My son and I head down to the Berkeley Marina every other day because it's how Jacks falls to sleep calmly for a mid-day nap. In the last several months it was always about visiting the boats-- as much for me as the baby because it helps me remember my father and our family sloop. Often the loop around the Berkeley Yacht Club parking lot inspired some needed grief for may dad, especially when on a Friday a stiff wind lifts and heels a J120 and its racing crew as it rounds the marina's breakwater. I like to think also that I'll be able to raise my son in the multi-generational tradition of my Long Island Sound family, sailing big boats, racing and cruising.
Two weeks ago, our little Marina trip down the road was met with the white suits of the clean up crews. The 58,000 gallons of oil from our recent spill had been swept by wind and tide to our coastline, and the marina became the center of the Bay's clean-up effort. Birds we had come to take for granted in the past had become symbols of universal grief and guilt. And this time I cried not for my dad, but for these birds, the most visible and vulnerable to the spill. No one was on the bay: it smelled like oil. The bay was beautiful and empty as long as I kept my car window closed. I told my students the next day that we will be one day as the bay's wildlife is now; actually, we already are, only we aren't breathing liquid oil just living off it surreptitiously. It's telling that the best way to put my son down for a nap is by driving because, after all, he spent far too much time in a car already in his short life, even though our family drives less than 40 miles a week.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Monday, October 8, 2007
Ambivalence
Romantically smug. That's one way I recently described my western love affair with place which is of course as clichéd as it is sentimental. The innocence of romance is always shattered by time and reality. Here's another conversation with the afore-mentioned brother who once lived in San Francisco but moved back east to Connecticut:
Me: It's a good thing you moved when you did. California breaks your heart. So much traffic and pollution.
Eastern brother: no response (only he looked sad and nostalgic on the video conference.)
Maybe it is my dad's death of cancer that he attributed to his time working on the Hoover Dam in the 50's, or the fact that a lead specialist found lead in our garden's soil, a remainder from the time when gas still had lead in it. Or maybe because I live within a mile of a twelve-lane highway, beside the 1 mile section known for among the worst daily traffic jams in the country. Or maybe it's also because I live across the street from coastal redwoods and can see the bay and the Golden Gate a few blocks away. The Golden Gate with its marvelous design eloquently marrying the synthetic and the organic, is too often shaded brown by a necklace of smog that adorns the entire bay and highlights the highways connecting the bay's cities. The dichotomies when they co-habitate break my heart and piss me off.
I live in the flatlands of Berkeley, once wetland, then pasture, then the workers' neighborhoods that rose up next to the over eighty industries developed around the railroad and the bay's ports. Rome lives on top of its classical past and has reclaimed relics to rebuild each new era. Here, we reclaimed relics of the past too. Our history is almost entirely modern: an hundred-fifty year chronicle of fossil fuels with only brief moments of nature's reclamation during the New Deal. Hopefully, Berkley's plans for green industry in West Berkeley will be longer lasting.
Historical link:www.webaic.org/history.html
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Saturday, May 19, 2007
"When green got silly" and "The Kitchen Gardener"
I'm referring here to Lynette Evans column in the today's San Francisco Home and Garden Section. Evans compares eco-bloggers and the new green consumers hot for now popular expensive green items to Marie Antoinette, who had her own "faux peasant village so she and her courtiers could pretend to be peasants without hunger, pestilence and hard labor." Evans goes on to argue that we can't assume easy answers to envionmental crises and that it's more important to use critical thinking than Stella MacCartney's organic shopping bag ($495) when it comes to conscious living. It's a good article even it is just to introduce her colleague's new column "Your Ecological House." I like the way she is stretching the concept of sustainability to its rightful shape: without a consciousness of poverty, pestilence and exploited labor elsewhere, there is nothing sustainable about designer eco-products.
Another notable piece in the same section today:"The Kitchen Gardener" by Anne Raver of the New York Times. She describes how to make a salad garden in a kind of large portable planting box that can be put on wheels or sawhorses. (Directions for the self-watering container can be found at hgic.umd.edu, under online publications, on container vegetable gardening.) A friend and I are contemplating a large educational project called the Edible Truck, a truck that runs on biofuel that holds portable planting boxes filled with edible plants. My dream would be to install a camping stove, a worm and food compost in different compartments of the truck and make it into an art car that visits local schools that don't have edible schoolyards. An even bigger dream (just hatched) is to become a partner in our local Biodiesel Oasis, a woman run cooperative that is the first to sell biodiesel in the East Bay. Then the Edible Truck can live at the Oasis!
Another notable piece in the same section today:"The Kitchen Gardener" by Anne Raver of the New York Times. She describes how to make a salad garden in a kind of large portable planting box that can be put on wheels or sawhorses. (Directions for the self-watering container can be found at hgic.umd.edu, under online publications, on container vegetable gardening.) A friend and I are contemplating a large educational project called the Edible Truck, a truck that runs on biofuel that holds portable planting boxes filled with edible plants. My dream would be to install a camping stove, a worm and food compost in different compartments of the truck and make it into an art car that visits local schools that don't have edible schoolyards. An even bigger dream (just hatched) is to become a partner in our local Biodiesel Oasis, a woman run cooperative that is the first to sell biodiesel in the East Bay. Then the Edible Truck can live at the Oasis!
american gold finches and hawks
While writing I have been visited. After my father died last August and briefly took on the form of a hummingbird in my mind, I have the uncanny though pathetic fallacy that birds are telling me something. I'm trying hard now, nearly a year later, to see it as a lovely coincidence that amazingly beautiful birds visit me while I'm writing. It makes sense that while I write about plants and birds, and I'm sitting still, I would see something through the window in front of my desk. Today I saw what I think is an american gold finch, the first I have ever seen of whatever it is-- truly bright gold with a touch of black on its wings. Its color set against the green pounced at me like a parrot or a tropical fish reminding me that I am still a tourist having moved between micro-climates in the Bay Area in my ten years here. The question is really who is visiting whom?
