Pasadena: apparently good for roses. trees.. not so much

I grew up in Pasadena.  In fact, I consider myself a second generation Pasadena girl. And, although, my mother technically grew up in La Canada, Colorado Blvd. was the place to be then, as it is now.

Anyone who has lived or visited this town can sense the history in every nook and cranny. Even though Pottery Barn attracts tourists, Le Sex Shoppe down the way announces our history.

That is why it is so devastating that a few blocks down, the Pasadena City Council cut down the ficus trees that have been in existence for as long as I can remember.  In all honesty, it is not so much that they were cut down, but how they were cut down.

 

This was the culmination of a plan that started ten years ago, that consists of removing 43 ficus trees from streets in the area.  The reasoning behind the removal is an alleged push by business owners in the area who are concerned with root destruction, as well as, what seems to be simple cleanliness issues (abundance of seed pods and residue from tree sap).  Last month, there was hope that a new vote would not pass, thereby saving the trees, but the wavering City councilman wavered the other way.

I am sure we will never know an exact time line of events, but the next decision on the part of the City Council is the one that seems the most devious.  Originally slated for an April removal, there was a decision to remove the oldest of the trees at 2 in the morning, last Friday, just hours before a scheduled protest by residents opposed to the tree destruction. I think that anyone who opposed the tree removal would feel less betrayed had there had been a reasonable discussion, and the opposition felt it had been heard.  

This does seem to have become a battle between residents and business owners, where the businesses have been winning.  Vroman’s Bookstore, established in 1894, is a central player in this particular district and the owner was very vocal in his support of the tree removal. However, many residents are asking people to use the power of money to influence change by not taking their business to the establishments in the area that supported the tree removal.  As a result, many owners, including Vroman’s, are now stating that they are disheartened by the decision of the City Council.

This however may backfire on them in another way, which is that the City Council feels betrayed and left to fend for themselves against the residents, and voters, of the town.  The businesses may suffer in the future, because of their side-stepping on their support of the tree removal by the council.

Since my focus is always about the environment, I feel it is important to say something about why the tree removal will do more harm than good.  I do believe that if the city had paid attention and cared for the ficus trees properly, they would probably never have been in this mess and the far reaching benefits of these trees would still be in place.  Old growth trees like this are fantastic for three things; shade, flood prevention and carbon capture.  

The shade and insulation provided by these trees is immeasurable.  Not only do they do a fantastic job of cooling the direct area underneath the trees, but the subsequent insulation provided to the neighboring buildings is immense.  So, now Vroman’s, or any other business, is going to be emitting even more CO2 with increased heating or cooling requirements by the simple fact that they do not have a tree either helping to cool in the summer, or by insulation in the winter.  

Obviously, I cannot say for certain, and only time will tell, but trees with large root structures are incredibly helpful in preventing floods.  The simple fact is that those roots and those trees need water.  In an area that is covered in cement, trees are indispensable in flood prevention, because all of the soil is covered.  As I said, this will remain to be seen.  I have no idea what the sewer and flood prevention system is like in this part of town.  Also, given that we are in a drought it may be a non-issue. However, time will tell if the tree removal has a disastrous effect on water absorption in the area.

Lastly, and most importantly, old growth trees are THREE TIMES more effective in trapping carbon dioxide than a new tree.  And to add insult to injury, an old growth tree, NEVER releases the carbon dioxide it has trapped.  We are in a race to trap greenhouse gases before they increase our planets temperature to unsustainable levels. To remove these trees without thought to see if there were other actions that could save these carbon sinks is irresponsible, to say the least.  When the world is doing its best to reduce emissions and meet new climate change goals, this decision seems irrational and petty.

In the meantime, we will have to wait and see what happens.  The last City Council meeting was rife with residents voicing their dissatisfaction with the elected officials and asked for a moratorium on future tree cutting.  One hopes that with information and a willingness to hear both sides of the argument, the Mayor and the City Council can make the best decision for the future.

your butt might be a wee bit upset

but, it is for the betterment of the planet, for gosh sakes.  So GET OVER IT!!

