ThinkLady

You have two bodies

Bet you didn't know you have two bodies. There's the one you're acquainted with -- the one you feed three times a day, the one that walks your brain around the house, takes you to work, the one that performs thousands of simple and complex tasks each day to keep you alive. This is the body you're most aware of, the one many of us try to keep healthy with thoughtful diet, exercise, rest, good health care.

Your second body gives you water to drink, air to breathe, food to eat and millions and billions of resources. This body isn't yours alone. This body connects you to every other species, human and non-human. This second body is reeling from the effects and impact of so many first bodies. This second body is the earth.

Such is the discourse and unfolding epiphanies in "The World We Have: A Buddhist Approach to Peace and Ecology," by Thich Nhat Hanh, teacher, author, poet, peace activist and Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk. More from Hanh's book:

... I have many other hearts. The sun in the sky is also my heart. If my own heart failed I would die instantly. But if the other heart, the sun, explodes or stops functioning, I will also die right away.

... We're imprisoned in our small selves, thinking only of having some comfortable conditions for this small self, while we destroy our large self.

I've been reading this little book almost daily and find it so rich, so full of meaning, I'm reading only a page or so at a time to meditate fully on the concepts.

Hanh's approach to the meaning of time and wealth, of how chasing after money ensnares us, embodied here, is a useful reminder on navigating the murky waters of a consumerist society where success is often defined by how much money you make:

We have constructed a system we can't control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims. For most of us who want to have a house, a car, a refrigerator, a television, and so on, we must sacrifice our time and our lives in exchange. We are constantly under the pressure of time. In former times, we could afford three hours to drink one cup of tea, enjoying the company of our friends in a serene and spiritual atmosphere. We could organize a party to celebrate the blossoming of one orchid in our garden. But today we can no longer afford these things. We say that time is money. We have created a society in which the rich become richer and the poor become poorer, and in which we are so caught up in our own immediate problems that we cannot afford to be aware of what is going on with the rest of the human family or our planet Earth.

Upaya Institute and Zen Center in Santa Fe published a portion of Hanh's book in their latest newsletter here. Read and enjoy.

Just dropped in to see what condition my transition was in

If you’re interested in the Transition movement but haven’t had time to read The Transition Handbook or visit the Web sites, you can thank writer Jon Mooallem and the New York Times for a terrifically reported, detailed and erudite article, “The End is Near! (Yah!)” (love the title) that provides a comprehensive portrait of this burgeoning movement.

Many, many provocative jewels here. Pros and cons fairly presented and questions raised (and we should always be asking questions!). Lots of food for thought in the whole magazine issue too, which has a green focus for Earth Day, but this story in particular reminded me of what good journalism is and can be … a reflection of society to educate, provoke thought and stir our souls.

Money quotes:

· What Reuter said he felt was wonderful about the Sandpoint Transition Initiative was how quickly it was rejuvenating people’s faith that the changes they craved were worth working for. “To say the group has only created a community garden so far really isn’t sufficient,” he told me. “It’s something really more substantive: they’re bringing people to the process.” … The movement wasn’t going to unify everybody in Sandpoint, he said: “I know that’s their dream, but I just don’t see it happening.” But it was inspiring for Reuter to watch the group emerge as one fervently turning gear in the larger mechanism of self-governance.

· … as Reuter saw it. “Government used to be the place in our community where people came together and made civic decisions,” he told me. “That’s what we should do again, and that’s what’s going to bring us back together: not having government be this force somehow outside of us, that’s bearing down on us or annoying us, but as a force that we actually embrace and want and that does what we want.”

· For a wide range of not-always-consistent reasons, people in Sandpoint decided that Transition could help them build the world they wanted. And now, only because enough people stepped forward and made that decision, Transition actually looked like a good tool for the job. They were picking it up by whatever handle they grasped. They were swinging it as earnestly as they could.

More highlights from the story:

· But those living on the land, whether out of a left- or right-wing ideology, do have a lot in common, including an astounding amount of resourcefulness.

· When I asked her later what she made of the exercise, Hellar told me: “First of all, I’m not a good-feelings, touchy-feely kind of person.” She added, “People wanted to talk about where we can put community gardens, how can we make our downtown more viable.” John T. Reuter, a Republican city councilman a few seats over, told me that when Berta told them to hold hands, he was looking around the room, counting up the people he knew Transition just alienated.

· Now, maybe because our various crises have escalated, or because it costs so much to disappear into your own parcel of wilderness, opting out no longer feels like a possibility. One of Transition’s more oblique arguments may be that we can’t escape anymore. We have to work together to remake the places where we already live.

