Sustainable Tucson will show 5 top-rated sustainability films
covering critical sustainability topics:

* The U.S. financial crisis erupted in 2008 and still looms on the horizon.
* Resource depletion including non-renewable fossil fuels and clean water threatens further economic growth.
* Global warming and climate change threaten most life-forms including people and future food.
* Social disruption following economic dislocation and government contraction can threaten our capacity to solve-problems and build a more sustainable culture.
* Many solutions are being identified but most require abandoning “business as usual.”

Sunday, August 12th.

1) 11th Hour    1:00 – 2:30pm, is a comprehensive presentation of the sustainability crisis and a pathway out of our predicament. Many sustainability leaders are interviewed including  Wes Jackson, Paul Hawken, David Suzuki, Kenny Ausubel, David Orr, Janine Benyus,, Stuart Pimm, Richard Heinberg, Paolo Soleri, Thom Hartmann, Lester Brown, James Hillman, Joseph Tainter, James Woolsey, Stephen Schneider, Stephen Hawking, Sandra Postel,  Bill McKibbon, James Hansen, Dr. Andy Weil, Ray Anderson, Andy Lipkis, Tom Linzey, Herman Daly, Peter Warshall, Jerry Mander, Mikhail Gorbachev, Bruce Mau, William McDonough, John Todd, and Gloria Flora among others.

2) Inside Job     2:30 – 4:15pm, is an award-winning documentary describing the financial crisis which erupted in 2008 and continues to play out today as the global economy is beginning to contract. Financial experts help tell the story of how the largest financial bubble in history grew and finally burst. These include Simon Johnson, George Soros, Satyajit Das, Paul Volker, Nouriel Roubini, U. S. Rep. Barney Frank, Kenneth Rogoff, Raghuram Rajan, Martin Wolf, Christine Lagarde, and among others.

3) Power of Community    4:15 – 5:00pm, is a special film describing how the island nation of Cuba became more self- sufficient and resilient after the food and energy subsidies ended from the Soviet Union which collapsed in 1991.

Monday, August 13th,

1)  Taken For A Ride 5:00 – 6:00pm, is a documentary about how the many electric street car systems in U.S towns and cities were intentionally scrapped by a group of automobile-related corporations. The result is that the U.S. is the only industrial country in the world without electric rail systems within and between most cities.

2) Blind Spot   6:15 – 7:45pm, is a comprehensive presentation of the sustainability crisis and the need to find a pathway out of our predicament. Many sustainability leaders are interviewed including Richard Heinberg, Lester Brown, U. S. Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, Albert Bartlett, Joseph Tainter, David Pimental, Terry Tamminen, Bill McKibben, James Hansen, David Korten, Derrick Jensen, and William R. Catton, Jr. among others.

Sustainable Tucson August Film Festival  – August 12th and 13th

Joel D. Valdez Main Downtown Library, Large Lower Level Meeting Room,
101 N. Stone, Tucson, AZ

Free lower level parking off Alameda St.

Doors open at 1:00 pm on Sunday, August 12th.
Doors open at 4:45 pm on Monday, August 13th.

From Sustainable Tucson:

In March Sustainable Tucson hosted our first “Conversation with our Elected Officials.” One hundred Tucson community members met with Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothschild, Council Member Regina Romero, and Council Member Steve Kozachik to discuss a wide range of sustainability issues such as water policy, urban form, food security and transportation.

On June 11, from 6 – 8pm, Council Member Karin Uhlich and Leslie Ethan, Director of the City of Tucson Office of Conservation and Sustainable Development, will join us for our second “Conversation.” A networking session will precede the meeting from 5:30 to 6:00.

We believe that building a sustainable future will take the cooperation and partnering of residents, government, institutions and organizations. It is in this spirit that we are reaching out to our public officials and bringing them together with Sustainable Tucson and the wider public in this discussion and process. Our ultimate intent is to build partnerships and work together toward our common goals.

We invite you to join us in our second conversation with local public officials.

June Sustainable Tucson General Meeting
Monday, June 11th
6:00 – 8:00 pm

Joel D. Valdez Main Library
101 N. Stone, Downtown (free lower level parking off Alameda St)

Doors open at 5:30 pm.
The meeting will begin promptly at 6:00 pm.

May Sustainable Tucson General Meeting
Monday, May 14th
6:00 pm
Joel D. Valdez Main Library
101 N. Stone, Downtown (free lower level parking off Alameda St)

From the Sustainable Tucson website:
Prosperity Without Growth – What does it look like?

Please join us at Sustainable Tucson’s May meeting to hear local experts talk about Sustainable Economics, and share your thoughts about what this looks like and what it entails. Help us engage the planners with solutions appropriate to our time.

Planning efforts in Tucson (including Imagine Greater Tucson) assume growth to be inevitable and good.

Until recently, there was no reason to question that belief. With a seemingly endless supply of resources and space to dump waste products, there was no feedback raising our awareness, nor reason to ask questions.

Now, however, the pinch has begun. The high carbon energy fuels upon which we have built our modern civilization are not only becoming more problematic to supply, but the effects of their combustion are destabilizing the climate, decimating biodiversity, disrupting food security and beginning to affect social cohesion. The problem is the result of the collective impact of our human species. Our numbers have increased to the point where our resource consumption and related waste is beyond the planetary ecosystem’s ability to continue to supply and absorb them.

If the planet were our house, the debt we have accumulated is coming due, foreclosure is on the horizon, and we may soon lose our home.

Ecological economist Herman Daly notes that growth can become “uneconomic” when the “bads” accumulate faster than the “goods”, the “illth” faster than the wealth.

What are the alternatives to Growth?
What positive vision can lead us away from the “inevitable”?

