jinasphinx | Two articles on sustainability

On the local level, the Seattle P-I has an opinion piece about Sustainable Seattle. The article discusses a number of things: the mayor's initiatives in his Environmental Action Agenda, the Seattle Justice Center's planned rooftop garden, the new jobs expected in the northwest's clean energy industry, and local green companies.

On the larger scale, Planet Drum has a lecture by Peter Berg on The Post-Environmentalist Directions of Bioregionalism. (Link copied from Rebecca's Pocket.) Despite what you'd expect from the title, this lecture is very easy to read, and has a great tone. Berg isn't preachy: he takes the attitude of that we are part of the bioregion. It's not us vs. nature; we're part of the environment, and we need to think about how we live so that we can keep on living. I hadn't heard the term "post-environmentalist" before, but I think this part of the lecture is describing the term:

Environmentalism wasn't really addressing the issue of "we are the human species sharing the biosphere together interdependently with other species and should have the long-range goal of doing so harmoniously." The previous directions of environmentalism were mainly to stop polluting air and water, to protect human health, and to slow down the destruction of nature. This was essentially from the mental perspective of industrial society surrounding nature. Actually, nature surrounds industrial society. We're in the biosphere, not in the Boeing aircraft factory parking lot. We're not in a human created environment, we are animals in the wild biosphere.