Comments racje has made

Urine contains urea, a component of nitrogen fertilizers. A little bit is good for plants; a lot creates nitrogen burn. Carnivores' pee is more nitrogenous than omnivores or herbivores, so if you are vegan, your urine is more benign than a meat-eating dog.

Highly fertilized lawns are more vulnerable to nitrogen overload than unfertilized lawns.

The best place to pee outside would be your compost pile, especially if it is low in nitrogen. The composting process will even out the nitrogen content as well as destroy the odd hantavirus, and you can regulate how much you put on various parts of your garden.

Or dilute, as the above poster suggests--but then, you're probably not actually peeing outside, are you?

Putting waste matter into drinking water and flushing it away is insane. The recovery period is likely to be rocky. Meantime, avoid grossing everybody out: do as your hosts do.

I don't own a dishwasher; there is no room for one in my kitchen.

I also don't leave the water running while I'm washing dishes. I use a wash pan and a rinse pan, each with about one and a half gallons of water. I scrape the dishes, pre-rinse them if necessary, replace the pre-rinse water with clean rinse water, wash in soapy water, rinse, and air dry. This (4.5 gallons total) is enough for a day's worth of dishes.

The statistics Umbra cites come from a dishwasher manufacturer. They are biased. I don't think most people just leave the water running while they are doing the dishes. I wish Umbra would be more careful with her sources.

• Nutritional reasons for drinking milk: calcium, protein. 
• Soy milk, rice milk, help milk, almond milk are naturally low in calcium; calcium is added to many commercial brands, but if you make your own you won't be getting calcium. You can get calcium from greens, or from pills--no need to drink any white liquids. 
• Only soy milk and cow's milk have significant amounts of protein. You can get protein from many other sources. Again, no "milk" of any sort is necessary. It's just about wanting something white and familiar in the chai or on the cereal. 
• Now, does anybody have a recipe for cultured blue soy cheese? I miss blue cheese.
  

I don't like the new site.

Searches don't work--I tried one and just got broken links and comments but not articles.

Also, I don't like the colors, can't find anything. It doesn't look like grist!

Obama is a boomer, too.

I'm a boomer, and I'm delighted that Reagan is fading into the background, but, um, you've got your generations confused.

Obama is a boomer. The baby boom started in 1946 and ended in 1964. Obama was born in 1961. He's a late boomer, but definitely a boomer.

Reagan wasn't a boomer, and his support came mainly from older generations, not from boomers.

Clinton and Bush were early boomers, born the first year of the postwar baby boom.

Boomers are now aged 44 to 63. Most boomers are now in their fifties. The oldest boomers have not yet reached 65. There were no presidents from the middle years of the baby boom.

So yes, let's encourage boomer Obama to take on the suburbs and throw off the highway system built by Eisenhower in the 1950's, when boomers were little kids or not yet born. Just don't  blame the suburbs on the boomers. We didn't create Levittown and the Interstates.

Nor, I should add, did we choose to be so numerous. Our parents bred like rabbits. We didn't. While Reagan was president, the previous generation continued to breed, but boomers married late and had very low fertility rates.

Yeah, there were and are too many of us. Short of mass suicide, we did the responsible thing and left fewer descendants. Fertility in the next cohorts is higher. Perhaps the younger generation should take a lesson from the boomers in responsible self-control.

-- Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. --Ursula LeGuin

A perfect time to create green jobs

Jon, I'm with you on the use of green infrastructure creation as the way to rebuild prosperity from the bottom up.

During the Great Depression of the 1930's, Franklin D Roosevelt's administration invested in building social infrastructure. We are still using libraries, schools, roads, and (oh yes) dams built during those years, and we have murals, records of life in slavery times, songs of America's regions, and photographs of America's industrializing landscape, because the Federal government employed people to do that work.
We're about to elect a new administration that isn't totally clueless about how to build a prosperous and sustainable society from the bottom up. Soon we can start to build an environmentally responsible infrastructure: retrofitting our houses, building public transit, doing research and development on alternative energy, restoring wildlife habitat, and learning how to live in harmony with natural processes.

