Over the last month, I’ve been reading Tastes of Paradise: A Social History of Spices, Stimulants and Intoxicants by Wolfgang Schivelbusch.  It sat in my bookcase for a while, unread, and then last fall I listened to a webcast about enlightened communication where the organizer began the program connecting enlightened communication to the conversations that arose in coffeehouses in 17th century England and France. I decided to see what this book had to say.

In Tastes of Paradise, Schivelbusch writes about the links between new foods brought to Europe through trade with the Middle East, the Far East and the Americas.  He covers the effects that pepper, coffee, tea, chocolate, tobacco, beer, hard liquor and opium had on European culture from the 17th through 19th centuries.

The most interesting and compelling substance that Schivelbusch writes about is coffee, which was introduced through the Middle East into several ports:  Venice, Marseilles, London, and Amsterdam.  Coffee was a medicinal food before the 15th century.  It wasn’t till this time that Islamic cultures roasted, ground and brewed the beans into the bitter drink we know today. It was quickly adopted by the non-alcoholic drinking Islamic culture.

I want to focus in on how the Bourgeois of England and France were ripe to adopt coffee as their drink of choice and how the mindset of the early Enlightenment was supported by coffee, which was a stark difference from the previous drink of choice: ale, beer and wine.  According to Schivelbusch, before the introduction of the potato, beer and ale represented the second most consumed foods in central and northern Europe. These drinks played an important role in the demonstration of loyalty and friendship through drinking contests and toasts. Men gathered to compete at drinking and worked themselves into a frenetic state from cheering and glass raising.  In the book, there are many illustrations showing the height of tavern inebriation, including a drinker depicted with the head of an animal, vomiting, and Demon Alcohol in the background orchestrating the events.

The introduction of coffee was seen as a soberer of an alcohol dependent society.  The overconsumption of alcohol in taverns was associated with incompetence and laziness.  The Protestant Reformation spurred the criticism of alcohol and its customs.  Coffee was welcomed by the English especially as an illuminator, a substance to wake up humanity,  “…Coffee, the sober drink, the mighty nourishment of the brain, which unlike other spirits, heightens purity and lucidity; coffee, which clears the clouds of the imagination and their gloomy weight; which illuminates the reality of things suddenly with a flash of truth…”

It’s interesting how coffee was first utilized by different strata of society too.  The Aristocracy enjoyed coffee for its superficial accouterments—the porcelain cups and coffee pot, the particular way to drink it—but the middle class valued coffee for its practical aspects. It was seen to stimulate the intellect, support an increasing shift to indoor, mental labor in an office, and extension of the work day.

Coffee also became the official drink of the emerging capitalist economy. In England, circa 1700, there were roughly 3,000 coffeehouses in London alone, which works out to about one for every 200 people.  Initially, these were places where merchants and insurance brokers gathered to discuss business, but increasingly became places to discuss art, politics and literature.  Coffeehouse etiquette was the opposite of Tavern behavior.

Coffee is interesting to me for two reasons:

• As a study into the role that food has on culture. Did coffee itself stimulate the Age of Enlightenment, or did the rational thinking of the Enlightenment lead to new patterns of consumption? Although it’s a bit of a chicken/egg question, the latter is more true. Europeans’ desire to create a new culture spurred the coffeehouse as a new gathering place and the coffeehouses in turn encouraged a culture of dialogue which influenced literature, philosophy, art and politics.
• As background for an inquiry into the relationship that we have with food today.  From personal experience, I can see that the more physically fit I become, the less I want to eat very heavy foods, meat and carbs.  This is true for many of us who want to develop our physical health and are changing our food consumption patterns.  I’m looking for major shifts in our culture about the way we eat.  What is emerging in our consciousness that would be supported and positively enhanced by something concrete?  Will it come from certain foods or certain ways of eating?  I don’t know and I’m interested in finding out. 

image by Llima

Over the last four months I have been part of a fitness challenge group spurred by Uli, a friend through this site. In February, Megan and I joined her and Brad in their $50/week exercise commitment challenge. Since then, my friend Siobhan has joined us. As Uli wrote about the structure of the group, the group holds us accountable to our goals, and we’ve all experienced a lot of growth through the process.

Not too long ago, Megan wrote about the tremendous positive physical and non-physical changes she has seen in her body and beyond. I have seen changes in my physical body, too, and that’s been so refreshing and a big encouragement for me to continue. But the biggest shift I have made through this challenge of fitness is that I am now starting to understand the importance of consistency. The importance I now place on making time for regular physical activity is what has been most transformative for me.

I was thinking about how to express this—how can I describe a new realization of my body’s potential, what word would I pick to express the new found sense of energy that I feel moving in my day and more so, the hope I see about other areas of my life that I can transform? Reverence is the word that I’d choose for the profound respect I have for my physical body in all its amazing capacity to develop and become more than I can imagine. According to Webster’s online dictionary, one of the meanings of reverence is:  “profound, adoring, awed respect.” This accurately conveys what I feel about the surprise and joy that comes from seeing my body get stronger, leaner, and straighter from regular workouts. I also have gratitude for all the different types of exercise I can engage in. This past week I tried out two at home Pilates videos, and I have increased my speed and duration in running. 

Before joining this fitness challenge group, I used to think that I could only exercise when I had extra time or on the weekends. As a result, I exercised sporadically and I had 3 different clothing sizes in my closet; big clothes for when I got chubby and thin clothes for my life with exercise. But as I’ve gotten older, I find that I really like to exercise, and it helps me relax and stay focused mentally. The big challenge was making time for it. Our commitment group has helped me to block out times to workout and to mimic the Nike slogan, “Just Do It.” I found that I tend to spend more time worrying about it or wondering about fitting it into my schedule. I still worry, and kvetch, but now push it aside more and more so I can get going, get out and workout.

Since committing to exercise for four hours per week, I now value exercise as an integral part of my life, just as important as work, school, and socializing. Making the choice to exercise is a choice to put positive action ahead of negative complaining or doubt in the unknown. It’s a truly great step in the right direction.

Exercise grounds all parts of my being together: physical, mental, emotional, and moral. I have found that it is the most efficient action I can take—at least right now it is—to catapult me out of a stinkin’ thinkin’ perspective. It shows me a different perspective very quickly. When I workout and I’m sweaty and really trying as best I can, I break the cyclical limiting thoughts momentarily. They do come back, they always come back, but I’m learning more and more that they’re not the truth, there’s always another perspective, to keep an open mind and to just chill out rather than jump to an interpretation that makes a problem out of someone or something.

Through this commitment I’ve made to myself and four other people the wall of busyness and excuses I have made for not pursuing greatness in my life are being worn down through exercise and checking in about it weekly with them. In the last couple of months, I’ve started to notice friends and acquaintances of mine who already do make exercise part of their normal life. It’s not only when they “have time” or “feel like it.” It really is all the time, as important as everything else, with some slowing down when it’s appropriate—like during sickness or some huge project at work, or moving.

I have had slips. I fell short on my hours twice and had to pay the penalty, 50 bucks. But it’s helped me value the practice of workouts, and scheduling time to take care of my physical health in an ongoing way, not just for a brief period of time but as part of daily life. The biggest former obstacle that I overcame was fitting in exercise during busy times. I managed to workout during my spring semester finals. One week I did fall short and had to pay because I was sick and didn’t tell anyone. Out of this came a conversation that it’s fine to decrease hours for sickness if I communicate this to another member during the week, not after. 

I started running last July and have kept it up for nearly a year. Now, I’ve become faster and I think it’s time to change my running routine from track running to street running. Exercise greatly benefits my mental focus and keeps my body relaxed, when I tend to get anxious. Last week I had a breakthrough during an Abs workout.  I really worked through each movement and afterwards my back was much stronger and I was easily able to stand up straight. That’s the day I made the connection with the foods I eat, and saw that the foods I choose affect my workouts. Fruits and veggies support greater physical activity. A bonus of exercising is that the more fit I become, the more easily I find it to cut out the sweets, the sugar, and overeating because they don’t support my body. Either I feel tired and heavy or I get a stomach ache and this inhibits my exercise and the enjoyment and energy that come from it. Splurging is okay, I’ve found, if done infrequently, when appropriate like when I’m out to dinner or when the dessert is top notch and is satisfying on multiple levels—taste, quality, atmosphere and shared conversation.

Another thing I am learning is how to accept that my flexibility and energy level will change due to various factors like sleep or time of the month and not to make a sweeping negative self-judgment about it. Rather, I am learning to follow-through, stay focused on specific movements of my workout, and let go of the results.

Another cool thing is my perspective on being pushed and pushing others is changing. Two weeks ago, I got up to go running, kind of groggy and stiff and not wanting to go. On the walk over, the streets were quiet and sleepy, the sun refracting off the dew on the grass and trees. I finally arrived at the high school track where I usually run and there was this whole entire group of people that I had forgotten about—the physically fit runners, walkers and chatty soccer moms, yelling coaches and chirping children all exercising or supporting young athletes. I thought, yeah this is the culture I want to be part of, the people who value working out. At one point, I saw a soccer coach yell at his players, “Move it, Move it, Leeett’sss Goooo!!” A short while back,  I would have thought that he was being unnecessarily harsh,  but I started laughing, thinking about how I often push myself to get moving,  knowing well that most times, unless we don’t do this for ourselves and others,  we won’t develop in a real, measurable, and completely inspiring way.

image by christin▲

Recently, I experienced a personal victory. I finished a semester of graduate school completely, and made the previously tight grip of perfectionism on my life a little weaker. While I haven’t found out my grades yet, I am happy, and amazed that I finished this while also working part-time, keeping up with a consistent exercise schedule (that I slightly modified) and writing occasionally for this site.

I know that there’s a lot of you out there that choose to be super busy and super psyched about life, and so this may not seem like such a big deal. But for me it was, in comparison to what I would usually do and the way I usually would respond to the pressure of completing projects within a time frame.

My need to be perfect and make anything I did perfect showed up very strong while I was in college.  It took me so long to complete my papers and I wound up taking several incompletes that took years to finish. In the past, I let laziness, fear, and wanting to make things perfect do me in. I would put off doing my work because I didn’t want to do it right away, and thought I could put it off, thinking I’ll have time later, and it won’t take too long.  But all my projects always did take longer than I planned for partly because I had waited so long to do them.

I found writing term papers to be nearly impossible—I wanted to do a superb job and include every bit of fascinating detail. I thought that details were king. Sometimes I saw the broader links in what I was writing.  What I sought was a feeling of wholeness; I wanted to develop an idea through my own unique style of writing, to develop a thought completely. Coupled with wanting to do a superb job was the critical internal nag putting me down, saying that whatever I was doing was never good enough, or wasn’t quite right. Consequently, I left and went back to school several times, and I took ten years to complete my degree.

What I have learned is that projects take longer with each day you put them off. They use up unnecessary thinking time, and this thinking is repetitive because it’s the same thought “I have to do… I have to do…” I was talking to a high school physics teacher recently about perfectionism.  He said that if you put off expressing an idea because it’s not perfect, then the idea keeps cycling around and round in you and it never changes.  In fact, he said no idea is perfect and will ever be perfect, but when we express them, then they can be worked with. Once expressed, ideas have the freedom to change and we keep developing them for the rest of our lives. This was a misunderstanding I had. I thought I was required to have perfect ideas in order to even express them in the first place. 

It’s interesting that education has changed since I was an undergrad. Now, I usually receive a rubric for each required project in graduate school. In most ways, this has made my own personal writing easier in that I can meet the requirements and then add my own perspective on top. As a teacher it’s showing me what clear instruction looks like: there are specific things to learn, find and do, rather than hey, if I like your work, you’ll get a good grade. 

What is perfectionism? I often look up words I think I already know because it helps me maintain some objectivity. Left to my own mind, I make up some pretty negative and wacky meanings. Most words have multiple meanings which I find adds depth to how they can be used in writing and speech. According to the American Heritage College Dictionary, perfectionism is a propensity for being displeased with anything that is not perfect or does not meet extremely high standards. It also can mean a belief in certain religions that moral or spiritual perfection can and must be achieved before the soul has passed into the afterlife.

Bingo! For me, needing to be perfect shows up exactly like the former meaning. Not only has this meant that I don’t find my own ideas good enough to express, but I’m also critical of others’ ideas too. Not very much can get done in a mental atmosphere as controlling as this. The latter meaning points to humanity’s desire for goodness. We want to achieve a high degree of perfection in so many areas before we die, or at least we want to get to a higher place that where we start out from at birth. I want this too, and agree with this meaning, but I realize that I misunderstood how to get there.

I thought that my ideas had to be perfect from the get go, rather than expressing what is there and through getting them out choosing the best ideas or refining the ones I want to work on. I’m still figuring all this out, so it may sound nebulous. Over these past five months, I often reminded myself of the ideas from two people whose examples “against” perfectionism were particularly vivid to me: my brother and a friend, Campbell Dalglish.

Back in January, while I was doing life coaching homework I spoke to the ten closest people in my life whose perspective I trust and value. During a conversation with my brother, we talked about perfectionism. He said that in his work, there’s really no place for it. He works as an engineer designing cars. The development of each new model is on a time frame. Any new research and design modifications must be worked into the design for a new model within the given time frame. He said that you could have a spectacular idea for a new design, but if it’s after the deadline, it cannot be used because that would mean that the rest of the production schedule for that car would be pushed back and that means loss of money for the company. So for every alteration, no matter how fabulous, there is a cost. This is part of the reason why there are new models each year… Part of it is that car buyers want the latest model for looks, but if the priorities of a car manufacturer are maximum efficiency and safety, then yearly adjustments are good.

When I interviewed Campbell and Catherine at their amazing sustainably built home in Long Island, Campbell thoroughly explained the details of how the house was built.  He said that while the house is going up, sometimes as a homeowner, you want to change planned features, like, “Let’s move the window 6 inches to the right.”  But this means that a construction worker will have to move stuff around. And extra labor means money. So even if you have this fantastic vision of how a window will look set slightly right, is your vision worth the extra money and time? These examples served to concretize the consequences of perfectionism in my life. Every time I put off addressing what needs to be addressed quickly, I lost out on in terms of money, self-confidence, my own integrity and others’ trust.

Now, so many things have shifted for me. I have noticed that whenever I take a step towards a project right away, my thinking about it usually develops. I begin thinking about other things that are related or I get focused and hone in on how I can more clearly develop the idea I want to express. 

Now, my challenge with projects is in determining how much time is required to get something completed, and what level of completion will others and myself be satisfied with, and what projects do I want to take on? Over these past five months, my goal was to finish things, not make them perfect. Being content with getting things done is new for me. I have felt excited and even elated with a few things I’ve finished but for most of the things, accomplishing tasks has meant just crossing things off a list, with no accompanying feeling of satisfaction. After all, my feelings aren’t the most important thing to consider.

When I commit to completing projects I am committing to other people, or to a system, or a structure that is in place.  Their expectations of me and trust in me are important to maintain and uphold.  Learning to be part of a team is a big lesson that I am learning. I wonder how I will learn how to develop confidence expressing my ideas, developing them within a defined time-frame and sharing them with others in public.  This is the next phase of my work on dismantling perfectionism in my life and on adopting a philosophy of ongoing development and acceptance of myself and others.

image by woodleywonderworks

Summer is coming up—my favorite time of year when gardening takes priority over being indoors. This past spring, I really wanted to start my seeds indoors early, but I was so busy with graduate classes, so I pushed aside seed planting. Gratefully though, I did do a seed germination test with my leftover seeds from years past. Actually, what pushed me to test my old seeds was that I had committed to write about it for this site. It’s interesting how that works, but since I shared my thoughts with other contributors here—Megan, Uli, Sarah, Stella and Rich—I was bound to deliver on it. In the future, I would like to cultivate my interests to a greater extent to where my motivation is large enough to propel me forward, and sharing with others enriches it, reinforces it, but is not dependent upon it.

After the germination tests, I did cull a lot of old seed.  I am really enjoying the clarity and sureness of knowing that all the seeds in my seed storage box are viable. That may sound silly, but it’s a bonus to see the link between effort and results, because in life, it’s not always so clear. For the first time, this spring I looked out at my garden, and realized that its beauty is not only because of the intrinsic beauty that is nature, but also a result of the effort and care of my parents and me. I was moved more by the realization that the garden shows the efforts we have invested in making it beautiful than everything that needs doing.

I am feeling more confident in my abilities as a gardener to flow with the activities that keep it flourishing; planting from seed on time, growing a variety of vegetables, pruning perennials, building the compost, and harvesting the compost. In working on a garden there are a few different kinds of results to witness. There’s the end of season harvest after four or so months after planting, then there’s the slower development of perennials adjusting to their specific locations and also the way the sum total of plants, trees and non-living features blend together, which creates a landscape. 

What I want to say in this article is not so much about the details of gardening and gearing up for planting a multitude of vegetable varieties as it is about the form a garden takes when well tended over the years by human hands.

