Monday, November 30, 2009

A great use for that incandescent bulb

Creative Re-use: Turn a Light Bulb into a Terrarium:
steampumk-bulb1.jpg

Incandescent light bulbs will be collectors items soon, no matter what Michele Bachmann thinks. Instead of just throwing the old ones out, perhaps something creative can be done with them. Coincidentally, both Lifehacker and BoingBoing address this problem today; Boingboing with Professor Alexander's Botanical Vasculum - Steamed ...Read the full story on TreeHugger
Love this idea. Replace your incandescent bulb with a CFL and then convert that bulb into a terrarium.


I created one - doesn't look as great as the picture above. It was an easy process to open the bulb and clean it out. Packed some moss and small stones in, propped it up on a copper wire stand... Now if the moss grows - I may make some more.

Saturday, November 28, 2009

Celestial Seasonings and Kombucha

Hain Celestial Group Acquires Infinitea Kombucha
The Hain Celestial Group, Inc. (Nasdaq: HAIN), a leading natural and organic products company, today announced the acquisition of Infinitea Kombucha in Boulder, CO. Infinitea Kombucha is a producer of organic kombucha, a fermented probiotic tea, that is sold through natural food retailers.

The Infinitea Kombucha product line will no longer be manufactured. Celestial Seasonings® is expected to launch Celestial Seasonings® kombucha in Spring of 2010. Nicole Gervace, owner of Infinitea Kombucha, has joined the Company as Product Manager to manage the Celestial Seasonings kombucha product line.
I have been using Celestial seasoning teas in my home brewing. Red Zinger Kombucha is now my fave. Love the idea that they are venturing in this direction, but it is still cheaper for me to make my own. Wonder if I could patent Red Zinger Kombucha before them?

Tofu, Tree Farms...

Tofu, Tree Farms and Electric Tractors:
peak oil and agriculture photo
Image credit: Bountiful Backyards

As the wonderful BBC documentary A Farm for the Future has shown us all too clearly, modern agriculture is woefully dependent on fossil fuels, and oil in particular. And with International Energy Agency (IEA) whistleblowers suggesting peak oil may be nearer than we think, and even the IEA chief saying time is not on our side, we'd do well to start designing our way out of an oil-based food system. So what might that transition look like?

Many activists are putting time into community nut and fruit tree plantings as a source of food security. (The image above comes from an orchard planted in my town last week.) And those cutting back on meat consumption, and especially grain fed meats, are undoubtedly doing their part to move away from oil-intensive food.
Hard to break the fossil habit on large farm factories but in our own yards - it is all your muscle power.

Thursday, November 26, 2009

Giving Thanks for America's Good Food Movement

Jim Hightower :

What better day than Thanksgiving to celebrate our country's food rebels!

I'm talking about the growing movement of small farmers, food artisans, local retailers, co-ops, community organizers, restaurateurs, environmentalists, consumers and others -- perhaps including you. This movement has spread the rich ideas of sustainability, organic, local control and the Common Good from the fringes of our food economy into the mainstream.

Couldn't agree more!

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Forget it Rush

Dangerous, Potentially-Irreversible Climate Change Happening Faster Than Scientists Thought:
extinction stencil photo
photo: Loco085 via flickr.

A lot's happened with climate change science since the last IPCC report. With the general consensus (hacked CRU email non-revelation brouhaha aside) being that things are happening much faster than we expected and that the uncertainty regarding human causes being over whether it 90% certainty or 99% certainty more than anything else. With the COP15 conference just two weeks away a group of UK scientists has taken the time to distill the current state of climate change for us. The picture is clear and stark:
First of all, the scientific evidence for "dangerous, long-term and potentially irreversible climate change has strengthened significantly" since the last IPCC report two years ago:

CO2 concentrations continue to rise and after a decade of stability, methane concentrations (more potent, though shorter lived than CO2...) have begun increasing again.

The years 2000-2009 have been warmer on average than any other decade in the past 150 years.

