cows.

I was shocked when I got the report, because it said our No. 1 impact is milk production. Not burning fossil fuels for transportation or packaging, but milk production. We were floored.

Nancy Hirshberg, Stonyfield’s vice president for natural resources, commenting in this morning's New York Times on a report commissioned by her company in 1999 to assess their corporate impact on climate change.

The impact of the dairy industry on climate change results from the methane produced by cow belches.

Stonyfield and Danone (which owns a controlling interest in Stonyfield) have found that by restoring the cows to a diet that more closely mimics the sweet grasses they consume in the Spring, they're able to reduce their methane production to 18% among U.S. organic farms. In France, Danone has seen a 30% reduction when the diet was introduced across the larger commercial enterprise.

the story of stuff

“The Story of Stuff,” a 20-minute video about the effects of human consumption, has become a sleeper hit in classrooms across the nation.

From A Cautionary Video About America’s ‘Stuff’ in this morning's New York Times.

poverty is a pollutant

I=PAT
In which:
I = Environmental Impact
P = Population
A = Affluence, and
T = Technology

The IPAT algorithm was proposed by ecologist Paul Ehrlich and the physicist John P. Holdren in the 1970s as a means of projecting our environmental impact on the planet.

In yesterday's New York Times John Tierney called attention to the counter note that is the Environmental Kuznets Curve (EKC) and the quantitative study it describes that suggests affluence acts as a positive force on environmental impact once it clears a collective threshold within society. More on that here »

As someone who lives along the tidy streets of affluence among my Prius driving neighbors I buy into the Kuznets Curve; but as someone who has traveled in countries where poverty spills into the streets and overflows into murky effluence in the air and water, I'd add this last little bit: When any of us live in poverty on this planet, we are all impacted by the ungainly industrial striving of those who are just entering this game and firing up the engines. The industrialization that powers our planet often (always?) means that *somebody* is living in cramped quarters and taking home low pay. These are conditions which frequently translate into the godawful mess of poor sanitation, miserable water supplies, and inadequate nutrition.

Under these conditions human potential is crippled and the earth also pays the price.

Poverty is a pollutant that cannot be contained. Environmental discrimination against impoverished communities is a well-documented phenomenon; we are foolish if we believe that it's only the folks downriver who will be impacted by the dioxins pumped into the water or by the mercury that despoils the lake.

Every effort made to alleviate poverty puts money in the save the planet piggy bank.

We are all connected.

Happy Earth Day.

robofish

Photo: Reuters

[The robotic fish] will be able to detect changes in environmental conditions in the port and pick up on early signs of pollution spreading, for example by locating a small leak in a vessel. The hope is that this will prevent potentially hazardous discharges at sea, as the leak would undoubtedly get worse over time if not located.

Professor Huosheng Hu of Essex university in the Financial Times speaking of self-piloting robotic fish that will be released into the waters of the port of Gijon to monitor conditions and report back to their base station via Wifi.

Reuters also reported the story »

hardiness happens

USDA 1990 Hardiness Zone Map

The revised National Arbor Day Foundation 2006 Hardiness Zone Map

In 2006 the National Arbor Day Foundation published its own revised map using data that showed winter lows increasing as much as eight degrees warmer in some places. According to the foundation, the old zones have marched alarmingly northward.

Louise Ducote writing in the March | April 2009 issue of Orion Magazine about the USDA's resistance to replacing their 1990 hardiness zone map, drawn from data gathered from 1974 to 1986, with one that relies on more recent data regarding temperatures in the U.S.

location, location, location

Planners, lenders, and most consumers traditionally measure housing affordability as 30 percent or less of income. The Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, in contrast, takes into account not just the cost of housing, but also the intrinsic value of place, as quantified through transportation costs.

From the Housing + Transportation Affordability Index, developed by CNT and the Center for Transit Oriented Development (CTOD), in an effort to accurately measure the true affordability of housing.

