The Power of the Pen: Memory of Earth, Wind and Fire

[Above: Spokane County Commissioner Bonnie Mager presents a bike to Connor Dinnison whose submission “Autonomy” received first place in an energy-themed essay contest organized by the Sierra Club as part of its “Beyond Coal” campaign. ]

Environmental writing from the edge of world of fiction, poetry brings truth


By Paul K.Haeder

(part one of two)

There’s much shifting going on in the area of American arts and letters, and plenty of books, articles and analyses discussing the end of the Humanities.

Attacks on universities are largely in these areas, including literature, sociology, and the general study of our culture, our interrelated struggles, and the complexities that make up civilization.

Look up “humanities” in the Oxford English Dictionary or Wikipedia, and you can see how broadly the humanities encompass most of things that make our world interesting.

More and more, social media, blog blurbs, and insipid celebrity mongering – everything that Jon Stewart, Juan Williams or Al Gore have done in their respective hybridized and fake worlds making it on NPR or in the LA Times – strips away our cultural language and literacy into something quickly becoming digital noise, consumer hucksterism and unprofessional and uninspiring blathering. Andy Warhol’s phrase, “Everyone is famous for 15 minutes” has been morphed into “everyone is famous every day, everywhere, online.”

In the past, mainstream magazines and newspapers published short stories, poetry and creative non-fiction. These seemed to be niches in people’s lives to deal with strong literary threads.

Past cutting-edge topical stories– civil rights, Viet Nam, Latin America, the Generation Gap, and, Rock ‘n Roll, love and drugs – all made it into creative writing and received decent play in the mainstream media.

Today, published prose/poetry seems quaint and anachronistic amid the 24/7 blaring and flashing TV and internet junk that bombards the very structure of Americans’ ability to think outside the proverbial polarized and largely corporate-constructed box.

But wait! The word is coming back, thanks to climate change and environmental collapse. The literary bug is also catching on in Spokane.

Brad Hash, who has a master’s in environmental studies from University of Montana, and now the regional Sierra Club’s organizer for clean energy, put on a community writing contest this fall specifically because he believes art – and the art of the word – needs a place in “the movement.”

“Words yield power, influence and inspiration,” Hash says. “As print media wanes and library visits plummet, the word is perhaps ironically more popular than ever given the onslaught of social networking tools.

The challenge is to embrace and utilize these communication options in ways to reconnect people to their environments and/or demonstrate the critical need to protect and restore these environments. We must be able to integrate these tools into our communication options in order to engage and be engaged.”

Hash sponsored the “Shift to Green: Spokane’s Transition to Clean Energy” writing contest during Sustainable September Spokane, which limited writers to one page, any form, any style, any literary genre. He got 20-plus entries, not bad for the greater Spokane area.

The top prize, a new commuter bike worth $550 from Spoke “N Sport, was given as part of the Sustainable September Sierra Club activities. It went to Connor Dinnison for his poem, “Autonomy.” Hash said more than 50 attended the event, including Spokane County Commissioner Bonnie Mager who spoke about the TransAlta coal plant and efforts to get it shut down by 2015.

“The audience was captivated by the poem – compliments poured in afterward,” Hash said. “Connor was extremely humbled, excited, shocked at winning the bicycle – he did not have a bike of his own and had been borrowing one. Eight of the writing contestants attended the event.”

I’ve spoken with Brad, and interviewed him for my KYRS show, Tipping Points. His life in West Virginia landed him degrees in psychology and geography respectively from Shepherd University. His Montana graduate work brought him back to Appalachia where he focused on the people and culture tied to mountain top removal (a destructive and permanent environmental scorched earth method of extracting coal).

The other writing winners were Adam Membrey, who earned second place for his creative non-fiction piece, “Bringing Growth to Light,” and Sophie Dituri, a Lewis and Clark junior, who earned third for her hip-hop poem, “Coal.” (All three of the top submissions can be read by clicking on “related documents

http://www.downtoearthnw.com/stories/2010/dec/09/power-pen-memory-earth-wind-and-fire/?documents )

Hash and the Sierra Club’s Beyond Coal campaign aims to cut the amount of electricity generated by dirty coal-fired plants in Wyoming and Montana that comes to the State of Washington, as well as shutting down the TransAlta plant, Washington’s only coal-fired electricity generating plant. It’s owned by a Canadian firm, and the energy is sold and transported out of state. It’s the state’s single biggest contributor of greenhouse gas and mercury pollution.

