A Change in the Wind

Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer

Is urban farming really a sustainable lifestyle?

This is a question Novella Carpenter spent ten years of her life trying to figure out in Oakland, California, and it's a question she answers in her new book Farm City.

Here's a picture of the writer on her urban farm:

The book gets a favorable mention on Maud Newton's site, and the interview that goes with the mention is great.

Carpenter describes the nature of urban farming this way:

I want to send a cautiously optimistic message. Urban farming is really intense and requires discipline, thrift, and a strong back (just like “real” farming). While I did make some mistakes that rendered some of my farming experiments economically unfeasible (hundred-dollar turkey), over the years I did learn ways to make it sustainable. I think urban farming does have the chance to change the way we eat. You know, I finish narrating my book in December of 2007. That moment was the end of an era of massive cultural bloat—a time when urban farming was considered fringe-y and outsider. My how times have changed! But, I do want people to be realistic. If you look at places like Detroit, which has the most advanced urban agricultural scene in the US, they still only grow 3% of the city’s produce. So it can’t replace, it just supplements, rural farms.

Another book to read, but it sounds like a good one...

Sunbathing in Scotland by 2060?

From the staid London Times:

The government’s chief scientific adviser has warned that climate change could destabilise populations across Europe, potentially triggering a wave of migrants heading for cooler regions such as the British Isles and Scandinavia.

Professor John Beddington believes that, without deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, average temperatures could rise by about 6C by 2060 in countries including Spain, Italy, Greece and Turkey.

This would make most cities unbearably hot in summer, while destroying agriculture and turning much of southern Europe into a desert. The result could be that millions of people will migrate northwards.

“It is going to be extremely unpleasant to live in southern Europe and may not be feasible for the current level of population so many people may need to move,” said Beddington. “Northern Europe will be a far more attractive place to live.”

But summering in Scotland may be a vain hope on my part. Recently the rains in summer there have been awful, I hear from visitors and reporters alike. Aberdeen had its wettest summer since l943, with the equivalent of a month's rain in a singe day, according to the BBC.

Here's a picture of an Aberdeen street in early September from Mark McHardy:

Water Deal: Delta Savior, or Unworkable Mess?

Yours truly has been trying to make sense of the massive California water deal headed for the Governor's desk. Haven't made a whole lot of progress yet; it's so big that apparently most of the legislators who voted on it, either pro or con, didn't even try to read it.

But I have come across a greatly helpful site, Aquafornia, which is a gold-mine of information from California papers of all sorts, and included this "leak of the week" chart from Capitol Weekly circulated by lobbyists showing on a proposed structure for Delta governance.

Is this intended to show how ineffective the Delta Stewardship Council will be in improving the Delta? Because it looks to me like a model for gridlock and inaction...

Sarah Palin: A Job in Heels with Cross-Eyes

If you find the Palin phenomenon fascinating, if alarmingly irrational, you will want to read the astounding rant on the subject from Matt Taibii, not published by Rolling Stone, but available via True/Slant. Here's a selection:

Palin’s paranoid ramblings and self-pitying tantrums on the way out of office not only didn’t injure her chances for national office, they actually appeared to help, as polls taken in the week after her resignation showed that 71% of Republicans were now prepared to vote for her for president in 2012. Just as she had during the campaign last fall, Palin defied rational analysis by making a primal connection with the subterranean resentments of white middle America, which is apparently so pissed off now at the rest of the planet for not coddling its hurt feelings in the multicultural age that it is willing to embrace any politician who validates its insane sense of fucked-overness.

Nobody understands this political reality quite like Palin, even if she doesn’t actually understand it in the sense of someone who thinks her way to a conclusion, but merely lives it, unconsciously, with the unerring instinct of a herd animal. Palin’s supporters don’t judge her according to her almost completely nonexistent qualifications for serious office, they perceive her as they would a character in a Biblical narrative, a Job in heels with cross-eyes and a mashed-potato-brained husband who happens to spend a lot of time getting shat upon by Letterman and Maureen Dowd and the other modern-day Enemies of Christ.

Here's Palin becoming famous, second by second, at the GOP convention, via an AP photo by Susan Walsh.

The Elephant and the Frog (climate edition)

For the thousandth time, thank you Tom Toles, for publishing your sketchbook:

For Those Who Hate Daylight Savings Time

That's from PostSecret.

For thoughtful sorts who like a little reasoning to go with their instinctive hatreds, here's Ryan Sager from True/Slant, making a shocking amount of sense.

I'll just mention his first of ten reasons to dump daylight savings time:

Daylight Saving Time (DST) was sold as an energy-saving measure. But it doesn’t save energy. The results of a natural experiment in Indiana (where the state was moved onto DST by a change in the law in 2006) showed that DST actually increased residential energy demand by 1% overall — and by 2%-4% in October.

If you need more, take a look at his other arguments. 

But if you ask me, put simply and factually, Daylight Savings Time is an Orwellian exercise in hubris.

It's the all-powerful us attempting to control time, and promising to exercise this power solely for good.

But regardless of our intentions, the claim that we have the power to make time run backwards is absurd. Preposterous, Ridiculous. Deserving of mockery.

