EVERETT, Wash. — Out here next to Steamboat Slough and the lumber mill, piles of garbage from Seattle are lined up in neat rows and blanketed with a fabric similar to that used in high-end Gore-Tex clothing.

What goes in as yard waste and food scraps will emerge two months later as a mountain of loamy compost sold by the bag at garden centers throughout the Pacific Northwest by Cedar Grove Composting. In the process, the waste is ground up, piled up, aerated, dried and sifted. The space-age fabric covering the piles allows air to enter but keeps pungent odors from wafting over the countryside.

“This is the cool side of trash,” Cedar Grove’s founder, Steve Banchero, said of the process, which is on recycling’s cutting edge.

The company, the major composter in this area, will soon have much more trash coming its way because Seattle is making food waste yet another mandatory recycling ingredient in its already long list.

“The food-waste issue is the new frontier for recycling advocates,” said Kate Krebs, the executive director of the National Recycling Coalition. “It’s the next big chunk.”

Seattle now recycles 44 percent of its trash, compared with the national average of around 30 percent, which makes it a major player in big-city waste recovery. Its goal, city waste management officials said, is to reach 60 percent by 2012 and 72 percent by 2025.

In many other parts of the country, recycling is in the doldrums — and in some cases backsliding — despite the sounding of environmental alarms about global warming and shrinking resources. And it is a far cry from recycling’s heyday, after the nation was jarred into action in 1987 by images of a barge carrying garbage from Long Island being towed up and down the East Coast in search of a place to unload. Six months later, its cargo was returned to New York and burned in a Brooklyn incinerator.

The wandering barge had a profound effect on the American psyche, and within three years most states had passed laws requiring some kind of recycling. But recycling victories are now gauged in much smaller increments. In Seattle’s case, the latest success is measured in scraps.

As the law now stands in Seattle, residents of single family houses are allowed to mix food scraps with yard waste, which is then shipped off to be composted. Recycling of food scraps will become mandatory in 2009.

The new law may add yet another container for curbside pickup, which already includes receptacles for nonrecyclable trash, yard waste, glass and other recyclables. In Seattle, many residents take pride that their weekly nonrecyclable output fits in a container no larger than the average countertop microwave.

But like other cities, Seattle also found itself in a recycling skid a few years back, losing ground to apathy despite being a pacesetter in the boom years of the late ’80s.

“We hit a cardboard ceiling,” said Tim Croll of the Seattle Public Utilities.

The city’s response was to ban paper and cardboard from nonrecyclable garbage — with enforcement penalties — followed by allowing food scraps to be mingled with yard waste.

Still, Seattle’s progress on the home front addresses only part of the challenge of use and reuse. Commercial recycling is in its infancy, though programs have been going for some time — and with considerable success — in places like the San Francisco Bay Area.

The larger picture is that the West Coast is a recycling bellwether, given the emphasis placed on it in Washington, Oregon and California. That includes legislation in California that requires 50 percent of waste statewide to be recycled.

“People are just a little greener on the West Coast,” Mr. Croll said.

But there is a more practical reason for recycling’s success in the West. Seattle and the rest of the West Coast have Pacific Rim ports at their disposal, and freighters plying routes to Asia have found a profitable cargo in recycled paper, particularly for the Chinese market. Waste paper is now commanding about $90 a ton throughout the United States, which makes it possible to turn a profit by loading it onto ships instead of dumping it into landfills.

Not to sell it “would be like burying money,” said Chaz Miller of the Environmental Industry Associations, which represents the private waste service industry. Because of that, collecting paper for recycling is at an all-time high.

One of the few publications that tries to quantify recycling is BioCycle Magazine, which works in conjunction with the Earth Engineering Center at Columbia University. It puts the West at the forefront of the country, with 38 percent of its waste being reused. By comparison, the neighboring Rocky Mountain region recycles only 14 percent of its trash, with almost all the rest going into landfills.

Jerry Powell, who publishes Resource Recycling magazine, based in Portland, Ore., and is considered one of the nation’s experts on the subject, is bullish on the industry’s prospects.

“This decade is the best for recycling markets ever,” Mr. Powell said. “If you can’t make money recycling, you should go elsewhere.”

By his count, more recycling legislation was passed in 2006 than in any year of the previous 10. Even the current downturn in recycling in many places has to be kept in perspective, he said, considering that today, recycling is a part of almost everyone’s life.

“We’re a part of the fabric of the country,” he said. “What used to be done by a guy who wore Birkenstocks and drove a Volvo is now being done by someone who drives a Ford 250 with a gun rack. It’s the largest environmental concern we’ve ever known.”

Mayor Greg Nickels of Seattle said he was chagrined when the numbers began to fall in his city. Now he thinks Seattle has reached a point where it can serve as a model of how to recoup from a stumble.

“One thing we can offer is an example of how to tackle this,” Mr. Nickels said.

For 44 years David R. Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and former executive director of the Sierra Club, has been fighting for conservation. He has helped establish several of our national parks, seashores, and monuments (and led the fight to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur National Monument) . . . created, edited, and designed many of the Sierra Club's famous exhibit format books, including InWildness Is the Preservation of the World . . . and played a major role in the 15-year struggle that led to the passage of our nation's 1964 Wilderness Bill. (What's more, Brower led all these conservation fights while earning a reputation as a highly skilled outdoorsman. He was, for example, the first to climb New Mexico's Shiprock . . . as well as some 30 peaks in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada!)

