USA Hemp Museum presents great pictures of live cannabis plants over Willie and Amy Nelson’s song, “A Peaceful Solution,” performed by Amy Nelson and Rattlesnake Annie. The bill was introduced by Cong. Barney Frank. H.R. 5842 is the 2008 version of the medical marijuana bill. Support the congresspeople who support cannabis.

Related: The Lotus Eco Elise uses a host of sustainable materials to make up the body and trim, including hemp, “eco wool,” sisal and a new high-tech, water-based paint that can be applied by hand. It’s fitted with a set of flexible solar panels on the hard top to help power the electrical systems, reducing the drain on the engine and improving efficiency. There is a new green shift light on the instrument panel that assists drivers in maximizing fuel efficiency.

All of these elements reduce the Eco Elise’s footprint throughout its lifecycle, limit the amount of energy used during production. Lotus looked to reduce the car’s environmental impact by focusing on how it is made as well as how it performs. Link.

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Science Daily is a great site for weird stories. Here are some snips from the past few days.

In a follow-up to research showing that psilocybin, a substance contained in “sacred mushrooms,” produces substantial spiritual effects, a Johns Hopkins team reports that those beneficial effects appear to last more than a year.

Watermelon may have a viagra-like effect: Continue Reading »

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My friend B. wrote me this:

So I was reading the Bay Area Guardian, something I do exactly as regularly as I vote, and I ran across something that I thought might interest you. It seems San Francisco has a Peak Oil Preparedness Task Force to explore life after fossil fuels. Of course few take them seriously.

And I replied:

Do you mean that people locally don’t take the task force in SF seriously? Or don’t take post-oil seriously?

The peak oilers are sometimes hard to listen to because they’re so apocalyptically pessimistic. They see the energy packed into a hydrocarbon molecule and moan, What can possibly replace this? They don’t see anything on the shelf that can replace oil, so assume we’re all doomed. I do admire their historical analysis, tho, and I think Hubbert was right; well, he was right, US production peaked right when he said it would. A year or so ago the Saudi Minister of Energy said the planet was running out of oil and had to get ready. And now the King of Saudi Arabia has created a $10-billion endowment for a new university, sci and tech research, that will be a mini-kingdom unto itself in order to free it (and thus attract students and faculty) of Sharia, the heinous religious law of fundamentalist Islam. The king’s reasoning was explicit: Saudi Arabia won’t be an energy economy for much longer and needs to transform itself into a knowledge economy. Amen, brother. At last we agree on something. Continue Reading »

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“Bend of bay and swerve of shore” begins Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and that pretty well describes the Lake Michigan shore around Traverse City. I’m here for the ACE 2008 Conference, a gathering of agricultural and natural resource science communication professionals. I’m staying at the Holiday Inn.

Please note that there are no Michigan girls in my room. (And let me say up front that, although I’m traveling for work, the opinions expressed here in no way represent those of my employer, and the photos and information gathered for this post were done on my own time and at my own expense. No need for a tax-payer revolt, y’hear?) But if you don’t know “Michigan Girls” by Califone, I hope you’ll check the song and the band out.

Broke heels and bare legs
Pink waterline gave up on your twisted code
God’s eyes are crossed maybe just like yours. (”Michigan Girls” by Califone) Continue Reading »

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My colleague Jolie Kaytes is a professor of landscape architecture at Washington State University and is interested in sense of place, how place makes us who we are, both as individuals and as communities, and how creative and analytical thinking can be used in solving problems. Recently, she created The GridShiter, a souvenir origami kit for a gallery show in San Francisco. (The show is, or was, at City | Space in Noe Valley.) I was intrigued by the analogy of folding paper and faulting crust and asked her if we could create a video that would showcase not only her art project, but some of her ideas about sense of place, as well. The result was this five-minute video. We shot all the photographs, interviews and sound-over narration in one 90-minute session; Jolie is an amazingly fun and efficient person to work with. This was my first time doing stop-motion photography, so the still camera work is pretty rough. But I like it; it gives the folding demonstrations a nice earthquakey feel.

Unpacking Place

About a year ago, I used a bunch of still photos taken by Jolie and did a video reinterpretation of “Unpacking Place,” an installation in the Cougarland Motel in downtown Pullman. Along with 10 other artworks, “Unpacking Place” was available to the public for one day, March 2, 2007. The collection of installations was curated by Samantha DiRosa, assistant professor of digital media, and titled “In(n) and Out of Nowhere.”

