Comments Bobbi Katsanis has made
and thank you
Thank you jratz for your perceptive response. From the posts here (and my perception of blog comments in general) I get the sense that many posters didn't even read the Times article (simplistic as IT is) before they started throwing tomatoes at Waters and Pollan. And you're right, most people - even enviros, but especially "lifestyle" journalists - don't seem to understand food issues.
The point Waters and Pollan were trying to make - AND THEY'RE RIGHT ON - is that the McDonald's and microwave food culture is predicated on an endless supply of cheap oil, as it takes oceans of the stuff to grow and transport the raw materials of Big Macs all over the planet. As the world seems to have noticed, oil is a fossil fuel and will not last forever. Thus, any market system predicated on the falsehood of its endless supply will ultimately collapse.
Local food, however, mostly doesn't depend on petrochemicals. So what is happening is that your in-season, locally-grown produce (including, not just fruits and veggies, but dairy products, honey, meats and fish, and here in Berkeley, brown rice) lately has a more stable price than comparable items trucked from Chile to the supermarket. This point WAS made in the Times article, but Philpott et al. chose to overlook it.
People, you cannot hear this often or loudly enough: READ THE ORIGINAL MATERIAL BEFORE YOU COMMENT. Sometimes even that's not too great so you have to learn to think critically. Our mental environment seems to me just as threatened as our natural one. FIGHT GLOBAL DUMBING. On Why Michael Pollan and Alice Waters should quit celebrating food-price hikes posted 1 year, 7 months ago 27 Responses
Bananas are *tropical*....
Dear friends of the earth - don't forget that bananas are a tropical species and therefore can be grown nowhere in the mainland U.S. Therefore, even if you buy organic, large amounts of fossil fuels have to be burned and emitted to transport bananas to you. Our household has decided that the earth cannot afford Americans continuing this kind of high-traffic food lifestyle, even if the fruits and veggies are grown as ecologically sensitively as possible, so bananas for us are a rare treat. We live in northern California, and it's early March, so right now we are eating locally-grown organic oranges and storage apples.
I know that there have been studies (or at least one) indicating that locally-grown doesn't always win the prize - but I have yet to locate a detailed description of what was measured with these studies. It's like the British nappy study which found that cloth & disposable come out about even. Well, friends, that study was descriptive not prescriptive, and so measured the ecological footprint of the way people use cloth diapers - washed in a nearly-empty washing machine on HOT and dried in the dryer. I haven't been able to get hold of the details of that study either, but I suspect that it did not take fully into account the fact that a cloth diaper's useful life is somewhere passing 30+ years (my mother's still using mine to dust furniture) and they DON'T end up in a landfill.
The point is that if we environmentalists make use of these studies to endorse certain ecological bad habits without checking the specifics... well, that's just bad karma. On Umbra on organic bananas posted 1 year, 9 months ago 22 Responses
Blueberries? In September???
Hey, Roz,
Are you still getting fresh local blueberries in September? 'Cause the blueberry season in northern California ended months ago. Hope you're not importing those (spendy eco-miles) from someplace far away just because blueberries = summer. (So do tomatoes, melons, and corn on the cob, and we've still got plenty of those.)On As the season fades, it's time for one last blueberry blowout posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses
Food Miles
The "efficiently packed trucks" argument is specious. When I lived in Seattle, I had a choice between veggies from a CSA in the Green River Valley (30 miles from my house) and veggies from southern California (1300 miles from my house). Even if the SoCal trucks carry four times as much produce as my CSA, the CSA could make ten times as many trips and still come out ahead. That's even before taking into account the fact that SoCal produce relies extensively on heavy use of pesticides (which have to be trucked from somewhere), fertilizers (ditto), and shockingly energy-intensive irrigation, while much of the produce at my CSA is hand-cultivated and relies on Pacific Northwest rainfall, fertilized by compost from the farm itself, and with no chemical inputs whatsoever.
And Seattle is a lot closer to southern California than the East Coast is, so the number of trips possible to make local still the best choice increases by an order of magnitude. And there's no point in comparing the car trips made by individual consumers to the supermarket versus the farmers' market unless the nearest farmers' market is in the next county. Anyplace I've ever lived (Seattle, Minneapolis, Berkeley) the farmers' market is usually closer, or at least equidistant.