In the course of these efforts, Dave has, on occasion, been accused of bending facts in order to win a preservation battle. Indeed, John McPhee — in his book portrait of Brower, Encounters With the Archdruid — went so far as to say, "In the war strategy of the conservation movement, exaggeration is a standard weapon." However, Brower staunchly — and point by point — denies such charges. He does allow that, when absolutely necessary, he's willing to accent the emotional appeal of an endangered landscape: "After all, " Dave says, "people who don't believe in emotion can be thankful their parents didn't share that problem. Otherwise, they wouldn't be here. "

In 1973, Brower was the subject of MOTHER EARTH NEWS NO. 21's Plowboy Interview. (At that time he'd just helped defeat the move to develop the proposed SST aircraft.) Well, Dave's hardly been treading water since then. Indeed, his current battle may ultimately turn out to be his most important effort yet . . . because the unflagging conservationist has taken the field against the greatest global threat of all: nuclear war. As a result of his long experience with environmental causes and thought, Dave goes beyond simply proclaiming that we should "ban the bomb"; and points out the ecological root problems we need to address in order to make life safe after disarmament . . . and hence make the permanent abolition of nuclear weapons a real possibility.

During a recent visit to Warren Wilson College in Swannanoa, North Carolina, Dave spoke on the interrelationship of the current strain on human and natural resources and the tensions that are leading us toward nuclear war. The following remarks are condensed from his evening talk and from an hour and a half of conversation held — the next day — between Brower and a member of MOTHER's staff.
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If you were to compress the earth to the size of an egg, all of the water on the planet would be but a drop, the air — liquefied for comparison — but a droplet, and the soil a speck barely visible to the naked eye. That trio — drop, droplet, and speck — make the earth unique among all the known planets in the universe, yet we rush to obliterate the difference.

We continue to spew the sulfur and nitrogen oxides that cause acid rain. These emissions have already killed the fish in many lakes in the Adirondacks and thousands in Norway. Now they threaten some 50,000 bodies of water in Canada. We're also putting too much carbon dioxide into the air. I don't want to tell you the sky is falling because of all this C0 2 It's not, but the ocean is rising . . . and the icecaps are beginning to melt.

The population is still growing — according to the Global 2000 Report , there should be six billion people on earth by the turn of the century — and to feed all our people, we're mining our soil with intense mono culture plantings. These cause such enormous losses of topsoil that I believe Wes Jackson was right when he said the plowshare, in the long run, has done more harm than the sword.

We're also, in effect, burning our soil. To cook their food and keep warm, people around the world are desperately using all the wood and dung they can get for fuel. Thus, they're using up the very materials that allow the soil to renew itself . Conse quently, there may be 2-1/2 times as much desert land in the year 2000 as there is now. And by that same date we may also have lost a great deal of our planet's genetic diversity, since there'll likely be 500,000 to 2,000,000 fewer species then than there are now.

In sum, as Ray Dasmann says, "We are already fighting World War III, and I am sorry to say we are winning it . It is the war against the earth." Furthermore, that struggle is leading directly to the war of people against people with nuclear weapons . . . World War IV. The final nuclear quarrel over the resources left in the bottom of the barrel is inevitable if World War III — between humankind and our planet — continues.

To stave off that fate, disarmament of the superpowers is essential. The nuclear freeze is a step in the right direction, and Friends of the Earth supports a multilateral freeze. I myself think our nation could go further than that. We could make a unilateral move and start dismantling some of our weapons. We'd still have more than enough bombs to destroy the other side and everything else, yet such a move would set the necessary example for initiating real Strategic Arms Reduction Talks.

However, whether you agree with my route toward disarmament or not, the fact is that we do have to get rid of nuclear weapons somehow. But still more than that is required. We have to ask, as Moorhead C. Kennedy, Jr. puts it, "What are you saving the earth for , not just from ?" We need to outline what we want our planet to be like and how we'll all manage to live on it sustainably. If we can come up with those scenarios, it's going to be easier to disarm in the first place.

Right now, the world's economic systems heavily discount the future. Instead, the superpowers are in a growth race as well as an arms race. The vigorous growing economy all our leaders keep exhorting us to produce is simply not eternally possible on an earth of fixed size, and continuing attempts to produce such growth constitute the basic threat to peace. So we need a blueprint for an economy that will endure in peaceful stability . . . that will not require the war with the environment that leads to war with fellow humans.

Now I'm not saying all growth is bad. The key question is, "What kinds of growth must we have and what kinds can we no longer afford ?" I think if you wrote down the two answers to that question, you'd find that the first list would be a fairly short one, and the second very long. We should treat the matter the way nature does. In spring there's a great deal of promise of vigorous new growth, and that's good. We're going to need it. Throughout summer the growth is exploding, and by fall its yield is harvested. But then winter comes and the world undergoes a very severe editing. What is no longer needed won't show up again. Editing out the things that must not come back is what we've forgotten to do with our economy. We do need growth, a new blossoming every so often . . . but we also need to balance that off with what we let die.

We need to stop building roads and dams . . . we already have plenty of those. We need to quit destroying wild places . . . we need all the ones we've got left. We who live in America need to stop using so many "advanced" lifestyle trinkets ... we're creating almost half the world's resource drain. And everyone needs to work to halt — nay, to reverse — the global population increase. I'd be happy to "grandfather clause" all the people who are alive now, but those who aren't here yet should quit arriving in such large numbers.

This is where those of us in the environmental movement can help the disarmament cause, for we've been thinking about planet-sustaining issues for a long time. Currently, many groups are approaching the atomic war issue from different angles, and this is all to the good. The Union of Concerned Scientists has brought its expertise to help scientists and policymakers anticipate the possible consequences of unbridled technology. Physicians for Social Responsibility has made the health disaster of a nuclear war clear to citizens who will believe their doctor, if no one else. The church — at least some of it — is reminding people of the sacredness of life and our moral obligation to preserve it. Now, the environmental movement needs to extend its traditional scope to encompass a nontraditional but transcendent need . . . helping people discover how we can all take care of this planet well enough so that we can afford to wage peace .

This new emphasis doesn't mean that we conservationists should ignore or forget the usual global threats. As Hazel Henderson says, "It's not a question of 'either or' . . . it's 'both'." We have to assume that we'll wipe out the nuclear threat, whereupon we'll still have all the ongoing preservation issues to face. So we have to work on both war and conservation causes at the same time, even if it means putting in a few extra minutes a week for the sake of the planet.

