Posts by Rob Wheeler
Write to President Obama: for a Sustainable America
Published March 17, 2009 @ 03:20PM PT
Please help us urge the Obama Administration and Congress to lead the American people in developing and implementing a National Strategy for Sustainability. Click on Take Action (to the right below), make any changes you want to the letter you find there, login with your email address and send it. It will automatically go to President Obama, his Administration, and your Congressional Representatives. It’s that easy.
Thanks, The Sustainable America Team
Farming Sustainably in America
Published March 05, 2009 @ 10:46AM PT
If we want to create a sustainable America and world, adopting more sustainable agricultural programs and healthier eating habits would be a good place to start. Perhaps that is one reason why so many of you have given us suggestions for what should be included in our National Strategy for Sustainability focusing on these topics. As Jeffrey Barber mentioned in the blog post below, we’ve been reviewing the suggestions you’ve made and will be featuring and commenting on them in the weeks to come.
We’ll begin by covering such topics as how a White House Victory Garden could be used to promote the development and implementation of a National Strategy for Sustainability; eating a healthier diet can help us protect the natural environment, conserve valuable resources, and prevent global warming; federal sustainable agriculture programs could be strengthened; unsustainable subsidies could be replaced with sustainable incentives and policies; and home and community gardening encouraged through a National Strategy Plan; etc.
We face many agriculturally related challenges in the US that could be dealt with by implementing a Sustainability Strategy. For example, agriculture uses 70% of the water in the US, which is causing serious problems particularly in the Southwest. A recent study found that Lake Mead, which supplies water to 22 million people in the region, is likely to go bone dry by 2021. Similarly, a 2006 UN study found that raising livestock accounts for 18% of all greenhouse gas emissions and can lead significantly to water scarcity.
Factory farming is another problem. By 2002 there were 12,000 concentrated animal feeding operations in the US holding 890 million animals, thus averaging 75,000 animals each. A single farm, with 140,000 head of cattle, can produce 1.6 million tons of manure each year, more waste than is produced by Houston, Texas. The EPA reports that factory farms produce three times as much animal waste as humans, the majority of which is spread on the ground untreated often carrying excess nutrients and farm chemicals that find their way into waterways, lakes, groundwater, soils and airways. This includes antibiotics and hormones, pesticides, and heavy metals.
According to the Pew Trust, “the industrialization of American agriculture has transformed the character of agriculture and with it the face of rural America. The family-owned farm that once produced a diverse mix of crops and food animals is largely gone, replaced by ever-larger operations producing just one animal species, or growing just one crop, and many rural communities have fared poorly.”
Our federal government needs to do more to address this. Of $165 billion spent on farm programs in the US between 1995 and 2005 more than three-fourths went to commodity crop subsidies, benefiting just 10% of producers. More than 90% of these checks went to corn, wheat, rice, cotton, and soybean growers. Thus many sustainable agriculture advocates call to scale back subsidies and put more money into conservation, nutrition, and rural development instead.
We’ll be covering such topics as these in the coming weeks with many suggestions for how we can overcome such challenges by developing a US Strategy for Sustainability. Meanwhile a couple of things that you can do is to look for grass-fed, free-range meats; cut down on meat consumption; and seek out local farmers that can assure you about the safety of their practices.
Love Mother Earth for Valentine's Day
Published February 14, 2009 @ 04:00AM PT
You could think “today is just one more day like any other” OR perhaps you could say “it is the first day of the rest of my life”.
We live on an incredible planet. She provides superbly for our every want and need. Can there be any place more beautiful or wonderful in all of the heavens -- if you look at all of the love and diversity shared by humanity or the marvels given to us by mother nature?
So it is strange to think about how we have abused her and how we are destroying so much of the capacity of our mother to care for us.
John Denver wrote the following (Watch the Videos at Left):
“I want with all of my heart to be able to go fishing with my grandkids; and I want to go show them coral reefs in the ocean.”
“I think that all people have that kind of feeling in their hearts; and how much would there be to regret if we destroyed that opportunity for ourselves.”
“Its something we all have to be mindful of as we make the decisions that have to do with our lives, and how we live our lives, and what we want out of our lives…”
So, on this day, Valentine’s Day, I am inviting you to make a commitment. That commitment is to ensure that we can leave our children, and our children’s children, with as many of the blessings that have been given to us as possible.
Again, John wrote,
“One of the ways to keep love alive is to stay in touch with the natural environment - the wild living places on Earth. Some of the places where love is most difficult to find are those places where the forests are gone, the birds no longer sing, the waters are poisoned and the skies are brown with the effects of human pollution. We must protect the remaining wild places, and restore others. Much of this good work is underway. I applaud and encourage those of you who are involved. All of these special wild places are a part of mother nature. Mother Earth is the place from which there comes a constant, unrelenting ability to nurture. She is the life force that sustains us all.”
If we can remember this, then surely we can succeed as well in protecting and restoring Mother Earth and in creating a sustainable world and America. Happy Valentine’s Day!!
Develop a National Strategy for Sustainability
Published February 04, 2009 @ 09:07AM PT
We have a big challenge and an ever bigger opportunity before us. The sustainability movement, and adoption of sustainable practices in the US, has grown by leaps and bounds in recent years; but we are still a long ways from living sustainably. The United States agreed during the Rio Earth Summit Conference in 1992 and again during the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg in 2002 to develop and implement a National Strategy for Sustainability.
During the Clinton years a President’s Council for Sustainable Development was established that met for 6 years and issued a series of reports and recommendations for how we could create a more sustainable America. Unfortunately most of the recommendations have still not been, and thus need to be considered, added to, and/or implemented. Go here for more.
