Victoria | Mike Thomas

Alex Steffen at Town Hall Seattle Nov 11 & 12

2009-11-11T04:34:49Z

Greeting Worldchangers,

Our two night event at Town Hall Seattle starts tomorrow! We are thrilled to invite you to Town Hall’s Center for Civic Life for an evening with Alex Steffen, Seattle City Council President Richard Conlin, Seattle Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn and the Worldchanging Team.

Each night, the doors will open at 6:30 pm. Come early and come hungry as Seattle's street food perfectionists from Skillet will be serving up delicious pre-talk snacks outside Town Hall. After a bite to eat, head inside to visit with other worldchangers and our fantastic sponsors: The American Institute of Architects, The Bullitt Foundation, Climate Solutions, The Community Coalition for Environmental Justice, The Fremont Brewing Company, Greendrinks, Groundwire, PubliCola, People’s Parking Lot, Three Degrees, Undriving, Urban Land Army, Seattle Tilth, The Sierra Club, Sightline, Sustainable Industries and Sustainable Seattle.

At 7:30 pm, Alex will give a 90 minute talk about the planetary challenges we face and cutting edge ideas about bright green solutions, sustainability and urban innovation. Night One features thoughts on our global future, while Night Two focuses on opportunities for Seattle. Tickets are $5 and are going fast. Details and links for purchasing are below. We strongly encourage you to purchase tickets in advance if you want to be sure of a seat.

After Alex's second talk on Thursday night, join other Worldchangers in the Town Hall lobby for great conversations, networking and delicious beer from the artisan brewers at The Fremont Brewing Company.

Good food, great drinks, inspiring people and provocative thinking -- all in one place! We are so excited about this event, and hope to see you there. The talks will also be recorded by KUOW-FM (NPR) and the Seattle Channel for broadcast on radio and television, and are being shot by a documentary film crew, who will be releasing the edited video as podcasts, so even if you're going to miss the events themselves you will have some chance to hear what Alex has to say.

Thanks,
The Worldchanging Team

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Alex Steffen: Building a Planet with a Future
A two-night talk presented by Town Hall’s Center for Civic Life, 11/11 and 11/12

A New Global Future - Night One - Alex Steffen, introduced by Richard Conlin

Nine billion people on a straining planet is a recipe either for catastrophe or transformation. Which future we get - tragic disaster or sustainable prosperity - will depend largely on the choices we here in the developed world make. What is possible for billions of people rising out of poverty will be determined largely by the shape of the economy we create in places like Seattle. How do we understand what a bright green future looks like and how do we propel our region toward it? This first night will explore the breakthroughs in renewable energy, green building, clean technology, smart infrastructure and sustainable design that can enable the Pacific Northwest to not only help lead the planet away from catastrophe, but also to become an economic power house.

Seattle's Bright Green Moment - Night Two - Alex Steffen, introduced by Mayor-Elect Mike McGinn

Cities are the engines of a bright green economy. A new urban way of life is emerging that is not only ecologically frugal, but wealthier, healthier, and more enjoyable. At the same time, smart cities are becoming the hothouses of sustainable innovation, growing the designs, technologies, policies, and start up companies that will thrive in the new global economy. Learn how leading urban regions like London, Copenhagen, Melbourne and Seoul are scrambling to rebuild themselves on bright green lines in order to lead in the economy of tomorrow. Join the conversation on how we can use cutting edge practices such as innovation networks, metropolitan coalitions, and government 2.0 to break through the logjams blocking Seattle's progress to build a more vital, sustainable and prosperous home.

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Tickets are $5.00
Click here to purchase tickets for the 11th, here to purchase tickets for the 12th.

Both talks will be in the Great Hall at Town Hall Seattle, and start 7:30 p.m. (doors at 6:30 p.m.). Each talk is 90 minutes, no intermission. Presented by Town Hall’s Center for Civic Life.

Image credit: Mikael at Copenhagenize.com

Citizens' Assemblies: Wise Democracy from the Minipublic

2009-11-10T10:54:00Z

This article was written by Jason Diceman in September 2008. This month, along with our regular fare, we'll showcase some of our best, in celebration of three years of WorldChanging Canada.

