The Bush Administration’s Ostrich Effect

You know the old caricature of the Ostrich sticking it’s head in the ground to avoid seeing something bad that it really doesn’t want to see or deal with? Well, that’s apparently how the Bush administration is dealing with the Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled. “If I don’t see it, then it doesn’t exist,” right? The New York Times noted that the White House basically told the EPA that “an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened” (“White House Refused to Open Pollutant’s E-mail,”New York Times, June 25, 2008).

This is just amazingly stupid and reflect the fact that this administration is just living in denial when it comes to the fact that global warming is a reality. The fact is that the National Academies of Science has come out to unequivicolly state the climate change is happening and all countries need to take prompt and substantive steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“Global Warming Myths and Facts,” Environmental Defense Fund, http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=1011). Of course this just doesn’t sit well with the President’s and his entourage’s belief that if they just ignore global warming then it won’t happen. While this is the end-time of President Bush’s tenure it does not mean that he gets to sit back and relax and take things easy until January 20th 2009! I’ve always suspected that when it came to the real decision making in this administration that he wasn’t really the final stop…now I can see that he probably wasn’t even the first.

Nation Building Here at Home

Thomas Friedman has written a wonderful op-ed piece on the need for the next President to focus efforts here at home. Whether it’s Senator John McCain or Senator Barack Obama as the next President they will have to focus on getting America back on the right course. President Bush and this Congress has done more damage to this country then any President that I can recall (I don’t remember the Carter years all that well since I wasn’t old enough to appreciate what was going on around me at the time — yes, I just kind of dated myself there).

We need to refocus on rebuilding this country and recapture our sense of purpose. Instead of building other nations and sending our money (it’s not really our money since we’re borrowing it heavily from foreign investors and putting our children more into debt — but it equates to our future and our children’s future) elsewhere we need to keep the effort here at home. We need to focus on rebuilding our infrastructure, re-constructing our industries, and developing the next technology revolution (a Green Revolution that focuses on energy efficiency, energy independence, renewable energy generation and reducing greenhouse gas emmissions), and inspiring our children to study, explore, learn, and build something more than themselves.

We have to change our attitudes — plant victory gardens, cut our energy use, and build hope for the future. From my own perspective I and my family have begun this journey by embracing these principles by planting a garden (and planning to expand it dramatically — who needs all that grass 🙂 ), starting to conduct an energy audit of our house and replace energy in-efficient appliances, solar power for the house, rain barrel water collection for the garden, expanding and improving our composting and recycling efforts, planting a rain garden to control runoff, and looking to other projects — keeping chickens (for eggs and chicken poop for fertilizer) in a portable chicken coop (see here), amatuer beekeeping (to help rebuild the population of bees that has been devasted by mites and colony collapse disorder and to ensure that we have enough pollinators for the crops in our garden) — as well as others in order to try and set a good example for our neighbors that you can do these things as part of our national effort to become energy independent and resource wise.

What I can only hope is that my effort will inspire my neighbors to see that you don’t need to do all of these things but you can do a few of them in order to contribute in this effort. America has always been a “can-do” country — we need to recapture that spirit and stand up as a nation. What we can’t afford to do is to sit around and wait for someone else to solve our problems. We must solve them ourselves.

Garden Update

We’ve got tomatoes! We now have 27 tomatoes coming in on the tomato plants in the garden and there appears to be a bud on the zucchini plant. The pole beans are coming out of the ground and we really need to get the peas in. Also, I’m watching the eggplant plant.

We potted a few peppers in pots and they seem to be having a bit of a problem. Unlike tomatoes which are self-pollinators the peppers need help from insects like bees and butterflies. The problem is that I haven’t seen that many pollinators in the garden or near it this year. They’re there…I’ve got these little weeds in the yard that flower and I can see the bees (both honey bees and bumble bees) flying from one flower to another but they’re not really getting into the garden plants yet. My feeling is that people have been spraying pesticides on their yards to kill the weeds (I know because I see the yellow “Caution” flags in their yards that the lawn companies use to tell people to stay off the grass — of course, bees don’t read signs so they still go for the flowers that have just been sprayed) and that’s impacting the overall pollinator population. I’ve decided that I may have to eventually start keeping a hive in the back yard to help replenish the bee population in this area…on top of that it may just be a good thing as I may be able to help fight against the loss of pollinators overall due to mites and colony collapse disorder. I recently read an article on the WTOP website that quoted the fact that the numbers of beekeepers in the United States has declined since the 1970s and that probably the best way to save our bee population is by encouraging hobbyist/backyard beekeeping. That being the case I also found this article talking about how beekeeping is coming to urban areas as well as the outlying farms.

Anyway, here are some more pictures of the garden.

Garden from the entrance looking from bed #3 to bed #1

Teepee for Pole Beans

Looking at beds #2 and #1

Growing Tomatoes!