Low Carbon Diet

To briefly build on the post that my colleague made on Friday I wanted to add a little about the low-carbon diet. As was mentioned Bon Appetit Management Company is very conscientious about this. Though I was unable to attend the presentation that was mentioned in the previous post one of the materials available there was an article in the LA Times from April 2008.
Here is a little more information about the Low Carbon Diet Day program. There is also an interactive Low Carbon Diet Calculator.

Bon Appetit: Food Services For a Sustainable Future

In college, I remember going to the dining hall for meals, catching up with friends and eating what looked decently edible. We never thought much about our food or where it came from. Sure, we found ourselves wondering where the mysterious looking meatballs came from, or why the vegetable medley was the same in every entree, and the salad bar seemed far from "garden fresh." But that was just part of college life right?

Not exactly. I recently attended a luncheon hosted by Bon Appetit Management Company called "The Story Behind The Food." Bon Appetit is an onsite restaurant company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities, and specialty venues. They have over 400 locations in 29 states. Seattle University is one locations they serve. The guest speaker was Vera Chang. After arriving a few minutes late and helping myself to a vegan wrap and pasta salad, I started listening to her story. Chang is Bon Appétit Management Company’s West Coast Fellow. She is an honors graduate in Global Ethics from Carleton College, is certified in permaculture design and has completed an apprenticeship in Ecological Horticulture. Her background as an intern with the California Food & Justice Coalition and as founder and president of Food Truth, a student organization at Carleton College focusing on food issues, give her a unique perspective on the twin issues of sustainability and justice in the food system. Like me, she discussed her experiences as an undergraduate with little awareness of where her cafeteria food was coming from. That changed when she started asking questions, raising awareness, empowering students as farmers and advocates.

Pop quiz: How far does the average American meal travel from farm to plate? give up? At least 1500 miles.

The food we eat changes hands an average of ____ times before reaching our plate? Six

What percentage of the world's greenhouse gases are produced by livestock operations? 18% (Although I read a recent study showing this number is as much as 40%, the leading cause of climate change)

What part of your summer fruit salad contributes to the most climate change? Banana (air freighting, refrigerated fruit is carbon intensive)

I've been overlooking the environmental price I pay for the convenience of fruits, vegetables and meats on my plate. For non-local or out of season produce to get to the grocery store or cafeteria, a lot of it has to be shipped internationally. The consumption of bananas is no exception. "Most of the bananas raised for export are cultivated in the lowlands of Central and South America. Ecuador, Colombia, Panama, Guatemala, and Costa Rica supply two-thirds of the 10.3 million tons of fruit that winds up in international markets. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization predicts a production of nearly 11 million tons in 1999." (Tracy Baxter, Hidden Life of Bananas) Although this is a lovely feature of our globalized society, it also means that a great deal of fossil fuel and energy is used to get it to us. Chang discussed the role of large food suppliers, specifically Bon Appetit, in addressing concerns of sustainability and justice within the food industry. Bon Appetit has developed a "Low Carbon Diet" awareness campaign and committed to purchasing produce from within North America and educating consumers on where their food is coming from. Bon Appetit at Seattle University purchases it's produce from local farms and encourages students to farm and sell their produce to the company (If we all started buying locally, think about the job loss for the truck drivers and freight managers! Not to mention the GNP decline...)

Bon Appetit is also committed to limiting it's carbon footprint through the utilization of composting practices. As Chang pointed out, Seattle University uses all pre consumer waste (the parts of vegetables and fruits that are discarded before being served) as garden compost around the campus. All post-consumer waste (the stuff left on the plate, the stuff that doesn't get eaten) is sold to Cedar Grove, a waste management and gardening product company in the northwest. Why is this important? 25% of food waste goes into landfills, and rather than turning to soil, it rots and emits methane into the environment, further contributing to climate change. Composting food waste allows it to turn to soil and replenish the earth ( and pretty gardens).

As I finished my wrap and salad, I felt some pride in knowing that environmentally just practices went into preparing it. I thought about my own food practices with a new consciousness and awareness. Although I still have a great deal to learn, this was the perfect opportunity to begin my journey and I'm glad to have attended the luncheon. Food for thought. Happy eating and more to follow!

Personal Testimonial

Today I want to share a brief personal experience post.

