Earth Hour is tonight, at 8:30pm local time.
On Earth Hour hundreds of millions of people, organizations, corporations and governments around the world will come together to make a bold statement about their concern for climate change by doing something quite simple—turning off their lights for one hour. In the U.S. where we are already feeling the impacts of climate change, Earth Hour sends a clear message that Americans care about this issue and want to turn the lights out on dirty air, dangerous dependency on foreign oil and costly climate change impacts, and make the switch to cleaner air, a strong economic future and a more secure nation.
Participation is easy. By flipping off your lights on March 27th at 8:30 p.m. local time you will be making the switch to a cleaner, more secure nation and prosperous America.
- EarthHour.org
Not sure what to do for a whole hour with no lights? Check out
this list of ideas from previous years.
‘Save Three Lives’,
by Robert Rodale
A recent train of small events lead me to read
“Save Three Lives: A Plan for Famine Prevention” by Robert Rodale, founder of the
Rodale Institute and
Organic Gardening Magazine. Although the book is nearly 20 years old and I’m sure some of it is out of date, a large amount, sadly, is not. The problems the author talks about in 1991 Africa are still here in 2010 – famine and (in some ways worse) the consistent, continuous low-level hunger and malnutrition – not quite starving, but never having quite enough – from which it is so easy to topple into famine or premature death from related diseases.
The most important problem, according to Rodale, the problem that makes the majority of our efforts useless or even damaging to the very people we are trying to aid, is a lack of cultural understanding – a lack of even caring to understand essential differences. Soil in the tropics is delicate, and needs much more care to continue to produce than soil in temperate regions. But we come in to Africa with our Western agro-science, developed in cooler regions with resilient soils, and tell the people who have lived in an area for generations that they’re doing it wrong. They follow our well-meant advice and can produce nearly twice as much food from the same land (by paying for Western fertilizers, etc) – for a few years. This was the so-called
“Green Revolution,” and it lead to food surpluses and a population explosion, but just a decade or so later their soil had lost its fertility and was producing less than in the beginning, with the added burden of now needing to purchase petroleum-based fertilizers, making the food that was being produced too expensive for many living there to buy. Depleted soils force farmers to move on to a new piece of land, often removing the forest to do so, and lack of firewood has become a problem nearly as severe as lack of food. Nor, according to Rodale, are fuel-efficient stoves the answer, since an open fire serves many purposes in an African home. One of these overlooked purposes is that the smoke kills insects in the thatch, preserving both the roof overhead and the inhabitants by reducing the insects that prey on straw, food stores and people. A similar story of well-meaning Westerners damaging indigenous societies is related in
“Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond: Westerners arrive in the highlands of Papua New Guinea and convince the people to change their mountainside farming practices – and because of that change, the first strong rain of the monsoon season washes away all of the carefully-built topsoil.
Alley Cropping with Leguminous Trees
Rodale’s solutions all revolve around ensuring that aid provided to Africans is of the type that Africans themselves want and will use – often encouraging them to return to more traditional agriculture such as
alley cropping with rows fast-growing leguminous (nitrogen-fixing) trees planted between rows of food crops. The trees would provide nitrogen, wood for fires and building, mulch for the crops to retain moisture, and act as a barrier to diseases and pests that can easily sweep through a monoculture.
His suggestions for repairing the problems, for preventing the need for food aid that often results in huge amounts of surplus subsidized American yellow field corn, suitable for animal feed, being sent too late, to regions where the people eat white rather than yellow corn, undercuting the prices of what food the local farmers can produce, and which is often hijacked by soldiers on both sides of conflicts or even prevented from landing – these suggestions are
still relevant, at least partly because so little progress seems to have been made. I am not trying to suggest that many very dedicated people have not come up with improved ideas and implemented them in some places (a number of articles about reclaiming the desert spring to my mind). However, the fact that what ‘everyone’ knows about Africa – the ‘rickets and flies’ stereotypes of famine and refugees – has not improved in 20 years, seems to indicate that the problem is nowhere near being solved.
I searched online trying to find something that directly addressed the points the author makes and the solutions he puts forth, but didn’t find anything specifically touted as an update to this book. I did read
“Plan B 2.0″ by Lester Brown a few years ago, but I don’t remember many of the specifics and they’re up to 4.0 now, so I obviously need to go back and read the updated version. I’d be very interested in any other recommendations anyone might have.
For quite a while, I’ve been wanting to write about gardening, preserving, cooking, reducing energy use, frugality, and general sustainable living. That’s a lot of topics, I know, and I didn’t want to crowd out or overwhelm the sustainable business focus of my
Sundrop Jewelry blog.
A recent train of small events lead me to read
“Save Three Lives” by Robert Rodale, founder of the
Rodale Institute and
Organic Gardening Magazine. Although the book is nearly 20 years old and I’m sure some of it is out of date, a large amount, sadly, is not. I’ll write a
separate post about the book, but it was the final straw, with a call to action that caused me to actually write to all three branches of government (the Dept of Justice is starting an
series of public workshops looking into antitrust and monopoly issues concerning our agriculture conglomerates this spring).
The book also tipped me over the edge and convinced me that I really did want to blog about all these things – I sat down and in a half hour had a list of post ideas more than a page long. Since then, more keep popping into my head or being sparked by other bloggers’ posts coming across my google reader list. Some posts you can look forward to seeing here:
- a series of at least one good recipe for each food coming out of the garden
- how to build self-watering containers
- donating to food pantries (I’ve always wondered whether it’s better to donate money or loss leader items from the grocery store)
- an update on the 90% reduction posts I did 3 years ago
I also hope that having a blog will help/force me to actually keep records of my gardening so I have a better idea what to do/not do again in the future.
