Discussions – Page 4 – Citizens for Sustainability

SEF News-Views Digest No. 72 (10-7-14)

I Believe, Therefore I Must Be Right (Clifton Ware, Editor/Publisher)

The two words in the declaration “I believe” can make a potent impression on listeners or readers. Thanks to our advanced mental skills, each of us constructs a belief system or worldview that provides a functional psycho-emotional foundation for managing life’s many challenges.

Fortunately, regardless of the validity of our belief system, we are able to survive and perhaps even thrive when living conditions are relatively stable. Proof of this assertion rests in the fact that, although humans worldwide espouse a wide range of beliefs, all are managing to get by in life, albeit some more successfully than others.

And here we may ask: Are some belief systems more serviceably effective than others? I think so, because an effective belief system stimulates greater freedom of expression, the result of nurturing such positive qualities as curiosity, inclusiveness, complexity, flexibility, and creativity—the types of qualities that enable us to consider a wide range of topics, including issues deemed too sensitive, or even taboo in some societies.

Personally, I believe that all topics should be open to intellectual study, intelligent discussion, skeptical criticism, and civil debate. Such open-mindedness ensures the freedom to address the most controversial human concerns, including politics, culture, health, the natural environment, and especially religious beliefs. I think you’ll agree that our most remarkable human attribute is the ability to integrate critical reasoning and temper emotionalism in seeking equitable, practical solutions in managing all aspects of living well.

Each of us depends on others to provide useful knowledge and skills, beginning with parents or caregivers in childhood, and gradually expanding to include family members, teachers, religious leaders, politicians, and media pundits. For most of our adult lives, we rely on conventional media sources for the latest news and views, a topic to be addressed shortly.

When interpreting any news or views, most well-balanced, rational-minded persons rely on using a combination of: curiosity—a desire to learn as much as possible; skepticism—an attitude of doubt or disbelief (when warranted); and critical thinking—a reliance on evaluating, analyzing, and judging any idea or action. As fallible beings, most of us fall short of using our full psycho-emotional capacities in practicing principled thought, talk, and walk. Only saints are capable of thinking and acting rationally in most situations, and they are few and far between.

This leads us to consider the powerful reach of the media in influencing our beliefs. When media are used primarily to shape others’ beliefs, the disseminated information may be construed as indoctrination or propaganda, the systematic propagation of a doctrine or cause that reflects the views and interests of certain causes or groups. This is largely what we’re experiencing daily in the conventional media, with individuals, corporations, and organizations shaping our attitudes and behaviors—to consume more, to vote this way or that way, to support this cause or that cause. The sad reality is that most people seldom question what they hear and see in the conventional media. In such cases, it may be said that we’re not using our “thinking caps”. This follow-the-herd-instinct may be summarized with the biblical text found in Handel’s Messiah: “All we, like sheep, have gone astray!”

So where can we find substantive, factual, less-biased information? For an answer, begin by reading an informative article by Chris Hedges: The Myth Of The Free Press. Also, in the Expectations section you’ll find several articles for curious-minded readers, and none are associated with the conventional media. Trust me, they’re worth reading.

ENVIRONMENT (Natural Resources-Wildlife-Climate)

> Yes! Matt Damon, Harrison Ford Lead All-Star Cast In Showtime Climate Change Series. If we’re to preserve the planet we call home, it’s time to go big. This 9-episode series weaves together important elements of the climate change story, from how scientists study it to how effects—such as droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and melting glaciers—are playing out. Perhaps most importantly, it thoughtfully explores how politics and religion divide people and impede action on this critical issue.

> TC Daily Planet: When It Comes To Climate Change, Our Feelings Do Matter. We talk a lot about the science of climate change and the economic impacts of various solutions, but we don’t always talk about how we feel about it. Embedded in the science, the calls to action, and the debating are deeply felt emotions: Anger, sadness and despair, and hope that solutions will create a healthier, more equitable world.

> Washington Post: The World’s Climate Change Watchdog May Be Underestimating Global Warming (Chris Mooney). We do not always hear directly from the IPCC about how bad things could be. For instance, by 2100, sea level rise could be plenty worse than the IPCC suggests — and realizing this might lead policymakers around the world to view global warming very differently.

> Associated Press: Climate Change Is Real, Humans Are Mostly To Blame, Time Is Short, UN Panel Says (In MPR)”Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts,” the report said.

> MinnPost: Poor Irrigation Has Poisoned Much Of World’s Farmland With Salts, Study Finds. Based on the IWEH estimate of 2,000 hectares or 5,000 acres lost per day, and a gazetteer figure of 33.7 square miles for the island of Manhattan, the world is losing that much acreage every four and a half days. It’s estimated that the annual losses attributable to salt-induced land degradation might amount to $27.3 billion worldwide.

> NPR: As Infrastructure Crumbles, Trillions Of Gallons Of Water Lost (In MPR). But not all of that treated, potable water makes it through the system to homes and businesses. In fact, quite a bit of it is lost. Where does it go? Much of it just leaks out of aging pipes and water mains that crack and break.

> Thomson Reuters Foundation: Sao Paulo Running Out Of Water As Rain-Making Amazon Vanishes. South America’s biggest and wealthiest city may run out of water by mid-November if it doesn’t rain soon.  São Paulo, a Brazilian megacity of 20 million people, is suffering its worst drought in at least 80 years, with key reservoirs that supply the city dried up after an unusually dry year.

> Food Tank: Dirt In Danger: How Soil Around The World Is Threatened (Kathlee Freeman). For a multitude of reasons, including modern agricultural practices, the world’s soil is at risk. According to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), “Half of the topsoil on the planet has been lost in the last 150 years.” “Additionally, as a result of erosion over the past 40 years, 30 percent of the world’s arable land has become unproductive.”

ENERGY (Fossil Carbon-Natural Resources-Renewables)

> Post Carbon Institute: The Peak Oil Crisis: A Reality Check (Tom Whipple). This week the Post Carbon Institute (PCI) released a detailed study of the prospects for US shale oil and shale gas production entitled Drilling Deeper – A Reality Check on the US Government Forecasts for a lasting Tight Oil and Shale Gas Boom. This new study takes a hard, detailed look at what has actually happened during the shale boom to date and at the EIA’s projections.

> Resilience: Is There Really An Oil Glut? (Kurt Cobb). Between consumers who can’t afford to pay higher and higher oil prices, and companies that can’t afford to produce the extra oil we’d like at lower prices, we are stuck in an ever-shrinking no man’s land, a price band really–one that will eventually disappear, as the average cost of producing the extra barrel of oil goes beyond what consumers, and businesses, can and will pay.

> Common Dreams: The Revolution That Wasn’t: Why The Fracking Phenomenon Will Leave Us High And Dry. A new, landmark report shows that hopes of a long-term golden era in American oil and gas production are unfounded.

> Common Dreams: Tar Sands Resistance Blowing Huge Hole In Oil Industry’s Bottom Line: Report. The growing tide of tar sands resistance—seen in blockades, tree sits, petitions, education efforts and calls to divest—is having a measurable negative impact on the bottom line of the tar sands industry, according to a new report, prompting researchers to declare that “business as usual for tar d sands is over.”

> ENSIA: This Infographic Shows Why Renewable Energy Is Here To Stay. This infographic depicts the evolution and future growth of renewable energy, from WWI to the present and beyond.

> Common Dreams: Oil Industry Set To Ignore “Final Warning” On Climate Change (Andy Rowell). The bottom line is that because the fossil fuel industry has so much capital already invested or lined up to be spent extracting fossil fuels, it will just carry on doing so, ignoring the desperate calls for action from the climate scientists.

ECONOMY (Finances-Global-Local

> Post Carbon Institute: How To Shrink The Economy Without Crashing It: A Ten-Point Plan (Richard Heinberg). The human economy is currently too big to be sustainable. We know this because Global Footprint Network, which methodically tracks the relevant data, informs us that humanity is now using 1.5 Earths’ worth of resources.

> Yes! Before The Zombie Apocalypse—These 4 Trade Deals Were Ravaging The World! What really keeps us at YES! Magazine up at night are the international trade agreements [free trade] constantly being negotiated by the United States and its partners—each one more terrifying than the last.

> Bloomberg News: Hackers Probing Financial System’s Defenses Show Why Everyone Should Worry. Financial companies are losing ground to hackers, according to a report by management-consulting firm Deloitte. In 2013, 88 percent of all successful intrusions into the computer systems of financial companies were accomplished in seconds, minutes or hours, not days, Deloitte found, while 79 percent of intrusions were discovered by the targeted firms only after days, weeks or months.

> WeTheEconomy: We The Economy (22 Short Films, including “A Bee’s Invoice: The Hidden Value in Nature”). In the current economic climate, the need for citizens to be engaged and informed is greater than ever. Distributed digitally, across multiple platforms and in theaters, WE THE ECONOMY will do both… and best of all: it’s available everywhere, to everyone.

EXPECTATIONS (Knowledge-Psychology-Beliefs)

LastOurs: Last Hours. This 10-minute documentary is a must-see experience for a succinct overview of global-warming’s potential to destroy life on earth.

> Peak Prosperity: About that Shale Oil ‘Miracle’… (Chris Martenson). It’s been said that humans are rationalizing — not ‘rational’ — animals. The deep truth in that statement is that we humans have strongly-held beliefs that color the information we take in and accept. We’re often guilty of recognizing only the data that supports those beliefs while rejecting the rest.