Precipitation changes have been at the upper limits of what climate models predicted, characterized by decreases in the subtropics and increases in high latitudes.

Arctic summer sea ice cover declined suddenly in 2007 and 2008, melting 40% more than the average prediction from the IPCC report.

Evidence for continued and accelerating sea-level rise increases around the world -- by 2100 we're on track for double the amount of sea level rise projected back in 2007 -- that's more than a meter, with continued rises seen in subsequent centuries.
Rush, Sean and Alex Jones are making a huge deal about the "leaked" emails and how global warming is all a hoax to promote a One World Order. Wonder what they'll make of this?

Sunday, November 22, 2009

Reading from Limbaugh's Playbook

Global Warming Meltdown: Climategate!:
"

Alan Caruba

Warning Signs

November 22, 2009


For those of us “skeptics” and “deniers” who have been jumping up and down, pointing at the Sun, and saying, “See, it’s the Sun that determines how warm or cool the Earth is. See it? Up there in the sky?” The truth about some of the scientists behind the global warming hoax has finally arrived.



The hoax has its roots in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an instrument of the United Nations Environmental Program, for whom global warming was the open sesame to achieving a one-world-government by scaring nations into signing a treaty that would control their use of energy, the means of producing it, and require vast billions to be sent to less developed nations in exchange for “emitting” greenhouse gases.


Energy is called “the master resource” because, if you have lots of it, you can call your own shots. If you don’t, you are condemned to live in the dark and keeping people in the dark about the global warming hoax was essential.


For years the IPCC has been controlled by a handful of the worst liars in the world, utterly devoted to taking actual climate data and twisting it to confirm the assertion that the Earth was not only warming dramatically, but that humanity was in peril of rising oceans, melting glaciers and polar ice caps, more hurricanes, the die-off of countless animal species, and every other calamity that could possibly be attributed to “global warming”, including acne.


So, around November 20, when some enterprising individual hacked into the computers of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), making off with thousands of emails and documents that demonstrate the level of collusion and deception being practiced by its scientists.


It’s a climate hoax expose that some are calling the revelations a “little blue dress” while others are comparing it to the Pentagon Papers. It has also been dubbed “climategate.”


As James Delingpole wrote in the Telegraph, one of England’s leading newspapers, “Conspiracy, collusion in exaggerating warming data, possibly illegal destruction of embarrassing information, organized resistance to disclosure, manipulation of data, private admissions of flaws in their public claims and much more” was revealed in the 61 megabites of confidential files released on the Internet for anyone to read.


The conspirators had a visceral hatred for scientists who challenged their phony statistics and climate data, but they also agonized over the difficulties of hiding a long established climate cycle such as the Medieval Warm Period. At one point it was left out of a graph that famously became known as “the hockey stick” because it depicted a ludicrous sudden rise in warming, ignoring the previous natural cycle.


At the heart of the revelations were the intense efforts to ensure that no legitimate scientist, particularly those dissenting from the various IPCC reports, would be allowed to participate in the peer review process. Peer review is an essential element in science as it permits other scientists to examine and test the data being put forth to substantiate a new interpretation or discovery.


The IPCC reports were the basis by which popular media such as National Geographic, Time and Newsweek magazines could spread the lies about a dramatic “global warming”, passing them off to an unsuspecting and scientifically illiterate general public. At the same time, the lies were integrated them into school curriculums and maintained by Hollywood celebrities, politicians and others, duped or deliberately ignorant.


To this day, otherwise legitimate news media outlets continue to trumpet and repeat absolute nonsense about “global warming” like brain-dead parrots.


Now that Hadley CRU and its conspirators have been exposed, there truly is no need to hold a December UN climate change conference in Copenhagen; one in which nations would be required to put limits on “greenhouse gas emissions” even though such gases, primarily carbon dioxide, have nothing to do with altering the Earth’s climate.


And that is why you are going to hear more about “climate change” and far less about “global warming.” Hidden in such discussions, intended to justify legislation and regulation, is that the Earth’s climate has always and will always change.


