PlacerSustain: Voices of Placer County's Sustainability Community

This is a copy of any article sent by Bioneers via email about their upcoming conference in Marin, October 14-16, Marin Center, San Rafael, California.  The article is about a "National Security Sustainability Network:"

Breakdown To Breakthrough at the Bioneers Conference: 

The Radical Center By Kenny Ausubel

At the climax of the debt ceiling game of chicken, I landed in D.C. for the founding meeting of the nascent National Security Sustainability Network. We gathered there to address the ecological debt ceiling.

Co-founded by David Orr, Bioneers board member, ecoliteracy leader and political enzyme, and Colonel Mark "Puck" Mykleby, who just resigned his post as Special Strategic Assistant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Network is a resilience strategy to build a decentralized web of place-based restoration initiatives in every Congressional district within seven years, with participation by the military.

The Department of Defense is necessarily a reality-based outfit. With the onset of climate change, what do you do with hundreds of coastal military bases facing rising sea levels and ever-fiercer storms? How do you prepare to move 150 million citizens away from the coasts in the next 75 years?

Homeland security begins with environmental security, and the country is essentially indefensible against the coming shocks in its current form and infrastructure.

Quite apart from an extensive push to green its own operations for functional reasons

-- supply lines for gas and oil in Iraq and Afghanistan are big fat targets, and hugely expensive -- the military is seeing "defense" and "security" as a very different proposition from World War II or the Cold War. David and Puck have written deeply thoughtful and strategic papers on this new perspective. (PDF Downloads: A National Strategic Narrative and David Orr's National Security and Sustainability)

Housed at the D.C.-based New America Foundation (co-founded and chaired by Google chairman Eric Schmidt), the Network is an initiative to build resilience by linking and spawning localized place-based restoration initiatives, initially with an emphasis on decentralized energy and food systems and large-scale education.

If you've been tracking Bioneers over the years, this will all sound familiar to you -- except that now it seems ready to go mainstream.

I'm excited that this critically important conversation will take place publicly at the Bioneers conference this year with David, Puck and Amory Lovins, who has been working with the DoD for many years now, and it seems to be paying off. Top journalist Mark Hertsgaard will moderate -- and provoke with tough questions.

As a friend once said, "It's great to be ahead of your time. Like -- two weeks ahead of your time." All the work the Bioneers community of leadership has been advancing over the past two decades becomes more acutely important every day. What has been on the margins is moving toward the emerging radical center.

The inevitable collision course between human civilization and natural systems is compelling the rapid adoption of the pantheon of breakthrough solutions Bioneers has been highlighting and incubating for over 20 years. And it'll all be on radiant display at the conference this year.

It's time to move these solutions into mobilization and toward scale. See you there!