VICTORY LAWNS?
What happens when oil really gets expensive, and 3,000-mile strawberries become $30 strawberries? Welcome to Plan B invites Jan Lundberg, one of the most prolific, commonsensical “solutions” writers in the USA Today. Created in 1969 and defended by local residents, Berkeley's People's Park has become a model for U.S. cities. On the 4th of July, Lundberg planted corn and beans there, while marveling at “the healthy state of fruit trees, berry bushes, vegetables, and herbs.”

Driveways and parking lots are easy to remove, he notes. And “Rooftop gardens are advisable if water is available.” [Culture Change Letter #104 July 8/05]

Heather Coburn picks up this theme in her book, Food Not Lawns. “More than 58 million Americans spend at least $30 billion every year to maintain over 23 million acres of lawn. That's an average of over a third of an acre and $517 each,” she reveals. “The same size plot of land could still have a small lawn for recreation, plus produce all of the vegetables needed to feed a family of six. The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week -enough to water 81 million acres of organic vegetables, all summer long.”

For apartment dwellers, “An amazing amount of produce can be grown in containers or window boxes, especially greens like lettuce,” the Sierra Club's “Mr. Green” Bob Schildgen suggests. To promote peaceful “perpetual salads” instead of perpetual war just snip some leaves and let the plant grow back. [Sierra Nov-Dec/06]

In terms of labor, fuel, and poisons, lawns are bigger than industrial agricultural sector in the United States. American lawns use 10-times as much toxic chemicals per acre as industrial farmland, poisoning playing children and downstream groundwater, and making them tricky to convert for veggie growing unless allowed to lie fallow for a few years. In the meantime, if pesticides are a problem, make some “raised bed” sandboxes filled with clean soil.

Now is a good time to park the power mower, which excretes the same pollutants in an hour as a car driven 350 miles.

“Let's turn our cities into gardens,” suggests Nick Routeledge in the Whiteaker Community Newsletter. “Right now is the time. We are the ones we've been waiting for.”

An English vegetable garden can produce 8 tons an acre! During World War II, 40% of Britain's food and vegetables were derived from some 300,000 acres of home vegetable gardens and community plots. The return of urban households to vegetable gardening in cities like Vancouver, British Columbia is one of the biggest, quietest and most transformative revolutions currently underway.

"The suburban family farmer is the savior of the world," Bill Mollison believes. Anyone can join! While returning some 14,500 pesticide-soaked golf courses in the United States to safe food production, many of the nation's 700,000 athletic grounds could be used in part or completely to grow food. [Front Porch News May/00]

“If we truly feel committed to treating the earth and each other with equality and respect, the first place to show it is by how we treat the land we live on. It is time to grow food, not lawns!” Deborah Coburn urges. “The reasons include reducing pollution, improving the quality of your diet, increasing local food security, and beautifying your surroundings, as well as building community and improving your mental and physical health. You will save money and enhance your connection with the earth and with your family.”

What about introducing school playground gardens to kids? “If we can change our land-use philosophy from one of ownership and control to one of sharing and cooperation, we can renew our connection with the Earth and each other, and thus benefit through increased physical and mental health, an improved natural environment, and stronger local communities,” Coburn extols. In other words: “Use Permaculture to make peace real.” [Front Porch News May/00; Food Not Lawns; Discover Magazine July/03; Global Warming Crisis Council in Aug/03]

TOPSY TURVY
Above all, we must protect topsoil. “The planet is getting skinned,” reports Tom Paulson from Seattle. “Disappearing dirt rivals global warming as an environmental threat.”

"It's just crazy," fumes fifth-generation farmer, John Aeschliman. "We're tearing up the soil and watching tons of it wash away every year." Aeschliman is among a growing number of American farmers trying to persuade others to adopt "no-till" methods, which involve not tilling the land between plantings, and instead leaving crop stubble to reduce erosion and planting new seeds between the stubble rows.

