a fool for the planet

Earth Day passed with nary a word from me.  I didn't even make the fairly lame gesture of tweeting last year's Earth Day post, have you hugged a republican today?  

And I didn't hug a Republican either.

I admit, last week I was too preoccupied with reading the boys next door at Listen to Your Mother DC to write about anything else (it was great fun, btw--thanks to everyone who came out!).

I haven't been completely silent, however. 

On April, 14th, I trekked down to Richmond with my activist friend Lisa to protest Dominion Virginia Power's plans to spend over one billion dollars to build a fracked-gas power plant in Brunswick, VA.   The plant would increase carbon fuel emissions by 25% over the next 20 years. 

Increase?  Isn't that the opposite of what we're supposed to be doing?

Some may say VA is for "lovers," but it could be that VA is for "losers" - losers in the race to clean energy.  According to the VA Chapter Sierra Club, VA ranks close to last in the nation for investment in clean energy.  While Dominion Power's short-sighted fracked-gas plant commits our beautiful state to decades of dirty fuel and dangerous extraction methods, our more progressive friends in Maryland move inexorably into the 21st Century with plans to build an offshore wind farm 12 miles off the coast of Ocean City, MD.  It would be the second in the nation (after Cape Wind in the Nantucket Sound).  That is exciting!

I wish some of those smarts would rub off on us!  Why in the world would we invest in fossil fuel infrastructure at this late date? In my mind, the Age of Oil is over. 

Dominion Virgina Power doesn't seem to get that. I don't want to let them reduce Virginia to nothing but a carbon powered dinosaur, chugging and slugging its way to extinction with clouds of sooty black smoke ballooning out from our decrepit state chimney. (I wish I could draw).

So, I went to Richmond to protest Dominion's Brunswick plans.

I want to tell you this particular demonstration was in inspiration.  The plan itself, hatched by the VA Chapter Sierra Club, was full of promise and fun: gather outside the Dominion Virgina Power building and dance the electric slide. 

Imagine the stuffy executives watching our antics from their high perch while pacing and rubbing their chins with worried consternation, one saying to the other in an unmistakable good ol' boy drawl, "I need a drink!"  As they toss back their Sunday morning bourbon, they despair over the billions of fracking dollars they worry might swirl down the throat of a more responsible environmental policy.

Ah yes. 

But this is VA, not Hollywood.  In VA, turnout for this protest was poor.  If any Dominion executives watched, they probably used the morning to reassure themselves that everything would be OK.  Ugh.

Meanwhile, my friend Lisa and I, two self-proclaimed introverts, found ourselves in the middle of a sparsely attended protest where we would be expected to dance the electric slide for the cameras like we'd never had so much fun in our lives.  When the speeches ended and the moment came, we looked at each other with silent recognition: "Oh my god, now we will have to dance."

When we heard that those less inclined to dance could hold up a letter in the back, we bee-lined it for the placards.  Somehow, I ended up with a letter, and Lisa did not.  (I should have given her mine, I'm sure of it). 

I'm holding the "R" in "Energy."  Lisa, bless her heart, did the sliiiide.

Then she took pictures (which saved her from being in this one).

To make up for snagging the letter, I did a fair bit of foolish rockin' out of my own, waving my "R" around with my feet rooted in place like a funky dancing flower. Anything to make the fracking and the burning stop, right?

It's hard to be the ones who care about clean energy in a state that apparently, doesn't. It's not that much fun to dance the electric slide by yourself, you know!? But guess what, all the more reason to do it then.   If we're not willing to make a fool of ourselves for the planet, who will?

Eventually, the music stopped and we packed up our signs and went home.  The fight didn't end there, however.  The State Corporation Commission held a Public Hearing on Dominion's plans last week, April 24th.  I couldn't make it, but Lisa attended by herself (no dancing required) and despite her nerves, worked up the gumption to speak (go Lisa!!).   

Regardless of how the SCC rules, I suppose the point is that if we want to stand up for our planet against monopolizing corporations like Dominion, we may have to step outside of our comfort zone to do it.  That doesn't mean you have to dance alone in a field (although that hopefully doesn't hurt)! But it could mean speaking before a commission, or perhaps just posting your concerns to Facebook, sharing a link, or raising awareness among your friends. 

So go ahead, in belated honor of earth day, find a way to be a fool for the planet!

If you're a Virginian concerned with the direction Dominion VA Power wants to take our state, visit their Facebook page and and let them know!

