I’m not a religious person in the conventional sense, but this new presentation on climate change made me sick to my stomach, put the fear of god into me, and doubled my resolve to do far more to reduce my carbon and ecological footprints. I’ll share those actions on this blog, through posts and video, in the coming weeks and months, and I hope you’ll do the same.

The presentation is boring in some parts, and it uses charts and scientific jargon. Please be patient. At a minimum, you should thumb through the slides, and listen to the last third of the presentation to get the key points. The key takeaways for me are:

• If we don’t make big changes, we’re looking at dangerous global warming by 2035, front and centre in our lifetimes. I don’t even want to think about our kids’ lifetimes.

• We, the 1%, are responsible for 50% of global emissions, not China, not India, not the world’s billions of poor. Changes to our lifestyles (flying less, driving less, eating less) are the only place and the only hope for avoiding the worst effects of climate change.

• Action is critical. This is about individual action, community-level dialogue, and collective action in the form of climate politics at the local, provincial and federal levels. We must demand regulation from our governments, starting now.

“I am serious, and don’t call me Shirley.” (RIP Leslie Nielsen).

Here’s the latest in a series of posts taking on the environmental blind spots and hypocritical behaviour of sustainability advocates like myself (I set my sights on the iPhone and tech boosterism in earlier posts).

Why am I picking on us? Because for reasons I’ll explain shortly, the world expects and deserves better behaviour and smaller ecological footprints from environmentalists. It’s also the social corner of the world I live in, and as I’ve come to understand through ongoing research into climate change communication and social change, we can only really meaningfully influence those closest to us, at a community level. This is also the level at which real social demand (political will) for government regulation is generated.

At the end of the day, all of this boils down to a simple moral question: Do you believe all human beings are equal, and deserve an equal share of personal security, hope and opportunity? Most of us would answer “yes,” and that means we either reduce our ecological footprints or throw all our morals out the door. In the absence of action, our behaviour says, “We are the exceptional ones, and those most vulnerable to climate change and environmental degradation are the unlucky ones. And that’s okay.”

It’s not okay. We can and must do better.

So here we go. Sacred cows be damned. It’s nothing personal, some of my favourite people in the world fly like there’s no tomorrow (but hopefully that will start to change).

Fasten Your Seat Belt

You might think that infectious personality and environmentally-conscious brain of yours is important enough to strap into a 737 and fly it across the continent at just under the speed of sound to attend a few meetings and eat some local greens, all in the name of social change, but it’s not. Not in today’s severely carbon-constrained world, where in the short-term, climate change threatens the most vulnerable, and in the slightly longer-term, the rest of us.

Except in exceptional circumstances, where you’re able to directly trace the carbon saved, from the carbon burned, because your in-person meeting blew some powerful person’s mind and changed the course of history, telecommuting (via Skype or any other video chat) should meet 99.9% of all organizational and personal communication needs. If it doesn’t, you should seriously question the environmental integrity of the people or organizations you’re working with (and flying to).

Some might argue there’s a window of opportunity when it’s okay (or even important) for some “key influencers” to fly around the world spreading environmental messages. Except in exceptional circumstances, I think that’s a selfish conceit. To that argument, I’d answer, it’s precisely because you are a professional social influencer that you need to model the change you want to see in the world. The public expects and deserves a higher standard of sustainable behaviour from those advocating it.

Be the Change

When it comes to reducing our carbon footprints by flying less, environmentalists are some of the worst offenders I know. Worse still, some glorify it, making it part of their own self-affirmation. Here are a couple of anonymous examples of environmentalists and social-change types (friends and colleagues of mine) talking about their flying habits on social media:

“On my way to North Carolina in a couple hours….Nvr been! After this trip I will only have to go to Florida to have been to every state in the USA!”

“On the hop in NY – fun couple of days of meetings, making some new and influential friends for our planet.”

Every time you walk down the street with a baggage ticket on your suitcase, every time you “check-in” to your favourite airport online, you’re sending a strong message to friends, family and colleagues that flying is not only okay, but that it’s even desirable.

How can we honestly expect people to take our warnings about climate change seriously when our behaviour suggests it isn’t a big deal? Some environmentalists would prefer to dismiss such questions as ad hominem attacks, or detours that detract from more important targets like big corporations, but the research shows people are paying attention to your behaviour. By “being the change” you put yourself in a much stronger position to ask for serious emission reductions from corporations and government. There needs to be a cultural demand for regulation, and that won’t happen if we’re all acting like the people in First class.

