First thing you need to get is wood. You should aim for untreated hardwood or railway sleepers. Don’t buy wood brand new – it’s too expensive. In any case, it’s better to recycle, so find yourself a salvage yard. In Melbourne, secondhand hardwood boards can be sourced from between $3 or $4 a metre. Do the math and work out how much wood you need – not just the boards, but also a stake that can be used to attach the boards together (see below). Cut to size.

I then use the small stakes to join the side boards together.

In situ, attach the end boards to the sideboards, as seen below.

Then soak lots of newspaper and cardboard in water and then lay it in bottom of the garden bed. This keeps weeds and grass at bay.

A raised bed this size will require a fair amount of soil, and I ordered some in (to supplement backyard too). For Melbournians, I highly recommend Bulleen Art and Garden for great soil. Don’t skimp on soil. The cheapest stuff can be more sand than soil, which is no good for growing food. Soil is the foundation of a flourishing garden.

Start filling your bed with soil.

If you can get organised enough, grow your own seedlings rather than buying them. You’ll save lots of money.

Time to plant the bed up!

And in a month or so it will look like this. (Note mandarin tree at the end which I planted a year or so ago.)

Tell me that isn’t a beautiful nature strip! I dream of a day when every nature strip in suburbia looks like this (see “The Sufficiency Economy,” by Samuel Alexander).

Obviously, the same building method works just as well in the backyard/front yard.

For Australians, please see the competition being run by Reclaim the Curb, offering good prize money for the best curb-side garden!

“Self-Sufficiency in a ‘Time of Plenty’: Mass Consumerism and Freedom in 1970s Australia” – full essay here. 

This article examines the notion of post-industrial self-sufficiency in Australia in the early 1970s. Against the backdrop of more than twenty years of economic prosperity from which the majority of Australians had benefited, an increasingly dissatisfied minority voluntarily chose to ‘opt out’ of mainstream society to live a life of intentional poverty. Despite their material affluence, those who were drawn to self-sufficiency did not feel free under the constraints of mass consumerism. Their solution would be to reunite the dual spheres of production and consumption to regain control over their lives by providing as much of their needs as possible themselves. Thus, to understand the complexities of the movement (and the failings of the consumerist ideal) this paper contends that one needs to view post-industrial self-sufficiency as much a product of post-war consumer capitalism as a reaction against it.

Keywords: Consumer Capitalism; Consumption; Freedom; Mass Consumerism; Production; Self-Sufficiency

After the article, I’ve posted a number of resources for those who’d like to look into these issues further. 

SUPERANNUATION’S CARBON FOOTPRINT by Michael Green 

If you insulate your home against the climate, insulate your money too.

YOUR carbon footprint comprises emissions from household energy use, transport, food, shopping and waste. But is that all?

A new social media campaign called The Vital Few argues there’s something we’ve overlooked: “Are you accidentally investing in climate change?” it asks.

“Maybe you reduce, reuse and recycle. Maybe you’re into using renewables… But are you even remotely aware of how your pension contribution is being spent on your behalf?”

The campaign is coordinated by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project. It’s a not-for-profit organisation, with board members including John Hewson, the former Liberal Party leader, and Sharan Burrow, the general secretary of the International Trade Union Confederation.

Dr Hewson says The Vital Few is about “empowering superannuates to contact their directors and trustees, and ask them why they are investing so intensively in carbon-heavy industries”.

He says an average pension fund now invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

But those numbers must change: “These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low–carbon intensive industries.”

Julian Poulter, the executive director of the Disclosure Project, says it’s not only a worry for the environmentally concerned. It’s also about protecting your nest egg.

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Last December, the organisation launched an index of the world’s largest pension funds, rating them on their management and disclosure of climate risk in their investment portfolios.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, in New South Wales. There were five other Australian funds in the top ten: CareSuper, Cbus Super, VicSuper, UniSuper and AustralianSuper.

Even so, the report concluded that no fund had “accurately assessed or managed its climate risk”.

Mr Poulter says the average fund member is 20 years from retirement. “By 2030 our climate and energy supply are going to look very different, under any scenario. Either the climate will be in such trouble that we’ll be into panic mode, or the fossil fuel industry will be in trouble,” he says.

Switching away from fossil fuels might mean a short-term sacrifice on returns, he says, but it’s the only way to avoid a long-term loss.

