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How to flight climate change? Let's try honesty.
This is blog action day, and we're all supposed to be blogging about climate change. Which, one way or another, is what I generally blog about.
My suspicion, though, is that the blogosphere is going to give us, today, a great deal of just what - in my view, at least - we don't need. Which is terror, gloom and doom.
Granted, it's hard to avoid. The situation is grim, and the prospects for the kind of dramatic global action that will address the issue look pretty flimsy. But I think one reason they do look flimsy is that we have spent so much time and energy on the grim prospects. If, in fact, there is little hope that we can avert the worst effects of climate change, why bother? And especially why bother when averting those effects would involve economic peril and enormous (and unwelcome) changes in our lifestyle?
It's not that the press, as well as organizations fighting global warming haven't noticed this. And they are making furious efforts to convince the world's citizens that they really can do something to combat global warming. The problem is that the changes we really need to make sound so terrifying that they're scared to be honest about them.
So instead we are encouraged to believe, by well-meaning folk - including the UN itself, with its glitzy, ad-agency designed, Facebook-oriented Hopenhagen website - that washing your clothes in cold water and installing fluorescent lightbulbs will make a significant contribution to the problem. It won't. As Bill McKibben said last spring at a showing of a film about the (small-scale) efforts religious groups were making to address global warming: those are all good things, but it's too late for them. (One indication of the essential frivolity of the project: one of its partners is Coca-Cola. Another: so far, the petition's garnered less than 80,000 signatures. Stop Animal Cruelty has 4.5 million.)
Meanwhile, stunts (or, as Elizabeth Kolbert calls them in a wonderful New Yorker critique, eco-stunts) proliferate. My current favorite is Dirty for Swain. That's Christopher Swain, who, backed by Timberland, is swimming from Massachusetts to DC to publicize ocean pollution and encouraging his followers to support him with their own get-dirty stunts and then publicize the stunts on Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
We don't need this kind of nonsense. We need truth. We need a global discussion about the real costs and consequences of addressing climate change. How can we, as a society, figure out what changes we are willing to make if we don't talk honestly about our options?
Because guess what? Once we get past the scare tactics of politicisnas and corporations who insist the steps we need to take will destroy a) their business, b) their consituents and c) the global economy (conveniently not mentioning that they've said exactly the same thing about every new environmental regulation passed in the last 30 years), we may discover that the changes we need to make will actually lead us not to the cold, dark, uncomfortable future we all, on some level, dread, but to a way of life that is more resilient, more sustaining, and just plain more fun.
Labels: Bill McKibben, Christopher Swain, climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert, Hopenhagen
But I want to take the train!
I'm heading off to Madison, Wisconsin tomorrow, which may be one reason that a couple of items about high-speed rail travel caught my eye this morning. Not that I'm going to be taking high-speed trains. I only wish....
I did think about taking a train. When I first came to New York, I used to take the train home to Chicago for Christmas; in fact, it was in the dining car on my first trip home that I first ate plum pudding, now a Christmas-dinner staple in our household. But apart from the cost (which unless you want to spend the night sitting upright, is prohibitive), you can't get there from here. At least not the day I needed to travel.
Actually, make that days. The Lake Shore Limited - which, at 19 hours, is the quick train - only runs three days a week; if you happen to want to arrive in Chicago on one of the other four days, you take the Cardinal, which leaves New York at 6:55 AM and spends 28 leisurely hours wandering down to Washington and as far south as White Sulphur Springs, Virginia, before turning north again towards Cincinnati and (ultimately) Chicago. In Chicago, you hang around for six hours before getting a bus to Madison, finally arriving - after 38 hours of travel - at 8:30 pm.
Given the pathetic state into which we've allowed our once-proud passenger rail system to fall, the best use of it I've ever come across was that of a friend who had a major exam in front of her. She shut herself, and her books, up in a train bedroom, and studied her way from New York to San Francisco and back again. Lots of time, lots of solitude...and lots of scenery.
Of course, the reason we only have three direct trains a week between New York and Chicago is that for years, rail travel in this country has struggled under the myth that it has to be self-supporting. We'll build highways, we'll build airports, but trains? They were a marvel of the 19th-century free enterprise system, and if they can't make it on their own now, well, the world has just passed them by. Tough luck.
In a review in today's Financial Times of Christian Wolmar's Blood, Iron & Gold (which sounds like a book every rail nut should rush out and buy), UK Transport Secretary Andrew Adonis demolishes that fairy tale. From the very beginning, he says, railways benefited from the efforts of enthusiastic supporters like Abraham Lincoln ("a pro-railway lawyer before becoming US president"), who pushed the Pacific Railroad Act through Congress and then gave it "tens of millions of taxpayer dollars in loans, grants and land." Nor was Lincoln unique. Railways around the world benefited from government support, with Tsar Nicholas II, Bismarck, Cecil Rhodes, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, Mao and the Emperor of Japan all playing major roles in Wolmar's book.
It's the same today: the high-speed rail revolution that's swept Japan, Europe and China (if there were a bullet train from New York to Chicago, the trip would take about 3 hours) depends heavily on government support. That's why Britain, which under Thatcher bought into the myth of a self-supporting rail system, is lagging so badly. The Channel Tunnel is all very well, but when you get to Paris, you can keep traveling at high speed. Once you get to Euston Station, though, you're back to dawdling.
But if Britain is dawdling, we in the US are crawling. The train from London to Totnes, in Devon, takes about three hours. The train from Burlington, Vermont to New York City (yes, there is one) , covers roughly the same distance in nine hours. And that's when it's on time.
So what of the high-speed rail funds that the Obama administration squeezed into the stimulus bill? Max Ajl, who looks at that issue today on SolveClimate, says the stimulus bill's $8 billion barely enough for a good start, and the $4 billion the transportation department might get in its 2010 budget doesn't help matters much. Spain, which wants to put 90% of its population within 30 miles of a high-speed rail system, expects to spend more than $200 billion to do it. A decent system in the US could cost $500 billion - or even more.
Why don't we think it's worth that kind of money? I think one of the reasons is that we have fallen captive to the notion that the aim of business is to give people what they want - and of course, since hardly any of us take trains (because they're not there to take), we don't even think about them, let alone ask for them.
That's foolish even from a free-enterprise perspective. Haven't the greatest fortunes been made by people who created not what consumers already knew they wanted, but products or services they had never thought of wanting because they had never existed?
And where the climate is concerned, as Eric Wilmot points out on GreenerDesign, it's also a recipe for disaster. (He's talking about design, not transportation, but the argument holds good.)
So, since I really do have to get ready for my trip, I'll leave you with his wise words:
The current interpretation of human-centered has expanded to indulge human desires at the expense of other equally critical considerations. This is a dangerous interpretation that has become default for many leading academic and professional creative practices. Don Norman explains the main concern of such unquestioning adoption of human centered approaches: "The focus upon individual people (or groups) might improve things for them at the cost of making it worse for others."
In reality, our human-centeredness has driven us to the brink of unsustainable lifestyle through the strain our over-consumption is putting on our natural resources, and may represent the largest self-inflicted problem a species has ever created for itself short of Easter Island.
Ironically, and perhaps controversially, our current overload of media is in many ways widening the gap between our habits, actions, and understanding of the consequences of our lifestyle choices. A recent study showed that children could identify on average, over a 1000 brand logos, but could identify less than 12 native plants and food types.
The inertia of mass adoption of ever-changing technologies makes it a component of our evolutionary history. Period. But a question we must now ask is, "Where are we going with all of this?"
Labels: /antrack, Andrew Adonis, high-speed rail
Programmable thermostats stirring up heat. Really.
You wouldn't think the subject of programmable thermostats would spark a passionate argument, but there's one going on right now at Green Building Advisor, where Martin Holladay included the devices in his list of the 10 most useless energy-related products.
Well, actually, he says, "these devices aren’t really useless — they’re just unnecessary and insufficient." The point he's making is that buying a programmable thermostat will do absolutely nothing to curb your energy use. You have to program the thing.
Holladay argues that a plain old thermostat is just as good - all you have to do is remember to turn it down when you leave for work and back up when you come home. (He neglects down when you go to bed and back up when you get up.) And he states flatly that the vast majority of people who buy the programmable variety don't actually program them.
He's getting a lot of grief in the comments on the piece. Now possibly, this is simply the programmable-thermostat lobby getting excited. But I'm wondering about his basic premise.
