“To introduce our special guest: Tony Hayward has spent his entire 28-year career at BP and held the position of CEO of the company for the last three years. On April 20, BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig exploded, killing 11 men and causing the worst environmental disaster in U.S. history. Mr. Hayward handed in his resignation this summer, noting that ‘for the good of BP, and particularly the good of BP in the U.S., it’s the right thing to do for me to step down.’”

“Please welcome Tony Hayward.”

(See his appearance here: http://www.facebook.com/tnsmonona.)

Monona Public Library “Get out of Jail Free” card. Three prizes worth $10 each.

Winners: Deb Vacha of Monona, Carmela Diosana of Madison, Rob Everhart of Monona.

Signed copy of EnAct: Steps to Greener Living, by Dr. Sonya Newenhouse. Worth $15.

Winner: Trevor Sisson of Monona.

Monona Bait & Ice Cream Gift Certificate. Worth $20.

Winner: Todd Kleibor of Monona.

Aldo Leopold Nature Center membership. Worth $35.
Winner: Debbie Andreas of Monona.

Madison Gas & Electric Energy Conservation Package. Worth $36.
Winner: Jim Billmeyer of Verona.

Three subscriptions to the Herald-Independent. Worth $37 each.
Winners: Iris Patterson of Monona, Janet Zimmerman of Madison, Pat Howell of Monona,

Savings Bond from locally-owned and operated Monona State Bank. Worth $50.
Winner: Lyle Harbort of Monona.

Crema Cafe gift card. Worth $50.
Winner: Erica Munson of Monona.

Monona Motors gift certificate. Worth $50.
Winner: Kristy Schaefer of Verona.

Earth Machine Compost Bin. Worth $52.
Winner: Alex Grant of Madison.

A “Garden Family” Membership from Olbrich Botanical Gardens. Worth $55.
Winner: Mabel Kuharski of Monona.

Energy Star 3-Way CFL Torchiere Lamp from Madison Gas and Electric. Worth $60.
Winner: The Schallens of Madison.

Two-hour garden consultation from Permaculturist Kate Heiber-Cobb of Sustainability on Stilts, LLC. Worth $120. Our raffle brochure listed a one-hour consult, but Kate upped it to a two-hour consult.
Winner: Joan Andrusz of City of Monona.

MSR MiniWorks EX Water Filter. Worth $90.
Winner: Peter McKeever of Monona.

Willy Street Co-op recycled cotton grocery tote filled with a bunch of locally produced products. Our raffle brochure listed a value of $100, but Willy Street upped it to $111.
Winner: Paul Kachelmeier of Monona.

Four shares of MGEE stock. Worth fluctuates, but at noon on August 30, the four shares were worth $148.88.
Winner: Sigurd Midelfort of Monona.

Sustain Dane Tandem Rain Barrel System. Worth $160.
Winner: Paul Moderacki of Mukwonago.

Third Prize: Osprey Kestrel 48 Backpack. Donated by Erehwon. Worth $160.
Winner: Sarah Pollpeter of Monona.

Second Prize: Weekly Autumn Share of Two Onion Farm CSA (September and October). Worth $210.
Winner: Kate Heiber-Cobb of Monona.

Grand Prize: The Gary Fisher “Simple City 8” Bicycle with Vapor helmet. From Trek. Worth $1,015.
Winner: The winner is from Cottage Grove. She chose to donate the prize back to The Natural Step Monona! What a generous individual! 

Green Tuesdays, the free series of films, presentations, and conversations on sustainability started by The Natural Step Monona, expands this fall from one Dane County community to five. On Thursday, September 2 at 7:00 p.m., the expansion begins with “Green Tuesdays – The Thursday Edition” at the Middleton Public Library. The event features a screening of the award-winning film The Yes Men Fix the World and a special appearance and apology from Tony Hayward of BP. 

