Snag yourself some documentary

Snag is offering a pre-election Film Festival, screening dozens of documentaries on everything from climate to education to straight-forward politics.

Check out this one, on the movement in the Hudson Valley (where I grew up) to clean up the river.

Earthdance!

No matter where you're reading this from, you can go to Earthdance this weekend.

Earthdance is one of those times when unification trumps narcissism. This is a trans-global dance party, with events from Argentina to Zambia, but we're fortunate in having the Hub Event, the center of it all, just up the coast at the Black Oak Ranch in Laytonville. It unites world music, jamband, electronica, folk and reggae on five stages over three days.

Find your local Earthdance event - from Argentina to Zambia - on the main website.

Paul Stamets: Six Ways Mushrooms Can Save the World

Wow.

Mushroom expert (what an inadequate word!) Paul Stamets preaching the gospel of Mycelium.

Islands are crumbling

"World sea levels rose 3.1 millimetres (0.12 inch) per year from 1993 to 2003, the Nobel-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has said."

Doesn't sound like a big deal, does it? It's just millimeters, right?

The thing that is rarely reported when they mention that figure is... "average" means that some places it's lower, and some places it's higher... much higher.

"...a 2006 study by Australian oceanographers found the rise was much higher, almost one inch every year, in parts of the western Pacific and Indian oceans.

"It turns out the ocean sloshes around," said the University of Tasmania's Nathaniel Bindoff, a lead author on oceans in the U.N. reports. "It's moving, and so on a regional basis the ocean's movement is causing sea-level variations ups and downs."

Just as warming is much higher than average in the Arctic - and causing a host of problems, from melting sea-ice to melting permafrost - the sea level change is higher in some places, like the island nation of Kiribati.

"For nations and communities that sit only a few metres above sea level, even small ocean rises engulf their land and send destructive salty water into their food supply, leaving residents with little choice but to flee...

As sea levels have crept higher, the coasts have eroded, corals have been bleached, and islanders' staple foods such as the giant Babai taro, coconut and banana are unable to grow in salty soil.

On the Carterets, where one island has been split in two by the encroaching sea, Rakova said hunger and desperation were sending the young men to mainland Papua New Guinea, or spiralling into depression."

Another place the rising waters threaten: Australia's Torres Straights Islands. Here, too, it's the extremes:

"Ron and Maria Passi, who operate Murray Island's only taxi, were out driving the night the king tide struck... The couple's son, Sonny, was outside his fibro shack with his five children, watching the monster surf, lashed by north-west winds, rise ever higher. In the commotion, everyone had forgotten that Sedoi, the baby, was still inside. They heard her crying and found her in her cot, covered in sand. Water had surged in after a wave picked up a big wooden pallet and flung it through the front wall...

No one on Murray had ever seen such a high tide before. Other islands in the Torres Strait, which lies between the far north-eastern tip of the Australian mainland and Papua New Guinea, have witnessed similar scenes in recent years. Houses, roads and graveyards have been flooded, and the locals believe they know the reason: climate change."

Something for the rest of us to look forward to...

UPDATE: The Guardian reports that the Maldives are looking to buy themselves a new homeland.

Not thinking about polar bears

Watchmen Trailer

Coming in 2009... at last.

Termites and hydrogen

Searching for a miracle... a fuel source that is actually efficient.

Ethanol has been a disaster, barely breaking even in energy output, not doing well at all in carbon footprint, and driving up the price of corn and other grain. Time to try something else.

Hydrogen hasn't been much better, so far - it's still not cost effective. We simply don't have an industrial process to make it cheaply and in bulk. Wouldn't it be nice if we did? Termites, and the microbes in their guts that allow them to digest wood, could change that.

Termites? Termites!

A worker termite tears off a piece of wood with its mandibles and lets its guts work on it like a molecular wrecking yard, stripping away sugars, CO2, hydrogen, and methane with 90 percent efficiency... Offer a termite this page, and its microbial helpers will break it down into two liters of hydrogen, enough to drive more than six miles in a fuel-cell car. If we could turn wood waste into fuel with even a fraction of the termite’s efficiency, we could run our economy on sawdust, lawn clippings, and old magazines.

