Ardent Eden

After 5 days away...

2006-07-24T21:21:00.000-04:00

...the basil looks divine:

And the zucchini keep getting bigger. We also picked our first tomatoes of the season and a bowl of the most intensely flavorful blackberries. The weeds and Japanese beetles were also busy while we were out of town. We're pretty beat from the car trip today, but we weeded from the time we put the Bean down for bed until the sun went down to try to make a dent.

I also wanted to share a photo of the lovely and creative produce bag I received from Melissa at The Color Green. I can't wait to fill it at the farmers' market. The first time I took my canvas bags to the grocery store in town, I was greeted with a completely blank look from the teenage boy packing my groceries. I promptly reported to Matt that the grocery shoppers in Boston were much more tuned in to the simple practice of bringing their own bags. So the next time I went into the store with my huge canvas bag and a few smaller ones, I was prepared for a similar reaction from the teenager bagging that day. Instead, he exclaimed "cool bag!" and the checkout girl said that "everyone" was using them that day. Somehow I think she was exaggerating given the number of people I saw walking out with paper bags inside double plastic bags. I have to keep working on making sure that I have my reusable tools (canvas bags, cloth napkins, coffee mug and travel mug) with me when I need them.

R & R

2006-07-18T22:05:00.000-04:00

Our family is in need of a little respite from the pace we've been keeping. Tomorrow evening we're going to travel up to Maine for a visit with family in a lovely cottage on the water. I'm looking forward to some of the free therapy that Mother Nature offers!

Oh, and getting out of the triple digit heat for a couple days won't be bad either. Our house has central A/C, but it hasn't been on since the day we closed. I grew up in a brick house that was surrounded by mature trees and had ceiling fans in the bedrooms. We didn't have A/C, and we didn't miss it. Matt's family had A/C but seldom used it. I figure that if I made it through last August's heat while 9 months pregnant, I can hack a few sticky nights now! Our bedroom does have a ceiling fan, and the family room has two of them. They really do help. We set up a standing fan for the Bean's room and bought a small baby pool for her to splash around in to beat the heat. After she's done, we just collect the water into our watering cans to give the plants a drink.

I'm off to finish packing, put my wineglass in the dishwasher and hope that the thunderstorm knocked a couple of degrees off the temperature in the bedroom.

Photos: black-eyed susans and day lillies post-bloom in one of our front beds and the zuchhini plants that could feed the world

More after Maine...

Feed the Good Wolf

2006-07-17T09:26:00.000-04:00

The title of this post is my new motto based on a story I read in the Elizabeth Berg novel, The Year of Pleasures:

There is a story about a Navajo grandfather who once told his grandson, "Two
wolves live inside me. One is the bad wolf, full of greed and laziness, full of anger and jealousy and regret. The other is the good wolf, full of joy and compassion and willingness and a great love for the world. All the time, these wolves are fighting inside me." "But grandfather," the boy said. "Which wolf will win?" The grandfather answered, "The one I feed."

*I'm aware that a photo of a wolf would be more appropriate, but I cut these black eyed daisies from my front bed this weekend and have been enjoying them on the table since them. Maybe the good wolf is hungry for some beauty this week.

Smattering of Photos

2006-07-16T10:35:00.000-04:00

Entrance to the garden. The asparagus bed is off to the right, and the berry bushes are on the left and back perimeter. These are all plants that the former owners established.

The view from the back deck (those grass clippings are waiting to be raked up and put in the compost bins or used as mulch):

The compost bins. Note the zuchhini plant growing out of the one side. We've harvested some fruits from the former owners' cast off scraps from last summer. Isn't nature an amazing provider? That's one of the six grape plants in the foreground. You can also see some of the blackberry plants creeping over the garden fence.

Future home of fruit trees:

More later...

Homestead Happenings

2006-07-15T21:11:00.000-04:00

Today marks our second week as homeowners. Amid the 90+ degree heat, we've gotten the family room painted, (some) furniture purchased and finally straightened out our cable internet access issues. It's been amazing to look out at our two acres and think about the possibilities. We have a lot to learn about caring for the land and our house. We want to become much more self-sufficient. It's slowly starting to settle down around here so we can get back to our place on the path. I have to constantly remind myself that we're on a journey, not a race. There's time to set up our household, plan the gardens and generally try to save the world (just kidding....sort of). It's funny: when I sit down to write about it, I feel overwhelmed with ideas. It's difficult to sort through my thoughts and impose some sort of order to the internal chaos. It's even harder to slow down and be mindful of the task at hand - whatever that may be- rather than trying to check another item off the to-do list.

Today was nice though. We had some breakfast, and worked on getting the office and computer set up. I then headed off to the local grocery store and got lost in the cavernous aisles. Does anyone need 5 shelves worth of barbecue sauce? Is anything local and/or organic? Add writing a letter to the store manager to that list of things to do.

While my Mom was playing with the Bean this afternoon, I set to work making a Pennsylvania-Dutch coleslaw for dinner with the remaining 1/4 head of monster cabbage I bought at a farmers market in Lancaster on the 4th of July (organic and just $1.50 -- this head of cabbage had fed many people at many meals). I tried to be mindful of each task, and it didn't seem like work at all. (I love cooking, but I don't like cramming it in among a million other activities). Next I prepared some zuchhinis stuffed with a mixture of spinach, ricotta and fresh herbs. My brother-in-law, sister-in-law and nephew were coming for dinner, so I wanted to do something a little more special than usual. I made some tomato sauce to spoon over the stuffed zukes, and fettucine with lemon cream sauce. We had a lovely meal with good company, and scrumptious chocolate peanut butter brownies baked by my sister-in-law for dessert. It was just what I needed to quell the inner treadmill effect. Tomorrow's another day.

Good Stuff

2006-07-11T16:17:00.000-04:00

We're in the house! It's wonderful, and we're feeling so blessed and fortunate. More on that later. In the meantime, there's plenty of complaining about the fact that we don't have internet access yet (hence, the lack of updating, commenting and photos of the garden/yard/various works-in-progress). It's scheduled to be hooked up tomorrow. Thank goodness! I'm itching to get back into the swing of regular posts as it seems like there is so much material. Anyway, my Mom is visiting now and has been a great help with watching the Bean, lining shelves, cooking meals with the loads of zucchini that keep coming from the garden (think zucchini pancakes with salsa verde; zuchhini muffins with fresh currants from the garden; lasagne made with long strips of zucchini in place of the noodles; zucchini and ricotta penne pasta…you get the idea; please send favorite zukes recipes my way!!), and generally just being helpful in the way that only a Mom can. Matt's parents were here for week beforehand, and were also really great with suggestions about the land and plenty of snuggle-time with their youngest grandchild.

Instead of diving into all of the thoughts swirling about my head about the house, the garden, open spaces, local farming, community, what I've been reading and the like, I thought I'd tell you about two nice sustainable businesses in downtown Philadelphia. I was heading back to work from a business lunch a few weeks ago when a sign for fair trade, organic coffee caught my attention. In need of some afternoon energy and some beans to take home for the morning, I strolled over to the independently-owned Joe Coffee Bar (11th and Walnut) this afternoon and was delighted. Joe's is an eclectic little space selling whole beans, the standard coffee drinks, and assorted munchies. The helpful clerk told me about the organic and local foods that they serve, as well as the fair trade coffees. She helped me pick out some Mexican beans too. And, because I bought 1 lb., I got a free cuppa coffee (with soy milk- a big plus for me). Shame on me for leaving my travel mug back at the office - -bah! Joe's has a reciprocal relationship with the fair trade non-profit Ten Thousand Villages which has a store a couple of doors down on Walnut St. so that if you show your receipt from Joe's at Ten Thousand Villages, you get 10% off and vice versa. The purchases don't have to be on the same day so you can save the receipts for when you need to do some shopping or some coffee drinking. I hopped over to Ten Thousand Villages and found some cloth napkins that were 75% off, so it only cost $8 for a set of six. This will be my third set of cloth napkins, and I still think we could use more. I am committed to reducing/eliminating our use of paper napkins and paper towels (except for the yuckiest spills), and I think that we need to have a bunch of napkins on hand so that they're at the ready for all of those good ol' fashioned community-building potlucks and casual meals we've already started having around our new kitchen table. Good stuff.

Oh, and I was pleased as punch to open up my email today and see that I won a handmade cloth produce bag from Melissa at The Color Green. Can't wait to get it! Another step in the quest to reduce plastic bags in our house.

Seven Stars Farm

2006-06-25T20:03:00.000-04:00

I haven't been able to make a batch of yogurt in awhile because my yogurt maker is buried somewhere in our storage space waiting to move into our house. I usually mix some yogurt in with the Bean's daily breakfast of oatmeal and pureed fruit. Because buying little containers seems wasteful for that purpose, I've been buying Stonyfield Farm's yogurt because it's the only one I could find that was made with organic whole milk (best for babies) and in a plain variety (I figure the Bean gets plenty of natural sugars from the mangoes, cherries, bananas, peaches, and other fruits that we serve her with the yogurt). I'm not sure what to think about Stonyfield. I'm skeptical about the sale of the company to Dannon. Anyway, when I ran into Whole Foods today in search of yogurt, I was pleased to see whole milk plain yogurt that's organic (biodynamic even) and local. I grabbed some Seven Stars Farm yogurt, and mixed some in with the Bean's dinner of lentils, avocado and green beans. It was a hit with her and tasted delicious to me too. Seven Stars Farm is located in nearby Chester County on 350 acres that are owned by the Kimberton Waldorf School and protected from development. The couple that farms the land produces the yogurt in small batches and, as far as I can tell from this story, exemplifies caretaking of the earth.

PS - We close on the house on Wednesday! We move on Saturday! Yes, that's worthy of many exclamation points! It may be a little while longer until we get the internet situation sorted out, but I promise that more frequent posts are coming along with some writing for a new venture.

Quick Round-up

2006-06-18T12:59:00.000-04:00

Last week I finally found time to do a long post that was a round-up of what has been going on around here. Unfortunately, blogger had other plans for the post, and I lost it. Drat! Here's the abbreviated version of life in the Ardent Eden household:

We're still living like transients. We move into our new house in two weeks. Until then, we're in our temporary city apartment. I've been enjoying making a pit stop at the Reading Terminal Market after work for some fresh produce before coming home. Why doesn't every city have a permanent farmers market like this? There's one stand in particular that I enjoy: The Fair Food Farmstead. The farmstand is a project of the White Dog Cafe Foundation, which is the non-profit arm of the venerable local and organic restaurant here in Philly called White Dog Cafe. The farmstand brings together produce from local farms in one place. We've had juicy strawberries, crunchy snowpeas, shelling peas that make perfect puree for the Bean, and tender stalks of asparagus. On Thursday night, I stopped at the market and stumbled upon a local strawberry tasting complete with free samples of strawberry white sangria made with Blue Mountain local wine. While the white dessert wine was too sweet for my taste for plain sipping, it was just perfect for mixing up with fresh strawberries, lemonade and a little ginger ale for a summer punch. Yum!
We've been researching, sketching, and dreaming about our garden plans for the new house. Thankfully, the sellers are gardeners who have worked a little bit of the soil and have established compost bins. They also kindly allowed us to drop by last weekend to plant some tomatoes, zuchhini and collards. We just couldn't stand being in the house all summer without any garden fresh produce, and waiting until we moved in would have been pushing it for planting tomatoes. The sellers even offered to water for us until we move in. Aren't gardeners the kindest folks? ;) Now we're researching fruit trees to plant this fall. We want to have sour cherries, apples, pears, and peaches, if possible. The two acres are surprisingly spacious. We just need to figure out how best to use the space. Any suggestions on varieties that do well when grown without spraying are most welcome!
The Bean continues to be a peach. She's eating her homemade food like a pro. Right now, I'm simmering some lentils and zukes to puree for her.

I'll be able to post more regularly once we move and have our home computer set up. It's been a challenge!

City Life

2006-06-04T11:46:00.000-04:00

We finally have internet access again! I was starting to feel really out of touch. We made The Move to Pennsylvania last week, and are getting settled in our temporary apartment in the city. Of course, we're dying to get into our new house. But in the meantime we're exploring the city of Philadelphia, and I'm getting used to my new job. A quick run-down of random tidbits from the last couple of weeks:

There are some great energy efficient appliances out there. Sure, some of them are a little bit more expensive than the conventional alternatives. But we decided that purchasing an Energy Star front-load washer and refrigerator for our new home was a sound decision for the long-term health of our planet. (Consider this: Energy Star refrigerators use half as much energy as models manufactured before 1993.) We learned that Energy Star doesn't rate dryers because most use a similar amount of energy. So I'll have to finally buy a clothes line and drying rack.
There are more vegetarian restaurants in Philly than Boston. Within walking distance, we've noticed a veggie Chinese restaurant, and we've tried a vegetarian falafel place that may just become a staple for the next month.
It's easy to get produce from local farmers in the city at the Reading Terminal Market. This has been my favorite part of city life! This urban indoor farmers' market is a Philly institution for good reason. There are so many vendors with prepared foods and plenty of farms from the Pennsylvania Dutch country. I've grabbed lunch there a few times, and we bought some asparagus and peas from an Amish family. I saw a stand selling local, organic, free-range eggs too. That's our next stop.

EDITED to add: Looks like Philly is #4 on SustainLane's sustainability index for cities. I never would have guessed before moving here!

Well, off to try to tick off some of the to-do items on the long list This moving stuff is hard work!

Break for Action

2006-05-19T09:10:00.000-04:00

Before getting started on the day's moving-related tasks, I took a few minutes to fill out some post cards that the Massachusetts chapter of the Sierra Club sent to me yesterday. I'll send the cards to my representative in the state house and senate letting them know that I oppose the fare hike currently being considered for Boston's subway and bus system. Among other things, the proposed increase would increase subway fares from $1.25 to $1.70. More information on the fare increase can be found here. With the prospects of peak oil and global warming upon us, we need to do all we can to promote public transportation.

The post cards remind state legislators of a couple of key facts:

(1) "With gas prices high we should be doing all we can to encourage people to use fuel efficient transit, not setting up more economic roadblocks for riders."

(2) "There is a real concern that fare hikes without additional state assistance is not enough. We are seeing a downward spiral of reduced revenues that lead to higher fares that lead to reduced ridership that lead to reduced revenues requiring higher fares."

If you're in Massachusetts and you want to let your legislators know that you oppose these fare hikes, you can send postcards, find out about MBTA hearings, and email the MBTA from the Sierra Club's site here. If you're elsewhere, finding out more about what you can do to support public transportation in your local area is worth your time.

Refrigerator Soup

2006-05-18T02:22:00.000-04:00

I took a break from packing today to try to use up some of the food in the fridge, pantry, and freezer. I hope to waste as little food as possible in the move, but it's hard to be creative in the kitchen while stepping around half-packed boxes blocking just about everything. In the spirit of my sister-in-law, who makes delightful soups from what's on hand that she calls "refrigerator soups", I threw together this impromptu lunch. As always with my cooking (and especially with this soup), measurements are approximate at best.

Packing Soup

Saute one onion and two sliced carrots in olive oil over medium heat. Add peppers (I had some frozen orange, red and yellow peppers), and season liberally with salt, pepper, cumin, oregano and a dash of turmeric. I also added some dried sea veggies for salty goodness. Toss in a cubed potato. Add 1/3 c. green split peas, 1/3 c. yellow split peas, 1/3 c. red lentils and 1/2 c. bulghur. Stir in a can of coconut milk and about two cans worth of water. (Of course, stock would be better, but the theme here is use what you have.) Add some frozen spinach, and give it all a stir. Simmer for an hour.

Local Flavors

2006-05-17T21:03:00.000-04:00

Check out this post for an elegantly simple explanation of why it's so crucial and delicious to eat sustainably. Well-said!

Sun. Period.

2006-05-17T10:34:00.000-04:00

I should be wrapping my wine glasses in newspaper (procured for free from the local co-op supermarket) and packing them gently in wine boxes (also free, from the local liquor store) because we're moving next Wednesday! But today is the first day in about ten days that the sun is shining in New England, and we just had to get outside to soak it up. There's nothing like a hardy dose of nature sprinkled with a romping dog, a cooing baby in her jogging stroller, a husband gazing at orioles and warblers through his binoculars, and blooming lilacs to get the blood flowing. It cleary was not a waste of time. But now that we're home and the Bean is napping and the husband is pouring over Sibley's, I really ought to return to packing. We head to a temporary apartment for a month before closing on our house at the end of June. Last night, I spent a few minutes surfing local harvest while enjoying a glass of wine (hey, I am supposed to be enjoying this time before my new job starts, right?). I'm so excited about all of the local food possibilities close to our new home. There are farms with sustainably raised poultry (for the hubby), free-range organic eggs, and plenty of farmers' markets. We really hope to be able to participate in one of those farmers' markets in the future. In the meantime, it's so exciting to scout out great local food options and dream about our garden plans. We're also rereading This Organic Life for some inspiration. In between getting our vitamin D fix while we can.

Mission Accomplished

2006-05-08T21:42:00.000-04:00

We bought a house this weekend! We flew down to PA on Friday evening and returned tonight having signed a purchase agreement for our first home. I'm exhausted from the travel and mental energy flow, but I'm also happy and excited about the lovely home and 1.8 acres. A nice bonus: the sellers are gardeners who are relocating and there's a three-year old asparagus bed, some raspberry, blueberry and currant bushes and some rhubarb growing. Our heads are spinning with the possibilities!

One Down, One to Go

2006-05-04T17:00:00.000-04:00

Life moves along full steam ahead. I long for things to get settled for our family so that I can get back to the daily stuff that makes a life. In the meantime, we're working hard to get the pieces to fall into place on the two big decisions: job and home. The good news is that I've accepted a job that seems like a really good fit for me. I start on May 30th, so we'll be making the move to Pennsylvania by then. The bad news is that we don't know where we'll be living. This housebuying stuff in another state is quite taxing! We thought that we had found a great place to set down some roots, grow a little food, and raise the Bean for awhile. In a bizarre stroke of fate, the former owners of the house swooped in at the last minute and made an all-cash offer for the place that we just couldn't (or wouldn't) compete with. We've spent a lot of time telling ourselves that it wasn't meant to be. We jet off again tomorrow afternoon to spend the weekend pouring ourselves into a renewed house hunting effort. We don't want to rush things, but we also want to be in a position to act quickly if the right place is presented to us.

In the meantime, I'm desperately in need of some good reading material that will take my mind off of these Life Decisions. Suggestions?

It Takes A Village - Cliche but True

2006-04-19T08:48:00.000-04:00

"We can see, if we care to look, that the way we treat children - all of them, not just our own, and especially those in great need - defines the shape of the world we'll wake up in tomorrow. The most remarkable feature of human culture is its capacity to reach beyond the self and encompass the collective good." - Barbara Kingsolver

A dear friend reminded me of Barbara Kingsolver's excellent essay, "Somebody's Baby" in her collection called High Tide in Tucson. Like all of Kingsolver's nonfiction writing (and most of her fiction), it spoke to me pretty loudly. I'd read the essay back in the pre-Bean days. But now that I have a daughter, Kingsolver's exhortations to start collectively caring for the children in our families, our neighborhood, and our global community resonated even more. Today is my day at home with the Bean, so I won't spend too much time sitting at the computer writing. I'll just say, go read this essay.

Super Baby

2006-04-17T08:40:00.000-04:00

While the life flux continues, I think that I'll try to get in some posts about the everyday stuff that we're trying to do to live more sustainably in the here and now. The Bean turned seven months yesterday. We had a lovely Easter dinner with my younger brother and his girlfriend: strata from my favorite all-around vegetarian cookbook, along with coleslaw, garlicky green beans and a few slices of ham for the meat eaters. Oh, and some oat and brown sugar coffee cake. Yum! Of course, the Bean is too young to partake in that kind of feast. But since we introduced solid foods a couple of months ago, we've fed her only homemade, organic foods. It makes me feel good to know exactly what's going into her tummy, we avoid the excessive packaging of tons of baby food jars, and it's a whole lot cheaper. Turns out it's pretty easy too.

I use Super Baby Food as my basic guide for how best to prepare the baby foods. There are timetables for when to introduce new foods, tips on how to store homemade baby food, and lots of pointers and recipes for feeding infants and toddlers whole foods. We introduce a new food every 4-7 days. Right now, the Bean eats mango, green beans, sweet potatoes (her hands down favorite), asparagus, banana, whole milk yogurt, pear, tofu, avocado, and zucchini. We usually mix those foods with store-bought rice cereal, oatmeal cereal, or multigrain cereal and some breast milk or water. Of course, some preparation is necessary to get those foods into baby form, but a little work upfront and a good Cuisinart go a long way.

My typical process goes like this:

1. Buy fresh organic produce. Steam, bake, or gently boil it. Drop into food processor. Puree, adding water as necessary to get the right consistency. If I’ve boiled the veggies or fruit, I just use the boiling water that has all those good nutrients. (Some items, like mangoes, don’t need to be cooked first.)

2. Use small glass jars to set aside any that we’ll feed the Bean over the next day or so. Pour the rest into ice cube trays. Below is a mixed tray of sweet potatoes and zukes. It’s amazing how far one sweet potato can go! I usually get about two dozen cubes from one.

3. Cover with foil and freeze. Put into freezer bags for storage.

When we’re ready to feed the Bean, we pop one of the cubes into the microwave to defrost for just a few seconds and mix it with the other ingredients. I don’t freeze the tofu or the bananas because those are so easy to mix up right before mealtime. I can’t wait for the summer produce to start rolling in so that Bean can enjoy the freshest local items. I’m sad that we won’t be able to have our usual community garden spot this summer, but I’m optimistic that we’re going to be in a new house in Pennsylvania by late spring/early summer. We probably won’t be able to get much in the ground for this summer, but we can get to work on figuring out where the Bean’s food will grow next year.

Musings

2006-04-08T08:55:00.000-04:00

While life continues to be chaotic here, I'm struggling to get back into the swing of blogging regularly. It's much easier to write about the everyday decisions that collectively create a better world than the big life decisions that our little family unit is muddling through. Plus I'm plum tired. In an effort to kick start the ol' blogging zeal, here's what's happening in my life right now.

We've been planning to move to City A for years now. It's where Matt grew up, it's closer to my mom and where I grew up, and it's accessible to lots of places where people that we love live. Oh, and the job market isn't bad. In the process of looking for a job there, I stumbled across some job postings in my hometown so we decided to check them out. We had never planned to move back to City B, but that was partly because we doubted that I could get the kind of job that I need right now. To make a long story short, I interviewed for two positions in City B, got offers from both, and declined both offers. In the end, they just weren't the best fit for me. There was true soul turmoil in the process because we started to get used to the idea of living in City B, buying some real land (which we could afford there despite the huge salary differential from the Boston market), and being close to my Mom. My Mom has always been my best friend, and the miles that separate us physically have not changed that. We email multiple times each day (my immediate family belongs to google groups - I highly recommend it for keeping in touch) and talk on the phone a few times per week. Anyway, the idea of raising the Bean close to her Grandma tugged hard at me. In the end, though, the situations just weren't right. Around the time that we were in City B for my interviews, I got word of a possible position in City A. Lots of antics with my headhunters in City B ensued (these people have no shame!). I eventually made my way to City A for an interview...and I loved it. The decision to turn down the positions in City B felt a whole lot better. Now I'm heading to City A for a second interview on Tuesday, and we're spending lots of time looking at real estate online. We won't be able to get nearly as much land, but even a couple acres would allow us to start growing some serious food and creating a small homestead...with dreams for more land in the future. We're all feeling hopeful...oh, and just a tad stressed.

Don't know why, but I just felt like I needed to get that out before I could move on with blogging.

I'm Alive!

2006-04-01T09:08:00.000-05:00

If anyone's still reading, I wanted to write another quick piece to fill you in on what's been going on in our lives and why Ardent Eden has been silent over the past couple of weeks. The job search kicked up a couple of notches and the past three weeks have involved trips to Pennsylvania to interview with three companies. The interviews all went well, two offers were made and a third is expected. But, oh, the complexity of it all! Which part of the state to move to? How does a company's industry affect my values? How can you believe anything a headhunter tells you? Can we afford to have a homestead on a bunch of acres or is it best to start with a house with just a little land to get our hands dirty in and save some bucks for the Big Dream in the coming years? What's behind the story told at an interview?

We're wading through all of it. It has been all-consuming though. I can't deny the level of stress that has seemed to pervade each day. Because in addition to these huge life decisions, I'm still working hard at a demanding job, and being a wife and mother. But I feel like we're finally coming out on the other side of all of this. I'm starting to feel energized and excited about the possibilities again, rather than just feeling ragged and beaten down. I hope that you'll excuse the long absences here and join me for the ride.

Anticipation

2006-03-14T11:19:00.000-05:00

We’re working on taking one day at a time around here. Our little family unit is flying out of town tomorrow for job interviews and house hunting. There are phone interviews and long conversations about acreage interspersed in our already busy days. I keep meaning to write, but there just hasn’t been time. Stay tuned. We’ve got exciting things brewing…

Peace Is...

2006-03-08T09:13:00.000-05:00

...reading to a child.

We stumbled upon The Peace Book while looking for a colorful new picture book for our daughter about a month ago. At four months old, she was content with some favorites: Where's Spot?, Fuzzy Bee & Friends, What Is Love, Biscuit?, and Time for Bed (which is read every night in our house), to name a few. It was her parents who needed some new stimulation after finding ourselves reciting lines from the books throughout the day - whether or not we were reading them to her. (I also recently found myself walking to the subway with the lines from This Old Man dancing through my head. Rounding a corner, coffee cup in hand, I actually sang "knick-knack paddywhack, give a dog a bone..." before realizing that I was walking down a city street alone.)

