NRDC POST-STATE OF THE UNION POLL: 60 PERCENT OF AMERICANS SUPPORT PRESIDENTIAL ACTION TO FIGHT RAVAGES OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Environmental, Small Business and Farm Leaders Welcome President Obama’s Vow to Reduce Threat

WASHINGTON (February 13, 2013) – Sixty-five percent of Americans think that climate change is a serious problem and a substantial majority support President’s Obama using his authority to reduce its main cause, dangerous carbon pollution, according to a national poll of 1,218 registered voters conducted immediately after last night’s State of the Union speech for the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC).

The nationwide survey – the first snapshot taken specifically on the climate agenda Obama outlined in his address to the nation – reveals that a strong majority of Americans are convinced that action is needed soon to reduce a real threat they see in climate disruption. The polls is available at http://www.nrdc.org/2013stateofunion, and has a margin of error of +/- 2.8%

Released on the heels of the hottest year ever in the U.S. and one marked by extreme weather, the national poll conducted by Public Policy Polling for NRDC found:

* 65 percent of Americans think that climate change is a serious or very serious problem, including 58 percent of independents.

* 60 percent of Americans support the president using his authority to reduce dangerous carbon pollution, including 53 percent of independents.

* 62 percent agree with the president’s statement that “for the sake of our children” and our future, we must do more to combat climate change, including 55 percent of independents.

“The president made it absolutely clear that he will lead the fight against dangerous carbon pollution, and a compelling majority of Americans stand firmly behind that leadership,” NRDC President Frances Beinecke said today. “The best way to strike back, as a nation, is to reduce the carbon pollution from our dirtiest power plants, the single greatest threat to our climate’s future. That will take presidential leadership. Americans are counting on bold action – for the sake of our children.”

“The president’s pledge to address climate change struck a chord with Americans,” said Environment America Executive Director Margie Alt. “Now we’re counting on President Obama to put words into action, by rejecting the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, limiting carbon emissions from power plants and advancing clean energy solutions — while protecting the air, water and special places Americans hold dear. By taking these actions the president will help fulfill our obligation to our families and to future generations, and we stand ready to support him at every turn along the way.”

Beinecke and Alt held a telephone press conference today to discuss the poll results and offer their views on the climate and energy elements in the president’s speech. They were joined by Roger Johnson, president of the National Farmers Union (NFU), and John Arensmeyer, CEO of Small Business Majority.

Tom Jensen, director of Public Policy Polling, which conducted the poll of 1,218 registered voters for NRDC and Environment America, outlined other key findings:

* A majority of Americans, 57 percent, agreed with Obama’s promise to make addressing climate change a priority in his second term.

* 65 percent of Americans think that climate change is already a problem or will become a problem in the near future, including 58 percent of independents.

* Obama said the nation can choose to believe Superstorm Sandy and severe drought and raging wildfires were all just “a freak coincidence” or believe the overwhelming judgment of science that they were climate change related. A majority, 58 percent, said they were the effects of climate change, including 51 percent of independents.

* A majority, 58 percent said the country should do more to address climate change, including 51 percent of independents, while just 14 percent said we’re doing enough already.

National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson said: “Extreme weather events like the current drought are hurting America’s farmers’ and ranchers’ ability to provide the nation with food, feed, fiber, and fuel. Given the right incentives, agriculture can play a significant role in combating climate change by being a part of the solution.”

“Scientific opinion polling has shown time and time again that small businesses are looking for pragmatic, innovative policies to address clean energy and climate change,” said John Arensmeyer, founder & CEO of Small Business Majority. “Small businesses believe government investments in clean energy have an important role in creating jobs and boosting the economy, and they support regulating emissions that cause climate change. Some of the extreme weather we’ve been experiencing is a perfect example of how climate impacts small businesses’ bottom lines. Some businesses will recover, others never will. Our economy can’t take that hit right now. Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Any policies put on the table to address these issues should take their needs into consideration.”

The extreme weather events of 2012, from record heat waves to large-scale drought, from raging wild fires to Hurricane Sandy, raised public awareness of climate change and public support for taking action to address climate change and one of its chief causes: industrial carbon pollution from power plants.

Last year, the president started down the road to addressing climate change by announcing standards for cleaner cars and trucks, and by proposing carbon pollution limits for new power plants. More than 3.1 million Americans submitted public comments last year in support of strong limits on carbon pollution from power plants. Additionally, Small Business Majority’s opinion polling found 87 percent of small business owners supported adopting stronger fuel standards, and by a 3:1 margin, small business owners across the nation support the EPA regulating carbon emissions that cause climate change.

Today, the hundreds of power plants across the country have no restrictions on the carbon pollution they emit into the atmosphere. NRDC has offered one way for the president to use his authority to significantly cut that carbon pollution by 26 percent by the end of this decade.

The low-cost, high-benefit plan would create thousands of clean energy jobs making homes and buildings more energy efficient, while protecting people from asthma attacks and heart ailments, in addition to saving families as much as $700 a year in electricity bills. More information about this plan can be found http://www.nrdc.org/air/pollution-standards/.

Pop-Up-Foundation – Preparing the Ground for Sustainable Living

Dr. Paul Clarke
Professor of Education, St Mary’s University College, Waldegrave Road, Strawberry Hill, London email: contact@pop-up-farm.com

If you plan one year ahead, plant rice;
If you plan ten years ahead, plant trees;
If you plan a hundred years ahead,
educate the people.
Chinese Proverb

Abstract
This paper will argue that a curriculum for sustainability can only arise through practical actions that are focused on ecological principles. To achieve this we need to invest time and energy to establish basic operational conditions in our schools which foster such principles; these conditions are distilled from the broader canon of sustainability research and development in the case of our programme into six foundation themes, energy, water, waste, food growing, well-being and sustainable buildings. Collectively these can be thought of as the basic building materials for what I have called elsewhere an eco-capability (Clarke 2010). They are a framework for understanding and focusing our learning and action concerned with sustainable living. They will be informed by, and evolve through human activity and experience, but connect closely with natural systems and processes all aligned to the development of a new consciousness arising form a need to make a transition from the modern to the ecological age (Clarke 2012). The basic idea embedded within the Pop-Up-Foundation is embedded in and around a set of modules that schools use that guide their actions to become sustainable. The modules set the groundwork for new learning and experimentation, out of which emerges new understanding and solutions for sustainable living.

