The End of Our Era

Our last show looms ahead. Sustainability Now Radio's final entry airs this coming Friday, May 4th at 4 pm on The Lion 90.7 fm (listen here). Cole Hons of Penn State's Center for Sustainability will be our host and asking us the questions including - of course - "What does sustainability mean to you?"

What else would you like to hear? You can let us know here with a comment here, at Facebook or  Twitter, or give us a call on the air at (814) 865-9577.

Will peak everything bring peak resilience?

A few years ago, author and activist Derrick Jensen wrote in Orion magazine, "The most common words I hear spoken by any environmentalists anywhere are, We’re f***ed." I'd say that assessment - that a lot of environmentalists say that anyway - is pretty accurate.

Face it. Current and coming generations of people and other organisms face a wicked problem of interconnected wicked problems. Here are six:

• Global human population will hit 7 billion this October and is projected to climb to 9 billion by ~2050.
• Global warming has already reduced sea ice in the Arctic Ocean and caused extensive ice cap and glacial melting from Greenland to Argentina to Antarctica. Projected warming from the IPCC and other scientific bodies will cause further melting which will raise sea levels over the coming century, flooding coastal cities and sinking islands.
• Deforestation, especially tropical deforestation, prevents carbon sinking and increases other greenhouse gas emissions while also changing the way equatorial weather patterns that regulate other weather patterns.
• Industrial production is increasingly toxifying air, water, and land in many different places across the Earth and the most educated societies in the world do not understand the interactive effects of tens of thousands of unregualated chemicals.
• Anti-biotics and vaccinations drive bacterial and viral virulence.
• The modern industrial and post-industrial economies have been built with fossil fuels, mostly oil for transportation. Coal and oil peak production has more or less been reached while natural gas from deep shale gas is on the rise.

These problems all feed one another. Peak everything is here or coming and the response to it by big government and big industries is, well, sorely lacking according to today's guest.

Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment TV, "online television series featuring people creating resilient communities for a more sustainable, lower-energy future. Programs range from permaculture farms to electric bikes, ecovillages to car-sharing, emergency preparedness to careers for the coming times." Like other guests on our show working with the "transition" and "slow money" movements, Donaldson has focused on how the big wicked problems above can be tackled by resilient and skilled people working together. She has interviewed women who have worked to bring gardens to school, psychologists examining reactions to climate change, economists critiquing growth economics, and environmental activists rallying people to find strength within themselves.

If there is anything we can be sure of, Donaldson has witnessed and soaked up a lot of wisdom on sustainability and resilience.

Hear her on today's Sustainability Now on the Lion 90.7 from 4-5 pm.

Sustainability Now's co-host is Tweeting

If you're interested in following some of the news and views that Sustainability Now's Peter Buckland is reading, you can follow him on Twitter @PeterEvolves. He's following a fleet of organizations, news outlets, and people around the state and country weighing in on sustainability issues.

Climate change and population

Demographers predict that Earth's human population will reach 7 billion by Halloween of 2011. Global development seeks to to increase the affluence and health of the world's underdeveloped populations. With increased affluence comes more purchasing power to consume anything from toys to bottled water to cell phones to cars to pets.

In their book, Healing the Planet, Paul and Anne Ehrlich proposed an equation I=PAT. It's a heuristic, or cognitive short cut, to represent environmental impact.

Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology

Like any heuristic, it has some shortcomings, but it's useful because it gets us to glimpse the unseen. Impact can be expected to increase if there is a net increase of P, A, and T. If affluence and technology remained steady but more people use them, impacts increase. If the population and technology remained steady but affluence increased, then more purchased stuff by the population increases impact. If population and affluence remained steady but technological impacts went up because of proliferation or size, then impact increases.

Today, we have all three. There are more people with more purchasing power buying more pieces of technology that net more material and energy use than ever before. Today's I=PAT is much larger than 1950's I=PAT even though we have had so much progress in that time.

So when we get to an issue like climate change, it's been easy to talk about energy efficiency or renewable energy. Environmentalists in the United States generally laud wind power and eschew coal. In a world with lots of poor people it's been important to laud global development efforts that afford people the ability to meet their daily necessities of food, water, shelter, community, and healthy environments. Beyond that, most people hope that people can meet more than the necessities but be comfortable and happy. There's the rub.

What's a necessity, or as the Brundtland Commission called it in their report Our Common Future, a "need"? If we all "need" to have heated or cooled housing, cars, and electronic gadgets, how can we expect to stop a problem like climate change if development mandates increased affluence and technological dispersion for 7 billion people later this year and 9 billion by 2044? With no appreciable reduction in fossil fuel demand by efficiency, are we on a collision course with the climate?

