Relocalization Community of Loveland

David Brower, The Man Who Saved Nature

MyPetGoat — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 21:28:13 -0700

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.

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Food As Medicine - presented by Sara Frank

Rsmith — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 21:35:49 -0700

Start: 2007-04-03 19:00

End: 2007-04-03 21:00

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril

MyPetGoat — Sun, 04 Mar 2007 07:45:44 -0800

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.”

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Boulder Valley Relocalization Panel Discussion

Rsmith — Mon, 26 Feb 2007 17:38:55 -0800

Start: 2007-03-01 19:00

End: 2007-03-01 21:00

Relocalization Community of Loveland

RCL Public Event

p_padden — Sun, 04 Feb 2007 18:13:07 -0800

Start: 2007-02-08 19:00

End: 2007-02-08 21:00

Relocalization Community of Loveland

How to Get Involved

p_padden — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 17:06:42 -0800

How You Can Get Involved

Easy ways to minimize your impact

Eat Locally/Grow your own food
Start a compost pile! Grow a garden!
Buy from independent and locally owned businesses.
Lower your thermostat 2 degrees in winter and raise it 2 degrees in summer. It sames 2000 lbs. of carbon dioxide a year.
Cut down water use. Use a low flow shower head or collect rain water.
Use less hot water! Wash clothes on cold or warm and turn down temp on hot water heater.
Bring your own bags to the store!
Support the local Farmer's Markets. Frozen food uses 10xs more energy.
Get to know local farmers and participate in CSAs.
Plant a tree!
Turn off and unplug electronic devices when not in use. They drain energy even when turned off.
Switch to green power. Clean, renewable sources such as wind and solar.
Stop throwing away disposable everything. Use reusable containers,and rags instead of paper towels.
Look in to transportation alternatives. Ride a bike, walk or carpool. Enjoy the fresh air!
Choose a more fuel efficient car or truck.
Replace all 60 watt incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent (CFL) 15 watt bulbs. save 300 lbs. of carbon dioxide a year per light bulb. CFL's online from Energy Federation.
Join Community Dialogues.

Compiled by Brita LaTona

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Resources

p_padden — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:36:19 -0800

Resources for Living Sustainably

Books:

The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and other Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century by James Howard Kunstler
PowerDown: Options and Actions for a Post Carbon World by Richard Heinberg
Relocalize Now! Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil by Julian Darley
The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David Korten

Films:

The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream
The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil
The Future of Food
An Inconvenient Truth
Transforming Energy

Local Farms/Farmers:

Cresset Community Farm (CSA) 970-278-0499 www.cressetcommunityfarm.com
Monroe Organic Farms LLC (CSA) 970-284-7941 www.monroefarms.com
Miller Farms 970-785-6133 www.millerfarms.net
Happy Heart Farm (CSA) 970-482-3448 www.happyheartfarmcsa.com

Important Websites:

Compiled by Brita LaTona for The Relocalization Community of Loveland

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Relocalization Community of Loveland Film Screening

p_padden — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 15:16:22 -0800

Start: 2007-02-01 19:00

End: 2007-02-01 21:00

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Relocalization Community of Loveland Film Screening

p_padden — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 13:49:59 -0800

Start: 2007-01-25 19:00

End: 2007-01-25 21:00

Relocalization Community of Loveland

Relocalization Community of Loveland

s_frank — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 11:21:43 -0800