Now Todd Parr's simple primary-colored book about peace has become another favorite, especially with my husband and I. The book's premise is simple: each page begins with "peace is..." and lists a seemingly simple tenet of a peaceful world. Some examples: Peace is keeping the water blue for all the fish. Peace is growing a garden. Peace is everyone having a home. In some ways, reading the book to the Bean is a nice reminder of the basic values that create a peaceful world. They are simple. It's just when the big people get involved, things get complicated pretty fast. So I'm happy to sit down in my rocking chair with the Bean on my lap and begin to teach her what a peaceful world is all about. I don't mind the reminder myself.

While not in the book, a good addition would be: Peace is reading to a child. I have been amazed at the rapt attention that the Bean has shown from a really young age when being read to. There are coos and attempts to grab the book and lots of smiles. Every child should be able to experience the joys and lessons found on the pages of books. So when I give a gift to a child, I always try to include a book. There are also some great organizations working to make reading an integral part of the lives of children who don't have a collection of books sitting on a shelf in their room:

Reach Out and Read - a program for doctors and nurses to give new books to children at each well child visit from 6 months of age to 5 years, and accompany the books with developmentally appropriate advice to parents about reading aloud with their child.
First Book - gives low income families new books.
Local tutoring organizations - before the Bean was born, I tutored a girl every Monday night. My student is from a family that lacks resources, and reading was not a part of her life when I met her at the beginning of her fourth grade school year. Over the four years of our weekly meetings, I witnessed how reading came to excite and inspire her. In the beginning, we chose books from the learning center's shelves solely based on whether there were two copies of the book so that we could each read chapters from the same book during the week and discuss it or read aloud from it at our Monday sessions. We started with Ramona Quimby, Age 8, and I was instantly transported back to my own childhood. Better yet, my student was hooked. We read other Beverly Cleary books, then moved on to the old Nancy Drew series. These mysteries captured her attention, and my student started finishing one book per week. I had to read the books on the subway to make sure that I had completed them in time for our meeting. (People are used to seeing adults read Harry Potter; Mystery at the Ski Jump still gets some strange looks though.) We eventually tackled Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. I was a little apprehensive, but my student begged to read it because she was captivated by the photo of Anne Frank on the cover. We talked about the Holocaust, we talked about bravery, we talked about innocence. I was humbled each week. I hope that, in some small way, I passed on my love of books to a young girl.

I guess all I'm trying to say is that we can all contribute to a more peaceful world by reading to a child and helping get books into the hands of children everywhere.

Out of Whack

2006-03-05T12:08:00.000-05:00

I'm wrapping up an intense week at the office: late nights, early mornings, too much coffee, too few hours with my daughter, and a grumpy attitude. The amenities of modern culture - cell phones, blackberries, conference call dial-in numbers and the like - have facilitated the encroachment of work life on more and more of my personal life. It's a battle that I know many people struggle with, but it feels isolating to be running around at breakneck speed all the time. For once, I don't want to "think on my feet." I want to think in a chair, damn it! Preferably with a cup of cocoa, a good book, and a warm blanket.

I can't help thinking that priorities in our society are out of whack. The rich are lavished with free stuff at every turn, while the poor struggle and toil without reward. Many spend all day in a building without windows that open in order to make enough money to take a vacation and breath some fresh air. There's much talk about so-called family values, but maternity leaves are short and consumer culture has overtaken the lives of some children. Apples are carted in from Argentina while grains are exported around the world. Pollution billows from coal-burning power plants while health care costs rise.

If it sounds like I'm in a negative state of mind, that's only partially true. I am feeling particularly overwhelmed right now. Most young parents probably do. There's always that glimmer of hopefulness under the surface though. I know that we can do better and that many people are. I know that individuals are devoting precious time and depleted energy reserves to working for a better world. It's humbling to step back and realize that, despite the burdens that everyday life can pile on me, others are working to dismantle the systems that stifle our better nature. Maybe the best I can do right now is hope that we can all share some of the burdens and some of the joy.

A burden shared is only half the trouble

I knew you cared - I knew you'd understand

A burden shared is only half the trouble

Joy shared is joy made double...

- Michelle Shocked

Keeping Score

2006-02-26T07:15:00.000-05:00

Via one of Sustainablog's posts during this weekend's green blogathon:

The League of Conservation Voters has published its 2005 Environmental Scorecard. Check it out to see how your senators and represenatives are ranked based on their environmental record. Then take a minute to drop them a line letting them know that you approve or that they better focus on environmental issues because you're paying attention.

No surprises for me: on key environmental and public health votes, Kennedy and Kerry each got a 95% score and Mike Capuano got a 94% score. How did your Congress-folk do? Let them know what you think about their score.

Making It Happen

2006-02-25T07:32:00.000-05:00

Planning for life changes is never enough. You just can't predict the soul-turmoil that accompanies spending hard-earned savings for your dreams. Moving away from comfortable surroundings is bound to be difficult even when it's been planned for years. As I've mentioned before, we're starting to put the wheels in motion to buy a little (tiny? microscopic?) homestead where we can grow some food, watch the Bean chase fireflies on summer evenings, and cozy up next to a warm fire in the winter. Real estate costs have us groaning and feeling as if we have to be hyper-vigilant and extraordinarily smart. We know we can't afford much land, but we want something to get started with. Add a search for a new job in a different state to the mix, and let's just say that there are a lot of long talks and furrowed brows around here.

Through it all, my husband has been like a mountain stream on an August afternoon: cool and refreshing. He takes care of our daughter with amazing attention and inspiring love. He calls the pediatrician's office to discuss the questions of first time parents. He volunteers to go suit shopping with me for the interviews that I hope to have over the coming months. He meticulously tracks our finances and suggests adjustments when necessary. He never fails to take our dog out morning and night so that I don't have to. He sets up the coffee maker before bed so that I can have a fresh cup when I wake up early to nurse the Bean. He gently chides me out the door to admire the songbirds and tree trunks with him and forget about the stresses of the day. And he makes a delicious batch of enchiladas each Friday evening for dinner. With all of the stresses and strains, with the budget crunching and weighing of numbers, he's there -- making so much happen for our family. I'm so grateful.

Join the Counter Revolution

2006-02-22T09:25:00.000-05:00

I felt that familiar surge of outrage coursing through my veins this morning. And I have to admit that it felt good. I've been curled up a little too tightly inside my own mind for the past few weeks to get fired up about much of anything. It's not that I like to walk around feeling outraged, but sometimes that little kick in the pants gets me going, gets me re-energized to fight the good fight. So what did it for me on this sunny February morning? I'm home from work today so I decided to finish watching Deborah Koons Garcia's documentary called The Future of Food. Amazingly, Netflix started carrying the film so I quickly moved it into the first position in our queue. I'm glad that I did.

Much of what Garcia outlines in the film is territory that I know well about the emergence and prevalence of genetically modified foods and what it means for the future of agriculture. But the film is certainly worth a viewing because it ties together the strings quite well and connects the rise of agricultural biotechnology with global corporatism and the decline of subsistence and family farming. The film intertwines interviews with Andrew Kimbrell, who runs The Center for Food Safety, and Fred Kirshenman, who directs the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture, along with the viewpoints of farmers like Percy Schmeiser and others who have stood up to the agribusiness giants. Just when I found myself getting furious about our blind adherence to the technology and corporate will, Garcia seemed to sense that it was time to talk about a different world, a new possibility, in her words: a counter revolution.

This revolution wouldn't rely on corporations to feed the world. It would acknowledge that hunger isn't caused by a scarcity of food. Instead, hunger in the world is an issue of access, of policies, of distribution, of injustice. It won't be solved by the introduction of "terminator seeds" that cannot be saved for the next year's crop and may pollute and cross-pollinate with natural seeds. It's certainly not solved by petroleum and input-centric farming mechanisms that make farmers dependent on multinational corporations for high yields of cash crops for export. And more technology isn't the answer either. Kimbrell tells us that the US is currrently reviewing whether to allow genetically modified fish, insects, trees, livestock, and poultry. Of course, these beings could lead to the extinction of species that have existed and evolved with nature. Are we so foolish to think that we can outsmart nature or God? Garcia's film concludes that the real revolution is focused on sustainable agriculture, organic farming, farmers markets, CSAs, and standing up for the logic of nature. The film ends with shots of anti-GMO protests and interviews with the couple who organically farm the diverse and beautiful Full Belly Farm in California. These are juxtaposed with images of gas mask adorned men spraying fields of strawberries with chemicals and a fresh faced boy slugging a can of Coke. The choice, these images tell us, is clear. Garcia gently exhorts us: it's up to you.

For some ideas on how to combat GMOs, see my last post on frankenfoods and the related links. Also check out Food First and, by all means, watch Garcia's film. Reliance on the kind of technology that is overtaking one of our most intimate acts, eating, makes us feel helpless and disenfranchised. In Visionaries: People and Ideas to Change Your Life, Kimbrell says it well:

"This is the century of the technological imagination. We think we can do anything with enough research & development - even find the genes that control aging so that we can achieve immortality. But most spiritual traditions say that limits are important, limits bring transcendence. When we are playing music, holding a baby, making love, pitching a great fastball - those moments are meaningful and beautiful in and of themselves."

I would add sharing a wholesome meal, growing our own food, choosing beautiful organic fruits and vegetables, and living in harmony with nature to Kimbrell's list. Call it a transcendent revolution. It can be beautiful and simple. But it requires us to make different choices every day. It requires vigilance and commitment. A sense of humor helps too. It's our future. Isn't it worth it?

*The t-shirt and others like it are from zendik.org.

Pizza and Cookies

2006-02-20T20:37:00.000-05:00

Ah, comfort food. It's true that our food traditions - from elaborate holiday celebrations to that morning oatmeal with cinnamon and banana on a winter Monday - bring peace to our lives. That's why I turned to a couple of tried and true recipes tonight for a February dose of calm. I broke out the recipe for whole wheat pizza dough and a tried and true chocolate chip cookie recipe. Add some sauteed garlic and artichokes to the pizza crust with some tomato sauce and cheese, and we had a lovely dinner.

I've been feeling rather out of sorts lately. Maybe that's evidenced by my lack of consistent posting. I'm not sure if it's a case of the typical late winter blues or apprehension about the major decisions that we have in the months ahead: new job, new state, new house, new start. It's overwhelming, but exciting too. At the same time, I acutely feel pain about the state of our world. I find myself thinking about Darfur, global warming, the corporate grip on our democracy...it's enough to make me want to crawl back into bed. But there's a baby to nurse, a job to go to, a husband to love, family to chat with, plans to be made and, yes, pizza dough and chocolate chip cookies to bake.

Sometimes I look at the faces around me on the subway or brushing past my arm while scurrying across an intersection outside my office and I wonder what thoughts are swirling through the minds of those people. Are they concerned with a project at work? Are they excited about a social event scheduled for that evening? Are they sad about a lost love? Do they worry how they will feed their family that evening? I'm not sure if there's a clear point to my thoughts tonight. I've just been searching for the peace that starts from within and radiates outward, letting me live in the moment without fear for the future. That peace centers me and lets me try to take some positive steps rather than burying my head. But it can be hard to come by when the winds of change are howling. For tonight, cooking some comfort food and watching my husband sigh with delight at having a warm cookie for dessert brought me a small measure of that peace. It's up to me to find it in the next moment and the one after that.

Good Questions

2006-02-18T08:43:00.000-05:00

Leave it to Wendell Berry to gently lead us through the questions that we should all ask on a regular basis. From this interview:

HB: What are some things we can do—small things, perhaps—until we actually make a commitment on a broader scale, to initiate husbandry (whose trajectory will be felt globally) to ourselves, our families and our communities?

WB: I think this starts with an attempt at criticism of one’s own economy, which may be the same thing as good accounting. What are the things that one buys? How necessary or useful are they? What is their quality? Are they well grown or well made? What is their real cost to their producers and to the ecosystems in which they were produced? Almost inevitably when one asks these questions, one discovers that they are extremely difficult and sometimes impossible to answer. That frequently is because the things we buy have been produced so far away as to make impossible any stewardly interest on the part of the consumer. And this recognition leads to an even better question: How can these mysterious products brought here from so far away be replaced by products that have been produced near home? And that question, of course, leads to all manner of thoughts and questions about the possibility of a better, more self-sufficient local economy. What can we neighbors do for one another and for our place? What can our place do for us without damage to us or to it?

HB: Is it possible to reshape our thinking in baby steps or must we make sweeping changes?

WB: Oh, let’s be against sweeping changes and in favor of doing things in small steps. Let’s not discourage ourselves by trying for too much or subject ourselves to the tyranny of somebody else’s big idea.

Indeed.

Intersections

2006-02-17T21:30:00.000-05:00

The abundance of the earth is a gift that everyone should be able to share. Of course, in our society of private property, tradable pollution "rights," and disturbingly disproportionate access to food, services, education, and just about everything else you can imagine, we don't share equally. Not even close. I'm heartened to see that Grist has introduced a seven-week series on environmental justice focused on the intersection of poverty and the environment. From the introduction to the series:

"...poverty and environmental degradation go hand and hand in the United States as well. The lower your income in this country, the higher the likelihood that you will be exposed to toxics at home and on the job. The greater the risk that you will suffer from diseases -- ranging from asthma to cancer -- caused or exacerbated by environmental factors. The harder it will be for you to find and afford healthy food to put on your table. The less likely you are to live in a community that provides safe outdoor spaces for you and your family to enjoy. And, as recent history tragically exposed, the more vulnerable you are to environmental catastrophes, whether they are natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina or human-made tragedies like the Exxon Valdez."

The series is in its first week and the theme is "Land and People." The idea is to explore the land where many Americans, including the poorest, live rather than focusing on the wildernesses and sacred spaces frequently associated with the environmental movement. There are virtual walking tours, articles about mountaintop removal and the impact on the people who live in affected areas, interviews with activists, and a bunch of other worthwhile links.

It's no use to try to separate issues of poverty and class from environmental degradation, just like we shouldn't isolate "issues" so that globalization goes in one basket, tuberculosis care in Haiti fits into another, mercury in breastmilk gets plopped into a third, and so on. Rather, we've got to look at the whole fabric of our way of life and ask ourselves whether our current structure serves life. I'm intensely interested in these interconnections. I like not having to align myself with just one cause or another. Instead, I try to keep that old web of life metaphor at the forefront of my daily thinking. It's my sanity-saver in these zany times.

Simply From the Heart

2006-02-14T09:27:00.000-05:00

All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
All you need is love (all together now)
All you need is love (everybody)
All you need is love, love, love is all you need

- John Lennon/Paul McCartney

It really is that simple. I believe that the words of the famed Beatles song are meant to be taken in the broadest possible sense. That is, we all need to love in an active way -- reaching out to all of humanity and all of nature from the heart. Instead of ranting against the consumerism that typically marks Valentines Day, I am choosing today to focus on the love that I have to send out into the world. It may sound sappy or soft, but I believe that it’s all we need to do.

In the spirit of love for our neighbors, I am celebrating Valentines Day by making a donation to Partners In Health. You may have heard about Paul Farmer’s organization in Mountains Beyond Mountains (recommended reading!) PIH puts love into action by creating “a preferential option for the poor” and providing health care services to those with the least resources in the world. They literally save lives that would be lost to TB, malaria, and AIDS.

My heart feels fuller already. And you have to love that!

Grace, Faith, and Snow

2006-02-12T15:31:00.000-05:00

This morning I sat watching the snow blow sideways outside my window with the side of my daughter's soft infant head pressed firmly into my left cheek. I squeezed her just a bit tighter and dispensed some kisses on the back of her neck, thanking God for grace the whole while.

You see, the weathermen's hype was enough to get us out of the house yesterday afternoon and off to the library for storm provisions. I picked up a book about bread, Ruth Reichl's latest foodie memoir, and Anne Lamott's Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith. I've always liked Lamott's quirky spiritual side: a Christian who is as progressive as anyone I've read, a recovered addict, a single mom, and a delightful writer who brings it all together in a way that makes me want to write her a letter that simply says, "Let's have coffee and talk about all of this sometime." I dug into her newest book yesterday afternoon and felt enlightened and, yes, more faithful with each essay. Her witty commentary about George Bush synchronizes seamlessly with her tales of her son's adolescence and her ardent struggle to see and affirm light every day.

The book has been like a cup of hot cocoa for me while the storm rages outside...and inside. Because the other blizzard activity that my husband and I undertook was watching Schindler's List for the first time. I can only tell you that having that film juxtaposed with a book on faith that I happened upon at our library yesterday is one of the simplest examples of Grace that I know. My God. I don't have the message all figured out. I just know that when Grace speaks, you're given a chance to listen, to respond. For now, I am going to sit quietly in the heavy silence of the snowstorm, with my baby snug and safe nearby, listening.

"P" is for Precaution

2006-02-11T11:17:00.000-05:00

The "P" in EPA is supposed to stand for protection. But precaution, prudence, and protection seem to be the last virtues upon which the agency bases its actions. Until February 21st, the EPA is accepting comments from the public on its current proposal to allow a carcinogenic chemical called methyl iodide to be used as a pesticide. According to this OCA report, the EPA's proposal would allow farmers to spray up to 400 lbs. of methyl iodide per acre of land. Apparently, this pesticide causes particular problems because it vaporizes quickly and floats through the air, drifting far distances.

So why should we care about methyl iodide drifting through the air we breathe? First, California considers this chemical to be cancer causing. Second, the EPA itself has said that it causes thyroid tumors. Third, I always vote for using the precautionary principle. And I want the government agencies that are charged with regulating environmental health to start exercising the same sort of prudent judgment. We may not have books full of double-blind, scientifically rigorous studies about every single agricultural pesticide or the interactions among those pesticides (check out this Enviroblog entry for info. about a recent Berkeley study about this). What we do have are many objective studies that show that the pesticides that are sprayed onto the ironically-termed conventional produce cause health problems for humans, the soil, and the birds, bees, insects, fish, and frogs that make their home near farms. Each one of us also knows many people who have suffered from cancer, and we stand helplessly by.

Why don't we start exercising common sense? Why do we persist in trying to outsmart Mother Nature? I just can't sit back believing that human beings can manufacture ways to subdue the earth's natural processes without suffering some dire consequences. Come to think of it, this latest move by the EPA gets at the heart of why I call myself an environmentalist. So I've taken a minute to learn more at the Pesticide Action Network's well-footnoted site and have sent a comment to the EPA. Won't you do the same?

Hole in the Head

2006-02-08T18:18:00.000-05:00

If it's been some time since I've posted about the woes that big box stores, especially Wal-Mart, heap on our society, it's not because my views have changed. If anything, I'm more violently opposed to what is happening to our landscape, our workers, and the impoverished people abroad who are existing in near-slavery conditions in order to produce the cheap goods that Wal-Mart demands. At some point, though, I started suffering from what I've heard aptly termed "outrage fatigue syndrome" on the Blue Voice: the consistently high level of outrage that we feel about something eventually leads us to need a little break from thinking about it. Such was the case with me and Wal-Mart.

Today I heard my husband let out a loud groan while scanning headlines. "Ugh, Wal-Mart is planning to build 1,500 new stores....," he said with a shake of the head and a troubled tone. I know that he often worries about the destruction of our environment for the sake of new McMansions, Applebee's restaurants and, yes, Wal-Mart super-centers. I also know that when he looks at the area around his hometown in Pennsylvania, he feels a palpable pain at seeing cornfields and meadows turned into another subdivision with tiny lollipop trees or a Target. Maybe I vicariously felt his disgust this morning, maybe it's just that it's already been a long week and we're only halfway to the weekend. Whatever the reason, I'm feeling really bent out of shape about this latest Wal-Mart news. We need another 1,500 Wal-Mart stores in America like we each need a hole in the head. Where are our heads? Where are our hearts? Maybe the better question is, what can we do about it? Is there a way that we can overcome our outrage fatigue syndrome and do something about this?

Here are a couple of ideas. Please share any that you have.

The most obvious idea is to stop shopping, or at the very least reduce your dollars spent, at Wal-Mart and other big box stores. Yes, that means Target too. I admit to shopping at Target occasionally, but I know that it's not the answer to Wal-Mart. I haven't stepped foot inside a Wal-Mart in a long time, and I don't plan to again...ever. I just can't be complicit with their policies.
We need to get and stay educated about the effect that the largest retailer has on so many aspects of our society, culture, and environment. Check out the Wal-Mart movie if you haven't yet seen it. There are also a bunch of books that your local library likely stocks about the mega-chain. One that I particularly like because it focuses on what it's like to work not only at Wal-Mart but also in other low-wage jobs is Barbara Ehrenreich's excellent Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America.
Support so-called "Fair Share Healthcare" legislation in your state. The Maryland state legislature passed a law that is set to take effect on Saturday requiring corporations employing more than 10,000 workers to pay 8 percent of their payroll in employee health care or pay the difference to the state. 30 other states are considering similar measures. Predictably, a lawsuit was filed yesterday challenging the law. Read here what you can do to support these kinds of laws that force companies like Wal-Mart to provide health care coverage to their workers that doesn't leave the taxpayers on the hook for subsidizing their basic health care. If you live in a hot spot state (Connecticut, New Hampshire, Washington, and West Virginia), start writing letters to your representatives in the state legislature.
If you are in a town where Wal-Mart is trying to build one of its new stores, join in the protests. Talk to your neighbors, organize, fight!

I've been feeling a bit powerless in the face of my outrage recently. I'm going to take the edge off by kneading dough for two loaves of bread and enjoying some red wine with dinner tonight. Maybe then I'll be able to celebrate the many blessings I've been given while at the same time holding the outrage in my heart and turning it into something productive: an energy for saving this world of ours.

Mixed Bag

2006-02-04T13:40:00.000-05:00

Ah, Saturday. I finally have a chance to catch up on some of the things that have been on my mind this week.

First, something that makes me crazy: the destruction of virgin forests by Kimberly-Clark in order to make toilet paper. Yes, toilet paper is quite literally destroying the rain forest. Since Kimberly-Clark makes the most popular brands of consumer paper products (Scott, Cottonelle, Kleenex and Viva), we're talking about a lot of trees being logged for paper towels and tissues. I had heard of Greenpeace's campaign against Kimberly-Clark but I didn't pay too much attention to it because we buy Whole Foods' 365 brand of toilet paper and 100% recycled tissues from Trader Joe's. But my Mom called the other day to say that her local newspaper ran a story about this (not available online) that included the web address to NRDC's shopping guide for sustainable alternatives. We were both (somewhat) heartened that this kind of article was run in a mainstream press even though it was buried in the Health section. Anyway, I decided to take a look at the NRDC page to refresh my mind about the issue. Two numbers speak louder than words:

1.1 million: cubic meters of trees from Canada's boreal forests that Kimberly-Clark uses each year
0: percentage of recycled content in grocery store brands such as Kleenex and Scott

What can we do in the face of this scale of disregard for the crucial role - as habitat, as ecosystem, as sacred places - of forests? While sending a message to Kimberly-Clark is a good idea, we all know that as long as those boxes of Kleenex are flying off the shelves it will be business as usual. NRDC has a handy shopper's guide (PDF) that you print and take to the store with you. Greenpeace has more info. on brands of paper products to buy and which ones to avoid. And spread the word. I'm thinking about getting one of these t-shirts to wear this spring. Maybe it will get a conversation going.

Next, some words that make me feel hopeful: Check out baloghblog for some inspired words from Bono on poverty, faith, Africa, and our notions of charity, equality and justive.

Finally, something I've been meaning to do: breadchick and norene have tagged me for this meme, so here goes.

4 jobs I've had. I don't want to even think about my real job on a Saturday, so I'm going with these throwbacks to a simpler time when minimum wage was plenty to get me a rad outfit for the big Friday night football game: hostess at restaurant in mall; piffer (lest you think that this was something interesting,"PIF" stands for "put in file"); neighborhood baby-sitter; Girl Scout cookie salesperson
4 Movies I could watch over and over. Like Norene, I don't watch movies over and over so I'll list the last four films I saw in the theater. Yes, I realize that I haven't been to the movies for a long time. Maybe I need to hire one of those neighborhood sitters...: Sideways (thumbs up); Kinsey (thumbs down); Spanglish (sideways thumb); The Yes Men (thumbs up)
4 places I've lived. Boston, MA; Pittsburgh, PA; Cambridge, MA; Lewisburg, PA
4 Tv Shows I love. I don't really watch TV, but a few shows I've liked at various times are: Sex and the City; NOW with Bill Moyers; Victory Garden; weekend cooking shows on PBS
4 Places I've Vacationed. Isla Mujeres, Mexico; London, England; Rehobeth, Delaware; Boothbay Harbor, Maine
4 of my favorite dishes. any veggie falafel/tabouli/hummus combo; good ol' Tex Mex (burritos, enchiladas, fajitas); huevos mexicanos at Centre Street Cafe; dark chocolate (surely that counts as a dish)
4 sites I visit daily. MSNBC; bloglines; boston.com; hotmail
4 places I'd rather be. Life is pretty good on a Saturday with my husband, baby girl and dog, but some other good spots: sitting in a chair at the ocean's edge in August; in my grandmother's kitchen; on a wooded trail on an early fall day; sitting across the table from my husband at a restaurant in Mexico, margaritas in hand
4 bloggers I'm tagging. I'll cheat again: feel free to play if you want to. :)

State of the Yogurt

2006-02-01T08:26:00.000-05:00

So I admit that I just couldn't bear to watch the State of the Union last night. I actually have a visceral, angry reaction to listening to Bush speak. I'm not exaggerating: I think it's bad for my health! The Democratic response usually isn't much better. So last night I decided to treat myself to something much better than listening to Bush trumpet about Iraq. I went to bed. Yep, I decided that crawling into bed at 9:00 pm was a much better use of my time. From this, it seems like it was business as usual and I didn't miss much. I was, however, glad to hear that Cindy Sheehan shook things up a bit.

Now moving on to the important stuff. Namely, my foray into yogurt making. When I read about Norene's excellent results with home yogurt making, a light bulb went off. This is another one of those skills that I should work on for multiple reasons: yogurt cups are hard to recycle, yogurt is so good for you, and making your own saves money. Once I start thinking about everyday decisions through the lens of interconnection, it usually seems so obvious to me that I should take some sort of action. If it seems like I take these kinds of decisions seriously, it's because I do spend time analyzing the costs and benefits beforehand. I'm a working mother who, like the rest of us, needs to make her time and money count in the most effective way. I also don't like to buy a new kitchen appliance without being sure that I'm going to use it.

