Silver bullet award goes to...Walmart?
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Just got back frm a trek through Yale's e360 website, which covers all the ways we are devastating our world. Usually, dreadful environmental impacts are somewhere in the future--2080, 2050, etc. This site focuses on the here and now.
Images of toxins swirling through my bloodstream, ocean beds denuded of edible fishies, collapsing under 30 billion tons of plastic...
And Walmart is our current silver bullet.
Yeah, I know. Apparently, Walmart is going to require all products sold in their stores to have a sustainability guide on the packing--like a nutrition label for planet earth. AND, the corporation will only buy fish that's been sustainably, um, fished.
Some economists hope this will create a domino effect, with companies who don't even sell to Walmart creating comparable sustainable practices.
I hope this shames politicians into action. If even Walmart is getting on the bandwagon, what's the holdup?
A Few Good Words
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
"Perhaps we must confront and embrace the depths of our despair before we can see clearly. Once we do, however, the remarkable fact is that we can likely do something about climate catastrophe, despite the necessity, for the moment, of bypassing our globally failed political process. Very briefly, local self-sufficiency and sustainability, steady-state no-impact economics, eco-restoration, and rational birth reduction."
Adam Sacks wrote that here at grist.org.
It may be true that personal behavioral changes like bringing reuseable bags to the grocery store and buying squiggly light bulbs only distracts us from fighting for legislative action. But does anyone believe Senate will pass an effective climate bill?
Change on an individual level won't make a big impact. Nationwide commitments are next to impossible at this stage. But community-wide awareness is possible. It's possible for me to see communities transform into the vision outlined by Sacks. Community has become almost irrelevant -- for my part, my awareness is limited to my circle of friends and family or to Washington D.C. and beyond. Grand Rapids and Minnesota are blurry concepts somewhere in the middle area of my perception.
What I like about the ReStore is the logic: why throw away decent material? Why not resell it to fund a non profit? The prices are cheaper than retail and all the profit stays right in the community (save for a 10% tithe to Habitat International).
Solutions like this should be our focus.
Rustlings
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
The trees have dusted
all the leaves
from their branches.
The thermostat twitches.
I danced
with a quick-footed plastic bag
until it fainted beside shrubs.
Wrappers and styrofoam lounged
like partiers at the punch bowl.
A good hostess, I gathered them.
Straws rubbed shoulders
with a vodka bottle &
the shyest scraps mingled
with the rustling crowd.
The Omnivore's Delusion?
Saturday, November 7, 2009
I found a thought-provoking article by a Missouri farmer, written in response to "agri-intellectuals" (his word choice) such as Michael Pollan who presume to know how to farm better than industrial farmers.
It's a good article, because it adds a hefty dose of realism and common sense to the debate about our food supply. It's something to consider in all other environmental debates as well. Blake Hurst (aka Missouri farmer) sums up his point best with this:
"Pollan thinks farmers use commercial fertilizer because it is easier, and because it is cheap. Pollan is right. But those are perfectly defensible reasons... farmers have reasons for their actions, and society should listen to them as we embark upon this reappraisal of our agricultural system."
The reason: to provide the greatest amount of food at the cheapest possible price. No one can argue against that. But I think he's too close to the issue. This is demonstrated by his use of anecdotal evidence throughout the piece, such as the actions of his neighbor and meetings attended by his father. While I appreciate his use of common sense and farming logic to deconstruct some of Pollan's more fanciful ideas, I'd like to see interviews from a wide variety of industrial farmers about their farming methods and motives.
Even if most farmers agree with Hurst, his argument has another weakness, illustrated here:
"[Pollan's] other grand idea is mandatory household composting, with the compost delivered to farmers free of charge. Why not? Compost is a valuable soil amendment, and if somebody else is paying to deliver it to my farm, then bring it on. "
Part of the reason our food is cheaper is thanks to technological advances such as fertilizer and genetically modified crops. But when you consider government subsidies and the environmental damage caused by locating, collecting, refining, and transporting the oil used in fertilizer, diesel engines, and processing crops; not to mention the farming practices themselves which depletes soil and creates runoff that makes most waterways in the area unswimmable and unfishable, the food isn't cheap at all.
Organic farming eliminates many of these costs, but unfortunately creates new costs that are borne by the farmer instead of the ephemeral environment. Bugs, mold, and lower crop yields are all possibilites that no farmer would happily embrace, especially since no economic cushion currently exists to help the farmer make that risk.
Unfortunately, our food system is set up to favor industrial methods. Large-scale organic farming just doesn't work, but large-scale industrial does work, as long as environmental and public health costs are ignored of course. It's the economy, stupid.
To transform our agricultural system, our government needs to subsidize organic farming practices and phase out subsidies for industrial farming. This will raise food prices, so the government will also need to subsidize basic food products to keep it affordable. The environment is a public good, and it's up to our government to maintain it. Funding? Cut the military budget in half, cease all military aid, raise taxes for the wealthiest Americans, legalize marijuana and tax the hell out of it, etc. The possibilities are endless. My favorite solution: tax the hell out of high-spending lobbying organizations.
