Funny, the books I’m reading this weekend are affirming each other. I suppose this means nothing more than I have consistent taste. I’m now reading The Sound of Mountain Water by Wallace Stegner. He writes about the value of wilderness as more than just a place to hike, ski, photograph, raft, or play. He writes about the value of the idea of wilderness.
Tag: Green
-
The Sound of Mountain Water
-
Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight
I just finished The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Revised and Updated: The Fate of the World and What We Can Do Before It’s Too Late, which details how we are running off of “startup capital” in a resource-draining, non-integrated way. The beginning echoed many environmental books – a depressing litany of all of the ways we are living unsustainably. When I read that sort of thing I get to feeling hopeless, like there’s little I can do that will affect, say, the fact that we may drive chimps, bonobos, and gorillas extinct in the next 100 years (a factoid in a recent New Yorker article), will run out of oil, are destroying forests, losing soil to the oceans, and are causing certain fish populations to collapse. It makes me want to hide in a cave and renounce everything. It makes me want to give up. It makes me feel like the problem is so much larger than my own actions that there is no hope.It is refreshing that Thom Hartmann’s calls-to-action for recovery are small and affirming and possible instead of grand:
- meditate,
- live intentionally according to your own values, this has immense power and affects others, a positive ripple effect, a dampening of other influences,
- notice the stories we create and accept about the way the world works and work to get outside them,
- turn off the tv and talk to your neighbors, your spouse, your family, listen to the wind and see other living things as part of the larger system,
- involve yourself in your local community.
He doesn’t list them like this. But I think the main theme of his book is: get connected with yourself (meditate), with others, and with the larger system we all inhabit.
For my part I’m passing this book onto a few like-minded friends and continuing with some things I’m already doing (meditation, subscribing to a local CSA), and I’ll be looking for other little changes to make to align myself with these ideas and work for positive change.
-
Our food comes from: Tantre Farm
We are what we eat, and the choices we make about food matter in terms of our personal health, the health of the soil, and energy consumption. So, to act on our good environmental intentions, and to connect ourselves more deeply with our local community, we joined with another couple to purchase a Community Supported Agriculture Share. Together with our friends, we will share in whatever a local organic farm, Tantre Farm, has on offer. Each week we’ll pick up our locally grown organic vegetable goodness from the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market. I’m excited about this.
-
Ethical food | Good food? | Economist.com
Ever since we lived in England in 1996-7, we have maintained a subscription to the Economist magazine. We appreciate its international coverage and clever sense of humor. Its photo editors/photo caption writers get me laughing quite often–I still chuckle over the “Greetings, earthlings” cover of Kim Jong Il.
Anyway, I typically disagree with their political and environmental perspectives, but somehow feel more informed and not quite so knee-jerk liberal by somewhat tolerantly reading them. This week’s opinion piece on organic, local, and fair trade foods got me thinking. Ethical food | Good food? | Economist.com and Food politics | Voting with your trolley | Economist.com
They generally bashed organic farms for being more land-intensive than factory farms (demanding more habitat destruction), bashed people trying to save energy by eating locally with a finding that a great part of the petroleum/energy used in the food process is in local consumer transit, not shipping. The editorial argued that New Zealand lamb, even when counting transportation to Britain, requires less energy than British lamb (something about the agricultural practices, or maybe climate). In support of this contention, I did hear an NPR commentary about an Ann Arborite who was trying to “eat local” for Thanksgiving (no foods from more than 100 mile radius of his home), and in fact he did end up doing a lot more driving than usual (including driving to Windsor to purchase salt mined under Windsor/Detroit).
The opinion piece basically said, if buying this way makes you feel good, great, but don’t confuse “voting with dollars” with actual voting and political activism. Shoot, now I actually have to go stand with the crazies on the corner and not just hide out at the fancy grocery stores.
-
Depressing
Been dipping back into ecology recently, reading two pop-sci books: Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and E.O. Wilson’s The Future of Life. In response, I wrote a much longer post that was basically a bunch of whining about it all. Feel grateful there is a delete button.
I am looking for something more constructive to do instead of whine online. Beyond upping my check to the Nature Conservancy, I am currently thinking of volunteering for the Sierra Club Inner City Outings as a way to get out of the house and do something concrete….