Author: Grist – the Latest from Grist

by Jonathan Hiskes

As an antidote to news of the oil spill on the Great Barrier Reef, here’s Paul Hawken giving last May’s commencement address at Portland University. From the entrepreneur, author, and ideas guy:

There is invisible writing on the back of the diploma you will receive, and in case you didn’t bring lemon juice to decode it, I can tell you what it says: You are Brilliant, and the Earth is Hiring. The earth couldn’t afford to send recruiters or limos to your school. It sent you rain, sunsets, ripe cherries, night blooming jasmine, and that unbelievably cute person you are dating. Take the hint. And here’s the deal: Forget that this task of planet-saving is not possible in the time required. Don’t be put off by people who know what is not possible. Do what needs to be done, and check to see if it was impossible only after you are done.

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world. The poet Adrienne Rich wrote, “So much has been destroyed I have cast my lot with those who, age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world.” There could be no better description. Humanity is coalescing. It is reconstituting the world, and the action is taking place in schoolrooms, farms, jungles, villages, campuses, companies, refugee camps, deserts, fisheries, and slums.

You join a multitude of caring people. No one knows how many groups and organizations are working on the most salient issues of our day: climate change, poverty, deforestation, peace, water, hunger, conservation, human rights, and more. This is the largest movement the world has ever seen. Rather than control, it seeks connection. Rather than dominance, it strives to disperse concentrations of power. Like Mercy Corps, it works behind the scenes and gets the job done. Large as it is, no one knows the true size of this movement.

Full speech here. Big tip of the hat to the wonderful Portland magazine for reprinting Hawken’s address.

Related Links:

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

Coal freighter rams Great Barrier Reef, spilling oil into pristine waters

After Copenhagen setback, U.N. seeks way forward on climate

by Todd Woody

Photo via .hello foto of FlickrIn my last
Green State column, I wrote about Agriculture 2.0. The conference, held in
Silicon Valley recently, brought together venture capitalists and
sustainable ag startups in an effort to jump start a market for the regional
distribution of fresh food.

This week I take a closer look at some of the companies that
tried to catch the ear and checkbooks of the high-profile investors who packed
that confab at the Four Seasons in Palo Alto.

One of the more intriguing ideas came from startups thinking
outside the agribusiness box by developing urban farms in a box. Literally.

Take AeroFarms. The
New York company builds aeroponic farms that fit inside containers—soil and sun not required. The containers, which can be
stacked on top of each other in warehouses and old buildings, have the potential to transform blocks of abandoned structures in places like Detroit or Newark
into agri-lofts tended by urban farmers.

“This puts buildings back into play with a technology that
would do something productive and employ people,” Ed Harwood, AeroFarms’
founder and chief executive, told prospective investors at the conference.

Here’s how it works: Leafy greens—say, arugula or lettuce—are planted in a cloth bed and irrigated with a nutrient-infused mist that is
applied directly to the plants. Light is provided by LED lamps, which are more
energy efficient than conventional lighting and can be placed closer to the
beds. The LED lamps also provide pest control, says Harwood, because they can be set to emit certain wavelengths that disrupt insects’
breeding.

(A video of AeroFarms vertical farming system can be found here.)

Harwood said AeroFarms is about to sign its first order—a deal
worth between $1.5 million and $2 million. The startup has raised $500,000 from the
investors 21 Ventures and the Quercus Trust.

Verdant Earth
Technologies, meanwhile, wants to recycle all those shipping containers currently used
by industrial agricultural to ship produce from continent to continent and turn them into seedbeds for a local food production system.

Racks of vegetables or herbs would be stacked inside the shipping
containers. Josh Hottenstein, co-founder and chief executive of the Tucson,
Ariz., startup, says one standard container can grow the equivalent of
an acre’s worth of crops.

“We control the humidity ratio inside the container, the
temperature, the air flow, the wavelength of the light, and alter how the plants
grow,” he told investors at the conference. “We’re capable of increasing the
uniformity of the crop when it comes out and the plants are ready for market.”

A centralized system can control multiple containers.

“The only labor involved is seed and harvest,” said
Hottenstein, whose company, which was spun out of the University of Arizona, is
looking to raise a relatively paltry $750,000 to get its product to market.

San Francisco’s Cityscape
Farms stressed its thrift as well, with chief executive Mike Yohay making a
pitch for $200,000 to build Cityscape’s first two rooftop farms. (That’s on top of
$300,000 that Yohay says the U.S. Department of Agriculture has already granted the
company.)

“We see a lot of under-utilized space in the urban
landscape, such as vacant lots and rooftops,” said Yohay. “Our vision is to
transform cities into net food producers.”

To do that, Cityscape is developing an aquaponics system that
combines aquaculture and hydroponics. Tilapia are raised in fish tanks and the
filtered fish waste provides the fertilizer for growing organic crops in
greenhouses. The water is then cleaned and recycled back into the fish tanks to
complete the loop.

“Over the next two years the plan is to roll out two
quarter-acre greenhouse farms to grow high-value crops—lettuces, herbs,
tomatoes and tilapia, strawberries,” said Yohay. “Our target market includes
100 restaurants and 50 supermarkets committed to local sourcing.”

Cityscape’s business model is to earn revenues from the
crops it grows in the Bay Area as well as from the fees it will charge to franchise rooftop
systems and provide technical support.

Now’s the part of this column where we offer a reality check.
These companies are, to varying degrees, in the early stages of development.
Whether their technology will work as anticipated and whether a market will materialize
remains to be seen. And most importantly, only time will tell if these
technologies can be scaled up to provide a credible challenge to industrial ag.

Courtesy of Cityscape Farms

There are plenty of hurdles to overcome. Cityscape, for instance, faces
a potential bureaucratic nightmare in getting permission to build fish farms
and greenhouses on urban rooftops.  (“It
keeps me up at night,” Yohay said. “The building codes have not kept up with
urban agriculture.”)

And there’s no guarantee that food grown locally will be
consumed locally. (Though that’s a good bet in places like the Bay Area, with
its scores of farmers markets. I can’t imagine Cityscape would have trouble
selling its produce in my home base of Berkeley, with its three organic farmers
markets a week.)

That said, what’s striking is the conceptual breakthrough
the startups represent. These entrepreneurs are not hippies, but they carry a
subversive message when it comes to food production—one that, judging by the interest ofsome of
Silicon Valley’s most prominent VC firms, is resonating with investors.

In closing his pitch, Yohay appealed to the sleek-suited
crowd’s desire to do good by doing well.

“This is about a lot more than earning a return on your
investment,” he said. “It’s about co-creating a model of food production that
really reverses the historical damage agriculture has done to our planet. This
is about feeding our increasing urban population nutritious, accessible food
and connecting them to the source of that food like never before.”

Related Links:

The secret mall gardens of Cleveland

Garden Girl TV: Healthy soil equals healthy plants and people

Garden Girl TV: Raised beds in the city

by Ed Bruske

Meal time at the Washington Jesuit Academy. Photo: Ed Brukse

This is the third of three articles detailing how food made from
scratch using local ingredients is served to students at the Washington
Jesuit Academy in Northeast Washington, D.C. The first is here; the second here: 

Prior to hiring Fresh Start Catering a year ago to make meals from scratch, food at the Washington Jesuit Academy was very much like the stuff served at the public elementary school my daughter attends: re-heated convenience food. Adminstrators at the private, tuition-free middle school for “at risk” boys knew they needed to make a change. Too often the students were listless, cranky, and out-of-focus after meals. The school now pays 30 percent more for meals prepared from fresh, mostly local ingredients in their own kitchen.

The change meant an additional $60,000 a year—for a total food budget of about $220,000—but the school’s board of directors didn’t bat an eye, said Headmaster Joseph Powers. “We justify this simply: This is what is best for our boys.” he said. “They eat three meals a day with us and we have an obligation to provide the best possible meals we can.”

Mostly the increase is tied up in labor. The academy has four cooks in the kitchen making meals from scratch for 71 boys and 20 staff, as well as children and staff at a nearby day care center and 18 students enrolled in a post-high school training program across town. At my daughter’s public school, where the closest thing to cooking involves dumping frozen chicken tenders into a steamer,  three kitchen ladies are all it takes to feed 300 kids every day.

The trend in public schools has been to hire less trained kitchen personnel who don’t work enough hours to qualify for benefits. Cooks start at $12.75 an hour an hour at Fresh Start and are entitled to a benefit package that includes paid health insurance, short-term and long tern disability insurance and a life insurance policy for free, two weeks paid vacation, plus eight paid personal or sick days and  50 cents on a dollar matching contribution to a retirement plan.

Sosna said Fresh Start operates on a 15 percent profit margin.   

“There’s been a dramatic improvement from what the food used to be,” said reading and social studies instructor John Scheibel. “There’s lots more fruits and vegetables. And lots more taste. It’s a lot less institutional.”

Despite all the improvements and increased expense, however, a random sampling of student comments turns up a litany of grievances.

“I don’t really like the vegetables,” said one. “A lot of time they’re either overcooked or undercooked.”

“They make too much soup,” groused another. “We’d rather have solid food. And sometimes they put leftovers in the soup.”

 “See this right here?” said a third, holding up a roasted carrot speared on the end of his fork. “This is dry. I hate dry carrots.”

