 Welcome to Abundant Planet, the weekly radio show on the cutting edge of creating a fair and sustainable world, a world that runs on the infinite and abundant power of the sun and respects the dignity, interconnectedness, and sovereignty of all life on earth. I’m your host, Lonnie Gamble. Abundant Planet is a collective, which currently includes Steve Boss, who hosts Great Taste, a food show, and Kelley Custer and Brian Robbins, who host the Pharam Show, a show that highlights urban permaculture design solutions. Lonnie Gamble, Abundant Planet Radio founder, hosts a show with news and interviews about imaging, creating and advocating for a beyond-sustainable world. In the fossil fuel era, man created an economy of scarcity. Fossil fuels are a one time gift from nature, ancient sunlight that was captured by plants millions of years ago and stored in their dead bodies and the bodies of the animals that ate them. We’ve been living off this gift, which is becoming increasing expensive and politically problematic. Fossil fuels pollute at every stage of extraction and use.  High frequency Sun energy travels easily through empty space and the earth’s atmosphere. Once it hits the dark surface of the earth and oceans, it is transferred into low frequency energy. Think of the gentle heat on your back as you lie on a sun warmed rock. Carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere reflects back this low frequency heat, acting as a blanket that warms the earth. Too much Carbon Dioxide is causing earth to overheat. The overwhelming majority of scientific evidence points to the burning of fossil fuels to power man’s economy as the major cause of a global warming that is unprecedented in human history. For this and many other reasons, we need to convert from an ancient sunlight economy to a contemporary sunlight economy. We get a new supply of sun energy democratically distributed and delivered free to every part of the planet each day. It’s been 100% reliable for billions of years, and will continue to be 100% reliable for billions of years into the future. This is the basis for the Abundant Planet economy, and this show will explore the frontiers of creating it. Fortunately, we have an example of an economy that runs on the free sunlight that hits the earth every day – the economy of nature. The economy of man is embedded as a small subpart of this economy – there is in reality no distinction between man and environment. The economy of nature includes the systems that clean and purify our air and water, that maintain a stable balance of gases in the earth's atmosphere, that move huge quantities of heat from the equator to the polar regions of the earth. The gulf stream moves 5 billion gallons of warm water per second from the equator to Europe,greatly moderating the continental climate. Natures economy also maintains the fertility of the earth. There are over 100,000 creatures that provide free pollination services, including pollination of almost everything that humans eat. Natures economy operates with energy and material flows that are thousands of time greater than those used in man’s economy, and on such a vast scale in both time and space that some of the water molecules in your body almost certainly once flowed in the Nile, the Ganges, and the Euphrates rivers. Some of the molecules of air that you breathe were once in the lungs of dinosaurs. The vast economy economy of nature operates on the renewable income of solar energy we get every day. It’s like the difference between using the interest from a sum of money and spending the money itself. One is infinitely renewable, the other will inevitably run out. Man’s economy is a small subset of the economy of nature. The sun unimaginably powerful – it delivers free to the earth 14,000 times more energy than is used in man’s economy every day, and the earth only intercepts about a billionth the energy that is radiated by the sun. Nature’s economy runs on sunlight, and man’s can too. It is time for a new design for Man’s economy, a solar powered one based on the design principles of the abundant economy of nature. The outline of a fossil fuel free economy for mankind, an economy that runs on contemporary rather than ancient sunlight, is beginning to emerge. It gets its inspiration from the billion year design experience of the economy of nature. It goes beyond globalism to re-localize and reinvigorate the places where people live. In this show we will be looking at the latest thinking and beyond in the design of a world that runs on solar energy – the Abundant Planet economy. As author William Gibson said, the future is here now, it’s just not evenly distributed. We’ll be searching out those who have developed positive solutions and visions for a solar economy – engineers, tinkerers, urban planners, chemists, farmers, writers, architects, builders, performers, educators, students, public policy makers, leaders, followers - everyone has a part to play. In this week’s abundant planet, we’ll travel to the Iowa Environmental council annual conference in Des Moines where we’ll hear from organic farmer and Secretary of Agriculture candidate Denise O'Brien, we’ll hear about David Osterbergs latest solar bike tour to raise awareness of renewables in the Midwest, David will tell us about a state in Germany where on one windy day last year they got 100% of the electrical energy for 2.9 million people (about the same population as Iowa) from wind power, the fastest growing and cheapest source of energy on the planet. |