· Karl Dye, head of the Bonner County Economic Development Corporation, told me, “All the things Transition’s doing basically line up with what we’re trying to do, which is create better-paying jobs.” He saw a lot of promise in Lanphear’s group, though he also said: “If you start a business to produce food locally and there are opportunities to make money by taking it to other areas, you’re going to do it. You may believe in Transitions and local production and local consumption, but hey, man, we’re still Americans.”

· A minister told me she was glad that Transition wasn’t “a greenie, hippie, far-out thing.” But Michael Boge, the City Council president, seemed to complain of exactly that, telling me he didn’t understand why the group had to cheapen a good idea by “inventing a new word for it and wrapping themselves in that catchphrase.” (The new word Boge objected to wasn’t “Transition”; it was “sustainability.”)

· Still, Boge, who owns five drive-in restaurants and is active in a long-distance motorcycling club called the Iron Butt Association, told me that he felt allied with Transition’s ideals. “I’ve bitched about this to my friends for years: we need to make a concerted effort to get off fossil fuels,” he said. “And I truly believe that with the country and God behind us, we can do it.” Transition was a prism, offering a slightly different view of Sandpoint depending on how each person turned it, but always shooting out lots of rainbows.

· The vibe was much more Alice Waters than Mad Max. (Jeff Burns, a local food activist who joined the food working group, was a conspicuous exception. “Some people on the food group want to feel good,” he told me, “and some people want to figure out how to feed 40,000 people in case the trucks stop rolling.”)

· Transition doesn’t claim its method is mathematically guaranteed to succeed. It simply posits that our best hope is to “unleash the collective genius of the community” and hope all the right pieces spill out. “We truly don’t know if this will work,” Rob Hopkins asserts in a mission-statement-like document called the “Cheerful Disclaimer!”

· “The genius of the Transition message, as I see it, is that it takes what we should be doing to avert these crises and turns it into something that sounds inviting and

positive and uplifting,” Richard Heinberg, a Transition U.S. board member, told me in Sebastopol … Heinberg said he worries that Transition risks losing people in the elation it inspires. He has been debating with Hopkins whether, in addition to devising a long-term descent, Transition should emphasize preparing for disasters that Heinberg says are unavoidable or already unfolding, like volatile gas prices or “being sideswiped by economic catastrophe and weather disruptions.”

· I was also surprised by the degree to which Transition members were intermixing with city authorities. Shortly after the Great Unleashing, Shelby Rognstad, a young cafe owner and an early Sandpoint Transition Initiative board member alongside Kühnel and Lanphear, was appointed to the town’s planning and zoning commission — a significant position, because Sandpoint was writing its first new comprehensive plan in 30 years.

Whole article here. Transition Town OKC project here ::: www.goinglocalokc.com.

Chemical panty twist and honest growth

Couple of highlights from recent readings:

Organic White House Garden Puts Some Conventional Panties in a Twist

La Vida Locavore highlights Mid America CropLife Association's (MACA) miff fit and their Orwellian letter to our First Lady about her organic garden. MACA is another thread in the tightly woven web of big corporate ag machinations. A sampling of the corporations

represented on MACA's board of directors: Monsanto, Dupont, Bayer CropScience, Nufarm. According to SourceWatch, CropLife America

is:

" ... a trade association representing the manufacturers of pesticides and other agricultural chemicals. It was formerly known as the American Crop Protection Association, and before that as the National Agricultural Chemicals Association.

CropLife America's rhetoric, and its name, indicates a shift in the pesticide industry's rhetoric and approach to public relations in the last decade. "CropLife America's mission," says its Web site, "is to foster the interests of the general public and CropLife America member companies by promoting innovation and the environmentally sound manufacture, distribution and use of crop protection and production technologies for safe, high-quality, affordable and abundant food, fiber and other crops."

The pesticide industry hopes to be know as the "crop protection" industry. The image it presents is one of a hi-tech, efficient, responsible, and green industry that is already thoroughly regulated to assure the safety of its products. While the industry quietly pursues an anti-regulatory agenda to assure no pesticides would be removed from the market, its trade association claims its aim is to "promote increasingly responsible, science-driven legislation and regulation."

and

"CropLife shares office space with Responsible Industry for a Sound Environment (RISE), a lobbying and public relations trade organization for the pesticide and fertilizer industry."

In "(No) Drill, Baby, Drill," New York Times columnist Tom Friedman riffs on Costa Rica's holistic approach to environmentalism and economic growth. I liked this:

" ... if a chemical factory sells tons of fertilizer but pollutes a river — or a farm sells bananas but destroys a carbon-absorbing and species-preserving forest — this is not honest growth. You have to pay for using nature. It is called “payment for environmental services” — nobody gets to treat climate, water, coral, fish and forests as free anymore.