Get some insights on it from Lester Brown and Robert Engelman on Hard Ball. This is a hard nut to crack and it's impressive that MSNBC took it on at all.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The Rick Smith Show: "I want some accountability."

Last night, SN's co-host Peter Buckland was on The Rick Smith Show to talk about his ride to Harrisburg for sane natural gas policy. The show brings Rick's "Teamster-member outlook to the air" in a pretty red state.

Asked why he's riding to Harrisburg, Peter said,

I believe that we are not being represented well by our governor and sometimes not terribly well by our legislature. It seems to me that...the natural gas industry has more or less been able to buy its representation, giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to Tom Corbett's campaign alone and about $3 million to Pennsylvania campaigns in the last ten years...I want some accountability.

You can listen to the MP3 here. Peter's interview is about half-way through the show.

Shale Gas: Jekyll and Hyde

Last week, we encouraged you to watch the 60 Minutes piece on shale gas extraction. We've included it below for you to watch again. A lot of the issues we've discussed on the show were front and center. From the need to reduce carbon emissions to the national security/military issues associated with oil to the dreadful costs to communities and ecosystems in terms of water pollution and truck traffic, this feature gets into a lot of the things we've questioned our guests about.



What do you think of Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon's statements comparing Drano and frack water? If we are willing to clean our drains in our own houses with toxic chemicals, why not do it in a massive industrial process? If we use lawn killers and other toxins in our everyday lives, do we have the right to go after natural gas companies? What's the difference?

Sierra Club director Michael Brune argues that natural gas is the future and it has to be more tightly regulated. Some of our guests think it can't be. If he's right, do we have to deal with our own Jekyll and Hyde? What do you think we should do to make sure this is done "the right way?"

60 Minutes piece on the Marcellus Shale

The Sierra Club has just sent out a media alert. This Sunday evening, November 14, the top-rated CBS program 60 Minutes, will be featuring a piece investigating the environmental damage caused by inadequate regulation in the natural gas industry. Lesley Stahl interviewed Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune extensively for the story.

Sierra Club is one of the most vocal and powerful environmental conservation groups in the country and has been committed to fighting for effective natural gas regulation in the face of the massive and barely controlled rush, including fighting to keep the oil and gas industry out of areas where drilling and production poses unacceptable risks. To learn more about their efforts, go here and get news, views, and ways to connect with other concerned citizens. If you want to involve yourself with central Pennsylvania's chapter, go the Moshannon branch of the Sierra Club's website here. Their members are hosting free screenings of Gasland in the coming couple of weeks.

Check your local listings to tune in to 60 Minutes this Sunday.

Sustainable Politics

Given the recent state and national election results, today's show was timely. Perhaps not timely enough given the highly charged atmosphere and the anti-climate change mood in much of the country, but timely in talking about what sustainable politics could be.

It was our good fortune to host three pretty engaged women. For the first few minutes talked with Jennifer Wagner-Lawlor (Assoc. Professor of Women's Studies) who has arranged the TEDxNorthPacificGarbagePatch event being aired at the Berg Auditorium in the Life Sciences Building at Penn State's University Park campus. You can get a sense of the problem by watching the following TED Talk and checking out the plasticpollutioncoalition.org.

Then we talked about sustainable politics with Rosa Eberly, a self-described free-range rhetorician who teachers Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State and deals with civic engagement each and every day. We also were joined by State College mayor Elizabeth Goreham. What is a sustainable politics? Well, it involves engagement, good information, alertness, and staying engaged.

Listen to the show HERE.

What should the press be doing about climate change?

We have now had three shows on climate change. We've talked legislation and climate change denial with Ed Perry of the National Wildlife Federation, the ethics of climate change with Don Brown of the Rock Ethics Institute and former Clinton ambassador for the environment, and now the science and ramifications of climate change with Richard Alley of the IPCC and Penn State's College of Earth and Mineral Sciences. We are some small press for the biggest issue facing us today.

This show's co-host, Peter Buckland, has a piece in Voices of Central Pennsylvania on what the press needs to do about climate change. In his article, "Climate change puts us all in danger," Peter argues that the press needs to press people making climate policy on our duties and responsibilities to other people, especially people in Sub-Saharan Africa, Bangledesh, the Maldives, and Arctic indigenous populations. Without question, the United States has adversely affected those people's economies, societies, and ecosystems. We should be responsible for this and our press should be holding them accountable.

Read the article here.