Farmers’ market season is in full swing here in the Northeast. And for this devotee, the season of fresh local produce can never come soon enough.

This is the season I long for throughout the barren winters when supermarket produce trucked and flown in from fields far from the Hudson Valley leaves my cooking juices as well as my taste buds in the doldrums. Put simply, farmers’ market season reawakens my interest in food. Now that the season is here it’s possible to indulge in exquisite meals in which the starring role can be taken by the simplest of preparation methods – peeling, cutting, and tossing with a bit of fruity olive oil and some freshly picked herbs from the garden.

Lest anyone try to convince you differently, the fact is that taste, freshness, and healthiness are inexorably linked. At my local farmers’ market I almost exclusively buy organically grown produce. Although there are skeptics who have been known to deny the efficacy of my taste buds, I swear by my ability to taste the residue of pesticides even after thoroughly washing and peeling conventionally grown fruits and vegetables.

But taste is just the beginning of why health-conscious consumers should be thinking about whether to purchase conventionally grown produce or make the slightly higher investment during your farmers’ market season to purchase organically grown produce.

The Environmental Working Group (EWG), a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to protecting human health and the environment, provides sobering, science-based research that can help families make smart choices about the food we purchase and consume.

This year when EWG conducted their annual analysis of U.S. Department of Agriculture data, they found that nearly 70 percent of the samples USDA tested of the 48 types of conventionally grown produce were contaminated with the residues of one or more pesticides. Researchers at USDA found an astounding total of 178 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products on the thousands of samples analyzed.

You read that last sentence correctly. Let me repeat: 178 different pesticides and pesticide breakdown products were found.

One of the questions consumers should be asking is what are the health effects of the astounding number of chemicals we’re ingesting via our food supply? The truth is that contrary to popular belief, it’s been proven that pesticide residues remain on fruits and vegetables even after they’re washed and, in some cases, even when they’re peeled.

What does that contamination mean for the consumer?

The pesticide and chemical industry have been telling the public for years that pesticides, growth hormones, and antibiotics in produce, in dairy products, and in meat, fish, and poultry are “nothing to worry about.”  If that false reassurance reminds you of another industry that promised their products would do no harm you wouldn’t be far off the mark. We should never forget the years of promises and lies broadcast by the tobacco industry.

The question is: Who should consumers believe when looking for answers about the safety of ingesting pesticides? The independent doctors and scientists or the industry that profits from agribusiness’s addiction to pesticides, growth hormones, and antibiotics?

Here’s Dr. Philip Landrigan, Dean of Global Health and Director of the Children’s Environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai School of Medicine, sharing the health industry’s conclusions about pesticide exposure in the most vulnerable – our children.

Even low levels of pesticide exposure can be harmful to infants, babies and young children, so when possible, parents and caregivers should take steps to lower children’s exposures to pesticides while still feeding them diets rich in healthy fruits and vegetables.

If you’re looking for guidance on which conventionally grown fruits and vegetables to avoid in terms of pesticide residues and help with making informed decisions about getting the most healthy “bang for your buck” when making decisions about purchasing organically grown produce, look no further than the Environmental Working Group’s annual scorecards. They’re called the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen.

The Dirty Dozen

• Strawberries
• Spinach
• Nectarines
• Apples
• Peaches
• Pears
• Cherries
• Grapes
• Celery
• Tomatoes
• Sweet Bell Peppers
• Potatoes

Key Findings on the Dirty Dozen from the Environmental Working Group Study

• Nearly all samples of strawberries, spinach, peaches, nectarines, cherries, and apples tested positive for residue of at least one pesticide.
• The most contaminated sample of strawberries had twenty different pesticides.
• Spinach samples had an average of twice as much pesticide residue by weight than any other crop. Three-fourths of spinach samples had residues of a neurotoxic pesticide banned in Europe for use on food crops – it’s part of a class of pesticides that recent studies link to behavioral disorders in young children.

The Clean Fifteen

• Corn
• Avocados
• Pineapples
• Cabbage
• Onions
• Sweet Peas Frozen
• Papayas
• Asparagus
• Mangoes
• Eggplant
• Honeydew Melon
• Kiwis
• Cantaloupe
• Cauliflower
• Grapefruit
  

Key Findings on the Clean Fifteen from the Environmental Working Group Study

• Avocados and sweet corn were the cleanest: Only 1 percent of samples showed any detectable pesticides.
• More than 80 percent of pineapples, papayas, asparagus, onions, and cabbage had no pesticide residues.
• No single fruit sample from the Clean Fifteen tested positive for more than four types of pesticides.
• Multiple pesticide residues are extremely rare on Clean Fifteen vegetables. Only 5 percent of Clean Fifteen vegetable samples had two or more pesticides.

The post What we’re eating: The Dirty Dozen vs. the Clean Fifteen appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Everybody loves park rangers. You know, those folks in the Smokey-the-Bear hats. Friendly, courteous, helpful. Now they are emerging as rogue force of resistance to Donald Trump. Scientists and people who love nature are not to be trifled with.