“When it comes to retirement, most baby boomers think they’re going to escape the climate crisis. Unfortunately, they’ll probably just be moving into the retirement home or the hospice by the time the impacts kick in. Economically, climate change could be very inconvenient for their superannuation,” he says.

He says that for most people, their home is their largest asset – followed by their super. There’s no sense in greening one while the other is actively brown.

“We think that once people join the dots, as customers of these funds, they will be in a position to influence the debate and drive change in the industry.”

Illustration by Robin Cowcher

Read this article at The Age online or at Michael Green’s website.

__________________________

And here are some resources for those who’d like to look into these issues further, compiled by Govind Maksay. Thanks Gove! Download file here: Resources-1. 

See also: http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-22/can-a-divestment-campaign-move-the-fossil-fuel-industry AND http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-03-27/the-reasoning-behind-divestment

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Dear Mr. Ferguson,

I am writing to you because I have a few questions regarding climate change and the Federal Government’s coal export policy.

The 2012 Energy White Paper contained the following statement on page 18.

“Australia’s nine major coal-exporting terminals had a combined capacity of almost 400 million tonnes and loaded nearly 290 million tonnes of coal in 2010-11. Further planned investment in coal, rail and port infrastructure in the next decade will support growth in this vital export industry.”

I am very concerned by the fact that Australia is seeking to expand its coal exports exactly at the time when climate change science and policy is clearly indicating that the global community must rapidly de-carbonise if we are to avoid catastrophic climate change impacts.

Increasing coal exports concerns me for two reasons.

1. Australia will be directly contributing to accelerating climate change by selling its coal to the world in an uncontrolled manner. I believe that coal exports should be capped and that a plan should be established to phase out coal mining within a decade. There are various policies that could help achieve this objective but I don’t hear the Federal Government talking about the need to do this.
2. Investing heavily in coal exports will leave Australia open to significant economic shocks as the world moves away from fossil fuels over the coming decades. I believe that a time will come soon when the global community clearly realises the catastrophic impacts unchecked climate change will have and this will result in a rapid retreat from fossil fuels. Australia should be preparing for this time and we should not be investing heavily in fossil fuels.

This brings me to another important point. At Copenhagen in 2009 the majority of the world agreed to take action to hold any increase in global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius. Australia signed the Copenhagen Accord so has clearly supported this objective.

There is a growing consensus that if were are to limit warming to two degrees 66%-75% of proven fossil fuel reserves cannot be consumed unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) is widely deployed.

Respected and conservative international bodies, such the International Energy Agency (IEA), have clearly stated this point. The following quote is taken from page 6 of the IEA’s ‘World Energy Outlook 2012′ report. I have attached the report also if you wish to take a look at it.

“No more than one-third of proven reserves of fossil fuels can be consumed prior to 2050 if the world is to achieve the 2 degree Celsius goal, unless carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology is widely deployed.”

Importantly the IEA also states on the same page that ability to widely deploy CCS is highly uncertain as only a small handful of commercial-scale projects are currently in operation. I believe to rely on CCS to save the situation would be very risky and is not a sensible bet. We need to get out of fossil fuels and move rapidly towards renewable a d zero emission energy sources.

There is a growing awareness in the finance industry that the fact that 66%-75% of fossil fuels is potentially unusable could result in massive financial disruptions. Many reports are being published stating that the market is currently not adequately pricing this risk into the share price of fossil fuel companies and that this is creating significant investor and market risk.

A very recent report from HSBC (attached) states the following:

“This analysis has prompted concerns that fossil fuel assets – and not just power generation facilities in the IEA scenarios – could become stranded in the transition to a low-carbon economy. Indeed, Carbon Tracker argues that equity investors could be facing a potential ‘carbon bubble’, with assets in excess of what can be safely and profitably exploited.”

It seems clear to me that investment in fossil fuels at such a time is very risky from a financial and economic perspective. Australia should be preparing for the inevitable rapid shift towards a low-carbon economy rather that investing further in fossil fuels.

Importantly, the decision to continue investment in fossil fuels (especially coal) is not only risking our environment but also our economic future. To continue to do so requires ignoring the overwhelming evidence before us.

We urgently need government direction and policy to firstly cap coal mining and coal exports, and secondly to manage the phase-out of the coal industry.

I would like to know how the Federal Government is taking the above information into account. Specifically I have the following questions.