No-till farming can greatly reduce topsoil erosion agrees Washington State University soils scientist John Reganold. Organic farming methods, he adds, also reduce soil loss

Another way to lose soil is to pave it over. Since the 1960s, Washington state's King County's has cemented 60% of its farmland for cars and trucks - which now need to consume corn, too! In 1979, a farmland preservation program that can be replicated in any community convinced voters to approve a bond issue that buys back farmland to protect it from development. More than 13,200 acres have been saved from paving so far. [Seattle Post-Intelligencer Jan 22/08]

Since less than 1 degree increase in global temperatures has brought crop-killing winds, floods, ice storms and nine years of topsoil-removing drought in countries like Australia, we had best get moving right away on individual, family, neighborhood, regional and national activates to transform what could become a time of terror into a Cuba-and-Berkeley style time of healthy, innovative, cooperatively fun and otherwise advantageous opportunities.

In joining the worldwide community convergence toward simultaneous, like-minded action, here is one possible 15-point plan outlining what you can start doing wherever you are, right now:


1. Treat water like the life-giving liquid it is. “U.S. households are water hogs. On average, each man, woman, and child uses an average of 100 gallons of tap water per day,” writes Janet Raloff. No other people on the planet waste the water of life on such a thoughtless scale. Where does it go? Roughly one-quarter is flushed down the toilet, Raloff riffs. “Nearly as much goes for bathing, clothes washing uses 8 gallons per person daily, and garbage disposals and automatic dishwaters send another 4.1 gallons down the drain. Lawn watering and swimming pools consume roughly 25 gallons per day on average, and car washing another 2.5 gallons.”

Wisconsin water manager Lynita Docken says if we don't shape up, we're heading for homes with only one faucet dispensing drinking water. A second line will draw groundwater from a well “that might have dangerously high arsenic concentrations” for toilets, basement washers and “maybe bathtubs and showers” that will also bathe occupants in volatile toxic compounds. [Science News Nov 17/01]

2. Cut your fossil-fuel burning by 30% immediately. And another 30% as quickly as possible. If the methane trapped in tundra and the ocean seafloor thaws and massively enters the atmosphere, we are toast. "As a global society, we need to get down to a level of 90% reductions by 2050," says Canadian climate scientist and chief editor of the Journal of Climate, Andrew Weaver. This means starting immediately to cut back on burning carbon in all its forms (including wood fires, slash burning, coal and gasoline-ethanol mixes) - and start tapping into super-abundant solar energy in its most direct, cleanest forms.

Think it can't be done? Germany has lowered its emissions by 9% since 1991, and has convinced the EU to make 40% reductions by 2020. After Britain cutting emissions by 8% since 1990, the UK aims to reduce them 60% by 2050 - and is urging the rest of the European Union to do the same. Meanwhile, with wind power growing at 31% a year, more than 600 cities worldwide have developed their own plans to reduce carbon emissions. [Washington Post Dec 28/07; Christian Science Monitor May 22/07]

3. Do whatever else it takes to keep the grandfathers standing. Post-Bali talks are looking to find a global strategy mobilizing all rain-forest governments to preserve their forests through cash credits. [AP Feb 2/08]


4. Restore seed diversity. Since the hilltop survivors of worldwide flooding following rapidly melting glaciers started planting and saving seeds 12,000 years ago, thousands of varieties of rice have been cultivated in China; over 5,000 kinds of potatoes and 7,000 varieties of apples took root in the Americas. Today, 97% of this precious U.S. seed diversity has been lost to corporate monocrops extremely vulnerable to pests and climate shift. We can start reversing this trend by saving the seeds that work best in your own soil and watering practices.