In 2008, we partnered with the Monona Public Library to start Green Tuesdays, and its easily-accessible format of education and discussion has been well-received. In collaboration with sustainability advocates from Cross Plains, Middleton, Mt. Horeb, Cottage Grove, and Oregon, and film festival planners from the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, the Green Tuesdays program was re-organized into a circuit. Each community’s program is on a set date on the calendar. Except for Cottage Grove, which plans to launch in January, all the other communities start up this fall.

“Expanding this to more communities was only natural because more and more people were coming to Green Tuesdays from outside of Monona,” said Dawn Ramin, founder of Oregon Working to Live Sustainably. “Now we will reach more people, reduce the amount of driving, and grow the conversation about sustainability in more communities.”

Explaining the kickoff’s title “Green Tuesdays – The Thursday Edition,” Deb Saeger, Sustainability Committee Chair for the City of Middleton, said, “In September 2008, we began offering Sustainability Seminars on the first Thursday of each month. We’re excited to be partnering with the Green Tuesday communities on this environmental series, but we’re sticking to our first Thursdays – now known as Green Thursdays here in Middleton.” Mt. Horeb’s program will also be on Thursdays. All the other communities offer Tuesday programs.

The Natural Step Monona’s Green Tuesdays remain on the second and fifth Tuesdays of the month, and run from September through May. The Yes Men Fix the World and More Jam, More Jobs will be screened in Monona on September 14.

Molly Schwebach and Peter Boger brought Nelson Institute film festival experience to the collaboration, sharing insights as well as six short student films that will be screened along with the feature films. Said Schwebach, “In fall 2009, students in the Tales from Planet Earth project searched Wisconsin for compelling environmental stories to put on the big screen. We are thrilled to share the resulting films.”

More Jam, More Jobs, a student film that shows one woman’s attempts to convince twelve sororities to buy local products, will be screened at the event along with the documentary feature film The Yes Men Fix the World. This documentary follows two unconventional activists who, in richly humorous ways, impersonate business and government leaders to raise questions about the global harm caused by powerful interests.

“When people see the movie, they’ll understand why we asked Tony Hayward to appear at our event,” said Heather Gates, Executive Director of The Natural Step Monona. “We are hoping for a major announcement about BP.”

To date, more than 632 attendees have shared in this community exchange of information and ideas on sustainable living, and have discussed topics such as Permaculture, walkable communities, backyard berries, composting, Dane County’s groundwater, and urban chickens. Whole Foods has sponsored Monona’s Green Tuesdays since 2009 by providing food and drink.

The series is sponsored by The Natural Step Monona, in collaboration with Oregon Working to Live Sustainably (OWLS), Mount Horeb Area Sustainability Network, RGPL Green Tuesdays (Cross Plains), the City of Middleton Sustainability Committee, Cottage Grove Green Tuesdays, and the Nelson Institute, and is supported by a grant from the Dane County Environmental Council.

To see the calendar for all Green Tuesday and Thursday dates, go to www.tnsmonona.org/green-tuesdays-green-thursdays.

Green Tuesdays – The Thursday Edition: sparking conversation in more communities, more often.
Thursday, September 2, 7:00 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Middleton Public Library, 7425 Hubbard Avenue, Middleton, WI.
Free.

Or you could win an Autumn Season CSA share from Two Onion Farm, an Osprey Kestrel 48 backpack from Erehwon, or a tandem RainReserve rain barrel system from Sustain Dane. One lucky person will win $100 worth of local foods and goods from Willy Street Coop, and another will win four shares of stock from MG&E. A total of twenty-four prizes are part of the All Things Monona Raffle, and you could buy a winning ticket!

The drawing is at the Dream Park Shelter in Winnequah Park. We’ll be there at 6:30 and the drawing starts at 7:30. Tickets are only $5, and may be purchased at the Monona Farmers’ Market on August 22, at Monona Motors (4500 Winnequah Road), at the Dream Park Shelter in the hour leading up to the drawing, or directly from a member you know. You may also contact us at info@tnsmonona.org to purchase tickets.