Want to know more about green initiatives in your state? Visit the Sierra Club main page and hit the local tab to find your state chapter. 

what's in the pot?

I'm cooking stock--a lot of it--hoping for about 36 cups.  There's something so completely satisfying about this pot, simmering and smelling so heavenly on the stove.  It seems a culmination?  A witch's brew? A recycling? A pot of healing power?  I don't know.

Why do I get so inspired by a pot of soggy boiling stuff? 

I think it brings together a lot of things.

I remember sitting with friends in college, eating some sort of frozen meal - a creamy, but fat free, chicken cordon bleu, I think.  I held up a forkful of this "delicious" frozen dinner and said with amazement: "They can turn anything into food!" 

If you asked me to eat that same meal now, I know I'd gag in the trying. 

I also remember the first time it occurred to me to question the source and content of my food.  A friend of my sister's, Mary, had researched the possible causes of her husband's cancer.  Mary told my sister she believed people were getting sick from all of the preservatives and additives in food.  My sister repeated this to me in almost hushed tones.  "Really" I said, in that weighted way you do when you've just heard some very juicy gossip.   I can't say a light bulb went off bright white and hot over my head, but it set to humming in a dim but persistent glow.  Was our food safe? 

Already foodies who loved to cook, my sister and I set out on a journey.  It wasn't a mission at first, just a journey.  It involved a little accidental discovery here, a little shock and outrage there, a medical problem or two thrown in for good measure, some research as it came our way, and overall, a general pattern of gradual adoption and change.  We're still hunkering our way down the path of it now. 

There are so many different reasons for avoiding highly processed or industrial food.  From health, to the environment, to ethics.  You don't have to learn about them all at once.  You don't even have to care about them all at once.  It would take years before I would begin to avoid the preservatives and additives that Mary warned us about.  Her concerns simply served as an impetus that set us off, to find our own way. 

I started with organic milk in 1998.  I remember the first time I bought it, paying twice the money (about $3.50) for a half gallon than I used to pay for a whole gallon.  This felt like a huge extravagance to me (one I, of course, hid from Steve like another new pair of designer shoes), but I was learning about the "true costs" of cheap food, so I made the leap and spent precious extra dollars on just that one thing. 

Doing it, I felt empowered, like I could change the world.

Over the next few years, I heard increasing rumblings about organic food, but Gareth was a toddler, and  I was buried deep in my Ph.D. program.  We ate fresh and homemade meals, but our food choices centered around creativity and pleasure more than they did politics or spirituality.

Then I did some reading: Your Organic Kitchen (a cookbook) by Jesse Ziff Cool in 2000, Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser in 2001, and The Healthy Kitchen  (another cookbook) by Andrew Weil, M.D. and Rosie Daley in 2002.  These three books introduced me to the realities of mass produced food and the attendant need to eat local and organic whenever possible.  The books came out over the course of three years, so I had time to absorb and process the information. 

At the time, organic vegetables showed up in the grocery store about as often as salami showed up at the doughnut shop.  Still, I fell into the rhythm of seasonal eating, organic or not. I began to feel annoyed with my usual cooking magazines and their insistence that I rustle up fresh tomatoes or cilantro in February.  Never a fan of fast food for its obvious health implications, I also began to think, for the first time, about food choice as connected to something larger - a petroleum dependent industry laden with questions about the ethical treatment of animals, use of herbicides, pesticides and fertilizers, loss of biodiversity, and the disappearance of the small family farm.

My new convictions about food gathered steam after that.  I discovered my organic CSA (community supported agriculture, or coop) in 2003.  My sister randomly met a woman who ground her own grain for bread (and who taught us to do the same) in 2005.   And at some point, we made a trip to a local pick-your-own farm and came home with 90lbs of strawberries between us.  I don't know what came over us--some sort of bizarre frenzied panic to gather way more than our fair share?  We had all of those berries either in a jam jar or the freezer before the sun went down that night, so I'd say we officially had the fever.  We canned applesauce that fall and gradually added other things like tomatoes and peaches as the years went by. 

Over those same years, I'd gradually shifted my produce shopping from the grocery store to the farmer's market, supplementing what I got from my CSA with food from other local farmers.  I had a growing sense of control--I thought I had it all figured out!  Then, in what felt like a huge setback, Olivia was diagnosed with food allergies and sensitivities in 2009.  To resolve digestive issues, rashes and trouble with excessive hyperactivity and inattention, the doctor advised no wheat, gluten, dairy, egg, or peanut. No food dyes, preservatives, additives or refined sugar either.   She couldn't eat my homemade bread!  More eye opening, however, she couldn't eat most of what we had in our cupboards: cereal, cookies, crackers, pasta, cheese sticks, yogurt, carrots dipped in ranch, granola bars, pretzels, toast, sandwiches, waffles, butter. 

