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

Climate change really is inconvenient. Despite all of the scientific study being poured into this issue, the impacts remain difficult to predict. And although its effects may not be noticeable for decades, the window of time we have left to address it could be very small. Meanwhile, our US leaders are elected for 2- or 4-year terms. Oftentimes, this leads to a focus on short term solutions that keep constituents satisfied. Sounds like a major conflict.

When asked about this balance between short and long term policy consideration, Congressman Dennis Moore notes that “in the short term, we need to utilize the tools we already have available - implementing energy efficiency measures, encouraging responsible behaviors and investing in the research and development of technologies that will ultimately aid in us achieving our long-term goals .”

However, it is sometimes difficult for me to believe that our government is going to make a difference on this issue. I may even agree with Wall Street Journal editorialist Joe Rago who seems to think Congress is stretching out the discussion on carbon emission controls in order to maintain credibility with environmentalists while putting off a decision that could have serious economic impacts.

To some degree, I don’t blame them. We have no idea if potentially costly programs put in place today will really make a difference 50 years from now. But that shouldn’t stop us from giving it a try and hoping that our collective efforts will help us turn the corner on climate change. All we have to lose - and gain - is a more sustainable future for ourselves and for our planet.

- Jeff

Michael Dorsey says we are screwed. He says It is too late to worry about fixing climate change and time to start focusing on adapting to its impacts. At least that is what I gathered from his virtual visit to Media & the Environment this month.

So is Congress just spinning it’s wheels discussing carbon taxes and cap-and-trade programs? When questioned about dealing with climate change, Congressman Dennis Moore (D-KS) thinks it is high time we get something done.

“The longer we wait to curb greenhouse gas emissions, the more expensive it will become. With big policy changes, there are bound to be growing pains, however, we simply cannot afford to continue business as usual.”

Congressman Moore feels the legislature has turned the corner on responding to this issue.

“The House leadership has not only made it one of our top legislative priorities, but support for many of these energy efficiency efforts seems to be bipartisan. Of course, a few of my colleagues and others involved in our national dialogue on this issue still refuse to acknowledge the problem is real, as well as a few of my colleagues who are trying to protect the interests of their districts (like big coal districts, etc.), but generally, the support is widespread. As we move forward, therefore, we will have to work together to draft legislation that we can all support - legislation that will make real progress on this issue while understanding that we can’t fix the problem overnight.”

If Dorsey is right, overnight may be all the time we have.

- Jeff

Americans don’t trust Congress. This is not news. But a Gallup poll in July 2007 put Congress at the bottom of a list ranking public confidence in 16 American institutions. According to the poll, American’s put more trust in big business than they do in our legislature. And we definitely don’t have much love for big business.

That distrust may be part of what is driving younger voters to turn out in record numbers this year. Congressman Dennis Moore (D-KS) is certain the youth vote will be heard in the 2008 elections. “Young people have traditionally been very successful in achieving social change - from the women’s suffrage movement, to Vietnam, to the civil rights movement,” he says. “This year, young people have a unique opportunity to participate in social change in the November elections.”

With the environment ranking among the top 5 issues important to young voters, let’s hope we can add sustainability to that list of social movements. Only time will tell if the current groundswell will continue through to November.  But if it does, we could start seeing our elected officials taking the environment more seriously.

- Jeff

I have never attended a city council meeting. I have never participated in a protest (although I’ve signed a few online petitions in my time). And until recently, I have never written my state senator or representative. You could say I am apolitical. I guess I’ve always chosen education over activism to address the issues that are most important to me.

But as the battle to build coal fired plants in Holcomb, KS, raged on this spring, I felt it my civic duty to write my legislators. I knew their minds were already made up to vote for a veto override (even though they both sat through our local “Focus the Nation” event just three months ago listening to arguments against the legislation), but I fired away my messages anyway.

I was pleased to get a detailed response from my state representative, Tom Sloan. But it left more questions than answers. Here’s just a snippet of his reasoning for supporting new coal, and the queries left in its trail:

“Simply saying no to coal-fired electric generation does not result in the construction of renewable generation units.”

Maybe not, but doesn’t saying yes squelch the need for any other source of energy in our state for the time being, and put an end to opportunities for renewable development?

“The coal-fired plants would serve as anchors and financial supporters of the high voltage electric transmission lines necessary to move wind energy west to the California market and south and east to urban centers.”

When did Kansas get in the business of exporting power to the rest of the nation anyway? I thought we were an agricultural state.

