climate change

I hate to be the one to have to tell you this, but this whole Earth Day thing is really just a front for a cabal of dirt-loving luddites determined to destroy life as we know it in America. Dig down below that crunchy granola surface, that coalition of fruits and nuts (so annoyingly high in moral fiber) and you’ll find a half-baked conspiracy to deprive us of some of our most cherished traditions: lush lawns unblemished by dandelions or dangling laundry; easy-to-heat, awful-to-eat cuisine; four wheel-drive vehicles with single digit gas mileage, and so on.

These terroirists hate our freewheeling ways, and, no, that’s not a typo. It’s a homegrown insurgency inspired by the French notion of “terroir”--the way that a specific region’s soil and climate influence the foods and beverages produced there.

Wikipedia loosely translates terroir as "a sense of place;” locavores, aka food mile fanatics, describe it as “the taste of here.” It’s a foreign concept to most Americans, whose terroir tends to be the suburban supermarket; there’s no “here” there, just overprocessed, overpackaged food that’s traveled thousands of miles by truck, ship or plane.

We’ve been awfully piggy about our oil consumption, as Jad Mouawad noted in the New York Times last Sunday:

Keep in mind that we’re only 4% of the world’s population. A graph accompanying Mouwad’s piece showed that other developed nations have managed to keep their consumption levels in check or even lower them significantly; Sweden and Denmark have reduced their oil use by 32% and 33% respectively.

Our oil consumption, on the other hand, rose 21% as we hitched our wagon to a fantasy of infinite—and cheap—fossil fuels, and went on building bigger houses, buying bigger cars, choosing longer commutes, eating more fossil-fueled fast foods.

Along the way, we glorified wastefulness and gluttony, converted fertile farms to sterile sprawl, stopped building sidewalks, marginalized mass transit, banned backyard clotheslines and front yard food gardens, and sent our soldiers off to die defending what is, at the end of the day, a pretty indefensible way of life.

And now we’ve got an agri-culture war here at home. Rising fuel and food costs, along with concerns about global warming, have given a growing army of “front-yard farmers,” as the Wall Street Journal calls them, plenty of ammunition in their war to replace resource-hogging, planet-polluting lawns with food gardens. Read the objections from grass-addled neighbors who view these minifarms as a blight, and you’ll see why Michael Pollan qualifies growing one’s own food as a “subversive” act.

Pollan’s the most high-profile combatant in the grow-your-own guerrilla campaign, his latest contribution being a piece in Sunday’s New York Times Magazine’s “green” issue that cites planting a vegetable garden as one thing an individual can do to combat climate change and shorten the food chain. But he’s got plenty of company; Rip-Out-Your-Lawn-And-Grow-Veggies is a hot literary genre these days; in addition to Pollan’s best seller, In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, there’s Heather Flores’s Food Not Lawns and Fritz Haeg’s Edible Estates: Attack On The Front Lawn.

There are websites to inspire the would-be urban homesteader, too, such as Kitchen Gardeners International, whose founder, Roger Doiron, is on a mission to convince the next occupant of the White House to revive the wartime tradition of the victory gardens that provided us with plenty of homegrown produce during World War II. And The Path To Freedom website documents the astounding quantity of food one family produces on a fifth of an acre in Pasadena, California.

But the curb-your-carbon-footprint campaign doesn’t stop at the curb; it’s infiltrated the institutional food sector, too, as an article in Tuesday’s Los Angeles Times noted. Enlightened eaters are encouraging university and corporate campuses to drop the mass-produced glop and start serving “real food,” i.e. meals made with as many fresh, local, organically grown ingredients as possible. Efforts to reduce waste and compost kitchen scraps are becoming more common, too.

At the forefront of this movement is a coalition of students who are launching a national campaign called The Real Food Challenge, whose goal is to “create a food system that truly nourishes people, communities, and the earth.”

In other words, a food system diametrically opposed to the one we have now; you know, the one that nourishes obesity, diabetes, animal abuse, worker abuse, pollution, and global warming. The one that our tax payer dollars have been underwriting even as it undermines us all, as Christopher Cook, author of Diet for a Dead Planet: Big Business and the Coming Food Crisis points out in an op-ed in today’s Christian Science Monitor.

So how do these wild-eyed idealists define “Real Food”?

Aha! You see, they even admit that overthrowing our uber-consumer culture is part of their agenda. So don’t be fooled by the rash of feel-good festivities and token tree hugging that inevitably breaks out around Earth Day. It’s really an all-out assault on your right as an American to plunder the planet. Alert Homeland Security! Code Green! There's an elevated risk of attack by trowel-toting terroirists.

Barbie and I don’t have a lot in common. For one thing, I’m biodegradable and she’s not. But we do agree on one thing; math is hard. For example, how is it that Lisa Simpson’s been a vegetarian for thirteen years when she’s only 8 years old? Is it possible that an anti-oxidant-rich plant-based diet has the power not only to delay the aging process but actually reverse it?

