Sustainable Communities

Sustainable Communities: "Are there retirees out there who would be interested in working together to form a residential community, I wondered. Hence this blog.

For many years I have been very concerned about the destruction that humankind is wreaking upon our natural environment. As my knowledge of the steadily increasing destruction expanded I became more and more despondent about any kind of long term future for humankind. Over the Easter weekend I spent a fair amount of time surfing the web looking at environmental web sites and I became even more despondent because the bulk of the information contained in them seemed to be predicated on fixing particular issues that arose from what I saw as the real problem which is the West's total way of living which is completely unsustainable and which the rest of humankind seems hell bent on following."

Australians named as world's worst polluters

It seems that Valli Moosa got it wrong -- Eskom is not the worst polluter in the world.

Australians named as world's worst polluters | Environment | The Guardian:

Australians are the world's worst individual greenhouse gas polluters if emissions are calculated from the output of the country's power stations, according to new analysis.

Each Australian produces nearly 11 tonnes of CO2 power sector emissions, the United States follows on nine tonnes per person, while Britain is ranked ninth at 3.5 tonnes and China - heavily criticised by the international community for its rapid development of coal-fired power stations - produces only two tonnes a year per person. Indians emit about half a tonne of CO2 per person....

The US produces 2.79bn tonnes a year and China slightly less with 2.7bn. They are followed by Russia with 661m tonnes; India 583m tonnes; Japan 400m tonnes; Germany 356m tonnes; Australia 226m tonnes; South Africa 222m tonnes; the UK with 212m tonnes and South Korea with 185m tonnes.

That's no reason for complacency, of course, and Eskom still needs to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, and look for alternative sources of energy.

Economics, environment and eco-justice, by Prof Klaus Nurnberger

Economics, environment and eco-justice

Some rough notes on a paper presented by Prof Klaus Nurnberger at the SAFCEI conference, Rosettenville, Johannesburg, 2008.

Some basic economics

Based on throughput -- leading to waste.

Classical economics based on the "market", but depends on power, and classical economics does not take this into account.

After nothing some of the characteristics and assumptions of classical economics, Nurnberger went on to explain that economics was based on the worldview of modernity, and contrasted it with traditional (premodern) worldviews.

Collective consciousness - interaction between traditionalism and modernity

Traditionalism is built on submission to authority, modernity is built on emancipation.

Some characteristics of traditionalist worldview:

a) Reality is composed of unstable dynamistic power
b) this can be manipulated beneficially through ritual or detrimentally through sorcery
c) humans live in a dangerous world. Solidarity and discipline are essential
d) life flows along the male lineage, authority based on patriarchal hierarchy
e) culminating on the ancestors
f) leading to tight status and role allocations
g) life oriented upwards towards authority, backwards to the past

Modernity is based on emancipation from authority

a) think for yourself (rationalism)
b) see for yourself (empiricism)
c) pursue your own interests (liberal economy)
d) try out what works (pragmatism)
f) insist on your personal dignity (human rights)
g) claim equality (female emancipation)
h) let the youth find its way (anti-authoritarianism)
i) relate to your personal Saviour (pietism)

Working principles of modernity

a) in science -- evidence
b) in technology -- efficiency
c) in commerce -- profitability
d) in the consumer culture / utility / pleasure

The dominance of modernity

Modernity has become the dominant culture because it delivers the goods in terms of

• knowledge
• productivity
• wealth creation
• need satisfaction
• power generation

Traditionalism is being marginalised
This includes the Biblical faith as a traditionalist belief system

The lure of modernity lures peripheral populations to the centre, but worldviews, motivations tend to lag behind (urbanisation /civilisation)

Changes needed

The centre population must learn

• modestry
• solidarity
• responsibility (ie ubuntu)

The peripheral population needs to learn (restructure consciousness)

• emancipation, initiative, self-consciousness
• scientific knowledge (maths and science education)
• technological efficiency
• administrative competence
• concsientiousness, reliablity, worth ethic
• freedom and responsibility

______

Questions/comments

Q - Beach at Simonstown -- using a front-end loader to move sand back -- cannot unskilled labour be used, less CO2 emission etc.?

KN - machines are cheaper, don't go on strike etc. China tried labour intensive dam building? At UKZN 30 years ago they used 20 people with hand mowers, now one man with a machine.

Q - it was precisely the attitudes of modernity that led to the problem. How can we advocate that as a solution?

KN - there are too many of us. We cannot feed 6 milliard people with old methods. Modernity, and the neoliberal/capitalist system is in control. We need to see how we can integrate people who have been thrown out of the system.

