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Laura Bush supports gay marriage
Laura Bush told Larry King last night: "When couples are committed to each other and love each other, they ought to have the same sort of rights that everyone has."
King: Would that be an area where you disagree [with your husband]?
Bush: I guess that would be an area where we disagree. ... I think it's also a generational thing.
King: You think it [legalized gay marriage] is coming?
Bush: Yeah, it will come, I think.
| May 12 2010 at 11:57 AM
Crushing global warming
Enter your Facebook account and you become the star of a new teen video that seeks to stomp out global warming. An attractive youth of the opposite gender shows off a tattoo with your name in it as s/he raps about climate change. S/he has a crush on you because you're green!
"You wanna turn me on, baby? Stop puttin' gas up in my atmosphere!"
You can share the video via Facebook as well, encouraging your friends to sign the Declaration of Independence from Fossil Fuels, a youth-written document asking leaders to take action against climate change.
The campaign comes courtesy of the Alliance for Climate Education, an Oakland-based nonprofit focused that educates youth about climate change.
For a youth campaign, it's weird that this one assumes that you're heterosexual, but you can work around that that by saying you're the opposite gender. Youth, fortunately, don't just support action against climate change by a wide margin; they also back GLBT rights.
And they know an awful lot about technology: Who knew you could personalize a video using a Facebook account?
Try it out; it's a lot of fun!
| November 19 2009 at 12:33 PM
The lady behind the Pie
Tonight, 10 Women will hold one of its semi-annual events honoring—you guessed it—10 Bay Area women for their extraordinary community contributions. One of the women in the lineup is sustainability visionary Karen Heisler, who co-founded Pie Ranch in Pescadero and co-owns Mission Pie at 25th and Mission in San Francisco.
Karen Heisler
Pie Ranch is a nonprofit sustainable farming learning laboratory that sits on a 14-acre parcel shaped like a piece of pie. Founded in 2004, it offers educational extension programs for at-risk area youth as well as farming apprenticeships for adults. Heisler's farming partners are a young married couple whom the 48 year-old San Francisco native met through her work on the leadership board of Live Power Community Farm, California's first CSA.
After founding Pie Ranch, which bills itself as a "a rural center for urban renewal," Heisler also opened Mission Pie, a separate for-profit business that gets its ingredients from Pie Ranch and other small sustainable farms and offers occupational internships for at-risk youth. She explained that the idea behind Mission Pie was to bring the ideals of Pie Ranch and other places like it into the city and to put sustainable food within the geographical and budgetary reach of all San Franciscans. Mission Pie is not yet a certified green business, but it is a member of the Green Café Network.
I sat down with Heisler last week on a cluster of tree stumps beside a cornfield for a sprawling interview. As her work growing ingredients for pies on a pie-shaped ranch in an effort to illuminate where food comes from suggests, the one-time EPA administrator is deeply philosophical and seems particularly inclined toward the synecdoche. So in some of the specifics of how she's carved out success for herself in the nonprofit world and as a green entrepreneur, you get not just tasty insider tidbits, but also some quietly revolutionary insights on why green, broadly defined, matters, and how it can succeed in small, but important, ways.
How did Pie Ranch come about?
Having spent nearly 20 years in a community-supported agriculture community of people centered on a farm, I felt like, what would the next step be? And for me the next step was teaming up with some friends who wanted to be farmers and educators and contributing financial resources to secure the place while they contributed the time and labor to build a farm—and to really look at that as a model of bridging between the urban and rural communities and people.
So you don't do the farming at Pie Ranch?
No. I mean, I can do a number of tasks here, but I haven't been living the lifestyle of being a farmer—you know, I live in the Mission District. It's a really different landscape. There's a lot less self-sufficiency in my neighborhood than there is here. But don't feel that my calling is to be a farmer, I feel it is to be a person who talks with people in the city about the importance of [sustainable farming] and the need for there to be more of a sense of mutual investment.
