The environmental dilemma

Here is one way to state the problem:

we humans have to fit our infinite appetites into the contours and confines of a finite world.

One of the glorious aspects of being human is that we are blessed with urges, desires. We are curious; we are inquisitive; we are daring; we are hungry for meaning, purpose, exploration, answers. We want to know more, do more, see more, possess more. That is what makes us human and that is what makes us just a little divine. Our drives make us worthy of being God's partner in creation. People who are lazy or satisfied don't build, discover, or grow. They just sit. How wonderful that Eve, way back in the Garden, dared to take the fruit and eat it.

But it is this very seeking and turning and digging and wanting that causes us to trash the earth. Our current linear, one-way path of consumption: dig up, transform, package, transport, sell, throw out, is a model of our expectations of endless resources. It functions as if there are infinite resources, infinite money, infinite dumps. But of course, there are not.

We need instead to build and use the model of cycles, the eternal return of stuff from earth to earth. (for an amusing, if sometimes edgy, portrait of what we do wrong and how we can do it right, see www.storyofstuff.com) We need to make things that from their inception, know how they will end up.

This has begun, elsewhere in the world. Elsewhere they are asking: What if manufacturers were required to dispose of, reuse, or recycle their products after their lifecycle was done? What if computer manufacturers, vacuum cleaner companies, car companies, etc had to take back their products and recycle or reuse or else pay to have the stuff hauled away and dumped?

Nations and companies have begun implementing, or exploring, take-back and recycle programs. Canada is exploring implementing an Extended Producer Responsibility (“EPR”), at least for electronics, mercury-containing lamps, batteries, packaging and printed materials.

The idea is that if manufacturers had to bear the responsibility and cost of managing the waste their products created, there would be much less waste.

This is one large way of extending our finite resources into a more infinite loop. And it is one way to help all of us understand the true lifecycle, and costs, of the goods we consume. Hurrah.

Why I support local, seasonal eating - for now

Thanksgiving might very well be America's favorite holiday. It comes at a time when the weather is getting colder and we, in the more northern parts of the country at least, look forward to gathering and cuddling together in our snug, warm homes (even if we are occasionally distracted by wondering how to improve efficiency and reduce our heating bills and CO2 emissions). It is a holiday free from the frenzy of gift-giving, and we are neither measured, nor measure others, by the bounty or price of the gifts that are given.

We don't even have to do think much about what to serve: the menu (often the hardest part of planning celebrations) is largely pre-set.

But one of the lessons of Thanksgiving's feast that is often lost on all of us grateful holiday gluttons, is that it reflects the once essential trait of eating locally and seasonally.

Of course we all know this, but eating local and seasonal foods on Thanksgiving seems more charming than inevitable, as it was 400 years ago. Ideally this year at least, our Thanksgiving menu will remind us of the blessings, and the challenges, of a global food market.

Let me go on the record as being an agnostic about the ultimate value of local, seasonal eating. I am not convinced that eating pumpkins in the fall in Baltimore is inherently more ethical or environmentally sound than eating bananas - if we can control for several factors. We are a global community, and my purchases of certain foods can mean the difference between financial security and poverty for some family I will never meet and some community I will never visit. Many foods that will never grow in Baltimore are not only healthy and good for but also are aesthetically pleasing and might be an essential part of our diets. Simpler living - which I highly advocate - does not always mean only local living.

However, at the same time, I need to be sure that the production and harvesting of these foods are done in sustainable ways - that woodlands, hillsides and tropical forests have not been denuded for my indulgent gastronomic choices; that the workers are not exploited; that fertilizers and pesticides are not wastefully, inappropriately and unhealthily used (if at all); and that fossil fuels are not expended spewing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. If, and I would like to think when, we can be assured that food is produced, processed and transported sustainably and equitably, we would then not be constrained by the location of its growth. That is, if - and hopefully when - food can move as carbon-neutrally and as sustainably 3,000 miles as it does 50 miles, then all food can be considered local.

This is what we are seeking when we talk about fair trade coffee. That we carve out this special niche of foreign food is motivated mostly by our addiction to caffeine, and our equally laudable desire to consume it without guilt. Likewise our desire for sugar, chocolate, tea and other exotic staple foods that we would be most unhappy without. Can we not extend the same criteria which allow us to get our morning rush and our endorphine pleasures to other sorts of commodities?

