Strive for green

Topps Meat Co., aka “The Hamburger People” may have to change their motto to the “We hope you don’t get E. coli O157:H7 from our factory farmed, inhumanely treated, crap infested cows!” According to CNN, Topps began the recall Tuesday with 330,000 pounds and increased it to a whopping total of 21.7 MILLION pounds!

If we guess that the average Topps cow that has been loaded with artificial growth hormones, antibiotics and fed parts of its relatives, produces about 1000 pounds of hamburger, then we’re talking about 22,000 cow’s worth of potentially tainted meat. What a waste! And all because the industrial farming system used to raise cattle is exceptionally disgusting.

Unfortunately the way we produce most of the beef in this country effectively guarantees recalls like this one. Cows evolved to eat grasses on rangeland (or if you are into creationsism/intelligent design, God created cows to eat grass and have open space). The majority of cows raised in this country are kept in tight confinement and fed corn, grain, and even other dead cows! Without massive injections of antibiotics and other medicines, cows forced to live this way would die fast. Next time you watch a zombie movie, imagine the zombies are cows and you’ll have a pretty good picture of what you’ll eat next time you go to Mc. Donald’s or Burger King!

How do you avoid the possibility of eating E. coli-inducing beef?
To start with, avoid the non-grass-fed stuff! Grass-fed beef are far healthier, and studies have shown that the concentration of E coli on grass fed beef is virtually nothing at slaughter time whereas the concentration on corn/grain-fed beef is often enormous. It might look virtually the same at the market, but when you get grass-fed beef you are effectively choosing a production method that is better for the environment, better for the cows and better for YOU!

One topic I will discuss often on this blog is our relationship with fossil fuels and how we can strive to live our lives in such a way that minimizes our reliance on them.

Fossil fuels are the backbone of US agriculture - they create fertilizers, pesticides, power farm equipment, and transport the average produce item on your plate 1,500 miles from where it was grown. Believe it or not, Avocados from Chile are only made possible by relatively cheap fossil fuel enabled supply chains. Given massively increasing demand for fossil fuels worldwide and the fact global oil production is about to start decreasing, oil prices are going to increase A LOT in coming years. And with increased oil prices, the systems that depend on cheap oil most, like transporting agricultural goods long distances, are going to change out of simple necessity and economic pressure.

Ten years from now when faced with the purchasing decision of choosing a $1 locally grown pound of apples or a $30 Avocado from Chile, I think most of us will choose the apples no matter how bad we crave the Avocado. Locally grown food is simply going to make far more economic sense when shipping costs have doubled, tripled, or more. Also, for all of you environmentalists out there with what I call “global warming tunnel-vision,” local agriculture is incredibly less carbon intensive!

Another positive element of urban and local agriculture is that it builds real community! Suburban America is about as un-community based as you can get and I think the massive proliferation of online social networking tools like myspace and facebook ardently demonstrate this fact. People simply feel disconnected, and are trying to find community anywhere they can. I love peace and solitude but I’ll admit I am guilty too as I have spent countless hours on facebook trying to feel “connections” when I could have simply gone to a park and talked to real flesh and blood people! Local and urban agriculture build the basis of real community: interdependent groups of people who have a vested interest in their future.

I often worry what will happen when necessity and economics force us to quickly adapt to local and urban agriculture, but videos like this give me real hope:

(Video found on a French eco-blog)

I just came across a post on greenbuildingsNYC revealing that Hannaford Supermarkets has proposed to build a 49,000 LEED Platinum supermarket in Augusta, ME. This comes as a particular surprise to me since I spent my childhood years 20 miles away in Appleton and never dreamed Hannaford (formerly Shop ‘N Save) had any environmental aspirations. Also, Augusta commonly gets called “disgusta” by other Mainers.

Developments like this are certainly encouraging as it shows businesses are really waking up to the fact that they will save money if they enact good conservation programs.
(This particular Hannaford is definitely failing on the impermeable surface test!)

I love skiing and have done so all my life, but I have always regretted the environmental impacts. Something I plan to focus on once the season begins is how to be as green as possible when you go to the mountains. It seems a group of film-makers is already several steps ahead and has produced a film specifically about reducing one’s carbon footprint while skiing. Titled “Weather We Change,” it premiers on October 4th in San Francisco at Jelly’s by the ballpark. Check out the trailer:

Some good quotes:
We need the environment; we need the snow… to keep our lifestyle going and keep our lives happy.This season really has increased people’s awareness of global warming.

This one makes you think:
Maybe we’re not the biggest consumers, and its probably because we don’t have enough money to consume that much.

This Wednesday at Santa Clara University, the Silicon Valley Leadership Group (SVLG) group will host “Clean and Green,” a community forum aimed at presenting and discussing the greening of business in Silicon Valley. Each year SVLG releases a future projections report, and this year the major focus was on “clean tech” and how it is becoming big business in the area. All the corporate focus on greening this last hear has been a welcome development, and it seems companies are realizing that striving to be green is not just socially conscious, but economically beneficial as well.

