Water, Water, Everywhere: $50 per gallon and up

Hey all.

Family stuff is happening these days, so I'm not able to keep up here as I once was, but I have been following the rapid approach of World Water Day, which occurs this Sunday, March 22. To that end, I thought I might link you all to some articles around the web that might give you a broader understanding of the problems involved in water rights and water availability throughout the world.

• CHILE: Why "Free-Market" Water Rights Just Don't Work
  An article about the water struggles in Quillaqua, Chile by The New York Times illustrates how badly wrong a water rights policy can go.
• CANADA: No Princes in the Water Rights Game Either
  Now, you'd think that a country with a fairly solid human rights record (in the main--I know no one's perfect) would be a little quicker to agree that clean water is a basic human right. Not so much. Luckily, you can tell the government just what you think of that.
• AFRICA: Coca Cola Equals Fresh Water?
  The Coca Cola Company has pledged $30 million dollars to fresh water projects in Africa. Now if they could just stop wasting the world's water by bottling it and shipping it across the globe.
• USA: We Solve Our Problems on Film
  The Environmental Protection Agency is running a contest for films that will inspire the nation's people to protect our lakes and wetlands.

For more information about water rights, check out:

• New American Dream, which is holding a webinar on water rights this coming Monday.
• This list from Business and Human Rights Resources which provides more links to more water info.
• FLOW: For the Love of Water is a documentary film on the global water crisis. It's available on Netflix, if you're like me and are too lazy to seek it out in a theater or rental store.

So that's it for today. Go drink a little tap water out of a real glass, would you?

Cats and the Environment I: The Litter Question

I was talking to my boss last week about her cats. It was originally a discussion about the composter I want to buy (which she has and likes [though she says it does smell a bit when you open it]), but grew into a discussion of recycling here in the office and at home and that led to the thing I do that annoys me most, ecologically speaking: throwing out the cat litter.

We have two cats, both indoor-exclusive, and we live in a condo high-rise with some very strict rules. One of them is that you must not toss bags of kitty litter down the trash chute. (That's pretty common sense, actually--bags do not stay intact while hurtling 30 floors through a small tube to their death in the garbage room, no matter what anyone tells you. Litter Bomb? No thanks.) The building's answer is to do a daily trash run: kitty litter bags are left in the trash room on our floor and maintenance comes by in the freight elevator and adds it to the pile of kitty litter bags they already have. It cuts down on the possibility of a litter bomb, so this rule, too, is all to the good.

Not to the good? I cannot reuse plastic grocery sacks to bag the litter. And it must be double bagged. So I end up spending extra money to buy small trash bags and then double wrap the kitty litter to ensure that it never ever sees a molecule of oxygen with which to decompose.

Annoying. And again, I mention that we have two cats. Who create a lot of smelly litter. In a high-rise building with decent but not brilliant cross-ventilation, I have to scoop the litter boxes (plural) every single day and still there is the problem of a teensy bit of stink in my oh-so-sensitive nose. Baking soda mixed into the litter helps, but the odor isn't the only problem.

I have allergies. Big, bad, killer allergies. And every single day, scooping that clay clumping litter is killing my lungs a little bit more. Yes, I know that there has never been a clinical study that shows that clumping litter is dangerous for anyone's health (but I kind of think that's just because they haven't bothered to study it), but the fact remains that I kick up an awful lot of dust scooping those things out and that does my allergies no good at all--can't imagine burying in the dust is great for the cats, come to think of it.

And the creation of the litter does no good to the earth, either. Conventional cat litters use clay, which is usually found some 30-40 feet underground on clay-containing mountainsides. Easiest way to get to it? Skim off the 30-40 feet of topsoil and growth above it and collect the clay. The result is a lopped-off mountainside (we had one where I was a kid--they're finally rehabilitating it now, decades later) that increases flood damage for the land below it and is generally an ecological disaster. It is so time for a change.

