The last week of the Foundations course the students at ISDSI fan out over the city and study four sustainability indicators — walkability, traffic, the use/health of the Ping river, and the food systems of Chiang Mai (looking at organic food, the size of the foodshed, etc.).  The students split into four groups, and each group spends Monday planning, Tuesday and Wednesday gathering data, Thursday doing data analysis, and then Friday on a presentation.

Nikki and Jack talking about "som" (tangerines) in both supermarkets and fresh (wet) markets.

It is always fun to see what creative ways students work out to learn about sustainability in the city.  This semester the rivers group borrowed a couple of ISDSI’s sit-on-top kayaks and paddled down the Ping river, the food systems group decided to focus on oranges/tangerines as a proxy for broader food system dynamics, the traffic group looked a cars and “public” or at least “mass” transportation, and the walking group tried to figure out how difficult it was to walk in different places in the city.

Molly and Taylor discussing the challenges of walking in the city center.

The papers are here as pdf files:

• Walkability index for Chiang Mai city
• Traffic and mass transportation as a measure of sustainability for Chiang Mai
• Food systems, organics and the foodshed for tangerines (som) in Chiang Mai
• The Ping river and its connection to sustainability and the life of Chiang Mai

Krissy and her group did a great job working out the challenges of walking, and how even the idea of walking around the city is culturally mediated.

On Friday we were joined by Khun Pim Kemasingki, the editor of Chiang Mai CityLife magazine, a well known English language magazine published in Chiang Mai for almost 20 years. Khun Pim was great — having grown up in Chiang Mai she was able to add a lot of historical background, and with her position as editor, she understands the challenges of sustainability for Chiang Mai city. It was great for the students as well to get another perspective on the city, and the role of culture, language and politics in sustainability. (Also check out CityLife’s page on going carbon neutral.)

Ajaan Christina, Ajaan Mark and Khun Pim were the discussants for the presentations.

The students learned a lot about the city that is there home for this semester, got out into places tourists don’t often go, and were able to pull together research involving both social science and ecology. Well done all!

Matt explains the traffic and how it all fits together.

This coming week the Copenhagen summit will be going on, from December 7-18.  The goal of this summit is to follow up on the work done during the Kyoto agreements, and to try and limit global warming.

The stakes are incredibly high.  Pressure, slander and huge amounts of money and disinformation are being thrown in the way of any binding agreements, as oil companies and their allies try again to introduce doubt into the debate (hacking into scientists’ private email and distorting what they said is just part of it).

The science is clear, settled, and overwhelming. If drastic cuts are not made in global emissions of CO2 and other gasses that contribute to global warming, we are headed towards a global catastrophe. We are already seeing massive changes due to anthropogenic climate change, and it is only going to get worse.  Feedback loops in climate are making even the worst case scenarios of only a couple of years look like underestimates of how bad it can get.  And it will get very very bad.

If we can get back to 350 ppm CO2 (we’re around 384 now), there is hope.  It will be a benefit to our economies to move away from oil, and the opportunity for business for clean and renewable energy and technologies are huge.

But the challenge is significant.

I’ve included here a tracker showing real time what the negotiations are working towards. Below that are some good links to learn more.

Let’s hope history is made in the next few days, or future generations will point to this time as an opportunity lost.

Homepage for the conference: http://en.cop15.dk/

One of our students coming in the spring, Taylor Cantril, is at Copenhagen.  He mentioned in the comments several blogs worth noting, especially deppcopenhagen.wordpress.com and thecopenhagenquestions.wordpress.com

Good summary and detailed current report on the state of the science and current situation: Copenhagen Diagnosis

The best online discussion of the science is at Real Climate.  This includes links to basic science information (see these lectures which are particularly good).

The best discussion of the politics around climate change from the perspective of an engaged and passionate scientist is at Climate Progress.

Great new book out from Lester Brown, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.  The book is both a call to action and a hopeful message showing what is already being done. Wind power, for example, is coming online faster than expected, and huge gains are being made in de-carbonizing our civilization. However,

The question we face is not what we need to do, because that seems rather clear to those who are analyzing the global situation. The challenge is how to do it in the time available. Unfortunately we don’t know how much time remains. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock.

