EDA News January 2023

Annual Fireside Chat presentation

At EDA’s third annual Fireside Chat in December, James Quilligan discussed how a new Cold War has been developing since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. As the United States and Europe square off with Brazil, Russia, India, China and other nations, collectively known as BRICS+, the power struggle between these blocs has profound implications for the future. Since neither pole has a regenerative vision for economics or government policy at the global level, there appears to be no immediate solution.

In his presentation, Moving Beyond the Geopolitical Divide, he examined why collaborative engagement is necessary for reorganizing the social production of common goods to meet human needs.

If you missed this event, this presentation is now posted on our website.

First Annual Business Meeting

EDA will be holding its first annual business meeting on January 12. At this online event, IMPACT, our business planning team, will be presenting EDA’s Strategic Plan for next year.

EDA has a legal requirement to hold a yearly meeting for all members to review our finances and announce future activities. We hadn’t done this before because the level of our income has been under the threshold for this requirement. Now that we are anticipating greater financing, we will be holding this meeting every year. As stakeholders and shareholders of EDA, we invite you to attend.

If you are an EDA member, you'll find the link to this meeting in Basecamp, under "Schedule" on the Active Members section.

Time
8:00 - 9:30 pm ET
7:00 - 8:30 pm CT
6:00 - 7:30 pm MT
5:00 - 6:30 pm PT

Biodiversity loss is the gradual extinction of animal and plant species and ecosystems. The solution involves global conservation which leads to greater protection of food, water and energy. This means measuring the carrying capacity of the planet’s resources because we are using up resources faster than Nature can replenish them.

Humans are always behind every instance of biodiversity loss. At sea, over-fishing is contributing to the loss of species. We are already seeing fewer varieties of fish in our supermarkets. On land, agriculture is one of the biggest culprits. Over-fertilization, pesticides and agricultural runoff impacts the sustainability of food as well as the quality of our water. If there is no biodiversity, there will be no food on the planet.

EDA’s focus is bioregionalism, which takes the same global concept and puts it at the state level—what’s happening in our backyard. We examine a region’s carrying capacity and how it can support the needs of its population.

With all the commitments made at COP15, people don’t expect all the goals put in place to succeed because right now there are no advocacy efforts to support it. What’s needed is for people everywhere to step up and tell their governments that these issues are critical to our survival.

So what can you do?

EDA’s State Legislation database is currently being populated with bills that will impact food, water and energy. Over the next few weeks, make sure you check the State Legislative tracker to see what bills have been identified in your state that will support equity and sustainability in your region.

If you identify a bill that you feel strongly about supporting, contact our Advocacy team to learn more about what you can do to let your elected officials know how important these issues are to you and your community.

Your voice matters.

There are 1,750 seed or gene banks located around the world and they make sure that the Global Seed Vault has duplicate copies of their seeds. The United States has 20 seed banks that also store their backup collections at the National Laboratory for Genetic Resources Preservation in Fort Collins, Colorado. Some of these seeds can last up to 75 years.

Together, these seed banks hold genetic codes of the world’s crops, both past and present in seed form, or as plant tissue called germ plasm. According to the UN’s food and agriculture agency, these vaults contain about 7.4 million types of germ plasm.

This global network collects and shares seeds to further agricultural research and develop new varieties. The Global Seed Vault in Svalbard holds the genetic diversity of wild seeds, and old varieties that are not used anymore. Its value as a backup was tested in 2015 when Syria’s bloody civil war forced an important seed bank in Aleppo to relocate to Beirut. More than 100,000 seed samples were sent from Svalbard to replant in the new Beirut facility.

Over the last 50 years, agricultural practices have dramatically changed. Large-scale monoculture production may have increased crop yields, but biodiversity has decreased. In North America, just six individual corn genotypes make up over half of all corn crops. Crop diversity is also decreasing around the world. Today there are only about 20 crops that provide 95% of human food-energy needs. In China, only 10% of rice varieties grown in the 1950’s are still being used today. In the U.S., over 90% of fruits and vegetable varieties have been lost since the 1900’s.

When a lack of genetic diversity within individual crops like wheat and corn dominate globally, our food supply is more vulnerable to disease and the effects of climate change. Norway’s Global Seed Vault contains seed DNA with the genetic code that we may need in the future to develop new strains of crops that can adapt to higher temperature growing conditions brought on by the challenges of climate change. The Svalbard vault represents a move towards international cooperation for the good of humankind.

Excerpt from Time.

Information about climate change is everywhere in the news and online. There’s no shortage of suggestions on how to reduce your personal greenhouse gas emissions — everything from using energy-saving light bulbs to having fewer children. Most of us are trying to do our part to help by adopting the energy saving practices we feel are making a difference, but how much of an impact do they really have?

In December 2022, the New York Times published the results of a survey they conducted with 1,000 Americans to test their knowledge on ways that we can reduce our personal greenhouse gas emissions. The survey found that although some of the habits you have adopted might seem significant, in reality they have a very small effect on limiting climate change.

Below are the survey results, comparing how Americans rated their behaviors for reducing emissions with the scientific reality.

Sources: Survey by Ipsos; small, moderate and large effect categorizations by Times Opinion, based on estimates from “Quantifying the potential for climate change mitigation of consumption options” by Diana Ivanova, John Barrett, Dominik Wiedenhofer, Biljana Macura, Max Callaghan and Felix Creutzig. Note: Responses were weighted to be nationally representative. Results for Americans who correctly guessed “small effect” also include those who thought the action might have no effect.