5. Improve farm practices. "Most rice farmers in Asia broadcast urea directly into the floodwater. But only one bag in three is used by the plants. The rest is lost to the air and water," observes IFDC President and Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Amit Roy. The IFDC is already working with farmers in developing countries to improve the efficiency of fertilizer use. See also topsoil protection through organic farming and “no till” farming (above). [mongabay.com Feb 20/08]


6. Dismantle biotech giants like Monsanto, whose insane drive to patent all seeds and control the world's entire food production threatens a mass human die-off. In 2003, alone among more cautious nations, U.S. farmers planted 100,000,000 acres with GMO corn and soybeans known to cause cancerous tumors in laboratory animals. Spread by the wind, insects and other animals, these cellularly-compromised crops are spreading to nearly every corn and soybean field in America - even as Monsanto pushes to contaminate the country's wheat with unnatural “Frankenseeds”. When Ireland's single-variety potato crop was killed by a blight, much of the population died of starvation. Ask U.S. farmers what happened when a corn blight threatened to wipe out their entire monoculture corn crop in 1978. Answer: Mexican farmers husbanding hundreds of corn varieties sent some blight-resistant corn that saved the U.S. crop.

7. Join food buyers everywhere who are protecting the land and their children's future by switching from poisoned to “organic” foods. If you are paying $50 a month for cable TV, another high ransom for your cell-frying cell phone, and hundreds of dollars more for junk food, alcohol and drugs the “higher cost” for organics is just an excuse. Eat less, eat better, insist on organic. Consumer demand is already bringing prices down.


8. Demand government incentives for people to return to the land! As Goldsmith predicted at the Global Climate Change conference, “A deindustrialised world in which people live in small towns and villages, and produce locally much of their own food and artifacts, would be largely unaffected by the oil shortage that faced us today.”

9. Stop eating cows, and do not eat chickens laced with antibiotics and stuffed 25,000 at a time into a football field-size warehouses chocked with arsenic, ammonia, and other chemicals found in feed and manure. Americans consume 185 pounds of water and feed-intensive beef, pork, and poultry per person every year. People who rarely exert themselves and eat mostly Western foods - including sweets, French fries, refined grains such as white bread, and red and processed meats - are much more likely to develop diabetes than people who eat minimal amounts of these foods. Vegetable oils found in leafy green vegetables, nuts and flaxseed significantly reduce the inconvenience of dying from heart disease. [Sierra Nov-Dec/06; Internal Medicine Nov 8/04; birdskorea.org; newstarget.com; Grist/AlterNet Feb 23/06]

10. “Support local growers who treat their land well, and whose products travel short distances to market.” Farmers and eaters can also stop wasting so much food! Half the food grown in the USA, and one-third of UK crops are thrown out. During a decade spent measuring food loss, a U. of Arizona anthropologist found U.S. farmers discarding perfectly edible but less-than-cosmetically optimal harvests. “Half the time this has to do with market issues,” Dr. Jones reports. “If profit is not enough, the crop will be turned under.” Ditto the practice of throwing out “leftovers” from typically huge American meals. If you can't finish your meal - eat less. You'll live longer, leave more for others in the lifeboat to eat, and keep more money in your jeans. [Agribusiness Examiner June 20/05; Independent Feb 5/08]

11. Cook your own meals! This lost art can become a meditation that reconnects us to the farmer and the land. Preparing meals nourishes our own spirits, as well as the people we feed. As processed, long-distance transported food prices helpfully retreat out of affordable reach, preparing our own meals from locally obtained produce and poultry will also save about $4 per pound over instant, nutritionless “food”.

12. Simplify, simplify, simplify. Voluntary Simplicity means reducing consumption, reducing and reusing waste, and trading distracting, debt-enslaving fripperies for the direct pleasure of living fully in each moment. If you don't like your moments - change them. Become a bioregional person. Eat local, buy local, work local, locally distribute surplus food and farm supplies, urges Deborah Coburn. “Set a limit for yourself as to how far you want your resources to come from. Pay careful attention to the embedded energy in your food and supplies, and try to embrace a bioregional ethic. Land Stewardship means placing the needs of the land and non-human species ahead of human needs. Though this can be quite a challenge for our anthropocentric culture… when we care for the Earth she will care for us.”