It is, for example, shameful and deceitful for the EPA to claim carbon dioxide is a “pollutant” that should be regulated. The same applies to “cap-and-trade” legislation with the same purpose.


Billions of taxpayer dollars have been wasted on studies of global warming and poured into agencies such as NASA that have lent credence to the global warming hoax.


“The U.S. taxpayer has much exposure here in the joint projects and collaborations which operated in reliance upon what the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit was doing,” says Christopher C. Horner, a longtime global warming skeptic. “There are U.S. taxpayer-funded offices and individuals involved in the machinations addressed in the emails, and in the emails themselves.”


Horner, the author of “Red Hot Lies”, said that the initial revelations “give the appearance of a conspiracy to defraud, by parties working in taxpayer funded agencies collaborating on ways to misrepresent material on which an awful lot of taxpayer money rides.”


The climate, defined as long term trends, and the weather has nothing whatever to do with human activity and suggesting it does reveals the depth of contempt that people like Al Gore and his ilk have for humanity and those fleeced by purchasing “carbon credits” or paying more for electricity when their utility does.


The East Anglia CRU charlatans have been exposed. Most certainly, the United Nations IPCC should be disbanded in disgrace. It belongs in a museum of hoaxes right beside the Piltdown Man and the Loch Ness Monster.

"
Sounds like it is coming from Rush and Sean's playbooks. So the warmer weather and glacial melting has no bearing on the discussion? It is all a plot to run the world with one government? Do nothing and we'll all be happy? Or is it do nothing and we won't have anything to worry about since Mother Earth will get rid of the disease hurting her - that would be us!

Friday, November 20, 2009

Don't bomb the turbines

U.S. Military Wary About Offshore Wind Power Off Coast of Maryland:
"offshore wind turbines photo
Photo: Wikipedia, CC

Maryland Offshore Wind Development
Martin O'Malley, the governor of Maryland, would like to see offshore wind power developed off the cost of his state, but the U.S. military has expressed fears that the turbines could 'disrupt flight and weapon test ranges, as well as erroneously appear on radar as unidentifiable aircraft.' Three military bases in the region are using that area in the Atlantic for training missions and flight tests....Read the full story on TreeHugger"
Reading further, some are concerned since the military spends mucho bucks in the area - can't let that go away.


There has got to be a way to make everyone happy. The turbines will bring money to the area. The climate will love it. Just have to get the military to take those turbines off the "shoot to kill" list.

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Adding to my wish list

Vertical Farm + Fish Tank + Solar Power = Balanced Diet:
"inka system closed loop vertical farm
Inka Biospheric systems

It has been a science fiction dream: the completely integrated, closed loop system 'micro-farm.' And we get it with the Inka Curve, a vertical minifarm that provides herbs, grasses, fruits or vegetables grown on a vertical 'bio-quilt.'
But these need nutrients, which come from fish poop. But fish tanks need cleaning and aerating, and the vertical farm needs pumped water which requires power; that comes from wind turbines and solar panels, stored in a battery bank.

So the fish poop provides nutrients for the garden, all powered by the sun, using 10% of the water of conventional farming. The bacteria in the bioquilt of the vertical farm break down the nutrients and purify the water so that it can be returned to the fish tank, providing a balanced diet of protein and green vegetables on an incredibly small footprint. It is a dream kitchen addition that means we will never have to go out food shopping again.
I have the veggie garden already but adding a small fish farm makes this a great gift - hint...hint!

We are all connected

Viewing the world as a system will help us establish sustainability:
Paul Hawken was the keynote speaker at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum in San Francisco on Thursday. He had some inspiring talking points (the forum’s goal was to ‘reinspire the inspired’), but one of the key takeaways was in how we should be viewing sustainability.  He started by saying that sustainability should be viewed as a easily defineable.  Sustainability means we survive.  Living unsustainably means we don’t.  But it was how he suggested we view this that was really interesting. 
He wanted to suggest that sustainability is about seeing the world as a system.