Here in Berkeley, I walk to the farmers' market, and the trucks from the farms are on average half the size of a semi-trailer. SoCal tomatoes are still 500 miles away, but my friend Efren's are only 65 miles away. This is not differential calculus. On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 28 Responses
City-Slickers please be quiet and listen to farmer
Dear friends,
I grew up on a very small farm in North Dakota. A relative and member of the community hung himself from the beams of his barn when he could not make his mortgage payments. That was during the recession of the 1980s, when bad weather and worse prices (and horrible farm policies: Earl Butz's "get big or get out") were forcing family farmers from the land in droves.
Why should we care about small family farmers? Why are they "different" from other professions? Why should the government subsidize them to keep them in business (in a way that does NOT send taxpayer money to Cargill et al.)?
- Farmers grow our FOOD. Food doesn't come from the supermarket. However, we need it to live. OK, that's an obvious point.
- What is special about small family farmers is not their personalities, vocations, or any such thing. It's their knowledge. Every small farmer that has intimately worked the land for generations has a knowledge of that land, its climate variations, soil fertility, and needs, knowledge that is lost forever every time a farmer has to leave his or her "vocation" and go work for minimum wage in the nearest city. This is such a big problem that farmers in the eastern part of the country are now begging the Amish to come and give workshops about how to farm, because nobody else still knows all the secrets.
- Small farmers are a BIG part of the environmental and global warming solution. If Congress were to offer supports to struggling farmers below a certain income, acreage, and carrying a certain amount of debt (leaving out Cargill et al.), they could target supports for farmers who are using organic methods (not necessarily certified, that's another story) and selling their wares locally. The ecological footprint of most Americans is biggest when it comes to FOOD, not transportation, as southern California trucks (the transportation $$$ can be written off) produce all over the country. Every state should be largely responsible for growing its own food and we should not be importing fruits and vegetables from other countries. Locally-grown is environmentally much saner, more nutritious, tastier, and supports sustainable local economies. These are things we WANT, people.
- Small farmers do not enjoy the same legal contracts in their trade agreements as other industries. Example: an organic produce cooperative in Appalachia made an agreement with local supermarkets to supply their tomatoes for the year. When harvest time came, the supermarkets had discovered that they could get California tomatoes cheaper (see transportation write-off, above) and reneged on the agreement. The farmers had NO LEGAL RECOURSE and tons of tomatoes went to rot, and all their $$ inputs wasted. Can you sue your employer if they fail to pay you what was agreed on for work you had already done? Yup. But small farmers can't.
- Farmers grow our FOOD. Food doesn't come from the supermarket. However, we need it to live. OK, that's an obvious point.
A view from the Bay
Certainly it is the vendors' prerogative to be offended by anything they choose. In this case, though, context is everything, and the Ferry Plaza market is held in front of the backdrop of a smallish indoor shopping plaza, in a location that is prime for tourists but not convenient to most city dwellers, where the choices range toward expensive olive oils, gourmet cheeses, chocolates, breads, and so forth. Also, the Bay Area is among the two or three most expensive places to live in the nation; that's as true for farmers as it is for anyone else, and they have to charge enough to live and keep farming on, and most of the "local" farms are at least an hour's drive from the city, if not more. (San Francisco is on a densely populated peninsula.) With Ghirardelli chocolate and the world's best sourdough bread, we have more than our fair share of "foodies," too.
I can understand why someone from another country would be shocked at the prices at Bay Area markets, and especially the Ferry Plaza market. I recently brought a Congolese friend to one of the Berkeley markets (mainly because he didn't believe there were farmers in the US who practiced hand cultivation, and I wanted him to meet some), and he remarked that what he paid for two leeks there ($2 a pound) could buy a bushel back home.
All of this is a way of getting round to saying that in my view, locally grown food is affordable, but not cheap. Locally grown does not externalize costs to the environment and human health the way big-box grocery retailers and their suppliers do, so often pound-for-pound, specific items can be more expensive - but not always. Supporters of locally grown understand that they are supporting sustainable farming practices, local economies, and the health of the planet and their own bodies, and are willing to pay more for it. It's a form of preventive health maintenance, both for the planet and ourselves.