Think taking off 1.8 million cars from Washington’s roads and that’s TransAlta’s carbon footprint for the year.

Hash was blunt when asked what the biggest challenge is working in the environmental field to engage youth: “Overcoming the distraction of current social networking tools and the sound-bite culture those tools encourage.”

Yet, Hash sees hope in the power of the word: “Words can be linked together in so many literary styles transcending age, professional spheres, education levels (unless of course one is illiterate) communities of faith, cultures and sub-cultures. Therefore, the printed word is the critical link to reaching these demographics.”

Photographer Jordan takes viewers through ‘the numbers’

Mass consumption, mass culture collide in artist’s giant photos

Paul K. Haeder


Photography is this fabulous medium from which the human shared vision of the world captured in silvers, dyes and digital pixels has transformed culture.

The Gulf of Mexico and the coast itself have been captured over decades in the viewfinders of artists, and now we are at the point of cataloguing and reflecting the pain of the BP oil disaster through multitudes of photographers who have amassed there to tell a story.

Photographs are now being used to raise consciousness, and one area that the photographic image plows into ethos and pathos is the environment.

Lucky for Spokane, and thanks to a benefactor from Boeing and his widow, we have not only a riveting event featuring an internationally acclaimed photographer, but Whitworth University now has one of the country’s largest collection of photography books.

Thanks to Floyd and Shirley Daniel, hundreds of books – coffee table types – are in a special collections group at Whitworth’s Library.

According to Tad Wisenor, the university’s director of campaign planning and fund raising, having the Daniel Collection brings to the private college an historical record of photography’s impact on our world. Daniel was an avid videographer and photographer who heard about Whitworth at his Seattle church.

Bringing to campus Seattle-based photographer Chris Jordan Oct. 12, 7 p.m. to the Weyerhaeuser building, ties into the college’s effort to teach the Christian community about the impact of photography on world cultures and consumerism’s impact on ecosystems.

[see his work here:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/gallery/epu/#e-pluribus-unum


“We want the Whitworth community to realize the decisions they make have a broader impact on the world,” Wisenor said.

Jordan’s work is varied, and he is famously known for those huge digitally manipulated panels of the junk and stuff our consumer society uses and throws away. His work is haunting and beautiful, even when we find out that that horizon that looks from a distance like a colorful beach is made up of 2 million plastic bottles, the number the U.S. uses every five minutes.

His artwork’s themes tie together various forms of dualism: “E Pluribus Unum”; “Midway; Running the Numbers I” and “II;” “Intolerable Beauty; In Katrina’s Wake.”

Jordan says this about his show, “In Katrina’s Wake: Portraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster”: “There is evidence to suggest that Katrina was not an entirely natural event like an earthquake or tsunami. The 2005 hurricane season’s extraordinary severity can be linked to global warming, which America contributes to in disproportionate measure through our extravagant consumer and industrial practices.

Never before have the cumulative effects of our consumerism become so powerfully focused into a visible form, like the sun’s rays narrowed through a magnifying glass. Almost 300,000 Americans lost everything they owned in the Katrina disaster. The question in my mind is whether we are all responsible in some degree.”

His images of rotting and desiccated remains of seabirds in the continuing project, “Midway: Message from the Gyre,” awakens in many viewers the reality we dump so much plastic into the ocean and around its edges that we are yearly responsible for the deaths of millions of birds, marine mammals and fish who eat things like BIC lighters and soda pop six-pack rings.

One portrait, huge at 64-inches by 94-inches, shows a hammerhead and blue shark, with Japanese calligraphy in the center. Almost like a tattoo some sailor would have scribed into leathery skin. Except this image was “made” using 270,000 fossilized shark teeth in a pointillist genre, the total number of sharks killed everyday for their fins (known as the extinction-facilitating shark-finning practice to serve mostly Asian palates.

Some of his images represent the futility of modern culture to want something nature never intended – in “Barbie Dolls” (2008, 60 inches x 80 inches), the viewer standing way back sees the contours of a woman’s torso and breasts. Upon closer inspection, the flesh color canvas is made up of thousands of pods, almost like some Rose Bowl float flower-like shape. Except each shape is made up of Barbie dolls, 32,000 in all, equalling the number of elective breast augmentation surgeries done in the U.S. monthly in 2006.

Jordan has made a name for himself using the photographic art form to sculpt a certain visceral and intellectual reaction from us, his audience and his consumer masses. The impact of the number of cellular phones tossed away daily, shaped like an undulating sea, or the 1.14 million paper grocery bags used hourly in the U.S. manipulated to look like a birch forest pull the average viewer into his own personal space – how and why we are all shaped by this hyper-consumerism society, where obsolescence is either perceived or planned.