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The percentage of Americans who regularly smoke cannabis has fluctuated, but it hasn’t significantly changed in years. Yet, again, it isn’t a political issue of any importance. At best, it gets tapped in as an invisible plank in Democratic health care policy. Cannabis continues to be the plant that dare not speak its name.

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When “Lexicographers at Oxford University Press [recently] observed that this social transformation [resulting froma concern about the sources of one’s food] is having a noticeable effect on the English language” they could have also noted a recent uptick in the use of the word “biodynamic.”

Biodynamic farming involves a strict adherence to ritual that, according to a theorist quoted in an article in Mother Jones, “makes typical organic farming look like strip mining.” I first heard the word a couple months ago at a vineyard fieldman’s breakfast in Washington wine country. The practice stems from the theorizing of Rudolph Steiner, the Austrian philosopher and involves the ritual preparation of, well, preparations more commonly known as compost teas. The vineyard owner I talked to admitted that there was an almost complete lack of science behind these preparations, one of which involves stuffing cow poop in a slaughtered (gratefully and ritually, of course) cow’s horn and then burying it for six months. But, as Novella Carpenter writes in the Jones article,

In the early 1990s, John Reganold, a soil science professor at Washington State University’s Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, started comparing conventional and biodynamic farms. His research, published in Science, found that biodynamic farms had higher quality soil than conventional farms and were just as economically viable. Later studies found no difference between biodynamic and organic crops, and Reganold noted that no one really knows how the preps work. “I’m not an organic freak,” he told me, yet he called biodynamic “the most holistic system I’ve seen.” Continue Reading »

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I just learned from World Wide Words that the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen “locavore” as its word of the year. Locavores are folks who try to get their food from as close to home as possible. Michael Quinion, the author of the weekly e-newsletter, World Wide Words, to which I subscribe, cites the Oxford press release naming their choice:

the word was coined in 2005 by a group of four women in San Francisco; it notes that “The choice reflects an ongoing shift in environmental and ecological awareness over the last several years. Lexicographers at Oxford University Press have observed that this social transformation is having a noticeable effect on the English language.”

The word previously appeared in Puck in my review of Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral. You’ll find Quinion’s tracings of the word here.

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I’ve suggested before that plants are the ultimate selfish genies. Or geniuses. Red queens in green drag. One day soon, I swear, I’m going to get around to explaining what I mean by that and once and for all answer the question, Who cultivates whom?

In the mean time, here’s a tantalizing tidbit that underscores just how dependent we are on plants. Norm Lewis is a scientist at Washington State University’s Institute for Biological Chemistry. I’m a news writer for WSU and, more particularly, for the College of Ag, Human, and Natural Resource Sciences, of which the IBC is a part. Lewis’s work interests me professionally, since I’m paid to be interested, but also because it’s straight up cool: I’ve learned from these scientists to never turn my back on a plant, much less an entire monocropping field of them.

Lewis and his crew of researchers, in the words of a Newswise press release,

has cloned six genes coding for different forms of the enzyme arogenate dehydratase (ADT), which converts a compound called arogenate into phenylalanine.

A description of phenylalanine’s fate underscores its central role in terrestrial plant life and the importance of the enzymatic reaction that produces it.

Phenylalanine is converted into phenolic compounds that are the building blocks of many of the plant world’s most distinctive and important substances, including the pigments in flower petals and chemicals that protect leaves, stems and bark from ultraviolet radiation. Perhaps the best-known end product of phenols is the one that allows trees to stand upright.

But, the release continues,

Phenylalanine is more than a precursor to other important compounds. Since it is an amino acid, it is used as a building block itself in the production of proteins. That happens in animals as well as in plants; humans and other mammals, however, can’t produce phenylalanine. We obtain it by breaking down proteins in the food we eat—either plant material, or the meat of animals that ate plants.

We’re getting close to the big-bang heartbeat of the living world here or, at least, to identifying a strand that weaves all life together.

Lewis said our reliance on plants to make phenylalanine means the reactions that produce it are as crucial to our survival as they are to that of plants.

“If these don’t exist, we don’t exist. It’s as simple as that,” he said.

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review by Brian Charles Clark

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver
Harper Collins, 2007
Cloth, $26.95

A third of the world’s fossil fuel habit goes to supporting agriculture. Though that’s not the reason for the rise in organically grown food, it’s a good one. (The main reason is concern for the health of body, soul and soil.) A third of the world’s oil goes to growing and trucking food around the planet—and, in the U.S. at least, food transportation is tax deductible.

No wonder the industrial food chain is so addictive. Not only can we get what we want when we want it (apples in late winter and spring from New Zealand, to give just one example), but we can get it cheap, too. Continue Reading »

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