1. Does the Federal Government acknowledge the fact that the best analysis to date clearly indicates that 66%-75% of proven fossil fuel reserves cannot be consumed unless CCS is widely deployed?
2. Does the Federal Government acknowledge that the goal of restricting global temperature increases to 2 degrees is fundamentally in conflict with a policy of expanding Australia’s coal exports?
3. Has the Federal Government factored in a rapid retreat from fossil fuels into its decision to expand Australia’s coal exports?
4. Does the Federal Government acknowledge that a significant investment in fossil fuels (especially coal) leaves the Australian economy open to significant shocks given the fact that the world has agreed to limit warming to 2 degrees?

I look forward to receiving a response from you.

Regards,  Govind Maksay
Brunswick, VIC, 3056

______________________________

Govind received a response from the Minister’s office, which can be read here. There is much more to say on these issues, and I hope to address some of them in coming weeks, including providing a list of resources worth considering.

Mark A. Burch, from the Simplicity Institute, has just been interviewed by Dr Randell Hardy about voluntary simplicity and mindfulness. The interview (38 mins long) is freely available online here. As always, Mark stands out as being an extremely eloquent and insightful advocate of simpler, more mindful living. It’s well worth a listen. (If you enjoy this interview, you might also like listening to one of Mark’s talks that he gave a couple of years ago, available here.)

Secondly, those of you in Melbourne might be interested in a talk by Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute, which is taking place this Wednesday at Trades Hall. His talk ($25 entry) will be exploring business models in a post-growth economy – see here for more details. It’s a fascinating and important subject.

BURSTING THE CARBON BUBBLE

Energy analysts and activists are warning that most of the world’s fossil fuels must remain in the ground, and that it can’t be business as usual for the industry.

LAST Tuesday, at 2 pm in San Francisco’s city hall, the regular council meeting was called to order, as usual. But that afternoon, councillor John Avalos proposed a decidedly irregular resolution: the city’s retirement fund should withdraw its money from fossil fuels.

“San Francisco has aggressive goals to address climate change,” he said. “It’s important that we apply these same values when we decide how to invest our funds.”

He isn’t the first to say so. In December, Seattle mayor Mike McGinn declared that the city’s cash balances – the US$1.4 billion it uses to manage its daily operations – would no longer be stashed in fossil fuel stocks. He also wrote to the city pension fund, which counts Exxon Mobil and Chevron among its major holdings, requesting it do the same.

The deliberations in the two west coast cities made a media splash, adding momentum to America’s fastest growing social movement: ‘Go Fossil Free’, a nation-wide blitz calling for universities, governments and churches to freeze new investments in fossil fuel assets, and to sell what they’ve already got.

The impetus for the campaign is a set of simple numbers – a global carbon budget.

It is a way of framing the climate crisis that is uniting student activists and market analysts. The former use the numbers to prosecute a moral case that the fossil fuel industry has gone rogue; the later, for a cold-blooded calculation that trading away from carbon-heavy assets is in the self-interest of investors.

The numbers were set out in a report called ‘Unburnable Carbon’, released last year by the Carbon Tracker Initiative, a group of analysts and environmentalists in the UK. It highlighted the work of the Potsdam Climate Institute, which in 2009 produced a set of emissions scenarios together with their likely influence on global temperatures.

These are the numbers: for a low chance – one-in-five – of exceeding 2-degrees warming, we can only emit another 565 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide by mid-century.

But proven fossil fuel reserves (held by listed corporations, private companies and nation-states) equate to 2795 gigatonnes; five times the carbon budget.

In Copenhagen in 2009, the world’s governments agreed to limit warming to 2 degrees. To do so, four-fifths of our fuel must stay in the ground.

James Leaton, Carbon Tracker’s research director, says this “huge overshoot” of reserves represents a “carbon bubble” in financial markets. We’re on track to exceed the budget by 2028. “Investors need to start questioning the wisdom of companies pouring more capital into developing even more reserves,” he says.

The International Energy Agency, in its World Energy Outlook for 2012, presented a similar case. Using the same research, but choosing a higher, 50-50 threshold for exceeding 2-degrees warming, it stated that two-thirds of proven reserves must stay in the ground, unless carbon capture and storage is widely deployed. (It observed that the pace of deployment of the technology “remains highly uncertain”.)

Bill McKibben, the author and activist who inspired Go Fossil Free in the US, explains that despite decades of advocacy, “the penny dropped” when he saw those numbers.

