Last year, when the Haitian earthquake happened, there were crisis camps set up in response all around the world. Pecha-kuchas, short design talks using only 20 slides with only 20 seconds allowed for each slide, devoted to helping Haiti occurred on one night in cities on almost every continent. Resources were brought to bear in an ad hoc way that are currently being institutionalized. It seemed to me that people had begun to learn from the experience of the Asian tsunami, New Orleans and Katrina, and now Haiti how to respond in a way that was more effective. I think the same kind of thing could happen with the long emergency of climate, especially if it were focused on building security and developing a better standard of living.
The other day, I ran into Thomas Goreau who has publish the first of a set of books on innovative technologies for small island developing states. His field of primary interest is the coral reefs and he told me he is going to Panama to work with some islanders there on a solar project. Now I know why I went into that supermarket even though I didn’t buy anything. A handbook or encyclopedia of appropriate technologies in printed and electronic form could be distributed and updated by the users as they build their own indigenous projects. The same day, Robert Lange ( http://www.the-icsee.org/proje… ) who has been working in Tanzania with the Maasai developing a more efficient cookstove and building solar LED lighting systems emailed me about getting his new stove design tested. I’ve been trying to put him in contact with Richard Komp ( http://www.mainesolar.org/Komp… ) who’s been doing solar as a cottage industry, seeding small solar businesses around the world for the last 20 or so years. The point is that there is so much expertise and so many different people working, mostly in isolation, on the same problems. Lots and lots of things are happening on the local and regional level that never reach the outside world. We need to link all of it together and reveal for ourselves a new infrastructure of development and economics that is hidden because it is disconnected and unrecognized.
I’ve seen this in the local agriculture field. When we started direct marketing here in MA back in the mid-1970s, there were only 12 or 18 farmers’ markets. Now there are over 140 and bids to make some of them year-round. In the 1990s, I tried to get the local ag folks to start mapping the economic system that had grown up around those efforts but they weren’t interested. It was only a year or so ago that Boston’s Sustainable Business Network started doing that and went on to hold a huge event by the Children’s Museum, a local food festival that was more successful than they’d dreamed of. It was packed, all day, and everyone had a great time. I think the same dynamic is happening with local responses to climate change and I think one of the next steps will be recognizing that fact. I just hope it doesn’t take 30 years.
The 10/10/10 world-wide climate work day was great as was the international art day that happened in November. Both need to keep happening. Add the linking and networking on practical, local solutions and responses and we can start a parade that the politicians will be running to get at the head of, as they always do.
I’ve sent this idea to Bill McKibben and 350.org They are interested in the concept.
DIY Climate Change: Ain’t Nobody Else
http://www.dailykos.com/story/…
* Appropedia http://www.appropedia.org/Welc…
Globalswadeshi http://globalswadeshi.ning.com/
Coalition of the Willing coalition@googlegroups.com
Global System for Sustainable Development http://gssd.mit.edu/GSSD/GSSDe…
previously published at http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
An “ongoing global brainstorm” is an excellent proposal — the keyword being global. I have some significant reservations, however.
<
p>In my view, a shared aspect of all of genuine solutions and adaptations is that they must be decentralized and bottom-up — an enormous number of very small energy sources rather than a small number of very large ones. Several imperatives drive this aspect, among them the reality that transportation costs will skyrocket long before any technology is available, and those transportation costs heavily mitigate against national and perhaps even regional solutions. Current national boundaries are likely to change, perhaps even in North America: the southwest faces a nearly certain water crisis, and a shrinking New England facing severe coastal flooding that will literally destroy its coastal cities is, in my opinion, unlikely to allow its diminishing resources to be diverted to solving water problems on the other side of the continent.
<
p>If we accept the premise that effective technical solutions are decentralized, then we must recognize that it is already too late for the United States to play a major role in creating and deploying them. Asia and Europe have been investing in these technologies for decades while the United States has been essentially sabotaging domestic competitors. The recent failure of Evergreen in the face of overwhelming technology advantages of Chinese suppliers is just one example.
<
p>We are currently agitating to demand increased protection of American intellectual property rights by the Chinese. Yet, in the world we are entering, we may find the shoe on the other foot. In the nineteenth century, when water-powered textile mills were the vital technology of the day, Henry Cabot Lowell memorized the design of industrial technology held closely by then-dominant England. Today, we would call that “industrial espionage”. The likelihood is that we will be “reverse-engineering” (ie, stealing) Asian and European technology, not vice-versa.
<
p>Today’s Americans are accustomed to thinking of ourselves as the technology leaders of the world. This is a delusion when it comes to the energy domain. We are woefully behind in our technology. We are woefully behind in our technical education. We are woefully behind in our social and economic attitudes. While we shoot each other with automatic weapons and squander our remaining resources on far-flung military operations throughout the world, the Chinese invest in economic and technology development.
<
p>Yes, the brainstorm needs to happen. Yes, it must happen from the ground up because our leaders will continue to do everything possible to suppress and then co-opt it. At the same time, I think we must recognize that our roles in whatever emerges are likely to be very different from what we are accustomed to.
<
p>I suggest that economic tipping point has already happened, no matter what ultimately transpires in the natural impact of global climate change.
but on this part it’s a mixed bag
<
p>
<
p>Nope. We generate the technology. We’re just not very cost-efficient at mass manufacturing it.
<
p>
<
p>I agree, to a point. Are we short engineers at the BS/MS/PhD level? I’m not sure; maybe the PhD level. Are we short blue collar technical expertise? Yeah, big time. This is IMO where we need to go to pick up efficiencies. Better training for everyone from HVAC installers to the building trades to mechanics would result in little nibbles of reduced carbon, over and over and over again. This is worth lots of effort methinks.
<
p>
<
p>About 2/3s of us are đŸ™‚
<
p>
<
p>I only half agree here. You lose 1/4 of me when it occurs to me that China is the second most expensive military (1/6 of tUSA, but they have low labor costs). You lose another 1/4 of me when it occurs to me that the US military may well be part of the solution. Just as DARPA et al gave use GPS and the Internet, they’re working hard on energy efficiency, particularly fuel in their supply chain.
<
p>
<
p>
<
p>I pick your posts apart a little more because (a) they’re more thorough, and (b) they’re better than most. Perverse, to be sure. Say hi to your lovely wife for me, now that I no longer run into her at CVS.
“In my view, a shared aspect of all of genuine solutions and adaptations is that they must be decentralized and bottom-up – an enormous number of very small energy sources rather than a small number of very large ones.”
<
p>Exactly. If this brainstorming is going to happen, local solutions will be coming from the people directly involved, will be decentralized, smaller scale, and, of necessity, from the bottom up. I thought that’s what I was describing.
<
p>Still lots of innovation here in the USA but there are many, many places around the world where innovation is also happening. Take a look at Africa and the young people there who are simply bursting with creativity. They know exactly what they need and are doing their best, technically, to get it with the tools they have available. Take a look at http://www.afrigadget.com/
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
<
p>It was won by Falmouth’s John Todd, one of the founders of the late, lamented New Alchemy Institute, for an ecological design to restore the coal-ravaged lands of Appalachia.