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>> The second Westside Permaculture Gathering will be an "Intro to Permaculture" primer, put together by community permaculturists, as well as a local potluck. All are invited to the free event: Monday, June 23, 6:30 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. in the Multipurpose Room of the Santa Monica Main Library, 601 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. Contact Sean Jennings at swjennings@gmail.com with questions.
>> At the "ReGreen: Green Home Improvement" event, everyone from homeowners to design professionals can find out about the ReGreen program -- "best practice guidelines and targeted educational resources for sustainable residential improvement projects" developed by the American Society of Interior Designers' Foundation and the U.S. Green Building Council. The free event happens Tuesday, June 24., from 6 p.m. - 8:30 p.m. at the Multi-Purpose Room of the Santa Monica Public Library, 601 Santa Monica Blvd., Santa Monica. RSVP to gbrc@globalgreen.org are appreciated but not required.
>> Hear the authors of the Homegrown Evolution blog, Kelly Coyne and Erik Knutzen (interviewed here), at an L.A. Eco-Village event titled "The Urban Homestead: A Talk, Slide Show and Book-Signing." The event happens Thursday, June 26, at 7:30 p.m., at the L.A. Eco-Village, 117 Bimini Place, Los Angeles. Suggested donation's $5; RSVP to crsp@igc.org.
>> Join artist Jane Tsong and curator Donna Conwell for a conversation at the Farmlab Public Salon, " 'Everything is Alive' and Other Street Projects." "Everything is Still Alive" is an art project in which native California poppies were planted on patches of exposed earth in the L.A. area: "where the poppies survive, orange blossoms reveal the disparate patterns of land management." The free event takes place Friday, June 27 at noon at Farmlab, 1745 N. Spring Street #4, Los Angeles.
For more eco-themed events happening in the L.A. area, check out the Emerald City green calendar.
Photos courtesy Jane Tsong via Farmlab
 For a primer on current environmental concerns -- alongside lessons in sociocultural, architectural, and political history around the world -- pick up Alan Weisman's book, "The World Without Us."
I read this book after watching "Your house without you," a short animation that shows just how long a typical U.S. home would last if humans suddenly disappeared. That times 100 is what "The World Without Us" looks at, examining what seemingly-indestructible edifices will quickly disintegrate without our presence -- and what material legacies will remain of human life long after we disappear as a species.
What will remain: A lot of plastic. "The World Without Us," in fact, features an interview with Capt. Charles Moore, whose discovery of the "Pacific Garbage Patch" -- a huge area in the ocean covered with plastic debris -- prompted the current Junk raft trip, which departed Long Beach for Hawaii on June 1.
Frighteningly, every bit of plastic we've ever created -- save the small amount that's been incinerated -- still remains, according to the chapter titled "Polymers are forever." Even more frightening is the fact that plastics, instead of biodegrading, are simply breaking into smaller and smaller bits -- and getting ingested by smaller and smaller organisms. And because plastics act as sponges for toxic substances such as DDT and PCBs, the potential for bio-accumulation of these poisons as they work their way up the food chain really gets scary.
Not all of "The World Without Us" is so doom and gloom. In fact, because the book covers so much ground -- from the history of the Hagia Sophia to today's virtual water trade in Kenyan flowers -- "The World Without Us" sometimes reads as a compendium of bits of sociocultural histories you've always wanted to learn more about but never got around to exploring on your own. Do you know why wild African animals have survived alongside humans while so many U.S. species went extinct when European settlers arrived? Are you familiar with VHEMT -- The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement? Reading "The World Without You" will educate you about the things you never even knew you were curious about -- and perhaps make you a better Jeopardy player in the process.
Even as it points out some man-made ecological disasters, "The World Without You" doesn't get preachy or push a strong environmental agenda. More than anything, "The World Without You" gives us a glimpse of both the fragility and resilience of life on Earth -- a nature that humans have proved quite adept at destroying, but also a nature that will long outlast the human species. In the end, the book paints a history and future of the Earth that's not so human-centric, and correspondingly, encourages a more humble perspective of our role on this planet. What you end up doing with that perspective is entirely up to you.
Erik Knutzen and Kelly Coyne, who write the blog Homegrown Evolution chronicling their adventures as urban gardeners and farmers, recently released their first book, "The Urban Homestead" from Process Media. Last Friday, Erik, who is also a board member of the Los Angeles County Bicycle Coalition, sat down in his garden with Streetsblog's Damien Newton to talk about the new book and sustainable transportation.
DN: So the book's called "The Urban Homestead." How did you come up with the name?
EK: It's a phrase that's been floating around since the '70s. That's the earliest I've seen a reference to an "Urban Homestead." The magazine Mother Earth News, a classic resource for back-to-the-land hippies, and still a wonderful resource, had a bunch of stories in the 1970s that used the expression "Urban Homestead."
There's also a classic example in Berkeley from the early 1970s that was an experiment in self-reliant living in the city called the Integral Urban House. It was a very ambitious project based in Berkeley aimed at setting up a self-reliant urban household. For instance, they had fish ponds with bee hives over the fish ponds. The dead bees would fall into the ponds, providing food for the fish. The goal was to apply principles of the back-to-the-land movement to living in the city.
I'm actually not all that happy with the phrase Urban Homestead because the word homestead suggests a sort of Little House on the Prairie, completely self-sufficient life. Our focus isn't on that kind of extreme living, but on small things that anyone can do. It's about integrating things like growing some of your own food into a normal urban or suburban life. It's not about becoming completely self-sufficient. Community is a good thing, after all, and we still need to work with each other, not focus on running off alone.
DN: Does your family have a history of farming?
EK: Half of my family moved from Germany to Missouri and they are farmers. Some of them are farmers today, but like most family farmers, can't make a living off of it so they have to do other jobs as well. Kelly's family does not have any farmers in it, at least in the last century. But all of us are descended from farmers. In 1900, a majority of people lived on farms. Today, less than 2% of the population feeds the other 98%.
DN: Is that the inspiration to do all this? You have the gardens in the front and back, the chicken coop... Was that all a master plan from earlier in your life, or was it something you came up with as you went along?
EK: It kind of evolved. Like a lot of people we're concerned about where our food comes from.
DN: So you've been at this house...
EK: ...ten years now.
DN: And what was it like when you got here?
EK: The reason we picked this house was because it had everything inside from when it was built in the 1920s. Unfortunately, that also meant it was incredibly dilapidated. But there were also a lot of charming details. This is a modest house, it's a small house. But we prefer a small, nicely detailed house rather than a large dry-wall pup tent.
DN: But when you got here there was no chicken coop.
EK: No chicken coop. We did some vegetable growing when we still lived in an apartment, but we didn't start doing all this stuff until maybe 2000 or 2001. Originally we were spending all our time on fixing the house.
DN: When you began to convert it from the traditional urban yards, full of green grass, to the style of garden we see now, what was the first step? Put another way, if my apartment in New Jersey ever sells and I buy a place out here and want to convert a grass yard into this type of garden, what should I do?
