While there should be some worry about big stuff like dolphins, pelicans and shrimp, the stuff to worry about is the small stuff, the worms, planktons, and snails. The bottom of the food chain next year is what the real worry should be. Once they are killed off, the top of food chain dies off too.

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LEAN and Lower Mississippi Riverkeeper have begun a sampling project in collaboration with the six other Save Our Gulf Waterkeepers. The sampling project will cover the Gulf Coast from Galveston Bay in Texas to Apalachicola Bay in Florida.

The sampling project will look for the presence of the components of crude oil and dispersant in the environment and what happens to them over time. Click the picture above to watch a short video of a recent sampling trip or go here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5q25IPi3QA

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More tomorrow

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As I promised the second part of the Basil Economy…It is everything a holiday should be happy, joyous, warm and wonderful…Enjoy.

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/25675

Anatomy of a community garden: The riveting 2nd installment of building a basil economy

Homeland Security

by North of Center | December 23, 2009 – 9:55am [Originally published June 17.]

by Danny Mayer

It’s 11 o’clock in the morning and I’m sitting on a stump in a shady spot of London Ferrell Community Garden, located in downtown Lexington, Kentucky. There’s no other way to say it. I stink. Bad. For the past several weeks I have been trying to meet up for an interview with Ryan Koch, co-founder of Seedleaf, a non-profit created to help establish community gardens throughout Lexington. Although he’d never fess up to it, Ryan is a busy dude.

Thirty minutes earlier, in hopes of catching Ryan on my way home from a morning jog, I had detoured through the fenced-in, rectangular patch of urban community farmland that is London Ferrell. He was there—he’s always there on Saturdays, it seems—and relatively available so I quickly proceeded home, grabbed my recorder for an interview, and made haste back to the half-acre patch of newly productive land, where Ryan was busy negotiating a collection of citizen community gardeners, student volunteers, bitter salad greens, weeds, some donated extra tomato plants, and now one seriously smelly amateur journalist/jogger.

Ryan wasn’t always this busy. A little over a year ago I recall working several Saturday and Thursday mornings alone with him, both at London Ferrell and at a garden Seedleaf helped establish next to Al’s Bar. (Produce from the Al’s garden helped offset food costs at Stella’s Kentucky Deli and Al’s Bar—and to provide its customers with fresh veggies.) Ryan appreciated the morning conversation and at times even the semblance of work I offered.

DOT DASH DOT

“I see gardening as a long, slow conversion for me,” Ryan began between sips of coffee as he grabbed a stump next to me in the shade. “I was 18 and in a college lecture. A professor whose name I couldn’t tell you—and I couldn’t tell you about any of his lectures—read ‘Mad Farmer Liberation Front,’ that Wendell Berry poem. And he read it in the beginning of class and said ‘that doesn’t have anything to do with today’s lecture. I just liked the poem.’” While remaining an intermittent fan of Berry’s work, it wasn’t until 2004 when he married Jodi that the two “committed to trying to do a garden whenever we could as one of our habits of marriage. I thought lettuce was hard to grow. In our first year, I don’t know if we grew any lettuce, but we had a tomato. So we called it goal achieved for year one.”

Before I could get around to asking Ryan how he saw his connection to gardening as an intimate “habit of marriage,” a dog barked behind us in the old Episcopal Burial grounds located at the approximate east flank of London Ferrell. The two neighbors from Campsie who owned the dog began chatting with Ryan; meanwhile, my friend Andrew arrived, the first time I”d seen him since he returned from a two-week sojourn to western Canada and back. Before I noticed it, Ryan had slipped off to help out some other volunteers and neighbors, who asked questions, told stories and awaited directions as to what should be picked,what mulched, what turned under.

Oikos
Although I never recaptured that Right moment to follow up, Ryan’s comments resonated with me. Two weeks earlier I sat in the kitchen of Sherry and Geoff Maddock discussing a range of topics that circled around the ins and outs of what I clumsily call “a basil economy” and they called “food systems.” Through the course of our conversation, I asked Sherry about how she viewed her position as head of the North Martin Luther King Neighborhood Association (NMLKNA). Sherry explained that she viewed the neighborhood association as “as a civic unit for change. The capacity to work out change in our lives,” she continued, “starts in our own households and then with who we live next to.” Her position as NMLKNA head was simply a considered outgrowth of her everyday life.

Understood in this context, London Ferrell—which owes much of its rebirth as a productive space to the creative social energy of Sherry Maddock—seems like a logical next step. The plot sits less than two blocks from the Maddocks’ house. Its redevelopment as a community agricultural space reflects the Maddocks’ commitment to working out change alongside their neighbors.

DOT DASH DOT

“If you want to care for the earth more,” Ryan observes before ditching me, “put a basil plant in a pot and watch how much you care about when it rains. That’s been very real in my life. I really stress out after four dry days in a row. I never used to be that kind of guy. I’m irritable. I pray more. I’ve never prayed so much for rain. It’s changing me; it’s part of how gardening is converting me.”

Imagination and Action
I recall being mildly surprised when Sherry told me that, as a producer of food, London Ferrell does little to effect the larger presence of hunger in the greater Lexington area—our most immediate neighbors. It “doesn’t even make a dent in…the provision of local food,” she says. It’s too small; for it to have a tangible impact, London Ferrell would have to scale up its production, its volunteers, its space. All of these things have consequences of course—more labor, more dialogue about best use of the communal space, more places ready to receive and process the increased amount of food coming in. These things take time, Ferrell is a limited space, and meanwhile people are still hungry. Instead, Sherry talks about the garden’s main function residing “at the level of the imagination…it begins to stimulate people’s minds to possibilities.”

I’m normally skeptical of these assertions because they tend to ride into the more politically passive realm of symbol. As in, that London Ferrell garden is a “symbol” of change in the community. However true that may be, I tend to add more value to even the smallest material changes in people’s lives. Did anyone get fed because of the garden’s existence? If so, for me that outweighs any symbolic meaning that, like money, we can’t use to sustain ourselves for long. It’s a little like Obama’s message of “hope” in that way.

But I must admit, as important as those food routes may be for the nourishment of at least some North side residents, viewing its chief work as working “at the level of the imagination” makes a lot of sense. If taken correctly, London Ferrell is both model and challenge for action; Seedleaf is both an invitation to imagine gardens sprouting in most any place and a working pamphlet guiding us along through spring, summer, and fall plantings. One can already see people answering the call of Seadleaf and Ferrells’ challenge of our imagination. Seedleaf is up from three to ten gardens this year; some of the gardeners tending plots last year took the knowledge learned from watching things develop at London Ferrell and moved on to other lots—some no doubt at home, some in a friend’s yard, some at other community lots.

