ecological anarchism

Baby owl visited me at work today.

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:11:57 -0400

Baby owl visited me at work today.

"There are non-dietary reasons to eat fewer animal products. Even if their nutritional profile were..."

Fri, 24 May 2013 12:09:00 -0400

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There are non-dietary reasons to eat fewer animal products. Even if their nutritional profile were unambivalently beneficial, they use too many resources: land, water, energy and — not the least important — food that could nourish people. (To the often-asked question, “How will we feed the 9 billion?” — used to defend a host of objectionable agricultural practices — many of us say, “Focus more on feeding people plants and less on feeding them animals.”)

And there are two other factors to consider: the industrial production of livestock is a major (if not the leading) contributor to greenhouse gases, and the rampant and nearly unregulated use of antibiotics in that production is making those drugs less effective while encouraging the development of hardier disease-causing germs.

”

- Mark Bittman, “Why I’m Not a Vegan”

Millennials Are All: Fuck Driving

Thu, 23 May 2013 16:01:37 -0400

Millennials Are All: Fuck Driving

High Plains Aquifer Dwindles, Hurting Farmers

Thu, 23 May 2013 14:40:31 -0400

High Plains Aquifer Dwindles, Hurting Farmers:

Parts of the vast High Plains Aquifer, once a prodigious source of water, are now so low that crops can’t be watered and bridges span arid stream beds.

Well shit. #wheresallthewatergone

Hotels Aim to Attract Foodies Traveling on Business

Thu, 23 May 2013 13:20:08 -0400

Hotels Aim to Attract Foodies Traveling on Business:

A push for local foods helps hotels differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace, where catering to business travelers is a priority.

Is It Time to Bag the Plastic?

Mon, 20 May 2013 17:20:22 -0400

IN my New York City apartment, the kitchen drawers, the coat closet, even the wine rack are overflowing with a type of waste that is rapidly disappearing elsewhere — the used plastic shopping bag.

Many countries and a handful of American cities have more or less done away with this supposed convenience item, by discouraging its use through plastic-bag taxes at checkout counters or outright bans. Walk down the streets of Dublin or Seattle or San Francisco and there is barely a bag in sight. Life continues.

“It didn’t take people very long to accommodate at all,” said Dick Lilly, manager for waste prevention in Seattle, where a plastic-bag ban took effect last summer. “Basically overnight those grocery and drugstore bags were gone.”

But in much of America we seem more addicted than ever. On a recent shopping trip to Target in Chicago for some dorm supplies while visiting my son, I emerged with what seemed to be more bags than socks or rolls of toilet paper (only a slight exaggeration). At my local supermarket, plastic bags are applied layer upon layer around purchases, like Russian nesting dolls.

“Plastic shopping bags are an enormous problem for New York City,” said Ron Gonen, the deputy commissioner of sanitation for recycling and waste reduction, noting that the city pays $10 million annually to send 100,000 tons of plastic bags that are tossed in the general trash to landfills in South Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania. That, he points out, “is amazing to think of, because a plastic bag doesn’t weigh much at all.”

All across the country, plastic bags are the bane of recycling programs. When carelessly placed into recycling bins for general plastic — which they often are — the bags jam and damage expensive sorting machines, which cost huge amounts to repair.

“We have to get people to start carrying reusable bags,” Mr. Gonen said. “We’re going to do what we can to start moving the needle.”

“The question,” he continued, “is do we use a carrot or a stick to change behavior?”

So far New York has used carrots, to little effect. (More about that later.) Unfortunately, most experts believe it will take a stiff stick to break a habit as ingrained as this one is in the United States. (In many European countries, like France and Italy, the plastic bag thing never fully caught on.)

In my case, I know I should bring a cloth bag along for shopping trips. And I do — when I remember. But experience shows that even environmentally conscious people need prodding and incentives to change their behavior permanently.

Where they exist, bans and charges or taxes (when set high enough) have been extremely successful and often raise revenue for other environmental projects. Unfortunately, these tactics are deeply unpopular in most of the nation.

After Austin, Tex., passed a bag ban earlier this year and with Dallas considering one, State Representative Drew Springer, a Republican, introduced the Shopping Bag Freedom Act in the Legislature. That act essentially bans bag bans, protecting the right of merchants to provide bags of any material to customers.

Businesses often fight hard against plastic-bag laws. When in 2007, Seattle first tried to impose a fee of 20 cents for each plastic bag, the American Chemistry Council financed a popular referendum that voted down the “bag tax,” before it even took effect, Mr. Lilly said.

It took several more years for the city to regroup and impose its current ban. Plastic shopping bags are forbidden in stores, and though paper bags may be used, each one costs the shopper 5 cents. (There are exemptions, however: restaurants managed to secure one for takeout food, for example.)