Our experience, arising from the Pop-Up-Farm (Clarke 2009) programme has taught us that the basic ideas of sustainable living need not be overcomplicated, indeed, they resonate with the everyday and encourage creative engagement, but they have to provide routes for profound change in organizational and individual behaviour. What is more complex, and remains a testing matter, is how to proceed and engage with a school community in a way that enables teachers to integrate ideas about sustainable living in the curriculum (Capra 2010). We have found that learning and understanding about sustainable living comes from action, from doing things and seeing how sustainable living can be easily undertaken. Our approach is best experienced as a living, emergent, formative, evolutionary form of pedagogy. It has to relate and reflect the reality of where we live, and acknowledge that we are in the main living in far from sustainable communities.

Our central dilemma when it comes to mainstream education, concerns how closely to align with existing practice, and how far to push the boundaries to facilitate new thinking. Moving too far, too soon, can frighten people away from taking steps forward, but too much caution will not generate the necessary creative organizational turbulence to initiate any shift of mind or practice. Therefore how to position the sustainable living agenda in such a way as it maintains the vitality and creative impetus without compromising our radical ambition is a central concern for progressive eco-literate design.

Introduction – setting the context
As societies around the world begin to recognise that their relationship with the natural environment has to evolve if it is ever to be sustainable, the role of education becomes ever more critical as it moves to the centre stage. The trouble is, that if we turn to mainstream education across most developed nations we will find very little ecological learning takes place beyond some elementary ideas about how to grow a few vegetables in the schoolyard.
Education in the industrial age has traditionally fragmented learning, corresponding educational understanding with the ways in which we have modeled and progressed our societies through industrial growth and development, creating subject disciplines that disintegrate rather than integrate knowledge. By way of contrast, the ecologically capable learner engages with ideas differently, they combine ideas to form coherent, holistic ways of understanding, indeed the notion of single, isolated solutions is meaningless within an ecological pedagogy as the entirety is interdependent and mutually supportive.
So there is a job to do, to offer a coherent and cogent curriculum for sustainable living that does not end up as a bolt-on addition to existing curricula, or a set of fragmented experiences which fail to provide sufficient connection for learners to get the fundamental messages about sustainable living.
What we need is a new set of capabilities and literacies concerned with deep ecology, and a set of steps for people to get there which connects hand, heart and mind through practical learning (Sterling 2005). What is clear is that, as yet, there is an insufficiently connected and systematic response to the broad concept of sustainable living emerging from the school world as it grapples with this dilemma of moving from older formulations of learning to new ones, and through this process of transformation, reconceptualises the entire enterprise of the schooling experience to suit the emerging ecological arena that is unfolding across business, communities and systems worldwide. Clearly, a few vegetables in a schoolyard are insufficient on their own to enable a conceptual shift to happen, but they do serve as an important starting point upon which to build (Clarke 2009).
Interest in the natural environment as a facility for learning raises the need to think carefully about what we might learn, what we already know, but do not consider to be of value, and what do we need to find out about to make the connection between curriculum content and attributes which will help young people to understand and apply this new knowledge to make their own life choices in greater harmony with the world around them.
How much of the burgeoning interest in schools might be assigned to mandatory measures, rather than a particular organisational conviction remains to be seen. The emergence in the regulatory framework of carbon reduction measures will no doubt translate into required activity by every institution and household as nations strive to meet targets that have been set on the international scale. In the English context this is already taking shape both structurally and culturally. At a structural level, Local authorities and businesses are having to look closely at their internal schemes for reduction of their carbon footprint, and at a cultural level recent Ofsted reports have cited the importance of learning outside the classroom and its role in improving student achievement, standards, motivation, personal development and behaviour (Ofsted 2008). Without going so far as to ensure that both awareness and action are mandatory, the general direction that they have pointed towards in terms of best practice suggests that some form of knowledge, perhaps informed through the previous government gateways to sustainability, may provide a framework for action and modification of curriculum to guide and inform a transition of basic practice.
Elsewhere there are more systemic efforts being introduced which will form structural and subsequent practice based changes. For example, the Australian national curriculum reform has embedded a full third of the entire cross curricular themes to sustainability thinking, but even here, the tension between conventional design through subjects and an overhaul of these ideas better suited to ecological principles is causing considerable design challenges.
The importance of innovative community projects, learning design and method
Perhaps more important than the centrally prescribed ‘sustainability’ pedagogy, is the rise of community awareness on the issue of sustainable living. These many and varied projects are connecting local activism with new thinking about community and landscape, which amongst other things is generating public debate on daily habits and routines (Hopkins 2008, Clarke 2010). In my own case, my involvement in the design and development of Pop-Up-Farm and more recently the Foundation have provided direct evidence of a rapidly expanding and demographically widespread interest in the way individuals and communities can take action to redefine themselves and re-orientate their activity towards more sustainable practices. The drivers behind these projects vary from personal beliefs and values, to simple economic necessity, but the prevailing focus is localism and redefining self and local context. However, there remains a consistent acknowledgement of the importance of networks and connectivity within our programme globally. Indeed, critical to the success of the programme is the network, sharing, challenging and strategising for an emerging set of conditions.
This tension between local and global, by personalising the bigger sustainability challenges and framing them within a consistent set of core themes enables people to participate and act, it encourages debate and questioning of existing ways of living, and in turn can be used within schools as a vehicle for reform and redesign of both curriculum practice and process.
