Thursday, February 28, 2013

Social Cohesion and Climate Crises

Two articles accessed through discuss the importance of social cohesion for dealing with climate change and the aftermath of extreme weather events. Studies of disasters show that living in a walkable neighbourhood where you have frequent contact with people on the streets and local businesses promotes the kind of social network that will support you through a crisis. 

By Sarah Goodyear

After Superstorm Sandy, neighborhood networks like the ones that Klinenberg references in his piece were activated quickly around the five boroughs. Community-based groups such asRed Hook Initiative in Brooklyn (where I volunteered after the storm), which already had deep roots in the area, were able to call on existing relationships and get help where it was needed, even as government and national relief organizations were falling short.
"I don’t think in any way did it change the tight-knit community, other than to make us tighter," says one Rockaways surfer and homeowner in a video about the storm’s aftermathproduced by Surfer magazine. "Because I don’t know anyone who didn’t help out."

by Eric Kleinberg, The New Yorker

DEPT. OF URBAN PLANNING about “climate-proofing.” For the past decade and a half, governments around the world have been investing in elaborate plans to “climate-proof” their cities—protecting people, businesses, and critical infrastructure against weather-related calamities. Much of this work involves upgrading what engineers call “lifeline systems”: the network infrastructure for power, transit, and communications, which are crucial in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Some of the solutions are capital-intensive and high-tech; some are low- or no-tech approaches, such as organizing communities so that residents know which of their neighbors are vulnerable and how to assist them. Even if we managed to stop increasing global carbon emissions tomorrow, we would probably experience several centuries of additional warming, rising sea levels, and more frequent dangerous weather events. If our cities are to survive, we have no choice but to adapt. Writer speaks with Klaus Jacob, a geophysicist at Columbia University. Genuine adaptation, Jacob believes, means preparing for the inevitable deluge. “The ocean is going to reclaim what we took from it,” he said. He thinks that New York can learn from Rotterdam, which has a long history of flooding. After enduring a devastating storm surge in 1953, Rotterdam began building a series of dams, barriers, and seawalls. It’s now experimenting with an architecture of accommodation: it has a floating pavilion in the city center, made of three silver half spheres with an exhibition space that’s equivalent to four tennis courts, and buildings whose façades, garages, and ground-level spaces are engineered to be waterproof. It also has a resilient power grid, designed to withstand strong winds and heavy rain, with power lines which are primarily underground and encased in water-resistant pipes. The island nation of Singapore offers other lessons. Singapore began adapting to dangerous weather thirty years ago, after a series of heavy rains during monsoon season caused repeated flooding in the low-lying city center. Mentions Singapore’s Marina Barrage and Reservoir, which opened in 2008. Still, a strategy of resilience will involve more than changes to our physical infrastructure. Increasingly, governments and disaster planners are recognizing the importance of social infrastructure: the people, places, and institutions that foster cohesion and support. “There’s a lot of social-science research showing how much better people do in disasters, how much longer they live, when they have good social networks and connections,” says Nicole Lurie, a former professor of health policy who has been President Obama’s assistant secretary for preparedness and response since 2009. Discusses, at length, the case of a deadly 1995 heat wave in Chicago, during which people living in neighborhoods with stronger social networks fared better than people who lived in comparable, but less socially cohesive, neighborhoods. Since 1995, officials in Chicago have begun to take these factors into account. City agencies have maintained a database that lists the names, addresses, and phone numbers of old, chronically ill, and otherwise vulnerable people, and city workers call or visit to make sure they’re safe. 

Read more:

Wednesday, February 27, 2013

Italy's Election: Networked Politics


I've done some more investigation of Beppe Grillo's Movimento 5 Stelle. It has a very Green agenda, but it's more like the Pirate Party with a greener slant.

