Go Green

Edmond Beautiful unveils new Web site

EDMOND — The nonprofit Edmond Beautiful, which staffs Edmond’s recycling center at 20 W Third St., launched a new Web site last week designed to educate the community about environmental issues and ways residents can address them.

The site provides tips to those looking for ways to live “green,” as well as provides dates of upcoming events and ways to volunteer.

Other features and information include an Edmond ‘Yard of the Week’ archive, a history of Edmond Beautiful — formally known as Keep Edmond Beautiful — and a community profile.

For more, go to www.edmondbeautiful.org.

– Micah Gamino, Staff Writer

By John Sutter

A ranking of “sustainable” cities released Monday put Oklahoma City and Tulsa among the least environmentally friendly cities in the country.

A green media group called SustainLane ranked OKC 49 and Tulsa 48 on its list, which included the 50 most populous cities in the country. Mesa, Ariz., finished last on the list. Portland, Ore., ranked No. 1, followed by San Francisco. The report takes into account things like climate policy, bus ridership, commute length, city planning, air quality and water quality.

Oklahoma City Mayor Mick Cornett said he was “disappointed” in the ranking, but did not argue with the results. The city is looking to hire a director of sustainability to address environmental issues, he said, adding that quality of life in Oklahoma City is still high.

Commute lengths set the city back in the rankings, he said. He called for a cultural shift away from automobile dependence.

The Wall Street Journal’s “Environmental Capital” blog makes an interesting point concerning the survey:

The big winners are all out west: Portland, San Francisco, and Seattle. The biggest laggards are, too: Las Vegas, Tulsa, and Oklahoma City.

The bottom line: The kind of things that make cities “sustainable” also make them expensive. Take the rankings of “housing affordability.” The cheapest cities—San Antonio, Fort Worth, Arlington, El Paso—also scored the worst on public transit, bike-friendliness, and ability to walk to work. The big winners there are also among the most expensive places to live, like San Francisco, New York, San Jose, and Boston.

By John SutterNew York Times columnist Thomas Friedman joked that he felt somewhat out of place giving a lecture on the coming “green revolution” in an oil and gas state like Oklahoma.

In a speech in downtown Oklahoma City today, the Pulitzer Prize winner said that America won’t know that the environmental revolution has come until “you see bodies by the side of the road.” Those will be the bodies of oil and gas companies, which may not be able to adapt to the clean energy era, he said.

Friedman’s overall message, though, was one of optimism. He laid out a number of crises facing the world — climate change, biodiversity loss, overpopulation — and said that the United States and Oklahoma are amply equipped to tackle the problems with the right support from the state and federal governments. The country and state’s success in doing so will decide who controls global politics and succeeds in the world economy this century, he said.

“You can see these as problems or you can see them as the bird of the demand for a whole new industry,” he said. “Our country, the United States of America, has to lead this industry.”

The goal of this new world order? “Who can invent a source of abundant, cheap, clean, reliable electrons.”

Friedman, who is promoting his new book, “Hot, Flat and Crowded,” said all sectors of the economy, including energy companies, can be part of the change. But he said current efforts to green the economy are more of a self-aggrandizing party than a genuine revolution. He referenced a litany of “green” self-help books with tips on saving the planet and products as obscure as “vegan condoms and solar-powered vibrators,” which are supposed to denote a new era of environmental thinking.

Forces of environmental change are bubbling up from the bottom of America, he said, but “brain-dead” politicians in Washington D.C. have not acted in a proportional manner.

He advocated for a tax on carbon, which he said would put a true cost on the pollution, health risks, climate change, biodiversity loss, loss of national security and lessened respect in the world that fossil fuels create for the United States and around the world.

Friedman likened this energy and environment revolution to the Internet and technology movement of the 1990s. The difference, he said, is that clean energy offers no functional benefit over dirty energy — your lights work the same whether coal or wind powered them. Computer groups offered new products with entirely new functions. As such, energy deserves a push from the government to get started, he said, adding that he has more faith in the power of American innovation and capitalism than government forces to make the changes necessary. Both revolutions will have to operate by a “change or die” philosophy, he said.

He railed against politicians, including John McCain, who are preaching drilling for more oil as the solution to the energy crisis. That is analogous to companies at the dawn of the computer revolution calling for more typewriters and better carbon-copy paper, he said. (See video at top of post for more on that)

The foreign affairs columnist referenced the fact that Oklahoma biofuels and agriculture can play a part in the “green revolution.” He also mentioned U.S. Sen. Jim Inhofe, R-Tulsa, by name on several occasions. Inhofe has become known nationally for saying global warming is a “hoax.” Friedman said Inhofe is wrong on that point, but, whatever you believe about global warming, America needs to become more efficient to tackle environmental problems and to ensure it has a top spot in the global economy.

