June/July 2007

Complementary Currencies for Social Change: An Interview with Bernard Lietaer
Ravi Dykema

To Remake the World: Something Earth0changing is Afoot Amonth Civil Society
Paul Hawken

Leave No Child Inside
Richard Louv

Research Shows Television Watching Affects Children's Development
Jody Woodruff

Global Warming Can't Buy Happiness
Bill McKibben

Worldwide Shift to Compact Fluorescents Could Close 270 Coal-Fired Power Plants
Lester R. Brown

The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success
Deepak Chopra

Principles for Spinal Safety
John Stern

The Economic Potential of a New Energy Revolution
Jerome Ringo

The Campaign for a Department of Peace: A Holistic Approach for Reducing Violence
Pip Cornall

Translated Ancient Buddhist Texts: Teachings of Life Free From Agression, Full of Compassion
Lama Chönam, Sangye Khandro & Jules B. Levinson

Book Review

Cosmic Calendar
Salina Rain

BACK TO TOP

Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth, A.D. 2030 is an optimistic look at a future where renewable energy has replaced King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes, Gas). Journalist, author and activist Harvey Wasserman paints a picture of a world where technology using renewable-resources (wind, solar and biomass), in tandem with focused techno-efficiency, has created an abundant, sustainable, democratic existence. The book opens with an ultra-light hybrid aircraft cruising in pollution-free air as the author describes its origins:

“The H-bio-PV hybrid has core power provided by farm-grown fuels. The fermentation of Earth’s fastest-growing, most cellulose-intense crops gives us a great green liquor that far exceeds the energy content of any fossil fuel to which we were once so catastrophically addicted. The ‘H’ is for renewably-produced hydrogen. When mixed with our base bio-fuels, these potent proton-electron pairs provide the extra zip that flies us at speeds once thought impossible for ships this big. The ‘PV’ is for the solar cells that line our wings and fuselage. These high-tech photovoltaic collectors are everywhere in Solartopia. They cleanly and quietly convert sunlight to electricity, which in this case gives our flying chariot a vital backup … Like all else in our brave renewable world, the hyper-efficient jet fuel mix of organic plant residue with renewable hydrogen and solar cells was long ago dismissed as ‘voodoo physics’ by lavishly funded ‘experts’ who always knew more than anyone else. Many of these professional nay-sayers surfaced as TV commentators. Their endlessly erroneous arrogance is still the stuff of Solartopian satire. All the technology that was ever needed for a post-pollution world was available in 2007, when the term Solartopia took off. All the advances that now seem so spectacular flowed easily and organically from what was readily available at the turn of the new century. And the ‘impossible’ vision of ‘those solar fools’ is now the ultimate Solartopian cash cow. It took no magic wand to get us to where we are now—only what Albert Einstein might have called ‘a holistic new way of thinking.’ Utopian seers inspired grassroots pioneers who paved the way for solar scientists and green engineers, followed, inevitably, by prescient financiers. And, of course, Solartopia’s first worst enemies now claim credit for making it all happen.”

While this may sound unrealistic, Wasserman, a long-time environmental activist, describes a world that has rethought and rebuilt itself on the basis of technology that is available to us today. “All the technology that was ever needed for a post-pollution world was available in 2007,” he writes. He also emphasizes that this technology, once King CONG is no longer in control, is hugely profitable.
Even human waste is a source of energy in Solartopia (as it very well could be today if we were willing to fund the infrastructure), “Sewage systems everywhere double as energy-generating compost operations” and have been transformed into “the trillion-dollar business of converting waste to power. Few today can comprehend it … but this country once actually dumped human waste onto the lands and into the oceans!”

