School lunches

School lunches have become a hot issue in the last few years; celebrity chefs in both England and America have protested the unhealthy, processed meals and pushed for reforms. That’s a great thing – but even better, why not show children how to make their own food?

A number of teachers around the world have found great success doing just that. Zenobia Barlow, director of the Center for Ecological Literacy in the U.S., helped a school turn its garden into an allotment. In doing so, the school has turned almost every class into a field trip, and every school dinner into a nutritious, organically-homegrown feast.

School gardens, or field trips to existing allotments, accomplish many things at once. They show children where meals come from – this farmer, this field, as opposed to a plastic package. They demonstrate that they have the power to create, and that negligence has consequences, that some things cannot be hurried or improved upon.

They create a living laboratory of biology, chemistry and economics; holding a fat worm makes a lesson real to a child in a way that no video can. Gardens also create exercise and entertainment for children who have been sitting behind desks for hours.

Time spent with nature is a vital part of growing up, and one that fewer young people experience as the countryside is built up and they spend more of their time watching television. One recent study suggested that the recent rise of problems like attention-deficit disorder is due to “nature-deficit disorder,” the lack of natural stimulation – climbing trees, jumping over streams -- in children’s lives.

Perhaps most of all, a garden makes the best food around. Nutritionists have shown that vegetables lose vitamins and taste from the moment they are picked, and gardens provide children with healthy food much of the year. Whether you are minding children, teaching, or just parenting, consider making gardening a part of your child’s daily education.

One of my daughter's favourite spots

You can't see it from this angle, but the roots are an exposed tangle on the lake side as well, leaving sheltered pockets of water where my girl and her friends can look at tiny fish, and benches for them to sit and feed the ducks.

Heilewelt

I am trying to coax my daughter into learning German, her mother and grandmother's native tongue, but as I am not fluent, my German is at about the same level as that of the four-year-old. Ironically, she is now coming home using Gaelic phrases, and I have to start all over again.

Anyway, I've been reading German books to her as long as I've read English books, and she enjoys them just as much. Occasionally one of them will show a more Continental attitude towards bodily functions; for example, one of her favourite books is called "Der Kleine Maulwurf, Der Wissen Wolte, auf dem Kopf gemacht hat," or "The Little Mole who wants to know who pooed on his head." In the story, an irate mole who has been defecated upon wants to know what animal did it, so he goes to different species and learns about what their poo is like.

As most Americans would, I found this a little shocking at first, but ... well, why not? Kids are fascinated by poo anyway, and if we are to live with animals, she will need to know these things.

Our favourite books, though, are a series that have no words at all, but show scenes of a German village in different seasons. The pictures are rich with the detail that children love to discover and talk about -- windmills, a train station, streets covered with pedestrians and bicycles, nearby lakes and farms. It looks only slightly idealized from the Germany I have seen, and my wife says her country has a long tradition of such scenes, called "Heilewelt," meaning "a healthy world."

I love these children's illustrations for another reason, though -- they are happy, wholesome images of a post-peak world. I doubt the artists had that in mind, but I know two artists who did -- my acquaintances Ken and Roberta Avidor sketched a fantasy town they called Illichville, after the priest and Green pioneer Ivan Illich, in order to help people imagine a community without fossil fuels. I'm using one image here, but do check out the whole world they've created on their site.

In an article I wrote for the American Conservative, I used the metaphor of "The Andy Griffith Show," an old-fashioned place where people turn to a pharmacist that knows them instead of going to Wal-Mart, where instead of sitting around the television in the evenings, people play the guitar on the porch and sing together.

We have heard the dire warnings about what the Long Emergency will bring, but we also need to remember how good our lives could be in a world with less cheap energy. It's why I try to combine crisis news and household tips with images of a more traditional world, why this blog is called "Restoring Mayberry." Our ideal communities will differ in detail, but I suspect they will resemble each other in broad strokes, and I would like to see us fill our lives with such images and stories, something to hold in our minds if we are to begin creating it together.

