Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Next month, at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the wealthy nations that produce most of the excess carbon in our atmosphere will almost certainly fail to embrace measures adequate to ward off the devastation of our planet by heat and chaotic weather. Their leaders will probably promise us teaspoons with which to put out the firestorm and insist that springing for fire hoses would be far too onerous a burden for business to bear. They have already backed off from any binding deals at this global summit.  There will be a lot of wrangling about who should cut what when, and how, with a lot of nations claiming that they would act if others would act first.  Activists -- farmers, environmentalists, island-dwellers -- around the world will try to write a different future, a bolder one, and if anniversaries are an omen, then they have history on their side.

A decade ago, and a decade before that, popular power turned the tide of history. Nov. 30, 1999, was the day that activists shut down a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Seattle and started to chart another course for the planet than the one that corporations and their servant nation-states had presumed they’d execute without impediment. Since then, events have strayed increasingly far from the WTO’s road map for global domination and the financial scenarios that captains of industry once liked to entertain.

Until that day when tens of thousands of protestors poured into the streets of Seattle (as well as other cities from Winnipeg to Athens, Limerick to Seoul), the might of the corporations made their agenda seem nothing short of inevitable -- and then, suddenly, it wasn’t.  Disrupted by demonstrators outside its door and, on the inside, by dissent from poor nations galvanized by the ruckus, the meeting collapsed in confusion. Today, the WTO is puny compared to its ambitions only a decade ago.

The Berlin WallThe mass civil disobedience in the streets was, in a way, an answer to another landmark day a decade earlier:  Nov. 9, 1989, when the Berlin Wall fell and tens of thousands of Germans swarmed across the forbidden zone splitting their once and future capital city to celebrate, and eventually to reunite their nation.  The fall of the Wall is now often remembered as if the gracious acquiescence of officialdom brought it about.  It was not so.

“I announced the wall would open, but it was only the pressure by the people that made it possible” said Günter Schabowski, then-East German Communist Party central committee spokesperson, earlier this year. Had those East Germans not shown up and overwhelmed the guards at the Wall, nothing would have changed that night. In fact, popular will toppled several regimes that season.  Thanks to creative civil-society organizing, steadfastness, astonishing courage, and imagination, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Hungary also slipped out of the Soviet bloc and so out of a version of communism tantamount to totalitarianism as well.

There was a lot of triumphalism in the West thereafter.  From the White House to business magazines and newspapers came a drumbeat of pronouncements that communism had failed and capitalism had triumphed.  As it happened, those weren’t the binaries at stake in the astonishing uprisings that season in Eastern Europe, or in the failed uprising in Tiananmen Square in the Chinese capital Beijing that spring. People certainly wanted freedom, but it wasn’t the freedom to trade mysterious debt instruments and buy Double Whoppers, exactly. Nor was it capitalism, but civil society, very nearly its antithesis, that had risen up and brought down the Wall. The real binary then was: civil society versus top-down authoritarianism -- and framed that way, our situation didn’t look quite as good as Washington and the media then made out. 

Nevertheless, for a decade afterward, it wasn’t that easy to argue with the logic of capitalism’s triumph, since even China was making a beeline for a market economy and, in the process, doing an especially good job of proving that capitalism and democracy were separate phenomena. It was also the decade of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first of a series of broad international treaties meant to secure the terms of corporate power for a long time to come.  Its implementation on January 1, 1994, prompted the Zapatistas, the indigenous peasants of southern Mexico’s jungle, to rise up against the treaty, which promised -- and has now delivered -- a grim new chapter in the deprivation and dispossession of Mexico’s majority. Like the fall of the Berlin Wall, the rise of the Zapatistas came as a great shock.

The sucking sound and the turning tide

Few remember how dissent against NAFTA was dismissed and even mocked in the era when the treaty was debated, signed, and ratified. In his debate with Bill Clinton and the elder George Bush during the 1992 presidential campaign, Ross Perot was ignored when he said, “We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.”  He was ridiculed for describing the “giant sucking sound” of those jobs heading south. Which, of course, they did -- and then on to China in a financial “race to the bottom,” while cheap corn raised by Midwestern agribusiness also went south where it bankrupted Mexico’s small farmers.

Cheap food, cheap labor, cheap products turned out to be very, very expensive for the majority of us. It’s a sign of how much things have changed that Hillary Clinton felt compelled to lie in last year’s presidential campaign, claiming she had long been against NAFTA. In that, she was just a weathervane for changing times.  After all, in the decade since Seattle, most of South America liberated itself not just from a legacy of American-supported dictators and death squads, but from the economic programs those instruments existed to enforce.

Venezuela lent Argentina enough money to pay off its debts to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that earlier instrument for imposing free-market ideology and corporate profit. Various other countries did the same, and the continent largely freed itself from the imposition of neoliberal policies that mainly benefited Washington and international corporations. The IMF was so impoverished by Latin American divestment -- which went from 80 percent of its loans to about one percent -- that it’s been reduced to selling off its gold reserves. The World Bank is doing well only by comparison. By 2005, the tide had clearly turned, and the power of these institutions and of the so-called Washington Consensus that went with them was on the wane.

That tide had just begun to turn 10 years ago, when New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman referred to the people in the streets of Seattle as “a Noah's ark of flat-earth advocates, protectionist trade unions and yuppies looking for their 1960's fix.”  He charged, “What's crazy is that the protesters want the W.T.O. to become precisely what they accuse it of already being -- a global government. They want it to set more rules -- their rules, which would impose our labor and environmental standards on everyone else.”

Nice though our labor and environmental standards might have been elsewhere too, most of us didn’t want the WTO to do anything or to have any power. As the Direct Action Network organizing leaflet from August 1999 put it, the WTO’s “overall goal is to eliminate ‘trade barriers,’ frequently including labor laws, public health regulations, and environmental protection measures.”

That day in Seattle a crane dangled a pair of gigantic banners shaped like arrows: the first, inscribed “Democracy,” pointed one way; the second, labeled “WTO,” pointed the other. The leaflet and banners were pieces of a carefully organized resistance, and it’s important to remember that events like the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia 20 years ago or the shutdown of the WTO weren’t just spontaneous uprisings; they were the fruit of long toil.  While the right and too many American media outlets like to remember a fictitious Seattle that was nothing but a cauldron of activist violence (while ignoring serious police violence), too many on the left wanted to think of it as a miraculous convergence rather than the result of careful coalition-building, strategizing, outreach, and all the usual labors.

Straying Far from the Blueprint for Our Era

In the twenty-first century, free-trade agreements came down with their own version of swine flu, a disease likely generated on a gigantic Smithfield Farms hog-raising operation in Veracruz, Mexico, and nicknamed the NAFTA flu. NAFTA itself has been widely reviled.  Presidential candidate Manuel Lopez Obrador campaigned in Mexico’s 2006 election on promises to renegotiate it; Hillary disowned it. The plan for a hemisphere-wide Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) was met with massive opposition in Miami in 2003. It crashed and burned in Argentina in 2005 and has since been abandoned.

