September 13th, 2009 by Jess

Hello to my four readers! I have shifted the focus of my blogging efforts to a new permanent home.

Openly Balanced is a blog dedicated to finding equilibrium; in our lives, our communities, and on our planet. Because they’re all connected and you can’t have one without the others. It is about sustainable living, and what that means to each of us. So if you liked my posts on TNTeam, please go check out the new site and let me know what you think!

June 19th, 2009 by Jess

This absence brought to you by a week-long internet outage.  Assuming a resolution of all technical issues, we will return to our regularly scheduled ranting next week.

Have a great weekend!

June 11th, 2009 by Jess

The American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), passed by the House Energy and Commerce Committee several weeks ago, is moving quickly towards a vote on the House floor.  On Wednesday, Chairmen Henry Waxman and  Edward Markey– architects and champions of ACES – spoke with activists on a conference call organized by 1Sky.

Their message was loud and clear.

If ACES is to pass, they need our help.  In their words, a “hurricane” of activism is needed in the next two weeks.  TWO WEEKS, people.

If you have ever felt like your politicians don’t listen…

If you feel like the world’s problems are too many and too huge…

If you have ever felt like there was nothing you could do to make a difference…

Now is your chance. They asked for your help.  And over the next two weeks, Congress will be listening.  Please make your voices heard.  It only takes five minutes.

We’ve compiled a list of automatically generated letters to Congress.  In most cases, you fill in your contact information, and the source site will send your letter to the correct representative.  You can edit the letters, or just send them as is.

If you know of a letter that is not listed, please post in the comments and we will add it to the list.  Check back regularly to send letters to Congress via our most recent additions!  New letters will be added in the order received, so you can just pick up where you left off.

Use the button at the bottom of the post to share this with everyone you know.  It’s time to be heard.

Don’t put this off.  Don’t navigate away.  Don’t save this for later.

We only have two weeks.

American Clean Energy and Security Act Letters

1Sky Representative Letter

1Sky Letter to Speaker Pelosi

Audubon Action Center Letter to Congress

Endangered Species Coalition Letter to Congress

Environmental Defense Action Fund Letter to Congress

Green For All Letter on Green Jobs

League of Conservation Voters Letter to Congress

National Wildlife Federation Letter to Congress

National Wildlife Federation Care2 Petition

Power Shift 09 Letter to President Obama and Congress

Progressive Secretary.org to Executive and Congress

Save Our Environment.org Letter to Congress

Union of Concerned Scientists Care2 Petition

The Wilderness Society Letter to Congress

None of these letters quite what you wanted to say?  Write your own letter and send it to your Representative.

ACES, american climate and security act, climate change, congress, letter to congress, Waxman-Markey

June 11th, 2009 by Jess

I hate moving.

First, you pack everything you own.  Then you realize you own way more than you thought.  You sell stuff, give stuff away, throw stuff away, pack more.  You think you’re done, but inevitably you end up finding more as you’re walking out the door.  At least that’s how it seems to go for me.

You get to your new place.  There is almost always something wrong.  This time, we had no water.  Then we had no propane.  It took almost two weeks to get our internet hooked up.  No mailbox keys.  No garage keys.  A seemingly never-ending flurry of phone calls setting up utilities and getting everything taken care of.

Amidst all that, I made a call to the trash and recycling company to arrange for trash pick up.  The customer service rep asked if we were interested in having yard waste pickup.  It would be composted.  Since our new house has a big yard, which has been very poorly maintained over the last year, I decided to go for it.  After all, I can just pick up the phone and cancel it later.

The next day, our big blue yard waste bin arrived.  I went out to the curb to fetch it and was met with a wonderful surprise.  It is not just yard waste.  That big blue bin is for full composting – food scraps, yard waste, food soiled paper, the works!  Since then, I have been surprised to find that many local businesses and restaurants have recycling and compost containers next to their trash receptacles.

When I found out that my hometown of Boulder, CO had started doing curbside composting, I assumed that it was one of very few places with a residential composting program.  I am excited that it appears to be more widespread than I initially thought.  Beginning this year, residents of Seattle are required to sign up for curbside composting (although there is currently no way of ensuring that everyone uses the service).