 EK: The first thing I tell people is to start small. The mistake that a lot of people make is trying to transform the entire house and yard all at once. There are all these examples of people doing these really heroic projects to try and maximize the space all at once. The easiest thing you can do if you have a yard is to build something like a small raised bed to grow a few vegetables in. The one we have is 4x8 feet made out of wood, but it could be made out of other stuff like broken concrete or whatever you have at hand. You make a box with no bottom, then you buy soil or make compost, and then start vegetable gardening because you know the soil is good.
Do you know the expression, "you don't grow plants, you grow the soil?" The first thing you really need is the right soil, and in most places the soil you'll start out with is really bad. Using a raised bed is a way to jump-start growing while you amend the existing soil, which can take years.
If you want to take over the lawn or do something more ambitious, the first step is to really grow the soil. Make compost, but most people won't be able to make enough to fertilize a whole yard so you might have to import compost. We get horse bedding material. Did you know L.A. has more horses per capita than any other large city in the country? There is tons of compost around here...
We don't believe in tilling the soil. We believe you should amend it from above. Soil has a symbiotic system of fungus and worms that work with the roots of plants. If you till it you're going to destroy that relationship. The way to build it is to add organic matter as mulch. You might have to gently break the soil up a little bit, with a tool called a broadfork, but do it gently. You definitely shouldn't till it. Tilling isn't just bad for the soil, it contributes to pollution because it releases CO2 into the atmosphere.
If you're just moving into a place, another thing to think about is the tree situation since it takes awhile for a fruit tree to mature. You may have to take out some existing trees and put in some new ones, making sure to plant them carefully so that they provide shade where you want it -- say to cool the house, while at the same time not shading out areas where you want to grow sun-loving vegetables.
Overall we're guided by permaculture, which can be a difficult thing to explain. Permaculture came out of Australia, from the work of Bill Mollison and David Holmgren and mimics nature. Rather than industrial agriculture, which has a lot of artificial inputs such as fertilizer ... with permaculture the plants work with each other in a mutually beneficial relationship.
The best example of this is the "three sisters" that the Native Americans used to plant: corn, squash and beans. The idea being that beans are nitrogen-fixing plants, they pump nitrogen into the soil to fertilize the ground for the corn and the squash. The corn grows up as a trellis for the beans. The squash serves as a mulch for the other plants. And together these three plants provide an ideal diet for humans.
DN: I noticed out front you're growing clover to nitrogen-fix the soil a little.
 EK: This sort of gardening is the opposite of American agriculture. Too often they're putting in petro-chemicals temporarily into the soil to try and grow plants. With permaculture you use nature to do that and create a beneficial feedback cycle. It also simply requires less labor.
And that's an important part of gardening from home. I mean, you have a 9 to 5 job...
DN: Or you blog from your living room...
EK: (laughs) Right, or you blog. Or worse, you garden then you have to blog about the gardening, which takes twice as long.
Anyway, in permaculture you try to use plants that thrive in your region. If you think of gardening as a whole system, such as the "three sisters," you end up with what we see here. You see those artichokes there. The nearby fennel flowers attracts the kind of insects that deal with the bad insects on the things that we eat. You try to mix things in here such as Mexican sage, which attracts birds that also eat the insects we don't want.
One of the main goals of permaculture is to require as few human inputs as possible. There's a phrase local permaculture expert David Khan taught me that I really like, "work makes work..." If you plant a grass lawn you have to mow it every week, you have to fertilize it. I just don't have time for that kind of work. I don't want that kind of work. I also don't want to pay someone else to do it.
If you work with nature rather than against her, you don't have to do as much work. Nature doesn't need humans to make it go.
DN: So let's talk about apartments for a moment. What can the apartment dwellers do?
EK: If you happen to have a sunny balcony, what I would recommend most people do is make their own self-watering containers. There are really great directions for self-watering containers on the Internet by Josh Mandel. (Writer's note: here's a cool You Tube video from Homegrown Evolution.)
A self-watering container has a reservoir of water at the bottom, and really only requires watering about once a week. Vegetables need moist soil, not soggy, and self-watering containers do that perfectly.
You can also grow herbs. You don't need a self-watering container for herbs. Just grow them in a regular pot. If you don't have a balcony that's sunny, there are community gardens where you can rent space. There's not enough of them, and that's a real problem.
Or you can forage for food. Foraging is something for people that don't have land or access to a community garden. Especially in L.A. where there are a lot of wilderness areas close by you can go out and find plenty of plants you can eat. They're quite good. There are many cultures that still forage for food. Italians still forage regularly. Armenian people forage as well.
I can literally walk two blocks away in the spring and there are fields full of mustard seeds. Dandelions, you can eat the leaves or use the flowers to make dandelion wine. There's also a group -- Fallen Fruit --that makes maps of where the public fruit trees of Silver Lake are.
There's a whole world of mushrooms to forage if you know what you are doing, but you, of course, need to be very careful. Go to the free lectures the Los Angeles Mycological Society puts on.
The book is about a lot more than gardening and foraging. It's also a home economics book. Stuff our grandparents used to do that we forgot somehow. Lots of immigrants still do this stuff, but they don't have blogs so nobody knows about it, I guess (writer's note, he was either picking on me or being self-deprecating here). There's a whole world of fermentation you can do right in your kitchen. You can ferment stuff from the farmer's market, you can make your own beer...
...the reason to do your own fermentation is you can't buy this stuff. There's a type of fermentation called lacto-fermentation, and you may have heard of probiotics. It's a type of health food that has living organisms in it. Yogurt is the most obvious example -- yogurt with active cultures in them. These yogurts are important for our health.
Our environment is too clean for our own health because we're missing these organisms from our bodies. Lacto-fermentation method can replace some of those essential organisms. Kimchi is an example of this, but most pickles you buy in the supermarket are pickled in vinegar instead of the traditional lacto-fermentation method.
People in apartments can also make wild yeast (sourdough) bread. It's important to use wild yeast...
DN: What qualifies yeast as "wild"?
EK: I'm glad you asked that because it's very simple. To make sourdough bread all you have to do is mix flour and water together and every day throw out half the mixture (or make bread with it) and add more flour. The wild yeast is contained in the flour itself, and the air in smaller concentrations. It's there naturally. It's very easy to make good bread without commercial yeast.
Bread without commercial yeast lasts longer, tastes better and some say is better for you.
DN: Talking about energy, is there anything easy one can do to take better advantage of solar energy without buying solar panels?
 EK: There's lot of fun things you can do, if you like to tinker. That's the excitement I get from these kind of projects, that I can make them myself. For example, a solar cooker. You can make one out of cardboard, aluminum foil and a black pot.
DN: I saw a woman at the bike expo in Pasadena the other week pulling an oven baking cookies with solar power on her bike. I thought that was cool.
