No Impact Man

Another way to fill the craving to shop

Shopping is an American social pastime, but the problem is that shopping from "want," instead of from "need," causes the use of planetary resources we can't afford to burn. We talked about this a little here.

Yesterday, I mentioned how much fun my daughter Isabella had running out to a farm field to harvest vegetables. Harvesting? Shopping? Harvesting? Shopping?

Wait! Aren't they kind of the same thing?

Here are the excellent thoughts on the subject of a regular reader and commenter, who calls herself Linda from Deerfield:

I keep thinking about Isabella being thrilled by "going out into the field to harvest a squash". Am I imagining things, or does this not point to a gloriously healthy direct substitute for shopping?

I read about a potato farmer who ran out of harvest time and profitability, so he invited the public to dig their own and take them home -- much to his surprise, literally thousands came. I once took my friend and little one to a rural orchard, mistakenly assuming that few people had discovered the delight of an afternoon plucking apples and sipping cider -- I was stunned by the huge line of families in cars waiting to pay their fee and gain entry.

There is evidently a great hunger within us to harvest our own food, but still we stand by and let the orchards and farms fall to developers.

How to get your child to eat almost any vegetable

Ask my little girl Isabella what she wants to eat and it's either a. grilled cheese sandwich or b. peanut butter and jelly. Suggest that she should eat her spinach, broccoli or brussels sprouts first and you get an encyclopedic explanation of why she can't eat it--it doesn't taste good, it's too hot, you have to chew it too much, etc etc etc.

But the other weekend we stayed with our friends Rachel and Steffen Schneider at Hawthorne Valley Farm (from which we buy our produce as part of local eating). Rachel took Isabella out into the field to harvest a squash and then they cooked it together. Isabella wolfed it down.

The picture above shows Isabella with a squash she picked out of our own community garden today. We also harvested some lettuce. Isabella can't wait to eat them both.

So, if your child is anything like mine, here is what you have to do to get your child to eat just about any vegetable: let them grow it for themselves!

Urban gardening and connecting to nature

There are all sorts of reasons to farm food in the cities--reduction of the heat island effect, local food production, keeping storm water out of the waterways. But something happened to me the other day as a result of growing vegetables in my new garden plot that I wasn't counting on.

It's been a dark winter and a pretty rainy spring. I've been waiting for the sun. And still the rain comes.

When I was little, when it rained, my grandmother would always say, "Well, it's good for the farmers." And I would give lip service and say, "That's true," and then I'd feel bad about the fact that I really didn't care about the farmers. I just wanted sun.

For thirty years, I pretty much just wanted sun.

But the other day, when it rained, I wasn't disappointed. I'd seen the difference to my new community garden plot after watering with a hose versus a soaking with a good rain. One keeps it alive. The other makes it thrive.

Living in the city, we don't have as much connection to nature as we should. But keeping my new vegetable plot at Laguardia Community Gardens, the thing I wasn't counting on was that I suddenly discovered a new gratitude for the cycles of nature.  I was grateful for how the world works. I was grateful for the rain.

Environmental conundrum

You may remember that we got a community garden plot of our own this year. The rub was that the person who had the plot before us had allowed a young tree to take root in it (you aren't supposed to let trees grow in the garden), which made it unusable for growing vegetables. The tree kept the plot in shade all day long.

Dilemma: On the one hand, I wanted to help promote urban agriculture by keeping a garden plot. On the other, I don't remotely like the idea of cutting trees down.

Well, I gave it some thought and I decided to fell the tree and, yes, I felt like crap doing it. Especially when some community members got upset. One of my fellow community gardeners answered: "This is a garden not a forest."

But I still felt conflicted.

Did I do the right thing? Did I do the wrong thing? I don't know. I am, of course, trying to do what's right but sometimes what's right seems wrong and what's wrong seems right. When is the use of environmental resources justified and when is it not?

That's the environmental conundrum.

