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Last week I got to visit a school in the Chicago area. The art teacher Ms. Holly thought of making an elephant sculpture out of recyclable laundry detergent bottles. This is a great example of just how much stuff we use — and just in time for Earth Day. Here we see the elephant without his ears and half a nose.

The principal also took about 45 minutes out of her busy schedule to discuss doing a children’s book with their school next year. I’m excited because Ms. Holly is very creative and I think this would be a good project for the budding artists here.

World traveler came home to fulfillment — JSOnline

This is a great story about my trip around the world, coming home, and how this all evolved into working with local schools to illustrate children’s books.

Thanks to Laurel Walker for doing such a thorough job, and to help build our local community by spreading change. I also had a big big surprise to see that I made the cover of the online edition. I had many teachers tell me that it was a win for the education system during these troubled times of protests in the State Capitol. Also, see the fun photo gallery by Kristyna Wentz-Graff.

PS. The original full-page story about my trip around the world in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel is no longer accessible :(

Is bicycling bad for the environment? Some food for thought as to the consequences of our every-day actions.

1. Law of entropy. Everything is bad for the environment, because everything consumes more energy than it produces. The real question: Can humans live in harmony for the life of the planet and sun?
2. The infrastructure of today’s society is inherently non-sustainable. Perhaps if our societies were designed around bicycles or trolleys, I wouldn’t be writing this. However, our society’s are built around cars, which means re-building the roads, or subtracting lanes from the cars, or impeding traffic. What is the environmental cost of increased traffic jams (time driving) or reduced parking spots and circling vehicles. (This legal issue halted San Francisco’s bicycle progress for 4 years.) Indeed, whole communities would have to be rebuilt to a more medieval European scale.
3. Indirect use of petrol. Most cars that pass a bicycle will slow down, swerve and then accelerate. This constant indirect acceleration and decceleration of passing vehicles uses more gasoline than simply driving your own car slow and steady. Compound that by bad drivers, angry motorists and even overcautious motorists creating a mini-traffic jam as they wait to pass the bicyclist.
4. Increased food consumption. Cost of food is approximately 1/2 gallon of oil per 1000 food calories, or about 17 times (up to 54x*) more energy is used to grow the food than is gained by eating the food. In other words, every time we eat we are indirectly consuming petrochemicals (and sometimes we are actually eating the petrochemicals). More info.
5. Increased lifespan. The active lifestyle of a bicyclist is estimated to add at least 2 years to your life, which indirectly increases the population and energy consumption.**
6. Increased chance of serious bodily injury to the bicyclist due to accidents (and on a lesser scale simple wear and tear, such as worn out joints, smog-damaged lungs, overexposure like sunburn and dehydration) and the related costs of medical care and equipment. (25% of the average American’s working life is devoted to paying for healthcare.)
7. Being cool. Environmental cost of bicycle, clothes, tools and high-tech gear, especially in addition to a car, or additional modes of transport, like trains, buses and cabs to support the car-less bicyclist.
8. Cold beer and hot showers. I think just about everyone loves a cold beer and hot shower after a day of cycling; however, some research studies have concluded there is not even enough energy (re-newable or not) to produce a hot shower or a cold beer every day for every citizen of the planet until time’s end, nevermind the cost of manufacturing and transporting these materials.
9. Angry bicyclists. Being a bicyclist myself I hate to admit it, but lots of us, particularly the gearheads and fanatics types, just plain have bad attitudes, and bad attitudes correlates not only into increased backlash in most of my points, but also if you are metaphysically inclined, the bad attitude is polluting the atmosphere with a bad vibe.
10. Lost time and energy. Bicycling takes time and can be exhausting, which could drain resources and passion away from all other endeavors, including saving the planet, and/or increase resources needed to recover.

Copyright © 2010. Please attribute Scott Stoll and www.theArgonauts.com

Sources:
*”The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Michael Pollan. The Penguin Press.
**“The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling”, Karl Ulrich. University of Pennsylvania.