Yesterday, Megan spoke about our inherent connection to nature and that there is no difference between the force and energy of mountain uplift and the desire, plan and technological know-how of blasting through it to build a tunnel.  I was really fascinated by the connections she brought to light and I can see it so clearly in my garden. Any garden well-tended by gardeners who observe the plants, insects and soil and plan their gardening desires based on the laws of nature will flourish and will be exponentially grander and breathtakingly more beautiful exactly due to human touch, human intelligence. I don’t agree that nature is only at its best the wild forests, untamed and left alone. While pristine land is important for maintaining a certain level of biodiversity I don’t believe that it’s the only natural setting that does our planet good.

So now when I survey my garden, I notice that the beauty is partly a result of my sweat and care and that this care is not separate from the natural rhythm coming from the plants, the earthworms, and from me. This really does change everything!

While I didn’t start my seeds super early, which would have been ideal, as I look around my garden, I see that there are not too many weeds and they will come out easily. There’s a new compost pile to build and a lot of the finished stuff to spread around. Yesterday, I quickly started my seeds for herbs and lettuce, having planned it all out with containers, seed starting mix and a hand drawn diagram. I was amazed at how quickly I got it done and afterwards again noticed that because I prepared all my materials and selected a manageable variety of seeds, starting them was a breeze. I am beginning to choose a natural flow to life, stretching further, but not being a perfectionist about things, getting overwhelmed then crashing. Instead, I am just doing consistently more, taking one step, and then another.

image by √oхέƒx™

A few months ago I started to observe the moon every night as part of an assignment for a science education class. The instructions were to watch the moon daily, at the same time, from the same location for about 5 weeks and record all observations in a journal. This seemed straightforward enough, fine, let’s see how it goes. I decided to set my cell phone alarm to 11:30 p.m., because I knew I would forget.

At first, it was hard to pull myself away from my computer or get home a little earlier just to observe the moon. I wanted to stay inside, writing emails or reading. It was too cold—why bother watching it? I can just look up the phase online, I thought.

I could look up every last bit of minutiae about the moon online, but it’s no substitute for the actual act of going outside and watching. I did not know this back in February. So, I recorded data on the phase, elevation from horizon, size, color, shape, visibility, weather, and star visibility. I found my exact location in latitude and longitude. Did you know that people in the southern hemisphere see the phases of the moon in the opposite order that we northerners do? They see it waxing from the left and waning on the right, whereas we see the moon grow and shrink just the opposite way. This is all new information to me, a person with virtually no science background embarking on a new career to be a science teacher, humbled by how much there is to learn and surprised that I’ve been walking this planet for 35 years and didn’t know these things.

La Luna, the moon, is our closest neighbor in space.  It is a mere 240,000 miles away. The sun in comparison is 93 million miles away. The moon rises in our east and sets in our west just as the sun does. This is because, like almost all planets in our solar system (except for Venus and Uranus), they rotate around the sun counterclockwise. The moon’s distance from us varies during the month because its orbit is elliptical. Apogee is the name given when the moon is its furthest away from earth, and perigee is the name of the moon’s location when it is closest to us, actually 7% closer than its average distance. The dark spots that we see on the moon are large plains called flatlands. They are also termed lunar maria, because early astronomers thought they were bodies of water—mare in Latin, plural, maria.  These plains are the result of ancient volcanic eruptions that occurred between three and three and a half billion years ago. 

After the five weeks, I compiled my data. I was missing most of the drawings, and forgot to find out the weather or didn’t record the elevation or missed a few days in a row. I thought I was on top of all this, what happened? My generous professor allows us to redo our assignments over to achieve mastery, as a model for us to keep with our own students. Ideally, this policy fosters development and responsibility. Ok, so this time, I carefully recorded everything in a notebook and used binoculars most of the time, and almost always jumped up at 11:30 no matter what I was doing to watch la Luna.

My professor made a point of asking us what our plans are for dealing with the complaints that arise when we assign moon watching. Your students will probably say it’s too hard or they don’t have time, or who cares? How will we help them? New York City students have busy parents, or one parent, or a guardian, and so many responsibilities. How will you guys, as their teachers, impress upon them that yes, moon watching is as important as everything else, at least for a month. How patient will we be with their process? How supportive?  I came to realize that developing patience for myself, practicing this new subject, was a start. How will I impress upon my students that observing the moon is worthwhile? 

I saw that as I developed a commitment to moon-watching, I learned about many other things besides the wax and wane of the moon. In showing up for the moon I confronted things in myself like impatience, feelings of never being good enough, resistance to new things, and organization. Most importantly I started to see what development and confidence actually are. I saw myself develop from being uncertain and half-hearted about moon-watching to being full of awe and wonder about this beautiful admirer out in space that glows brilliant one a month.

On the night of April 9th, I went outside, expectant of a full moon. I took down the general characteristics and then started to look through my binoculars. It was so wild to see the flatlands and the mountain chains; those bright white dots and lines. I realized that as I sat there, I was doing science. Hey, this is what scientists do; they observe closely what is going on. I wasn’t inside doing something habitual like cooking, cleaning, or depending on information online—I was finding out for myself. I noticed resistance coming on strong because I haven’t developed much confidence in being myself, in being natural, so new tasks seem impossible because I only see things I don’t know, and so much to do, rather than a new area to discover and bring myself into.

As I sketched the moon that night, all kinds of nagging voices emerged, those whining children saying,  “You should be somewhere else,  go inside, it’s cold, your sketch isn’t good enough, hurry up, it’s taking too long, what’s the point?” I decided not to listen and continued sketching.  I found out I could draw all those flatlands that I saw through my binoculars by associating them with a shape. So the upper right looked like a horse and bit by bit I created a fairly accurate sketch.

I started thinking that I really like being out here, in the crisp cold, sketching the moon. The way to know what’s important in a person’s life is by asking them what they do with their time. How do I know what’s important in my life, I thought? By measuring the time I spend doing the things I do, I answered. Cooking as a career used to be very important to me. Making things perfect according to some old, rigid, familial, God knows what idea, used to be important to me. They aren’t anymore. Moon watching is important, and that’s refreshing. How many women or girls do this?  How many mothers take their daughters outside at night and watch the moon?

I am connecting this with being a woman, because although my parents considered education very important, as a child, I didn’t spend my weekends learning how to use a compass, or make up mini-science projects, watch the moon or look through a telescope. I spent my time cooking with my mother—a great thing to do, for sure, but not something that will advance women’s typical conversations or the role of women in the sciences. On a grander scale, what are parents teaching their children? How do parents spend family time together? 

If we as a culture want to advance technologically, and impress on our youth that care and responsibility for the natural world is in everyone’s best interest, then all our students, especially the girls, need to be exposed to hands-on science activities and experiments from a young age.  Fortunately, science teaching has been moving in this direction for a while now and it’s exciting to learn about approaches such as project based learning and expeditionary learning.

My experience with watching the moon is showing me the potential of this kind of learning. When we go outside the lines we’ve drawn in our lives—our habits, expectations, and opinions—to really look closely at the world around us, great things can emerge: responsibility, care, growth, confidence, and optimism. It starts with a willingness to try something new and a commitment to seeing it through. How will I as a teacher support my students in going beyond what they think they know about what is important? How will I continue to challenge myself to do the same thing? These are important questions for me as an educator—and for all of us—to engage with as we push into new ways of living in this magnificent world.

Catherine, Campbell, and baby Milo

This is the last segment of Victoria’s exploration of Ahalani through an interview with the homeowners. Click here and here to listen to both parts of the interview in their entirety. Read Part 1 and Part 2.

After I had spoken to Campbell and Catherine about the 7 principles that guided them through building Ahalani, I asked them about their daily experience of living in it.  I wanted to find out what their lives are now like since its completion.  I wanted to know about the sense of accomplishment and breakthrough that they experienced.  So toward the end of the interview, I asked them.

Since you’ve finished building and have lived here for six years, how has this house changed your life?

Here are their responses, separately because Catherine was caring for their son Milo when I asked:

Campbell: Every day I wake up and live in this house. We were living in a one bedroom apartment in NYC…it was tight quarters and tight living and that was fine. But there’s something that opens up your whole life when you have a belief, or you have a complaint that’s been going in your head for so many years—I can’t stand it, why do they build this way? Why do people live this way? The energy scare, and on and on and on. And finally…we were just going to buy something, anything to just get out of the city…[then] we found a vacant lot and this whole idea of building came in, and we thought oh, we’re going to build a house.

I can take all these complaints I’ve had in my fifty years of life and I can build the dream home that I want.  I even wrote poems and songs about living in someone else’s dream.  You know, that’s what it is, wherever you’re living, you’re living in somebody else’s dream….So, what if you were to build your own dream, would you copy what somebody else did? Would you go back those three generations and borrow from what you thought was wise and good, home and comfy, so you’re just perpetuating the past? What are you going to do?

Bill Chaleff was beautiful about this because he has a whole way of working as an architect.  He doesn’t begin with here’s a box house, where do you want your rooms? Where do you want your bedroom? [Instead], he began with, what’s your personality like? When you get up in the morning, what do you like to do?

[So I asked myself different questions] what would be healthy? Am I just going to go by my past? when I wake up now, What do I do? Well, first thing I do is I look for light….I want to sit down in a warm spot in the winter with a cup of coffee and the newspaper…Now I can say, how can I do that?  And that’s not going back to, well, I used to have a kitchen that had this nice area… No, I’m saying, that’s what I like.  I like to see the sunrise.  To me that’s the magical hour.  So, it’s part of the name of this house, Ahalani—house made of dawn, and some of the magic that we created here.

The way this played out in the house design was that Bill Chaleff helped them incorporate their love for morning light, and a view of the lake into the direction they built their home.  He advised that rather than build the house due south to catch the maximum solar energy, they could face the house 12 degrees due East, and catch just as much sunlight, while also getting a view of the lake, plus a reflection when the sun hits the lake. Catherine really insisted on the view of the lake, while Campbell wanted maximum energy efficiency. She won and now they can sit at the kitchen table or be in their bedroom and enjoy the light streaming in. 

Catherine: When we first moved in, it was incredible to watch the sunrise upon just waking up. Being out in nature and being close to the water has improved our quality of life.  [The inside of the house wasn’t totally completed when we moved in, in March 2003], so we didn’t experience that fantastic feeling when you buy a house and everything’s brand new. The house has been completed in stages; we just finished the kitchen right before the baby was born last January. So before then we had a makeshift kitchen. We have been completing different parts of the house in stages.

Since they exceeded their original building budget by 60,000 (due to building mistakes/difficulties procuring good labor), they ran out of money for building the kitchen, framing the windows, and finishing other areas. They have completed one project at a time. I am truly impressed with the design and craftsmanship of their home.

Below are some resources to learn more about Ahalani and some of the materials and products it is built with:

• Ahalani: Living in Harmony with the Sun—A short film in 2 parts Catherine and Campbell made about building their solar home
• Renewable Energy Long Island (RELI) - each fall they organize a National Solar Tour, during which Campbell and Catherine have an open house of Ahalani.
• Bill Chaleff- architect of Ahalani, and many more energy efficient homes. member of the US green building council
• SIPS (Structurally Insulated Panels) - the walls of Ahalani.  A SIPS built home is three times as strong as a stick frame house and uses one-tenth the amount of wood.
• Silvaculture: Sustainable forestry program of the Menominee tribe, WI.  They have been sustainably harvesting lumber from the same land for 150 years.  They practice generational responsibility, that is gleaning the wisdom from the past three generations, looking at what can be done in the present (the present is considered to be the fourth generation) in order to plan for next three generations.
• Solar Laminate – roof panels are lined with a solar sensitive material, an alternative to installing a rack of solar panels on the roof.
• Broan Nu-Tone Guardian plus air fresh exchange unit- exhausts indoor air, sucking in fresh outdoor air, which is filtered and heated before entering the house.

Storage under stairs to loft

Today is Part 2 of Victoria’s exploration of Ahalani, an owner-designed and built eco-friendly home in Long Island. Read Part 1 and Part 3.

Campbell and Catherine served as general contractors for the building of their home, Ahalani, with Catherine directing the building for the last several months when Campbell returned to his teaching position. In the process of researching, designing, and building, they found 7 primary challenges in constructing their home. These principles highlight the interconnectedness of the whole house into an integrated whole.

#1: Energy Efficiency
Energy Efficiency is made up of several elements that are integrated into a dynamic energy system. 

• Passive solar energy which enters through south facing windows, letting in solar light and heat during the day. 
• An air tight building structure to trap the passive solar energy within its walls. They achieved a tight seal through using SIPS (Structurally insulated wall panels) wall construction and Anderson windows. SIPS panels are efficiently manufactured and utilize trash wood (sapling trees) from sustainably managed forests.
• Thermal Mass: The heat, both passive solar and geothermal is stored in their concrete slab floor and 22 ft. high, painted concrete wall. These two components are the core of the house, storing heat. 
• Active solar system: the roofing panels are laminated with a solar cell material.  Each cell absorbs solar energy autonomously, regardless of shadows or snowfall.
• Geothermal heating/cooling system, with a Desuperheater heat exchange unit. Also, a fireplace will potentially contribute heat in winter.
• Air Circulation: An air exchanger continuously circulates air, flushing stale air out of the house and bringing in fresh outdoor air.  A heat exchange unit on it warms the air coming in and a HEPA filter traps microscopic particles.
• Insulation: SIPS wall panels, at 4” thick provide the equivalent insulating power of a 6” conventional stud wall, and they are also airtight because they’re manufactured as one piece.

I know all this may sound complex, but it’s really not. In learning about the components that make up an energy efficient home like Ahalani, I am becoming aware of all the requirements needed to live healthfully indoors.  It’s not so long ago that the term sick building syndrome was coined.  Now we know more than enough to create modern, indoor living spaces, using more human ingenuity than natural resources.

#2: Affordability
There’s a commonly held misconception that you must be wealthy to afford building an energy efficient solar home. Campbell and Catherine agreed to hire Bill Chaleff as the architect for Ahalani under one condition; that it cost no more than $100/ft2. They designed a house that would cost a total of $110,000. However, due to unforeseen rise in costs, it wound up costing $135/ft2. They’ve come up with 4 C’s, learned as a result of building to educate other homeowners:

• Cost of labor: Labor costs change over time, that has to be accounted for.
• Change: After something is built, as the homeowner you may realize that you want a feature, like a window moved maybe 6” over.  It costs more money to change it once it’s built.
• Corrections: The first framer on Ahalani built a stud door instead of a pocket door, which had to be fixed. He made other mistakes that totaled 25,000 to fix. Campbell had to absorb this in order to stay on schedule and get the house finished.
• Corruption: One subcontractor came with migrant workers who did not speak English. This created a lack a communication when one of the roof turrets was lowered. Also, the labor price that Campbell was billed was not what these workers received.

Campbell and Catherine emphasize searching for contractors who have integrity and who take pride in their work, no matter what. Overall changes in costs delayed the process and increased the price.  So the total cost in the end was $170,000. Still, considering that the typical home in Long Island costs upwards of 500,000, it seems to me that they did extraordinarily well!

#3: Environmental Friendliness
CFC bulbs are used throughout the house. Energy star appliances, eco-friendly fixtures, and a Climate Master geothermal pump were also bought.  Any material that subcontractors brought in was held up to this ideal.  Pressure treated lumber or anything that could potentially off gas was rejected. 

#4: Sustainability
Inspired by selective timbering practices of the Menominee tribe of Wisconsin, they cut down only the trees on their property required to build their home, reserving the trunk of the biggest Oak.  It now stands in the center of their home in the exact spot where it once grew. Also, the wood in the SIPS wall panels originate from sustainably managed forests.

They were attentive to the placement and type of trees planted around their home.  They kept deciduous trees on the south side which provides shade in the summer and when their leaves fall in autumn, lets the sunshine inside.  Coniferous trees live on the Northwest side which block winter storms.  There’s also a berm (mounded earth) located in front of the conifers acts which works with the conifers to redirect winter winds away from the house. 

They considered the tilt of the earth through the seasons in the house design.  The sun’s rays shift 47 degrees from June to December, that’s a lot of sun movement to play with. Campbell and Catherine note that with this information, anyone can design a house and yard that literally dances with the sun! 

#5: Mass Appeal
You don’t need to build a home that looks like a spaceship to achieve energy efficiency and eco-friendliness. Catherine and Campbell proved this point by hiding all the alternative sources and building something that includes old world charm like Queen Anne turrets, cathedral ceilings, and travertine tiles in the bathroom.  The main space is open and airy, yet there’s also spots to cozy up with a book and cup of coffee.

#6: Small but spacious, Mini but Mighty
They started with keeping the house footprint small (they could have legally built it a bit bigger all around), leaving more outdoor yard space.  More yard space in combination with building more windows that open up to it allows the feeling of spaciousness and openness while still being indoors. This design is in keeping with their philosophy of embracing nature, rather than wrestling with it. In comparison, a typical suburban home is built bigger, shrinking the yard space.  Homes are close to each other and homeowners keep their curtains drawn most of the time. This domino effect of design cuts occupants off from nature and discourages the feeling of space.