> The Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: Involuntary Simplicity (J.M. Greer). 23,000 man hours is a barrel of oil equivalent (BOE), so if you are employing energy at those rates you can produce debt at those rates, because pretty soon there will be work done to pay off the debt and interest (the energy from fossil carbon doing the work). What has changed with the advent of peak oil is that the future is one of debts not being able to be re-payed, because there isn’t the energy to do the work to pay the debts.

> Solutions: Introduction: Why Resilience? (Joseph Fiksel). While there are many definitions of resilience, it can generally be defined as the capacity for a system to survive, adapt, and flourish in the face of turbulent change and uncertainty.¹ In short, this means the ability to overcome adversity and bounce back.

> The Daly News: Are We Hard-Wired To Think We Can Grow Forever? (James Magnus-Johnston) Is there an evolutionary mechanism stopping us from living within our planetary constraints? In Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind, co-authors Varki and Brower argue that human intelligence is unique in the animal kingdom, but our capacity for denial may be the greatest differentiating factor.

> AlterNet: The Coming Revolution: Evolutionary Leap Or Descent Into Chaos (David DeGraw) A new paradigm is organically evolving: new economic systems, sustainable communities, solar energy, organic farming, liquid democracy, worker co-ops and new media. For all the problems we are confronted by, there are existing viable solutions. This is Part 3 in a series of adapted excerpts from DeGraw’s new book, The Economics of Revolution. You can read Part 1 here and Part 2 here.

> Resilience: Sufficient Liberal Stories–The Krugman Function Part 4 (Erik Lindberg). The primary narrative of Krugman, Reich, and the whole Liberal enterprise today is a narrative of perpetual repeatability with regard to past accomplishments (FDR’s New Deal, etc.) The introduction just of oil supply and carbon emissions into the liberal field of view pretty much undoes the main story told by mainstream Democrats today.

EQUITY (Equality-Health-Social Concerns)

> AlterNet: Americans Are Huge: 5 Surprising Reasons Why. Between the 1960s and the 2000s, Americans grew, on the average, an inch taller and 24 pounds heavier. The average American man today weights 194 pounds and the average woman 165 pounds. Almost a third of American children and teens are overweight.

> Common Dreams: Infuriating Facts About Our Disappearing Middle-Class Wealth (Paul Bucheit). People in the U.S. and around the world are being rapidly divided into two classes, the well-to-do and the lower-income majority. This severing of society will change only when progressive thinkers (and doers) agree on a single, manageable solution that will stop the easy flow of wealth to the privileged few.

> Resilience-Transition Voice: American Kids In The Age Of Oil: ‘Economically Worthless But Emotionally Priceless’ (Erik Curren). Only in an industrial economy where energy is cheap and corporations provide most of a household’s needs can families afford to turn two generations, the youngest and the oldest, into economically unnecessary people — Two generations of mouths-to-feed who don’t carry their own weight.

> Grassroots Economic Organizing: Ways To Create A Democratized Economy (Gar Alperovitz). This article is excerpted from What Then Can I Do? 10 Ways to Democratize the Economy, which originally appeared on Gar Alperovitz’s website. The full article is also available in PDF format here.

> Green Money: REIT, Drink, And Be Merry: Farmland LP’s Fund Gives Investors, Enviros, And Foodies Something To Cheer About (Rob Dietz & Eric Roach). Farmland LP (www.farmlandlp.com) is an investment fund that buys conventional farmland, converts it to organic using a pasture and crop rotation, and then manages the farmland for an optimal mix of environmental health, food production, and financial returns.

> ENSIA: Cities Are The Greatest Hope For Our Planet (Denis Hayes). Cities matter because they represent our greatest hope for long-term survival, not only for humans but for all species. They offer the best chance to dramatically reduce carbon pollution, provide shelter and community for the world’s growing human population, and protect rural habitat for species in decline.

> Shareable: Sharehub: At The Heart Of Seoul’s Sharing Movement. In 2012, Seoul publicly announced its commitment to becoming a sharing city. It has since emerged as a leader of the global sharing movement and serves as a model for cities around the world.

> TC Daily Planet: No Big Bucks Needed For Complete Streets. Here are some lessons from NYC in creating interesting, safe, attractive, and inexpensive upgraded streets for pedestrian use.

EDUCATION (Local Events- Information)

> SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION FORUM (New Format): HUMANS AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. Sat., Nov. 15^th, 3-5 p.m., St. Anthony Village Library, 2941 Pentagon Drive in St. Anthony Shopping Center. Presentations and discussions include a book, For Love of Lakes by Dave Demsey, presented by Idelle Peterson; “The Ebola Crisis”, material presented by Peter Doughty; plus discussion of articles by various writers, and presented by participants. Seating limited to 20 persons. RSVP (warex001@umn.edu)

> THIRD ANNUAL EVENT: SUSTAINABILITY FAIR, Thurs., Nov. 20^th, 5:30-8:00 p.m., Silverwood Park Visitors Center, St. Anthony Village (Map). Co-sponsored by the cities of St. Anthony Village, Lauderdale, and Falcon Heights, in collaboration with Three Rivers Park District and U of MN sustainability faculty and students. Poster exhibits presented by 43 students and other exhibits presented by local sustainability groups, including CFS. Free and open to the public.

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> UM Institute on the Environment: Frontiers in the Environment: Big Questions, Wednesdays, 12:00-1:00 p.m., IonE Seminar Room R380, Learning & Environmental Sciences Bldg., St. Paul. Free. Watch online

Nov.12 — How Can We Help Children Connect to the Natural World?
Nov.19 — Environmentalists and Corporations Make Strange Bedfellows . . . Or Do They?

> Future First: 2014 Women’s Congress for Future Generations, Nov. 7-9, Earle Brown Heritage Center, Mpls., MN. Register>

> Pilgrim House Unitarian Fellowship: Minnesota Clean Energy Solutions (J. Drake Hamilton, Science Policy Director, Fresh Energy). Sun., Nov. 9, 10:15-11:30 a.m., 1212 W. Highway 96, Arden Hills, MN

> Sierra Club-North Star: Minnesota Beyond Coal To Clean Energy, Sat., Nov.15, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Sabathani Community Center, 310 East 38th Street Mpls., MN. RSVP: http://sc.org/MNBeyondCoalRetreat Questions: (jessica.tritsch@sierraclub.org)

> MN350-MCAD: Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (feature-length documentary of a filmmaker’s undercover investigation of the cattle industry). Sun., Nov. 23, 6:30 p.m., MN Institute of Arts Auditorium. 2501 Stevens Ave, Mpls. Free (donation requested).

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SEF News-Views Digest No. 71 (10-31-14)

What’s Really Scary — Clifton Ware, Editor-Publisher

Boooooo! Halloween 2014 is nigh, along with the typical appearances of ghosts, witches, vampires, zombies, and all kinds of nefarious characters—plus benign non-scary impersonations of angels, animals, super heroes and celebrities. For some deep-seated emotional need, we welcome the adrenaline highs associated with being scared out of our wits when experiencing immediate life-threatening danger.

I suspect that most readers of this e-newsletter lead relatively safe and sane lives, with little fear of encountering severe danger. On the other hand, many world citizens live in harm’s way on a regularly basis, including human-inflicted violence.

But there are some long-term potential dangers that we tend to ignore, deny, or bury in our subconscious minds. After all, there are personal obligations to fulfill—earning a living, caring for family members, planning for a financially secure future, and contributing to society in various ways.

If we are sincerely concerned about the kind of future our descendants will inherit, then our attention and efforts should be focused on the really scary dangers, including: the Ebola crisis; the increasing impacts wrought by climate change; the rising terrorism and social discontent; the decline of essential natural resources; the growing gap between the rich, the middle classes, and the poor; the waning of democracy; and the inevitable future dangers caused by a bulging worldwide population. Obviously, in order to lessen or blunt the impact of potential calamities, we need to take positive, constructive, action.

So what can we do? Here are five suggestions:

1) Support organizations and programs that address a wide range of life affirming causes, with your finances and/or through volunteer service.

2) Cultivate a “big-picture” awareness and knowledge of sustainability issues, by attending informative events, seeking information in all reputable media (books, articles, etc.), and participating in study/discussion groups (like the Sustainability Education Forum).

3) Respond to notices from prominent organizations that identify harmful practices by corporations and organizations, and a request to send personal or form letters to designated politicians, corporations, or groups.

4) Adopt a green, healthy lifestyle based on consuming less stuff, and more attuned to nature.

5) Join with others in local citizen groups (like Citizens For Sustainability) to affect positive changes on a community level.

In St. Anthony Village we are fortunate to have a core of citizens dedicated to creating greater resilience, sustainability, and livability for our community. But we can certainly use more citizens to join with us in developing and implementing specific progressive initiatives.

In closing, may we learn to focus on real dangers, not imagined fears. With courageous determination and perseverance, we can take positive steps in confronting whatever lies ahead. Bring on the super heroes and heroines!

(Note: For a complementary view of fear, see The Nature Of Fear, a NY Times article by Akeiki Busch in the Oct. 27 Star Tribune.)

ENVIRONMENT (Natural Resources-Wildlife-Climate)

> Institute for Policy Studies: COMBAT VS. CLIMATE: The Military And Climate Security Budgets. A report argues that a change from 1% to 4% of security spending is not commensurate with the role U.S. military strategy now assigns to climate change: as a major threat to U.S. security. Nor is it remotely sufficient to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control. Download the full report.

