Sustainable Living and You: November APLS Carnival

Greening Families is pleased to be hosting November’s APLS Blog Carnival. I’ve appreciated the conversations on sustainability and green living that the APLS Blog Carnival has sparked so am glad for the opportunity to directly support their continuation. If you are interested in serving as a host of a future carnival, simply contact Robbie from Going Green Mama at goinggreenmama[at]gmail[dot]com. December’s carnival will be hosted by Erin at The Conscious Shopper. Be sure to visit her site in a month’s time to read where the discussion goes next.

The topic for November’s APLS Blog Carnival was how people have been affected by their efforts to live a more sustainable life. The questions posed included:

What have your efforts to live a more sustainable life taught you about yourself? Have you been able to change a behavior you initially thought you could not? What has surprised you about your own capacity in your efforts to live more sustainably?

Here is what folks had to say. Read more

The Wall Street Journal Talks Canning – and They Don’t Mean CEOs

This morning I was very pleasantly surprised to see an article about canning food in the Wall Street Journal. It is really exciting to see that people taking control of their food sources is becoming a strong movement! (And nice to read about another kind of canning – ba dump bump!)

The article links to Canning Across America, which has some yummy looking recipes along with links to resources and events. The National Center for Home Food Preservation is a good source of information on canning as well as pickling, freezing, fermenting and other preservation methods. If you want to take advantage of the season to load up on locally grown food, PickYourOwn.org can help you find both sources of food in your area and preservation methods to match what you harvest.

Happy eating!

Benefits of Going Green – 7 and Counting

As we have been preparing for the new school year, we’ve been looking backwards as well as forward and reviewing our progress over the year to date. We have our green goals and have been tracking our progress on them but it struck me that the benefits of going green have gone far beyond meeting those goals. Here are the main benefits of going green we have experienced: Read more

Slow Food USA’s Time for Lunch on September 7

How can children learn and grow to their full potential when the food pictured here is what we feed them in schools? They simply can’t.

This fall, the Child Nutrition Act is up for reauthorization. This Act provides the governance for several child nutrition programs, including the National School Lunch Program. The National School Lunch Program supplies 30 million school children with lunch every school day. For many of these children, the meals they receive at school provide the majority of their nutrition during the school year. Read more

Missing Bees? More Reasons Why and How to Help

This spring and summer have been remarkable for several reasons – the Texas heat has been unrelenting, our drought has become significantly worse, and we have been missing bees. We are used to hearing their buzzing, especially in the front on our native plants, but this year we have seen only a handful.

I was thus excited to learn that a team of researchers led by Dr. May Berenbaum at the University of Illinois have untangled more of the mystery around colony collapse disorder. (I’m not an entomologist but knew of Dr. Berenbaum from her creation of the Insect Fear Film Festival and the character named after her on the X-Files.)

Beginning in 2006, colony collapse disorder and the resulting missing bees have been a concern to people all over the world. Bee keepers in North America and Europe lost 30-90 percent of their bee colonies and many of the bees were simply never found. Many workers were flying out of their hives and never returning, very un-beelike behavior. Many more were found dead within their hives, passing away seemingly overnight. The most chilling part was no one knew why.

As reported in Time, scientists now have some answers. According to Time:

A new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) shows that the causes of CCD may be more varied than scientists expect. The bees may be dying not from a single toxin or disease but rather from an assault directed by a collection of pathogens. A research team led by entomologist May Berenbaum at the University of Illinois compared the whole genome of honeybees that came from hives that had suffered from CCD with hives that were healthy. The sick bees exhibited genetic damage that could account for the die-off, and that damage indicated that they might be afflicted with multiple viruses simultaneously. This could weaken them enough to trigger CCD. “It’s like a perfect storm,” says Berenbaum.

The PNAS team’s work was possible only because the honeybee’s genome is one of the few animal genomes that scientists have decoded in full. The researchers looked at the genes that were switched on in the guts of sick and healthy bees — the gut being both the place pesticides are detoxified and the main region for immune defense. The technique they used is what’s known as a whole-genome microarray, and it’s ideal for this kind of sweeping analysis. “It’s a really powerful tool that lets us look at all 10,000 honeybee genes at the same time,” says Berenbaum. “The causative agents [for CCD] might just leap out.”

