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Green Energy or Brown Boondoggle?
HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
The Cayuga County Legislature in CNY met on the last day of August to present a proposal for a new “Green Energy” initiative that would link the county with some industrial dairies, in the southern end of the county, to produce power for the counties Industrial Park in Aurelius. The plan is to have about 10 large CAFO’s build and maintain anaerobic digesters that would feed biogas into a county maintained pipeline/scrubber/generator/compressor complex that would potentially provide electricity, heat and compressed natural gas to prospective industries at the industrial park and perhaps to the neighboring BOCES campus as well. This energy would be touted as “green energy” from “renewable” sources. The county and its agricultural partners are hoping to recruit food processors such as a cheese plant to the site. Food waste from the plants would be trucked to the digesters to increase the production of biogas.
Because biogas from manure digesters is caustic due to the presence of hydrogen sulfide, the pipeline will need to be stainless steel; 40 miles of stainless steel pipeline.
Some of the CAFO’s have already built anaerobic digesters through a combination of their own funds and government grants and loans. Others are on board to proceed if this project goes through. While the digesters can be built to generate electricity on site to power the dairy operations, and can feed power back into the grid, the electric company does not pay enough, nor accept enough, to make this a profitable or even break even operation. The county would become a Power Authority with the ability to broker electricity and gas to commercial clients.
Planners claim this project is needed to protect the environment from the pollution to air, streams and wells by manure. As a matter of fact the same farmers who for years have been denying the impacts of manure lagoons cited this problem repeatedly during the meeting and in the printed material that was distributed to attendees. One forthright farm family spoke of how they turned to a digester because when they went from 100 cows to 1000 cows, the manure stench created problems for themselves and for their neighbors.
The spokesman for the Marketing group repeatedly claimed to speak for Southern Cayuga Dairies.
Ana wonders if they speak for all dairies,
or just the ten or so industrial dairies who can hope to be part of this project?
Ana is also concerned at how dependent the county would be on the CAFO’s. If the CAFO’s choose to keep their power on site, choose to switch to a different technology, find they can’t afford the upkeep on the technology, or stop raising livestock, will the county be left holding the bills for its part of the project, with no energy source flowing into the pipeline? How much power does that give to the CAFO’s? Local politicians are already influenced through campaign contributions from these entitites.
In response to a citizen’s question it was learned that the BION Corporation (the lead player in the 72K cow project in a neighboring county) has been part of the discussion, though it is not currently signed on.
Other citizen questions had to do with: the use of emminent domain in laying the pipeline; whether lagoons to hold manure and food waste would be lined; would we end up in a bidding war with other interested parties on food waste; would Marcellus Shale development reduce the price of natural gas to the detriment of the price that could be charged for biogas; what is the county’s responsibility for disposal of contaminants from scrubbing biogas; who would own the carbon credits; could the trench for the pipeline be leased to other utilities as well to recapture some of the cost?
All good questions. Some had tentative answers, others will be looked into.
This project has been in the idea/planning stages for five years or more, yet this was the first meeting to present it to the public. I know that is the way that boards and committees work, but it would seem to me that an earlier discussion with the public may have determined whether or not their constituencies would even want them to proceed with the idea before so much time and $(?) was used up.
One attendee, a resident of the south end of the county, stated that at their towns planning meetings folks have indicated they don’t want this type of agriculture to continue to spread. Now the county is entering a deal that will push it on them.
Another resident asked, “why should the tax payer pay to clean up a mess made by private industry”?
Why indeed?
Hope Springs
by Ana Grarian on Sun, Aug 22, 2010
Ana grew up in a small rural town in Rockland County NY, on a homestead surrounded by forest. As time went by it seemed that the only things growing on surrounding fields were cookie cutter houses on too small lots. That and malls. By the time Ana left the remaining dairy farm was losing ground to those folks who moved to “the country” and then found they didn’t like it.
Ana just came across this website for The Rockland Farm Alliance. “The mission of the RFA is to facilitate local sustainable agriculture in Rockland County.”
Maybe Ana could still fulfill her dream of winning a lottery, moving back home, buying out that development by her home, bulldozing it, and putting a farm back in. Or maybe not.
