ASHLAND — While many at a forum Thursday wrestled with local sustainability issues — recycling, getting smaller cars and homes, growing and eating food locally — one think-tank specialist warned that global warming "will overwhelm every problem we have and threaten the livability of the planet."

While it’s human nature to think environmental problems are happening elsewhere, global warming will arrive in this region with more and stronger Pacific storms, "lots more rain" and stronger coastal storm surges that will affect low-lying towns, said Angus Duncan, chief executive officer of the Bonneville Environmental Foundation and a member of the Governor’s Advisory Group on Global Warming.

"It’s not complicated," he said. "Storms and wind are how the planet redistributes heat. We’re going to see more precipitation falling as rain and less as snowpack. There will be less water for mid- to late-summer irrigation — and the fish will need the water at the same time irrigators do," said Duncan, a Medford native now working in Portland.

Duncan and others from local farms, orchards, government agencies and environmental and development interests traded ideas at the "Sustainability in Concept and Practice" forum sponsored by Southern Oregon University’s Institute for Environmental Studies. The forum attempted to define the concept of "sustainability" and plot some strategies to achieve it.

Most defined it as doing what it takes in research, policy and planning to consume fewer resources than can be replaced.

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America’s present lifestyle, said Headwaters conservation director Cindy Deacon Williams, is one of "eating, drinking, traveling and enjoying ourselves in ways that are not sustainable. If the rest of the world behaved as we do, it would take 4.5 earths to support us."

Williams called for a "change in ethics and philosophy" committed to shrinking America’s "ecological footprint" so residents live closer to where they work, use fuel- efficient vehicles, support local farmers (to reduce fuel use from transporting food), get energy-efficient appliances, buy smaller homes and collaborate in local groups and governments.

Jack Shipley of the Applegate Partnership showed how a group of residents operating in a large region with no incorporated towns modeled the ideal that "you have to do sustainability together," getting small dams removed, restoring streambanks, eliminating feedlot runoff into rivers, restoring hillsides, eliminating old logging roads and many other projects.

"Sustainability is forests, wetlands, natural resources, grasslands and habitat with social sustainability, cultural sustainability and civic sustainability," Shipley said. "It isn’t random development beyond what we can provide water for. It isn’t importing logs and turning our backs on our forests. It isn’t Measure 37. It’s not a boom-and-bust economy. It’s not Wal-Mart or buying cheap stuff from China to sell here."

Trey Senn, a member of the Klamath County Economic Development Association and the Oregon Sustainability Board (created by the 2001 Legislature), called sustainability a "controversial word" that reminds people of the state’s surly 1960s warning, "Come visit but don’t stay." But it is being increasingly accepted to mean renewability, energy efficiency and good, common sense that saves money, Senn said.

The Sustainability Board is combing through all state agencies, he said, trying to support sustainable thinking. One recent accomplishment was getting the Oregon Department of Transportation to provide batteries at truck stops for refrigerator trucks so they don’t have to idle all night as drivers sleep.

Sustainability is becoming a concept that is shaping research and guiding policy-making, noted SOU President Elisabeth Zinser.

The concept of sustainability, said Duncan, faces a huge problem with human nature, which regards it as "a list of dismal trends that competes with your task of living everyday life. It’s like a breakfast cereal that has lots of fiber but not lots of taste and you don’t buy a second box of it."

In the past half-century, Duncan said, Oregon has moved from a 90 percent renewable energy base with hydroelectric power to 50 percent. Forty percent of the state’s energy is now carbon- based and thus adding to global warming, he added.

"The Rogue Valley is under more and more development pressure and living off less sustainable resources. Pacific Power, used by Medford, burns 85 percent coal. It’s in Montana and out of sight, out of mind," he said.

Several in the audience of 40 people asked for answers about what energy will fill in for declining oil supplies.

"It will be a long slide (on oil use), but not on consumption," said Duncan. "There’s a lot of wishful thinking that we’ll be sustainable in our communities, but the reality is we have an awful lot of coal that can be gasified and liquefied. It will be at a higher cost than oil. Even with the long-term environmental costs of coal, we will probably do it."

John Darling is a freelance writer living in Ashland. E-mail him at jdarling@jeffnet.org.