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Bio: Bill Stillinger is General Manager of PV Squared, a worker-owned cooperative that designs and installs renewable energy systems for homes, businesses, and institutions. In addition to advocating organizational learning and regenerative enterprise, he is interested in the connections between and among efficiency, clean energy, the arts and science.
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A Little Madness in the Spring
April 1st, 2009Spring is upon us. Every year at this time we find an excess of people taking out ads paying lip service to “going green” or “saving the planet” or reminding us “For all of us here at the Apocalypse Corporation, every day is Earth Day” and associated claims.
Given our economic and political circumstances here in the U.S. let us hope some of this sentiment resonates and sticks in people’s hearts and minds, not put away once the season passes like we might do with a box of holiday ornaments.
I don’t have to say that sustainability is a serious issue: what it means and how quickly we can individually and collectively grasp its important implications affects our ability to carry on in a world awash in human abuse. Given the scale and breadth of our evolutionary history the challenge is daunting.
Elsewhere on the NESEA blog Joel Gordes is discussing the important definition of sustainability as articulated by the Brundtland Commission. I want to put forward some observations that may add some insight to the topic; not so much as a comment on Joel’s subject, but to branch off in a different direction.
For example, MIT’s John Ehrenfield states that sustainability is the possibility that life can continue forever. It’s an embarrassingly simple statement, but realizing that possibility seems impossibly complex.
The Brundtland Commission definition (“meet[ing] the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”) and its 1987 report “Our Common Future” suggests what needs to happen globally to accomplish such a state of affairs. But beyond generalities and government-style recommendations, it offers scant advice as to how to actually undertake the massive social, economic, and environmental transformation required.
I don’t believe anyone truly understands sustainability. On the other hand, there are a number of people who by their experience and life’s work and from their perspective offer ways that society can move. Their examples are important puzzle pieces from which we can learn. I don’t believe that the movement to sustainability will ever be led by a single charismatic figure as has been the case for many social and religious movements. We certainly need leaders and thousands of good case studies to hold up for inspection. It’s probably also safe to assume that only in a democratic society will we hope to achieve a sustainable society.
So as a springtime exercise I offer up ten perspectives from ten brilliant people. This is not a David Letterman “top ten list”, but rather a gathering of names that should be important to everyone who cares about the subject. These are presented in no particular order. Perhaps you could produce a different grouping:
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Here we are 22 years later and the message brought by Harlem Gro Brundtland (b. 1939) and her United Nations Commission in 1987 has yet to reach very many of us. But it is key. She is a former Prime Minister of Norway, and has served as the Director General of the World Health Organization. She now serves as a Special Envoy on Climate Change for the United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon.
Rachel Carlson (1907-1964), founder of the contemporary environmental movement, author of Silent Spring, advocate of nature and environmental ethics. She is a remarkable study in courage.
Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), ecologist, forester, pioneer in land and wildlife management, author of A Sand County Almanac. “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
John McConnell (b. 1915) is responsible for a long list of accomplishments all strongly related to global awareness,peace, religion and science. He is the founder of Earth Day (and the Earth Flag), and an early drafter of the United Nations Earth Charter.
Dr. Karl-Heinrich Robert (b. 19??) is one of Sweden’s foremost cancer scientists who, in 1989, initiated an environmental movement called “The Natural Step.” In 1984, Robert won the Swedish Hematological Association Research Award. He headed the Division of Clinical Hematology and Oncology at the Department of Medicine at the Huddinge Hospital from 1985 until 1993. Robert has authored numerous scientific publications concerning leukemia, lymphoma, lung cancer and their clinical implications. His research on damaged human cells provided a platform for his interest in environmental questions. Later, with Dr. John Holmberg, he developed first order principles, the four so-called “system conditions,” for ecological sustainability.
Dr. Donnella H. Meadows (1941-2001), founder of the Sustainability Institute, was a 
professor at Dartmouth College, a long-time organic farmer, a journalist, and a systems analyst. Along with Dennis Meadows and others, she authored The Limits to Growth in 1972, examining the consequence of interactions between the Earth’s and human systems; a pioneering example of whole systems thinking on a global scale. Through her writing and speaking, Dana helped people understand global systems with long delays and complex feedbacks, while also inspiring many to think about individual choices in daily living.