According to a Washington Post story by Darryl Fears and Kayla Epstein, It started with tweets by a former Badlands National Park Service employee who wanted to re-educate Trump on climate change. The initial tweets by the Badlands employee were quickly taken down, but not before earning the hashtag, #Badasslands.

Shortly after the initial Badlands tweets were removed, the whole thing morphed into the Twitter site, AltUSNatParkService. It bills itself as “The Unofficial ‪#Resistance team of U.S. National Park Service. Come for rugged scenery, science facts & climate change information. Run by non-gov individuals.”  In its first day, the site garnered nearly half a million followers.

Contributors to the site are remaining anonymous. They told the Post, “We will not be identifying ourselves due to the anger and threats coming from President Trump’s loyalists. We are just here to push the science that is being dismantled by the current administration.”

Other protest accounts soon sprouted according to a list called Twistance created by Alice Stollmeyer. Stollmeyer is a digital advocacy strategist and founder of the consultancy @StollmeyerEU. Her list includes accounts such as RogueEPA, AltMuirWoods, Rogue NOAA , Stuff EPA Would Say and lots more.

Jenna Ruddock is owner of one of the rogue sites. According to her,

The major impact is that people are taking note, and it’s raising red flags all over the place. One of the riskiest things would be for censorship, whether it’s of journalists or of scientific institutions, to go unnoticed. Censorship is a very slippery slope.

Timothy Egan commented in The New York Times,

It started at the inauguration, when the uniformed protectors of America’s front lawn took in the sweep of humanity at the National Mall. It seemed obvious that the crowd for President Trump was not nearly as large as that for Barack Obama in 2009. Somebody in olive green retweeted the obvious, using comparative pictures.

This small act of historical clarification by the keepers of our sacred sites and shared spaces would have been no big deal, had not the response from the new president sounded like an edict from the Dear Leader. A gag order on public servants was issued, and the National Park Service tweet on crowd size vanished, replaced by a picture of a bison.

But then, flares of defiance! The response to the dawning realization that a crazy man had taken over the White House was truth.

Egan wraps things up with this encouragement,

Here’s a suggestion: Go rogue, you lovable park rangers and biologists; tell the truth about science, you nerds in funny hats and badges. Let Trump’s thought police come after you at Golden Gate for tweeting that “2016 was the hottest year on record for the third year in a row.” Oh, the audacity of science!

Now the fight has begun. I always knew I could depend on those folks in the Smokey-the-Bear hats.

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What happens when a landfill fire meets a radioactive waste dump?  St. Louis, Missouri, may be the first metropolitan area to find out.

In North St. Louis County, near the St. Louis Airport, and a mile from Pattonville High School, the Westlake Landfill is on fire. It’s not a flaming, above-ground fire, but something more insidious and potentially more dangerous: a smoldering underground fire caused by years of decomposing garbage, the methane gas it produces, and the oxygen that has seeped in.

Close by – some say within 300 feet—is another [previously hidden] burial ground, where high-grade uranium leftovers were dumped during the 1970s.

The smoldering fire is spreading. The boundaries of the radioactively contaminated soil are not clearly delineated. The timing of the merger of the two entities is anybody’s guess. And having never encountered this situation before, no one really knows what the result would be.

A mushroom cloud is not going to happen; and there probably won’t be an explosion. But many speculate that the situation is akin to a slow-motion dirty bomb [without the boom], poised to spread some very nasty stuff into the environment.

Environmentalists say that this situation is unique and unprecedented in the U.S. Neighbors, “radio-activists,” fire officials, EPA regulators, the Missouri Department of Natural Resources, and Republic Services–which operates the landfill-—agree that something must be done. But no one knows precisely what that something is, or who should be responsible for doing it.

Here’s my [unscientific, unofficial, and possibly factually flawed] understanding of the situation:

How did this happen?

It all started in 1942, when the US decided to try to develop an atomic bomb. A St. Louis chemical company—Mallinckrodt—won the contract to process the uranium needed for the bomb. The source material came from a mine in what was then the Belgian Congo. It was uranium of a radioactive strength unmatched anywhere else. But the enrichment process left tons of highly radioactive waste, and Mallinckrodt had to find a way of getting rid of it. At first, they dumped it downtown, where their main processing plant was. In 1946, Mallinckrodt started dumping it on a 21-acre property just north of the St. Louis Airport. [It’s known as SLAPS.]

In the 1960s, a different company bought the waste ore from the airport site and transported it [sometimes in open trucks] to a nearby storage site. [The Latty Avenue site.]  There was a lot to move: 74,000 tons of Belgian Congo soil, containing approximately 13 tons of uranium; 32,000 tons of Colorado soil containing about 48 tons of uranium; and another 7 tons of uranium from somewhere else.