Carbury Castle

A friend of mine from America visited a few years ago, when we were still new to the area, and wanted to see the head of the River Boyne. We drove all over the tiny capillaries of Irish back roads, triangulating the source of the river, and along the way we came upon Carbury Castle.

Eventually we found a nearby manor, on whose grounds, we were told, the river began. We knocked on the giant door and were greeted by an elderly gentleman, who had lived there his entire life and was the last of his lineage. He was blind now, we realized, but could point in the right direction, and we stayed for a while to talk to him about the history of the place.

He told us about his boyhood there in the Edwardian era -- at 86, he was actually older than the independent nation of Ireland -- when he and other boys rolled hoops and held picnics on the hillsides. He told us about the Normans who first built Carbury Castle, and the warlords who ruled the area in medieval times -- one, he said, invited all the local lords to a feast and killed them in treachery, as in the opening of Braveheart.

We followed his finger to the place where the Boyne began -- a river named after the goddess Boyne, often depicted standing in water. My friend and I came upon it and she promptly fell in, standing knee-deep in the spring.

The food pantry

Most of you know about my group, FADA. We started around the same time as the similar and better-known Transition Towns was forming a little south of us in Kinsale, although neither of us knew about the other at the time.

We have a lot of projects planned for the coming year -- we hope to build a new community garden in the middle of town, we want to get more people to audit their homes' use of energy, and we plan to speak to new groups of teenagers. We also want to enlist the teens' aid in interviewing the elderly people around the area, to help them learn more about how to live in a low-energy world.

One important project we hope to start soon, though, is an emergency food project for our villages -- buying food and storing it for ourselves and neighbours for when whatever happens happens. I worked out a year's food storage plan for my own family some time ago, and here's what I came up with -- the more members we have, the more will have to multiply this. I was using an American site for prices at the time, so prices are in dollars -- of course for us they will be in euros. My references to "Mormons" are from the LDS food calculator site, which I don't completely agree with but which is useful.

There are many limitations to this list -- it assumes we will have a manual grinder to grind the wheatberries (working on that), it does not take into account people who are intolerant of foods like beans, and it neglects things like spices that make food last longer and are more palatable.

It is weighted on the side of starches and proteins, not because we expect to eat just these -- people are already too heavy, if you will, in these areas -- but because we would hope to have many greens all around us most of the year. It does not have much in the way of meat for several reasons - meat is not ideal for long-term storage, some people won't eat it, we eat too much of it as it is, other foods do equally well for protein, and if we must eat meat or fish, better to have it fresh.

Most importantly, perhaps, it does not include seeds. As my wife pointed out the other day, if anything suddenly shut down the economy or transportation, we could have diffficulty getting seeds. Many seeds need to be grown in a monoculture of similar plants -- cruciferous vegetables, she said, are difficult to seed -- and require some agricultural infrastructure.

Write me and tell me what you think of this. What plans have you made with your neighbours? Is there anything we are missing?

ONE YEAR FOR A FAMILY OF FOUR:

STAPLES

Wheat berries (Manual grinder to follow soon)
Shelf life – 20+ years
Mormons recommend 525 lb. wheat, 87 lb. flour
500 lb. wheat - $230 ($23 for 50 lbs at Walton Feed, www.waltonfeed.com/cart/all.html)
(Honeyville Grain - - $708.00, Bulk Foods - $1,178)

Corn
Shelf life – 8-12 years
Mormons recommend 87 pounds
Cornmeal – 100 lbs from Walton Feed - $30.00

Oats
(Steel Cut) Shelf Life – 30 years (?)
Mormons recommend 87 pounds
100 pounds, $104.00
http://store.honeyvillegrain.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=360
Groats (organic) – 50 lb. - $22.85
100 lb = $45.70
http://waltonfeed.com/cart/all.html#J1

Rice
Shelf Life – brown rice six years, white rice eight to 10 years.
Mormons recommend 175 pounds
25 lbs Long White Rice - $16.50 from Walton Feed
100 lb = $66.00

Barley
50 lb. - $20.40

Quinoa
45 lb - $88.00

Pasta
Shelf Life – 20 years
Mormons recommend 87 pounds
Walton Feed:
20 lbs white spaghetti - $18.00
20 lbs whole wheat - $18.20
80 lbs = $90.00

