Do you still question that our atmosphere is warming faster now than in the last 250 years of recorded weather history, and that our energy, transportation and land use industries and policies are the cause?
 
I don’t – partly because I am experiencing the effects of changing weather in my own backyard. Studying the effects of greenhouse gases accumulating in our atmosphere just confirms what I observe. From the summer of 2011 to the summer of 2012, climate change affected me directly and profoundly. In the spring of 2011 I contracted Lyme disease while working in my garden. This chronic and debilitating disease is transmitted by infected deer ticks, which are now common in Vermont due to our milder winters. That same summer, tropical storm Irene, a new kind of storm never before seen in northern New England, dumped billions of gallons of rain on Vermont. Our villages, roads and bridges, homes and farms sustained millions of dollars of damage in just a few hours. Just down the road from Gardener’s Supply, a dozen small organic farms in Burlington’s Intervale lost almost a million dollars worth of crops during peak harvest season. 
 
In the summer of 2012, our garden was battered by a series of violent storms with record winds and rainfall. For the first time my berry garden was invaded by Spotted Wing Drosophila (Drosophila suzukii), a destructive fruit fly that lays its eggs in ripening fruit. In just 6 years, this non-native pest has spread from the Pacific Northwest to the mid-Atlantic and throughout New England, decimating fruit orchards and berry patches. (more…)

For over a decade I've been trying to understand how one of the most biologically diverse and species rich areas on the planet might be protected and restored.This is the dry tropical forest area of Guanacaste, Costa Rica. It is home to almost 3% of the world’s total biodiversity including thousands of new plant and insect species and hundreds of migratory birds, like this 4 ft tall Jabirus, making it a bird watcher's paradise.

Our work is now being done through a registered US non-profit organization called Restoring Our Watershed. We are discovering that nearly 300 bird species use our river valley to rest, feed and nest and that poor land use practices, often caused by economic stress, have substantially reduced the health of their habitat. So we decided to act. We developed microloan programs to help small landowners diversify their income.Then we married that with government supported tree planting to restore forest cover and Bees for Trees was born. Please check it out: How a “Honey Economy” Can Restore A River, Habitat and Livelihoods .

If you’d like to visit the Nandamojo Valley and learn more about our new “honey economy” and the birds that call our watershed home consider entering this contest.

The concentration of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the earth’s atmosphere has increased dramatically over the past 250 years and is causing widespread environmental changes. To mitigate this ecological crisis caused by climate change, we need a combination of strategies that reduce human-caused CO2 emissions and remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere.

Before humans began loading up the atmosphere with CO2, the earth’s “carbon cycle” maintained a near balance of CO2 levels by sequestering excess carbon in the ocean, vegetation and soils. These natural uptake mechanisms can no longer keep pace with the accelerating rate of emissions from human activities. Deforestation, industrial agriculture water pollution and other human activities have also compromised natural carbon sinks.

The Earth Partners (TEP) and its member firm Applied Ecological Services, have been at the forefront of carbon sequestration research and development for almost 20 years. AES and its partners created science-based methods for measuring, monitoring and documenting for the marketplace, soil carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and sequestration. TEP has formalized that method, which has now been validated through Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) Association.  TEP and other partners will employ this soil carbon method and its expertise in terrestrial carbon sequestration of forests, wetlands, rangelands and croplands to accelerate greenhouse gas emission reductions through sequestration via conservation, ecosystem restorations and agricultural projects.

As with all strategies to reduce atmospheric carbon, terrestrial carbon sequestration has many economic, social and ecological trade offs. But done well, climate change mitigation as well as other benefits can be achieved.  For example, converting marginal farmlands to forests or wetlands may increase carbon sequestration, enhance wildlife habitat and water quality and increase flood storage and recreational potential.  Harvesting invasive woody perennials from degraded rangeland can yield valuable biofuels and also support native grasses to thrive again thus increasing carbon storage, soil health, and water quality.