But while eternal tweener Lisa’s the token treehugger in the Simpson household, it’s Bart who’s got the perfect prescription for how to cool Mother Nature’s fevered brow: don’t have a cow. Literally. The less meat you grill, the more you help the planet chill.

Now, before you dismiss me as some kinda free-range Chicken Little, clucking about the catastrophic consequences of our fossil-fueled food chain, you should know that I’m not the only one warning that burgers do more harm than hummers.

Activist/author Anna Lappé’s been looking up at the sky, too, but while I’ve been running around squawking that it’s falling, her brand new campaign Take A Bite Out Of Climate Change looks up and sees a sunny solution--a plant-based food chain founded on the ultimate renewable energy source, solar power.

Lappé’s upcoming book, Eat the Sky: Food, Farming, and the Climate Crisis, will no doubt help spread the word about the wonders of foods grown through the natural miracle of photosynthesis instead of that man-made marvel, synthetic fertilizers, and the power of a naturally biodiverse, balanced ecosystem to protect plants from pests and disease instead of pouring on toxic pesticides.

But in the meantime, she’s put together a wonderful, non-wonky website that lays out for the layperson why switching to a diet dominated by locally grown, organic fruits and vegetables is one of the single most significant things you can do to curb your carbon footprint.

This is a huge public service and a tremendous boon to me, personally, because my endless chanting of the “eat-less-meat” mantra elicits plenty of puzzled looks from folks who can’t grasp the notion that a veggie-centric diet does more to reduce your greenhouse gas emissions than driving a hybrid car. I have been trying to get this message out for a while, now (which, in the interests of full disclosure, may be why Lappé put me on Take A Bite’s advisory council,) but now I can just say, “Go to takeabite.cc and see for yourself!”

Lappé is on a mission to liberate us from a food chain that relies on a systemic abuse of land, animals and people. Industrial agriculture is essentially a failed coup on Mother Earth, a tragically arrogant attempt to overrule the laws of nature, and now it’s coming back to bite us on our ever-expanding asses. It’s fouled our air, water and soil, spoiled our health and worsened global warming.

But Take A Bite’s raison d’etre is not to bum you out about the ecological disaster we call Agribiz; its purpose is to provide you with all the information and resources you need to lighten up your carbon footprint in the most delightful and delicious way. So thanks to Anna and her crew for stepping up to the solar-powered plate. Now even us Henny Pennys can look up and say, here comes the sun!

I don’t know how many rockstars spend their free time reading UN reports, but Paul McCartney’s apparently devoured and digested the UN’s study on the meat industry’s contribution to global warming, “Livestock’s Long Shadow.” He cites the report as the clearest evidence yet that a vegetarian diet is the most effective way that we, as individuals, can combat climate change. In a letter to the Press Association, McCartney wrote:

McCartney cites the study’s conclusion that 70% of the Amazon’s forests have been razed for grazing and that livestock now take up 30% of the entire world's land surface, and adds:

Will the beloved ex-Beatle prove to be a more effective advocate than his ex, Heather Mills? Mills, a vociferous vegan, caused a ruckus last month when she asked ‘Why don’t we drink rats’ milk, cats’ milk or dogs’ milk?’ Mills also attempted to make some converts by offering the fifteen contractors who are working on her swanky new Sussex home a holiday feast. They were psyched until they peeked into her freezer and spotted the Tofurkey. One worker complained:

Nonetheless, he added:

We’re locked in an existential game of “chicken” with China, each nation daring the other not to take its foot off the gas pedal as we careen towards catastrophe. We don’t want to change the way we live, and the Chinese want to live the way we do, too.

Unfortunately, the limitations of our finite world make that a mathematical impossibility. As James Kunstler is fond of saying, (and I am equally fond of quoting,) America’s suburbs represent “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world. America took all its postwar wealth and invested it in a living arrangement that has no future.''

Our love of living large has brought us to the brink of disaster, as Al Gore noted in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in Norway yesterday. Borrowing a line from Winston Churchill, Gore compared the world’s leaders who downplay the urgency of global warming to those who ignored Hitler:

But Gore’s not the only one who sees a parallel between the Holocaust and global warming. Climate scientist James Hansen caused a ruckus back in October with this bleak statement:

Dave Roberts of Grist wrote a brilliant post about whether Hansen’s Holocaust analogy is “appropriate,” asking the question, “Why do we judge the Holocaust unique in history?”

His conclusion:

America’s original suburb, Levittown, recently declared its intent to become the nation’s first “green” suburb, with a series of initiatives designed to encourage more energy efficient homes and habits in this Long Island enclave. Scott Carlin, an associate professor of geography at Long Island University, wrote approvingly of the plan in Newsday, but noted that “truly greening the suburbs will require a bigger shift in values and behaviors.”