Check out the article... it's fascinating.

Sea ice closing in on record

Bad news for those who still think it'll be 20 or 30 years before we have to face an ice-free arctic ocean. Climate change is accelerating far faster than anything in the models.

More ominous signs Wednesday have scientists saying that a global warming "tipping point" in the Arctic seems to be happening before their eyes: The National Snow and Ice Data Center reported that sea ice in the Arctic now covers about 2.03 million square miles. The lowest point since satellite measurements began in 1979 was 1.65 million square miles set last September...

Within "five to less than 10 years," the Arctic could be free of sea ice in the summer, said NASA ice scientist Jay Zwally.

"It also means that climate warming is also coming larger and faster than the models are predicting and nobody's really taken into account that change yet," he said

Celebrating Lenny Bernstein

Where was I twenty years ago? Covering Leonard Bernstein's 70th Birthday bash at Tanglewood...

Leonard Bernstein at 70
Tanglewood, August 25-28
By Jeremy Bloom

There is an irony to the career of Leonard Bernstein, celebrated this past weekend with a whole series of concerts and parties at the Tanglewood Music Center, where that career began.

By the end of Thursday night's gala multi-starred celebration, it was obvious what an impact “Lenny” (as everyone calls him) has had in every area of music, from conducting the works of Copeland, Stravinski and Mahler to his own writing for the classical halls, the Hollywood screen, the Broadway stage.

There is so much wonderful material to draw on - songs from his early broadway shows, On the Town and Wonderful Town; his ballet collaboration with Jerome Robbins, Fancy Free; his film score for On the Waterfront: and of course, the unforgettable melodies of West Side Story and Candide.

"Poor Lenny, ten gifts too many,'' was the sad refrain of the lyrics specially penned for the evening by collaborator and friend Stephen Sondheim.

And yet, this is the man who once criticized Gershwin as being merely a pop composer whose music would not dwell among the immortals. Bernstein wants very much to be remembered as a serious classical composer. But of the 36 works performed over the course of the weekend, only four were from among his classical writings - and all four were choral works or songs, including the jazzy Mass. His heavier pieces, such as his Age of Anxiety Symphony, were passed over completely.

So what? Let's let Lenny and his psychiatrist and the historians sort it out. Thursday night, there was no doubt about how his contemporaries feel about him.

One after another, the people he has touched took the stage to thank their friend and mentor with a memory, a joke, and a gift of song - a Who's Who of 20th century music, from cellist Mstislav Rostropovitch, older than Lenny himself, to the 16-year-old Japanese wunderkind violinist, Midori; more than 50 singers, conductors, composers and musicians.

"I was at the Nureyev birthday celebration in New York last year,'' said one tuxedoed gentleman who had laid out $5,000 for top tickets for the week, ""and it was nothing like this. No one else has this depth of talent to draw on. These aren't just performers he's worked with - these are all his friends.''

Or, as Greek minister of culture Melina Mercouri put it, one of dozens of world figures sending greetings to the birthday boy: "To say, bless you? You were born blessed.''

Remembering Lena

Another of my "Greatest Hits"

Cafe Society
(Appeared in The New York Times, 1991)
By Jeremy Bloom

“There is a cloud of weirdness that hangs over Saratoga Springs,” says the singer-songwriter Bruce (Utah) Phillips. He should know, having spent most of the mid-'60s period he calls “the great folk music scare” in the small upstate New York city, along with Arlo Guthrie, Don McLean, Rosalie Sorrels, Bob Dylan, Spalding Gray and others.

They gathered spontaneously around Lena Spencer and Caffe Lena, the small Bohemian coffeehouse she ran in Saratoga Springs from 1960 until her death in 1989. The oldest continuously-running coffeehouse in the country, Caffe Lena endures as almost a time capsule - and a natural documentary subject.

