Category Archives: sustainability

Greenpeace protests logging in Canada

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Report here. 

What bothers me is when I see trees torn down for yet more construction when there are thousands of empty buildings waiting to be occupied.  There should be a law that prohibits this–we don’t have the luxury of time anymore.  We need those trees to take the carbon dioxide out of the air and provide us with fresh oxygen.  Indiana is especially bad about destroying forests–when you look at aerial photos, you can pick Indiana out just by the lack of trees.   You can tell such a difference when leaving Indiana and going to Ohio–the air is better.  Combine this with the 15 million pounds of toxins released into our waterways…toxic soup.  (sigh)

Heavy Metals and Chemical Toxins in Foods **edited

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Where’s my spoon?  /snark

Magnetic Wheaties.  The press refused to publish this because they didn’t think it was real.  Anyone want to test their own Wheaties and dispute it?

Heavy Metals in Vegan foods. 

Sea vegetables.

Here’s another paper on heavy metals content in foods.

Arsenic in food.  The discussion is in defense of reports of arsenic in organic foods.  What the news reports got wrong was that heavy metals are present in conventionally grown foods, too.  It’s not a fault of growing them organically…but it is a fault of our toxic environment—which we are all responsible for promoting.

Another link here.

While there is a set legal limit for the amount of arsenic in water, that’s not the case for food. In previous weeks, researchers also detected high levels of arsenic in apple and grape juices. “All of these arsenic studies come back to the fact that there are multiple exposures, with the levels varying from product to product and batch to batch,” says Patty Lovera, assistant director of Food & Water Watch, a consumer safety organization. “We need to figure out some regulatory limit.”

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Arsenic in rice has been discussed on the mercury support group–obviously, we’re concerned about putting more poison in our bodies.  It’s frustrating as hell because even if you eat organic, you’re still at risk of heavy metals by the soil contamination.

Someone said in a reply on one of the sites I visited:  you’re pretty much going to get exposed by anything you eat…nothing is safe.

But I would not give up organic food.  Conventionally grown food is less nutritious, besides polluting the environment even more–it doesn’t make sense on that point alone.

Finally, here’s a disturbing video produced by Environmental Working Group on toxic chemicals in babies’ blood.

I looked up the Kids Safe Chemicals Act of 2008…and I’ll give you three guesses how it turned out.  Yep.

But, wait!  There’s yet another bill introduced with link to co-sponsors…here’s where it stands. 

Sen. Frank Lautenberg [D-NJ] Bill Author

Kirsten Gillibrand [D-NY] Bill Author

Max Baucus [D-MT]

Michael F. Bennet [D-CO]

Richard Blumenthal [D-CT]

Barbara Boxer [D-CA]

Maria Cantwell [D-WA]

Benjamin Cardin [D-MD]

William “Mo” Cowan [D-MA]

Richard Durbin [D-IL]

Dianne Feinstein [D-CA]

Al Franken [D-MN]

Tom Harkin [D-IA]

Angus King [I-ME]

Amy Klobuchar [D-MN]

Patrick Leahy [D-VT]

Robert Menéndez [D-NJ]

Jeff Merkley [D-OR]

Barbara Mikulski [D – MD]

Patty Murray [D-WA]

Bill Nelson [D- FL]

Bernard Sanders [I-VT]

Brian Schatz [D-HI]

Charles Schumer [D-NY]

Jon Tester [D-MT]

Tom Udall [D-NM]

Elizabeth Warren [D-MA]

Sheldon Whitehouse [D-RI]

Ron Wyden [D-OR]

Again, no mention on the toxins’ effects on the animals and birds.  Mercury has been found in birds on land and sea birds.  It’s also been found in marine mammals.

**edited to correct wording.

The Winter We Danced

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Leanne Betasamosake Simpson has a post up on a book about the Idle No More movement with stories and poems and such.  I haven’t read it, but would love to have a copy of what sounds like a wonderful historical book.  She notes that the royalties will benefit the indigenous youth. 

Radiation from Fukushima found in soil in Canada

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Soil sample collected near Agassiz contains radioactive metal.

…but officials say…wait for it…don’t worry, it’s not that much…yeah, we should worry.

We should be worried, too, looking at this map.  It’s not just on the tip of the coast, but quite a ways inland.  Just look at the relation to the U.S.

Can you imagine this, combined with Keystone and the pipelines that have already leaked, combined with pesticides, herbicides, chemical fertilizers, genetically modified organisms…

Fact-Checking Eva Moskowitz; Dangerous Bipartisan collusion

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Diane Ravitch has posted this on Eva Moskowitz’s loose version of the facts.

Moskowitz’s Success Academy 4 has almost none of the highest special needs students as compared to nearby Harlem public schools. In a school with nearly 500 students, Success Academy 4 has zero, or one, such students, while the average Harlem public school includes 14.1 percent such students. With little sense of irony or embarrassment, Moskowitz has attacked Bill de Blasio for preventing the school’s expansion inside PS 149. Her school’s expansion would have come at the cost of space for students with disabilities. The school has already lost “a fully equipped music room … A state-mandated SAVE room … A computer lab… Individual rooms for occupational and physical therapy … and the English Language Learners (ELL) classroom,” due to earlier Success Academy expansions in the same building.

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Moskowitz made a number of other claims during her Morning Joe appearance. She said “we are self-sustaining on the public dollar alone.” In fact, Success Academyspends $2,072 more per student than schools serving similar populations. This additional funding comes from donations by the very same hedge fund moguls who have donated over $400,000 to Governor Cuomo’s re-election campaign (charter supporters in the financial and real estate sector have contributed some $800,000 to Governor Cuomo’s campaign).

