The California power grid wants to make sure it can keep electricity flowing as residents rely on a greater amount of wind and solar power and strict water rules force the shutdown of power plants along the coast in the next few years, the agency said.

California has the most ambitious plan of any state to expand use of renewable resources to 33 percent by 2030, by boosting wind and solar generation.

California is also ahead of other states in efforts to dramatically reduce the amount of ocean-water used for cooling at existing natural gas-fired power plants built along the coast.

via Calif. seeks flexible power rules as wind expands | Reuters.

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.

During a Republican presidential primary debate last June, Michele Bachmann lit into the Environmental Protection Agency, recommending it be renamed the “job-killing organization of America.” Her fellow contenders nodded in agreement, each explaining how shutting down the EPA, or at least instituting a moratorium on regulations, would be a priority in their White House.

The GOP’s desire to kill America’s chief environmental regulator hasn’t just been grist for the bizarre sideshow that is the Republican Party’s presidential primary. Over the past year, Republicans in Congress — in actual positions of power — have succeeded in massively defunding the EPA. In March, no less than nineteen riders were floated on the floor of the House of Representatives to cut the EPA’s budget. Fifteen Republican senators even proposed deleting the EPA as a cabinet-level agency. The harshest of these legislative bombs were diffused, but the cuts that prevailed added up to the largest single year drop in EPA funding since 1981 when President Reagan (“Trees cause more pollution than automobiles do”) began his unprecedented assault on the greens.

Republicans by no means have a monopoly on the “job killer” trope. Moderate, so called-Blue Dog Democratic senators like Jay Rockefeller and Ben Nelson, who hail from states with huge corporate energy interests, have co-sponsored legislation to ditch specific EPA standards. Even President Obama recently reinforced the mythology that environmental regulations are counterproductive to economic development, saying in September that his decision to rescind ozone air-quality standards was essential to the nation’s economic recovery. Both parties also are seriously pursuing environmental deregulation of industry, and cuts to the nation’s major cleanup programs.

The problem with all of this, however, is that California’s economy is now crucially dependent on environmental regulation and remediation. This is especially true in cities where decades of industrial pollution have created an environment not only toxic to human health, but also economic investment.

In fact, cleaning up toxic sites has become a fundamental driver of the Bay Area’s economy. As a result, cutting the EPA’s budget, and possibly reducing funds for the state agency responsible for partnering in cleanup, the Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), will stall job creation and condemn huge swaths of urban California as economic dead zones.

But the fallacy that environmental laws kill jobs doesn’t end there. According to economists who study the impact of regulation on markets, California’s economy will likely add more jobs and develop new vibrant sectors of activity much faster if politicians embrace ambitious environmental goals. According to this emerging school of thought, environmental regulations aren’t only pivotal for human health and environmental quality, they stimulate innovation, and innovation is the key to California’s economy.

Read the rest here.

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!

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

By Chris Cano
Check out the Midnight garden, a canvas of “living art” powered by compost produced from the food waste of the Gainesville local restaurant community, including The Midnight’s fruit and vegetable scraps which we collect each week via bicycle.

via Building The Midnight’s New Edible Wall Garden [Photo Story] | Gainesville Compost.

Here’s another interesting story I wrote this year..what a cool biz: Recycling humans and animals!-tr

RTI Biologics employs 700 people worldwide, 500 of these at the Alachua headquarters. The spotlessly clean facility operates 24/7, with receiving facilities always ready for gifts of human donated tissue, which are quarantined in freezers on first arrival, while testing and screening is conducted to determine if the tissue is safe for transplantation. The tissue is shaped into its final form, then sterilized through one of RTI’s proprietary tissue sterilization processes before being distributed to surgeons worldwide.

via An issue of tissue | Evolution Online.

Locals are finding ways to move away from food created by corporations

BY KATHY JOHNSTON

A quiet revolution is stirring in local kitchens. All over San Luis Obispo County, people are claiming their right to decide what goes in their mouths and their power to choose where it comes from.