My son and husband are in Reno visiting his family, who are struggling with our brother-in-law's newly diagnosed leukemia. I'm home struggling with my newly diagnosed pregnancy. Just talking to Doug on the phone he told me about the hawks living in his mother's backyard. We were up there last weekend and our son Jackson checked out the hawks and immediately gave a pretty good impression of their calls. We thought it was maybe just wishful thinking, but now we know Jacks has that hawk call down. Just now I heard him make the call while talking to Doug. Those hawks are not just "visiting;" Jacks' in direct dialogue with them. The hawks usurped a squirrel's nest high in a tree and seemed to have formed a ring of nests around the house. Last week the hawks were very much with us while we gardened with our three year old nephew, whose parents are both at the hospital full time right now. We planted a giant 100 pound pumpkin, contest-size, to be ready in time for Halloween. Who knows what this summer and fall will be like for our nephew; hopefully, nature will be benevolent. The hawks with their awesome feeding patterns are pretty brutal but magnificent also.
It's wrong to say we are visited by the natural world. Yes, tiny ants, famous in Berkeley, form giant Macy parades in our house whenever a grain of rice is left on the floor. We've decided to coexist with several spiders, about one per room. There's been a lot said already about the forces of life and death mirrored in the plant, insect and animal world. We humans like to separate ourselves from the others and use them as metaphors, and maybe that is why we are stunned, like a bound Gulliver, when we are felled by a disease or morning sickness or worse, death. I know my father found solace in only a few things while fighting prostate cancer: his tomato plants, his family, the hummingbirds at his feeder, New England coastal storms and the sounds of waves. A poem I wrote for his memorial service called "How to prepare for a storm," concluded with the directive: "let yourself belong again." It's ironic how language and thought make us feel apart, yet how language also brings us back.
My son and husband are in Reno visiting his family, who are struggling with our brother-in-law's newly diagnosed leukemia. I'm home struggling with my newly diagnosed pregnancy. Just talking to Doug on the phone he told me about the hawks living in his mother's backyard. We were up there last weekend and our son Jackson checked out the hawks and immediately gave a pretty good impression of their calls. We thought it was maybe just wishful thinking, but now we know Jacks has that hawk call down. Just now I heard him make the call while talking to Doug. Those hawks are not just "visiting;" Jacks' in direct dialogue with them. The hawks usurped a squirrel's nest high in a tree and seemed to have formed a ring of nests around the house. Last week the hawks were very much with us while we gardened with our three year old nephew, whose parents are both at the hospital full time right now. We planted a giant 100 pound pumpkin, contest-size, to be ready in time for Halloween. Who knows what this summer and fall will be like for our nephew; hopefully, nature will be benevolent. The hawks with their awesome feeding patterns are pretty brutal but magnificent also.
It's wrong to say we are visited by the natural world. Yes, tiny ants, famous in Berkeley, form giant Macy parades in our house whenever a grain of rice is left on the floor. We've decided to coexist with several spiders, about one per room. There's been a lot said already about the forces of life and death mirrored in the plant, insect and animal world. We humans like to separate ourselves from the others and use them as metaphors, and maybe that is why we are stunned, like a bound Gulliver, when we are felled by a disease or morning sickness or worse, death. I know my father found solace in only a few things while fighting prostate cancer: his tomato plants, his family, the hummingbirds at his feeder, New England coastal storms and the sounds of waves. A poem I wrote for his memorial service called "How to prepare for a storm," concluded with the directive: "let yourself belong again." It's ironic how language and thought make us feel apart, yet how language also brings us back.
Bring Back the Natives
Since last writing, I went on the wonderful East Bay Bring Back the Natives Garden Tour and checked out amazing private gardens committed to California native flowers and shrubs. I found my favorite flower in my favorite garden: the hummingbird sage found in a Berkeley garden cultivated by a mom of two pre-schoolers. The hummingbird sage has a deep purple flower that's sticky to touch and smells sweet, almost like a shrub you find in the Sierra nicknamed Mountain Misery because of its sticky resin. (An old boyfriend nicknamed Mountain Man Dan, a former wildlife technician in Yosemite said Mountain Misery got its name from miners who thought the smell reminded them of their wives back home.) Well, the hummingbird sage attracts humming brids of course, likes shade and has what I am beginning to see as an the exotica of the native plant. Natives just don't look like show pieces in the gladiola, impatiens, pansy, peony tradition. Maybe because they haven't been cultivated for market, maybe because they are what landed here and just evolved on their own without targeted human tinkering. I don't want to totally belittled my beloved peonies-- we had a huge bed of over 50 gorgeous multi-colored peonies in my mom's garden growing up in Rochester, New York. But, I like the way natives are mostly drought resistant, they draw local birds and insects and they help us chart recent eco-history. When a good bunch get scorched in the summer or die off in the winter frost maybe they're telling us something.
When we bought our house in 2005, I inherited a garden thoughtfully created using natural gardening techniques and unknowingly let my husband make destroy it this year. I didn't realize I had such a cool garden until I took the Bring Back the Natives tour. In fact, I used to dis it and talk of the plants I inherited as wimp plants that lacked the beauty of a really lush garden. So it was easy for my husband to convince me that we needed more lawn. We pulled up a big rectangle of bricks that served as a small pond the winter of 2006 when winter storms flooded our backhouse the night I went into labor. Last summer, the new dad ripped up the vegetable garden and put in a french drain thus making a foot wide ten foot long underground pipe that sucks water and makes anything planted above it completely compromised. We also lawned over the bed of year-round rainbow chard and made raised beds when we found our soil had left over lead from the residue of the years when gasoline was laced with lead. We craiglisted our recycled concrete stepping stones and bought new commercial granite stones from god knows where and lawned over a path formerly made of the recycled concrete.
