"Going Home Grown"

I was cleaning out my living room and I found an article from the Post and Courier's Household Helper section.  It was printed February 2, 2011 and it focused on Callie Watford and her pledge to eat locally for 2011.  They joined a community supported agriculture program that allows the family to gather locally grown vegetables etc.and they have started a blog on their local food diet (www.urban-farmgirl-callie.blogspot.com)  The real interest I had in this article was the tips on how to eat locally.  I thought that this would be helpful to anyone in the class, who want to start eating locally.  The article suggested joining a community agriculture group if possible, learn to can vegetables for the times when growing food is difficult, and check out "Kitchen table Cuisine" that has access to locally grown food.  The local meat farms or processors suggested by the article were Legare farms, River Run Farms, and Keegan-Fillian Farms. The grocery stores that stock local food are Queen Street grocery, Ted's butcher Block, Remedy Market and Vegetable Bin.  I have been to the vegetable bin and it has pretty good prices for a lot of food.   It is right next to the teeter if you need something you can not find locally ( understand that we can't go completely local right away  including me).  For seafood they recommend Crosby's seafood, Raul's seafood, and the docks at Shem creek.  The article even listed local drinks from Coast  beer to Firefly vodka and rum.  Then the article suggested that you ask for local food at restaurants telling the reader that by doing this the demand for locally grown food will grow.  I thought that the article was a good example of how local food is becoming more important in the Charleston area.  i had no idea so many grocery stores stocked local produce.  I am going to try each you of these places to see how they stack price and quality wise.  Wish me luck. 

One More Thing

A little side-note, Charleston Wine and Food Festival is March 3-6 and it is by far the most delicious festival in Charleston. Just a few things to enjoy are:

• AWESOME FOOD
• Celebrity chefs (I'm a Top Chef slut)
  
• Local farms and their products
• Cheap meals at nice restaurants
• Supporting local agriculture

There's even a Farm-to-Table Excursion that is exactly what it sounds like. (You know what's awesome?? IT'S ALMOST SOLD OUT.) Even better is this! The whole festival is a supporter of Lowcountry Local First. So by going out, enjoying tasty morsels of food and (organically grown!) wine, you can help support the organization that's working to make local and urban agriculture a reality.

Charleston Wine and Food Festival

What REAL Urban Agriculture Looks Like...I Think.

I'm finally on the blog! Yay! Turns out to get to this thing you have to have the "internet" and a "browser" and that browser has to be "updated." Whatever THAT means. Anyway.

With all this talk of urban agriculture, I decided to go to a source that I rarely rely on for factual information but have found some true entertainment in. Grist is an online magazine focused on environmental issues and news, is hopelessly liberal and is almost always roll-around-on-the-floor hilarious. Recently I received their biweekly email and what do you know! An article on urban agriculture!

"Are You Kidding Me with Your F-ing Farm Skyscraper?"

Woven among her sarcasm, the author presents really relevant points to any urban resident, especially broke college students. (Or soon to be my case: broke out-of-college students) Eating healthy and fresh is difficult and expensive--and forget organic. I'll eat a pesticide-ridden banana for 17 cents because I can afford it and I haven't had a decent source of potassium in about a week. Same goes with spinach (I'll take the e-coli?) or apples or tomatoes. Author Susan Gregory Thomas or "Broke-Ass" tells the story of a chance encounter with a green-thumbed male nurse, James McCrae. McCrae has wise insight into the dilemma of healthy eating, urban farming and charity. On a vacant lot in Brooklyn, New York, McCrae (with the help of the local homeless population) tends an urban farm and raises crops for distribution among the surrounding families. McCrae is the perfect example of where urban agriculture needs to go. In order for this movement to be successful, the "little guys" have to step up and take initiative while the mega-agra businesses keep their greedy paws out of it. I think the immediate solution is not a 50-story skyscraper with a crop on every floor--I think the immediate solution is the enabling and encouragement of the intimidated backyard basil grower. I think it starts with us.

Earth Day Film Contest

Starting in April Marion Square will start hosting free movies on Friday evenings sponsored by Charleston City paper. Although viewing the movie is free they do ask for a $1 donation that will benefit the local non-profit organization of the week. Coastal Conservation League (an organization established in 1989 that works with local Charleston businesses, citizens, groups and schools to protect coastal South Carolina) is sponsoring a “My Day: Charleston” film contest. The details below are from the facebook event page:

“My Day: Charleston”
The Challenge: Show us how you spend a day in Charleston- celebrating the earth.
Do you love the beach? The marsh? The beautiful parks all over the city? The West Ashley Greenway? There is a lot of beauty here in Charleston and we want to see how you spend your time, taking care of, exploring, and loving our piece of earth in this historic city.This contest is open to any individuals, families, businesses or organizations who want to show what Charleston is all about on Earth Day!