I’ve had the opportunity to attend classes at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, and I’ve interviewed a few artists, and photographers specifically for newspaper and radio shows. One show (heard here) included talking with Arizona physician Michael Collier, who has for 30 years created 13 books showing his love of geology, photography and aeronautics.

“I want people to see beauty in the landscape,” Collier says. “If they can start there and realize that there are tendrils of information, that there are stories buried in it, then I’ve done the work I’m supposed to be doing.”

His work covers beautiful shapes and colors, contours and lines and geometrics, all seen from this single-engine Cessna 180. His photos can be seen in many publications, but one of his books, “Over the Mountains, An Aerial View of Geology”(Mikaya Press), is the kick-off picture book focused on the morphology or evolution of landscapes.

Matthew White (read interview here -- http://www.downtoearthnw.com/stories/2010/jun/28/some-say-character-develops-darkness/)

has spent decades in the Gulf of Mexico, photographing towns, ecosystems, and the intersection between nature and development. White believes in showing the reality of the oil spill, not exploiting people’s misery.

What these photographers bring to their work is a larger sense of how the image brings to the human eye a conscious decision to allow the sheer vastness of our landscape and our consumption to overtake our intuition.

Jordan’s talk ties into the larger goal of sustainability at Whitworth, which Wisenor says has had much impetus – from students – over the past five years. Wisenor, with a master’s in urban and regional planning from Eastern Washington University, says this effort to show students the “value of creation protection” (ecological awareness) allows students who haven’t necessarily been exposed to sustainability issues to connect their lives and consumerism to negative effects Jordan so beautifully shapes in his photographs.

Photographer Chris Jordan and his photos will be at the Weyerhaeuser building at Whitworth University at 7 p.m. Oct. 12. Reception is free to the public. For more information on Jordan, visit www.chrisjordan.com.

Hot Air, Celebs, Bono – Love Miles, Jet Travel, and an On-line Book to Rock your Ages

By Paul K. Haeder

In a post I’ll be putting on PacifiCAD Blogspot over the weekend dealing with masculinity, or the so-called end of macho, and the debate about labor shortages, especially the construction industry and industrial arts, and the rise of women in the workplace – especially in board rooms and in the business and health and education fields – and how women outnumber men significantly in terms of matriculating from colleges here, I’ll be talking about how we have a major disconnect with these facts – the downfall of men, who have been hit hardest in this unemployment sacking of our economy by the stock market creeps, as in up to 80 percent of the jobs lost in the past 6 months involve the Y chromosome holders – AND how we need hard work and workers that are smart with hands, building principles, and fabrication and engineering to build turbines, solar arrays, to retrofit our leaky, inefficient houses and buildings, even to go at the farm work and to retool our cities.

For now, though let’s get back to U2’s Bono (see an earlier blog post here) and the celebs whose carbon footprints are an embarrassment to humanity, and we as citizens who have been dubbed consumers need to rethink what we buy, what we do to entertain us, and what money we spend on to continue our own support of these pop icons. Read below the article by Vanessa Richmond on eco-footprint and U of British Columbia professor William Rees’ work on ecological footprints. These high-flying people are earth killers, and as Richmond points out, wouldn’t it be cool if writer Naomi Wolf looked at Angelina Jolie’s carbon footprint as she flies her private planes to jet set here and there. I know Wolf, and I’ve interviewed her and had the pleasure of being on the same stage with her. I know her life as a successful writer involves flying around, getting to one book signing and one lecture to the next. She does use commercial airlines to tool around. Her carbon footprint is so much higher than some hard-working guy or gal who rarely or never gets to fly in a jet (think third world and developing world population).

Celebs like Madonna or John Travolta have several homes, many cars, and even Travolta has a specially equipped 747. Come on! We need carbon taxes on these things – shadow homes, 2-4-2’s as they call them. That’s two people in 4, 000 square foot fully outfitted cabins for two weeks in Montana. Tax excess vehicles. Give tax breaks on those who don’t fly, who bike to work, who do not have a new car every two years, who have less square footage.

Rees is one person we talk about a lot at PacifiCAD Blogspot, and we’ll be looking British physicist Brian McKay’s online book

Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air

David JC MacKay http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf. Here’s his work on air miles --

“For instance, if you learn that a round-trip intercontinental flight emits nearly two tons of CO2 per passenger, then knowing the average emissions yardstick (51/2 tons per year per person) helps you realise that just one such plane-trip per year corresponds to over a third of the average person’s carbon emissions.

