Garden Girl

“But let’s look at it like this: In Kenya, where millions of undernourished, underemployed people choke the slums of Nairobi and Mombasa, should the fertility of the nation’s prime farmland, and the efforts of its most ingenious farmers, rightly be used to grow organic tomatoes for consumers in Mother England?

By the same token, should the best farmland of Guatemala and Mexico be devoted to stocking the off-season produce shelves at Whole Foods outlets in the comfy areas of Austin and Manhattan?”

link to the rest of the article

Granny Good Food now has a blog that’s very worth keeping up with.

“When I was a girl, you got food from the grocery store, and then got your medicine from the drug store. Today, there are drug stores inside grocery stores. This is not a coincidence. If you eat just anything off the shelves without doing your homework, you will need medicine.

Caldwell County (I live in Lockhart) apparently uses a lot of medicine, with 14,159 of the 36,523 residents having asthma, emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease, and diabetes.[1] That’s a whopping 39% sick people in this county! In blogs to come, I will expose the food fraud and venomous vittles that are sabotaging our health and stealing our future, and hopefully change these frightening numbers. ”

Link from the Austin American Statesman

Good article in Salon

“The short version is that a wedge represents a climate solution that starts slowly but then rises in impact over the 50 years and ultimately avoids the emission of one billion tons of carbon per year. If the average car on the road in 2057 got 60 miles per gallon, that would be one wedge.

The world needs 8 to 10 wedges, starting now, to avoid catastrophic global warming. Interestingly, the report makes clear that:

For nuclear power to be even one wedge we would need 10 Yucca Mountains to store the waste.

We would have all of the proliferation risks associated with spreading nuclear power across the planet.

And the power isn’t cheap: 8.3 to 11.1 cents per kilo-watt hour.”

Read more here.

This article doesn’t even factor in the resources needed to cool nuke plants.

Maybe superconductor tech, cold fusion or some other break thru will change the scene– if they can be researched and implemented in time, but the bald facts are these:

The so called clean coal we have now puts out more carbon than oil does.

Biofuel as it is now, will further tax poor soil quality and will mean less food for the planet, also ” the U.N. warns, that could lead to erosion, nutrient leaching,and — if the crops replace forests — ‘large releases of carbon from the soil and forest biomass that negate any benefits of biofuels for decades.’ ”

‘Tho Gore makes an argument for a biofuels as a transitional energy source. Read here about that.

Solar will be getting cheaper & better, but even combining it with hydro, wind and fuel cells (none of which are in place on any scale & it will take oil to manufacture the change over to them, btw.)

Throw in nukes– sure why not, even tho we still don’t have a good solution for the waste, if you want, or investing more in getting to what oil is left in tar sands or in the Antarctic.

None of it will keep up with our current energy use.

I say use and not needs, because I’m deeply convinced that we need more community and less strip malls. More intimacy and less mass media entertainment. The ever amazing Colin Beavan has a great post on the topic right here .

We will have to scale down & localize much more than we are used to. We don’t have much more of the single cheap energy source we have. None of the replacement tech currently offered is going to be *nearly * as plentiful & inexpensive as oil and we don’t have the infrastructure for replacing oil yet. Global climate change is going to make transitioning to other options even more expensive than it normally would be as supply lines and whole economies become destabalized.

So maybe we’d best take this as our wake up call to re examine our values. Maybe , even if we could buy as many McMansions, SUVS and home theaters as we wanted, they simply woulden’t feed us what we truly need: which is, in my opinion, a sense that we are a human family together, exploring and learning in a universe full of wonders.

Good news here.

If stories like this:

Feds: Millions have eaten chickens fed tainted pet food.

encourage your desire to eat organic food, then stories like this:

…in high summer of 2005, about the time I was seeing red in my kitchen, the same thing was happening to some of our county’s tomato farmers. They had learned organic methods, put away the chemicals, and done everything right to grow a product consumers claimed to want. They’d waited the three years and paid for certification. They’d watered, weeded, and picked, they’d sorted the round from the misshapen, producing the perfect organic tomatoes ordered by grocery chains. And then suddenly, when the farmers were finally bringing in these tomatoes by the truckload and hoping for a decent payout, some grocery buyers backtracked. “Not this week,” one store offered without warning, and then another. Not the next week either, nor the next. A tomato is not a thing that can be put on hold. Mountains of ripe fruits piled up behind the packinghouse and turned to orange sludge, swarming with clouds of fruit flies.

As simply as that, a year of planning and family labor turned to red mush.

may make you think about buying local.

I’m on an organic beekeeping email list of about 1,000 people, mostly Americans, and no one in the organic beekeeping world, including commercial beekeepers, is reporting colony collapse on this list. The problem with commercial operations is pesticides used in hives to fumigate for varroa mites and antibiotics are fed to the bees to prevent disease. Hives are hauled long distances by truck, often several times during the growing season, to provide pollination services to industrial agriculture crops, which further stresses the colonies and exposes them to agricultural pesticides and GMOs.

The whole post is fascinating & potentially very good news!

Self-sufficiency on a balcony

If you suffer from allergies– not just to plants but to things like nutri-sweet, you will want to watch this. Seriously.