This year Ryan seems finally able to have a go at Seedleaf fulltime. He’s secured a little city money that will pay him to scale up his compost retrieval from area restaurants who would otherwise dispose of it. The increased amount of decomposing vegetable matter will ultimately overwhelm London Ferrell, so he will soon bring his scraps out to PeaceMeal Gardens, a twenty acre patch of rolling hillside at the back of the Bluegrass Community and Technical College’s (BCTC) Leestown campus that is being converted into a working suburban farm. Jessica Ballard, the farm manager at PeaceMeal, worked with her UK sustainable agriculture class to help Ryan develop good composting practices to more quickly and beneficially turn the scraps into usable compost and soil. Both Ryan and the sustainable ag class had their imaginations sparked by a visit paid by urban farmer and activist Will Allen. Some of Jessica’s salary is provided by the Catholic Action Center, who in conjunction with Rebecca have plowed under an acre of soil to grow things that will feed into their food kitchens for the hungry who show at their Godsnet location. Another portion of Jessica’s salary will be paid for through a market garden that will provide BCTC students a dearly needed dash of fresh produce in what is otherwise an educational food desert.

To paraphrase Sherry, there are a lot of imaginations being stoked here, a lot of new configurations of of power and productivity arising through these new food systems. Importantly, several people have done the hard work of translating the imagination into the realm of possibility and eventually actuality.

We need more of that.
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Is it too early to say have a HAPPY NEW YEAR? nawww never is.

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If everyone did this the world would be a better place.

 http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-green-schools-03-nov03,0,5196889.story

Composting at schools: Students get into the act

In Oak Park, Villa Park and Naperville, students begin putting their food scraps in compost bins

By Noreen S. Ahmed-Ullah Tribune reporter

November 3, 2009

When they’re done with lunch, students at an Oak Park school sort uneaten morsels into bins — empty milk cartons and juice boxes into one receptacle, orange rinds and banana peels into another, and anything non-recyclable into a third, that one clearly labeled “landfill” to drive home the point.

Hatch Elementary this year joined a national movement to reduce waste headed for landfills. Not only are students and teachers composting leftover fruits and vegetables, but they’re also promoting zero-waste lunches and moving away from plastic spoons, straws and biodegradable trays. Instead, the school is installing dishwashers and buying reusable trays and silverware.

After mastering — and then teaching their parents — how to recycle pop cans and paper, elementary school students are moving beyond Recycling 101 and into more sophisticated terrain.

Zero-waste initiatives at schools across the Chicago area have students aggressively reducing the garbage they produce and trying to avoid anything not biodegradable. Now they’re separating food, determining what can and can’t be composted. They do the composting themselves in outdoor bins or with worm composting in the classroom. They’re learning how to reuse paper towels and use fewer of them. And they’re no longer taking home endless fliers — many schools now post announcements online with “virtual backpacks.”

When a new state law goes into effect in January, expect some of these measures to become more mainstream. The law, passed in August, designates food scraps as organic — not waste — and will lead to widespread efforts to compost food waste.

It’s a skill the little ones have already adopted. At a recent lunch at Hatch, parent volunteers asked a question: “If you don’t eat all your broccoli, what do you do with it?”

“Compost” came the resounding answer.

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It is Jam Band Friday -

http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+can%27t+always+get+what+you+want&docid=1345780778117&mid=16E7403197023CEB494316E7403197023CEB4943&FORM=VIVR10

Everyone in this country has been programmed by rampant science fiction to believe that everything for the future comes from outer space. So the Japanese launch a press release about using a satellite to beam microwaves back to Earth.

http://www.physorg.com/news172224356.html

Let’s see, first you have to clean up the 13,000 pieces of space debris…then you got to up our payload capacity and multiple the number of vehicles available by at least 1,000. Just to START such a project. Hell we can barely generate enough capacity to keep the International Space Station running  which is 160 volts in DC. Which gets us back to this final meditation on “living off the land”. There are somethings we will have to give up on and the first one is Space Flight. Why? Not because of the money and effort that could spent elsewhere. Not because of the hellishness of the logistics. NASA’s dirty little secret is Cosmic Rays. They would destroy any unshielded human and that is why the International Space Station is not in geosynchronous orbit or higher. Stewardesses and Pilots who regularly fly at high altitudes are exposed to enough Cosmic Rays to have a slightly higher chance of developing some cancers. That is why NASA limits the space station stay for astronauts to under a year. But what is the point of going out there?

GROWTH

If we replaced that with

Quality of Life

As a principle the world would be a much nicer and longer lived place.

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http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+can%27t+always+get+what+you+want&docid=1322404807369&mid=9E85A21DF312D9016FDC57CBDDDC180567D96A9A&FORM=VIVR12

For those of you who want what you need and a simpler life there are many resources out there

http://www.livingoffgrid.org/

Tips for Off-Grid Living – How To Live Off The Grid

Welcome to our free online resource for off-grid living.
We are here to help you along in the rewarding challenge of living off of the power grid. Whether you are a veteran off-grider living in an RV or cabin in the woods, a seasoned rural farmer, a third-generation rancher – or someone just looking to get out of the rat race – we have the information you seek.

What to look for when buying real estate off the grid >>

Though sometimes a challenge, the many benefits of living off grid make it all worthwhile. How can one describe the feeling of running your house or business off of clean energy sources like natural gas and propane, or renewable energy sources like solar, wind and hydro? Who could explain the effect being out of the city and suburbs has on your sense of well-being? How many of us would enjoy more fresh produce grown organically on our own property?

This website isn’t just about owning property that happens to not be connected to the big power company’s grid. It is about living closer to the land; Being responsible for the culture, values and environment we leave behind to our children; knowing that life was meant to be enjoyed, rather than working in a tiny cubicle to earn enough to accumulate stuff we didn’t need in the first place.

Well, that’s what it’s about for me at least. But more importantly:
What is living off grid about to you?

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A_vcFUAUXzY

You can even be a Dad and do it:

http://frugaldad.com/2009/04/05/living-off-the-grid/

Living Off The Grid

Ever wish you could just unplug from your current hectic life?  Maybe quit your stressful job, move to a farm with several acres, and spend your remaining time living off the grid.  Yeah, me too.

The problem is that this type of lifestyle seems so simple, but is terribly difficult to pull off these days.  Why?  Because we have become slaves to our stuff – myself included.  We have our houses, our cars, our expensive hobbies, our electronic gadgets, our new furniture, our designer clothes, etc.

We spend the majority of our lives working to pay for the stuff that keeps us from living a life with more freedom.  Along the way we usually manage to accumulate debt buying more stuff than we can afford.  So then we spend even more time working to repay the money we borrowed to buy the stuff that we work to pay for in the first place.  Whew!  It’s a vicious cycle.