He listed several major problems facing the world. All can be dealt with through innocation and market forces, with a government push, he said.

I’ll list some below:

1. Climate change: The weather is becoming “weirder,” not necessarily hotter, he said. Places that are hot are getting hotter, places that are dry are getting drier, places that are wet are getting wetter, and hurricanes are getting stronger, he said. He also said climate models are becoming more and more troublesome over time. For instance, it recently was thought that ice in the Arctic Circle would disappear by 2050. Current projections say that’s more likely to happen in 2012, he said.

2. Biodiversity: According to Conservation International, a new species goes extinct every 20 minutes. “We are the first generation that is going to have to think like Noah, and save the last two pairs” of animals of each species, he said.

3. Petropolitics: The U.S. spends $700 billion supporting some of the worst regimes on earth, he said. That’s because we have to buy their oil. “We’re in a war on terrorism and we’re funding both sides,” he said.

4. Energy and Natural Resources: Friedman said there are “too many American carbon copies” in the world, meaning that more people in developing countries want to live like Americans — they want to have big houses, drives cars over long distances and use lots of electricity. There aren’t enough resources around for that to happen, he said, and new America-like places are sprouting up all the time.

“If we don’t redefine what it means to be an American in resource terms, you’re going to see resource demand go through the roof,” he said.

5. Population Growth: There will be a billion more people on earth by 2020, and not enough resources to go around.

Some basics: Friedman’s speech was sponsored by the business school at Oklahoma State University as part of a lecture series. Tickets were $75, and the talk mostly was attended by older people who were wearing suits. A number of students also came.

Friedman is not the final word on these subjects, of course, although he is a well-known authority on globalization and global politics. Student groups have protested his talks in the past, saying that his support for military intervention in the Middle East and his usually hands-off global economic policies, which some say hurt the world’s poor. Students from Brown University reportedly threw a pie in his face recently (the clip is on youtube).

I’d love to hear what you all think about his talk. People in the audience seemed to give a mixed response, with most standing to applaud at the end, but no crazy cheers or anything like that. Nearly 900 people registered for the event.

[Bob Waldrop, above, one of the founding members of the Oklahoma Sustainability Network, is among a feisty group of Oklahoma bloggers writing about environmental issues. One of Waldrop’s newest creations, The Bulgar Bugle, is all about getting local wheat into your diet.]

By John Sutter

So you’ve got all this excess bulgur wheat sitting around … what’s a green guy to do? Well, turn to the Bulgar Bugle for starters. It’s one of a number of green blogs that are sprouting up in Oklahoma, as I wrote in The Oklahoman today.

On the bulgur blog, you’ll find an assortment of reciepes from local environment guru Bob Waldrop. The commentary behind the recipes is what makes the blog such a charming read, though. Here are some examples:

(June 7th) This morning I was making whole wheat pancakes for breakfast, and decided, what the heck, I have all this bulgar laying around, let’s throw some in the pancake batter.

Good choice, Bob. I used the bulgar that I had cooked overnight in the crockpot (see previous post today). My recipe for whole wheat pancakes with bulgar is as follows …

(June 11th) How American is this? We had frozen home-made “TV dinners” tonight, which included bulgar pilaf. There was a bottle of ketchup sitting on the counter, and I thought, “Why not?” So I dashed a good portion of ketchup onto the pilaf, mixed it in, and it was very good.

(June 9th) Cook some sausage and scramble some eggs (however much you need for those you’re feeding). After the eggs are scrambled, add cooked bulgar pilaf (about 1/4 cup per person). Combine all ingredients in skillet. Voila, quick and nutritious “stick to your ribs” breakfast.

My newspaper story talks briefly about how much the environmental (or sustainability) movement has grown in Oklahoma in recent years. Waldrop was among a handful of people who started the Oklahoma Sustainability Network over coffee meetings in 2002 or 2003. That group has spawned several sub-chapters, and members of the movement pride themselves on being a loose alliance of interested people rather than organizationally strong. The Sierra Club and others have been active in Oklahoma for some time, but currently none of the groups are said to employ any staffers (although Sierra Club is looking to hire one now). The groups have found a home online, through listserves and blogs. Here’s a list of some I found interesting:

Fresh Greens: Tips and anecdotes from 13 bloggers in Oklahoma City who write on topics from local foods to energy efficiency. Excerpt from their inaugural post:

Why a local blog on sustainability? Plenty of blogs and other websites are dealing with sustainability issues at a national or international level, as well as plenty of bloggers here in OKC who write on trying to live sustainably. I suppose the real impetus behind this collaborative blogging effort, is a desire to employ the Web 2.0 phenomenon in creating a center of discussion specific to the Oklahoma City sustainable community and its geographical neighbors. In the spirit of Wendell Berry we recognize the essential value of grounding our efforts in the community instead of attempting to swim against the current of our culture alone.