The Federation of Greens is the official Green Party of Italy, but only garners 2% of the vote. They have worked in coalition with Socialist and Communist parties and tend be socialist Greens. Beppe Grillo's M5S has a Green agenda, but rejects (even ridicules) socialist politics, which is probably why M5S got 25% of the vote. M5S pulled votes from both the Right and the Left. The Federation of Greens supports Grillo's M5S movement:

"In September 2010 the Greens launched an Ecologist Constituent Assembly. In Bonelli's view the new political force would have taken inspiration both from the French Verts and the German Grünen and would have be open to the contribution of movements and associations, notably including Beppe Grillo's Five Star Movement."[Wikipedia]

Franco 'Biffo' Berardi also supports the M5S movment: 

"This movement of society that you propose, would it have any programme?

A citizen wage Reduction of the working week to 30 hours.The restitution to schools of the 8 billion dollars that the Berlusconi government stole from the education system. Good working conditions for all precarious workers in education, health and transport. Nationalisation of banks that have favoured speculation at the cost of the community. Immediate abolition of the fiscal pact."



Monday, February 25, 2013

Crisis of Civilization: the Neo-Liberal Crisis

This film, "The Crisis of Civilization", narrated by Dr. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, is a very sophisticated and carefully argued explanation of the current crisis of energy, climate, food production, financial instability, war and terrorism. Before you dismiss it as just another conspiracy film, or just another home-made doc on peak oil and climate change, watch it through, it's only 77 minutes. It's not a conspiracy film because it presents a much more sophisticated and nuanced explanation using a theory akin to Wallerstein's World Systems Theory. And it's much more than a doc on 'peak everything' because it explains in great detail how Neo-Liberal economic policy is a key driver behind all these crisis.

Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Full Employment Through Cooperatives


Friday, February 1, 2013

Coming Off the Dark Mountain

What have we learned from our urgent debates on climate change, peak oil, fracking, war and financial collapse? Have we learned something other than paranoia and fear of system collapse? If that’s all we’ve learned, then we’ve lost the opportunity to awaken from our technocidal nightmare, to learn something profoundly meaningful and constructive. These crises provide us with the opportunity to learn the most valuable lesson of all, which is that we’re all deeply connected to each other and the earth. This is the hard lesson we’ve been avoiding in the over-developed West for over 500 years, and we’re paying the price for it now—and so is everyone else on the planet—in the form of energy depletion, economic collapse, civil war and a badly disrupted climate. 

But we still have a chance to learn the one lesson that needs to come out of all this in order to turn our culture around and survive the crisis—we have to learn that we are deeply connected to each other and to the earth, that every action we take affects many other people and species near and far, now and long into the future. If our response is only to run away to an isolated village and attempt some DIY survivalist homesteading, then we haven’t learned that we’re all deeply connected. If our answer is to stockpile weapons for fear of attack by hostile ‘others’, then we’ve learned that we’re deeply connected, but only in the darkest and most paranoid sense. 

Indeed, all we’ve been able to articulate about this connectedness thus far is that our energy, food and livelihoods are ‘over-connected’ and over-managed by a global corporate elite, and thus susceptible to collapse. That over-connectedness by corporate elites only chains us to their system, while it severs our consciousness and connection with the earth and each other. We are at war with each other and the earth while we rail at our corporate overlords. That is the dark side of connectedness, but it is a dark connectedness that divides us against each other, unable to feel empathy for others, atomized, isolated and afraid. 

But there is a light side to this same dark awareness of our ‘over-connectedness’—we can begin to work through these same tightly connected networks to steer this culture in a new direction of other-centredness, of taking actions that benefit everyone, all species and ecosystems, not just ourselves and our immediate needs. We can take care of each other and all species with fairness and compassion. We need to learn this while we still have time. We need to use issues like climate change, fracking, peak oil, civil war and economic collapse to connect with all species of others empathically, to turn this culture around, to talk, sing and shout to the world that we are all deeply connected.

In the following short interview with Bill Moyers, Vandana Shiva talks about our connectedness with the each other and the earth.