Earth Friendly Shopping

The NY Times wrote a blistering editorial on the FDA’s  Draft study on BPA which concluded that

that the small amounts of BPA that leach into milk or food are not dangerous.

The FDA’s scientific advisory panel found that (the)

draft safety assessment prepared by the F.D.A. ignored relevant studies, used flawed methodology and created “a false sense of security” about the safety of BPA, which is found in baby bottles, plastic water bottles and the liners of cans, among other products.

Further  the advisory committee

  left little doubt that the weight of the evidence, in its view, suggests the need for a much greater safety margin than the F.D.A. draft deemed adequate.The United States National Toxicology Program — which considered many of the studies the F.D.A. had discounted — has expressed some concern about BPA’s safety, and Canada has moved toward banning the sale of baby bottles made with BPA. Some research suggests that BPA might cause neurological damage, accelerate puberty, interfere with chemotherapy and increase the risk for heart disease, diabetes and cancer.

We recommend the use of safe, BPA free, stainless steel water bottles.

We are always looking for ways to improve the effectiveness of green marketing.   Convincing people to do the right thing benefits us all, but it isn’t always easy to find effective and compelling arguments.  Scientific American reports on how we are learning

Anyone who has stayed at a hotel in the past few years has seen signs asking us to reuse towels.  It is no secred why hotels want us to do this.   Every towel that they don’t wash means less laundry, so less water, less energy, less detergent.  It saves them money.  It is also better for the environment.  Typically, hotels put up signs reminding us that reusing a towel is better for the environment.

In experiments whose results ultimately confirmed what persuasion experts long believed, a team led by Noah Goldstein, now at the University of California, Los Angeles, created two types of professional-looking signs: one with the standard environmental message and the other telling guests that most of their fellow guests had reused towels. “It’s one of the oldest marketing tricks in the book,” says Goldstein, citing the plentiful research showing that in ambiguous situations people tend to follow the pack. Sure enough, as the investigators describe in the October Journal of Consumer Research, the social-norm message worked about 25 percent better than the standard environmental one. In a follow-up study that tested different tweaks to the social-norm message, Goldstein’s team got even more remarkable results. Telling guests that those who had stayed in this room had reused towels worked better than saying that other guests at he same hotel had done so—even though all the rooms were alike.

Can we use this in our daily messaging?  In short, can peer pressure be used to save the environment?

California is about to vote on a High Speed Rail Network. KQED ran a piece that tells us more about it.

We think that the high speed rail has got to be a major component of our transportation future. It is efficient and clean. We have talked before about the need for smart growth in California. Simply put, we need to put together an infrastructure that supports denser populations, and uses less resources. We think that high speed rail is a part of that future

We have written before on the desirability of a low carbon diet.  We have long recognized that our current food system is highly polluting and bad for our health.   But a recent article by Michael Pollan in the NY Times really  opened our eyes to the serious and the extent of the problem .  Pollan tells the President Elect that Food Policy will be a major issue in the coming years.

First he lays the case for how bad the current situation is:

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study.

In 1940 the farm system in the U.S. produced 2.3 calories of food  for every calorie if fossil fuel used.  Today,  it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to produce 1 calorie of modern supermarket food.

Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.

Yuch.  and it gets worse

Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount — from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent.

The bottom line for the next president

the food and agriculture policies you’ve inherited — designed to maximize production at all costs and relying on cheap energy to do so — are in shambles, and the need to address the problems they have caused is acute.

The cause of this disaster?

 the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.

The results have been subsidized monocultures.  Cheap monocultures of grain (mostly soy and corn) leading to the Confined Animal Feed Operations (CAFO), leading to yet more ecological problems

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all.

As Al Gore said about our borrowing money from China, to buy oil from Saudi Arabia, to burn it in ways that are destroying our environment “every part of this must change”

Pollan proposes the following:

I. Resolarizing the American Farm

II. Reregionalizing the Food System

III. Rebuilding America’s Food Culture

He uses the Victory Garden movement, lead by Eleanor Roosevelt as an example of what is possible

When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.) By the end of the war, more than 20 million home gardens were supplying 40 percent of the produce consumed in America

We like it

District Cotton alerts us to a bizzare greenwashing attempt by “Cotton Inc” (American producers and importers of Cotton.

In a seemingly odd new PR strategy, Cotton Inc (American Producers and Importers) has begun a web-based campaign to discredit general environmental wisdom, such as the advantages of organic cotton in an effort to enhance their own ‘greenness’. Using such tools as an online game-show, the Cotton website quizzes contestants to differentiate between green-washing and actual facts about living in a more sustainable fashion. Questions include such generalities as “True or False: Its always better to buy local produce?”, which is of course false, but misses the point that it usually is true. Unfortunately, this kind of misleading information only discourages people from adapting better practices by allowing them to rationalize-away anything. The quiz goes on to discredit organic produce in general, and organic cotton in particular with such gems as “All cotton comes from a plant, so it is renewable and natural.”