Latin America went its own way while the Bush Administration locked its attention on the Middle East. Indigenous peoples in Ecuador and Bolivia had a particularly rousing set of victories, while the people of Cochabamba, Bolivia, astonishingly, defeated U.S.-based Bechtel Corporation's privatization of their water, and Ecuadorans are suing Chevron for environmental devastation in what could be the biggest corporate settlement in history -- $27 billion.

Meanwhile, the WTO lurched from one meeting to another, safe in the Doha round from pesky protesters, if not from the dissent of developing nations.  It was again besieged by activists in 2003 in Cancún, Mexico -- in scale and impact another Seattle -- and then further battered in 2005 in Hong Kong. The next ministerial conference of the WTO actually convenes in Geneva on Nov. 30, a decade to the day since the Seattle shutdown, still attempting to resolve issues that arose in Doha. Of course, in the meantime, sneakier bilateral trade agreements have taken the place of big multilateral ones, but this has hardly been the triumphant era predicted a decade earlier.  Even Iraq hardly proved the hog trough the big oil and contracting corporations had anticipated.

In fact, for the corporations nothing much has turned out as planned. Capitalism itself failed a little more than a year ago. Or rather the bizarrely rigged corporate-run market economies that determine at least some portion of nearly everyone’s life on Earth imploded in a frenzy of deregulated fecklessness and weirdly disassociative procedures. Then, they were propped up by governments in a way that made the phrase “socialism for the rich” truer than ever. For a while, the same business newspapers that had celebrated capitalism’s triumph in 1999 were proclaiming “the end of American capitalism as we knew it” and the “collapse of finance.”

It was as though the world economy had been a car driven by a drunk.  Even if we have now let that drunk back behind the wheel, at least his credibility and the logic of what he claimed to be doing have been irreparably harmed. On the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, Time Magazine’s cover story was: “Why Main Street Hates Wall Street” and it told readers in its opening passage that they should be furious.  The fall of Wall Street, you could call it, if you want to hear the echo from Berlin.

Oil-price hikes, the misadventures in turning food into biofuels, and economic meltdowns have had other consequences. Michael Pollan wrote in the New York Times more than a year ago:

"In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington... and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead..."

Another death knell for the sunny corporate vision of globalization had nothing to do with ideology; it was about oil, since the more it cost to ship things around the world the less financial sense it made to do so. As the New York Times put it this August:

The passages cited above came from the New York Times, not the Nation or Mother Jones. Which is to say that if communism failed 20 years ago, then capitalism staggered 10 years ago in Seattle, and fell to its knees a year ago. The crises of petroleum and food costs only augment this reality. But the crisis of climate change matters more than all the rest.

Futures that Work

There are endless questions and conundrums about the largely unforeseen situation in which we now find ourselves, all six billion of us. One of them is: if capitalism and communism both failed, what’s the alternative? The big tent of subversions and traditions called the left hasn’t, in recent times, done a very good job of providing pictures of the possibilities available to us. Still, perhaps the answer to what the political and social alternatives might be will prove very close to what a sustainable world in the face of climate change might look like:  small, local, smart, flexible economies and technologies, democracy as direct as possible, an elimination of excess wealth as part of a leveling that might also eliminate dire poverty.

Some of our hope for the future has to be that, one day, the ecological and the economic can be aligned so that, among other things, petroleum and coal become increasingly expensive, as well as increasingly offensive, ways to run our machines. Will we be creative enough to embrace change before crashing systems and wild weather force change on us in the form of an unbearable crisis? Decisions about the nature of that change to come must be made by the citizenry, which seems to be fairly willing to face change when it gets its facts straight, rather than by wealthier nation-states and their leaders who seem, at this juncture, more interested in protecting business than life on Earth.

To survive the coming era, we need to re-imagine what constitutes wealth and well-being and what constitutes poverty. This doesn’t mean telling the destitute not to hope for decent housing, adequate food, and some chance at education, as well as some pleasures and power. It means paring back on the mad consumption machine that has been the engine of the global economy, even though what it produces is often enough entirely distinct from what’s actually needed. American life as it is now lived is poor in security, confidence, connectedness, agency, contemplation, calm, leisure, and other things that you aren’t going to buy at Wal-Mart, or at Neiman Marcus for that matter. If we can see what’s poor about the way we are, we can see what would be enriching rather than impoverishing about change.  

Anniversaries of a whole host of revolutions seem to fall in years ending in nine -- from 1789 in France to 1959 in Cuba and 1979 in Nicaragua. And then, in our calendar of nines, there was the fall of the Wall and the Battle of Seattle.  The “revolution” that got us into this era of climate change, however, can’t be dated that way.  It was the industrial revolution, a gradual shift to an era of mechanization made possible by, and paralleled by, the rise of fossil-fuel consumption. We can’t, and shouldn’t, undo this revolution, but we need to reject some of its premises and recognize some of its costs, including alienation, degradation, and commodification. 

We need a postindustrial revolution of appropriate technologies, both in the developed world and in the developing one, so that, for example, kerosene lanterns and wood-burning stoves will be replaced not by conventional appliances but by elegant solar technologies.

There needs to be another revolution in addition to these, one that finishes decolonizing the world so that Europe and the United States are no longer using the lion’s share of resources and emitting the lion’s share of carbon per capita. The WTO, the IMF, and other instruments of neoliberalism existed to keep that world-as-it-was going; the revolt in Seattle was against their ideology as well as their impact, and the decade-old graffiti that said, “We are winning,” had a point.

The “we” that could win and needs to win in the climate change wars isn’t the United States itself.  As Bill McKibben recently wrote of President Obama, “The announcement yesterday from the APEC meeting in Singapore that next month’s Copenhagen climate talks will be nothing more than a glorified talking session makes it clear that he has, at least for now, punted on the hard questions around climate. The world won’t be able to get started on solving our climate problem, and the obstacle is -- as it has been for the last two decades -- the United States.”  The citizens of the U.S. need to revolt, again, against their nation’s failure of vision and responsibility, in solidarity with the rest of the people of the world, and the animals, and the plants, and the coral reefs, and the coastlines, and the rivers, the glaciers, the ice caps, and the weather as we now know it, or once knew it.  That's why November 30th is going to be a global day of action.  

Everything is going to change either as runaway climate change takes hold, with its concomitant destruction and suffering, or because a set of programs will be embraced that forestall the worst and return our planet to an atmospheric carbon level of 350 parts per million, now considered the necessary standard to avoid environmental catastrophe.  We’re already at 390 parts per million.  Unfortunately, a lot of the nations in the key Copenhagen negotiations have fixed on an outdated notion that the world as we know it can survive at 450 parts per million, which would conveniently mean that relatively moderate adjustments are needed.

