Green Careers in Energy

We have had a splash in the nation's educational/schooling publishing wing with the release of Green Careers in Energy (linked through Powell's Books). I wrote an essay, titled "Education and Action to Achieve Sustainability" featured in Chapter 1: Essays on the Importance of Sustainability. Several people in the club, especially Zach B, Jared B, and Derek L contributed to the thinking and writing of the essay. Having read the other essays, we are the "bomb throwers" so to speak because we/I reject the global growth economy outright and demand place-based solutions.

I concluded the essay (with Zach's input!):

In the end, we must reduce our economy. We must not just learn about reduction. If we want a verdant planet, then we will need to educate ourselves by unlearning the consumption economy and retool culture to live while using less. Only then, will we live in a truly green economy, and will humans and all life flourish on Earth.

I think it's a hallmark of our progress and our society's progress that this can even make it into a book that informs "the economy." While not mainstream, we have people listening and reading and that is reason for hope.

The book, by the way, is a reasonably comprehensive guide to the opening field of renewable energy jobs and programs. Certainly, it provides a way for people to think and act on ways to retrain themselves in the emerging "green economy" and it helps students out there in undergraduate and graduate degrees or in their searches for the "greenest one." By the way, 3E-COE has a big fat blurb on page 242! Nicely done folks. Keep it up!

The impact of "No Impact Man"

This is a guest post by Penn State Environmental Society president, John Stevenson. John involves himself in the major sustainability and natural environmental justice initiatives at Penn State. He is also an extant member of 3E-COE. Enjoy

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I think that No Impact Man by Colin Beavan is the most important environmental book of our generation.

Other books offer critiques of our current way of life, tackling the lack of community and active citizenship, the gospel of consumption or the way we work. Beavan writes with knowledge of these histories and focused studies, but I think he knew that we needed something else. We needed a personal, accessible, honest narrative about a different way to live, and that’s what he wrote. Upon starting the project, he was not an expert in anything environmental but simply a liberal who complained a lot and did little.

No Impact Man is not a how-to guide. There are other books out there on how to cook and find local food, reduce your waste and use low-carbon transportation. This is the story of a family’s journey towards reducing their impact on the world, one step at a time.

Beavan describes his personal strategy and experiences such as the frustration of washing clothes in their bathtub, getting his wife off coffee and having limited hours to work from solar electricity. He also recounts the joys of no-TV, the meditative benefits of bread baking, spending more time with his family and becoming a social hub for his friends. The Beavans break their own rules sometimes, deal with the guilt, and have family disputes, but these only add to their humanity and make it easier to identify with them.

Beavan also offers up concise descriptions of issues which involve all consumers. These essentially outline his motivation for various lifestyle changes and cover a number of key points about where the American herd is going. The most striking fact to me was that Americans spend 5 work-months per year either in their cars or paying for them. Is this love affair satisfying? Or worth that much time? He covers externalities, the urgency of the environmental crisis and questions the typical definitions of progress and growth, not in an academic way, but in a very tangible oh-my-god-we-need-to-change-the-status-quo-rapidly way.

I can’t emphasis enough how accessible and straight forward this book is compared to every other environmental or lifestyle book I’ve read. He recognizes complexities and difficult issues like nuclear power, political change and the job transition necessary in coal towns, but he doesn’t get bogged down in them. He goes straight for the heart in discussing the difficulty of individual behavior change and examining our life priorities. Beavan suggests that, “It feels better, we think, to go in the wrong direction than to feel we don't understand our true direction.”

I would highly-recommend this book to people at every stage of environmental awareness and action. It will teach you something, it’s well documented and it’s a good kick in the rear for us to take the world situation seriously and recognize our personal power. 25 pages of it are available for preview on Google Books. Check it out.

- John T. Stevenson

Mark Schapiro at Penn State

Today Jackie Edmondson and I went to see Mark Schapiro, long-time environmental reporter for The Nation, Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's (the index is awesome) held at the Penn Stater. He gave a really quite interesting talk on how the United States' lack of environmental regulation is actually causing the U.S. to lag economically. In short, the European Union's comprehensive rigor regarding the natural environment is driving innovation the world over.

The E.U. is the largest single economy in the world. With a population of 500,000,000 people dispersed in 27 nations combined into a single economic and political entity, they have enormous influence. Regulators within it can transform the market by demanding that business and industry change. They do this in a number of ways that, so far as I understand it, fall under the "Precautionary Principle" which assumes that a chemical is guilty until proven innocent. It is a standard in government policy that says that we need to see ample evidence that an action, chemical, or product will not harm humans and, by extension, the government. At Rio in 1992, the "precautionary approach" was worded as follows:

Principle 15

In order to protect the environment, the precautionary approach shall be widely applied by States according to their capabilities. Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures to prevent environmental degradation.

This wording is a bit confusing. I'll try to state it more simply:

We want to protect the environment.
We will apply the precautionary approach broadly.
However, it will be enforced according to consituent states' ability to enforce it.
Where threats are serious or irreversible, scientific uncertainty will not postpone cost-effective measures that prevent environmental degradation.

The Wingspread Conference defines the precautionary principle as follows:

When an activity raises threats of harm to human health or the environment, precautionary measures should be taken even if some cause and effect relationships are not fully established scientifically. In this context the proponent of an activity, rather than the public, should bear the burden of proof. The process of applying the precautionary principle must be open, informed and democratic and must include potentially affected parties. It must also involve an examination of the full range of alternatives, including no action.

This is more or less the opposite to what the U.S. has (more on that some other time). In the U.S., we the public have to prove that a chemical is guilty and we carry the burden of its costs, not the originator of the chemical.

Yes. That's crazy.

What does this mean for us in the U.S.? Schapiro illustrated his argument using cosmetics. The E.U. has demanded that cosmetics be safe and free of cancer-causing agents. We do not. Who gets the cancerous lipstick, mascara, etc.? We do. Who gets genetically modified organisms (GMO) to eat? Us.

GMOs may be safe but their effect on the larger environment and agriculture was not considered in the U.S. in 1992. Who eats them? Us. Not Europe in lots of cases. Whose agriculture suffers? Ours. Who can't eat? Lots of people who might otherwise eat American produce. [Note: There is a lot more to this and I don't want to paint industrial agriculture nicely here. But notice that because of GMO's, the American farmer is further blocked from selling his goods and subsidized by the government in a command economy scenario.] There are more examples. Toys. All kinds of plastics.

Suffice it to say that regulators could do a lot more to drive a much more potent green revolution in the U.S. But the whole structure of American capital markets and the government stands in the way, from the Department of Agriculture and its tight relationship with so-called agri-business companies, and members of congress who are in their pockets. The iron triangle there is behind the times and we the people suffer for it. But if we can get good regulation, we can change this. Schapiro paraphrased Anne Marie Slaughter from New World Order: "Regulators are the new diplomats." Let's influence them with sound evidence and good reasoning. Let's change this stuff. I don't want to be a dump and I don't want my kid's world to be a dump.

As educators, I think we need to be activists and not just sit down because the government says so. We are regulated so much that it's painful. Educators are supposed to serve the common good for our common welfare on our common land and in our common water. Surely allowing us, our children, our neighbors, and our food to be poisoned is antithetical to all of those things.

If you are interested in reading more of Schapiro (I am), you can get his book, Exposed: The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products.