Brown clearly lays out that the multiple issues facing us (climate change, energy, etc.) eventually lead to the problem of food.  How do we balance food demand and supplies? From the start of the book:

From time to time I go back and read about earlier civilizations that declined and collapsed, trying to understand the reasons for their demise. More often than not shrinking food supplies were responsible. For the Sumerians, rising salt levels in the soil—the result of a flaw in their irrigation system—brought down wheat and barley yields and eventually the civilization itself.

For the Mayans, soil erosion exacerbated by a series of intense droughts apparently undermined their food supply and their civilization. For other early civilizations that collapsed, it was often soil erosion and the resulting shrinkage in harvests that led to their decline.

Does our civilization face a similar fate? Until recently it did not seem possible. I resisted the idea that food shortages could also bring down our early twenty-first century global civilization. But our continuing failure to reverse the environmental trends that are undermining the world food economy forces me to conclude that if we continue with business as usual such a collapse is not only possible but likely.

This is an important point usually lost in the Global North, where over feeding (obesity) rather then food shortages are currently of concern.

Climate change, of course, is the biggest contextual threat to food supplies. As glaciers retreat the buffer they supply by slowly releasing water in the dry season will disappear. Drying (as we’ve seen in Australia already) is leading to permanent drought, dust storms, and desertification. Sea levels increasing even a small amount lead to salt intrusion.  More severe storms, like Cyclone Nargis, devastate standing crops, and their storm surge leads to even more salt being dumped into soils. Shifting rainfall patterns destroy the predictability of rain-fed agriculture. The “shift to the poles” of growing zones challenge farmers with crop yields and new weeds and pests. Demand for bio-fuels pull  land out of food production into feeding cars.

Brown lays out the issues of shifting to renewable (non-carbon) based energy, sustainable cities, poverty and overpopulation, restoration ecology and related issues. This last chapter, “Can We Mobilize Fast Enough?” he lays out our options and chances of making it.

There is much that we do not know about the future. But one thing we do know is that business as usual will not continue for much longer. Massive change is inevitable. “The death of our civilization is no longer a theory or an academic possibility; it is the road we’re on,” says Peter Goldmark, former Rockefeller Foundation president and current director of the climate program at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). Can we find another road before time runs out?

The notion that our civilization is approaching its demise is not an easy concept to grasp or accept. It is difficult to imagine something we have not previously experienced. We hardly have the vocabulary, much less the experience, to discuss this prospect. We know which economic indicators to watch for signs of an economic recession, such as declining industrial output, rising unemployment, or falling consumer confidence, but we do not follow a similar set of indicators that signal civilizational collapse.

He ends with a challenge:

The choice is ours—yours and mine. We can stay with business as usual and preside over an economy that continues to destroy its natural support systems until it destroys itself, or we can adopt Plan B and be the generation that changes direction, moving the world onto a path of sustained progress. The choice will be made by our generation, but it will affect life on earth for all generations to come.

Get the book (online or hardcopy), read it, and pass it on.

(Download or purchase Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization. The data the book is based on is going online, as well as other supporting information and resources.)

Fishing the commons in Trang.

We are pleased to see recognition for Elinor Ostrom’s lifetime of work on common property resource management in winning this year’s Nobel in Economics.

Her academic career addresses the myth of the inevitability of the tragedy of the commons.  The conventional (Garrett Hardin-esque) wisdom was that resources either had to be legislated by public government or privatized to protect resources from over-depletion.  Her focus is on the ways that resource user groups develop their own institutional mechanisms to govern multiple-user resources (commons) — that conventional wisdom failed to account for human innovation in the institutional realm, and that people are apparently not always as self-interested as some economic theory predicts.  This is important to ISDSI’s work, as commons (forests, fisheries, rivers) provide a large portion of the livelihood sources for many of the people our students are working with on the program.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2009/ecoadv09.pdf
describes this year’s prize.
For more on this subject, including a bibliography of over 57,000 articles about common property management, see:
http://www.iascp.org/resources.html

Scientists need a listening public

A sobering post up by Joseph Romm on the failure of scientists to communicate the realities facing us due to global warming, Publicize or perish: The scientific community is failing miserably in communicating the potential catastrophe of climate change. His post is a reprint from a special issue of Physics World on Energy, Sustainability and Climate Change. (emphasis mine)

