As I post this, I am knee-deep in presenting a webinar, hosted by the Global Ecovillage Network, on the theme of ecovillage responses to climate change. Let me reprise some of my talk from that event here, starting with the latest weather reports and a year in review.
Last week Australia’s Southeastern coast area—New South Wales near Sydney—upgraded its wildfire risk from “extremely dangerous” to “catastrophic.” Even though there may be no nearby fires, the catastrophic warning means schools and public offices have been closed and residents are urged to leave.
Local residents don't require much urging. If the trauma of their 2019-2020 wildfire season is not fresh enough, they all saw what happened in Maui. The wildfire that broke out on Aug. 8, six weeks ago, scorched through the town of Lahaina at 60 miles per hour, reducing ten square miles of city to ash in mere minutes. Only a month before, wildfire forced evacuation of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada’s Northwest Territories.
Last month a buoy in Manatee Bay, south of Miami, registered 101.1 degrees, a reading that, as the Washington Post put it, is “more typical of a hot tub than ocean water.”
Mintec Analytics, which delivers market prices and analysis for thousands of commodities, food ingredients and associated materials to the world's largest food and manufacturing brands says that “One of the most direct effects is the increase in ocean temperatures, especially in the central-eastern Pacific, [will be] disastrous impacts on the local fish populations.”
Additionally, due to the atmospheric changes during historic Very Strong El Niño events, certain regions are likely to receive less rainfall than normal. These regions include northern South America, South Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and Australia. During these years, many high-value crops were adversely affected by a lack of moisture, leading to reduced growth and lower yields. As a result, supplies of palm oil and rice drastically declined.
The report also has dire warnings for the Northern Hemisphere, where increases in extreme rain events and flooding are likely to cause over-saturation, rotting, and harvest delays in lower latitudes, as seen in eight catastrophic floods in 11 days this month, and heatwaves, droughts and wildfires at higher latitudes, as seen concurrently in Canada.
California is particularly vulnerable to excessive winter rain during strong El Niño years, which can reduce yields of vegetables and the flowering of almonds, as the pollinating bees are less active.
The floods in California in January and February are among 23 climate disasters that cost in excess of one billion dollars already this year in the U.S. and we still have three months to go.
Dave Borlach gave a very nice overview of the overheating ocean in two recent YouTube videos, part of his Just Have a Think series. In short, the ocean has been taking and storing about 80% of the excess heat produced by greenhouse gas overload. This heat is measured in zetajoules—one joule followed by 26 zeros. The 2021 increase of 14 zetajoules was equal to exploding seven atomic bombs in the ocean every second of every day for a year. The last IPCC report (AR6) said the oceans absorbed 396 ZJ between 1971 and 2018. Since then, ocean heat absorption has been in a curve of overheated acceleration.
We predict [for 2024] at least a 50 percent increase in the post-2010 global warming rate, compared to the 1970-2010 rate.
—Hansen et al, September 14, 2023
While here in Tennessee we have not been getting a lot of our food from Australia, we nonetheless need to be concerned about global commodities. To quote Dave Borlach, “If food becomes scarce then all sorts of really very unpleasant consequences start kicking in.” It was not surprising then that in a recent poll of our residents and two workshops, “growing more of our own food” emerged as the first priority in a pretty long list of how we should respond to climate change.
Wheat trade 2018-19 (pre-Covid and war in Ukraine). The height of a block is proportional to the volume of wheat exported or imported by the corresponding country, and the width of a stream field is proportional to the volume of wheat traded between the two countries connected by the stream field.
According to the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, we are well beyond the safe thresholds for six of nine boundary prerequisites for human civilization. In several cases, such as polar ice melt, we have passed tipping points beyond which recovery is impossible for thousands of years. In others, we don’t exactly know where to find those points, but we could be at, near, or past a number of them.
"Over a fifth of ecosystems worldwide are in danger of collapsing," said Professor Simon Willcock from Rothamsted and Bangor University, who co-led the study published in Nature Sustainability.
"However, ongoing stresses and extreme events interact to accelerate rapid changes that may well be out of our control. Once these reach a tipping point, it's too late."
"Previous studies of ecological tipping points suggest significant social and economic costs from the second half of the 21st century onwards. Our findings suggest the potential for these costs to occur much sooner," added co-author Professor John Dearing, Emeritus Professor at the University of Southampton.
The polling and workshops at The Farm are one part of a wider program by the Global Ecovillage Network, with sponsorship by the Rasmussen Foundation, to formulate our recommended strategies, coming from an ecovillage holistic viewpoint, to get larger populations to adapt to and begin to mitigate the climate emergency. By and large, there is no need among ecovillagers to waste time arguing whether climate change is a Chinese hoax. We have an entire network of ecovillages in China and they don’t think it is a Western hoax either.