Why this confession? Everything our garden had been followed practices of natural gardening techniques: native plants that naturally thrive in the San Franciso Bay Area, control of weeds and water conservation with mulch, water conservation by selecting hardy, local native plants and by removing part or all of your lawn, inclusion of berry bushes and water sources for wildlife. Now we have a lot of lawn for our 14 month old son to roll around in, but he doesn't actually use the lawn. He likes to dig and pick strawberries (ripe or otherwise) and check out the birds and insects that fortunately still visit. Which leads me to wonder: what is with adult men and their lawns? Perhaps the wielding the lawn mower is such a right of passage for boys (and a trick right of passage because dads hype it up just so they can pass off the chore to someone else!) that they never quite get over it. Lawns are necessary thereafter in order to feel like a dad and a property owner. I like our new lawn but I was far more impressed with gardens I visited on the tour that had an amazing diversity of native plants, none of which required regular water and electric lawn mowers. Jacks at one surveys his domain confidently, a sight more interesting than the mower. It consists of eye-level lamb's ear stalks, roses, an immense lavender bush, cabbage plants that draw the cabbage moths, current bushes, idahoe fescue, firecracker and pineapple sage that inspire intimate encounters with hummingbirds and the lemon trees still small enough for Jacks to pull off leaves (which, by the way, we discovered yesterday also smell of lemons.)
When we bought our house in 2005, I inherited a garden thoughtfully created using natural gardening techniques and unknowingly let my husband make destroy it this year. I didn't realize I had such a cool garden until I took the Bring Back the Natives tour. In fact, I used to dis it and talk of the plants I inherited as wimp plants that lacked the beauty of a really lush garden. So it was easy for my husband to convince me that we needed more lawn. We pulled up a big rectangle of bricks that served as a small pond the winter of 2006 when winter storms flooded our backhouse the night I went into labor. Last summer, the new dad ripped up the vegetable garden and put in a french drain thus making a foot wide ten foot long underground pipe that sucks water and makes anything planted above it completely compromised. We also lawned over the bed of year-round rainbow chard and made raised beds when we found our soil had left over lead from the residue of the years when gasoline was laced with lead. We craiglisted our recycled concrete stepping stones and bought new commercial granite stones from god knows where and lawned over a path formerly made of the recycled concrete.
Why this confession? Everything our garden had been followed practices of natural gardening techniques: native plants that naturally thrive in the San Franciso Bay Area, control of weeds and water conservation with mulch, water conservation by selecting hardy, local native plants and by removing part or all of your lawn, inclusion of berry bushes and water sources for wildlife. Now we have a lot of lawn for our 14 month old son to roll around in, but he doesn't actually use the lawn. He likes to dig and pick strawberries (ripe or otherwise) and check out the birds and insects that fortunately still visit. Which leads me to wonder: what is with adult men and their lawns? Perhaps the wielding the lawn mower is such a right of passage for boys (and a trick right of passage because dads hype it up just so they can pass off the chore to someone else!) that they never quite get over it. Lawns are necessary thereafter in order to feel like a dad and a property owner. I like our new lawn but I was far more impressed with gardens I visited on the tour that had an amazing diversity of native plants, none of which required regular water and electric lawn mowers. Jacks at one surveys his domain confidently, a sight more interesting than the mower. It consists of eye-level lamb's ear stalks, roses, an immense lavender bush, cabbage plants that draw the cabbage moths, current bushes, idahoe fescue, firecracker and pineapple sage that inspire intimate encounters with hummingbirds and the lemon trees still small enough for Jacks to pull off leaves (which, by the way, we discovered yesterday also smell of lemons.)
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
an interview for a middle school student
Hello!
I am writing a story about global warming and I knew you were doing energy
project so I thought you would know a lot about the subject. Here are some
questions I would like to ask you.:
1)Explain a little please about global warming.
Global warming is the effect of increases in the overall global temperature caused by "the greenhouse effect." The greenhouse effect is best described by Al Gore in his movie "The Inconvenient Truth." Basically, carbons in our atmosphere that are the product mostly of our burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal, trap the earth's heat. These carbons in the atmosphere prevent the release of heat from the atmosphere. So it is as if our planet is living in a greenhouse where the heat of the sun as it reflects on the earth is retained rather than released into space. Now because the planet is heating up, glaciers and polar ice caps are melting. The ice of glaciers and polar ice caps actually absorbs heat a lot better than water, so ice melt further complicates matters. And then add the carbons released when tundra, or frozen earth , melts and you see how a tipping point can occur. More global warming caused by the greenhouse effect leads to a natural release of more carbon from decaying plant matter, and this carbon further seals in heat in the outer atmosphere.
2)How can the government help us to stop this problem and are they doing
anything right now?
The government as well as individuals and individual institutions (like schools and businesses!) can reverse global warming if we act quickly. The U.S. and state governments and private institutions like our school need energy policies that show a commitment to reducing our carbon footprint. The government needs to commit to a long-term strategy of substituting oil and coal for sustainble energy sources like wind, biofuels, solar, geothermal and hydoelectric and tidal energy sources. We as citizens need to choose responsible leaders who are not afraid to make some radical changes. Our country and economy requires massive consumption of manufactured goods to compete in the world economy and to be successful. We have to figure out a way to change this equation so that consumption is not what principally drives the economy.
