Challenges and Opportunities

What is human activity doing to our planet?

Is it destruction? Or damage? Or merely an acceptable alteration?

For the sake of our children, and grandchildren, and their children and grandchildren, etc., I think we must ask these questions. I also think that we must reach our own answers.

In reaching your answer, here's some information worth considering:

• The planet's climate scientists overwhelmingly agree (97% to 3%) that the climate is warming and human activity is likely the cause (1)

• If CO2 emissions were immediately cut back, we would still see some amount of warming over the coming decades. But global CO2 emissions are not cutting back—they are increasing every year, with 2012 setting the record for most CO2 emissions in a year. The record before that was 2011. Before that, it was 2010. (2)

• As billions of people in China, India and many other countries continue to adopt the consumption-based lifestyles of North Americans, Europeans and Japanese, it seems highly likely that CO2 emissions will continue to increase throughout the coming decades. (3)

• Rising CO2 leads to rising temperatures. Rising temperatures will likely lead to enormous problems by creating a world that will have less predictable weather patterns, more droughts and floods, more frequent and severe disruptions to agriculture, more extreme weather events, more habitat for disease-carrying insects, more loss of biodiversity, more human migration, displacement, and refugees, etc. (4)

But climate change (i.e. global warming) is only one part of the story.

• We are already seriously damaging the world's oceans through over-fishing and pollution. (5)(6)(7)

• We are polluting and depleting the world's supply of freshwater. (8)

• We are cutting down much of the planet's remaining forests. (9)

• We are causing habitat to change faster than animals can evolve, and so many species are going extinct that we may be in the midst of a historic mass extinction of our own making. (10)(11)

• We are even altering the chemical composition of our own bodies as we absorb increasing amounts of man-made chemicals that we put into the environment. Nobody knows what long-term impact this will have. (12)

When I consider all of this together, it definitely feels like damage, or perhaps even destruction, would be the right words to describe what we are doing to our planet.

I wonder, 'What might all this mean in 10 or 20 or 30 years, when our children or grandchildren will be reaching adulthood, or beginning families of their own? What kind of world might they find waiting for them? How might such a world impact their ability to be happy, fulfilled, joyful, or perhaps even safe, healthy and well fed?'

I think that all adults in the world today have a moral imperative to think deeply about these kinds of questions. The world we leave to our children should be our responsibility and our burden, not theirs. And if we accept that responsibility, then it certainly seems like we have some pretty extraordinary challenges ahead of us.

And yet, I am optimistic. The problems facing the world are significant, but so, too, is human ingenuity and creativity. So, too, is human compassion, kindness and generosity. Facing these problems will bring out the best in us individually and collectively, and it may even have the potential to lead us to the birth of a new era of human history, marked by greater international cooperation, sharing of power, and harmony with nature.

Wouldn't that be an amazing gift to leave for future generations...

So what can we do now? So many things! I want to hear other peoples' ideas. Here are a few of mine:

• Consume wisely, i.e try to buy things that are: 
• Produced by people being paid a fair wage (i.e. Fair Trade)
• Free of (or low in) toxic chemicals
• Easy on the environment when produced, when used and when thrown away
• And, of course, consume less! Have more experiences and fewer things!

• Support organizations (w time and/or money) that are doing positive work that you believe in

• Spend more time in nature. Connect children with nature.

• Educate yourself and others about important issues (human rights, ecology, environmental protection, child welfare, etc.)

This is just the tip of the iceberg. There really seems to be SO MUCH that we can do to help move the world in a better direction.

Let's all listen to our hearts' guidance. Let's allow our actions in the world to be guided by kindness and generosity. If we can do this, I believe our actions will be good. Good for us personally and good for mankind and good for the Earth.

-----------------------

References:

(1) Climate change consensus: http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consensus

(2) CO2 levels increasing: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/03/world/emissions-of-carbon-dioxide-hit-record-in-2011-researchers-say.html?_r=0

(3) CO2 levels forecast to increase for decades: http://www.eia.gov/forecasts/ieo/

(4) Effects of climate change: http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/urgentissues/global-warming-climate-change/threats-impacts/index.htm

(5) Overfishing of oceans: http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/world/oceans-overfishing-climate-change

(6) Great Pacific garbage patch: http://education.nationalgeographic.com/education/encyclopedia/great-pacific-garbage-patch/?ar_a=1

(7) Ocean dead zones: http://www.businessinsider.com/map-of-worldwide-marine-dead-zones-2013-6

(8) Freshwater depletion: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/may/24/global-majority-water-shortages-two-generations

(9) Deforestation: http://www.livescience.com/27692-deforestation.html

(10) Habitat loss causing extinctions: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/mar/07/extinction-species-evolve

(11) Current mass extinction: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/03/2/l_032_04.html

(12) Chemicals in our bodies: http://science.nationalgeographic.com/science/health-and-human-body/human-body/chemicals-within-us/#page=1

Growing Veggies (Update)

On May 26, I posted about "Growing Veggies." At that time, the garden was just starting to take shape and nothing was ready to be eaten. What a difference a month makes...

