GoGreenNation.org » Sustainability

Cash Mob @Farmer’s Market!

Trish Riley — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:42:37 +0000

Cash Mob!Our goal is to support local family farmers by each spending $20 at the Alachua County 441 Farmers Market. Come check it out Saturday, February 4th 8:30AM to 1:00PM. Click here to see the flyer.

via Florida Organic Growers.

Race to save Ecuador’s ‘lungs of the world’ park

Trish Riley — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 14:21:28 +0000

The Yasuni National Park, known as "the lungs of the world" and one of the most bio-diverse places on earth, is under threat from oil drilling. The race is on to find the funds required to develop new sustainable energy programmes that would leave the oil – and the forest – untouched.

In the early light of dawn, the Napo River, running swiftly from its headwaters in the high Andes, swirled powerfully past the bow of our motorised canoe.

Suddenly, a dense cloud of green parrots swooped down from the canopy of the jungle and in a cackling din started scooping tiny beakfuls from the exposed muddy bank.

The heavy mineral rich clay, the birds seem to know, is an antidote to the toxins present in the seeds of the forest which are a major part of their daily diets.

via BBC News – Race to save Ecuador’s ‘lungs of the world’ park.

Green Drinks Feb. 1!

Trish Riley — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:17:59 +0000

Greetings, Green Drinkers and Cinema Verde Fans!

We had a great January candidates forum at Blue Water Bay – thanks to Shawn Sheppard and Jason Fults, as well to all of you who joined us! And now it’s time for some more fun next week…

Green Drinks (www.gogreennation.org/category/green-drinks/) will be held 6 – 8 p.m. Feb. 1 at Cafe C, 424 Northwest 8th Avenue – opening this night just for us, so please come hungry and thirsty!

The UF Office of Sustainability is sponsoring Green Drinks this month as a kick-off event of their month-long Food For Thought series highlighting sustainable and local foods. The evening will be co-hosted by Cafe C, a sustainable restaurant owned by Celebrations Catering, in celebration of our partnership with Celebrations to use their lovely Villa East (301 N. Main) as our venue for Cinema Verde (Feb. 24 – March 2).

Cinema Verde NEWS

ATTEND AND ADVERTISE: Our plans for Cinema Verde are evolving rapidly. We’ll have fairs to “Celebrate Nature” and provide “Sustainable Solutions” Feb. 24 and 25, and we invite environmental organizations and sustainable businesses to participate. We’re also creating our program and Sustainable Business Directory, which we would to be as comprehensive a resource as possible – please let us know if you’d like to be included. Details on our schedule and program opportunities are here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

CHECK OUT OUR FILMS: While we won’t be releasing our full film schedule until the end of January, we have posted links to a few films we plan to include. Directors and principals of many of these films would like to attend – please help bring them in by making a donation to cover their expenses! View the trailers for these films and donate here: http://www.verdefest.org/2012-cinema-verde-schedule/

FREE TICKETS!! Wear your Cinema Verde t-shirt around town, and if we see you we’ll give you a free ticket to one of our films! We’re selling tickets online and at the Wednesday Farmer’s Market, where you can get a shirt, too!

We welcome support of our 2012 festival, which is just around the corner, Feb. 24 – March 2, 2012. There will be tabling and booth opportunities for environmental organizations and businesses during our opening weekend and also during the week at individual films.

Please let us know if you’d like to let us help showcase your sustainable initiatives! Call Trish Riley: 352-327-3560… thank you!

Best,
Trish*–
Trish Riley, Director: Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival
www.CinemaVerde.org, PO Box 358711, Gainesville, FL 32635, 352.327.3560
Cinema Verde is a Florida not-for-profit corporation designated as a 501(c)(3) public charity by the IRS: Contributions are tax deductible.Thank you for your support!
Publisher: www.GoGreenNation.org

Cinema Verde Sponsor Reception

Trish Riley — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 22:08:05 +0000

Greetings, Green Drinkers and Cinema Verde Fans!

