Plastic bottles – they are an environmental disaster. They seem to be everywhere and although they have become, alongside plastic bags, much-maligned icons of mindless consumerism, they still are ubiquitous.

But some organizations in Africa have decided to give them a better destination than the recycling plant and built a house with it. In Kaduna State, Nigeria, to be precise.

The plastic bottles were filled with earth and mud and the builders say the three-room structure is so sturdy it could stand for thousands of years.

What’s better, the bottle house will run on solar power, features a fuel-efficient clean stove, urine filtration fertilization systems and water purification tanks, which makes it pretty much a self-sufficient building.

The bottle house is a result of the work initiated by Katrin Macmillan, who launched Nigeria’s bottle recycling program in December 2010. The program gets the bottles from hotels, restaurants, homes and embassies and has rid the environment from thousands of bottles.

The project counted on collaborations from Yahaya Ahmed, CEO of Development Association for Renewable Energies (DARE); Andres Froesse, founder of Eco-Tec Soluciones Ambientales (Honduras), who went to Nigeria to train local masons in the bottle building technique; engineer Chris Vassilou, who donated the land.

There are other bottle buildings in the pipeline. The next Nigerian bottle building project is a school hall in Seluja at the Africa School of Excellence, which urgently needs classroom space.

The school children are being trained in the bottle brick making technique and the newly trained masons will lead the build in January 2012.

Article by Antonio Pasolini, a Brazilian writer and video art curator based in London, UK. He holds a BA in journalism and an MA in film and television.

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We can’t successfully tackle climate change without changes to the corporate regime which has been in place in America since the Reagan presidency. That’s the underlying message of Charles Derber in his latest book, Greed to Green: Solving Climate Change and Remaking the Economy. It’s a message he delivers with directness in a book much more readable than I expected from an academic sociologist.

He accepts the position of scientists like James Hansen and others who point to the ominous dangers of tipping points in climate and conclude that we are already above a safe level of atmospheric carbon dioxide, which they consider no more than 350 parts per million. It’s not a happy acceptance. “No sane person would wish it to be the scientific truth,” he writes.

Derber recounts the terrible difficulty he had, after realising with despair the seriousness of climate change, in dealing emotionally with the prospect of mass, collective death — “more difficult than dealing with my own personal death.”

The only good news he discerns is that the scientific truth may be spreading and leading to a tipping point in the world’s social and political awareness. But any realisation of the scientific truth by a majority of the community has not passed beyond cognition to what he calls “gut acceptance.” Derber acknowledges the difficulties of such acceptance, drawing on his own experience. The reality is so serious it intensifies the psychological pressure to deny.

Nevertheless, he identifies some factors that make gut acceptance of climate change tolerable: we have the power to stop or mitigate it, tackling it can also contribute to solving more immediate social problems, and there are benefits in the green lifestyle.

Meanwhile, the denial industry has been powerfully influential, though he notes that it is now moving from Stage 1 denial, that global warming is a hoax, to Stage 2 denial, that human-caused global warming exists but must be solved gradually with a slow phasing out of fossil fuels.

“If the new denial succeeds, civilisation will be destroyed in the name of green incremental reform,” Derber writes.

In sectors of America greening is partly under way, thanks to the actions of long-term thinkers. However, the frontal long-term attack is insufficient to gather wide enough public support. It needs to be accompanied by a second path — what he calls a “time-tricking” strategy that seeks to solve the long-term crisis by hitching a ride on the back of short-term issues worrying the majority of Americans. He sees this as a key strategy for the Obama administration — and one which Obama himself understands and is already employing.

“Socialism by stealth,” I can hear the denialists proclaiming. Certainly Derber associates himself with the welfare of working people and sees the necessity for organised labor to play a significant part in a green regime. He laments the way American jobs have been degraded under the corporate regime, many outsourced and others casualised. One of the important attractions of a green regime is that it will be rich in secure jobs, many of them associated with renewable energy.

He also proposes pragmatic temporary nationalization of some banks and of giant, dysfunctional oil and coal companies — but not on the basis of any socialist ideology. The banks have already required enormous injections of public money to keep them afloat. The fossil fuel energy giants such as Exxon are already effectively on the public dole.

Essentially Derber is urging a transformation of America away from an increasingly unstable economy based on ever-growing consumption of unnecessary goods and ever-expanding suburban housing. Coerced consumerism he calls it, which has locked Americans into a pattern of insecurity and overwork.

In its place he urges an economy solidly based on the production of green energy and its efficient use. Those jobs stay local and secure. And there’s plenty of room for market-inspired innovation within such an economy. The transformation is necessary to fight climate change, and at the same time it works to alleviate America’s current social justice crises.

Derber’s book focuses on the United States “because a green revolution here will be a shot heard around the world.” In discussing the ways in which the green revolution becomes global he points to “a new posthegemonic order of green security and globalization.”

He’s firm on the need for the west to take responsibility for the poverty and environmental degradation it has foisted on the rest of the world. The west must finance massive aid and technology transfers that allow the remaining nations to develop a green strategy without giving up their rights to achieve a decent standard of life.

He offers several suggestions for finding the money for this purpose: cut the bloated American military budget; implement a green Tobin tax on currency movements; cancel dirty debt in exchange for green development; create a new “commons” of clean energy technology. He explains the importance of a global carbon tax.

