Attainable Sustainability

The good news is we’re all sitting on gold.  The bad news is we can’t have it and sit on it at the same time.  Over the last few decades, we paved over the family farm to create the highways-byways-skyways-safeways of  modern agricultures.

Farming was poor family business, but its economies of scale made it good corporate business.  That is why companies like Monsanta, Con-Agra, Cargill have become big business and why in the name of big business  they are replacing our biological diversity with cubed tomatoes that never rot, has no taste, and no nutritional value. Big Ag designed genetically-engineered Round-Up weedkiller-resistent soybean to benefit its bottom line – if the result loses nutritional value and carries toxic hitchhikers, that’s not their problem.   Remember what the Produce Section USED TO BE?  Now it is a heartbreaking wasteland of overpriced, uniform, sterile, factory-made, genetically-engineered, cubed product.  An insulting knock-off of the miracle of nature, keeping us one-step removed from our relationship to the very planet our collectively-ripening rumps squat on.

Capitalism has a fatal flaw, and Big Agribusiness is no exception – in the battle between stockholder and consumer, the stockholder always win.  Problem is, the stockholder is also a consumer.  Big Agribusiness is full of people just like us, sharing our concerns, but collectively will starve and poison us in the name of Stock Prices and Book Value.  This is unsustainable, bad juju for the human race.

But the backlash is happening.  The hottest trend in the Food business is USDA Organic, local-grown & Kosher/Talal foods.  I’d like to say the public is wise to Big Agribusiness and taking back the farm, but the honest truth is: we don’t care so much about weedkiller-resistent soybeans, we’re tired of tasteless cube tomatoes.

The original tomato came close to extinction.  In the 90’s, Farmers planted old tomato seeds, and what came off the vine was very strange fruit, misshapen, any color but candy-apple red, and utterly delicious.  Heirloom tomatoes hit the market and I think started the Organic Farming/Local farming revolution.

Now everywhere, family farms are sprouting.  Applying for USDA Organic certification not just for the money, but as a core value.  Apples the like never seen before from Mendocino County.  Lamb from Petaluma.  Free-range Chicken.  Free-range Turkey.  Lettuce, Onions, Chile peppers.  Marin County Cheese.  Organic Juices.  Whole Foods carry organic.  Trader Joes carry organic.  Now even Safeway and Lucky’s are carrying Organic.  Prices are going down.  We’re rediscovering variety, taste, and our Mother planet’s fecund beauty.  Who were at the forefront of this movement?  Chefs.  People who cook and feed people for a  living and like having honest-to-god ingredients to cook with.

Rick Bayless, Chef/Owner of Frontera Grill is in the forefront with the Frontera Farmers Foundation.  When he opened Frontera Grill in Chicago in the late 80’s, there were no farmer’s market, and he was laughed at by Wholesalers.  Now there are.  Add to that the Noveau Cuisine movement started by Alice Waters, Chef/owner of Chez Panisse in Berkeley, and a rash of top-rated Restaurants in Napa Valley – Mustard’s Grill, the French Laundry, Ubuntu.  Oregon, Washington, even the Hudson Valley?

Family farms enhance our quality of life.  Sustainable, higher-quality, wholesome, nutritious food.  Unique, innovative, delicious.  And profitable.  Taking the harder road of Organic certification, building your market, experimenting with variations and techniques, the family farmer has to be learned and tech-savvy.  And watchful.  This ain’t your daddy’s farm, it’s a new beast.  What’s the next step?

Full Circle Farm

Peterson Middle School, student run, grown organic farm with funding by Silicon Valley companies like Cisco.  Next article.

When you get down to the local level, Politics tend to be replaced by Pragmatics.  There’s less buffoonery and silliness, less Special Interests to deal with.  Big Government has too much concentration of power and wealth, when you make the decisions for millions of people and billions of dollars, no wonder corruption is such a wide problem.  When you make the decisions for a few thousands, many who you see every day, with a very tight and very dog-eared budget, it keeps you (more) honest.