It’s nice to see that Conklin’s, Dr. Davies‘ and VanHouten’s are still there.
Post a comment...72K – Cows That Is.
by Ana Grarian on Sun, Aug 22, 2010
HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
The BION Corp is actively pursuing a project in Oswego County NY that would put 72 thousand head of beef cattle into a perpetual motion machine of beef/energy production. They want to put 72000 beef cattle on 5 farms in lots of 67 acres each.
The manure would be transported to a plant where the methane gas would be collected and used as fuel. The cellulose from the treated manure would be burned to power an ethanol plant which would create ethanol from corn. The by-products of the ethanol plant would be trucked to the livestock facilities to feed the cattle. Corn shipped in – nothing but energy and meat shipped out. Sounds too good to be true doesn’t it? 72K head of cattle on 5 sites of 67 acres each is 14,400 animals per site or 215 animals per acre.
Can you say crowded? BION claims the plant will be able to produce several thousand gallons of ethanol per year. Several? Is that a lot? The animals will be producing around 450 TONS of raw manure per year. What kind of holding facilities will be needed at what capacities? How will that be transported? By truck? What is left over after taking out the cellulose? How will that be handled? Who will shoulder the responsibility for the safe handling of that waste stream? And while we’re at it. What is the anticipated mortality rate for these beef cattle? How will the animals who don’t make it to slaughter be disposed of? Who takes the financial hit for animals that succumb to the pressures of high intensity livestock handling? Who will own and run the slaughterhouses? Will these be safe and well paying jobs? Or will these be like the horror stories we hear of in other states where migrants labor long hours for low pay in atrocious conditions with high rates of injury and sometimes death? How will the slaughterhouse waste be handled and whose responsibility will it be? Is this the type of slaughterhouses we need in NYS? BION is pursuing the project. They have the idea and stand to gain from royalties on their intellectual property and patents. It seems BION will not be running or managing the different operations. BION claims this project will bring 600 jobs paying $20.3 million per year. Is that 600 jobs paying $34K a year? (not bad but well below the US median wage) Or will their be a few managers earning $100K each and the rest getting maybe $20K a year for jobs that entail long, hard, dirty work? That’s what we call the working poor. Is anyone asking about the amounts of water these operations will require? What about the waste water? What will it be contaminated with and how will it be treated? BION says that some liquids will be managed by a “reconstructed wetland”. Does that mean they are going to build a swamp? Where? What exactly will be going onto it? Will it smell? Don’t swamps usually smell? Ana thinks what we really need is 1000 farmers raising 72 head per year of primarily grass fed beef, raised on pasture as nature intended, with the manure being returned to fertilize crops and pasture. Instead of one slaughterhouse closed to outside animals, we need several small slaughterhouses that provide facilities for local livestock producers and hunters.
Hollowing Out the Middle – a book review
by Ana Grarian on Sun, Aug 15, 2010
HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
Ana has been attempting to wade through “Hollowing Out the Middle: The Rural Brain Drain and What It Means for America” by Patrick Carr and Maria Kefalas PB $16.00 9780807006146.
Carr and Kefalas are researchers sent by the Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood to live in a small town with one school, in the middle somewhere, away from the ocean and a metropolitan city and in a red state. They are one of five teams looking at transitioning into adulthood and the only team looking at a rural town.
“We are not experts on rural America, small towns or regional development..” No sh*** Sherlock. The disdain these authors show for rural America has Ana eating nails and spitting tacks! Let’s start with the biased labels that these “researchers” use.
Achievers vs Stayers. Achievers are the ones who most succeed at school and not surprisingly are most often from the higher income families. An interesting finding is how these students seem to have been cherry picked by teachers, parents and other community members to be mentored and coddled into getting out of town and into University. State College or State University are only mildly acceptable. To really achieve it is best to go to the coast.
My argument is in contrasting them with “Stayers”, because of course, as these authors present it, the only way to “achieve” is to leave. What about if we labeled them “Leavers” vs “Stayers”? That might have been a fairer designation. Apparently folks who stay in their home town to build John Deere tractors, care for the elderly in nursing homes, or raise a family have not “achieved” anything in their lives. Success and achievement can only be measured by bottom line, urban standards. I guess Mother Theresa was a complete loser.