I mean, come on....if you're worried enough about the environment (or your energy bills) to remember to go to the trouble of adjusting your thermostat several times a day, how could you not welcome a gizmo that turns the heat up automatically 15 minutes before you get up in the morning, and warms your house before you arrive home from a cold commute? Our house has steam heat, and one of winter's luxuries is to lie cuddled under the blankets, listening to the sound of heat rising in the pipes.
And how do we know that people don't program their thermostats? True, you can find articles all over the web saying that something like 70-80% of the people who buy them don't set them up. But how do these writers know that? None of them actually cites a source.
So, a few years back, while writing an article about saving energy, I decided to track that number down. I spent a whole day at it. I called energy experts, I searched websites, I even called up the country's biggest maker of programmable thermostats. Nowhere could I find an actual study - or an actual expert - with any hard information about the habits of programmable thermostat buyers.
Which is, when you think about it, not surprising. After all, does it make sense that millions of people would pay good money for a gadget designed to save them even more money, and then not use it? Does the majority of those buying a DVR (a much harder machine to set up) leave it sitting useless on a shelft?
Is this just an urban myth?
Or - even worse - have we now said so often that programming thermostats is difficult, that we've managed to make the myth come true?
Labels: energy efficiency, Green Building Advisor, heat, programmable thermostats, urban myths
Adventures in energy-audit land
About a year ago, I went to a meeting sponsored by our local councilperson about saving energy. Frankly, I expected it to be the usual pablum - put in CFLs - but in fact it was fascinating. I was especially entranced by a Con Edison official who'd done his own green retrofit and took us through all the tax credits, rebates and tax deductions that made it practically free.
This summer I finally decided that it was time to put our money where my mouth is and try to make our 140-year old brownstone at least somewhat energy-efficient. So last month we got an energy audit. Somewhat to my surprise, it turns out our house is in pretty good shape, and our appliances are pretty green. The big exception (no surprise): our oil-fueled boiler, a noisy, smelly hulking black monster that once upon a time burned coal.
The surprises have come since, and the biggest one is that getting all these tax breaks is by no means a simple business. Our energy audit was conducted by a contractor licensed by NYSERDA (New York State's energy department), which hands out the state's 25% rebate for green improvements...but only if the work is done by a NYSERDA-licensed contractor. Unfortunately, there are very few NYSERDA-licensed contractors in the New York City area. There are, in fact, even fewer than NYSERDA thinks there are, as I discovered when I started calling them and discovered that several had gone out of business. Most of those left - like the company that did our energy audit - specialize in insulation.
Our contractor knew of only one NYSERDA-licensed heating contractor, so we called him for an estimate on replacing our boiler, either with another oil-burning boiler or with a gas-burning one.
First surprise: the most energy-efficient heating systems use forced air or forced hot water. They do not use the system endemic in New York City (as well as, presumably, in the Iowa city where The Pajama Game is set): steam heat.
Second surprise: if you want a NYSERDA rebate, gas is out: there are no gas-fueled steam boilers efficient enough to meet NYSERDA's standards. (Of course we could install a whole new heating system, but replacing all the radiators and much of the plumbing in a four-story brownstone is stratospherically beyond our budget.)
It is, however, possible to buy an oil-burning boiler that just scrapes by. So I had the contractor come over to give me an estimate.
It was when I got his seven-page contract, two copies, all ready for me to sign and return, that I realized this really wasn't going to be simple. To replace the boiler, he wanted $20,500. To replace a single radiator valve, he wanted $600. (There are 15 radiators in our house, and they probably all need new valves.)
I knew it was going to be expensive to replace the boiler - why else hadn't we done it in the 30 years we've lived here (at 62 degrees in wintertime - with plastic on the windows - to keep the oil bills under control)? But $20,000? Sure, the NYSERDA rebate would cover roughly a quarter of that. And since getting NYSERDA certification takes time and trouble, I'm willing to pay a slightly higher price. But $20,000?
I called up Heat USA, the highly-to-be-recommended (if you use heating oil) coop that's helped us keep our oil bills at a manageable level, and asked what one of their plumbers would charge to replace a boiler. The answer? Even if we bought the most efficient boiler made, we would be hard-pressed to spend as much as $10,000.
Armed with that information, I called up National Grid (formerly Keyspan and before that, Brooklyn Union Gas, and stuck forever in my memory as BUG) and got them to send a plumber out to give me an estimate on the cost of switching to gas (which is what I, an at-least-halfway believer in peak oil, wanted to do all along). That estimate? $7,000, give or take - and a $500 credit from National Grid.
As I talked to all these guys, I discovered that there's an oil vs gas battle raging in New York, and right now the gas forces have the oil army on the defensive. Oil won't explode! the oil guy says. You can't get a service contract for a gas boiler! You have to install a chimney liner! It costs thousands of dollars!
Well, actually, said the gas man, you do have a steel lining. (I suspected as much, because we'd paid a small fortune some years back to replace the damn thing.) You can get a service contract - but when was the last time you had problems with your gas water heater?
What about price, I asked? Oil has generally been cheaper, said the oil man. Gas was cheaper last year, said the gas man. No help there. Faced with a decision whose results will likely outlive me, I consulted my son, who will inherit them. Since future prices are a mystery, he advised, go with the option that's cheaper to install.
So gas it is (ta-da!). And just one step into what's obviously going to be a long and painful road, here's realization number one: whoever wrote the rules for NYSERDA's program lived in the suburbs. Closely followed by realization number two: there's at least one NYSERDA contractor out there who doesn't expect customers to figure out that 75% of $20,000 is a hell of a lot more than $10,000.
Next problem: asbestos. Stay tuned.
Labels: energy audit, heat, natural gas, peak oil
If going green is hard, passing green bills is harder
David Roberts really is wonderful.
I have been seeing - and deliberately not reading - dozens of op-eds, analysis pieces and blog posts about all the ways that President Obama is messing up the health-care fight. They all follow exactly the same pattern: if Obama would only do (or, if you think the battle's lost, had only done) what I say he should, we would have a health-care bill.
Well, maybe. But, though I'm struck breathless by some of the lies that are being told about the health-care plan, I have also been watching this country freak out over anything that could be painted as socialized medicine for almost as long as I've been alive. So it never occurred to me that Obama could wave a magic wand, or even give a brilliant speech, and hey, presto, the nation would see the light.
And yesterday on Grist, David Roberts nailed it: "Barack Obama is not our magic negro. He’s not Bagger Vance. He hasn’t come along to teach the ornery white folk the error of their ways. He’s just the president, a centrist Democrat embedded in a power structure replete with roadblocks and constraints."
We all know - when we stop to think about it - that pushing health-care reform, or a climate bill that will actually make a difference, through the US Congress will take sweat, and determination, and a whole lot of people making phone calls, writing their congressmen, and all the other boring labor that goes into political organizing. But what we feel is that we got this man elected, and now it's his job. As the New York Times reported a few days ago, the activists who campaigned so enthusiastically for him are feeling politicked out. They support the president wholeheartedly, the Times reported, but they are "taking a break from politics."
One activist who's got it straight is Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, who - to judge from his Twitter posts - seems to be on the road and around the world virtually full-time. organizing massive global demonstrations for next October 24 to influence the run-up to the Copenhagen climate talks in December. McKibben - who could get his byline into any paper in the country - isn't spending his time (at least not much of it) sitting around writing articles about what Obama should be doing about climate change, though I'm sure he has some pretty strong opinions. But he also recognizes that politicians do not do, and (with rare exceptions) never have done, what is right. They do what is politic. And it is our job, not Obama's, to put so much pressure on them that the right thing to do becomes also the politic thing to do.
Obama isn't going to save us. He can't. It will take a whole lot more than one man - even if if he's the president of the United States - to bring us universal healthcare and a serious climate bill.
Well, we've got a whole lot more - we've got ourselves. The question is, do we have the fortitude to give up the luxury of complaint, turn around, and just keep on keeping on until we get where we need to be?
Labels: 350.;org, Bill McKibben, climate change Obama, David Roberts, health care
Easy ways to go green - a dangerous oxymoron
If I see many more headlines about easy ways to go green, I'm going to go bananas. I just did a Google search for variants of that pernicious little phrase and came up with 41 million hits. 10 easy ways to go green. 5 cheap and easy ways to green your wardrobe. 8 easy ways to green your reading. 50 easy ways to go green.
Here's the problem: if they are really going to make a difference, they're not easy. And if they're easy, they're probably also pretty inconsequential.
