August 30, 2007 by Mark.

So, we’re taking on a challenge to get into an Iowa frame of mind. Naively, perhaps, we believe that means getting into corn. Here are the rules:

Mark – Can only eat corn. No butter, no salt. Just corn.
Ben – Can only eat products that contain at least one corn-based ingredient. That appears to include nearly everything processed.
Julie – Can eat anything, so long as it includes no corn-based ingredients.

(The challenge started today, Wednesday, and ends on Sunday night when we drive out of Iowa, about four days total.)

Just a couple hours into Iowa, we’ve already learned that corn-based ingredients (I’ll call them “CBI’s” for short) may be found in the most obscure places. Ice cream. Gatorade. Iodized salt. Citric acid. Today we even found a CBI in some guacamole at the supermarket. Awesome. Ben may well be able to eat anything!

Or will he? Julie will be working on the other end of the spectrum. We thought she’d be safe with some fruit this evening, but we found that there may be some corn-based product in the wax that farmers apply to fruit. We’ll definitely be watching for that.

I need to eat about 20 ears of corn each day to get my recommended daily allowance of calories. Some folks say I’ll get stopped up. Others guess I’ll get the runs. What do you think? I think I better chew those little kernels well or I’ll find them going straight through me faster than I can say “Archer Daniels Midland.”

After finding a local corn stand along the way, and then finding it to be closed, we proceeded to load up on some corn at a local supermarket. Ben found some bagels, corn chips, honey roasted peanuts, and corn relish. Julie already dug into her apple and banana. Since we don’t have room for 20 ears of corn in Rachel (the car), I’ve got it sitting between my feet for the next hour. Then time for dinner. I’m already hungry.

One with the Corn,

Mark

Posted in Travelog, Mark | 1 Comment »

August 28, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

We thought that we knew all there was to know about the Cape Wind controversy in Nantucket Sound. Then we talked to the folks involved, and you might say our pre-conceptions were "blown away." We encourage you to join us in our newfound indecision as we grapple with some intriguing windy nuances…

Just click here or the picture below to watch "YERTpod7: Words of Wind-dom in Massachusetts"

This could well be an oil executive’s dream: proponents of clean energy pitted against conservation-minded environmentalists. Cape Wind is hunting for a location for their wind farm, but folks represented by Cape Cod’s Save Our Sound have cried NIMGV! (Not In My Gorgeous View). After meeting with Mark Rodgers, Communications Director of Cape Wind Associates, and Charles Vinick, President and CEO of the Alliance to Protect Nantucket Sound, we learned that there is much more to this issue than NIMBY or NIMGV, but for every minute that the siting issues for Cape Wind remain unresolved, we burn more fossil fuels to fill in the gap.

Wind energy has become one of the fastest growing power sources in America, but still remains miserably low on the energy totem pole, generating less than 1% of all power in the U.S. (1) YERT believes that offshore wind turbines sitting beyond the visible horizon (roughly15 nautical miles from shore) make the most sense, and could generate as much as 907 gigawatts. Folks from the National Renewable Energy Laboratory say that number exceeds the "current installed U.S. electrical capacity." Oddly, we’re currently tapping a whopping 0% of that potential. What are we waiting for? Hopefully not the release of our little video. Take a look, then take a stand by clicking below on YERTpoll4: Wind Energy Opinionations — quickly!

Wind-ing Down for the Afternoon,

Julie, Ben, and Mark (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

<a href="http://www.micropoll.com/akira/MicroPoll?mode=html&#038;id=50081">View MicroPoll</A><br /> <a href="http://www.micropoll.com/">Web Survey</a><br /> <a href="http://www.micropoll.com">Free Web Polls</a><br />

P.S. And now for Breadcrumbs! If you want to learn more about the topics in this video, check out these three resources:

