Let’s get the New Year off to a fresh start by tackling this sickening situation. In public spaces across the country, including offices, stores, restaurants, airports, and schools, air "freshener" is being forced upon us. Daily we are subjected to known carcinogens, endocrine disruptors, and other toxic substances. Sounds like a horror film, but it is our scentsational reality.We’ve talked before about the hazards inherent in air fresheners. The EPA puts it quite poetically: "Air fresheners are usually highly flammable and also strong irritants to eyes, skin, and throat. Additionally, the solid fresheners usually cause death if eaten by people or pets."Yes, these household helpers — which became popular in the 1950s, along with perky smiles and perfect apple pies — contain all manner of harmful ingredients, including formaldehyde, a powerful pesticide called paradichlorobenzene, and phthalates. In short, air "fresheners" actually make our air quality much worse, polluting our space and our bodies. To quote the EPA again, "air fresheners … release pollutants more or less continuously."

via Ask Umbra: Can air fresheners make you sick? | Grist.

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).

Health advocacy groups have worked for decades to get the Environmental Protection Agency to require coal and oil-burning power plants to restrict emissions of mercury, dioxin, lead, arsenic and other toxic pollutants that can cause cancer, heart and developmental diseases, asthma and premature deaths. Though more than a dozen states have adopted such rules on their own to spare their citizens the health-damaging consequences of such pollution, electric power industry lobbyists have generally pressured Washington to resist establishment of federal standards on such toxins. Last week, the EPA and the Obama administration finally imposed the standards.

The new rule, 20 years in the making, marks a huge and notable Christmas gift of cleaner, healthier air in the near future. If it is fully implemented over the next four years, studies show it will save tens of thousands of lives and diminish health care costs by an estimated $90 billion.

The new rule to restrict the electric industry’s worst emitters of toxic air pollution is, indeed, long overdue. Even TVA agrees its past time to clean-up or shut-down its dirtiest old plants. Resisting this rule in Congress would be myopic and wrong-headed. Americans deserve cleaner, healthier air. It’s time they got it.

via Hope for healthier air | timesfreepress.com.

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.’

via A Deliciously Resourceful Town Aims For Total Food Self-Sufficiency in 7 Years | Wake Up World.

A high-speed robotic screening system, aimed at protecting human health by improving how chemicals are tested in the United States, begins today to test 10,000 compounds for potential toxicity. The compounds cover a wide variety of classifications, and include consumer products, food additives, chemicals found in industrial processes, and human and veterinary drugs. A complete list of the compounds is publicly available at www.epa.gov/ncct/dsstoxTesting this 10,000 compound library begins a new phase of an ongoing collaboration between the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, referred to as Tox21. NIH partners include the National Toxicology Program NTP, administered by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences NIEHS, and the NIH Chemical Genomics Center NCGC, part of the NIH Center for Translational Therapeutics NCTT, housed at the National Human Genome Research Institute NHGRI.

via US Tox21 to begin screening 10,000 chemicals, December 7, 2011 News Release – National Institutes of Health NIH.

Black cumin is regarded by many as a panacea and may therefore not be taken seriously by some, but for those inclined to dismiss folklore, it should be noted that these humble seeds have been found superior to almost every other natural remedy when used for autoimmune disorders, conditions in which patients suffer greatly because their own systems attack their bodies. Black cumin, especially when combined with garlic, is regarded as a harmonizer of the imbalance which allows immune cells to destroy healthy cells. The technical language to describe this property is “immunomodulatory action.” The difference between black cumin and interferon is that there are no known side effects with black cumin when administered in normal dosages. The saying goes that the beauty of black cumin is their capacity to restore harmony.

via Black Cumin Seed: The Ancient Remedy for All Diseases.

As the weather begins to cool off, I find myself spending more time baking in the warmth of my kitchen. Lately, I’ve taken the opportunity to experiment with sourdough breads.

Sourdough is a game entirely unlike bread baking with active dry yeast or a bread machine – it requires a little more time and attention. But, once you learn the basics of keeping a sourdough starter you’ll discover an infinite world of bread making.