“Emission standards for carbon releases from power plants, other commercial enterprises (e.g., ethanol plants), motor vehicles, etc. should be established. Currently no standards exist at the federal or state levels because scientists and policy-makers have not yet reached consensus on what levels are relevant and attainable. “

Now your talking. So shouldn’t we give current debates at the national level work themselves out before we jump headfirst into increasing carbon emissions that will soon be regulated?

“Wind energy will and should be part of the energy mix serving Kansas and the nation/world. The proposed Holcomb plants will be the lowest emitting plants in the nation and will be the first plants to have carbon capture and mitigation investments as part of their business plan”.

This one totally lost me. If wind should and will be part of the mix, why do we need to add more coal? In a state where 75% of the energy produced is from coal, and most of the remainder comes from nuclear power, I’d say we have a long way to go to make wind even part of the mix. Cleaner or not, coal definitely needs to make room for it’s renewable cousins.

I could go on, but I think you get the point. I don’t doubt Representative Sloan’s sincere interest appreciate his effort to education himself on the issue, but for me the logic just doesn’t add up. It looks more like new coal would limit our opportunities, not broaden our horizons, and make shooting for the stars even more difficult than it already is.

“Ad Astra” statue atop of the Kansas capitol. Source: flickr.com

-Jeff

Despite my many visits; I had never really seen the Haskell-Baker wetlands until I had saw them through the eyes of Mike Caron, a passionate scholar and activist of wetland habitats who has a way with words.

As a fellow environmentalist I mirrored Mike’s respect for the wetlands and was eager for the tour by a man who knew so much about its dynamics and history. But before our trek even got started, a sad and disturbing sight confronted us.

Not 20 feet from the edge of the Haskell Indian’s Memorial Grounds, noisy earthmovers were mindlessly digging up the land and hauling the dirt away. The Memorial Grounds are recognized historical site and a memorial for the many dead First Nations children that attended the Haskell Boarding School - an assimilation institution intent on, as Mike put it, “killing the savage and saving the man”.

What these titans of construction were doing is unknown, and how they had permission to do so is even more confusing. According to Mike, a historical site should have no construction done around it. This fact, however, did not stop the erection of sewage lift stations, which pipe sewage near the symbolic headstones (the actual graves are mythed to be under the basketball courts) and the wetlands for processing.

Sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many cultural and environmental injustices that have befallen Haskell land.

The Haskell-Baker wetlands are a historically and culturally significant area for many different First Nations people. It is significant because of the way people of many Nations were forced together for their reeducation. The land is imbued with the traces of these people and the many trials they faced here together.

From a Eurocentric perspective, the land was seen as unproductive and a dumping ground for vagabonds and waste. However, from an ecological perspective; wetlands serve as an important, and continually rarified, ecosystem. The wetlands ecosystem exists in a delicate balance of environmental factors and life cycles which make it home to hundreds of environment specific plant and animal species. For the First Nations people the land is sacred and life-giving. These contrasting views represent the struggle of these people while modernity encroaches onto their lands and into their world.

This struggle continues today. Presently, there is a critical issue that has been raging for the past 20 years: the proposed South Lawrence Trafficway (SLT). This highly contested highway, intended to relieve traffic congestion in the city of Lawrence, threatens to rob the wetlands of its cultural significance and ecological diversity. The wetlands has long been a place where people have come to take comfort in its wild refuge, to study, to pray, to come together in solidarity with their families and their community. The construction of the SLT would result in the loss of one more valuable wild area, just to be replaced by more development and sprawl. One more loss for our increasingly diluted culture, and one more win for our market-driven globalized world.

What we are seeing here on the local scale in Lawrence is a severe clash of values, and assumptions made by our Western views and values. It seems difficult for immigrated peoples to realize the integral nature of an environment and its peoples. Instead, non-natives view their relationship to their habitat with neoliberal economically tinted glasses; that is as individuals’ divorced from the land that they view as a commodity and nature being something to control rather than to respect and nourish. These views of our neoliberal globalized society further perpetuate environmental injustices on land that is, in the view of many, priceless.

-Juliana Tran

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A Rainy Day at The Wetlands By Juliana Tran

Top Photo by Wally Emerson

The Lawrence Sustainability Network, LSN, was born in 2006 of skepticism and hope. LSN’s founders did not believe that politicians could be counted on to halt our society’s steady march toward the precipice of environmental destruction, economic collapse, and social instability. Instead, they believed that individuals would have to decide for themselves to leave the herd and find another path, to find other disaffected souls, and learn to live lightly and sustainably on planet Earth. Herein lies hope, hope for other species, our families, our communities, and hope for the future.