3)What do you think we can do about it? We can do a greenhouse gas inventory at our school and recommend and campaign for a more a green school-- that is a school (like Prospect Sierra) that is a green business. How can our school be a green business? We can buy sustainable energy credits that offset our use of fossil fuels burned whenever we use electricity to power our laptops, our printers and our lights. We can help our school's landlord to make our buildings more energy efficient with time synchronized lights and heat. We can campaign to design and build a green school building with solar panels and other principles of green architectural design. Teachers can apply for grants to buy solar panels for our building so that we begin to study how solar panels work while also helping to offset our school's carbon footprint.
At home, we can buy less consumables like clothes, video games-- anything made of plastic. Nearly everytime you throw something out which can not be easily recycled (and that includes your lunch!) you are contributing to global warming because what you consumed required manufacturing and trucks, boats or planes to move it to a store. Just buying the product you probably had to drive or get on the internet to buy it-- both of which consume fossil fuels. Bike more, get outside and plant some food that you can harvest from your backyard. Use Moodle and upload your homework so that we don't waste paper. Change your attitude and what it means to have fun. Are 2 hours of Ichat or shopping always really more satisfying than meeting a friend to play soccer or to hang out at the beach? If so, why?? When is your personal conservation of energy (ie. laziness) draining the resources of the planet? How consistently inspiring is laziness really? Do you see where I'm going here? Passion for doing something healthy for yourself and others can translate into both energy conservation and inspiration.
4)Is there any possibility right now that it doesn't exist? Not that I know of.
5)What do you suggest we as students do about it? Educate yourself and take action.
6)If we don't do anything, what will happen? Watch Inconvenient Truth again if you want a reminder of the consequences. A quick review: we will lose biodiversity, plants, animals and insect species will die, sea levels will rise, subsequently, millions of people will need to be relocated because of changes in climate and sea-levels-- and here, you need to worry about people in very poor countries and not simply a few hundred thousand in San Mateo and downtown Manhatten.
7)What is happening to the animals right now? Species are dying. Imagine a mountain where a certain species of plant or butterfly lives a particular elevation, say at 3000 ft. That species will have to migrate upward to survive. But the circumfrance of the mountiain gets smaller as they migrate upward towards it peak. With less surface area, fewer species can survive. Here's a quote from a good website about the cloud forests of Central America:
"Climate change and severe El Niño events have already been found to increase the height at which clouds form. As clouds move up the mountains, forests are left exposed and become drier. If the forests are already at the mountain top, they will have nowhere higher to go and will become extinct.
Felling rainforests for pasture in nearby lowlands poses a similar threat to cloud forests. Cattle pastures are warmer and drier than rainforests and so less clouds form above them.
These two process have been linked to the drying out of the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica, causing the extinction of species which need water. Half of the of 50 frog species, including the golden toad, disappeared during an El Niño event in 1987: only five have re-appeared." Philip Bubb, "Cloudy Future" http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/131/bubb.html
8)Is there any immediate action we can take to stop this? YES! Changing light bulbs is a great first step. Carpooling and biking are also critical choices to make. Turn off your electrical appliances when you aren't using them. Shop less and waste less. Examine yourself and your world: your greed, your ignorance, your apathy and why you throw out 50% of your lunch daily-- especially when most of that waste is packaging.
9)Do you think enough people are paying attention to this problem? I hope so.
10)How can we get the word out and show people that this is a problem? Al Gore did a wise and great thing by working with a huge team of people to create the movie The Inconvenient Truth. Leonard di Caprio has just made another movie called the 11th Hour that will hopefully be as popular and important. See these movies more than once so you learn what is going on then team up with other interested friends and family members to write, talk and do something about the problem. Personally, I started a blog called "Blossom Jack" that is meant to be a brainstorming and educational tool-- plus I get to write about things I care deeply about like the species of hummingbirds that visit my edible Pineapple Sage bush in my garden. If you like to make movies, make one about global warming or sustainable energy and show it to friends and family. Next year, I want to make a movie about garbage with a bunch of students-- I think it could be a super cool topic. We could interview bottle collectors, dumpster divers and other radical recyclers. A teen version of Oscar the Grouch could have a cameo. Now you know why he's grouchy, right?
I am writing a story about global warming and I knew you were doing energy
project so I thought you would know a lot about the subject. Here are some
questions I would like to ask you.:
1)Explain a little please about global warming.
Global warming is the effect of increases in the overall global temperature caused by "the greenhouse effect." The greenhouse effect is best described by Al Gore in his movie "The Inconvenient Truth." Basically, carbons in our atmosphere that are the product mostly of our burning of fossil fuels like oil and coal, trap the earth's heat. These carbons in the atmosphere prevent the release of heat from the atmosphere. So it is as if our planet is living in a greenhouse where the heat of the sun as it reflects on the earth is retained rather than released into space. Now because the planet is heating up, glaciers and polar ice caps are melting. The ice of glaciers and polar ice caps actually absorbs heat a lot better than water, so ice melt further complicates matters. And then add the carbons released when tundra, or frozen earth , melts and you see how a tipping point can occur. More global warming caused by the greenhouse effect leads to a natural release of more carbon from decaying plant matter, and this carbon further seals in heat in the outer atmosphere.
2)How can the government help us to stop this problem and are they doing
anything right now?
The government as well as individuals and individual institutions (like schools and businesses!) can reverse global warming if we act quickly. The U.S. and state governments and private institutions like our school need energy policies that show a commitment to reducing our carbon footprint. The government needs to commit to a long-term strategy of substituting oil and coal for sustainble energy sources like wind, biofuels, solar, geothermal and hydoelectric and tidal energy sources. We as citizens need to choose responsible leaders who are not afraid to make some radical changes. Our country and economy requires massive consumption of manufactured goods to compete in the world economy and to be successful. We have to figure out a way to change this equation so that consumption is not what principally drives the economy.
