Ant misbehavin'

Last weekend, I spent a couple of gleeful hours pulling weeds and dying plants out of our front yard to make way for a few new future dead things. In the process I came across a few spiders, some nasty earwigs, and a whole lotta ants.

I respect insects, really I do. I love them so much I let them thrive in the damp plant debris of my overrun yard for months at a time. But I could swear the earwigs I unearthed were stalking me. Two of them came out of the ground and headed toward my feet while I was standing on the sidewalk. And each time I moved, they changed direction to follow me. I'm not kidding. So I squashed them with my spade.

Then, less than thirty minutes later, I found piles of ants busy pulling apart and carrying away the sticky goodness of earwig carcass. Mmmmm...earwig carcass.

At least the earwigs were crushed first. Shortly after we moved into this place, I was walking down our front steps to head to the grocery store when I saw a thrashing, oozing caterpillar being attacked by hundreds of merciless ants. When I returned a few minutes later, the caterpillar was mostly gone and decidedly dead.

I figured at that point that my battle with the ants already inside our home was doomed. Turns out, though, that the hundreds of tiny spiders that stand guard near every crack or hole in our creaky home mostly keep them in check, leaving behind piles of ant carcasses stacked neatly in the corners of our windowsills. As long as I avoid spraying ant and spider killer, and clean mostly with castille soap and vinegar, they keep up their important work. In fact, I've found that not cleaning the nooks and crannies at all works equally well.

I would prefer not to come into contact with ants. It makes me grumpy when ants invade my compost bin, or carry aphids onto my burgeoning herb garden, or herd up my son's leg when he steps onto the grass. And it makes me especially grumpy when I see or read more about just how incredible they are. For intance, a recent study reports that one ant species will throw itself into holes and dips in an ant trail to make the road smooth for the rest. My favorite quote: "Broadly, our research demonstrates that a simple but highly specialized behavior performed by a minority of ant workers can improve the performance of the majority, resulting in a clear benefit for the society as a whole." Darn it, I just can't stay mad an insect that will clean dead earwig meat off my sidewalk, or let 200,000 of its peers literally walk all over it for the good of the colony.

Brad is my new hero

I never considered Brad Pitt the kind of man who could make me forget about my wedding vows. Sure, he's a decent actor, and I respect that he's not afraid to make himself ugly or scary or an awesomely anti-consumerism terrorist, or to appear in a film squint-off with Claire Forlani. But he also apparently thinks 4.5 years of marriage is a success story, though I'm hoping for the sake of the colony that he has changed his mind about that.

I, for one, am beginning to change my mind about Brad. A while back, when I read something about him getting deeply interested in architecture, I brushed it off as harmlessly kooky. Then yesterday, he unveiled his latest project: a housing development in New Orleans. It is aimed at providing housing for families who have so far been unable to return to New Orleans. There will be a community center included that is designed to provide shelter during the inevitable next storm. Plus, the housing will be eco-friendly, with solar panels and other such things.

Oh, Brad, tell me more about how we should use this project as a template for communities that are rebuilding...

Books as accessories

My husband noticed the following organizational quirk and passed it along to me. Z Gallerie, a store that sells furniture and other decorative items, also sells a few books, and files them on their site among the candles, fake flowers, picture frames, and other "accessories". It's worth noting that the first book in their inventory is World Changing, a useful reference book all about environmentalism and eco-conscious business, consumption and living. Here, apparently, it is eco-consciousness as accessory. Go to Z Gallerie. Uncover your style. Grab a tropical leaf pillow, Monstera leaf placemats, and a copy of World Changing to showcase your profound respect for nature. Accessorize.

So when we reach peak oil it will still be light outside

Daylight savings time began early this morning in the U.S. Apparently, this means I've done my part for the environment today, and all within minutes of getting out of bed. With the push of a few buttons, I've helped America save 10.8 million metric tons of carbon emissions in the next 13 years. Sure, that's 10.8 million metric tons over 13 years out of the billions of metric tons created each year in this country. Still, I don't see Europe rushing to spring forward in the beginning of March.