To be sure, in the absence of these guarantees of ethical, sustainable food production and distribution, local, seasonal eating becomes an ethical imperative. And today, since such assurances are not given and transportation is largely based on fossil fuel, and wasteful production contributes tragically to increased greenhouse gas emissions, eating closer to home is the ethical thing to do. But hopefully we can right these wrongs, and thus local eating might best be seen as a transitional behavior, and not an absolute one.

No There There

Thursdays are magic days. We usually call them trash days, but they often feel like magic. Thursday mornings, my neighbors and I dutifully, and gratefully, shlep our trashcans, full of decaying, odorous debris with seven days’ worth of personal waste, to the bottom of our driveways. We leave it there, and walk away. Poof, when we return, that trash has disappeared.

Our world is once again clean, clear, and more to the nose. Out of sight, out of mind. Gone. Away. And so, in our world of magical thinking, all is good.

That is what we used to think. But today we know this to be wrong. We know now that what goes around, comes around. There is no “away”. There is no there there. No place on earth is unaffected by the detritus and debris that we create through the consumption of our lives. It is reported that the Alaskan Inuit have the world’s highest levels of DDT and PDBs in their bodies – though they live thousands of miles from the sources.

Many of us have begun to respond. We try to limit our waste. We recycle everything from plastic bags to banana peels. And yet, as conscientious as we may be, we still have garbage bags every week to set out on the corner. Commercial packaging is part of the problem. Non-recyclable plastics is another. I suppose unnecessary purchases is a third. And while we can control the last, we cannot personally control the first two. Which is why living an environmentally friendly, or sustainable, life, is not something we can achieve only by our personal behavior. We need to move the movers, the makers, the manufacturers, merchants and money-lenders. We need to promote and support legislation that requires reduced waste and proper disposal.


Anthony Cortese, a former Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection and now president of Second Nature (www.secondnature.org), tells us that as Americans, we “consume the equivalent of our body weight in solid materials daily, over 94% of which goes to waste before we ever see the product or service. It takes about 2000 pounds of material, most of which went to waste, to make a laptop computer.”

The stuff that we personally consume represents only a small portion of the overall waste we are responsible for.

What to do about it? Yes, keep recycling, reducing, reusing. Keep learning and encouraging others to do the same. And, just as much, when you do go shopping, make your purchases make a statement. Buy products from manufacturers who work to reduce the waste stream they create from production, to packaging, to transportation to disposal.

Watch this fun 20 minute video to learn about moving from a linear, unsustainable production model to a cyclical, sustainable production model. The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com).

Then before you make your next purchase, check out the most environmentally friendly products available. For more information on a world of green products, visit www.coopamerica.org. Get their Green Pages. Let your purchases help change the world.

Extreme recycling

I wore a six-year old two-piece dress with a seafoam scoop-neck top to the weddings of my two older sons. I wore the same dress to my two youngest children’s bnai mitzvah celebrations just a few years earlier. I am hoping for more summer simkhas so I can get additional mileage out of it.

I know it is part of the American cultural ritual to buy something new for fancy events, each special occasion occasioning an expansion of the wardrobe. I could justify my recycling of the dress by arguing that with all the money we were already spending, why unnecessarily spend more? Truth be told, though, I liked wearing a previously worn dress.

I liked opening the school books at the beginning of the year and discovering the students from the grades above me whose karma now infused that book, binding me to them and the learning enterprise. I liked it when library books came with cards stamped with due dates that showed how often and how recently a book was taken out. I like buying used books from Amazon’s marketplace, pages smoothed and a little dog-eared by previous readers. Most of our family’s best children’s books are library discards – books once held on the laps of countless parents and children in the most tender moments of discovery. I like buying used wooden furniture studded with round water stains from iced-tea glasses accompanying long summer visits with dear old friends. I like old houses, old handbags, old chinaware.

If I could, I would live in a converted train station – imagining the people, the stories, the hellos and goodbyes, the tears and the pacing, the grumbling and the jokes that people would have told waiting for life’s little adventures to unfold. I would conjure up their voices at night and feel the vitality of life’s tidal forces.

I don’t quite understand the lust for new. New feels incomplete to me, possibilities without the wisdom to guide and temper it. The Old gifted as New seems to me the best of all worlds.