EK: That's nice. It's amazing how easy these things work. We cook our rice in a solar cooker now and it's easier than cooking on the stove. We just throw it in the solar cooker and two hours later you have perfectly cooked rice and you can't burn it. That's the kind of thing we show how to do in the book and the kind of thing that someone in an apartment or someone who can't afford solar panels can easily do.
There's also the solar dehydrator, which we showed you earlier. It's a little more involved, it's made out of wood, but it's a lot easier than installing solar panels. Nothing against solar panels, but it's not possible for everyone. Solar cooking is for everyone. Even if you don't have a balcony in your apartment you can always use your solar cooker for a picnic.
EK: I was talking about the tragedy of modern agriculture. You and I can see the impact of our failed transportation policies. I think more and more people are beginning to see the tragedy of our agriculture policy, which is equally appalling in this country. The power of industrial monocultural agriculture, i.e. growing tons and tons of corn for corn syrup and the resulting health crisis is something people are starting to be aware of.
In our supermarkets you can get all kinds of vegetables all year round but they taste out of season all year round. And so as we come to grow more things ourselves, and you can see that this garden isn't that ambitious, it's small and modest. This is not Versailles obviously. But, just growing a few flavorful unique varieties of vegetables and fruits opens a whole new world of flavor. Especially in the winter, because the winter here is the best time to grow food in Southern California. But, we grow all kinds of food, mostly Italian styles of vegetables and they are much more powerfully flavorful then anything you can get in the supermarket. Bitterness as part of our flavor palate alone is something that's been lost in North American cuisine.
The U.S. palate has tilted towards the sweet. And when we started growing these Italian varieties we were like, 'Wow, this is so powerfully bitter.' But we eventually realized that this is a different part of the palate of food that we're missing and it's really wonderful. These bitter foods also tend to be highly nutritious. That's the real motivation for us, to have flavorful, unique food that's in season.
When you're growing food it ties you to nature. No, you don't have oranges year-round, you have it at one time of the year. You have avocados another and artichokes another. It depends on where we are in the sun's course in the heavens through the seasons. Growing food ties you to the real world rather than the virtual world ... the blogging world where you and I are for a lot of our lives.
I don't want to come across as a technophobe either because I think technology is really important and can do wonderful things. I like having a computer and blogging and all that. I think that's really important. I'm not a Luddite at all. I don't like Luddites. I don't like that rejection of technology.
The important thing is to have a balance. To know how to grow your own food. To know how to take care of chickens and that sort of thing. To know how to make beer and bread. The important thing is balance.
The transportation portion of this interview appears at Streetsblog. "The Urban Homestead" is available through Homegrown Evolution.
Photos by Damien Newton
 Are e-books like the Kindle (left) and Sony Reader (right) more eco-friendly than paper books? The short answer is that we don't know -- yet. We have a pretty good idea of the carbon footprint of paper books, thanks to a newish study, Environmental Trends and Climate Impacts: Findings from the U.S. Book Industry, released earlier this year by the Book Industry Study Group and the Green Press Initiative. That report concludes each paper U.S. book releases 8.85 pounds of carbon dioxide.
 Unfortunately, the study doesn't cover e-books. "In order to address e-books effectively, I’d need to look at a lifecycle comparison that analyzes the impacts of e-readers vs. paper as a medium," said Tyson Miller, founder and director of the Green Press Initiative, in an interview published on Sustainablog. "I do hope that we can explore much more in-depth in future iterations."
The lack of studies effectively comparing the carbon footprint of paper vs. electronic books hasn't stopped the e-book industry from marketing both e-books and e-readers as eco-friendly products. There's even a Read an E-book Week, which appears to have been started by a couple of e-book writers, who claim on their website that "E-Books Can Help Reduce Your Carbon Footprint."
Sony, too, has been pushing its Sony Reader (right) as an eco-product. In an interview with the Sietch Blog, Rick Clancy, senior vice president for Corporate Communications at Sony, recently recommended the Sony Reader thusly: "Think of all the trees that can be spared if more people read e-books. Another great feature is that the Sony Reader uses very little energy. My understanding is the device can go through about 1,000 page turns without needing to be recharged."
To actually measure the carbon footprint of an e-book, however, would require doing a lifecycle analysis of the e-reader -- including its production methods, materials used, energy required for the reader's use, and recyclability. A future study will likely come up with a ballpark average figure, but variables will remain depending on how one obtains and uses the product (Is the reader charging up the book via solar power or coal power? Will readers discard and buy new e-readers as often as they do cellphones or computers?).
And beyond the paper book to e-book comparison, there's the reading habit comparisons for both. For instance, someone who only reads paper books -- but mostly borrows the books from the library which she gets to by bicycle (that's me) -- will have a vastly different reading carbon footprint than someone who drives their Hummer to the bookstore and buys books printed on virgin paper.
But what all of this got me thinking about is whether people would even use e-books for the same purposes that they do paper books. A while back, I wondered whether or not Google Docs would actually make offices more eco-friendly (I'd gotten an e-mail from a Google person touting Google Docs as eco) since it's unclear how the carbon footprint of "traditional" paper use compares to that of going paperless.
I posed this question to Jamais Cascio, futurist of the Cheeseburger Footprint fame, who said "I guess that the question can only be answered by looking at what you're doing with paper & paperless, and just how fungible the two really are." More on that and a review of the Sony Reader next.
 What perfume did you wear as a teenager? I went through a lot of Poison -- and now I find out that toxic stuff contained four different phthalates!
This I discovered reading "Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry," a new book by Stacy Malkan, cofounder of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. The reason for the book? Many of the personal care products people use on a daily basis contain lead, formaldehyde, phthalates, parabens, and other carcinogenic chemicals. Why? Because cosmetics companies are allowed to use the stuff -- and the stuff is cheap.
Instead of taking a precautionary approach as many European countries do, the U.S. goes by a "prove harm" approach. Writes Malkan: "The Environmental Protection Agency must prove a toxic substance 'presents an unreasonable risk of injury to health or the environment' before regulating it -- which roughly translates to 'show us the dead bodies.' "
Nor does the Food and Drug Administration require manufacturers to demonstrate that cosmetics products are safe. This means that the cosmetics industry regulates itself -- meaning products are only tested for short-term obvious health effects (rashes, eye irritations and the like). "Most chemicals in cosmetics have not been tested for their potential to cause long-term health problems such as cancer or reproductive harm," Malkan writes.
To prove its point, "Not Just a Pretty Face" covers a lot of ground, from scientific studies to the history of the Environmental Working Group (including its popular consumer cosmetics database, Skin Deep) to the inner workings of the Cosmetic, Toiletry, and Fragrance Assn. And while there's much to be distressed about, Malkan also points to some positive signs -- most of which is actually happening in California!
For example, the California Safe Cosmetics Act, which mandates that companies let the state know if the ingredients used in products are linked to cancer or birth defects, went into effect January 2007. More recently, the California Toxic Toys Bill passed. That bill, which goes into effect January 2009, bans phthalates from children's toys sold in California. In addition, the California Green Chemistry Initiative was unveiled early this year, with three fundamental policies: "creating a new regulatory and enforcement system, strengthening consumer protection laws and better informing consumers about toxic substances in products," according to the L.A. Times.
