Adelaide Greenies on Google Calendar

Having found it very easy to lose track of all of the different events that Adelaide's environmental movement has organised, I have started a Google Calendar to remind me. It's called the Adelaide Greenies calendar, and it's an agglomeration of an array of different mailing lists that carry events that might interest fellow environmentalists. There's a little gadget (in list form) on the side of my blog that shows you what is there.

At the moment, all of this should be considered a bit of an experiment. There will be information missing because not everyone knows the length of time that their events will last. I'm also making a policy that private addresses won't be included with events without the explicit permission of the people at that address; I realise that such a policy might make it a little more difficult to advertise permablitzes, but I do want to show a bit of respect for people's privacy.

For the moment, I am treating this as a stop-gap solution. It's quite a chore to enter all of this data for everyone, even so far, and not everyone will use this to stay abreast of what's happening around South Australia. However, I'm going to have a go at keeping it up to date for a month or two and see what happens. What I hope for people to do is to start their own calendars for their own groups, so that people can subscribe to what interests them or what is going on in their local area. Besides, any calendar program worth its salt - including the HTML widget on the side of this page - can combine several calendars of events onto a single timeline.

The calendar is available in a number of different formats, so that you should be able to read it from anywhere. At the moment, I'm the only person who can edit anything (I hope). I will list the ways you can subscribe to the calendar below.

• To view the calendar in your browser, just follow this link to the HTML version, or add it to your Bookmarks or Favourites.
• To view the calendar as an Atom or RSS feed, add this link to the XML version to your feed subscriptions. In many browsers, you should just be able to click on the link and go from there. Otherwise, look for this logo in your browser:
• To add the calendar using software such as iCal, Outlook 2007 or Mozilla Sunbird, add this link to the iCal version to your subscriptions or accounts. To add the calendar to Outlook 2003 or earlier, download the file from that link and import it manually. (Note that the older versions won't update iCal files automatically, so every so often, you'll have to delete the calendar and import it again.)
• If you like the widget I've got in the blog, let me know. Google Calendar does have a tool that lets you customise this widget, but only if you have private access to the calendar - that is, only if you're me. I know WordPress doesn't like the widget I'm using (it doesn't like iframe HTML tags), but you should be able to add the RSS feed above in the meantime; I haven't looked into this yet.

Whether you find this useful or have strong criticisms of it, please let me know. As I said, it's all fairly experimental at this stage.

UPDATE 2009-11-02: You can indeed use the XML version (Atom/RSS) of a calendar in the RSS widget in WordPress, but the formatting isn't ideal. I found this tutorial on Helen's Nerdy Blog for customising RSS feeds, and I've since created a more refined version of the XML feed for WordPress users. To incorporate this into WordPress, add an RSS widget for this link on feed43.com. There's an example of this on the Permaculture Education Zone blog (which I also set up).

Thanks to everyone for their input so far. There may be another update later to address the most important questions.

World Car-Free Day 2009 - Adelaide, South Australia

I've finally finished the video I shot on World Car-Free Day on 20 September 2009. There is footage here from both the Mawson Lakes Environment Watch suburb walk in the morning and the street party in College Park.

Click here to watch the video on YouTube.

Monbiot loses the plot?

A few days ago, George Monbiot of The Guardian newspaper published an article entitled "The Population Myth". The article was circulated to me with the rather blunt title, "Monbiot loses the plot". Fearing that some on the mailing list had hypocritically missed the point, I wrote my own response.

I suspect that a lot of the controversy surrounding this article (at least here) could be averted simply be removing this tagline:

"People who claim that population growth is the big environmental issue are shifting the blame from the rich to the poor"

Among those of us who preach the significance of population growth, not all of us are taking out our frustrations on the very poor. Most of us can already see the hypocrisy of the most polluting countries, such as Australia and the USA, who blindly point the finger at poorer nations rising by housing our dirtiest industries. Some of us even understand the dependence - again, however forced via globalisation - of developing countries upon affluent foreign markets, and their consequent dependence on foreign money.

