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Water Wars in America

The Environment
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Water Wars in America
By Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman
Sep 27, 2008 – 12:21:00 AM

Water Wars in America
Will the 21st Century water wars merely be a last stand against an inevitable corporatized future, or the beginning of a far-reaching revolt to reassert democratic values?

Drinking at the Public Fountain: The New Corporate Threat to Our Water Supplies
By Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman

In the last few years, the world’s largest financial institutions and pension funds, from Goldman Sachs to Australia’s Macquarie Bank, have figured out that old, trustworthy utilities and infrastructure could become reliable cash cows—supporting the financial system’s speculative junk derivatives with the real concrete of highways, water utilities, airports, harbors, and transit systems.

The spiraling collapse of the financial system may only intensify the quest for private investments in what is now the public sector. This flipping of public assets could be the next big phase of privatization, and it could happen even under an Obama administration, as local and state governments, starved during Bush’s two terms in office, look to bail out on public assets, employees, and responsibilities. The Republican record of neglect of basic infrastructure reads like a police blotter: levees in New Orleans, a major bridge in Minneapolis, a collapsing power grid, bursting water mains, and outdated sewage treatment plants.

Billions in private assets are now parked in “infrastructure funds” waiting for the crisis to mature and the right public assets to buy on the cheap. The first harbingers of a potential fire sale are already on the horizon. The City of Chicago has leased its major highway and Indiana its toll road. Private companies are managing major ports and bidding for control of local water systems across the country. Government jobs are also up for sale. For the first time in American history, the federal government employs more contract workers than regular employees.

This radical shift to the private sector could become one of history’s largest transfers of ownership, control, and wealth from the public trust to the private till. But more is at stake. The concept of democracy itself is being challenged by multinational corporations that see Americans not as citizens, but as customers, and government not as something of, by, and for the people, but as a market to be entered for profit.

How the Water Revolt Began

And a huge market it is. About 85% of Americans receive their water from public utility departments, making water infrastructure, worth trillions of dollars, a prime target for privatization. To drive their agenda, water industry lobbyists have consistently opposed federal aid for public water agencies, hoping that federal cutbacks would drive market expansion. So far, the strategy has worked. In 1978, just before the Reagan-era starvation diet began, federal funding covered 78% of the cost for new water infrastructure. By 2007, it covered just 3%.

As a result, local and state governments are desperately trying to figure out how to make up the difference without politically unpopular rate increases. A growing number of mayors and governors, Republicans and Democrats, are turning to the industry’s designated solution: privatization.

Providing clean, accessible, affordable water is not only the most basic of all government services, but throughout history, control of water has defined the power structure of societies. If we lose control of our water, what do we, as citizens, really control?

The danger is that most citizens don’t even know there’s a problem. Water systems are generally underground and out of sight. Most of us don’t think about our water until the tap runs dry or we flush and it doesn’t go away. That indifference could cost us dearly, but privatization is not yet destiny.

A citizens’ water revolt has been slowly spreading across the United States. The revolt is not made up of “the usual suspects,” has no focused ideology, and isn’t the stuff of headlines. It often starts as a “not-in-my-backyard” movement but quickly expands to encompass issues of global economic justice.

In Lee, Massachusetts, the revolt began against potential water-plant layoffs. In Felton, California, it was initially about rate increases and local control; in Atlanta, broken pipes and sewage lines. In other communities, it focused on corruption, cover-ups, and complicity between politicians and giant corporations.

One of the epicenters of this nascent movement has been Stockton, California, in the heart of the state’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley. A citizens’ group there took on not only the mayor and city council, but also some of the world’s largest private water corporations in a preview of the corporate water wars to come.

When private water companies case a city as a potential privatization target, they look for a “champion” in city government, someone who will take the lead in selling off the city’s water services. In Stockton, they found their champion in Mayor Gary Podesto, a former “big box” grocery store owner. In his view, it was “time that Stockton city government treat its citizens as customers.”

But Mayor Podesto had other reasons to privatize. Stockton was already under pressure from state and federal environmental agencies to modernize its sewage plant to reduce San Joaquin River pollution. This was an expensive project, and the mayor thought that a private company could do it cheaper, if not better.

In 2002, Podesto sought bids from private water companies to take over the city’s water department. The winner of the bidding war was a consortium of two multinational giants: OMI, the water division of Colorado-based CH2M-Hill, one of the largest engineering firms in the United States, and London’s water company, Thames Water, which was itself a subsidiary of German energy powerhouse RWE. For OMI and RWE/Thames, Stockton was an opportunity to show California, and the country, what a private utility could do. It would be the largest water privatization deal in the western United States–a 20-year, $600 million contract.

But Mayor Podesto and the water giants were in for a surprise.

Water’s Dirty History

Although hidden from sight (and scent), even pipes have a history. In the nineteenth century, water ownership and management in the United States was largely in private hands.

But as populations grew, private water companies did not have the resources or expertise to meet the need. Citizens demanded, and eventually won, modern public water systems, financed through bonds, operated by reliable engineers and experts, and accountable to local governments. The nation built a dazzling system of community waterworks that provided clean, reasonably priced water and sewer systems that still rank among the best in the world.

But in recent years, federal disinvestment in water services has sparked a new era of privatization with contemporary players repeating promises made by nineteenth century entrepreneurs. The world’s largest private water companies have quickly entered the American market: Suez and Veolia from France and Germany’s RWE/Thames. Few Americans have heard of them, but the Big Three have dominated the global water business and are among the world’s largest corporations. Together they control subsidiaries in more than 100 countries.

Relying on free market ideology rather than research, neither government officials nor the media have generally bothered to check the shaky record of these multinationals in cities around the world. Suez and Veolia have had a reputation for influence peddling in France that has reached right into the presidential palace. Suez’s first foray in the United States was in Atlanta, which threw the company out after four years of brown water, low water pressure, and general incompetence.

The companies directly involved in the Stockton deal have also had their share of controversy. OMI was charged with falsifying water quality reports in several small American cities. RWE/Thames had been named “worst polluter” in Britain several years running.

How to Privatize an American City

If Stockton Mayor Podesto had doubts about OMI and RWE/Thames, he didn’t let on, saying only that Suez’s failures in Atlanta would come back to haunt them in the American market. In his view, privatization promised efficiencies of scale, as well as competitive cost cutting, lower water rates, and a business culture that would favor real-estate development.

The argument for marketplace competition should lose all traction with a monopoly service like water, but water companies still contend that the profit motive gives them an incentive to cut costs. However, such efficiencies usually turn out to come from somewhere else—usually from service cutbacks, staff layoffs, and failures to invest in preventive maintenance.

As for rates, studies from across the country reveal that private water systems charge more—often much more—than public systems right next door. But private water operations make their biggest profits by expanding their service areas as cities grow. The industry’s business culture makes it a natural ally of developers and an opponent of citizens’ groups trying to limit growth, preserve agricultural land, or establish greenbelts.

All these political and business considerations make it easy to forget that even when water is public, it is not really our water at all. It is the planet’s circulation and life force. Climate change expresses itself through water or the lack of it. Droughts are a spreading problem across the United States, making conservation of water a high priority. However, private water companies want customers to use more water, not less, in order to maximize profit for their shareholders.

It’s not always easy to define the spark that ignites local rebellion. In Stockton, it was a growing distrust of local government. The Concerned Citizens Coalition of Stockton (“the coalition”) had formed in 2001 to monitor and challenge what its members called they mayor’s “political-control machine.” For the next six years, fighting water privatization would become its defining cause.

The coalition was unified by the conviction that Mayor Podesto was out to railroad the water privatization plan through the city council without a thorough public hearing and a citywide vote. Coalition members tenaciously confronted the mayor and his allies every step of the way. When it appeared that he still wouldn’t listen, they gathered 18,000 signatures to put an initiative on the ballot to require a citywide vote before privatization could take place.

Increasingly embattled, Podesto recognized that the coalition’s initiative was a poison pill for privatization. He wasn’t about to be outmaneuvered. In early 2003, less than two weeks before the initiative was to go to the voters, he put the proposed OMI/Thames contract on the city council. A vote by the seven-member council could preempt the 18,000 signers. Hundreds of people came out to protest. The details of the privatization deal itself had become secondary. At the electrifying two-hour meeting, the debate was over the rights of citizens, the value of the ballot, the meaning of representative democracy, and the human right to water.

In the end, Podesto himself cast the deciding vote in a 4 to 3 decision to approve the contract. Days later, Stocktonians voted overwhelmingly to approve the coalition’s initiative, but their votes had been made moot by the council’s action.

The coalition fought back in court. In its rush to approve the privatization, the city had failed to do an environmental impact study. The coalition’s lawyers claimed that was illegal and filed suit to stop privatization.

Podesto and OMI/Thames moved quickly to implement the contract. On July 31, 2003, water department employees turned in their city badges for ones with the OMI/Thames logo. Meanwhile, the coalition’s legal challenge went before superior court judge Robert McNatt, whose record indicated that it would be a hard sell. In October 2003, the judge shocked observers by throwing out privatization and giving the city 180 days to unravel the deal. McNatt wrote that the city’s self-exemption from environmental law was “an abuse of discretion.” But the city appealed, setting in motion a multi-year legal battle.

