environment

i am drinking tea with honey while the bees die.

i am eating fritters made with the corn that kills wombs.

without bees, soon, no more food. without wombs, soon, no more babies. maybe that’s a good thing, the perfect pairing. if there are no more babies we won’t need any more food. of course, if we — with our potions and poisons and tinkered genetics — disappear, then the bees will return for our habits will no longer be killing them.

and then there will be food again. no human mouths.

maybe that’s a good thing, for us all to die before eating our own irradiated recycling and birthing the few conceivable babies with six arms but no faces or fingers.

let’s just do it: die before the plague and the hurricanes, the drought and the flood.

before another dozen bodiless feet wash ashore in british columbia. severed, waterlogged, mysterious. how many more will there be? before our soldiers poison the world with their burnings.

while there is still some honey, still enough untainted water to make some cups of tea.

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the con ed bill arrived this week and LO, i rejoiced!

my electric usage was half — HALF! — what it had been this time last year, during a month where i didn’t even go out of town. i didn’t have to make drastic changes to get here, just got in the habit of turning not only the computer, but also the router (you ever feel how HOT those mac airport base stations get?) when i’m not using them. of not letting myself fall asleep reading in bed every night with the light on. (only sometimes.) replaced most of my incandescents with compact fluoros. (take THAT, john mccain.) i still have some regular bulbs, because i hate that fluorescent light with a passion, and if i had to look at myself in the bathroom mirror in eerie operating-roomlike blue light every morning, sooner or later you’d find me swinging from a rope.

am i as green as i could and should be? nah. for a while, my brother dated a woman who was off the electric grid entirely, ran her whole house off a solar-powered generator. she had all kinds of energy-efficient appliances that i’d never even heard of. have you ever seen an insulated refrigerator? i couldn’t even tell what it was until she showed me, and that fridge ran on less juice than a lightbulb. compared with that very gold standard of green, i am an omniverous energarian. so i don’t compare myself with her, generally, i compare my self of today with my selves of the past, and if i can point out incremental improvements on a regular basis, then i am on the right track. the con ed bill is a prime indicator in this process.

not everybody can live off the grid, cheerfully making all the little daily sacrifices and adjustments that involves. (i mean, this woman turned off the light if she stepped out of the room for a SECOND — like, you go to pee and you see there’s no toilet paper and you step over to the closet which is RIGHT there, not four feet away, to get some but you turn the bathroom light off for the micromoment it takes — i doubt she even thought about it, turning shit off had become a total reflex for her, something she would do in her sleep. her mastery of turning things off also worked, eventually, on my brother, but that’s another story.)

getting green, for us non-superhuman type folks, isn’t that hard, and isn’t limited to electricity. i recycle everything now, even envelopes, even the little roll of cardboard from inside the paper towels, the kind kids use as mini-megaphones.  i take totes to the supermarket and walk a couple blocks to bring the few plastic bags i end up with to the CVS recycling center. i flush only when necessary. i use revolving doors whenever possible unless i’m carrying something large and ridiculous. if you’re wondering what’s so green about revolving doors, it’s the way they prevent heat (or air conditioning) escaping from the building and reduce the amount of juice needed to keep the lobby comfy for the security guard who wants to see your ID before letting you inside.

this green thing is getting contagious — the first green billboard has just gone up in times square, powered entirely by solar and wind. i mean, a big ugly hulking neon thing that doesn’t even HAVE a plug attached to it. great news for the obscenity of light that is times square. you ever go there in the middle of a weeknight? like a tuesday-into-wednesday at around 3am? even the winos are asleep, but those glowing, throbbing, spinning, quick-cutting homages to capitalism just keep winking on and off, with nary an eye upon them. so bravo to the ricoh corporation on that.

and bravo to me on my incredible shrinking electric bill!