“I’ve followed this all pretty closely – I wrote the first book about climate change – but I’d never really understood in my gut that the end of this story was written. It’s utterly clear. There is no room for wishful thinking,” he says, on the phone from his home in Ripton, Vermont.

“These guys have five times as much carbon in their reserves as the most conservative government on Earth says would be safe to burn. Once you understand that, then you understand that this has become a rogue industry. This formerly socially useful thing is now the greatest threat the planet has ever faced.”

Last August, he published an article in Rolling Stone, called ‘Global Warming’s Terrifying New Math’. Teen heartthrob Justin Bieber was on the cover, but it was McKibben’s essay that went viral.

Spurred by its unexpected popularity, McKibben hit the road the day after the US election, on his ‘Do the Math’ tour. With support from Desmond Tutu, author Naomi Klein and others, he spoke to sold-out concert halls “in 24 cities in 26 nights”.

Just two months on, students on over 250 campuses have started campaigns for their universities to divest from fossil fuel companies. (Together, US colleges command over US$400 billion in endowments.) Already, three have agreed.

“It’s actually happening faster than we thought,” McKibben says. “These are hard fights. All these kids know that, but they also know that this is their future.”

The campaign is modelled on the anti-apartheid divestment movement. In the 1980s, 155 colleges sold their South African assets, and scores of cities, states and counties joined in economic action against companies connected to the apartheid regime.

This time – and with the blessing of Tutu – the call for divestment is about undermining the fossil fuel industry’s legitimacy. “We’re not trying to bankrupt Exxon; colleges selling their stock is probably not going to do that,” McKibben says. “We’re trying to take away their social licence.”

The writer is scheduled to visit Australia in June, before his organisation, 350.org, holds its ‘Global Power Shift’ conference in Istanbul. But local activists aren’t waiting until then.

In January, Friends of the Earth began to promote Market Forces, a new campaign “to stop our money going into projects that would harm the environment and drive global warming”,according to its founder, Julien Vincent.

Likewise, the Australian Students Environment Network has started Lock the Campus, which targets universities’ investments, research and partnerships with the fossil fuel industry. They have a precedent: following a brief student campaign in 2011, ANU agreed to sell its million-dollar stake in coal seam gas company Metgasco.

As it turns out, the students have an unlikely ally – albeit one with a slightly different goal in mind.

John Hewson, the former leader of the Liberal Party, now fronts the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP) and its accompanying social media campaign, The Vital Few, which is aimed squarely at superannuation funds.

The Vital Few website is set up for battle, rallying the public to “storm the castle” and “rewrite the future”. In practice, that means emailing your fund, requesting transparency about its interests in fossil fuels and calling for a bigger stake in renewables.

Hewson says the average pension fund invests about 55 per cent of its portfolio in “high-carbon intensive industries” and only 2 per cent in their low carbon counterparts.

“These asset owners have a long-term, not a short-term, horizon,” he says. “Their fiduciary responsibility is to maximise the returns to superannuates over time. How are they going to manage the risk of catastrophic climate change going forward? The best way is to put a higher percentage of their funds in low carbon intensive industries.”

In the finance world, “climate risk” translates as the prospect of reduced earnings or devalued assets, caused by climate change. That could come by way of physical impacts – say, a flood that destroys infrastructure – or cheap clean technology, or tough policy measures, such as robust carbon pricing and regulations.

Alongside Hewson on the AODP board is Bob Litterman, the former head of risk management for Goldman Sachs in New York. He sees an analogy between the carbon bubble and the sub-prime crisis, in which financial institutions “piled up mortgages on their balance sheet, assuming they were safe”.

“Similarly, today, we’re piling up carbon emissions in the atmosphere. When there’s a recognition that it cannot absorb an unlimited amount of carbon, there’s risk that people will very quickly revalue all the assets producing those emissions,” he says.

Last year, the AODP – which has connections with the Climate Institute – launched an index of the world’s pension funds, insurance companies and sovereign wealth funds. It ranked them on their management and disclosure of climate risk.

The highest rating fund was Local Government Super, based in New South Wales. It estimates that low-carbon assets comprise more than 10 per cent of its total holdings. Members can choose a coal-free shares alternative, which screens out BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, Wesfarmers and Whitehaven Coal, among others.

