activism

America suffers from a collective case of do-gooder deafness: we have a hard time hearing a message when it's delivered by a dorky academic or an unattractive activist. We're all ears, though, when celebrities speak out about their pet causes, or their pets, or whatever. So, in acknowledgement of the fact that I, as a mere blogger, can only hope to influence so many people, I'd like to enlist the aid of some of our most ogled and Googled celebrities to help America combat climate change and overconsumption:

1. Britney Spears: Britney's evidently on the road to recovery after some much needed r 'n' r. Here are three more "r's" I'd love to see Britney promote: reduce, reuse and recycle. Our landfills are overflowing with post-consumer crap and the oceans are clogged up with plastic; what better time for Britney to redefine white trash! Recommended reading/viewing: Garbage Land by Elizabeth Royte; The Story of Stuff by Annie Leonard.

2. Paris Hilton: A rolling stone gathers no moss, but a globe-trotting Paris Hilton gathers dross. You're just fossil-fueling yourself, sweetie; stop running around the world making geographical gaffes and hyping your hybrid SUV. Take a page out of No Impact Man's playbook and see if you can stay a little closer to home for a year. Borrow a bike from Ed Begley Jr., and pedal your way to penitence. Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping will bless you.

3. Lindsay Lohan: Lindsay confided to Elle magazine last fall that she feels bad about the fact that media coverage of her shenanigans "is distracting from the other things that are important, like global warming and that kind of stuff." So, Lindsay, why not use that media glare to highlight the hazards of climate change? You'll get a glow, and it won't be from global warming. Go on David Gershon's Low Carbon Diet, school yourself with the hot eco-doc Everything's Cool, and you'll be cool, too.

4. David Beckham: The soccer superstar and style icon's receding hairline has the blogosphere all abuzz. Stressing about your thinning tresses, Becks? Imagine how folks in West Virginia feel about the bald spots the coal-mining industry's leaving on their beloved Appalachian mountains. The tragedy of male pattern baldness pales besides the heartbreak of mountaintop coal removal. Once you've covered your semi-nude noggin with pricey plugs, why not get out and stump on behalf of your adopted home's oldest mountain range before they blast the last tree to smithereens? Recommended reading/viewing: Coal River by Michael Shnayerson, Burning the Future: Coal In America.

5. Madonna: America's most famous ex-pat has set down roots as deep as her brown hair in Britain, so she's the perfect candidate to publicize the plight of Britain's endangered red squirrels, whose very future is imperiled by an invasion of deadly pox-carrying gray American squirrels. How about an animated PSA to the tune of "Who's That Squirrel?" in which she helps Squirrel Nutkin knock Rocky J. Squirrel's block right off the island? At the very least, the pop princess could follow Prince Charles' royal lead and become a patron of Save Our Squirrels.

6. Donald Trump: The Lowbrow Baron of the High-Rise isn't getting very far with his bullying and bulldozing these days. From his proposed golf course development in Scotland to his Long Island "Trump on the Ocean" project, The Donald's grandiose plans keep running aground in the face of stiff opposition from locals. Is his stature diminishing? Here's a new mantra for the author of Think BIG and Kick Ass in Business and Life: Think small and DO GOOD. Recommended reading/viewing: Deep Economy by Bill McKibben; Garbage Warrior, coming to a theater near you on April 2nd!

7. Rush Limbaugh: Yes, Limbaugh's a noxious gasbag, but scientists are making great strides these days converting methane gases from manure into energy. Limbaugh is the nadir of climate change naysayers, and it's a safe bet that he'll continue to pooh-pooh the notion that global warming's a threat to the planet, so why not harness the harmful nonsense he spews and turn it into a useful source of energy? Recommended viewing: Biogas, The Movie:

8. Amy Winehouse: Winehouse is, alas, goin' back to rehab, so she presumably won't be available to do any kind of pr for awhile. But once she's bounced back from her latest crack-up, I'd love to see Amy put her beehive'd head to work on raising awareness of colony collapse disorder, the mystery disease that's killing bees all over the U.S. and Europe. Come to think of it, she'd be a great spokesperson to raise awareness of white nose syndrome, too--that's the deadly illness that's decimating the northeast's bat population. Recommended viewing: Every Third Bite, coming soon!

