John of All Trades

This morning, I was listening to the podcast version of “Can Coal be Earth-Friendly?” from NOW on PBS (link). This is usually a great program, providing well-rounded coverage of the issues they cover. But I’ve noticed a certain hesitance when it comes to environmental issues. At its root, I think this is the most significant contribution conservatives have made to the issue of global warming: to make anyone in the media wince when it becomes unavoidable to talk about the environment. For anyone familiar with the issues surrounding clean coal, NOW’s wince was a full-body convulsion.

Their whole show centered around the question of whether it was technically possible to eliminate carbon dioxide emissions from the stack of a power plant, as if this would settle the question of whether clean coal was possible. Their only acknowledgement of the whole segment of our population who think clean coal is an oxymoron was one quote from a representative of the Big Coal side of the debate. True to form, he explained with an analogy from his past, about how his mother had had a different idea from him of what constituted a clean bedroom. Yeah, that’s the same. Environmentalists are obviously just a little…anal…when it comes to how dusty they like their air. They’re just making a mountain out of a molehill.

As if this weren’t enough, NOW then spent several minutes retracing the well-covered ground about how many of these folks don’t believe in human-induced global warming. Gasp. Guess what? Some people think we never went to the moon. Crazy people exist. Some of them get help, some don’t. It’s tragic that so many of them are in power, but this is a syndrome that wealthy people seem predisposed to. Get over it.

In spite of all this, I’m not really too concerned about what they said. I’m really disappointed that we can’t seem to have an honest, all-cards-on-the-table discussion about things like clean coal. We see, in a single article, discussion the technical challenges alongside the health problems in communities where coal is mined, alongside the fact that we’re blowing up mountains and poisoning water tables for this stuff, alongside concerns about the uninspected retention dams that collapse and kill people. We can never take a full accounting and understand that capturing and transporting CO2 from coal-burning power plants takes a lot of energy, which means we’ll have to accelerate all of the above in order to maintain the same electrical output. This isn’t about whether you believe in global warming (like God, it believes in you!), it’s about having an honest discussion about where we stand and where we can reasonably go from here. Without the marketing distractions from people who stand to make a lot of money, or want to protect existing investments.

The same thing applies to smart electricity grids, wind and solar power, battery technology and hybrid vehicles, biofuels, local vs. industrial food…just about anything that isn’t supported by a large existing marketing machine. We cannot seem to have an honest, comprehensive discussion in the mainstream media about these things. And this is probably the single most important thing when it comes to choosing a wise direction for our future. Without honest discussion, we cannot make decisions that are good for us and our children.

So, this is what I want. This is my wish for Earth Day 2009, if you like.

Media, stop wincing, and stop mistaking equal representation for honest discussion. Just give us the information. All of it. Remember the reason you got into this business, and do your job.

Happy Earth Day, everyone.

Up to this point in my life, I’ve labored under the false assumption that nobody around me was interested in sustainability, local economies, environmental improvement, and so on. Oh sure, I do come across the occasional Sierra Club member through get-togethers with Emily’s colleagues and professors. But for the most part, I look around myself at the multitudes of Hummers and missing recycle bins on trash day, and think I’m truly alone.

I say “up to this point” because all that changed tonight. I attended a community stakeholders’ meeting for Sustainable Alachua County (sorry, no link yet), which is apparently in the process of trying to refocus and find its identity. Before tonight, I’d been to several Saturday classes at INDIGO (a local green building supply store), but I had no idea how many organizations exist in Gainesville that orbit around that central concept of ‘Sustainability’. There must have been two hundred people in the room tonight, and many of those were representing small organizations with a tight focus on this or that environmental, social, economic, or other issue in town. The meeting lasted two hours, of which we spent at least an hour brainstorming different initiatives we would be interested in pursuing in different categories like local economy, civic engagement, education, energy, water, food, and so on.