Here’s a video with two of the bloggers:

Oklavore: Local foods, cooking and environment blog.

New Okie Pioneers: Yahoo! listserve devoted to environmentalism and independence in rural Oklahoma. Site has 711 members. This morning, they were posting about donkeys.

Ag Law OKC Blog: A local attorney blogs on agriculture and the environment.

The San Francisco Chronicle had a blip this morning on cloth vs. paper napkins — which uses less water, emits less carbon and is better for the environment? Like many such comparisons, the answer isn’t easy, the paper writes:

Alas, a simple answer was elusive. A visit to AskPablo, a blog belonging to a sustainability engineer, Pablo Paster, who endeavors to analyze carbon footprints, uncovered a many-paragraph essay that concluded that a cloth napkin used 50 times as much water as and emitted more carbon dioxide (including its manufacture) than 50 paper napkins.

However, there are antique napkins that have been used many hundreds, even thousands of times …
If you are throwing a party, however, and want to use paper, look for recycled napkins - and be sure to put them in your green (composting) bin with the food scraps instead of with the landfill-bound trash or uncontaminated recycling.

The question reminds me of Sheryl Crow’s reported war on toilet paper. The singer says we can save resources and fight climate change one square at a time. Sounds tricky …

–John

By John Sutter

A new green blogging community called Fresh Greens sprouted up last week. The site features 13 bloggers and is devoted to sustainability and environmental issues in the Oklahoma City area. Shauna Struby, president of Sustainable OKC, posted a blog this week on the challenges of finding local foods when you’re out on the road. (Burger King is ubiquitous, but local options are worth searching out, she writes.) You can find other blogs by Struby at Think Lady.

Twelve other bloggers will join her on the site, and it sounds like they come from a diverse and interesting backgrounds. One is a vice-president at Sonic who is new to the green movement. One is a new mom who will write about the challenges of going green with a newborn. Another is Jennifer Gooden (see video above), who was a co-founder of Sustainable OKC and works for the Homeless Alliance. Gooden said over lunch on Monday that she plans to write about social justice issues and how they intersect with environmentalism and energy efficiency. The blog hopes to have two new posts per week.

Struby said the goal of the Fresh Greens blog is to connect people in Oklahoma City who are interested in environmental issues. She sees the blog as a conversation — a forum for public debate. Too often, she said, people who are interested in environmental issues in Oklahoma operate in tight circles, not realizing that a bigger movement is afoot. For example, when Struby set up a Sustainable OKC booth at the recent Dave Matthews concert downtown, people kept stopping by and expressing great surprise that any environmental groups existed here, she said. She wants those people to get connected online.

What are your favorite blogs? Know of any other green blogs in Oklahoma? I’d like to know … considering a story for the paper about the topic. The most random I’ve seen, the Bulgar Bugle, is devoted entirely to getting more bulgar wheat into your diet … Hey, it is a local food, and who doesn’t like tabbouleh.

And if you haven’t seen the Blog Oklahoma network, it’s a cool place to find local bloggers on topics that interest you.

By John Sutter

If you’re lonely and live in Oklahoma, don’t join a dating service, buy a Smart Car.

There’s no better way to get noticed or make a friend than to drive one of these cutesy micro-cars through the herd of mammoth SUV’s in Oklahoma City, according to employees at Crafton Tull Sparks, an architecture and engineering firm that in November will give one of the cars away to an employee.

Some of the firm’s architects at a northwest Oklahoma City office have been trading turns driving the fuel-efficient car. One said he was followed home by a family in a Lexus who wanted to inquire about the car’s gas mileage. Another was approached in a store parking lot by a person who almost demanded to be given a chance to sit in the Smart Car.

“You pull up to a stoplight and you notice people are looking at you,” said Nate Baker, a vice president at the company.

Omar Khoury, another VP, said the car is so small “you could almost pick it up and put it in the trunk” of a sport utility vehicle.

“Your rear is almost on the back wall and your feet are almost on the front wheel,” Baker said.

Underlying all the attention is a sense that fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly cars seem out of place or awkward in Oklahoma, which is a state that’s thrived on an oil and gas economy. But the employees who’ve been given a chance to test out the Smart Car say things are changing. People are gawking, sure, but only because they’re interested, they say.