Finally, in the 1970s, another 47,000 tons of soil mixed with radioactive waste wound up in the nearby West Lake Landfill. At the time, there were no safety regulations for landfills regarding this kind of waste. One activist recently told me that, at the time the landfill operators did ot know that the radioactive waste had been mixed with topsoil. “So, they used those enormous piles of dirt to cover and level out garbage daily,” she said. “Sadly, that radioactive waste now lies nearly on the surface of the landfill, which is why it more easily becomes airborne in the form of dust.”

That toxic stew decomposed and bubbled for years, but almost no one knew that it contained radioactive waste. Then, in 2013, Republic Services reported that an underground area of the landfill was smoldering. That development made some people begin to take notice.

A few years earlier, a group of women who had attended a nearby North County high-school began realizing that many of their classmates—and members of their families– had been diagnosed with various cancers. It seemed like too many of them. They remembered that, as children, many of them had played in nearby Coldwater Creek—a tributary of the Missouri River—which some industrial companies had used as a dumping ground over the years. They also recalled roaming around the open fields and railroad tracks near St. Louis Airport. After looking into it more closely, they were shocked to discover that their neighborhood was ground zero for radioactive waste dumping.

In the early 1990s, the Environmental Protection Agency made SLAPS and Latty Ave into Superfund sites. The cleanup at those sites is nearing completion, under the direction of a federal sub-agency called FUSRAP.  [Of course, it’s hard to know when you’re really finished:  The boundaries of the radioactive areas are squishy, because wind, rain and flooding tend to move soil around.]

But Westlake remains a problem. Several groups of activists have been persistent and outspoken in pushing for a resolution to the problems in the area. [Some call themselves “radio-activists.”] But they’re trying to navigate a dizzying matrix of agencies with conflicting jurisdictions and agendas: EPA, Missouri Department of Natural Resources, local politicians, the Bridgeton Fire Department, the U.S. Department of Energy, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to name a few. Some have proven helpful, but many seem to be in denial. [At one community meeting, an EPA official is recorded on video saying, “We have no evidence that the radioactive waste is near the fire.”]

In 2008, EPA proposed sealing off one of the waste areas with a 5-foot cap. Very little happened to that plan, but just this week [April 18, 2016] at another community meeting, EPA revived the idea. It received a chilly reception from  many residents and activists, who have been pushing for years for removal, rather than further burial, of the contaminated waste. Westlake Landfill activists also are leading an  a effort to secure a voluntary buyout of properties within a one-mile radius of the landfill.

Even the “good guys” can be difficult: the U.S. Centers for Disease Control [CDC] has been reluctant to accept the notion that there are cancer clusters in the area. A separate group of activists–“Coldwater Creek – Just the Facts” — is focused on a federal health assessment aimed at determining if there is a link between the elevated cancer rates in the area and radioactive contamination.

In the meantime, most residents of St. Louis City and County are only marginally aware of what’s going on “up there” in the North County area. Even people who now live—or formerly did—near the dump sites may not realize what they may have been exposed to. And when they receive a diagnosis of an unusual cancer, their doctors may say, “This is so rare. You are one in a million.”  The radio-activists beg to differ: “You actually are one of millions,” they counter.

I recently took a tour of “radioactive St. Louis,” guided by a very knowledgeable activist from the Missouri Coalition for the Environment. We went to Latty Ave., to SLAPS and to Westlake, where we ran into a “Just Moms” founder who was making her daily rounds of the site. She was taking pictures of the latest efforts to contain the fire, tamp down the stench, and keep a lid on the situation—literally: The whole landfill is covered with a green tarp, over which is vast web of hoses and exhaust pipes, plus valves, and air-quality meters, and surrounded by a very tall chain-link fence. Iconic yellow “radioactive” signs are everywhere. It’s something you really wouldn’t want in your neighborhood.

And it’s scary. What will happen next is not within the realm of accurate prediction, said our guide. We may not even know when whatever is going to happen actually happens. Maybe it already has. And it’s possible that the consequences may not manifest themselves for years.

One thing is certain, though: The world should be watching.

The post STL landfill fire nears collision with radioactive waste: What’s next? appeared first on Occasional Planet.

We sanitize happily in the United States.

In fact, we are blessed to not have to pay a lot of attention to our toilets at all. They are there. We flush, or as now in many public locations our toilets self-flush, and we move on.

Arriving in Colombia, I found a whole new toilet world. Here, we are offered signs and warnings in bathrooms throughout the country that paper is not an acceptable depositable possibility.

In public toilets, we are told that anything extraneous to bodily function is strictly prohibited from being flushed. In many restaurant and hotel bathrooms, the same applies.

Soiled toilet paper goes in a provided waste basket next to the toilet.

What?

Believe me, this is a cultural adjustment.

It just doesn’t seem right. If you have grown up flushing and leaving, believing that the infrastructure has got you covered, then readjusting when traveling or living abroad can take some getting used to. And what do you know, Colombia is far from alone in providing separate recepticles for toilet paper.