CEO Peter Lambert insists this attitude to climate risk is pragmatic, not political. “Increasingly the blowtorch is going to be turned towards these issues and there will be a time when they’re priced into assets.

“You can say you’ll sit back and wait until that occurs and then start to adjust your portfolio. Our position is that we should be ready for it now, because by then it’s too late and it will cost our members money,” he says.

That view is not yet widely shared in the industry. Nathan Fabian is the CEO of the Investor Group on Climate Change, which covers more than sixty institutional investors. “I’m confident we’re heading in the right direction,” he says. “But the truth is that the process is going slower than what is necessary to address climate risk.”

For funds and analysts, the risk boils down to the likelihood of widespread carbon pricing. Most are betting against it – that is, they’re tipping we’ll exceed the budget and press on to a hotter world.

Even for the most concerned among them, it is difficult to translate knowledge into action.

Typically, super funds invest heavily in “passive funds” that track the market – deviating from that benchmark entails a risk of doing worse than everyone else.

The very nature of financial modelling is a barrier, Fabian says: a dollar today is worth considerably more than a dollar in a decade. When you factor in deep uncertainty about carbon policy, along with fund managers who are rewarded for meeting short-term targets, a systemic, long-term risk such as climate change slips off the computer screen.

“The risk is there,” he says. “It’s just hard for us to measure it.”

Nick Robins is the head of the climate change centre at HSBC Bank, in London. Over the past year, his team has tried to measure the risk by estimating the impact in Europe of a deflating carbon bubble. In their scenarios, it could nearly halve the value of coal assets on the London exchange, and knock three-fifths from the value of oil and gas companies. And yet, he says, “at the moment this risk is not being priced at all”.

While the San Francisco and Seattle divestment proposals received a lot of press, the funds in question haven’t yet adopted them. In Seattle, a consultant’s report advised the board that doing so would be “costly”.

But just as the current patterns of world finance continue to reinforce the fossil fuel economy, so the movements for change – laid out by Carbon Tracker, McKibben and the Vital Few – weaken the walls of the carbon bubble. The more noise they make, the more exposed fossil fuel investments appear.

Robins says divestment is “not on the cards” for large institutional investors. “But people are recognising that over the next two years, they will need to come up with investment plans about how they’re going to be part of a 2-degree world, rather than the 4- to 6-degree world which they’re on at the moment.”

For his part, McKibben expects Go Fossil Free will spread rapidly and internationally, precipitated by citizens’ experiences of weather extremes.

“If anybody has a good sense of how important this is, it’s Australians right now. You guys broke every temperature record you had, day after day in January,” he says.

“Either we pay attention, or we engage in the most incredible collective denial that human beings have ever engaged in.”

Read this article at The Age online and see more of Michael Green’s articles here.

I’ve posted the introduction to Trainer’s new report below and the full report is freely available here.

Your Delightful Day: The Benefits of Life in The Simpler Way

Ted Trainer

Introduction

Global problems cannot be solved unless we dramatically reduce the amount of producing and consuming going on.  This means that people in rich countries must move down to per capita levels of resource consumption that are a small fraction of present levels  (see Trainer, 2010, 2011a).

Understandably people think this would involve severe deprivation and hardship, and it is therefore not surprising that there is a general refusal to consider it.  The assumption however is quite mistaken.  Moving to The Simpler Way would enable a far higher quality of life than people in the rich and over-developed consumer societies have now.  It would be a huge liberation from the rat race and the stress, depression and struggling to cope that it inflicts, even on richer people.

It is necessary to note briefly the main features of The Simpler Way as the benefits to be discussed derive from these.  Because we would not be consuming more than we needed for a good life, and because there would be many non-resource intensive sources of enjoyment, we could cut a great deal off the present amount of producing, work, production, sales and GDP.  There would be highly self-sufficient local economies using local resources to produce most of the basic things we needed, from the land and small firms within and close to our suburbs and towns.  Thus there would be little need for transport compared with now, so most people could get to work on a bicycle or on foot and there would be little need for cars, little traffic or road expenditure. We would run those economies via participatory systems, such as town assemblies, to ensure that needs were prioritised.   Most of the work needed to keep the town running well would be done by voluntary committees and working bees, for instance maintaining the many commons providing free food, materials and leisure resources. There would still be a national economy, some international trade and some functions for state governments, but relatively little. (For a detailed account of the new economy see Trainer 2011b).

