The 10:10 project is an international campaign for individuals, businesses, schools, and organizations to publicly commit to taking responsibility for their person contribution to global warming by reducing their greenhouse gas emissions 10% in 2010.

If all of Albany participated, we would get well on our way to the City-wide greenhouse gas reduction goal of 25% by 2020!

Transition Albany is supporting this campaign by spreading the word and encouraging people to do the same. Here are 4 easy steps to participate!

1. Commit. Sign onto 10:10 online and tell Transition Albany that you’re committing, so that we can add you to the list in Albany.
2. Count. Measure your baseline greenhouse gas emissions with one of the many online carbon footprint calculators. We recommend the one at coolclimate.berkeley.edu because it is more comprehensive than some others out there. Note: Click “click here to continue” after entering California as your state.
3. Act. Start reducing! Find a helpful and fun list of tips on the 1010uk.org site. Read Albany’s Climate Action Plan to get some ideas. Share and discuss action ideas on the Transition Albany forum.
4. Share. Spread the word about the 10:10 campaign to others in Albany. Volunteer to contact and sign up 20 friends. Or pick a business or block of businesses to sign up. Or go after your school or your child’s school. Let us know through the comments below. The more we talk about it, the more people will be aware of 10:10!

Join the list of those participating in Albany!

(in alphabetical order)

Individuals & Families

Arkin Tilt family, Marge Atkinson, Dorothy Bevard, Gerhard Brostrom, Marge Brostrom, Allen Cain, Christopher Carter, Patty Chin, Jess Cosby, Heather Cunningham, Linda Currie, Len Edmondson, Edward Fields, Andrew Frankle, Evan Frisch, Tree Gelb Stuber, Chester Godfry, Clara-Rae Jenson, Miya Kitahara, Robert Lieber, Dan Lieberman, Ly / Williams family, Allan Maris, Peggy McQuaid, Claire Norris, Caryl O’Keefe, Brian Parsley, Nick Pilch, Beth Pollard, Suzanne Schrift, Janet Smith-Heimer, Amy Smolens, Catherine Sutton, Carol Swan, Karina Tindol, Ellen Toomey, the Utedskis, Meera Valdez, Wynette Weaver, Buddy Williams, Tony Wolcott, Florence Wahl…

Businesses

Gathering Tribes

Organizations

Albany Unified School District

This list is updated every week or two. Please alert us if you see a misspelled name.

Get on the list by filling out this quick form or by commenting on this post!

Read more about each step…

Transition Albany has prepared a statement of commitment, to recognize the importance of individuals participating in the 10:10 campaign.

To get plugged into the global movement, sign up on www.1010global.org and www.1010uk.org.

Below is the statement signed by many of those appearing on the list of participants in Albany:

WE THE UNDERSIGNED, citizens of the City of Albany

CELEBRATING the beautiful and intelligent balance of nature as a complex, interconnected system,

RECOGNIZING that the natural balance is being severely and dangerously disrupted, with the potential result of irreversible and catastrophic climate change,

ACCEPTING that the actions of humans are jeopardizing the balance through emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases,

REGRETTING that governmental leadership has failed to alleviate the impact of human societies,

APPEALING to the wisdom of all the people that enrich us as a community and recognizing our diverse interests and abilities,

UNDERSTANDING that individual action can collectively influence the impact of the whole,

HEREBY COMMIT to taking accountability for our individual impacts on the environment by

MEASURING our direct and indirect emissions of greenhouse gases, and

REDUCING the amount we emit by at least 10% during the year 2010 as compared to previous years.

There are many “carbon calculators” out there. Some measure just your energy use and car trips. Others include emissions for the goods and services you consume. Some are based on broad averages (like what state you live in) and others take specific data input (like how many kWh of electricity you use).

Transition Albany recommends the Cool Climate Calculator from the Berkeley Institute of the Environment. It includes energy, transportation, food, goods and services. It provides defaults based on your local averages, and allows you to input your own data if you have it. Much of it is based on how many dollars you spend in each area, and converts this using average per-dollar emissions. They are currently working on making this more nuanced.