To this end, Monbiot has an excellent point, but he stops short of making it. (His suggestion of changing the I=PAT equation doesn't help either; in modern times, we already tend to measure the affluence of a population by its consumerism.) Whether by resource depletion or by rising sea levels, we are at risk of an apocalyptic population crash. The strategy of The Powers That Be is to centralise those dwindling resources so that they can outlast everyone else. It's like the old joke about trying to escape a river full of crocodiles with a pair of flippers: I still can't swim faster than a crocodile, but I can swim faster than you.

Think of the situation in Iraq. If the USA could reduce its dependence on oil, and could afford to buy it at wildly fluctuating prices, they wouldn't have to send the military around the world to steal it. This doesn't solve peak oil, but it does mean that the "non-negotiable American way of life" might last just long enough for them to see other countries depopulated first.

I have no delusion that such a strategy would benefit anyone more than those already at the top of the pile. On mailing lists like this one, a more common strategy for resilient communities would be to concentrate on the resources you really need and to invest them wisely. A strategy to strut around the world taking these resources by force is no less cogent - provided, of course, that you first give up your last shred of human decency.

Cheers,

AN

New video: Dave's permablitz 2009-09-13

I've finally gotten around to uploading the video I put together from a permablitz I went to in Belair, just up the hill. It's not as long as the video I did for Soph's permablitz, but I think it's still OK.

There's more video on the way as well. I shot some video for the recent World Car-Free Day, and there's another permablitz happening on the long weekend.

To add a rating or comment to this video, you can visit its page on YouTube.

peak oil in transition

Update: This article was republished in On Line Opinion on 23 September 2009. Many thanks to Susan Prior for her consideration.

A couple of Wednesdays ago, I went to see a film entitled The Age Of Stupid (IMDB link), about the current state of the climate change debate. The movie only played in three cinema complexes in Adelaide, and two of them were in Westfield shopping centres - probably the wrong crowd for a movie about climate change. There's no word yet on whether our local Palace Nova cinemas will pick it up.

After paying 17 bucks to watch what appeared to be a copied Blu-ray disc, and to have an entire theatre all to myself, I came away from the movie with a mixed message. Most of the main characters in the film seemed to have conflicting ethics for their reliance on energy, but few actually showed any remorse. The oil rig worker who stayed in New Orleans throughout Hurricane Katrina sees the obvious connection between his work and his environment, but he has no remorse about it whatsoever. The lady in the Niger delta, having seen the massive pollution and the ravages of war that are brought to their nation by our greed for natural resources, sells petrol in bottles to make a bit of extra cash.

I don't know what the point of the movie was any more, but I still think I know what it was supposed to be. Climate change isn't just an environmental problem: it's a broad social, economic and political problem that will affect all of us to an extent that we cannot fully comprehend, even after seeing a film about it. This one got so close: people do understand that the drive for resource wealth does as much harm as good, but it never actually asked the question of whether it's worth devoting your lifestyle to it. (This point is raised directly by Michael Moore in The Corporation.)

After a decade-long hiatus, climate change is back on the agenda, and regardless of their position on the subject, everyone is back on message. The greenies want to save the planet. Big business doesn't want saving the planet to interfere with employment or economic growth. The politicians want to implement a trading scheme for greenhouse gas emissions, but want to set aside $11,700,000,000 in welfare for the mining industry.

Most importantly of all, everybody has an opinion that they can't wait to tell you about but that they can't live up to. I saw a bumper sticker the other day about doing something about climate change - on the back of a 20-year-old Ford Laser. To be fair, you could see through the brown exhaust fumes that it was at least carrying a full complement of passengers. Everyone gets climate change, and gets it well enough to talk about it, but nobody's doing anything to fix it. An Inconvenient Truth (IMDB link) was a bold step, and we had the impression of having come a long way since Kyoto; one wonders how far we have travelled since.

The previous weekend, I was back at The Food Forest for a weekend workshop on something called the Transition Towns initiative. The goal of transition is to make communities more self-sufficient, and therefore more robust to problems such as economic downturn, political dysfunction, or the disruption of utilities. Think of it as permaculture scaled up to a society level: the idea is to take similar tenets of environmental management and use them to plan entire communities. It stands to reason that climate change is a given in this philosophy, as is peak oil.