Where Do I Put the Toilet Paper is a website that breaks down what to expect country by country when traveling worldwide, The site is invaluable. Perusing their flushable country-specific advice, it quickly becomes apparent that the US is in fact far from the norm. Our US toilets and how we expect them to perform may, in fact, be one of the things that set us apart and define us as first-world.

Restroom systems in many other parts of the world can’t deal with what we are throwing at them.

At first, in Colombia, I was unenthusiastic, to put it mildly. Put this where?

And then, just last month, I saw in the New York Times that things are not so rosy even in New York City. The Times piece, Wet Wipes Box Says Flush. New York’s Sewer System Says Don’t, underlines that even the New York sewer system is under siege. Even the most sophisticated sewer systems in the world can’t deal with what we are doing right now, flushing wet wipes. The Times piece speaks of “the latitude of flushability,” sort of the same warning that crops on in slightly different wording on signs next to toilets throughout Colombia. The Times article goes on to mention that the New York City environmental department has begun work on a public awareness campaign concerning the importance of proper wipe disposal: throwing them in the trash.

What do you know; a sort of reverse symbiosis is going on. Colombia may be ahead of the curve.

There might be a benefit to all of us to introducing a trashcan for non-flushable materials next to toilets throughout the US.

I missed wet wipes when I first arrived in Colombia. The US marketing machine has made them indispensable. But the introduction of a commonplace toiletry product without an equal investment in sewer infrastructure is somewhat of a pipe dream. To me, this is the equivalent of saying that plastic bags have no impact on the environment.

Not.

And what do you know: wet wipes have just recently arrived in Colombia.

What?

A country whose sewer system can’t deal with regular toilet paper now wants to flood its pipes with wet wipes?

Are you kidding me?

No, not exactly. The wet wipe manufacturers, jumping on a worldwide bandwagon of profit, simply want us to use their product to increase sales and offer us a modicum more of cleanliness. But in Colombia, for the product once used, the same advice applies. Do not even think of flushing!

Use the caneca!

Dispose in the waste bin provided.

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The fossil-fuel industry is reaping the rewards of its three-quarters of a billion dollar investment to secure a Republican controlled congress. But they weren’t just buying Republicans—in a spirit of bi-partisanship, they bought 37 Democrats.

On January 9, 28 House Democrats voted with 238 Republicans to authorize construction of the controversial Keystone XL oil-sands pipeline. On January 20, nine Democratic senators voted with 53 Republicans to approve Keystone XL:

1. Michael Bennett, Colo.
2. Thomas Carper, Del.
3. Robert Casey, Pa.
4. Joe Donnelly, Ind.
5. Heidi Heitkamp, N.D.
6. Joe Manchin, W. Va.
7. Claire McCaskill, Mo.
8. Jon Tester, Mont.
9. Mark Warner, Va.

A list of the 28 House Democrats who voted for Keystone can be found here.

Corporate money and the Keystone vote

Think Progress reports that Senators voting in favor of the recent Keystone XL bill have received a combined $31 million over their careers from the oil and gas industry, compared to under $2.7 million in career contributions for the Senators who voted against the bill.

In other words, Republican and Democratic senators voting for Keystone XL have received seven times more oil and gas industry money than the 36 Senators who voted against it. Republican and Democratic Representatives who voted in favor of Keystone XL received 8.5 times more oil and gas industry money in the 2014 election cycle, on average, than those voting against the bill.

Because the Keystone pipeline will cause a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions, and will threaten the land it crosses with toxic spills, scientists and environmentalists have pronounced it too dangerous to build. Yet 37 Democrats, who claim to represent interests of the people, voted for it.

The motivations of Democrats to vote for Keystone XL, I’m sure, are complicated and varied. But the money connection is there.

Democratic betrayal more damaging than Republican

Republicans have always been the party of banks and corporations. We don’t expect them to be interested in the welfare of ordinary people or in promoting democracy. Their blatant efforts to suppress the vote are well-known. Traditionally, Democrats have been the party of the people. We expect them to be interested in our welfare and in promoting democracy. So when Democrats campaign as progressives, then join Republicans in serving the interests of banks and corporations, when they vote “yes” for the Keystone pipeline in return for donations or favors from the fossil-fuel industry, when they mindlessly accept the false narratives generated by corporations to sway the public, they deliver a huge blow to democracy. When Democrats become corporate Democrats, we have no one left in Washington DC to represent us.

The EPA and Obama’s veto

Obama, a long-time friend of the fossil-fuel industry, has enthusiastically promoted “clean coal,” fracking, and offshore drilling. However, he has decided to veto Keystone X—if it is found to adversely affect climate change. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), by directly contradicting the bogus pro-Keystone studies generated by the State Department, has given him cover to do so.

On February 2, the EPA issued a letter on the proposed Keystone XL Pipeline, in which it advised that, “development of oil sands crude represents a significant increase in greenhouse gas emissions.”

