Print friendly
E-mail story
Tip Us Off
iPod friendly
Comments
Bookmark This
del.icio.us.
Digg!
furl
google
newsvine
reddit
technorati
Facebook
Yahoo!“There’s gold in them thar hills,” and valleys! Savvy investors from far and wide are packing up their carpetbags and heading to California to cash in on the green gold rush. The same corporate mindset that brought us Big Oil, Big Agriculture, Big Auto, and Big Water and Power is now at work to bring us “Big Green.”
Faced with growing public concern about climate change, the proponents of “Big” are swathing themselves in green to seize a golden opportunity. The rush is on to convert rural lands and already fragmented wildlife habitat into bio-fuel production and industrial solar and wind power plants. Big Industry is manipulating the political system to receive government subsidies to develop hydrogen fuel cells, mega-solar, and other so-called new technologies that lend themselves to centralized production and big profits.
While starry-eyed environmentalists ooh and ahh over wind and solar, Big Green is taking advantage of their naiveté to cover the hills and valleys of the Golden State with big new power plants.
The problem with “big” is that living large is what got us into this mess. Since WWII, the local and sustainable systems that supported self-sufficient communities were deliberately destroyed and replaced by hugely energy-consumptive, centralized corporations.
Big ag gobbled up the small family farms and consolidated them into mega-farms—hugely dependent upon Big Oil and Big Water and Power.
Big Oil and Big Auto sabotaged regional rail and transit systems to create a transportation monopoly dependent upon their products.
Big Water and Power dammed up the rivers and built giant power plants to create a centralized water and power system for the mega-farms and the sprawling housing tracts. California’s head-long rush to big has been the death of small, local, and sustainable.
Like most Californians, I too am excited about the possibilities of solar and wind power—especially as replacements for coal, oil, and nuclear—but not at the expense of additional habitat loss. We have impacted so much natural land, at home and abroad, with our various addictions (large cars, huge houses, corporate ag, unsustainable land-use patterns, war, and water gluttony among them) that we are facing global ecosystem collapse. The solution is not to destroy more of California’s rare and wild places to keep on doing what we have been doing; the solution is to change what we do.
Instead of destroying more habitats to feed our addictions, how about driving less in smaller cars and building smaller, energy-efficient houses? We could even use clothes lines. What if we live closer to work, walk and bike, and grow and buy food locally? We can build regional rail and transit systems, and cover urban rooftops with solar panels instead of covering natural habitat areas. Call it “enlightened self-interest”: the ecosystem you save could be your own.
Instead of being big, we need to get small again. It’s time to embrace the natural world, realizing that we are part of it, and adopt, as a society, the concept of taking only what we need.
Patrick Veesart is a Santa Barbara resident who bikes and buses to work and uses a clothesline.
Previous Month
Comments
Discussion Guidelines
Great article Pat. Keep sending material to HopeDance as well! And get involved with the Transition Town Santa Barbara. Contact Linda Buzzell at lbuzzell@aol.com and buy the book THE TRANSITION HANDBOOK: FROM OIL DEPENDENCE TO LOCAL RESILIENCE. The author Rob Hopkins writes in the same vein AND with lots of humor and fun going small. You can purchase the book through us and we have a new listserv specifically about this. Believe it or not CEC might even get on the bandwagon. Do you know Tam? Click here for details about this new movement: http://tinyurl.com/5j57rn
hopedance (anonymous profile)
August 21, 2008 at 10:40 p.m. (Suggest removal)
AMERICA IS FULL OF "ENERGY IDIOTS"
‘Buy America Energy’ should be our focus for the future.
We could have $2.50 gasoline from our own local supplies.
The American oil shortage is political, not geological.
In the U.S., the local, State and Federal governments prohibits drilling offshore, effectively blockading American companies from supplying oil to Americans so that foreigners can make obscene profits from our energy stupidity.
Half the home sales in America are foreclosures because we are sending all our money overseas for foreign oil, when it could be staying here creating millions of safe American oil and gas jobs.
The entire economy and our communities are facing collapse because of the irrational ongoing attack on American Energy.
Without hydrocarbons fuel you would soon be walking. You couldn’t be driving cars, and it wouldn’t do any good to call the maintenance or repair people because they wouldn’t be able to get there, as they would be walking too.
ANWR: Could quickly replace 10% of America's oil imports.
OIL SHALE: There's 3 trillion barrels of oil in Shales in Colorado, The technology to remove the oil was developed back in the mid 1980s. This Area could supply 20-30% of America's oil needs within a decade, with modest environmental impacts. It only takes 3 barrels of water to make one barrel of shale-oil. It take 85 barrels of water to make one barrel of ethanol!
CALIFORNIA FACT; There is between 2-3 billion barrels of proven-probable barrels of oil within 20 miles of the Santa Barbara County shores alone.
See; http://www.strategicnine.com/santa-barba...
CALIFORNIA FACT; This area alone could produce 300,000 to 500,000 barrels a day for 10-20 years, replacing more than half of California's oil imports, while generating billions in County, State and federal royalties, and make Santa Barbara County the wealthiest in the nation.
NATURAL OIL SEEPS POLLUTION; The Santa Barbara County continues to suffer 6,000 tons per year or airborne pollution from natural oil-gas seeps and does not get a nickel in revenues or health benefits from natural oil seeps and instead continues bankrolling Americas competitors and enemies.
Change is urgently needed, or the American economy will soon disintegrate.
The OPEC-Russia-Chavez oil cartel is not just looting the United States, but the whole world, and will accumulate over $1.5 trillion in net profits this year. At their current rate of take, OPEC-Russia will acquire enough cash to buy majority control of every leading company in the United States within six years. And you are voting into power the very American-energy-traitors who are doing this to you and your country.
Its high time to Put American’s Energy Supplies First.
Vote all the energy-idiots out of local state and federal governments.
http://www.arcticoag.com/
petersterling (anonymous profile)
August 22, 2008 at 1:26 p.m. (Suggest removal)
You make a great point, the same one I try to impress on my "shades of green" friends (and myself). It's wonderful to work to derive our energy needs (wants?) from less destructive sources, but we need to acknowledge that the biggest destroyers are our own habits. How many purchasers of hybrid vehicles actually wind up driving more? I nearly cried when I saw a Prius with the personalized plate "gud4erth" or somesuch. No Prius has ever been good for the Earth, nor will it ever be good for the Earth. But chiding aside, I think we can all agree that smaller is better when it comes to our footprints.
tegrat (anonymous profile)
August 26, 2008 at 10:22 p.m. (Suggest removal)
Post a comment