It’s become clear to me that if we can manage our water resources
better we can dramatically save energy, protect natural resources,
and increase our security.

_

In an era defined by polarized political agendas, imminent environmental collapse, and faltering
global economies, one doesn’t have to look far to find conflict. This is as true for water as for
anything. In the west conflict often starts with water, as wryly noted by Mark Twain’s observation
that, “Whiskey is for drinking, Water is for fighting over.”

_

While there is variation in the numbers, most sources currently agree: managing water consumes
about 20% of US energy. Surprisingly, California numbers are not dramatically higher than the
national average – on a percentage basis, Kentucky uses more energy managing water than does
California. To make matters worse, at least 30% of the fresh water we consume is used by power
plants, primarily thermal plants. That’s correct, about 1/3 of our water supply is used to cool
power plants. So we are using energy to draw fresh water, which takes more energy, which
requires more fresh water, and the cycle continues.

_

In the same way that using water compounds energy use and vice-versa, conserving water has a compounding effect on energy. What does this mean? In fact, removing lawns, reusing shower
water, efficient irrigation, and harvesting rainwater can reduce our dependence on fossil fuels
– perhaps more effectively than any other strategy.

_

The good news is that we have been managing water so poorly that we can make great strides in
conservation and reuse relatively easily. To give a short overview of typical US water management
is almost comical. Tremendous public investment is created to extract, treat, chlorinate, and
distribute what is perhaps the most reliable and healthy water supply ever known to human-kind.
We utilize less than 10% of that water for personal consumption, the bulk being utilized to collect our excrement and irrigate our yards.

_

To imagine a more sensible and efficient relationship to water, both pragmatically and
philosophically, is not difficult for even the most simplistic among us.

_

It is meaningful to consider what has been accomplished with energy: according to the Rocky
Mountain Institute, more than 90% of new energy demand during the period 1980 to 2000 was
met through conservation – energy efficient appliances, increasing the efficiency of infrastructure,
and education programs (remember those “turn off the lights” stickers of the 80s?).
During this period of tremendous growth, no significant new power plants were built.

_

It occurs to me that a similar commitment to water conservation and reuse just might spare us
from the dramatic, often apocalyptic projections for wars over water in the 21^st century and beyond. Cultivating a healthy respect for clean water and re-thinking the ways we manage this most
important resource can help us all feel a little more secure — naturally.

Josiah Raison Cain
is a Partner at
DESIGN ECOLOGY,
lectures regularly,
and teaches at
Sonoma State
University,
University of
California Davis,
and Esalen Institute.

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Water Footprint Network

You may know your carbon footprint, but do you know how much water you use? Whether you luxuriate in lengthy morning showers or carefully turn off the water while you briskly lather up, chances are you mainly think of water only when it’s flowing from your tap. Now, a handy website calculates how lifestyle choices correlate to water consumption, from vegetarianism (lower) to buying fancy coffee beans from overseas (higher). Much like a carbon footprint, it’s those hidden thousands of gallons of H20 that produce everything from cotton towels to daily cups of coffee that make the difference, not simply how carefully you brush your teeth. Find out your water footprint through this handy tool—and learn how to better conserve the blue stuff on both a personal and global scale. www.waterfootprint.org —-

Rotterdam’s Watersquare In 2007, Rotterdam created their Waterplan 2 Rotterdam, a comprehensive outline of dykes, water storage, and green roofs to help the city forestall a watery siege by 2030. A particularly innovative piece of the plan is the Watersquare, by design firm De Urbanisten, in which city parks double as storm water management systems. Beneath undulating green knolls and gradated landscaping (replete with kid-friendly tunnels), sits a complicated system of drains that pulls rainwater and gray water from throughout the neighborhood, then filters it into the soil or nearby bodies of water —instead of back into the overtaxed and beleaguered sewer system. In dry weather, people can congregate here to walk, sunbathe, or toss around a Frisbee; when it rains, children can play in the streams and eddies that will appear in the park. The first Watersquare is nearing construction, and a total of twenty-five will be built over the coming years. www.waterpleinen.nl

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Aqualta at Studio Lindfors The sight of Kevin Costner standing astride a pirate boat in Waterworld may have overstated the matter a tad, but it’s not just celluloid fantasy that our water levels are rising. New York-based design firm Studio Lindfors has created a series of thoughtful images that explore the reality of what urban landscapes might look like a century from now. Centered around Tokyo and New York, the pictures show how residents might repurpose their cities, creating rooftop farms and greenhouses, building networks of canals and pedestrian boardwalks as new transportation grids, and in general, demonstrating what the firm calls “an adaptable city infrastructure capable of acclimating to nature.” Overall, it’s a much more palatable vision than a pirate ship. studiolindfors.com