Take a look at the mission statement on the SLVG website:
The Silicon Valley Leadership Group is organized to involve principal officers and senior managers of member companies in a cooperative effort with local, regional, state, and federal government officials to address major public policy issues affecting the economic health and quality of life in Silicon Valley.

Their mission does not directly mention environment, but given the focus of this year’s report and forum, its obvious they consider environment one of the “major public policy issues affecting the economic health and quality of life in Silicon Valley.” Hopefully corporations across the rest of the country will follow their lead and take real and meaningful steps to ensure a better future for all of us.

Railroad travel has been out of style in the United States for quite some time now, but as oil prices top $80/barrel and continue to climb, I think rail travel is going to make a big comeback. Driving is simply going to get more and more expensive, and the price of maintaining our massive highway infrastructure will certainly far exceed the $150 billion per year we currently spend. Railroads provide a way to make travel drastically more efficient because several hundred people in a couple railroad cars is about the best carpool I can think of! Beyond the simple economics, taking trains is more environmentally responsible AND relaxing! Let me tell you about my train ride yesterday:

After visiting my girlfriend in Sacramento over the weekend, I decided to take the California Zephyr to get back home to Tahoe. I had previously used Greyhound and Amtrak’s bus service to complete the trip, but I decided to check out the actual train. I bought a ticket online the night before, and showed up at the station five minutes before departure and was soon rolling through a bunch of places I had never seen. Bottom line: travel by rail is dead simple.

It would have been quicker to take a car, but the little bit of extra time on train was well spent reading and noting the beautiful surroundings. Every time I travel long distances in a car, I arrive at my destination stressed out and feeling like I just risked my life for several hours. Riding on an Amtrak train is about as mellow as you can get and I arrived at the station in Truckee feeling good.

A cool side note is that on this route there are historians from the California State Railroad Museum who tell passengers interesting facts about the route. For instance, I learned that back in the late 1800s when devastating hydraulic mining was used to wash away entire hillsides for gold, the railroad had to hire special police to protect the rail lines because the miners were so greedy that they would try to wash away the very ground the tracks were on! Luckily hydraulic mining was banned in 1884, but the scars were still readily evident everywhere I looked.

As an environmentalist, it definitely felt good to take a train. According to The Consumer’s Guide to Effective Environmental Choices, from the Union of Concerned Scientists, rail travel is better than driving. Period.

Today I enjoyed a scenic, relaxing, informative and GREEN ride on Amtrak’s California Zephyr from Sacramento to Truckee. I’ll write more about it tomorrow, but for now, here is a nice video of a train passing by:

This time of year in Tahoe (and elsewhere) yellowjackets become a major nuisance to those who like to eat outdoors and even a threat to people with allergies. The aggressive little critters have ruined many a breakfast on the deck and afternoon BBQ’s! We also got a huge nest of them in our attic this year, and hoped to find a way to avoid using horrifically toxic products like Raid. When you go to the hardware and grocery store, you can generally find traps that cost about $7, but they work very slowly and waste materials and money! Check out our home-made method to eliminate yellowjackets:

1. The first step is to get your materials together: an empty carton/bottle, string, dish soap (Oasis works great), a chunk of fish, and scissors.
   
2. Start by cutting the top off the plastic milk bottle so you have a cylindrical container.
   
3. Next, poke four holes in the container which you will use to attach string to.
   
4. Cut four equal lengths of string.
   
5. Tie the string into the container and together so you can hang the container.
   
6. Tie a piece of string through the fish, making sure the meaty side of the fish is facing towards toward the bottom of the string.
   
7. Hang the fish in the center just over the top rim of the container.
   
8. Fill the container with water, and add about a tea-spoon of soap (the soap breaks the surface tension of the water so when the yellowjackets hit it, they get trapped).
   
9. Hang the trap anywhere you want and soon it will look like this:
   

As you can see, we got about 100 in there, and we only had the trap up for about 12 hours! The nest in our attic has been mostly cleared out and we can now actually use our deck again!

So why write a blog about striving to be green? Can we prevent the world from completely falling apart? Are efforts to protect the environment futile since we are going to utterly ruin it in the end? Is there any point at all to green our own lifestyles when doing so may not accomplish anything in the grand scheme of things?

We are going to focus many of the upcoming posts on these very questions, but for now, I would love to hear some feedback from others out there. What do you think?

We depend on our beautiful planet to provide us with the means to live, and now the earth depends on us choosing to live responsibly in order to keep on providing. We may feel insignificant and unable to cause change through our choices, but everything starts with individuals and grows into movements that create real progress. Strive for green is the voice and spirit of Bio Pac and we sincerely hope you will join us in our quest to live healthy and environmentally friendly lives!