We keep our promises small, regarding the reversal of time, and so think we have gotten away with it, but small absurdities, like small mistakes in arithmetic, remain mistakes.  

Daylight Savings Time is nonsense, plain and simple.

What additional argument is required?

The Amazon: Carbon Sink...or Source?

According to the leading researcher in the field, Oliver Phillips, it's kind of up to us:

The world’s forests are an enormous carbon sink, meaning they absorb massive quantities of carbon dioxide, through the processes of photosynthesis and respiration. In normal years the Amazon alone absorbs three billion tons of carbon, more than twice the quantity human beings produce by burning fossil fuels. But during the 2005 drought, this process was reversed, and the Amazon gave off two billion tons of carbon instead, creating an additional five billion tons of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere. That’s more than the total annual emissions of Europe and Japan combined.

If we can restrain global warming, we have a chance, explains environmental author Paul Brown:

Significantly, [Oliver] Phillips also found that the 2005 drought was not the result of El Niño, the cause of previous smaller episodes, but of a regional rise in sea temperatures—one of the expected early signs of global warming. Taken together, these findings suggest that climate change could trigger the worst kind of vicious cycle, with climbing temperatures causing the rainforests to dry out and give off massive quantities of greenhouse gases, which in turn causes the planet to warm more rapidly—a dynamic with harrowing implications. An article last year in Proceedings of the National Academy of Science identified rainforest-wide dieback in the Amazon, along with the melting of the Arctic sea ice, as among the nine most crucial "tipping points" that must be staved off to prevent catastrophic climate change.

One wonders if this variability in the Amazon could explain much of the global variability in carbon output, a swing as much as 2.4 gigatons a year.

In any case, here's a scary picture of what drought looks like in the Amazon, when a vast tributary dried up and stranded a ferry, from the Washington Monthly special issue on the Amazon.

Encouragingly, the experts think they have an answer -- using money to encourage locals to save their forests, or REDD, for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation. It's on the agenda at Copenhagen...

Water Use in U.S. Levels Off

Peter Gleick, water analyst extraordinare. and leader of The Pacific Institute, reveals that water consumption in the US of A has actually declined slightly in recent years, according to the USGS.

This is a big deal, as he says, for this reason: 

Water planners are trained to assume that as population and economies grow, water use must inevitably grow. This assumption is why we hear the drumbeat of calls for new supply, new supply, new supply. We argue that this is false -- it is possible to improve the efficiency of water use, as our studies repeatedly show, and such improvements eliminate the need for expensive and environmentally damaging new supply.

Gleick adds:

If each American today still used 1,940 gallons per day (as we did in 1975), population growth would have caused the U.S. to use an additional 165 billion gallons per day. That's equal to more than 12 new Colorado Rivers -- or enough water for everyone in California, New York, Florida, Texas, Illinois, and Michigan. We could never have supplied that much more water without destroying our remaining rivers, lakes, aquifers, and aquatic ecosystems. Conservation and efficiency improvements have saved our butts.

Sometimes I wonder if enviros  and agencies need to learn how to trumpet their successes.

Why I Moved Out of L.A.

From Indexed.

Was a good move then, and feels necessary now, for mental health.

The Rendering of the Dogs vs. Raising Cattle Well

In a bold Swiftian essay from a non-fiction book soon to be published called Eating Animals, New York novelist Jonathan Safer Foer brings up an unpleasant fact:

Rendering—the conversion of animal protein unfit for human consumption into food for livestock and pets—allows processing plants to transform useless dead dogs into productive members of the food chain. In America, millions of dogs and cats euthanized in animal shelters every year become the food for our food.

Guess I should have known. After all, as Foer points out:

Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.

But at the same time, there are folks out there in the world raising cattle, working to do the job right, for the herd, for meat-eaters, and "in conjunction with [Federal and state] agencies," as rancher Gareth Plank explains in a video report for the Redding Searchlight (below).

That means working to make sure the operation is improving the clarity of local streams, to encourage salmon to spawn. It means irrigating thoughtfully, to avoid waste (though Plank complains about restrictions on his water use). And it clearly means a lot of plain hard work.

Take a look:

Gifts of Uncertainty: Joanna Macy Sees Our Present Moment

The Ojai Foundation, a beautiful place for spiritual seekers, this week inaugurated a "great teacher series" by bringing deep ecologist and Buddhist Joanna Macy in to lead a workshop and give a talk.

A truly inspiring talk it was, and I don't write such words often, being a bit of a skeptic about gurus and leaders of all sorts.

It's so easy, so enjoyable really, to turn our problems over to some one else to solve.

For example: Barack Obama. I love the guy, I really do, but he can't possibly be expected to answer all the global questions he's been asked. The more we expect of him, in fact, the less likely he is to succeed.

Macy didn't address that aspect of our woes, but she did make a fundamental point, which cannot be repeated too often to people concerned about the fate of our world. 

"It is natural for us to be distressed over the state of the world. We are integral components of it, like cells in a larger body. When that body is traumatized, we feel it," she pointed out. "Our culture conditions us to view pain as dysfunction. A successful person, as we conclude from commercials and electoral campaigns, brims with optimism... "Be sociable." "Keep smiling." "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." 