That bit about honest growth - brilliant! Thank you Tom Friedman! Any bets on how long will it take for our state legislators to understand this concept?

To infinity and beyond

I love Buzz Lightyear. His optimism in the face of reality (believing he can fly on pop-up wings), makes this diminutive Toy Story hero full of geeky bravura and sincerity incredibly endearing. But it is his mouse-sized roar of “To infinity and beyond” that makes him my way cool, sustainable hero.

You’ve probably noticed energy discussions are as ubiquitous as chewing gum these days. The growing awareness we’ve got to do something has folks from cowpokes to CEOs grappling with their “holy electricity switch” moment, that dark point in time they realize cheap, easy energy days are floating away like so many plastic Wal-Mart bags in a sweeping prairie wind.

But start talking about designing sustainable energy systems and things get considerably dicier. While just about everyone supports being energy independent, the notion that the equivalent of Star Trek’s dilithium crystals will be found to satisfy our energy addiction is so deeply embedded in our psyche that some of our elected leaders tend to grasp at any energy solution like desperate junkies in need of a fix. 

The recent deceptive blathering about nuclear power in Oklahoma’s House of Representatives is a perfect case in point. Two bills were approved by the House Energy and Utility Regulation Committee Feb. 17 after nuclear energy advocates manipulated the fear factor that other energy sources alone such as solar, wind and geothermal, will not be enough to meet future power needs.

While there are many reasons nuclear energy is not a sustainable option (and reasons why other truly clean renewable energies like wind and solar are), one of the most under discussed reasons for axing nuclear energy out of any future energy mix is this -- nuclear energy production is totally dependent on yet another finite resource – uranium. Dr. David Fleming, author of “The Lean Guide to Nuclear Energy,” estimates if the entire world’s electricity were generated by nuclear power, we’d have around three years of uranium left and writes:

“Shortages of uranium - and the lack of realistic alternatives - leading to interruptions in supply, can be expected to start in the middle years of the decade 2010-2019, and to deepen thereafter.”

Clearly nuclear energy is not a Buzz Lightyear, “infinity and beyond” option. And even more obviously, we need to dig deep into proposed energy solutions and thoroughly evaluate them with a stringent list of sustainable criteria.

A few thoughts on the criteria:

• Are the resource(s) used to produce the energy finite or virtually infinite? Let's learn some lessons this time around from over-reliance on finite resources like oil, natural gas, and coal and develop the virtually infinite instead.
• What is the Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI) for the resource?

• What is the carbon footprint of the energy source?

• What is the water footprint of the energy source?
• What is the waste footprint of the energy source?
• With all environmental, waste, water, infrastructure and production costs factored in, how much does the energy cost per kilowatt hour?
• Since taxpayers subsidize our energy systems, who will profit and how much, i.e. what are the CEO and executive staff salaries, perks and bonuses of the energy producing company, and what is the anticipated return to shareholders on new infrastructure?
• Are the energy company’s middle and lower-level employees sustainably and equitably compensated with living wages and adequate benefits?
• How will the proposed energy source impact the area where production is located, the people, non-human animals, eco-system and general environment?
• What other factors do we need to be thinking about?

As Rob Hopkins notes in “The Transition Handbook,” a future with less energy is inevitable. Richard Heinberg extensively covers many of the various pros and cons of a variety of energy sources in his latest Museletter, which beautifully illustrates the depths of the challenges facing us and the urgent need for massive energy conservation programs.

The Transition Movement, founded by Hopkins, takes these realities and helps us see them as opportunities for creatively rethinking how we live in the world and how we use energy, to envision something better, something hopeful, less toxic to ourselves, to our fellow species and congruent with this amazing planet we call home. The first Transition Town initiative in Oklahoma, Transition Town OKC, launched last month, aims to enhance opportunities for our communities to imagine, envision and implement this energy transition together, to capture the power of every person's creativity and move us together toward a positive future.

We know reducing energy consumption will go a long way toward solving the energy puzzle, as will investment in energy technology and clean, truly renewable energy resources, but every energy technology and resource needs an adequate and thorough vetting using sustainable criteria. And that means thinking not just about the next 10, 20 or even 50 years, but in Buzz Lightyear speak, “To Infinity and beyond.”

Demand an apology to arugula

Yesterday I read the press release about Oklahoma House Bill 2151, by state Rep. Don Armes, R-Faxon. In Orwellian language, Armes claims the bill will, “… simplify regulation of livestock producers by making the state the single-source regulator in Oklahoma (other than the federal government).”

I was struck by the labeling, divisive language of Armes’ quotes.

