“Every single calorie we eat is backed by at least a calorie of oil, more like ten. In 1940 the average farm in the United States produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil energy it used. By 1974 (the last year in which anyone looked closely at this issue), that ratio was 1:1.” (Manning 2004)

Richard Manning is one crazy guy. He writes about the economy of food and can quite convincingly trace part of our current energy crisis to the slaughter of the Great Plains bison. The U.S government encouraged the bison slaughter for many reasons. The cruelest perhaps was to deny the Plains Indians a food source. The dumbest reason was to reduce competition from the bison with sod busters and cattle ranchers.

The plains arguably produced more bison than cattle on the native prairie grass, but after the bison were wiped out, our ancestors tilled up and destroyed the prairie grass to plant the grains we feed our cattle. Now, I’ll be the first to admit that grain-fed beef tastes a lot better than grass-fed beef. Still, was it wise to destroy a plentiful protein source, which survived nicely on the existing grass and the existing energy (sun and rain) only to plant grain which requires sun, rain and petro chemicals by the truck load? It sounds wasteful to me.

Chemical agriculture requires a huge amount of fossil fuel to grow our food. Its not just transportation of crops and the use of field equipment which consume the oil, the plants themselves are grown with petro fertilizers. As the price of oil has risen in recent months so has the cost of growing our food. Organic farmers have the chance now to capture a greater market share, as their food will eventually cost about the same to produce as chemically grown produce. The environment benefits of course, because the idea behind organic agriculture is to feed the soil which will then feed the plants. In chemical agriculture the plant is fed chemicals and grows bigger and produces more fruits and vegetables, but the soil is left depleted and chemical runoff fouls waterways and water tables.

I bet this leap of logic will get your dander up but here goes: If we as a country drove nearly 10 billion miles less in May than a year ago because of higher fuel costs and therefore put less CO2 into the atmosphere, and if the increase in chemical fertilizer costs makes organic agriculture more cost effective, then isn’t high priced oil good for America? The math is way beyond my ability, but the cost to the environment of those 10 billion miles and the cost to the environment from chemical farming must mitigate the $4-plus we are paying per gallon of gas.

Have fun with this one kids. Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.

Stop by Qualcomm Stadium on Sunday, August 3rd between 9 am – 1 pm for free compost!

Practical Application and Benefits of Compost
Compost can be used as an amendment to improve soil texture and increase nutrient and water holding capacity. In San Diego, where soil is of poor quality, mixing compost in with the soil is one of the best things you can do for your yard and garden.

Here’s how:
Amend garden soil by incorporating one to two inches of compost four to six inches deep into the soil. Irrigate area twice thoroughly before planting.
Top dress planters with compost to help reduce water loss and protect root systems. Spread three inches of compost around the base of plants and shrubs, keeping it from touching plant stems or trunks.
Use compost as potting mix for growing containerized plants and seedlings. Mix two parts compost, one part coarse sand, one part vermiculite, and one part peat moss.
 
• Residents must load their own compost
• Residents must supply their own receptacles/bins and shovels
• Maximum 1 cubic yard per resident

Compost generously provided by the City of San Diego:
Visit the Miramar Greenery at the Miramar Landfill for a wide range of high quality landscaping products from fine compost to a variety of quality decorative mulches and wood chips.  Call (858) 694-7000 for more information.”

It floors me that all these San Diego promoters and developers and smart talking civic leaders never did the math; never calculated the water available versus the water needed. How many people, how many lush tropical gardens, how many golf courses, resorts, water parks and business parks could Southern California support on the very finite water available? It appears we are about to find out. The answer is fewer than we have if we keep sucking up the water as we’ve done in the past.

Here are some water facts from Organic Gardening Magazine:

The answer really is blowin’ in the wind. At least that’s what oil billionaire T. Boone Pickens believes. He calls it the Pickens plan and I’m intrigued.

He got my attention when I heard him say “we can’t drill our way of this.” He’s referring to W’s plan to reduce the 70% of our oil that we get from other countries by drilling off the coast and in the arctic. I know many of you have let it be known the drilling can’t start soon enough for you. Ridiculous! Sooner or later we have to move on to the next energy source. Now granted, I’m dubious when a republican oil man declares that drilling isn’t the answer, but I was willing to read.

What I saw at the Pickens Plan web site is very interesting. He proposes wind farms which stretch across our country’s windy mid-section. The big wind mills would start in the Texas panhandle and not stop until the northern reaches of North Dakota. Pickens figures that would provide 20% of the electrical output this country needs to operate. That is the same amount we now get from natural gas. He proposes we divert the natural gas to power our cars. He believes there is enough natural gas for 98% of our domestic needs, and he says it will reduce our oil imports by 38 %. Pretty cool, huh?