The EPA found that greenhouse has emissions from the extraction, transport, refining and use of the 830,000 barrels per day of oils sands crude would result in an additional 1.3 to 27.4 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents per year. To put that in perspective, 27.4 million metric tons per year is equivalent to the annual greenhouse gas emissions form 5.7 million passenger vehicles or 7.8 coal-fired power plants.

If Obama vetoes the Keystone Pipeline bill, it is unlikely there will be enough votes in congress to override his veto. No thanks to Senator McCaskill, and other DINOs, we will have dodged a bullet. But, Sen. John Hoeven, [R-ND], sponsor of the Keystone bill, stated that if Obama vetoes it and there aren’t enough votes to override, Republicans could attach approval for the Keystone to other legislation. Unfortunately, this story is not over.

The post Keystone pipeline vote: corporate money trumps public good appeared first on Occasional Planet.

Don Corrigan, newspaper editor, author and college professor, taught us something new at the Missouri Progressive Action Group meeting on Saturday. In addition to being an entertaining speaker, he reviewed in one presentation the many assaults on our environment and some promising positive steps people are taking.

Don told about his visits to European countries where corporations like Monsanto are being investigated in the media on a daily basis. European journalists he meets at various conferences ask him all the time why the American media doesn’t do its job any more? Where are the real investigative journalists today?

As Don spoke I was reminded once again of Ira Levin’s prize-winning science fiction novel, “This Perfect Day.” I read the summary from this Wikipedia entry after listening to Don yesterday.

As much as I try not to be a conspiracy theorist, it’s pretty much impossible these days not to see what’s going on behind the curtain of deceit.

What has been happening to our system of government over the last few decades is similar to the changes in our environment. Slowly we’ve become accustomed to highway signs telling us the air quality is yellow or orange and asking us to car pool. Slowly we’ve been adding up the number of wildfires, killer storms and dried up lakes. We are adjusting to what has become the new normal.

So, too, we’ve become accustomed to a political system so dysfunctional that all we can do is joke about it. All the while, we are becoming less “awake” as the characters in the novel struggled to become even as they were fed their regular doses of brain-numbing medication.

Just like Levin’s docile characters, we are controlled by something not that dissimilar to UniComp in the novel. Instead of one small group controlling society from an underground command center, we have multiple hands on the controls. They operate out in the open. We even buy stock in their companies and celebrate when our portfolios increase in size. Breathing toxic air is considered a small price to pay for our financial success, especially when the worst of the toxic air, water and land is in someone else’s neighborhood.

And the pollution has increasing seeped into our democratic form of government. Don Corrigan asked us why Missouri legislators continually pass bills that they know are unconstitutional when they’ve taken an oath to defend both the state and federal constitutions? How is that someone as cynical about political power as I am didn’t think of that? We are all aware of the bills passed in Jeff City that cost the taxpayers money to fight in court, and we tsk tsk about it. But have we ever really stepped back and recognized what is happening?

Every year, the discussions in our state legislature and, to a certain extent, in the U.S. Congress, become more and more bizarre. We are becoming accustomed to the charade that our “representatives” actually represent our interests. They talk about wanting to create good-paying jobs and then kill any effort to do that. They talk about protecting our health and safety then pass laws making it easier for fossil fuel companies to pollute our air and water. They have done everything they can to empower the already powerful and anesthetize the rest of us.

Voter turnout in this year’s primary election in Missouri is estimated at 25%, at best. I’m not surprised that citizens have given up on our form of self-government. They’ve chosen “reality” TV over the reality they face every day trying to stay alive without health insurance, trying to keep their kids from being shot by a stray bullet, trying to piece together enough money from three lousy jobs to pay the bills. How can we expect them to recognize what is purposely being done to them by the people they elect?

I admire Don Corrigan for not giving up. He engages with people who totally disagree with him and tries to find something they have in common. He encouraged all of us to do the same. He also said to keep writing letters to newspapers because people really do read them.

Whenever I get really discouraged, I listen to Judy Collins singing “Democracy is Coming to the USA.” Then I remind myself how younger Americans are refusing to accept the toxic pablum being fed to them by politicians and media moguls. Hope springs eternal.

The post We’ve adjusted to the new normal, and that’s unfortunate appeared first on Occasional Planet.

In the well-lit aisles of your drugstore, millions of tiny and dangerous pollutants lurk in the cheerful packaging of your favorite exfoliating cleansers. But in Illinois, you’ll notice a distinct lack of certain facial washes. In a groundbreaking decision, Illinois recently became the first state to ban the use of the microbead, a popular ingredient in many face washes.

Manufacturers use microbeads in their facial washes to rub away dead skin cells, allowing users to scrub their faces to remove dirt and makeup. Microbeads are tiny plastic particles – designed to slip down your bathroom sink, each less than a millimeter in size.

