In 1992, at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, 12 year old Severn Cullis-Suzuki spoke to the delegates. Her video, now known as "The Girl Who Silenced the World for 5 Minutes" is one of the most inspirational speeches I've ever witnessed.
Severn has been an activist for all her life.
She continues to change the world with her work but her words, almost two decades later still inspire us to stop. To reflect. To CHANGE. But can we? Can we actually listen? And do we have the courage to act.
There is a great movie with Bill Nighy and Kelly Macdonald called "The Girl in the Cafe". It is a love story but it gives insight into the inner-workings of the G8 Summit. In a crucial scene Gina speaks out in a situation where there is tremendous pressure to stay silent... but she can't. You can see the discomfort in the room but in spite of that she continues to speak the simple honest words that have so much impact on those around her. Those that have the power but are often too willing to compromise.
We should never be afraid to speak. We cannot always change the world but we can change ourselves and how we live. We can change our world.. and hopefully all of these individuals will become a groundswell that nothing can stand against.
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Friday, September 17, 2010
Messages from MUTTS
I love the MUTTS comic strip and it's creator, Patrick McDonnell. He mixes in fun and humor with important messages about animal welfare and issues.
According to the site:
McDonnell's website, muttscomics.com, promotes his animal and earth friendly philosophy. Consistent with McDonnell's concern for the environment, all of the MUTTS books are printed on recycled paper. He and his wife Karen O'Connell are vegetarian and happily reside with their formerly feral cat MeeMow.
Thank you, Patrick for the work you do. Your strip always makes me think... and smile.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Collaborative Consumption
I'm very much in favor of Collaborative Consumption. I think it helps reduce cost and waste and brings people and, hopefully, communities together.
Part of our goal as "Less Impact Fam(ily)" is to not buy someting if we don't need it and to see if we can borrow or share it as the first option.
Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.
I've seen this coming together happen after a natural disaster. What if it was something that you feel comfortable doing every day?
Sunday, April 4, 2010
Becoming the "Less Impact Fam(ily)"
I am a fan of self-improvement. I love to learn and experiment and explore. I read a lot, I try new things, I refuse to stagnate. One of my relaxation treats is to watch documentaries. Lately they have been on food (Food, Inc., Future of Food, King Corn, Earthlings), social and cultural issues and environmentalism. These have always been some of my favorite topics so it was great to watch No Impact Man which combines all of these topics.
What is so neat about watching this movie is that I had read the No Impact Man blog during the time he was embarking on this "experiment". If you aren't familiar with the blog or the movie, Colin embarked on a year-long trial with his wife and child to see how little they could impact the earth. This means they tried to only eat locally, cut out trash, stopped using chemical cleaners, phased out electricty and got around using their own two feet, bicycles or scooter.
The documentary had an inspirational influence on me. We do our best here to lighten our load on the environment. We're vegan for starters, which does create a huge reduction but we also try to be good about the recycling, reusable bags, making stuff from scratch a lot and only one of us commutes to work. We have a high efficiency washer & dryer and only do about 6 loads a month. We haven't used a dishwasher in 10 years. So all that isn't bad to start. But after watching the documentary, we're inspired to try and push ourselves to do a bit more.
So, what are we going to put into place? Well...
- Eliminate eating out, especially take out, unless we're going out for a social occassion with friends or family
- Reduce/Eliminate food packaging by buying in bulk, making stuff on our own (granola for cereal, bread, tomato sauce, almond milk, veggie/bean burgers, etc.) and freezing or storing it in reusable containers. Bring our own reusable bags for shopping and bulk and produce buying.
- Remove our names from all catalogs and ask our banks and bills to go paperless.
- Stop buying commercial cleansers and make ours from natural options including borax, castile soap, baking soda and vinegar
- Use up all of our current stock of food items and personal care items before buying more
- Stop using paper towels (except for pet messes) and swiffer cloths. Instead use sponges and cloth towels, cloth napkins and broom, dust pan and steam mop
- Cut down our overall consuption (HUGE issue!)
- Borrow or barter before buying
- Attempt to reuse/refill packaging before recycling
- Sell or donate items that are just taking up physical and mental space. If they are not getting actively used they need to go.
- Low energy evenings. This means turing out the lights and turning off the TV/games at dusk. We will relax, read, etc. We don't need or want so much sensory input all the time.
- Hold out on turning on the AC or heaters. It's cool in the house now with the windows open, the fans on and the attic fan on. It was above 80 degrees today and we still felt okay in the house. Our goal is to see how long we can go into May before it gets too warm inside.
- Create and maintain our garden. Keep composting but do more such as using our bean soaking water to water the plants.
- Buy most of our produce from the farmer's market. We pretty much do this any ways but we want to be better about eating seasonally.
