Tree Hugging, 101

Dear Earth,

OK -- so I still have yet to deliver on that art blog entry that I said I would write at some point. I have had so many other thoughts zipping through my head, though, and quite frankly art hasn't exactly been my focus recently (a fact which I am sad about). I don't think making jewelry from scraps qualifies for an entry either, at least not yet.

That aside, here's a little introduction before I hike up my proverbial skirt and stand on a soap box. I name my blog "Full of Earth and Dirt," because it's a line from one of my favorite David Crowder Band songs, which you can read the lyrics here. "I am full of earth and dirt, and You" points towards the fact that I am a creature, and I have a Creator. I screw up and God never screws up. I've got all kinds of blemishes, but He is total purity -- but He still embraces me. But the phrase Full of Earth and Dirt means more: I have a responsibility to care about the things God created... people, animals, nature ... Simply because He made it.

I am not what you might consider an environmental activist; or perhaps an activist of any kind. That word, activist, has such a negative (read: political) cloud around it that I generally try to distance myself from using it as a way to identify myself. Don't let that fool you: I do care about things going on around me. Human trafficking (which includes the porn industry) and animal abuse are two examples. I also tend to get fired up about hypocritical and better-than-thou sorts of behavior. I think Fair Trade is a fantastic thing, and Ten Thousand Villages is one of my favorite places.

I remember a drawing that I made when I was a little girl that depicted animals stranded in a field of stumps while loggers cut down trees with chainsaws. Before I had turned 8, I also had subscriptions to Zoo Books and Ranger Rick, magazines featuring detailed but fun information about wildlife and the environment. That's where I first learned about endangered species, actually. Today I'm addicted to Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel. So I have a record for believing that taking care of the world around me is of great importance, though somehow in my adolescence and adulthood I lost sight of that. It wasn't until I started working at a privately owned eco-friendly store that I've begun to do more research on my own about "green" practices, products, foods, etc. and reading articles about what we're doing to the environment.

OK, I'm hiking up that skirt and stepping onto the soap box now.

The BP oil spill is, without a doubt, a massive disaster that will not only affect the environment and ecosystems, it affects the livelihoods of people too. BP seems to not care: clocking out at 5pm, checking out on beach clean-ups when the weather isn't perfect, and overall seemingly taking their time to get the mess sorted out. I'm pretty convinced that all BP cares about isn't so much what they are losing in the oil spill -- but what they will gain in the months to come when gas and oil prices are skyrocketing. Keep an eye on your local gas station prices and see if I'm right (I could be wrong after all). While Obama's charisma has gotten him pretty far, his response to the oil spill feels ... well, less than adequate. Is that wrong? Our system seems to be floundering with the Gulf of Mexico again, just like it did with Katrina. I don't expect Rome to be built in a day, but there are bad things going on here that really shouldn't be or shouldn't have happened in the first place.

But, to BP's credit, they are doing a better job than Chevron has been in the Amazon Rainforest. I recently learned that in Ecuador, Chevron (who bought Texaco) abandoned hundreds of oil-waste pits in the Amazon in the 90's and refuse to clean it up. The 60 Minutes video clip from 2009 sheds quite a bit of light on Chevron's stance, so I suggest following the link I provided. It points out that what happened in the Amazon would never happen in the U.S. -- and certainly wouldn't be a debated problem for 30 years. Though I think BP is dragging their feet, 50 some odd days is like a breath to 30 years. It's appalling. I really don't care about the legalities, why should it even matter what country your in when there are hundreds of oil pits contaminating water and soil in one of our most precious forests on the planet, destroying animals as well as communities of people?

It's like the palm plantations the United States has in Indonesia, Malaysia and Papua New Guinea's tropical forests. Basically, we're carving out acres of tropical forests so we can throw palm trees in for palm oil; and while the companies involved are rolling in the dough, native towns get pennies compared to the overall profit. And palm oil is in practically everything

And that's just the beginning of my lessons of "Tree Hugging, 101." Or perhaps I should say, "Living as a responsible human being and treating people, animals, and the environment with respect, 101." Or we could even say, "Loving God's created everything, 101."

Adventures in learning about what I eat:

This might seem like a tangent but I promise it's not. I get headaches, and quite frequently. We figured out that one problem is that I have a tendency towards iron deficiency anemia. I'm not a vegetarian -- contrary to several folks supposing I must be as an artist -- I just don't seem to get enough iron in my diet. I still get headaches though, usually accompanied by nausea, and my wonderful husband may have struck gold in suggesting that I have a sensitivity to MSG. OK ... so what foods have MSG? Much to my disdain, practically everything I like to eat has some form of MSG in it, and usually masked under a totally different name. Great. That's going to be fun to navigate and try to experiment with. This got us discussing how creepy it is that there are so many chemicals on a Food Label that we don't even know what they are. What exactly is "natural flavoring," anyway? (You'd be surprised!) Ironically enough, as we were discussing these things, a move called Food, Inc. showed up on our Netflix suggested movies, so we decided to watch it.

Can I tell you that I will probably never look at packaged chicken in quite the same way again? And no, it's not because they showed people slaughtering animals in some kind of graphic way. No, it's because only 5 major companies produce consumer meats (pork, chicken, beef). Five. That leaves for a TON of room for problems. Example: chicken farmers can spend over $500,000 on coops for chickens, which puts the farmer in massive debt when they start out. Companies like Tyson demand the chicken coops to be upgraded, costing more money. I use the term "upgraded" loosely, since the coops house hundreds of chickens and have no windows. You would think that the farmer would get a nice return to pay back their chicken coop debt, but you'd be wrong. They get less than $20,000 a year for their chickens.

Chickens, by the way, normally take 3 months to grow to full maturity. Corporation chickens are different. They only about half that time because their growth is accelerated... which means their organs and bones can't keep up with their size, so they can only take so many steps before they need to sit and rest. Kinda creepy, right?

If that wasn't messed up enough, if you speak out against the beef industry when ecoli runs amock and kills children, they turn around and sue you. Yes. They will sue you. They sued Oprah in the late 90's. Isn't that a violation of freedom of speech? I know that speaking out against the Government is generally frowned upon, but apparently speaking out against Beef is worse. This is ridiculous. Equally ridiculous is that Smithfield meat companies have actively recruited Mexican workers (read, they purposefully bring them to the US illegally to work in their factories) -- and when illegal immigration started being a "problem" they handed over the workers to the police to be deported. I'm sorry, why isn't Smithfield being held responsible for doing that in the first place??
What makes it even scarier is the fact that past government administrations have had major players from agriculture and meat industries also as major players in the FDA and USDA -- which means if they don't want to tell consumers they are eating something Cloned or Genetically Altered for example, they can get away with it. It also means companies like Monsanto can have a patent on a genetically altered soy bean, and blacklist farmers who save the beans or accidentally acquire them, and send what may as well be secret police to come get you.

....

I think I'm done standing on my soap box. But I assure you I might be back. I'm not even sure what to do with all of this information because the other thing that really pisses me off is that organic and local foods are expensive, while processed foods and all the foods coming from the underbelly corporations is a lot more affordable. When you're on a budget or hardly have much to spend on a month's worth of food, it's almost like you have no choice. If you want to eat you have to buy what you can afford... but then what I'm eating is either a) laced with mysterious chemicals or b) coming from a corporation that treats the environment/people/animals as totally expendable. What do you do when you're on a budget?

Any suggestions are helpful and encouraged.