Green Options

In the UK, journalist and television presenter Jeremy Clarkson found his own bit of global warming, on his doorstep! Seven members of group Climate Rush visited his home and left steaming piles of horse manure on his drive, along with a message reading ‘This is what you’re landing us in’.

One of only three wolf pairs in Oregon was killed by U.S.D.A. Wildlife Services with approval from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

The Center for Biological Diversity announced today that Oregon’s wolf recovery program suffered a serious setback when a pair of wolves residing in the Eagle Cap Wilderness in eastern Oregon were killed over the weekend by wildlife authorities.

The Pew report recommends a new regulatory framework that treats animal farming no differently than other industries (that cause pollution and potential health risks). It also recommends phasing out any confinement system that restricts “natural movement and normal behavior” (such as calf-to-adult confined feeding stalls) and a ban on antibiotics not intended for disease eradication (i.e., growth modification, such as with veal calves).

It’s in the papers and on TV. It spreads across the Internet (including this very post), and it is finding its way into the classroom. Global climate change is nothing new. And it certainly isn’t going away. Not yet, anyway.

A recent study by Canadian researchers published in the Journal of Animal Science indicate that by fine-tuning the balance of starch, sugar, cellulose, ash, fat and other elements of cattle feed, methane production by the cows can be reduced by as much as 25 percent.

The small city of Lancaster, Texas has had a law on its books banning all chickens within the city limits, but for years it had gone unnoticed and unenforced, until recently.  That changed when a local resident found out that the previously unknown law would now be enforced citing anyone who kept chickens within the city limits.

Local food writer and sustainable living proponent Marye Audet, has kept a flock of 19 chickens on her 2 1/4 acre rural homestead for the last five years in a rural area of town, unaware that she was breaking the law by doing so.

“This is not about us living in a subdivision of $400,000.00 homes and being the Beverly Hillbillies.”

I’m sitting in my backyard, surrounded by chickens and children. A couple of dogs periodically pester both species of livestock. (Yes, I did just call my child flock “livestock.”) I’m waiting on the first egg of the day, a pink speckled one from my oldest Americana hen.

This backyard chicken experiment is new to my family, only a 6-month-old endeavor. We wanted our children to know where food comes from. We wanted to know that the eggs we ate were from happy chickens.

But as the number of small chicken “farmers” pop up in cities, suburbs, and rural areas alike, our collective grand experiment may be in peril.

The urban chicken movement is growing as more and more folks try to move away from factory farmed food and towards self-sufficiency.

[Creative Commons photo by Linda N.]

Why Chickens?
Chickens are pretty low-maintenance. Once you have your coop set up, you just have to make sure they’re fed, watered, and get to run around outside. Most people who raise their own chickens do so for the eggs, not the meat. Instead of buying eggs from a factory farm or from hundreds of miles away, urban chicken owners benefit from a cheap, local, reliable source of protein. Chicken poop is also a great fertilizer for your garden!

Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post Here’s a peek at pork.

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The “other white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pig—on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

Due to the high variety of bacteria, worms and other undesirables in pig flesh, and because of the quick-spread disease potential of crowded pig farms, heavy doses of antibiotics are administered routinely. Those same drugs end up in your body via waste streaming into our water supply, and via that Mooshu pork to go. Other side dishes you might not have ordered include growth hormones to encourage meat-heavy livestock and vaccines injected to avoid profit-damaging disease.

Texas has reportedly applied for a waiver of the current ethanol standards. The Energy Policy Act provides an option for a waiver only if the environment or economy would be severely harmed because of the Renewable Fuel Standards.

Converting the U.S.’s ample and renewable volumes of cow manure into biogas could provide as much as 3 percent of the nation’s electricity needs, say two researchers at the University of Texas at Austin.

In a new study published in the online journal Environmental Research Letters, Amanda Cuéllar and Michael Webber conclude that harnessing the full potential of cow poop power could not only help generate as much — or more — electricity as wind and solar power do today, but could greatly reduce greenhouse gas emissions.