Much of what I have done over the last few weeks is explore websites, read blogs and articles and then share them with my posts. Apparently this effort is coming to fruition. Last night I went to the grocery store and as I walked up and down the aisles with my coupons and store circular in hand. I didn't just look at or for things that I wanted to eat. I didn't just look at the prices and calculate how much a coupon would save me. I thought about much of what I have been reading and consequently posting about here. I walked by the dairy section thinking about the energy that it takes to power those open coolers with the OJ in them, same with the cheese, hotdogs and bacon. I briefly ventured down the frozen food aisle (looking for a specific item I had 2 coupons for) and thought about what it takes in packaging for those products, then thought about the transportation chain and how the product must remain frozen in transit, in a storage freezed and then again in the display freezer. All of that was adding to my ecological footprint. This wasn't something that I planned to happen, it just started to "click" with me as I was doing it, my brain was bringing what I have been learning to me when it was most relevant to be applied.

I found that this was a very reinforcing moment as I was internalizing what I was learning and becoming prepared to apply it in my day to day life. I hope some of you have positive experiences as I described above.

Greenopia

Today I found another fairly extensive website, Greenopia. This is a very good portal with green product reviews, green business directory, news and articles and much more.
I like that you can customize the site and the offerings by selecting your city. I found this helpful. I browsed some of their areas and I thought that their rating system was cool as instead of stars they award green leaves. I really liked looking at the green leaf ratings of different colleges and universities.

Just a short post here today but you will be rewarded by exploring this site.

Green Living

Do you live Green? Is where you live Green? Here is a list of the 10 Greenest States. this article was on Yahoo Real Estate, but it was from CNBC. Here is the slideshow of the 10 Greenest States!

Eggs - Myth and Fact

This afternoon I found a featured blog article on Yahoo Green. It was called Four Myths About Eggs.

The four myths were:

Brown eggs are different than white.

Free-range eggs come from hens that roam freely outdoors.

Organic eggs are healthier.

Egg substitutes are simply eggs (or egg whites) without the shells.

You might be surprised by the answers. The author of the blog also writes on "The Conscious Consumer" blog and she has some very interesting posts/articles there too!

World Changing

After a couple of days off from posting I am back to day with a new website I found. As one of the primary reasons for my starting this blog and making frequent entries is that there is so much information out there to be consumed, this website is an excellent example. The site is http://www.worldchanging.com/ and they have 7 major headings that information is categorized into. These categories are Stuff, Shelter, Cities, Community, Business, Politics and Planet. the feature I like most on this site is that under each of these categories there are articles posted from most recent to older ones and the articles often have information in them that relate to other categories. The "home" category that the article is most relevant to is tagged so you know its emphasis.

Since that was a difficult thing to describe, I recommend that you look around the site and check out a few articles. One of the articles I found, read and thought was very good is Toward Sustainable Travel: Breaking the Flying Addiction which is about the impact of flying on carbon footprints. It was a very thorough article and I found several of the links and citations interesting enough to pursue as well. This article was under the Cities category.

They also have three local blogs of their own and they are Worldchanging Seattle, Worldchanging Canada and Worldchanging Denver.

Ecological Debtor

This post is more focused on the ecological debt that is accumulated by nations who outstrip their biocapacity. Sometimes it is important and impactful to see things more than once and in different formats.Between the last few posts you will be able to find graphics like the one above showing the ecological debt that has been accruing since the 1980s and how the ecological footprint has been growing over the last 5 decades. Below I have added a graphic from the WWF about possibly reversing the overshoot. They also provide three scenarios: Moderate business as usual scenario (YIKES!); Slow shift scenario; and Rapid reduction scenario that are interesting to check out!Here is a link from the WWF to a report about EU countries living beyond their ecological means. On this page they als have links to some of their reports from 2007 which they compared to data collected at times between 1971-2007.

You can find the ecological footprints for a number of countries here. I have included a graphic for the debtor US below.

For those of you who are interested in receiving mroe information or don't have the time or energy to explore all of the links I have posted in these few posts, you can sign up for the Global Footprint Network Newsletter.

Ecological Creditor

There will be two posts today, the first will be on Ecological Creditors and the second one later today will be on Ecological Debtors.

Ecological Creditor nations are those who have biocapacity larger than their ecological footprint. There will be an Ecological Creditor Nations Summit later this year in October. Less than 20% of the nations in the world are ecological creditors. Here are two great graphics from Global Footprint Network showing the level of credit/debt that nations have as well as in the past.

You can see that there are generally fewer ecological creditor in the top graphic in 2006 and in fact a large majority of the population of the world resides in the countries with ecological debt. this has some justice implications for many of the creditor nations, which are developing countries. As development has risen in the past, nations have turned from creditors to debtors. How to have healthy development in these creditor nations without decreasing their credit contribution to the earth's ecological footprint is important. It is probably much more important to find ways to decrease the debt producing nation's footprints than restrict development or focus solely on the creditor nations.