We don’t see anything particularly bizzare about this campaign.  Slimy, yes. underhanded and dishonest?  Absolutely, but not surprising coming from big agri-business.   They see that “green” is becoming popular, so rather than actually DO anything to make themselves more green, they simply SAY “we’re green” and hope no one  looks to hard

The Organic Trade Association gives us some facts about cotton

• Cotton uses approximately 25% of the world’s insecticides and more than 10% of the pesticides (including herbicides, insecticides, and defoliants.). (Allan Woodburn)
• Approximately 10% of all pesticides sold for use in U. S. agriculture were applied to cotton in 1997, the most recent year for which such data is publicly available. (ACPA)
• Fifty-five million pounds of pesticides were sprayed on the 12.8 million acres of conventional cotton grown in the U.S. in 2003 (4.3 pounds/ acre), ranking cotton third behind corn and soybeans in total amount of pesticides sprayed. (USDA)
• Over 2.03 billion pounds of synthetic fertilizers were applied to conventional cotton in 2000 (142 pounds/acre), making cotton the fourth most heavily fertilized crop behind corn, winter wheat, and soybeans. (USDA)
• The Environmental Protection Agency considers seven of the top 15 pesticides used on cotton in 2000 in the United States as “possible,” “likely,” “probable,” or “known” human carcinogens (acephate, dichloropropene, diuron, fluometuron, pendimethalin, tribufos, and trifluralin). (EPA)
• In 1999, a work crew re-entered a cotton field about five hours after it was treated with tribufos and sodium chlorate (re-entry should have been prohibited for 24 hours). Seven workers subsequently sought medical treatment and five have had ongoing health problems. (California DPR)

In the Wilson Quarterly, Witold Rybczynski asks “why can’t we build affordable home?”  He acknowledges that it seems like a strange time to ask the question, with housing prices so low, but he says

one of the reasons we are in this mess is that people bought houses they couldn’t really afford. At some point in the future, consumer confidence will be restored and people will start buying houses again. ­Pent-­up demand, and the inevitable delays in ­re­starting an industry that has seen the withdrawal of many home builders, will likely produce a spike in prices, and once again the affordability issue will come to the ­fore. 

Rybczynski is thinking in terms of single family detached houses that are commercially built.  His example is the Levittowner.

These were among the first mass produced houses.  Built right after World War two.  the basic Levittowner had 3 bedrooms and sold for under $10,000 (under $90,000 today)

After examining housing sizes, design methods and materials, as well as construction methods, he determines that most of the run up in housing prices is due not to the house itself, you could build a 1,000 square foot house at an equivalent cost to the Levittowner, but rather to the shortage of “service” land to build houses.  He blames several factors for this

• Proposition 13 and other similar measures made  it more difficult  if not impossible for municipalities to  finance the upfront costs of preparing new communities.  Instead, it was up to developers to pay for roads, sewers and other infrastructure.  These costs were passed on to the buyer.

•  Lower cost housing would depress the prices of existing homes in the same neighborhood.  Therefore, current homeowners press municipalities to restrict growth by increasing lot sizes, and making less land available for development.  This increases the cost of each lot.  To compensate for the expensive lot, home builders create McMansions, making the cost even more expensive.

Rybczynski points out that these policieshave

 another, less happy effect: It pushes growth even farther out, thus increasing sprawl. While ­large-­lot zoning is often done in the name of preserving open space and fighting sprawl, in fact it has the opposite ­effect. 

Bigger houses also require more materials, use more energy to heat and cool, and in general are not good for the environment.

He concludes by acknowledging a vicious circle

Smaller houses on smaller lots are the logical solution to the problem of affordability, yet ­density—­and less affluent ­neighbors—­are precisely what most communities fear most. In the name of fighting sprawl, local zoning boards enact regulations that either require larger lots or restrict development, or both. These strategies decrease the ­supply—­hence, increase the ­cost—­of developable land. Since builders pass the cost of lots on to buyers, they justify the higher land prices by building larger and more expensive houses—McMansions. This produces more community resistance, and calls for yet more restrictive regulations. In the process, housing affordability becomes an even more distant ­chimera. 

OK, as far as it goes, but I think he misses several crucial points.

1. Most of early Levitt homes were built for rental, not sale.

2. War veterans were returning in massive numbers, immediately increasing the demand for housing.

3. What made the Levittown possible and successful was the existence of large tracks of land near moderately paying but good, stable jobs.  Levittown in NY is close to the Hicksville Station of the Long Island Railroad, bringing workers into the NYC at a reasonable price.  Levittown in Pennsylvania was built largely for workers at a nearby steel mill.  Where are these kind of jobs today?

Recreating a Levittown, even the more modern version, is not, in my opinion feasable.  We do need a higher density of housing in many areas, but to support it, we need to put other things in place.  For one thing, we need better transit systems.   In addition, we need to rebuild the kind of manufacturing base that can support the workers that will populate these houses.

Rather than try to recreate the world of the 50′s we may be better looking to revitalizing our cities, and building for sustainablility.  Perhaps the best ideas are do be found in the Congress for the New Urbanism    Sustainbly developed housing built to infill existing urban areas.

We’re big fans of the WE CAN SOLVE it campaign.  These are the folks that are pushing to repower America with clean, renewable energy.  It was the WE CAN SOLVE it campaign that first brought our attention to Al Gore’s Energy Challenge.

Apparently, they have a new ad, and ABC is refusing to run it.

ABC recently refused to run our Repower America ad, even though they
run ads from oil companies that mislead the American people about the
role fossil fuels play in the climate crisis.

We don’t think that’s right, and we encourage you to contact ABC and ask them to reconsider

I thought this was a lot of fun.  From some students at Occidental College