How's Your Day Going?

Just in case you were starting to feel good about your day, check out this site. This site aggregates disasters around the world and plots them with cool iconography onto a map of the world. Scroll down to get more detail on each event. Who knew, just today in the US we have had an explosion, a chemical accident, and an outbreak of Murine Typhus.

Organic AND local?

According to a post on Treehugger, the Soil Association (one of the UK's organic certification bodies) is considering adding shipping to their list of considerations to determine whether or not something is organic. In this instance, they are considering removing the organic label from any produce that air freighted on the idea that the pollution created to ship the organic produce all those miles eliminates any benefit of having grown it organically in the first place. I wonder if the USDA could be so enlightened? (HA! Not a chance if Wal*Mart, unWholeFoods, EdenFarms, and the like have their way would be my guess. Just think of it--what would unWholeFoods do if it couldn't ship organic garlic from China to New York?!?).

Still, it is good to see someone thinking more about the organic label. Organic, at least in the US, has come to mean nothing more than "chemical-free" (and not always that), and any sense of the original local, sustainable, and small, that the organic movement first had have disappeared.

A digression: my food today? Local bread--as in out of my own oven local.

"Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants"

In tomorrow's New York Times magazine (one advantage of getting the NYTimes in New York is that you can get the Sunday sections on Saturday!) is another article by Michael Pollan from which I quote my post's title, "Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants." A sentiment that pretty much sums up my own food philosophy if you understand (as Pollan does) food to mean whole, unprocessed food. Not too much--I've never been a fan a gorging myself. An mostly plants--I've always had a vegetarian bend. I think I would also add local: eat local food.

What is most relevant about Pollan's article is his insight that somewhere in the 70s and 80s we started seeing food through a lens of science and that food could be broken down into some basic parts (nutrients, vitamins) and reassembled with no loss of any health value. It reminds me of the magic pill that we were all promised in the 70s that would replace eating altogether. Or was that Tang?

Of course, the difficult part is, as Pollan is quick to point out, how to eat other than industrial food. Difficult, but not impossible. Today's shopping trip: beef, spicy lamb sausage, black radishes, potatos, turnips, and three kinds of cheese, all from local producers.

UnWhole Foods

I'm growing to really dislike Whole Foods. Don't get me wrong--it's a lovely store. The food (especially produce) is exquisitely displayed, everything is very fresh and very tasty. But it is also horribly expensive, crawling with children-laden suburbanites, and has moved far, far away from any ideal of "whole foods" that it once tried to live up to.

For quite some time, I've had the idea in my head that something was wrong with the organic food market, and health-food market, and that food as described by "slow food" and local food movements provided a deeper alternative. Yet, I have also found that I have ideas about what (I think) is right and what I would like to be doing far sooner than I really fully understand them.

But the more I spend thinking about the differences between a place like Whole Foods (something Michael Pollan calls industrial organic) and locally & sustainably grown food, the more I really start to see and feel the difference. I've shopped at food co-ops and alternative health food stores for years (decades, really) and it is sad to see how so many of the alternatives have disappeared or become something else. Just this morning, while at Whole Foods (yes, I still shop there) looking for garlic, I found some. Organic even. But grown in China! Why would I want garlic that had to travel 7000+ miles (or whatever the distance). And then there was the beef. Organic beef. Reasonably priced. Tasted very good--especially as part of the Nachos we had for lunch. But then I started thinking back to Michael Pollan's book and his tracing of the corn industry in America.

What stuck in my brain was his spectrometer analysis of a fast food meal. On the surface the meal was a varitable breadbasket of diversity: burger, cheese, bread, dressing, soda, fries. But once he ran the meal through the spectrometer he could determine that the vast majority of the meal was derived from corn. And so I stood in Whole Foods wondering if the organic beef I was about to buy was really just the by-product of the well oiled corn industry that we have going on here in America.

At least the tortilla chips didn't hide their corn nature . . .

Smog Eating Concrete

A recent article in the New York Times describes efforts by architect Richard Meier to use new technology in a church he is building outside of Rome. The building uses his usual minimalist approach and stark whites and glass (like his Federal Court House in Central Islip, NY, where I once served jury duty). But in the Rome church he is using photocatalytic concrete. This concrete contains a coating of titanium dioxide that, when exposed to sunlight, destroys the smog in the immediate vicinity.

Certainly not a silver bullet, but a interesting element to the push towards green architecture and design.

We All Like Sheep

Especially organic ones! There is a lot of coverage out there about organic food and organic health care products--but what about organic cloth and clothing? Cotton has one of the most chemical intensive plants to grow, partly on the (wrong) assumption that since we are not eating the crop, the chemicals will not affect us.

My two favorite pair of pants both happen to be made from organic cotton: my Patagonia duck pants--which I wear for anything outdoors, from hikes here In New Jersey and New York, to stomping around the wilds of Australia. And a pair of organic, Patagoina Aimless Jeans. I just got these and they are some of the most comfortable jeans I have had.

Not to toot Patagonia's horn too loudly (although I do think that they are a really good company and have tremendous products), but Patagonia has made big efforts to produce their clothing from eco-sensitive materials. From creating fleece from recycled plastics, to organic wool and organic cotton. Not an easy thing in this Wal*Mart world where people associate cheap with good.