Proceeds support The Natural Step Monona’s good works in our community and beyond (see About Us/Contact Us to learn about how we make a difference). A total of twenty-four prizes worth about $2,500 will be given to the winning ticket holders. (The “about” is because of the fluctuating value of those four shares of MG&E stock.)

Thank you to the prize donors — businesses, individuals, and organizations — who so generously gave such amazing items for this raffle. Thanks to our members and friends who are selling tickets. Thanks also to everyone who purchased (or will purchase!) tickets — you’re supporting the continued good works of The Natural Step Monona and its volunteer members!

It seems obvious, but sometimes we need to have a bit of fun. To inspire one another to share past actions and planned ones at The Natural Step Monona’s second anniversary party, Jeanie Verschay came up with the idea to pose questions by means of a two big paper trees. Each would pose a question and people could answer by writing on paper “leaves” that were then pasted on the trees.

It was not only fun to create, it was beautiful. We brought the trees out again at our third anniversary party, and then shared them with the public at the Monona Grove Energy & Sustainability Fair in May, slightly altering the first question to fit the audience. See what your friends and neighbors are doing and planning to move toward sustainability.

From the Anniversary parties:

What have you changed as a result of being involved with The Natural Step Monona?

• I picked up litter (child)
• Installed rain barrels, dug up my lawn for a veggie plot, installed an Energy Star toilet!
• Giving classes in ways to go green in your own home
• Installed solar tubes
• Installed (by permit) a composting toilet
• Eat much less food from far away, very little dairy, less coffee
• Use native plants, they require little or no hand watering
• Bought our first compost bin
• Compact fluorescent light bulbs
• Became a one-car family; less driving, more biking; stopped buying paper products (well, almost all J)
• Connected with others for community action
• Have installed a porous driveway
• Sold car, ride bus
• Save mulching materials, hopeful about growing food using less resources
• Front loading washer, installed solar tubes, high efficiency water heater
• My focus has changed from self to community
• Became more aware of green practices
• Reuse of cloth bags at Woodman’s

What plans do you have for future action towards sustainability?

• I could weed. (child)
• Plant more fruit trees, install insulation, educate others when I can
• Get rain barrels and composter, go organic
• Tool co-op or tool lending library
• Bike more, walk more
• Change electric switches to sensor type
• Simplify: Donate “things”& Buy less “stuff!”
• Enjoy each day fully and contemplate nature’s beauty
• Have wind-generated electricity
• Plant a veggie garden
• Explore how to collect/use greywater
• Light rail transit, both Monona and Cottage Grove—integrate a bike route, school to school transport
• Use less, buy less
• Community car/truck in Monona
• Have everyone know and really understand sustainability
• Remembering to bring tote bags for grocery shopping
• Take the bus to work 
• Pull weeds by hand
• Build a habitat for small animals in our backyard
• Solar on roof & pellet stove
• Promote renewable energy
• To work harder to get city to sustainability
• Decrease automotive miles traveled. Someday biodiesel?
• Install solar hot water system

From the Energy and Sustainability Fair:

What have you already done towards creating a more sustainable future?

• I don’t toss my cigarette butts on the ground
• We recycled cell phones
• I compost!
• Buy locally made products, or as close as possible
• Ride my bike to work
• We installed Solar Tubes
• I reliably use cloth bags
• I grow my own tomatoes

What plans do you have for future action towards sustainability?

• I will ride my bike more often (child)
• I will recycle forever (child)
• No more cars or rods (child)
• Garage to Greenhouse: Become Sustainable before the Oil Runs Out book project by David and Julie Marca
• Grow food in schools for use in school lunch program and teach children about growing food
• I will use Permaculture techniques in our yard.
• To remember to bring tote bags for grocery shopping
• Recycle & turn it off
• Composting
• Use a push mower
• Are planting a veggie garden… want to explore how to collect/use greywater
• To have everyone I know really understand sustainability

By Bill McKibben (Cross Posted from TomDispatch.com)

Try to fit these facts together:

• According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record.
• A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.
• Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.
• And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t do less than they could have — they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.

