good vs. evil

So, I've run into two products today, both of which deserve a mention.
First, Brunswick Beeworks
is a new local honey supplier! The closest local honey they have at Whole Foods is from Goodlettsville - and Brunswick makes candles and skin stuff!
Whoohoo!

Second, there's a Slate article about Proctor & Gamble's Olay Body Wash Plus Spa Exfoliating Ribbons. YUCK. I read a while back about the Giant Sea of Plastic and was freaked out, but this Olay stuff is actually DELIBERATELY putting microplastic out there! We're not talking about plastic trash that's breaking down, this stuff is MADE like this and put in something that we're using to wash our bodies and then flushing "away".
Yuck yuck yuck.

E2A: I sent that article over to Beth at Fake Plastic Fish, and lo and behold, she already knew about it! Check out her blog post on it, from nearly a year ago!, because it's got some great resources.

Outdoors all this weekend!

So, in case you are living under a rock (like me... there are many different kinds of rocks, including sinus infections and for-sale condos), this Saturday is the Earth Day celebration at Centennial Park from 11-7. Make sure you check out the Greener Nashville Tent, where, along with Gardens of Babylon, they'll be giving away 1,000 free baby oak trees!



Many thanks to jeffmradio for tipping me off to the Billboard Green 10! I've really been digging KT Tunstall lately, and it's no surprise that Willie is up there!

Meanwhile, Rites of Spring is now swingin' over at Vandy, so head over there to catch some yummy tunes like Lady Antebellum, Feist & Old Crow Medicine Show. Between Rites and VU baseball vs. Auburn, I'm going to be at Vandy all weekend!

EPA air standards & Williamson county

Driving into work this morning on my insanely long commute really pinched this morning because of a story i heard on NPR - Apparently Williamson county is one of 345 counties in the US that is now above the new smog limit that's just been set by the EPA.

Besides the obvious (dirty air = yuck!), what bothers me about it all is this:

"The EPA's new smog limit is 75 parts per billion of ozone... The EPA's independent science advisory panel unanimously had said the standard should be no higher than 70 parts per billion...

Industry groups, which had said before the announcement that the limit shouldn't be lowered at all, said they were disappointed with the decision.

The new standard "could have a devastating effect on manufacturing employment," said John Engler, chief of the National Association of Manufacturers. "

ARGH!!!!!!! If you are doing something that is hurting/killing people, then you either need to stop or find another, non-lethal way! Good god! They're "disappointed"?!?!?!?!?!

Well, I'm disappointed that little kids in big cities have asthma at an alarmingly disproportionate rate! I'm disappointed that when i use a sponge to clean off my window sills or outdoor furniture, there's black nastiness that reminds me of what's in my LUNGS (read some more about air quality and health here). I know that Nashville isn't the Bronx, but if I remember correctly from my Geology class back in the day, Nashville is ituated in a 'geographic bowl', where, due to the topography, pollutants get trapped and sort of settle over the city. So there are air quality concerns here that are on my mind. But Industry is disappointed, so let's not get ahead of ourselves...

Vegetarianism, Veganism, and the "All-American" Hamburger, part 2

So, I told you all about how the chicken made me queasy the other night. Yeah, it might have been that fast-food fried chicken isn't exactly at the top of the healthy-eating list. Also, like LisaT suggested, had I taken the time to actually sit down and thoughtfully eat, perhaps I would have either a) gotten queasy earlier or b) STOPPED EATING THE DAMNED THING. But I think that really, in that moment, it was because i couldn't stop imagining the live chicken. Not that I have some emotional connection to chickens. Mostly, I hate them, thanks to an evil rooster my cousins had when we were kids that would fly maniacally at you whenever you went to collect the eggs from the coop. But still, something about that live chicken image in my head...

Now, like Mr. Franklin explained, since I am a rational creature, I can surely come up with a way to convince myself that eating meat is ethically okay in regards to my relation to the animal (animals eat other animals; people have been doing it forever; our bodies need the protein; the animal was killed humanely; this is my chance to take revenge on the poultry population; etc etc etc).

But what about the staggering economic & health impact of eating animal products?

Here's where, for me, it gets pretty clear.
- It takes 990 gallons of water to get you one gallon of milk (Thanks, AnimalBlawg! Click here for a citation... fact is on page 167)
- Livestock is responsible for 18% of the greenhouse gas emissions worldwide (Thanks, NoImpactMan)
- Hog Farms don't have to treat the hog waste; plus, they're helping to grow antibiotic-resistant bacteria (check out this article from Rolling Stone)

There are lots of ways to rationalize these problems - sure, water is a renewable resource; sure, humans are causing a lot of greenhouse gas emissions just by breathing...

But the more that I read, the more I want to just opt out. Thinking about the vastness of these problems and how they affect just me, just this one body, really freaks me out.

So maybe going vegetarian and/or vegan is something that I should do out of respect for myself; putting aside my respect for the environment, or animals, or my fellow man, shouldn't I try to take care of my own body first? If I am going to start eating thoughtfully (O, were there more than 24 hours in a day - an additional 4 hours for yoga and thoughtful eating would be a true blessing), why don't I use that brain-power to hunt down green foods? Eating those free sandwiches from the BEC was definitely not a thoughtful act - it was "easy" and "free". We come back to the idea of scope versus scale here - sure it was, on the "scale" scale, easy and free, but on the "scope" scale, I actually paid for that food with my own body. I sold out. I spent myself instead of money... and we are spending our planet, instead of our time and money, on all of that meat.

I am feeling quite trapped by this problem, because I have always had a hard enough time respecting my own body without bringing green into it. The last time I did hot yoga was two weeks ago (Hey, I rationalize, sleep is more important and I don't have the money to go). Last night I ate three packaged, mass-produced, white bread dinner rolls (they were free). This morning I ate a Little Debbie snack (no excuse there other than i could find 75 cents in the floorboard of my car).

This is all, for me, like a drug addiction! But unlike heroin, the price of this addiction is "cheaper" than the alternative. Additionally, there seems to be little societal support for someone who wants to break the oil/sugar/processed-food/animal-products/waste/mass-production addiction. My job, the media, my financial life, and people around me all make it difficult to do what, if I weren't so implicated in this bizzare system, I would choose to do.

So, economics play a HUGE part in this for me. All of the immediate things, like the balance in my bank account and the time i have in a day, completely occlude the big picture cost of what I'm doing to myself by persisting in these very un-green habits.

Well, I certainly didn't intend this post to be quite such a whine-fest as it turned out to be, but I do want to ask for help in this sense - do you all have any ideas how to quantify your choices? It is easy for me to quantify the price of a lunch (free sandwich from BEC = $5 at least still in the bank). It has not been so easy for me to quantify the cost of that sandwich (that roast beef and the styrofoam packaging - how much is that costing my body and my world?).

That's why I'm super excited about a new curriculum at my parents' Alma Mater, Warren Wilson College, which I'll talk about in my next post. Maybe it will help us quantify scope in a way that our over-stressed brains can actually understand.