Indoors, they’ve employed strategies to fit lots of living into a small space.  So there are pocket doors which slide open and close, built-in shelving galore in the baby’s room, high ceilings to give an open sense of space, and repetition of windows to bring in light and give the illusion of space. For example, there are 6 windows in the baby’s room, and one of them looks out into the main living space which looks out a southern-facing window to the lake.

#7: A Healthy Home
We spend 80% of our lives indoors, so in thinking about what causes disease, what’s inside the home should be seriously considered. It’s imperative to choose building materials and household cleaners that don’t slowly poison indoor air. Catherine and Campbell made sure that the building materials they chose wouldn’t off-gas as they aged. So the composition of the concrete in their air radiant first floor doesn’t off gas; neither does the kitchen cabinetry. The paint has a low VOC level. They also have a policy of “shoes off” when coming inside to make sure that pesticide and herbicide residues don’t get spread around the rest of the house. They use no harsh detergents such as bleach or ammonia and a HEPA fresh air filter continuously exhausts stale, indoor air while filtering incoming outdoor air.

Tomorrow Victoria will share some of the resources Catherine and Campbell used in building their home.

Alahani in Long Island

This article is part 1 of an interview with Campbell Dalglish and Catherine Oberg, homeowners and builders of Ahalani, an energy efficient house in Long Island.  Below are my reflections about meeting them and taking a tour of their house. Read Part 2 and Part 3.

Late last year, I became interested in wind and solar power and I read that the New York City area is a good candidate for embracing clean energy technology, especially solar. I learned that the biggest deterrents to adopting renewable energy technologies are culturally conditioned ideas about land usage and what’s possible. Then I heard about a couple on Long Island who built their own energy efficient solar home and who enthusiastically educate others and thought Oh, I have to meet them and see this house!

Campbell Dalglish and Catherine Oberg finished building Ahalani, their Suffolk County, Long Island home, in March 2003. Ahalani is a Navajo word meaning “House made of dawn.” A few months ago I spent a Sunday afternoon visiting and interviewing them, learning about the process they undertook to build their sunny home: two years of research and design, choosing an architect to draw up plans, deciding to take on being the General Contractors themselves, and all the unknowns and surprises they encountered as they built.

I had never stepped foot inside an eco-friendly, sustainably built home before. I have visited an eco-built health food store, but never did I get a personal tour of a home intentionally built to incorporate so many different technologies built by the owners themselves. I knew this would be a treat.

Part of the reason Campbell and Catherine built the house is to demonstrate a paradigm shift that they want to see come alive in the world. And they share the entire process of building in their film: Ahalani: Living in Harmony with the Sun (watch their film here). Sometimes Catherine jokes that Campbell built the house just to make the film, because his passion to show others that it can be done is so strong. But really, they had spoken to many people who had high hopes of building green and then compromised in the end. They decided to follow through on their highest intentions and not compromise. The only items in the house built of conventional materials are the cherry wood kitchen cabinets and some oak railings.

Trees and lake in the backyard

Ahalani is a tall house, sitting behind a berm off the road. They mounded up the ground to create this earthen wall on purpose—it redirects prevailing Northwesterly winds in the winter from pounding the sides of the house. The layout of the grounds immediately struck me as different: where was the customary front lawn? Slate/Brick pathway? Plantings of boxwood and azalea that most suburban homes fall in step with?  I did see trees dotting the property and there is grass amidst them, but landscaping is not the focal point. The house itself is, nestled comfortably in its environment.

The house has two turrets on both sides of the roof in the Queen Anne style of Victorian architecture.  It seems bigger than nearby houses because it’s taller, but its footprint is actually smaller than homes in the area and it doesn’t have a basement.

Inside, the home is very bright and airy. Thirty-six windows and a laminated solar roof make up an integrated passive/active solar system. Their active solar system generates anywhere from 17-33% of their electricity needs, which are greatly reduced from typical construction due to the choices they made in building. Air is heated and cooled geothermally, then circulated through an combined system including an air radiant floor, plenum (a sealed off, insulated area), and air exchange unit. This air circulation system continuously cycles air from the floor and exits through openings at the top of their cathedral ceilings into the center monolithic wall.

All the lights are compact fluorescents; they’ve chosen energy star rated appliances. In the mid afternoon, as we stood inside talking, no lights were on at all, just the refrigerator and computer. They incorporated small but spacious techniques as beautifully demonstrated in their baby’s bedroom: shelves under a staircase lead up to a loft bed. Storage space is built in, so now they are gathering their outgrown city furniture and excess stuff for a tag sale. It’s just not needed anymore.

After I left that day I looked at the homes along the Long Island streets as I drove away. Ahalani really is different, I thought, when comparing it to the fortress-like suburban homes I passed. Most homes are built to protect from natural features, whereas Ahalani befriends those same features. Meanwhile it is beautiful, toasty warm inside and tastefully decorated. They did it! I slapped my steering wheel, excited. I can’t believe it, but they really did do it. Only after visiting Campbell and Catherine could I see what new housing construction could look like—an integrated approach of incorporating the wisdom of the past with an intention to create something better in the present in order to leave enough resources for future generations.

One week after I visited Ahalani, I shared my experiences at a Sunny Way meeting. After hearing my impressions of Ahalani, Megan said, “Oh, it’s an integral house! Today, we have more thought power than we do natural resources power, and it sounds like they took advantage of this fact to do something cool!” Very true, and it has a kind of aliveness or movement to it. In Ahalani, human thought and intention meet nature and physical reality in an elegant way, showing us what is possible. We can create energy efficient buildings that thoughtfully consider our needs and nature’s laws together under one roof.

image by cesar astudillo

Why is tutoring effective? I am finding out that tutoring helps kids understand difficult concepts by looking at them in a clear, straightforward way.  I try to supply lots of examples to kids when I’m explaining math concepts for example.  Tutoring also proves to a child that she/he can certainly learn well, but may just need extra time, repetition or a different method to understand material.

There’s many reasons why a child may need tutoring.  For some, English is not their native language. Others come from families that don’t value reading before bedtime. For others learning in a large classroom is too distracting. I have been a home tutor now for about two months and tutoring is showing me so much about the way children learn.  It’s also an opportunity for me to share what I know and develop relationships with children.

The missing link with all my students seems to be related to confidence and time.  A few of my kids who are just beginning to read or aren’t yet fluent are feeling around for their own voice and need someone to encourage them, or they need to learn how to choose appropriate books that are neither too easy nor too hard.  Two boys I have are scared of math.  A first grade girl isn’t very social at school and tells me that she doesn’t really speak to any other kids, an 11 year old wants a library card desperately.  They all need time with an adult who can explain concepts by using concrete examples.  I am finding out through tutoring that there’s a lot I can do to change these sad stories.

For one sixth grade boy, I spent about three sessions showing him how to translate verbal phases into algebraic phrases, and he found it fun to do.  He then wanted to know how to solve for x, but wondered why the variable wasn’t after the equal sign.  I actually realized how foreign and weird it may seem for a child to solve for x…I think it’s the first time that they have to solve a mathematical sentence where the final answer cannot be found on the right side of the equal sign.  He helped me realize how foreign it was, because he asked me why there was a number after the equal sign.  Once he understood how to look at an algebra problem, he could do the rest of the computation. Now he has confidence in his own abilities, and can recognize an algebra problem which he can build on. 

Reading with fluency—so the words flow—takes a lot of practice for a child.  I have four students of different ages who all need help becoming fluent readers.  Reading with fluency is an integral skill for children, so that they can approach any other subject and learn about it, and so they can read and follow directions.  What I am beginning to find out is that children really love being read to.  For them, hearing the sounds spoken with expression is very exciting and models how to translate letters into sounds.  Just this week, I was reading 101 Dalmatians to a 4th grader using paired reading, where we alternate reading pages.  At the end he asked if I would read the book again to him.  I was surprised.

Don’t his parents read to him? I wondered. Doesn’t he want to read for himself and develop a sense of confidence in his own abilities?

He really enjoyed the book and I could see that he was engaged when he expressed that he wanted to watch the movie afterward.  I could also see that he tries to act like a big kid, like his older cousin who is often in the apartment.  Then he showed me his evening bedtime book and it was too hard for him to read! That must be so frustrating for him.  This child may be preoccupied with growing up too fast.  Previously I had been focusing our sessions on math skills, but I’m seeing that he needs more help in literacy, so now, I’ll focus more of my time reading with delight to him and monitoring his reading.

One of the most important things I am learning is that the way I show up to these tutoring sessions really dictates how the children will concentrate and thus if they will emerge from our time confident in their own abilities, and motivated to try their best.  When I show up prepared and organize the time well, they respond with putting forth their best effort.  If I show up disorganized or start shuffling papers around, their attention and excitement wanes.  This observation is empowering because it shows me that they are mimicking almost whatever I do.  I have to take responsibility and rise to the occasion.  Moreso, it shows me that children really do want to learn, do want to be engaged, and do want to succeed. 

image by WTL photos

Early spring…an emergent time of year when plants wake from winter dormancy to soak up sunlight of longer days.  I walked around the house yesterday searching for signs of spring, finding perennial chives reaching up and up, bobby yellow primrose blooms peeking between downy leaves, and fleshy tulip shoots poking layered leaves through mulch.  I am excited for the spring bulbs especially.  I planted over 70 tulips and my Dad planted more than this in daffodils and crocuses.  When I purchased them last fall, they were on sale, so I got nearly twice as many as I had intended to plant.  I have visions of a sea of spring flowers, it’s almost time.

It’s also the time for checking all those leftover seed packets you may have stored, from last year’s garden. Better to check old seed than waste money buying new.  But are these seeds viable?  Some seeds last many years if stored properly.  Proper storage involves keeping seed dry and away from direct sunlight.  I have stored my seed in small Ziploc bags in the freezer, but now keep them in wine box on a shelf. Others store theirs in shoe boxes in a cool room.

How to test seeds
I have found that lettuce only lasts for two seasons, even though some websites say otherwise, whereas beans, arugula, morning glories, and Swiss chard seem to be indestructible.  Tomato seed is a mid range keeper. You can test the potency of your saved seed by doing a viability test with some paper towels, a gallon size Ziploc bag and about a week’s time. After gathering all seeds to be tested, here’s what to do:

• Place seeds in a double row down the center of a moistened paper towel.  I place about 10 of each variety within a small space on the towel.  I can fit 10 varieties on each towel, 5 in each row.
• Record name and amount of seed as your key.
• Fold edges over seed rows.  They’ll look like French doors.
• Spritz again and seal in a large ziploc bag. Put in dark place.
• Number of days till germination varies, but after about a week, check your seeds.
• Divide the number of seeds germinated by the total number for each variety.  This will give you a percentage of viability
• For seeds with a low percentage, plant thickly, for seed with a high percentage, plant thinly.

Last year I culled a lot of old seed and bought new, trying to be moderate in my seed order.  They’re so enticing, “Of course, I’ll have time and space to plant 8 kinds of lettuce! Sure…” but I don’t have the space, or the time to devote to a full-time garden.  What I do have is experience planting certain vegetables that we eat a lot of or neighbors are happy to accept: lettuce, tomatoes, pole beans and cucumbers.  Last year I successfully planted 4 months worth of lettuce!  I’ll do the same this year.  Lettuce is expensive in the supermarket, and a packet of seed is only 3 bucks!  With water and consistent weeding, homegrown lettuce is tastier and exponentially cheaper than store-bought lettuce. 

Here’s a list of high quality seed catalogs:

• Fedco Seeds: An education on seeds as well as purchasing
• Cook’s Garden: straightforward.  Seeds available throughout the Season
• High Mowing seeds: all organic seed, regionally grown in Vermont
• Path to freedom seed and plant exchange: regardless of the state of our world, our wallets or mood, plants keep on growing, hell bent on the sun!

Are you gearing up to start your garden?  Have some favorite varieties of seed or a helpful resource?  Please share in the comments.

image by yogasanft

The Brooklyn Green Team celebrated their 1-year anniversary last month.  They threw a party with prizes and speeches read from a Blackberry (so as not to squander paper!), and unveiled their new Superheroes video. Here’s what else happened:

The “Yes We Can” volunteer challenge was unleashed!
Participants commit to donating 3 hours of your time in three months to an organization of your choice. I signed myself up, not knowing exactly where I would fill my three hours, but a few days later, a neighbor called me to help her plan her vegetable beds at a nearby neighborhood garden/bird sanctuary.  So that’s where I’ll be.  I have been a home gardener for years, but have not really shared what I know and my overall interest with other active gardeners.  I hope to contribute my gardening skills, learn new tricks, and meet new people at this community vegetable garden, where all the food grown is donated to a nearby soup kitchen.

I wrote a letter to my congressperson:
Solar One and Community Energy were on hand to guide residents on options for building solar systems in the city and supporting wind power through their utility bill with Con Edison.  In my letter I nudged my congressperson to support pro-solar state legislation that would make solar power a more widely available clean energy technology for New Yorkers to choose for their homes. 

“Dalai Lama Renaissance”
I went to The Rubin Museum for the first time Last Sunday to see “Dalai Lama Renaissance”. It was a thought provoking, breathtakingly beautiful documentary about a gathering of forty of the world’s most cutting edge thinkers with the Dalai Lama in India.  The event was filmed in 1999, but the movie was not released till sometime in the last few years.  These participants, called the Synthesis Group, all intended to create some kind of strategic plan for changing the world, for addressing poverty, the influx of Chinese consumer goods worldwide, global warming…actually these problems certainly still exist today, but it seems to me that our outlook has started to change from viewing them as problems to seeing them as unfinished projects, or topics of possibility.

Since the movie was filmed almost ten years ago, I think dominant thought is overall still the same, “we have to solve the world’s problems,” but more of us already know that the biggest obstacle to changing is to be willing to change ourselves.  I know this because I have observed for myself the biggest obstacle to my own change is the way I interpret my life, the life I’ve created thus far, and my own potential for growth.  Also, most dramatically through this site, reading about the personal development articles and activism challenges taken on my Megan, Uli, Rich, Stella, Sarah, and so many others of you out there,  I see how much change has already occurred within almost one year since this site has been launched.  And I’ve seen every person I mentioned create ripples of transformation with each life they’ve touched.

Starting with ourselves is what this film highlights, although after each of us can consciously push our egos out of the way when we come together collectively, then I do think that we can make straightforward, large scale decisions.  Five friends and I went to see this movie. I was especially inspired and softened by the love shown between the Dalai Lama and Brother Wayne Teasdale. Here’s how it positively impacted my small circle:

• My friend Jennifer said that her spiritual batteries were recharged as a result of watching the film.  She now plans to attend an upcoming talk by Susan Salzberg on The Science of Positivity, part of the Brainwave exhibit at The Rubin Museum.  Another friend, Siobhan ran off to an Oscar Party, but later admitted that she thought of the movie all throughout the rest of the evening.
• The movie brought to my attention the power of forgiveness.  The Dalai Lama harbors no resentment to China and they kicked him out of Tibet and killed thousands of Tibetans fifty years ago.
• I told my mother about the movie and we had a beautiful conversation about spiritual experiences.  She told me about a powerful presence of communion she felt a few years ago while at mass one Sunday.  I told her about my own spiritual experiences and gently asserted that my search for faith looks different from her Catholic religion, but is no less authentic.

“Dalai Lama Renaissance” will be showing through this, Sunday March 1st. The last showing on Sunday will be introduced by the Dalai Lama’s representative in New York.  They are also showing their second annual Brainwave exhibit, an exploration into how mind and matter meet.

Talking Their Way Into Science

Why do the leaves change color? How did the moon begin? Why are blood veins different colors? Will we ever be able to live on another planet?

These are some of the questions that Karen Gallas, the author of Talking Their Way into Science, asks her first and second grade classes as an integral part of their science curriculum.  This book was required reading for one of my education classes last fall and a jumping off point to conduct a science talk with some neighborhood children.

As part of a class assignment, I asked three neighborhood kids to participate in four science talks, using questions from the book as examples.  Three students, 5th grader Helen, 4th grader John, and 4th grader Solomon, my next door neighbor, wanted to participate (I’ve changed the names for privacy).  Helen and John are siblings and attend Catholic school; Solomon attends public school.

What are Science talks?  Science talks are discussions, formally scheduled, where students inquire into general, open-ended questions together.  Ideally the focus of the talks is on how children respond to a question, not on answering correctly, or being right or certain.  The point is for children to co-construct their ideas, to take risks expressing themselves, to disagree and to learn how to respectfully listen to their peers.  Science talks are about acquiring a discourse.  A discourse is an ongoing conversation. Acquiring means to possess through one’s own efforts. Questions are often created by the children themselves.

The author started these talks because of her own inquisitive itch, “How do young children talk about science?” She wanted to, “explore the language children naturally used before they had had much exposure to ‘school science’ ”.  She found that all students are naturally equipped to engage in scientific inquiry and that unfortunately, conventional schools often train “those natural abilities out of children.”