Remembering how dramatically -- and unexpectedly -- things have changed in the recent past is part of the toolbox for making a deeper, far more necessary change possible. Surely, the extraordinary power of ordinary people in Berlin and Seattle provides us with the kinds of history lessons, the riches we need, to start learning to count.

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UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon at a press conference in Seattle (Oct. 26, 2009).Jon Hiskes / GristAs the U.S. Senate begins work on a climate and energy bill this week, senators shouldn't be surprised if they get a phone call from the guy who counts every person on Earth as a member of his constituency. Ban Ki-moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, said Monday that he plans to contact senators to urge them to pass a bill before December.

“I’m going to engage myself with not only government leaders but with senators of the United States,” Ban said at a press conference in Seattle.

He didn’t elaborate on who, or how, or what strategy he would employ to jumpstart the world’s most deliberative deliberative body. But his pledge illustrates how heavily the American legislative process weighs on the minds of those preparing for the UN climate conference in December.

China, India, Brazil, South Africa, and Mexico are all “ready to make some political compromises only if and only when the United States is ready to [pass a bill],” Ban said. “Leadership and initiative from the United States will be crucially important at this time. We have only six weeks to go. We don’t have much time.”

Ban maintained that reaching a treaty in December was still his goal, even as prospects for that diminish. He acknowledged that work toward a treaty would likely continue after the Copenhagen conference concludes, though he added, “I’m sure we will have an agreement there.”

Ban was in Seattle to accept an honorary degree from the University of Washington. He also stopped by the home of Bill and Melinda Gates to discuss ways to address maternal death rates and child health.

I asked him what benchmarks would make an effective U.S. climate bill, and Ban said it wasn’t his role to become involved in a domestic bill.

“Even with this domestic legislation, it may not be sufficient, but it can have a huge political impact with other negotiators, other countries,” he said.

Ban did sketch (in broad terms) what he considers the most crucial elements of an international climate treaty, largely echoing his op-ed in Monday’s New York Times. First, it must have ambitious mid-term targets for emissions. (He mentioned goals for 2020, as opposed to, say, 2050.). They must be backed by binding commitments. And wealthier countries must supply “substantial” financial aid to help poor countries adapt to the impacts of climate change.

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Here We Go Magic is the new project from Seattle singer-songwriter Luke Temple. It is quite a departure from his previous albums under his own name, which were folky, hummable affairs.

HWGM, on the other hand, is like krautrock meets Graceland meets Bon Iver meets ... a really big bong. Drony, pulsating, ethereal, gorgeous, occasionally latin tinged, this is an excellent album for the long, cold nights of winter. Snuggle up.

This track is called "Fangela."

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Scott Cooper, sustainability coordinator for EOS Alliance in Seattle, wants all his fellow Emerald City denizens to join him at the Space Needle this Saturday for International Climate Action Day.

350.orgWhy? Cooper offers up a top ten reasons:

10. Hang out at the fountain with family, friends, and neighbors

9. Show the world that Seattle is serious about climate change

8. Free buttons!

7. Send a message to policymakers

6. Take part in an unprecedented global collection of human aerial art

5. There’s a strict moratorium on singing “Kumbaya” and “We Are the World”

4. The viaduct is closed this weekend, so getting anywhere else will be a hassle

3. You don’t want Capitol Hill to be waterfront property

2. This could be your last chance to get a photo taken with Mayor Nickels

1. Be a part of the global movement to confront climate change

If you attend only one climate change event in Seattle this year, make it this one!

More info. on the Seattle event:

* Seattle details on 350.org

* @350seattle on Twitter

* On Facebook

Not in Seattle? There are more than 4,000 actions planned in 170 countries around the world. Find one near you!

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Runoff and dog poop are killing Puget Sound.

On Sept. 17, a diverse coalition of 57 cities, counties, businesses, universities, and advocacy groups launched a campaign called Puget Sound Starts Here to try and deep six these and other threats to Washington State’s vast inland waterway. (Funding for the effort is coming from state and private sources.) 

Puget Sound is home to orcas and octopi, salmon, and sea lions and four million people. The people—and their pets—are the problem.

On an average day, stormwater runoff fouled by lawn fertilizers, household cleaning products, and oil from roadways sends 140,000 pounds of toxic chemicals into streams and rivers, which empty into the Sound. An amount of oil equivalent to the 11-million gallon Exxon Valdez spill washes into Puget Sound every two years.

Puget Sound pet poop adds even more goodies: fecal coliform bacteria, roundworms, salmonella, giardia, and perhaps even the dreaded MRSA, the staph bacteria that’s been turning up on beaches around Seattle.

These environmental insults are bad for Puget Sound orcas, already among the most PCB-contaminated mammals; bad for the region’s multi-million fishing and shellfish industries and for its $9.5 billion tourist industry; and of course, bad for the Sound itself.

“Puget Sound is dying,” said David Dicks, director of Puget Sound Partnership, one of the coalition members. “And many of us don’t realize that our actions are contributing to its decline.”

Puget Sound Starts Here hopes to change that. A new advertising campaign and website encourage residents to take simple steps, including reducing or eliminating the use of fertilizers and pesticides, fixing any fluid leaks in the car, choosing biodegradable home cleaning products and religiously scooping that poop.

Polling shows that 97 percent of Puget Sound residents value the Sound and want to protect it, but that a mere 25 percent know there’s a problem. Puget Sound Starts Here plans to boost awareness of the problems confronting Puget Sound and inspire fans to become part of the solution. 

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Local food, local goods, local everything is in, as you’ve no doubt heard. Local is fresher. Local burns less shipping fuel. Local keeps the wealth nearby.

Naturally, there’s money to be made off local, so big businesses are muscling into the game. The emerging term is localwashing—a variation on greenwashing wherein businesses claim to be local when actually ... you get it.

“The ingenuity of the food manufacturers and marketers never ceases to amaze me,” said author Michael Pollan, who’s done more to articulate the need for local in the food realm than maybe anyone else. “They can turn any critique into a new way to sell food. You’ve got to hand it to them.”

Here’s a look at some prime examples of that ingenuity/absurdity/deception.

Courtesy NEAFP.comCitgo: “Local. Loyal. Like it should be.” The crop of new billboards from the petroleum company owned by Hugo Chavez’s Venezuelan government makes sense only if the rather undemocratic president lives around the corner from you. Which he doesn’t.

Maybe you’ve heard of this cute little bookstore around the corner. It’s got a DIY-looking video blog with the tagline, “All bookselling is local.” Except when it isn’t.

“Hellmann’s Mayonnaise, a U.S.-based subsidiary of European processed-food behemoth Unilever, has seen fit to subject Canada (Canada?) to an eat-local campaign,” reports Grist Food Editor Tom Philpott. He’s dumbfounded. Here are those locally sourced ingredients of which Hellmann’s is so proud:

WATER, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, SOYBEAN OIL, VINEGAR, HIGH FRUCTOSE CORN SYRUP, EGG WHITES, SALT, SUGAR, XANTHAN GUM, LEMON AND LIME PEEL FIBERS, COLORS ADDED, LACTIC ACID, (SODIUM BENZOATE, CALCIUM DISODIUM EDTA) USED TO PROTECT QUALITY, PHOSPHORIC ACID, NATURAL FLAVORS.

