In January, I published an open letter to President Obama humbly giving him my unsolicited advice on what national policies he should follow in terms of national energy and sustainability policies. But what about local communities? What advice would I give local politicians, bureaucrats and community leaders?
First, I would suggest that the advice I give individuals would be useful for communities to promote. Communities are made up of individuals, after all. The more individuals within the community that are making wise choices in their lives, the better off the community as a whole will be. What advice do I offer individuals? See the following essays and newsletters:
Ways to get ready for the future - lists fifteen things you can do now to get ready for whatever the future holds in store.
What To Do Now - making wise choices, particularly in terms of personal finance and preparing for difficult times ahead.
Modern Victory Movement - building self-reliance, particularly in regards to raising a portion of your own food and scaling back your lifestyle.
The Resource Miser - regular series promoting energy and resource efficiency.
Life Forests - regular series on reforestation and growing trees for food and other renewable resources.
Next, I would recommend that the local powers-that-be concentrate on "greening" their local economies and relocalizing their food systems.
By "greening local economies", I mean making policy decisions and infrastructure improvements based on long-term sustainability, rather than just political expediency or short-term financial gain. Much can fall under this heading, including water, energy and transportation systems, preventing or even reversing urban sprawl, providing useful employment that pays a fair wage, and so forth.
By "relocalizing food systems", I mean working to shorten the travel distance of most of the food consumed by the citizens of a locality. Ideally, you should be working to provide all the basic food needs of your community within a 100-mile or so radius.
Local Sustainable Agriculture
Most of the food that citizens of Western nations eat is trucked or flown in from all over the world. For many people, the piece of fruit that they will eat today is much more a world-traveler than they are. In my local grocery stores (I'm in NC, USA) there are fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as frozen and canned goods, from places as far away as Chile, Peru, Argentina and the Philippines.
But what if you suddenly couldn't import your community's food from all over the globe? Could your community survive on only the food produced locally? The fact is there are many reasons why you may not be able to import large quantities of food in the future - everything from peak oil and sky-rocketing energy prices to world-wide food shortages to crop failures caused by disease or drought.
Communities should encourage people to produce a portion of their own food. This can be done by reviving the Victory Gardens idea of the first two world wars (see my Modern Victory Movement). Communities should also promote local sustainable agriculture.
Ways to Encourage Local Food Production
- Promote the idea Victory Gardens (both private and community-based) and food co-ops.
- Provide training courses in gardening and permaculture through local community colleges and agricultural extension offices.
- Remove unnecessary restrictions on people growing their own food (maintaining needed restrictions to promote health & safety and prevent animal cruelty).
- Remove unnecessary restrictions on local farmers selling their crops to local markets (often put in place due to lobbying by big agri-business).
- Require that government food services (such as school lunch programs) spend an increasing portion of their budgets on locally produced food.
- Encourage the formation of farmers markets.
- Local relief agencies should provide vouchers or special debit cards for use at local farmers markets as part of their assistance programs.
- Promote the health, economic and environmental benefits of low-meat diets (educational programs only - what people eat should be their choice).
- Public tree-planting programs should include fruit and nut trees.
- Support programs to capture organic waste (food scraps, animal & human manure, leaves & other yard waste, agricultural waste) for composting to improve soils.
Clean water is the invisible crisis and providing continuing supplies of clean water for local communities is perhaps the biggest challenge of the 21st century. Did you know that as much as a third of a typical city's water usage is flushing toilets? Various types of dry and composting toilets can greatly reduce this inefficient use of clean water. One of the shopping malls in my local area recently installed dry-flush urinals in its public restrooms, and they seem to be working perfectly.
Leaking pipes, not just in homes and businesses, but in the local water systems themselves, is a major problem that wastes huge amounts of water. Detection and elimination of such leaks should be a high priority. (Water conservation is the theme of two editions of my Resource Miser newsletters, RM #004 and RM #011.)
Local governments can also encourage water conservation by charging less per gallon to customers that use less water. In other words, a household that uses 100 gallons a month would be charged less per gallon than a household that uses 1000 gallons a month.
In my area, the water supply comes from two main sources - a lake and an nearby river. Local governments have actually been fairly pro-active in protecting these sources. Over the years they have surrounded the lake with a large municipal park, protecting it from development and pollution. And they have worked diligently protecting the river through a series of parks and conservation easements. Local governments depending on the river for water have come together to hire a "River Keeper" whose job is to patrol the river looking for illegal dumping and other threats.
Also in my area they are a couple of days a year (one is typically Earth Day and the other in the Fall) that are promoted as "waterway clean-up days". Individuals and community groups are encouraged to clean trash out of out local ponds, streams and wetland areas. This is heavily promoted in the local media, and local governments provide trucks and workers to haul off the trash that is collected.