And it's not, as some critics would suggest, cause-hunting "trendiness" that has led many environmentalists to suddenly try to head off atomic war. It's not that we're tired of such ongoing issues as nuclear power, but that we're frightened of nuclear war. That's especially true now that we have a President who can talk about limited nuclear war and say we should sell nuclear technology freely because it's none of our business who has the bomb. The risk of an explosive holocaust has increased since Reagan came to office.

Actually, there's a direct connection between atomic power plants — which Friends of the Earth has been fighting for years — and nuclear weapons. A country that doesn't have atomic generators has no excuse to be making weapons-grade plutonium and uranium. Yet we keep on exporting so much nuclear technology to so many nations — remember, for instance, when Richard Nixon wanted to sell reactors to the Shah of Iran? — that the Stockholm Peace Research Institute has estimated some 40 countries will have the bomb by 1990 . . . making atomic war inevitable.

In addition, nuclear power plants produce great amounts of spent fuel that has to be disposed of, and one current popular idea for dealing with much of that waste is to put it through reprocessing plants. But such a facility accumulates an enormous inventory of high-level waste. Indeed, nuclear weapons expert Ted Taylor has said that the destruction of one reprocessing plant that had been operating for ten years could release more strontium 91 and cesium 137 than would the detonation of all the atomic weapons now on earth. If a single such facility were blown up in western Europe, that entire region would be rendered uninhabitable for generations. It's like building gargantuan land mines and then planting them in your own country!

To stop both the growth race and the arms race from destroying the planet — to keep the human-caused extinction of creatures and ecosystems from being a precursor of our own fate — we need to redefine security. Thus far the disarmament movement has been hard pressed simply to slow the buildup of nuclear weapons, so it hasn't been able to pay attention to alternative definitions of security. But we do need to establish some. We must search for the types of national security that will sustain the human race, recognizing that real national security can come only if we have improved global security.

I have my own set of ideas as to how we might start working toward that goal. One is for America and Russia to stop standing toe to toe and instead stand side by side, and see not what they can do to each other, but what they can do for the rest of the world . . . to form a U.S./Soviet Marshall Plan that invests in resource recovery, not depletion. And how would they fund such a massive undertaking? Just recall that the two nations, between them, plan to spend four trillion dollars in the next five years — 25 trillion in all by the year 2000 — for their counterproductive attempts to increase security through arms. So just spend that money on healing the earth instead of blowing it up.

I'd also like to propose that Homo sapiens adopt Magna Carta II. Magna Carta I came in 1215 when King John of England was required, by his abused barons, to grant a long list of rights to free commoners. The parallel between the need then for human law and order and the need now for natural law and order — to prevent a nuclear holocaust — provides an extraordinary opportunity for the most important paradigm shift in history. In Magna Carta II, the natural world's rights to its existence and freedoms would be acknowledged. We would quit trying to imprison and destroy other species and ecosystems.

But those are my personal ideas. To help us all examine the economics of peaceful stability, Friends of the Earth and other organizations are planning a three-day conference in mid-October to be called "Conservation and Security in a Sustainable Society: The First Biennial Conference on the Fate of the Earth". A long list of environmentally concerned leaders — including Ansel Adams, Wendell Berry, Lester Brown, Helen Caldicott, Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Amory and Hunter Lovins, Linus Pauling, Russell Peterson, Pete Seeger, Gus Speth, and Stewart Udall — have agreed to serve as advisers. We want to spend three days looking into the links between the growth and arms races and planning an economically feasible route to a sustainable society so that disarmament will be possible.

The idea of the conference sprang, in part, from the series of biennial meetings we began in 1949 to work for passage of the Wilderness Bill. Those meetings had an enormous effect on the public's understanding of the need for wilderness . . . and they helped spawn the movement that led, in 1964, to the bill's final passage. In addition — as evidenced by its title — the conference's concept comes, in part, from Jonathan Schell's superb work, The Fate of the Earth . . . a book that may do more than any other single factor to make us end the threat of nuclear holocaust.

To those who say this effort sounds utopian, let me point out that the alternative is oblivion. To those who would ignore the threat of holocaust and hide their heads in the sand, let me say, "All too soon, you may find that sand fused." To those who think such decisions should be left up to the politicians, I quote Dwight Eisenhower's words: "Governments will not produce peace until the people force them to." And to those who believe the public can't change things, let me repeat that — according to H.R. Haldeman's book The Ends of Power — Richard Nixon would have used the atomic bomb in Vietnam if it hadn't been for the demonstrations of antiwar protesters. We all have to look at our own roles as participants in the strongest democracy there is and remember that democracies work best when they're participatory, rather than spectator, sports.

An individual alone can make a difference. Just think of Amory Lovins, whose first book Eryri: The Mountains of Longing saved Snowdonia National Park . . . Marion Edey, who made the League of Conservation Voters work . . . Rachel Carson, who almost singlehandedly sparked the environmental movement . . . and now, Jonathan Schell. These days, we all must participate to see that this planet does not perish from the universe just because one or the other of us had part in letting it go.

We have to act from love, the one resource that will be exhausted only if we forget to use it. I learned from the Nepalese, during a visit to their country a few years back, that there are really just two basic laws for good behavior: It's a sin to make a child cry, and it's a sin to embarrass anyone. Now, I don't break that first rule very often, but — when it comes to dealing with earth-wrecking developers or politicians — I must confess that I keep forgetting the second one.

Yet we all must, as Schell says, replace the Law of Fear with the Law of Love. We have to remember to thank politicians when they do something right and — without compromising our standards — try to understand their point of view when we disagree. And most important of all, we have to acknowledge the rights of those to come . . . to stop stealing from the children who aren't yet born.

You know, I love this place ... this planet. I'm not going to want to leave it. But I'm not going to mind leaving it — since I know I must — if I'm sure that it will survive and that I've done my bit for the largest population of all: the billions of people to come and all the billions of children they will wish to have and see grow up with hope in future millenniums.