Photo courtesy of iLoveButter

How To Break The Chains of Stuff?

So how do we break the cycle?  How do we join others who are living off the grid?  It isn’t easy.  I believe the very first step is to stop accumulating stuff.  Draw a line in the sand (or on your front porch), and vow not to allow anything else to enter your home unless it is a necessity or improves your quality of life in some way.  If something qualifies under those two conditions, you must save for it and pay cash.  No more borrowing!

The second step is to take a look around your house, and your budget.  Are you paying for things that you could really live without?  The $40 gym membership, or the $15 Netflix membership, may not seem like much by themselves, but how much of a nest egg would be required just to cover those expenses?  I mentioned the multiply by 25 concept in a previous post.  The idea is that you can estimate how much of your nest egg would be required to maintain your current expenses.  I used Netflix as an example:

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iX1OVXTplos

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymLRWZG4u24

The movement is not just limited to the US.

http://www.off-grid.net/

Top govt advisor attacks Big Power

Section:

• EVENTS

— by Alexbenady, 30 Oct

Simpson: Local hero

The UK is in the grips of a power cartel, says an insider from the governing UK Labour Party.

That cartel actively hinders the fight against global warming by lobbying for its own narrow commercial interests at the cost of local democracy and the future health of the planet.   It’s an argument that off-gridders and anti-capitalist campaigners will be familiar with. It’s not really what you expect to hear from an advisor to Her Majesty’s Government. Yet it is precisely the belief of Alan Simpson, who occupies a place close to the heart of political power in Britain as  energy advisor to the Secretary of Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband and Member of Parliament for Nottingham South.

>>Keep reading Top govt advisor attacks Big Power Your Comments: 0
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http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=you+can%27t+always+get+what+you+want&docid=1346708637036&mid=00EB313253A0B35936F300EB313253A0B35936F3&FORM=VIVR34

Some people even thrive in an “off the grid” living:

http://www.eartheasy.com/blog/2009/06/what-its-like-living-off-grid/

By Greg Seaman Posted Jun 9, 2009

In the summer of 1980, my wife, three-month old son and I moved “off-grid”. We loved living in San Francisco but wanted to live a simpler, more independent lifestyle, and so we bought a small cabin with land on a rural island in the Pacific Northwest. Since there were no services to the island, our home had no electricity. Residents of the island had to create their own electricity or do without.

Now here I sit, almost 30 years later, with the kids grown and their rooms empty, and with some time to reflect on our experience living and raising a family off-grid. But before even considering the challenges and solutions in dealing with our energy needs over the years, one observation seems to leap out: how little things here have changed. We’ve done very little over the years to enhance our energy needs, aside from installing two solar panels last year to power the computer I’m using to write this article. (Alongside my computer on the table here is a kerosene lamp, and a candle for added light.) This lack of change is testament to the feasibility of off-grid living, and my vision for the upcoming years is to keep things pretty much the way they are.

But keeping it simple hasn’t always been simple. We had to learn alternate methods of preserving food, how to build things without power tools, how to cook on a wood stove, how to clean diapers without a washing machine, entertain ourselves without TV, and accept that many common tasks can take longer and be more difficult without electricity. Here are the main challenges we encountered in living off-grid, and how we managed with them.

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For much more:

http://www.emagazine.com/view/?2650

http://www.coyotecottage.com/

http://science.howstuffworks.com/living-off-the-grid.htm

http://www.bringaboutgreen.com/

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Oh yah and the people that made the song famous:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OPCRIFLjfPo

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It is true. Even though stories about disappearing honey bees, or even Colony Collapse Disorder have appeared on 60 minutes, Scientific America and even NatGeo. There is very little truth to it. It is largely a North American and European commercial pollination problem which would never really effect food production much. If they worked me as hard as they do the commercial bees I’d fly away too. My Pawpaws are pollinated by flies so I don’t really care. If you don’t believe me read this:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20427316.800-the-truth-about-the-disappearing-honeybees.html?DCMP=OTC-rss&nsref=online-news

But this and yesterday’s post got me to thinking about eating simply and it furthers my meditation on living off the land. Humans have come to eat so complicatedly and chemically. Did you ever wonder why Lay’s Potato Chips claims that”you can’t eat just one” and they are probably right? I am no extremist veggan or anything approaching one. There are 200,000 deer in Illinois and if oil collapsed tomorrow and with it civilization I would go shoot one the day after. I don’t even know if the children still trick or treat for Unicef but in that spirit let’s start with Plump-i-nut factories in Africa:

http://www.unicef.org/media/ethiopia_38423.html

UNICEF Executive Director inaugurates Ethiopia’s first Plumpy’nut factory

© UNICEF/2007/Wiggers

UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman receives flowers from children upon her arrival at the new Plumpy’nut factory in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

By Indrias Getachew

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia, 21 February 2007 – UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman inaugurated Ethiopia’s first Plumpy’nut therapeutic food factory in Addis Ababa yesterday.

The inauguration marks a joint venture between UNICEF, US-based private donor and businesswoman Amy Robbins and the Hilina Enriched Foods Processing Centre.

Plumpy’nut is a high-protein and high-energy, peanut-based paste used for the treatment of severely undernourished children. An estimated 1.5 million children in Ethiopia are severely undernourished. At full capacity, Hilina Enriched Foods will produce up to 12 tons of the paste per day.

“Today as we open the doors of the fourth, and largest, factory in Africa that will produce Plumpy’nut, we are taking a step in the right direction in addressing the issue of malnutrition,” said Ms. Veneman.

Generous solution

In 2005, the Robbins family donated $1.3 million to UNICEF to allow the purchase and import of 267 tons of Plumpy’nut to Ethiopia.

Formulated by French scientist Andre Briend in 1999, Plumpy’nut has been used to save children’s lives in major emergency situations in Darfur, Niger and Malawi.

© UNICEF/2007/Wiggers

From left: Philanthopist Amy Robbins, Minister of Trade and Industries Ato Girma Birru and the State Minister for Agriculture at the inauguration of the Plumpy’nut factory in Addis Ababa.

Plumpy’nut requires no preparation or special supervision, so an untrained adult – such as a parent – can deliver it to an undernourished child at home, allowing governments to reduce the amount of money spent on therapeutic feeding stations. The paste has a two-year shelf life when unopened and stays fresh even after opening.

Though Plumpy’nut is relatively inexpensive and easy to transport, Ms. Robbins discovered that huge costs were incurred from its importation and that limited capacity at the French plant made it difficult to ensure timely food supplies from Europe.

To solve the problem, her family foundation donated $340,000 towards investment in the needed equipment to manufacture Plumpy’nut within Ethiopia.

