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Japan for Sustainability
Junko Edahi, WorldChanging
With the ultimate aim of helping to create a sustainable society, I lecture and write in Japan, and I also translate into Japanese the latest information as well key messages from around the world. I have been honored to have had the opportunity to bring to Japan the words and writings of the environmental academic Lester Brown, Dennis Meadows, for example, and also to translate Mr. Al Gore's book, "An Inconvenient Truth."

Eight years ago, I started an e-mail newsletter that provides a variety of environment-related information in Japanese. Today I have almost 10,000 subscribers, including people in national and local governments, the business world, NGOs, and universities. Going in the reverse direction, to communicate environmental information from Japan to the rest of the world in English, five years ago I launched with some colleagues and an NGO called "Japan for Sustainability," which is one of the media partners from this conference. Today, we disseminate latest initiatives, technologies as well as old wisdom in the field of sustainability from Japan to 189 countries.

Now, may I ask you a question? When you hear the words "Japan" and "sustainability," what kind of image comes to mind? Long ago, the Japanese lived in harmony with nature. Our houses were not built with solid brick and stone like in the West, but with soft materials like wood and paper. Even when the Japanese were inside their homes, they were aware of the wind and insects singing outside. During the hot summers, people cooled their senses by sprinkling water on the ground and by enjoying the sound of wind chimes. The traditional way of life was close to nature.

Allow me to mention a bit about the Edo Period, when the city of Edo--now known as Tokyo--was the center of Japan.
(30 November 2007)
The essay goes on to discuss sustainability during the Edo period as well as in modern Japan. Two years ago, we posted (with permission) some intriguing essays that appeared at the Japan for Sustainability site: Japan's sustainable society in the Edo period (1603-1867). More about the Edo period can be found at the Japan for Sustainability site. -BA

A No-Nonsense Look at Climate Change and Petrocollapse with Jan Lundberg (Video)
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment

Former energy analyst Jan Lundberg opens by singing "Have A Global Warming Day" and closes with "The Depaver's Song." In between is an unabashed look at climate distortion, peak oil, and declining ecosystems, all bringing a necessary collapse of our "pigging out" economy. He envisions a future with radically curtailed energy use, and people coming together groping for local solutions. Episode 81.

Janaia Donaldson hosts Peak Moment, a television series emphasizing positive responses to energy decline and climate change through local community action.
(28 November 2007)
Jan Lundberg is a long-time sustainability activist and a contributor to Energy Bulletin. -BA

Dutch horticulture, traffic, key to green future
Deutsche Presse-Agentur via M&C
Amsterdam - If the people of Venlo have their way, new buildings in this busy nexus of the Netherlands, Germany and Belgium will generate more energy than they use.

This ambitious target has been gaining momentum in the province of Limburg, southern Netherlands, since the airing of a television documentary about the revolutionary concept of 'cradle-to-cradle' living that produces zero garbage and zero pollution yet allows maximum economic activity.

The idea would to be have things up and running by the time the once-a-decade mammoth flower show - Floriade - starts drawing world tourists to the region in 2012.

...The region was inspired by the 2006 Dutch public television documentary 'Afval = Voedsel,' or Garbage equals Food, which spotlighted the work of the dynamic German-American eco team, Michael Braungart and William McDonough.

Braungart, a chemist and German university professor in Lower Saxony, and McDonough, an architect, have made their name brainstorming award-winning designs - like an eco-friendly production facility for Ford motors in the United States. In 2002, they wrote a book, 'Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things.'

The two believe that everything humanity needs can be made of environmentally friendly, 100-per-cent sustainable material. Moss, used on the Ford factory, is a key element because it guarantees maximum insulation and, not coincidentally, also absorbs carbon dioxide.
(1 December 2007)

Interview with author of The World Without Us (Audio)
Jason Bradford, The Reality Report
On this episode of The Reality Report, Alan Weisman talks about his book "The World Without Us," a fascinating study of what would happen to our built infrastructure and the natural world were humans to vanish. Though the book's scenario is far fetched, it works as a teaching device. It gives one a sense of the vulnerabilities we face with resource constraints as we may find it difficult to maintain what was built with fossil energy and rich mineral ores.

Jason Bradford hosts The Reality Report, broadcast on KZYX&Z in Mendocino County, CA.
(30 November 2007)

This stove cooks -- but burns
Marla Dickerson, Los Angeles Times
A Salvadoran wanted to help the environment and his country's poor. Instead, his acclaimed invention has cost him his family and savings.
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SAN SALVADOR -- In a makeshift laboratory equipped with little more than a battered chair and a cheap kitchen scale, inventor Rene Nuñez Suarez displays the contraption that has become his life's obsession.

It's a stainless-steel cooker that uses about 95% less fuel than conventional wood stoves, with minimal pollution. It would seem to be a can't-miss technology in a country where millions still cook with wood and most forests have been destroyed.

The device has garnered Nuñez a prestigious environmental prize. It has earned him a U.S. patent. And it has won fans among some Salvadoran peasants who no longer spend a good chunk of their days hunting for firewood and the rest inhaling cooking smoke.

It has also wrecked Nuñez's marriage, alienated two of his three children and swallowed his life savings. At 61, he lives with his mother to save on rent and drives a 1990 Kia. Nuñez knows some people think he's a fool to have poured $2.5 million of his and his family's money into his project with little to show for it.

"My ex-wife said: 'Man, you are an idiot. Poor people have no money. They are not going to buy your stoves,' " he said. "She was right."

Nuñez gambled that the government or nonprofit groups would finance production of the appliances to distribute to low-income people. But Salvadoran officials so far have shown scant interest in his invention. Environmental groups have offered praise but little financial backing.

Nuñez wonders if he'd get more respect if he hailed from Silicon Valley instead of this tiny Central American nation, where he toils in obscurity at a small private university in the capital.
(28 November 2007)
Related at The Daily Green.