But how can we convince our fellow Americans that conservation is a civic duty, and not a commie plot? An indignant Newsday reader from Hicksville (no comment) replied to Carlin’s op-ed as follows:

In other words, better dead than red. Because, you know, the suburbs do such a stellar job of fostering connectedness and bonhomie. Al Gore said yesterday that our children will either be asking us 'What were you thinking; why didn't you act? Or they will ask instead: 'How did you find the moral courage to rise and successfully resolve a crisis that so many said was impossible to solve?'''

The answer to the first question: We were thinking, how can we ever get through to every dumbass in Hicksville? The answer to question number two: We had to forge ahead, despite all the dumbasses in Hicksville, because the fate of the earth was at stake.

I don’t know which question our kids will be asking, but I'm guessing that the answer isn’t to cling to a way of living that spells death for life as we know it.

“The Story of Stuff” is a sly short that offers a crash course in consumption; it’s like a sermon from Reverend Billy, a lecture from Bill McKibben, and a rant from James Kunstler rolled into one and made fun (well, OK, as fun as an analysis of our crass consumer culture can be.)

Eco-activist Annie Leonard’s breezy presentation is a compelling blend of facts, figures, and animated stick figures that traces the path—and the carbon footprint—of all the crap we buy, from inception to incineration. She charts our rising consumption and a corresponding decline in happiness, and exposes the post-World War II mindset that made us a nation of lemme-have-it lemmings with a 1955 quote from a retail analyst named Victor Lebow:

Lebow’s dream of a consumer-based culture started to look more like a nightmare a couple of decades later—or a horror movie, anyway. “Dawn of the Dead,” George Romero’s classic zombie sequel, was inspired by a 1974 visit to the Monroeville Mall in Pennsylvania, one of America’s first sprawling shopping complexes.

As Romero walked through the mall, he was struck by:

The Story of Stuff has its share of Gore, too. Like An Inconvenient Truth, its goal is to inform and inspire, and it does so beautifully. Yes, it seems like we’re drowning in an ever-rising waste stream, but Annie Leonard shows us that we don’t have to go with this flow. Thanks to those masters of the snappy, socially conscious short at Free Range Studios for tossing us this lifeline.

We’re enjoying an extended growing season here in the Northeast—well, some of us are, anyway. Our farmers are happy to be harvesting tomatoes and peppers this late in the year, but there’s something a bit freakish about the zinnias and nasturtiums blooming away blithely in my own front yard.

This October was the warmest in the Northeast on record, and while that scares some of us, others prefer to focus on the upside of rising temperatures. As White House press secretary Dana “Pollyanna” Perino noted in a press conference last week:

Yeah, and it’s helping the caterpillars who’ve been chowing down on my greens, and the mosquitos, and the grubs that are hatching in my soil, promising a second generation of god-knows-what kind of pesky beetle or borer. Our whole eco system is out of whack.

If you have any connection to the natural world at all, you can see the havoc that climate change is already wreaking. But hand wringing and finger pointing will not move the beltway bureaucrats who’ve dug in their heels to deny the mounting evidence--melting ice caps, shrinking lakes, parched soil, burning brush.

So it’s the perfect time for Step it Up, the sequel—Saturday, November 3rd (tomorrow!) Communities all over the country will be rallying to demand action on climate change. Please, please stand up and be counted. As Majora Carter, Executive Director of Sustainable South Bronx, told Daily Kos diarist Watthead, just showing up is “more than half the battle - there is no battle unless we show our numbers and push.”

Carter, also an advisor to eco-activist Van Jones’ terrific Green For All project, is speaking this weekend at Power Shift 2007, “the first national youth summit to solve the climate crisis.”

Power Shift’s goal is to bring together 5,500 young people dedicated to fighting global warming together to descend on DC for a rally in conjunction with Step it Up, followed by a “weekend of training, action, and movement-building in College Park, Maryland.”

Carter told my fellow Kossack Watthead:

I’m hopeful, too. That’s why I’ll be at the Step It Up rally at Washington Square tomorrow at noon instead of puttering in my garden and grumbling about the grubs. How can you say no to Bill McKibben?

The United States remains the world’s heavyweight champion when it comes to obesity, but the British are closing in on us, and they’re not happy about it. Two just-released reports show that the number of obese adults in Britain has tripled since 1980, earning it the distinction of being the fattest country in Europe.

Government officials and health experts are suitably alarmed, and anxious to find ways to turn more Brits from fat to fit. Britain’s health secretary, Alan Johnson, calls the obesity epidemic a "potential crisis on the scale of climate change."

But the cultural forces that feed this crisis are so pervasive that it will take a massive effort to reduce the U.K.’s collective body mass. As a spokesman for the International Obesity Taskforce by the almost unbearably British name of Neville Rigby told the CS Monitor:

Sound familiar? A sedentary lifestyle coupled with a surplus of cheap calories equals a nation facing catastrophic health care costs. One of the reports, a major review from 250 experts, noted that our current way of life essentially guarantees excess weight gain because our metabolisms haven’t adapted to all the labor-saving devices we’ve created. Professor Peter Kopelman, one of the contributors, noted:

In other words, we have to go work out at the gym, now, to burn off all those calories our ancestors would have just naturally expended in the course of the day. No hunting and gathering, just grunting and panting.

