Healthy Planet

Plant (sponsor) a Tree in Niger

Sponsor one of eight million trees (including the baobab, that are being planted in Niger as part of an UN-supported effort to create a heat shaped forest in the Sahara.  www.tree-nation.com.

This came from the Feb 2009 www.Oprah.com magazine.

Carbon Footprint of Our Pets

From Nov 2008 of Mother Jones (http://www.Motherjones.com), by Ben Whitford, pg 73, come these comparisons, along with my comments.

Please make your own comments by clicking the comment button below AND email Mother Jones if you are feeding fresh, local food as the carbon costs drop to near zero along with improved health. What if all your emails got 50% more people feeding a fresh food diet - healthier animals and healthier planet.

"feeding Fido creates 596 lbs of CO2 emmisions per year and Fluffy is 517. Size matters: According to a 2006 National Academies study, a St. Bernard needs 12 times as much food as a cat, meaning greater energy use and more emmissions:"   This is for people feeding commercial food. The carbon costs can entail raising the meat and vegetables, transporting them to the factory (and remember much comes from China so a lot of carbon is used up), processing them with the concurrent waste products, packaging them and shipping them to the distribuition centers and then to the stores where you buy them, and recycling or trash costs for the packaging once you have fed them.  Compare this to buying local organic, free range meats and vegetables for your animals, especially when you are using unwanted scraps. The carbon footprint is less for raising them, zero for shipping to the processing plant, zero for processing, zero for packaging, zero for package disposal. Just your gas to pick up the products and the energy to wash up your utensils and electricity for the freezer.

"A weekly 10 mile ride to the off-leash park produces 400 lbs of carbon per year - the equivalent of feeding a whole cat. ... Felines kill songbirds (me: this is very debateable and I do not think domestic or feral cats really cause much depletion here - not compared to habitat destruction) and litter pellets, often made with strip-mined clay, add some 3.4 million tons of solid waste a year to landfills." Here again, speak up and write to Mother Jones - there are many cat litters that are easier on the planet - pine, corn, newspaper for 3. Yes, there are packaging and shipping costs unless you buy from your local feed store. Comments please from those of you I know buy something for cat litter from the feed store that I have forgotten.

"The biggest problem? Pet owners. We spend $1.8 billion each year on dog toys, often imported and/or made from plastic. Cats have to make do with $1 billion worth of catnip and rubber mice." Again, there are many options for locally made toys or ones you construct yourself.

For health, please do not buy toys made in China.

Again, please write Mother Jones about holistic alternatives and comment below as well.

Where are the lions? Do you use trash bags?

I responded to the Blog I reported on earlier which has a lot of great information already. and I responded to one comment on his blog about using biobags instead of paper or plastic for your trash. The following was made on http://changingthedream.blogspot.com/

What a great next step, Alan. I am a facilitator on the East Coast (check www.AwakeningtheDreamer.org for symposia you can attend) and have a blog, www.HealthyPlanetBlog.com. I will make more frequent posting one of my daily practices now.

By the way, almost 100% of the scientists, when polled recently about species extinction, agreed that we facing the 6th mass extinction. From the symposium, we hear a video of David Ulansey saying that 90% of the lions, and tigers, and sharks, and big fish, and other talismanic and important species are now on the verge of extinction and we do not hear about it.

A comment about Corinna's comment about using biobags is to use no bags at all. For the last 10 years at least, I have used no plastic bags for trash. In my kitchen I have a hard plastic trash can (got at a yard sale)and I put a folded piece of newspaper (my husband still insists on getting the paper) on the bottom. When full I dump it into the outside trash can and wash it if needed. All other trash baskets in the house have no bags in them.

I waited for my trashmen and asked if they were willing to dump my big trash can the way it was done years ago and they were. I put the trash straight into my (reused) garbage bin and they lift it up and dump it into the truck. I know that some municipalites will not allow this. Just ask. Or try it and see what happens.

One negative about using the biobags that I have heard (may be incorrect) is that when it is mixed in the huge piles in the dump, they do not biodegrade. Ultimately, they will, I think, and then there will not be any plastic pellets left, so they are better than petroleum based plastic bags. Best is fewer of either.

For recycling, I use old boxes, or old trash cans, not paper or plastic bags.

My goal is less trash, and I am down to one trash container a month, most of the time. Would be less if my husband and daughter were more interested in how they purchase things.