Yeah, OK, the EU made a few enviromental policy changes this week. But I care so much about the environment that I downloaded a software update this week so my computer would skip from 1:59 to 3:00 today. So much about energy conservation that one of my clocks was still set on daylight savings time from last year. That is the American way. The American government is just as aware of the looming environmental crisis as the EU is, but prefers not to flaunt that awareness. It even quietly encourages our greatest minds to do the same. Let us effect change by going shopping for electronic devices, preferably for the kind with enough technological prowess to automatically shift their times forward on the second Sunday of each March. It's not about what we do, but about what we do without knowing or acknoledging how or why we are doing it.

Fashion ecology

Here's a questionable benefit to poisoning one link on the food chain: the vultures of Nepal are getting their own restaurant. The daily daily special is diclofenac-free cow. Apparently, the vulture population in South Asia is threatened by the widespread (though illegal) use of the drug diclofenac to treat inflammation in cows. Drugged cow carcasses poison and kill vultures. The restaurant managers are attempting to boost the dwindling vulture population by collecting sick and dying cows that have never been treated with the drug. Once dead, the cows are presented for local vultures to snack on.

In unrelated news, a popular London restaurant is currently offering up free meals to models threatened with an unhealthy Body Mass Index. Minus-sized models can present an identification card with their clothing size on it to receive the grub. The restaurant is getting some good press for the program; whether they save any dwindling models is another matter. Skinny models may find eating to be so detrimental to their livelihood that offering the cow (or, if they prefer, "charter pie containing leeks, chicken, and bacon") for free may be insufficient incentive to fatten up.

In Madrid, a larger carrot is being dangled. Models there can now be denied runway access if their BMI drops into carrion territory. The policy was set after a rise in eating disorder-related death within the modelling community; recently 5 models were barred from appearing on the Madrid catwalk until they "fatten" up.

Though other fashion capitals are talking about adopting a similar policy, unhealthy body and body image has poisoned the water, and it could be some time before cultural obsession with the unnatural evaporates. In Spain, for example, plastic surgery, often with walk-in appointments and financing plans, is so common it was recently added to the monthly inflation equation.

(Sadder still is what is being dropped from the equation. Apparently money once spent on cloth, upholstery fabric, and most appliance repair has been diverted for the repair and maintainance of a certain corporeal aesthetic.)

But it is not just our wallets that are affected. A recent study highlights the deep inner reach of body image consciousness, and the detrimental effects negative self-image can have on our physical and emotional wellbeing. Dr. Lora Park, of the University of Buffalo, New York, developed the appearance-based rejection sensitivity (ARS) scale to measure "the extent to which people anxiously expect to be rejected by others based on their looks." People with a high score are those most likely to think of themselves as unattractive and to base their general self-worth on their appearance. In Park's study, a high ARS score predicted that subjects were also likely to be anxious, neurotic, insecure, and to not eat well.

These results are disturbing given the current push for heightened image consciousness. The question is whether kicking a few models off a catwalk will do for the general human population's body image what the diclofenac-free cafe has done for South Asia's vultures.

Update: GE's ecocon

GE is negotiating with the EPA to weaken proposed railroad locomotive smog control rules, the Wall Street Journal is reporting.

As a spokesperson for GE puts it, they are discussing with the EPA "how to achieve attainable and sustainable emission reductions"--a politic way of saying they are negotiating just how much money the EPA's reductions will cost them. The sticking point, it seems, is the technology that would have to be developed to meet the reductions guidelines, which would take effect between 2011 and 2017.