Their genes are in our custody, and guarding them is our greatest responsibility. After all, we do not inherit the land from our fathers ... we borrow it from our children.

FROM THE FATE OF THE EARTH

As Dave Brower points out, Jonathan Schell's The Fate of the Earth (published by Random House and available in any good bookstore for $11.95) is one of the most compelling tomes ever written about the threat of planetary extinction by nuclear war and the need to act to save the earth. In fact, Senator Alan Cranston recently read some excerpts from Schell's work into the Congressional Record . . . including the following passages.

* * * * * * *

Bearing in mind that the possible consequences of the detonations of thousands of megatons of nuclear explosives include the blinding of insects, birds, and beasts all over the world; the extinction of many ocean species, among them some at the base of the food chain; the temporary or permanent alteration of the climate of the globe, with the outside chance of "dramatic" and "major" alterations in the structure of the atmosphere; the pollution of the whole ecosphere with oxides of nitrogen; the incapacitation in ten minutes of unprotected people who go out into the sunlight; the blinding of people who go out into the sunlight; a significant decrease in photosynthesis in plants around the world; the scalding and killing of many crops; the increase in rates of cancer and mutation around the world, but especially in the targeted zones, and the attendant risk of global epidemics; the possible poisoning of all vertebrates by sharply increased levels of vitamin D in their skin as a result of increased ultraviolet light; and the outright slaughter on all targeted continents of most human beings and other living things by the initial nuclear radiation, the fireballs, the thermal pulses, the blast waves, the mass fires, and the fallout from the explosions — and considering that these consequences will all interact with one another in unguessable ways and, furthermore, are in all likelihood an incomplete list which will be added to as our knowledge of the earth increases — one must conclude that a full-scale nuclear holocaust could lead to the extinction of mankind.

* * * * * * *

Once we learn that a holocaust might lead to extinction, we have no right to gamble, because if we lose, the game will be over, and neither we nor anyone else will ever get another chance. We have no choice but to address the issue of nuclear weapons as though we knew for a certainty that their use would put an end to our species.

* * * * * * *

The risk of extinction has a significance that is categorically different from, and immeasurably greater than, that of any other risk. Up to now, every risk has been contained within the frame of life; extinction would shatter the frame. It represents not the defeat of some purpose but an abyss in which all human purposes would be drowned for all time.

We have found it much easier to dig our own grave than to think about the fact that we are doing so .... At present, most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won't happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us.

* * * * * * *

Such imponderables as the sum of human life, the integrity of the terrestrial creation, and the meaning of time, of history, and of the development of life on earth, which were once left to contemplation and spiritual understanding, are now at stake in the political realm and demand a political response from every person. As political actors, we must, like the contemplatives before us, delve to the bottom of the world, and Atlaslike, we must take the world on our shoulders.

By MARIAN BURROS
Published: April 25, 2007 NY Times

JESSICA ABEL may have gone to extremes when she collected seawater from Long Island Sound and boiled it down to make two cups of salt. But people who are determined to eat only food made within 100 miles, give or take, sometimes find themselves reaching for creative solutions.

Ms. Abel and her husband, Matt Madden, cartoonists who work at home in Sunset Park in Brooklyn, have given three strictly enforced local-only dinner parties over the past year. A fourth scheduled for next month will feature fiddleheads, ramps, new fresh cheese and baby lamb.

“Last summer it was goat stew with peaches and onions, and in the middle of winter it was an all-butter, all-the-time meal,” she said. “We all missed white flour and sugar.”

Ms. Abel and Mr. Madden are dabblers in a small but increasingly popular effort to return to a time before the average food item traveled 1,500 miles from farm to table. In that sense, the only thing new about the phenomenon is its name, locavore, which was coined two years ago in California. But the appearance of the word seems to have given shape to a growing subculture. Weeklong locavore challenges have been popping up all over the country, even in places like Minnesota and Vermont, where it would seem to be pretty hard to eat local foods in the dead of winter.

Many drawn to the movement say they have been eating that way for years and had never thought about the implications beyond the flavor. “Initially it was the taste thing for me,” said Robin McDermott, who lives in Waitsfield, Vt., where locavores call themselves localvores. “But now when I think about what it takes to get lettuce across the country so I can eat it in the middle of winter, between the fuel costs and the contribution all the transportation is making to global warming and climate change, I just can’t do it. It’s not sustainable and I don’t want to contribute to it.”

Those who think this is another harebrained scheme of the food fringe may be surprised to learn that locavores are poised to move into the mainstream. Barbara Kingsolver, the best-selling novelist, has written one of three books out this spring about eating locally.

“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” (HarperCollins) recounts her family’s adventures during the year they spent eating food raised in their corner of southwest Virginia. Her book and others are successors to several earlier books including “Coming Home to Eat” by Gary Paul Nabhan and “Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection” by Jessica Prentice, who coined the word locavore and founded the Web site locavores.com.

Ms. Prentice’s group claims to have started the grass-roots locavore challenges that sprang up in California in 2005. Participants exchange recipes and advice.

Some locavores follow the 100 Mile Diet, created by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon, authors of the just-released “Plenty” (Harmony). They spent a year in British Columbia eating only food grown within a 100-mile radius.

It wasn’t easy. Faced with potatoes, once again, for lunch, Ms. Smith recounts her feeling that “I’d kill for a sandwich.” When Mr. MacKinnon said he would make her one, she couldn’t imagine what he had in mind because they had no local flour for bread. But soon enough he produced greenhouse-grown red peppers and fried mushrooms with goat cheese between two golden brown slices of something. Something turned out to be turnips.

The authors held so strictly to their plan that when they eventually found locally grown wheat they took it even though it was filled with mouse droppings. Mr. MacKinnon painstakingly separated the droppings from the wheat with the edge of a credit card.