We in America have this awful habit of wiping our asses with the most pristine of tissue papers… made from virgin wood, process with chemicals… just so we have that soft texture for the THREE SECOND job.  Yep.  That is the average amount of contact time of toilet paper to nibbly bits.

And that habit is doing more damage than driving an SUV, eating fast food, or owning a huge house.  More than 98% of what is sold in this country is toilet paper made from virgin trees.  Other countries, only purchase 40%.  Interestingly, Americans use more paper than any other country in the world: about three times more European and 10o times more than your average person in China.

What are virgin trees or forests?  Timber from an original forest that has not been previously disturbed or influenced by human activity. Many consider 150 year old trees virgin. Also, and most importantly, untouched, natural forests can store up to three times the carbon than those forests created in man-made tree farms and plantations. Plus, to add insult to injury, those untouched forests not only store more, but the carbon that is stored is never released, as it is with tree farms that are frequently logged.

In other words… stop buying Charmin or Cottenelle or Brawny paper towels even. JUST STOP IT… you really have no excuse because it is just the right thing to do.

Greenpeace has put out a very easy guide to follow about purchasing eco-friendly tissue. Download it, follow it, do your part to save the trees and the planet.

new video

Hey everyone… check out the new video from This is Reality.

It was created by the Coen Bros. and is pretty good.  It will be in the video section at least all week.

in the news, 2.25

 

some news from around the world for today, 2.25.09

E.P.A. Is Told to Reconsider Its Standards on Pollutants, via the New York Times

Bush administration standards for pollutants like soot are “contrary to law and unsupported by adequately reasoned decisionmaking,” a federal appeals court said Tuesday.

The court ordered the Environmental Protection Agency to reconsider its standards for the pollutants, fine particulates, which are linked to premature death from lung cancer and heart disease and to other health problems including asthma.

Michael Pollan Fixes Dinner, via Mother Jones

MJ: The food activism community is criticized as being elitist, blind to the issues of cost. How do we democratize better quality?

MP: It is the important question. One of the problems is that the government supports unhealthy food and does very little to support healthy food. I mean, we subsidize high fructose corn syrup. We subsidize hydrogenated corn oil. We do not subsidize organic food. We subsidize four crops that are the building blocks of fast food. And you also have to work on access. We have food deserts in our cities. We know that the distance you live from a supplier of fresh produce is one of the best predictors of your health. And in the inner city, people don’t have grocery stores. So we have to figure out a way of getting supermarkets and farmers markets into the inner cities.

West blamed for rapid increase in China’s CO2, via the Guardian

The full extent of the west’s responsibility for Chinese emissions of greenhouse gases has been revealed by a new study. The report shows that half of the recent rise in China’s carbon dioxide pollution is caused by the manufacturing of goods for other countries – particularly developed nations such as the UK.

Last year, China officially overtook the US as the world’s biggest CO2 emitter. But the new research shows that about a third of all Chinese carbon emissions are the result of producing goods for export.

my house smells good

For the last few years, I have been convinced I have an issue with gluten.  It was very simple: I ate bread, I cramped up.  I didn’t eat bread, I was fine.  I am good with deductive reasoning and so, voila, I stopped eating bread.

However, I always wanted to learn how to bake bread.  I considered it the final frontier of my cooking prowess.  So, I set out to teach myself to make the crusty goodness.

Getting books from the library, I read and studied and researched and then got in the kitchen.  Some loaves, not so great.  Other loaves, wonderful!  And, the best news… in moderation… I CAN EAT MY BREAD.

I have decided that it is because I am not adding anything to my bread like preservatives or chemicals or what-have-you to extend its shelf-life.  The bread simply contains flour, water, yeast… and other ingredients as the recipe calls for it.

I am not a fantastic photographer, but I did take some pictures for you to see the fun process

BREAD RISING

BAKED BREAD

i’m doing my part

Last night, I watched the first two hours of Manufacturing Consent.  This is a documentary about Noam Chomsky, based on his book of the same title.

A main discussion point, and something not new to me, is that the elite controls major media outlets, which then dictate to smaller outlets what is considered important news. 