Pop-Up-Farm has evolved in a matter of a few years from a small-scale school sustainability project, to an eco-lobbying force with connections locally, regionally, nationally and internationally. It is now moving to charitable status, will shortly participate in new programmes of agriculture through trade between Uganda and the UK, linking enterprise and opportunity to the sustainability agenda, enabling people to begin to see ways of creating new business opportunities and begin to create intergenerational assets. As it has evolved we have recognised that an emergent methodological approach has been adopted, not particularly by deliberate design, but by circumstance. As we began to see that there was so much happening we also realised that to orchestrate all elements of the programme within one operational structure was a self-defeating job. Instead, we encourage creative participation and self-managing of discrete programmes within the broader project, and we contain the overall concept within a set of capabilities concerned with core ideas – actions to become sustainable (hand, heart and mind), energy, water, waste, well-being, growing food, and buildings.
Oddly enough, these simple ideas raise some challenges for schools, who have in the past tended towards very structured approaches to learning and development to be applied to fit alongside their existing arrangements. We see this, but we question their logic, and encourage them to engage with the possibility of making connections as a route to learning which take risks, are experimental in nature, and continually provide them with links and systems of support to reinforce and guide their learning in emergent rather than pre-defined ways.
The Pop-Up-Foundation, and Pop-Up-Farm is not interested in business as usual with a few eco-green additions, instead we are looking for a radical overhaul of how to live. To make the shift, we encourage all learners, of any age, to see the programme as a series of interdependent and mutually supportive micro-projects, that way, they can adopt a strategy – from the small-scale to the ambitious depending on their interest, and we encourage them to then begin to experiment using the bigger frame of the Foundation to provide a type of bounded zone that provides their experimentation with conceptual and operational justification for their activity, as it is endorsed by the broader local community and by connection to a much wider network of similarly minded organisations. As a result, we have a series of innovative projects underway, ranging from growing (Pop-Up-Farm), coffee (The Thoughtful Coffee Co.) energy (Pop-Up-Power) to a dispersed orchard project (Pop-Up-Orchard).
The pedagogic implications of these observations are important, we see any ‘eco-literacy’ or ‘eco-capability’ as essentially emergent forms of learning, emphasising process as a vital component of how to understand and interpret what is happening when we engage with the natural world.
In the programme, schools are all experimenting with different ways in which they might engage young people and parents in practical activities which on their own appear relatively benign, such as growing food on an old playground, or planting an orchard, or learning jam-making and pickling, or introducing compost heaps, or water harvesting strategies.
It is when we begin to accumulate these different elements we can see the emergence of a formula or ‘pattern technology’ for sustainable living, connecting self to place, to soil, to water, to weather, to season and therefore making that important first step to connect to the natural world, and gain an understanding of the intricacies of place, highlighting the uniqueness of context.
The resilient sustainable community is not, we suggest, something that has been pre-formulated and pre-defined, it is emergent and remains in this dynamic state indefinitely. This insight into design may be of great value as we proceed to try and make sense of how to nurture suitable sustainable capabilities within our school systems.
Each school context remains unique, and importantly so because we are not interested in mass-production of single solutions; but each context connects to a wider network of ideas and approaches which begin to illustrate and demonstrate a shift of mind, a change of cultural understanding.
Design
Our design of an eco-literacy, a pedagogy for the ecological age, might be seen as a process of engagement and enquiry with critical local concerns, in consort with global challenges, rather than a set of assumptions based on global circumstances, which may not be easy to connect with in our own school settings.
For example, we can begin by looking at what we have and ask: ‘What can we do with the waste space we have around school? What can we grow here? How much can we grow together across a network of schools? How do we reduce our wasteage of resources to a point where 100% becomes recycled? How do we generate more energy on our school site than we use? Can combinations of schools begin to overcome the persistent problem of provision for lifelong learning in difficult to reach communities?
Such questions might also lead on to other more embedded challenges that would not necessarily lie traditionally within the remit of schooling. We might explore questions such as:
What does our city/neighbourhood look like with failed infrastructure?’
What does our city/neighbourhood do when 15% of its population are undocumented?
What might our city/neighbourhood look like when a great number of its children get no formal education?
What strategies might our city/neighbourhood adopt when its water resources begin to run dry?
From such questions we are able to think about the opportunities that exist in our environment around school which can provide responses to these questions. We can consider the approaches we might adopt, from the mandatory to the free-forming, we can see that different governance approaches will have different consequences. We can then move to the practicalities and consider what happens if we grow food in our small urban spaces. We learn that we have to know how to nurture that produce, we develop specific, contextualised understanding of soil, water, plants, light, heat and the ways they combine, patterns for sustainable living and enquiry.
These simple starting points provide our students with a direct link to their environment and offer them a route to redefine their urban environments based upon what they discover. This is the first step to an eco-capability of retrofitting what we have in the form of educational provision, to suit a new situation. The point being that cities, neighbourhoods and streetscapes are not going to go away in a hurry, they will be the places we live – sustainably or otherwise, and they will form the landscape which in turn will shape the mindscape of our citizens. As a result, we have to reconceptualise them so that they serve our needs and those needs of the planet, the small act of growing sustainable communities, through challenges which in turn generate new insights becomes a route map for this new literacy.