The coalition didn’t leave the battle solely up to its lawyers as appeals continued. Each year of private control, the group issued damning report cards on OMI/Thames’ performance. Mayor Podesto had, for instance, claimed that water rates would rise only 7% over the 20-year life of the contract, but the coalition analysis showed an 8.5% increase in just the first three years. In addition, leakage doubled, maintenance backlogs skyrocketed, and staff turnover was constant.

Some residents of Stockton also noticed a difference when they sniffed the air. Workers at the plant said that OMI/Thames had cut back on odor-control chemicals to save approximately $40,000 a month.

As if that weren’t enough, on the Friday before a hot summer weekend in 2006, the wastewater-treatment plant spilled eight million gallons of sewage into the San Joaquin River, contaminating a mile-long stretch where people normally went swimming. It took 10 hours for managers to notice the problem and another three days to notify the public about the health danger.

In late 2006, the courts finally reaffirmed the coalition’s position that the city had violated California environmental law and, in the spring of 2007, after Mayor Podesto had left office, Stockton’s new city council—dissatisfied with OMI/Thames’ performance—voted not to appeal and set March 1, 2008, for Stockton to resume full control of its water system.

Nevertheless, the city faced all kinds of problems taking its water system back from the private consortium. The water department remained understaffed with a huge backlog of maintenance, and it was estimated that it would now take millions of dollars to fix the system.

Reverberations

The events in Stockton were followed by activists around the country and reverberated through the private water industry as well. In September 2005, RWE/Thames cited growing “public resistance to privatization schemes” in its decision to get out of the water business. In leaked minutes from an executive board meeting in Essen, Germany, then CEO Henry Roels complained that the water business required too much long-term investment in plant and equipment and offered little hope for once anticipated quick profits. But there was an ominous note in the RWE minutes. An unidentified board member cited a Goldman Sachs prediction that the “water business would become the oil business of the decade from 2020 to 2030.”

And so a new stage in the water privatization wars beckons as Goldman Sachs, Macquarie bank, huge pension funds, and billionaire investors hop on the infrastructure bandwagon.

Will the Democrats—if elected—resist the trend? Past history suggests that the Party is deeply split on the issue of privatization and that only public resistance has slowed the fire sale. No matter who is president, the fate of public services and assets is likely to be left to local citizens groups that have cut their teeth on water battles like the one in Stockton.

Those local groups have already coalesced into a national movement for a democratic and sustainable water future. The unanswered question is whether these twenty-first century water wars are merely a last stand against an inevitable corporatized future, or the beginning of a far-reaching revolt to reclaim citizenship, reassert democratic values, and redefine how we interact with our environment.

Alan Snitow and Deborah Kaufman are award-winning filmmakers whose PBS documentary “Thirst” was the first film to bring attention to the global movement against water privatization. Their book by the same name exposed how the corporate drive to control water has become a catalyst for community resistance to globalization. Their PBS films include “Secrets of Silicon Valley” and “Blacks and Jews.” Snitow is on the board of Food and Water Watch. Kaufman is on the board of the Progressive Jewish Alliance. They are currently working on a film about Jewish power and identity in America. This essay was adapted from a longer version in the new book Water Consciousness: How We All Have to Change to Protect Our Most Critical Resource, edited by Tara Lohan (AlterNet Books, 2008).

Documentaries about Water:

Kim’s Journal Entry for 1/28/11

Kim's Journal
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Lately I’ve been so busy reading the news and posting articles that I’ve gotten behind on documenting my own journey.

This week I put together our 72 hour emergency grab bag.  We live on a fault line so it’s important to be ready for an earthquake and there’s always the possibility of tornadoes in our area.  So today I bought a small fire proof document case that I filled and packed in our hideout with lots of power bars, water, a water purifier, flashlights, first aid kit, radio, candles, lighters, sleeping bags,  and batteries.  I found a very cool LED headlamp at Lowes.  In an emergency it’s good to have light and be hands free. I still need a few more items to make it complete but it feels good to be getting prepared. I stored 12 gallons of water in there as well. Next, I’ll be working on an emergency kit for the car.

I shopped with my good friend, Teri, at Whole Foods this week and I picked up a very nice 50 gallon rain barrel with a screen top and built in hose attachment.  The rain barrel is safe for organic gardens (no BPA),  is jet black and was just $99.00.  I’ll need to build a platform and hook up my saoker hose to it soon.

With food prices predicted to increase this year (gas too) I decided to go ahead and get started on my food storage plan.   I filled up large bags of dried beans, quinoa and organic brown rice at Whole Foods and purchased large boxes of organic canned food at Costco.  I ordered the seeds for my garden at Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company.  Their seeds are all non-hybrid and non-GMO.  I can’t wait to start planting!

I was also politically active this week.  I contacted my senators because I’m hoping to help prevent Islam Siddiqui from being confirmed as the chief agriculture negotiator in the office of the United States Trade Representative.  President Obama just installed him but the senate will be voting on whether or not to confirm him soon.   Islam Siddiqui is the “inside man” in the Obama Administration for his former clients at CropLife (a front group for genetic engineering and chemical-intensive agribusiness corporations including Monsanto, Syngenta, DuPont and Dow Chemical).  From the article…

Another Washington wheeler-dealer using the revolving door between government and big business, Siddiqui formerly worked for Clinton’s pro-biotech USDA. Siddiqui gained notoriety in 1997-98 as an insider pushing for the infamous proposed USDA regulations for national organic standards that would have allowed toxic sewage sludge, irradiated foods, and genetically modified organisms to be labeled “organic.”

You can watch the video and read the article by clicking here.  Ask your senator to refuse his confirmation at the bottom of the site.  It’s so easy to do.

One of the most rewarding aspects of this journey for me is building community.  A few of my friends have decided to start working together to help each other get their gardens going.  We share news, recipes and nutrition advice.  I would love to see this community grow!

I also read an amazing book this week entitled, “The End of Food”.  I highly recommend this book to anyone who eats!

The End of Food

Here’s a good book review of ‘The End of Food’:

In this carefully researched, vividly recounted narrative, Roberts lays out the stark economic realities beneath modern food—and shows how our system for making, marketing, and moving what we eat is growing less and less compatible with the billions of consumers that system was built to serve.

–
At the heart of The End of Food is a grim paradox: the rise of large-scale, hyper-efficient industrialized food production, though it generates more food more cheaply than at any time in history, has reached a point of dangerously diminishing returns. Our high-volume factory systems are creating new risks for food-borne illness—from E. coli and Salmonella to avian flu. Our high-yield crops and livestock generate grain, vegetables, and meat of declining nutritional quality. Overproduction is so routine that nearly one billion people are now overweight or obese worldwide—and yet those extra calories are still so unevenly distributed that the same number of people—one billion, roughly one in every seven of us—can’t get enough to eat. In some of the hardest-hit regions, such as sub-Saharan Africa, the lack of a single nutrient—vitamin A—has left more than 3 million children permanently blind.

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Meanwhile, the shift to heavily mechanized, chemically intensive farming has so compromised the soils, water systems, and other natural infrastructure upon which all food production depends that it’s unclear how long such output can be maintained. And just as we’ve begun to understand the limits of our industrialized superabundance, the burgeoning economies of Asia, where newly wealthy consumers are rapidly adopting Western-style, meat-heavy diets, are putting new demands on global food supplies.

–
Comprehensive and global, with lucid writing, dramatic detail and fresh insights, The End of Food offers readers new, accessible way to understand the vulnerable miracle of the modern food economy. Roberts presents clear, stark visions of the future and helps us prepare to make the decisions — personal and global — we must make to survive the demise of food production as we know it.

So that’s my week in a nutshell.  Hopefully the weather will be nice enough next week for some outdoor work.  I’m itching to get started in the garden but first I need to read,  “The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre!”

What You Should Know about Genetically Modified Food

Nutrition and Prevention, The Environment
Published on

 

The first time I heard the phrase, “Genetically Modified Organisms”, I was sitting on my couch watching ‘Food Inc.’.  I remember asking the grocer at Kroger where the non-GMO bread was and he looked at me funny.  He had no idea what I was talking about.  So how is it that I live in a country where most of the processed food in the grocery store has GMOs in it and people, including myself and the folks who are selling it  have no idea what it is? So what is a GMO?

The Definition of Genetically Modified Food –  Meat and edible plants radically modified through genetic engineering (GE). Although humans have genetically modified animal and plants since the beginning of civilization, they did it through selective breeding possible only within the same species through natural reproduction over decades or centuries. GE techniques, however, can transfer genetic material from any source to another to instantly create utterly different variants. Since alien genes are not welcomed by the existing genes, suppressive GE techniques must be used to force the animal or plant to accept them. Such artificially mutated foods are a source of unresolved controversy over the uncertainty of their long-term effects on humans and food chains.

Why should you care? “Genetically modified foods have been linked to toxic and allergic reactions, sick, sterile, and dead livestock, and damage to virtually every organ studied in lab animals. The effects on humans of consuming these new combinations of proteins produced in GMOs are unknown and have not been studied.” Click here to read the original article.

In the last 20 years, since the introduction of GM foods there has been a:

400% increase in food allergies
300% increase in asthma, with a 56% increase in asthma deaths, and a
400% increase in ADHD and between a 1,500 and 6,000% increase in autism

Many believe that these increases are directly related to the introduction of GMOs to our diet.