While this news turned our worlds upside down for a time, it also taught us the hardest of all the lessons about food:  regardless of where we got our produce, we also needed to stop eating all that crap that populates the shelves in the bone dry desert of nutrition we call the center of the grocery store.  For Olivia's sake, we had to, and in so doing, came to understand the real meaning of eating whole food.  That means food that hasn't been divided up into its smallest parts then recombined in unnatural proportions, pulverized, salted, sweetened, packaged and shipped. 

Living without it sounded so complicated, but it turned out to be so simple.  When we went to the grocery store and read labels, there was very little Olivia could eat, right down to the ketchup (complicated!), but when we started out with meat, fish, fresh fruits, vegetables, and whole gluten-free grains like quinoa and millet, there was very little Olivia couldn't eat (simple!).  Olivia's body was telling us it only wanted real food.

And the changes transformed her, both physically and mentally.

Figuring out this new diet really turned up the power on that light bulb over my head.  I now had a sense of urgency burning hard and bright.  By then I'd also read Animal, Vegetable Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan.  I stepped up my efforts to eat locally, canning a wider variety of foods each year, finding Polyface Farm for our grass fed meats, and last year, finding a winter coop through a fruit vendor at my farmer's market. 

This year, I've discovered something I should have know more about a long time ago: winter markets!  More on that in another post, I think.

So, you see, when I tell you I'm making stock, I think what I'm telling you is that I have this story in a pot on my stove.  It holds celery and onions from my winter coop, the carrots frozen from my summer coop, chicken carcasses we've kept frozen and recycled from several previous meals of whole, local and grass-fed chickens, and the herbs (save the bay leaves, salt and peppercorns) dried from my herb garden.  It sounds a little bit like I'm a wizard.  Should I tell you I hand pumped the water from my backyard well?  I won't--I didn't. 

On one hand, it took me longer to get that pot boiling than it took to put it together, but on the other, it took me fifteen years to put it together.  Stirring it periodically throughout the day feels deeply spiritual - a culmination of a lifestyle, of a season of eating, gathering, storing, loving and coming together in one delicious place.  Even better, the end product will go into the freezer to serve as a homemade base for multiple future meals.

While I say the pot of stock feels like a culmination, I don't mean to suggest it's an end point.  I still have a ton to learn. I have broccoli frozen in the garden right now because I never bothered to pick it!--plant killer - see!? I'm still wondering where I can get local grain for my flour; I marvel at how full my grocery cart is every week, despite all my efforts to prepare food myself, and where the heck is my vegetable garden!?! 

But still, I'm so rewarded by where I am in the process, because it is the process, not the end point that matters, right?

So if you're feeling overwhelmed, like you could never get a pot to boiling like that in a day, well, you're right.  You can't.  But that doesn't mean you can't make it at all. 

What do you have for your stock today?  Whatever you have will be good enough.  If you see yourself as simply on a continuum towards preparing more eco- and body-healthy food, then no day's cooking falls short; it's simply another step on your journey. 

Perhaps this blog could be to you, what Mary's cancer theories were to me.  A spark.  The impetus to question, to act and to find your own path. If you've gotten this far in this horrendously long post, then I assume you have some kind of interest in the subject of food and where it comes from.  If so, I'd suggest you find the thing that matters to you and follow it.  Pick something to read, or a documentary to watch.  See what inspires you, what outrages you, what makes you move. 

Follow it and see what ends up in your pot!  

xmas wrap up

I had this fab plan to wrap all of our xmas presents in newspaper this year.  Wouldn't it be great? I reveled in how we'd avoid that mountain of wasteful shiny, non recyclable paper that always depresses me so much in late December. 

I announced my plan with unbridled enthusiasm, as if I were declaring "double presents for everyone!" But immediately, I sensed dissension in the ranks. 

Nobody actually said anything, but Steve wrapped A LOT of presents before I could get to them.  He scampered around like a squirrel before winter, stashing everything under cover of one very under average Santa-faced green paper that we had leftover from last year. I didn't complain. I understood that all that paper was headed for the dump anyway, no matter what path it took, so why not let it detour under our tree?

