2 Great Reasons...

...that I am thrilled with Al Gore's winning of the Nobel Peace Prize

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The Meaning of the 21st Century

I am currently reading the book and I find it simultaneously riveting, terrifying, angering, and stimulating. Thus far Martin seems to place far too much faith in technology and humanity in general for my liking, but he is much, much better connected to What is Going On, so I am withholding as much judgment as I can. Another good video of Mr. Martin here

If for no other reason than to make your brain sweat, I recommend the book.

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And The Rains Came

July had less than an inch of rain, thus far in August we are over 14 inches in Johnson Creek, with parts to the West of us in Wisconsin getting hit hard. We spent much of the week reading account after account of the devastation-focusing in especially on our local Organic Farmers which after overcoming the odds by eking out an existence as Sustainable Farmers were being blasted by the whims of fate and possibly the far reach of Global Warming.

Our preferred source for veggies that we don't grow is Harmony Vally Farm, a large organic farm NW of Madison in the heart of the "organic valley" of the Kickapoo River made famous by Organic Valley Dairy. Harmony valley took 12 inches last weekend, to make 17 inches in one week. Losses are expected to exceed $300,000 dollars in gross sales. Far more disconcerting is the state of the fields as the floods recede-the topsoil is gone and a gravel sludge now resides in its place. Back to that $300k number-this isn't agribusiness-I have met the farmer and his stand is full of 20 to 30 somethings that he is teaching to farm sustainably, and also paying fairly for their labor. Luckily half of his farm is above the floods, so the damage is not total. When we stopped out today to buy onions and brassicas (gone due to flooding) we gave the clerk 2 twenties for the $18 bill. When he tried to hand one back-we told him we had read about the floods and that having them at the market every week was very important to us-enough that $2/ea for onions seemed pretty darn fair to us.

Here at the Beo suburban farm, the tomato crop was set back by 3 weeks as tomatoes split so fast it was almost comical-at least Mia was able to put up 9 pints of sauce last week before the deluge. The melons are a little watery, and the corn has all fallen over. But the new rock walls around the garden beds have held firm so the fall crops of lettuce, beets, and carrots are coming in strong-if one braves the mosquito swarms to check on them.

Started pricing garlic bulbs and potato "seeds" today in preparation for the Business Plan on the Prairie Dock acreage. Not sure if I have a market for 3000lbs of heirloom potatoes, but am willing to look! The Insight's payload capacity is 250lbs....

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Get Busy Living, or Get Busy Dying.

Bart and M.E.O.W. have linked to something we all need to Get Real on. The reality is getting so, um, Real that even CNBC is catching on!

I have come to think of Peak Oil and Climate Change as one issue which I loosely call "unsustainability", the answer to which is Sustainability. The root problem is the same-we are using energy waaaaaaaay to fast, behaving irresponsibly, and need to course correct in one generation-probably in one half of a generation before we doom our children to a life of poverty and doom the third world to a life of starvation.

Kerry talked about it and now Edwards is too-we need to hit Sustainability with the same National effort that we used to get on the moon. Screw Mars-if we want to keep from looking like Venus we need to get honest with ourselves, scrap the Hummers and make 300 bicycles each from the recovered steel. Silliness aside, we need to use the energy we have to set ourselves up for a sustainable future. It takes alot of energy to make PV cells or even Tulikivi stoves. Time to get busy living.

Be the Change!

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"What Can I Do?"

Being Eco Aware in a Fortune 500 company can be interesting. Some of it is great-everyone wants a test drive in your hybrid, but it can also get weird when they want to feel the texture of your organic hemp shirt. Last week in a lull during a meeting in a peer’s office while he took another call I filled the gap by sketching a rough diagram of The Funnel on his dry erase board and as he finished his call I proceeded to regale him with a 90 second version of my deep concern about the results of our current rampant consumerism and its effect on the population limits of our Earth mixing in various elements of ideas such as ecological footprint, Peak Oil, the effects of the melting of the Himalayan glaciers on water availability in India and China, etc. to such an extent that the overall effect was to stun my peer into silence. The Green Bug rears its head at odd times.

Last Friday one of the other supervisors was in that office and my buddy, who has left the diagram up, threw him under the bus by asking me to explain the “funnel” to him. After the inevitable stunned silence he asked me what that means for us. I explained my belief that if it gets that bad-the 1st world will be somewhat protected by our affluence-i.e. in the Depression there was not rampant starvation, just rampant poverty- but for the 3rd and 4th worlds they would not have such luxuries-water and food shortages could be acute with horrifying results given their population levels. He answered with the only real ethical and logical response: “What can I do?”

I was amazed to find that I couldn’t immediately answer. Being short of words is almost unheard of, but after working myself that deep into the Doom and Gloom, changing a few bulbs to CFL’s didn’t seem even remotely enough to offset water shortages on a continent wide scale. I gave it quick thought that centered on a few macro level changes that called for more of a change in mindset than tweaking how you light your kitchen which is my typical answer when a friend asks for a way to live a little greener.

Buy Less After talking so much about the rampant energy consumption, pollution and water shortages in China and India I feel strongly that exporting our pollution and resource use is an immoral act. It takes a lot of energy and water to make a Mattel Hot Wheel in China while at the same time pushing uncontrolled urbanization that is further eroding that region’s ability to feed itself. We cannot be sustainable until we learn to live more frugally. Cutting consumption impacts everything. It cuts environmental degradation from resource appropriation, cuts energy consumption and industrial pollution from unregulated manufacturing, and frees up household money for more sustainable practices that unfortunately can cost more initially while offering long term savings.

