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50 Ways to reduce your carbon footprint
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"Just hop on the (biodiesel) bus, Gus. Make a new (home energy) plan, Stan..."
We know from singer songwriter, Paul Simon, that there are 50 ways to leave your lover, but did you know that there also 50 ways to leave your carbon-wasting ways? The Metro Silicon Valley News has recently published a helpful list of 50 things we can do to reduce our carbon footprint. Remarkably, 10 out of the 50 had a connection to food, drink and gardening. Maybe it's time we all found a new plan.
26. READ LABELS AND BUY LOCAL. Organic from Canada or overseas isn't as easy on the environment as locally produced products. Buying anything imported across an ocean means a container ship transported it. "Just one container ship traveling one mile produces NOx emissions equaling 25,000 cars traveling the same distance," says Anthony Fournier of the Santa Barbara County Pollution Control District. Foreign manufacturers often use carbon-intensive industrial and environmental practices that are illegal here. Many imports are made in sweatshops where people labor in dangerous work environments and aren't paid fairly. Reducing the demand for imports not only reduces our carbon footprint but also sends a message to big business that we want better for everyone.
34. BECOME A LOCAVORE. When you choose out of season organic food that's from journeyed overseas instead of locally grown anything, the pollution caused by the container ships outweighs any benefit you're going to get. Locavores say eating what's available locally is healthier anyway. Cooking dinner? Make a few meals at the same time and stash them in the fridge.
35. SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL FARMER. Visit www.localharvest .org and find the farmers market nearest you. Even better, find a CSA and get your produce from a sustainable local family farm.
36. MAKE YOUR OWN SALAD. Live Earth Farm's Debbie Palmer says make your own organic salad mixes from scratch and use less bagged and precut produce because they use a lot of resources to produce.
37. DON'T BE A SLAVE TO CONVENIENCE. We'll all be paying later for using convenience foods like packaged mixed salads, because they use a lot of resources to produce.
38. AVOID FAST FOOD. Methane-producing factory farming and long-distance shipping are the heart of its business model and they're clear-cutting rain forests to graze their cows.
39. EAT LESS MEAT. Especially beef. The Worldwatch Institute says growing numbers of intensively farmed livestock are responsible for 18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and account for 37 percent of emissions of methane, which has more than 20 times the global warming potential of CO2, and 65 percent of emissions of nitrous oxide, another powerful greenhouse gas, coming from manure.
41. GREEN COFFEE IS DELICIOUS. Barefoot Coffee Roasters' Andy Newbom says that when you buy fair trade or organic coffee you're supporting sustainable farming practices that don't clear-cut trees or use pesticides or chemical fertilizers and that makes a big difference. "Buying fair trade coffee rewards and supports sustainable farming, reducing developing nations' carbon footprint," he says. "It's easy for the first world to say let's reduce our carbon footprint, but it's harder for farmers in developing countries to do this." Buy fair trade beans whole or ground, get a press or cloth filter and make your own.
42. DISPOSABLE CUPS? Really? Do the math: Buying coffee every day in a disposable cup generates at least 20 pounds of paper a year plus several hundred megaindustrially produced plastic covers. Styrofoam cups are worse. Dr. Theo Colborn, in "Our Stolen Future," says researchers have found traces of polystyrene in 100 percent of human tissue tested, because it migrates from the cup into hot food and beverages. Yuk! Bring your own coffee cup!
47. YOUR GARDEN ISN'T AS GREEN AS YOU THINK. Alrie Middlebrook designs and builds native plant gardens locally. She says take out your water-guzzling lawn and replace it with native plants. They use less water and nourish birds and bees.
Photocredit: Andy
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Take-away, give back
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Editor's note: This article and photo were contributed by Liz Kirchner of Manchester, UK. They feature an inspiring man, Shorker Tashek, who grows apple trees by the thousands in a modest garden tucked behind his take-out restaurant, giving the seedlings out to his customers and anyone else he can. Through his trees and his life, Shorker reminds us all that one person can make a difference.
Standing hunched in a sleety drizzle, Shorker Tashek surveys his orchard.
The back garden of Kyae’s Pizza and Curry Take-away in Bury, UK is crammed with yearling apple trees, hundreds of them, maybe thousands. They're gushing from fruit boxes mounded with compost. They're sprouting from milk crates stacked in racks. They're stuffed in plastic pots. They're clustered shivering around our ankles in nooks of soil with no pots at all. A forest of cherries trees, head-high, in rows of rusting tomato puree cans huddle against a shed full of restaurant supplies - fat bundles of onions, stew pots, bright yellow tomato puree cans, sacks of chiliis. A white cat is sitting on a stack of burlap bags. Beyond the brick wall, a bus roars past spewing gravel and exhaust down Tottington Road, but in the rain, the garden smells sweet, cold, and soggy, like compost and cinnamon.
We hunker in the rain looking at the little trees. "I can tell you just the time I started planting," he says. "When my son was born. He is seven. I knew that if we don’t do this, the next generation will not respect us. They will say, 'How can we trust you? You have ruined the planet.'"