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there’s been an awful lot of gloom & doom on this blog recently, and i thought that i would take a break from my OCED (obsessive-compulsive election disorder) and post some good news in honor of sunday.

i’ve been collecting heartening environmental news stories for awhile (no, you’re not going to hear about the polar icemelt, at least not today). some of it is amazing and all of it is delightful.

did you know that much of south america has banned plastic bags completely? like, you go to the supermarket and they will not give you a bag. bravo, buenos aires! closer to home (and quite astonishingly) wal-mart has committed to reducing its use of plastic bags by one-third. that’s the first good news i’ve ever heard about that company, so way to go wal-mart. but beware, supermarkets: if you DO still provide plastic bags, you better be paying the baggers — two NYC grocery executives just did the perp walk because baggers were working for nothing more than the coins in their tip cup.

twelve-year-old william yuan has invented a new type of solar cell that is 500 times more powerful than the solar cells presently in use. when i was twelve, i was still trying to master double-dutch jump-rope, and here’s william already well on his way to singlehandedly solving the energy crisis. you go, kid! meanwhile, scientists at ohio state university have created another new material that absorbs the full spectrum of light, also much more powerful than current technology. this is solar energy 2.0.

my own hometown, nyc, has commenced an experiment in using ocean-powered turbines to produce energy. it’s believed that the power of the tides in the east river alone could power up to 10,000 homes (or is that apartments?) once the project goes fully online. turbines are also being tested in spain and have gone LIVE and are already feeding power to the central station in dublin!

a company with the playful name “Zero Water” has invented a pitcher that takes all — ALL, do you hear me? — chemicals, residues, contaminants, lead, mercury and whatnot out of tap water. which is quite fantastic, as water now outsells soda and most of the bottles are not recycled (likely because there’s no nickel redemption) (why not?). so go pour yourself a tall, cool, beautiful glass of zero tapwater!

coolest of cool things: a portable solar phone-and-ipod charger. that’s what i call imagination! a laptop charger should be next.

and readgreen seems to be catching on. that’s a program that lets you digitally subscribe to magazines that are ordinarily only available in print. i’ve recently started recycling my magazines (i subscribe to The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, Utne Reader, Mother Jones, Electronic Musician and Recording Magazine) by sending them to my company’s headquarters in california, where they are put in the computer-repair waiting room. collecting and shipping them really brought home to me just how much paper actually passes through my life in this way. i don’t know if i could bear to part with The New Yorker (the cartoons! the caption contest! the reading it late at night in bed!) but i’m going digital with the rest of them as soon as my present subscriptions expire.

and an awesome new online tool has just been invented: the wind & solar potential map. you can log in (it’s free) and if the answer is “solar” and you’re the DIY type, you can even make your own solar panels out of cheap stuff you can buy on ebay!

here are some helpful tips on how to keep your morning coffee green.

the world’s largest solar-powered winery is being built in california. not a wine drinker? then get yourself a cup of tea from traditional medicinals, which has already opened the largest solar-powered tea factory.

interested in more green reading? eco-homes put together a review roundup of the top thirty environmental blogs & websites.

so now i’ve extracted all the good news from my environmental folder, and you know what that means… but i’ll leave the scary stuff aside until after the election: we’ve got enough to worry about right now.

oh, speaking of the election (yes, my OCED is kicking in a little) i never imagined that a political ad could be serious and funny at the same time. but i was wrong! so, have you talked to YOUR parents about john mccain?

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last night i dreamed of the economy. except it wasn’t the economy, it was a landfill. this is how dreams work: you’re walking through a castle and dream says “this is your office”. rather, dream makes you Know this is your office. dreams are all about knowing, vivid slices of Real in the sleepy night. dreams can be ecstatic, terrifying, repetitive, confusing, erotic — the only thing a dream can never be is uncertain. dreams always know.

i dreamed of the economy and the economy was a landfill but it wasn’t a sparkly new separate-your-recyclables landfill, no. it was a seething, boiling, fetid lake of filth abubble with disintegrating plastics and grease and stale medications. i held a cloth over my face. i couldn’t breathe. i was there, alone, at the edge of the poisonous landfill of our economy. it was a long, long dream. i stood and watched the noxious lake in a landscape that held nothing else, grey and barren as the moon. i saw heat squiggles rising off the black swells. i took small breaths and shivered in the freezing cold.

how many of us believed that the US economy really could collapse? how many of us understand that it has already happened, nothing but the details of it to be worked out….and worked out, and worked out, as savings vanish and opportunities for livelihood cease. a few months ago i wrote here that it’s too late for everything, environmentally speaking. i might have missed the whole point in that post, climate change may be the least of our problems. not that i’ll stop recycling or taking a tote bag to the grocery store.