This concept is not really a new one. The inter-connectedness of all has been talked about for centuries. It was the way our forefathers lived. It is just "modern" man has forgotten that. It is time we start remembering.

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Battle lines drawn

GOP Ramps Up Attacks on Dems Who Support Clean Energy Reform for 2010 Elections:
Republicans on the Anti-Energy Reform Warpath for 2010
This unfortunate headline caught my eye in today's GreenWire: Political Fallout of Vote for Climate Bill Tested in House Race in N.M. Turns out a well known Republican politician is preparing to try to take his seat back in the House of Reps--by focusing squarely on the fact that his opponent, Democratic incumbent Harry Teague voted for the climate bill. As per usual, he's falsely casting the bill as nothing but a giant tax. The worrisome thing is that this tactic appears to be spreading across the country.
Listening to Rush and Hannity and other talking heads, the talk is the same: cap and tax; it's cold out so forget about global warming?; it's just nature's cycle, man has nothing to do with it; drill, drill, drill - the supply of oil is endless.


Funny thing is, what if they are wrong? Mother Earth cleans us out. Nothing to risk in reducing, reusing, recycling, going green... Only thing to risk is less bucks in the wallets of several large companies - which in turn means less money in the pockets of many politicos.

Monday, November 16, 2009

Yeast People - Bread, beer or...

The Fate of the Yeast People by James Howard Kunstler.
It's certainly true that the planet is suffering from human population overshoot. We're way beyond "carrying capacity." Only the remaining supplies of fossil fuels allow us to continue this process, and not for long, anyway. In the meantime, human reproduction rates are also greatly increasing the supply of idiots relative to resources, and that is especially problematic in the USA, where idiots rule the culture and polity.
The cocoon of normality prevents us from appreciating how peculiar and special recent times have been in this country. We suppose, tautologically, that because things have always seemed the way they are, that they always have been the way they seem. The collective human imagination is a treacherous place.
I'm fascinated by the dominion of moron culture in the USA, in everything from the way we inhabit the landscape - the fiasco of suburbia - to the way we feed ourselves - an endless megatonnage of microwaved Velveeta and corn byproducts - along with the popular entertainment offerings of Reality TV, the Nascar ovals, and the gigantic evangelical church shows beloved in the Heartland. To evangelize a bit myself, if such a concept as "an offense in the sight of God" has any meaning, then the way we conduct ourselves in this land is surely the epitome of it - though this is hardly an advertisement for competing religions, who are well-supplied with morons, too.
Moron culture in the USA really got full traction after the Second World War. Our victory over the other industrial powers in that struggle was so total and stupendous that the laboring orders here were raised up to economic levels unknown by any peasantry in human history. People who had been virtual serfs trailing cotton sacks in the sunstroke belt a generation back were suddenly living better than Renaissance dukes, laved in air-conditioning, banqueting on "TV dinners," motoring on a whim to places that would have taken a three-day mule trek in their grandaddy's day. Soon, they were buying Buick dealerships and fried chicken franchises and opening banks and building leisure kingdoms of thrill rides and football. It's hard to overstate the fantastic wealth that a not-very-bright cohort of human beings was able to accumulate in post-war America.
And they were able to express themselves - as the great chronicler of these things, Tom Wolfe, has described so often and well - in exuberant "taste cultures" of material life, of which Las Vegas is probably the final summing-up, and every highway strip, of twenty-thousand strips from Maine to Oregon, is the democratic example. These days, I travel the road up the west shore of Lake George, in Warren County, New York, and see the sad, decomposing relics of that culture and that time in all the "playful" motels and leisure-time attractions, with their cracked plastic signs advertising the very things that they exterminated in the quest for adequate parking - the woodand vistas, the paddling Mohicans, the wolf, the moose, the catamount - and I take a certain serene comfort in the knowledge that it is all over now for this stuff and the class of morons that produced it.
A very close friend of mine calls them "the yeast people." They were the democratic masses who thrived in the great fermentation vat of the post World War Two economy. They are now meeting the fate that any yeast population faces when the fermentation process is complete. For the moment, they are only ceasing to thrive. They are suffering and worrying horribly from the threat that there might be no further fermentation. The brewers running the vat try to assure them that there's more sugar left in the mix, and more beer can be made from it, and more yeasts can be brought into this world to enjoy the life of the sweet, moist mash. In fact, one of the brewers did happen to dump about a trillion-and-a-half teaspoons of sugar into the vat during 2009, and that has produced an illusion of further fermentation. But we know all too well that this artificial stimulus has limits.
What will happen to the yeast people of the USA? You can be sure that the outcome will not yield to "policies" and "protocols." The economy that produced all that amazing wealth is contracting, and pretty rapidly, too, and the numbers among the yeast will naturally follow the downward arc of the story. Entropy is a harsh mistress. In the immediate offing: a contest for the table scraps of the 20th century. We've barely seen the beginning of this, just a little peevishness embodied by yeast shaman figures such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. As hardships mount and hardened emotions rise, we'll see "the usual suspects" come into play: starvation, disease, violence. We may still be driving around in Ford F-150s, but the Pale Rider is just over the horizon beating a path to our parking-lot-of-the-soul.
It's a sad and tragic process and, all lame metaphors aside, there are real human feelings at stake in our prospects for loss of every kind, but especially in the fate of people we love. The human race has known catastrophe before and come through it. There's some credible opinion that "this time it's different" but who really knows? We have our 2012 apocalypse movies. The people of the 14th century, savaged by the Black Death, had their woodcuts of dancing skeletons. Feudalism was wiped out in that earlier calamity but, whaddaya know, less than a century after that the Renaissance emerged in a wholly new culture of cities. Maybe we will emerge from our culture of free parking to a new society of living, by necessity, much more lightly on the planet and for a long time, perhaps long enough to allow the terrain to recover from all the free parking.
Living simply out of necessity. Too bad we need a disaster to push us to living simply and ecologically-sound.