If you are looking for a lot more information on this the 2009 Ecological Footprint Atlas is a 111 page document with so much information!

More Ecological Footprint

Today I explored this more and followed all the way through the Ecological Footprint Calculator. Apparently if everyone lived like me we would need 3.7 Earths. I was a little surprised by this as I almost exclusively ride the bus and on the weekends I ride my 90 mpg scooter. I recycle a lot and I am energy conscious at home. When the results came up apparently a lot of my footprint comes from the type of food I eat. Many of the posts last week can help me address the food situation to be both more local and more sustainable. Fresh food will decrease on the packaging as well.
I was interested in seeing what would happen if I increased my air travel to the high that I did, which was in 2007 with well over 100 hours of air travel and my footprint increased to 5.4 Earths.They even let you explore specific scenarios such as taking a local vacation this year or reducing the animal products eaten by half. Eathday Network also offers a list of 25 ways to lower your footprint.

Ecological Footprint

Ecological Footprint? What does this mean? I am sure everyone has heard of a carbon footprint but what is an Ecological Footprint? An ecological footprint is a measure of human demand on the Earth's ecosystems. Here is the link to Global Footprint Network and their site is excellent. I learned a number of things about the global ecological footprint there. Currently we (humanity) use 1.4 Earth's as far as resources go to sustain ourselves each year. I found it more startling that within 10 years it is expected that this will rise to 2 Earth's resources per year. Another way to think about this that the website explained is that at 1.4 Earth's it takes our planet 17 months to regenerate resources we use and absorb our waste for each year at our current level of usage. To imagine this rising to 2 in such a short period is quite distressing.

To go along with this is Earth Overshoot Day, which in 2009 was September 25. This was the day that we began using more in ecological equivalent than the Earth was going to produce last year.

I also enjoyed the footprint calculator and I will definitely be spending more time on this site because there is so much more there than I could share here in this blog.

Environmental Justice

Here is the second post for the day to help get caught up to my once a day goal for posting. This post is about environmental justice and even though this is a relatively brief post, this is a topic that is very deep! The website related to this that I am highlighting today is the Encyclopedia of Earth. There is an absolutely huge wealth of information on an incredible array of topics within this site. Specific to environmental justice I am highlighting an article about the origins and definition of the term. I found this to be brief but well written with past, present and future views as well as a few ideas for further reading.
Another section of the site is the larger Environmental Justice page from which, you can jump into a number of topics within environmental justice that are in alphabetical order by the articles they are. There are a number of articles that are specific to Africa, which is a major interest area for me. Here are links to a few of them about chemical use, environmental and socioeconomic impact of armed conflict, and legal responses for sustainable development plus many more.

Yahoo Green

Hello, I am currently two blog posts behind so I will kick into gear again this week and get caught up. Today I am highlighting a much larger gateway to information than the sites I posted last week. I know many of you are Google people but I have always been a Yahoo person and last night I "discovered" green.yahoo.com You can start this blog by calculating your carbon footprint.
There are a number of featured articles, today there is one about scary fast food breakfasts, that are not specifically "green" but are also good for healthy living. They have links to blogs, here is one highlighted posting about selecting green colleges and universities to attend. There is a Living Green section which has information about buying a fuel-efficient car, commuting, gardening, recycling etc.

I have enjoyed this page so much I added it to my favorites. I am seriously considering changing my home page for my browsers to this site though rather than the regular Yahoo page.

P-Patch

Yesterday I was preparing an afternoon post when my week had a big setback so I was unable to post it so I am doing it today. This beautiful Seattle saturday is a perfect time to post on this topic. The P-Patch is a community gardening program through the City of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. P-Patches have been gardened for 37 years and there are currently 73 P-Patches totaling about 23 acres throughout the city.
My knowledge of P-Patch is minimal and very new, I was only introduced to them when I overheard a conversation about them a week ago. The P-Patches build a sense of community in the areas where they are located as they are tended by people in the neighborhoods where they are located. There is apparently a huge waiting list for people to become active in one of the P-Patches showing both the commitment of local individuals willing to participate and the value that these plots are bringing to the community. To continue to build on the sustainable food source theme for the week it is also important to point out that in 2009 P-Patch gardens and gardeners donated over 12 tons of obviously local, sustainable food to Seattle food banks and feeding programs.I highly recommend looking around this website, each P-Patch has a description and history along with pictures and information located here. Overall this is one of the best government managed websites I have seen in a very long time with easy access to any information you might want to know about the program.

Eat Local/Local Harvest

As I continue this week I am still focusing on local sustainable food and sources of food. Tonight I will highlight two websites/organizations that I have come across in my now daily trek through the world of environmental sustainability.