It is now clearly understood that above a relatively low amount, monetary income is not very important for quality of life or happiness. (For an impressive review of the evidence, see Alexander, 2012.) This is the case even in consumer-capitalist society where many benefits cannot be accessed without money.  The Simpler Way would enable many extremely important sources of life satisfaction that are not available in present society no matter how rich you are.  Following is an indication of the many benefits we could be enjoying if most of us lived in the kind of communities outlined.

The full report is freely available here.   

LIVING OFF-THE-GRID IS POSSIBLE, BUT IT’S NOT ENOUGH TO FIX CLIMATE CHANGE

by Ted Trainer, Visiting Fellow at University of NSW

My old house has never been connected to the electricity supply. It runs on a couple of photo voltaic (solar) panels and is warmed by firewood. All water used is rainwater.

I have a vegie garden, fruit trees and chickens. My pumps and machinery run on 12 volt solar electricity. I travel 25km to paid work once a week, by bicycle and train, and drive about 10km a week. I never go away on holidays. The average Australian household uses about one kilowatt of electricity; I use eight watts.

So isn’t downshifting to less consuming lifestyles the way to solve the greenhouse problem?

Emphatically, no it isn’t. It’s part of the solution but not the main part. If you want to fix the climate, developing nations’ poverty, resource depletion and other environmental problems you will also have to totally scrap economic growth, and therefore capitalism, and largely scrap globalisation, centralisation, the market system, representative democracy, the financial system, big cities, modern agriculture and urbanism.

A little extreme? Here’s the core argument.

Everyone knows the basic facts and figures, but few face up to what they mean. To provide the average Australian with food, settlement area, water and energy now requires about eight hectares of productive land. If by 2050, nine billion people were to have risen to the present Australian “living standard”, and the planet’s amount of productive land is still the same as it is today, the amount available per capita will be about .8ha. In other words Australian’s today are using ten times the amount that will be possible for all.

It’s much the same for all other resources. There are already scarcities regarding food in general, fish, water, most industrial minerals and petroleum, with estimates of peak coal occurring within a few decades. Only about one fifth of the world’s people have rich world consumption rates, and six times as many will soon be aspiring to them.

And yet, everyone is manically obsessed with constantly increasing “living standards”, production, consumption and GDP. At the standard 3% per annum growth rate, according to WWF figures we will need more than 20 planet earths to meet 2050 resource demands.

The glaringly obvious yet ignored point is that rich world per capita levels of resource consumption and ecological impact are far beyond levels that that are sustainable, or that could be made sustainable by any remotely plausible technical fixes. People, including most of the green ones, do not grasp the magnitude of the overshoot, nor the significance of the change required to solve the big problems.

The problems are being caused primarily by our systems, not our lifestyles although these are far too affluent. It’s not possible to get resource consumption down to one-fifth or one-tenth of present levels, unless we not only shift to a zero growth economic system, but to one with a far lower level of GDP. That means an economy in which there can be no interest paid.

That means we have to scrap the present financial system, and the forces driving innovation, incentive, work and investment, and the quest for greater wealth. It means much more than scrapping capitalism; it means completely abandoning some of the fundamental ideas (like the definition of progress,) and values (such as getting rich) that have driven Western culture for 300 years.

We could do it, easily, if you wanted to. My system, The Simpler Way (detailed in my book), is one whereby we transform our present suburbs and towns into highly self-sufficient and self-governing local and zero-growth economies, in which the quality of life would be higher than it is now in the consumer rat race.

Yes, an important part must be the willing acceptance of frugal, self-sufficient, cooperative ways at the level of the household and community. But it would not be necessary to go as far as I choose to on my bush homestead. We could still have electricity grids, (small) cities, (some) trade and heavy industry, railway networks, a (small) central state (under the control of town assemblies), universities and professional skills, and more socially useful high tech research and development than we have now. You might need to work for money only one day a week.

Many people in eco-villages more or less live in the required ways now. Many are attempting to transform their towns and suburbs into being more self-sufficient and self-governing local communities.

But these very encouraging beginnings are not yet focused on the crucial goals. If you really want to help save the planet don’t fret much about downshifting but join your local community garden, with a view to getting people there thinking more about the need to focus on us eventually achieving the big structural and cultural changes.

For more articles by Ted Trainer, see the Simplicity Institute’s publications listing here.

