Sustaining Dialogue on Sustainable Food Systems in NYC

The New York Times has been running a nice series this week wherein the Executive Director of Just Food has been answering readers' questions about all things food-, ag-, and sustainability-related.

I submitted two questions and today, one of my questions (about bees, of course) was answered. Here's the item. Also discussed: community-supported agriculture, food justice, and ferreting out locally grown legumes.

Here is the first set of questions and replies, in which urban chickens, community gardens, and locavore-itude in an urban context are discussed.

Just Food in the New York Times

Spring is here on so many levels. And a welcomed groundswell of attention is being paid to sustainable farming, community-supported agriculture, urban food-growing, and all that good stuff.

We're pleased to see that the Executive Director of Just Food—a NYC-based organization that, among its many other good works, is seeking to get beekeeping legalized in our fair city—is being featured in one of the New York Times' Q&A columns.

So go ahead, Ask About Local Food in New York!

Mood Swings

We've gone from bitterly upset about the new (and unsurprising) report that America's birds are in deep peril (thanks to our collective ecological mental health problem) to exceedingly thrilled by the news that the Obamas are going to plant a vegetable patch on the White House Lawn.
But it gets even better: "A White House carpenter who is a beekeeper will tend two hives for honey,"quoth the New York Times.
To read about one of the groups that advocated tirelessly for this exceedingly good idea, visit eattheview.org.

You can also say a proper thankee for this Good Thing by going hereabouts.

And you can learn some interesting fun facts about the White House, Victory Gardens of the past, ecological activities prior presidents (except for you-know-who) have undertaken, and all that sort of thing by heading over here.
Of course, this doesn't mean we're forgetting about the birds.

Sustaining the Honeybees

Not sure how I missed this article on Sustaining the Honeybees by British bee-advocate Philip Chandler back in October, but better late than never: check it out.

Visit Phil's Barefoot Beekeeper site for more.

Beekeeping Backwards & Looking Forward

Lots to look forward to around here: namely, two packages of bees to be hived this weekend and—next week—the launch of a new series on this blog called "BeekSpeak," featuring interviews with beekeepers around the block and around the globe. My first interviewee is Romanian beekeeper and bee-blogger Gheorge Tamas.

During the interview, Gheorge mentioned a resource I'd never heard about called Principles of Beekeeping Backwards.

It's a challenging and excellent essay by Charles Simon, a writer and self-described "bee-removal expert" in California who died in 2007. I highly recommend the article, which is archived on the resource-rich Beesource website. See also: More Beekeeping Backwards: I Owe a Huge Debt to Varroa.

Top Bar Hive Beekeeping With Corwin Bell & Kelly Simmons

This 1-hour video was shot at the Organic Beekeeping Conference in February 08. In it, the speakers discuss their philosophy of sustainable beekeeping and provide tips for beekeeping using top bar hives.


Many other videos from the Organic Beekeeping Conference are available online through the good graces of Golden Rule Apiary's "Bee Unto Others" website.

Form, Function, & Herman Miller's Honey

I found a smart new site today called Inhabitant (wherein you can read about how office furniture designer Herman Miller got into the honey-making biz). Here's Inhabitant's manifesto:

GREEN DESIGN IS GOOD DESIGN
GOOD DESIGN IS GREEN DESIGN

Inhabitat.com is a weblog devoted to the future of design, tracking the innovations in technology, practices and materials that are pushing architecture and home design towards a smarter and more sustainable future.

With an interest in design innovations that enhance sustainability, efficiency, and interactivity in the home, Inhabitat’s attention is focused on objects and spaces that are eco-friendly, multi-purpose, modular, and/or interactive. We believe that good design balances substance with style. We are frustrated by the fact that a lot of what we see being touted as “good design” in magazines and at stores is all style and no substance. A lot of contemporary design merely imitates the classic Modernist aesthetic without any of the idealistic social agenda that made Modernism such a groundbreaking movement back in the early 20th Century. The flip side to this is that oftentimes real technological innovations - the ones which will eventually change the way we live our lives - are often not packaged into enough of a stylish aesthetic to move beyond niche circles and crossover into mainstream popular taste.

Likewise, we are frustrated at seeing an emerging category called “Green Design” - as if sustainability is somehow seperate from good design in general. We believe that all design should be inherently “Green”. Good design is not about color, style or trends - but instead about thoughtfully considering the user, the experience, the social context and the impact of an object on the surrounding environment. No design can be considered good design unless it at least attempts to address some of these concerns.

We believe in the original modernist ideology that form and function are intertwined in design. Style and substance are not mutually exclusive, and Inhabitat is here to prove it!

Clorox Buys Burt's Bees—The Juicy Backstory

“The magic of living life for me is, and always has been, the magic of living on the land, not in the magic of money.”—Burt Shavitz, co-founder of Burt's Bees

I've always wanted to know the story behind Burt's Bees, whose lip balms have been close companions of mine over many a dry and windy season.
It's been impossible not to notice the company's meteoric expansion over the past couple of years; whereas once the product was found mainly in health food stores and food coops, it now seems that kiosks and endcaps featuring Burt's Bees products are springing up everywhere, from large grocery store chains like Hannafords and Whole Foods to fancy cosmetics vendors in midtown Manhattan. All this has made me wonder who that bearded man on the Burt's Bees package really is and what lies behind the exponential growth of this brand. (Which, by the way, delivers an excellent product.) I've also wondered about the beekeeping practices utilized at Burt's Bees, which emphasizes the idea of "all-natural" in its branding strategy.