If my visit to Washington Jesuit Academy proves anything, it’s that kids can’t be depended upon to make their own food choices. Unlike most public schools, where food service caters to kids’ worst instincts, the boys at Washington Jesuit Academy either eat what’s served, or don’t eat. Here is one instance where adults actually decide what’s best for children, and not the other way around.

But it would be foolish for grownups to assume they can wave a magic wand and make kids like healthier foods, especially when the kids in question grow up surrounded by a culture of junk. From what I saw during repeat visits to the academy, a lot of the vegetables so painstakingly sourced and lovingly prepared by Fresh Start ended up in the trash. The first day it was roasted carrots and snow peas. The second day it was an Asian braise of cabbage and onions and baby corn. The adults wolfed it down. The kids—not so much.

Nor did they particularly attack the salad bar that had been assembled with such care and such a huge variety of different greens and vegetables. Or the soups—especially the fish soup and the corn chowder finished with grassfed cream from a local dairy. No, what I saw were kids behaving very much like kids: clamoring for pasta, inhaling macaronia and cheese, rioting over baked potatoes. The chicken noodle soup was more popular. In fact, I watched one boy drain a whole bowl full of noodles out of a pot at the soup station to eat with the plate of salmon croquettes, macaroni and cheese and cabbage braise he got in the food line.

But look what the kids are drinking with these meals: water, not sodas, nor the flavored milk served in public school that might as well be Mountain Dew. Just water. I didn’t hear any complaints about that.

The good news is, influencing kids’ eating habits is a process, not an event. Patience is key. As any chef who’s worked with children can tell you, it often takes a dozen or more attempts to get a child to try and actually like something new.  At Washington Jesuit Academy, the boys are getting attention from multiple directions.

First, the facilities. At my daughter’s school, there is no stove. Scrambled eggs were cooked in Minnesota with 11 other industrial ingredients and shipped frozen to D.C. where they were simply heated in a steamer. At the Jesuit Academy, they have something in the kitchen called a “tilt skillet,” or a very large griddle with tall sides in which you can easily scramble many dozens of eggs fresh. There’s also a stove, a convection oven and, in a separate room, a commercial dishwasher. No styrofoam trays here. Except at breakfast, when there’s not enough staff to wash dishes, the boys eat from non-disposable plastic plates, bowls and cups and use real metal cutlery, not plastic “sporks.”

The kitchen staff is engaged with the food and with the students. After the meal, boys wander in and out of the kitchen, joking and teasing with the cooks, getting a hug or a squeeze or a punch in the arm to go with a little friendly guidance. The school has a “social club”—nine boys—who meet on Wednesdays to help in the kitchen and get cooking lessons. Last year, the school organized a trip to a local farm to harvest vegetables and see where food actually comes from.

The school adminstration is one step ahead of Michele Obama and her “Let’s Move” campaign. More than a year ago they implimented a wellness program with more physical activity and classroom instruction on better eating habits, the risks of drugs, alcohol, and sex. “We spend a considerable amount of time at each grade level discussing the importance of eating right and how to go about doing that,” said Powers. “This lines up perfectly with our new food service program.”

Andy Deyell, dean of students, led me outside the dining hall to a new sports field freshly covered with artificial turf. Tractors were busy pushing dirt around an area to be paved. “We want to get these boys moving,” said Deyell. “We want to get them eating well.” The new field is marked for football, soccer and lacrosse. Deyell said the school will be adding four new sports to its program, in addition to basketball and football.

The boys get 3.5 hours each week for team sports, in addition to 50 minutes every day for recess and 1.5 hours per week for physical education. Powell said the new wellness classes easily fit into the existing curriculum. The school day at Washington Jesuit Academy is 12 hours long. “Our test scores continue to show tremendous growth even with the amount of time evoted to physical exercise,” Powers said.

Dinner that night was baked potatoes. The potatoes came from a produce auction in Dayton, Va., 145 miles southwest of Washington, where Fresh Start sources much of its produce through its parent organization, D.C. Central Kitchen. One of the cooks, Derek Nelson, stays late to cover the dinner service at 4:45 pm.

Nelson had spent part of the afternoon wrapping the spuds individually in aluminum foil before placing them in the convection oven. On the salad bar he arranged the garnishes: a pot of sour cream, grated cheddar cheese, blanched broccoli florets, sliced mushrooms, freshly chopped chives.

A great clamor arose as the students jostled around the food line to collect their plates. Soon they were helping themselves to heaps of sour cream and cheddar cheese.

“Wow, we haven’t seen this is a long time,” one of the boys remarked. “They must have made this because you’re here,” he said, pointing at me, the visiting reporter. “We usually have soup.”

I couldn’t help being impressed by how excited these boys were over such a simple meal. Simple, but good.

Related Links:

Underground school lunch blogger hits ‘Good Morning America’

Lunchroom drama, nanotech follies, and other tasty bites

With a bit more cash and lots of ingenuity, school lunches could be much better

by Jonathan Hiskes

The Shen Neng 1 in a plume of heavy oil in Great Barrier Reef Marine Park.Australian Maritime Safety AuthorityUgh. Everything about this is bad: A Chinese freighter crashed into Australia’s Great Barrier Reef Saturday, running aground and spilling heavy fuel oil into the water. The ship is stuck, and while the flow of oil has been stopped, rescuers worry that righting the ship could create even more spillage.

Coral reefs cover less than one percent of earth’s oceans, but are home to about 25 percent of identified marine species. The Great Barrier Reef is the king of coral reefs—stunning, ecologically priceless, full of matchless biological diversity, and in grave danger. Even before this most recent oil spill, rising ocean temperatures and acidity levels and previous toxic shipwrecks have threatened the reef.

Besides its fuel, the ship that rammed the reef was carrying another toxic fuel—Australian coal meant for power-plant furnaces in China. Australia is the world’s largest exporter of coal and China the world’s largest consumer of coal, so the route the ship was supposed to run is a common one. But the coal is incidental—the ship could have been carrying solar panels and the fuel spill would have been just as damaging.

There are reports of potential fines in excess of $1 million. This is ludicrous, of course, as there’s no way to put a price on an ecosystem which is unlike any other in the world. The hope is that such fines are steep enough to scare shippers into more careful practices.

Coral around the world is sad today.

Related Links:

A movement far larger than the Tea Party

Time for Obama to embrace another GOP energy plan

Coal freighter rams Great Barrier Reef, spilling oil into pristine waters

by Terry Tamminen

Like many Americans, I battle with my waistline, watching the same twenty pounds come and go year after year. Eating everything from Tootsie Rolls to asparagus, at times the healthy fare wins over the junk food, but usually the other way around. No food is either good or bad, because consumption isn’t measured against a real plan to lose weight and get fit. It now appears that President Obama has adopted this Tootsie Roll approach to the nation’s energy needs.

Last week the President said he would facilitate more oil drilling in U.S. coastal waters. Acknowledging critics, he said it was part of “a broader strategy that will move us from an economy that runs on fossil fuels and foreign oil to one that relies more on homegrown fuels and clean energy.” Unfortunately, the U.S. has no more chance of winning with this approach than I do of permanently losing weight with my unmeasured consumption of candy and veggies.

In July 2008, then presidential candidate Barack Obama engaged several energy experts in a debate, asking each of us to argue against our own positions. At the time, politicians of both parties advocated for more domestic oil drilling, suggesting it could offset $4/gallon fuels that had become commonplace over the summer. Knowing that I come from California, which has repeatedly voted against it, he asked me to give him the best arguments FOR more domestic offshore oil drilling.

First, I said, we have no right to destroy the environment, lives, and livelihoods of impoverished villagers in places like Ecuador or Nigeria, where oil for the U.S. market is extracted, while imperiously protecting our own fragile coasts, waterways, and air quality. If we want the benefits of convenient fuels, we should bear the majority of the true costs, especially those that we would never tolerate in our own backyard. Second, the carbon footprint of oil from thousands of miles away is obviously much greater than anything sourced closer to the end users.

Finally, I argued that we need a plan to transition from fossil fuels—which are limited by Mother Nature and controlled by a few—to clean, renewable sources of energy that are both domestic and available to all of us. Once we have that clear blueprint, we should fill our short-term fossil-fuel needs from the sources closest to home to be more in control of our economic and environmental destiny.

I stand by those three arguments today and call on the president to work with stakeholders across the nation to develop such a plan, which might be based around a two simple concepts:

Given global competition for a dwindling oil resource, we should plan to power at least 75 percent of our vehicles with inexhaustible, clean sources of domestic energy by 2025. That target would inform policy—and a detailed blueprint to achieve the goal—on both fuels and vehicle technology.

Given our role in creating the climate crisis, we should plan to power at least half of our electricity needs with inexhaustible, clean sources of domestic energy by 2025. That target would create a policy blueprint, both for the development of sufficient energy supplies and for making our uses of energy far more efficient than they are today.

Mr. President, we need a real “strategy” that recognizes we will soon run out of oil and atmosphere, setting goals to sustain our economy and environment in equal measures. Within such a blueprint, we can then consider roles for all types of energy and assess the costs/benefits of each over time. Without a plan, just boosting supplies of various energy sources is no better than giving me more Tootsie Rolls and asparagus and hoping for the best.

Related Links:

Time for Obama to embrace another GOP energy plan

Can we get some attention for our issues now?

Obama was against offshore drilling before he was for it

by Jesse Jenkins

By Jesse Jenkins and Yael Borofsky

With President Obama’s announcement Wednesday that the administration would support expanded offshore oil and gas extraction, it’s now apparent that price pressures on oil make political pressures on politicians impossible to ignore and that some expansion of offshore drilling is inevitable.