Anyway, my yogurt maker arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago and I set out to find yogurt starter at a local store. After calling every health food store in the greater Boston area, it became pretty obvious that I wasn't going to find starter. Time to move on to Plan B, which would mean abandoning Norene's reliable recipe. I was feeling a bit intimidated, but I dove in after referencing the instruction manual and reading recipes online.

The end result is a thick, creamy and yummy plain yogurt. I want to work on flavored yogurts next for some variety. In the meantime, I've been taking a jar of this stuff to work with me and mixing it with a jar of my homemade granola for a mid-morning snack each day. I also want to drain it for some yogurt cheese, serve it in lieu of sour cream on the black bean soup on tonight's menu and the enchiladas verdes scheduled for tomorrow night, and concoct some savory dips with it. I definitely think that the yogurt maker purchase was worth the $30 as long as I can keep the habit going. By the way, the Super Baby Foods book that I've been reading is all about making whole foods for babies to eat. There's a whole section on making yogurt, and the author gives some ideas on how to incubate yogurt without having a yogurt maker. If anyone is interested in trying those, let me know and I'll post about them.

Yogurt 101

Step One: Heat 4 cups of milk in saucepan until it boils and starts to climb the sides of the pan. I used Organic Valley skim milk. Remove the saucepan from the heat and allow the milk to cool to between 95 - 105 degrees. I pulled out my new thermometer for this step because it's important that the milk not be so hot that it kills the beneficial bacteria you add in Step Three.

Step Two: Pour cooled milk into a pitcher and add 5 tablespoons of dry milk. I used Organic Valley nonfat dried milk. Stir until dissolved. The yogurt maker instructions say that you need to strain the milk as you're pouring it into the pitcher. I didn't find that necessary but it was nice to have the yogurt in a pitcher for pouring into the jars. You could save a step and keep it in the saucepan though.

Step Three: In a small bowl, mix together already-made yogurt with a small amount of the cooled milk until you have a smooth mixture. I used a container of Trader Joe's organic plain yogurt, but I'll be using a little of my own yogurt going forward. The idea is just to get some of those live cultures into your batch where they can work their magic.

Step Four: Mix the smooth mixture into the pitcher of milk.

Step Five: Pour the mixture into the glass jars, put them in the yogurt maker without their lids, put the cover on, and flip the switch on. Don't bump the yogurt maker! Let the jars incubate for eight hours for thick creamy yogurt. If you like a runnier texture, reduce the amount of dry milk and/or the time incubating. When done, put the lids on and refrigerate for three hours before eating.

Step Six: Enjoy plain, with fresh or frozen fruit stirred in, or with nuts or granola for some crunch!

Weekend Habits

2006-01-30T10:29:00.000-05:00

Simple Katie wasn’t the only one who had a productive weekend. I am incredibly jealous of her quilting talent though. Yesterday was filled with the kind of home projects that make me feel like I am accomplishing something tangible. And I really need that satisfaction to counteract the equally tangible feeling of despair that I sometimes feel about what we’re doing to our children’s world. So in the spirit of accentuating those real, positive actions, here are the steps we took on our path to sustainable living this weekend:

Bought CFLs. We made one of our fairly rare trips to a big-box store this weekend. While trying to navigate through Target as quickly as possible with the Bean’s stroller, I stumbled on a display of GE CFLs in two-packs on sale for $4.88. We picked up two packages. For under $10, four compact fluorescent bulbs seemed like too good of a deal to pass up. I already replaced the bulb in the lamp in the Bean’s nursery. I’m thinking that we'll get the most bang for our buck by putting the other three bulbs in a bedroom lamp, our kitchen overhead, and the lamp in our den.
Baked bread. Thanks to breadchick, we are officially addicted to homemade bread! I’ve also been spreading the gospel about her no-fail recipe, and I see that OrganicVegetarian and SockknittingMama are getting on board too.
Drafted weekly meal plan. It’s the fourth week that I’ve been committed to planning out the week’s meals in detail on the computer. It makes the grocery shopping smoother, we save money, and I actually stand a chance of executing healthy, vegetarian meals after a busy day at the office.
Made yogurt. Yep, I finally broke out the yogurt maker and made my first batch yesterday. I was getting discouraged about the fact that I couldn’t find a single health food store in the Boston area that sold yogurt starter, and I was too impatient to order it online. Armed with online recipes, I used a container of organic plain yogurt from Trader Joe’s as my starter. It's delicious! And so easy!
Prepared granola. This week’s variation on my granola recipe includes almond extract and some ground ginger for flavor along with walnuts and chopped almonds. It tastes pretty darn good with the yogurt!
Tried 2 new yummy veggie recipes. Norene’s cabbage soup was a great Sunday night dinner paired with some chickpea veggie burgers with melted cheese served on fresh from the oven bread. A little slice of heaven when eaten with a smiling baby starting into my eyes.
Purchased book. I ran into one of our good local independent bookstores and picked up this book about making and storing your own baby food. The Bean had Earth’s Best organic rice cereal for the first time last week, so it’s time for me to start learning about freezing those organic pureed sweet potatoes!

I'm happy that some of these steps are becoming habits for me. As Norene said in one of the comments last week, "It's one thing to start something, but it's another to sustain the effort. " So true. My next steps on the homefront are to learn to add some flavoring to the yogurt and to make some of my own non-dairy milks. The packaging and price of nut, rice, and soy milks (not to mention the additives in some) are making me think that there's a more sustainable way to support my habit. If anyone has recipes, tips, or suggestions, send them my way please!

Last night I fell into bed with that tired, satisfied feeling that I usually get after spending a day working in the garden. A good honest exhaustion that was rewarded with an excellent night’s sleep with nary a peep from the Bean until I woke her up at 6:30 this morning to nurse before I left for work. No complaints here this Monday morning.

Crazy Debates

2006-01-29T07:57:00.000-05:00

I've written before about the media-fueled "debates" about global warming (see here and here). Now, MSNBC tells us, there's a new debate about climate change: whether we're already at an irreversible tipping point that will lead to widespread destruction. Here's the spin:

This "tipping point" scenario has begun to consume many prominent researchers in the United States and abroad, because the answer could determine how drastically countries need to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions in the coming years. While scientists remain uncertain when such a point might occur, many say it is urgent that policymakers cut global carbon dioxide emissions in half over the next 50 years or risk the triggering of changes that would be irreversible.

It's important, apparently, to determine if we're really, really doomed before we get off our seats and do something, do a lot of things really, about global warming.

The article goes on to tell us that the Bush administration scientists are still trying to determine if we're doomed:

"There's no agreement on what it is that constitutes a dangerous climate change," said [President Bush's chief science adviser, John H.] Marburger, adding that the U.S. government spends $2 billion a year on researching this and other climate change questions."We know things like this are possible, but we don't have enough information to quantify the level of risk."(emphasis mine)

I don't know about you, but I think that a better use of that $2 billion would be researching how to change our ways now. Or better yet, stop researching and use the money to start making changes. What am I missing here? This stuff is making me crazy!

Find Your Tree

2006-01-28T10:30:00.000-05:00

I want to see a world full of people finding their own version of their "tree," committing to living their lives for something bigger than themselves, and creating lives of meaning, joy, and connection. - Julia Butterfly Hill

Most of us have heard about Julia Butterfly Hill, the activist who sat in the tall branches of a redwood named Luna to save it from logging. Taking such a magnificent stand requires a seemingly superhuman amount of bravery. It's the kind of thing that's easy to admire, to elevate to the unattainable level of "heroic" and then to forget about because it's far outside of the grasp in our daily lives. Julia has a way of making her time in Luna relevant for all of us. I found the website for her non-profit, Circle of Life, a few years ago and have enjoyed the blog about the We the Planet tour that she leads in her biodiesel bus. The idea is to bring connection and the idea of service to the planet, to animals, to nature, and to each other to people in an ongoing, ever-present way.

Recently, Julia's words have been speaking loudly to me. Take a few minutes and play these excerpts of her speaking. (By the way, they are from a fabulous website called Big Picture TV that has video clips of leaders in the sustainability movements. Lots of good inspiring stuff there.) She is also Grist's featured activist this week so there is an interview with questions from Grist's editors and also questions by readers. As usual, I think that the readers' questions yield more depth and insight. Some of what she says will surely sound radical to some:

Personally, I have chosen to have surgery to insure that I never procreate. I feel we have not earned the right to give birth to children, because we are not doing a good enough job taking care of the children who are already here or the planet into which they are birthed.

But it all seems to come from a place of deep caring put into action. I'll leave you with the following Q&A.

Q: Where do you see the planet in 50 years, both if the world follows the destructive path it's on and if more people start being more environmentally conscious? -- Mike Scott, Madison, Wis.
A: The future lives in the here and now through who we are being, the choices we make, and the stands and risks we are willing to embrace. We live our lives backward, saying that some day, if things are a certain way in our lives, then we can be what we want and create what we want. The truth is that who we are co-creates the world we are a part of. You want to know what the future will look like? Look in your life and see where your life and actions are in integrity, love, justice, peace, and commitment, and where they are not -- that is what the future looks like. Our greatest power in having a future that inspires us lies in living inspiring, connected, and committed lives now

Go and read the rest. And find your tree for the day.

Chowda Time

2006-01-27T07:59:00.000-05:00

Not being a native Bostonian, I'm still taken aback when I hear someone talk about having a bowl of "chowda" for lunch after eight years in Beantown. I haven't eaten fish for six of my eight years here, so I haven't had much of the famed clam chowder. Come summertime, though, I usually get my chowder fix by whipping up a few batches of corn chowder with fresh corn on the cob and whatever herbs look good in the garden that day.

When I asked my husband for input on this week's meal plan, he asked for corn chowder. Hmmm...no fresh corn, no fresh herbs. Would it be worth it without the essential goodness of those ingredients? Turns out the answer is yes, especially when paired with some multigrain muffins from Moosewood Cooks at Home. SustainableGirl asked me to post my recipe. I'm always more than happy to share recipes as there's something satisfying and collaborative about someone cooking up a dish I make with their own touches. Like most of my soups, the "recipe" is really just a loose process that changes with what I have on hand and how much time I have. I learned this process from a newsletter stuffed between a dozen ears of corn in our CSA box from Stillman's Farm a few summers ago. It's best with fresh, milky sweet corn scraped from the cob moments before, but it's also an easy winter dish made with frozen corn and the promise of summer.

Corn Chowder

olive oil
1 large onion, chopped
flour
about 3 potatoes, cubed (I used organic Yukon Golds from Wood Prairie Farm in Maine)
corn (4 ears or about 1 1/2 - 2 cups frozen corn)
herbs (fresh thyme and oregano are great, but dried herbs to taste work well)
milk (I used some skim and some buttermilk, but richer milk would yield richer, thicker soup)
salt & pepper

In soup pot, saute onion in olive oil. Add some flour (maybe 1 T.) and whisk until thickened. Pour in about 1 cup of hot water and whisk. Add potatoes and just barely cover with hot water. Cover and let come to steaming point. Add herbs. Turn heat to low and simmer until potatoes are tender. Add corn and about half as much milk as there is potato water in the pot. Combine 1 1/2 T. flour or cornstarch with 1/4 c. milk and add to pot to thicken the soup. Season. Dream of August and enjoy!

Lights Out

2006-01-25T22:13:00.000-05:00

It seems that the universe is conspiring against the kind of thoughtful posts that I keep meaning to sit down and write. This time it was an electricity blackout that lasted for an hour and a half this evening. Unfortunately, the lights went out during the evening hours that are so crucial for getting things in order around the house. We were just putting the Bean to bed, and I was getting ready to do my normal evening tasks: prepare the coffee pot for the morning, pack up lunch and snacks to take to work tomorrow, pump breastmilk for one of the Bean's feedings tomorrow while I'm at the office, iron clothes to wear to work, and, for a little treat, some blog reading and posting. Well, the short blackout was a good reminder of how far away we are from truly living a simple life. We were halted in our tracks by not having lights for a little while. We did light some candles (we weren't that unprepared), but the lesson for me is how reliant I am on electric conveniences. Maybe it's a sign that I need to think outside the box (don't you hate that expression?) about reducing our energy consumption. Hmmm...food for thought.

Before the blackout, I opened up a couple of packages that were waiting for me this evening. The theme: Supporting fair trade leads to good stuff! The bag is for signing up for Coop America's Adopt-a-Supermarket program to encourage a local market to carry more fair trade products. (Thanks to Siel for the tip on that!) The fair trade coffee and tea is my prize, courtesy of City Hippy, for writing this post about fair trade tea and bananas. Can't wait to try those goodies!

In the meantime, I need to get cranking on those weeknight tasks.

Following Up

2006-01-23T21:16:00.000-05:00

Posting has been sporadic because my mom has been in town for a long weekend. It's been a delight to have her around to snuggle with The Bean while reading her Where's Spot for the millionth time in a day and to make multigrain muffins and corn chowder with me for dinner. I've been meaning to write a post and to leave some comments to excellent posts I've read over the past couple of days, but I've been immersed in the easy rhythm of mothers and daughters, cooking, singing silly baby songs, reading children's books, and planning meals together. At various times, miscellaneous thoughts have popped into my head to blog about, and I keep meaning to follow up on past ideas that I've floated in posts. Since I don't have much time on my Mom's last night here, I thought I'd do some quick follow-up to a few recent posts. Forgive the bullet point mindset!

I got my yogurt maker in the mail over the weekend. Now, I just need to order the yogurt starter and mix up a batch of Norene's special yogurt. (Organic Vegetarian's reminder that a typical cup of fruit yogurt provides 70 percent of a day's worth of added sugar gave me a good kick in the pants.)
I've been baking bread regularly with some great results. Inspired by the delicous goodness of breadchick's no-fail farmer's loaf recipe, I tried a batch of whole wheat bread from a Deborah Madison cookbook that I love. My husband called me at work the other day to say that he was eating an amazing piece of toast. My heart was singing for the rest of the day. (Hey, it's the little things!)
I've also continued to bake up a batch of granola each week. I just alternate the nuts and the flavoring. Our current fave has cashews, walnuts, plenty of cinnamon, and vanilla.
My order of Hampstead biodynamic/fair trade loose green tea leaves came the other day. Pots of that have been been poured all weekend. Highly recommended.

In looking over the list, two things are obvious. One: it's been all about the food recently! That's no surprise, I suppose, as the pleasure of sustainable cooking and eating is one of my true passions. Two: there are some things that I've meaning to get around to doing that haven't happened yet. I need to get moving on getting CFL bulbs, a coffee carafe, and a drying rack.

Oh, and since this is another monkey mind post, I might as well add an unrelated plug for great posts that I read recently from two of my favorite fellow bloggers. Check out Norene's beautiful tale of the power of love and what it can mean for the future of our earth and SustainableGirl's astute questioning of childhood consumerism, the inevitability of growth, and species extinction. Inspiring stuff!

Books, Bars & Philosophy

2006-01-21T15:03:00.000-05:00

I got an email from a local organization I have occasionally volunteered with. It reminded me of how the simplest ideas can make a difference. And the Prison Book Program has a simple mission:

We believe that literacy and access to reading materials are crucial for the personal, spiritual and political development of all people. With 2 million people locked up in our nation’s federal and state prisons and local jails, and with educational programming being drastically cut, the need for our services has never been greater. Education is the only tool proven to help prevent people from returning to prison again and again.

PBP puts its mission to practice in a way that is accessible and easy to plug into -- there are no long volunteer orientations or bureaucratic steps to take. If you want to help send books to prisoners, you show up (no RSVP necessary) on Tuesday or Thursday nights (or on one of their special Saturday sessions), read letters from a prisoner, find some books in PBP's library of donated books and package them for mailing. Simple as that. Sometimes you are lucky enough to find the exact books that the prisoner is requesting, and that's a fulfilling moment. Other times, you just do your best to find the closest type of book to the one requested. If you love reading, you know the joy of sharing a beloved book with a friend. Well, finding the right book to share with someone desperate for reading material gives you that same feeling.

Before the Bean was born and life got extra-busy, I also used to visit with a young man who was trying to get his college degree through the Partakers College Behind Bars program while serving time in state prison. (I highly recommend checking out a prison visiting room for an insightful and sad window into our society. That's a post for another day though.) One of the striking things that I learned was how badly many incarcerated people want books, but they just don't have access to them. And many prisons have made the rules for sending books directly to the imprisoned complicated and intimidating to their families on the outside. PBP and programs like it navigate the system and get books into the hands of inmates.

I should pause here to answer the question that many have asked about prison outreach: why spend time and money helping those who have been convicted of crimes, in some case violent ones, when there are many "good people" who need our help and many worthy "causes" and "issues"? The answer is probably different for everyone. For me, it comes down to the philosophy that I have about how to walk through this world in a life-giving way.

My philosophy in a nutshell? It starts with the idea that there are no separate causes and issues. It's all connected. Global warming and inner city violence and factory farming and cancer all stem from a culture of fear that takes life rather than sustains it. Sometimes we can find a direct cause-effect relationship. For example, economic despair leads to desperate hopelessness and all the effects that stem from it. In other instances, the problem is a byproduct of actions taken in haste or in greed or in fear that lead to results that may be unintended. The lack of education and opportunity is the root of so many social ills. So is the feeling that there are so many different issues that are intractable and impossible to solve.

The hope in all of this, in my view, comes from the fact that we all have a limitless capacity for love in the broadest sense of the world. Nobody forces us to choose between caring for an AIDS orphan in Africa and helping a disadvantaged teen pass the SAT. We can be moved by different situations at different points in our lives. We just need to find the entry point that speaks to us at any given point on the path. Yes, our energy may be limited. But the love doesn't have to be.

If ending the cycle of imprisonment is an entry point that moves you, check out these resources. If not, there are millions of ways to affirm the best of humanity each day. Pick one and do it.

What I Want My Words to Do To You: a documentary about playwright Eve Ensler's writing workshop in a women's maximum security prison.
Prison pen pal programs.
Prison book programs.
The Garden Project: A San Francisco-based program bringing organic gardening to prisons.

News Flash: Bush is Bad for the Earth

2006-01-19T07:22:00.000-05:00

I was surprised to see that the main headline on MSNBC's homepage when I turned the computer on this morning had to do with the environment. That stuff is typically tucked neatly back under two menus. Usually you have to click on U.S. News, then the Environment subcategory. But today this headline screamed at me: "'Self-Destructive': Six EPA Heads Blast Bush on Global Warming." The story is here. Basically it tells us the earth-shattering (no pun intended) news that six of the former heads of the EPA think that global warming is a result of human activity and Bush isn't doing what needs to be done to slow it. Um, yeah...that's not news to most of us.

I suppose what got this story on to MSNBC's homepage (besides the lack of any breaking news of more corruption in Congress, which really isn't news anymore either...) is the fact that five of the six former EPA heads who spoke up about climate change are Republicans. The story is news because MSNBC, and probably most of its readers, assumes that environmental issues are strictly voted on according to party line, and we're all shocked to hear that someone on the right believes in even the most basic environmental tenet: climate change is accelerating due to human factors, and we're not doing what we can to stop it.

I suspect that there are plenty of Republicans who feel that more environmental protection is necessary. They're just not willing to vote for it at the polls for two reasons. First, other issues (like tax cuts for the rich...oops, I was trying to be nonpartisan in this post!) are more important to them. Second, they believe what the EPA's current chief and the Bush administration are selling them about the impending economic doom that will result from increased environmental protections. It's telling that when Stephen Johnson, current EPA chief, tried to defend Bush at the conference described in the article he said this:

"I know from the president on down, he is committed,” Johnson said. “And certainly his charge to me was, and certainly our team has heard it: ‘I want you to accelerate the pace of environmental protection. I want you to maintain our economic competitiveness.’ And I think that’s really what it’s all about.” (emphasis mine)

That little gem about "economic competitiveness" is the reason that the U.S. is an international embarassment for not signing Kyoto (which doesn't even go nearly far enough, but at least would be a start) and the reason that every environmental protection in place since the 1970s has been weakened or is currently threatened.

We've got to figure out how to get past these political lines in the sand. Individual acts of conservation are not nearly enough in the face of Bush policy. We've got to do more of them, of course, but we also need to strategize on the political front whether we want to or not. As long as Americans believe that they will lose their jobs the second that Congress votes to strengthen environmental legislation, the news about the environment will be grim. Even if it's not on the front page,

Save Coins and Make Change

2006-01-18T07:22:00.000-05:00

Since driving habits have been on my mind, this AP story jumped out at me this morning:

Salt Lake City- Utah’s largest is joining a small, but growing, list of municipalities nationwide that offer free parking as an incentive for people to buy fuel-efficient vehicles.

Salt Lake City is offering free metered parking to residents whose vehicles get 50 miles per gallon, have low emissions or are powered by an alternative fuel. Friday was the first day permits for the program were issued.

Utah already offers an income tax credit of up to $3,000 for residents who buy clean fuel vehicles and some gas-electric hybrids. It also allows those vehicles to use high occupancy vehicle lanes.

Read the rest of the story here.

I think this is a fabulous idea as it's obvious that we need to offer every kind of incentive available in order to start changing the prevailing habits that are sucking life from our culture and earth. I think an even better idea is to pursue ways to re-design communities to make alternative transportation options available and attractive. Lots of people would like to leave their cars at home even if their sole motivation is saving gas money. They just can't get to work without them due to the location of businesses and lack of alternative transportation. In the meantime, this kind of incentive is a glimmer of hope: some local governments are taking a step in the right direction. We each need to encourage these steps in our own municipalities. It's the perfect subject for a letter to the editor of your local paper. I'm off to write mine.

How Long Can We Go?

2006-01-17T21:40:00.000-05:00

In an effort to make progress on my 2006 goals, I've been engaging in some little self-challenges recently. Besides the kilowatt game that I'm playing against myself (must get next month's electric bill below 160 kwh!), I'm trying a new eco-test to stay inspired and focused. This one has to do with the car.

I've written before about the car as a source of green guilt even though we use it relatively infrequently around town and a few times per year for trips to see family. We've grappled with whether it makes sense financially for us to sell the guzzler and get a more efficient vehicle. Having concluded that it's not feasible just yet, we're trying to further reduce our driving. The biggest impediments to reduced car use are the New England weather and the short winter days. Call me a wimp, but I'm not a huge fan of walking by myself in the city when it's dark and cold. But we're committed to this goal, so here's what we've been doing. I've been walking to the subway stop each morning and walking home each evening. It takes between ten and fifteen minutes, which really is nothing if you think about it. On the weekends, we're consolidating errands as much as possible. But I think the real kicker is that we've just gotten more comfortable hanging out close to home. We have a baby and a dog. We love to cook and read and write. We live within walking distance of a few lovely parks, good restaurants, and a couple of cafes. There is a lot to be said for staying local and enjoying the simple pleasures right before us.

So how have we been doing? Unlike the electric bill, the empirical evidence is harder to come by because I'm not sure how many miles we usually drive. The next time I'm in the car, I'll check out the odometer so that I have a baseline going forward. In the meantime, I'm using a very rough gauge of how much driving we're doing: how often we have to get gas. This month, I've gone to the pump once and put in $15.00 worth of gas on January 8th. I wonder how long we can go before we fuel up again?

Incidentally, this is yet another example of making an environmentally positive decision and reaping collateral benefits. In this case, it's guaranteed exercise each day and saved money. Those kinds of positive side effects always seem like the universe telling me to keep going, to do more. Will I meet the challenge?

Transformed Nonconformists

2006-01-16T00:54:00.000-05:00

This hour in history needs a dedicated circle of transformed nonconformists. Our planet teeters on the brink of atomic annihilation; dangerous passions of pride, hatred, and selfishness are enthroned in our lives; truth lies prostrate on the rugged hills of nameless calvaries; and men do reverence before false gods of nationalism and materialism. The saving of our world from pending doom will come, not through the complacent adjustment of the conforming majority, but through the creative maladjustment of a nonconforming minority. - Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sometimes the Monday of a three-day weekend ends up being just another day filled with the regular errands that typically fill our Saturdays and Sundays. For some, sales provide a reason to hit the malls for some American-style holiday celebrating. I have many things to do today to get ready for the work week ahead, but I can't let the day go by without pausing to reflect on Martin Luther King's message as it applies to the environmental movement. Many more eloquent than me will surely make connections between MLK, the sad state of our nation today as we wage a seemingly endless and unnecessary war, and deteriorating social conditions in our own country and throughout the world.

Those of us gravely concerned with the state of our planet also have something to learn from Dr. King. For me, his focus on nonconformity provides a loud answer to questions about how to deal with a social and economic system based on plundering resources, economic consumption, and a disconnect from the earth. We can't stand by and accept the state of our communities and the planet as an unyielding truth with no room for change or improvement. We can't be helpless. We need to actively seek a different, better way of life right now even when it makes us stand apart from our neighbors and the existing societal norms. In time, the simple yet bold efforts of those who refuse to conform to an unjust, unsustainable way of life can force the norm to evolve. We have to believe that real change is possible, and we have to put aside our fears about stepping outside of our comfort zone for the greater good of all beings on our planet. In some way, today, I hope to refuse to conform to the status quo that perpetuates the lowest expectations about humanity's power. I want to be part of the nonconforming minority. It's my way of honoring Martin Luther King, Jr.

Sweet Little Rollover

2006-01-14T21:54:00.000-05:00

If children had a say, they'd vote organic. - Raffi

My daughter rolled over for the first time this evening. She had been flirting with rolling for a couple of weeks now: thrusting her legs high in the air and propelling onto her side. She usually just stayed on her side then flopped onto her back and the process would start again. This could go on for a long time. While I was kneading bread in the kitchen tonight, my husband called for me to come into the living room where the Bean was proudly laying on her belly after having made a complete back-to-belly roll. We sat smiling at her little bottom sticking up into the air. It was one of those simple parenting moments that fills me up with such a profound feeling of life, of goodness: the blessing of a mother dusting flour off of her hands and watching her husband and baby daughter roll around on the floor.