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Everyone knows that factory farming of animals pioneered here in the Corporate US of A is dangerous to the health of all involved including the humans. Everyone knows that eating cow flesh is probably not a good idea, at least everyday or even 2 or 3 times a week. Goats, sheep, fowl and pigs are much better alternatives.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goat

The most recent genetic analysis^[5] confirms the archaeological evidence that the Anatolian Zagros are the likely origin of almost all domestic goats today. Neolithic farmers began to keep them for easy access to milk and meat, primarily, also for their dung, which was used as fuel and their bones, hair, and sinew for clothing, building, and tools.^[1] The earliest remnants of domesticated goats dating 10,000 before present are found in Ganj Dareh in Iranian Kurdistan. Domestic goats were generally kept in herds that wandered on hills or other grazing areas, often tended by goatherds who were frequently children or adolescents, similar to the more widely known shepherd. These methods of herding are still used today.

Historically, goat hide has been used for water and wine bottles in both traveling and transporting wine for sale. It has also been used to produce parchment

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Not to mention that the flesh is wonderful and so are the milk and cheese. They will eat just about anything and everyone should have at least 2. Again it is the GROWTH model that destroys the equilibrium of the planet. Simple is laughed at. People who juice their foods live much long because their foods are fresh and uncooked.

http://www.powerjuicer.com/?gclid=CLyzu7yY4J0CFQ4hDQod9ilOMA

Jack LaLane should know he has been at it for years:

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Our GROWTH system even prevents or even worse obliterates local options. When I found out about Pawpaws I was thoroughly amazed:

Cultivation and uses

Asimina triloba is often called prairie banana because of its banana-like creamy texture and flavor.

The pawpaw is native to shady, rich bottom lands, where it often forms a dense undergrowth in the forest. Where it dominates a tract it appears as a thicket of small slender trees, whose great leaves are borne so close together at the ends of the branches, and which cover each other so symmetrically, that the effect is to give a peculiar imbricated appearance to the tree.^[1]

Although it is a delicious and nutritious fruit, it has never been cultivated on the scale of apples and peaches, primarily because only frozen fruit will store or ship well. It is also difficult to transplant because of fragile hairy root tentacles that tend to break off unless a cluster of moist soil is retained on the root mass. Cultivars are propagated by chip budding or whip grafting.

In recent years the pawpaw has attracted renewed interest, particularly among organic growers, as a native fruit which has few to no pests, and which therefore requires no pesticide use for cultivation. The shipping and storage problem has largely been addressed by freezing. Among backyard gardeners it also is gaining in popularity because of the appeal of fresh fruit and because it is relatively low maintenance once planted. The pulp is used primarily in baked dessert recipes and for juicing fresh pawpaw drink or drink mixtures (pawpaw, pineapple, banana, lime, lemon and orange tea mix). In many recipes calling for bananas, pawpaw can be used with volumetric equivalency.

The commercial growing and harvesting of pawpaws is strong in southeast Ohio. The Ohio Pawpaw Growers’ Association annually sponsors the Ohio Pawpaw Festival at Lake Snowden near Albany, Ohio.

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But really the place to start with all of this is to pick your foods carefully. Find a butcher and get to know him or her. Look around and find local growers that you can trust. When you have to go to a modern grocery store go there with a certain amount of fear and suspicion.

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Oil and Natural Gas will never run out…Am I a Google whore or what? Still when you say things like that out loud they seem so silly. Or more like impossible. So I would like to continue our meditation on “living off the land” by looking at some sustainable communities around the country and the planet.

This guy will build it for you:

http://www.placeonline.us/about.html

Who, What, Why | Meet The Team | Board of Directors | Frequently Asked Questions

What is PLACE?

PLACE® is a nonprofit organization that works with cities to create leading-edge communities that promote the arts, environmentalism and social justice. Through a community-driven, ethically-focused process, PLACE develops new models for urban neighborhoods that demonstrate the best practices in environmental design, live/work development for artists and creative businesses, affordable workforce housing, and supportive housing for the most economically distressed. Our vision is to change the way communities are made.

We strive to make each PLACE project reflect the highest community ideals, creating beautiful and inspiring places, lifting people out of poverty, empowering community participation, and providing equal opportunity, all while generating economic return, renewable energy and jobs. PLACE communities seek to dramatically improve the way we live, work, play, commute, create, and interrelate, as well as the way we impact our cities and our Earth.

PLACE was founded by Chris Velasco in 2005. PLACE and its respected national board of directors bring extensive experience in creating the public/private partnerships necessary to finance, develop and operate complex, economically-sustainable facilities. As an entrepreneurial nonprofit, PLACE uses proven market approaches and cutting edge funding methods to develop projects that are economically self-sustaining. PLACE’s projects blend the arts, environmentalism, community-driven development, live and work space, smart growth, small business development and affordable housing — all together in one, inspiring place.

What does PLACE build?

The PLACE Team works with architects, engineers, artists and builders to create:

• Alternative energy communities
• Green artist enclaves, communities, neighborhoods, communes and villages
• Eco Villages
• Green affordable housing and supportive housing
• Sustainable communities for artists and artisans
• Green arts facilities and green theaters
• Next-generation communities
• Cultural tourism destinations
• Inspiring, transformational places

How is PLACE funded?

PLACE is a 501(c)3 publicly-supported charity, which means that donations made to the organization are tax deductible. In addition to private donations and grants from foundations and corporations, PLACE receives funding for its projects from local, state and federal governmental entities. The PLACE organization also collects fees from the development and operation of its projects, speaking engagements, and consulting efforts. You can donate to our efforts by clicking here.

What’s a good example of a PLACE project?

The Working Artists Ventura (WAV) project is a state-of-the-art community designed for artists and creative businesses. Located in the cultural district of downtown Ventura, California, WAV will offer affordable living and working space for over a hundred artists of every kind: painters, sculptors, dancers, poets, musicians, filmmakers and more.

Currently under construction and on schedule for completion and occupancy in September 2009, WAV has been developed in unique concert with the local community. Over the course of its development, PLACE and the City have held over one hundred public meetings, engaging the local community in every aspect of WAV’s design, purpose, and spirit. These meetings have resulted in a project that both meets the critical needs voiced by Ventura’s community, and gives the project the kind of wholesale support that is often lacking in many developments. Click here for more about WAV.

What’s on PLACE’s horizon?

PLACE is pleased to introduce a groundbreaking sustainable development called E-Generation™. Imagine a mixed-use, mixed-income, creative urban community designed to include a compact power facility capable of converting waste into clean, renewable energy. A safe, sanitary, nearly invisible system built into the development will process all the waste produced on site: one hundred percent of the garbage, recyclables and liquid waste, or black water. Community life creates waste, this waste creates clean renewable energy, which powers community life — a perfectly efficient cycle. Learn more about E-Generation by clicking here.