GE, you will recall from my previous post, is currently in the midst of its "ecoimagination" ad campaign, through which it is promoting its ecologically innovative technologies, and portraying itself as an ecofriendly company. The campaign itself, as I previously argued, misses its mark. Now it also seems GE is misplacing money to hype their ability to take salt out of ocean water while they haggle over their desire to lower locomotive emissions by six tenths of a gram less than the EPA would like in the next ten years.

Fish out of water

GE has an underactive "ecomagination". In their new commercial, which is titled "fishing" and can be viewed at ecomagination.com, a fishing boat hauls a net overflowing with clear and fresh bottles of water from the ocean. The fishermen excitedly sort through their catch; one proudly displays an impressive four foot long bottle. A voiceover boasts that GE technology is turning saltwater into drinkable water.

The practice of making ocean water safe for human consumption is less ecological and innovative than it is disturbing. If there is a need for this technology it is because we are depleting and damaging our freshwater resources. GE's "ecomagination" campaign suggests we should solve a problem we have created not by learning from our mistakes but by stepping on as-yet untapped, undepleted, and less damaged resources. It suggests that if the water around us is disappearing or dirty, we should drink up and pollute away. GE will come to the rescue.

But beyond being troubled by the underlying message of the ad, I question the efficacy of the ad itself. If the "ecoimagination" campaign is meant to appeal to the eco-conscious, it is a sure misfire. Not only might GE's desalinization technology be unimpressive to this demographic, but the imagery used in the ad will likely evoke thoughts opposite those intended by the execs who conceptualized the ad.

For example, the ecologically aware tend to be concerned about the resources used in bottling water; seeing hundreds of plastic bottles hauled out of the ocean could bring to mind waste and environmental destruction rather than joyously clean and bountiful harvest. Furthermore, recent research suggests the ocean's fish supplies will largely disappear by the middle of this century at current fishing rates, so likening exploitation of the ocean's water to that of the ocean's fish is more likely to disturb than impress anyone who is thinking beyond what store their next Dasani will come from.

Less stuff, more birth control

A recent study (summarized here) concludes that the biggest contributors to our ecological footprint are population size and consumption.

The ecological footprint is a rough and somewhat abstract measurement of the impact humans individually and collectively have on Earth. It is, as defined in the aforementioned article, "a quantitative measurement of the stress placed on the environment by demands for available lands and resources to meet the need for food, housing, transportation, consumer goods and services." There is strong evidence that we are currently overstressing the planet by leaving an ecological footprint that is larger than the productive area of the poor overworked planet.

The study is rather optimistic, suggesting, for example, that it is within the realm of possibility that we will reach the Millineum Development Goals of the UN. I won't pretend to know what that means. But I will suggest that this news should not encourage us to sink comfortably into our SVUs and go about our Sunday shopping. Right now the U.S. has a footprint of 1.4, that is, 1.4 times the sustainable level. It is the country with the largest footprint, and though the study's authors do not expect that to be true in 2015, this is not because the U.S. is expected to dramatically reduce its footprint by then. Rather, China and India are expected to outpace the U.S., and to help bring our global footprint to 1.6. This is depressing. Even bringing our global footprint down to 1 means we would be using exactly the land and resources our environment can sustain. Meanwhile, the population grows and global warming reduces the amount of land we have to live on.

I am, however, encouraged by one aspect of the study: the two most significant contributors to our downward-spiraling global environmental dilemma are the two things we can each easily contribute less to on an individual level, by simply reducing our daily consumption and limiting our procreation.

An Inconvenient Inconvenient Truth

An after-school screening of "An Inconvenient Truth", the Al Gore documentary on global warming, by Yakima, Washington's Eisenhower High School Ecology Club has been put off--at least temporarily--per school policy that requires, basically, that both sides of all issues be presented to students. Check out the Yakima local paper's editorial on the issue, which makes many good points on what "presenting both sides" should mean.

Would you like biodegradable plastic or canvas?