It is also the case that millions of dollars of food stamps are redeemed at farmers' markets across the nation each year, so it's simply not true that the poor do not have access to locally grown organic food. However, people who are used to processed food products, who lack the time and inclination to cook from fresh ingredients, or who have trouble understanding that there is not any way to do straight cost-comparision between the farmers' market and Safeway, are going to need some help getting on board with locally grown. America does not have a tradition of good food the way Italy does, and it is true that our poor often eat shockingly badly. Understanding and finding ways to address class issues within the various aspects of the environmental movement is a crucial challenge for all of us within that movement. On Ruminations on food, class, and Carlo Petrini posted 2 years, 5 months ago 17 Responses
Carbs are Bad! Send in the Troops!
Lily is absolutely right. This is one of the many reasons I don't watch television, because the fear tactics of the "newsmagazines" waver between insulting and ridiculous. I call them the "what you don't know about your toothpaste might kill you!" programs.
Because our schools do not teach young people critical thinking skills, the majority of U.S. citizens are vulnerable to this kind of emotional pressure (think of the myriad ways in which 9/11 has been manipulated).
Sooner or later, a not-very-well-informed person (one of my brothers fits this description; he has a high-school education) quits listening to any of it, considers it all "junk science," and has no way of evaluating any of the information about food and health coming their way, shrugs their shoulders and eats whatever they want (which they are programmed to want by TV advertising). I bet if you mapped education levels and obesity rates, you would find an incredible overlap.
It's not a conspiracy, exactly (although many of the patterns of food-processing ownership of Cargill et al., called "vertical integration" in the industry) are incredibly predatory and strategic, designed to screw everyone from small farmers to consumers. Oh, excuse me, for "screw" read "make a HEALTHY profit for shareholders." It isn't healthy for anybody else--not your body, not the land, not the small farmers. On On the peculiar American habit of demonizing food posted 2 years, 6 months ago 22 Responses
Kudos to Alisa & James...
They're not alone. I would commend to you Coming Home to Eat by Gary Paul Nabhan (NY: Norton, 2002), who spent a year eating local foods from an even smaller radius in the Arizona desert, and limited himself to food items that are native to Arizona. Or This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow (Chelsea Green, 2001), who grows close to 100% of her own produce in upstate New York, and no, she doesn't live in the country, but in town. Novelist Barbara Kingsolver and her family just came out with a new book about eating locally and being as self-sufficient foodwise as possible (they make their own pasta, cheese, and yogurt). The message we need to carry away from all these inspiring stories is it's really not that hard. Like every other kind of sustainable choice, if we each did as much as we can (and revise that upward periodically), the changes could be very dramatic, in our lives, those of our communities, and for the planet. On Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon chew the fat on their 100-mile diet posted 2 years, 7 months ago 13 Responses
Think small - very very small
When my husband-to-be commented that planning a wedding seemed almost like planning the invasion of Normandy, we decided to think small. Our people are scattered all over the country, but it occurred to us that nearly all of them are people of some sort of faith, so rather than invite them to the physical wedding, we sent out (recycled paper) announcements ahead of time asking everyone to hold us in prayer at the time of our wedding. Because we had added a "vow of simplicity" to our vows to one another, we also asked our friends and family to make a donation to PCC Farmland Fund (or the charity of their choice) in lieu of gifts, which was a beautiful act of community that brought people together in generous outwardly focused ways and that has blessed us tremendously. There were exactly seven people at the actual wedding: best man and his spouse, matron of honor and hers, the minister, and us. We picked up an organic fair trade chocolate cake and a bottle of organic champagne at the PCC on the way over, I asked my groom to pick out a dress from those I already owned, and it was lovely and largely stress-free (an added bonus). Only one person was a trifle put out at not being physically there. (PCC = Puget Consumers Co-op) On Umbra on greening your wedding posted 2 years, 8 months ago 11 Responses
Local Food -Yes!
