Challenges of Overpopulation

As the human population has grown, our species uses more space and more resources.  On a finite planet, therefore, unlimited growth poses many problems.  Already overcrowding contributes to armed conflicts, food shortages, other resource shortages, and general stress.  Human population is a complex global issue.

• Human population is currently on an exponential curve.
• There are currently about 6.8 billion humans on Earth.
• This overpopulation may endanger the Earth, and is troublesome for humans, according to some scientists.
• Historically, human population was much less, until quite recently.
• Population increase is starting to decline, now that effective forms of birth control exist and women’s rights are expanding.

Family Planning Resources

Family planning offers many benefits.  It reduces the drain on Earth’s resources, leaving more space for biodiversity and providing better for humans too.  It ensures that every child is wanted, which reduces rates of child abuse and other problems.  It protects women’s health, lowering unwanted and perhaps unsafe pregancies.  The gods have already given us their greatest power — the power to create life.  Use it wisely.

• USAid Family Planning Resources
• Family Planning Publications
• Planned Parenthood
• Compare Methods of Contraception
• Abstinence Advantages and Disadvantages
• Information on Sexuality

It’s Now Legal to Catch a Raindrop in Colorado

DURANGO, Colo. — For the first time since territorial days, rain will be free for the catching here, as more and more thirsty states part ways with one of the most entrenched codes of the West.

Precipitation, every last drop or flake, was assigned ownership from the moment it fell in many Western states, making scofflaws of people who scooped rainfall from their own gutters. In some instances, the rights to that water were assigned a century or more ago.

Now two new laws in Colorado will allow many people to collect rainwater legally. The laws are the latest crack in the rainwater edifice, as other states, driven by population growth, drought, or declining groundwater in their aquifers, have already opened the skies or begun actively encouraging people to collect.

Three Questions

1) What are the benefits of catching and using rainwater?

2) Do you have any kind of rain catchment system in your home or town, or if not yet, are there plans to add one?

3) What do you think about the water laws in the Southwest and West, especially in light of recent scientific discoveries about how water really moves through a landscape?

Forget-Me-Not Day: Keeping Blogs Alive

Tips for Bloggers

Blogs fail for many reasons.  Sometimes it happens because the blogger can’t quite get a handle on this type of writing.  Here are some suggestions to help your blog survive.

• Post frequently. The minimum is once a week; less than that, people forget about your blog.  Daily is better.
• Post regularly. If you can’t make lots of posts, at least ensure there will be new content at regular times.  Monday-Wednesday-Friday or Monday-Thursday are good schedules.
• Setting a theme helps. It concentrates your audience, attracts like-minded readers, and gives you ideas for new posts.
• Establish some regular posts or topics. Frex, here I offer the “Weekend Meet-n-Greet” to help readers get to know each other and read other people’s blogs.  On Hypatia’s Hoard of Reviews I have the “Friday Favorites” for people to discuss what they’re reading.  On The Wordsmith’s Forge I have many, including a monthly Poetry Fishbowl, Pimp-A-Friend, and Hard Things.
• Read the news. Subscribe to some newsfeeds and post excerpts of interesting articles with a few lines of personal commentary.  This is a fast way to make posts that people will care about.

Tips for Readers

When you find a new blog that you love, do what you can to support it. There are many ways you can help a blog keep going.

• Comment. Feedback is candy!  Nothing motivates a blogger like good comments on the posts.  This is the most important thing you can do.
• Link to the blog. Put the blog in your Links list if its topic is relevant to what you blog about.  Another option is just to have a “favorite blogs” section regardless of topics.
• Relay the best posts. Quote 1-3 paragraphs from a post that you love, link the title back to the original, and add a few lines of personal opinion.  This encourages your readers to explore the blogs you like.
• Review the blog. Write a review about the blog and its author.  Describe its topic, what kind of posts it makes, etc. and invite people to check it out. Post the review on your blog and/or a blog review site.
• Rate the blog on blog directories. There are now many services that help people find blogs about their favorite topics.  Most of these have some kind of rating system.  When you rate a blog, that helps draw attention to it.  Look in the far right column here, and you’ll see that Gaiatribe has a 7.3 “very good” rating on Blogged.

Visit Some Blogs

Here are a few blogs I enjoy that would benefit from higher traffic.  Please drop by there and say something.

• Householding is a LiveJournal community that focuses on small-scale communal living.  Its members are people who live in shared households with multiple members who aren’t all related to each other.  This blog features discussions about how to make a group house work.
• Redneck Liberal is a political opinion blog, about halfway between liberal and conservative.  The title is a good description; it’s often full of liberal ideas couched in conservative language.  Also it’s really, really funny.
• The Blessed Bee is a Pagan blog.  It offers magical recipes, Pagan prayers, tidbits of lore and liturgy, and other things of interest to witches.

What are some of your favorite blogs, especially new ones or blogs with low traffic that could use a boost?

