Toban Black

An "Eat Wild" mud stencil

That image was cropped out of a photo from a page on mudstencils.com. This statement is posted on the same page -

“Wild food is plants and animals that are not farmed, grown, or raised for human consumption. Wild food is nutritious, and finding it makes you more aware of your environment. Wild food is all around us, even in urban environments, most just overlook it and disregard it as weeds and nuisances. The dandelion is the prime example of that mentality. Dandelion greens can be eaten before the plant blooms and becomes bitter, the bright yellow flowers can also be eaten or fermented into dandelion wine. Dandelion roots can be roasted and ground into a tasty coffee substitute. Instead of gathering these plants many people poison them with dangerous herbicides to maintain their monoculture lawn. Incorporating wild food into your diet will broaden your pallet and lead to exciting adventures. When gathering, it is important to know exactly what you have before you eat it, and the proper way to prepare it. One part of a plant may be delicious while another part is poisonous. Field guides are great, an expert you can personally learn from is better.”

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Tara Lohan on urban foraging -

“All of a sudden, you can see things — food — where there wasn’t any before. The weed you might be stepping over of the sidewalk with out even noticing — that’s purslane, and its stems and leaves are great in salad or you can cook it up. It’s packed with iron, beta carotene, Vitamin C and other healthy stuff. It’s also a secret source of omega-3 fatty acids.”

[Read more →]

[In this post I basically am following up another one titled "Waves of greenwash"]

Body Shop marketing in a mall

Shop for The Earth!
Buy from the Planetary Guardians!

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Exerpts from an article by Stan Cox in CounterPunch -
“The Political Economics of Greenwashing: Green as a Blackjack Table” (in 2008)

“In their desperation to keep the American economy afloat, government and business will be tossing overboard any proposals for real environmental protection. No time for such romantic foolishness when there are investments to be protected.”

“Not that we won’t be hearing about the environment; indeed, the next [commercial expansion] spurt, if it comes, is likely to be clothed in a green as green as the felt on a blackjack table.”

“For more than 30 years, The Body Shop and its CEO, self-styled anti-capitalist capitalist Anita Roddick, avidly cultivated a corporate image as pioneers of high business ethics. But The Body Shop has been dismissed by critics as no more than a world leader in pale-green consumerism.”

[Read more →]

A post that I wrote for the Waging Nonviolence web site -
“Indigenous and water rights activists protest Canadian landfill”

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Inasmuch as that opposition to the Tiny Township dump is a ‘Not-in-my-backyard’ (NIMBY) campaign, it is a lot more justifiable, relative to other such battles. In the Waging Nonviolence post there is some background about the local significance of the conflict. More specifically: there are details about the acquifier under and around the potential landfill site, with details about the indigenous situation in the area.

That post also (more implicitly) points out how the campaign isn’t just about NIMBY issues — since the acquifier under the potential landfill site is connected into the Great Lakes. After entering Lake Huron through Georgian Bay, water contamination from the dumping grounds would spread through the rest of the Great Lakes.

Yet, waste also would reach other areas if it is dumped there instead.
Other landfill sites will be filled up and contaminated if we continue to churn out so much waste.

[Read more →]

“INDUSTRIAL WORKERS of the world
SOLIDARITY forever”

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Those photos were taken in an alley in London, England.

To be more specific: the mural is in the Whitechapel district — beside the anarchist Freedom Press and Bookshop (which is at least in the same area of the city where a Whitechapel Anarchist Group is based).

(There also was anarchist graffiti in the area. Here is an example.)

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The clutter in front of the mural was blocking it even more when I first noticed it; I moved some of it out of the way before I took the photos. Later, I blurred out the waste pile on the ground to draw some attention away from it.

The pile of waste and those efforts to get it out of the way are symbolic, I think. As wtih a lot of social movements, this statement about worker solidarity had been obstructed and obscured. Clearly the message has been underappreciated. Waste even was left in front of it.

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Surely most people wouldn’t associate labour organizing with street art. I appreciate the exceptional flair that this mural brings to those labour issues (even though I don’t actually like the swirls, the dots, or the blobs at the top of two the letters; but I’m just nit-picking now).

I also appreciate how that message is presented at street level (even if it is hidden away in an alley). For the sake of contrast, the Trades Union Congress in London is a very relevant case in point. As an organization based out of an office building there, that Congress often is distant from street settings and outsiders (despite its connection with the annual Tolpuddle Martyrs Festival, and despite a public statue displayed outside of the Trades Union Congress office building — to give a couple of counter-examples).

[Read more →]

A guest post on the Waging Nonviolence web site -
“Toronto’s “garbage strike” elicits public outrage and labour disunity”

(To be fair, I should point out that I edited that write-up with Bryan Farrell.  There are words in there which he had added himself while we were editing it.)

That photo was taken last year in Toronto, Ontario, Canada –
well before the ‘garbage’ strike which is underway there right now.

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Christopher Hume (in this article) -

“At a time when a garbage strike has turned Toronto into a festering communal dumpsite, the connection between consumption and trash can be seen – and smelled – everywhere around us.”

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Waste in and around a bin which had been taped shut by the city government -

(From one of Matthew Blackett’s posts on the Spacing Toronto blog.)