Go to the calculator website.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions / your carbon footprint can be done in many ways!

It can be done by reducing what you consume (energy, stuff), reusing and sharing what you consume, and rethinking what you do or how you do it. The Transition Town movement focuses on those things that enhance life and community that also reduce greenhouse gases and the use of fossil fuels. Look around this website to get some ideas, and to get involved!

The 1010uk.org website offers 10 ways to cut 10%.

Comment below to share an idea, or go to our forums start discussing!

Now that you’ve signed on to the commitment and started working toward the 10% goal, spread the word and get the rest of Albany to participate! The more people, businesses, and groups participating, the more of an overall reduction we’ll achieve!

Here’s are some ideas of who should also sign up for 10:10. Have any other ideas? Or sign up to be the one to encourage one of these to participate!

• Albany schools (each school, or AUSD as a whole)
• City of Albany
• Your block! Make it a goal to sign up your whole block.
• Local businesses, or through an organization like the Chamber of Commerce or the Solano Avenue Association
• Large businesses and entities, like the USDA, Target, or Golden Gate Fields
• Girl Scout and Boy Scout troops
• Preschools
• Community organizations, like the Lion’s Club, Rotary, and Soroptimist

HomeGrown: The Film

HOMEGROWN follows the Dervaes family who run a small organic farm in the heart of urban Pasadena, California. While “living off the grid”, they harvest over 6,000 pounds of produce on less than a quarter of an acre, make their own bio diesel, power their computers with the help of solar panels, and maintain a website that gets 4,000 hits a day. The film is an intimate human portrait of what it’s like to live like “Little House on the Prairie” in the 21st Century.  - Excerpt from the film’s website.

Visit the film’s website to learn more.

Discussion with Novella Carpenter

I’ve been cultivating the city for over ten years now, and my neighbors still think I’m crazy. It all started with a few chickens, then some bees, until I had a full-blown farm near downtown Oakland. - Excerpt from Novella’s log at www.novellacarpenter.com. Farm City is her account of her experiences. She will have copies of the book available for sale at the event!

Seed and Plant Exchange

Simply bring your extra seeds and plants, and some envelopes or containers to hopefully take home others in exchange. Best to label all items properly to prevent surprise crops (but would that be so bad anyway?).

Writing in Britain’s The Guardian, George Monbiot called The Age of Stupid “a captivating and constantly surprising film: the first successful dramatization of climate change to reach the big screen.” Grounding the film is a fictional character who looks back upon our time with full knowledge of the environmental and social upheavals of the first half of the twenty-first century. This device distinguishes the film from more conventional documentaries and arguably provides a drawing card for the film.

In the film, Academy Award-nominated actor Pete Postlethwaite stars as the Archivist, the lone caretaker to the collected knowledge of humanity.  In the year 2055, the Archivist looks back upon video clips of the early years of the climate crisis from within his tower in the now-melted Arctic, his refuge from a world devastated by storms, starved by droughts, and consumed by violence.  As he views the videos, he seeks answers to the question that haunts him: Why did humanity fail to save itself?

Postlethwaite, whom Steven Spielberg named “probably the best actor in the world today,” delivers a strong performance, but it is the lives of real people from our time whom he observes in videos in his archives that make the film so compelling.  Through these videos, director Franny Armstrong follows the struggles and aspirations of several intriguing people in often uncomfortable relationships to oil and global warming.  From Iraqi refugees to a British wind farm developer, from an Indian airline founder to a French mountaineer, we see the emerging possibilities of humanity’s future with all their complications and contradictions.

Amidst resistance to change in countries such as the U.S. and U.K. and growing aspirations elsewhere to “live like Americans,” can we avoid the fate that the film depicts? Or is our time destined to be remembered as the “Age of Stupid” for our failure to heed repeated warnings?

It’s been said that the best way to predict the future is to create it.  Consider this showing an invitation from Transition Albany to begin doing just that.

Age of Stupid: Trailers: Original Theatrical Trailer from Age of Stupid on Vimeo.