In 2010, Applied Ecological Systems (AES) was awarded one of nine conservation innovation grants from the USDA and NRCS to refine and calibrate the TEP Soil Carbon Method to achieve a high level of confidence for use by emerging carbon markets. The Method was been tested in a wide range of ecosystem and agricultural projects in North, South and Central America, Europe, New Zealand and Australia. Testing and technical peer review spanned four years and involved many key global soil scientists. TEP’s resulting methodology is performance and measurement-based to ensure that carbon credits brought to the marketplace are “real”.

The restoration and rehabilitation of degraded lands can revitalize some of the most powerful carbon sinks in the world. TEP’s soil carbon quantification methodology will ensure good data is available to build models with higher confidence for these and other land types. Capturing the real climate benefits will help drive carbon market incentive payments and maximize investments in these critical initiatives to mitigate climate change.

To learn more about TEP and its member partners: www.theearthpartners.com.

Healthy ecosystems of all types convert atmospheric CO2 into plant and soil carbon above and below the ground achieving additional benefits of improved biodiversity, water quality, and food security and energy security.

There are various versions of this World Wildlife Fund chart showing the capacity of the Earth’s natural environment (soil, air, water, forests, minerals, energy resources, etc.) to support human life. They all tell a similar story.

Before WWII, humans were using about half the Earth’s available natural resources (the “biocapacity” of the planet) to support our various activities.  Just 30 years on, we were consuming our full planet's worth of resources and had achieved a sort of breakeven steady state with respect to the Earth’s carrying capacity. In accounting terms there was no profit (gain) and no loss of biocapacity.

Since the 1970s, our consumption has continued to increase and we now require more than 1.5 times the Earth’s biocapacity to support our human activities. Our planet’s biocapacity income statement is operating in deficit and we are depleting the Earth’s natural asset’s savings account to fund our lifestyle.

Even more alarming is that fact that if all economies were placing the same burden on natural assets as the US economy, we would need the equivalent of 5 times the Earth’s biocapacity to be at steady state. China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and other developing countries are successfully emulating the economic success of North America and Europe, and as they do, the depletion of Earth’s biocapacity will accelerate.
 
My career has been about trying to reduce the human ecological footprint by focusing on three of the biggest causes of biocapacity depletion: industrial food systems, energy from non-renewable sources and failure to recycle waste as resources. I now know that efforts like mine will fail unless we create a new economic system that recognizes the cost to natural assets of the current non-sustainable economic system. This is the reason I joined the board of the New Economics Institute. NEI believes:

“We are at a turning point in history.  Rising temperatures are now recognized as a sign of our planet in crisis. Inequities between rich and poor, North and South, grow ever deeper. The global economy has failed in its promise to produce and deliver basic goods in an efficient manner for an expanding population, leaving increasing numbers in abject poverty. The environmental crisis, the equity crisis, and the crisis of distributed production all have their roots in the current economic system, with implications for our culture, for our society, and for our health and well-being. What would an economy built on principles of fairness and sustainability look like?  How do we model it; where is it emerging; how do we collectively strategize to fully implement it? These are the pressing questions of our time.”

On June 8-10, the New Economics Institute is hosting a conference entitled "Strategies for a New Economy," at Bard College on the Hudson River in New York State. Our purpose is to bring together what are often diverse and scattered efforts to reshape our economic system, place them under one tent, and raise the flag to announce that transitioning to a new economy will mean engaging politicians, researchers, media, educators, citizen activists, business leaders, financial experts, scientists, union workers, cultural leaders, advocates for the disenfranchised, and youth—all working together to achieve a common goal.
 
And speaking of youth, this article by Andrew Revkin for the New York Times describes some of the reasons young people are calling for a new economy.

The way we transmit and distribute electrical power has been unchanged for 120 years. Designed when energy was cheap and abundant, and increasing demand was the goal, it is centralized, unidirectional, and serves demand not supply.

What we now need are “smart” electrical power systems that will improve the efficiency, reliability, economics and sustainability of electricity generation, transmission and distribution. Estimates predict that during the next decade, $100 billion will be spent adapting the world’s electrical power infrastructure to new “smart grid” technologies.

