A Billion Lives

But each of us can do our small part and perhaps we can collectively save a billion or more lives from the impending catastrophe we affectionately call climate change.

Anyone that watches/reads the news is well aware of the shortage of food. The war in Ukraine, Russia destroying the wheat fields that feed many countries, the extreme heat of 2021 and 2022 that prevented a wheat harvest in our own Midwest, the drying up of the Yangtze and its shipping lanes, the Thames and the Rhine, the crash of fertilizer access world wide, factories in the U.S. that have massive bacterial contaminations, parts of the food sector that are controlled by just a couple of very large companies, the Avian flu. I could go on, but I’m sure you can understand by now that finding healthy food to eat will be problematic for many years to come. And with salty sea water now contaminating vast areas of farmland here in the coastal U.S. and around the world, we need to admit that it will never be like it was. Our old lives are never coming back. We have only ourselves to blame.

(I should stress that these are my opinions, although well educated opinions. You may disagree. I will strive to make all of these suggestions based on conclusions of scientific experiments and epidemiological/statistical data, not TikTok hacks. And, oh yeah, just basic common sense.)

This isn’t political, it’s survival.

Try to incorporate these in your family’s routine. A little at a time works best:

IN THE GARDEN …don’t buy soil amendments. You don’t know what toxins are in them. All those chemicals at Lowe’s , etc. are gone and in your neighbors’ yards within a couple months, and then into the municipal compost. Commercial mulch has sometimes been contaminated with plant growth inhibitors and coated with who knows what. Where did those freaky colors come from.

Make your own. Compost all vegetable waste, grass clippings, leaves in the fall. Garden with hand tools not gas powered whenever possible. Gardening is good for the heart, the physical heart, cheaper and no carbon footprint compared to driving to the gym, and close contact with the soil is better than a month of psychotherapy. Ask anyone that is addicted to their garden.

Use raised beds for vegetables, hand watering with a hose and adding amendments only inside the beds not the aisles. (And don’t even think of buying those ridiculous kits. No need to incorporate poisons into your beds or increase your carbon footprint just to grow food.) The raised beds provide better drainage, the soil warms faster in the spring, and they use less water and amendments because they are not being wasted in the aisles.

Stop trying to keep your grass green in the summer. You are wasting water and weakening the grass trying to convince it to grow in the heat when it is really a cool weather plant. Lawns negatively affect the water table almost as much as paved roads and driveways. I applaud the jurisdictions who charge a rain tax. We are given rain from above and those who thwart that and damage the water supply below for all of us should be penalized.
Plus, having a perfectly manicured lawn deprives fireflies of essential habitat. Ease up. Don’t mow so often. (You know who you are, Mr. OCD.) A fluffy lawn is more appealing to humans too and I can’t imagine growing up without those magical creatures.

FOOD…Buy rice from California or Southeast Asia, assume all others are heavily contaminated with arsenic. Many US farmers used to spray their fields with it to kill pests. That doesn’t go away. (We’re sooo smart in this country.) And why would we reward those fools anyway.

We buy only organic soy and corn. These crops were genetically modified to be resistant to Roundup (glyphosate). The crop is sprayed with the herbicide to kill the weeds. Now many weeds have become resistant, which means that not only do the farmers (and I use that term loosely) rain down even more glyphosate but spray additional poisons to kill the resistant weeds. 95% of the soybean in this country is GMO Roundup resistant, also known as Roundup Ready.

We also buy only organic potatoes and wheat because of their pesticide loads. Potatoes, for example, are treated with the following measures: prior to planting, the soil is fumigated with a gas pesticide to kill nematodes (there are natural alternatives) and sprayed with herbicide to kill weeds, after planting they are treated with a systemic insecticide which is absorbed into all plant structures to kill the bugs that chew on the leaves, then up to 10 weekly sprays of chemical fertilizers. Just before the plants begin to touch each other in the field they are sprayed with a fungicide, pesticides are also applied by crop dusters every other week and farmers (or any animal) cannot enter the field for 5 days after because it damages the human nervous system. They spray a defoliant so they can harvest (remember Agent Orange in the Vietnam war?), and finally, they they treat them so the potatoes can’t sprout after purchase. While some farmers may skip some of these steps, so what. I don’t want to eat a potato with even one.