She sees our plight as a conflict between two stories. In the first story, which is variously called Business as Usual, Late Capitalism, or the Industrial Growth Society, all the focus is on the growth of the economy -- money. "In order for us to be comfortable and safe, this system is ready and willing to do anything."

In the second story, which she calls The Great Unraveling, we see the bill for decades of extraction, exploitation, extinction, and ruin come due. "Just to speak of this, to transform it into words, seems inadequate," she said. "It takes moral imagination to see what is happening now, this moment is so huge."

But her focus is on the third story, which she dubs The Great Turning, and what's fascinating is that unlike most of our leaders -- even great ones, such as Obama -- she admits uncertainty as to our fate. We really don't know how it's all going to come out. She sees this uncertainty as a gift. As in love, as in childbirth, as in raising a garden, our success is not foretold.

"We have this notion in America that we ought to be sure [of our success in an endeavor] before we start," she said. "We are addicted to hope in this culture. But hope takes you out of the present moment. You have a chance to be alive at this moment. Isn't that what you want?"

Thank you, Joanna Macy, for articulating this thought, for helping me and countless others transform our fear for our world into a desire to act for it...out of love.

The Loneliness of the Last Flat-Earther

Funny story from Dana Milbank's Washington Post sketchbook on Sen. Inhofe, whose rants against global warming now seem so utterly dated and Bushian:

"It must be very lonely being the last flat-earther.

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, committed climate-change denier, found himself in just such a position Tuesday morning as the Senate environment committee, on which he is the ranking Republican, took up legislation on global warming. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) was in talks with Democrats over a compromise bill -- the traitor! And as Inhofe listened, fellow Republicans on the committee -- turncoats! -- made it clear that they no longer share, if they ever did, Inhofe's view that man-made global warming is the "greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people."

"Eleven academies in industrialized countries say that climate change is real; humans have caused most of the recent warming," admitted Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). "If fire chiefs of the same reputation told me my house was about to burn down, I'd buy some fire insurance.'"

Craziness.

Bears and Minivans in Yosemite (the beta)

Fascinating study in the Journal of Mammology sent to me by a reader.

The opening of the study and the headline in the Los Angeles Times agree: Minivans in Yosemite are targets for bears, maybe because they're usually inhabited by messy young children.

As reporter Carla Hall put it:

It's official. Those discerning car critics, the black bears of Yosemite, have voted the minivan their most sought-after vehicle.

Not to drive, of course, just to break into.

Year after year, foraging bears have made minivans their first or second choice among tens of thousands of SUVs, sedans, sports cars and other vehicles in Yosemite National Park.

At least that's the conclusion of an article in this month's issue of the Journal of Mammalogy, which details a study of 908 bear-on-vehicle break-ins from 2001 to 2007.

It's a reasonable "interp," one might say. ScienceFair reported it in similar fashion, but found a picture as well for the story, showing a couple of bears defying the study results and attacking a sedan.

But it's not the only possible interpretation offered by the study. Without getting too definite as to its reasoning, the study also hints that the breaks could be the work of just a few bad apple bears.

That's what this paragraph at the top of 1044 seems to say, although it's difficult to believe:

Finally, selection of minivans could reflect the foraging decisions of a few individuals that developed a learned behavior for breaking into minivans. Anecdotal evidence supports this idea and indicates that most of the break-ins resulted from a maximum of 5 bears and possibly as few as 2 individuals. Furthermore, the pattern of selecting minivans likely spanned 2001–2007 (Table 1) and known individuals suspected of breaking into vehicles were alive and in the area during this period.

Which is a shocking suggestion, given that the table 1 they referred to includes hundreds of incidents. Take a look (click to enlarge):

So is it then a handful of ursine villains ripping into dozens of minivans parked in Yosemite Valley? Maybe all this smashing of windows, ripping open back doors, tossing out of seats -- said to have "appeared effortless" for the perpetrators -- was the two bad bears?

Hmmmm....

May need to contact Stewart Breck or one of his coauthors to find out.

Imaginative Reporter Shreds "Global Cooling" Fallacy

With newspaper revenues cratering, most reporters are too busy covering their ever-expanding beats to think imaginatively about ways to cover a story. But Seth Borenstein, who has been reporting on science issues for the Associated Press for years, doesn't need to fear for his next paycheck, and has consistently brought imagination to his work. Confronted with a "zombie" (that is, brain dead) argument that the global climate is cooling, because the warmest year on record is 1998, a canard foolishly repeated in the Superfreakonomics book, Borenstein cleverly sent the climate numbers to four different statisticians, without revealing the source, and asked them to talk about the trends they found.

The results? Not one of the four statisticians found a cooling trend. As Borenstein writes:

The experts found no true temperature declines over time.

"If you look at the data and sort of cherry-pick a micro-trend within a bigger trend, that technique is particularly suspect," said John Grego, a professor of statistics at the University of South Carolina.

Brilliant. But one suspects the zombie argument will somehow stagger on...followed by the deniers.