The Only Way To Fly

When you do fly, as a matter of carefully considered necessity, (and I underline, bold, and italicize that, because really, if we don’t redouble our efforts to actually “be the change,” then our supposed concern about climate change is just bullshit) here are some basic rules to lessen it’s impact:

UPDATE: My buddy Jeffery feels that climate politics and the role of active citizenship and collective action weren’t prominent enough in my original post. Well, let’s fix that.

• Be a frequent citizen (and an infrequent flyer) – Lobby your local, provincial and federal politicians for real climate leadership. Vote for (and join) political parties that actually have plans to fight climate change (Prime Minister Harper and his federal Conservatives don’t have one). Canada needs to support international climate treaties and put a price on carbon. It also needs to put hard caps on major emission sources like the oil sands. Active citizenship and collective action goes hand-in-hand with personal change and strongly expressed values at the community level.
  

• Fly less (a lot less, almost not at all) – Rinse, repeat and ask, “Why can’t I Skype or video chat?” Do I really need to fly to achieve this goal? On balance, will this trip honestly move the world towards sustainability? If you have any intention to monitor your personal carbon budget, you need to know that a single long-haul flight takes-up more than 50% of the annual per capita emissions recommended by climate scientists to stay below dangerous levels of climate change. That basically means flying (if it happens at all) should only occur every few years (and you better be living like a saint in between). One flight puts you and the world, deeper into carbon debt.

• Don’t glorify it – Flying is a form of conspicuous consumption and it’s one of the most environmentally-destructive forms out there. Flying is a delicious, addictive indulgence, that is completely unsustainable. When you do fly, don’t broadcast it. Social media trip planners that announce your comings and goings send the message to your peers and colleagues that flying (and lots of it) is normal, maybe even desirable. Should each of the approximately 7 billion people on earth aspire to casual flying? What makes you the exception?

• Offset the shit out of it – While they can be problematic, offsets are better than nothing, but only by a little bit. Every time you fly, you’re endorsing and advertising a carbon-intense lifestyle. Offset a little more for your bad influence on others.

• Measure and report your personal and organizational carbon footprints – All roads to sustainability point to low carbon social innovation and low levels of personal consumption. In the absence of measuring and reporting, environmental groups become what they most fear. They become a subset of the economy, mini-corporations similar to film studios, telling moral stories that people want to buy and believe in, but that are never substantively lived, least of all by the people telling them (“Do as I say, not as I do”). Set an example for the citizens, corporations and governments you seek to influence, by including your carbon footprint in your annual report.

• Practice community building on the road – When you do find yourself in foreign lands, get involved with the local community. Consider local activism and citizenship as another form of offsetting. If you see yourself (and your reason for flying) as a source of social innovation diffusion, bringing only light (in the form of information) to the darkness (ignorance of local audiences), pack up your suitcase and go home. You forgot to pack two other components of public engagement: affective (emotion/interest and concern) and behavioural (action). Both can only be generated at the community-level, where social capital is created. Local people are the best people to do this, but if you’re in town and can lend a hand to a local cause, you should.

Adopt an Organizational and Personal “No-Fly Policy”

Let’s be more mindful, and apply a stronger set of criteria for determining when flying is truly necessary (for work or personal pursuits). For long trips, take alternative transportation like buses and trains, even if it takes longer – a lot longer. There was a time when trips across the country were a momentous occasion, requiring immense resources, careful planning, intention and fortitude. Surely the people you would otherwise fly to meet, deserve similar preparation and attention. If the reason you’re flying isn’t worth the sheer resources, planning and commitment of a Lewis and Clark expedition, then don’t fly. That’s what Skype is for.

Think about implementing a “no fly” policy in your organization and within your household. Have that conversation. Explain that you’re trying to keep track of and reduce your carbon footprint. When we start to measure these things with intention, behaviour change comes a lot more naturally.

Fly less and start measuring your carbon footprint today. Practice political citizenship like you mean it. Support political parties who believe that it’s important to fight climate change. Prove to the world that you surely are serious.