]]> http://simplicitycollective.com/ted-trainers-new-article-on-the-conversation/feed 4 http://simplicitycollective.com/has-civilization-a-future-simplicity-institute-report-by-paul-ehrlich-and-anne-ehrlich http://simplicitycollective.com/has-civilization-a-future-simplicity-institute-report-by-paul-ehrlich-and-anne-ehrlich#comments Tue, 29 Jan 2013 04:50:20 +0000 Samuel Alexander http://simplicitycollective.com/?p=1921 Can a collapse of civilization be avoided? This is the bold question Paul and Anne Ehrlich, from Stanford University, confront in their challenging new essay, published today by the Simplicity Institute. Paul Ehrlich has been amongst the most prominent figures in the Environmental Movement ever since his 1968 publication of The Population Bomb. 

I’ve posted the introduction below and the full report, with references, is available from the Simplicity Institute here.

CAN A COLLAPSE OF CIVILIZATION BE AVOIDED?

1. Introduction

Virtually every past civilization has eventually undergone collapse, a loss of socio-political-economic complexity usually accompanied by a dramatic decline in population size [1]. Some, such as those of Egypt and China, have recovered from collapses at various stages; others, such as that of Easter Island or the Classic Maya, were apparently permanent [1,2]. All those previous collapses were local or regional; elsewhere, other societies and civilizations persisted unaffected. Sometimes, as in the Tigris and Euphrates valleys, new civilizations rose in succession. In many, if not most, cases, overexploitation of the environment was one proximate or an ultimate cause [3].

But today, for the first time, humanity’s global civilization—the worldwide, increasingly interconnected, highly technological society in which we all are to one degree or another, embedded—is threatened with collapse by an array of environmental problems. Humankind finds itself engaged in what Prince Charles described as ‘an act of suicide on a grand scale’ [4], facing what the UK’s Chief Scientific Advisor John Beddington called a ‘perfect storm’ of environmental problems [5]. The most serious of these problems show signs of rapidly escalating severity, especially climate disruption. But other elements could potentially also contribute to a collapse: an accelerating extinction of animal and plant populations and species, which could lead to a loss of ecosystem services essential for human survival; land degradation and land-use change; a pole-to-pole spread of toxic compounds; ocean acidification and eutrophication (dead zones); worsening of some aspects of the epidemiological environment (factors that make human populations susceptible to infectious diseases); depletion of increasingly scarce resources [6,7], including especially groundwater, which is being overexploited in many key agricultural areas [8]; and resource wars [9]. These are not separate problems; rather they interact in two gigantic complex adaptive systems: the biosphere system and the human socio-economic system. The negative manifestations of these interactions are often referred to as ‘the human predicament’ [10], and determining how to prevent it from generating a global collapse is perhaps the foremost challenge confronting humanity.

The human predicament is driven by overpopulation, overconsumption of natural resources and the use of unnecessarily environmentally damaging technologies and socio-economic-political arrangements to service Homo sapiens’ aggregate consumption [11–17]. How far the human population size now is above the planet’s long-term carrying capacity is suggested (conservatively) by ecological footprint analysis [18–20]. It shows that to support today’s population of seven billion sustainably (i.e. with business as usual, including current technologies and standards of living) would require roughly half an additional planet; to do so, if all citizens of Earth consumed resources at the US level would take four to five more Earths. Adding the projected 2.5 billion more people by 2050 would make the human assault on civilization’s life-support systems disproportionately worse, because almost everywhere people face systems with nonlinear responses [11,21–23], in which environmental damage increases at a rate that becomes faster with each additional person. Of course, the claim is often made that humanity will expand Earth’s carrying capacity dramatically with technological innovation [24], but it is widely recognized that technologies can both add and subtract from carrying capacity. The plough evidently first expanded it and now appears to be reducing it [3]. Overall, careful analysis of the prospects does not provide much confidence that technology will save us [25] or that gross domestic product can be disengaged from resource use [26].

The full report, with references, is available at the Simplicity Institute here. 

Not only that, oyster mushrooms are extremely expensive when purchased from a supermarket, so it makes sense to grow them yourself. Currently in Melbourne they are going for $34 per kilo.

I’m no mushroom-growing expert, so do your own research, but below I’ve outlined how I’ve successfully grown my own oyster mushrooms on straw. It’s surprisingly easy, although you do need to take appropriate precautions to make sure you are growing the right mushrooms and in a hygienically safe way. Apparently white oyster mushrooms are the easiest variety to grow, which is why I started with them.