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The Frog’s Dream There were over 2.8 million home foreclosures in 2009, many of which were suburban McMansions. Instead of letting these places slowly turn into decrepit shadows of their former selves, designer Calvin Chiu proposes that these houses be transformed into wetland havens. In Chiu’s vision, these bloated residences would be converted into eco-water treatment systems, called “Living Machines,” in which algae, bacteria, fish, and clams would naturally purify the water. Outside, where sprinkler systems and leaf blowers used to dominate would instead be wetland eco-systems: Frogs would cavort, beavers would roam, and bikers could enjoy the view of the new marshy greenery from converted highways and roads that would help transport the purified water to urban centers. Seems like a futuristic vision that makes good sense. www.re-burbia.com

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Walkscore In some American cities, pedestrian sightings are as rare as Sasquatch—and are regarded with a similar degree of skeptical amazement. But with gas prices rising and lengthening commutes, battling traffic to buy an espresso is losing its luster and many a driver instead dreams of strolling out their front door to a coffee shop down the block. Now, the website Walkscore can help realize your relocation fantasies. Type in a residential address, and the site will rank it on a scale of zero to a hundred by number of foot-friendly places nearby; it shows everything from parks to restaurants to trendy boutiques on its maps.  Real estate agencies feature Walkscore rankings on some listings, making it even easier to forsake the gas pedal in favor of your feet. And should you get tired of hauling groceries to your new home, the website just added a new feature that shows the proximity of public transit options.www.walkscore.com

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Gallup’s “Soul of the Community” Some cities are full of residents that love where they live; in other places, people flee at the first opportunity. What makes certain areas more appealing than others? The pollsters at Gallup are attempting to answer that question with a three-year study that targets twenty-six communities across the country. After talking to almost 28,000 people over the past two years, they’ve found that the top factors to foster strong local favor are plenty of places to meet and mingle, diverse educational offerings, and an overall conviviality. Plus, looks do count: plentiful green spaces and overall attractiveness round out the list. Gallup will end its study at the end of 2010 by seeing if these emotional attachments are associated with economic growth, hopefully proving once and for all that well-designed cities aren’t just pretty—they also make good financial sense. www.soulofthecommunity.org

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Actions: What You Can Do With the City. Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Chicago, IL. Imagine an inflatable pink rubber playground in which children cavort. Or a traffic island colonized by bright red tomatoes, or a series of recycled truck tires remade into lounge chairs for weary pedestrians. In this exhibition, ninety-nine such projects display the multitude of ways in which architects, designers, students, and activists from around the world are making their cities a little less gray and a lot more interesting. Repurposed garbage, urban foraging expeditions, and creative adaptations of architecture make multiple appearances. The show is also online, should your travel plans not coincide with a trip through the Midwest. cca-actions.org

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[murmur] “Humans, not places, make memories,” wrote novelist Ama Ata Aidoo. But without places, where would our stories reside? A documentary oral history project called [murmur] is seeking to imbue old buildings and streets with people’s stories. Print out a neighborhood map from their website of various cities, from Dublin to Toronto to San Jose, then wander the streets looking for the project’s little green ears posted on telephone poles and street signs. Call the number on the ears, and you’ll be treated to stories of where you’re standing. One woman recounts an old movie theater that was redolent of garlic, another waxes poetic about Maltese baked goods, and a man tells of the meaning behind the gates to Vancouver’s Chinatown. It’s a fascinating history lesson, told by the people who lived it. murmurtoronto.ca

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“The Sharing Solution: How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life, and Build Community” (Nolo Press, 2009) A comprehensive manual that helps educate readers on how to share just about everything from nannies to jobs to property. Published at a time when people are starting communes and collectives, planting backyard farms, and even creating their own micro-economies, “The Sharing Solution,” written by attorneys Emily Doskow and Janelle Orsi, is not only a useful guidebook but an important reminder that the best intentions are made better when made official.

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Button Parks As the natural playspaces of our childhood disappear for our own kids (or remain, but are kept off limits to kids today mostly due to safety concerns), Richard Louv, author of “Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder,” suggests we create a DIY version for future generations to explore and enjoy. “Button parks,” as Louv proposes naming them, would operate as “nearby-nature trusts”–essentially small green parcels of nature, officially preserved by residents under the official auspices of larger land trust organizations. Ideally, land trusts would develop and distribute free tool kits to help facilitate the creation of these small public spaces. Louv even envisions a future of symbolically linked button parks, a sort of “decentral park.” And why “button” parks? Well, says Louv, “people can sew those on themselves.”

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LEGO Community Workers Set Perhaps Sarah Palin would have been forgiving of the notion of community organizer had her kids played with this charming set of LEGO workers. Construction workers, waiters, police officers, bakers, mechanics, and EMTs are among the occupations depicted. Perfect for inspiring little Presidents-to-be.

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In her book, Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It (Bloomsbury, 2008), journalist Elizabeth Royte explores the precipitous rise of the bottled stuff, and its subsequent effect on tap water and questions of sustainability. I interviewed Royte recently about her findings and the larger impact of water consumption as an environmental concern.

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AH: Why research water? And bottled water in particular?

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ER: I wrote a book about garbage (Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash) following different streams of waste from my house and their downstream environmental and social impacts. So I had become obsessed with the concept of disposability and single use packaging. I came to the water issue from that ubiquitous lightweight piece of plastic.