The fate of the next 50 generations may well be determined in the next few months and years…

The International Scientific Congress on climate change held in Copenhagen in March, which was attended by 2000 scientists, concluded that “Recent observations confirm that, given high rates of observed emissions, the worst-case Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realized.” That would mean that by 2100 there would be atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of more than 1000 ppm, total planetary warming of 5 °C and sea-level rises probably on the high end of recent projections of 1–2 m followed by a rise of as much as 2 cm per year or more for centuries. We would also see one-third of inhabited land reaching dust bowl levels of aridity, half or more of all species becoming extinct, and the oceans increasingly becoming hot, acidic, dead zones. And if we do not change course quickly, the latest science predicts that these impacts may be irreversible for 1000 years.

That’s not good.  The problem is:

In short, the fate of perhaps the next 100 billion people to walk the Earth rests with scientists (and those who understand the science) trying to communicate the dire nature of the climate problem (and the myriad solutions available now) as well as the ability of the media, the public, opinion-makers and political leaders to understand and deal with that science.

Given the money being poured into denying climate science to protect the profits of carbon intensive industries (coal, oil, etc.), and their exploitation the false idea of “there are always two sides to every issue” we’ve got a serious problem. The same dynamic existed with the link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer (money poured into creating doubt, insisting on “balance” when the science was clear there as a link, etc.).  The big difference here, however, is that the changes taking place are occurring over generations, rather than an individual’s lifespan.

People who smoke die of lung cancer at higher rates, and it is easy to see and observe first hand, even by people who don’t understand the science. You can see an uncle who you remember being young and healthy coughing, getting ill, and finally dying from lung cancer in only a few years.  The end point — death — was something that anyone could see, and see multiple times from multiple cases.

We have, however, only one earth, and it is dying. Part of dealing with a terminal illness is getting over the denial that it is really happening, because denying in some ways makes you feel superior. “The doctor’s wrong!” “I’m as strong as an ox!” “The tests aren’t reliable!”

Another stage in dealing with a terminal illness is bargaining: “It won’t be that bad!” “There will be a cure soon.” “We can deal with it once technology gets better…”

The problem isn’t just that scientists are poor communicators.  The problem is that we don’t want to listen.

(See also The Invention of Lying about Climate Change)

Patagonia's Footprint Chronicles

One of the big issues facing a transition to sustainability is for businesses to figure out how to run more ethnically and be environmentally sustainable.  No one, of course, is all the way there yet, and most businesses are aware of that.  There are a lot of different approaches, and that’s great — we need a lot of different ways to figure this out.

Two interesting examples are Apple and Patagonia.  Both take very different approaches to sustainability, as they deal with different industries and products.  By their own admission, neither one is perfect, but I think they serve as good thought provoking approaches.  Rather than focusing on a critique of their efforts, here are some of the good things they are doing.

Patagonia’s Footprint Chronicles

Patagonia is one of my favorite companies.  They have done so much to advance sustainability in business, from developing recycled fleece to starting 1% for the Planet.  They’ve really worked on being ethical and sustainable on a number of levels, and it is worth jumping over to their website to see all the different environmental initiatives they have going.

One of the more recent initiatives they have started is The Footprint Chronicles.  In their own words,

Build the best products and cause no unnecessary harm. This is our mission. Yet we’re keenly aware that everything we do as a business — or have done in our name — leaves its mark on the environment. There is still no such thing as sustainable business but every day we take steps to lighten our footprint and do less harm. The Footprint Chronicles allows you to track the impact of a specific Patagonia product from design through delivery.

When you choose a product, a map of the world show you how it travels — from factory to warehouse. There is a discussion of each element of the product (including energy use, CO2, water, etc.) as well as “The Good” and “The Bad” — essentially what they’ve got done so far, and what they are still trying to do.

They don’t have every product on the site, but enough diversity to give you a good idea of the type of manufacturing they do. Doing all the products would be close to impossible, and be so overwhelming it would actually be difficult to sort through.  They’ve done the hard work of sorting out what matters, and how it all fits together.  The product profile is supported with photos, videos (including interviews in the factories) and other information.  You could spend a lot of time clicking through what they are doing with each product, and come away with a really good understanding of the challenges and struggles it takes to be a sustainable business.