Below are some of the best comments from June 2009.  This is a way to recognize people who make insightful contributions to this blog, thus encouraging traffic and making it easier for audience members to get to know each other.

From Weekend Meet-n-Greet 6-13-09, 2009/06/13 at 10:40 PM

Ginx wrote:

I found your site while randomly browsing through blogs.

I would say my blog is similar to your blog… in a way. I would imagine your blog to be a straight line, and mine would be a curvy, sinusoid line that intersects at various points. And though our lines do not appear that related, I believe we are both headed in the same direction.

I too have a strong sense of obligation towards the Earth, both as our home and as the home of future generations. While I consider myself an atheist who denounces organized religion, there is no doubt that what I would call “natural law” and ”biology,” you could just as effectively argue to be religious by virtue of its order and beauty.

I look forward to reading your views and suggestions on topics of environmentalism, as well as regarding natural religion (animism? pantheism?).

From Our Sacred Oceans, 2009/06/21 at 8:44 AM

Grampa Ken: Social Fix

I love the ocean and cycle down to the beach once or twice a week for a very personal visit. It never gets boring. Often I have my camera on my hip to capture the moments.

It’s sad what lies beneath the surface in the populated and industrial areas. Hopefully the environmental movements will improve on our past treatment of the oceans,

From Life in the Raspberry Patch, 2009/06/29 at 1:44 AM

Ratty

Great story about the raspberries. My grandpa used to keep raspberry plants long ago when I was kid. I’ve loved them ever since. I think everybody has unwittingly eaten a bug or two in their lifetime, so it’s not too bad. Not only chimps, but many cultures of people eat bugs. Again, great story.

From Weekend Meet-n-Greet 6-27-09, 2009/06/29 at 9:50 AM

The Mother

My father is an organic gardener, and Gaiaist. I, however, was abandoned by Gaia at an early age when I realized that I had a black thumb that could even kill plastic plants (no, really. I have one losing its leaves in the living room as we speak).

I blog mostly about life with four teenagers, and what life was ike when the kids were little, but I have recently started a series on the history of motherhood, and that appears to be where we intersect. It’s a tell-it-like-it-is history of the stuff that was perpetrated on women since the beginning of recorded history.

Feel free to drop by.

America is a beautiful country, and we want to keep it that way.  However, some holiday traditions place extra strain on the environment.  Here are some Earth-friendly ways to celebrate the Fourth of the July.

Food and Decorations

Pick foods from a garden or shop at a farmer’s market.  This supports the local economy and reduces your “food footprint.”

Choose foods that are naturally red, white, and blue instead of using lots of artificial colors and other additives.

If you’re celebrating at home, use silverware and tableware instead of disposables.  Reusable items conserve resources.

If you’re going to a picnic, choose “green” picnic supplies that are recycled and/or biodegradable instead of those made from fossil fuels.

Instead of throwaway decorations, buy Earth-friendly decorations that can be reused (such as fabric tablecloths), eaten (such as fruit bowls), or composted (such as paper streamers).

Decorate with live plants instead of cut flowers.  The next day, you can plant them for a long-term red, white, and blue display.  There are many choices, but petunias work especially well for this.

Activities

During the heat of the day, show war movies, history documentaries, and other examples of America’s past.  If you have veterans coming to your party, ask if they have stories they would like to share.  Talk about where we came from and where we’re going.  Keeping people in one air-conditioned room conserves energy and reduces the chance of heat-related collapse.

Celebrate at a park where you can hike through cool forests and enjoy the beauty of the great outdoors.  Fireflies provide perfectly “green” fireworks!

Play green games.  Get the whole family involved.

Attend a community fireworks display rather than shooting off fireworks in your yard.  This boosts community spirit and lets many people enjoy using the same resources.  Also, community displays are going green and reducing their use of noxious chemicals in the fireworks.

Skip the fireworks altogether and build a bonfire instead.  If you want some sparks, include pine wood or pinecones, and keep people farther back — the resins will pop and spit showers of sparks.   Later, roast hot dogs and make s’mores over the coals.

Sign up for cleanup at a park or other place after the festivities or the next day.  Keep America beautiful!

Pros and Cons of S. 787

Environmental groups believe that the bill extends urgently needed protection to waters that people are currently free to pollute:

Clean Water Restoration Act Provides Hope

The federal Clean Water Act is the nation’s primary protector of water quality. Its basic goal is to restore and maintain our lakes, rivers and wetlands, to ensure that we have clean water for fishing, swimming and drinking.

On Feb. 17, Earthjustice called on Congress to introduce and pass legislation that would fix a glaring loophole punched in the Clean Water Act during the Bush years. The Supreme Court, with Bush administration backing, held that only “navigable” waterways could enjoy protections of this law.

Today, I am glad to report, the Clean Water Restoration Act has been introduced by Senators Russ Feingold, Barbara Boxer, Benjamin Cardin and 20 other pro-clean water senators in the 111th Congress. The new bill would protect ALL waters of the United States, regardless of whether one could paddle a dinghy down the stream or not.