I know T. Boone Pickens is the single largest owner of natural gas rights in the U.S. so he stands to get even richer, but so what if it works? He deserves to get richer if he can significantly reduce our use of foreign oil, do it without drilling off the coast and in a wildlife refuge and get it done quickly. Frosting on the cake is the jobs Pickens promises in the wind power industry. He claims it will cause a revival in rural America with high paying jobs in production and maintenance of the vast wind farms.

The cost will be over a trillion dollars, but the cost of continuing to import oil is $700 billion a year and growing. In 10 years that’s $7 trillion.

This is exactly what I’ve hoped for, alternative energy applied in a big way by a guy who can get things done. He’s not the guy I would have chosen to lead the revolution, but why not if he’s got the best plan. It looks good to me, but what about you? Does his past give you pause? Does his science work for you? Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up! Here’s a link to the Picken’s plan web site www.pickensplan.com

There is a recurring theme I’ve read in many of your postings. It goes something like this: Why do we care more about caribou than humans, or why should Southern Californians reduce our water use for some little fish? Then there is the time tested favorite: forget the whales, save the humans!

What frustrates me is the idea some people have that we are the only organism that matters. Bio-diversity refers to the variety and interdependence of life on earth. The idea that the earth’s systems work as well without bio-diversity shows a lack of understanding about how the tiniest creatures can have huge effects on the greater system. Let’s take bees, bats and butterflies for example. What do they have in common and why should we be concerned by their demise? Afterall bees sting, bats carry disease and butterflies are nice but… All three of these creatures are pollinators. 2/3 of all our food crops depend on pollinators to grow. The value of pollinating insects and animals to global agriculture is $200 billion a year. As many as 200 thousand species pollinate a quarter million plant species worldwide. Which ones of these can humans do without? Do you feel confident that you can choose the ones which are unimportant enough to allow them to go extinct?

If it helps to view this in human terms, consider the last time you lost someone you truly care about or the time someone important to you moved away. The experiences may have caused you to reflect how that person will be missed. Perhaps the person brought you strength in troubling times, or maybe they just brought you coffee and donuts on Tuesdays. Either way their absence creates a void in your life. It’s the same when species disappear. Each organism, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant plays a role in its ecosystem. So next time you note that you are tired of hearing about delta smelt, or snail darters, spotted owls, wolves, polar bears and caribou, try thinking about how each individual creature may fill a niche and when it is gone, the environment is forever changed.

What do you think? Are there animals, insects or bacteria you think are worthless and undeserving of protection? Are humans the only organisms which matter?

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.

Why are environmentalists so hated?

It is surprising to me how the word ‘environmentalist’ really gets under some people’s skin. Research bears it out. There are countless Web sites dedicated to people’s hatred of those of us who speak out on behalf of plants, animals and ecosystems. The common theme of the hatred is that if environmentalists care about those things, they must surely despise people.

Here is one blogger’s take on the subject: “A naturalist is someone who is interested in and knows a lot about the natural world. An environmentalist is someone who hates people.”

Another common theme is that environmentalists are communists, socialists or simply power hungry fanatics bent on taking people’s rights away in the interest of inferior creatures.

Last week someone sent me a link to an article which quotes the Czech Republic’s President Vaclav Klaus who says: “As someone who lived under communism for most of my life I feel obliged to say that the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity at the beginning of the 21st century is not communism or its various softer variants. Communism was replaced by the threat of ambitious environmentalism.”

Wow! I am naïve. My interest in a healthy clean environment is so that humans many generations from now will know the joy of cooking a trout over a camp fire after catching it in a clear mountain stream, I want my great-great-grandchild to watch a hawk riding the thermals along the coast or get to experience the leaves changing in the autumn. This is actually a populist attitude which considers how nature improves the human condition. If we don’t try and keep clean water, air and soil for the future then human beings will follow the other extinct species.

Seems to me, those of you who refuse to accept that the environment is in peril are really the ones who hate people. To deny climate change, ocean pollution, overfishing, species decline and on and on, is selfish. It’s nothing more than saying, ‘I want mine and my children can take what I leave behind.’ In the case of the environment, what we leave them won’t be worth having unless we act to protect it now.

So tell me why do people loath environmentalists? Is it fair to say people who want to improve the environment hate people? Here’s your chance to set the record straight.

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.

I’m not ready to put a McCain ’08 bumper sticker on the Prius just yet, but the ole guy sure has been on a roll the past couple days. He has taken the lead on the energy issue and seems to have knocked Barrack Obama back on his heels.

You’ve probably already read or heard about the $300 million prize McCain proposed for the battery we need to make the next generation of plug-in and hybrid vehicles.

”I further propose we inspire the ingenuity and resolve of the American people by offering a $300 million prize for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars. This is one dollar for every man, woman and child in the U.S. — a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency — and should deliver a power source at 30 percent of the current costs,” he said.

