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At a holiday party, sharing some local cheese, I met someone who I thought might give me some insight on an important question. I asked him what he thought was more sustainable, buying local produce that is not organic, or buying organic, even if it comes from Chile. The answer he gave surprised me, he said, “it depends on whether you care more about yourself or the environment.” Huh? Is there a difference? So, I pondered this for a while and came to this.

Although buying local organic food would be the optimal thing to do, sometimes you do have to choose. I realized that he was thinking people only choose organic, pesticide free, hormone free food because they care about their own physical wellbeing. This couldn’t be further from the whole truth. In fact most people who buy organic do it because it is the best thing for our environment and our future and the fact that it’s the best thing to put in their bodies well, that is a serious perk. Here’s why they do it:

•    Buying local allows you to meet the farmers growing your food, ask them questions about their methods and connect with a food source in the Wimberley area. Being aware of local farms and their owners may be the most important part of re-localization. Our communities must become more independent in the next few years a nd growing our own food is the most important part of this task.

•    Rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels is the principal cause of global warming, and plants absorb carbon dioxide from the air and put it into the soil. In a 23-year side-by-side comparison, the carbon levels of organic soils increased 15 to 28 percent while there was little change in the non-organic methods. According to the 2003 Rodale Institute Farming Systems Trials conducted in Pennsylvania, if just 10,000 medium-sized farms in the U.S. converted to organic production, they would store so much carbon in the soil that it would be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off the road.

•    Unlike chemical-intensive agriculture, organic agriculture doesn’t pollute waterways and estuaries.

•    Organic agriculture is more labor intensive, creating more jobs per unit of food grown.

•    Soil is one of our most important natural resources, and one that can either be cherished or squandered. Organic agriculture is a way of “investing in our soils,” and sustainably protecting this precious resource.

Quote of the Month: “Why don’t we pay more attention to who our farmers are? We would never be as careless choosing an auto mechanic or babysitter as we are about who grows our food.” Michael Pollan,
The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World

In many homes, gift givers are trying to keep wrapping and buying to a minimum by choosing unique and more meaningful gifts for their loved ones.
 
Here are some things you can do to make your holiday greener:

•    Give gifts that tell a story or have history, last year my grandmother gave me some pieces of old transfer ware that have been in our family for years and used for many Thanksgiving dinners. It was one of the most meaningful gifts I have ever received and I will cherish it always.

•    Be creative with your presentation, instead of using wrapping paper or boxes, find an old bread tin, fill it with new knitting yarns and some antique wooden needles as a gift for the knitter in your family. The bread tin has a double use and will bring joy and beauty to their home for years.

•    Give home made gifts, one year a friend gave us home made play dough, Aidan loved it, and it was more meaningful and green than buying it ready-made with all the plastic packaging.

•    Give the recipe for your famous bean chili and the ingredients for making it in a hand-sewn bag or new casserole dish from a local store.

•    Give gifts that help others. For the last couple of years Marc and I have chosen a favorite charity, Heifer International, and given ducks or goats or sheep in our friends and family members’ names.

•    Save your raisin boxes, your tea tins, and your coffee cans and cover them with paper from presents you got last year or your child’s artwork, and put a lovely hand knitted scarf inside.

•    Inevitably you will receive gifts with a lot of packaging and wrapping paper. Save the paper for next year and the cardboard for kindling. Save your Christmas cards for next year’s gift labels. I like to cut the recipients initials out of a card and tie it around the gift with twine.

•    Instead of a thing, give an experience: a massage, cooking class or tickets to a concert.

•    Spend your time with a nice cup of tea making a list of fewer, more meaningful gifts this year that you can make or find locally, instead of in the car or at the mall.

•    Make cookies with your kids, wrap them in parchment paper and give them in wonderful reusable boxes or antique dishtowels you can find in a local antique shop.

Enjoy your holiday and enjoy giving, that is what it’s all about. Happy Holidays!!
 
Quote of the Month: “Waste not the smallest thing created, for grains of sand make mountains, and atoms infinity.” E. Knight

One thing I am most thankful for is my family, and when we sit at the table to eat we share thanks to the Great Spirit for our nourishing food. Each time we give thanks I take a mental note of how much of our food came from the farmer’s market and local stores. More and more, I am thankful to say, our food is not traveling very far to our table.

Did you know a U.S. Department of Transportation study showed that on average fresh food(not including imported or exported) travels 1500 miles before it is eaten? And an increasing quantity of food is now being brought in from other countries, in 2001, the U.S. imported 39% of all its fruits, 12% of all its vegetables, and 78% of its fish and shellfish. This lengthy food transport is not only damaging to our environment, it’s not sustainable, and it generates additional energy uses like the need for more packaging, processing, and refrigeration.