The Hellmann’s campaign also asks Canadians to take a hard look at the food-kilometers of the non-mayonnaise portion of their diet.

Potato farmers pitch chips fresh from the field in a series of ads from Frito-Lay North America, a subsidiary of PepsiCo. The five regional ads reportedly feature farmers who really do grow potatoes in those areas. “By this logic, all of us here in Iowa can begin referring to high fructose corn syrup as a local food as well,” writes Kurt Michael Friese.

Courtesy PSFK.comThese green “local” signs in a New York Whole Foods might point to brands that are local. But the coffee they’re selling wasn’t grown anywhere near Union Square. Blatant deception? No. But one blogger asks for a little clarity please.

In a bit of un-branding that caught the attention of its hometown, Starbucks stripped its name and logo from a Seattle coffee shop and reopened as the “rustic” 15th Ave Coffee and Tea.

Courtesy The Stranger.Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood greeted indie-Starbucks with mockery.

The “We buy local” website of the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce includes such mom-and-pop establishments as Wal-Mart. Stacy Mitchell’s superb reporting on localwashing exposes how regional booster groups, through campaigns like this, enable multinational companies to brand themselves as local.

Photo: Whyibuylocal.comIn central California, the Economic Development Corporation of Fresno County launched its Buy Local campaign at the Fashion Fair Mall, with Macy’s in the background. Nearby chains Anthropologie and The Cheesecake Factory added to the confusing message, Mitchell reports.

Banners saying simply “Local” hang above the produce sections at some Wal-Marts. Don’t ask questions. Writes Mitchell: “The chain's local food offerings are usually limited to a few of the main commodity crops of that particular state—peaches in Georgia or potatoes in Maine—and sit amid a sea of industrial food and other goods shipped from the far side of the planet.”

Finally, HSBC calls itself “the world's local bank.” It’s a very large bank--one of the world's largest. This sign is from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

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Photo: ceegee-ceegeeAdvocates of Seattle's Referendum 1, a proposal for a disposable-bag fee that was soundly defeated in Tuesday's primary election, may have lost a battle. But Brady Montz, chair of the local Sierra Club chapter and leader of the effort to pass the referendum, feels confident that the war against plastic bags is going well.

"We've never had a vote before where 42 percent* of people decided, ‘I want to pay for my plastic bags,'" he said. "How well did the first votes on gay marriage work? How well did the first votes on drug legalization work? These things, they build."

The American Chemistry Council dropped big bucks to fight the referendum--$1.4 million in total, compared to just $80,000 raised by the Seattle Green Bag Campaign, a coalition of environmental groups and volunteers who worked to pass the referendum. The ACC and plastic-bag manufacturers got a lot of traction with their arguments that the tax was unnecessary and would hurt low-income people, though of course their real motivation was to protect their own bottom lines. Montz said the ACC's paid signature-gatherers misled some pro-fee voters into signing a petition to put the fee on the ballot by implying that there wouldn't be a bag fee if there wasn't a vote. But the fee, originally an ordinance passed by the city council and signed into law by Mayor Greg Nickels, would have automatically taken effect at the beginning of 2009 if it weren't for the ACC's efforts.

Montz said he sees the ACC's aggressive fight against the bag fee as an example of how "the industrial political complex has perfected this strategy of doing deceptive astroturf campaigns." Without the resources to make massive television and radio ad buys, he said, efforts like the Seattle Green Bag Campaign face a huge uphill battle. In this summer of "death panels" and forged letters to members of Congress, progressive groups across the country are searching for new ways to overcome the profit-protection machine. "What we've got to do is figure out how to use what we've got, which is people and the truth," said Montz.

Voters are starting to dig for the real dirt beneath the astroturf, according to Montz. After the corporate campaign against it, many Seattleites who didn't like the bag fee don't like the ACC either, and that could affect similar fights in the future. "When cities can be punished by companies because we dare to make a law restricting one of their products, if people just understand that, that right there is a huge win," Montz said. "[Voters] now know the ACC spends money to overturn laws. So next time is not going to be so easy for them."

The ACC's involvement also raised awareness of the issue and turned it into a hot topic, getting Seattleites to at least think and talk about plastic, even if they aren't ready to bag it yet. "People now in Seattle know about the North Pacific [trash] gyre," Montz said. "If you just focus on [the fact that] this particular fee lost, OK, well, that's bad, but on the issue of how do we change how people behave, how do we make people think about their choices, that we've won."

Montz said the pro–bag fee camp plans to continue to dialogue with Seattle voters and gauge what the next step in the war against plastic should be. In the meantime, environmentalists have a lot to focus on in November's election, with Sierra Club activist Mike McGinn a potential frontrunner in the mayoral race, and fellow Sierra cohort Mike O'Brien leading his city-council race. While Montz said he doesn't think the bag fee will be a big issue in the mayoral race, he doesn't expect it to fall out of the public consciousness. "After this election is over, these bags are not going away," he said. "I'm sure the conversation is going to continue."

For now, Montz and all the other volunteers at the Seattle Green Bag Campaign have reason to get excited about being at the forefront of a growing debate over plastic's role in our world. Even though Seattleites can still get their plastic bags for free, they might think twice before they do.

"At the party [on election] night there were so many happy volunteers, getting drunk and happy," Montz said. "Because if you look at where we are now compared to where we were a year or two ago, it's amazing."

*UPDATE, 26 Aug 2009: As more ballots have been counted, the percentage of "yes" votes has gone up. The latest results have 47 percent voting in favor of Ref. 1 and 53 percent voting against.

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Image: Tom Twigg/GristIn the end, elections always come down to numbers. In the case of Seattle's Aug. 18 primary -- a vote that would decide whether the city would adopt a 20-cent fee for paper and plastic bags at local stores -- the most important number turned out to be not the 20 cents nor the number of votes against, but the amount of money spent on the anti-fee campaign by plastic industry lobbyists.

That number is $1.4 million ... or about 7 million disposable bags at two dimes a piece. Enough, apparently, to defeat the measure by a hefty margin with more than half of the (all mail-in) ballots counted.

In comparison, the pro-bag camp raised just $80,000, and they knew they faced a tough fight, said Heather Trim of People for Puget Sound and the Green Bag Campaign.

Still, Trim is happy with the amount of media attention the issue garnered in the run-up to the vote and says it has inspired more people to bring their own bags. "We've had a huge surge of awareness," she said. "This is only going to help."

For more on the BYOBag debate, see our rundown of disposable-bag restrictions around the world and our list of alternatives from fanny packs to lunch tins.

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While Seattleites squabble over whether to impose a fee on disposable bags, we offer up alternatives for lugging your goods home from the store (and ideas for what to do with the plastic bags you've already accumulated).