I have to say, it is astonishing how much our garbage load is reduced by having a compost bin.  We aren’t garbage-intensive people by any means.  I try to keep purchases of packaged goods, especially foods, to a minimum, and we are very good about recycling everything we can.  It is estimated that 27% of municipal waste is organic matter but, at least in our house, it seems like a lot more.  And I really like that it is now being composted instead of piling up in a landfill.

I have to say, I don’t know why more communities don’t offer curbside composting services.  We pay them to take our food waste.  It is then composted and sold back to us at over $3 per bag.  To me, it seems like a win-win.

I will probably eventually begin vermicomposting myself, both because I will have the garden and because having semi-pet worms will be fun.  But even then, I think we’ll probably keep the composting.  They will handle the meat and dairy that the worms don’t, as well as any yard waste that is too big for my little compost system.

Do your communities offer a curbside composting service?  If so, do you take advantage of it?  If so, how do you like it?  If not, why did you not sign up?

compost, Food, Recycling, Washington

June 10th, 2009 by Jess

gardening, locavore, My Project, wordless

June 9th, 2009 by Jess

So I missed World Oceans Day.

I did not go to the ocean.  I did not think about the ocean.  I did not eat anything from the ocean.  Oh wait… that one is good!  While I meandered around my land-bound house, not thinking about the oceans, the eco-blogosphere was filled with seawater.

GeekDad had some great suggestions on how I could have been enjoying World Oceans Day.  The Monterey Bay Aquarium had a photo contest (the new official iconic ocean image will be announced June 18th).  And the nice folks over at Treehugger taught us about jellyfish, the other seven biggest ocean issues, the Great Barrier Reef, and why we hope the oceans will stick around until August so they can see how much we really love them. And nude bicyclists. But I don’t think that one had anything to do with oceans.

I did end up participating in World Oceans Day in two ways.  First, I spent the evening trying to catch the special World Oceans Day fish on a crazy FaceBook fishing game that I play.  Second, I forwarded my skepti-dad some links about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.

To be honest, the oceans are something I really struggle with.  I love the ocean.  I feel intrinsically connected to them, probably due to generational memories of living on sailboats passed down from my maternal grandfather.  If I could live anywhere in the world, I would live by the ocean.  Any ocean.  I love everything about them.  Including sushi.

This is where I run into trouble.

I don’t eat very much meat.  It’s not good for the environment, my budget, or my health.  I am a social meat eater, and a deliberately occasional meat eater at home.  When I do eat it, it is usually in the form of a hamburger, because that is one comfort food I’ve had a hard time giving up.  But sushi is a different story.  I could eat sushi for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

So I was thrilled when the Monterey Bay Aquarium released their pocket guide to sustainable sushi. Until I looked at it.

I wish I lived in San Francisco.  San Francisco has Tataki. But in contrast to what this article from the Center for American Progress says, I haven’t found it easy to eat sushi sustainably in the average sushi restaurant.  Maybe it is true that in high-end sushi restaurants, the chefs on staff can tell you exactly where the fish is coming from.  The sushi restaurants I visit are not like Nobu – chefs resisting customers’ pleas on behalf of the oceans and continuing to employ virtually the least sustainable menu choices possible.  But for the most part, my attempts at verifying the origin of my salmon nigiri have come up short, either because of a language barrier or because they just don’t know exactly where their salmon came from.

So where does that leave me?  Right now, it leaves me trying to eat sushi more rarely.  And I think it’s important to keep pulling out my pocket guide and asking, because even if they don’t know the answers, they know that at least one of their customers cares.  If more of us ask, if more of us care, hopefully we’ll start to see more sustainable choices enter the mainstream.

Looking for more on food and the environment?  Subscribe to our feed and follow @thatsnatural on Twitter.

Nobu, overfishing, seafood pocket guide, sustainable sushi, world oceans day

June 8th, 2009 by Jess

I spent a couple hours on Saturday morning watching The Future of Food, a documentary about genetically engineered foods.*  I generally consider myself fairly educated about environmental and health issues.  I try to be an engaged citizen and consumer.  And I like to rant about things to my skeptical family, which means I have to be pretty careful about my facts.  But this movie got me.  I didn’t know all of this.  I barely knew any of it.  Which makes me think that most people probably don’t know about it at all.

