If I’m wearing a jacket, is the earth really warming?

Most of the United States had a notably cool summer and fall, a phenomenon that plenty of climate-change skeptics have seized upon. “Nice global warming we’re having,” they’ve been saying for months as extraordinarily cool temperatures have prevailed. So it looks like it’s time for another enlightening discussion of the elemental difference between weather and climate—with infographics!

Let’s look at the most recent month, October. The National Climatic Data Center recently released a map of October’s global temperature anomalies in one of its State of the Climate reports. Blue dots show cooler-than-average temperatures; red dots show higher-than-average temps. The bigger the dot, the greater the departure from average. As you can see, the U.S. is an island of blue in a world that is virtually red:

Also see maps from June, July, August, and September—as well as the combined June-August period—at the NCDC website. To varying degrees, they show the same thing: The United States has been one of the coolest places on the planet, relative to average, for months.

So the next time you hear a denialist—or just your well-meaning friend who’s clumsily trying to make small talk about the weather—attempt to link climate change and the current temperature outside your door, don’t just shake it off. Remind them that as usual, the big picture is what counts. And yes, it’s still getting warmer out there.

Source: National Climatic Data Center

Image courtesy of National Climatic Data Center.

While the FDA holes up and takes a good, hard look at the health effects of the widely used plastic additive bisphenol A, there’s a flurry of news and activity on the BPA front.

Consumer Reports has ginned up considerable media attention with its recent study of BPA in canned food, which found the substance showing up widely in soups, juices, and canned vegetables. Check out coverage at Grist, Civil Eats, and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, and see the Consumer Reports blogs for coverage of the industry reaction.

A study published days ago in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives found a correlation between aggression in young girls and high BPA exposure during pregnancy by their moms. Read stories about it at E Magazine and Sierra Club Green Home. Another study covered in today's Washington Post found that Chinese men exposed to high BPA levels suffered erectile dysfunction.

And now the mighty Kristof hath taken up the cause with his pen. New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof weighed in on Saturday with “Chemicals in Our Food, and Bodies.” Springboarding off the Consumer Reports hullabaloo, he sums up some of the alarming science and pronounces endocrine disruptors—the dangerous class of chemicals to which BPA belongs—scarier than “threats from warlords, bandits, and tarantulas.”

Apparently, he’s not the only one scared by the BPA situation. Business Insurance reports that 25 BPA-related lawsuits that seek class-action status were consolidated last year, seeking damages from companies that include baby-bottle makers Avent, Evenflo, Gerber, and Playtex, as well as the maker of the ubiquitous Nalgene bottles. The most frightening aspect for the corporate defendants is that the strategically worded suits specifically do not allege bodily injury, and thus insurance will likely not cover the companies' court costs. (Instead the suits seek economic and punitive damages.) The story suggests that BPA may be next major cause for plaintiffs’ attorneys.

Finally, there may be broader reform afoot in the area of chemical safety. The Wilmington, Delaware, News Journal  reports that “momentum is gathering to strengthen the government’s primary mechanism for banning harmful chemicals or limiting their use in consumer products, the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act.” The story notes that EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson said in a September speech that there are “troubling gaps” in the data on many widely used chemicals.

“Many are turning to government for assurance that chemicals have been assessed using the best available science, and that unacceptable risks haven’t been ignored,” Jackson said. “Right now, we are failing to get this job done.”

Sources: Consumer Reports, Grist, Civil Eats, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, E Magazine, Sierra Club Green Home, Washington Post, Business Insurance, Delaware Online 

You can be forgiven if you’ve grown somewhat cynical about food labeling in the organic and natural aisle: Lately it always seems to turn out that brands with names like Grandma’s Garden are fabricated and owned by Acme Evil Megafoods Inc. At EcoSalon, Vanessa Barrington sizes up 10 big organic and natural food brands to explore who owns what, and what they’re putting into their products.

Can you guess which of the following brands on the list are still independently owned, even though they’ve grown large enough to make it to your local market?

• Amy’s
• Arrowhead Mills
• Cascadian Farms
• Eden
• Horizon
• Nature’s Path
• Newman’s Own Organics
• Organic Valley
• Stonyfield
• White Wave/Silk

Read Barrington’s full post at EcoSalon for her thoughtful analysis and commentary on these 10 brands. The website has become a must-bookmark destination for people interested in solid, sane advice on living green. Recent topics have included the Purell-ification of flu-panicked America, a new Levi’s clothing tag that promotes Goodwill donations, and seven delicious non-tofu meat alternatives.

Thanks, Alternet.