• Save Our Sound. From the web page: "The [Save Our Sound] Alliance was formed in 2001 in response to Cape Wind’s alarming proposal to build a 130 turbine wind farm in Nantucket Sound." "Nantucket Sound and the waters surrounding the Cape and Islands are famous for natural beauty and abundant, diverse and unique wildlife. The Sound is also famous for recreational boating and fishing and draws over six million visitors annually to Cape Cod & the Islands. Nantucket Sound is central to our entire economy precisely because of its natural appeal."
• Cape Wind. From the web page: "Cape Wind is proposing America’s first offshore wind farm on Horseshoe Shoal in Nantucket Sound. Miles from the nearest shore, 130 wind turbines will gracefully harness the wind to produce up to 420 megawatts of clean, renewable energy. In average winds, Cape Wind will provide three quarters of the Cape and Islands electricity needs."
• If land and sea-based wind power seem too costly or problematic for you, how about high altitude wind power? Folks at SkyWindPower seem to have a very compelling idea in and (literally) over their heads. From their website: "In mass use, our calculations show that FEGs [Flying Electric Generators] of Roberts’ design should be able to produce electricity at a life cycle cost of LESS THAN TWO CENTS PER KILOWATT HOUR using tether materials now available. And new tether materials with even stronger strength to weight ratios are being developed.." Here’s the detailed paper: Harnessing High Altitude Wind Power. (For reference, land-based wind and coal power cost around 3-4 cents per kilowatt hour, per this clever estimate in Science.)

Footnotes:

• (1) Energy Information Administration, "Electric Power Monthly, March 2007," http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/ftproot/electricity/epm/02260703.pdf
• (2) National Renewable Energy Laboratory. W. Musial and S. Butterfield. "Future for Offshore Wind Energy in the United States," June 2004. http://www.nrel.gov/docs/fy04osti/36313.pdf

Posted in YERTpoll, Video | 1 Comment »

August 28, 2007 by Julie.

Grandmother.
What a wonderful word. What can it mean to realize 90 years on this earth and to be able to look in the faces of 10 grandchildren and 8 great granchildren and see your own parents’ and grandparents’ DNA in iterations of individual beauty? For my grandmama it is to have have bred babies and lost babies, to have worked at home and held down jobs, to have taught herself to cook, to crochet, to do needlework, to have supported her kids through dancing school… to have been a steady and constant wife and companion until holding the hand of her beloved as he passed from this earth, to have moved far from home to be close to her daughters and to have watched her only son pass away before her…
I don’t think i’ve often been in town to share my Grandmama’s birthday, since we’ve lived in different cities for 20 years. So this year, when YERT discovered that we were going to be just a few hours’ drive from her, the boys conspired with me to make it happen. We left Chicago Saturday afternoon and drove directly to St. Charles to meet my St. Louis family. I warned Mark to expect a somewhat raucous reception as there are many women in my family with lively blood. The girls did not disappoint. Jubilant calls greeted us from the street before we even set foot out of the car and were only compounded by sheer numbers once inside my aunt’s house. I love my family.

Grandmama sat in her chair at the kitchen table looking pretty but smaller and paler than the last time I saw her. The skin on her hands, always brown and tan, seemed almost translucent. She looked stunned to see us, and a little confused. “I’m so surprised,” she said, in her still gentle Georgian accent, “I didn’t know you was coming!” Her eyes cried a little, for the house’s being filled up with still more of her dearly-loved ones. And she told us stories that began and began with no endings and moving on to limbs of other stories we might have heard before…

The next day all relatives reconverged on the house and the food came in waves, with presents, cards, and my aunt Karen, Grandmama’s caretaker for many years now, brought a new pink walker out of the garage, tied up with ribbon, complete with a little pink horn and its own headlight. And then there was the cake. The cake was decorated with Grandmama’s portrait, (something I had never seen before) and had 9 candles, one for each decade. When we started singing Happy Birthday, she hid her face in her colorful bib and wept. She tried to talk but could only say that she had only asked for plain yellow cake, which got us all to howling. Aunt Karen asked her if she was sad and Grandmama said, “No, I’m so happy!” And she was.

Still, she cried pretty hard when my mother left this morning with my brother and his wife. Which of course made my mom cry, even harder. sigh. So today I spent all afternoon with Grandmama going through old photos in her room, as I know it is a thing of rare satisfaction for her, revisiting pictures of people she loved and times she remembers. She loves to remind whoever will listen of how we are related and whatever became of Tardy Fensterbush…She doesn’t have her stories quite as crisp as she once did and certain names start becoming interchangeable…but she nevertheless has her wits about her and remembers the most important stuff…who was “a really nice man,” who was “a lovely person,” who “never did have any children…”

After supper, Aunt Karen pulled out a box with more old photos, some of which I placed into Grandmama’s album so that she can see them easily. Her eyesight is no longer what it was either, so she can’t always see exactly the person in the picture, and we are finding her habit of labeling backs of photos in ink a rather useful tool for identifying relatives who died before we knew them.

