The Futures Foundation

Reports of a visionary proposal to install 10m solar rooftop panels in the US are significant not only for their own news value, but as a further indicator that the green revolution is bursting onto centre stage in a polity long dominated by fossil fuel interests.  And it is certainly "a good start", as one advocate for renewable energy put it -- perhaps wryly.

“It’s a brilliant and visionary idea to put solar energy into the middle of the discussion on energy,” said Arjun Makhijani, the president of the Institute of Energy and Environmental Research. “A goal like that is very important because it will mean the solar manufacturing industry will have certainty that there will be a demand at the other end."

Makhijani was responding to a local newspaper, the Battleboro Reformer (03 07 08), with comments on a proposal from Vermont Senator, Bernard Sanders to  encourage the installation of 10 million rooftop solar units on homes and businesses over the course of 10 years. At one kilowatt-hour a unit, that could supply up to 10,000 megawatts of energy, or approximately the output of 13 nuclear reactors.

A major exhibition planned for San Francisco at the end of August is being called "the largest celebration of American food in history" -- and it's not fast food but Slow Food.  Its message is that Americans need to fix the food system or risk destroying their health and the planet. 

According to the San Francisco Chronicle 50,000 people are expected to participate, including some of the world’s leading food authorities, health care experts, farmers and policymakers.

"Slow Food Nation is the first such event to be held in the United States, although it’s patterned after similar events in Europe." the newspaper reported on June 30.  The exhibition will be held over the American Labor Day weekend (August 30 to September 1).

"Slow Food, a philosophy that food should be not only savored, but also produced with a social and environmental conscience, started as an Italian protest movement in 1986.

"Furious that McDonald’s had come to Rome, political activist Carlo Petrini organized a demonstration against the fast-food chain.

When I was a young activist, the ’60s were not yet far enough away, and people still talked about “after the revolution.” They still believed in some sort of decisive event that would make everything different-an impossible event, because even a change in administration cannot bring a universal change of heart, and the process of changing imagination and culture is plodding, incremental, frustrating, comes complete with backlashes . . . and is wildly exciting if you slow down enough to see the broad spans of time across which change occurs. A lot of people then were waiting for the revolution; a lot of people now have lost faith that there will be one. The overthrow of the United States government seems extremely unlikely at the moment, but the transformation of everything within, around, and despite it has been underway for decades, including radical transformation in the governments of many other countries.

Sex before marriage. Bob and his boyfriend. Madame Speaker. Do those words make your hair stand on end or your eyes widen? Their flatness is the register of successful revolution. Many of the changes are so incremental that you adjust without realizing something has changed until suddenly one day you realize everything is different. I was reading something about food politics recently and thinking it was boring.

Do we really have a better life than our hunter/gatherer ancestors?   Dr Richard Eckersley, Visiting Fellow at the National Centre for Epidemiology and Population Health at the ANU in Canberra and Founding Director of Australia 21, offers some surprising responses to that question in this talk for the ABC Radio program, Ockham's Razor (hosted by Robyn Williams)

An enduring myth of modern times is that life before it was miserable. In the oft-quoted words of the 17th century English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, the life of man in his natural state was 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short'.

A good example of the Hobbesian school of thought is Bjorn Lomborg's controversial book, The Skeptical Environmentalists: Measuring the Real State of the World. Lomborg includes a long quotation from the historian, Lawrence Stone, which he also paraphrases in his final chapter: 'We are no longer almost chronically ill, our breaths stinking of rotting teeth, with festering sores, eczema, scabs, and suppurating boils'. He uses this to warn against 'a scary idealisation of our past' and as a descriptive benchmark against which to judge progress. It is recited as if it represents the human condition before we discovered material affluence.