The first site is a local Seattle company called Eat Local. I have not tried them but I found their information on the website very intriguing and I am motivated to try it some this summer. I joined their online newsletter while on their site so I will get information sent to me which will be a helpful reminder to try them out. They prepare meals and desserts and sell them to customers frozen, just needing to heated and enjoyed.

I feel like an advertisement and all of this information is on their site but I think it is worth repeating here too: they use Northwest farmed, organic or sustainably grown produce, grass-fed and finished meats, free range chicken, meals are hand made and available in BPA-free biodegradable packaging or reusable glass containers. I recommend exploring the foods from Pastas to Fish to Desserts and more!

OK, now onto part 2 of the post - I found another great source of sustainable local food information but this website is helpful for those all across the US! The site is called Local Harvest and they have information about local farms, farmers markets, restaurants and grocery stores that use and sell local sustainable foods. I like providing these resources and allowing you to explore them because that is what I am doing.

I spend some time poking around each of these sites, usually learning a lot in the process. Local Harvest also has a great directory of blogs from Local Harvest members and a newsletter with extensive archives. There is so much more to share about this site I can't type any more I just invite you to check it out on your own.

Urban Chickens

Some of you may be wondering about urban chickens since the end of my post on Monday afternoon alluded to a future post. Well now that I have built suspense for a day without posting I am ready to share about urban chickens. To begin with I will share this article from the Seattle Times about what is like to be a "City Chicken" in Seattle. There are some great pictures of extensive coops and overall a great article about urban chicken life. Seattle Tilth, a website featured in one of Monday's blog entries offers a chicken coop tour for those interested in physically exploring this topic further and this takes place in July.

A brief internet search about urban chickens will yield a number of websites. One of the first to come up will be urbanchickens.org and they have a fun easy to navigate site on the subject. They mention some benefits of maintaining urban chickens as providing a local source of protein (eggs), a source of fertilizer for gardening, pest control and that it can be very fun! Their resources page is AWESOME as it has resources located in different cities across the country, general information and supply resources as well. This site is based in Albuquerque, New Mexico but they are chicken proponents for other places as well. They have website sections on caring for chickens, chicken coops, recipes & crafts and several other topics.

On the Seattle Urban Farm Company website, which was featured in Monday's blog entry, there is information on the local ordinance for Seattle governing urban livestock, including chickens. Currently the limit per property is 3 chickens but the Seattle Department of Planning and Development is proposing a code change that will increase the number allowed from 3 to 8 chickens among a few other proposed changes regarding urban agriculture.

Afternoon Urban Gardening

As promised this morning, here is the afternoon update on urban gardening with "fresh" links. The first site to highlight in this post is Seattle Tilth. They offer classes and workshops about gardening, urban livestock, sustainable landscapes and more. These are offered at several locations throughout Seattle from April to November so they are reasonably easy to get to. Their mission "is to inspire and educate people to garden organically, conserve natural resources and support local food systems in order to cultivate a healthy urban environment and community." I definitely recommend at least a brief exploration of their website in order to see what is offered and to find areas that are interesting to you.

The second site I would like to feature is the Seattle Urban Farm Company. They do not have a calendar as full of events at the moment as Seattle Tilth but they do offer some services and resources that complement the other sites in today's posts. They have a position currently posted for an "Urban Farming Assistant," a great resource page with links to many different organizations, a blog of their own and the area I found the most interesting was on urban chickens!

I found it interesting when I moved to Seattle that there were as many chicken coops as there are throughout the city as I had never thought of having chickens anywhere other than on a rural farm. Their site has the specific Seattle Municipal Code and information about keeping chickens and other urban livestock within Seattle.

I found so much good information about chickens today I have to wait until tomorrow to share it all. Please remember to check back then to read about this exciting topic!!

Urban Gardens

I was close to posting last night but I didn't get it together so today I will post two entries. The entries today will be about Urban Gardening. There are so many resources and groups in different cities around the country that are involved in this. One of the primary goals of this is promotion of sustainable locally sourced foods. This first site is for Urban Garden Share and they primarily offer a place for those with gardens to match up with those who have gardening skills that they would like to use or develop. I love the A-Team style introduction about how the organization began. This is a Seattle group but I would imagine that this type of organization exists in other green, sustainable minded and gardening friendly cities as well. I will have a second post this afternoon with a different Seattle urban sustainable gardening organization but here are a couple of links to organizations I found in other cities. I encourage anyone visiting this blog from another location to at least see what types of similar organizations or resources are available in your neighborhood.

