biohabit.org

One of my new year resolutions for 2009 was to us a calendar. I've been using my phone as my calendar for quite a while now but the point of the weekly calendar is to review the coming week. It definately has helped focus my thoughts and use it as a Saturday (or Sunday) morning ritual to clarify what are the next actions.

I still have an electronic calendar with events several months in advance and use OmniFocus to have the more details list of projects, sub-projects and associated tasks.

This cold weather blast that Portland is experiencing seems to be an opportune time to check out the new jacket and boots for how they actually hold up. Besides, given the dogs have been so wound up I needed to get them out of the house or I was going to go crazy.

The new Carhart jacket did pretty good in 20 degree weather and 20 mph winds, same with the new boots and gloves. The sweat pants + rain pants didn't hold up very well, next time I'm planning on being out in these temperatures I'll need to wear long johns.

The following was written by Michael Pollan and the single best article I have ever read about modern industrial agriculture and have pulled out a few passages that I found to be particularly important.

"After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy -- 19 percent.  And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do -- as much as 37 percent, according to one study."

Regarding the massive problems associated with relying on cheap oil and no longer using animal poo as a fertilizer source.

"But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant -- factory farms are now one of America's biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution -- animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete -- and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all."

 As for what to do now.

"It will be argued that sun-food agriculture will generally yield less food than fossil-fuel agriculture. This is debatable. The key question you must be prepared to answer is simply this: Can the sort of sustainable agriculture you're proposing feed the world?

There are a couple of ways to answer this question. The simplest and most honest answer is that we don't know, because we haven't tried. But in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food."

Also, if you want to improve health care, we need to change in a big way what as a county we are eating.

"In addition to the problems of climate change and America's oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount -- from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet."

  The above does not do the article justice by any means and would strongly encourage folks to read the whole article. 

http://www.michaelpollan.com/article.php?id=97 

Dear World:

The United States of America, your quality supplier of ideals of Liberty and Democracy, would like to apologize for its 2001-2008 service outage. The technical fault that led to this eight-year service interruption has been located, and the parts responsible for it were replaced Tuesday night, November 4. Early tests of the newly-installed equipment indicate that it is functioning correctly, and we expect it to be fully functional by mid-January.

We apologize for any inconvenience caused by the outage, and we look forward to resuming full service -- and hopefully even to improving it in years to come.

Thank you for your patience and understanding,

The USA