SO FAR – 570.00

PROTEIN

Dry Milk
Shelf life – 20 years
Mormons recommend 210 lbs.
50 lbs - $115.95

Soy Mince (In American, Textured Vegetable Protein, or TVP)
Shelf life – 15-20 years
Not on Mormon list, but very important.
50 lbs - $93.95
www.bulkfoods.com

Beans, Dry
Shelf life – estimated eight to 10 years.
Mormons recommend 105 lbs “beans,” 16 lbs “lima beans,” 35 lbs “soy beans,” 16 lbs split peas, 16 lbs lentils.
Kidneys – 25 lbs = $23.80
Blackeyes – 25 lbs = $26.25
Black Turtles – 25 lbs = $23.35
Great Northern – 25 lbs = $22.00
Lima Beans – 25 lbs = $23.75
Soy Beans – 25 lbs = $32.00
Mung – 25 lbs = $28.90
Split peas - 25 lbs = $34.00 - www.bulkfoods.com
Green lentils - 25 lb - $16.55
All others Walton Feed

PROTEIN TOTAL = $440.50

Sugar
Shelf Life – two years?
Mormons recommend 140 lbs sugar, 10 lbs honey, 10 lbs brown sugar, four lbs molasses, 10 lbs corn syrup, 10 lbs jams, four lbs gelatin and 21 lbs “powdered fruit drink.” We, however, hope to have our own bees and make our own jams.
Say 20lb. sugar, one lb brown sugar, one lb. molasses, one lb. corn syrup, one lb. gelatin.
White sugar, 25 lbs = $16.25
www.bulkfoods.com

Evaporated milk
Shelf life -

Baking Powder
Shelf life – indefinite
50 lbs = $54.44
www.bulkfoods.com

Cream of Tartar
Shelf life – indefinite
Five lbs - $29.14
www.bulkfoods.com

Yeast
Shelf life – two years
Five lbs = $17.42
www.bulkfoods.com

Vegetarian bouillon powder
Five lbs - $20.88
www.bulkfoods.com

Salt
25 lb - $5.47
www.usaemergencysupply.com/food_storage

Vinegar, White
One gallon = $1.99
www.grecianimports.com/pricelist.doc

+ SPICES

SIX-MONTH STORAGE:
Tea
Coffee
Nuts
Oil
Vitamins

MORE RESOURCES:
http://survivalacres.com/information/shelflife.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/videos/2007/0208-keeping_food_for_years.htm
http://msnbc.com/onair/nbc/dateline/food/shelf.asp
www.usaemergencysupply.com/food_storage
http://www.survival-center.com/foodfaq/

The past and the future

I can't think of anything to say about the inauguration that has not been said endlessly, so instead I will reprint this early 20th-century photo of Lucan, just outside Dublin.

Notice that, while people mostly used horse carts and carriages, there were also electric rail lines through town, that could swiftly (for the time) take one across the country or the city.

I am researching lost tram (streetcar) lines, and will write more about that soon, but for now I will simply say this: this intersection looks much the same today, but with the narrow roads clogged with commuter traffic. You would never see this road as open -- or as quiet, I'm sure -- as it was then, nor could children play near the road today, nor would the bloodstream of the inhabitants be filled with various lead compounds, nor had the climate begun to change severely.

Yet even if these double-decker trams ran at only 30 clicks an hour -- a pace most of us find glacial today -- they would get you to your destination faster than a modern traffic jam through the same town.

If we do this right, this may also be a picture of fifty or a hundred years from now.

Things my four-year-old knows

My daughter is into quizzes now, so when we play together, she asks me to be the quizmaster and she and her stuffed animals are the contestants. Things she knows:

Comfrey is good for a headache.

Puffins say “moo.”

Apples come from white flowers.

Gorillas are smart and gentle but can’t talk.

You can make cloth out of nettles.

The red bricks in the fields are peat, which you burn to keep warm, and which were plants back when there were elephants here.

Red flowers are usually pollinated by birds, because birds like red, and they usually don’t have a smell, because most birds can’t smell much.

