http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zORv8wwiadQ&feature=player_embedded

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Silver bullet award goes to...Walmart?

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?

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A Few Good Words

"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.

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Rustlings

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.

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The Omnivore's Delusion?

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!

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No Impact Man

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.

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The Great Pacific Garbage Vortex

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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Play hard, go easy on the environment

Hands down, my favorite playtime activity of choice is camping. My dad, who has enough will power for five people, has built three gorgeous canoes. He's also gone camping in the Quetico or Boundary Waters every summer for the past 25 years. Multiple trips per summer. Usually I avoid physical exertion of any kind, but I really get into camping. The little pleasures of life become amplified--a good swimming hole, tasty food, a loon call, and of course the satisfaction of good raingear and boots.

I've seen many green living websites where environmentalists sound like they're neo-Puritans, telling people to use 2-ply toilet paper and stop using A/C. That's just one side of the equation, and really not one that many people are going to get excited about.

Thing is, the most fulfilling moments of my life aren't from eating Big Macs or watching TV, it's from camping trips with dad, bike rides with my cousins, climbing trees, picking princess pine with mom, and a host of other (carbon-neutral) activities that allow me to interact with my environment up close and personal, without a car window in the way.

Earth Easy is a wonderful website that will transform the way your think about environmentalism.

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Easy DIY project

Today a fine drizzle transformed into a flurry. On a blustery day like this, cheer yourself up with a rescue project. You see all that discarded paper languishing in the recycling bin? Paper that's been printed on just one side, gift wrapping, a ceral box or two? Retrieve the paper, grab some string and glue (or a plastic comb binder if you have access to a school supply closet), and craft yourself a unique, personalized notebook. Don't forget to use the cereal box for the covers.

You'll wonder why you ever bought those lame notebooks at Walmart.

You will be inspired.

Help your friends become as cool as you and call up the ReStore to schedule a Notebook Soiree for your next rescue mission. A ReStore representative (me) will bring paper rescued from local businesses and all other necessary supplies. Call 218.999.9099 and ask for Johanna (yes, me).

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Environment Furniture

Environment Furniture is a company that uses reclaimed, recycled, and sustainably harvested wood to make these gorgeous pieces.

This chair reminds me of the storage bin where dad kept all his (clean) rags. My favorite place for hide and seek and a wonderful place to nap. It also reminds me of the monsters in Where the Wild Things Are.

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The Search for the Authentic

One of Salon's bloggers wrote a fantastic post about shoppers' quest for authenticity as expressed by the new TV series "Man Shops Globe." In this series, a dude scours the globe for one of a kind items that can be marked up to outrageous prices at Anthropoligie, a store that also sells mass produced "one-of-a-kind" merchandise as well as the generic pretty things you can find at any retail store.

The post does an excellent job analyzing our need for authenticity in a consumer culture saturated with flimsy disposable commodities with no connection to "the concreteness of old stuff that looks like it has a long and storied history."

This helps explain why upcycling, reconstructing, and otherwise reusing materials is such a feel good thing to do. What better way to add value to your belongings than working on it yourself and make it uniquely yours?

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Stop Trashing the Climate

How would you like to shut down one fifth of all coal-fired power plants in the US?

Turns out, there's an easier way to reduce the equivalent amount of carbon emissions. You probably know what I'm going to say: divert materials out of the wastestream and back into re-use. I was recently told the ReStore has diverted more than 600,000 tons of material from the landfill, so I started hunting the internet for some more information about the environmental benefits of keeping useable materials in circulation.

I read an interesting study written by the Institute for Local Self-Reliance which reports the impact our waste has on the environment.

Americans dump 170 million tons of waste into landfills and incinerators every year. That's enough for a 30' wall around the entire U.S. border. Here's the kicker: we have the technology to cost-effectively recycle, reuse, or compost 90% of what we dump. A zero waste approach would reduce greenhouse gases by about 406 megatons CO2 eq. every year. That reduction per year is the same as shutting down 21% of the nation's 417 coal fired power plants.

This figure is reached by including more than just the environmental benefits of disposing materials in a responsible manner. That just accounts for an annual 2.6% of greenhouse gas emissions.

The study includes the climate change impact of replacing the materials we throw away.

"For every ton of discarded products and materials destroyed by incinerators and landfills, about 71 tons of manufacturing, mining, oil and gas exploration, agricultural, coal combustion, and other discards are produced. More trees must be cut down to make paper. More ore must be mined for metal production. More petroleum must be processed into plastics."

By including this aspect, wasting accounts for 36.7% of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. A zero-waste approach is one of the fastest, cheapest, and most effective way to protect the climate and environment.