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Or if you are rich:

http://www.serenbecommunity.com/home.html

At home at Serenbe.
Let’s say you could create the perfect place to live. Blank slate. Anything you want.

You might want a place where your quality of life was extraordinarily high. Where you felt an easy sense of community. Where the principles of sustainability touched everything from your home’s methods of construction to the organic produce on your table that was grown by one of your neighbors.

Speaking of neighbors, you might prefer an eclectic group, from artists to writers to farmers to business people. You might like to walk paths that take you through both forest and meadow, ride horses along tree-canopied trails, or hear music outdoors in your neighborhood amphitheatre. Maybe you’d just like a place to get away, a place where you can enjoy a simpler life. For miles around you the Chattahoochee Hill Country is protected with a master plan that calls for 80% green space.

Let’s say you’d like a place where you can stroll as well as stride. Where you can spend time being as well as doing. Then perhaps Serenbe is a place you’d be at home.

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They are in Britain:

http://www.goingcarbonneutral.co.uk/

Located in rural Cheshire, Ashton Hayes is a well knit community of about 1000 people that is aiming to become England’s first carbon neutral community. We started our journey in January 2006 and since then we have already cut our carbon dioxide emissions by 23% – by working together, sharing ideas and through behavioural change. This website encapsulates our journey towards carbon neutrality and offers free advice and guidance. Please feel free to use anything from our website (we’d like a credit if you can).

Tuesday

06Oct2009

Parish Council votes to apply for Low Carbon Communities Challenge funds

They are in Australia:

http://masg.org.au/?p=1291

Ride and Walk to Work and School was on Wednesday the 14th

A free community breakfast was held at Victory Park.
About 60 people braved the rain and cold weather to breakfast up on tasty food.
A thanks to those who dontated goods including Goodfoods, Bakers Delight and Don KRC .
A blessing of the bicycles by Uniting Church minister Gordon Bannon took place at 8.30am.
This event was made possible by our dedicated volunteers, with a special thanks to Jacqueline Brodie-Hans and with financial support by the Mount Alexander Shire Council.

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Then there is my favorite, East Wind. I have visited this place…I have their original sandals. I have their new and inproved sandals. Now they are into Nut Butters…WOW

 http://www.eastwind.org/

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If you want the list of Thousands and I am not kidding then this is for you:

http://www.ecobusinesslinks.com/sustainable_communities.htm

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I do not believe that living off the land has to be conceptualized as pastoral idealism. All I think it means is giving back to the Earth as much as we take. I am not sure that we have to give up on technology to accomplish Earth centered practices. What we have to stop is growth. Still there are many people who if given the chance would go “back” to a rural existance. Then there are those that really want to go native:

 http://www.ehow.com/how_136589_live-land.html

How to Live Off the Land

Instructions

1. Step 1

   Clarify your objectives. Is your goal to experience a short-term wilderness retreat, live in harmony with nature for the long haul or just survive a reality-show stint in the South China Sea? What level of technology and tools will you employ: GPS device or compass and sextant? Zippo or flint and steel?

2. Step 2

   Enroll in a wilderness preparedness course, such as those offered by Outward Bound (outwardbound.com) or the National Outdoor Leadership School (www.nols.edu). You will learn vital skills such as navigating with a map and compass, shelter construction and first aid.

3. Step 3

   Choose an environment with significant opportunities for food, water and shelter. Solo adventures are really only feasible in warm or temperate climates. Abundant water is essential to survival. If you don’t have a reliable source of clean water, become expert at purifying water in large quantities.

4. Step 4

   Become expert at starting a fire without matches. Your best bet is probably the bow-drill technique. For detailed instructions on this, go to www.wmuma.com/tracker/skills/fire/bowdrill/.

5. Step 5

   Learn how to make a basic shelter. Review 474 Survive Being Lost for instruction. Choose a camping spot with easy and reliable water access. Without a mechanical system of delivery and storage, obtaining water may be your biggest daily task.

6. Step 6

   Know how to use, repair and sharpen basic tools. Living off the land requires that you get very close to that land. Axes, knives, shovels, hoes and fishing gear will be essential to your survival.

7. Step 7

   Study the flora and fauna of your intended destination. Be able to identify edible plants and practice locating, harvesting and preparing them long before you set out.

8. Step 8

   Learn to see and feel changes in the weather and to take appropriate action.

9. Step 9

   Practice whatever hunting method you choose until you are an expert. Hunting is difficult and unpredictable; fishing is more reliable and requires less physical effort.

10. Step 10

    Learn how to process skins in order to make clothing. Practice harvesting reeds and grasses in order to make baskets and rope.

11. Step 11

    Keep an apartment in Manhattan for those times when you need to get away from it all.

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I think it is amazing how much you have to know and how skillled you have to be to do “back to nature” well.

Then there are the people who want a house and an outhouse instead of a tent:

 http://www.organic-gardening-and-homesteading.com/self_reliance.html

Self Reliance – How to Live Off Your Homestead

Is self reliance your dream? More people are turning to homesteading, depending upon themselves for their food and making a living off their land. If you long to get off the office treadmill and onto your own land, here are some crucial steps you should take to pursue your life of freedom

Get Out of Debt

As any farmer will tell you, unless you own a corporation with hundreds, if not thousands of acres, you won’t make a fabulous income living off the land. Those farmers who do own hundreds of acres and thousands of dollars worth of equipment (along with the mortgages to prove it) are struggling to get by. The secret is to live simply and downsize.

Sell that newer car with those high car payments and buy a used model, preferably one with no payments. Avoid fast food and cook at home instead. Learn to live on a budget and cut back on unnecessary expenses. Then use that extra money to pay off your loans.

Get Some Land

You don’t need hundreds of acres, but if you want to live off your land, you will need at least five. You will want enough space for a good sized garden, along with some farm animals. Live in town? Consider selling or renting that house and buying a used manufactured home set on a small acreage instead. Many people do it and live quite comfortably – and debt free.

Learn to Grow Your Own Food

Put in a lot of raised beds and grow potatoes, carrots, tomatoes and other vegetables. Learn to preserve your food through canning, drying and freezing, so that you go to your pantry instead of the grocery store, cutting down on cost and time. Growing food is one of the most satisfying aspects of self reliance.

Get Your Goat

Goats will supply you with milk, meat and cheese. Control their diet – only hay and grains – and your goat’s milk will taste exactly like cow’s milk, only sweeter. Plus, many people are realizing the health benefits of raw goat’s milk, making it a marketable product. Get two or three female goats – or does – along with a billy goat, and you will have enough milk for your family and some extra to sell to cover your cost.