This blog makes the point that a Sustainable world will be composed of autonomous, smaller communities that band together – yet with technology still operates under more global governance.  You get the best of big and small government.  We still have a lot to learn before reaching this point, and creating a more sustainable, robust society, and small communities are doing the learning.

Governance – Placing the needs of the community beyond the needs of the few. Example: Do you put a stoplight in front of a Shopping Center? How do you balance the economic needs of a few with the good of the many – put a stoplight in front of the shopping center that pumps money and jobs into the community. Don’t if it doesn’t. Strong Committee, Weak Mayor – In smaller communities, the Mayor is the contact, the face, even the heart, but not the brains and the pocket of the community. The Mayor does what they do best, the Board what they do best.

Self-containment – A community that provides 75% of the services it needs because it recruits/attracts talents and skills needed. Wouldn’t it be great if a City posts on Craigslist an ad for a Web developer, housing provided?

Local Networks – A community setting up trade with neighboring communities to provide both protection, economic stimulus, talent, and to pool buying power. Counties sort of do this, but communities can show a bottoms-up approach rather than top-down.

Environmentally sustainable local transit, local economies – If you work locally, you don’t need to drive everyday to and from work. Possible even in larger communities with a good local transit system, as long as you keep commute time to less than 45 minutes each way.

The Marketplace – Malls replaced community with commerce, but killed a human need. Notice Malls try to look like communities, with street-signs and lampposts, but it’s phony, sterile. Malls are struggling now, and downtowns coming back to life. Shopping where you know everybody and where everybody knows you is the essence of a local economy, and strengthens Communal independence.

When my friend was offered a part-time survival job, he jumped on it.  He now works in inside-sales for 25 hours/week.  He spends 20 hours/week commuting, 5 days a week.  And he’s making minimum wage + commissions.  And this is for one of the better companies of its type.

But make no mistake, that’s slavery.  The company doesn’t have to pay benefits, and my friend works full-time for half-pay, not including $160/month for train and bus fare.

I have no quarrel against part-time work.  In fact,  I’m looking for permanent part-time work.  Because it pays the bills, and leaves me enough of the week left over to use flexibly – doing more work, opting for higher-paying, less-stable gigs that may lead me to full-time employment.  I win, and the company wins, only if part-time means 8×3 or 25 hour fixed price projects.

The problem are 4×5 or 5×5 jobs.  The time it takes to get ready for work, to commute to work, then commute home can easily add 10 or more hours a week, and that’s not counting wasted time from missed connections and traffic congestion.  Part-time work alone is not enough for most people to survive on, yet having to do everything times five leaves you too tired, too strapped, and without enough contiguous time to do substantive work.  And of course, it’s bad for the environment to be travelling when you could be at home.

Companies don’t do this to be mean, or in a bid to use slave labor.  Most companies hire part-time assistants, organizers, coordinators as a resource for their full-time staff, who also work 5-days a week.   But for the most part, it’s just the reality of life that a company’s employees are higher on the food chain than part-time, temporary staff.  This isn’t a call on companies to mend their ways.  This is directed at you, the part-time worker to negotiate.

First off, cut one day off the week.  Instead of working 4 hours, 5 days  week, try for 4, or even 3 longer days, which approaches the 8 hours/day overtime limit in California.  If the company still needs coverage over 5 days, they can hire an additional part-timer to fill out the rest of the week.  You can even cut your total hours if your company’s budget cannot cope.  But also remember, by not paying benefits, companies are already saving a lot of money hiring you on a part-time basis.  This is for your benefit, but if you work it right, it benefits the company too.  Make a business case out of it, and try for a win-win situation.  This is sustainable living, this is innovative living, this is humane living, and it’s a living.