"Not Just a Pretty Face" in fact, is also an encouraging and empowering story -- in which most of the heroes are women! Jane Houlihan of EWG, Jeanne Rizzo of the Breast Cancer Fund, and of course, Malkan herself, are all leading the fight to make consumer products safer. Even new beauty innovations are being done by women. "Not Just a Pretty Face" tells the story of Amy Cannon, the world's first PhD in green chemistry, who's used UV light to shrink-wrap hair into a non-toxic perm.
You too can be part of the effort to ensure the products on store shelves all become safe products. Until that happens, read "Not Just a Pretty Face" to get educated and get tips on making wise consumer choices. And when purchasing products, use the Skin Deep database to help you pick the safest and greenest products on the market.
Earlier: Simplify your beauty routine for your health and the environment's, says Stacy Malkan.
 Bike to Work Week's officially over, but the bicycle love just keeps coming -- into my mailbox and e-mail inbox. The latest fun bike love comes in the form of a cute 120-page booklet, "Seven Wonders for a Cool Planet," written by Eric Sorensen and others at the nonprofit think tank Sightline Institute and published by the Sierra Club.
The first wonder, as you may've guessed, is the bicycle. Why? It's the most energy-efficient vehicle ever made, and it's available widely NOW. In fact, all seven "wonders" covered in this book -- from the condom to the clothesline -- are ALL uber-efficient objects that are both affordable and readily available.
While all seven of these items are eco-friendly, efficient inventions in and of themselves, each also serves as a synecdoche for larger environmental issues. Yes, every bike ride that replaces a car trip reduces CO2 emissions -- but considering the bicycle also forces us to confront larger issues about our transportation habits, our city layout and planning, our car culture, and the like.
Those of you reading this blog'll be happy to know that the microchip also makes the list, as a synecdoche for the information economy. After all, the computer's made telecommuting -- and the attendant reduction in auto travel -- possible. Even though computer use still uses up a lot of energy, the computer's given us a way of sharing information cheaply and efficiently.
Of course, I did have quibbles with the book here and there, mainly because "Seven Wonders" often tends to oversimplify issues and statistics for dramatic impact. For example, "Seven Wonders" asserts that a book bought at a bookstore incurs 16 times the energy costs of a book bought at Amazon -- despite the fact that enviro experts have shown e-commerce only saves energy -- and not even that much -- if you live in rural areas.
In addition, "Seven Wonders" claims roughly 80% of humans can afford to buy a bicycle -- which I have a hard time believing, considering the fact that over half of the world's population lives on less than $2 per day according to the United Nations Development Programme.
Still, I liked the book's can-do attitude and the micro-macro perspective to the major enviro-issues confronting us today. Read some excerpts here, or buy the book -- printed on chlorine-free, 50% post-consumer recycled paper -- for $9.95.
What would happen to your house if you -- and everyone around you --suddenly disappeared? Would your lawn grow lush with lavender plants? Would your fireplace turn into a beehive? And if so, how quickly?
Now you can visualize your house without you via this 2-minute animation. How long do you think it would take your house to disintegrate, leaving no trace of your having lived in it? Pick a number (of years), then watch this:
The animation's part of the promotion for Alan Weisman's book "The World Without Us" -- a book that I thought sounded intriguing, but didn't read because it also sounded really, really depressing. I mean, this is a book that shows, in a sense, how unnecessary we humans are. If we died out, the ecosystem would continue on -- corroding our subways while helping birds and animals and plants flourish.
But the animation's piqued my interest now. Plus, the book appears to have a silver lining. According to the book's website: "As [Weisman] shows which human devastations are indelible, and which examples of our highest art and culture would endure longest, Weisman's narrative ultimately drives toward a radical but persuasive solution that doesn't depend on our demise."
I'll pick up the book soon. In the meantime: How close was your guess for the time it'd take for your house to integrate?
Thanks to Mary Forgione, LATimes.com's deputy web editor for travel and books, for the tip.
Last minute eco-Mother's Day gifts:
>> Get your fair trade flowers from Ten Thousand Villages Pasadena, or from the Fair Trade LA booth at the Santa Monica Festival today.
>> Go shopping with your mom at eco-boutique Regeneration in Eagle Rock. Mothers get a 15% discount until May 15.
>> Give your mom a night of eco-pampering by getting mom-and-daughter tickets to "Beauty and Sustainability: An Eco-Evening of Networking, Pampering and Discovery," happening Tuesday, May 13, 7:30 to 10 pm in Beverly Hills.
>> If you're reading this Monday and your gift's gonna be late anyway, check out my list of eco Mother's Day gifts for any budget.
In other news:
>> The Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area could get bigger. In what comes as a surprise, at least to me, President Bush signed legislation ordering the Interior Department to consider making additions to the protected area. Many obstacles -- including the high cost of land -- still remain.
>> How science-for-hire helps keep toxic chemicals legal. Read Newsweek's review of David Michaels' new book, "Doubt Is Their Product: How Industry's Assault on Science Threatens Your Health": "'Product-defense firms' have sprung up to spin the science and manufacture doubt—proudly. One boasted on its Web site of persuading the Food and Drug Administration to let an unnamed drug stay on the market for '10 additional years of sales' before the FDA banned it for harming people." (via enviroblog)
>> Dell says it'll reduce packaging waste, after bloggers call the company on it. A similar incident happened with the iPhone way back when: A girl put up a YouTube video about her 300+ page paper iPhone bill, prompting iPhone to make some quick changes.
>> New(ish) misleading excuse from anti-environmentalists: "It'll hurt the poor." That's what one guy getting money from Exxon claims will happen if polar bears are declared an endangered species.
Photo of fair trade rose courtesy of TransFair USA
 If you're like me, you use GMail, Google calender, Google maps, and just plain google.com on a daily basis. So perhaps eating like Google does was just the next step for me. Google employees get free healthful gourmet meals made for them every day -- a fact that fills me with jealousy whenever I ride my bike past Google's Santa Monica office on my way to the farmers market.
Well, now, I can eat like the Google people do, thanks to former Google chef Charlie Ayers. His new book, "Food 2.0: Secrets from the Chef who Fed Google," is filled with his environmentally-conscious, locavore-friendly cooking tips -- with more than 100 yummy recipes accompanied by mouth-watering pictures.
Ayers was hired by Google when the company had just 40 mouths to feed. When he left Google in 2005, he was feeding 1,500 people a day! And in "Food 2.0," Ayers tells little anecdotal stories from his tenure at Google while dispensing healthful eating advice. "You're smart. So why don't you eat that way?" he asks.
"Food 2.0" emphasizes that eating healthfully and ethically doesn't have to be time consuming. Many of the easy-to-make recipes are labeled "Grab & Go." Plus there's lots of time-saving tips, from cooking in bulk and freezing for later use, to instituting an effective labeling system for the meats in the freezer. Then there's the eco- and health-conscious advice, like "Stuff to avoid feeding to yourself or people you love" to "4 best herbs to grow at home."