Raise Chickens

These wonderful birds will supply you with eggs, meat, and even income if you raise enough of them. Fresh chicken eggs are easy to sell. These eggs are delicious, and if they come from chickens who have eaten mostly grass and insects – chickens who live in chicken tractors, for example – they are also far healthier and more valuable than the store-bought brand.

Diversify What You Sell

Many people who try living off the land make the mistake of raising a single product in large supply and then selling it. But if the crop fails, then you are in trouble. Instead, raise a small supply of several items to sell. Sell chicken eggs and goat’s milk, honey and produce when it’s in season. That way if one item fails to produce, you have others to fall back on. Your pursuit of self reliance will be easier.

Avoid the Exotic

A few years ago, raising ostriches were all the rage. At least they were until those raising them realized not many people are willing to eat ostrich meat. For self reliance, it is far wiser to stick with the standard fare – chickens, pigs, and beef, for example. Raising something unusual and hoping to get rich off it – like many get rich quick schemes –usually leaves you with an empty pocketbook and an animal nobody wants and you have to feed.

Raise Only What You Want to Eat

This goes with the ostrich example above. If you don’t sell those hundreds of bushels of Japanese beets, then be prepared to eat them. If you don’t enjoy them that much, then don’t grow them.

Be Prepared to Learn a New Trade

My grandfather was a plumber, and even during the depression, he prospered. During hard times, people might not need an insurance adjuster, but they will need someone who can fix their leaky pipes. Consider learning carpentry, electrical work or mechanics. Learn to make practical, useful items that you can sell or barter with. There is no better way to prepare for a life of self reliance

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You get the general idea…

http://articles.moneycentral.msn.com/CollegeAndFamily/RaiseKids/live-off-the-land-in-the-city.aspx

Live off the land — in the city

Wild greens, mushrooms, fruit and even fish and game can be harvested in America’s urban jungles. Dandelion salad, anyone? Or some batter-fried squirrel?

[Related content: savings, save money, groceries, food prices, Donna Freedman]

By Donna Freedman

MSN Money

Feeling squeezed at the supermarket? Maybe you should be looking for food in the parking lot, or in your neighbor’s yard

We’re talking dandelions, feral mushrooms, gleaned fruit, local fish or even those wascally wabbits that overrun city greenbelts. Ingenuity plus a little sweat equity can put fresh, healthful food on the table and possibly provide other benefits as well: exercise, relaxation and a different way of looking at your neighborhood.

For example:

• Chauncey Niziol fishes for bass and bluegills in downtown Chicago.

• Steven Rinella traps squirrels and catches pigeons in Brooklyn, N.Y.

• Jeff Yeager harvests shoots from bamboo that grows in his suburban Washington, D.C., yard.

• Katy Kolker harvests tree fruit that otherwise would have rotted in Portland, Ore.

• “Radical ecologist” Nance Klehm plucks salads out of city sidewalks and leads urban foraging walks around her home city of Chicago. A few clients are survivalists, she says, or foodies who are looking for “unusual tastes.” But most are simply “curious about the world around them.” Foraging is “about a connection and an interaction with an environment,” she says.

Chowing down on chickweed

According to her Spontaneous Vegetation Web site, Klehm grows or forages nearly everything she eats. The wild greens she harvests are what most people would think of as weeds: wood sorrel, mallow, chickweed, wild mustard and the like. Some can be eaten only at certain times of the year; dandelions, for example, are best when very young.Klehm recommends using wild plants in moderation at first, because their flavors can be strong. Besides, “if you don’t have a very flexible or curious palate, you might not find them tasty” in large quantities.

• Urban farms: US cities get their green on

What’s most important, however, is knowing what you’re eating. The difference between the right plant and a look-alike is the difference between a nice salad and a trip to an emergency room. Where you find your food is important, too, because you could be sickened by food from polluted soils or waterways.

Klehm recommends buying a reputable field guide to local flora. It’s also smart to seek out community-college classes or local plant walks; if neither exists, get a group of like-minded folks together and pay a local botanist to educate you on what and where to pick. Keep that field guide handy whenever you go out on your own, though.

Mushrooms, bamboo and ferns, oh my

Books by the late naturalist Euell Gibbons introduced Yeager, aka “The Ultimate Cheapskate,” to wild edibles. Yeager, who grew up in Ohio and now lives about 20 miles south of Washington, doesn’t harvest as many wild things as he once did. But he still keeps his eyes peeled when walking or bicycling.For example, why pay for chicory when you can find it growing volunteer? “The wild stuff is much more potent,” says Yeager, whose mom and dad were pleased when he brought home this coffee enhancer. They were also fond of the wild onions that he dug up and pickled: “My parents liked those in their martinis.” (Yeager preferred the onions in a cream soup.)

Sometimes a “wild” plant is a cultivated variety that jumped a fence or was spread by birds or carelessly dumped garbage. Yeager has found asparagus, zucchini, black raspberries and even watermelons growing in fields and along roads. His own yard is “packed with bamboo” — an increasingly common landscape plant — so he cooks the young shoots in the spring.

While Chicago native Niziol focuses mostly on fishing and hunting in his weekly ESPN radio program, he’s not strictly carnivorous. Niziol swears by a good plate of fiddlehead ferns, fresh wild carrots (aka Queen Anne’s lace) or a mug of sassafras tea (“it tastes like root beer”).

And mushrooms? Don’t get him started. “I use them every which way I can. I put them in stews, I dry them, I make a killer mushroom soup,” says Niziol, a former outdoors columnist for the Chicago Tribune.

Mushrooms must be picked with care, he notes, because some fungi are poisonous. A good field guide is essential. What’s even better is to find a local mycological society and start taking walks with experts.

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Just so you don’t think I didn’t notice, oil is over 80 $$$ and the speculators are getting ready to bid it up so that oil will be over 100 $$$ by the end of the year, maybe. No matter what, gasoline will be over 3 $$ because the oil companies are shutting down refinery capacity at an increasing rate. Everyone will blame it on the “weakness” of the dollar, which of course, China controls.

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I know at first this story won’t seem to have much to do with the post that follows, but I wanted to lose weight one day. I did not need to. I am 6′3″ and 180 pounds. (blush on my drivers license it says 165) So I cut back on ye old intake. All I really wanted to do was drop 5 lbs. to 175 because my pants were getting a little tight in the waste (sorry waist). In a couple of weeks I got down to 176 lbs. I got distracted. An environmental issue got hot and I just lost track. When I got back to thinking about how much I weighed, I got on the scales and I weighed 180.5 lbs. In a week even though I cut down some I was at 182! In was then that I became very aware of the theory of “set points” and what happens when you disturb them…

Anyway you must remember the No Impact Guy…I did a post on him last year:

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/

Join No Impact Week video discussions here!

Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger.com, is participating in No Impact week, starting October 18, and he wrote on the Huffington Post:

Instead of edicts – depriving you of your car or forbidding drinking your latte from a paper cup – the No-Impact week brought to you by Colin Beavan and Huff Po is instead the opportunity to try out lifestyle strategies that just may be more fun than you thought.

With the shape of the earth and our complex society, we need lots of people coming up with lots of approaches.

I look at No-Impact week as carbon-cleansing experiment in which I get to see which of my lifestyle choices actually contribute to my happiness.

He’s right of course!  So join in!

Meanwhile, we’ll be having online video conversations every night of the week starting on Sunday at 5 PM EST, so tune in below. Sunday’s chat will be with Wood Turner of Climate’s Count on the topic of consumption and Monday’s (at 9PM EST) will be with Bill McKibben of 350 and Betsy Taylor of 1Sky on the topic of trash.

Hope to see you there.

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He had his own blog and organization that the Huffington Post helped start:

What is No Impact Project?

The No Impact Project is an international, environmental, nonprofit project, founded  in the spring of 2009. It was inspired by the No Impact Man book, film, and blog.

Mission

To empower citizens to make choices which better their lives and lower their environmental impact through lifestyle change, community action, and participation in environmental politics.

The No Impact Project was conceived by Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, following the success of his blog, book, and film, which chronicle his family’s year-long experiment living a zero-waste lifestyle in New York City. Central to his thesis is the notion that deep-seated individual behavior change leads to both cultural change and political engagement. Living low-impact provides a clear entry point into the environmental movement. This thesis is the bedrock of the No Impact Project.

Goals

• Promote behavioral change
• Enable the public to experience their own No Impact Experiment
• Engage people who are not already tree-hugging, bicycle-riding, canvas-bag-toting, eco-warriors

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He Got a documentary out of it

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1280011/

No Impact Man: The Documentary

MOVIEmeter:

Down 23% in popularity this week. See why on IMDbPro.

Directors:

Laura Gabbert
Justin Schein

Contact:

View company contact information for No Impact Man: The Documentary on IMDbPro.

Genre:

Documentary

Tagline:

Saving the world, one family at a time.

Plot:

Follow the Manhattan-based Beavan family as they abandon their high consumption 5th Avenue lifestyle and try to live a year while making no net environmental impact. | add synopsis

NewsDesk:

Oscilloscope Laboratories plans on Making an ‘Impact’
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Then a book.. or was it the book then the documentary?

http://festival.sundance.org/2009/film_events/films/no_impact_man

NO IMPACT MAN

Then Colin turns things upside down. For his next book, he announces he’s becoming No Impact Man, testing whether making zero environmental impact adversely affects happiness. The hitch is he needs his wife, Michelle—an espresso-guzzling, Prada-worshipping Business Week writer—and their toddler to join the experiment.A year without electricity, cars, toilet paper, and nonlocal food isn’t going to be a walk in the park

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Then he got phat:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/33357744/ns/us_news-environment/

After year without, family finds middle ground

No TV? Toilet paper? Perceived sacrifices end up being nothing of the sort

Letting go
When the year was over, Conlin and Beavan didn’t want to set any more rules for themselves. After all the restrictions, they wanted to finally let it all go and see what felt right.

Mostly, they stuck to buying their food at the farmer’s market. But if they were short on groceries after a late night at work, they would stop at the supermarket — despite the packaging on the food on the shelves, despite the distance it had traveled.

While the amount of garbage they produced increased from a single quart every four days to five gallons, this was a far cry from the 90 gallons they produced before the experiment. Their refrigerator is back on, but their freezer is gone.

They started buying olive oil and some seasonings, even though they’re not made nearby. They began saying yes when friends invited them out to dinner. And they started using toilet paper again — but now it was made from recycled paper.

Neither of them wanted to bring back their giant, 46-inch TV. But once a week or so, if they’re in the mood, they’ll watch a drama on a laptop.

It was an obvious choice to keep the rickshaw bikes they’d come to love — three-wheelers with space for groceries and a seat for Isabella. But now, when it rains, they sometimes take the subway.

The air conditioners once seemed like a necessity. But take them away, and the heat and the lack of electronic entertainment drove the family outside, where they spent most evenings at the fountain at Washington Square Park. They cooled off in the mist of the fountain, looked around at the virtual circus of performers who have made the public plaza their stage. They talked with neighbors.

No longer hunkered down in their family’s lonely bubble, they were out in the city. They loved

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So there are HUGE journalist temptations here. MSNBC take the “regaining there balance” approach like they were some extremists and now they have come more to the middle of the road. There are other approaches…like to “laugh and say they were destined to fail”. Or like they do with Ed Begley jr. and twitter like his wife, “isn’t he just the oddest sort”

But fresh off my bout with weight loss I say “way to go” on a tough test, and congratulations on not rebounding too far.

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The reason this Post is so late in the day is because I opened my web browser today and it showed that I had 35 messages waiting for me. Someone had unleashed a worm on my address book and it was busy sending all my friends spam. Some of it dangerous spam. I was mortified. I spent over 2 hours checking to make sure it was originating on my computer. People sent some of it back to me so I could see what the heck was spewing out of my account. Then in consultation with my computer expert Afredo I determined that just changing my email password could halt the attack…So I did and it ended. I had to blow off lunch with David Lasley, Dave Fuchs and the Sangamon County Democrats just to get to here…Damnit.

There were some things that I saw at the Illinois State Fair that I did not really care for. One of those things was the prominence of Biofuel in both of  Governor Pat Quinn’s tents. We all know that biofuel, especially ones made from foods, distract people from getting rid of the internal combustion engine. It also drives up food prices so this:

and this:

were NOT appreciated.

Though the latest craze in biofuels is watermellons that are farm waste:

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2009/08/26/watermelon-fuel.html

Watermelon Juice: The New Fuel?

Michael Reilly, Discovery News

Fill ‘er Up | Discovery News Video

Aug. 26, 2009 — A staple of backyard barbecues and summer time snacks, watermelon is also a promising new source of renewable energy.

According to a new study, leftover watermelons from farms’ harvests could be converted into up to 9.4 million liters (2.5 million gallons) of clean, renewable ethanol fuel every year destined for your car, truck, or airplane’s gas tank.

Agriculturally, watermelon is a peculiar fruit — each year farmers across the country leave between 20 and 40 percent of their crop to rot on the ground. These are the ugly ducklings of the lot; though perfectly fine on the inside, the misshapen or blemished melons simply won’t sell at the grocery store.

“If a crow lands on a melon, takes two pecks at the rind, and then flies away, it’s no good,” Wayne Fish of the United States Department of Agriculture in Lane, Oklahoma said. “I had farmers telling me, ‘I’m leaving one-fifth of my melons on the land. Is there anything I can do with them?’”

