Sustainable Bellingham Website

We are in the process of a major update to our website, and are excited about what we have in store to share with you all. Meanwhile the site is currently down.

In the meantime, this is a good time to explore our other online presences.
First, check out our presence at the Post-Carbon Institute's Relocalization network:
http://www.relocalize.net/groups/bellingham

Here you can register as members and participate with us interactively via blogs, forums, Events listings, and News items. You can also explore what other groups in the network are doing. You don't have to be registered to browse these pages, but you must register to participate... http://www.relocalize.net/user/register&destination=node/1274
and then join the Sustainable Bellingham group.

Second, our wiki pages are still up, at least for now. The main sections of our wiki are the CommunityInventory and the SustainabilityDocumentationProject. The CommunityInventory is a project to collect information about local community groups and resources involved in the development of sustainable living in our bioregion. Our SustainabilityDocumentationProject is an ever-growing archive of great articles on the subject of sustainability, collected here for your convenience, and divided into 18 categories.
http://sustainablebellingham.org/wiki/wikka.php?wakka=Home

By the way...if there are people out there who'd like to pitch in to help us get the new website up and running, please let us know!

David MacLeod
Sustainable Bellingham Web Team and Vision Team

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Quote of the Week
“What a way to go: Life at the End of Empire is making it's way through the community as a living room showing and discussion group phenomenon."
- Clare Fogelsong, City of Bellingham Environmental Resources Manager


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Zero Waste Workshop
Thursday, January 10th, 9am-1:30pm
Broadway Hall, 1300 Broadway, Bellingham

Toward Zero Waste: A workshop in sustainable business practices
Join a leadership group of local Zero Waste pioneers including Ryzex, Nature's Path, Samuel's Furniture and La Fiamma, (many of whom say achieving the first 80% of waste reduction is fairly simple and extremely profitable), for a 'how-to' workshop. We promise to provide you with the specific information you need, and lots of promotion for your business, so that you can reduce costs AND waste, and help move our recycling rates in Whatcom County up to a level more consistent with this community's high environmental values, (meaning let's re-set the bar with this one too)!

Due to some exciting new opportunities we are postponing this workshop from November 29th to January 10th. Stay tuned for details.

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Progressive Documentary Movie Club Forming Now—Moved here recently with my collection of Progressive Documentaries which I would like to share/watch with others. If you would like to receive notice of what is showing when, please e-mail me and tell me what evening works best for you. My house holds 20 so at any screening, the first 20 to reserve a chair are welcome. Spread the word. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it


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Wise Awakening
Special Holiday Hours

Diana LaDue Hand has been very supportive in helping to promote Sustainable Bellingham events, so for this week with fewer events for our calendar, they're getting a free promo here. The staff at Wise Awakening are there to serve you by offering excellent service, amazing gift ideas, new products, gift wrapping and more. Stop by and enjoy the beautiful Holiday atmosphere!
Mon - Weds 10AM to 6PM, Thurs & Fri 10-7PM, Sat. 10-6PM, Sun. 23rd: 11-4PM, Dec. 24th : 10-4PM.


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Recommended Reading & Watching

The Story of Stuff
interactive web video with Annie Leonard
From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world. It'll teach you something, it'll make you laugh, and it just may change the way you look at all the stuff in your life forever.
* Highly recommended - this is becoming an extremely popular web presentation.*
http://www.storyofstuff.com/

The Story of Stuff
By Robert Weissman, ZNet.org
An article about the video presenation above.
"The Story of Stuff with Annie Leonard" is an engaging new short film that explains the "materials economy" in 20 fun-filled minutes. Yes, fun-filled. The core themes of the Story of Stuff are:
1. The world is running up against resource limits.
2. Corporate globalization is premised on externalizing costs - making someone other than the companies that make things pay for the environmental and human costs of production.
3. The corporate economy rests on the artificial creation of need - "the golden arrow of consumption."
4. Things can be different. And they must be made to be different.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/120907E.shtml

The Perfect Ark
by Rick Dubrow, Cascadia Weekly
This green builder doesn’t build house boats. No, the typical home in these parts simply doesn’t float. Not a big deal, unless predictions abound, then come to pass, that the waters may rise. Oooops! Predictions do abound with just such a forecast. All this talk about the perfect storm, brought to you by global warming and peak oil. Water is expected to rise.... So what can we do right here, right now, to design and build our way towards addressing this perfect storm? If these predictions do come true, are you working on your ark? (And surely you know I’m speaking of an ark in a figurative, not a literal, manner! I’m referring to a vehicle – a strategy or path - that will help take you to the other side of what will be.) Well, then, let’s imagine a perfect ark.......
http://www.a1builders.ws/rss/cascadia_weekly_035.pdf

Journey to Permaculture - A Win-Win Solution
by Merry Teesdale, Whatcom Watch, December 2007
It has been said that permaculture will save the world and at the very least it will design a greener, healthier planet. The great attraction is its positivism because, wherever the techniques are implemented, they lead to benefits for us as well as other living things. Furthermore, anyone can practice it.
http://www.whatcomwatch.org/php/WW_open.php?id=877

Kyoto @ 10
Cascadia Weekly special edition, Dec. 12, 2007
A look back at the Kyoto Protocol (large pdf warning)
http://www.cascadiaweekly.com/pdfs/issues/200750.pdf

Bellingham Herald Blog Discusses Peak Oil
Read and respond to John Rawlins' letter to Jared Paben, the Herald's transportation reporter.
http://blogs.bellinghamherald.com/index.php?blog=7&title=reader_study_media_don_t_discuss_future_&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1