Pop-Up-Foundation is therefore just one example of the way that people as a community of learners (Clarke 2010) can take practical steps towards sustainable living. We know from our global encounters, that people need examples, they want to be able to see how it might be done, and this means that schools can play a very important strategic role in educating not just young people, but their entire neighbourhoods. The use of the school-yard as a food source is one powerful approach which Pop-Up-Farm, as a part of the Foundation, promotes. To rethink the physical landscape of the school as a sustainability learning-hub challenges us to experiment with existing space and put it to new use. This is a foundation piece of the approach we adopt – to get people to look again at their landscape, and to change their mindscape: be it the playground, the classroom, the street, the park or the balcony, they can all be seen as starting points for new thinking about sustainable living.
In our case we have seen schools use a variety of solutions, planters to enable growing on tarmac playgrounds, wall-gardens, herb gardens, hen coops, water capture projects, all of this physical activity generates practical questions – how can we secure water for the plants? what happens out of school time? how do we know what will grow well here? can we create new ways of using old resources and waste to improve soil quality and perhaps generate greater warmth through greenhouses and sheltered growing? We are learning that simple starting points, such as food growing generates significant connections across the core issues of water, energy, soil, well-being and place and enables students and staff and parents to connect on a practical set of activities which in turn generate deeper questions about longer-term sustainability.
In particular, when such practical activities are then considered on a wider cityscape the potential for a set of interconnected, local and dispersed networks becomes hugely attractive, for reasons of yield potential (a multi-site, dispersed solar farm for example using school rooftops) and dispersed consciousness. This comes in the form of new thinking about the shape, movement and spaces in what are rapidly being known as smart-cities. Instead of building new roads and tower blocks, infrastructure strategies begin to spawn new ways of working, if we are asking how to retrofit cities so that they bring together the farm and the city we are asking people to re-imagine the urban space radically. We have done this before as a species, we imagined the urban space as one for business and transport, the motor car then reinvented the city to meet its own needs, this transition is in effect no different, we re-imagine the urban learning environments as trailblazers for the necessary realignment of the human with the ecological, ensuring in so doing a better chance of resolving a real response to the predicted challenges around the corner with in eco-systemic change. If schools do this, children and their parents and grandparents will be first-hand witnesses of the convergence of urban and rural. This step from unsustainable to sustainable thinking, perhaps initiated by shift from a food-for-self, to food-for-all programme of growing on scale at school sites across entire towns (and we are underway for example through Pop-Up-Farm in the Burnley network and in Uganda at Parabong School), emphasises the importance of sustainable living as a social as well as a technical consideration.
As people live in the city they need to eat, and the more people that arrive in the next few decades in cities, the greater pressure there will be to meet their basic needs across energy, waste, water, building and well-being, in sustainable or unsustainable ways. If they are to survive then we have to make the former our default position. If carbon-based energy availability emerges as the crisis issue of the next two decades as is being predicted, then our existing modes of moving food from the country to the city become ever more problematic as they are heavily carbon dependent. Instead, redesigning urban space so that it becomes a backbone for survival through the localising of food within urban space, provides a viable way forward and should therefore form a substantive element of any eco-literacy for our education system.
As we begin to connect to such a narrative, we begin to see that reshaping cities for long-term health and well-being of all natural systems is quite possible, it generates wealth and knowledge and maintains engagement of people within their social and community spaces in new and more convivial ways. In pursuing this agenda we can begin to see a new and transformational role for schools. We simply have to work outside of the predictable, a lesson we have learnt and continually adopt in the Pop-Up-Foundation.
That is why growing food in the school yard is a good start, but is by no means an end game, it is the first step on a journey towards full use-age of the city as a natural food-scape, and a direct link to the myriad of problems people face daily in their struggle to exist in cities at the present time as it enables and empowers, rather than deskills and disempowers the citizen. Schools more often than not have at least some play space, or some wall-space which can be adopted as a basic food-growing hub. This simple demonstration of the possibility of new uses for existing spaces has profound possibilities.
Conclusions
There are many ways of developing capabilities which serve to inform an eco-literate society. These are not exclusively the concern of schools as they are lessons we learn by living and have currency for us all. However, schools play a critical role in preparing people to see the world in culturally appropriate ways. In the past, these culturally appropriate ways included an acceptance that we can use the natural world as a resource for our sole use, to the exclusion of other living things and this was modelled through a defined curriculum, industrialized in design and fragmented in the process. As we are leaning, this is no longer tenable nor practical, if for no other reason than we now understand that our own life is dependent upon a bio-diverse community which in its interdependence and emergent learning maintains and nurtures further life on the planet.
It is therefore in our own self-interest to nurture eco-literate, evolving capabilities in learners, they follow lines of enquiry based on real time problems within their lived environment concerned with the stuff of life – water, land, energy and waste. Schools can participate in the development of a range of capabilities that will facilitate this learning. Through the curriculum they offer, and through the ways in which they utilise their resources, their buildings, their land and how they use and dispose of waste they learn by doing the necessary things to respond to the changing landscape.
We should ensure however, that this work remains naturally focused, which is why food growing plays a central role and is such a powerful connector, it serves as a guide to the necessary capabilities of observation, nurture, maintenance, conservation of resource, attention to solar energy, the cropping and preparation of food as a life source, and the cyclical properties of resources once used to form waste to enrich and maintain the soil.
This paper set about starting a conversation which Iin time will form a new pedagogy for sustainable living, it may have a bearing upon sustainable education but we may choose to lose the sustainability branding as time passes because that in itself will be self-evident, just as ‘industrial learning’ does today, where I think it leads us to is an idea of a sustainable school. The activity that is arising from the work of the community around Pop-Up-Foundation, through networks such as the Pop-Up-Farm begin to illustrate in more meaningful ways what we might understand by progressive sustainable community.