*gulp*

• Bottled water consumes between 1100 and 2000 times more energy on average than does tap water


• Global demand for bottle production alone uses 50 million barrels of oil a year, or 2 1/2 days of U.S. oil consumption


• Drinking an imported bottle of water is about two-and-a-half to four times more energy intensive than getting it locally


• U.S. bottled-water consumption in 2007 required an energy input equivalent to 32 million to 54 million barrels of oil


• Although the energy for purifying and delivering tap water varies, even in the most expensive cases it is hundreds of times less than for bottled water

The research findings of environmental scientists Peter Gleick and Heather Cooley of the Pacific Institute as reported in Drink Up, Energy Hogs in the 26 February issue of ScienceNOW.

The article continues: "To put that energy use into perspective, Gleick says to imagine that each bottle is up to one-quarter full of oil."

the mango tree

solitary mango tree across the valley
Originally uploaded by joaobambu

a found poem

her children insist
so she takes them back

there’s our house
there’s the mango tree

they shout

there is nothing to see
only an ocean of mud

Found in A Corner of Indonesia, Sinking in a Sea of Mud in this morning's New York Times.

Lilik Kamina and her family lost their village to a mud volcano that was created during exploratory oil drilling by PT Lapindo Brantas on their island of Renokenongo in Indonesia over two and a half years ago.

The land is becoming uninhabitable, inch by inch, and the air is increasingly carcinogenic. Many people of Renokenongo have lost their livelihoods; many have no where to go.

by the shining big-sea-water

It was Hiawatha ... who bound together the five arrows. One arrow alone, he said, can be broken, but the bundle of five is too strong. The structure of the Iroquois Confederacy became the model for the colonist's new union, and the symbolism stands today: the eagle in the great seal of the United States holds those five arrows [1] in its talons.

From The Rights of the Land by Robin Kimmerer in the November | December 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.

Kimmerer's piece, about a unique suit brought by the Onondaga Nation to regain legal responsibility for their ancestral lands surrounding Onondaga Lake, is unfortunately only available in the print edition.

Onondaga Lake is now a superfund site due to industrial misuse. The Indian nation has introduced a suite that "is unheard of in American property law":

The suite is termed a 'land rights action.' When they finally got their day in court last October, members of the Onondaga nation argued that the land title they're seeking is not for possession, not to exclude, but for the right to participate in the well-being of the land. Against the backdrop of Euro-American thinking, which treats land as a bundle of property rights, the Onondaga are asking for freedom to exercise their responsibility to the land.

[1] Thirteen, actually, for the thirteen colonies. It's the origin of the symbolism that's of interest in a country that rarely acknowledges its indigenous precedents.

forb covered nobs & my kind of conservatives

Spent the morning at the Nachusa Grasslands near Rochelle, Illinois, climbing rocky nobs where some of the last remnant scraps of authentic prairie in the Midwest were preserved in a land-grab by the Nature Conservancy some 22 years ago. The Conservancy secured the parcels of land just 15 minutes before they were slated to go up for auction to housing developers who were expected to slice them into subdivisions.



True prairie started to slip away when the European immigrants first hunkered down on the grasslands with their cattle and sheep in tow, but the true beginning of the end, according to Al, our guide -- who is also steward, along with his wife, of Doug’s Nob, one of the high-quality prairie remnants within the parcel -- coincided with John Deere’s invention of the cast steel plow in 1837. [1]



When folks got around to taking a head count in the early 1900s, after Deere’s highly efficient deep cutting steel blade had had its way with the terrain, they realized that less than one percent of the diversified prairie landscapes that once covered over 250 million acres in the Midwest for nearly 8,000 years, remained.



The Nature Conservancy is trying to bring this 2,500 acre patch back, through careful stewardship that includes regular burnings, weed pulling, seed harvesting and spreading, and a hundred other ways to volunteer your Saturdays (they meet every Saturday, year round, at 9AM right next to the barn. all are welcome.)



