January 2008 Newsletter

PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE

There is a movement afoot, a rumbling from deep in the earth and reverberating through our hearts. It is somewhat imperceptible and under the radar of mainstream media. Making up a kind of innate intuitive, an all-of-a-sudden pervasiveness that demands our attention. A global immune response with us acting as the fighter T-cells. Globally joining billions of others and a million or more of small not for profit organizations like FoCuS, people everywhere are finding the courage to seek truth and empower collaborative community. These organizations are uniquely leaderless composing a movement that fosters the development and expression of what’s left after all the layers of fear and defense have been stripped away; a core of gratitude, compassion, love and a fierce need to protect the gift we call life.  By that I mean All of Life.

It’s time to choose to play BIG. In responding to the global crisis we discover it contains a seed of remarkable opportunity. Our work then is to recycle what no longer serves us, choose aliveness and trust your heart. Remembering what it means to be human and using our inherent passion for the great restoration project. Starting with our own inner being and a commitment to act in ways that create mutual benefit for all. I challenge you to use the compost from the trimmings of some dying “Bush” and create fertile soil to plant the seed of a new reality. 2008…It’s our Year.

At the heart of this great restoration project is the question:

“How do we as living communities engage in the real conversation about the future we truly want, and how do we become enrolled to work together toward that future?”

FoCuS asks this question and invites your participation in this broad and most interesting conversation. What is your piece of the puzzle? What are your interests? What can you offer? What are your resources?

Eric Taylor

A new initiative will be implemented in the 2008 year entitled the “Garden School Initiative”

FoCuS Board members voted last meeting to provide a small short term stipend to Laurel Lyons to begin the process of grant writing and liaising with schools on the introduction, development and ongoing implementation of school gardens. The Agricultural Seed Pod is hosting a workshop in early February to set a plan to identify the stages in this exciting initiative. We invite anyone with particular interest in this field to attend. Please contact Christine or Eric Taylor for further information. (209/728-9112 or tablemountain@goldrush.com). 

The Green Schools Committee has just completed the initial stages of the garden at Michelson Elementary School in Murphys and we will be using this as a model for other local schools to imitate. All schools, parents, teachers will be invited to participate in this year-long unique learning experience through educational workshops and hands-on consultations. We envision funding to employ a “Roving School Garden Coordinator” responsible for bridging the gap between curriculum and school gardens with training in “Life Lab” or equivalent. We are seeking funding to help build this position and implement this program in our local schools and college. Donations of any amount to FoCuS and earmarked “garden initiative” are tax deductible.

Another new development that is coming to the fore is the “Local Business Initiative” which will look at strengthening our local economy. With the introduction of a “Buy Local Campaign” that both encourages local business to adopt social responsibility, respect for environment concerns whilst maintaining financial security as well as encouraging the consumer to look for businesses that are serious about adopting these principles. Discussions are presently under way to form a sub-committee that will introduce these ideas to our community via a local business directory. If you are interested in getting in on the formulative stages of this exciting initiative please contact FoCuS at focus@goldrush.com.

MEMBERS WANTED!

Please consider joining FoCuS as a member. Your tax deductible membership fee of $30 a year (more is welcome!) will help us to support the programs that we already have in place and allow us to create new programs for building a Sustainable Community in our region. We will continue to send our monthly newsletter to everyone on our mailing list, but would love to have you join us in a more tangible way. Please go to our website to join – www.foothillsustainability.org and click on the tab that says “Support” to download a membership form – or contact Shaun Michael at focus@goldrush.com. We have several SeedPod (Project) Groups that you could join up with to help carry out their tasks – General Plan, Land Use, Health and Wellbeing, Transportation, Agriculture, Green Schools , Renewable Energy & Green Building .

Cold Enough Yet?

It’s that time of year again where, unless you are fortunate enough to live in a straw bale  or passive solar home, many of us are using lots of energy to heat our homes.  Sometimes, this energy can get expensive.  Here are some low cost tips that can save you money and keep you more comfortable this winter.

1.       Keep the heat in and the cold out by weatherizing your home.  If you can see light through the cracks in your door, you are losing heat.  Weather-stripping  and replacing the worn threshold gasket at the base of the door jamb are inexpensive fixes. 

Another common source of heat loss is recessed lighting.  Recessed lights that connect to attics or vaulted ceilings are basically a hole in the thermal barrier of a home.  Newer recessed light fixtures have AT/IC ratings meaning that they are airtight and can come into contact with insulation.  If you have older recessed light fixtures that are not IC rated, insulation is held back 3-6 inches away from the fixture, leaving large breaks in your thermal barrier.  DO NOT cover these “non-IC” rated fixtures with insulation as it is a fire hazard.  If possible, replace non-IC fixtures in ceiling/attic interface with AT/IC rated fixtures and insulate over and around them, or caulk around the fixture/ceiling interface.

