Last Friday I slipped into the Local Foodshed Commons and Conference, part of Boulder County’s Eat Local! Week sponsored by Transition Colorado. There are so many groups working on increasing local resilience, it’s hard to keep them all straight. I go to events sponsored by Transition Denver and set up by Dana Miller; now Transition Westminster/Arvada/Broomfield is holding contradances every third Sunday!

Yet the conference was a quiet affair when I arrived. Booths lined the walls of the Glenn Miller Ballroom at the University of Colorado, where I found The Winter Harvest Handbook by Eliot Coleman, about growing through the winter in “cold greenhouses”; Holy Shit: Managing Manure to Save Mankind, which made me laugh; and, most interesting to me, How to Store Your Garden Produce by Piers Warren (all available from Chelsea Green Publishing).

I also found myself lingering over pictures from a local farm that uses permaculture principles. One picture caption discussed how permaculture mandates surrounding fruit trees with the following: plant to attract beneficial insects (both pollinators and insects that attack damaging insects), plants to repel damaging insects (onions, garlic, marigolds—that is, anything with a strong smell), plants to fix nitrogen in the soil, and a food source (in this case, squash). I love stuff like that. I love the mixing of types of plants, which is counter to how most of us were raised to garden; I love the attention being paid to pollinators; I love the idea of growing plants to improve the soil in an orchard.

I guess I’m multidisciplinary at heart.

By the time I finished visiting the booths, perhaps 60 people were listening to Bruce Milne talk about establishing a New Mexico foodshed. When I think of local foodsheds, I think of recruiting farmers to grow food. But Milne made a point that hadn’t occurred to me. He said that a local foodshed needs a broker between farmers and restaurateurs, a liaison who can develop contracts that allow farmers to make a living and that allow chefs to have a stable supply of food. He also asked the question, “Should we issue local bonds to support farmers?”

I would vote for that. Would you?

Milne is part of FoodPrint NM, formerly called the Alliance for a Carbon-Neutral Foodshed (kudos on the name change!). It was formed in response to a 2006 executive order by Governor Bill Richardson to reduce New Mexico’s greenhouse gas emissions by 11 million metric tons by 2020. One way to do that is to grow food locally (within 300 miles of urban centers instead of the 1,500 miles food often travels), so less fuel is expended getting food to people.

Travel Globally, Grow Locally?

I’m torn between the Location Independent life I envision and my desire to live simply, grow lots of food in the summers and consume it throughout the year, and make my own clothes and furniture. I know the former is probably more suitable for me; I know that I’ve never grown more than a small fraction of the food I eat and that my few attempts at sewing (let alone carpentry) were not all that successful. But somehow I’m still drawn to the idea of that self-sufficient life, even though it would mean staying in place. It’s difficult to be a farmer (even a small-time one) and travel the world.

But maybe Todd and I could travel the country and interview people who are doing these things. Then we could connect the local farmers with other locals who don’t know about these efforts.

Or maybe I could be a sometime farmer, traveling places and interning on local farms.

Kenny Kirkland of Woolly Egg Ranch in the Tennessee Valley in California (yes, you read that right) is living the dream, as far as I’m concerned. Check it out at the Fibershed blog.

“An Afternoon at Woolly Egg Ranch” by Ecological Artist

While the US Social Forum was happening June 22–26 in Detroit, the media ignored it, for the most part (as did this blog). Now the New York Times’s Business section has recognized its existence. Nancy Folbre, the author of the article, compares the Social Forum to the February convention of the Tea Party, which drew 600 participants to the US Social Forum’s 15,000. Not to mention a lot more press.

Both she, and I, wondered why. She thought that Tea Party members packed more economic clout. (Source: “Is Another Economics Possible?” by Nancy Folbre, New York Times, July 19, 2010)

But I think that the right has more cachet these days than the left. Maybe it’s always been that way. Certainly, many lefties who were too far out for the establishment have ended up with FBI files. I wonder how many right-wingers suffer the same kinds of surveillance. It would be interesting to do a comparison, but I don’t think that information would be available for contemporary lefties and righties.

I wanted to go to the US Social Forum, but to be honest I didn’t make much effort. I didn’t really want to go by myself, and I don’t know a whole lot of lefties these days who have time to take a week off to go to a convention. Next time, I told myself. In another 3 years.