For a year or two now (and especially as my thesis nears completion), I’ve been telling friends and family that I’m trying to carve out a new livelihood for myself, one that strives for a better balance between work online (read computer), and offline, hands-on stuff (in my case, woodworking and urban agriculture). Today, I’m excited to say that I’m one step closer to achieving that balance.

Starting this month, I’m (re)joining the ForestEthics team as their new part-time Senior Communications and Media Manager, focusing on the Enbridge Northern Gateway pipeline and Sacred Headwaters campaigns. It means that my online time will be spent with a creative and successful ENGO with clear, local campaign goals for making the world a better place, and it also means I’ll have more time to work with my hands, learning more about woodworking and urban agriculture (I love getting my hands dirty!).

Both realms of work will be enhanced by one another, a cross pollination of ideas, insights and physical movement that will make for a healthier livelihood while also boosting my productivity in each sphere. Less time on computer = healthier body = healthier brain = greater creativity & results.

Part of my new livelihood still includes my communications consulting and press release service. I’m still open for business. If you or your organization need to make an important contribution to the public sphere or set the agenda about a particular issue, campaign, or policy, I’d be more than happy to help.

I’ll provide more updates on “the new livelihood” as it takes shape. Stay tuned.

After I parked the car last night, I checked the trip meter: 936km. Before leaving Vancouver last Friday for a family Thanksgiving in the Okanagan, I zeroed the meter. A couple of hikes, some salmon watching, two family dinners and a late night Monopoly “City” game later, we were back in Vancouver, all the richer for having spent quality time with family (lot’s of laughs). Our trip, like any other, did have a cost though, and I figured I should start keeping track of it.

After entering my vehicle year, make and model (a good condition, used, standard, four cyclinder, four door hatchback), carbonfootprint.com told me I had put .22 metric tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the course of our return trip. That’s 220kg, or the equivalent of 5.5% of our annual household carbon budget for the year.

What the heck is a carbon budget?

Good question, it’s dead simple, but I’m only just learning how to manage it meaningfully. Let’s start with the bottomline: In order for the world to keep global warming below two degrees celsius, scientists say that annual per capita emissions of carbon dioxide need to be two tonnes or less. To put that into perspective, and to give you a sense of the challenge, the average North American has a carbon footprint of 20 tonnes, ten times what is equitable and sustainable. One long haul flight alone will easily eat-up more than half of your personal carbon budget for the year.

Clearly, we’ve got a long ways to go.

Transportation and utilities are probably two of the easier line items to keep track of, other sources of carbon dioxide, like the products we consume (electronics, clothing etc.) and the food we eat (How was it grown or raised? How far did it travel? Does it take a lot of fossil fuel to grow feed, e.g. corn for cows?), are a bit trickier to calculate, but online carbon calculators will make a “best guess” based on your purchasing habits. The rule of thumb is to eat local as much as you can, and to eat meat sparingly. When you can avoid buying new, used is the way to go.

Kicking some carbon ass (aka living simply)

Because this is the first time we’ve kept track of our personal carbon emissions, I have no idea how we’ll measure up (quite poorly I’m guessing). Our annual household (two-person) carbon budget is 4 tonnes (2 tonnes per person). If we were to include a recent flight to Ohio we took to visit family, as well as our other trips and consumption habits earlier in the year, I’m sure we’re already deeply in the red several times over.  However, because I finally remembered to zero the trip meter, I’m going to use the Thanksgiving weekend as the end and beginning of our carbon fiscal year. It seems fitting, given that this is the time of year we make a point of giving thanks for family and the food that sustains us. There’s also something about the end of the harvest and the change of the seasons that makes it especially poignant. All of these things are intimately tied to the impacts of climate change.

With those impacts firmly in mind (pick any climate change news story), we’re not going to just measure for measuring’s sake. We want to see what kind of difference we can make. In recent months, we’ve made a real effort to grow more of our own vegetables with summer and winter gardens, and we’re getting close to a plastic-free “zero-waste” lifestyle (more on that soon). We’re also buying a lot more local food, and preserving it (canning and dehydration). Local and plastic free are at the top of our list when we go shopping. All of these things will help to reduce our CO2 emissions, saving room in our carbon budget for the things we really love, like surfing in Tofino, or having Thanksgiving in the Okanagan.