Steve wasn't the only dissenter.  Gareth, in typical teen detachment, didn't even know about my plan until Christmas eve when he reacted with a simple and somewhat disdainful, "What?!"

Olivia, on the other hand, knew from the beginning, and like her father, held her tongue.  When faced with the curled and oblong remnants of paper discarded by her father, she quietly took a piece of newspaper from the pile I had so happily provided.  Can you see me? I'm sitting with hands folded, watching with beaming anticipation to see what she'll create.  As I looked on expectantly, she rolled her father's new Redskins hat up in grey print, scribbled a haphazard purple heart on one side, then tossed the mediocre results carelessly under the tree.

Did I sense an element of resentment there?

Sometimes I really feel like the Grinch, tap tap tapping my long and greedy nails on the table top as I think up new ways to rob my innocent little Whos of their cherished Christmas traditions.  I can hear Olivia-Lou-who now, "Mommy why, why are you taking our wrapping paper, WHY?"

Why?  Well, I just cannot take things at their surface value alone.  I like this about myself, but I know that it sometimes makes me a really annoying person to be around.  I regularly ruin movies while we're still in the middle of watching them, and you know I'm a nightmare on a shopping trip.  It doesn't stop there.  For example: we saw a lit up polar bear in someone's yard the other day. It looked something like this one:

Olivia said, "Awww.  How cute!  Look at the polar bear!" 

Since it was Christmas eve, I figured it was my turn to hold my tongue, but truth be told, I didn't see "cute," I saw this:

And I thought: "Wait.  We're burning fossil fuels to light up a plastic polar bear at a time when the burning of fossil fuels has caused warming dramatic enough to have drowned baby polar bears at a rate of approximately 45% because the sea ice that allows them to rest and feed during long swims has melted due to the burning of carbon-emitting fossil fuels used to (we're coming around full circle here) light up things like this stupid plastic polar bear that, instead of speaking to us about how to save the baby bears, delivers a 'Merry Christmas!' message during a holiday season that's supposed to be centered around the hope of new birth?" 

Yes, I can't stop this paradoxical rant from prattling around in my head as I drive with my family over the river and through the woods to grandmother's house for dinner on Christmas eve.  No matter how you light him up, a polar bear is a polar bear, and I just cannot turn that off. 

So sure, flashy presents look beautiful and festive under the tree.  But to see that, and only that, you have to ignore the trashy truth beneath: that most wrapping paper cannot be recycled, that half of the paper Americans use in a year goes to wrapping gifts, and that household waste increases by 25% between Thanksgiving and New Years with trash from wrapping, packaging and shopping bags, food waste, bows and ribbons creating 1 million extra tons of trash per week (source).   The Carnegie Mellon Green Practices Initiative claims that "if every American family wrapped just 3 presents in re-used materials, it would save enough paper to cover 45,000 football fields."

Forty-five thousand football fields? You had me at "one." 

Since I cannot unlearn stuff like that, I persisted with Grinching up Christmas for my poor little Who family.  I hoped that perhaps I would inspire them with my "beautiful" recyclable creations. 

I felt intent on my purpose, but I didn't expect to have so much fun carrying it out.  I've said before that I break into a sweat at the word "craft," and nothing can clear me out of a room faster than the three letters DIY.  In a doltish sort of way, however, I always enjoyed coloring as a child.  How lucky that wrapping with newspaper turned out to be just that sort of job--but with the added interest of words. 

Since an article about drone strikes doesn't make good packaging, I found myself searching the Style section and the Sports page for fun headlines and pictures, then coloring them in for what my mother would call, "a little zing." 

Ensconced in our bedroom on the afternoon of Christmas eve, I lost myself in the task.  Steve came looking for me at least an hour later and found me sitting on the bed like a child, surrounded by cut up newspapers, a mountain of broken crayons, and an array of green and red markers.  I actually felt embarrassed.

"What have you been doing in here?" he asked with exasperation.

"Coloring," I said sheepishly, putting down my crayon.

I'm no artist, but I was proud of my creations anyway.  And since the fam knew I worked so hard on them, no one complained about the newspaper under the tree. I think (hope) they appreciated the effort, if not the cause.

Some results:

this gift for steve featured a Redskin returning a ball for a touch down.
no, i have no idea who he is, but steve knew, which is all that mattered.