I am excited to participate in the Growing Power Conference this week along with a lot of amazing experts in their field. I am honored to speak about:

Sustainable Living:
As seen by a man who cycled the world

Breakout Session description: I bicycled around the world (4 years, 33,000 miles, 50 countries and 6 continents) searching for the meaning of life. I witnessed how cultures across the globe struggled to feed their families, frequently to the detriment of the environment. One example involves traveling through Zimbabwe during their political upheaval and seeing people literally starving, indeed starving myself, as the agriculture crashed bringing down the rest of their society with it. President Mugabe had stripped the white farmers of their land, giving it back to the black people who, unfortunately, had no knowledge of mass agriculture; in addition, they had also forgotten the traditional farming techniques of planting corn or raising chickens in their backyard in nearby countries like Tanzania. This experience really painted a vivid picture of how our American society is built on precarious, non-sustainable farming techniques that could quite literally crumble overnight if the oil spigot were turned off. I will also present everything you need to know to live a healthy and sustainable life in 4 words.

Below are some thoughts from Will Allen, son of a sharecropper, former professional basketball player, ex-corporate sales leader, and now farmer, has become recognized as among the preeminent thinkers of our time on agriculture and food policy. The founder and CEO of Growing Power Inc., a farm and community food center in Milwaukee:

In the fall of 2009, I was thinking about how we will grow Good Food Revolution. I realized that we did not have all the players at the Good Food Table. Over the years, many people have been working hard on getting good food into our communities in many different ways, but all too often they were working only in their own sectors. I feel that for us to fundamentally change the food system, we must work together as a team. I have worked at, spoken at, participated in many gatherings and conferences over the years. At these conferences, it seemed there were never all the players needed, to know each other and eventually work together. This conference is my attempt, and Growing Power’s attempt, to bring to the table folks that have never worked together to build a new food system that works for everyone in every community. Some of these folks are farmers like myself, urban planners, government officials, financiers, corporate companies; teachers and university academics; doctors, dieticians and nutritionists; folks in the fitness field; people in renewable energy; aquaculturists, composters, recyclers and reusers; environmentalists including freshwater, wastewater and stormwater experts; brownfield specialists; and perhaps most importantly, youth, whose world will be shaped by what we do or not do, here and wherever we all return to. Over the next few days, working hard while eating some good local food from our local and regional producers, I hope that all of you will learn more, gain new partners, get inspired to go back to your communities and Grow the Good Food Revolution. Our ultimate goal is to make sure everyone, in all our communities, has access to healthy, safe, affordable and culturally appropriate food. Food is the one thing we all have in common. Building a Good Food system is the No. 1 thing that will lead us in building sustainable communities. This is really what social justice is about. ~ Will Allen

Now imagine increasing the steepness of this curve by 10-100 times and that would measure human consumption of non-renewable resources, which would also be an approximate measure of pollution, oxygen consumption, greenhouse gases and much more.

What if greenhouse gases aren’t the problem?

We are all aware of our reliance on fossil fuels and their byproduct of greenhouse gases and poisons. But have you ever wondered about the oxygen needed to burn the fuel?

Gas (C) + Oxygen (O2) = Carbon dioxide (CO2) or Carbon monoxide (CO).

As mankind burns more and more fuel, we are also burning more and more oxygen. Simultaneously, the planet’s ecosystem is being destroyed. And because the plants produce our oxygen as a byproduct of photosynthesis, less plants also means less oxygen.

Are the plants suffocating too?

The over-simplified answer is — Yes! Plants breathe carbon dioxide (CO2). A common misperception is that more emissions means more CO2, and thus plants will grow faster and produce more oxygen. Does the planet look anymore green to you? Unfortunately, the emissions from a vehicle contain more carbon monoxide (CO) which the plants can’t use and is poisonous to humans.

