Genetically Modified Foods

This 1-hour video entitled "The Health Dangers of Genetically Modified Foods" convinced me to stop buying and eating GMO foods and to spend extra time to shop with more care avoiding that any GM food ends up in our shopping cart. The author of the talk Jeffrey Smith also wrote a book called "Seeds of Deception". This video presentation was the straw that broke the camels back. No more GM food for us, no more Wrighley's chewing gum, no more Lays potato chips, no more Kelloggs cereals, ...

Greenpeace advises on how to buy in order to avoid GM food. This is a very difficult task in the US. Here is the Greenpeace advice for the US. For Spain, Greenpeace has produced a specific booklet listing all GMO food products by supermarket chains and manufacturer. A green list of safe products and a red list of products to avoid because of risk or certainty of GM content. See if your local Greenpeace office has a similar booklet for your country.

Comparing Depressions

All of us who stay informed on the current economic situation know that the crisis is far from over. 5 days ago I saw a discussion of the book "The Crash of 2010" on Spanish TV. The author argues that the worst is yet to come. We have a lot more of downhill to go before we can speak of true "green shoots". I am repeating just the obvious, but this blog has very good charts on how we compare our ongoing 2009 depression to the depression that started in 1929. It is appropriately entitled "A Tale of 2 Depressions". The first two charts show clearly that it went downhill for 36 months. Even 51 months after June 1929 the stock market was down by about 35%. In the Great Depression it took some 4 years to reach the turning point, i.e. the lowest point, and some 8 years to get back to the original level. In the depression that started in 2008 we should expect worse. We will not recover in 8 years because during these 8 years we will be hit with another crisis: peak oil, environmental crisis, a possible water resource limitation, etc. Furthermore, it will be more difficult to get out of this depression because our living standard (at a materialistic level) is a lot higher. Everyone already has a car, a TV, etc. The markets are saturated and the primary fuel for the economy, i.e. oil, is diminishing. In respect to GNP we might possibly not get back to 2008 levels for the rest of our lives. But we can get back to levels of happiness and quality of life higher than 2008 in short time if we set our mind to it, by focusing less on materialistic issues, striving for a sustainable life and enjoy the simple things.

Seventh Generation Concept

From the Great Law of the Iroquois Confederacy: "In our every deliberation, we must consider the impact of our decisions on the next seven generations."

Wow, that is one simple and impacting concept. For every decision the Iroquois Indians took they thought about how this would impact the following seven generations. Now, that is far sighted. The complete contrary to today's short-sighted political and economic leaders.


There is also a company selling products that in tune with nature under the Seventh Generation name.

More alternative News

www.brasschecktv.com provides one daily video clip (ranging from a few minutes to full documentary films) on political issues, civil rights, new technologies, food, health care and similar. It is an interesting alternative news channel. No RSS feed, but if you subscribe you get one email per day with a link and a brief description of the video of the day. Have a look at it!

Healthy Skepticism

While reading the book Sophie's World which is an easy to read summary of western philosophy, I stumbled across a story similar to the following. A person sees a stone falling. Every time he picks it up and lets go of it, it falls. He performs this experiment over and over again, and every time the stone falls. So, he concludes there must be a natural law that says "Stones fall to the ground".

Imagine now a chicken. Every day at 5pm comes a lady, usually with a straw hat, to the chicken coop and brings food. Every day. The chicken follows this experiment. It never fails. As it turns late afternoon, the lady comes and brings food. It asks other chickens as well, was there ever a day the lady did not come in the afternoon to bring food? No. The lady always comes. So, the chicken reaches the conclusion there must be a natural law that says "In the afternoon someone brings us food". Of course one morning, the lady comes with a knife, carries the chicken into a separate building and cuts its throat.

Lesson? We must be very skeptical of everything. Ever heard sentences like "given long enough time the stock market always goes up"? Looking at a chart, housing prices in the 20th century have always gone up. Water is a unlimited resource. The recession will be over shortly. We have a true democracy. This evil country has weapons of mass destruction, they are a danger to our security, hence we must attack them to free their poor suppressed citizens.

We are told so many lies. Whatever you see, hear or read; always be skeptical. Ask yourself why something should be as portrayed. Is it really a law of nature? Or is it something that happened to happen frequently in the past? And if something happened frequently in the past, I bet it happened frequently because some people with power wanted it to happen frequently so that they can take advantage of it. Further questions would be: Who is benefiting? Who has the power to manipulate the issue? What are alternative approaches? What is the externalized cost of this action or product?

Water

Last weekend we watched "Blue Gold : World Water Wars". I would say it is a must see. Water is such a crucial element to everything we do, it is important to be informed about water issues at the small scale and on the big scale. On the small scale we have the little things we can do in our home: low-flow faucets, two-button toilets, turning off the water while we brush our teeth, using greywater for plants, etc. If you have a garden the list goes on: building a swale, catching rain water, watering at night to reduce evaporation, building a solar water distiller, etc. This movie is more about water on the big scale: how companies buy up the water rights, raise the prices, how water becomes unavailable to poor people, how Coke is cheaper than water in some places, how the IMF and World Bank order dry countries to export water, how companies can create laws that make it illegal to catch and capture rain water, etc.

Hearing the last comment made me nearly mad: In Bolivia (until reversed by protests) it was outlawed to capture or use rain water in any fashion. Rain water was property of Bechtel, a private US corporation. Can you imagine how twisted our profit seeking world has become! One day our air will be privatized and they will charge us for the air we breath. Back to H2O.