Apple

Life cycle impact and energy use.

Apple has taken a somewhat similar approach with Apple and the Environment. They lay out their overall approach to the environment and sustainability, and you can download a report on each currently shipping product.

We account for everything.  Including our products. Apple reports environmental impacts comprehensively. We do this by focusing on our products: what happens when we design them, what happens when we make them, and what happens when you take them home and use them.

Apple has been criticized in the past for not communicating well about what they are planning on doing for the environment.  Now they are communicating, and are trying to focus the discussion on what they are actually doing, not what they are promising to do.  A lot of companies come up with great plans for being more sustainable, but Apple in this case is focusing on what they are doing and have done.  They’ve got some great comparative data on their site, looking at past products and how things like changing packaging impacts their carbon footprint, etc.  Clearly they’ve been working on these initiatives for a long time, and it is good to finally see them doing a good job communicating about it.

They do a good job working through their carbon footprint, looking at manufacturing, shipping, facilities (including retail spaces), recycling, and the impact of consumer use. They deal with the issues of toxic substances in manufacturing, and are open about what they still need to do.  The focus on the life cycle is especially good, as they are thinking about and taking into account the product once it leaves their stores — working toward cradle to cradle accounting, including the environmental impact of consumer use and taking products back for recycling.

There is still a long way to go for both, and neither Patagonia nor Apple is all the way there yet.  However, it is very encouraging that two very different companies care enough about sustainability to put the resources behind not just doing it, but communicating well about what they are doing.

If you’re interested in sustainability, both of their websites are a good place to start to understand how it can happen in the real world!

Laurie explaining the role of the Ping river in urban sustainability

This past week ISDSI students fanned out across the city collecting and analyzing data to develop sustainability indicators for Chiang Mai city. This was a great exercise in experiential learning and they were able to apply their Thai language skills as well as knowledge of the city and sustainability issues in general.

Early in the week, we had two activists with the Rak Baan Rak Muang group come and talk with the students, sharing about their struggle to make Chiang Mai more sustainable. (Read more about them here.)

The 33 students were divided into 8 groups, with a group of 4 in the morning and 4 in the afternoon.  They focused on four key issues: traffic, walkability, the availability of organic vegetables and the Ping river.

Monday was spent planning their studies, with Tuesday and Wednesday focused on data collection.  Thursday was a frenzied day of data analysis and preparing posters for Friday’s presentation and poster session.  The Friday poster session was organized like those at a professional conference, with all eight posters up, time to browse and look at the posters. Each group then presented their methods, findings, and questions for further research.

The focus of the exercise was twofold.  First, to give the students a chance to apply what they have been studying for the last five weeks — from Thai language to knowledge about sustainability and Thai society. The second goal was to gather some useful data about what is going on in Chiang Mai. The research the students did will be given to the Rak Baan Rak Muang group so it can be used in helping make a more sustainable city.

Rapid surveys like this can be very valuable for getting a sense of what is going on in an area (a city, village or landscape), and the students did a terrific job figuring out indicators and collecting the data. The studies are exploratory, not definitive, and so provide a good starting point for further research and generating more questions for follow-up studies later on.

Each study is available below as a PDF file:

Organic Produce, Organic Markets

Walkability 1, Walkability 2

River Use and Access, Urban/Suburban River Health

Traffic Composition, Traffic Flow

Julia Child, cooking REAL food.

Good thought provoking article in the NYT, Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch, by Michael Pollan, author of “The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals” and “In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto.”

Pollen is known for saying that anything our grandmothers (or great-grandmothers) wouldn’t recognize as “food” probably isn’t. So much of what we eat is processed, artificial, or very much removed from the plants and animals that humans have lived on for all of history up until now.

Just as Pollen has explored how our food is produced, and what is happening to agriculture, he explores in this article what is happening to cooking in America — in short, it is disappearing from American homes, and with that, so is our health and connection to real food.