Of course, not everything in "Food 2.0" is simple and easy -- especially to a cooking novice like me. For example, Ayers names his top favorite vinegars to use at home -- all 11 of them -- then gives instructions for making more! I don't even have space for that many vinegars... In addition, some recipes, like those for Lamb Korma or Goan Pork, seem both complicated and time-consuming. Good thing I don't cook meat.
But I drooled over most recipes. The first one I want to try: Smoked salmon-sun-dried cranberries-goat cheese wrap. Prep time: 6 mins. Cook time: 0. I just need to bike past Google tomorrow for the Wednesday farmers' market, where I plan to pick up some local goat cheese from the Redwood Hill Farm booth!
For a taste of "Food 2.0," try the recipes on Ayers' website, or the Lamb Burgers with Tzatziki Sauce recipe published on Amazon.
Eco-advice columnists are all over the web now. There's Grist's Umbra, Salon's Pablo, Slate's Green Lantern - and even me with my Q&As. But Sierra magazine's Mr. Green -- a.k.a. Bob Schildgen -- is the first of all of these to have his own book out.
Published earlier this year, "Hey Mr. Green" is a compilation of the advice Mr. Green's doled out since Feb. 2005, when his column launched. The Q&As, loosely organized into sections like "At Home" and "Food for Thought," are humorously informational -- not the least because Mr. Green takes on even the oddest and rudest of questions.
Seriously, Sierra magazine appears to attract some strangely angry readers (vegans?) -- many who are unnaturally attached to their air conditioning. (David: "You really ticked me off with your condescending attitude about air-conditioning." Mary: "I'm supposed to sit at home sweating it out? ... Don't make us don sackcloth while our corporate friends wear silk!") Who knew people could get so passionate about AC?
The random questions mean that the columns go anywhere from the big picture -- i.e. changing one's quality of life by spending time to cook healthy meals, instead of spending time "working to pay for processed, instant, plasticized food" -- to the almost inconsequential -- i.e. paper or plastic? Mixed in there is a passionate argument pro eating meat -- in condiment-style moderation, of course -- as well as recipes for yummy chili and salsa, and a number of money-and-energy saving tips.
Mr. Green even gets poetic sometimes -- especially when talking about lawns, which he seems to have a mild obsession with. "Lawns make the landscape look bleak, like a cemetery without tombstones," he says, then adds in another column:
Lawns are a type of death denial, in that they're replicas of cemeteries where the owner glides on the mower, godlike and immortal, over the pristine green, enjoying the illusion of immunity from burial and decay below.
I'll never look at a grassy lawn the same way again.
Of course, there were times in the book when I laughed at, not with, Mr. Green. One avid knitter wrote complaining that her daughter refuses to wear the handknit acrylic sweaters, the girl's argument being that acrylic's bad for the environment. Mr. Green dutifully points out that acrylic yarn may not be any worse than conventional cotton or wool (he neglects to mention there are organic cotton, bamboo, hemp, and eco-wool yarns) -- never considering that the reason this poor girl doesn't wanna wear her mama's handiwork probably has nothing to do with the environment at all....
Photo by Adam Drewes via Flickr
If the growth of the EcoMoms network's any indication, having a baby often acts as a catalyst for people to lead cleaner, greener lives. And a new book "Healthy Child Healthy World: Creating a Greener, Cleaner Safe Home" helps parents do just that.
Written by Christopher Gavigan, CEO of the nonprofit the book was titled after, "Healthy Child Healthy World" begins with a precaution: "Don't get overwhelmed" -- an apt warning, since the book then goes right into describing the many health issues children have today due to our ungreen, unsafe world. Then, after introducing the fear of cancer, asthma, allergies, autism and ADHD, mental retardation, hormone disruption, and obesity, "Healthy Child Healthy World" introduces 300+ pages of detailed info and instructions on the many different things a parent can do to minimize the risk of these ills.
Yep -- It's easy to get overwhelmed. Still, the book is quite encouraging, noting that even minimal changes can often have big results on children's health. In fact, many of the tips had to do with green cleaning , as a way of reducing the number of harmful chemicals in the home. And simply switching out cleaning products to eco-friendly options is a change anyone can make, now that even Clorox has come out with a green cleaning line.
"Healthy Child Healthy World" has chapters dedicated to green lawns, green kitchens, green bathrooms, green clothing, green pets, and safe, eco-friendly toys. Lest going green seems to sound like buying more expensive, eco-products, the book also provides DIY tips for making everything from your own baby food to finger paint to cleaning products.
Perhaps to appeal to the People magazine-reading crowd, "Healthy Child Healthy World" includes celebrity guest essays from Gwyneth Paltrow, Tom Hanks, Erin Brockovitch,Michelle Obama, Sheryl Crow, Brooke Shields, and many more. Meryl Streep, who's a board member of the nonprofit, penned the foreword.
Can't get enough of the book? Sign up and get involved with the Healthy Child Healthy World nonprofit. If you're expecting, an especially cool program is "First Steps to Healthy Babies program," which will send you email updates on child development, during pregnancy and until your child turns two.
Of course, there's no need to wait to have a kid to create a healthy, green home. Most of the tips in the book are applicable to cleaning and greening anyone's lifestyle. Treat yourself as well as you would your own child --
If the Green Guide magazine is too big a dose of green for you, maybe bpm (beats per minute) magazine's
more your style. Each issue of this "music.tech.nightlife.style"
magazine's got a sizable green section on the back that reports on
everything green and now, thanks to a collaboration with green
lifestyle site The G Living Network.
bpm brings pop culture together with environmentalism. There's an
article about Shepard Fairey of "Obey Giant" fame, making The 11th Hour
posters. There's a feature on green L.A. gallery Eco-Logical Art.
TempoHousing, stackable little homes, gets an article too, as do Illy
insta-cafes made entirely from recycled materials.
Tightwads might not like bpm, because -- sort of like Wired -- the magazine
reports on the newest goods and gadgets -- which tend to be higher-end,
design-oriented, pricy stuff as opposed to more quotidian, practical
green goods. In many ways, bpm and gliving are about exposing
eco-potentialities as opposed to giving DIY eco-advice.
Some articles are really more about popular stuff with a barely-green slant. A few issues
ago, Avalon Hollywood was featured as a music venue going green, but
really, Avalon was making only the teensiest steps: recycling, using 25%
recycled paper, and switching to CFLs -- after each incandescents burns
out. And in the latest
issue, a blurb about Blackle -- a website that's basically the Google homepage turned black -- doesn't include the fact that the black screens only save energy on old CRT computer screens.
Still, the mag's generally a fun, informative read -- and available for free reading online!
The current issue includes a review of MOMA's pre-fab exhibit and a
feature on the newest and coolest bikes. Check it out for yourself.