According the Jeffery Smith, Author of ‘Seeds of Destruction’, 

“The American Academy of Environmental Medicine (AAEM) has called on all physicians to prescribe diets without genetically modified (GM) foods to all patients.1 They called for a moratorium on genetically modified organisms (GMOs), long-term independent studies, and labeling, stating,”

“Several animal studies indicate serious health risks associated with GM food, including infertility, immune problems, accelerated aging, insulin regulation, and changes in major organs and the gastrointestinal system.

…There is more than a casual association between GM foods and adverse health effects. There is causation…”

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GMO lies: Deliberate misuse of the term “genetically modified” designed to mislead people
Tuesday, January 25, 2011,  by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger

It’s one of the most common false arguments of GMO pushers: There’s nothing to be worried about with genetically modified foods, they argue, because almost everything is genetically modified, they claim. What they’re referring to is the genetic selection used in the long, slow development of many crops such as wheat, which originally began as a grass but was shaped generation after generation through the selection of larger seeds, ultimately leading to modern-day wheat.

This stands in stark contrast to genetic engineering, which is the artificial inserting of genetic code (often from animal species, by the way) into the DNA of a plant. This is a completely artificial, interventionist “engineering” of the DNA of a plant that wildly differs from mere genetic “selection.”

GMO  pushers attempt to confuse people with these terms by claiming that “lots of foods are genetically modified,” thereby blurring the distinction between genetic selection versus genetic engineering. I’ve even heard top-level scientists attempt to use this false argument, hoping that no one will notice.

The simple truth is that genetic selection works in harmony with natural processes of gene variation within a species. If you grow corn, and you save the seeds from your best-tasting corn to plant the next generation of corn, you are engaged in genetic selection. This is natural.

But the GMO industry doesn’t even want you to be able to save your seeds from one generation to the next. They use “terminator” technology in the seeds to ensure that the second generation of seeds is non-viable. That alone is a crime against humanity because it forces a seed monopoly upon farmers and consumers in developing nations and first-world nations. This is why any individual or organization that is in favor of seed-termination technology in GMOs is supporting a crime against nature.

As usual, the powerful corporations pushing GMOs are attempting to blatantly confuse consumers (and journalists) over the difference between genetic selection versus genetic engineering. None of the biotech GMOs are created through selection processes along. They all are based on artificial genetic engineering.

10 facts you need to know about GMOs:

• GMOs are created through artificial genetic engineering of plant DNA, usually through inserting animal genes into plants.

• Genetic “selection,” in contrast, is a natural process whereby people plant seeds, generation after generation, from their crops that demonstrate desirable characteristics. This is how wheat, corn and other crops were developed over centuries of seed selection.

• The GMO industry uses seed terminator technology to forbid seed saving and planting, thereby forcing farmers to buy seeds year after year (creating a seed monopoly and a single point of control for food).

• People who promote GMOs are engaged in crimes against humanity and crimes against nature. They promote dangerous technologies that threaten the future of life on earth by causing genetic pollution and a sharp loss of seed diversity.

• GMOs have been linked to at least 200,000 suicides in India over the past decade due to failed crops (http://www.naturalnews.com/030913_M…).

• The GMO industry has financially taken over much of the mainstream media, politicians and science journals (http://www.naturalnews.com/031093_u…). They will not stop until they achieve complete control over the world food supply.

• GMOs cause “genetic pollution” that damage other crops and ultimately threaten the reproductive viability of crops in the long term. The future of food is jeopardized by GMOs.

• The GMO industry is now attempting to brand all opponents of GMOs as “unscientific” by claiming that GMO = science, and therefore anyone who opposes GMOs is automatically an opponent of science (http://www.naturalnews.com/031093_u…).

• The GMO push into Europe is a confirmed conspiracy involving U.S. officials and GMO corporations, as revealed in a Wikileaks cable that the mainstream media has still refused to report (http://www.naturalnews.com/030828_G…).

• The next great food famine (and mass starvation) will undoubtedly be caused by GMOs. And yet the industry claims that GMOs will save the planet from starvation! Only in a crooked, corrupt world could an industry claim to be saving the world while actually enslaving the world.

After GM soy was introduced in the UK, soy allergies increased by 50%. In the 1980’s, in the US, a soy-based food supplement called L-tryptophan killed 100 people, and caused sickness and disability in another 5-10,000 people.

Currently Commercialized GM Crops in the U.S.:  (from The Institute for Responsible Technology)

Soy (91%) Cotton (71%) Canola (88%) Corn (85%) Sugar Beets (90%) Hawaiian papaya (more than 50%) Alfalfa (at Supreme Court), Zucchini and Yellow Squash (small amount) Tobacco (Quest® brand) – (Number in parentheses represents the estimated percentage that is genetically modified.)

Other Sources of GMOs:
• Dairy products from cows injected with the GM hormone rbGH
• Food additives, enzymes, flavorings, and processing agents, including the sweetener aspartame (NutraSweet®) and rennet used to make hard cheeses
• Meat, eggs, and dairy products from animals that have eaten GM feed (factory farmed meats)
• Honey and bee pollen that may have GM sources of pollen
• Contamination or pollination caused by GM seeds or pollen

Some of the Ingredients That May Be Genetically Modified: Vegetable oil, vegetable fat and margarines (made with soy, corn, cottonseed, and/or canola)

Ingredients derived from soybeans: Soy flour, soy protein, soy isolates, soy isoflavones, soy lecithin, vegetable proteins, textured vegetable protein (TVP), tofu, tamari, tempeh, and soy protein supplements.

Ingredients derived from corn: Corn flour, corn gluten, corn masa, corn starch, corn syrup, cornmeal, and High-Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS).

Use this guide to make healthy, non-GMO choices: Non-GMO shopping guide.

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There are numerous books, films, websites, news sites and blogs dedicated entirely to the subject of GMOs.  The most comprehensive site that I have found is, ‘The Institute for Responsible Technology’. GMOs are banned in many countries but are not even labeled in America.

Films about GMOs

Stay informed about GMOs

Watch NaturalNews editor Mike Adams rap about GMOs in the hit song, “Just Say No to GMOs”
Visit www.NaturalNews.com/NoGMO to learn more.
Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/031105_genetically_modified_GMO.html#ixzz1C3n7fTk4

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Trailer for ‘The Future of Food’.

What You Need To Know Before You Buy An Electric Car

Becoming Resilient
Published on

Eventually we hope to buy an electric car.  We’re waiting for prices to come down and for a later, more improved generation of EVs.  However, this article is full of information to help guide our eventual purchase, so I thought I would share it with you.

Things You Need to Know Before Buying an Electric Car: To read the original article click here

Interested in buying an electric car? Check out these buying tips, so you know about maintenance, battery charging and warranties, and other key factors.

The buzz in 2011 is about all the new electric cars on the road, led by the Chevrolet Volt and the Nissan Leaf. But because these are new products to the U.S. market, we asked Nick Chambers, who has written about next-generation automobiles for the New York Times, Popular Mechanics and others, to cut through the hype and offer some practical tips for consumers interested in buying an electric car. He came up with these nine things you should know about electric cars before making a purchase:

1. There Are Two Kinds of Electric Cars

Turbocharger? What’s that? In this new world of plug-ins there are really only two types: all-electric cars and plug-in hybrids.

All-electric cars are solely powered by large batteries charged from the grid; when they run out of juice they can’t move anymore. The Nissan Leaf (left) is an example of an all-electric car.

Plug-in hybrids have a shorter all-electric driving range using a smaller battery pack. After the battery pack is drained, they can either revert to being a normal fuel-fed hybrid, or they can use fuel to run a generator and recharge the batteries on the fly. The Chevy Volt (right) is an example of a plug-in hybrid.

2. There Are Lucrative Federal and State Incentives to Buy Them
Although the sticker prices for electric cars tend to be higher than similarly-sized and -equipped conventional cars, federal and state governments think they are worth subsidizing and have offered some seriously chunky incentives for you to buy one.

All U.S. taxpayers are eligible for a $7,500 federal tax credit — but only if you have a one-year tax liability that exceeds that amount. If you don’t have that much tax liability, don’t fret, you can lease the car from the manufacturer and use the entire $7,500 to pay down the lease right off the bat. As a result, Nissan and Chevy — the two electric vehicle manufacturers first out of the gate with mass-market offerings — both have relatively affordable $350 per month lease deals. The federal tax credit will remain in effect for a given EV (electric vehicle) manufacturer until it sells more than 200,000 EVs.

In addition to the federal incentives, many states have sweetened the kitty with their own. For example California has a $5,000 credit, Oregon has a $1,500 one and the State of Washington waves its usual 6.5% sales tax charge. Some states also provide special parking and carpool lane privileges. Nissan’s LEAF website has a handy tool to help you figure out what incentives are available where you live.

3. There Are Three Ways to Charge Them
Although the engineers will tell you this is a complicated point of discussion, what it really boils down to is that electric car manufacturers in the U.S. can provide three “levels” of charging support for their vehicles.

Level 1 charging happens off of a standard three-prong household outlet. Every electric car comes with a cable that supports this type of charging, but it’s slow — only adding about 5 miles of driving range for every hour of charging.