Pollen describes how the time spent on food preparation has declined significantly over the last few decades, as corporations have focused on marketing industrial “food” that is easy to prepare. Time spent cooking is now spent on the Internet, and, at least in part, on watching food shows — where people are competing (think “Iron Chef”) and not really teaching about food or cooking. Julia Child’s cooking show was all about cooking — in real time — real food, mistakes and all (he mentions a great story about her not quite getting a potato pancake flipped on live television). From Julia Child encouraging people to cook, we now have passive game shows of cooking contestants.

We have the time to shop for real (local) food, and time to cook it. But we’ve chosen to spend our time on YouTube and cable TV instead.

Today the average American spends a mere 27 minutes a day on food preparation (another four minutes cleaning up); that’s less than half the time that we spent cooking and cleaning up when Julia arrived on our television screens. It’s also less than half the time it takes to watch a single episode of “Top Chef” or “Chopped” or “The Next Food Network Star.” What this suggests is that a great many Americans are spending considerably more time watching images of cooking on television than they are cooking themselves — an increasingly archaic activity they will tell you they no longer have the time for.

This matters.

[O]besity rates are inversely correlated with the amount of time spent on food preparation. The more time a nation devotes to food preparation at home, the lower its rate of obesity. In fact, the amount of time spent cooking predicts obesity rates more reliably than female participation in the labor force or income. Other research supports the idea that cooking is a better predictor of a healthful diet than social class: a 1992 study in The Journal of the American Dietetic Association found that poor women who routinely cooked were more likely to eat a more healthful diet than well-to-do women who did not…

So cooking matters — a lot. Which when you think about it, should come as no surprise. When we let corporations do the cooking, they’re bound to go heavy on sugar, fat and salt; these are three tastes we’re hard-wired to like, which happen to be dirt cheap to add and do a good job masking the shortcomings of processed food. And if you make special-occasion foods cheap and easy enough to eat every day, we will eat them every day. The time and work involved in cooking, as well as the delay in gratification built into the process, served as an important check on our appetite. Now that check is gone, and we’re struggling to deal with the consequences…

He ends with a great quote from a marketing expert (who markets processed food):

“You want Americans to eat less? I have the diet for you. It’s short, and it’s simple. Here’s my diet plan: Cook it yourself. That’s it. Eat anything you want — just as long as you’re willing to cook it yourself.”

Sustainability has a long history in SE Asia

Good overview of the growing importance of sustainability in higher education by Jillian Berman in USA Today, “College students are flocking to sustainability degrees, careers.”

Several schools are mentioned, as is AASHE (The Associate for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education).  Both undergraduate programs, graduate programs, majors, minors and other initiatives are surging in popularity.  I know that last year at the AASHE conference it had grown enourmously from the first one I attended six years ago – from 300-400 people to close to 1,800 participants, 400 presenters and 130 exhibitors!

This growth in interest is across the board – from undergraduate majors, to MBAs, architecture degrees to student life. Not content to just focus on sustainability in the classroom, there is a lot going on outside the classroom as well – with campus organic gardens, LEED certified buildings, recycling, etc.

What is most exciting about this is that the initiatives are largely student driven – as students get together to push the (sometimes reluctant) school administrators for more green / sustainable initiatives on-campus.

We’ve noticed the trend ourselves – we’ve got a record number of students enrolled this fall, and are seeing the students who do come have a deeper understanding of sustainability issues than in the past. It is enourmously encouraging to see the growth over the last 10 years at ISDSI, as sustainability has moved increasingly to the center of higher education!

Great new movie out in the theaters in the US.  I’ve not seen it yet, but am working on getting a copy and hopefully we can get a screening here in Chiang Mai.  The folks involved have a deep understanding of food systems, and for anyone interested in sustainability this is really required viewing.

Several of the people in the trailer are authors we read on our courses, and this is a great fit with our course on agroecology as well as several of the other courses that link into food systems issues, such as our forests course.

Featuring interviews with such experts as Eric Schlosser (Fast Food Nation), Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) along with forward thinking social entrepreneurs like Stonyfield’s Gary Hirshberg and Polyface Farms’ Joel Salatin, Food, Inc. reveals surprising—and often shocking truths—about what we eat, how it’s produced, who we have become as a nation and where we are going from here.

Go to the website here for the trailer and other information: http://www.foodincmovie.com/

Any movie with a bar-coded cow has to be good.

If you see it, let us know what you think in the comments!