We spend about one third of our energy on controlling the temperature of our surroundings – at home and at work – and on warming or cooling our food, drink, laundry, and dirty dishes. Remember that these are English consumption habits. Americans consume fifty percent more energy than the British."

We also mention George Monbiot’s Guardian newspaper column on global warming, and his book, Heat. There are plenty of studies on how much pollution and CO2 and nitrous oxide that air travel produces, and it’s not public transportation, efficient public transportation. Too often my greenies talk about five or 10 sustainability-green symposia they travel to yearly, via air travel, and I argue that those air miles are part of the problem. They default to some odd concept – “The plane is taking off anyway so what’s wrong with me filling one of those empty chairs?” I will get to those greenies' arguments who might read the blog by presenting physicists’ findings on the impact of those air miles, and what each empty and full jet plane seat means. We know in planning and transportation planning specifically that air fields and air strips and expansion of airports is one of the biggest areas of the land use game in the coming 30 years. Up to 30 to 60 percent increase in the number of air strips and the total square miles of airport expansion projects are predicted and are being planned for.

Perchlorate and noise and the destruction of communities – that is just some of the price of airport expansion, airport development. More on those issues, but for a quick look at the fight in London on expanding Heathrow airport shows the battle line against airport development and expansion. We'll look at the expansion of air cargo business in coming blogs. For now, enjoy Friday and the weekend. Note that a video link is at the bottom with Monbiot talking about these "love miles."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/london/6178867.stm

Uproar at airport expansion plans
Campaign groups have come out fighting as the government pledged to press ahead with airport expansion plans

********************************************************************************************

How Angelina, Bono, Gisele and Madonna Are Destroying the Planet

By Vanessa Richmond, The Tyee

What if celebrity news carried its own version of a nutrition label? But instead of calories, or health risks, how about a label that gets at celebrities' impact on the planet?

Imagine if each time a tabloid or movie or TV show fed our celebrity addiction by running the image of Angelina, Bono or Gisele Bundschen, they also were required to put the celeb's eco-footprint in the corner of that image? If the tabs really wanted to knock themselves out, they could also run a kind of eco-ingredient list -- the number of hours the celeb spends in the air, the square feet of housing she owns, number of children he has, and so on.

It's an idea with real timeliness, if I do say so myself. A few weeks ago, uber-feminist Naomi Wolf praised Angelina Jolie's independence, symbolized by her ability to fly her own plane, without even mentioning that if every woman did that, we'd need a million planets worth of resources to support the human population.

Flying High

Wolf is far from alone. This week, the top story in several tabs was that Jolie has resumed "one of her favourite hobbies...flying lessons!" without making any comment about the relative impact on the planet of flying to, say, knitting or karate.

People Magazine ran a piece about how pregnant supermodel Gisele Bundschen is "constantly traveling" (what a good earth mother). John Travolta owns his own specially outfitted 747 jet.

And the Daily Mail ran a piece about how Victoria and David Beckham were in the Seychelles one day, then Heathrow, then LA the next. How smoggy their designer footprint must be!

But these stories, and most others, tell us nothing of the impact of celebs' enviable lifestyles.

Glam Carbon Gluttons

Last week, Carbon Footprint calculated the impact of U2's world tour. Ironically, U2 is outspoken about their commitment to the environment, but carbon output of their tour this year is far bigger even than Madonna's high-maintenance carbon-heavy tour. U2's carbon emissions will equal that of 90,000 people flying from Dublin to London, and are equivalent of the waste created by 6,500 average British or Irish people in an entire year (equal to leaving a standard 100 watt light bulb on for 159,000 years). "To offset this year's carbon emissions, U2 would need to plant 20,118 trees."

This story hit media outlets around the world within hours, demonstrating that not just me but a lot of people actually are interested in such information. (I'm guessing we belong to the same tribe of label readers at the grocery store.)

But it's not enough to calculate footprints for the odd tour or movie. What the public is most often consuming is celebrity lifestyle information. And we need good information about what that actually costs.

How to Read an Eco-Footprint

People follow celebrities because "reality is scary and the surreal is not," says Dr. William Rees, the UBC professor who invented the concept of the ecological footprint. "We have made wealth and glitter and this false world of celebrity into the ideal, and people glom onto it." But, he adds, "in a sense, doing an eco-footprint of these folks might help ground us back into reality."