Wangari Muta Maathai was born in Nyeri, Kenya (Africa) in 1940; the first woman in East and Central Africa to earn a doctorate degree, and in 2004 she became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for “her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace.” It was while she served in the National Council of Women of Kenya that she began a grassroots organization with women groups whose main focus is the planting of trees in order to conserve the environment and improve their quality of life. Through the Green Belt Movement she has assisted women in planting more than 20 million trees on their farms and on schools and church compounds.
Ray Anderson (b. 19??) former CEO of Interface Global, the world’s largest manufacturer of modular carpet. In 1994, while preparing remarks on Interface’s environmental plans for a company meeting, Ray read The Ecology of Commerce – an experience Ray has described as an epiphany, a “spear to the chest” awakening to the urgent need to set a new course toward sustainability for his company. Coupled with Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, the book changed Ray’s life and set Interface Global on its pioneering journey towards sustainability. Ray was quick to recognize the necessary connection between sustainability and organizational learning – an under-appreciated reality.
Janine Benyus (b. 1958) is a life sciences writer and author of six books, including Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature in which she names an emerging science that seeks sustainable solutions by mimicking nature’s designs and processes. She now writes popular books in the life sciences, consults with sustainable business leaders and talks about the genius that surrounds us while living in her natural habitat – the northern Rockies.
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So that’s the list. Is yours different?
And by the way, the oil painting reproduced near the beginning of this post is titled “The Table” by Pierre Bonnard, and it is dated 1925. You can see the original and many others at New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in an exhibition of Bonnard’s work through April 16. If you go, I would ask you to think how Bonnard’s view of the world (he lived through World Wars I and II in France) relates to the concept of long-term survival and sustainability.
Finally, here is a cautionary if not humorous springtime poem from Amherst’s Emily Dickinson (1830-1886):
A little madness in the Spring
Is wholesome even for the King,
But God be with the Clown,
Who ponders this tremendous scene–
This whole experiment in green,
As if it were his own!
WLS 04-01-09
Small Wind?
February 4th, 2009You are no doubt aware of NESEA’s Building Energy 2009 conference coming up in Boston March 10, 11, and 12. This writing springs from thoughts surrounding a conference session I am chairing on Wednesday March 11 at 11:00 a.m. titled “The Reality of Small Wind Turbines”. While I hope the session will address that topic directly and fully, here is an opportunity to provide some background information on wind energy and energy resources, putting them in the larger context of overall energy use in the United States.
We learn to use language early on to connect with other people and try to make sense of the world. “Big” and “small” are two of our most useful but potentially misleading adjectives. Anybody who has erected a “small” wind turbine knows this; a nominal 6.6 kW machine sports two blades that are nine feet long, thus sweeping out an 18-foot diameter circle. This “small” turbine weighs 450 pounds and may sit atop a tower more than 100 feet above the ground. So this is pretty big; installation is hardly a weekend do it yourself project.
On the other hand I recently walked alongside some blades that were in transit for a giant 3.6 MW (3,600 kW) three-bladed wind turbine. They each seemed to be in excess of 150 feet in length. In electric power terms, once in operation this behemoth is capable of well over 540 times the output of the “small” wind turbine example. Now that’s big. Or is it?
Let’s keep the overall energy picture in perspective. If you believe in the importance of whole-systems thinking, you are mindful that wind and the other renewable energy resources are only a small part of the totality. Here is a chart that shows that.
It is shamelessly borrowed from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory showing how most of our energy flows through our lives in the United States. Although not stated on the chart these data appear to be 2005 or 2006 vintage. The units of energy are enumerated in Quads, or quadrillions of BTUs. On the left side are our primary sources of energy; on the right are the principal categories of usage. Note in the middle we have the conversion of primary energy into electricity which is then transmitted and distributed to end users. Wind energy is less than 0.2 percent of our total energy use.
There is a lot of useful information on this chart. As a nation we annually use about 100 Quads of energy. Looking at the petroleum segment in the lower left, about 60 percent of our petroleum is imported (In 1970, pre-OPEC, imports were about 20 percent I believe). On the extreme right hand side we see that the overall amount of energy that is “lost” (i.e. thrown away or otherwise not put to useful work) is about 56 percent of the total. Just looking at electricity generation, 67 percent of the input energy is lost one way or another before the electric energy finds its way to end users. This is big.
A thoughtful person understands why energy is so thoroughly embedded in our economic, environmental, political, and social lives. Striving for a so-called “sustainable energy future” is not a simple matter. But Mahatma Gandhi has famously said, “Whatever you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it.” That is really big.