Level 2 charging uses special wall- or pedestal-mounted equipment unique to electric cars. Even so, it is essentially like charging from a standard household dryer outlet. Level 2 charging is faster than Level 1, adding about 15-30 miles of driving range per hour of charging, depending on the vehicle.

DC fast charging uses industrially-rated, gas pump-sized stations to dump electrons into your car’s battery like a firehose. Only some cars support this type of charging, and it’s usually an option that costs extra. DC fast charging can add about 80 miles of driving range in a half hour of charging.

Related: The Future? Electric Car Charging for Free, While You Shop

4. It’s Easy To Install a Home Charging Station, But It Costs Extra (Don’t Worry, There Are Incentives)
Although every electric car comes with support for Level 1 charging, most people will want to install their own Level 2 charging station at home so that they can fill up their car’s battery overnight — but it’s by no means a free endeavor.

Level 2 home charging stations will cost between $1,500 and $2,500 to install, depending on the manufacturer and the equipment chosen. If you have special circumstances, such as a long wiring run, the costs can be considerably more. Sounds like a lot, no? The federal government, again, has a pocketful of cash it’s ready to dole out, providing a tax credit of 30% of the cost of purchase and installation, up to $1,000.

5. Public Charging Stations Are Coming, But The Rollout Will Be Slow and Sporadic

So you’ve got your spiffy new electric car, and you coughed up the dough for your own home charging station. If you’re like 80% of Americans, that’s likely good enough for most of your driving needs — you’ll get to the work and back, and have enough to run typical errands. But what about if you want the same freedom that a gas tank and a filling station ever few miles offers? That’s where public charging comes in, providing you the ability to extend your electric car’s all-electric range substantially. (The Wattstation, at right, is an example of a public Level 2 charger.)

There is currently a huge push from the EV Project — a $250 million joint federal-private program — to install nearly 15,000 public Level 2 charging stations in a handful of early deployment regions around the United States over the course of 2011. This includes areas of Oregon, California, Washington, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and Washington, D.C. If you live in one of those regions you will have a relatively robust public charging infrastructure quickly. If you don’t, you may have to wait a while unless your community is charging ahead without federal support.

6. All-Electric Cars Are for Daily Driving, Not Cross-Country Road Trips
If you buy a plug-in hybrid, you can ignore this because they are capable of taking long-distance trips. However, most of the initial crop of all-electric cars have a range of around 100 miles on a full charge. Some have up to 200 miles, but are quite a bit more expensive. If you have public charging where you live, or you return home and plug-in during the day, you can drive your EV more than 100 miles. Even so, you’re not going to be taking them on long trips. Most people who buy an all-electric car will have a second car available for the occasional long trip.

7. You’ll Spend Less On Maintenance, But… (Yes, There’s a “But”)
All-electric cars ditch the thousands of moving parts of a combustion engine and associated transmission for a handful of moving parts in an electric motor. They also have no emissions equipment. As a result you will have very few maintenance costs — no more oil or transmission fluid changes or catastrophic mechanical repairs. And, although plug-in hybrids still have an engine and emissions equipment, they will need far less maintenance than a typical gasoline engine because they will operate as an electric car much of the time.

Even so, EVs have large, expensive batteries that may need to be replaced after 7-10 years. However, in this first crop of electric cars the manufacturers have provided long battery warranties. In the case of both the Nissan LEAF and the Chevy Volt, that warranty is 8 years or 100,000 miles. The average new car buyer owns the car for six years.) In 8 years the price of batteries will likely come down substantially.

8. All-Electric Cars May Not Have Tailpipe Emissions, But They Aren’t Emissions Free
Sure, we’ve all heard the “zero emissions” claim, and some of us have seen it plastered on the side of a Nissan LEAF — but it’s not entirely true. About half of the U.S.’s electricity comes from coal-fired power plants, so many drivers are filling up on a dirty fossil fuel – it’s just burned a few miles down the road, rather than under your hood. Depending on where you live, this ratio might be more or less — and in places like California or Washington, a large proportion of that electricity comes from natural gas and renewable energy sources, like wind, solar or hydro power.

Even if your electric car is powered by 50% coal there are several studies that conclusively show it will pollute less than the average diesel or gas car, such as this one from the Electric Power Research Institute. (Photo: Istock)

9. Electric Cars Are Really Cheap to Operate, But Expect Higher Utility Bills
Given the average cost of electricity in the United States of about 12 cents per kilowatt hour, you can drive an EV for around three to four cents per mile. At $3.20 per gallon, a 30 mpg gas car costs about eleven cents per mile to drive — plus regular and unexpected maintenance that you likely won’t have in an EV. If you drive your EV 50 miles every day, you can expect your electricity bill to increase by half.

Read more: http://www.thedailygreen.com/environmental-news/latest/electric-car-buying-tips#ixzz1BjKUroY5

Fertile inquiries: A very basic primer on creating and maintaining soil fertility

Gardening
Published on

Fertile inquiries: A very basic primer on creating and maintaining soil fertility
by Sharon Astyk
Published Jan 24 2011 by Casaubon’s Book, Archived Jan 25 2011
Gardeners like to compete with each other over who has the worst soil. You wouldn’t think we’d be proud of this, but what can I say, we’re a strange bunch. One will argue for his hard clay, baked in the sun, another for her sand, without a trace of organic matter. I’ve got my own candidate for the worst soil ever – the stuff in the beds around my house.

Oh, texturally, it is among the best I’ve got – sandy loam, warms up nicely, isn’t too wet like much of the rest of my soil. It had some nice enough foundation plantings, and I mostly ignored it for the first few years I was here. But a couple of years ago, I decided that I wanted to make use of this growing space, and then I discovered that my soil, was, well…dead.

By dead, I mean there wasn’t a living thing in it. Not a beetle or a spider, and especially not an earthworm. It was weird. I knew that some previous owners of our house were umm… shiny green lawn people, and I don’t know if that has something to do with it, but this stuff was “Its dead, Jim” dead.

So we embarked on a campaign of soil improvement. Any kind of soil improvement has two parts. First, there’s getting your soil up to speed. In some cases, this might not be much – maybe some ashes from your stove or a little lime to even out some acidity, or maybe a little rock powder for trace minerals, or a light dressing of the rabbit poop your rabbits make sure you get anyway. If your soil is basically in good shape – you’ve had a soil test and you know that it is high in organic matter and sufficient in macro and micronutrients.

But what if it isn’t? What if you’ve got dead soil, like mine, or rock hard clay, or soil (also like mine) that has been leached of nutrients? Again, there are two projects here – the first is the short term building of soil so that you can get to gardening. The second is the long term maintenence of soil health, and the addition of more organic matter, so that eventually, your soil can hold enough organic matter to save the world – or at least sequester a bit of carbon. Plus, things will grow better. Win-win.

My favorite way to build soil on something that is completely unworkable is the lasagna method, which is pretty much sheet mulching (covering the soil with newspaper or cardboard, then laying on as much organic material as you’ve got, with some dirt or compost on it. This makes raised beds, which is good if what you have is either wet or rock hard, or if you are, say putting your dirt on gravel or something toxic. It might be tough in a dry, hot climate though – raised beds dry out and warm up in the spring earlier, and keeping them wet might be tough. In that case, you might consider digging into the ground, creating sunken beds with the same mixture. We use leaves, grass clippings and farm bedding as the main ingredients in our lasagna beds, with a layer of find compost on top if I’m starting seeds in it.

If you need to amend soil, you’ll have the choice of synthetic or natural soil amendments. Generally speaking, you’ll want the natural ones. I’m not a complete organic purist – I think there are times when artificial fertilizer use is justified. But there’s a price to be paid for its use, and care is needed – otherwise you can end up contaminating your water supply, wasting your money and depleting your soil overall. I don’t generally use synthetic fertilizers, and if I were to use them, I’d use them only on untilled soil with plenty of organic matter added, in small and precise quantities. Most of the value of artificial fertilizers is presently lost into waterways and various other sites of contamination.

You can buy an organic fertilizer mix, or you can make your own. I generally use a mix of alfalfa meal, rock phosphate, and wood ashes, along with greensand and kelp, as well as occasionally special additions to deal with soil types or plant special needs. But I don’t know about you, but I can’t mine rock phosphate from my property, nor do I produce enough alfalfa to fertilize my garden. So this is not a long-term sustainable project. I use these amendments sparingly, where they are needed to bring soils up to basic fertility.

Then, we try to keep the fertility there. That means cover cropping a portion of our garden every year, integrating dynamic accumulator plants into our plantings (these are plants that bring up nutrients from the subsoil), undercropping with nitrogen fixers (these plants fix nitrogen from the air), mulching (we try to grow as much of our own mulch as possible in place – another good use for undercropping – a nice planting of buckwheat under tomatoes, or white clover under garlic can provide a living mulch and then the next planting cycle’s mulching materials), and the heavy application of organic material – that is, compost and composted animal manures.

Every time we take something off of the soil, we are removing nutrients from our soil, and depleting, to some degree, the organic material available to them. High levels of organic material are essential for soil life and health – so faced with dead soil, the first thing I did was put my turkey poults in a chicken tractor on top of the border for a few days. The easiest way to move the poop to the garden beds is sometimes to move the poop makers there . Now since this was raw manure, I made sure there was plenty of bedding, and I wasn’t planting food plants there right away. Had I needed to use it immediately, I would have switched to already composted manure, and gotten out the wheelbarrow.