References

Capra, F. (2010) Schooling for Sustainability: Making Teaching and Learning Come Alive. Lecture series at Berkeley, California, June 23–25, 2010
Clarke, P. (2010) Incredible Edible: how to grow sustainable communities, Forum. Volume 52 Number 1 2010 pp.69-79

Clarke, P. (2012) Education for Sustainability: Becoming Naturally Smart. Routledge. London
Hopkins, R. (2008) The Transition Handbook. From oil dependence to local resilience. Green books. Totnes
Ofsted (2008) Learning outside the classroom. How far should you go? Report no 070219. Crown Copyright. London
Sterling, S. (2005) Sustainable Education: Revisioning Learning and Change. Schumacher Briefings. Green Books. Totnes

City Farms, Parks and Boston: Let’s Grow Up

Tuesday, June 21, 2011
posted by Meg Muckenhoupt

It’s been days since Edward Glaeser published his urban farm-bashing piece in the Boston Globe, but I’m still annoyed. Glaeser, a professor of economics at Harvard University and director of the Rappaport Institute for Greater Boston, managed to argue against farms in a way that could extend to urban parks, gardens, zoos, swimming pools, and most sidewalks. He also ignored some intriguing trends in making urban farming more efficient, a.k.a. the Vertical Farm.

But before I give you a view from the roof, let’s consider what’s happening on the ground. Glaeser chaired the Citizens’ Committee on Boston’s Future, a group gathered by the Boston City Council in 2010 to figure out “what Boston must do to compete to be the best city” in four quick and easy kind-of-public meetings: you can read Shirley Kressel’s sour assessment of the group, or just read the final report. You’ll find urban farms mentioned three times in 23 pages. Apparently, Glaeser is concerned that people might take them too seriously. Here’s an excerpt from his Globe piece:

“But while neighborhoods benefit from the occasional communal garden, it is a mistake to think that metropolitan areas could or should try to significantly satisfy their own food needs… Farm land within a metropolitan area decreases density levels and pushes us apart, and carbon emissions rise dramatically as density falls… Urban farms mean less people per acre which in turn means longer drives and more gasoline consumption. Shipping food is just far less energy intensive than moving people.”

Now, just for fun, I’m going to substitute the word “park” for “farm” and “plants” for “food.”

“But while neighborhoods benefit from the occasional communal garden, it is a mistake to think that metropolitan areas could or should try to significantly satisfy their own plant needs… Park land within a metropolitan area decreases density levels and pushes us apart, and carbon emissions rise dramatically as density falls…Urban parks mean less people per acre which in turn means longer drives and more gasoline consumption. Shipping plants is just far less energy intensive than moving people.”

Who needs the Emerald Necklace when you can get plants from a florist? It’s much less resource-intensive to just buy a ficus tree at a shop when you want one instead of wasting precious city space on a sycamore. Heck, they don’t even have leaves half the year.

Of course, we do have parks. Apart from the Boston Common, all of Boston’s Emerald Necklace parks were established when Massachusetts had been rapidly, rampantly deforested for timber and farm land, reaching a low of ca. 30% forest cover by 1850. We’re back up at about 60% forest now. (See this “Wildlands and Woodlands” report put out by the Harvard Forest for an interesting, slightly confusing graph of the process on page 5.) Bostonians had many reasons for putting large, wasteful fields of money-wasting green space in their cities—water treatment, religious beliefs, public health, civic pride. I talk about them in my book Boston’s Gardens & Green Spaces.

But really, the reason we still have most of our parks—with some glaring exceptions, like Wood Island—is that people like them, and are willing to work to protect them. In Boston, we have groups like the Emerald Necklace Conservancy, the Friends of the Public Garden, Friends of Franklin Park; have you ever heard of the Friends of the Bowker Overpass? The Hynes Convention Center T-Stop Conservancy? They’re public works, too. Somehow, they don’t attract quite the same affection.

Historic postcard of sheep grazing in Franklin Park, courtesy of the Dorchester Historical Society

Nowadays, people like Boston’s farms too: Revision Houses’s farm, and the Food Project, and Allandale Farm. It may be simply a fashion, but Boston has had plenty of park fashions in the past; the preferred way to experience plants changes from generation to generation. The Public Garden was a botanical garden when it was first decoratively planted in 1837. Mount Auburn and Forest Hills Cemetery were enormously popular with 19th-century tourists who enjoyed viewing trees among the dead. In 1885, Frederick Law Olmsted convinced Bostonians that the highest and best use of Franklin Park was to graze sheep. In the 20th century, parks like Wood Island and a portion of the Riverway were paved over altogether, to construct Logan Airport in Wood Island’s case, and to make a parking lot for Sears out of the poor Riverway.

(Mind you, not everyone is keen on the idea of farms in the city. In May, some Dorchester residents objected to the “arrogant” way the city of Boston was promoting farming on four vacant lots in the neighborhood, prompting City Councillor Charles Yancey to declare “This is not a plantation.” Abutters also voiced fears of increased rodent populations. A representative from Revision House, which has been operating a small farm in Dorchester for more than 20 years, said that there weren’t any more mice than usual at Revision’s Farm.)

But even if urban-dwellers willingly waste their precious money and space on mere lettuces, is Glaeser right? Will urban food production ruin our economy, change our climate, and make our world a more miserable place to live?

The answer seems to be no, because current city set-ups and rural agriculture are already making our world a more miserable place to live. Cities save energy to be sure—it’s a lot cheaper to heat a two-bedroom apartment than a free-standing house, and walking and public transportation make a difference too. But all that carbon-saving efficiency comes at a price; American cities use vast quantities of energy and fresh water dealing with feces, urine, and food waste. (Some Kenyan city-dwellers can take advantage of Sanergy’s recycling waste into methane.) Sewage and rotting food has to go somewhere.

At the same time, rural agriculture wastes vast quantities of water. U.S. growers pour pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers on crops to keep pests away and give them nutrients—and still lose millions of pounds of crops to floods, drought, spoilage, disease, and pests each year. Fresh water used for irrigation runs off, depleting fertilizer and leaching these chemicals into the groundwater and local rivers. The result: a dead zone of 7000 square miles in the Gulf of Mexico, and saline and heavy metal contamination of California’s Central Valley Aquifer, which is used to irrigate California’s most productive crop land. Yuck.