- Install a clothes line to dry some of our laundry
- Work on house projects we have the stuff for but have been putting off.
It seems like a lot but I don't think it will be that difficult. These are all things we like and want to do but we just have not sat down and decided to to do them. We have a few things we need to put into place, like the clothing line and some window fans, but these are all doable.
We'll keep you informed with what's working and what isn't. What are something you would like to do or suggest to us?
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The Meat of the Problem via The Washington Post
An interesting article in mainstream media that talks about, if you care about the environment, you can do more good by eliminating meat from your diet. Worth reposting.
The Meat of the Problem
By Ezra Klein
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The debate over climate change has reached a rarefied level of policy abstraction in recent months. Carbon tax or cap-and-trade? Upstream or downstream? Should we auction permits? Head-scratching is, at this point, permitted. But at base, these policies aim to do a simple thing, in a simple way: persuade us to undertake fewer activities that are bad for the atmosphere by making those activities more expensive. Driving an SUV would become pricier. So would heating a giant house with coal and buying electricity from an inefficient power plant. But there's one activity that's not on the list and should be: eating a hamburger.
If it's any consolation, I didn't like writing that sentence any more than you liked reading it. But the evidence is strong. It's not simply that meat is a contributor to global warming; it's that it is a huge contributor. Larger, by a significant margin, than the global transportation sector.
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat's contribution to climate change is intuitive. It's more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. "Manure lagoons," for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas -- interestingly, it's mainly burps, not farts -- is a real player.
But the result isn't funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. "How convenient for him," was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. "He's a vegetarian."
The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in bacon has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this issue. The National Resources Defense Council has a long page of suggestions for how you, too, can "fight global warming." As you'd expect, "Drive Less" is in bold letters. There's also an endorsement for "high-mileage cars such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids." They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word "meat" is nowhere to be found.
That's not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn't poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. "The Sierra Club isn't opposed to eating meat," was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. "So that's sort of the long and short of it." And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock.
The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you'd otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn't require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn't mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It's healthful. And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that "you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch." Given that PB&J is delicious, it's not the world's most onerous commitment.
It's also worth saying that this is not a call for asceticism. It's not a value judgment on anyone's choices. Going vegetarian might not be as effective as going vegan, but it's better than eating meat, and eating meat less is better than eating meat more. It would be a whole lot better for the planet if everyone eliminated one meat meal a week than if a small core of die-hards developed perfectly virtuous diets.
I've not had the willpower to eliminate bacon from my life entirely, and so I eliminated it from breakfast and lunch, and when that grew easier, pulled back further to allow myself five meat-based meals a month. And believe me, I enjoy the hell out of those five meals. But if we're going to take global warming seriously, if we're going to make crude oil more expensive and tank-size cars less practical, there's no reason to ignore the impact of what we put on our plates.
Ezra Klein can be reached at kleine@washpost.com or through his blog at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ezraklein.
The Meat of the Problem
By Ezra Klein
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
The debate over climate change has reached a rarefied level of policy abstraction in recent months. Carbon tax or cap-and-trade? Upstream or downstream? Should we auction permits? Head-scratching is, at this point, permitted. But at base, these policies aim to do a simple thing, in a simple way: persuade us to undertake fewer activities that are bad for the atmosphere by making those activities more expensive. Driving an SUV would become pricier. So would heating a giant house with coal and buying electricity from an inefficient power plant. But there's one activity that's not on the list and should be: eating a hamburger.
If it's any consolation, I didn't like writing that sentence any more than you liked reading it. But the evidence is strong. It's not simply that meat is a contributor to global warming; it's that it is a huge contributor. Larger, by a significant margin, than the global transportation sector.
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat's contribution to climate change is intuitive. It's more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. "Manure lagoons," for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas -- interestingly, it's mainly burps, not farts -- is a real player.
But the result isn't funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. "How convenient for him," was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. "He's a vegetarian."
The visceral reaction against anyone questioning our God-given right to bathe in bacon has been enough to scare many in the environmental movement away from this issue. The National Resources Defense Council has a long page of suggestions for how you, too, can "fight global warming." As you'd expect, "Drive Less" is in bold letters. There's also an endorsement for "high-mileage cars such as hybrids and plug-in hybrids." They advise that you weatherize your home, upgrade to more efficient appliances and even buy carbon offsets. The word "meat" is nowhere to be found.
That's not an oversight. Telling people to give up burgers doesn't poll well. Ben Adler, an urban policy writer, explored that in a December 2008 article for the American Prospect. He called environmental groups and asked them for their policy on meat consumption. "The Sierra Club isn't opposed to eating meat," was the clipped reply from a Sierra Club spokesman. "So that's sort of the long and short of it." And without pressure to address the costs of meat, politicians predictably are whiffing on the issue. The Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, for instance, does nothing to address the emissions from livestock.
