Wednesday, April 7, 2021

Greenland ice melt continues to concern

The soil under the Greenland icecap seems to have been growing plants about a million years years ago. That's a relatively short time in geology. The Greenland ice cap is shrinking far faster.


https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/07/greenland-ice-sheet-melting-climate-change-history/


Thursday, July 11, 2019

Planting Ahead - Trees

News is catching up with some of my old posts.
More adroit news media are spreading the word far better than I.

Plant Trees! Plant Lots of Trees.

It's not the only thing we need to do,
but we must do each thing we can.



https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/jul/04/planting-billions-trees-best-tackle-climate-crisis-scientists-canopy-emissions?fbclid=IwAR1v5oP93SJw1E_kldbrSamlNMfr0bRCxIbBrT2qANgT-AXeDn6m31bKXmU


Thursday, August 30, 2018

Notification

This may appear automatically but I did a screen save (therefore the hotlinks won't work).

Friday, October 27, 2017

Herbal Mushroom Soup - gluten free 
October 27, 2017

  1. 17 grams clarified butter (Organic Valley ghee)
  2. 58 grams Portobello mushroom (vitamin D enriched), chopped
  3. 85 grams white Onion, chopped
  4. 8 grams Parsley, chopped
  5. approximately 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground Nutmeg
  6. approximately a pint  (it was 438 mL) poultry broth (defatted), warmed up in a separate container (microwave bowl in my case)
  7. 1/4 tsp Redmond sea salt
  8. approximately 3/4 cup (it was 188 mL) whole organic Jersey cow milk, warmed up in a separate container (microwave bowl in my case)
  9. 12 g (1 and a half tablespoons) tapioca flour

Stove top 2 quart sauce pan: 

Ingredients 1 to 5:
Melted the butter, and put mushroom, onion, parsley and nutmeg in it to soften and meld at medium heat.

Added the pre-warmed broth (#6) and stirred gently while the mix came to a bubbly simmer.
Added the sea salt (#7).

Added the milk (#8) and stirred in and kept simmering.

Poured off a cup of the hot mix into a ceramic bowl with a handle and blended the tapioca flour (#9) 
into the separate hot mix, before washing the results back into the main saucepan with the help of more hot mix.

Stir to be sure the tapioca is well mixed. 
This makes a light herbal version of mushroom soup.  
It's not the gooey version that relies on gluten for a thickener. I could add more tapioca if it had to be used as a sauce on something.


Monday, December 7, 2015

Talking with Quakers about Climate Change

by Joan Savage

Yesterday I facilitated a discussion with a small group, mostly Quakers, about Climate Change.
When I asked them what word or two first came to mind,  the answers were as diverse as: oceans, political action, controversy, population, education, solar, and living beings.

Here below is an outline I distributed at the beginning to help the group start.
I deliberately went lightly on the stunning amount of evidence, which as you can see, I subordinated to "Have we done our 'homework'?"

CLIMATE CHANGE

Do we speak 

Love to fear? 
Truth to power? 

Have we done what we can and are we ready?
Have we done our ‘homework’?
Prudent preparation for environmental instability.
Drought/deluge; internal migrants and refugees.
Food instability and/or scarcity.
Press for sustainable energy sources and use.
Fair and democracy-compatible energy use;
due decision process among peoples and countries.

Who speaks for you, and for us? 

How do Friends see climate change in terms of 
National security/ global security?
Climate change is called the “threat multiplier.”

What canst thou say? 



Where can you - and the Meeting - do the MOST good in combatting climate change?

Can you educate those around you?
Can you help eliminate atmospheric pollution?
Can you prepare your family and community?
Can you call for wise policies?



Time is growing short


Are You Ready?



We cherish the living earth, our bountiful home. 

Sunday, December 21, 2014

Tantalum, Coltan and You

For any of you to read this blog, you are most likely operating in a network that uses tantalum capacitors. Your cell phone (smart or dull), your wireless network, and your country's satellites and missile guidance systems use tantalum.  So of course probably does your GPS, if you have one.

Why should you care? Well, at the very least, tantalum is a strategic mineral, as so much of our communications and economy would fail without it. It is also used in turbine alloys, so that redoubles its strategic importance.

 Government foreign policy almost never mentions tantalum, or its source mineral coltan (technically called tantalite).   The silence of governments is a huge clue, not about its supposed unimportance, but about tantalum's overwhelming importance.   In some ways, it is too big to discuss.

What would upset the flow of tantalum into the electronics and turbine manufacturing industries?

Most tantalum in our devices has been freshly extracted from coltan, it was not recycled, so the logical place to look first are what countries produce coltan, and what is going on there.

Countries with coltan resources have shifted in dominance over recent decades.  As of 2013, two thirds of global coltan production, by metric tons, was mined in the cluster of Rwanda, the D.R. Congo and other parts of Africa.

 For those of us who track world news, can we say the g-word, genocide, or the r-word, rape, without thinking of Rwanda or the Congo?   Can anyone think of a UN sanction or other meaningful intervention in either country?  Help me, I haven't found one that had any teeth to it.

So I'm using an old cell phone, about ten years old, a flip phone. My laptop is over five years old.   I'm as dazzled as anyone by the advances in technology, and if I had more money, I might be tempted to silence my conscience and buy new devices, even knowing the dismal origins of tantalum.

If someone can start selling fair-trade electronics with clear-conscience components, that would be a  shock. I'm not holding my breath!  You do what you want.   I haven't offered an easy answer for you or me.

In the long run of plan(t)ing ahead, we need to reuse and recycle this mineral, obviously. Meanwhile, the related human rights abuses are shocking, at least to me, reminding me of what happened when Cotton became King in the 1800s.  How can we be so blind?

Thursday, January 23, 2014

Change in emphasis - sunshine and vitamin D

by Joan Savage

Planting Ahead was conceived as a blog about adapting to major change, inspired by the Mohawks' work on conserving black ash trees. I'm still much about adapting to major change.

In the past five weeks I have been paying less attention to the none-the-less important work of preparing for and mitigating climate change, and more attention to what I need to get healthy, healthy enough to do any useful work.
So, Planting Ahead is still about adapting to major change, and that change begins with me.

This health endeavor has involved reading two books, many hours reading medical abstracts, changing my diet, changing sleep pattern, and experimenting with exposing myself occasionally to UV-B light.  However, I remain open to adjustments.  Just today, my daughter shared a link on redheads, pheomelanin and the MC-1R, which led me a few minutes later to find a rather scary abstract on redheads and melanoma. 

The two books:

James Dowd, The Vitamin D Cure, revised edition
Michael Holick, The Vitamin D Solution

Portal to medical abstracts:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/

My experimental source of UV-B light:
Exo Terra Repti-Glo 10.0 Compact Fluorescent Desert Terrarium Lamp

---------
From Shakespeare's MacBeth

MacDuff:

Such welcome and unwelcome things at once
'Tis hard to reconcile.
Malcolm:
Well, more anon -