 

the front of the post featured
 this mystical wintry picture of reindeer pulling a sled.
i admit i didn't read the article.  i hope it wasn't about something
dreadful like disappearing ice

an advertisement
offered a rare full page of solid red - a gold mine!
(i glued the picture of notes & shopping bags to the front for Olivia, our musician)

this picture of blinds made for some cool horizontal lines
on this masculine package for Gareth - and the ad even said "warm wishes"

Other packages featured Gareth's favorite Maryland Terps scoring a basket, a sports headline about "getting the ball rolling" on a package that contained juggling balls, and a color picture of a sustainably powered house (appropriate, right?). 

the lot of them
 

In the end, as I began to grow tired, I slapped a random paper onto a gift for Olivia without really looking at the articles. When I turned it over, only two words of the bold-faced headline had wrapped around to the front: "gratitude" and "unite." I couldn't help myself: I took it as a sign. 

"Gratitude" - a reminder to be grateful for what we have, of course.  But since the word appeared just as I finished wrapping, I also took it as a thank you for my recycled wrapping job. 

And "Unite" -  the inspiration to write this post and ask others to unite in using recycled or reusable packaging for gifts.  I really don't know if we can save the polar bears, but I do know that together we can at least save 45,000 football fields worth of paper.  That has to be worth something.

And what of my tortured little Whos?  Of course you know that Christmas "CAME."  "Somehow or other, it came just the same!"

--------------------------------
The holidays are winding down, but it's not too late to get started.  Here are some alternatives to wrapping paper we can experiment with throughout the year.

 - old maps
 - old newspapers/comics/magazines
 - recycled and/or recyclable wrapping paper
 - if you can sew, DIY cloth gift bags (thanks for the link thalassa!)
 - purchasable cloth gift bags/decorative boxes (I'll let you google it rather than tell you what to buy)
 - reusable tins
 - cloth ribbons and bows
 - twine
 - recycled gift wrap and bags that you salvage from gifts you are given

Feel free to share if you have other ideas!

earth: full, pantry: empty

Like a lot of folks, I’ve read and watched some scary stuff about our economy and the environment in recent years. We face a warming climate, overpopulation, crippling trade deficits, a seemingly insurmountable national debt, peaking oil and water supplies, and a food production and distribution system that depends on all of these other at-risk factors to keep our rumbling bellies full. It’s too much to think about, really.

And so we don’t.

Deer in the headlights? Ostriches with our heads in the sand? Or perhaps a creative double-jeopardy-kind-of-combination never before seen in the history of denial: we have our heads in the sand and our asses to the headlights: doomed, paralysed, and willfully ignorant.

Before I crush you with negativity, grab yourself a beer, a coffee, or perhaps a tub of ice cream, and watch Paul Gilding’s fairly optimistic TED talk The Earth is Full. Or if you prefer, you can read an interview with him about his book The Great Disruption. Or, egad, read the book itself! (I haven’t yet).

Gilding is a genius. Not for his science, not for his research or business acuity, not for his synthesis of information.

For his attitude.

He somehow argues that when the poor abused fan we call earth spins into the imminent shit storm of ecologic and economic calamity he predicts, we will have our finest hour. 

Gilding contends that not only is the earth warming, it is full. He cites the Global Footprint Network to argue that it takes 1.5 Earths to maintain our global economy in its current state.  Add that we expect the population to quadruple by 2050 and things look dire indeed.

If that's not enough, there's a catch-22.  While we need to reduce our rates of water consumption, CO2 emissions, and soil degradation to sustain the earth, we need to increase these things to sustain the economy.

With our present methods, we cannot do both.

Don't worry.  That wasn't the positive part.  This is:  Gilding argues against despair.  From a position of hope he claims humans are good in a crisis.  We are innovative, possess an incredible capacity for change, and when pressed, repeatedly come together to achieve "whatever it takes" with speed and efficiency.

Reading this, I feel like a child getting a pep talk from my mom.  Yes we can!

He admits that there will be pain and suffering in our lifetime, possibly even a collapse of our civilization, but ultimately, Gilding argues, we will come through it for the better ("it won't hurt" says mom at the doctor's office, "you'll just feel a little pressure").

I appreciate the positive angle, and I see how Gilding’s attitude makes his rather devastating news more digestible.

But I can also read between the very wide lines. System collapse means empty shelves at the grocery store, no gas at the pump, water scarcity, heat, and cold.

In the worst case, we’re using dollar bills for toilet paper (now that’s going green!) and defending our meager vegetable plots with stolen guns that we don’t know how to use.