Did you know that 10 calories of energy are needed to produce every 1 calorie inherent in fresh food? And for every calorie of processed food, 1000 calories are used! As a result of industrializing agriculture, huge amounts of energy are necessary to power heavy machinery, to process foods, to refrigerate foods during transportation, to produce packaging materials, and to manufacture and transport chemical inputs such as fertilizers and pesticides.

There are solutions to these problems: one effective method is to reduce or eliminate plowing the soil, a Canadian study determined that a no-till system reduced the use of diesel fuel from 7.9 gallons to 1.1 gallons per hectare. Another study indicated that total CO2 emissions generated by this system were 92% lower than emissions from conventional tillage. In fact, small-scale, less mechanized, more diverse organic farming operations have been shown to use 60% less fossil fuel per unit of food than conventional industrial farms.

As a consumer you can decide what’s on your table by choosing to shop the local farmer’s market or join a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) group. Ask Brookshire Bros. to carry locally-grown produce. Plant a garden and avoid processed foods. Lastly, try to buy foods with minimal packaging, this reduces the amount of energy used to produce the product and keeps these materials out of the waste stream.

Thanksgiving Meditation: As I sit before my plate full of food, may my heart not forget the many who are hungry, and whose plates are never full. May this food become fuel for a life that is of use to those who are hungry. 

Although you might think it impossible, many small, locally owned businesses are actually out-performing their “big box” competition, not only in the value that they bring to their consumers, workers, and communities, but in their lower “real” costs to the community. Unlike mega stores and multi-national chains like Wal-Mart, these small businesses stimulate the economy by buying supplies and services locally, paying livable wages, adapting to rather than fighting against local environmental and labor regulations, and staying put for many years, often generations.

The Small-Mart Revolution: How Local Businesses are Beating the Global Competition by Michael H. Shuman, details dozens of specific strategies small businesses are using to successfully out-compete the world’s largest companies. And it shows how consumers, investors and policymakers can effectively revitalize their own communities by “going local”. “Why?” you ask.

Here’s why:
1. Buying Local supports YOU- many studies have shown that when you buy from an independent locally owned business you continue to strengthen the economic base of the community. For every dollar spent at a locally, 46 cents goes back into the community and our tax base. For every dollar spent at a big box store only 14 cents comes back. Go to http://www.newrules.org/retail/bigboxstudies.pdf for summaries of a variety of economic impact studies.

2. Reduce environmental impact- Locally owned businesses make more local purchases requiring less transportation and generally set up shop in town as opposed to developing on the fringe. This means they are contributing less to urban sprawl, congestion, habitat loss and pollution. Go to http://www.relocalize.net/groups/wimberley for some new ideas to help Wimberley move toward sustainability.

3. Get better service- Local business owners often hire people with a better understanding of the products they sell and who take more time with you.

4. Encourage local prosperity- Growing economic research shows that entrepreneurs and skilled workers are more likely to invest and settle in communities that preserve their one-of-a-kind businesses and distinctive character. Tourists seek out a destination that has a sense of being someplace, not just anyplace.

5. Shop Wisely- The green guru has said it before, the consumer is voting with their dollar every time they spend. Buy less, don’t waste, buy local - and if you can’t, buy regional - and buy fair trade.

Quote of the Month: “We don’t need to increase our goods nearly as much as we need to scale down our wants. Not wanting something is as good as possessing it.” - Donald Horban

The new Community Learning Center, located at Katherine Anne Porter High School is a proud addition and asset to Wimberley. Among many new courses offered right now, the Green Guru is teaching one called Sustainability and Stewardship of the Earth.

In this six week course we will discuss solutions to the problems we face with global warming, peak oil, water shortages and our energy crisis. This course will hopefully inspire and initiate changes in the lives of those who attend. We will be making our own solar ovens, learning how to make Biodiesel, listening to experts on Permaculture and Green Building and together constructing a piece of Green Art that will be displayed locally.

The green guru wants all who are interested to please come on Thursdays from 3:30 to 5:00pm, for more information about this course or others offered at the KAPS Community Learning Center, please call Mr. Michels at 847-6867.

September 14th: Understanding Our Problem

- Global Warming, Peak Oil

September 21st: Solar Power and Alternative Energy

- Build a Solar Cooker with Kenny (speaker/expert with Earth Solar)

September 28th: Biodiesel

- Our Carbon Footprint

- Benefits of Biodiesel (expert/speaker Jason from Diesel Green Fuels)

Saturday, September 30th Workshop: Making Biodiesel (10am)

October 5th: Permaculture Introduction

- Waste = Opportunity

- Stewardship of the land (speaker/expert)

- Animals and Gardening

October 12th: Green Building

- Techniques (speaker/expert)

- Alternatives to conventional materials

October 19th: Green Art

- How art makes a difference

- Using recycled materials

Saturday, October 21st Workshop: Building “Green” Art (10am)

 
Quote of the Month: “A society is defined not only by what it creates, but by what it refuses to destroy.” John Sawhill 
former president and CEO of The Nature Conservancy

For the last week it has been hard for us to even deal with heat let alone beat it. Still, the green guru has some suggestions for how you can greenly beat the heat this summer and for many more to come…..