Sometimes she went into more detail – answering a question that bees help flowers have babies, she said, “We need to make sure bees are okay, because if they get sick there will be no one to take care of the flowers, and if the flowers goed away, all the girls in the world will be sad because no one will give them flowers anymore.”
__________________________________

Other times I didn’t quite know how to respond: When I asked her, “what are the only mammals that can fly?” she responded confidently, “Fairies.”
__________________________________

As I kissed her goodnight, she asked, “Papa, how do you make electricity?”

Usually by turning magnets really fast, I said. It’s electricity that pulls magnets together or pushes them apart.

“Could we try it tomorrow?”

I don’t know if your hippo magnet on the fridge is enough, I said – you would need big ones like on a windmill.

“Can we make electricity with a windmill?” she said.

When you are a little older, I said, I expect that you and I will make ourselves a windmill together.

"I love you, Papa."

Trail near our home

Heroes

Originally published April 20, 2005 in Pulse magazine.

September 11 cast a deep shadow over America, not only from the event itself but for the U.S. government's subsequent actions, made in the name of the dead. None of those killed are more revered than the police officers, paramedics and firefighters -- the “first responders” -- who ran into the collapsing buildings.

It would surprise many Americans, then, that a group of 9-11 first responders are calling for an end to the federal government's occcupation of Iraq, urging that we instead work with the rest of the world to track down terrorists and bring them to justice. The group, First Responders Against War, has not only tried to spread their message in the United States, but has made common cause with its counterparts in Afghanistan and Iraq.

In his new documentary, Worlds Apart: 9-11 First Responders Against War filmmaker Tom Jackson talks to dozens of members of this group about the terrorist attacks, their political awakening and the fire they have drawn from elite groups. Jackson has been traveling the United States showing his film, and will speak before a showing in St. Paul Thursday.

“I initially talked with about 30 first responders for the film,” Jackson said. “But after I started showing it, a funny thing happened. I was showing it in New York, and one guy said he knew a paramedic who helped the victims of 9-11 who feels the same way, and she got me in touch with other people, so they just keep growing. Eventually I may have to make a longer update of the movie.”

The group was formed in 2002 by Megan Bartlett, who was an Emergency Medical Technician during 9-11. One of the first things Bartlett did was to contact first responders in Afghanistan, after the Bush administration had ordered that country bombed and invaded.

Over time, Bartlett and others began to communicate with first responders there, and journeyed to Afghanistan to meet some of them later that year. She informed Jackson, whose previous documentary she had seen, and he asked to accompany them.

While the group’s message is one of nonviolence, Jackson said they are not passive in the face of terrorism.

“One of the firefighters puts this in pretty basic terms,” Jackson said. “He said that if you want to stop terrorism, you bring the terrorists to justice and you eliminate the root causes of terrorism. When someone is killed, the detectives try to find a motive, which helps them find the killer. They don’t imagine searching for a motive would excuse the actions of the murderer. Terrorism has causes. We can find them and deal with them, and that will help us prevent them in the future.”

Jackson had journeyed to Iraq twice in 2000 with the human-rights group Voices in the Wilderness, witnessing firsthand the results of the sanctions. Upon his return, he quit his job as a technical writer and made his footage into a documentary, Greetings from Missile Street.

He is promoting his latest film by taking it on the road, showing it to religious and human-rights groups across America. About half the audiences are at universities, he said, which usually results in a lively debate. Other times, he said, he is showing it to activist groups, which he admits is “preaching to the choir.”

“But that’s not all bad,” he said. “They are activist groups, they promote each other, and here is this great new activist group no one knew existed.”

What should be front-page headlines

Reprinted with permission from David Cook of Chattanooga, Tennessee.

Just after midnight on December 22, our own levees broke, and a man-made pond containing toxic ash - essentially the leftovers from the nearby coal-burning power plant - burst its walls, and more than one billion gallons of coal ash spilled into the Tennessee River and its tributaries.

