Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse

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Although I have numerous tasks to get on with, right now I can barely drag myself away from Feasta’s latest book Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse.  The book draws together many ideas developed over the last few decades and applies these to a single question – how can we resolve the complexity of inter-related issues we find ourselves in?

It proposes that the financial crisis affecting the world's richest countries since 2008 is a turning point in human history because it begins an era wherein economies will tend to decrease rather than grow. Incomes will decline because the natural resources required for growth - particularly oil, the lifeblood of the world economy - can no longer be extracted in increasing quantities. Why? Because the rising global demand for cheap fossil fuels is now head up against a static and eventually depleting supply.

Indeed, as this book shows, the financial crash itself was due to this irresistible force. Its collection of twenty-seven essays by well-known international authors, all leading thinkers in their fields, extrapolates out from this fact across interlinked areas: Energy Availability, Business, Money and Finance, New Ways of Using the Land, Dealing with Climate Change, Changing the Way we Live, Changing the Way we Think and Ideas for Action.

The solutions it puts forward involve changes to our economy and financial system, but they go much further: this substantial, wide-ranging book also looks at the changes needed in how we think, how we use the land and how we relate to others, particularly those where we live.

While it doesn’t discount the complexity of the problems we face, Fleeing Vesuvius is practical and fundamentally optimistic. It can arm readers with the confidence and knowledge they need to develop new, workable alternatives to the old-style expanding economy and its supporting systems. It’s a book that can be read all the way through or used as a resource to dip in and out of.

Timely, practical, and fundamentally optimistic, this is a must-read for anyone concerned with reducing our risk of environmental and societal collapse.

http://www.feasta.org/ Is gradually uploading a free online edition of this book and welcomes comments on each section as they appear online.

Freshwater cleanup urgent

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The Fresh Start for Fresh Water package of reforms announced by the Government in May, came out of the Land & Water Forum, which recommended these principles: More national direction; Limits on the resource; Good management practice; Efficient allocation and Transferable water permits.

To its credit the NPS uses an integrated land and catchment management model, with councils expected to work closely with local iwi and communities to develop ‘broad values-based narratives before focusing these down to actual standards based on: Safeguarding ecosystems and indigenous species; Reducing and avoiding over-allocation; Improving and maximising efficient water allocation and use; and Protecting wetlands.

By providing additional certainty around freshwater impacts, the NPS is expected to create greater efficiency in the resource consenting process, while at the same time  avoiding the ‘salami’ approach where a lot of small water uptakes and effects ramp up to being too much with regional councils and territorial authorities expected to work together.

However, the Green Party goes much further with the following urgent plan to clean up our rivers and lakes:

1. Implement clear, robust standards for clean water that set limits to the amount of water being taken from rivers and lakes, and the amount of pollution going into them. This will include a minimum standard for intensive agricultural practice, which is one of the main causes of our current water quality decline.

2. Introduce a fair charge for irrigation water through creating incentives for the efficient use of water by putting a fair price on its commercial use. This will help stop over-use of our precious water resources. A charge of 10 cents per 1,000 litres would raise $370-570 million dollars per year of which we would use $138 million to fund river clean-up projects by farmers and councils.

3. Support water clean-up initiatives by providing financial assistance to farmers and councils to help them clean up our waterways. This will create jobs that help the environment by funding people to work with farmers to fence and plant their streams to keep stock and pollution out of rivers. In addition, by providing financial assistance to councils to upgrade their sewage treatment plants so that wastewater no longer pollutes our rivers.

The Power of Sunshine by Chris Keenan

Amid all the talk about the need to exploit renewable energy, very little is being done to encourage the cleanest and most potent new energy source of all - our homes.

Just why is it we rarely see solar electric panels on our roofs? It's odd. The cost of solar keeps plummeting, Australia is on to it, it's rapidly expanding overseas and we even export some of the technology.

The answer is that New Zealand is almost alone in the Western world by not having the legislation that makes home energy production feasible. Recently a powerful new group, Pure Advantage, was started by the likes of Sir Stephen Tindall, Rob Fyfe and Chris Liddell to frame the economic argument for a greener economy. More

Restoring local plant communities

Forest Flora uniquely eco-source seeds and raise plants from the Waikato and Coromandel by focusing on ecological processes and the careful restoration of local plant communities. 