A number of states are considering some form of statewide bans or taxes. And last month, Representative James P. Moran, Democrat of Virginia, introduced a bill to create a national 5-cent tax on all disposable plastic or paper bags provided by stores to customers. Some of the revenue would be used to create a Disposable Carryout Bag Trust Fund and to maintain national parks.

Actually, the idea of a bag tax may not seem so foreign to federal lawmakers: for the past three years, Washington has had its own 5-cent tax. Although bag use there dropped sharply, many experts feel that the charge should be even higher. In Ireland, for example, the bag tax is about 30 cents per bag.

By any measure, New Yorkers are laggards on the issue. In 2008, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg tried unsuccessfully to pass a bag tax of 6 cents. More recently, New York State has preferred to attack the problem with soft diplomacy. Since 2009, large stores throughout the state providing plastic bags have been required to take them back for recycling. But there is not much enforcement, Mr. Gonen said, and the program “hasn’t put a dent” in the numbers.

While the chain pharmacies and supermarkets in my neighborhood initially put out recycling bins for the bags, they have largely disappeared. Some stores will begrudgingly take back plastic at the sales counter — though I’ve seen the bags subsequently tossed in the trash. (Though plastic bags can be recycled, they must be separated from other forms of plastic.) The Bloomberg administration is also considering partnering with supermarkets to create incentive programs with shopping points awarded to those who bring reusable bags.

Frank Convery, an economist at University College, Dublin, who has studied the effects of Ireland’s 10-year-old bag tax — the first in the world — is skeptical: “As regards the plastic bag issue, whatever is done has to be mandatory,” he said. “The New York model is designed to fail.”

Mr. Gonen said cities got a lot of complaints about plastic bags. So why wouldn’t that inspire more of them to take action? It is another paradox of environmental politics — just as when New Yorkers show strong support for a bike-sharing plan but protest when bike-sharing racks appear on their sidewalk.

In a city where dog owners are forced to pick up their pets’ waste and are precluded from smoking in parks, why is it so hard to get people to employ reusable bags for shopping?

By ELISABETH ROSENTHAL

Lines in the Sand

Mon, 20 May 2013 16:14:10 -0400

A lot of what’s known about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can be traced back to a chemist named Charles David Keeling, who, in 1958, persuaded the U.S. Weather Bureau to install a set of monitoring devices at its Mauna Loa observatory, on the island of Hawaii. By the nineteen-fifties, it was well understood that, thanks to the burning of fossil fuels, humans were adding vast amounts of carbon to the air. But the prevailing view was that this wouldn’t much matter, since the oceans would suck most of it out again. Keeling thought that it would be prudent to find out if that was, in fact, the case. The setup on Mauna Loa soon showed that it was not.

Carbon-dioxide levels have been monitored at the observatory ever since, and they’ve exhibited a pattern that started out as terrifying and may be now described as terrifyingly predictable. They have increased every year, and earlier this month they reached the milestone of four hundred parts per million. No one knows exactly when CO₂ levels were last this high; the best guess is the mid-Pliocene, about three million years ago. At that point, summertime temperatures in the Arctic were fourteen degrees warmer than they are now and sea levels were some seventy-five feet higher.

When the milestone was passed, Keeling’s son Ralph, a geochemist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, glossed the event as follows: “It means we are quickly losing the possibility of keeping the climate below what people thought were possibly tolerable thresholds.” Maureen Raymo, a marine geologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, was more blunt. “It feels like the inevitable march toward disaster,” she told the Times.

President Obama will make a decision in the next few months—unless he puts it off again, as he did in 2011—about whether to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. The question before him is whether it’s in the “national interest” to grant the permits needed for constructing Keystone, which is supposed to dogleg from Alberta to Nebraska, and join a pipeline that will extend to Texas, connecting Canada’s tar-sands deposits with American refineries. The latest figures from Mauna Loa reveal what’s at stake.

Last week, as the President was otherwise engaged—with the uproar over the I.R.S., the Justice Department’s subpoena of phone records from the Associated Press, and the e-mails about the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi—lobbying for the pipeline reached a new level of intensity. At the start of the week, the Canadian government launched an ad campaign to build support for the pipeline in the U.S. One ad, featuring construction workers fitting sections of pipe, says, “America and Canada: Standing together for energy independence.” Although the Canadians have not released the cost of the campaign, the Globe and Mail reported that Canada’s natural-resources department has set aside more than sixteen million dollars for advertising this year. (Canada’s natural-resources minister, Joe Oliver, recently travelled to France and England to push the tar sands; he ended up threatening the European Union, which is considering labelling tar-sands oil as “highly polluting,” with taking the case to the World Trade Organization.) Then, at the end of the week, Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, came to New York to make the pitch himself. “All the facts are overwhelmingly on the side of approval,” he said, at the Council on Foreign Relations. With a touch of menace, he added, “I know the Administration will do a thorough analysis before arriving at the right decision.”

