———————– ** Fresh Green Beans ** ———————– Grown in Kansas. Eaten Worldwide.

I spoke with KU professor, ethnobotanist, and Medicinal Wild Plants of the Prairie author, Kelly Kindscher about the sustainability of Echinacea.

Echinacea is a species native to Kansas that is used as a general cure all and as protection against the common cold. In the United States, herbal medicine has gone by the wayside and today the main importer of Echinacea is Europe. The demand has leveled off, but there are still people harvesting the species.

The plant was heavily harvested during the herbal products boom of the late nineties. Harvesters were using shovels and pick axes to dig up roots and capitalize on the rush. Kelly’s work focuses on the harvesting techniques associated with Echinacea. He’s found that Echinacea is a very resilient species and will re-sprout even after a great amount of harvest.

Kelly believes the preservation and respect for native prairie habitat is the primary means for maintaining the species. Kelly’’s work stresses the resilience of nature. Even after heavy harvest, Echinacea stands strong.

Listen to podcast.

-Bobby Grace

This two part Webisode series illustrates the current debate about how to manage a growing Grizzly Bear population in the Norther Rocky Mountains.

-Adam Bowman

For Mario, it is flower power.  For us it is consumer power.  We have been talking about “green washing” and social responsibilities of companies.

I found this article and thought of you all.

Have a good weekend,

Adam

There is an old saying, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

photo courtesy of astro.uva.nl

However, after a semester researching and analyzing environmental media content, I have come to think that environmental problems are in fact new. The earth has seen environmental transitions and changes before, but never has the cause of those problems had the intelligence and technology to stop and possibly reverse it’s impact.

Human beings have had to make difficult decisions before, such as whether to go to war or how to feed ourselves. But the environment brings a level of complexity in the decision making process that we haven’t had to deal with before

Because these problems are new, we have a difficult time figuring out solutions. This makes communicating about the issues equally daunting. As our blog illustrates, we all have different ideas about how to fix the problems, and how to communicate about the problems. In traditional media, the issues are discussed, like most things, as polarizing opposites in conflict. The benefit of new media sources is that there is opportunity to discuss the issues as people problems, rather than political problems.

The one constant in all of this is that the environment isn’t a Democratic issue. It isn’t a Republican issue. It isn’t a rich issue. And it isn’t a poor issue. It is a people issue. The brilliant thing about people is that we are all different. And the frustrating thing about people is that we are all different. Because of that, there is no one answer for how to reach everybody to inform and educate them about sustainability.

What has come through all of this, for me, is that you have to talk to people where they are. What is important to them. And show them how by being sustainable, they are really making everything that is important to them better. Basically, you have to talk to them on a personal level.

So even though the problems are more complex than anything under the sun, the way to communicate about them is as old as dirt.

photo courtesy of pioneerasphaltinc.com

-Adam

Recently a new book has come out about how cartoons have helped in education of conservation.

And not just any cartoons, but big box office cartoons like; Bambi, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Finding Nemo, The Jungle Book, and… wait a second, those are all Disney movies.

But Disney is a giant corporation. Shouldn’t they be making movies about a cute little oil monster who saves the family car?

Just the opposite is true. As Adam Werbach pointed out in his “The birth of blue” speech, not all company CEOs are only consumed with profits. Many are people just like us who care about things.

The proof is in what amazing things corporations have done without their green PR reps there to point it out to the world.

For example, Disney animation. Who could reach generations of youngsters like Disney? Yet as the author points out, they are providing a positive sustainable message.

“Disney films have often been criticised as inauthentic and pandering to popular taste rather than developing the animation medium in a more thought-provoking way.

“In fact, these films have taught us variously about having a fundamental respect for nature. Some of them, such as Bambi, inspired conservation awareness and laid the emotional groundwork for environmental activism.

“For decades Disney films have been providing children with potent fantasies, enabling them to explore how they relate to the natural world.”

Has the EPA done that? Or the Sierra Club? Perhaps, but not nearly to that scale.