Next, I planted the foundation plantings to annual alfalfa, since it was already summer, and warm. Different cover crops are specific to different seasons – they are spring, summer or fall sown. You sow the fall crops to overwinter – to hold soil in place, and add organic material. Winter rye, hairy vetch, fava beans (in some climates) are all common winter sown cover crops. Spring sown crops are generally cut down in summer, and either stay in place all season (things like red clover), providing multiple doses of fertility and green material, or they are cut down (oats, say) to provide organic material for the fall garden. Summer crops (buckwheat, annual alfalfa) can go in after the peas or the early lettuce, and grow fast and fill the space until fall. For a site you don’t plan to get to for a year or two, perennial crops can do a lot to regenerate soil.

Cover cropping is very place specific – the best crops are specific to your climate, seasons and locality, so talk to your cooperative extension. They are a powerful tool for building fertility, adding organic matter and improving soil, and one that is worth getting to know.

My goal in the long term is for these beds to provide a warm, dry, moderately fertile site for mediterranean herbs and a few flowering perennials. That is, I wasn’t trying to produce fertility for growing heavy feeders, like greens or corn. So after the alfalfa, I added some greensand and kelp, a light layer of compost, and planted into the mulch I’d already established. In went lavender, oregano, several marjorams and thymes, a rosemary that probably didn’t survive the winter this year, and some plants that like or tolerate similar conditions of slightly dry soil, lots of sun and only moderate fertility – catmint, echinops and malva. And they’ve thrived.

Many perennial plants make wonderful fertility enhancers to annual gardens – whether perennial nitrogen fixing shrubs, whose leaf litter and root nodes enhance the trees and perennial plantings around them, comfrey and stinging nettle which can be cut for mulch or compost, small trees integrated into garden sites to provide leaf mulch, or perennial living mulches. This is one of those things that has potentially enormous long term yields, and has really only begun to be explored in a deep way.

The best soils for sequestering organic matter will be those that are in perennial plantings, that have constant inputs of organic matter – these include forests that are enriched yearly by leaf drops, permanent pastures which are manured by grazing animals (It has been calculated that Joel Salatin’s grazed pastures sequester as much carbon as a similarly sized forest after decades of grazing), and perennial gardens that are carefully managed to provide their own needs.

I maintain fertility in the perennial planting I established in these beds by the occasional dumping of animal bedding on the ground, permanent mulch, wood ashes from our stove, and a strewing of kelp. I’ve also grown an annual crop of chamomile, a good dynamic accumulator, and left everything but the flowerheads in place. I give the whole thing an occasional boost of nitrogen by dumping dilute urine over it – urine is safe unless you have tularemia (in which case you have worse problems than not being able to fertilize with your pee) and diluted 1-7 (1-10 if you don’t drink enough), it provides a real boost to plants. To be paranoid stop doing so 10 days before harvest.

More demanding annual feeders get composted chicken or goat manure, plant compost, weed and manure teas. Other plants might also get living mulches, and I rotate plants as wisely and carefully as I can, following the heavy feeders with nitrogen fixers or light feeders undersown with nitrogen fixing cover crops. My whole garden gets rotating quantities of worm casting to supplement the soil and improve its texture.

Meanwhile, in maintaining, we try to put back what we take off. Crop residues are left in place, either chopped down and incorporated into the permanent mulch or they are burned in our woodstove (for heavy, dense stalks) and returned as ash. Some of the nitrogen is returned in the form of urine. We mulch as much as possible with our own mulches – grass clippings, leaves and plants grown for compost or as mulch plants. We try not to steal too much from any one other place – but we gratefuly take things people discard, like leaves from yards when we venture into suburbia, or horse manure from our horse-keeping neighbors.

Animal manures have a very powerful role in gardening – in a perfect world, we’d compost all human manures until they were thoroughly pathogen free, and restore the soil with what we take off. But whether this is safe is debatable, and anyone who shares food will not want to risk a lawsuit. So composted animals manures are a powerful tool for maintaining fertility – one of the reasons that polycultures of animals and plants are generally more effective than either alone. We use composted human manures only on decorative and tree plantings.

Two particular ways of maintaining fertility deserve mention here – fungal soil support, by mycorrhizae (tiny fungus that colonize the soil) and biochar. Mycorrhizae have a symbiotic relationship with the roots of many plants, and can enhance the ability to plants to uptake nutrients and deal with water stress among other things. Many soils are fungi deficient, and an application of mycorrhizae can improve your plants ability to absorb the nutrients in your soil.

Biochar/Terra Preta is a fascinating subject – and one still uncertain. Terra Preta involves adding plant based charcoal (ie, not the briquets at the grocery store) to your soil. What this does is still a matter of speculation – it isn’t clear, for example, whether the charcoal itself or the organic processes it enables are actually what creates the rich soil involved. Nor is it clear that all soils respond equally well to terra preta inputs – for example a study found that boreal forest soils did not seem to respond to biochar applications. That said, however, there have been some fascinating results – biochar supplemented soils seem to stimulate nitrogen fixing in legumes, for example, and while charcoal supplemented soils enable plants to take up more minerals, the soils deplete more slowly. This is a project still in the exploration stages, but one that home gardeners and small farmers can contribute to with experimentation.

We’re not a closed circle by any means – we still take advantage, as long as they are available and we can afford them, of valuable amendments. But the idea is to lose as little as possible, while getting the best possible balance between improved soil, the health of the world, and a system in which you need to bring in a little less from offsite each year. This, it seems, is an entirely achievable goal.

Read this article in the Energy Bulletin by clicking here.

The gutsy food sovereignty movement

Becoming Resilient, The Environment
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The gutsy food sovereignty movement

by Olga Bonfiglio
It is a basic tenet that a community’s food supply should be healthy and accessible for everyone.

Truth is that local communities have very little control over their food. Corporate food producers dominate the American food system by providing cheap and plentiful food. While this may seem to be a good thing, the food and the processes used don’t necessarily guarantee the nutrition or health they purport to provide.

The food companies have created an industrialized agriculture system that uses a multitude of chemicals in fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides as well as genetically-modified products. Some people believe these additives contribute to skyrocketing rates of diabetes and obesity not to mention asthma, food allergies and other health problems.

Accessibility to good food can also be a problem, especially for lower-income groups in large metropolitan areas who typically do not have grocery stores in their neighborhoods. Instead, these “food deserts” have an ample supply of party and liquor stores that stock snacks and processed foods but not fresh fruits, vegetables and meats.

Participants in the food movement have actively taken on these “food security” or “food sovereignty” issues by creating substitutes to the industrialized food system including community-supported agriculture (CSA), farmers markets, local food, family and neighborhood gardens, farm-to-school initiatives, food as economic development, food policy councils, food assessment programs, and youth programming and training. And, they are beginning to make a difference in the way America eats.

Food sovereignty means that people have the right to decide what they eat and to ensure that food in their community is healthy and accessible for everyone, according to the Community Food Security Coalition. It also means that producers receive a fair price for their products and that local family farmers and fishers should have the first right to local and regional markets.

With this mission in mind, food security advocates have been successfully changing food policy not only in the United States but all over the world.

Here are some good examples of groups that were honored at the Community Food Security Coalition at its annual conference held recently in New Orleans. Family Farm Defenders received the 2010 Food Sovereignty Prize, which recognizes organizations that uphold the principles of food sovereignty and fight for and make real change to end hunger and poverty.

Honorable mentions were also awarded to ROPPA (Burkina Faso), the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network, and the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty (Vancouver, BC).

Family Farm Defenders
Family Farm Defenders (FFD), a grassroots non-profit organization in Madison, WI, was founded in 1994 to support the livelihoods of small dairy and vegetable farmers.

John Kinsman, who is president of FFD, began pushing for food sovereignty when he helped protest the injection of bovine growth hormones (rGBH) in dairy cows on the University of Wisconsin campus. Researchers there were beneficiaries of corporate gifts that encouraged and affirmed its use. Even the National Dairy Board promoted rGBH. But no one ever asked the dairy farmers if rGBH hurt their production, said Kinsman, despite Monsanto’s claims that it did.

Kinsman worked with former U.S. Senator Russ Feingold who at the time was a state senator, on labeling rGBH milk, which the corporate milk producers didn’t want to do. A labeling law was eventually passed, however, and it became a model for the organic food movement, which now is trying to label genetically-engineered (GM) foods.

Through FFD, Kinsman also worked to re-localize food/farm economies and forge new economic relationships between consumers and farmers. An example of this cooperative effort is the Family Farmer Fair Trade Project that enables FFD to direct market cheese from Cedar Grove in Plain, WI. One outcome of this relationship is that farmers receive a fair price for their products as they provide consumers with rGBH-free alternatives.

“I’m a peasant farmer,” said Kinsman who uses this term to differentiate himself from food corporations that are now trying to call themselves “family farmers” just as Monsanto is trying to call itself “green.”

“We need to find new words,” he said.

It is important to note that Family Farm Defenders makes sure that urban people are on its board—40 percent of them. This is because the board believes that they must be as involved in defending the family farm as the farmers themselves.