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Jan Resseger posts about the dangerous bipartisan conventional *cough* wisdom.

As early as 1989, President George H.W. Bush, responding to fears that the United States was becoming uncompetitive,  launched a movement based on standards, assessments, and accountability by convening an education summit of the nation’s governors, chaired by Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas, to agree on national education goals. Through the 1990s states began to embrace test-based accountability. Then in 2001, when Congress—under President George W. Bush—reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, with a new name, “No Child Left Behind,” the federal government mandated test-and-punish.

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Once again, the Bushes and Clintons responsible for so much destruction and misery.

Today, DN hosted a debate between public schools and charters.  The car salesman, er I mean, charter school proponent, Steve Barr,of Green Dot, who was behind the fiasco of Los Angeles schools, Parent Revolution, and  Brian Jones , a public school teacher now pursuing a doctorate.

Barr did the usual charter proponent schtick:  he tried to once again pull the wool over the public’s eye and say that charter schools were public schools; he refused to answer direct questions (because he knew it would make charters look bad); and repeatedly stated he was a “progressive”.  Yeah, right.  Just like Bill Clinton is a progressive.  Wink, wink. Nod, nod.

He was pushing the “progressive” schtick a little too much in hopes that would make opponents back down, I guess, because he’s a “good guy”.  Pffft.  He also lied about charters NOT being about profit.  Thankfully, he got called on that….but some key points were not countered by Amy or Juan.  I was disappointed in that.

Finally, Reclaim Reform has a post up on Diane and the FUD, or Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt propaganda campaign to destroy public education.  This is one of the psychological techniques used in communications that turned my stomach and why I would never be in PR.  Fear, sex, anger, and love are the top communications techniques to persuade people….keep that in mind, folks, whenever you view any type of media: spoken word, radio, TV, internet, printed, etc.

Related to this, the local school administration said this on the radio: “A teacher can ask the student how many nickels equal a quarter…but if they go to a computer, it can be illustrated how many nickels equal a quarter, and then a dollar, and so on…” (may not be verbatim, but close).  What I heard from that is two things:  1) teachers are boring, so we have to have computer animation; and 2) another way to slip online/computer learning as a replacement of live, human beings.  I personally would have illustrated how many nickels equal a quarter by bringing out five nickels.  I would always use visual cues to help kids understand.  This is especially important for dyslexics, of which I am one.

And a question that keeps rolling around in my head is…why are these people called philanthropists?  Isn’t philanthropy giving money away, not expecting anything in return?  ‘Cause the Broads, Clintons, Bushes, Gates, and billionaires boys clubs absolutely expect to gain from their so-called philanthropy. Absolutely.  So I don’t see that this is philanthropy, but should be called “investment”…

 

Vegetarian diet and heavy metals

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Along my path of change, I was re-examining everything, including eating meat.  I became a vegetarian at about 1997.  My kids thought their mother had lost it.  It’s not easy changing to vegetarian when you’re responsible for cooking for the family.  I had to get everyone’s needs met.  They actually liked a bulgur wheat and lentil burrito I made, plus some other dishes.  But they did not want to convert fully to vegetarian diet, which I understood.

In 2006, I was advised to go back to eating meat due to severe anemia.  I didn’t know at this time that I was heavy metal toxic–that would be another year before my discovery.

I did not want to go back to eating meat, but my body had been craving it, so I knew the advice was sound.  I talked about it with a lady whom had been a vegan, and she too had to go back to eating meat.  Her theory was that some of us are just genetically set up to require meat, while others could do quite well without it.

Dr. Natasha Campbell-McBride said in her book of the GAPS diet, which heals the gut, that she did not recommend vegetarian diets–she saw many in her practice that were not healthy.  She saw a problem with vegetarians eating a lot of soy and grains.  I am guilty of this–I was eating a lot of tofu and pasta.  One of my favorites was eating spaghetti with olive oil and garlic.  Yum.  But eating this is not doable for Celiacs.  (Not to mention non-organic pasta being GMO)

I polled the mercury poisoning group about being vegetarian.  One was a vegetarian all his life until chelation.  He said he felt heavy and sluggish–he felt better and had so much more energy when a vegetarian.  I have to agree to that–I had so much more energy and my skin glowed. It was unfortunate that as I was beginning the vegetarian diet, my body was becoming more toxic from the mercury.

Another group member said it was just too hard on the body and with dietary restrictions, it was impossible to chelate without eating meat.

They were all under the impression that they could not go back to just a vegetarian diet–one said he hoped to go “almost” vegetarian, with eating some meat, but not totally meat-free. 

I don’t know.  Time will tell. 

More Spring

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Man, it is like a dam broke…there’s just this sudden explosion of activity in the natural world…

I was outside with doggie.  Warm…not quite up to the 50 degrees yet.  A gentle breeze. Sun shining brightly.

As I’m standing there, I hear  something that’s not quite a chirp, more like “brrrt”.  I look up to see what look like geese flying in a “v” formation…but it’s not geese.

They’re cranes.  I have seen them many times through here, but have not had the pleasure of listening to them call to each other.  They’re definitely the young returning–not quite the size of the adults.

We fortunately live near a nature preserve.  Sadly, though, it is fenced and not open to the public.

All I can do is walk by, peering in…

“…put’em in a tree museum, and charge people a dollar and a half just to see them…”

(Joni Mitchell, Big Yellow Taxi)