The plan outlined in Ms. Kingsolver’s book is much less strict than the one in “Plenty.” The author said that in her attitude toward food she is something between a Puritan (“I’m going to be holy right now”) and a toddler (“I want absolutely everything every minute and the idea of not having fresh peaches in January is sort of horrifying”).

Each member of her family was allowed one luxury item that came from far away. Her husband chose coffee, her children hot chocolate and dried fruit. Spices were Ms. Kingsolver’s indulgence.

“Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” gives no sense of privation or even boredom. Ms. Kingsolver spent a fair amount of time putting foods by when they were in season so that the larder was stocked.

But most readers would have trouble following her program, which included raising much of what the family ate on their farm, including chickens and turkeys.

“We undertook this project because it brings together so many compelling issues of the moment: carbon footprint, global warming, the local economy, the nutritional crisis and community,” said Ms. Kingsolver. “Community is very important to me and every book I’ve ever written is on this subject: what is the debt of the individual to the community?”

“We wanted to see if we could show that it’s possible and even a lot of fun, not just an experiment in sacrifice,” she said. “It was so much more fun than we expected it to be.”

Most locavores are not strict constructionists. They tend to make exceptions for coffee, pasta, spices, salt and flour.

While West Coast residents can use olive oil, Ms. McDermott had to substitute sunflower oil made in Vermont, which has obvious drawbacks. “It definitely tastes like sunflower seeds,” she said, “but another alternative is to make ghee from local butter.” Wheatberries take the place of rice, and ground cherries or gooseberries, she said, “can kind of pass for raisins.” A birthday cake of mashed parsnips was sweetened with maple syrup and maple sugar.

Ms. McDermott, who designs Web-based training for manufacturing companies with her husband, Ray, started one of the several localvore groups in Vermont last year in the Mad River Valley. During their first event in September, 150 participants took the pledge to eat locally for a week. Only slightly fewer tried it again this January, and more events are planned this year.

“The two biggest barriers to eating local are time and cost,” she said. “A lot of people think this is somewhat elitist because if you buy a local chicken it is $3.50 to $4 a pound and you can get them for a lot less in the supermarket. If you want boneless chicken breasts you’ll go broke, but if you buy a whole chicken it’s affordable because you will use it all. The same thing with lesser cuts of meat. You do need time and a desire to cook something.

“And you need a freezer, something like a root cellar. Last year I got into making kimchi and sauerkraut as a way of preserving of food.”

By far the most pragmatic of these locavores is Ms. Prentice. “To restrict yourself to eating locally is an interesting exercise,” she said. “It’s consciousness raising to see what you’d be living on, but I don’t think of it as a necessary or practical solution of our globalized food system. I am not opposed to any importation, but what we can grow locally we should grow locally.

“We have a situation in California where we export as many strawberries as we import. It’s gotten ridiculous.”

People who have tried to eat a strictly local diet, even those like Ms. Abel who are dabblers, say it has been a life-changing experience. “One of the things about having this party is becoming aware of how far things have come,” she said. “So now we are eating differently. Having a dish of eggplant, tomatoes and zucchini in February is weird to me. We are eating a lot of kale and root vegetables in winter and buying a lot of stuff at the Greenmarket year round. It’s not a life philosophy but it’s not a game.”

Though eating locally can be a difficult feat, in many parts of the country it is easier than it was five years ago. Farming land continues to disappear as larger farms go under, but the number of small farms that cater to their neighbors has increased 20 percent, to 1.9 million in the last six years. The number of farmers’ markets and farm stands, food co-ops and community-supported agriculture groups is growing. In his new book “Deep Economy,” (Times Books) Bill McKibben writes that the number of farmers’ markets has increased from 340 in 1970 to 3,700 in 2004.

New Seasons, an eight-store supermarket chain in Portland, Ore., has made its name as a place where local food is king. Byerly’s and Lunds in Minneapolis also feature local products.

Schools are catching on to the idea. In 2002 400 school districts in 22 states had farm-to-cafeteria programs that provided students locally grown food. Today 1,035 districts in 35 states participate.

But before locavores take too much credit for the phenomenon, there are a bunch of back-to-the-landers in Vermont who ate local foods 30 years ago. “There are a lot of people here who call themselves yokelvores,” Ms. McDermott said. “They get their food from within 100 feet of their homes — homesteaders who have their own cows, chickens and grow their own vegetables. They consider people like us as Johnny-come-latelies.”

Study out of Stanford says pollution from ethanol
could end up creating a worse hazard than gasoline.
- San Francisco Chronicle April 18, 2007

If ethanol ever gains widespread use as a clean alternative fuel to gasoline, people with respiratory illnesses may be in trouble.

A new study out of Stanford says pollution from ethanol could end up creating a worse health hazard than gasoline, especially for people with asthma and other respiratory diseases.

"Ethanol is being promoted as a clean and renewable fuel that will reduce global warming and air pollution," Mark Z. Jacobson, the study's author and an atmospheric scientist at Stanford, said in a statement. "But our results show that a high blend of ethanol poses an equal or greater risk to public health than gasoline, which already causes significant health damage."

The study appears in today's online edition of Environmental Science & Technology, a publication of the American Chemical Society. It comes at a time when the Bush administration is pushing plans to boost ethanol production and the nation's automakers are required by 2012 to have half their vehicles run on flex fuel, allowing the use of either gasoline or ethanol.

Jacobson used a computer to model how pollution from ethanol fuel would affect different parts of the country in 2020, when ethanol-burning vehicles are expected to be common on America's roadways.

He found that ethanol-burning cars could boost levels of toxic ozone gas in urban areas, but that Los Angeles residents would be by far the hardest hit because of the city's reliance on the automobile and environmental factors that tend to concentrate smog there.

His study showed that the city would experience a 9 percent increase in the rate of ozone-related respiratory deaths -- 120 more deaths per year -- compared with what would have been projected in 2020 assuming continued gasoline use.