Sitting alone at my computer in the dark of night, bleary eyed in my Twitter Haze, I got a little scared. Shouldn’t we prepare for this coming-apart-at-the-seams? I mean, what will it take to be one of those upbeat innovators who comes through the “pain and suffering” part to enjoy the new sustainable world? When the Care Bears flit around on wind turbines, bounce carelessly from solar panel to solar panel, and slide giggling over the arches of renewable rainbows, I want to be there.

And who can I talk to about this desire, these fears?

Even though the naysayers repeatedly discredit themselves with faulty research and ad homonym attacks on credible scientists, their noise creates uncertainty for lay people like me who are unschooled in the details we need to fully understand what's going on.

Let’s face it. Nobody wants to be called Chicken Little, and anyone who talks about societal collapse and catastrophic climate change in the mainstream takes that risk.

I checked Gilding’s credentials and those of the sources he cites. Very solid. And to be truthful, a lot of this wasn’t new to me. I read Storms of My Grandchildren by NASA scientist James Hansen. I read The Long Emergency by James Howard Kunstler. And besides, it doesn't take a rocket scientist, or a climate scientist for that matter, to understand that we cannot create infinite economic growth on a finite planet. Period.

I decided I'd rather be safe than sorry. I would collect necessities, but secretly. No one would have to know.

Why secretly?

Because I'd rather be a big chicken in private than Chicken Little in public.

Pathetic, I know.

So surreptitiously, I set out for the grocery store with a mission: save myself, save the kids, live to see the future! Then I got overwhelmed. How do I store months’ worth of water for four in a “small house” without anyone knowing about it? Where would I put all those canned goods? Will we have to eat them before they spoil if the sky doesn’t fall? Blech! How often do I replenish? (that’s expensive!).What about other necessities like tampons, band aids, BAKING SODA?!  The list started to explode.

In the end, I came home with an extra bag of rice and three bars of soap.

It’s true. I don’t shop well in a crisis.

So bring it on: resource wars, floods, starvation, dehydration, gun fights in the potato patch:

We'll be lathered and ready.

How about you?

don't legislate! tolerate!

Remember that bumper sticker conservatives loved after 9/11 that said “Freedom isn’t Free!?” When it came to justifying the cost of war, Republicans were all about freedom and the high price we should be willing to pay, both in dollars and in lives, to preserve it. 

I never put much credence in that argument, so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the party willing to pay so dearly for freedom currently has its righteous nose pressed against my liberties at every turn.  The examples keep rolling in, fast and furious:

-Rick Santorum doesn’t think I should be allowed to use birth control

-The Republican Legislators in my state of VA don’t think I can manage my personhood and pregnancy at the same time

-Reverend Jesse Lee Peterson doesn’t think I should be allowed to vote

-Wisconsin’s Governor Walker doesn’t think hard working public servants should be allowed to bargain together for fair wages

-The north Carolina legislature doesn’t think scientists should be allowed to practice their professions and publish inconvenient data on climate change

-Lawmakers in Arizona don’t think students should read books by or about Mexicans or Native Americans. 

-Lawmakers in Florida don’t think all registered voters should vote

-Conservatives across the country don’t think same-sex couples should be allowed to marry —with some, such as those most recently in North Carolina, using their state constitutions to deny rather than confer rights to citizens 

-Michigan lawmakers join a long list of state legislators who don’t think women should have autonomy over their own bodies, pregnant or not   

-And just for some comic relief, squirmy Michigan legislators would prefer if we didn’t say the word “vagina” in their presence 

 I guess vagina is the new Voldemort – that which shall not be named. 

 Are those men in kindergarten? 

How ironic Republicans fault Democrats for running a Nanny state. As self-appointed babysitters, they’ve cornered the market on regulating personal conduct, fussing like old ninnies over our every move.

Here’s the problem: I’m all grown up, and in the process, I grew a moral conscience of my own.  With it, I can make all these decisions for myself. 

I bet you can too.

The issue here is not whether a person particularly likes Native American Literature, agrees with the threat of rising sea level, supports gay marriage or a woman’s right to choose; the question is about who gets to decide an individual’s actions as they pertain to these issues. Legislative babysitters? Or individual citizens?

We need to do a better job of separating what might be a rule in one person’s family from what should be a law in everyone’s nation.  With this clear separation, you can more easily see that one person’s right to read a book, or enter into a same sex marriage, or terminate a pregnancy, does not mean everyone else has to do it too.  My right to exercise a freedom does not infringe on your right to abstain from it, disapprove of it, or even condemn it.   

In other words, you don’t have to do it, but you do have to tolerate it. 