We had a great January candidates forum at Blue Water Bay – thanks to Shawn Sheppard and Jason Fults, as well to all of you who joined us! And now it’s time for some more fun next week…

Jan. 30 Sponsor Reception: Don Davis will host a reception to thank past and potential Cinema Verde sponsors at Capital City Bank, 1417 N. Main St., 5:30 – 7 p.m., please RSVP (Trish@CinemaVerde.org) if you’d like to join our circle of winners! Thank you, Don!

Cinema Verde NEWS

Please let us know if you’d like to let us help showcase your sustainable initiatives! Call Trish Riley: 352-327-3560… thank you!

Bill Moyers on Colbert

Christine — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 02:10:25 +0000

Bill Moyers exerts his charm on the interviewer.

Bill Moyers believes that capitalism is out of control and there can be no people’s democracy as long as corporations are considered people.

U.S. sets limits on fisheries

Christine — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 00:12:41 +0000

By Juliet Eilperin, Published: January 8, Washington Post

In an effort to sustain commercial and recreational fishing for the next several decades, the United States this year will become the first country to impose catch limits for every species it manages, from Alaskan pollock to Caribbean queen conch.

Although the policy has attracted scant attention outside the community of those who fish in America and the officials who regulate them, it marks an important shift in a pursuit that has helped define the country since its founding.

inShare

Graphic

Catch limits are intended to protect the 528 species in federally managed fisheries.

Unlike most recent environmental policy debates, which have divided neatly along party lines, this one is about a policy that was forged under President George W. Bush and finalized with President Obama’s backing.

“It’s something that’s arguably first in the world,” said Eric Schwaab, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s assistant administrator for fisheries. “It’s a huge accomplishment for the country.”

Five years ago, Bush signed a reauthorization of the Magnuson-Stevens Act, which dates to the mid-1970s and governs all fishing in U.S. waters. A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers joined environmental groups, some fishing interests and scientists to insert language in the law requiring each fishery to have annual catch limits in place by the end of 2011 to end overfishing.

Although NOAA didn’t meet the law’s Dec. 31 deadline — it has finalized 40 of the 46 fishery management plans that cover all federally managed stocks — officials said they are confident that they will have annual catch limits in place by the time the 2012 fishing year begins for all species. (The timing varies depending on the fish, with some seasons starting May 1 or later.) Some fish, such as mahi-mahi and the prize game fish wahoo in the southeast Atlantic, will have catch limits for the first time.

Until recently the nation’s regional management councils, which write the rules for the 528 fish stocks under the federal government’s jurisdiction, regularly flouted scientific advice and authorized more fishing than could could be sustained, according to scientists.

Joshua Reichert, managing director of the Pew Environment Group, said the law’s ban on overfishing forced fishery managers to impose limits that some commercial and recreational fishers had resisted for years.

“This simple but enormously powerful provision had eluded lawmakers for years and is probably the most important conservation statute ever enacted into America’s fisheries law,” Reichert said.

And unlike many environmental regulations, which are written and enforced by Washington officials, the fishing limits were established by regional councils representing a mix of local interests.

“Because the final decisions were left on the local level, you have a higher assurance of success,” said James L. Connaughton, who helped prepare the reauthorization bill while chairing the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “If it had been imposed in Washington, we’d still be stuck in 10 years of litigation.”

But the changes have not come without a fight, and an array of critics are seeking to undo them. Some commercial and recreational operators, along with their congressional allies, argue that regulators lack the scientific data to justify the restrictions. And they suggest that the ambitious goals the law prescribes, including a mandate to rebuild any depleted fish stock within a decade, are arbitrary and rigid.

Barnett aims for a ‘water ethic’

Christine — Thu, 29 Dec 2011 00:13:00 +0000

Bruce Ritchie
Floridaenvironments.com
Author Cynthia Barnett of Gainesville says she traces the start of her focus on water issues to a St. Petersburg Timespage 1A story written in 2003 that she says made her “insane.”

Barnett is author of “Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis.” It’s an important new book that challenges Americans to transform their views of water to protect and sustain a resource that is so important to people, the economy and the environment.

Her book follows her 2007 book “Mirage: Florida and the Vanishing Water of the Eastern U.S.” Mirage created the realization that water wars, droughts and vanishing supplies are issues no longer confined to arid Western states.