But despite Green backlash against the Obama administration’s apparent embrace of “drill, baby, drill,” it’s actually another Republican energy plan Obama should turn to if he wants to make a real dent in America’s dependence on oil.  Embracing a GOP plan to put the hundreds of billions in potential federal revenues from new oil and gas royalties into a fund to accelerate clean technology innovation could offer Obama a bona fide opportunity to “reach across the aisle,” strengthen America’s energy security, and help make clean energy cheap.

Don’t believe it? Here’s the breakdown…

While much of the rhetoric used to advocate for offshore drilling deals with the threat of rising prices at the pump and our nation’s energy security, Energy Information Administration projections show that “access to the Pacific, Atlantic, and eastern Gulf [offshore] regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030.” At that point, access to the new portions of outer continental shelf (OCS) previously off-limits would cut gasoline prices at the pump by just three cents, a clearly insignificant step towards “energy independence.”

What could have a significant impact on our energy security, however, would be to invest the hundreds of billions in potential federal revenues from oil and gas royalties to accelerate cleantech innovation and deployment, helping America develop the clean and affordable energy sources needed to truly diversify our energy mix and secure our freedom from oil.

How much money are we talking about?

According to EIA estimates, there are about 8 billion barrels of crude oil and 58 trillion cubic feet of natural gas (about 59.6 billion mmBTUs) potentially available in Eastern/Central Gulf of Mexico and Atlantic OCS areas previously off-limits to exploration and extraction (another 10 billion barrels of crude and 18 trillion cubic feet of gas may lie off Pacific coastal areas). That estimate does not include potentially recoverable oil and gas in the Arctic Alaska coastal areas also opened up in the president’s new proposal. 

At today’s oil prices of roughly $85 per barrel, that works out to about $680 billion worth of new oil production and another $238.5 billion worth of gas at today’s relatively low natural gas prices (about $4/mmBTU).  Add in the recoverable reserves off Alaska’s North Slope and let’s call it an even trillion dollars worth of new oil and gas production (more if prices climb in the future).

The federal Minerals Management Service (MMS) controls oil and gas leases in the OCS and collects 1/6 of the value of oil and gas produced from OCS areas. That means the MMS has the potential to collect over $165 billion in royalties from new offshore drilling. That’s far from a trivial sum of money.

Of course, those royalties will be collected over the course of a couple decades and likely won’t start flowing until 2014 or later, but even after individual states close to drilling sites claim their share of the revenue there will still be a sizable chunk of change available that could be invested in the development of clean energy technology.

(And there could be ways to front-load the royalty payments to get money flowing to cleantech sooner, such as a requiring a portion of the royalty value paid in advance upon signing the leases; this would have the additional benefit of helping discourage speculative efforts to lock up sites but not produce oil, accelerating production of new oil and gas).

After all, we simply cannot drill our way to energy security. The New York Times reports that at current rates of consumption, estimates show that there could be as much as a three-year supply of oil and around a two-year supply of natural gas in the OCS areas. That’s not exactly a long-term ‘fix’ for an oil-addicted nation, which is why Obama noted Wednesday in his speech at Andrews Air Force Base that offshore drilling is meant merely to aid in the “transition to cleaner energy sources;” drilling is no alternative.

We can, however, invest and invent our way to freedom from oil. That’s where (somewhat ironically!) the Republicans “all of the above” energy plan, aka the “American Energy Act,” has a leg up on the president—at least for now.

Under the GOP proposal, put forth by House Republicans in June 2009, 90 percent of the federal share “of the revenues created by OCS exploration would go to a renewable energy trust fund to pay for a variety of renewable, alternative, and advanced energy programs.” This “American Renewable and Alternative Energy Trust Fund” would be dedicated to efforts accelerating the development of clean energy technologies that can truly help end America’s oil addiction.  If the federal government retained 75 percent of the royalty revenues from new OCS and Alaskan Coastal Plain production, this formula could represent an infusion of over $110 billion for critical clean energy investments over the next twenty years.

So while the expansion of offshore drilling may seem like we’re taking a step back from a future free from oil, investing the royalty revenues in clean tech RD&D could amount to a big leap forward in the transition to a clean energy economy by securing a revenue source for clean tech that is not tied to embattled efforts to establish a carbon price—all while beginning the urgent work of securing America’s cleantech competitiveness and ensuring our energy security.

Nearly the entire Republican caucus, not to mention a handful of Democrats, is already on record voting for this concept in the August 2008 vote on the New Energy Reform Act, introduced by the so-called Gang of 10 during the height of the oil price spikes in 2008.

If offshore drilling is to move forward over the next few years, the Obama administration and Congressional Democrats should waste no time in embracing this clean energy investment plan. 

Alternatively, Obama could look to pacify the deficit hawks by dedicating the royalty revenues to lower projected deficits—ignoring for a moment that it will be new industries and a growing economy that will have the largest impact on rebalancing the federal budget.  Obama could also heed the advice he’s likely to get from Beltway Green Groups who will no doubt urge the president to use the lion’s share of the funds for state revenue sharing in a (likely futile) attempt to entice votes from Southeast and Gulf Coast Senators for the troubled Kerry/Graham/Lieberman “comprehensive energy and climate” bill.  Either would represent another wasted opportunity to make a critical large-scale investment in our cleantech competitiveness and a future free from oil.

With offshore drilling seemingly unavoidable, wouldn’t it be ironic if Republican plans for the resulting royalties wound up more supportive of cleantech investment than President Obama and the Democrats?

Jesse Jenkins is the Director of Energy and Climate Policy at the Breakthrough Institute. Yael Borofsky is the Institute’s Staff Writer and Researcher and her writing can be found daily at the Breakthrough Blog

Related Links:

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

Filling our short-term fossil-fuel needs

China’s global shopping spree: Is the world’s future resource map tilting East?

by Agence France-Presse

Photo courtesy the.rohit via FlickrSYDNEY—Australian authorities were Monday battling to prevent a badly damaged Chinese coal carrier stranded on the Great Barrier Reef from spilling tonnes of oil into pristine waters teeming with marine life.

The Shen Neng 1 ran aground on Saturday when it hit a shoal off the eastern state of Queensland at full speed, apparently breaching a fuel tank and causing a two mile slick in the scenic tourist spot.

Authorities remain concerned that the ship, which is being hit by a two to three-meter swell and grinding against the reef, may break up but professional salvage experts on board believe that risk has diminished.

“The ship is stuck on a shoal and wave action is meaning that it’s moving,” Marine Safety Queensland (MSQ) spokesman Mark Strong told AFP. “Every time that happens you increase the risk of damage to the structure. The assessment as of now from the salvors is that the ship is reasonably stable.”

The Chinese-registered carrier, which is loaded with 65,000 tonnes of coal and about 975 tonnes of heavy fuel oil, is stranded 43 miles east of the resort destination Great Keppel Island.

One tug boat was already at the scene trying to stabilize the vessel and another will arrive early Tuesday, while aircraft were being used to monitor the spill in waters that are home to hundreds of species of coral and fish.

“In the current conditions we are reasonably assured, as far as we can be, that there will be no catastrophic break-up of the ship, but if the weather turned bad it will be another problem,” MSQ general Patrick Quirk said.

The vessel hit Douglas Shoal at the southern end of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, 15 nautical miles outside the nearest shipping channel, at full speed.

Authorities said the damage was serious, confirming that the rudder was seriously damaged, the ship’s double bottom tanks which provide buoyancy had been breached, and one of the fuel tanks had also likely been breached.

So far, however, the oil spill has been limited to about three or four tonnes. After dispersant was used on the slick on Sunday, workers will now place a boom around the oil to prevent it from spreading further.

Queensland Premier Anna Bligh said salvage teams were assessing how they might be able to refloat the China-bound carrier, including removing all the oil from the ship first.

“This is going to be a very specialist and delicate operation,” she told the Nine Network.

“If this ship was to break further apart, if there was another very significant oil spill, then we would not only see tonnes of oil into the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park but modeling shows it is likely to come up onto the beaches of Shoalwater Bay, which is a national park area.”

Bligh said the vessel was in a restricted zone of the Great Barrier Reef which was “totally off limits” to shipping and the government would investigate why the ship was so far off course.

The carrier’s Chinese owners, a subsidiary of Cosco Group, could be fined up to $920,000 and the captain handed a $230,000 penalty over the incident, she said.

The accident, which follows a large oil spill from the container carrier Pacific Adventurer in March 2009 which polluted Queensland beaches, has prompted warnings from conservationists about the impact on the reef as shipping increases.

The number of seaborne exports of coal and natural gas is set to surge in the coming decade as Queensland opens new resource developments to supply Asia’s growing energy needs.

The Great Barrier Reef, which covers 133,000 square miles along Australia’s northeast coast, is a major tourist attraction and home to hundreds of species including dugongs, dolphins, and sea turtles.

Related Links:

A movement far larger than the Tea Party

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

After Copenhagen setback, U.N. seeks way forward on climate

by Agence France-Presse

PARIS—Countries gather this week in the hope of erasing bitter memories of the Copenhagen summit and restoring faith in the battered U.N. process for combating climate change.

Negotiators meet in Bonn from Friday to Sunday for the first official talks under the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) since the strife-torn confab.

Their first job will be stocktaking: to see what place climate change now has on the world political agenda.

