“At the end of the eighteenth century it was the rage to journey to ruins and graveyards and meditate on the prospects these stones held out to mortal man.  Now as the twentieth century declines it is the rage to journey to Los Angeles and meditate upon the prospect of what that city holds out to the rest of the nation.”

It’s been years since the twentieth century declined completely to nothing, (to continue on in Thompson’s brooding vein), and Los Angeles is still Los Angeles.  At this writing in November of 2009, the twenty first century is almost one tenth gone. And those of who live in LA  occasionally find ourselves meditating on its prospects for sustainability — whether or not the rest of the world is actually doomed to follow our example.

Recently I have been pre-occupied with food and water.  As people who live in Los Angeles are well aware, the water here all comes from someplace else, and often enough, it stinks.  When I lived in Arizona, and tourists from LA came into the Natural Foods store where I was working, I wondered at everyone insisting on bottled water.  Other people preferred it; only people from LA insisted on it.  Now, of course, I know where that thinking comes from, even if I am dismayed at the tonnage of wasted plastic the bottled water industry annually produces.  The other night I tried to take a bath, and the water smelled so terrible I could only stand to stay in the water five minutes.

Bottled water, natural supplements and store-bought organic food have been hallmarks of wealthy Los Angeles culture for decades now.  For people who want and can afford it, all the benefits of acai, or Omega 3 eggs, or Fiji water, are available at the large Natural Foods chain store of your choice.  Not that I am really criticizing these places or these choices.  A consciously healthy lifestyle is almost certainly a better choice than the unconscious, unhealthy lifestyles so many of us lead.   Sometimes, though, I just have to question our priorities, on the larger scale.

Is it really better to have the natural world available to us in the form of  Natural Foods Store items?  Or would it be better to have actual nature around us, and in our midst?  As someone who has worked as a manager in several such stores, including while founding SSRD, I think I have some insight into the business, and I can say there are days I would trade it all in for urban gardening, farmers’ markets everyone can walk to, clean water and clean air.  In Los Angeles, this would be a revolution, and perhaps, as Thompson seemed to imply, it would show the rest of the world the writing on the wall.

“Like a shadow that does not permit us to jump over it, but moves with us to maintain its proper distance, pollution is nature’s answer to culture. When we have learned to recycle pollution into potent information, we will have passed over completely into the new cultural ecology.”

- William Irwin Thompson

“Instead of hope, we need to provide young people with reasons to live sustainably that are rational and effective,” the professors write. “We need to lift up examples of sustainable living motivated by virtue more than by a dubious belief that such actions will avert environmental disaster.”  This makes a lot of sense to me, and most people would agree that hope of averting disaster is a rather burdensome aspiration.  ”Sharing”, “improving the neighborhood” and “eating well” are examples of much more immediate and practical motivators, and what is built on them outlasts our constantly shifting anxieties about the future.  People who participate in a community garden project are making big strides towards a sustainable lifestyle, but they are not necessarily doing it just to save the world.  They might (or even might not) want to save the world, but a community garden is also connected to commonsense, personal-level virtues that nearly everyone tries to live up to; and it yields local, tangible results.  Another way to put this is that, in addition to working on how we can help make society more sustainable, we need to ask how we can connect sustainability to the everyday business of living a good life.  Maybe one day the future will be an intrinsically hopeful concept again; for now, what we want to achieve is more in the nature of practical inspiration. 

The Transition Town project, when I heard about it, certainly had an inspiring effect on me. “Transition Town”  is a framework for achieving carbon neutrality on a community scale, by taking responsibility for the vision of the places where we live.  Transition Town provides sustainability activists a set of common goals, a process model, and some support infrastructure; so it’s more, and less, than a blueprint.  The underlying philosophy is a cheeky kind of can-do,  community empowerment (because, to paraphrase the website, government projects may be too little, too late, and individual effort is usually too little);  and the key concept is the Transition Initiative.  As Transition Town’s wiki sets forth,

‘A Transition Initiative is a community working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question: 
for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?’

Hundreds of communities around the world have become part of the project, and thousands more probably have the critical mass of people ready to take it on.  There may be a Transition Initiative happening where you live — Los Angeles, where I live, has one — and perhaps you are interested in helping to organize something in your own community.

Hi, this is Ashley Cornwell, founder and CEO of Sustainable Systems Research and Development.    I will be using this space to write about the subject areas we are passionate about at SSRD:  during the coming months,  the spotlight will be on biofuels, as our own sustainable biodiesel facility in Los Angeles slowly becomes a reality.

These days, most people agree that biofuels — ethanol and biodiesel — have some kind of important role to play in our transition away from a petroleum based economy.  We are just past the point in history where everyone was talking about the potential for biofuels, and we have begun to experience, in a real way, their limitations, drawbacks and, ironically, their potential for doing worse ecological damage than the fossil fuels they substitute for.  Crop-based ethanol and biodiesel production has seen huge growth in recent years , and the recent drop in world oil prices has slowed, but not stopped, the new sector’s expansion.  And perhaps the slowdown in biofuels is a good thing.  This is an area where the interests of  several large, dark industries converge, and the kind of biofuels economy we end up with depends on whether it becomes the marriage of Big Oil to conventional agribusiness, or something more locally committed, small scale, and responsible.

My own faith in the promise of biofuels is unshaken, and SSRD is moving forward with its plans to build an innovative sustainable biodiesel facility in Los Angeles.  The keyword there, of course, is sustainable.

In the United States, government support for biodiesel and ethanol was supposed to help create American jobs in the agricultural midwest, and increase American energy security.  The policies — and in fact ethanol — are questionable from a sustainability point of view.  Sustainability has not always been a priority in the government’s (often) short sighted ideas of what jobs and energy security really mean, and of course it’s harder to hit a target you don’t aim for. From a scientific standpoint, there is an ongoing debate over whether crop-based ethanol, especially, even yields more energy than producing it requires.  Crops grown for ethanol and biodiesel both impact land use patterns, not only in the United States but around the world.  (For instance, a recent study suggests that since U.S. farmers began planting corn every year for fuel crops, rather than corn alternating with soybeans, Brazilians have picked up the slack by clearing more of the Amazon rainforest to plant in soybeans.   Deforestation, among its other destructive consequences, creates a net global carbon debt many times the size of what any crops repay).

Yet sustainable biofuels are possible, and it will be possible to make a profit producing them.  The single most important principle is to avoid an industrial, crop-based biofuel economy built on herbicides, till farming, monoculture, long distance transportation and apparent (but unsustainable) economies of scale.

Sustainable biofuels have these characteristics:

• Fuel production occurs locally, where the fuel is to be consumed.  This implies  a local-sized scaling of the fuel production.
• Fuel production uses sustainable agricultural practices, or even better, recycles  agricultural or other waste.
• Sustainable biofuels production creates less carbon than the fossil fuels it  replaces: ideally of course it should reduce net atmospheric carbon.

We are excited about proving that this set of criteria is practical, and profitable.