rootstock II's Public Library

"Serving two masters is getting sloppy in Salt Lake City.

The capital's altruistic pursuit of youth sports fields in Rose Park and its simultaneous push for environmental protection are pitting the causes against each other in a sort of sudden death.

Mayor Ralph Becker is charging forward with a $41 million plan for a sprawling sports complex west of the Jordan River at 2200 North. City voters approved $15.3 million toward that goal in a 2003 bond election, while Real Salt Lake chipped in a $7.5 million "gift" that expires next year. Becker is negotiating with Salt Lake County to cover the gap of more than $17 million in exchange for letting the county run the facility.

But here's the kicker: In February, the City Council unanimously approved a resolution supporting Envision Utah's "Blueprint Jordan River," a guiding document embraced by a dozen cities and two counties that calls for preserving the waterway's corridor as natural open space.

Fields for soccer, rugby, lacrosse, softball and baseball -- along with parking and a stadium -- don't qualify.

"That location for a sports complex is inconsistent with our recommendation," says Gabe Epperson, Envision's planning director. Fields, unlike a nature preserve, can be built anywhere, he says, "but you can't move the river."

Now, city officials are squirming for explanations about how the policy paths diverged and how to steer toward a resolution. "

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"Consumer Reports has been measuring contamination in store-bought chickens since 1998. For our latest analysis, we had an outside lab test 382 chickens bought last spring from more than 100 supermarkets, gourmet- and natural-food stores, and mass merchandisers in 22 states. We tested three top brands—Foster Farms, Perdue, and Tyson—as well as 30 nonorganic store brands, nine organic store brands, and nine organic name brands. Five of the organic brands were labeled "air-chilled" (a slaughterhouse process in which carcasses are refrigerated and may be misted, rather than dunked in cold chlorinated water).

Among our findings:

* Campylobacter was in 62 percent of the chickens, salmonella was in 14 percent, and both bacteria were in 9 percent. Only 34 percent of the birds were clear of both pathogens. That's double the percentage of clean birds we found in our 2007 report but far less than the 51 percent in our 2003 report.
* Among the cleanest overall were air-chilled broilers. About 40 percent harbored one or both pathogens. Eight Bell & Evans organic broilers, which are air chilled, were free of both, but our sample was too small to determine that all Bell & Evans broilers would be.
* Store-brand organic chickens had no salmonella at all, showing that it's possible for chicken to arrive in stores without that bacterium riding along. But as our tests showed, banishing one bug doesn't mean banishing both: 57 percent of those birds harbored campylobacter. "

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chicken contamination bacteria testing consumer-reports organic industrial broilers

"YONKERS, NY — Consumer Reports’ latest test of fresh, whole broilers bought in 22 states reveals that two-thirds of birds tested harbored salmonella and/or campylobacter, the leading bacterial causes of food-borne disease. The story appears in the January 2010 issue of Consumer Reports and is also available free online at www.ConsumerReports.org.

Consumer Reports has been measuring contamination in store-bought chickens since 1998. The recent test shows a modest improvement since January 2007, when the magazine found these pathogens in 8 of 10 broilers, but the numbers are still far too high. The findings suggest that most companies’ safeguards are inadequate. Consumer Reports also found that most disease-causing bacteria sampled from the contaminated chicken were resistant to at least one antibiotic, potentially making any resulting illness more difficult to treat."

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chicken contamination bacteria testing consumer-reports organic industrial broilers

"Today, we will be releasing our latest show called “The Moral Math of Climate Change” with Bill McKibben. He’s an environmentalist who has been studying and writing about issues of global warming and sustainability for more than 20 years. Most recently he founded 350.org, aimed at raising awareness about climate change and ground-up solutions around the world.

During Krista’s interview with McKibben, she asked if he could give her a better understanding of the history of climate change and how climate scientists have arrived at their conclusions. I wasn’t able to listen to the conversation while it was happening, but the first thing Krista mentioned when she emerged from the studio was how helpful his “four-minute” explanation was.