At first blush, biodegradable cat litters look like a fine idea. They are often made from things like leftover pine branches after a tree has been felled by the lumber companies or from corn husks and cobs left over from grain extraction (not 100% green, but at least it uses up the stuff no one wants). They rarely have anything chemical added to them and are, by all accounts, very good at controlling odors. And they biodegrade! They break down when you're done with them! Sounds perfect.

In actual fact, they are brilliant for people who have outside composters or large compost heaps that generate enough heat to kill all the bacteria that teem through feline waste. For someone like me--who will be double-bagging the dang stuff in air-blocking plastic, so it can be thrown in a landfill, which is, itself, an almost completely anaerobic environment--biodegradable litter only provides me with a product that was slightly less earth-killing to produce.

Flushable litters offer a good solution for me. There are a number of organic and/or natural brands out there, with varying textures, so moving your cat from one cat litter to another might be a little easier if the two feel basically the same. They don't really cost any more than the clays and might actually be more cost effective because you use less of them (supposedly--we'll see what happens in Chez Peaceable).

The basic truth is that I don't have a properly ventilated space for a certified animal-waste-processing composter (they suggest these only be placed outside because they smell regardless), and I'm sick to death of A) having to take my litter out to the trash room at a specific time to make sure it doesn't smell up the hall while it's waiting to be picked up, and B) throwing away hundreds of pounds of earth-damaging clay litter. I'm just starting my first foray into trying to get my older cat to use it. This should be fun.

NOTE FOR OWNERS OF OUTDOOR CATS: If you have an indoor-outdoor or outdoor-exclusive cat, your animal may be exposed to toxoplasmosis, a parasite which is not fun--it is the reason why pregnant women are told not to clean cat boxes, because the risk to the fetus if the mother contracts toxo is very, very high.

For this reason, you should probably find a different way to dispose of your kitty litter than flushing it down the toilet. Regional water treatment plants don't screen for toxo and it could end up in the water supply or, more likely, in the lakes, rivers, and oceans. Composting is the best bet there, as the heat of composting should kill off the parasite. Also, taking your cat to the vet and having them tested for toxo periodically is a healthy thing to do anyway. If you or your partner is pregnant or plans to become pregnant, for the love of the unborn babies, please test your cat for toxo. Birth defects are bad.

Cleanliness is next to--*hackhack* *coughcoughcough*

I like clean. Really I do. I like my house clean and my kitchen clean and my kid, my cat, my car... I just can't stand cleaners.

So I scrub the bathtub with baking soda and rinse it with hot, hot water and I use vinegar on stains and I basically try to get by without ever resorting to bleach or scrubbing bubbles (there's actually no bleach in my house and hasn't been for years).

"My God!" a good American parent would reply. "Don't you bleach your son's toys after he's had friends over? What if one of them had the sniffles? He could get a cold!?"

Um, yes. He could. And while I'm not advocating letting my child develop whooping cough or meningitis, a cold might be good for him.

There is a hypothesis called, aptly enough, "The Hygiene Hypothesis (HH)." (A good, though very medicalese, discussion of the theory is found in the first main section of this article) Basically, it posits that our immune systems create themselves bit by bit as we are exposed to and form antibodies to various bacteria, viruses--you know, "germs". Now, if your house is spit and polish, your baby's emerging immune system doesn't know quite what to make of it all. It knows it's supposed to create antibodies, but it's not sure to what it should create them because there's nothing like, say, rhinovirus around. You've done such a good job of protecting the child from "contagions" that his immune system says, in effect, "Well, I can't find any germs to make antibodies against. I know! How about this plant over here!?"

And thus, say the HH people, are created millions of children with asthma and allergies. Their immune systems are reacting to anything and everything because they have nothing concrete and dangerous to which to react.

Now, while I'm not entirely sure I quite buy all they have to say (a lot of the research done to prove the hypothesis is a little dicey and self-fulfilling for my taste), I do agree that children need to be exposed to a lot of things at a young age.

I believe in socializing a child and dealing with the blessed inevitability that he'll get rhinovirus or rotovirus or some other virus in his first couple of years. It will suck mightily to stay up with him while he labors through it, but it is a necessary thing.