•    First, go to Blue Hole regularly!

•    Keep your thermostat on 80 or 85. When it’s 100 outside, 80 feels really good!

•    Take cool baths and showers; this saves energy and keeps you cooler.

•    Do your outdoor activities in the morning and come inside in the afternoon.

•    Get an attic fan. Don’t have an attic? Neither do we, we got a window mounted whole house exhaust fan. I always heard stories of my parents’ houses and how even though they didn’t have AC growing up, with the attic fan on all night they would get cold in their beds. The secret to attic fans is to crack all the windows and let the fan pull all the cold air in. They really do work! Just using them to expel all the hot air in your house before you turn on the AC, will help your AC to not have to work so hard.

•    If you are building a new home, use the right insulation and a lot of it. R30 or higher is recommended for walls and ceilings, and choose double pane insulated wood windows; wood is a better insulator than vinyl or metal.  Since windows are far less insulating than walls, the fewer and smaller the windows the better. Encourage your architect or builder to make long overhangs on the east and west sides of your house, and choose a reflective roof material, like metal.

•    If it is time for a new AC unit or you are choosing one for your new home, consider an evaporative condenser. Allied Energy Systems in Austin, says the Thermal–Flow is essentially a scaled-down version of a commercial cooling tower. This is not a swamp cooler; it merely cools the air with water before it enters the unit. This unit uses 30% less energy that conventional systems. And for those rainwater collectors out there, the water used can be set to cycle in a closed system so not to waste any, and in the driest conditions only evaporates at the most 30 gallons a day.

•    Go see An Inconvenient Truth and stay cool in the theater while learning why we are so hot in the first place.

•    Lastly, please do your part to reduce global warming and join the carb-cutter challenge at www.coopamerica.org/takeaction/carbcutter/index.cfm Lower your carbon emissions and offset the ones you have to make, by planting more trees.

Quote of the Month: “I feel more confident than ever that the power to save the planet rests with the individual consumer.” Denis Hays

I know a lot of central Texans that suffer with cedar fever and wish there were more cedar choppers out there who would bull doze them all down. They think that if they do, it will not only help their allergies, but bring back all the water to our drying soil. What they are not realizing is that it would be ecologically devastating and impossible to do so. Cedar covers over 24 million acres of Edwards Plateau and provides year round drought tolerant greenery for erosion control, cooling protection for the soil, shelter for a lot of wildlife, and not to mention, raw materials for the fence post industry. What would we do for fencing and late night campfires if it were not for the ash juniper? There are some like the green guru that think the resinous aroma of cedar makes life worth living, in Texas.

The truth about cedar is that adult trees in moist conditions can absorb up to 32 gallons of water a day from the soil, whereas cypress trees absorb hundreds of gallons per day, since when did you see a campaign against them? In 2002 a study was done by a non-profit called American Forests, they found that since 1985, San Antonio has lost 45,000 acres of dense (mostly cedar) tree cover due to development. These trees had more than aesthetic value… If preserved the trees could have soaked up more than 3 million pounds of CO2 a year and saved the city $146 million dollars in drainage costs to control floodwaters and erosion. Unless one is willing to plant another evergreen tree for every cedar they cut down, their choice is contributing to global warming, soil erosion, and flooding.

If we have some nice oaks we would like to focus our attention to and allow to grow fully by cutting surrounding cedar that is one thing, cutting them down only to leave soil that will erode or crack in the sun is another. Dr. Charles Taylor, Jr. of the Texas Agriculture Experiment and Research Station, suggests the use of goats to control new cedar growth on your land and allow for more grazing area. Goats seem to like the young cedars and are a great sustainable way of keeping new cedar growth to a minimum.

I cringe at the sight of the scarred Wimberley hilltops whose owners felt was necessary to denude. With only a few tenuous oaks dotting the land, the fragility makes you wonder if there wasn’t a sacred balance ripped away from the hillside. Their soil soon will be baked in the heat of the Texas sun and eroded away in the wind or next gully washer. The cedar choppers are saying, “But, cedar trees weren’t here 500 years ago!” Well, neither were we…. And there are now 23 million Texans.

The green guru asks those who feel that cedar is the culprit of central Texas water shortages, since the average Texan uses 60 gallons of water a day, what could we learn from the cedar tree.
 
Quote of the Month: “ The bulldozer and not the atomic bomb may turn out to be the most destructive invention of the 20th century.” Philip Shabecoff, New York Times Magazine, 4 June 1978