Organic gardening, lasagna-style gardening, forest gardening and similar techniques utilizing compost and natural soil amendments instead of chemical fertilizers will protect local water supplies from dangerous chemical run-off. Also, these techniques typically utilize mulch and other ground cover which greatly reduces surface evaporation thus reducing the need for irrigation.
Transportation Systems & Building Community
National transportation systems should be focused on trains for the long distance movement of goods and people, rather than on trucks and cars. Local transportation systems should emphasize walkways & cycyling and natural gas & biofuel buses, as well as rail systems where appropriate. Car pooling and park-and-ride systems can be encouraged. Designing more compact communities is a big step to improving local transportation systems.
Urban sprawl is a major problem, especially here in the USA. The results of urban sprawl include increased public expense to expand & maintain road systems, increased use of fossil fuels, increased pollution and the loss of agricultural land.
Better planning is needed to make communities smaller, geographically speaking. The travel distances from home to work, home to markets, and home to schools need to be decreased. There will always need to be people living outside of urban areas in agricultural belts, but most of the population should be in high density communities. The growth of traditional suburbs should be discouraged by public policy, not encouraged.
Recreational and cultural opportunities should be promoted within communities. Local festivals and open-air concerts, parks, tennis courts, golf courses, hiking trails, libraries, museums, zoos, botanical gardens, historical sites and community theater are some of the opportunities for local entertainment that can be promoted. People should recognize that there are opportunities to enjoy vacations and holidays within their local regions.
Energy Policy
Energy issues loom large for most communities. Oil and coal are heavy polluters, and finite resources. Oil fields world-wide are already in decline. Communities must look to other sources of energy, preferably to clean, renewable sources. One valuable source is energy efficiency.
Amory Lovin of the Rocky Mountain Institute argues in favor of what he refers to as "radical resource efficiency" and points out that saving energy costs less than buying it. Radical resource efficiency is just what it sounds like - the act of achieving maximum efficiency in the use of resources, such as energy. This includes using energy efficient technology as well as designing and planning homes, businesses, communities and lifestyles in such a way as to achieve maximum efficiency.
"Without much effort, the almost 500 million citizens of the European Union could reduce their energy use by one-fifth, studies have found. That would add up to savings of roughly €60 billion ($79 billion) per year. Such huge sums become less abstract when broken down to household level: An average family could save from €200 to €1,000 by using their energy more efficiently." -- Alexander Jung, Why Conservation is the World's Best Energy Source
For more on resource & energy efficiency, please check out my Resource Miser newsletter.
Local governments can do much to encourage energy efficiency:
Start by making local government buildings & vehicle fleets as energy efficient as possible.
All vehicles purchased by local governments in the future should be electric, natural gas or flex-fuel (electric for small vehicles, natural gas or flex for trucks & buses).
Make energy efficiency a high priority in local building codes.
Reduce urban sprawl (see above).
Local governments should also encourage the development of clean renewable energy in their area. Clean renewable energy sources include solar, wind, geothermal and hyrdo (including wave & tidal). Biomass and biofuels are also renewable sources and cleaner than oil & coal. Hydrogen is often talked about, but highly problematic since it will require technological breakthroughs before it can become a real solution.
Building the infrastructure needed (smart grids) to transport the energy to the end-users and removing restrictions that prevent the development of renewable energy are the two most important ways governments can promote renewable energy in their regions. Tax-incentives and direct grants are two other possibilities.
Local community colleges and state universities should offer programs in renewable energy technology. Unemployment programs should include training in renewable energy.
Greening the Local Economy
Politicians and community leaders should look to encourage the development of a green economy in their area. But, exactly what is the green economy?
In short, the new green economy is based on clean renewable energy, energy & resource efficiency, recycling & resource recovery, clean water systems, sustainable agriculture and sustainable forestry. It includes both high-tech and low-tech industries and ideas. Some people also include ideas of social justice (living wages and so forth) in their definition of a green economy.
Communities already direct the development of their economies through tax-policy, infrastructure projects, zoning laws, business regulations and even active recruitment of businesses to their area. Communities should refocus their policies, planning and efforts towards promoting the new green economy.
All of the steps I've outlined above will help encourage the development of the green economy in your local area.
For more information, I highly recommend reading the press release from the Earth Policy Institute and Lester Brown, entitled New Energy Economy Emerging in the United States.
Lester Brown has written extensively on creating a green economy. Please visit the Earth Policy Institute website where you can download for free (.pdf format) Brown's most recent book, Plan B 3.0.
Also, I have designed the Next Strategies website to act as a portal to the green economy. On it you will find many essays and news articles on the green economy, as well as links to many job boards featuring "green-collar" job listings.