Hope for the Planet

The Awakening the Dreamer, Changing the Dream symposium was started by the request of Achur Elders who said that to help the rainforest we must shift how we see the world here in the north. I have been leading the symposium for the last few years, since attending the first one and feeling hope for our planet. There are now 659 Facilitators trained to lead the symposium worldwide!  go to http://www.AwakeningtheDreamer.org to find a symposium near you or to schedule one - anywhere in the world. The message has reached at least 11,567 people in 14 countries, including India and China.

After attending a Symposium with over 100 people at the Inner Light Ministries in Santa Cruz, one attendee was inspired to create the following blog, which eloquently captures the experience of attending the Symposium for the first time. http://changingthedream.blogspot.com/ Go to Feb 26 to hear about the symposium itself. The more recent posts are about great ideas he is getting and trying.

Please comment if you have attended a symposium. Click the comment button below.

Home delivery of Milk in Maryland and Elsewhere

Milkmen. Glass Bottles. Early morning rounds. Sounds like the old days? This is an old tradition that has positive environmental impact and is great for health for both people and animals.

Megan Hartly, in the Baltimore Sun, Friday 3/12, (www.BaltSun.com) reports that South Mountain Creamery, milks 200 cows in a sustainable way with no hormones and non-homogenization is also available. They deliver yogurt and cheese as well to people's door. The home delivery started when ONE PERSON wanted the convenience and environmental sustainability and social justice of customers supporting a local business. He got 80 people to become customers and South Mountain started delivering to Mt. Washington. They had been doing other neighborhoods since July 07. Their end goal is not to be a large business, but to be able to sell all the mild the farm produces in a direct fashion.

The Oberweis Dairy in Illinois never stopped delivering milk since its beginning in 1915. They are still growing and have 40,000 customers today.

Add a comment - do you get local dairy products in re-usable containers?

Plastic in the Ocean

You read my blogs earlier from bioneers about problems in the ocean, you have heard about the albatross babies and other sea birds eating so much plastic they starve to death. Now we will hear directly from people close to the plastic "nation" - Hawaiians.

DISTURBING NEWS OF THE WEEK:
TOXIC SOUP OF PLASTIC TWICE THE SIZE OF U.S. FORMS IN OCEAN
The University of Hawaii is set to launch an expedition with the
goal of confirming a new trash "continent" in the Pacific Ocean. A
vast expanse of floating trash has been collecting in the Pacific
Ocean into a mass that scientists are now referring to as the Great
Pacific Garbage Patch. The thick mass of plastic soup, located
approximately 500 miles east of California, is now reported to be
twice the size of the Unites States. The collection of debris comes
as no surprise to experts in this area. According to a recent report
from the UN Environment Programme, on a global level, each square
mile of ocean water contains an average of 46,000 pieces of floating
garbage.
Learn more:
http://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_10831.cfm

Good Thought when News is Bad

"Stop thinking this is all there is. Realize that for every ongoing
war and religious outrage and environmental devastation and bogus
Iraqi attack plan, there are a thousand counter-balancing acts of
staggering generosity and humanity and art and beauty happening all
over the world, right now, on a breathtaking scale, from flower box to
cathedral. Resist the temptation to drown in fatalism, to shake your
head and sigh and just throw in the karmic towel. Realize that this is
the perfect moment to change the energy of the world, to step right up
and crank your personal volume; right when it all seems dark and
bitter and offensive and acrimonious and conflicted and bilious...
there's your opening.

Remember magic! And, finally, believe you are part of a groundswell, a
resistance, a seemingly small but actually very, very large impending
karmic overhaul, a great shift, the beginning of something important
and potent and unstoppable."

-Mark Morford, SF Chronicle columnist

SAVE YOUR FOOD SUPPLY

ARE YOU

• Tired of poor tasting food?
• Worried if the meat you bought will be recalled tomorrow?
• Worried that your pets may be poisoned by adulterated food?
• Eating less because of the rising costs of food because of the shipping costs of higher gas prices?
• Wondering about the happiness of the animals who provide your milk, dairy and eggs?

DID YOU KNOW THAT

• Small farms following sustainable methods can raise 2 - 4 times the numbers of cows on the same acerage, have no odor from the farm, the meat give you super amounts of nutrients and vitamins, and since you see it being raised you know how safe it is?
• The government's NAIS (National Animal Identificatioin System) could put all small farmers out of business?
• The best tasting meat is from Argentina and they slowly cool meat for an hour?
• Our government worries about the spread of chicken diseases like avian flu, yet prohibits small farmers from processing the chickens on the farm which would prevent the spread of diseases from the loose feathers as the chickens are hauled down the roads?
• Dreaded diseases from Canada Geese are from eating silage fed to cows?