The authors also seem to think that “Stayers” stay because they want to live in a place where everyone is and thinks the same. Or to put it in their terms – because they can’t handle diversity. I think the authors better get to know their neighbors a little better. Yeah the population is overwhelmingly Christian and White, but look closer and there are lots of differences in that crowd. There is a whole gamut of political, social and religious beliefs. LGBT is not limited to the big city, though sadly it is often less well received in rural areas, but that is changing. One of my favorite things about small towns are the odd balls who are loved and even celebrated. When everyone knows each other and are often related, the edge is taken off the differences. Uncle Ernie might be a racist and Aunt Jane might be a flaming Liberal and Cousin Joe might be a kook, but when you love and depend on each other, those traits are overlooked and attention is more likely placed on where you agree.
This book is well written and brings some good points to light. If you too can’t understand why anyone would choose to live in a small town, you might be able to finish the book without throwing it across the room. If you do – let me know how it ended. And if you work for the MacArthur Foundation or some other organization that wants to do research on small town America – next time include a small town man or woman in as part of the team.
Ana Grarian
Dog Eat Dog
by Ana Grarian on Mon, Aug 2, 2010
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HEARD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
I heard gratitude and praise for teachers who demanded quality work. “But it was years later we appreciated this,” one young woman commented……”About all we gave credit for at the time was being recognized as people instead of mass robots.”
This quote is from the aforementioned “From the Orange Mailbox” by A Carman Clark. These were students of the 70′s speaking of chafing ,at the time, at hard work, but even then, appreciating that they were being seen as individuals with unique talents and ideas to share.
Industry would prefer them to be mass robots.
When I read and write about CAFO’s I often wonder how I can get through to folks about the evils of treating animals as cogs in a machine when we as people are pressed more and more into little boxes and expected to perform as machines. Henry Ford be damned, the assembly line has certain advantages and benefits to production, but when pushed to today’s extremes it is simply a meat grinder chewing people into psychosis.
Livestock forced to exist in confinement on unnatural surfaces develop foot, joint, skin and mental disorders that I believe can be seen also in human society. To the mind of the corporations we are simply consumer machines. Our duty is to buy and use and dispose. Our jobs are actually becoming less skilled, in that we are expected to not make judgements but to follow a proscribed script and not vary from it. Corporations have no qualms admitting that the less people they have to use, the better.
The same goes for corporate farming. More livestock, fewer operators.
Confine animals, feed them all the same, fill them with antibiotics so they hopefully won’t get sick and die, push them out the other end. I have been reading that livestock veterinarians are being told that “the animal is not worth the cost of doctoring”. One vet offered to treat an animal for free. They could not afford the “time” for an employee to help. This sow with a broken leg was expected to live that way until she gave birth. Then they would knock her in the head and foster her piglets off.
Farm hands forced to treat animals inhumanely, managers forced to treat employees inhumanely, big shots too closed off in their glass offices staring at bottom line figures. All this time spent being treated, and treating others as worthless, replaceable bits of machinery, turns us into little Hannibal Lechters.
In a dog eat dog world, we develop a taste for dog meat.
DON’T WASTE WEEDS
by Ana Grarian on Wed, Jul 28, 2010
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HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
Yesterday I began rereading “From the Orange Mailbox” by A Carman Clark, a compilation of columns written for the Camden Herald by a wonderfully adventurous Maine woman. It is put together as a month by month journal so whenever I pick it up I start at the current month.
July begins with an essay on the value of weeds. Weeds are tougher and better fitted to the local environment than vegetable crops and so not easily discouraged. Healthy weeds are high in protein and deep rooted weeds serve as a pump to bring minerals from deep in the soil to the surface where shallower rooted plants can use them. “Collected composted and spaded into the soil, weeds feed my garden”, says Clark. Weeds left as a cover crop off season can protect the soil from erosion by wind and water.
This morning for some reason I see a metaphor for people in these weeds.