2.      If you have central heating and cooling systems(HVAC), chances are the distribution ducts are leaky.  California Energy Commission(CEC) estimates that 70% of all HVAC systems leaks 30% or greater.  It is common to find HVAC systems that leak 50-75% of conditioned air into unconditioned spaces(attics, crawl spaces).  This means that a majority of homes are paying 30%-75% too much on their heating and cooling bills.  

The CEC regards leaky ducts as such a big problem that all new and retrofit HVAC systems require a duct blaster test to measures duct leakage(with few exceptions).  Not only are leaky ducts a waste of energy, they can be a source of allergens and toxins, can create a negative household pressure  which can pull carbon monoxide into the house, and can result in overworking the system and decreasing equipment lifespan.  

Leaks in ductwork are most common in the supply plenum, joints, and around the boot at the register, however, kinks and tears also occur in flexible ducts.  When fixing these leaks, do not use common duct tape, as it quickly degrades when exposed to heat.  Ask for type 558CA tape or use mastic rated for duct use. 

3.      There are other things one can do to tighten up the air barrier in your house, but making it too tight without proper ventilation can be dangerous.  A blower door test can be performed to maximize air tightness without getting too tight.  If you are interested in a analysis of your home’s ventilation system, an energy audit, or a solar PV system, e-mail me at ginouye@volcano.net or call me at 293-7702.  Winter Special:  Get a Blower door test and a duct leakage test for $50 til January 24^th(limit first 6 responders).

Glen Inouye is a solar PV designer and salesman for Advanced Solar Energy.  In addition, he is a FoCuS member, a Calaveras Planning Coalition member, a CHIPS board member, and is a certified energy plans examiner, duct tester/blower door tester who works on building energy performance issues through his company Go Green! Energy Consulting.  

Seed Pod Reports

GENERAL PLAN

Mickey Williamson

Thank you to everyone who took the time to attend one of the General Plan Community Visioning Meetings in December!  It is truly important simply for lots of us to be there whenever the General Plan is being discussed.  When they keep seeing more and more citizens showing up, even if only a few of them say a word, they know that we care and they do pay attention to that.

If you missed the meetings and have information you would like to have considered for the Vision Statement, you can submit written comments care of Lynn O'Connor: loconnor@co.calaveras.ca.us.  Now is the time to do this!

Very soon, the official Draft Baseline Report will be released for public comment.  Everyone is welcome to submit information that adds to that document or corrects inaccuracies.  Again, comments can be sent through Lynn .  Thank you for taking the time to care about this process!  It can be time-consuming, but it will directly affect the future conditions of this county we love.  For more information contact Mickey Williamson, mickeyw@goldrush.com

TRANSPORTATION & RECREATION

Sandy Kasten

The Calaveras Council of Governments has commissioned a study of all the various (primarily social service) organizations in the county that provide some form of transportation.  The goal is to coordinate the efforts of these groups.

One such organization, the Calaveras Volunteer Center , has operated a volunteer transportation 'safety net' for our vulnerable populations since 1991.  When a need arises, and when available and moved to do so, volunteers offer to drive others from their community to doctor appointments, the post office, grocery store, etc.  Providing transportation to those with disabilities, and our senior and low income populations, helps to maintain self confidence and community connections, raises the level of health care access, and enables our frail and elderly to maneuver through life and remain in their homes for as long as is safely possible.

More drivers are needed in the Arnold-Murphys area. Volunteer drivers are fingerprinted for background checks, and provide proof of a valid California Drivers' License and current auto insurance.  All rides are coordinated through the Volunteer Center .  From time to time, clients enjoy donating to the gas and mileage for the driver, however, when that is not possible a ride is still provided, and reimbursement is provided through the Volunteer Center office.

For more information about becoming a volunteer driver, call the Volunteer Center at 209-754-1699.  You may also wish to visit their website at www.calaverasvolunteer.com.

Health & Wellness

Visit www.focusonwellbeing.info for more information on classes, lecture series & practitioners in our area. 

Folk dancing has moved to a private home in Forest Meadows.  The class, held on two Wednesday evenings per month, is now FREE!  For details contact Sandy at arnoldtax@yahoo.com.

Highly Recommended DVD

FoCuS heartily recommends that you view The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. It is available in the Calaveras County Library’s Verna Johnston Nature Library (its home branch is Arnold , but it may be rented from any Calaveras Library branch). This documentary is the story of how Cuba ’s economy and quality of life were affected by the “Peak Oil” effect of the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the resultant end of regular oil supplies from Russian oil fields.

The answers that they found are at the heart of the FoCuS mission and vision – they created local, sustainable, organic agriculture across the entire country, created vibrant communities of mutual care and support, and developed a mass transit system that was affordable and inexpensive to operate.

