Sustainable skateboards

Read the full story at Great Lakes Echo.

A 13-year-old boy, beanie hat covering his shaggy hair, practices grinding his skateboard down a handrail in a busy urban neighborhood until a police officer chases him away.

Skateboarders’ love of skate spots, like this one in Lansing, Michigan, leads to a heightened care of these environments. Photo: Kristen Oliver.

He may not sound like a typical environmentalist.

But skateboarders are agents of an alternative type of sustainability, according to a recent article published by the academic publishing company Taylor and Francis and written by Francisco Vivoni Gallart, visiting assistant professor of sociology at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

The original research article was published in a special issue of Local Environment: The International Journal of Justice and Sustainability, which focused on children, young people and sustainability. Browse the table of contents of the full issue here.

 

Coal, Cattle Ranching ‘Most Environmentally Costly’ Businesses

Read the full story in Environmental Leader.

Coal-powered energy and cattle ranching are the two most environmentally expensive industries — and cost the economy more in environmental damage than they generate in revenue, according to a UN-backed report.

Natural Capital at Risk – The Top 100 Externalities of Business by the Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity Business Coalition, estimates that the primary production — including agriculture, forestry, fisheries, mining, oil and gas exploration, utilities — and primary processing — including cement, steel, pulp and paper, petrochemicals — sectors analyzed have externality costs totaling $7.3 trillion, which equates to 13 percent of global economic output in 2009.

 

Working towards national sustainability using a regional approach

Read the full story in GreenBiz.

Editor’s note: If you’re interested in this topic or want to learn more, check out the program for our upcoming VERGE Boston event on May 13-14.

Mark “Puck” Mykleby, a colonel who retired from the Marine Corps in 2011, is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation working on what he calls a “grand strategy” for the United States. The strategy focuses on activating the public, private and civil sectors to collaborate on long-term regional investment strategies focused on smart growth, regenerative agriculture and resource productivity.

The project is focused in the following four regions: Upper Midwest (Minneapolis, Minn.-Milwaukee, Wis.), Lake Erie area (Detroit, Mich.-Youngstown, Ohio), Southeast (Charleston, S.C.-Savannah, Ga.) and California (Silicon Valley-Salinas).

GreenBiz recently spoke with Mykleby to learn more about his vision.

 

Webinar: Environmental Sustainability and Behavioral Science: Meta-Analysis of Pro-environmental Behavior Experiments

Tuesday, May 7,  1-2 pm CDT
Register at https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/6597474733924842752

There have been over 100 published psychological experiments that have attempted to get people to do the right thing for the environment. These experiments have covered many different kinds of behaviors (recycling, energy conservation, etc.) and have used many different ways of motivating people (incentives, information, feedback, etc.) What is the big picture that comes from all of this research? In this webinar, Dr. Richard Osbaldiston will discuss his recent meta-analysis of these studies, and he will share what we know—and what we don’t know—about promoting pro-environmental behaviors.

About the speaker: Richard Osbaldiston has been studying environmental issues for over 15 years as both an engineer and a psychologist. He is equally comfortable talking about kilowatt hours or intrinsic motivation. And in fact, it is the marriage of these disciplines that gives the greatest insight into we what need to do to change behavior and protect our environment.

This event is part of the P2Rx Social Media and Behavior Change webinar series.

 

Sustainability: Past, Present, and Future

Read the full story from the Energy Collective.

A variety of factors are coalescing to make 2013 a pivotal year in the growth of sustainability. Year after year, sustainability has gained ground as an increasing number of organizations are incorporating environmental and social concerns into their strategic planning.

 

How to Map the New Economy in Your City

Read the full post at Shareable.

Groups all over the world are resisting the status quo of profit maximization by putting society’s happiness, health and the Earth first. This work, though, is often overshadowed by big business with its bloated advertising budgets and economic monopolization, which makes alternatives seem insubstantial if not nonexistent.

New economy projects are mostly unconnected, so each one struggles alone rather than supporting each other. One result of this is that awareness remains low.  The US Solidarity Economy Network (USSEN) and its international counterpart, RIPESS, are working to change this by implementing a mapping and economic integration tool to connect groups with one another to build a cooperative, just and sustainable economy.

 

More on Divergent Paths to Human Progress

Read the full post by Andrew Revkin.

The University of Illinois has posted a well-produced video of my talk there last October, titled “9 Billion People + 1 Earth = ?” It’s worth posting here given that this has been the central question shaping this blog since its inception. I explore many ideas, but focus particularly on the need to get comfortable with the wide range of human reactions to risks of various kinds. (Around minute 13, I credit the “cultural cognition” work of Dan Kahan at Yale University.)

This means there won’t be a clean and neat path to progress, nor should there be. It also means, as Abhas Jha of the World Bank has put it in the context of disaster planning, we need to manage risk for “graceful failure” — soft landings amid uncertainty and imperfection. As I’ve put it, that’s the art of “falling forward without falling down” (one definition of walking).

 

$10,000 Prize and Publication for Best Essay about Sustainability

The Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, a program of the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University, has teamed with Creative Nonfiction magazine to create the $10,000 Walton Sustainability Solutions Best Creative Nonfiction Essay Award. The award-winning essay, as well as other select submissions, will be published in a special “Human Face of Sustainability” issue of Creative Nonfiction (CNF).