Residents with various income levels are filling their forks with fresh food from local farms and fields as the local food movement gains ground. The Central Coast is among the easiest places for people to pack their plates with food from the community, rather than corporate commodities.

Eating fresh local food is moving beyond farmers, markets, and fancy restaurants. Today’s options include home delivery of just-picked fruit and vegetables from dozens of local farms; improved access to fresh, local produce for people with limited incomes; backyard gardens and chicken coops; a push to grow old-fashioned crops to meet local demand; even a new SLO City-owned farm.

“There’s definitely a shift away from corporate food,” said Caroline Ginsberg, on a break from picking ripe red apples from an orchard at SLO Creek Farms on a sunny afternoon earlier this month. She’s the volunteer coordinator for GleanSLO, a local nonprofit whose volunteers harvest thousands of pounds of excess local crops for distribution to hungry families by the SLO County Foodbank.

Foodbank staff and volunteers are working to increase the amount of local produce provided to hungry people, rather than relying on the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s “heavily processed” commodity foods, Ginsberg said.

In addition to GleanSLO and the Foodbank, other groups and agencies are pushing to give people better access to fresh foods in SLO County, according to Clint Slaughter, board chairman for the Environmental Center of San Luis Obispo County (ECOSLO). A new countywide effort known as the Food System Coalition aims to see people with limited incomes use their food voucher cards to buy fresh, local, nutritious products for their dining tables. Under a $100,000 Hunger-Free Communities planning grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture, other actions to enhance the county’s food system are also under study.

“Even on a budget, if you cook it, you can make a delicious healthy meal—but it is more challenging until we relearn how to do it,” Slaughter said, pointing out that earlier generations grew a large percentage of their food in backyard victory gardens.

“You can actually grow a decent amount of food on your balcony, or in a community garden plot. Plus the Central Coast has so much opportunity for healthy, locally grown food. You see the benefits across the board, on health and the local economy,” he said.

As an emergency room physician, Slaughter is concerned about the costly obesity epidemic in the United States: “Obesity is preventable; it depends on what we’re eating. By eating locally grown fresh vegetables and fruit without sugar or additives, we have the opportunity to avoid obesity.”

Locally raised, grass-fed beef is also healthier than the meat from cattle kept in concentrated feed lots, he added, where the amount of antibiotics used on the animals is “quite appalling,” leading to problems with the development of resistant bacteria. He and his family bought a share of a grass-fed cow raised in the Cayucos hills, part of a growing local movement to provide healthier meat and poultry.

Along with more than 500 other local residents, the Slaughters also subscribe to a weekly home-delivery service for freshly harvested local produce: SLO Veg. Owner Dan Melton collects crops from more than 60 Central Coast farmers, assembling the yield in various sized boxes for delivery to his customers at their homes or workplaces.

“There’s a huge amount of awesome farmland around here, some with fourth- or fifth-generation farmers, some new to it. The farmers have definitely embraced SLO Veg,” Melton said.

So have his customers, as the business continues to expand.

“It’s a growing social psychology to want to know where your food comes from,” he explained. “It’s a great change in people’s attitude. Even people with less income, people who are struggling, are willing to spend more, to look me in the eye and have confidence in their food.”

His customers compare their weekly veggie box to opening a Christmas present: “I hear them say with excitement, ‘The box is here! What’s in the box?’” he said.

For Laura Slaughter, who does most of the cooking in the family home, receiving the weekly box is fun. She and her 2-year-old son unload it together, remarking on each vegetable or fruit.

“We’ve made lots of new things—bok choy, pomegranates—and I do enjoy it. Sometimes there’s a little hesitation—what do I do with a daikon radish?—but that’s part of being local. The food is so healthy, and we know a carrot is a carrot, not something shipped across the country with no taste and no nutrition,” she said.

She’s grateful to have the opportunity to make healthy, pesticide-free baby food from the contents of their weekly box, pureeing the produce and freezing it in ice cube trays for their son’s meals.

As her husband said with a smile, “You just feel better. It’s a warm and fuzzy feeling.”

Fork you, Wall Street

The recent Occupy movement has helped inspire people to think about where their food comes from, said farmer John deRosier.