Lowland plant communities are often highly modified and Forest Flora take a lot of trouble to piece together evidence of how these may once have looked. They know their areas well and that knowledge of natural patterns is a major asset. 

By starting from the perspective of restoring natural patterns and processes, the benefits are biodiversity as well as low maintenance because plants chosen suit the site, rather than modifying the ground to suit plants. And they plan for regeneration and succession to taller, slower growing and more shade tolerant species over time. 

Wayne Bennet, Forest Flora co-director, is currently the coordinator for Ecosourced Waikato, a project manager forWaikato Rivercare and is on the committee of Ngaruawahia Action Group. He has a fascination for wild places, natural systems and native plants and animals.

Salad Gardens need little space

Last spring desperate for some easy to pick salad greens I came up with the novel idea of creating small salad gardens in ex-wool bags. We've got an overgrown subtropical back garden, shaded by bamboo, avocado trees and banana palms – I wanted somewhere sunnier and within easy reach of the kitchen.

So here's my garden recipe:

• Buy bags inexpensively from Mitre 10
• Line with recycled cardboard - you can get this from Mitre 10's outdoor bins
• Fill with a mix of compost, and potting mix or vegetable garden growing mix
• Add some blood and bone
• Plant seedlings and water several times a week in the summer

Our 'wool bag' gardens are in a spot that gets sun 70% of the day. We pick rocket, mizuma, silverbeet, lettuces, basil, spring onions, chives, kale, cress, nasturtiums, puha, parsley, and coriander all year round! Along with cherry tomatoes, peas and strawberries in the summer.

Eco-retrofitting goes beyond Zero Carbon

Genuine sustainability will require more than 'ecological restoration'. 'Zero carbon' and 'zero waste', at best, leave things as they are - we need to go beyond zero to development that delivers positive impacts. 

Achieving truly massive positive gains calls for a new approach to the planning, design and management of our built environment. Design and planning guru Janis Birkeland presents the innovative new paradigm of 'Positive Development' in which the built environment provides greater life quality and health.

Birkeland makes the case that with a different form of design that focuses on what we can do to achieve positive outcomes, not on what we should not do, development itself can become a 'sustainability solution'. The cornerstone of this new paradigm is nothing less than the eco-retrofitting of the vast urban fabric we already inhabit.

Birkeland presents a revolutionary new tool called SmartMode to achieve this end. This challenging book throws down the gauntlet to anyone working in or studying the areas of sustainable development, planning, architecture or the built environment to rethink their current ideas and practices. Review of Positive Development: From Vicious Cycles to Virtuous Cycles

Wind farms need a holistic approach

Why are we dealing with wind farms on a case-by-case basis rather than through a comprehensive approach to the entire country in terms of the best places - landscape sensitivities as well as wind generation - to place these?

In Scotland the government has funded heritage and conservation agencies to look at the entire country in terms of high to medium to low sensitivity for wind farms. Assessing these on heritage, geomorphology, ecology and so on. A major sifting process.

The success of this approach is shown in developers now being more focused and pragmatic about where they propose wind farms.

By contrast, in NZ we have wind farm proposals bogged down in the Environment Court, and in the past a cluttering effect as accumulated wind farms appear in a single area. 

The Environment Court's decision that a wind farm proposal has to be considered not just on its own landscape effects but on the 'cumulative' effects of all wind farms being proposed in one area seeks to prevent this. However, in response to this ruling we now have developers rushing to get in first, often to the detriment of the reason for their proposal in the first place: to produce wind power as efficiently and cost-effectively as possible.

Another issue often raised is the question of large versus small wind farms, unfortunately in practice it is not that simple. For example, the Te Awhitu wind farm - once officially on hold because its small scale was considered not cost-effective enough - is an 18 megawatt farm that caused enormous opposition at Waiuku. By contrast another wind farm - HMR to the south of the Waikato River - planned at 520 megawatts, and yet the level of opposition has been much less. To generate the amount of power from HMR you'd have to put up with 35 communities like Waiuku in anguish around the country.

So this is a complex situation with a panorama of issues, and what we seem to lack right now is national leadership from government in getting the best outcomes possible from our country's wind energy potential.