I recently heard of an e-establishment from whom you rent toys instead of buying them. You go on line, choose age-appropriate toys for your kids from this enterprising entrepreneur, use them for however long you want and then return them and get new toys. Kind of like Netflicks for toys.

And there is an outfit that rents handbags for a night.

I was talking with a potter who says that when she is stuck for a gift, she chooses a bowl from her home pottery collection, , washes it off, and Voila, instant gift. I thanked her, for she had liberated my desire to do the same.

Imagine how rich we would be if the stuff we owned was coated with a patina of lives lived fully; if the gifts we gave were crowded with our stories, our memories, our blessings. Imagine if our daily acts were added, layer by layer, onto a tel of tales, a mound of memories captured and held by the stuff of our lives.

gender, service and the economy

WYPR's business commentator, Anirban Basu, reported today that there were really two economies in this recession: one for men and one for women. That is, whereas men have lost 700,000 jobs recently, women have gained 300,000 jobs. He goes on to explain that the jobs most vulnerable now are the ones men traditionally occupy: manufacturing and construction, while the job sectors that are growing are the ones that women traditionally occupy: teaching and healthcare.

While Basu couched this insight in gender terms, it is so much more than that. It is, if we allow it to be, the opening insight into the necessity of redesigning the definition of a vibrant economy. That is, instead of building a successful economy on paying more and more people to make more and more things (and encouraging the consumer to buy more and more things), we can build an economy on paying more and more people to do more and more things, like service -oriented jobs, healthcare, homecare, childcare, eldercare, teaching, coaching, protecting, training.

Maryland began to experiment with this changed view of the economy when it suggested taxing computer services. I am not here engaging in the debate of whether that particular effort was right or wrong. What I want to stress is that it opened up for the general public an awareness, whether conscious or not, that services are also a "good" produced by society. Why, it seemed to ask us, do we distinguish between the two in the tax code? If we tax the one (goods), would we not tax the other (services)?

(I am sure this is a topic that has been hotly debated among economists for a while. And I would bet this sounds naive to the finance cognoscenti. Indeed, I would love to hear economists weigh in on this subject and teach the rest of us benighted folks what the state-of-the-art thinking is on the status of goods and services. But I write as one of the public - not an economist.)

Truth be told, I never thought of that before. I never wondered why we pay 6% more for the stuff we buy but not for the things people do for us. The divide between things we buy, which incur a sales tax, versus services we buy, which do not, create a psychological divide in our mind between the two. Again, I am not arguing about whether sales taxes are good, or whether we should tax services. I am only arguing that the way we structure our tax system indicates different attitudes toward services and goods, and thus the economic value we attach to them.

The good news about Basu's report is that gender issues are now so mainstream that one cannot look at society without viewing it through a gender-sensitive lens. The challenge we learn with Basu's report is that we have to now make the environment as ever-present and sensitive a lens through which to read economic trends. For with such a green lens on, we can read these same figures as trending toward a healthier, more futuristic, sustainable economy - reducing our reliance on the creation of unnecessary "stuff" to keep the economic wheels greased (thereby bringing manufacturing more in line with the needs and rhythms of the earth) and increasing our output and investment in service, a marketplace with never-ending demand.

the story behind the things we buy

If you are looking for a quick way to learn more about the way things are made, and discarded, like cosmetics, plastic bags, chocolate, how they affect the environment and what we can do to lower our waste and increase our health, check out Good Stuff? - A Behind-the-Scenes Guide to the Things We Buy.
(http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/44)

Published by the World Watch Organization, it is a free download-able booklet which devotes one page to each of its 24 categories.

Quick and easy to read, it satisfies the first flush of curiosity about the things in our everyday life that we often don't give enough thought to.

Hitting close to home

The climate change crisis just came home to roost. There I was, buying my regular dozen bagels from Goldberg's on Monday when boom, the cashier says $9.xx. I can't even remember the exact price because the first number was so astonishing. The price of a dozen bagels (12 plus 1) at Goldberg's had been $8 for years. A small jump would be reasonable, even expected. But 15%! And then I remembered the sign on the refrigerator at the Giant the previous week, apologizing for the uncontrollable rise in prices for eggs and milk. (Paraphrased, the sign said: it's not our fault.) The reasons for these disparate price increases seem to be one and the same: what's happening to our land.