And what did the people at the US Social Forum want? More jobs. A more cooperative form of economics, which is not the same as top-down command communism. In other words, they want more worker-owned companies, more worker cooperatives, a more egalitarian workplace.

Sounds good to me.

Right now the United States has an economy that treats a few very well and perhaps half the population well enough. The rest are struggling, and those at the bottom are barely getting by. I wish all the people in favor of self-sufficiency could be forced to live like the working poor and try to survive on their incomes. I think it would be a rude awakening for them.

I would like to see cooperative workplace arrangements make up a larger segment of the economy. Notice I did not say “the entire economy.” I think a diversity of business types, like diversity in other areas, fosters innovation and competition.

I would also like to see smaller corporations. The merger trend has been going on since the 1970s. I want to see it reversed. I want companies to break up, become more local, and become less “efficient.” Because “efficiency” is just a euphemism for cutting jobs.

What kind of economy would you like to see?

Wow! There were an estimated 77,505 wading bird nests in south Florida in 2009, a much larger number than in 2008 and the best numbers since the 1940s. You can read all about it at American Bird Conservancy.

What interested me most about this article was the implication that these populations can explode and dramatically fall. Check out these numbers:

Scientists also found that wading birds appeared to increase nesting activity on the recently restored section of the Kissimmee River floodplain. Over 1,500 nests were recorded there, which is considerably greater than the six nests that were recorded there in 2008 and greatly surpasses the previous high count of 637 nests in 2006.

I wonder why they’re not more stable. It will be interesting to monitor the effects of the Deepwater Horizon spill on these numbers.

Go wood storks! I saw my first in February when I was in Florida for the last night launch of the space shuttle.

Source: “Wading Bird Population in South Florida Up Significantly,” American Bird Conservancy press release, April 16, 2010

My father-in-law brings by his copies of National Geographic from time to time, to add to the backlog of Sustainable Industries and World Ark and Cultural Survival and Yes! that are piled up in our main room. The January 2009 issue (yes, we’re behind on our magazine reading) featured on the cover an article titled “Gold: The True Cost of a Global Obsession.”

There’s a lot of information in the article, such as “In all of history, only 161,000 tons of gold have been mined, barely enough to fill two Olympic-sized swimming pools. More than half of that has been extracted in the past 50 years.” I wonder where that statistic comes from—seems as if it would be hard to measure.

The article says jewelry accounts for two-thirds of the demand (which now far outstrips supply). And I can believe that. The shopping mall nearest my house, Flatiron Crossing, has 7 jewelry stores that sell gold, plus 3 department stores (Dillard’s, Macy’s, and Nordstrom’s).

Here’s my take: we should stop mining gold.

It’s so destructive. It’s not just a pit we dig in the earth that we might fill up and cover with grass. We run chemicals like cyanide through the ore, and the gold bonds to the cyanide. Somehow, I guess, the two are separated, the gold is shipped away to be made into jewelry or electronics, and the tailings are poured into a pond, which often enough overflows and contaminates nearby land and waters.

I’ve read that obtaining enough gold for a typical wedding ring requires digging out enough ore to fill a two-story house.

I like gold just as much as the next person. I have several pieces of gold jewelry, most of which were gifts. The last item I bought was a gold chain to hold a heart pendant my parents gave me for my 16th birthday. It’s still my favorite necklace. I looked for a used chain, but the clerk at Victoriana, which sells estate jewelry from its Larimer Square location, told me that the thin chains don’t last. I still feel that I should have tried harder.

But I don’t need it, and neither do you. We only need it, at present, for electronic and other industrial uses.

According to the article, India is the country that buys the most gold, for jewelry for brides. It’s a form of investment. Most Americans consider their homes to be their major investments; Indians think that way about gold. (It’s certainly more portable.)

But wouldn’t ending gold mining cost jobs?

Yes, of course it would. This 2003 post on Modern Ghana mentions that 60 percent of the people employed by Newmont Ghana Gold lived in the area. (It also mentions farmers having problems getting compensated for loss of crops.) I’m not suggesting that we just shut down the mines and never go back to them. But it’s time to realize that all the “easy gold” has been found and that mining the remaining gold will be too destructive to the environment. The jobs created by gold mining last a few decades, but the damage can last far longer, especially if the tailings are dumped into inland bodies of water or the ocean.