Gordon Graff’s proposed SkyFarm, via www.verticalfarm.com

There is an alternative: vertical farms. Build a skyscraper full of crops instead of people—or better yet, build giant greenhouses on top of existing buildings—and you won’t take up any more of Glaeser’s precious productive economic land. Heck, the hydroponics firm Brightfarms is already plunking a greenhouse on top of a supermarket in Brooklyn just like Boston chefs are growing greens on their restaurant roofs and the Food Project is farming 6,000 square feet on a parking deck at Boston Medical Center.

Present-day urban farms take up far less water than rural farms. According to the Economist, in 2006-9 a hydroponic barge in New York City, growing crops without soil in nutrient-laden water, used one tenth as much fresh water as a comparable farm field—with no run-off, and no pesticides, and a potential year-round growing season.

The barge used one-tenth as much water as a comparable field farm. There was no agricultural run-off, and chemical pesticides were replaced with natural predators such as ladybirds. Operating all year round, the barge could grow 20 times more than could have been produced by a field of the same size, says Dr Caplow.

to see the Vertical Farm diagram, www.verticalfarm.com

In a perfect world, vertical farmers could also make use of composted food waste. They could even purify “black water” (sewage), or “gray water” left over after solids are removed from sewage. New York City alone produces a billion gallons of gray water a day. Instead of sending gray water it to a waste treatment plant, vertical farms using it to feed fast-growing non-edible plants like duckweed, sawgrass, and cattails (well, cattails are edible, but most people don’t know how.) Harvest your sawgrass to make methane, and you’ve got clean water and energy! And a rather odd view from the 45th floor. Look out your balcony at…duckweed?

Sure, vertical farms will require some investment, and hydroponics isn’t exactly the all-natural back-to-the-land experience that some city-dwellers yearn for, now that less than one percent of Americans claim to be working as farmers. But if, as Vertical Farms author Dickson Despommier states, the world population is projected to increase from 6.8 billion to 9.5 billion by 2050, we’re going to need a lot more cropland to provide calories: an area the size for Brazil. Where else are we going to find it?

also to follow up you might want to take a look at the treehugger post

An Interview with Michael Shuman: if we’re serious about localisation, “all of us have to go to Business School”…

Published on February 14, 2011 by Rob Hopkins on the Transition Network website

AS FOLOWS:
I was honoured last week to be able to interview Michael Shuman, who has long been one of pioneers of thinking on the question of localisation. It was a fascinating conversation…

Can you tell us about your work and what you do, for those unfamiliar with that…

Right now my formal job portfolio is split 50/50 between BALLE, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, and another for profit called Cutting Edge Capital. BALLE is a non-profit founded about 10 years ago, which is building networks of local businesses through North America and I do research and economic development activities for them. Cutting Edge Capital is really working with small businesses and communities to help them figure out ways of creating more local investment solutions. I guess within Cutting Edge Capital I do a lot of other stuff that’s pretty broad: public speaking and I do community engagements on local food systems and on specific economic development plans. I’m also working on a new book now on local investment strategies (note: Michael is also author of Going Local and Small Mart Revolution).

When you talk about localisation, what do you mean by it?

I think localisation really is two pieces – one is ownership and the other is proximity. The particular spread of local food ideas has given a lot of weight to the proximity issue – that is, that the distance between farm to table should be a short one – but I think it’s given short thrift to the ownership issues, and I consider it just as essential that localisation involve local ownership of every node of a shortened journey that a good or service travels to get to the end user.

There was a news article here recently where Colin McInnes at Strathclyde University wrote a very critical piece about localisation without really understanding it. I’m just going to read this out to get your thoughts on it:

“… at its core, localism is in many ways an indulgent form of self-interest. A self-sufficient community is exactly that. It is independent of the cares or needs of other communities and is unwilling to engage in the wider human enterprise … we should reject these new forms of localism. We should have as little interest in growing our own food or generating our own energy as we have in producing our own steel. If we leave energy to energy utilities and food to efficient large-scale farming, we can enjoy the products of both while undertaking a myriad of other productive tasks, and so ensure growing prosperity for all”.

The reason I wanted to mention that was because it seems to sum up everything that is a misunderstanding of what localisation means, and it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on it.

That’s a great quote and I’d love it if you could send me a link to that article, because it would be fun to make fun of! There’s a bunch of things to say about this. First or all, I’m sympathetic with most of the underlying values of the author – that is, I do believe it’s important for an economy to be efficient and to achieve good economies of scale and for a community to maximise wealth, and I also believe it’s important for communities to relate to the rest of the world.

If in fact localisation meant poverty and withdrawal from the world, I would not be in favour of it. But what the author has wrong is a complete misunderstanding about economies of scale and also that the way that localisation is working, just like our phone-call is working, is that the wealth and the time and the resources that localisation provides to a community enables it to be a more powerful and effective participant in international affairs. My own professional trajectory – I’ve been out of law school now for basically 30 years.

The first half of my professional life was helping cities get directly involved in foreign policy. I had a journal for mayors and city council members in the US called The Bulletin of Municipal Foreign Policy, which was designed to make it essential for communities to get involved in international affairs. What I ultimately realised was that globalisation – the way that it had mutated – was making it more difficult for cities to maximise their wealth and to participate in international affairs. That’s how I got interested in issues of localisation. We could talk more about the economy of scale issue, but I do believe that localisation is about cities and communities becoming wealthier.

Where do you stand on the question of economic growth? Is it feasible? Is it desirable? Is it possible? Is it possible to have localisation where local size businesses are growing within a wider national framework of de-growth or steady state?

I guess I’m with some of the writings of Herman Daley on this, and that is that the way that one can make economic growth fit within the ecological limits of the planet is by growing information and technology, and decreasing energy use per unit of production and decreasing material throughput per unit of production.

Can we do that? I think there are some encouraging trends, but I think in order to make sure that that is the way it happens, that’s why it’s so important to move to energy and material taxation – that is, green taxation – from our current systems of taxation so that that becomes a requirement of economic growth. So reframed I think, growth of technology, growth of information, growth of intelligence are all possible and could in fact lead to growth of GDP.