While these plastic beads may seem tiny, it’s their small size that makes them such a nuisance. Just as these beads slip down the drain, they also slip through sewage systems and water treatment plants, making their way to the Great Lakes in mass quantities. In fact, microbeads accounted for about 90 percent of the plastic pollution in Lake Erie alone.

Unfortunately, their size and color makes them closely resemble fish eggs – effectively causing fish and wildlife to consume them and soak up the toxins like sponges. These tiny plastics food create a grave ecological threat, as they are being incorporated into the food web at an alarming rate. Scientists found over 6,000 microbeads on average per every 0.1 gram of facial cleanser, and these cleansers are used widely across the country.

Illinois is leading the country in eliminating this dangerous and often disregarded pollutant. The manufacture and sale of products containing the beads will be banned by 2018. However, many companies such as Unilever and Johnson & Johnson are one step ahead – already agreeing to phase out microbeads on a global scale, without legislative pressure. Alternatives to these plastic exfoliating beads include more environmentally sound options such as crushed apricot pits, cocoa beans or sea salt.

So, what can consumers like you and me do to eliminate plastics from our bathroom cabinets? “Polyethylene” and “polypropylene” on ingredient labels mean that the product contains plastic, indicative of the dangerous microbead. Some manufactures even advertise the ingredient, putting “microbeads” on the product label. However, with recent pressure from environmental groups and lawmakers, the inclusion of microbeads won’t be anything for companies to brag about for long.

In general, the plastics in microbeads won’t degrade within the consumer’s lifetime. It is simply not logical to design a disposable product that will last forever. Why create a product that will only be used for a few seconds but will continue to negatively affect the ecosystem for decades?

Change starts with the individual. While eliminating microbeads may seem like an insignificant lifestyle change, it will have a huge impact in the long run. After all, if we can eliminate microbeads, effectively we’ll be getting rid of the majority of the plastics in the Great Lakes, where 20 percent of the world’s freshwater is stored. This will prevent problems with fish and wildlife, as well as protecting ourselves and future generations from the many toxins leaching into drinking water.

As responsible consumers, changing out our facial washes for something without exfoliating microbeads is a concrete step we can take in solving the environmental crisis that faces our planet. Liking a Facebook post isn’t environmental activism – we need to be taking real action and dramatically changing our lifestyles.

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Global warming and its effect on climate change is real, and it’s frightening. While our political and corporate classes are joined at the hip and still pushing carbon fuels—and even more stupidly, fomenting coups and threatening wars over access to gas and oil—it’s time to look for real solutions. If we don’t find a way to change things fast, the powers-that-be—with their greed, fantasies of exceptionalism, dreams of world hegemony, addiction to fracking and drilling, bullying of countries that don’t submit to U.S. domination, and determination to build toxic sludge-filled pipelines—will push the Earth to her limits. If that happens, and it already is, She will fry all of us—or if we live near a coastline—drown all of us. That’s hardly a world we want to leave to our children and grandchildren.

In answer to this ongoing insanity, Scott and Julie Brusaw have come up with a brilliant idea that could not only save us all from extinction, but solve many other pressing problems in the process. Some have described their invention as world-changing. I second the hyperbole, because, among many other amazing benefits, their invention could end wars for access to oil and gas. Have a look at the following short video and see if you don’t agree.

The Brusaws are crowd funding for Phase II of their project. They have provided the following info at www.indiegogo.com:

• Solar Roadways has received two phases of funding from the U.S. Federal Highway Administration for research and development of a paving system that will pay for itself over its lifespan. We are about to wrap up our Phase II contract (to build a prototype parking lot) and now need to raise funding for production.
• Our glass surface has been tested for traction, load testing, and impact resistance testing in civil engineering laboratories around the country, and exceeded all requirements.
• Solar Roadways is a modular system that will modernize our aging infrastructure with an intelligent system that can become the new Smart Grid. We won the Community Award of $50,000 by getting the most votes in GE’s Ecomagination Challenge for “Powering the Grid” in 2010. We had the most votes again in their 2011 Ecomagination Challenge for “Powering the Home”.
• On August 21, 2013, Solar Roadways was selected by their peers as a Finalist in the World Technology Award For Energy, presented in association with TIME, Fortune, CNN, and Science.
• Solar Roadways was chosen by Google to be one of their Moonshots in May of 2013.
• Solar Roadways was chosen as a finalist in the IEEE Ace Awards in 2009 and 2010.
• Solar Roadways has given presentations around the country including: TEDx Sacramento, Google’s Solve for X at Google’s NYC Headquarters, NASA, Keynote Speaker for the International Parking Institute’s Conference and much more…
• Solar Roadways is tackling more than solar energy: The FHWA tasked us with addressing  the problem of stormwater. Currently, over 50% of the pollution in U.S. waterways comes from stormwater. We have created a section in our Cable Corridors for storing, treating, and moving stormwater.
• The implementation of our concept on a grand scale could  create thousands of jobs in the U.S. and around the world. It could allow us all the ability to manufacture our way out of our current economic crisis.

