Why A Post-Carbon City?

Imagine a world of darkness. You flip the light switch, but nothing happens. Electricity no longer exists because our addiction to fossil fuels has fueled us to use them up. Even the days are gloomy because the sky is blanketed with thick brown clouds of pollution. You look around and see only cement and skyscrapers. There is nothing green in sight. Forests are extinct; all were cut down to accommodate the ever-growing human population that has taken over the earth. This overpopulation coupled with overconsumption has led to extreme shortages in food and water. Sea levels have risen by 5 feet, displacing millions of families and ruining entire ecosystems. This is our future if we continue on the path we are on today. However, it's not our only option. Post-carbon cities offer us a creative strategy to avoid this bleak future.

The Power of Design

As humans, we are now faced with a challenge like no other in our existence. We have evolved and grown in such a way that has created a great amount of distance between man and nature. From the Agricultural Revolution to the Industrial Revolutions we have been separating ourselves from the very essence where we began. This gradual change had been at a constant speed for millions of years; however, with new technologies and careless man made materials this change is occurring at an exponentially faster rate[1].  We are now moving and growing at a speed that is leading us towards a dead end. What was once thought as “good” is now harming and creating imbalance between the human species and the natural environment meant to sustain us[2]. 

Restaurant Revolution

Walk into your kitchen and look into your refrigerator or pantry. What do you see? The simple reply would be food, but do you know where your food comes from? The food in your kitchen can say organic, but most likely your food came from some distant city or country thousands of miles away from your home. Some farmer probably used a gas powered machine to harvest your apple before it ripens; it then traveled in a refrigerated truck across the country to your local grocery store; then sat in your grocery store for some time before you picked it up and placed it in a fruit basket in your kitchen. This food cycle has a large carbon footprint, which contributes to the tons of green house gases released into the atmosphere depleting our ozone layer.

May with no Flowers?

            Inspiration often comes, as many say, through the beauty of nature. A habitual walk through a park or spending some time in a garden really gets the juices flowing in the human brain for many people. So, I decided to try it out. I put a sweatshirt on, grabbed my umbrella (after all, it is San Francisco), and headed out of the synthetically lit dorms into…sunlight? Yes. I walked across the USF campus and down to the Panhandle of Golden Gate Park. By this time, I had shed my sweatshirt and was irritated that I had not looked out my window before leaving my room. “But its April,” I thought to myself, “Surely it should be brisk, even if the sun is out.” But the more I walked, the more I realized this was a different kind of natural inspiration. Seeing the blooming cherry blossom trees along the dirt path forced a sudden realization into my head: this is the reality of climate change. This is what climate change looks like; what climate change feels like.

A Post-Carbon Breakfast: Snapshot of our Future Food System

Imagine the light rising in the east as you wake. Enjoying breakfast, just before dawn, listening to the birds sing from the limbs of grandmother magnolia tree, who long ago sunk her roots in the backyard. Winter is shedding her layers and with each day the light lingers longer as we step into spring. Your plate is a mosaic of colors, scorched earth bread, golden yellow egg yolks, translucent green herbs and deep rich purple kale, all set off against a crimson ceramic plate. Mint tea glows softly and wafts a slight honey aroma throughout the kitchen. The sun moves higher into the sky and your internal tummy compass craves fresh orange juice. This is no ordinary breakfast, this is a breakfast supported by a dynamic community food system. The provenance of each ingredient is known to you and was easy to discover, a transparent food web that prioritizes access to fresh produce, nutritional value, food security and local community resilience above all.

How to Create Your Own Herb Spiral

Do you like to cook?  If not, do you like to eat?  That probably was a little easier to answer.  How would you like to go grocery shopping in your backyard?  To be able to jazz up some pasta with some fresh, fragrant basil, or give a soup an extra kick with a pinch of dill?  If you have a spare patch of land in your yard, you just opened up a world of possibilities.  An herb spiral can snuggly fit into a smaller backyard, or can be nice extension to your regular kitchen garden.  Utilizing a small amount of land, herb spirals are a smart way to support a variety of plants with minimal resources.  If you feel intimidated by the time and effort a larger garden requires, an herb spiral is perfect for you.  Little maintenance is needed after construction; besides watering and harvesting, an herb spiral pretty much takes care of itself, providing you with herbs year round.