In McInnes’s quote I read you out earlier on where he talked about how it’s undesirable for all communities to produce their own steel…. clearly when we’re talking about localisation, there are different things that work on different scales. What in your analysis would be the things that make economic sense at the local scale quickest? Food? Energy? Building materials?

Let’s get very specific and empirical about this. From data in the US, we have something called the North American Industrial Classification System – NAICS – and it splits up the economy into 1100 categories. A very interesting exercise that you can perform is to ask in how many of these 1100 categories do we have more examples of large business than small business? In the US we have a peculiar definition of small business which is 500 employees or fewer, but let’s call that….if not a local producer than at least a regional producer scale.

The answer to that question is 7. That is, in 1093 of these categories we have more examples of successful small business than large business. The truth is, when you look at those 7, top of the list is running your own centralised monetary system, which actually many localisation people think they can do through local currency. Number 2 on the list is running your own nuclear power plant which none of us care about. Number 3 on the list is missiles and rockets, and maybe we would be prepared to concede that one. But even in the other 4 items on that list, there are examples of successful small business, and so the point is that a good economic development programme would not ask the question, “what is the average economy of scale of a successful steel plant?” A good economic development programme would say, “let’s find the best examples of small scale, steel production and implement that and see if we could make a go at it.”

I don’t take it that steel is undoable at a local level. I believe that almost everything is doable at a small, local level in a competitive way if you’re smart about it. Almost every advantage that you can get through a larger economy of scale, you can achieve through a bunch of small businesses working together in, say, a producer cooperative or some other relationship. But that said, you have to say that where the economies of scale are changing, are shifting to the local level the fastest, would be where the weight of an object if relatively high and its value is relatively low – because those are the areas where rising energy prices are going to effect trade most significantly. So food and building materials certainly are high on that list.

If the analysis is that a localised economy, as much as is feasible, is what we want to see happening because it will be better for economics and better in terms of carbon and resilience and so on, how do we get there from where we are now? How do we start to be really strategic about what the key enterprises are that we need and how do we create, at the local level, a culture of social enterprise around localisation?

I think there are a couple of elements here but let me just focus on one that is the least obvious of them. In my mind, we need to make localisation politically attractive across the ideologies. I think one of the places where I depart from a lot of my fellow travellers here in the US is that I spend a lot of time working with and breaking bread with most conservative parts of American society, which put to shame the conservative parts of Europe!

What are the things that they care about? Reducing taxes, freeing markets, getting rid of big government, and so I think that it is very useful to begin to conceptualise localisation politically around those ideas. In point of fact, I think that a lot of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in right now is that large government agencies and major government subsidies and legal frameworks have made globalisation unwisely and irresponsibly cheap and if we begin to dismantle those, a lot of localisation will occur naturally.

In the US nearly all subsidies are around big things – big oil, big natural gas, big utilities, big cattle, big farms – it’s so perverse. Stripping away those things, that conservatives want to do right now, would be a tremendous boost for localisation. Even when you get to the State level it’s the same thing. I just finished a study for the Kellogg Foundation where we looked at the three largest economic development programmes within 15 US states, so we looked at 45 programmes in all. What we found, counting the dollars in the grants that went to these various economic development programmes was that 80% of the programmes were giving money to non-local business, that is out of state business attraction or attention.

About a third of them were giving more than 90% of their money to non-local business. So basically, if you abolish economic development as we know it, and save lots of money, which many conservatives are seeing the virtue in, it’ll be a huge boost for localisation, because the effect of these subsidies is to make non-local business more competitive, more powerful than local businesses.

The second thing I would say – the second area where this is true – is security law, so this kind of moves into the investment domain and what I’ve noticed about localisation discussions in the US and Europe and in Australia, (those are the places where I’ve spent some time), is that things are very much focused on consumption and buy local, produce local and all that is great, but there’s been really inadequate discussion about investment. What is perverse, this is true in the US and true in Australia, I don’t know for sure about Europe, is that when I go to an audience and I say, “by a show of hands, how many of you are doing your banking at a local bank or credit union?”, and almost all the hands go up…. but then when I say, “how many of you have your pension funds in local business?”, and all of the hands go down.

So we know that local businesses – and this in the US constitutes about half the GDP, in Australia it’s about two-thirds, and I suspect in Europe it’s probably somewhere in between. Yet none of our pension money is going in to local business. That is a huge market failure, and that market failure, when you start scratching at what causes it, is largely driven by security law which is a really obscure area of law. But security law basically makes it very expensive for small investors to put money in to local small business.

Coops are sort of an exception to security laws, which is why, among folks like us they’re very popular. But thinking about how to reform security laws and makes capital markets work more efficiently, I think is a critical piece of localisation. That’s another theme that I think also politically is very appealing to conservatives.

So you’re suggesting that in terms of making localisation happen, the focus should really be more on the Tea Party than on the alternative community?!

Yes. Well, I think there’s value in both and I don’t want to diminish the value of the alternative community, but…. people laugh when I say this, but I do try to practice it enough so that people take it seriously, that to the extent that we try to spend time rolling up our sleeves and working with others in our community, that we really find the people whose views are the most different from our own and really try to work it through, because I think therein lies the real rocket fuel for making what we’re talking about happen.

Might one suggest that often within the more alternative community there’s an aversion to enterprise and business and so on, and that’s going to need to be a key part in it?

Yeah, I think that’s right. Some of it is having a more mature democratic sensibility, which is to say, when we say we’re with the people to really take that seriously, because the people have such diverse views. Part of it is taking business seriously, in all of its incarnations, but even with those many incarnations, being demanding that the ownership structure of business – whether it is private or coop or non-profit – be local. Be locally controlled and reminding people of the virtues of that.