I was thinking as I read this article that it points the way toward the next "revolution" in cookbook writing and food: local food. Many Americans may be starting to appreciate how good food can be in terms of flavor and variety, but most of us still don't realize that fruits and vegetables have local seasons where they are much better than the rest of the year. We don't understand that our food accounts for more fossil fuel burning than our cars. I'm putting together a cookbook that will help cooks make use of farmers' markets, CSAs, and other venues for locally grown produce, to enjoy and savor those tomatoes in August and September and WAIT FOR THEM the rest of the year. (Parsnips are coming up in April, and I'm excited; just finished a Brussels sprout run that was most satisfying.) I'm thoroughly convinced that anybody who doesn't like tomatoes has just never had a locally grown one in season.On How a cookbook renaissance heated up the sustainable-food movement posted 2 years, 9 months ago 18 Responses
The REAL costs of conventionally grown food
First of all, a word to FarmerJon. When you have more beans than anyone wants to eat (and winter coming soon), go to Google, or a keyword search at your local library, and type in the following words: "canning," "freezing," and "drying." This is not rocket science.
With regard to the actual topic at hand, it seems that the conventional-food industry is staging a stealth attack through more intellectual media on the benefits of organic food. In the past 36 hours on NPR, I have heard not one but two analyses of organic food, both of which offered a disingenuous comparison of the nutrient value of conventional and organically grown produce. On Sunday evening's Market Reports, and last evening's broadcast from the BBC World Service, analysts discussed the comparative nutrient content of the two methods, and concluded that there was not much difference. The Economist seems to be trying to make a similar argument.
I say "disingenuous" because the comparison of nutrient value is a complete straw man. The chief concern of those of us who choose to pay the additional cost of organic food is not nutrients, it is toxins. Simply put, conventionally grown food is sprayed with a variety of poisons during the growing cycle, and organic food is not. Those poisons are in many cases impossible for the consumer to completely eradicate, even with thorough washing and cooking, and they have been linked to a variety of cancers, as well as having measurable negative impacts on the neurological development of growing children.
And the health aspects of choosing organic do not exhaust the benefits of that choice. The environment is also negatively impacted by pesticides, which indiscriminately affect non-target species such as monarch butterflies in addition to the intended pests. Pesticide use is also a component of an intensive system of agriculture that depletes the soil of its fertility and requires ever-larger chemical inputs to sustain profitable harvest levels.
When it is practiced as part of a system of smallholder-operated, locally-produced food, organic food is superior in terms of its economic impacts as well. When third-world farmers purchase genetically engineered or hybrid seed from Monsanto or Cargill, for instance, they often are unable to afford the chemical inputs required to support the crops, and are sent into a downward spiral of debt. This indebtedness also erodes biodiversity and food security, as hardy landraces are abandoned in favor of so-called "miracle" crops.
In short, organic produce is in many ways healthier than conventional: it is safer for the human body, and healthier for the environment and for local economies as well. Conventionally-grown produce is only "profitable" insofar as it is able to externalize the costs of depleting the environment, local economies, and human health.
If you think it's not worth it to pay a little extra for "ethical" food, ask if you'd rather pay for cancer treatment thirty years down the road. Or participate in food riots when conventional agriculture has depleted large tracts of land of their fertility and water availability. The produce at Wal-Mart might be cheaper right now, but their supply lines are NOT SUSTAINABLE, particularly not in a world that is already facing the damage of climate change and political fallout from increasing scarcity of fossil fuel. My investment in organic locally grown produce is an investment in the future of my own health, my children's and grandchildren's, and the planet itself. On Why The Economist's recent assault on "ethical food" missed the mark posted 2 years, 10 months ago 16 Responses
Better Food, Better Health, Better Planet
It's always seemed to me that ecology, health, and gastronomic enjoyment went hand in hand, long before I moved to an apartment just down the road from Chez Panisse. My mother had an enormous vegetable garden, cooked all of our meals at home, and took an interest in learning new recipes and adding a certain amount of culinary flair. Even on the many occasions when my family, farming a small acreage in North Dakota in the 1980s, was flat broke, we ate very, very well.