“Farmers are so beaten down by industrial food companies and low prices,” he said. “They have had their dignity taken away from them.”

ROPPA
Our culture requires us to behave in a certain way and that is centered around food, said Djibo Bagna, of the Network of West African Peasant and Agricultural Producers’ Organizations.

Food policies are usually formulated by people in offices and agriculture is governed only by financial considerations, he said. However, peasants are leaving their farms because they cannot earn a living.

“As a food sovereignty council, we first had to decide that we would no longer allow others to speak for us or tell us what kind of agriculture we should have,” said Bagna.

Poverty is a rural phenomenon and its strongest conflicts center around resources. Unfortunately, there typically is no investment in rural areas nor is credit offered at reasonable rates. ROPPA tried to change this situation and decided that in order to do so it had to be present at the policy table.

The United Nations Agriculture Policy group was surprised to learn of ROPPA’s request. At first it allowed them only one representative but ROPPA baulked. It didn’t just want representation; it wanted to shape the policy. When the UN refused to give ROPPA representation, ROPPA promised that it would organize 10,000 farmers to take the streets during the policy group’s meetings. The UN capitulated and allowed ROPPA a seat at the table.

“You can’t have food sovereignty unless you are involved in the debate,” said Bagna. “You need funding for farmers to grow food and communication to break down the barriers between policymakers who set the rules and farmers who produce the products. You need agricultural research, value-added products and a dialogue space to talk to each other.”

Detroit Black Community Food Security Network
Detroit has one of the poorest urban populations in the country. With 50 percent unemployment in the city and a terrible “food desert,” a group of school parents, teachers and administrators decided it was time to act: they would learn how to grow their own food for their children.

In 2006, this group became known as the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network. It focuses on urban agriculture, policy development and cooperative buying.

The group observed that “many of the key players in the city’s local urban agriculture movement were young whites, who while well-intentioned, nevertheless exerted a degree of control inordinate to their numbers in Detroit’s population,” according to its website.

DBCFSN believes that the most effective movements “grow organically from the people whom they are designed to serve.” So, the group is creating model urban agricultural projects that seek to build community self-reliance and to change people’s consciousness about food.

For example, its urban agriculture program planted and maintained a quarter-acre garden in 2006 and a three-quarter-acre mini-farm in 2007. In 2008 it built the D-Town Community Garden where it grows 35 crops, keeps bees and maintains a vermiculture compost program.

All produce is grown using sustainable, chemical-free practices, and sold at the farm sites, the Eastern Market, and markets for urban growers throughout Detroit. The group also holds harvest festivals four times a year.

Policy development, however, is DBCFSN’s “jewel in our crown.” It has crafted food policy for the city that was adopted by the Detroit City Council. This policy includes provisions for education, economic justice, finding ways to combat hunger, discerning the school’s role in food security, advocating and providing for urban agriculture, developing emergency responses to food shortages and food deserts and forming a food policy council.

With cooperative buying, the network has tried to go beyond the basic co-op model and include food distribution networks. So the network formed a regional system with Detroit, Toledo, Chicago, and Milwaukee in cooperation with the trucking industry.

“We didn’t do anything that we didn’t feel we had to do,” said Aba Ifeoma, one of the members of the network.

Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty
Dawn Morrison of the Working Group on Indigenous Food Sovereignty is a member of the Vancouver Island Network that has mobilized people to define the food system in Canada for indigenous peoples of 27 nations. They did this by working together with non-indigenous people.

Morrison pointed out that food is a sacred gift of the Creator and humans have a responsibility to maintain right relationship to plants and animals that provide us with food.

“We must be free from corporate control to determine where we get our food and how we grow it,” she said. “We do this in our day to day actions with family and the community. Our policies, meanwhile, must be driven by practice and be community-based.”

Citizen participation is the key to establishing and keeping a democracy. As we watch our representative government crumble through corporate influence, political corruption and hate speech, we can look to the food sovereignty movement to remind us how democracy really works. Then, let’s hope that spirit will spread.

One Family Prepares for Peak Oil

Becoming Resilient
Published on

One Family Prepares for Peak Oil

I watched this series of videos last summer and was very impressed and inspired by what this family is doing to build resilience and live sustainably.  Make sure to grab a pen and paper because you will want to take notes!

Peak Oil – Preparing For: Part 1 of 4

Preparing For Peak Oil – Part 2 of 4

Preparing For Peak Oil – Part 3 of 4

Preparing For Peak Oil – Part 4 of 4

Study: Only 10 percent of big ocean fish remain

The Environment
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Last night while I was working out on the treadmill I watched, ‘The End of the Line’, a documentary about what over-fishing is doing to the oceans and how it is threatening the very existence of some of the fish you and I love to eat.  Imagine that your grandchildren may never taste a blue fin tuna!  I guess it takes a lot of fish to feed nearly 7 billion hungry humans but I really had no idea of how close to extinction many of these fish are.

And here’s another disturbing fact:  There is now 6 times more plastic in the oceans than plankton.  Each hour, North Americans consume and discard about 2.75 million plastic water and soda bottles; that’s 24 billion a year and that’s not counting plastic bags.  And, Each year, a million sea birds and 100,000 sharks, turtles, dolphins and whales die from eating plastic.  YUCK!  What are we doing???  Sometimes I think we’re all just sleep walking.  We’re told to work, eat, shop, watch TV and sleep.  Are we just going to sleep until it’s too late to make the changes that are necessary to leave some of what we’ve had in abundance (fish, real food, clean air, pure water, oil, coal and gas) for our children and grandchildren?  It’s time for a change.  Let’s wake up and take responsibility for what we are doing to God’s earth and start being good stewards instead of pillagers.  Our grandchildren deserve better!

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Study: Only 10 percent of big ocean fish remain

View the original article by clicking here
May 14, 2003|By Marsha Walton CNN

A new global study concludes that 90 percent of all large fishes have disappeared from the world’s oceans in the past half century, the devastating result of industrial fishing.

The study, which took 10 years to complete and was published in the international journal Nature this week, paints a grim picture of the Earth’s current populations of such species as sharks, swordfish, tuna and marlin.

The authors used data going back 47 years from nine oceanic and four continental shelf systems, ranging from the tropics to the Antarctic. Whether off the coast of Newfoundland, Canada, or in the Gulf of Thailand, the findings were dire, according to the authors.

“I think the point is there is nowhere left in the ocean not overfished,” said Ransom Myers, a fisheries biologist at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia and lead author of the study.

Some in the fishing industry took issue with the tone of the report.

“I’m sure there are areas of the world with that level of depletion, but other areas are in good shape,” said Lorne Clayton, with the Canadian Highly Migratory Species Foundation, a foundation that supports the sustainable development of the tuna industry.

He said some abuses of the past have ended: Long drift nets are illegal, untended longlines are illegal, and many countries adhere to elaborate systems of licensing, quotas and third party observers working on boats.

Yet Clayton agreed that there remains much room for improvement.

“It’s important to keep these issues in front of the public. That puts pressure on the fisheries and agencies to keep cleaning up their act,” he said.

According to the report, the big declines in the numbers of large fishes began when industrial fishing started in the early 1950s.

“Whether it is yellowfin tuna in the tropics, bluefin in cold waters, or albacore tuna in between, the pattern is always the same. There is a rapid decline of fish numbers,” Myers said.

Co-author Boris Worm said the losses are having major impacts on the ocean ecosystems.

The predatory fish are like “the lions and tigers of the sea,” said Worm, a marine ecologist with the Institute for Marine Science in Kiel, Germany.

“The changes that will occur due to the decline of these species are hard to predict and difficult to understand. However, they will occur on a global scale, and I think this is the real reason for concern.”

Six times more plastic than plankton in the Pacific Ocean

More plastic than plankton in Pacific Ocean
Reese Halter |  Calgary Herald |  01.25.2009
Amass of plastic in the Pacific, increasing tenfold each decade since 1945, is now the size of Texas and killing everything in its wake.

Each day, North Americans throw away more than 385,000 cellphones and 143,000 computers– electronic waste is now the fastest-growing stream of garbage. Lead and mercury are seeping from this waste into ground water.

Most of this electronic waste is shipped overseas, where it is dismantled and burned, deleterious to the environment and human health. Some of the e-waste, however, is winding up in the sea.

Each hour, North Americans consume and discard about 2.75 million plastic water and soda bottles; that’s 24 billion a year.

Globally, 100 million tonnes of plastic are generated each year and at least 10 per cent of that is finding its way into the sea. The United Nations Environmental Program now estimates that there are 46,000 floating pieces of plastic for every square mile of ocean. Some of that trash circulating the globe is 30 metres deep.

Worldwide, each year 113 billion kilograms of small plastic pellets called nurdles–the feedstock for all disposable plastics– are shipped and billions are spilled during transfer in and out of railroad cars. Those spilled nurdles are ending up in gutters and drains and eventually carried into the ocean.

The U.S. produces about 6.8 billion kilograms of plastic each year and only one per cent of it is recycled. As a matter of fact, the average American uses 101 kilograms of plastic each year and by 2011 it’s projected to be as high as 148 kilograms per annum.