3)What do you think we can do about it? We can do a greenhouse gas inventory at our school and recommend and campaign for a more a green school-- that is a school (like Prospect Sierra) that is a green business. How can our school be a green business? We can buy sustainable energy credits that offset our use of fossil fuels burned whenever we use electricity to power our laptops, our printers and our lights. We can help our school's landlord to make our buildings more energy efficient with time synchronized lights and heat. We can campaign to design and build a green school building with solar panels and other principles of green architectural design. Teachers can apply for grants to buy solar panels for our building so that we begin to study how solar panels work while also helping to offset our school's carbon footprint.
At home, we can buy less consumables like clothes, video games-- anything made of plastic. Nearly everytime you throw something out which can not be easily recycled (and that includes your lunch!) you are contributing to global warming because what you consumed required manufacturing and trucks, boats or planes to move it to a store. Just buying the product you probably had to drive or get on the internet to buy it-- both of which consume fossil fuels. Bike more, get outside and plant some food that you can harvest from your backyard. Use Moodle and upload your homework so that we don't waste paper. Change your attitude and what it means to have fun. Are 2 hours of Ichat or shopping always really more satisfying than meeting a friend to play soccer or to hang out at the beach? If so, why?? When is your personal conservation of energy (ie. laziness) draining the resources of the planet? How consistently inspiring is laziness really? Do you see where I'm going here? Passion for doing something healthy for yourself and others can translate into both energy conservation and inspiration.
4)Is there any possibility right now that it doesn't exist? Not that I know of.
5)What do you suggest we as students do about it? Educate yourself and take action.
6)If we don't do anything, what will happen? Watch Inconvenient Truth again if you want a reminder of the consequences. A quick review: we will lose biodiversity, plants, animals and insect species will die, sea levels will rise, subsequently, millions of people will need to be relocated because of changes in climate and sea-levels-- and here, you need to worry about people in very poor countries and not simply a few hundred thousand in San Mateo and downtown Manhatten.
7)What is happening to the animals right now? Species are dying. Imagine a mountain where a certain species of plant or butterfly lives a particular elevation, say at 3000 ft. That species will have to migrate upward to survive. But the circumfrance of the mountiain gets smaller as they migrate upward towards it peak. With less surface area, fewer species can survive. Here's a quote from a good website about the cloud forests of Central America:
"Climate change and severe El Niño events have already been found to increase the height at which clouds form. As clouds move up the mountains, forests are left exposed and become drier. If the forests are already at the mountain top, they will have nowhere higher to go and will become extinct.
Felling rainforests for pasture in nearby lowlands poses a similar threat to cloud forests. Cattle pastures are warmer and drier than rainforests and so less clouds form above them.
These two process have been linked to the drying out of the Monteverde cloud forest in Costa Rica, causing the extinction of species which need water. Half of the of 50 frog species, including the golden toad, disappeared during an El Niño event in 1987: only five have re-appeared." Philip Bubb, "Cloudy Future" http://www.ourplanet.com/imgversn/131/bubb.html
8)Is there any immediate action we can take to stop this? YES! Changing light bulbs is a great first step. Carpooling and biking are also critical choices to make. Turn off your electrical appliances when you aren't using them. Shop less and waste less. Examine yourself and your world: your greed, your ignorance, your apathy and why you throw out 50% of your lunch daily-- especially when most of that waste is packaging.
9)Do you think enough people are paying attention to this problem? I hope so.
10)How can we get the word out and show people that this is a problem? Al Gore did a wise and great thing by working with a huge team of people to create the movie The Inconvenient Truth. Leonard di Caprio has just made another movie called the 11th Hour that will hopefully be as popular and important. See these movies more than once so you learn what is going on then team up with other interested friends and family members to write, talk and do something about the problem. Personally, I started a blog called "Blossom Jack" that is meant to be a brainstorming and educational tool-- plus I get to write about things I care deeply about like the species of hummingbirds that visit my edible Pineapple Sage bush in my garden. If you like to make movies, make one about global warming or sustainable energy and show it to friends and family. Next year, I want to make a movie about garbage with a bunch of students-- I think it could be a super cool topic. We could interview bottle collectors, dumpster divers and other radical recyclers. A teen version of Oscar the Grouch could have a cameo. Now you know why he's grouchy, right?
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Flau-wa and "pests"
My 14 month-old son says maybe five comprehensible words, but my favorite is flau-wa. Most of his new words ( ball, mama, dada) start as just a play on sounds or an onomatopoeia, then they have amazing specificity (amazing for a mom!) as he points directly at the named thing. In the third stage he generalizes and goes-to-town, and suddenly the moon is a ball and a circle is a ball, and balls are literally everwhere. Flau-wa has hit the third stage and now seems to name not just all the flowers in our garden and neighborhood, but all things plant-like at eye-level. Working with a baby in a garden (even a small 500sq foot one) , letting him dig, teaching him what is edible and what is not, or how not to torture a snail, is an extremely relaxing activity. We notice bees, hummingbirds, robins, finches, and sparrows, which plants they frequent and which days of the year they seem preoccupied with our garden and when they have moved on. The sparrows, which played and hung out in packs of 40 or 50 on the telephone wires, diving and performing aero-acrobatics between our small trees, have moved on. The robins seem bigger and the lesser gold finches dropped in for a week or so in early April. I always notice their entrance on the scene because of their calls. I suppose I should teach Jackson how to collect and throw out all our snails or learn to enjoy escargot, but I haven't the heart for it yet. We could get a duck to eat them (and wouldn't he love that!).