I agree—from my experience with the children I observed, children are naturally curious and will entertain all possibilities for the natural processes they see.  At our first meeting, I really didn’t know what to expect. I was nervous because I hoped they would like the whole idea of it. They were nervous too as the siblings didn’t know Solomon and vice versa.  At first they looked at me more than one another.  “Oh no”, I thought, “they’re supposed to be looking at each other.”  I knew this was normal, after all I had asked them to come, what did I have in store for them anyway?  So when I noticed this again later from Solomon, I told him to ask his peers instead. 

I was excited to listen to what they said, to see how they would talk about the questions, and to see how they would speak to each other.  I asked them 2 questions at each session and noticed that sometimes when they paused for a while or showed blank stares, I would help them, re-explaining it or making connections with what I thought might be prior knowledge for them.  I noticed that it was challenging for me to remain the silent, observant, non-intervening teacher.  This is what Gallas says is the excruciating part for teachers; we have to learn to let children talk it out, disagree, and build ideas between each other, yet also spotting misconceptions and rectifying those.

Helen especially had tons to say about every question.  When I asked if they thought we will ever be able to live on another planet, they spoke about Mars, The Tower of Terror ride at Disney World, and string theory. 

Solomon said, “The only way to live on another planet in the future is if we make a big balloon of oxygen and transport it to another planet to live inside.”

Then I asked, “Could we live in a different galaxy?”

Helen stated confidently, “I bet we could live in another galaxy.  But I’m not sure if anyone wants to spend their entire life trying to find another galaxy.”

By the third meeting, I asked them how they liked these talks because I noticed that here it was, 10:30 a.m. on a Saturday morning and they looked bright eyed, and seemed to anticipate what question I would ask them next.  Would it be about planets, or plants or the color of their blood in their veins?  The siblings said that they enjoyed coming and they would otherwise be lounging at home in bed watching cartoons.  Helen noted that she kinda liked getting up early and her brother agreed.  Solomon said that he liked coming and his mother told me over and over how much he loved the talks and that he couldn’t wait to come back the following week. On the last day that I saw them, Solomon and I had a second talk, just he and I, about his mother who was very pregnant at the time. 

“Its twelve days before the baby comes out.” He drew a picture of the baby. “Yes the baby is a boy, [she showed me] the first amnio pictures and the baby looked a little bit blurry, and it was hard to tell what the baby was at all.  On the second picture [which] is called an ultrasound, on the second amio, the picture was clearer, and I could see the head as separate from the arm. And it’s definitely a boy.”

I was impressed with his vocabulary and with his interest in comparing the clarity between the pictures.  It was tremendously important for him to express these findings to me.

The experience of these talks shows me how people can learn from each other so passionately and so openly.  I am noticing how pre-occupied I can be with knowing information, being right, having the answers, having and exerting control.  But lately this has become so boring to me. When did I forget the joyful spark of being inquisitive?  I am grateful for noticing as this is the first step for me to act differently.

I can understand why some children may find science boring, if it’s just another textbook to read or they may not have ownership over the activities they’re engaged with, if they don’t talk about their questions and observations.  The process of talking about an idea in a focused way seems to be an effective method not only for acquiring familiarity with a discourse for children, sure,  but for us adults,  It keeps us continually curious in newness and listening to each other. Gallas emphasizes that through reading her transcriptions of the talks,  it’s the children’s voices that resonate with us, “The tremendous potential for complex thinking that they embody when spaces are made for them to act in concert…”

Tomorrow, January 31, there will be a combo celebration/education event promoting sunny solar power!! The Brooklyn Green Team will celebrate, “One year of Action” at Bar Reis in Brooklyn.  Other environmental organizations will be present including Solar One which will be set up to educate guests on why NYC is a prime candidate for building a solar power system with Photovoltaics (PV).  They will be explaining their legislative initiative to make NY the region’s solar capital and will be set up for you to write letters to your legislators straightaway.

Last week, I attended an event about Solar Power organized by the Metro NYC Environmental Meetup group.  It was held at Solar One where Chris Neidl presented a thorough investigation of the reasons why NYC is a prime location for generating solar power.  NYC uses more energy than some developed countries.  We also use energy intensely and creatively for all kinds of artistic, innovative endeavors.  So, we need a better type of electricity to power our urban culture.  There are so many characteristics that make NYC a good candidate for going solar.  Here’s a list of a few of them:

• New York is 65% sunnier than Germany; currently the # 1 producer of solar power from PVs. If they can do it so can we.
• NYC has an abundance of flat surfaces— roofs! for installing PV panels
• Generating our own energy within the city limits could greatly reduce our drain on the regional energy grid during times of peak use-the summer, and so decrease blackouts.
• We use the greatest amount of energy (in summer) when the sun is shining brightest.  By installing PV panels on our rooftops we could be generating power right when we need it most—creating synergistic events!
• The price of PV technology continues to decrease with increased acceptance.  Part of the price includes labor costs and this decreases as installers become more efficient and knowledgeable with each installation.
• PV technology would displace building generators (kick in during times of peak energy demand) which create lots of particulate matter, contributing to smog, which exacerbates asthma.  Going solar would clean up our air and our children’s health.

In this video, a group of tenants share their story of how they went about putting solar panels on their Manhattan apartment building.  It’s a great example of a group working with NY State legislators to expand government incentives for solar power to a greater section of the population.  For more information on the New York Solar Initiative, click here.

How cool would it be to let the sun power the city that never sleeps?

image by dtcchc

The Concert for Peace has been an annual New Year’s Eve event at St John the Divine Church for 26 years.  The concert was started by Leonard Bernstein in 1983. This year, to commemorate his ninetieth birthday, three excerpts of pieces from West Side Story were chosen to be performed.  My friend and I sat behind the orchestra in old wooden pews carved for individual sitters.

The concert was a beautiful combination of musical performances and spoken word to reflect on for 2009.  Religious leaders from all different faiths spoke briefly on themes of peace, trust, and truth. Harry Smith, one of the Cathedral’s trustees, emphasized that we evaluate our values. He suggested that in these financially difficult times ahead, it would be wise to turn away from trust in things to trust in each other.

Words about truth from Rabbi Jill Hausman struck me in particular. Each person has their own unique truth, she said (and I’m paraphrasing) that is true, but we have to ask ourselves if we are willing to lay down our own truth in order to listen to someone else’s, in the interest of peace between each other. What this brought up for me was the idea that unless we create peace and harmony, we cannot continue to develop. Although tension and strife can cause growth, we are at a point now where our separations are stifling our attempts to build a new world rather than supporting them. It’s time to come together on a higher, deeper level.

This past holiday season, I received a Christmas card from my aunt with a lion and lamb lying down together on the front with a background of blooming red flowers. Most of us have probably heard this phrase or seen the Peaceable Kingdom paintings of Edward Hicks. Both the phrase and paintings are based upon this passage in the Old Testament: Isaiah 11:6, “The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.” Now, it’s obviously not meant to be taken literally, but as a metaphor for harmony between people, cultures, and ideologies.  Establishing harmony is necessary between us if we are going to collaboratively create a new culture, those varied blossoming red flowers. Of course we have come a long way, but we still face subtler forms of intolerance such as excluding certain groups based on values that are dissimilar rather than what we commonly share and value.

“Somewhere” was one of the songs performed during the concert.  Although this song was composed in the context of two warring immigrant gangs, the Jets and the Sharks, this dream to live in a place of tolerance and harmony is a sentiment we can all relate to. We have made great strides since the Civil Rights Movement of the 50’s and 60’s, and although we have much left to do, today I listen to this piece and think about the hope I have in creating my own life according to my highest principles, rather than borrowed beliefs and interpretations that may no longer be relevant.

How does his song inspire you? What are the meanings that this duet brings to mind? Please share your thoughts below.

image by AlbySpace

What began as a simple question—Hmm…I wonder if Greendisk would recycle my spent lithium ion laptop battery?—led to a nearly two-hour phone conversation with Greendisk’s enthusiastic and visionary CEO, David Beschen. I found out much more than I had anticipated. Greendisk is organized in a way that cooperates with existing businesses and non-profits to make electronic waste recycling a seamless last step in the life cycle of techno trash—computers, VCR’s, laptops, cell phones, CD’s, peripherals, VHS tapes, batteries, etc.

Besides answering my question, David explained to me how Greendisk puts the spotlight on the first “R” of the Waste Hierarchy (Reduce), and has created a structure to handle discarded electronic waste while not creating anything material. Greendisk accepts a large variety of techno trash, the most extensive list of any e-waste recycler in the US.  They are skilled at directing this trash from individual and commercial sources to be sorted and consolidated into component parts.

Volume is the key word in recycling. Recyclers won’t take “handfuls” of e-waste from you or me—they deal in truckloads. So Greendisk serves to consolidate a few computers here and a box of cell phones there into amounts that recyclers/remanufacturers will accept.

Greendisk acts as a liaison by preparing materials from individual consumers and corporations for resale to recyclers for the next step. Preparation entails destruction of any intellectual property and sorting into different components. The Lower East side Ecology Center (LESEC) sends all their media (floppies, CDs, zips, VHS tapes) to Greendisk which is how I heard about them. I sent 18 pounds of old VHS tapes, remote controls, and dead phones through the mail at the cheapest “media mail” rate through their Pack-It service. 

Greendisk bases their collection structure on rule #1 which is don’t make it if you don’t have to and select qualified people to do each task. Therefore, they do not have their own fleet of trucks to pick up the material. Instead they have a relationship with Fed Ex and USPS to pick up material at the end of delivery runs (as is convenient for them). This material is an end of life product, so it’s not time sensitive. It can be leisurely shipped. Available space on trucks is utilized with material that would otherwise be garbage, but is turned into a recoverable material instead. This is example of how Greendisk works to integrate systems: using underutilized resources. Materials are sent at an appropriately slow pace.

Who destroys all this personal data and sorts the stuff you may ask? Greendisk has eight depots (with plans to increase up to 25!) located throughout the country where materials are shipped. They are located near or at non-profit organizations that employ disabled individuals who are trained on destroying the data and sorting. They don’t necessarily do the work the quickest or most efficiently, but the work is done according to their needs, to create work, not automation, with existing resources.

Greendisk strives to understand the downstream customer. They seek to look at the whole agenda of an existing client and then adjust themselves to their client’s needs. This becomes the most efficient, ecological way to recover recyclable materials.

Movie/music/software companies are very important customers, too. Their need is to destroy prototypes and practice work as they evolve through research and development. They need written documentation that media was destroyed, so Greendisk destroys all intellectual property, and the record becomes proof of proper disposal and recycling.

David Beschem has several more projects in the works. One is helping companies fund recycling bins through already established advertising budgets. In this way advertising can be linked to green pursuits. This visibility also functions to increase worker retention rates, as a growing number of employees consciously look for employers to participate in green practices. He also has been working with USPS to create a “green rate” which would be the cheapest rate of all, to encourage consumers to send old media for recycling. He told me that there are 75 million VCRs sitting unused on garage shelves, and few recycling companies who will process them. But Greendisk does.

I was impressed with David Beschen’s excitement not only for recovering materials, but more importantly for linking existing groups of people in a ways that honors their respective needs and links them in a network that is mutually beneficial.  That’s the gem of what his team is creating.

I had the pleasure of reading My Side of the Mountain this past fall for an introductory science education class, and I fell in love with the world that Sam creates in the Catskill Mountains.

Sam Gribley, the thirteen year old hero, decides to run away from his cramped home in New York where he lives with eight siblings. He runs away to live a different life on land that his Great Grandfather Gribley owned in the Catskill Mountains 100 years prior.  Sam’s tenacity to make a life in the wilderness despite snickers and jests from adults is what is so attractive. Sam doesn’t let any bit of doubt or cynicism from others stop him. He figures out how to live off the land from prior knowledge, library research, from carefully observing animals and plants, and from friends along the way. 

I love Sam’s authentic willingness to share the life that he is manifesting with strangers he meets. One day, Sam struts into town proudly wearing his homemade deerskin outfit, complete with rabbit underwear and squirrel lined moccasins. He meets a boy (whom he refers to as Mr. Jacket) who skeptically sizes him up, calling him Daniel Boone. But Sam’s excitement for his rugged inventions shines through so he invites Mr. Jacket to come visit, “Come on up to the Gribley farm and I’ll show you what I’m doing. I’m doing research. Who knows when we’re all going to be blown to bits and need to know how to smoke venison” (p.110).

Sam’s open invitation to come see a different life, a different way of living, reminds me of two recent messages, from spiritual teacher Andrew Cohen and food lover Alice Waters. They each invite us to evaluate our lives and choose to live with clear intentions for the good of all creation.

I heard Andrew Cohen speak at a retreat this past October.  He is the founder of Evolutionary Enlightenment, a spiritual path that combines the absolute freedom of being with the human desire to evolve. At one point he said that some newcomers think his teachings are elitist because he asks that we consciously focus on living from the best part of ourselves at all times, which he calls the Authentic Self. But he said, raising out his hand, what I’m asking all of you is to, “Come join us!”

Similarly, Alice Waters is asking us to change what we eat and our relationship to food into one that values seasonal organic vegetables.  Her Edible Schoolyard project is centered on teaching children by affirming what to eat, instead of what to avoid.  This experiment is focused on bringing children “into a new set of values.”

Sam becomes quite the chef as he learns how to make salt from hickory sticks and flour from acorns which he toasts and grinds. He also learns how to forage for edible plants such as jack in the pulpit, fashion a fishhook from whittled sticks and string, train a falcon (which he names Frightful) to catch small game, and even hollow out a hole in the base of a huge Hemlock tree for his home. Here is where he stores his food, builds a fireplace, entertains guests, and watches the long, cold winter. 

He understands the importance of experimentation and when to do research first.  Therefore he takes occasional trips to the nearby town library where he befriends a librarian. She helps him find the whereabouts of the Gribley farm from old maps, letters, and local histories. She also cuts his hair so he’s less likely to be noticed by townspeople.

Sam learns from a variety of sources, and later reflects on the value of nutritional advice from his mother when he intuitively senses that he is lacking vitamins in late winter. He honors his body’s attraction to liver and eats his fill of rabbit that Frightful catches. In retrospect he notes that, “hunger is a funny thing. It has a kind of intelligence all its own…I am not surprised to find that liver is rich in vitamin C. So are citrus fruits and green vegetables, the foods I lacked ... As it turned out liver was the only available source of vitamin C—and on liver I stuffed, without knowing why” (p.143).

Towards the end of the year that he lives in the woods, Sam meets Matt Spell, an aspiring teenage reporter who is trying to find the “Wild Boy” that has been described in local newspapers. Sam doesn’t admit who he is, but acts like he’s met him. The two talk for a while, and Sam roasts a rabbit for them. Sam expresses his desire to create a different life when he tells Matt, “I ran away once because…well because I wanted to do something else.” His clear vision juxtaposes the victim-based reason that Matt shares, “…I ran away once because I thought how sorry everybody would be when I was gone” (p.155). 

The author, Jean Craighead George grew up learning about the animals and plants in the Potomac woods near her family’s home in Washington D.C. Her father was an entomologist and showed her and two older brothers all the wild animals and plants. She has written over 100 children’s books, inspiring several generations to study environmental science. I am amazed at the passion that she has continued to bring to children’s literature in her nearly ninety years of life.  Click here for an audio interview with her from 2007. 

I think Sam lives in all of us when we follow our inner greatness and pursue the inklings of a new way to live.  Have you read this book?  Please share something that you love from the book or how it has inspired you.

image by wildxplorer

The Climate Change exhibit at the Museum of Natural History is currently on display and I encourage everyone who can make the trip to see it to do so. A few weeks ago, I went to learn as much as I could about it. It was very informative, with plenty of interactive exhibits and two short movies.

The exhibit is straight forward and scientific. It clearly presents the evidence supporting the existence of climate change, going into great depth on how the rate at which we are burning fossil fuels has thrown off the balance of the carbon cycle. The carbon cycle is pretty amazing, a checks and balance system between several reservoirs of carbon: the atmosphere, the land (plants and soil), sedimentary rock, the ocean and fossil fuel reserves. Through burning fossil fuels (essentially, burning history) we are releasing a greater proportion of CO2 into the atmosphere that has to be absorbed by the other reservoirs.  The perspective represented in the exhibit doesn’t place blame on humans, but does put the pressure on us to figure out clean ways to generate energy.

The first room of the exhibit shows the historical context for understanding climate change.  There’s a graph, against 2 long walls showing the upward clime of atmospheric CO2 from 1600 till the present, expressed with a red, neon line against a backdrop of images from western civilization’s great technological advances.  As we have evolved, the amount of atmospheric CO2 in ppm—parts per million—has kept pace. Burning fossil fuels for the last 400 years has caused a higher concentration of CO2 molecules in our atmosphere, not seen for at least 800,000 years. 

I was shocked, then hopeful, when I read a few brief sentences about Europeans who in the 16th century had exhausted their main source of fuel, wood, and started mining for coal. Many were hesitant to make the switch from wood to coal because it was dirty and because craftspeople saw that it burned differently than wood and so altered the way in which they had to technically produce their goods, such as bricks and glassware.  But they adjusted in order to continue to build their economies and thrive.  When I read that at the exhibit I was so surprised, after all Europeans at this time had weathered recurring waves of the Black Death, the last major bout in London ending in 1666.  This population was no stranger to suffering and death, so why the hesitation to change? 