I ought to know: a few years ago I, too, wrote one of these stories, as part of a series I wrote for MSN Money called "Walk the Talk." In the process of researching it (and because they were going to film my house), I decided I really should practice what I preached. So I put up a clothesline (those are my sheets in the video), and searched Home Depot (in vain) for a water heater wrapper, and tried to remember to turn off the power strips.
Here's the brutal fact: saving energy is not convenient. It sounds great to say you're picking the low-hanging fruit, and you are. But harvesting even low-hanging fruit is a lot of work.
Here are just a few of the "easy" suggestions that are a dime a dozen on the internet:
Stop using paper towels (they suggest using any old rags). Right, and wash the rags, dry them, find a place to store them....
Put all your electronic gadgets on power strips. I thought this was easy too, till I tried it. First you have to figure out when you use each gadget and make sure all the gadgets on each power strip really can be turned on and off at the same time. You also have to find a place to put the power strip where you can actually reach that little switch. And you have to remember to flick it.
Line-dry your laundry. Yes, it is rewarding. Sheets dried out of doors smell heavenly, and there's a pleasant contemplativeness to the act of hanging them out in the sun. But easy? Unless you have a clothesline inside as well as out, you can only do the laundry in good weather (which, this summer in the Northeast, where I live, means you could hardly do it at all). And while clothes dried outdoors may smell wonderful, unless the wind is blowing pretty briskly, they come out stiff as a board. (Drying them indoors is even worse; my husband, a patient man, finally put his foot down on my drying his towels indoors. They felt, he said, like sandpaper.)
Start a garden. I wonder what could possibly have made anyone think that was going to be easy.
Recycle everything you can. Yes, it's worth doing - and it's a royal pain. It's not difficult with the things the city picks up weekly, though I will never understand why juice cartons go with the metal and not with the paper. But everything you can? Let's see: compact flourescents (package them properly and take them to a not-easy-to-find recycling site), fabrics (recycled at a few of New York's Greenmarkets), books (there's a store in Manhattan that will take them), electronics (hope you get word of one of the city's infrequent collections). Oh, and remember to rent a Zipcar for all the schlepping.
Let's get real here: this is a country in which, according to a statistic widely cited on the internet (though I've never actually been able to track it to a specific source), up to 70% of the people who buy a programmable thermostat never actually program it. And that really is easy.
But here's the real problem: when we tell people it is easy to go green, one of two things will happen. Either they will put in a compact fluorescent bulb and think they are saving the planet, or they will try to make more dramatic changes and - like the people who buy a programmable thermostat with the best of intentions - give up when they find it's harder than they expected.
We have all - every one of us - grown up in a society that prizes convenience above almost every other value. And going green is not convenient. To stick to it, you have got to be willing to take trouble. Sometimes a lot of trouble.
The issue isn't simply personal. It's global. We can change all the light bulbs in the world, and it won't make a significant dent in climate change. The changes we'll need to make to really make a difference will be uncomfortable and expensive. So much so, that I can't think off the top of my head of a single politician who has actually spoken truthfully about what will be required.
Those changes may - I believe they will - bring us richer lives. But they will not be either convenient or easy.
Telling us that going green is easy isn't just dishonest. It also short-changes us, in the same way we were short-changed after 9/11 when Bush told us to go shopping. As Rebecca Solnit points out in her new book, A Paradise Built in Hell, (reviewed in the New York Times today), human beings faced with disaster are capable of extraordinary creativity and resilience.
So don't tell us it's easy. Do us justice. Tell us the truth.
easy. Labels: climate change, easy ways to go green, Rebecca Solnit
Of queens and letters and the limits to growth
Monarchs definitely have their uses.
The Queen of England has become the focal point of a fascinating economic debate...all because of an innocent (or perhaps not so innocent) question she asked last November in a visit to the London School of Economics. Why, she wondered, was nobody able to foresee what she called this "awful recession"?
Had anyone else asked that question (as indeed many people have) it would have gotten lost in the media scrum. But this was the Queen, so an answer was required. Or at least so thought the British Academy, the UK's 107-year-old "national academy for the humanities and social sciences," which held a forum on the question, And - again because it was the Queen - when the Academy finally answered the Queen last month, its letter landed on the front pages.
The result of all the Academy's work was something of a tautology: the failure to foresee the recession was "principally a failure of the collective imagination of many bright people, both in this country and internationally." In other words, we missed it because we missed it.
But in yet another letter to the Queen, published this month, a group of environmental and social thinkers offered a deeper answer: that our inability to foresee the recession stemmed ultimately from our inability to see the real problem. The "imbalances in the global economy" cited in the Academy's report, they argue, are just a symptom of "far more serious imbalances between our insatiable hunger for energy, its finite nature and the environmental pollution in its use."
Because our economy runs in on energy, they argue, our insistence on - not to mention our almost religious faith in - more and more economic growth depends on an equally enormous growth in the supply of energy. And in a finite world, the supply of energy cannot keep up with our appetite for it. At least not at a price - both economic and environmental - that we can pay.
The letter, which is well worth reading, ends with a challenge to the Academy: to join in a public dialogue about these issues. And it signs off in proper courtly style: "We will of course report findings of such debate to Your Majesty. "
You gotta love the Brits.
Labels: British Academy, economic growth, energy, Queen Elizabeth II
Does the media stoke our national what's-in-it-for-me debate?
The other night I saw an ad for ABC News in which the ever-avuncular Charlie Gibson touted the program as focusing on what matters to you in the news. I've seen this kind of pitch often enough, heaven knows - every news program on the air claims to tell you how the news will affect you - but this time it really bugged me.
What, may I ask, makes them think they can know what matters to me? They can't, of course, so they have to make assumptions. And the assumption they almost universally make is that what matters most to me is how some news development will affect my pocketbook.
Well, sorry, Charlie, but there is more to me - there is more to all of us - than our pocketbooks. And I'm beginning to think that the media's relentless focus on the cost of anything from a gallon of milk to a climate bill is one big reason that our national discourse has become so stunted, so pinched, and so angry.
Then comes this marvelous post on Climate Progress. What's missing from media coverage of a climate bill? According to Penn State's Donald A. Brown, it's the ethical consequences of doing nothing. "The climate change debate in the US," Brown says, "shows no sign of acknowledging that US climate change policy should be guided by duties to the rest of the world." In contrast, he points out, when Scotland passed a remarkably ambitious climate bill (a 42% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, rising to 80% by 2050), one of the arguments made for it was that, as climate change affects everyone on the planet, Scotland had a duty to do its part to address the problem.
In the US, meanwhile, the latest argument in favor of passing a climate bill is that unchecked climate change will endanger our national security (all those climate-change refugees out there). I don't mean to belittle that argument - it's quite true. But how is it that the United States, which so profoundly felt its duty to the rest of the world after World War II, seems now to be a country in which the only arguments that have any traction are the ones about how much this will hurt us? Or, even worse, not us, but me?
Obviously, the media doesn't bear the whole blame for our national descent into a what's-in-it-for-me ethos. Politicians, who regularly bring home the pork with one hand while stoking the national paranoia about taxes on the other, bear a lot of the blame. But the job of the media - theoretically, at least - is to ask the hard questions. And surely there are harder questions begging to be asked than "how will it affect me"?
Labels: climate change, Climate Progress, ethics
There is nothing romantic about growing food
Yesterday I went to a book party for Jill Richardson's Recipe for America. I found out a lot about the good guys and bad guys in Washington (at least on food issues).
But what has stuck with me wasn't the book (which I haven't read yet); it was a conversation I had when we broke for refreshments. Somehow it came up (in local food circles it tends to come up) that my husband is a beekeeper. Instantly I was asked, by an urban farmer, about the plight of a friend of hers who'd been busted for keeping bees (an activity that's illegal in New York City).
Then someone else chimed in: "I love the idea of illegal beekeeping. It's so countercultural."
Which got me thinking about the romanticizing of local food, and how little use I have for it. Yes, it's romantic to think of underground bee-keeping. That is, unless those are your bees that just swarmed to a lamppost a block away, and unless you can see the surrounding crowd pointing out your rooftop to the policeman. We held our breath for the knock on our door.
In fact, we've never (yet) been busted, which is surprising, given how active John's been in the move to increase beekeeping in the city. But we and every beekeeper we know are crossing all our fingers and toes as Just Food nudges its campaign to legalize beekeeping through the various layers of city government.