Then there is the story Werbach told about McDonald’s putting pressure on soy bean farmers.

It came about through a European consumer campaign led by Greenpeace to put pressure on McDonald’s to stop buying chickens for Chicken McNuggets that were produced with soy from the Amazon. McDonald’s investigated and then put pressure on its soy producers. The soy moratorium has protected millions of acres so far.

So don’t knock the corporate sustainable initiatives, as many of us were brought up and influenced to be environmentally conscious by a piece of contrived corporate pop-culture.

-Adam

Much of my insight into the world is through beer.

And surprisingly, not always through consumption.

As I was looking through the photo essay of food consumption around the world, (sober) I recognized them from an article I read in Time Magazine last summer. Of course I couldn’t remember the specifics of the article, just that I had read it. So I read it again.

The article focused on the loss of the national identity of food.

For thousands of years, humans were chiefly agrarian, which meant that you ate only what you could grow or slaughter yourself or trade for locally. Geography was culinary destiny.

That last sentence struck a an alcohol related chord in my head. For the last 20 years there has been a reinvention of beer. In this country, what once was limited to the American light adjunct lager and it’s “less filling” counterpart, beer has transformed into a regional culinary treat. This is all thanks to the craft or micro brew boom.

Photo Courtesy of USA Today

Now you can go to any part of the country and find a relatively local glass of suds. Each one is a unique beer experience. But this didn’t just happen. It started with the legalizing of home brewing by Jimmy Carter. (Thanks Jimmy) Then it took beer connoisseurs and advocates to move away from the Budweisers and Millers of the world. Companies like Sierra Nevada, Anchor Steam, and Bert Grant’s Yakima Brewing Company pioneered the way for other brewers around the country to provide regional taste sensations.

The same is just beginning with food. As we have discussed on this blog, locally produced food is getting a lot of attention and is a growing market. Can it continue to become a share of the American pie?

The other lesson from the evolution of liquid bread is the business of it. Before there was refrigeration and modern brewing technology, more people brewed on their own. You will still find a fair amount of enthusiasts, but not nearly the scale that home brewing once was. Now local brewed beer is big business. Like all technologies it allows us to specialize in our own fields and jobs, but still have the luxury of locally brewed beer. Most of us don’t have time to brew our own.

In Bryan Walsh’s Time article, he points out that a lot of the loss of regional food identity is from our modern busy lives.

She looks happy, even serene as she works, but when asked whether she has passed these skills on to her daughter, she sighs. “Of course not,” Shinobu says. “She’s far too busy for this.”

It is neither good or bad that we are loosing some of the domestic skills our parents possessed. Just an evolution of society.

Change is happening in food, albeit slowly. Along with stores, restaurants are offering locally inspired fare. This means regional flavors still have a chance. The meat from farms around Lawrence Kansas should taste different that meat from California. Just like Free State Brewing Company in Lawrence Kansas tastes different from Stone Brewing Company in San Diego. (To the discerning palate anyway) We need to keep a weathered eye on the impacts of the transformation and make eating decisions that are sustainable.

Along with all the positive environmental impacts of eating locally, we should see a revitalization of cultural cuisine.

This should be celebrated, preferably with a toast, as it allows us to have our beer and drink it too.

Photo Courtesy of Whatsontap at Flickr

-Adam

This post was originally published with an article by our very own Ranjit at Red, Green, and Blue. Check it out.

In Holcomb, Kansas, there rages a battle over energy, jobs, and economy.

The Sunflower Electric Company has a plan to build two coal-fired power plants that would produce 1400 megawatts of power. And until the Secretary of the Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE),Roderick L. Bremby, denied the application for an air quality permit, they probably would be breaking ground right now.

People in the more populated Eastern part of Kansas, (which is pretty much all powered by coal), want to abandon the coal for sustainable wind energy. For Kansas, wind makes a lot of sense. Wind maps show that we are sitting in a very productive wind energy area. Basically any state in the Great Plains has an abundance of wind at their disposal. And the good news is, there isn’t any waste emissions or land ruining strip mining to harvest this energy.

