Article nabbed from here in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The new law in San Francisco mandating division of waste into recyclables, trash, and compost has a lot of people in a huff.  One the one hand, if followed by citizens, the law could divert up to 90% of all waste from landfills and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.  (The city has a goal of NO WASTE by 2020).  On the other hand, Americans (even in SF) don’t like being told what to do.  I personally think it’s a great idea, but read about it to decide for yourself!

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Posted Sunday, August 9, 2009 online in Washington Post blog.  You can find the article online here. Thank you to Belinda Gordon for sending us the article!

GRANT COUNTY, N.M.

I’ve spent the past three years trying to get petroleum out of my life and live locally. Where I differ from many locavore cruncholas is in my determination to do these things without giving up digital-age comforts — you know, the ones that allow me to file this essay from a solar-powered ranch 23 miles from the nearest town.

I was plugging along, burning about 80 percent less oil than I did before overalls became my fashion mainstay, when the world financial system nearly collapsed. Now climate change exists again (officially), and there’s talk that a green-tech economy might somehow emerge from the ashes of the one torched by derivatives.

But no one’s sure. What if the Earth’s supply of oil is half gone, with the masses in India and China just now latching on to the consumption teat? What if “cap and trade” and plug-in hybrids don’t get here in time?

Suddenly the end of globalization and other apocalyptic visions of the planet’s near future, once the purview of Idaho survivalists, are prime-time stories on CNN. Mainstream suburban friends of mine who used to say that my experiment in neo-rugged-individualism was radically subversive have abruptly changed their minds. Now they just say it’s radically unfeasible. Yet everyone seems to sense that 69-cent plastic garden buckets might one day be difficult to come by.

I have a fiancee and a son to provide for, so I decided to take a hard look at our prospects for survival if our consumer safety nets went away. For now, my green lifestyle choices at my remote 41-acre outpost in the American Southwest are optional. You know, growing lettuce instead of buying Chilean. Using organic cotton diapers instead of buying Pampers. But what if one morning in, say, 2049, I wake up to milk my goats and find out that supplies are no longer streaming in from China and California? What would I do if both big-box stores and crunchy food co-ops suddenly were no more?

In other words, I’m examining my place in a hypothetical post-oil, post-consumer society 40 years in the future.

Now, I’m not rooting for such a thing. Slave labor, forest depletion, climate change and resource wars aside, globalization has a lot going for it. I love that I can e-mail a musician in Mauritania and ask to download his latest album. And anyway, lots of people think globalization is the economic model for the foreseeable future. Still, when I was covering the former Soviet Union as a journalist in the 1990s, every single person I met told me that they’d thought pigs would fly before the Politburo crumbled.

I started my year 2049 assessment by assuming that I’ll be 100 percent food-, water- and power-independent by then. An optimistic assumption, perhaps, but three years into my local-living experiment, my solar-powered fridge is filled with regional (and often home-grown) produce, and thanks to a solar-powered pump with a 30-year warranty, my water flows to a drip irrigation system that requires no electricity.

I own healthy if rambunctious goats that, despite the carnage they wreak in my rosebushes, give me more than half a gallon of milk per day, and the ranch’s chickens provide so many eggs that I can practically feel my arteries clogging from all this healthy living. When I embarked on this project, I had enough food in my home for about three days, in case of a supermarket disruption. Now I have three months’ worth. I need to do better than that, but I’m on my way.

With my growing brood fed, I wanted to analyze our prospects in other basic areas we often take for granted — clothes, for example. I quickly realized that the long-term question might not be “Where will I find fair-trade organic cotton boxer briefs?” but rather, “Where will I get any underwear at all?” In post-consumer 2049, children in Bangladesh will no longer be sewing my skivvies for me. Luckily, my sweetheart has taken up knitting. And we’re pricing alpacas.

First things first, though. I won’t even have a place to store my underwear if I don’t think about the ranch’s physical security. What if my family gets its survival cards in order — and hordes of former Wal-Mart shoppers don’t? What could we do to stop them from treating my ranch like a buffet line?

“Form a small army,” my friend Wiley recently suggested — or at least a well-armed clan. That might be a good start. I’ve kept his suggestion under my hat until now because I recognize that, to people in the civilized world, the idea of armed ranch protection conjures images of Waco compounds. But here in rural New Mexico, folks take this kind of discussion seriously.

Security, alas, is just one of my concerns about a post-oil scenario. I have to be able to maintain a life worth securing. Here again, I found myself thinking tribally, recalling my predecessors in this valley and on my very property, the Mimbrenos.

The Mimbrenos were the indigenous folks who thrived here for 1,000 or so years in numbers greater than we have today, and without Realtors. Maybe their share-the-tasks system would work in post-consumer society. Someone else could take care of, say, the equipment maintenance work I don’t know how to do. I’m talking about basic stuff — fixing broken windmill blades and fridge motors.

