This is lovely.

Solar power offers some hope.

Thanks B!

"A tiny rectangle superimposed on the vast expanse of the Sahara captures the seductive appeal of the audacious plan to cut Europe's carbon emissions by harnessing the fierce power of the desert sun.
Dwarfed by any of the north African nations, it represents an area slightly smaller than Wales but scientists claimed yesterday it could one day generate enough solar energy to supply all of Europe with clean electricity." LINK

And an excellent response to the Why Bother? article by Michael Pollan

Reading the "Why Bother?" article, I got all worked up in my pathetic own way, and rushed out to buy lettuce, leek, and parsely seedlings, and a small but pricey darling little rosemary. Filled with good intentions and feeling clean in my soul, I thought, "yes- I will grow my own lovely tomatos! and be free of the eveil, consumer cycle!" I even thought how nice it would be to be able to get a damn tomato without having an existential crisis at the supermarket, where I can spend an easy 20 minutes reading labels on tomatos and feeling torn between my puny pocket and my puny concience. Is the local greenhouse tomato a more ethical purchase than the organic from Spain? Is the $1.99/lb washed out looking hulking tasteless thing even food anymore? Is there anyway I can justify (ethically or financially) buying the gorgeous little on-the-vine ruby red ones? And it usually ends with me realizing that my quick stop for some food has turned (once again) into a minute theater of the absurd, and I quickly get some, feel horror at the register, and then let the damn things shrivel in the fridge.

Yes, I thought, I shall grow my own.

But then...

I quite like to garden, you know. I like to plant, and I love seeing things come up. I am decent at keeping plants alive. I know about what many of them want, and at least always set out to provide them with what they need. But.

Full sun? Nope. Do I get home from work (the days I get home before 10 pm) filled with a wholesome urge to drag a hose around and hand-squish pests? Nope. Have I ever managed to grow enough tomatos to justify the amount of labor, expense, and sheer pain-in-the assness of it all? Nope.

So when I read Salon's Andrew Leonard's response to Pollard's article, I felt a great easing of the soul, in that maybe I am not alone in being The Worst Person Ever.

In Leonard's response, he points out that "growing your own food is work -- ask any peasant. To be able to enjoy it as play, or as an almost spiritual exercise that connects you more deeply to the earth and all living things (some of which you must kill: Die, all aphids and snails!) can be a tough call after a long day or week at the office. It can also be an affectation that is only accessible to those who spend their Sunday mornings working their way through the New York Times, before deciding where to put their snap pea trellis."

He even goes where Pollard not only feared to tread, but didn't even acknowledge was on the map- the "what-if-you-don't-have-a-back-yard class warfare morass... everyone is landed gentry, or at the very least, can plant basil in a windowbox." issue.

Well, I have these little seedlings, and I will assuredly plant them, and I especially hope to enjoy the leeks, as leeks are my favorite veggie, but I don't really feel that in any way a little suburban vanity gardening is a solution.

I don't see a solution. When rice is being hoarded and wealthy governments are talking about rationing and poor governments are trying to hold back their starving masses, yeah- me growing some Brandywine heirloom tomatos really isn't going to make a fucking difference. They might be tasty, but that is all.

Fantastic fantastic article. Why bother?

This article made me cry it was that good and did, honestly, make me feel that there is maybe a tiny speck of hope- or at least of redemption. Maybe.

"Why bother? That really is the big question facing us as individuals hoping to do something about climate change, and it’s not an easy one to answer. I don’t know about you, but for me the most upsetting moment in “An Inconvenient Truth” came long after Al Gore scared the hell out of me, constructing an utterly convincing case that the very survival of life on earth as we know it is threatened by climate change. No, the really dark moment came during the closing credits, when we are asked to . . . change our light bulbs. That’s when it got really depressing. The immense disproportion between the magnitude of the problem Gore had described and the puniness of what he was asking us to do about it was enough to sink your heart.

But the drop-in-the-bucket issue is not the only problem lurking behind the “why bother” question. Let’s say I do bother, big time. I turn my life upside-down, start biking to work, plant a big garden, turn down the thermostat so low I need the Jimmy Carter signature cardigan, forsake the clothes dryer for a laundry line across the yard, trade in the station wagon for a hybrid, get off the beef, go completely local. I could theoretically do all that, but what would be the point when I know full well that halfway around the world there lives my evil twin, some carbon-footprint doppelgänger in Shanghai or Chongqing who has just bought his first car (Chinese car ownership is where ours was back in 1918), is eager to swallow every bite of meat I forswear and who’s positively itching to replace every last pound of CO2 I’m struggling no longer to emit. So what exactly would I have to show for all my trouble?" LINK

Silent Spring, here, now.

