Facing Changing Climate, San Francisco Prepares to Share

When climate change unleashes storms and rising seal levels on the city of San Francisco, its residents will be ready … to share. Mayor Edwin Lee recently announced a partnership between the city’s Department of Emergency Management (DEM) and BayShare, a group of stakeholders in the Bay Area’s sharing economy. The city and its population of tech-savvy, share-friendly environmentalists already have big ideas for repurposing existing apps and online services for use when disaster strikes. Keep reading.

The failure to impose limits cannibalizes natural resources and human communities. This time, the difference is that when we go the whole planet will go with us.

Arctic Alaska has quickly become the most contested land in recent U.S. history. It’s home to vast natural resources and a precariously balanced—and highly threatened—ecosystem. In this excerpt from the collection Arctic Voices, writer Nancy Lord gives an account of a gathering of Yup’ik Elders facing the troubles of thinning ice in the Bering Sea. 

“The New Golden Age of Oil That Wasn’t,” by Michael T. Klare.

Last winter, fossil-fuel enthusiasts began trumpeting the dawn of a new “golden age of oil” that would kick-start the American economy, generate millions of new jobs, and free this country from its dependence on imported petroleum. Ed Morse, head commodities analyst at Citibank, was typical. In the Wall Street Journal he crowed, “The United States has become the fastest-growing oil and gas producer in the world, and is likely to remain so for the rest of this decade and into the 2020s.”

[…]

It turns out, however, that the future may prove far more recalcitrant than these prophets of an American energy cornucopia imagine. To reach their ambitious targets, energy firms will have to overcome severe geological and environmental barriers — and recent developments suggest that they are going to have a tough time doing so.

Image by Ray Bodden, Creative Commons.

“Australian ecologist Roger Bradbury has recently asserted that coral reefs are doomed, living-dead, “zombie ecosystems” that will inevitably—and soon—utterly collapse under the multiple fatal blows of overfishing, pollution and the ocean acidification and warming resulting from the global buildup of carbon dioxide. (See his New York Times op-ed, “A World Without Coral Reefs.”)

Bradbury says we should give up. Any hope for reefs, he says, is a delusion.”

Can that really be so?

Carl Safina. “Life Finds a Way, But Needs Our Help,” from the Utne.com blog, Realizing the Vision.

This summer’s conditions may indeed be perfect for fire in the Southwest and West, but if you think of it as a “storm,” perfect or otherwise—that is, sudden, violent, and temporary—then you don’t understand what’s happening in this country or on this planet. Look at those 346 burnt homes again, or at the High Park fire that ate 87,284 acres and 259 homes west of Fort Collins, or at the Whitewater Baldy Complex fire in New Mexico that began in mid-May, consumed almost 300,000 acres, and is still smoldering, and what you have is evidence of the new normal in the American West.

“The West in Flames” by William deBuys. Read more at Utne.com.