And that’s the true price of freedom: tolerance. 

I read a Republican slogan today that said, “Annoy a Democrat, love your country!”  Republicans are great at waving the flag and professing their love for America, but they’re not so great at loving Americans.  No.  Not so great at all. I don’t think it’s enough to love your country if you can’t tolerate the people in it.

All of this legislative babysitting is an attempt to make us all the same.  They want us to restrict immigration so we’ll all look and talk the same; censor books and science so we’ll all think the same; purge voter rolls so we’ll all vote the same; restrict marriage so our families will all be shaped the same; restrict reproductive rights so that all women will choose the same. 

That's a lot of time wasted protecting conservatives' fear of difference! 

But conservatives are right about one thing:  freedom isn’t free. They’re just wrong about the price.  Instead of paying in dollars, or in soldiers’ precious lives, we need to pay by electing officials who trust and respect Americans enough to let us choose, let us vote, let us read, let us debate, let us marry, let us control our own destinies. 

We need to pay in tolerance.   

My message for conservatives:  Don’t legislate! Tolerate! 

earth day: have you hugged a republican today?

Earth Day 2012: Mobilize the Earth
from www.earthday.org

For Earth Day, I thought I might make a list of green things to do around the house, but I was reading blogs this week and discovered an excellent one, already written, at Simple Mom.  She’s listed 40 ways to go greener at home. 

It’s worth checking out, but I have to admit, when I first read it, something irked me.  She started off with a disclaimer about how she didn’t want to push a political agenda.  Few things are more politically urgent to me right now than our need to cut back on CO2 emissions.   If you care about the earth enough to write a post about going green, how can you not care about the politics of making green things happen on a larger scale?  I mean, who cares if you change your light bulbs if your car still only gets 26 miles/gallon in 30 years? 

There are politics in the light bulb (and the blog post) whether intended or not. Why deny it?

I stewed about this for a bit.  Then I had an idea.  Simple Mom has thousands and thousands of readers—I think she has as many comments in a day as I have readers in a month.  An audience that big must hail from a broad array of backgrounds.  Perhaps she’s just walking the fine line of inclusion—trying not to alienate readers.  Instead of a political agenda (code for democratic agenda, I think), she claims to support good stewardship and frugality.  She even connects green practices to God, explaining that going green is a way of caring for God’s earth. 

Is she apolitical, or is she a political genius? 

I ask because, whether she intends to or not, she’s encouraging conservative readers to become activists for what most perceive as a democratic cause.  And this got me thinking about our desperate need for some green cooperation.  No one can deny that the humanitarian and planetarian crisis of climate change is mired in a paralyzing heap of steaming partisanship that could undo us all. 

It wasn’t always that way.

The first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, had bipartisan support.  Democratic Senator Gaylord Nelson and Republican Congressman Pete McCloskey co-chaired the campaign to have a national environmental teach-in.  Twenty million Americans participated in rallies across the country, giving the issue enough political clout that the following fall, Republican President Nixon passed the Clean Air Act.  Of further note, the 1970 Clean Air Act passed the Senate unanimously.  Unanimously! 

Then Ronald Reagan came into office.   No sooner had he wiped his shoes on the White House welcome mat, than he ordered the removal of the solar panels that Jimmy Carter had installed just 2 years prior (the panels didn’t actually come down until 1986, in conjunction with some other roof work). 

Carter installed the panels as a symbol of our clean energy future.  Reagan removed them as a symbolic rejection of that future.   He went on to cut 85% of Carter’s R&D budget for renewable energy.  He also allowed solar tax credits to expire and abandoned planned increases to fuel efficiency standards. 

With his pro-market decimation of Carter’s energy policies, Reagan made the environment a liberal issue, effectively sneezing on earth-day, infecting its preservationist and conservationist ideals with the parasite of partisanship that we have yet to eradicate. 

Now, after 30 years of bickering, we’re in a real mess.  To turn things around, we need to reduce atmospheric CO2 levels from our current level of 392 parts per million (ppm) to 350 ppm (read more at www.350.org).  To accomplish this goal, we need to cut CO2 emissions to 80% below 1990 levels by 2050.  That’s just 38 years away! 

Predictions of what will happen if we don’t accomplish that goal? Collapsed continental ice sheets, a sea level rise of dozens of feet, and the ever-lurking and dire possibility that warming becomes irreversible.

A few energy saver light bulbs ain’t gonna cut it. 

We need Republicans.  We need them bad.