Heartbreaking story, and another reason to eat local. I just saw the documentary Winged Migration, and my (already huge) appreciation of birds has, to put it cheesily, soared. To think that they are being poisoned so we can have Chilean grapes or whatever is awful. So I'm going to redouble efforts to check where produce comes from.

"The number of migratory songbirds returning to North America has gone into sharp decline due to the unregulated use of highly toxic pesticides and other chemicals across Latin America.

Ornithologists blame the demand for out-of-season fruit and vegetables and other crops in North America and Europe for the destruction of tens of millions of passerine birds. By some counts, half of the songbirds that warbled across America's skies only 40 years ago have gone, wiped out by pesticides or loss of habitat.

Ornithologists say another silent spring is dawning across the US as birds are being poisoned by toxic chemicals or killed as pests in their winter refuges across South and Central America as well as the Caribbean. They say that many species of songbird will never recover, and others may even become endangered or extinct if controls are not put in place or consumer habits changed.

More problems await those birds which make it home. Millions of acres of wilderness the birds use as nesting grounds have been ploughed under in the drive to grow corn for ethanol, for bio-fuel. " LINK

Biofuels and ethics...

Pretty intense article about increases in the cost of food, the ethics of biofuel, and the real life day to day impact of the food crisis. Great read.

"And, as a result of the vast tracts of farmland now being given over to corn for ethanol production, the price has risen sharply. Hence the tortilla riots in Mexico, last summer, over the price rise in the corn flour that makes the pancakes. Some claim that there is now a war between the 850 million chronically hungry of the world and the 800 million motorists - all fighting for the same food crop. It's a pretty unbalanced battle: the maize to fill a tank for a 'Chelsea tractor' would feed a family of four for three months. In October the United Nations' spokesman on famine, Jean Ziegler, called the biofuel boom 'a crime against humanity'. And as the Economist magazine recently noted: 'The 30 million tonnes of extra corn going to ethanol this year amounts to half the fall in the world's overall grain stocks.'

Last week, after a mass protest at the price of soya beans in Indonesia (which rose because of the shortage of corn and other crops to supply the biofuel industry), Ashok Gulati, director at the International Food Policy Research Institute said: 'It's finally a trade-off between filling stomachs and filling diesel tanks in cars and trucks.'"

LINK

Is it really eco-friendly shopping?

"Paul Hawken, an author and longtime environmental activist, said the current boom in earth-friendly products offers a false promise. “Green consumerism is an oxymoronic phrase,” he said.

“We turn toward the consumption part because that’s where the money is,” Mr. Hawken said. “We tend not to look at the ‘less’ part. So you get these anomalies like 10,000-foot ‘green’ homes being built by a hedge fund manager in Aspen. Or ‘green’ fashion shows. Fashion is the deliberate inculcation of obsolescence.”

He added: “The fruit at Whole Foods in winter, flown in from Chile on a 747 — it’s a complete joke. The idea that we should have raspberries in January, it doesn’t matter if they’re organic. It’s diabolically stupid.”
LINK

So long, and thanks for all the... wait, where's the fish?

Sorry, fish.
Right, so everyone knows that fish are out around 2050, right? Well, some guy wrote a book about it, ( actually , Charles Clover wrote The End of the Line: How Overfishing Is Changing the World and What We Eat) which is being roundly ignored, but there are some gems from this Salon interview with him. Check it out.
"I didn't say in my book, "Don't eat fish." I say, "Don't eat certain fish, don't eat endangered fish." If a fish takes 20 years to double its population, that's a long time. If it takes 30 years before it breeds, don't touch it. But if you eat something that's fast reproducing and not overfished, you should be all right. And there's quite a lot of those species out there. You can eat a hell of a lot of shellfish, a huge amount of mussels and oysters, and your deep-water scallops, with a clear conscience. You can have a really nice fish stew, it's not a problem. But why eat endangered fish? And the slow-reproducing ones are probably going to have mercury in them anyway, so it's a win-win.
I think [cutting back on endangered fish] would be enough of a message to the fishermen of the world and the industries. God knows we're eating a lot of them at the moment. If you go to New York, restaurants seem actively to encourage it. "

Fucking New York.
LINK to great interview

The irony- it burns, it burns. Again.

So, if you read the post about the ludicrously expensive and oh-so-fashionable eco-totes, and maybe thought, well, $960 for a Hermes shopping tote is a bit out of line, but gee, that Anya Hindmarch "I'm not a plastic bag" bag sounded neat-o, well, think again.