Growing your own food, Japanese style

First thing, wanted to remind you that I also twitter here and I friend my readers on Facebook here. Onwards...

As you may know, Japan has lower per capita carbon emissions than any Western European country. For that reason, I asked my friend, Sean Saskamoto, who recently moved to Japan and who blogs at I'd Rather Be In Japan, to check in with us every so often. I thought we might be able to learn a little something about "happier planet, happlier people" lifestyles from Sean's experience there.

Here is Sean's latest dispatch:

Growing Your Own Food, Japanese-style
by Sean Sakamoto

No matter where you go in Japan, one thing you’ll notice are the gardens. Even in fairly dense suburbs, every plot of land is meticulously tended, usually by the stooped figure of a grandmother or grandfather. My in-laws live in a tall apartment building in a packed suburb, with a wheat field on one side and a rice paddy on the other.

When people get old in this country, they work in their gardens. It doesn’t matter what time of year it is, or how bad the weather is. They’re out there in the brutal heat of summer, pulling weeds in the bone chilling damp of winter, planting tomatoes while surrounded by the spring cherry blossoms, and picking pumpkins as the Autumn leaves turn fiery red.

When vegetables ripen, it’s common to have a neighbor drop off a bag filled with cucumbers, beans or whatever bounty their garden has brought. It’s amazing 70 to 90 year old folks working so hard outside, and their vitality is inspiring.

During lunch time at the school where I work, the conversation invariably turns to what food is in season, and it goes beyond the garden to the forest.  On weekends we go out in the woods with friends to pick whatever wild vegetables are in season. Last weekend we picked wild onions, ferns, and wasabe leaves. The weekend before that we picked bamboo shoots.

Everyone seems to have a relative with a plum tree, a chestnut tree, or some other kind of bush or shrub that gives up something to munch on at some time of the year. This close connection to nature reminds that food is part of a natural rhythm. Every meal is like a party, celebrating whatever came in that week. I like eating by the calendar.

Anticipating the grapes that come in late summer makes them that much sweeter when they finally burst in my mouth. The food that is grown locally, and eaten locally, also tastes so good because it’s so fresh. It isn’t bred for toughness over taste, or built to withstand weeks in passage to my plate. Anyone whose eaten a tomato at the peak of ripeness knows what I’m talking about. The same holds true for daikon, potatoes, squash, you name it. Just like bread is best the day it was baked, vegetables are best the day they were picked.

I wonder if the focus on fresh vegetables and the value of working hard in a garden is what keeps these senior Japanese neighbors of mine able to hoe a row at the age of 90? Is there a connection between a healthy old age and a deep interest in gardening and eating fresh fruit and vegetables year round? Even if there isn’t, the benefits of staying fit and eating well are plenty enough for me to give it a try.

The city rents out plots to garden for $50 a year. My family rented one (that's my wife Noriko and my son Kazu in our plot in the picture above), and the first day we went out there and poked around, we had a bunch of old men giving us advice. People lent us tools, gave us drinks, and showed us how it’s done.

My son, Kazu, likes to play in the nearby stream while Noriko and I pull weeds and plant seedlings in the mud. It’s a nice, practically free way for a family to spend an afternoon. So far, we’re doing OK. Some bean plants and spinach are already starting to grow. With any luck, I’ll have a few bags of veggies to share with my neighbors by August.

Keeping kids healthy by eating local and unprocessed food

A big part of the No Impact project was to eat only local, seasonal, unpackaged food. That meant, basically, lots of fresh vegetables. Michelle and I both lost a lot of weight.

As though to prove how good eating a local-food diet is for kids, too, BusinessWeek writer Cathy Arnst has posted a story, which comes from the processed food end of things, called "How Mac 'n' Chees Is Like a Cigarette." She writes:

Two thirds of adults are considered overweight or obese, as is one out of every three children under age 18. Those numbers have been rising steadily since the 1980s, when the average weight took a dramatic spike upwards for all races, age groups and genders. For example, in 1960 women aged 20 to 29 weighed an average of 128 pounds. By 2000 the average weight had jumped to 157.

