The Office of Environment recently had the pleasure of hosting Vik Maraj, of Unstoppable Conversations, as part of the ongoing The Way We Green Speakers Series. Vik’s talk, entitled ‘The Green Transformation: Are You Ready?’ focused on building a new paradigm to view and talk about the future while dealing with our current ecological issues.
“It’s not about change,” Vik said, “It’s about transformation.” He opened by sharing a Sufi parable of a man crouched on the street under a streetlight searching for a set of keys he lost. Another man comes to help him and after a while of unsuccessful searching asks if the first man if he was sure he lost his keys here. The man points to his dark house and says “No, I lost the keys in my house, but the light is out here, so this is where I’m looking.”
Vik likened our society’s view of change this way. He pointed out that when we develop new strategies and tools we tend to take what we had yesterday and make it a little bit better. He says we look for solutions in places that are familiar to us, when we actually need to discover a new vision for tomorrow—one that we haven’t seen yet. The ecological problems we face today are too big to be using yesterday’s solutions. Vik shared the following image from www.theoildrum.com.
The image shows that for one cubic mile of oil we would need the equivalent of an unbelievably large number of alternative energies running for 50 years to produce enough electricity to satiate our fossil fuel addiction of a single year. What makes this even more daunting was his message that the current global demand for energy is reaching the equivalent of 3 cubic miles of oil every year.
“Technology will not save us,” Vik says, instead we need to be “fundamentally shifting the conversation of thinking.” We cannot be tied to old ways of thinking;we need to transform through new ideas that create a new tomorrow, not a slightly different yesterday. Just like a baby taking its first steps, the motivation needs to be walking rather than not falling down. If we keep our mental energy on not falling down, then at best we will learn to stand still; but by stepping out of the paradigm we are used to, we can focus on walking and actually moving toward the new tomorrow. Ideas like this, Vik says, are game changers.
Luckily, with the bright minds all around the world, and local work on The Way We Green, this transformational future is possible. But first, the idea that “they” need to fix “it” is an outdated model that we need to cast aside. We are all in this together. So it is time to start having brand new conversations that are focused on transformation, not change; then we will come up with the game changing ideas that will reshape the vision of our city and our planet.
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{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
If I calculate 32,850 * 3 because we use almost 3 cubic miles of oil every year and multiply that by 50 (for the 50 years running time) I get approximately 5 million wind turbines.
Is it me or is that not that many?
Ohhhhh, I am so sorry I missed this discussion, it sounds amazing and I am so glad you have summarized it for us here. What an interesting graphic, mind blowing really. We do need to take a look at how we live, not just the new technology to supply us with green energy. It starts with us. We all need to change, and live smarter and cleaner and with less stuff. In fact, the scope of the change we need to put into our lives, our society, our very culture, is probably just as overwhelming as that graphic (when you get right down to it…).
But I kinda agree with the commenter above – 5 million wind turbines to supply the world’s energy? Not too bad actually. That is a turbine for every 1,800 people in the world, so Canada would need 16,700, Edmonton 550. We could do that couldn’t we? I guess it doesn’t take into account the relative use of energy by country, and as we know, Canada is among the highest in all the world…
Your arithmetic is quite correct, and 5 million wind mills is not such a large number. The world has a lot of manufacturing capacity. The challenge is one of finding places to put them down. The total area is not trivial. Questions like what was the land being used for, and who owns it, and how does installation of wind power affect the owner will need to be addressed as well as other environmental impacts from the land-use change, including emissions resulting from any deforestation. People are also concerned about the impact they might have on migrating birds. Provisions made putting the requisite storage system and transmission lines. They just add to the cost. Given the opposition we have witnessed in even much smaller installations, getting public acceptance will be the big hurdle. I refer you to the book, A Cubic Mile of Oil.