"However, the I'm Not a Plastic Bags are actually even less "green" than customers realised: they were made in China, using cheap labour, from non-fair trade, non-organic cotton - a fabric as environmentally damaging as plastic. Petra Kjell, campaigner with the Environmental Justice Foundation, says: "Cotton accounts for 16 per cent of global insecticide releases - more than any other single crop. Of the $2bn of chemical pesticides used on cotton crops each year, at least $819m are considered toxic enough to be classified as hazardous by the World Health Organisation. Aldicarb is one of the most toxic pesticides applied to cotton, yet it is also the second-most used pesticide in global cotton production. One teaspoonful of aldicarb on the skin would be sufficient to kill an adult."

Sainsbury's issued a statement saying it had "never claimed the bag was fair trade or organic. The point of the bag is that it can be re-used, thereby saving millions of plastic bags from being used in future years. The bag was designed to raise awareness of the issue of the abusive use of disposable plastic bags, a goal which it has achieved internationally, beyond anyone's expectations". However, many shoppers reported that their I'm Not a Plastic Bag purchase was handed to them in... a plastic bag." LINK

LA takes eco-friendly shopping totes to predictable absurd heights, but still, this seems like a good thing.

This is somewhere between laughing, crying, and cheering.

"There's paper. There's plastic. Then there's the $960 reusable Hermes shopping bag.

Originally designed for discerning Europeans, it hits America this summer, and if it sounds like an exotic fluke, consider the new $843 grocery tote by Italian designer Consuelo Castiglioni of Marni.

Or the $495 organic cotton canvas shopper, due out in June from Stella McCartney.

Or the now-famous I'm Not a Plastic Bag by the British handbag designer Anya Hindmarch, which has been selling at more than 10 times its $15 price on EBay.

A spokeswoman for Hermes, for example, said that their new Silky Pop, a hand-wrought silk tote that collapses into a wallet-size pouch of calfskin, was intended as a high-end alternative to the extra fold-up shopping bag that many European women already carry in their purses. ("Say you're out walking. You decide to pick up a few apples, you pull out your bag," she explained, then quickly added: "Though obviously, Hermes clients usually aren't shopping for their own groceries.")

This month's Vogue mentions all four in a call to arms of sorts, urging fashionistas to become more bag-wise: "No loitering, girls," contributing editor Sarah Mower exhorted. "Today, let us go out and harness the power of fashion to change the way the nation shops. One stylish act of rebellion in supermarkets, delis, drugstores and designer emporiums and at market stalls is all it takes: Say no to plastic bags. Whip out your own brilliant alternative. Make people stare. Break a habit. Set a trend."" LINK

Ahhh, fashion. So fun, so fickle, so damaging?

"Disposable" fashion?

Inexpensive, trendy clothing is a huge market, in the US and in Europe. Companies like H&M, Old Navy, Target, and others have recieved lots of positive attention for making high style at low prices available to the masses, there are hidden costs- both environmental and other.Target, for one, is being sued by Williams Sonoma for copyright infringement, with Williams Sonoma accusing "Target Corp. of systematically copying its designs on a range of products, from Christmas stockings to votive candle holders." LINK That is interesting in itself, and, well, it kind of makes a lot of sense. High style at a great price? Yeah, stolen goods bought on the cheap. But anyway, I digress.

Environmentally, the idea of "fast fashion" (think fast food), is disastrous. A Cambridge University report examines the environmental impact of thefast fashion movement, and it is bleak. In order to make the clothes so inexpensive, they are generally less well made, and will not last as long as a well sewn item, and as one shopper says " “If it falls apart, you just toss it away!”

This is a really good article about how some of the big stores in the UK, like Marks and Spencers, are trying to keep up their sales while being eco-conscious and the same time. Delicate balance, but at least they're trying. LINK

And actually, that dress up top is disposable fashion, and environmentally sound- it's made of dissolving polymers!!!! How cool is that?!?!? And not only that, but the flowers on the dress turn into a brief art show when it melts!

"The fabric is knitted from a clear polymer - polyvinyl alcohol - of the kind used in sachets that release detergent in washing machines. The dresses will dissolve and turn into a form that can be recycled as a bottle.
However, they break down so slowly that they can survive a sweaty party.

The dresses are decorated with cleverly designed flowers that slowly give off a dye when they dissolve, making them move around like sea anemones in the huge goldfish bowl."