It is getting late and I’m losing my thoughts so before I wane like the moon outside, I’ll say to the grand matriarch of our family, our true southern belle: We love you, Grandmama, and we hope you know how much we do.

Posted in Events, Julie | 1 Comment »

August 26, 2007 by Julie.

Walk out onto the roof of most City Halls in America and you will likely find a black tar roof, piping hot, offgassing, or else collecting acid rain, or maybe you’ll see the Batman and Robin variety opening onto a concrete flat patio, some pipes and vents and a generator, a little lip around the edges… But walk through the door onto the roof of Chicago’s City Hall and prepare for something entirely different. How’s about being buzzed by a herd of dragonflies like we did upon first opening the roof door, swat a mosquito, follow a monarch butterfly around as he flits from flower to flower, meandering all the way back to the beehives that rest in a corner of this rooftop garden habitat, hundreds of feet in the sky, nestled amongst skyscrapers where we were lucky enough to even see a pigeon hawk stealth out of hiding.

We have seen several living roofs on our journey so far but none of them alive like this. The ones we saw at Ford, at Apeiron, at the Grand Rapids Ballet - were planted with a low-growing succulent called sedum that’s nice, but hardly impressive when compared to this veritable ecosystem, that offers natural habitat as well as the requisite improved insulation, heat reflection and water capture/treatment. There are tall grasses here, a variety of flowers, little shrubs and other plants native to the area that make it possible for wildlife to survive, even thrive on this roof. Buzzing bees in two hives pollenate the flora doing their part. There is even a bat nesting box, though noone’s sure how much it gets used. I trod the stepping stones peppered throughout to avoid stepping heavy on any living thing.

Then we were joined by Sadhu Johnston, Mayor Daley’s environmental right hand man, who spoke to us about the mayor’s goal for Chicago to be the greenest city in the nation. Sadhu is responsible for making sure that all of the departments in the city of Chicago are working under the same environmental guidelines, and is doing his best to make sure that the triple bottom line (people, profit, planet) is on everyone’s agenda.
Living roofs, wind turbines, blue bag recycling (somewhat unsure of this one), green planters in the middle of bustling highways, even a solar-powered hotdog stand outside the Field museum selling vegetarian hotdogs along with standard pork and beef fare.
I am issuing a challenge to NYC, city I love… to green that apple…

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

August 25, 2007 by Julie.

God, how i love how a brilliant storm will morph the air from stifling, suffocating heat to fresh rip-your-heart-out cold torrents in a matter of moments. Menacing mile high black clouds moved like a train and lightning flashes of fury and fierce wind tore roofs and scaffolding right off the top of buildings and ripped trees from their roots along Lakeshore Drive, in Chicago. See the crane on the top of the building to the right? The scaffold is on the top right corner and was still intact in this photo but, in a matter or seconds, huge pieces of it were hurtling through the air to come crashing down on some poor person running to get out from under the sudden downpour. We were actually just meeting Wendy Abrams, the creator of the concept of the coolglobes exhibit, outside of the Field Museum next to the Reduce Reuse Recycle globe when the sky went from windy with scary clouds to falling down around us. Everybody seemed mesmerized by the sky and the falling debris, until the wind hit us like a wall and we scrambled up the Field steps for safety. Nature, when she doesn’t kid, is a force not to be trifled with.

Earlier in the day, we met with Phil Baum who talked with us about a really exciting prospect called Green Exchange. Due in 2008, Green Exchange will be the nation’s first green marketplace for retailers of consumer goods by a commercial developer. Finally! Real-estate with a real estate! It seems that several communities have intended to do the same thing - basically make a sort of Mall whose tenants are all on the same environmentally conscious page (ie: Global Citizen Center in San Francisco which is basically on hold for funding) - but, for whatever reason, none of them have yet come to fruition. Until now.