Wasteland: Garbage to Art, Picker to Person

Contemporary artist Vik Muniz

            Imagine climbing up a mountain range of trash, soaking wet and oozing with the foul odor that emanates from your kitchen when you have waited too long to take out the trash.  Imagine burying hard-worn and leathered hands deep into piles and piles of organic waste, like leftover cow meat and rotting banana peels, endless plastic bottles carelessly thrown out, and perfectly good objects, from books on the philosopher Nietzsche to expensive shirts, shoes and children’s dolls that now look like they have emerged from a creepy horror film.  Imagine this is your life: waking up with the harsh, smog-smothered sun each morning in a helplessly small shack only to walk down the littered street to spend a16-hour day of back breaking work picking recyclable materials from 7,000 tons of waste that arrives daily at the largest landfill in the world, Jardim Gramacho in Rio de Janiero, Brazil.  This is a day in the life of the 3,000 catadores, or more bluntly “pickers,” who work in this toxic, polluted landscape.

Power from the People

Imagine yourself walking down the sidewalk on your way to work or school or the grocery store. You’re taking your usual route, but today you notice this is no ordinary sidewalk. Instead of the usual concrete slabs bordering busy 2-lane streets designed for efficient traffic movement, you are surrounded by greenery. Instead of car traffic buzzing by, you hear birds chirping and cheerful bicyclists zooming past in their own lane. The pavement, made out of recycled car tires, has a nice bounce to it. Not so much that you can’t keep your balance, like on a trampoline, but just enough to avoid the stress of impact you get on hard surfaces such as concrete. When you look down you notice an illuminated circle in the center of this rubber slab. This glow lets you know that the step you just took has generated electricity.

Don't Eat That Oil

                We love our apples, oranges, bananas, pickles, corn, carrots, eggs, pork, chicken, beef and baby back ribs (well I love all of those except the meat—I am vegan and proud)! I believe you already read or glance at the little labels that stick to your fruits and vegetables, telling you where they come from. I assume you probably do not think twice about the distance? Or, how long it sat in the truck or ship to get to your plate? That meat on your plate may or may not, comprise of corn and grain, maybe a few pieces of chicken remains, fed to the cattle and beef in factories. Additionally, those tomatoes or cucumbers, celery or carrots—unless organically grown in a local farm—most likely grew in a garden of pesticides and fertilisers made from...oil. Yes, oil. That meat on your plate? Oil surrounds it. How do you think those factories run? Or, the grain and corn produced to feed the cattle? Or, the fertilisers and pesticides sprayed and mixed into the soil of those beautifully and perfectly round and red tomatoes? Oil. Oil. Oil. The peak of oil has surpassed us and not much more remains, but our current agricultural system continues to depend on that oil, as though it shall never end.  

               

Good Day to you, Green Fields

Morning Cup of Community

By: Amber Manuwa

Hazily opening my eyes, the sunlight filters through the white sheer curtains and fills my bedroom with a beautiful morning yellow. Lying in bed for a few minutes, I hear through my open window a couple of the neighborhood children playing superheroes outside. It’s Saturday morning rising out of bed and walking to the kitchen, I fix myself a cup of tea and munch on some strawberries with sourdough toast. Taking my petite déjuener outdoors, I read the news at the farm table on the grass that has replaced the ripped out asphalt and sidewalk that once made up my street. Contentment and awe bubble up inside me and makes me smile from ear to ear. With the view of the city to my right and the ocean to my left I think, “Life could not get any better than this!” My head suddenly comes down from the clouds “Good morning,” I cheerfully greet the parents of the two little superheroes as they stroll over to join me. Conversation consumes my morning the community garden, the skill resilience program, and the free concert tonight at the town center makes up a few of the topics. As I part ways, I ponder how none of these facets of the neighborhood would of been possible without community involvement and support. Grabbing my basket, which I weaved at the skill resilience workshop, I head to the community garden to forage for a few lunchtime ingredients.