Denver - Denver Urban Gardens

Sacramento - Sustainable Urban Gardens - Tons of info on their site!

Milwaukee - Milwaukee Urban Gardens

Portland - Growing Gardens

A post for yesterday! - Oil Spills

I know that the oil spill off the coast of Louisiana is such a huge headline and everyone can find tons of information about oil spills since this one is so prominent in the news but I wanted to still do a little self-exploration. Do the pictures below make you think of some possible alien invasion? It kind of makes me think of this but the spills in these two pictures have also turned the coasts into alien-like environments too.
This morning I read a blog post about the 5 worst oil spills and I was surprised at all of them. Here is a link to the blog post I read. According to their list the Exxon Valdez is #5 but it was the only one of the top 5 that I had even heard of.I did a little reading about each of the other four and I found another link that had information about a lot more oil spills over the last 45 years. Here is the link to that one. I thought it was interesting that many of these were recent enough (last 15 years) that I felt I should have heard about more of them but our news in the US is so focused on our country that many of these just never made the broader headlines like the spill now is. It makes me wonder if the current spill is getting news headlines in other parts of the world yet?

Recycling

I have recycled literally tons of glass, aluminum and cardboard at past jobs. I saved aluminum cans when I was a kid and turned them in for money at a local recycling center. I currently recycle at home as well. I need to be more vigilant about this at my current jobs and when I am traveling though. Today I want to share some recycling statistics and the website I found them at. These statistics are from http://greenliving.lovetoknow.com/Recycling_Statistics There is a lot more statistics on their site and good information too.

-Over 200 million gallons of used motor oil is disposed of into the environment. Most of the oil is poured down the drain, onto the ground, or just tossed in the garbage. It only takes one gallon of motor oil to contaminate one million gallons of drinking water.
-Producing cars from recycled aluminum decreases air pollution by 95 percent.
-Producing recycled paper produces 74 percent less air pollution, 35 percent less water pollution and uses 64 percent less energy than making paper from logs. A ton of paper made from recycled materials can save a total of over 500 pounds of air pollution

-Aluminum from recycled materials saves 95 percent of the energy
-Steel from recycled steel saves 60 percent of the energy
-Newspapers from recycled paper save 40 percent of the energy
-Plastics from recycled plastic save 70 percent of the energy
-Glass from recycled glass saves 40 percent of the energySome other interesting information I found on the US Environmental Protection Agency website is a little startling yet encouraging. For an agency that is 40 years old this year and with one of it's primary focuses on safeguarding the natural environment, I found it surprising that in 2006 the agency wide recycling rate was only 39%. It was very encouraging that the rate rose to 51% in 2009 though. I also subscribed to their monthly newsletter while I was on the site this morning.

Ozone? What Happened?

Today I would like to begin the Enviro-Sustain blog with a note on precisely why I am beginning this blog. As I mentioned in the opening blog, I will make Every Day my personal Earth Day by maintaining the level of awareness that is garnered once a year for the actual Earth Day.

OK, This morning my attention was brought to a brief article on Yahoo News from LiveScience about what happened to the hole in the ozone layer that was such a prominent topic when I was young but I haven't heard about it in an urgent manner in several years. I recommend you read the article as it is interesting and points out that keeping a raised awareness is important. A good example is illustrated below, I was not aware of thinning of the ozone layer above the north pole, which is addressed in the article as well.

Here is the article: What Ever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer

Enviro-Sustain

Hello,
Some of you may know that I have two other blogs, No Profundity and The Mullet of Blogs. Today I would like to begin a third blog. No Profundity is primarily an interest blog for things I am interested in and enjoy sharing, including places I have been, want to go and random things to share with the inquisitive people out there. The Mullet of Blogs is primarily an entertainment blog with postings about AWESOME things and there are often videos that are posted there.

You may be wondering where I find all of the time to have three blogs? I am a voracious reader of news, current events, and interest articles on the internet even with my busy work and school schedules. It is actually relatively easy to post interesting material and I have a huge backlog of things I have read and explored on the internet in the past that I have always wanted to share.

OK, back to the main topic, today I am starting a new blog called Enviro-Sustain and this blog will have daily or near-daily updates with an environmental or sustainability focus. Why have I decided to do this, you ask? I have stated to people several times in the last two weeks since Earth Day, that having one day of heightened awareness is good but being only once a year this doesn't have the impact I would like. I am making a personal commitment through this blog, which is within my individual capacity to spend part of each day with this focus and attempt to influence change and increase awareness. I will now have a personal Earth Day - Every Day!I hope that you both enjoy this blog as well as increase your awareness of environmental and sustainability issues and resources through these posts.