Four years before Mirage, Barnett had just earned her master’s degree in environmental history at the University of Florida. Among the books she had read was “Land into Water — Water into Land: A History of Water Management in Florida” by Nelson Manfred Blake.

Barnett said the book, published in 1980, described how developers throughout Florida’s history had “got rid of water, got rid of water, got rid of water.”

She also was working as an associate editor at the business magazine Florida Trend (which is owned by the Times). She said she was “writing stories about how developers are desperate to find water, find water, find water.”

“It was with that specific irony that the same guys who got rid of it all got desperate to find it,” Barnett told the attendees at the Society of Environmental Journalists national conference in Miami on Oct. 25.

But it was the St. Pete Times article — and watching the loss of her clear, bubbling springs in north Florida, that provided that extra motivation to focus on water threats, she said.

Times writers Craig Pittman and Julie Hauserman wrote the page 1A story “North has it, South wants it” telling how the Florida Council of 100 business group in 2003 was working on a recommendation to then-Gov. Jeb Bush to redirect water from slow-growing, water-rich North Florida to booming Central and South Florida.

“They wanted to move water from the north to South Florida or Central Florida to replenish what they had drained,” Barnett said. “That single story got me so insane that I went on to spend the next eight years of my life writing water books.”

In researching “Blue Revolution,” Barnett traveled around the United States and the world exploring places where people are conserving and protecting water or are looking for more. She paints no one as saints or villains, just players in a system where too much authority has been turned over to utilities, power companies and engineers. We use water with wasteful abundance in some areas when it is tragically lacking in other areas.

It’s an amazing book and is amazingly well-written. It ties history and policy-making with water disasters around the world, such as the disappearing Aral Sea in Central Asia or the Colorado River as it disappears, never making it to the sea.

In the Netherlands, she explores how the Dutch created engineering marvels and disasters along its coastline. In Singapore, the island nation has created a water ethic that led to reducing pollution, reusing treated wastewater and cleaning up waterways. But farmers were moved off their lands and the nation’s residents lost touch as their natural waterways were viewed as enemies.

Barnett drills down into the politics, economics and seeming corruption that drive the “water-industrial complex” in this country. The water industry drives us towards engineered solutions rather than low-tech adaptations towards living lightly on the land.

In her firm but polite and well-researched way, Barnett touches everyone’s lives, making us think about how our ignorance or how our religious views of the end of the world may shape our living now. And she makes us think about how our hurried lives separate us from knowing life’s crucial resource and where it comes from.

But she offers so much more for the reader to take away than self-loathing or condemnation of others.

Her writing encourages us all to learn about our sources of water — to explore our own neighborhood frog creeks from where they begin as a trickle on the land to where they end in a bay or ocean.

“The blue revolution is a reconnection to water,” she writes. “It gives children more natural waters to play in — flowing springs and rivers. It alters the way our communities look: More meandering streams, less concrete. More natural wetlands thronged by living things, fewer chain-lined retention ponds. More green roofs, less asphalt. More shade trees, less open lawn. More plant buffers to filter rain, fewer stagnant stormwater basins. More community farms, less industrial irrigation.”

Her idea of a “water ethic” is borrowed from Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” in his landmark conservation book “A Sand County Almanac.” The land ethic was first applied by his hydrologist son, Luna, to water.

And Barnett ends her book by acknowledging Luna Leopold’s “acid test of leadership” on environmental issues and describing how that begins with the individual, be they a homeowner, a water engineer or a member of Congress.

“The water ethic begins with that one, brave steward,” she writes. “Then, it spreads out into the community, building collective courage among citizens, businesspeople, church members, political leaders. Just like ripples of children playing in a wide, free river.”

Inspired by the journalism of others, Barnett is creating a new brand of environmental journalism that will inspire others.