This is how I've come to understand food: it should be made at home, by hand, and shared with loved ones, and it should be grown locally and organically. Even as a busy graduate student, I still take the time to make a home-cooked meal almost every day. It's resting and reviving for my mind and body and a way to enjoyably spend time with my husband. We don't eat at restaurants much, and it's less an issue of money than that I can usually cook better. We buy our produce at the local farmers' market and only eat what's available in season. It is so worth it to wait until the end of July for that first tomato. Our bodies are healthier, the planet is healthier, and our marriage is healthier. Everybody wins.On Why everyone should be allowed to love food with unrestrained glee posted 3 years ago 3 Responses
Biofuels
Biofuels are a separate topic. We absolutely cannot afford to grow our way out of the energy crisis. The land is needed for food. But biofuels can be "harvested" from used restaurant cooking oil, for instance, tons of which are thrown out every day. Will this be sufficient to meet our transportation needs? Of course not. We are going to have to cut back drastically, which includes, as this article points out, eliminating our reliance on foods hauled long distances from the field to our table. In fact, food transportation uses dramatically more fossil fuel than personal transport.On Can industrial agriculture withstand climate change? posted 3 years, 1 month ago 11 Responses
GMOs are not the answer
Why not? Because nature can handle changes better than humans can. In places where farmers save seed, a field represents a certain amount of natural diversity. Within it, there are genes to deal with almost any eventuality, including drought, heat, heavy rains, etc., any of those genese might have a chance to shine if certain conditions prevail. A genetically engineered crop is just the opposite: every plant in the field is identical; there is no storehouse of possibilities. In fact, when crops created by technology fail, it is inevitably back to the diversity of landraces that we must turn. Monoculture forces out diversity and makes our chances for survival slimmer. On Can industrial agriculture withstand climate change? posted 3 years, 1 month ago 11 Responses
What kind of E. coli? Where does it come from?
Bart is right: I believe that the E. coli outbreak from Salinas Valley spinach can be traced back to agricultural runoff from feedlots where grain-fed cattle are "finished."
We need to be clear about what kind of E. coli we are talking about, because there are many, some of which live happily in human and bovine guts all our lives without causing us a single unhappy thought.
The one to watch out for is E. coli 0157:H7. This type of E. coli only occurs in the guts of cows who have been fed grain. Strictly pasture-fed animals never have it.
So: grain-fed cattle operations near water supplies which irrigate spinach. That's your culprit. As much as Monsanto would like you to believe that organic food is dangerous, the truth is that large-scale industrial farming is what's dangerous: to the environment as well as to human health.
(Posting from Central Valley, California, and eating Blue Heron Farms organic spinach from the Berkeley farmers' market)On Latest E. coli outbreak should prompt rethink of industrial agriculture posted 3 years, 2 months ago 8 Responses
Consumer culture
Thank you, Virginia, for bringing up the excellent Affluenza. Elizabeth Chin's piece is not polemic; she is not judging either the rich or the poor--merely offering a theoretical model for understanding differences in their choices and behavior, which is sorely lacking. Consumerism is so ingrained that we respond to overconsumerism by CONSUMING THINGS--like the ridiculous, 300+ page Real Simple magazine.
One solution to overconsumerism is very, very simple: turn off your television. Like the poster above who couldn't fathom why she had so many clothes and books, TV--both commercials and programs--has an insidious way of making us want things we don't need, making us feel inadequate for not possessing the latest car/deodorant/beer/toothpaste. Madison Ave execs don't pull down six figures for nothing--they are very, very good at their jobs, and most of us, especially children, do not have the defenses or critical analysis skills to make us as immune to this assault as we might think. Try turning off your TV and see if you don't start worrying less about what you don't have. On Wealthy strive for posted 3 years, 9 months ago 18 Responses
Just plain wrong
A couple of things to lift up that have been somewhat glossed over in other posts:
Even if all of us did our big box shopping in fuel-saving, once-a-month increments, big box retailers would STILL be bad for the environment in terms of transportation because the supply lines are so long. Tomatoes from Chile or (in season) an organic grower in your county? Clothing from China or a manufacturer in your own state? The ten or fifteen miles of driving I might save by doing all my shopping at Wal-Mart pales in the face of the 4,000-mile trip everything in the store made to get there.
