Our friend Josh Dorfman—aka The Lazy Environmentalist—voiced off on the Huffington Post recently on the distinction between the scientific and political in the debate over how (and even whether) to address global warming. His take? It’s not about convincing people the numbers are real, but about engaging their self-interest:

When it comes right down to it, I’ve learned that you don’t have to convince global warming skeptics that global warming is real in order to generate their support for the solutions that solve it. The question we must ask ourselves is, “Is this about winning the debate and being ‘right’ or is this about getting people enthusiastically on board with the solutions?”

Do you think less science and more talk is the right approach? Read the entire piece here, and share your thoughts in the comments.

(via Huffingtonpost)

According to this piece in Monday’s New York Times, yes you can.

Apparently, Dr. Michael J. Haas, a research biochemist at the United States Department of Agriculture, in collaboration with a Philadelphia biofuels company turned an 800-pound sculpture of Benjamin Franklin and the Liberty Bell (constructed for the Pennsylvania Farm Show, in Harrisburg) into 75 gallons of biodiesel fuel and a lower-grade bunker fuel.

Unfortunately (or not?), it doesn’t look like the process is economically feasible. “The cost of edible butter is too high,” Dr. Haas said, conceeding “The number of rancid butter sculptures in the U.S. is probably not significant.”

(via New York Times)

Today in the Thought Kitchen, we’re featuring an interview with writer, environmental scientist and sustainable food activist Temra Costa. She is the author of Farmer Jane: Women Changing the Way We Eat, a new book tracking the growth of the sustainable food movement and the role that women are playing in transforming the way we eat and farm. The book profiles thirty-two women in the sustainable food industry, from urban farmers to farm-to-school advocates.

The Thought Kitchen: I suppose it’s appropriate here in The Thought Kitchen that we’re talking about food and the issues around sustainable agriculture. What made you want to write this book?

"Farmer Jane" Author Temra Costa. Photo by Bart Nagel.

Temra Costa: Farmer Jane really provides an alternative lens through which to looking at sustainable food and agriculture. I feel that a lot of issues have been well articulated by other authors, but the whole feminine perspective has yet to be really well explored. Sixty percent of employees at grass roots Ag organizations are women, and moms in homes are the ones cooking meals and controlling upwards of 85 percent of household spending. In 2007 when the USDA came out with their last Ag census it showed that women farmers were the fastest growing demographic by 30 percent since 2002. So women are really making things happen and while they don’t always put themselves in front of cameras, they’re definitely behind the scenes making it happen every day.

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Editor’s note: This is the fourth post in a series of updates from our 2009 Grant for Change grantees, Benjamin Drummond and Sara Joy Steele. While we compile the votes for the 2010 G4C, we checked in with the Seattle-based documentary team who are working to build eight new stories for their long-term project, Facing Climate Change.

It seems like we are spending a lot of time in windy places for our new Facing Climate Change stories. We recently visited 25,000 acres of abandoned farmland above the Snake River to learn about how and why it went from sagebrush to potatoes to wind farms in one generation. The agricultural development is called Bell Rapids and one farm owner told me he’s seen the wind blow sugar beets up out of the ground.

In 35 years the State of Idaho went from selling this land for around $1/acre, basically begging farmers to make the desert bloom, to buying the water rights back for almost $1,000/acre. What’s left is a sort of post-apocalyptic landscape of sheet metal barns with telephone numbers still scrawled on the doors, houses with boots under beds and paystubs in kitchens, four million pounds of dry steel pipe that used to carry Snake River water, and some enormous new wind turbines.

Benj and I worked long days, photographing at sunrise and sunset and interviewing farmers in between. We spent nights in the back of our truck up on the plateau, just us, the wheatgrass and wind. Except for the first night, when we woke up to find a pair of tiny headlights making their way across the empty space. As the vehicle got closer, the driver flipped on a spotlight and we knew someone had called the police. After a few minutes of questioning, a second officer arrived on the crime scene. Once we convinced them that we were taking pictures, not old farm equipment, they turned into the friendliest cops we’ve ever met.

We spent a lot of time chasing light down straight dusty roads laid out in a one-mile grid. (Bell Rapids Road becomes the 400 road. If you follow that to the 5600 road over to the 300 and up to the 5700, the light will inevitably be better back down the 400 to the 5500.) 25,000 acres is a lot of ground to cover — for us and for the Snake River water that once made these fields green.

I have been an activist my whole life. Working at Nau is a dream come true because I truly feel like I am making a difference every day. The oil spill has really taken a toll on me and a lot of people around me. I have never felt so helpless. No amount of money or aid will even come close to fixing this. It has been incredibly difficult to stand by as this disaster unfolds.

Last weekend I decided to stop feeling helpless and take part in a ‘Hands Across the Sand’ event on the Oregon coast. There were more than 800 grassroots ‘Hands Across the Sand’ events that took place in communities across the country and around the world. I decided to go to my most favorite beach…..Short Sands. I joined hands with activists, surfers, children, and grandmothers and formed a symbolic line across the beach. The message was simple and powerful. No to offshore drilling, yes to clean energy. As we stood there hand in hand I couldn’t help but look into the waves and contemplate what it would be like for an oil spill to happen on this beach. How heartbreaking it would be.

Fossil fuels pollute enough when used the way they are intended to be — burned cars, planes, power plants, etc. The Gulf oil blow-out disaster is getting plenty of attention as it works up to ravaging the Gulf coastal and marine eco-systems. Here’s a look at a forgotten disaster. In 1960 Centralia, Pennsylvania was bustling center of the US coal mining industry. Today is a wasteland — a de facto ghost town. Check out this video to see what a HALF CENTURY-LONG COAL MINE FIRE does to a city. How would you like to be the mayor trying to put together a carbon emission reduction plan?

