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Now, here's a project I can really sink my teeth into. What an absolutely marvelous idea! A public food forest. Who would have thought?
Strange as it may seem, for most of human history the food that fueled our existence was not packaged, preserved, or purchased from the grocery store, it was provided by nature. But perhaps even today we are still skilled foragers at heart, if not just a bit unpracticed. Soon, however, residents of Seattle, Washington will get the chance to grab a bite the old-fashioned way -- thanks to a brand new food forest being planted in the heart of their city.
Earlier this month, planners broke ground in Seattle's Beacon Hill neighborhood for what will be the nation's largest free and open edible landscape, the Beacon Food Forest, a project three years in the making. Established on the notion that permaculture infrastructure brings about more sustainable communities and ways of thinking, local agriculturist formed the group Friends of the Food Forest to help realize the dream of creating a public space where food could be grown and shared.
Sitting on seven sloping acres of hillside in Jefferson Park, the urban forest will feature a variety of food-bearing trees, shrubs, vines, and other plants. Robert Mellinger of Crosscut describes the design of the nation's soon-to-be largest publicly available food forest:
The end goal is an urban oasis of public food: Visitors to the corner of 15th Ave S. and S. Dakota Street will be greeted by a literal forest — an entire acre will feature large chestnuts and walnuts in the overstory, full-sized fruit trees like big apples and mulberries in the understory, and berry shrubs, climbing vines, herbaceous plants, and vegetables closer to the ground.
Further down the path an edible arboretum full of exotic looking persimmons, mulberries, Asian pears, and Chinese haws will surround a sheltered classroom for community workshops. Looking over the whole seven acres, you'll see playgrounds and kid space full of thornless mini edibles adjacent to community gardening plots, native plant areas, a big timber-frame gazebo and gathering space with people barbecuing, a recreational field, and food as far as you can see.
Crafting such an idyllic public space, of course, didn't come without some hard work and dedication of the surrounding Beacon Hill community -- though its certainly not beyond the reach of others. For nearly a century, the land the forest will sit on was left unused in the hands of the Seattle Public Utilities department. With the idea that more could be done with that space, Friend of the Food Forest set about rally public support and raising funds for the revolutionary park. Finally, after garnering an incredible amount of public interest, city officials ultimately decided to grant the group the unprecedented liberty of spearheading such a community project on public land.
"If this is successful," Beacon Food Forest's lead landscape architect Margarett Harrison tells Crosscut. "It is going to set such a precedent for the city of Seattle, and for the whole Northwest."
For agriculturalist Jenny Pell, one of the project's earliest supporters, the thought of food forests sprouting up throughout Seattle could not just transform the otherwise cold city landscape, it might even change its residents urban lifestyles for the better.
"If people had access to larger pieces of land to do projects like this you would see really different cultures emerging around these things," she says. "If Seattle could provide 5 percent of its food from within the city, that would be more than almost any other city in the world. Even places that are really committed get less than 1 percent. Can you imagine what the city would be like if 10 percent of the food came from the city?"
Such urban food forests may be worlds away from those wild ones which nourished our primitive ancestors for millennia, but the sustaining power of communities working together towards a shared goal knows no limitation. Let's not forget to mention the health benefits that come with this. Foragers will get additional exercise and fresh air collecting this food. Plus the health benefits of eating foods grown without pesticide or artificial fertilizer will benefit all who partake of this free bounty.
Dill is mentioned in the Ebers Papyrus (approx. 1500 BCE); the ancient Egyptians used it to relieve headaches. Stems of dill were found in the tomb of Amenhotep II. To the ancient Greeks and Romans, dill symbolized wealth and luck. Dried seed heads were hung in the home, over doorways and above cradles to symbolize love and protection.
Apparently native to Europe and Asia, dill also became featured in many cuisines. Along the way, people figured out that dill has some beneficial health effects, too. According to some food historians, the Holy Roman emperor Charlemagne was fond of having his banquet tables strewn with dill so that overindulgent guests could use it to settle any digestive upsets. Later, early American colonists referred to dill seeds as "meeting house seeds", as they were chewed during long church services to keep hunger pangs at bay. Today, studies show that dill's compounds, including monoterpenees and flavonoids, may have antibacterial and antioxidant effects.
