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(click on image to see source geotech article)
By Jeff Conant at Alternet:
If we learned anything from the World Water Forum it should be that the privatization model has failed and a grassroots movement is needed:
"On the last day of the Forum I spoke at length with a reporter from Agence France Press who had come to look for stories of appropriate technology and small-scale, community-driven development -- of rainwater catchment and ecological sanitation and village-level water purification and the revival of traditional water management strategies. He didn't find them. So I pointed him to Rajendra Singh, of Rajasthan, India, whose work with villagers over three decades brought seven rivers back to life. "We learned to value traditional knowledge," says Rajendra, "where knowledge is shared for the good of all people and not for the good of some people to keep others down. Knowledge of the land's contours, of the land's capacity to hold water, and of the people's capacity to manage it -- geo-cultural knowledge. So, we have revived seven rivers in Rajasthan with the participation of people who were thought of as poor, as illiterate -- and this not only brought the rivers back; it has brought back the meaning to their lives."
I've outlined a local strategy on my November post. This is a method implemented by strategies developed by North East Trees and the Green Street model.
Dual LA and San Gabriel watershed basins - Due to pressures of urbanization both rivers have been highly modified with dams and concrete channeling resulting in a loss of habitat and human access to the rivers. Diversions of water for use in groundwater recharge, significant discharges of wastewaters including sewage treatment plant reclaimed waters, and non-point source contributions such as urban runoff have dramatically changed the natural hydrology of the rivers.Watersheds sustain rivers and aquifers which sustain life, upon which human settlements rely. The issue is discussed at the International Rivers website, and centers on the impact of dams. The most recent resource information from them is as follows:
Track Major RIS Sites on Google Earth
Dams suspected of triggering earthquakes are strewn over all six continents. To learn about individual cases, see the website above and click on the individual pins for more info.
New Factsheet on Reservoir-Induced Seismicity
"A Faultline Runs Through It: Exposing the Hidden Dangers of Dam-Induced Earthquakes"
Besides posing a major risk to dams, scientists are increasingly certain that earthquakes can be triggered by the dams themselves. Globally, scientists believe that there are over 100 instances, strewn over six continents, of dam reservoirs inducing earthquakes. The most serious case could be the magnitude-7.9 Sichuan earthquake in China in May 2008, which some experts believe may have been induced by the Zipingpu Dam.
The global economic and environmental changes are swiftly altering our world in ways that we can't anticipate or plan for, so how can human society deal with these fundamental shifts? The way we inhabit our homes and cities will need to change from old patterns based on manufacture to a new pattern driven by efficient energy and denser urban core. Many ways exist for creating infrastructure that integrates multiple sustainable practices.. Atlantic author Richard Florida outlines a scenario by which the US (and the world) can reinvent its infrastructure to implement these new paradigms in urban design, capturing new opportunities for regeneration, growth and sustainability. This will have to address the issues of climate change, as well as completely change our destructive model of "growth", as pointed out by Pulitzer-Prize winning writer Thomas L. Friedman.
Patterns of energy capture follow not only urban needs, but also follow opportunities for capturing natural energy resources, such as solar power, for example, by appropriating unprotected Federal lands for use. Southern California has immense acreage of federal land, some of which is claimed by corporate entities for this purpose. Like the California water infrastructure, this creates a large footprint upon which the urban centers can draw. Like the old water rights claim system , this infrastructure is a patchwork of energy sources owned by the entities that file land claims, i.e., private profit from public lands (click on image to enlarge)
This new infrastructure interlaces with existing transportation infrastructure to create business opportunities, such as those outlined in Edison's Distribution and Logistics Profile (pdf file). Energy capture and distribution will align with existing systems while they create new nodes. In this manner, the entire system becomes more efficient and less wasteful. For this reason, it's vitally important to create more intelligent SYSTEMS that reinforce sustainable goals.
(click on image for larger view)
Implementing sustainable development in urban and suburban areas will require developing new benchmarks for areas and regions as opposed to "scoring" specific amenities in a building or a site. It is a more systemic, or comprehensive view, of a local cluster of structures and landscape. This goes well beyond current LEED guideline developments.
A method used in "smart zoning" is called an urban transect, and the sustainable version of this approach is called a green transect. How does this transect (mapping areas and systems relative to the distance from an established point) reflect a scale of sustainable, or "green" building strategies?