Droughts and floods, not just in one place, but around the world, have reduced wheat production over the past two years and raised wheat prices (futures at least) 100%. Add to these lower yielding harvests the additional impact of fewer fields growing wheat, replaced instead with acreage devoted to growing subsidized corn to meet ethanol marketplace demands, and you get an even smaller wheat, and food, harvest. Add a minus to a minus and you have to get more minus.

Yet if we would raise miles-per-gallon standards quickly enough, conserve meaningfully enough, and invest in alternative fuels (cellulosic biofuels) energetically enough, we could have our corn and eat it too. Meanwhile, we are instead tragically making it more expensive for people around the world to feed themselves and their families on these basic food crops. With wheat and corn getting more expensive, so do the foods that rely on them: eggs, milk and meat.

Even worse, studies coming out show that burning corn ethanol may be even more damaging to the environment than burning traditional oil, and if not worse, than no better either. So we may be creating world-wide food shortages without any environmental gain.

This is a complex issue that is coming home to roost. And we must be diligent consumers and continue to read and learn and advise our politicians. But if we thought climate change wouldn't hit us for decades, we must think again. The future has already begun.

folded green paper

A confession: I use Kleenex. Yes, I have heard that Kleenex brand tissues are not good for the environment. I even tried buying Seventh Generation tissue instead, when I could find it. But it wasn't soft enough. So, I continued to buy Kleenex. And then this morning, this happened:

I was in my car and reached down to open the new box of Kleenex tissues that I had placed there a little while ago. Upon enjoying that delightful little zzhhipp-ing sound the cardboard makes as you rip off the closure, I saw peeking out at me a folded slip of deep green paper.

Thinking, whoa, what a lovely surprise. What sort of gift could this be? A coupon for my next purchase? Had I unsuspectingly bought their billionth box and now would enjoy a lifetime of free tissues? Delighted at this unexpected joy, I opened the accordion-folded 3 x 5 inch paper.

It was none of that. Instead, it was a creative act of guerilla advocacy waged by Greenpeace. Now, I am not always a fan of Greenpeace. Their tactics often offend more refined (not to mention civil) political sensibilities. But I have to tip my hat to them when they are this inventive.

They had figured out that they can slip this folded piece of paper into the very slot left for you to insert your thumb to open the box. And on this neatly folded paper, they tell you what you didn't want to hear:

Kleenex is made from 100% virgin fiber, which, in Greenpeace's words, "has a devastating impact on ancient forests."

They have approached Kimberly-Clark (the parent of Kleenex) and asked them to use recycled materials for their tissues. Kimberly-Clark, according to this insert, has declined, saying that we, the customer, don't care.

Clearly, we do. And we need to tell them so.

Here is what I plan to do:

1) Visit www.StopKleenex.com and see what I can find there.
2) Call Kimberly-Clark (1-888-525-8388) and tell them that I care and will no longer buy their product until they change their tree harvesting and manufacturing ways.
3) Buy handkerchiefs. I know, I know. Tissues seem so much more aesthetic and sanitary. Who wants to carry that stuff around in their pockets? But now that I think about it, my father used handkerchiefs his entire life. Maybe if he was bed-ridden with the flu or bad cold, he might have used tissues, but otherwise, a white handkerchief. For messy colds, for guests and cars, I will continue to buy appropriate tissues, whenever possible. In the meantime, I am on the hunt for a nice handkerchief.

ownerless energy

Imagine if the world's power source was not located in any one state or nation; not owned, controlled or abused by any one company. Imagine an energy source that did not have to be dug up or blown off or piped across any expanse of land. Imagine an energy source that did not have to be transported in tankers, or trunks; whose distribution was managed by the forces of nature and not the whim of CEOs; whose harnessing was tamed by the creativity of the human mind and not the brute, crude force of destruction. Imagine an energy source that could not be blown up or blown down by terrorists or storms.

Imagine an energy source that did not make any one wealthy, but that made everyone rich.

Such is the nature of wind and solar energy - and who knows what other decentralized, readily available, on-site, safe, sustainable, no waste energy sources.

No wonder the energy companies are fighting it. There is no profit in the stuff of sun or wind. They can't hold or own or control the sun's rays or the wind's force. But there is profit in the machines that capture their energy; and in the green economy of manufaturing through recycling and the ever-expanding need for a service economy that can meet the infinite needs of the human spirit for care, companionship, and culture.