The oxygen in our atmosphere is being measurably and quickly reduced. Oxygen depletion, in our opinion, will soon be recognized as the greatest crisis humanity has ever faced. And it will probably happen in our lifetime. It is critical to start changing our habits and infrastructure while we still can. Because as we all know, we can’t simply stop driving our cars tomorrow. Which, by the way, is another great reason to ride a bike. Especially since one minute of driving your car consumes the equivalent oxygen that 5 people breathe in one day — that’s a lot of bicycling.

Join our O2 Crisis Facebook Fan Page and follow some current thinking, and maybe lend some of your own.

Buying direct from your local authors, artists and entrepreneurs versus faceless corporations.

If you choose to purchase through Amazon, please click on the below Amazon banner. Then I get 76¢ of my book back.

CAVEAT EMPTOR (Let the buyer beware): Please make informed decisions, because every decision we make has an influence on the community we live in, which eventually raises or lowers the standard of living for everyone, as our current financial crisis is proving.

Before I begin, I should say there are many reasons why Amazon.com has been a great resource to book lover’s everywhere. One reason is the selection of rare and used books and the worldwide network of resources. However, along with this came a host of parasites.

Example: mega-stores and online bookstores are driving your friendly corner stores out of business, and seriously impeding an author’s ability to earn a living wage and bring new products to the market. Not only are the online bookstores impersonal, automated machines, but they take up to 8 times the profit that the author earns (depending on cost of printing, discounts, service fees, etc). In addition, with the growing number of competing online stores (computer programs), most offer bargain discounts that further undercut authors and entrepreneurs. Ultimately, these tactics drive down the entire economy by reducing the cash flow and de-motivating innovation.

Here’s how it works: Some of the country’s largest bookstores are Amazon.com affiliates with no actual brick-and-mortar store or helpful staff. Many online stores, believe it or not, don’t even have any books. A very simplified version of their business model looks like this: After the author/publisher invests the time, money and effort to produce a book (which can take years and thousands of dollars), they upload the book into the book distribution database and begin their marketing efforts (spending additional time, money and effort). Meanwhile, the online bookstores have automated systems that download the book database, posting thousands of books on Amazon.com, and just wait for the author’s marketing efforts to begin to reap rewards. Every time a potential customer searches for a book, it appears as “in-stock” in various online bookstore warehouses across the country; however, most new books are actually printed on-demand. There is NO stock. LIkewise, if it says “Used — Like new” it is also probably being printed new on-demand. So, when a customer purchases a book, the online bookstore’s computer relays the order to the author’s publisher/printer. The printer prints the book (on-demand) and ships the book to the customer on behalf of the online bookstore.

Since there is little to no human effort these online companies can afford to offer huge discounts, spend extra money on commercial shipping and the additional printer service fees for individual or rush orders, not to mention the dozens of other costs of doing business to simply piggyback off someone else’s efforts. In fact, I have calculated that most online bookstores are earning roughly $0.25-1.25 per book. Some bookstores I suspect make zero profit on books, while compensating with inflated shipping prices. A nickel here and a dime there adds up to millions—so they hope!

These tactics artificially inflate book prices and drain the cash flow away from the people that created the product, which eventually reduces the cash flow for the entire community, because in turn the entrepreneurs have no cash to invest in their own community.

There are a lot of good and bad reasons to use Amazon, we just request that you make informed decisions.

Thanks for your support,
Authors and artists and small business owners everywhere

PS. We recommend the movie Wal-Mart: the High Cost of Low Price. Or at least click here to watch the movie trailer. You’ll see one small friendly bookstore be driven out of business and the owners become employees of Wal-Mart.

Introducing the Eco-Footprint Label. Helping make environmentally-conscious decisions.

I’m proud to say I thought of this idea around 2005, before I even heard of people like Michael Pollan, and since then it has been presented to the Australian Parliament and been incorporated into a UC Berkeley student’s MBA research project.

Above is a conceptual label design for a can of corn produced locally. Believe it or not, if cross referencing dozens of resources on the internet is reliable, these numbers are fairly accurate.