I suppose it was fitting then that I received my introductory package from Mothers of Organic (MOO) today. MOO is a project of Organic Valley, a nationwide organic dairy cooperative, and the Children's Health Environmental Coalition, a non-profit that aims to protect families from environmental hazards of all sorts. A little over a month ago, I found MOO's website when I googled Sandra Steingraber's organic manifesto so that I could find a printable copy of the essay by the biologist-cancer survivor-mother whom I admire so much. I was impressed with the content of the site which, although not extensive, ranges from stories about the "organic epiphanies" that members have had to downloads of Raffi songs. I registered to become a member and have since received a few email messages from MOO about incorporating organics in a family's meals.

Anyway, I grabbed the mail on my way in the door from what we call a "big shop" at Whole Foods this morning. I was still lamenting how high my bill was when I opened the welcome package from MOO. The contents of the envelope, while modest, reminded me of the value of organics: a Save Our Soil bumper sticker (I'm not inclined to use this on my car, but I think I'll stick it under my Vote For the Environment bumper sticker on an old painted bookcase in my den), a package of Mammoth Grey Stripe sunflower seeds, some coupons for Organic Valley dairy products that would have come in handy at the market earlier today but will surely be used in the coming weeks, and nicely produced booklets of Steingraber's manifesto and an essay by Dr. Alan Greene called "Fathers for Organic." The booklets are nice reminders of why deep organics (which go far beyond industrial monoculture sans pesticides) are so crucial for our children, their health, and the world we want to leave for them.

I thought that this was a nice gesture aimed at educating mothers about the importance of organics. I'm okay with the fact that MOO is a nice marketing tool for Organic Valley because the business is the type that deserves my dollar as far as I can tell. Organic Valley is a cooperative of 700 family farms that together produce and market all sorts of dairy products without pesticides, antibiotics, or hormones. We buy their skim milk, chocolate milk, soy milk, nonfat dry milk (for the bread!), eggs, and cheeses and have always been impressed with the quality. I also like the way that Organic Valley is run. Family farms that are members establish equity in the cooperative upon joining and are represented by regional committees that report to a national governing board. Profits from the cooperative are shared among the farmers (45%), employees (45%), and community (10%). While the cooperative enjoys the benefits of national branding and marketing, the milk is distributed regionally. Since I have not been able to find a local dairy farm to purchase milk and eggs from directly, buying Organic Valley products allows me to support farmers from my region. I've got no problem having a cooperative like that market its products to me while providing educational resources to mothers. (It would be another story if Horizon was behind MOO.)

Tonight I poured a thick glass of chocolate milk and daydreamed about showing my daughter sunflowers this spring. For now, I nursed my sweet little roller, savored the moment, and kissed her goodnight.

Powering Down

2006-01-13T22:02:00.000-05:00

Analyzing my electric bill yesterday and reading the comments to my post about it got me thinking about ways to most effectively reduce consumption of energy.

Project Outlet Audit

I heeded baloghblog's advice and conducted a little audit of what's plugged in to the outlets in my apartment. Here's the lowdown by room:

Kitchen:

Outlet #1: (1) power strip that has microwave and toaster plugged into it; and (2) coffee pot
Outlet #2: refrigerator
We also have a dishwasher and electric oven. I use an electric coffee grinder each morning, and I also have a food processer and mixer. The small appliances are not plugged in unless they are in use.

Living room:

Outlet #3: (1) lamp with CFL bulb; and (2) cell phone charger [Damn! I've been trying to keep the charger unplugged when there's no cell phone connected to it.]
Outlet #4: stereo
Outlet #5: (1) power strip that has computer, printer, air filter, speakers, and desklamp plugged into it; and (2) lamp

Den:

Outlet #6: (1) extension cord with TV and DVD player plugged into it; and (2) lamp

Bedroom:

Outlet #7: answering machine
Outlet #8: extension cord with lamp, clock and dust-buster plugged into it

Nursery:

Outlet #9: cd-player
Outlet #10: lamp

Main bathroom:

Outlet #11: hair dryer

Second bathroom: no outlets

Expert Advice

Having checked out what we keep plugged in all the time, I think I have a pretty good sense of where the kilowatts on the bill are coming from. We rarely use the overhead lights unless we're in the kitchen or bathroom. Otherwise, we're table lamp kind of folks. Since I don't have one of these nifty devices for measuring kilowatts, I pulled out my handy Union of Concerned Scientists book to check out the chart comparing the electricity used in common household appliances. Here are some snippets from the chart which shows the average electricity use per unit (in KWH/year) of common appliances (when there are multiple units in the house, as with lamps, you'll need to multiply this number by the number of units):

Refrigerator - 1,155

Lighting - 940

TV - 360

Electric dryer - 875

Range/oven - 458

Microwave - 191

Dishwasher - 299

Electric washer - 99

Computer - 77

Once they figured in the impact of multiple units in a household, the UCS's bottom line is:

Overall, the top contributors to the environmental impacts of household lighting and appliances turn out to be, in descending order of importance, refrigerators, lighting, televisions, and far down in impact, electric dryers and stand-alone freezers.

What to Do?

The UCS says that using electric appliances as little as possible is good practice, of course. But the even better practice is to choose the most efficient unit as possible before you bring it in the door and get it plugged in. Since I'm not in the market for any new appliances, I started to feel like I was doomed to have higher wattage than I'd like for awhile. But the UCS also emphasized the benefits of CFL bulbs. I knew that my regular incandescent bulbs were bad. What I didn't know was that only 10% of the electricity used by regular bulbs produces light while the rest goes to heating the filament. Not much bang for your coal use, especially when you consider this incredible statement about the benefits of CFLs:

...if the mix of fuels used to produce the electricity is typical, just one compact fluorescent bulb will eliminate the combustion of three hundred pounds of coal.

Hmmm...I think that I'll have to rethink yesterday's conclusion that I'll wait until my regular bulbs burn out to replace them with CFLs. Instead, I think that I'm going to get two CFLs, for starters, to put in the nursery lamp and the overhead lamp in the kitchen. From my audit and the information from the UCS, it looks like making changes in the lighting department will result in the biggest impact.

By the way, I didn't mention the cost of my electric bill for the 160 KWH month. It was $30.62. Not exactly astronomical, but I know that we can do better. Plus the pollution from coal-burning power plants is just not something that I want to contribute to any more than absolutely necessary. And now that I've made my electricity stats public, I've got an incentive to get that number down before I have to post next month's usage. The bar graph doesn't lie.

I think it would be kind of fun (in a nerdy way) to make a little game out of this. If you're so inclined, let me know what you're monthly KWH usage is from your last bill and then report back when the next bill comes in. Maybe we can hold each other accountable for bringing those numbers down a little bit each month.

Bright Lights, Big Bill

2006-01-12T22:29:00.000-05:00

Goal #2 for 2006 is to reduce our household's collective energy consumption on as many fronts as we can. I thought we'd start with electricity since that's the only utility that we pay for in our apartment. (Yes, I know that we have to be just as concerned with the fossil fuels that we don't pay for with our greenbacks but which our earth dearly pays for. But I'm all for starting somewhere, and the utility that affects my pocketbook seemed like a logical place.)

Step One: Data Collection. I finally signed up for online access to my account with our electricity provider. Why didn't I do this earlier? Now I can save paper by not getting bills and save money by not using stamps. Duh. After an easy online registration, my account information popped up on the screen. Here, in a handy bar graph, is our apartment's electricity usage over the last year:

I also downloaded this chart of our kilowatt usage for the past 12 months:

01/06/06 - 160
12/06/05 - 116
11/04/05 - 201
10/04/05 - 201
09/06/05 - 179
08/04/05 - 139
07/06/05 - 112
06/06/05 - 112
05/10/05 - 90
04/07/05 - 90
03/08/05 - 114
02/05/05 - 139
01/06/05 - 86

Step Two: Data Analysis. A couple of things are pretty obvious from this data. First, the kilowatts used in January 2006 (160 KWH) are almost double the kilowatts used in the same month last year (86 KWH). Second, I can't blame the high kilowatts of the past few months (December doesn't count because we were out of town for a few weeks) on the short days of winter when January, February, and March of last year saw much smaller electricity usage. Third, the electricity usage increased in September when our daughter was born.

Step Three: Conclusions. While we think that we are doing well with electricity conservation, we obviously need to do better. We certainly can do better because, well, we did just last year. What could have caused this spike? I think we've gotten a little lax about leaving the computer on during the day rather than putting it on sleep mode. Also, the Bean goes to sleep with music on and sometimes the small cd-player in her room is, um, left on during the day. We also seldom used the guest room that is now converted into a nursery. That means we're using electricity in another room.

Step Four: Action Items.

Turn off the darn lights! And computer! And stereo!
I love the idea of CFL bulbs, and I have one in a lamp in the living room. I plan to replace the other bulbs as they burn out. I just can't bring myself to replace them before then. You know, the whole waste not, want not thing.
Finally get that carafe I've been wanting so that we don't have to leave the coffee maker turned on all morning.

Step Five: Solicit assistance. I'm determined to get February's kilowatts below 160. So tell me: what else can we do? What am I missing? And how many KWH is your household using per month?

Monkey Mind Tuesday

2006-01-10T22:16:00.000-05:00

I seem to have a case of monkey mind today: my interest has been piqued about a bunch of things that I've read and wanted to follow up on, but I just can't settle into any one train of thought long enough to extract any wisdom. Instead, my mind just flitters on to the next thought or a new idea. Instead of fighting it, I'm going to give into the monkey mind today in the hope that there is something to be learned from my mental wanderings. Let's see:

With my post about GMOs still fresh, I was quite interested in the surprisingly informative newsletter put out by Seventh Generation (you know, the company that makes the more benign kinds of paper and cleaning products). This edition has a blurb about two new studies showing that GMOs may be as harmful to human health as some have long feared. In the first study, researchers in Russia fed rats flour made from Monsanto's Round-Up Ready soybeans while the rats were pregnant and nursing. 55% of the rats born to the mothers who were on the GM diet died within three weeks while only 9% of the control group died during the same period. And the surviving baby rats in the test group were stunted. The American Academy of Environmental Medicine, upon hearing of these preliminary results, became greatly alarmed. And with good reason! Over 78 million acres are planted with Round-Up Ready soybeans. The second study wasn't exactly reassuring. But when I started to read about it, the monkey was ready to move on to the next topic...

This interview in Grist made me really pine for a bike. The Xtracycle sport utility bicycle looks cool, and I know that $999 is a bargain compared to the price of cars. Just when I was trying to wrap my head around why that amount of money for a bike seems completely out of reach when most cars are over $30,000 and my own car payment is not exactly cheap, I read this Q&A in the interview with Xtracyle's president:

Q: What's your favorite TV show?
A: I think current television is so integral a part of the Wheel of Destruction and breeding the culture of insatiable desire that this question should not be asked in this forum. It's like asking: What's your favorite exploitative big-box retailer? Your favorite SUV for short trips? And in so doing, inadvertently using environmental
activists to legitimize the very behavior that we think might not be good for the world.

Hmmm...what is the role of television and mainstream media? Is he right that the question makes some assumptions that tell us something disturbing about the norms in our society? Or does his answer just make us non-cable-subscribers look irrelevant to most of the populace?

I got a few late afternoon hunger pangs and thoughts about media, television and the modern environmental movement were rudely interrupted with thoughts of the dinner I had planned for tonight: a stew of chickpeas, potatoes and carrots served over rice. The extra rice will work well in the lentil casserole I'm going to make tomorrow to serve with a butternut squash gratin. And if all goes as planned, the savory onion, chard and cheddar bread pudding will be assembled tomorrow evening to be popped into the oven on Thursday evening for that night's dinner.

A little while later, I took a sip of tea and popped over to Siel's site for a moment. I was thrilled to have won some fair trade tea and coffee from City Hippy for this post about the Starbucks Challenge 3.5. (Thanks again!) Elated at having won a great green gift, I began to muse about the connections I've made with people in the blogosphere since I started Ardent Eden back in November. Of course, that reminded me of Norene's post about the community of bloggers that seems to have sprung up around her. I had to go back to reread this insight of hers: "One of the things I'm coming to realize is that any power we have as individuals is power that is granted to us by our communities." Well-said! How can I foster a greater sense of community? Wasn't that one of my goals for 2006? How am I doing with those goals anyway? What can I do to dig deeper? Will I finally figure out how to make a series of showings of eco-documentaries in my home happen? Will anyone show up? Will the monkey mind ramblings ever evolve into a post more intelligently designed than this one? Hey, that reminds me of an interesting topic...

Simple Preparations

2006-01-08T13:45:00.000-05:00

Sunday is a day to relax and unwind, but also the time for preparations for the week ahead. I'm learning that organization goes a long, long way towards making simple living possible and enjoyable. If I don't do a little planning ahead, there's no way that the canvas bag is going to be in the car, the leftovers packed for lunch, and meals made from scratch. Instead, there will be hand wringing at the impromptu market stop when all of the items must be juggled out to the car because I just don't want to say yes to a bag, purchases of expensive and packaged lunches, and orders of take-out placed for dinner.

So as the snow fell lightly this morning, I started making some preparations. As the hours passed, I was in a nice rhythm and was enjoying the tasks of the day. What did I accomplish? I made a batch of vegetable stock from the scraps that I keep in a plastic bag in the freezer. Some of the stock was measured and frozen for future use, and six cups were kept out for tonight's lentil soup. I started putting together breadchick's no-fail bread recipe. Ah, the catharsis of kneading! While the bread was rising, I mixed up a batch of whole wheat pizza dough and set that to rise. The dough recipe makes enough for two pizzas, so I stuck the two balls of dough into plastic bags in the freezer for a weeknight meal. Then, I got really anal...er, organized. I sat down at the computer and started to think about how I could cook meals from scratch for the rest of the week with the ingredients that I had purchased at the supermarket. I crafted a meal plan for the week and sketched out what needed to happen in the evening before bed and in the morning before work in order to make dinner appear on the table. It all seems very do-able and, yes, obnoxiously detailed. But the funny thing is how enjoyable the day has been. Taking care of home matters and getting organized isn't just preparing for good times in the future...it is the essence of the good life.

Daydreaming Saturday

2006-01-07T12:35:00.000-05:00

Photo of New Zealand eco-village from www.converge.org.nz

If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. - Henry David Thoreau

Maybe it's the fact that there was no coffee in the house this morning when I woke up with the Bean at 6:00 that set the stage for my daydream. Because once I finally did get that cup a few hours later, the caffeinated thoughts started flowing fast and furious. Last night I read this post by madcapmum before bed. The idea of neighbors sharing a cow for milking seemed so simple, and just makes pure sense. That vision must have been dancing in the back of my mind because as soon as I had that first cup of joe in my hand, the wild dreaming began. Here's what I started to imagine:

In all of those so-called communities which are really nothing more than big and blah tract houses on carved-up pieces of former farmland or forest, we could take the idea of private property and turn it on its head. I'm not delusional enough to think that folks are going to give up their right to own property and do with it what they please. My thought, instead, is that the people who live in these houses could come together -- acting like neighbors rather than individual material accumulators -- and think about better ways to put the huge lawns to work. Each family could keep their lawn and land, of course. They would just have to decide on ways to put some of that land to use for the good of the neighborhood and wildlife.

What would this look like? Well, let's think about a typical subdivision a little differently. The neighbors agree to get together and rethink the ways that private spaces could be used for the public good. And "public" could be defined to, gasp, include creatures other than humans. Think about this: two houses have swingsets set up in the backyard. Instead of every household in the subdivision with children purchasing its own swingset, the two households that already have them agree that their private property - the swingset and the part of the yard on which it sits - could be used by the kids in the other houses. Now the kids wouldn't necessarily need to have free reign to yell like crazy at 7:00a.m. while playing on this swingset. There could be some basic ground rules for the use of the swingsets. The idea, though, is quite simple: sharing the resource of the swingset in the community. In exchange, the swingset owners would receive all kinds of resources from other families in the subdivision. Maybe one household could get some chickens to raise for eggs. Homeowners who have green thumbs could talk about the best way to cooperate in order to grow a range of food on parts of their land. Others could convert some of their lawn into wildlife sanctuaries with planned plantings to attract native species. Each family could have something to offer. There wouldn't be strict rules per se; just a sense of shared commitment to making better use of the spaces that are being wasted with huge chemically-dependent lawns. I'm not advocating for getting rid of lawns either. Some families could opt to keep their whole lawns intact with some set-aside areas for the neighborhood's kids and pets to play under the same guidelines as the public use of the swingsets.

Maybe this rethinking of the use of space could lead to a rethinking of the way we relate to one another too. The person who bakes tasty breads shares her bounty with the neighbor who is a handy carpenter. Informal exchanges of goods happen alongside the participation in the mainstream economy of cheap imported goods. This bartering leads to the exchange of ideas as well...and soon you're on the slippery slope toward a real community that supports life in the best of ways.

What could result from sharing even a small part of our private property with our neighbors? Less use of the resources that it takes to maintain large lawns. Food grown and raised closer to home. Kids playing with each other rather than in isolated islands of green behind their own homes. Neighbors talking with one another and collectively deciding what's best for their community. Less driving as more basic needs - for food, recreation, companionship - could be met in the neighborhood.

We recently watched "End of Suburbia," and you don't have to be an expert in peak oil to know that the auto-centric way of life we are living is not sustainable based as it is on the presumption of an endless supply of cheap oil. You could fall into the Jim Kunstler camp of extreme cynicism about our prospects for working together to get out of the mess we've created. Or, we could do what Bill McKibben argues for in an excellent piece in Orion magazine. McKibben exhorts us: "With a little lead time, we can put in place the no-regrets kinds of policies that make sense for a less spendthrift society." What would these no-regrets policies look like? McKibben says that they are different from a survivalist hoarding of resources to prepare for a world where global warming and peak oil are a daily reality in all aspects of our life. Instead, he tells us,

The no-regrets options are different, and seductive. They all involve communities learning to fend more powerfully for themselves—communities ratcheting down their dependence on the overstretched and oil-dependent lines of supply that mark a globalized economy, and ratcheting up the semiforgotten, close-to-home economies that might prove more stable in an energy-starved world. Some of this work is already underway, but it will be given a new urgency if the price of oil just keeps on leaping.

What does this all mean? Is it just a utopian fantasy or the bright side of the doomsday scenario that may be just beyond the horizon? How can we work to make this happen? Madcapmum really got me thinking about this. It's a testament to how the seeds of another world can prosper when they land on fertile ground. It's time to dream a little dream about what could be...and figure out some unique ways to put the foundations in place that will make it happen.

It's Not Just for Coffee

2006-01-06T08:39:00.000-05:00

Many people who know about fair trade* associate it only with coffee. While the benefits of fair trade in the coffee market are becomingly increasingly well-known, it's time to take another step and seek out a fair trade certification on the other agricultural imports that we regularly enjoy.

Check out this brief piece from Grist about the benefits of fair trade for workers on India's tea plantations. And since the Ideal Bite tidbit in my inbox a couple of days ago touted the slimming benefits of drinking a few cups of green tea per day, I thought that it was a good time to order up one of the organic, fair trade selections that the gals recommended. Turns out that the loose Hamstead tea is on clearance right now, so I'm also satisfying one of my 2006 goals to be frugal. Plus loose tea leaves mean less packaging. I'd say that this adds up to a good green purchase!

Bananas are another fair trade item that I've been seeking out recently. Transfair has a backgrounder on the importance of bringing fair trade to banana plantations here. Like coffee, bananas are a widely consumed product. According to Transfair, 96% of American households buy bananas regularly. That's an exciting number because there's a potential for a huge impact if even some of these households switch to fair trade bananas. Here's a list of where you can find fair trade certified fruit. After seeing the fair trade label on a bunch of bananas at our local co-op, I've been making it a point to buy bananas for my oatmeal there. (If you don't have time to peruse the list, it may be helpful to know that Wild Oats carries fair trade bananas at all of its stores. I wonder why Whole Foods doesn't follow their lead...) While I'm on the subject of bananas, thought I'd plug one of my favorite documentaries: Life & Debt. The film does a good job of showing the effects of global corporatism and monetary policy on the small island, including a segment on the banana market.

*Astonishingly, some people who you would expect to know about fair trade coffee, such as these Starbucks baristas, have never heard of it. If you would like to help increase consumer demand for fair trade certified coffee at Starbucks and pressure the company to educate its sales staff about Cafe Estima, the only fair trade certified blend served at the chain, take the Starbucks Challenge 3.5.

Sustainable Eats, Beantown-Style

2006-01-05T16:55:00.000-05:00

I often tout the power of cooking wholesome food as an antidote to stress, a means of fostering everyday creativity, and a sound way to limit your ecological footprint. That said, I sometimes find myself daydreaming about times (pre-Baby Bean) when my husband and I enjoyed a margarita and some good Mexican food out at a restaurant. Let's face it: we're all going to eat out or get take-out every once in a while. It's a pleasurable treat, and one that shouldn't have to compromise your green principles. Besides the inevitable search for yummy vegetarian options, I long for restaurants that serve up local, seasonal cuisine with organic ingredients. Oh yeah, since frugality is a cornerstone of my own personal sustainability mission, it has to be affordable. Tall order if you're not on the west coast, huh?

We've found three standout gems in the Boston area. I hope that places like these serve as a model for other sustainable businesses.

Centre Street Cafe in Jamaica Plain often has a long line snaking down the sidewalk at about 8:30 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays as hungry brunch-goers wait for the 9:00 opening. The line is a fixture the whole morning on most weekends, even when the cold Boston winter is bearing down. If you're stuck outside waiting for a table, though, you can always run in and grab a mug of Fair Trade coffee to bring outside to warm you up. The wait is worth it for huge portions of huevos mexicanos, waffles piled with fresh fruit and maple whipped cream, and, if you're lucky, a cuban scramble special made with eggs or tofu, together with sweet potatoes, plantains, black beans, and tortilla strips. Besides getting two delicious meals worth of food from one order, the best part about Centre Street is the focus on sustainably grown and raised food. A full page of the dinner menu is devoted to information about the farmers who supply their produce. Mark, the head server for weekend brunch, will happily tell you all about the heirloom tomatoes that comprise the salsa in the summer. At dinner, they've got a bunch of veggie options plus organic wines and my favorite organic beer, Wolaver's.

On one of our dreaded trips to the land of big box stores for baby supplies, we stumbled upon a little treasure in the most unlikely of places. Big Fresh Cafe is tucked into a hideous strip mall in Framingham right in the shadows of every cheap, chain restaurant serving pre-made muck to suburban shoppers. I couldn't believe that this little cafe was serving Equal Exchange coffee, glasses of organic Frey wines, and a bunch of freshly prepared organic meals. I knew I'd like Big Fresh when I saw a magazine rack by my booth while waiting for my meal of satay tofu, collards, rice pilaf, and stir-fried veggies to be cooked up behind the counter. The magazines? Co-op America Quarterly, Mother Jones, and Sierra. Big Fresh isn't fancy, but it's exactly the kind of neighborhood spot that you long for in your own neighborhood. I'm not sure what it says about our communities that this place is located in a strip mall, but the tofu Thai curry is pretty good stuff.

The third place is more upscale and well-known, and I think the accolades are well-deserved. Oleana in Cambridge is owned by chef Ana Sortun, who creates some delightful Mediterranean-influenced seasonal meals with organic ingredients. The ricotta and bread dumplings with kale and porcini are scrumptious.

My philosophy is that trying to live a greener life should be joyful and rich. What better way to introduce a friend or family member to sustainable cuisine than to share a meal at a local restaurant that focuses on tasty, environmentally-sound food? Now, I'm off to cook up some peanut noodles for our dinner. Hey, a girl can dream about eating out, right?

OK, Maybe I'm Crunchy

2006-01-04T11:59:00.000-05:00

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. — M. F. K. Fisher, The Art of Eating

Seems a lot of folks are shunning the chemically-dependent, agribusiness-run food industry in favor of the slow, delicious goodness of cooking from scratch using wholesome ingredients. Even better if you can grow, raise, and preserve those ingredients yourself. Madcapmum made her own cottage cheese, Norene is making yogurt, and spiral and breadchick have shared bread recipes. I'm re-inspired to commit to taking more steps to move further off the supermarket grid. This tidbit from a summary of Marian Nestle's book Food Politics gives a flavor for the corporate environment that drives what appears in the pantries of many supermarket shoppers:

Like manufacturing cigarettes or building weapons, making food is very big business. Food companies in 2000 generated nearly $900 billion in sales. They have stakeholders to please, shareholders to satisfy, and government regulations to deal with. It is nevertheless shocking to learn precisely how food companies lobby officials, co-opt experts, and expand sales by marketing to children, members of minority groups, and people in developing countries. We learn that the food industry plays politics as well as or better than other industries, not least because so much of its activity takes place outside the public view.

Buying "health foods" doesn't mean that big corporate powerhouses are not reaping profits. Check out the tangled web of corporate ownership of the organic brands we buy, for instance. Why do we care that big corporate money is behind our Odwalla juice, Muir Glen tomatoes, or Boca burger? Because those multinationals wield a lot of power in defining what "organic" means and, indeed, they are all too happy to profit from a weaking of the standards. Plus homemade food has less packaging, and less preservatives and other funny ingredients. And, as said so well by madcapmum here, a meal prepared at home with love and intention is indeed a sacrament.

Today's step? Making my own granola for the first time. While the $3.99 box of Cascadian Farm's Oats & Honey Granola is yummy, the recipe that I created is really very good. It's cheaper, has a lot less packaging, and isn't made by a company owned by General Mills (a GM executive was recently appointed as "consumer representative" to the National Organics Standards Board after the company lobbied for weakening the organic standards). And the house smells scrumptious.