The spill is 40 times larger than the Exxon Valdez disaster in Alaska, and one of the greatest environmental disasters in our nation's history. Imagine a river nearby to where you live: healthy, full of aquatic life, essential to community, ecology and economy. Now imagine that same body of water now filled with a grey-black sludge almost volcanic in proportion and density, full of toxins and poisons.

So we need your help here in eastern Tennessee.

Environmentalists on the ground here are calling it an "Un-Natural Disaster.'' The Kingston coal power plant is one of the many energy plants owned and operated by the governmental agency known as the Tennessee Valley Authority. Created in the Roosevelt years as a source of employment and power for legions of poor folks in Appalachia, TVA continues to burn coal as a source of energy, and in the process, must dispose of the ash waste through retention ponds, not unlike aqua-landfills. A few years ago, studies suggested the Kingston retention pond needed updates, the most effective also being the most costly. TVA settled for the cheaper way out.

And then December 22, when the walls burst and the pond no longer was able to hold back the black ash.

And now, folks in eastern Tennessee are realizing with damning clarity what environmentalists have been saying for decades: there is no such thing as clean coal.

"It is clear that, in its early response, TVA prioritized public relations over public health and has largely been overwhelmed by the size of this spill, which appears to be the largest industrial spill in our nation's history,'' testified Stephen Smith, executive direction of Southern Alliance for Clean Energy, as he appeared before the US Senate last week. "It is outrageous that the landfills holding our household garbage are more regulated than the pits holding this toxic coal sludge.''

Ash waste contains a witch's brew of contaminants: arsenic, lead, selenium, mercury, cadmium, chromium, boron, thallium and molybdenum. With this in mind, activists on the ground are asking TVA a host of questions that continue to go unanswered, foremost among them: why are independent agencies and volunteer groups doing more work to safeguard the people than you?

Why is a small, volunteer led group called United Mountain Defense Fund having to raise money to provide heavy metal screening for folks impacted by the disaster? Why is TVA not paying for this?

Why is UMD passing out more bottled water than TVA?

Why did the first water samples released to the public come from UMD and another watchdog group Appalachian Voices, and not from TVA? Incidentally, the Appalachian Voices samples found "concentrations of eight toxic chemicals range from twice to 300 times higher than drinking water limits.''

So here in east Tennessee, we need your help. We need you to get the word out that there is no such thing as clean coal. We need the rest of the nation to hear that a spill - 40 times larger than the Valdez wreck - has destroyed the waters and communities around Kingston, TN, and that it could happen again. We need your help to support the workers on the ground whose blood, sweat and tears are keeping these communities together. Matt Landon, the full-time volunteer for United Mountain Defense, is running on empty and needs funds. You can help by visiting unitedmountaindefense.org.

And we need you to hear this story, so that coal is no longer considered clean, and so that the old lie that says humans are to subdue and conquer, to property-own and pollute, no longer is able to spill out its poison into the rivers and streams and land and bodies of people everywhere.

David Cook lives, writes, teaches and drinks water in Chattanooga, TN, downriver from Kingston. He can be reached at dcook7@gmail.com. More importantly, donations to United Mountain Defense can be made at www.unitedmountaindefense.org and their address: United Mountain Defense, PO Box 20363, Knoxville, TN, 37920.

Photos taken by me from the United Mountian Defense web site. Top photo: Fern Lake, Tennessee. Bottom photo: After the deluge.

Landing, bailing and crashing

In his column – one of the few I read every day – the admirable Rod Dreher links to this Wall Street Journal article, and notes that the U.S. may go the way of the British Empire. I was going to post a comment, but my writing became too long for that, so I will expand here.

I am a patriot – if an expatriate one – and I don’t want my country to collapse, but there are worse options than going the way of the British.

U.S. government and business communities have made some bad choices. Money and investment have become ever-further removed from the realm of tangible infrastructure. The government has become the world’s largest importer of energy in exchange for accumulating the world’s largest debt, while sinking to the bottom of the West in health care, education and services. The United States government currently runs hundreds of overseas bases and spends more on the military than the other 194 countries of the world combined, and while many Americans have died keeping the government in that position, it has not made us a richer or better people. U.S. residents’ food increasingly comes from vast centralized businesses and their goods from the Third World, circulating in fleets of trucks that rumble past vacant lots and vacant factories.