(Photos courtesy of Beacon Press. Story copyrighted by Bruce Ritchie and Floridaenvironments.com. Do not copy or redistribute without permission, which can be obtained from brucebritchie@gmail.com)

Michael Pollan’s food classes

Christine — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 23:50:53 +0000

Joe Fassler writes in The Atlantic about Edible Education 101. Joe Fassler, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, teaches creative writing at the University of Iowa. In 2011, his work for TheAtlantic.com was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award in Journalism. He hosts The Lit Show on KRUI radio and litshow.com.

This fall at the University of California, Berkeley, a new course surveys the political, social, environmental, and gustatory stakes of modern food production. In his Edible Education 101: The Rise and Future of the Food Movement, Berkeley journalism professor and best-selling author Michael Pollan yields the spotlight to other experts: Though he appears frequently as introducer, moderator, and panelist, the classes are focused on an all-star cast of guest lecturers. Taken together, these food A-listers and innovators provide a compelling, comprehensive portrait of 21st-century eating. Each lecture is available, for free and in full, via UC Berkeley’s YouTube channel.

For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start.

“This is a very powerful lineup such has never been accumulated for a single class,” Pollan told students in his introduction to the course. If you’re already asking questions about your food, it’s likely your favorite author-activist appears. For people learning about food systems for the first time, this class may be the very best place to start.

Edible Education 101 commemorates the 40th anniversary of Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant founded by chef Alice Waters, whose culinary approach — fresh food, prepared simply and sourced well — has influenced several generations of eaters. This year, Waters has rebranded her Chez Panisse Foundation as the Edible Schoolyard Project, which will seek to recreate the Foundation’s Berkeley-based teaching garden in other school systems throughout the nation. Waters thought that a Berkeley course, taught by Pollan, would be a fitting way to usher in the new era of student outreach.

Pollan found a co-teacher in Nikki Henderson, a Bay Area activist who directs The People’s Grocery, a non-profit that seeks to improve the health and wealth of West Oakland residents with locally grown food. Her focus on food education and social justice complements Pollan’s interest in the philosophy and semiotics of eating, as well as Waters’ farm-to-tastebuds culinary approach.

As they planned the course, Waters, Pollan, and Henderson decided that each weekly meeting would focus on a specific theme — lecture topics like “Nutrition, Health, and Diet-Related Disease,” “School Lunch and Edible Schoolyards,” and “Corporations and the Food Movement.” From there, they began reaching out to qualified authorities on each topic, slowly assembling a food Dream Team.

“Alice brought her years of experience and relationships to the table, which was fantastic,” Henderson told me by phone. “Michael wanted the course to be academically rigorous — a sophisticated inquiry and exploration and into some of the more difficult topics.”

“My focus,” she said, “was to make sure that justice was central — that race and class and power were concepts to be digested deeply by the audience, and by the speakers.”

In the Bay Area, Edible Education 101 has become a phenomenon. Each week, Berkeley made 300 free tickets available to the public, and, according to Henderson, tickets to the first lecture sold out within 10 minutes. But even by live stream, it was thrilling to watch the boldfaced names lecture at the university podium — Raj Patel’s wryly comic illuminations of farm economics, for instance, or Carlo Petrini’s passionately gruff exhortations on the virtues of Slow Food, the movement he founded (extemporaneously translated from the Italian by our own Corby Kummer).

Georgia River Reindeer Population Dramatically Dropping (PHOTOS)

Trish Riley — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 22:23:31 +0000

The world’s largest reindeer population has plummeted up to 92 percent in the last few decades. Once standing at 900,000, the George River herd now stands at 74,000, according to Survival International.

Important to the Innu and Cree people of Quebec and Labrador in eastern Canada, iron-ore mining, hydro-power flooding and road building are reportedly to blame for the depleting numbers of reindeer.

Innu elder and Chief Georges-Ernest Gregoire told Survival International: “All the massive industrial ‘development’ projects that have been imposed on our land in the last forty years have undoubtedly had a cumulative impact on the size of the caribou herd. That is why we need real control over our territories and resources, and why we must be involved as equals in decisions that affect our lands and the animals that live there.”

via Georgia River Reindeer Population Dramatically Dropping (PHOTOS).

Town aims for food self-sufficiency

Christine — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 04:43:42 +0000

Vincent Graff -of the Daily Mail reports, dailymail.co.uk, on the town that is growing its own:

Admittedly, it sounds like the most foolhardy of criminal capers, and one of the cheekiest, too.