At the end of our new “fiscal year,” what I imagine we’ll find is that we’re still over our per capita carbon budget, but much less than we would have been otherwise. We’ll see areas where we can improve, and we’ll also see the limits of individual effort – those places where we need to come together as citizens to build things (through politics) like better transit systems, cleaner eletricity generation (and conservation), putting a price on carbon, and regulating industrial developments like the tar sands and saying “no” to proposed pipelines.

I strongly believe in a mix of personal low carbon social innovation and government regulation for achieving the two tonne average we’ll all need in short order to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. I also think the strong political call for regulation will only arrive when we all begin to think about issues in a bigger-than-self fashion. Rather than getting ahead as individuals, we’ll strive to get ahead together. Without simple (yet rich) lifestyles and a strong sense of community, I don’t see how we’ll achieve sustainability.

I’ll keep you abreast of our carbon reduction efforts throughout the 2011/2012 “fiscal year,” and shortly after Thanksgiving, 2012, I’ll give you our annual report. I’d love to hear about your own efforts as well!

That a man with a wife and children dies young, is sad. That a brilliant (and by many accounts brutal) billionaire electronics product designer passes away, and is mourned as a saviour, is creepy. I’m genuinely sorry anytime a fellow human being leaves this earth, but I also think it’s important to analyze and critique what society’s apparent outpouring of grief over Steve Jobs’ death says about us (sacred cows be damned).

I’m sorry folks, I’ve got a MacBook Pro and a second-hand iPod Shuffle, and they make a great deal of the time I spend on a computer, or at the gym, more enjoyable, but the way some people are reacting to Steve Jobs’ death creeps me out. I say that because he isn’t being mourned for the man he was, but rather for the brand he led as well as the ubiquitous electronics environment he designed and which we work (and apparently worship) in today. In my opinion, the world’s reaction to his death doesn’t say good things about where we’re at as a society.

In addition to the modified Apple logo featuring a silhouette of Steve Jobs as the bite taken out, as well as the countless Steve Jobs university commencement speeches shared on Facebook, there are quotes from other videos like this:

“To me marketing is about values. This is a very complicated world. It’s a very noisy world. And we’re not going to get a chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is…Now Apple, fortunately, is one of the half-a-dozen best brands in the whole world, right up there with Nike, Disney, Coke, Sony. It is one of the greats of the greats. Not just in this country but all around the globe.”

Indeed, Apple was one of the hallowed names of the corporate world when Jobs retook his position as CEO (after being pushed out years earlier in an internal power struggle). On his return, he had even bigger plans for the brand. Here he explains Apple’s “core value,” something that would set it above the rest:

“We believe that people with passion can change the world for the better…And that those people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones that actually do.”

The Apple Religion

Steve Jobs was the leader of a religion – or at least as close to a religion as you can get in Western consumer society. There are the symbols, the strictures, the loin cloth (Levi’s 501 blue jeans, black mock turtle neck and New Balance sneakers), the followers and the evangelists. There are the legends and stories of the leader’s selfless unshakeable commitment to “simplicity, ease of use and elegant design.” There was the famous “1984” ad, touted by Jobs himself as “probably the best ad ever made.”

Indeed many of the things Jobs did were described as “revolutionary.” In asking his followers to “Think Different” he directly invoked historical religious and cultural leaders (for example, Gandhi), building religiosity by associating the Apple brand with ideas and selfless acts of humanity far greater and more powerful than making computers for profit.

He said the company’s ad campaign was to “honour” those people who had actually changed the world. Some were living and some were not. “But the ones that aren’t, as you’ll see, you know if they ever used a computer it would have been a Mac.” Really? Would Gandhi have gotten behind a keyboard in celebration of the indentured servitude, farmland destruction and cancer-causing pollution Apple makes possible in China? I think differently.

How Has Apple And Its Followers Actually “Changed the World?”

As I attempted to convey in an earlier blog post on the serious cancer-causing and ecological consequences of iPhone production in Northern China, there’s a dark side to the Apple religion. There’s a reason Apple briefly became the most valuable company in the world earlier this year: They ship a lot of units. Tens and tens of millions, in fact. In the name of “elegant design” we’ll buy and throwout the latest generation of whatever we bought a year ago, completely oblivious to its ecological footprint.