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AH: What drove the popularity of bottled water?

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ER: We had bottled water before, but it came in glass bottles like Perrier or in thicker plastic. In 1989, it became possible to put water in PET plastic, which was much lighter and cheaper and turned water into this anywhere, anytime kind of beverage. The ads focused on the health benefits: that you’d be thinner and more beautiful by drinking water instead of sodas or even juices and teas. But it was also really important that there was no organized criticism of water until the last two years, so the water marketers had an open field to push this product with no competition from tap water. Plus, we’re a society of convenience—we like to grab something and go. It was a combination of those factors that contributed to bottled water’s phenomenal growth.

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AH: What do you see as the biggest problems of bottled water?

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ER: I think what has captured consumers’ attention is the carbon footprint of the water. Bottled water comes out of ground from pump or spring, then it’s pumped into a tanker truck, which delivers it to a bottling plant where it’s put into small bottles that are then sent to distribution centers, which then send trucks out to grocery stores and vending machines. It’s a huge energy input behind an industry that’s fundamentally superfluous if you’ve got good tap water to drink and you have a reusable bottle. Then there’s the water footprint, the fact that it can take 3.2 gallons of water to make one liter on the shelf, from cooling the equipment in the plant to rinsing out the bottles to washing equipment. There’s also the waste issue on the back end. We go through 30 billion water bottles a year in this country and most of them don’t get recycled. The recycling rate has gone up to 25%-30% since I wrote the book, but the vast majority are still going into landfills or into incinerators or are getting littered.

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AH: How does that contrast with tap water?

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ER: Tap water from municipal supplies is pumped from surface supplies like reservoirs or rivers, or it’s pumped from the ground and called ground water and it goes right into filtering and disinfecting plants and then it’s sent out through big pipes, through shared infrastructure to homes. Where I live and in many places, the water’s delivered by gravity. You don’t have all those trucks on the road, and you don’t have all that packaging. It’s pretty much a zero-waste proposition.

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AH: The New York Times is publishing a series on how tap water is contaminated and dirty in many places. Doesn’t that justify drinking bottled water?

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ER: Bottled water might be cleaner, if it’s not sitting around for too long, and the company making it is responsible and changes its filters on time and inspects their water, etc etc. But I still don’t think we should be drinking it. Bottled water is too expensive and its environmental toll is too high, and if we don’t support public water systems and just abandon public water sources, there will be very little political will to protect water sheds and to raise rates that go to improving water infrastructure. And that’s what we need to do now. Instead, I think we should all find out exactly what is coming out of our taps, read our annual reports from utilities, and then do further independent testing at our taps. Find a certified lab here and send out water samples, and order up all these tests. And then if there’s anything in the water that concerns you, get a good filter; the Environmental Working Group has a really handy tool on their site to choose a filter. It’s equally important to work on solutions to these water problems, and not just say, well, I’m okay, I’m protecting myself. We have to think about society at large and stopping polluters.

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AH: How do we do that?

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ER: Support your local watershed group by volunteering or sending them money. There are watershed groups out there that are fighting the good fight. They’re fighting developers, they’re fighting industry, they do things like stream restoration and building wetlands and water testing. I think keeping your water local and recharging aquifers, not treating dirty water as something to immediately get rid of— re-localizing the whole water system is really important, even if you’re not water stressed. Paving less, having permeable surfaces, using the ecosystem surfaces we already have, using the earth to filter the water instead of building massive concrete infrastructures. We also need to strengthen the Clean Water Act. It’s up for reauthorization, and it could be much tighter. We’ve stopped a lot of point source pollution with the act and we don’t have as many big sites spewing toxics into clean waterways. But now we need to go after non-point sources of pollution, and that speaks to keeping the bad stuff out in the first place.

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AH: What about larger water issues? Some have called it the next eco-crisis.

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ER: There’s a finite amount of water on the planet, and we’ve had the same amount for the past 4.5 billion years. And that’s great, but we’re polluting water faster than ever before, and we’re moving it away from its home water shed faster than ever before in the form of virtual water – goods, textiles, food that we grow in one area and ship around the world. The population is going up, so the water has to be spread out among more people, and climate changes are exacerbating everything.

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AH: How can we deal with water scarcity and at the same time, create better drinking water?

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ER: That’s what Orange County is doing. They were sending all their wastewater out into the ocean, and then they realized that this waste is a resource. So they’re now capturing all the water from sewers and homes and toilets and industry, sending it through a wastewater treatment plant and through a newly built purification plant and they’ve ended up with a water purer than anything anyone is drinking upstream. Some people call it toilet to tap, and I think we’re going to see more of that.

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AH: Any other technologies that can preserve or replenish local water supplies?

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ER: The biggest fraction of water goes to outdoor use: lawns and cars and gardens. Getting people to take out their lawns or plant drought tolerant species has been really effective in cutting home water use. And using water that’s treated to a pretty high level by waste water treatment plant for non-potable purposes, to water lawns and golf courses and flush toilets. So there’s that sort of technology, and water reuse, and recycling – there’s a lot going on. The important point is we know how to do it and it can be done, it’s just how do we get everyone on the same page.