> ENSIA: Can We Have Our Cities And Biodiversity, Too? Smart development could mean big benefits for biodiversity and urban areas alike. View a 3-minute video.

> Star Tribune: New Combination Herbicide For Crops Gains Federal Approval. Environmental groups condemned the decision, and said that EPA ignored serious health risks, especially to children, that are associated with 2,4-D. Critics said the chemical has been linked to reproductive problems, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and Parkinson’s disease.

> Huffington Post: ‘Anthropocene’ Term Gains Traction As Human Impacts On Planet (Seth Borenstein). People are changing Earth so much, warming and polluting it, that many scientists are turning to a new way to describe the time we live in. They’re calling it the Anthropocene — the age of humans.

> Take Part: 34 Surprising Facts You Need To Know About California’s Drought. Infographic: Why the Golden State’s long dry spell—and its changing climate—will have implications far beyond the West Coast.

ENERGY (Fossil Carbon-Renewables)

> Post Carbon Institute: Drilling Deeper. This report presents a reality check on U.S. government forecasts for a lasting tight oil and shale gas boom.

> Post Carbon Institute: The Revolution That Wasn’t: Why The Fracking Phenomenon Will Leave Us High And Dry. A new, landmark report shows that hopes of a long-term golden era in American oil & gas production are unfounded.

> Common Dreams: Big Oil Spending Millions To Kill Local Anti-Fracking Measure. Fossil fuel energy companies have spent over $7.6 million to defeat a measure that would ban fracking in California’s Santa Barbara County.

> Resilience: Resilient And Sustainable Infrastructure For Urban Energy Systems. Extreme weather from climate change and growing urbanization are making cities more vulnerable to loss of electric power and damage to energy infrastructure. Policy makers and users of critical infrastructure services are searching for solutions that increase the resiliency of energy systems but are closely tied to other goals, such as sustainability and affordability.

> MinnPost: America’s Energy Future Is Starting To Look Like Our Energy Past. Three interesting takes on America’s complicated energy puzzle showed up in national papers in the last couple of days, revealing renewed interest in exploring geothermal and nuclear power.

> MinnPost: How Minnesota’s Highways Are Poised To Become Renewable Energy Generators. A pilot project proposes up to five 1-megawatt solar panel arrays for public right-of-ways around the state. If the project proceeds as planned, it would exceed the total capacity of a solar installation at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport expected to go online next fall and touted this month as the largest in the state.

> Our Finite World: Eight Pieces Of Our Oil Price Predicament (Gail Tverberg). One big problem is that our networked economy is quite inflexible. Even a small amount of shrinkage looks like a major recession. If there is significant shrinkage, there is danger of collapse. We haven’t set up a new type of economy that uses less oil.

ECONOMY (Finances-Global-Local)

> Peak Prosperity: Energy Economics – Crash Course (Chapter 19). In order for the economy to grow, it must receive an ever-increasing input supply of affordable energy and resources from the natural world. What I’m about to show you is a preponderance of data that indicates those inputs will just not be there in the volumes needed to supply the growth that the world economy is counting on.

> The Daly News: Paul Krugman On Limits To Growth: Beware The Bathwater (Brian Czech). Adam Smith was among the great, classical economists who readily recognized limits to growth, all the way until at least John Stuart Mill. After that and throughout the 20^th century, things got murky for economists as they turned increasingly to microeconomics, losing the forest for the trees.

> Peak Prosperity: How The Federal Reserve Is Purposely Attacking Savers (Chris Martenson). A moral obligation is something that almost never enters into the decision matrix of our society’s richest, or the banking industry. For them, the number one rule is that whatever is expedient and makes the most money is the right thing to do. For the bottom 99%, it’s like playing with a stricter set of rules.

> Boillier.Org: A Paradox To Savor: A High-Quality, Free Economics Textbook (David Boillier). Unlike conventional economics textbooks, which set forth axiomatic principles that supposedly govern an entire field of economic life, the [free] Core-Econ textbook is a big fan of empirical realities, behavioral evidence and economic history. Watch this video or go to the Core-Econ webpage.

> Spiegel Online International: The Zombie System: How Capitalism Has Gone Off The Rails. Today’s issue is “secular stagnation,” as former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers puts it. The American economy isn’t growing even half as quickly as did in the 1990s. Japan has become the sick man of Asia. And Europe is sinking into a recession that has begun to slow down the German export machine and threaten prosperity.

> Post Growth: The Not-For-Profit World Beyond Capitalism. Research increasingly shows that, under the right conditions, human nature has a tendency towards co-operation (pdf). We’re witnessing the rise of a workforce increasingly motivated by purpose, and we’re realizing the potential of an existing business structure called not-for-profit (NFP) enterprise, that encourages the best aspects of human nature.

EXPECTATIONS (Knowledge-Psychology-Beliefs)

> Huffington Post: Getting A Grip On Ebola (Robert Reich). The real crisis is the hysteria over Ebola that’s being fed by media outlets seeking sensationalism and politicians posturing for the midterm elections.

> Resilience: Living And Breathing In A ‘Black Swan’ World (David Orr). Sustainability implies a stable state that can be achieved once and for all. Resilience, on the other hand, is the capacity to make ongoing adjustments to changing political, economic, and ecological conditions. Its hallmarks are redundancy, adaptation, and flexibility, as well as the foresight and good judgment to avoid the brawl in the first place.

> Resilience: The Infinite Toddler Regress–The Krugman Function Part 3 (Erik Lindberg). Except for the fact that the future of life on Earth may hang in the balance, we should have sympathy for Krugman’s position. It is not easy to be a Liberal Functionary in this day and age—when ecosystems are crashing all around us, the polar ice caps are melting, and world conventional oil has peaked.

> The Archdruid Report: A Pink Slip For The Progress Fairy (J.M. Greer) I’m aware that true believers in progress insist that this [envisioned collapse] can’t happen to us, but a growing number of people have noticed that the Progress Fairy got her pink slip some time ago, and ordinary history has taken her place as the arbiter of human affairs. That being the case, getting used to what ordinary history brings may be a highly useful habit to cultivate just now.

> Star Tribune: It’s My Belief And I’m Sticking To It (Timothy Taylor). Several studies confirm that result of receiving balanced pro-and-con information was not greater intellectual humility, but rather a greater polarization of beliefs. Student subjects on both sides — who had received the same packet of balanced information! — all tended to believe that the information confirmed their previous position.

> The Atlantic: There’s More To Life Than Being Happy. In a new study, which will be published this year in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Positive Psychology, the authors write: “Happiness without meaning characterizes a relatively shallow, self-absorbed or even selfish life, in which things go well, needs and desire are easily satisfied, and difficult or taxing entanglements are avoided.”

> Pew Research: From ISIS To Unemployment: What Do Americans Know? Older adults generally demonstrate higher levels of news knowledge than younger Americans, and there are age divides across several of the questions asked on the survey. Differences also show up according to educational background and partisan affiliations.

> Resilience: Could Do Better: Why We Must Set Young Minds Free (Vanessa Spedding). It is time all young people knew this: the work of our time is the work of reconnection, regeneration, restoration and reconciliation. Their talents and open minds, their unselfconscious creativity and determination are all desperately required.

EQUITY (Equality-Social Concerns)

> Common Dreams: Economics As If Future Generations Mattered. Growing numbers of people are waking up to the reemerging Commons ethic, which holds that human systems must be aligned to match ecological ones. People believe that future generations have the inalienable right to a healthy planet, and many are now seeking ways to withdraw their consent to the politics and policies that lead to a toxic future.

> City of the Future: On Public Health And Energy (Lakis Polycarpou). If the question is how to maintain public health in a world of declining energy resources, it’s worth looking at countries with relatively low per capita energy consumption and long life expectancy. Amazingly, in 2011, Costa Rica and Cuba had life expectancies of 79 years — the equivalent of the United States–while consuming only 14 percent of the per capita energy.

> CNN: Americans Taking Fewest Vacation Days In Four Decades.” Americans are work martyrs,” says the U.S. Travel Association. They leave more and more paid time off unused each year, forfeiting earned benefits and, in essence, working for free.” According to the study, in 2013 U.S. employees took an average of 16 days of vacation, compared with an average of 20.3 days in 2000.

> Streetsblog: By A Wide Margin, Americans Favor Transit Expansion Over New Roads. A new poll [PDF] from ABC News and the Washington Post shows that attitudes varied by political leaning, place of residence, and other demographic factors.

> Common Dreams: Bill Moyers: Pro-Democracy Movement Must Challenge Corporate Control. Ahead of final sign-off, veteran journalist tells viewers that reaching out to their fellow citizens and neighbors is the essential task in creating the transformation so desperately needed. “Neither [political party] will change voluntarily because the people in charge have too great a stake in the status quo.”

> Common Dreams: ‘A Generation Cast Aside’: Child Poverty On Rise In World’s Richest Countries. Children remain “the most enduring victims” of the recession in the world’s wealthiest nations, where 2.6 million children have fallen below the poverty line since 2008, a new report from UNICEF reveals. In 2012, 24.2 million children were living in poverty in the U.S.

ENGAGEMENT (Goals-Activism-Solutions)

> ENSIA: Sustainia Wants Us To Start Acting Today, Not Tomorrow. The nonprofit highlights innovative and readily available sustainability solutions happening right now around the world.