A new era of economics and spirit will have to dawn for us to save this planet, and ourselves. We will have to move from a disposable economy to a renewable economy; and from an economy of stuff to an economy of service. We can do this - and even more, we will be a better people, a happier people, if and when we do.

one percent non-solution

I often wonder how much energy it takes to make a bag that I may use for 10 minutes. Let's say I go to the drug store, get shampoo, vitamins and make-up and check out. The cashier puts that stuff in a bag. I drive home - 2 miles - take the stuff out of the bag and then throw the bag away. That return trip, with the brand new bag, took about 7 minutes. So, this bag that took oodles of resources and energy to make and get to me, went from treasure to trash in 10 minutes.

Okay, so let's say it don't throw it away, but recycle it. I put it in my "bag of bags" and take it to Giant next time I go, and put it in their bag receptacle. Now, there is a difference of opinion as to where this Bag-of-Bags goes. Some folks - including workers at Giant - say it is thrown in with the trash. But even assuming it gets recycled, I am still not so happy.

After all, there are, we are told, five [linear] stages of merchandising and consuming: extraction (getting the materials out of the earth), manufacturing (making the resources into the stuff we use), merchandising (selling it to us), consuming (using it) and disposal (getting rid of it somehow). In between, by the way, is all the transportation and trucking and shipping and driving that moves the stuff from place to place.

Recycling only affects the first and last. Manufacturing, merchandising, consuming and transportation remain. Which is why we say the first step in limiting pollution and waste is Reducing what we use. So even if all the plastic bags were biodegradable, we should still make it a habit of shopping with cloth, reusable bags.

But there is more. I just watched a piece on the lifecycle of stuff - you can see it at http://www.storyofstuff.com/

There is an astonishing, horrifying, piece of information there: Guess how much of the stuff that is made today will still be in use six months from now. The number is horrifying: 1%.

Now, even if she - the narrator of the Story of Stuff - is off by a factor of ten, and even if "in use" is a big vague as a category, it is still an astonishing figure. But think about it: all the food we eat, and the packaging it comes in. The candy, the tchotchkes we buy, the paper and ink and pens and napkins; the cups and covers and other disposables we use at McDonalds and Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts. The batteries, the cleaners, the oil. The newspapers, cardboard boxes and styrofoam peanuts. So much more than I can even imagine right now.

And it points to a great truth. We use more stuff than we need to. Imagine if all that money we spent on stuff went to fair wage salaries and rebuilding our nation's infrastructure. (I have written of this before so I will spare you now.)

We focus so much on recycling, and that is not bad. But we also need to focus on the other two "R's": reducing and reusing.

Maybe that should be our next big push. The world seems to have begun with reducing (or banning) plastic bags and water bottles. Let's keep the momentum going!

today I am a fountainpen

Fountain pens used to be the iconic gift of the bar mitzvah bourgeoisie; a stiff symbol of manhood handed down at this rite of passage from one generation to the next.

But that was 40 and 50 years ago. Who talks about fountain pens now? Sure, you can find outrageously priced writing implements in the advertising section of the New York Times or Levengers catalog, but no real people we know use fountain pens anymore.

Well, um, not exactly. See, today, I was running out of my favorite (need I add: disposable) pen and went to order another pack when I realized that over my lifetime I probably was throwing away enough pens to build a foot-bridge over a 10' wide river.

It astonishes me that even as I try to live sustainably, there remain these stealth consumables that I do not even flag.

When and why the dawning comes remains a surprise - but tonight, I determined that even better than a disposable retractable point pen was a fountain pen. I in fact own a fountain pen that I inherited from my father, a beautiful grey pen with his initials. However, I resist taking it out of the house, doing so only on special occasions, such as my children's wedding so we could use the pen to sign their ketubot, their wedding documents.

I should probably buy an inexpensive fountain pen - the body of the pen can be used for a lifetime; several lifetimes if we are mindful. And the ink comes in a glass, recyclable container. But that might not happen for a while. Meanwhile, runner-up to the fountain pen, is a cartridge pen I bought years ago. Even if the cartridge is disposed of, at least the body of the pen is re-used. For now, I will take my marbled green cartridge pen with me wherever I go and hope that I do not lose it. (Popular advice tells me that the more expensive the pen, the less likely one is to lose it. I am skeptical, but willing to give it a try.) If that works, I should probably get one for home - and keep it at my desk. Imagine all the space I will gain when I use up and don't replace all my disposable pens. And even if my diminution of the landfill is miniscule, handling my re-usable pen on a daily basis will, like keeping kosher, remind me of the greater values that I hope will infuse the deeds of my life.

