conservation

How will you dress for the Bush Depression this winter? Me, I'm counting on my slightly tattered but super-toasty flannel-lined OshKosh overalls--so old they were actually made in OshKosh. That, and the sweaters I'll be wearing à la Jimmy Carter, since our thermostat and our bank balance will both be chillingly low.

President Carter tried, and failed, to make cardigans and conservation cool during the seventies energy crisis. He warned of "the serious consequences of our long delay in creating a comprehensive national energy policy" in a speech announcing the Emergency Natural Gas Act of 1977, and called on us all to buckle down and bundle up:

Sadly, the sole American family willing to heed Carter's "make do with less" message was the Waltons, who, alas, resided only in the corn pone-filled cranium of Earl Hamner Jr. Two years later, a frustrated Carter asked, plaintively, "Why have we not been able to get together as a nation to resolve our serious energy problem?" He blamed the loss of community and the rise of materialism in our culture:

Again, Carter channeled the Waltons while the rest of us stayed glued to the oily exploits of the Ewings. We bought into the more-is-more mania, and our collective carbon footprint expanded exponentially. Houses and cars and waistlines grew bigger, while an endless geyser of consumer goods gushed all around us. Will it ever run out of steam?

Consider this astounding statistic I came across in the October issue of Organic Gardening: In 1995, the average number of food items sold in supermarkets was 3,000; by 2006, it had jumped to 45,000. And most it is cartons and cans and clamshells filled with industrially grown stuff that's been processed to death and then schlepped over land and sea. That's why Michael Pollan's "eater's manifesto," In Defense Of Food, advises us to avoid supermarkets altogether and seek out fresh food from local farmers--and our own front yards--instead.

Sure, some folks will continue to fill their cupboards with Campbell's soup--the only stock that didn't tank when the Dow sank. But more and more Americans are rejecting pre-fab faux foods in favor of DIY dining. Today's New York Times cites a report that, as of May, "53 percent of consumers said they were cooking from scratch more than they did just six months before," driven by the rising cost of convenience foods. Hey, when you're unemployed, there's plenty of time to hone those handy Depression-era skills like how to make your own stock, grow your own veggies, and can tomatoes.

We're reverting to old-timey modes of transportation, too--there's been a dramatic spike in bike sales and train travel in recent months. And many of us are buying less, learning to make do, and turning off the lights when we leave the room. We are, at last, achieving Jimmy Carter's dream of a simpler, less-stuff driven life--a dream, by the way, that he shared with another recent U.S. president, George H. W. Bush.

Poppy Bush declared back in 1992 that he wanted to "make American families a lot more like The Waltons and a lot less like The Simpsons". How gratified he must be to see that Waltons-style austerity is finally in vogue. And all it took was his son's catastrophic stewardship of our country.

Lou Dobbs has got his presumably made-in-the-USA knickers in a twist over Al Gore’s “truly absurd proposal” for Americans to ditch the fossil fuels and switch to renewable energy in the next decade. Dobbs, inexplicably deluded that stepped-up domestic drilling would offer some kind of immediate relief from high gas prices, is furious at the folks who oppose lifting the offshore ban:

So I guess I’d be going off on an abstract tangent, here, to note that while drilling in ANWR or offshore won’t make a dime of difference to our current energy crisis, there’s something Americans could do to save 30 cents a gallon now, starting today. According to Thursday’s New York Times, the Energy Department has determined that “fuel efficiency deteriorates radically at speeds above 60 miles per hour. Every 5 miles over that threshold is estimated to cost drivers…essentially an additional 30 cents per gallon in fuel costs.”

So, the fastest way to “ease the pain and the burden” would be to simply slow down. But many Americans vehemently reject the very notion, regardless of the potential savings:

Why ease up on the gas pedal when we could wring every last drop of oil out of our soil and seas instead? Three-quarters of Americans reportedly share Dobb’s support for offshore drilling despite the fact that it would do little or nothing--even in the long term-- to offset rising fuel costs, as the New York Times noted recently:

Did you get that? The best case scenario in ANWR would lower prices by $1.44 a barrel in, like, two decades. And, as Senator Diane Feinstein noted in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times, promoting offshore drilling as any kind of meaningful solution to our energy crisis is a total sham, too.

We’re so screwed that there’s no way we can drill ourselves out of this mess. What will it take for people to accept the fact that the era of livin’ large is over? The signs are everywhere, from Wal-Mart’s procuring its produce more locally to cut fuel costs to pilots accusing U.S. Airways of sending them up with an insufficient fuel supply in a desperate bid to lighten their load.