Before I left my home country, long before the Wall Street turbulence, I saw a society increasingly strained and fragile: towns with crumbling buildings and boarded-up storefronts, friends and relations working several jobs to get by. That said, the country is still fabulously wealthy compared to most populations in most eras, many Americans are decent and intelligent, the country has been through worse, and collapse – in the Zombie Apocalypse sense -- is not inevitable.

The United States will not remain the world’s dominant military force when the sun goes nova a few billion years from now, so at some point we will “fall,” in the same way that a plane, held aloft by a massive infusion of temporary power, must fall. The stratosphere is not that iron’s natural home. We are already falling fast, but there might be other options than crashing.

The more mainstream environmentalists and peak oil activists are lobbying governments and corporations to take the massive initiatives needed to avert an energy and ecological collapse -- in other words, to land the plane. Many in the Green movement -- crunchy cons, "back-to-the-landers," the original Green Party, people taking the "Benedict Option," whatever you call them -- are taking parachutes and giving them to their fellow passengers. In our case -- and here's where the plane metaphor breaks down -- we need both, and will benefit from a combination.

Personally, I wouldn’t mind the U.S. “fall” in the way that British empire has since the Second World War – letting go of its colonies, often gradually and peacefully, leaving them largely prosperous and amicable. Their empire continued undeterred after my own country’s rebellion in the 1700s, but I wonder if they learned a great deal from the Irish rebellion, and especially from Gandhi’s courteously iron resistance. That may explain the way they dealt with Cyprus, South Africa, Rhodesia, the Carribbean, Canada, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand.

These countries all have vastly different circumstances and histories, of course, but they tend to be roughly better off than neighbours of comparable population and history -- even troubled Zimbabwe has a literacy rate of 90 percent, which according to this might be better than the U.S. Many British perceive their country to be a better place now, and speak of the loss of their empire with gentle humour rather than bitterness.

My fear is that the country will crash as Spain did after briefly, if only theoretically, owning virtually the entire planet. Spain clung to its fortresses and oppressed populations, straining its capacities, running up debts, and losing its possessions one by one after centuries of bloodshed, until it was among the poorest of Western nations. Much of the population of the Western Hemisphere was left with a legacy of poverty and violence, speaking Spanish and carrying the Y-chromosomes of the tiny country that they look back on with rancour.

Pretending

Sorry for the light posting -- I've been laid up with the flu.

One recent night, my daughter proposed that we -- I am not making this up -- pretend to be continental landmasses and call each other on the phone.

"Hello, Africa? Are you there?" she said into her pinky finger. Yes, who is this? I said.

"This is India -- how are you doing today, Africa?" she said. I'm fine, I said -- a little ticklish from the elephants and zebras walking on me.

"I have hot weather today, and I have elephants too, and women who wear bindis!" she said. And so on.

She is just nine different kinds of awesome.

Dublin at dawn

Coal

In the early 1970s, country singer John Prine wrote one of my favourite songs, "Paradise," about a boyhood in the Appalachian Mountains -- and, years later, finding that the mountains had been destroyed.

It wasn't fiction. The practice has never received much media attention in the last four decades, but coal companies have destroyed some of oldest mountains in the world in one of America's two great ranges. I don't mean they stripped the trees off the mountain slopes. I mean some of the mountains themselves are now gone and the land flat.

For a hundred years, companies mined coal by sending men down dangerous shafts, resulting in labour battles so fierce they involved periodic Wild-West gunfights. In the 1970s they discovered a quicker way – literally blasting away mountains and, with “the world’s largest shovel,” as Prine's song put it, pushing the rubble into the once-forested valleys.

According to Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us, more than 1,000 miles of mountain streams -- the distance from New York to Chicago and Ireland to Africa -- have now been buried under the rubble, and will be deeply contaminated by the time they bubble up again.

You would think one of America’s two great mountain ranges would be somewhat protected, or that there would be some fuss about destroying so many of them, but this act – one of the most extreme ever committed by our species – rarely receives any media attention.

