Green Options

Many of our Bayview neighbors joined us last weekend to celebrate the second anniversary of the Latona Community Garden. What used to be a smelly skanky debris-filled eyesore, is now a thriving organic community garden. The formerly blighted corner has been transformed into a warm and welcoming public space where neighbors gather, local kids play, and organic food is grown.

Several of the neighborhood kids climbing the walnut tree in the Latona Community Garden.

Walkscore rates a neighborhood’s walkability on a 1 to 100 scale based on a number of criteria such as proximity to restaurants and grocery stores. Now, they’ve added a transit rating which takes into account a neighborhood’s public transportation options!

Awesome, right? The idea is to “measure how easy it is to live a car-lite lifestyle,” so adding a transit component makes sense. Maybe you can’t hoof it to the grocery store, but you can walk to a train station that takes you to a farmers market. You can still do your thing car-free!

So why do they need our help?

See a battery, pick it up, and all the day you’ll have good luck. Especially if you take the battery that you found and safely recycle it, keeping dangerous toxic poisons out of our seas and drinking water.

I found this used battery near the ocean in Pacifica, right across from our friend Rick’s Salada Beach Cafe. It has since been safely recycled, and kept from polluting our waterways.

Our oceans are already turning into acid. We have to start today to try to make things better. Keeping one more toxic battery or piece of plastic out of our oceans, collectively, will make a difference. Once you start looking, you may be really surprised just how many “disposable” batteries litter our streets and sewers. Next time you see one, pick it up; what you do matters.

Recently I have been reading very disturbing research about how Diet Coke can possibly cause cancer and kill you. The artificial sweetener that is used in most diet beverages, aspartame, once ingested, becomes a lethal poison called methyl alcohol. Small quantities of this noxious substance can lead to blindness and death; even the most miniscule amounts of this aspartame toxin are strongly linked to cancer.

This is an image of the cancerous tumor that was recently removed from my body.

CNN highlights the Billionaires for Wealthcare enthusiastically singing the praises of a public option, as they entertained unsuspecting attendees at a health insurance conference in Washington DC last week. Wolf Blitzer and Jeanne Moos discuss the increasingly popular use of guerilla musical theatre across the nation. Cleverly orchestrated performances and mini-musicals seem to have become much more popular with folks now than rabid screaming teabaggers.

Sigourney Weaver narrates “Acid Test“, an illuminating and terrifying NRDC documentary that explains how quickly our planet’s oceans are acidifying due to all of the carbon dioxide that we are pumping into our air. This pollution is causing rapid changes in our oceans’ chemistry that will completely disrupt all life on the planet as we know it on a scale that has not been seen for tens of millions of years.

First Lady Michelle Obama talks straightforwardly about women and why we all so urgently need health care reform in this five minute short that was just released by the White House. At the moment I know that I am existing in something of a self-absorbed cancer bubble of my own, but I actually found this quite moving and powerful.

If you are going to be anywhere near San Francisco City Hall this afternoon, please consider going to the fourth floor to voice your support for greywater recycling. There will be a meeting at the Building Inspection Commission today to vote on a SF city amendment which is attempting to make it more complicated for city residents to recycle and conserve our own water.

Time: Wed, Oct 21, pm @ 2pm

Where: SF City Hall, Room 416

Rain barrels made from recycled food grade containers for water conservation.

Ocean acidification is the undersea equivalent of climate change, as the ocean absorbs 1/4 of the excess CO2 in our atmosphere.

Over time, this is going to have disastrous effects on marine life. The documentary A Sea Change takes a look at some of the consequences surrounding ocean acidification.

The Senate climate bill is coming out any day now, and it’s time to get heard! With a new tool from 1Sky, it’s easier than ever to call your Senator and let him or her know you support a strong clean energy policy.

Filmmaker Ken Burns’ most recent PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, is a stunning and utterly engrossing tribute not only to our country’s many awe-inspiring natural landscapes, but also to our nation’s fundamental democratic principles. Burns interviews scores of ordinary people, from park rangers and activists to journalists and historians, as they trace the origins of our greatest collectively-owned resources, and share their unique personal experiences in the vast beauty of our national parks.

“When we look at the parks and we look at the United States and we examine the whole idea of democracy, I think that the park experience is an exploration of the idea of freedom.”

-Shelton Johnson, Park Ranger