The Flaming Grasshopper

Hats off to Gary Paul Nabhan, who edited the recently released Renewing America’s Food Traditions (Chelsea Green), for a splendid article in today’s Dining & Wine section of The New York Times.

The pieces opening lines capture the mission and method behind Nabhan’s efforts:

Some people would just as soon ignore the culinary potential of the Carolina flying squirrel or the Waldoboro green neck rutabaga. To them, the creamy Hutterite soup bean is too obscure and the Tennessee fainting goat, which keels over when startled, sounds more like a sideshow act than the centerpiece of a barbecue. 

But not Gary Paul Nabhan. He has spent most of the past four years compiling a list of endangered plants and animals that were once fairly commonplace in American kitchens but are now threatened, endangered or essentially extinct in the marketplace. He has set out to save them, which often involves urging people to eat them.

That last line speaks to what Nabhan calls “eater-based conservation” and something he explains in the book’s opening pages.

Almost as good as the article, and fun to investigate, is the interactive map the folks at the Times put together that shows each North American Food Nation and some of its endangered foods. Check out the map by clicking here.

OK, so that’s not an exact quote, but we are proud to have learned that three of our books, The Man Who Hated Work and Loved Labor by Les Leopold, Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier, and Javatrekker by Dean Cycon, are each finalists for ForeWord’s Book of the Year Award in their respective categories, Biography, Home & Garden, and Travel Essays. The winners are announced on May 30. Nice going, guys!

Lately I’ve been enjoying chewing gum here at work and today I noticed on the list of ingredients that my gum includes titanium dioxide. I know TiO2 is used to whiten things. I’d also heard somewhere back in the depths of trivia land that titanium is an energy intensive industry. So I wanted to know roughly how much global warming contribution was being conducted just so that, in part, I could have a whiter piece of chewing gum. The envelope please…

Well, it turns out not to be the easiest question to answer. The US EPA “U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Reports” break down greenhouse gas emissions by industry [pdf] and include the TiO2 folks in their listings (p. 29). Overall, in 2006, industrial processes accounted for 5 percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions (p. 1) (this excludes the emissions resulting from the generation of electricity to power those processes). The biggest emitters (those with double-digit teragrams of CO2 equivalent emissions) were iron and steel, cement, lime, nitric acid, HCFC-22, electrical transmission and distribution*, and ammonia manufacture.

(*Again, this is not from the generation of the electricity itself. These emissions come from the escape of sulfur hexaflouride, which is used as an insulator in electric equipment. SF6 is a powerful greenhouse gas.)

Titanium dioxide comes further down the list, registering 1.9 teragrams of CO2 emissions in 2006. (Translation: 1.9 teragrams = 1.9 billion kilograms = 2.2 billion pounds = 1.1 million US tons = 11.3 Nimitz class aircraft carriers, including the two nuclear reactors on each ship.) This represents actual CO2 released in the chemical process of turning raw titanium-containing ores into the bright white titanium dioxide beloved by chewing gum manufacturers, and so many other producers of modern, bright white consumer products. It’s both a lot of CO2 and a little: on the little end, it’s a mere 1/2 percent of all industrial releases, and therefore a mere 0.03 percent of all US greenhouse gas emissions; on the lot end, it represents the annual emissions of 150,685 model year 2005 Ford Focus sedans each getting an average of 25 mpg and driving 15,000 miles in the year.

And to reiterate, this excludes the energy that was used to process the titanium, it only refers to the CO2 emitted purely from the chemical process involved. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find a source that usefully tells me how to add energy related emissions to this total. Suffice it to say, if the purpose of the TiO2 is just to make some food (like the gum in my mouth or the fresh mozzarella that I sometimes buy) look whiter, that’s a lame use and the manufacturers of those products should stop using it and reduce demand for its production. Sure, it’s a drop in the bucket, but at the same time that we are encouraging people to use public transportation and do other little things that all add up to a lot, avoiding purely cosmetic ingredients in food that add to global warming is another little thing that has got to go. Unfortunately, now that I’ve written this blog post, I don’t have time to write to the gum company and give them my 2 cents worth–I’ve got to get back to work!

Think Clinton is a self-aggrandizing, power-grubbing jerk? Think Obama is a neophyte, empty-rhetoric chump? Think Nader is an absolute joke? Okay, you are more than welcome to your opinion, but keep the following in mind as you allow yourself to stew in a cynical stew of “they’re all the same.” From Juan Cole:

… In other words, elect McCain, my friends, and you are summoning the awful genie of another 9/11. I said it. I mean it. I’m not taking it back. That man’s announced policies could well produce a blowback that will lead to the end of democracy in the United States. It is a momentous decision.

If the book wasn’t enough to get you up and actively working to save the country from sliding into a fascist morass—then perhaps putting it up on the big screen will.