Pollution from ethanol would be more risky than pollution from gasoline because when ethanol breaks down in the atmosphere, it generates considerably more ozone. Ozone is a highly corrosive gas that damages the delicate tissues of the lungs. In fact, it's so corrosive that it can crack rubber and wear away statues, Jacobson told The Chronicle.

Jacobson's study focuses on the health effects of an ethanol type called "E85," a highly publicized fuel composed of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.

Last month, California Democratic Sen. Diane Feinstein, along with Sens. Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, both R-Maine, introduced a bill to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from motor vehicles. The bill would "require fuel suppliers to increase the percentage of low-carbon fuels - biodiesel, E85 ... hydrogen, electricity, and others - in the motor vehicle fuel supply" by 2015, according to a March 30 press release from Feinstein's office.

Reacting to Jacobson's study, Feinstein issued a statement Tuesday.

"We should proceed with caution," she said. "All of these fuels emit certain pollutants, and those pollutants have to be known and evaluated for their health effects. There can be no real rush to judgment about these fuels.

"We've got to find a way to develop low-carbon fuels that do not have adverse health effects."

A spokesman for the state Air Resources Board said officials there were still studying prepublication copies of the Jacobson paper and would have no immediate comment.

"This is the first we've heard of it," said board spokesman Dimitri Stanich. In the meantime, he said, "there are multiple avenues for reducing California's carbon 'footprint,' (with) hydrogen and ethanol being part of that plan. We consider (E85) as part of the strategy."

The study also attracted the attention of environmental scientists.

The basic principles of Jacobson's paper are sound, said David Pimentel, an ecology professor emeritus at Cornell University in an e-mail.

"The burning of ethanol releases large quantities of ozone, a serious air pollutant," he said. "In addition, the use of ethanol as a fuel releases formaldehyde and acetaldehyde, plus benzene and butadiene. All of these are carcinogens and are a threat to public health."

Jacobson's study, however, concluded that the cancer-causing effects of ethanol would be roughly comparable to those of gasoline.

Chris Somerville, a Stanford professor who chairs the executive committee for the recently announced BP-funded Energy Biosciences Institute at UC Berkeley, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of Illinois, said the study was interesting and it "should be followed up with experimental work."

It is "possible that ethanol will not be the major biofuel in 2020," he said. "I see ethanol as a transitional fuel that will eventually be replaced by ... second-generation fuels. I am just uncertain whether it will be done by 2010 or whether it may take longer."

The institute is slated to develop a new generation of carbon-neutral biofuels, including ethanol.

Alex Farrell, a Berkeley professor of energy and resources, was also complimentary of the study.

"It's a good scientific paper that has taken the first look at the air-quality impacts of ethanol in a worst-case scenario," he said. "It is definitely my opinion that ethanol is not the only solution to air pollution."

Jacobson's computer model for Los Angeles is extremely high-resolution, as such models go. It breaks the Los Angeles atmosphere into a three-dimensional grid akin to 100,000 "boxes" stacked more than 10 miles high. Each box measures 3 miles wide and a few hundred feet deep.

He said he isn't surprised that no one previously tried to model the long-term health impacts of ethanol in such detail "because it's very complicated."

"The only reason I was able to do it is because I've been building this model for 18 years now," he said. "You really require a humongous model."

I think with a concentrated bit of effort we can wake up all
of the Americans who have not taken the time to realize
how dumb we have been. In the words of a good friend of mine, "just because you've been dumb doesn't mean you
have to stay dumb." . . .

-- DAVID R. BROWER

The government once had a plan to build a dam that would flood the Grand Canyon. That was less than 40 years ago, and the man who was instrumental in scuttling it, David Brower, has only just died. Filling up the Grand Canyon to produce hydropower? The idea seems almost bizarre today and it is a credit to our society’s evolution that it would seem so.
Saving the Grand Canyon was the most spectacular of Brower’s successes. Others included saving stands of ancient redwoods, the passage of the Wilderness Act and Wild River Act, and putting vast tracts of Alaska off limits to development, as well as smaller parts of Cape Cod. A few weeks after Brower’s death, President Clinton signed legislation preserving parts of the Florida Everglades, another of America’s wild areas that Brower had fought to preserve.

Brower was the kind of man for whom the failures loomed larger personally than the successes, and he summed up his achievements by saying, “All I did was to slow the rate at which things are getting worse.” And failure, he explained, is easier to measure than success: “When they win, it’s forever. When we win, it’s merely a stay of execution.”

His biggest failure was the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in Utah. When the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966 it inundated hundreds of square miles of Arizona and Utah. The dam served little purpose past (then unneeded) power generation and it destroyed some of the most beautiful riverine vistas in the country. Brower essentially traded Glen Canyon to keep the Bureau of Reclamation from erecting another dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, upstream from Glen Canyon. The experience of negotiating away priceless wilderness radicalized Brower, and made him unwilling to compromise.

Edward Abbey, in his compelling essay “Down the River” (collected in Desert Solitaire), wrote about a float through Glen Canyon in its last days above water: “The beavers had to go and build another god damned dam on the Colorado.” He fully expected that the Grand Canyon would experience the same watery death. But when the Sierra Club (under Brower’s leadership) ran full-page ads in the New York Times under the banner “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel, so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” it killed the monstrosity.

Brower was a prickly guy and that rare kind of true believer who becomes more radical with age. Like Abbey, Brower compared dam builders to beavers: “They can’t stand the site of running water.” It is a conundrum that the kind of uncompromising stance needed to save wild areas bleeds over to more reasonable projects. For instance the West Side Highway in New York, where decaying docks that supported populations of protected fish are among the reasons that drivers today wait in traffic jams. (This was not actually one of Brower’s projects, but, jeez those jams are irritating.) It is hard for fanatics to disaggregate the needed from the frivolous, and Brower followed some causes too far. But Brower’s extremism also provided cover for environmental moderates. Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality chairman Russell Train said, “Thank God for Dave Brower. He makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable.”