We have the term "peak oil". When will have the term "peak water"? We have it: read about it here. When is peak water? Some countries have reached it. The movie highlights many national and international water issues and predicts that the next wars will not be over oil but over water. I'd say that the fact that the George Bush family bought 98,000 acres of land on top of one of the world's richest aquafers as a vote in favor of the value of water and that people are willing to fight over it, either commercially, politically (the IMF and World Bank have been doing this for a decade already) and even bellicly.

The next time you have a sip of this refreshing cool liquid, think about it.

Blue Gold links:

• Official site
• Imdb
• Wikipeadia
• Video snippets and trailers on Google Video and YouTube
  

Progress and Values

What is progress? What are values? How to measure the well being of a nation? Of a person? The book Rural Renaissance by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist pointed something out that is quite obvious. We have heard it before, but it was nice for me to have it repeated again so that my mind is refreshed on this issue.

What's the goal of life? The goal of a nation? What should we look at, focus on: development, growth, progress, quality of life, health, sustainability, ...?

Politicians, financial markets and industry seem to focus only on one thing: Growth. And how is it measured? With the GNP. But what measures the GNP? Money spent. Terrorism is good for the GNP. Because that causes lots of spending on the war on terrorism. Plain war is great for the GNP. Bombs are expensive and billions are spent. Natural disasters are great for the GNP because the recovery operations of floods, tornadoes all cost money. Running out of safe ground water is great for the GNP because people are forced to buy expensive treated water. A high cancer rate is great for the GNP because that requires expensive medical treatment. And the list goes on and on. Nearly anything that is bad for us drives the GNP up: oil spills, high divorce rate, high crime rate, human made disasters, ...

Is GNP the right index to measure the health of an economy, a nation? I don't think so. Still, all politicians tell us that we are doing great if the GNP is raising. Such short-sightedness.

Robert Kennedy in 1968 said: "The gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures … neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile."

Since the politicians don't create a new index to measure true human progress towards a more fulfilling sustainable life, it is up to us as individuals to create our personal quality-of-life index.

Look at Redefining Progress where you can find sustainability indicators, genuine progress indicators and more.

Rural Renaissance

Over the last 3 days I read the book Rural Renaissance by John Ivanko and Lisa Kivirist. I liked it. It pretty much describes the direction I am mentally heading. I am about 5 years behind them. I am looking for a rural plot with an old farm house to reform and repair. I have been looking for about 5 months now and seen some 10 properties. I want to give this old farm house (once found) a new live and make it our new home. All the things I plan on doing are described eloquently in this book. They moved from Chicago to a farm stead without much knowledge. Step by step they learned all the basics: the first tomatoes, first chicken, adding a small pond to the garden, planting veggies with permaculture in mind, fixing up the house with a wood burner, eventually adding solar panels, growing our own food, living ecologically, ... It is good reading for all permaculture beginners and also for people who want to give their life a new "green" focus, wherever they might live (city, suburbs, countryside). Every section has a summary page with cross references to other books or web sites with more details. The book is hands-on, with many examples and personal anecdotes.

I recommended this book to my wife so that she can better understand me and my reasons why I want to leave our comfortable city flat behind. A lot of the motives and hopes discussed in the book are shared by me. I want a simpler life, a healthier life and a life where day-by-day I am in tune with nature. There are also some major differences between my goals and capacities and the authors. Unlike them I have no intention on running a B&B out of the farm home and I am certainly less social and outgoing as the authors who bring together a lot of different folks to share their rural adventure. Still I found it nice reading, feeding my dream and adding a few facts to my theoretical understanding of permaculture.

Access Time

In the Chris Martenson self assesment there is a question which is roughly like this: "How much time do you need to access, i.e. get a hold of, your money? Please measure in hours." What do you think? I conservatively figured that 3 days would be a good estimate. I was wrong. Look at my current experience.

Since I am more and more convinced that the crisis will be long term and that the dollar will lose it value short as well as long term, I have reached the conclusion to sell off my private pension plan, i.e. my IRA account. I pay 10% penalty and taxes now for early withdrawal but I figure it will be better to lose some money now than seeing a lot of devaluation over the next decade. My IRA account consisted of shares of XLE. So, last Friday I sold all shares I owned. For four days my account said "cash not available for withdrawal, awaiting settlement of sales". Only today Wednesday, on the fifth day after executing the sale, the cash was available for withdrawal. But now the next surprise occured. The complete amount of the cash cannot be transferred because there is an upper limit implemented by the financial institution. And finally, even the reduced amount could not be transferred because the web site continuously returned an error.

By now it is clear, it will take me more than a week to actually get a hold of the money. The story continues and I will update it as it evolves. But I have the feeling that several phone calls and several days tracking the issue are required to actually resolve it.

Compost and Manure

Do you want to start composting? This book The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure by Joseph C. Jenkins is for you. I cross read it this weekend and I found it excellent. There are a lot of practical tips how to create your own compost pile and how to maintain it. It includes all the do's and dont's. It also explains composting human manure which I also found interesting. Recommended reading for everyone who wants to start composting or ever thought about an outhouse or similar solutions for dealing with human waste. The author provides even many composting videos on this video page.

Vinegar

What do have sunburn, insect bite, itch, window cleaning, kitchen cleaning, healthy drink, clogged coffee pot, etc. all have in common? Vinegar is a solution to all of them, and furthermore vinegar is cheap and environmental friendly. Apply vinegar on the red skin after a sunburn, apply it on the skin in case of an insect bite or itch, use it to clean windows, declog the kitchen drain, cut grease, eliminate calcium deposits such as in coffee makers or shower heads, mix it with water and honey to make a healthy refreshing drink, use it as diet control, reduce infections, use as herbicide, and of course as culinary ingredient. And there are a hundred uses more. Read them all here, here and there. It is close to magic!