Choose foods that have a lower carbon footprint and smaller environmental destruction such as small, locally farmed shell fish, small scale chicken and local fisheries. Or grow/catch your own. Most large scale fish farms are ecological disasters.

Limit steak to once a month. Try to find grass fed. Local.
Don’t encourage those who think cutting down forests for steak is a good idea.

Buy vegetables in season, from the North American continent.

Buy produce locally from a CSA, farmers market, or a Local Food Hub. Ask if they sell seconds or buy from the online services who buy directly from the farmers whose vegetables would otherwise go in the trash. We started with the mail order as soon as the US shut down for the pandemic. Our part in trying to keep the small farms across our country from bankruptcy.

Don’t eat fake food, your liver doesn’t know how to detoxify it.
Eat real food. Eat foods that don’t have things added or subtracted. (Flour is required by law to be fortified with vitamins, so that is OK.) Read the labels. Good rule of thumb—if you can’t pronounce it, don’t eat it. Don’t eat foods that have been disassembled and reassembled, aka plant-based meats. If you are vegetarian, OWN IT. Pretend burgers and fish are absurd, not to mention the ridiculous number of off-label chemicals used from multiple steps to produce them and the carbon footprint to manufacture them. Don’t eat products containing palm oil, non-organic soy products, food coloring that doesn’t come from vegetables, the chemical stain called caramel coloring. And what the quail is natural flavor? Dog vomit? That’s natural. What are they hiding that they don’t want to say what it is? Mayonnaise that won’t give you food poisoning? If bacteria are too afraid to eat it, why would I?

(A note on changing tastes: growing up, my mother would buy frozen vegetables and boil them for 45 minutes. No flavorings. I hated vegetables. Since then, the quality of fresh vegetables and the enormous variety has greatly increased. Which means, when we add a lot of seasonings, especially southeast Asian and Mediterranean, we have many meals without meat. The meat would just be a distraction. When we eat quesadillas I eat enough fresh salsa to call it a side dish. My go to, for the last 40 years, has been Bon Appetit and a few very good cook books. And, oh yeah, Tony Bourdain.)

While hydroponically grown foods are touted to be the future to providing food for everyone on a crowded planet, I try to not consume them. Studies have shown that (1) plants grown in plastic hoop houses absorb micro particles of the plastic as it degrades, and (2) plants that grow at an increased speed contain significantly less nutrients.

Get rid of plastics, especially drinks. You are feeding your children poisons and chemicals that were developed for birth control. Just imagine what that’s going to do to your son. Your daughter. Store food in glass containers. And the latest news is that our infants’ poop is full of micro plastics. In our household we have also been trying to get rid of appliances with plastics. We have been successful with a new coffee pot, cookware, and glass storage containers but just decrease our use of the processor. Discovered that I actually like chopping veggies. My mother thinks I’m crazy.

Vast mechanized monoculture farming is wrong on so many levels. (Whew, that’s the very short version of tens of thousands of pages of research.)
Grow your own. Buy seeds from small, possibly local companies. Our favorites are Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (local to us) and Baker Creek. They both take extraordinary measures to safeguard the genetic diversity of this planet to try to insure that the human race will survive any cataclysm global warming might throw at us.

If you don’t have a yard, Amazon has 4 foot LED shop lights that you can attach directly to the ceiling. We use these all winter for the chili pepper plants that we bring inside when it gets cold and the new seedlings we start late winter. Our goal is to scale up so we can harvest more during the winter. You can buy seed starting trays and 48 and 72 cell inserts to start seeds from places like Fifth Season Gardening.