Are you a yeast people?

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Bring back the root cellar

Eco Etiquette: How To Eat Local This Winter
Say what you will about the smog and traffic in Los Angeles, but it's pretty darn fantastic to be able to pedal on over to my local farmer's market year-round. That's one of the advantages of living in sun-soaked California, the nation's breadbasket. San Joaquin Valley, to the north, produces nearly half of all the fruits, nuts, and vegetables sold in the United States (though that number has declined in the past three years due to drought); San Diego County, to the south, has more farms than any other county in the country.

These agricultural tidbits went largely unnoticed by me until a trip to Boston in the dead of winter a few years back, after I had already moved out West, when I realized that it was only in LA that grocery stores offered almost entirely local produce; even the Beantown Whole Foods I visited featured -- you guessed it -- California's finest fruitage.

Believe it or not, you don't have to live in the Golden State to enjoy farm-fresh food 365 days a year; there are winters farmers markets, even in some darn-cold areas of the country...

Want to know how to procure farm-fresh, local food even in a four-foot snowstorm? The answer is as simple as C-S-A...

I did a survey of CSAs around the country and found that surprisingly, winter offerings can be quite diverse: Garden of Eve's farm share on the East End of Long Island includes stored vegetables like beets, rutabagas, and winter squash, as well as organic eggs; Laughing Stock Farm in Freeport, Maine, offers fresh salad greens and baby carrots from its greenhouse (which is heated with a renewable fuel, of course)...

Of course you can also grow your own and store your turnips, rutabagas, carrots, squash. Freeze some turnip and beet greens. Leave the kale in the garden, mulch your beets...

A perfect way to enjoy your vegetables? A great soup that includes potatoes, rutabagas, squash, parsnips, carrots, kale and turnip greens. That's my dinner for two or three nights this week.

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Climate Rage

Climate Rage:
One last chance to save the world -
for months, that's how the United Nations summit on climate change in Copenhagen, which starts in early December, was being hyped. Officials from 192 countries were finally going to make a deal to keep global temperatures below catastrophic levels. The summit called for "that old comic-book sensibility of uniting in the face of a common danger threatening the Earth," said Todd Stern, President Obama's chief envoy on climate issues.