The arguments in favor of Keystone run more or less like this: Americans use a lot of oil—more than eighteen million barrels per day. It has to come from somewhere, and Canada is a more reliable trading partner than, say, Iraq. The U.S. already imports roughly a million barrels of Canadian tar-sands oil a day, and if it doesn’t import the rest some other country will. “It’s overwhelmingly likely the oil would find another way to market,” USA Today observed in a recent editorial. For instance, a pipeline could be built to British Columbia, and the oil shipped from there to China, though there are many political and logistic barriers to such a plan—among them the Canadian Rockies.

If the arguments in favor of Keystone are persuasive, those against it are even stronger. Tar-sands oil is not really oil, at least not in the conventional sense of the word. It starts out as semi-solid and has to be either mined or literally melted out of the ground. In either case, the process requires energy, which is provided by burning fossil fuels. The result is that, for every barrel of tar-sands oil that’s extracted, significantly more carbon dioxide enters the air than for every barrel of ordinary crude—between twelve and twenty-three per cent more.

Alberta’s tar sands contain an estimated 1.7 trillion barrels of oil. Assuming that only a tenth of that is recoverable, it’s still enough to generate something like twenty-two billion metric tons of carbon. There are, it should be noted, plenty of other ways to produce twenty-two billion metric tons of carbon. Consuming about a seventh of the world’s remaining accessible reserves of conventional oil would do it, as would combusting even a small fraction of the world’s remaining coal deposits. Which is just the point.

Were we to burn through all known fossil-fuel reserves, the results would be unimaginably bleak: major cities would be flooded out, a large portion of the world’s arable land would be transformed into deserts, and the oceans would be turned into liquid dead zones. If we take the future at all seriously, which is to say as a time period that someone is going to have to live in, then we need to leave a big percentage of the planet’s coal and oil and natural gas in the ground. These basic facts have been established for decades, and every President since George Bush senior has vowed to do something to avert catastrophe. The numbers from Mauna Loa show that they have failed.

In rejecting Keystone, President Obama would not solve the underlying problem, which, as pipeline proponents correctly point out, is consumption. Nor would he halt exploitation of the tar sands. But he would put a brake on the process. After all, if getting tar-sands oil to China were easy, the Canadians wouldn’t be applying so much pressure on the White House. Once Keystone is built, there will be no putting the tar back in the sands. The pipeline isn’t inevitable, and it shouldn’t be treated as such. It’s just another step on the march to disaster.

Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker

Turns Out Bike Lanes Are Really Good for Local Business | Business on GOOD

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:32:43 -0400

Turns Out Bike Lanes Are Really Good for Local Business | Business on GOOD:

Good news for bike activists: Making a safe place on streets for cyclists (and pedestrians) boosts sales for the small businesses in the area.

The Madonnas of Science

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:01:09 -0400

The Madonnas of Science

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Tue, 30 Apr 2013 22:50:35 -0400

Healthy, Meet Delicious

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 15:11:00 -0400

Healthy, Meet Delicious:

A new column from Mark Bittman explores moderate, conscious eating: a diet higher in plants and lower in animal products and hyperprocessed foods.

"Health care, immigration reform, environment- you name the big issues today, we have not been able..."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 12:01:28 -0400

“Health care, immigration reform, environment- you name the big issues today, we have not been able to move on any of them, because of the power of the process, the power of the special interests…””

- Chuck Hagel, U.S. Secretary of Defense

Solar DJ at the University of Utah’s Earth Week...

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:27:46 -0400

Solar DJ at the University of Utah’s Earth Week Celebration on Thursday.

"Don’t buy that shirt. In an economy of abundance, there is enough. Not too much. Not too..."

Fri, 19 Apr 2013 11:18:56 -0400

“Don’t buy that shirt. In an economy of abundance, there is enough. Not too much. Not too little. More important, there is enough time for the things that matter: relationships, delicious food, art, games and rest. Most of us in the United States live in what is though to be abundance, with plenty all around us, but it is only an illusion, not the real thing. The economy we live in is marked by ‘not enough.’”

- Yvon Chouinard, CEO, Patagonia

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Tue, 16 Apr 2013 10:49:03 -0400

"We must work together to safeguard our future—the future of mankind. To find the way for a common..."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 18:41:00 -0400

“We must work together to safeguard our future—the future of mankind. To find the way for a common work for a common goal there is no need for a revolution. There is need merely of deep knowledge, of objective thought, of constructive discussion, and of willingness for understanding.”