This theatrical showing of The Age of Stupid is expected to be the only one of its kind in the San Francisco Bay Area in the coming months.  Tickets will be available for purchase at the box office of the Albany Twin both in advance and on the morning of the 11:30 a.m. showing on Sunday, March 7, 2010.

I was reminded of this as I reviewed my experience at an Awakening the Dreamer Symposium last Sunday in Oakland’s Chinatown.

Awakening the Dreamer is a masterfully compiled multimedia collection of video excerpts, music, photographs, quotations, animation, live presenters, dyads, group processes and wisdom snippets – from Joanna Macy, Thich Nhat Hahn, John Robbins, Paul Hawken, Wangari Maathai and Vandana Shiva, among others – that, in only four hours, clearly distils the facts and elicits and presents answers to four questions:

I had just watched the climate docu-drama The Age of Stupid and was keenly aware of the precariousness of our position on the edge of collapse as cheap oil, the fuel behind our consumer society, runs out and its effects as climate change grow more severe.

A key concept of the symposium is that we have been “entranced” by years of “marketing” to believe that we need something outside ourselves to be satisfied and that ever-increasing consumption is the answer. Although it is clear that our addiction to consumerism is driving climate change, perhaps we are not so much “stupid” as hypnotized. Stores and manufacturers in our capitalistic world proclaim their wares with brand images and logos that we have been conditioned to feel we cannot live without.  What does the name “Safeway” actually have to do with food, for instance, or “The Territory Ahead” with clothes?

The Awakening the Dreamer Symposium was put together several years ago by the Pachamama Alliance in response to a heartfelt plea from the indigenous Achuar people of Peru/Ecuador, whose shamans had predicted that the world was on the verge of a terrible catastrophe, which only industrialized countries could avert. The version I experienced was a recent improvement that is taking the Bay Area (and beyond) by storm as more and more attendees are inspired to become facilitators and bring the symposium to their own groups and associations.

At the crux of the event is the revelation of one basic assumption under which we have been operating for centuries, the reversal of which will make it inevitable that we reduce our consumption, care more for the earth and each other than for profit, and rebuild our lives in resilient communities. Can you guess what it is?

I saw the Symposium as offering a beautiful, compact introduction to the Transition concept, so I was delighted to hear this morning that the Pachamama Alliance and the Transition Network are currently formalizing a partnership to do just that.

On the other hand, you might be an avid gardener struggling to satisfy your passion with a container garden or in a tiny space with inadequate sunlight. Or perhaps you’ve done as much as you can in your own yard and you’re itching to transform another patch of ground.

Whichever person you are, think about this: as cheap oil gets scarcer, so will cheap food. Consensus among geologists has it that we’ll reach a Global Peak in oil production somewhere between 2008 and 2012, and, because it’s hard to tell until after you’ve got there, we may be at that point already. I find it interesting that Chevron is closing their Richmond plant; they say it’s because of a lack of downstream demand, but I wonder.

So, if food is getting too expensive at the store, let’s grow our own! Small mixed vegetable plots – with flowers for the pollinators – are more productive than large commercial fields by a large margin, and we can grow exactly what we like and only have to walk out into the yard to get it. How about that for reducing your carbon footprint!

If we have too many carrots, peas, potatoes, onions, beans, beets, turnips, leafy greens, lettuce, radishes, plums, apples, pears, lemons, kiwis, oranges  …  we can give them to our neighbors or trade them at the Albany City Share produce swap (Tuesday nights at the Albany Community Center, May through October).

Albany now has its own garden sharing website on the new Hyperlocavore social network. Sign up, then find someone or some few who can work your plot and transform it into a beautiful haven – where you can sit and enjoy the peace of a well-nurtured garden, serviced by the bees and butterflies – while providing you both with delicious produce.

Throwing a gardening party is the best of all. Neighbors donate their good hard work in the morning (tear up that front lawn and put in beds?), then share a potluck meal and camaraderie afterwards.