In home remedies, dill is most often consumed as a tea to help settle an upset stomach or ensure a good night's sleep. The seeds are stronger and more flavorful than the leaves, though both can be used. In cooking dill is, of course, most commonly associated with pickling, though dill is a welcome addition to many other dishes as well.
Lack of access to clean drinking water is a huge problem for many people in the world, and their only recourse is to drink the water at hand, which may be contaminated and dirty. One of the big issues in supplying clean water to those communities is the cost of the technology to do so, but a new method for water purification using just sand and tree seeds could be the answer to inexpensive and sustainable drinking water.
Researchers from Pennsylvania State University knew that earlier studies showed that a substance from the seeds of the miracle tree, or Moringa oleifera, was able to clean water, but that the processes used in those studies were either too expensive or not feasible for producing water which could be stored. The team set out to develop a less expensive and simpler way of using the miracle tree's seeds to purify and clean drinking water that would also be more sustainable.
Their new study found that by using an extract of the Moringa seed (containing the positively charged protein) to bind to sediment and kill microbes, in conjunction with negatively charged sand, they were able to produce potable and storable water without expensive or complicated technology.
“The resulting ‘fictionalised,’ or ‘f-sand,’ proved effective in capturing lab-grown E. coli and damaging their membranes. The f-sand was also able to remove sediment from water samples. The results open the possibility that f-sand can provide a simple, locally sustainable process for producing storable drinking water.” - Stephanie B. Velegol, Ph.D., lead author
The miracle tree, Moringa oleifera, is already grown for biofuel, food, and medicine in some equatorial regions, so this purification method could also make that natural resource that much more useful.
Sustainable and inexpensive drinking water using just seeds and sand? Sounds like a winner. With over 1 billion people lacking regular access to clean drinking water, this new method could be a life-saver for many of our fellow world citizens. Here's hoping it goes beyond the study stage and gets scaled up for implementation in the real world.
Today, Rembrandt (1606-1669) is known as one of the world's most famous portrait painters; but, in his day, he was criticized for his work. Some said his intimate portraiture was too personal or too eccentric.
The rose family isn't just about beautiful flowers. Apple, pear, peach, cherry, plum, mountain ash and hawthorne trees are also members of the rose family.
The San Francisco Earthquake of April 18, 1906, registered 8.3 on the Richter scale and lasted 20 seconds followed by almost a minute of aftershocks. The quake sparked fires that burned for three days and destroyed two-thirds of the city.
The largest living sea mammal is the Blue Whale, which can weigh up to 189.6 tons. The smallest land mammal is the Pygmy Mouse, which can weight as little as 6.8 grams.
Towering 29,029 feet above sea level, the formidable Mount Everest has served to tested the strength and perseverance of humanity's boldest souls -- but, due to the warming effects of climate change, ascending the world's highest peak may become more difficult yet.
Nepalese climbing guide Apa Sherpa has scaled Everest a record twenty-one times and likely knows better than anyone that mountain's rugged terrain, though he says it's becoming increasingly unrecognizable. Like many people living in the Himalayas, this 'Super Sherpa' has seen his fair share of changes to the range's ice coverage and run-off which has impacted farming in the region due to global warming, and he says Mount Everest is beginning to grow impassable because of it.
"In 1989 when I first climbed Everest there was a lot of snow and ice but now most of it has just become bare rock. That, as a result, is causing more rockfalls which is a danger to the climbers," Apa told the AFP, via PhysOrg. "Also, climbing is becoming more difficult because when you are on a mountain you can wear crampons but it's very dangerous and very slippery to walk on bare rock with crampons."
While far too many people still believe that the harmful effects of climate change has yet to be convincingly proven, for folks living in the shadow of Everest there remains little doubt. A recent survey of Nepalese farmers found that well over half felt that the weather had been getting warmer in the last decade, with 70 percent saying that water has become less plentiful. But it's not just those relying on snow-melt witnessing a changing landscape.
"What will happen in the future I cannot say but this much I can say from my own experiences -- it has changed a lot," says Apa Sherpa. "I want to understand the impact of climate change on other people but also I'd like tourism to play a roll in changing their lives as it has changed mine."