MOTORIZED ROUTE DESIGNATION FOR NATIONAL FOREST

Forwarded by Glen Inouye

The Forest Service announced that the Stanislaus National Forest is inviting the public to comment on a Forest-wide travel route designation proposal. The meeting is scheduled for January 10^th at the West Point Community Hall from 5-9pm.  The proposed action would allow wheeled motorized vehicle travel on designated routes only, and focuses on changes to the Forest transportation system. The Forest proposal does not include or affect designated wilderness and other non-motorized areas.

The route designation proposal would generally prohibit public motorized travel off of designated Stanislaus NF roads and trails. Direct access to campsites, parking, woodcutting, or gathering forest products would be provided by allowing wheeled motorized vehicle travel up to 100 feet off of designated Forest roads and trails, provided that no resource damage occurs. The proposed action would change the use of 324 miles of National Forest System (NFS) roads, and add approximately 142.5 miles to NFS motorized trails. The NFS roads and trails on the Stanislaus NF include approximately 3,000 miles of roads and 60 miles of motorized trails.

The Forest is preparing an environmental impact statement (EIS) that will analyze the impacts of the proposed action, and seeking public comment by January 18, 2008 as part of initial scoping. Route designation interdisciplinary team members will explain opportunities to participate in the analysis process, and listen to comments and suggestions from interested agencies, individuals and groups.

Proposal maps will be displayed at the public meetings, outlining the diversity of road and trail opportunities for each specific Ranger District. Forest specialists will be on hand to answer questions and assist participants in providing useful, substantive comments for consideration in the analysis.

For more information on the meetings and the proposed action contact Sue Warren, phone: (209) 532-3671 ext. 321; or, e-mail: swarren@fs.fed.us. Detailed maps and tables describing the Forest transportation system and the proposed action can be found on line at http://www.fs.fed.us/r5/stanislaus/projects/ohv

Comments may be submitted to Stanislaus National Forest , Attn:  Motorized Travel, 19777 Greenley Road , Sonora , CA 95370 . Comments may also be submitted by FAX at (209) 533-1890, or by hand-delivery to the address shown above, during normal business hours, Monday-Friday 8:00 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Electronic comments, in acceptable plain text (.txt), rich text (.rtf), or Word (.doc) formats, may be submitted to comments-pacificsouthwest-stanislaus@fs.fed.us with Subject:  Motorized Travel.

SOME WONDERFUL WEBSITES

To view a wonderful and easily understood analysis of a large part of the FoCuS message: http://www.storyofstuff.com deconstructs the linear take-make-waste consumerism model and replaces it with a cyclical model. A delightful animation! Good for all ages. Great potential for the classroom!

Ecological footprint calculator: http://www.earthday.net/footprint

Summary of recently passed Energy Bill

http://energypriorities.com/entries/2007/12/energy_bill_summary2007.php

U.S. EPA rejects Calif. car emissions waiver – Governator Arnold to sue!

http://media.cleantech.com/2228/u-s-epa-rejects-calif-car-emissions-waiver

UN climate change conference in Bali http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/main.jhtml;jsessionid=XBOGFJZYFG4VHQFIQMGCFFWAVCBQUIV0?xml=/earth/exclusions/bali/nosplit/bali-climate-change-conference.xml

New Word: “Locavores” – read on!

December 14, 2007

Op-Ed Contributor

The Deep-Fried Truth

By SARAH MURRAY

THIS Christmas will probably be greener than any holiday in recent years. The Rockefeller Center tree is now illuminated by energy-efficient bulbs. Greeting cards will be sent online. Carbon offsets might be fashionable seasonal gifts. So what should we be doing about Christmas dinner?

Some are bound to suggest that buying ingredients only from local farmers would help reduce the carbon emissions associated with our festive dinners. This “food miles” diet is a neat concept. The trouble is, the distance food is transported is not necessarily an accurate measure of its environmental impact.

For a start, consider the relative efficiency of different forms of haulage. If you look at fuel consumption per pound carried, an oceangoing vessel carrying thousands of containers (a single 20-foot container holds about 48,000 bananas) does relatively well, while a 10-mile trip to the local farm stand in a large car to pick up a few bags of vegetables seems, in emissions terms at least, downright destructive.

And while it might seem logical that the further an item of food journeys, the more carbon emissions it generates, this turns out not to be the case. When you count the energy used by harvesting and milking equipment, farm vehicles, feedstock and chemical fertilizer manufacture, hothouses and processing factories, transportation emerges as just one piece of the carbon dioxide jigsaw puzzle.

Take the potato chip, for instance. When Walkers, a British snack manufacturer, studied the carbon footprint of a packet of its chips, distribution represented just 9 percent of the total. The greatest emissions came in storing and frying the potatoes. Farmers store potatoes in artificially humidified warehouses, which take energy to run, generating emissions. Because of the way they’re stored, the potatoes contain more water and take longer to fry, generating more emissions. And since farmers sell potatoes by weight, they have no incentive to drive off excess water. Changing the way potatoes are warehoused and sold could therefore significantly cut the carbon footprint of chips.