- Hugo Boyko

An Interview with Dr Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s...

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 19:39:00 -0400

An Interview with Dr Vandana Shiva, one of the world’s foremost environmentalist, anti-GM activist and an advocate of ecological farming and sustainable agriculture as a solution to climate change, food security, hunger and peace. The interview was taken on 16th March 2011, during “Grandmother’s University” a three day course at Navdanya Biodiversity Farm at Dehradun, Uttarakhand, India which Dr. Vandana Shiva founded in 1987 to help save traditional seeds. The farm also undertakes research and training, along with the important role of distributing native seeds to farmers in the region.

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Mon, 25 Mar 2013 12:26:54 -0400

Are Plastic Food Containers Too Toxic to Reuse?

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 02:40:00 -0500

Now that we are deep into the Plastic Age, questions about material safety and environmental impact have become a bit more complicated than in previous technological epochs like the Bronze or Iron Ages.

Your yogurt containers are probably made of polypropylene (PP), or #5 plastic, which does not contain BPA, an estrogenic chemical that we know to be harmful. The #7 plastic is the one that may contain BPA. So the yogurt containers may be safe to reuse, although a recent study in Environmental Health Perspectives indicates all types of plastics used in food containers, beverage cans, plastic bottles, and wrappers can release estrogenic activators if reused repeatedly, and we know that such chemicals can be harmful. It may well be that the amounts released are too small to cause problems, but if you want absolutely certain safety, store food in glass containers only. If you do reuse plastic containers, follow the Environmental Working Group’s advice, and only use #1, 2, 4, or 5, although one study shows that higher temperatures can cause the release of the heavy metal antimony from #1, PET. And since heat intensifies the release chemicals, never microwave with any type of plastic container and don’t put hot food in it. Regarding the plastic bags, I doubt that they pose a problem, since there is no liquid in bulk items to leach anything out like there is with most leftovers. But to play it super safe, you could avoid storing grains, beans, nuts, or flour in the bags.

As noted, many #7 plastic containers contain BPA, and although the BPA is being phased out, you should not use any #7 container unless you are sure it is BPA-free. The most frightening thing is that some baby bottles, toys, and sippy cups contain BPA, to which to fetuses and children are more vulnerable than adults.

Also, BPA lurks in other places, including the lining of some metal water bottles and in food and beverage cans at possibly harmful levels, according to a study by EWG. I hate to break this news, because canned foods are an excellent way to preserve the solar energy and vitamins from a summer’s harvest. (For more on this, see my October 7 column, “Are Plastic Cups Poisonous?”)

While the food industry denies that BPA can reach hazardous levels in food, the jury is still out. Evidence of the dangers have prompted the EPA and the National Institutes of Health to conduct further research on the substance. Households that consume a lot of canned food and beverages, especially of they have children, may want to consider cutting back until we get the results of that study.

So, although reuse is usually preferable to recycling, in the case of plastic food and beverage containers, recycling is a better choice. Besides, the plastic industry is desperate for more of the stuff. While U.S. capacity for PET (plastic bottles) recycling alone is estimated at almost 1.9 billion pounds, only 20 percent of the PET even gets collected here, and of that, only about 642 million pounds make it to U.S. companies. The other 800 million pounds is, like so many of our jobs, outsourced to foreign factories.

US Accountants Finally Realized Climate Change Is a “High Risk” to the Government's Fiscal Health

Mon, 18 Feb 2013 18:50:06 -0500

There are a number of plausible scenarios that may have led the Government Accountability Office to finally recognize that global climate change poses a “high” level of risk to the nation’s fiscal health, after having failed to do so until 2013.

Perhaps the unusually strong frankenstorm Sandy smashed into the East Coast, costing the government $50 billion to clean up, and something clicked—this must be what all those scientists and economists mean when they talk about the future costs of climate change, the bureaucrats thought, frantically reshuffling their papers under fluorescent lights.

Perhaps it was upon viewing the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration’s annual State of the Coast report, which may have reminded them that 52 percent of the country’s population lives in low-lying coastal areas, and that nine percent more will live in them by the end of the decade. That’s a lot of people, a governmental accountant may have considered. Sea levels are rising, after all, and those storms seem to impact those coastal areas above all—I imagine it’d be expensive to account for something that threatens the federally maintained transportation networks, federally subsidized electrical grid, and the federally insured homes millions of people rely upon.

And then there’s all that drought, wildfire, and flood stuff too. Shit. Well, in it goes, into the big books.

[Brian Merchant]