Green Work

There is a lot of talk right now about how to "green" our home lives--from carbon-offsetting of car usage, to the food choices we make, to the cleaners we use, etc. But I suspect that you, like me, spend a large amount of your time not at home but at work (and in my case, I spend more time at work than at home). And so I often struggle with the question--how can I green my work life? It is an important question because I think that history shows us that people make very different decisions when they are part of larger organizations and institutions than when they are on their own or in a social context other than the work institution (it is easy to place the blame or fault for something you feel may be wrong on the institution and then disconnect yourself from being an actor in the situation: "Oh, this is the way we do business," "Its about the numbers," etc.)

Of course, if you are in a power position in an organization there are an immense number of of ways you can green your work: make green building choices; reduce product waste; educate your employees; increase efficiency and reduce waste (green = efficient = $$$ saved or lost). But most workers are in control of these decisions. What is there to do?

I look at my daily habits--are there things I do everyday that create unnecessary waste? Say buying a coffee every day on the way to work? If so, I try to find an alternative (i.e. I make my coffee every day and bring it in a thermos). Other ideas:

• Waste. What am I throwing away every day? Just because I don't have to pay for the trash removal doesn't mean my garbage isn't accumulating somewhere.
• Avoid bottled water. Bottled water requires at least 2-3x the amount of water found in the bottle for the filtration process and in the process of creating the bottle itself. And then you have to do something with the bottle. Buy a water pitcher/filter pitcher and keep it at your desk. Saves ya money too.
• Turn off your computer. Plain and simple--it is a myth that leaving your computer on all the time is good for it. Turn it off every night.
  
• Optimize your computer's energy usage. Your computer (Mac or PC) has a Power Savings or Energy Savings setting. Turn it to optimize power usage or battery life. By default, your computer is set to optimize performance. Think of how much energy could be saved if everyone switch their computers to optimize energy esage (one estimate I saw recently was the switch from Windows XP to Windows Vista, where the energy saving options will be the default, will save $25B (that's billion) in energy).
• Stop printing. Especially emails. And always, always, always, preview what you are about to print so you only print the pages that you want.
• Buy Adobe Acrobat. With Adobe Acrobat (the program, not Adobe Acrobat Reader) you can create PDFs from any document. Want that Excel spreadsheet as a PDF? You can do it. Why is this important? Because Adobe Acrobat comes with annotation tools. So instead of printing out a document and marking it up on paper, you can do it all electronically.
• Carbon off-set your work travel. Some organizations do this already (I believe Bank of America carbon-offsets all their employees travels). There are many organizations that you can donate to that will invest in carbon-offset projects. I prefer to give to an organization like Nature Conservancy that preserves and conserves land--something that has a much broader (positive) environmental aspect than building, say, a wind farm. Or if you have land (I am of the landless masses of apartment dwellers), plant some trees (native species only!!!).
• Bring your food from home--how much waste is generated by take-out, delivery people, driving to a restaurant, etc?

Other ideas are welcome . . . .

Manchester City Sports Stadium

This seems to me to be the way to do it: when building something make it as self-reliant as possible. Manchester City's footbal club just got permission from the city of Manchester City to build a giant wind turbine to power their stadium. I like the idea of wind-power but those turbines are such an eyesore. At least this turnbine is relagated to another eyesore--the stadium itself (even if it is built by one of my favorite architects, Norman Foster). But the basic concept is sound--make your new construction as self-reliant as possible, much as Norman Foster did with the cooling and heating systems that he built into the German Reichstag in Berlin.

Going Green - Something More?

This past September I wrote about "going green" and the efforts I was trying to make to "green" my life. My list included things such as buying and eating local & organic food; off-setting my car's carbon output; buying my electricity from alternative energy source (wind, hydro, and solar); etc. And over the past few months I have noticed and read about other people doing similar things (mostly recently Ben Jervey in Good Magazine).

While I think that all these efforts are admirable (if I can give myself a self-congratulatory pat on the back) and while I do think that these efforts will make some difference (would Wal*Mart be selling organic food if more and more people weren't asking for it?), I don't think that these efforts are nearly enough. The best way to sum up why I think this (although perhaps not the most rigorous of reasoning) is that none of these efforts, by me or by others, really push us past our comfort zones. Not that comfort or discomfort is a good measure of whether or not something is good/bad; but it strikes me that none of the things that I am doing to go green change anything fundamental. Essentially, they are efforst in efficiency and productivity. Necessary efforts, but not sufficient.

The real question is what can we do that is fundamentally changing? It strikes me that too much of the green efforts and talk these days is a consumerist talk. Doing good through consumption. Even if it is not of the buying sort of consumption, it is still a way of being that sees the world as something to use, to consume, to deplete, even if it is an efficient manner. What is needed is a way of being that is not consumption based.

Where to start? Well, first off, I don't think that there is any one way to approach these issues. I can say that I am trying to stretch myself in several directions. One direction is what I would call the self-sufficiency/fundamentals route. I think that there is a lot to be gained (both personally and on the green side) for trying to do things for yourself, whether that is making things for yourself, raising your own food, repairing things, etc. And in order to gain a level of self-sufficiency you need to have an understanding of basic fundamentals (how do you grow vegetables? how are clothes made? what really is going on in the belly of my apartment building to create heat? where is all my water coming from when I turn on the tap?).

Another direction is simply trying to do with less. I am feeling particularly bombarded with junk these days. In my apartment, in the world outside (try walking down a Jersey City street on an early Monday morning--all it is garbage and rubbish strewn everywhere). And of course, in the media, shopping areas, etc--oh, oh, here comes Thanksgiving and Christmas, time to gorge ourselves. Ahem, I digress. But my next direction is really to prune out the junk that surrounds us everyday--but to try and reduce it in a manageable and responsible way.