From Cosmos to Kitchen II

CSAs are Community Supported Agriculture - that is, a kind vegetable coop you buy set shares in. So every week, you get a set amount of vegetables (and some fruits) depending on the produce grown on the farm you associate with.

They are wonderful in many ways, but the biggest challenge, and the second most powerful lesson I learned from mine, is the burden of abundance. It is almost embarrassing, and certainly guilt-inducing, to even have to admit it.

But, after all, how much watermelon can one eat, some of our members uncomfortably mumbled? How many squash can you prepare before exhausting both your ideas, and your appetite?

After a while, your friends begin to run when they see you coming with a bulging canvas bag. You may be able to dump your excess on them once, but after that, they get wise to you.

I am particularly happy scheduling meetings at my home now - in part just so that I can entice my visitors to take some of the excess produce home!

I give some to the women who clean my house; to the guys who came to repair my oven. I'd give it to my mailman, if I ever saw him. I am thinking of leaving some outside for the oil man to find when he hangs the delivery receipt on the front door handle! Or maybe I'll just wrap them in bunting and leave them on my neighbors' doorsteps with a note pinned to them that says: Eat me!

Inevitably, we cannot eat all of it fast enough, and so sometimes some of it goes into the compost heap.

This brush with abundance, and the waste it causes, makes me appreciate the necessity of two elements of food 'technology':

-- the art of preserving food
-- the creation of a successful transportation and distribution system.

In days gone by, preserving, or "putting up" foods, was a time-honored tradition. It was an all-consuming household ritual that is all but lost to us today. Late in the season, households would prepare for the intense, concentrated cooking, jarring, baking, sealing that would go on possibly for days. All available hands were recruited. Water-hauling, pot-stirring, fuel-tending, who knows what else; the tasks were endless. But it was necessary if the "excess" harvest, the harvest that could not be eaten before it went bad, was not to be wasted. It was this food that would get the families through the winter.

In the face of such excess, I began to appreciate the physical and spiritual elements of preserving.

With almost a dozen squash - acorn and butternut and another one that looks like baby, striped footballs with flattened ends - I had to figure out how to use them all. There was just so much ratatouille and casseroles that I could make. And truth be told, they don't freeze particularly well.

I was lucky enough to find a squash yeast bread in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest - a trusted cookbook if ever there was one.

So while I had my doubts, I followed Molly Katzen's lead and discovered that I could use up three acorn squash making three loaves of delicious squash bread. And these freeze beautifully.

But the amount of time I devoted to mixing and kneading and waiting for the bread to rise reinforced in me a great appreciation for the work, wisdom, talents and dedication of our mothers, who were taught by their mothers how to take the 'excess' of the season and store it away for the lean days of winter.

And say what we will about the benefits of local foods, it is essential to create a distribution system that gets the local foods to the local mouths.

I know that ours is not the only household in our CSA that 'complains' about too much food. I know that ours is not the only household that has thrown away food on occasion. This waste - small though it be - reinforces the awareness that producer and consumer do not always live in close proximity, or in related orbits. Growing the food is the first challenge; getting it to the ones who need it is the second. Even as we laud eating locally, we still need to work on proper distribution.

So it makes me wonder if farms have excess food too that they are unable to sell and distribute - and does that food go to waste when nearby families go to bed hungry?

Is there a way our community can arrange to buy that excess food and distribute it, with accompanying cooking classes and recipes and potluck dinners, to those in need?

I heard a stunning comment on a report of fresh foods, or the lack thereof, in an inner city. A woman who just started a community garden said: It is easier to get guns and drugs in this neighorhood than to get a tomato.

CSAs are wonderful. I gained so much more than the healthy, local food I ate.

What do I now do with these insights, blessings and guilt?

From Cosmos to Kitchen I

On October 24, the Comet 17P/Holmes, an otherwise well-mannered, highly ignorable comet, erupted in light. While this didn't make the press, the stargazing world is abuzz with excitement. My son - the astronomer - called us at 11:30 at night to tell us to go out and look up and see this amazing phenomenon. Indeed, there where no star usually is seen, was a messy blob of light.