It's a perfect time to put people to work doing things that are worth doing, and in seventy or eighty years our descendants will thank us.

First we have to get through the next three months... without further tying up all our resources in war, Wall Street, and welfare for the wealthy. It's a challenge, but we can draw on a tradition of equality, responsibility, fairness, and community engagement. In recent years in the USA, we've slid away from our true national ideals. It's time to live them.

-- Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. --Ursula LeGuin

What about powdered wheat gluten for seitan?

I have a bag of powdered wheat gluten I bought in bulk this week. I use it to make seitan. Now I realize I don't have any idea where it comes from--is it from China? Or Sasketchewan?

So how can I find out if Chinese powdered wheat gluten, possibly contaminated with melamine, has made its way into the US human food chain?On An interview with author and nutritionist Marion Nestle posted 1 year, 2 months ago 1 Response

Celebrating interdependence

Well, we don't actually need to celebrate by blowing stuff up. We could try...

Stargazing (the moon is just a tiny new crescent, won't outshine the stars).

Trying to sing the Star Spangled Banner.

Making a flag ice cream cake, with sparklers.

Reading the Declaration of Independence.

Practicing democracy. Until we get it right.

Reading (or writing) a Declaration of Interdependence http://www.shalomctr.org/node/656 )

Practicing community with humans, beasts and flowers. Until we get that right.

Whatever sets off the fireworks in body and soul, heart and mind.

-- Love doesn't just sit there like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new. --Ursula LeGuin

Power and Weapons and War: the links

The opposition to the spread of nuclear power is not merely a question of local environmental concerns vs. global worries. Nuclear war and nuclear materials pose tangled global questions as knotty as the problem of global warming.

I'm going to ignore the global environmental hazards of the uranium cycle, questions about central vs. distributed power generation, for the moment.; somebody else can take those on.

I'm most immediately concerned about links between uranium processing for nuclear power, nuclear weapons, and war.

Here's what we know:

1. Most countries in the world want energy security. If they see other countries using a technology that seems to work, they will try to get it for themselves.
   
2. Nuclear power is attractive to a lot of nations that are becoming technologically savvy, such as Iran, Korea, and many others.
   
3. The equipment needed to enrich uranium for nuclear power is the same equipment needed to enrich uranium for nuclear weapons. You just need to run it longer to make weapons.
   
4. Therefore, the spread of nuclear power capability is going to lead to risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
   
5. Also, the spread of nuclear power capability will give nations who want to go to war a pretext for doing so, claiming nuclear weapons are being developed wherever uranium is being enriched for nuclear power. We saw that in Iraq. At the moment, since it's exactly the same equipment, we can't tell what's happening in Iran. See, for example, William J. Broad's April 29article on uranium processing in Iran.
   

Iran is slowly but steadily gaining the industrial experience needed to make reactor fuel, or, with the same equipment and a little more effort, bomb fuel.

What can we conclude from what we know?

Nuclear disarmament first. The Nonproliferation Treaty calls for global nuclear disarmament and the creation of a robust international system to monitor nuclear materials and equipment, so that the world can be sure the uranium is being used only for power generation, not for weapons.

The world will not cooperate with the monitoring system as long as the USA is not living up to its part of the agreement by getting rid of its nuclear weapons and becoming part of the monitoring system.

If we want an international system that works, we need global nuclear disarmament including the USA. We also need a much more robust international monitoring system.

Then we will need to solve the many remaining questions about the safety of the uranium cycle, including mining, transport, processing, the power plants themselves, reprocessing, and waste disposal.

Nuclear power is not a quick fix for the problem of excess carbon use. Nor are the concerns merely local. On Projected nuke-power renaissance spurs U.S. uranium-mining bonanza posted 1 year, 6 months ago 11 Responses

Just make it on the salad

If you do what my mother did, you don't need an emulsifier.

