Last month, the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published Climate Change— Who’s Carrying the Burden? The chilly climates of the global environmental dilemma (Ottawa: Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives, 2010), edited by Professor L. Anders Sandberg and Tor Sandberg. This timely publication draws attention to the disparity between climate change and social justice concerns. Its contributors confound, confuse and extend what constitutes the meaning of climate change. Moreover, they juxtapose and make connections between climate change and the chilly climates that exclude and marginalize groups and individuals who live and imagine different ways of interacting that are more respectful of social and environmental relationships.

As the introduction succinctly notes, the devastating impacts of climate change are clear. But there are disturbing revelations about how global elites are tackling the issue. Al Gore—on one hand — promotes carbon emissions trading and green technologies as a solution, and—on the other—profits handsomely from his timely investments in those same initiatives. Infamous climate change skeptic Bjørn Lomborg recommends free market solutions to fight global poverty and disease. And it’s these solutions that almost exclusively receive the attention of world leaders, so-called experts and media pundits.  This publication rallies the call of climate justice advocates and activists concerned with ‘system change not climate change’. This call demands control of local resources, the restitution of past wrongs, and the willingness to conceive and accept different modes of living and seeing.

The book is dedicated to those that suffer the most from climate change yet are the least responsible for it.  The authors focus on the distributional impact and visions of climate change and the connection of climate change to wider systemic forces. The contributors present a view of climate change that is critical of markets, new technologies, and international agreements as solutions to the climate change dilemma and also explore the origins of climate change and the places where its impacts are felt the most. The collection makes a significant contribution to understanding climate change itself as an oppressive force in not only hiding the historical connections of the carbon economy to colonialism, capitalism, and a rampant and exploitative resource extraction, but also the resiliencies, possibilities and alternatives articulated by groups who fight and stand outside the carbon economy. It argues that there are chilly climates that surround the discussions on climate change that erase, exclude and marginalize alternative views and possibilities.

To purchase a copy visit the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives. See Climate Change— Who’s Carrying the Burden? The chilly climates of the global environmental dilemma

Contents

• Introduction: Climate change — who’s carrying the burden? — L . ANDERS SANDBERG and TOR SANDBERG

PART I:  CLIMATE CHANGE AND CLIMATE JUSTICE

• The Health Impact of Global Climate Change — STEPHEN LEWIS
• From Climate Change to Climate Justice in Copenhagen — L . ANDERS SANDBERG and TOR SANDBERG
• Paying Our Climate Debt — NAOMI KLEIN
• Vandana Shiva Talks About Climate Change — AN INTERVIEW BY TOR SANDBERG
• The Path from Cochabamba — SONJA KILLORAN- MCKIBBIN
• COP15 in an Uneven World — Contradiction and crisis at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — JACQUELINE MEDALYE
• Climate Change, Compelled Migration, and Global Social Justice — AARON SAAD

PART II: CHILLY CLIMATES

• Framing Problems, Finding Solutions — STEPHANIE RUTHERFORD and JOCELYN THORPE
• Penguin Family Values: The nature of planetary environmental reproductive justice — NOËL STURGEON
• ‘Walking on Thin Ice’ The Ice Bear Project, the Inuit and climate change — JELENA VESIC
• Operation Climate Change: Between community resource control and carbon capitalism in the Niger Delta — ISAAC OSUOKA
• Broken Pieces, Shattered Lives: The lasting legacy of Hurricane Katrina — TANYA GULLIVER
• Unearthing Silence: Subjugated narratives for environmental engagement — JAY PITTER

PART III: BEYOND CLIMATE CHANGE AND CHILLY CLIMATES

• A Practical Environmental Education:Shrinking ecological footprints, expanding political ones – ELIZABETH MAY
• “Keep the fire burning brightly” Aboriginal youth using hip hop to decolonize a chilly climate — ALILAKHANI, VANESSA OLIVER, JESSICA YEE , RANDY JACKSON & SARAH FLICKER
• Forty Years of System Change: Lessons from the free city of Christiania — ANDERS LUND HANSEN
• Marginal Medleys: How Transition Towns and Climate Camps are relocalizing the global climate crisis — ADRINA BARDEKJIAN AMBROSII
• Dig Where You Stand! Food research/education rooted in place, politics, passion, and praxis — DEBORAH BARNDT

It turns out that Tim Hortons’ cups, over any other coffee distributor, provide an excellent food source for bacteria used to make biofuels, such as ethanol and hydrogen. As we know, ethanol can be made from certain food crops but this has dangerous implications for issues of social justice, not to mention the beautiful sections of the rainforest being cut down in order to plant such crops. In comes the used coffee cup.