Second, people "seem to prefer" working in overseas sweatshops to self- and community-sustaining agriculture? That's why people work in sweatshops? There are so many things wrong with this assertion I don't even know where to start. Please, Mr. Akst, do some reading about global economics and the way rich countries and their corporations have stolen land, water, and resources from what used to be sustainable local economies all over the world before you make such a wide-eyed, naive assertion. And please, Grist, don't let Akst publish another single thing until he demonstrates that he's read at least five books about the realities of global economics. Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano (a classic) would be a great place to start. Confessions of an Economic Hit Man by John Perkins would be a good supplement. After that, make him do his own research.On Could chain stores actually be good for the environment? posted 4 years ago 19 Responses
What else helps?
No, no, no, no, no on so-called choice as the answer to sprawl! Doesn't the author notice that the children will have to be transported to the "good schools" in the suburbs? UNNECESSARY TRANSPORTATION UNNECESSARILY POLLUTES THE ATMOSPHERE.
Why do inner-city schools do such a bad job? Some of the answers have been touched on, but not the most important ones. Money helps, but parental involvement helps more. Schools can be successful even if they're poor if they can manage to maintain a high level of parental involvement.
An even more important point is that inner-city schools have exponentially more obstacles to successful education than wealthy suburban ones. Teachers are trying to educate populations of kids that include homeless kids, kids who speak English as a second language, kids who aren't getting enough to eat, kids whose parents are abusive, addicted, and/or absent, etc. I believe that school funding should absolutely be de-linked from property values, because right now the schools that need the most money (because they must handle the most difficult problems) get the least. Allowing parents "choice" will only exacerbate the problem.
Schools need to be smaller (500 in a high school, max), filled with teachers who are motivated and energetic (read: paid enough), racially and economically diverse, and given the resources to address the problems their students bring in the door. There COULD be a good school in every neighborhood, but we've never really applied ourselves to the strategies that might make it happen. Schooling kids is expensive and it will never turn a profit; our capitalist-obsessed nation needs to face that fact. But doing it right is always worth it.
It sounds like the author mainly wants to justify his desire to bus his kids out. There are lots of self-justifying arguments that so-called environmentalist parents come up with because they're not willing to do the work of being real environmentalists. These are the same folks who want to believe that Pampers are as environmentally friendly as cloth diapers, mainly because they're too lazy to mess with cloth diapers. On School choice could be an answer to sprawl posted 4 years, 1 month ago 24 Responses
I am not a chump anymore. I don't think.
For cleaning products, as our dear Umbra has indicated, if you've got a gallon jug of white vinegar and a 4-pound box of baking soda, you can clean anything. You can also open a drain: one cup baking soda, followed by one cup vinegar (bubbles! woo-hoo!) followed by boiling water. For more cleaning recipes, look for Epstein & Klein's Substituting Ingredients (The Globe Pequot Press). May be out of print; buy used!
For food, buy local buy local buy local. Learn to cook. Better yet, learn to garden. Learn to love your farmer's market. If organic food travels more than 25 miles from cropland to table, the transportation pollution outweighs the pesticide pollution on conventionally grown.
You can also make your own cosmetics with locally grown inexpensive ingredients (people who buy $10 organic herbal shampoo are REALLY chumps--it's mostly water, which the shampoo companies are allowed to count as an "organic" ingredient). Recipes in Jeanne Rose's Herbal Body Book.
We CAN be enviros without being chumps. Si se puede!On When it comes to green products, who's zoomin' who? posted 4 years, 4 months ago 14 Responses
Headlines
A more responsible headline for this story might have read "Study Shows Parents Must Wash Cloth Nappies Responsibly to Achieve Environmental Impact." As it is, millions of parents are going to bed thinking, "Well, that's all right then," and merrily continuing to cast 10,000 disposable diapers per child--some filled with hazardous waste--into landfills. Those of a more mean-spirited cast are going to bed thinking, "Ha, those environmentalist wackos are wrong about this, too."
And they say the media has a liberal bias!On A new study on diapers finds no difference between cloth and paper posted 4 years, 6 months ago 8 Responses
A bum rap, indeed
The study is, unfortunately, flawed. Disposables and cloth are NOT equal. Here's why:
- The study compared the resources used to make disposables and cloth diapers, without weighting the results to account for the fact that disposables are used once (400,000 tons of landfill in the UK alone is a LOT, people, and it's hazardous waste, too) and cloth diapers can be used almost forever (my best friend's mom still uses hers, 35 years old and counting, to dust furniture).