"It's not a meteor or a space invader, but the damage to our planet, to our community, to our children and their children will be just as great."

That was back in March. Since then, the endless battle over health care reform has robbed much of the president's momentum on climate change. With Copenhagen now likely to begin before Congress has passed even a weak-ass climate bill co-authored by the coal lobby, U.S. politicians have dropped the superhero metaphors and are scrambling to lower expectations for achieving a serious deal at the climate summit. It's just one meeting, says U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu, not "the be-all and end-all."

As faith in government action dwindles, however, climate activists are treating Copenhagen as an opportunity of a different kind. On track to be the largest environmental gathering in history, the summit represents a chance to seize the political terrain back from business-friendly half-measures, such as carbon offsets and emissions trading, and introduce some effective, common-sense proposals - ideas that have less to do with creating complex new markets for pollution and more to do with keeping coal and oil in the ground.

Among the smartest and most promising - not to mention controversial - proposals is "climate debt," the idea that rich countries should pay reparations to poor countries for the climate crisis.

Friday, November 13, 2009

Ring in a new year

Church bells to ring out warning on climate change:
The World Council of Churches on Thursday called on churches around the world to ring their bells 350 times during the Copenhagen climate change summit on December 13 as a call to action on global warming.


The leading council of Christian and Orthodox churches also invited places of worship for other faiths to join a symbolic “chain of chimes and prayers” stretching around the world from the international date line in the South Pacific.


“On that Sunday, midway through the UN summit, the WCC invites churches around the world to use their bells, drums, gongs or whatever their tradition offers to call people to prayer and action in the face of climate change,” the council said in a statement.

A step in the right direction. This, along with the Green Bible, gives me some hope that religion and science can work together.

Get ready...

Whistleblower: World Running Out of Oil Faster Than IEA Says: <
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According to two unnamed sources as reported in the Guardian—one current International Energy Agency (IEA) employee and one former—the IEA has been purposely painting an overly rosy picture of the remaining available world oil supplies to avoid panicking the public. Apparently this obfuscation has been a result of heavy pressure from the United States.


As one whistleblower put it, “Many inside the [IEA] believe that maintaining oil supplies at even 90m to 95m barrels a day would be impossible but there are fears that panic could spread on the financial markets if the figures were brought down further. And the Americans fear the end of oil supremacy because it would threaten their power over access to oil resources.

Get ready. Things are going to get very interesting.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Ditch the fizz!

Soda Helps Make Americans Unhealthy and Fat -- Will Soda Tax Prevail Despite Pushback by Beverage Industry?:
Soft drink makers, supermarket companies, agriculture and the fast-food business have poured millions into campaigning against taxes on sweetened beverages.



Soft drink makers, supermarket companies, agriculture and the fast-food business have poured millions into campaigning against what they fear could be a burgeoning national movement to raise money for health care reform by taxing sweetened beverages.
Do we really need the sugar?

Solution - drink kombucha and kefir. Or just the old standby - beer!

Monday, November 9, 2009

Seeing the light

Five Hundred Oil-Industry Geologists Vote on Peak Oil:

Guess What the Results Were
The theory of peak oil itself is fairly non-controversial. But saying that we're close to this absolutely peak in oil and gas production is still debated by very knowledgeable people on both sides. A few years ago, it seemed like the balance was tipped in the direction of the 'peak oil is not a problem for the near future' side, but lately, it seems like things might be going the other way. At the Petroleum Geology Conference in London, 500 geologists took a vote on wether "Peak oil is no longer a concern" (something that was argued by some of the speakers). The results were interesting.
Only about 1/3 of the votes supported that claim!

Sunday, November 8, 2009

A new art medium?