CNF and the Sustainability Solutions Fair, one of the programs within the Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives, chose to launch this competition because of the growing conversation around this issue on both a global and an individual level.

In addition to the $10,000 prize, the winner will be invited to a special launch event hosted by ASU’s Walton Sustainability Solutions Initiatives. The contest deadline is May 31, 2013, and “The Human Face of Sustainability” issue will be published in Spring 2014. The issue will be guest edited by Donna Seaman.

Additionally, the magazine is seeking an artist to illustrate the issue. The artist chosen will receive $3,500 and have their work profiled prominently for at least three months on CNF’s website. He or she will work closely with CNF’s editorial and design staff to create 8 to 10 original designs to be featured on the cover and interior of the magazine. All styles of interpretation, as well as various media (e.g. line drawings, watercolor, collage) will be considered, providing they are well suited to a print format.

Complete submission guidelines are available at www.creativenonfiction.org/sustainability.

 

Free on Coursera: Introduction to Sustainability

Next session begins Mar 11th 2013 (8 weeks long).
Register at https://www.coursera.org/course/sustain

About the Course

This course introduces the academic approach of Sustainability and explores how today’s human societies can endure in the face of global change, ecosystem degradation and resource limitations. The course focuses on key knowledge areas of sustainability theory and practice, including population, ecosystems, global change, energy, agriculture, water, environmental economics and policy, ethics, and cultural history.

This subject is of vital importance, seeking as it does to uncover the principles of the long-term welfare of all the peoples of the planet. As sustainability is a cross-disciplinary field of study, this foundation requires intellectual breadth: as I describe it in the class text, understanding our motivations requires the humanities, measuring the challenges of sustainability requires knowledge of the sciences (both natural and social), and building solutions requires technical insight into systems (such as provided by engineering, planning, and management).

About the Instructor(s)

Dr. Jonathan Tomkin is the Associate Director of the School of Earth, Society and Environment and a research Associate Professor in the department of Geology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Tomkin directs the undergraduate program in environmental sustainability at the University.

His research aims to uncover the processes of how changing climates, glaciers, and landscapes interact. This study has involved fieldwork all over the world – including the Olympic Mountains, the Swiss Alps, Patagonia and Antarctica. He is the co-editor and contributing author of the college textbook Sustainability: a comprehensive introduction.

Course Syllabus

Week 1: Introduction. Pessimism vs. optimism.

• Neo-malthusians, J-curves, S-curves and the IPAT equation

Week 2: Population. Demographics and the disappearance of the third world

• Demographics, population trends.

Week 3: Tragedy of the Commons.

• Fisheries, pastures, public vs private solutions

Week 4: Climate Change. The climate of the near future: hot, hotter, or hottest?

• Weather vs. Climate, Proxy and data climate evidence, Climate projections

Week 5 : Energy. What happens when we reach “Peak Oil” Renewable energy: is there enough to make the switch?

• Peak Oil/Fossil Fuel, Energy survey, availability, and density, EROI

Week 6: Agriculture and Water. Is there enough water and food for the 21st Century?

• GMOs and the Green Revolution, water stocks and flows – physical and social constraints

Week 7: Environmental Economics and Policy. Can economists lead the way to sustainability?

• Environmental Evaluation, project and policy evaluation, Incentive policies

Week 8: Ethics and Culture and Measurement. The long view.

• NeCarbon Footprints, Energy and water efficiency metrics, Sustainability Ethics, Environmental ideology and conservation movements

Suggested Readings

The course will use a free, online textbook “Sustainability: a Comprehensive Foundation (Theis and Tomkin, Eds.)”. Participants can download the book as a pdf or html file (for laptops and computers) or as an epub file (for tablet readers) http://www.earth.illinois.edu/sustain/sustainability_text.html

Course Format

Each week of class consists of multiple 8-15 minute long lecture videos, integrated weekly quizzes, readings, an optional assignment and a discussion. Most weeks will also have a peer reviewed assignment, and there will be the opportunity to participate in a community wiki-project. There will be a comprehensive exam at the end of the course.

 

5 thriving, sustainable communities

Read the full story at Mother Nature Network.

Ecovillages are communities of people drawn together by the common goal of living more sustainably. Their commitment and practices vary from ecovillage to ecovillage but all share the bond of not being satisfied with the status quo. Ecovillagers seek to live in harmony with the environment and develop their land with an eye on protecting vital natural systems and on fostering good relations with neighbors, both of the human and animal variety. They farm and garden, pool their buying power to save money, and may share other community resources like cars and tools. Does every house on the block really need to have its own lawn mower?

The modern-day ecovillage has its roots in the communes that first popped up in the ’60s and ’70s. As the environmental movement was born and matured, more eco-centered communities started forming. In 1991, sustainability experts Robert and Diane Gilman wrote “Ecovillages and Sustainable Communities,” a study on ecovillages undertaken on behalf of Gaia Trust that helped lead to the formation, four years later, of the first ecovillage conference that took place in Findhorn, Scotland. That event led to the founding of the Global Ecovillage Network and to countless ecovillages all around the world.

We scoured the web in search of five American ecovillages that have taken root and thrived. Whether you’re reading because you’re just curious about ecovillages or are looking for a new place to call your eco-home, these five make for a good read.