Jeremy Rifkin Video

Lights Out for the Territory

In 2001 I took a journey with two friends from Southern Arizona to the red rock country of Utah. On the way home we passed through Hopiland and gave a lift to an old woman who was walking back to her village on the first mesa. We were silent for a long time in the car together. Our heads full of Sedona vortexes, fossilised forests and medicine wheels, the presence of a real Native American was unnerving. ‘What you do call that bird?’ I finally asked, pointing to a red-tail hawk floating above us in the giant bare landscape.

‘Bird,’ she replied and looked toward her village where the coal mine blew out toxic dust into the atmosphere and she said her sister was losing her mind.

The desert is a place where you get real. Where the reality of growing crops in one of the toughest territories in the world comes home to you. This is years before the seeds of the Transition movement are sown on the coast of Ireland, where Rob Hopkins, a teacher of permaculture, designs an energy descent action plan with his students for the town of Kinsale. This is years before I come to the end of a walk along the East Anglian coast, and realise that to be any use to the place we call earth, I will have to look at the coal mine and the world that was driving everyone crazy.

The Hopi nation are famous for making a pledge to keep the world in balance by example. Harassed by the industrialised world to conform, they still grow maize and beans by hand and honour the cycles of the growing year in their kivas and ceremonial dances. Everything has meaning and significance in the life of the pueblo. But the one thing they do not order is the wilderness, represented by the form and spirit of the wild turkey.

You give a place for wild turkey to remind you what comes before the kivas, the village, the fields of corn. Our ancestral link to the earth and the living systems of ourselves, without which all life goes haywire.

Transition and the Big Frame

The Transition movement began in Totnes in 2005, with a series of documentaries about peak oil. These films made it clear that everything in our industrialised world, from the clothes we wear to the food we eat, is wholly dependent on cheap fossil fuels. For people whose lives are defined by the private ownership of cars and houses and technology, these facts were a shock. Hopkins called it The End of Surburbia moment. The moment you realise the mantra of economic growth won’t hold in the face of dwindling resources and ecosystems in a state of collapse.

In 2008 I watched a film called The 11th Hour in a market town in Suffolk and found myself in a group known as Sustainable Bungay, discussing the steps we could take to make ourselves resilient in the face of peak oil and climate change. For the last four years, we have been engaged, like the 876 Transition communities worldwide, in the business of relocalising everything we do: creating CSAs, co-operative bakeries, breweries, community kitchens, wind turbines, solar-power stations, alternative currencies, alternative media, planting trees, reducing waste, setting up exchange systems, seed swaps, tool libraries. In short, reshaping a culture that has become entirely divorced in its mind from the territory in which it sits. Rob Hopkins’ new guide book The Transition Companion lists 82 ‘ingredients and tools’ that define initiatives. Based on the seminal work of ecological design, The Pattern Language, these represent ways in which communities can shift from individualism towards working together. How we might downshift to a lean-energy, low-carbon future, following the permaculture principles of fairshare, earthcare and peoplecare.

Our hardest task is to consider the price our fossil-fuelled everyday lives exacts from the earth and its atmosphere. We stand before the petrol pump aware of the tar sands of Alberta, in front of the stove and consider ‘fracking’for shale gas in Lancashire, turn on the light and see the plundering of the Appalachian mountains and the Amazon.

Walking the coast in 2008, I found I could no longer keep these geo-political realities at bay. I encountered activists on the Sizewell Nuclear power station, stood amongst protesters at Walberswick as the government withdrew funds for flood defences, along the Blyth, the Alde and the Ore. I looked out of my window, across the marshes, and where once only moonlight reflected on the sea, oil tankers floated in the darkness, waiting for the oil prices to rise, like giant neon sharks.

In a recent article for the Globe and Mail, ‘Our Peak Oil Premium,’ author Thomas Homer-Dixon provides a brief updated view on peak oil.

An interesting article from Alice Friedemann: http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2012-02-25/why-do-political-and-economic-leaders-deny-peak-oil-and-climate-change

Natural World: Farm for the Future

Climate change is essentially a long-term change in a region’s climate, in terms of temperature, precipitation, humidity and winds. Climate change is caused by a variety of things, but one of the main causes is the emission of the greenhouse gas, CO2, into the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels. Nearly all citizens use vehicles to travel, and these vehicles emit significant amounts of CO2. The large amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere “trap” the heat within the Earth, creating a “greenhouse effect”. This trapped heat continues to heat up the planet, altering the very landscape of different regions of the planet, from mass flooding in Jakarta, to the melting ice in the Arctic. It is in the Arctic that the biggest effects of climate change are being experienced. Unfortunately, this is only the beginning; the ice in the Arctic contains large amounts of permafrost, which hold significant amounts of methane. Methane is another type of greenhouse gas, only much more powerful than CO2. When the permafrost melts, the methane warms the temperatures of the earth even faster than CO2.