These were a few facts discussed by Joel Salatin (author of Holy Cows and Hog Heaven) at the Annual Conference of the Homeopathic Medical Sociey of the State of Pennsylvania in Lititz on February 28, 2008.  Some of the following is more for those of you farmers and some is for us consumers.

Learning about these new/old approaches to farming that Joel shares is critical to saving our food supply. Right now commercial farming could fail if there is no oil, or prices could soar with high oil prices and loss of bees. The bees were lost because of the stress of being transported around big farms. 1. Heed what Joel and others are saying. 2. Ask your local farmers to farm this way. 3. Offer to pay the farmer more to have nutritious food. 3. Organize a group to purchase local food. Joel said that is sustainably produced foods could be 5% of the market, the chemical farming would swith over. You could help create the 5% with your demand.

"Animals want to be fed the way God designed them. These many meat recalls because of E.coli recently and BSE in the past are because nature is screaming "enough" of torturing animals with wrong living conditions and diet. He raises grass fed beef and slaughters weekly at PolyFace Farm. People come from all around to purchase his meat because it tastes so good. He attributes taste to genetics, bricks (measures of healthy soil), production stress, slaughter and processing and minerals. Different producers focus on different aspects of this healthy approach. He focuses on bricks, minerals and less stress.

Genetics is fascinating because we have produced animals that could not survive easily, have poor health and poor tasting meat. Wild species are very homogeneous - same color, size, shape, etc. This is because of a lot of interbreeding, which also produced some abnormalities and deaths. Those who survived were the healthiest and very successful. If all bulls were selected from cows who were over 8 years of age, the resulting offspring would be much healthier as they had proved they could live a long, healthy life.

Also, it is good to select for regional adaptations. In the south, for instance, a black steer in the summer will start to lose muscle mass because their coats can increase their internal temperature by 40 degrees.

Bricks, a favorite with Joel, refers to the amount of organic matter in the soil. You do not want to apply raw manure or fertilizer to have high organic matter. They have been rotating cattle, following with chickens to eat through the manure, resting fields, harvesting without tilling first and more practices for 50 years. A visiting agronomist said h soil tasted super sweet. Who knew people really did
"EAT DIRT!"

Cows love routine. He moves his cows at 4Pm every day.

Joel referred us to Joan Robinson great site, www.EatWild.com for information about pasture meat and lost of great products, too. You can find local sources for your foods here.

Joel feeds "grain Hay" in the winter for a few months (only 4 weeks this winter). Most farmers, North, South, East and West - feed hay for 160 days of the year.  why?  Cause it is just done that way. And most of the hay is fed from tilled soils which harms the planet and lowers the nutrition being fed the cows. He harvests this special hay that is a 2nd or 3rd cutting (often in August) that is very high in nutrients. It is so nutritious that it is like grain. It is perennial, very dark green, raised without tilling. Tilling adds too much oxygen, so it depletes the organic matter. You can till and rotate every 7 years, but better not to till. Nature fertilizes with Brown leaves and brown grass stalks that fall over when they are lignified. Now, at the end of February, his farm is green when all around him are brown, because of the high bricks and nutritious soil. He gets 400 cow days/acre rather than the neighbors at 160.

He rents land to pasture many of his cows, and in one year the pasture is 70% healthier and people, even local farmers and landlords ask how he did it. rotating the cows daily is the only change he made to the pastures. He doubles the production/acre and the costs are $25/acre for water and electirc.

To foil the attempts of the government to force everyone with animals to put in a microchip and report weekly to the government, we need lots and lots of people to have a few animals. In Los Angeles alone there are 70,000 backyard flocks. In Quebec animals must have birth certificates in order to be slaughtered!!! [I guess this is hard to get for small farmers.  I was not clear on this.] In Quebec 1,000 small farmers quit every year. Would E-Bay ever have succeeded if every person selling a product on it had to have a business license and be inspected? We need to preserve small businesses because they supply the new ideas. The median age of the American farmer is 60. 70% of food production is owned by people who have ended their most creative time. Nike - median age - 31 and lots of new ideas.