The need to transfer all our stuff from one place to another seems to pose one of the great dilemmas of our time-- a fact brought on, in part, by the fact that we have and acquire so much stuff to transfer. It is a dilemma for cities as well, as city sanitation systems must deal with the overflow of packaging discarded from residents' homes. San Francisco is making an effort, in cooperation with grocery stores, to reduce the number of plastic grocery bags used each year by 10 million. As part of this effort, the city is asking grocery stores to voluntarily submit data on their customers' use of plastic grocery bags last year. The San Francisco Chronicle is reporting today that three grocery store chains in the city have submitted their 2006 data. No word yet on what the data show, or on how to track what their customers are doing with the bags--taking them home to reuse them, recycling them (which can be done at many grocery stores), or throwing them straight in the garbage, the practice my friend from Safeway favors.

Of course, we have to eat, which means, for most of us, that we have to transfer food from the grocery store to our homes. Bags are the obvious choice for carrying food, but we can encourage people to use and reuse their own bags by offering discounts to those who bring their own bags or by charging people for store bags (the latter approach is taken in many countries, while the former is common in the US). We could at least go back to using paper, which I find a somewhat less objectionable option than plastic for many reasons, particularly when they are sturdy and easy to reuse.

San Francisco's approach is to start thinking about requiring stores to use biodegradable plastic, a second-best option that seems to acknowledge the difficulty of forcing other people to change their behavior. On the plus side, replacing plastic bags with biodegradable plastic bags will require nothing of consumers. Unfortunately, biodegradable plastic may be the same sort of solution to our packaging needs that recycling is--that is, probably better than doing nothing, but not better than reducing our use to begin with. Any kind of plastic still requires enormous energy and material to produce, and, as Planet Ark notes, the biodegradability of biodegradable bags is still in question. Here's hoping that a shift to biodegradable is accompanied with a clear message that "bring your own bag" is still the best move.

Water, water, everywhere

SFGate (the SF Chronicle's website) is in the midst of a series of articles by David Lazarus on bottled water. On Wednesday, Lazarus introduced the phenomenon and big business of bottled water; today, he discusses the sources of bottled water. The series will continue at least through Sunday.

Yes, people drink an enormous amount of bottled water, and spend a lot of money on it. Businesses spend a lot of money advertising it, and the water itself is often just filtered tap water with a few minerals added for taste. None of this seems particularly newsworthy. But it is always interesting to be reminded of the phenomenon, particularly of all those taste tests showing that people can't actually tell the difference between most municipal tap water and their favorite bottled water brands.

I'm mainly concerned with the use of tons of plastic containers to carry the water. Apparently, the American public drinks more bottled water than milk, coffee, or beer. This seems astounding, though it is difficult to imagine exactly what 8.3 billion gallons of bottled water last year means in terms of large scale waste in America. If you've ever been impressed by the amount of beer bottles you set at the curb after just a small gathering, imagine the volume generated by your block, city, or country every day, week, or year. The coffeehouse coffee phenomenon alone generates a significant amount of waste, as people use disposable and discardable cups for their daily--sometimes multiple times daily--fix.

A Starbucks "Green Team" memo quoted in the March-April 2004 Utne Reader cites the following staggering statistics: First, if just 50 customers in each store used their own mug for coffee each day, the store (and the planet) would save 150,000 disposable paper cups each day. Second, those 150,000 paper cups saved would have weighed 1.7 million pounds.

It is hard to wrap my mind around the level of waste that could be avoided by the small actions of just 50 Starbucks customers per store per day, much less to conceive of the amount of waste generated each day, in Starbucks stores alone, by all the people who do not use their own mugs.

The Starbucks memo was meant, I think, to encourage stores to encourage their customers to use their own coffee mugs in exchange for a $0.10 discount on their coffee. This saves paper, but also, of course, saves Starbucks a lot of money. This program, along with the disposable coffee and bottled water phenomena and statistics have inspired the following grand idea: What if we encouraged people to carry their own plastic water bottles or cups around with them? We could then place some kind of water dispenser into stores, restaurants, homes, and workplaces, and give consumers a good price on the water used to fill these bottles and cups.

