STOP palm oil!

As the article below highlights, the trade in palm oil is devastating the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia, critical habitat for orangutans and other species, home to indigenous peoples, and an important portion of the earth’s living lungs (the forests that give us oxygen!)

Palm oil is popular in commercial food production because it is stable, tasteless and cheap.  But it is an unhealthy ingredient with a terrible cost: its production may entail the extinction of the orangutan within the next ten years, if nothing is done.  Producers cut down forest in order to plant palm trees in monocrop plantations which cannot support the same diversity of life as the forests; orangutans are often injured or killed in the process, and robbed of their habitat.  Orangutans are only found on Borneo and Sumatra, and their numbers are plummeting.

It is a detestable system that bows to profit at all costs.  Our demand for cheap processed food, and the unwholesome manufacturers who peddle it to us, are killing ecoystems on the other side of the world.  STOP palm oil!  Boycott it in your own life and demand that manufacturers stop using it!  You will only gain in health from avoiding all the products that use it (okay, soap is a different matter, but soap can be made from other oils which don’t entail forest destruction).  We don’t NEED shit like Oreos or other processed sweets, they are patently unhealthy, and our pleasure in eating them shouldn’t outweigh the needs of other beings to simply LIVE and be let alone.  If you have a sweet tooth, try making your own vegan sweets from (organic and fairtrade) ingredients that won’t harm you or other animals.

Here’s the article, again brought to my attention by the Earthsave Canada newsletter:

Saving the orangutan

http://www.londoncommunitynews.com/2012/06/saving-the-orangutan/

More information:

SOS – Sumatran Orangutan Society

Borneo Orangutan Society Canada

garden serendipity

I don’t weed much in my big gardens.

I mean, I have to weed right now, since I mistakenly put fresh hay down as a mulch all over the back garden – leading to thousands of hay seeds sprouting aggressive, spreading grass over its entire surface. The no-dig garden has mistakenly become a “dig” garden, as I work to pull out all of these plants. But, in everyday maintenance, I let things slide, and I’m generally happy that way.

So are the pollinators: I have seen bees of every stripe and colour visiting the first dandelions, then the other flowering weeds in the garden in the early spring. Bumblebees, honey bees, mason bees, and even green metallic bees.  As this lovely little article points out, dandelions are an important early source of food for all pollinators, helping them start up after winter and keep going until the more nourishing flowers open.  And with colony collapse disorder threatening to kill off the human-kept pollinators on whom we depend for a large proportion of our food, it’s becoming more and more urgent to protect what is left of wild pollinator species.  Therefore, in order to protect our food safety, leaving patches of wildflowers and flowering weeds is not laziness nor untidiness, it’s kindness to wild creatures and self-preservation.

There are quite a few other serendipities of letting weeds grow as they will and only more-or-less reigning them back when they actively interfere with food crop growth.  Among those serendipities:

- when the ground is bare except for food plants, crop-destroying insects have an easier time honing in on those plants, because they operate on sight and scent to locate them, and the less confusing the landscape, the more chances they have to find the plants that you’re so busy trying to coddle into maturity.  But with enough biodiversity in the garden, the insects may choose to predate on the weeds instead of your plants, if they’re more tender and tasty – organic farmers operate on a similar principle when planting trap crops, sacrificial plants underseeded around brassicas or other plants vulnerable to predation.

- weed cover gives shelter to predatory animals like toads, lizards and snakes, who help reduce the numbers of slugs and other unwanted insects.  I have planted out my tomatoes in the front garden this year, which is less sheltered and wild than the back garden, and already my losses to slugs are heavy.

- letting the weeds get big before they’re pulled means much less work.  (That is, if you catch them before they go to seed).

- weeds are only weeds when they’re unwanted plants; yet sometimes, happy discoveries of ‘wanted’ volunteers turn weeds into welcome visitors.  If not for a plant identification guide of local species to Quebec, I would have pulled out a bunch of Oenothera biennis or Yellow Evening Primrose, not only not a weed in my opinion but also a medicinal plant whose seeds I had planned to BUY in the future in order to plant it.

Oenothera biennis, a welcome visitor and beneficial native plant

More serendipity, less related to weeding and more related to mulching is the fruiting of two morel mushrooms in the front garden:

I believe they are edible morels and not false morels, but I’m not sure of my identification skills so I left them alone.  Still, I was thrilled to have them pop up in the middle of the straw!

 

they are beautiful

Look at my seedlings for the coming gardening year:

The tags read Roma #1, Roma #3, Roma #4. I selected the four plants last year that came up earliest, recovered fastest from transplant, and produced the most tomatoes, and saved seeds to re-plant, thereby starting the process of developing my own superior Roma germplasm adapted to our valley microclimate. Seeds from Roma #2 never germinated, but the others are beautiful.

That’s tinfoil behind the seedlings and it’s helping reflect the grow light.

Monarda didyma (bee balm) from dried seed heads I collected last year in Kingsey Falls, a village where I was employed by a large paper-recyling company to work in their Horticulture department. An enjoyable and profitable summer, as I was able to collect many cast-off plants and seeds.