Brower was born in Berkeley, CA, the son of an instructor of mechanical drawing. Those in search of a developmental explanation for his combative personality might harp on his family history. He lost most of his teeth in an early traumatic fall, and was nicknamed “the toothless boob,” by his family until age 12, when a new crop of misshapen teeth emerged from his adolescent gums. Yet the family was also the source of his intense appreciation for nature. His mother went blind when he was seven, and he credited leading her around and describing what he saw with sharpening his appreciation of the natural world.

He studied entomology at Berkeley, but dropped out to become a mountaineer. He made 70 first ascents in Yosemite, and established many new routes up mountains there. He later said he “graduated from the university of the Colorado River.” He was still climbing the Himalayas into his 70s. During WWII he served as an instructor in the 10th Mountain Division. When he returned from the war he edited the Sierra Club magazine. In 1952 he was named executive director of the club John Muir had founded in 1911, by then little more than a somewhat politicized hiking group. Under Brower’s energetic leadership 7,000 members grew to over 70,000 by the 60s. Immediately after the 1966 ad campaign over the Grand Canyon dam, the IRS removed the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status. Brower welcomed the attention: “People who didn’t know whether they loved the Grand Canyon sure knew whether or not they loved the IRS.”

But by 1969 his radicalism had got him kicked out of the Sierra Club. The same year he founded Friends of the Earth, today the largest environmental group in the world. There are branches in 68 countries. FOE eventually kicked him out, too. But his motto for the organization, “Think globally, act locally,” lives on. Among the other organizations he founded was the Earth Island Institute.

Brower was friends with Ansel Adams. John McPhee wrote a book about him titled Encounters With the Archdruid (1971) in which McPhee called him the Sierra Club’s “preeminent fang.” He edited more than 50 books. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He worked to save more places than most nature fans visit in a lifetime, including the Northern Cascades in Oregon and Washington; the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina, the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, the Allagash Wilderness in Maine. He fought for trees, for porpoises, and against nuclear power and pesticides. He was, without peer, the most important environmentalist of the 20th century.

Brower is famous for saying, “We do not inherit the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.” The words are chiseled into stone at the National Aquarium in Washington, DC. But Brower claimed he only said it after a third martini to a reporter at a North Carolina bar. The sentiments he wished to be remembered for were more extreme: “We’re not just borrowing from our children, we’re stealing from them – and it’s not even considered to be a crime.”

He ended most speeches on a positive note borrowed from Goethe: “Anything you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Brower managed to alienate many of the people he worked with, but his dreams, many made into physical reality that the living can visit, will live on.

"Compact Fluorescent Bulbs can be taken to the Larimer County household hazardous waste center, located at the landfill. You may want to call them first, 970-498-5773, since some lamps have such a minute amount of mercury that they can go in your household trash. I don’t particularly like doing that, but the lamps themselves have very little salvage value."

The above information was sent to me by an anonymous 'reliable source'. Thank you, Bruce :)  

The following is from http://blog.wakeupwalmart.com/

In January 2007, Wal-Mart announced it had set a goal of selling 100 million compact fluorescent bulbs this year. But, even after two months, Wal-Mart has refused to adopt a national recycling program to deal with the serious environmental threat posed by the mercury content contained in the CFL’s.

Without a national recycling program, Wal-Mart’s efforts to sell 100 million CFL’s could result in the spreading of an estimated 227,273 pounds of mercury into American households. In addition, Wal-Mart has not publicly committed to selling only low mercury fluorescent light bulbs. In fact, the fluorescent light bulbs available for sale at Wal-Mart have a higher mercury content than similar fluorescent light bulbs available for sale at other retailers...

Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril

Published: February 27, 2007
Ann Johansson for The New York Times
Permission to reprint here pending

VISALIA, Calif., Feb. 23 — David Bradshaw has endured countless stings during his life as a beekeeper, but he got the shock of his career when he opened his boxes last month and found half of his 100 million bees missing.

In 24 states throughout the country, beekeepers have gone through similar shocks as their bees have been disappearing inexplicably at an alarming rate, threatening not only their livelihoods but also the production of numerous crops, including California almonds, one of the nation’s most profitable.

“I have never seen anything like it,” Mr. Bradshaw, 50, said from an almond orchard here beginning to bloom. “Box after box after box are just empty. There’s nobody home.”

The sudden mysterious losses are highlighting the critical link that honeybees play in the long chain that gets fruit and vegetables to supermarkets and dinner tables across the country.

Beekeepers have fought regional bee crises before, but this is the first national affliction.

Now, in a mystery worthy of Agatha Christie, bees are flying off in search of pollen and nectar and simply never returning to their colonies. And nobody knows why. Researchers say the bees are presumably dying in the fields, perhaps becoming exhausted or simply disoriented and eventually falling victim to the cold.

As researchers scramble to find answers to the syndrome they have decided to call “colony collapse disorder,” growers are becoming openly nervous about the capability of the commercial bee industry to meet the growing demand for bees to pollinate dozens of crops, from almonds to avocados to kiwis.

Along with recent stresses on the bees themselves, as well as on an industry increasingly under consolidation, some fear this disorder may force a breaking point for even large beekeepers.

A Cornell University study has estimated that honeybees annually pollinate more than $14 billion worth of seeds and crops in the United States, mostly fruits, vegetables and nuts. “Every third bite we consume in our diet is dependent on a honeybee to pollinate that food,” said Zac Browning, vice president of the American Beekeeping Federation.

The bee losses are ranging from 30 to 60 percent on the West Coast, with some beekeepers on the East Coast and in Texas reporting losses of more than 70 percent; beekeepers consider a loss of up to 20 percent in the offseason to be normal.

Beekeepers are the nomads of the agriculture world, working in obscurity in their white protective suits and frequently trekking around the country with their insects packed into 18-wheelers, looking for pollination work.