Politicians should take note; there is a new answer to some of the toughest questions of our times. When presented with an issue with no obvious popular and sensible solution, or a situation where a legislature is unable to make progress on an important topic, 100 random citizens can be called on to solve the political puzzle, as they did in the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Ontario (my home province).

Following the 2001 election, the newly elected premier of BC followed through on a promise to create a citizens' assembly to consider changes to the provincial electoral system. In 2006 the Ontario government followed suit as part of their democratic renewal efforts. Both citizens' assembly projects followed an innovative model designed by former BC politician, Gordon Gibson, and were given a clear and independent mandate by an all party committee.

Each assembly process began with tens of thousands of written invitations sent out to random citizens all across the province. Through several stages of positive responses and further lottery selection, the members of the assembly were narrowed down to 158 in BC and 103 in Ontario. Members came from every electoral riding. Their ranks included equal numbers of women and men, and spanned the demographic spectrum in rough similarity with census data. While not absolutely perfect, this was a more representative sample of folks than I have ever seen at any town meeting or campaign rally.

Central to the citizens' assembly model is the learning phase. In Ontario and BC, members spent six weekends learning about the topic from panels of experts, custom educational materials, and a staff of adult educators selected and trained to present a range of perspectives in a way that avoids biasing the process. By the end of this learning phase these assorted bus drivers, home makers, blue-collar managers and school teachers were able to debate election reform at a Masters level.

Following this learning phase, the assembly members took part in a series of public meetings and opportunities for comment from the public, giving members a greater understanding of the varied views and opinions within the population.

Finally each assembly went through an exhaustive six weeks of facilitated consensus driven deliberations and structured decision-making. Members talked in small groups and large groups, debated, researched, weighed options, heard concerns and voted step-by-step through each of the key decisions required to find a common answer. In the end both BC and Ontario citizens' assemblies ended with over 90% of their members voting in favour of a common final recommendation. As the third party evaluations and academic reviews have come to prove, these staggering majorities were not the result of charismatic manipulation, authoritative coercion, or exhausted frustration. These results represent over 100 random people approaching full agreement on an open ended question—on an issue as complex as election reform. This was achieved by a thorough understanding of the options and respectful discussion with the stated goal of seeking the best solution that would be in accord with the commonly recognized values of the people. This was an example of the wise and practical democracy most of us assume is impossible. As Gordon Gibson expressed it "For someone with a faith in democracy, this was like seeing God."

To put this demonstrated model of the citizens' assembly into context let's quickly look at some more traditional methods of hearing the 'voice of the people' on public policy:

Elections: Candidates often win less then 50% of the votes cast, (but still more than their multiple competitors). Voters are generally poorly informed by combative media campaigns and are unable to recall much detail about the policy positions of their favourite candidates. Once elected, politicians are driven by short term public perceptions and party rivalry in order to secure a re-election.

Expert Panels: In formal committees, politicians and government bureaucrats are informed by select experts. The members of these committees are often well informed about their subject matter, but without any necessary grasp of public values. The selection of experts may bias the advice.

Opinion Polls: These telephone surveys are a result of top of mind reactions to yesterdayís sound bites and newspaper headlines. They superficially reflect public values, but without the educated, deliberated, and reasoned conclusions one would want to steer a society by.

Focus Groups: Focus groups typically have a small number of people at the table who are usually not informed about the issue at hand. Depending on the facilitation, focus groups may yield results that are uninformative, and not highly representative of the values of the population as a whole.

Town Halls & Hearings: Comments from the floor in a public hall have always been abused by the loudest and most charismatic speakers who are first to speak their complaints and accusations to the room. While iconic of our early democracy, the self-selected public speakers who tend to participate are often driven by personal or interest group agendas and are quickly situated in Us-VS-Them debates. These are not well informed, representative, or consensus-driven events.

In comparison, the citizens' assembly model is what deliberative democracy theorist Archon Fung calls a "minipublic," that is "...an educative forum that aims to create nearly ideal conditions for citizens to form, articulate, and refine opinions about particular public issues through conversations with one another." It is one of few processes where the shared values of the public are directly applied to policy recommendations, rather than guessed or assumed by privileged individuals—sometimes with their own agenda. That said, the citizens' assembly model it is not a perfect system. It is susceptible to manipulation or corruption by incompetent staff, or can be directed by a biased chair, possibly appointed for political reasons. According to the third party evaluations, this was not the case in Ontario or BC.