Beekeeping is not romantic. It is hard work: hot, messy, and sticky. If one of your queens isn't producing good workers, you've got to find her, and kill her, in order to introduce a better queen. An attack of any of the multitude of diseases to which bees are prone could wipe out your hives. And while beekeepers get used to being stung, it's never pleasant and it can be not just painful but life-threatening; every beekeeper with even a slight grain of caution keeps on hand an EpiPen to inject themselves in case they suddenly develop a violent allergy to bee venom. (Trust me, it can happen.)
I'm certain the same can be said of urban farming, another occupation that currently gets a lot of swooning attention. It's amazing to me how ignorant even people involved in the local food movement can be about farms and farmers. A few weeks ago I asked the woman who runs my CSA whether we'd be getting any tomatoes or whether our farmer had been hit by the tomato blight. "Blight?" she said, looking puzzled. Meanwhile, farmers are watching their biggest cash crop disappear in front of their eyes. Amy Hepworth, the farmer who supplies much of the produce sold at the Park Slope Food Coop, told our buyer recently that fighting off the blight costs her $1,000 every time it rains - and it has rained a lot this summer.
I suppose that the romanticism is just another symptom of how divorced we have become from the process of producing our food. And annoying as I find it, I guess it's a necessary first step towards bridging that gap. It's better to romanticize food producers than simply to ignore them.
But I sometimes think that a day's work on the farm should be a requirement for joining any CSA, or for buying produce from any urban garden. I'm not about to argue that we should - or could - go back to an 18th agrarian century idyll (if it was an idyll, which I doubt), but if we're really going to turn our food system around, the production of the food we eat needs to be an always-present part of the world we experience. So, yes, support your local farmers, and brewers, and cheese-makers, and beekeepers ( please sign Just Food's petition). Buy from them, talk to them, find out what they do. Just don't go all gooey over them! Labels: Amy Hepworth, beekeeping, Just Food, urban farming
Are Clunkers Enough?
This is sort of a guest post; it comes from GreenBuilder Vantage, the email newsletter of Green Builder Magazine. (You can subscribe to the magazine here; I've no idea how to subscribe to the newsletter, which simply began appearing in my inbox not long after my story on Amory Lovins ran on MSN.)
I thought it was interesting, so here (with permission) it is.
One of the top news stories this week is the fate of the Car Allowance Rebate System, A.K.A., 'Cash for Clunkers'. The program, which offers $3,500 to $4,500 in rebates to automobile owners who trade in an old car for a new one with higher fuel economy, was created to prop up the faltering American auto industry and improve the average fuel efficiency of vehicles across the nation.
Cash for Clunkers has been so popular with consumers that the initial $1 billion allocated to the program was exhausted in a matter of days. While the program provided a tangible financial stimulus for auto makers, dealers, and consumers alike, the future of the program seemed uncertain—that is, until the Senate joined the House yesterday in extending the program, fu! nding it with another $2 billion, which is expected to last through the summer and subsidize the purchase of approximately 500,000 cars.
Critics argue that the Cash for Clunkers program is a give-away to auto makers, creates unnecessary debt, and that it misappropriates taxpayers' money to a band-aid fix that doesn't create a long-term financial solution. Environmentalists contend that the embodied energy and additional waste created by destroying the clunkers negate the benefits of getting the cars off the road. From a short-term perspective, both of these arguments have validity. But, in certain ways, each of them misses the point.
The larger issue here is not the average 61% increase in fuel economy (or 10 M.P.G. increase) that the new cars represent over the clunkers or the average $850 per year that drivers will save in fuel costs.
What we should be focusing on is the need for an arsenal of solutions like this one to adequately address the immense emissions problem caused by our transportation system, which, according to the EPA, accounts for nearly 40% of our national greenhouse gas emissions. To achieve the kind of results that would be needed to satisfy the energy and climate legislation passed by the House (which requires carbon dioxide emissions to drop 83% by 2050), we can't just focus on getting cleaner vehicles on the road, we need to look at larger changes in our transportation system, travel behavior, and regulatory strategies.
Sara Gutterman @ SaraGBMLabels: cash for clunkers, Green Builder Magazine, transpotation policy
Transition towns and evangelical churches, or what do Rick Warren and Rob Hopkins have in common?
If you follow green blogs and tweets, as I do, it's hard to miss the ongoing slanging match between Climate Progress and the Breakthrough Institute. And I'm not, at least in this post, picking a dog in that fight. But I have been reading Breakthrough - the book that birthed the institute - and it seems to me that Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, the book's co-authors, have at least one insight that all of us should pay attention to.
It answers a question I've always had about my own history as an environmentalist: if I do believe in this cause - and I do - why have I seldom contributed to, and never volunteered for, any environmental group? I did once work - for pay - for a couple of environmental groups, but that's another story. (Though perhaps not entirely unconnected to the question at hand.)
It also goes a long way to explain the exponential growth of the Transition Town movement.
Nordhaus and Shellenberger make two related points. First, that for most of its history, the environmental movement has been almost entirely dedicated to stopping things. And second, that about all it has asked from its supporters is their money and their votes. The result, they argue, is that while an enormous number of people say they support environmental causes, when push comes to shove - when they have to put their money or their convenience on the line - their environmental concerns fall by the wayside. (They're not alone in noticing this: a sure way to make green business guru Joel Makower testy is to send him a survey reporting that some huge percentage of Americans buy green, when all the evidence indicates that they don't.)
All this made sense to me, but where they really caught my attention was when they compared the success, or lack thereof, of the environmental movement with the growth of evangelical churches. Unlike environmentalists, they argue, members of evangelical churches will turn themselves inside out to support their church. Why? Because their church is more fun.
Well, I spent quite a lot of time at an evangelical megachurch while I was researching The Word, my book about how people read the Bible, and the Breakthrough guys are right: it's much more engaging, exhilarating, and satisfying to be a member of an evangelical church than it is to be a member of, say, the Sierra Club. It's not just that evangelical church schedules are packed full of meetings, clubs, groups and activities, though they are. It's also that their members are convinced that, through all these activities, they are helping to build a better world. Yes, there are things they want to stop. But there is much more that they want to create.
And suddenly a light went on: that's why the Transition movement is growing so fast. (If you're not familiar with the Transition movement, go here, or here, to find out more. Better still, get ahold of a copy of Rob Hopkins' The Transition Handbook.)
Transition isn't a church, or in any way religious, but but the Transition movement is more like an evangelical church than any other group I've ever come across. Rob Hopkins has grasped what most environmental activists seem to have missed: if people are going to be engaged over the long term, they have got to be building something, not stopping something. And they have got to enjoy themselves.
There are a lot of Transition Towns in the US - and around the world, for that matter - but the one I'm most familiar with, because I've spent some time there, is Totnes, the first in the UK. This summer, according to their July bulletin, you could attend a solstice picnic, go on an edible garden crawl, or go to a meeting about direct action on climate change. There were activities for bikers and photographers, a kids' event at a local estate, a bunch of lectures and movie screenings. And no matter what aspect of our climate crisis grabs you - housing, the economy, jobs, energy, food, health, the arts, politics - they've got a group for you.
The other genius of Transition is that the task of a Transition Town group is not to stop climate change. It is to imagine how their town could not just survive, but thrive, in an oil-constrained and warmer world, and then to do everything they can to make that imagining a reality. But the very process of working towards that goal, of course, also deepens their commitment to doing whatever they can, personally and politically, to address climate change. The two feed, and feed on, each other.
So, though it's hard to think of two people more different in almost every way than Rob Hopkins and Rick Warren...
Labels: Breakthrough Institute, climate change, Climate Progress, environmentalists, evangelical churches, Joel Makower, peak oil, Rick Warren, Rob Hopkins, Transition Towns
Living off the land in Central Park
 Well, I finally did it. I went on a Central Park foraging trip with "Wildman" Steve Brill. Years ago, in our Mother-Earth-News-let's-live-off-the-land days, my husband and I knew quite a lot about wild edibles. I've read all of Ewell Gibbons, and some of it has stuck; I regularly harvest the purslane and chickweed that comes up in my garden. But years of living in New York have dimmed my foraging fervor; Though nettles are one of my favorite spring greens, I don't pick them myself. I buy them at the farmer's market. So though I've known about Brill's trips for years, I'd never before summoned up the energy to go on one.
While we were waiting for all 50 of us to get there, I did a little mental math. Fifty people at $15 a pop, times a hundred-plus foraging tours a year (only a fraction of them in Central Park) - this is not a bad business to be in. Of course, a trip on a cold February day probably doesn't get 50 people; on the other hand there are school demonstrations and private events, and book sales...