> FarmProgress: Prairie Conservation Strips Help Stop Nutrient Runoff From Farms. The upshot is, without affecting yield on the remaining 90% of a field, prairie strips improve the condition of waterways, cut back soil and nutrient loss, and revitalize Iowa’s natural heritage by providing habitat for native species–including natural predators of crop pests.

> Wall Street Journal Online: Warren Buffett Puts Wind In Berkshire’s Sails. Since 2004, Berkshire has invested $5.8 billion into wind projects in Iowa. The Iowa utility, still called MidAmerican under the Berkshire Hathaway Energy banner, has built more than 3,300 megawatts, or 64% of Iowa’s wind-generation capacity, compared with about 100 megawatts it had built there by 2000.

> Growing Cities: A Film About Urban Farming in America. In their search for answers, filmmakers Dan Susman and Andrew Monbouquette take a road trip and meet the men and women who are challenging the way this country grows and distributes its food, one vacant city lot, rooftop garden, and backyard chicken coop at a time. Watch the trailer>

> NPR: Millennials: We Help The Earth But Don’t Call Us Environmentalists. This is the difference when it comes to millennials, 18-33 year-olds. Young Americans may be turning away from the word “environmentalist.” Previous polls have found people under 30 were more likely than older Americans to favor developing alternative energy sources, and also more likely to believe that humans are responsible for climate change.

> Open Democracy: Oxford Real Farming Conference: Power, Lies, And The Need For Agrarian Resistance (Colin Tudge). The world’s global strategy of food and farming is founded on three great untruths – lies, in effect. Overall, the world needs a Renaissance – to build a different and better world in situ. Agrarian Renaissance is key because agriculture sits right at the heart of all human affairs and if we get it right, then everything else becomes possible.

> Resilience: The Archaic Arts And Skills (Brian Miller). We on a small farm are learning the archaic arts—harvesting manure to build soil fertility, constructing secure fences that do indeed make good neighbors, planting vegetables that, when they mature, will feed us for a month, creating a plate of shortbread cookies that nourishes the soul—and all connect us with long past practitioners of these arts in ways that Facebook and Walmart never can and never will.

EDUCATION (Local Events- Information)

> SUSTAINABILITY EDUCATION FORUM (New Format): HUMANS AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. Sat., Nov. 15^th, 3-5 p.m., St. Anthony Village Library, 2941 Pentagon Drive in St. Anthony Shopping Center. Presentations and discussions include a book, For Love of Lakes by Dave Demsey, presented by Isabelle Peterson; “The Ebola Crisis”, material presented by Peter Daughty; plus discussion of articles by various writers, and presented by participants. Limited seating—20 people. RSVP (warex001@umn.edu)

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> UM Institute on the Environment: Frontiers in the Environment: Big Questions, Wednesdays, 12:00-1:00 p.m., IonE Seminar Room R380, Learning & Environmental Sciences Bldg., St. Paul. Free. Watch online

Nov. 5 — How Can We Make the Most of Agriculture’s 21st Century Transformation?
Nov.12 — How Can We Help Children Connect to the Natural World?
Nov.19 — Environmentalists and Corporations Make Strange Bedfellows . . . Or Do They?

> CERTs: Midwest Gateway To Solar Conference. Tues., Nov. 4, 8 a.m to Wed., Nov. 5, 5 p.m., Hilton-Airport/Mall of America. Learn more and Register >>

> MN Environmental Fund: Shop For A Cause, Tues., Nov. 4, 5-8 p.m., Ten Thousand Villages Gift Store, 867 Grand Ave., St. Paul. Click here to learn about Ten Thousand Villages

> Future First: 2014 Women’s Congress for Future Generations, Nov. 7-9, Earle Brown Heritage Center, Minneapolis. Register>

> UM Cont. Ed: Building Minnesota’s Capacity For Climate Adaptation: Second Conference On Climate Adaptation, Nov. 6, 7:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., Hyatt Regency Hotel (1300 Nicollet Mall, Mpls.) Information:) Online Registration>>

> Sierra Club-North Star: Minnesota Beyond Coal To Clean Energy, Sat., Nov.15, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Minneapolis (location TBD).RSVP: http://sc.org/MNBeyondCoalRetreat Questions: (jessica.tritsch@sierraclub.org)

Sustainability News-Views Digest No. 70 (10-24-14)

Transitioning (Clifton Ware, Editor/Publisher)

In company with many organizers of sustainability-oriented groups, I’ve learned that promoting sustainability and recruiting active participants is quite a challenge, especially for an old fellow. The reality is that most people are up to their hairlines in negotiating a variety of personal and professional activities, including earning a living and caring for loved ones.

Next March I’ll be 78 years of age, so this seems to be an opportune stage in life to turn the CFS leadership reins over to others. To make it official, I recently submitted my retirement announcement (via email attachment) to core CFS members.

Nearly two years after the founding of CFS (Jan.’12), I’m confident that a substantial foundation is in place. A group of dedicated members have accomplished some significant initiatives, with others underway. There’s no question that, with ongoing interest and commitment, CFS will continue creating greater resilience and sustainability within St. Anthony Village and surrounding communities.

Of course, Bettye and I intend to continue participating in some type of supportive roles. For instance, I’ll probably continue producing this newsletter, though changes will be made, including the temporary title (Sustainability News-Views Digest).

The newly formed sustainability education forum (formerly sustainability book club) is expected to continue on a reduced level, with perhaps six forums annually. The new forum format is meant to encourage more individual participation, as organizers, presenters, and coordinators.

At the Nov. 15^th Sustainability Education Forum, which will be held at the St. Anthony Library (3-5 p.m.), participants will discuss if they wish to continue holding sustainability education forums, and if so, according to what collectively determined terms and conditions. Please note that this forum is open to anyone interested in studying, presenting, and discussing all topics and issues associated with sustainability. However, since seating is limited to 20 persons, RSVPs will be greatly appreciated (warex001@umn.edu). Also, any feedback you wish to offer is warmly welcomed.

In closing, I extend my sincerest thanks to all who have participated in CFS activities and events, especially those who have taken on leadership roles. I also wish to thank readers of this newsletter for allowing this publication to grace your email inbox I hope my commentaries, and the news and views expressed in numerous articles, have expanded your awareness of primary sustainability issues, and possibly encouraged you to take constructive action.

And now, here’s some of the week’s top sustainability articles, plus upcoming events.

ECONOMY

> Peak Prosperity: Fuzzy Numbers – Crash Course Chapter 18. What if it turned out that our individual, corporate and government decision-making was based on misleading, if not provably false, data? As we detail in this latest chapter of the Crash Course series, that’s exactly the case today with the key indicators (inflation, GDP, employment, deficits, etc.) our central planners are using to guide the future of the global economy.

> Telesur: The Next Financial Crisis May Be Just Around The Corner “The market pathologies we all grew to know during the crisis of 2008 are returning,” writes the Financial Times.

> The Daly News: The New Economy Versus Today’s Flat Earthers (Eric Zencey). Beyond all reason and evidence, standard economics remains dedicated to the idea of perpetual increase in our species’ stock of wealth, income, and material wellbeing. We need a new, steady state economy suited to the planet we have, not the one that economists thought we had two hundred years ago.

> Star Tribune: Commentary: Will Steger: In Minnesota, Jobs Are The Newest Sign Of Climate Change Today we can celebrate more than 15,300 Minnesotans working in a clean-energy economy that is creating an increasing number of high-paying jobs, decreasing dependence on fossil fuels, and improving air and water quality in the state.

> Daily KOS: Wealth Inequality Hurting Corporate Profits. Corporations that get their revenue from the shrinking middle class are starting to worry about their customer base. 68% of the top 100 retail companies in the U.S. (including Walmart, Apple, McDonald’s and J.C. Penney) say that stagnant wages pose a major threat to their bottom lines, according to a Center For American Progress report.

> MinnPost: Anchor Initiatives: Local Food Means Business For Local Neighborhoods. “Anchor” describes institutions that are rooted in a particular locale, and want to make sure their communities remains stable and safe. “Colleges and hospitals are embedded in their community and have a real stake in seeing that it thrives.”

ENERGY

> Resilience: Peak Oil Review – Oct 20. Four oil-related topics are discussed.

> Common Dreams: World War III: It’s Here And Energy Is Largely Behind It (Kurt Cobb). It can be no accident that the raging fights in Syria, Iraq, Libya, and the Ukraine that all coincide with areas rich in energy resources or for which imported energy resources are at risk. There are other conflicts. But these are the ones that are transfixing the eyes of the world, and these are the ones in which major powers are taking sides and mounting major responses.

> Resilience-Resource Insights: Oil Decline: Price Makes The Story (Kurt Cobb). When it comes to short-term price movements, the whole issue of oil prices is too complex and too lacking in transparency to be discussed intelligently. In what looks like declining demand, it’s likely the Saudis are encouraging falling oil prices to maintain their worldwide market share, by cutting prices.

> New Economics: Energy Round-Up: Sinking Oil. High oil prices threaten our economy; low prices threaten the oil industry. How much longer will we rely on this volatile industry that is not only destroying our environment but also destroying itself? The argument for kicking oil before it kicks us is stronger than ever.

> Weathering the Storm: Oil’s Unsustainable Surge (M. Conley). The perfect storm clock is ticking. An intertwined array of recent energy and economic events has accelerated the countdown. See also: “Energy 101: There is a Better Way“.

> Duluth News Tribune: Save Or Shiver: Ways To Conserve Energy As Winter Looms. Here are some practical energy-saving steps to take in your home this winter, and for all seasons.