None of this is news, really. What did shock me, though, was the list accompanying the article, drawn from the World Health Organization’s database. It shows the percentage of obese adults in a number of industrialized nations, and the difference in rates is dramatic:

Why does Canada have only half the number of obese adults as the U.S.? And the French really don’t get fat, except by comparison to the Japanese, whose rate of obesity is astoundingly low.

Do our neighbors to the North live so differently from us? Don’t they have comparable geographical and cultural conditions that help pack on the pounds? Why the drastic differences between countries that would seem, on the surface, to have a similar lifestyle?

Maybe it’s because we live in the Land of Outlandish Proportions. I was still scratching my head over the piece in yesterday’s CS Monitor when I came across an article in today’s edition from their resident linguist, Ruth Walker, entitled Large is Back—In a Very Big Way. Walker explores how the simple classifications of small, medium and large have been, well, largely replaced by the jumbo-grande-collosal-giant-mega portions that give us such monstrosities as 7-Eleven’s 64-ounce Double Gulp soda. That’s right, a half-gallon soda served up in one sitting.

Walker was inspired—and appalled—by a recent report that nutritionist Lisa Young co-authored with Marion Nestle which reveals that abnormally large portions are still the norm in the fast food industry, despite the growing health crisis caused by all these excess calories. Young asks "Are we that much thirstier or hungrier than we used to be?"

I haven’t heard any of our presidential candidates really talk much about the obesity problem, except for the formerly fat Mike Huckabee. Global warming fares a little better, but deserves far greater attention than most of our politicians are giving it.

But what really needs to be made clear, and what no one on the national stage is saying, is that the obesity epidemic and climate change are simply two sides of the same coin—overconsumption. We are sacrificing our nation’s natural resources and polluting our air, soil and water on the altar of More: Big Gulps, Monster Thickburgers, and, from McDonald’s--which has retired the phrase “supersize” but not the concept--the Angus Third Pounder.

And our crazy-big carbon footprint is leaving its mark on the rest of the world; as more of us eat more meat and guzzle soda by the half-gallon, rain forests get depleted, greenhouse gas emissions rise, and corporations turn water to soda in countries where millions lack access to safe drinking water and drought depletes our water supplies here at home.

Consider this: a municipal water authority in India sells water to Coca-Cola for its bottling plants there at one quarter the rate it charges its own residents. Here in the U.S., as Coco-Cola’s home base, Atlanta, runs dry and Georgia’s governor declares October “Take a Shorter Shower Month,” Coca-Cola’s vice president of sustainability, Bruce A. Karas, tells the New York Times that:

But as the article notes, Georgia’s officials should have been well-aware of—and far better prepared—for an impending water shortage:

Looks like the leaders we’re supposed to rely on have got their heads in the sand, presumably looking for untapped reservoirs of water and oil. They’re fiddling while the rest of us burn, just as the musicians on the deck of the Titanic played on till everyone drowned.

I’m just praying that Morgan Spurlock’s soon-to-be-released documentary What Would Jesus Buy? will do for overconsumption what SuperSize me did for junk food—that is, get people thinking and talking about it. We’ll have to look to the film’s stars, the Reverend Billy and his Church of Stop Shopping, to find out what Jesus would buy, but in the meantime, I’m going to go out on a limb and bet that he wouldn’t turn water into a Big Gulp.

More and more of my friends are flushing their toilets less and less. In fact, some of us are even flushing each other’s toilets less and less. That may sound like a ghastly breach of etiquette to the vast majority of Americans, but when you’re as immersed in water issues as some of my friends are, you start to feel foolish about flushing away gallons of water just to disperse, say, a pint of pee.

Most of us have barely begun to size up our carbon footprint, and the concept of “peak oil” is just starting to seep into the MSM. But Jon Gertner’s chilling story on the cover of Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, The Perfect Drought, adds two new phrases to the lexicon of looming limitations: “peak water,” and “water footprint.”

The West is dry as a bone, as Malibu’s transformation from hot spot to inferno so vividly illustrates, and the fires are spreading from San Diego to Santa Barbara. The drought is so severe in North Georgia that Governor Sonny Perdue has called on President Bush to declare 85 counties federal disaster areas.

All of which lends credence to Gertner’s claim that a severe water crisis is already in the pipeline. An extended drought compounded by climate change has left reservoirs at an all-time low just when more and more people are relocating to the increasingly arid West. There’s not enough water to meet the growing demands of agriculture and development, and the situation is only going to get worse—much, much worse, according to the experts Gertner interviewed.