The Day in the Life of a Lazy Farmer

Journal Entry Day 56

As a kid, my idea of a farmer was very labor intensive, back breaking work from dust to dawn. Dirty, stinky, and sweaty. Yet the unrealistic conveniences of so called modern society, of the possibility of eating a banana in a cold temperate climate when they grow in more tropical destinations, have created for the most part a lazy society, me included. So the concept of growing my own food from vegetables to perhaps even chickens and pigs was a novelty. But this idea of being self-sufficient isn’t so wild. In fact, within my family it was only a generation or two before that were indeed farmers.

Community Newsletter

Who's Talkin' Trash? A Case for Zero Waste

Is it possible to live in a world where there is no waste? Imagine it: a world where plastic grocery bags do not permeate household rubbish piles, water bottles and syringes do not end up on pristine beach shores, and six-ring can holders do not threaten the livelihood of our precious ocean creatures. Unfortunately, trash has come to be characterized as an inevitable and unpreventable part of our society. This modern notion begs to be challenged.

Aside from the visible litter that pervades our walkways and our exposé media outlets, the majority of modern America has the luxury of never seeing landfills. These waste dump sites are among the most forgotten aspects of American consumerist culture. We have the luxury of putting as much waste per week in our street side trash bins as we want, and then having the elusive “garbage man” drive a truck through our neighborhoods to retrieve all of it to take it away so we never have to look at it again. Our waste removal system is institutionally designed in such a way that it encourages people to waste as much as they want with no direct consequences. 

The Blueprint for a Low-(or Post-) Carbon Society

            Let’s pretend that our wonderful state of California one day decided that it was fed up with being involved in the economic and social rules and norms that the rest of the world deals with. What if the citizens of our fine state revolted against the government in D.C., with a new society in mind emphasizing entirely different values, based on preservation and sustainable living. This is the envisionary approach that Ernest Callenbach took when he wrote his book Ecotopia in 1975. The fictional novel centers around Northern California, Oregon, and Washington, who have seceded from the United States in favor of a much different way of life. In this short futuristic tale, Callenbach paints with vibrant colors the picture of a post-carbon utopia, spending time on each component of society as if they were the pieces of a background to a portrait where the foreground could be you and me. The detail with which he writes his prose, combined with the main setting of San Francisco and its surrounding areas, forced me as a reader to really envision what a society like the one he is suggesting would look and more importantly feel like. Ernest Callenbach’s book Ecotopia describes a culture of emotion, feeling, and nature which we have never seen before. Although many individual parts of the vision may seem flawed, the innovative thinking of social ecology which Callenbach so artfully entwines into a plot line can lead even the average reader to focus on the creativity and ingenuity of environmentalism.

Carbon What?

We’ve all heard of climate change, either in the news or the classroom or everyday conversation. Still, nearly half the U.S. population isn’t sure if it’s real or if we as humans are causing it. For the scientific community, though, there is no debate: humans are changing the climate, and it will only get worse as we emit more and more greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels. But not all of us are scientists. Not all of us know the words fossil fuels or greenhouse gases and how they relate to turning on the lights or driving to the grocery store. Not all of us understand what carbon dioxide emissions are and what that has to do with temperature. Without the background knowledge needed to understand climate change, of course many of us are left puzzled, especially when the media broadcasts so many mixed messages. I will clear up that confusion by starting with the basics: the fundamental relationship between carbon and the global climate.Carbon interacts with the world around us in a variety of ways to form the carbon cycle. As a complex web of give and take between the atmosphere, ocean, land, and living things, it is an essential process that allows our habitable Earth to exist. Disturbing the carbon balance could alter the very nature of the planet we know today.