I took a quick ride in the car (to shoot the video above), and the only difference you notice between the tiny Smart Car and any other compact car is the fact that, if you look behind you, the road is right there. Such close quarters leads some people to consider the Smart Car unsafe, Baker said, but that opinion’s not based on testing. Crash tests indicate that the car’s cage-like design stands up well to impact, earing the car top crash scores, according to the National Safety Commission.

The Crafton Tull Sparks give-away is intended to promote the company’s focus on sustainability. The firm is working on more building projects that use “green” methods, Baker said, and will offer the car raffle only to employees who have passed a certification exam on green building techniques.

[Do you drive a Smart Car? Know someone who does? Have an opinion on them? Feel free to e-mail me at jsutter [at] oklahoman.com or post comments below.]

A tour with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture visits Sunrise Acres, an organic farm run by two retirees in Newcastle.

By John Sutter

There’s a movement passing across dinner tables in Oklahoma. Local foods appear to be coming back in a big way.

The number of farmers markets in the state has grown 75 percent — to 49 — in the past year. Sales at the online Oklahoma Food Cooperative are up 70 percent over those in 2007, with $65,000 worth of Oklahoma food sold each month to subscribers. (disclosure: my household has a membership to the coop)

The reason for the changes are many. Some people are concerned about health scares associated with industrially produced foods. Some worry about growth hormones and antibiotics fed to cattle and chickens, or the humaneness of feedlots and confined animal feeding operations. Still others are concerned about the greenhouse gases emitted when food is trucked across the country and flown around the world to the dinner table.

Behind those arguments, though, is an overwhelming sense that society lost something when people started buying food from fluorescent-lit shelves instead of from their neighbors. What’s missing is a connection with the land and with people who still work with it, advocates of local foods, or “locavores” say.

That connection inherently involves people — farmers who consumers trust with their food, their values and their health.

Plus, there are the kooky stories. Food that comes from someone you’ve met has a story. Oklahoma seems to have plenty of them.

To learn some of them, I went on a tour of six Oklahoma farms with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture. The non-profit group, which pushes for alternative and environmentally friendly farming methods, hosted the tour of part of an annual conference in Oklahoma.

On the bus with me were a number of types of people who were interested in local foods. There were would-be urban gardeners who just wanted tips for their tomatoes. There were traditional farmers interested in trying something new. There were farmers market coordinators and agriculture scientists. And there were a few local food pioneers — people like Cathie Greene, who requires that her customers visit her farm in far eastern Oklahoma (Wild Things Farm, in Pocola) so that they can see her methods and trust that she’s growing vegetables without chemicals and only sprays her strawberries sparsely with fungicide.

We started the morning at Oklahoma State University-Oklahoma City, where one of the city’s busiest farmers markets is held (find a full list of farmers markets in the state here).

Then we went on to meet an angry sailor who grows peaches, a goofy retiree who attacks shoulder-high weeds with a shovel, and a bison rancher who wears suspenders with t-shirts.

Meet these farmers and some others below, and be sure to check out their videos. (The one of the peach farmer is YouTube-worthy, even unedited.)

Old School Revolution

Robert Stelle and his wife Barbara have retired from their desk jobs — but don’t look for them to be resting any time soon.The couple spends many waking hours pulling weeds and picking crops from their small organic farm — Sunrise Acres — in Newcastle.Robert Stelle, with his conductor-style overalls and scraggly beard, exemplifies an interesting point about local food: it’s not new. While the “locavore” movement has caught on recent years, it’s really more of a throw-back to old times than a push for innovation.People on the tour marveled at Robert Stelle’s old-school farming tools, for example.The 61-year-old cut a triangle out of the tip of a shovel to attack the big weeds that grow in his vegetable gardens, since he doesn’t use chemicals to keep them down. And he constructed a rolling cart with a seat welded to the top so he could sit down while pulling weeds out of the ground by hand. He uses his feet to push himself back between rows of pepper and okra plants.

In a greenhouse, Stelle joked with the group about how he hasn’t had time to tidy up lately.

“It’s a rainy day job to clean this up, and it hasn’t rained in 40 days,” he said.

He said that the “canned generation,” which grew up eating food straight out of cans, is yearning for a connection with whole foods that have an origin you can explain.

