Editor’s Note: This guest post is originally published at Green For All.
People often ask me what the environment has to do with poverty, and why communities of color are getting so active in the fight against climate change.
Today, we released a new video that says it all.
I love eating locally produced foods when I have the chance. I enjoyed having access to fully tree-ripe stone fruit when I lived in Davis, CA. Today I get to enjoy the ultra-local herbs, vegetables and fruit from my garden part of the year, and I make 10-20 gallons of wine from my little vineyard. I feel that I am fortunate, not noble. In January our county (San Diego) is one of the few places producing strawberries and I certainly enjoy those, but it doesn’t mean I don’t buy them later in the year when they come from further North. Local food can definitely be a treat, but to think that it is a noble thing to be a “locovore” is a bit silly and often quite pretentious. There are plenty of non-local foods that you should eat with no sense of guilt. In this and my next blog I’ll talk about why.
Every once in a while I come across something in the scientific literature that really surprises me. Because there isn’t much oxygen in a worm gut, it creates the ideal conditions for these particular microbes (”de-nitrifiers”) to turn nitrate (NO3) into nitrogen gas and also generate some nitrous oxide in the process.
Ok, some background. Nitrous oxide (N2O) is a very potent greenhouse gas with 310 times the global warming potential of carbon dioxide. Its really an Achilles heel for agricultural sustainability because around 80% of the human-generated emissions of this gas come from farms. If even a small amount of the farmer’s nitrogen fertilizer gets converted to N2O it becomes a major part of the total carbon footprint of that field
Read the rest of this entry »
We’ve all heard of The Story of Stuff. But The Story of Sustainability?
This past weekend, we had the pleasure of hosting Dennis Paige, founder of Swiftdeer-Paige, at Inn Serendipity to share a program on storytelling with our community of friends and family. Awarded the 2008 Grassroots Conservation Leadership Award from the Audubon-Chicago Region and the Chicago Wilderness Habitat Project, Paige has been entertaining and teaching thousands of people about the most pressing ecological issues of our times while inspiring a more balanced relationship with the web of life through the craft of storytelling. He’s been at it since 1989.
Paige’s hour-long program was a reminder of how far we still need to go on our journey of creating a “Story of Sustainability” that most American’s can embrace, not just a few. Obviously, the present American story of never-ending growth, executive bonuses, consumer-based economy, and more jobs is not compatible with the long term sustainability of a finite planet – especially if you recognize that despite our technological know-how, two thirds of the planet’s human inhabitants still cannot drink a glass of safe water, for example.
Elements of a Great Story
According to Paige, the elements of a great story are imagination, believability and content. Our group of local friends, bed & breakfast guests and family members circled around Paige as he orchestrated various activities to help our group, who ranged in ages from 4 to 80, become better storytellers and understand this ancient art and craft of storytelling. In terms of the content, it’s all about the problem, resolution and moral of the story.
When thinking about “carbon footprints” it helps to have real numbers to put things in perspective. The EPA estimates that for the US, agriculture represents about 8% of total human-related greenhouse gas emissions. The following is a list with a little of the detail of what makes up the footprint of an acre of a rain-fed Midwestern corn crop with a few other things thrown in for comparison. Since we grow 80-90 million acres of corn its something that matters. The values are all expressed as pounds of CO2 equivalents. If you want Carbon equivalents multiply by 12/44
My earlier blog about greenhouse gas emissions from composting generated a lot of good discussion so I am writing to respond.
Cloned asian pears in New Zealand (photo Steve Savage)
OK, I’ll admit it. That question and the picture caption are a little bit manipulative because few people know that all the major fruit crops are technically “cloned” because they have to be to get the varieties we want. If you take the seed of a Fuji apple and plant it, the tree you will eventually grow will not make Fuji apples.
It will be something new because when the apple flower was pollinated there was a new combination of genes from the male and female flower. Its the same reason our kids don’t come out exactly like either parent. So, for millennia, people have been propagating the fruit varieties they liked by making cuttings or grafting or some other way to keep the identical genetics of the desirable fruit.
So, there really isn’t anything creepy about eating cloned fruit, but because I use the emotive term, “cloned,” I can usually get a negative response. Why do I mess with farming-naive people this way? I do it to make the point that if you want to understand controversial issues about food and the environment, you need to be vigilant about being manipulated by emotive terms.
I find this to be particularly true about the anti-GMO camp. Its one thing to make an argument, but the reason that many people are afraid of these things is that they have been given a healthy dose of disinformation, often through the use of emotive terms that don’t really convey information as much as they do fear.
Composting is a really green thing to do, right? I’ve always thought so since my Grandfather taught me to do it in the early sixties. Large-scale composting is getting to be quite the rage. The City of San Francisco attracted a great deal of attention with it’s mandatory food scrap recycling program and lots of local wineries are bragging about their use of that compost to fertilize their vineyards.
I just read today about how the Langley Parish Council in England is setting up a village compost and “set an example to small villages as the UK strives to battle climate change.” Unfortunately, I recently learned that they and San Francisco and the Napa wineries might actually be doing is contributing to climate change.
Climate change science often ends up challenging things we think we know.
Inconvenience
The idea of composting is to provide plenty of moisture and oxygen so that microbes will digest the easily available organic matter and generate a great deal of metabolic heat in the process. What is left at the end is a sterilized source of more resistant organic matter that can enrich a soil.
of wastes is done with very good intentions, but there is the inconvenient truth that even a very well run large-scale compost operation emits some methane.
But if you stop to think about it, as much as you intend to have oxygen available to the whole pile (aerobic conditions), there are definitely going to be micro-sites that are going to lack oxygen (anaerobic conditions) particularly when there is huge oxygen demand during the peak of the process. That is where methane gets made.
This post was originally published on Eco-Libris blog on July 20.
As part of our efforts to promote green printing, we continue to closely follow the printing industry, keep you posted with printers who have already adopted eco-friendly practices in their business and speak with them on the state of green printing, the trends, the challenges in the present and their plans for the future.
We posted already two interviews with green printers (Greg Barber and Deb Bruner) and today we are happy to have another green printer on our blog: Livio Ciciotti of Monroe Litho (Rochester, NY).
Livio Ciciotti is an Account Executive with Monroe Litho based in Rochester, NY. He is a graduate of the Rochester Institute of Technology’s School of Print Media. He has been invloved in printing since high school. Livio is also in the Marine Corps Reserve, an honor graduate from the School of Infantry he now serves with 3rd Battalion 25th Marines out of Buffalo, NY and is preparing for a deployment to Afghanistan.
I have lived in Europe on two occasions now — for five months in the Netherlands (two years ago) and for ten months in Poland (currently). I have been green-minded since I was a young child, and knew that Europe did better on many green issues. Nonetheless, to come here and live here has given me more insight on the perspectives of the people and more of a practical understanding of why Europe fairs so much better than the US on many environmental issues.
Recently, I came up with a list of seven things that really stand out to me as good environmental practices in Europe that could be transferred to the US. These could all be adopted in the US, but some are more personal in nature and some are more systematic. Furthermore, some of the personal ones regard large, life decisions, and some are much simpler in nature and easier to implement into your life now.
Of course, Europe is not one country and things vary from country to country. Nonetheless, there are also several similarities across borders. I have friends in other countries and have traveled a bit as well, so I hope to be sharing the best of the best.
Here’s the list!
Read the rest of this entry »
Sustainablog
Since July 2003, sustainablog has been providing information on environmental and economic sustainability, green and sustainable business, and environmental politics. The blog regularly features environmental leaders, experts in alternative energy and green technology, and real people trying to lighten their environmental footprints.
Subscribe via email