Doors open at 5:30 pm.
The meeting will begin promptly at 6:00 pm.

Saguaro conducted a thorough analysis of the potential impacts of eliminating the sale of disposable bottled water and soda, and determined that the more sustainable solution is to provide new water bottle filling stations for visitors to refill their own reusable containers.

There are new water bottle filling stations located at each visitor center as well as the Rincon Mountain District bike ramada. BPA free, reusable water bottles are available for purchase in either visitor center for as little as $1.99.

The EPA estimates that less than 15% of plastic water bottles are recycled, which means the rest are thrown away and go into landfills.

Click here for the Saguaro National Park announcement.

Photo by Kate Kaemerle

Creating a sustainable Tucson is going to take the cooperation of residents, government and organizations. Tonight’s meeting features a conversation with Tucson Mayor Jonathan Rothchild and Council Members Regina Romero and Karin Uhlich about building a sustainable future.

The meeting is tonight at 5:30 PM at the Joel D. Valdez Main Library.

From the Sustainable Tucson website:

The Sustainable City Project will address many areas, including renewable energy, climate change, economic development, affordable housing, transportation, water management, public health and ecosystem conservation.

From the UA News:

Through the UA partnership, the project is designed to build and support teams composed of University faculty members and students representing a diverse array of academic disciplines – architecture, landscape architecture, city and regional planning, environmental science, geography and development and public administration – and representatives from local and state agencies, community groups, developers, business and industry.

“This initiative is a great opportunity to make UA research on sustainability – especially in climate, solar energy, water and ecology – more relevant and accessible to our local community and for the University to better understand the needs and future of our city,” said Diana Liverman, co-director of the Institute of the Environment.

The Sustainable City Project is based at UA Downtown in the historic Roy Place Building at Stone Avenue and Pennington Street in Tucson. There, UA faculty members and students can connect with city officials and staff, community leaders and project developers for dialogue, vision, analysis and development of sustainable scenarios for the future.

UA Downtown also serves as a forum where academic, civic, cultural and business leaders can meet to discuss sustainability scenarios for the future of Tucson and Southern Arizona.

For the rest of the article, click here.

UA earned gold for their campus-wide sustainability efforts in three areas: education and research, operations and administration.

From UA News:

The University of Arizona has earned a STARS Gold Rating in recognition of its campus-wide sustainability efforts from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education, a group that measures and encourages sustainability in all aspects of higher education.

The UA is one of only 30 institutions in the U.S. and Canada to receive the association’s gold rating.

The Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System, known as STARS, counts 173 institutions as members. Institutions do not have to be members to receive ratings.

AASHE’s STARS program is the only one of its kind that involves publicly reporting comprehensive information related to a college or university’s sustainability performance. Participants report achievements in three overall areas: education and research; operations; and planning, administration and engagement.

Read the entire UA News article here.

If you’ve got the mesquite, Desert Harvesters have the mill. And I’m talking a big, industrial-sized hammermill for making flour. It easily breaks up the tough mesquite pods to produce quality flour while saving a lot of time compared to hand grinding or blender methods.

You can bring your harvested mesquite pods and get them ground into flour for a small donation at the Ninth Annual Mesquite Milling and Fiesta at the Dunbar-Spring Community Garden on Sunday, November 20th. This fundraising event also features a mesquite bake sale with an array of baked goods.

From the Desert Harvesters website:

You can bring your harvested pods (up to 15 gallons) and get them ground them into flour for an additional donation. Again this year we will have three hammermills in operation to speed up the milling. The minimum milling fee is $5 for any amount under 3 gallons of whole pods (broken pods may be weighed instead). If you have 3+ gallons of whole pods to grind, you pay $2 per gallon. We want to encourage folks to bring at least 3 to 5 gallons of whole pods (5 gallons of whole pods will provide you with about 1 gallon of fine, edible flour in about 5 minutes of milling).

Desert Harvesters is a Tucson non-profit organization that promotes local food security and production by encouraging the planting of indigenous food-bearing shade trees, such as the Velvet mesquite, and educating the public on how to collect and process the harvest.

Event: Desert Harvesters Mesquite Milling and Bake Sale

Date: Sunday, November 20, 2011

Bake sale times: 9 am – noon
Milling times: 8 am – 2 pm
Where: Dunbar/Spring Organic Community Garden, Tucson, AZ

For more information contact hammermill@desertharvesters.org

Directions to Dunbar-Spring Community Garden:
The garden is located at the corner of 11th Avenue and University Blvd. The nearest major intersection is Speedway & Stone. From Speedway & Stone: Go south on Speedway 3 blocks, and turn right on University Blvd. Go 3 more blocks to 11th Ave. The garden is at the northwest corner of University and 11th.

Local organizers have put together a Tucson-centric conference, designed to share ideas about community resilience, collaboration and inspire ways to create positive change. The evening is centered around two themes, Mysteries of Desert Dwelling and Creating Radical Collaboration Culture.

Connect with other forward-thinking Tucsonians working to change things for the better at TEDxTucson on Thursday November 10, 6 to 11 PM at the Fox Theatre.

*TED – Technology, Entertainment and Design

From http://www.solardecathlon.gov/:

This is the fifth Solar Decathlon, a ten day event featuring 20 teams of college students who have designed and built solar-powered homes. It’s an educational and promotional endeavor, designed both to stoke public interest in solar technology (which, despite recent growth, still accounts for less than 1 percent of U.S electricity production) and prepare American kids for their future jobs laboring in the great clean-energy factories. Previous decathlons were held on the National Mall, where crowds could marvel at the “solar village” of gee-whiz houses temporarily installed in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol.

The U.S. Department of Energy sponsors the event and has photos and video on their website here.

More photos from National Geographic here.