Shooting will commence in early May on the adaptation of Naomi Wolf’s The End of America, a word-of-mouth phenomenon from publisher Chelsea Green. The book was on The New York Times Best Seller list for more than five months. A simultaneous theatrical and DVD release is scheduled for late summer.

When some enterprising students videotaped Naomi’s lecture tour in support of The End of America and posted it on YouTube, more than 460,000 people viewed and passed the video around, creating a truly grassroots movement—achieved solely by word of mouth with no outside promotion.

Clearly, something unique is afoot. This vital information is resonating with concerned citizens, and Naomi Wolf has proven herself to be the right messenger.

The End of America details the ten steps a country takes when it slides toward fascism. It’s not a “lefty” tome, rather a historical look at trends in once-functioning democracies from modern history that are being repeated in our country today. It gives any reader (or viewer of the lecture) a much-needed history lesson and constitutional refresher. Most importantly, it puts the recent gradual loss of civil liberties in the U.S. in a historical context. The average American might not be alarmed at AT&T selling our private information to the Bush administration, but when this action is seen as part of a larger series of erosions and events, a pattern emerges with unfortunate consequences that become disturbingly clear.

Naomi Wolf is a truly captivating speaker. She takes the idea of “civil liberties” out of the realm of something that applies (or fails to apply) only to scary terrorists and “enemy combatants” and compellingly empowers the reader/viewer to understand that rights like habeas corpus and due process of law are not only worth protecting in the abstract, but vital to the USA as we know it. Ironically, and although he said it in a different context, Constitutional abuser par excellence Dick Cheney’s words are true when it comes to our rights: the American way of life is non-negotiable. With The End of America, Wolf has established herself as America’s preeminent citizen-defender of the Constitution.

This documentary film will bring The End of America fully to life.

Academy Award–nominated documentarians Annie Sundberg and Ricki Stern (The Trials of Darryl Hunt, The Devil Came on Horseback) will film an Inconvenient Truth-style, multi-camera version of Naomi’s incredible lecture with an interactive audience. Interstitial break-away segments, featuring both talking-head and “fly on the wall” interviews with ex-presidents, political leaders, military generals, intelligence community top bass (who are willing to talk on camera about the uselessness of “intelligence” gained through torture), and innocent victims of our gradually eroded civil liberties, will anchor viewers emotionally to both the historical echoes and present-day consequences of the erosion of our Constitution.

There is an audience of concerned American citizens clearly hungering for this information. In this pivotal election year, The End of America documentary film seeks to accompany Naomi’s best-selling book as a clarion call for citizen awareness—and for the protection of the Constitution that defines and unites us as Americans.

I talk a big game about how much I love riding my bike, but since I started
working at Chelsea Green in early February, I’ve commuted back and forth on
two wheels all of four times. I have a laundry list of excuses,
mostly having to do with our snowy Vermont winter and the 10-mile route
along a winding 50 mph road.

But since the season of redemption and rebirth is now squarely upon us, I
decided it’s time to test my chops. The 8th Annual Juniper Festival will be
held on Friday April 25 and Saturday the 26th at the University of
Massachusetts-Amherst. Its theme is The Word & The World and it aims to
explore the confluence between Environmental Science & Literary Art. Our
Associate Editor, Jonathan Teller-Elsberg, will be representing Chelsea Green on a
publishing panel at 3 p.m. that will also include folks from ECOTONE and Orion. And I’ll be tabling on Saturday afternoon and evening, with plans to sneak away from my post to hear Derek Jensen read at 5 p.m.

What better excuse for a little adventure…I mean, what better way to honor
the confluence of literature and the environment than to set off by bike for
an eco-lit festival? The route to the Juniper Festival is about 100 miles
long and I’ve been given the go-ahead to leave on Thursday or Friday if I
want to turn the work trip into a bike-to-work trip.

So for anyone else who can make it to the Juniper Festival in western Mass
that weekend, I hope you stop by the Chelsea Green table and say hi. With
luck – if I make it there on two wheels instead of four – I’ll be the
exhausted person who looks relieved & grateful to be finally sitting still.

Chelsea Green’s authors have been winning big recently for their work as individuals and as writers, and even we’ve been honored for our environmental commitment as a publisher. Congrats to everyone!

Diane Wilson (An Unreasonable Woman, and the forthcoming Holy Roller) is being honored with the Open Doors Award by the Fort Worth chapter of the Society of Professional Journalist. The award “trumpets the record of an individual or organization in defending the people’s right to open government and open records.” Congrats Diane! Try not to get arrested before the ball!

Hazel Henderson and Simran Sethi’s Ethical Markets: Growing the Green Economy garnered a bronze medal in the Axiom Business Book awards in the Business Ethics category. (Editor’s Note: The title of this book was incorrect in our recent newsletter, and we apologize for the error)

The American Horticulture Society (AHS) gave Perennial Vegetables by Eric Toensmeier its Book of the Year Award.

