Comments etorbert has made

  • Let's package all our guilt into one movement

    Just in case the occasional drive to the mountains didn't make you feel guilty enough, let's try to put weight loss and finding time for people into the same movement. And then take that guilt, and do what with it? Shop! This pretty much sums up what I think is wrong with the environmental movement ... we all take our guilt and try to deal with it on an individual basis. This is perfect for a consumer society, because you can only think, what could I buy or do differently?

    Instead, why don't we work together to make our voices heard? Our values and interests are being overlooked, our tax dollars are being spent on wars instead of public transportation. Buying the newest diet craze won't help you change that, but forming a social movement like the Civil rights movement might.  On Adam Werbach follows up 'Death of Environmentalism' with 'Birth of Blue' posted 1 year, 7 months ago 46 Responses

  • Food transportation

    Food miles are rapidly becoming more complicated concept than a straight "as the crow flies" distance from the farm to your plate. While food in the conventional system often comes from further distances, the Economist article points out that the trucks are often packed efficiently ... more efficiently at least than a small pickup bringing 400 pounds of produce to a farmer's market. I have been undertaking a small study in my region and the preliminary data shows that the carbon imprint of both systems (per pound of food) is roughly equivalent. Mr. Philpott suggests that we use rail transportation on regional scale and I heartily agree that rail transportation would reduce the carbon imprint of our food. While we are all advocating and buying the tiny fraction of food that comes to us on trains, though, we have two sad choices: food trucked efficiently in semis, or small amounts of food trucked in a haphazard way to our local farmer's markets. Perhaps a temporary solution could be to organize the trucking of local food through farmer coops? Perhaps by making the distribution more centrally organized, we could have both efficiently transported and locally grown food. On If buying locally isn't the answer, then what is? posted 2 years, 3 months ago 28 Responses