Oranges rotting on a London market stall. Wasting food leads to the waste of huge quantities of water. Photograph: Martin Godwin via guardian.co.uk
As consumers throw millions of tonnes of uneaten food into the bin each year, few give a thought to the hidden cost of such waste – the water that it took to grow the food.
But new research shows that we throw away, on average, twice as much water per year in the form of uneaten food as we use for washing and drinking.
What is worse, increasing amounts of our food comes from countries where water is scarce, meaning the food we discard has a huge hidden impact on the depletion of valuable water resources across the world.
According to the first comprehensive study into the impact of the "embedded water" in the UK's food waste on world water supplies, more than a 5% of the water used by the United Kingdom is thrown away in the form of uneaten food. While these figures deal with the UK, I'm sure the numbers are indicative of most of the first-world countries; and, possibly some of the second-world countries as well.
The research was carried out by the government's Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap) and the green campaigning group WWF, and is published with the title: Water and Carbon Footprint of Household Food Waste in the UK.
The water used to produce food thrown away by households in the UK amounts to about 6.2bn cubic metres a year.
That represents 6% of the UK's total water footprint, which includes water used in industry and agriculture.
About a quarter of the water used to grow and process the wasted food originates in the UK, but much of it comes from countries that are already experiencing water stress.
Green campaigners have for years called for more attention to be paid to "hidden" or "embedded" water – water that is used in the production of all sorts of goods, from food and clothing to cars and furniture, and which represents a hidden cost on exports.
As more countries suffer from water scarcity, these exports can further deplete natural resources and cause environmental problems such as salination – which can render land unfit for growing crops – and higher prices for water to poorer consumers.
Food waste carries another environmental cost: it accounts for about 3% of the UK's annual greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to the amount generated by 7m cars each year.
That is enough to cancel out the greenhouse gases saved each year by British households' recycling efforts.
Liz Goodwin, chief executive at Wrap, said: "These figures are quite staggering. Although greenhouse gas emissions have been widely discussed, the water used to produce food and drink has been overlooked until recently.
"However, growing concern over the availability of water in the UK and abroad, and security of the supply of food, means that it is vital we understand the connections between food waste, water and climate change."
She said the organisation – which is threatened with budget cuts – would work further with retailers, food and drink companies and local authorities to reduce the amount of food wasted.
David Tickner, head of freshwater programmes at WWF, said consumers could make a "small but very significant" contribution to reducing water stress if they tried to avoid wasting so much food.
Protesters say the rare earth plant being built in eastern Malaysia poses a hazard from radioactive waste. Photograph: Bazuki Muhammad/Reuters via guardian.co.uk
About 3,000 Malaysians have staged a protest against a refinery for rare earth elements being built by the Australian mining company Lynas over fears of radioactive contamination.
It was the largest rally so far against the £146m ($231m Cdn) plant in eastern Malaysia, and could pose a headache for the government with national elections widely expected this year.
Authorities recently granted Lynas a licence to operate the rare earth plant in Pahang state, the first outside China in years, and it has been the subject of heated protests over health and environmental risks posed by potential leaks of radioactive waste.
Lynas says its plant, which will refine radioactive ore from Australia, has state-of-the-art pollution controls and plans to start operations by June.
Protesters, including opposition MPs, pledged on Sunday to put pressure on the government to scrap the project. Many wore green T-shirts with the words "Stop Lynas" and some shouted "Destroy Lynas" during the two-hour rally in the Pahang state capital, Kuantan.
The opposition leader, Anwar Ibrahim, said his alliance would seek an emergency motion in parliament to urge the government to cancel the project. He also pledged that the opposition would scrap the plant if it won national polls expected by June.
"We don't want [this project] to sacrifice our culture and the safety of the children," he told the crowd.
Lynas says its refinery could meet nearly a third of world demand for rare earths, excluding China. It also may curtail China's stranglehold on the global supply of 17 rare earths essential for making hi-tech goods, including flat-screen TVs, mobile phones, hybrid cars and weapons.
Malaysian activists and Pahang residents have sought a court order to halt the Lynas plant.
An International Atomic Energy Agency team, which assessed the Lynas project last year, found it lacked a comprehensive long-term waste management programme and a plan to dismantle the plant once it is no longer operating.