It is also a lot of work. We didn't walk fast, we stopped often, but after four hours of ups and downs around the northern part of the park, I was pretty bushed.
I went, as you can tell from my opening calculations, as a bit of a skeptic. I was waiting for Brill to produce something new, and when his first three stops were for blackberries, wood sorrel and chickweed, I began to feel let down (especially as the blackberries were behind a fence and not yet ripe).
But by the time we were chewing on black birch twigs
 and digging for sassafras roots, and nibbling garlic mustard and poor man's pepper, I was hooked. I knew that crushed jewelweed leaves are a remedy for poison ivy. But I didn't know that you can make a skin lotion out of jewelweed stems and witchhazel. I didn't know (and am not sure I believe) that there is a cancer-causing toxin in raw mushrooms - at least according to Brill - and you should always cook them. I may once have known, but I had most certainly forgotten, that black birch twigs taste like wintergreen, and though I'd heard of cheeses (one of the many nicknames for mallow) I'd never in my life seen them, much less eaten them.
But though I enjoyed myself, I'm left wondering - what is the point it? It's not as though I'm going to take to the park every weekend in search of food. While Brill doesn't hesitate to climb fences and otherwise break what I presume is a long list of Central Park rules (a ranger we met along the way told us that 25 years ago, she'd been instructed to arrest Brill), I haven't got his hardihood. (Even he has his limits; after we dug up a bunch of sassafras roots, he told us to hide them in our backpacks. We know that we're not hurting the plant by digging them up, he said, but it doesn't look good to be walking around the park clutching roots.)
But perhaps I can look at my garden with something of a new perspective. And not just at my garden, but at those bits of waste land scattered all over the city. The barrier between food and not-food, it turns out, is permeable. And that's well worth the knowing.
 Labels: foraging, Steve brill, wild food
Feeding the hungry with thrown-out food
Turns out I didn't need to source a British writer( in yesterday's post), on the subject of outrageous food waste. We have a home-grown expert, Jonathan Bloom, who's tracking the subject for an upcoming book. By his estimate, Americans waste 40% of our food. That's over $100 billion a year, folks!
In a recent post, he writes about a Binghamton, NY food recovery (sounds a lot better than dumpster diving, doesn't it?) group called CHOW. The group has rebuilt a dumpster, making it into a food stand that's using wasted food to provide free meals for the homeless - complete with doggie bags.
At the end of his post, he asks his readers if this is a good idea, or insulting. (I'm not quite sure if he means the whole project, or just the use of the dumpster - which is painted a bright green and looks quite chic).
But either way, it seems to me, if we could learn to take waste seriously as the evil that it is, the question of whether it is insulting to serve thrown-out food to anyone would simply disappear. As would any notion that it's offensive to repurpose a dumpster.
What really is insulting is throwing it all out in the first place.
Labels: CHOW, food waste, Jonathan Bloom
Is waste the century's greatest sin?
Even before I started worrying about global warming and peak oil, I had a real thing about waste. I don't know where it comes from. True, my parents grew up in the Depression and my mother, especially, was marked by it, but I don't remember her being a particular demon about wasting things. We sure produced out enough trash - as I remember vividly, since throwing it out was my job.
But the older I've gotten, the more intense have been my efforts not to let anything go to waste. I am a maniacal turner-out of lights and a passionate recycler; how many people, I wonder, would have crowed with delight on discovering that you can recycle used textiles at some of New York's greenmarkets?
As we look harder at the burden we're putting on the environment, it turns out that my hatred of waste is downright sensible. Waste may be the biggest energy-hog of all. Take, for instance, food. In a scarifying article in the Financial Times, Tristram Stuart (author of the appropriately-named Waste) reports that the average UK grocery store throws out enough perfectly good food every day to feed 100 people. A typical day's haul included 28 ready-meals; 16 Cornish pasties; 83 yogurts and other desserts; 18 loaves of bread; 23 rolls; one chocolate cake; five pasta salads, and 223 fruit and vegetable items ranging from lemons and fair-trade bananas to leeks, avocados, and mushrooms. Oh, and margarine, milk, and a potted orchid.
I have to confess that when I'm shopping at the farmer's market, my eyes can sometimes outrun my cooking capacity: at one point, tempted by truly beautiful heirloom lettuces from the Queens County Farm Museum stand into buying more than we could possibly eat as salad, I was reduced to making lettuce soup and lettuce risotto, and I still had to throw some away. But my guilt is somewhat alleviated by the possession of two rolling compost bins and a worm composter; at least the vegetables that, despite my best efforts, don't manage to get eaten before they spoil will be put to some use.
My current musing about waste, though, has been prompted by a more recent event: we finally got around to getting an energy audit. And let me tell you, it was scary. For one thing, we were forced to face the absolute necessity of replacing our furnace, which is so old that once upon a time it burned coal (our house is roughly 150 years old). We've been dodging this one for years, largely because all the pipes in the basement are wrapped in asbestos. But now it turns out that besides leaking heat and CO2, we are leaking oil - the oil tank is beginning to spring holes.
I expected the furnace verdict (though not the oil tank one). What I did not expect was the lousy energy efficiency of some of our newer appliances, which seem to be working just fine. I didn't think about the cracks in our beautiful but ancient wooden front doors; since there's another set of doors inside them, and a radiator next to that, the only time we notice how breezy the front hall really is, is when there's a snowstorm and snow blows right in through the cracks. (You'd think that my use of the hall as an extra refrigerator might have driven that point home, but no.)
And I didn't even think about the fact that the insulation we had blown into the roof some 30 years ago might not be doing its job any longer - especially as the occasional roof leak has probably turned it to mush, or worse.
We haven't yet gotten the report, so I don't know how much we'll save by getting all these things fixed - a bundle, I hope, since I am absolutely certain it will cost us more than a bundle to fix them. But given the amount of waste that a waste-hater like me has managed to tolerate out of sheer inertia, I'm not a bit surprised at the recent McKinsey report that says the US could cut its energy consumption 23% by fixes considerably less dramatic than some of the ones we're about to undertake. By spending $520 billion, the study says, we could save $1.2 on our national energy bills over the next 30 years, and cut our total energy use by 23%. I only hope the improvements we're embarking on prove that cost-effective.
But I'm not holding my breath till the country actually reaps those savings Yes, making those fixes would provide jobs that couldn't be outsourced - our house alone is likely to keep 3-4 people employed for a couple of months. Yes, they'd make it much easier to cut our carbon emissions as deeply as we need to cut them. Yes, the average American would end up saving money on the deal.
But...I have known that furnace needed to be replaced for at least 20 years, and I haven't done anything about it. The problem was too big, and too complicated, and too expensive even to think about, let alone tackle. So every winter I'd grit my teeth, cover the windows in plastic, turn down the thermostat, and live in sweaters.
Inertia is powerful, in my case more powerful even than my passionate hatred of waste. And what conquered it in the end wasn't any moral awakening on my part - it was the government, which finally put some weight into the other side of the scales in the form of tax incentives, rebates, and low-cost loans.
Are there a lot of other people out there who need just the nudge of some government-sponsored bargains to finally realize the sense of spending money now to save it later? And is the government willing to provide those bargains? To the tune of several hundred billion dollars? In a recession?
There are hopeful signs. Some northeastern states, for instance, are offering rebates when you trade in an old refrigerator or freezer for an energy-efficient replacement (though given the cost of an energy-efficient refrigerator, the promised $30 rebate seems unpersuasively skimpy).
Last winter, on a sleety, windy night, I went to a symposium sponsored by my state representative on New York's energy-saving programs, and despite the ghastly weather, about 40 people showed up. A good start. But reaping that $1.2 trillion in energy savings is going to take more than a few local meetings - it's going to take the kind of door-to-door, call-every-telephone effort that got Obama elected.
I hope it happens. But I'm not holding my breath.
Labels: carbon, energy efficiency, food waste, McKinsey
Playing the hand you're dealt - the CSA challenge
A lot of the people I follow on Twitter are foodies, and many of them belong to a CSA. (CSA is short for Community Supported Agriculture; you buy, basically, a share of a farm's harvest, and then each week you pick up whatever the farmer is providing).
Each week, they wax eloquent about the abundance they've received. And abundant it is. But what they don't talk about (and I acknowledge that it's difficult to discuss in 140 characters) is the flip side of that abundance. When you get your vegetables from a CSA, you don't cook what you chose. You cook what you've got. Whether it's what you feel like eating or not.