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AH: If you were desperate and thirsty, is there any brand of water you’d buy?

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ER: I would drink from a sink or refill my bottle from a sink, or I would wait to get where I’m going. People have forgotten how to wait till they get where they’re going to get a drink. I’m just not going to walk into a corner store and buy water.

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In Portland, Oregon, rows of sedge plantings and aspen trees sit on what used to be an asphalt parking lot. In Las Vegas, homeowners trade their lawns for vast wads of cash. Birds flying over Chicago see fields of sedum on rooftops, and wastewater in Orange County is transformed into water that’s as clean as what comes out of the tap. The common thread to all of these examples? A desire to better manage water.

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A new report released last fall by consulting firm McKinsey & Company declares that by 2030, the world’s water demands will have increased by 40%. Add to that the fact of rising seas, droughts, and shrinking water sheds, and cities across the country are starting to respond with some particularly innovative solutions tailor-made to their varied water needs.

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A good case in point is Orange County, which has created the largest-scale program of recycling wastewater in the world. This part of Southern California had formerly relied on gleaning most of its water from a mix of ground water and two rivers (the Santa Ana and the Colorado). Anticipating increased land development, combined with multi-year droughts decreasing the river systems, the area was facing large water shortages.  As a result, the water district came up with a way to recycle wastewater that would otherwise drain into the ocean. Called the Groundwater Replenishment System , it essentially diverts the wastewater from one of the area’s two sewage treatment plants to a system that cleans the water to drinkable levels through a three-step process. The purified water is then put back into the ground, where it trickles through the soil to again become part of the municipal aquifers. On track to process half of the total wastewater produced by the area’s 2.5 million residents, the system has been up and running for two years. That’s 34 billion gallons of water recycled for reuse. An added bonus is that the system conserves the energy otherwise used in importing water from various rivers, saving money in the process. Entirely successful, the program’s already planning to expand, and cities such as Los Angeles and San Diego are looking into emulation.

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Las Vegas, likewise, has focused most of its local water conservation efforts on one spectacularly successful program, although quite different in type from Orange County. Called the Water Smart Landscapes Program in which people are paid to rip out their lawns, “it’s our flagship conservation program and over 80% of what we do,” says Doug Bennett of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. Initially launched as a five-year research project of 700 houses in 1995, the results of the study were startling: When people replaced their grass with native plants and xeriscaping, they reduced their water use on average by 75%. Not bad for a city where almost three-quarters of residential water use is outdoors. So in 1999, the area started the cash for grass program, available to all commercial and residential customers, scaling up the rebate amounts to its current level of $1.50 per square foot of grass removed for the first 5,000 square feet (larger conversions pay more in the $1 per square foot range, such as with golf courses and parks). Tiered water utility rate structures provide additional incentives to conserve, as do new city codes that prohibit grass in front yards and limit back yard size and outlaw nonfunctional grass in commercial developments.

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“No relationships have been forged over the roar of a lawnmower. 

And when one neighbor takes out their lawn, often the rest of the street follows.”

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The measurable results of this program are impressive: Over 40,000 lawns amounting to 141 million square feet of turf are now decorated with Joshua trees and cacti instead of grass, with savings of more than 33 billion gallons of water over the past decade (almost 20% annually in water savings for the city). As for other results, Bennett asserts that taking out lawns has helped build community. “No relationships have been forged over the roar of a lawnmower,” he says. “And when one neighbor takes out their lawn, often the rest of the street follows.” His dream is that the program will one day put itself out of business. Los Angeles has recently instituted a more modest similar program , and the nonprofit Utah Rivers Council has created a suggestively-named Rip Your Strip program that offers tips and advice (although no money) to residents taking out grass.

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A world of weather away in Portland, OR, the issue is not scarcity, but rather how to manage a wealth of the wet stuff. With near-constant precipitation for much of the year, Portland has created a comprehensive approach that integrates various ways of dealing with stormwater and rain, so that it’s not all just draining into (and polluting) the Willamette River that runs through the center of the city. “There are much better solutions than just building big new pipes” says Linda Dobson of the city’s Bureau of Environmental Services. “You save money and enhance natural environments when you take a holistic approach and don’t just upsize pipes.” Perhaps the cornerstone of this effort is the Green Street Program that turns impervious roadways where water pours into sewer systems into streets where water naturally drains through soil and greenery, as well as creating curb extensions, permeable pavement, and pedestrian-friendly crossings in place of parking spaces. The city has resolved to remove 60 million gallons of stormwater each year from the sewer system by 2011, in large part through green streets. Already, 475 such streets have been created; another 500 are planned over the next two years, and most of the streets are already seeing more than an 80% reduction in water flow to the sewer system. Residents have bought into the program, helping choose plantings for their streets and being involved through a downspout disconnect program , that encourages rain barrel use and credits homeowners and property managers for managing their stormwater on site.