In 1989, a BBC-TV crew filmed performances and interviews with some of the many musicians who considered Spencer a friend and her “caffe” a surrogate home. The result, titled “Caffe Lena”, will be broadcast at midnight Thursday on WNET (NY).

Arlo Guthrie is on hand for the film, as he always was for Spencer - he jokes about his role as financial angel for the often-broke cafe, saying he knew things were O.K. with Lena when he didn't hear from her.

Rosalie Sorrels lived with Spencer, and her children stayed with Spencer when she was on the road (Spencer never had any children of her own, but after her husband left her, the cafe provided an ever-shifting family). Ms. Sorrels' contribution to the documentary is a soulful performance of Mr. Phillips' “I Could Be the Rain” with blues-rocker David Bromberg playing lead guitar; it's the kind of collaboration that happened all the time in the early days.

Spalding Gray got his first acting job in a short-lived theater company which Spencer founded and then folded at the cafe during what he describes as the surreal summer of 1966. He has vivid memories of late nights with Spencer piloting the Ouija board.

“The theater productions were done with such inspired madness,” he told an interviewer. “The backyard looseness of it really set the tone for the Wooster Group's work,” he added, referring to the avant-garde theater he founded in New York in 1975 with Elizabeth LeCompte, who was waitressing at Caffe Lena when they met.

And then there was Spencer herself. She presided at the top of the stairs with the myopic regality of a Persian cat. “Do you have a reservation?” she would ask each visitor in the refined tones of an Italian immigrant's daughter who has trained for the stage.

Like her friend Bob Dylan (he played the cafe in 1962, but is not seen in the film), Spencer was at heart a private person. “She was a strange, warm, mothering character,” Mr. Gray recalls fondly. “One of the few I've met in America.”

Four easy ways to cut your CO2

Want to cut your carbon footprint at home? Four ways you can make a difference:

Disposable Coffee Cups
It might not seem like a big deal, but paper coffee cups add up – fast. One national chain estimated that in just one year, their customers who chose to bring their own mugs together prevented 30 tons of paper from going into landfills. That’s a lot of trees, and a lot of CO2.

Disposable chopsticks
Next time you’re in an Asian restaurant, think about the more than 100 billion pairs of disposable chopsticks used every year, the millions of trees cut down to make them, and the CO2 released when they are burned or land-filled. You can join the movement to bring your own chopsticks.

Wrap it up
More than 4 million tons of wrapping paper goes into US landfills every year. Use old newspapers, color comics, magazines or pieces of cloth instead.

Nix the bottle
Americans use - and dump - 30 million plastic water bottles every day. All of those bottles were manufactured (using power and 63 million gallons of petroleum per year), packed into cardboard boxes (millions of trees cut down), then trucked around the country (more oil). Use an inline filter on your tap, and a reusable bottle when you're on the road.

The Al Gore Challenge

Check out the website here.

See highlights of the challenge on YouTube:



Annotated version on the New York Times' Dot Earth blog...

Beef is the worst.

We've been pushing local food for some time now. Local food tends to be better, more nutritious, and tastier. And and if you don't ship stuff thousands of miles, you don't pump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.

A recent study by a pair of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University came up with a surprising result, though. While transporting food long distances definitely contributes to greenhouse gases, that amount is tiny compared to the impact of red meat and dairy.

...engineers Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh have found that although most foods in the U.S. are transported over long distances, the process of making the food dominates greenhouse gas emissions. Indeed, they traced 83 percent of the average household's food-related footprint of greenhouse gases to the origins of the food itself. Transportation only contributes 11 percent of greenhouse gas emissions on average—with the transportation leg from producer to retailer accounting for just 4 percent.

The big culprit is, of course, cattle. Not only do they crank out vast amounts of methane (and methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2), but other aspects of the production process are also GHG intensive.

The start-to-finish process of raising and distributing red meat causes more greenhouse gas emission than any other food group, with dairy products coming in second. Animal products create the greatest amounts of nitrous oxide, emitted as a result of soil fertilization and management, because animals are inefficient at using plant energy. Producing red meat and dairy also causes the bulk of all methane emissions, which are put out by ruminant animals and manure fertilizer.

