Agate Beach

Tsunami.

One of my favorite places to go as a child was Agate Beach.  Decades ago it was a blink or you'll miss it wayside, though now it is a thriving vacation community.  It is still a secluded and lovely stretch of Oregon's all-public shoreline.  I remember long walks with my sister and Mom along the beach, wading in the tidal lagoon, and beach combing for hours.  Agate Beach was named for the spectacular abundance of agates, colorful pieces of quartz washed and polished by the ocean until they shine and transmit light.  A single walk could garner handfuls of agates, to be taken home and used in planters or as make-shift jacks.  It was common to find beachcombers hauling buckets of agates up to their cars.  Something about the shape of the beach, the nature of the source rock, and the particulars of the ocean currents has always funneled shells and stones to this tiny Oregon beach.

Yesterday we walked the length of the entire beach, and found not one.  Now the only thing that washes up on Agate Beach is remnants from the Japanese Tsunami covered with exotic and invasive species, and shards of plastic.  People still walk the beach with buckets in hand, but they are largely picking up trash.  And the public notices sign in the parking lot discourages swimming or water contact of any kind due to high bacteria count.

This makes me sad.  It serves as proof, in my own lifetime, of the damage we have done to the environment, and the consequences of our greed.  Agate Beach is gone forever.

Take nothing but pictures.  Leave nothing but footprints.  

To Volunteer or Contribute to SOLV, Oregon"s Beach Cleanup Non-Profit:

http://www.solv.org/

The Oregon Coast Management Program:

http://www.oregon.gov/LCD/OCMP/pages/ocmp_intro.aspx 

Photograph of Tsunami Debris on Agate Beach Courtesy of:

http://newsfeed.time.com/2012/06/07/massive-fishing-dock-washes-ashore-in-oregon-15-months-after-japanese-tsunami/

Stone Soup

Hash.

According to a 2012 report released by the Natural Resource Defense Council 40 percent of the food in the United States goes to waste. Much of this is in the production and marketing of pre-packed and pre-prepared foods, and much of it is due to over-sized restaurant portions. But a lot of it just gets tossed from our refrigerators because we forgot to get around to cooking it.

Food waste argues against itself. There are no good reasons to waste food, only good excuses for why it happens. I believe that one of the primary contributors to American food waste is the loss of home life and the domestic art of cooking. Sure, people still make a couple of things here and there, and we will still make a special trip to the store to try a new recipe from the Times, but the art of daily cooking, and the practice of sitting down to eat has been disappearing from our lives since the 1980's. Cooking has become a form of social action.

That we make too much food and then throw it away or let the leftovers go bad is true, but an overlooked and important contribution to food waste is in our food preparation. More specifically, because we no longer cook from scratch or with regularity, we waste more food. Vegetable ends and peels go into the trash or compost instead of a broth. Past-fresh breads and pastries are thrown out instead of cooked into a bread pudding. Leftovers and need to be eaten now items are tossed over for takeout instead of cooked into a improvised hash. Knowing how to prepare our food, what is edible and is not, how long it can be kept, or how to freeze and preserve leftovers or seasonal batches can prevent food waste as well. Do you use the lemon zest before you slice the lemon? Do you remember to toss the squeezed lemon wedges in with the chicken to season it as it roasts?

While food preparation waste may not be the largest contributor to our overall food waste, the NRDC claims that a decrease in our food waste of even 15 percent could feed 25 million Americans annually. Small changes go a long way.

The best things you could be cooking with things you might otherwise throw away:

1. hash
2. vegetable broth
3. sweet or savory bread pudding
4. veggie and cheese spreads/tapenades
5. smoothies and juices

Recipes:

Hash is an dish with protein, veggies and some kind of starch (potatoes etc.) although you can substitute a grain like rice or quinoa.

The New York Times lists lots of simple and delicious hash recipes:

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/vegetable-hash-for-an-easy-dinner/

Vegetable and meat broths can be made easily from scraps and frozen until you need them. An easy starter recipe from Frugal Living:

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/makeyourowningredients/r/Vegetable_Broth.htm

Bread puddings are easy and flexible, substitute any kind of bread and add or subtract sweet and savory ingredients.