What parts of the economy will benefit these upgrades? It will surely be a win for GE, Bechtel, Siemens and other big infrastructure companies. But, just as changes in our food system created new opportunities for farms and small businesses here in Vermont, there are also many ways for new businesses to participate in producing, monitoring and distributing energy through a smarter power grid. In Vermont, energy efficiency and renewable energy have already created thousands of associated jobs. With our state’s new Center for Energy Transformation and Innovation, we are at the forefront of the smart grid revolution. Burlington Free Press article, "State, UVM partner with national lab on smart grid project".  

Vermont’s strong commitment to food and energy resiliency and political collaboration, means that Vermont is a good testing ground for new responses to energy service reliability, energy security threats, and energy efficiency through technology. As the vice president of Sandia’s California laboratory relayed in the article above, “Vermont is particularly well suited to a collaboration with Sandia because all of its “stakeholders” in the grid, including the utilities and the renewable energy sector, are already working together”.

Smart grids offer another big upside. Shifting to renewable power sources (sun, wind, hydro, biomass) is challenging because the flow of power is intermittent. Smart grids technologies can compensate for intermittency limitations and help harmonize local energy production and distribution with regional and national energy supply and demand.
 

In the spring of 2011, I installed a 1 acre array of solar panels (enough to power the electrical needs of about 25 average homes) at South Village (photo) under Vermont’s innovative group net metering program. My goal now for the project is to work with Green Mountain Power on integrating smart grid technology and battery storage to substantially improve the value of the electricity that can be produced by “citizen” solar installations.

This is such a fascinating time. During the past century, industries core to our well being were centralized: energy, food, information and finance. Concentration of control and ownership created great wealth (for a few) but also great loss. Burning fossil fuels changed our climate. We lost half of our country’s topsoil to industrial farming practices. We created dead zones in our lakes, rivers and coastal areas. A global financial meltdown has left millions unemployed.
 

Now the tides are reversing as we move toward decentralizing our food and energy systems, increasing access to ideas and information through the internet and social media, and re-localizing finance (via Slow Money investing and more locally owned banks), we are returning crucial sectors of the economy to local control. A very good direction.

New Legislation Encourages Small Scale Solar Installations

 Last week, Vermont’s Governor Peter Shumlin flipped the “ON” switch for our new solar array at the Farm at South Village. That project is an exciting story in itself  (read all about it in the May 2011issue of the Green Energy Times), but the governor and other state legislators were also on hand to sign an important new bill into law.

The Vermont Energy Act of 2011 (H.56) makes it faster, easier and more lucrative for Vermonters to become small-scale solar energy producers. Homeowners, farmers, businesses, non-profit organizations and even small towns, can now gain approval for a solar installation in less than 2 weeks. This new legislation also requires local utility companies to purchase energy that’s generated by their customers AND pay a premium for it.

Vermont Governor Peter Shumlin signed the new bill into law, minutes before throwing the switch to begin producing energy with our 150 kW solar array at the Farm at South Village.

The US and VT tax credits for renewable energy projects have definitely played an important role in incentivizing the installation of photovoltaic arrays. Here in Vermont, nearly 5 MW of photovoltaic panels have been installed, with another 5 MW expected before the end of the year.

By reducing the expense and barriers associated with the permitting process, and ensuring that local utilities will purchase power from small-scale producers for a good price, Vermont’s shift to a cleaner, more sustainable and more secure energy future has moved into high gear.

I was one of several speakers at the commissioning event. You can watch a VIDEO HERE (my comments start at minute 2:05).

Costa Rica is an exotic, nature-inspired place, with tropical beauty and abundant wildlife.

Here in Vermont, today’s weather is the polar (and I mean “polar!”) opposite of Costa Rica’s, and the most exotic creature roaming our mountains might be a bull moose. The smartest ones have buttoned up or headed elsewhere for winter after doing their seasonal work of scattering seeds, pollinating flowers, and storing calories for winter.

So, on these cold, grey days, it’s no wonder my thoughts wander to my second-favorite place on earth: Costa Rica’s warm, ecologically rich Nandamojo River valley in the Guanacaste region. About 10 years ago, I co-founded “Restoring Our Watershed,” a U.S.-based non-profit that uses creative ideas and partnerships to protect and restore this fragile ecosystem and developing community. Our interests extend from local farming and small business development, to erosion control and habitat preservation.