Loud mouth peaches

In Blanchard, there’s a former sailor — covered in tattoos and has a mouth as filthy as Ludacris’ — who raises peaches on Sailor Orchard.Robert Mearkle, 63, yells at his peach trees like he would a Navy enlistee. He gets red in the face and flaps his hands around with limp wrists, as if mocking the plants that produce what he says are the best peaches in the state.Last year, it rained so much that his peaches were watery instead of sweet. That ticked off the irascible Mearkle so much that he took a chainsaw to 200 of his trees. There’s a big patch of mowed grass behind his house where an orchard used to be.

He teases customers relentlessly. Once he falsely told a group of older women that his watering system was actually controlled by a computer that kept all the bugs away.

They seem to come back for his juicy fruits again and again. He doesn’t put a sign out in front of his house, but people just seem to search him out, he said, mostly because the taste of fresh-picked fruit is so much different than the “cardboard” sold in grocery stores.

Mearkle seems mostly to be selling the flavor of his juicy fruit. That, and the entertainment he provides on even a short visit.

Buffalo with personality

The tour stopped for lunch at the Wichita Buffalo Company in Hinton. There, James Stepp, 56, and family served bison burgers, bison hot dogs and Oklahoma-grown watermelon, which was the sweetest I had ever tasted.

Over the lunch, he made a pitch for the other tour attendees to take up bison ranching. Mainly, he’s concerned with the healthiness of local food.

Bison meat is lean (it is a quarter of the fat of choice beef and a third of the fat of chicken, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture), and therefore is good for the overweight and the health conscious, he said.

Stepp, a short man who looks a bit like Alfred E. Neuman and was wearing a faded green t-shirt with suspenders with jeans, showed photos of his animals. He’s given them names — Pedro and Sally were the first bison he bought, in 1997 — and says he knows their personalities.

All of this plays into his marketing strategy in that it helps his customers feel connected to the animals they’re eating.

“It’s what we sell,” he said. “We sell that story and we tell it over and over and over again.”

No-hormone cheese

One of the final stops was at Christian Cheese, which is operated by George Christian in Kingfisher.

Christian doesn’t use hormones, preservatives or antibiotics in his cheeses, for those who worry about what effects those may have on people. All of the cheeses are made in a tin-roof building with doors you have to duck through and outside walls that are painted to look like a cow.

We stopped here for just a short while. Other tour members tasted the cheeses, I spend some time admiring just how many kinds he produces. Entire walls of a back room are lined with bricks and bricks of the stuff — all different colors and textures. (It also didn’t hurt that this “cold room” was a nice relief from a 100-degree day).

Check out their Web site for some family heirloom cheese recipes.

At the table

All of these stories come together on the dinner table.

According to local food proponents, eating a meal that’s grown and raised by people you know is a unique and reassuring experience.

“While the environmental benefits are important, I think the most important (benefits) are the personal satisfaction of just having a dinner table that represents a lot of friends and family and neighbors and farms,” said Doug Walton, community foods coordinator with the Kerr Center for Sustainable Agriculture, a non-profit advocacy group. “It totally changes the whole proposition of food … it’s not just for the body, it’s for the heart and soul.”

That sounds all well and good, but for the average person it may not be possible — at least not all of the time. Some critics say local foods are too expensive for the poor. Others contend that all the cooking and shopping and thinking that has to go into an all-local diet doesn’t jive with our fast-paces lives.

Walton told me he doesn’t think local and alternatively farmed foods should take over the market. They have a niche, and that niche is growing, he said.

This was particularly evident as I left the tour. Our bus pulled into a parking lot in downtown Oklahoma City, and as everyone got off, I heard two of the tour’s leaders (Chris Kirby, director of the Farm to School program for the state Department of Agriculture, and Steve Upson, an ag consultant at the Noble Foundation) talking about how they wanted to grab something to eat.

It was 8 o’clock in the evening.

They said they wanted something quick.

Maybe … fast food?

[I don’t point that out to be critical so much as I thought it was an interesting illustration of a challenge facing the current sustainable food system.]

Sarah D. Wire had this interesting story on the front page of The Oklahoman on Tuesday. It’s about how a family goes green together.

The kids seem enthusiastic:

“I want her to learn to be self-sufficient. That way, if she ever has to grow her own food, she can, and if she doesn’t have to, she can grow it because she enjoys it,” Shauna Struby said.

“Which I will,” her daughter piped in immediately.

Struby is the current president of a local group called Sustainable OKC, which has been one of the loudest voice for sustainability in Oklahoma City for the past couple of years. Struby tells me that the group is soon starting a blog network of its own. I’ll be sure to pass along more information on that when it becomes available. In the meantime, you can visit their site to sign up for a newsletter that’s got lots of information on local meetings and environment-related happenings.

–John