Frances Moore Lappé was honored recently by the James Beard Foundation with its Humanitarian Award for 2008.

And, finally Chelsea Green was given a “Longtime Leader” award during the recent second annual SustainPrint Leadership Awards, which recognize magazine and book publishers for their outstanding achievements in environmental sustainability. Scholastic Inc. won in the “Newcomer of the Year” category for book publishers and Chelsea Green won in the “Longtime Leader” category. Every Day With Rachael Ray and Nickelodeon Magazine both earned their awards in the “Newcomer of the Year” category for magazine publishers.  Read the full story.

If ever there was a single article that captures the spirit and intellect of Lynn Margulis, this profile in the Daily Collegian may be it. It simply underscores all the reasons why we here at Chelsea Green love Lynn and why we are proud to work with her on the Sciencewriters Books imprint.

Just take these few choice lines:

“The answer to all my questions is always bacteria, except talking—they don’t do talking.”

Or,

“When I was in [elementary school], I was bad because I was bored. I’ve always had trouble doing what I’m supposed to do. I just laughed at goodie-goodies, and made trouble, and chased boys, and I was bad.”

Or, my personal favorite when talking about her days at the University of Chicago:

“I got my critical ability to detect bullshit. I’m really good at that.”

And, dear readers, let me concur that if ever you have bullshit that needs detecting, Lynn’s the one you want on your side.

April 8, 2008; New York. Parade magazine, the popular Sunday newspaper insert, has filed suit in District Court today against former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld claiming copyright infringement. The suit follows on revelations in former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith’s new book, War and Decision, that Rumsfeld presented a “Parade of Horribles” to high-level officials in the White House prior to the launching of the war with Iraq in 2003. Lawyers for Parade magazine claim that Rumsfeld signed his own name to the list of possible disasters that might result from a war with Iraq, despite the fact that the list had originally appeared in the July 6, 2002, issue of Parade as part of a quiz, “Fire or Ice?” In the quiz, readers were asked to rank potential problems in pursuing a war, jumbled in with a set of random letters, numbers, and diacritical marks. (The correct ranking for most likely problem was “all of the above.”) The lawyers state that Rumsfeld was not the author who supplied the quiz, under contract, to Parade. Rumsfeld’s creation of this list from previously published material, and the photocopying and distribution of the list among White House staff, if true, would constitute a clear violation of U.S. and international copyright law.

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a frequent critic of Rumsfeld, noted the irony that Feith is now claiming that the most ardent of pro-war advocates also had had the best foresight regarding potential problems resulting from the war they lusted after. “Feith’s book forces us to make one of two conclusions. Either he’s a lying sumbitch trying to conduct cosmetic surgery on his and his colleagues’ war-crime past, or they are even more imcompetent than we ever imagined. Even after taking the Parade quiz, they still went ahead and launched this bumblefuck war? Lord help us!”

Walter Anderson, chair and CEO of Parade Publications, said he nearly choked on the wine he was drinking when he came across the relevant passage in Feith’s book. “These guys are supposed to be defending the American way from terrorists, protecting our right to unlimited volumes of brain-deadening ‘entertainment’ and Hollywood gossip, and yet here they are breaking the most sacred trust I hold with the shareholders of this company to the profit stream available from reproductions of our quiz? I never thought I’d see this from members of the Bush Administration.” Anderson went on to note that Parade had itself settled out of court over a complaint that its quiz had utilized previously published material. “Yeah, it’s not as if it took a rocket scientist to figure out that the Iraq war was going to be stoopid [sic] beyond all belief. There must have been about 1,000 articles a month on how the war was doomed to be a quagmire–maybe not in the mainstream media which was busy kissing Bush’s post-9/11 ass, but the word was out. Nowadays you can’t think of any criticism of the President and his policies that hasn’t been pointed out by dozens of people before you. Not only is he running this country into the ground, but he’s making it hard for writers to write anything without stepping on one another’s toes.”

In response to requests for comment, Rumsfeld said only, “why have you chosen to be with the terrorists?”

With the start of the baseball season underway, The Wall Street Journal’s enviro blog (”Environmental Capital”) takes a look at what teams are preaching green this season, and no we don’t mean signing bonuses or debating natural versus fake turf.

Rob Nuttig, the Mother Earth News publisher and owner of the Pittsburg Pirates, is one of the champions of a new, greener image. And, our own regional favorites—the World Champion Boston Red Sox—have even taken to public service announcements.

Baseball isn’t any different than the scores of other businesses that have suddenly discovered the virtues of environmental stewardship—with one huge difference. Lots of people actually watch, and care about, what happens in baseball.

“Our other businesses have the scale. The Pirates aren’t as big, but they have the visibility,” said Mr. Nutting.

Read more of Keith Johnson’s report here, and find out how and why big league owners are seeing green.