Good news fleshy mortals, after over a week that screams 80′s more than Devo, according to most major weather networks, South Sounders will be getting an at least 10 degree heat reduction for a little while. But not before mother nature stomps the yard.

While Weather Underground is suggesting tomorrow may break the rain drought with a 20% chance to t-storms in 85 degree heat, our friends at AccuWeather have predicted that not only will we be seeing heat in the 92 degree range, but we’ll break the 88 degree weather set in 1978.

Place you bets folks, place your bets. Do we break the record, thus giving AccuWeather the crown and landing another token of Al Gore’s nostradamusism, or does Weather Underground get us wet…?

image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/bredgur/

Environmentalists blather and quake in their hemp clothing as new research done by Canadian scientists are now able to reduce cattle-produced methane gas by 25%.  When I read the title heading in Science Daily’s May 09 issue, I couldn’t help but be solidly impressed.  How have researchers figured this out?  By compiling an extensive database of methane production values measured on cattle to formulate equations to predict how much methane a cow would emit based on its diet.  Researchers then genetically select cattle that inherently produce less methane.  Next stop?  Genetically selecting humans that produce less excretions.

In 2006, researchers officially quantified greenhouse gas emissions, stating that livestock is a bigger problem than a car emissions.  The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization showed that livestock generates 18% more greenhouse gas than modes of gas transportation.

Worse, cattle are a large factor in enhancing drought situations by stripping the land, exposing the soil to the wind, and with no grass or shrubs with roots to hold the soil down, the soil is blown away or becomes nutrient-depleted.  Along with this soil deficiency comes water degradation.

When I lived in Oklahoma, there was this beautiful road sign that said “Keep our Land Grand” and next to that was a sign in the shape of Arkansas and Oklahoma’s trash being thrown into it.  A legal battle has ensued between the two states, with Oklahoma accusing Arkansas of dumping chicken, turkey, and cattle pooh into watersheds that then dump into Oklahoma streams and rivers, posing a huge health hazard to drinking water and recreational settings.

In Arizona, a long drought period has decimated the lands, further increased by the cattle industry.  The impact of grazing, drought, erosion, and fire are directly correlated to each other, and Dr. Robert Kattnig at the University of Arizona states that it takes upwards of two years or more to “recover” the land from cattle destruction.

In 2007, Washington State Beef Industry Statistics show that the sale of cattle was approximately $724,533,000 with an impact of $2.17 billion on the state’s economy.  There are approximately 11,700 cattle ranchers and 760 dairy farmers, and approximately 1.09 million cattle in Washington, of which 243,000 were dairy cows.  Total beef production was 848,710,000 pounds, whereas the entire United States produced 26.5 billion pounds of beef.  The “Total Use Mandate” of Washington allows for cattle to graze on public lands, further increasing the expanse and production of Washington cattle.

My teenage years were spent on a beef cattle ranch in the northeast corner of Oklahoma (plus a short and financially devastating stint with Emu ranching that ended with us turning all 200 of them loose–locals still say they see one every once in a while, providing them with a good dinner that evening).  My brothers and I were in charge of taking care of the cattle, all the way from bottle feeding, branding, castrating, to labor and delivery.  My favorite Christmas occurred when Dad gave us a wrapped box full of rocks, only to find out it was a treasure hunt that ended at the far end of the ranch with cows tied around 3 of our very own cattle.  My job was to get a bull calf into the head gate, then one brother would brand it, and my dad would finish the job by castrating it, turning it into a fine steer with a glorious ending at the local slaughter house.

Last Saturday, May 16th, my bookstore sold books at a Michael Pollan event in the Central Enoch Pratt Library in Baltimore, Maryland. Over 1,100 people showed up for this question and answer session with the author of (most recently) In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. I’ve only read an earlier book of his, A Place of My Own, but since I’ve been studying his precursor, Wendell Berry, it’s only a matter of time before I get to his other work. I’m always behind on the latest trends.

Tony Geraci, the new Baltimore City Head of School Lunches, interviewed Michael Pollan. I didn’t take these questions and answers down verbatim, so these are not direct quotes by Michael Pollan, but they are the content of what he said.

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In our latest Melon Underground podcast, we chatted with Erik Bjornson about the questionable quality of Tacoma’s air and the legacy of Asarco.  The American Lung Association has come out with their 2009 State of the Air Report which basically grades our chance at survival.

How does Tacoma fare? Not great. The Pierce County rating for High Ozone (O³) Days, which is basically a indication of frequency of the three molecule Oxygen compound or smog falls into the C grade (compared to a F in Pierce County). While we’re amongst the average in Ozone, our particle pollution grade is a flat out FAIL. Particle pollution “refers to a mix of very tiny solid and liquid particles that are in the air we breathe.” The source of this type of pollution is mechanical and chemical processes (cars and paper mills for example).

While you’re more likely to be immediately affected by Tacoma air pollution if you’re diabetic, A DEVELOPING CHILD, people with heart disease and the elderly here are some of the risk from living in this environment year-round:

• increased hospitalization for asthma attacks for children living near roads with heavy truck or trailer traffic
• slowed lung function growth in children and teenagers
• significant damage to the small airways of the lungs
• increased risk of dying from lung cancer
• increased risk of death from cardiovascular disease

Compared to the rest of the US, Tacoma doesn’t appear to be that bad.  Find out how the rest of the Nation and Washington stacks up and for more explanation about air pollution check out http://www.stateoftheair.org/.

I’m curious how air quality relates to housing prices, so if anyone has similar map with data please say so in the comments.

first seen here: http://news.yahoo.com/s/hsn/20090430/hl_hsn/morethanhalfofamericanslivingwithdirtyair

image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/21313845@N04/

It’s Earth Day, baby! That means it’s time to go out and make some sweet, sweet love to mother Earth.  According to our potentially misleading friend, Wikipedia, Earth Day was founded in 1970 by US Senator Gaylord Nelson.  The decision to make Earth Day happen occurred at a meeting in 1969 in Seattle.

So what should we be aware about this year? Conservation, conservation, conservation AND BIONIC PENGUINS.

Firstly, let us illustrate the realities of global warming with these graphs straight from NASA:

Makes it pretty evident that we're heating up, no?

The data is there. Maybe global warming is man-made (it is), maybe it’s not but the reality of what our Earth will become based on our increasing temperatures isn’t pretty.

What’s more is in a report from New Scientist, our essential resources aren’t going to last much longer. See for yourself.

click to zoom

HOW CAN YOU CELEBRATE EARTH DAY?

• Leave the lights off in your house today
• Don’t drive. Bike, walk or run.
• Don’t eat beef.
• Plant a tree.

Earth Day isn’t a party this year, it’s a day of action.

BTW: If you’re interested in legislation in our country for the environment this site has great updates.

This is an extended and edited version of a brief presentation I recently gave at a dinner for the DC Green Muslims, a group of environmentally minded Muslims from around the Washington Metropolitan area. The discussion was geared around the concept of space and my portion of the program dealt with community space. I tried to guide the topic away from the euphoric and existential and focus more on the failures of ‘green’ and to make some criticisms of the green movement’s current community development paradigm, which I see as not taking into account the realities of disparate communities, specifically, the urban poor and communities of color.

At the most basic level, a community space is somewhere that people live and work together. School, mosques, grocery stores and neighborhood are all community spaces in that people come together to create place, and that space is defined by its individual component parts. For example, one can say that a neighborhood is defined by the sum of all the buildings, roads, parks and trees which it contains. Remove any single part of the equation and you have altered that community space to some degree. Of course, altering is not always a negative thing and many communities need to be developed and changed in order to become more sustainable and livable.

In the era of environmental degradation, ‘green’ discourse seems almost unchallengeable precisely because an alternative model is so badly needed. Certainly, those who are not too fond of the environmental movement come up with their usual complaints, but internal criticism if rare, and where it is found, it has yet to pick up any steam. This is because planting trees, opening cafes, building walkways, using recycled bags to do our shopping, planting community gardens, installing solar panels on traffic lights, all these things are needed in order to develop a community space and make it sustainable.

But what often goes unnoticed and sometimes even ignored is the idea that no matter our intentions, the present green development paradigm has dramatic consequences on the urban poor. In order for the green movement to be successful in developing sustainable community spaces, the community which is most impacted and which defines the space MUST be at the forefront of all projects.

In Islam, our deeds are judged by our intentions. Good rarely comes from a bad intention. The Prophet Muhammad (saw) said: “Surely actions are by intentions and each will get that for which they intend.”

But what if a good intention actually produces a negative consequence for some? Examples of this abound here in DC and in urban centers around the country where the dominant green discourse is said to clean up areas and promote sustainability while actually accelerating the process of gentrification. Communities may be developed but seldom do the current residents of these spaces benefit from such development.

The reason that the urban poor are often left out of the equation is because the development paradigm began not as a movement to make cities more sustainable, but rather, to stop the spread of and reverse the process of urban sprawl. This movement, almost from inception was led by the middle and upper class. Susana Almanza, in her article, Removing the Poor through Land Use and Planning published in Race, Poverty and the Environment, asserts:

People of color, the poor, and the working poor were not at the table and thus, the impacts on these communities did not receive meaningful consideration. Urban planners and developers began developing the urban core as if people of color were not living in them. New zoning codes and policies were adopted to make room for the new urbanisism. Communities of color throughout the United States began to see condos, lofts, McMansions, and live/work buildings pop up in low-income and people of color neighborhoods. A tidal wave of gentrification began to engulf people of color communities.

Columbia Heights is but one example.

B. Jesse Clarke, editor of Race, Poverty and the Environment admits to me that the current system is doing nothing more then “greenwashing and smart development at the expense of established poor communities.” The solution, according to Clarke, is to put political power in the hands of the poor and communities of color who have historically been disenfranchised.

In short, “it takes political power to win social and economic rights for communities of color and low income people”, a power which often takes a backseat while we figure out the next project that will make us feel good about ourselves. The fundamental issue is that the green movement is perceived as, and in many ways actually is, a movement of the elite, or rather, to be less critical, a movement that is, more often then not, led by those who have the ability and the time to care.

If we are to move beyond just feeling good about ourselves because we recycle, reuse and reduce and towards developing communities, the urban poor, the residents of these neighborhoods MUST be at the forefront and we MUST work towards their political rights and their power. Unfortunately, the poor often don’t have the means or ends to participate, just as they do not have the means to shop at Trader Joe’s or buy organic products.

If the people most impacted by environmental degradation are not considered, then green projects ultimately fail in their goal of sustainability. We must make sure that our good intentions result in good deeds which benefit the poor rather then making their communities unlivable.

photo credit http://flickr.com/photos/baldheretic/, http://flickr.com/photos/carbonnyc/

Today, November 12, 2008, we celebrate the 38^th anniversary of arguably the most significant event to rock the Pacific Northwest: Whale Blowing Day. The atom bomb – terrible as it was – was detonated TWICE on enemy soil. Yet 38 years later, no one has again attempted to dispose of a beached whale via half a ton of dynamite. That very uniqueness in itself makes this moment in history special, and a somewhat appropriate symbol for this region we share.

For me, the now famous video inspired a full year of independent research that ultimately culminated and congealed into my college thesis: Rendered, Redeemed & Transformed: The Social History of Whale Carcass Disposal on Northwest Shores. I encourage you all to read it but assuming few actually will (it’s 31 single-spaced pages), I’ll just post my conclusion below.

FROM

Rendered, Redeemed & Transformed: The Social History of Whale Carcass Disposal on Northwest Shores.

If someone had asked a Clatsop Indian 200 years-ago to write a thesis analyzing Man’s relationship with nature through the lens of whale carcass disposal, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been able to comprehend the question. After all – nature was a whale and the Earth a whale carcass. Today, science and popular wisdom suggest otherwise, though whale carcasses now serve as popular environmental indicators of severe disruptions in the “natural order” that supposedly drives our daily lives. Too often a beached whale gives people reason to pause and reexamine both their behavior and their relationship to the natural world around them. In some circles the fear that human activity could be responsible for a premature demise carries with it tremendous guilt, and ultimately a need for redemption (undeserved though it usually is).

Yet despite centuries of shared history and experience, in the final assessment, beached whale carcasses continue to confound coastal communities across the Cascade region. To this day, there remains no standard protocol for rendering, disposing or claiming dead whales. Nor has whale carcass disposal become any less news-worthy or more predictable in recent years. While local governments seem to be drifting toward establishing barriers between beached whales and civilians in the form of roped-off police/demolition lines, for some people the allure of dead whales remains too powerful.

In July of 2005 the body of a 22 foot gray whale that had washed ashore near University Place Washington became the subject of a minor investigation when parts of the skeleton – including the skull – which had formally been claimed by several Pierce County officials as the property of an unfinished environmental education center, were stolen by an unidentified person with “opportunistic purposes.” One article published in the Tacoma News Tribune warned that Pierce County public works would “like to have the skull back, no questions asked” if the person in question were to voluntarily surrender the bones. To date, the unidentified culprit remains at large and presumably in possession of the skull.

In May of 2007 the body of another gray whale – 40 feet long – washed ashore near Newport Oregon on Memorial Day weekend. Unable to dispose of it for 5 days, police fought an unsuccessful battle to dissuade tourists from scavenging for souvenirs. Despite all efforts, several pieces of the whale were cut away, some of which later appeared for sale on Craigslist. Even the force of the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act and the threat of a $10,000 fine proved not enough to stop Oregon’s most determined vacationers.

For better or worse, whales that die on Northwest shores will probably continue to inspire a complex mixture of concern and curiosity for years to come. The process of disposal, meanwhile, will similarly continue to be shaped by economic factors as well as notions of regionalism and our ever shifting environmental mentality. Encounters with beached whales will probably continue to provoke feelings of redemption and transformation, though, considering that this is a theme that has repeated itself for the past 200 years, arguably nothing really is redeemed or transformed. Or perhaps the real disruption that inspires these themes is not rooted in the nature of the Pacific Northwest, but in the nature of Man.

This, however, is mere conjecture. All that is certain is that – just as beached whales have played a tremendous role in shaping our past – so too are they bound to shape our future.

From http://www.flickr.com/photos/diejohndoe/

Michael Pollan, author and environmentalist, published a letter earlier this month in the New York Times arguing that food policy should share an equal billing at the top of the country’s agenda with national security and rising health care costs. In the letter, which is addressed to the next president-elect, outlines why food policy is so important and what the government and citizens can do to improve our quality of life. He states that while the candidates have not addressed food policy thus far, many issues that have come up during this campaign are directly related to how we make our food and what kind of food we eat. Those are: energy independence, health care and global warming.

For now, I want to take a closer look at one of those aspects—energy independence—and explain how what you eat can affect our ability or inability to reach this goal.

I know we have all heard so much about energy independence these last few months that we can hardly stand to hear the chant “Drill, baby, drill!” or any phrase beginning with “green.” But the fact of the matter is that our current dependence on oil now significantly shapes our foreign and economic policies. Reducing our use of oil is one of the best ways that we can solve this problem. However, some people are still unaware of all the places petroleum products are used.

Read More >>

Our goal at the DNC and RNC conventions was to cover what was happening in the streets, not to obtain passes for the scripted and superficial showcases going on inside the armored fortresses. This included a 10 to 15 minute daily video dispatch as well as blogs from each convention. The daily video dispatches are viewable online and were also aired on cable television via Free Speech TV.

Ground Noise and Static was a week-long editing effort between several members of PepperSpray Productions and was directed by Franklin Lopez from subMedia.

This documentary will be shown at UPS, WWU, TESC, and possible UW in the next couple of weeks. I will keep you updated on that.

In what hits a 5 in my dumb shit-o-meter everyone’s favorite animal rights organization (who has done some wonderful things) has once again acted a fool to prove a point. PETA has requested that Ben & Jerry’s (of Ben & Jerry’s Ice cream) replace all of the milk used in their ice cream with human breast milk. According to PETA, that would treat humans equal to the cattle and would benefit people because of the nutrients in breast milk. PETA notes that drinking milk from one animal over another isn’t actually that different, so not that weird. As far as weirdness goes, I couldn’t agree more. Drinking milk from cows is incredibly odd. I mean, we’re talking about an animal that eats its own shit and we’re drinking milk from it (I used to do stand up comedy and the cow milk routine went on for about five minutes.)

But anyway, this idea (while clearly meant to make a point) is so ridiculous that even PETA acknowledges that it’s nuts. Ashley Byrne, a campaign coordinator for PETA, acknowledged the implausibility of substituting breast milk for cow’s milk, but said it’s no stranger than humans consuming the milk of another species.

“We’re aware this idea is somewhat absurd, and that putting it into practice is a stretch. At the time same, it’s pretty absurd for us to be drinking the milk of cows,” she said.

Even PETA!!! When you make a statement so batshit that even you have to note that it’s batshit, you’re probably not being very effective. But at the same time, I’m writing about it, so hey, maybe PETA is on to something.

In all seriousness, you may question PETA’s actions but there should be no question that they’re fighting for a good cause. The way animals are treated in our society is inhuman and it needs to be stopped. A good first step? Educate yourself. Check out PETA’s website.

Full article:

Thanks to Melonite Walid for the spot.