Fossil Fuels at Peak, Part 1: A Personal Peak Oil Discovery Process
by John Rawlins, retired nuclear physicist, currently teaching Physics at Whatcom Community College (May 2006)
.. my worst fears are being realized, and my faith in any government "solution" is at absolute zero for this country. We consume far too much energy, and two-thirds of what we consume depends on fuels that are no longer reliable: oil and natural gas. Of these, oil is the most fundamental: almost everything that moves uses an oil derivative for fuel...
Part 1a:
http://www.raisethehammer.org/index.asp?id=319
Part 1b: One of the more bizarre aspects of this entire discovery process is the reactions we experience from others when we try to share our knowledge... These reactions helped us decide to change our retirement plans - we will stay right where we are rather than move into the city of Bellingham where obtaining enough food and staying warm in the winter could be real problems a few years from now. Cities that do not plan and begin preparations for this future could soon become very unpleasant places to live.
http://www.raisethehammer.org/index.asp?id=336

The peak oil crisis: the NY Times drops the first shoe
by Tom Whipple
...The New York Times and the Wall St. Journal have taken a major step forward by admitting for essentially the first time in front-page stories that the U.S. is going to face a big problem in the next few years. Neither however has connected the dots.

Nowhere does the Times remind us that the U.S. is now importing two-thirds of its oil consumption each day and that a drop of a few percent in daily flow is likely to cause pandemonium at the pumps as it did back in the 1970’s. Neither paper has as yet mustered the editorial courage to discuss the 800-pound gorilla, oil depletion, which every year quietly eats away 4 or 5 percent of our oil supply – the life blood of modern civilization.

Until our major newspapers begin discussing in a frank and open manner what will soon be the first major crisis of the 21st Century, the U.S. Congress is doomed to empty posturing and debating energy red herrings. It is clear that most have no clue as to what is about to befall us.
http://www.energybulletin.net/38385.html

Solvitur Ambulando
by John Michael Greer, Dec. 5, 2007
...What we do know is that certain things are not working just now, and need to be changed; and that certain other things that still work may not keep working for long, and having a Plan B in place would be sensible. It’s possible, of course, to come up with a grandiose plan to fix all of the current problems at once, along with the changes we expect to come later on, but this may not actually be the best option. Rather, it may well be more constructive to encourage as many different responses to our predicament as possible, in the hope that one or more of them will work well enough to become standard practice in the future. It may also work better to encourage piecemeal responses that focus on narrowly defined dimensions of our predicament, and can be implemented on a small scale before moving to a larger one, instead of trying to change everything all at once. That is to say, our best option may be to embrace an adaptive approach to the situation, and then simply try to adapt.

Solvitur ambulando is an old bit of Latin that still gets a little literary use these days. Taken literally, it means “it is solved by walking;” a more idiomatic English translation might be “you’ll find the answer as you go.” An adaptive approach to the crisis of industrial society might well take this as a watchword. Next week’s post will focus on a specific, and distinctly down-to-earth, example of how this can work.
http://www.energybulletin.net/38227.html

Agriculture: the price of adaptation
by John Michael Greer, Dec. 12, 2007
...Unlike air and water, the vast majority of the food we eat comes from human activity rather than the free operation of natural cycles, and the human population has gone so far beyond the limits of what surviving natural ecosystems can support that attempting to fall back on wild foods at this point would be a recipe for dieoff and ecological catastrophe. At the same time, most of the world’s population today survives on food produced using fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources such as mineral phosphate and ice age aquifers. As the end of the fossil fuel age approaches, other arrangements have to be made.

...Still, this is one of those places where one of the central themes of recent Archdruid Report posts – the theme of adaptation – is particularly useful. If today’s industrial agriculture were to keep chugging away along its present course into the future, the results could be disastrous. One of the few things that can be said for certain, though, is that this sort of straight-line extrapolation is the least likely trajectory for the agriculture of the future.
http://www.energybulletin.net/38349.html

Al Gore's Nobel Prize speech - video link
http://nobelprize.org/cgi-bin/asxgen.asx?id=796&type=award&year=2007

Economic growth and the global economy at Bali
by Jan Lundberg, Culture Change
Dear Mr. Steiner, UN Under-Secretaty General, United Nations Environment Programme,
Let me offer you praise as well as a criticism while you represent Mother Earth in Bali for the UN. Your statement (in the ENN article dated Dec. 6, "Silver Lining to Climate Change - Green Jobs"): "Without a strong and decisive emission reductions regime, the transformational foundations being laid today could prove to be built on sand tomorrow. We need to change the subsidies, tax structures, and accounting methods that permit the "externalization" of severe environmental impacts so they are factored into the costs of doing business on this planet" is excellent.
However, when you say, "...the transition to a global economy that is not only resource efficient and without the huge emissions of greenhouse gases, but one that also restores environmental and social values," you undermine your other statement. This global economy is possible only through world trade predicated upon affordable, abundant petroleum fuels that are dwindling and subject to supply cut-off and market pandemonium. Also, the idea of a healthy local ecosystem populated by consumers needing goods from distant lands is a complete contradiction, and it goes against everything one should value for socially just production conditions. The refusal of hapless consumers to participate in their local communities for sustainable economic health is mainly a result of transnational corporations' hold on governments and academia...
http://culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=136&Itemid=2

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Events and recommended reading compiled by David MacLeod
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