Eco-Chick · The modern girl's guide to living green & fabulous.

Going Local, Expanding the Cheap-Energy Mind

Every year, around this time, I get excited to head over to our local farm to start participating in our CSA (community supported agriculture.)

This year I am going to try my hand at a bit of horticulture at home, but we are still keeping our CSA membership as well. Being part of a community-minded organization such as a CSA is a great way to avoid the florescent lights and frigidly air-conditioned stores and get out and meet people! There are many food options, usually within ten or twenty miles of home. Here are a few resources that can help you to find locally produced items.

Local Harvest: I love this site. You can find vegan restaurants, soaps, herbs, organic barbecue joints, or where to find local honey (great for allergy sufferers!)

Locavores: The home website of those who coined the term ‘locavores.’ Jessica Prentice, a chef from the Bay area, began using the term in 2005, defining it as eating food harvested within a 100 mile radius. The links page has a lot of useful connections.

The Eat Well Guide is another great site. There is a local food finder on the main page that lets you enter your zip code to find farms, co-ops, restaurants and more. This site has guides that show where you can find hormone-free dairy, water-conscious establishments, and also has a database that lets you know what is in season in your region.

The Sustainable Table is a fantastic resource for educational information regarding all things sustainable. These are the folks who brought us The Meatrix.

If you don’t want to buy it, do one better – grow it! Michael Pollan’s recent piece on climate change and self-sufficiency in the NYT Magazine Section was so inspiring. I love his description of the cheap-energy mind and our disconnect from the simplicity of nurturing ourselves.

The idea is to find one thing to do in your life that doesn’t involve spending or voting, that may or may not virally rock the world but is real and particular (as well as symbolic) and that, come what may, will offer its own rewards. Maybe you decide to give up meat, an act that would reduce your carbon footprint by as much as a quarter. Or you could try this: determine to observe the Sabbath. For one day a week, abstain completely from economic activity: no shopping, no driving, no electronics.

But the act I want to talk about is growing some — even just a little — of your own food. Rip out your lawn, if you have one, and if you don’t — if you live in a high-rise, or have a yard shrouded in shade — look into getting a plot in a community garden. Measured against the Problem We Face, planting a garden sounds pretty benign, I know, but in fact it’s one of the most powerful things an individual can do — to reduce your carbon footprint, sure, but more important, to reduce your sense of dependence and dividedness: to change the cheap-energy mind.

For a Fun Night Call….360 Vodka!

As those who know and love me are aware, I love vodka. And though I:

-eat organic, local food (except for my unfortunate pineapple habit, which I’m twelve-stepping my way through….did you know to get 1 lb. of pineapple to our plates, it takes 40 lbs of CO2! Serious bummer.)

-don’t drink bottled water unless there’s an emergency (I love my Sigg bottle!)

-never, ever throw my cigarette butts in the street (I know, smoking’s a disgusting habit, but I only smoke 4-5 a week)

-keep my house at near-freezing levels in the winter to conserve energy

So even though I do all these things, and more, I’ve been slow to buy organic spirits. But once I tried 360 vodka, I vowed to change my ways. Not only is it excellent both chilled straight up, but it make a fabulous mixer. And it wears it’s eco-friendliness on its sleeve, literally:

(Click here to see a blown up version of the label)

I brought my bottle over to my good friend (and vegan chef extraordinaire) Pauline’s house and we made gingery cocktails (see recipe below) from the 360, and enjoyed an awesome meal of hummous and fresh bread, arugula, pear and almond salad, summer zucchini risotto with fresh tomato tapenade, with a hand-picked blueberry turnover for dessert. Talk about enjoying the harvest!

Pauline’s Ginger Limey

1.5 shots vodka
1/4 cup organic limeade
1/3 bottle ginger beer
Fresh lime wedge

Pour ingredients in glass with plenty of ice, mix with finger, garnish with lime wedge.

For more cocktail ideas, check this page out.

Yes, our glasses are very empty in this picture…

Many thanks to my friend Pauline Dean, dedicated vegan animal LOVER, Willie Nelson devotee, and polka-dot popularizer.

Deep Economy: Q&A with Bill McKibben

When Bill McKibben wrote The End of Nature in 1989, it was the first popular press book to address global warming in a meaningful way. Since then, McKibben has not only carved out a career as an environmental journalist; he has become one of the most steadfast and trustworthy voices in the arena.

McKibben is currently at work promoting Step It Up 2007—a decentralized protest calling for Congress to introduce measures to cut carbon emissions 80% by 2050—which will take place on April 14 in over 800 locations across the country.

In his latest book, Deep Economy (Henry Holt, 2007), McKibben submits that we’re past the point of changing our light bulbs and hoping for the best. Instead, it’s time to challenge the prevailing economic ideology of “More is Better,” with local yet systemic alternatives.

McKibben recently took some time from his work to discuss Deep Economy with Eco-Chick.

Eco-Chick: How does the idea of deep economy differ from the idea of local economy?