I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I’ve spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.

For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund. We owe them a great debt, and not just for their hard work. We owe them a debt because they did everything the way you’re supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and compromised at every turn.

By the time they were done, they had a bill that only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry that if you listened closely you could actually hear the oinking. They bent over backwards like Soviet gymnasts. Senator John Kerry, the legislator they worked most closely with, issued this rallying cry as the final negotiations began: “We believe we have compromised significantly, and we’re prepared to compromise further.”

And even that was not enough.  They were left out to dry by everyone — not just Reid, not just the Republicans. Even President Obama wouldn’t lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in the fight.

The result: total defeat, no moral victories.

Now What?

So now we know what we didn’t before: making nice doesn’t work. It was worth a try, and I’m completely serious when I say I’m grateful they made the effort, but it didn’t even come close to working. So we better try something else.

Step one involves actually talking about global warming.  For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else — energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that “green jobs” polled better than “cutting carbon.”

No, really?  In the end, though, all these focus-group favorites are secondary.  The task at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone — beginning with the president — to start explaining that basic fact at every turn.

It is the heat, and also the humidity.  Since warm air holds more water than cold, the atmosphere is about 5% moister than it was 40 years ago, which explains the freak downpours that seem to happen someplace on this continent every few days.

It is the carbon — that’s why the seas are turning acid, a point Obama could have made with ease while standing on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s bad that it’s black out there,” he might have said, “but even if that oil had made it safely ashore and been burned in our cars, it would still be wrecking the oceans.” Energy independence is nice, but you need a planet to be energy independent on.

Mysteriously enough, this seems to be a particularly hard point for smart people to grasp. Even in the wake of the disastrous Senate non-vote, the Nature Conservancy’s climate expert told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, “We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth, and show how it matters in people’s everyday lives.” Translation: ordinary average people can’t possibly recognize the real stakes here, so let’s put it in language they can understand, which is about their most immediate interests. It’s both untrue, as I’ll show below, and incredibly patronizing. It is, however, exactly what we’ve been doing for a decade and clearly, It Does Not Work.

Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we’re going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don’t actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run.  We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can’t still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who’s made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business.

Instead they should pay through the nose for that sewer, and here’s the crucial thing: most of the money raised in the process should be returned directly to American pockets. The monthly check sent to Americans would help fortify us against the rise in energy costs, and we’d still be getting the price signal at the pump to stop driving that SUV and start insulating the house. We also need to make real federal investments in energy research and development, to help drive down the price of alternatives — the Breakthrough Institute points out, quite rightly, that we’re crazy to spend more of our tax dollars on research into new drone aircraft and Mars orbiters than we do on photovoltaics.

Yes, these things are politically hard, but they’re not impossible. A politician who really cared could certainly use, say, the platform offered by the White House to sell a plan that taxed BP and actually gave the money to ordinary Americans. (So far they haven’t even used the platform offered by the White House to reinstall the rooftop solar panels that Jimmy Carter put there in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan took down in his term.)

Asking for what you need doesn’t mean you’ll get all of it.  Compromise still happens. But as David Brower, the greatest environmentalist of the late twentieth century, explained amid the fight to save the Grand Canyon: “We are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and find allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else propose the compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become a nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function.”

Which leads to the third step in this process. If we’re going to get any of this done, we’re going to need a movement, the one thing we haven’t had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.

Movement Time

As Tom Friedman put it in a strong column the day after the Senate punt, the problem was that the public “never got mobilized.” Is it possible to get people out in the streets demanding action about climate change? Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called  the “largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind” on any issue — 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A.

People were rallying not just about climate change, but around a remarkably wonky scientific data point, 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, which NASA’s James Hansen and his colleagues have demonstrated is the most we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Which, come to think of it, we do. And the “we,” in this case, was not rich white folks. If you look at the 25,000 pictures in our Flickr account, you’ll see that most of them were poor, black, brown, Asian, and young — because that’s what most of the world is. No need for vice-presidents of big conservation groups to patronize them: shrimpers in Louisiana and women in burqas and priests in Orthodox churches and slumdwellers in Mombasa turned out to be completely capable of understanding the threat to the future.

Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We’re following up in October — on 10-10-10 — with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we’re getting to work, what about you?

We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids.  (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)

The big environmental groups are starting to wake up, too.  The Sierra Club has a dynamic new leader, Mike Brune, who’s working hard with stalwarts like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. (Note to enviro groups: working together is fun and useful). Churches are getting involved, as well as mosques and synagogues. Kids are leading the fight, all over the world — they have to live on this planet for another 70 years or so, and they have every right to be pissed off.

But no one will come out to fight for watered down and weak legislation.  That’s not how it works. You don’t get a movement unless you take the other two steps I’ve described.

And in any event it won’t work overnight.  We’re not going to get the Senate to act next week, or maybe even next year. It took a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott to get the Voting Rights Act. But if there hadn’t been a movement, then the Voting Rights Act would have passed in… never. We may need to get arrested.  We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger.

Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we’ve got. It’s not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we’re going to have to raise our voices.

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Earlier this year the Boston Globe called him “probably the country’s leading environmentalist” and Time described him as “the planet’s best green journalist.” He’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College.

(Note: you can join The Natural Step Monona’s “10-10-10 Event” at www.350.org/monona.)

The Natural Step Monona wouldn’t be the successful organization it is without Demita’s help. She and her staff were strong supporters of our goals and programs, partnering with us on numerous projects from our inception. In 2007, they helped us create the Sustainability Section in the library. We partnered again in 2008 to start the ongoing program Green Tuesdays: Films & Lectures on Sustainability, a community exchange of information and ideas on sustainable living that continues to be held at the library. We collaborated again on a community art project, with the library serving as both mailbox and gallery for postcard art. Demita also served as the city’s staff person on the city’s Sustainability Committee when it first came into being in 2007. She was passionate about energy efficiency at the library, reducing energy use and saving thousands of dollars for the city and taxpayers.

I miss Demita, but she will not be forgotten. Her influence spread to so many areas of our community; I see it far and wide. It’s in the library, of course, successfully turned into “Monona’s living room,” as Demita had desired. It’s in the people of Monona who carry a pride about having a library as inviting, engaging, and good as it is. And it is certainly in the members of The Natural Step Monona who can point to the library as more than a building full of resources, but as a building block of our foundation.

Heather Gates

The BP spill has sparked much thought and conversation. It has also, at times, sparked in me a physical reaction. As I go through my day, I can be interrupted with a “jolt of BP,” finding myself horrified anew, as if learning of the spill for the first time. Ka-thunk, ka-thunk, I hear my heart. My muscles tense, and sometimes my eyes well: I could cry sweet crude. After nearly three months, the magnitude and recklessness of the event and its expanding consequences still stun and haunt me.

I felt similar physical shocks after my father passed away several years ago. Now, as then, I want the world to turn off all devices, like the absurd directives in Auden’s poem “Funeral Blues.” “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone…” Clearly we should all be sharing our grief over this devastation. It’s so enormous that “nothing now can ever come to any good.” Where’s our outrage? Why aren’t people protesting and marching in the streets?

Perhaps we’re too busy driving down them.

Our finite planet. Unlimited economic growth is not sustainable on a finite planet because we have finite resources.

“Look no further than BP’s disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to see the consequence of trying to live beyond our environmental means,” said Andrew Simms, policy director of the New Economics Foundation. “We can no more have infinite economic growth than a bird currently fishing off the Louisiana coast can come up squeaky clean.”  

“Our challenge is not only to break our fossil fuel addiction, but to engineer our economy into equilibrium with the biosphere in order that we may survive and thrive lastingly.”  

Continues Simms, “…we are disillusioned by the mainstream response to the crisis we are facing. It’s time for a new economics of sustainability, where the goal is better lives, not more stuff.”  