I believe that children need dirt. No, I'm not saying you now have an excuse never to clean your house again, but I am saying that it's cool if, after a rainstorm, your son gets into a mud toss with his friends and ends up mucky from head to toe. Skin is there to keep the sodden gunk out of his peritoneal cavity. We're built to last, us humans.

Most of all, I believe that there is a much greater risk posed by many of our cleansers than by many of the germs for which we created them. Bleach is a poison. If you drink the cup of bleach you washed down the drain to "clean" it, you will die in all likelihood. If, however, you drink the pan of water you used to clean out the drain instead of the bleach, you're likely to be better hydrated and not much else (unless you didn't wait until the water cooled down before you drank it--shame on you).

I think it's not a bad idea to try to clean with only what you'd eat. Granted, I'm not interested in having a glass of vinegar with dinner, but I will use it on my salad, and therefore, I can use it on my floor.

A newborn really does need protection from pretty much everything, chemical or biological, but I'd rather not lock my three-year-old out of his room once a week because the rug cleaner I used in there was toxic. And really, unless he's dropping glasses of juice on that floor every five minutes, couldn't I shampoo the rug a little less often and vacuum it most of the time instead?

The old saying "God made dirt. Dirt don't hurt?" I'll buy that.

How Green Is Your President?

Barack Obama has been in office about a month now, so I thought it was time to see exactly how much damage he's done to the environment.

Let's leave the stimulus plan, which at 900 pages created a minimum of half a million pages of paper waste and attendant ink and electricity usage. That's not just his fault, it's the fault of the Congress, too. (Would they save money, do you think, if they worked electronically more often instead of printing out absolutely everything?) No, let's just look at the president's movements since he took office and do the math from there, yes?

Inauguration Day: Seriously, no way I can assess the environmental damage of the entire day. All I'm going to do here is calculate the miles he actually traveled. The answer there is: miles from White House to church to Capitol to White House and an average of miles to all of the parties. Times five, because that's the number of cars in his typical entourage on that day. This all works out to about 75 miles (remember, it's times five).

Week One: As I recall, he spent the first week pretty much in DC, so maybe we say another 35 for that, to cover going to and fro trying to get the stimulus and such off the ground.

Week Two: One trip to Williamsburg, VA via Air Force One. 500 airplane miles (AMs) round trip air, plus 100 car miles for the week.

Week Three: DC to Camp David to DC (200 miles via helicopter, roundtrip); DC to Elkhart, IN to DC (1000 AMs roundtrip); DC to Fort Myers, FL (900 AMs), to Springfield, IL (1050 AMs), to Peoria, IL (90 AMs), to Chicago, IL (135 AMs). Add at least 150 car miles for the whole week.

Week Four: Chicago, IL, to DC (590 AMs); DC to Denver, CO, to DC (3000 AMs roundtrip); DC to Ottawa, Canada, (projected back to DC) (1000 AMs roundtrip). Say 200 car miles for the week.

Miscellaneous: Because the president uses the White House Helicopter to go to and from the local airport and other places, I'm adding 100 helicopter miles to his entire time in office so far. Also, I'm assuming the gas mileage of an SUV for the car miles [~15 mpg]--which, granted, might be overstating the efficiency of his vehicles.

Let's do the math now (I love math!): (560 car miles [.5 tons CO2]) + (300 helicopter miles [.7 tons CO2]) + (8625 airplane miles [4.0 tons CO2]) = 5.2 tons of CO2 used.

By one person. In one month.

If we assume that this is an average month, by the time the president finishes his first (and hopefully not last) term, he will have burned 250 tons of CO2 on travel alone--I'd love to know the energy profile of the White House and its grounds, but I'm thinking that might be a state secret.

So? Ways he could reduce this impact? Some are simple yet complex (stop driving around DC with two cars ahead of you and two trailing behind--which would probably be perceived as too much of a security risk) and some are much more difficult (not meeting face to face with other world leaders is a problem as it paints you as elitist or worse). I do wish more worldwide discussions would be held via conference call. I wish there was some sort of international security flight service so that dignitaries from countries nearby each other could all be picked up in the same secure plane and flown to whatever conference they're heading for.