The scale is such that, for the average household, just cutting a little over a day's worth of red meat and dairy would totally balance out the buy-local effect.

Which isn't to say that buying local isn't a worthy goal - it is. But encouraging people to cut out meat and dairy is even better. Even one meatless day can have a big impact; cutting our red meat entirely would be as good, from a GHG perspective, as driving a more fuel efficient car or cutting out a couple of airplane flights.

For perspective, food accounts for 13% of every U.S. household's 60 t share of total U.S. emissions; this includes industrial and other emissions outside the home. By comparison, driving a car that gets 25 miles per gallon of gasoline for 12,000 miles per year (the U.S. average) produces about 4.4 t of CO2. Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year, Weber says.

Another good point - ocean shipping is much more efficient than trucking. So food brought in by boat from Chile to San Francisco has a fairly low impact - better than potatoes trucked in from Idaho.

Which is good news for us, since we eat no red meat, but are addicted to mangoes and coconuts...

Yes We Can

A leader we can believe in.

Gov Schwarzenegger at the Yale Climate Change Conference

The Governator says Environmentalism is sexy:

Successful movements are built on passion. They're built on confidence. They're built on Teddy Roosevelt's bully pulpit. They're built on critical mass and often they're built on an element of alarm that galvanizes action.

I believe the environmental movement is switching over from being powered by guilt to being powered by something much more positive, something much more dynamic, something much more capable of bringing about revolutionary change. Its image is also changing from one of hand‑wringing and whining to one that is hip, an image that is cutting edge, forceful and self‑confident and even sexy.

He whines a bit about environmentalists blocking power lines, but for the most part, it's amazing how... well, how the climate has changed. :)

Utah Phillips, 1935-2008

Utah Phillips has passed away.

He was a hell of a guy, a storyteller, singer, raconteur, and union man.

"Don't mourn, organize"

Here's a piece I did on Utah some twenty years ago...


Labour of Love
Utah Phillips spreads the word – and the ashes – of Joe Hill

By Jeremy Bloom

“If you want to do something good for yourself, go to Utah and get thrown out.”

U. Utah Phillips knows from whence he speaks. In 1968, he got 6,000 votes as the Peace and Freedom Party candidate for the U.S. Senate from Utah (Eldridge Cleaver headed the national ticket as Presidential nominee). For some reason, in 1969 Phillips found himself persona non grata in Mormon Utah.

He left - and ended up becoming a nationally-know (or at least notorious) raconteur, folksinger, and Union activist with the Industrial Workers of the World – aka, “The Wobblies”.

Which was how it happened that he found himself in Washington, DC (“Or Mordor, as we like to call it”) recently, on a special mission to pick up a very unusual parcel: the ashes of Joe Hill.

For those unfamiliar with “The Ballad of Joe Hill,” or the Wobblies, Phillips is glad to explain. After all, stories and songs are his living.

“Joe Hill was executed by the state of Utah, essentially for writing songs,” he says. “He was the Wobbly Bard.”

The IWW was doing organizing up in the silver mines, and the governor of Utah had vowed to break the union. Joe, an organizer as well as a songwriter, was framed on a murder charge and executed.

His final wish: that he be cremated and his ashes scattered in every state but Utah. He is also reputed to have asked his friends to get his body over the state line into Wyoming, so he wouldn’t “be caught dead in Utah.”

(This is trademark Utah Philips: Tell ‘em a story, make ‘em laugh, and then slip in the message.)
Joe’s last request to his friends has become famous: “Don’t mourn, organize”.

It was that business about scattering his ashes, though.

“An extraordinary experience, you know, to have Joe’s ashes in my hand,” he said, simply. “They were so kind to me. The woman down at the National Archive was a mole back in the inner recesses, by name Aloha South. She’d been there 27 years. The ashes were in a little ceramic jar. And there was the torn envelope.”