That brings me to my worst fears about 2049. Having been raised in the suburbs on fast food and TV (Gilligan, though a survivor, offers few useful tips), I can barely change my truck’s oil, let alone wire a solar panel. So I have to make sure that my solar electrician, a former hippie named Craig, is a high-ranking member of the tribe. You think an electrician is hard to schedule now? The best house, polygamy, whatever it takes — Craig would get it. We can write the myths however we want.

Nascent tribalism is already appearing in my obscure valley, largely because we modern Mimbrenos are so sick of driving 46 miles to and from town every time we need a carrot. In the past two years, a food co-op, a farmer’s market and a harvest festival have all started up.

Surely I’m forgetting some essential aspect of life in 2049, the way I inevitably forget at least one shopping item every time I schlep into town. Have I stockpiled enough light bulbs and seeds? What about medicine? I’m not too concerned, though. I think I have a priceless asset in my expanding herd of goats, which will make up for supply gaps. Whenever I need something I neglected to stockpile during the boom times of globalization, I’ll barter off a goat kid like someone out of “The Red Tent.” I don’t think we’ll starve.

Overall, I’m surprised to have come away from my ranch assessment feeling fairly well positioned for a post-apocalyptic 2049. Of course, the chaos that’s sure to ensue if local living morphs quickly from voluntary to mandatory makes it difficult to predict exactly what life will be like. But this assessment has shown me that the only way I can become truly independent (a word I like even better is “indigenous”) is through incremental steps based in a local economy. Yikes. I’d better start trying to get along with my less-friendly neighbors. Meanwhile, I’m investing in green tech.

From:  Environmental Building News Volume 14, Number 7 · July 2005

which can be found here.

Some kind of scary stuff- 50 million acres in North America are used up by grass??  I’ve heard that in the US 400 million acres accounts for crop land, with fruits and veggies accounting for only 4% of this, or 16 million acres.  That means that if we all grew vegetable gardens instead of grass (that sucks up our water supply and gas and needs toxic chemical fertilizers), we would increase veggie production by 300 percent.

What’s Wrong with the Conventional Lawn?

Lawns occupy roughly 50 million acres (20 million ha) in North America—an area twice the size of Pennsylvania. Annually in the U.S. we spend tens of billions of dollars caring for these lawns. In some areas we use over half of our municipal freshwater to irrigate these lawns, and we fortify them with millions of tons of fertilizer and thousands of tons of pesticides.

What’s wrong with this picture? From an environmental, health, and even economic standpoint, a lot is wrong with conventional turf. Maintenance of turf necessitates regular mowing during the growing season. The roughly 90 million lawnmowers, weed trimmers, leaf blowers, and other small-engine lawn and garden tools in the United States spew out approximately 5% of the nation’s air pollution, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)—and a good deal more in many metropolitan areas. A typical 3.5 horsepower gas mower emits about the same quantity of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in one hour as a late-model car driven 340 miles (550 km), according to the California Air Resources Board. On top of that, EPA estimates that users of such equipment spill 17 million gallons of fuel each year—which is more than the Exxon Valdez oil spill!

Watering lawns consumes 30% of municipal freshwater in the eastern U.S. and 60% in the West. A U.S. News & World Report article reported that a 1,000 square-foot (93 m2) lawn requires, on average, 10,000 gallons (37,850 liters) per summer. With droughts continuing in the West and expected to increase in severity as a result of global climate change, this is a growing concern.

To maintain lush lawns, we use a lot of fertilizer—some 70 million tons (64 million tonnes) per year in the U.S. We use more fertilizer on our lawns in the U.S. than India uses on its food crops. Nitrogen fertilizers are produced by converting molecular nitrogen (N2) in the air into ammonia through the Haber-Bosch process, which is extremely energy-intensive, requiring approximately 18,000 Btus per pound (41 GJ/tonne) of primary energy input, which comes primarily from natural gas. Worldwide, ammonia production accounts for approximately 1% of global primary energy use.

Insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and other pesticides are a growing concern with lawns. U.S. homeowners use 67 million pounds (30 million kg) of pesticides on lawns each year, according to EPA. Our suburban lawns and gardens receive heavier pesticide applications than our agricultural land: between 3.2 and 9.8 pounds per acre (3.6–11 kg/ha) vs. an average of 2.7 pounds per acre (3.0 kg/ha) for agricultural lands.