Fantastic plastic alternatives

Nothing says cool like a Cap-sac.For smaller items:

For serious groceries:

For carrying your sack lunch: Remember that bitchin' tin lunch box you toted to first grade every day? When did that stop being cool again?

For wet items: Try a reusable, waterproof tote bag for wet clothes, dirty diapers, or any other damp items you might need to carry around. For a few more bucks, you can get one in a crazy pattern.

Umbra's got suggestions for lining your trash can and scooping pet poop, and there's also the option of biodegradable doggie-poop bags.

Uses for the plastic bags you already have sitting around

Yup, it’s a bag made of plastic bags.If you're like me, you save any plastic bag you acquire in a valiant effort to mitigate its harmful effects by reusing it as many times as possible, only to end up with a growing pile of plastic bags that you don't know what to do with.

Luckily there's already an informative list out there of creative uses for plastic bags. Number 1 -- "make a purse out of them by sewing a bunch of them together" -- is actually completely possible. My grandma used to crochet reusable tote bags out of strips of old plastic bags. I carried my stuff to swim practice in one every day -- not only was it durable and a little stretchy, the crocheted plastic made it ideal for a dripping bathing suit.

The list also suggests using plastic bags as mattress or pillow stuffing, packing materials (instead of foam peanuts), rubber gloves if you don't have the real thing, or "a solid white one tied onto a pole as a truce flag." (You never know when you might need to declare peace.) Oh, and regarding suggestion #47 -- please, only in an extreme emergency.

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Seattle voters will decide on Aug. 18 whether to impose a 20-cent fee on all paper and plastic bags from grocery, drug, and convenience stores. But it's not the first U.S. city to restrict disposable bags -- nor even the first in Washington state.

In Edmonds, Wash., north of Seattle, the city council voted in late July to ban disposable plastic bags at retail outlets (excluding those used for produce and bulk foods). The ban will go into effect next year.

Even green-leaning western Washington is behind the times in comparison with San Francisco, which enacted the nation's first ban on plastic bags at grocery and drug stores in 2007. The city council in Oakland, Calif., also voted in 2007 to impose a ban on the bags, but the plastic-bag industry has tied the measure up in court.

Other bag-hostile California cities include Palo Alto, Calif., where a plastic-bag ban is set to go into effect this September, and Los Angeles, which will begin banning plastic bags in July 2010.

Maui, Hawaii, will start banning plastic bags in 2011. A smattering of other cities around the U.S. are also considering bans.

But on the global stage, plastic-bag restrictions are hardly new.

In 1989, Italy took a look around its beaches and saw plastic bags cluttering the scenery and choking dolphins. To help clear up the mess, the Italian government began taxing plastic bags, and next year it will institute an all-out ban on them.

After bag-clogged drains led to prolonged flooding in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 1988 and 1998, the government banished disposable plastic bags from the city in 2002.

Lethal floods blamed on bag-clogged drains have also prompted a number of city and state governments in India to impose plastic-bag bans.

In 2002, Ireland became the first European nation to tackle the plastic-bag problem. It imposed a 15-cent PlasTax, revolutionizing the Irish shopping scene with reusable sacks and reducing the use of flimsy plastic ones by 90 percent within weeks.

In South Africa, plastic bags were such a ubiquitous scourge that they became known as the "national flower" until the nation banned them in 2003. Eritrea, Rwanda, and Somalia followed suit in 2005, and Tanzania in 2006.

In Kenya, Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Mathaai blamed plastic bags for helping to spread malaria because discarded bags can fill with rainwater and become a breeding ground for mosquitoes. Her country banned thin plastic bags in 2007 and imposed fines on thicker ones. Uganda followed its lead.

In China, where up to 3 billion plastic bags were being used per day, the government in 2008 banned super-thin plastic bags and imposed fees on thicker ones.

South Australia hopped on the "ban" wagon this year, threatening fines of up to $5,000 for stores that don't comply. The rest of Australia is considering a similar ban.

Find out more about bag bans around the world from Planet Ark, the BBC, and National Geographic News.

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Image: Tom Twigg/Grist

UPDATED: 11 Aug 2009

When the Seattle City Council voted last summer to impose a 20-cent fee on paper and plastic bags, the Progressive Bag Affiliates (PBA) of the American Chemistry Council immediately sprang to action to block the move. The fee would have taken effect January 1, 2009, but the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax (funded by PBA, the Washington Food Industry, and 7-Eleven) collected enough voter signatures to put the measure on the August primary ballot.

Referendum 1, as it's now known, would require consumers to pay 20 cents for every disposable bag (paper or plastic) they get from grocery, drug, and convenience stores. Small businesses -- those with under $1 million in annual revenue -- would retain the entire 20-cent fee. Other businesses would get to keep five cents, with the rest going to Seattle Public Utilities to pay for implementation and oversight of the program, and to provide free reusable bags to low-income families, soup kitchens, and homeless shelters.

Voters will cast their ballots on Aug. 18. Some polls have shown people closely split over the issue. A more recent poll [PDF] found the "no" side leading 55 percent to 41 percent; Democrats and young voters were more inclined to support the ballot measure, while Republicans, Independents, men, and minorities were inclined to oppose it.

The "yes" camp

The pro-bag-fee side has raised around $64,000 so far -- a tiny fraction of the million-plus dollars raised by the "no" side. The main organization supporting the measure is the Seattle Green Bag Campaign. Notable endorsements have come from The Seattle Times, The Stranger, Mayor Greg Nickels, five Seattle City Council members, the 43rd and 46th District Democrats, PCC Natural Markets, Central Co-op's Madison Market, and a host of environmental groups, including the National Wildlife Federation, People for Puget Sound, and the UW Sierra Student Coalition.  The campaign has also received support from Orin Smith, former president and CEO of Starbucks, and Reusablebags.com.

The fee was introduced as a simple way to change Seattleites' shopping habits, encouraging the use of reusable bags without banning disposable ones outright. Supporters point to Ireland's successful PlasTax measure, which, by imposing a similar fee, saw plastic bag use reduced by over 90 percent only a few weeks after it took effect. Plastic bags can take up to 1,000 years to decompose, and paper bags, while more easily recyclable, require far more energy and toxic chemicals to produce. A study by Seattle Public Utilities indicated that Referendum 1 could cut disposable-bag-related greenhouse-gas emissions by about 4,000 tons per year (the equivalent of taking 665 cars off the road). In 2002, Bangladesh became the first country to ban plastic bags, and dozens of other nations, from Botswana to Denmark to South Korea, have restrictions on disposable bags. Bag-fee supporters hope to make Seattle a model for other American cities on this issue, the same way the city set a precedent by introducing residential curbside recycling in 1988.