At least 80 per cent of the plastic in the ocean originated from the land. Thousands of cargo containers fall overboard in stormy seas each year. In 2002, 33,000 blue-and-white Nike basketball shoes were spilled off the coast of Washington.

Plastic in the ocean acts like sponges attracting neuron-toxins like mercury and pyrethroids insecticides, carcinogens such as PCBs, DDT and PBDE (the backbone of flame retardants), and man-made hormones like progesterone and estrogen that at high levels induce both male and female reproductive parts on a single animal.

Japanese scientists found nurdles with concentrations of poisons listed above as high as one million times their concentrations in the water as free-floating substances.

Each year, a million sea birds and 100,000 sharks, turtles, dolphins and whales die from eating plastic.

Nurdles resemble fish eggs or roe. Tuna and salmon feed on them indiscriminately. Around 2.5 billion humans eat fish regularly. Plastic and other man-made toxins are polluting the global food chain and it’s rising at an unprecedented rate.

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is actually comprised of two enormous masses of ever-growing garbage. The Eastern Garbage Patch floats between Hawaii and California. The Western Garbage Patch extends east of Japan to the western archipelago of the Hawaiian Islands. A narrow 10,000-kilometre-long current called the Subtropical Convergence Zone connects the patches.

The massive clockwise North Pacific Gyre is carrying plastic that is over 50 years old. Last year, plastic found in the stomach of an albatross had a serial number traced to a Second World War seaplane shot down just south of Japan in 1944 and identified over 60 years later off the West Coast of the U. S.

Currently, there is six times more plastic than plankton floating in the middle of the Pacific.

The North Pacific Gyre, its ocean currents and winds have essentially become a giant toilet bowl that regularly disgorges metres of plastic onto Hawaii’s Big Island. Kamilo Beach is often covered in plastic lighters, toothbrushes, water bottles, pens, nurdles, baby bottles, cellphones and plastic bags. About one half trillion plastic bags are manufactured each year around the globe.

Oceanographers and conservation biologists believe the only way to contend with the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is to slow the amount of plastic flowing from the land to the sea.

Buy six organic cotton shopping bags. Use them instead of supermarket plastic bags. Make it a habit to return those bags to the trunk of your car after unpacking groceries.

Reuse your plastic water bottles. If you can refill one bottle for a day then why not attempt it for a week.

Thermal conversion landfills –like those of Golden Spirit Enterprises–will soon render all landfill trash neutral and prevent landfills from contaminating groundwater and haphazardly leaking the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere.

In the meantime, each of us must deliberately reduce the amount of garbage we generate and, in particular, the quantity of disposable plastic that are carelessly being discarded– because the ocean and all of its life forms are suffocating.

Dr. Reese Halter is a Conservation biologist and Founder of the international Conservation institute global Forest science. He can be contacted through www.drreese.com

 

Reality Support Groups

Becoming Resilient
Published on

Published Jan 24 2011 by Yes! Magazine, Archived Jan 24 2011
Rocky times ahead: Are you ready?
by Sarah Byrnes, Chuck Collins

Community support and solidarity is helpful in the face of tough economic times.
“I don’t believe the economy is getting better,” says Billy R., a member of a mutual aid group in Oregon that he jokingly calls “my reality support group.” “All around me I’m surrounded by media and advertising urging me to keep borrowing, buying, and sleepwalking. I love meeting with others who are staring down the potential risks and challenges of the future.”

Maybe more of us could use a reality support group.

Even with the announcement that the official unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent, millions of people remain in dismal economic straits. The pace of home foreclosures has barely slowed and millions remain out of work. Even upbeat scenarios still assume protracted unemployment and economic stagnation for much of the decade ahead. The unspoken scenario is that things could get worse.

So here’s the point: you must not face the future alone. Find your own “reality support group” (we’ll tell you how below). This year, make a resolution to deepen your relationships with people around you with whom you can face what’s coming down the pike.

Sometime during the next couple of years, there will likely be a fundamental shift. It might be another economic meltdown along the lines of 2008, or a shock to the economy thanks to a rapid spike in energy costs. It could be a series of extreme weather events that result in flooding, drought, or unprecedented heat waves. Think Hurricane Katrina on a larger scale. These changes could lead to food and water shortages—and test our personal and community preparedness in ways that we have not experienced in our lifetimes.

You should know that we, the authors of this piece, are not apocalyptic, bunker-building, pessimistic people. We’re both parents, gardeners, and active in our neighborhoods. We like a good football party—though we root for different teams (Patriots v. Steelers).

We believe our society has almost everything we need to build stronger communities, reduce inequality, live in harmony with the earth, and make a graceful transition to a new sustainable economy. But we won’t get there ignoring the data, and we won’t get there disconnected from one another.

We’re not talking about yet another issue campaign. We certainly need to remain engaged in the good fights around economic justice, peace, democracy, the environment. But there is something huge missing right now in our approach to social change. Our social movements are weak and, with some inspiring exceptions, not changing the political dynamics. The “Net Roots”—online organizing and social media—are creative ways to aggregate money and power in specific situations, but online activism is not a substitute for a movement based on durable and trusting face-to-face relationships. In some religious and labor traditions, this is called solidarity.

Fearful, Alone, & Ashamed

Presently in the United States we are witnessing the emergence of politics based on fear and the erosion of status. Millions of people saw their livelihoods and dreams collapse in the aftermath of the economic meltdown. People lost their homes, jobs, savings, and sense of a positive future. They’ve had to adjust their expectations—for example, facing the reality that they may never be able to retire or improve their standard of living.

Some people respond to these circumstances by blaming themselves and feeling ashamed about their difficulties. Many are hunkering down, feeling depressed and withdrawn. In the U.S., we tend to think everything is about the individual—even blaming ourselves for things that are largely beyond our control.

Others of us respond by scapegoating others, often those more disadvantaged. These responses often come from a place of fear, isolation, and shame.

There is good reason to be angry and focus on powerful financial and political actors who are responsible. But, as in the grieving process, we must move from anger to a place where we can boldly face today’s difficult realities and also initiate pro-active responses. We can start by learning to accept and live within new limits set by economic and ecological reality. Many people are already deliberately moving away from the old economy, and they’re finding new types of security and abundance. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they often feel much richer than they did in lives defined by the “work-watch-spend” cycle.

Rebecca Solnit, in her remarkable book A Paradise Built In Hell, reminds us to look for the “shadow governments of kindness,” the deep reservoirs of resilience and compassion that emerge during disasters and troubled times. All over the planet, people are defying the stereotypes of the self-centered “economic man” and instead caring for one another, building alternative economies, and deepening solidarity.

A Movement to Build Economic Security

The good news is people are already coming together in small groups to form and strengthen relationships. Some are called “common security clubs,” while others go by names like “mutual aid groups,” “resilience circles,” and “unemployed support groups.”

Call it what you want, but the purpose is the same: getting together regularly—8 to 15 adults—to face ecological and economic change. Small group organizing is part of the missing architecture in our social movements … which may be why it’s catching on so quickly.

Such groups are designed to strengthen our personal and community resilience. They typically have three purposes: to learn together, support one another through mutual aid, and engage in social action.

Learn together. It’s hard enough for each of us alone to keep up with news about the ways our changing economy and ecology are impacting our lives. But it’s particularly challenging to face unsettling realities in isolation. In order to move forward, we need a community to help us learn and figure out how to deal with our fear, anger, loss, and feelings of betrayal.

Group members watch videos, read articles, talk to each other, and organize forums. Since the “experts” mostly got things wrong two years ago, participants are investigating things for themselves. What’s really happening in the economy? What caused the economic meltdown? What’s changed? What are the ecological risk points? How will the decline of cheap, easy-to-get oil affect the future economy? What will a transition to a new economy look like?

Mutual Aid. Our mutual aid muscles are out of shape. We need to find ways to increase our real economic security and web of support through shared resources, skills, experience, and capacities. Some folks do this through extended families, religious congregations, and ethnic and fraternal associations. But millions of people are disconnected from extended family and the immigrant and civic associations that helped earlier generations survive. And many religious congregations have gotten out of the practice of being centers of mutual aid.

Common security clubs often gather around potlucks, sharing food and recipes for healthy, low-cost meals. They support one another to get out of debt, brainstorm about employment options, share tips on saving money. They form bartering circles to swap skills, tools, and time. They talk about the challenges of parents moving in with children, children moving in with parents—and adjusting to new norms and limits as a result of the changing economy and future.

Social Action. Many of us want to make meaningful change at the local and national level. We want to find ways to constructively channel our anger and fear to resist further Wall Street destruction of our local economies. We want to act together in ways that go beyond online petitions or phone calls to our member of Congress. Think “affinity group” or “social action group”—a place to deepen our effectiveness as a small unit, but be part of larger movements.

Common security clubs in particular have worked for national policy changes, from universal health care and Wall Street financial reform to the extension of unemployment benefits. Many clubs, animated by the “break up with your bank” and “move your money” efforts, relocated personal, congregational, and other funds out of Wall Street, and into community banks and credit unions.