A snippet of wisdom. Michael Bugeja of Iowa State University wrote, “Conscience acts on simple truths. It does not debate whether climate change is fact or fiction; it intuits that burning so much fossil fuel is harmful to health and hemisphere.”

Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet, the new book from Bill McKibben, is necessary reading. McKibben was the first to write about climate change for a general audience with The End of Nature (1989). In it, he warned about the consequences of not addressing climate change rapidly.

His warnings went unheeded; we didn’t make rapid change. Now the predicted consequences have come true. Hence the need to “rename” our planet: it’s profoundly different. As McKibben recently said, “Our inability to imagine that we are capable of changing things on that scale is one of the reasons that we are so bad at taking real action… It seems impossible to us that we could have grown large enough to be changing the world, but we have.”

McKibben breaks down this complex subject well. He starts by sharing documented effects of the one-degree rise in global average temperature that has already occurred, such as: Warmer air holds more moisture. Our atmosphere, now holding five percent more moisture, is making already dry places drier and wet places wetter. What was a long-term drought in Australia is now the “new normal” and California’s wildfire season is seventy-eight days longer than in the 70s and 80s; fires burn four times as long.

The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate, thawing tundra is releasing methane (a greenhouse gas twenty times more potent than CO2), the tropics have expanded by more than two degrees latitude both north and south, and the Mountain Pine Beatle has decimated thirty-three million acres of Rocky Mountain forests (because unusually warm winters allow beetle eggs to hatch and spread). Oceans are thirty percent more acidic, threatening coral reefs with permanent extinction (and thereby losing the valuable habitats they provide). Weather is increasingly erratic and unpredictable, and natural feedback mechanisms accelerate the process.

Writes McKibben, “One barrel of oil yields as much energy as 25,000 hours of human manual labor – more than a decade of human labor per barrel. The average American uses twenty-five barrels each year, which is like finding 300 years of free labor annually.” In planning for a future with less or little oil, these are significant numbers. Among other things, they show the need for solutions that take into account that humans will be doing more of the lifting.

In the second half of the book, McKibben shares his vision for the future and proposes exchanging growth for stability, consumption for thrift, bigness for smallness, and complexity for following natural systems. He argues that our hope depends on scaling back, and on building small societies that can hunker down, focus on the essentials, and be supportive and collaborative.

It isn’t up to us whether the world is changing: it already is. But we do have a choice about the degree to which it changes—we can lessen our impacts greatly, some, or not at all—and we also have a choice in how we adapt to this altered “Eaarth.” Will we be smart enough to listen? Smart enough to adjust?

I ask that each of us take immediate and bold actions, simultaneously reducing our fossil fuel use and advocating for laws and policies that cap carbon, raise the taxes on fossil fuels, and use that revenue to invest in creating a stable future.

Can’t do it? We have to, because the cost of not acting is much, much greater. We have to take bold steps because the climate change boogey man isn’t merely rumored to be in the neighborhood. He’s here. He’s at your back door, and he’s turning the key.

(Growing Power’s Will Allen – One of Time Magazine’s 100 people who most affect our world)

When: Saturday, August 7. The tour starts at 2:30 p.m and lasts about one and one-half hours.

Where: Milwaukee Headquarters and Urban Farm, 5500 W. Silver Spring Drive, Milwaukee, WI 53218 

Who: Up to thirty people. (Update: As of August 3, we have room for 12.)

How much: The tour is $10 per person, payable to Growing Power when we take the tour.

How to sign up: Just shoot an email to info@tnsmonona.org with your name and phone number. Also, pleaselet us know if you’re willing to drive or would need a ride, and what area you live in so we can coordinate the carpooling.

How to get there: We should leave Monona by 12:30-ish. Carpooling is encouraged and being coordinated! (Total Travel Estimate: 1 hour 29 minutes / 80.52 miles / Roundtrip Fuel Cost: $16.30 at 27 MPG)

Sign up now! You don’t want to miss this!

Sunday, July 4, 2010
10:00am – 5:00pm
Winnequah Park, at the corner of Nichols and Healy