Malaysia's last rare earth refinery, operated by Mitsubishi of Japan, in northern Perak state, was closed in 1992 after protests and claims that it caused birth defects and leukaemia among residents. It is one of Asia's largest radioactive waste cleanup sites.
Lurking in a petri dish in a laboratory in the Netherlands is an unlikely contender for the future of food. The yellow-pink sliver the size of a corn plaster is the state-of-the-art in lab-grown meat, and a milestone on the path to the world's first burger made from stem cells. Now, if this isn't enough to turn you vegetarian, nothing can. Lab-grown meat...yummy!!
Dr Mark Post, head of physiology at Maastricht University, plans to unveil a complete burger – produced at a cost of more than £200,000 ($315,817 Cdn) – this October.
He hopes Heston Blumenthal, the chef and owner of the three Michelin-starred Fat Duck restaurant in Berkshire, will cook the offering for a celebrity taster as yet unnamed.
The project, funded by a wealthy, anonymous, individual aims to slash the number of cattle farmed for food, and in doing so reduce one of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Personally, I'm not surprised that (s)he elected to remain anonymous.
"Meat demand is going to double in the next 40 years and right now we are using 70% of all our agricultural capacity to grow meat through livestock," Post said.
"You can easily calculate that we need alternatives. If you don't do anything meat will become a luxury food and be very, very expensive."
The recipe for meat grown in the lab. Image courtesy: Guardian graphics
Livestock contribute to global warming through unchecked releases of methane, a gas 20 times more potent a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.
At the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Vancouver, Post said the burger would be a "proof of concept" to demonstrate that "with in-vitro methods, out of stem cells we can make a product that looks like and feels and hopefully tastes like meat". I'm salivating already.
Post is focusing on making beef burgers from stem cells because cows are among the least efficient animals at converting the food they eat into food for humans.
"Cows and pigs have an efficiency rate of about 15%, which is pretty inefficient. Chickens are more efficient and fish even more," Post said. "If we can raise the efficiency from 15% to 50% it would be a tremendous leap forward."
Post and his team of six have so far grown thin sheets of cow muscle measuring 3cm long, 1.5cm wide, and half a millimetre thick. To make a burger will take 3,000 pieces of muscle and a few hundred pieces of fatty tissue, that will be minced together and pressed into a patty.
Each piece of muscle is made by extracting stem cells from cow muscle tissue and growing them in containers in the laboratory. The cells are grown in a culture medium containing foetal calf serum (whatever that is), which contains scores of nutrients the cells need to grow.
The slivers of muscle grow between pieces of Velcro and flex and contract as they develop. To make more protein in the cells – and so improve the texture of the tissue – the scientists shock them with an electric current. Maybe I'm alone here; but, I don't want to eat anything that's been electrocuted first.
Post said he could theoretically increase the number of burgers made from a single cow from 100 to 100m. "That means we could reduce the number of livestock we use by 1m," he said.
If lab-grown meat mimics farmed meat perfectly – and Post admits it may not – the meat could become a premium product just as free range and organic items have.
He said that in conversations with the Dutch Society of Vegetarians, the chairman estimated half its members would start to eat meat if he could guarantee that it cost fewer animal lives.
Meat grown in the laboratory could have several advantages, because its manufacture is controlled at each step. The tissue could be grown to produce high levels of healthy polyunsaturated fatty acids, or to have a particular texture.
Because the burgers are made from animal stem cells, researchers could make products from more exotic animals. "We could make panda meat, I'm sure we could," Post said.
He believes it will be a relatively simple matter to scale up the operation, since most of the technical obstacles have already been overcome. "I'd estimate that we could see mass production in another 10 to 20 years," he said.
A little girl waves to a passing Beluga whale at the Vancouver, BC aquarium. Photo courtesy: rafe arnott / metro file
The answer, in a word, is absolutely!
Many year ago, my daughters and I were paying one of our frequent visits to the Vancouver Aquarium. At the whale exhibit, my youngest happened to stand in the spot the trainers stand in to signal the Beluga whale to spit (so to speak). He spat at her and spat again about five minutes later and so on. She was delighted - the whale recognized her. While my eldest and I toured the rest of the Cetacean exhibit, she stood there visiting with the whale who remembered and recognized her from previous visits.