Disappointment or disillusion swept many capitals when 120 heads of state and government returned from Copenhagen after coming within an inch of a fiasco.

Over the past three months, political interest in climate change has ebbed, says Sebastien Genest, vice president of a green group, France Nature Environment.

“The summit prompted a widespread sense of failure and a kind of gloom,” says Genest.

Moving to fill the vacuum are climate skeptics and pragmatists—those who call for priority to domestic interests and the economy rather than carbon emissions.

On the table in Bonn will be how to breathe life into the summit’s one solid outcome: the Copenhagen Accord.

The slender document was hastily crafted by the heads of 28 countries as the December 7-19 marathon wobbled on the brink of collapse.

It sets the goal of limiting warming to 2 degrees C (3.6 F), gathering rich and poor countries in action against carbon pollution.

It also promises $30 billion dollars for climate-vulnerable poor countries up to 2012, and as much as 100 billion dollars annually by 2020.

The deal falls way short of the post-2012 treaty that was supposed to emerge from the two-year haggle which climaxed in Copenhagen.

Its many critics say it has no deadline or roadmap for reaching the warming target and its pledges are only voluntary.

It was not even endorsed at a UNFCCC plenary, given the raucous reception it got from left-leaning countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. So far, less than two-thirds of the UNFCCC parties have signed up to it.

Yet the Accord also has powerful supporters.

While acknowledging its flaws, they note it is the first to include advanced and emerging economies in specified emissions curbs. And, they argue, it could provide the key to resolving climate financing, one of the thorniest problems in a post-2012 pact.

A big question in Bonn will be how to dovetail the Copenhagen Accord with the UNFCCC, so that money can be disbursed.

But negotiators will be unable to duck what went wrong at Copenhagen—the cripplingly slow textual debate, the entrenched defense of national interests, and the deep suspicion of rich countries among the developing bloc.

“The meeting … is going to be very important to rebuild confidence in the process, to rebuild confidence that the way forward will be open and transparent on the one hand, and efficient on the other,” UNFCCC Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer says.

Many voices, such as French President Nicolas Sarkozy, are arguing for changes to the UNFCCC’s labyrinthine, two-track negotiating process.

The final hours at Copenhagen showed how quickly things could move when handled by a small group, as opposed to gaining unanimity of all 194 parties in one go, they say.

The way forward could lie with a representative group which would advance on major issues and consult the full assembly, which would also vote on the outcome, according to this argument. Some are looking closely at the G20, which accounts for rich and emerging economies that together account for some 80 percent of global emissions.

Lord Nicholas Stern, a top British economist, says the G20 has gained clout and credibility thanks to the financial crisis. “We’ve essentially marginalized the G8 and replaced it with the G20,” Stern said in an interview in Paris.

Related Links:

A movement far larger than the Tea Party

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

Coal freighter rams Great Barrier Reef, spilling oil into pristine waters

by Michael T. Klare

Cross-posted from TomDispatch.

Think of it as a tale of two countries.  When it comes to procuring the resources that make industrial societies run, China is now the shopaholic of planet Earth, while the United States is staying at home.  Hard-hit by the global recession, the United States has experienced a marked decline in the consumption of oil and other key industrial materials.  Not so China.  With the recession’s crippling effects expected to linger in the U.S. for many years, analysts foresee a slow recovery when it comes to resource consumption.  Not so China.

In fact, the Chinese are already experiencing a sharp increase in the use of oil and other commodities.  More than that, anticipating the kind of voracious resource consumption that goes with anticipated future growth, and worried about the availability of adequate supplies, giant Chinese energy and manufacturing firms—many of them state-owned—have been on a veritable spending binge when it comes to locking down resource supplies for the twenty-first century.  They have acquired oil fields, natural gas reserves, mines, pipelines, refineries, and other resource assets in a global buying spree of almost unprecedented proportions.

Like most other countries, China suffered some ill effects from the Great Recession of 2008.  Its exports declined and previously explosive economic growth slowed from record levels.  Thanks to a well-crafted $586 billion stimulus package, however, the worst effects proved remarkably short-lived and growth soon returned to its previous high-octane pace.  Since the beginning of 2009, China has experienced significant jumps in car ownership and home construction—along with worries about the creation of a housing bubble—among signs of returning prosperity.  This, in turn, has generated a rising demand for oil, steel, copper, and other primary materials.

Take oil.  In the United States, oil consumption actually declined by 9% over the past two years, from 20.7 million barrels per day in 2007 to 18.8 million in 2009.  In contrast, China’s oil consumption has risen in this same period, from 7.6 to 8.5 million barrels per day.  According to the most recent projections from the U.S. Department of Energy, this is no fluke.  The Chinese demand for oil is expected to continue climbing throughout the rest of this year and 2011, even as American consumption remains nearly flat.

Like the United States, China obtains a certain amount of oil from domestic wells, but must acquire a growing share from overseas suppliers.  In 2007, the country produced 3.9 million barrels per day and imported 3.7 million barrels, but that proportion is changing rapidly.  By 2020, it is projected to produce only 3.3 million barrels, while importing 9.1 million barrels.  This situation has “strategic vulnerability” written all over it, and so leaves Chinese leaders exceedingly uneasy.  In response, like American officials in decades past, they have moved to gain control over foreign sources of energy—and similarly many other vital materials, including natural gas, iron, copper, and uranium.

China Binging on Energy

Chinese energy companies initially started buying up foreign firms and drilling ventures (or, at least, shares in them) as the twenty-first century began.  Three large state-owned oil companies—the China National Petroleum Corp. (CNPC), the China National Offshore Oil Corp. (CNOOC), and the China Petroleum & Chemical Corp. (Sinopec)—took the lead.  These firms, or their partially privatized subsidiaries – PetroChina in the case of CNPC, and CNOOC International Ltd. in the case of CNOOC—began gobbling up foreign energy assets in Angola, Iran, Kazakhstan, Nigeria, Sudan, and Venezuela.  On the whole, these acquisitions were still dwarfed by those being made by giant Western firms like ExxonMobil, Chevron, Royal Dutch Shell, and BP.  Nonetheless, they represented something new:  a growing Chinese presence in a universe once dominated by the Western “majors.”

Then along came the Great Recession.  Since 2008, Western firms have, for the most part, been reluctant to make major investments in foreign oil ventures, fearing a prolonged downturn in global sales.  The Chinese companies, however, only accelerated their buying efforts.  They were urged on by senior government officials, who saw the moment as perfect for acquiring crucial valuable resources for a potentially energy-starved future at bargain-basement prices. 

“The international financial crisis… is equally a challenge and an opportunity,” insisted Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, at the beginning of 2009.  “The slowdown… has reduced the price of international energy resources and assets and favors our search for overseas resources.”

As a policy matter, the Chinese government has worked hard to facilitate the accelerating rush to control foreign energy resources.  Among other things, it has provided low-interest, long-term loans to major Chinese resource firms in the hunt for foreign properties, as well as to foreign governments willing to allow Chinese companies to participate in the exploitation of their natural resources.  In 2009, for example, the China Development Bank (CDB) agreed to lend CNPC $30 billion over a five-year period to support its efforts to acquire assets abroad.  Similarly, CBD has loaned $10 billion to Petrobras, Brazil’s state-controlled oil company, to develop deep offshore fields in return for a promise to supply China with up to 160,000 barrels of Brazilian crude per day.

Prodded in this fashion and backed with endless streams of cash, CNPC and the other giant Chinese firms have gone on a global binge, acquiring resource assets of every imaginable type in staggering profusion in Central Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America.  A very partial list of some of the more important recent deals would include:

* In April 2009, CNPC formed a joint venture with Kazmunaigas, the state oil company of the energy-rich Central Asian state of Kazakhistan, to purchase a Kazakh energy firm, JSC Mangistaumunaigas (MMG), for $3.3 billion.  This was just the latest of a series of deals giving China control over about one-quarter of Kazakhstan’s growing oil output.  A $5 billion loan-for-oil offer from China’s Export-Import Bank made this latest deal possible.

* In October 2009, a consortium led by CNPC and the oil heavyweight BP won a contract to develop the Rumaila oil field in Iraq, potentially one of the world’s biggest oil reservoirs in a country with the third largest reserves on the planet.  Under this agreement, the consortium will invest $15 billion to boost Rumaila’s daily yield from 1.1 to 2.8 million barrels, doubling Iraq’s net output.  CNPC holds a 37% share in the consortium; BP, 38%; and the Iraqi government, the remaining 25%.  If the consortium succeeds, China will have access to one of the world’s most-promising future sources of petroleum and a base for further participation in Iraq’s underdeveloped oil industry.

* In November 2009, Sinopec teamed up with Ecuador’s state-owned Petroecuador in a 40:60 joint venture (with Petroecuador holding the larger share) to develop two oil fields in Ecuador’s eastern Pastaza Province.  Sinopec is already a major producer in Ecuador, having joined with CNPC to acquire the Ecuadorian energy assets of Canada’s EnCana Corp. in 2005 for $1.4 billion.

* In December 2009, CNPC acquired a share of the Boyaca 3 oil block in the Orinoco Belt, a large deposit of extra-heavy oil in eastern Venezuela.  In that month, CNOOC formed a joint venture with the state-owned company Petróleos de Venezuela S.A. to develop the Junin 8 block in the same region.  These moves are seen as part of a strategic effort by Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez to increase his country’s oil exports to China and reduce its reliance on sales to the U.S. market.