I like it. Not only does it inspire the private sector to find non-oil solutions to energy, but by involving government in the race for new technology it adds an “our team” element to the quest.

McCain is also proposing $5,000 tax credits to people who buy zero emissions cars. What a wonderful incentive for automakers to produce more and better clean cars.

The Republican senator is saying what many of you believe is tree-hugging, hybrid-driving, Al Gore-loving, Birkenstock-wearing, green nonsense too. McCain has acknowledged that climate change/global warming is indeed a result of how we use fossil fuels. Way to go John boy! Check this out:

“We now know that fossil fuel emissions, by retaining heat within the atmosphere, threaten disastrous changes in climate. No challenge of energy is to be taken lightly, and least of all the need to avoid the consequences of global warming.

Among the compelling evidence of this danger, satellite images reveal shrinking glaciers, Antarctic ice shelves and polar ice sheets. Our scientists have also seen and measured reduced snowpack, with earlier runoffs in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. We have seen sustained drought in the Southwest, and across the world average temperatures that seem to reach new records every few years. In the frozen wilds of Alaska, the Arctic, Antarctic and elsewhere, wildlife biologists have noted sudden changes in animal migration patterns, a loss of their habitat, a rise in sea levels. The facts of global warming demand our urgent attention, especially in Washington. Good stewardship, prudence and simple common sense demand that we act to meet the challenge, and act quickly,” he said.

Still Senator McCain is only a little better than the Bush gang who insist on oil wells off our coast and in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve etc. McCain believes it should be up to the states. Keep the moratorium, Senator McCain!

The McCain energy plan seems like a surprise to Barack Obama, who said today that the $300 million isn’t enough.

He said, “When John F. Kennedy decided that we were going to put a man on the moon, he didn’t put a bounty out for some rocket scientist to win — he put the full resources of the United States government behind the project and called on the ingenuity and innovation of the American people not just in the private sector but in the public sector.”

Sorry Senator Obama but that is WEAK!

Now before you get me wrong, I’m a long way from rockin a McCain pin on my lapel. There are a few problems… lets see, oh yeah, that whole hundred-year war in Iraq, the Bush tax cuts, a woman’s right to choose, the makeup of the Supreme Court, NAFTA, manufacturing jobs he says will never come back, not talking with our enemies and I’ve never heard a worse speaker in my life, uhh, except for the current President.

I gotta say though that John McCain is way out in front on the energy conversation. Here’s a link to his 6/24/08 energy speech in Santa Barbara http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/Read.aspx?guid=49a335bf-34f5-462c-aff8-108de6fc48c8

What do you think?

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.

You’ll forgive me, I hope, if I tell you I think George W. Bush knows as much about how to solve the country’s energy woes as he does about the constitution, disaster relief or who caused the attacks on September 11th.

His latest pronouncement that we must open up oil exploration off our coast and in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is the wrong idea and it comes from a guy who has fronted an administration with little or no credibility when it comes to energy policy.

The attempt to fool the American people started almost immediately with Dick Cheney’s secret energy meetings and his refusal to name 10 shadowy members who reviewed and probably set energy policy. Among the shadowy group was Ken Lay “Kenny Boy” of Enron. You’ll remember that Lay (Enron) and others among the secret group were instrumental in pillaging California’s huge surplus by manipulating the price of electrical power until our state’s treasury was in shambles.

I’ve noticed so many people uttering the name Al Gore as though the very name is enough to make someone ill. The sad part is that if the country had listened to Vice President Gore well before he was part of the Clinton administration we’d be much better off today.

How about this Gore quote from 1991?

“With oil prices dropping, there is no better time for a bolder energy policy. We should ask the President for political leadership and the kind of courage he showed in the gulf in order to accelerate the development of energy alternatives, confront our addiction to fossil fuels, especially foreign oil and measure the full costs of the energy choices we make.”

Or how about this gem from Gore during the first President Bush’s time in the White House:

“… the Bush strategy will result in an overall increase in U.S. oil imports from approximately 50 percent to 60 percent when the plan is fully implemented by 2030.”

I know some of you love to point out how wrong Al Gore is. He’s wrong on this one. Under the latest President Bush we’ve reached 60% of our oil being imported already. That’s much faster than even Gore imagined.

So my question to you is, should we drill in ANWR? How about here in California? Are you ready to have oil derricks off Del Mar? What about alternative energy? If we had listened to Al Gore and put real brain power behind alternatives two decades ago, we wouldn’t be hog tied by people who don’t really care for us now. How would things be different today if we were finishing up the second term of a Gore administration instead?

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.