Just remember, you may be a bottom feeder, but you’re not a slave.  You have just as much right to walk away as a company does to cut you.  If you have skills, you are entitled to make a living and keep that roof over your family’s head while you save up for walls and floor too.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/US/10/28/california.bay.bridge.accident/index.html

A simple question for you.  What happens when Mass Transit becomes the shortest route between point A to B?  BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit), a line of electric trains nearly girdling the Bay gets to find out.  The 77 year old Bay Bridge has closed down indefinitely, with catastrophic consequences.  Ever since Loma Prieta’s famous span collapse, it’s been vulnerable.  They started building a new bridge next to it 2 years ago, but that project was put on hold due to the financial crisis.

Now, the unthinkable happened, the Bay Bridge crumbled and it’s CATASTROPHIC.  The Bay Bridge connects San Francisco with the East Bay (Oakland, Berkeley) and… Northern California and… any of a dozen or so states feeding into I-80 (I-80 ends at the SF end of the Bay Bridge).

If you want to drive from Oakland/Berkeley to San Francisco, you’d either have to take the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge to the Golden Gate, or the San Mateo Bridge, both a 30-40 mile detour on already heavily-trafficed routes.

The only direct connection now is BART, which goes under the bay from Alameda to San Francisco.  It’s SHOWTIME!  And BART, the Mass Transit alternative, gets to find out what it’s like being the main artery.

It’s happened before.  77 years ago.  Which is why they built the bridge in the first place.  Now the question is… can BART take the load, and will drivers like it so much that when the bridge reopens they’ll still take BART?   I predict some, but not the majority.

I dream of a mass transit paradise.  This won’t be it.  But if this experience causes 50% of local drivers to switch to BART every time they want to cross that part of the Bay and leave their cars behind, Urban planners and CALTRANS would be forced for the first time to give Mass Transit equal footing to the automobile.

The DARPA Urban Challenge was held on November 3, 2007, at the former George AFB in Victorville, Calif.  Building on the success of the 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenges, this event required teams to build an autonomous vehicle capable of driving in traffic, performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking and negotiating intersections.  This event was truly groundbreaking as the first time autonomous vehicles have interacted with both manned and unmanned vehicle traffic in an urban environment.

http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp

The DARPA Urban Challenge was held on November 3, 2007, at the former George AFB in Victorville, Calif.  Building on the success of the 2004 and 2005 Grand Challenges, this event required teams to build an autonomous vehicle capable of driving in traffic, performing complex maneuvers such as merging, passing, parking and negotiating intersections.  This event was truly groundbreaking as the first time autonomous vehicles have interacted with both manned and unmanned vehicle traffic in an urban environment.
http://www.darpa.mil/grandchallenge/index.asp

Public Personal Transit using Robot vehicles can be a reality in as little as 10 years.  Public acceptance, politics, insurance issues and the threat to the industries already involved in mass transit can take decades.  Why should you care?  You don’t ride the bus.  And I do, but I’m just a blogger.

You should care.  This is not mass transit.  Public Personal Transit is for anybody, your elderly parents, grandparents, you, your kids, even your family.  Electric, zero-emission vehicles can cut down on Greenhouse gases.  Efficient vehicles cut down on power consumption.  People housebound get to go out and do things.

Picture if you will…

It’s late.  You’re miles from home.  You don’t have your car.  From your office you pull out your keychain.  On the keychain is a slender device.  You press a button and the display lights up, ‘Wookie, eta 10 minutes’.  You go down the elevator and wait by the curbside near the door, in a lit place beneath a prominent video camera.  In 10 minutes, you see what looks like a glowing yellow Twinkie trundling towards you.  On the sign in front it says ‘Wookie’.  It glides to a stop 2 feet from you.  You wave your keychain device in front of the door.  It chimes and the door opens and it kneels towards you.  Inside it’s brightly lit, and there is a comfortable padded bench.  Other models have recliner seats, but you selected this one on the website, as you did the name ‘wookie’.