What is the true cost of food? A 1994 US study (1) reported that 400 gallons of oil a year are used to produce the food for the average American. So, it was easy for me to calculate that the average person uses 1.1 gallons of oil per day, which is 17 times more energy than a person actually gains by eating the food. Some independent studies report as much as one gallon of oil is consumed to grow, fertilize, pesticide, package and ship one can of food, and the cost increases when you include all the other factors such as water. It takes an estimated 500-5000 gallons of water to grow one pound of beef. So, at an average of 2500 gallons per pound of beef, that’s $2.50 using Phoenix tap water or $1350.00 dollars using New York City tap water.

So, how much does something really cost, especially if you include the subsidies and tax incentives? And what about the future cost of topsoil erosion, pesticides and pollution (some which take over 50,000 years to degrade), aquifer depletion, oxygen depletion, loss of natural habitats and bidodiversity, global warming, et cetera. No one knows the true cost of food.

What is an ecological footprint? Ecological footprint analysis is an estimate of the amount of biologically productive land and sea area needed to regenerate (if possible) the resources a human population consumes and to absorb the corresponding waste. This estimate measures how many resources, defined by land area called global hectares, it takes to support a given population. The United States citizen consumes 9.6 global hectares, meaning it would take 9.6 planet Earths to sustainably provide for the United States alone.

Why do I care? Even if these numbers are greatly exaggerated, eventually this will affect everyone as our environment becomes increasingly polluted and degraded, causing an increase in health problems, rise in cost of living and a lower quality of life. The Eco-Footprint Label allows consumers to make educated decisions of how their everyday purchases affect themselves and the environment.

How do I make better choices? The Eco-Footprint Label can be applied to all consumer products, similar to a nutrition label for food. You could call it a nutrition label for Mother Earth. It would measure the resources needed to manufacture a product and ship it to the market place, giving consumers tangible evidence of their cost of consumption.

Examples of better decision making: What if you are on a small budget yet want to maintain a healthy lifestyle? You could compare the Eco-Footprint Label and Nutrition Labels of competing products. What is the cost of vitamins to supplement the low-nutritional value of mass-produced, genetically-engineered and processed foods? Maybe it is actually cheaper to spend “more” money on organic whole foods and free-range meat.

What if you’re an animal rights activist? Which decision makes more sense: To buy synthetic shoes made from Saudi Arabian oil, shipped to China, manufactured into shoes, shipped to the USA and trucked across the country? Or to buy those leather shoes locally made? Which has bigger consequences on the environment and ultimately everything that lives in it?

Or, what if you are eco-friendly, health-minded vegetarian. Does it really make sense to eat that tofu packaged in plastic, with a fancy label using toxic, non-degradable metallic inks, and shipped from Asia? Maybe it is healthier for everyone to modify your diet to eat locally produced, seasonal meats and vegetables to reduce environmental pollution.

Now, I leave it to you to spread the word to those that can make this work!

Interesting update: The public announcement of this concept and design on my blog represent what’s called “prior art” in patent law, which basically means that a big corporation can’t patent this concept. Now why would that be a good thing? Often corporations buy technology simple so that they can prevent something from undermining their profit margin, even if it is overall detrimental to the society.

Here’s an idea that will make your head spin. The Omnivore’s Dilemma says: “Unless you grew up on organic food, most of the kilo or so of nitrogen in your body was fixed by the Haber-Bosch process.” The Haber-Bosch process is the method used to make ammonium nitrate fertilizer out of petroleum. Nitrogen is one of the body’s basic but essential building blocks like carbon. So, this means: if you are the average American, approximately two pounds of your body weight or about 1% is literally composed of petroleum by products, most likely Saudia Arabian oil.

So considering conservative estimates show it takes approximately 0.5-1 gallons of oil to grow 1 bushel of corn (not including processing this into other food stuffs and shipping them to your store), and corn is used to make sugar, starch, feed cows (accounting for beef and dairy products) and tens of thousands of other things, and considering when you are eating corn based products, you are essentially eating oil, it makes me wonder if riding a bicycle, burning more calories and thus eating more, and demanding more food be grown and shipped, is an environmentally friendly thing.

Stay tuned for my complete article.