13. Share knowledge and expertise. Community education promotes “exponential learning,” Coburn continues. “I teach you something, you teach ten people, they each teach ten people, and within a few generations, we have a global culture based on ecological ethics and mutual aid.” How cool - and child friendly - is that?


14. Recycle everything all the time. “While we're no longer flinging bottles and cans around like cavemen tossing bones, recycling still lags,” Schildgen says. “Recycling is just as important with food scraps. Composting could drastically reduce the almost 500 pounds per household per year of organic matter hauled to dumps, while creating fertile soil for your vegetable garden.”

"Paper or plastic?" Neither! Even before your store follows other countries in no longer offering “disposable” paper, or plastic bags that are mass murdering sea life and forming a grotesque plastic island that stretches from about 500 nautical miles off California, across the Pacific almost as far as Japan - start saving trees, oil and critters with your own cloth bag. Why not be consistent by also leaving your vehicle parked and making human-powered shopping trips part of your fitness program, Schildgen suggests? Help stop the “grain drain” by refusing corn and soybean ethanol that pollute far more in their growing and manufacture than burning straight gasoline. Insist on European-style labeling of all GMO foods - and boycott them as if your life depends on it. Because it does.


15. Speaking of labeling, on the back of his oatmeal box “where it now tells me how many calories I get from each serving,” reflective eater Chad Heeter wants to see a chart that “tells me how many calories of fossil fuels went into this product. On a scale from one to five - with one being non-processed, locally-grown products and five being processed, packaged imports - we could quickly average the numbers in our shopping cart to get a sense of the ecological footprint of our diet. From this we would gain a truer sense of the miles-per-gallon in our food. [TomDispatch.com Mar 24/06]

GREEN RIGHTS FINDS GLOBAL COMMON GROUND
Spurred by a worldwide outcry and massive, countrywide protests, Beijing's National Climate Change Program is now implementing an eight-point action plan to reduce carbon emissions by about one-fifth of current record levels in just three years through diversifying energy sources and improving fuel efficiency. China's declared aim is to cut its carbon emission per unit of GDP by 40% in 2010 and 80% in 2050.

Built on Chongming Island near Shanghai, the “New City” of Dongtan will go even further, generating zero carbon emissions by cutting energy demands by two-thirds and using wind turbines, biofuels and recycled organic material to generate the rest. Most of Dongtan's waste will be reprocessed for irrigation and composting. Urban designer Braulio Morera says, “We want to reinterpret a Chinese city - and Chinese urban lifestyle - for the 21st century."

In dust-plagued inner Mongolia, the greening of the desert is simultaneously seeing a low-cost $8 million joint China-South Korean venture growing a “Green Great Wall” as a “bioshield” against the raging yellow dust storms currently sweeping across the United States and Northern Hemisphere. [truthout June 21/07]

“We can save our cities, revive the economy, and green the planet - all at the same time, agrees an enthusiastic Leyla Kokmen in Utne Reader.

Green rights, green justice, and green equality are “the new civil rights of the 21st century," proclaims environmental justice activist Majora Carter.

“Green rights spans public health, community development, and economic growth to make sure that the green revolution isn't just for those who can afford a Prius,” Kokmen reports. “It means cleaning up blighted communities like the South Bronx to prevent potential health problems and to provide amenities like parks to play in, clean trails to walk on, and fresh air to breathe. It also means building green industries into the local mix, to provide healthy jobs for residents in desperate need of a livable wage.”