"Unfortunately, there’s been a trend of over-reach by fringe groups who don’t know much about animals, agriculture production, or the free market, yet still feel the need to impose their version of ‘animal Nirvana’ on local farmers and ranchers through arbitrary regulations," said Armes, R-Faxon. "This bill will simply ensure that livestock regulations are developed by experts at the state level who know what they’re doing."

And this:

"Let's be honest: The majority of people in San Francisco probably think the chicken just magically appears ready to eat next to the arugula and tofu in the grocery aisle," Armes said. "In a place like Oklahoma, where there are literally more cattle than people and agriculture production generates billions of dollars in gross state product, it just makes sense to have trained experts making regulatory decisions."

Honesty? Really! There are so many prevarications and inane statements in just these two quotes it's hard to know where to start.

First, about that "let's say hateful things about Californians" thing: I have a sister and brother-in-law who are former residents of the Bay Area and are farmers. They live two hours north of San Francisco and operate a small, sustainable and organic family farm in Mendocino County, Calif. They are amazing, informed people with a firm grasp on the agricultural business, very connected to their land and to the local food movement in their county as well as in that demonized Bastion of Enlightened Eating known as San Francisco. I am so proud of them for what they are working hard to do. Wanna talk sweat equity? This is it!

This summer they shared their abundance of produce with local food banks and they are constantly hosting visitors at the farm to teach them how to be more self-sufficient and live sustainably. Most especially my sis and bro-in-law understand the inhumanity, pollution and public health hazards of industrialized factory farms. As farmers they were huge supporters of Proposition 2, the ballot question Armes references in his press release.

Second, given all the problems our nation and Oklahoma faces, are belittling, mischaracterizations such as these from Armes the mark of leadership, or of someone bought and paid for by the Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO) industry?

Blogger Oklavore wrote a beautiful, eloquent reply to this nonsense:

I am sick of people using food to exacerbate perceived divisions. Just yesterday a state representative invoked “arugula” to conjure feelings of “us” and “them.” How is it that a salad green has come to represent elites, or in this case ignorant, elitist city-folk? Remember Obama’s so-called “arugula moment” in mid-2007? Ridiculous. It grows in the wild and is easy to cultivate, for goodness sake! What’s the big deal? It’s been hijacked as a political tool (remember “freedom fries”?). Could it be that Californians have actually gotten more informed about food and agriculture and that’s why they voted for Proposition 2? What do you think?

More of Oklavore’s reply here. And more about California’s Proposition 2 here.

Third, as Oklavore notes, why pick on arugula! As I write this, I am feasting on arugula harvested from my backyard cold frame. It grows in the winter dammit! It's great with eggs. It's great in dips. It's heavenly in salads. I think it would be wonderful to flood Rep. Armes email inbox demanding he apologize to arugula! Or maybe we can take him a nice supply of arugula from Oklahoma's local farmers along with a stack of studies about what CAFOs are doing to our grand land. Or maybe we call the TV stations and invite them to a salad sit-in! 

But fourth and finally and more to heart of the matter: The demand for an apology to arugula is light-hearted, but this bill and its true intent are deadly serious. I think this bill has nothing to do with supporting local agriculture, and everything to do with protecting big agribiz CAFOs from any possible future federal regulation of their Grinch-hearted, inhumane CAFO pens and their filthy practices. 

CAFOs will spend millions in lobbying and advertising and spin factories to protect their taxpayer-subsidized machine as long as possible regardless of the overwhelming mountain of evidence confirming the damage they do to Oklahoma’s rural communities and economies, people, environment, public health, watersheds, tourism and natural resources. So maybe we can help Rep. Armes understand we the people aren’t as uninformed as he thinks and won’t take this gross assault on arugula, on family and friends in California, and most importantly, on Oklahoma's rural and urban communities. From our container and backyard urban gardens, from our small, thoughtfully run farms, from our hearts and minds yearning for healthy communities, clean skies and water, and humanity for all people and all species, we can can speak louder than Armes' bully pulpit.

Here’s Armes’ email address: donarmes@okhouse.gov and his phone number (405) 557-7307.

If you want, throw in a few links to studies about CAFOs in your email too. See below for links to get you started. Please spread the word and share more studies and info if you want.

· CAFOs Uncovered: The Untold Costs of Confined Animal Feeding Operations

· Industrial Livestock at the Taxpayer Trough: How Large Hog and Dairy Operations are Subsidized by the Environmental Quality Incentives Program

· Local control and CAFOs: A public health issue for rural counties

· Assessment of Impacts on Health, Local Economies, and the Environment with Suggested Alternatives

· Farmers Worry About CAFO Dairy: Pollution, Land Values Are Concerns