Image by arincrumley, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source: EcoSalon 

Republicans for Environmental Protection may sound like one of those fake advocacy groups that corporations invent for lobbying purposes, but it’s an actual organization that truly is dedicated to protecting the environment. David Jenkins, REP’s vice president for government and political affairs, tells Sierra magazine in its Nov.-Dec. issue that the group’s motto is “Conservation is conservative,” and that it’s gotten a better reception from party members than he might expect:

“Last year was the first time we had a booth at the Republican National Convention. And you know, delegates there are the dedicated core. I was expecting to have to defend my position, but I was absolutely stunned. Constantly I heard, ‘Oh, I’m so glad you’re here. The party needs to do better on the environment.’”

Jenkins says that a climate bill with “with strong, constructive input from Republicans will be stronger than one Democrats would draft on their own” and suggests the GOP could “score some political points” by standing up against mountaintop removal coal mining, which “offends everybody’s environmental sensibilities.”

REP's staff and members write opinion pieces, grant interviews, and bend legislators' ears. Its website also hosts columns by policy director Jim DiPeso, who blogs as The Green Conservative at The Daily Green. DiPeso recently celebrated the nation's wild grasslands as worthy of wilderness protection and prodded the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in an open letter to get on board with climate change legislation.

REP still has its work cut out: Project Vote Smart notes that only 15 Republican members of the House of Representatives have expressly endorsed the group, and only one senator has done so: Susan Collins of Maine. Meanwhile, Sen. James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican, is still huffing, puffing, and embarrassing his colleagues with his delusional climate-change denialism.

Sierra suggests such politicians are out of step the with party rank and file: Although 45 percent of Republican voters polled by Zogby had a favorable view of the American Clean Energy and Security Act, which the House passed in June, only 8 of 178 House Republicans, or 4 percent, voted for it.

That’s barely half the number of the GOP House members who endorsed REP—which makes me wonder just how deep those “conservative” values run.

Sources: Sierra, Republicans for Environmental Protection, The Daily Green, Project Vote Smart, Washington Post 

It’s home canning season, and by some indications a lot more Americans are joining in on the pickle-packing fun. If you’re one of them, you ought to know that your plastic-lined canning lids probably contain bisphenol A, the endocrine-disrupting chemical that’s been suspected in a host of health problems and is under intensive scrutiny by the slow-moving FDA.

“Canning jar lids from the brands Ball, Kerr, Golden Harvest, and Bernardin are coated with bisphenol A,” writes Organic Gardening magazine in its Winter 2009-2010 issue.

The magazine asks an endocrine-disruptor expert about the potential health hazards. “If the lid doesn’t contact the food, it’s not a problem,” says Frederick vom Saal, a biological sciences professor at the University of Missouri-Columbia. But that’s unlikely to be the case, so he recommends using a BPA-free product. Organic Gardening suggests Weck brand canning jars, which have glass lids.

It’s too bad that the legions of Americans who are growing and preserving their own produce—often because they’re trying to avoid the mega-food system and eat locally and heathily—have to deal with yet another potential toxin in their diet. And while I don’t know how serious the canning-jar-lid threat is, I agree with Treehugger that Jarden Home Brands, the manufacturer of all four BPA-containing brands mentioned above, is not exactly setting a high ethical standard with its website FAQ statement falling back on highly questionable FDA studies. “Weasely words,” Treehugger calls them.

The FDA, as Utne Reader reported in August, expects to rule by November 30 on whether BPA is safe for food and beverage containers.

It’s enough work learning how to blanch and shock our vegetables and avoid the dreaded botulism. Shouldn’t we at least be able to declare our canning jars poison-free with confidence?

Sources: Reuters, Houston Chronicle, Organic Gardening, Mother Earth News, Treehugger, Jarden Home Brands

UPDATE 10/26/09: Lloyd Alter at Treehugger, who wrote about this issue in July, is conducting a test to compare BPA levels in two jars of home-canned pickles: one that's been sloshing around in the trunk of his car and another that's been kept upright. We’ll follow the results here on Utne.com.

Image by TheBittenWord.com, licensed under Creative Commons.

Mark Kastel and the Cornucopia Institute are at it again, standing up for the organic food label and going after corporations who play loose with it. The organization co-founded by Kastel, who was recently named one of Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” just fired a volley at Target, accusing the megaretailer of deceiving customers about soymilk.

In a press release, Cornucopia says Target advertised Silk soymilk as organic in newspaper ads by showing the carton with “organic” on its label, even though the soymilk was not organic. Cornucopia has filed formal complaints with the U.S. Agriculture Department’s organic program and with Minnesota and Wisconsin officials.

