One Geek, One Earth

So, gas prices stink right now, at least relative to where they were. We’re paying $3.58 around here and it seems like only a few months ago that we were below $2.40. The idea has been floating around that the federal gas tax ought to be removed for the summer to help out the consumer, since gas prices have risen to such heights. John McCain jumped on board, saying it was a great idea. Hillary Clinton said we should do it and we should take money from Big Oil to pay for it. Obama said that we shouldn’t do it - we’re not going to be able to solve our energy problems until we understand the pricing behind them and that we’re going to have to make some sacrifices.

McCain is obviously on board with what is mainstream Republican philosophy - “economy first, environment second (or third, or fourth, or seventy-eighth)”. Hillary does what she does very well - say what she thinks people want to hear (and picking an easy target in Big Oil). Obama actually treated the American people as adults, making the assumption that we understand that there is a problem and there is not going to be an easy fix and short term relief will only end up causing pain in the future.

A politician that actually says what he thinks? And that cares about finding solutions to our environmental problems? Sign me up please. He’s got my vote in the May primary.

Over the weekend, Aurora attended a birthday party for one of her friends (the first of 3 parties over 3 consecutive Saturdays). What was neat was that it was located at a place called The Scrap Exchange in downtown Durham. Their goal is to promote environmental awareness through creative reuse of what would normally be considered junk. Their party room had big barrels full of various pieces of scrap - foam shapes, empty CD cases, loose pieces of wrapping paper, small corks, and a bunch of other things that I didn’t recognize from coming from something specific.

The kids were encouraged to wander aimlessly and just pick out scrap to use to make an art project in conjunction with scissors and tape (no glue, bad for the environment). The kids (and the adults) had a blast. Joy even found a scrap piece of gray tile that she may be able to use for a backdrop for photographing her jewelry and it only cost her a quarter.

This place is a great to emphasize the fact that a lot of things that we throw away could probably be reused in a creative way.

From an article on Planet Green, they talk about the reasons not to top off, including:

• Evaporation from spillage leads to bad ozone days
• You end up paying for gasoline that just automatically gets fed back into the pump (which is bad for the pump as well as your wallet)
• Gas tanks need wiggle room for expansion of the gas - if you overfill, you could mess up your fuel pump.

So break the habit and when the pump clicks, that’s your sign to hang ‘er up.

Joy and I signed up for the mobile farmer’s market available through Duke. You get to choose between 7 local farms, each of which offers a different selection of food (one farm offers fresh cut flowers instead of food). We signed up for Vollmer Farms, who is mostly organic, but not completely. John Vollmer was a former tobacco farmer who needed to find a way to convert the farm to a different product in order to survive. He’s been slowly changing most of his fields to organic production methods and I expect that in a few years, he’ll be completely 100% organic.

The way the process works is that we pay up front (in this case, $400 for 20 weeks) and every Tuesday, we get a box of produce that we pick up at the Duke Gardens, which makes it very convenient. The next Tuesday, we exchange the empty box for a new box and so on. Every Saturday, we get an e-mail telling us what will be in the upcoming box, which gives us a chance to meal plan and prep before our Sunday grocery run. In this last box, we got:

• 8 oz Baby Specialty Lettuce Mix ($4.50)
• 1 lb Strawberries ($5.00)
• 1 bunch Radishes ($1.50)
• 1.5 lbs Sunburst Tomatoes ($5.25)
• 2 lbs Turnip Greens ($5.00)

This allows us to eat more locally, which helps the environment and probably also our health. The hardest part is adjusting to thinking about

“what can I fix that will use what we’re getting?”
vs.
“what do I need to buy so I can fix what I want to eat?”

But it has opened up the chance to try some new things (I had never tried collard greens before last week). I definitely think it is a great thing. You may not have a mobile market near you, but check and see if you have a farmer’s market. It is definitely worth the effort.

…or offers you 20 ways that your home can save the earth, anyway. Sunday night they had an hour long show illustrating 20 ways to green your home. To be fair, it was about 50% product placement but a lot of the products were actually interesting, if somewhat expensive at times. The neat stuff:

(1) Plug into the hottest appliances

A dishwasher that automatically senses what dishes you have in the washer and uses just enough water and heat to clean. Also highlighted a monthly energy dashboard for your house that is accessible from the internet, so you can see what your energy usage patterns are, even while you’re not in the house. And the one I’d really like - a built in, hermetically sealed food composter.