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It’s perhaps the most impressive example of stormwater management in the country, and one which other cities are starting to mimic. San Francisco is installing its first major green street by the year end on Newcomb Avenue in Bayview, a redevelopment area, and the city hopes to make the project just one of many to come. Chicago has also made impressive strides, concentrating their efforts on alleys rather than streets. With over 1900 miles of back alleys, the city created a pilot program in 2006 that replaces traditional concrete and asphalt with permeable pavers that allows 80% of rainwater to seep underground instead of into the sewers. More than 80 green alleys were created in the first two years of the program, and the city is forging ahead with more for the future . Even smaller localities, like the city of Toledo, OH, are jumping on the bandwagon: They’re planning a green alley project to break ground this spring that will incorporate permeable pavements and landscaping with free rain barrels and rain gardens provided by the city to the neighborhood’s low-income homes www.raingardeninitiative.org.

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Other cities are taking their green above street level. Chicago is perhaps the recognized leader in this area, with a green roof grant initiative program since 2005 of up to $5,000, a city hall topped with crabapple trees and honeysuckle vines included among its 20,000 plants, and more than 600 green roofs totaling 7 million square feet throughout the city. Seattle, Portland, Toronto, and New York are all ramping up their own green roof programs, offering tax incentives, code requirements, and building allowances through their various cities. At the same time, tree planting has become another popular move towards soaking up rainwater naturally—as well as beautifying streets. New York City recently launched MillionTreesNYC , an initiative that plans to put a million trees throughout the city’s five boroughs over the next decade, and Portland gives “treebates” and free trees through their city program , hoping to line streets with the waving branches of native alder, fir, maple, and madrone

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Then there are cities like Tucson which offer no flashy projects, no sexy PR, just solid, well-integrated water conservation programs that are quietly doing a good job. “In the 1970s, we ran into demand issues based on city growth,” says Fernando Molina of Tucson Water. “So we took an integrated research management approach for conservation, and we’ve sustained it since then.” From a peak period of average daily per capita use around 200 gallons a day in the 1970s, the city now boasts an average per capita use that hovers around 138 gallons (the national average for a family of four is over 240 gallons a day, according to the EPA). The city offers a long list of rebates from toilets to rainwater collection, has extensive public education programs on the importance of watching water use, maintains conservation ordinances from gray water to plumbing codes—including a new ordinance taking effect this June that mandates gray water plumbing be installed in all new construction—as well as an inclining block rate structure for water customers, and promotes a forward-thinking xeriscaping effort that began decades ago. “Phoenix likes to say that you can’t tell where the desert ends and Tucson begins,” Molina states of the other Arizona city, where lush green lawns carpet the landscape. Tucson residents are proud of that intended slur; it means they’ve been ahead of the water curve for years.

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As Benjamin Franklin once wrote, “When the well is dry, we know the worth of water.” It would be disastrous if we let ourselves get to that point. Perhaps if we follow these cities’ leads and look to the future, we will understand the value of water before it’s both literally and proverbially too late.

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“The fastest way to change society is to mobilize the women of the world,” said Charles Malik, former president of the United Nations General Assembly in a recent speech. Though women represent a disproportionately low percentage of the world’s utilized capital, they may also be a key to overcoming serious obstacles from poverty to climate change. When we unleash their talents and bring their inherent qualities into balance with the world’s power structures, things change.

In the Nike Foundation’s award-winning cause campaign, The Girl Effect, this message was made demonstrably clear. The world is a mess, and according to Nike, a girl is the unexpected solution that can turn a sinking ship around:

“Adolescent girls are uniquely capable of raising the standard of living in the developing world,” says The Nike Foundation. “[They] are the most likely agents of change, but are often invisible to societies and our media.” To be sure, the world’s women and girls, willing and able as they may be to instigate change, face an unfortunately skewed system and general lack of opportunities.

The data demonstrating global gender disparity is clear enough. According to the White House Project, women’s income is 50 percent lower than men’s income in over 60 of the world’s states. Of the 1.2 billion people living in poverty worldwide, 70 percent are female, while women own less than one percent of the world’s land. To make matters worse, it is has just been revealed that women will take on the brunt of climate change.

“Climate change will not only endanger lives and undermine livelihoods, but it threatens to exacerbate the gaps between rich and poor and amplify the inequities between men and women,” says the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) in a new Report. “Women – particularly those in poor countries – will be affected differently than men. They are among the most vulnerable to climate change, partly because in many countries they make up a larger share of the agricultural work force and partly because they tend to have access to fewer income-earning opportunities.”

The UNFPA’s report indicates that not only are women are more likely than men to die in climate change-related natural disasters such as heat waves, hurricanes, cyclones, droughts and floods, but they have historically been unable to adapt as well as men. Whereas men migrate to safer areas, most women and girls stay home, as they are the ones primarily responsible for local agriculture production as well as sustaining families in poor communities. To change their fate, women need better platforms for engagement.