Other clubs have connected with community-wide “transition” efforts, inspired by the Transition Town movement sweeping England and now moving U.S. communities into action. Transition neighborhoods and towns proactively prepare themselves for climate change, economic hardship, and the decline in easy-to-get oil and cheap energy—with its huge implications for transportation, food security, building design, and our standard of living. Within the broader initiatives, small personal groups like common security clubs provide a place where people can meet to practice mutual aid and reciprocity. Both transition towns and common security clubs are integral components of building needed personal and community resilience.

A Few Stories

Encouraging stories are emerging from common security clubs and other mutual aid groups.

A group of unemployed workers in Maine created a resource sharing exchange. They met regularly at the library and laughed so much the librarian didn’t believe they were economically struggling.

A group in Greenfield, Massachusetts calls themselves “the neighbors” and meets monthly to check in, sing together, and practice mutual aid. On another night they meet for a monthly game night—what one member called “fun and affordable entertainment.”

In Fort Wayne, Indiana, a network of Unemployed and Anxiously Employed Workers meets weekly and has formed committees to help educate one another about computer use, unemployment insurance, stress management in tough times, and green job opportunities. “Part of our work is to help face the unemployment bureaucracy so people get their benefits,” said Tom Lewandowski, a founder of the group. They invite people leaving unemployment offices to join the group. Members volunteer at libraries on Sunday afternoons to help unemployed workers file claims online.

Small Groups in Social Movements

Can forming a small group like this really make a difference, when the problems we face seem so overwhelming? History tells us they can. At many crucial moments in our past, small groups have played an essential role in incubating the seeds of great change.

During the Great Depression of the 1930s, more than 27,000 “Share Our Wealth” clubs formed to discuss the causes of the Depression and advocate for a radical program of wealth redistribution.

Also in the 1930s, seniors organized “Townsend Clubs” to advocate for old age pensions—a formidable social movement that added to the pressure to establish Social Security. By 1936, more than 8,000 Townsend Clubs had been formed with over 2 million members. In ten states—including Oregon, Colorado, California, Florida, South Dakota—there were more than 50 clubs per congressional district.

In the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, people formed nonviolent direct action groups to engage in sit-ins and keep up morale. Activists rooted in faith-based congregations and tight-knit communities were able to take greater risks knowing that if they should be jailed (or worse), there were others to care for their children and elders.

The women’s movement was built upon small consciousness-raising groups, which enabled millions of women to reflect on their identity. “The personal is political” was experienced in thousands of face-to-face gatherings, ultimately shifting gender attitudes throughout the society. The anti-nuclear movement in the late 1970s formed “affinity groups” as part of direct action efforts to prevent power plants from being built.

In the labor movement, the success of organizing female clerical workers into trade unions depended upon an organizing approach that included small support groups. Large mega-churches have grown upon a foundation of “small group ministry” in which members connect through smaller, face-to-face groups. A growing number of organizers today are examining the “power of networks” in social movements.

Given the challenges we’re collectively facing in the present, where are such movements today? It appears that without a lived experience of “solidarity” in our personal lives, it can be difficult to respond to an abstract call for the common good. It may be that small group organizing is central to our hopes for broad-based change.

Potential Shock Points

There is good reason to believe that the next 10 years are going to be very different than the 10 years prior to the 2008 economic meltdown. Persistent unemployment means that millions of people may live out the decade in an economic depression.

Moreover, the underlying economic structures that brought on the collapse have not been addressed. We remain at risk for more financial nosedives. As a result, new Wall Street economic bubbles and busts may emerge. The “danger” light on the dashboard is still flashing…

In fact, the future could bring any number of “shock points”: another economic meltdown along the lines of 2008; a further increase in unemployment, even to 20 percent; more extreme weather events (hurricanes, floods, droughts, heat waves); new spikes in the cost of energy; rapid deflation as the value of money falls; a dramatic increase in the cost of food; and/or shortages of fresh water.

Because of the extreme inequalities of income and wealth that have opened up over the last generation, the brunt of these changes is falling, and will continue to fall, most intensely on lower and middle income and disadvantaged folks. But these changes will touch everyone in various ways, even those who believe they have built a wall of economic security around their families.

These are some of the reasons people need to face the future together and strengthen the social fabric of our communities. This is not a future you can, or should, face alone.

How to Start a Common Security Club

Calling All Organizers! Does this idea of a small support group appeal to you? Is it a missing part of your organizing work? Would it benefit your community, or your own life? Check out the resources provided by the Common Security Club network to help you organize a group.

Calling All Facilitators! Are you good at getting people together and holding a respectful space? If you’ve ever successfully facilitated a small group, you can facilitate a Common Security Club. You don’t need to be an expert on these matters, just good with people. There is a network that provides a free downloadable Facilitator Guide chock full of ideas for discussion, learning, sharing, mutual aid, and social action. The network provides facilitation tips, conference calls, and ongoing support.

Visit www.commonsecurityclub.org to learn more.

The Transition to the New Economy

Eight million jobs in the old economy are not coming back. But new jobs, enterprises, and livelihoods are emerging. We are seeing vibrant new kinds of enterprises in the local food sector, green building, and alternative transportation, as well as locally rooted cooperatives and producers. These are the pieces of a new economy that is emerging piecemeal around the country—an economy based upon entirely different models of economic growth and indicators of community health, and also new conceptions of wealth, community, and governance.

This new economy includes financial institutions invested in the real economy, like community banks and credit unions walled off from the Wall Street speculation that adds no real value to our economy. It includes respect for “all that we share”—our commons of public and private institutions such as libraries, schools, or agricultural knowledge. It is based on sound management and protection of the gifts of nature including water systems, seed banks, and land conservancies.

In the current political moment, leadership for large-scale transition to this new economy will not come from Washington, D.C., but from movements around green jobs, local manufacturing, alternative transportation, regional food, and more. This is a moment for each of us to reflect on our own power and agency. We each have a role to play, but perhaps we aren’t sure what it is yet. This is where your small group is important. Small groups help disconnected individuals find their roles, turning them into community players who contribute to the movements toward the new economy.

If we are prepared for a transition, we will be in much better shape than if we simply hope life will somehow return to normal. If we have our “core group,” we can face changes with less fear and more sense of our personal agency. Together, we will be able to work toward an economy that works for everyone.

Chuck Collins and Sarah Byrnes wrote this article for YES! Magazine, a national, nonprofit media organization that fuses powerful ideas with practical actions. Chuck is a senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) where he directs the Program on Inequality and the Common Good. Sarah is the organizer for the Common Security Clubs at IPS.

Is Eating Healthy Really Worth It?

Becoming Resilient, Kim's Journal, Nutrition and Prevention
Published on 1 Comment on Is Eating Healthy Really Worth It?
If you read my post, Transitioning to Clean Food, you realize what a daunting task it is to truly avoid the toxic food that is part of our SAD American Diet (Standard American Diet).   Eating organic vegetables and fruits and grass-fed/free range meats and dairy is expensive.  So is it really worth the cost?

Right now our family spends about 20% of our budget on food and supplements for the four of us, which is comparable to what many people in other countries spend on food. The average American spends less than 10% of their budget on food. I used to believe that buying the cheapest food was the way to go. Now I realize that I can’t fuel my body with cheap, nutrition-less (and often toxic) food and expect excellent health, lots of energy, clear thinking and longevity.
Here are some statistics that concern and motivate me to carefully navigate the minefield of modern food and drugs and make wise choices about what I feed myself and my kids:
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I often wonder why we Americans are we so willing to pay top dollar for stuff (tvs, computers, houses, etc…) while treating our own bodies so poorly. We certainly wouldn’t put cheap fuel in our gas tank if we knew it would burn up the engine quickly, require more time at the shop and shorten the lifespan of the car by decades.  Frankly, there seems to be a mindset that says, “If I feel OK I’ll eat whatever I want and then, when I get sick/diseased, I’ll just go to the doctor and get some drugs, surgery, or chemo to take care of it.”

Unfortunately, over 100,000 people die every year from taking prescription drugs exactly as they are prescribed by their doctor.  Pharmaceutical drugs often interact with other drugs to cause more problems and frequently result in side effects that have to be treated with still more drugs.  NO THANK YOU!  I’m just as interested in quality of life as I am in quantity and I believe the quality comes with prevention.  Eating healthy  empowers me to take control of my health and my future.  Sure, it’s not a guarantee that I’ll never get sick or get cancer, but it certainly stacks the odds in my favor, plus I’ll have a stronger immune system to fight with.

So, yes, we spend a lot on food but in the days to come I’ll be exploring more ways to get the same quality of food for less as I continue on this journey. I understand that many people simply can’t afford to eat 100% clean but everyone can take baby steps.  That’s how we started.  I truly believe that if the American people start demanding quality when it comes to food, then the food companies will respond.  It’s already happening but the only way we can effect change is with our dollars.  I vote every time I go to the grocery store and so do you.   Why not vote for health and for a sustainable future for all of us?

More Reasons to be Diligent in Nutrition and Become Informed about Toxins in the Environment:

• The skyrocketing of childhood allergies and asthma
• The prevalence of Genetically Modified foods in the diet
• The 60,000 chemicals to which we’re exposed in our air, food, and water
• The unprecedented number of vaccines mandated today
• The epidemic of autism in the US, between 2 and 4 million
• The absence of regulation for the safety of foods in our supermarkets
• The eternal advertising of drugs, drugs, and more drugs
• Side effects of drugs as a primary cause of death