Buy Local If we are to survive post Peak Oil and remain flexible enough to roll with the punches of our new self made climate we need to recreate village/regional economies. There is more patriotism to Buying American than in keeping Harley afloat. Here in Wisconsin it isn’t always easy to find local foods and goods year round, but by purchasing as close to home as possible we drive a local economy that encourages artisan skills that will be essential as we are forced to switch from a resource intensive economy and revert to a more knowledge based one. Factor in the massive resource and pollution savings of cutting several thousand miles of transportation off your goods and it’s a no brainer.

Conserve Energy This is usually where I start my Eco Evangelism. I have even made inroads with some die hard neo cons… energy is expensive and even if you don’t believe in Peak Oil or Climate Change, money is a powerful persuader. I figure we are saving $6-8k annually compared to where we were before going green. On a more sustainable level, due to the massive energy losses in transmission lines for electricity or in shipping oil half way around the globe, cutting energy use at the source pays back immense dividends in resource and pollution savings. Hybrids, CFL’s, programmable thermostats, caulking, etc can have incredible effects. Kick it out another level and factor in the built environment with LEED standards, New Urbanism development, and efficient mass transit and hope becomes a reality. We need that energy to invest in a different production infrastructure and may only have a generation to do it.

Buy Organic I rarely push the health benefits of buying organic. The science can be unconclusive and few want to admit they have been slowing poisoning themselves or their children so it throws up walls for them. Instead I push the undeniable environmental consequences of our current industrial agriculture. We are losing our topsoil to the wind while we poison our groundwater--two resources that we literally cannot live without. Almost more terrifying to me is that with the passing of the current generation of farmers (mean age of over 55) we will be losing untold generations worth of accumulated oral traditions of “organic” farming. Our grandparents learned from their fathers before them how to farm successfully without petroleum. Their children switched to a more industrial model and the majority of young farmers today have never farmed any other way. Anyone who has ever tried to start a garden knows that nature is a firm taskmistress and does not brook mistakes-and even Eliot Coleman can only teach you so much from a book. We need that knowledge to be passed on as it always has-through experience: how to hold a hoe, when to plant in your county, and with those skills to have the seeds that have been painstakingly saved for generations to thrive in that exact farm.

I still firmly believe that coming off too strong will not help give others the impetus to change, but that doesn’t mean that we have the right to shy away from the realities of the logical conclusions of our society’s path. If all you can do is convince your neo con neighbor to buy a CFL then we are several hundred Kwh to the better. But for those that are further along the change curve in accepting reality, giving them real tools to help them reorient their lives is critical if we are to build the amount of grassroots momentum to literally save the world. Hubris got us into this mess, it just might be the only thing to get us out.

Be the change!

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CAR-bon Emmisions

I have been giving Global Warming alot of thought lately. I finally got around to watching Inconvenient Truth a week ago at a free public showing at our Village Hall and that kicked me into a bout of Doom and Gloom. My fear is that we are entering into a feedback loop of warming that will make averting the pending disaster of massive sea level rise virtually impossible. Hit the Asia-Pacific page of the BBC today. Jakarta is under 13 feet of water with 340,000 evacuated due to record rains and China is in a nasty drought with the warmest winter in 30 years melting off the snowfall early. Now shoot forward a generation, and potentially, that is now what Jakarta looks like all the time and China's billion's are without water because the Himalayan glaciers that feed their rivers are gone. That is some scary sh/t.

Now the EU is trying to do something about it, by attempting to limit the automotive CO2 emissions to about 120g per KM. Autos are the only industry with rising CO2 emmisions in the EU. That is kinda Greek to us in here in the US so check the chart above from Earth Trends. The EU has a long way to go, but compared to the US, they are squeaky clean. How in the hell can Congress defend GM and Ford when they sell us an average mpg fleet of an appalling 18.8 mpg when their EU fleet is almost double that with half the emissions? Besides that- all the numbers are pretty appalling and none are anywhere near the EU's goal numbers-though they have improved slightly over these 2002 figures. But the EU won't move until 2008, and we won't move until we get another election. Grim.

The macro picture is looking too bleak right now thru my doom glasses, so I decided to turn my angst into action. On the local side, I finally converted our dining room 'chandelier' to CFL's. In 30 minutes I converted it from a motion sensor'd 300 watt incandescent setup, to a 50watt CFL set-up with the same lumens. I am saving a kwh every 4 hours that the dining room is on! Not too shabby, but its crazy that our society still uses such wasteful bulbs. I then rewired the powder room with the motion sensor switch, which can't run CFL's, so that the 240 watts of light in there aren't on forever with the kids forgetfulness. That light is now never on more than 3-4 minutes at a time, and CFL's don't do so hot in those quick on/off situations so that will be the last room to convert. The main bath is another story-that one is on the budget for March, with the master bath (I too am concerned that we have 3 bathrooms) to convert in April, leaving only the powder room between us and 100% CFL'dom.

Then we begin considering the Wood Stove to embrace biomass heating (and wood fired bread/pizza!) for 2009. These things are pricey!

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