our next president, whoever it may be, will be stepping into an impossible job. john mccain said yesterday that he knows how to fix this problem. maybe he doesn’t yet understand, or simply doesn’t want to admit, that this isn’t fixable. that to bail out all of the failing firms means mortgaging not just your future and your children’s futures, but several generations of futures. it means writing checks that we have no way of cashing. it means china cuts off our credit. (it’s abominable that this country has even come to rely so heavily on loans from china in the first place. but we have. how the fiscally conservative republicans who started this practice square that with their financial philosophy is beyond me.) conversely, not bailing out the failing firms means that insurance policies and savings accounts become worthless. means that mortgages vanish completely and only those wealthy enough to pay cash can buy a place to live. it means owners walk away from rental properties and throw up their hands when the shivering residents scream that they need heat. blood from stones. suing the landlord doesn’t accomplish much if he’s as broke as you. lawsuits never filled a furnace or changed a lightbulb yet.

nor fixed a bridge nor paved a road nor repaired a levee. 

but hey, mudd & syron will still get their multimillion dollar kisses on their way out the door. the fundamentals of our economy are strong.

and last night i dreamed of a landfill.

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if you’re like me, growing environmental awareness has got you boycotting Kleenex, buying Seventh Generation cleaning supplies and bringing your own cup to the coffee shop. it’s also got you carrying some brand-new guilt-baggage (like when i forget to bring my tote bag to the supermarket) and, particularly if you live in a low-income neighborhood, fresh opportunities for awkward retail interactions.

for example, when i DO remember the tote bag, sometimes the supermarket down the street doesn’t let me bring it into the store. i might be a shoplifter.

“but this is how i’m going to carry the groceries home”

“it’s all right miss, we’ll give you bags for that”

“but i don’t want to waste all those plastic bags”

“don’t worry, we don’t charge extra for them”

there’s no getting past him, this very polite older man who spends hours at day at this door in exchange for minimum wage and likely gets many of his own groceries at the soup kitchen. if i have the energy to make a fuss at checkout i’ll insist that my tote bag be returned at that point so that i can avoid receiving half a dozen disposable bags that will only be used to walk my bananas half a block west, but even that is disheartening: the cashiers roll their eyes and shrug, look at me like i’m stupid if i mention that the bags are made of oil, apologize to the customers waiting on line behind me, who rightfully should be on their way out the door already, hurrying home to throw their own bags straight into the trash.

and that’s only the supermarket. just try getting your coffee served in a glass cup.

the other night i gave in to a strong bad-food craving and visited a fried chicken joint up the street, where the more well-to-do homeless get many of their meals. i wanted a big, fat, greasy, heart-killing chicken breast and by god i was going to get one. like the supermarket, Mama’s Fried Chicken is just half a block from my apartment. i ordered the breast and then, on a whim inspired by a handmade sign, a container of banana pudding on special for a buck and a half. if you’re going to kill your heart, goddamit, kill it good. (after wellbutrin, the best cure for depression is evil food.)

after the chicken was entombed in glassine and the pudding appeared on the counter beside it, i told the man behind the bulletproof window that i didn’t need a bag. he looked at me as if i’d farted, said i’d need a bag to hold the napkins and the spoon.

“i don’t need those, either”

he didn’t say another word but proceeded to put the breast (sans utensils) in a paper bag anyway. when he whipped out a plastic bag for the two items i slid them toward me, out of his reach, and put the pudding in my tote.

environmentally speaking, fast food is such a dreadful blight all by itself that the bag hardly matters. from headless chicken farms to e-coli in the beef and slaughterhouse blood, with its freight of antibiotics and bacteria, soaking the land. of course, if it weren’t done that way, no one would be able to pick up a fried chicken breast for $1.49 — and many people can’t afford to spend more than that for their dinner.

harlem’s not quite a low-income neighborhood these days, it’s more like a neighborhood in stripes: Mama’s Fried Chicken is flanked by luxury condos, winos sleep it off on benches beside middle-aged mothers rocking carriages that cost more than my rent. and many of the clerks and shopkeepers are confused, if not outright annoyed, when you try to break their process by skipping the bag.