If you want a more expanded FAQ page, go here. If you are scientifically inclined, and want to know how much electricity solar roadways can really produce, go here.

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The financial meltdown of 2008 prompted many of us to look back to the decades after WWII for guidance—when Glass-Steagall kept banks in check, when labor unions had bargaining power, when a family could buy a house and live comfortably on a factory worker or a postal worker’s salary. Things seemed to be going well back then.

It was a time when the wealthy paid their fair share—the upper income tax bracket under Eisenhower was 90%. And there were jobs, and good paying ones—at least for some. In hindsight, it seemed like the “Golden Age” of American capitalism, when it seemed the economy worked for most people. The TV series “Leave it to Beaver,” which featured a generic, white, middle class family living in comfort in a generic, white suburb, furthered the myth that everyone in America could live a comfortable life if they showed up at work and paid their bills. For a large chunk of the population, of course, this wasn’t the case.

Banks and corporations constrained themselves after the Great Depression and WWII. Then, chomping at the bit to increase profits, they began to find ways to game the system. By the 70s, things started falling apart. Corporate globalization caused massive deindustrialization and the outsourcing of once good paying jobs, and the financial sector began its highjacking of the economy. The problem, the Golden Age myth would have us believe, was that bad capitalists and bad bankers took over what was really a good system.  If greed and bad behavior are held in check, the thinking goes, then capitalism really is the best economic system, synonymous with freedom, democracy and the American Way.

The myth vs. the reality of the post war era

In his recent article in ZCommunications, Paul Street debunks the “Golden Age” myth and sheds light on the failures of capitalism during this period.  He writes that, during the entire post war era, 10% of the population—20 million Americans—experienced no progress at all and deep poverty remained entrenched. Drawing on Judith Stein’s 2010 book, Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance during the 1970s, Street provides the following statistics:

As the nation spent billions to put astronauts on the moon, millions of Americans remained ill-clad, ill-fed, and ill-housed. The median U.S. family income in 1968 was $8,362, less than what the Bureau of Labor Statistics defined as a “modest but adequate” income for an urban family of four. The Bureau found that 30 percent of the nation’s working class families were living in poverty and another 30 percent were living under highly “austere” conditions.

U.S. industrial capitalism at its “golden” best was no land of milk and honey for millions of Americans on the wrong end of capital’s constant drive to extract value from working people, the broader community, and the Earth. Thanks to its rapacious and wasteful extraction of wealth from the natural environment, moreover, the profit system had already generated what numerous left and other U.S. environmentalists were already describing as an ecological crisis (see Barry Commoner’s haunting 1971 book The Closing Circle).

In support of the idea that the problems with capitalism are systemic, Street quotes Yale trained economist Richard Wolff:

As Wolff explained two years ago: “Historical and contemporary records overflow with blame variously heaped on the illegal acts of financiers, corporate executives, corrupt state officials, union leaders, and ‘organized crime’ for causing capitalism’s cycles and crises. . . Pinpointing ‘the bad guys’ perpetuates the ancient art of scape-goating, deflecting blame on convenient targets when in fact the system is the problem. Capitalist societies can continue to monitor, identify, regulate, and prosecute economic misdeeds, but doing so never will prevent cycles and crises. Overcoming the systemic roots and nature of capitalist crises requires a change in the economic system.” (Wolff, Democracy at Work).

Can we change the American economic system?

Banks and corporations have no interest in doing so. Republican and Democratic politicians and government officials, most of whom serve their interests—and are rewarded handsomely for their efforts—have no interest in doing so. The American people, however, who continue to suffer the economic, social and ecological consequences of this rigged system, eventually, may want to try something different.

For starters, Wolff feels we can cure capitalism by bringing democracy to the workplace. “We would have stores, factories and offices, in which all the people who have to live with the results of what happens to that enterprise, participate in deciding how it works.” He recommends moving from the traditional top down, corporation—that squeezes workers in order to funnel money to CEOs, shareholders, and Wall Street banks—to cooperatives, where income is more equitably shared, and where decisions about what to produce are made democratically. Good news: there is already a strong cooperative presence in this country to build on.

As an answer to the current unemployment problem, if the private sector won’t provide jobs, Wolff says, then the government needs to do it—and he is talking 15 to 20 million jobs. The lion’s share of those jobs would address climate change through green infrastructure projects—building clean mass transportation, building green energy systems, retrofitting buildings, etc. This is a no-brainer, but vehemently opposed by a monied class that refuses to pay taxes to be used for the public good.

Wolff offers another solution for the unemployed.  He would do what Italy does. If you can get ten unemployed people together and start your own cooperative business, the Italian government gives all of you your unemployment benefits in a lump sum payment to fund your venture.

To see more of Richard Wolff, and hear more of his ideas, check out his appearances on Bill Moyers & Company here and here.