What follows is a quote from astronomy.org/starwatch website I found that explains this phenomenon.


" What happened to dinky Holmes, to transform it into a fuzz ball visible... in center city Allentown? It is thought that a sinkhole collapsed on the tiny one-to-two mile diameter nucleus which triggered an explosive amount of outgassing caused by the sun’s heat. The gasses pushed out huge quantities of dust which were sprayed like a turning garden hose as the nucleus rotated. The result has been a circular halo of debris now over one million miles in diameter, scattering sunlight back to us and creating the fluffy blob of light near the bright star Mirfak in Perseus the Hero. Why the media hasn’t picked up on this is anyone’s guess, but it is the top story if you’re an astronomer. Comet 17P/Holmes won’t be around forever. Its expanding coma will eventually get so huge that it will simply disappear against the sky background."

We live in an exciting neighborhood!

And while we are on the subject of the sky: the annual Leonid meteor shower is coming up.

Meteor showers - when you can possibly see a dozen or so shooting stars an hour! - occur throughout the year.



The Leonids are so called for they appear in the constellation of Leo.

This is what upcoming.yahoo.com tells us about this year's Leonids:

"Because Leo does not start coming fully into view until the after midnight hours, that would be the best time to concentrate on looking for the Leonid meteors.

The Leonid meteors are debris shed into space by the Tempel-Tuttle comet, which swings through the inner solar system at intervals of 33 years. With each visit the comet leaves behind a trail of dust in its wake."

That site also gives you a lot more stargazing information in user-friendly (non-technical) language.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors is also a good popular and understandable site. This is their explanation of meteor showers:

What are meteor showers?

An increase in the number of meteors at a particular time of year is called a meteor shower.

Comets shed the debris that becomes most meteor showers. As comets orbit the Sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the comet's orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Depending on where Earth and the stream meet, meteors appear to fall from a particular place in the sky, maybe within the neighborhood of a constellation.

Meteor showers are named by the constellation from which meteors appear to fall, a spot in the sky astronomers call the radiant. For instance, the radiant for the Leonid meteor shower is located in the constellation Leo. The Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.

You can also find a full list of the eight major meteor showers and the best dates for viewing them at this site.

So much for the cosmos.

To the kitchen:

My foray into the CSA world (Community Supported Agriculture) has taught me many things. Two of which are this:

That we as modern privileged westerners generally tend to consume according to our desires. If we want a nectarine in February - no problem. Fresh strawberries in November - just run to the store. We may pay a bit more, but otherwise we generally don't think much about it.

Yet I can remember not so long ago a series of commercials that promoted something called "summer fruit." Pictures of luscious peaches and mounds of berries would be draped across the tv set, telling us these fruits that we have waited for are once again available. Because they were not available all year round back then - at least not at any prices that normal folk could afford. It is hard to imagine these days that something we craved to eat was beyond our reach simply because it was cold outside.

Our cheap fuel and impressive transportation and refrigeration systems have enabled us over the past 20 years to make it summertime all year round in our supermarkets. And while that is great for our appetites, it might not be so great for the planet.

For one thing, today, freighters and tankers that move cheap food and products around the world contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions than does the aviation industry. That is a relatively new development.

In addition, the fields that are cleared to feed our summertime desires in the midst of our winter, and the "cheap" products that are made (for example) in China are, in fact, quite costly. They take their toll on the earth and on the health of the workers (occupational safety as we know is not well regulated in China). Additionally, as you probably know, China has now surpassed the US in the amount of CO2 emissions it spews into the air largely from the coal-fired power plants it is building now (using outdated 1980's technology) that run the factories that give us our cheap merchandise.

It all begins with our appetites.

The CSA has taught me what I knew but did not yet feel: that the earth has its cycles and that we live within them. Even more, that there is a grace and humility and joy that comes with living within those cycles. Which is not to say that agriculture and manufacturing cannot be pushed to bring the earth to its fullest potential. Humanity is charged with bringing both ourselves and our earth to our greatest level of dignity and productivity. But not by sacrificing the long-term health of the workers, the land, the water or the air.

So bending my appetite to the cycles of the earth instead of bending the yield of the earth to my appetite is a lesson I take away as this CSA season ends.

I will talk about the response to (some would say oppression of) abundance in the next post.