You step in, and without a word it proceeds on.  If this were your first time, a soft recorded voice would’ve given you instructions on how to proceed.  There is an LCD screen on the end, flashing ads.  But via voice command you can browse the internet, or select music to listen to as you move.  In one corner, you see a map with a little triangle in it, it’s your vehicle showing its progress towards your home.  It’s not fast.  Acceleration is perky but not dramatic, braking more gradual.  Since it’s point to point, speed doesn’t matter as much.  Even in evasive maneuvers, acceleration is soft, the robot vehicles are smart, and quick to respond.  But for the most part, it avoids trouble, even to the extent of pulling off to the side of the road.

If needed, you can say ‘help’, and an operator appears offering assistance.  The operator is at the control center, and your communication is live and real-time.  Occasionally, an operator might recognize you and pop on the screen just to say hi.  Some people like to chat on their way home, you’re one of them.  You chat.

The control center is not guiding your vehicle.  There is no special line in the roadway.  Your vehicle does the driving and the navigation, checking road-side cameras, traffic reports, even other botsis to determine the best route ahead.  If a stoplight turns red, it stops.  When it is green, it goes.  If a 5 year old child runs out in front of it chasing a ball, it already saw the child coming and it slows down to a stop.  If it crosses an intersection at night and sees a car coming from the right at 70 mph on a collision course, it accelerates out of the way.  The drunken speeder drives by harmlessly through a red light, and will get a visit from Police the next day, because his transgression was video’d in high-definition by one of the many cameras on your vehicle, which also catches his license plate and emails a report to the local police and Highway Patrol.

If there were an accident, airbags would inflate all around.  But it’s tough carbon-fiber shell can absorb a lot of damage, and the vehicle is light enough that it will bounce from a collision.  It is designed to sacrifice itself for the safety of the passenger.  If you are a criminal, you do not want to commit a crime near a Botsi, because it’s wired up for sound, visible light, infrared, even radar, all the sensors it needs just to navigate roads safely.

But there are no crimes or accidents tonight.  Your vehicle safely navigates potholes and detours.  Plays nicely with other vehicles, even the 1980 Camaro that still has an 8-track player.  And delivers you as close to your door as possible.  It stops, chimes, kneels.  The door opens and it wishes you a safe evening.   No payment this time, you’re on the monthly ride all you want plan.

When you’re home, the vehicle checks its batteries.  It has adequate power, so instead of the recharging site, it goes to a nearby shopping mall, finds a parking spot the Mall rents to the Transit Authority, and next to its siblings, turns itself off and waits for the next call.  Criminals beware here too, because they’re still watching, and listening.

Meanwhile, it’s a slow night at the Control Center.  Since the Botsis do most of the work themselves, a handful of operators just monitor the incoming video, audio, text messages, transported via wifi using internet standards of the day.  The Operator’s cellphone goes off, it’s another Botsi transporting his teenage daughter and friends from a concert – he’s tempted, but doesn’t listen in.  He knows they’re safe and having a good time, and the manifest shows there are no boys in the vehicle, just as he requested when he set up an account for her.  A monitor comes alive, and he sees his elderly mother’s face on the screen.  He draws it up on the screen, ‘Hi Mom, how did the test go?’.  She’s coming home from night classes.  She’s in a wheelchair, but wouldn’t even think of staying home.

And all across the community, Botsi’s trundle on.

Part I - http://ajaxofalltrades.com/sustain/uncategorized/get-on-the-bot…l-transit-pt-i/

If you want to design the perfect transit system, try riding the bus for a few years.  Then rethink what perfect is.  Most mass transit systems and vehicles are designed by people who never use them, for people on the bottom of the Economic totem pole.  When you ride a bus system where design goals place greater value on urine-resistant seat fabric than on human happiness, set your expectations low and go down from there.

I’ve been riding the bus for 11 years.  I’ll save you the time by summarizing what’s bad about bus transit, some no longer the case for Silicon Valley’s VTA.

- Vehicles are noisy, the ride uncomfortable, crowded at peak times and sometimes valley times.

- Frequent Stops.

- Sometimes a long wait because stop is a scheduled stop.

- Uncomfortable, exposed, difficult-to-reach stops.  Stops that are unsafe at night or in unsafe neighborhoods.  El Camino Real is a 6 lane throughfare, old people struggle to cross the street in the time given them.

- Knowing where you are, what stops are coming, especially at night.  VTA has a digital sign system and automated voice announcements that solved this nicely.

- Old buses with hydraulic platforms to haul wheelchairs up and down, awkward and dangerous.  VTA’s newer buses are kneeling and don’t have steps, but still has old 3-steps.

The system works, and have worked, by-and-large for years.  There are designers who do ride the bus and put in great creativity improving the rider’s experience.  There are systemic changes driving this change of heart.  Communities are battling congested highways, pollution and seeking sustainable means of transportation; the ridership is changing, now professionals are commuting by bus.  Callousness is now being replaced by mass transit love.

But no matter what, there is not a single bus system that will compete with what’s coming.

I will share with you a vision for a Public, Personal Transit system centered around unmanned, robotic vehicles.  There is research going on for this, and in small scale, pilot systems already running.  It has many names, but my name for this is Botsi.

Botsi is short for Robot Taxi.  Robotic vehicles that will safely and comfortably transport you from point to point, from as close to your door to your destination’s door as possible.

More details in Part 2.  http://ajaxofalltrades.com/sustain/community/get-on-the-botsi-public-personal-transit-pt-ii/

Scientific Certification Systems visionary leader, Dr. Stanley Rhodes, has a system.  It’s a great system for measuring the environmental impact of a coal plant or a bucket of Fried Chicken.  It’s their Life Cycle Impact Assessment that measures (excuse me eharmony.com) 19 dimensions of incompatibility.

Everything from nuclear waste, heart-hurting chemicals, to wetlands and feedstock resources are covered here.  And it brings new dimensions to Sustainability.

It’s easy to have an informal relationship to the fight against Global Warming.  You can care, you can be interested, even amused, then put it on hold at any time for later.  For you, I’m happy to write amusing, interesting, thoughtful articles.  This is a soft topic.   If you run a company, or industry, or are a Republican, Global Warming is a liberal debate designed to attack the Free Market.  You say it’s all an opinion, and wrong, and bar your doors to people calling for action.

But add Metrics, and the nature of the thing changes.  When you introduce numbers, all of a sudden it’s no longer theoretical or a debate.   Metrics is a battering ram, and puts industry on notice.  Industry will fight tooth-and-nail against the numbers, and the fight gets ugly.  Numbers make industry accountable.  And it makes you accountable.

What you do and don’t can be measured, and must be measured.  If we are to reverse global warming, we all have to be accountable, we actually have to play by the numbers.  We need environmental bean-counters!  Now you can take a factory to task not just for what they do now, but what happens to materials before and product after.  And you can expose green-washers and frauds.  Companies that say they’re good for the environment but are not.  People selling natural foods or recycled goods.  People who shout because everybody else is shouting, who spouts ideas.  Everybody has an opinion, everybody has an idea, everybody has a product.  But what can actually save the planet and what is just a waste of time?

Metrics separates the good from the fanciful.  Take driving a hybrid for example.  Do you think it’s good for the environment?  SCS says no.  Because before a Hybrid magically appears in your driveway, batteries have to be built.  And after you trade yours in, batteries have to be disposed of.

But replacing light bulbs with LEDs in your home may have a more profound impact, and requires little willpower to do.  Or cutting beef consumption in half.  Or leaving your car in the garage one workday a week.  Or working a 4-day workweek rather than 5.  Or planting trees.  And reversing World population growth.

We don’t have a lot of time.  And none to waste.  Some people say we’re only 25-30 years from the tipping point.  That means we have 30 years to reverse global warming.  The earlier you start, the more who do, the more who stays with it, the more likely our grandchildren will inherit an Earth in better shape than the one we have today.

About SCS and LCIA – http://www.scscertified.com/lcs/docs/SCS-002-1_Backgrounder.pdf

Cash for Clunkers is great for the environment – as long as you don’t resell the Clunkers!!!

Money wins, Environment loses, but not a complete loss.