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?
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