It was incredible. The conversation in that room generated so many ideas that we found very quickly that we had to limit the brainstorm to a few prominent ideas in each subject that we could use as a springboard to get started. Three hours later, I made it home, after spending quite a bit more time after the meeting talking about ideas with other stragglers. As I write this, my mind is swimming with new ideas, and I find myself a little drunk on the sheer potential represented by that many people, all chipping away at so many different angles of this one central problem of how to make our community more sustainable. We never even really defined that word, instead relying on everyone’s intuitive sense of its meaning to lead them into the groups where they could address what they saw as the biggest problem. This was a degree of self-organization that I’ve never seen before in a group of people. There was no awkward shuffling around looking for a place where you would belong; there was no last guy to be picked for a given team. After 20 minutes brainstorming in a large group about the broad issues we thought we should tackle, everyone seemed to know where they could be of the most use to the group.

I can’t wait for the next meeting. In fact, I’ve already talked to one of the people at tonight’s meeting, and I really think we’ll be discussing the issues of our group much more before that next meeting. I feel like this is what I’ve been training for, this is where I can finally use the skills I’ve built in my career, and the knowledge I’ve gained through so many books and you, dear Internet.

By the way, my group is in charge of the civic engagement topic. The upshot of tonight’s meeting was that there are a ton of organizations in Gainesville, most of which are operating below the public consciousness. What we really need is a way to sort of “fold in” the content on several registry websites for these sorts of organizations, along with the ability to allow organizations to directly manage information in cases where they aren’t listed in another registry website. I’m guessing this will take the form of a site serving three broad categories of activity: Buy/Shop/Use, Volunteer/Provide/Sell, and Organizational Communications. The idea of folding in is to make use of content from other registry sites where possible without the need to completely replace them and compete with them. That way, they can continue to operate according to their own agenda, and can still share information with our site.

If anyone were to read this post, and have an idea of how we might put a site like that together, I’d be very interested to hear about it.

10am on this brisk Saturday morning (yes, 30 degrees is brisk in Gainesville) found me paying close attention in a room full of people at the INDIGO Green Store downtown. We were there to hear what Michael from the Edible Plant Project had to say about edible landscaping, local food production, and the propagation of perennial, native, food-bearing plants. The morning began more like the beginning of an orienteering or geocaching adventure, with a swarm of people departing on various modes of transportation almost immediately with directions to an old fallow blueberry farm a mile or two away. Things didn’t seem to be shaping up to a very good start at that point, but things changed upon arriving at a nondescript track that threaded its way back into the blueberry farm and the Edible Plant Project’s gardens.

As we waited for everyone to arrive, some really interesting conversations sprang up, and continued sporadically throughout the class. Most of it was related to the task at hand, but I was struck by how many people are really deeply interested in learning how to apply the lessons of modern homesteading, and how far we’d come as a group. This is the crowd I never knew existed in Gainesville; I’d been to several classes at INDIGO in the past, and while people always seem interested and friendly, there’s usually a certain reluctance for people to really embrace their inner hippie and get their hands dirty. Not so here; people were talking all over the place, about how many chickens they’re raising, or how they plan on applying ideas of edible landscaping to become self-sufficient (in terms of food) in their retirement. Some of us talked at length about the CSA situation around town, and what to do if you can’t get past Rosie’s waiting list. At one point, I found myself talking with Michael about how I might improve my prototype greenhouse design by storing more water in the pipe and choosing better pipe materials to absorb more sunshine (and heat) for overnight.

I have to say that today was a high point in my re-education about Gainesville, which really began about a year ago. Since then, I’ve discovered that you can get just about all of your food – except for the odd out-of-season tomato – within 50 miles of my house. Now, we have pork, beef, chicken, more veggies than we could possibly eat (even if we knew what they all were), milk, and much more…and we spend almost no time at the grocery store these days. Seriously. Today represents the next step in that process, which I first glimpsed last spring when I learned about square-foot gardening. Using the knowledge of edible landscaping with perennials, I think we can really take that next step, and start making our land produce for us without constant coaxing.

My first project on this subject is going to be to see whether I can root some cuttings from fig trees down the block that produce some truly beautiful fruit. Oh, and there’s that orange tree a few blocks away…I guess I’d better start volunteering out at the Edible Plant Project so I can learn as much as possible about this stuff. It simply has to be as important a life skill as knowing how to balance your checkbook.