Buy Local

Most fruits and vegetables at supermarkets in the United States are grown in California, Florida or Washington, which means that they're doing a lot of traveling from earth to mouth. Sometimes it's unavoidable, as not all places are as fertile as those three states. But often, the same fruits and vegetables that are shipped to us from afar are being grown nearby. This creates an enormous amount of unnecessary pollution that we can greatly decrease by buying local.

In addition to decreasing pollution, buying local also supports small farmers and strengthens rural communities. And local foods are probably going to be fresher, which is one reason that many people believe local foods taste better and are healthier.

There are many ways we can eat more locally produced foods. One is to shop at farmer's markets, where local farmers sell their goods directly to consumers. Another way is to buy directly from farmers. Localharvest.org is a great resource in this, linking consumers with "farmer's markets, family farms and other sources of sustainably grown food" throughout the U.S.

Another option is to participate in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In CSA, a group of consumers partners with a local farm. They pay a lump sum to the farmer at the start of each season and then receive regular deliveries of fruits, vegetables, dairy, meat, etc. to be picked up at a central location. This system supports local farms, provides consumers with fresh goods and links consumers more closely to the land and to farmers. For more information about CSA, go here. For a list of CSA groups in the U.S., go here.

Another way to buy local foods is to look for them at the grocery store. Some stores, such as Whole Foods, have signs indicating which items were produced locally. If our local store doesn't do this, we can ask them to start.

And when we're trying to buy local at the supermarket, it's important to keep in mind what's in season, because if it's not in season, but it's available, then it must be coming from some place far pretty far away. For a list of what's in season where you live, go here.

Buying local is a big issue for food, but it's not just food. Anything that we can buy locally reduces the pollution costs of long-distance transportation. And often it supports small-scale, family operations that are likely to be more friendly to the environment than large corporations.

But all that being said, we live in a global marketplace, and some of what we have come to need is not produced locally. So it's not realistic for most of us to buy only local products. But it is realistic for almost all of us to buy more things locally, to do a better job of supporting local, family farms and to encourage large businesses, through our words and our dollars, to sell more locally produced goods.

For more information about buying local, here are two useful websites:
Sustainable Table
Food Routes

Heat

Last night, PBS Frontline aired an excellent documentary called Heat. It's about global warming and what governments and corporations are doing (and not doing) to help guide us in the right direction. You can watch it in full here:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/heat/view/

Here's the trailer:

Think Mottainai

As we try to change our habits to become more friendly to the environment, the single most important thing we can change is our mentality.

The current mentality of our culture is that the planet's resources are limitless, so we can use as much as we want. And the planet's landfills are equally limitless, so throwing things away is not a problem. When we use gas for our cars or electricity for our homes or electronics, we think only of the monetary cost, what comes out of our pockets. And when we buy things, we don't worry about where they'll go after we throw them away. The trash man comes once a week and everything we don't want disappears, out of sight, out of mind.

This is the old way of thinking about things. Our new way has to be almost the opposite. We need to think of every use of energy, every consumer purchase (all destined one day to become trash), as having a cost, as mattering.

And that's what mottainai is about.

Mottainai (pronounced like the English words 'moat-tie-nigh') is a Japanese word that doesn't translate directly into English, but means something like, 'Earth and what it gives to us are precious, so we should respect what we have and not use things thoughtlessly, we should not throw things away when they still have usefulness, we should be grateful for our environment, let's not be wasteful.'

Here's an example of how it would be used in Japanese: you go to the local farmer's market and buy a few apples, and the salesperson starts to put them in a plastic bag. You smile and say, 'No, thanks. Mottainai.' The salesperson smiles and hands you the apples, which you put in your pockets or in the bag you brought with you. Another example: you leave the water running while brushing your teeth, and your spouse says, 'Mottainai,' and turns the water off.

Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan woman who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2004 for her work in promoting democracy, women's rights and, especially, environmental protection, has spoken around the world about the need for conservation. She learned of the word mottainai while in Japan in 2005, and has used it since, promoting it as an international word, usable in any language, to express the spirit of the environmental movement.

So let's take her cue and make this word a part of our vocabulary. And, more important, let's try to approach our daily lives in the spirit of mottainai.

The Last Tree

Only after the last tree has been cut down
Only after the last river has been poisoned
Only after the last fish has been caught
Only then will you find that money cannot be eaten
--Cree Native American prophecy

Earth is in crisis. You might not know it from watching the evening news or glancing at the front page of the paper. But when you dig a little deeper, it becomes very obvious, very quickly.

Consider this: more than 80% of Earth's natural forests have been destroyed (in America, over 95% of the original forests are gone); fifty years ago, rain forest covered 14% of Earth's surface, but today it covers only 6%--sixty acres are lost every minute; since 1950, over 90% of the world's large fish have been taken from the ocean; "one in four mammals, one in eight birds, one third of all amphibians and 70 percent of the world's assessed plants now appear on the Red List of endangered plants and animals."

The life system of planet earth is dying. We are dependent on that life system for our existence. If it dies, we die.

The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, "the most comprehensive survey ever into the state of the planet," states that, "human actions are depleting Earth's natural capital, putting such strain on the environment that the ability of the planet's ecosystems to sustain future generations can no longer be taken for granted."

So why is all this happening?

Well, it's me. And it's you. And it's everyone we know. It's virtually all humans, all over the planet, but especially those of us living in the industrialized world. Our way of life is based on intensive consumption of the resources of the planet and creates an enormous amount of pollution and waste.

We have all grown up with the mindset that Earth's resources are limitless and that Earth is indestructible. Our consumption decisions are usually guided only by our desire for comfort and pleasure, without thought to the environmental impacts.

But our actions do have impacts. The things we buy use resources and create pollution during their production, and they create pollution after we throw them away. The energy that powers our homes, cars and electronics comes from fossil fuels, mainly oil and coal, which cause environmental damage during their extraction from the earth and which cause pollution and global warming when we convert them into usable energy. There is, in fact, an environmental cost to almost everything we do.

This does not mean that we have to reduce our 'carbon footprint' to zero. The only way to do that would be to retreat to the forest and use rocks and sticks to hunt and farm. We're not going to do that. But there is a lot of middle ground between going back to the Stone Age and giving no thought to our consumption of the world. We can all do a lot in our daily lives to reduce our impact on the planet.

And that's what this blog will be about. I hope to share some ideas and information about reducing our impact. There really is a lot that we can do. We just have to take one step at a time. We just have to commit to doing something--even if it's something small--rather than doing nothing. And we need to do it now, so that our children and grandchildren don't have to realize that prophecy about the last tree, so that we can leave them a world that we're not ashamed of.