There are lots of things I love about living in an urban environment, not the least of which is that struggle to maintain enough of a sense of self-sufficiency to not feel at risk. In the last two generations the loss of basic skills in urban communities has been precipitous. And I see that as one of the reasons that people are sort of fearful and hostile.
But there's no question that this kind of a landscape is fantastic for instilling [self-sufficiency], and that's a lot of the reason that we are motivated to bring teenagers here. Because getting a little bit of a taste of the competence of making something yourself, like a meal, or learning how to do something new is infectious.
You mentioned you'd previously been involved with a CSA. Which one, and how were you involved?
It was Live Power Community Farm, which was the first CSA farm in California. I wasn't a founding member; I joined after they'd been doing it for a few years, right at a time that the farm was about to be faced with the challenge of how to secure their relationship with their piece of land. I was deeply involved in the deliberations about what would be a viable pathway for this farm. Should it be a non-profit, should it be a private entity? And it ended up being a model for using a beefed up conservation easement.
What was your job during that time?
I was at EPA. I was working for about 7 years on pesticide regulation and about 7 or 8 years on sustainable agriculture incentive-based policies. But I increasingly did what felt like activist work within the agency, building the bridges for people who didn't have as much voice to have voice in policy decision-making.
Green food can be expensive, and it's certainly culturally very white. How do you negotiate that?
Yes, that's true, but it's sort of overstated in one way, and some dimensions are understated.
There's been such a movement toward processed and pre-prepared food, and within that, we're evaluating what costs are, right? When, really, when you take things to basics, it's not outrageously expensive to eat well. It requires an investment of time and interest in making our own food.
Fundamentally, if I'm a Mission High School student and I go to one of the not-that-inaccessible farmers markets and buy food that's maybe not organic, but somewhere on the sustainability continuum, and I go home and cook it myself, I bet you I will get a more nutritious meal for less than I would pay for a fast food meal.
I'm not saying all that to be dodgy. It is true that an organic whatever is more expensive than a conventional one at the cash register. But where are the externalized costs? The externalized costs are in the compromised health of people who are working in fields growing chemically produced food. The externalized costs have to do with fast food, and health care.
We have access issues all over the place, but I think sometimes they're not always quite what they seem and there's really some unification across class that can happen around self-sufficiency. Because a lot of people who are really wealthy can't cook; they've just been able to gain access to higher-priced options. But that's not really comprehensively a better place to be in terms of their sense of security, their confidence.
We might actually think about the possibility in the future of Pie Ranch being a place where young people from really different environments come together around common learning because the potential for that is so rich here in terms of doing work together and doing food preparation and sharing together. And that's just hugely meaningful.
We've been talking mostly about Pie Ranch. Tell me about Mission Pie.
Mission Pie is explicitly and intentionally a for-profit business with a few goals: One is to help people understand where their food is coming from, but to do that at a price point that's much more widely accessible than a higher-end restaurant in order to make the discussion of sustainable food accessible to more people.
We try to make things where the ingredients tell their own stories instead of a whole bunch of stuff around them. We're selling things that cost between a dollar and ten dollars, and most of them are in the $3.50 to $7 range, and that's where we want to be. We're making [sustainable food], and it's not out of reach.
It's possible to make interesting things and just make good choices so you can keep the cost in balance: If you have a higher-cost ingredient, then you counterbalance it with something that's not. Read More 'The lady behind the Pie' »
| October 24 2009 at 03:58 PM
Why I hate Burning Man
Burning Man is uber-progressive. You free yourself of capitalism for the weekend and experience only art; you free yourself of social roles and norms and enter a utopian world. Since Burning Man went green in 2007, what's not to love?
Looked at another way, Burning Man is the anti-ecology. But before I get to that, which is my main point here on the Thin Green Line, let me first say that Burning Man isn't free of social norms at all. The Playa fills up almost exclusively with 20-40 year-old economically privileged white heterosexual people, the majority of whom exist on a fairly narrow swath of the political spectrum: the place where hippie meets libertarian. If the festival were as effective as some believers think at conjuring away normative biases, that wouldn't be the case.