One of their tenants-to-be, Rich Cohen of Distant Village Packaging, welcomes the opportunity to be under the same roof with like-minded businesses and patiently looks forward to the projected grand opening in 2008. Rich’s eco business is interesting in that its purpose seems to run counter to one of the messages that has resounded on our trip: Buy local. But, to Rich, the benefits of providing a fair wage to craftspeople who might not otherwise be able to support themselves or their families (and supporting these people to create sustainably) far outweighs the cost of shipping finished products overseas to reach American consumers. Maybe if America wants developing countries to see the good in “going green,” supporting green commerce and green trade is a good way to provide evidence that we are all in this together. We are looking at what Americans are doing to live sustainably. Buying local is a beautiful thing. But America does a ton of trade with other countries for goods that are NOT sustainably created (ie: most coffee), where labor practices are NOT fair (ie: clothes, cotton from India), where much of what is made is designed to be “disposable,” or for one-time use, and where we aren’t even sure what is going into the products bc the country doesn’t have the same regulations as we do regarding materials (ie: lead in toys from China). Perhaps supporting craftspeople in distant villages is the one way that we have as a country to help ensure that developing countries DON’T follow in our industrially wasteful footsteps. Our carbon footprint is a giant one. Giving some littler guys a hand to step over it seems like the least we can do. Just a thought.

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 3 Comments »

August 24, 2007 by Mark.

Hi, Gang!

We’re headed into Iowa next week, and we have ETHANOL on the brain. We’re not drunk, though the thought has crossed our minds. And it might make interesting footage– but it simply isn’t our style.

That said, YOUR style can be our style, particularly if you help us figure out how to address ETHANOL in Iowa. We’re hungry to meet interesting folks who can tell us all sorts of fascinating facts and stories about ETHANOL. Do you know any corn farmers in Iowa? Community leaders? Professors? Political types? Send them our way and we’ll work to visit and learn from them– and share it back with you. (Also, if you know of any places we can stay in Iowa, we’d love to hear about those, too!)

Also, do you have any questions about ETHANOL? We think that you just might if you read this paper about various forms of biofuels. It certainly got us thinking, so we’re eager to dive into this issue… hardcore.

Send us a note, or answer the poll below, or both. We’ll love you either way!

YERTfully Yours,
Mark

<a href="http://www.micropoll.com/akira/MicroPoll?mode=html&#038;id=49545">View MicroPoll</A><br /> <a href="http://www.micropoll.com/">Web Survey</a><br /> <a href="http://www.micropoll.com">Free Web Polls</a><br />

Posted in YERTpoll, Issues, Mark | 1 Comment »

August 23, 2007 by Julie.

We rolled into Chicago thanking Marta (and our lucky stars) for the sweetest offering of her house to lay our heads - the most perfect haven of rest during our stay…plus super-fast wifi connection…Oh the things we can get done!!

Mayor Daly’s ultra “green” reputation encouraged us, so we put in a call to his office before we arrived. Now we just got a call that we will be meeting with Sadhu Johnston, city of Chicago’s Commissioner of the Environment! That’s almost as thrilling as the storm that sent giant pieces of construction flying off unfinished buildings downtown today, where we were meeting with Wendy Abrams, the founder of the CoolGlobes exhibit along the waterfront in Chicago right now.

Much like the colorful cows in the Chicago CowParade in 1999 (followed by NYC cows in 2000, horses in KY in 2004, and pigs in Seattle), these fiberglass sculptures started out as blank canvases and artists were invited to realize them as art objects. However, unlike those cool cows, horses and pigs, the globes project was designed to send a message which, I think you can guess, is a project after our own heart. I ran around madly taking as many pictures as I could while Ben and Mark pretended to interview one of the globes, Gracie Green Roof (Ben called her Myrtle). Once they retrieved me, we each interviewed passersby for their reactions to the installation and to the Environmental “movement” in general, and called it a day. (You can visit my little photo gallery to see some globes.)