The UNFPA asserts that we cannot successfully confront the climate challenge if we ignore the human side of things – the raw potential of half the people on the planet. Empowering the status of women must be a key strategy to persevere in the fight against global warming, they say. But so far this topic has received scant attention from negotiators working toward a new global climate deal. As a Worldwatch Institute press release recently pointed out: “Women will be most affected by climate change but remain noticeably absent from Copenhagen agenda.”

That’s too bad, because the UNFPA’s report’s core message hearkens back to The Nike Foundation’s Girl Effect campaign, positioning women as highly effective change agents. Women may very well be the missing link between a seemingly unsolvable climate problem and a viable, human solution.

“This is the first report in which a United Nations agency has connected climate change to human population and the status of women,” said Robert Engelman, Worldwatch Institute’s Vice President for Programs in the press release. “Its main finding – that investing in women and erasing the constraints on their achievement will slow climate change and build social resilience – is powerful and hopeful.”

Models of Resilience

What would happen if the world’s poor farmers – many of them women – began to work directly with the soil and crops to transform themselves from net emitters of greenhouse gasses to net absorbers? Could they slow, perhaps reverse, the rise of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere? The UNFPA describes such a process in its report, noting that it would require a new agricultural production system based on increasing the carbon content of soil and decreasing the use of chemical fertilizers. However, the significance of the concept is greater than science involved.

The UNFPA’s idea demonstrates the need for adaption. So many communities are coping with climate change, but adapting to it is another story. With this idea, each farmer adjusts to a changed reality, becomes part of a necessary solution and serves as a model of resilience. With initiatives such as this, women could potentially elevate their status from climate change casualties to climate change agents.

The women of the world have an excellent track record when it comes to implementing ideas and taking part in organized systems that advance their own development. In Bangladesh, for instance, eradicating poverty has been a key concern, and thanks to assistance from micro-finance institutions such as The Grameen Bank, which distribute small loans at affordable rates, many women have overcome even the most difficult of personal circumstances.

“The fact is that mainstream society does not allow women to explore their full potential,” Nobel Peace Prize winner and Grameen Bank founder Dr. Muhammad Yunus told me in an interview several years ago. “My original hope for Grameen was that it would dispel poverty and hunger at their origin, and that by investigating the sources of poverty, we would develop better approaches for eliminating it. We quickly recognized that women should be the focus. Once we help a woman explore and seize her immediate opportunities, she concentrates on her family and reshapes their destiny.”

Indeed, data indicates that whereas a woman or girl will reinvest 90 percent of her income back into her family, a man will invest 30-40 percent. Women and girls tend to nurture their families, which in turn strengthens communities, creating a chain reaction that can translate to major socioeconomic change. This is why Grameen narrowly concentrates on female bank clients.

Ninety-six percent of Grameen’s four million borrowers are women, whereas 98.02 percent pay back their loans. Given that there are roughly three thousand microcredit organizations such as Grameen worldwide operating with a similar construct, this success represents great potential – a means of liberating people from poverty and increasing their participation in the broader economic and political scheme of things.

Should such a macro-construct be devised and executed on a global scale for climate change, the impact could be just as sweeping. The UNFPA stresses the potential of such a vision, but again points to the obstacles to women’s participation, in rich countries as well as poor. Women have the innate power and will to mobilize against climate change, but this potential can only be realized through policies that empower them.

“In a world whose changing climate must be simultaneously combated and adapted to, shackles on half the world’s population are unsupportable,” says the UNFPA’s report. “A positive development is that many women are moving forward despite these constraints. They are modelling new ways of operating in society and relating to one another in ways that could make a difference—not just to climate but to sustainable social relations and a sustainable environment overall.”

Perhaps there is reason to be optimistic. For all the talk of carbon credits, carbon trading and carbon taxes, it is really striking to reconsider the role of people and relationships in all of this.

Invest in a woman or girl, give her a platform for change, and she will do the rest. Clearly she is not the whole solution to our social and environmental woes, but she is a significant part, one that is presently being overlooked. Can world leaders and Copenhagen negotiators grasp a feminine solution? Can they afford not to? Consider what’s at stake. As Nike says in its Girl Effect campaign: “It’s no big deal. Just the future of humanity.”

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Thursday, January 14th – 2010, 6pm

The topic of our March Salon (the fifth on our series) was on water.  Water is perhaps the biggest, and yet least understood, environmental crisis we are facing.  Right now, 1.1 billion people (that’s a sixth of the planet), does not have access to clean drinking water.  By 2035, it is estimated that up to two-thirds of the planet will be in the same sad state.

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Allison Arieff talks with the founders of Shareable.net, who see their new effort as “an invitation to join the fun of building a new world.”

It’s strange how some times the most common sense things can come to feel transgressive. Consider victory gardens, once tended by post war, they’ve been experiencing a resurgence, often led by such unexpected ambassadors as installation artists and community activists like Amy Franceschini and the Rebar Collective. Similarly, sharing with one’s neighbors, once the mainstay of civilization fell out of fashion as we jumped in our cars to stock up at Costco, rarely if ever, seeking out a cup of sugar from a neighbor. But in recent years, sharing too has emerged as an almost radical act, seeing how it nearly flies in the face of contemporary American individualist tendencies. Individuals are rediscovering the value not only of neighborhoods but of neighbors.