PolyFace Farms have cows on 100 acres they own and 100 acres they rent. They graze for 3 months. They have 400 head on the 100 acres each month, so this raises 1,200 cows for good economy of scale.  On the owned land they raise Beef cattle, chicken broilers, eggs, turkeys an pigs, making $5,000 per acre. [Maybe this was per months, cause per year is not that good.]

Another problem is that most farms stink. Healthy farms do not stink. Local governments, because of the odor, often put farms away from people (customers have to drive then), deny sawmills on farms (where the trees are, so increased shipping costs), butcher shops away farms and not allowed on the farms (so the live chickens spread their feathers all down the interstate, possibly spreading diseases to people. The Department of Homeland Security identified 3 area of security vulnerability - 1. Centralized production facilities; 2. centralized processing facilities; and 3. Long distance transport. Republicans, Democrats and greens all agree on this and yet the government will often not let the solution to safety be implemented. If every community had a farm that was totally self sufficient, with a blacksmith, sawmill, butcher shop and needed few to no fertilizer, pesticides, seeds, drugs trucked in from the rest of the country, there would be no areas of security vulnerability.

For instance, the grass fed cows near me wear organophosphate tags to keep flies away. These are made from oil, then shipped using oil, then weaken (slightly) the cows, and may be polluting the Bay (a little). Instead Joel suggested they keep chickens on the fields and rotate the cows daily. Then they would have no, or few, flies and would not be using any oil. Or they could get rotonone or diatomaceous earth (no oil used to produce, though may not be local) and put it in bags for the cows to rub themselves on. These would have only a little negative effect of killing some of the beneficial bugs living near the bags.

How can you save your food supply - buy local, encourage organic, sustainable methods. Then enjoy the great taste.

Paper or Plastic shopping bags???

Once you read this post, please click on the comment button and share your thoughts.

Since I was 18, I have used paper or plastic bags less than 5% of the time. In the 70s I was often challenged by check out clerks and had to call the manager to walk out of the store, with a receipt, without having my toothpaste tube in their disposable bag. Now, while clerks still offer bags, they are fine with my choices. When I do not have bags with me I look for boxes they have emptied and use them. This gives the box at least one more use before recycling or using in my compost or garden

Whole Foods, says an AP article in the Baltimore Sun, Saturday, February 9, 2008 Business section and February 5 in the Lifestyle section, (www.Baltimoresun.com) proclaims they are going plastic bag free. The article says little about the severe down side of paper bags, leaving people thinking that paper is the better choice. While deciding which foods are best to eat and feed our animals can be a very difficult challenge, choosing to not use paper or plastic is much easier. Plastics NEVER biodegrade and paper uses a lot of natural resources.

www.reusablebags.com says the answer to the "paper or plastic" dilemma is: Neither. They're roughly equal in pros and cons. While convenient addictions, they both gobble up natural resources and cause significant pollution. The BEST answer is to use cloth bags or other reusable containers. The following is from their site.

Issue 1: Energy and natural resources It takes more than four times as much energy to manufacture a paper bag as it does to manufacture a plastic bag.

ENERGY TO PRODUCE BAG ORIGINALLY (BTUs)

Safeway Plastic Bags: 594 BTUs
Safeway Paper Bags: 2511 BTUs (Source: 1989 Plastic Recycling Directory, Society of Plastics Industry.) Of course, most paper comes from tree pulp, so the impact of paper bag production on forests is enormous. In 1999, 14 million trees were cut to produce the 10 billion paper grocery bags used by Americans that year alone. Paper bag production delivers a global warming double-whammy forests (major absorbers of greenhouse gases) have to be cut down, and then the subsequent manufacturing of bags produces greenhouse gases.

Issue 2: Pollution The majority of kraft paper is made by heating wood chips under pressure at high temperatures in a chemical solution. As evidenced by the unmistakable stench commonly associated with paper mills, the use of these toxic chemicals contributes to both air pollution, such as acid rain, and water pollution. Millions of gallons of these chemicals pour into our waterways each year; the toxicity of the chemicals is long-term and settles into the sediments, working its way through the food chain. Further toxicity is generated as both plastic and paper bags degrade.
POLLUTANTS PAPER V.S. PLASTIC Paper sacks generate 70% more air and 50 times more water pollutants than plastic bags. Source: "Comparison of the Effects on the Environment of Polyethylene and Paper Carrier Bags," Federal Office of the Environment, August 1988

Issue 3: Recycling It takes 91% less energy to recycle a pound of plastic than it takes to recycle a pound of paper. But recycling rates of either type of disposable bag are extremely low, with only 10 to 15% of paper bags and 1 to 3% of plastic bags being recycled, according to the Wall Street Journal.
ENERGY TO RECYCLE PACKAGE ONCE (BTUs)

Safeway Plastic Bags: 17 BTUs Safeway
Paper Bags: 1444 BTUs Source: 1989 Plastic Recycling Directory, Society of Plastics Industry.
Although paper bags have a higher recycling rate than plastic, each new paper grocery bag you use is made from mostly virgin pulp for better strength and elasticity.