“There’s a general vibration that we need to go more local with food, to get it out of the hands of corporations,” deRosier said.

“In San Luis Obispo County, you can get everything [locally raised] but grains and dairy. If we get our act together, we could do those, too,” he said.

He’s passionate about supplying locally grown grain crops, leasing fields with different microclimates all over the county where he grows a variety of old-fashioned grains, including hull-less oats, several kinds of wheat, barley, sorghum, triticale, rye, millet, and more unusual crops including quinoa, amaranth, and teff.

A bright green field of vibrant young oat plants shimmered, catching the late-autumn sunshine in the Los Osos Valley recently as deRosier threw out his hands with enthusiasm.

“This is a connection story I feel with humanity and grain,” he said. “We’ve grown grain for at least 10,000 years. This is how we survived. There’s a lot of reverence for grain in pretty much every culture. These plants are so amazing.”

He knelt down in the dark, rich soil, cradling the young shoots, his eyes glowing as he said, “All the stages are so intriguing. They blow in the wind and make a chattering sound. There’s a spirit that’s so vital, that calls up a sense of real life and sustenance and community.”

But industrial farms are geared toward producing great quantities of grains, rather than focusing on quality, he said.

“Grain is the poster child for corporate farming. A few companies own the entire world supply of grain because it’s easy to move and store. To me, being non-corporate is a big part of the story. We’re never going to have a strong community food system without grain. Our food supply is dependent on these plants,” he said.

Turning these plants into useable food is “challenging,” requiring quite a bit of labor and specialized equipment, but for deRosier, the satisfaction is worth it.

“You’re eating food from someone who touched it, who co-collaborated to bring it to you. If you buy quality food, if you buy fresh and local, you’re supporting individual farming operations that have integrity. We have to support what we want to see with our dollars,” he said. “Farmers and ranchers are the ones interacting with our environment. It takes the consumer to make the big wheel of environmental stewardship turn. It’s the most empowering thing we can do.”

Fresh, local food is also being produced in more and more SLO County backyards. In Garden Farms south of Atascadero, Rob and Karyn Kimmell raise their own “really, really fresh eggs,” honey, herbs, heirloom vegetables, fruit, and nuts behind their home. Known as Tread Lightly Farm, their less-than-an-acre plot is based on permaculture principles that work with nature.

Chickens scratched in the fallen leaves beneath fruit trees just before dusk earlier this month. The birds had been temporarily released from the portable cage Rob Kimmell called a “chicken tractor.” The hens—and a rooster—eat the bugs, till the soil, mow the lawn, and fertilize the ground, he explained.

His passion lately, though, is honeybees and their gift of pollinating the various food plants in the garden, plus “the unity and the soul” they show as they work together for the good of the whole—and, of course, the “precious” honey they produce.

His eyes shining with unabashed love for his six-legged friends, Kimmell showed a visitor the inside of one of the bees’ homes, an elevated, peaked-roof box known as a top bar hive. Along with several others around the yard, it was constructed by hand from plans he found online. The couple’s bees are managed naturally, with an emphasis on helping the pollinators proliferate rather than a focus on honey production.

Although backyard beekeeping is not allowed in many parts of SLO County, the large plots and supportive attitude in Garden Farms have made the bees a welcome addition to the neighborhood, Kimmell said.

And, he added, the backyard honey is much more healthy and alive than chain-store honey from China.

“We enjoy the excitement of growing our own food. This is an easily reproducible model. You don’t have to have much land to increase the proportion of your diet that comes from your own yard,” he said.

Trading some of the backyard harvest with other nearby gardeners can turn a neighborhood into a grocery store, according to Elizabeth Johnson, who helped form the SLO County Seed Exchange, which she described as a nonpolitical, non-hierarchical group that gets together annually to share seeds from their gardens.

“The Seed Exchange is a celebration of all the good things, such as the aesthetics of what seeds look like. Although the organizers don’t want it to be political, for me personally, that’s such a major thing, especially this year, the way corporations are trying to take over seeds,” Johnson said.