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Mike Smith (in this article) -

The “strike opens our eyes to the awful levels of waste we produce.”

“They call it a work stoppage, but almost anyone can take it as an excuse to slow down and think.

At a local café, I drink coffee that’s arrived here in bean form from afar on a huge metal bird; I finish and put my cup in a bin, having no need ever to think of it again. It will simply… disappear.

Except, this time, it doesn’t. The cups, the wrappers, the refuse – the things we’ve been refusing to think about – sit there, reminding us that there are many wizards who work this magic for us, often behind the curtain of night. The breakdown of a machine proves the best way to observe how it works.”

“Even now, striking, garbage collectors are providing a sort of public service. As trash mounds grow in the rinks and pools of local parks, we are faced (nosed, specifically) with the reality of how much we throw away and the lives we lead in pursuit of the privilege to do so.”

“There’s a poetry to parks being chosen as dumps, a chance to see how connected things are.”

[Read more →]

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On cars as we know them -

Asher Miller (in this blog post) -
“Only about 15% of the energy that goes into your gas tank is used to move your car. And, because of the weight of an average car, only about 1% is actually used to move you.”

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Alec Dubro (in this article) -

“The average car or light truck is two tons or so: 4000-plus pounds to move 200 pounds of people. OK, everybody out of the SUVs and F-150s and into a nice, green Prius. However, the curb weight of an unladen Prius is 2765 pounds, which means a ton and a half around to get you and a bag of groceries home. Not good.”

“Even if we were able to produce a … zero pollution vehicle, we’d still need to maintain the infrastructure of roads, bridges, and energy distribution. That means steel, concrete, asphalt and plastics. Just concrete production alone generates as much as 10 percent of all greenhouse gas. In 2007, the U.S. produced 95 million tons of cement by burning fossil fuels and, according to the EPA, is the third largest source of greenhouse gas pollution in the U.S. (Scientific America, August 7, 2008) The production of asphalt – a petroleum product – also creates carbon. As does the production of motor oil, tires, and on and on.”

And there’s another intractable problem: the very thing that makes tires so useful – comfort, stability, adhesion – also produces immense rolling friction. In order for us to makes cars that are maneuverable and relatively safe, they have to grip the road, which takes buckets of energy to overcome. One reason trains are able to transport people using far less energy per passenger mile is that there are fewer wheels per person and steel wheels have much less rolling friction.”

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(Photo by Berd)

[Read more →]

(Photo by “fotdmike“)

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“SocProf” at the Global Sociology Blog -
“Colonial Dumping”
“Nice New International Division of Labor we got here: we produce garbage and we send it to poor countries” …

John “Ahni” Schertow at the Intercontinental Cry blog -
“Threatening the Land and People of Chiapas” (December, 2008)

WorldFish -
“Climate change means ‘unprecedented hardship’ for 33 fish-dependent nations”

Miriam Mannak for the Inter Press Service -
“Africa: Why The Richest Continent Is Also The Poorest” (September, 2008)

A poster about
rainforest extraction equipment

Kimberley D. Mok on the TreeHugger blog -
“Logging, Palm Oil and Human Rights in Borneo: Malaysian Government Pushes Ahead By Ousting Indigenous Leaders” (September, 2008)

Michel Chossudovsky on the Global Research web site -
“War and Natural Gas: The Israeli Invasion and Gaza’s Offshore Gas Fields” (January, 2009)

Press TV -
“Iraq: US war caused environmental disaster” (October, 2008)

Andy Rowell at the Oil Change blog -
“NATO’s New Frontier” (January, 2009)
There is a “new military and resource conflict of the Arctic.” …

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A couple of related posts on this blog -
- “Iraqi oil”
- “Canadian oil supplies; American priorities“

Gary Hirshberg in The Huffington Post - “How to Recycle Less and Do More”

Exerpts -

“Recycling is almost universally regarded as a virtue. I beg to differ. The act of recycling actually means that we have failed to reduce or reuse.”

While (attempting to) recycle, “we have to spend enormous amounts of energy and money carting away all of [our] waste to someplace else, where it will be made into something different — a process that releases still more CO2 into the atmosphere.

What is more, recycling affects only a fraction of solid waste. At best, 5 percent of plastic gets recycled. We do better with aluminum cans, but the recycle rate is still only about 45% percent.”

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I highlight those statements because they show that most of the process of ‘recycling’ actually is just another form of waste. Recycling isn’t actually benign. Yet many people seem to think that through either magic or through some non-existant form of high-technology we are able to recycle without using up resources or generating pollution.

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Note (from the next day) -
In other words, a lot of what we refer to as “recycling” isn’t actually recycling!

The Story of Stuff

A must-see video. I highly highly recommend it.

From the web site:
“From its extraction through sale, use and disposal, all the stuff in our lives affects communities at home and abroad, yet most of this is hidden from view. The Story of Stuff is a 20-minute, fast-paced, fact-filled look at the underside of our production and consumption patterns. The Story of Stuff exposes the connections between a huge number of environmental and social issues, and calls us together to create a more sustainable and just world”

[Originally posted on the Relocalization Network]