- The study also gave equal weight to production, disposal and maintenance variables that are controlled by the producer and by the user. If all parents using cloth diapers only ever washed the diapers in cold water with a full washer, POOF! there's no comparison in environmental impact.
- The study compared the resources used to make disposables and cloth diapers, without weighting the results to account for the fact that disposables are used once (400,000 tons of landfill in the UK alone is a LOT, people, and it's hazardous waste, too) and cloth diapers can be used almost forever (my best friend's mom still uses hers, 35 years old and counting, to dust furniture).
Like a spastic...
I use plastic bags. New ones. The zip- and non-zip-close sandwich size, mostly. And I don't wash and reuse them (they just never seem clean enough to put food in again, especially after holding part of a cut onion or a hunk of cheese--I like extra sharp cheddar). And just as the flower lady could grow her own or buy organic (or at least local) and the paper lady could use the backs of envelopes and letters in her recycling bin, I'm sure there is a reasonable eco-friendly path beyond my plastic baggage. I'm just not ready for it. As St. Augustine prayed, "Lord, make me chaste--but not just yet."On What's your secret eco-sin? posted 4 years, 7 months ago 84 Responses
Like a spastic...
I use plastic bags. New ones. The zip- and non-zip-close sandwich size, mostly. And I don't wash and reuse them (they just never seem clean enough to put food in again, especially after holding part of a cut onion or a hunk of cheese--I like extra sharp cheddar). And just as the flower lady could grow her own or buy organic (or at least local) and the paper lady could use the backs of envelopes and letters in her recycling bin, I'm sure there is a reasonable eco-friendly path beyond my plastic baggage. I'm just not ready for it. As St. Augustine prayed, "Lord, make me chaste--but not just yet."On So tell us ... what's your dirty little environmental secret? posted 4 years, 7 months ago 84 Responses
More eco-sci-fi
If you liked all of those, you might also really like The Fifth Sacred Thing and Walking to Mercury by Starhawk, as well as Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy. Enjoy!On Umbra on getting up to speed on enviro issues posted 4 years, 8 months ago 28 Responses
The One Book Every Environmentalist Should Read
E.F. Schumacher's Small Is Beautiful. I would recommend this as a baseline, if you don't read anything else about environmentalism, read this.
Also: Anything by Terry Tempest Williams (Refuge; Red; etc.). Lester R. Brown of Worldwatch Institute's Plan B is good (if depressing). Al Gore's Earth in the Balance is better than you might expect.
I have a particular passion for environmental issues relating to agriculture, and so would further recommend Vandana Shiva's Stolen Harvest; Wes Jackson of The Land Institute's Becoming Native to this Place; and Shattering by Cary Fowler et al.
Finally, John Muir's Mountains of California--by the man whose philosophy started the Sierra Club--is worth owning a copy of, as well.
Happy reading!On Umbra on getting up to speed on enviro issues posted 4 years, 8 months ago 28 Responses
What do non-enviros think???
Why don't we ask some? My dad and stepmom both profess to hate environmentalists. But when I ask them for clarification on that, it turns out they LIKE clean water, clean air, healthy soil (they live in farm country), healthy wildlife populations, etc. What they actually hate is PETA, which did an anti-meat demonstration at the North Dakota state capitol building. They hate Karl and Deborah Popper, who have proposed turning all of North Dakota into a buffalo commons (which means getting rid of the people). So when I explained that a farmer who keeps his soil healthy (preferably without chemical fertilizers and pesticides) is an environmentalist; that Ducks Unlimited and Trout Unlimited are environmentalist organizations (they work to protect habitat) and so forth, suddenly they weren't so down on environmentalists. They just didn't know what they were, except for what Lying Limbaugh had told them. (My stepmom even works for a company that does environmental surveys of brownfields to estimate how, and how much it will cost, to clean it up. But she doesn't like environmentalists. Go figure.)On Elevator Pitch Contest winner posted 4 years, 8 months ago 4 Responses
Environmentalism
Healthy food, clean air and water, healthy ecosystems, and a sustainable relationship between human beings and their environment. A world where the needs of all living things are met.On An elevator pitch for environmentalism posted 4 years, 10 months ago 154 Responses