A couple years back Apple did grudgingly make some improvements to the environmental-friendliness of some of its products, a response to Greenpeace’s “Green My Apple” campaign. Those changes however, are a drop in the bucket compared to the impacts of glorified planned obsolescence, the kind that is so engrossing that consumers will buy a product knowing full well another version with a camera or a wifi connection will be released six months later (“No problem, I’ll sell the old one on Craig’s list and buy the new one in time for Christmas). Now that’s changing the world.

Why Not Try Thinking Differently, For Real?

One of the reasons I wrote this post is because it bothers me to see fellow “progressives” and “environmental advocates” mourning the loss (in the way that they are) of one of the world’s greatest CEOs, capitalists, and electronics manufacturing expansionists. Again, it’s sad to lose someone early, but it’s another thing to immortalize a corporate brand and its promise land of never ending beautiful electronics (read growth). Don’t preach to me about the values of occupying Wall Street while you wax poetic about one of history’s most successful and brutal capitalists.

Environmentalists have lots to say about flows of dirty oil and greenhouse gas pollution, but little to say about the flow of dirty electronics. The religion of Apple, as currently conceived, is diametrically opposed to sustainability. Unfortunately, environmentalists are some of the worst technology boosters I know.

Truly thinking differently in the sense of Gandhi, Martin Luther King or even Einstein (all three invoked by Apple’s advertising campaigns) means that your mouth shouldn’t be watering over the release of the next iwhatever, or at least if it does, you’re also mindful of the real ecological impacts of any given purchasing decision, and your true NEED for it. Frugality (make it delicious frugality) is how we need to start thinking, and living (drive that electronic device until the wheels fall off). Anything else is just the religion of mindless consumerism by any other name.

If you haven't seen Dr. Strangelove, you should.

This weekend is Thanksgiving, and there’s no better way to celebrate the gifts of the harvest, than by planting the gift that keeps on giving: garlic. I say “giving,” because in addition to giving you pungent breath and all kinds of incredible medicinal benefits (cancer-fighting, antibacterial, blood pressure reducing), garlic is one of the tastiest and most productive plants you should have growing in your garden.

Garlic is also a relatively easy and forgiving plant to grow. It doesn’t need much watering in Vancouver’s wet environment. If you’re a houseplant killer, garlic might be right for you.

"Northern Quebec" cloves ready for planting.

According to Edible Vancouver, October is the perfect month to plant garlic in the Pacific Northwest, but you can plant anytime in the Fall, up until the first frost. When the cold weather comes, the cloves are ready to work their magic, multiplying from a single clove into 4,5,6 or more cloves over the course of the growing season, depending on the variety. In the spring/early summer hard neck varieties will grow a scape that can be cut-off and stir-fried or, and this is absolute luxury, pulverized with olive oil and served as pesto. Drool.

Two raised garlic beds, covered in leaf mulch.

This is my first year growing garlic and I planted two varieties: Northern Quebec and Leningrad. Northern Quebec has nice large cloves, with pinky purple skin and it grows well in all conditions. It’s described as “hot” and “vigorous” with good flavour. The other variety I planted is Leningrad, an early maturing variety that stores well with especially tight skin keeping the cloves tightly packed and protected. You can harvest this variety in July and enjoy eating it right through to the next spring – beats that Chinese soft neck stuff that gets mushy and starts growing as soon as you take your eyes off it.

Decorative tree stump.

Because garlic likes well-drained soil, and this is my first time planting in this garden space (generously donated by a fellow East Van resident), I wasn’t confident about how the soil drained or retained moisture, so I built up two raised beds and turned them in with compost. Once I planted the garlic (six inches apart in all directions, though eight to nine inches is even better), I threw on some shredded Fall leaves to help with moisture retention and basic weed control (although I’ll be watching these beds like a hawk). For real weed control you need a few inches of leaves…come to think of it, I better add some more next week. If all goes well, I should have 85 garlic plants growing in nice neat rows next summer, more garlic than we’ll need all year!

Garlic: Just set it, and forget it (almost)

If there was ever a plant sold by Ronco infomercials, it would be garlic – you can “set it and forget it.” Actually you should fertilize in the spring with something like compost tea, and water periodically, but you get the picture. Put the garlic to bed and enjoy a second Thanksgiving come July.

P.S. Garlic Boundary Farm has an excellent page on planting, harvesting and curing garlic for storage.