Both the BC and Ontario Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform ended with referendums (similar to U.S. ballot initiatives) that were carried out as an addendum to the provincial elections. That is, the thoroughly debated, close-to-consensus recommendation of over 100 random citizens (who had been highly educated on the topic at hand), was subject to 60% approval by a general public that was overwhelmingly uninterested and uninformed about the subject matter. In BC the proposal won 57.7% of the votes, but did not pass the 60% threshold required. In Ontario the proposal only received 37% support. One theory for the difference between the two is the much higher level of media coverage of the citizens' assembly process that occurred in BC, i.e. the more people learn about the citizens' assembly process, the more likely they are to support its recommendation. In any case, referendums are dependent on expensive media campaigns and commercial news coverage with often trivial, controversy seeking, and superficial rhetoric. Without a complete overhaul of the media system, like public opinion polls, referendums are not appropriate mechanisms for wise policy decisions. In short, the citizens' assembly model works to produce useful recommendations to government and like any legislative commission or committee, should not be required to pass a referendum.

Beyond these two Citizens' Assemblies on Electoral Reform, Canadians have and continue to use similar random selection, educated and deliberative citizen panels to inform various government decisions, such as the newly starting Ontario Public Drug Programs Citizens' Council, the ongoing independent Canada's World project, or some of the many citizen dialogues conducted by the Canadian Policy Research Networks. Based in Toronto, a young firm called Mass LBP is aiming to make a business out of citizens'-assembly-inspired public consultation.

Internationally, many governments and non-government organizations have conducted similar processes under many different names: Consensus Conferences, Study Circles, Planning Cells, National Issues Forums, 21st Century Town Halls, Citizen Juries, and Citizen Panels (among others). Each model varies in the number of members, the amount of time given to education and deliberation, and the facilitation process, but as Matt Leighninger of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium suggested at the BC When Citizens Decide conference, "We should avoid 'modelitis' that focuses on the difference between models rather than the similarities. The larger context is more important then the specifics of the model." That larger context most importantly includes the political will of the government to listen to recommendations from its citizens.

Looking to 2009, we will see elections in Canada, the Unites States of America, Germany, Mexico, India, Japan and over 50 other counties. These politicians will all be facing such challenging issues as climate change, public education reform, strains on health care, improving child care, supporting minority rights, addressing aboriginal land claims, fresh water protection, demographic shifts, sustainability and development. When looking for direction on such complex issues, there will be many that seek advice from business leaders and experts, some that carry out traditional consultations with the usual suspects, but only a courageous few that will take the political risk to champion citizens' assembly like process that will have actual influence based on the deliberation of informed random citizens. These few pioneers will be the examples for future democratic leaders and we should give them our support.

You can learn more about deliberative democracy processes at the National Coalition for Dialogue & Deliberation's Learning Exchange.

Jason Diceman is a stakeholder engagement consultant with LURA Consulting and author of the popular Dotmocracy Handbook for large group decision-making.

Policy from the People | Jason Diceman
Coalition and Parliamentary Democracy | Dominic Rossi
Dotmocracy in Venezuela | Karl Schroeder

Climate science and policy-making

2009-11-09T09:27:00Z

By Milan Ilnyckyj.

I wrote the following to serve as a one-page introduction, laying out some of the key items for consideration and listing some of the most accessible and reputable sources of information about climate change. For more information on specific subjects, see my climate change index.

The key elements of the general climate science and policy consensus are:

On average, the planet is warming.
Most of this is because of human emissions of greenhouse gasses.
Continued warming would be harmful, and perhaps very risky when it comes to human welfare and prosperity.
By most accounts, the cost of mitigation is less than the cost of adaptation. Some anticipated changes may overwhelm the capacity of human and natural systems to adapt.

While there is a public perception that there is a lot of scientific disagreement about the fundamentals of climate science, this really is not the case. Back in 2004, a survey of peer-reviewed work on climate science demonstrated this. There is also a notable joint statement from the national science academies of the G8, Brazil, China, and India.