“Where corporations have become so strong, it’s really important to regain control over your own life and what you eat. Food from large corporate farms has become toxic, with 15 forms of corn in one product. It behooves us to stay away from that,” she added.

Back at the GleanSLO apple harvest gathering just south of San Luis Obispo, SLO Creek Farms’ owner Robyn Gable expressed his appreciation for the many volunteers who have helped him see this year’s bumper crop picked and distributed to those in need.

Surrounded by trailers piled with the just-picked red-and-gold orbs of Braeburn apples reflecting the afternoon sun, Gable smiled as he said, “People on the East Coast are shoveling snow, and we’re shoveling sunshine!”

GleanSLO volunteers sipped golden apple juice bursting with fresh flavor, crushed from apples that were hanging on heavily laden trees less than an hour before.

“We’re hoping to figure out how to preserve more of the produce from local farms. Even after we glean, there’s still more there,” said Stephanie Peaford, a board member for the organization. A fruit-canning gathering at the SLO Senior Center was a “community-building” experience, bringing older residents with knowledge of food preserving together with younger folks eager to learn, she said.

Another local-food activist at the apple orchard, Greg Ellis, explained his vision for “garden matchmaking,” a system to connect gardeners with unused garden space. He’s also working on a project to create more backyard gardens this coming springtime, with a “flash mob” of workers converging to build and install raised beds for growing food.

Even the City of SLO is hopping on the local-food bandwagon, with the newly created, city-owned SLO City Farm on 25 acres off Los Osos Valley Road and Calle Joaquin at the south end of town. Shopping-center developers were required to preserve 50 percent of their land in agriculture, under the city’s General Plan.

The Central Coast Agricultural Network recently received a $255,000 grant from the California Department of Food and Agriculture to develop the SLO City Farm, with the idea of providing organically grown food crops and public education.

Awareness of the pitfalls of the nation’s corporate-dominated food supply is spreading, with locally grown food widely seen as a solution. For example, a prestigious foodie group, the James Beard Foundation, chose this theme for its national conference in October: “Sustainability on the Table: How Money and Media Influence the Way America Eats.”

The way SLO County eats is moving away from the influence of money and media, with local menu choices relying increasingly on what’s growing on local farms and ranches, what’s living in nearby coastal waters, and what’s thriving in backyards and garden spaces.

As Melton of SLO Veg observed, “Food is such an intimate part of a person’s life. Everyone wants to be healthy.”

Contributing writer Kathy Johnston can be reached at kjohnston@newtimesslo.com.

Reporting from Yadkinville, N.C.

Loyd Bryant used to pump manure from his 8,640 hogs into a fetid lagoon, where it raised an unholy stink and released methane and ammonia into the air. The tons of manure excreted daily couldn’t be used as fertilizer because of high nitrogen content.

The solution to Bryant’s hog waste problem was right under his nose — in the manure itself.

Graphic: Power-generating hogs

A new waste-processing system — essentially a small power plant — installed on his 154-acre farm uses bacteria to digest the waste and burns methane to produce electricity. It also converts toxic ammonia into forms of nitrogen that can be used as fertilizer for more profitable crops.

Waste-to-energy systems have been around for at least 15 years. But Duke University, which helped develop and pay for Bryant’s system, says this one is the cleanest in existence — and virtually the only one that tackles all of the environmental problems created by animal waste.

The system was built with off-the-shelf parts and simple design plans that are free for the asking. It’s poised to become the standard for a cleaner waste-to-energy model that brings together farmers, utilities and private companies in an environmentally friendly effort.

“It does it in a way that is not overly complicated and stands to yield many more benefits beyond energy production and environmental protection,” said Tatjana Vujic, director of Duke University’s Carbon Offsets Initiative.

The $1.2-million project is funded by the university, Duke Energy and Google, which operates a data center in nearby Lenoir, N.C. All three, along with Bryant, will benefit.

Bryant saves money on electricity and gets a cleaner farm. Improved air quality in his hog barns also means his pigs will have lower mortality rates and convert feed more efficiently, fattening Bryant’s profits.