He said it's easy to calculate an eco-footprint: it's simply a person's consumption on an annual basis. And 85 per cent of it is made up of fuel, food, housing, and space heating.

Rees says that for the average individual, by far the biggest component is private transportation using fossil fuels: cars and plans. "Let's face it, most celebrities have half a dozen of those and travel by private aircraft."

The next item is food, because for most people, food travels long distances and therefore takes fuel, and it also consumes pesticides and so on. "Celebrities tend to have very high-end diets."

The next major category is water and space heating, and "the bigger your house and car, the larger your consumption of those." Of course, many celebrities not only have one large house, but many of them.

Rees said that there are only two hectares on the planet to support each person, but the average North American uses nine hectares, which means most North Americans need three to four times as much productive ecosystem as is available on the planet to support their needs. "The really inconvenient truth is that the current global development path is an impossibility serum."

What Planets Do They Live On?

I plugged in the consumption numbers for an imaginary celebrity into this footprint calculator and this one, too. I assumed that the person had a private jet, flew more than 400 hours a year, had at least two large houses, and owned more than one car. Those consumption amounts exceeded the maximum inputs on the survey -- there was no category for more than one house, or for private jet, for example. But even given that, the survey found it would take over 60 earths to support that lifestyle for everyone.

But then, celebrities aren't everyone, are they? They live on 60 or even hundreds of planets, while the rest of us inhabit one that's arguably in deep trouble. I'm not holding my breath that my modest proposal would ever be taken up by a media industry so invested in feeding our celebrity worship. But I'll keep dreaming of truth in labelling.

© 2009 The Tyee All rights reserved.

On the flight path to global meltdown

There is no technofix to the disastrous impact of air travel on the environment, argues George Monbiot in the final extract from his new book - the only answer is to ground most of the aeroplanes flying today

“Our moral dissonance about flying reminds me of something a Buddhist once told me: ‘It doesn't matter what you do, as long as you do it with love.’ I am sure he knew as well as I do that our state of mind makes no difference to either exploited people or the environment. Thinking like ethical people makes not a damn of difference unless we also behave like ethical people. When it comes to flying, there seems to be no connection between intention and action.

This is partly because the people who are most concerned about the inhabitants of other countries are often those who have travelled widely. Much of the global justice movement consists of people - like me - whose politics were forged by their experiences abroad. While it is easy for us to pour scorn on the drivers of sports utility vehicles, whose politics generally differ from ours, it is rather harder to contemplate a world in which our own freedoms are curtailed, especially the freedoms that shaped us.

More painfully, in some cases our freedoms have become obligations. When you form relationships with people from other nations, you accumulate what I call ‘love miles’: the distance you must travel to visit friends and partners and relatives on the other side of the planet. If your sister-in-law is getting married in Buenos Aires, it is both immoral to travel there, because of climate change, and immoral not to, because of the offence it causes. In that decision we find two valid moral codes in irreconcilable antagonism. Who could be surprised to discover that "ethical" people are in denial about the impacts of flying?

There are two reasons why flying dwarfs any other environmental impact a single person can exert. The first is the distance it permits us to cover. According to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, the carbon emissions per passenger mile ‘for a fully loaded cruising airliner are comparable to a passenger car carrying three or four people.’ In other words, they are about half those, per person, of a car containing the average loading of 1.56 people. But while the mean distance travelled by car in the UK is 9,200 miles per year, in a plane we can beat that in one day. On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once the necessary cut in emissions has been made.

The second reason is that the climate impact of aeroplanes is not confined to the carbon they produce. They release several different kinds of gases and particles. Some of them cool the planet, others warm it. In the upper tropo-sphere, where most large planes fly, hot, wet air from the jet engine exhaust mixes with cold air. As the moisture condenses, it can form "contrails", which in turn appear to give rise to cirrus clouds - those high wispy formations of ice crystals sometimes known as ‘horsetails.’ While they reflect some of the sun's heat back into the space, they also trap heat in the atmosphere, especially at night; the heat trapping seems to be the stronger effect. The overall impact, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a warming effect 2.7 times that of the carbon dioxide alone.