Ardent Eden's Easy Granola
As usual, I started by reading over a few recipes to get an idea of basic process and proportions. Then I looked in our pantry to see what ingredients I had on hand. The result is the following easy recipe; it's simple, doesn't use a lot of ingredients, and has a nice subtly orange-flavored crunch.

Combine the following ingredients in a large bowl:

3 1/2 c. oats
1/2 c. slivered almonds
1 c. coarsely chopped pecans
1/2 c. wheat germ
1/2 c. roasted sesame seeds
1 1/2 t. cinnamon

In a small bowl, whisk together:

1/4 c. canola oil (make sure that this is non-GM!)
1/4 c. honey
zest from 1 orange (it's especially important that it's organic since you're using the peel)

Pour the oil/honey/orange mixture over the oatmeal mixture and stir very well to coat. Spread in a shallow layer on two baking sheets.

Bake at 200 for 55 minutes. Store in air-tight container.

Enjoy!

10 Years of Frankenfoods

2006-01-02T10:21:00.000-05:00

Do you ever have the experience of reading or hearing something, thinking that you should blog about it/tell someone about it/research it further/etc., and then noticing it everywhere? It's like the universe is telling you to get on it already! That just happened to me. I've had my nose in Jane Goodall's new book for the past couple of days, and I just finished the chapter on genetically modified foods yesterday. It re-ignited my ire about the fact that so much of the United States food supply contains GMOs and there is no way for consumers to know about it because the biotechnology companies have succeeded in convincing the folks in our govermnent not to require labeling. Stop and think about that for a second. I have been mulling over what we need to do as citizens to take control of this situation. Then, I just happened to notice this article on MSNBC as I was doing my daily mainstream media news scan. MSNBC reports that it's been 10 years since the GMO experiment was started on the American food supply. If that anniversary is not a sign that I better get off my duff and dive into this issue, I don't know what is!

OK, so let's review some background about GMOs. As usual, the Union of Concerned Scientists has published an excellent primer on the subject on its website, and the Organic Consumers Association also has a worthwhile overview of GMOs. The basics:

GM foods are created when the genetic materials from one species of plant are inserted into the DNA of another species. The point of doing this is not to cultivate naturally vigorous hybrids in the way that farmers have for ages; rather, the purpose is to create plant species that are resistant to some pests and, most alarmingly, herbicides and pesticides created by the same company (typically Monsanto) that sells the seeds. My common sense tells me that making a seed (for profit) that is resistant to the chemicals sold by the same company (for more profit) does not create conditions where the environment and health are of paramount importance. [In response to a great question, I've clarified what I mean by this chemical resistance in the comments.] Even without looking into GMOs further than this, it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that engineering food plants to withstand an even greater chemical onslaught just does not make sense on any level. Period.
The effects of GMOs on the human body are largely untested. Yet the FDA says that genetically modified foods are just as nutritious and benign as traditional crops. Once you start reading about the testing of GMOs, however, you will come across stories about a man named Pustztai and his potatoes. Arpad Pusztai is a scientist in the United Kingdom who tested the effects of feeding genetically modified potatoes to lab rats. To his surprise, Pusztai found that the rats began to experience health problems, including stunted growth, damaged immune systems, and smaller hearts, livers and brains. He called for more testing, but in many ways human beings (especially Americans) are the lab animals ingesting GM foods each day.
GM foods make up a huge portion of the US food supply. MSNBC tells us that, despite the risks associated with GMOs:
Still, acreage planted with biotech crops around the world is increasing and this year topped more than 1 billion acres sown to soybeans, corn, cotton, canola and other crops. In the United States, 52 percent of all corn, 79 percent of upland cotton and 87 percent of soybeans planted in 2004-05 were biotech varieties, according to the USDA.
Rice, the staple food for many people in the world, is the next frontier for genetic engineering. In the meantime, eating processed food from the supermarket often means eating genetically engineered ingredients. The Center for Food Safety estimates that 70-75% of processed foods contain GMOs.
The US public is still in the dark about GMOs. The Center for Food Safety reports that 80-95% of Americans want GM foods to be labeled as such. The FDA, however, doesn't think that it's necessary. That means that when you buy a crackers containing soybean oil, for example, you're likely buying GMOs -- you'll just never know it.
Introducing GMOs into an ecosystem could very well wreak havoc on the environment in ways that we can't yet begin to understand. We know that pests respond by becoming stronger and resistant to the ever-higher levels of pesticides that GM crops are sprayed with. How will the complex web of nature respond to genetically engineered seeds traveling from the farmer's field and contaminating traditional crops? We do know that the USDA is not doing its job in monitoring field tests of GM crops. We also know how agribusiness responds to the cross-pollination of its GM seeds into traditional farm fields. In a well-known case, a farmer named Percy Schmeiser found that his organic crop was contaminated with Monsanto's Roundup Ready canola seeds. Monsanto's response? To sue Schmeiser for patent infringement claiming that he stole the company's seeds.
The promise that GM foods will bring an end to world hunger is empty. Again, profit is the driving factor in the push to sell more genetically engineered seeds. If ending hunger was the goal, then the biotechs wouldn't try to sell farmers in developing countries so-called "terminator seeds" that can't be saved from year to year in the sustainable way that generations of farmers have done.

There is much more evidence that leads me to believe that corporate profits are being put ahead of health and the environment...again. So what can we do about it?

Take heart that other citizens in other countries have successfully fought agribusiness on this issue and won. We can too. Swiss citizens just voted for a 5-year ban on GMOs. There is a bill pending in Vermont which would would hold seed companies liable for damages from cross-pollination by GM crops.
Stay informed. Bookmark this daily GM-related news round-up and this one. There's tons of information on the web about GMOs. I've also found the following books to have highly readable information on the subject: section IV of The Food Revolution, chapter 4 of Harvest for Hope, and the book Eating in the Dark.
Mobilize to create local ordinances banning GMOs. Resources and links to local organizations are here. Fight to protect GE-free zones, like the one the citizens of Mendocino county in California voted for. Sign a petition here.
Urge the FDA to require safety testing and mandatory labeling of GM foods. A letter to the FDA is here. The FDA currently supports voluntary labeling. Uh...I'm not going to hold my breath waiting to see those voluntary labels anytime soon. Why not also drop your Congressional representatives a line too at this link?
Donate to organizations working to regulate and limit GM crops. Many environmental organizations are involved in GM-related campaigns. Here are just a few: Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Alliance for Bio-Integrity, The True Food Network and Organic Consumers Association.
Pressure supermarkets and food companies to refuse to include GM ingredients in their products. Whole Foods labels its house brand products that do not contain GMOs and Trader Joe's has a policy to keep its private label brands free of GM ingredients. Let your local supermarket know that you don't want to buy products that contain GMOs and that you won't buy the house brand if it does. Tools for taking action with a variety of supermarkets can be found here.
Shop smart. Use this guide to find out which brands are GMO-free.
Buy organic. The national organic standards forbid the inclusion of any GM ingredients in products labeled organic. (That means we've got to continue to fight to protect the standards. Read about that and take action here.) Sadly, there are documented instances of organic foods being contanimated with GM foods, such as when Terra Firma Inc., an organic food company in Wisconsin, had to recall its organic tortilla chips because they were contaminated by GM corn from another farm. The only way to ensure that you are not eating GM ingredients, then, is to eliminate their presence in every food product.

Whew! I'm glad I got THAT off my chest!

Bright Ideas for 2006

2006-01-01T16:26:00.000-05:00

As I sat down to compile some thoughts about my goals and personal aspirations for the new year, a clear theme seemed to emerge. 2006 is all about energy: both the personal kind of energy that will enable me to work on carrying out some of my ideas for living more simply and sustainably, and the kind of energy that fuels our economy while at the same time depleting our earth's resources. In short, I need more of the former and less of the latter! I guess I should be a little more specific than that though. Here goes:

Putting down roots. This is the biggie. At long last, 2006 is the year when we plan to buy a home with enough land to do some small-scale homesteading. We would love to find a place that will let us grow more of our own food with room to do some organic market gardening eventually. At the same time, concerns about the unsustainable way that Americans are draining our energy resources mean that location will be key. I don't want a long car commute from a rural area to work, shopping, restaurants, etc. We're going to have to be creative and patient. Once we get settled, we can lay out plans for converting a yard into a permaculture-based system and gradually implement compost bins, set up rain water barrels, and plant fruit trees.
Decrease our energy reliance. We've been toying with selling our car in favor of a more fuel efficient model, but I'm not sure if it makes financial sense for us at this point. Either way, we need to continue trying to reduce car usage as much as possible. I plan to buy a bike this spring for starters. We'll continue with small steps in our household too. We don't use AC (and if I didn't use it while 9 months pregnant in August, I don't think I need to start anytime soon...) and we're conscientious about conserving, but there's much more we can do. I'm going to track our monthly kilowatt usage and make a game of it. Someday we'd love to install solar panels. Um, I think a house may be necessary for that. First things first.
Make it local, organic and whole. I plan to continue with the next steps laid out here. I'm going to need to learn to preserve and can food, bake bread (any tips on getting in the habit of bread baking? easy whole grain recipes?) and other items from scratch, and I'm going to have to practice what I do know how to do. That means being organized about cooking on the weekends and planning ahead. When the time comes soon to start the Bean on solid foods, my goal is to make them myself with a food mill and some ice cube trays for storage. (I need to be on the lookout for this book at my favorite used book stores.) I want to really limit the processed foods that we buy - even if they are organic.
Cultivate my frugal side. I'd like to continue to decrease our family's role in the consumerism that seems to rule the day. I also know that if I want to make the goals outlined above work, we're going to need to be more frugal than ever (this is where my husband shudders!). The time has come to re-evaluate the budget. That means tracking expenses for a while. I don't mind spending money where I believe that I'm voting with my dollars, but I want to have some more dollars for the big projects that are ahead. I suppose that our new house ought to have furniture, yes?
Build community. We obviously can't go it alone. The support of our family and friends has helped us get to this point. We'll need their encouragement to take the next steps. We'll also need to build a community of people who share our beliefs and can help encourage us, teach us new skills, and make us laugh in the process. We also want to offer what we know and have learned to others. This blog is a good start, and I hope that you'll help feed the energy that I have for 2006 and that, in some small way, I can do my part to feed yours!

Peace and hope for 2006!

It's a Wrap!

2005-12-31T09:22:00.000-05:00

As 2005 comes to a close tonight, I'll be ringing in the New Year on my living room couch with a glass of organic wine to toast the year's accomplishments. Uh...that is, if I can stay awake until midnight. Not sure if I've done that since the Bean was born a few months ago. In the event that I doze off before the ball drops, I thought I'd start the day with a recap of some of the steps -- big and small -- that I've taken on the path of sustainability and greener living during the past year.

Survived natural childbirth....and would do it again. Okay, so I'm not exactly chomping at the bit to do it again right away, but my biggest accomplishment of the year was obviously the birth of my baby. I'm especially proud that I was able to resist the urgings of the anesthesiologist who, in the middle of hard labor, gives one of the best damn sales pitches I've ever heard. (This should go without saying, but I'll do it anyway: the birth of any baby is a beautiful process that every woman experiences differently. Getting an epidural or other medical pain relief is a personal decision that I wouldn't dare judge for a second.)
Breastfeeding my baby. I know that I'm giving my baby a healthy start despite my horror at the toxins that accumulate in breastmilk. Seriously, we parents need to start getting really pissed off about this! Actually, why limit the ire to parents? This is one of those flashing neon signs about the state of our environment that is telling ALL of us to wake up. Rant aside, breastfeeding also has green benefits. (I'll pause for the same caveat as the one above here.)
Ate more organic foods. I've been buying organic for a few years. Perhaps it was my pregnancy that made me up step it up another notch. Now, it's very difficult for me to purchase a piece of produce that is not organic. I feel blessed to have the means to choose to buy organic most of the time, and I feel strongly about allocating funds to food choices that are better for my health and the health of farmers, song birds, streams, rivers, and the soil. We're a pretty frugal family, but I don't mind giving a bigger piece of the budget pie to sustainable foods. We just cut back in other places.
Made Fair Trade a Priority. It was the same thought process as the one about organics. I have been buying Fair Trade coffee for awhile now. In the past year, I've become much more passionate about refusing to buy coffee that is not Fair Trade and I've added bananas and chocolate to the list.
Grew more food. I wrote about our plot in a community garden here. I won't repeat myself except to say that food doesn't get more local than coming from your own garden. Growing food is one of those green actions that has a positive impact on so many levels: fresher food, reduced transportation and fossil fuel usage, stronger communities, and increased biodiversity for starters. For me, it has also added a little more beauty to my world.
Started this blog. Having an outlet for exploring my ideas more fully and "meeting" others who are doing amazing things in the little moments of their day has been so fulfilling.
Reduced waste. I've made some more small steps to decreasing the amount of waste that our household contributes to landfills each year: we use reusable bags (almost) all of the time, we've switched over to cloth napkins and dishrags, the amount of packaging an item has become a key factor in my decision whether to purchase it, we've replaced our coffee filters with a reusable hemp one, we're starting to use the teapot and filter some of the time rather than highly packaged tea bags, etc. (Anyone know of a source for Fair Trade loose tea leaves?)
Shopped local. We've become much more serious about buying items - from a humidifer for the nursery to holiday gifts - from local businesses rather than chain stores. We need to keep working on this, especially for clothes and baby items. It seems really hard to get get those things affordably at independent shops.
Learned more about nature and spent time enjoying it. This usually leads to action!
Got inspired to make some ambitious green plans for 2006. I've been inspired to go a bit further next year. Tomorrow I'll let you know what I'm planning.

Cheers!

Learning Is a Road to Action

2005-12-29T22:55:00.000-05:00

We're just back from a few lovely days visiting friends and family. (Unlike last time, we remembered to bring our dog along on the trip...) This holiday season has brought lots of thoughtful conversation/political rants and food for thought. I received two books that I have been dying to crack open: The Consumer's Guide to Effective Environmental Choices put out by the Union of Concerned Scientists and Harvest for Hope: A Guide for Mindful Eating by Jane Goodall. I must confess that I feel a pang of excitement when someone gives me a wrapped gift that is obviously a book. And when I saw these particular books, I was positively gleeful. The first one is a rigorous study by the UCS of what individual actions have the greatest impact (positive and negative) on air pollution, global warming, water pollution, and habitat destruction. Um, that's right up my alley (see here and here). Jane Goodall's book is another one that I had been salivating over in the local bookstore as it's about the power of our food choices - - another subject that really riles up my intellectual energy (see here, here and here). And once that spark is ignited, I start to feel more hopeful. Ah, there is so much to learn!

I've always been a bit of a bookworm, and one of those people who truly enjoyed school. But the real education - the one that gets me fired up - has happened informally after college and graduate school ended. As a student, I had never done much reading about sustainability, the environment, the sciences. I've fed those passions on my own. And once I started learning about our natural world as it intersects with human activity, the mundane actions of, say, a typical Wednesday started to mean something in a way that they hadn't before. I've started to appreciate the beauty of nature in a more profound way than I'd previously experienced because, frankly, I hadn't noticed the details. My reverence for nature expands when I know some of the specifics.

For example, my husband has started down the path of birding. Fortunately, he hasn't (yet) reached the obsessive level of the birders I've heard about who wear pagers to receive alerts from fellow birders about sightings. Since I've learned to identify some basic backyard and migratory birds through our studies of field guides and the knowledge shared by friends, a walk or time spent at a park is an opportunity to scan the trees, brush, and fields for birds. Even when I don't see any birds, I notice the berries holding onto a bush through the winter or the seed pods that have been picked clean by wildlife. My experience of nature is enhanced, and I yearn for the next expedition.

And the next step? Well, it's coming home and thinking about ways to protect the beauty, the purity, of the natural world that I have experienced so fully...that I feel like I know in a deeper way than I had before. This same circle of studying-experiencing-taking action starts again when I learn more about trees, wildflowers, animals, etc. It also happens when I learn about an heirloom veggie, engage in growing, cooking, and eating it, and then reflect on how to change our food system to promote this sustainable and delicious way of living and eating.

Whether it's the identifying characteristics of an American Coot or the recipe for a winter squash gratin, being a life-long learner involves much more than an accumulation of knowledge. It's an active process that helps me better engage my senses in the world around me, and then take action to preserve this fragile planet. For me, the road to change often begins with the ideas in a book, a conversation, or a documentary film. My hope is that it will end with a better world.

A Living Library

2005-12-26T17:36:00.000-05:00

The death of an old person is like the loss of a library. - African saying

On Christmas Day, we spent an hour with a 98-year-old woman. We had never met her before. She lives in a nursing home, and didn't have any family planning to visit for the holiday. We arrived at the home just after 11:00 a.m., pushing a stroller and carrying bags full of gifts and flowers from the Little Brothers-Friends of the Elderly organization that coordinated our visit and many others for the holidays. Most volunteers delivered meals. Since our elder (let's call her Mary) lived in a nursing home that provided food, we just brought the tokens of companionship provided by the Little Brothers.

We found Mary laying on top of her bed, staring into the air. She was, despite her position and the somewhat vacant look that she initially appeared to have, the picture of dignity in a fuschia skirt, ruffled white blouse, and fresh perm. Her hearing wasn't good, her eyesight shot, her body frail; nevertheless, Mary stood up to greet us and clear off some space on a chair next to her bed. For the next 45 minutes, we talked loudly and had a few awkward silences. But mostly we listened to a woman who was born in 1907 tell us snippets about her past, her family, her pets, and her life in the nursing home.

This last chapter in Mary's life has been hard. She missed her job and days spent interacting with patients at the hospital where she served as a caregiver. Now she depends on the aides walking past her door for every necessity. Her nieces and nephews, though living nearby, rarely visited anymore. She feared that her belongings and the gifts we brought would be stolen as they had been in the past. Most of all, she regretted being a burden.

I often write about trying to live in a life-giving way. For me, that means a daily struggle to make choices that affirm the life of the planet and those living on it. Sometimes looking to the oldest among us can provide a beautiful example of this path. I recently read in Ode magazine (a favorite source for alternative news stories that accentuate the positive) about old people gathering in public areas in China to practice tai chi together; they are simply enjoying life and companionship. On Christmas Eve, we took a walk in an urban shopping district and saw peace signs and colorful flags being waved. The people staging this public display for peace on earth? A group of senior citizens. And the original environmentalists? The people, like my grandmother, who lived through harder times when food was not wasted, reusing and recycling were daily necessities, and simple living wasn't a voluntary exercise. How much we have to learn from the examples of our elders! This Christmas, I witnessed the finest example of the life-giving spirit that I want to infuse my days exemplified in the simplest of scenes: a 98-year-old woman I had known for less than an hour smiling and cooing at my 3-month-old baby.

Playing Tag

2005-12-25T22:41:00.000-05:00

I've been tagged for my first meme by Andrea. Here goes:

Seven Things To Do Before I Die

Hike the Appalachian Trail -- not all at one time (I'm not that hardcore!)
Live near the ocean for a summer
Own a business
Write something worth publishing even if it doesn't get published
Run an organization that makes a dent in social and environmental problems in a community
Learn to do more with my hands: knitting, sewing, canning, baking bread, etc.
Enjoy many meals with friends and loved ones. Fresh food, good wine, a beautiful setting, children playing, a dog or two under the table, my husband strumming a guitar = bliss

Seven Things I Can't Do

Sing (not that I don't love trying...)
Dance (see #1)
Keep dog fur off my floors, furniture, pants, etc.
Vote Republican
Cook meat (well, it's not so much "can't" as "won't")
Stop talking to my husband while he's reading, writing, watching TV
Write witty answers to memes

Seven Things that Attract Me to Blogging

It's an outlet for the ideas swirling in my head
Connecting with people I never would have met otherwise
The discipline of writing for an audience
Sharing what I've read and learned
Reading and learning more
Feeling inspired
Getting comments!

Seven Things I Say Most Often

Um, I think she needs to have her diaper changed.
We really need to hustle.
What do you feel like eating tonight?
We don't need a bag.
[He/she/it/fill in the blank] drives me crazy.
Oh my.
Where's the binky?

Seven Books That I Love (OK, so choosing just seven is an obviously impossible task. These are the first that came to mind.)

Sophie's Choice - William Styron
The Unsettling of America - Wendell Berry
Where the Sidewalk Ends -Shel Silverstein
Hope's Edge - Frances Moore Lappe & Anna Lappe
All of Barbara Kingsolver's books
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris

Seven Movies I Watch Again and Again (Caveat: I'm known for not watching movies more than once or twice. Here are some random movies that I like though.)

Stealing Home
Life and Debt
Krzysztof Kieslowski's Red, White, and Blue trilogy
Sideways
Cry Freedom
The Way We Were
Manufacturing Consent

Seven People I Want to Join In
I'm going to cheat here and just say feel free to join in if you are so inclined!

Whew! That was a rigorous assignment. Off to bed.

A Pause for Gratitude

2005-12-24T10:16:00.001-05:00

Since we've toned the consumerism of Christmas way down, our little family is free to celebrate the holiday tonight and tomorrow enjoying the simplest of pleasures: a walk on this unseasonably warm winter day, a delicious meal and a glass of wine this evening, gratitude for the profound blessings of the past year, and hope for the year to come. We'll also be visiting a homebound elderly person tomorrow morning through a local organization. Bringing a little warmth to another is the very best of the holiday season.

As you enjoy the holiday buzz of the next two days, some words from Mary Oliver that make me pause and fill me with the wonder and light of nature and love. Amid the problems that mire the world, beauty can sustain us. Happy Holidays!

The Sun

Have you ever seen
anything
in your life
more wonderful

than the way the sun,
every evening,
relaxed and easy,
floats toward the horizon

and into the clouds or the hills,
or the rumpled sea,
and is gone--
and how it slides again

out of the blackness,
every morning,
on the other side of the world,
like a red flower

streaming upward on its heavenly oils,
say, on a morning in early summer,
at its perfect imperial distance--
have you ever felt for anything

such wild love--
do you think there is anywhere, in any language,
a word billowing enough
for the pleasure

that fills you,
as the sun reaches out,
as it warms you

as you stand there,
empty-handed--
or have you too
turned from this world--

or have you too
gone crazy
for power,
for things?

Tools of the Trade

2005-12-23T18:10:00.000-05:00

Reducing needless consumption is one of my goals for the next year. If I step back and think about whether I really need to buy something, I often decide against it. Sometimes simply delaying a purchase accomplishes the same thing by reducing impulse buys that will clutter my home and a landfill someday. But there are times when purchasing something that will help reduce my consumption of resources in the future or is reusable seems worthwhile. So my current wish list of items to help me live a little greener each day follows. The criteria is that each item must help me to reduce or reuse resources in some way. Bonus if I can hit the first two Rs in one shot!

1. Indoor clothes line. Apartment living (and New England winters) means that an outdoor clothesline is out of the question. But I've read about how the enormous amount of energy a clothes dryer uses here (a good source for information on how much electricity various appliances use and how to reduce the electricity that you are using). So even though we don't pay for the electricity that powers our dryer, I've been feeling rather guilty about using it. I do try to limit the amount of time it's on, clean out the lint after each use, etc., but there's a lot of coal a'burning for me to get my clothes dry. A nice indoor drying contraption like this or this would be fabulous.

2. Cloth napkins. I have a set of four cloth napkins that I picked up on a clearance rack a few years ago. Since then, I've become a firm believer in the gracious simplicity of using cloth napkins for every meal and abandoning the waste of yet another disposable paper product. (Will I be able to go the next step and use these someday?) I'm all for making do without more stuff, but I do think that another set of cloth napkins would be a worthwhile investment. For those who sew, whipping up a few napkins with fabric scraps would be a good way to get a charmingly eclectic set of napkins. Until I invest in a sewing machine (yet another skill I'd like to learn...), this set made by artisans in Nepal or a few of these will be on my wish list. Not only are these cloth napkins reusable, they reduce consumption of paper products, and are fairly traded.

3. Coffee carafe. After reading a recent Easy Green tip about the electricity used to keep brewed coffee warm in the pot, the little orange light on my Krups coffee maker has been taunting me every time I walk past it. A good solution seems to be pouring the coffee into a thermos carafe like this one after it's brewed, so I can turn the pot off but still enjoy a hot cup of joe.

4. Produce bags. I have the canvas and hemp shopping bags under control, and I've successfully established the habit of making sure that I always have them with me in case I make a purchase. I need to work on establishing my husband's habit a bit more, however. As evidenced by the cupboard pictured to the left, we still have a long way to go as a household. Nevertheless, it's time for me to move on to advanced bag reduction by cutting out some of those pesky thin, plastic bags used for produce. When buying produce like apples or corn on the cob, it's easy to do without a bag altogether. But for items like greens and mushrooms, for example, a bag is necessary to contain the veggies and keep the moisture separate from my other stuff. I found these reusable produce bags which look like they'd do the job well.

5. Bike. Since this is a wish list, I might as well add one biggie that would make a real dent in reducing my ecological footprint: a bicycle. I've wanted one for awhile but have been somewhat apprehensive about riding on the mean streets of Boston. For short trips that are just beyond convenient walking distance, though, a bike with a basket would be a worthwhile investment. Bill McKibben said it well:

Our task is to demonstrate that to live simply is more elegant, more satisfying, and more pleasurable than consumer society. It doesn’t work to just tell people to get out of their cars to save the upper atmosphere. Instead we need to encourage them to ride a bike. It’s elegant. It’s fun. It makes you feel better.

A Little Piece of the Earth

2005-12-22T19:39:00.000-05:00

I want to plant a little garden with you now, take care of a piece of the earth somehow...Greg Brown

From the comments to yesterday's post, it seems that a lot of us have something in common: a love of fresh, locally-grown foods and the benefits that come from supporting sustainable agriculture. It was a few years after I became a vegetarian that I started to really think about food choices and the bigger environmental picture.