We’re gonna try to be there, at least once a month over the course of the year, out of pure selfishness. I want to see how the fragrance of that place changes as the seasons change, see if the grasses always crunch underfoot like snow that’s crusted over, or if that’s a quality that’s unique to autumn; particular to today.

And I want to take more pictures »



[1] Of ironic interest: The John Deere historic site is just half an hour down the road from the Nachusa Grasslands.

seeing.

Tucson over time, as seen from Kitt Peak. (NYTimes)

When the Northridge earthquake knocked out power in Los Angeles in 1994, numerous calls came into emergency centers and even the Griffith Observatory from people who had poured into the streets in the predawn hours. They had looked into the dark sky to see what some anxiously described as a “giant silvery cloud” over the shaken city.

Not to worry, they were assured. It was merely the Milky Way.

Helping the Stars Take Back the Night in this morning's New York Times.

If you've ever laid yourself down under a full night sky when the seeing was sublime, you know how that canopy inspires ideas untethered from gravity.

Most cultural mythologies spin stories from the stars. For the Greeks the Milky Way was the breast milk of Hera, required nurturing for the gods and spilled across the sky when she refused it to the mortal Heracles. For the Maya the Milky Way was transfigured by the seasonal spinning of the heavens: Now a canoe on an important passage, now the World Tree. Always a central player in the story of death and regeneration.

For Galileo and Copernicus the night sky inspired heresy, dangerous ideas born out of its vast reach that suggested maybe man wasn't the center of everything. Maybe there was more than us.

But anymore it's rare to see the night sky. Light pollution from our cities leaks into most of our lives, hiding the vastness from view.

The New York Times story focuses on developments in outdoor lighting to reduce light pollution, and alludes to the dark sky movement, which lobbies for dimming the lights as both an energy saving measure and as a way to restore that view -- and make way for all that seeing ushers in.

speaking of the magnificent things man has made

a found poem

Everything here
seems bound
for someplace else

The grain goes down
the river
the trains speed through
the little towns
the interstate highway
is full of long-haulers
and out-of-state
license plates

I can hear
the soft chatter
of a kingfisher

I can hear
the bushes rustle
where a marmot roots
near the water's edge

I can hear
the cars plying
the bridge between
Engineer's Town
and the reservation

But except
for the slightest swish
coming from a thin
strand of water
that emerges from
halfway down
the dam's
otherwise
dry spillway

The night is devoid
of the sound of water


Found in Matt Rasmussen's Pastures of Plenty in Orion, a piece about Woody Guthrie's involvement as a songwriter hired to shill for the Columbia River Dam project in the 1930s.

Rasmussen's piece is elegiac and heartbreaking, beautifully capturing the tension between power of place and our pursuit of that thing called Progress and how it stilled the teeming Colombia where the salmon have now gone missing.

My Bompa would burst into Guthrie's Roll On Columbia when we crossed the bridge that spans the great river. He loved the Pacific Northwest with a passion, but he was also of the generation that believed it could be harnessed for our use, at no detriment to its nature.

I don't know what he would say to hear the salmon aren't running: I remember the first time he took me to the Ballard Locks to watch the fish run, how he was nearly giddy then. How in subsequent years, as the run grew smaller, the fish more demure, he seemed disquieted but inconclusive, unsettled as if he were unsure how such magnificent engineering could produce something some puny and small.

I know if he were still alive his heart would break to hear the news of this season's salmon run, and I suspect he would noodle it in silence, his head bent low over the paper, his face pursed with the quiet rage and worry of a broken promise revealed.

the science of 350

At the American Geophysical Union meeting in San Francisco last December [climatologist James Hansen] named a number: 350 parts per million carbon dioxide.

That, he said, was the absolute upper bound of anything like safety — above it and the planet would be unraveling. Is unraveling, because we're already at 385 parts per million.

Bill McKibben writing about the 350 climate change campaign in the July | August 2008 issue of Orion Magazine.