What I couldn't know empirically is that their presence means the environment is reasonably unpolluted (says Pam Peirce in "Golden Gate Gardening", an awesome resource book for our area) and that the mockingbirds and robins control pests. The robins eat wireworms (their big 1/2 inch leathery, pale yellow larvae found in the soil around our plants look like something unearthed from Pan's Labyrinth), cutworms and caterpillars and the mockingbirds eat beetles, grasshoppers and other insects. Ironically, among the reasons why we have so many birds in the first place is because there are insects. I do my best to keep my pesticide-happy husband from using toxins. Tiny ants thrive as do probably a whole host of other pests. We were fortunate to inherit a garden intended for local fauna. We have what is officially called "attractant flowers" which are "especially valuable in late winter and early spring when little is blooming" (GG Gardening, p. 131). We have Mexican Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) bushes, drought-resistant, beautiful hummingbird lovers with small throated red and pink lips for flowers. Apparently, this sage's leaves can be used to make tea or to flavor fruit dishes. The flowers can decorate a salad or dessert. We also have two Japanese Plum trees (Nubiana's, I think) that are famous in the neighborhood. The white-crowned sparrows feast on new buds in February and local human families, with a similar seasonal knowledge, stop by around in June to eat plums. One such neighbor asked me if he could bring his daughter to show her the fruit he ate when he was as kid growing up around here.
The middle school where I teach does not have a garden except for the ruins of a long neglected garden beside the front door. It has a black top, which is an effective space for basketball, handball and gossip's required space for clique dispersal. We have no curriculum around food though I am developing a project about waste for whole school in June. Perhaps because we don't own the property or that as a community we have been chronically ambivalent about the pittance of a play yard, this area of school life is sorely lacking. Compare it to Martin Luther King School's Edible Garden a few miles away that is now world famous thanks to Alice Waters and Prince Charles and Camilla's visit, and we clearly lack vision in that area of middle school life. Even though all we have to offer the birds is uneaten lunch, huge seagulls and crows guard the blacktops like savvy bullies.
("speechless sorrowing of Nature")
(you will get lost you will be left)
bending over looking for the trinket lost
(most quiet heaven)
-- "Middle Distance," from Swarm by Jorie Graham
What I couldn't know empirically is that their presence means the environment is reasonably unpolluted (says Pam Peirce in "Golden Gate Gardening", an awesome resource book for our area) and that the mockingbirds and robins control pests. The robins eat wireworms (their big 1/2 inch leathery, pale yellow larvae found in the soil around our plants look like something unearthed from Pan's Labyrinth), cutworms and caterpillars and the mockingbirds eat beetles, grasshoppers and other insects. Ironically, among the reasons why we have so many birds in the first place is because there are insects. I do my best to keep my pesticide-happy husband from using toxins. Tiny ants thrive as do probably a whole host of other pests. We were fortunate to inherit a garden intended for local fauna. We have what is officially called "attractant flowers" which are "especially valuable in late winter and early spring when little is blooming" (GG Gardening, p. 131). We have Mexican Pineapple Sage (Salvia elegans) bushes, drought-resistant, beautiful hummingbird lovers with small throated red and pink lips for flowers. Apparently, this sage's leaves can be used to make tea or to flavor fruit dishes. The flowers can decorate a salad or dessert. We also have two Japanese Plum trees (Nubiana's, I think) that are famous in the neighborhood. The white-crowned sparrows feast on new buds in February and local human families, with a similar seasonal knowledge, stop by around in June to eat plums. One such neighbor asked me if he could bring his daughter to show her the fruit he ate when he was as kid growing up around here.
The middle school where I teach does not have a garden except for the ruins of a long neglected garden beside the front door. It has a black top, which is an effective space for basketball, handball and gossip's required space for clique dispersal. We have no curriculum around food though I am developing a project about waste for whole school in June. Perhaps because we don't own the property or that as a community we have been chronically ambivalent about the pittance of a play yard, this area of school life is sorely lacking. Compare it to Martin Luther King School's Edible Garden a few miles away that is now world famous thanks to Alice Waters and Prince Charles and Camilla's visit, and we clearly lack vision in that area of middle school life. Even though all we have to offer the birds is uneaten lunch, huge seagulls and crows guard the blacktops like savvy bullies.
("speechless sorrowing of Nature")
(you will get lost you will be left)
bending over looking for the trinket lost
(most quiet heaven)
-- "Middle Distance," from Swarm by Jorie Graham
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Bill Mckibben's questions
Bill Mckibben's questions to live by: "What things about my circumstances can I change by myself and what require me to be politically active? Is my way of life at all sustainable? Durable? Could 6 billion people live anything like I am living? If not, what can I do politically?"
I want to check out Deep Economy: the wealth of communities and the durable future, by Bill McKibben. Definitely the reason my husband and I live in a 900 sq foot home in Berkeley, CA has to do with the East Bay community and its durability. Why is it durable? Because neighbors talk to each other about something other than lawn products, because our neighborhood is so diverse, because we have access to farmer's markets, a marina, great hiking trails and the ocean all by bike or public transportation. And because of the farmer's market I know what is in season and grown locally and can pick produce that does not require a lot of fossil fuel to grow and transport. The fish and meat counters of our stores list the sustainability of the fisheries and farms.
But we do not live in a way that 6 billion people could live largely because of our housing and food costs and the fossil fuels and manufactured products that we use. Our consumables. A few days ago, I bought some moisturizers made by a Colorado company. The box it come in was made of a biodegradable cardboard with basil seeds embedded in it-- just put it in a hole in your garden, and the box will come back to life. Can we imagine something similar for our yogurt containers? And what about our tooth brushes?