What good was it to eat a food that was strictly vegetarian but had been shipped over 3,000 miles to reach me? Sure, an animal didn't suffer in factory farming conditions, but there are myriad other problems with this kind of industrialized food system. From the genetically-modified seed to the pesticides coating the leaves of the plant to the pollution generated from a big rig driving across the country to the days spent languishing on a supermarket shelf, I started to think that most of the food deemed "conventional" really wasn't in line with any convention that would sustain our planet or our health. I picked up a memoir called This Organic Life by Joan Dye Gussow. (Check out a Q&A with Gussow here on the Slow Food Forum.) Gussow tells the tale of growing an organic garden and eating locally from her suburban home on the Hudson River in New York. Before reading Gussow, I understood the problems, the theories about our food system. What I didn't know was the beauty of the alternative.

Being stuck in a series of urban apartments due to various circumstances didn't create ideal conditions for getting my hands into the dirt. So I continued to read and to search out farmers markets. Cooking seemed to go hand in hand with discovering the beautiful new-to-me heirloom varieities of veggies from small farms. I didn't (and still don't) have time to always seek out the family-farmed local option, but I did what I could and always felt better, more whole, when I created a meal from these delicious ingredients.

A couple of years passed, our passion for the pure pleasure (not to mention the environmental and health benefits) of natural, whole foods grew, and we decided that we were ready to take on the next step: growing some of our own food. Since we were still in an apartment, we tracked down a community garden in our neighborhood and signed up for a plot. Then the real love affair began. We poured over seed catalogs through the winter, cleared out and turned the soil in early spring, transplanted seedlings from our kitchen to the soil later in the spring, and enjoyed the harvest all summer and fall. We began to feel the seasons more acutely.

The small garden plot gives us a bounty of fresh, delicious vegetables. Now we grow multiple varieties of lettuce, beans, tomatoes (Oh Lord, the tomatoes!), kale, collards, chard, herbs and flowers. We are constantly amazed by the abundance that springs forth from a small plot in a vacant lot.

Next year, we hope to take our dream of living closer to the land a step further by buying a house with room to grow more food. We'll have a lot to learn. So for 2006, my next steps are:

To learn more about preserving and canning. I'm going to check out the late Carla Emery's Encyclopedia of Country Living for a comprehensive view on food preservation and all kinds of other sustainable practices.
To buy organic foods that are sold with integrity in the face of Big Food's push to weaken the organic standards that consumers should be able to trust. Laurie is starting a great grassroots effort to find honest organics, and the Organic Consumers Association has some useful resources.
To buy local and seasonal when possible.
To share more delicious home-cooked meals with loved ones. What better way to celebrate the earth's abundance?

Just One Thing

2005-12-21T12:01:00.000-05:00

I haven't been at this blogging thing for very long, but already I know that I need your help. The most satisfying experience for me as a blogger and you as a reader happens when we put our heads together and collaborate. In the month or so since I've started Ardent Eden, I have been amazed by the thoughtful comments and suggestions from people who have dropped by. There's a community of people who are thinking about and taking everyday action to make the world a better place. What a wonderful antidote to despair.

So I'm asking for your input -- even if you've never left a comment on the Internet before. (It's really not scary, I promise.) Tell me about the one thing, however small, that you are going to do to try to improve our world in the next year. It could be a way of building community that's as simple as meeting someone new, a way of expanding your thinking as easy as reading a new book, a way of taking one step for the environment as easy as using a travel mug, a way of recharging in the beauty of our natural world as easy as a weekly walk in the woods....You get the idea. I'm not much for New Year's resolutions because they seem made to be broken, so let's keep this simple and achievable. It's the small steps that empower the bigger ones, right?

Let's help inspire each other to stay on a life-affirming path in 2006. It can start with just one thing.

Baby Steps

2005-12-20T08:54:00.000-05:00

After throwing the "e" word around yesterday, I woke up with a refreshed perspective today: still distraught over the direction that our country continues to head in, but also renewed in my commitment to do what I can -- even if it seems like a drop in a bucket. Am I a glutton for punishment? Why do I continue to worry about getting a drying rack to use the clothes dryer less often (speaking of gluttons, the dryer is one of those greedy electricity gobblers that Roger was talking about the other day) in the face of a political process that can make citizens feel helpless? Why walk to the post office when our last American wildernesses could be opened for oil drilling anyway? Why shop for foods with the organic label when food industry representatives make the decisions about organic standards? In short, why do I continue to sweat the small stuff?

There are three main reasons why I continue to focus on the little things. First, I'm convinced that they will add up. Call it a tipping point, a ripple effect, the boiling point, the power of numbers or whatever other metaphor speaks to you. The idea is that we don't know when our actions will collectively start a tidal wave of change. We don't know if our asking for a cup of Fair Trade coffee for the 100th (1,000th? 1,ooo,oooth?) time at Starbucks will finally make the corporation realize that there is a consumer demand for it and decide to brew it everyday. While there still would be a lot of people drinking coffee that isn't Fair Trade, there also would be tangible effects in the lives of farmers. Real change for real people. That alone should make taking a small action worth it. I've read so many inspiring stories that don't make it to our mainstream media (see Ode magazine, the essays in The Impossible Will Take a Little While, the stories in Hope's Edge and You Have the Power, and the examples in Visionaries for starters). The root of these stories and why I keep coming back to doing whatever I can do on any given day - and that varies depending on what is going on my life, my mind, and my heart - is that we'll never know what is possible if we don't try. Paul Rogat Loeb reminds me why cynicism, while a natural response to the overwhelming problems before us, is not the way forward:

But as understandable as such moments of doubt and apparent impotence may be, especially in a culture that too often rewards cynicism and mocks idealism, they aren't inevitable. If tackling critical common problems seems a fool's errand, it's only because we're looking at life through too narrow a lens. History shows that the proverbial rock can be rolled, if not to the top of the mountain, then at least to successive plateaus. And, more important, simply pushing the rock in the right direction is cause for celebration. History also shows that even seemingly miraculous advances are in fact the result of many people taking small steps together over a long period of time.

The second reason that I refuse to give up on the small steps as a way to fight the larger battle of winning back democracy is simple: it's empowering. When I read the headlines in the corporate-controlled media, my head starts to spin at times. I risk not engaging in the struggle for a better democracy--that necessary underpinning that connects many of the issues that concern us most. But if I can walk into my kitchen and find organic ingredients from a local farm for a soup, serve a meal with cloth napkins rather than disposable ones, and buy Christmas presents from a local bookstore rather than the big box alternative, then I feel like I am doing something. However small, I am contributing. I am trying. I feel better and, on a good day, I feel ready to try to do more. To try to reach someone else and encourage them to take a similiar step, to build community, to vote with my dollars, to make a difference in the life of someone who lacks the means to choose to take these steps on their own.

Finally, the third reason for marching on is sitting on my lap right now. My daughter deserves it. Siel asked yesterday if being a parent makes one desperate to make the world a happier place. I was pretty desperate for a better world before I became a parent. But now I have the most beautiful reminder of all of the reasons why. You don't have to be a parent, though. You just have to care about the world that we are creating for others --young and old. And put one foot in front of the other.

Is Evil Too Strong a Word?

2005-12-19T09:07:00.000-05:00

I don't like to throw around the word "evil" much. But I'm starting to agree with Harry Reid that this Congress may be the most corrupt in history. I woke up to the headline this morning that the House defense bill (that's right, a bill that is supposed to focus only on defense matters) contains a provision to open the Artic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. The defense spending bill also contained provisions for funds related to Hurricane Katrina and bird flu, apparently making it hard for some House members to vote against it in their bleary-eyed pre-holiday state. This makes me absolutely raving mad! Now it's up to the Senate to filibuster the defense bill. Now is the time to take five minutes and email or call your Senator and encourage them to do so. Email addresses and phone numbers are here. I've often said that I try to stay optimistic, but this sort of thing just blows my mind.

Chartering a New Course

2005-12-18T09:07:00.000-05:00

We must join together to bring forth a sustainable global society founded on respect for nature, universal human rights, economic justice, and a culture of peace. Towards this end, it is imperative that we, the peoples of the Earth, declare our responsibility to one another, to the greater community of life, and to future generations. - Preamble to the Earth Charter

So it's Sunday morning and you have a piping mug of your a.m. beverage of choice* and your favorite newspaper sitting before you. But you're not quite ready to crack open the paper just yet and face reading W's defense of domestic spying or Cheney's talking points from his surprise trip to Iraq. Rather than risk descending into cynicism and despair when you should be enjoying the good Sunday morning vibe, why not read something different, something life-affirming? May I suggest that you spend half an hour reading the Earth Charter?

Like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Earth Charter sets forth a set of guiding principles for a peaceful world. According to The Earth Charter Initiative:

It seeks to inspire in all peoples a new sense of global interdependence and shared responsibility for the larger living world. It is an expression of hope and a call to help create a global partnership at a critical juncture in history.

The Earth Charter is a people's treaty that is the result of a collaboration between individuals and organizations that started in 1987 when the UN World Commission on Environment and Development called for a charter to set forth principles of sustainable development.

The principles set forth in the Earth Charter are meant as a guide to the conduct of individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments. So what does the Earth Charter say? It states four broad commitments for the respect and care for the community of life:

Respect Earth and life in all its diversity.
Care for the community of life with understanding, compassion, and love.
Build democratic societies that are just, participatory, sustainable, and peaceful.
Secure Earth's bounty and beauty for present and future generations.

The charter then offers three categories of more specific principles which, if followed in decision-making at every level, would fulfill the broad commitments. The categories are: ecological integrity, social and economic justice, and democracy, nonviolence and peace. Reading the principles (often!) is a great way to remind yourself that there is a different, life-giving path that we can take. With thoughtfulness, collaboration, and sincere commitment, I am optimistic that we can get our society on to this path. In that spirit, I would love to hear your thoughts if you take a few minutes to read the Earth Charter.

*****

* My hot beverage of choice is a cup of organic Fair Trade coffee with soy milk. (A decaf soy latte would be divine if I could find a cafe with Fair Trade espresso beans.) So I was quite interested in the discussion over at SustainableGirl's place about bleached coffee filters. I felt pretty good about my practice of using unbleached coffee filters purchased at my local co-op until I looked more carefully at the nearly empty box and found that they were a product of Sweden. Um, shipping coffee filters from Sweden doesn't strike me as the most sustainable choice. Ugh. I walked over to the same co-op yesterday and picked up a reusable coffee filter made of hemp by a family business in Washington State. For $4, I'm promised years of use. So far it has worked like a charm and is easy to clean. Highly recommended!

Evolution of a Vegetarian (Part 2): Why I Am a Vegetarian

2005-12-17T11:44:00.000-05:00

I don't believe that we are isolated consumers, alienated from what gives life, and condemned to make a terrible mess of things on this planet. I believe we are human beings, flawed but learning, stumbling but somehow making our way toward wisdom, sometimes ignorant but learning through it all to live with respect for ourselves, for each other, and for the whole Earth community. - John Robbins

Yesterday I wrote about the reason that I became a vegetarian - - the gut reaction that I had to learning about the cruel and inhumane treatment of animals on the standard industrial factory farm. (If you want to test your own reaction, check out this or this.) Over the six years since I stopped eating meat, the reasons that I am a vegetarian have strengthened and broadened. It's no longer just factory farming at issue for me.

A lot of people asked a lot of questions about my vegetarianism. Some I could answer easily: Where do you get protein? Beans, tofu, eggs, nuts, etc. Don't you think that humans occupy a higher rung on the food chain because we're supposed to eat animals? Um, I don't have a problem with eating animals per se. But unless you're in the Vice President's office, being in a position of power doesn't justify systematic torture that is nowhere close to being natural .

Other questions made me realize that I wanted to learn more about where our food comes from. John Robbins' book, The Food Revolution, was an enormous help in connecting the dots for me. Robbins' description of the knowledge that led him to a vegan lifestyle echoed the path that I (quite unexpectedly) found myself on:

I was learning that the same food choices that do so much to prevent disease - that give you the most vitality, the strongest immune system, and the greatest life expectancy - were also the ones that took the least toll on the environment, conserved our precious natural resources, and were the most compassionate toward our fellow creatures.

I learned about the antibiotics fed to livestock and the pesticides that accumulate in grain-fed cattle. I learned that we're feeding nearly half of the grain that the world produces and 70% of America's grain production to livestock in return for only a tiny fraction of nutrients at the same time that we think about hunger as an intractable problem. I learned about the land and water use from meat production. (As compared to the resources used to make pasta, meat uses 20 times the land, and generates three times the greenhouse-gas emissions. Check out this Ask Umbra column.) For more background information on the environmental and health benefits of a vegetarian diet, check out the list of my favorite vegetarian resources below.

I discovered delicious vegetarian meals. I became more confident in my decision to exclude meat entirely from my diet. While much of the reading that I did also implicated dairy farming practices, I still eat dairy and eggs. Logical fallacy, perhaps? I admit that it would be ideal if I could eschew those animal products too. But life is a contiuum and a series of steps. The step that I can do and have done joyfully for six years is not eating meat. Becoming a strict vegan would require a drastic lifestyle change for me (no goat cheese! no omelets!). Instead, I try to be especially careful to buy dairy products that are produced in a sustainable way that doesn't harm the chickens or cows. Small, local, organic family farms are always the best and tastiest choice. I also really enjoy soy products, so switching from cow's milk to soy milk was pretty easy for me.

Being a vegetarian isn't a sacrifice for me. It's a way to align my values with the food on my plate. But I don't think I could do it without truly enjoying an abundance of delicious vegetarian food. Is being a vegetarian the answer for everyone? Probably not. Others may find a different place on the contiuum is right for them. Maybe it's eating one less meal of beef in a week. (According to New American Dream, for every 1,000 who do that, we save over 70,000 pounds of grain, 70,000 pounds of topsoil and 40 million gallons of water per year.) Maybe it's eating humanely-raised, hormone- and antibiotic-free meat as my husband does. Maybe it's referring to a handy wallet card that helps you choose fish responsibly. The point is that we can all be aware of how our food choices have a profound impact on the web of life and then do what we can...joyfully.

A Few Favorite Vegetarian Resources:

On the big picture: The Food Revolution; Hope's Edge
On nutrition: Becoming Vegetarian
On yummy cooking: Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone; Moosewood Cooks at Home; The Modern Vegetarian Kitchen

Evolution of a Vegetarian (Part 1): Why I Became a Vegetarian

2005-12-16T10:12:00.000-05:00

"So, why did you become a vegetarian?" Like most other vegetarians I know, I have been asked this question many times since I've stopped eating meat. I don't mind the question, of course, but lately I've been thinking about whether a more appropriate question might focus less on the impetus of my vegetarianism ("why did you become a vegetarian?") and more on why I have remained one for nearly six years ("why are you a vegetarian?"). It's not that the reasons have dramatically shifted so much as they've evolved. My thinking about vegetarianism is more expansive, more complex now.

(The second most common question is about exactly what I do eat, so I'll get that out of the way upfront. I'm not a vegan, but I am a strict lacto-ovo vegetarian. That means I don't eat meat, poultry, fish or anything made with them. Dairy and eggs are okay, but more on that in Part 2.)

Ok, let's start with the first question. Why did I become a vegetarian? Around the holiday season six years ago, I was registering for courses for my last semester of law school. I had to fulfill a writing requirement, so I wanted to opt for a seminar that would allow me to research and write about something engaging, something different, something that would hold my attention longer than secured transactions... When I read the description of an Animal Rights Law class in the course catalog, it gave me pause. It seemed "out there" to me at the time, and the fact that the law school was offering the course for the first time in its venerable history (gag!) created quite the stir on campus. I had never given much thought to animal rights, but I did have a dog for the first time in my life. My compassion for animals blossomed with the faithful companionship that I shared with my pup. I never would have considered the class if I didn't have her. In a way, then, I guess my dear dog (rest her soul!) is the reason I became a vegetarian. Let's not get ahead of ourselves though.

Having signed up for the course and after enduring some raised eyebrows about my choice, I showed up to the first class in February 2000 without any preconceived expectations. The professor was Steven Wise, a practicing animal rights lawyer and author who waded through the political landmines of teaching Harvard Law School's first-ever class on animal rights law with great aplomb. His first assignment for the hodge-podge of students (some dedicated animal protection or environmental advocates, some interested students without a particularly well-organized set of thoughts about the role of legal protections for animals, and a few snarky right-wingers who would sign up for a course just to argue their point of view) was a thick binder of background reading compiled from a variety of sources. Over the weekend, I settled in on my loveseat, with my dog's head resting on my lap, and cracked open the binder. Good Lord! Professor Wise was pulling no punches here! He had assembled a history of factory farming complete with photos of artificially big-breasted chickens stacked atop each other in cages piled high to the rafters of huge coops, descriptions of the imprecise science of killing a cow for meat when the original stunning fails, depictions of pigs living in small wooden pens where they were unable to move or nurse their young. It was not for the faint of heart. And it didn't exactly make you want to enjoy chicken pot pie for dinner. After reading about the factory farm system for hours, I had the most basic of reactions: my stomach can't handle meat tonight with those pictures dancing in my head; veggie stir-fry it is!

When I woke up the next morning, I realized that I still wasn't ready to eat meat. It just didn't feel right. I walked my dog over to the local dog park to frolic, and a question occurred to me that was striking in its simplicity. If I believe that my dog can feel pain (which I was sure of after watching her recover from a painful hip surgery earlier that year) and the thought of her suffering makes me distraught, how can I abide contributing to the pain and suffering of another species of animal just because I don't share the same kind of emotional attachment to it? As long as the factory farm system continues, I thought, I really don't want to contribute to it. I dropped my dog off at home, walked to the bookstore, bought Becoming Vegetarian to bone up on the nutritional aspects of not eating meat, and called my parents that night to announce that I wasn't sure if I could meat again. But it turns out I was sure -- I haven't had meat since then.

So the reason that I became a vegetarian was quite specific and based on a visceral, compassionate reaction (one that I didn't expect to have, by the way): the treatment of animals at factory farms is morally wrong. As we all know, when you take an action that challenges the status quo in some way, some view it as a great opportunity to test the logic of your philosophy. I was quite unprepared for the barrage of questions intended to pick apart any lack of coherence in my reasoning. The most frequently asked follow-up questions: (1) Farm animals are raised to be eaten. That's their purpose. Don't you agree that humans are at the top of the food chain? (2) Do you wear leather? How is that any different? (3) Why not just buy meat that is not from factory farms? (4) So you don't eat sushi? What about scallops? How about calamari? Oysters? Mussels? Please don't tell me that you won't eat the crab dip!

I didn't have answers at the ready for these types of questions; I just didn't want animals to suffer because of my eating habits. Why was my diet being analyzed, sometimes by people I didn't even know very well? Why did this decision cause others to foam at the mouth in the hopes that my reasoning would be discovered to be faulty? In time, the answers came to me and my reasons for being a vegetarian broadened and became much more complex. Stay tuned for Part 2: Why I Am a Vegetarian.

(It's worth noting here that while I had always enjoyed eating meat, I also really liked every vegetable I had ever tried and a wide variety of foods (i.e, I'm not a picky eater) so making the shift to a vegetarian diet wasn't as difficult for me as I think that it can be for others. It also helped that the madgeneral was off "kickin' it" in Albuquerque at the time and not around to plea for my special meatloaf recipe. Which was damn good.)

Rolling Right Along

2005-12-14T19:41:00.000-05:00

While I should be making batches of biscotti a la Farmgirl for yuletide giving, wrapping up my holiday presents in recycled paper Spiral-style, or planning a beachy end-of-the-year getaway like Laurie (in my dreams...), I've been indulging in some excellent online reading. I've added a few of my latest finds to my blogroll. Check them out when a cup of coffee and thoughtful writing sound more appealing than trying to come up with an appropriate gift for Aunt Martha:

Spiral's been making good sense of simple living: from energy-efficient hairdrying to shopping local for the holidays.

A blogger that I used to faithfully read for her insightful and personal comments about her environmental awakening is back with a vengeance. If you drink coffee (and I know you do...), you must see SustainableGirl's posts about coffee filters and the chemical soup that comes from the bleached paper variety. She's also inspired me to finally purchase a copy of the End of Suburbia DVD rather than waiting for Netflix to upgrade it from "very long wait" on my queue.

I found Choosing Hope via firedoglake and knew that I might have stumbled upon a kindred spirit when the first post that I read was about Frankie Lappe. Walker's thoughts on stating the obvious are dead-on too.

And, last but not least, is my husband who is "making MacArthur look like Mary Poppins," as his tagline now reads at madgeneral. (I'm not sure where he gets this stuff...) In any event, his post on Wal-Mart makes mine look like a spoonful of sugar.

So, I'll keep reading, we'll all keep writing, and maybe we'll roll a little closer to a better world.

Smile! It's Recycled and Recyclable

2005-12-13T23:50:00.000-05:00

When our household finally kicks the killer cold strain that has cruelly descended upon us during the holiday rush, it'll be time to replace our germ-infested toothbrushes (lovely image, yes?). Throwing away a toothbrush is one of those mundane tasks that gives me pause when I consider that there is no "away" and the toothbrush will meet millions of others in a landfill somewhere. I recently read here that if we continue to discard toothbrushes at the current rate as recommended by our dentists, 50 million pounds of toothbrushes will end up landfills each year.

So I was quite pleased when I saw a local company's sustainable solution at Trader Joe's. Recycline's product is brilliantly simple: the Preserve toothbrush is made of nylon plus 100% recycled polypropylene from Stonyfield Farm yogurt cups. The really cool part (if you're into these things...) is that the handle and nylon bristles are recycled by Recycline when consumers return them to the company in the postage-paid envelope available at the store where the toothbrush was purchased. Recycline grinds up the toothbrush to make recycled plastic lumber for outdoor furniture.

Recycline has my wallet's vote in the dental department. Ethical consumerism won't change the disposable society that we live in overnight, but it's always encouraging to find a company who is doing things just a bit more sustainably.

Listen to the Silence

2005-12-13T11:36:00.000-05:00

The climate summit in Montreal has come and gone. As I mentioned before, we didn't hear much about it even after Bill Clinton showed up to refute Bush's claims that Kyoto or any measure like it "would wreck the US economy." Even Bill McKibben couldn't get geared up for the talks. Check out his piece in Grist this week. Two lessons come to mind from the uproar that never was:

1. The bad news: corporate control of our government is out of hand. I know, I know--this is not an earth-shattering revelation. But McKibben's description of how the US representative in Montreal was handpicked by ExxonMobil and delivered to the administration on a platter is striking in its simplicity: the folks at our favorite big oil company send a fax to the White House and Dennis Hastert's senior aide is hired to serve as its chief climate negotiater. It's as easy as that. Ah, blessed democracy! (By the way, reading Ross Gelbspan's book Boiling Point is a good way to get fired up about this...just be prepared to have a glass of wine, take a walk, or do whatever it is you do to calm yourself down after reading a few pages of it.)

2. The good news: inspired individuals are not giving up the fight. In the face of our government's egregious blockade of meaningful progress on global warming (or any other environmental issue for that matter), McKibben highlights the efforts of young activists keeping the faith about the power of engaging in the work of democracy. They're taking the simple, optimistic steps from which I derive so much hope: holding meetings, handing out low-energy lightbulbs, and creating community. Just like the kids protesting Wal-Mart, the message is simple and clear. We need to change the way we live - now. Is anyone listening?

Let's Follow Their Lead

2005-12-12T15:10:00.000-05:00

Come on Wal-Mart, don't delay, do what's right this holiday. - Chant of 5th graders protesting outside Framingham, Massachusetts Wal-Mart store

The Boston Globe reported today that a group of fifth-grade students showed up at a local Wal-Mart yesterday demanding that a letter protesting the store's purchase of items from sweatshops be received by the store manager and then sent to Wal-Mart's CEO. Read the story here. The simplicity of the arguments made by these kids is a good reminder of the pure compassion of the human soul. One ten-year-old put it best: "It's not that we don't like Wal-Mart. We don't like what they do. Basically, we're just here to get the message out: Stop shopping at Wal-Mart until they stop using sweatshop labor." When you put it that way, it's hard to argue with.

(A Wal-Mart spokesperson was quick to dismiss any allegations of sweatshop labor as a "major campaign by union-based organizations to tarnish our reputation." Hmmm...I didn't know that the fifth-graders were union operatives...interesting. This Daily Kos post has links to two mainstream press reports about Wal-Mart sweatshops, but you need only google "Wal-Mart sweatshops" to get many more stories.)

Grounds for Change

2005-12-12T11:03:00.000-05:00

We often hear about the rising obesity epidemic among kids these days, and we also hear all about the causes of it: less time spent outdoors, no physical education classes or recess, the prevalence of excessively sugar-laden foods and sodas, etc. We also know that there are alternatives to this way of life. School gardens, such as Alice Waters' edible schoolyard in Berkeley, are a promising example of how we can help children connect the food they eat with the health of the planet and their bodies. These kinds of hopeful initiatives bring beauty to the barren lawns that have become standard issues at some schoolyards while reducing the pollutants pumped into the air from diesel trucks carrying produce across the country (or from New Zealand!) into our school cafeterias.

Despite the obvious benefits of these kinds of programs, we are stuck in the status quo where Coke, candy, and chips are sold to kids all over school grounds. The federal government is doing very little to stop junk food at the schoolhouse doors. (No surprise there given the power of the food industry lobby.) The good folks at Commercial Alert describe the current regulatory situation:

"Federal restrictions on the sale of junk food in school are extremely weak. The definition of junk food is narrow. It includes only sodas, water ices, chewing gum and candies made mostly of sugar. Even worse, the US Dept. of Agriculture can only stop the sale of these foods during mealtimes in cafeterias-- not in vending machines elsewhere in school, or school stores..."

Pretty pathetic, isn't it? A new piece of pending legislation called the Child Nutrition Promotion and School Lunch Protection Act would expand how "junk food" is defined for purposes of restricting its sale at schools. The legislation would also restrict the sale of junk food in all areas of schools.