The Great Change is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
Many intentional communities worldwide, including ecovillages and co-housing communities, have explicit goals of living in an ecologically regenerative manner, humans not apart, and are taking conscious steps towards that in more or less systematic frameworks and auditing processes developed over the past 30 years. Initiatives based on delocalization, cultural diversity and social empowerment have an inherent advantage in achieving what is being called decarbonization (although I prefer the term “recarbonization”— meaning a fair and sustainable reallocation of carbon cycle distribution). Scientists, economists, and politicians have all noted the need for greater recognition of community-led initiatives in reversing climate change from the bottom up.
Hansen, et al: Global temperature (relative to 1880-1920 mean for each month) during the El Nino origin year for the 1997-98, 2015-16 and 2023-24 El Ninos. The impact of El Nino on global temperature usually peaks early in the year following the year when the El Nino originated.
Everything becomes more controversial and political when we begin to discuss how to address the great challenges of our time, e.g. how to achieve and maintain a safe global average temperature. At one extreme is geoengineering and other technological fixes, attractive because they require little change in the status quo, but also fundamentally undemocratic and exclusionary (Sovacool 2021) and pose enormous known and unknown risks (Bodansky 2013). At the other extreme is the decarbonization of daily life of people all over the planet. This alternative would require that people in different cultures and socio-ecological systems create their own sustainable solutions adapted to each context. There is no precedent for this type of change and no single entity can control it, but ecovillages and other community-led initiatives might be our best examples of efforts in this direction (Daly 2017; Schäfer et al. 2018; Sherry 2019).
***
What is common among all these initiatives is that they emerge from the bottom-up, are based on values of conviviality and commons (Helfrich 2015), and they prefigure “their vision of a future society through their ongoing social practices, social relations, decision-making philosophy and culture” (Monticelli 2018, p. 509).
***
Many problems we presently witness in the world are not caused by the lack of technologies, but by people’s lack of capacity to live and work together, to take on their share of responsibility, to collaborate, to share resources and to co-create solutions with people from different cultural backgrounds. Although ecovillages are not perfect, they are experimenting and developing solutions in all these dimensions, and are thus incubators of innovations and learnings.
***
…[E]covillages can be regarded as incubators for other ways of being in a rapidly changing world. They make efforts to embed regeneration in daily social and cultural practices, and to create new models of well-being that are not so much attached to economic growth and consumerism….
—Schwab and Roysen, Nature Climate Action (2022).
This is a free post, because we need as many people as possible to know that adopting personal do’s or don’ts matter and there are many strategies that can help. These posts keep coming only because good people dig deep and choose the modest voluntary subscription fee options from their hearts. Thank you!
Here are the top 20 strategies our little ecovillage at The Farm has polled:
Based on the number of residents’ suggestions that fell into each category, our pie chart looks like this:
Based on how people then voted their preferences, the weighted chart is this:
Forests ranked high because we are a forested ecovillage and we saw what happened in 2018 in California. The towns of Paradise and Concow were almost completely destroyed, each losing about 95% of their structures. Recent research has found that forests, such as in the tropics, can withstand up to a 3.9 ± 0.5 °C increase in air temperatures before hitting a tipping point in metabolic function, auguring leaf death and tree death. We don’t know where our temperate hardwood forest’s threshold lies. The carbon cycle, water cycle and biodiversity are all interlinked. Deforestation and fragmentation can amplify local temperature changes which then bring on more deforestation and fragmentation.
Within our ecovillage now, there are committees being formed, action plans being brainstormed, budgets being calculated, and recruitment of talent. Each month there are virtual get-togethers between delegates from 20 ecovillages around the world that are part of the process.
Credit the Biden Administration and Nancy Pelosi, who managed to pass over strong opposition the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. It included nearly $50 billion for climate resilience projects. Then the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act added several billion more, including $2.6 billion for coastal communities, $235 million for tribes, and $25 million for Native Hawaiians. Still, twenty-three separate billion-dollar-plus disasters this year necessitated a supplemental $16 billion additional funding request for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). That, unfortunately, is now on the chopping block in order to avert a threatened government shutdown. When the next disaster strikes, FEMA may be AWOL.
The US is cutting off its nose to spite its face.