ENVIRONMENT

> Peak Prosperity: Ebola! (C. Martenson), Let’s spend some time understanding the nature of Ebola, specifically, and viral contagion, more generally. At the very least, Ebola can serve as an instructive reminder about how our society’s responses to a viral outbreak could prove to be at least as disruptive and damaging as the virus itself.

> MPR-Associated Press: Ebola Escalation Could Trigger Major Food Crisis. U.N agencies and non-governmental organizations are scrambling to scale up efforts to avert widespread hunger.

> Huffington Post: Another Month, Another Global Heat Record Broken. Earth is on pace to tie or even break the mark for the hottest year on record, federal meteorologists say. That’s because global heat records have kept falling in 2014, with the hottest September in 135 years of record keeping.

> Common Dreams: 2014 Set To Be Hottest Year In Recorded Human History: NOAA. The “combined average temperature” of land and ocean surfaces for September was the highest in recorded history, the report states. Furthermore, October 2013 to September 2014 was the warmest 12-month period ever recorded.

> Inside Climate News: Will Climate Change Denial Become A Political Liability? U.S. climate change envoy Todd Stern speaks at Yale University on October 14 about U.S. climate policy and global climate treaty talks. “I doubt, even a year from now, whether major political candidates will consider it viable to deny the existence of climate change,” he told the audience.

> Grist: Why Minneapolis’ Beautiful Bike Freeways Are Totally The Best. Minneapolis is unusual, as cities go, because it has a funny-shaped park system called the Grand Rounds Scenic Byway that encircles most of the city like a ring road, a nice freeway system for bikes.

> Common Dreams Small Scale Food Producers Are The Solution To The Global Food Crisis. Governments around the world have sidelined small-scale food producers for decades, pushing millions of them into hunger. Yet, even today, most of the world’s food is still grown by them, using traditional seed varieties and without the use of industrial inputs.

> ENSIA: When It Comes To Food Packaging, What We Don’t Know Could . [Hurt Us]. Recent analyses raise disturbing questions about the health and environmental effects of the stuff that encases our edibles.

> ENSIA: The Vaults In This Bank Hold Something More Precious Than Money. Kew’s Millennium Seed Bank Partnership is working to provide a safety net for global plant diversity by collecting and storing seed samples from plants all across the globe. View this 5-minute video.

> Organic Consumers Association: Ten Reasons Why You Should Care What You Wear. The choices you make regarding your clothing are not only expressions of style or identity, but are vital to personal health as well as environmental and ethical responsibility. Every consumer dollar spent on clothing has an impact—from economic to environmental, ethical to health. ‪

> Mercola.Com: Herbicide & Insecticide Use On GMO Crops Is Skyrocketing. Over 99% of GMO acreage is engineered by chemical companies to tolerate heavy herbicide (glyphosate) use and/or produce insecticide (Bt) in every cell of every plant over the entire growing season. The result is massive selection pressure that has rapidly created pest resistance.

EQUITY-EQUALITY

> NY Times: Where Are The Hardest Places To Live In The U.S.? A Times magazine study looked at six data points for each county in the United States: education (percentage of residents with at least a bachelor’s degree), median household income, unemployment rate, disability rate, life expectancy and obesity. Then each county’s relative rank in these categories was averaged to create an overall ranking. Conclusion: Several southern states were ranked the lowest.

> Common Dreams: The Top 1% Own… Half. The 2014 Global Wealth Report (pdf) provides figures that give more evidence that inequality is extreme and growing, and that economic recovery following the financial crisis has been skewed in favor of the wealthiest.

> Grassroots Economics Organizing: Another World Emerging? Well, Maybe. Some thinkers and observers are envisioning a new kind of economics that fosters cooperation, abundance, and solidarity on a broad scale. That fosters a lot of caring rather than a lot of gouging or co-opting, and requires four core elements related to the infrastructure of regional cooperative/solidarity movements.

> Resilience: Challenging Corporate Power In A Not-For-Profit World. A not-for-profit (NFP) model presents an alternative macroeconomic framework with the potential to revolutionize how we produce goods and services, and thereby pave the way for an ‘economics of enough’ approach.

> MinnPost: Blog: Become A Midlife Revolutionary: Walk To Work. Minneapolis is among the 10 safest cities for pedestrians in the country. Although walking to work is most common among young adults with relatively low incomes, it creeps up again among people 55 and older.

> Kateraworth: Want To Get Into The Doughnut? Tackle Inequality (Kate Raworth). Humanity’s central challenge in the 21st century is to meet the human rights of all people within the capacity of Earth’s life-support systems.

> Resilience-Truthdig: The Imperative Of Revolt (Chris Hedges). “Democracy has been turned upside down,” Sheldon S. Wolin said. “It is supposed to be a government for the people, by the people. But it has become an organized form of government dominated by groups that are only vaguely, if at all, responsible or responsive to popular needs and popular demands.”

EXPECTATIONS, ENLIGHTENMENT, EDUCATION

> Resilience: The Krugman Function, Part 2: Whole-System Thinking (Erik Lindberg). Whole-system thinking reminds us that our economy cannot be intelligently assessed without an understanding of resources and energy.

> Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The Hour Of The Knife (J.M. Greer). The disintegration of social hierarchies, the senility of ruling elites, and the fossilization of institutions all lead to the hour of the knife.

> Resilience: Shades Of Green: A Movement In Search Of A Narrative (Part 3; Kari McGregor). There really is no wrong shade of Green, provided one’s environmentalism is approached with integrity and a willingness to observe the system as a whole. Assimilating shared values and working toward shared goals with complementary means is integral to the success of the movement, but it does not have to come at the cost of diversity.

> Contributoria: Bringing The Jungle To The City (Brett Scott). Here’s a techno-shamanic quest to reconnect urban life to ecological reality.

> Media Matters: The More You Watch, The Less You Know. Viewers who watch cable news closely are the ones who are the most misinformed about Ebola. The overheated rhetoric of the news media is to blame: http://mm4a.org/1ra06PQ

> MPR: A Classroom Runs Through It: Vermillion Teaches Students, Stewardship. A teacher and his students study and work to save Lake Vermillion.

> Resilience: Limits To Growth: Where We Are And What To Do About It (Nate Hagens). In this video talk (for the New Economy Week 2014 in Vancouver, BC) Nate Hagens synthesizes the current landscape of global energy, environment and financial risks while offering suggestions on what to do as a hominid living on a full planet.

> Peak Prosperity: Richard Gould: Learning From Ancient Human Cultures. Hunter-gatherer societies, while often rarely exceeding subsistence-level living standards, were quite successful at meeting their needs. This stands in stark contrast to modern society, where our base needs may be easily met, but we have an endless string of unfulfilled wants and manufactured “needs”.

ENGAGE (Local Events and Information)

> SUSTAINABILIY EDUCATION FORUM (New Format): HUMANS AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. Sat., Nov. 15^th, 3-5 p.m., St. Anthony Village Library in St. Anthony Shopping Center. Presentations and discussions include “The Ebola Crisis”, material presented by Peter Daughty; plus discussion of articles by various writers, and presented by participants. Limited seating—20 people. RSVP (warex001@umn.edu)

> U of MN Institute On the Environment-Frontier Lecture Series: The Role Of The Environment In This Year’s Minnesota Elections, Wed., Oct. 29, Noon-1 p.m., R-380 Learning and Environmental Sciences, St. Paul; Online via UMConnect. Speakers: David Gillette, special correspondent, Twin Cities Public Television; Amy Koch, small business owner and former Minnesota Senate majority leader; and Mark Andrew, president, Greenmark. Learn more >

> CERTs: Midwest Gateway To Solar Conference. Tues., Nov. 4, 8 a.m to Wed., Nov. 5, 5 p.m., Hilton-Airport/Mall of America. Learn more and Register >>

> Sierra Club-North Star: Minnesota Beyond Coal To Clean Energy, Sat., Nov.15, 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., Minneapolis (location TBD).RSVP: http://sc.org/MNBeyondCoalRetreat Questions: (jessica.tritsch@sierraclub.org)

> MN Dept. of Health (planning tools; data): Minnesota Climate Change Vulnerability Assessment ; Public Health Data & Resources for Planning ; MDH Strategic Plan

CFS News-Views Digest No. No. 69 (10-17-14)

The Primary Shades of Green (Clifton Ware, Editor/Publisher)

When was the first time you heard of the color “green”, in relation to green practices or green movement? Like a lot of trendy terminology, it seemed to have crept into the environmental lexicon, but so far I’ve had no luck in discovering its origin. If you know where such information can be found, please advise. Otherwise, I can only assume “green” evolved as a metaphor, probably as a reference to living green plants. It seems that both the colors blue (sky, water) and green (plants) are used to represent environmental concerns [which explains why both colors are used in the CFS logo and newsletter lettering.]

As a consolation for not providing the origin of “green”, here’s a capsule history of the green movement in the U.S. (please continue reading at the end of this newsletter)

ECONOMY

> Peak Prosperity: Understanding Asset Bubbles – Crash Course Chapter 17. Through the long sweep of history, the bursting of asset bubbles has nearly always been traumatic. Social, political and economic upheavals have a bad habit of following asset bubbles, while wealth destruction is a guaranteed feature.

> New Economics: The Next Financial Crisis – Not If But When. The latest World Economic Outlook from the International Monetary Funds (IMF) paints a gloomy picture of slowing growth across the world. Even mainstream economists like former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers are talking seriously about “Secular stagnation” – the idea that developed economies are now in a permanent slump.