Then there's the stuff they take: the labor- and transportation-intensive costumes created for one-time use, the DIY climate control machines, the generators, the fire dancing, the drugs (which, with the possible exception of marijuana aren't green...at all), the packaging, the bottled water, etc. Some of the art is made of reused and/or reusable materials, which is great, but some of it isn't. I wouldn't expect DaVinci to limit himself to reused materials, but let's be honest: Most of the "art" of the man is just "look at this cool thing I made" for the Man. And, really, watching a giant hunk of wood and whatever else burn just for kicks is the epitome of wastefulness.
The festival's green proclamation, while an important step, is a substance-lite exhortation of the kind that I've read on many a corporate website. Did I mention that Burning Man is a for-profit corporation? Whose leaders refused to take a stand when Sempra proposed building a coal-fired power plant nearby?
Burning Man is, at heart, a party—and it's one that thousands of people drive hundreds of miles to get to. It's great that they clean up after themselves when they're done, but driving that far to have a good time just plain ain't green.
So why do Burners drive out to the middle of nowhere to have fun, especially since so many of them hail from the same 2-3 cities? Because the natural world there—which is flat and barren—won't upstage their ego-shows. I don't mean that quite as harshly as it sounds—we all have egos, of course, and not everything that we do to feed them is inherently bad. But nature offers a radically different perspective on the ego: It makes you feel like a small part of something much bigger, which, empirical evidence suggests, does wonders for the psyche.
I'd venture that no matter how fantastic your costume, if you stand in front of Niagara Falls you'll feel silly. I'd further venture that not that many people would stop to look at you.
I'm sure the Burners reading this would protest that the festival is physically away from the everyday world so that participants can get psychologically away from the everyday world. But going outside of nature to do it overlooks the answer that's been there all along. Our human and social norms seem limiting and arbitrary because, well, they are. What's not limiting and arbitrary? The complex forces and landscapes and patterns and interactions of the huge planet that we live on. The one that made us. And pretending not to see that is as silly as some of the costumes on display.
Burners: Ready, aim, fire!
| September 08 2009 at 06:31 AM
PETA's whale war over: Who won?
I blogged last week on PETA's billboard ad in Jacksonville, Fla., calling a fat woman a "whale" and asking people to "lose the blubber" by going vegetarian. I was not alone in calling the ad sexist.
PETA has replaced the ad with something less controversial.
The new ad feels a little like passive-aggressive gloating to me. Did PETA lose or win with its gross ad?
PETA's replacement ad
| August 26 2009 at 11:13 AM
BART shockers
Some controversial statistics are revealed in the Chronicle's database of BART's top earners. Read 'em and weep. (Caveat: I compiled these numbers myself based on a quick-and-dirty perusal of the data.)
Just 17 of the top 100 earners are women.
Of all employees making over $100,000 in gross pay, 29 percent are blue collar workers, including electricians, train operators and vehicle inspectors but excluding police.
121 of the 716 employees earning more than $100,000 (or 17 percent) are police, which accounts for nearly half of the total BART police department of 296 personnel. According to the SFPD Public Affairs Office, a beginning San Francisco police officer makes $80,000; a SFPD lieutenant makes up to $141,414. Five BART lieutenants have base salaries higher than that, with overtime earning as much as $227,692.
With some high stakes blunders in recent memory and increasing pressure for public oversight, BART police salaries seem particularly bloated.
Indeed, officer Tony Pirone, who threw a punch in the Oscar Grant incident, earned $112,500 last year. Even Johannes Mehserle, who was later fired and charged with murdering Grant, took home $103,300 with overtime pay. He had been on the force for just two years.
| August 25 2009 at 12:24 PM
You can't not look
I know that the best response to this would be not to mention it at all but I can't help myself.
Frisker
PETA's at it again. In an attempt to increase the sexiness of vegetarianism by linking it to weight loss, the drama-queen organization has launched an ad campaign featuring a fat woman in a bikini with the slogan, "Save the Whales." Subtitle: "SaveLose the blubber. Go vegetarian."