The Encyclopedia of Solartopia (A.D. 2030) offers this definition: Solartopia: So-lar-to-pi-a (accent on the first and third syllables): A once-futuristic vision, now the term attached to our global society of 2030, whose totally green hyper-efficient energy economy is supplied primarily by the “Solartopian Trinity” of wind, solar and bio-fuels, but which also embraces hydroelectric devices, wave and tidal harvesters, ocean thermal and geothermal sources, among others. Power is carried primarily by hydrogen, especially in the transportation system, and by electricity. In its more general uses, the term Solartopia identifies a world now totally free of fossil and nuclear fuels, which have been permanently banned. In historic practice, the Solartopian focus on renewable energy has expanded to embrace a model in which all forms of pollution have been eliminated, along with the production of anything that cannot be entirely recycled. Social and political reforms have followed in tandem, along with the transformation of the post-modern corporation. First popularized early in the new millennium, the term Solartopia came to be synonymous with the larger goals of the ultimately successful global grassroots movement for a fully sustainable post-pollution economy. Its use over time has come to embrace phrases such as “the Solartopian Vision,” “The Post-Fossil/Nuclear Solartopian Society,” “Pollution-Free Solartopia,” “Solartopian Windiana,” “the Solartopian Trinity,” etc. In their early manifestations, such visions were viewed as marginal, unrealistic and even frivolous. But in the second decade of the new millennium, in the face of extreme economic and ecological peril, it became clear that without turning the Solartopian ideals into tangible realities, humankind could not survive. And so it happened …

Solartopia! is available for $18 from Box 09683, Bexley, OH 43209www.solartopia.org, www.harveywasserman.com.

Are You a Solartopian?

Solartopia is our planet when, as Kurt Vonnegut might have said, we finally decide to like it here, the 21st century vision of our bold green future.

It is what Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., calls the “beautiful, tangible, credible, necessary & do-able” green-powered Earth. It is the key to our survival—economically, biologically and spiritually.

Solartopia rests on four simple pillars:
1) Total renunciation of all fossil and nuclear fuels. There is no place for them in a sustainable, survivable world. They are neither green nor clean.
2) All-out conversion to renewable energy, led by the Solartopian Trinity of wind, solar and bio-fuels. Mother Earth gives us the natural power we need.
3) Complete commitment to increased efficiency, including revived and solarized mass transit and inter-city passenger rail systems.
4) No more production of anything that cannot be re-used or recycled. Zero tolerance of any waste makes Solartopia a post-pollution world.

In addition to wind, solar and bio-fuels, Solar-topian energy comes from the waves, currents and tides; from the geothermal heat beneath the earth’s crust; from the temperature differentials between solar-heated water at the oceans’ surface and that deeper down; and more….

The efficiency revolution drives Solartopian energy consumption levels to a pittance. Compact fluorescent bulbs are transcended by Light Emit-ting Diodes and a whole army of efficiency devices, many of them invented in backyards and spread at hyper-speed through the ever-evolving super-linked internet that accelerates the green revolution.

This hyper-powered internet fuels both the pure democracy of instant grassroots organizing and a raging geek-driven torrent of Solartopian innovations that produce and save energy.

Hydrogen and electricity are the chief power carriers, but they are always produced by green means.

The safe energy revolution spawns millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in decentralized wealth. With homes, buildings, communities and farms controlling their own energy supplies, the economy has a solid floor beneath it, and prosperity spreads widely, rather than concentrating in the hands of King CONG—Coal, Oil, Nukes Gas—and its elite stockholders.

Thus Solartopia is diverse, tolerant and fair. Solartopians are argumentative, opinionated, liberated. The rich are plentiful, but the poor have their dignity—and the necessities of life. Nobody starves in Solartopia. Everyone has a right to an education, and to the basic rights due all beings.

Paper ballots guarantee actual democracy. Women are empowered, erudite and equally paid, so the birth rate has stabilized.

After so many thousands of corporations “Enronized” in toxic clouds of overextension and greed, Solartopia decided that capitalism may be one thing, but cannibalism quite another.

So those corporations that are truly productive and accountable are tolerated. But Solartopia demands they serve society rather than vice versa. Their charters require that they balance the profit motive with social service. They are restricted to focusing on the types of business they do best, in the locales where they are most efficient. Ultimately, they worship at the Solartopian altars of accountability, efficiency and service.