And then this morning, I saw this:

Climate Change Is Not Taken Seriously Because Media Is Not Highlighting Its Significance, Expert Says, via ENN

Dr Neil Gavin, from the School of Politics and Communication Studies, believes the way the media handles issues like climate change shapes the public’s perception of its importance. Limited coverage is unlikely to convince readers that climate change is a serious problem that warrants immediate and decisive action.

The research company lpsos-MORI found that 50% of people think the jury is still out on the causes of globalwarming. The limited amount of media coverage – which tends to be restricted to the broadsheets – means that this statistic is unlikely to alter in the short-term.

One reason I found this interesting is because of something mentioned in the documentary: the two leading newspapers are The Washington Post and the NY Times. These papers are known for their stance against global warming.  In fact, just last week, the editor of the Washington Post wrote about his disbelief of global warming.

So… if other news outlets follow these two papers as to what is a leading story and these two papers downplay the truth about climate change… there should be no surprise that the public does not understand the severity of what is going on.

It makes me slightly pleased that the NY Times may be closing its doors….

opinion: carbon calculator, week 7…. a little delayed

Week 7 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

SHOPPING…..

the activity the United States economy is entirely built on.  

The biggest problem with magazines and films and television is that they encourage you to buy.  Literally.  When we see ads that reflect a type of life we would like to emulate, an area of our brain is fired up and our craving centers are ignited.  The only satiation is to feed that craving.

There are so many issues with unnecessary consumption.  First off, your money could be better spent in other areas.  In this country, we have created the belief that buying something is more important than having the money for what we want to buy.  As we have seen in the last few months, that has been disastrous for this country, and may be something we cannot recover from.  

Secondly, there is all the emissions created from making whatever it is you are buying.  Just the games that are made in China account for 25.7 metric tons of CO2.  That is just the games.  Think of the clothes, and the electronics, and the appliances, and the shoes, and the beddings, and the cookware, and the list can go on and on, supplying 300 million people with a handful of useless things.  

Third, there is the impact of transportation.  Who knows how much CO2 is emitted because the goods had to travel from where they were made to a distribution center in the United States.  From there they had to travel to the individual stores.  Or, if you are shopping online, to your home and however many other homes, depending on the popularity of the product.  How close do you live to the mall?  Do you want the item so badly that you will travel as far as you need to to get it? After you are done using it, there is the trip to Goodwill, if you are a charitable person.  And, if not, the trip from your dumpster to the landfill.  Where the item that was in your life for the greater part of 12 months, sits on our planet for a very, VERY long time.  In some cases, much longer than your life.

This may be the greatest damage done by your shopping habit.  Most of what we have in our homes are made with products that do not go away.  Plastic never decomposes.  You think you are doing so well because you have moved away from that plastic water bottle.  But, look around.  Look at the paneling in your car.  What about the container your moisterizer comes in.  Or the shampoo, dish soap, laundry soap, the new cd or dvd, the soles of your shoes, and I could keep going.  If it is not made of plastic, maybe its metal, which could be melted down and used again.  But not if it were a battery.  Not if you are one of the millions of people that takes their pots and pans to the dump.  What happens to your car when you are done with it? We have created such ease and effortless in our lives that we never take the next steps to figure out what happens after we are done the item.

Unless the item you buy is 100% biodegradable, that item has a life span much longer than your grandchildren.  I know this because much of what’s in my house belonged to my grandparents, and it will be around much longer after I am gone, as well.  We look at these items as things we need, when in reality we are calming down some electrical activity in our brains brought on by a campaign created by a man on Madison Avenue.

Why is it we get so upset when others try to control our lives in mundane ways, but give them carte blanche when it comes to how we spend money that we worked really hard for?

No. 2

Kathleen Merrigan.

Many women have broken the ceilings with their placement in the Obama Administration.  But, this woman… you should be very happy about.

Many people were very upset when Obama picked his Secretary of Agriculure, Iowa governor Tom Vilsack.  Vilsack has a great relationship with big agribusiness.  Many feel his ties to the corn and biotech industries are a little too close. But things may be moving in a great direction with the appointment of Merrigan to Deputy Secretary for the USDA.  