Although McKibben’s explanation isn’t a complete, comprehensive history, he provides a good overview and a basis for discussion. And, he leaves a lot of space for asking more questions."

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"It’s in this context that we can define the Silent Running fallacy; it’s the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart from nature. It’s this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved because, basically, it’s cute. That sort of argument invites the response, just as stereotyped and more appealing to our culture’s governing narratives, that hard-headed practicality takes precedence over emotional appeals and nature can therefore be ravaged with impunity. "

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“Contrary farmers are those who have another job or career and look to their home pursuits as a form of enjoyment that at the same time provides good food and meaningful work. On many days a contrary farm requires nothing more than sitting at the breakfast table or reclining in a hammock while watching animals graze. And what the contrary farmer is learning, from the hammock, he or she may someday turn into a commercial farming venture.”
~

Gene and Carol Logsdon have a small-scale experimental farm in Wyandot County, Ohio. Gene is the author of numerous books and magazine articles on farm-related issues, and believes sustainable pastoral farming is the solution for a stressed agricultural system.

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"As I said in my last post, taking energy efficiency in buildings seriously means expanding our policy horizons beyond the blunt tool of raising energy prices. We have to think in creative ways about how to remove market and behavioral failures that inhibit cost-effective responses to today’s energy prices. How can we make efficiency markets more rational and robust?

What follows is not intended to be comprehensive, just to call out some of the bigger challenges and a few interesting attempts to overcome them."

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retrofit buildings energy-efficiency financing scale

"A recent paper by the biologist Janis L. Dickinson, published in the journal Ecology and Society, proposes that constant news and discussion about global warming makes it difficult to repress thoughts of death, and that people might respond to the terrifying prospect of climate breakdown in ways that strengthen their character armour but diminish our chances of survival.

There is already experimental evidence that some people respond to reminders of death by increasing consumption. Dickinson proposes that growing evidence of climate change might boost this tendency, as well as raising antagonism towards scientists and environmentalists. Our message, after all, presents a lethal threat to the central immortality project of Western society: perpetual economic growth, supported by an ideology of entitlement and exceptionalism.

If Dickinson is correct, is it fanciful to suppose that those who are closer to the end of their lives might react more strongly against reminders of death? I haven't been able to find any experiments testing this proposition, but it is surely worth investigating. And could it be that the rapid growth of climate change denial over the past two years is actually a response to the hardening of scientific evidence? If so, how the hell do we confront it?"

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"The world economic fiasco, which I call "The Long Emergency," may be speeding us into a future of permanent nostalgia in which anything that is not of the present time looks good.

I say this to avert any accusations that I am trafficking in sentimentality where the subject of railroads is concerned. For the moment, any suggestion that a railroad revival in America might be a good thing is generally greeted as laughable for reasons ranging from the incompetence of Amtrak, to the sprawling layout of our suburbs, to our immense investment in cars, trucks and highways -- motoring culture now overshadowing all other aspects of our national identity."

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"GRAIN is a small international non-profit organisation that works to support small farmers and social movements in their struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems. "

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"The Earth’s oceans, which have absorbed carbon dioxide from fuel emissions since the dawn of the industrial era, have recently grown less efficient at sopping it up, new research suggests.

Emissions from the burning of fossil fuels began soaring in the 1950s, and oceans largely kept up, scientists say. But the growth in the intake rate has slowed since the 1980s, and markedly so since 2000, the authors of a study write in a report in Thursday’s issue of Nature.

The research suggests that the seas cannot indefinitely be considered a reliable “carbon sink” as humans generate heat-trapping gases linked to global warming.

The slowdown in the rise of the absorption rate resulted from a gradual change in the oceans’ chemistry, the study found. “The more carbon dioxide the ocean absorbs, the more acidic it becomes and the less carbon dioxide it can absorb,” said the study’s lead author, Samar Khatiwala, a research scientist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University and a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. "

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"Junk food elicits addictive behavior in rats similar to the behaviors of rats addicted to heroin, a new study finds. Pleasure centers in the brains of rats addicted to high-fat, high-calorie diets became less responsive as the binging wore on, making the rats consume more and more food. The results, presented October 20 at the Society for Neuroscience’s annual meeting, may help explain the changes in the brain that lead people to overeat.