Heck, I'd like to wish our president flew a more fuel-efficient plane!

While none of that is ever likely to come to fruition, I do think it's interesting to think about the impact that the global village is having on... well, the globe. We want to see friends and family from across the world, we need to connect with our clients hundreds of miles away... It's all complicated.

So the next time you think about driving the five blocks to the sandwich store, remember that every mile you don't drive is one that a world leader can use to hobnob with other world leaders.

...

Doesn't sound like much of a trade-off, huh?

Daydreaming Again

In my mind there is a city. The density is about 15,000 families per square mile (That's about 3 million people for a city the square mileage of Manhattan Island, so dense, but not too dense), living in mid-rises and row houses.

When I was young, there was a community garden for every mile of land (meaning there still had to be a lot of food trucked in), but as I've gotten older--and technology has gotten cooler--that's now a 40-story vertical farm, employing a tenth of the people living in the one-mile "food circle" and providing no fewer than 1000 different crops. The growing highrise is adjacent to a processing facility that turns the farm's peanuts into peanut butter and its chilies into hot sauce. Employees of the vertical farm get paid and also get a free share of the crops.

There's still a park for every mile, too, in place of my original community garden plots, because people need to sit on the grass and that grass cools down the city wonderfully.

The population is diverse and well-integrated, without sacrificing the feeling of cultural community that, say, an Irish girl might want to have with other Irish people who live nearby and understand the necessity of having a butcher around who knows how to make a proper black pudding.

And you can have that black pudding, if you want. Outside of town, there's a ring of farms that are designed to raise cattle and sheep and chickens in such a way that their waste can be turned into biofuel (haven't ever figured out how to harness the methane in their wind, but it may come to me). They are pastured, of course, and the pastures are covered in local grasses, organically grown.

Back in the city, commercial and residential areas are mixed, so that there don't need to be any "big box" stores that take an hour to drive to, because you can find pretty much everything you need within a couple of miles' walk of your home: groceries, a shoemaker, a yarn boutique, a hair salon, an electronics store--all the important things. Industry nestles up against home where possible--polluting smokestacks are replaced with carbon filter caps and green energy buildings.

People know each other and the schools are safe and thorough in their educating and the kids come home to family members or neighbors who make sure they get a good afternoon snack, a bit of exercise, and a quiet place to do their homework. There are enough baseball, football, and soccer fields, along with hockey rinks, swimming pools, and basketball courts, to make sure there's something for almost everyone.

Every building has solar PV built right in, so there's no need for more than a couple of wind farms on the outskirts of town to supplement the grid and provide the power for battery-operated car docking stations. When there's no wind and little sun, car owners can make a little money dumping energy back into the grid.

For people who want to grow their own food, or just don't want to pay for the produce at the store on the ground floor of the vertical farm, there are garden plots on all the building roofs, making sure that people have a contact to nature and a cooler roof in summer and less run off all year long. Kids learn how the food chain works by growing things, picking them when they are ripe, and going downstairs to the apartment to cook them minutes later.

People have also rediscovered the use of water cisterns, which adorn all the buildings, providing as much of the water for each building as the climate will allow. There's central plumbing and water reclamation facilities and fresh tap water--don't worry. Nobody has to live on only what the rain provides, but at least the cisterns take a little bit of the burden off the water grid.

People don't worry so much about paper or plastic. Because it's never more than a few blocks to the local grocer (who is also the local farmer), people are content to bring their baskets--just like those quaint ones we all see in the "rural middle ages" movies.

Except that these baskets are filled with not just the foods that could be grown outside in the agricultural zone, but foods that are grown in the vertical farms. In the northern midwest, people can get melons and berries until November and again in April because the vertical farm acts like a season extender. It's all about resources, of course, so the place doesn't keep the temperatures tropical year-round. The heat and lighting are dictated by the region, to an extent, but the seasons of bounty are a little longer, produce from warmer climes can be grown during the warmer months, and the cold season still provides enough to live on.