Here are some facts:

- director of the agriculture, food and environment program at Tufts University

- an academic and former congressional aide who helped write federal organic food-labeling rules.

- Expert Consultant to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations 

Why is her appointment so important?   Because most people credit the Deputy Secretary as the person who gets things done.  And, as we all know, we need things changed in almost every area of our food policies.  

Congratulations, Ms. Merrigan!  I look forward to following what you do.

study: companies lie to SEC

The law states that if you, as a company, have a heavy environmental sanction, you are required to report it to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  However, most companies fail to disclose this information, found a study coming out of the University of Arkansas.

Andrea Romi, a doctoral candidate at the university’s Sam M. Walton College of Business, examined the SEC filings of 309 companies that received notice from the Environmental Protection Agency between 1996 and 2005 that they should expect to pay at least $100,000 in fines – the minimum amount required for disclosure by SEC Regulation S-K, Item 103. Romi found that about 72 percent of these companies omitted this information on their filing forms, a violation of federal law.

The reason behind not giving the information: punishment in the stock market.  The study showed that those companies who filed the proper documents with the SEC, on average, had a fall of 1.6%.  And, it has also been shown, that there are no consequences if the information is not reported.

So what do we do?  The company has no incentive to follow the law and if they do their bottom line is affected.  One suggestion, made by Emily Setzer, a writer for Matter Network, says:

 

The problem is there is no easy solution. Without disclosing this information to the public, writing a check for $100,000 or $200,000 is basically a slap on the wrist for many large corporations. Entities with such large environmental sanctions deserve the public flanking, but if there is little regulatory action and punishment, and no incentive to report, how many businesses will choose to risk negative publicity? Perhaps the best solution is for the government to automatically disclose all corporations that receive environmental sanctions of $100,000 or more, instead of leaving it up to the businesses, because disclosures of corporate social responsibility and environmental records are still voluntary.

In an interesting conversation with a friend, I learned that almost every high level profession requires multiple ethics classes (doctors, nurses, lawyers, etc), however, business school does not require any type of ethics course as its curricula.  I think we are starting to see where the omissions of ethics in business is having a negative impact on our planet.

in the news

Here are some important news items…

Arctic Sea Ice Underestimated for Weeks Due to Faulty Sensor, via Bloomberg

A glitch in satellite sensors caused scientists to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 500,000 square kilometers (193,000 square miles), a California- size area, the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center said.  The recent error doesn’t change findings that Arctic ice is retreating, the NSIDC said. The center said real-time data on sea ice is always less reliable than archived numbers because full checks haven’t yet been carried out. Historical data is checked across other sources, it said.

MIT Group Increases Global Warming Projections, via Washington Post

 

New research from MIT scientists shows that in the absence of stringent reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, 21st century climate change may be far more significant than some previous climate assessments had indicated.

The new findings, released this month by MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, showed significantly increased odds that by the end of the century warming would be on the high end of the scale for a so-called “no policy scenario” as compared with similar studies completed just six years ago. The main culprits: the cycling of heat and carbon dioxide in the climate system are now better understood and projections of future greenhouse gas emissions have increased.

The results also showed that even if nations were to act quickly to reduce emissions, it is more likely that warming would be greater than previous studies had shown. However, the increase in projected temperatures under the “policy scenario” was not as large as for the no policy scenario.

Climate change timetable slips as Obama backtracks on 2008 deadline, via Guardian UK

 

Barack Obama has been forced to slow down a key green objective of his presidency: early legislation to reduce the carbon dioxide emissions that cause global warming.

Officials now concede that Congress is unlikely to pass such legislation by the end of 2009, a delay that could hurt efforts to reach a global treaty at the climate change conference in Copenhagen this December. It also frustrates hopes that last week’s huge infusion of green investment in the $787 bn economic rescue plan would give momentum to efforts to cut greenhouse gas emissions.

Presidential staff say America remains determined to play a leadership role at the climate talks in Copenhagen, but downplay prospects of taking steps to curb its own carbon emissions first.

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