 What you need:

Straw (I used pea-straw successfully but I’m told wheat straw is better)

Robust plastic bags, medium or large size (which can be reused)

Oyster mushroom spawn (which I got from CERES  in Melbourne and are also available here). You may need to find your local supplier.

Spray bottle and water

 My 10-Step Method:

(1) Before you begin, wash your hands and clean all your surfaces well. It’s very important to be hygienic when cultivating mushrooms, as you do not want to grow the wrong types of fungi! Good mushrooms are really good; bad mushrooms are really bad. Fortunately, oysters mushrooms are very distinctive.

(2) Once you’ve got all the materials, the first thing you need to do is pasteurise the straw. From my research online, I discovered that this essentially means heating the straw in water to around 70-75 degrees (Celsius) and holding it at that temperature for around 45-60 minutes. I used a large Fowlers cooking pot. Pasteurisation kills the bad bacteria but leaves the good bacteria. Before you put the straw in the pot, most websites recommend that the straw is cut it up into small pieces around 1 to 3 inches in length. (To be honest, I didn’t cut up my straw, and I still grew mushrooms, but perhaps if I had cut it up my production might have been greater – further experimenting required.)

(3) Once you’ve pasteurised the straw, take it out of the heating pot with tongs and let it sit in a clean tub while it cools down. Be careful as you’re dealing with a lot of hot water and the pot will be heavy. It’s important you don’t put the mushroom spawn into the straw until the straw is at room temperature otherwise you will kill the spawn.

(4) When the straw has cooled down, pack your robust plastic bags with straw quite tightly, and then distribute some of the mushroom spawn throughout the straw. I put about three or four pieces of spawn-covered dowel in each bag, but perhaps one would have been fine (further experimenting required). The straw should not be dripping wet, but it should still be damp from the pasteurisation.

(5) At this stage, sterilise a skewer or a nail (by pouring boiling water over it) and jab holes in the bags every 3 inches or so. This let’s some air in, but not too much.

(6) You now have to find a home for you mushrooms. Keep them out of direct sunlight. They like some indirect light and I am told they like it best at around 15-20 degrees Celsius. (It’s been considerably warmer than that in Melbourne over the last two months, and mine have grown very well, but again perhaps the yields would have been greater had the temperature been cooler). More experimenting required. I kept my bags inside to minimise the risk of contamination.

(7) Now you wait while the mushrooms spawn develops into mycelium and beginning taking over the entire bag. Mycelium looks a bit like white furry cobwebs, and you should start seeing it develop in the first couple of weeks. It’s important that your bags of straw stay moist, but not dripping wet. I found that the water from the pasteurisation was sufficient to keep the straw suitably moist without needing to spray with water.

(8) After a number of weeks (depending on the size of your bags) the mycelium should have spread across the entire bag of straw. It is at this stage (which for me was about 5 weeks later) your mushrooms should start forming. I cut some slightly larger holes in the bag, although I’m not sure this was necessary. The mushrooms will decide that they want to grow out of one or more of the holes you’ve created, and they’ll usually grow in one or two clusters.

(9) Now comes the fun part. The mushrooms essentially double in size every day, so within a week or so you should have good-sized oyster mushrooms. Mist them with water two or three times a day over this period – again, not so they are dripping, just so they are moist. The mushrooms should be harvested while their rims are still curled over a little and pointing downwards. If their rims seem to be turning upward, it’s probably time to harvest.

(10) Harvest and eat. To harvest the mushrooms give them a twist at the base. This ensures that you leave the very bottom of the mushroom still in bag. You want to leave that part in the bag as it is needed for the subsequent flushes of mushrooms. If you keep the mushrooms moist and in suitable conditions, you should get three or four flushes of mushrooms, although I’m told the first and second flushes are the most productive. I’m currently harvesting my second flush. When your bags stop producing, the straw can be used as mulch for the garden. (Alternatively, my understanding is that you can distribute some of your straw into new bags of fresh straw and the growing process begins again).

If there are any mushroom experts out there, do let me know if you have any advice, and if any of you decide to begin cultivating your own mushrooms, do let me know  how you get on. I’m going to keep experimenting in the hope of developing the easiest and most productive methods.

That’s all for now. I’ve got to go cook me some shrooms.