Can't find a good organic wine bar? Get a copy of the local eco-directory Greenopia and you'll have five different options to pick from!
The launch party for this greener, thicker, second edition happened four months ago, but Greenopia 2.0 just hit stores earlier this month. Greenopia's like cross between a Zagat guide and a yellow pages -- with an eco twist. With listings for everything from eco-friendly restaurants to green pet stores, Greenopia lets Angelenos quickly locate green goods and services they need -- or even green organizations they might want to join.
Showing the growth of green businesses in L.A., Greenopia's expanded
impressively to 262 pages, up from the 140-page first edition that
launched at Earth Day on the Promenade in 2006. Each business or service listed gets between one to four "leaves"; the more leaves, the greener the company. Accordingly, each listing section of the book begins with an explanation of the criteria used to award the leaves. Restaurants, for example, are judged almost exclusively on the sustainability of the food products they use, while hotels are judged on their recycling and resource management programs, eco-friendly building materials and landscaping, and even "good ventilation and fresh air exchange for healthy indoor air."
This second edition includes little essays from local enviro-entrepreneurs and activists, including designer Linda Loudermilk, Akasha Richmond of Akasha restaurant, and Andy Lipkis of Treepeople. In addition, the end of the directory includes lists of local environmental organizations, eco-minded schools, and recommended books.
Greenopia did still miss a few green businesses. For example, Lou, the cute Hollywood wine bar that specializes in natural wines (many organic or biodynamic) and serves locally-sourced foods, wasn't included! If your business is green, get listed by contacting Greenopia.
Greenopia's available for $17.95 online, in stores around Los Angeles, or at book signings. For NoCalians, there's Greenopia San Francisco too.
Odd thing about Myspace's new eco-book, "MySpace/OurPlanet: Change Is Possible": It kicks off with Myspace president Tom Anderson basically declaring the supremacy of the printed word over the web: "I wouldn't be doing this unless I thought it was for something so unbelievably important that it had to be in print," Anderson writes in his foreword.
Is the soy-ink printed, recycled-paper book mightier than the blog? Perhaps, though in Myspace's case, the book's designed to mimic the social networking site, covering a whole lot of topics in a semi-disorganized, but also semi-associative, eclectic, freewheeling fashion.
Published by HarperTeen, "Myspace/Our Planet" clearly aims at a young audience, with advice on greening prom, taking eco-alternative spring breaks, and changing mom and dad. And impressively, the book provides a rather surprisingly informative and engaging perspective on a wide range of environmental topics, despite the web-friendly snippets-and-bullet-points format of the book.
That, of course, makes me think that the book wasn't exactly written "by the Myspace community with Jeca Taudte," as the cover states. More accurately, the book seems to have been written by Taudto, with random pullout quotes from Myspace members sprinkled in. Here's one such brilliant quote included in the book, written by one Lorylicious![[♥rawr]]:
I REALLY HOPE PPL START TO TAKE ACTION ON ALL THE DISASTERS WE ARE CAUSING. GLOBAL WARMING IS GETTING BAD AND NO ONE REALIZES WE NEED MOTIVATIONAL TEAMS TO GET EVERYONE INVOLVE I THINK THERE SHOULD BE MORE RECYCLING, STOP THE WAR BECAUSE WERE ONLY DESTROYING MORE OF OUR WORLD AND LOOSING SOLDIERS THAT HAVE FAMILIES (sic on all spelling, grammar, punctuation errors, and choice to use all caps)
Perhaps unsurprisingly, it's the effort to tie the book in with the social networking site that seems most strained. In the first few pages, readers are advised to employ Myspace as a tool to further their enviro-activism -- by adding eco-organization as one of the "Top 8" friends or using eco-related pics and wallpaper to "make it clear that the earth matters to you" -- actions that seemed so ineffectually small that it actually made me LOL.
But the web activism advice improved as I read on. A chapter tied in personal enviro-activism with larger political activism, for example, also conveniently tying Myspace's Our Planet page with Myspace's Impact Channel. And then the book recommended green blogging "to educate communities and to inspire change." Wait -- that's me!
Maybe I shouldn't have LOL'd so quickly. Serendipitously, I got an "invite" to add Heal the Bay as a "cause" I support -- so I hit "accept." On Facebook.
Environmentalists say the mainstream media hasn't asked presidential candidates enough questions about global warming. But if the questions were asked, would people even understand the debate?
Let's play a little game: Raise your hand if you can tell me the difference between a cap-and-trade program and a carbon tax program -- You get 20 points. Raise both hands if you can explain the difference between the cap-and-trade program Hillary Clinton supports, versus the one that McCain supports -- You get 80 points. 100 points wins the game here -- Did you win?
More seriously: Clinton, McCain, and Obama all say they support a cap-and-trade program, while Nader's behind a carbon tax. Nader's lone wolf stance perhaps gives you an idea of how politically infeasible a carbon tax program would be to institute -- but if you're like me, you'll still want to know why that's so. Yet you probably don't want to slog through hundreds of articles or commit to reading long, wonky tomes full of numbers to figure out what's going on....
Thanks to Peter Barnes, you don't have to. The author of "Capitalism 3.0" has come out with a new quick read -- a little booklet called "Climate Solutions: What Works, What Doesn't, and Why." Labeled as "a citizen's guide," this 120-page booklet (81 pages without all the front and back matter) seeks to give enviro-conscious people a digestible yet thorough primer on today's major political debates about lowering carbon emissions.
"Climate Solutions" is a simple guide to the big environmental policy decisions that are soon going to be made. The U.S. needs to decide what program to put in place to reduce our carbon emissions, and this booklet explains in plain language what these different carbon-reduction-related programs are -- as well as what political, environmental, and social implications are tied in each of these programs. By reading these few pages, the average voter will be able to figure out what programs to support and what to fight against, instead of simply shrugging one's shoulders and hoping for the best.
Read this, and you'll find out the difference between carbon taxes, carbon caps, and carbon regulations. In fact, did you know that there are in fact three different cap-and-trade programs? Well there are: Cap-and-giveaway, cap-and-auction, and cap-and-dividend.
While laying out the options, Barnes isn't shy about sharing his opinions. He's clearly not behind carbon taxes, asserting that "A carbon tax is an economist's dream but a politician's nightmare." To believe carbon taxes will work, Barnes says we need to "assume heroic behavior by a majority of Congress members for several decades, an assumption not grounded in reality." That's rather sad news for the environmental justice groups that have been pushing for carbon tax programs instead of cap-and-trade -- though I (and most environmentalists and environmental groups) agree with Barnes' opinion.
In fact, Barnes comes out in clear support of cap-and-dividend programs -- and makes a pretty good case, because he takes an unflinching look at all the options on the table first, dissecting their possibilities and potential failures.
Read the book yourself to see whether you agree or disagree. You can buy the booklet for $9.95 -- or download an abbreviated free PDF version titled "Carbon Capping A Citizen's Guide" at onthecommons.org. This version's just 22 pages long, and is mostly limited to covering just the carbon capping programs. However, this PDF also has information on current legislation -- and will be continuously updated to reflect the latest news.