1) Climatic science and history

There are some good primers available from reputable organizations online. For instance, the United Kingdom’s Met Office has a quick guide.

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the most authoritative review of the scientific work that has been done on climate change. The summary for policy-makers for the synthesis report is available online.

For detailed information on the physical science of climate change, the technical summary of the IPCC’s Working Group I report is a good resource. Unlike the summaries for policy-makers, which are vetted though a quasi-political process, the technical summaries are prepared exclusively by scientists.

For Canadians who want to read one book about climate science and policy, I recommend University of Victoria Professor Andrew Weaver’s book: Keeping Our Cool: Canada in a Warming World.

For those looking for a concise history of the entire development of climatic science, starting in the late 1800s, I very much recommend Spencer Weart’s The Discovery of Global Warming. In addition to the book form, it is available free online.

For a more specific history of what we have learned about climate from ice core samples, see Richard Alley’s The Two Mile Time Machine. For an excellent (though somewhat technical) discussion of the relationships between the carbon cycle and biological organisms, see Oliver Morton’s Eating the Sun.

2) Climate change mitigation

Ultimately, the only way to keep the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere constant is to reach the point where humanity has zero net emissions. Getting there fundamentally requires two things: the shifting of the energy basis of the global economy to low- and then zero-carbon sources, and the stabilization of the biosphere through actions like ending net deforestation.

Three excellent books that evaluate options for moving to a low-carbon economy are:

George Monbiot’s Heat: How to Stop the Planet from Burning. (In which he considers how the UK could achieve truly dramatic rapid reductions in greenhouse gas emissions)
Joseph Romm’s Hell and High Water (focused on the United States)
David Mackay’s Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (in which he evaluates renewable and efficiency options from first principles, but in a very accessible way – available free online.)

On the costs of climate change mitigation, the most comprehensive work is probably that which has been done by Nicholas Stern, beginning with the Stern Review. The review’s executive summary is also accessible online. More recently, he has argued that the costs of inaction are even more significant than those projected at that time.

On the political and ethical side of things, the best short summary may be Stephen Gardiner’s article “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” published in Ethics. Volume 114 (2004), p.555-600. One key idea related to international equity and climate change mitigation is contraction and convergence: an arrangement in which the emissions from all states eventually fall to zero, but where the per-capita emissions of developed and developing states also converge over time.

3) Other major climate change issues

Other areas relevant to climate change policy-making include:

Abrupt and runaway climate change scenarios
Adaptation to climate change
Carbon sinks (physical, such as the oceans, biological, such as the forests, and geological, such as rocks that erode and form carbonates)
Economics (carbon pricing, risk management, etc)
Emission pathways (and their international breakdown)
Equity issues (historical responsibility, climate change and development, etc)
Global politics and international law
Planning and design (cities, buildings, etc)
Science (climatic equilibria, models and projections, etc)
Sociological and philosophical issues (ethics, communication, political theory, etc)
Targets (stabilization concentrations, temperature change, etc)
Technologies (renewable energy, transport, nuclear, efficiency, etc)

I can recommend resources in all of these areas, if someone has a particular interest.

4) Good sources of climate related news

Probably the best scientific climate change blog is RealClimate.

Good responses to climate ‘skeptic’ arguments can be found in the How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic series. I also keep track of my own arguments with climate change deniers.

Climate coverage in mainstream media sources is often inconsistent in quality. The BBC and The Economist often publish good information, but also sometimes include incorrect or misleading information.

5) A few key graphics

This ice core record of carbon dioxide concentrations illustrates one major reason why we should be more concerned about human-induced climate change than about natural variation. Our use of fossil fuels is generating a spike in greenhouse gas concentrations that is set to rise far above anything in the last 650,000 years, at least.

The above shows how observed warming is inconsistent with climate models that do not incorporate human greenhouse gas emissions, but consistent with those that do.

The wheel on the right depicts researchers’ estimation of the range of probability of potential global temperature change over the next 100 years if no policy change is enacted on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. The wheel on the left assumes that aggressive policy is enacted. (Credit: Image courtesy / MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change)

I would be delighted to answer and questions, or suggest further resources in other areas of interest.

Last updated: 6 November 2009

Article copyright Milan Ilnyckyj. sindark.com.