[GPSCC-chat] Fwd: [California Greening] Transition for my town

[Wes Rolley]

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[California Greening] Transition for my town
Date: 	Tue, 28 Dec 2010 14:09:59 -0800 (PST)
From: 	Wes <wrolley at charter.net>
To: 	wrolley at charter.net



This is scheduled for the 12/31 issue of theMorgan Hill Times 
<http://www.morganhilltimes.com/>.

The history of the Santa Clara Valley is one of constant transition. 
Long gone are the days when the Union Pacific RR advertised it as the 
Valley of the Heart's Delight. Some of the agricultural economy has 
remained but the structure has radically changed. No longer do we have 
packing sheds next to the railway. Morgan Hill is not even just a 
bedroom community for Silicon Valley, as it was when I moved here over 
30 years ago. Rather we are transitioning to something new and don't 
really know just what that will be.

One of the most important drivers for the past transitions has been the 
value of our land. How do we use it? How do we tax it? Is it more 
valuable for agriculture or for industrial development. You have only to 
examine the office parks along Cochrane Rd. to appreciate how we have 
answered those questions.

It seems obvious that we may not always answer those questions in the 
same manner, or that we will start asking new question. As our economic 
life changes, there will be new drivers for local decisions.

In a recent NY Times column, Nobel Laureate economist Paul Krugman 
discusses the new economic normal. “Oil is back above $90 a barrel. 
Copper and cotton have hit record highs. Wheat and corn prices are way 
up. Over all, world commodity prices have risen by a quarter in the past 
six months.” With changes like this, perhaps it will become more 
valuable to maintain agricultural land in close proximity to where we live.

Krugman gets right to the point. “What the commodity markets are telling 
us is that we’re living in a finite world, in which the rapid growth of 
emerging economies is placing pressure on limited supplies of raw 
materials, pushing up their prices. And America is, for the most part, 
just a bystander in this story.”

That is a big change from that past vision of America. How do we adapt 
to the reality of a finite world, one in which resources are limited, 
access to them is increasingly expensive when transportation costs are 
added, and America no longer has an inexhaustible supply. Politicians 
talk about meeting out energy needs through the exploitation of oil 
shale, but they never mention the costs, direct and indirect, that oil 
shale operations have. There is probably no single process that would 
destroy more watershed than a massive exploitation of the shale deposits 
in Colorado, Wyoming and Utah. This is water that would go to the 
Colorado River and make that water supply unusable.

There are other drivers that we have to consider; a changing climate is 
just one. The frequency of extreme weather events that we are currently 
experiencing around the world is on of the predicted results of 
increased greenhouse gas accumulation in the atmosphere. New York has 
been hard hit by a blizzard while Greenland continues to warm. In the 
Southern Hemisphere, South Australia has experienced their worst drought 
while Queensland had record rainfall and flood this week. It may rival 
the flood from Pakistan but affect fewer people. Remember: a warmer 
atmosphere will hold more water and that will fall somewhere.

We can no longer count on our state and federal governments to prevent 
future catastrophic events, or even to adapt to them after it happens. 
There is neither the fiscal capacity in either Washington or Sacramento 
nor the political will act if it costs money. We can only raise taxes so 
much and I doubt that the incoming Republican House of Representatives, 
filled as it is with new Tea Party members, is gong to do much of 
anything productive about energy or climate change.

Morgan Hill has to recognize that the future of this community depends 
on what we do, collectively, here and now. There is a good model for 
this cooperative community action in the Morgan Hill Community Emergency 
Response Team. (http://www.mhcert.com/) This is how we take local action 
to deal with a sudden emergency because we know that immediate help will 
not be coming form State or Federal agencies. This is not because those 
agencies don't want to help, it is because the can't.

How will we deal with events that are not sudden, but rather assert 
themselves over time. There is a model for this as well. Morgan Hill is 
uniquely positioned to be a Transition Town, developing a local 
resilience that will see us through, transitioning to a newer reality. 
You can find more information about Transition Towns by following 
Hopedance, an online journal published by Bob Banner of Santa Barbara. 
(http://bit.ly/huvptZ)

The key objective of a Transition Town is to provide that local 
resilience. They begin by asking different questions: What is the true 
cost of consumerism? How willing are we to push down other people in 
order to maintain our idea of American Exceptionalism? How do we best 
adapt to this new world we have created? These are moral questions as 
well as economic ones.



--
Posted By Wes to California Greening 
<http://cagreening.blogspot.com/2010/12/transition-for-my-town.html> at 
12/28/2010 02:09:00 PM
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