Some detractors contend that the bill is too broad and would encourage lawsuits impairing commerce:

Clean Water Restoration Act Gains Detractors

In a letter to Senate Environment and Public Works Chair Barbara Boxer and ranking member James Inhofe, the American Farm Bureau Federation said that the proposed law would “extend to all water — anywhere from farm ponds, to storm water retention basins, to roadside ditches, to desert washes, to streets and gutters, even to a puddle of rainwater,” stated the letter. “For the first time in the 36-year history of the act, activities that have no impact on actual rivers and lakes would be subject to full federal regulation.”

Agricultural operations would be subject to civil lawsuits that currently are not possible, the Farm Bureau stated. If un-navigable waterways are added, businesses and farms would be subject to civil lawsuits from organizations and individuals who don’t like the way the business or farm is using property,reports Wilson County News.

If you are concerned about the quality of America’s water and/or landowner/business rights, please study this bill and its implications so that you can contact your elected officials and voice your opinion.  What do you think about this bill?

Black Raspberry Patch

This year, the black raspberries along the south edge of the ritual meadow, supported by the fence, are fruiting like mad.  I have already picked several baggies of berries.  Once I got a full bag right after someone else took half a bag!

Wildlife and Raspberries

I’ve been reading about permaculture recently, including the food web. Since I very rarely resort to pesticides, my yard is teeming with minute wildlife. While picking berries, I was amazed by two things: 1) the huge variety of insects and spiders swarming through the patch, and 2) the fact that they weren’t devouring the berries or the leaves.  There are a few holes nibbled in the leaves, and the overripe berries get eaten, but the unripe and ripe berries are almost untouched.  Apparently the bugs are so busy eating each other that none of them have time to do significant damage to the crop. Sometimes birds eat the insects too.

Sadly my camera is not suited to photographing bugs.  I did turn up some resources online.  This page shows miscellaneous insects attracted to raspberries; I’ve seen aphids and a couple of stinkbugs in my patch (sometimes alive, sometimes in a predator’s mouth).  This page shows some beneficial insects; we have vast numbers of ladybugs.

Pesticides (or Lack Thereof)

There are several reasons why I don’t use much in the way of chemicals on my plants:

• Chemicals are expensive; I’m broke.
• I’m allergic to a lot of things, so I try to avoid possible allergens.
• No matter how “safe” the label says it is, I can usually taste the stuff in the food after the recommended delay time, which makes it useless around edible crops before harvest.
• I have minimal time to work outside, and better things to do with it.
• I know that chemicals tend to be bad for the environment.

Sometimes that adds up to spotty or absent fruit.  If I want to eat pears, most of the time that means picking up a bucketful of them off the ground and cutting out the good chunks.  (Results: excellent stewed pears for use as ice cream topping or pie filling.)  But other times it results in a happy balance, like this raspberry patch which is full of both bugs and raspberries.

One final note about bugs and fruit: If you pick your own fruit, you will sometimes eat a bug.  Don’t worry about it too much.  Blow or rinse away the ones you can see.  You won’t get all the ones you can’t see.  Unless you do something really careless like putting a bee in your mouth, eating the occasional bug is unlikely to cause harm.  Although one of the great culinary rules is “Americans do not eat insects,” our closest cousins — the chimpanzees — do eat insects so our bodies have some evolutionary background for it. People who are really squeamish about bugs should settle for commercially grown fruit.

This week I found some at the Dollar Store that were 6 for a dollar, but bigger packets than average.  I bought 18 packets.  Some of these will get dumped into my big can of mixed flowers.  Other varieties will get planted individually — I pull up weeds, scratch the thatch off the earth, sow the seeds and water them.  Usually some survive.  Wildflowers do best, but some domestic flowers also work, such as poppies or zinnias.  Annuals give quick color; perennials add lasting appeal.  Butterflies and other wildlife like them all.

If you have some space in your yard, consider shopping for bargain seed. You can get huge amounts for very little money at this time of year.  Ideally, plant them immediately.  Some will survive to next year, though — I’ve had my mixed can going for several years.

What bargains are you shopping for?

Critics Fault Climate-Change Legislation

Across the nation, dairy operations such as Joseph Farms, as well as landowners growing trees on previously empty land and vegetable farmers who plant seeds over old crops without tilling their fields, could win big under climate-change legislation advancing on Capitol Hill.

The measure, which might be considered by the House this week, would force businesses to meet steadily tightening limits on carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions blamed for global warming. To meet the new caps, companies could cut their emissions or buy allowances from the federal government or other businesses to spew more of the pollutants.

But the legislation also would allow companies to “offset” as much as 2 billion tons of their emissions each year by investing in pollution-reducing projects.

Three Questions

1) On the whole, do you think this bill sounds good or bad?

2) Do you feel that “carbon offsets” should play a role in our strategy to stop climate change, and if so, how much?

3) What are some ways of reducing the carbon footprint of farming without driving farmers out of business?