Issue 4: Degradability Current research demonstrates that paper in today's landfills does not degrade or break down at a substantially faster rate than plastic does. In fact, nothing completely degrades in modern landfills because of the lack of water, light, oxygen and other important elements that are necessary for the degradation process to be completed. A paper bags takes up more space than a plastic bag in a landfill, but because paper is recycled at a higher rate, saving space in landfills is less of an issue. At the end of the day using something totally reusable is the real answer! Check out their bags at www.reusablebags.com

Another source, www.alternet.org/environment/61607 gives us more facts.

Each year across the world some 500 billion plastic bags are used, and only a tiny fraction of them are recycled. Most of them will have a short lifetime with a consumer -- they'll be used for the few minutes it takes to get from the store to home and then they're thrown away. Stephanie Barger has seen what washes up on the shores of Southern California. The executive director of Earth Resource Foundation (http://www.EarthResource.org), Barger has helped clean up the sands of Orange County and has helped educate people about the effects of a society that embraces disposability.

Environment California (http://www.environmentcalifornia.org) reports that plastic bags, and other plastic refuse that end up in the ocean, kill up to one million sea creatures every year, such as birds, whales, seals, sea turtles, and others. And the number of marine mammals that die each year because of eating or being entanglement in plastic is estimated at 100,000 in the North Pacific Ocean alone.

The Algalita Research Organization (http://www.algalita.org/research.html) learned that broken, degraded plastic pieces outweigh surface zooplankton in the central North Pacific by a factor of 6-1. That means six pounds of plastic for every single pound of zooplankton. So birds and sea animals or looking for food -- more often, they are finding plastic. Because plastics do NOT biodegrade, no naturally occurring organisms can break these polymers down. Instead, plastic goes through a process called photodegredation, where sunlight breaks down plastic into smaller and smaller pieces until there is only plastic dust. But always plastic remains a polymer. When plastic debris meets the sea it can remain for centuries causing untold havoc in ecosystems.

In the United States alone, an estimated 12 million barrels of oil is used annually to make plastic bags that Americans consume.

The best thing we can do, though, is change our behavior as consumers and begin valuing durability instead of disposability. By purchasing a reusable cloth bag, consumers can save hundreds and perhaps thousands of plastic or paper bags.

Compostable or bioplastic bags may seem like a good solution to the typical plastic ones, but Barger believes they are more of an alternative -- not a solution. The bioplastics may may contain a whole bunch of chemicals we don't know about. Most of them will come from corn or soy, needing more farmland laden with petroleum-based pesticides and fertilizers and the same environmental and energy costs to truck the bags to market. And, while the bags may not last a thousand years, they do break down slower than regular compost and could last up to six or eight months in the environment -- threatening wildlife just the same.

If you can’t afford a cloth bag, then use as often as you can and then recycle it.

ME – Better options if you can’t afford cloth bags or have forgotten yours, re-use the cardboard boxes from the store. If you use public transportation and that is not practical, you can purchase school backpacks for only a few dollars at Goodwill or Salvation army that will be even better than cloth bags. Or go on FreeCycle (at Yahoo groups) or Craig’s List for free bags and backpacks.

NOW, please click the comment button below and add your thoughts.

Electronic waste quiz - how much do YOU know?

We are all committed to making our footprint smaller, each in our own way. I was at the computer store yesterday, one that sells "restored" computers. I thought that meant a used computer that had been fixed up. Not so. These are just new computers not selling well. What will I do with my left-overs? What lap top is most environmental?

This quiz shows what happens to all our electronic garbage. Add a comment with your grade to this blog. I missed 2 of the questions.

GO TO: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-01/high-tech-trash/trash-quiz.html

for the

e-waste quiz.

THEN COME BACK HERE and record your grade and comments on this quiz.