The pity of it is that compared with cars or appliances or heating your house, eating pasta on a night when you'd otherwise have made fajitas is easy. It doesn't require a long commute on the bus or the disposable income to trade up to a Prius. It doesn't mean you have to scrounge for change to buy a carbon offset. In fact, it saves money. It's healthful. And it can be done immediately. A Montanan who drives 40 miles to work might not have the option to take public transportation. But he or she can probably pull off a veggie stew. A cash-strapped family might not be able buy a new dishwasher. But it might be able to replace meatballs with mac-and-cheese. That is the whole point behind the cheery PB&J Campaign, which reminds that "you can fight global warming by having a PB&J for lunch." Given that PB&J is delicious, it's not the world's most onerous commitment.
It's also worth saying that this is not a call for asceticism. It's not a value judgment on anyone's choices. Going vegetarian might not be as effective as going vegan, but it's better than eating meat, and eating meat less is better than eating meat more. It would be a whole lot better for the planet if everyone eliminated one meat meal a week than if a small core of die-hards developed perfectly virtuous diets.
I've not had the willpower to eliminate bacon from my life entirely, and so I eliminated it from breakfast and lunch, and when that grew easier, pulled back further to allow myself five meat-based meals a month. And believe me, I enjoy the hell out of those five meals. But if we're going to take global warming seriously, if we're going to make crude oil more expensive and tank-size cars less practical, there's no reason to ignore the impact of what we put on our plates.
Ezra Klein can be reached at kleine@washpost.com or through his blog at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ezraklein.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Questions
One of the questions you get (among many) when you are vegetarian or vegan is:
Don't you care about people? Why don't you spend more time worrying about people rather than animals.
Personally, I find it very weird to think that these two things are mutually exclusive. Many people I know who are animal activists care very much for people too. They care about the environment. They often do other volunteer work. They support anti-child labor laws.
But even if you don't actively campaign for a human cause, you are helping people by switching to a vegetable based diet.
There are tons of side benefits that eliminating animals and animal secretions from our diets. Insurance rates could be lowered because health would be better. Lifestyles would improve. The run off from animal processing plants would be reduced. The mental trauma from killing animals would not happen either.
Another huge impact is to the clear cutting of the rain forest for cattle. This impacts our air, potential medicines and even slave labor. Greenpeace just released thier report on the Amazon Cattle Footprint. Some highlights from the report are:
- Forests are a crucial carbon stock: forest ecosystems globally store about one-anda-half times as much carbon as is present in the atmosphere.25 Deforestation of tropical forests is responsible for up to approximately 20% of the global emissions of greenhouse gas, more than the world’s entire transport sector.
- The Amazon is estimated to store between 80-120 billion tonnes of carbon.27,28 If this is destroyed, roughly 50 times the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the US will be emitted.
- Cattle ranching in the Amazon has horrific social impacts, including the highest rates of slave labour in Brazil. 3005 rural workers, kept in slavery, were freed from cattle ranches in 2008. 99% of them had been held in the Legal Amazon.
- The region is home to more than 20 million people – including over 200,000 indigenous people, belonging to 180 different ethnic groups31. The rainforest is their home, providing them food and shelter to tools and medicines - it is also central to their spiritual life.
- Studies estimate that the Amazon supports 40,000 plant species; 427 mammals; 1,294 birds; 378 reptiles; 427 amphibians and 3,000 species of fish. Many other species are still unknown.
- The Amazon produces 20% of river water in the world. The forest influences the hydrologic cycle at local and regional scales, as humidity retained by the Amazon is carried by the wind to other parts of Brazil and South America. The reduction of the forest cover diminishes the amount of rainfall on the Southeast and Center of Brazil, affecting agriculture productivity.
- Belched methane from livestock constitutes one of the largest sources (roughly 30%) of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Agriculture as a whole contributes between 10-12% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
- The greenhouse gas emissions from beef are13 kilograms CO2-eq per kg36. This means eating a kilogram of beef represents roughly the same greenhouse emissions as flying 100 kilometers of a flight, per passenger.
It is definetly something to consider when you are choosing your food. The food we eat should be considered as carefully as any other choice, be it politics or money, because each bite we take as far reaching consequences. Consequences that impact more than just ourselves. The impact of each meal is shared by the world.
Don't you care about people? Why don't you spend more time worrying about people rather than animals.
Personally, I find it very weird to think that these two things are mutually exclusive. Many people I know who are animal activists care very much for people too. They care about the environment. They often do other volunteer work. They support anti-child labor laws.
But even if you don't actively campaign for a human cause, you are helping people by switching to a vegetable based diet.