Your child's disapproval is strong motivation, surely, so. Tashek, 34, set about matter-of-factly greening the planet. In his native Bangladesh, he worked with volunteer organizations planting mangoes, bananas, and jackfruit to reduce hunger and bolster flood protection. In the UK for five years, he continues.
A giant hoarding above the gardens in brilliant blues and greens encourages passers-by to "Save the Planet. Save Yourself". People come everyday to take trees, he says.
His is the no-frills, no-nonsense "Grow trees. Give trees." approach. Tashek buys fruit-bearing trees, but plants apple seeds simply to produce plantable trees. Then he gives them away. One-by-one they go in little bundles along with the naan and cucumber salad to customers, neighbors, and friends at the take-away.
By the thousands they go to organizations like the Red Rose Forest, neighborhood Green Streets efforts. Elementary school classes replant barren fields with them. Garden centres hand them out at the till. "I grew 2,000 this year. Five thousand all together are in the gardens",
says Tashek.
There’s no knowing how many actually get into the ground, but the huge scale suggests quite a few. When it’s suggested that 5,000 trees is a lot of trees, he says, For one person it is a lot. For a country, it is nothing.
In from the cold, we drink hot chai on teal plastic couches under the take-away menu for pizza and poppadums, and newspaper clippings about Tash’s trees and his recent nomination for the prestigious Unilever Dragonfly Environmental Award.
"What he’s doing is to be commended", says Bury Councillor Dorothy Gunther. "Some of the trees are very small, but, you know, tall oaks from little acorns grow. Everything’s got to start somewhere. "
Saying good-bye and walking to town on that wintery afternoon, the lights are coming on in the houses, and I realize, there are apple trees in the gardens all along Tottington Road.
Story and photo copyright of Liz Kirchner of Manchester, UK.
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Kitchen gardens enjoy a comeback in Japan
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By Yaeko Abe, printed in the Asahi Shimbun, June 22, 2007
Across the world, backyard vegetable patches have traditionally been the preserve of bearded baby boomers.
In recent years, however, a rustic urge has been catching on in Japan. People of all ages and interests have been getting down on their hands and knees to cultivate the earth.
Some do it to put fresh, pesticide-free vegetables on the table. Others simply want the satisfaction of growing their own produce.
In response to booming demand, allotment gardens that make use of fallow farmland are cropping up everywhere. There are up to 3,000 across the nation--the little "kitchen garden," it seems, is making a comeback.
Urban vegetable gardens that cater to members only are being created in front of railway stations in major cities. Tokyoites are now able to grow vegetables in patches that straddle railway lines.
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Seeing October in a new light
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By Barbara Damrosch, published Thursday, September 20, 2007 in The Washington Post
When T.S. Eliot wrote "April is the cruelest month," he might have added, "October is seriously underrated."
Consider those two months. We expect from both a temperature range midway between hot and cold, with unpredictable doses of either. But gardeners, especially, embrace April with exaggerated hope and cheer, oblivious to the imminent onset of blistering heat, drought and bolted lettuce. By October many edge wearily and even gratefully into the shadow of oncoming winter, forgetting to enjoy the gardening year's best weather.
Poke your head outside the cocoon of artificial lighting and controlled indoor temperature, and you'll better understand the rhythm of the seasons' lag time, a planetary dance in which reality and symbol rarely mesh. What we call summer solstice (around June 21) runs about two months ahead of the year's hottest weather, and the winter solstice (around Dec. 21) two months ahead of its coldest. "As the days begin to lengthen, the cold begins to strengthen," the old saying goes.
The number of daylight hours on the spring equinox (around March 21) is the same as that on the fall equinox (around Sept. 22), but while the sun in March seems feeble, in September it feels strong, thanks to the slowness with which the earth absorbs and releases the sun's heat. In spring the warming of the soil surface can lag a month and a half behind that of the air on a mild day, and six feet below, the lag can be as much as three months. In fall, the ground is comparably slow to chill.
This all adds up to fall gardening nirvana. The earth is still warm, even if you start the day with a thick sweater. Pest insects are bundling themselves up in pupae to hibernate or seeking refuge underground. The shortening days let you get away with feats impossible in spring. Lettuce and spinach, whose impulse to go to seed is triggered by lengthening days, do not bolt cruelly, but bide their time, allowing a gloriously long harvest. Arugula loses its harsh bite. Carrots, beets, turnips, parsnips and Brussels sprouts begin the magical sweetening-up that comes with the cold.
As maples turn scarlet, Tuscan kale glows with the deep green of chlorophyll. By the time such summer crops as tomatoes, cucumbers and melons have frozen or lost their flavor, far more crops have reached the perfect moment. You're then ready to compost all those tired vines and embrace the garden's benign season.
Article copyright of Barbara Damrosch. Reprinted with permission.
Photo credit: Veronica Lynn
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