Monarda citriodora (lemon bee balm) from seeds from the lovely Paradise City Herbal micro-farm owner, Sheri Lee Pierce, with whom I seed swapped last year. Click on the photo to go to their website!

BASIL! There’s Poppy Joe’s basil (the biggest one, and it’s resistant to verticillium wilt, an important asset in our humid climate), Lemon Basil courtesy of Tree & Twig Heritage Seeds, and Holy Basil again from the lovely Sheri Pierce.

Both myself and another vegan gardener in Quebec are hoping to embark on peanut growing this year, which may sound crazy in such a far-north location, but there are short-season varieties of peanut available, and crop losses last year means that peanut butter has skyrocketed to $9 for a 750 gram jar (less than 2 pounds), so not that crazy after all right?  Meansoybean is further ahead than I, having already sourced and ordered the peanuts and started them in pots indoors.  I’m waiting for the weather to warm a bit more first.

This year calls for much more potatoes, carrots, beets (being sown today), and beans.  I grew out some heritage dry beans last year, and painfully resisted cooking up any of them for eating, so that we could grow mammoth crops of them this year and have them for dried beans all winter long.  I have Canadian Wonder, Orca, and Kahnawake Mohawk Beans to plant in abundance.  I also sent out an order for Orchard Baby corn, and a dried pea called St. Hubert which was brought over from France by the first European squatters in Quebec.  Unfortunately it’s looking like my order got lost in the mail, which is shitty because I sent cash~!  We’ll see.  That order also contained Chia seed, Psyllium seed, hulless barley, Black Cumin, and other enticing herbs (chamomile, I think).

Anyways that’s enough – out to get weeding and sowing.

Happy growing and compassionate eats!  Change can start with our food, which is a major part of our political and environmental impact.  Empower yourself – grow it yourself!

 

on hiatus

Instead of letting things drag on with more and more intermittent posts, I’ve decided to put this blog on a more or less permanent hiatus.

It takes three hours to write a good blog post, and about an hour to write an ordinary one.  And I’m finding I just don’t have the time to dedicate here to writing and researching as I like to do.

It’s for good reason though: as of about a year ago, I decided to put my art career into gear.  So when I’m not working at the bakery to make just enough money to sustain us, I’m working on my art.  On my most disciplined days, I wake up at 5 am, do a workout and spend some hours painting before going to bake bread at 11 am.  Weekends are used for the same purpose.

Already my work is bearing fruit: I had a small solo show in August, got accepted to a ‘virtual gallery‘ in the winter, and by springtime the local college requested that I be one of the artists to display in their art gallery in February of 2013.  One of my paintings – an animal-rights themed work, featuring the Hyacinth Macaw whose endangered status is due to deforestation and the ‘exotic pet trade’ – is being displayed at a microbrewery boutique in the nearby town of Victoriaville.

And that’s before my garden gets going – seeds for which I sowed on Sunday in seedling flats in the same room where I paint.  We’re really focused on having a subsistence garden, to save money and to avoid all the harms we see in industrialized food.  And this means time and work: mulching, weeding, weeding and more weeding, and finally the much-anticipated harvest.  I’ll be ramping up the amount of canning this year; I even found a local ‘collective kitchen’ which allows members to pool time, resources and helping hands, so hopefully I ‘ll join up with them to help preserve the harvest.

All this to say: I love writing here, but other priorities in my life are taking over.  If I have a down moment, I’ll try to write; but I’m not going to string things along or force myself to post when there’s other very important things I need to be working on.

Thanks so much for reading and commenting over the years; I really appreciate it.  I’ve met some really awesome people through this blog, and their feedback has helped me grow and evolve.

smarter, cheaper and healthier than test tube meat

You know I think that test tube meat is a terrible waste of resources that could better be spent elsewhere – not least of which because it’s not even ethically neutral, considering that they must forcibly take tissues from captive animals in order to try to cultivate the cells in vitro.  That’s along with my concerns about the amount of chemicals, electricity and money that go in to maintaining laboratories – all of which could be better used for more pressing problems like helping us through this climate crush.  (What is urgently needed is investment so solar and other techologies can become economically competitive with petrol, coal and nuclear power – companies and people are not going to willingly lose profit, and the capitalist machine grinds on inexorably, so we have to make eco-friendly the superior option if we want to drastically reduce emissions NOW.  If the technology is superior the market will adopt it – just think of the investment that went in to making cell phones, and how that’s swept the world.  We as a society can’t do the same with solar power?)

Also, why are we trying to give people a justification for eating flesh when we know there are health problems with meat consumption, and that eating fruits and vegetables in high proportion along with nuts, seeds, beans, etc. is a healthful, safe, and less harmful way of eating?

Here’s more proof from Europe, way ahead of the curve as usual, as a small company perfects a meat substitute that has the moist, chewy, flaky texture that many of us love, without any of the ethical quandaries, expense, or environmental impact of laboratory-grown flesh.  It can be made from wheat, peas, lupin beans or soybeans, showing that allergy concerns can be addressed.  They say the texture is perfect, they just need to perfect the taste, and it should be done by next year.