As a 40 year old, I feel that I sit upon a massive mound of garbage that if I imagine accurately is the detritus of my years with the privileges to buy and consume in the U.S.-- It would have shoes, and dresses, pants, hats, belts, 1000 yogurt containers, 10 of thousands of plastic bags, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and gas...clearing out my aunt's basement after she held on to all her New York Times newspapers for 10 plus years I rescued for recycling 50 pounds of New York Times-- and that was just 10 years accumulation. I think school children should be asked at some point to draw everything that they've owned and thrown out in the first 15 years of life-- a sort of rite of passage before they enter full blown materialism.
I am from a family of shoppers. At a young age, I was taught how to shop. How to entertain myself for hours in a store while my mom bargained hunter for fashion, and I love shopping. I am a product of this culture without knowing its roots and consequences intimately. And yet my grandmother whose character rooted me and my mother cherished the orange put in her stocking as a child at Xmas, and hung her clothes on the clothes line long after she could have owned a dryer. Because of her I know sheets dried on a line are crisp and smell like the wind, like sails.
I want to check out Deep Economy: the wealth of communities and the durable future, by Bill McKibben. Definitely the reason my husband and I live in a 900 sq foot home in Berkeley, CA has to do with the East Bay community and its durability. Why is it durable? Because neighbors talk to each other about something other than lawn products, because our neighborhood is so diverse, because we have access to farmer's markets, a marina, great hiking trails and the ocean all by bike or public transportation. And because of the farmer's market I know what is in season and grown locally and can pick produce that does not require a lot of fossil fuel to grow and transport. The fish and meat counters of our stores list the sustainability of the fisheries and farms.
But we do not live in a way that 6 billion people could live largely because of our housing and food costs and the fossil fuels and manufactured products that we use. Our consumables. A few days ago, I bought some moisturizers made by a Colorado company. The box it come in was made of a biodegradable cardboard with basil seeds embedded in it-- just put it in a hole in your garden, and the box will come back to life. Can we imagine something similar for our yogurt containers? And what about our tooth brushes?
As a 40 year old, I feel that I sit upon a massive mound of garbage that if I imagine accurately is the detritus of my years with the privileges to buy and consume in the U.S.-- It would have shoes, and dresses, pants, hats, belts, 1000 yogurt containers, 10 of thousands of plastic bags, hundreds of thousands of gallons of water and gas...clearing out my aunt's basement after she held on to all her New York Times newspapers for 10 plus years I rescued for recycling 50 pounds of New York Times-- and that was just 10 years accumulation. I think school children should be asked at some point to draw everything that they've owned and thrown out in the first 15 years of life-- a sort of rite of passage before they enter full blown materialism.
I am from a family of shoppers. At a young age, I was taught how to shop. How to entertain myself for hours in a store while my mom bargained hunter for fashion, and I love shopping. I am a product of this culture without knowing its roots and consequences intimately. And yet my grandmother whose character rooted me and my mother cherished the orange put in her stocking as a child at Xmas, and hung her clothes on the clothes line long after she could have owned a dryer. Because of her I know sheets dried on a line are crisp and smell like the wind, like sails.
Saturday, April 21, 2007
Garbage
A.R. Ammons' book of poems Garbage was a National Book Award finalist in 1993. Here are a few lines that play with the semiotics of garbage:
Garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways...
possibilites already here, this where we came
to and how we came: a priestly director behind the
black-chuffing dozer leans the gleanings and
reads the birds, millions of loners circling
a common height, alighting to the meaty streaks
and puffy muffins(puffins?): there is a mound,
too, in the poet's mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and
shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strenghthened by what it strengthens...
On another note:
We had friends over last night and after a great feast of halibut, salmon and tiramisu, we discussed ways to conserve. The topic shifted to some critical questions: Why can't anyone advise a way to convert an old slab foundation into a radiant heat system that holds heat? What exactly are wind credits? And where is the $15 going for the wind credits I bought this week at Whole Foods to offset our carbon footprint? The point is not to be negative, but rather to be critical so that all the great ideas and momentum that are coalescing around environmental and energy issues translate into sustainable programs and products.
Garbage has to be the poem of our time because
garbage is spiritual, believable enough
to get our attention, getting in the way, piling
up, stinking, turning brooks brownish and
creamy white: what else deflects us from the
errors of our illusionary ways...
possibilites already here, this where we came
to and how we came: a priestly director behind the
black-chuffing dozer leans the gleanings and
reads the birds, millions of loners circling
a common height, alighting to the meaty streaks
and puffy muffins(puffins?): there is a mound,
too, in the poet's mind dead language is hauled
off to and burned down on, the energy held and
shaped into new turns and clusters, the mind
strenghthened by what it strengthens...
On another note:
We had friends over last night and after a great feast of halibut, salmon and tiramisu, we discussed ways to conserve. The topic shifted to some critical questions: Why can't anyone advise a way to convert an old slab foundation into a radiant heat system that holds heat? What exactly are wind credits? And where is the $15 going for the wind credits I bought this week at Whole Foods to offset our carbon footprint? The point is not to be negative, but rather to be critical so that all the great ideas and momentum that are coalescing around environmental and energy issues translate into sustainable programs and products.
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Plant consciousness for a new language
My husband and I just came up with the title of this blog: Blossom Jack, the name of a cow he once had and a reference to what I hope these posting will be about. I am here to capture some of the amazing innovations and news around green politics, environmental science, green education and green living-- what's inspiring today and how it's inspiring me and my friends.
So here goes:
Natalie Angier's article "Green, Life-Giving and Forever Young" in the Science Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17angi.html?ex=1177646400&en=8daa8d1eefabbe8f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Her thesis: "Plants are not only alive in their own right, they are also the basis of virtually all life on earth, including ours."