Put two spoons of oil in the salad bowl, with the salad, and toss until every thing is very lightly coated with an exquisitely thin shimmer of oil. (If the coat is too thick, try a smaller spoon next time.) Then add one spoon of vinegar or lemon, salt and pepper, and toss again. The oil keeps the salt from wilting the greens...

You can of course gussy it up by soaking fresh herbs in the vinegar, but really the fresh vegetables are wonderfully awakened by the smooth oil and tart vinegar. Nothing more is needed.On Here's a dressing that passes muster without cutting the mustard posted 1 year, 7 months ago 3 Responses

Just Maui'd

Dear Umbra,

I think you are missed some of the point when you gave the advice on a "carbon-neutral wedding."  Perhaps the couple who asked you for advice had already booked the space, paid the deposit, printed the invitations, and otherwise irrevocably committed themselves to flying themselves and forty guests from San Diego to Kuai to tie the knot. In that case, it was kind to offer them the option of feeling better about the global warming and other environmental damage their wedding is causing, by paying some money to plant some trees. Some trees are better than no trees, after all.

However, for anyone who is planning a wedding and still has time to make responsible choices,  if you look a little more deeply at the first web site Umbra referred to, Flying Off to a Warmer Climate?,  you will find a FAQ that addresses carbon offsets. It isn't as cheerful as an Earth-loving  couple might hope.

Can't I just pay somebody to plant some trees to soak up the CO2 emissions from my flight?

There are many such "carbon offset" schemes, but the accounting of how much carbon is actually taken up by the trees is very unreliable. In many cases companies are just taking your money and doing what they were going to do anyway -so it doesn't help the climate.
Trees take a long time -several decades - to grow to maturity. During this time the CO2 emissions from your flight are still warming the atmosphere, and much of this heat will remain for hundreds of years in the oceans.
In some locations (especially peatlands) planting trees can cause net emissions of CO2 to the atmosphere, because they dry out the soil and allow microorganisms to oxidise it.
As a carbon storage, trees are not a long-term substitute for fossil fuel under the rocks. They may be decomposed by microorganisms, or burn in forest fires as the climate gets warmer and drier, in both cases returning the CO2 to the atmosphere.
And finally, remember the CO2 contributes only about a third to the total greenhouse warming effect from aircraft emissions....

the air travel industry is now growing by 7% each year and is by far the fastest growing source of greenhouse gases. ...

Most importantly, you need to remember that only a very small fraction of the world's population currently enjoys the luxury of air travel. Many more people aspire to the lifestyle of the "rich world", but the atmosphere could not bear the burden of everybody living such a lifestyle. To achieve a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, we will have to distribute emissions quotas more equitably, and people in the "rich world" have to change their lifestyle to set an example.

To which I would add the environmental destruction involved in drilling for oil, building and using pipelines or shipping it in tankers, and refining it, not to mention the oil wars engendered by endless use.

It seems pretty silly, after expending all that fuel and warming the climate by flying to Hawaii, to worry about the tiny relative amount of fuel they might save by car-pooling in Maui.

Each person would have to drive about 5000 miles  on Kuai to burn as much fuel as he or she expended on the flight. Kuai is a fairly small island... they'd get dizzy driving around in circles... Better first to reduce the environmental destruction involved in getting everyone vicinity the wedding, and then think about the on-site choices about food, local transportation, and so on.

We tend not to think about air flight damage. It happens so fast, many of the emissions are invisible, and the airplanes don't have rear view mirrors!

A truly "green" wedding would be a lasting gift of joy and love to each other, a shining example to all who aspire to a really good life, and the beginning of a legacy of environmental health and justice for their children and all the living beings to come.

Maybe they could charter a sailing ship to get to Hawaii?

True love,

RachelOn Umbra on green weddings posted 4 years, 4 months ago 7 Responses