Even if you like it, it can be a problem. Red Jacket Orchards, which provides the fruit for my CSA, has recently been blessing us - positively overwhelming us - with apricots. Two quarts a week for the past two weeks, and another quart coming this week, along with plums. I adore apricots - but how on earth to use up four quarts of them? Especially as raw apricots aren't really appealing - it takes cooking to bring out the flavor.
Well, I have almost done it. Thanks to an apricot tart, apricot and orange ice-cream, and a serendipitous (because the same week that we got apricots, we also got fennel) recipe I found for fennel and apricot chutney, I have used up two and a half quarts. And last week, at - of all places - a beer fest, I met a guy from Red Jacket and posed my apricot dilemma to him He insisted that if I let the apricots ripen almost to the point of decay, they'd be delicious raw, and to my surprise, he was right. So that's another pint or so. I have one quart left, and today I found a recipe for spiced apricots that's supposed to be delicious with the Christmas bird. (Of course there's another quart coming, but I'll worry about that when I get it.)
More difficult than apricots are some of the vegetables we have been getting, like carrots, cabbage and turnips. Those may indeed be early summer vegetables, but unfortunately, they are also - for someone living in the Northeast - among the few local vegetables available all winter. By June I am, to put it bluntly, sick to death of them. I have now made two different kinds of cole slaw (not my favorite salad), and have also put some of the cabbage, as well as the leaves from the kohlrabi we got three weeks running. and a few other winter oddments, into a batch of kimchee. It's pretty good, though by the time it fermented enough to soften the kohlrabi leaves, the cabbage tasted almost cooked.
But this is exactly what makes a CSA worth doing, at least for me. Yes, it's a way of supporting a local farmer, and yes, it is, at least some of the time, a taste of summer's abundance. But more deeply, it is a way of cooking that - until the arrival of the deep freeze, the supermarket, and refrigerated shipping - was universal: doing the best you could with what you had. Which I find both an intoxicating challenge and in some way a spiritual discipline.
We are so accustomed, we Americans, to a hyper-abundance of choice. We import whatever we want from wherever it grows. Wandering the frigid aisles of a supermarket produce section is in many ways like wandering the air-conditioned corridors of an airport. We could be anywhere. The vegetables, clean and glistening in their waxed piles, look picture perfect, as though dirt never had anything to do with them. It's an eerily disconnected experience.
Which is not to say that I don't - CSA or not - take advantage of the choice available to me. Raspberries and red currants are in season right now, and since Red Jacket hasn't provided us with either, I bought some this weekend to make summer pudding, in my opinion one of the great desserts of all time, and not to be missed no matter what the CSA gives me.
But I don't buy too much, because at the back of my mind, always, is that refrigerator drawer stuffed so full of vegetables that they spill over onto the shelves: potatoes, turnips, carrots, half a cabbage, some fresh onions, several different kinds of green peppers. And always there's the question: now, how can I make them - not the corn or tomatoes that I'd rather be dealing with - into something we'll enjoy? Tonight it was peppers, grilled, then briefly sauteed with chili powder, doused with leftover sour cream mixed with leftover ricotta salata and rolled in flour tortillas. It was delicious.
But I am really looking forward to the corn and tomatoes we've been promised at tomorrow's pickup.Labels: cooking, CSA, local food, seasonal food
If growth is the measure of all things, why aren't we 20 feet tall?
The question of the juncture - or is it disjunction? - between sustainability and economic growth is being raised all over the place right now. Over on Rob Hopkins' Transition blog, there's a lively debate on the UK's low-carbon transition plan and its emphasis on economic growth. Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, responds -- with a mordant logic worthy of Jonathan Swift -- to arguments that global warming won't be so bad because it will only cut GDP by 5% over the next 100 years. Hey, look, he says, we could wipe out almost half the world and drop GDP by only 4.4%, so why worry? And Dennis Pacheco, on Chelsea Green, asks whether California's IOUs are really a cleverly disguised alternative local currency.
It's a huge topic, and while, after decades as a financial reporter, I know something about the subject, there's a lot more that I don't know than that I do. But it does seem clear to me that there's something perverse about the way that economic growth has become the fundamental measure of the health of our society. Or any society.
If you watch financial news, you've noticed that the very first question out of any interviewer's mouth is "When is the economy going to start growing?" The very definition of a recession is negative financial growth. We are taught, over and over again, that the test of our well-being is how fast our economy is growing, and the first argument raised against any attempt to curb greenhouse gases is that it will hurt economic growth.
So when peak oil folk talk - and they do - about a steady-state economy, it's kind of scary, even to me. Can we thrive - all of us - in an economy that does not grow? Where everything stays pretty much the same?
Of course, it's not that there's not enough to go around. Just as there's enough food in the world to feed us all - if it could be gotten to the people who need it - so there's enough money in the world for a decent, if not extravagant, lifestyle for all, if some of it could be taken from those who have a ludicrous excess and given to those who have almost nothing.
The trouble is, I can't think, off the top of my head, of a single even slightly developed society that has succeeded in doing that. The human desire to hang onto what you've got is very, very strong.
On the other hand, to argue that economic growth is the only way to bring even a modicum of wealth to the world's poorest people is - essentially - to claim that it's necessary to make some obscenely wealthy in order that others may have the barest necessities of life. Does that make sense?
I certainly don't know the answer. But if climate change and peak oil are the overwhelming and intertwined emergencies of this century - and I believe they are - then it's a question we're going to have to tackle, and soon. Journalists and economists and politicians -- and all the rest of us -- are going to have to find a new way of defining social well-being. Growth won't cut it.Labels: Chelsea Green, climate change, economic growth, FiveThirtyEight, peak oil, Transition Towns
We share gardens. And chickens. Why not pigs?
Sharing is in. And not just because I wrote about it for MSN. It's even got its own website, The Sharing Solution. You can also find dozens of websites covering particular kinds of sharing. Garden-sharing's got several, including (but by no means limited to) Sharing backyards, Urban Gardenshare, and Hyperlocavore. And neighbors are beginning to get together to share the work of raising chickens.
But as far as I know, nobody has tried to share a pig. And what I want to know is, why not?
This all stems from a conversation I had this morning with my husband about our worm bin. Specifically, about how much garbage a bin of worms can actually eat. In our case, it's about a third of what we generate; another third goes into a composter in the garden.
And then there are the orange peels.
We are, you see, addicted to fresh orange juice. We drink just one small glass a day each. But it takes somewhere between 12 and 16 oranges (depending on size and juiciness) to make a quart of juice, and we go through a quart in roughly four days. That's an awful lot of orange peels. And to compost them in either the worm bin or the composter, I'd need to cut them up into tiny pieces, a task that daunts me. (Nor do I think that high a proportion of oranges - even organic oranges - would be especially good for the soil.)
As we were mulling this over this morning, I realized what we really need is a pig. Now, we can't raise a pig in our Brooklyn backyard. But why couldn't a bunch of neighbors get together and share the work of raising a pig - and the resultant meat? Animals seem almost meant to be shared - raising them single-handed is a no-time-off job. With a bunch of people sharing the job, nobody would be overworked, and everybody's excess food scraps would find a happy home. Including our peels, which might give the pork just a delicious hint of orange.
This isn't unheard of. In a recent post, Rob Hopkins writes of a Totnes resident who, as a child, took a bucket of pig swill down to a neighbor's pig every evening. He doesn't say, but I'd be astonished if the family didn't get some pork out of the deal. And in A Presumption of Daath, a mystery that takes place in World War II England, Jill Paton Walsh describes at some length the pig clubs that country-dwellers put together to get what was otherwise strictly rationed meat. One of the rules, apparently, was that you had to feed the pigs good garbage. "We have thrown someone out of the club...because they growed the most horrible-tasting meat," says one character. "Mr. Puffett's is best of all. He gives 'em windfall peaches from his kitchen garden, along of all the peelings, and do they taste different! Gorgeous, they are."
Of course, finding a place to keep the pig (or pigs - Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, a great proponent of home-raised pigs, warns that they're highly social, and says it's cruelty to keep just one) could be a problem. And from all I hear about pigs, it wouldn't be easy for club members to harden their hearts and send them off for slaughter. A friend of mine raises pigs for a living, and when she told me she'd stopped keeping ducks because they were so smart she hated to kill them, I asked how she dealt with killing pigs. "I close them in the truck," she said, "and try to forget where they're going."
Which may be what's behind the current dearth of pig clubs. Along with pesky municipal ordinances about raising them in the first place. But still (at least for the meat-eaters among us), wouldn't it be nice to take your kitchen scraps down the street to an appreciative pig, knowing that they were going to come back to you in the form of pork chops and bacon?