In the academic discussions about localisation there’s the idea of reflexive and unreflexive localisation – so localisation which is good, in a sense, and localisation which is undemocratic and unjust. What’s your sense in terms of when starting to implement localisation, start putting in place the infrastructures that we need for that to happen, how can we ensure from the outset that what we end up with is a reflexive form of localisation?

That’s an interesting question. Part of it is probably…..it’s the beauty of Transition Towns and what we’re trying to do with this conversation, which is to really say that the objective here is to build a global network of self-reliant, resilient communities, and to realise the best service that we can give to peace, justice, ecology and the world, is to prove that a small scale steel plant is tremendously competitive and then give that technology away to the rest of the world, knowing that if you have a 100,000 communities around the world using that technology, they are not in the end competing with each other because they’re all going to the local markets.

I think it’s the logic that the information flow and innovation that can come through an international network of local communities will lead to a more successful form of economy building than what we’re doing right now. That’s the way you get a healthy form of localisation. What I would regard as unhealthy, and this again puts me a bit at odds with some of my fellow travellers, is that wherever one throws up what are obvious trade barriers – I think that is inviting the fear, criticism that this is going to a) weaken your economy and b) it is a bit withdrawn from the world. I think the goal is through competitiveness and wealth building to become as local as possible, rather than through withdrawal and trade barriers.

So you don’t think there’s any role for legal or policy changes? Because at the moment, if you’re say, trying to promote local food and to get local authority procurement for example then you’re in danger of running up against protectionism laws and GATTs and this kind of thing. But your sense is in terms of localisation of food for example, there wouldn’t be any international policy or changes that would make that more likely? Because at the moment there isn’t really a level playing field so the Wall-Marts are always going to be….policy is skewed in their favour. So if you aren’t in favour of laws around changing protectionism, would there be any changes in the law that would support and make that playing field a bit more level?

Local procurement’s a really good example. Let me first off say that what you say really emphasises the importance of people like us pushing for policy change at the national and global levels because it is such an unequal playing field. Given that unequal playing field, it’s hard not to be sympathetic with efforts of communities to try and equalize it with their own tilt in another direction, but I do think that there are ways of framing policy that can be more consistent with market principles that may get us further along this.

Procurement is a really good example. Say for example…..in the US we have about two dozen communities that have across the board procurement preference laws. So they say, “if you’re a local business you will get a 5% advantage in the procurement process.” Those laws are probably illegal under the WTO but given the way dispute mechanisms there operate it may be decades before we know that! (laughs). It’s a good thing I guess!

But I’ve been thinking about – what’s another way of framing this that gets us to a more legally defensable result? So one thought is that within the WTO and with US law, you still have the ability to look at the long term impacts on price of a given contractor. One way of thinking about it is that you should require from any municipal contract an analysis of how much of that contract is going to be spent in the community. You then do a multiplier analysis and you look at what the tax collection from the respending of dollars is going to be.

The real price that a municipality faces from the contract will be the nominal price from the bid minus the tax collection. No because we know that local businesses spend a lot more per money locally, this would be an automatic tilt of the market in favour of local businesses. Because it’s not framed in a discriminatory fashion, that is that local businesses automatically get it because a non-local business from Taiwan could come into Washington DC and say, “we’re going to spend all our money in DC and do very well under the law.” We should say, “great, that’s fine”, because technically speaking they are contributing to the local economy, so we’ll give them due credit. I think that is a way of reframing the law and getting to the same place without violating market principles – that are important to conservatives.

If the process is successful with TTs and BALLE and other ways to try and make this push, if in twenty years it has been successful and we have managed to shift to a localised economy, can you describe that vision to us?

It’s sort of like the internal life of Switzerland! There are a couple of things about Switzerland that are impressive to me. It is such a highly decentralised country that no one ever can identify who the President is, and in fact the President does rotate every year or so, so it’s hard to identify. You also have these very powerful decentralised cantons. The reason this decentralisation was put into place was because of the bloody wars and they wanted to end them and they came to a wise conclusion that the decentralisation would eliminate the violence and in fact that happened, and it’s a major factor that contributed to Switzerland’s neutrality internationally.

The Swiss are fabulously wealthy, among the wealthiest per capita in the world and with very limited resources have become tremendously self reliant but they also are good in trade. That’s where the analogy ends because the Swiss are addicted to material in terms of energy, in terms of trade. I would say that we have shifted tax laws from all the ridiculous taxes that we have now on income sales and property….and move entirely into energy and materials taxes and so those, along with the natural spikes in energy prices are contributing to a great deal more natural self reliance.

Who knows, but I think in the world that we’re talking about, the value of trade could well increase but the content, the weight of that trade, the energy content of that trade would go down. I could imagine us trading a lot more things like music, conversation, intelligence – things that flow in the way of electrons, but things that are goods and have weight we’ll be doing a lot more of ourselves. Food is high on that list, energy is on that list too – and because we’re using less energy, and using materials more effectively, it will help to ease some of the environmental burden of that as well.

My last question is, in order for TT projects to take a step up and make this happen….what skills and what abilities do we need to learn, bring on board? What tools and resources do we need to move forward?

I would say two or three things. The first is I think that all of us have to go to business school. We have to realise that even if we’re going to be advocates of local economies, we have to be those economies and model those businesses that we want out there and prove concept wherever possible.

The second thing is it is the political majority, the listening….rather than trying to beat those on the right that people just instinctively distrust, I think it’s about embracing those with different political views and finding the right ideological and philosophical mix that gets us from here to there.

I think the last piece is seeing ourselves as part of the problem. Our consumption dollars, what drives the system, our investment dollars provide the foundation for the system. The more that we can create alternative systems by channelling our consumption and investment and convince others these are great ways of living, and consistent with what we’re trying to achieve long term, I think that’s the way we’re going to succeed.

Original article: http://transitionculture.org/2011/02/14/an-interview-with-michael-shuman-if-were…