And yet, as angry and frustrated as folks are with the high cost of gas, they’re apparently not ready to do something so drastic as conserve by reducing their speed, which puts them right in step with our President, who wouldn’t dream of asking them to. That, he insisted at a press conference the other day, would be “presumptuous…They're smart enough to figure out whether they're going to drive less or not."

But aren’t these the same people who are too slow-witted to stop driving so fast? And what about the millions of Americans who haven’t got the option of scaling back on their driving because we’ve never bothered to invest in the infrastructure to support alternative forms of transportation like mass transit, biking, and walking? We haven’t committed serious resources to developing renewable sources of energy, either, and all because we’ve been too busy bowing at the altar of the automobile.

Is Gore’s admittedly ambitious challenge “truly absurd,” as Dobbs huffed? What’s truly absurd is the idea that anyone would look to a former Texas oilman to do anything other than shill for the drillers.

Most folks are assuming that the catastrophic floods in Iowa are a natural disaster, caused simply by too much rainfall. But, leaving aside the question of whether climate change is partly to blame for all that rain, a growing number of environmental experts suspects that the flooding may have been caused in part by agricultural practices that have severely impaired the landscape’s ability to absorb excess rainwater.

As the Washington Post reported last Thursday, “Most of the wetlands are gone. Flood plains have been filled and developed,” and added that “Between 2007 and 2008, farmers took 106,000 acres of Iowa land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to keep farmland uncultivated…That land, if left untouched, probably would have been covered with perennial grasses with deep roots that help absorb water.”

So now that we’re looking at some four million acres of washed out crops, the New York Times reports that Senator Charles Grassley (R, Iowa) is calling on the USDA “to release tens of thousands of farmers from contracts under which they had promised to set aside huge tracts as natural habitat,” so that they can plant more corn.

This sounds like a really bad idea if the loss of water-absorbing habitat is what made the floods so severe in the first place. But what do I know? I’m not an Iowa farmer. Happily, though, I know someone who is—Denise O’Brien, the organic farmer who ran for Secretary of Agriculture in Iowa in 2006 and nearly won, with 49% of the vote. So I asked Denise for her thoughts on what role industrial agriculture might have played in this disaster.

As luck would have it, Denise just had a letter to the editor published in Sunday’s Des Moines Register addressing this very subject, so she forwarded it to me and I’m reprinting it here, in the hopes that more people will consider the possibility that these floods were as much an act of man as an act of God:

My dad’s a true conservative, which is to say that he actually conserves—i.e., uses things sparingly. This leaves him utterly at odds with our rampant consumer culture, but strangely in sync with his lefty-blogger-daughter, despite our obvious political differences.

My dad’s always been ahead of his time in some ways; he was a computer geek, complete with pocket protector, way before it was cool. He’s an early adopter--he owned one of the first personal computers, the long-since obsolete Osborne—but you could call him a late discarder, too. I think he only just got rid of his dot-matrix printer about a year ago.

He hates to throw things out, or buy things he doesn’t really need, and he can’t stand wasting anything, whether it’s water, or electricity. When we were officially in a drought in California (as the Central valley is again, now), he dutifully saved our bathwater and used it to water the yard or flush the toilet. My parents’ car of choice was a used Toyota, and they planned their trips carefully to save gas, even when it was cheap. At Christmas, we exchanged simple, inexpensive gifts; material things have never held any allure for my dad, with the possible exception of a faster Mac.

All of which makes him kind of a crackpot by current conservative standards. Our whole economy’s based on getting us to run out and buy stuff whether we need it or not—not to mention whether we can afford it, or how much it’s screwing up the environment. From the perspective of low-flush-toilet-hating harpy Ann Coulter, it’s downright un-American to tell folks to conserve:

Where does she get her monstrous vision of our relationship to the earth—the King Kong edition of the bible? This, from the woman who calls liberals “godless.”

Thankfully, there’s a growing number of folks on the right who reject the views of Coulter and her fellow climate-change-naysaying wingnut, Rush Limbaugh. Whether it’s eco-evangelicals worried about global warming, or NRA members alarmed by the loss of wildlife habitat, some conservatives are finally daring to buck the party line and embrace the notion of treading more lightly on the planet.

All over the country, today, fathers will be receiving gifts of one sort or another, whether it’s another useless tie or an electric shaver or a copy of Tim Russert’s Big Russ And Me: Father And Son—Lessons of Life, which has leapt to the top of the bestseller list since Russert died so unexpectedly last Friday.

I didn’t buy anything for my dad, because he honestly doesn’t want anything, except maybe a little appreciation. So here it is, Dad—thanks for teaching me that, contrary to the current conservative orthodoxy, there is virtue in thrift, and we don’t need a lot of stuff to make us happy. Hey, Dad, are you sure you’re not a closet liberal?