* That same December, CNPC signed an agreement with the government of Myanmar (Burma) to build and operate an oil pipeline that will run from Maday Island in the western part of that country to Ruili, in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan.  The 460-mile pipeline will permit China-bound tankers from Africa and the Middle East to unload their cargo in Myanmar on the Indian Ocean, thereby avoiding the long voyage to China’s eastern coast via the Strait of Malacca and the South China Sea, areas significantly dominated by the U.S. Navy.

* In March 2010, CNOOC International announced plans to buy 50% of Bridas Corp., a private Argentinean energy firm with oil and gas operations in Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile.  CNOOC will pay $3.1 billion for its share of Bridas, which is owned by the family of Argentinean magnate Carlos Bulgheroni.

* In March, PetroChina joined oil major Shell to acquire Arrow Energy, a major Australian supplier of natural gas derived from coal-bed methane.  The two companies are paying about $1.6 billion each and will form a 50:50 joint venture to operate Arrow’s holdings.

And that’s only in the energy field.  Chinese mining and metals firms have been scouring the world for promising reserves of iron, copper, bauxite, and other key industrial minerals.  In March, for example, Aluminum Corp. of China, or Chinalco, acquired a 44.65% stake in the Simandou iron-ore project in the African country of Guinea.  Chinalco will pay Anglo-Australian mining giant Rio Tinto Ltd. $1.35 billion for this share.  Keep in mind that Chinalco already owns a 9.3% stake in Rio Tinto, and has been prevented from acquiring a larger share mainly thanks to Australian fears that China is absorbing too much of the country’s energy and minerals industries.

Shifting the World’s Resource Balance

Chinese companies like CNPC, Sinopec, and Chinalco are hardly alone in seeking control of valuable foreign resource assets.  Major Western firms, as well as state-owned companies in India, Russia, Brazil, and other countries, have also been shopping for such properties.  Few, however, have been as determined or single-minded as Chinese firms in taking advantage of the relatively low prices that followed the global recession, and few have the sort of deep pockets available to such companies, thanks to the willingness of the China Development Bank and other government agencies to offer munificent financial backing. 

When the United States and other Western nations finally recover from the Great Recession, therefore, they will discover that the global resource chessboard has been tilted strongly in China’s favor.  Energy and mineral producers that once directed their production—and often their political allegiance—to the U.S., Japan, and Western Europe, now view China as a major customer and patron.  In one eye-catching sign of this shift, Saudi Arabia announced recently that it had sold more oil to China last year than to the United States, previously its largest and most pampered customer.  “We believe this is a long-term transition,” said Khalid A. al-Falih, president and chief executive of Saudi Aramco, the state-owned oil giant.  “Demographic and economic trends are making it clear—the writing is on the wall.  China is the growth market for petroleum.”

For now, Chinese leaders are avoiding any hint that their recent foreign resource acquisitions entail political or military commitments that could produce friction with the United States or other Western powers.  These are just commercial transactions, they insist.  There is, however, no escaping the fact that growing Chinese resource ties with countries like Angola, Australia, Brazil, Iran, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, and Venezuela have geopolitical implications that are unlikely to be ignored in Washington, London, Paris, and Tokyo.  Perhaps more than any other recent developments, China’s global shopping spree reveals how the world’s balance of power is shifting from West to East.

Michael Klare is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., and the author, most recently, of Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet.  A documentary movie version of his previous book, Blood and Oil, is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Related Links:

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

Time for Obama to embrace another GOP energy plan

Coal freighter rams Great Barrier Reef, spilling oil into pristine waters

by Tom Philpott

Sardines at a market in Portugal. We’re wasting this magnificent resource on low-quality, mercury-laden farmed salmon? Not in Tom’s Kitchen!

In Tom’s Kitchen, Grist’s food editor discusses some of the
quick-and-easy things he gets up to in, well, his kitchen. Forgive him
for the lame iPhone
photography.

———

A while ago, my colleague Jon Hiskes requested a recipe for sardines. He said he knew he should eat more of them, but didn’t know how to make them in an appealing way. Moreover, his wife, like lots of folks, was predisposed to hate them.

Ah, I thought to myself, I’ve got to make the classic Sicilian dish pasta con sarde for “Tom’s Kitchen.” It’s one of my favorite dishes in the world—and easy, fast, cheap, and highly nourishing, too.

Well, I finally got it together this weekend—only to see that Mark Bittman, The New York Times’ celebrated food writer, had beat me to the punch in his latest Minimalist column.

At first I decided to scrap the idea: anxiety of influence and all of that. But then two events changed my mind. One was news  that the United States’ last sardine cannery had closed in Maine. There were several reasons cited for the collapse of the U.S. sardine-canning industry. Lack of domestic demand was a major one. Not even the women who staffed the Maine plant ate the canned delicacies anymore.

Then this post, by Marc Rumminger of the Ethicurean, reminded me of the widespread misuse of highly flavorful and nutritious bottom-feeding fish like sardines. Rather than eating them directly, we’re catching them en masse, churning them into fishmeal, and feeding them to factory-farmed, top-feeding fish like salmon (and also, amazingly, CAFO pigs).

This is nothing short of an ecological crime. According to Taras Grescoe, author of the excellent book Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood, it take about four pounds of fish like sardines and anchovies to generate a pound of salmon.

Don’t get me started on the various other ills of factory salmon faming. Suffice to say that we would wade a lot more lightly on the ocean if we stopped top-feeding, resource-intensive, filthy salmon farming and simply began to enjoy sardines and anchovies straight from the water—or a can.

Peru has proven that a taste for such fish can develop where it did not exist before. Off of its shores, industrial vessels routinely hoover up vast amounts of anchovetas for the fishmeal industry. Tired of seeing that amazing resource vanish so that U.S. consumers could eat salmon while Peruvian hunger and malnutrition rates remained high, the Peruvian government initiated an effort to promote anchoveta consumption, reports Rumminger.

And it has worked. “By late 2007, demand for fresh anchovies in Peru was up by 46% and demand for canned was up by 85%,” Rumminger reports.

In the spirit of helping make something similar happen here with sardines, I decided to plunge ahead, without reading Bittman’s piece. The world does not need fewer takes on pasta con sarde—or fewer food writers promoting this delectable little fish.

Note well: by switching from farmed salmon and other top feeders to sardines and other so-called “trash fish,” you’re not only helping save the ocean; you’re also getting a rich source of omega-3 fatty acids with (unlike farmed salmon) extremely low levels of mercury.

The key to enticing the sardine-suspicious is to acknowledge that sardines have a strong, pungent flavor—and, counter-intuitively, to pair them with other strong, pungent flavors. I’ve learned a similar lesson with wild watercress, which is now emerging from around the creek of Maverick Farms. Watercress can be piercingly peppery, turning some folks off. Dress it with fresh lemon juice and a little garlic, and it becomes tame and appealing.

That’s what the Sicilians have done with pasta con sarde. With a powerful hit of garlic, the sting of chile pepper, a shock of sweetness from raisins, the richness of pine nuts (and/or walnuts), and a whole lot of chopped parsley, sardines provide the robust backdrop to a glorious cacophony of flavors.

This version isn’t strictly authentic; when I’ve had the dish in Sicily, I’m pretty sure it was made with fresh sardines. I have to confess that this preparation is one I’ve improvised based on one fantastic example I encountered at a small restuarant near Palermo’s outdoor market seven years ago. So purists may find me doing things that simply aren’t done in Sicily. But this version will more than do in a pinch.

Pasta con sarde, Tom’s Kitchen-style

The mise en place. Those onion-looking things are immature garlic.Photo: Tom PhilpottMise en place: one pound whole-wheat spaghetti (see note, below); two 3.75 oz. tins of sardines packed in olive oil, opened; 1/2 cup total pine nuts and/or coarsely chopped walnuts; 1/4 cup raisins; extra-virgen olive oil; 3-4 cloves of garlic, minced (I used some young green garlic from the garden); one bunch parsley, chopped; some chile pepper flakes; good sea salt; a loaded pepper grinder.

Note: I have almost completely lost interest in white flour, and have shifted to whole-wheat pasta. At first, I didn’t like the flavor; now, I find that it stands up to and complements strong-flavored sauces, and use it with pleasure.

Start pasta according to this revolutionary 2009 article by the food-science expert Harold McGee. Add 1 pound spaghetti to a good-sized pot; add 8 cups water and 2 teaspoons of salt. Turn heat to high. Keep an eye on the pot, stirring occasionally as it begins to boil.

Snap, crackle, and pop: raisins and pinenuts saute with garlic and chile. Photo: Tom PhilpottMeanwhile, put your largest cast-iron (or other kind of) skillet on the stove over low heat. Add just enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan. Add chopped garlic and a good pinch of chile pepper, giving it a stir. When the garlic begins to give off its aroma, turn heat to medium and add the nuts. Saute them, stirring often, until they crisp, a minute or two. Now add the raisins and a good pinch of salt. (Be cautious with salt in this recipe; the canned sardines are salted.) Saute the raisins a bit, allowing them to puff up and take in the flavors.

Now, with a fork, lift the sardines from the cans in several batches, letting their oil drain a bit, and drop them in the pan. Give them a good stir, letting them saute for a few seconds; and then, with a wooden spoon, mash them into small pieces. If some raisins and nuts get mashed in the process, all the better. Turn heat to lowest setting while you deal with the pasta.