Currently, the energy that we all depend on comes almost entirely from taking ancient carbon bonds (in the form of coal, oil, and natural gas), mixing them with oxygen, and lighting them on fire.  The products of this chemical reaction are energy (heat) and green house gases emissions.  By now, we all know this is not sustainable.

The folks at the Rocky Mountain Institute — a self-described “Think-and-Do Tank” whose mission is to “drive the efficient and restorative use of resources” – believe we can find a way to avoid literally burning up our collective future.  They lay out a vision for how our market economy can drive transformative change from dirty carbon to renewables and energy efficiency:  They call it ”Reinventing Fire.”

I know, I know, “Vision…blah, blah…Policy…blah, blah, blah…” — it gets boring fast.  But it’s critically important stuff, so give this video a chance – it communicates complex issues in simple terms, has cool images to illustrate key concepts, uses great video clips of old-school carbon, and even includes some quick hits of info-graphic porn for the process nerds among us.

Following up on last week’s post on the graphic representation of data, it’s interesting to note that while we often overestimate the quantity of natural resources at our disposal, we tend to underestimate the damage that we can do to those resources.

From IfItWasMyHome.com: A scale graphic overlay of the BP oil spill over Nau's hometown of Portland, OR.

Case in point: The BP oil spill. We’ve all seen the live video streams from the well, and the photos of oil-covered pelicans. But to truly grasp the scope of this disaster, visit IfItWasMyHome.com. A simple google map mashup, it allows you to overlay a map of the oil spill over your hometown. Here in Portland, the spill would extend from Mt. Bachelor outside of Bend to beyond Mt. Rainier, and well out into the Pacific. Sobering stuff, but sometimes that’s what design is for: to give us needed perspective as we consider how to we can, and must, change.

(hat tip to Otis)

In moving past traditional notions of business profitability to embrace the idea of a ‘triple bottom line’—accounting for one’s impact on people, planet and profit—one of the necessary paradigm shifts you have to make is to start looking at the Earth’s air, water, soil, minerals et al. (what we normally think of as its natural ‘resources’) as natural assets. Like other assets, they’re easy to spend, but harder to replace. Once you start thinking that way, you want to keep a careful budget of how much we have to spend.

But how can you begin to wrap your head around the volume of the world’s water? Its atmosphere? The numbers get so big, and become warped by our perceptions—the sea, after all, looks very deep, the sky very high—that placing a value on them can become academic. With quantities so large, it’s easy to become lulled by the idea that we’ll never run out.

Good design, however, offers a solution. Specifically, the graphic visualization of data that is the domain of folks like Edward Tufte, or our friends at GOOD. And recently, we got turned on to this great example of graphic visualization by Adam Nieman. The blue marble on the left represents, to scale, the volume of all of the Earth’s water. The pink marble on the right, all of its air. A simple and powerful depiction that puts the seemingly infinite into perspective.

Our Partners For Change at Ecotrust recently shared this clip of New York Time’s blogger Andrew Revkin talking about Nieman’s work, and the impact it might have if images like the one above were part of every fourth grade science book.

(via NYT’s Dot Earth blog)

Back in March, we gave bottled water a pretty hard time—enough to even catch the ire of the International Bottled Water Association, who accused us of ‘mis-reporting’ their greenwashed pro-bottled water film. They said their piece, but the facts remain: billions of plastic bottles are thrown away each year while less than 30% are recycled; shipping water needlessly wastes energy and contributes to climate change; bottled water is no safer than tap water in the United States; tap water actually outperforms bottled water in taste tests; and—perhaps most galling of all, almost a quarter of bottled water is just tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi—it’s just thousands of times more expensive.

So I was interested when a link to a new product floated across my desk: boxed water, labeled simply enough “Boxed Water Is Better.” No plastic, easily recyclable, made from materials largely produced from a ‘renewable’ resource. They’ve even pledged to donate 20% of their profits to water and reforestation organizations. Sounds pretty good, right?

Well, maybe. The question is: better than what, exactly? Despite their optimistic rhetoric, many of the fundamental flaws of bottled water really have less to do with the bottle, and more to do with the idea of packaging, shipping, and selling something we can get for free in our homes. While paperboard isn’t made from petroleum, it still takes energy (usually from coal and oil) to package, ship, and dispose of the box—thousands of times more than just turning on the tap. And only about 50% of states in the U.S. have access to carton recycling, meaning many (if not most) of those boxes will end up in landfills. Based on that, boxed water only looks better than one thing: bottled water. Which isn’t a high bar to clear.

While I admire their pluck and positive intentions—20% of profits is an admirable benchmark, even for a company not yet turning a profit—I have to wonder if this really is, as they claim, ‘a step in the right direction.’ Boxed Water Is Better describe themselves as an “ever growing and adapting project…committed to constantly exploring new technology to lessen the impact of the portable water market.” So maybe down the road they’ll invent a solution that’s better than just ‘less bad’. But as Nau’s Grant For Change gets underway, it’s interesting to ponder the limits of innovation and design in solving problems of manufactured demand. Perhaps sometimes, the best solution isn’t to change the package, but to change ourselves.

So what do you think about Boxed Water? Step in the right direction? Or, as the Seven Sins of Greenwashing would put it, just a ‘lesser evil?’