Much of what we call weeds are actually edible and sometimes therapeutic. Burdock is not just an annoying source of pricklers that stick to your clothes and itch, the inspiration for velcro, the whole plant from root to leaf is edible. Chicory is not just a pretty blue wild flower but also a source of coffee substitute that is said to soothe and calm a person under stress as Chicory has no caffeine.
I wonder now at the numbers of plants and their uses found around the home where , I grew up. In addition to grapes, currants, black walnuts and apples, there were also fiddle head ferns an antioxidant and a good source of Omega 3′s. In CNY there is a flower my friend calls an outhouse flower because it frequently grew around the outhouses. I swear it’s a Jerusalem Artichoke. They are a good source of potassium and iron and can be eaten raw or steamed.
I wonder how our lives would be different if we ate more of these plants that are better suited to our particular geography, instead of trying to grow and consume a universal diet of hybridized and genetically altered plants, transported around the world and processed to death, becoming more a product of the petroleum industry than the soil. Perhaps we would be better suited to our geography too.
Arley Carman Clark (1917 – 2005)
Genre: Mystery, Non-Fiction
Carman Clark, born on 17 April 1917 in Old Forge, N.Y., lived on a poultry farm in Union, Maine, from 1949 until her death on 28 Nov. 2005. She was a regular columnist and the gardening editor for the Camden Herald; she wrote the paper’s From the Orange Mailbox column for over 20 years, compiling selections from the column for a book titled From the Orange Mailbox: Notes from a Few Country Acres (1985). She published a mystery novel in 2001, The Maine Mulch Murder, in which a woman discovers the body of a young man who had come to rural Granton, Maine, to locate his birth parents. A sequel, The Corpse In The Compost, was planned. Clark’s first career was as a school teacher specializing in language arts at Thomaston Junior High School. She was the mother of mystery novelist Kate Flora, who interviewed Clark in the Spring 2001 issue of Mystery Readers Journal (not online), and librarian John Clark. She died in Nov. of 2005. http://www.waterborolibrary.org/MWI_detail.php?authID=397
The Plow the Promise and the Law
by Ana Grarian on Thu, Jul 15, 2010
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HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
I’m currently reading an essay in Harper’s Magazine (July 2010), Agrarian Anxieties by Steven Stoll. It ties in well with the book I read last month Scripture, Culture and Agriculture by Ellen Davis. I had the good fortune to meet Dr. Davis and to hear her both preach and lecture on the topic. Stoll’s essay speaks to agriculture as the impetus for aggression calling it ” the most destructive and socially transforming technology ever invented”. Whoa? I didn’t see that coming! I thought we beat our swords into plowshares, not the other way around!
Stoll starts of course with Adam and Eve and their expulsion from the garden. Where once the couple could effortlessly pick their food, now they are condemned to working for it. Their sons Cain (the farmer) and Abel (the shepherd) bring to God the fruits of their labor. Cain’s wheat is rejected but Abel’s spotless lamb finds favor. (Another Bible story I never understood) Stoll poses the thought that the lamb is a greater sacrifice because it contains more nutritional value than a bundle of wheat. Cain as we know becomes angry and kills his brother, “marking the beginning of the association of shepherds with peace and farmers with violence”, according to Stoll. What? Farmers equated with violence?
At this point, due to some odd wiring of my brain, I thought of the musical Oklahoma, and the song “The Cowman and the Farmer Should be Friends”. I had always considered the ranchers (cowmen) to be the villains in that drama. Didn’t everyone see it that way? Or is that perhaps because I am from the Northeast, where fences have been necessary for a long time due to population density.
Hmmm.
Cain is sent into exile where he founds the first city. Nooooooo! Farmers vs City, I cry! But the die was cast. Genesis is about population as destiny, says Stoll. Which reminded me of a sentence from the beginning of the essay regarding pesticides, antibiotics and the oil spill in the Gulf. “We invent these monsters without intending to, and ignore them for as long as possible with the self-deceiving certainty that they will not harm us.”