The "no" camp

Opposition to the measure has been largely driven by the Coalition to Stop the Seattle Bag Tax, which lists its members on its website. Most of its funding -- about $1.4 million so far -- comes from the American Chemistry Council, whose members include Dow Chemical, ExxonMobil, and major plastic-bag producers. Coalitions such as the Korean American Grocers Association, Washington Association of Neighborhood Stores, and the Independent Business Association have also come out against Referendum 1.

Mayoral candidate Jan Drago opposes the bag fee, as do Seattle City Council candidates Jordan Royer and Sally Bagshaw. The Central Area Motivation Program has spoken out against the fee because it believes it will unfairly affect low-income people, and Real Change, Seattle's weekly activist paper sold by the homeless, recommended a "no" vote. A group of economists called the Northwest Economic Policy Seminar conducted an analysis [PDF] of the proposed fee and then published a letter to the Seattle City Council voicing their opposition.

Because the American Chemistry Council represents makers of plastics, many in the "yes" camp have come to see the effort to pass the referendum as a fight against big oil. But some in the "no" camp say they oppose the measure because it's costly and unnecessary in a city where 90 percent of citizens claim to already reuse their disposable bags. "We don't have a serious plastic bag litter problem," said Peter Nickerson in the Northwest Economic Policy Seminar's letter to the city council. Opponents have also said that the measure includes too many exemptions and loopholes to really be effective.

Opponents tend to refer to the measure as a "tax," not a fee, and by definition it could probably go either way, although the fact that revenues go specifically to bag-elimination efforts (instead of into a general fund) puts it more in the fee category.

The Seattle Times plans to publish its endorsement on Referendum 1 on Aug. 8. [UPDATE: The Times endorsed the referendum.] No endorsements yet from the Seattle Post-Intelligencer or the Seattle Weekly.

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Obama headed to Copenhagen, sets the bar for success

Obama going to Copenhagen

Would you trade your car for a bike? That's what the folks behind the Tour de Fat want to know. New Belgium Brewing's now-annual cycle celebration is pedaling to Seattle this Saturday -- and they'll be taking a car off the hands of one (lucky?) local driver and handing him a cool commuter bike in return. (Patrick explains why he wants to reduce his wheelprint from four to two.)

So what else does the Tour de Fat offer aside from the car/cycle swap-o-rama? A six-mile bike parade leaves Gas Works Park at 11 a.m. -- think Solstice cyclers ... but more fully clothed. Beginning at noon, festivities will include musical and circus acts, dance troupes, and drum corps.

All the while, the New Belgium beer will be flowing (Fat Tire, natch), and all proceeds go toward local bike advocacy programs. The closing ceremony will celebrate the courageous car swapper as he signs over his pink slip to charity.

Check out a short video from a previous Tour de Fat in New Belgium's hometown of Fort Collins, Colorado:

Three years ago, we featured an essay from a suburban mom in Normal, Ill., who went carless. And the Tour de Fat team seems to think just about anyone can do it -- so how about you? Would you trade your car for a bike?

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Gourmet’s conscience, Gopnik on cookbooks, and other tasty morsels

General Motors to start repaying government loans

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General Motors to start repaying government loans

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Five months ago, Tesla Motors appeared to be following in the footsteps of other American automakers. Lay-offs, a dearth of financing, and a spring recall of 70 percent of delivered Roadsters prompted speculation that Tesla might soon be the next casualty of the economic downturn.

But Tesla proved just too cool to fail. In May, German automaker Daimler injected $50 million in the "we're this close to profitability we promise" EV maker for a 10 percent stake and a deal for Tesla to supply the batteries for the test series of Daimler's smart electric drive. And then in June, Uncle Sam followed suit with $465 million in Department of Energy loans to Tesla to produce and manufacture the new Model S sedan. The loans will also finance the construction of a LEED-certified assembly plant in California, which will manufacture components for the Model S as well as the smart ed.

Rolling in cash and brimming with plans, Tesla turned this newfound financial confidence into a string of retail stores -- don't call them dealerships -- that have more in common with Prada boutiques than your local used-car lots. The red Tesla marquee graces exposed brick in New York, Los Angeles, Menlo Park, London, and Seattle with stores coming soon to Chicago, Miami, D.C., Toronto, Munich, and Monaco.

And as the Washington wine flowed and trays of tiny hors d'oeuvres were passed among the Polo-clad attendants at the Seattle opening, I couldn't help but ask, Seattle? Really?

"Good question," laughed Colette Niazmand, senior manager of marketing at Tesla. "Seattle is certainly not a traditional sports-car market, but when we were marketing the Roadster a couple of years ago, we saw a high concentration of reservations for the vehicle in the Seattle area. There are a lot of early adopters and entrepreneurs in Seattle who understand tech and saw the appeal of the Roadster."

Apparently that's an understatement. With more than 30 of the $101,500 Roadsters zooming around Lake Washington and more on the way, the Seattle area boasts one of the highest concentrations of Roadsters outside California. Though it may be untraditional, Seattle has provided a burgeoning market for luxury EVs.

However, the Roadster's clean lines and flashy colors can't take all the credit for the spread of EVs in the Seattle area. Effective July 26 (coincidentally the public opening of the Seattle Tesla store), Washington state now joins New Jersey, Connecticut, and Arizona in waiving 100 percent of sales, luxury, and use taxes on EVs as well as on infrastructure to support electric vehicles like home charging stations [PDF]. Including the federal tax incentive of $7,500 on electric or plug-in hybrid vehicles, Tesla hastens to point out that for Washington buyers, the purchase of a Roadster represents a significant savings over an internal combustion vehicle with a similar sticker price.

For those in the market now for a $100,000 "car with a conscience," Tesla is literally the only game in town. Rivals Fisker and Dodge have announced plans to launch the Karma and the Circuit as early as 2010, but neither has a production model on the road. However, Tesla's presence in Seattle doesn't mean that prospective buyers can stop by the showroom on Westlake Ave. and drive out with their very own Roadster: "The wait-list is four months," said Niazmand.

Want a peek at driving in a Roadster? Check out Grist's video: "Three minutes in a Tesla." The car boasts acceleration of 0-60 in 3.9 seconds, torque of over 13,000 rpms, and minimum charging time of 3.5 hours plugged into a 220 V/70 amp outlet. Tesla also claims that the car can go 244 miles per charge, but owners have reported distances of closer to 200 miles between charges.

The Seattle Tesla store is open by appointment only; check the website for details.

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The American Chemistry Council will spend more than $1 million to fight a 20-cent fee on plastic shopping bags in Seattle, hoping voters reject the proposal in August.

Or send the Bag Monster and all his friends to Copenhagen this December!Photo by Bag Monster via FlickrIf it seems absurd to spend a cool mill defending something as ubiquitous, hard to love, and (very often) wasteful as disposable bags … consider that this trade group for the plastics industry sponsored a program to pay parents to expose their children to pesticides and allow researchers to study the effects.

Before the ACC’s check clears, we’d like to suggest some better uses for the money, ones that would still promote the wonderful qualities of plastic.