“This is the most complete evidence to date that suggests obesity and drug addiction have common neurobiological underpinnings,” says study coauthor Paul Johnson of the Scripps Research Institute in Jupiter, Fla.

To see how junk food affects the brain’s natural reward system — the network of nerve cells that release feel-good chemicals — Johnson started at the grocery store. He loaded up on typical Western fare, including Ho Hos, sausage, pound cake, bacon and cheesecake. Johnson fed rats either a standard diet of high-nutrient, low-calorie chow, or unlimited amounts of the palatable junk food. Rats that ate the junk food soon developed compulsive eating habits and became obese. “They’re taking in twice the amount of calories as the control rats,” says Johnson’s coauthor Paul Kenny, also of Scripps."

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research scripps-research-institute rats junk-food addition obesity diet paul-johnson 2009 society-for-neuroscience

"About Us
The Market Hall is the first project for a new non-profit in summit county called Responsible Communities. The organization has applied for non-profit status and was started by Kurt Von Puttkammer and Jesse Swing. Together their mission is to stimulate local community by bringing people together in a sustainable fashion. It is our goal to provide grant incentives to businesses in Summit County that are making sustainable choices. To show our own commitment to sustainable growth our Market Hall is powered by solar power! The Market Hall has 4 retail spaces in the center of the indoor space that change on a weekly basis with a theme that supports a different part of the community each week. It is our goal to eventually make these spaces free to the community! This way everyone in the community has a chance to share their product or services in a community fashion. The Market Hall has 11 spaces for local businesses to rent on a monthly basis working together in one market place at an affordable price, offering office space and a retail space to local sustainable businesses in the Wasatch region."

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Even before scientists found temperatures creeping upward over the past decade, sea turtles were threatened by beach development, drift net fishing and Costa Ricans’ penchant for eating turtle eggs, considered a delicacy here. But climate change may deal the fatal blow to an animal that has dwelled in the Pacific for 150 million years.

Sea turtles are sensitive to numerous effects of warming. They feed on reefs, which are dying in hotter, more acidic seas. They lay eggs on beaches that are being inundated by rising seas and more violent storm surges.

More uniquely, their gender is determined not by genes but by the egg’s temperature during development. Small rises in beach temperatures can result in all-female populations, obviously problematic for survival.

“The turtles are very good storytellers about the effect of climate change on coastal habitats,” said Carlos Drews, the regional marine species coordinator for the conservation group W.W.F. “The climate is changing so much faster than before, and these animals depend on so much for temperature.”

If the sand around the eggs hits 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), the gender balance shifts to females, Mr. Drews said, and at about 32 degrees (89.6 Fahrenheit) they are all female. Above 34 (93), “you get boiled eggs,” he said.

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climate-change leatherback turtles costa-rica extinction decline

LIKE a tsunami that follows an undersea earthquake, collateral damage from the collapse of credit markets is about to strike the millions of daily transit riders in America’s biggest cities. Public transit agencies in cities including New York, Atlanta, San Francisco and Washington are under pressure to surrender $2 billion from their budgets because financial institutions have spotted a chance to gain a windfall from complicated tax-shelter deals known as “leasebacks.”
. . .Virtually all major city and state public transit systems in the country have at least one of these deals still on the books. If they have to make these payments, commuters will bear the brunt, in terms of higher fares and deferred maintenance.

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A widening gap between data and reality is distorting the government’s picture of the country’s economic health, overstating growth and productivity in ways that could affect the political debate on issues like trade, wages and job creation.

The shortcomings of the data-gathering system came through loud and clear here Friday and Saturday at a first-of-its-kind gathering of economists from academia and government determined to come up with a more accurate statistical picture.

The fundamental shortcoming is in the way imports are accounted for.

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GDP statistics united-states economics productivity distortion

The Brooklyn Kitchen Labs is a new venture located at 100 Frost St, right around the corner from our 616 Lorimer St location.

