The price of vegetables will be higher this year because of the California drought. That was reason enough for the mariner to increase the amount of ground dedicated to home grown vegetables. The great majority of readers have some amount of ground, even as little as a dozen square feet that could support vegetable gardens. Also, check with friends and family; they may be willing to share space. At least one reader belonged to a community garden club. A modern twist on vegetable growing at home is to have a pot farm. Virtually any vegetable from scallions to squash will be happy in a pot or wooden box.

The price of food is one reason to grow one’s own vegetables but the real benefit – guess – is saving water. Most truck crops are grown in irrigated fields because these soft vegetables contain a lot of water and need constantly damp soil. Generally, the source of water for irrigation comes from underground aquifers or rivers. There have been news headlines for years about underground aquifers losing water at rates that threaten many western states with drought and no crop yield. In 2005, the latest year on record, about 410,000 million gallons per day (Mgal/d) of water was withdrawn from aquifers for use in the United States. Processing (washing, etc.) requires additional water.

For readers with little experience in growing anything but grass, growing vegetables is similar in management except one doesn’t mow the vegetables. However, one must remove weeds that will crowd the vegetables and reduce productivity. Open the following link to see how easy it is to grow one’s own bell peppers:

http://homeguides.sfgate.com/much-water-used-grow-green-bell-peppers-41234.html

If the reader has any interest in gardening, it won’t be long before sunny windows and grow light devices will provide whatever the reader wants to grow year round. The mariner has found that fresh herbs add noticeably more flavor to a recipe than dried herbs.

Home advocacy is a matter of degree. However, if everyone grew only one vegetable or herb, that’s one plant that didn’t require water from an aquifer.

Of all the home advocacy recommendations in this series, home grown vegetables provide the largest payoff in water preservation, food quality, and personal selection. Further, readers who want to avoid insecticide toxins or artificial hormone growth, home grown is the way to go.

If the reader grows enough crop that there is too much to eat before the vegetables go bad, one can freeze the excess or can it. Some shrewd shoppers wait until a vegetable is deeply discounted at the market then buy large amounts to freeze or can. This practice protects the buyer from price issues but this practice doesn’t save water.

The mariner hopes this series on home advocacy provides a link between the huge issues of the world and ways that each of us can contribute to resolution. We may not bring the oil industry to its knees but our efforts reduce pollution and natural resource abuse – if only by a tiny bit.

Ancient Mariner

Advocacy at Home – Food (Meat)

This advocacy is not about dieting. The mariner mentions dieting up front to be done with it. The United States population eats four times the volume required by Homo sapiens and performs a small fraction of the effort humans were meant to exert; we eat unnatural sugars that must be manufactured to meet our sweetness requirements. On average, we weigh 30% more than we should. Obesity is so common it falls within the standard deviation. Dieting advocacy is the reader’s choice.

Nor is this advocacy about nutrition, though nutrition is the reason food is important. Now, about food:

The mariner became interested in food processing several years ago. What first caught his attention was that people were buying water when they could have it free at home. This did not make sense to him.

Food is an extensive and odd subject. At the center of every food issue is water. In fact, water is at the center of most manufacturing and natural resource issues like fracking but since this advocacy is about food, the mariner will stick to water and food. Food advocacy will be lengthy so there will be more than one post.

First, we must expose the power of suggestion used by food producers. Food producers make food pretty, convenient, and insist that you need to buy their product to be healthy. This is never true. As a sensitivity exercise, the mariner asks that you go to the following website and play the little movie on the right. It is about bottled water.

http://www.foodandwaterwatch.org/water/bottled

Does the reader remember the faux pas of the meat companies that produce hamburger? It was commented that “pink slime” was added to improve the taste and texture of the hamburger. Even McDonald’s had to back away from that comment. Many balk at the fact the meat product is sterilized with ammonia. Ammonia was cleared by the FDA forty years ago and is part of everything from cheese to chocolate. If more water is squeezed from pink slime, it becomes 25% of an inexpensive hotdog; ground beef labels can advertise 100% beef with up to 15% pink slime added. There is nothing unhealthy about pink slime in spite of its name – obviously an insider term in the meat industry.

These two examples show how easily we can be influenced when it comes to food. It is likely that evolution made us selective about what we eat, leaving us vulnerable to suggestion. Internet browsers quickly will expose the reader to common ingredients that are much worse in comparison – definitely not a tour for the squeamish.

This post will address home advocacy for meat. The reader likely is aware that meat consumption per person has been rising for decades. From 1951 to 2003, daily meat consumption in the United States rose from 150 grams to 250 grams, a 60% increase. Since 2003, consumption has leveled. It is presumed by the FDA that awareness of a relationship between cancer and red meat, along with an awareness of animal abuse on factory farms, are the primary reasons for lower consumption. Pork is the world’s (and the US) most eaten meat. The mariner posted comments about factory farm abuse in “About Rights” in April. Whether home advocacy includes abstinence because of animal abuse is the reader’s choice. The reader must be prepared to eat fish, shellfish and crickets because all fowl and mammals are abused on factory farms.

See

http://channel.nationalgeographic.com/doomsday-preppers/videos/cricket-stir-fry/ 

It is virtually impossible to avoid entirely a given meat source. How can we make it through Thanksgiving without turkey? And spam – that’s a meat, isn’t it? However, combine the intentional reduction of meat as a source of protein, and an increase of protein from fish, nuts, beans and some dairy, and home advocacy against abuse will happen naturally.