You’ll note, especially if you’re using whole wheat pasta, that the water is turning thick and murky. This is a culinary resource—a bit of it it will add an extra dimension to the sauce. So when the pasta is just done, drain it in such a way that you can reserve a cup or so of the water.

When you’ve drained the pasta and reserved some water, empty the pasta pan and return the pasta to it. Dump the sardine mixture on top. Add a drizzle of olive oil, the chopped parsley, about half of the reserved pasta water, and a vigorous grind of black pepper. Toss. Taste for salt. If it needs a little, add the rest of the pasta water. Serve—and enjoy.

Note: this is an extremely wine-friendly dish; it almost demands wine. For recommendations, I turned to Jay Murrie, the wine buyer for Chapel Hill-based 3 Cups. 3 Cups is one of those new-wave wine shops with small, carefully chosen selections focusing on wines made in small batches with minimal manipulation, usually on the farm where the grapes are grown. These tend not to be the rather homogeneous “jammy fruit bombs” favored by the likes of Robert Parker and The Wine Spectator, but rather subtle, interesting wines in a variety of styles that reflect the place they’re from. Here’s what Jay came up with:

• 2007 Colli della Murgia Erbaceo $14.99 Certified organic blend of 60% Fiano Minutolo and 40% Greco from Puglia, ripe, rich.

• 2008 Valle dell’ Acate Il Frappato ($16.99). “A light red from southeastern Sicily, practicing organic, bright, refreshing, red currant & cranberry aromas.” [Jay got me hooked on this gorgeous wine last summer.]

• 2007 Comte Peraldi Vermentino ($19.99). from Corsica. “Smells a little like pine nuts. Fresh but has some substance to it as well.”

• 2007 Do Ferreiro Rebisaca ($16.99). “Because not all wines that are good with pasta con sarde are Italian. Organic, 75% Albarino & 25% Treixadura from the coast of Galicia. Very seafood-friendly” 

 

 

Related Links:

One more blow to the ailing Great Barrier Reef

A fast-and-furious weeknight skillet dinner

Ask Umbra dives deep with ocean advocate Sylvia Earle

by Tom Philpott

Still life, with spork: Mrs. Q’s snap of pre-fab “Salisbury steak,” with canned peaches and canned corn. Photo: Mrs. Q

 

Mrs. Q is an anonymous midwestern public-school teacher who has vowed to eat the rotten dreck being served up in her school cafeteria for an entire school year.  Anyone who doesn’t understand all the fuss around school lunches must check out her blog, Fed UP with Lunch, where she documents these unhappy meals.

The blog really is terrific. In addition to the daily accounts of lunch-table disasters like “Salisbury steak,”  Mrs. Q offers smart, pungent commentary from inside a public school in an economically depressed region. Her discussion of the “obesity frame”—a topic I’ll be returning to soon—is one of the best I’ve seen. Her post on how “there’s no money”  for public schools—not just for lunch but for basic stuff like … teachers—is a heartbreaking commentary on how our public-education system is an ideal mechanism for entrenching class divisions.

I’m delighted to see Mrs. Q getting lots of media attention for her blog. Below is a Good Morning America segment on the courageous teacher. In it, she reveals that she fully expects to be exposed for her blog and fired for daring write it. I believe her. Teachers are supposed to slink into the lounge at lunchtime and not meddle in the affairs of the cafeteria. We are lucky that Mrs. Q refuses to play along. I watched the video twice—and can’t resist noting that the rotating set of adverts that precede the video come from the likes of Pepsi and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on Ronald McDonald’s retirement, card games, and a coffee stirring stir

Why climate realists and skeptics talk past each other

Lunchroom drama, nanotech follies, and other tasty bites

by Umbra Fisk

Send your question to Umbra!

Q. Dear Umbra,

After close to 50 years of hawking fatty food directly to kids, a groundswell of parents, health experts, and children’s advocates are calling on McDonald’s to retire Ronald McDonald. A new report and national poll released by Corporate Accountability International found that close to half of the public favors the clown’s retirement. What do you think?

Myriah
Boston

A. Dearest Myriah,

Did you happen to catch one of Grist‘s (sadly) more believable April Fools’ articles last week? Who knew so many people would actually believe that McDonald’s food wouldn’t break down in 1,000 years? Perhaps it was this stranger-than-fiction, 1-year-old Happy Meal that made it all the more plausible.  

For context, dearests, Corporate Accountability International, with its Retire Ronald campaign, is comparing RM to the likes of previous kid-geared corporate characters like Joe Camel and Spuds MacKenzie (BTW, as a wee lass, I once waited for two hours at a chicken wings restaurant for that Bud Light–hawking dog to sign a poster for me; sadly, or perhaps fortunately, he never showed and my affinity soon wore thin).

As for Ronald, while I find clowns in general creepy and clowns marketing a product to children really creepy (check out his note to readers at Ronald.com: “Hey, kids. This is advertising!”), Ronald McDonald is not the real problem. Happy Meals don’t need a floppy-shoed shill; they’re kid-friendly versions of McCuisine in colorful bags, plastic toy included.

And kids are not the ones forking over the money to buy Happy Meals, for the most part—their parents are. Thusly, a campaign to educate parents about the food they put in their kids’ mouths seems a better use of time and money than simply asking a clown to retire, even though I’m generally a fan of clever provocation.

I chatted with Grist’s own grand poobah of food, Tom Philpott, who thinks the most direct way to support the movement is to rally around school lunch reform. We teach kids to read, write, and do math in schools, but we also teach them how to eat. And what we’re teaching them now is that industrial crap is food. Janet Poppendieck, author of Free for All: Fixing School Food in America, wrote a rad blog post about how to let your voice be heard on the matter. Contact your senators and representatives, who’ll soon be having their say on the Child Nutrition Reauthorization legislation, which controls school lunches and other nutrition programs. Tell them exactly what you want and why it’s so important to you.

I’d also suggest taking a page from Michelle Obama’s playbook, even though we don’t have the same platform she does: As part of her campaign against childhood obesity, in addition to a revamping of the school lunch program, she’s planning a boost in funding for farmers markets, a major initiative to “end” food deserts by 2017, a focus on maintaining children’s exercise levels, and a set of broad public-private partnerships, along with reforms to front-of-package nutrition labeling and the food pyramid. Whew, I’m tired just thinking about it all, but I’m energized by her ambition nonetheless. You can join the First Lady’s Let’s Move campaign for tips, strategies, and updates.

Also, it sounds simple, but just don’t buy fast food for your own kids. Flip off the TV, stow away the video games, and force them outside. Better yet, go with them. Lead by example, and you won’t have to worry about some crazy-looking clown doing it for you.

Nutritiously,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

Hello! This is Ian. I’ve been designing a card game recently. I’m 9. I’m nearing the final touches, and one of them is packaging and producing the actual product. I really want to make it eco-friendly, but I’m struggling with how. Basically, I’m wondering how I could find the local (I live in Bismarck) resources to create eco-friendly paper, dice, and packaging without too much expense. Thanks!

Ian
Bismarck, N.D.

A. Dearest Ian,

Goodness me, you’re an industrious fellow. You know, I actually made trivia board games when I was kid, based on research from my set of World Book Encyclopedias. The categories were always the same: birds, dinosaurs, and presidents. Did you know that Pres. John Tyler had more children than any other U.S. president? He whelped (look it up) a whopping 15 kiddos. Sadly, Ian, you’ll probably never know the joy of owning a set of encyclopedias, much less researching the presidents in them. Sigh.

Anywho, I wonder, are you planning to market and sell the game on your own? Is it for personal use? Or are you hoping to pitch the prototype to a company to market and sell for you? I think I have a solution that may work in any case.

I personally love it when I find items packaged in recycled boxes and recycled wrapping paper—perhaps old newspapers, magazines, saved paper from holiday gifts. It’s really cool and more personal when every package is slightly different.

As for dice, what I did for my games may get you in trouble, but I just borrowed from other board games around the house. Of course, annoyed family members looking for missing dice can be a hazard of this method. Another solution is secondhand shopping for old board games—they may be missing some pieces, but that’s just fine for your purposes. You can use the dice, game pieces, and even the box (perhaps covered in recycled wrapping paper) for your own game.

Good luck, Ian! I’d love to see the finished product when it’s ready.

Gamely,
Umbra

Q. Dear Umbra,

I would suggest to the coffee guy to put in the milk and sugar first—adding the hot coffee mixes everything up well.

Keep up the good work with your column!

Jack
Zurich, Switzerland

A. Dearest Jack,

Great suggestion! I used it this morning with my tea-and-rice-milk combo, and it worked beautifully. Readers, keep the tips coming. I adore drawing from your vast collective wisdom and experience.

Thankfully,
Umbra

Related Links:

Underground school lunch blogger hits ‘Good Morning America’

Lunchroom drama, nanotech follies, and other tasty bites

Ask Umbra on Babeland’s boinking for bucks

by David Roberts

Lisa’s fantastic essay, “Say it loud: I’m childfree and I’m proud,” had 196 comments last time I checked. If you haven’t read it, you really should. I’ll wait here.

…

It got me thinking. Pardon a weekend ramble.