"We can fight pollution and poverty at the same time and with the same solutions and methods," agrees the Ella Baker Center's Van Jones. The center's Green-Collar Jobs Campaign is using $250,000 from the city of Oakland to give disadvantaged people ages 18 to 35 paid internships for training in such “new energy” skills as installing solar panels, and maintaining wind farms and making buildings more energy efficient. Passed in December 2007, the Green Jobs Act authorizes $125 million annually for similar "green-collar" job training to bring 30,000 people a year into similar key “green” trades. After successes with “Sustainable South Bronx” - including 10-weeks hands-on training for NYC residents in brownfield remediation and ecological restoration - the organization has also raised $30 million to construct “a bicycle and pedestrian greenway along the South Bronx waterfront that will provide both open space and economic development opportunities,” Kokmen describes.

Sustainable South Bronx facilitator Majora Carter “stresses that framing the environmental debate in terms of opportunities will engage the people who need the most help.” [Utne Reader March-April/08]

So let's get busy and have some fun starting work on local electric bicycles or gardens now. Your own future begins as soon as you act. You won't want to miss out!

“SÍ, SE PUEDE”
In a heartening demonstration of how artificial bubbles like Canada and the United States could be returned to reality by the converging impetus of unaffordable oil, tight money, and rapid climate shift, Cuba's real revolution has come from farming the urban landscape.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s following severe misallocations of talent and treasure into weaponry, foreign wars and ill-fated attempts at centralized control, Cubans faced the overnight loss of half the country's oil, fertilizers and pesticides - and much of their food. More than 80% of their imports and exports vanished. Transportation stopped. Blackouts shut down the country's oil-powered electric power grid up to 16 hours every day.

“Try to image an airplane suddenly losing its engines. It was really a crash,” remembered Cuban economist, Jorge Mario. The international development and relief agency, Oxfam reported on the wreckage: “In the cities, buses stopped running, generators stopped producing electricity, factories became silent as graveyards.

Unable to fuel their aging cars, Cubans walked, biked, rode in donkey-drawn carts, motorized two-seat rickshaws, and big semi-trailer trucks called “camels” holding 300 passengers each. Or they caught rides in nearly empty government vehicles with available seats flagged over by yellow-garbed government officials, and carpooled - four people riding in front, four in back.

“Obtaining enough food for the day became the primary activity for many, if not most, Cubans,” Mario added. The average Cuban lost 30 pounds as families and neighborhood organizations identified idle land, cleaned it up, and started planting. “People had to start cultivating vegetables wherever they could,” a tour guide told a documentary crew filming in 2004 to record how Cubans survived, then prospered on half their oil imports.

Hand tools and human grit replaced petroleum-powered machinery. Worms and compost created productive soil, while drip irrigation conserved water. The government supported Foundation for Nature and Humanity showed neighborhoods “the possibilities of what they can do on their rooftops and their patios,” recounted Carmen López. Standing amidst grape vines, potted plants, and compost bins fashioned from tires on the center's rooftop, the urban Permaculture director described how hundreds of urban gardeners have been trained, and entire communities transformed.

“Things are changing. It's a local economy,” engineer-turned-farmer Nelson Aguila told the filmmakers. At neighborhood agriculture cooperatives like the Organipónico de Alamar, an urban farm, produce market and restaurant complete the cycle of locally grown and distributed produce.

This quiet revolution continues today, with city dwellers enthusiastically growing their own rainbows of brightly colored produce from raised garden beds in parking lots, patios and rooftops. By 2006, 60% the vegetables eaten by more than 2.5 million residents in the Caribbean's biggest city were grown by themselves inside Havana. In other Cuban towns and cities, urban gardens produced from 80% to more than 100% of their needs.

ABUNDANCE FROM SCARCITY
“Most of the food is grown where it is eaten - inside cities,” observes Walter Schwarz. Visiting Havana, the co-author with Dorothy Schwarz of Living Lightly, Schwarz found veggie stalls everywhere inside the city, where “chemical fertilizers and most pesticides are forbidden.”

“Food grows in unlikely spaces between houses,” he wrote, in huerto private urban gardens ranging from a few square meters to more than six acres. Enjoying “elaborate official support,” over one-million huertos are registered in Cuba. The Playa borough's community garden “boasts a hectare abundant with parsley, lettuce, spinach and tomatoes,” Schwarz found.