Our national weight gain is not, as many people assume, because we are far less active; studies have found little difference in energy expended now than in the 1950s. It is because we are eating far, far more calories than ever before, in the form of soda, junk food, sweets, fat and salt laden meals, and huge portions. We have become addicted to food, and that addiction starts in very early childhood.

Kessler [author of the new book The End of Overeating] lays out how sugar, fat and salt stimulates the reward centers of the brain in much the same way as cigarettes, alcohol and illicit drugs. By eating food that is extremely palatable, we keep wanting more, whether or not we are hungry. Since highly palatable junk food is socially acceptable, and often cheaper than the healthy stuff, we keep going back for more. The food industry knows this better than anyone. Kessler quotes an industry consultant who says that food manufacturers try to hit the “three points of the compass”:

Sugar, fat and salt make a food compelling, said the consultant. They make it indulgent. They make it high in hedonic value, which gives us pleasure. “Do you design food specifically to be highly hedonic,” I asked. “Oh, absolutely,” he replied without a moment’s hesitation. “We try to bring as much of that into the equation as possible.

Here's the good news about local eating. None of the farmers I talk to at the farmers' market try to jam their food with salt, fat or sugar to get my little Isabella addicted.

Urban gardening time is here!

During the No Impact project, I helped my friend Mayer Vishner with his vegetable plot in the Laguardia Community Gardens here in New York. For those of you who don't know, a community garden is a public piece of land broken up into a checkerboard of plots and a different gardener tends to each plot.

Urban vegetable gardening, I think, is hugely important for a variety of reasons--local food production, aesthetic enhancement of the city, absorption of rainwater to help prevent sewage overflows, amelioration of the heat island effect. But what may be more hidden than you'd expect is evident in the very name of what goes on--community gardening.

This year, our little family finally came to the top of Laguardia's waiting list and we got our own plot. Isabella, my four-year-old, has the time of her life in the garden. She runs around talking to people, playing with shovels, squirting herself with the hose.

I knew that she would have fun, but what I hadn't anticipated was how much pleasure she brings to the older population of gardeners. She helps them water or weed, and the oldsters get as much pleasure as the youngster.

Who'd have thought:

In the world's fastest city, it turns out that local food equals community.

Local, ecologically-sound and economically stable

Yesterday, I posted about how investment in a network of local economies rather than one big central economy by the Obama Administration could provide not only a more sustainable paradigm but one that is more socially and economically stable.

Think of the Internet. Instead of all our requests traveling through one gigantic central server, information is routed through millions of computers all over the world. This means that, because service provision is "distributed," if one server goes down the Internet still works.

Compare this with the misery caused when our centralized, unsustainable economy takes a hit. One problem at the center and everyone suffers.

But what if the economy was "distributed" like the Internet? What if it was based on local, human relationships that meant less transportation, community-accountability, transparency of operations and lesser resource use?

If one part of it took a hit, the problems would remain local, and the rest of the "Economy-Net" would continue to function.

This is a paradigm that is based on strong communities rather than strong corporations. Admittedly, it's a vision rather than a plan. But if the vision came to fruition, we would be more economically stable, have more fulfilling relationships, determine our own fates rather than have them determined by corporate head offices and we would help the planet.

It may seem trivial, but an initiative by New York's Just Food to raise chicken-producing eggs right in the center of the City is a small but worthy example. The point is that no matter what happens to the banks, no matter whether the transportation system runs out of petroleum, if this program were scaled, New York would have all the eggs it needed.