What's cool about Angier's thinking: plant consciousness. She explains how we take plants for granted. She begins, "Show somebody a painting of a verdant, botanically explicit forest with three elk grazing in the middle and ask what the picture is about, and the average viewer will answer, “Three elk grazing.” Add a blue jay to the scene and the response becomes, “Three elk grazing under the watchful eye of a blue jay.”
What you’re unlikely to hear is anything akin to, “It’s a classic temperate mix of maple, birch and beech trees, and here’s a spectacular basswood and, whoa, an American elm that shows no sign of fungal infestation and, oh yeah, three elk and a blue jay.”
And then Angier goes on to explain how plants are heroic, particulary impressive, how wouldn't it be cool to know one because they are autotrophic, which means they create their own food, and sophisticated in many other ways as well.
The article made me think of a class to teach "Arguments for the Environment"-- it would be 4 weeks of argumentative and creative writing, debate, environmental issues and education and 4 weeks of multi-media work. We would make an environmental movie in the style that my colleague and I created over the last few years at my middle school. Angier's essay would fit in 7-12 grade curric. It's cute, stylish, concise and even a tad cheeky.
Which leads me to thinking we need a new language to revolutionize the way we think about nature. Being green has been labeled as hippy-tree-hugging-talk for too long, and now it's already maybe sold out to mainstream advertising (I have mixed feelings about the sell-out. Is it a sell-out?) How to make the living world part of living language in a way that allows it to have style, edge, urgency, that allows it to elude stereotyping and didacticism. And can this language be alive in some way that is not simply apocalyptic, the way global warming has had to enter into our consciousness? Does a pliable language for the environment already exist outside the circles of the classic nature writers? For example, how do you get an urban kid who loves urban culture to relate? Consumption for a lot of us means a way out and up and not a death duel with life on the planet. Virginia Woolf said she desired, "some little language such as lovers use." Maybe it is this idea I'm going for: a little language that makes us fall in love with ourselves again and thus with the world again in a way that is generous and sustaining and super accessible.
I was thinking yesterday that if we think and talk of waste differently, for example, that waste is alive, that maybe we don't even call it waste anymore. (What else could we call it?) Will the new point of view then allow us to see death differently? Will death be less forboding-- something that does not pull us out of the moment, and of ourselves, and away from what is happening our all around us? Might we would then think of time differently too? For instance, if we see waste as alive, as an eternal presence (and not always the one we want, as in the case of carbon or toxins, or plastic car seats and strollers and all the plastic detritus that we feel we have to have as new parents ), it could alter our way of fundamentally seeing the world and what we love about it. I'm maybe being precious here; I can think this way because I don't have to worry about just making it through another day, though getting through another a year without using plastics, or fossil fuels? That would be interesting.
So here goes:
Natalie Angier's article "Green, Life-Giving and Forever Young" in the Science Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/17/science/17angi.html?ex=1177646400&en=8daa8d1eefabbe8f&ei=5070&emc=eta1
Her thesis: "Plants are not only alive in their own right, they are also the basis of virtually all life on earth, including ours."
What's cool about Angier's thinking: plant consciousness. She explains how we take plants for granted. She begins, "Show somebody a painting of a verdant, botanically explicit forest with three elk grazing in the middle and ask what the picture is about, and the average viewer will answer, “Three elk grazing.” Add a blue jay to the scene and the response becomes, “Three elk grazing under the watchful eye of a blue jay.”
What you’re unlikely to hear is anything akin to, “It’s a classic temperate mix of maple, birch and beech trees, and here’s a spectacular basswood and, whoa, an American elm that shows no sign of fungal infestation and, oh yeah, three elk and a blue jay.”
And then Angier goes on to explain how plants are heroic, particulary impressive, how wouldn't it be cool to know one because they are autotrophic, which means they create their own food, and sophisticated in many other ways as well.
The article made me think of a class to teach "Arguments for the Environment"-- it would be 4 weeks of argumentative and creative writing, debate, environmental issues and education and 4 weeks of multi-media work. We would make an environmental movie in the style that my colleague and I created over the last few years at my middle school. Angier's essay would fit in 7-12 grade curric. It's cute, stylish, concise and even a tad cheeky.
Which leads me to thinking we need a new language to revolutionize the way we think about nature. Being green has been labeled as hippy-tree-hugging-talk for too long, and now it's already maybe sold out to mainstream advertising (I have mixed feelings about the sell-out. Is it a sell-out?) How to make the living world part of living language in a way that allows it to have style, edge, urgency, that allows it to elude stereotyping and didacticism. And can this language be alive in some way that is not simply apocalyptic, the way global warming has had to enter into our consciousness? Does a pliable language for the environment already exist outside the circles of the classic nature writers? For example, how do you get an urban kid who loves urban culture to relate? Consumption for a lot of us means a way out and up and not a death duel with life on the planet. Virginia Woolf said she desired, "some little language such as lovers use." Maybe it is this idea I'm going for: a little language that makes us fall in love with ourselves again and thus with the world again in a way that is generous and sustaining and super accessible.
I was thinking yesterday that if we think and talk of waste differently, for example, that waste is alive, that maybe we don't even call it waste anymore. (What else could we call it?) Will the new point of view then allow us to see death differently? Will death be less forboding-- something that does not pull us out of the moment, and of ourselves, and away from what is happening our all around us? Might we would then think of time differently too? For instance, if we see waste as alive, as an eternal presence (and not always the one we want, as in the case of carbon or toxins, or plastic car seats and strollers and all the plastic detritus that we feel we have to have as new parents ), it could alter our way of fundamentally seeing the world and what we love about it. I'm maybe being precious here; I can think this way because I don't have to worry about just making it through another day, though getting through another a year without using plastics, or fossil fuels? That would be interesting.
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