Megan Quinn Bachman
Outreach Director
The Community Solution
Saturday Evening, September 16, 2007

Confronting the Triple Crisis: Powering-Down for the Future—Toward an International Movement for Systemic Change: New Economies of Sustainability, Equity, Sufficiency and Peace

* Presentation for the “Ingredients of Systemic Change (1)” Panel Discussion with Megan Quinn Bachman, Bill McKibben, Richard Heinberg, Helena Norberg-Hodge, Rob Hopkins, Josh Farley, and Thomas Princen.

 

Introduction

My organization, The Community Solution in Yellow Springs, Ohio, views the converging calamities of our time as symptoms of a greater problem – that of our disconnection from each other and from Nature – in short, a crisis of community. Sixty-five years ago, our founder, Arthur Morgan, saw the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the world, based upon the availability of cheap fossil fuel energy, as a dangerous trend, that would result in environmental degradation, social alienation, and great inequities.

So he spent the latter part of his life preaching the message that only by living interdependently within small, local communities can we truly be sustainable, and live healthier, happier, meaningful lives. He founded our organization to continue his work, which brings me before you this evening.

Because trying to define community is like trying to define the word “love,” I’m going to talk about community in mostly practical ways. Among many things, community is a vision of the future where we conserve and share scarce local resources rather than deplete, destroy and battle over seemingly abundant distant resources. It is a vision where we consume far fewer resources, but have a better life, filled with valued relationships rather than valued possessions.

But before we can live locally, in community, we have to stop living globally. So the first thing to do is to participate by not participating. To stop contributing to so much global destruction by reducing our consumption of resources, starting with the most destructive, fossil fuels. This is what we call curtailment, and is the critical first step towards community.

So how far do we need to curtail? An easy calculation to make is that the land and oceans can absorb up to 10 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year. So with anywhere from 6 – 8 billion people on the planet over the next few decades, we’ll need to be emitting a maximum of 1 - 2 tons of CO2 per person per year. Well, we Americans are now each producing 20 tons of CO2 per year, Western Europe is at about 10 tons per capita, and the world per capita rate is 4 tons. So we, in the United States, need a 90 – 95% reduction.

Unfortunately, most so-called “solutions” to the energy and climate crisis don’t get us close to the 90 – 95% reduction. Many of them, such as hybrid vehicles, make us more dependent on unsustainable systems. These mostly government and corporate solutions placate our fears and keep us complacent and consuming. We’re told that the “experts” will come up with something to save us, and we believe them, because it’s easier to do so than to change our own habits. But I invite you to ask the question – whose solutions are those? They are not for us. They do not serve us, and they do not empower us.

That is why the only solutions that can both save us from catastrophic climate change and economic collapse at the end of the era cheap energy and give us a chance for a democratic, equitable, sustainable world, are solutions based upon personal and local actions to consume less.

I’m going to address these dangerous false solutions, many of which are ironically based upon consuming more resources, and instead offer radical curtailment strategies so we can begin to approach the 95% reduction level. I’m not offering the easy low-hanging fruit, such as compact fluorescent light bulbs and other token measures. We need to look at the places where we’re consuming the most energy to make the most impact.

Curtailment Solutions

Housing

This begins by looking at how we’re using energy. Tonight I’m going to look energy use in the areas most under direct personal control – housing, transportation, and food. It may surprise you that in the U.S. buildings consume 48% of our total energy, including the construction, demolition, embodied energy, and maintenance of buildings. This is more than for our food or transportation. Worldwide, though the U.S. produces 27% of the global CO2 emissions, buildings in the U.S. generate 42% of the world’s CO2 emissions from buildings.

Size is a major factor. The average size of a new home in the U.S. today is about 2,200 square feet, or 800 square feet per person. In 1950 it was 1,000 square feet and about 300 square feet per person. Compared with Europe and Japan, our residences are twice as large and consume 2.4 times the energy.

The dominant solution we hear about for buildings is so-called “green building,” including programs like LEEDs certification, solar houses, zero energy, passive solar, Energy Star and the like. On average these programs save about 15% -- 30%  of the energy used in a typical building, but they account for only 2% of new construction, which is itself about 1 – 2 % of total buildings. This is too little, too late.

We can make a bigger impact by retrofitting the existing 90 million residential structures and 5 million commercial buildings we have in the U.S. There are many innovative strategies available, most of which revolve around increasing the thickness of building shells, increasing the efficiency of appliances (most easily done by getting rid of them altogether), and better habits, like being more temperature-flexible (another way of saying, suck it up). Community Solution has several model home-retrofit projects underway at the moment, as we try to determine what the most effective structural and lifestyle changes are to reducing home energy use.