Across the United States, he estimated that 360,000 tons of watermelons spoil in fields every year.

Some local growers wondered whether the waste melons could be turned into ethanol, the clean-burning fuel derived from plant sugars. In a series of new experiments published yesterday in the journal Biotechnology for Biofuels, Fish and a team of researchers showed that they can.

What’s more, watermelon juice may turn out to be the perfect way to optimize industrial-scale production of ethanol from corn, molasses and sugar cane.

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Then there was this. What the hell. This causes Earth Quakes in Texas yet it makes it to the State Fair?

Fracking is Coming to Decatur. People better get ready for it:

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,526233,00.html

Drilling Eyed as Possible Culprit Behind Texas Earthquakes

Sunday, June 14, 2009

CLEBURNE, Texas  —  The earth moved here on June 2. It was the first recorded earthquake in this Texas town’s 140-year history — but not the last.

There have been four small earthquakes since, none with a magnitude greater than 2.8. The most recent ones came Tuesday night, just as the City Council was meeting in an emergency session to discuss what to do about the ground moving.

The council’s solution was to hire a geology consultant to try to answer the question on everyone’s mind: Is natural gas drilling — which began in earnest here in 2001 and has brought great prosperity to Cleburne and other towns across North Texas — causing the quakes?

“I think John Q. Public thinks there is a correlation with drilling,” Mayor Ted Reynolds said. “We haven’t had a quake in recorded history, and all the sudden you drill and there are earthquakes.”

At issue is a drilling practice called “fracking,” in which water is injected into the ground at high pressure to fracture the layers of shale and release natural gas trapped in the rock.

There is no consensus among scientists about whether the practice is contributing to the quakes. But such seismic activity was once rare in Texas and seems to be increasing lately, lending support to the theory that drilling is having a destabilizing effect.

On May 16, three small quakes shook Bedford, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth. Two small earthquakes hit nearby Grand Prairie and Irving on Oct. 31, and again on Nov. 1.

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Why buying your food locally is so important in so many ways. One of corporate capitalism’s goals is for people to lose their common sense. Some forms of food have been moved all over the planet for 20,000 years. Certain forms of food lend themselves to this process nicely. The commodity grains for example have been move by draft animals, boats and now trucks since their mass cultivation began. Even this can be moderated a bit. But to be shipping all manner of food all manner of places in all types of weather is just dumb.

I boil this down to a single sentence. Do I need to eat apples in Illinois in the winter? If I do should it come from Ecuador? (this is true) I have an apple tree in the back yard. Shouldn’t I just freeze some? But then irrational uses of our transportation system is a hallmark of the modern world. But there is more to consider. Local foods encourage carbon sequestration in the plants themselves, their reintroduction into the soil by composting, and the enhancement of your personal health. These are a few things to consider when you buy only food grown within a hundred miles of your house.

Then there is the ethics of factory farming of any living thing. Anyway planting a garden and harvesting local free stuff only makes sense.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/26/business/worldbusiness/26food.html

The Food Chain

Environmental Cost of Shipping Groceries Around the World

Massimo Sciacca for The New York Times

Kiwis grown in Italy are examined — and damaged fruit is discarded— before being shipped.

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Published: April 26, 2008

Correction Appended

Cod caught off Norway is shipped to China to be turned into filets, then shipped back to Norway for sale. Argentine lemons fill supermarket shelves on the Citrus Coast of Spain, as local lemons rot on the ground. Half of Europe’s peas are grown and packaged in Kenya.

In the United States, FreshDirect proclaims kiwi season has expanded to “All year!” now that Italy has become the world’s leading supplier of New Zealand’s national fruit, taking over in the Southern Hemisphere’s winter.

Food has moved around the world since Europeans brought tea from China, but never at the speed or in the amounts it has over the last few years. Consumers in not only the richest nations but, increasingly, the developing world expect food whenever they crave it, with no concession to season or geography.

Increasingly efficient global transport networks make it practical to bring food before it spoils from distant places where labor costs are lower. And the penetration of mega-markets in nations from China to Mexico with supply and distribution chains that gird the globe — like Wal-Mart, Carrefour and Tesco — has accelerated the trend.

But the movable feast comes at a cost: pollution — especially carbon dioxide, the main global warming gas — from transporting the food.

Under longstanding trade agreements, fuel for international freight carried by sea and air is not taxed. Now, many economists, environmental advocates and politicians say it is time to make shippers and shoppers pay for the pollution, through taxes or other measures.

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/28/AR2008112801611.html

Want to Shrink Your Carbon Footprint? Think Food.

Transportation choices such as car vs. subway have a big effect on carbon footprint, but experts say food choices have nearly as much impact. (By Ramin Talaie — Bloomberg News)

By Katherine Salant

Saturday, November 29, 2008; Page F04

In moving for a year to New York City from Ann Arbor, Mich., a small Midwestern college town, the biggest change for me has not been the shift from a house to a high-rise and a living space that is only one-third as big.

It is the absence of a car.

The difference was apparent the first day. As in previous moves, settling in included many trips to the hardware store for this and that. But this time it was not a simple matter of getting directions and driving there. It was confronting a subway system with 26 different lines. And, after reaching Home Depot and making my purchases, I had to figure out how to get them home. (I learned that most stores in Manhattan offer delivery services for a fee.)

Even the most mundane details of daily life, including meal planning, have changed. In Michigan I had the luxury of “last-minute cuisine,” routinely making a dinner plan at 6 p.m., heading for the grocery store that is a three-minute drive from my house, grabbing a few things and returning home, all inside of 20 minutes. Here the grocery store is a 15-minute walk from our apartment building. The return trip is longer because I am lugging my purchases in a wire shopping cart. With each grocery outing taking at least 40 minutes, I plan ahead and shop for groceries only once or twice a week.

Traveling by subway has not proven to be a timesaver, but the time is allocated differently. On a 60-minute car trip you can while away the time by listening to the radio or music. On a subway you can read. The rush hour is still stressful, but the defensive maneuvers are different. Sandwiched into a subway car, you have to be watchful of backpack-wearing riders who never seem to realize how often their backpacks whack other passengers.

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If you want to calculate how much you save by buying locally:

http://www.foodcarbon.co.uk/

Home The food we consume contributes to climate change. The production, packaging and transportation of food all consumes energy and results in carbon emissions which threaten to raise average global surface temperatures.

However, not all foods are equal…

The Food Carbon Footprint Calculator (FCFC) provides the opportunity to calculate the resultant carbon dioxide from the food you eat, called your “Food Carbon Footprint”.

This website also offers personalised and practical ways to reduce the carbon footprint of your diet, reducing your impact on climate change.

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