Seriously, though, if people want to pay for water, let them. If people just want their water filtered--and this is something I can understand--wouldn't it be more cost-effective to offer filtered tap water dispensed into reusable cups than to buy and/or sell overpriced filtered water in possibly toxic and difficult to recycle containers? Unfortunately, the convenience factor of picking up, drinking, then tossing, seems to outweigh other concerns. We've been conditioned to think that plastic bottle disposal is harmless, particularly if we recycle, and the disposable water industry has no interest in encouraging us to think about the inconvenient truths of bottled water waste.

Two roads diverged in a Safeway

A few days ago, I walked to the grocery store for a few dinner items with a paper bag I planned to reuse. Taking along a bag was especially important to me as I was going to a store that seems to keep its paper bags in a vault while handing out plastic bags like water. I’ve even seen the baggers at this store double-bag a single gallon of milk.

When I reached my turn at the counter, the cashier was busy chatting with a co-worker, her back turned as she absentmindedly rang up my 5 or so items and began throwing them into 7 or so plastic bags. I tried several times to get her attention to let her know I had brought my own. Finally she turned to me and laughed, graciously pulling my items back and handing them to me to bag.

“Boy,” she commiserated, “you’ve got to be careful. Those plastic bags can take over your home if you don’t watch it.”

I agreed. And then she continued: “Last time I moved, I think I found more plastic bags in my house than anything else. That’s why now, as soon as I get home I throw my plastic bags straight into the garbage.”

On resourcefulness amid overabundance

I am often impressed (or depressed) by the level of waste and abundance found in developed countries. But the overabundance of my life hit me especially hard a few weeks ago, while watching a recent addition to the Discovery Channel's "Survivor Friday" line-up. The unfortunately titled "Man vs. Wild" stars Bear Grylls, a British survivalist, climber, sky diver, former member of the British Special Air Forces, and more, who, in each week's episode, parachutes into the wilderness, then shows the audience how to survive under such conditions while finding your way back to civilization. I'd be concerned about revealing a bit of a crush on this impressive man, but I think my husband is just as captivated by him; see for yourself here. (My husband would want me to mention here that Grylls is married, with two children, and that he has no intention of leaving me for Grylls.)

There is an absurdity to the situations Grylls finds himself in. Few people are likely to be faced with these circumstances, though in each episode Grylls recounts stories of people who unexpectedly have been. And the recent tragic deaths in Oregon of CNET editor James Kim and hiker Kelly James, and the presumed deaths of Kelly James' fellow hikers Brian Hall and Jerry Cooke remind us that no amount of technology and innovation can shield us from the force of nature. But Grylls doesn't just jump into the middle of nowhere and find his way out. He falls off of cliffs (voluntarily, while tied to his parachute) or jumps into freezing cold ponds to show his viewers what you would want to do if you were to find yourself (involuntarily, I assume) in a similar position. He places his urine-soaked t-shirt on his head to cool off in the desert, and drinks the liquid from fresh elephant dung to demonstrate what can and should be done to survive the most dire circumstances.

The show is a real lesson in not only survivalism but the fundamentals of necessity and resourcefulness. Grylls typically lands on the ground (or water, or tree) with the materials of his parachute, a knife, a canteen, and the clothes he is wearing (the garb varies depending on his destination). It is not that Grylls finds joy in torturing himself through extreme deprivation. Though he knows how to survive with very little, and to forage for what he needs, he is often heard pining for a cup of tea or other bastion of civility. But just as often he finds extreme pleasure in something as simple as a fire, a meal of fresh fish (as in, just plucked by hand out of the water), or a flat and safe place to sleep.