9. Chuck Norris: Now that Mike Huckabee's presidential bid is over, Norris presumably has some free time, so I'd like to suggest that the legendary martial arts megastar turn his attention from black belts to green belts and use his status as America's number one action star to slay the developer dragons and strip-mall monsters. Who better than a diehard conservative to champion conservation? Recommended reading/viewing: The Long Emergency by James Howard Kuntler; The Unforeseen.

10. Richie Sambora: Sambora was arrested last Tuesday in Laguna Beach after his black Hummer was spotted weaving in and out of traffic. The Bon Jovi guitarist went to rehab twice last year; will a third time be the charm? Drinking and driving is never a good idea (especially when your 10 year-old daughter's in the backseat) but alcohol can be a tough demon to shake. Maybe Sambora would have more luck if he swore off driving instead? Ditch the Hummer, Ritchie, get off the Lost Highway, and become an advocate for Transportation Alternatives.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

The secret to Jim Hightower’s success lies in a style of political commentary best described as “pleasantly apoplectic;” he’s mad as hell, but in an ultra-affable way. Who else could stoke a fire in the belly with so many belly laughs?

In our climate change crisis, Hightower’s a natural source of alternative energy. He’s got his own brand of windpower, fueled by blowhards and gasbags, of which the right seems to have an endless supply.

And then there’s the wave power he’s helping to generate with his new book, Swim Against the Current: Even a Dead Fish Can Go With the Flow. Swim Against the Current, co-authored by Susan DeMarco, provides heartening proof that citizen activists are turning the tide against the Powers That Be who’ve dragged our democracy through the muck.

If you subscribe to the “Yes-Things-Are-Awful-But-What-Can-I- Do-I’m-Just-One-Person” school of thought, I’m giving you an “F” for fatalism. I’ll change it to an “A” for attitude adjustment after you read this book and get off your apathetic ass and join the ranks of the grassroots greenies and grannies who are the heroes of Hightower’s book.

Hightower profiles people from every region in our country who are working to better our communities and our country. There are success stories about cooperatives formed by everyone from organic dairy farmers to cabbies and strippers, and benign bankers (yes, you read that right) willing to give low-income folks a leg up. Whether urban or rural, religious or secular, these people all share a devout faith in the power of democracy.

The book also highlights the rise of eco-conscious Christians, who’ve helped grow grassroots groups like the Coal River Mountain Watch, a coalition of Appalachian residents who took on the coal mining industry. The industry’s embrace of a practice called mountaintop removal has flattened their mountains, poisoned their water, and flooded their “hollers” with toxic coal slurry, an environmental catastrophe one coal industry official characterized as an “act of God.”

Hightower calls the devastating practice of mountaintop coal removal by its rightful name, “ecocide: the total annihilation of a priceless ecosystem that is older than the Himalayas.” These rural communities are being ravaged while most of us flip on a switch and never think about where that power’s coming from. You can witness the courage of these “average” folks in the face of brutal indifference from the coal industry in the film Burning the Future: Coal in America.

Another movement Hightower gives a shout-out to is the growing revolt against revolting food. We call it the “real food revival,” or the “good food movement,” but Hightower gives it a locution worthy of the Lonestar State: “the upchuck rebellion.” Hightower’s been hurling tomatoes at Agribiz for decades; his first book, Hard Tomatoes, Hard Times, written with DeMarcos in 1972, was an exposé of how industrial agriculture hijacked tax payer-financed agricultural research for its own gain, at the expense of our food chain. As Agriculture Commissioner of Texas from 1982 to 1991, Hightower fought hard to promote organic farming and regulate pesticides, and he sums up succinctly the way that Agribiz has perverted “agriculture production from the high art and science of cooperating with nature into a high-cost, high-tech process of overwhelming nature.”

Our school cafeterias are, as Hightower notes, “that last refuge of awful “mystery meats” and pre-packaged fat bombs,” but that’s changing, too, thanks to the farm-to-cafeteria movement and the efforts of good school food luminaries like Alice Waters and Chef Ann Cooper, along with ordinary folks who are fed up with the stuff they’re serving our kids:

Advocating more mindful consumption, Hightower sounds like an apostle of the Reverend Billy or a fan of No Impact Man as he calls on us to reject rampant consumerism and get a real life:

Beyond a series of uplifting anecdotes of folks who are doing just that, Swim Against the Current offers pages of resources to connect you to all kinds of organizations that are revitalizing our communities and reclaiming our democracy. Dive into this book and start paddling, because while you’re moping around on the sidelines, you’re really sinking. Why sink when you can swim with Jim?