Manure Sculpture "Nick Smith in the Shit" Sold at Auction:
shit sculpture of nick smith by sam mahon image
Image: TradeMe

Bullshit Bust Pokes Kiwi Minister
A manure sculpture of New Zealand agricultural minister Nick Smith has sold on the Kiwi auction site TradeMe. The sculpture by artist Sam Mahon, who traditionally works in bronze, immortalizes Mahon's opinion that Nick Smith has not taken sufficient action to protect New Zealand waters from pollution by agricultural run-off. Read the full story on TreeHugger
Makes a statement and uses a readily available medium. Likey-likey.

Saturday, November 7, 2009

Is Liz Hurley the World's Most Glamorous Farmer?

Is Liz Hurley the World's Most Glamorous Farmer?:
hurley snacks.photo
Image from Elizabeth Hurley

You've come a long way baby... Liz Hurley, of the Versace safety pin dress (after the fold for that one) and former girlfriend of Hugh Grant, sigh, (after the fold for him too....) has abandoned the London celebrity scene for the countryside. Not life on just any 400 acre farm, but one that is working and organic, complete with sheep and cattle.

But being a farmer doesn't mean that she is letting herself go.
Sure she looks great, but you never saw me in my boots, coveralls and muddy hands!

If it is needed

Civil Unrest Has a Role in Stopping Climate Change, Says Gore:
by Oliver Burkeman in Los Angeles

Al Gore has sought to inject fresh momentum into the Copenhagen build-up, saying he is certain Barack Obama will attend and predicting a rise in civil disobedience against fossil-fuel polluters unless drastic action is taken over global warming.

Thursday, November 5, 2009

Pee target practice

Negawatts From the Men's Room:
The-Pee-Bee.jpg
See the bee? Aim the pee. Photo Sfegette via flickr.
Chasing negawatts, the energy that you don't use, is a popular pursuit these days for cash-strapped states, and California is turning out to be excellent at it. Negawatts (a term Amory Lovins came up with) can offer a lot more bang for the buck, so to speak, then building new power.

Waterless urinals are nothing new, but they are starting to get more attention in the mainstream as a way to save lots of water (20 to 45,000 gallons per year) and in California's case, perhaps indirectly save energy, too. In Los Angeles, waterless urinals have just been approved for all buildings. Naval Base San Diego saved 14 million gallons of water, in part by installing waterless urinals.

Waterless urinals have evolved beyond early complaints that they were smelly. They won't win over some men who seem to be fond both of aiming their pee stream into water and hearing the satisfying flush at the end. Waterless Inc., one of the biggest waterless urinal companies, now includes a fly decal above the drain holes, perhaps giving the guys something to aim at -- and thus helping to avoid errant drips and drops. The flies (or bees) can purportedly help keep public restrooms a lot cleaner.
Always thought that each home should also have a urinal. Very convenient. And with the fly decal - fun too!

Shame

US Pulls the Plug On Copenhagen:
stern-todd-hillary.jpg
Todd Stern and Hillary Clinton (Photo: EPA)

The head US climate negotiator, Todd Stern, and Sen. John Kerry have announced that they are giving up hope of reaching a deal for a new climate change pact at next month's meeting in Copenhagen. The move comes as world leaders are meeting in Barcelona to finalize negotiating text in advance of the December meeting in Copenhagen. Without the US's participation, there is no hope for a treaty that will result in capping emissions any time soon.

Blue Man and Frogs

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

Roll out the Garden Polka

Gardening for Gumbies - the Roll-Out Veg Mat :
Roll out Veg mat with handle photo
Photos: Chris Chapman website

Chris Chapman is an early twenties British designer, who baulked at the idea of studying design to make 'pretty things for wealthy, privileged consumers.' So he changed tack and learnt design-for-sustainability instead. He now has a quiver of cool green projects ready to fling at prospective clients or employers.

The one that most captured our attention was his Roll-Out Veg Mat. Each season householders buy a new roll of corrugated cardboard impregnated with vegetable seeds. Simply roll out the cardboard and cover with soil. Presto! Near instant veggie garden. It's simplicity could even push the No-Dig Garden for uncomplicated elegance.
But wait. Half the fun of a garden is to dig, weed, plant, thin...I'm sticking to Johnny's.