Since these cups have already been pre-treated and processed into a “bacteria-ready form” they are a splendid form of biomass, preferred over alternative sources such as wood chips which must undergo a thorough transformation involving processes like steam explosion and acid treatment before they turn into bacteria-digestible sugars.

Microbiologists Richard Sparling and David Levin have devised a process where the shredded cups are tipped into a bioreactor which is kept at a temperature and pH level perfectly suited for the bacteria. Thanks to the shredding process, the bacteria have even more surface on which to latch allowing them to munch up the mulch even more efficiently. The cup waste is therefore fuel for the bacteria which in turn produce their own waste: ethanol and hydrogen, as well as acetic acid and carbon dioxide which can be used as fuel.

Now this is great news for all the waste produced by Canada’s favourite coffee outlet, Tim Hortons, especially during “Rrroll up the Rrrim to win” promotional times. Since these cups already exist and are being used at a, sadly, prolific rate, it makes sense to use them as a source of biofuel over planting new crops solely for the production of alternative fuels. Though the commercialisation of such a technique won’t be available for at least a few years, one wonders if it would be effective in diverting waste. Certainly Tim Hortons’ new recycling bins have not proved all that popular. Perhaps if this effort were turned into a private commercial venture there would be a much stronger push for the recuperation of cups.

Still, elimination of takeaway cup waste altogether would be preferable. Despite this ingenious reuse method, the impact created by the amount of energy, water and raw materials needed to make the millions of paper cups used and then thrown away each day indicate that it is time we changed our habits. Reusable mugs remain the best solution. They can be stylish or subdued in style and provide perfect control of your beverage’s temperature. Have no fear creators of biofuel everywhere, there’s a lot more waste left to be diverted. Keep it up with your ingenious discoveries!

Jan Gehl, renown architect and urban planner

Featuring Alana Kronstal’s Thesis Summary: Community-Based Mental Health and Addiction Practice
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Jan Gehl, renown architect and urban planner

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Jan Gehl, renown architect and urban planner

Featuring students and Prof. Jose Etcheverry
You can click here to see the video on climate justice and climate change prepared by students.

A highlight of the conference was the public panel which presented the results of an exploratory project funded by Canada’s Three National Research Councils. What Do We Know? What Do We Need To Know? – The State of Canadian Research on Work, Employment and Climate Change featured the following speakers:

Carla Lipsig-Mummé York University
John Calvert and Marjorie Griffin Cohen Simon Fraser University
Steve Tufts York University
Geoff Bickerton Canadian Union of Postal Workers
John Holmes Queens University

A final report based on the work presented at the panel along with other W3 updates will be online in the fall of 2010.

Jan Gehl, renown architect and urban planner

Sometimes transformation can occur before you even realise it’s happening.

This was the primary message that I took out of legendary Jan Gehl’s presentation in Auckland tonight entitled “Cities for People”, and one that I am very happy to have heard.

Jan Gehl, a Danish architect and urban planner with a vision towards restoring the planet’s cities for its inhabitants, has a simple message: “if you are sweet to people, they will be sweet to you”. He had the slides and images to back that claim up too.

After introducing the state of architecture when he himself emerged out of architecture school 50 short years ago – where buildings were grand and people were small, where the most important perspective – eye level – was completely forgotten, and where “bird sh** architects” dropped massive concrete buildings on cities like bomber pilots (all his expressions, not mine!), and in an era where Jane Jacobs fought successfully to keep her beloved Greenwich village from becoming ground zero for an expressway – some cities where already shifting towards a revolutionary style of city, one where people are its central focus, not cars.

Copenhagen is one such city, explains Gehl. Little by little, and with the direction of a visionary architect and city planner, Copenhagen began to systematically reduce the amount of available parking space by 2%. The amount was negligible (small enough for no one to really notice) and with it came the appearance of lovely human thoroughfares, with benches and cafes and places for people to sit and chat and walk if they wanted. Copenhagen never knew what hit it and in the space of 1 year the main street was completely pedestrianized.