But what about Eastern and Western States that aren’t sitting on a wind gold mine?

Kenneth Defeyes writes in his book, Beyond Oil, that coal, “is the best of fuels; it is the worst of fuels.”

Coal is cheap. (Not including the environmental costs.) And more importantly, we have the largest reserve in the world. Which means that we aren’t in conflict with foreign countries for our energy. We can dictate the costs.

Coal is the dirtiest of dirty energies. From excavation to consumption, it pollutes. There have been many advances in reducing the amount of mercury and sulfur dioxide emitted by coal plants. But they still contribute to the majority of green house gas emissions in the world. In 2004, 10 billion tons of CO2 were emitted into the atmosphere through the burning of coal. Wouldn’t it be great if we could get rid of the best of fuels worst byproducts?

There has been a buzzword in fossil fuels lately, clean coal.

At the National Governor’s Association annual winter meeting, energy was at the heart of the event. Governors from coal-rich states say it is irresponsible not to have coal in the energy debate. They put a lot of stock in new technologies to curb the emissions from coal. There is a lot of skepticism however, from Governors of renewable energy rich states, and environmentalists.

One clean coal technology already in use is coal gasification. It basically boils the coal into gaseous elements. These can then easily be separated and used for other purposes. Unfortunately there aren’t a lot of uses for CO2. However, Basin Electric in North Dakota has found a buyer for their waste.

PanCanadian Petroleum is pumping the gas into porous rock about a mile underground. This forces oil out of the rock. Pumping CO2 into the ground is called carbon dioxide sequestering. Essentially, in this case, it takes a fossil fuel, uses its energy, and then puts back into the ground the useless parts for more fossil fuels. It also extends the life of the oil well.

And if we are ever fortunate enough to wean our selves off of oil, it is estimated that there is enough porous rock not containing oil underground to sequester every bit of CO2 emissions for centuries.

Another new discovery is using re-engineered simple organisms to feed on CO2 and emit methane that can then be used for fuel. Scientists expect this technology to be up and working in about 18 months. However, this may cause more problems than it solves. There is little known about the side effects of genetic engineering. The point is that people are working on the problem because coal may need to be in our future.

In the larger picture of energy, there is no one answer, or even two answers. Wind is a fantastic option, but it won’t work for everywhere. Reducing energy consumption is part of the solution, but in a consumer society, it is a hard sell. Nuclear is potentially catastrophic, plus there isn’t a useful thing to do with the waste. Solar is expensive and not as efficient as we need it to be yet. Coal is cheap, it’s here, and we control it. With new technologies, we may be able to truly clean coal consumption.

The exciting thing is that all these options come with a ton of jobs, and economic growth. So at least that part of the puzzle can be answered. It just comes down to: what do we want to invest in for the future, and what do we have to invest in for the present?

-Adam

photo courtesy of treehugger

There has been a number of posts on our blog suggesting that the answer to the environmental impact is eating local and vegetarianism.

I don’t buy it. The solution is getting rid of corporate farming in favor of sustainable farming techniques.

Let’s deal with vegecrazyism (like the guy above) first. Vegetarians argue that it takes more land to grow meat. Land that could grow far more vegetables and grains for human consumption. Yet, we already grow enough food to feed everybody on the planet. The problems with hunger are more economic and political reasons rather than food shortages. Vegetables (with the exception of avocados) and grains are already at bargain prices. If there is a flood in the market because all agricultural land is converted to crops for human consumption, prices would drop. This would cause an economic drought on the family farms we have left and their already tiny incomes would dry up and blow away.

An argument brought up in the poorly researched Vegetarianism is the New Prius (all of her sources were from practically the same place) says that meat production also degrades biodiversity. What? That doesn’t make any sense. If you are growing vegetables for human consumption, you cant grow native species grasses. Cows can feed on native species grasses. By keeping the native grasses, all the other critters that are part of that ecosystem remain in the ecosystem. How would growing vegetables maintain biodiversity?