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although i am opposed to trading carbon offset credits on the open market (see this post for the reasons why), today i accepted Brighter Planet’s 350 Challenge and added the badge to my blog. why? because this is, as BP freely acknowledges, simply a way to focus attention on the growing threat of climate change. this blog, in and of itself, is using neither more nor less carbon than it used before i posted the badge; however, the badge itself is a call for change that others may see, acknowledge, act on and propagate.

350.org, the inspiration behind Brighter Planet’s badge program, is an online agent for positive environmental change. i urge you to visit, sign up, brainstorm and perhaps start an action of your own. i’ve got one in mind that will get rolling as soon as i am able to make the time.

still, i am about to unnecessarily burn a bit of carbon this morning by driving to a memorial service that i would prefer not to attend. why not? it’s a family thing. the woman being memorialized was my first cousin and, at this point in our (mid)lives, a near-total stranger. i’d laid eyes on her exactly twice in the last twenty-something years, and spoke to her on the phone exactly never. she was a good and friendly woman, it’s not that we didn’t get along, it’s simply that our lives and interests did not intersect. we might have passed each other on the street without knowing it — unlikely, though, as we lived a few thousand miles apart.

so why am i going? quite simply because, if i don’t, i will be in a world of shit with my aging father, who will take it as a personal slight. why am i dreading going? because there will be other cousins in attendance whom i would rather not see. cousins whom, if they were afire, i would not spare the piss to quench. in short, it’s not likely to be an especially pleasant day, and the fact that i’ve got to waste gasoline to do it is just an extra spoonful of sadplanet icing on the cake.

but hey, i got my badge.

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our food supply is seriously compromised. three times in the last two weeks I’ve been slammed with the SPLS*, one instance bad enough to seriously compromise my father’s day visit with dear old dad. in each case I’d eaten salad the evening before in a decent restaurant.

(*Screaming Projectile Liquid Shits)

in a recent article on alternet, allison kilkenny writes:

In 2007, a California produce company recalled bagged fresh spinach after a sample tested positive for salmonella. Nearly a year before, an outbreak of E. coli in fresh spinach killed three people and sickened 200. The recent tomato salmonella outbreak has affected at least 145 people, resulting in 23 hospitalizations, and many believe water contamination is the cause of the affected tomatoes.

It’s not the veggies that are to blame. The problem is the meat. Salmonella is an animal pathogen, so it doesn’t originate from tomatoes. Most experts agree that the bacteria probably come from groundwater contaminated with animal feces.

You read that right: Cow shit is in your tomatoes.

and it’s getting there via the aquifer, at the exact same moment that many large US cities are signing a pledge against buying bottled water.

these days my apocalyptic daymares are a combination of hurricanes, earthquakes, lightning
storms (such as several hundred this week that set half of california on fire), and an exodus of terrified pedestrians fleeing the cities in a world that’s run out of gas.

you are here:

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it was discouraging, in a two-steps-forward-one-step-back sort of a way, to settle my stuff on the Starbuck’s microtable and realize that i’d forgotten to request a staycup. (staycups are real cups, made of glass or pottery or whatever it is that those big old off-white coffee cups are made of, to be returned to the barrista when emptied, rather than dispatched to the landfill with a million other chlorine-bleached go-cups.)

if i were really serious about greening myself i wouldn’t be in starbuck’s at all, of course, i know that. but i do love sunday mornings with the horrid new york times and a cup of coffee that i didn’t have to brew for myself. it’s the type of thing that a long-time-single person learns to rely on, to look forward to, almost like having breakfast delivered to you in bed. anyway, this morning i forgot to specify a staycup (which usually has to be explained and is never, under any circumstances, offered or suggested).

i can see from my Con Ed bill that i am honoring my commitment to green, though:according to yesterday’s bill, i used only one-third as much electricity as i did during the same period last year. i admit to having been an energy slob — the computer (including DSL modem and wireless router) left on night and day along with the living room exhaust fan, incandescent bulbs in every socket… well, i’m having no more of that, and i am very proud of the progress i’ve made. i mean, one-third less! and i wasn’t even out of town during the month. allow me a pat on the back, unnecessary go-cup and all.