Guanacaste’s flora and fauna have felt the effects of climate change in dramatic ways, yet somehow they continue to do their part in supporting one another. Despite ongoing habitat loss and sometimes insensitive human neighbors, howler monkeys have continued to thrive along with treetop-dwelling birds and bats that scatter seeds and delight tourists.  Plus migratory birds and sea turtles travel thousands of miles each year to nest and start their next generations.

We hope that Restoring Our Watershed’s efforts will reward theirs, though they ask nothing in return!

One important partnership we’ve forged is with Asociación de Conservación Vida Verdiazul, or the Sea Turtle Conservation Project. These once-abundant and now endangered turtles have dwindled in number along many Costa Rican beaches…but much less the case at Playa Junquillal, located on the Pacific at the bottom of the Nandomojo watershed. Egg hatch rates here for three species of at-risk sea turtles are so high that the World Wildlife Fund is conducting research into the turtles’ unusual success.

As the turtles thrive, so do innovative responses to the human threat to the turtles. In addition to research, the Project’s eco-tourism and education efforts are encouraging people’s interest in the species while helping to protect eggs from collectors, dogs and beach habit decline.

You can visit our new website at http://www.ourwatershed.org to learn more about the Nandamojo River valley and our organization’s other wildlife, sustainable business and restoration projects. Many people worldwide are partnering to return this local ecosystem to a healthy nature cycle, where the land, flora and fauna, and human inhabitants all nourish one another…  This is our mission: to show how human stewardship can help reestablish a system of sustainable well-being.

Restoring Our Watershed has a goal of raising $250,000 over the next three years to support these initiatives. If you’d like to play a part, please consider our organization as you plan your end-of-year giving. Click here to donate safely online via PayPal. On behalf of Restoring Our Watershed, as well as the animals and people who depend on a healthy Nandamojo River valley, thank you!

Partnering With Nature To Solve Climate Change from Will Raap on Vimeo.

This past July, the University of Vermont hosted its first-ever TEDx event, joining the ranks of the world’s top thought-leaders and sharing our ideas for impacting the world through sustainable living. I was thrilled to be invited to participate as a speaker.

TEDxUVM is one of a growing number of local, self-organized events affiliated with the nonprofit organization, TED. The TED acronym comes from the organization’s original mission: to bring together leaders from the worlds of Technology, Entertainment and Design, and to discuss “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

What began in 1984 as a single annual conference, still held each year in Long Beach, California, has inspired countless individuals and become a worldwide phenomenon. Speakers run the gamut from the unknown to the celebrity, from human rights activists and authors to business leaders, scientists and magicians.

Thanks to the Internet, TED talks are available free, to anyone, anytime. If you’ve never seen one, you’re in for a real surprise—most likely, one that will change the way you view the world. I urge you to visit www.TED.com and poke around a bit. (Set aside a good chunk of time, since it’s likely you won’t be able to watch just one!)

Here in Vermont, TED and UVM’s Institute for Global Sustainability partnered to present Ideas Worth Spreading: Leading and Managing for Sustainability on July 19 at UVM’s Billings North Lounge. More than a dozen national leaders, including Robert Egger, social entrepreneur and founder of the DC Central Kitchen, Debra Rowe, a leader in campus sustainability, Michael Shuman, an economist, attorney, author, and entrepreneur, Ted Castle, president and founder/owner of Rhino Foods, numerous UVM faculty, and other innovative Vermont sustainability leaders shared their most inspirational and thought-provoking ideas at the event.

For my contribution, I chose to focus on how America can shift from being a climate change laggard to leader through creative approaches to the carbon economy, including inventive use of carbon sinks (capturing and storing excess atmospheric CO2 in soil, trees and wetlands). By doing so, we’ll reduce climate change and environmental degradation, as well as hunger, famine, land and water scarcity, and other daunting world challenges.

I’ve attached portions of my Powerpoint presentation with audio here to inspire you to consider your own solutions, including through home gardening and composting. What is your role, large or small, in the climate change movement?