There are already hundreds of Transition groups all over the world, and each community is tackling the problems a little differently. It might start as modestly as a car pool or a sewing circle, or it could be as ambitious as a local currency or an activist group to fight against imposing businesses that, one way or another, do not act in the community's interest. Neighbourhoods become more productive and more closely knit, favouring local businesses and activities seeing their own well-being as prosperity in itself.

As much as I find a lot of the environmental debate quite tiring, I found the Transition Towns weekend very uplifting. The difference was that the people who attended this workshop seemed more like the sorts of people who might actually do something to make their lives better. Naturally, such a weekend involves a lot of talk, but it's positive and enthusiastic talk, and those of us who were already doing something were more interested in networking and marketing what was there than the minutiae of establishing something new. Suddenly, the confidence was there among us, the right courses of action were obvious, and everything else seemed irrelevant, distant, archaic.

I wondered, then, whether the environmental debate could truly be taking this direction, and, if it were not, whether this might be an opportune time to turn it this way. It was nearly five years ago that I discovered the peak oil debate, and at the time, it was all doom and gloom. In fact, Matt Savinar's primer, The Oil Age Is Over (sadly now out of print), ends with a discussion about the depression one typically suffers after the penny drops about peak oil. Arguably, though, the debate is still one of doom and gloom today, and the purists among us are only too ready to howl down anything touted as a solution.

We can do better.

I can vouch for the concept of post-peak depression. I remember when I ran out of both questions and answers, and I remember how helpless I felt at the time, as if the only way not to lose was not to play. The best way out of this funk is to do something positive. For me, getting around my oil dependency meant less car travel, working out public transport again, and getting a bicycle. I'm still going with that.

When you consider most problems so fundamentally, the solutions are simple too. If you're worried about food miles, buy local produce from suburban markets. The dominance of large supermarkets and department stores can be mitigated by shopping elsewhere, even if you can't buy everything in the one place. Learn to turn things off when you're not using them, and not to buy things you don't need. Even questions about money - from the siphoning off of local investment by major banks, to the very nature of fiat currency itself - seem tractable when considered the same way.

The point of these individual tasks is twofold. Firstly, you participate less and less in a system that will break off in massive chunks in the coming decades and crumble into the sea. (With that mental image, you and Antarctica are in this together. Secondly, the more you think about this, the more you learn and understand the way things really are in the world. New challenges will come along in our current convention, and current conventional thinking won't solve them; you will need a new paradigm. Either way, you're doing something positive about the world's plethora of problems, and coming shocks won't be quite so shocking.

It's a lot more easily said than done, of course. For example, buying food is easier and quicker than growing it, and there will be no shortage of people telling you so. That said, it's all about believing in what you're doing. If you believe that growing food is important - and with good enough reasons - you should do it anyway. Every person who attended the Transition weekend, I conjectured, probably knows someone who isn't interested in climate change, peak oil, permaculture and the like, but that hasn't stopped us getting together anyway, and it won't stop us trying to do the right thing.

This is perhaps the real key. Just give it a go. Buy a rainwater tank. Walk somewhere that you normally would have driven. Repair something you would otherwise have thrown away. Whatever form a collapse of civilisation may take, you are far worse off afraid or ignorant than you would be armed with options.

Above all, the Transition concept has given me a sense of hope that I haven't had for years. It hasn't assured me at all that we won't see major societal upheaval in the next decade or so, but it has motivated me, with neither fear nor rage, to do something more constructive to prepare for it. Furthermore, it's also given me a better way to talk about to those ordinary people I know who imagine me in sandwich boards telling them how nigh the end of the world is.

I mentioned The Age Of Stupid as merely the most recent Chicken Little, and despite its good intentions, I wonder how much films like this are really helping. Then again, even if people are tiring of hearing about the problems, they need more in the way of solutions than superficial gesture of buying a CFL and a green shopping bag (that is, in all probability, made of plastic anyway). I sense a valid opportunity here, to engage interested people not to panic but to empower themselves, and to make peace (or at least neutrality) with the non-believers who may never notice your conviction. You don't even need to talk about a crash; at least, what you want is to make the world a better place.

Think about a low-energy future. Food without chemicals. Transport without pollution. Austerity without exploitation.

Think about a human-energy future. Motivation without badgering. Urgency without panic. Darkness without fear.

We can do better.