> Market Watch: Ready Or Not: Three Unsustainable Trends Are About To Collide (Chris Martenson). A perfect storm of demographics, debt, and energy are converging. And it helps to bear I mind that most of the negative news and major world events we see around us are symptoms of the disease, not the disease itself.

> Business Insider: China Overtakes Us As World’s Largest Economy. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) measures both GDP in market-exchange terms and in terms of purchasing power, in which China is overtaking the US right about now and becoming the world’s biggest economy. By the end of 2014, China will make up 16.48% of the world’s purchasing-power adjusted GDP (or $17.632 trillion), and the US will make up just 16.28% (or $17.416 trillion).

> Peak Oil: Schools Of Thought On Degrowth (Brian Davy). Different groups with different words in different languages and they do not always translate exactly into an identical idea.

ENERGY

> Resilience-ASPO-USA: Peak Oil Review – Oct 13 (Tom Whipple). A weekly review including Oil and the Global Economy, The Middle East & North Africa, China, Ukraine; also Quote of the Week and The Briefs.

> Peak Oil News: Peak Oil Is Here: The View From Barbastro (Antonio Turiel). We discovered that the peaking mechanism is very general and affects everything that can be overexploited. There was peak gas, peak coil, peak uranium and – in time – “peak minerals”, which was the origin of my book “Extracted“.

> Common Dreams-Resource Insights: World War III: It’s Here And Energy Is Largely Behind It (Kurt Cobb). It’s not the war we thought it would be, that is, a confrontation between major powers with the possibility of a nuclear exchange. Instead, we are getting a set of low-intensity, on-again, off-again conflicts involving non-state actors (ISIS, Ukrainian rebels, Libyan insurgents) with confusing and in some cases nonexistent battle lines and rapidly shifting alliances.

> Post Carbon Institute: Paul Krugman And The Limits Of Hubris. Richard Heinberg responds to Krugman’s latest op-ed (“Slow Steaming and the Supposed Limits to Growth”) in which he derides “hard scientists who think they are smarter than economists.” Heinberg examines Krugman’s latest assertions and arguments one by one, saying they reveal a great deal about how economists think, and why they tend to disregard physical science when it comes to questions about finite resources and the possibility of infinite economic growth on a small planet.

> The Guardian: Boeing Investing In UAE Effort As Detractors Warn Of ‘Peak Travel’. According to the 2013 IPCC report on climate-change mitigation strategies, the answer is to reduce travel, as well as to advance technology: “Sectoral studies suggest that achieving significant reductions in aviation emissions will require reductions in the rate of growth of travel activity through demand management alongside technological advances.”

ENVIRONMENT

> MinnPost: New Evidence Suggests Earth’s Oceans Are Warming Far Faster Than We Knew. New evidence indicates that the world’s seawater has been absorbing far more heat than expected over the last 45 years, scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory are saying in a paper published Sunday in the journal Nature Climate Change. In fact, they say, the oceans may be warming twice as fast as has been generally assumed.

> MPR: Climate One Series: Resource Revolution; How Climate Change May Affect Your Bottom Line. Two radio programs discussing climate issues.

> RTT News: Military Must Be Ready For Climate Change Challenges. US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Monday described climate change as a “threat multiplier,” and stressed that the US Defense Department is taking steps to incorporate this issue into all planning.

> The Gazette: Iowa Scientists Point Climate Change’s Effect On Health. The fourth annual report of “The Iowa Climate Statement 2014” was signed by 180 science faculty members and research staffers from 38 Iowa colleges and universities, claiming that climate change is negatively impacting water quality, increasing exposures to allergens and air pollutants, introducing new infectious diseases, flooding cities and croplands, and imposing increased stress on Iowa families.

> Common Dreams: Greenhouse Gas Emissions Could Trigger A Trillion-Dollar Coral Reef Problem. The report—An Updated Synthesis of the Impacts of Ocean Acidification on Marine Biodiversity—explains how the oceans’ absorption of atmospheric carbon dioxide has driven a change in ocean chemistry that lowers ph levels, meaning the waters are more acidic, 26 percent more since pre-Industrial times.

> ENSIA: Hey, America: It’s Time To Talk About The Price Of Water. The problems are also laying bare the flawed way we pay for water — one that practically guarantees pipes will burst, farmers will use as much as they can and automatic sprinklers will whir over desiccated aquifers. We’re subsidizing our most wasteful water use — while neglecting essentials like keeping our water plants and pipes in good repair.

> Inter Press Service: Humanity Failing The Earth’s Ecosystems. Over the last 40 years Earth has lost 52 percent of its wild animals; nearly 17 percent of the world’s forests have been felled in the last half-century; freshwater ecosystems have witnessed a 75-percent decline in animal populations since 1970; and nearly 95 percent of coral reefs are today threatened by pollution, coastal development and overfishing.

> ENSIA: We Only Have One Earth, So We Better Start Taking Care Of It. With limited, and in many cases, dwindling natural capital, it is increasingly looking like we will be unable to provide all of the food, water and energy that we need for 9 or 10 (or more) billion people in the decades ahead.

> Yes! “Nature Deficit Disorder” Is Making Us Sick—But These “Bioneers” Believe They Have The Cure. Kenny Ausubel: “Taking care of nature means taking care of people—and taking care of people means taking care of nature. The principle was this: Working with nature to heal nature.”

> Civilian Intelligence Agency: If Global Response Not Improved, Ebola Cases Could Spike. Demanding a stepped-up global response to the Ebola crisis, especially in the hardest hit areas of West Africa, the World Health Organization warned on Tuesday that if efforts to combat the deadly virus are not improved there could be as many as 10,000 new cases per week within two months.

EQUITY-EQUALITY

> USA Today: Oxfam: Richest 1% Own Nearly Half Of World’s Wealth. In its study titled Working for the Few, the British-founded development charity Oxfam concludes that the $110 trillion wealth of the 1% richest people on the planet is some 65 times the total wealth of those floundering at the “bottom half” of the world’s population.

> Truth-Out: Why We Should Be Seething With Anger Over Inequality (Paul Bucheit). A look at the numbers compiled by Us Against Greed shows how personal it really is. Out of that $5.35 trillion made since the start of 2013, the bottom 80 percent of America took an average of less than $5,000 each. The richest 6 to 20 percent fared better, taking an average of about $65,000.

> Common Dreams: #Worldvsbank: Global Coalition Demands End To World Bank’s ‘Moral Bankruptcy’. The U.S.-based Oakland Institute, a think tank that focuses on the intersection between social, economic, and environmental issues, released a new report (pdf) aimed at dismantling well-worn “myths” about the role the bank plays in terms of agriculture and development. See also: Farmers, Indigenous Peoples, And NGOS Take To Streets.

> Archdruid Report: Dark Age America: The Collapse Of Political Complexity (J.M. Greer). The senility that afflicts ruling elites in their last years, the theme of the previous post in this sequence, is far from the only factor leading the rich and influential members of a failing civilization to their eventual destiny. Another important factor is a lethal mismatch between the realities of power in an age of decline and the institutional frameworks inherited from a previous age of ascent.

> Peak Prosperity: The Schizophrenia Tormenting Our Society & Economy (C.H. Smith). Those who shape our interpretation of events also shape our responses. Thus, propaganda’s role: Shape the interpretation, and the response predictably follows. The phrase politics of experience unpacks the way our internalized interpretation of experience can be shaped to create uniform beliefs about our society and economy, forming norms of behavior that support the political/economic status quo.

> Foreign Policy: Aging Population Forces Disaster Planners To Adapt Strategies. With the 60 or older population expected to nearly triple to 3 billion by 2100, according to the United Nations, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) is taking new measures to protect the world’s elderly.

ENLIGHTENMENT-EDUCATION

> Common Dreams: The Solution Is The Soil: How Organic Farming Can Feed The World And Save The Planet. Mark Smallwood will deliver a Rodale white paper (Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change) on Oct. 16th to U.S. lawmakers, alongside a broader coalition of advocates for a global agricultural transformation in growing crops, managing soil, and feeding livestock, as the key solution to stop, even reverse, the growing volumes of carbon and other greenhouse gases that are overwhelming the atmosphere and oceans.

> Resilience-Transition Network: What Is Reskilling Anyway? The [reskilling] process itself clearly has many dimensions, some of which are purely social, but I would argue that reskilling is first and foremost a community-oriented method to master the simple, practical, and useful appropriate technologies that will be prevalent in a localized and carbon-constrained world.

> Common Dreams: Bring Home Best-In-The-World Ideas To Make Sure Your City Thrives. Imagine a major city where 35 percent of all traffic is people on bikes. Or think even bigger–an entire nation where 27 percent of all trips are pedal-powered.

> YouTube: White Oak Pastures: A Polyculture Farm. (2-minute video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBFVba6–Ks&feature=youtu.be). Will Harris grew up on a conventional factory farm, but now he has converted his family farm to a beyond-organic operation that celebrates polyculture, rotational grazing, solar power, and the recycling of all “wastes” from his animal operations.

> Star Tribune: Nature Play Areas: The Next Big Thing In Minnesota Parks. A growing body of evidence finds that children of all ages who play outside and play with natural, found materials — such as water, rocks and dirt — have better physical and mental health, greater social resilience, and more creativity than their couch-surfing counterparts.