The nonprofit organization Beyond Pesticides (previously the National Coalition Against the Misuse of Pesticides) reports that of 30 commonly used lawn pesticides, 13 are probable or known carcinogens, 14 are linked with birth defects, 18 have reproductive effects, 20 may cause liver or kidney damage, 18 are considered neurotoxins, and 11 are known or suspected endocrine disrupters. A 1987 paper in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute reported that the incidence of childhood leukemia is 6 1/2 times greater among families using lawn pesticides than among those who do not, and a 2004 paper in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medicine Association found that certain dogs are four to seven times more likely to contract bladder cancer if they live in households that use lawn herbicides than if they live in households that do not—a finding considered especially significant, according to the researchers, because 70% of human bladder cancers develop from unknown causes.

Along with the resource and environmental burdens of producing fertilizers and pesticides, a significant portion of these chemicals applied to lawns ends up in stormwater runoff and in groundwater. According to EPA, 40–60% of the nitrogen applied to lawns ends up in surface water or groundwater. Stormwater runoff from turf is one of North America’s biggest sources of water pollution.

Noise pollution is another concern. Lawnmowers, weed whackers, hedge trimmers, and leaf blowers cause significant noise pollution, a very real but often overlooked health hazard.

Due to the need for all this maintenance, lawns are a huge expense. Homeowners spend roughly $27 billion per year on lawn care, according to the National Wildlife Federation (NWF)—ten times more than we spend on school textbooks. At the business level, the lawn care industry did approximately $61 billion in business in 1997 and has been experiencing roughly 20% annual growth in recent years. On a per-acre basis, maintenance costs for mowing, irrigation, and application of fertilizer and pesticides average $1,120 per year, according to the organization Wild Ones Natural Landscapers. For more on lawns and turf grass, see EBN Vol. 13, No. 4.

The Swine Flu Crisis Lays Bare the Meat Industry’s Monstrous Power

By Mike Davis, Comment Is Free. Posted April 28, 2009.

An Important article.  You can find the original at http://www.alternet.org/healthwellness/138798?page=2

As our friend steph put it, “Public Health Fail.”

Since its identification during the Great Depression, H1N1 swine flu had only drifted slightly from its original genome. Then in 1998 a highly pathogenic strain began to decimate sows on a farm in North Carolina and new, more virulent versions began to appear almost yearly, including a variant of H1N1 that contained the internal genes of H3N2 (the other type-A flu circulating among humans).

Researchers interviewed by Science worried that one of these hybrids might become a human flu (both the 1957 and 1968 pandemics are believed to have originated from the mixing of bird and human viruses inside pigs), and urged the creation of an official surveillance system for swine flu: an admonition, of course, that went unheeded in a Washington prepared to throw away billions on bioterrorism fantasies.

But what caused this acceleration of swine flu evolution? Virologists have long believed that the intensive agricultural system of southern China is the principal engine of influenza mutation: both seasonal “drift” and episodic genomic “shift.” But the corporate industrialisation of livestock production has broken China’s natural monopoly on influenza evolution. Animal husbandry in recent decades has been transformed into something that more closely resembles the petrochemical industry than the happy family farm depicted in school readers.

In 1965, for instance, there were 53m US hogs on more than 1m farms; today, 65m hogs are concentrated in 65,000 facilities. This has been a transition from old-fashioned pig pens to vast excremental hells, containing tens of thousands of animals with weakened immune systems suffocating in heat and manure while exchanging pathogens at blinding velocity with their fellow inmates.

Last year a commission convened by the Pew Research Center issued a report on “industrial farm animal production” that underscored the acute danger that “the continual cycling of viruses … in large herds or flocks [will] increase opportunities for the generation of novel virus through mutation or recombinant events that could result in more efficient human to human transmission.” The commission also warned that promiscuous antibiotic use in hog factories (cheaper than humane environments) was sponsoring the rise of resistant staph infections, while sewage spills were producing outbreaks of E coli and pfiesteria (the protozoan that has killed 1bn fish in Carolina estuaries and made ill dozens of fishermen).

Any amelioration of this new pathogen ecology would have to confront the monstrous power of livestock conglomerates such as Smithfield Farms (pork and beef) and Tyson (chickens). The commission reported systemic obstruction of their investigation by corporations, including blatant threats to withhold funding from cooperative researchers .

This is a highly globalised industry with global political clout. Just as Bangkok-based chicken giant Charoen Pokphand was able to suppress enquiries into its role in the spread of bird flu in southeast Asia, so it is likely that the forensic epidemiology of the swine flu outbreak will pound its head against the corporate stonewall of the pork industry.

This is not to say that a smoking gun will never be found: there is already gossip in the Mexican press about an influenza epicentre around a huge Smithfield subsidiary in Veracruz state. But what matters more (especially given the continued threat of H5N1) is the larger configuration: the WHO’s failed pandemic strategy, the further decline of world public health, the stranglehold of big pharma over lifeline medicines, and the planetary catastrophe of industrialised and ecologically unhinged livestock production.