Richard Branson, of all people, campaigns against beef as a food product. His reason: it takes 1,800 gallons of water to make one pound of beef. The same argument could apply to every animal to a lesser degree but cattle have a large footprint when it comes to water consumption and processing.

So we have come back to water. Home advocacy for meat encompasses the following:

Reduce red meat to a minimum in the reader’s diet.

Find a butcher who processes his own meat or better, grows it himself. Much less water will be required and the reader will avoid any additives.

Make seafood the primary protein source.

Don’t eat crickets; they are too much trouble. Eat grasshoppers.

Ancient Mariner

The state of the environment around the entire planet is a major crisis and confronts the manner by which all nations govern. The environment shifts slowly but scientists have begun to notice more rapid change. Even fossil fuel corporations are beginning to work on carbon control legislation. Dealing with global warming is not a one-nation issue; it is not a treaty issue; it is a global issue that can wipe out millions of people, species, and permanently change the world as we know it. Global warming is not the only issue affecting the environment. In the name of increased profit, corporations abuse, contaminate and even destroy natural resources. Poisons are spilled, buried, spread, and hidden all over the planet. Many species have surrendered their kind to the abuse of corporations.

Yet, these same catastrophic issues can be affected by advocacy at home.

Many of these activities already are widely known:

• Recycling. If everything made from Aluminum or glass had to be made from scratch, both would become expensive commodities. Everything not made from recycled plastic clutters the world even more rapidly than the clogging that exists now. Recycled paper products save trees – a rapidly disappearing natural resource that helps with excess carbon dioxide. Tin, iron, copper and other industrial metals are melted and returned to a natural state for reuse. Take them to a recycling center.
• Do not be seen using plastic grocery bags! Use your own cloth bags over and over again. Plastic bags, quite un-biodegradable – are the most voluminous item in landfills.
• Set the thermostat back in winter, up in summer; Heat with the Sun through windows in the winter, cool by blocking sunny windows in the summer.
• Use modern light bulbs that require fewer watts.
• Unplug electronic devices that continue to glow – particularly those “vampire” boxes called chargers. They are never off unless they are unplugged.
• Clean gas furnace burners once each year.
• Replace older windows and doors with modern ones designed to mitigate temperatures and block solar radiation.
• Upgrade attic insulation.
• Recently, as prices dropped to what normal budgets can afford, solar panels are growing in presence. Every $1,000 in cost may be amortized in two years through reduction in electric bills.
• Service the automobile regularly, including tires.
• Within five miles of work? Use a bicycle. Within two miles of work? Walk.

The effect of these hands-on activities directly reduces consumption of oil byproducts. Further, these activities reduce the use of water necessary to mine and process metals, oil, plastic, and paper manufacturing.

Speaking of water, it takes 1,800 gallons of water to recoup 1 gallon of drinking water; it takes 60 gallons of water to make 1 kilowatt hour, it takes 97 gallons of water to make one gallon of gasoline; it takes 39,090 gallons of water to make a car.

One wonders how many gallons of water it will take to visit a relative 500 miles away. Assume 20 mpg:

500 miles/20 mpg=25 gal/gasoline.

25 gal/gas*97 gal/water=2,425 gal/water to travel 500 miles.

Add in 39,090 gal/water for the car = 41,518 gallons of water was used to make the trip.

Along with global warming, drinkable water rapidly is becoming a political issue all over the world.

By the way, a human requires 2 quarts of drinkable water per day at or near sea level and 2 gallons if you live in Denver, Colorado.

Advocacy at home may be the real battlefront…

Ancient Mariner

Sit back for a moment and consider the ways the reader can have direct access to local issues. Focus on personally accessible issues, not guns and violence, not celebrity gossip (unless the reader can rid us of it), not the Middle East, not Putin, not the Mexican border. These news items are not issues that can be altered on your property or even in your neighborhood.

In truth, each of us will have a slightly different list. Some issues will be front page issues; some will be back page. To keep our focus on advocacy at home, the mariner will provide a short but important list:

List

Utilities (water, gas, travel)

Global ecology (air, water, chemicals)

Food (water, quality, chemicals, land use)

Specie ecology (Microsystems, estuaries, wildlife)

Neighborhood gestalt (trash, abandoned housing, loose pets – and your house!)

Local organizations (scouting, youth clubs, nursing homes, PTA, Lions Club)

 Tools

Many newspapers, even if online versions and especially local newspapers

Two or three respected soft cover journals, even if they’re at the library

Neighborhood walks

Discerning eyes

Personal blog and twitter communication

Physical effort (scheduled time, communication, achieve goals)

Goodness, the mariner tried to keep this post short! However, what one can do as an advocate to improve his/her immediate environment is virtually endless.

What one notices about advocacy at home is that issues have a direct relationship to people and other species. Feelings of fairness and, as John Forbes Nash would put it, equilibrium, are important. Reading to a bedridden patient in a nursing home does more for the reader and the patient than winning a debate over voting rights. Advocacy at home can be won by the reader – without the political free-for-all that rocks the world.

Further, it is amazing how little space can have such great accomplishment. Pick up a used soft drink cup in the gutter and the appearance of the street has been changed for blocks in each direction. Planting a small pot of petunias will brighten the day for everyone who sees it.

Many projects will require more effort but the nature of advocacy at home is to make the most of small changes.

The mariner will address the list in ensuing posts.

Ancient Mariner