Not only does the campaign not exactly make sense, it also minimizes the importance of the Save the Whales campaign while playing to sexist, anti-fat images of women. I'd find it far less offensive if, for a change, it retired the woman's body as the template for sexy-not sexy debates and instead used a man's fat body. (I wrote about a previous PETA ad campaign here.)
Then there's the issue that vegetarianism doesn't really make you thin (as I can attest). Veganism—obviously PETA's ideal—might, but even that is a stretch. And is vegetarianism really the most important animal rights issue of the day, and do animal rights justify collusion with the exploitation of women, anyway?
I'm voting no. Real question: How does this group have such good funding? And how did it pull off a wildly successful anti-fur campaign only to devolve into this?
| August 17 2009 at 01:18 PM
Tiny baby feet, giant carbon footprint
A new study argues that having children dwarfs parents' attempts to go green in other ways. Having a child boosts a mother's carbon footprint enough to offset 20 times over her choices to use CFLs and energy-efficient appliances and windows.
The study includes consideration of how many children each child is likely to have and adjusts predictions for likely carbon emissions in different countries. For instance, a child in the United States is likely to have 7 times the carbon footprint of a child in China. (Remember that when you wag a finger at China!)
Because the study focuses on fertility, it attaches the additional carbon emissions to the mother, rather than the father, concluding that "each [U.S.-born] child adds about 9441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to the carbon legacy of an average female, which is 5.7 times her lifetime emissions."
Mathematically, it may sense to attach the environmental impacts of fertility to a woman, but politically and ethically it does not. Men certainly play an active role in deciding whether to have children. In fact, there is a trend among politically engaged young men to choose vasectomies to foreclose the possibility of having children, even accidentally. And, as Thom Hartmann writes in his newly released book, Threshold, the single greatest factor in determining population growth rates in a society is the empowerment of women. Basically, women in developed countries have fewer children in order to be able to have a career and enjoy other hobbies, from travel to marathons.
Thinking about zero population growth as something that can be obtained by empowering people, rather than forcibly sterilizing them, makes the issue more approachable. I'm glad the study reveals childbearing as an important environmental decision, but science will have to learn how to stop considering women and fertility to be interchangeable if we are to make any progress on the population issue.
What do you think?
| August 07 2009 at 12:42 PM
Radio host and author Thom Hartmann talks about Threshold
Thom Hartmann, a former Air America radio host, currently hosts The Thom Hartmann Program, which claims to have more listeners than any other progressive talk show in the nation. Hartmann's book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, inspired Leonardo DiCaprio's movie The 11th Hour. I talked to Hartmann about his most recent book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (Viking, $22.95).
Wikipedia
Radio hosting and writing seem like radically different undertakings. One is interactive and spontaneous; one is solitary and highly planned. How did you wind up doing both, and how do you balance the two?
You're right that in the process piece of it, there's a real radical difference between the two. But at a larger level, they're really kind of the same thing, which is trying to share ideas with people in ways that are meaningful and hopefully transformational. These have been two of my passions my whole life. When I was a little kid—literally eight years old, I used to watch Walter Cronkite and I would try to imitate him. I always thought doing news would be just the coolest thing, then when I was 16, I got a job as a DJ and kind of worked my way through college for a while and I had been writing the whole time. I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wanted to do broadcasting, and that's what I do. It's pretty cool to do what you always wanted to do.
In the book, you make a strong critique of the way we use—and overuse—the word sustainability. What does the word ultimately mean to you?
Well if we're going to continue to use the word sustainability we need to totally recalibrate its meaning [to mean that] we are part of interpenetrated by inseparable from the world around us, we need to view every part of the biosphere, from the mosquito to the redwood as equally sacred as we are—I know that flips out a lot of religious folks. But I'm concerned that if we don't recapture that in our culture, our culture is screwed or doomed. To be sustainable is not to be in our own human cocoon or cubicle, and say, here, look at this, we can make our machines work. It has to mean to be seamlessly integrated with all of nature. And that's not what it means for most people now; it means they can recycle their plastic bags or something.
What practical suggestions would you make for businesses and environmentalists who use the word to describe efforts at becoming more sustainable, which rarely means truly sustainable?
