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October 30, 2005

The danger of breathing

Remember the Alar scare? I'm not sure I ever saw it myself, but the legendary news clip lingers in my mind: suburban women chasing the school bus to try to retrieve a possibly Alar-sprayed apple from their child's lunchbox. Health and the environment are closely connected, but we need to keep our perspective. My daughter sent this quote, making a joke of our modern hysteria about safety and hygiene:

"Science Editor Daniel Koshland lampooned this mood last June
when he invented an interview with "Dr. Noitall" whose "appearance
on three talk shows is enough to qualify me as an expert." "Are
there other dangers about which the EPA has failed to advise us?"
Noitall is asked. "Breathing," he says. "All breathing generates
oxygen radicals...the main sources of mutations in DNA, leading to
cancer, birth defects.... Breathing has been observed three minutes
before death in 100% of all fatalities. We urge everyone to stop
breathing until proper research has been carried out."
The article is "The wasteful pursuit of zero risk" by Warren T.
Brookes.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 5:49 AM | Comments (0)

October 18, 2005

Will we join them? Or will they join us?

While I'm feeling guilty about air travel, I guess the oil companies are feeling twinges of guilt, too. At least that's what you would think, at the airport or reading the major financial papers. Chevron, Shell, and BP (British Petroleum) are all engaged in 'peak oil' PR, and it's simply amazing to see. Greenwashing, according to critics at Postcarbon.org, but it seems to me that if oil companies are splashing statistics across the walls of airports the situation is grave enough that lots of people can be persuaded that we need to shift gears, and live differently.

Chevron's campaign is called "Will you join us?" Myself, I doubt that the transformational leadership we need will come from Big Oil. But it hasn't come, effectively, from Greens, and I welcome these campaigns both because they do raise awareness, and because they may actually mean that there are people in power with the sense, and courage, to recognize the problems we face.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 8:44 AM | Comments (0)

October 17, 2005

Biotech corn makes history

David and I flew to Iowa just over a week ago to see our son Tom, who has just started college there. To my surprise and pleasure, he has decided to get involved with the campus garden, and says he has blistered hands today from digging over some of the beds. I imagine that college gardens are all organic, but farming in Iowa is not.

We spent a wonderful afternoon while we were there at the Living History Farms, walking through the woodland grove where an Indian encampment, and gardens, had been created, then on to an 1850 farmstead. The third farm was from 1900, with a house that reminded me of my grandparents' rural Iowa home. The final display was of modern agriculture, with lots of tractors and the other equipment so beloved of boys and, presumably, other visitors. It was harvest time, and we were happily, curiously examining a long bed planted with different types of soybean, and then different types of corn.

Corn is a curious plant: it depends on humans, who take its seeds out of the heavy husks, in order to reproduce. There were tall, lanky plants of the ancient grass ancestor of our modern corn, and then various other types of corn. The final one, looking not much different from its neighbor, was labeled "BT corn." Biotech, that is, genetically modified corn. I was stunned to see it growing there, next to ordinary hybrid corn, because I thought Bt corn was always carefully separated. Insects can pollinate corn plants as far as 100 feet (31 meters) away, so the corn beside it was necessarily non-Bt anymore.

I'm not hysterically anti-GM, but I do believe strongly in the rights of consumer to know what they are eating. This experience didn't leave me feeling quite so confident about the separation of GMO and non-GMO (yet another way of saying this). See for yourself, in this photo: biotech corn growing at Living History Farms in Des Moines, Iowa.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 8:53 PM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2005

Nature-Deficit Disorder

I was in the bookshop picking up Teach Yourself German, because I'm leaving for Frankfurt on Monday, and happened to spot a book called Last Child in the Woods, Saving Our Children From Nature-Deficit Disorder. What a pleasure to see that such an important subject is being tackled, and published. The jacket copy is a little overloaded with pop culture allusions like "a nature-child reunion," but if that's what it takes to get people to tune into a shift that isn't just an abstract problem but a real loss for the little people we love, I won't complain.

The author says his son asks him why it used to be more fun being a kid, and his stories of playing outside--which children in western and urbanized cultures do not do any more--resonate with me. My husband and I both grew up in suburbs, but we spent much of our childhoods outside, playing with other children.

Instead, our children have playdates and Nintendo, and they suffer from obesity, ADHD, and depression. Take a look at this book, and see if perhaps you can effect, somewhere, a nature-child reunion. Or even a nature-adult reunion. We need the chill of summer dawns and the crunchy brightness of autumn leaves, too, just as much as our children.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:54 AM | Comments (0)

October 9, 2005

Traveling light

I do a lot of traveling, more than ever before, and I'm increasingly conscious of the impact of our excessive mobility is. I'm not sure just what to do about it, but there are certainly a few days we can do immediately.