After you've formed your opinion, check out where your preferred presidential candidate stands on carbon caps.
 Nuclear energy's poison, says the guy who used to head up the U.S.'s biggest nuclear program, Tennessee Valley Authority. The now 82-year-old S. David Freeman has built up 50 years of experience in the field of energy -- and he's using his background and expertise to push for a green energy revolution.
In his latest book "Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How," Freeman argues that we need to get rid of "three poisons": coal, oil, and nuclear energy. That's no easy task, as those three poisons give us 71% of our energy right now. Yet Freeman says it's both practical and feasible to get all our energy from renewable resources -- with today's technology.
The problem, Freeman points out, is that big energy companies have been very successful at convincing the American public that green energy is not yet ready, and won't be for years and years yet. That's delayed efforts to gain energy independence -- and now, we need to finally seize the moment and push for big changes, he says.
Thus, Freeman calls for a fixed, 30-year timetable to achieve energy independence for all of the U.S. This plan would mandate federal efficiency programs, phase out coal and nuclear power plants, and reduce our dependence on oil by developing green vehicles.
But while Freeman makes a convincing, specific argument as to why these three poisons need to be eliminated, his assertion that alternative energy technologies available today can provide all the power we need isn't quite as convincing -- mainly because he spends so much time talking about technologies that haven't yet been developed. Certainly, one of Freeman's points is that we need to fund research and development of these new technologies NOW so we can benefit from them later. Yet his penchant for praising practically every potential energy source that's not one of the three poisons has a rather haphazard "throw money at everything else and see what sticks" attitude about it.
For example, he writes about ethanol as a clean energy option -- then quickly admits that corn ethanol "on a net basis, could supply only 2 percent of our gasoline supply" and goes on to tout cellulosic ethanol -- a fuel that's definitely not viable now and may actually never be viable, according to recent studies. (Corn ethanol, by the way, has many, many other social and environmental problems, many excellently outlined in this Rolling Stone feature.)
Freeman also writes glowingly about hydrogen fuel cell cars -- despite the fact that even GM and Toyota execs have "expressed doubts about the viability of hydrogen fuel cells for mass-market production in the near term," according to the Wall Street Journal. (via grist)
That said, Freeman does also show how existing technologies in solar, wind, and other existing renewable energy sources could be used to liberate us from the stranglehold of the three poisons. These already-proven technologies just need to be applied on a large scale to provide dramatic solutions to our energy problems.
And perhaps even more importantly, "Winning Our Energy Independence" is a highly inspiring and optimistic read that encourages environmentalists to think big and act fast. Near the beginning of the book, Freeman recounts about how Environmental Defense's David Yarnold asked "Why would you want to lobby for something that can't get done?" when asked in 2005 why his organization didn't offer solutions more dramatic than what Congress was considering. "Winning Our Energy Independence" challenges this attitude, asserting that we should ask for and demand more, that we shouldn't let our imaginations and actions be limited by what the status quo says is possible.
Earlier: 'Winning Our Energy Independence' — one bus ride at a time
 National Geographic's now out to green the average magazine reader. Today, National Geographic Green Guide magazine hit newsstands around the country, sporting this subhead: "The Resource for Consuming Wisely."
While the focus on consumption might make some environmentalists raise an eyebrow, many pieces in Green Guide's premiere issue are about buying and spending less. Articles like "Save $60 a Week -- and Save the Planet" and "Products We Can Live Without" encourage reducing and reusing. In fact, the Green Guide reads much like an Eco-living 101 booklet, with a primer on CFL bulbs, tips on green cleaning, and other basic green lifestyle advice.
Of course, the magazine has an eco-shopping section showcasing pretty new goods hitting the market -- like a $1,698 Les Paul SmartWood Electric Guitar made with Rainforest Alliance-certified wood, a $60 Loomstate T-shirt, and a $112 recycled glass necklace.
But more practical green shopping tools are included too, like a punch-out "Smart Shopper's Card" that explains all the different little recycling symbols on plastic packaging. Green thinking shoppers could ostensibly whip out this wallet-sized card while in the grocery store to make sure they pick out the most eco-packaged products.
Green Guide includes a photographic essay that follows Wal-Mart's plastic bag recycling program. Unfortunately, while the piece mentions that only a paltry 0.6% of plastic bags get recycled in the U.S., consumers are simply encouraged to recycle these flimsy things, not reuse more durable shopping totes. Somewhat paradoxically, an organic cotton reusable tote was included in the little press package for the Green Guide ...
The most useful article for me was a thorough piece on improving indoor air quality. I'm now determined to clean my furnace filter -- tomorrow. I'm planning to turn my pilot light off in preparation for warmer days ahead --
Find National Geographic Green Guide at a newsstand near you, or subscribe online to get 4 issues for $15. A $12 annual e-subscription's available for enviros who want to cut out paper consumption -- though Green Guide is printed on FSC-certified paper with 10% post-consumer recycled content and with inks from renewable sources. Can't afford the subscription fee? Lots of related content's available for free at thegreenguide.com.
This week's eco-topic: Green workplace
 Prefer books to blog posts? A new pocket-sized, 96-page booklet -- "Greening Your Office -- From Cupboard to Corporation: An A-Z Guide" -- came out just last month, with advice to help make your workplace an eco-friendly one.
"Greening the Office" is organized as a glossary beginning with Adhesives and ending with Yellow Pages -- making it, more accurately, an A-Y guide. But while the booklet's a useful resource, it's not a step-by-step greening guide as I'd initially hoped for, since the eco-information is simply organized alphabetically. I would have preferred a guide that presented the info in a way that made it easier for companies to take green action -- perhaps starting with the easy to implement, low hanging fruit first (i.e. changing light bulbs to CFLs) to later move on to bigger, more difficult changes (eco-renovating a building).
More importantly, some of the information is actually out of date -- although perhaps our economy's changing at an extremely rapid rate. A pullout quote in the booklet claims "Our consumption of paper in the United States continues to rise by about 20% each year" -- but the NY Times reported earlier this month that worldwide paper consumption has plateaued -- and is actually decreasing in the richest countries, including the U.S.
Still, most of the advice in the booklet is sound, with greening suggestions for everything from carpools to postage meters. The booklet is most relevant for the employer or decision-maker, as much of the advice centers around either directly instituting major changes or motivating employees to do so. Maybe you'll want to get it for your boss; it'll only put you back $7.95.
Don't let the coal industry get you down. Look on the upside: We have a "special opportunity to get angry!" That's what author and green energy activist S. David Freeman said at the launch party for his new book, "Winning Our Energy Independence: An Energy Insider Shows How," at the Architecture + Design Museum on Wednesday. [below: My friend Summer, Freeman, me]
If you saw "Who Killed the Electric Car," you've seen Freeman on screen. Freeman's served as an energy advisor to President Jimmy Carter and as the head of Tennessee Valley Authority and the Sacramento Metropolitan Utility District -- and doesn't seem to have lost an ounce of his passion for green energy.