The story of Noah’s return to land in Genesis 8 is recollected from a different point of view also. Noah is told that farming will continue:
“As long as the earth endures,
seedtime and harvest,
cold and heat,
summer and winter,
day and night
will never cease.” Genesis 8:22 NIV
1 Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. 2 The fear and dread of you will fall upon all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air, upon every creature that moves along the ground, and upon all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hands. 3 Everything that lives and moves will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything. Genesis 9:1-3 NIV
This passage has been often used to validate our degradation of the land. Dr. Ellen Davis of Duke Divinity counsels us to look further. Humankind (adam) is created from the fertile soil (adamah) and the humbled Noah is charged with its care-taking. But as Ellen points out, anything mankind is given to manage, mankind can also abuse. The beasts and birds and fish have plenty to tremble over.
The Levitical laws are developed to stymie human tendencies toward violence. Complicated rules on how to use the land, to eat, to interact with others. The Sabbatical laws can be seen as early environmentalism. Protecting the fertility of the soil is also a method of ensuing a peaceful life, “because a seed planting people able to remain within their ordained territory had no need to go to war with their neighbors”. (Stoll)
Time goes on and the respect for the land as a loan from God eventually becomes warped into the idea that the land is a “gift” from God to a favored people. A reward so to speak. In the new relationship, posession and intensive use of land, is recognized as the road to wealth, and dominion. The Israelites knew this to be a blessing and a curse. Having escaped from Egypt they knew that being an empire also makes you a target.
What about today? How does this knowledge work for or against us?
In VietNam did the spraying of Agent Orange, a precursor to RoundUp, not only remove the jungle canopy which helped the Viet Cong to avoid detection, but also prevent them from feeding themselves in the future?
In Palestine, is the separation of Palestinians from their fields an intentional means to separate them from their God given power to feed themselves?
Did destroying the Haitian hog herds in the Reagan years, and then replacing them with American style hogs and a requirement to raise them in an industrialized manner, ensure the power structure of American agricultural industries?
Is the BP disaster in the Gulf a voice crying:
“the land is Mine, you are but strangers resident with me“. Leviticus 25:23
Will we listen this time?
Havin’ a Heat Wave
by Ana Grarian on Wed, Jul 7, 2010
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HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
This weekend I have had the luxury of sitting out the heat like an old dog in the relative comfort of my ceiling fan. It’s been in the 90′s hard on the 100 degree mark. I don’t do heat. I wear t-shirts all winter and b*tch because public places keep their thermostats too high.
On the farm I was much more productive. For one thing it didn’t get as hot there. We were at a higher elevation and since we were also at the crest of a ridge, there was always a breeze. Many of our years there we had a pool. My coping mechanism was to work, jump in the pool, work, jump in the pool, work, jump in the pool, you get the picture.
I can also remember filling my boots with cold water at chore time, though mostly I would just milk barefoot in the summer. We had a 30 cow tie stall barn.Nothing like squeezing between two 100+ degree 1200 pound furry animals on a hot summer day.
Of course nothing beats climbing into a second story hay mow and putting away hundreds of scratchy bales of hay or straw. If possible we would put this task off until evening, unless of course a storm was threatening, hot or not you don’t let all that hard work go down the drain with a rain storm.
For the next two days I get to work the hottest part of the day…in an air conditioned store. Ah the luxury. Hopefully tonight I will have the self determination to get some exercise in. Once the sun goes down bicycling creates enough of a breeze to overcome the heat it generates. Last night I darn near dragged my mattress out onto the stairs – only the threat of blinding my neighbors stopped me. It’s supposed to go down into the tolerable 80′s by the weekend with cool sleepable nights. I can’t wait.
I have a friend who farms in Waco, TX. Bethel – you are one hell of a woman -in many, many ways. Here’s a link to her blog. HOT Urban Gardening – indeed!
Show Me the Farm, Man!
by Ana Grarian on Mon, Jul 5, 2010
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HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
On our trip through the Midwest we visited many Community Gardens and Urban “Farms”. (quotations mine) About halfway through the trip I became very frustrated that we weren’t seeing any of what I would label “real farms”. I wrote in my journal
“I am so lonely for farm country. Who would have thought that an agrarian road trip would include so many cities. Will we talk to real farmers and get their perspective on how it came to this? Will we meet those who have successfully beat the storm? We will need farms and farmers growing ethically to fully feed our population. Urban gardening will not be able to do it all.”