“Free market” capitalism (which relies heavily on a corporate nanny state) has brought us American imperialism, endless war, Orwellian government surveillance of our private communications, and life threatening climate change. It’s time liberals and progressives realize capitalism isn’t the only game in town. There are ways to organize an economy so that it serves the interest of all, not just the most aggressive and avaricious among us. We can start by learning more about the Nordic democratic socialist model, which provides a good standard of living for everyone in those countries, and expanding the democratic, cooperative workplace here at home. We need to shift our consciousness from believing a competitive economy—in which everyone is supposed to have (but in reality doesn’t have) a shot at success— is the best economy, to knowing that a more humane, peaceful economy—in which everyone has his or her basic needs met, and economic activity is channelled for the public good—is a recipe for saving ourselves and the planet.

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While browsing YouTube, I came across this video by Canadian environmentalist David Suzuki. He explains the concept of exponential growth and how it applies to the growth of world population.

OMG! Well, I had to explore this further. On to Wikipedia, the “World Population” entry, and an amazing collection of charts and graphs on population growth through time including projections for the future.

I chose the year 10,000 BC as a starting point. At that time only 1 million people inhabited the entire planet. Fast-forward 10,000 years to the year 1 AD, and the Earth’s population had “ballooned” to 2 million. As a point of comparison, the greater metro area of St. Louis, MO, the city where I live, has a population of 2.8 million.

Leaping ahead—way ahead—I chose my mother’s birth year, 1915, as the next milestone. No entry for 1915, but Wikipedia says in 1900, the world’s population was 1.65 billion. My mother died in 2009 at the age of 93. By 2010 the world’s population had reached 6.9 billion. On March 12, 2012, the United States Census Bureau estimated the world population had exceeded 7 billion.

Where do we go from here?

Environmentalists are warning we are doomed to a dangerous and ultimately suicidal population explosion beyond what the Earth can support. Can that be true? Let’s try another YouTube video.

This one is a BBC documentary on world population by Swedish professor of international health, Hans Rosling. The title, “Don’t Panic,” drew me in. Rosling made the film to specifically counteract the population doomsday predictions of Microsoft scientist Stephen Emmott. I won’t embed “Don’t Panic” here as it is about an hour long. But, click here if you want an amazing and informative presentation on the facts about the health, wealth and population of 200 countries over the last 200 years. Rosling has been dubbed the “Jedi master of data visualization,” because of the innovative animated graphics he uses to explain complex data.

Using projections from the UN Population Division, Rosling suggests that global population will indeed continue to grow dramatically, but will level off at about 11 billion by the end of the century. He admits we will have to face huge challenges, but that we have reason to hope—that the problems associated with such a huge increase are “surmountable.” “Don’t Panic” informs a mostly uninformed Western audience that many Third World countries have, for decades, been working to decrease birth rates while simultaneously providing better healthcare and reducing poverty.

From the  Telegraph’s review of Rosling’s documentary:

And we’d all better hope that [Rosling] is right. Because a near 50 per cent increase in global population by the end of the century is already a done deal. In the BBC programme, [he] explains that the mechanism that will power population growth on such a scale has already—and irreversibly—been put into motion, and to suggest that efforts should be made to limit its growth is to effectively propose a “holocaust” and prepare “the intellectual ground for killing people”. This is because of a phenomenon that Rosling describes as “Peak Child”.

Briefly put, the surge in the number of people on Earth isn’t any longer being caused by more people being born, but is because of those who are alive. There are now more children on the planet than ever (about two billion under the age of 15) but the global decline in birth rates means that the number has leveled off, and is not expected to increase. The reason the global population will continue to rise until around 2100 is because of a “demographic lag” and longer life expectancies.

As an example of the “Peak Child” phenomenon, Rosling uses modern-day Bangladesh, one of the most densely populated countries in the world. For decades, Bangladesh has made great efforts to educate its population about the benefits of smaller families and has provided free birth control. As a result, since 1972, the average number of children per woman has fallen dramatically from seven to a little over two. In fact, the world birth rate has dropped from an average of 6 per two adults in 1800 to 2 today. According to Rosling, it’s the worldwide drop in fertility rates that will save us.

The environmentalists have a very valid point—the Earth’s resources are limited. But, I agree with Rosling that the problems are surmountable. That is, if in the next century, the world moves away from capitalism to a more equitable and humane economic model, perhaps yet to be invented, that prioritizes the human needs of the many over profit making by a few. In such a new economic system, the belief, for example, that every human being deserves clean, safe, adequate housing would take precedence over the capitalist understanding of housing as a vehicle for investment and speculation. In other words, human use value has to trump exchange value. Democratically run, cooperative work places would supplant for-profit corporations, providing meaningful work and a living wage for everyone. If basic human needs are met first—and they can be—then our children, grandchildren and great grandchildren will inhabit a livable world. If we fail to grow beyond capitalism—a system that depends on unsustainable economic growth punctuated with boom and bust crises, funnels money to the top 1%, and drives the real doomsday scenario of climate change—then all bets are off.

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