"It's 2008 and the air is still not clean in L.A. and most other cities -- and we've become complacent," Freeman said at the party. He argued for nixing the three poisons -- coal, oil, and nuclear power -- and turning to renewable energy sources instead. Freeman pointed out that, despite the big oil companies' claims at going green, "90% of their money is going into oil and gas .... They're taking us to the cleaners."
The book launch brought out an energetic crowd for the LED-lit party -- including Chris Paine, writer/director of "Who Killed the Electric Car," who introduced Freeman, and Bob Foster, mayor of Long Beach, who toasted Freeman with a shot of Jack Daniels (all attendees got "Winning Our Energy Independence" shot glasses as party favors).
I also got to meet Santa Monica City Council member Kevin McKeown -- who apparently took the 720 bus down Wilshire to attend the event! [below: Paine, Summer, me, McKeown]
Carpooling back, my friend Summer and I felt very un-eco in her Jetta. Me: My council member's greener than I am.
Summer: Yeah -- we're green losers.
I'm hoping I'll feel better after reading "Wining Our Energy Independence." According to the publisher, Freeman's book "provides action plans for showing us how to influence change." That may start with opting for the 720 over a carpool --
Top and bottom photos by Summer Bowen; middle photo by Siel
 Want to feel free and liberated in the new year? De-car-ing might be the answer. Wait -- Don't stop reading! I'm serious, and you'll wanna know this too! Karrie Higgins reports for the L.A. Times on Tom Hodgkinson's book "The Freedom Manifesto":
Hodgkinson explores how the very machines and appliances that supposedly save time actually devour it, cars being the prime example. Americans associate cars with personal freedom, but Hodgkinson points out that, according to the late cultural critic Ivan Illich, once you consider all the labor required to pay the loan, gas and repairs, not to mention all the time spent at the service garage, you get an average of only a lousy 5 mph. Marketers prey on our sense of being "time starved" and exacerbate the condition to their advantage.
I can't emphasize how much I agree with this. My take on my past car ownership: When we think of cars, we often think of freedom to go where we want, when we want. Certainly that's how cars are marketed to us. But in many ways, I found my car restricted my freedoms. The car kept me from spending a good chunk of my money on other stuff, from sleeping in late on street-cleaning day, and even from a stress-free evening out without worrying about finding parking and a designated driver.
This doesn't mean I no longer ever ride a car. I sometimes Flexcar, sometimes cab it (my whole de-car-ing series here). But I'm free from both the physical and financial unfreedoms of having to own a car 24-7.
Karrie Higgins' whole article, "Escape from Consumerville," is an interesting read that reviews both Hodgkinson's book and Anne Elizabeth Moore's "Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity." Beware: It's not all an easy road to checking out to consumerville. After all, "attempts to fight the consumerist culture can actually advance it." But you're not a sucker to advertisement, are you?
 Made a local dish for Thanksgiving? Now's the chance to share, aka show off, your locavore-friendly recipe. A local group in Westchester called Environmental Change-Makers is putting together a local foods cookbook, and you're invited to contribute!
To participate, all you have to do is:
- Create a dish from local foods -- with all or almost all ingredients grown or produced within about 100 miles of L.A.
- Taste-test the recipe.
- Write up the recipe, including fun details like where you found unusual ingredients, why you included certain non-local ingredients, or what season your recipe will work best in.
- Send your recipe to Environmental Change-Makers. Be sure to include your name and your neighborhood or city to get credited for your contribution.
 Environmental Change-Makers will then put the best recipes into a cookbook, which will be available free as a PDF online or in hard copy at Environmental Change-Makers meetings. The recipes will be shared under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license.
Can't wait for that cookbook to come out? Then check out "The Santa Monica Farmers' Market Cookbook" by Amelia Saltsman. Here's a sample recipe: Classic Tomato Soup with a Goat Cheese Swirl.
Top image courtesy of 100milediet.org
 Zucchini never tasted so sweet -- because by zucchini, I mean zucchini chocolate chip cookies! (PDF)
That recipe I got from "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life," a yearlong memoir of sorts by Barbara Kingsolver that documents her family's life of trying to eat as locally as possible in southern Appalachia.
And they ate good food! Barbara brags about how she got kids to eat zucchini with these cookies: "They asked for seconds. Ha!" Of course, that's not exactly surprising when you consider that the butter, honey, brown sugar and chocolate chips outweighed the locally grown zucchini content by about 3 to 1....
 Why did Barbara decide to eat local? The same reasons lots of other people are trying to eat more locally these days. Basically, people are developing a distaste for pesticide-ridden tomatoes that were shipped here via fossil fuels from thousands of miles away and taste anything but fresh and yummy. People also don't like their tax dollars going to farm subsidies that support big farm corporations growing genetically modified corn, which is then used to produce high-fructose corn syrup that gets sold to us in soda and fast food, making us fat and sick.
So the reasons to eat local are rather doom and gloom, but the book itself is fun and tasty. After all, Barbara is not a purist like Alisa and James of 100-Mile Diet fame, who promptly lost 15 pounds when they started their super-strict diet. Barbara's family grows and gets local everything they possibly can, but makes some exceptions for things like organic fair trade coffee and of course, chocolate chips.
The work sounds rather arduous at times. I mean, this family tends a rather large farm-garden, as well as a small flock of poultry. That said, Barbara's take is that it's enjoyable work that lets her enjoy the outdoors and develop a useful hobby while connecting her with community and family. Plus, there's a certain hilarity and satisfaction in getting her turkeys to mate and produce little turkeys naturally -- apparently no easy feat!
I found "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" inspiring, even though I'm not exactly inspired to keep a chicken coop on my apartment balcony. We just live in very different places, Barbara and I. Barbara does a lot of farming and canning and jamming, which is cool if you enjoy it, but not as necessary for Angelenos who can get fresh local produce at the farmers market year-round.
That said, I tried a rather lax 100-mile diet awhile back and have pretty much stuck to it since! Tomatoes are yummier fresh from the farmers market.
As for gardening: The only things I've grown successfully in my balcony garden so far are herbs, but I have high hopes for next spring.... In the meantime, check out Jenn and Nat's urban lawn garden in Santa Monica for inspiration.
 What I really need to work on now are my cooking skills. I'm great at salads and sandwiches and, um, bowls of cereal that I can just add soy milk to, but not so much at anything else. Sure, the zucchini cookies turned out, but then it's pretty hard to make a dense combo of sugar, honey and chocolate chips taste bad.
My eggs in a nest (PDF) were passable but not spectacular (left); my veggie frittata (PDF) barely edible. The Asian veggie rolls (PDF) turned out pretty well, though -- perhaps because there wasn't too much actual cooking involved. I need a local cooking class.
But I'm a proud member of the local eating movement. Join me!
Thanks to Lisa for sharing the book with me.
Photos by Siel
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