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

Poor Michael Pollan. Well, OK, poor is probably a poor choice of words; after all, his new book’s been at the top of the New York Times bestseller list since it came out last month, so he’s presumably making big bucks exhorting America to buck Big Food. Pollan’s so famous now that there’s no time for personalized inscriptions at book signings, as I discovered when I went to hear him speak in NYC last month.

The thing is, though, Pollan never intended to become the biggest star in the progressive foodie galaxy. He’s gone from Walden to Wal-Mart; after making a name for himself as a Thoreau for our times with a series of brilliant essays and books on our uneasy relationship to the natural world, he took on industrial agriculture and stumbled into Upton Sinclair’s Jungleland, where he’s been tangled up ever since.

The Just Food fundraiser where I heard Pollan speak took place in a sleek ‘n’ swanky Manhattan loft, the kind of event a scruffy blogger only gets to attend by volunteering to check coats and clear plates (and spill red wine on a white rug—sorry, Molly!) Hearing Pollan discuss his latest book, I couldn’t help feeling that he’s gotten himself trapped in a CAFO—a Confined Author Feeding Operation.

He’s really ready to move on, to sink his teeth into a non-edible topic, like, say, ethanol (I think the USA Today photographer who took the liberty of rummaging through Pollan’s fridge uninvited was the last straw.) And who would be better at getting the word out about the environmental disaster that is ethanol? Besides, the corn lobby’s probably already got a contract out on his life; he might as well go for it.

But Americans--sick of, and sickened by, this warped Western diet we’ve been roped into by the robber barons of Big Food—needed a hero to lead a showdown at the We’re-Not-OK Corral. So when lean, lanky Michael Pollan strode onto Agribiz turf like some kinda Gary Cooper of Good Food, he became the Sheriff of Sustainable Ag, like it or not.

I can kind of relate, because when we started growing tomatoes on the roof of our West Village apartment fifteen or so years ago, I had no intention of becoming a food activist myself (wasn’t planning to end up in court with our landlady, or in the pages of Garden Design magazine, either, but that’s a story for another day.)

This is what happened: I became obsessed with gardening, and then, organic gardening. I started hanging out with the farmers at the Greenmarket and speaking in agricultural acronyms: CAFOs, GMOs, CSAs. I read Michael Pollan, Bill McKibben, Helen and Scott Nearing, Wendell Berry, Joan Gussow, Marion Nestle, Gene Logsdon, et al., trying to make sense of the crazy way we live and eat these days.

I never wanted to be an agri-culture warrior. I stumbled into the real food revolution, literally, after a knee injury ended my career as a painter/landscaper and forced me to take up “mental manual labor,” as John Gregory Dunne aptly called the vocation of writing.

Sometimes I feel like I’m making a little bit of a difference, but a lot of times my head hurts from being banged against a wall day in, day out. Some days being an advocate for sustainable agriculture just feels, well, unsustainable.

I feel bound up by the cord to my laptop, trapped in the blogosphere when I really want to be puttering in my garden or just reading for pleasure, something I vaguely recall having done a few years back. In my darkest moments, I think Wendell Berry was right, and that the Internet sucks (well, that’s not what he said but that was the gist of it.)

So I was in dire need of the warmth and wisdom of Hillary Rettig, author of The Lifelong Activist: How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way, who gave me, Matt, and a roomful of twenty-something vegans a pep talk at NYU last night on the subject of “Living a Joyful Progressive Life While Avoiding Activist Burnout.”

Rettig is a consultant and a life coach for activists, volunteers, and other do-gooders who so often shortchange themselves in their zeal to change the world. The talk was sponsored by Farm Sanctuary, a non-profit dedicated to ending cruelty to farm animals--hence the twenty-something vegans, and the butter-free baked goods we snacked on as Rettig enlightened us on how to lighten our load.

