In the lunchroom at Stowe Elementary School in Duluth, Minn., forlorn piles of half-eaten sandwiches and bruised bananas are transformed from trash to treasure.
Instead of tossing their uneaten school lunch scraps in the garbage bin, Stowe students donate their leftover fruits and vegetables to the school's worm compost. Items that aren't as compost-friendly, such as breads and potatoes, are donated to area farmers, who feed the free and tasty slop to their pigs.
Rich consumers are still voraciously gobbling up the world's resources, despite the worst recession in a generation, with their appetite pushing the planet into "ecological debt" from today, according to a report by think-tank the new economics foundation.
This "ecological debt day" marks the point in the year when consumption around the world exceeds the Earth's annual "biocapacity" — so for the remainder of the year, we will be eating into environmental resources that will not be replaced, according to nef's calculations.
Pam Hartwell-Herrero is making sure she washes her family's clothes when the olive tree, rhubarb and coffee berries in her front yard look thirsty.
Why?
Hartwell-Herrero and a team of fellow water conservation enthusiasts recently installed a "laundry to landscape" graywater system at her 1960s Fairfax bungalow. It took most of a day to attach a special valve, punch a hole in her garage wall and set up the pipes leading from her washing machine to the garden.
But now, every time Hartwell-Herrero fires up a load of whites, the plants perk up.
San Franciscans have six more weeks before they're required to toss their food scraps into green composting bins or face a fine - but apparently all the trash talk coming out of City Hall is already having an effect.
Just a few months ago, the city Department of the Environment was doling out five to 10 green composting bins a day; now that number is up to 130. The amount of composted material coming out of San Francisco is up 15 percent over the past few months - now totaling 480 tons every day.
CALIFORNIA, Md. - Approaching Evergreen Elementary, it's clear right away that there's something different about this new school. A pair of silo-like structures squats in front of the two-story brick building - cisterns storing rainwater for flushing the toilets. Then there are the cactuses and other plants growing atop the entrance canopy - put there to soak up more rain.
Everyone needs something to believe in, and for many Latin American progressives, that something for years has been Costa Rica. The country has long been cited as a beacon of progressive tranquility in a region better known for violence, inequality and poverty. Following an uprising in 1948 led by Jose Figueres Ferrer, the country embarked on its own unique path of social democracy, involving extensive progressive taxation, universal health and education availability, and no armed forces.
Without water, nothing can live. And in the Western United States,
there isn't much of it because the region is a desert.
"Everything yearns to be alive in the desert," says Riley Mitchell, a
park ranger at Capitol Reef National Park in southern Utah.
Okay, only fair to warn you. I do not answer the question here. Second, the subject is not really one for a blog, more for a book. But it's important to say short things as well as long. Third, I have a bias. We all do. In this case, it matters that I like Michael Pollan's writing and that I believe there is much wrong with conventional agriculture as practiced in the United States. You will see why that is relevant in just a moment. Now back to the question.
This one really matters.
Most of us would agree that there is a serious problem vis-a-vis access to food in the developing world. According to the UN food agency, there are now more than one billion undernourished people worldwide. The need to do something about the broken food system is especially apparent in Haiti, where I have been on a working assignment with Grassroots International for the past few weeks.