It is not surprising that we must first act individually in the decision to live differently. American society glorifies individualism and competition, teaching each of us that we will sink or swim on our own merits. So it is no small irony that our first steps away from destruction are personal initiatives to develop a collective response. We in LSN believe community building is key to our success. Together we can imagine what a more sustainable world might look like. We can pool our ideas and our resources, and we can share the daunting task of figuring out how to make the transition from where we are to where we want to be. The introduction to LSN’s vision statement, taken from our website, sets out in broad strokes what we would like to accomplish:

Ecological sustainability means living in a way that is mindful of consequences for the future. We envision a community built around livelihood strategies that protect the commons of clean air, soil and water; deliver efficient, affordable, clean and renewable energy; prioritize local food systems; and promote biological diversity so that future generations of people and other species can also satisfy their basic needs. In this community ‘development’ will mean improving the quality of life for all people in the Lawrence area, fostering social justice in the distribution of available resources and opportunities, and fortifying our local economy toward the goal of self-sufficiency. Social relationships are equally important to ecological sustainability; the social world we will advance will be built on mutual aid, trust, equity, and participatory democracy.

A just and healthy world is LSN’s hope for the future. It will take many hands and minds and hearts, coming together in community, to bring it about.

~ Jane Gibson

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“All creation is connected and interdependent. If any part of the system is upset, the whole system is affected. There is no separation between our land and our spirituality; this is simply our way of life… We grow ourselves out of the land.”
– Nasbah Ben, a coordinator of the Save the Peaks campaign and a member of the Navajo Nation in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona.

The San Francisco Peaks are sacred mountains that are revered by thirteen different First Nation groups in Flagstaff, Arizona, including Nasbah’s own Navajo people, the Diné.

These days, the land isn’t used for ceremony, or herb gathering; rather, the land is restricted for use by the Arizona Snowbowl, which now occupies the Peaks. This huge, barely used, ski resort was erected for the wealthy of the area, seemingly mocking the mountains that were deemed as holy by the local people for centuries.

Now, to add insult to injury, if the Arizona Snowbowl wins a pending court case, they will be able to continue developing their resort and start using recycled sewage water to create artificial snow - controversial because of the dangers it may cause to the environment and in turn, the people.

This is an issue that isn’t just about the San Francisco Peaks but about the rights of all humans to protect their environment and maintain their relationships with the land.

Since the ski resort was built in the 1960’s, there continues to be resistance by the Navajo and those who have sided with this solidarity movement to stop further development of the resort and maintain respect for this once sacred space. Unfortunately, their voices are barely heard.

In an interview with Nasbah - it seems as if only superficial legislation have been passed to help protect sacred land, such as various Executive Orders passed under Bill Clinton, which consider the voices of the native people in the area, but won’t stop companies from development. These measures seem only to be symbolic, projecting an illusion of environmental justice while effecting no actual change, but only placating the demands of both the activists and corporate interests.

The issue with the San Francisco Peaks and the Snowbowl represents the tremendous amount of injustice that occurs to many minority populations and low-income populations all over the nation. Environmental justice works to keep these populations respected by public policy and corporate development, but often it is the case that these voices aren’t heard.

Environmentalism goes hand in hand with Human Rights; it should be a natural right for people to have clean water, clean air, and sacred space.

In this world, it seems that only the wealthy can afford to choose their environment and modify it to their liking, while there are groups like the Navajo, who are marginalized from wealth and political persuasion. These people represent those of many that are victims of structural violence – when people are subjected to poor lifestyles and harm because of exploitive social structures and institutions. Despite trying to voice their opinion, power plants are erected in their neighborhoods and amusement parks put on their temples.

How can we heal this rift, which separates a clean and healthy person from a clean and healthy environment? How can we stop the destructive development, which is built on the homes of the poor just to be out of the sight of the wealthy? And how can we make this change global? These are questions that the baby boomers and generation X have placed squarely on our shoulders, and we do not have their luxury of leaving them unanswered.

-Juliana Tran

San Francisco Peaks: Flickr

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Has the poo crusade of Brad Pooterish had an impact in America? Let’s take a look at waste reduction and recycling in Lawrence, KS to find out.

Use less CRAP, people! Reuse your crap! Recycle your crap!

~ Sarah H

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Since 1986, it has been estimated that every year, 58,500 acres of wetlands in the lower United States are lost due to logging, release of toxic chemicals, mining and other anthropogenic factors. Comparatively, in the 1600s, 220 million acres of wetlands existed. Now there are a paltry 90,000 acres left.