An interesting take on going local, not to abolish globalization but to reduce its space, sees Derber use the term “glocalism,” favouring local economies wherever possible and reserving global production only for those areas where local production cannot work.

Derber is impressed by much that Obama has said about climate change and much that he has set in place. He particularly welcomes the respect he has accorded to science and scientists who understand the reality of global warming.

But it would be a mistake to think he won’t need a big push from social movements. Derber himself is a lifelong social activist. He considers that today’s social and environmental movements are the best last hope for solving global warming on the urgent time scale required.

It has always been social movements which have awakened America to urgent systemic crises such as slavery, women’s disenfranchisement, or the capitalist exploitation of workers. Derber discusses the ways in which movements can face up to the existential truth of the emergency of climate change and take swift radical action to mobilize the largest number of people including the president.

Derber is a lively writer. He has a go at a short Greek drama in the course of his book, with the Oracle reminding foolish people that time is running out.

He also provides the text of several fireside chats for Obama to have with the American people, in the fashion of Franklin Roosevelt. In an engaging short personal account he answers any who wonder whether he walks his talk — a mixed case, he reports, not a couch potato but not a hero-activist either. His talk made good sense to me, whether he walks it assiduously or not.

Article by Bryan Walker apearing courtesy Celsias.

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Don’t expect climate change to get fixed by the governments of the world.  Don’t expect that, however noble in intention, the efforts of Gore, McKibben, Stern, and their many cohorts will succeed either.  Not on any large scale.  It won’t be clean tech or green products saving the day either.

Climate change, like energy scarcity, water pollution, and other serious global issues is merely one symptom of a larger global problem.  Tackle the symptoms individually, and at best you might get lackluster results.  Tackle the source of the problem, and everything attached to it will be positively affected.

That problem is consumerism.  Too many people want too many things on a finite planet with limited resources.  The process of obtaining and manufacturing those things is what has gotten us into trouble: carbon emissions, resource depletion, deforestation, species extinction, etc.

The consumer economy is the cornerstone of “democratic” governments worldwide.  As a result, governments have no genuine interest in changing the status quo.  It would be too problematic, too chaotic, and mean transcending too many vested interests.  Don’t count on Copenhagen to come to much.

And while Al Gore and company have some good ideas and rational arguments, the problem is that the arguments are rational, while the roots of consumerism are not.

For decades, the worldwide public both in the U.S. and any country that has emulated the American formula for “success” has had their minds absorbed by consumerism, and their emotions compromised by its advertised promises.  At this point, the average consumer is largely driven by irrational motives, advertisers tugging at the heart strings, making promises that products will solve “problems”.

In this emotional landscape and this mindset, at best you might get a few people to change to energy efficient light bulbs.  You might get their attention just long enough for a few token actions.  As for significant lifestyle shifts, they will be few and far between.  Any significant shift will come from reaching people on an emotional, and likely irrational level—just as advertisers have been doing for decades.

What we need is a shift to a new model—for our lifestyle, for our economies, for our livelihoods, for our planet.

A rational argument is not going to bring those about.  What will?

Not clean tech, not green products, nor any other model that looks similar to the one we already have.  Merely re-positioning “stuff that is less bad” for consumers to consume is just shifting the nature of the problem.  As Buckminster Fuller advised, to make an existing model obsolete, one must create a new model worth aspiring to.

Or as Einstein so elegantly put it,

“We cannot solve problems using the same logic we used to create them in the first place.”

There needs to be a shift in people’s values and behaviors on a wide scale.

The terrain is there for exploration.  Here is a well documented series from the BBC tracing the origins of consumer behavior and how they got us to where we are today.  It’s a long series to watch, but incredibly detailed and insightful.  If you are serious about wanting to change the way things are, study and reflect on these videos.

As the old adage goes, “Turn the problem into the solution.”  In this case, the answer is getting consumerism to quickly consume and snuff itself out.  Will it be another banking crisis that does it?  Some other social movement rooted in the masses?  Some other driver yet undetermined?  Who knows, perhaps you will be the one coming up with the next golden idea on that one.

The Century of the Self Part 1

The Century of the Self Part 2

The Century of the Self Part 3

The Century of the Self Part 4

Article appearing courtesy of Celsias

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A greater percentage of consumers are viewing leading brands as being socially responsible, according to preliminary numbers from a consumer survey.

The SHIFT Report, an annual survey of 5,000 people from the North American general population by sustainability marketing consultancy Conscientious Innovation studies attitudes towards sustainability and leading brands.

According to preliminary data from the first 1,000 respondents, the percentage of consumers that view GE, Apple, Microsoft, and Wal-Mart as being “socially responsible” more than doubled over a year ago.

The data, which is being collected this month and is exclusively released to Matter Network, shows that more than 40 percent of consumers viewed these companies positively.

Many of these brands had major marketing campaigns to tout their sustainable bona fides, which must have paid off.

Interestingly, while positive attitude towards companies are on the rise, the percentage of consumers who say they are have made sustainable choices related to home energy is down by 13 percent. Also down, albeit slightly, is the importance of global warming in individuals’ decision making (from 58 to 54 percent, so far).

Nearly two-thirds of consumers say health and environmental toxins in products is a “significant concern” to them.

Article appearing courtesy of Matter Network.

[image credit: Conscientious Innovations]

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