This legislation is a good first step in changing the way that we teach our children about the food on their plates (or in their wrappers...). Why not write to your represenatives and ask them to co-sponsor this legislation? A sample letter is here. Then, we can move on to showing kids the beautiful and tasty alternatives that exist. Real change starts from the ground up.

Low Impact Holidays

2005-12-11T10:19:00.000-05:00

Greenies may do a great job at all of those small actions that add up throughout the year but when December rolls around, things get sticky. Travel, shopping, traffic jams, shipping, etc. all seem like just another part of the holiday season that we can all too easily blindly accept at this time of year. I've been trying to remind myself that Christmas doesn't have to be completely at odds with ecological responsibility. For inspiration, I've been checking out New American Dream's useful tips on simplifying the holidays here.

Here are the main steps I'm taking this year to reduce my ecological footprint during the holiday season:

1. Location, location, location. Like others this holiday season (see good posts here and here), I am trying to support independent, local businesses when shopping for the Christmas presents on my list. I think that the idea of a buynothingchristmas is great, but putting that in to practice this year isn't going to happen. The discussion over at Laurie's pretty much sums it up for me too. My family exchanged gifts at Thanksgiving since we're not going to be together for Christmas, and we tamed the spending madness by setting a dollar limit. We were able to find gifts at independent businesses, and I think it was a success.

Now we're in the middle of shopping for my husband's side of the family, and the goal is to spend our dollars at local, non-chain stores. (By local I mean within a vicinity of about ten miles, but preferably even closer.) I like to buy gifts that educate, inspire or are practical in some way...oh yeah, and that won't break the bank. So we'll be hitting the great toy store down the street (filled with toys that don't require batteries or make the parents feel insane when the same song repeats again and again), a fabulous independent bookstore not far from here, a nearby book and cd shop that carries a diverse selection of music (and the owner lets you open up the cds and have a listen over the store's stereo first), and the local Ten Thousand Villages for fairly traded hand-made goodies.

2. Waste Begone! I have a passion for using reusable bags (hey, there's a great gift idea...), so I am determined not to be caught without one of my hemp shopping bags when a gift buying opportunity crops up. Our families are used to getting gifts from us wrapped in the Sunday comics or re-used wrapping paper with gift tags made from last year's holiday cards, so I'll be continuing that tradition as well. I'm going to have to ship some of the gifts though, so there's no avoiding packaging all together. I've been saving boxes and packing materials, so I can reuse those but it's not ideal.

3. A Spoonful of Hope. I know that I am blessed to have the luxury of contemplating how to have a greener Christmas when so many others will just be continuing the search for clean water, a stable food supply, and a warm shelter. So I've added another gift to my list: a package of honey bees and a hive from Heifer International for a family to use in creating a reliable source of income. (As an aside, Barbara Kingsolver wrote a great essay about Heifer's positive effect in Peru in the latest issue of Mother Earth News. The article is not online, but check it out at the library or pick up a copy of the magazine...then share it with a friend.)

Is this Christmas going to be an all-local, all-organic, all-independent, waste-free celebration of charitable giving? Not quite. But it is going to be a little greener and a little sweeter.

A Joyful Process

2005-12-10T10:46:00.000-05:00

The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory. - Howard Zinn

Lately it seems that I keep coming back to a familiar theme: how not to get bogged down in the despair that comes with caring, as Andrea so aptly put it. So the message that hit home for me in last night's brief interview with Frances Moore Lappe on PBS's NOW was quite simple: living an engaged life is the good life. It's not dull or boring to get informed and take action. It's the heart of what it means to be involved in society, and there is joy in connecting with others and trying to change the world. Of course, reading here that Bush's job approval rating is on the rise is enough to make even the most committed citizen feel more cynical than joyful. That's when we need to take the long view and realize that today's actions may not yield any results in the foreseeable future...but we have to keep faith that they will change things. And we need to feel joy in the process. After the program, I curled up (with a box of tissues -- the baby and I are both fighting a nasty cold) and re-read a Howard Zinn essay in the worthwhile collection, The Impossible Will Take a Little While. Zinn seemed to speak to my state of mind. Read a shorter, modified form of the essay here if you need to be reminded why being "hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is also based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness."

Intelligent Optimism

2005-12-09T10:48:00.000-05:00

The slogan on the cover of Ode magazine caught my eye the other day: "for intelligent optimists". That's what I'd like to be! I find inspiration - and even optimism - in the elegance of simple solutions to complex problems and in knowing that people are making life-affirming decisions each day. In the face of the seemingly intractable despair that I could fall prey to if I let myself wallow in the worst of what is happening today, I turn to books, film, and media sources that tell the other side of the story. For example, I'd rather learn about the social factors inside a prison that contribute to a revolving door from a story that tells about someone who is trying to change those factors. It renews my faith in humanity and gets me excited to do my part too. It makes me hopeful, which is no small task sometimes. But my optimism is a hungry beast that constantly needs to be fed. Without a daily dose of inspiration, it withers under the scary stories of the status quo that are trumpeted by the media bullies. So I am always on the lookout for new sources of hope, inspiration, and optimism (suggestions appreciated!).

A few years ago I found the work of Frances Moore Lappe. Lappe is best-known for her 1970s bestseller, Diet for a Small Planet, about the root causes of hunger in a world of plenty. Having never read that book, I wasn't familiar with Lappe when I stumbled across her 2002 book, co-written with her daughter Anna, called Hope's Edge: The Next Diet for a Small Planet. It was a revelation to me! My passion for food as a means to connect all sorts of complicated issues through a medium that is essential to life itself was stoked by the stories of individuals and groups challenging our notions about the industrial food system and chemically-dependent agribusiness. I learned more about the systemic problems that our communities face (the prevailing food system is just one connecting thread to a host of social, environmental, and spiritual problems) in the context of optimism and hope. Later, I heard Lappe speak at an urban agriculture conference sponsored by the industrious and inspired teens of The Food Project, and I was hooked on her brand of intelligent optimism.

Yesterday I finished reading Lappe's latest book, Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life. In it, Lappe expands upon the framework that she explored in her earlier works. She writes about how the lack of an informed, engaged citizenry leads to the social and environmental conditions in our society that none of us, as individuals, would want. She argues that we need to live democracy each day. We can do this by creating connections and community rather than accepting "thin democracy rooted in a narrowly individualistic, material view of life." In essence, we can create the world that we want by feeding the intelligent optimist within. It's a daily task that requires deliberate attention to seek out the life-giving examples in our midst and then to create our own path. Lappe's books have given me much-needed fuel to keep my fire going.

Frances Moore Lappe is appearing on PBS's NOW this evening. I'll share my thoughts tomorrow, but I'd also love to hear yours. Let's expand the community of intelligent optimists!

Coming to Our Senses

2005-12-08T09:02:00.000-05:00

Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. - Rachel Carson

The frenzy of December always makes me feel more stressed than festive. I have a few secret weapons that usually help combat the craziness: copious amounts of red wine, cooking up soups and other warm dishes (the vegetable curry from the new Moosewood cookbook has done the trick recently), and taking long walks. Long walks in spring, summer, and autumn are easy in New England. Harsh winds and early sunsets make long winter walks more challenging. But somehow those cold strolls outside always leave me exhilarated. Maybe it's because I can notice the little things that the glory of springtime blooms, the lush green abundance of summer, and autumn's flashy colors obscure with their granduer. When I am aware of my presence as a part of nature by experiencing the natural world outside my windows in every season, a wellspring starts to trickle within me. I want to explore more, to learn more...to be more worthy of the gifts of the earth.

For many, the sensory experiences that come from spending time in nature are the necessary precursors to effective environmental advocacy. I recently read a collection of correspondence between Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman. The two women were intimate friends who shared a deep love of nature -- not just the nature of grandiose mountain vistas or spectacular sunsets, but the nature found in a partially frozen tide pool on the coast of Maine in the dead of winter. In trying to explain the depth of feeling in her writing about the environment, Carson wrote to her friend, “I doubt that I could explain how any particular feeling or effect is achieved…but if there is any simple explanation I think it is that my sensory impressions of, and emotional response to, the world of nature date from earliest childhood, and that the factual knowledge was acquired much later.” Our experiences in nature create sensory responses and feelings that are powerful and formative. They make us hungry for more....and, if we're lucky, they make us the most effective advocates for our environment. What if Rachel Carson had not experienced nature as a child?

The problem is that many of us live lives that lack any regular contact with the natural world. Now, I realize that we all are nature; that is, we are a part of nature. Nature isn't something that we walk out of door into. That said, many of us spend our days in the car, in front of the computer, at the gym on a treadmill, back in the car, then in front of the television for a few hours before bed. It makes it pretty hard to see, smell, taste, touch, or hear the earth. The connection starts to wither, the well begins to dry. If we're lucky, we can call upon fond memories of time spent outdoors as children. We can renew those early moments when our senses ruled our time by walking while looking carefully at our surroundings, breathing deeply in the cold winter air, and slowing down to notice what is alive in nature in any season.

I worry that today's children will not grow up with those deep connections that can sustain us as adults and make us want to preserve and conserve the ecology around us. Richard Louv, an author and columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, wrote an excellent book called Last Child in the Woods about the disconnect between children and nature. Louv describes "nature deficit disorder," his non-scientific term for many children's lack of direct experiences in the natural world. Louv makes a convincing case that this way of living - apart from nature rather than as a part of it - affects kids physically and spiritually. And it's only becoming more common as wilderness areas, parks, and open space decrease at the same rapid pace that the calendars of our kids become booked. Time to explore or lay in the grass and daydream gives way to yet another sports practice or studying for the next state-imposed standardized test. At the same time, the amount of unhindered space dwindles, kids munch on processed food shipped from 3,000 miles away, and the television sucks away imagination. It's all connected and it makes my head spin! (Is it too early for a glass of wine?) The reasons for our collective nature deficit disorder - in children and adults - are a complex tangle of social and environmental factors.

The good news is that the solutions hinge on the flip side of this interconnection. Once we move society onto a more life-affirming path with less television and video games and more time in the woods, for example, there can be a ripple effect. So I'm going to bundle up and head out for a brisk walk and a dose of wonder. Then I'm going to get a hot cup of coffee and get to work on adding my drop to the bucket.

Demand Answers: Sign the Letter to Starbucks

2005-12-07T08:54:00.000-05:00

I said in my last post that citizens are seeking to interact with corporations in ways other than the traditional consumer-supplier relationship. Shareholder activism, lobbying for changes to corporate law to permit (require?!) corporations to consider a triple bottom line, conscientious purchasing decisions, shopping local...and even meetings with global corporations to discuss whether their commitment to Fair Trade and social responsibility is as strong as their marketing department would have us believe. Green LA Girl has organized a meeting with representatives from Starbucks to discuss how the chain has failed the Starbucks Challenge over and over again. At the meeting, she will present the folks from the corporate social responsibility division of Starbucks with this letter demanding answers to some of the questions that the challenge has raised. This is your chance to make your voice heard. We may do lots of complaining about the unbridled power of corporations, but we've also got to be willing to sit down at the table with them. Consumers have more power than we know - let's use it! Please sign the letter at Green LA Girl or City Hippy today.

What's Your Bottom Line?

2005-12-05T18:53:00.000-05:00

I spent a lot of time in the car this weekend traveling back home after a couple of weeks out of town. Watching the landscape go by out the window simultaneously inspires me (how resilient nature is!) and depresses me (how destructive we are!). Either way, a road trip always makes me think about the big picture. And recently I'm finding that I can't think about the direction of our society and earth without seeing The Almighty Market's presence on the horizon. Corporate responsiblity has been cropping up on a regular basis, it seems. From analyzing the Wal-Mart movie to taking the Starbucks Challenge, a lot of us are concerned about the effect of "global corporatism" (Frances Moore Lappe's preferred term for globalization) on our society and our planet. We've decided that our government is too busy with "staying the course" in Iraq and concocting immoral budget bills to focus on the growing feeling of disconnect between what we as individuals want from a just society and what is being served up to us in big box stores, fast food restaurants, and a corporate-funded media. It's time for individuals to interact with corporations in new ways that go beyond the consumer-supplier relationship.

The recent emphasis on the so-called triple bottom line is heartening. Check this out for a brief background on this new way to analyze corporate results. Instead of thinking only about quarterly earnings - the traditional bottom line that measures corporate success - analyzing the triple bottom line gets us to look at two additional factors: social responsibility and environmental sustainability. This big picture approach makes good sense as a way to invest our money and make choices about the goods we buy. Using this approach can also remind us to think about the consequences of all of our actions on "the big picture."

So I've started to look more critically at all of my decisions during the day, starting with the most simple and mundane: paper, plastic or cloth? drive or walk to the store? fill up travel mug with organic Fair Trade coffee at home or try my luck at Starbucks where only 1.6% of the coffee is Fair Trade? And what I've found is that the right decisions often end up being good for more than just the traditional economic bottom line. A few examples:

I take a large canvas bag and three smaller hemp bags to the grocery store. Turns out that what's best for the environment is also slightly better economically thanks to the (small) discount that the market gives for bringing your own bags. It also saves my kitchen from being overrun with plastic bags.
When I decide to buy Christmas gifts at my local bookstore rather than a big box bookstore or Amazon, I am not contributing to the demand that makes corporate executives think that another large, anonymous book warehouse is needed in a new shopping center, my dollars are going back to my community, and I get some great personal recommendations from the owner.
I brew a pot of coffee in the morning and fill up my travel mug. I don't have to use a paper cup with plastic top and cardboard sleeve, I am sure that I am getting Fair Trade, organic, shade-grown coffee, and I save myself some money.
When I walk to the local co-op to buy groceries, I reduce the amount of carbon emissions that I'm responsible for while also saving money on ridiculous gas prices, refusing to support oil companies, and getting exercise.

You get the idea. Considering the triple bottom line just makes sense. When you get down to it, the right decision starts to seem obvious even if it's not the norm in today's low-cost, convenience-driven society. It's not always easy, but I'm committed to asking myself about how my actions affect the big picture today. Let's start there.

Get on Board

2005-12-01T16:14:00.000-05:00

People get ready, there's a train a-comin'. You don't need no baggage, you just get on board. - Curtis Mayfield

Isn't it interesting how little we've heard about the UN's Climate Change Conference in Montreal? Isn't it interesting that the administration put out a handy read at home guide to the Iraq war this week? I'm not a conspiracy theorist by any stretch (well, on a bad day I could be convinced that there are some pretty shady dealings going on behind the curtain at the White House...), but the timing of these kinds of things always seems a bit suspect to me. Anyway, we know that the media do a great job of keeping the debate going about whether global warming exists despite overwhelming scientific proof that it not only exists, it's getting worse with each passing day. We know that our personal choices do make a difference in the fate of our planet, especially when the decisions relate to how we heat our home, what kind of car we drive, how much time we spend behind the wheel, and what kind of food we eat. We also know that without broad-based pressure on the very structure of global corporatism, we're going to have a hard time sleeping at night knowing that our children and their children will have to live with our reticence.

So it's good to see this MSNBC article about the protests and activism scheduled for this Saturday, December 3rd. Most of the events are being organized by the Climate Crisis Coalition and many will be in Montreal. But events are being held around the country and around the world. Check here to see if there is an action planned for your area.

While many see demonstrations and public actions as a relic of the Vietnam era, hitting the streets is crucial for reminding anyone who's listening in Washington that the debate is over and the time to act is now. Global warming is not a distant problem that Americans don't care about. It's real. It's happening now. And it's our responsibility to fight like hell to stop it.

It's All Relative: Another Starbucks Challenge

2005-11-30T10:54:00.000-05:00

I still haven't done the Starbucks Challenge myself, but I have been evangelizing about it quite a bit. It must be working because I got the following email from my sister-in-law reporting on the results of the challenge she took last Friday:

Store Address:
Galleria at Mt. Lebanon
1500 Washington Road
Pittsburgh, PA

Result:
Positive but not total victory

Description:
We waited in a line out the door of a Starbucks in a local mall on Black Friday for a coffee. No Fair Trade coffee brewed but once we asked for it, they immediately offered to french press one for us and indicated the display of Fair Trade coffee which we could purchase. It would have been nice if it was already brewed.

A quick question about the challenge: What if you want a cappuccino or latte? Particularly, this time of year it is nice to get a egg nog latte or gingerbread latte. Is the coffee used in these drinks Fair Trade? If not, is it possible to get the coffee in these drinks Fair Trade as well?

*****

My sister-in-law's questions about Starbuck's espresso beans are good ones, especially when it's obvious from any trip to a Starbucks location that many customers order the specialty coffee drinks that really make some dough for the company. Green LA Girl addressed this question here. The answer is that Starbucks does not use Fair Trade espresso. Seems that Starbucks is blaming the lack of Fair Trade espresso on a dearth of customer demand for it. The idea of the omniscient marketplace silently responding to customer demand seems a bit insincere given the way that many of the Starbucks locations have failed to provide Fair Trade coffee even when a customer asks for it. If you'd like to order a soy latte or some other expensive and yummy caffeine concoction and you'd like for the farmers who grew those espresso beans to be paid a fair wage, why not drop the folks at Starbucks headquarters a line and demand it? The comment form is here.

Field Notes from the Burbs: Part Two

2005-11-30T10:20:00.000-05:00

Five of us spent the greater part of Sunday afternoon raking leaves. It's an activity that brings back memories of the sunny autumn afternoons of my childhood. Dragging a rake through grass for hours got me thinking about lawns and how very, very much of the green stuff there is in the suburbs. Seeding, fertilizing, and mowing the big lawns that surround American houses has become something like a national pastime. Perhaps those images of the Kennedy kids throwing the ol' football around on the lawn of their estate really inspired us. Whatever the cause, we've created large swaths of land covered in grass and often populated with a few conical shrubs and trees.

I had a hunch that all of this grass isn't the best for Mother Earth given the amount of chemical inputs that many weekend warriors pump into their lawns and the amount of pollution generated from gas mowers. This article gives the details on the impact of lawns on the environment.

Now, let's take a minute and envision the suburbs with less grass. Not none at all, just less. I imagine houses having kitchen gardens where fresh herbs and healthy veggies grow organically, ready to be picked as part of the family meal. Less time and money would be sucked into the Big Food industry and we probably wouldn't need all those plastic bags. I also imagine native plants, shrubs, and trees attracting songbirds and other wildlife. Perhaps a rainwater collection system would allow us to nourish all of these new plants without the full-time sprinkler approach that is necessary to support a lush lawn. And with people growing food and noticing wildlife, perhaps we'd start communicating with our neighbors a bit more: sharing that huge zucchini yield, commenting on the bluebird that landed in our crabapple tree.

Winter is approaching and with it the time for dreaming of spring. In the midst of the holiday craze, let's nurture ideas for a different, gentler way to live on our little piece of the earth. For some great inspiration, you can't beat what the folks over at Path to Freedom are doing on just a 1/4 acre in Pasadena. And check out the National Wildlife Federation's Backyard Habitat Certification Project for great ideas on how to create habitat for wildlife in suburban areas.

By growing some of our food (a subject I am passionate about) and creating wildlife habitats, we not only avoid some of the environmental pitfalls created by too much lawn, but we also send the message that we have not fallen for the empty promises of industrial agriculture and suburban sprawl.

Field Notes from the Burbs: Part One

2005-11-28T16:35:00.000-05:00

After an eye-opening journey from Boston just over a week ago, we are still visiting family where I grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh. Having lived in Boston for the past eight years, I can look at the suburban experience with fresh eyes. My thoughts about driving an SUV seem even more pertinent in the suburbs. In an urban area like Boston, I can to walk to the subway stop, take the train to work, run errands on foot, and get plenty of exercise at parks without having to travel ten minutes to a gym in my car.

When it comes to getting around, the contrast between the city and most suburbs is stark. Here outside of Pittsburgh, cars begin to feel essential- a dangerous state of mind that leads to complacency about America's reliance on driving. It begins to seem normal to crank up the car for a trip to the mailbox. It is so rare to see a walker or biker on the side of the road here! I guess most walking and biking is saved for parks...which everyone drives to.

It's not as if people who live in this area don't want to rely less on their cars. If nothing else, the Texas-sized gas prices have frightened people all over the country into thinking a bit more critically about transportation. The planning (or lack thereof) when the subdivisions went up in the 1950s did not include sidewalks or wide roads. And when sidewalks do exist in residential neighborhoods, they don't connect with the concrete jungle of big box stores where people engage in most of their economic lives. Despite our quiet neighborhood, I felt a bit nervous walking with a stroller and a dog the other day because I had to jump out of the way when a car whizzed past me. Forget about hitting the four-lane to walk to the supermarket!

What needs to happen? For one thing, we need to encourage better urban and suburban planning. Portland, Oregon seems to be doing a great job at encouraging bike commuting. Check out the Portland Department of Transportation's site for some inspiration. (I'd love to hear whether Portland's progress is real change or eco-hype from someone who lives there or visited recently.)

But what about the long-established suburban areas around the country like this one in Pittsburgh? How can we encourage people to drive less without adequate public transport, sidewalks, or bike lanes? Ideas?

The Power of a Cloth Sack

2005-11-27T10:59:00.000-05:00

I first noticed sideways glances and puzzled looks. Sometimes there were expressions of slight confusion from clerks: "You don't want a bag? You sure? Uh...ok." All of this makes me feel a bit giddy about the burgeoning revolution that could be in the works. We all know that the more than 500 billion (billion!) plastic bags consumed each year are terrible for the health of the planet. For a good reminder why, read this. That's why I have gradually tried to make the move to bringing canvas or hemp bags with me everywhere I go so that I never have an excuse for getting one of those pesky bags. I recently got a few of these on sale and I love them. I've found that if I always have a couple of bags rolled up in the car or in my diaper bag, it's really easy to use them. I still do use plastic bags for some produce at the supermarket so that I have pooper-scooper bags for use when walking the dog. (I know that there are biodegradable alternatives out there that I should look into as well.) All in all, bringing a reusable bag is an easy solution to a host of environmental problems.

Perhaps as important a reason to me for utilizing reusable bags when I shop is that it is a simple way to share my values with neighbors, strangers, and those I casually interact with during trips to the local market or drugstore. It's another opportunity to model the change that we want to see in our communities. Much like our choice of car can be a visible example of what our values are, walking home from the store with a canvas bag full of groceries or whatever items we've purchased shows others that we value the environment and that easy alternatives exist.

A note about cars as visible tokens of our values: I mentioned before that we drive an SUV that we purchased a few years ago for a variety of reasons. Would we make the same decision now? Probably not. Sometimes I feel incredible guilt about driving an SUV - and rightfully so. I'm acutely aware that driving - especially a vehicle that gets poor gas mileage - is up there as one of the single worst contributors to global warming and pollution. Thankfully, I can take mass transit to work and we only need to use our car for short city trips and when we travel to see family out of state a couple of times a year. I'm certainly not making excuses for owning an SUV. I doubt that my conscience will allow me to keep it forever. Part of my path is to figure out what changes I can make in my life as I move along the journey of learning and struggling to be the person that I hope to become. I'm not at the destination yet by any stretch. If we're honest, very few of us really are. But the revolution is starting with acts as simple and radical as choosing to bring a bag from home on our holiday shopping trip and supporting each other as we choose to make the small changes that will lead to the bigger ones. Onward!

Brewing Questions over Coffee

2005-11-26T08:37:00.000-05:00

I saw this piece on Thursday but just didn't want to think about it on Thanksgiving. I was trying to focus on the positive that day because I do have so much to be grateful for. But no matter how thankful I am for all I've been given, it's difficult to avoid feeling the weight of these issues every day. It was all I could do not to grill my seventy-nine year old grandfather about what he was doing to save the polar ice-cap!

According to the Reuters article, "Ocean and so-called greenhouse gas levels are rising faster than they have for thousands of years..." And guess what? Much of what the scientists found in the study shows that human activity is the cause. Now, why get more upset about this? Isn't this something we know and accept as reality?

My reaction to the report was to read the headline on Thursday, then scamper off and busy my mind with myriad other thoughts, each just so crucial: Would having another cup of coffee make me jittery or pleasantly chipper for our holiday guests? Would the baby nap long enough that I could steal a short nap and forego the coffee? Before I knew it, the baby was calling (read: screaming) and the decision was made for me. Anyway, the point is that global warming was the last thing on my mind....and I'm someone who thinks about the environment a lot, especially after I've had one of those cups of coffee.

So what is it about the thought of global warming that makes people shut down in some way? Is the potential for disaster simply too large for most of us to willingly face? The paradox is that the larger the problem the more urgent it is that we think about it, talk about it, and do everything we can to fix it -- yet we often only focus on the smaller, easily accessible issues of everyday life (more coffee?) in the face of a seemingly insurmountable dilemma. How can we start thinking about the destruction of the planet in a way that is as tangible and accessible as the morning coffee?

I might not have given further thought to yet another article about climate change had the first sentence not ended this way: "...according to two reports published on Thursday that are likely to fuel debate on global warming" (my emphasis). I know that the energy lobby and the corporate-controlled media would like for us to think that there is room for debate on the causes of global warming. And I realize that our government still questions the necessity of the Kyoto Protocol, a measure which stops far short of what we need to halt global warming. I know these things, but I guess I still find it hard to believe that there is really a "debate" about the existence of global warming.

How can we get past this red herring "debate?" How can we start making progress? How do we get people to stop burying their heads in the mundane and start working together to fix this? These are the questions I am thinking of this morning as I drink that cup of joe.

Just a Walk

2005-11-25T20:47:00.000-05:00

We went for a walk in a local park today. During the "off-season", some of the park roads that traverse steep hills and weave in between thick woods are closed. Closed roads meant that we could stroll on yesterday's layer of snow without cars racing by, without the roar of snow plows and salt trucks. Our breathing deepened just a bit. We spotted a bird, an American Kestrel my husband tells me, and stopped to admire it through the binoculars. We watched three white-tailed does stand atop a hill waiting for us to pass before making their way down to a stream for a drink. We listened to a woodpecker tapping on a tree somewhere out of sight. We exchanged pleasantries with a threesome walking arm in arm up the hill. We tried to identify some berries that had outgrown the boundary of the forest and spilled onto the road. We wondered about the animal that left tracks crisscrossing the road.