Aviation has been growing faster than any other source of greenhouse gases. Between 1990 and 2004, the number of people using airports in the UK rose by 120%, and the energy the planes consumed increased by 79%. Their carbon dioxide emissions almost doubled in that period - from 20.1 to 39.5m tonnes, or 5.5% of all the emissions this country produces. Unless something is done to stop this growth, flying will soon overwhelm all the cuts we manage to make elsewhere. But the measures the government proposes are useless. The transport department suggests that the aviation industry should "pay the external costs its activities impose on society at large". This is an interesting proposal, but unfortunately the department does not explain how it could be arranged. Should a steward be sacrificed every time someone in Ethiopia dies of hunger? As Bangladesh goes under water, will the government demand the drowning of a commensurate number of airline executives? The idea is strangely attractive. But the only suggestion it makes is that aviation fuel might be taxed.

Unlike most environmentalists, who have also called for this measure, the government knows perfectly well that fuel tax cannot be imposed on international flights. It is prohibited under international law by article 24 of the 1944 Chicago Convention, which has been set in stone by 4,000 bilateral treaties - making it almost impossible to unpick. Now the government proposes that aviation be incorporated into the European Emissions Trading Scheme. If flights continue to grow, it will break the system.

The one certain means of preventing more flights is the one thing the British government refuses to do: limit the capacity of our airports. It employs the ‘predict and provide’ approach that has proved so disastrous when applied to road transport: as you increase the provision of space in order to meet the predicted demand, the demand rises to fill it, ensuring that you need to create more space in order to accommodate your new projections. The House of Commons environmental audit committee calculates that the extra capacity the government proposes means 'the equivalent of another Heathrow every five years.'

The Department for Transport, along with the airline industry, claims that expanding airport capacity is ‘socially inclusive,’ in that it enables poorer people to fly. But a Mori poll commissioned by the Freedom to Fly Coalition, a lobby group founded by the aviation industry, found that 75% of those who use budget airlines are in social classes A, B and C. The people who are most vulnerable to climate change are the poorest inhabitants of the poorest nations, the great majority of whom will never board an aeroplane.

So what is to be done? There are two means by which the growth in flights could be reconciled to the need to cut carbon emissions. The first is a massive increase in the fuel efficiency of aircraft; the other is a new fuel.

As far as aircraft engines are concerned, major new efficiencies in the next 20 years or so are a pipedream. The Royal Commission reports that ‘the basic gas turbine design emerged in 1947. It has been the dominant form of aircraft engine for some 50 years and there is no serious suggestion that this will change in the foreseeable future.’ It is hard to see how it could be made much more efficient than it is already.

The choice of low carbon fuels for aeroplanes is similar to the choice of low carbon fuels for cars. According to a paper by researchers at Imperial College, London, it is technically possible to fly planes whose normal fuel (kerosene) is mixed with about 5% biodiesel. But biodiesel, as I have shown elsewhere, is likely to cause more global warming than it prevents.

Ethanol, the same paper suggests, would be useless: it is insufficiently dense and, in aeroplanes, extremely dangerous. This appears to leave only hydrogen. Jets could use hydrogen today, if instead of carrying passengers and freight they carried nothing but fuel - it contains four times less energy by volume than kerosene. But if this problem could be overcome, the researchers suggest, the total climate impacts of planes fuelled by the gas ‘would be much lower than from kerosene.’

Unfortunately, when hydrogen burns, it creates water. A hydrogen plane will produce 2.6 times as much water vapour as a plane running on kerosene. This, they admit, would be a major problem if hydrogen planes flew as high as ordinary craft. But if the aircraft flew below 10,000 metres (33,000ft), where contrails are less likely to form, the impact would be negligible. What they have forgotten is that because hydrogen requires a far bigger fuel tank than kerosene, the structure (or "airframe") of the plane would need to be much larger. This means it would be subject to more drag. The Royal Commission points out that ‘the combination of larger drag and lower weight would require flight at higher altitudes’ than planes fuelled by kerosene. In fact, hydrogen planes, if they are ever used, are most likely to be deployed as supersonic jets in the stratosphere. If so, their impact on the climate would be around 13 times that of a normal aircraft running on kerosene.

And that, I'm afraid, is that. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change discovered, ‘There would not appear to be any practical alternatives to kerosene-based fuels for commercial jet aircraft for the next several decades.’ There is, in other words, no technofix. The growth in aviation and the need to address climate change cannot be reconciled. In common with all other sectors, aviation's contribution to global warming must be reduced in the UK by some 87% if we are to avoid a 2C rise in global temperatures. Given that the likely possible efficiencies are small and tend to counteract each other, an 87% cut in emissions requires not only that growth stops, but that most of the aeroplanes flying today be grounded. I realise that this is not a popular message, but it is hard to see how a different conclusion could be extracted from the available evidence.