Some vegetarians argue that people would be healthier with an all veggie diet. There is no conclusive evidence of this. Doctors have found evidence for and against vegetarianism. (If you’ll notice in the two linked articles, the pro-meat argument is far more researched than the pro veg one.) Then there is the argument that human beings didn’t evolve eating meat. Poppycock. What do you think all the animal bones in prehistoric caves were from, a Neanderthal veterinarian clinic?

Further, a discussion that doesn’t seem to take place when talking about the environmental impact of beef, is all the other products we get from cattle. It’s not just food people. So rather than waste all that tasty meat, why not eat it.

Then there is the local movement. Buying local seems like a no brainer when it comes to fighting our eco footprint. But there are some problems in the local food movement.

Not all farmers live near municipalities large enough to sustain their farms. And not all municipalities are located near enough farms to feed their entire population locally. There definitely seems to be agreement that family farms are a good thing. So how do you keep family farms from dying if they are looked down upon for not living closer to a city?

If small farmers are only operating on a local level, there are some economic hurdles to overcome. Local burger is a fantastic restaurant, but their prices are not for the average college student. Or for the average small town family. If a farmer is trying to sell his local goods to a tiny town, chances are they are not able to pay the prices that the farmer needs to remain economically sustainable. By having a world wide market for agriculture, there is a set price for certain goods. This ensures that farmers get paid roughly the same.

I just called my Uncle Larry to get his thoughts n this idea. He is a wheat farmer about 20 miles from Concordia. He says there are two main factors that would hurt farmers in a local food market. One is volume. Most farmers grow far more food than they could sell to a town of roughly 5,500 people. He is primarily a wheat farmer. Right now wheat is double what the price of it was last year. Part of that is the terrible wheat year in Australia and South America. By having the global market, countries can save each other from drought years. What if cities were set up for local food only, and another dust bowl happens. What are people going to eat then?

The other problem is man power. Larry said that in the olds days, there would be 8 farms to a section. Now there is a farm every 6 sections. Since one farm is bigger than it had been, if he wanted to diversify and turn his wheat farm into what he called a “truck” farm, meaning growing a variety of things for public sale, it would take a ton of manpower. Most small mid-western towns don’t have that man power anymore.

I am not making the argument that people should only buy food from china, far from it. I would encourage you to buy local when you can. But recognize that local isn’t a reality that is going to solve our food transportation problems.

As for vegetarianism, well… I have no problem with people eating veggies. But again, the world going vegetarian isn’t a real approach to solving anything.

The emphasis should be sustainable farming practices. True, right now there is no way around the oil dependency, but it will come. What we can do is protect our land, our water, and our ecosystems through smart sustainable agriculture. And keep working on alternative fuel sources.

-Adam

As I sit here at 11 o’clock at night pining over my slice of caramel turtle cheesecake, I begin to think back on my food consumption of the day.

I didn’t eat any fast food. (Yeah for me!) However, a lot of the food items I ate had some of the additives that Beth Bader claims “just don’t belong in food despite what the FDA says.” But Bader never flushes out the argument to tell me why that is. So I will attempt to find out why these shouldn’t be in our food.

For breakfast I had Quaker Instant Oatmeal. In an article in Business Week, Instant oatmeal contains butylated hydroxyanisole (BHA) or butylated hydroxytoluen (BHT) which are preservatives. Bader quotes some source as saying that BHA is “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” Let’s first look at that sentence, “reasonably anticipated to be a human carcinogen.” The dictionary defines anticipated as “to foresee“. So essentially, without the test to prove the forethought, it is someone’s, (presumably a scientist’s), best guest. But just in case, they put the clause, “reasonably” meaning within the bounds of common sense. The last part of the sentence, “carcinogen,” means causes cancer. So what we have is that using common sense BHA probably causes cancer.(Hold on while I throw away all the rest of my Instant Oatmeal.)

