Climate commons was intended always to be a short term experiment with two primary goals. First to bring together researchers/thinkers/producers from a wide range of fields to contribute information/ideas to a multidisciplinary pool. Henry Jenkin’s writes about this in his blog: “In a networked society, people are increasingly forming Knowledge communities to pool information and work together to solve problems they could not confront individually. We call that collective intelligence.”

The second was to create on the internet in a blog form a space for conversation, questions, and contributions from anyone–a participatory network. As I contemplate what happened in the more than one hundred posts and three hundred comments with the site visited by an average of 3000 people a day, a number of new questions have formed:

what is the nature of participation on the internet?

one year ago this month

a whiteout on a glacier in Iceland

Today is the first day of the 4th International Polar Year, perhaps a fitting end or a new beginning for Climate Commons. As many of the posts here have discussed, the poles play an important role in global climate. A major goal of this IPY is to study these linkages in greater detail and make the public aware of them. You can learn more about IPY at www.ipy.org and get a 3D tour in Google Earth at www.earthslot.org/ipy . It’s been a pleasure participating in this commons, and I encourage you all to continue the sorts of discussions we’ve had here as part of IPY.

Cheers,
Matt

from a great article in Harpers this month:

Another way of understanding the presence of gift economies—which dwell like ghosts in the commercial machine—is in the sense of a public commons. A commons, of course, is anything like the streets over which we drive, the skies through which we pilot airplanes, or the public parks or beaches on which we dally. A commons belongs to everyone and no one, and its use is controlled only by common consent. A commons describes resources like the body of ancient Music drawn on by composers and folk musicians alike, rather than the commodities, like “Happy Birthday to You,” for which ASCAP, 114 years after it was written, continues to collect a fee. Einstein’s theory of relativity is a commons. Writings in the public domain are a commons. Gossip about celebrities is a commons. The silence in a movie theater is a transitory commons, impossibly fragile, treasured by those who crave it, and constructed as a mutual gift by those who compose it.

Tim O’Reilly has a recent post about energy issues making it onto what he calls the “alpha geek radar”. I think another way of saying this might be that more and more people are having conversations like ours. He says, “It’s really interesting the way ideas spread and catch on, and suddenly get on everyone’s radar at the same time. It makes me think of Danny Hillis’ definition of global intelligence: ‘It’s that which decided that decaf coffeepots should be orange.’”

Friends,

I would like to suggest we ask if a policy of replacing liquid fossil fuels for transportation with ANY form of ethanol makes any sense at all? Does this strategy yield the greatest degree of energy independence?

Consider, even cellulosic ethanol at 5:1 net energy will be burned in an I.C.E. with only 30% efficiency. As a result, the true net energy of the ethanol I.C.E. system is a mere 1.5:1

Given that buildings are the source of 48% of climate changing gases, perhaps we should look at a displacement strategy. That is, if we use solid biofuels for space conditioning we can re-allocate the displaced fossil fuels to transportation.

Our grass-based pellet fuels have a net energy of 14:1 and are combusted in systems with at least an 83% efficiency [USDA FS & PFI data]. As a result, the true net energy of grass fueled space conditioning is on the order of 11.6:1. This is a 673% increase in net energy of the system compared to ethanol.

This is a photo I took in April of 2004 in Resolute Bay. I was there with the film crew for our NOVA show, and they wanted the iceberg as a backdrop for their interview with Roy “Fritz” Koerner. They’d had Koerner bring an ice core from the Greenland glacier from which he had just returned, and his protest that standing in front of bay-ice with a core from a glacier might be misleading was ignored. He certainly looked the part of an arctic personality, with a narrow, grizzled face that could have stood beside an old photograph of Amundsen. He remained remarkably cordial throughout his interview, despite the cold and the fact that the producer kept having him re-do his lines to hit the specific points she was looking for.

Hi, in thinking about the conversations of the last month I’ve been struck by the many interesting ways of connecting and seeing science and art together. In windows around the world one thing I’m always struck with is light and in one of Jane’s last posting she had a number of photos of light on winter days. light is a powerful part of the arctic as at certain times of the year the sun is not up and othertimes it’s always up. light is also a powerful aspect of art.