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Fair, Ambitious & Binding: Essentials for a Successful Climate Deal

This Friday, don’t just Buy Nothing—use nothing!

Seattle is the most sustainable big city in the nation, according to a list compiled by Smarter Cities, an NRDC project that looks at the progress American cities are making toward going green. Not surprisingly, San Francisco and Portland are the runners-up.

Using data from the EPA and the U.S. Census Bureau, as well as some voluntary survey responses from city governments, the project identified the top 15 large, medium, and small cities according to 10 different environmental criteria, from air quality to recycling to transportation.

Here's a look the top 15 large cities (population of 250,000 or more):

It's hard not to be environmentally minded in a city with views like this.Photo: Simonds1. Seattle
The Emerald City gets props for its brand-new light rail system, reliance on hydroelectricity (and the resulting good air quality), Mayor Greg Nickels' U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Agreement, and two global warming initiatives: Seattle Climate Action Now and Seattle Climate Partnership. Seattleites are described as "highly educated and environmentally minded." Think it's just a coincidence that Grist is headquartered here?

San Francisco is one of the most densely populated cities in the country.Photo: ATIS5472. San Francisco
San Francisco's dense population, walkability, plastic-bag ban, city-created carbon offset fund, solar power program, and booming local food movement propelled it to the No. 2 spot. (Read more about Mayor Gavin Newsom's green efforts.)

Portland has always been a leader in big-city sustainability.Photo: Ben Amstutz3. Portland
Seattle's neighbor to the south got its light rail up and running more than 20 years ago, and the city has always been ahead of the curve on controlling urban sprawl and suppressing greenhouse-gas emissions. Portland's residents also recycle more than half their waste.

Oakland is making a green comeback.Photo: satanslaundromat4. Oakland, Calif.
This once-struggling city has a Green Jobs Corps, a New Urbanist 10K Downtown Housing Initiative, a Zero Waste Plan, and a growing local food movement (as urban farmer Novella Carpenter explains). It also gets 17 percent of its electricity from renewable sources. Sounds like there is a there there.

How green was my Silicon Valley?Photo: the_tahoe_guy5. San Jose, Calif.
Always on the cutting edge of the high-tech world, this capital of Silicon Valley is fast on its way to leading the green-jobs revolution. Its Green Vision includes plans for bringing 25,000 new clean-tech jobs to the area.

Austin's new smart grid will light up the night -- sustainably, of course.Photo: Visualist Images6. Austin, Texas
A liberal outpost in red Texas, this city owns its electric utility (meaning voters elect the utility's board) and plans to adopt a smart grid in the near future.

Sacramento aims to be green while it grows.Photo: kla40677. Sacramento, Calif.
The Golden State's capital, while suffering from the side effects of rapid population growth, has a progressive, publicly owned utility that, in addition to offering a 100 percent renewable power option, provides free trees to residents hoping to cool their homes with natural shade.

Boston stands out among less-green East Coast cities.Photo: werkunz18. Boston, Mass.
Boston's push toward wind and solar energy, its efforts to become more bike-friendly, and its LED traffic lights make it a leader on the environmentally lagging East Coast.

Denver conserves water like nobody's business.Photo: kla40679. Denver, Colo.
The Mile High City is already way ahead of its goals for reducing water consumption. Its new bike-sharing and composting programs and extensive system of city parks also helped it make the top 15.

Chicago's city hall has its own green roof.Photo: Smarter Cities10. Chicago
Always famous for its architecture, today Chicago has more LEED-certified buildings than any other U.S. city and boasts 300 green roofs. (Read more about Mayor Richard Daley's green efforts.)

San Diego is growing smart.Photo: Smarter Cities11. San Diego
Parks and open spaces make up almost a quarter of this city's land area, and its smart growth program has led to impressive developments.

The Big (Green) Apple.Photo: mikeleeorg12. New York City
What it lacks in air quality and renewable energy it makes up for in density, walkability, and Mayor Bloomberg's commitment to reducing the city's carbon footprint. (Read more about Bloomberg's green efforts.)

L.A. works to clear a path through the smog.Photo: Storm Crypt13. Los Angeles
Infamous for its smog and clogged freeways, L.A. is making admirable efforts to switch to renewable energy and conserve its water supply.

Big D: Greener than you'd think.Photo: dherrera_9614. Dallas
Dallas gets 40 percent of its electricity from wind, has seen a huge spike in public transit usage in recent years, and cracks down on lengthy truck idling during the "ozone season" from April to October.

Columbus hopes for an urban resurgence.Photo: jpmueller9915. Columbus, Ohio
A perhaps unexpected entry on the list, flat Columbus lends itself to bike-friendliness. The city has also been working hard to revitalize its downtown core and combat sprawl.

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The new wave of urban farming (and fresh food from small spaces!)

Energy Trust and the Big Hope

Photo: wings777 via FlickrIt's been a long time coming, but starting this Saturday, it'll be "all aboard!" when Seattle's light rail trains pull into the station.

The Sound Transit trains will travel 14 miles from Westlake Center, in the center of downtown, south to Tukwila, two miles short of the Sea-Tac airport. By the end of the year, the trains will reach the airport.

Thanks to generous Seattle voters, this $2.3 billion "starter line" will eventually reach north to the University of Washington campus (2016) and out to other suburbs like Federal Way, Overlake, and Lynnwood on a 53-mile track that is expected to serve some 280,000 daily trips by 2030.

But for now, ridership is expected to be much lower. More than 100,000 people are expected to go for a ride opening weekend, when all trips will be free. But starting Monday, regular fares will apply and Sound Transit estimates just 26,600 weekday trips on average for the next year.

The light rail will provide some commuters with a fast and efficient way to get to work -- and soon, the airport. And the project has generated some 7,000 short- and long-term (green) jobs. But it's been an uphill battle all the way.

Years late and miles shorter than promised when voters approved the plan back in 1996, the light rail project has seen its share of engineering challenges -- from toxic soil to sinkholes, as well as a couple of minor train-car collisions.

One of the long-time proponents of the light rail project has been Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels (D). He talks about finally seeing the dream realized in this short Seattle Times video from a recent media ride-along:

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Food writer and urban farmer Novella Carpenter is everything the elitist, foodie stereotype is not: she squat-farms near downtown Oakland, Calif., dumpster-dives to feed her rabbits, and offers to show anyone who still thinks otherwise exactly "what urban farming smells like."

Novella Carpenter and cute baby animals today, dinner tomorrow.Photo: Courtesy of Novella CarpenterIn Seattle while touring for her new book Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer, Carpenter took a few minutes to give Grist the low-down-and-dirty on the up-and-coming trend of urban farming. From roof-top gardens to city chickens, an increasing number of city slickers are becoming "obsessed with their bellies right now" and getting very intimate with what goes down those gullets. Taking that hyper-personal approach to food even further, Carpenter chronicles how she became an urban farming evangelist in her memoir. (It may have had something to do with "something about the growing season in California that's totally delicious" but which can work almost anywhere.)