Outside the police station in the small Victorian mill town of Todmorden, West Yorkshire, there are three large raised flower beds.

If you’d visited a few months ago, you’d have found them overflowing with curly kale, carrot plants, lettuces, spring onions — all manner of vegetables and salad leaves.

Today the beds are bare. Why? Because people have been wandering up to the police station forecourt in broad daylight and digging up the vegetables. And what are the cops doing about this brazen theft from right under their noses? Nothing.

Well, that’s not quite correct.

‘I watch ’em on camera as they come up and pick them,’ says desk officer Janet Scott, with a huge grin. It’s the smile that explains everything.

For the vegetable-swipers are not thieves. The police station carrots — and thousands of vegetables in 70 large beds around the town — are there for the taking. Locals are encouraged to help themselves. A few tomatoes here, a handful of broccoli there. If they’re in season, they’re yours. Free.

So there are (or were) raspberries, apricots and apples on the canal towpath; blackcurrants, redcurrants and strawberries beside the doctor’s surgery; beans and peas outside the college; cherries in the supermarket car park; and mint, rosemary, thyme and fennel by the health centre.

The vegetable plots are the most visible sign of an amazing plan: to make Todmorden the first town in the country that is self-sufficient in food.

‘And we want to do it by 2018,’ says Mary Clear, 56, a grandmother of ten and co-founder of Incredible Edible, as the scheme is called.

‘It’s a very ambitious aim. But if you don’t aim high, you might as well stay in bed, mightn’t you?’

So what’s to stop me turning up with a huge carrier bag and grabbing all the rosemary in the town?

‘Nothing,’ says Mary.

What’s to stop me nabbing all the apples?

‘Nothing.’

All your raspberries?

‘Nothing.’

It just doesn’t happen like that, she says. ‘We trust people. We truly believe — we are witness to it — that people are decent.’

When she sees the Big Issue seller gathering fruit for his lunch, she feels only pleasure. What does it matter, argues Mary, if once in a while she turns up with her margarine tub to find that all the strawberries are gone?

‘This is a revolution,’ she says. ‘But we are gentle revolutionaries. Everything we do is underpinned by kindness.’

The idea came about after she and co-founder Pam Warhurst, the former owner of the town’s Bear Cafe, began fretting about the state of the world and wondered what they could do.

They reasoned that all they could do is start locally, so they got a group of people, mostly women, together in the cafe.

‘Wars come about by men having drinks in bars, good things come about when women drink coffee together,’ says Mary.

‘Our thinking was: there’s so much blame in the world — blame local government, blame politicians, blame bankers, blame technology — we thought, let’s just do something positive instead.’

We’re standing by a car park in the town centre. Mary points to a housing estate up the hill. Her face lights up.

‘The children walk past here on the way to school. We’ve filled the flower beds with fennel and they’ve all been taught that if you bite fennel, it tastes like a liquorice gobstopper. When I see the children popping little bits of herb into their mouths, I just think it’s brilliant.’

She takes me over to the front garden of her own house, a few yards away.

Three years ago, when Incredible Edible was launched, she did a very unusual thing: she lowered her front wall, in order to encourage passers-by to walk into her garden and help themselves to whatever vegetables took their fancy.

There were signs asking people to take something but it took six months for folk to ‘get it’, she says.

They get it now. Obviously a few town-centre vegetable plants — even thousands of them — are not going to feed a community of 15,000 by themselves.

But the police station potatoes act as a recruiting sergeant — to encourage residents to grow their own food at home.

Today, hundreds of townspeople who began by helping themselves to the communal veg are now well on the way to self-sufficiency.

But out on the street, what gets planted where? There’s kindness even in that.

‘The ticket man at the railway station, who was very much loved, was unwell. Before he died, we asked him: “What’s your favourite vegetable, Reg?” It was broccoli. So we planted memorial beds with broccoli at the station. One stop up the line, at Hebden Bridge, they loved Reg, too — and they’ve also planted broccoli in his memory.’