Labels: chicken coop, composting, garden sharing, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, pigs, sharing, worm composting
Reversing global warming in your backyard?
I believe in all the big solutions to global warming - really I do - but what gets me truly excited is finding really effective solutions that will work on a local scale. And by really effective, I mean stuff that's a lot more dramatic than switching to fluorescent light bulbs. (Even though all the bulbs in my house are indeed fluorescent.) God knows I've written enough stories touting the virtues of this and other tiny steps, because those are the stories that popular media outlets want to buy. But although in one way it's true that every tiny step makes a difference, in another way it's fundamentally dishonest. If we don't take some really major steps soon, it's not going to matter what kind of light bulbs we use.
All of which is a roundabout way of getting to the subject of biochar. And what, you may ask, is biochar? Charcoal, basically - but charcoal made in such a way that it captures, and holds, a lot of carbon. According to the International Biochar Initiative, biochar production is not just carbon-neutral, but carbon-negative; its production and use actually decrease the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.
But the really neat thing about bio-char is that you can make this stuff at home - at least according to Organic Gardening. All you need is some dry organic material, a steel pot with a loose lid and a source of heat.
Now, most of us (including me) aren't going to be making backyard biochar anytime soon. (Our neighbors are antsy enough about the bees.) But there's something enormously appealing about a product that produces fuel and fertilizer, removes CO2 from the atmosphere, and can be made on an extremely small scale. In fact, a Brooklyn start-up company, re:char, is hard at work on a unit that small farmers (and community gardens?) could use to turn waste plant material into biochar to nourish the soil, and biofuel to produce electricity.
And what could be niftier than that?
Labels: biochar, gardening, global warming, greenhouse gas emissions
The rationing delusion - it's not just health care
I've spent most of my career covering business and finance, which means I've dealt with a lot of corporate executives in my time. And a whole lot of (gulp) investment bankers. And, to tell the truth, I've liked most of them very much. They're not out to trash the world, and they believe that their companies are doing good things (which, much of the time, they are).
So when my radical friends, or bloggers I like, attack corporations as rapacious monoliths out to dominate the globe, it makes me twitchy. Most corporate executives want to make the world a better place. I'm even willing to believe that at least some Monsanto executives want to make the world a better place - and genuinely believe they're doing it. (Whether or not they're actually doing it is another question, but one that can also fairly be asked of governments, radical activists, and in fact just about all of us. How to make the world a better place is a question to which there's no single, or simple, answer.)
But this much, I believe, is clear: the basic necessities of human life must not be controlled by any organization whose existence depends on making a profit.
The argument over health care is a case in point. Those who oppose government-run health insurance, and government research as to what treatments actually work, argue that we can't let the government decide what health care we get: that's rationing. But, as David Leonhardt pointed out in the New York Times the other day, private health insurers and providers ration health care constantly. The only difference is, they ration it on the basis of who can afford to pay for it and how profitable it is, instead of who needs it and whether or not it works.
It's the same with food. Let's say, just for the sake of argument, that Monsanto's GM seeds actually are better; that they can feed more people from the same amount of land than ordinary seeds. (Not that I believe it for a minute.) Even if it's true, though, allowing Monsanto to patent those seeds and control their distribution gives a single company the power to to ration our food supply. Not on the basis of who needs it, as many countries did in WWII, but on the basis of who can pay for it. (And, in Monsanto's case, who can keep paying for it, as the company carefully makes sure farmers can't save seed, but have to buy new for each planting.)
And here's one that we're not hearing so much about, but is possibly the most egregious of all: the privatization of water. By which I don't mean putting it in bottles and selling it, though that's bad enough. I mean privatization of the water supply. By the middle of this decade, the water supplies of 9% of the world's people were controlled by private companies, all of them hungry for more. (Milwaukee is currently considering turning over its water system to a for-profit company.) And what happens when a private company controls water access? Rationing again: those who can afford it get more, those who can't, get less - or even none at all. Meanwhile profits, instead of being reinvested, are siphoned off to the company's coffers.
It's hard to make fair rationing decisions, and however rational they may be, the people who don't get what they want, or what they believe they're entitled to, always feel disenfranchised. But what is so much better about rationing on the basis of ability to pay? And how is it that we - as a nation - have somehow been bamboozled into accepting without question that rationing based on need, or usefulness, or any other rational criterion, is unwarranted government interference, while rationing on the basis of whether you've got enough money to pay is the wonderful free market at work?
Labels: food, health care, rationing, water
Why You Shouldn't Take an Empty Bus, and Other Anomalies
Groovy Green's got a link to a fascinating cradle-to-grave study of vehicle energy use and greenhouse gas emissions per passenger kilometer traveled. And the winner is? An urban diesel bus - at peak hours only. During non-peak hours, the same bus is just about the worst offender in both categories.
Urban light rail and commuter trains stack up a lot better than off-peak buses, but I wonder whether the same kind of on-peak/off-peak difference applies; the study doesn't differentiate. (Of course in many cities there are no off-peak trains - just try getting into Boston by commuter rail on a Sunday morning.)
Surprisingly, given the vilification air travel gets these days, the PKT emissions for a jumbo (I assume a full jumbo, which most of them are) stack up just about as well as those for light rail. The operating emissions are higher by far, but building and operating the infrastructure for light rail is responsible for a much higher level of emissions than building and operating airplane infrastructure.
The vehicle-building emissions aren't so startling - the emissions from building cars and trucks (again per passenger kilometers traveled) are more than double those of building aircraft and many multiples higher than those of building rail cars. But because even gas guzzler engines emit fewer greenhouse gases than bus engines, the total PKT emission load of a near-empty bus is almost double that of a conventional gasoline sedan.
The lesson that Groovy Green's Eric Spitzfaden takes from the study is that sharing rides - or, I would think, vehicles - is a real plus. (To your Zipcars, city dwellers!). Another - and the one that surprised me, though of course it makes sense when you think about it - is that mass transit, often cited as a panacea, might not be. It all depends on ridership. In other words, if it doesn't attract riders, the Obama high-speed rail plan we're all so ecstatic about will do a lot more to create jobs than it will to make us a greener country.
Meanwhile, if you're going to DC from New York, you might do less harm to the planet taking a packed plane than a near-empty train.
Weird, huh?
Labels: greenhouse gas emissions, mass transit, vehicles, Zipcar
Food safety and giant supply chains - a contradiction in terms
So now it turns out, according to The New York Times, that America's packaged food manufacturers don't actually know whether their food is safe. In fact, they don't have a very clear idea of where the ingredients they use come from. So they want to make us responsible for the safety of their food. All we need to do, they say, is heat it properly - in other words, hover over our microwaves, food thermometer in hand, sticking it into the food (in several places) to make sure it's hot enough. (When the enterprising Times reporters tried this with some Banquet pot pies, they discovered that you can heat them enough to burn the crust and still not get them hot enough to be safe. Sounds appetizing, doesn't it?)
The whole fuss has provoked outraged comments from many of my food-passionate friends. And it is, of course, preposterous that companies that are selling their pitiable excuse for food to hundreds of millions of people don't actually know where the ingredients come from or how to make them safe to eat.
But personally, I think it's also funny. Because the truth is that we can't ever know - for sure - that what we're eating is safe. Too many things can happen to the food between the grower and our plates. Food is an accident waiting to happen; careless treatment anywhere along the line can make it lethal.
The real problem here isn't that the food companies can't ensure our safety. It's that the consequences of their failure can be so dire. The Banquet pot pies that the New York Times used as its example of the problem sickened 15,000 people.
Of course, Con Agra sells roughly 100 million of those pies annually. In an operation of that size, 15,000 is a rounding error. A rounding error that brings Con Agra a ton of bad publicity, costs it a lot of money, clogs up our health care system, and messes up a bunch of lives - but in the context of our mammoth food system, it's still just a rounding error.
The problem isn't that the food companies can't keep us safe. It's that the food system is so humungous that the consequences of the almost inevitable failures to keep us safe are devastating. (Just think - as terrorist experts do - of what would have happened if instead of salmonella, it had been something seriously lethal in those pot pies.)
We've got a food system that's too big to fail and is at the same time bound to fail. It's a pretty dumb way to feed a planet.
Because I buy almost all my food from farmers I trust, many of whom are my friends, I'm personally protected from massive food-system threats. I don't have to search my freezer every time a food company announces a massive recall - and when I ran my eyes down the endless list of no-name hamburger brands involved in the recent recall of almost 100,000 pounds of ground beef, I was very grateful for that.