Pat Mulroy, head of Southern Nevada’s Water Authority, told Gertner:

Those of us who hail from the irrigated deserts of California are familiar with the water-wise mantra “If it’s yellow, let it mellow; if it’s brown, flush it down,” or what Treehugger has dubbed “the selective flush.” But, as Treehugger noted, the Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, caused a furor when he suggested that Londoners might want to think twice before flushing.

On this side of the Atlantic, the squandering of water is not only accepted, but expected. Ann Coulter decries the low-flush toilet as the epitome of liberal lunacy. Coulter once told Slate:

Coulter presumably showers religiously, too, unlike those filthy French who sometimes go a day or two without bathing.

And then there’s the ubiquitous American lawn, utterly unsuited to much of the country’s climate, yet mandated by local ordinances. How much water do lawn lemmings waste maintaining their eternally thirsty turf? I was delighted by a Daily Kos diary the other day devoted to a Boulder, Colorado CSA (community supported agriculture) run by a farmer, Kipp Nash, who works with suburban homeowners to convert useless lawns into productive vegetable patches.

Lettuce in lieu of lawns? If our nation’s salad bowl turns into a dust bowl, we’re going to need a nation of Kipp Nashes to keep us in greens. The impending water crisis threatens the very foundation of our current agricultural system, which not only sucks up a huge percentage of the West’s water, but also spews copious amounts of chemicals back into our water supply, as Elizabeth Royte documents in her thorough--and thoroughly distressing--recent Grist feature, From Bad to Thirst.

Water’s been on the verge of becoming the new oil for awhile, now, but with the evidence mounting fast that we’re on the verge of being tapped out, maybe the need to conserve will finally sink in. Or, we could just keep flushing away. I’m sure Ann Coulter will.

It’s quite a resumé: two Oscars, an Emmy, and now a Nobel Peace Prize. But the prize that might have mattered most eluded Al Gore, even though he won the popular vote back in 2000.

Would we be a nation at peace today if Gore had actually become president? Ralph Nader was so convinced that Bush and Gore were indistinguishable that he felt obliged to offer Americans a genuine alternative.

Thanks, Ralph, but you really shouldn’t have. Gore would not have launched a needless and unjust war, for starters. He also, in all likelihood, would not have implemented the No Incompetent Crony Left Behind Act, or the current administration’s “a fox in every henhouse” policy. In a Gore White House, breaking levees would have been breaking news, not a compilation of clips put together for a highlight reel our commander in chief finally watched nearly a week after Katrina hit.

But when it comes to climate change, well, that’s when the “what if’s” become truly painful. I’m happy that Gore won the Nobel, but it’s a bittersweet victory. His fellow recipients, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, are releasing a report next month that reveals the IPCC has underestimated the rate at which greenhouse gases are accumulating. To put it more dramatically, if ungrammatically, the worst case scenario just got worser.

Scientists had thought we’d have a decade or so before we’d pass the ominous milestone of 450 parts per million—the measure of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. That number represents, in essence, the Point of No Return; once you pass that threshold, it may be impossible to halt catastrophic climate change.

Alas, the IPCC’s report will show that we’re already there.

So what to do, now? We can give up, or we can Step it Up. As peak oil prophet Albert Bates noted at the talk I attended last week, we have only two choices at this point: sustainability, or extinction. Kind of a no-brainer, dontcha think?

The average American commute is growing ever longer, according to a study released last week:

Longer commutes eat into mealtime, too; with more of us leaving the house at the crack of dawn and coming home later in the evening, we’re too rushed, even, for a bowl of cereal in the morning, much less a home-cooked meal in the evening.

And those obliged to drive to work miss out on the opportunity to incorporate a bit of physical activity into their workday, unlike folks who are lucky enough to live within walking or biking distance of their jobs.

Do we really need to read another study to figure out that all this eating on the run and endless driving is eroding our quality of life? The automobile has not lived up to its promise; it doesn’t provide us with true autonomy or mobility. It’s enslaved us to fossil fuels from foreign countries while depriving most Americans of any alternative means of transport. And all this commuting is a driving force behind climate change, too.

Mass transit, regarded as a common good that merits serious investment in most developed nations, is considered by many American planners and politicians to be as quaint and outmoded as, say, the Geneva Convention.

Plenty of people still consider proximity to public transportation a selling point, judging by the property values of older suburban enclaves that offer the convenience of commuter trains. But somewhere along the line, we started to put all our eggs in one combustible basket, and now we’ve hatched a whole flock of problems.

Many people would dearly love to live closer to their jobs, but can’t afford the high cost of housing near their workplace. Parents who might prefer to raise their kids in a more densely populated, culturally diverse, mixed-use kind of neighborhood find themselves forced to move to the ‘burbs because the public schools are better, the streets are safer, or the property taxes are lower.

But there’s a sizable percentage of folks who’d rather live in a bigger house on a larger lot no matter how far from their place of work, for whom the long daily drive seems a reasonable trade-off—or even a pleasure. Their commute gives them precious “alone” time, or a chance to listen to their favorite author’s latest book, or an opportunity to multitask on their cell phones (hands free, we hope.)