So, Novella, we asked: what's the deal with urban farming? And how is it different than your average patch of city peas and petunias? Well, Grist, she answered, there isn't a huge difference and went on to dismiss her own Ghost Town Farm as "really just a hobby farm." But as far as definitions go for Carpenter, urban farming usually implies raising animals or growing enough produce to trade or sell the extra. All of this taking place within your city-limits because, well, that's where most people now live (and want to live).

When we queried Carpenter on the possibility of her setting up a bigger farm outside of the city, she was quick to retort in the negative: "I hate the country. I hate it." She confessed that she gets her kicks from the diverse experiences and peoples of bustling metropolises rather than bucolic meadows. And she's keen to avoid the country's "dirty secret" -- the need to drive everywhere.

Another appeal of bringing agriculture into a city is food security and fiscal savings during uncertain times. "Recession is really good for urban farming," Carpenter said. She acknowledges that the urban farming movement likely will take a hit once the economy recovers, because -- as we all know -- history repeats itself. The most obvious evidence is found in the widely acclaimed 20 million victory gardens of World War II, which produced approximately 40% of the domestic food supply and then promptly slipped into oblivion as convenience foods rose to prominence in America. Carpenter admits that scenario could very well happen again, but is encouraged by First Lady Michelle Obama's example of an organic veggie garden and by the growth of community and backyard gardens, especially in depressed urban areas like Detroit, which apparently is a hot spot for such projects.

Turkeys lay claim to this street cornerPhoto: Courtesy of Novella CarpenterAnother concern Carpenter has is that greenhorns who have never grown a thing in their life will become overwhelmed and discouraged by the amount of work urban farming requires; even more so if they set out to produce bushels of veggies and simultaneously raise chickens, bees, and goats. (Trend alert! Nigerian mini goats "are hot right now. It's stupid.")

While growing food in a city presents its own challenges for urbanfolk -- whether that's soil contaminated by lead, a lack of water or space, changing landowners, or uncooperative neighbors -- the benefits are just as numerous and unique: The nostalgia of food memories and Southern farm roots which bubble up among African Americans transplanted to Oakland. A revolution for today's youth to set themselves apart from the expensive stigmas associated with the Slow Food movement of their parents' generation. Organic leafy greens that keep dinner parties well-supplied for the bargain price of a few dollars per seed packet. An ownership of what you put in your body and what you do to the land no matter where you live, coupled with the satisfaction of picking fresh groceries minutes before they hit the pan.

The Grist staff certainly savored Carpenter's irreverent, relaxed, dirt-under-her-nails demeanor, which was amplified by her stories of "just grab[bing]" swarms of runaway bees in her neighborhood. Trained by reknowned foodie author Michael Pollan and a grad of the University of Washington, Novella Carpenter is a voice as fresh as the food she grows in an expanding but humble realm which successfully rails "against the five-dollar arugula thing." Whether you're like me and have dozens of containers spilling with veggies in your rental's front yard, or you're like Carpenter and have guerilla plans to supplant (and eventually whack) city ornamental landscaping with edible fruit trees, I'd venture to call urban farming a trend worth its weight in zucchini.

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Is there a tradeoff between economics and the environment?

A Penny Saved Is…

Photo: otakuchick via FlickrEvery three-point shot made by a Seattle Storm player this season will be a slam dunk for a local forest.

Through a partnership with Carter Subaru, a local car dealership that promises to plant trees for every test drive, the Seattle Storm were able to plant 154 trees last year as part of their "3's for Trees" campaign. This year, they're aiming for even more trees planted on the Mountains to Sound Greenway, the scenic byway along I-90.

Joining the ranks of other green sports stars, the Seattle Storm have also committed to reducing the footprint of their games by upping recycling efforts, cutting paper use, and ensuring that merch stands are selling ecofriendly goods like "Thundersticks" made from biodegradable plastic. They're also asking fans to take a pledge to make easy changes at home.

This Thursday, Seattle's belles of the ballcourt will storm into Key Arena for "Go Green Night" during a nationally televised game with their Western Conference rival, the Sacramento Monarchs. They'll be handing out Storm-branded low-energy night lights, wearing their green-colored jerseys and organic cotton shooting shirts, and dispensing green tips throughout the night.

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U.N. chief will pressure senators on climate bill

Photo: Sarah van SchagenStroll into the newly renovated Starbucks coffeehouse in Seattle's University Village and the décor may feel more familiar than you'd expect.

The menu boards are made from the chalkboards you may have scribbled on at nearby Garfield High School; the shelving is from old bleachers you may have sat upon; the leather accents near the bar are from your old shoes and car seats; and the ash-wood community table that stretches the length of the store and patio (one-third of it is outside) is salvaged from a tree that fell in Seattle's Wallingford neighborhood.

It's part of an effort to create a shared sense of community while reducing impact on the planet -- all by sourcing materials locally. But it's no one-off show-off. The University Village store is actually one of three pilot locations (another in Seattle is on the corner of 1st Ave. and Pike St., and a third is in Paris Disney Village in Paris, France) for the company's new global store design strategy.

That strategy, which is part of the brand's Shared Planet initiative, also involves employing local artisans and craftsmen and incorporating reused and recycled materials as much as possible. All of which will help the stores achieve LEED green building certification -- the goal for all new company-owned stores built and renovated beginning in 2010.

Photo: Sarah van Schagen"This green store vision for the company has been happening and building in momentum for several years now," says Jim Hanna, director of environmental impact for Starbucks. "When we ran our carbon footprint, it basically said that 75 percent of our total carbon footprint is operation of our stores ... so if we were really going to have an impact on reducing our footprint, we had to start with the stores."

And this particular store, which reopened to coffeehounds at 6 a.m. this morning, is the company's second busiest globally, which makes it a perfect location for testing the green design concepts. One of those new elements is the lighting: Unhappy with the LED options available on the market, Starbucks partnered with GE to create an LED light fixture that wouldn't be so harsh.

And while the new GE lights are only available to Starbucks right now, they may eventually make it to the mass market. It's a good example of how the company is using its size for good, Hanna says -- not unlike Wal-Mart and other massive global brands that are often villainized, but can create major change in the market when they put their minds to it.

"A lot of our stores have a relatively similar footprint to people's homes," Hanna said. "So if somebody sees a cool LED lighting bank in the store, that's something they can take home and use in their house to reduce their energy usage."

The same could be said for the dual-flush toilets, which are already in use in all of their Australian locations. "It's interesting," says Starbucks Corporate Architect Tony Gale, "people come out of those coffeehouses and that's what they're talking about -- the dual-flush toilets."

In an effort to shepherd this sort of take-home messaging, Starbucks is adding explanatory signage throughout the stores to highlight the sustainable elements.

"Our new design actually gives the community a way to learn a little bit more about it as they discover it and maybe take some of those behaviors back to their homes," says Liz Muller, director of global concept design. "It becomes more of a lab for taking care of our planet."

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