The center of the exhibit shows the multitude of effects that climate change is having on the atmosphere, land, sea, and polar ice caps.  Also, there are several examples of how some societies are adapting to changes such as flooding and drought. To adjust to flooding, Tokyo has built a system of tunnels to handle overflowing rivers, floating homes are being built in the Netherlands, and rural Bangladeshis are building floating garden beds on top of bamboo rafts that stay afloat during heavy Monsoons. 

There’s an interactive wall called “making a difference” which shows all kinds of actions an individual can take to contribute to reducing CO2 emissions. Viewers are invited to push a button in support of an action they are committing to do.  These actions fall into categories such as getting around, eating and drinking, and raising awareness. One critique I have is that the raising awareness category is vague and uninspired, when this is the most important category in terms of getting each of us to actually be proactive in changing our habits and getting involved in taking action.

The last room shows several wall displays of renewable energy technologies that are in the process of replacing outdated conventional energy means. We have to start with the technology that we have right now, even though it’s expensive. The technology doesn’t have to be perfect, because over time, as we implement solar, wind, geothermal, improved nuclear, and wave energy, more will be learned and advances made.

Back in the very first room, there’s a miniature model of the first steam engine that was invented, called the Newcomen engine. This first one was very inefficient but was improved tremendously fifty years later. Just like the Newcomen engine, we have renewable energy technologies available that may not yet be perfected, but we have to implement them first in order to get the ball rolling.

Developing a new energy plan is the most important culture shift that we have to focus on. Today, we have the opportunity to embrace change. According to the exhibit:

Though there’s no single approach that will dramatically reduce emissions, we can meet this challenge through a combination of actions…If we continue “business as usual” and do not reduce CO2 emissions worldwide, growing global populations, economies and energy demands will push emissions to new highs…On this course changes to Earth’s climate would be dangerous. If we reduce annual global CO2 emissions to where they were in 2000 by the middle of this century, we can prevent Earth from warming more than 2.0°C (3.6°F) above preindustrial temperatures…On this course changes to Earth’s climate would be manageable.

And I bet that we could do better than manageable, if we really put our brains and energies into it, maybe we could bring the level of CO2 down dramatically.

Resources Toolkit
I encourage you to look at these sites below for current plans for clean energy:

• The Solutions are Waiting: An interactive video about the effects of climate change and new energy solutions that emphasizes behavior change as one solution to get us back on track! It shows how multiple forms of energy are required to shift our energy dependence away from fossil fuels. 
• Pickens Plan: Founder and chairman of BP capital Management, Pickens has a plan to build wind turbines throughout the Midwest in order to free up natural gas as fuel for light truck transport.
• The Hot Spot: article on reasons why people don’t do more about global warming
• Into a Warming World: A review on the 2009 edition of State of the World
• Why Clean tech Investors Haven’t Panicked: article on how forward thinking cleantech investors will move the American economy forward
• UN Climate Change Conference: Going on now, from Dec 1-12, 2008
• 3TIER: a forecasting company that maps out which renewable energy source is best for particular parts of the world based on unique weather patterns and climate conditions.
• 1Sky: Tell Obama we need clean energy, not clean coal.

Victoria’s homegrown garlic

Most of us have noticed that the arena of locally grown food has been developing rapidly and attracting more and more people. These days, a straightforward vegetable garden is the tip of the iceberg. There are all different types of gardens; backyard, raised bed, rooftop, window boxes, community garden plots, urban farms, and school gardens.

There are the how local can you go types of challenges, like the ultra serious Dervaes 100 foot food challenge.  Even president-elect Barack Obama will have the opportunity to build an organic farm on the White House lawn through the WHO Farm project. I can’t wait for that day to happen!

The potential of seriously growing food crops in urban and suburban settings represents the next shift in food production. Gardens are excellent learning tools for children, bring people together, and feed people healthy food. Food miles are decreased, built landscapes are enlivened, and wildlife, especially insect species, are offered new habitats. We can create a new community of life by reinventing the land surrounding preexisting homes and infrastructure. 

Gardens are easy to neglect because gardeners usually do it as a hobby rather than as if their lives depended on it. What would it be like to take a household garden seriously, like you mean business instead of something to fall back on in the summer between supermarket or even farmers market trips? What if more of us spent a larger chunk of our time growing our own food by utilizing the assorted tools, methods and know-how that has developed over the last 30 or so years from the organic farming, urban gardening and permaculture movements? 

Homegrown lettuce

This summer, my goal was to grow a constant supply of lettuce and keep up consistently with garden maintenance. I have usually started with high hopes, then after planting, have assumed that I can sit back and relax. The bulk of the effort in gardening, as in most things, is at the beginning when everything has to be planted as soon as the earth warms.

Now, it’s November and I wonder: Is it wiser to start with a small garden and increase from there each year, or to set your sights very high and get inspired by the sheer abundance that the garden produces figuring out how to use the produce as you go? Setting high expectations with a willingness to be flexible seems the way to go. Maybe the only way to glimpse gardening as a viable way to produce more of our food in our future is to jump right in and find out.

I’ve seen and heard of farmers and gardeners who did not prepare for how they would handle and process their harvests. Tomatoes are a prime example. Tomatoes ripening on a vine branch will not wait for when we are ready to pick them. They have their own clock. The consequences may be that a lot of them rot, time was wasted in planting at all, or somebody had to step up and make some sauce.

Being challenged drives us to come up with new solutions, whereas if we choose to be negatively affected by the enormity of something, we will probably collapse. This positive tension brings us closer to others; often the only way for us to develop new solutions is by asking others to contribute their energy and expertise. This amazes me with hopefulness. Isn’t it funny that most of us have no clue as to the enormous potential that is waiting to explode if we tap into it? It’s similar to our own human capacity; we don’t know the strength of our bodies or the capacity of our minds to devise solutions till we test them out.

Homemade sauce from homegrown tomatoes

So this summer, I did set my garden sights high and I grew some new varieties of veges. But I also did fall short in consistently maintaining my garden. That was my biggest challenge; planting on time, weeding, harvesting and pruning. This shows me the gap between my highest ideals and my actual level of commitment. It also shows me the staggering potential of a small plot of land. And this potential is exciting to me as it is to many other Americans.

Planting a garden is only part of the responsibility. Harvesting vegetables when they are at peak ripeness and storing them correctly is just as important. In the last two months I have been busy preserving garden produce: pears, tomatoes, figs and lettuce. I harvested every day and preserved in small batches.

I referred to Putting Food By for advice. Through this process, I inspired a couple of novice gardeners to expand their own gardens and was able to feed friends, family and strangers too. Below are some examples of how I creatively wove various threads of my life together by preserving the harvest.

• First, I combined time spent repetitively peeling and slicing our hard neck garlic harvest (that started to rot in September) with listening to Ken Wilber’s Kosmic Consciousness talks. Hard neck varieties of garlic are not good keepers, but are big on flavor. Years ago, I learned from farmer Elizabeth Henderson that a simple way to adjust to this characteristic is to chop up the heads, pack them in small jars covered with olive oil, and freeze. Then move the jars to the fridge as you need. Although an initial investment of time, it makes for quicker cooking later on. Stepping back, I saw that all this chopping while listening to Ken Wilber’s integral theory could be understood from his AQAL model. This was a cross quadrant use of time, where I drew upon the upper right, exterior-individual (culinary intelligence), lower left, exterior-collective (agrarian), and upper left, interior-individual (intentions, spirituality).
• We could not eat all the lettuce I grew, so I gave it to a neighbor who delivers garden produce to a nearby soup kitchen called the INN- Interfaith Nutrition Network.
• Tossing out these purist ideals: only store in glass, never plastic, buy from small businesses, and pressure can.  Well, I visited my local, family owned hardware store, but they were not selling any large glass jars or earthen vessels. A few weeks later, I found the perfect sized glass jar at a Wal-Mart upstate. I bought it with reservations, but then decided that while it is good to have ideals, they shouldn’t cause me to waste time or be rigid about minutiae.  I started lacto fermented sauerkraut in it today. Some books to guide you in making your own lacto-fermented delights are Wild Fermentation, or if you’re making it with children, Bottle Biology clearly explains the fermentation process.
• Use what I have: Use all the jars and containers I already have:  glass jars, and plastic takeout containers, all good for freezing the harvest.
• Involved my family in the pre-processing preparation. My father was a big help trimming string beans, sorting beet greens and peeling garlic while he watched TV.
• Time Management: Breaking down big tasks of picking, sorting, cutting and blanching into size-able chunks, doing a little bit each day.
• Tailoring preserving to my time and space requirements. I decided not to pressure can, because I had small quantities of a variety of fruits and vegetables. I opted for freezing instead; tomato sauce, fig and nut conserve, frozen chard, frozen green and purple beans, peach jam, and basil pesto.  I poached the Bartlett pears; once in vanilla syrup and the second batch in red wine.  I gave these away as presents.
• Of course there is more to do: rotate my compost piles, dry calendula blossoms, and make parsley pesto for freezing.

Did you have an abundant harvest this past summer or enjoy preserving your harvest?  Please share your thoughts and ideas in the comments.

Composting in the garden

This is the third of three parts of Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne Clark of the Homecoming project and Sophia Garden. Read part one and part two.

VG: When did you decide to become a nun?

SJ: In 1958 at the age of twenty-one, I entered the convent. Before that I worked as a secretary in an advertising agency for three years.

VG: And you grew up on Long Island? Is that why you were saying you wanted to come home?

SJ: When I speak about “Coming Home” I’m really talking about coming home to Earth and the Universe. Actually when I first came into the understanding of myself as coming out of Earth and being so connected with Earth, I wanted to help others see this connection.

I wanted to do the work that I am doing now on the West Coast where I had spent five years. It was so beautiful there right near Seattle and in the midst of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. I thought of the people there as much more progressive. And to me at the time Long Island seemed like a wasteland of consumerism. I didn’t want to stay here.

But my congregation of Dominican Sisters wanted me to stay as did my friends and the people with whom I had been meeting and envisioning living life sustainably on Long Island.

Also Sister Miriam MacGillis who I had studied with at Genesis Farm reminded me that Long Island was my bioregion and needed my voice. And so I stayed. I have never regretted that decision. You can see the Long Island of the shopping centers and asphalt parkways where people speed about; but there is another Long Island—the Long Island of beautiful rivers, of the Pine Barrens, of the red-winged blackbird and Osprey. When you go to the places on Long Island where the human voice is muted, you can feel the soul of Long Island. I discovered that the land on Long Island was a community to which I belonged. These reflections make me think of something Thomas Berry said which I quote often: “There is no such thing as the human community. There is only the community of life of which the human is a part.”

VG: It is beautiful land and extremely fertile too. A friend of mine in my exercise class was sharing that she gardens around her cooperative. She lives in Oceanside, and noticed that everything easily grows. I told her that Long island has some of the richest soils in the country. The land is dotted with houses, but the soil is still rich. Do other religious individuals like you see the stewardship of the land as part of their calling?

SJ: Yes, there is an increasing number of religious who see Earth and human life as one sacred whole. But I would not use the term stewardship…

VG: O.K.

SJ: Because stewardship denotes…

VG: That separation.

SJ: Yes. Matter of fact in the Dominican order alone, there are many centers where this is happening. Genesis farm is one in New Jersey, Crystal Spring in M.A.; and the Sisters of Blauvelt have a farm in Goshen, N.Y., as well as the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill who have a mile of land along the Hudson. Many religious are aware that ecology and religion are all coming together.

VG: You also said that the nuns and Dominican Village residents have been affected.

SJ: Yes, now we have many retired sisters on the 3rd and 4th floors. They’re looking out their windows all the time telling me about the farm, and how beautiful it is, because this land was a farm long ago. So we’re going back to the history of this place also. And that’s another big piece of coming home to place. It’s another thing that I didn’t talk about that’s very strong in me, which is the whole understanding of coming home to your place. Wendell Berry the Kentucky farmer, is very strong on this because we have no sense of place.

VG: True.

SJ: We live in these virtual worlds. We have to come home to our place. When we located the garden here, we began to explore more of the history of this place. Our sisters came here in 1876, so we’ve been here since then on this land.

VG: That’s a long time.

SJ: And it was a farm. The land was leased to us because of our work with orphans. This part right around here (present 1.5 acre Sophia Garden where we are sitting under a tree) was the Stattel farm which we bought in 1953. So we’re now part of joining our history to the history of Long Island, where now the farmland is disappearing and we’re trying to say, “It’s valuable!” This probably is the most open space in the town of Babylon. I know that the Town of Babylon is about 95% developed. So this is a big open space within the town.

VG: We have all these new words now that are in our consciousness. We’ve got local, locavore, 100 mile dieters, and people are really getting into it. They’re canning, they bring their own bags. So people are embracing it on a superficial level, but I think that for many people, it’s more than superficial. Because they keep doing it and getting more involved. There’s more blogs, books, etc. So I think it is sticking but I wonder about Long Island. I mean, now the cost of transported food has increased and the cost of local food is actually on par or is less.

SJ: We have waiting lists for membership.

VG: So my underlying question is, how do you envision Long Island looking in say 10 or 15 years?

SJ: Well I think it’s a choice. You see Thomas Berry says it’s a choice and we’re at the crossroads of choice. He calls it the Technozoic Age or the Ecozoic Age. The Ecozoic Age naturally being the one where the human and the natural would go into the future as one single community. We’re ending the Cenozoic Age. This is historically correct. The Cenozoic Age has gone on for the last 65 million years and because of our technology, we are actually ending that age.

Sophia Learning Center

There’s a movie called, The Awakening Universe. There’s one particular scene of the dinosaurs, where the narrator states that the dinosaurs ended because of an asteroid, and then the scene changes to cars stuck in traffic on a highway, the narrator continues, saying things are ending now because of an “usteroid”. So we are in fact ending this era. The choice lies in where will we go? There’s nothing for sure. If our consciousness keeps going in the direction of the Ecozoic, we will create a mutually enhanced relationship with Earth.

VG: In terms of one issue, in terms of feeding ourselves, I think there’s plenty of space we can do that on, if we do it intensively, if we do it in our backyards and on public lands.

SJ: If we go into the Ecozoic, which I’m hoping for and working towards, then the lawns on Long island will be changed into vegetable gardens. Why have lawns when you need food?

VG: [Laughing] Right! A friend of mine has an idea to build curbside gardens, where children could pick fresh vegetables that are easily accessible.

SJ: Already the builders are trying to build self-sufficient villages, because we know we are going to run out of oil. Have you seen the movie, The End of Suburbia? It is a challenging film. The movie reveals the historical context of suburbia; it was built during a time when we had so much fuel and could drive anywhere, but now we know better and need to design villages where jobs and shopping are within walking distance.

VG: So we can embrace what we learned from the past.

SJ: Sure, because organic farming is not new. That’s the way people farmed before the chemical industry. After the Second World War was when the chemical industry blossomed.

VG: But hasn’t technology taught us a lot in the last 25-30 years?

Children drawing

SJ: Oh, well we wouldn’t have the new story without technology. We wouldn’t have the story of the universe. That’s what I teach children. I’m not against science. “Sr. Jeanne loves science”, I tell them. And I say that scientists are searching for the truth and they bring the truth to us. Science and technology brought us the photo of Earth. Just imagine, astronauts had to leave Earth to take this picture, so all of us could see our home.

And that has changed our consciousness. So technology is not bad. It’s the consciousness with which we use the technology.

VG: I did a search on Thomas Berry and he writes about his meadow experience.

SJ: Oh, yes when he was 11 years old. He learned an important truth taught to him by a meadow near his home in North Carolina.

VG: Yes, I read a bit on his website.

SJ: Sr. Joyce and I visited some schools in Brooklyn. We did some teaching there once a month. And when we taught the 9 & 10 year olds, we told them the story of the meadow. During his encounter with the meadow, he realized that, “Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good…Whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good.”

He wrote about that experience in his book, The Great Work. We told them that we all need to be involved in something bigger than ourselves, to be together in this work. We’re all involved in this Great Work, helping to save the planet and to make this world safe for all species. Just think, [we tell the students] Thomas Berry learned from the meadow when he was around the same age as all of you. Do you have that book?

VG: I don’t, but I may get a copy. His writing is very interesting.

SJ: I can loan it to you. I have a couple of copies.

VG: I’d love to read it.

The universe with sticks

This is the second of three parts of Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne Clark of the Homecoming project and Sophia Garden. Read part one.

SJ: It is a challenge. Things are changing. It’s all part of the evolution. We are becoming different people. We offer three children’s programs in the summer. A new group started today. The children learned about the story of the universe and how the universe came to be.

VG: Oh my, it’s so important that you are teaching children about the universe.