Her simple and sage advice on how to manage your time, define your mission, conquer your fears and do good in the world without doing bad by yourself is priceless, but Rettig’s so committed to cheerleading us citizen activists that she gives it away for free at her website, in an E-book you can download called “The Little Guide To Beating Procrastination, Perfectionism and Blocks: a Manual for Artists, Activists, Entrepreneurs, Academics and Other Ambitious Dreamers.”

The E-book expands on part III of her engaging and inspiring book, which is the next best thing to actually having your own personal life coach. Admittedly, the book presented a bit of a Catch-22 for me, though; having read about it and rushed out and bought it, I procrastinated about actually reading it. I have an ever growing stack of “must-read” books I can’t seem to make a dent in—for every book I finish, two more come along.

So I was delighted to have a chance to hear Rettig share the highlights of her strategies on how to make the world a better place without making yourself miserable in the process. Rettig shows us non-profit types how we can profit from the marketing savvy and fiscal pragmatism of the business world without selling our souls or diluting our goals. Activism is, after all, a kind of marketing; it’s just that we’re trying to sell people on a common good instead of consumer goods.

The way to do that, according to Rettig, is to avoid the “us versus them” mindset, and try find common ground instead of alienating people by passing judgment on their (to us) obviously boneheaded choices, or, in my case, hitting them over the head with a sustainably harvested two-by-four.

Rettig calls on us to be more compassionate to ourselves and the world around us, to make realistic goals and spend our time more wisely. She disputes the adage that “time is money,” pointing out that time is, in fact, a far more precious commodity than currency.

If your back aches from carrying the weight of the world on your shoulders, let the Lifelong Activist’s message massage those sore spots. Rettig’s book and website are the ultimate self-help guide for those of us who are hellbent on helping others.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

Fasting is in the zeitgeist, or, rather, “dietgeist,” as those witty Ethicureans like to say. In the past two weeks I’ve heard about several fasts that activists are encouraging people to participate in as an exercise in consciousness raising—one’s own, and others. I was so intrigued, I actually signed on to two of them. After ten and a half days of a liquid fast, I can tell you one thing with absolute certainty. I am really, really looking forward to eating solid food again. Food for thought is all well and good, but not very filling.

Giving your body an occasional break from food is a common practice in many cultures, whether for religious purposes or simply to give your digestive system a rest. Fasting in America, though, tends to consist of trendy crash diet/detox strategies like the Master Cleanse, which requires subsisting on nothing but fresh-squeezed lemon juice mixed with cayenne pepper, maple syrup and water for ten days. This regime is popular with women who are in a hurry to get back into their “skinny” jeans, and it seems to work pretty well, until you start eating again.

Starving yourself for fashion’s sake doesn’t really interest me, but the notion of foregoing food to make a social statement has a long and noble history, so I was intrigued when I heard about the Globesity Festival, a 7 day event coming to NYC in October to draw attention to all the havoc overconsumption is wreaking on our bodies and the planet.

I decided to see if I could handle the 10 day juice fast they’re asking participants to undertake. So I stopped eating solid food and consumed nothing but smoothies, juices, and plant-based brothy soup concoctions I whipped up in my trusty vintage Vita-Mix, a pulverizing machine that can make sawdust out of two-by-fours, though that’s not recommended.

OK, I did cheat once or twice, eating a few of our own cherry tomatoes and grapes that were just hanging there waiting to be picked—they were only going to wait so long, after all. And I had a few bites of a meal I made for a guest, just to check that the feta hadn’t gone fetid and the chili was sufficiently spicy. Oh, and a teeny bit of homemade corn ice cream—does that count as solid food?

Other than that, though, it has been all liquid, all the time, while Matt surreptitiously savored all kinds of yummy-looking and highly aromatic foods. It took enormous will power, and I was, obviously, counting the days till I could eat again. Yesterday was the 10th day, so I would have resumed eating solid food today, until the Climate Emergency Fast came along, asking Americans to “Give up food for one day now to draw attention to the fact that others may have no food tomorrow unless we halt global warming.” That one day happens to be today, September 4th, the day Congress returns from recess.

The U.S. Climate Emergency Council, a DC-based non-profit dedicated to fighting global warming at the grassroots level, was looking for a thousand Americans willing to give up food on September 4th to draw attention to the threat posed to food supplies all over the world by climate change. Drought, floods, and plagues of pests and diseases threaten crops all over the world, but the poorest countries are sure to be the hardest hit.