LINK

UK grocery stores to label food's carbon costs along with calories and nutritional info

This is so cool. Yet another reason to wish to live there. Very civilised place, the UK.
"In the most significant step announced yesterday, Tesco, the UK's biggest retailer, which produces 2m tonnes of carbon a year in the UK, said it would put new labels on every one of the 70,000 products it sells so that shoppers can compare carbon costs in the same way they can compare salt content and calorie counts.
Meanwhile all food products airfreighted into the UK will carry an aeroplane symbol."
LINK

Update on coffee grown in wildlife conservation areas

A few days ago I wrote about Indonesians clearing land within protected areas to farm coffee.

"The WWF reported that about 15,000 local farmers worked illegally inside the park, cultivating 45,000 hectares of conserved land to grow more than 19,600 tons of coffee. Their illegal activities had destroyed about 20 percent of the forest.

Seventy percent of the 365,800-hectare Bukit Barisan Selatan national park is located in Lampung, while the rest is in Bengkulu province. It is home to a number of critically endangered species, including populations of approximately 40 Sumatran tigers, 500 Sumatran elephants and between 60 and 85 Sumatran rhinoceroses."

Starbucks denies purchasing the beans, which were grown illegally in a sanctuary for endangered rhinos, tigers, and elephants, while Nestle "regrets" purchasing the beans, but claims they didn't know the origin of the beans. LINK

Delicious! B-O-L-O-D-N-A!

Cloned meats, fantastic. That steak was extra-tender? Let's all have the same exact piece!
No, I really am at a total loss as to the ethical hows and howevers for cloned meats. Are we just killing the same, sweet, brown-eyed cow over and over? And did that tasty beast have especially bad karma?

I guess I'm holding out for lab-grown meat- cells on trays, never attached to anything called Bessie.

/and no, I'm not vegetarian. I'm a nasty carnivore, but I do feel guilty! Does that count for anything?

Doomed, for reals.

Well, it is hard not to feel super extra double doomed these days. The baiji dolphin is gone. Gone. Douglas Adams wrote about these creatures in his last, heartbreaking book- and I'm serious, even though he was the funniest writer of the late 20th c,Last Chance To See was absolutely heartbreaking.

So, so long and thanks for all the fish.

But that's not it.

The weather is, to put it gently, fucked up beyond all repair. FUBAR. Daisies blooming in Moscow. The highest temperatures recorded in 347 years in the UK for 2006. Severe drought on the Great Plains. It's 52 fucking degrees here today. It's december. My lilacs are leafing out. They'll probably die. Meanwhile, in Lapland, where Santa's village is, "Rovaniemi, a town on the Arctic Circle in northern Finland which is the Lapp capital, is normally covered in deep drifts at this time of the year, with accompanying temperatures going down to -20C." There is no snow there now. The temperatures are above freezing. Bears cannot hibernate, ducks are swimming on open water in Russia. Aspen, Colorado is very excited that they might make more money, because there isn't enough snow in the Alps for skiiers. Oooh, money. Australia is on fire. Long Island's aquifer is tapped. No, you can't have water. Not yours.

Yeah. So, that's where I'm at.

Fuckity fuck fuck, so doomed.

It's all happening so much faster than they thought.

A really interesting, if incredibly disturbing article I was reading yesterday was about the formulae used to calculate the 'cost' of climate change. Apparently, economists and ethicists are (surprise!) in disagreement. The term for the generational decrease in quality of life is " "social rate of time discount," the rate used to compare the well-being of future generations to the well-being of those alive today.

The choice of an appropriate social time discount rate has long been debated. Some very intelligent people have argued that giving future generations less weight than the current generation is "ethically indefensible." Other equally intelligent people have argued that weighting generations equally leads to paradoxical and even nonsensical results."

Nonsensical results, eh?

I'll show you a nonsensical result, you greedy bleeding bastard. Your children, gasping, thirsty, and at war over water, because you failed to understand that your fucking Darwinian imperative (IMPERATIVE YOU SHITHEAD) is to reproduce and defend your young, so that your DNA can move on.

The most nonsensical thing I can think of is animals who kill their young, like sick gerbils or something, eating diseased babies. The Darwinian imperative has always made sense to me, that our driving force to do anything is to procreate and make ourselves immortal in our children. But everyday, breeders are making choices that will kill their children, and everyone else's. Maybe that's why this is happening, maybe somehow there is a rising awareness that we are the cancer, and that we have to be stopped, and it's easier to kill our children than it is to kill ourselves. Maybe that's it.

It's just a shame that we're taking out the dolphins first.