McKibben: Local economies are the main prescription, I think, for dealing with the deep problems of our current system—that it’s driving the Earth off an ecological cliff, and that it isn’t making us as happy as it seems to. We’ve thought much too shallowly about what we want out of the economy: not simply more, but a satisfying and workable world.

Eco-Chick: In Deep Economy, you say that it’s time to move beyond “More is Better,” but qualify that by saying, “researchers report that money consistently buys happiness right up to about $10,000 per capita income, and that after that point the correlation disappears…” (41). Do you see environmentalism as something of a class privilege? If so, do you think that has been sufficiently recognized by the environmental movement?

McKibben: I think that not caring about the environment is a kind of class privilege. The very poorest people—in this country and around the planet—feel the effects of the damage more than the rest of us do. (Go to New Orleans to see what I mean, and after that Bangladesh.) The onus on cleaning up should fall most heavily on those of us who have made the most mess—in this case, by pouring CO2 into the atmosphere, carbon that is directly related to our consumption. And we shouldn’t point too many fingers at China for their carbon emissions, not while our per capita emissions are four times greater. Instead, we need to figure out how to re-engage with the rest of the world to help them develop on something other than our energy path.

Eco-Chick: Since the Democrats took control of the House and Senate last November, many Americans have expressed hope that Congress will finally address growing public concern about global warming. However, you note in Deep Economy that unless we also critically examine our marriage to economic growth—something the Democrats have failed to do—we cannot expect to arrive at meaningful solutions to climate change and other environmental crises. What, if anything, can we reasonably expect from the Democratic Party, both in Congress and in the upcoming Presidential election?

McKibben: I hope that the Democrats will set targets—dramatic and ambitious ones—somewhere near the scientific mandate. At stepitup07.org, we’ve been saying 80% cuts by 2050. If that happens, it will help set in motion the train of events that will, hopefully with enough speed, wean us away from a world of fossil-fueled hyper-growth and towards something more durable. Congress won’t vote against growth. They may vote for higher energy prices (under some guise like cap and trade), which will then help lead us in saner directions. But an awful lot of the work is going do have to be done on the local and state level.

Eco-Chick: As I read more about local economy and, specifically, local food production, it seems to me that the discussion might need to include a reconsideration of the traditional gender roles that Americans have challenged in recent decades. In other words, the move from processed food to fresh, locally grown food requires that there be someone cooking in the kitchen. Do you think that this is part of the dialogue or is it a non-issue by this point?

McKibben: What can I say? At our house, I do the cooking. I guess I don’t think that cooking is such a bad thing—better for your body, for the planet, and probably for your mood than subcontracting it to some fast food kitchen. The fact that we’ve largely forgotten how to cook is a problem, and if we relearn, I sure hope it won’t be attached to gender as it has been in our past.

Eco-Chick: Likewise, does the idea of deep economy suggest that we might need to reconsider the roles that children and grandparents can play in a family and a community?

McKibben: Yep. Children and grandparents are now viewed as slightly problematic since they’re not contributing to economic growth. But any sensible community anywhere in the world has knit [children] into the fabric of real life—not by “child labor,” but by allowing ways that they can help. And it’s the same with grandparents.

Eco-Chick: Your research for Deep Economy took you to India, China, and Cuba, as well as cities and towns across the U.S. To me, one of the elephants in the room is that many of the most committed, knowledgeable and active environmentalists (those who would be most open to the idea of deep economy) are also people who love to travel, partly because they appreciate seeing alternatives to their own ways of thinking and living. Is there a way to reconcile travel and deep economy? Is it enough to buy a hybrid and carbon credits? Or should we heed poet Gary Snyder’s advice and, “Find your place on the planet, dig in, and take responsibility from there”?

McKibben: I think that Snyder is basically right. One of the hypocrisies of my life is that I spend a great deal of time traveling to tell people to use less carbon. I hope I end up a few gallons to the good. Of course, I buy carbon offsets, but that’s fairly token. My real joy is to stay and home and my favorite vacation of recent years is described in a book called Wandering Home, about a three-week backpack trip across my home county.

Eco-Chick: Deep Economy is dedicated to Wendell Berry. What influence has he had on your work?

McKibben: I read him first at an impressionable age, and he shocked me out of believing that the conventional wisdoms of the world were, in fact, so obvious. As I told him recently when we shared a stage, he completely changed the course of my life, and for that I’m about 85 percent grateful.

Eco-Chick: It’s been 18 years since you published The End of Nature, the first popular press book to address global warming (as far as I know). What has changed—in terms of scientific knowledge, public and government action, and your own concerns about the issue—since then? Are you satisfied with how we are responding?

McKibben: The science has gotten steadily grimmer. We didn’t understand how finely poised the Earth’s physical systems were, so we’re seeing huge responses to warming (such as Arctic melt) sooner than we would have expected. The political response—especially in this country—has been slower than I would have thought. The last six years have been totally and completely wasted, and they were important years. At the moment, though, I’m feeling a little optimistic. The response to stepitup07.org has been so much larger than I could ever have guessed and I think that we’re finally nearing a tipping point.

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