So if these so-called extreme commuters are happy with their way of life, why should anyone else frown upon it?

It depends on whether you regard global warming as a problem. If you don’t, well, then, there’s not much I can say to persuade you that the exurbs are inherently unsustainable. But as U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon just told a roomful of world leaders at today’s Climate Summit, "the time for doubt has passed…inaction now will prove the costliest action of all in the long term."

And another report issued last week, from the Urban Land Institute, points out that choosing to live closer to work is, in fact, a more effective way to fight climate change than switching to a hybrid car.

Unfortunately, our land use policies historically have encouraged exactly the opposite phenomenon, with federal, state and local policies that actively encourage sprawl and make it seem inevitable. And there are plenty of people willing to defend our ever expanding exurbs. As James Burling, the litigation director for the Pacific Legal Fund, a conservative group that dismisses environmentalists’ concerns over sprawl and global warming, told the Los Angeles Times:

Ah, the proverbial bit of lawn, that precious American birthright. Who cares about greenhouse gases, as long as we can have our own bit of green? When it turns brown from drought, will the suburbs lose their luster, or will extreme commuters even notice, since they leave their homes before dawn and return after dark?

In the meantime, I’m off to hear Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig, head of the Climate Impacts Group at NASA’s Goddard Institute, give a lecture on the impact of climate change on agriculture and food in the Hudson Valley.

Lucky for me, the venue hosting the event is within walking distance, because Manhattan is going to suffer from major gridlock today, thanks to the UN’s Climate Summit. Featured speakers include Al Gore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicolas Sarkozy. Bush couldn’t make it, but he condescended to send Condi. Guess he’s busy prepping for his own two-day climate summit on Thursday and Friday, which will call for the usual voluntary measures and other pie-in-the-sky solutions. Brace yourselves for more hot air.

We joined more than twelve thousand people in Indianola, Iowa yesterday for Senator Tom Harkin’s famous steak fry, where the steaks and the speeches were, by and large, pretty well done. Six of the democratic presidential candidates gathered on a hot air balloon field and vied to be the most uplifting speaker in their efforts to woo Iowa voters.

On our field trip to “flyover” country, we brought along a bit of blue state big city bias, but the souvenirs we collected over the weekend forced us to chuck our preconceptions and make room for the reality that Iowa is, in fact, a hotbed of sustainable agriculture.

You wouldn’t think so, looking out on all those amber waves of grain that flood our food chain with high fructose corn syrup and factory farmed animal flesh. We passed endless fields of corn, all of it destined for feed or fuel, none of it fit for human consumption.

And, indeed, the only corn we got to eat all weekend were the peanut butter-filled chocolate ears of corn my Drinking Liberally colleague Katrina shared with us at the airport on the way home. Locally made, but kind of bittersweet; after all, shouldn’t there be enough people-grade corn in Iowa that they could scare up some ears to serve at the Harkin steak fry? Instead, we got potato salad.

Gary Larsen, an Iowa farmer we met at the steak fry, shared our dismay. “People have got to eat more vegetables!” he told us.

“So what do you grow?” I asked.

“Corn and soybeans,” he answered. Gotta make a living, he explained. Larsen’s got 400 acres and three kids who don’t want to follow in his tractor tracks. “Farming has changed so much,” he lamented. “It’s gotten too big.”

I’ve been told that farmers are a deeply conservative bunch, with a horror of all things liberal, and Larsen certainly looked like a straight-out-of-central-casting commodity crop farmer. Turns out, though, that he drives a Prius and is totally OK with his openly gay son. Which is to say that he’s way more concerned about global warming than gay marriage.

Larsen worries that James Hansen may be right when he says we’ve got less than a decade to do something about climate change. He relies on cover crops instead of chemicals to keep his soil fertile, and his politics are as progressive as his farming methods (he expressed disappointment that Dennis Kucinich wasn’t at the steak fry.)

And Larsen’s not an anomaly. We also met Denise O’Brien, who founded the Women, Food & Agriculture Network and grows fruits and vegetables on a fourth generation family farm, which she graciously gave us a tour of during our visit (photos and post to follow). O’Brien ran for Iowa’s Secretary of Agriculture last year, and nearly won, to the consternation of conventional farmers for whom the word “organic” spells panic.

Plenty of Iowans are working to counter agribiz monoculture and manure lagoons, from the folks at the Leopold Institute for Sustainable Agriculture to the Seed Savers Exchange, the Iowa Farmers Union, and even Iowa State University, where there’s a graduate program in sustainable agriculture.

We came home with a bagful of great souvenirs: a board game called Farmopoly; t-shirts from the Iowa Farmers Union with a Wendell Berry quote (“If you eat, you’re involved in agriculture”); and a Des Moines downtown farmers’ market burlap shopping bag with fancy wooden handles, which belonged to our Des Moines Drinking Liberally colleagues Tricia and Mike until I admired it, at which point they insisted on giving it to me!