Pickles:Food Preservation at Its Finest

In our post-carbon city we imagine a widespread culture of food preservation. For our community it is important to preserve the seasonal surplus, in order to minimize waste and store a diverse array of food options year round. Preservation techniques such as fermentation, and solar food dryers use zero carbon and will be a key element of our future food system. 

          Who doesn’t love pickles?  The word alone is fantastic. Take a moment and say it aloud… you can’t help but smile as the letters cluck with a particular happiness. Pickling is one of the fundamentals of food preservation, a skill that is becoming ever more in demand and will help communities become more resilient. Preserving food is necessary for folks trying to be self-sufficient but it is also a great intermediary step for others who are interested in building skills or simply making tasty high quality foods. There is room for everyone at a pickle party.

A Walk in My Shoes

It’s a usual foggy morning in early March in Marin County, a peaceful province of just over 200,000 residents nestled among rolling grass green hills north of the Golden Gate. Although the fog fails to wake my sleepy self, I push back piles of warm blankets, roll out of my twin sized bed, and muster up enough effort to strap on my no-longer-sunshine-orange-mud-caked tennis shoes for what feels like an early morning hike (mind you, it is really 10 am). With the sound of a horn loud enough to wake the entirety of my sleepy Maple Hill Drive neighborhood and the wafting smell of fresh morning coffee, I am out the door and off to meet my early riser and far too athletic boyfriend Dominic, who insists the day is wasted waking up anytime after 8 am. As I force down a slice of buttered whole wheat toast to gain some much needed energy, our oh-so-Marin County Prius drives us through the characteristic green sprawl to the zooming 101 freeway.   

Resilience in Action: EcoVillage at Ithaca

          Twenty years ago, Joan Boaker was just a young woman with a vision similar to our own – to build an ecological city. Today, her dream is a reality in the form of Ecovillage at Ithaca. Armed with only a bold vision, supportive friends and a flood of enthusiasm, Joan was able to create a self-sustaining community of 160 people that exist in harmony with the environment. This small village in rural New York serves as proof that our post-carbon city is attainable. While we are still in the planning stages of our own community, we can learn from Joan’s story and adopt some of the ideas that have made her village so successful. However, we must also develop our own innovative ideas to account for differences between a rural ecovillage in Ithaca and our urban village in San Francisco.

Eat With Me

Imagine grocery shopping in a garden. Instead of pulling your sweater closer against the intrusive cold of the produce aisle, your skin is warmed by morning sunlight as you pick a handful of strawberries to munch on as you peruse your options for breakfast. Your lips stain red as you hear the bawk of your chickens, announcing their presence to the neighborhood. Even in the silence of the early morning, you can sense hushed activity just beginning as your neighbors are awakened. One by one, they will shuffle out, rubbing their half-open eyes, grasping their warm cups of tea as they contemplate the possibility of pancakes, or frittatas. Soon, they will join you, but for now, you enjoy the solitude of dawn. 

Mind Maps

Before I go into my story, I want to reflect on an inspiring writer of the environment, politics, place and art, who lives in San Francisco. Her name is Rebecca Solnit. After reading some of her pieces—‘The Limits of Landscape’ and ‘Hope in the Dark’—and attending her lecture on maps, it really got me thinking about the way in which we design our notion of a place or many places. In her lecture, Solnit showed a variety of maps, maps that are so beautiful, some colourful, others were black and white or sepia, there were pictures of women, men, ships, boats, trees, flowers, circles, squares, some without text and some with. She emphasised how maps tell stories, along with the idea of everyone having several maps (of even one place)—certain transformations, experiences, etc., and that they do not always have to tell you how to get from point A to point B. For instance, I was born and raised in Moscow, Russia. For me, I see Moscow as a home, a place where my heart and soul reside. My dacha (Russian for summer house), the images that come to mind, as you shall see further on, are different than someone who comes and visits. My experiences and my view of my dacha is very different than, say, your image of what my dacha looks like, what you feel versus what I feel when I am there (of which you shall also learn).