I think sustainable is fine, I just think we just need to broaden the frame. For example, we try to conserve water, but...the vast majority of water used is not used for bathing and washing—it has nothing to do with low-flow toilets; it's used by industrial processes and industrial agriculture. We can use fluorescent bulbs all day long, but the majority of our electricity is used by industry. You can go down the list where we're trying to be more sustainable and [every category is] dwarfed by what our military and our industry are using. We need a fundamental rethink of how we've constructed our economies: the idea that growth is good, and the understanding of the carrying capacity of the earth for human flesh. In the absence of oil, the planet had only a billion people on it and it was groaning under that—and, at that we were killing off whales like crazy. Arguably, the planet might only be able to handle half a billion people without oil—and we've hit peak oil. We've got to figure out how to keep the other 6.5 billion from starving, and to stop producing more of them. I mean we need some fundamental rethinks here and they all tie in to how we view ourselves in relation to each other and in relation to the planet.
It took all of human history to reach the first billion people in 1800; the second billion took only 130 years, and the fifth billion took just 14 years. We tell ourselves that this explosion of population is simply the way it is for human beings, but there are many cultures in the world that have been population-stable for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. What we find that the most consistent factor that will stabilize a population, even within a single generation, is when women have power equal to men, and that's a huge cultural issue.
How did you come to the conclusion that women's rights is the determining factor in population?
There's been some pretty decent research on it over last couple decades, and I don't think it's something that's highly in dispute; it's just that it doesn't get talked about very much because it gets into religious issues, and scientists don't like to get into issues that deal with religion.
The country in Europe that has highest rate of birth control is Italy, which is almost entirely Catholic. What that means to me is that it is possible for the people in a culture to move faster than the religious institutions in a culture. We don't have to go out and teach the Catholic Church, or Muslims in countries where it's legal to have up to four wives, or teach the fundamentalist Mormons that their religion is wrong—we just have to empower the women.
The Old Testament has over 600 rules in it, most of which are ignored today—but that doesn't mean that there's been a wholesale rejection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many people get a lot of solace and meaning from their religion but they don't follow the rules.
Part of what's revolutionary about that point is simply that it allows you to talk about population control, while, as you note, most greens don't. What would you add to lists like "51 Ways to Save the Planet" to address the issue of population?
I would say that they're just nibbling around the edges. Most of the pop-culture environmental movement, the corporate-acceptable environmental movement is just nibbling around the edges. The real issue is culture: resacralizing our world...It doesn't have to be in a religious context, but reconnecting with a sense of awe—re-respecting the Earth might be a word that people would find less inflammatory—and resacralizing each other. The obvious sense of that is the empowerment of women and ending discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender—those are the biggies I guess. In a way that change brings us to another very large frame, which is, are we going to be a we society or a me society? The Northern Europeans concluded long ago that they were a we society: They have very high taxes on high income, so they don't have super wealth; they have a very strong social safety net, so they don't have super poor, and everybody's part of we.
Since the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher and Milton Friedman winning the Nobel Prize, we've celebrated ourselves as a me society, and what it's brought about is incredible destruction of our social fabric, our environment, and of many countries around the world. We need to have a national conversation about whether we're a we or a me society. And I think what we'd find is that majority of Americans really want to live in a we society.
What's your beef with Thomas Friedman?
He was the main cheerleader for [free market economics] with The Olive Tree and the Lexus. That book was very influential in the Reagan era in convincing people to go this way. The unfortunate reality is, Friedman got it completely wrong; he didn't do his homework. For two decades [Japan] heavily subsidized Toyota [the company that makes the Lexus]; they made it illegal to sell American cars in Japan. The Lexus was result of government subsidies and protectionisms: if you want a poster child on how to build up an industry, it should be the Lexus. And Friedman turned it totally on its head. It's a little bizarre, actually; economists read this book and go huh?—or at least those that aren't enthralled to the Cato Institute.