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Upcycle your clothes

The Contract I wrote about in my first post sounds an awful lot like deprivation and ascetism, suitable only for people who want an excuse to be a tighwad. But I assure you, making an effort to borrow, barter, or buy used allows you to explore the right side of your brain. Some crafty people have taken a pledge to take fashion into their own hands:

The Pledge

I __________________ pledge that I shall abstain from the purchase of "new" manufactured items of clothing, for the period of 2 / 4 / 6 months. I pledge that i shall refashion, renovate, recycle preloved items for myself with my own hands in fabric, yarn or other medium for the term of my contract. Signed__________________.

Just as my thrift-store finds mean more to me than what I find in a box store, my reconstructed clothes are special. It's hard to be attached to the disposable mass produced commodities surrounding us every day. Whenever I pull something out of the waste stream and make it uniquely mine...well, it's a rare experience for most of us. These Contracts and Pledges are a way to express ourselves rather than pay for a corporate-sponsored expression.

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Weatherization will save us all.

Pop quiz: What saves money, saves energy, creates green jobs, fights climate change, can fix the economy, will make America great again, and is both a floor wax and a dessert topping?

Answer: It’s weatherization! And both the U.S. government and the European Union are embracing its potential.

In a report released today, Joe Biden’s Middle Class Task Force (which, hello: still a terrible name) recommends steps toward a national retrofit program, citing a potential $21 billion in annual energy savings and 40 percent cut in energy use. Specific proposals include: an Energy Star-style labeling program for existing homes; a national home energy performance measure; municipal financing that attaches retrofit costs to homeowners’ tax bills; and national standards for workforce training and certification.

“These recommendations can pave the way for a self-sustaining retrofit market, a market that can reliably cut energy bills while also creating good green jobs and saving consumers money,” says the report. Hear that? Weatherization will save us all.

Next step? Another task force! Yesssss. The interagency Energy Retrofit Working Group will submit an implementation plan to Biden in thirty days. At which point he will create a subcommittee to ... oh hell, just go add some insulation to your attic. We’ll let you know when the good stuff comes.

Meanwhile, across the pond, a draft EU report recommends retrofitting 15 million buildings in Europe over the next decade as part of an “energy efficiency action plan” aimed at cutting energy use by 20 percent. The European Building Initiative would generate about $19.7 billion in savings and could create 300,000 jobs a year, the report estimates: “Investing in energy efficiency in buildings can play a key role in the EU’s economic recovery.”

Hear that? Go on, repeat after me: Weatherization will save us all.

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ReStore Monthly Newsletter

Be the first to know about our newest items, sales, workshops and more. E-mail restorevista@itascahabitat.org to sign up for The Salvage Times.

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The Compact

The Itasca County Habitat for Humanity ReStore proudly presents their very own tree hugging granola crunching earth lover: me!

Two years ago, I resolved not to buy anything new, anymore. I got the idea from some fellow environmentalists out in San Francisco who formed a group called The Compact. Their aims:

1. To go beyond recycling
2. To reduce clutter and waste in their homes
3. To simplify their lives

Their principles:

1. To buy no new products of any kind
2. Borrow, barter, or buy used

Yes there are a few exceptions--food, toiletries, and cleaning supplies. And underwear. Sorry Goodwill, I just can't bring myself to buy your panties, and I'm sorry if I ever "donated" any to your establishment.

Making the Compact myself was pretty simple. I was in college at the time for one thing. For another, I don't appreciate a brand new product nearly as much as finding that one-of-a-kind item at a thrift store.

Lately, my best finds have been furniture. Earlier this year, I found two gorgeous chairs. They matched, looked like something out of the Victoria era, and were upholstered in pink velvet. To go with the chairs, I also found a squishy yellow couch. These furnishings now reside at the Coe College EcoHouse, where I'm confident they are well loved. There's no way I could have afforded these items brand new, and the kind of new furniture in my price range is of the beanbag and blow-up type.

Nowadays, I've been exploring the richness of the color brown for my latest apartment. I lucked out at the ReStore in Grand Rapids--a leather button back chair they were giving away for free! I borrowed my dad's guitar so as to teach myself to play. And just today, one of the volunteers at the Itasca County ReStore is giving me a few pounds of home-cured venison in exchange for my admiration of his hunting prowess.

No longer are my purchases a hasty affair in a windowless box, negotiated by an anonymous cashier. My finds are forged through human connections and resourcefulness. When I do find an item I've been looking for, it's a rush.

Bargain hunters, it's time to start feeling smug. We're not only saving money, we're also doing our part to save the planet.

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