This was taken a few days ago:

In the front right, with the yellow flowers, is zucchini. Immediately behind that is daikon, and behind that is sweet peppers, chili peppers, basil and goya (aka bitter melon). To the right of goya is corn and cauliflower. To the left of the zucchini is a row of morning glory (aka water spinach), the dark green chijimina (similar to bok choy) and behind that is more morning glory. To the left of that row is eggplant, tomato, cucumber and spinach (in the back).

Here is Ayumi with a few days worth of zucchini:


Here's another angle on the veggies:

From front to back: spinach; water spinach; (L to R) goya, basil, chili pepper, sweet pepper; corn and one of the eight cauliflowers.

This has been an awesome experience for me. Watching the plants grow has been magical. And it's a wonderfully enjoyable culinary experience to pick fresh, pesticide- and herbicide-free plants outside your home and to be eating them within the hour. For one, the food tastes great--fresh, delicious, full of life. But also, it's very gratifying to be feeding ourselves food that we know is so healthy.

And it was really pretty easy to do. In fairness, my father-in-law, an experienced grower, was doing all this with us, so that helped. But it was all fairly straight-forward. This is what went into it:

First, my father-in-law used a machine to mix up the soil and plow it into rows. Ayumi and I then spent a few hours forming the rows and smoothing the surface. My father-in-law then applied small amounts of chemical fertilizer (he composts, but the compost was not sufficient by itself--in the future, I hope to learn how to grow veggies 100% organic) and we waited a week. Then we planted seeds and seedlings. We've watered them daily since then. Once every few weeks we've had to pull out weeds by hand. And a few times we sprayed charcoal vinegar (a natural insecticide) to discourage some little bugs who were eating the young zucchini and chijimina leaves. So it hasn't really taken up that much time, and what time we have spent (watering, weeding, etc.) has been really enjoyable and relaxing.

It's about 6pm here, the sun has just gone down below the hills behind the house, so it's time to water the plants. Then I'll harvest something for dinner. I think tonight we'll use moning glory, chijimina and zucchini. Mmmm.....

Food Inc.

"The way we eat has changed more in the last fifty years than in the previous ten thousand."

This is the opening line of a new documentary on how food is produced in the United States, focusing particularly on the industrial food system. I've touched on this issue in previous posts (see: "Support Organic", Dec. 19, 2008; "Organic: Good for Earth", Feb. 3, 2009), and I think it is extremely important.

The way we in the industrial world produce food is unsustainable, destructive to the environment and yields food of dubious nutritional value whose main virtue is that it's cheap. This system is excellent economically (at least if you don't take into account the money spent treating obesity, diabetes, heart disease, etc., and the costs of pollution of streams, rivers, lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the air, etc.) but it is terrible in every other way. It persists, I believe, primarily because most people don't know the facts about it. If every person in the United States spent just one single day educating themselves about how our food is produced, that would be enough to bring about massive changes. The facts are powerful and overwhelming.

At least that's how it looks to me. You might disagree. But either way, you owe it to yourself to be informed, because this issue is so important and so universal. This film looks like a great place to start.

Here is their excellent website, which is loaded with information: http://foodincmovie.com/

And here's the trailer:

Growing Veggies

What better way to reconnect with the land than to grow food! For years, I've been looking for an opportunity to grow some veggies, and this summer, living with my wife Ayumi's family in Japan, it's finally come. The city where we're living, Hofu (in Yamaguchi state), is fairly rural and many, many people grow their own vegetables, right out in their front yard. It's inspiring to see.

Ayumi and I have planted seeds for zucchini, ensai and chijimina (don't know the English names for the last two!). We're also helping her parents grow spinach, tomatoes, potatoes, onions, eggplant, okra, cucumber, bell peppers, chili peppers, goya (a Japanese vegetable), daikon (Japanese radish), lettuce, parsley, basil, garlic, koimo (a Japanese starch veg, similar to potato), watermelon and shiso (a Japanese herb).

There's something really magical about putting a tiny little seed into the ground and then watching the delicate buds push their way up and out through the soil, growing day by day into a big plant. Here are some pictures of what we've got so far:

April 27： Seeds for zucchini, ensai and chijimina have just been planted. Ayumi, in pink, surveys the land, while her mom, in blue, pulls weeds. The bubbles house young eggplant, tomato and cucumber plants.



May 2: Zucchini (top) and chijimina (bottom) are starting to emerge.





May 12: More sprouts emerging. Eggplant, tomato and cucumber are out of their bubbles. Starting to look like a real garden now.



May 22: Chijimina is starting to look like a real plant, though many of the seeds never sprouted, so we planted some more. Ensai, past the dark green chijmina, is having trouble (I think we planted the seeds too deep--learning as we go!), so we planted some more seeds. On the right are the zucchini. Behind them is the daikon.



May 27 (today): The zucchini (first pic) are starting to get big. Even the ensai (second pic) are growing well now. The garden is getting greener every day.