SJ: Yes. They find out where Earth came from and that we are part of Earth. The first thing many of the children do when they come to the garden is swat the bees and the ants. I tell them, “Oh wait a minute. We are outdoors now. This is where these creatures live. This is their home. The ants probably do a lot more work for Earth than we do. We leave them here; we don’t kill them.”

Then we teach them the Story of the Universe and how it came to be. They see how the humans enter late in the Story and how they are part of the WEB of life. So we are teaching people about Earth through Sophia Learning Center and providing certified organic food through Sophia Garden. These are the two projects of Homecoming.

I always say that this Garden is about more than vegetables. Although it is very important to be related to the land and to grow vegetables in a way that is good for the soil, the water system, animals and birds. All that is very important. But the transformation of human consciousness is what it’s really about. Earth is depending on the transformation of our consciousness to the new understanding that the human and natural world are one sacred community. I don’t know if you are familiar with the work of Thomas Berry.

VG: I looked him up, because I know you draw from his teachings.

SJ: Yes, we do a lot of teaching out of the work of Thomas Berry. We need to redefine the human; redefine who we are. That’s the first thing the children learn when they come here to Sophia Garden. I ask them when they come “Where are we?” It is very important to know where we are. I show them a map of Long Island and ask them some questions to see how much they know about Long Island.

Then I show them a photo of Earth and explore the fact that this is also where we are. This is our home. They usually tell me how we obtained this photo. An astronaut took it in outer space. We then share who shares this home with us. The children usually begin with naming all the humans, but eventually we get to the birds, animals, rivers, etc. I point out that we need to make sure that all of us, all humans and all creatures have a space to live here on our Earth home.

Then I show them a photo of the Milky Way. This is also where we live. There’s a photo of the Milky Way with an arrow that says, “You are here”. The children learn that we live in Earth which we share with all others living here, and we live in a cosmic world. I remember a quote of Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer, essayist and poet who said “You cannot know who you are until you know where we are.” Knowing where we are is part of redefining the human at this historic moment in which we live.

VG: I read an article recently in Enlightennext magazine. It was about the ongoing expansion of the universe. It hasn’t stopped. There are scientists who study where the outer reaches are and they know that it keeps going and expanding. And why would it stop? It created all of this and so much more.

SG: And its purpose is life. Everything about the Universe and Earth is for life. And we see that here in the Garden.

VG: In all of its complexity. In things we understand and things we don’t. I went to see Michael Pollan last week at P.S. 1. He is fascinating. He said so many thought provoking things. For example humans have 23,000 different genes, but rice has 50,000 different genes. It has been here longer and has been able to adapt to wherever it’s been grown. There’s wisdom there, it is consciousness.

I believe it is the same consciousness that humans abide in, it’s just that, the plant’s world seems foreign to human eyes. We have to study the world of plants in order to see its beauty and oneness with ours. Pollan referenced Joel Salatin, whom he doesn’t call a farmer, but a playwright. Salatin composes. He looks at what’s going on and then positions things in the right way. And it is just fascinating to see a farmer described like that. He’s more of a conductor.

Sunflowers

SJ: Absolutely. The real farmers are the microbes and worms. They are the orchestra and the farmer is trying to make all of this work in balance, that’s why the typical understanding that this is MY farm is a totally different emphasis. Sophia Garden as a CSA is made up of many people. You have the shareholders, the farmer, the core group, the Garden manager. We are all working together with of course the microbes in the soil, the sun, the bees and butterflies, the water. When the children come to learn about Earth, they learn that the microbes and worms are the real farmers. When we use chemicals, we kill them and create dead soil. When we plant vegetables in dead soil, we get dead food; food that has no nourishment.

VG: We are coming into a new mind. Right now we are in this transition. I believe that’s why there is so much friction going on and you can feel it.

SJ: Exactly. That transition is taking place right here at the Motherhouse of the Dominican Sisters. We embody both the new and the old mind. It has nothing to do with age, but with a way of thinking. We have sisters in their eighties who are right on board with the understandings of the new cosmology and the thinking of Thomas Berry. But when these thoughts were first introduced; even when the idea of Sophia Garden was first introduced, there was friction. That friction is still there at times.

I try to understand this friction and transition or transformation through the lens of Gandhian nonviolence. When I was resisting the Trident submarine on the West Coast we tried to practice as best we could this way of Gandhi, which is to say you are leaven in the community. You stay where you are and live your truth as deeply as possible. You live alongside of your opponent who believes another truth. You stand together living the truth you believe. You dialogue with and listen to your opponent; to the truth they speak. Eventually a new truth will emerge.

The Dominican Order has come through thirteen centuries always adapting to new thought and new ways. Here on this land we have a beautiful old building built in 1896 which represents the monastic tradition out of which we have come. And on the same land we have Sophia Garden and Learning Center representing a path into a new way of thinking and being. Naturally there is friction when you are going from one into the other. But there is also continuity.

I believe there is one consciousness. And we are all part of it. I think this is what Eckhart Tolle is talking and writing about. It is amazing how popular he is becoming.

VG: I know. He managed to get Oprah on board.

SJ: His whole teaching is that there is this consciousness and we just need to be present. And this is not new. This is in the tradition of many religions. It is part of the mystical tradition of the Catholic Church. It is part of the monastic tradition. In meditation and through spiritual practices we are meant to be stripped of our ego so that we can enter into our true self. I am beginning to understand that my true self is a larger self that is Earth. I am Earth conscious. Actually we teach this to little children in their language. For the very little ones we teach new words to Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.

We are stardust yes we are
We’re all made of stuff of stars.
Fish and animals, birds and bees
Plants and rocks and you and me.
We are stardust yes we are
We’re all made of stuff of stars.

We’re all stardust. We come from the stars and all the elements in our bodies were once inside of stars. We are all connected. We all Belong! It is so important to help people to know that they belong. Alienation is an illusion. We can’t be alienated. We belong to everything; Of course you can feel alienated. But when you enter into this consciousness, you know you belong to everything; you are one with everything. I believe this is what Jesus called the Reign of God. He said its right here; it is in your midst if you open your eyes and really see.

VG: I personally have chosen not to continue practicing Catholicism. Although I still consider the teachings of Jesus as Truth.

SJ: Many Catholics have along with people of other faiths. We need to rethink much of our language and ideas and interpret them in light of this new consciousness. The Story of the Universe is the context in which all other stories exist. Sister Margaret Galiardi, Adult Program Director for Homecoming has written a book called Where the Pure Water Flows: The New Story of the Universe and Christian Faith. In it she probes the new scientific understanding of the Universe and how it applies to an understanding of Christianity in the 21st century.

Actually this kind of work is not new to the Catholic Church. In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas took the science of Aristotle and theologized out of new understandings. Today feminist theologian, Sallie McFague, in her book, The Body of God joins body and soul, God and Earth when she suggests a model of God specifically for the sake of Earth. She challenges us to change our thinking by changing our image of God and think about Earth as the Body of God. If we did that it might help to change our destructive behavior toward Earth.

Sister Jeanne with children

Sophia Garden is a 1½ acre certified organic farm in Amityville, Long Island. It lies on land owned by the Dominican Sisters of Amityville. Towards the back of their property is the farm, a colorful, lively area of vegetables, flowers, tool and harvest sheds. In late 1996, the Sophia Garden was started on a section of the Dominican sisters’ land that was an orchard in years gone by. The farm produces organic vegetables within the CSA model of agriculture that joins suburban families with locally grown organic produce. In 2006, the farm was moved to a different area of the sisters’ property where it currently exists.

In our Sunny Way efforts to open up dialogue, and listen to varied perspectives, we thought that reaching out to religious communities could foster relationships to figure out how we’re going to create an inspiring, hopeful future where all of life, in all its variety is cherished and encouraged to thrive.

I interviewed Sr. Jeanne this past August in the garden. She spoke about her life, dreams, and works for social justice. I was so impressed by her courage and vision to start the Sophia Garden that I decided to volunteer there once per week. I am learning how to approach the time I spend there with absolute openness and humility. There’s so much to be curious about when I greet the garden’s plants, insects, and people with a truly open mind. It’s also fun and rewarding to see the vegetables thrive from my careful weeding.

Sr. Jeanne’s story unfolds beautifully in this interview. She has transformed her own search for community and home into a vibrantly accessible garden and learning program that suburban Long Islanders are rejoicing in.

VG: What was your inspiration for wanting to start Sophia Garden?

SJ: It was related to my believing that we need to come home to Earth. In the 1980’s I went to the West Coast near Seattle, Washington to join Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action. Ground Zero is located on the Kitsap Peninsula, just sixteen miles across the Puget Sound from Seattle. It is the “home” of the Trident Submarine, a nuclear submarine designed to destroy 409 cities at once. At the time the Navy wanted to build thirty of them. I knew that this was as far as we could go with violence and wanted to say “NO.”

While there I began to write about “home” since everyone on the Kitsap Peninsula talked about the “Homeport” of the Trident submarine. I knew that the Trident submarine was opposed to all that I thought of as home. After five years at Ground Zero on the West Coast I returned to Long Island and became very involved with Salvadoran refugees who were now in large numbers on the Island. It was while working among them that again the theme of “Home” emerged. There was a campaign called “Going Home” which engaged North Americans in going home with Salvadorans from a refugee camp in Honduras to their home, El Salvador.

It was on one of these trips that I realized that I not only wanted to accompany the Salvadoran people home to their land, but that I, too, needed to “come home.”

The Salvadorans were so connected to the land. When they thought of returning to El Salvador, it was to the land. I realized that when I thought of my country the United States or my home, Long Island, I did not think of the land. I had grown up disconnected from the land. I needed to “Come Home.” It was a very deep and personal experience of knowing in ways I had not known before. I certainly wasn’t a refugee the way the Salvadorans were, but in some way I was a refugee. I had been taken away from the land, my home. In 1992 I went to Genesis Farm in New Jersey and did a seven-week program with Sister Miriam Therese MacGillis which led me to come back to Long Island, my home with a new understanding that the human and natural world are one sacred community.

VG: Wow, that’s quite a story.

SJ: With this new understanding I came back to Long Island knowing I needed to become more intimate with its rivers, its birds, flowers, soil. I began the not-for-profit, Homecoming in order to focus myself and others on connecting with this place where we live. We are all learning to come home to Long Island; learning to come home to Earth.

At this time I connected with some others who had a similar vision. We gathered and reflected together and came up with the idea of purchasing a piece of land on Long Island where we could model how to live sustainably. Some folks were thinking they might sell their homes and join in this venture of holding land together, building homes that were clustered so that we left more of the land open and available for the growing of food that we would all share. We looked at many parcels of land, but were always met with financial obstacles and the high price of land and taxes on Long Island. After many months of looking and dreaming we decided we should not wait, but should begin to think of ways we could begin with what we already had.

Maturing eggplant

VG: Right, beginning with the resources at hand is a practical way to start anything.

SJ: I thought about the land my Dominican congregation had here in Amityville. At that time I was on a committee with other sisters related to visioning a new kind of world. We all began to think of the land here in Amityville and came up with the proposal to create a CSA on the land thereby connecting people to the land and to local organic food. At a meeting of all the Dominican Sisters, we presented the proposal and it was approved. We named our farm Sophia Garden. Sophia means wisdom. We believe that Earth is the wise one who is going to give us the wisdom we need if we look to her.

So that was the beginning of Sophia Garden. It was a coming together of a group of people with a vision for sustainability on Long Island and the Dominican Sisters vision of looking at a new way of ordering life; one which included Earth. We came together saying, “We’ll begin here.”

VG: What you described with the clustered homes reminds me of cohousing. I went to an orientation of a group of people in Brooklyn who are starting a cohousing community there. It’s interesting to see it in the forming stages.

SJ: And there are ecovillages. I’ve read about a lot of them all over the country. Some have been successful; some not. As a culture, we’ve been brought up to live independently. So for us as North Americans it is a challenge. Perhaps the idea is a bit easier for me since I am a part of a religious congregation where we do share things in common.

VG: What are the challenges you face in continuing to keep this CSA going?

SJ: (Looking out to the fields…) The farmer

VG: Why is that?

SJ: Keeping a farmer is one of the biggest challenges here in this part of Long Island. We are in suburbia and it is a small parcel of land. We try to pay the farmer a living wage, but it is difficult since what the people pay is not really the true cost of what it costs to grow the food.

VG: Right

Heirloom tomatoes

SJ: You don’t want to raise the price because you have to be competitive with all the other CSA’s. That’s the challenge. It’s a challenge for all of us: how to grow food locally and pay a living wage to a farmer. We are use to cheap food which is subsidized by the government. We don’t realize what it really costs to grow food.

The other challenge in keeping a farmer here at Sophia Garden is that we are located in suburbia. Most young farmers don’t want to come to suburbia. They like the rural farms. And they are working toward having their own farm. They want ownership. We’ve had some young farmers and some older ones. A person who is close to retirement might also be able to do it financially. But as they get older it becomes too difficult and they can’t continue. So the biggest challenge is keeping a farmer for the long term.

VG: There are differences between organic farms in suburbia and those in rural areas. Suburbia doesn’t seem to have the same support structures that a rural area has. It seems to me that farmers barter for goods and services in rural areas so that; often no money is exchanged outright.

SJ: Yes. And there’s another piece here. We don’t have housing. So that’s a big piece. There’s a farm in Stanfordville, NY that the Sisters of Charity run. They had trouble in the beginning with farmers. They finally found their present farmer Dave who is building a house for his family on the land. He is married with two children. Having the house makes it probable that he will be there for a long time.

So in a sense it is his farm and yet in another way it isn’t. CSA’s really belong to the people. It’s a mutual relationship between a farmer and the people who buy shares in the farm. It’s more like a marriage. Things are not mine. They are ours. The people support the farm and farmer and the farm supports the people by giving them wonderful organic vegetables.

VG: Yes, that’s so true.

Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne continues tomorrow.

image by phault

It sure has been a while, since my last Democracy update. At that time, I had a scheduled meeting with my Congressperson Carolyn McCarthy. I went to my meeting with her on Thurs Sept, 4th. Overall, it was a positive experience that I recommend to every Sunny Way reader out there. Each person I met at McCarthy’s office was polite, respectful and serious about the reason for my meeting.

I prepared myself by reading the 1sky platform of three imperatives: no more coal-fired plants, 5 million new green jobs, and emissions reductions of 20% of 1990 levels by 2020, and 80% by 2050. I also looked at my congressperson’s website to find out her voting history for renewable energy projects. After introductions I told her the reasons why I came: to present the 1sky policy platform and to discuss the environmental issues on Long Island, as well as the future for a more sustainable Long Island. I gave her a folder which included the 1sky platform, a list of organizations who have already signed on in support of the 1sky solutions, and the abstract page from a document on barriers to the renewable energy industry.

After I described the three 1sky solutions, I asked if she would read them on her own and think about signing onto them. Then we spoke about several large environmental projects currently affecting Nassau County:

• The Third Track project of The LIRR
• Expansion of the Long Island Bus system
• The failed LIPA offshore wind farm
• The Lighthouse, a planned residential/shopping complex for central Nassau County

When I brought up the importance for pushing for renewable energy projects, a 1sky imperative, she noted that just 4 years ago there was a proposed wind power project spearheaded by LIPA (Long Island Power Authority), which she was in favor of. This was a very big proposal which I did not know about. This project, which was projected to be the biggest wind farm outside of Europe, was terminated by LIPA because of higher than originally estimated ratepayer costs. Other reasons why this as well as other recent wind projects have failed is a general fear of the new: higher outright construction costs, a change to the seascape view, and fears of how bird and fish wildlife will adapt to the turbines.

How interesting though that Denmark has 6 offshore wind farms. Of course they have less land to build turbines on, and wind farms on land are less expensive than those at sea. Interesting too that total cost for wind farm construction in Europe has decreased over time. Also, Long Island and Cape Cod residents have expressed fears and concerns over losing their unmarred view of the sea. European wind farms have actually become tourist attractions, boosting local economies.

In my perspective, seeing an ocean wind farm is inspiring and beautiful, as I know that the energy from it is clean, and I don’t agree that my view would be destroyed. The photos of Denmark’s off-shore wind farms are beautiful, not like the dirty images we picture when we think of conventional power plants. The turning turbines look more like site-specific art akin to Christo’s The Gates.

The problem that these projects are encountering in the US is really the fear that Americans have for how the future will change if we shift from a fossil-fuel-based energy economy to a renewables-based economy. Perceived ocean-view changes, assumptions of decreased/altered fish populations, conflict with airplane flight paths, and migratory bird flight patterns are the concerns that residents list. The next offshore wind farm project is being considered off the Delaware coast.

McCarthy stated that she was in support of the project, as were environmentalists were and local fisherman, but the residents were in opposition because of NIMBY concerns. NIMBY(Not In My BackYard) is the same reason some LI residents are opposed to the third track slotted by the LIRR to increase commuter service along the main line. Residents who own homes abutting the RR tracks are opposed to construction which is slotted to be completed in 2018. McCarthy expressed her favor for the project, and noted very calmly that yes, people’s homes/properties will be impacted, but that we can work with the plan and address the needs/concerns of constituents whose homes are right next to railroad tracks.