Late last year, Tennessee builder Howard Switzer wrote in a prophetic letter to the Knoxville newspaper, “[m]any might think this is the price we must pay to keep lights on in the U.S., but actually the coal from under those mountain tops is going mostly to China."

“That’s right, we are allowing the destruction of our mountains so that China can pollute its air,” said the longtime conservationist, who specializes in building homes out of straw bales.

Switzer ran for governor of Tennessee last election as a third-party candidate, but was unable to generate much attention to this issue. Then this happened:

The sludge that ripped eight homes off their foundations was referred to as ash, but it is not the wood ash that is good for the soil when dug in. It is the chemical remains of mining, filled with lead, arsenic and thallium – extremely poisonous elements banned from most uses. You can remember them by the murder mystery in which they were used as a poison (Thallium: Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse. Arsenic: Arsenic and Old Lace).

Initial reports -- which, judging from Internet sites, seemed to receive scant coverage in America -- stated that 1.8 million cubic yards of this Oobleck flooded over what used to be forest. The news turned out to be wrong – it was three times that. A billion gallons. The largest such disaster in U.S. history. According to the journalists reaching for visual aids, that is enough ash to fill 450,000 dump trucks. So, a lot.

According to the Louisville Courier-Journal, “[t]he sludge has flowed into the Emory River, a tributary of the Tennessee River, which provides drinking water to millions of people downstream in Tennessee, Alabama and Kentucky.” Thankfully, poison levels have not gone very high for people downstream, and I wonder how many unsung heroes at the filtration plant really deserve a vacation at this point.

I found two passages particularly revealing. First, according to the Associated Press: “This is not the first time that the coal ash containment ponds have breached at the Kingston Fossil plant. There have been two in recent years, one in 2003 and in 2006. Danny Collins, the manager of the Rockwood Municipal Airport, said that he'd noticed a green ooze coming from the retention wall of the waste pond for the last year and a half.”

And this one from the Louisville Courier: “The spill has reignited the national debate over whether federal standards should be established to store and dispose of the waste left from burning coal.” At present, there are no federal rules for storing and disposing this toxic waste.

After the event Switzer wrote another letter to list-serves far and wide, saying that: “Coal kills … It is estimated that over 64 million Americans breathe air that has so much particle pollution that it puts their health at risk ... Besides the microscopic particles linked to asthma and heart disease there are other health affects as well, not to mention the forest killing acid rain. Coal-fired power plants are the largest single man-made source of mercury pollution in the U.S., the largest contributor of hazardous air pollutants overall ... Coal kills far more people than terrorism."

Switzer didn’t note the big problem with coal – there is enough of it to tip the climate, rapidly spreading deserts across the world. Coal is dangerous not only because there is so much more of it, but because it is much less efficient than oil or gas, so much more of it must be mined and burned to release the same amount of energy. As oil grows scarce, nations will be tempted to turn to coal, which would stretch our fossil-fuel credit a little longer at a much higher interest rate.

How can I write about this on the Internet, when the electricity you and I are using may have come from coal? Because we can get electricity from many sources, and turning vast areas of the Earth into desert is not necessary to post on the Internet. Because none of us ever got to vote where our power comes from --- most of us are never told, and if we knew, would vote differently. Because we must talk to each other as well, or nothing will happen.

Because I, and many other people, are cutting our usage and realizing how much can go -- and by trimming the waste now, we can make sure we can blog with little impact, just as by trimming the hundreds of kilos of junk mail, we can make sure there are enough trees left to enjoy a good book.

Top photo: Appalachian stream, public domain. Bottom photo: Courtesy of Associated Press.

Three days

We have been caught up in Christmas obligations, building and other things, and that's my excuse for blogging being light this month. For now, here are three days in the life of my daughter:

Day 1, 14:00 hours:
"Papa, you are my favourite and my best."

Day 1, 20:20:
"I wish I didn't have a Papa!"

Day 2, 1930:
"Papa, I want to be just like you when I grow up!"

Day 2, 21:30:
"Papa, I will never be your friend again!"

Day 3:
"Papa, you are my favourite person ever."