On one recent episode, Grylls stranded himself on a desert island. After a few days apparently enjoying the island life--climbing coconut trees for the food and natural protection from sun and wind the coconut oil provides, fashioning fishing lines and spears from local plant life to catch his dinner--Grylls decided to turn his attention toward building a raft to get himself off of the island and, hopefully, rescued at sea. Grylls excels at making rafts; he has quickly fastened a few logs together on more than one previous episode to speed his return to civilization, as he says a river is generally the fastest way home. But this time he wisely took his time, building a rather elaborate raft and sail from what he could find on the island.

He also took some time to collect a few items to help ensure his survival on the ocean. (Of course, he had a camera crew there, and the show's rule--that the crew will interfere only in a matter of life or death--is both what lends fascinating realism to this show and what allows Grylls to take such insane risks.) The most basic necessity, of course, is water; Grylls needed plenty of water to survive even a few days waiting for rescue. How to hold such water? Well, this is where Grylls got lucky. You might think unbelievably so, unless you've been to a beach recently and started collecting the trash that washes onto the shore: he found an empty plastic gallon container, a little dented by its journey, but still able to hold a decent amount of the rainwater Grylls had been collecting.

Yes, what impressed me here, and has continued to come to mind each time I toss an item into the trash or recycling, is this plastic jug. This is the kind of item we routinely buy with the intention of using its contents and throwing it into the garbage or recycling bin (or, apparently, the ocean), but that could have significant use left in it. Likewise, as I am inundated with junk mail, flyers, and unsolicited offers each day, I am most likely to be so overwhelmed with the sheer volume of junk in my mailbox that I choose to toss it straight into the recycling. I know, however, that besides adding to the garbage collection or recycling flow, each of which takes up space and precious energy, there are other possible uses for the many items that enter my home each day. The paper could be used to make more handmade paper, or to create paper beads, or the blank parts used to make envelopes or as scratch paper for my son.

There are many reasons to get junk mail, plastic jugs, and other packaging out of your house as quickly as possible, and many reasons not to keep such items around for continued use, including time constraints and maintaining sanity, general cleanliness and order. But this is precisely the point. My grandmother used to have a pink embroidered bird on white cloth framed and hanging on the bedroom wall. The cloth was a scrap, and the thread used for embroidery was unraveled from another scrap, a project undertaken by a great-grandmother while she was pregnant on a farm somewhere in Kansas. My grandmother also kept a small jar on her windowsill, in which she kept a collection of the red plastic and wire closures that came with saltine crackers, and a small container in her pantry, into which she stuffed assorted plastic bags. On top of this, my grandmother collected the possessions of the generation that preceded hers, which included the possessions of the generations before that, as they passed away, and stored these possessions in hutches, closets, cupboards, and drawers. Yet, compared to many homes today, hers was relatively bare; the vast majority of stuff in her home was valuable or useful. Her plastic bag and red saltine wrapper collections were of reasonable size because she brought home a reasonable amount of plastic bags and saltine crackers, and because, like island-stranded Grylls and his plastic jug, she made good use of what she had.

These days there are entire televisions shows devoted to helping people rid themselves of boxes of fabric and jars of red saltine wrappers. And with good reason. A person who saves even a small portion of the useful bits and pieces that come into the average home could quickly be overrun. A single trip to the grocery store might yield enough packaging to fill your garbage or recycling bin; a run to Target or the mall might overstuff your closet, then send you running back to Target for some organizational tools.

For me, Grylls' plastic jug serves as a both a reminder of absurd overabundance and a challenge to think more carefully about the resources I bring into my home. It does not suggest to me that we should all strand ourselves from civilization and survive off the land and the garbage that floats our way. Rather, it suggests to me that, beyond reducing general consumerism, we should be conscious of the overabundance of resources afforded by even a simple lifestyle, of the disposable scraps we pick up each day even when not over-consuming, and that this simple consciousness might inspire powerful change. Stick around as, in the next few days, I develop this challenge into my next personal project.