At 5:20am we sucked ourselves out of sweet beds, forcing our scratchy eyes open all the way to Irv at the Green Citymarket in downtown Chicago. Holy hay, how do farmers do it every day? Irv, co-founder of Shelly & Irv’s Freshpicks, a completely homegrown Chicago CSA service (Community-Supported Agriculture), says he hasn’t gotten used to rising before the sun yet, but give him time - they’ve only been at this for about a year. We followed Irv and his son, Miles, around the market as they gathered vegetables from each farmer’s station and stopped to talk to an organic farmer named Vicki, who only started farming herself 8 yrs ago, and who said it took 18″ of good compost and several years to condition her 24 acres of soil so that it could nourish anything. After the market we went on to the storage house where the chosen produce is repackaged for customer delivery. The YERT team helped bag some of the customers’ weekly sacks of green beans, salsa fresca mix, and end of season blueberries, we sang to the workers in the cooler since their radio is not working, and came away with a nice bag of surplus apples and nectarines (Thank you, Shelly & Irv!). We even got to follow their driver to the first delivery of the day (though the customer wasn’t home and the driver left the box inside the gate…hope they got it!

Supper was real Chicago deepdish pizza, seemed a crime not to, and we have to thank our server, Anthony, for doing his part to help with our no-waste mission, even if he did say at first it was “impossible.” He snagged us some silver straight out of the dishwasher to avoid the usual napkins folded about them and he took back the straws for the water…Unfortunately, he did bring back sauce in plastic containers (hence my and Ben’s faces) and the fat juicy pizza came out on a cardboard round that is going to have to be stuffed into our shoebox. Fig.

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

August 21, 2007 by Mark.

Dear YERTians,

Welcome to our SECOND farm pod in honor of the upcoming farm bill. Despite its small size, the state of Rhode Island fit the bill for YERT’s farmy explorations, so we have all sorts of new stories to share.

Just click here or the picture below to watch "YERTpod6: Growing Meat, Milk, and Fluff in Rhode Island"

"No amount of money could make me do that."

It seems that in this modern era, we don’t hear that phrase very often. Everything has a price, right? Wrong. YERT has repeatedly heard this phrase during visits to spectacular landscapes, happy people, and thriving communities. We’re not certain what it all means just yet, but we heard it a few times when visiting these beautiful farms:

• Watson Farm - Cattle, sheep, turkeys, and chickens grow here among the pearls of wisdom from Don Minto, philosopher farmer and caretaker of this picture perfect part of Historic New England.
• Dutra Farm - Joe and Jessie Dutra know all of their cows by name, and we could literally taste the care in every glass of Rhody Fresh milk that we drank. They even gave us fresh zucchini bread to "go with the milk." As if we weren’t sold already!
• Paradise Farm - Ever felt alpaca fur? It is impossibly soft. Alpacas would make perfect fuzzy pets if they didn’t come with a bit of attitude. And a tendancy to spit at you. And each other.

Another common thread among these farms is the way they build, maintain, and grow through their communities. Tedious daily chores are somehow transformed into acts of love– for their land, their families, and their neighbors. They challenge economies of scale with economies of really-giving-a-damn-about-doing-things-the-right-way, and no amount of money could make them do it differently.

How many calls does it take to convince a Senator to do things differently? Find out by calling yours over and over to voice your concern about subsidies for corn and other industrial commodities in the upcoming Farm Bill, scheduled for action in the Senate in September. We have too much corn. How about subsidizing small organic farms in every school so that students can grow their own healthy lunches? For more about the Farm Bill and why you should care, read Food Fight, by Daniel Imhoff, with Foreword by Michael Pollan.

Farmished,

Julie, Ben, and Mark (Your YERT Team)

team@yert.com

Posted in Video | 1 Comment »

August 19, 2007 by Julie.