They might be taking baby steps toward sharing—say, a babysitting co-op—or larger steps, like the near complete micro-economy established by Portland, Oregon’s 50+ family-strong Ainsworth Collective.

A brand new effort designed for this transformational shift in our collective consciousness is Shareable.net, described as “an invitation to join the fun of building a new world.” I spoke with Shareable’s founder and publisher Neal Gorenflo and its editor Jeremy Adam Smith about their hopes for their new venture and how it might help foster community.

AA: Tell me about your vision for Shareable, and how it got started.

JS: I want Shareable to become a point of intersection and discussion for people who are sharing in many spheres of life, from neighborhood babysitting coops to Zipcar members to cohousers to scientists to digital journalists to people who share code and video over the Internet. Why? Because I think one idea underlies all these activities: that everyone does better when everyone does better–in other words, that human societies thrive when people share what they have. However, I don’t want Shareable to become a propaganda organ. I want to show readers the shareable life that people are already living through storytelling, good writing, and discussion — not tell them what to think or how to behave.

NG:
What our stakeholders felt was missing was an accessible voice for this story, a voice that connected the dots between trends which on the surface appear different but operate under similar logic.  When you understand the connections between web 2.0, carsharing, open source software, cohousing, microfinance, the nonprofit movement, and social enterprise, you get a much different vision of human nature and our future than you see in the mainstream media, a very positive one.

We believe the tide is turning, that we’re at the cusp of a new, more humane order.  Our goal is to help accelerate this shift by telling this positive story and inviting people to organize their lives around this new logic.  And practically speaking, connect them to sharing tools and ideas they can use today.  Our next step, one in keeping with the value system we see emerging, is to launch a blog network so that this story can be peer produced.  We see our editorial as the kernel of an open source project and the blog network as a way for anyone to contribute to the project.  That’s our vision for a shareable magazine.

AA: Who is your audience?

JS:
I call our audience the sharing community. These are the people who engage

in sharing activities all the time. They’re members of City Car Share, they go to Burning Man, they live in cohousing or dorms, they organize potlucks and food clubs with friends, and they share code, videos, and news over the Internet. They’re also people who share professionally: designers, architects, scientists, nonprofit workers, digital journalists, sharing service employees, and so on.

AA: How does sustainability play into your notions of “shareable”?

JS:
When our goal is to own stuff, to amass square footage and cars and boats and electronic devices, our carbon footprint swells and we produce more junk. When we share all that stuff, our carbon footprint shrinks. It’s nice to own a crunchy electric car, but it’s better to share that car with our neighbors–or better, to ride public transportation. Sharing doesn’t just add to environmental sustainability–it also builds social and cultural capital and makes us as a society more sustainable. If we can’t learn to share, we won’t achieve sustainability in any area of life.

NG:
We think sharing is a bridge between the sustainability movement today and deeper social transformation.  Sharing starts at a place we’re familiar with, self-interest and getting our material needs met, but often leads to new patterns of social organization that are satisfying and empowering, that encourage people to take it further, and gives them the capacity to take on even bigger challenges.  On the collective level, it can build up our stock of social capital, which is a prerequisite for broad social change.  We have to be connected and committed to each other to become powerful collectively.

We also did research to learn how to frame sharing effectively for our audience, which helped us understand how to make a contribution to the sustainability movement.  Our natural inclination was to frame sharing as a sustainability thing.  As our site shows, we decided not to do this.  Instead, we frame sharing in real life as an extension of something that is natural as breathing online, and where the more you share, the more respect you get.  In this way, we want to inject net culture into the sustainability movement, broaden its appeal, and create a new frame, which leverages the positive values of net culture for real change on the ground.

While the sustainability frame was familiar and worked well to a certain extent, it appeared to us that its appeal had limits.  Surveys showed that a large majority of people agreed that the environment should be protected, but there seemed a failure to translate this sentiment into change.  This told us that the values and stories within this movement may not work for us if we wanted to connect with a broad audience.  What’s limiting this frame?  My opinion is that at the core of this movement is a disempowering story of crisis and failure, that we have a life threatening crisis and can not adequately respond to it.  The crisis is used to motivate people, but it can motivate only so many for so long.  And the crisis remains.  I also believe that this movement has elitist, proscriptive, and authoritarian tendencies.  It’s not particularly inclusive.  And it can make going green seem like a moral obligation and a chore.

By contrast, the story at the heart of net culture is one of possibility and success.  That amazing things are possible when people work together as peers.  That contributing is fun and engaging like a game.  It’s inclusive, democratic, and merit based.  Anyone can join in.  You’re encouraged to participate.  And that the more you contribute, the more respect you get.  It became clear to us that this is the ascendant culture.

AA: What would be the best first steps or a good first attempt for those wanting to explore this broader concept of sharing?