Just a partial list of some new-to-me facts:

• 97% of vegetables that were grown at the beginning of the century are now extinct.  That’s just scary.  What would be saying if it were 97% of animal species lost in a century?
• The right to patent living things was deliberately left out of the Constitution.  Maybe they had a good reason?
• Monsanto vs. Schmeiser.  This is just unbelievable.
• Transgenic corn has been genetically engineered to have BT, a bacterial toxin, in each cell.  This kills not just harmful insects, but beneficials as well.
• BT corn is not FDA tested, but is GRAS – “generally recognized as safe.”
• 25 countries require labeling of GMOs.  We are not one of them. We could be, if the bill ever makes it out of committee. (It will need to be reintroduced this Congress.)
• In ten years, all of the food in the world could be controlled by six companies, one of which will be American.  Any guess as to which company?  Walmart.

This film reminded me again that politics is in everything.  “The personal is political.”  And the political is personal.  We wouldn’t allow companies to patent our bodies, would we?  Why are we allowing them to patent other living things?  When they patent our food, it is personal.

Patents do not protect traditional knowledge.  Rather, they limit the process of passing on traditional knowledge.  Traditional knowledge is key to building resilient communities over generations.  How much has been lost in the last two generations?  There is a whole community forming today around relearning and revitalizing skills that we could have learned from our grandparents – growing and preserving food, and even basic cooking.  The more we allow companies to limit access to things no one person should own, the more we risk losing these fundamental skills.

Now let me clarify that I am a capitalist.  I really do believe in capitalism.  But I do not trust a corporation to self-regulate food safety and nutrition.  Corporations are designed to maximize profit, not nutrition.  The FDA exists for a good reason.

In order for corporations to continue doing what they do best (providing what consumers want), consumers need to be able to choose what to buy.  And in order to exercise choice, we must have access to information.  If genetically engineered foods aren’t labeled, we cannot choose.

We also need to start paying attention to who is running our government.  In The Future of Food, they narrated a long list of Monsanto-government crossovers throughout the last decade.  Just one – Michael Taylor, who was responsible for GMOs bypassing FDA testing in the early 90’s, previously represented Monsanto as Senior Counsel at King & Spalding.  In the best of worlds, there would be no such thing as a conflict of interest.  But Washington is not and has never been the best of worlds.

Do you take your children personally?  Do you take their food personally?  If so, now is the time to start taking politics personally.

* The Future of Food website does not appear to include the Hulu link.  If there is not a screening near you, or if you are lazy like me, you can watch the film online.

FDA, food safety, genetical modified organisms, genetically engineered food, GMOs, Monsanto, organic food

June 4th, 2009 by Jess

A few weeks ago I decided that every Thursday I would write a post dedicated to some new technological innovation.  Why?  Because Thursday and technology both start with “t”.  Technology Thursday.  Alliteration is neat.

Then I got distracted by my animals, local eating, my bed of weeds, organic food, composting, the new climate change bill and, just maybe, laundry.  So no Technology Thursday.

But the great thing about blogging is that you always get another chance to get it right.  Because the internet is all about letting anyone talk about anything they want, whenever they want.  So today I decided to give it another try.

Each morning I check out the latest updates on a very cool, geeky site called EcoGeek.  Today they had a post on a neat little thing called the nPower PEG, which allows you to harness your own kinetic energy to power gadgets such as cell phones, iPods, and any other portable electronic item you absolutely cannot live without.  Supposedly, if we all used the PEG daily, we could save enough electricity to power 21,000 households for an entire year.

Besides noting that, as far as Americans are concerned, the utility of this device is going to be dramatically limited by the fact that none of us ever moves, this got me thinking about a Big Question.  How green are our new eco-gadgets?

Green Gadgetry?