“THE WORK THAT RECONNECTS”

www.joannamacy.net

Joanna Macy is a Buddhist teacher, writer, activist, and scholar who has been developing teaching tools to help us respond to the perils and suffering of our world for three decades.  She is giving a one-day workshop on The Work That Reconnects on February 14th at Common Circle, Berkeley, from 10 to 6pm. This is a very special opportunity to spend time with one of the elders of our age, someone whose life has been dedicated to helping people feel connected to the world they live in, fully in touch with their own emotions, and warmly connected to one other.

A group of 15 of us, mostly from Transition Albany and Transition Richmond (the Richmond Rivets), had a touching day experiencing some of Joanna’s tools on January 24th, courtesy of Pam and Tatyana at Sarana Community Acupuncture Center, 968 San Pablo Avenue, Albany. Anne Symens-Bucher, an accomplished workshop leader in her own right and assistant to Joanna Macy for four years, introduced deep and inclusive exercises designed by Joanna to put us in touch with the power, liberation, and solidarity that come with owning our collective grief.

Joanna’s work has been embraced by the Transition community, which is well aware that, as we let in the information coming our way about climate change and the end of cheap oil, we can be sideswiped by fear, grief, anger, helplessness – the whole gamut of emotions. If we have no place to air these feelings we are likely to stuff them and gradually deaden our response instead of letting our creativity and resilience come up with solutions.

Joanna is leading a day-long workshop in Berkeley on February 14th, 2010 – sign up at http://commoncircle.com/wtrevent. The cost is $95 before Feb 10th, and $145 thereafter. I attended a weekend workshop on The Work that Reconnects in Bolinas with Joanna in December 2009. I was thoroughly impressed with the potency of the simple exercises we did. I’m usually rather skeptical of workshops but I “warmed up” in the room of mostly people I hadn’t met before very quickly.

Every Transition Town has a “heart and soul” element, and we are starting our own group for airing feelings and lending mutual support during challenging times, on Thursday, February 18th at 943 Madison Street, Albany. Come for a potluck at 6:30 pm if you would like, and please RSVP to transitionalbanyca@gmail.com or call 510-528-2261.

“The most remarkable feature of this historical moment on Earth is not that we are on the way to destroying the world – we’ve actually been on the way for quite a while. It is that we are beginning to wake up, as from a millennia-long sleep, to a whole new relationship to our world, to ourselves and each other”. Joanna Macy

Details:
SPECIAL EVENT!
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 1:15 – 4:45 pm
Edith Stone Room, Albany Library
1247 Marin Avenue, Albany
GROWING MORE FOOD IN ALBANY: WHERE & HOW ~
Inviting the Imagination and the Ingenuity of the Community
This community forum will use open space technology to give everyone a voice and generate good ideas and follow up actions.
$10 contributions welcomed.
Please arrive promptly at 1:15 pm to get the most out of this event.

FILMS & FELLOWSHIP
for a future we can live with …
Edith Stone Room, Albany Library, 1247 Marin Avenue, Albany
Sunday afternoons from 1.30 to 4.30 pm. Free.
The screening of each film will be sandwiched by opportunities to meet people
and talk together about our reactions to the film and to the challenges we are facing.

Sunday, October 25
THE END OF SUBURBIA, 2004, Canada
“I have often seen how screenings of End of Suburbia … act, in hindsight, as a catalyst for all sorts of things that follow.” Rob Hopkins, Founder, Transition Movement

Sunday, November 8
A CRUDE AWAKENING, 2007, Switzerland
Clearly presents the argument that we are at or near the peak [of oil production], using fascinating archival footage of America’s love affair with petroleum from the early days of the industry.

Sunday, November 29 (Thanksgiving Weekend)
MICROCOSMOS, 1996, France
The delightful and wordless film of bugs up close and personal in their own environment. Family entertainment at its best.

Sunday December 13
THE AGE OF STUPID, 2009, UK (if we can get it) or 11th HOUR with Leonardo di Caprio
Right in the middle of the make-or-break United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, this most powerful film about the dangers of not doing enough.
Please keep in touch.