But what were the ashes of Joe Hill doing in the National Archive? With Aloha South’s help, Phillips was able to piece together the story of the lost, lonely packet.

“We were in the first world war in 1917, and there was a big red scare,” he said. “They passed the Espionage Act June 15, 1917, and the FBI, through the Postmaster General, sent out the word to postmasters all over the country. They got in the habit of taking anything they thought looked suspicious and sending it to the FBI.”

Joe's ashes were parceled out into 47 packets for mailing to to the various states. But one of the packets became torn during the mailing, and the suspicious Chicago postmaster alerted the Feds. Perhaps it was illegal to mail an anarchist over a state line…

The ashes found their way into the National Archive in 1944. Their existence was common knowledge in the archive, but the world outside didn’t find out until last year, when the catalogue was published, and someone noticed and notified the IWW. The last of Joe was rescued from a bureaucratic burial, which left the question: What do with him?


“I really think the ashes ought to go to the farm workers in California”, was Phillips’ opinion. “That’s a living struggle with a superb record, consistent with what Joe and the IWW is about.”

Actually, he had another idea… inspired when an old-timer came up at a concert and asked, "Could you do a couple of lines of ‘Joe Hill’?"

“Well,” said Utah, laughing through his grey Santa Claus beard, "we could get a mirror and a razor blade… don’t tell anyone in my union I said that. They’re a humorless bunch.”


Utah Phillips sings Joe Hill's "There is Power in The Union."

30-story urban farms?

When I first heard about this idea, I thought it was dumb. With the amount of vacant land available, why bother growing food in skyscrapers? But there may be something to it.

Why build vertical farms in cities? Growing crops in a controlled environment has benefits: no animals to transfer disease through untreated waste; no massive crop failures as a result of weather-related disasters; less likelihood of genetically modified “rogue” strains entering the “natural” plant world. All food could be grown organically, without herbicides, pesticides, or fertilizers, eliminating agricultural runoff. And 80 percent of the world’s population will be living in urban areas by 2050. Cities already have the density and infrastructure needed to support vertical farms, and super-green skyscrapers could supply not just food but energy, creating a truly self-sustaining environment.

I'm particularly sympathetic to the idea of being able to isolate your crops to keep out GMOs and insect pests, having spent enough time in my life picking bugs off spinach, zucchinis and apple trees. Of course, if you ever got an infestation in the kinds of monocultures they would have in these buildings, it would be game over...

Update: Kate Petersen at Politicook sends me to City Farms, a blog about Urban Agriculture (not the skyscraper kind)

Mark Bittman: What's wrong with what we eat

Mark Bittman, who blogs and writes for that paper in New York, talks about the food situation.

Rant of the week

"It is not enough to simply question authority. You've gotta speak with it, too."

Bad news for Nuclear Proponents

It seems that nukes won't be our energy salvation, either.

A new study out of Australia points out a couple of salient facts: There's not that much Uranium available anymore, and gearing up for more power plants would just make the shortage worse. Building more plants and mining the uranium and processing it would generate - of course! - more greenhouse gases.

The researchers' basic assumption of declining uranium jibes with data from the Nuclear Energy Agency and the International Atomic Energy Agency.

The agencies have put the total amount of known recoverable uranium reserves at around 3.5 million tons. That accounts for reasonably assured reserves and estimated additional reserves that can be mined at moderate costs.

At the current rate of usage -- around 67,000 tons per year -- those reserves will last for just over 50 years. And that's before any additional nuclear plants are built, reports Friends of the Earth, Australia in this analysis.

McCain is one of those proposing a whole new round of nukes - according to one estimate, even reaching a fraction of his goal, meeting 20% of US needs, would take $250 billion dollars. (And that's just to build the plants, without even addressing the issue of waste)

In contrast, SolveClimate quotes a new Department of Energy Report (PDF) that says we could get to 20% of US needs with wind power by 2030... and all for just $43 billion, the cost of four months of the Iraq war. That seems like a better deal...