She truly believed he recognized her; and, I like to think she was right. The point being she was so convinced of the intelligence in marine animals it never occurred to her that he might learn to recognize some of the frequent visitors to his enclosure.
I am hoping that these magnificent mammals are given personhood status. Just because their lifestyle is different to mine does not mean their lives are of any less value than mine.
Whales and dolphins are intelligent and cultural creatures and should be granted basic personhood rights, scientists argue.
Lori Marino, a professor at Emory University in Atlanta, and Thomas White of Loyola Marymount University in California plan to present the Declaration of Rights for Cetaceans at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) conference in Vancouver.
The declaration aims to open a discussion about the ethical and policy implications of giving cetaceans basic personhood rights. Giving personhood rights is already being considered for the great apes.
According to the scientists, research has proven that whales have cultural and cognitive abilities similar to humans. The emotional and social areas of the cetacean brain are “enormously complex,” notes one researcher, “and in many species are “even more highly elaborated than in the human brain.”
Whales are self-aware — they can recognize themselves in mirrors — they understand symbolic language and they think about others in a way comparable to humans.
“They’re very similar to us: (they) have a sense of individual identity, personality, the ability to control behaviour and abstract thinking,” White said. “They’re even more social beings than humans are.”
They also have complex cultural lives involving learning, the transmission of cultural traits from one generation to the next and the use of tools.
Some scientists believe that whales, in particular, have mastered their own language. The use of sound among whales and dolphins is particularly advanced, and researchers say there may be “something like grammar, syntax, even language” in the complex songs and codas passed between generations and individuals.
The sonar use of sound has interesting social implications as well. “There’s nowhere to hide,” notes a researcher. “They can use sound to form an image of each other’s insides—whether you’re pregnant, hungry, sick.”
“We’ve shown that all these qualities that make humans persons are shared with other animals,” said Marino. “(They) shouldn’t be treated like property or objects — shouldn’t be confined, captured, slaughtered or exploited and all the things we still do to dolphins and whales,” she said.
Hal Whitehead, a Dalhousie University biologist says this: "Based on what we know, I’d guess that cetacean culture is intermediate between humans and chimpanzees. Not in material culture, but in most other respects."
Annelise Sorg, president of the Coalition for No Whales in Captivity, said the symposium will “open up a door that hasn’t been opened to any other species before.”
The Alberta Tar Sands project is probably the most despised example of environmental ruin there is - worldwide. Environmentally, it is such a disaster that well-paid employees are quitting their jobs rather than continue to contribute to the environmental devastation that is the "oilsands".
A bad berry crop last summer and careless handling of food and trash at the miner camps have been blamed for the dramatic increase in bear encounters. In 2010, 52 black bears where shot.
"It’s a very disturbing fact to hear and it’s one more cost of oilsands development that we need to look at...the fact that these numbers are so high is definitely very worrying," Mike Hudema of Greenpeace commented.
"Any kind of wildlife fatality is too many for these companies from their perspective and obviously they take it seriously,” commented Travis Davies, a spokesman for the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, “it’s just a matter of a high number of bears in the area.”
That said, Alberta Wilderness Association conservation specialist Carolyn Campbell called the attitude towards bears—and wildlife in general — primitive. "There needs to be much more responsible behavior by companies running these camps to really get serious about reducing food and other attractants," she said, "the attitude of ‘attract them, feed them and then shoot’ them is really repugnant to most Albertans."
This was not the first major loss of wildlife due to the tarsands project. In 2008, for example, 1,600 ducks perished in a tailings pond.
I'm fortunate to have several passions in my life. I am absolutely an eco-nut. I am always trying to find new ways to reduce, reuse, recycle. We, as a species, have done more harm to this planet in the short time we have been here, than any other catastrophe or happening ever has. It's up to us to fix it.
I care about the environment whether it is as small as a single cell or as large as the universe.
I adore creativity and think we can all do more with much less. This earth has enough resources for us all to live comfortably if we all learn to share. Wasn't that a lesson we were supposed to learn in kindergarten?
I also love the bizarre, unusual, the weird and the strange. Be prepared for the odd "different" blog.
Photo courtesy: MrTavis
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