This kind of city has always been a dream of mine--a place where people can get everything they need without going too far and wasting too much. And you want to know the funny thing? This isn't a new idea, or one that is unattainable.

The Amish do it--sure, they have more contact and trade with the "English" world now, but they still pretty much get what they need right near home. There are communities in many parts of the world that don't bother with the rest of us too terribly often. They do just fine.

The big problem is that most of us no longer know what "getting what we need" means. I'll admit it: getting what I need sometimes means buying the latest scifi film. It sometimes means Starbucks or a 3 Musketeers bar or that ever-needed lemon. I'm not shy about the fact that I like having things!

But maybe we should rethink how we get those things. Al Gore proposed a plan last year to replace US energy generation as we know it with 100% carbon-free sources in the next ten years. (Wow--and he thought running for president was hard!)

It's a fantastic idea that most of the establishment immediately marked as fundamentally unattainable. Let's stop and think a minute, though. What would his daydream world look like?

People who have spent their lives working in the steel, automobile, and coal industries have been losing their jobs by the thousands. In Al Gore's daydream, they'd be put back to work--first retrofitting the plants where they used to work and then building concentrating mirrors for solar arrays, or electric cars, or windmills. People could be put to work designing and building the new electrical infrastructure we need to make sure that the wind in Iowa can help power the buildings of Philly.

People who bought those new electric cars would be faced with expensive personal conveyances that could, in part, pay for themselves in a very real way. One of the problems we have to deal with while growing a new energy economy is the fact that, really, our batteries kind of suck. Once the sun goes down and the wind stops howling, we need to store that energy. By plugging in your electric car and charging it up, you'd be providing that battery. So why could we not, say, have all those garages in all those highrises in all those big cities install smart meters--meters that allow electricity to go both ways. During the day, the car could be charged by the grid. At night, if the car owner so desired, the battery in that car could help to light the highrise and lighten the driver's electricity bill.

(This is a particularly attractive choice for families like mine, who rarely use their car. In this future, our car could hold down the parking spot and the utility bill!)

His world would no doubt rethink agriculture as we know it. Less thinking about immediate yield and more about sustainable futures. It would have sustainably harvested forests. He probably even dreams of carbon-neutral air travel--though personally, I think we need to rethink the need for "live and in person" speaking engagements and make it fashionable to "satellite in" via audio-visual uplink.

The point here is, there are millions of us who have dreams about these things. And yes, I'm unlikely to ever be able to make my dream a full reality. But I can join the local garden club that plants and tends the greenery in those little havens of oxygen called city parks. I can plant some herbs in my kitchen (if I can find a way to keep the cat from eating them) and reduce at least some of my food miles. I can write my local electric company (again) and complain (again) about the fact that they (still) don't offer green energy (even though there are some hydroelectric and wind power plants in the midwest).

So dream, but work, too. Sure, there are the standard "use CFLs, plant a tree, turn off the TV, ride a bike" things that all of us know we should be doing, but what other things can you come up with that you yourself can do to make at least a little bit of your dream come true?

Think about it and get back to me, okay?

________

Want to find people living the dream? Global Ecovillage Network is just that--a network of ecovillages around the globe. Kinda cool.

Food and Movies! Two of my favorite things!

Just a quick post today, since I'm always running late on Sundays. I figured I'd leave you with something interesting to read, so I'm linking you to other people. :)

I happen to love documentaries, so when I got the latest issue of Treehugger's newsletter in my email box, I thought "Hey! More documentaries for me to watch!" And they're about FOOD, so really, how can you go wrong?

Speaking of documentaries about stuff I care about:

• No Impact Man, the documentary based on the New York dad who calls himself No Impact Man, debuted at the Sundance Film Festival to great applause this month! I hope we'll all see it coming to a theater near us some time soon.
• An Inconvenient Truth is always a good addition to any environmental film festival.
• Who Killed the Electric Car actually made me furious. I own a Prius, but I'd rather own an electric car! Also, check out the blog Revenge of the Electric Car to keep up to date on electric technologies.

That's it, I'm out of here--have to go enjoy the wonderful freezing weather! Have a great day!