Beekeeping practices are not the main subject of the fascinating New York Times article about Burt's Bees that appeared this weekend, but in the article you will learn:

* That all the beeswax used in Burt's Bees products comes from Ethiopia;

* Plenty of (semi-)juicy gossip about the company's co-founders;

* Details of the rather amazing saga of the company's recent purchase by Clorox for a whopping $913 million;

* That Burt Shavitz lives (by choice) in a modestly renovated turkey coop;

* The range of sustainable practices undertaken by Burt's Bees;

* and much, much more.

The article provides an intriguing glimpse into the odd bedfellows coming into being as large corporations seek to "shack up" with green businesses that offer impressive bottom lines and, potentially, a green-hued halo effect for even the most eco-hostile corporation. Only time will tell if Clorox will make good on its promise to embrace some of Burt's Bees earth-friendly practices, or whether this is just another instance of bleaching the green out of Green.

Thoughts for the New Year

I've just started E.O. Wilson's new book, The Creation, an urgent plea from a Pulitzer Prize-winning biologist to protect biodiversity by finding common ground between the "science community" and the "religious community" in order to halt the biological holocaust before it is too late. It's now or never, folks, and Wilson makes the case in potent terms.

The book is written in the form of a letter to a pastor, illuminating the intertwingular zone where spiritual belief, respect for the natural world, and science connect. Some passages of interest from the first few pages:

"According to archaeological evidence, we strayed from Nature with the beginning of civilization roughly ten thousand years ago. That quantum leap beguiled us with an illusion of freedom from the world that has given us birth. It nourished the belief that the human spirit can be molded into something new to fit changes in the environment and culture, and as a result the timetables of history desynchronized. A wiser intelligence might now truthfully say of us at this point: here is a chimera, a new and very odd species come shambling into our universe, a mix of Stone Age emotion, medieval self-image, and godlike technology. The combination makes the species unresponsive to the forces that count most for its own long-term survival."

***

"Even if the rest of life is counted of no value beyond the satisfaction of human bodily needs, the obliteration of Nature is a dangerous strategy. For one thing, we have become a species specialized to eat the seeds of four kinds of grass—wheat, rice, corn, and millet. If these fail, from disease or climate change, we too shall fail. Some fifty thousand wild plant species (many of which face extinction) offer alternative food sources. If one insists on being thoroughly practical about the matter, allowing these and rest of the wild species to exist should be considered part of a portfolio of long-term investment. Even the most recalcitrant people must come to view conservation as simple prudence in the management of Earth's natural economy. Yet few have begun to think that way at all."

***

"Granted, many people seem content to live entirely within the synthetic ecosystems. But so are domestic animals content, even in the grotesquely abnormal habitats in which we rear them. This in my mind is a perversion. It is not the nature of human beings to be cattle in glorified feedlots. Every person deserves the option to travel easily in and out of the complex and primal world that gave us birth. We need freedom to roam across land owned by no one but protected by all, whose unchanging horizon is the same that bounded the world of our millennial ancestors. Only in what remains of Eden, teeming with life forms independent of us, is it possible to experience the kind of wonder that shaped the human psyche at its birth."


—E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth

Listen to an interview with Wilson on NPR or check out this televised interview on PBS's Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.

The Vanishing of the Bees

This is a trailer for an upcoming documentary feature film called The Vanishing of the Bees.

more on mountains

A few days ago, we discussed the insane practice of mountaintop removal. It's an unforgivable form of true ecoterrorism being actively promoted, supported, and enabled by, you guessed it, our current "administration."

The letters in the Times this week are so eloquent on the topic at hand, I felt the need to share them here.

Thoughts On Sustainability

I came upon a beautifully written treatise on sustainable beekeeping last evening. The author, Phil Chandler, articulates better than I ever could some of the thinking behind beekeeping off the chemical grid, as it were. If you're thinking about taking up beekeeping, or interested in understanding the context for the current honeybee crisis, I highly recommend it.

Commercial and mainstream beekeeping is pumping bees full of antibiotics and chemicals, essentially breeding weaker bees with no chance of developing natural resistance to pests and diseases. This growing weakness is, of course, met with more chemicals and man-made "solutions" that are lucrative for certain humans and devastating for bees, our environment, and our already corrupted relationship to our brethren in the natural world.

In addition, our pollination practices undermine bees' nutritional needs, forcing them to collect monolithic nectar sources by treating them as pollination machines. One illustration: the underbrush of almond orchards is assiduously mowed to prevent other blossoms from "distracting" the bees from their (forcibly) assigned task, meaning that they have no choice but to collect nectar and pollen from a single plant: almond. In nature, bees visit a diversity of blossoms to ensure a rich variety of nutritional inputs.

These are just a couple of quick illustrations of how we're screwing, and screwing up, the bees.

There are alternatives, though you'd never, ever know it from reading the beekeeping books out there. It's a bit like the myth that organic farming is somehow less efficient or productive than dousing our food supply with chemicals, trashing the health of the topsoil, and wrecking the ecosystem to "manufacture" bright and pretty (and pretty tasteless) tomatoes, strawberries, or watermelons, in and out of season. There's a new report showing that organic farming more than holds its own against conventional farming practices. It's worth a look.