Me and my little resource hogs.I’m a father of two boys and I’ve absolutely loved it. I was making pretty poor use of being childless anyway, and it turns out having kids suits me better than independence ever did. But my first reaction to Lisa’s essay was not defensiveness. It’s not like we’re taking a quiz and there’s only one right answer. Surely it’s good news when anyone discovers their own best life and lives it! In general, it’s good for there to be lots of different kinds of people doing lots of different kinds of things. In particular, the kind of life Lisa’s chosen is complementary to the kind of life I’ve chosen.

Parents love their childless friends, often their only source of grown-up activities like, say, uninterrupted conversation. Or drinking and shooting pool (mmm…). Plus they’re good babysitters! Unchilded people love having relationships with kids. Children love hanging out with adults who are independent and adventurous; they need uncles and aunties. Human communities are ecosystems, and in all ecosystems diversity is the key to health and resilience.

We seem to have lost the sense of ourselves as embedded in communities, which is a fairly radical turn when you think about it. In the evolutionary history of homo sapiens, it’s only the blink of an eye that we’ve been living in discrete nuclear family units, in rows of houses and apartments alongside roads dedicated to automobiles, driving to 40-hour-a-week jobs, watching TV at night, buying consumer electronics on weekends, and eating food-like substances like Go-Gurt (“specially made to freeze and thaw by lunchtime”). Living this atomistic life, each a consumer in our own castle, is a radical departure from over a million years’ worth of living communally, in tribes.

Results from the growing field of happiness research strongly indicate that beyond a certain basic level of material comfort, more wealth doesn’t reliably bring more happiness. The most reliable way to maximize happiness is through social connectedness—through having a tribe. That means close bonds with loved ones (or even pets), people to confide in, and broader social networks in which we play a meaningful role and are acknowledged for it. (Technically, given how strong early imprinting is and how much the brain’s plasticity declines with age, the way to maximize happiness is to be raised within supportive social networks.) Connections with others are how we develop a sense of empathy and decency, which turn out to be crucial to happiness. It stands to reason that if we want more healthy, happy people, we should create more supportive social networks.

Despite extraordinary wealth, lots of Americans lack such networks. A recent study in American Sociological Review called “Social Isolation in America” found that 80 percent of Americans report having no one outside their family to confide in, and some 25 percent report having no confidants at all, a horrific figure that’s more than doubled since 1985. We have become, in Elizabeth Kolbert’s memorable phrase, “a nation of joyless lottery winners.”

There are many reasons for Americans’ increasing isolation and alienation, and much ink has been spilled on the subject, but I want to pick out something that’s often overlooked: the pervasive influence of the built environment.

Americans are atomized by design. Spaces for spontaneous, non-commercial social interaction outside the home have dwindled to almost nothing. Our daily routines now take place in a home/job/store loop. Interaction with friends and extended family—anyone outside the loop—must be initiated. You know how it is, all those people with whom you say, “We should really do something some time.” It’s just hard escaping the inertia of the day-to-day. In healthy communities, social interactions take place within the daily routine. They do not (always) need to be initiated; they just happen.

Why don’t they happen more often where most Americans live? One word: cars. OK, three words: Cars, streets, and parking lots. Our cities, towns, and neighborhoods are designed for cars, and by their very nature, cars limit opportunities for interaction.

Spontaneous, non-commercial, human-scale social interaction almost always happens when people are on foot. Shared experiences are what knit a social fabric, and shared experiences require shared spaces. That’s how we weave neighbors, local businesspeople, mail carriers, etc. into something more than the sum of their parts. That’s why real estate prices in walkable communities are so high. There’s demand! Americans are lonely.

Just as the trend toward urban density is the hot real estate story today, I predict that various sorts of cohousing arrangements will be the hot real estate story of 2020. If Lisa and I lived in a place with multiple families, some with children and some without, around shared spaces instead of roads and driveways, she would be part of my kids’ life. She’d run into them coming home from school every day or playing on the weekends. She would have the benefits of being involved in their lives and the freedom she enjoys from being childless. With childless folk around to act as babysitters, my wife and I would get the benefits of being able to go out spontaneously, or just get a night off, and the rootedness we enjoy from having children. It would be a community.

Only if we view ourselves as isolated consumers do we end up thinking that having a child or not is a competing choice, as if the question is, “Who’s getting the most for their money?” If we think of ourselves as parts of a human ecosystem—a community—such a question seems silly, akin to asking which is better, a tree or a meadow. The choice of whether to have a child or not is obviously significant for the person in question, but real communities should be able to incorporate, and benefit from, everyone, whatever their choices.

Related Links:

Ask Umbra on eyewear, faux eco efforts, and Easter baskets

Are you a farmer at heart? Start a ‘Crop Mob’

Old Olympic village for rent: cheap!

by David Roberts

Rogue Wave’s 2004 debut album, Out of the Shadow, was an immediately memorable mix of bright, melodic indie pop and off-kilter, art-rock time shifts. It made you want to tap your foot, but often made it quite difficult to keep time. It was one of those albums that got better the more time you spent with it, as the internal logic of the songs revealed itself.

Over the course of their next two albums they did what bands with art rock tendencies often do—travel a fair distance up their own backsides. The songs became turgid and overengineered.

With this year’s Permalight, however, they are back in the sweet spot and then some. It’s still got that angularity—it takes a few listens to really get a grip on it—but at the same time it’s the most straightforward, hooky album of their careers. One of the best surprises of the year so far.

Here’s the title track, the closest thing they’ve ever done to a disco song and one of many cuts that has totally ear wormed its way into my brain.

Related Links:

Friday music blogging: She & Him, again

Friday music blogging: Sarah Jaffe

Friday music blogging: Aloe Blacc

by Jonathan Hiskes

There’s always a place for some old-fashioned hating on plastics, especially if there’s a timely hook:

“If the traditional Easter egg is a symbol of resurrection, or a more paganesque generalized celebration of fertility, than what does a plastic Easter egg signify?” Andrew Leonard asks at Salon.

He learns that Easter, historically a high-sales season for chicken-laid eggs, no longer brings a boom for the egg industry. Because the plastic variety is winning out:

This weekend, millions of children will, knowingly or unknowingly, reenact ancient rituals honoring the mystery of life by hunting for plastic eggs that symbolize the exact opposite of fertility and birth. Instead of resurrection, plastic eggs are all about everlasting nonbiodegradable un-death,  inauthenticity and cheap disposability, not to mention global economic trends eating away at the livelihood of blue-collar American workers.

Take that, plastics industry. If you’re into eggs of the non-plastic variety, April McGreger has an ode to pastured farm eggs from last March, with recipes.

Related Links:

Why climate realists and skeptics talk past each other

Can we get some attention for our issues now?

Al Gore wants Earth Day volunteer videos

by Jonathan Hiskes

Courtesy Nemo’s great uncle via FlickrTruth be told, I’m more interested in people who are overcoming barriers to progress than in the endless “does global warming exist?” debates. When your house is on fire, at some point you stop arguing with someone who says there’s no fire, and you focus on getting your family out. Or if the house is an inescapable planet, you get to work dousing the fire.

But … there’s this awesome metaphor in The Economist that’s useful for understanding how climate realists and skeptics talk past each other. It goes like this: If you view climate science as a jigsaw puzzle, the full picture becomes clear once you’ve got most pieces in place. A loose piece here and there doesn’t obscure the whole picture. If it’s a kitten in a laundry basket you’re looking at, you can be sure it’s a kitten in a laundry basket with only 90 percent of the pieces in place.

Courtesy peterjroberts via FlickrOn the other hand, if you view climate science as a house of cards, with each piece dependent on another piece, one loose card can topple the whole apparatus. (The chain is only as strong as its weakest link, to add yet another metaphor.) So the improper emails at the heart of the “climategate” uproar or one incorrect report on Himalayan glaciers can seem like a fatal blow, even though the body of scientific work confirming climate change vastly outweighs them.

I find this illuminating. Understanding the difference between jigsaw people and house-of-cards people doesn’t resolve their disagreements. But it’s useful to see how they’re working off different metaphors. And The Economist’s thorough overview of climate science makes a strong case for why the jigsaw metaphor is the more appropriate one.

Bonus point: One reason why some people adopt the house-of-cards view is that they transfer the metaphor from fundamentalist religion. Fundamentalism requires that every single tenet of a holy scripture be true. If not, the whole apparatus topples. Hence the Biblical inerrancy view—the Bible is true not just as a whole, but in every single historical and scientific detail.

Most Christians I know don’t have this literalist view of the Bible. And I’ll leave it to theologians to explain whether this view of scripture makes sense. But if your faith rides on such a belief, you’re likely to look at climate change in the same way.

Hat tip to Clark Williams-Derry for spotting this.

Related Links:

Easter and plastic eggs

Can we get some attention for our issues now?

Al Gore wants Earth Day volunteer videos

by Grist

Related Links:

What’s that funny-talking TV chef doing in my West Virginia hometown?

Why are we propping up corn production, again?

Colbert grows a ‘crisis herb garden’

by Jonathan Hiskes

Fareed Zakaria—prominent foreign policy writer, Newsweek International editor, Washington Post columnist—uses President Obama’s campaign words to suggest it’s time for the president to devote his attention to energy policy:

During the 2008 campaign—before the global economic crisis—Barack Obama said the top three things he wanted to accomplish as president included withdrawing troops from Iraq, reforming health care and putting in place a new energy policy. A health-care bill has passed, and U.S. combat troops are on their way out of Iraq later this year.

So it’s time for energy policy, right? (Aside from the offshore drilling expansion, which was more politics than policy.) And if it’s Obama’s priority, it should be time for the political media to give it more attention too. It’s nice to see a foreign-policy pundit other than Thomas Friedman bring this up.