(5) Recycle with style

A reminder of the reuse portion of the reduce, reuse, recycle portion. Reupholstering old pieces of furniture can be incredibly stylish and keeps furniture from hitting the landfill.

(6) Planet friendly floors

They mentioned cork floors, which appeal to me as I don’t walk well in bare feet on regular hardwood floors, but cork has give to it for a softer experience and cork is environmentally great because it is harvested from the tree every 9 years rather cutting the tree down. Marmoleum, which is a brand name linoleum was shown. Linoleum is made from all natural products and the design possibilities are much better than what you may remember from your childhood. And finally, they mentioned carpet tiles (available from lots of different eco-friendly materials) - since tiles are placed in a pattern, if something happens to one, you can just remove the tile to clean it, rather than having to remove the whole carpet, which is definitely more earth friendly.

(13) Go with the low flow

Besides the standard low flow showerheads and faucets, they showed off a toilet that has two separate buttons - 1 for #1, 1 for #2 - that way, the toilet uses only as much water as is needed.

(17) Be green when you clean

Lots of expensive washer and dryers that I can’t afford, but they did mention dryer balls that are supposed to help your wet clothes separate, allowing your dryer to be more efficient and use less heat. Should also allow you to stop using dryer sheets and fabric softener. For $20, that seems like it would pay for itself before long.

(20) Keep nature natural

Planters made of corn husks that are naturally biodegrable - you plant them with your plant, and they become part of the soil. Neat. They also had a stylish rug made from recycled plastic bottles and furniture made from “polywood“, a substance made from recycled milk jugs. Definitely neat stuff and something to consider when we move and need deck furniture.

If you can catch the show on repeat on HGTV, I think it is worth a look see - at 45 mins if you can Tivo it, I think it is worth the time.

Earth Day is almost upon us and so I’ve been thinking about what I can do for Earth Day and what might be good for someone else interested in saving the environment but without a lot of time or money to give right now. So without further delay:

1) Eat Locally (even if only a little)

You don’t even have to change your eating patterns much this time of year to try and eat locally. Most areas will have a farmer’s market, or if you’re rural, an actual farm, where you could buy some local vegetables. It might cost you 2 or 3 extra dollars a week, but you’ll get fresh food which tastes better and will reduce the amount of gas spent transporting food around.

2) Donate $5 to an interesting eco-charity.

The hardest part of donating to charities for me is finding one that catches my eye and does something specific and meaningful. A lot of charities are so broad, I feel like my money is going into a big sea where I’ll have no idea what it was used for. But for example, you could donate to RelightNY, which “[supplies] low-income housing units with energy-saving CFL bulbs, both helping families to save on utility costs and fighting global warming.” Started by a 16 year old, this is the kind of effort where you know where your money goes, and it could have a very real, practical effect on climate change. Find a charity that is useful and donate $5. A little money - real effect.

3) Work from home

Not viable for everyone, obviously, but those with flexible employers can save some gas by telecommuting and getting some work done from home. If you’ve never worked from home before, perhaps you’ll find it works out well, and you can shift to a day a week from home, giving you regular savings in gas bills (with gas prices skyrocketing, that’s nothing to sneeze at) and helping the environment out a little.

4) Drive a little slower

If you do have to drive in to work, why not try going a little slower? I’m not saying become one of those hypermiler folks who are drafting behind trucks and never going faster than 55. But if you’re anything like me, you’re living in suburbia and don’t have a lot of access to public transportation and it is near impossible time wise to bike or walk anywhere. So, you’re driving around a lot and probably driving 10 miles over the speed limit, which seems to be the norm. So, for Earth Day, commit to a week or so of driving a little slower - maybe 5 mph less than what you’d normally drive. I started doing that and found that my commute time didn’t really change, which seemed counterintuitive to me, but was proven true over and over again. If you’re driving on a highway, those 5 mph can make a substantial difference in your gas mileage.