Americone Dream, it’s not. Aqua Colbert is a conservationist’s worst nightmare: a bottled water with a carbon footprint that stomps on sustainability and kicks it senseless in its quest to quench America’s insatiable thirst.

Thankfully, unlike Stephen Colbert’s vanilla-fudge-caramel concoction for Ben & Jerry, Aqua Colbert is only a fossil-fueled figment of Colbert’s fevered imagination, created in honor of World Water Day, today, March 22nd.

Colbert devoted Thursday's entire show to the subject of water, with uber-innovator Dean Kamen demonstrating a cutting-edge water filtration system that could be a life-saver for the millions who are sickened and killed annually by contaminated water.

Originally posted on TakePart.com.

I have a not-very-taxing question for all you tax payers out there:

Would you like to see your hard-earned dollars used to conserve precious wetlands and vital habitats, or would you prefer to see that money used to build football field-sized pools of pigshit generated by industrial pork producers?

The "manure lagoons" that surround Smithfield slaughterhouses like methane-filled moats emit a deadly and brain-damaging gas called hydrogen sulfide, so for the people who live downwind from them the question is, presumably, a no-brainer.

But what about the 90% of Americans who don't live on or near a farm? Would we rather see our agricultural policies promote conservation, or help fund factory farm cesspools that spew lethal levels of contaminants into air, soil and water with that legendary agribiz efficiency?

Congressman Collin Peterson, Democrat from Minnesota and Chairman of the House Agriculture Subcommittee, thinks we'd rather put our money into pollution than preservation.

So he's submitted a 2007 Farm Bill Proposal that would take funds away from the conservation programs that provide, among other things, aid to sustainable and organic farms, and use it instead to help corporate owned CAFO's (Confined Animal Feeding Operations) offset the cost of creating more manure lagoons.

I know, I know, you're thinking, sheesh, like Smithfield needs a handout?

But, actually, it turns out that they do, because, as Jeff Teitz noted in a scathing expose for Rolling Stone about Smithfield's execrable handling of its excrement, "There simply is no regulatory solution to the millions of tons of searingly fetid, toxic effluvium that industrial hog farms discharge and aerosolize on a daily basis. Smithfield alone has sixteen operations in twelve states. Fixing the problem completely would bankrupt the company."

And that's the largest, most profitable pork producer in the world we're talking about. You would think they could afford to deal responsibly with the vast pits of toxic waste that are a by-product of industrial pork production methods. But you'd be wrong, according to Tietz:

So obviously Smithfield needs a hand from Uncle Sam.

But what about all those forward-thinking farmers looking to be better stewards of the land? Don't they need assistance, too?

"In 2004, three out of every four farmers and ranchers applying to participate in Farm Bill conservation programs were rejected due to lack of funds," as Ferd Hoefner, policy director for the Sustainable Agriculture Coalition, told Dan Imhoff, author of Food Fight, the delightfully digestible, if disturbing, guide to the Farm Bill that's chock full of shocking charts and statistics. Read it or you'll get no dessert. Or should I say, if you don't read it, and don't lobby your legislators to better this bill, you'll get your just desserts.

Notes Imhoff, "In dollar terms, eight and a half out of every ten dollars requested were denied due to the funding shortfall. In fact, the 2004 backlog for conservation dollars exceeds the total funding available in 2005 by a three-to-one margin."

Despite being chronically underfunded, the Farm Bill's conservation programs have managed to restore nearly two million acres of wetlands and reverse the decline of waterfowl whose habitat gets destroyed when farmers drain wetlands to plant commodity crops.

More farmers clamor every year to board the sustainability bandwagon, but Congressman Peterson's decided we can't give them a lift. His proposal guts the Conservation Security Program and shifts those funds to the already amply funded Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which goes in part to help defray the costs incurred by CAFOs.

The House Agriculture Subcommittee's set to vote on Congressman Peterson's proposal tomorrow, Tuesday, May 22nd.

So if you'd like to see your tax dollars help underwrite the costs of more disease and death caused by CAFO-contaminated waterways, air, and soil; antibiotics rendered less effective in people by their overuse in chronically sick livestock made ill by horrendous living conditions; the millions of fish killed every time the manure lagoons burst and spill tons of toxic manure into our rivers (which they do regularly, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council); and millions more fish who die because of oxygen-gobbling "dead zones" that spread algae blooms thousands of miles along our coasts, fed by nutrients in animal waste, well, then, just sit back and let congress take its course.

If, like me, you think it makes more sense to encourage sustainable farming and conservation instead of funding more factory farms, you have only one day--today, May 21st--to ask your representative to, you know, represent you.