Anyone who has spent time reading up on recent developments in greentech knows that there is much to see in the world of green innovation.  From recent competitions to create the best new eco-gadget to Ikea releasing a line of solar powered lights, green gadgetry is everywhere.  Hey, I even have a solar-powered watch. Pretty neat.  But can eco-gadgets really change the world?

Electricity for 21,000 households is no small thing.  Many of the new and upcoming eco-gadgets have the potential to make a dramatic difference, if they are adopted on a wide scale.  A wide scale. That power for 21,000 households comes from over 23 million Americans using portable electronic devices.  23 million Americans who are going to spend $150 to buy a PEG?  23 million Americans who are going to remember to bring it with them every day they leave the house?  Who are going to commit to not forgetting about it and leaving it in a drawer?

Also, it takes energy and resources to produce these things.  Production will require energy.  And PEGs will come in some type of packaging.  Fortunately, PEG components are made out of recycled materials and are recyclable.  And hopefully nPower will strive to source their production power as sustainably as possible, as well as use recycled and recyclable packaging.  Still, even the most sustainable of eco-gadgets are still rooted in consumption.

But then we have this. For those who don’t feel like clicking on the link, it is a link to a blog post about a project undertaken jointly by a Dutch company and a Ghanaian non-profit to bring light to families in rural Africa.  This project is literally powered by three LED eco-gadgets: a solar-powered lantern, a reading light, and a wind-up flashlight.  For most families, these clean, renewable light sources would replace kerosene lanterns, which are dirty, inefficient and present a fire hazard.  For families that live without access to any electricity, these eco-gadgets could be life-changing.  At $50 per light, they are still not within reach of most families.  But with possible government subsidies and microfinance programs, hopefully they will soon be more easily available.

These two gadgets – the nPower PEG and renewably-powered LED lights – are both based on renewable energy.  Similar gadgets, completely different stories.

Will the PEG really be able to power 21,000 households?  I would like to think so, but I’m doubtful.  Even if it does, will the environmental benefit outweigh the energy consumed in the production and distribution process?  Hard to say.  The concept could be world-changing, but on this scale, it seems like one more geeky toy.

I’d rather spend my $150 to provide clean, safe lighting for three families in Africa, so that their children can study and do homework after their daytime chores are done.  With the environmental benefit here also comes a human benefit.  And a political benefit, as children educated through renewable energy grow become the continent’s next generation of leaders.

In the end, the innovation is inherently valuable.  But we need to measure the innovation and the real world benefit.  We are running out of time.  And today, the green isn’t in the gadget, but in how we use it.

eco-gadget, gadget, green technology, greentech, nPower PEG, renewable energy, solar lighting

June 3rd, 2009 by Jess

china, smog, wordless

June 2nd, 2009 by Jess

One could spend hours reading and watching and listening to the blow by blow development of climate change legislation in the U.S.  I know.  I tried.

But U.S. climate legislation is just one piece (albeit a large one) of the global picture.  Yesterday in Bonn, Germany, the current draft of the next international climate agreement lived to be argued over another day.  It was the first step on a long road to a successful international agreement in Copenhagen this December.

One of the biggest challenges negotiators will face is the divide between developed and developing countries.  Emerging economies cling tightly to the concept of “common but differentiated responsibility.”  Because developed nations are responsible for the bulk of per capita emissions, they should be required to shoulder the bulk of emissions reductions.  Additionally, developing countries argue that economic development must be their priority.  It would be unfair for them to be forced to adopt emissions regulation that would slow development and make it considerably more expensive.

India and China have been the loudest defenders of “common but differentiated responsibility.”  Unfortunately for all of us, climate models show that even if developed nations were to adopt stringent emission reduction policies, if China and India continue at BAU levels, their growth will eclipse collective emissions reductions made by developed nations.  It makes things complicated.

However, it will be interesting to see how the leak of India’s national solar plan will affect climate negotiations.  The sheer magnitude and ambition of this plan is not surprising to anyone familiar with India.  But it now seems tricky to argue that India should not be required to meet emissions targets – the means to do so are outlined in the plan.  Is it too much to hope for that other nations follow India’s example and develop renewable energy infrastructure on a national scale?

climate agreement, climate change, climate negotiations, Copenhagen, Kyoto Protocol