We probably underestimate the impact of things that are harder to do, such as avoiding air travel, or eating a vegan diet. And we overestimate the amount of emissions avoided by using energy-efficient appliances and recycling. Many people combine the benefits of recycling – which means less pollution and waste – with how to meaningfully address a very different problem: climate change. The broad answer to this is to measure a bioregion's resource carrying capacity to help us create resilience and self-sufficiency in every community.

One of the functions of the At-Large Trustees is to find out what’s in the hearts and minds of our members so that we can better represent your interests on the Board. While it’s nice to hear what we’re doing well, we also want to hear where we can improve.

We’re currently in the process of emailing all our members to learn more about how you experience EDA. The first batch of emails was sent in December. Some of you have already responded and others will be hearing from us soon.

We intend to solicit your feedback twice a year, so that we can ensure your voices are being heard. But you don’t have wait until we contact you. Feel free to reach out to any one of us at any time to share your thoughts and ideas.

Please take some time to give us this much needed feedback. We’ll combine these comments into one anonymous document so you can speak to us in complete confidence. If you prefer, you can contact one of us directly and we’ll be in touch.

As a truly democratic organization, EDA needs your input to be the best that we can be. We look forward to hearing from you.

Your At-Large Trustees
Terry Blatt, Geoff Schaber, James Kolb

The Post Carbon Institute defines resilience as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and re-organize while undergoing change so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity, and feedbacks”. In view of the varied economic, ecological and energy challenges that are facing us today, resilience means providing ways of counteracting the decline of resources by strengthening the systems that are already in place and building new ones.

What does Resilience do?

Using their own reports and those of others, Resilience offers a broad look at the world’s interrelated crises. These include the decline of cheap energy, the depletion of critical resources like water, complex environmental crises like climate change and biodiversity loss, and the social and economic issues which are linked to them. Besides analyzing these issues through geopolitics, ecology, population, finance, urban design, health, religious and gender issues, Resilience offers practical models for responding to these issues at the grassroots level.

What do we think?

Dennis Meadows on the 50th anniversary of the publication of The Limits to Growth

Only rarely does a book truly change the world. In the nineteenth century, such a book was Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. For the twentieth century, it was The Limits to Growth. Not only did this best-selling 1972 publication help spur the environmental movement, but it showed that the underlying dynamics of the modern industrial world are unsustainable on the timescale of a couple of human lifetimes.

We need nuclear power to solve climate change

Joe Lassiter is a deep thinker and straight talker focused on developing clean, secure and carbon-neutral supplies of reliable, low-cost energy. His analysis of the world's energy realities puts a powerful lens on the stubbornly touchy issue of nuclear power, including new designs for plants that can compete economically with fossil fuels. We have the potential to make nuclear power safer and cheaper than it's been in the past, Lassiter says. Now we have to make the choice to pursue it.

At the recent UN Convention on Climate Change (COP27), 200 countries presented lofty goals for dealing with this global crisis. But inevitably, when they return home political and economic reality sets in obliging them to scale back on their promises.

There’s no question we need our governments to proactively secure and maintain resource democracy as a basic human right. But we can’t take that for granted. We, their citizens, are the very foundation of our governments. It’s up to us to hold them accountable. We do that through the ballot box, but also through our continuing advocacy to remind them what our actual needs are, and what we expect of them as our representatives.

Let me personalize this for a moment. It’s fine to have expectations of my elected officials, but I also have obligations as a member of the community I live in. I don’t knowingly pollute the environment, I do what I can to conserve and avoid waste, to be respectful of others, even when we disagree.

I’m aware of issues like climate change and the stressors that are impacting people across the US and the world. I make an effort to see how such environmental issues affect political decisions from the local level all the way up to the global. But then I have to ask myself, what am I doing?

What actions am I taking? How am I making a difference?

These questions are a little harder to answer. I am active in EDA (as well as other organizations), and do what I can to help it and more specifically, the Advocacy Team thrive. But I have to admit that I’ve not done all I can out in the world where political decisions are made, to ensure people are able to manage the challenges that come with things like climate change, to get their basic needs met. After all, this is what EDA is about.

Maybe your own self-inventory reveals a more consistent engagement with your elected officials, and I applaud you for that. On the other hand, maybe you’ve shown up at City Council meetings or family dinners and simply complained to the people you believe to be at fault. Most of us probably fall somewhere in between passive inaction, and assertive (if sometimes misdirected) action. So, what to do?

Create a new action plan to move you closer to your goal

If your goal is to do something meaningful about the disparity in people’s access to affordable, healthy food, find someone else who shares your concern. Learn as much as you can about the dynamics of the problem. The more you understand about the issues, the better prepared you’ll be to speak with your elected officials in a way that will help them see you as a valued partner in finding solutions.

I know that I need to step up my game on all counts. Maybe you do too. Thing is, we need each other to do that. Acting independently will eventually exhaust and dishearten you and weaken your resolve.

Only you know what the specific issues are where you live. Only you can speak meaningfully with your own elected officials. EDA’s advocacy and education team members can help you develop a solid advocacy plan that you and others in your community can implement. Together we can accomplish what we could never do on our own.

We're here to help