(My comment - One answer: recognise the system, but not worship it, not idolise it)

Q - What about Basic Income Grant?

KN - sight of poor people is heart-rending. It would take away the worst suffering. It would give purchasing power, so the system can begin to produce for those people instead of for the super-rich. They can get slightly more healthy, slightly more energy, slightly more hope.

Q - (Rabbi Hillel) has holiday cottage, oppoisite it is field ploughed by horses, using organic farming.

KN - such initiatives are critical. The system we have is not sustainable in the long term. We need alternatives, and to know what works. We have to overcome powerful prejudices. Tried this in seminary, setting up a vergetable garden to feed the students, but the students went on strike -- they are becoming baruti, they are not labourers. These were the leaders, but they could not see.

Q - (Grace Mokhuku) How can we motivate the government not to give a grant, but teach people how to work?

KN - Don't expect everything from the government. Start at the bottom. People in the NGOs know better than government. A problem in our society is that government at grassroots level lacks capacity. There are not the skills or knowledge at the local level. That takes time and dedication. Sometimes when he can't sleep he reads history and in the country of his forebears things were worse 500-600 years ago than they are here today. We need patience.

Q - 1913 Land Act. Now thousands leave land, come to informal settlements, become dependent on external resources. Immigrants come from elsewhere, show initiative and prosper. Isn't there a possibility of going back to farming.

KN - The impact of apartheid is enormous, but exacerbated the problem, it was not the root. You find it in Brazil, which never had apartheid. People coming from outside are the most enterprising people of their societies. They leave the relaxed society, and outperform our society. They are the elite, but our elite go to Britain and elsewhere.

Q - Do you know about socio-economic democracy. The floor and ceiling are established democratically.

Q- Is it possible to match modern and traditional without some kind of crisis.

KN - Modernity is dominant, whether you like it or not. Because we have a democracy, grassroots people who are more traditional than the elite assert their power, as happeend at ANC conference at Polokwane last December.

In Limpopo lightning struck a hut, and people thought it was witchcraft, a diviner detected the culprit, and he was tortured. There was a court case. Now a young man comes from that area, wanting to learn science. The worldviews clash. There is uncertainty; you try out what works and what doesn't we need patience for these things to work themselves out. We can encourage people to take science seriously. People have worldview assumptions that we know are not correct. You have a right to think what you like, but one is correct. They can't both be true (intejection: they could both be wrong!). Scientists continue try to investigate.

In Germany in the wonderful days a student could study as long as you wanted free of charge. There were no first-year exams -- only at the end of the course, you passed or failed. So students who felt they were not ready to face their finals could study another year, and another, and another. But such a system is not sustainable in the long term.

Eskom is one of the biggest polluters in the world

Eskom is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases in the world said Valli Moosa, the non-executive chairman of the Eskom board, and former Minister for Environmental Affairs.

Moosa was speaking at the conference of the Southern African Faith Communities Environment Institute (SAFCEI) at Rosettenville last night. The picture shows Valli Moosa with Bishop Geoff Davies of Cape Town and Rabbi Hillel Avidan of Durban at the meeting.


Valli Moosa was Minister of Constitutional Development under President Mandela, and inserted a clause in the constitution on the right to a clean and healthy environment.

He was Minister of Environmental Affairs 1999-2004, after which he retired from government, but is still active in politics and was reelected to the ANC National Executive at the Polokwane conference last December.

He was asked to serve as non-executive director of the board of Eskom in 2005.

Here is a summary of Valli Moosa's speech:

There was a problem in serving on the board, Moosa said, as Eskom is one of the biggest polluters in the world. This was an interesting challenge for someone who had championed the Kyoto Protocol. The policy of Eskom had been to produce cheap electricity, so Eskom burns cheap coal, which is less efficient, and so produces more pollutants.

South Africa is one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases per capita in the world because of our use of low-grade coal, and there is no requirement for Eskom to reduce its greenhouse gases. The big challenge for Eskom is to meet the growing demand for electricity.

South Africa has become an energy-hungry country because we have had wrong policies. The policy has been to provide cheap electricity and thus attract industry and so create jobs. But because electricity was cheap, people tended to use more. We have had massive economic growth.

We also did not bother to develop legal standards, like building regulations to make buildings more energy efficient. There are no regulations for the energy efficiency of light bulbs. The problem of cheap electricity is also seen in consumer behaviour. Salesmen comparing fridges never say which model consumes less electricity, and consumers never ask this.