First, we should wake up to the impact of trips by car and especially aeroplane, and we should not make them carelessly, or just because it's what everyone else does (fly to Florida in March). How many times have you heard people say, "I needed a vacation from my vacation"? I was impressed recently to hear someone say that his family takes their August holiday at home, because they finally realized that they live in a beautiful place that other people come to visit. (My husband and I are in the same situation, living in what is a popular holiday destination, and the trouble for us is that it is hard to stop working when we're at home.)

Right now I'm in rural Iowa, visiting my son at the college he's just transferred to. We flew two hours to Chicago and drove another five hours. This is not negligible, environmentally, and it's astonishing that colleges in the US now expect parents to visit often, and for kids to go home for a week in the middle of the semester, as well as for Thanksgiving. Tom is planning to get permission to stay during break week and wanted to know what to say if there was a problem about it. I suggested he tell the truth, that his parents can't afford to fly him home every six weeks. But there's another truth that ought to have some effect on colleges, which always claim to be concerned about the environment. It's just not sustainable to have people flying to and fro across the country like this, without any real necessity. Doing community service in the surrounding region would be a lot better for the environment, and for the future these students are going to live and, we hope, raise families in.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 7:57 AM | Comments (0)

October 6, 2005

Autumn advice on using mirrors to brighten rooms

I was in London last week and found a spare hour to visit the Sir John Soane Museum in Holborn. I loved it just as much as I had as a student, and wondered if I had been unconsciously influenced by the memory of its rich red walls when I chose the paint for our offices--and in fact the color we now call "Berkshire red" for my company's logo and stationery.

I wish I could decorate my home with pieces of Roman ruins, as Soane did. But I did get a few practical ideas! It's getting darker, of course, as we enter October, and while I've always advised people to use plenty of mirrors in their rooms to provide extra light and a sense of space, the Soane Museum exhibits the extent to which mirrors can be used more dramatically than anything I've seen. There are large round mirrors above bookcases, and small round mirrors in corners. Mirrors are used as panels in narrow alcoves. The guidebook said that one small room had some 50 mirrors, in fact, and the breakfast room has what is called a "starfish" ceiling, inset with mirrors.

By using plenty of mirrors, you don't need floods of electric light and can create a rich, warm atmosphere and a greater sense of space. And mirrors needn't be expensive: you can often pick them up at tag sales and junk shops for almost nothing. I simply repaint the frames to match my woodwork. Try mixing framed mirrors with pictures on the wall.

But I also want to try the Soane's approach, and will be looking for places I can put long panels of mirror, edged with plain wooden molding and then painted. These could be especially useful in the bay windows where my plants are going to live this winter.

Here's a little related text from the Armchair Environmentalist:

Scandinavian style--conscious of the seasons and oriented towards nature--is a useful perspective for a green decorator:
• Rooms that promote togetherness
• Energizing colors
• Simply styled, affordable, sustainably-produced woods and other natural materials
• Lots of glass and rooms and furnishings designed to allow light to flow
• Hand-made, regional tiles and furniture to reduce transport costs and promotes local economies
• Furnishings that serve multiple uses

We'll be talking soon about the value of glass in decorating--and energy saving.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 6:17 AM | Comments (0)

October 3, 2005

Traveling by air

Air travel is the most energy-intensive of all, and is definitely to be avoided when possible. But I'm afraid that I've been crossing the Atlantic--it's hard to run an international business without doing some of this type of travel--so I thought I'd share some health tips from The Armchair Environmentalist's chapter on Greener Transport. More about ways to avoid excessive travel to come!

Wing Tips
• When you arrive at your destination, spend as much time as possible in daylight. Doing this will enable your internal clock to reset itself, and you’ll recover from jet lag more quickly. (Sex helps, too!)
• Wear sunblock.
• Avoid dehydration: Drink lots of water, avoid alcohol, and bring along a spray bottle of water to keep your skin moist.
• Breathe deeply to increase your oxygen intake.
• Take shorter flights. And if you have a chance to get off the plane, do so—jog or walk around the airport, or go outside for some fresh air.
• Ring ahead to order vegetarian meals.
• You see more wasteful packaging and disposable products on aeroplanes than anywhere else—decline all the overpackaged extras, and write to the airline asking that it institute better environmental policies.

Posted by Karen Christensen at 9:16 AM | Comments (0)