Local projects such as a wind farm or LIRR mass transit, while they will create changes that are inconvenient to some, will allow Long Island to continue to be an attractive place to live. The extension of the LIRR is projected to attract more young people to live on Long Island. It’s important to attract young generations to live here, as the age of homeowners is steadily rising.

It seems that the underlying problem of why Long Islanders are resisting change is culturally based. McCarthy reminded me that most residents originally moved away from crowded Brooklyn apartments seeking space and quiet in the Long Island suburbs. Therefore, when many (not all) of them hear proposals such as increasing mass transit tracks, or building wind turbines off of Jones Beach, fear sets in that their peace and quiet will change. These are assumptions. Long island will change, but if we embrace these changes, our lives will improve and our communities will be stronger. It’s very sad that the offshore wind farm was cancelled, as it could have provided lots of clean energy and also attracted a lot of interest!

Another project we discussed was the expansion of the Long Island Bus system, especially to create new routes connecting the south to the north shores. When I asked McCarthy how she envisioned the future of Long Island looking she decided to tell me about a specific residential and commercial project that is in the works called The Lighthouse. I wondered, why are so many Long Islanders willing to accept this change—a huge, LEED-certified development—but not a wind farm to power it? It’s clear we have work to do.

We spoke for about 25 minutes. Overall It was a great experience, the first time as an adult I have ever spoken to one of my elected officials. Her aide was very helpful and is willing to maintain contact with me. She recommended that I call her to learn about any new energy/environmental legislation being considered. McCarthy is interested in supporting projects of renewable energy/mass transit/alternative housing, but I wonder how far she will go to focus on those issues specifically. She understands that the main barrier is cultural conditioning, which is why many Long Islanders fear radically new projects.

When I started this Democracy challenge, I listed three items I wanted to accomplish to address the role of government in my life:
1) contacting all my friends/family about plastic bag legislation
2) signing up for wind power (support) on my utility bill
3) signing up with 1sky.

Number three became the main focus. I did sign up for wind power on my utility bill and currently on the watch for the extra charge. My plans now are to contact McCarthy’s aide to find out if she will sign on to the 1sky solutions. I have learned about sustainable projects that have been considered for Long Island, and I have also learned that the major barrier to instituting change is not any particular project itself, the fears that individuals have of what changes might look like.

We have a very big job to do. It’s not trying to find a painless plan for generating energy—it’s about creating a change in our culture, a change in our consciousness, so that we choose to grow and embrace new possibilities.

image by nakedfowl

Michael Pollan is an expert storyteller. He has the natural facility to tell the story of evolution from the perspective of plants and animals. He looks at an alternate perspective of why certain plants have dominated our agricultural heritage and how that came to be.  He places himself in the shoes, or rather roots of such plants as lawn grasses, potatoes, and orchids.

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a free talk by Pollan at P.S. 1 in Queens, titled, “Taking the Plant’s Point of View.” P.S. 1 was the perfect place for him to speak. 
The evening was gorgeous and sunny, blue skies with a few fluffy cumulus clouds. Throngs of people gathered, locating friends along the long line that stretched around the block. Being near the end of it, I was one of the last to get in.

Originally, the event was scheduled to be held outside, in the P.S. 1 courtyard, amidst the outdoor exhibition, P.F.1., but due to a pending threat of rain, museum organizers chose to move the talk to a gallery inside the museum.

Anticipation within the gallery turned lecture hall was fantastic. Attendees were densely packed in chairs and on the floor, so the room became a sea of people, wooden floor peeking through in thin strips. Overhead was a revolving mirror reflecting each person’s movements and summery dress, and it quickly became hot and stuffy from all the body heat. I found a seat in the overflow that spilled out through one of the three archways into the hall. I couldn’t physically see Pollan during his speech, but there was a speaker right in front of me—a great spot indeed as it was considerably cooler outside the gallery and somebody handed me their red tush cushion.

Pollan finally arrived and quickly thanked us for, “…spending a Friday night, in August, in Queens, on the opening day of the Olympics” with him. His talk was about perspectives, the human perspective versus that of plants.  He stated that the evolutionary trajectory of the plant world may not be going in the same direction as the evolution of humanity. I personally wonder how we can make that bridge. The birdlike architectural construct of P.F. 1 in the courtyard visually represented a visual representation of how differently we need to think to find solutions to difficulties we face in our relationships with the non-human natural world. 

Pollan started the evening off, asking us to consider a point of view that is plant and animal centric, rather than human centric: “We divide the world into subjects and objects.  We are the subject and nature is the object.  What if this point of view is all wrong?” What if we “looked at the world from the point of view of the plant or animal? What does this idea get us? Does it get us good, clear results?”

He clearly stated that he is not the founder of this other point of view, but that this perspective can be found in the work of Jared Diamond, Steven Budiansky and Charles Darwin.

Pollan’s fascination with learning about a plant or animal’s take on evolution began in his garden ten years ago, while he was planting potatoes under a blooming apple tree. While planting, there were lots of bees buzzing about attracted to the apple blooms. He asked himself, “What do I and those bees have in common? What is the relationship between the apple blossom and the bee that is similar to this piece of potato and myself?”

He observed that an apple tree is stuck in place, so it needs the bee to move its pollen. His role was similar to the bee’s, and is a sense he had been seduced by a photograph of the potato in Ronniger’s seed magazine. And so this epiphany has inspired the writing of The Botany of Desire, the Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and future work to come.

I must admit that Pollan’s point of view, or rather the plants’ point of view he assumed, unnerved me. While I agree that the human perspective is only one among many, I feel somehow powerless and slighted as a human to believe that our ability for self-reflective consciousness is not the pinnacle of evolution. Pollan offered another take: plants are not interested in consciousness. They do have wisdom and intelligence, of course—they have adapted to all kinds of ecosystems. I did not know that rice has 50,000 different genes, as compared to the human’s mere 23,000.  Pollan theorized that plants have an evolutionary path that differs from ours, which is why, “they evolved with angiosperms (flowering plants) who got animals to work for them.” 

Pollan’s description of the relationship between Tongue Orchids and wasps during fertilization was an invitation to become enchanted with the workings of how these 2 species mutually benefit each other. It reminded me of a recent movie I saw with my nieces, Horton Hears a Who. Horton is enthralled to learn of the microscopic world of Whoville, an entire community that exists in a tiny speck that gets caught in the pink spikes of a clover head, much as the audience was fascinated by Pollan’s in depth guide to orchid sex.

He went on to share with the audience the tremendously hopeful, solar-based (as opposed to fossil fuel based) farm of Joel Salatin, a Virginia farmer. Salatin, who raises grass fed animals for meat and eggs, organizes his farm to mimic nature. Each animal’s perspective is honored, so his cows graze on 100% grass, producing Salad Bar Beef, and his pigs produce pigerator pork—the term refers to pigs’ natural propensity to burrow through compost piles and newly cleared land.

Salatin is a self described “grass farmer”.  Pollan defines him as a playwright, balancing many points of view on the land that he farms. Salatin believes that “fixed structures are what’s wrong with world agriculture.” So he brings the animals to the grass with moveable fences and coops, one species after the next dancing outdoors in the sunshine.

I can’t help but see the similarities between this change in agricultural design to a change in how and increasing number of Gen X and Yers beyond are designing their lives based on travel, service, and adventure. I just finished reading The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss, who believes that fixed structures (i.e. large houses, clutter, and most grown up toys) are outdated.  Ferriss calls himself a lifestyle designer and promotes a life based continuous education and service often through travel and living in a variety of places. He believes that the point of it all is to become more developed, and to experience the range that life offers while still young, not to acquire more stuff and defer life till after retirement. This theme of fixed structures being transcended and replaced by more fluid and natural rhythms is one that keeps popping up in my thoughts about the future.

Towards the end of Pollan’s speech, his overarching message was that although we know much about this emerging ecological perspective, we still need to cultivate it into something we feel in order to live as members of the biotic community, rather than rulers of it. He strongly asserted that we aren’t going to address issues of healthcare or climate without talking about food.  According to Pollan, this is where human creativity comes in, “What’s important now is to make these things we know, things we feel as well. Which is why this is a project for writers and artists…and gardeners who best know how to take ideas and make them stick.”

I was fortunate to be sitting next to an artist, Mark, who sketched a picture of the crowded doorway in front of us. The synchronicity of the moment was perfect, and he agreed to send me a copy to accompany this article.  Thank you, Mark, for putting Pollan’s message to ink and paper. And thanks to Michael Pollan for putting the plants’ eye view into words, making it something we can contemplate as well as feel.

By Sebastian Bulldog

Over the last two weeks I have been contacting my representative and my senator with a clear goal in mind—procuring appointments with both so I can present clear objectives for addressing our climate crises. I have made some good progress and have learned so much through this challenge. I see that it takes a clear intention of what I want to accomplish paired with keeping my nose to the grindstone.

I feel a little like a bulldog as I’ve been calling and emailing the offices of my congress member Carolyn McCarthy and Senator Schumer roughly a half dozen times each. I also sent both offices a letter of request by snail mail for a meeting to speak with them about climate change, renewable energy and creating green jobs.

But following up has paid off—I have a confirmed appointment to speak with Congress member McCarthy next week. Yeah! I’m excited about this and will be reading up on the 1sky platform for solutions to climate change, specifically: reducing pollution, stopping new coal fired power plants from being built, and promoting green jobs and green energy initiatives.

In the works also is an appointment with a staffer of Senator Schumer. I have been playing phone tag with the scheduler in his office and just heard yesterday that I’ll have an appointment very soon, she’s just ironing out scheduling with the environmental staffer first.

I really want to get a few interested friends to come with me for my appointment with my congress member, so I just sent an email to large selection of friends in the hopes that a few of them will be able to come with me next week.

Why, you may ask am I so set on going with a group? Well, first of all, when elected officials see more than 1 person, it means that there are many individuals who represent a particular point of view, in this case want to change the way we generate energy. According to an organizer I spoke with at 1sky, over 1,700 people signed up to get engaged through their featured campaign for August, with roughly 400-600 actual actions taking place. That’s a lot of people who actually took the initiative to sign up. If each of them brings several people, and each of those folks represents several others, then our congressional representatives can see that many people want these changes.

Also by taking the time out of our lives, we show with our physical presence and voices what matters most to us. We show that creating a climate movement is important enough that we take a time out from our usual jobs and routines to say as much.

In addition, in going with friends, I am providing hands-on training for them to do it themselves in the future. The climate crisis is an issue for everyone. Mainstream Americans are wondering how they will pay for home heating oil this coming winter. It’s definitely not just hippie, back-to-the-land-ers who are in favor of changing energy dependency from fossil fuels to renewables, although many of them blazed a trail as examples that it is possible to live off the grid. Also, since it took some persistence for me to get an appointment, I want to make the most of it and get others to come with me.

In addition to getting the meeting set up with my congressperson, I was also successful in signing up for wind power through newwindenergy. There was a minor problem—the representative I was in contact with did not have my account number correct—but we solved it easily enough. She told me that signing me up with LIPA (Long Island Power Authority) was a bit tricky compared with Con Edison, who she has regular experience with.

Now, I am checking the mail for my LIPA bill to ensure that the extra charge is printed on there. The dollars I pay for electricity still come from my utility company, LIPA, but the percentage of power that LIPA receives shifts from coal, nuclear, oil, and gas to wind generated power for the total amount of kilowatt hours that I consume.

There are some action items that I listed on the first democracy challenge post that I haven’t done yet. So I’m going to get to those within the next week. I might be a little too optimistic about getting my friends and family to participate in taking action with phone calls and switching to wind power. However, I am committed to contacting them because even if they don’t respond to my request, I’m stating where I stand and showing what’s possible. And I am certain that each one will encounter someone else at a future time who will encourage them to take political action, too, and they may remember my email as a seed that was planted before and that is aching to grow.

My next steps for this week are to:

• Contact my friends and family who live in New York to call up the governor’s office to vocalize their opinion on the pending plastic bags recycling bill.
• Contact friends and family to make the switch to renewable wind energy through their utility provider.
• Study up on the 1sky platform
• Recruit friends to come with me for my appointments with elected officials I’ve been in contact with.

Every August, Senators and Congressional representatives return to their districts, and we have the chance to meet with them to express our opinions on the issues that matter to us and how we want to work together to affect change.

Last Tuesday, I dialed in to a conference call set up by 1sky.org. The reason: to bring together some of the many voices of the 1,600 people in all 50 states (WOW!) who signed up to lobby their representatives during the August recess.

The conference call lasted for one hour, during which the biggest thing I learned is that this lobbying effort is the beginning of an ongoing relationship with or elected officials, not a 1-shot deal. The other big refreshing idea from the call is that I don’t have to be an expert on climate change, green jobs, and renewable energy—I just have to read information on what the issues are, what solutions are available, and push my elected officials to support them.

1sky is a great organization—I got a lot out of the call and their website. They provide very clear, straightforward information that is easy to understand and share with others. 

The call started with introductions from everyone calling in. I’ve called in to a few nationwide conference calls before, but never any that were as participatory. This was hands on and how to, where lots of people shared ideas and asked questions, led by 1sky organizers from Washington D.C. I was inspired as each participant introduced him or herself and talked where they lived and where they were in the process. Some had scheduled appointments already and others, like me, had not done so yet.

Voices came first from the Virginia/Maryland area, from college students that have been organizing through a campus group and older individuals calling in from the same area, people from Chicago and Florida, then myself and another woman from NY State. It was tremendously inspiring to hear all these voices, near and far, loud and soft, coming through. Each person was committed, sharing his or her own experiences with the process already and asking questions. Many people calling in were affiliated or somehow connected to Interfaith Power and Light. I had never heard of this organization before—it is an interfaith ministry that is “mobilizing a national religious response to global warming.” This is awesome.

Here’s a list of some of the things that were discussed on the call. I hope you find that it’s easier than you might imagine to schedule a meeting and prepare yourself for talking to your elected officials.  Personally, I have sent request letters to 2 of my elected officials, but still have to follow up with phone calls to schedule my appointment which I plan on doing today. All the resources listed below can be found on the 1sky organizer resources page.

How to set up a meeting and make a phone call to a representative or senator

• Find your Congressional district office
• Submit a request in writing. Some will allow you to email—your congressperson’s website will have details.
• Follow up with a phone call. Ask to speak with the scheduler—this is the person to make the appointment with. For the meeting, most likely you will not be able to speak directly to your Congressperson/ Senator. Office staff personnel, directors and members will be the ones available for a meeting about your issue.
• Recruit others to go with you, friends and family
• It’s optimal to get a diverse range of people to come with you: different ages, backgrounds and experience levels

Talking Points

• Read the 1sky platform to familiarize yourself with the three imperatives they are asking for, be comfortable with the material, and internalize it so that during the meeting you can speak about it in your own words.
• Meeting with our legislators is all about establishing a relationship and softening them up through being ourselves when we meet them. Although Staff people may know of the Climate change issue, they may not be aware of the 1sky campaign and the specific facts of how our economy still favors producing pollution instead of radically diminishing it. They may not be aware that organizations, like 1sky NOW exist with solutions and ideas in hand on how to go about doing this. 
• Be yourself, you don’t have to be an expert.
• Be clear, Be simple, for example: “I really care about this issue.”
• Practice in front of the mirror, a friend or family member with your 1sky 3 Imperatives in hand
• When asked a question, don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know.” But be sure to follow up, this starts a dialogue.
• Be on time for your meeting. It will probably last 20 minutes, including questions and answers. 
• Tell them what you want.
• Don’t expect immediate results
• 1sky does not have an opinion on Nuclear power.
• Be a good listener; they may actually tell you why your representative disagrees with your position. Email this feedback to 1sky; they want to know.
• Research your representatives view to know what their position is on this issue.
• Research the three points (3 imperatives: ) so that you are comfortable speaking clearly abut them.
• When you go, be aware that there may be security guards and surveillance machines to go through.
• Bring your business cards and hand them out.
• Send a thank uou after your meeting.
• Send the 1sky platform via email: when you are scheduling the meeting, ask the scheduler if you can email the platform beforehand.
• Tell scheduler in advance the number of people that are coming with your group. Bring a few people, like 3 or 4. If more can come just let them know as the offices may be small and they may not be able to accommodate you.

Sample conversation

During the call, we role-played a conversation between a constituent and an environmental staffer. Here are some tips coming from the constituent’s perspective that I will use when I go to my meeting:

• Introduce yourself and those who are with you. Tell them a little bit about yourself and then relate it back to the issue of climate change.
• State the three 1 sky imperatives: no more coal, create 5 million green jobs, commit to freezing climate pollution and reductions of 25% by 2020 and 80% by 2050.
• Ask: “What is Representative X’s stand on these three issues?
• Ask: “We have a platform; will Representative X agree to sign on?”
• If they don’t sign on that day, follow up with phone calls and emails. Keep pushing the issue courteously and with respect.