But even though we are a developing country (and ths exempt from having to apply the Kyoto Protocol) we still need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The ANC conference at Polokwane last December adopted a resolution calling for the country to set emission targets. This was largely ignored by the media, who were interested in other things, but no other ruling party in the world has done this.

Eskom also has a responsibility to set its own targets, and has begun to do so. Eskom aims to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases per megawatt up to 2025, and after that to achieve an absolute reduction. After 2025 the older coal-fired power stations will begin to be decommissioned, and they should be replaced by power stations that do not use fossil fuels. Two new coal-fired power stations are being built, and Moosa said he hoped they would be the last.

There will have to be a mix of renewable and nuclear energy sources, and there has to be a trade off. The best thing is solar energy. Nuclear power requires uranium, and the mining of uranium itself damages the environment, and there is also the problem of nuclear waste, but Moosa said he believed it was better than the use of coal-fired power stations.

The most effective renewable source of energy is solar, and the government is introducing a subsidy for solar panels to heat water for household use. Wind is another option, and Eskom is building two wind farms, but wind is not reliable all the time, and so wind power may not be available when it is most needed. It is difficulty to store electricity, but we do have some dam storage schemes, where water is pumped up to a storage dam at times of low demand, and released to generate electricity at peak periods.

There is also solar thermal technology that can produce distributable power, but this is still at the research stage.

In spite of recent and proposed price hikes, South Africa's electricity remains the cheapest in the world, and even if we doubled the price we would still be cheaper than anywhere else. Without the increases we will not achieve energy efficiency, because people will continue to waste electricity.

There is an opportunity in the crisis, which may turn out to be a blessing in disguise. Until the power cuts last January, no one took the problem seriously. From the environmental point of view it has encouraged people to use energy more responsibly. If we hadn't built big aluminium smelters there would be no energy crisis, and this is another example of wrong policies in the past leading to the present problem, but this is a sensitive issue, as can be seen in BHP Billiton taking away its business from Standard Bank as a result of a Standard Bank spokesman saying that aluminium smelters should be closed down.

During question time several people queried the need for nuclear power, but Moosa maintained that it still remained the most feasible alternative to coal-fired power stations, which did more damage to the environment. Another questioner asked for more tranparency on the part of Eskom's board, and Moosa promised to try to arrange a meeting between the Eskom board and representatives of SAFCEI.

Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Giant Antarctic ice shelf breaks into the sea | Environment | guardian.co.uk: "A vast hunk of floating ice has broken away from the Antarctic peninsula, threatening the collapse of a much larger ice shelf behind it, in a development that has shocked climate scientists.

Satellite images show that about 160 square miles of the Wilkins ice shelf has been lost since the end of February, leaving the ice interior now 'hanging by a thread'.

The collapsing shelf suggests that climate change could be forcing change much more quickly than scientists had predicted."

Tread Lightly | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Guardian readers are invited to pledge to tread lightly on the earth: Tread Lightly | Environment | guardian.co.uk

This week they are asked to pledge to drink tap water rather than bottled water.

Hat-tip to The Spicy Cauldron.

The Genetically-Modified Food Gamble

Heads Monsanto Wins, Tails We Lose;
The Genetically Modified Food Gamble
By Robert Weissman
March 18, 2008

There have been few experiments as reckless, overhyped and with as little potential upside as the rapid rollout of genetically modified crops.

Last month, the International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA), a pro-biotech nonprofit, released a report highlighting the proliferation of genetically modified crops. According to ISAAA, biotech crop area grew 12 percent, or 12.3 million hectares, to reach 114.3 million hectares in 2007, the second highest area increase in the past five years.

For the biotech backers, this is cause to celebrate. They claim that biotech helps farmers. They say it promises to reduce hunger and poverty in developing countries. "If we are to achieve the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) of cutting hunger and poverty in half by 2015," says Clive James, ISAAA founder and the author the just-released report, "biotech crops must play an even bigger role in the next decade.

In fact, existing genetically modified crops are hurting small farmers and failing to deliver increased food supply -- and posing enormous, largely unknown risks to people and the planet.

For all of the industry hype around biotech products, virtually all planted genetically modified seed is for only four products -- soy, corn, cotton and canola -- with just two engineered traits. Most of the crops are engineered to be resistant to glyphosate, an herbicide sold by Monsanto under the brand-name Round-up (these biotech seeds are known as RoundUp-Ready). Others are engineered to include a naturally occurring pesticide, Bt.