Rules to Enter:
1. Video submissions due March 25 to Adrienne Levy and Suzie Webster. adriennel@scccl.org and scgreenfair@gmail.com
2. Maximum Length is 3 minutes
3. Video must incorporate theme and be appropriate for audiences of all ages
4.Top winners will have their video shown during the Music in Marion Square, presented by the City Paper every Friday in April. Grand Prize winner will be announced and shown on Earth Day, April 22. Special prizes will also be announced along the way."

Earth Day was first established on April 22, 1970 in the Unites States by Gaylord Nelson, a United States Senator. It offered activists an opportunity to express their concern for environmental and sustainability issues and incentives. In 1990 the day became a worldwide happening and now over 192 countries partake in Earth Day events.

Would this be a project that our class would like to become involved in? Any ideas of how we, as a class, would spend our day in Charleston celebrating the Earth?

http://www.facebook.com/#!/event.php?eid=185831401457411 http://coastalconservationleague.org/green-fair-music-with-a-message-contest-information/ http://www.earthday.org/about-us

Thinking Like A Mountain

“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”

~Aldo Leopold

If sustainability can be viewed as success (whether financial or ecological) over a given period of time, then it would seem the term is plagued by a certain amount of ambiguity. While success is extremely difficult to define in both commercial and scientific endeavors in and of its self, the matter is complicated by an incomplete view of the time function with which it is incorporated. While Albert Einstein said that time is irrelevant and Benjamin Franklin said that time is money, then it would seem that our generation has incorporated both paradigms. We have defined success as a matter of fiscal prosperity, while becoming increasingly shortsighted with regard to our progeny and the decades that lie ahead. Without an appreciation for the future, the concept of sustainability is essentially futile. In an effort to combat the anthropocentricity that plagues the human condition; Aldo Leopold argued that we must to learn to “think like a mountain,” and realize we are merely a moment in the spectrum of natural time. It is with this paradigm that the sustainable movement moves forward in an effort to ensure our footprint is commensurate with our weight.

http://www.eco-action.org/dt/thinking.html

Environmental Awareness in the Middle East

With all that's been going on in Egypt over the last few weeks, I've been thinking about how they might view or treat environmental issues (i.e. do they have ENVT classes over there?). While the industrialized nations like the US and China certainly contribute the most to pollution, the Middle East is a major source of our oil, so it would stand to reason that they must have some sort of environmental awareness or movement going on. So I googled "environmental awareness in the middle east" and came across a children's book being launched all around the Middle East entitled Omar's Goats. Author Kathy Hoopmann actually made the children's book from an environmental teacher's manual and it's meant to send a strong message to children in a very simple way (kind of like the children's propaganda books from the Holocaust, but in a good way this time). The book is endorsed by the Madares Al Ghad [MAG] program, which seeks to establish a coherent and respectable k-12 school system in the United Arab Emirates and a few other participating Middle Eastern countries. This link tells you more about MAG:

http://cliftonchadwick.wordpress.com/2009/04/09/the-schools-of-tomorrow-show-results-today/

And here's one for Omar's Goats:

http://www.7days.ae/storydetails.php?id=185&page=localnews&title=Omar’s%20Goats

I must say it is very reassuring to know that the grass roots environmental movement is taking place on the "opposite end of the world." I am a huge believer in education being the best way to prevent disaster and promote progress because things as simple as children's books make lifelong impressions on the kids who read them.

I also delved into "sustainable agriculture in Egypt." Didn't find much except for that Egypt is developing better methods of dry land farming to account for its arid climate, lack of arable land, water scarcity, water quality, and population growth. Experts say that MENA (Middle East + Northern Africa) countries' dilemmas (famine, disease, war, etc.) are almost all traceable to resource issues, so sustainable agriculture applied to dry land farming would be a godsend to the area. Perhaps the "fertile crescent" will be fertile again one day.

The Carbon Connection

I came across this documentry last night and found it quite concerning. I reccomend you give it a watch. Here is a short summary:

The Carbon Connection follows the story of two groups of people from each community who learned to use video cameras and made their own films about living with the impacts of the carbon market. From mental health issues in Scotland to the loss of medicinal plants in Brazil, the communities discover the connections they have with each other and the film follows them on this journey