So I’m taking my brand new bag to the Union Square Greenmarket to show it off and replenish our empty fruit bowl. I’ll leave you with some highlights from the steak fry. My favorite moment was meeting much-beloved-by-the-blogosphere Elizabeth Edwards, who graciously informed me that I “don’t look like someone who Eats Liberally”. We don’t generally endorse candidates, but I’m going to go out on a limb and say it—Elizabeth Edwards for President!

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.

Today is one of the three most popular days of the year to have a barbeque, according to CNN, with millions of Americans firing up their grills and engaging in the obligatory Labor Day meatfest (the other big barbeque holidays are, of course, the fourth of July and Memorial Day.)

Ah, but how does this animal flesh-eating frenzy mesh with your newly raised consciousness about meat-eating’s contribution to climate change? Won’t a charcoal-charred burger leave a smudge on your carbon footprint?

You don’t have to set up a solar cooker and fry yourself a veggie burger to make your holiday barbeque more eco-friendly. CNN says there are simpler ways to ”turn your backyard barbeque green”:

Hey, I’m all in favor of conserving electricity, and it’s entirely possible a grill is more energy efficient than an electric stove. But Gulledge’s advice conveniently skirts around the inconvenient truth about skirt steaks, or whatever cut of meat you care to cook: meat production generates more greenhouse gases than cars do.

Let’s say you’re one of those climate change naysayers who thinks this whole global warming thing is just a lot of hot air. Oh, and you really don’t care about animal welfare, either. Why can’t I back off, already, and stop trying to rain on your barbeque?

Well, because even though you don’t care about rising sea levels and institutionalized animal abuse, you’d probably rather not get cancer. Go ahead and savor that flame-broiled burger, but bear in mind that it may be dripping with carcinogens and toxins. Just ask health guru Dr. Andrew Weil, as one concerned lover of barbeque lovers did:

There you have it, further proof that a plant-based diet is the way to go! And what better way, on Labor Day, to celebrate the legacy of labor leader Cesar Chavez, than to go veggie? Chavez was as passionate about animal rights as he was about workers’ rights:

"I feel very deeply about vegetarianism and the animal kingdom. It was my dog Boycott who led me to question the right of humans to eat other sentient beings.”

Chavez believed that "kindness and compassion towards all living beings is a mark of a civilized society. Racism, economic deprival, dog fighting and cock fighting, bullfighting and rodeos are all cut from the same defective fabric: violence. Only when we have become nonviolent towards all life will we have learned to live well ourselves."

So I’m offering a Labor Day menu that honors the memory of a man who fought for fair treatment for all--the two-footed and four-footed alike:

CESAR CHAVEZ SALAD (serves four)

The foundation for a great Caesar salad is, of course, a nice fresh (i.e., local) head of Romaine lettuce, which, unlike pale, watery iceberg lettuce, actually contains a decent amount of nutrients such as folate, iron, and potassium. Like other darker colored lettuces, Romaine is also higher in beta carotenes, too. This vegetarian variation on the classic Caesar salad omits the anchovies:

First, make the croutons (feel free to use store bought, but try to find a whole grain crouton that’s free of partially hydrogenated oils—good luck!):

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Take 2 slices whole grain bread, brush (or spray) with olive oil, and, if you like, add a little garlic. Bake for 10 to 15 minutes, or until lightly browned and crisp.

Next, make the dressing:

6 ounces firm silken tofu (ideally, organic, non-GMO if you can get it)
1/3 cup freshly squeezed lemon juice
1/2 cup water
1 teaspoon minced garlic
2 tablespoons drained capers
1/4 cup nutritional (or brewer’s) yeast
2 teaspoons Dijon mustard
salt and pepper to taste

Puree ingredients in a blender or food processor till smooth.

Tear one large head of Romaine lettuce into bite-sized pieces and top with dressing, freshly grated Parmesan, and the croutons.

(I adapted this recipe from the Canyon Ranch Cooks book, and as an anchovy lover myself, I was skeptical about whether you could really make a true Caesar salad without these tasty little fish. But I am always amazed at the way this dressing mimics that delicious and distinctive anchovy tang.)

WORKING CLASS HERO

The definition of a hero is pretty elastic these days, and that goes double for hero sandwiches, which have historically consisted of anything you feel like putting on a roll, from cold cuts and cheese to pickled peppers or grilled vegetables. As Craig Claiborne wrote in the New York Times on August 27, 1963:

So stock up on freshly baked whole wheat or multigrain rolls, slice ‘em up and slather on your favorite cheeses and grilled vegetables—onions and bell peppers are the classic choices, but mushrooms, summer squash and eggplant work great, too.

And if you can’t handle going cold turkey on the cold cuts, consider some of the better veggie sausages and deli slices from Yves, Tofurkey, Lightlife, and others who make surprisingly satisfying soy-based meat substitutes. They may be fake, but they’re a real option for those of us who want to reduce our meat intake.

