An Exciting Time to Be Alive
by Deborah Brasket, SB CAN Executive Director
Is our civilization sustainable? Last week in Santa Maria, Detlev Peikert and Eric Lohela from the Sustainability Project gave an outstanding overview of the key principles of sustainability, including some of the huge challenges facing us today regarding global warming and peaking oil supplies.
- This included some startling images and statistics. For instance, did you know that:
- The human species now consumes about 40 percent of Earth’s primary productivity.
- Every day the worldwide economy burns up an amount of energy the planet needed 10,000 days — over 27 years — to create.
- While the U.S. population constitutes only 5 percent of world population, it consumes 24 percent of world’s energy.
- The U.S. is losing 400,000 acres of rural land per year, while urbanized land area increased 107 percent between 1969 and 1990. This is more than twice the rate of population growth in the same time period.
- Cities lost 33-50 percent of their pre-1950 population density, as automobiles became the primary mode of transportation and families moved to the suburbs.
- The average suburban shopping center takes up as much land as the city core of Florence, Italy, one of the most beautiful, admired, and livable cities on Earth.
These are only a few of the alarming statistics showing that our current levels of consumption, including our uses of energy and land, are not sustainable. We cannot continue gobbling up our diminishing oil supplies and rural lands at the rate we have been doing. We need to bring our social, economic and environmental systems back into balance in a way that replenishes them for future generations.
We can start by looking closely at own communities. Is our city sprawling outward, taking up more and more land, or is it becoming more compact, walkable and transit oriented? Are we creating convenient transit systems, and mixed-use streetscapes that encourage walking and biking? What percentage of our land use is devoted to neighborhoods where people are within a 10-minute walk of basic necessities, like schools, parks, grocery stores and bus stops?
Do city residents have greater access to public parks, plazas, community gardens and urban farms than to parking lots, strip malls and big-box stores? Are we encouraging the use of renewable energy, like solar and wind power, while reducing the use of carbon-based fuels?
What changes are we making now in the way we build our communities that will make us more sustainable in the future — environmentally, socially and economically?
While these challenges can be daunting, the workshop ended on a hopeful note, with these words from Severn Susuki, environmental activist and daughter of Dr. David Susuki, environmentalist and host of the popular science show, “The Nature of Things":
“I think this is the most exciting time to be alive in all of human history. This is the moment. In the following months and years, we’re going to have to make some big decisions. Whether we make the right decisions or fail to make the decisions, will determine the fate, not only of all human kind, but of countless species of plants and animals.
“This is the defining moment, when we will decide whether or not we’re going to be a spectacular, flash-in-the-pan failure, or whether we can step up to the plate and show that we are capable of finding humility, compassion, patience and wisdom to truly find a sustainable path.”
An exciting time, indeed.
Please join us on Wednesday, Oct. 7, at 6:30 p.m., at the Santa Maria Library for SB CAN’s next workshop in our Creating Sustainable Communities series. This time we’ll be looking more closely at sustainable transportation, energy use and landscaping.
Deborah Brasket is executive director for the Santa Barbara County Action Network (SB CAN). She can be reached at 722-5094,
or Deborah@sbcan.org. Looking Forward runs every Friday, providing a progressive viewpoint on local issues.September 25, 2009
http://santamariatimes.com/articles/2009/09/25/opinion/092509c.txt
Date:
25 Sep 2009 - 1:00pm