"The secret is in the high productivity of small urban units," Nelso Compagnioni of the Institute for Tropical Agriculture told Schwarz. "Every dollar of produce on a small plot costs 25 cents to produce. As soon as you increase the area you get higher costs - more workers, lower yields, more complex irrigation. And we have no need for transport: customers collect their food on the way home from work."

Before the “Special Period” of slashed oil imports, organic growing was not part of the Cuban culture. It is now. Growing organic makes financial, as well as environmental and health sense, Vilda Figueroa has found. "Organic growing is more economic because you get higher yields with lower costs. "

“With meat scarce and fresh local vegetables in abundance since 1995, Cubans now eat a healthy, low-fat, nearly vegetarian diet. They also have a healthier outdoor lifestyle and walking and bicycling have become much more common,” Schwarz reported. “Before, Cubans didn't eat that many vegetables. Rice and beans and pork meat was the basic diet,” Sanchez chimed in. “At some point necessity taught them, and now they demand [vegetables].”

With most Cubans earning about $3,000 per year, money is not the primary medium of exchange in a cooperative society, where free medical treatment provides a doctor for every 167 persons, free education provides one teacher for every 42 persons, and what Walter Schawrz found to be “the resourcefulness, determination, and optimism of the Cuban people” was often voiced in the phrase “Sí, se puede” - “Yes it can be done.”


POWER TO THE PEOPLE
“People in developing countries make up 82% of the world's population and live more on life's edge,” Schwarz adds. But overdeveloped countries “are also vulnerable to shortages in energy. And with the coming onset of peak oil, all countries will have to adapt to the reality of a lower energy world.”

Cuba has moved quickly during its severe oil crisis to develop mass transit and small-scale renewable energy: 200-watt solar photovoltaic systems were quickly installed to power households, as well as 2,364 primary schools and medical clinics. Compact solar water heaters, solar-powered water pumps and solar food dryers are also popular. [GNN; sisyphus.gnn.tv Feb 26/06; World Sustainable Agriculture Association Newsletter Fall/96; Resurgence issue 212]

TRANSFORMATION TIME
If only a miracle can save us from our own lessons now, the good news is so many good people everywhere have gotten the lesson! The moment we choose to turn our passivity into participation, each one of us becomes that miracle.

Seven billion miracles should do the transformative trick! Acting on life-affirming desires shared by families worldwide - and powered by the bracing inspiration of severe oil shortages, dramatic climatic flip, and economic cave-ins - we are going to arrive where we're going. So why not change course for a better world now?

Reconnecting with the land under our feet, and with each other can also bring us back to solidarity with the global village - and end an artificially controlling climate of fear. If we are really the government, as unelected pretenders keep telling us, it's time we insist on sending medicine, food and blankets overseas - not bombs.

People just want to be heard. The fastest way to shut down scared, desperate and angry suicide bombers is to listen to them and acknowledging their grievances. In conversation with a supposed “terrorist leader” during an armed siege, and in my travels among peoples around the globe, I have found that even among initially suspicious and even hostile “enemies” in time of war - a smile, and good will demonstrated by empathy and a willingness to listen even to those with whom I disagree are universally accepted gestures that invariably lead to broad smiles and... “Thank you, sir. Thank you, sir.”

More good news for Earth fans everywhere: After studying its most dire predictions, the UN concludes that the worst effects of climate change can still be avoided with straightforward measures using existing technologies and the exercise of personal responsibility at a potential cost of 1/10 of 1% to GDP if governments take action now. But global economic growth is predicted to grow substantially under this new entrepreneurial flowering.

SO YOU WANT TO START A HIP-POCKET GARDEN?

[ bbc.co.uk ]

SURGE PROTECTOR

Part 2 of A Crisis Of Convergence
by
William Thomas

willthomasonline.net