Yet so entrenched is our growth-oriented society that all we can focus on is applying innovations to brand new buildings rather than making what we have more energy efficient. Again, there’s this ridiculous notion of consuming more to consume less.

Transportation

Similarly with transportation we’re putting all our efforts (and all our hope) into making more efficient new cars. Well, hybrids have been on the market for 10 years now, and there are 1 million of them on the roads, out of the 750 million vehicles in the world, and where 75 million new vehicles are added each year. We’re told that next will come pluggable hybrids, fuel cells cars, electric vehicles, and the like. And if these don’t materialize, then we can just use bio-fuels to keep our cars running. We’ve seen at this conference how disastrous that would be.

At some point we have to admit that the personal car was a huge mistake – it devoured the planet’s most useful finite energy resources. We need to look for ways to reduce the number of vehicles on the road, and make transportation itself more efficient. We at Community Solution have a plan to use existing vehicles and current cell phone technology to start a ridesharing system we call the “Smart Jitney,” which aims to increase vehicle ridership from the current 1.5 persons per vehicle to 4-5.

Unfortunately in the short-term, cars are the only viable transportation option for our very decentralized automobile-dependent infrastructure, but in the long run revamping local and regionally economies, living, working , and shopping in the same area, we’ll be able to utilize the more sustainable options of walking, bicycling, and mass transit.

Food

Finally, food. In a way, our food system can be seen as a metaphor for our entire industrial system – that of disconnection from nature and life.

Before the industrial era our agriculture system was certainly not sustainable – we still robbed nutrients from the soil and disrupted the resilience of ecosystems, but fossil fuels allowed us to raise our destruction to unprecedented levels. Consider the fact that more land was converted into agriculture in the year 1945 than in the 18^th and 19^th centuries combined. Today our ridiculously inefficient system relies upon 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food energy. And it’s gets worse for grain-fed meat and manufactured foods, where 16 calories are needed to produce one calorie of meat, and 30 calories are needed to produce a calorie of soda.  

Our first step on the production side has to be to stop using so many fossil fuels – and this requires we change not only how we grow food, but what we grow. In the U.S. today 85% of the cultivated area is devoted to four crops – corn, hay, soybeans, and wheat, most of which is used as feedcrop for livestock or processed into manufactured food products, which have inferior nutritional content. U.S. medical costs, which are twice that of European countries per capita, are a good measure of how unhealthy our diets are.

The other most energy-intensive food is grain-fed livestock. A recent report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization entitled, “Livestock’s Long Shadow” reveals that more CO2 equivalent is generated by livestock production than from all of transportation.

This is why dietary change is so important. First of all, we’re overconsuming food just like we’re overconsuming energy, water, and so many other resources. On average, we’re overconsuming by about one-third. Two-thirds of our population in the U.S. is now overweight or obese. Secondly, we’re consuming too much meat. The average person in the world consumes three times the amount of meat that they did in 1960, with the Global North consuming three times the amount of meat per capita than the Global South. Finally, we are consuming too much highly-processed food and not nearly enough fresh vegetables, fruits, beans, nuts, and whole grains. These healthy crops compromise only about 3.2% of farmland in the U.S. Fruits and vegetables account for only 5% of the American diet on a per-calorie basis, and half of that is potatoes, no doubt largely in the form of french fries.

Beyond a more sustainable agriculture that uses less fossil fuels, and dietary changes to consume less energy-intensive foods, it is very important that we all take responsibility for where our food comes from. We’re the only animals besides baby animals that don’t do something to procure our food from nature. In the U.S., about 2% of the population are farmers. This has to change. When we shift to using fewer fossil fuels, start to repair and rebuild the damaged soil, and grow more real food, we’ll need vastly more human labor to do it. This includes more full-time farmers for sure, but all of us producing some food is the most efficient, sustainable, and secure agriculture.

This is actually a wonderful thing, because more people being engaged in food production can have a transformative effect on our culture. Agrarian discrimination is quite prevalent in our society. Some of the words we use to talk about are provincial, unsophisticated, hayseeds, bumpkins, yokels, hicks, peasants, hillbillies, county-cousins, rednecks, and clodhoppers doing back-breaking, mind-numbing labor. Farmers of the future must be respected above all, for theirs is the work of healing the Earth from industrial destruction, restoring the integrity of natural systems, renewing our long-damaged relationship with nature, and creating a new way of inhabiting the planet.