Most of the genetically modified crops in developing countries are soy, says Bill Freese, science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety and co-author of "Who Benefits from GM Crops," a report issued at the same time as ISAAA's release. These crops are exported to rich countries, primarily as animal feed. They do absolutely nothing to supply food to the hungry.

As used in developing countries, biotech crops are shifting power away from small, poor farmers desperately trying to eke out livelihoods and maintain their land tenure. Glyphosate-resistance is supposed to enable earlier and less frequent spraying, but, concludes "Who Benefits from GM Crops," these biotech seeds "allow farmers to spray a particular herbicide more frequently and
indiscriminately without fear of damaging the crop." This requires expenditures beyond the means of small farmers -- but reduces labor costs, a major benefit for industrial farms.

ISAAA contends that Bt planting in India and China has substantially reduced insecticide spraying, which it advances as the primary benefit of biotech crops.

Bt crops may offer initial reductions in required spraying, says Freese, but Bt is only effective against some pests, meaning farmers may have to use pesticides to prevent other insects from eating their crops. Focusing on a district in Punjab, "Who Benefits from GM Crops" shows how
secondary pest problems have offset whatever gains Bt crops might offer.

Freese also notes that evidence is starting to come in to support longstanding fears that genetically engineering the Bt trait into crops would give rise to Bt-resistant pests.

The biotech seeds are themselves expensive, and must be purchased anew every year. Industry leader Monsanto is infamous for suing farmers for the age-old practice of saving seeds, and holds that it is illegal for farmers even to save genetically engineered seeds that have blown onto
their fields from neighboring farms. "That has nothing to do with feeding the hungry," or helping the poorest of the poor, says Hope Shand, research director for the ETC Group, an ardent biotech opponent. It is, to say the least, not exactly a farmer-friendly approach.

Although the industry and its allies tout the benefits that biotech may yield someday for the poor, "we have yet to see genetically modified food that is cheaper, more nutritious or tastes better," says Shand. "Biotech seeds have not been shown to be scientifically or socially
useful," although they have been useful for the profit-driven interests of Monsanto, she says.

Freese notes that the industry has been promising gains for the poor for a decade and a half -- but hasn't delivered. Products in the pipeline won't change that, he says, with the industry focused on introducing new herbicide resistant seeds.

The evidence on yields for the biotech crops is ambiguous, but there is good reason to believe yields have actually dropped. ISAAA's Clive James says that Bt crops in India and China have improved yields somewhat. "Who Benefits from GM Crops" carefully reviews this claim, and offers a convincing rebuttal. The report emphasizes the multiple factors that affect yield, and notes that Bt and Roundup-Ready seeds alike are not engineered to improve yield per se, just to protect against certain predators or for resistance to herbicide spraying.

Beyond the social disaster of contributing to land concentration and displacement of small farmers, a range of serious ecological and sustainability problems with biotech crops is already emerging -- even though the biotech crop experiment remains quite new.

Strong evidence of pesticide resistance is rapidly accumulating, details "Who Benefits from GM Crops," meaning that farmers will have to spray more and more chemicals to less and less effect. Pesticide use is rising rapidly in biotech-heavy countries. In the heaviest user of biotech seeds -- the United States, which has half of all biotech seed planting -- glyphosate-resistant weeds are proliferating. Glyphosate use in the United States rose by 15 times from 1994 to 2005, according to "Who Benefits from GM Crops," and use of other and more toxic herbicides is rapidly rising. The U.S. experience likely foreshadows what is to come for other countries more recently adopting biotech crops.

Seed diversity is dropping, as Monsanto and its allies aim to eliminate seed saving, and development of new crop varieties is slowing. Contamination from neighboring fields using genetically modified seeds can destroy farmers' ability to maintain biotech-free crops. Reliance on a narrow range of seed varieties makes the food system very vulnerable, especially because of the visible problems with the biotech seeds now in such widespread use.

For all the uncertainties about the long-term effects of biotech crops and food, one might imagine that there were huge, identifiable short-term benefits. But one would be wrong.

Instead, a narrowly based industry has managed to impose a risky technology with short-term negatives and potentially dramatic downsides.

But while it is true, as ISAAA happily reports, that biotech planting is rapidly growing, it remains heavily concentrated in just a few countries: the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, India and China.

Europe and most of the developing world continue to resist Monsanto's seed imperialism. The industry and its allies decry this stand as a senseless response to fear-mongering. It actually reflects a rational assessment of demonstrated costs and benefits -- and an appreciation for real but incalculable risks of toying with the very nature of nature.

Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational
Monitor, and director of Essential Action.