Obviously, calculating the carbon footprint of food is an extraordinarily tricky business. But only when we understand a food’s energy use throughout its life cycle from seed to kitchen can we make intelligent decisions on where to start on cutting the greenhouse gas it generates.

Sometimes this might mean choosing products with far-off origins because the methods used to raise or process them are more environmentally sustainable than the local equivalent. But the local food movement is not only about the environment. Local food purchases, say locavores, also support local farmers. True enough.

But it depends on your perspective as to what constitutes a local farmer. Should we not consider supporting an African farmer for whom supplying Western markets with produce has provided a vital source of income — and who, by the way, often farms in a way that produces far fewer emissions than the typical American farmer.

Perhaps the most powerful driver of the local food movement is its rejection of industrialized production. Yet feeding the world’s 6.6 billion people, more than half of whom now live in cities, is not possible without mass production. Rather than turning away from the big food companies, we should press them to find safer, healthier and more environmentally sustainable methods of supplying our dinner tables.

The “food miles” concept has helped raise awareness of the environmental impact of one aspect of our daily lives: eating. Yet the potato chips example demonstrates that greening our food supply means we have to think more creatively. The danger of going for the easy target of transportation is that we focus too narrowly and miss the bigger picture.

Sarah Murray, a contributing writer for The Financial Times, is the author of “Moveable Feasts: From Ancient Rome to the 21st Century, the Incredible Journeys of the Food We Eat.”

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

Featured Member

Josh Bridges

Josh Bridges, Board member and current Vice President of FoCuS has embarked on a new chapter of his life as a community activist. As of November Josh is the Responsible Forestry Initiative coordinator for Ebbetts Pass Forest Watch, a position that was made possible from a generous grant from the Environment Now Foundation.  For the next 16 months Josh will be working 30 hours a week organizing around the issue of forest management in the Sierra Nevada (specifically in relation to Sierra Pacific Industries and their forest management practices) and working toward solutions to destructive forest practices.  Combining his love for our region and his degree in community studies, Josh is excited to get many of you involved in this issue and ready to take action.

This is a very important topic for the sustainability of our region, in both economic and ecological terms. We all know that our economy in the Sierra Nevada relies on the heavily on beauty of the surrounding forests, and also the resources that the forest provides us.  Building a sustainable world will not be done without engaging in head on confrontations with large private industry (SPI being the largest private landowner in our local counties, but more importantly in all of California , and even scarier the 2nd largest landowner in the nation!)  SPI plans to clear-cut over 1 million acres in the next 30 years and anyone who has seen the images of Calaveras and Tuolumne counties on Google Earth ought to be outraged to know that they plan to take more!!??!!?!?!  This issue is coming to a climax, with rapid climate change, ineffective forest rules, and public ignorance fueling the process of [forest] elimination. 

Josh asks all of you to take a moment, and think about the values that you hold close about this area we call home (or second home).  What would you give to save it?  How much time do you have to give?  What kind of skills do you have to share?  How much time are you going to wait before you actually do something?  How will we get it back if it is lost? 

Solutions!  That is how we are going to STOP this deforestation.  Josh invites you all to find your niche within this issue and bring your skills and interests to the table. 

Please contact him at the EPFW office: 795-8260, home: 795-1093, or email: joshbridges@hotmail.com.                            

Check out the EPFW website: www.epfw.org, and the statewide campaign against SPI: www.savethesierra.org                                                        

OUR PERSONAL TIPPING POINTS #4

John Adams

This is the fourth in a series of nine mini-articles that cover essential success factors for making deep personal habit changes. There are eight factors. In the December Newsletter, I introduced factor #2: “Belief that the change is both possible and desirable.” Making changes in our deeply ingrained habits is not easy. Whenever we are setting out to make a significant change in how we do things, we may benefit from checking over the eight success factors to see which ones we need to invest energy in.

This time, I will introduce factor #3: “Sufficient passionate commitment.” Even if we have accepted the necessity for making a change (#1), and the belief that the change is possible and desirable (#2), we may not succeed if we do not ensure that we are strongly committed to following through with the intended change.

One way to build a stronger commitment to a desired change is to tell others that you are making the change and to set deadlines for your next action steps. Making some fast progress by acting quickly to take easy and successful actions also builds commitments. You might also consider asking a friend to ask you about your progress frequently. Whatever works for you, crank up your commitment to changing to a higher and higher level!

This month’s challenge – reflect on a change you would like to make to enhance your sustainable life style. How would you rate your commitment on a 10 point scale? What can you do right now to move your commitment up a notch or two?