This means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there. It means that business meetings must take place over the internet or by means of video conferences. It means that transcontinental journeys must be made by train or coach. It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations. It means the end of shopping trips to New York, parties in Ibiza, second homes in Tuscany and, most painfully for me, political meetings in Porto Alegre - unless you believe that these activities are worth the sacrifice of the biosphere and the lives of the poor.

But I urge you to remember that these privations affect only a tiny proportion of the world's people. The reason they seem so harsh is that this tiny proportion almost certainly includes you.

This is an edited extract from Heat, by George Monbiot, published by Allen Lane. To order a copy for £16.99 with free UK p&p (rrp £17.99), go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0870 836 0875. Monbiot has also launched a new website - turnuptheheat.org - exposing the false environmental claims made by corporations and celebrities.

http://vodpod.com/watch/42191-george-monbiot-speaks-about-air-travel-and-love-miles

Even Amongst Plenty and Plenty of Haves, the World Must Tackle Global Hunger

By Paul K. Haeder

Even amidst the news of the men’s record-breaking Wimbledon final, Sarah Palin’s hightailing out of the governorship in Alaska, and the news of Americans enjoying a brief Summer 2009 respite from $3.50 a gallon gas prices, there are some organizations marking today as a sad day in world history: · One in six people in the world — or more than 1.02 billion — is now hungry. This is an historic ratio, an unconscionable number of fellow citizens going hungry not just because of the global economic crisis and high food prices. Climate change and disruptive and shaky weather and crop symbiosis have much to do with this current state of food security.

Food will be discussed in coming columns on this blogspot, including pieces in the Pacific Northwest Weekly Inlander, where I have a standing column tied to sustainability. We’ll look at Washington State and the Spokane region at large are doing to work on ag issues and food security specifically. We know about our country’s looming food crisis, and that’s not a lack of calories but rather too many of the wrong calories and calories ingested tied to way to much energy and fuel expelled to get those calories to our plates.

It’s called farm to plate/farm to fork miles, and the average foodstuff from the farm takes 1,540 miles to get to the average American grocery store consumer. Add to that a retrofitted USDA food pyramid, issues tied to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and the entire debate around genetically engineered or modified food and animal food products.

We’ll look at those as well as ways ag is or isn’t part of the climate solution in terms of CO2 and methane an nitrous oxide emissions.

For now, though, we have to look hard at the growing hunger and food instability crises. The U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization report tells us that there are 100 million more people who are hungry – that is, they receive fewer than 1,800 calories a day. The World Bank after the G20 meeting in May knows that the world must put in billions each year to help developing areas like South America and Africa get off of inefficient subsistence farming by ramping up sustainable farming and better infrastructure.

We have more than 6 billion people on earth now; by 2050, that will swell to 9 billion people, and farmers will have to produce much more food to stave off crisis after crisis.

"The silent hunger crisis, affecting one-sixth of all of humanity, poses a serious risk for world peace and security," said FAO’s director-general, Jacques Diouf.

Food riots in the developing world last year is just one indication of the fallout of this crisis in hunger and food security. This increase in hunger comes despite strong 2009 cereal production.

FAO’s report points to the urban poor as the hardest hit because of foreign investment declines and drops in demand for exports. What is already happening is a migration pattern shift, with millions returning to the countryside to feed themselves. Since the world is now 51-49 urban to rural, and that ratio is expected to reach 65 percent urban by 2050, we’ll see more environmental refugees. Think Dust Bowl. Think Easter Island or Greenland, as Jared Diamond discusses in his book, Collapse. While China is an economic powerhouse, it’s more than vulnerable to desertification, the loss of trees, the inundation of dust into prime agricultural areas, even the Three Gorges Dam flooding millions of acres of good farmland, and ground level and ecosystems pollution that makes 1890 London or 1910 Pittsburgh look like a park setting.

This all spells human misery and humanity jockeying for refuge. Island nations and Calcutta and even our own Easter seaboard are seeing a rise in sea levels. For planners, this spells huge challenges to water systems, agriculture, infrastructure, and loss of prime property.

We’ll talk about these issues in upcoming blogs, but for now, we must pause and remember the figure – 1.02 billion people are undernourished. Couple that with another 800 million or a billion over-nourished – with too many calories for too little physical work; diabetes; specialty crops and high meat and dairy intake for a minority while the majority of global population struggles for 2,000 calories a day.