There are tons of side benefits that eliminating animals and animal secretions from our diets. Insurance rates could be lowered because health would be better. Lifestyles would improve. The run off from animal processing plants would be reduced. The mental trauma from killing animals would not happen either.
Another huge impact is to the clear cutting of the rain forest for cattle. This impacts our air, potential medicines and even slave labor. Greenpeace just released thier report on the Amazon Cattle Footprint. Some highlights from the report are:
- Forests are a crucial carbon stock: forest ecosystems globally store about one-anda-half times as much carbon as is present in the atmosphere.25 Deforestation of tropical forests is responsible for up to approximately 20% of the global emissions of greenhouse gas, more than the world’s entire transport sector.
- The Amazon is estimated to store between 80-120 billion tonnes of carbon.27,28 If this is destroyed, roughly 50 times the annual greenhouse gas emissions from the US will be emitted.
- Cattle ranching in the Amazon has horrific social impacts, including the highest rates of slave labour in Brazil. 3005 rural workers, kept in slavery, were freed from cattle ranches in 2008. 99% of them had been held in the Legal Amazon.
- The region is home to more than 20 million people – including over 200,000 indigenous people, belonging to 180 different ethnic groups31. The rainforest is their home, providing them food and shelter to tools and medicines - it is also central to their spiritual life.
- Studies estimate that the Amazon supports 40,000 plant species; 427 mammals; 1,294 birds; 378 reptiles; 427 amphibians and 3,000 species of fish. Many other species are still unknown.
- The Amazon produces 20% of river water in the world. The forest influences the hydrologic cycle at local and regional scales, as humidity retained by the Amazon is carried by the wind to other parts of Brazil and South America. The reduction of the forest cover diminishes the amount of rainfall on the Southeast and Center of Brazil, affecting agriculture productivity.
- Belched methane from livestock constitutes one of the largest sources (roughly 30%) of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture. Agriculture as a whole contributes between 10-12% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
- The greenhouse gas emissions from beef are13 kilograms CO2-eq per kg36. This means eating a kilogram of beef represents roughly the same greenhouse emissions as flying 100 kilometers of a flight, per passenger.
It is definetly something to consider when you are choosing your food. The food we eat should be considered as carefully as any other choice, be it politics or money, because each bite we take as far reaching consequences. Consequences that impact more than just ourselves. The impact of each meal is shared by the world.
Monday, November 24, 2008
Invisible Kindnesses
Photo by landre via flickr
I wrote about the peacefulness of our little microcosm here in my backyard and today I had one more of those moments.
When I go to let the chickens out in the morning it is usually just after dawn. The sun is up but it's still early and quiet. Except for the birds and the squirrels. They've been running around, chasing each other in the trees, looking for food and water and ready to warm up in the sun after a long cold night.
Before my guys come out I rake out the coop, put down the "fresh" and their feed. I get fresh water for their bowl and dump out the old. When we had the early snow this past week, we've made sure to fill up the bird feeders and put out a pan of water for the songbirds too. Lately it's been so cold at night that both water pans have a thick layer of ice on top in the morning.
Having fresh water is so important to the local birds and wildlife, especially in the cold. And it's such an easy thing to provide. All you need is a basic container, any shape, but about 6 inches deep is good. Then fill it up and set it out. Simple. Even if you don't have seed or food, water will be appreciated by the locals. And a good bush or shrub to hide in, so let those grow out a bit too if you can.
But back to today.
Once I let the chickens out of the coop the girls usually walk around the yard, check out the fresh food, scratch in the feed and flap their wings a bit (these are such basic things I'm happy to provide for my chickens when so many others don't even get that minimum). Napoleon, however, chooses to follow me around while I clean up the inside of the coop. I shake out his bucket and the hay the girls snuggle down into at night and he watches me while alternating between the inside with me and outside with the girls. His favorite thing lately, though, is to jump up on my knee while I'm in the doorway of the coop. He snuggles there for a bit while I watch the girls walk around and usually get their morning drink.
Today we had a little visitor during this routine.
While I was standing there a little bird, I'm not even sure what kind, came and landed on the coop yard fence. He/she saw me in the doorway and peered at me with curiosity rather than fear. He jumped from the branch to the fence and wasn't sure if it was safe but really wasn't sure it wasn't either. After a few minutes, and because I was standing still and quiet, he decided all was well and landed on the rim of the water pan. For several minutes he dipped his beak and drank his fill of the fresh water. The chickens were still roaming around and I was about 4 feet from him but we all were calm and in harmony.
It was a brief interlude but a nice one. Our little friend flew away, probably to get some seed. I let Napoleon jump down and headed into the house. It was a nice reminder of all the other animals who depend on us and our kindness even if we don't think about it intentionally or even see the recipients. How much more good could we do if we intentionally thought about sharing with them and bringing more of this peace into our hearts, minds and lives?
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