Ina Garten's Bread Pudding:

http://www.barefootcontessa.com/recipes.aspx?CookBookID=0&RecipeID=813

Veggie and cheese spreads can be made in minutes with bits and pieces of whatever you have lying around. Alton Brown has a great beginners recipe:

http://www.foodnetwork.com/recipes/alton-brown/roasted-vegetable-spread-recipe/index.html

Smoothies are almost infinitely variable. Better Homes and Gardens provides a great selection of recipes:

http://www.bhg.com/recipes/drinks/anytime-drinks/smoothie-recipes/

Resources/References:

NRDC Report of Food Waste:

http://www.nrdc.org/food/files/wasted-food-IP.pdf

A Laying On of Hands

retreat.

One of my favorite things to advocate for in terms of the promotion of a healthy environment and good nutrition is the formation of community. Or, put differently, the loss of community in the modern way of life appears to be intimately linked to the destruction of the environment and the deterioration of public health.

We began to lose community in the process of trying to create it. In building suburbs we created lifestyles based on long, isolating, gas-guzzling commutes that eroded our personal time making social interaction and exercise harder to come by. Beyond that, we designed our suburbs without sidewalks, town centers, or public play spaces, effectively isolating our children from one another and putting them and their caretakers back in the car in order to grocery shop or go to the park. Of course, once you’re in the car, the likelihood of each person on a particular street going to a different park or grocery store increases, decreasing the casual everyday interactions between neighbors that do so much to foster community. The time and energy required to prepare meals of whole foods from local sources was also squeezed out by the distribution of our lives across a greater geography and our increasing desire for “down time” and instant gratification.

And isolation breeds isolation. Once disconnected from our neighbors and surrounding community, we are more likely to tell ourselves that video tennis is a reasonable substitute for actually going to play tennis, forgetting that going to play tennis may involve taking a walk, running into the neighbors, getting substantively more exercise and valuable vitamin D, and interacting with our children and the environment.

And infrastructure breeds infrastructure. Once we are tied to our cars for all of our activities we need an increasingly large number of roads, increasing in size, to handle our increasing numbers and increasingly large cars. Retreating to our houses necessitates larger and larger houses, filled with more and more things, to fill the void left by the absence of regular social interaction and the necessary chores of a conscious lifestyle. Consumption itself becomes a hobby. Instead of community centers, our houses become show pieces, museums to ourselves with all the accoutrements of a modern lifestyle, televisions, stereos, Jacuzzi tubs, and little evidence of actual interaction with the world at large.

I suggest that the formation and fostering of community in and of itself is an act of subversion, or at least a tangible protest of the current status quo. I believe that community is one antidote to deteriorating pubic health, eroded social services, environmental decline and climate change, and the propagation of an unhealthy and unsustainable popular monoculture. And it’s easy. And it’s free.

Playing For Change

allegro.

Playing for Change is an organization dedicated to the creation and propagation of peace through shared humanity and aesthetics, the playing of music. More specifically, Playing for Change is an international collective of musicians that play benefit concerts for and build music and art schools in impoverished communities. The project is rooted in the belief that music is an equalizer, a common thread that allows people to transcend distance and boundaries, be they political, economic, cultural, or ideological, that music is a path to peace. They illustrate this by producing mosaic videos of musicians from around the world playing the same song, somehow together, as a one-world choir, despite the distance. And they seem to play straight up into heaven, and right through to your soul.

They have a point. Music unites.

Watch and Listen:
http://www.playingforchange.com/episodes

Participate:
http://www.playingforchange.com/participate

The Economy: On the Dole

compassion.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics the number of unemployed persons in the U.S. has increased by 4.1 million in the last twelve months. That's half the population of New York City, or forty times the population of Eugene, Oregon. It's entire towns, graduating classes, families. And we haven't begun to see the beginning of the worst. There is still savings to burn, pension plans to liquidate, homes to sell, unemployment benefits to be had. But soon, there won't be. A time will come, perhaps quite soon, that Americans will have to do something they haven't done in a very long time, rely on the kindness, generosity, and ingenuity of their communities.

I would feel better about this prospect if we, as a nation, had shown some kind of aptitude for either community building or compassion, but we haven't. This is evidenced by our continued support of faith systems and policy makers that divide us based on arbitrary and often harmful stereotypes, greed, and outdated value systems and paradigms.

But we voted for change, and it will not come passively. It is time to fight the good fight.