One possible way to finance cleanup of mine sites worldwide would be to levy a tax on gold trading. Since the price of gold would rise if mining were curtailed, a new tax wouldn’t reduce investors’ profits.

If the process of cleaning up the mines was conducted properly—by which I mean the planning and monitoring of mine cleanup involved local communities and employed local workers—then communities currently affected by gold mining would eventually have a cleaner environment. And they would have time to create a sustainable economy based on management, rather than exploitation, of local resources.

A July 2009 article in the Christian Science Monitor (going through my old Delicious bookmarks, folks) noted that ecosystems may respond to restoration faster than previously thought.

Surveying 240 studies, scientists at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies found that the speed of recovery depended upon the type of ecosystem and the growth rate of the organisms within it. Forests recovered within 42 years, but ocean floors in less than a decade. Polluted ecosystems–those plagued by oil spills, mining, trawling, or invasive species–could recover in just five years. Only 15 percent were deemed beyond recovery.

The findings seem to contradict the popular notion that ecosystems take centuries or even millenniums to recover–boosting the rationale for proactive conservation. (from “Ecosystems Respond Well to Restoration” by Moises Velaquez-Manoff, Christian Science Monitor, July 13, 2009)

Of course, we don’t know what definition of restoration was used in the study, which was published in the journal PLos ONE.

From United magazine (February 2010):

The village of Kamikatsu (2,000 residents), on the island of Shikoku in southwestern Japan, sorts waste into 34 categories, more than the 3 categories of burnable, nonburnable, and recyclable used elsewhere in Japan. By 2020, the villagers believe they will have eliminated the need to burn any waste and will have reached their goal of zero waste.

The Zero Waste Academy, where trash is separated, lies on the edge of town.

San Francisco, by contrast, diverts about 80% of its trash. That’s good for such a large city. But I don’t believe it will get all the way to zero in the next ten years.

According to “Long Time Gone,” an article in the summer 2008 issue of Nature Conservancy, the nonprofit has introduced ferrets on its preserves in Kansas, South Dakota and Mexico.

It’s been almost 30 years since the ferrets were deemed extinct. Then a small population was found in Wyoming in 1981.

According to this site, the Colorado Division of Wildlife has partnered with Utah, the BLM, and the Fish and Wildlife Service to reintroduce the ferrets into Rio Blanco and Moffat Counties, which are part of their native range. The reintroductions began in 2001, and since 2004, state officials have noted the ferrets are “persisting” at one site. Apparently, black-footed ferrets were never abundant in Colorado, perhaps because they need a prairie dog town of 2,000 acres or more (according to Nature Conservancy). Know any ranchers who want 2,000 acres of what most consider a pest? (The Nature Conservancy managed to round up a few such ranchers in Kansas. Who’d have thought it possible?)

Here’s a quote from the Black-Footed Ferret Recovery Program:

Since 1991, federal and state agencies, in cooperation with private landowners, conservation groups, Native Americans, and the North American zoo community, have been actively reintroducing ferrets back into the wild from captive breeding facilities. Beginning in Wyoming, reintroduction efforts have since expanded to sites in Montana, South Dakota, Arizona, Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Kansas and Mexico. To learn more about reintroduction, visit our Reintroduction page.

The 1988 Recovery Plan for the black-footed ferret calls for the establishment of 10 or more separate, free-ranging wild populations. By the year 2010, biologists hope to have 1500 ferrets established in the wild, with no fewer than 30 breeding adults in each population. If these objectives are met, the ferret could be downlisted from endangered to threatened status.

Shows what we can restore when we want to.

Noted from the April 2009 issue of National Geographic, in the article “Ice Paradise”:

On a voyage to Svalbard in 1612, the captain of a Dutch ship reported that the Barents Sea was so full of whales that the ship’s prow parted the beasts as though it were cutting through pack ice. By the end of the eighteenth century, the world’s insatiable appetite for whale oil had almost wiped them out. Some 50,000 bowhead whales, the longest lived mammal on the planet, were taken by Dutch vessels alone. The commercial carnage drove the species to near extinction. (Today more than 10,000 bowheads survive, mostly in the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas.)

I’d like to see a sight like that. I’d also like to see the sky darken with passenger pigeons. I’d like to hear the ground shake from a herd of bison passing. The latter is at least possible, since there are around 300,000 bison in the United States these days.

Hey, I can dream.