Not that all the plots are — how does one put this delicately? — ‘official’.

Take the herb bushes by the canal. Owners British Waterways had no idea locals had been sowing plants there until an official inspected the area ahead of a visit by the Prince of Wales last year (Charles is a huge Incredible Edible fan).

Surplus vegetables grown at the high school go on sale, with all proceeds going directly back to the school.

Estelle Brown, a 67-year-old former interior designer who tended the plot, received an email from British Waterways.

‘I was a bit worried to open it,’ she says. ‘But it said: “How do you build a raised bed? Because my boss wants one outside his office window.”’

Incredible Edible is also about much more than plots of veg. It’s about educating people about food, and stimulating the local economy.

There are lessons in pickling and preserving fruits, courses on bread-making, and the local college is to offer a BTEC in horticulture. The thinking is that young people who have grown up among the street veg may make a career in food.

Crucially, the scheme is also about helping local businesses. The Bear, a wonderful shop and cafe with a magnificent original Victorian frontage, sources all its ingredients from farmers within a 30-mile radius.

There’s a brilliant daily market. People here can eat well on local produce, and thousands now do.

Meanwhile, the local school was recently awarded a £500,000 Lottery grant to set up a fish farm in order to provide food for the locals and to teach useful skills to young people.

Click the below picture for a Wake Up World Only Special Offer

Jenny Coleman, 62, who retired here from London, explains: ‘We need something for our young people to do. If you’re an 18-year-old, there’s got to be a good answer to the question: why would I want to stay in Todmorden?’

The day I visit, the town is battered by a bitterly-cold rain storm. Yet the place radiates warmth. People speak to each other in the street, wave as neighbours drive past, smile.

If the phrase hadn’t been hijacked, the words ‘we’re all in this together’ would spring to mind.

So what sort of place is Todmorden (known locally, without exception, as ‘Tod’)? If you’re assuming it’s largely peopled by middle-class grandmothers, think again. Nor is this place a mecca for the gin-and-Jag golf club set.

Set in a Pennine valley — once, the road through the town served as the border between Yorkshire and Lancashire — it is a vibrant mix of age, class and ethnicity.

A third of households do not own a car; a fifth do not have central heating.

You can snap up a terrace house for £50,000 — or spend close to £1?million on a handsome stone villa with seven bedrooms.

And the scheme has brought this varied community closer together, according to Pam Warhurst.

Take one example. ‘The police have told us that, year on year, there has been a reduction in vandalism since we started,’ she says. ‘We weren’t expecting this.’

So why has it happened?

Pam says: ‘If you take a grass verge that was used as a litter bin and a dog toilet and turn it into a place full of herbs and fruit trees, people won’t vandalise it. I think we are hard-wired not to damage food.’

Pam reckons a project like Incredible Edible could thrive in all sorts of places. ‘If the population is very transient, it’s difficult. But if you’ve got schools, shops, back gardens and verges, you can do it.’

Similar schemes are being piloted in 21 other towns in the UK, and there’s been interest shown from as far afield as Spain, Germany, Hong Kong and Canada. And, this week, Mary Clear gave a talk to an all-party group of MPs at Westminster.

Todmorden was visited by a planner from New Zealand, working on the rebuilding of his country after February’s earthquake.

Mary says: ‘He went back saying: “Why wouldn’t we rebuild the railway station with pick-your-own herbs? Why wouldn’t we rebuild the health centre with apple trees?”

‘What we’ve done is not clever. It just wasn’t being done.’

The final word goes to an outsider. Joe Strachan is a wealthy U.S. former sales director who decided to settle in Tod with his Scottish wife, after many years in California.

He is 61 but looks 41. He became active with Incredible Edible six months ago, and couldn’t be happier digging, sowing and juicing fruit.

I find myself next to him, sheltering from the driving rain. Why, I ask, would someone forsake the sunshine of California for all this?

His answer sums up what the people around here have achieved.

‘There’s a nobility to growing food and allowing people to share it. There’s a feeling we’re doing something significant rather than just moaning that the state can’t take care of us.

‘Maybe we all need to learn to take care of ourselves.’