And eating ‘lower on the food chain’ means freeing up resources for some of the rest of the billions of humans on earth, since eating plants directly is much more efficient than feeding those plants to animals, who use it for their own locomotion and body functions before having their lives taken away for the sake of our plates.

Forgive my run-on sentences.  I’m just in that sort of moood.  Here’s the link:

Factory can make meat substitute by the mile

The last two posts were brought to my attention through the Friends of Animals’ mailing list.

unbelievable

Injustice is Served

A one-person cat shelter in Florida which housed 700 outdoor cats, all of whom were given veterinary care, food, and shelter, has been attacked by PeTA after an ‘undercover investigator’ spent 5 months as a ‘volunteer’ at the shelter.  The person who ran the shelter has been run into the ground as an ‘animal abuser’ after footage of an old abandoned barn (that the cats didn’t have access to) and images of sick cats (who were being seen by a veterinarian) were flaunted by the ‘animal rights’ organization.

Apparently PeTA is against shelters like this, believing they can be only motivated by people who want to hoard or abuse animals – well, unlike PeTA, which simply euthanizes any unwanted refugees.

Please sign the petition, and send funds if you’re able, to help this person continute to care for the abandoned cats.  And please don’t give your money to PeTA – they do less than nothing for animals or for the cause of justice.  I made the mistake as a new vegan to take out a PeTA subscription one year – about eight years ago.  They still send a lot of publicity and requests for money to my old address in Victoria, despite my repeated requests to remove me from the list, and even my parents informing them that I was deceased.

I regret ever giving them my money to fund activities like this.  Shame.

 

 

links part 8

Oh no! In the meantime that I haven’t been writing, I’ve been collecting even more links that I think will be relevant to the readership of this blog.  Oh well!  Enjoy:

Digging Through the Dirt: A Vegan Who Promotes Animal Ag? – An interesting article but it’s especially this comment that hits my heart.

The Secret to Success of Organic Farming – an interview with an Austrian vegan-organic farmer, from SupremeMasterTV.com.  As I’m writing the video isn’t working on my computer, but there’s a complete transcript typed below the video link, so anyone who can’t see the video or who is hard of hearing can still have the benefit of the information.

On Nonhuman Slavery: An Important Discussion About Animal Advocacy by J. Muir – one of my blog posts got picked up for re-publication on this site.  I’m happy it was seen as relevant and I’m grateful for the exposure.

Guess Who’s Turning 100? Tracking a Century of American Eating – Interesting information about a century’s worth of statistics on American food consumption, and how it has changed and been influenced by availability, social norms, health information, and consumer affluence among other things.  Vegans are typically interested in what people eat, and what motivates them to do so; so this should be an informative read for many people.

Catskill Animal Sanctuary – a place that makes the connection between rescue and the cause of animals’ need to be rescued: they promote veganism, which in the long run would hopefully put them out of business as an organization (since without animals being owned and exploited, they wouldn’t need to be rescued, rehabilitated, and given shelter)

the voices of thistle farms: Thistle Farming Season – A beautiful little blog post on harvesting thistle to make paper, at a farm which is a healing center for women who have suffered violence and addiction and working in prostitution.  The women learn to grow and harvest, they learn the healing power of herbs, and they come together and help one another become empowered and talk about their struggles in both a personal and political light.

To me, being a thistle farmer means that the world is our farm, and our job is to see the beauty in the areas that have been abandoned or deemed unworthy of cultivating. Our fields include allies, lots behind malls, railway clearings, and the poorest sections of town. When we harvest a thistle it means that we still see the beauty in all of creation, and that nothing should be left to be condemned.

- Becca Stevens

So beautifully put!

Syndicat Industriel des Travailleurs et Travailleuses – Blog posts in English and French from the Montreal chapter of the International Workers of the World (Wobblies)

The Genocide of Intersex People

The Genocide of Intersex People.

links part 7

Hey, already a week worth of links.   I haven’t made much of a dent yet in the backlog of links I’ve bookmarked.  Well, onward…

tasty musings – the most current post as of my writing is one for “chocolate glazed fudge brownies”, which sound delicious but trigger me to remind you, please, to only choose fair-trade chocolate.  Chocolate is only an indulgence with absolutely no necessity in our diets, and if you can afford it, you can afford to make sure that it wasn’t harvested by child slaves stolen from or sold by their families.  Because that’s what’s going on with all chocolate that isn’t specifically marked as fair trade.  Don’t let it be in your name!

Stewarding the Wild – Reflections on our (in)ability to coexist with Nature

The Sistah Vegan Project

Organic Gardening/Farming Resources

Vision: Can Human Beings Drop Their Divisive, Reactionary Thinking and Move to a Higher Level?

 

links part 6

gay persons of color

Peaceful Prairie Sanctuary: A Place to Live

1TBM

Happy Earth – Adventures in Urban Sustainability

nixwilliams

… I keep striking out today.  Looked up a lot of links that I had saved that are now broken, no longer up to date, or not the quality I thought they were when I first decided to bookmark them.

Oh well.