That’s how many children die each day from waterborne illnesses. One out of six people do not have access to clean drinking water. Sure we all do for now, but the very sobering news that Lakes Mead and Powell will likely be dry in little more than a decade was treated with a collective yawn locally. It’s not just here in the California and surrounding states either. Travel a little farther east to the Great Plains. The water there comes from the Ogallala Aquifer. It irrigates 1/5 of our country’s farmland and we are using it far more quickly than nature is replenishing it. Here’s a link to the BBC’s interactive map of the world’s other water trouble spots. There is no shortage of them http://news.bbc.co.uk/…/world_water_crisis/default.stm

My friend, wildlife biologist Bill Toone with the EcoLife Foundation www.ecolifefoundation.org was in Africa on assignment recently and used water from his drinking bottle to wet a rag and wipe off a dusty table. His guide gently suggested he not do that anymore. Water is far too precious in Kenya to use it to wipe off a table. Boggles the mind to think how we use water by comparison.

Recently you may have heard people talking about the fact that it takes 37 gallons to make a cup of coffee. The figure is based on something called the virtual water footprint. There is a virtual footprint for everything. It takes 155 gallons to grow a pound of wheat, 37 gallons to grow an apple, 27 gallons for a banana, a pair of leather shoes eats up 4,400 gallons of water. You can get all the details of the virtual water use of your family and the rest of the world by going to a link at the end of this post. The benefit of knowing how much water is needed to produce the things we consume is so one can make personal choices which reduce our virtual water footprint. Consider this troubling fact: right now we waste 30 – 50 percent of the food that is raised. It’s lost in harvesting, processing, transportation, spoilage. Throwing out leftovers wastes every drop of water it took to raise it. Take a shorter shower and you’ll save a few gallons of water. Stop throwing out leftovers and you’ll save hundreds of gallons of water.

There is a local water challenge right now urging us to save 20 gallons of water a day. If we change our eating habits, we could make that 20 gallons seem like the proverbial drop in a bucket. Meat has a virtual footprint 5 to 10 times larger than vegetables. So by eating less meat and more veggies we could save hundreds of gallons a day. Get the idea?

Here’s the link: http://www.waterfootprint.org

After you click around and get an idea of how the water footprint idea works, I’d love to hear what you think. How will our lives change in the coming decades when it comes to water use?

I suspect my water footprint is large and I don’t think it will be easy to change but it’s time to try.

Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.

Please bear with me, I have a number of items that have gotten me excited this week.

You’ve no doubt seen the black beetles running around lately. To the casual observer, they look like common stink bugs. The difference is that they move much more quickly and dont stick their bums in the air. They do however put off a powerful stink. The beetles are a very cool sign that nature works beautifully when allowed to. A couple weeks ago, I did a short story about the moth invasion brought on by a combination of well-timed winter rains and the wildfires. At the time I interviewed wildlife biologist Bill Toone who said there would be a lot of caterpillars after the moths lay eggs, but not to spray pesticides because nature would respond with more predators to take care of the increased populations of caterpillars. He was so right. The beetles running around right now are called ground beetles/caterpillar hunters. They have voracious appetites and are very beneficial to have around the garden. Please let them be and theyll reward you with fewer grubs, caterpillars and a few other pests they come across.

If you are like me, you’re trying to save money these days. One good way is to rethink what we think of as garbage. You know those potatoes that sit too long in the pantry and grow eyes? Plant them. I just harvested 3 pounds of potatoes from one old potato I found in the pantry and buried in the veggie garden. Here’s a link to some growing tips.

Here’s one of those facts that seems silly given our push toward more solar energy: Did you know that one of the purest forms of solar energy is not allowed in most planned neighborhoods built in the past 30 years? Know what it is? The clothes line. Most neighborhood CC&Rs forbid clotheslines. I wonder how much energy could be saved and green house gas reduced if we thumbed our noses at the man and went back to that oh-so-Americana practice of hanging out the wash?

And finally, I am very finicky about the water I drink. Growing up in Connecticut, tap water was fine. Tasty, in fact. My experience in the Southwest has been different. When I moved to New Mexico for college the tap water gave me the gag reflex. San Diego’s water does the same thing. I’ve never been able to drink the stuff, and now I face a huge dilemma because bottled water is expensive and the bottles are a problem when not recycled. So, my family has always depended on a reverse osmosis system from the local Rayne man. I love the stuff. It tastes like a clear mountain stream. The problem is this little item I came across on the Plumbing Supply Company Web site…

“Does Reverse Osmosis use a lot of water?” Basically, the answer is yes with all brands. Some more than others. On our basic system, for every gallon of filtered water, approximately 4-10 gallons of water goes down the drain (depends on your water conditions).

Are you kidding me? Four to 10 times the water we get to drink is wasted in the process of making it. Why are these things legal in an era of low-flow toilets and drip irrigation? Why should such a wasteful technology be allowed when we import every drop we drink and we are using more than nature can make to keep up?

What do you think? Thanks for tuning in, logging on and speaking up.