Earth Day 2008 - How Can Diabetics Help?

“Everyone Knows Someone Who Needs This Information!”

April 22nd is always Earth Day, and as diabetics, daily monitoring produces a necessary amount of waste medical material that needs to be recycled and disposed of properly, in my diabetic diet plan, I help you compensate for those constantly-discarded monitoring supplies (something we cannot easily change), by making sure we make choices supporting earth-friendly behaviors which make positive impact, for our lives and our planet.We have to propel our governments into serious Change, too, and if every human on earth lived the same consumer patterns as the average American consumer, we already would need 5 1/3 planets to live this live-style! And, as we all know, we only have 1 Mother Earth. 

And hundreds of millions of newly-wealthy Asians are poised to jump-onboard the Affluent Express, churning out more pollution, with less personal understanding of the consequences and less empowerment over their governments, which are ginning up their production of pollution, largely unchecked. So what to do!

We all have to change. On a personal level, excellent, savvy, knowledgeable food choices are a logical step, among other actions, and I will introduce you to the concept of “Food Miles” and eating local and eating in season and eating organic. That will be a great start to making a positive individual contribution. Growing your own garden is actually the start of the Revolution!

Also, pay attention to packaging (the type, amount). If possible take your own canvas tote bags to the supermarket to bring home groceries and buy smaller, re-usable lightweight canvas bags with ties to use for bulk goods and produce. See sources below.

Advocate and insist that your market use the “new” plastic-like, clear, deli-containers and produce bags made from corn! I first used them at least 15 - 20 years ago in California health stores near Palo Alto, and they have been slow to be adapted, for no good reason. They work wonderfully, and over time, they will biodegrade. See sources below.

Additionally, try to use foods with a short list of ingredients; these usually have a smaller ecological “price” (foot-print) as fewer transportation resources were used to bring all the various ingredients to one location to produce the product. Plain, local, organic, seasonal fresh food is best. Learn about CSA networks through www.localharvest.org if you don’t have the space or inclination to “farm” your own food.

After trying to keep the smallest personal-ecological-footprint for the past 40 years, it is hard for me to see that we are losing the battle for our planet. We need to get others onboard, so I am recruiting you! Let your friends know the real details about the danger all of us are creating for all of life. Get them onboard too. It’s going to take billions of us now to make a difference and push for serious, innovative changes in organic, sustainable farming and sustainabkle, non-polluting transportation and creating better built, recycled and hemp housing and new energy sources for cars and homes. And, vote with your dollars; support “green”, ecologically-sound businesses, and starve the business-as-usual, rape-the-planet group.

I am including a video to watch, and then watch the 2 next earlier ones in the same archive. The first video helps you weigh the concept of “food miles”, “local eating”. becoming a locavore and eating in season. Start with the following quick video:

Food Miles Discoveries

Next, taking the ecology footprint test at www.ecofoot.org  shows that for me, the largest impact I have is reaching to buy a more efficient automobile or living in a denser-community like apartments or townhouses. However, as I barely drive most of the time, and always with passengers, and always must do at least 3 errands per trip, I will forego the car until necessary, and as far as housing is concerned, I have hopes of trying to get another home in a green-friendly co-housing, community. We need to create more of these communities. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cohousing

As Michael Pollan writes in his Living Green article at the New York Times: “There are so many stories we can tell ourselves to justify doing nothing, but perhaps the most insidious is that, whatever we do manage to do, it will be too little too late. Climate change is upon us, and it has arrived well ahead of schedule. Scientists’ projections that seemed dire a decade ago turn out to have been unduly optimistic: the warming and the melting is occurring much faster than the models predicted. Now truly terrifying feedback loops threaten to boost the rate of change exponentially, as the shift from white ice to blue water in the Arctic absorbs more sunlight and warming soils everywhere become more biologically active, causing them to release their vast stores of carbon into the air. Have you looked into the eyes of a climate scientist recently? They look really scared.“

And Pollan continues: “…Years ago the cheap-energy mind discovered that more food could be produced with less effort by replacing sunlight with fossil-fuel fertilizers and pesticides, with a result that the typical calorie of food energy in your diet now requires about 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce. It’s estimated that the way we feed ourselves (or rather, allow ourselves to be fed) accounts for about a fifth of the greenhouse gas for which each of us is responsible.”

By creating your own Victory Garden, ” … You quickly learn that you need not be dependent on specialists to provide for yourself — that your body is still good for something and may actually be enlisted in its own support. If the experts are right, if both oil and time are running out, these are skills and habits of mind we’re all very soon going to need. We may also need the food. Could gardens provide it? Well, during World War II, victory gardens supplied as much as 40 percent of the produce Americans ate.”

“… But there are sweeter reasons to plant that garden, to bother. At least in this one corner of your yard and life, you will have begun to heal the split between what you think and what you do, to commingle your identities as consumer and producer and citizen. Chances are, your garden will re-engage you with your neighbors, for you will have produce to give away and the need to borrow their tools. You will have reduced the power of the cheap-energy mind by personally overcoming its most debilitating weakness: its helplessness and the fact that it can’t do much of anything that doesn’t involve division or subtraction. … The single greatest lesson the garden teaches is that our relationship to the planet need not be zero-sum, and that as long as the sun still shines and people still can plan and plant, think and do, we can, if we bother to try, find ways to provide for ourselves without diminishing the world. “

REFERENCES:
www.localharvest.org
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/20/magazine/20wwln-lede-t.html?pagewanted=4&_r=1&hp

www.epicurious.com/bonappetit/features
http://planetgreen.discovery.com/home-garden/calculate-your-ecological-foot.html

compostable bags www.myhealthgate.com/article/531/eco-alternatives-compostable-corn-starch-bags    www.greenfeet.com
http://www.greenfeet.com/itemMatrix.asp?MatrixType=1&GroupCode=5505-00081  

compostable plates http://www.clearcreekcomp.com/
food pouches - canvas: http://www.thomasnet.com/products/cloth-bags-2521409-1.html
corn utensils and straws: http://www.2wplastic.com/pla_straws.htm
corn carrying bags: http://www.2wplastic.com/pla_boi_bags.htm
clear corn biobags http://www.clearbags.com/?overview%7Cspecial
http://www.trellisearth.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=10

tiffin lunch pail: http://www.greenfeet.com/itemdesc.asp?ic=6007-00185-0000
http://greenearthofficesupply.stores.yahoo.net/

Dear Reader, I am leaving town for California and Arizona to do some needed family tasks, so I’ll post again as soon as I can. I expect to be away from home maybe 6 weeks, or more. We’ll see.

So, I’m off to stage my packing.

Please take the chance to think a lot over these next weeks about what you can do to help our planet. Maybe prepare your pots or garden plot for a vegetable garden, and muse about how else to help while you do that.

Be sure to use the Titles Tab on the upper Navigation Bar to read more in-depth articles.

Best to all — Em

(c)2008 Em http://diabetesdietdialogue.wordpress.com
If you desire to use or quote from my article, please include the full copyright citation and my website address. Thanks!