Community Solutions

So as we curtail our consumption of fossil fuels, contributing less and less to the destructive global industrial system, we must begin to contribute more and more to its alternative, which we describe as small, local community.

Small refers to a more realistic scale of human habitation, which is less centralized and operates more as a web of interconnections between people, allowing more meaningful relationships to develop. Local refers to the necessity of being in close proximity with those whom you have economic relations – which is very important.

Part of the reason we can continue to allow and contribute to the ecological genocide of the planet and growing misery of the worlds poor through our daily economic decisions is that we are separated from this reality by so much distance. Everything and everyone who provides us what we need to survive is an abstraction. We consume brand names, not resources and people. If we could see the sweatshop workers and the falling forests, we could not morally continue to treat them with such disregard for their well-being.

So in re-developing more face-to-face economic relationships we will come to have more respect for those who provide our necessities, by making sure they have a fair wage and safe working conditions. In turn, they will make sure that our health and safety is provided for. This mutual relationship serves to improve everyone’s well-being, including the well-being of nature, not just corporate profit.

In this way, individuals and communities can have greater control over their destiny, rather than being at the mercy of global prices for oil and other commodities, corrupt CEOs, and inept public officials. Everywhere, you hear of people losing confidence in this crumbling global economic system, but most don’t have an alternative – they don’t have a community that can care for their needs. But community is the only real source of security – and as peak oil, combined with other resource depletion, global warming and an emerging financial crisis strikes home, more and more people will begin to realize this.

Time for Action

So what can we do? We can certainly blame many other people for the problems in which we find ourselves, and that may make us feel better temporarily, but in reality, we, the billion or so overconsumptive middle class people on the planet, are the greatest perpetrators of global destruction –  not the small number of elite consumers or the destitute and more self-reliant majority.

So we are the problem, but we are solution, as well. The changes that we make in our own lives can make more of an impact on global resource use than entire communities in other parts of the world. Consider the fact that the average American uses more energy just for their personal food consumption than the average person in the Global South consumes in total.

So how do we begin to make these means personal lifestyle changes, and sustain them into the future? Well, we got into this situation one bad decision at a time, and we’ll get out of it one good decision at a time.

But we need to realize that if we don’t choose, then the choices will be made for us. So we here in this hall, who are much further in our understanding of the problem and the false solutions being promoted, really have an obligation to take action. We certainly should do all we can to teach and to share the truth of our global crisis, but we also need to use this head start, this precious time we have now to begin to build our new community economies, and to revive and strengthen our local connections which will prove to be invaluable in a time of crisis. Together, we are pioneering a new low-energy future, and more than anything we need models of how it can succeed.

Community Solution has a plan and land for a model neighborhood-community called “Agraria” that we intend to build in our town of Yellow Springs, Ohio. It will consist of very small, passive houses – meaning designed so that they don’t need for heating or cooling systems – plus gardens will provide much of the food the neighborhood, and will be based on interdependent social and economic relationships both within the neighborhood, and within the greater community. Most importantly, we envision it as the educational and cultural center to transform of our small town of 3,700.

We need examples of what’s possible at all levels, and one very powerful example at the national level is Cuba. When the Soviet Union – Cuba’s oil lifeline – collapsed in the early 1990s, Cubans lost half their oil overnight. In just a few years, they made the transition from being one of the most industrialized countries in Latin America, to one of the most sustainable in the world. While consuming one-eighth the energy of the average American, Cubans have the same lifespan, a lower infant mortality rate, a higher literacy rate, and more teachers and doctors per capita than the U.S.

Today 80% of Cuba’s agriculture is organic, cities provide for most of their vegetable needs within their limits, and Cubans are decentralizing energy generation and developing more efficient mass transit. Many of these and other developments are documented in our film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. The real lesson for us is not just what Cuba did, but how they did it. When the crisis hit, Cubans didn’t hope for someone to save them, even their own government. They took the initiative in their communities, and survived, revitalizing exchange at the local level as they transitioned to a much more agrarian economy.  

I believe that this is how the change will take place, not from above, but from within. From individuals and communities and eventually entire nations pioneering a better way to live on this planet, and planting the seeds of a sustainable future.

I want to end with a quote from Henry David Thoreau. “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been planted, I have faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

I am prepared to expect wonders from this crowd. I hope you rise to the challenge.

Thank you.