You certainly seem to be arguing for a return to big government and protectionism as important parts of ameliorating the environmental crisis. Those are not politically popular ideas—how do you imagine us getting back to them?
People don't know the history of this country and other countries and don't realize that the economies doing well around the world are those that are heavily protected: China, Japan, and the European Union heavily protect their products.
Alexander Hamilton put forward in 1791 his "Report on Manufactures"; he laid out a plan on how to create an economy that was self-sustaining, and a big piece of that was tariffs. We had strong tariffs in place from 1793 to the 1980s, and the result of that was that we made our own clothes and food and TVs, and we don't make any of that anymore. We've become a country that exports raw materials—we export trash and wood—and imports finished products, and that's a pretty textbook definition of a third world economy. We were the largest creditor and now we're the largest debtor. Thirty years of free market economics brought to you by Ronald Reagan and Thomas Friedman has destroyed this country. We've made some big mistakes, and they've really only helped transnational corporations. There are entire think tanks devoted to pushing these ideas, like the Cato Institute, and they're very well funded.
Using health care as the example, the question is not do you want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, because we can't all afford to insure ourselves individually. The question is really do you want a representative to a democratic institution that is answerable to we the people, or do you want Bill McGuire—who, when he left UnitedHealth Group he had taken a 10-year compensation package of $1.78 billion—standing between you and your doctor? If you don't like the way your health care company is doing something and you try to protest, they will laugh at you, and if you show up at their office with a sign, they will have you arrested for trespassing. If you don't like the way the government is handling your health care, you can call your congressman or picket his office or run against him in the next election.
| August 06 2009 at 03:19 PM
GLBTQ film festival goes green
It would be the fourth year Samantha Less had volunteered at Frameline, San Francisco's gay and lesbian film festival, and her second festival as a Sunset Scavenger employee. Less was intent on greening the 2009 festival.
The Castro Theater has long hosted the Frameline film festival
She approached the festival in April, and received an excited response from Operations Manager Desiree Buford. The two then went together to the various theaters that host the 10-day festival to talk about setting up bins and educating employees and janitors.
"I'm really excited to be a part of all this," Less told me over coffee last week. "It's my community, too."
Greening the festival itself, which draws 60,000-plus movie-goers every June, is no small contribution. After each film and party, trash items will be sorted into compost, recyclables, and trash. Less and three others will be assuming the new volunteer position of Green Captain. With other volunteers, they will direct exiting viewers to the green and blue trash bins. If the system works, the only items left for the black landfill bin at the Castro Theater, for example, will be Red Vine bags.
But Less and her supervisor at Sunset Scavenger, Sean Davison, wanted to do more than green the 10-day festival. "We wanted to have it happen after we left," Davison explained. So Sunset helped the theaters set up "sustainable" waste reduction programs that will last long after the celebratory crowds of Pride have dissipated.
This year's festival is a pilot program and won't be zero waste, but Frameline, the historic Castro Theatre and the Roxie are committed to attaining that goal. It will likely mean changing the supplies they buy so they aren't left with non-recyclable packaging. (Red Vine lovers may be called upon to sacrifice.)
Frameline was so enthusiastic about going green that the staff asked Less about composting at their 9th Street offices, where building managers had not provided bins. This week, they and the other arts organizations sharing their building started composting.
Davison is also encouraging Frameline and the Castro make zero waste a term of the contracts they enter into. And he's working to produce a public service announcement to air before films at participating theaters to show viewers what to do with leftover items. (He said they were looking for a filmmaker: If you're interested and experienced, contact him!)
As for the theaters that were more reluctant, Less explained that Sunset's philosophy is that "no doesn't mean never; it just means not today."
Her commitment and enthusiasm were palpable. As she left the coffee shop, she explained that her inspiration came from nature. "There is no waste in nature," she said. "'Waste' is a verb; it's not a noun."
I found myself thinking about her framing over the weekend: It puts responsibility for wastefulness back on the individual. And Less is a powerful example of how one person can make a significant difference.
So, would you give up your favorite candy to help local theaters meet their zero-waste targets?
| June 22 2009 at 01:43 PM
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