Again, I'm using this just as an example of how food provision could be localized, but you get the point. Local is both more sustainable and more economically stable. Read more details of Just Food's urban chicken program below. For more information go to Just Food's website:

The City Chicken Project helps people legally and safely raise chickens for eggs in New York City. By working in partnership with our network of urban gardeners and other organizations, Just Food has launched an initiative to:

• promote best practices and the benefits of raising chickens in the city,
• teach people how to build coops that are structurally sound and healthy for hens,
• publicize relevant city regulations and codes, and
• support gardeners who are interested in setting-up or expanding egg production operations.

Why raise chickens?
These fine feathered friends can contribute to the social, economic, and environmental well- being of your community. They help out in the garden and the neighborhood by:

• improving garden health, suppressing pests and weeds, and building soil fertility,
• giving neighborhood children the opportunity to learn where their food comes from, and
• producing nutritious eggs to be enjoyed by their caretakers and sold at farmers’ markets.

Top UN climate scientist says eat less meat, I'm teaching a course at NYU, and Park(ing) Day is coming

I want to tell you about a course I'm helping to teach at NYU and about my plan to turn a NYC parking space into a park, but first, according to the BBC:

"People should consider eating less meat as a way of combating global warming, says the UN's top climate scientist.

"Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), will make the call at a speech in London on Monday evening.

"UN figures suggest that meat production puts more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than transport."

Meat production is responsible for 18% of manmade greenhouse gases (the transportation sector is responsible for only 13%). The problems come from the clearing forested land, the making and transportation of fertilizer, the burning fossil fuels in farm vehicles, and the front and rear end emissions of cattle and sheep.

"But the biggest source globally of carbon dioxide from meat production is land clearance, particularly of tropical forest, which is set to continue as long as demand for meat rises."

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So guess what? You know that totally cool professor at NYU I wrote about, Natalie Jeremijenko, who looks for ways to help structure citizen participation in responses to our environmental emergency? Well, she's asked me to act as an adviser on one of her courses.

The course's central assignment is to produce a visual essay for publication on Jeremijenko's How Stuff is Made, a collaborative encyclopedia that documents the impact on workers and our habitat of the production of a wide range of products. The aim of the project is to find and advocate improved practices.

If you happen to be an NYU student and you're interested--and I think you should be--there is still enrollment left. Read more here.

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Meanwhile, the time of year for Park(ing) Day--the international citizen action to convert parking spaces for cars into little parks for people--has rolled around again. You may remember that for last's year's Park(ing) Day, as I wrote then:

I am squatting in a New York City parking space and, with a group of friends, transforming it into a mini-park as part of an effort to demonstrate what cities could be if they were dedicated to people instead of cars. I’ve written before about how the current environmental crisis also offers us the potential to have, not only more planet-friendly cities, but cities that are more pleasant to live in (read here and here).

This year, my Park(ing) Day partner, Jen Petersen, and I are hoping that you might help and get involved with our mini-park. If you're interested in helping out, the list of volunteer opportunities are listed here.

Innovating business greenly

Meet Trevor Paque. He's landscape gardener meets local food farmer. He rents himself to homeowners, but instead of planting and growing pretty flowers for them--and using the requisite water and chemicals--he grows them organic produce and leaves it in a box on their back porch.

This apropos, partly, of yesterday's post about innovation vs conservation.

It seems to me--and I get that this service is rarefied and elite--that is this the kind of innovative thinking we need from business in general? A way to improve people's lives while helping the planet? A way to make helping the planet seem cool and trendy? A way to make money doing it?

The point is there are opportunities and jobs to be had that assist the healing of the planetary habitat we depend upon for our health, happiness and security. Pitting economic well-being against the environment is just plain wrong.

PS I know, we shouldn't have to make helping the planet it cool and trendy, but it's all hands on deck, no? Besides, isn't this the quintessence of "green business?"

PPS Meanwhile, while Trevor helps the rich to grow local food, the excellent NYC organization Just Food helps neighborhoods grow good fresh, produce to which they might not otherwise have access. Check them out!

Photo courtesy of the New York Times.