I hope this inspires you to contact your representative to set up a meeting to discuss climate change, creating green jobs, and ending all coal fired power plants. It’s still not too late. If you have met with them, please share with us how it went and something new you learned. Any tips, tricks and bits of advice would be greatly appreciated.

(image by GeishaBoy500 via flickr)

Lately I’ve been dreaming about where I want to live in the near future, what sort of home environment I envision creating, including the physical structure and people around me.  I know that I don’t want to live alone in an apartment.  The kind of space I envision living in is one with other adults in a community where resources are shared and more importantly where ideas, dreams and hopes are welcomed for the purpose of evolving ourselves and our natural and built environments. This is what the kind of space I want to create and abide in looks like. 

A little over a month ago, as I was writing down some ideas for my future home, I remembered that cohousing is a type of intentional neighborhood and looked it up.  Happily surprised, I found that a new cohousing group in Brooklyn has been meeting regularly: Brooklyn Cohousing.

While I gravitate towards cohousing in a rural setting, this new endeavor will be happening within NYC, in a building with surrounding open space. They have a vision statement, a target neighborhood for building or converting an existing building, have hired a well-known architect/designer to assist them in negotiations with potential developers, AND they have a move-in date set to fall 2009!

Cohousing appeals to me for two main reasons:

1) Each household has their own private home which is a little smaller than an average American house.  This is great, because I want to live in a relatively clutter-free home, with a minimum of stuff. Appliances, tools, and equipment are bought by the community to outfit shared spaces. This model makes sense in terms of purchasing fewer goods and freeing up living space.

2) I want to live with open-minded adults of different backgrounds and ages and spend concerted effort living and working in a context that takes on projects and continuously improves the local and global community.

I was introduced to cohousing 6 years ago. While interning at an organic farm upstate, I had the opportunity of visiting Ecovillage at Ithaca. Ecovillage is a very large venture presently made up of 2 communities with a third in construction. The communities have been designed using all kinds of sustainable design technology. The home I visited was simple, clutter free, and comfortable on the cozy side.

In cohousing—a word coined by Chuck Durrett, meaning “living communities”—each family has its own home which is roughly 15% smaller than a traditional suburban home. The extra space is combined and used for rooms/buildings that the community members decide are appropriate for the functions and needs of its members.

A great introduction to cohousing is this audio presentation by Chris Scott Hanson explaining cohousing in all its diversity. He’s a great speaker relating through humorous anecdotes, the zest, humor, challenges and joys that happens in cohousing.

A few weeks ago, I attended an open orientation organized by Brooklyn Cohousing. Even though I personally want to live in a more rural setting, I was interested in checking them out and seeing how they ran their meetings. The orientation took place at City Explorers, a play space for kids, where a room in the back served conveniently as a meeting room. Cohousing members’ kids were taken care of during the meeting. The meeting lasted two hours and was very informative. 

I think Ken, the moderator, was surprised at the number of people who showed up, given it’s the summer and many go away on vacation. But folks continued to come in, 18 in all. Of this total, 5 were either members or associates, 2 were writers (me and another woman), and the remaining 11 were prospective members.

The meeting attracted people I would describe as sincere, outdoorsy and caring. They all seemed very serious about joining. Many mentioned that they had friends or family members that lived in cohousing communities elsewhere in the US and had witnessed the expansive process that their friends went through in building a cohousing community. Many seemed ripe for joining, and some had already been preliminarily involved with other cohousing groups that never panned out. There was one man there who shared that he’d been waiting 10 years to find a serious, committed cohousing group. 

Details regarding membership requirements, prospective building sites, apartment pricing, risk factors, and building design options were discussed. One newcomer voiced concern for what school district her child would be able to attend, wanting her child to be eligible for Park Slope’s P.S. 321. I love how one of the members responded to her by saying that, “we are committed to making all schools better, not just the ones that are already well equipped and thriving.” 

At this point, there are no cohousing communities within the city limits, so this will be a first, and from what I could see it’s going to be a vibrant, committed community, giving a big impression to the city at large! There is an Intentional community in Staten Island, but cohousing is different, because residents own their own apartments outright, so if ever they want to sell, they can, as long as the incoming owner agrees to live within the cohousing framework.
Many have been waiting for cohousing to grow in NYC. I am interested in seeing how the group makes their decisions and plans come true. They are looking for more members to commit to the project. If you have considered cohousing before or are completely new to it but the idea sound appealing, I encourage you to check them out. You’ll learn much more than I’ve written here and meet a great group of people who have decided to take on building their future home together in a new way.

Do you or have you lived in a cohousing community?  Want to start one? We want to hear about it, so please share your comments below.

(image by 561design via flickr)

Since I have a healthy hang-up with trash and how to keep reducing it, I thought I’d take another look recently to see what was in there. I found mostly bits of unrecyclable plastic. I decided to find out how I could recycle just 1 item of this motley crew: plastic dry cleaning bags. After searching online, I did not find any dry cleaners or small recyclers that would accept them, but I did find was a great DIY site that offered a tip: tie the hanger end into a knot and use it as a large garbage bag—great, a way to reuse them, even better than recycling… But what about everyone else’s bags? I doubt most people are planning to tie knots in theirs or make fluffy plastic DIY Christmas wreaths.

To my surprise my search also turned up a piece of pending legislation on this very subject: Bill # A.11725/S.8643. This is a NY state plastic bag recycling bill that, should it pass, would override the more stringent NYC plastic bag recycling law that was signed last January.

After reading up on both city and state legislation, I called the state office, asking them to veto this state bill and voicing my preference for the city version. For any New Yorkers out there, you still have time to call Governor Patterson’s office to voice your opinion.

The city bill is quite encompassing and well suited to NYC. It is meant to dramatically reduce the overabundance of plastic grocery bags and plastic dry cleaning bags, which often get caught in city trees, strangling their branches. They also get swallowed by sea life, clog landfills, and are just plain ugly and wasteful.

I personally haven’t taken any measurable direct action regarding politics in over 8 years. I was gung ho for Ralph Nader when he ran in 1996 and 2000. I remember being so hopeful as a pole watcher during the 2000 election, as I gave out info at polling sites to vote green, a piece of green felt wrapped around my upper arm. After that I stopped being politically involved and just focused on what I could do personally to continue “greening” my life.

And it’s great to see how we can streamline our lives to be simpler and less demanding on all kinds of resources. It’s also incredibly inspiring and powerful to see how our attention to making these changes is strengthened and multiplied when we encourage each other through committing to a challenge together. Recycling, simplifying our households, and composting are great, but we can and must do so much more.

That’s why we are going to focus our efforts this month on getting out the message to our elected officials and to do so whenever we can in groups. With congress members home for recess in their legislative districts during the month of August, why not visit them and voice our concerns for solutions to climate change by supporting clean, renewable energy? Since we each have our own interests and niches of information, let’s share the research we’ve done with each other and take direct action in the political arena. For myself, I am focusing on three issues to get the ball rolling:

• Sending a personalized email to my friends and family in NY, offering information on plastic bag laws so they can call the governor’s office as well.
• Signing up with 1sky.org to learn about and take action towards supporting renewable energy projects, including visiting my legislators when they are back in their home districts. I will also email everyone on my address list with the 1sky info, encouraging them to do the same.
• Signing up to purchase wind power through a woman I know from Community Energy. It will be an extra nominal charge on our bill but worth the few extra dollars per month, and making changes like this gives the power of direct, experiential knowledge to discussions I may have with law-makers and others in my community

I’m excited to exercise my rights and responsibilities as a citizen. The sky is really the limit—whether your interest is in legislation, working on local issues, or getting involved with a favorite candidate’s political campaign, I encourage you to take action. Not only does it help push the country in the right direction; it helps each of us push ourselves in the right direction, too, as No Impact Man so eloquently described in his blog last month.

What kind of engagement will you have in our democracy this month?

(image by sonyaseattle via flickr.)

Are you aware of what a school lunch these days consists of? In most public schools, lunch is not the only meal being served. Breakfast and snacks are served year round as well. For some students, the meals they eat at school provide nearly all of their daily requirements for major nutrients, vitamins, and minerals.

I am a substitute teacher in the NYC public schools. Every time I deliver a class to the lunchroom, I glance at the food being served. Meals seem to vary in likability with the students. There’s also a big gap between what is being served and what is actually eaten.

As I see milk sloshing around in the liquids pail, partially eaten fish patties, and a white mountain of Styrofoam trays, I often wonder why we create such uninspired, ugly food for children at school. And how does this cafeteria mediocrity take place in New York City, arguably the food capital of our country and well-known throughout the world for beautiful, diverse eating experiences?

One reason is that nutrition standards for schools are developed on the national level, not the state level. Since it is a nationally organized program, it has historically been an outlet for USDA surplus commodities. Food that is not good enough for McDonald’s is being prepared and served to schoolchildren every day.

More than 860,000 meals are served each day in NYC public schools. In Manhattan, the lunch menu seems pretty varied, with vegetables offered every day, including a green salad once per week.  At my school, P.S./I.S. 217, the salad bar offers ribbons of fresh romaine lettuce, raw vegetables such as carrots and peppers, and a choice of dressings. The hotel pans are clean and the veggies look fresh and crisp for the most part. Overall, our menu is OK, with a few highlights. 

But again, is that what we should be serving to children, reasonably decent food? There’s plenty of room for improvement: more variety, smaller portion sizes, more time for students to eat lunch, smaller menus on half days, and reusable serving trays and utensils instead of Styrofoam and plastic. These seem to be the immediate changes that could take place as stepping stones to drastically changing the actual food being served.

School food can in fact embody the highest ideals of what children should be nourishing their bodies with. There are chefs across the country who are trying pilot programs at select schools, creating healthy meals for kids that include organic and locally grown produce, meats, cheeses, and breads. These chefs are up against many pressures like keeping food costs down and convincing bureaucratic school agencies to change how ingredients are purchased. Chefs also must convince their eaters—students—that healthy food can taste delicious, give them the nutrients they need, and help them create good eating habits and strong bodies.

In April, I attended a conference at Columbia Teachers College on this very topic: transforming our school food system so that we feed the highest quality meals to children. The Schools, Food and Community conference was organized by the Baum Forum, Nutrition Program at Teachers College Columbia University and Liquori and Associates. Roberta Sonnino was featured as keynote speaker.

The conference was well attended with teachers, chefs, a few farmers, directors/commissioners of different agriculture programs, students, gardeners, and community organizers to name a few of the attendees. Saturday’s program included a roundtable discussion about initiatives to change school food and health in New York City schools. The NYC school food program is undergoing a transformation, albeit slowly, by adding more healthful food choices and some locally grown produce to their menus.  For example, carrots grown in NY state are slowly making an appearance in NYC schools, precut and bagged as carrot crunchers. Apples and stone fruits from MY state are presently being served both whole and sliced in bags.

The keynote address from Roberta Sonnino, a professor of environmental policy and planning in Wales, was an amazing introduction to healthy school food programs taking place in Italy and the UK. Her keynote: “The school Food Revolution: Public food and Sustainable Development in the XXI Century” presented a wealth of information on several pilot programs in the UK and Italy tracking the creation of nutritious school cafeteria menus which emphasize using fresh seasonal produce and artisanally crafted food products.

The research was astounding in terms of how large, public institutions were able to establish relationships with local farmers, and organic food purveyors to create dynamic school food programs. What was also fascinating was that officials in Rome truly supported changing the school meals program and shifted their interpretation of what value and quality really mean. We are conditioned to believe that nutritious, fresh foods are exorbitantly expensive, but this is not always the case. In Italy, for example, the cost of purchasing local food with fewer food miles is not always more expensive in terms of dollar amount. Also, Italians view the purchasing food not just as a simple exchange of calories for cash, but instead as a transaction where important values are expressed concretely—values like supporting the local economy and stressing the importance of nutritious family oriented meals.

Prof. Sonnino’s research has been compiled in a soon to be released book, The School Food Revolution: Public Food and the Challenge of Sustainable Development.  As Prof. Sonnino reported on the great advances being made in the school food programs in Gloucestershire and East Ayreshire Whales, and Rome, Italy, I was tremendously hopeful and excited to learn that large public school systems have consciously made decisions to value the food being served to children.

Sonnino reports that food purchasing has conventionally been considered a commercial service where decisions on which items to purchase are based on their value only in economic terms. Some steps are being taken to change this point of view. In Rome, the bidding process has been overhauled so that rewards are given to suppliers for their green practices. For example, food suppliers are awarded with bids if they harvest and ship their produce within three days! Bakeries that want to supply bread to schools are required to bake and deliver their bread within 6 hours! Sonnino shares more examples in this podcast from June 2007.

During the Q and A period, a teacher in the audience shared that students in NYC public schools barely have time to eat their meal after standing in long lines to get it. Prof. Sonnino responded that in Rome, students immediately sit down at their tables to be served their lunch. Everyone laughed, recognizing the gap between Italian and the US views on the cultural importance of food.

As we in the US become more conscious of what we are eating, we need to make sure that these changes filter down to school lunches as well. We may never have waiters in school cafeterias, but we can certainly provide fresh, delicious, and nourishing meals to reflect the incredible diversity of our citizens, and to help children learn and grow.

(photo by Scott Ableman via flickr.)

During the first few years of becoming a hardcore composter, I decided to measure how much waste I was diverting from the solid waste stream. I think it’s important that when any alternative to conditioned behaviors is presented it be analyzed in a concrete, scientific way so that it can clearly be seen as a viable alternative. The results must be visible and dramatic enough so that individuals will decide that the benefits are worth withstanding discomfort and sacrifice.

I undertook my first weeklong measurement project nine years ago when I was catsitting for my compost-crazed friend Naomi in her Manhattan apartment. I sorted into 3 main categories; then, at the end of the week, I weighed everything using an antique metal produce scale. She had a wormbin for recycling food so I deposited my scraps in there. Usually, I would have dropped them off at the Lower East Side Ecology Center’s Greenmarket drop-off table.

Now I know nine years ago is a while back, but the numbers are still relevant, at least in NYC, where acceptable items for recycling haven’t changed dramatically. It was important for me to take an inventory, not just to see how much food waste I was generating and then diverting, but also to observe all the other trash I generated and incorporate lifestyle changes to further decrease my garbage output. I wanted to answer the question: How much of an impact can one person make?

Recently I decided to bring these statistics up to date. I again saved, sorted and weighed all garbage using an accurate bathroom scale. The data recorded here is not precise, but it’s pretty close.

Waste produced was sorted into three categories:

• food waste for an indoor vermicomposting bin (1999) or backyard compost unit (2008)
• plastics, metal, glass, and paper recycled through the NYC municipal recycling program (1999) or Village recycling program (2008)
• landfill-bound trash

A few notes about the numbers:

• The 2008 data represents the waste I currently produce with my lovely parents (who put up with my scrupulous scrap saving and watching me get on and off the bathroom scale a dozen times).
• From comparing the total for these 2 weeks, I can see how lifestyle, location, and number of people in the household all make a big difference in total amount of garbage produced. For example, when I was catsitting in 1999, I was using fewer disposable products (such as tissues and paper towels), but more non-recyclable plastics. Later on I started using reusable menstrual pads, which created even less garbage. By comparison, my parents and I generate much more garbage. Noimpactman has a lot of great ideas on reducing your trash flow.
• There’s a noticeable difference in the data on food waste for these 2 weeks. This reflects the larger proportion of garbage I create with my parents, as well as irregularities of eating at home.

What all of this obsessive saving, separating and weighing shows is that we could actually transform the solid waste problem into a solid waste opportunity by figuring out ways that composting could be developed on a large scale, tailored for a variety of communities depending on the variables and resources of each one. If our perspective shifted from seeing food waste as garbage to seeing it as a raw material for nutrient cycling—there would be no problem!

The most exciting part is really not what is saved, but what is created. The soil in my parent’s garden is a testament to their 30+ years of composting: rich soft soil like chocolate cake, a wondrous variety of plants, honey bees that buzz by in the summer, cardinals in their crimson coats balancing on the fence over turquoise blue morning glories. Don’t we want richness, abundance, health and beauty? If you are not composting, just think of all that potential beauty being tossed in landfills, creating methane gas and leaching into our precious groundwater.

Does one person’s effort make a big difference?

You bet it does ... since I started composting every day, with the only breaks being brief travel here and there (I’m a homebody), I have diverted roughly 2,106 lbs. of food waste. Over 1 ton out of the solid waste stream and into the nutrient cycle! This figure represents me, an omnivore generating about three pounds of food waste per week over a 13½ year period.

There are other ways to reduce your food waste, too, from planning and shopping carefully to donating to needy families.

Currently, as much as 40% of the food bought in America is not eaten. For those who want to make a positive impact on the environment, reducing food waste is truly low-hanging fruit.

(Stay tuned for our editor’s personal experiment in worm composting in her Brooklyn apartment.)

Victoria is a teacher and organic baker who lives on one island (Long) and works on another (Roosevelt). She’s The Sunny Way’s resident expert in composting and everything else that will help you not throw stuff away. We love her for her warmth, smile, and the fact that she brings pastries everywhere she goes.