But I know that buying my food locally doesn't guarantee I won't get sick. (Anyone who drinks raw milk becomes painfully aware of the food risks they may be running. "You could get tuberculosis," said one friend. And I could, I suppose.) But I can be confident that I won't get sick at the same time, or from the same cause, as the 15,000 or 150,000 or 1.5 million people who might suffer from a massive screw-up in, or attack on, our food system.
After all, most of the farmers I buy my food from don't sell to 15,000 people, let alone 150,000. If they sell a piece of contaminated beef or a few gallons of bad milk, it's not going to make more than a handful of people sick. If I'm one of them, and the FDA comes around looking for the source of the illness, it won't have to cross oceans to find it. All it has to do is ask. Because I know the answer.
And that knowledge, in and of itself, makes me feel a whole lot safer.
Labels: food safety, food system, local food
Of laundry and sunshine and washing days
One of the things hanging out the laundry has done - for me, anyhow - is to make me wonder about the vision I always had about our forebears. Back when men were men and women were houseproud, I thought, they always did laundry on Monday. I don't know just where I got this idea - was there a household schedule in Mrs. Beeton's book? - but I sure had it. There was a Baking day, there was a Cleaning day, and there was a Laundry day.
But if hanging out the laundry teaches you anything, it's flexibility. Because if you decide to do the laundry on Monday, it is almost guaranteed that while the sun will shine brightly on Sunday, it will pour on Monday and Tuesday. There is nothing quite so chastening. to those of us who think we have some control over our lives. as hanging out the laundry. Combine that with gardening, and you really know how little you're in charge and how frail your scheduling is. In the northeast, the weather has for the past several weeks been so generally wet and dismal that an English friend of mine recently announced to the world that she wanted to go back to England, where it was drier.
In its own frustrating way, that's one of the joys of hanging out the wash. Nothing I've ever done has put me quite so much in tune with the weather and the changing of the seasons - with the earth in its absoluteness. It's not just whether it's sunny or rainy. Wind has a lot to do with how fast the laundry dries, as well as how soft it is when you take it off the line. So, I discovered today, does the leafiness of the trees: the sheets I hung out a few weeks ago. when the trees were just leafing out, dried in half the time it took today, with all the trees in full leaf and the sunshine that much less penetrating. Then there's the length of the days. It doesn't matter how bright the sun may be in October, there just isn't enough of it to dry the towels in a single day.
And what on earth did our ancestors do in February? Just the thought makes "spring cleaning" suddenly seem like a lot more than a metaphor.
Labels: laundry
Is there such a thing as ecological intelligence? And would it help matters if there was?
The Financial Times recently reviewed Daniel Goleman's Ecological Intelligence," a follow-up to his Emotional Intelligence of a few years back.
Now I haven't actually read the book yet, so it's distinctly presumptuous of me to sound off about it. But I'm going to, because from everything I've read about it, I think the book is wrong-headed in two directions at once.
The subtitle of Goleman's book, to me, gives it all away. "How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything." Goleman's argument, according to the FT, is that if they knew the effects of the products they buy, "shoppers in Berlin or Brooklyn or Beijing could make informed choices that would speed the conversion of China’s power grid from coal-belching plants to alternate sources ... or enhance the health of miners in Africa."
There are two problems here. First off, knowing the hidden impacts of what we buy doesn't necessarily change our behavior. I challenge you to find one SUV-owner in the United States who isn't, in at least a part of her brain, perfectly aware of the by now not-so-hidden impacts of her gas-guzzler, and who doesn't feel both guilty and defensive about them. None of which stops her from driving that sucker.
If Goleman is saying that all it takes for that SUV-owner to change her behavior is to tell her about the terrible consequences of the stuff she's spewing into the atmosphere, then he's simply asking for more environmental nagging. And I think we've already had quite enough of that. I was turned off of nagging as an effective way to change behavior some 30 years ago, when in a burst of well-meaningness, I tried shopping using a little guide called "Shopping for a Better World" (now out of print), which ranked companies on a variety of social issues and then told you what products each of them made. That effort didn't last more than a month. I wanted some of the stuff that the nastiest companies made, and I didn't like the purer substitutes, and the only difference it made in my life was to stop me even trying for many years.
But just for argument, let's say that he's right - that, if informed about the result of their buying choices, consumers will do their best to use their buying power to clean up the Chinese power grid or improve the health of African miners. Just how, exactly, should they go about it? Should they buy only Chinese products manufactured using renewable energy? How will they know? So maybe they'll just stop buying anything made in China. If falling consumer demand pushes the Chinese economy into collapse, will that clean up its power grid? Has Goleman never heard of the law of unintended consequences?
What I suspect Goleman means by environmental intelligence is the desire to save the world from environmental collapse. But it's one thing to want that, and quite another to understand - much less agree - how to get there. On a listserve of the Society of Environmental Journalists, there's a passionate debate going on right now over biodiversity and poverty. To one camp, what is often hailed as biodiversity in desperately poor communities is actually the result of poverty so deep that it robs people of the ability to farm efficiently. To another, it is an ancient and freely chosen practice of great wisdom.
And - by the way - all parties in this debate are commited environmentalists.
Labels: climate change, consumerism, ecological intelligence
It's nice to be linked to, but....
I don't mean to pick on Chelsea Green, but.....
This morning they had a post publicizing Sandor Katz's new book (and a wonderful book I'm sure it is - I went to one of his workshops and not only did I have a ball, but I've been making kimchee ever since).
What worried me was their introduction, which said "We know that raw milk is now the single most briskly traded illicit commodity in the US, after illegal drugs. So what's the attraction?"
Not surprisingly - since I wrote it - that phrase "most briskly traded" leaped out at me. Only I didn't say it quite that way. What I said (in the story you'll find here) was: "Apart from illegal drugs, raw milk -- milk that's unpasteurized and unhomogenized, just as it comes out of the cow -- may be the most briskly traded underground commodity in the United States."
Note that: may be. I actually haven't a clue how many illegal drug trades there are in the US, let alone how many raw milk sales. But since I have certainly never heard of any illicit commodity besides drugs that's as popular as raw milk, I made a guess. A good guess, I hope - but a guess.
But as the story got passed around (and it has been, widely), the "may be" morphed into "is" and a new fake fact was born.
It's just kind of scary that it started with me.
Labels: Chelsea Green, raw milk, Sandor Katz
Hey, Chelsea Green, adjectives matter
Chelsea Green - in general one of my favorite sites - is running a campaign right now that is making me crazy. "Meatless in May." The premise being that meat production is responsible for huge greenhouse gas emissions and we should recognize that.
But when you dig a little deeper into the website, you find out that they're talking about something else. Here's what they say: "When one takes into account the chemicals, the grain, the fossil fuels, the medications, the shipping, the storage, the packaging, and the medical aftermath associated with eating a diet full of corn-fed, industrialized meats..."
In other words, the villain here isn't red meat, it's industrially produced red meat.
If I sound defensive here, it's because I am. I am, after all, a card-carrying member of the Park Slope Food Coop, home to an astonishing number of New York's vegetarians, vegans, raw vegans, and heaven only knows what else. (I once overheard a food coop shopper telling a friend about all the foods she had given up and complaining that she still didn't feel any better. It was a long, long list, and I felt like suggesting that maybe she should try eating....)
A few years back, the Coop decided, after a considerable battle, to start selling local, grass-fed, humanely raised meat. During the debate, I was astonished at how many of the anti-meat-selling contingent seemed to have drawn all their ammunition from the entirely valid arguments against industrially raised meat, and didn't even seem to have noticed that was not what the coop was proposing to sell.
If you believe that it is morally wrong to kill animals for food, then of course you won't eat meat - in May or any other month. But if you simply want to raise consciousness about the dreadful environmental effects of industrial meat production, why don't you at least point out that there are other kinds of meat available? From animals that spend their lives as nature intended, eating the grass they were created to eat, treated with love and respect? And that the people who raise them struggle against considerable odds, and need all the help they can get from environmentally conscious consumers?
If, instead of giving up meat in May, Chelsea Green's readers were to buy only locally raised, grass-fed meat, they'd not only be doing the environment a favor. They'd also be doing the local farm economy a favor, helping their communities become more self-sustaining, helping to preserve open land and a varied landscape...the benefits go on and on.
Not all meat is the same. Adjectives matter.
Labels: Chelsea Green, grass-fed, local food, meatless in May, park slope food coop
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