When this plan was laid out in 1962 stores along the street balked. Surely there sales would drop! But – and City of Toronto mayoral candidates should listen up – not a peep was heard from them after its inception.

The truth of the matter is very simply, lay down more concrete and more cars will come, remove the concrete – or use it differently – and people will come (and with them their money). People are the life of any city; Gehl reminds us that it is in our nature to be around people. We enjoy watching them, talking with them, walking amongst them on a sunny summer’s day. When a street is deserted, it feels unsafe and bizarre.

Gehl boasts that his beloved Copenhagen, in its efforts to meet its stated goal of becoming “The world’s finest city for people” is aiming to get 50% of its population on bikes. Businessmen bike to work, grandmothers bike, pregnant women bike. The spaces afforded them are wide, safe and numerous. Compare this to Brisbane, Australia (as told by Gehl) – and I would also offer Auckland – where biking is considered an extreme sport only done by 25 to 35 year old men dressed in full “survival gear”. Biking can and should be a preferred way of transportation in a truly mixed-use city. In Copenhagen cars must cross sidewalks to turn, not people crossing streets. What a beautiful distinction!

Copenhagen bike lanes

And so it turns out, that Auckland has been studied by Gehl for a “public realm health check” in 2009. Its preliminary recommendations could be just as easily suited for Toronto:
• Celebrate your beautiful natural setting – from this emerges that it should go without saying that people should be able to easily and pleasantly access the waterfront on foot.
• Connect the oases of life (parks, attractions) throughout the city to encourage people to move around.
• And finally and obviously, take out the 150 cars per hectare parking spaces (compared to 23 per hectare in Copenhagen!), and bring back the bicycle.

To show that it can be done, Gehl concludes with some images of his work in New York City (of all places). Since 2008 NYC has been transforming itself. Separated bike paths have been introduced on its main arteries and car lanes reduced. Broadway Avenue is now permanently closed to motor vehicle traffic since February 2010 leaving what used to be permanent gridlock (as I remember it in 2006) to reinvent itself into a street wide open air café. And just to show how happy everyone is, business has gone up 75%.

This is astounding and a positive sign that when you are serious about changing you city, the city will gladly respond.

Now let’s just make sure to redirect this increase in spending power away from the toys and chocolate abundant in that part of New York and rather towards sustainable goodies and practices – photovoltaic suppliers and vermicomposter retailers pay attention, now you know where your next potential customer base might lie!

Parasols on Broadway Plaza

People, not cars, on Broadway

This morning about 40 people (including myself) gathered on the top floor of the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Auckland, overlooking the beautiful and green (thank you evergreens!) University of Auckland campus, to take part in a full day training course on the Green Star NZ tool. Our lovely presenters were Liz Root, Green Star Technical Manager at the NZGBC, and Quinton, a NZGBC Green Star assessor and assistant creator of the tool itself. The room was packed with would-be Green Star New Zealand Accredited Professionals (refer to the above acronym), from Energy Analysts, to contractors and engineers to property valuers and building services managers, all keen to be initiated into the world of green building and supportive of the steps to get there.

Or so that’s what I assumed.

In reality, our presenters were met with what could politely be described as distrust but in fact sometimes seemed to simply be outright hostility. I am told this is specific to the Auckland crowd.

My perspective going into this day of training, which is a precursor to sitting the Green Star NZ Accredited Professional exam (NZ’s counterpart to the LEED AP exam), was that everyone was a convert and saw the intrinsic value of creating a more sustainable and less harmful built environment. However, a few (too many) of the participants seemed completely jaded and mistrusting of the tool apparently only seeking a soap-box platform for venting their frustrations instead.

I completely understand cynicism, but not the (misdirected) hostility. Take the case of the waste contractor who explained the dichotomy of waste managers in NZ:

In one camp there are those who DO own landfills and thereby make their money collecting waste and then chucking it into the landfill
On the other side are those who DON’T own landfills and make money collecting waste but must spend more to dump it (thereby giving money to their competitors).

The latter group clearly have a much larger incentive to divert waste (in fact they would be bad business men – let’s face it, they’re all men here – if they didn’t) whereas the former do not. This creates problems, as the gentleman pointed out, when the former are the ones contracted to remove waste from a Green Star building site under the presumption that they will be diverting the waste when in fact they are not. This is a legitimate and extremely troubling concept, unfortunately one that has now been added to my already-too-large repertoire of examples of how hard it will be to get everyone to sign up to join the Green Train (i just made that up, want to hop aboard?).