Video: 350.org: Because the world needs to know

nothing that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful

I'm not interested in how we can make materials sparkle and glimmer and make them visually spectacular, but how we can make them performatively spectacular.

Architect Eric Olsen in the May issue of Metropolis magazine, commenting on his winning entry -- the pleated bucket -- in the 2008 Next Generation design competition.



Constructed from pleated tarpaulin, the pleated bucket takes a cue from the Saguaro cactus -- each of its pleats expands as it fills with water. The "bucket" -- which is actually more shawl like, designed to be worn in just that way to transport water from one place to another -- will disinfect the water it contains when set out in the sun for five hours.




Illus & Photo: Metropolis

all your base are belong to us

Source: Common Wealth, Economics for a Crowded Planet by Jeffrey D Sachs, cited in this morning's Financial Times.

how much I suck

Embiggen »

My carbon footprint per Dopplr.com -- as of September 2007 when I started using Dopplr.

So yeah: I pretty much suck.

What I do to try to reduce my impact when I travel:

• Try to eat no meat (see: Diet for a Small Planet for the rational behind that), although I've been known to make an exception for Roscoe's House of Chicken & Waffles.


• Decline drinks & peanuts off the airplane snack cart -- goodies I don't need in packaging I don't need to waste.


• Rent a Hybrid whenever I can. I guess if I were really on the stick I'd start taking public transportation from the airport rather than cabs.


• Eat in restaurants rather than ordering take out with all that additional packaging.

Gonna get better about bringing my own coffee mug along -- so I'm not using up all those paper cups. Will probably start bringing my SIGG along too for a water bottle -- I average two plastic water bottles per trip because I have to dump it before I go through security.

But yeah: I still suck. Quite a bit.

the digging-est wolverine

Photo: Katie Moriarty

Oh my goodness! That is so exciting. So when are the grizzlies coming back? And the wolves?

Truckee High School Chemistry and Physics Teacher Susan Lowder, commenting on the return of the Wolverines to the Sierra Nevada Range as reported by the Sacramento Bee back in March.

Sue's also my aunt, and one of my favorite ones at that, so that + gushing about rarely sighted species + longing nostalgically for others that have gone before gets her a plug here at detritus.

Kin for sure.

karma credit

The most significant part of this story is that while [information and communication] technologies do indeed consume some energy, the net effect is that they cause society and the economy overall to use less energy.

Richard Hirsh, a specialist in energy history at Virginia Tech commenting in Internet helps Americans save more energy every year in today's Christian Science Monitor on a study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy (ACEEE) that found that for every kilowatt-hour of electricity used by information and communications technologies, the US saves at least 10 times that amount.

of sundogs & standing

Blogging belatedly on this previous weekend’s Humanities Day at the University of Chicago (not to be confused with the City of Chicago’s Humanities Festival which is currently in full swing).

How it works: During parents’ weekend each year (I don’t think UofC calls it “homecoming” -- there’s no football team, no tailgating, no ritual brutality at this particular egghead U) the Humanities Department throws a party for all the folks, and the Humanities’ Profs queue up and give lectures in a day long show and tell. The event is free and open to the public, so along with the grey hairs a few younger pulses show up for the offering.

Results, over the seven years we’ve attended, have been hit and miss. This year was a winner on all counts, with a kick off by Christina Van Nolcken delivering a lecture on the Vikings -- plump full of great stories of Eric the Bloodaxe and Ivar the Boneless, including speculation on whether or not Ivar’s inability to produce bonage at strategic moments with young maidens may have contributed to his nickname.

Richard Neer’s keynote was also first rate -- an explication of Poussin’s Landscape with Blind Orion Seeking the Sun that attributed the striking occurrence of a double sundog [1] in Rome contemporary with the artist's time in that city (resulting in the optical illusion of four additional suns), for the freaky ambient light source in Poussin’s image -- hard to pin down, difficult to trace -- and the speculation that the artist may have been a commenting on the rising tide of Scientific thought.