We all know there’s no chance that Republican lawmakers will voluntarily abandon their big oil buddies for the company of a lush green forest.  Demand for environmental policy needs to come from below, from Republican voters.  Currently, however, the only way a Republican can vote for the environment is by voting for a Democrat. That’s too much to ask.  To avoid that affront, Republicans cling to flimsy claims about an environmental conspiracy, burying their heads in the sands of denial. But there's no need for that.  We don’t need Republicans to be Democrats; we just need them to be environmentalists. 

Climate change is a humanitarian and planetarian crisis that doesn’t care at all about partisan bickering.  We can ride our donkeys and elephants straight into the lethal rays of a burning sunset for all it cares.

Or we can try to work together.  I know it seems like Republicans are doing all the bickering and denying, but there is also a way that Democrats don’t make room for them.  We like to claim green policy as ours—as one of the things that makes us right and them wrong.

We need a campaign to show Republican voters that they can care about the environment without giving up their other conservative ideals.  We need to put the conservative in conservation, to frame environmentalism as pro-life, pro-American, pro-job, even pro-God—because it truly is all of those things.   

The idea that Republicans should oppose sound energy and environmental policy was always a trick of the energy sector.  If Republican voters could see a conservative pathway through all of the misinformation about climate, perhaps they could be motivated to put the environment on their list of political must-haves with anti-abortion and guns.  Then policy-makers would have no choice but to follow suit.  Then we would have a real chance of defeating the demands of big oil in congress.   

So, I know the incentive today is to go out and hug a tree, but if we really want to save the earth, perhaps we should go out and hug a Republican.

(don’t worry, we can still fight about all the other stuff)

in like a lion?

Spring has nearly arrived.  But this year, unlike any other, I am not hungry for it.

My fuzziest socks lay unworn in the drawer, my store of tea remains undamaged by the season’s demand, my extra blanket rests lonely in the closet.   Because this year in Virginia, we saw no real snow, endured no cleansing cold. 

We didn’t hunker. 

We can think of winter as biting, painful, lonely.  But I think we also benefit from the paring down that winter asks – the trees naked, the ground sparse.  This freezing near-death of things creates a barrenness and sterility, an emptiness in our surroundings that makes way for a certain clarity of mind and spirit.  Without the clutter of outside, we turn inward. 

It’s a relief. 

And then, as with all cycles, we get tired of that.  We deplete our stores of spirit just as we deplete our stores of food.  We come to spring emptied and scoured by the cold. 

Ready.

March is supposed to be the month of transformation: in like a lion, out like a lamb after all.   In this month, we dare to let ourselves dream of spring.  We wait desperate for the sunlight that will fill us up so that we feel warmed from the inside out, instead of from the outside in. 

Except this year, the lion never showed. 

I understand that we can’t measure the degree of climate change through the sporadic weather patterns of a particular day (or season) in any given region.  I also understand, however, that the place of my home in Virginia has enjoyed a documented period of cool in recent years, despite the fact that average global temperatures have risen steadily.  Until last summer, we had been largely spared the kinds of weather we can expect from a warming climate. 

So, I wonder, is this our new “winter?” Anemic. Ambiguous. Thawed? 

It’s 70 degrees right now.  By all accounts, a rare and gorgeous day.  An April day.  A May day.  I’m sitting writing this on my deck.  The birds, reunited at last, sing a welcome to old friends in the treetops; the dog, sleeping at my side, communes with her old friend, the patch of sunlight by my chair; the daffodils and crocuses we have tried for a month to coax back into their winter fortresses, have arrived early to the party, unable to contain themselves a second longer. 

Of course I’m enjoying this day, but it lacks the usual euphoria of spring.  I don’t feel transformed.  The rhythm of the season has skipped a beat, (I suppose the lion went the way of the drummer), leaving my own clock out of wack. 

This all came home to me the other day when reading a blog I really enjoy called "the spirit of the river." The author’s post, “in like a lion” shows a picture of a snowy yard and includes a poem that aches for spring called “March” by David Budbill.  It’s about how we anticipate spring before it has a chance to arrive. 

The poem, however, doesn’t work for me this year, when spring’s reality has robbed us of anticipation, preceding the dream of itself.  And it occurs to me, will the poems of winter, whether lamenting the hard, cold dark outside, or celebrating the soft warm light inside, begin to ring false?  Will winter’s words become relics of nostalgia for a season lost?  

Of all the things I thought might change with the climate, I hadn’t considered that we’d need new poetry.