Sunday, November 1, 2009

Surviving the changes

Anthropoclastic climate change
Sometimes a good way to clarify a point of confusion is to introduce a new term. Allow me to add a word to your vocabulary: "anthropoclastic," consisting of "anthropo-" (from Gr. anthropos, man) and "-clastic (from Gr. klastos, broken into pieces). It's a very proper-sounding yet virtually unused term. "Anthropoclastic climate change" is reminiscent of "anthropogenic climate change," which is a theory that climate change is being triggered by human activity, such as the burning of fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas), agriculture (through deforestation, bovine flatus and so on), cement manufacturing, leaking or flaring gas into the atmosphere, chemical manufacturing... the list is very long. Anthropogenic climate change is the theory that these human activities are highly disruptive of the climate. Anthropoclastic climate change is the theory that a highly disrupted climate, which is what we already have, is highly disruptive of human activities, and, in consequence, highly destructive of human life. The anthropogenic theory is a case of man pointing the accusatory finger at man, while the anthropoclastic theory is a case of man pointing the accusatory finger at nature. I will leave it up to you to decide which of the two gestures is the the most futile, but, futile gestures aside, I believe that there are steps to be taken to let us survive climate change, and that these steps should be given due consideration before too long.

I don't have to look too far to find examples: in New England, where I live, farmers are receiving federal disaster aid, because they lost over half of their crop. According to the Massachusetts congressional delegation, which petitioned for federal relief, "rain was 148 percent above normal in June, which was also the sixth coolest June on record in both Boston and Worcester, and likely the second cloudiest June on record since 1885. In July, rainfall was 200 percent above normal, with corresponding lower temperatures." "Corn growers in Norfolk County saw 83 percent of the value of their crop destroyed. In Essex County, strawberry growers could not bring more than 35 percent of their crop to market" reported the Boston Globe.

New England is by no means a unique case; everywhere you look, agriculture is under assault from the shifting climate. The barrage of strange weather makes it increasingly difficult for farmers to decide what to plant and when and where to plant it.


Anthropoclastic climate change does not have to be a catastrophe, but it can be made catastrophic by clinging on to a failing agricultural model of food production. If we insist that farmers produce monoculture cash crops on the industrial model, we shall surely all starve. But if instead people make a concerted effort to reclaim the entire landscape, both rural and urban, for informal food production, growing edible plant species on former golf courses, parking lots, cemeteries, town greens, suburban back yards, urban rooftops and balconies, and front lawns of stately homes, then it seems quite likely that, no matter which way the climate lurches in a given year, something somewhere will be bearing fruit, enough to make it to the next season.

Wild foods can make a difference as well. Last summer, the forests of New England were full of berries that went unpicked. We did not pick any berries this year, but we did get a chance to pick some wild mushrooms, which had a fine year. As I write this, garlands of wild mushrooms are drying in our hallway. Man doth not live by mushrooms alone, but it's a start. And start we should, the sooner the better, but certainly before the shelves in the shops are bare, and so are the ones in your pantry. Mitigating anthropoclastic climate change will not be up to the politicians or the scientists or the industrialists, it will be up to me and to you.
Vegetable gardens, preserving, foraging... Eating not only the turnip but the turnip greens. Knowing how to cook. Knowledge that we all better have.

No honey for my tea?

2009 Has the Worst Honey Crop on Record
So, honey in the U.S. is scarce. And scarce seems to cause prices to rise ... the old supply and demand thing. But then there’s the exchange rate -- the U.S. dollar is weak. U. S. honey packers might actually have a better market overseas than at home, so that just might limit further any available product ... demand stays the same, supply becomes even shorter. Prices ... ?

So ... in the short run, the price of honey this winter is probably going to go up some. Maybe a lot. And you may not be able to find local honey later this winter.

My advice ... buy lots now. It might not be there later, and it will cost more later. And now you know why.



Mites, weather, CCD...drinking unsweetened tea.