Made me wish, as it always does, that I could make a living just thinking stuff up like that. And reading books and shit.


But the lecture that stuck was the one delivered by the one guy who got out of his own way and led the gathered assembly through the materials, using the shake up your brain with that good old fashion dialectic method of Socratic inquiry.

David M. Thompson, Associate Dean of the Humanities Division, laid down several different texts -- including Article III of the U.S. Constitution, two Supreme Court rulings and a handful of poetry -- and from there bent my brain into a pretzel re the difficulties of getting anything accomplished on behalf of the environment in America’s courts.

His point in a nutshell: To stand before the Court and argue one’s case one must have standing, or “the ability of a party to demonstrate to the court sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party's participation in the case” [2]; but of course to establish standing in a case where the environment is under threat -- when a species, or landscape, or ecosystem is endangered rather than an individual -- demands that the plaintiffs and their counsel perform all kinds of legal acrobatics to show some kind of “injury in fact”.

The first example Thompson put forward was Lujan, The Secretary of the Interior v. Defenders of Wildlife heard by the Supreme Court in 1991 in which two Americans argued, some what ridiculously, injury in fact as individuals who may be future tourists to Egypt and Sri Lanka who, given U.S. government funding of deleterious projects on foreign soil, would no longer have the privilege of viewing endangered species in their native habitat.

Not a particularly compelling approach, unless you believe in championing the right of the Bourgeoisie to an ideal vacation. But one of the only few available in a legal system that’s oriented to the primacy of property ownership. I.e., if you bought it you can call it broke: otherwise, no dice.

In striking contrast we read Seamus Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist and Wallace Stevens’ The Idea of Order at Key West, which as poems set out to do very different things, but manage each to accomplish that thing that the good poets are so good at: turning translucent the boundary between the self and the natural world, and wondering at our indivisibility from it.

Nearly a week later when my friend Aric blew through town he mentioned a concept that threads through the paper he was to present -- an African (Swahili?) word for citizen: “mwananchi” -- “one who belongs to the land”, and he noted that in Africa there are no words for scenery, for view -- for this thing that we gaze upon, objectify. It’s all one: part and parcel. Earth and body; host and resident. Solid ground on which we stand -- ours to injure, in fact.

EVENT
Nothing is happening
Nothing

A waterdrop
Soundlessly shatters
A gossamer gives

Against this unused space
A bird
Might thoughtlessly try its voice
But no bird does

On the trodden ground
Footsteps
Are themselves more pulse than sound

At the return
A little drunk
On air

Aware that
Nothing
Is happening

—Charles Tomlinson
(another poem served up by Prof. Thompson)

[1] The Plains serve up sundogs every once in awhile -- also known as a 22 degree halos. I captured a weak one once upon a time »

[2] Legal Standing per Wikipedia

of knitting and nurdles

“They’re called nurdles. They’re the raw materials of plastic production. They melt these down to make all kinds of things.” He walks a little farther, then scoops up another handful. It contains more of the same plastic bits: pale blue ones, greens, reds, and tans. Each handful, he calculates, is about 20 percent plastic, and each holds at least thirty pellets.

“You find these things on virtually every beach these days. Obviously they are from some factory.”

However, there is no plastic manufacturing anywhere nearby. The pellets have ridden some current over a great distance until they were deposited here—collected and sized by the wind and tide.

From Polymers are Forever in the May | June 2007 issue of Orion

Don't bother reading the Orion piece unless you're ready to be shocked and horrified into ageographical[1] conformance with San Francisco's ban on plastic bags, possibly even feeling compelled to pick up a pair of needles and follow Aija's Everlasting Bagstopper example, because that guy in The Graduate wasn't kidding -- there's a great future in plastics -- because they never die.

To quote the man: Think about it. Will you think about it?

YouTube Video: "Plastics." Of course.


[1] yes, as a matter of fact I did make that word up. "without geographic specificity" is what I was going for. did it work?