A local network of home gardens = A community of food producers!
Victory Gardens 2007+ calls for a more active role for cities in shaping agricultural and food policy. It is a concept we are trying to get adopted by the city of San Francisco that would provide a subsidized home gardening program for individuals and neighborhoods.

This program offers tools, training & materials for urban dwellers to participate in a city-wide transformation of underutilized backyards into productive growing spaces.

The project draws from the historical model of the 1940’s American Victory garden program to provide a basis for developing urban agriculture as a viable form of sustainable food practice in the city.

See the Video

Sitting down with a scotch tonight, I wanted to answer the question of why I called this site Climate Commons. I think the first word is obvious, but what is this notion of the commons? I went through my writing on it, and then starting surfing around the various sites I have found that use it as their central tenet. Daunted, I decided to collect phrases that seem to point at its varied form:

a public sphere in which community values are expressed

a collaborative working space

distributed problem solving

a public library

an invisible college

a space for community owned assets

a piece of land over which other people—often neighbouring landowners—could exercise one of a number of traditional rights, such as allowing their cattle to graze upon it

any sets of resources that a community recognizes as being accessible to any member of that community

Images by Jock Gill, Peacham, Vermont

Solid biomass energy in general offers attractive [net energy] ratios.
grass energy in particular, with a net energy of 14:1 in the pellet
state, yields, after combustion in an industrial system with 83%
efficiency [USDA & PFI data] a systems net energy of 11.6:1. No
liquid biofuel can come close to this systems net energy factor. Thus
we anticipate a significant future role for herbaceous energy crops in
our nation’s drive to energy independence and energy security.
Evidence of this can be found in the new farm bill with its attention
to incentives for growing grass as a dedicated energy crop.

Clearly, it is far better to BURN grass than turn it into ethanol.
7.7X better. All of the heating oil displaced by grass can then be
used to reduce oil imports required by transportation! This is a
faster, better, cheaper solution with a whole lot less entropy than
the ethanol route. N.H.’s own [Charlie Bass] new this years ago.

I am in search of any information pertaining to the Order 81. Iraqi Order 81 prohibits Iraqi farmers from using the methods of agriculture that they have used for centuries. The common worldwide practice of saving heirloom seeds from one year to the next is now illegal in Iraq.
PRESS ACTION

“The American Administrator of the Iraqi CPA (Coalition Provisional Authority) government, Paul Bremer, updated Iraq’s intellectual property law to ‘meet current internationally-recognized standards of protection’.
The updated law makes saving seeds for next year’s harvest, practiced by 97% of Iraqi farmers in 2002, and is the standard farming practice for thousands of years across human civilizations, to be now illegal.. Instead, farmers will have to obtain a yearly license for genetically modified (GM) seeds from American corporations. These GM seeds have typically been modified from seeds developed over thousands of generations by indigenous farmers like the Iraqis, and shared freely like agricultural ‘open source.’”
GRAIN

Not promoting, just found this interesting.

a quote from Barry Lopez, author of one of my favorite books about the Arctic, arctic Dreams:

It is my belief that a human imagination is shaped by the architecture it encounters at an early age. The visual landscape, of course, or the depth, elevation, and hues of a cityscape play a part here, as does the way sunlight everywhere etches lines to accentuate forms. But the way we imagine is also affected by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger ocean of air; by what the North American composer John Luther Adams calls the sonic landscape; and, say, by an awareness of how temperature and humidity rise and fall in a place over a year.Over time I have come to think of these three qualities–paying intimate attention; a storied relationship to a place rather than a solely sensory awareness of it; and living in some sort of ethical unity with a place–as a fundamental human defense against loneliness. If you’re intimate with a place, a place with whose history you’re familiar, and you establish an ethical conversation with it, the implication that follows is this: the place knows you’re there. It feels you. You will not be forgotten, cut off, abandoned.