Once the domain of hobbyists with a handful of backyard hives, beekeeping has become increasingly commercial and consolidated. Over the last two decades, the number of beehives, now estimated by the Agriculture Department to be 2.4 million, has dropped by a quarter and the number of beekeepers by half.

Pressure has been building on the bee industry. The costs to maintain hives, also known as colonies, are rising along with the strain on bees of being bred to pollinate rather than just make honey. And beekeepers are losing out to suburban sprawl in their quest for spots where bees can forage for nectar to stay healthy and strong during the pollination season.

“There are less beekeepers, less bees, yet more crops to pollinate,” Mr. Browning said. “While this sounds sweet for the bee business, with so much added loss and expense due to disease, pests and higher equipment costs, profitability is actually falling.”

Some 15 worried beekeepers convened in Florida this month to brainstorm with researchers how to cope with the extensive bee losses. Investigators are exploring a range of theories, including viruses, a fungus and poor bee nutrition.

They are also studying a group of pesticides that were banned in some European countries to see if they are somehow affecting bees’ innate ability to find their way back home.

It could just be that the bees are stressed out. Bees are being raised to survive a shorter offseason, to be ready to pollinate once the almond bloom begins in February. That has most likely lowered their immunity to viruses.
Mites have also damaged bee colonies, and the insecticides used to try to kill mites are harming the ability of queen bees to spawn as many worker bees. The queens are living half as long as they did just a few years ago.

Researchers are also concerned that the willingness of beekeepers to truck their colonies from coast to coast could be adding to bees’ stress, helping to spread viruses and mites and otherwise accelerating whatever is afflicting them.

Dennis van Engelsdorp, a bee specialist with the state of Pennsylvania who is part of the team studying the bee colony collapses, said the “strong immune suppression” investigators have observed “could be the AIDS of the bee industry,” making bees more susceptible to other diseases that eventually kill them off.

Growers have tried before to do without bees. In past decades, they have used everything from giant blowers to helicopters to mortar shells to try to spread pollen across the plants. More recently researchers have been trying to develop “self-compatible” almond trees that will require fewer bees. One company is even trying to commercialize the blue orchard bee, which is virtually stingless and works at colder temperatures than the honeybee.

Beekeepers have endured two major mite infestations since the 1980s, which felled many hobbyist beekeepers, and three cases of unexplained disappearing disorders as far back as 1894. But those episodes were confined to small areas, Mr. van Engelsdorp said.

Today the industry is in a weaker position to deal with new stresses. A flood of imported honey from China and Argentina has depressed honey prices and put more pressure on beekeepers to take to the road in search of pollination contracts. Beekeepers are trucking tens of billions of bees around the country every year.

California’s almond crop, by far the biggest in the world, now draws more than half of the country’s bee colonies in February. The crop has been both a boon to commercial beekeeping and a burden, as pressure mounts for the industry to fill growing demand. Now spread over 580,000 acres stretched across 300 miles of California’s Central Valley, the crop is expected to grow to 680,000 acres by 2010.

Beekeepers now earn many times more renting their bees out to pollinate crops than in producing honey. Two years ago a lack of bees for the California almond crop caused bee rental prices to jump, drawing beekeepers from the East Coast.

This year the price for a bee colony is about $135, up from $55 in 2004, said Joe Traynor, a bee broker in Bakersfield, Calif.

A typical bee colony ranges from 15,000 to 30,000 bees. But beekeepers’ costs are also on the rise. In the past decade, fuel, equipment and even bee boxes have doubled and tripled in price.

The cost to control mites has also risen, along with the price of queen bees, which cost about $15 each, up from $10 three years ago.

To give bees energy while they are pollinating, beekeepers now feed them protein supplements and a liquid mix of sucrose and corn syrup carried in tanker-sized trucks costing $12,000 per load. Over all, Mr. Bradshaw figures, in recent years he has spent $145 a hive annually to keep his bees alive, for a profit of about $11 a hive, not including labor expenses. The last three years his net income has averaged $30,000 a year from his 4,200 bee colonies, he said.

“A couple of farmers have asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ ” Mr. Bradshaw said. “I ask myself the same thing. But it is a job I like. It is a lifestyle. I work with my dad every day. And now my son is starting to work with us.”

Almonds fetch the highest prices for bees, but if there aren’t enough bees to go around, some growers may be forced to seek alternatives to bees or change their variety of trees.

“It would be nice to know that we have a dependable source of honey bees,” said Martin Hein, an almond grower based in Visalia. “But at this point I don’t know that we have that for the amount of acres we have got.”

To cope with the losses, beekeepers have been scouring elsewhere for bees to fulfill their contracts with growers. Lance Sundberg, a beekeeper from Columbus, Mont., said he spent $150,000 in the last two weeks buying 1,000 packages of bees — amounting to 14 million bees — from Australia.

He is hoping the Aussie bees will help offset the loss of one-third of the 7,600 hives he manages in six states. “The fear is that when we mix the bees the die-offs will continue to occur,” Mr. Sundberg said.

Migratory beekeeping is a lonely life that many compare to truck driving. Mr. Sundberg spends more than half the year driving 20 truckloads of bees around the country. In Terra Bella, an hour south of Visalia, Jack Brumley grimaced from inside his equipment shed as he watched Rosa Patiño use a flat tool to scrape dried honey from dozens of beehive frames that once held bees. Some 2,000 empty boxes — which once held one-third of his total hives — were stacked to the roof.

Beekeepers must often plead with landowners to allow bees to be placed on their land to forage for nectar. One large citrus grower has pushed for California to institute a “no-fly zone” for bees of at least two miles to prevent them from pollinating a seedless form of Mandarin orange.

But the quality of forage might make a difference. Last week Mr. Bradshaw used a forklift to remove some of his bee colonies from a spot across a riverbed from orange groves. Only three of the 64 colonies there have died or disappeared.

“It will probably take me two to three more years to get back up,” he said. “Unless I spend gobs of money I don’t have.”