The switch to renewables has defunded global terrorism. Shutting all nuclear plants has eliminated the pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction, and relieved us of the on-going fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error.

The money not wasted on failed atomic technology has accelerated the switch to true green energy.

Murderous coal mines with their lethal air pollution are as long gone as oil spills and gas shortages.

Solartopians still painfully howl at the absurd idea that atomic power was once hyped as “green” or that coal was sold as “clean.”

With organic farming, food production has revived and thrived, bursting past the devastating catastrophes of chemical pest-icides, herbicides, fertilizers and genetically modified crops.

Synergistic reefs under large off-shore wind towers have helped revive the ocean ecology. Against all odds, the “Apollo 13 Laws” banning any form of pollution has made Solartopia’s water and air fit to drink and breath.

Feisty and diverse, Solartopia has no firm consensus on personal beliefs about reproduction, meat eating (the Vegetopians are always feuding with the carnivores) or a thousand other enjoyably combative issues. It is as difficult to embarrass a Solartopian as to stop one from arguing.

But the bottom line is this: the absurd old hype about “green” nukes or fossil fuels is remembered in Solartopia as a silly joke. When push came to shove, King CONG could not cut it. Our hyper-efficient Solartopia runs totally, gratefully and without compromise on Mother Nature’s sun.

Around 2007, Solartopia rejected and tran-scended the corporatized, compromised Earth Day of 1970s origin. Now we require a choice: paint a new coat of greenwash on old fossil/nuke dinosaurs … or work for a genuinely sustainable future based on zero tolerance for obsolete technologies, unnecessary waste or corporate domination.

Solartopia is the diverse, green-powered, organic place we go to survive and thrive. The alternatives are moral collapse, financial bankruptcy and biological extinction.

With an unbending commitment to creative non-violence and a technologically-advanced civilization totally in synch with our Mother Earth, Solartopia is the 21st Century vision of our bold green future.

Are you a Solartopian?

Harvey Wasserman

Science says we face global ecological catastrophe. Harvey Wasserman envisions a way out. Solartopia! shows how we can save the planet with available technology using smart examples and simple language accessible to readers of all ages, from high schoolers to college activists and from homeowners to corporate executives.

There is no longer any scientific dissent that global warming is upon us, and that its impacts will be catastrophic. The good news is that we have the scientific and technical ability to avert its gravest outcomes. Furthermore, all the steps we need to take to avoid global warming are steps we ought to be taking anyhow, to reduce dependence on foreign oil, improve our national security, our prosperity and our health.

As early as 1952 Harry Truman’s legendary Paley Commission proposed that the United States lead the world by building an economy based on renewables, and on January 16, 2000, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory issued a draft report confirming that between 99% and 124% of the electricity consumed by the United States could be supplied by renewables by the year 2020. That’s a decade short of Wasserman’s Solartopian ideal. In purely technical terms, there is no doubt everything “fantasized” in this book could—and should—happen. Only footdragging in Washington and in the corporate board rooms has denied us this future.

Even today the minions of coal, oil, nukes and gas caution that another halfcentury must pass before green energy can even make a dent. That would be a full century beyond the first Presidential prediction.

But the renewables industry is defying those dark predictions. The worldwide wind industry, for example, is already beyond the $10 billion per annum mark and growing at 25-35% per year worldwide. Far more new wind capacity is being built and installed worldwide than nuclear power.

Likewise the photovoltaic (PV) industry, which converts sunlight directly to electricity, is booming into a multi-billion-dollar bonanza and already exploding Wall Street expectations.

Biofuels, including corn-based ethanol and soy diesel, are transforming into major industries and already making the transition from annual food crops to “incredible inedibles” like switchgrass, poplar trees and hemp, that don’t have to be sprayed, fertilized and replanted every year.