Sourdough bread has a rich history, dating back as far as the Ancient Egyptians of 1500 BC. Until only 130 years ago, all bread was leavened with a sourdough starter…

Continued via The Fine Print’s City Farmer: DIY Sourdough Starter and Chestnuts A’Plenty

I hope you’re enjoying the fall as we are. It’s a nice time to cuddle up with a good movie, eh? I’m enjoying rolling into fall. I just spent a week on the road – an odyssey that took me to Miami for the Society of Environmental Journalists conference, where I caught up with colleagues and told them about GoGreenNation.org and Cinema Verde. Then I (and Teddi) rolled on to Tampa, where I attended a conference put on by the Florida Department of Cultural Affairs, instructing us all on how to help our legislators learn about our cultural programs. It was time and 945 miles well spent, and I’m glad to be back home in Gainesville and behind my desk.

Green Drinks: We had a great meeting last month at The Midnight Cafe and Bar, thanks to Beverley Webb of The Midnight and Chris Cano of Gainesville Compost, who told us about his new compost-to-garden project. Thanks to all who attended; we had wonderful networking and discussions.

Our next Green Drinks meeting will be sponsored by Alachua Conservation Trust, and held at Prairie Creek Lodge as a fundraiser for Cinema Verde. Your donations will accrue toward a VIP pass for our upcoming film festival, February 24th to March 2nd, 2012. Join us at Prairie Creek Lodge, November 2nd 2011, 6-9 pm., 7204 SE County Road 234 Gainesville, FL. Come out and network with others who are interested in sustainability and environmental issues.

Saturday November 12, 7-9:30 pm Cinema Verde, our local Audubon Chapter and Paynes Prairie State Preserve will present a viewing of End of the Line, a film about overfishing that we showed at our festival in 2010. The film presents a hard look at how is overfishing impacting the environment, our food and our future. This is the first major feature documentary film to reveal the devastating effect that global over-fishing is having on fish stocks and the health of our oceans and is a wake up call to us all.
Following the film we’ll have a discussion with Cameron Jaggard, a speaker from the Pew Environment Group – the conservation arm of The Pew Charitable Trusts. Cameron will tell us about the issue of surface longline fishing in the Gulf of Mexico and discuss policy making with an interest in transitioning to more selective fishing practices.

Join us: 7-9:30 p.m., Saturday October 15, 2011 at Paynes Prairie Visitor’s Center, 100 Savannah Blvd. at Paynes Prairie State Preserve. South of Gainesville off US 441. Look for the park sign on the east side of 441. Be advised that it takes 20 – 30 minutes to travel through the park to the Visitor’s Center, so please plan to arrive early! There are displays and area walkways to explore before the film begins.
Free park admission for film goers! Suggested donation for the film $7; free film for campers!

More fun stuff:

Cinema Verde had a great day at Boo at the Zoo, Santa Fe College, 3-7 p.m. Monday, October 31, 2011. Thanks for all who came out and to Santa Fe College and the US Green Building Council for putting it together to provide a fun, safe Halloween for the kids in our community!

Cinema Verde will be in the University of Florida Homecoming parade with the bikers team on Friday, November 4th 2011; Come out and march with us (free t-shirt!)!

Plan to celebrate the third anniversary of Green Drinks with us on December 7… location TBA; sponsor, JDPais of Pais Realty. Please join us for fun and celebration of all things Green!

Cinema Verde and Green Drinks appreciate your support – would you like to help us? We are seeking partners and sponsors – please let us know how we can create a win/win with your organization to promote environmental education in our community!
Let us help you showcase your sustainable business or organization at our community events!
Contact Trish Riley, Director: 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 — Thank you!

Thank you all so much for your support and interest in Cinema Verde and environmental issues!
Best,
Trish*–
Trish Riley
Director: Cinema Verde Environmental Film & Arts Festival
352.327.3560
www.CinemaVerde.org
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

A provocative new video by political filmmakers Brave New Films says that Crossett residents who suffer from poor air quality and ambient carcinogens are victims of pollution emitted by a Koch Industries-owned paper manufacturer, Georgia-Pacific. The plant is located directly upstream from the channel behind Penn Road. “Whatever’s in (the water) is killing these trees,” says David Bouie in the video. “You can see the steam coming from the stuff. It gets up in the air, and it flows over where our property is.”

Natalie Kottke, co-producer of “Koch Brothers Exposed,” said the people she interviewed in Crossett had all worked for Georgia-Pacific in some capacity.

“A lot of their diseases and suffering came later in life, after they retired,” she told HuffPost in an interview. “They feel very betrayed by a company that they invested their whole lives in.” Many of them bought property in Crossett, expecting to retire there and have their grandchildren come visit, only to find their homes may have made the children sick.

via Koch-Owned Georgia-Pacific Plant Linked To High Cancer Rates, Film Alleges.