Hooray! Yet another local, thriving and supportive community in Ann Arbor, MI! We stayed on the floor of Bruce Jones’ bachelor pad for a couple of days. Bruce treated us to a wonderful vegetarian restaurant called Seva (314 East Liberty St) where all 4 of us passed our plates around the table so we could all taste a little bit of everything (Thank you, Bruce!). If we keep finding places like this, Ben might actually keep his promise to Woody Flowers to be a vegetarian for the rest of his life.
Before we left, we hit the food coop in Ann Arbor - here’s the quilt hanging on the wall, made of T-shirts from a bunch of other regional coops (several of which we have visited!)- and we also stopped by a local pool, heated by solar power: Sun Dragon Solar Energy Project. We spoke to its designer, David Konkle, an engineer with a lot of brilliant ideas that will be forthcoming in video format…

My hips are only just now forgetting to be sore at me for sleeping on the floor and that’s only cause my shoulders took over hollering, aching from our canoeing and climbing up sanddunes twice the height of the Statue of Liberty and nearly as steep. Ben bet that Mark could not run up and down one of the dunes 4 times in a row, only bc he knew that possibly Mark might try…here is Mark conceding defeat, and here I am taking it super slow…A bit later, we found another, smaller dune (maybe 150 ft?) and Mark actually did run up and down 4 times, much to the horror of some moms who were resting with their kids on the side. Ben said he was glad he hadn’t bet anything.

We found a fabulous little organic restaurant outside of the Dunes called Maybings, where we feasted and chatted up the owner, who told us that his mother is his inspiration. She makes only one brown grocery bag of garbage…per year. Per YEAR. We, with our one shoebox of waste per month, are properly humbled.

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 1 Comment »

August 17, 2007 by Julie.

OK so FORD didn’t offer to reimburse YERT for the Escape Hybrid we bought, or explain why Paris Hilton got the free one. (Ford has since contacted us to let us know that they did NOT, in fact, give Paris Hilton a free Hybrid but they did give her a free RIDE in a hybrid. So… Hollywood.com must have been mistaken. We apologize for any error - We took our info from treeugger.) But we did get an escorted tour of the facility and the museum, some P/R pamphlets explaining how green are Ford’s pastures at the Rouge facility, and a “global warming” mug with a map of the world, whose coastlines disappear when you add hot water (which was not free but which i totally could not refrain from buying from the FORD giftshop, without looking to see the Made in China label on the bottom, oooh Bad Yerter).

While FORD still creates some pretty heavy, gas-guzzling automobiles, their Escape Hybrid is the most fuel-efficient American-made vehicle (Ok, Ford also put us straight on this erroneous note, as the most efficient American-made car is certainly NOT any SUV, hybrid or otherwise - it is actually the Ford Focus at 37mpg. So, The Escape is the most fuel efficient American-made SUV. Duly noted. All you American carlovers out there, now you know.) and the Dearborn Rouge Center does have some impressive “green” facets: the largest “living roof” in the world (planted with sedum, a very low-growing succulent creeper that doesn’t rely on consistent rainfall to thrive), porous pavement that catches and filters rainwater for reuse within the plant’s cooling system (leaving the Rouge River thankfully out of the equation), a “bigfoot” cooling system which i don’t exactly understand but which basically relies on tall space, gravity and physics (rather than electrical push power) to regulate temp within the facility, and a very interesting “fumes to fuel” technology that apparently captures toxic paint fumes and turns them into energy - again something that I don’t understand, but which seems on the surface to be heading in the right direction.

What we’re hoping to address in MI: How raising CAFE (Corporate Average Fuel Economy) standards can be viewed as a GOOD thing for automakers instead of the evil jobs/revenue thief it is perceived as presently. LOL No idea how to do that. Any ideas? Anyone? If Japan has been making cars that average 40 mpg for 10 yrs, why is it that American automakers/consumers can’t seem to make that happen in our country? welcoming any thoughts…

and here is the car of my dreams…if only someone could convert it to electric for my birthday…

*(Editor’s Note: Ford has contacted us to correct our claim about Paris Hilton getting a free Ford Escape Hybrid, which we originally found through treehugger at Hollywood.com: http://www.hollywood.com/news/Hilton_Goes_Green_with_Free_Hybrid/4447353. In response, Ford wrote the following to us: “We did not provide Paris Hilton with a free car. She attended an event that Ford Escape Hybrid sponsored in LA. We did have VIP chauffering by Escape Hybrids, and she did receive a ride to/from the event. But, no free car. She did say that she wants one, so we’ll have to see how that plays out.”)
*(Editor’s note: this should read American-made SUV. The Escape hybrid averages 32 mpg while the Ford Focus averages 37 mpg, as does the Chevy Aveo.)

Posted in Travelog, Julie | 4 Comments »