even the times is in synch with me today, with a small front-page story about an upscale zero-emission home just built in santa monica. this house is completely off the grid, generates all of its own power, is almost entirely made of recycled materials, and is selling for (hold on to your seats!) 2.8 million dollars. it’s a green trophy home, something like a hybrid rolls royce (maybe not yet, but mark my word the day is nigh).

one step at a time i am reducing my carbon footprint. this gives me something to take pride in, some small measure of hope in what feels like an increasingly hopeless world. the fact that it’s ongoing, not a one-shot deal but many different choices that i must consciously make throughout my day, is changing my life and my consciousness in unexpected ways. i very rarely forget to bring my own bag to the supermarket when shopping. if i forget the bag but only buy a few things, i’ll tuck them under my arm for the block-long walk to my apartment.  i am trying to catch up with germany, which is rapidly becoming the world’s greenest state.

i’ve been a bit quiet on the blogging front these past couple of weeks. my trusty desktop computer has been in hospice for about a month, and what with mercurcy retrograde, dell needed weeks to ship the laptop replacement that i ordered in may. finally it has arrived, and i’ve spent a couple of max stress days xferring all (i hope) my links and docs and settings over to the new system. it’s another element of my greening, this laptop, as it uses far less power than a desktop/monitor combination (i am not using a docking station nor external monitor, and so expect to see my electric usage continue to plummet, air conditioner notwithstanding.)

i tried to make the switch to mac. i really really tried. i love the mac, i do, it is a delightful little personality of a machine. but i may be in the realm of old dogs at this point, not very good at learning new things, so i will focus for now on my greenlife, and maybe take another look at converting to the religions of apple a bit more down the line. (that goddam delete key that works backwards! i just can’t get used to that — anybody know a hack?)

in the meantime, i am going to get myself a copy of Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age, to get me back on consistent track with my blogging!

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both, i suppose. i actually shed a few for hillary yesterday, reading the inevitable postmortems on this fine, 100-degree june morning; felt just like the late august dog days of my childhood. today will be more of the same, another record-breaking day in what i predict will become a record-breaking month, just as last october was the hottest ever recorded in nyc history, just a year and change after our record-breaking snowfalls.

not that we’re trying to show off or anything. DC broke records in february, when it hit 73 degrees, and vegas did it with 104 in may.

I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE INTERESTING to get an idea of what average temperatures were back in the day, say a hundred years ago, but i couldn’t find that. NASA states the warming in terms of temperature increase over time, which is not the same as telling me how hot it was on 6/9/1957 (or 6/9/1857 while we’re at it). after quite a bit of digging, i found currrent “averages” (though no information on how those averages were determined), but even for these i had to scroll down and select the averages and records tab on that page — and they’re only available for the present day.

i’m no conspiracy theorist (the government is far too incompetent to execute any meaningful conspiracies) but i did find the fact that the only way you can get this information is to pay a LOT of money for it somewhat daunting. the climate change psychology blog is excellent, but even they don’t seem to have the old-time records that i would have expected to easily find in the public domain that is the internet.

OR IS THE INTERNET REALLY A PUBLIC DOMAIN? according to bill moyers it isn’t. free speech, both in print and online, is narrowing every day, not because of any conspiracy but because the media has largely rolled over and played dead in the face of corporate and governmental pressure.

getting back to hillary (i know, you were wondering when i’d work her back in), the the nutcracker doll is a perfect example of inappropriate journalistic silence — the same kind of silence i have found this morning, in my search for some pretty basic information on how regional temperatures in the US have changed over time. i’m sorry, but endless articles that amount to “hot enough for you?” and “drink plenty of water” simply aren’t enough. the planet is going down in flames and all we get from the so-called mainstream media is an unfunny version of denis leary’s asshole.

WE ARE NOT WITHOUT POWER IN THIS BATTLE, despite the size of today’s media conglomerates and the ignorant fascists in the white house. but we need to keep the pressure on. do not remain silent in the face of journalistic silence — blog, shout, write letters to the editor, make calls to congress. join the elecronic frontiers foundation (EFF), which has been working for years to keep speech free on the web.

and don’t count on me to inspire you. instead. let 40 minutes with the brilliant and fearless bill moyers do that, as it did so very well for me:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/v/Y0r71L7cojE&hl=en]

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