But who cares that the total acreage of wetlands are quickly decreasing? To be honest, I really didn’t. I mean seriously, wetlands look swampy, muddy and kind of ugly: Not where I’d want to spend an afternoon. Just take a look at the picture below of the Baker Wetlands. Everything looks kind of dead and muddy and gross.

I like money, though. In fact, I consider the economy one of the most important issues that determines the well-being and influence of our nation. A poor capitalist economy means a poor democratic government. If you would have told me the repulsive, murky swamps (aka: Wetlands) were intrinsically linked to our economy last week I probably would have told you to get a life. Well, it’s true.

In coastal wetlands, farmers raise and harvest shellfish. In the mid 1990s, wetlands-based shellfish catches contributed $15 billion to our gross domestic product. I don’t care how you look at it; $15 billion is a lot of money that strengthens our economy. That’s not even including all of the jobs the industry produces each year. Unfortunately, with the disappearance of the wetlands in our country, domestic shellfish prices, especially shrimp, drastically increased (smaller wetlands mean not as many shellfish can exist and be harvested).

Enter Thailand: The panacea to our need for cheap shellfish. The nation offered us inexpensive shellfish; hence, imports increased exponentially. Shellfish prices went down again and everyone and everything was happy - except for our faltering economy. Bye bye, American shellfish industry. Hello imports (and increases in carbon emissions that result from transporting shellfish around the world).

Who knew the elimination of wetlands in our nation could so detrimentally affect our economy? Sure, there are other factors that contributed to the increase in domestic shellfish prices, like Hurricane Katrina among other external factors. However, the elimination of our precious wetlands certainly played a devastating part on the shellfish industry.

But the preservation of our nation’s wetlands doesn’t just help our economy. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, wetlands also function as flood control agents (and decrease damage to surrounding cities and towns) and help refill aquifers, ensuring we have plentiful, clean drinking water.

The facts are simple: We have to ensure our precious wetlands don’t further disappear. Quite literally, our economy is positively impacted by larger wetlands. Alright, so wetlands might not be the most aesthetically pleasing facet of nature, but we must protect them. To do any less would be simply irresponsible.

J.J. De Simone

Workers package Earthbound Farms lettuce for shipment.

http://blog.americanfeast.com/2006/05/

The organic movement was started as an alternative to commercial agriculture, an alternative to the homogenization of our food crops, to free market domination by corporations, as a way to beat the Man - right? As organics becomes more popular, it also becomes more mainstream and commercialized.  Now we are in a sort of tug-o-war: should organic products keep growing, or will this type of unlimited growth compromise the original values behind the organic movement?  Using my not-so foolproof Oreo science in Part 1, it’s clear that the commercialization of the organic movement is a complicated issue, complete with blind turns and detours.

One thing is clear: Wal-Mart’s ability to determine market prices for organic products does not sit so well with many farmers who run smaller organic operations.  For many farms, including the two-acre plot run by the Kansas City Center for Urban Agriculture (KCCUA), the price premium consumers pay for their organic produce is reflective of the labor premium they put into the production.  These small, intensively managed operations allows for a stunningly diverse harvest from a surprisingly small area; a stark contrast with the expansive fields of lettuce managed by Earthbound Farms.

Volunteers working at KCCUA.

http://www.kccua.org/

Many consumers, including UC Berkley’s renowned food journalist Michael Pollan, are worried that as organics gets bigger, its original values will disappear, and that “going organic” will be nothing but a passing fad.  Already, lobbies for large companies have worked to allow synthetic substances into organic processed foods (like my Oreos).

To lower prices, imported organic produce shipments from China could continue to increase. The environmental costs of food transportation are astronomical, so the benefits of converting tracts of land to organic production methods are arguably outweighed with the amount of fuel burned to ship the food across the Pacific Ocean.  Unfortunately, organic foods produced on a small scale for local consumption are not likely to get any cheaper.  The truth of the matter is that the cost of most foods on the grocery shelves is artificial: government subsidy handouts to large farms mean low prices on the shelf.  The high costs to the environment and to us as taxpayers, who provide the money for the subsidies, are not represented by the totals on our receipts.

So is the organic movement standing on its last leg?  Will Wal-Mart - and other marketplace giants - succeed in devaluing ‘organic’?  If you have an opinion, make your voice heard as Congress continues to reformulate the Farm Bill, an incredibly important piece of legislation that determines the placement of those subsidies funded by our tax dollars.  You can also head to the Downtown Lawrence Farmer’s Market, where you can meet and greet with the farmers as you buy your produce.  We don’t have to sit back and watch the clock, your voice will help decide if the organic movement answers the grim reaper’s knock on the door.

–Jennifer Kongs