Of course, “before the global economic crisis” is a pretty big qualifier—it changes a lot on the political landscape. You might argue that it scrambles all the priorities.

But as Matt Yglesias likes to note, lawmakers can’t “focus on jobs” without focusing on actual changes that might create jobs. And the House clean-energy bill would create 1.9 million jobs, according to one economic study by University of California at Berkeley, the University of Illinois, and Yale University researchers [PDF]. (Dan Weiss has more.)

Zakaria’s comment, by the way, is from his interview with Energy Secretary Steven Chu, which contains some good stuff. Chu says the key is getting a solid carbon price in place:

Do you think that having a price on carbon is crucial?

I do. I absolutely believe a price on carbon is essential—that will send a very important long-term signal. [But] if it’s five years from now, I think it will be truly tragic, because other countries, notably China, are moving ahead so aggressively. They see this as their economic opportunity to lead in the next industrial revolution.

Related Links:

Easter and plastic eggs

Why climate realists and skeptics talk past each other

Al Gore wants Earth Day volunteer videos

by Tom Philpott

When my info-larder gets too packed, it’s time to serve up some choice nuggets from around the Web.

————————

Get ‘em while they’re hot. 

• Remember Fed Up with Lunch,  my favorite stunt blog ever? In it, an anonymous teacher in the midwest does something that few adults would volunteer to do—not even ones who tolerate paltry lunch funding: She’s lunching daily on kid rations in her public-school cafeteria. Her blog is a graphic document of the brutalized food culture we’ve created in public schools. It’s all about cardboard “pizza” and tater tots and other overly rich, undernourishing fare.

Well I’m happy to report that the blogger—who calls herself Mrs. Q—is getting plenty of much-deserved attention. Good Morning America/ABC News interviewed her (I’ll be posting the video soon); Yahoo News profiled her. The New York Times mentioned her. She even had a phone chat with the crusading British chef/U.S. school lunch reformer Jamie Oliver. She reports:

About his experience with school lunches and also what I have been up to. Jamie is a passionate advocate for children’s school food and their health. I’m not going to detail what we talked about because it wasn’t an interview, but instead a deep discussion about school lunches and what the US is up against. It was a high point for me and the blog.

Given all the attention the likes of Mrs. Q and Jamie Oliver are training on the rotten quality of school lunch, I’m surprised and disappointed that there isn’t more outrage around the Senate’s miniscule proposed increase in school lunch budgets. Mrs. Q published a guest post by the eminent school-lunch scholar Janet Poppendieck describing just how such outrage might be expressed to policy makers and legislators.

• Score another one for the Coalition of Immokalee Workers. Aramark, the gigantic institutional food supplier, has agreed to pay an extra penny a pound for Florida tomatoes—and sign the group’s worker-created code of conduct for farm labor. The group has gotten the largest players in the fast-food world to sign; and now two of the three largest institutional players (Compass Group and now Aramark). Next up: large grocery chains like Publix, and eventually the most massive grocery player of all: Wal-Mart. (For my on-the-ground report on the situation in Immokalee, go here and here.)

• Everyone should read the excellent public-health reporter Andrew Schneider’s series on nanotech for AOL News. Three key takeaways: oversight and regulation of nanotech is virtually nil,  even as it pervades products from sunscreen to underwear(!); nano-particles pose well-established risks; and, “despite denials” by the FDA, “nano-food Is already here”—and generating lots of buzz around new products within the food industry. As with GMOs, the strategy seems to be: release into the food supply en masse first; assess risks later (if ever).

• But the nanotech industry itself is researching the safety of its products and releasing the results to the public. Right? Not so much.

A measure forcing food and packaging companies to submit details of nanotechnology research to a national database could trigger an R&D exodus from the UK, the Government has warned.

In other words, if the UK government tries forces us to make our safety data public, we’re out of here. And, no doubt, preparing to alight upon the U.S., with its lax oversight.

• Speaking of AOL News (how amazing is it that dot-com titans of the ‘90s like AOL and Yahoo are rolling out news divisions, off all things), here’s a report that scientists have conjured up a genetically modified pigs with low-phosphorous shit, as a “solution” to the CAFO-waste problem. A certain food politics pundit isn’t impressed. AOL quotes him:

“It’s not just the phosphorous in industrial pig s—-t that causes trouble downstream,” Tom Philpott, food editor for Grist.org and co-founder of Maverick Farms in North Carolina, told AOL News. “It’s also full of nitrogen, which feeds dead zones and puts nitrates in folks’ drinking water. Indeed, waste from factory pig farms is essentially an industrial pollutant: It contains ammonia, methane, hydrogen sulfide, carbon monoxide, cyanide and heavy metals.”

Human pathogens are also a problem, he said, and pig waste carries a range of diseases. including the antibiotic-resistant strain of staphylococcus MRSA.

“The answer to the pig waste problem will not come from a lab but rather from policies that crack down on the disastrous practice of factory hog farming,” said Philpott.

• The Ethicurean’s excellent Marc R. aka Mental Masala dives deep into a report on on the whole problem of fishmeal and the oceans. “Over one-third of what fishing fleets catch—about 30 million metric tons annually—isn’t directly eaten by people, but instead is reduced to fish meal and fish oil, then fed to farmed fish or livestock, used as fertilizer, or as nutritional supplements,” Marc reports. Cracking down on the powerful fishmeal industry—and encouraging people to eat so-called “trash fish” like sardines and anchovies, rather than allowing comapnies to turn it into meal—could be a key leverage point for preserving the ocean as a thriving ecosystem. Marc reports that Peru, whose waters are plundered by large fleets plunder on the hunt for anchovy destined for the meal trade, has successfully convinced its population to consume much more bottom-feeding fish. We should do the same here—and i plan to do my bit.

• This municipal composting program in small-town Massachusetts seems like the way forward.

• Scientists: common farm poisons increase skin-cancer rates for farmworkers.

 

 

Related Links:

With a bit more cash and lots of ingenuity, school lunches could be much better

In a D.C. school, the simple power of a good breakfast

What’s that funny-talking TV chef doing in my West Virginia hometown?

by Lisa Hymas

A number of commenters on my “I’m
childfree and I’m proud” post, both here and on Facebook, argued that I’m just
the sort of smart, eco-groovy person who should be having kids, to ensure that
there’s a new generation of thoughtful and active citizens to carry on the good
fight.  Thanks for the compliment!  But I have to respectfully disagree. 

For starters, I’ll turn again to wise words from
Stephanie Mills, who heard similar arguments after she announced her
intention to remain childfree in 1969:

There were well-intentioned folks
who told me that I was just the kind of person who should be having children. I
would respond that given the presence of the then three billion people on
Earth, there were already plenty of promising babies in the world, a multitude
of whom could be well served by some economic and racial justice so that the
privileges I had enjoyed wouldn’t be such an extraordinary qualification for
motherhood.

Also, remember, as a number of commenters note: You don’t get to pick how your kids turn
out.  Good parents try their best to
instill in their kids strong social and environmental values, but ultimately
kids determine their own destinies, parents be damned. 

For evidence of this, I need look no further than my own
immediate family. My mother and father, despite their best efforts and
commendable parenting skills, completely failed in their endeavor to raise
their four children into Christian conservatives.  Instead, they ended up with four apatheistic liberals.

**

To respond to some of the other issues brought up in comments: 

One reader admonished me for not talking about “the waste in
diapers, in awful disposable toys, in the massive industry of junk peddling
aimed at parents and kids.”  But everyone
reading this already knows about all the cheap and disposable junk that’s part
of living as an American (and if you somehow haven’t been clued in yet, just
watch Annie Leonard’s “The
Story of Stuff”).  I didn’t want to
take cheap digs at parents, so I decided to focus on the positive aspects of
being childfree instead of the negative aspects of trying to raise a child in an über-consumeristic society. 

Another reason for my positive approach was to counter the
traditionally negative vibe that so many environmentalists give off when laying
out all those should not‘s.  In the (now rare) instances when enviros talk
about bypassing child-rearing for ecological reasons—as Stephanie Mills did—it’s often couched in the language of sacrifice.  I wanted to make the point that it isn’t
always a sacrifice; it can, for some people, be a rewarding personal choice, as
so many commenters have attested.

Yes, of course, adoption and foster parenting are wonderful
options for people who want to experience parenthood without bringing a new
being into the world.  Those issues were
simply beyond the scope of my original article. 

Lots of other topics were also beyond its scope:  The huge issue of overconsumption. The
unwillingness of most environmental groups to touch the population issue.  The touchy intersection between immigration
and population.  The bogus
“selfishness” charge leveled against the childfree.  The need for a global campaign to make
family-planning services available to women around the world, as well as
education, equality, and political empowerment, so all women can have the same choices
that we’ve been debating here.

If I had addressed everything I wanted to in
that first post, I would have produced a novel-sized opus that no one would
have read to the end.  But I plan to
address many of these topics in future posts, so stick around. 

I’m thrilled by the great comments submitted so far;
(almost) everyone has been uncommonly gracious, introspective, and candid, with
interesting insights on personal fulfillment and the movement to build a more
just and green future.  I look forward to
continuing the conversation.

Related Links:

Say it loud: I’m childfree and I’m proud

Population growth should be curbed, argues Jane Goodall

New York City gets big reaction to new sex symbol