If a meat-free Labor Day is a no-can-do for you, then at the very least try to go grass-fed. Even CNN’s catching on to the grassroots groundswell for grass-fed meats:

A barbeque featuring tofu dogs or veggie burgers would be enough to start a riot in some American backyards, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy the grass-fed burgers and hot dogs we buy from Hawthorne Valley and Fleisher’s. Hey, I even ate a non-grass-fed burger (and a dog) at the Teamsters Cookout at Yearly Kos. I’m not a purist (for the record, Marion Nestle had a hot dog, too—it’s all about moderation.) I just think we’d all be better off eating a lot less meat, and avoiding any meat (or dairy, or eggs) from factory farms. Note to Teamsters: pasture-raised meats contain brain-boosting omega 3’s, and you need all the brainpower you can get to cope with globalization and grow the grassroots labor movement!

“Plastics” was the big buzzword in 1967’s The Graduate:

Mr. McGuire: I just want to say one word to you -just one word.

Ben: Yes sir.

Mr. McGuire: Are you listening?

Ben: Yes I am.

Mr. McGuire: 'Plastics.'

Ben: Exactly how do you mean?

Mr. McGuire: There's a great future in plastics. Think about it. Will you think about it?

Ben: Yes I will.

Mr. McGuire: Shh! Enough said. That's a deal.

Forty years later, Mr. McGuire’s buzzword is a big ol’ buzzkill, and plastic’s a deal killer. Plastic shopping bags—which Americans reportedly go through at the rate of 100 billion a year--are getting banned left and right--and rightly so. Card-carrying environmentalists carry a reusable canvas tote.

But bottled water’s set to unseat the plastic shopping bag as Public Eco-Enemy Number One. “We're moving 1 billion bottles of water around a week in ships, trains, and trucks in the United States alone,” according to FastCompany reporter Charles Fishman, who notes that we indulge our thirst for convenience while “one out of six people in the world has no dependable, safe drinking water.”

What a colossal waste of fossil fuels, from the petroleum-based bottles to all that gas it takes to truck the stuff hither and yon from its source—which, in the case of Coke’s Dasani and Pepsi’s Aquafina, is just regular ol’ tap water, anyway. Taking a page from the Department of Redundancy Department, they re-purify previously purified municipal water. This is even more absurd than it sounds when you consider that federal quality standards for bottled water are less stringent than they are for tap water.

So, please, bypass the bottled water and take it from the tap when you can, whether it’s in a restaurant or on the road. Bring a reusable bottle and refill it whenever possible. And yeah, we know some tap water may need to be filtered first, and we’re aware that polycarbonate-based plastic bottles can leach contaminants. But you’ve got to pick your battles, and we’re awash in bottles. Don’t let bottled water be our Waterloo.

(hat tip to Elizabeth Royte for the FastCompany link)

Higher fuel costs and hotter weather have suddenly made a lot of people wonder why we ship salad greens from Central California to North Carolina, or fly pears in from Peru, or get our garlic from China.

Killer spinach and poisonous pet food have caught the FDA with its pants down, unable to cover its woefully underfunded, overburdened ass.

Shuttered mom and pop shops line the sidewalks of our main streets like so much corporate collateral damage, driven out of business by big box behemoths.

If you add up the food miles, the diet-induced diseases, the environmental degradation and climate change, the fertile farmland swallowed by sprawl, and the local shops gobbled up by global conglomerates, you’ll see that the cost of doing business as usual is higher than an elephants’ eye (maybe that’s why Republicans have so much trouble seeing the big picture?)

Our food chain has turned us into a culture of cannibals, locked in a vicious cycle of overconsumption that is, in turn, consuming us.

Sounds bad, but here’s the good news: people are rising up and revolting against the reactionaries. We’re addressing the need to feed ourselves in ways that don’t destroy our health and our air, land and water. We’re igniting a revival of our local economies through community minded coalitions like Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE) and an irreverent Reverend by the name of Billy, whose Church of Stop Shopping offers salvation to those of us (me included) who are “addled by advertising.”

And now the grassroots are growing in every sense of the word thanks to groups like Kitchen Gardeners International, a Maine-based non-profit whose mission “is to empower individuals, families, and communities to achieve greater levels of food self-reliance through the promotion of kitchen gardening, home-cooking, and sustainable local food systems.”

The folks at KGI are using the latest tool, a YouTube video, to revive an ancient tool, the trowel, in the hopes of rewriting history. Watch KGI’s History of Gastronomy, which depicts our evolution from knuckle-dragging primates to soda-swilling knuckleheads, and then see KGI’s vision of a new way for us neo-neanderthals.

KGI’s website shows you how to sow some homegrown hope, nourish your own community, and connect with people all over the world who share your yearning for a sustainable way of life. As KGI’s online newsletter notes: