Graduation Day
It’s a rite of passage, a period of great change and enormous possibilities. One where you hope someone will be there, preferably holding a road map with a big fat X marking the next spot and detailed instructions on how to get there. Well, here it is. Your graduation “go-to” info from one of the funniest, and now wisest people . . . Jim Carrey.
Fancy me. I’m making progress in my personal green revolution. Not only am I growing lettuce, basil, cilantro, and tomatoes, but I just planted purple carrots. I wouldn’t go so far as to call myself Ida Skivenes, but well, you know. I’m doing what I can to green up my world.
I’ve been wanting to compost, but living solo, I just don’t generate enough green waste to reach practical critical mass. Even considering my habit of buying more produce than I can possibly eat in a week and throwing out an obscene amount of food, it’s still not enough to justify investing in a personal 100 gallon composting unit. Like my (brief) foray into READ MORE HERE
Here Comes the Sun
For years, people prayed to the sun, thinking it was an actual God and the source of their abundance. Without the sun, earth was a dark and dismal place. Witness the endless winter caused by Demeter, the goddess of agriculture, who withdrew her gifts from the earth because her daughter, Persephone was imprisoned underground with Hades, god of the underworld. Clearly, winter wasn’t all Demeter’s doing. Apollo, the sun god of the Ancient Greeks, the bringer of light to the earth and the one who told Demeter about Hades’ kidnapping of Persephone, had to be involved. Without him, crops didn’t ripen and the earth didn’t warm. While Apollo still took to the skies every winter morning, his solar beneficence waned on those dark days as he streaked across in his gilded, horse-drawn chariot. Sometimes circumstantial evidence is all you have. READ MORE HERE…
“It’s a closed system, baby,” I wrote in a story. “We’re breathing the dust of the pharaohs.” And still? It’s so easy to ignore that our little planet, spinning in the darkness of space recycles and redistributes every bit of stuff we throw at her. For now. Remember the tsunami that hit Tohoku, Japan, in 2011? It’s been three years and even though network news ignores it, the harrowing story continues as cleanup stalls and a poisoned food supply is “approved” for human consumption.
At the end of the day, we’re not powerless, we are powerful, but we have to do our individual and collective parts. Write your congressman, your local city council (hey, if San Francisco can ban the sale of plastic water bottles on public property, what can your city do?), anyone who will listen, and ask them to focus their resources on this VIP issue. When planting your garden, use bee-friendly vegetation. Plant native flowers, keep flowers blooming all spring and summer by planting a variety that work their way through the seasons, skip hybridized plants that don’t seed because they produce less pollen, and for Godsakes, skip the pesticides. Your grandchildren will thank you, and so will your friends, the bees. READ MORE HERE
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And Then There Were None
A recent text conversation between my husband and I went something like this:
First of all, ignore the typos. I blame the smartphone. It gets a little too involved. Second, there were not enough of those little crying emoticon thingees to portray the appropriate degree of sadness, despair, and outright terror I felt about the bee situation. The honey bees, our fuzzy four-winged friends responsible for pollination of about 70% of the foods we eat are dying by degrees and we, seemingly, are powerless to stop it. The story with the wild honeybees is this: READ MORE HERE…
Did you know? Up to 80 percent of all life on our little blue planet is found in the oceans. . . and oceans contain 99 percent of the living space on the planet. More than half of the oxygen needed to maintain life on Earth comes from marine plant life.
OF FOODIES AND FOOLS
I’m on vacation and and have been exposed to more television than one would think possible but then there is the time factor (lots of it) and the the guilty pleasure factor (also lots of it). During the usual course of work and life it hardly makes sense to squander precious time sitting in front of the hypnotic eye. But here I am on vacation, and find myself triggered into watching one of the dozens of food based productions so readily available on TV. Back in the protozoan era of television programming, of say, the Galloping Gourmet or The French Chef, with Julia Child, the subject was cooking. Or good food. Or discovering what the French did with food that made it so freaking amazing (spoiler alert: it’s the sauce, cherie). Now, however, it seems that it is a competition about which nasty character can win the prize for the least disgusting dish whichincidentallylookstheprettiest. A show in particular caught my eye because it was all about pork. Pork belly, pork shoulder, pork haunch, bacon. Pig, pig, pig! It made me wonder: what is it about our love affaire with all that is porcine?
So okay, full disclosure, I’m a theoretical vegetarian. This means I mostly don’t eat meat which, by the way, isn’t easy. And I don’t ever want to be that person…you know, the one who will force the entire office to redesign the annual picnic to accommodate their very special diet restrictions because goddess forbid they should just shut the hell up and eat macaroni salad and be grateful to be included. But I digress. Back to the issue of pork. Honestly, I prefer fish but will indulge in duck or lamb if it’s locally sourced and not the product of a factory farm.
DO YOU KNOW HOW YOUR OINKER MET ITS FATE?
