Pockets of Hope
Tuesday, July 15th, 2008
In today’s world it’s easy for an environmentalist to get frustrated and say the whole world is going to hell—Bush lifting the ban on offshore drilling immediately comes to mind. But there are places that prove that it doesn’t have to be that way. If you look hard enough, you can find little pockets of hope.
One of them is the Danish island of Samso, which acclaimed environmental author Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about in a recent New Yorker article. Since 2005, the island has produced more energy than it’s used, and most of that energy has come from renewable sources like wind turbines and heating plants that run on biomass. In less than a decade the island’s residents went from heating their houses with oil brought in by tankers to earning an international reputation for living on “the renewable-energy island.”
Another example is Kamikatsu, a small town in the hills of southeastern Japan, which prides itself on producing “Zero Waste.” Residents have to compost all their food scraps and sort the rest of their garbage into 34 different categories for recycling. The one flaw in the plan, critics point out, is that residents have to drive their recyclables to Kamikatsu’s Zero Waste Centre.
For all its talk about being a Green City, Austin has a long way to go… but, seeing the change that’s starting to take place all around the world, I remain hopeful.