CFS AND OTHER LOCAL EVENTS

> CFS FORUM (New Format): HUMANS AND THE NATURAL ENVIRONMENT. Sat., Nov. 15^th, 3-5 p.m., St. Anthony Village Library in St. Anthony Shopping Center. Presentations and discussions include a book, For Love of Lakes by Dave Demsey, presented by Isabelle Peterson; “The Ebola Crisis”, material presented by Peter Daughty; plus discussion of articles by various writers, and presented by participants. Limited seating—20 people. RSVP (warex001@umn.edu)

> Pilgrim House Unitarian Universalist Fellowship: Sand, Cattle & Land Stewardship: How Can We Keep The Land And People Together? (George Boody, Executive Director, Land Stewardship Project). Sun., Oct. 19, 10:15 a.m., 1212 W. Highway 96, Arden Hills. Info: http://www.pilgrimhouseuua.org

EDITOR — The Primary Shades of Green (Continued)

The beginning of the green movement in America has been attributed to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, transcendental visionaries who in the early 1800s believed that “nature possesses a spiritual element that transcends human utility.” Unfortunately, the powerful forces of the Industrial Revolution overcame the philosophy of natural ecology, a conflict that has continued ever since, thanks largely to the discovery and use of carbon based energy resources that provided civilization with growing material prosperity.

Around the turn of the century John Muir, visionary proponent of the West’s natural beauty and founder of the Sierra Club, helped convince Theodore Roosevelt to establish vast wilderness areas for conservation, leading to further measures to save wilderness areas for the sake of preserving species, including humans. Gifford Pinchot, an early ally of Muir, was another influential environmentalist who Muir eventually criticized for instigating damaging forest management policies.

Due to two world wars and a worldwide depression in the early 20^th century, followed by unbridled economic development and its negative effects on the environment, the environmental movement was reborn, inspired largely by Rachel Carson’s insightful book, Silent Spring (1962), and followed by Paul Erhlich’s controversial book, Population Bomb (1968). In 1969 senator Gaylord Nelson promoted a nationwide grassroots movement that resulted in the formation of Earth Day, which took place on April 22, 1970. With the growth of environmental interest and political action, President Richard Nixon supported the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, and government support of scientific research led to the Apollo 8 mission, with astronaut William Anders snapping a photograph from space of Earth that helped world citizens to better visualize humanity’s place within the universe.

The oil crisis in the early 70s, and President Jimmy Carter’s attempts to create a more sustainable use of natural resources, provided an opportunity to establish political and economic policies that likely would have prevented or drastically slowed the several converging crises humanity is facing. However, throughout the past four decades socio-economic-political forces focused on creating greater material growth, causing public awareness of the environmental movement to diminish and fluctuate.

Today, one of the most well-know spokespersons for the green movement is Al Gore (some people might disagree), whose blockbuster film, An Inconvenient Truth, awakened millions to awareness of the climate crisis. But it took the serious recession of 2007 to stimulate a growing environmental awareness, especially regarding the future impacts of climate change, along with other major concerns.

So here we are now, finally awakening and undertaking some positive initiatives, though not nearly aggressively enough. [For a more detailed accounting of the green movement, please refer to What Is the Green Movement?]

My main purpose in writing this commentary is to draw your attention to the articles by Kari McGregor, who is featured regularly on Generation Alpha. Org. Resilience. Org. is featuring two of her articles that every green advocate needs to read: What Shade Of Green Are You? and Shades Of Green: Reconciling Differences And Building Solidarity.

In brief, McGregor explains the major types or stages of green advocate, including: Bright Green, Lite Green, Deep Green, and Dark Green. [Perhaps you might think of others; like the “Poison Green” which my wife, Bettye, suggested, as a reference to hypocritical corporations and individuals professing some objectives and projects, all the while continuing nefarious activities that pose harm to people and the environment.]. McGregor hastens to add that green advocates are not a single shade of green, but possibly a blend of all shades in various degrees, depending on one’s background, experience, and overall level of awareness.

Most of us don’t appreciate being festooned with labels, at least unfairly, but the truth is we use labels freely in describing almost everything, including personal characteristics, behaviors, relationships, beliefs, status, associations, and so on. So I’ll leave you to read and ponder Ms. McGregor’s articles, which may help determine how you wish to be labeled as a green advocate—in a progressive movement that’s growing stronger day by day.

CFS News-Views Digest No. 68 (10-10-14)

Optimism, Pessimism, or Realism? (Clifton Ware, Editor/Publisher)

At any time of life, no matter what we’re thinking or doing, it’s how we think and behave that defines us. Throughout my life I’ve pondered the question, “Is it my typical inclination to approach life as an optimist or as a pessimist?” The truth is that embracing an optimistic attitude during my lifetime has been relatively easy, and the same can be said for a majority of white Americans who came of age following WWII, a vibrant era of material growth and prosperity that lasted for several decades, fueled largely by ample, accessible, and inexpensive supplies of carbon-based energy.

As I’ve undertaken extensive research into sustainability issues over the past decade, my awareness level of how everything is interconnected has expanded and my understanding has deepened. I continue gaining a “bigger picture” perspective of how all entities form a universal ecosystem, of which humans are a tiny but very significant part. How can one not feel a great sense of humility in the face of such great wonders and awe?

On the other hand, I’m learning that, while a little knowledge may be a perilous thing, it’s probable that having a lot of knowledge may also cause confusion and consternation to one’s psyche and spirit. This is especially so when the knowledge gained reveals a systemic weakness in the very beliefs and institutions that have enabled the abundant material prosperity and opportunities most of us have taken for granted.

What I’m hinting at is the growing realization that my youthful optimism may have gradually morphed into pessimism about the future. It seems that a pessimistic outlook may be warranted, especially if founded on realistic assessments of sustainability challenges, and supported by good intentions to find and implement realistic solutions. Sharing company with a corps of highly respectable sustainability-oriented, futuristic experts is consoling and reinforcing to those of us working in the sustainability trenches. I think most of these fellow futurists might consider themselves realists, rather than optimists or pessimists.

Here’s a brief explanation: As a WWII history enthusiast, I often compare contemporary thought and behavior with the way people reacted during that stressfully defining worldwide era in response to the influences of major personalities, countries, and events. For instance, consider the cautious optimism of the UK’s prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, as he negotiated appeasement terms with Hitler, with minimal apprehension about the initial signs of Nazi Germany’s aggressive intentions and behaviors. In contrast, his successor, Winston Churchill, had repeatedly expressed skepticism about Hitler’s Nazi Germany. The carefully cultivated insight and aggressive stance Churchill assumed might be described as realistic pessimism. His skeptical, pessimistic views of Hitler’s and Nazism’s goals led him to form a realistic assessment that, in turn, undergirded his extraordinary optimistic belief that the UK would persevere and eventually overcome the forces of tyranny.

Similar stories abound throughout the war period. European Jews vacillated between optimism (“Everything will work out, you’ll see.”), pessimism (“We will surely be killed by the Nazis!”), and realism (“The situation looks bad, so we best leave while we’re can, or fight back.”).

Meanwhile, the majority of German citizens were mesmerized by Hitler’s promises of creating a Third Reich that would reign for a thousand years. They were also gratified that, after suffering a post-WWI economic collapse, the German economy was finally on the rebound. Citizen euphoria and optimism at the outset of the war was a common attitude throughout the country. However, as the war wore on, with major defeats on the African, Russian, and Italian fronts, widespread Nazi retreating, and the allied war machine’s tactical advances, the general mood changed drastically. Germany’s civilians—Jewish and Aryans—as well as the country’s armed forces, gradually grew more pessimistically realistic about likely future outcomes.

I’ll leave it to your imagination to make the connections between WWII and today’s worldwide scene, as related to optimism, pessimism, and realism. It’s important to bear in mind that, generally speaking, the mainstream media tends to disseminate optimistic economic views, based on information provided by mainline classical economists, financiers, and government officials. For example, recently there have been positive reports about growth in jobs, plentiful energy supplies, a robust stock market, and rising home prices. Of course it’s comforting to receive optimistic news; but are such optimistic reports based on realistic assessments of all available data? I suspect not, as equally valid information is found mostly online via reputable websites, including those used in this newsletter.

In contrast to rosy optimistic reporting, there are also reports indicating a need for skepticism and pessimism, including reports revealing that many Americans are, once again, increasing their debt load, primarily by consuming more goods—new cars, home furnishings, and a multitude of nonessential items. Some pessimistic reports point out legitimate concerns about bulging national debts, growing social unrest, expanding terrorism, a potential Ebola crisis, wealth inequality, declining natural resources, ongoing extinction of wild species, increasing population growth, and the accumulating effects of climate change. It seems that the nays outnumber the yeas.

In closing, I offer a brief argument for embracing realism, an integrated view that includes both optimism and pessimism in varying degrees, and may offer a more constructive perspective. Seeing clearly—and understanding fully—all aspects of any issue provides us with the appropriate information for taking positive action, including making essential preparations for any future challenges. Finally, in forming a realistic view of any issue or situation, we may act with either a positive or negative mindset. We close with this summary statement:

There are times, occasions, and situations when it’s appropriate to be either an optimist or a pessimist; but, overall, most people benefit from thinking and acting as positive-minded realists.

P.S. By coincidence, a fellow CFS colleague, Grant Foster, has initiated a new blog, and the topic relates to my commentary. Check it out: Inflection Point: Foiling Optimism.