What was completely inappropriate was the way it was broached. His tirade went on for perhaps 10 minutes, his voice was loud and his tone accusatory. This type of interaction has no place in a constructive space like this training sessions. Our presenters support their tool 100% and believe in its efficacy while still being very aware and realistic of its limitations. Green Star NZ has been developed to the best that it can be at this point and of course will continue to grow and improve as time goes by. Obviously there are things that could be better, this will always be the case as the world’s standards on green building keep rising. But as a non-profit organisation with very limited staff, not that any excuses need to be made as it is an excellent tool, the NZGBC cannot take the role of a third party auditor as well. We can only rely on the integrity of those who sign the reports stating that waste has been diverted. It is what it is and NZ is the better for it since 2007 (when the first version of the tool was released).

So to those who criticise so loudly and readily, I say give your time, give your energy and help us make it a truly strong and all-encompassing tool. It’s the job of many and the only way we can ever get there.

And my utmost thanks to Liz and Quinton for responding to the “attacks” with such tact and respect!

The first challenge item she has thrown at me is a milk bag. Not being much of a milk drinker, milk bags do not find their way into my life very often. When I do buy milk, though, I purchase the less sustainably packaged wax cartons of lactose free milk.

For milk lovers and bag avoiders, there is hope. Local dairies and dairy cooperatives like Harmony Organic have reintroduced the classic milk bottle, in addition to also offering carton and bag packaging options. Their website states: “All our products are available in returnable glass bottles* which leaves the milk tasting clean and ‘fresh from the farm’. Each bottle is expected to make 15-20 trips before being recycled. In an effort to bypass the use of chlorine as a sanitizing agent, we use hydrogen peroxide in our cleaning processes.” While I don’t drink much milk, I do eat yogurt every morning for breakfast. Similarly packaged in a reusable glass bottle, I buy delicious, creamy, full-fat, organic yogurt from Pinehedge Farms, located in St-Eugène, Ontario.

I case you’re wondering, St-Eugène is at the Ontario border with Quebec, between Ottawa and Montreal, and over 500 km away from my home in downtown Toronto. While I love the idea of reusable packaging, I wonder if shipping a relatively heavy glass jar 500 km each way is environmentally better than shipping a relatively light plastic container.  Would I not be better off consuming the equally delicious Saugeen Country Dairy organic yogurt, which is packaged in plastic and hails from Markdale, Ontario, only 150 km away? If this is the case, surely it would also be better to purchase milk in light weight bags (ideally from a nearby dairy) rather than in glass bottles. It seems we are back to generating plastic milk bags.

There are other, more challenging alternatives.  For example, you could forgo milk entirely, taking on a vegan (absolutely no animal products) or paleolithic (dairy-free with only certain plants and animal products) diets. You could live close enough to a dairy farm, so as to not worry about shipping heavy glass bottles long distances. Or you could lobby the government to allow urban backyard bovine, though I doubt a cow would be very happy living in a 20 square meter backyard.

This question is like so many other “what is more sustainable” scenarios, which are highly complex and — if you’re not careful — might make you think, it’s all bad so why bother? In those cases, often a simple act is a good place to start. So, start by reusing all your milk bags (including the clear ones that are impressively durable). Stop accepting plastic bags from retailers and stop buying them as much as possible. While you’re at it, stop buying food storage bags and use these instead. In fact, in many cases they could even replace plastic cling wrap if coupled with a rubber band or twist tie. The goal should not be to make your life guilt-ridden or inordinately complicated. Rather, we should all try to use less and use thoughtfully.

What do you think, Dawn? Agree? Disagree?

Ready for  a new challenge? My challenge to you, Dawn, is what should we do about these pesky items — cigarette butts?

Good luck,

Meagan

For more see:

http://www.unep.org/Documents.Multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=628&ArticleID=6611&l=en

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/06/the-carbon-footprint-of-the-2010-world-cup.php?campaign=th_rss&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+treehuggersite+%28Treehugger%29

http://www.norway.org.za/NR/rdonlyres/3E6BB1B1FD2743E58F5B0BEFBAE7D958/114457/FeasibilityStudyforaCarbonNeutral2010FIFAWorldCup.pdf