I guess you could say that we celebrated Buy Nothing Day with the simple gifts of nature on an empty road.

Hey Mr. Congressman

2005-11-24T12:40:00.000-05:00

At Andrea's behest, I snuck away from holiday preparations to write a quick letter reminding Mr. Mike Capuano that one of his constituents has a few things on her mind. Here's my letter. Who else needs an excuse to stop chopping celery and get a few things off their chest before loading their belly with Thanksgiving grub?

November 24, 2005

Office of Congressman Michael E. Capuano
1530 Longworth House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515

and

Office of Congressman Michael E. Capuano
110 First Street
Cambridge, MA 02141

Dear Representative Capuano:

I read with interest your op-ed piece in the Boston Herald on October 21, 2005. Thank you for continuing to oppose the unjust and unwise war in Iraq that is costing the United States its reputation for dignity and the financial security it needs in order to protect its citizens at home and respond compassionately to global need. But the cost is so much higher than reputation, or the vast sums of taxpayer dollars that are literally going up in smoke. The irreversible cost of this war is the many thousands of American and Iraqi lives lost or shattered. I look forward to learning your thoughts on policy going forward after the December election. I support drawing down our presence as soon as we can.

I am also writing to tell you about some issues that are on my mind as a constituent of the 8th district of Massachusetts.

1. The Health Care Accountability Act. I recently learned that half of all Wal-Mart employees are not covered by the company's health plan. This fact is appalling since we frequently hear that Wal-Mart’s profits and size are growing. The more surprising fact is that the uninsured employees of this profitable corporation are compelled to receive healthcare through the federal government. Every United States taxpayer, whether they support Wal-Mart’s policies or not, subsidizes Wal-Mart’s shortchanging of its workers and its failure to provide health care that is a real option for people struggling to get by on the low-wages paid by this company.

I urge you to co-sponsor and support the Health Care Accountability Act, introduced by Sen. Edward Kennedy and Rep. Anthony Weiner. As you know, this bill will require profitable companies like Wal-Mart to take responsibility for their employees' health care. It will prevent them from holding the American taxpayer accountable for their irresponsible treatment of employees.

2. Safe Breastmilk. I am impressed by your refusal to support legislation that weakens longstanding environmental protections, evidenced most recently by your rejection of Rep. Richard Pombo’s attempt to gut the Endangered Species Act. In an e-mail letter I received from your office on November 18, 2005, you expressed your outrage at Rep. Pombo’s attempt to diminish this critical piece of environmental legislation. You also said, “We owe it to our children and grandchildren to be good stewards of the environment.” I wholeheartedly agree. Yet, our lack of environmental stewardship allows for breastfeeding babies to ingest toxic chemicals through their mother’s milk – the very substance that provides nourishment and sustenance – every day. We do not yet fully understand how these chemicals interact in the complex human body, especially in small infants. But the United States does not currently have a program to test breastmilk in order to determine what substances are in it, or what dangers they may pose.

We need government funds to research and monitor the environmental toxins that accumulate in breastmilk. We need hearings on this issue. We need to get serious about protecting the health of the youngest and most vulnerable among us.

I would be happy to discuss these issues with you or a member of your staff. I can be reached at the address, e-mail address, and phone number listed above.

Sincerely,

Lauren

Toxic Bisque on Thanksgiving Menu

2005-11-23T17:54:00.000-05:00

I'm bringing toxic chemicals with me to our Thanksgiving celebration tomorrow. The convenient thing is, I don't even need to pack the chemicals in any special container, and they're readily portable! And when my two-month-old daughter breastfeeds day and night, she gets them too. Even though I eat a mostly organic, strictly vegetarian diet, odds are that my baby is filling her twelve pound body with a semi- toxic bisque eight to ten times a day.

By virtue of their spot at the top of the food chain, babies are able to receive powerful antibodies and immune-building substances through their mother's milk. Through the wonders of biomagnification, they also get the most contaminated of any food consumed by humans. The contanimation starts well before a baby has her first taste of milk. The Environmental Working Group's body burden study has identified the presence of 287 chemicals in umbilical cord blood. The contanimants only continue to build as mothers and babies engage in the natural symbiosis of feeding and eating. While the research about the effects of all of these toxic chemicals is growing (though mostly focused on their impact on adult males rather than newborn babies...), the truth is that we don't exactly understand how all of the pollutants in our air, water and soil work together in the complex ecology of the human body. We just know enough to be afraid.

As a new mother, I am horrified, and I'm raving mad. And I suspect that most of us, parents or not, would never choose a world in which a baby fills her tummy with PCBs, dioxin, and other chemical substances. I want to do my part to create a society that is sustainable and life-giving. We know that the declining health of our planet threatens future generations. As a collective body of individual decision-makers, we also need to be aware that our children's health is at risk from the imminent danger of man-made toxins, as the sustenance that nourishes and gives life to the young and voiceless is threatening their future health in ways that we do not fully comprehend.

What can we do? I've thought of a few starting points that I'm going to explore:

Become educated. Sandra Steingraber's informative and very readable book (even for a non-scientist like me), Having Faith: An Ecologist's Journey to Motherhood, is a good starting point. I read it for the first time a couple of years ago, but I think it's time for a refresher course. If anyone is interested in reading it, I'd love to compare notes.
Keep the environment in mind every day in every way. Many of us know good steps that we can take now to minimize pollution and the release of environmental toxins into the environment: drive less, walk or bike more; choose safer cleaning products; switch to compact flourescent lightbulbs; unplug appliances when not in use; minimize trash and waste; use reusable cloth napkins, silverware, shopping bags, and coffee cups; eat a local, organic, plant-based diet. We know these steps and so many more. Let's infuse our daily decisions with the urgency of a parent worried about a desperate child.
Advocate for breast milk monitoring. According to the NRDC, there are still not enough comprehensive studies on the subject of environmental contaminants in breast milk. (And we all know that if we don't have thousands of scientists telling us that there's a problem, then we won't take any action. Oh wait, even when we do have thousands of scientists telling us that life on earth as we know it is gravely threatened by global warming, we still don't do anything about it....) Breast milk monitoring programs - like those established in Sweden and Germany - provide much-needed data about which pesticides and chemicals that get into breast milk and what the effects are. The United States doesn't have a monitoring system in place for breast milk. The NRDC's Healthy Milk, Healthy Baby campaign suggests writing Congress and state legislatures asking for hearings on the issue and research funds.
Tell the EPA not to weaken toxics reporting. The EPA's toxics release inventory program is a searchable database of toxic chemical releases in neighborhoods across the country. The EPA plans to scale back this program and make it more difficult for the public to be informed about toxic releases. Write a letter to the EPA before December 5th urging them to preserve the toxics release inventory. Physicians for Social Responsibility has a sample letter and more information here.

Let's work together. What are our next steps?

Starbucks Challenge: On the Road

2005-11-22T19:43:00.000-05:00

We set off for the second leg of our trip yesterday - this time driving westward across Pennsylvania - with our baby and our dog. The drive went as well as could be expected: we talked landscape and birds, friends and faith; the baby slept soundly for most of the six hours; and we stumbled upon an opportunity to test a corporation's claims about social and environmental responsibility. We saw a Starbucks and decided to take the Starbucks challenge. As my motherly duty was called upon as we pulled into the parking lot, my husband valiantly agreed to take the challenge in my stead. His report:

Sideling Hill, Pennsylvania

Going along the turnpike through south-central PA, we saw a combo sign for Burger King, a Hershey's ice-cream stand, Sunoco, and a Starbucks. At first I thought, well this is a strange place for a Starbucks, but then I remembered what year it was (2005), what this company is about (global domination, with plans to bring outer space to its knees likely underway) and who their main competition in Sideling Hill is (?????Maxwell House?). My wife is never surprised to see another link in the Starbucks chain, only alarmed. She soon had that determined look she gets when she's thinking about sticking it to either me or some clear-cutting corporation whose tracks of greed have stretched far beyond main street and into places named after the side of a hill. "Oh man, we should take the Starbuck's challenge!" she said.

Ten minutes later, having been debriefed about green la girl and the Starbucks challenge and having agreed that it was a great idea and something we needed to do, I was told that I would be challenging Starbucks on this occasion. Our baby in the back seat was just then performing the kind of wild head rotations that mean trouble, and Lauren insisted on staying behind to feed her. I could do it, no problem, she said -- all by myself. So I left the car with our travel thermos feeling a little nervous. As I walked toward the glass doors of the rest station, a sort of crowded food court/toilet depot I thought: Sweet Jesus. There are a lot hungry people who really need to pee going in and out of there. What if I'm in line, demanding they brew a cup of fair trade coffee, saying things like "let's have an equal exchange" and "a fair shake for farmers," and some group of truckers who forgot to go to the bathroom before getting in line start doing the bladder dance and joining with other annoyed customers into some kind of coalition of the impatient against me? Do I have what it takes to handle something like that? Then, as I approached the front door, I had to wait for a family of about fifteen to get in there in front of me. After the last one entered, I took a step to get the door handle, but the little boy had stopped and was propping it open with his back, looking at me as if to say, "Are you coming in?" I was touched, and felt a little better about a lot of things. I decided that a kid holding the door was a sign that people were inherently good before their parents made them watch fox news or the president's state of the union address, and that I was the man to challenge Starbucks after all.

It wasn't much of a Starbucks, frankly. Just a large counter and a meandering rope-line to conduct us to the register, single file. It was a good, orderly line, with about ten people settling in behind me right away. I looked for solidarity in the faces there, but it was again proved true that no one enjoys being stared at. After ten minutes of rehearsing the lines Lauren had provided me to say, I reached the register. The following is a nearly actual transcript of my exchange with two very nice, unaccomodating employees:

Starbucks 1: "Hi. Can I help you."
Me: "Yes, may I have this (travel thermos) filled with your fair trade blend?"
Starbucks 1: "Yeah."

Here, after taking the thermos and turning toward the brewed coffee, she turned around and asked me what blend I had asked for.

Me: "Do you have a fair-trade blend?"
Starbucks 1: "No...Let me ask."

Starbucks 1 was already rattled by her last customer whose order she had sabotaged, a case of misfiring synapses. In her defense: She was young, perhaps inexperienced; she alone took orders and filled them; it was busy in there; there was reason to believe that it was always busy in there; she was working at the sideling hill rest stop; people were always coming off the highway to order complicated and expensive coffee-based cocktails with long, confusing names that were somehow very similar to each other. I felt bad for her. I could tell she was like "Fair trade! I'm hung over, what are you doing to me!" Anyway, she walked over to where a co-worker was standing. The co-worker had been writing something out, taking something into account when she was interrupted. I dared not think about the line behind me, which was now -- no exaggeration -- fifteen strong.

Starbucks 2: "Yes."
Me: "Yes, I'd asked for a fair trade blend."

Interestingly, after I'd been dished off to the superior, it was as though I'd been shut off from the side of the counter that had anything to do with the pouring of coffee. Indeed, Starbucks 1 had quickly taken the next customer. And although I'd only drifted to my left about three feet toward Starbucks 2, I felt that I'd been subtly dismissed into a different area, an invisible pen for grumblers to be dealt with apart from the easy flow of operations. God I'm paranoid!

Starbucks 2 simply said that they didn't have fair trade but that they sometimes do -- that they're limited to what they have brewing by the size of the store. I asked, "So it's not here?" She answered that it was not right now. Since it was clear to me that it was either not in the store, or she was not about to say that it was and give herself more work to do, I asked if they could fill the thermos with their "normal stuff." Later, thinking about how uncombatative and pleasant I had been, I became angry with myself and wished that I had yelled something like: "Oh, no fair-trade coffee today, huh, well just give me your best dark-roasted blend. You see, I've been in the mood to support working conditions in Africa and South America that are as close to slavery as you can get without actually holding hands and summoning Jefferson Davis back from hell."

So Lauren says that they failed the challenge, but those two women did nothing wrong. They were nice, and they were working hard at their job, and only one of them seemed to know what I was talking about and I can forgive her if she didn't take it as seriously as she might have or start sweating under the heat of (absent) protests. But her bosses at headquarters should be taking this a hell of a lot more seriously, and for them, my forgiveness is not so easily given. What is stopping them from having fair-trade coffee as an option for the throngs of tired consumers travelling down the highway? Indeed, what is keeping them from choosing, for an entire month, Cafe Estima as their "featured blend?" These are questions I have as a result of taking this challenge. Maybe someone can answer them.

The Ones Who Are Not Awake

2005-11-19T17:58:00.000-05:00

He or she who wakes up and understands is called a Buddha. It is as simple as that. - Thich Nhat Hanh

Yesterday morning, my husband and I packed our car to the brim with all of the essentials necessary for our first road trip with our new baby. We had the bouncy seat, the stroller, the huge supply of diapers, food for our dog...hell, I even packed a few canvas bags for shopping and some cloth napkins to try to limit the environmental impact of our trip.

So, despite getting little sleep the night before, I was feeling on top of things when we stopped to nurse the baby and grab some lunch two hours into our trip. As we pulled back onto the interstate, I casually asked my husband how much room the dog had in the back of the SUV with all of the baby gear (yes, we have an SUV; maybe the cloth bags and napkins are a way to ease some of that green guilt, but that's a post for another day). We looked at each other and had one of those moments when two people realize the exact same truth - a shared understanding of something unspeakable, and a shared vision of something unthinkable - at the exact same half-second: our dog wasn't in the back of the car. We had left her in Boston. We could only hope that Dixie -- our dearest baby before our girl was born -- was two hours away in our apartment and not outside on some city street, where she might be searching for us as we sped down the highway listening to NPR and admiring the last red leaves on the Scarlet Oaks.

My husband found an illegal way to turn the car around while calling a neighbor who would check our apartment to see if the pup was in there and not following us southward. He hung up, and we let the shock set in. Where were our heads? How could we have forgotten her? Isn't there a reason you're not supposed to operate heavy machinery on so little sleep? What would our lives become if the worst happened to her?

We had to distract ourselves from the guilt and disbelief that had sucked the air from the car and were choking us as we raced back home. So I reached into one of those canvas bags I'd packed and pulled out a book on tape that we borrowed from the library without much thought a few days earlier while checking items off our trip to-do list (next time, the list will include the words "pack dog"!). The tape was a series of lectures by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh called The Art of Mindfulness. Right away, Thich gently urged us: "be conscious of your in-breath, out-breath." After a few moments of measured breathing, he began talking directly to my husband and me. He spoke of the need to nuture mindfulness by being in the present moment, by being aware. Forgetfulness, he reminded us, is the opposite of mindfulness. Forgetfulness is being somewhere other than the present. We recognized that we were being given a lesson from Thich, but also from something beyond him. We felt aware of the universe, of God. And, just in time to receive the heartbreakingly wonderful news that our dog was safely waiting in our apartment, we began to wake up.

I think that for the rest of the trip we were the mindful beings that Thich Nhat Hanh spoke about. We saw a flock of blackbirds flying low over a city graveyard, we saw slate-purple swaths of cloud form a backdrop for the smoke billowing from a factory near Providence, Rhode Island. Just further south, we were aware of a hawk in the branches of a stately Spruce alongside the interstate bordering at least twenty acres that had been clearcut and were marked with a banner screaming "Coming Soon: Wal-Mart!". We were awake and aware of what surrounded us: unspeakable beauty next to the uspeakably dismal. Meanwhile, the good monk spoke about the ability of an awakened person to hold two truths together simultaneously: the positive truths that bring us joy, peace, and nourishment and the negative truths that encourage us to transform ourselves and our world. The ugliness of a landscape stripped of its berries, brush, pines and hawks - the future home of another Wal-Mart - could nourish our compassion if only we would be mindful of it, be aware. We needed to abandon our forgetfulness, our sleepy state where awareness is missing, where easy anger is present. We needed to wake up to the present paradox of beauty and ugliness. We needed to feel reality in its fullness and use it all for our good purpose. Only then will we be nourished by both the light and the dark and develop the compassion to help heal our planet and ourselves.

So we returned to Boston, retrieved our dog, and set off for the same journey, again - this time a bit more awake.

Concessions of Conscience

2005-11-18T06:19:00.000-05:00

It's pretty easy to be cynical about the fact that the House passed a budget bill early this morning that cuts programs from the weakest among us. And it's even easier to be cynical of media coverage that touts the concessions made by Republicans to get this bill passed.

Do these concessions mean anything to a struggling family that won't be able to reliably put food on their table without food stamps? What do they mean for an elderly person forced to choose whether to go to the doctor and face a higher Medicaid co-pay or save that money for the heating bill this winter? What about for the kid who won't be able to get health screenings because his family of four is above the federal poverty line even though they can barely make ends meet on $20,000 a year?

Instead of lots of talk about the political concessions made by House Republicans, we need to talk about the concessions being made each and every day by poor Americans. Read this to understand how little the political concessions will change the fundamentally painful cuts that will be directly felt by those struggling to get by. And then call or write your senator today and make your voice heard before the bill goes to House-Senate negotiation later this month. Let your senator know that you are not ready to concede your conscience.

Bring Fairness to the Table

2005-11-17T08:54:00.000-05:00

If Wal-Mart is a prototype for the destructive power that interconnectedness can wield, then fair trade is the counterpoint: a hopeful example of how our purchasing power ripples through issues of corporate globalization, big business, and agriculture.

Thanksgiving is a fitting occasion for promoting a sustainable global economy on a local level by encouraging the supermarket where you shop to stock more fair trade products. Co-Op America and Oxfam America are asking consumers to use Saturday, November 19th as a fair trade day of action at supermarkets since it’s one of the busiest grocery shopping days of the year. Inspired by green LA girl's post about not being able to get a fair trade chocolate bar at Trader Joe’s and having looked for them many times myself, I wrote a letter to the east coast headquarters. It would be a worthwhile first step if, in our Thanksgiving grocery shopping, we purchased some fair trade coffee or tea to serve after the meal. Even better, we could go beyond this act of conscientious consumerism by encouraging the supermarket chain where we shop to carry fair trade products. If the chain where you shop is like Trader Joe’s and stocks fair trade coffee and cocoa, you could compliment them on those products and ask for others. If we all bought one fair trade product, wrote one letter to our supermarket’s headquarters (addresses for major supermarket chains are here) and filled out one comment card at the market, we could possibly come a step closer to a fair economy in a tangible way. Taking one but preferably all three steps this week expresses gratitude for the work of the farmers who make your morning (and afternoon, and evening....) brew possible. And believe me, these farmers need more than gratitude. Being able to purchase fairly traded items is a norm that we should expect, but our society is just not there yet. Let's be thankful there are ways that our expectations can help shape a new reality...and then let's do something about it.

Low, Low Spirits, High Expectations

2005-11-16T14:14:00.000-05:00

I joined in the Wal-Mart Week of Action by attending a screening of Wal-Mart: The Movie. I’m not surprised that I left the film feeling angry and distraught over the pervasiveness of the social and environmental problems that Wal-Mart not only exacerbates, but also creates and sustains so powerfully all over the world. What did surprise me was that I saw the faintest glimmer of hope in the darkness. More on the hope later. First a word about the anger.

The rise of Wal-Mart is a good case study for the power of interconnectedness. Of course, in Wal-Mart’s case, that power is being used to the detriment of people, communities, and the earth. It’s not an overstatement to say that entire ways of life are being destroyed by the power of this behemoth. Wal-Mart’s policies affect all of us, whether we choose to shop there or not. In other words, we are all paying for the “low, low prices.” When Wal-Mart comes to town, there is little room for small businesses that have been built by families over generations. Yet, the local government often paves the way for Wal-Mart to destroy its own community by handing them large subsidies to help build mega-stores and create the necessary infrastructure (roads, sewage, etc.). In many cases local officials, knowingly or not, actually choose to pay for the demise of their own towns.

If you ask the local business owners, as the creators of this movie have, they know plenty about what happens when Wal-Mart comes in. Because the arrival of Wal-Mart has become inevitable in most small towns, many local businesses try to prepare for it the best they can, but the typical result is that the family business is liquidated, debts are barely covered with the proceeds, and the community loses a piece of its heritage. While townspeople may have liked their local grocer, hardware store, or bookstore, some may still be giddy with the prospect of a new Wal-Mart. After all, the low prices on t-shirts and microwaveable dinners are good for hardworking people, right? Plus there’s always the promise of jobs for those areas of the nation left behind by the information economy or stranded by the outsourcing of manufacturing jobs. They shop in the store or even apply for a job at Wal-Mart, loading up on cheap goods or working as a full-time “associate.” Trouble is, that full-time position doesn’t always result in enough hours per week or enough salary to pay the bills. Or, if they do end up working more than forty hours a week they are systematically denied overtime by management strategies such as shifting overtime hours to the next pay period, a period conveniently lacking the hours to qualify for overtime. The gleaming promise of health insurance and benefits for their families quickly evaporates as employees realize that they cannot afford to contribute to Wal-Mart’s health coverage on the low wages paid by the store (and forget about organizing because of the honed union-busting tactics employed by the kind folks at corporate headquarters in Arkansas). Not to worry, though, the store managers are prepared with literature on how employees can collect public assistance. The taxpayers can help pay for the Wal-Mart employees to put food on their table with food stamps, buy formula for their babies through the WIC program, and take their kids to the doctor through Medicaid. Everyone in America pays for Wal-Mart whether or not we shop there. Those low, low prices are not so low after all. But the Wal-Mart ethic of burdening local and national taxpayers and their own employees with the cost of operation is low, low indeed.

And whether or not we shop there, we also pay with our conscience. We pay if we know that the cheap goods sold at Wal-Mart are made by poor desperate people who want the same things for their families as Wal-Mart employees and shoppers want for theirs. But they must work in Wal-Mart certified sweatshops in China and Bangladesh, straining inhumanely to meet Wal-Mart’s demands for the cheapest goods from its suppliers. We pay when we know that Wal-Mart will often abandon one store and move to another location after the community has subsidized its growth but before real revenue reaches the local government. We pay when this wasteful sprawl eats up our green space at an alarming rate, chomping it up and spitting out another ten acre box store and parking lot. We pay dearly each and every time this store comes to another new town.

I’ve known some of these things about Wal-Mart. Yet the film was still worth seeing to connect the dots through the stories of individuals directly affected by Wal-Mart’s reign. So what is the take away message for someone like me who already refuses to shop there? Wal-Mart is among the worst of the corporations pilfering our society and earth with its artificially inflated size and breadth and the sheer greed and determination of those who run it. But it’s nevertheless a model taught to future executives in business school and one that is employed by businesses around the globe. Worse, it’s a business model that even progressive consumers often support directly or indirectly. Does it ease our collective conscience to have a new Target open rather than a Wal-Mart? Do we know what kind of campaign contributions they make? Where their goods come from? How much their workers earn? Is our earth any less stricken by a new Bed, Bath & Beyond, Home Depot or fill-in-the-blank box store being built? To vote with our dollars, we need to move beyond Wal-Mart. The holiday season is the perfect time to recommit to buying local, to discovering where your money goes after the cash register (check out www.buyblue.org) and to contributing to a sustainable economy. Shopping for a better world has its limits, of course. But in lieu of responsible government and sustainable business development, it’s a potent start.

What’s the next step? And where’s that sweet dose of hope? For me, the hope comes from the words of the people in the film who would not consider themselves progressive in the typical sense of the word. They may be life-long Republicans and true believers in the marketplace. But the words they spoke of how Wal-Mart afflicted their community can give hope to all of us. They declared that the owners of Wal-Mart should “spread out the wealth.” They said that we need regulations to “stop this rampage.” These self-proclaimed “conservatives” and “staunch Americans” said that this kind of business is not good for the people of our country. Here’s that glimmer of hope! If we can start talking to each other about the common values and concerns that we all share as American citizens, we might find that we’re not as far apart as the red state/blue state rhetoric the media would have us swallow. If we raise our expectations for what those “different” than us think and feel and find a way to connect with each other on our deeply human, common interests we will all win. In Frances Moore Lappe’s new book, Democracy’s Edge, she says “Wal-Mart’s approach stems not from an iron law of international economics but in large measure from what our expectations ‘normalize’.” It’s time to get together and talk about our dreams for our country and our democracy. We can far exceed our low, low expectations and in the process spread hope for an invigorated democracy.

Joining the Chorus

2005-11-16T13:33:00.000-05:00

At long last, the time has come for me to raise my voice. I’ve been reading thoughtful, enraging and inspiring posts on other blogs and saying “Yes!” for a while now. What’s taken me so long to find my voice?

I have always been drawn to seemingly disparate causes and issues – from the death penalty to animal rights to education. As my senses have been heightened by the wonders of the natural world, protecting our environment has taken on greater urgency for me. But it’s not just that I’ve become a more ardent environmentalist. Over the years I’ve begun to put together the pieces that connect the fragile yet sustaining beauty of our earth with the catastrophic threat of agribusiness, the cancer of suburban sprawl, the soul sickness that flourishes due to human action or inaction on social issues, the mind-numbing plague of blind consumerism, and the gnawing hunger facing a third of the people on our planet. With a mix of rage and determination, I’ve been caught between feeling like a personal commitment to action is futile in a world so afflicted by consumption, debased politics and deep inequality and being convinced that community involvement and simple everyday action can truly create possibilities for necessary social and environmental change. Perhaps like many others, I’ve been stranded between these competing worldviews. But I’ve been someone who leans more and more toward optimism and hope about the capacity for change when engaged individuals work together. So I took a deep breath and started writing letters to corporations and to Congress, reading and thinking about solutions and not just the problems, and voting with my dollars, while hoping that someday I’d find a way to share and explore ideas that could inspire collective problem-solving. Because all those disparate issues? Turns out they’re connected. And the feeling of futility? It stifles a voice that could reach someone. I am gravely concerned about where we are but hopeful that we can return to a better place in our society, in nature, and in ourselves if we would each add our voice to the chorus. I’m in. What shall we sing?