ECONOMIC AND ENERGY NEWS-VIEWS

> Peak Prosperity: A National Failure To Save & Invest – Crash Course Chapter 16. As detailed in earlier chapters, the US’ debts and unfunded liabilities far exceed its assets. But making matters worse, the country is suffering from a prolonged failure to save and invest — both at the personal and national level. Previous chapters also available—Free!

> Peak Prosperity: Daily Digest 10/8. Several relevant economic articles, a few related to various countries’ conditions, and some related to benefits denied workers.

> Common Dreams: Global Inequality Reaches Levels Not Seen In Nearly 200 Years. Growing wealth gap “one of the most significant—and worrying—features of the development of the world economy” since early-19th century, OECD says.

> CASSE-Daly News: An Economics Fit For Purpose In A Finite World (Herman Daly). Causation is both bottom-up and top-down: material cause from the bottom, and final cause from the top, as Aristotle might say. Economics, or as I prefer, “political economy,” is in between, and serves to balance desirability (the lure of right purpose) with possibility (the constraints of finitude). We need an economics fit for purpose in a finite and entropic world.

> Bloomberg Business Week: Consumer Debt Hits An All-Time High. For many American households, the recession was a time to pay off debt and get their finances in order. But according to the latest data from the Federal Reserve’s Flow of Funds (PDF), Americans are taking on debt once again, this time to finance new cars, college tuition, and other consumer goods.

> Resilience: Peak Oil Review – Oct 6 (T. Whipple). The latest oil and related geopolitical news from around the world.

> The Telegraph: Solar Could Beat Coal As World’s Top Power Source By 2050, Says IEA. Solar power will reach commercial “take-off” within a decade and could displace fossil fuels to become the world’s biggest source of electricity by 2050, according to a stunning report from the International Energy Agency.

> E&E Publishing: Why The Oil Majors Are Backing Away From Renewable Energy. When asking about why the oil industry has turned away from renewables, the word “core” comes up a lot, implying that an oil industry buffeted by change should return to the basics, though increasingly new oil sources are found in exotic, riskier, more difficult-to-extract locations that require more expense to manage.

> Oil Voice: WSJ Gets It Wrong On ‘Why Peak Oil Predictions Haven’t Come True‘ (Gail Tverberg). Many people think the economy is separate from resources and the extraction of those resources. Most classical economists think the economy can grow indefinitely, with or without the use of resources, a wrongful view passed down through academia’s peer review system, with researchers accepting and following work of previous academic researchers.

> Resilience: Pillars Of The New Economy (Noel Ortega). The way we talk about the economy has changed. We now integrate the environment, so we have a healthy place to live. We now have public banks, which are accountable and support local economies. The way we measure progress has changed, so we measure what we value. Economics is defined as the management of “home,” thus ecology is seen as intertwined.

CLIMATE AND ENVIRONMENTAL NEWS-VIEWS

> ENSIA: How We Can Save Coral Reefs (And Why We Should Want To). Reefs cover less than one-tenth of 1 percent of the ocean floor but support more than 800 species of coral and 4,000 species of fish. They are spawning grounds, coastal buffers against storms and lucrative tourist draws. To the detriment of those benefits, however, coral reefs have been deteriorating since the 1970s under a cascade of human impacts.

> Common Dreams: Planet On The Brink: Human Activity Killing The Planet’s Life-Supporting Systems. The newest state of the planet report (pdf) from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) claims that human activity has brought the planet’s life-supporting systems to the brink of tipping points, causing an “alarming” loss in biodiversity and critical threats to the services nature has provided humankind.

> Star Tribune: Research Links Some Extreme Weather To Warming. Researchers discover that climate change has increased the odds of extreme weather, including heat wavers, floods, and droughts.

> Common Dreams: Rate Of Ocean Warming Vastly Underestimated: Study. A report published in Nature Climate Change found that, since 1970, the top 700 meters (roughly 2,296 feet) of the ocean have been heating up 24 to 55 percent faster than scientists have been estimating, a massive miscalculation that was caused by “poor sampling of the Southern Hemisphere, and limitations of the analysis methods.”

> Transition Network: Why Economics Needs To Make Space For Nature (Aniol Esteban). “At one level, it [nature] provides everything we need to live and so guarantees our survival. That’s a very basic condition. At the other level, it makes our lives worth living and delivers multiple benefits.

LOCAL, STATE, AND REGIONAL NEWS-VIEWS

> Twin Cities Business: MSP Airport Building State’s Largest Solar Energy Site. A $25.4 million solar energy project now underway at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport is being touted as the state’s largest and is expected to create more than 250 jobs.

> Star Tribune: How Minnesota Can Keep The Lights On (Ellen Anderson). Credible studies show that Minnesota has the resources to meet energy needs from wind, solar, bioenergy from plant materials, geothermal, hydro and increased efficiency across the energy system — while dramatically cutting carbon emissions.

> MPR-Associated Press: Freeze Could End Growing Season For Immature Crops (In MPR). A freeze could stop the growing season in the upper Midwest as far south as Nebraska and Iowa, leaving farmers in a difficult situation because much of the region’s corn and soybean fields are not quite ready for harvest.

> MPR: Mississippi River States Prepare For An Oil Spill –Not If, But When. If a train derails near the Mississippi River between Wisconsin and Minnesota, spilling some 150,000 gallons of crude oil into the water, it would be a disaster of immense proportions.

> Star Tribune: Growth Guru Spreads Word About What’s Wrong With Towns. Engineer and Strong Towns advocate Charles Marohn revisits the compact, walkable Brainerd of the past, a foolproof livable approach developed slowly and incrementally over time. Today’s sprawling growth is too big, quick, car-obsessed, and costs a fortune to maintain.

SUSTAINABLE CHALLENGES, IDEAS AND PRACTICES

> Resilient Life: Multi-Functional Plants For The Permaculture Garden. If you have a choice of planting a tree, shrub, vine, herbaceous plant, or groundcover that only has one function or another species that fills that desired function and also provides three other benefits, why wouldn’t you plant the more functional species. In permaculture, elements of our designs should serve at least 3 functions.

> ENSIA: It’s Time To Bring Nature Into Our Built Environments. Biophilic design is not just good for humans, it also intrinsically promotes environmentally sustainable practices. Since the main aim of biophilic design is to connect humans with nature, greater environmental awareness and stewardship are likely to follow.

> Resilience: Permaculture And The Myth Of Scarcity (Charles Eisenstein). Research shows that when it is done properly, organic growing methods can deliver two to three times the yield of conventional methods. A vision for 21st century agriculture could reveal high-intensity permaculture around major population centers that meet 80% of their food needs.

> Yes! Small-Scale Traditional Farming Is The Only Way To Avoid Food Crisis, UN Researcher Says. New scientific research increasingly shows how “agroecology” offers environmentally sustainable methods that can meet the rapidly growing demand for food.

> Peak Prosperity: Chris Kresser: Functional Health (podcast). In this discussion, Adam Taggart and Chris explore the world of “functional medicine” and other approaches to health and wellness that offer potential to complement, or in cases, replace conventional western medical treatment. The focus in functional medicine is on recognizing and treating each patient’s biological uniqueness.

> Star Tribune: The Case For Labeling Genetically Modified Food (Bonnie Blodgett). The government could help level the playing field by conducting a thorough investigation of how GMOs are affecting the environment and human health, with costs paid for taxpayers and not the food industry.

> Consumer Reports: Where GMOs Hide in Your Food. Consumer Reports’ tests of breakfast cereals, chips, soy infant formulas, and other popular products found that GMOs lurk in many packaged foods—including some that carry labels suggesting that they don’t have these controversial ingredients. A survey found that 92 percent of Americans want genetically modified foods to be labeled.

> The Third Industrial Revolution. Jeremy Rifkin describes how the five pillars of the Third Industrial Revolution will create thousands of businesses and millions of jobs, and usher in a fundamental reordering of human relationships, from hierarchical to lateral power, that will impact the way we conduct business, govern society, educate our children, and engage in civic life.

CFS OCTOBER EVENT

> CFS FINAL FORUM (in past format): Sat. Oct. 11, 3-5 p.m., SAV City Hall Council Chambers. Speaker–Erin McKee VanSlooten, Local Foods senior program associate, Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy. Topic—“From Farm to School: Encouraging Food Literacy for Children”. Business—Establishing a sustainability coalition in SAV; Social—Refreshments and networking. Free, and open to the public. Please join us!

NOTABLE UPCOMING LOCAL EVENTS

> UM Institute on the Environment: Frontiers In The Environment, a series of presentations held in R350 Learning & Environmental Sciences Building. Information: http://environment.umn.edu/events/

> Pilgrim House Unitarian Universalist Fellowship: The Top Conservation Threats We Face, And What One Can Do To Make A Difference (presented by Sierra Club North Star Chapter). Sun., Oct. 12, 10:15 a.m, 1212 W. Highway 96, Arden Hills. Info: http://www.pilgrimhouseuua.org

> Sierra Club-North Star: Climate Changing And The Impact On The Horn Of Africa, Mon., Oct. 13, 5:00-7:00 p.m., Safari Restaurant Banquet Hall, 3010 4th Ave S, Minneapolis (map). RSVP: http://sc.org/MNClimateEastAfrica. Info: (karen.monahan@sierraclub.org)

> UM Water Resources Center: Minnesota Water Resources Conference, Tues.-Weds., Oct. 14-15, Saint Paul River Centre, St. Paul Info: University of Minnesota