A better world is possible - Global Commons Institute

Copyright Bruce Nixon 2010. All rights reserved. This electronic copy is provided free for personal, non-commercial use only.
www.brucenixon.com
Intelligent infrastructures Today’s infrastructure projects are lavish and massive, both on the surface and
underground, consuming vast resources, giving rise to enormous wasteful throughput, emissions and waste.
Ultimately these projects will be demolished leading to even more waste. Magnitudes have more than
doubled in Germany, for instance, since the sixties for motorways (260%), networks for gas (230%), water
(206%), electricity (398%) and transportation of goods by road (159%). A switch is needed from a throughput
economy to meeting human needs. As the magnitude increases for roads, the congestion and delays get
worse. The switch needs to be from magnitude and constant growth to services meeting human needs,
saving the planet and bringing about global justice. This means energy saving, eco-efficient products and
services and better local and community infrastructures – just the opposite of what is happening! It means a
shift to energy suppliers becoming energy efficiency service companies, integrated resource planning,
decentralised and least cost planning (LCP) of heat and power that can lead to big savings. The same can be
done for water supplies with fewer dams and less ground–water extraction. The concept of service
orientation and orientation to what is close at hand can be applied to mobility with fewer journeys and road
schemes – e.g. cycling, car-sharing and buses. Instead of building ever larger housing estates, there needs to
be a shift towards “functional intermingling” of housing, work, shopping, leisure, recreation, food growing,
land and buildings, local power and energy linked to both housing and offices.
Regeneration of land and agriculture In Europe 75 % of the population, 80% in UK, live in densely populated
urban areas. However, these are heavily dependent on the countryside for food, water, air, materials and
recreation. City and countryside are inter-related. We need to move from a parasitical relationship between
the two towards regionalism. We have depleted and neglected the countryside and damaged the capacity of
farmers to feed us by underpaying them. Industrial farming methods have harmed the soil, the ecosystem
and polluted our water. The countryside, trees and plants, play a major part in absorption and regeneration,
renewing soils, water and air. This requires respect for the ecosystem, a shift from monoculture to diversity,
from plantation to woodland, from linear agribusiness to organic cultivation, from food as a commodity and
heavily processed food to healthy food, from globalised supermarket to regional farmers’ market. We need
to be reconnected with food as the source of health and energy; learn how to grow and cook again. It means
producing food in our gardens, allotments and community gardens.
Liveable cities are described in Chapter 13 - Sustainable cities, towns and communities.
International equity and global solidarity It is most important that we manage our transition in a way that
does not harm the rest of the world, already suffering greater poverty as a result of the downturn, but brings
about greater equity. Chapter 9 will describe how we can create greater equality through a fairer global
economic system, global co-operation and involving poorer nations as equal partners.
Strategies
To avoid catastrophic climate change and secure energy supplies, governments need to take urgent action to
implement a coherent strategy on a massive scale. The two largest industries causing CO2 emissions are
energy, i.e. heat and power, and then transport. Here are outlines of what can be done:
Heat and Power
109