Ecovillages abide. But they are not islands. Across Europe and into Southwest Asia, migrants have been arriving to ecovillages, swelling beleaguered populations with needy paupers, sometimes productive, sometimes aged, infirm or disabled. Up to 1400 Ukrainians (around 200 children) escape to Western ecovillages along the Green Road each month. African migrants are now tugging at the heartstrings of the Italian ecovillage network, RIVE.
The world is being re-ordered. It is all well and good to wish for bygone days, and many social conservatives would, but we are at a crossroads now. It is a moment of choice. We may be the final generation of humans but we could still evolve into the first generation of eco-humans.
References
Bodansky D., The who, what, and wherefore of geoengineering governance. Clim Chang 121(3) (2013):539–551. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-013-0759-7
Cheng, Lijing, et al. "Another record: ocean warming continues through 2021 despite La Niña conditions." Advances in Atmospheric Sciences 39.3 (2022): 373-385.
Daly, Matthew. "Quantifying the environmental impact of ecovillages and co-housing communities: a systematic literature review." Local Environment 22.11 (2017): 1358-1377.
Eds., Ecological 'doom loops' edging closer, study warns, Phys.org (2023, June 23).
Hedlund, Johanna, et al, Impacts of climate change on global food trade networks, Environ. Res. Lett. 17 124040 (9 December 2022). DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/aca68b
Helfrich S (2015) Die Welt der Commons: Muster gemeinsamen Handelns. Transcript Verlag.
Miller, Riel. Transforming the future: Anticipation in the 21st century. Taylor & Francis, 2018.
Schwab, Anne-Kathrin, and Rebeca Roysen. "Ecovillages and other community-led initiatives as experiences of climate action." Climate Action 1.1 (2022): 12.
Tuomi, I. (2017). Ontological Expansion. In R. Poli (Ed.), Handbook of Anticipation: Theoretical and Applied Aspects of the Use of the Future in Decision Making. Cham: Springer Publishing.
Willcock, S. et al, Earlier collapse of Anthropocene ecosystems driven by multiple faster and noisier drivers, Nature Sustainability (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41893-023-01157-x
Meanwhile, let’s end this war. Towns, villages, and cities in Ukraine are being bombed every day. Ecovillages and permaculture farms have organized something like an underground railroad to shelter families fleeing the cities, either on a long-term basis or temporarily, as people wait for the best moments to cross the border to a safer place or to return to their homes if that becomes possible. There are 70 sites in Ukraine and 500 around the region. As you read this, 40 Ukrainian ecovillages and 300 in Europe have given shelter to thousands of adults and children and are receiving up to 1400 persons (around 200 children) each month. We call our project “The Green Road.”
For most of the children refugees, this will be their first experience in ecovillage living. They will directly experience its wonders, skills, and safety. They may never want to go back. Those who do will carry the seeds within them of the better world they glimpsed through the eyes of a child.
Those wishing to make a tax-deductible gift can do so through Global Village Institute by going to http://PayPal.me/greenroad2022 or by directing donations to greenroad@thefarm.org.
The COVID-19 pandemic destroyed lives, livelihoods, and economies. But it has not slowed climate change, a juggernaut threat to all life, humans included. We had a trial run at emergency problem-solving on a global scale with COVID — and we failed. 6.95 million people, and counting, have died. We ignored well-laid plans to isolate and contact trace early cases; overloaded our ICUs; parked morgue trucks on the streets; and incinerated bodies until the smoke obscured our cities as much as the raging wildfires. The modern world took a masterclass in how abysmally, unbelievably, shockingly bad we could fail, despite our amazing science, vast wealth, and singular talents as a species.
Having failed so dramatically, so convincingly, with such breathtaking ineptitude, do we imagine we will now do better with climate? Having demonstrated such extreme disorientation in the face of a few simple strands of RNA, do we imagine we can call upon some magic power that will arrest all our planetary-ecosystem-destroying activities?
As the world enters a new phase of the pandemic, there is growing recognition that we must learn to do better. We must chart a pathway to a new carbon economy that goes beyond zero emissions and runs the industrial carbon cycle backward — taking CO2 from the atmosphere and ocean, turning it into coal and oil, and burying it in the ground. The triple bottom line of this new economy is antifragility, regeneration, and resilience. We must lead by good examples; carrots, not sticks; ecovillages, not carbon indulgences. We must attract a broad swath of people to this work by honoring it, rewarding it, and making it fun. That is our challenge now.
Help me get my blog posted every week. All Patreon donations and Blogger or Substack subscriptions are needed and welcomed. You are how we make this happen. Your contributions are being made to Global Village Institute, a tax-deductible 501(c)(3) charity. PowerUp! donors on Patreon get an autographed book off each first press run. Please help if you can.