As of today, they’ve exceeded their goal, with 1102 folks signing on to the Climate Emergency Fast, myself included. But to what end?

All worthy goals, but skeptics abound--including my friend Steve, who noted that I totally trashed “Don’t Buy Gas Day.” How is not eating for a day any different than not buying gas?

Well, for one thing, Bill McKibben, Vandana Shiva, Van Jones, and other highly respected activists have thrown their weight behind the Climate Emergency Fast, and they’re organizing a press conference on Capitol Hill this afternoon. Will it generate the response they’re aiming for?

So far, the only places I’ve read about the Climate Emergency Fast are Grist and Daily Kos. It doesn’t seem likely to become frontpage news in an era when calling on Americans to make even the most modest sacrifice is viewed with suspicion. But I’m happy to participate, because, after all, I’m hungry for change. Really hungry.

Forget about low carb diets. 2006 was the year of the low carbon diet.

“Local and sustainable” is the new “farm fresh,” according to the NY Times, which cited “food miles” as one of the year’s catchiest catch phrases. The agricultural culture war that’s been fermenting on the foodie frontier finally exploded this year, bombarding us with books about our fuelish food system.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma put Michael Pollan at the top of the literary food chain; Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and What to Eat, was omnipresent, bursting Big Food’s bubble on every media outlet from NPR to CNN to last Wednesday’s NY Times:

Call it “gateway activism,” a term I learned from The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved, a funny and fascinating new book by food activist Sandor Ellix Katz. Subtitled “Inside America’s Underground Food Movements,” Katz’s book charts the intersection of food and politics from every angle, giving a comprehensive, thoroughly annotated overview of how agribusiness and perverse government policies have hijacked our food culture and corrupted the American diet.

Katz finds a silver lining to this toxic corporate cloud in the Small is Beautiful boosters: the seed savers, dumpster divers, feral foragers and agrarian activists all over the country who’ve rejected Monsanto’s monolithic monoculture in favor of a more seasonal, sustainable food chain.

In his quest to document every avenue of food activism, Katz takes a walk on the wild side with the Wildroots Collective, a group that puts the car back in carnivore by recycling roadkill. They eat insects, too; Katz shares Wildroots’ recipes for grasshoppers and crickets, which are best roasted over a pan and taste something like popcorn. “They’re surprisingly tasty and filling…crickets are incredibly high in calcium and potassium.”

Wildroots recommends sautéing slugs and sun drying earthworms, which can then be “ground into a very nutritious flour, which can be used as a soup thickener.” But if the idea of eating bugs doesn’t appeal to you, you can at least chew on the strange historical tidbits Katz dishes up, including these two:

The infamous Abu Ghraib prison where U.S. soldiers abused Iraqi prisoners was “previously home to Iraq’s national seed bank and research facilities.” Katz cites a report from the UN’s Food & Agriculture Organization which documents how our invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan resulted in the destruction of “generations of seeds of all crops” and the loss of “much seed expertise.” No doubt Monsanto will be happy to sell the Iraqi farmers their patented, genetically modified seeds.

In the U.S., government agencies are contemplating a ban on non-native invasive plant species, which may be a sneaky way to undermine the “grassroots free trade of seeds and plants” that lets home gardeners and small family farmers cultivate rare and heirloom varieties. Katz finds a forerunner to this current bout of botanical zenophobia in Hitler’s Central Office of Vegetative Mapping, which in 1942 declared a “war of extermination” against a particularly invasive variety of impatiens, citing the threat this “Mongolian invader” posed to “the beauty of our home forest.”

This is one of those rare books that anyone, no matter how much or how little you know about our corroding food chain, will find enlightening and entertaining. Will it inspire me to scoop up freshly flattened squirrels on my backcountry bike rides? Probably not, but I will definitely give the chickweed pesto recipe a try.

Then again, maybe eating roadkill is not as radical as it sounds. Our friend Joel, a skilled hunter, has carved up the carcasses of deer that collided with his car, and brought home the venison. When life gives you meat, make meatballs. Beats leaving Bambi for the buzzards.

The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved is a smorgasborg of activist anecdotes, horticultural history, and literally wild recipes. All the ingredients for a great read. Go Inside America’s Underground Food Movements and get to the bottom of what’s eating America.