I want to make it clear that I fully support the Urban Gardening/Farming movement. Growiing our own food is an empowerment that folks need to prevent us from continuing to blindly follow industrial food production to a path that may ultimately see fit to fill our plates with “Soylent Green” (1) The ability to connect people with the soil that is our life source, and the weather which nurtures the growing food is imperative to the understanding of where/how food becomes available. Physically working in the soil is life affirming in itself, and a pathway to physical and mental health. The additional abilities of Urban Farm/Gardens to build relationships between neighbors, community involvement and hope, are immeasurable.
A young man from West Virginia pointed out to me the official government definition of a farm…….
a farm is defined as any place with any combination of sales, potential sales,
and government payments totaling at least $1,000. (2)
We shared the irony of how that definition can skew the statistics when the government, or industrial ag wants to show how many “small, family, farms” still exist in the US. I also wise-cracked that I probably knew people who were growing that much in “herbs” under a grow light in their basement.
Now I understand that many farmers and ranchers would tell me that my little farm wasn’t a farm “it’s the backyard , little lady”, and I can appreciate that attitude. Still I had hoped to meet some folks who were managing to make their living from a sustainable small farm. I suppose that would be a hard venue to find as most small farms are only making it because someone is working off farm.
As a matter of fact we did visit a lovely little organic farm just outside Maryville TN., Liles Acres Organic Farm (3), a year-round working farm and educational facility, producing eggs, fruit, vegetables & honey, llama & Angora Rabbit yarn, compost and generating (green) solar energy.
Sheri and Russell Liles are indefatigable promoters of healthy living and agriculture. Bubbling over with enthusiasm they showed us around their farm explaiing what they were doing and why. The Liles are also in the forefront of new community gardens being developed at the Highland Presbyterian Church in Maryville, TN. (4) They also are employed off the farm.
Dr. Richard Olson, our guide at the Sustainable and Environmental Studies (SENS) program at Berea College in KY (5) pointed out that in order to provide the nutritional needs of a city the size of Philedelphia (6), it would need considerably more land than the 500 acres currently seen as a goal for garden development.
To think of it another way- If we farmed all of NYC’s Central Park (843 acres), that is not water (150 acres) or forest (136 acres), we could feed 4456 people (557acres * 8 people/acre). That is a far cry from the estimated 1.6 million people living there.
I was impressed to find that in the cities we visited there are a large number of single family homes with lawns that provide the potential for supplementing the family food budget with a significant amount of home grown produce. In the northeast I am accustomed to even small cities where real estate is too “valuable” to not be covered by concrete and macadam.
So yes, my fish out of water, experience in the big city did find me desperate for the fields and woods of home, and we did find some of that further on in our travels. And as much as I wish we could have visited small farmers who are managing to preserve a life style of sustainable family farming, I learned a lot. And like I have learned in my quest to prevent hydrofracking from destroying the environment of rural CNY - we need a coalition of people from all sides of the equation to affect change. The folks from more urban environments have the power of numbers that politicians listen to. If we can pull together we can preserve a way of life and provide a healthier life, for all.
As Wendell Berry says:
“Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
(1) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
(2) In 1975, USDA, the Offi ce of Management and Budget (OMB), and the U.S. Department of Commerce’s U.S. Census Bureau agreed on a definition of a farm that is still in use today. “A farm is currently defined, for statistical purposes, as any place from which $1,000 or more of agricultural goods (crops or livestock) were sold or normally would have been sold during the year under consideration” (Glossary, 2005). USDA’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) also includes government payments as sales. In other words, a farm is defined as any place with any combination of sales, potential sales, and government payments totaling at least $1,000.00 http://www.ers.usda.gov/Publications/EIB49/EIB49b.pdf
(3) http://www.lilesacres.com/
(4) http://www.highlandpresby.org/
(5) Richard Olson , Director of the Sustainability and Environmental Studies Program at Berea College, explores pathways to a sustainable future through his courses in ecological design, environmental justice, and sustainability. He played a key role in the design and operation of the Berea College Ecovillage including an ecological machine wastewater treatment system. He works with students on natural building projects, aquaculture and greenhouse food production systems. Olson is a founding member of the Berea Outpost, a citizens group working to transform the city of Berea into a sustainable community.
http://www.myearthwatchexperience.com/iec/speakers/index.html
(6) http://www.pennsylvaniahorticulturalsociety.org/phlgreen/current-communitygardens.html
Post a comment...Ana Been Trippin’
by Ana Grarian on Tue, Jun 29, 2010
HERD ABOUT IT?
by Ana Grarian
In the last two weeks I have been bombarded by sights and sounds, experiences and conversations that have left my head reeling with pain and relief. As a country girl living alone, in a quiet apartment, in a small tree filled city, the hectic pace of group travel through multiple cities was disorienting. It was also exciting, enlightening and encouraging. Since coming home I have tried to digest my experience and integrate it in some logical fashion with images and stories that have come across my computer.
Many of my readers know that I am constantly asking, “why do they want to move us out of the country?”. More and more I think it is because they don’t want people to see what is being done to this beautiful country we call home. And perhaps, so we become inured to concrete and steel and the industrialization of a landscape.
Several images kept returning to my thoughts this week. The view from a winding mountain road of a mountain top removal coal mine in West Virginia. A similar view of a huge landfill in western New York State. An image from the Rachel Maddow show of the web of gas and oil pipelines off the coast of Louisiana. The defacement of Jasper Wyoming by shale gas drilling. These images are kept out of sight of the general public. If we aren’t confronted by them, we either don’t know, or can pretend we don’t know they exist.
Rural NYS is home to many huge landfill sites where garbage from NYC and even Canada is hauled. In a town near to where I live, a battle was lost to stop the disposal of toxic and radioactive shale drill waste from hydrofracking. This waste is being brought in from Pennsylvania. These landfills when seen from the road, often a small two lane highway that wanders through bucolic farm land and forests, seem almost pristine. There are dirt walls that rise smoothly from road level, often grass covered. The road is always just low enough that you can’t see into the site. What gives it away is the circling of thousands of sea gulls, gated entrances and lots of truck traffic.
Deleware County Electric Cooperative Landfill Gas Project
Similarly when we followed the river valley in West Virginia, on a twisting, narrow, two lane road, what we saw was a clean cut, bulldozer manicured, mountain top. The lagoons and waste piles were out of sight. Out of sight, out of mind? But not leaving the people out of harms way. We could see the coal tram as it wandered directly beside the river. Wendell Berry describes the gut wrenching dismay when he sees the “other side of the mountain top”
http://speakingoffaith.publicradio.org/programs/2010/land-life-poetry/essay_postscript.shtml
Rachel Maddow posted a picture of the intricate web of 25, 000 miles of pipeline and 3600 wells in the Gulf of Mexico. Did you know that was there? Or like me did you envision this monstrous leaking BP oil well as sitting isolated out in the ocean with nothing but pristine ocean surrounding it. How would we know this was there?
Map of oil production in the Gulf of Mexico
from testimony by SkyTruth president John Amos to a Senate panel last year.
The Jonas gas fields in Wyoming and aerial photos of the Allegheny National Forest can inform us of what is in store in the northeastern US when the likes of BP and Cabot Energy get their way.
But I came away with other pictures too. I met a group of people from all over this country, from age 20 to 70+, Pastors and students and teachers and retirees, who care about what is being done to God’s earth and God’s people. I saw folks from all over who are working agriculturally to heal torn cities. To reconnect people with the earth that sustains them, and to heal people through a healing of their landscape.
This wasn’t just city parks with benches to sit on that are dependent on municipal funds to be maintained. These were community food gardens of all kinds, designed to give people a way to reconnect with their food supply, their neighbors, as well as the beauty of the earth. People empowered to tear down the abandoned structures that are emblematic of urban blight, and to use those materials to build a new agrarian, urban landscape that celebrates people and feeds them both nutritionally and mentally.
Folks are growing hope.
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by Ana Grarian on Thu, Sep 2, 2010
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