Photo credit: Therese Brummel.
 
When I turned 60 my son gave me a T-shirt as a birthday gift. It is bright green with a squiggly sketch of trees and, written in cursive, is the word "trees". He said, "Mom, it’s your color...and your name!"
 
My love of trees runs deep. I taught my young kids: “If you are lost, hug a tree”. It’s more than a directive for a lost child to stay put. A tree is a comfort, protection, cover, shade from the heat, retreat from danger, and home to birds, bugs and bees.
 
Once again, I am considering the value of our urban trees. Two 100-year-old oak trees near my house died this month and were ground to mulch. I think about the loss of not only their beauty and comfort and shade and habitat, but the loss of the carbon sequestration such huge trees provided. A newly planted tree will need decades to become an equal workhorse.
 
City pruning around power lines has begun in my area. Is there an arborist approving these workers’ choices? A small group of neighbors is asking this question.
 
Pasadena has been known as a city of trees - 60,000 it claims - but our Climate Action Plan calls for planting only 500 trees this year.
 
If our city followed the City of Los Angeles’ aspirational goal to plant 90,000 trees by 2021, quadrupling their usual 23,000 annual tree plantings, scaled for the size of our city, our goal could be to plant 3,000-4,000 trees by 2021.
 
https://laist.com/2019/08/05/la_hires_its_own_lorax_to_manage_and_care_for_our_trees.php
 
The City of LA hired an arborist, Rachel Malorich and obtained a grant specifically to achieve this goal. What a great investment, as Ms. Malorich said to ”reduce urban heat island effect, and... obviously reduced rates of asthma. And then (there's) that feeling of positive social well-being."
 
This fall, the Pasadena Audubon Society and the Arroyo and Foothills Conservancy will host a public discussion and film on trees as habitat and the state of our urban forest. Watch this space for details.
 
-----Therese Brummel.

Imagine a campfire with people sitting in a circle around it. The fire makes a center to focus your attention on while one person speaks. With your eyes focused on the fire your ears take in sound and your mind is free to focus on the sound of the speaker's voice. You listen deeply.
 
This is Council. It's an indigenous practice that people have been doing for millennia. It's very old. There is a center inside a circle of people. The speaker holds a talking piece that focuses our attention. Like an invisible rubber band, the talking piece attaches to the center and to each person's heart. Council is the practice of listening and speaking from the heart so as to awaken connection with self, others and the natural world.
 
When I first started participating in Council circles, I was struck by how close I felt to the people sharing the circle even though those people had been complete strangers an hour ago. There is something magical about this process that transforms people and creates community.

Council is a Transition Pasadena project and one of our offerings in the realm of Inner Transition. I facilitate this Council circle on the 1st Tuesday of every month from 7pm to 8:30pm. We'll have a center but, instead of a roaring fire, there will be a candle and a variety of interesting objects to focus on.
 
I want to explore the inner dimensions of living on Earth today. How it is for us members of industrial society as we cope with current events and the background of environmental degradation? What does it all mean? I envision this monthly Council as a safe space for people to come together and express how life is for them. Primarily, I was thinking about the crises facing our world but it's open to whatever subject participants bring.
 
I do create a plan each month but I am ready and looking to follow what participants have spoken about and move in directions spontaneously. Often, poetry is a good route to introspection. Wendell Berry, Rumi and Rilke have served me well.
 
I invite you to come to a Council circle. Hear other people's stories and share your own. You will experience connection and community. I know it's not easy, in our busy lives, to create a space for Council. There are many benefits once you have sat in the circle. Like meditation, the benefits are not obvious until you have finished and are sitting at the end of the meditation. Sometimes it is indescribable, but beneficial nonetheless.

-----David Cutter
 

Photo credit: Sylvia Holmes.

This past August the California Energy Commission approved Pasadena's latest 20-year plan for procuring electricity. This brings us two pieces of good news:  
 
1)  No more long-term contracts for fossil fuels. 
 
2)  Pasadena Water and Power managers tell us Pasadena was the first utility in the state to include the social cost of carbon in such a plan, and they hope they have encouraged others to follow suit.  
 
What does this have to do with Transition Pasadena?
 
The backstory:
 
In 2017 and 2018, "Pasadena 100" (a project of Transition Pasadena) worked to persuade the City to move more quickly to ween its electric utility away from fossil fuels. The City had an existing commitment to coal usage, extending through 2027, and had opted into a scheme to replace the coal-fired Utah plant with a gas-fired plant. This would have emitted even more carbon pollution and possibly even extended the City's commitment until 2077!  
 
Pasadena 100 used a classic inside-outside strategy to encourage change.  First, members met with the Mayor, City Council members, and Water and Power executives to learn their views and build our case. During 2018 the City was required to revise its 20 year Integrated Resources Plan and, as part of that process, the City Manager appointed a Stakeholder Technical Advisory Group of residents to meet with Water and Power managers. Our members, John Odell and Cary Belling, were appointed to this Technical Group.  
 
Meanwhile, on the outside, Pasadena 100 connected with other environmental organizations to stimulate more citizens to speak up in support, making clear our Technical Reps were speaking for more than just themselves. Many groups lent their logos to two beautiful cards that explained what was needed (see photo). We also received a gift of public relations expertise.
 
Pasadena 100 advocated that the City commit to signing no new long-term fossil fuel contracts extending beyond 2035 and that they get as close as possible to 100% clean energy by then. Pasadena 100 also argued that, if the City is going to choose among alternative energy portfolios based on cost, they should account for the indirect costs that society pays by burning carbon fuels. These indirect costs? Worsening climate change. Caltech had already started counting this social cost of carbon in major investment decisions but the City had never done so! 
 
In addition to advocating at the governmental level, collaborating with allied environmental organizations also paid off. When Water and Power held public hearings, citizen turnout was impressive, in particular at the Hastings Ranch Library, where some 100 people packed the meeting room and no fewer than 50 lined up to speak. All but one of those speakers hammered the same point:  we must get off fossil-based energy faster in the face of climate change. Present was Margaret McAustin, elected City Council Member and chair of the Council committee that oversees Water and Power. She later remarked that, while participating in such reviews for over a decade, she had never seen such forceful public participation!  
 
Our patient, coordinated campaign demonstrated the effectiveness of collaboration and citizen lobbying. Most importantly, Pasadena decided to opt-out of a 50-year commitment to natural gas. Their new plan concluded that no other long-term commitments to fossil energy would be cost effective.  (Bad news:  LA is still going ahead with that gas plant even though other cities opted out. What’s up with that, Garcetti?)
 
Over the two decades of this new plan, Pasadena is also likely to import electricity on short-term contracts from elsewhere in California, some of which will be generated by gas. But the 2018 state law known as SB-100 requires the entire state to phase down gas combustion during this time.   
 
Pasadena Water and Power also agreed for the first time to add indicators for the social costs of carbon to some computer models they used to estimate the lowest cost portfolios. There was no evidence they would have taken this step if not for the persistent work of Pasadena 100. They warmly thanked our reps for helping make the plan better.
 
In 2018, the share of renewables in Pasadena's electricity portfolio was 38%, which was above the state minimum but not high enough. The coal plant will continue to be responsible for the bulk of our electric carbon emissions until 2027, when those emissions will fall sharply.
 
The moral of the story:  persistent advocacy and allied collaboration works.

----John Odell