The Labs was born out the increased popularity of our cooking class offerings, and the fact that it seemed no matter how many classes we crammed into a month, our space was just too small to accommodate the ever expanding repertoire, and subject matter of our classes and the interests of our students.

The mission of the Labs is to bring together a place to experiment and learn about cooking in an a la carte fashion. We offer most of our classes as one session, with no pre-requisites, but will offer a comprehensive course listing so that through one class or 10 you can explore the vast and fascinating world of cooking to the degree that it suits you. From beginning cook looking to eat less take-out, to a seasoned professional looking to add to their skill set we will offer classes, workshops and events drawing from the food talent of Brooklyn and beyond. Artisans, chefs, butchers, grandmas and more.

We make every effort to keep the cost affordable and offer the most expert instruction. We believe that everyone can cook, and that all it takes is a few basic skills, but that there's more than a lifetime of learning to do.

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socks and other antimicrobial textile products need to be laundered, which raises the possibility that some of the silver may end up in the wastewater. The impact of increased amounts of silver in the environment is subject to study and debate; among the concerns are that silver may kill beneficial bacteria and other small organisms.

The products are relatively new, however, so little is known about how much silver is lost during washing, or in what form. Now in a study published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology, scientists at the Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Testing and Research have filled in some of the blanks.

Testing nine silver-containing textiles, including two brands of socks, Bernd Nowak and colleagues found large variations in the amount of silver released in the first washing, from less than 1 percent to about 45 percent. Most of the silver was in the form of coarse particles of greater than 450 nanometers, suggesting that mechanical stress in the washing machine was responsible for most of the release.

The researchers suggest that these coarse particles, which may include bits of fiber and aggregates of nanoparticles, are worth studying further, both to determine their precise composition and how they behave once they end up in wastewater.

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nanoparticles silver environmental-impacts research textiles socks

in describing an alternative treatment for asthma that does not yet have top clinical ratings in this country (although it is taught in Russian medical schools and covered by insurance in Australia), I am going beyond my usually stringent research criteria for three reasons:

¶The treatment, a breathing technique discovered half a century ago, is harmless if practiced as directed with a well-trained therapist.

¶It has the potential to improve the health and quality of life of many people with asthma, while saving health care dollars.

¶I’ve seen it work miraculously well for a friend who had little choice but to stop using the steroid medications that were keeping him alive.

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Now What?

Mike Shedlock (Mish) of Global Economic Analysis asks Where the Hell Is The Outrage? That’s a good question, but it appears that the American people are now incapable of fostering the revolution required to take down the corrupt clowns who govern us. If we elect a new, non-senior set of bozos in 2010 and 2012, we will quickly find out that some of the words have changed but the song remains the same.

If you doubt that entrenched power and corruption runs very, very deep, I suggest you watch Bill Moyers’ interview with Glenn Greenwald. Washington is now a place unto itself. Those of us outside the Beltway are merely a backdrop that lends the Capital a false sense of legitimacy. Most of them do not serve us; they serve themselves. Empires in decline always go through this phase.

Those of us who have written about the dangers of peak oil, dwindling domestic oil production, and recessions accompanying oil price shocks must come to grips with the Vicious Circle of Futility. If our goal was to promote public interest and understanding in these problems, we have succeeded to some extent. Sophisticates in the university and investment communities know all about peak oil. It’s mostly cocooned denizens of our Nation’s Capital who have never heard of it (or dismiss it if they have).

We must also come to grips with Bad Faith. If our interest was to foster policy actions to mitigate future oil supply problems, we have failed and always will fail, absent a miracle. We are merely bit players on the world’s stage. In this, we do not differ much from those concerned about health care costs—Congress has done nothing about them, climate change—Congress has done nothing about it, and Financial Reform—Congress has done nothing again. In this sense, we are like any other group with a cause, no more, no less.

(Of course, many would argue that peak oil is a civilization-changing event, and they are right. But we are living & doing things now, not a decade from now or two decades from now when the worst effects will be evi

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