Duke University and Google earn carbon offset credits from the system. And Duke Energy gets renewable energy credits in a state where a new law requires utilities to produce a small percentage of electricity from renewable resources beginning next year. North Carolina is the only state that will require a portion of that “set-aside” to include electricity produced from hog waste.

Bryant, whose family has farmed the rolling Piedmont of central North Carolina for four generations, says the 65-kilowatt turbine generates enough electricity to power the system — and five of Bryant’s nine hog barns, where giant fans hum day and night. The digester captures methane equivalent to 5,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide per year and produces enough electricity to power 35 homes a year.

“It’s cut my electric bill in half, and it’s going to make it so I can grow corn and wheat and beans,” Bryant, 71, said as he stomped across the sticky clay soil around the aeration basin.

**

The project is attracting national attention at a time when a growing number of U.S. livestock farms use various types of waste-to-energy systems to produce electricity and reduce greenhouse gases.

The Duke system is “pioneering,” said Gary Gero, president of Climate Action Reserve in Los Angeles, a nonprofit group that runs the nation’s largest carbon-offset registry and which developed the protocols that register and verify carbon offsets on Bryant’s farm.

Gero said the project shows that digester systems can benefit farmers, the environment and corporations while solving myriad environmental problems not entirely addressed by other systems. “They’re taking it to a new level,” he said.

The number of waste-to-energy systems nationally is growing every year, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Last year, 162 digester systems on U.S. farms produced 435 million kilowatt-hours of electricity — enough to power 25,000 homes for a year.

The systems reduced methane emissions by 51,000 metric tons and produced enough electricity to avoid 264,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel power plants — comparable to removing 235,000 cars from the roads. The reduction in methane emissions last year was nearly 22 times as great as in 2000, according to the EPA.

The traditional eight-hour workday may soon be the exception rather than the rule. New evidence shows that we’re reaching a tipping point in terms of workplace flexibility, with businesses seeing the wisdom of allowing employees — young ones especially — to work odd hours, telecommute and otherwise tweak the usual 9-to-5 grind.

One of the top 12 trends for 2012 as named by the communications firm Euro RSCG Worldwide is that employees in the Gen Y, or millennial, demographic — those born between roughly 1982 and 1993 — are overturning the traditional workday.

The Business and Professional Women’s Foundation estimates that by 2025, 75% of the global workforce will be Gen Y.

via Gen Y Workers to Employers: Flexible Hours, Not 9 to 5 | Moneyland | TIME.com.

Green Drinks invites the community to attend a candidate forum for the upcoming Gainesville City Commission election. The forum will take place at Blue Water Bay (http://www.thebluewaterbay.com/), at its new Gainesville location (12 SE 2nd Ave.) on Wednesday, January 4, 2012 from 6-8pm.

Numerous candidates from both the At-Large and the District 1 races have already confirmed attendance, and each will be given several minutes to speak, in addition to a question & answer session. There will also be opportunities for one-on-one discussion with candidates both before and after the forum.

Green Drinks is a non-profit international organization that meets informally each month in more than 700 cities worldwide to bring together sustainable businesses, organizations and government leaders who are working to create an environmentally healthy and sustainable future. We meet in Gainesville the first Wednesday each month at different locations to provide the opportunity to showcase sustainable businesses and to connect those who are engaged in creating a healthy future for our community and the planet.

Green Drinks Gainesville is presented by www.GoGreenNation.org, an environmental news and resource website. Green Drinks has been a wonderful forum for discussion and dissemination of ideas, and was the incubator for the annual Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival. Our meetings average 30-60 attendees each month; we recently celebrated our third anniversary with more than 150 attendees. Anyone interested in sustainability issues is welcome to attend Green Drinks; it’s a great networking opportunity.

For more information about Green Drinks, or to learn how we can help you showcase your sustainable business or organization at our community events, please contact Trish Riley (352-327-3560
Trish@GoGreenNation.org).

Please share our events with friends and in your newsletters: Green Drinks meets the first Wednesday of each month at varying sustainable businesses. For location information visit www.GoGreenNation.org.