Solartopia! emphasizes wind, solar and biofuels as the exciting path to economic and ecological prosperity. Today we squander our national treasury and the lives of America’s military men and women to ensure the flow of fossil fuels that are destroying our planet’s air and water supply and empowering the world’s worst dictators and terrorists. Non-renewable feedstocks are linear, capital-intensive and ultimately unsupportable. Their cash-flow goes just one-way: deep into the non-renewable, terrorist-funding black hole that has sucked so much out of the world economy, and especially that of the United States.

Not surprisingly Wasserman, an old-time nuclear activist who coined the term “no nukes” in the 1970s, points out that the popular panacea of nuclear power is not a realistic solution. The first atomic reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. Despite fifty years of promises the industry and its boosters have still not solved the problems of nuclear waste, toxic emissions, catastrophic meltdowns and potential terror attacks. While renewables show fifty years of rapid advance, nuclear power backers have left a dismal track record of fifty years of failure to bring us the most catastrophically expensive form of energy ever devised.

While extractive fossil and nuclear energies decimate local and larger economies, renewables are already creating millions of jobs worldwide. They support the communities in which they’re built. They offer immense paybacks in terms of saved energy costs, enhanced ecological wealth and internal recycling of community based resources.

We are already seeing solarization projects that come in ahead of schedule, under budget, and with immense benefits—both measurable and intangible—to the communities that choose to go that route.

Only political leadership and will can save us from the certain doom of “business as usual” and take the leap of green power and sustainability and allow us to reclaim the resources now squandered on war and waste—the inevitable byproducts of fossil fuels and nuclear power.

Wasserman’s Solartopia is the good, brave renewable world of sustainability, dignity, prosperity and freedom. It means converting the free fuel of the sun and wind into an inexhaustible supply of wealth while creating good jobs, prosperous communities and a real chance at a just society.

This book offers a first truly accessible vision of what the outcome might look like. It is beautiful, tangible, credible, necessary, and do-able. Wasserman treats us to a hypothetical plane ride in 2030 in a craft built with hardware and blueprints which are available today. So fasten your seatbelts for this exciting ride on Wasserman’s H-bio-PV H-airliner and prepare to land in Solartopia!

From the introduction to Solartopia! by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

“The dream of a green-powered ‘Solartopian’ planet has been with us for fifty years. Harvey Wasserman shows us how we can get there, and what our beloved Earth might actually look like once we do. It is a dream worth working for.”
- Bonnie Raitt

“Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! has made me what I previously thought impossible, optimistic.”
- Kurt Vonnegut

“In Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia, energy moves in harmony with the eco-sphere and all is well. Let’s make it happen. We have decades of joyous work ahead.”
- Dennis Kucinich,
US Representative (D-Ohio)

“With so much to gain, and so much to lose, every one of us has to choose. I choose Solartopia!”
- John Hall
US Representative (D-NY)

“Harvey Wasserman’s Solartopia! is a must-read for people who care about the sort of planet we will be leaving to our children and our children’s children. This is the work of that rarest of minds: a visionary who is a realist, a prophet who is recognized in his own homeland ...”
- Tom Regan,
Emeritus Professor of Philosophy,
North Carolina State University

A great vision of the future we are trying to make!”
- Walt Musial,
National Renewable Energy Laboratory

“I’m finally reporting back on your terrific book, Solartopia! I enjoyed the hell out of it ... found it informative, engaging and heartbreakingly urgent.”
- Bob Koehler,
Syndicated Columnist

“Solartopia! sets forward an ambitious, yet achievable, vision for our energy future. It takes a visionary like Harvey Wasserman to imagine and articulate the future that we all must now work to achieve.”
- Eddie Scher, Editor,
Waterkeeper Magazine

“Solartopia! is a must read for everyone who has hope for the future, or wants to have hope … and that should be all of us! We can and must create a clean energy future, and Harvey’s book helps us get there sooner rather than later.”
- Larry Fahn, Executive Director,
As You Sow; Past President, Sierra Club