5) Think in terms of capitalism

As mentioned above, charities are a good deal if you find the right one for you, but I also firmly believe a lot of good can be done by convincing companies that there is a huge market out there for changing the way they work to be more eco-friendly. If there is a profit to be had in it, they’ll make the change. In that line of thinking, my Earth Day contribution will be signing up for NC Green Power. Technically a non-profit, those of us in NC can donate in $4 blocks through our power bill. In their words:

The goal of NC GreenPower is to supplement the state’s existing power supply with more green energy – electricity generated from renewable resources like the sun, wind and organic matter. The program accepts financial contributions from North Carolina citizens and businesses to help offset the cost to produce green energy.

While my $4 “adds one block of 100 kilowatt-hours of green energy to North Carolina’s power supply”, that’s not a tremendous amount. The more important thing, in my opinion, is to make sure the power companies realize that there are lots of people out there who are willing to pay more if their power is green power. Maybe if enough people are on board, power companies will think twice about building another coal burning plant.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part III: Forest

The final portion of Omnivore’s Dilemma has Pollan going out and hunting a wild pig and gathering wild mushrooms to be able to create a complete meal that he gathered completely on his own. He diverges some at the beginning, as he goes into the idea of vegetarianism for a bit. He quotes famous animal rights activist Peter Singer, who said “No one in the habit of eating an animal can be completely without bias in judging whether the conditions in which that animal is reared cause suffering.” So he takes up vegetarianism for a while but comes to the conclusion that eating meat is ok, as long as the animal involved was either wild or humanely raised.

And so he goes out into the wilds of California and hunts a wild pig, with the help of an experienced hunter. He feels the thrill of the hunt, which is something he really wasn’t expecting to experience. He later feels guilty about the killing (and about feeling so excited during the kill) but eventually comes to terms with it.

He then has an entire section devoted to gathering wild mushrooms with hobbyist gatherers who all have their own personal secret locations to gather and rarely share them with the outside world.

He then makes his meal and serves it to everyone that helped him do the foraging and gathering and proclaims it as the perfect meal for him, in that while it might not have been the “perfect” meal as a cook would envision it, it had a unique greatness to him personally since he was so in touch with all the elements involved.  He does conclude that this meal, like the McDonald’s meal at the end of Part I, was just not sustainable in modern times. Just like you should only be having fast food on rare occasions, so the meal completely gathered by its cook is going to be a very rare event.  I found this section of the book to be the least interesting, mostly because it was the most personal - it was Pollan getting deeply in touch with basic hunting/gathering instincts and I just didn’t find it as interesting as the first two sections.

On a meta note, I messed up reviewing this book in 3 sections. It’s a complex,interesting book with a lot of themes that weave back and forth throughout. I thought by dividing it, I could do it better justice, but instead, I still couldn’t do it justice and I stretched this out to a painful ordeal both for you and for me. I’m 10th on the library waitlist for his next book, In Defense of Food, which I need to read so I can do this food challenge I have planned. But, I think I will work on making a shorter, more compressed review of that, and in the meantime, work on getting back to some interesting posts about the world of green. Between the prepping of the house for sale and getting my wife’s jewelry website running, blogging has seemed more like work that is getting in the way of other things that needed to be done, and I don’t want it to be that way. So back to shorter, more fun posts in the near future.

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part II: Grass

Part II actually takes Pollan down two separate paths for two different meals. First is discovering what Big Organic is all about, and then second is a trip to a small scale completely sustainable farm (whose owner refers to himself as a “grass farmer”).

Pollan thinks about shopping in places like Whole Foods is the equivalent of “supermarket pastoral” - a quality story attached to each piece of meat and vegetable to allow us to create a picture in our mind of how that free-range chicken lived a wonderful life before being brought to our plate. But in reality, the way Big Organic works is not tremendously different from regular industrial farms. The major difference is that they don’t use pesticides. But chickens, for example, are kept in the exact same condition as industrial farms, except that the farmers can’t use antibiotics, making the whole system even less stable. “Free range” means they have a door open to a small yard that the chickens never go out into (and the owners, afraid of chickens getting sick, pray that they never use).

Pollan goes on to explore the history of the organic movement, straight from its roots in hippiedom. Now organic foods gotten at the supermarket are mostly produced by two extremely large companies (Cascadian Farm and Earthbound Farms) or are subbrands of the industrial food system.  Pollan asks the question, “Is Organic better?” and concludes you have to ask the question, “Better for what?” If you’re asking about our health, the answer is “probably, but not necessarily”. The lack of pesticides can’t be a bad thing, but there have been no real tests to prove that the small doses of pesticides that we intake with non-organics is affecting us in any way. If you’re asking about the environment, the lack of pesticides is a good thing…but there’s a large carbon footprint involved with all the fuel used to transport this organic food across the globe. In short, the industrial organic movement, by its very nature, is a contradiction in terms.

