posted April 22, 2008
A new series of Discussions in Democracy will begin May 5. In May Dr. Olin Ivey, Ph.D. and David White, founding President of the Urban Century Institute, discuss the problems, causes, and solutions for water and oil conditions locally and in the world.
May 5 and 12, 6-8 p.m.
Beyond Water Wars: Assault on the Structure and Operation of Nature
Presented by Dr. Olin Ivey, Ph.D.
HCDP Headquarters
Description of discussion: The current battle over water rights between Georgia and Tennessee is rooted in bad decisions going back more than a decade. Poor planning and development in urban centers like Atlanta, increased residential and commercial use of natural resources in the Southeast, the growing culture of consumerism, and state's rights issues have all contributed to impending war between Southern states over an increasing water shortage. The current battle over water rights between Georgia and Tennessee is rooted in unsustainable decisions and practices: (1) Poor planning and uncontrolled development beyond urban centers like Atlanta, (2) increased residential and commercial use of natural resources far beyond the "carrying capacity" of these resources, and (3) the refusal to respect the integrity of natural structures such as watersheds. Discussions will focus on the structures of sustainability, both personal and societal, that enable us to move into a livable and viable future, with special emphasis on Tennessee's steps toward being sustainable with a systematic management process.
As Executive Director of the Georgia Environmental Organization, Dr. Ivey initiated the discussion of sustainability in Georgia in 1993 and held a series of conferences and consultations on sustainability throughout the remainder of the decade of the 90s. He served on task forces and working groups of the President's Council on Sustainable Development, was on the executive committee of two other national sustainability groups, and edited Georgians on Sustainability that included reflections of sustainability by a number of leaders throughout Georgia. Dr. Olin has lived and worked in Tennessee since 1999. He presently serves as the Associate for Stewardship and Outreach at Pilgrim Congregational Church in Chattanooga. In 2004 he developed and coordinated two conferences, the statewide Threshold: Sustaining a Land Called Tennessee and JustWater, an environmental justice conference for the Alabama-Tennessee Association of the United Church of Christ.
His undergraduate degree was received from East Tennessee State University. He holds two Master's degrees from Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. His M.A. and Ph.D. are from Claremont Graduate University California.
May 19 and 26, 6-8 p.m.
Peak Oil. Peak Credit. Peak America.
President by David White, Founding President of Urban Century Institute
HCDP Headquarters
Description of discussion: Oil has been known since antiquity, but the first wells were drilled for it in the mid-19th Century in Pennsylvania and the on the shores of the Caspian. The Industrial Revolution was already in progress, being driven by the steam engine, fueled by coal. But then in the 1860s, a German engineer found a way to insert the fuel directly into the cylinder inventing the Internal Combustion Engine, which was much more efficient. At first, it used benzene distilled from coal, before turning to petroleum refined from crude oil, for which it developed an unquenchable thirst. The first automobile took to the road in 1882 and the first tractor plowed its furrow in 1907. This cheap and abundant supply of energy changed the world in then unimaginable ways, leading to the rapid expansion of industry, transport, trade and agriculture, which has allowed the population to expand six-fold in parallel. These remarkable changes were in turn accompanied by the rapid growth of financial capital, as banks lent more than they had on deposit, confident that Tomorrow's Economic Expansion was collateral for Today's Debt, without necessarily recognizing that the expansion was driven by an abundant supply of cheap, largely oil-based energy. Simply put, with cheap credit and cheap oil now coming to an end, the prospects for a debt-ridden, oil-addicted U.S. are increasingly bleak, leaving us with two questions: (1) How did this happen? and (2) what can we do about it?
Mr. White is a graduate of the University of Virginia and began his professional career in the hospitality industry, where he held sales, marketing, and management positions at some of America's premier conference resorts, including Kingsmill in Williamsburg, Va., and the world-famous Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, W.V.
Combining his expertise in resort living with several years' experience in home-building and a growing interest in industrial ecology, Mr. White formulated a prototype for sustainable development called the Global Village Concept, an innovative plan for merging town and country, job and family, within the context of a self-contained but globally integrated community environment. Along the way, he attended the United Nations Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, was a delegate to Global Forum '94 in Manchester, England, and in 1996 served as on-site coordinator for the Second World Congress on Zero Emissions, held here in Chattanooga. In keeping with sustainable development's need for the commercialization of new technologies, Mr. White subsequently founded a small startup to commercialize a revolutionary green building technology called RamRock Compression-Formed Masonry, so named because it uses intense hydraulic pressure to "ram" a wide variety materials that would otherwise be buried in landfills into rock-hard masonry units. Mr. White is also founding president of the Urban Century Institute, a Chattanooga-based nonprofit dedicated to developing integrated solutions to the challenges associated with declining urban-industrialism at home and rampant urban-industrialism abroad.
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