“Asia and the Pacific, the world's most populous region, has the largest number of hungry people at 642 million. Sub-Saharan Africa has the highest hunger rate, with 265 million undernourished representing 32 percent of the region's population.”

As a side note 15 million are now hungry in the developed world, and this food crisis affects the quality of nutrition: families are purchasing cheaper foods, such as grains, which are rich in calories but contain fewer proteins than meat or dairy products. Add to that fact how many in this country are buying more junk food and fast food since those groupings of food are subsidized and monopolized by huge food conglomerates.

Vegetables and fruit are not subsidized, whereas the grain, beef and dairy industries are heavily subsidized.

Science and technology are now being pressed to help with everything from better mapping for climate shift, to developing high-tech irrigation systems and soil analyses that can be read and directed from the palm of the hand. We’ll talk about those innovations in upcoming blog posts.

The battle line includes those who want sustainable agriculture and scaled farming to meet the needs of local communities, and those on the other side who want to have control of all crops – seeds, grains, plasm, and the like. We in sustainability are being called upon to respond to this crisis.

In coming blogs, we’ll look at how science and technology meet the pavement (the row crop and soil) in Brave New World of peak soil, resource scarcity and the largest outfall of climate change – Diaspora. We will look at the concept of mass migration pattern shifts, refugees from climate change, and what will happen in a world that is now more urban than rural, but one still dependent upon fossil fuel in cities to deliver goods, to keep heating and air conditioning and refrigeration going.

“Envirogees” is the term being used by many in the fields of planning, and all stops must be pulled out to solve this global crisis that is considered not just a human rights and refugee issue tied to ethics and helping our fellow man. This issue of up to 200 million displaced, roaming people worldwide in the next 30 years involves issues directly linked to respective countries’ homeland security, equity, racism, and the larger issue of what we do as a global community to solve these issues. All of these climate refugees will put pressure on teetering job markets, infrastructure and food.

It’s clear to business leaders, innovators, entrepreneurs, corporations, individuals, and a plethora of groups and organizations and government agencies that we have to respond to this looming crisis of envirogees.

Companies like Autodesk are working with engineers, designers, architects and others to figure out design and software solutions to the global crises of energy, waste, pollution, and food and water insecurity.

These are some of Autodesk’s sustainable development “communities” linked on its Sustainability page --

Groups

US Green Building Council
Developed the LEED rating system to assess the environmental impact of a building

Greener Facilities
Alliance for Sustainable Built Environments exists to inform and demonstrate that sustainability is a viable, profitable business strategy for everyone

CBE
The Center for the Built Environment (CBE) provides timely, unbiased information on promising new building technologies and design strategies

Ecosa Institute
Educational programs in sustainable, ecological and regenerative design

Build it Green
Smart solutions from the ground up

Flex Your Power
Save energy, save money, save natural resources

Green Progress
Green progress for a green future

Blogs

Green Revit blog
Autodesk Revit, green building and design blog

Inhabit
Future forward design

Students for Global Sustainability
SfGS is a student organization committed to sustainable development and conservation projects on both the global and local levels

Additionally, in early 2004, IBM opened up its annual technology and business forecasting processes to the world with the Global Innovation Outlook. This collaboration is what we need now and it has to be tied to every sector in all societies’ social, economic, governmental, educational and science infrastructures.

For now, though, innovation and software design and modeling for climate change’s effects on growing, moving, and delivering food, and increasing food’s sustainability factors, are pressing issues for companies like Autodesk, IBM and thousands more. The California Institute of Technology’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has a great climate change web site for those needing some science behind the debate of what to do about climate change.

For now, though, we need real collaborative ways to solve hunger and food insecurity. Future blog posts will look at what companies like Autodesk and government organizations, think tanks and innovative educational institutions are doing to work on this mass migration shift our world now faces because of energy, food, and water scarcities and ecosystems degradation and political intransigence.

Sustainability Web Sites Referenced

http://www.autodesk.co.uk/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=452932&id=9662852

http://www.ibm.com/ibm/gio/resources.html

http://climate.jpl.nasa.gov/index.cfm

Climate Refugees, Envirogees, Immigration, Food Security Organizations and two pdf’s

http://www.jeanlambertmep.org.uk/DocumentStore/0206Ref_Env_Rep.pdf

http://www.gechs.org/

http://www.gecafs.org/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/01/q-and-a-copenhagen-summit

http://www.ccis-ucsd.org/fml/wrkg2_fml.pdf

http://www.jeanlambertmep.org.uk/DocumentStore/Climate%20low%20res_final.pdf