You may or may not know a lot about climate change, but I’m sure almost everyone knows about the endangerment of polar bears due to ice loss. Polar bears live all over the northern Regions of North America, in particular, the Arctic. Polar bears hunt their prey, such as bearded seals, walrus, and bowhead whales, from the ice. Due to climate change, temperatures in the Arctic are rising at an alarming rate, and more ice continues to melt each year. When the ice melts, the polar bears have less and less hunting areas, and are forced to either swim out into the open ocean or head south in our cities for scraps. Seeing a TV show of a polar bear struggling to find food in a city’s garbage dump only to be scared off by humans really hurt me; why should the polar bears have to suffer for humans’ mistakes? Every day, polar bears are drowning because there is very little ice to cling to. In addition, mother bears are having fewer and smaller cubs. Today, there are about 20,000 to 25,000 polar bears left in the world. These numbers will only continue to drop unless something is done.

Canada has listed the polar bear as a species of special concern; United States has listed the polar bear as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act, as well. Unfortunately, that is nowhere close to saving the polar bears. There are many things that we can do to help them. Since climate change is mostly caused by emissions of fossil fuels, we can do our part and reduce the amounts we emit. How do we do that? There are many different ways everyone can help; instead of driving your car to go pick up a magazine, walk or take your bike, carpool with coworkers to work, take public transit instead of your own car when you can, lower the A/C in the summer, and even use less heat in the winter. All of these activities can conserve energy and help reduce the amount of CO2 within our atmosphere and reduce the speed of the melting ice.

The polar bear is truly a beautiful and magnificent animal, and I do not want to see it disappear, especially by us. Instead of having the polar bears’ blood on our hands, let us join hands and save these animals. Mother Earth is for everyone and everything in it.

-Jeremy Prutchick

Believe it or not, crude oil is used in almost every stage of food processing and manufacturing. The industrial food supply system itself is one of the biggest contributors to climate change. Gas and oil are both used in manufacturing fertilizers and pesticides that protect food from pests. Oil is also used in planting and irrigating crops. Oils are found in the plastics and packaging that food is stored in. When food is actually transported around the world, ships, card, trucks, planes and roads all use oils, which increase the CO₂ in the atmosphere. This does not even account for the oils being used to maintain and repair the machinery used to farm and grow the food. For example, whitefish from Manitoba are shipped all the way to China for processing, and then shipped back to Canada for sales; too much energy is wasted in shipping the fish overseas. This can easily be avoided if the fish are processed in Manitoba, where they were caught. Also, apples from England are often shipped to South Africa to be waxed, only to be shipped back again to England for sale. These trips are perfect examples of “food miles” that waste energy, and the food hasn’t even reached our table yet. Unfortunately, the suburban way of life is so etched into our lives, that it is very unusual to grow food locally, for people will just go to the major retailer and buy their food there. If only there was a way that citizens can buy the foods they need, but reduce the amount of oils being spewed out into the environment… Lucky for us there is. The answer is simple; grow locally.

Gardening; the very common, everyday, but almost forgotten art. Today, it is very rare for people to grow food at home. While in fact, it is very easy to grow your own food, from vegetables to grains, fruits, herbs, and all other kinds of foods. There are so many benefits to growing your own food and buying locally grown food, as opposed to buying food shipped overseas. The main reason is that organic gardening can lead to a decline of global temperature, since less energy is used to process and transport the food to store. Other reasons are that vegetables require much less energy to produce, package and transport and they are safe from pests by using chemical-free pest control methods. Not only is gardening good for the environment, but good for you as well; it is a means for good exercise and healthy living, and it also reduces the amount of exposure from harmful toxins that are found in various packing materials, cosmetic waxes and pesticide residue. The best part? The food is fresher when it gets to your table! While there are some cons to gardening such as a high requirement of labour and maintenance, pests and high costs for starting materials, the benefits far outweigh the negatives.

Local gardening can also benefit society, for it can bring communities together. Transition Totnes, a small town in the United Kingdom, established a local community garden in which all citizens can buy vegetables and learn about taking up the practice in their own homes. Some of the citizens have grown their own vegetables at home, and sell them to other locals as well. When the people share similar beliefs and values, in this case, the environment, there is a strong sense of unity between the citizens.

Barrie should follow Totnes’ example, and implement local gardens; both for individual homes, as well as a community garden. Sunnidale Park is an excellent location for a community garden, for the land area is vast, and most of it is unused. Currently, there is a community garden in the park, but another garden would greatly benefit the community, whether it is in the park, or elsewhere in the city. Energy and oil use can be greatly reduced if people buy their food locally, as opposed to going to places where the products are shipped from overseas. With that, the community of Barrie can come closer together and the shared passions of the environment can be passed around the city. Buying food locally is one of the many solutions to reduce climate change around the world. So let’s plant the seeds of the future and watch them grow.

- Jeremy Prutchick