Have you noticed the lack of birds and pollinators in the mid-Atlantic states the last two summers? It was rather precipitous in our yard. We also used to have thousands of honey bees every spring when the maple trees bloomed. You could hear them from anywhere in the yard. Now, there is just silence. What exactly have we done to this planet? In our yard we have added more bird feeders, a hummingbird station for the one who, along with her ancestors, have lived here every summer for almost 40 years, planted shrubs for cover and food, keep kiddie pools for the spring peepers and their tadpoles, and allowed more wildflowers to come up in the field to help the pollinators. Our hummingbird has brought her sister this year. We are so excited. Maybe it’s a sign that we are providing enough food.

I do not advise buying full grown “pollinator” plants, they are usually sprayed with pesticides that will kill the pollinators. Buy seed. Or seedlings from a local farm that you trust.

We cannot assume that California, Oregon and Washington will always be able to feed us.
Have you seen the drought.
Have you seen the fires.

Think of all the pollutants from furniture in the homes that were destroyed. Now think of all that ash covering the fields.
It gives me anxiety attacks.

Download the best practices seafood list from Monterey Bay Aquarium onto your phone to reference while in the store. For example, farmed shrimp from Southeast Asia damages the environment in so many ways and many of the farms use forced labor. Why do you think it’s so cheap.

Also EWG’s yearly “Dirty Dozen “ of produce.

REMOVE AIRBORNE TOXINS…Teflon and it’s derivatives, anything waterproof, stain- resistant, wrinkle-free, grease-repellent. These are all endocrine-disrupting,forever chemicals.
Ditch the air fresheners, fire-retardants, polyurethane cushions and bed toppers, and MDF “lumber” , pressure treated and particle board. Use real lumber—the original carbon sequestration system.
The toxin load in our bodies and in our children’s is ridiculous. Most of them we will have until we die so why add more. And even then, our death isn’t the end of them. They are permanent on this planet, they take thousands of years to degrade. Why would we reward the companies that make these horrible things or those who use them in their products by giving them our money? Or the politicians who allow it? 

Almost everything that we buy new spends a month outside on the porch to outgas. If that isn’t feasible, it is isolated in a rarely used room with some R86 that pulls the toxins out of the air. Don’t use in a room that people are in. I don’t know enough about it to recommend that. I do know that it pulled all the smell out of the guest room when a skunk sprayed the underside of the floor boards from the crawl space.

DECREASE TRASH, DECREASE CONSUMPTION…I am not a minimalist. On the contrary. But…
Buy stuff that can be reused instead of single use. Reuse is always better than recycle. Up cycle everything you can. Be creative, use it for something new. Wine bottles look kinda funky upside down as a border in the vegetable garden. ( Yes, the wine is local.)

Cherish the family heirlooms. We all have so many things to remind us of those we love who aren’t here anymore and those that died so long ago that we never met. But each item tells you something about who they were.
Buy used home furnishings. Think antique or soon to be.

New furniture and carpets take 5-10 years to outgas. In the meantime you and your children are breathing all that poison. Do you want that stuff melting their brains, decreasing their performance in school?
Do you want fibromyalgia and cancer?

Likewise cars. Tell the auto industry idiots that the “new car smell“ has got to go.

Stop buying stuff. We are only now beginning to realize that the earth has limited resources. Our uberconsumerism is the real cause of the supply chain problems. Decide do you really need what you are about to buy or is it just impulse. Or boredom. Or habit. Try the two month rule that I use on my husband. Put it in the save section of your online cart. Usually he doesn’t want it anymore, it was just an impulse, something shiny and new. Ditto for me.

Don’t shop just because you like to shop, or because you can. Or because you want people to know that you can.
Instead find something useful to do, or be creative, volunteer in the community, donate to the local food bank. Or just read a book.

Our planet is becoming a garbage heap. List everything you don’t want anymore on give away sites such as Trash Nothing and Craigslist free stuff.

So many things to change. I know it’s overwhelming. We accelerated our changes because I had medical problems due to environmental conditions. Still, it took us a few years. Don’t stress about how fast you are going.

Do what you can today.

Learn to live with what you have.

Look for real joy every day.