Mission Statement:
Canyonlands Sustainable Solutions is an open forum, inspiring and empowering community participation in the creation of an ecologically sustainable and healthy society, cultivating local resources to meet local needs.
Organizational structure:
Canyonlands Sustainable Solutions is an open, community-wide study group in Moab, Utah meeting each first Wednesday of the month to coordinate activities aimed at making other arrangements to prepare our community for the coming oil-scarce future. Six working groups meet independently, between monthly coordinating meetings, to brainstorm ideas for, and to carry out, local projects. The six groups are divided between the following focus areas:
Food
Transportation
Building
Energy
Water
Community
All members of the community are welcome to attend the monthly coordinating meetings or those of any of the work groups.
Background and Rationale:
Human civilization is either at or past the “Hubbert Peak” of world oil production, the point when the less expensive and better-quality half of world petroleum supplies has already been consumed and total world oil production is in decline. Other research indicates that we are probably 22 years from reaching the same peak, in energy content terms, for world coal production. This means fossil fuels production will drop relative to current and projected demand. Fossil fuels will cost more to produce (no matter what the demand), making rises in cost inevitable and shortages probable. Even if we had limitless supplies of cheap-to-produce carbon-based fossil fuels available to us, we would not avoid run-away global climate change because that requires that we reduce global carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions to at least 80 percent below levels emitted in 2000. Greenhouse gas reduction can be achieved with currently available technology and energy-efficient consumption. If we substitute renewable energy production for fossil fuel-powered commercial, residential, and transportation systems, we can adapt these systems to the post-carbon technological world. Renewable energy technologies and efficiency measures easily scale to the local level. If we can produce and consume energy locally, we will not need massive capital-intensive power plants, refineries, coal mines, and the like to maintain the comfort and security of regional citizens.
As Fred Kirschenmann of the Leopold Center of Iowa State University points out, our current food supply and other economic systems are based on two premises:
1. there is unlimited, cheap energy available from petroleum and other fossil fuel sources, and
2. nature provides an infinite sink to absorb our wastes.
We now know neither premise is true. We need to build an economic system which recognizes and adapts to natural limits in non-renewable natural resources and natural waste recycling capacity. The components of such an alternative economic system have been developed and can be implemented by local communities.
Economic development institutions, such as the Sonoran Institute, the Rocky Mountain Institute, and the Urban Institute, have demonstrated that when a community pays out local money to buy imported goods and services, it impoverishes itself unless it can export more goods and services to other communities than it imports. However, if a community produces locally what it consumes locally, the money spent by local customers recycles through the community. A wealth effect is created each time the dollar that did not leave the community changes hands within it. Studies vary in their estimates of the “multiplier effect” of a dollar spent for a locally-produced good versus an imported good, but even the lowest calculations predict that a dollar spent for a locally-produced good generates seven times the local prosperity that a dollar spent on an imported good does.
The mission of Canyonlands Sustainable Solutions emphasizes community benefit. CSS is pursuing the course that best serves stable "economic development" that is least subject to macroeconomic changes in the national economy. We can do this by developing local production to replace imported goods, such as food and energy, and by reducing demand through adoption of efficiency measures. As local production is developed, it serves to protect community security because it insulates the community’s members from price shocks and supply disruptions in the imported goods supply chain. Finally, and not least, working together builds positive relationships between members of the community, potentially improving the quality of life and sense of security of all our citizens.