Since it wasn’t obvious where this quote came from, I checked all the links on Bader’s blog. I found it on a Center for Science in the Public Interest Web site. Strangely this site also was using that as a quote without citing it. This Web site also makes claims that we should avoid certain food additives. But it doesn’t say why. In one example it says we should try to avoid the additive BHT because, “it either increased or decreased the risk of cancer in various animal studies.” Umm…. what?

The CSPI Web site says we should definitely avoid BHA because in certain studies, it has caused cancer in the forestomachs in mice, rats, and hampsters. Further investigation led me to this site, ExToxNetFAQ. This site points out that although BHA has been shown to cause cancer in the forestomachs of rodents, (in very high levels), it hasn’t caused any cancer in animals such as dogs, pigs, or monkeys. In other words, animals that do not have a forestomach. (Hey, I don’t have a forestomach) This site also is the first to begin to give empirical data as to how much is actually in the food we eat, and what has been deemed safe for us.

When the food additives amendment first came out, BHA and BHT were listed as generally recognized as safe. This allowed that 200 parts per million could be in food. Both additives have since been removed from that list and subjected to tolerances. With tolerance tests, scientists determine what level of the potentially harmful substance causes no observed effects. From there they can determine a number of things, but for purposes of food additives, the most important is RfD, or reference dose. This means what an acceptable daily dose is for humans over an estimated life span of 70 years. The explanation also points out that this number is usually much higher than what the FDA estimates people do eat. (Sorry, I need to go pull out all the Instant Oatmeal Packages from the trash… 4 hour rule right?)

Now that I pulled my Quaker Instant Oatmeal out of the trash I decide to actually read the ingredients. Huh, that’s strange. It doesn’t seem to have that those sins of the food additive world BHA or BHT. So I looked at my source on the web. Yep, sure enough, it was posted in 1996, and revised in ‘97. So it looks like Quaker has been moving away from the more controversial preservatives. Kudos for them.

Two other food advocates that I came across are Janet Starr Hull, and Dr. John McDougall. Both of which made arguments about the issue that made sense, rather than making the claim that we need to get rid of additives without offering solutions. Hull provides the context of “we don’t know, it might, so maybe we shouldn’t.” I can get behind that. And it looks like Quaker did the same. Dr. McDugall offers a more complete picture of diet and cancer.

He points out that there is a lot of conflicting information on the internet, and thus, people are very confused about what to eat, and what not to eat. He uses an analogy of the Broad Street Pump story from 19th century London.

Dr. Snow noticed that the distribution of cases of cholera was largely confined to those people who obtained their water from one particular well, called the Broad Street Pump. He also observed that of the 530 inmates of the Poland Street workhouse, which was around the corner from the Broad Street Pump, only five people had contracted cholera; and that no one from the workhouse drank the pump water, for the building had its own well. Among the 70 workers in a Broad Street brewery, where the men were given an allowance of free beer every day, and consequently never drank water, there were no fatalities.
These findings resulted in the identification of the well as the source of cholera and the removal of the handle from the well’s pump – the epidemic of cholera ended.

Through observation, Dr. Snow determined that it was a certain water source that was spreading the deadly disease Cholera. So he removed the pump handle from that water source. The point is that even if science doesn’t prove that certain foods are directly causing cancer, we can still see some correlations, and that is reason enough to turn off that tainted water source. And apparently, if we drink beer, we will never die.

Cancer is a scary thing. No one wants it. Making a move away from possibly harmful food ingredients is a good thing. But as communicators, let’s flush our arguments out a little bit. I think we will reach a broader section of people. People like myself who are skeptics need hard data, not assumptions. Also, with any discussion of food, preach moderation. And don’t do drugs. (Now that morning is well underway, it is time for breakfast. I shall eat my yummy Quaker Instant Oatmeal care free. Especially since I shall make it with beer. Who doesn’t want to live forever right?)

-Adam