Cornucopia has previously criticized Dean Foods, the maker of Silk, for quietly switching to conventional soybeans in the core products of its White Wave soy division.

Was the image of the organic carton an honest mistake by a graphic designer, or an attempt to capitalize on the cachet of the organic label by implying that Silk is organic? Target isn’t saying much at this point. Spokeswoman Jana O’Leary tells Utne Reader that Target is investigating the matter and that the retailer sells both organic and nonorganic Silk at its SuperTarget stores.

Cornucopia has called foul on Target before, most notably in 2007 when it accused Target’s private-label food line, Archer Farms, of using milk that was produced in violation of federal organic livestock standards by the Colorado-based Aurora Dairy. Despite that the USDA found Aurora had willfully violated 14 federal organic regulations, the dairy was allowed to stay in business and Target stuck with Aurora as its Archer Farms milk supplier.

Source: Cornucopia Institute, City Pages

Image by GenGlo, licensed under Creative Commons.

I hope everyone who’s been watching the epic PBS documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea takes inspiration from the series, which was produced by Ken Burns and his longtime collaborator, writer Dayton Duncan. But one thing I hope they’re not inspired to do is follow in Duncan’s footsteps and attempt to visit all 58 national parks, a lifelong journey that he chronicles in the problematically titled article “Collect ’Em All” in the July-August Sierra magazine.

What’s wrong with visiting all the parks? Well, for starters, doing so would leave a massive carbon footprint. When Duncan unknowingly began his quest in 1959, visiting several parks on his Iowa family’s extended vacation, gasoline was cheap and seemingly plentiful and the idea of “carbon miles” was a million miles away. But now, alas, we know better: If we burned the auto and airplane fuel it would take to visit all the parks, many of which are in remote and hard-to-reach locations, we’d emit a huge amount of CO2 that ultimately would work against the very places we’re trying to preserve.

For another thing, “park bagging,” as I’ve heard it called, is ultimately an elitist pursuit, a game that very few can play. Face it, only the wealthiest and luckiest among us has the vacation time, the money, and the means to have a chance at ticking off all 58 parks, and even announcing your achievement to the world can come perilously close to bragging about what an amazingly fortunate life you lead—not the sort of message parks advocates should be sending. The National Parks quotes Teddy Roosevelt exclaiming at the Grand Canyon, “This is one of the great sights that every American, if he can travel at all, should see.” That middle clause, added wisely, is essential: Many Americans find it hard to travel to just one national park, let alone all of them.

Finally, the “collect ’em all” mentality goes against a better, nobler impulse, which is to get to know the land intimately. Better that we should acquaint ourselves with one, two, or a few parks very well than attempt to superficially survey them all in baseball-card-collector fashion. Several years ago, I worked for the summer in Alaska’s Wrangell-St. Elias National Park, driving a tourist shuttle van between the tiny gateway community of McCarthy and the mining relic town of Kennicott. Among my passengers I met a few park baggers, most memorably a man and his teenage son. They “explored” the park in an afternoon, which meant strolling among Kennicott’s dilapidated buildings, looking up at the stupendous glaciers around them, and then riding my van back down to resume their journey. Never mind that Wrangell-St. Elias is the nation’s largest park at 13 million acres, and that even someone who’s there for months, as I was, can barely claim to have scratched the surface of its vast wonder. The man told me that they were off next to the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, which they would fly over in a bush plane—not even setting foot on the tundra. They added both parks to their all-important list, yet they didn’t have a true wilderness experience in either place.

Now, I’ve got to cut Duncan some slack: He racked up some of his visits while researching and filming The National Parks, and the greater good that may come of the series is arguably worth the carbon he burned to do it. (This sort of rationale is how many “environmental” speakers and writers justify their flight-intensive, conference-hopping lifestyles.) But still, it seems that he, of all people, ought to know better than to wear his completed life list as some badge of honor.

Sour grapes? Maybe. I once thought I would travel to many of the world’s most beautiful places. The Patagonian Andes, Antarctica, the Galapagos Islands—all awaited my intrepid exploration. Now, with the reality of climate change hitting full force, I see that even if I had the means, visiting all my dream destinations just wouldn’t be right, and that in some ways staying close to home is the best way to honor the earth. So yes, I’ve resigned myself to the fact that there are some national parks I will never see, and that photo or video images will be my only acquaintance with them. Which is why I’ve been watching every last episode of The National Parks.

Sources: PBS, Sierra, Teton Gravity Research, National Park Service 

Image by Alaskan Dude, licensed under Creative Commons.