I have an idea for quite possibly the most boring (to everyone but me) reality show ever: an organic farmer and an industrial farmer switch farms. The drama!
No Impact Man
Friday, November 6, 2009
I first heard about Colin on the Colbert Report. He was getting the word out for his new book "No Impact Man: the adventures of a guilty liberal who attempts to save the planet, and the discoveries he makes about himself and our way of life in the process." He's also made a movie about his year of no impact living. And of course, he also has a blog, which I highly recommend. It's a bit spastic, but then again so are most blogs. He covers a wide range of living green issues.
Because let's face it, the first step to nurturing a green culture is transforming individual lifestyles. Social norms are powerful stuff. It's why my mom bought an organic turkey for thanksgiving this year and why both my parents have been eating more vegetarian suppers.
No Impact Man has also spearheaded the no impact project, a pdf how-to guide for a week of no impact living. Each day, participants in the project make one additional step to a no impact life. Day 1 focuses on consumption, Day 2 adds trash elimination, and so on with transportation, eating locally, reducing energy use, and reducing water use. The week rounds off with volunteering and an Eco-Sabbath-- make no impact all day long.
It's a radical week to be sure, and changing the usual routine is difficult. This experiment appeals to me for several reasons:
On a personal level, it advocates simplicity. I have less distractions. My life is more focused. Clutter is nonexistent. There's more dinero in my bank account.
No impact living is empowering. So what if our disposable culture pressures us to be wasteful? Live is possible without microwave dinners, television, and A/C. With the flip of a switch, I'm a bona fide responsible member of society, capable of ignoring the temptation of single-serving yogurt cups. Feel the power.
Life has more meaning. Every moment of my day is deliberate, since my every action's carbon footprint needs to be considered. I think we could all do with more mindfullness throughout the day.
The (few) items I own are imbued with significance. Like the ceramic bowl I bought 3 years ago from Goodwill. It has been my sole bowl through most of college and now my first year in the real world. I ate from that bowl when I lived in Iowa City, when I worked in Columbus Ohio, when I lived at a commune, and now in Grand Rapids. Then there's the hat my friend knitted for me at about the same time. I ran cross country with that hat, took skiing trips with my dad, lent it to friends. Most of my favorite clothes came from freebie tables and Goodwill racks.
Of course for many people in the world, there's no choice but no-impact living. I sometimes wonder how baffled they would be at the amount of websites dedicated to giving up all sorts of modern conveniences I've "sacrificed" in some sort of neo-esthetic dogma.
Then again, these same people live in areas of the world that are most affected by global warming, not to mention all the strange and wonderful creatures of nature who are harmed every day by our pollutants and waste.
What's so insidious about our disposable culture is the utter thoughtlessness of it all. We line our canned foods with toxins and use plastic bags for a 5 min errand run that'll outlast us for millions of years.
This isn't limited to environmental concerns. Consider our nation's eagerness to bomb Afghanistan's inhabitants, and the callous layoffs in corporations across the country. Under this system, razors are disposable, workers are disposable, entire nations are disposable.
What a waste of humanity's genius.
The Great Pacific Garbage Vortex
Thursday, November 5, 2009
An overlooked consequence of our throwaway culture has recently come to light. The vast amounts of garbage dumped by ships and coastal inhabitants coalesces into gigantic pools of toxic muck. A vortex is created when currents make a circular pattern in the ocean basin. Everything from shopping bags to packing peanuts, broken down into tiny pieces by sun and water, collects in these vortexes. The particles are too tiny to be picked up by satellite, so unfortunately there aren't any graphic depictions of the trash heap.
It's basically a layer of glop, mistaken for food by the fishies. The particles attract heavy metals during their swim, which enter the food chain when Nemo mistakes a toxic speck of flip-flop for dinner. Flounder eats Nemo, Flounder gets picked up in a fisherman's drag net along with a couple dolphins, Flounder ends up on your plate, and you've just eaten poison when all you were trying to do was get more omega-3s in your diet.
I hope you didn't eat any canned green beans as a side dish, because it turns out that the plastic lining in many canned goods leaches BPA into the food. According to the Endocrine Society, low-level exposure to BPA adversely affects male and female reproduction, thyroid function, metabolism, and could increase obesity. Consumer Reports conducted a study of 19 common canned goods and "almost all" of them showed measureable levels of BPA.
What does this mean? “A 165-pound adult eating one serving of canned green beans from our sample, which averaged 123.5 ppb, could ingest about 0.2 micrograms of BPA per kilogram of body weight per day, about 80 times higher than our experts’ recommended daily upper limit.” (Emphasis added.)
But what can be done about this? BPA is a building block of plastics, a material we all depend on. Not to mention it's an essential part of a $6 billion industry, the lobbyists of which are working hard to keep FDA-approved levels of BPA far higher than the level used by Consumer Reports.
As for the garbage vortex, the slop has been collecting for over 60 years, and only now are scientists beginning to study it. Discovering an effective way to clean up the goo, not to mention preventing more waste from being dumped in the ocean, is going to be an uphill battle.
As for me, I'll keep using my reuseable shopping bags and buying organic foods as often as I can.
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