I am pro-food. You’ll have to trust me on this. However, and increasingly, I am also pro-sustainability. Which factory farming is not. Just one hog produces 17.5 pounds of poo and pee per day. A theoretical farm of 1,000 theoretical hogs will produce 6 million theoretical pounds of waste per year. Most factory farms have more like 35,000 hogs…and honey, that’s a lot of poop to process. Factory farms keep pig waste in “lagoons” which sounds lovely, unless you live downwind or factor in oceans of antibiotics or gazillions of gallons of growth hormones swimming around in there. Or course, this chemical stew leaks and leeches into the local soil and eventually into the ground water, creating a bio-hazzard so so toxic on so many levels my heart spasms just to ponder it.
As animals go, pigs are clean, social, curious, and work collaboratively to solve problems, which makes them more intellectually advanced than many producers of reality television and some members of congress. I’m not suggesting that we give up our BLT or prosciutto-wrapped melon, I’m just saying that the price we collectively pay for our food should factor in what it takes to bring it to market.
Bon appetit, baby!
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Have you kissed a frog lately and thanked it? If not, this is your chance because May is National Wetlands Month.
“Wait…what?”you say. “What the heck is National Wetlands Month?”
Funny you should ask. You see, the federal government recognizes the beauty, the raw power, and the undeniable necessity of wetlands, not because of the commercial development value, but because of their intrinsic and strategic value in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.
Wetlands have three distinct parameters that earn them the title. First, they are water-saturated and can always be wet, like swamps, marshes, bogs and coastal wetlands, or seasonally wet, resulting from winter snow melt, and occurring in forested or wooded or open areas that collect standing water, and sometimes dry like ephemeral pools or streams which reemerge after a rain event and dry out with the sun until the next rain event. Second, their soils are hydric meaning that at least for some part of the year the soils will be immersed in water. Thirdly, they have more than less hydrophytic vegetation which simply means that this type of plant thrives in a water environment. Unless it’s an obvious wetland like a marsh or bog or coastal plain, a bit of scientific investigation is necessary to make a wetlands determination as it’s not always apparent to the naked eye. Permits are required to build in wetlands as well as avoidance and minimization of the planned disturbance and mitigation for whatever amount of wetlands are converted to uplands. It’s a bit of a complicated process, but with the federal government’s “no net loss”of wetlands policy, a crucial one.
Why, gosh darn it, are these mosquito-infested swamps so important? Well, wetlands act like a sponge. They control flooding, filter pollutants, and buffer storm surges like nobody’s business. The Mississippi Delta which is practically one huge wetland has over 40% of the wetlands in the lower 48 states and has lost over 1,900 square miles since the 1930’s. About two football fields worth of wetlands are lost every hour. It used to be that 50 miles of wetlands separated New Orleans from the next hurricane, but no more. Now storm surges and big winds have their way with her.
Philadelphia, was also a big wetland when the colonists first settled, but they ditched and drained their way to what is now known as Center City Philadelphia. The problem is not necessarily the conversion of wetlands. Many port towns around the coasts of our country were once inundated with wetlands and are now bustling metropolises rather than said mosquito-filled swamps, but overdevelopment, such as in the Florida Keyes and surrounding environs, has resulted in life out of balance. As coastal cities continue to build out, or develop their barrier islands beyond holding capacity, the 100-year storm which now seems to happen every five or ten years will continue to pound what used to be only shoreline, but is now littered with million dollar homes.
How many wetlands do we need to control flooding, keep pollutants out of our rivers and streams, and help blunt the surge of rising winds and tides? It’s a fact specific, case-by-case analysis, but as climate change forces sea levels to rise, I’d hazard a guess that we’re reaching critical mass in some of the more densely populated coastal areas, for example, the Jersey Shore. Maybe a few more acres of wetlands wouldn’t have stopped Hurricane Sandy, but they would have cut down way down on the property damage. As the sea levels rise, wetlands have become more important than ever. Insurance companies are keenly aware of this —pun intended —sea change, and have started charging more for policies on climate-threatened properties. Some are even suing municipalities to pay for the cost of global warming such as Farmers Insurance Co. did with some Chicago-area governments in a landmark class action suit filed on May 2, 2014 (Illinois Farmers Insurance Co. v. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago District, et al., Case No. 14CH06608, in the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois).
By the way, about the frog: they are extremely important to the balance of the ecosystem since they eat bugs, filter our drinking water (tadpoles), and are themselves a source of food for other species, as well as the source of many medical advances for humans. Plus they make the most rockin’music! Unfortunately, they’ve been on the decline for the last 50 years with fewer numbers and more mutations because of a variety of things, but degrading water quality, habitat loss and overuse of pesticides are a few of the major ones. Frogs are to the ecosystem like the canary is to the coal mine. Their death is the first indication that there’s a problem and where frogs go, humans will follow.
We can’t all have beach front property, not at great public and personal cost, but we can all enjoy the beach. What is it the Buddha said? Everything in moderation? So for National Wetlands Month, go ahead and build that dream vacation home, but build it on a upland so tomorrow our kids will still have a frog or two left to kiss.
we are collectively approaching a very important election and we can’t help wanting to jump into the conversation. you don’t mind, do you?
persephone's step-sisters 