JS:
I would not have called myself a sharer before I started this job but looking at my private world revealed to me that ways that I already share, all the time. We trade babysitting with other families, we launched a community organization and a cooperative preschool, we share rides and toys, and so on. The difference is that now I appreciate those sharing activities and their benefits. As a result, I’m looking for more ways to share in my life. So I think the first step is to look at the ways you’re already sharing, do an inventory. Then ask yourself, what else can I share? Pick one thing to share–and then give it a try and see what happens. If it works out, write an article for Shareable.net and tell us how you do it, so that other people can do it, too. If it doesn’t work out, tell us why–because sharing is hard and sometimes we fail to share. We have to keep learning; that’s the key. The site is a place where that learning can happen.

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So it comes as no surprise that social media is also a frontier where communal experiments flourish. Look at FarmVille, the most popular application in Facebook’s history, where 62 million (mostly young, mostly urban) ‘farmers’ tend crops, raise animals, and work cooperatively with neighbors.

FarmVille does what nothing else has, it brings together a massive number of people globally to grow and share food (albeit virtual food). Despite the predictable backlash, FarmVille is clearly a success as an experiment in community. It demonstrates how much common ground we can find as humans who nurture, and who eat. Quite an achievement.

Some see FarmVille as the ultimate sell-out, dismissing it on the grounds that true farming (and perhaps even true community) can only happen offline. It’s a reasonable observation. But to consider the urban farming experiments in Portland, Oakland or Brooklyn, for instance, as more authentic than FarmVille is to miss the point, and to miss the zeitgeist.

During the last “back-to-the-land” movement of the 60s and 70s, hippies started over 30,000 urban and rural communes. These young communards were ill-prepared; they lacked the tools they needed to come together, share resources and manifest the new world they desired. So in 1968, Stewart Brand created the groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog to help them, describing it simply as “access to tools and ideas” on everything from shelter building to systems thinking.

In a similar way, FarmVille is perhaps most important as a grouping of tools (disguised as entertainment), designed to train us to be better at community. But no one would argue that a virtual zucchini, the kind grown on FarmVille, is better than an actual zucchini. So while today, social media represents the most robust version of community – and community training – that we have, I hope that tomorrow it will not.

We have an opportunity to come back offline and bring our new social media toolkit with us. Let’s create an urban farm that integrates everything we’re learning about community-based sharing from both the physical and the virtual realms. This farm would be an online/offline mash-up of social and community infrastructures that could act as a model for how our 21st century ‘commons’ will work. Sounds to me like the kind of utopia Stewart Brand and “the hippies who built the internet”  first imagined. I’m thrilled that it can finally be realized today.

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For those of you that aren’t familiar with the program, the garden was started back in 1995, by the Chez Panisse Foundation (funded by Alice Waters) to serve as a garden and a kitchen classroom for Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School. The garden began as an empty lot with just a cover crop for the first two years. Now it is an acre of land thriving with all types of vegetables, herbs, fruit trees and complete with it’s own chickens that provide not only fun for the students but eggs to the kitchen. We learned that the garden has a Rainwater Catchment System that harvests and stores 200 gallons of water for every inch of rain. The water is harvested from the rooftop of their tool shed and used to water the garden!

The entire garden is tended to by a small and talented staff and by the students. The students provide about 70% of the work done in the garden because it is a part of their classes, like math and the sciences. In the kitchen, students learn about how to use utensils, measuring cups, thermometers and simple tools like a mortar and pestle. My favorite piece is that they not only get to learn how to cook using recipes and food from the garden, but they end the lesson by sitting around a table together and enjoying the fruits of their labor. Unfortunately, the majority of students never get the opportunity to eat around the kitchen table as a family at home.

The staff (Marsha, Ben, Sasha and Shaina) greeted us graciously with wolverine buns from Cheeseboard, a bowl full of a type of tangerines, coffee and homemade lemon tea. After a few introductions, we got straight to work picking radishes and lettuce for our lunch. Then we cultivated a strip of land that was then planted with more radishes, the beautiful Romanesco cauliflowers, chicory and lettuce. We even fertilized the land with compost they make on site.  All the while the chickens were running about and even helped us till the soil with their feet.

For lunch we ate a scrumptious bean soup the children had made in class while we were working in the garden, along with salad made from the ingredients we had picked earlier. The ginger cookies for dessert were as big as saucers and out of this world.

We reconvened in the garden to learn about mushroom cultivation. Ben Eichorn, an assistant garden teacher, taught us about the amazing properties of several types of mushrooms. I didn’t know this before, but mushrooms only flower when they know they have run out of room to grow and therefore will die soon. They flower to spread spores to perpetuate their species. Ben and Sasha then took us through the process of making our own oyster mushroom growing kits to take home with us using straw and mushroom spawn.

We ended the day discussing the issues around how to fund this kind of program in other schools. Ultimately you need people to champion the cause and to be the driving force for it to happen. We enjoyed our stay with the Edible crew and we encourage you too to visit.

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