Pollan then goes to Polyface Farms, in the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia. Polyface is run by Joel Salatin. Salatin is a fanatic. Not that is a bad thing in this case. But he lives and breathes the idea of a sustainable farm. He considers himself a grass farmer, by which he means that his primary goal is to make sure the grass at his farm is growing well - everything else flows from that. His cows are moved from pasture to pasture daily, getting only one chance to eat a particular set of grass a day. His chickens follow the cows two days later, eating grass destroying grubs and fertilizing the grass with their manure. The farm is also completely transparent - you can come by and watch your chickens being slaughtered - that allows you to know how your chickens were raised. He also only sells locally. Like I said, he lives it and breathes the environment where a lot of people just talk it.

This part of the book was the most fascinating to me, by far. I can’t do the section on Polyface Farms justice, honestly. It made me want to drive to Virginia to pick up some chicken and beef from the farm. It’s a complex, interesting farm and I highly recommend picking up the book, if for no other reason to read this section.

Next: Part III - The Forest

Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals
by Michael Pollan
Part I: Corn

Pollan’s book, is at its core, about the disconnect that the modern human being experiences from the food they eat. Or more specifically, the disconnect about where that food comes from. The title of the book (as he explains in the introduction) comes from the idea that herbivores mostly have it easy. The koala bear, he says, knows that if the green thing they’re eating has the characteristics of eucalyptus, in the mouth it goes. But the omnivore has a much broader array of choices, which makes it harder for the omnivore to determine what is good to eat (is this poisonous? Did I feel good after eating this last time?). And in modern Western society, the industry that has sprung up around food has made it extremely hard to determine what foods, exactly, went into whatever you are eating out of that package.

The book is broken down into 3 sections, where he attempts to follow the 3 major food chains that make up our choices - industrial, organic, and alternative.

Part I: Corn

This is both an amazing and scary section all at once. He moves through the history of corn as a plant and follows it from the beginnings in a farm to a grain elevator, a feedlot, a processing plant. and eventually a meal. What is amazing is how corn has basically taken over agriculture as we know it and due to a variety of factors (government subsidies, processing, hybrid corn’s ability to create high yield) we have a huge corn surplus in America. And since the surplus has to go somewhere, it does - low quality “commodity corn” goes to feeding cattle (which normally are grass fed) and it goes to processing, where it gets turned into hundreds of different things that we ingest in pretty every food that comes from the supermarket that isn’t in the produce aisle.

High fructose corn syrup is in soda (the primary ingredient, in fact) and hundreds to thousands of other products (check out a huge list of brand name products with HFCS in it). Dextrose, lecithin, corn starch and dozens of other ingredients that are regularly listed on labels - in fact, he says the larger the ingredient list the more it will be made of corn byproducts. At the end of the chapter, after he and his family ate a meal from McDonald’s, he takes a duplicate meal to a lab with a mass spectrometer. It turns out that corn’s greatest strength - it’s ability to make C-4 carbon compounds - also allows it to be easily tracked via spectrometer. And as it turns out, the meal from McDonald’s is mostly corn.

• Soda (100%),
• Milk shake (78%),
• Salad dressing (65%),
• “Chicken” nuggets (56%)
• Cheeseburger (52%),
• French fries (23%).

As he puts it, we have become “corn’s koala” - the creature that subsists solely on corn in one form or another. It is a really fascinating chapter and it makes me really wonder how, when huge industries and everything we eat revolves around corn, how we can manage to try and escape from it.

Part II: Grass coming soon.

Air Powered Cars (via Yahoo)

The company that is producing cars running on compressed air is going to bring them to the U.S.. Of course, to give them a range useful enough to work in the U.S., they’re adding a small gasoline engine to heat the air and allow the car to go up to 95mph. It takes an hour to fill the compressed tank, but if you can do that in your home at night, it doesn’t seem like it would be a big deal.

Seems like green technologies are starting to gain some ground. I could see myself driving one of these cars, although I wish they would change the look a little…