There needs to be a ranking based upon the development scale. This ranking could say that the best method to build small homes is to use simple stratgies such a solar orientation, building form, conservation in landscape drainage, and so forth.
Larger projects and major structures should be required to produce their own energy and recycle all water and waste, or become part of a system of local recycling with 100% recapture. In other words, it is a set of benchmarks that are imposed depending upon the scale of the impact of the development, or its "footprint". This would be evaluated in much the same way that an Environmental Impact Report is done now, except that there would be very specific requirements for the system's energy and water performance. Very large projects would need to provide a net surplus of power and water, with no carbon production outside the system; in other words, Regenerative.
"The alternative (to geoengineering) is the acceptance of a massive natural cull of humanity and a return to an Earth that freely regulates itself but in the hot state." --Dr James Lovelock, August 2008
Alternet: Australia faces collapse
Tom Dispatch: Burning Questions
Extreme drought means desertification, especially if it lasts for hundreds of years, as the recent NOAA-led study found (see NOAA stunner: Climate change "largely irreversible for 1000 years," with permanent Dust Bowls in Southwest and around the globe). The regions that NOAA identifies as facing permanent Dust Bowls:
* U.S. Southwest
* Southeast Asia
* Eastern South America
* Southern Europe
* Southern Africa
* Northern Africa
* Western Australia
To visualize this, here's a map from the World Resources Institute, Information and Analysis tools
The point of this map is to show that not only is desertification happening, which destroys water resources (watershed and aquifers) and food production for human societies, it is spreading across that horizontal global band of historical development of civilization. Understanding the biggest threat to industrialized countries that are overdrawing their local resources is to view this through Jared Diamond's chronicle of the expansion of human civilization that took place because of plentiful resources across the millennia, in his book "Guns, Germs and Steel".
It will hit the highly developed societies the hardest, endangering not only human civilization but planetary systems of life. Diamond further documents the consequences of human depletion of resources in "Collapse", as well as the choices that human society must make very quickly. Humanity now faces the unwinding of the civilization bubble, and our choices lie in how we manage this without further devastation across the globe. Further discussions of "far-ahead" thinking is at the Long Now Foundation.
Art is about itself. An excellent article here - "Why do we need art?" - about its roots in human celebration and expression in all ways. It connects people by "making special" the experience of being in a place.
This experience of a place is about the haptic (spatial, tactile, acoustic and light) dimension of physical space. It's grounded in the location and orientation of a site in an urban or rural environment. The place itself is part of a larger ecosystem and infrastructure, and the meaning of architecture is to make that experience coherent, not chaotic and arbitrary. Ways this has been addressed throughout human history is shown in the book, "Body Memory and Architecture" by By Kent C. Bloomer and Charles Willard Moore, as I pointed out in my first post here, Starting Out.
Our perceptions are also explored in this article "This is Your Brain on Architecture".
The organizing principles of architecture began with practical site constraints and protection from the elements; it is part of the land, an earth science. This later evolved into expressions of larger monumental structures that expressed the central community organizing principle, basically churches, temples and pyramids. The euro-centric history of the built environment is the history of churches built over several lifetimes, usually because most early cities and towns had homes/farms, stores and the central church, which expressed their community values and allowed them to congregate. Then came schools, specialty civic buildings and libraries, all still "monumental" to express continuity and stability. Banks became temples of commerce. Industrial revolution brought factories and weapons manufacture (no more ironsmithing those old flintlock muskets and cannons) and an explosion of building types in now-urban areas, including trains and shipping transport. Automobile production finally destroyed everything, thankyouverymuch Henry Ford.
Portovenere, Italy Sept. 2000
It's Twelfth Night - the night of epiphany, of recognition and awakening. From the darkest days of the year we need to look towards the light, celebrated around the globe, regardless of creed, in different cultures down through the eons with fire, candles, light and music.
We can choose to follow these luminous trails to a better future through intelligent crafting of solutions to the consequences of human habitation on earth. The dimensions of the resource problems are clear - see TED - and our financial challenges will force creative and highly streamlined efforts in rebuilding a new kind of infrastructure that creates instead of consumes.Walking in the path of natural capital - see the footprint network! - following the trails of nature's processes and becoming part of this ecosystem in balance again, is crucial to a future for all of life. Seeing the big picture and taking the high road will get us there, leaving behind the narrow and cynical view and the empty grasping of coin. Nature is not to be feared or conquered, but embraced and joined, because it's our world and our selves calling for stewardship.
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