In the guts of CCD-afflicted bees, the microarray analysis showed unusual fragments of ribosomal RNA. Ribosomes are essentially the protein factories inside cells — they’re vital to the health of the cell itself and the larger organism. Berenbaum believes that the presence of those genetic fragments inside the CCD-afflicted bees indicates that they may be under attack by a number of insect viruses — including deformed wing virus and Israeli acute paralysis virus — that damage the ribosomes. “It was the one factor that remained consistently associated with the CCD bees we tested, no matter where they came from or how severe the disorder was,” says Berenbaum. “It doesn’t have to be a specific virus, just an overload.” Once the bees’ systems get burdened this way, they are less capable of fighting off any other threat, from pesticides to other environmental causes.

If you are a go-to-the source person, the study’s abstract is available here.

If you want to help the honeybees, here are some ways to do so:

(1) Stop using pesticides. Pesticides can’t discriminate between insects – they kill all of them. Save yourself some money, save your family and neighbors from exposure to toxic chemicals, and give the bees a fighting chance by ceasing to use pesticides.

(2) Plant pollinator plants. The Pollinator Partnership has created a helpful tool to find pollinator plants for your area. Check out their Ecoregional Planting Guides to find plants for your zip code. Our previous articles on creating a certified wildlife habitat and the fabulous book Bringing Nature Home have more ideas and resources for making your yard eco-friendly.

(3) Ask your friends and neighbors to join you. Today’s Seattle Times included a great story about Sarah Bergmann, a Seattle resident who, with help from neighbors, converted a parking strip in her neighborhood into a pollinator zone.

Once a desert of grass with a few maples, the 108-foot-long, 12-foot-wide strip today blooms with plants selected to attract pollinators. It’s buzzing with life that has spilled over to plantings all around the neighborhood. An orange trumpet vine festooning a fence out back is mobbed with bees too busy to bother anyone, some stacked two to a flower.

She hopes to eventually extend the pathway to a mile, in all. “It’s so basic,” Bergmann said. “I consider it local ecosystem support.”

And I bet, in this time of declining property values, that this planting has made the neighborhood much more attractive to potential buyers.

(4) Join ongoing research efforts. Scientific research is beginning to utilize the power of the people. If you live in Illinois, check out the Bee Spotter, a group of citizen-scientists who collect information on bees in their area. The Bee Spotters monitor local bee populations via photograph to preserve the bees. They hope to expand to other states in the near future. If you live outside of Illinois, you can still start right away through the Xerces Society’s Bumblebee Project. This research project is also using citizen sightings to track three species of bumble bees that used to be common. The bees tracked by the project are the rusty patched bumble bee (Bombus affinis), the western bumble bee (Bombus occidentalis), and the yellowbanded bumble bee (Bombus terricola). Identification guides are available on their website. This would be really fun to do as a family!

While the fragility of the web of life is becoming more clear, studies like this one are helping us see what we can do to help other species survive and thrive. To learn more about the impact that missing bees could have on humans, check out the video below.

Are you missing bees in your area? Have you changed the way you garden or plant recently? Or do you have other ideas for helping bees? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Green Grants for Schools

As kids begin to head back to school, lots of parents are thinking about eco-friendly school supplies, PVC-free backbacks, and stretching a few more months from existing clothes. There is also much that can be done to green your child’s school environment once the fervor of back-to-school has ended. Here are two recently posted grants for schools that could help your child’s school become more green. Read more

Help Support the Sustainable Food Center

On Tuesday, August 25, Edible Austin, Alamo Drafthouse, and the Front Porch Project are hosting a Film Feast at Boggy Creek Farm to support the Sustainable Food Center.

Starting at 7 PM, the event will include cocktails and conversation; a locally-sourced picnic from Alamo chefs John Bullington and Trish Eichelberger; and a screening of the movie FRESH, which “celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system.”

Tickets, which include drinks, dinner, and the movie, are $35. They may be purchased in advance only online at Alamo Drafthouse. Guests are encouraged to bring lawn chairs or blankets to spread out on the lawn as seating is limited.

The Sustainable Food Center is an Austin-based nonprofit which works to “cultivate a healthy community by strengthening the local food system and improving access to nutritious, affordable food. SFC envisions a food secure community where all children and adults grow, share and prepare healthy, local food.”

Through their Grow Local, Farm Direct, and The Happy Kitchen/La Cocina Alegre™ projects, SFC is improving the lives of children and families throughout the Austin area.

Nourish your body, your brain, and your community by attending the Film Feast on August 25.

This article was syndicated on the AustinEcoNetwork. If you live in the Austin area, or want to learn about eco-happenings in Austin, be sure to visit the site.

Aspartame as Ant Poison

Those of you who have lived in areas with fire ants will understand my animosity towards these insects. I’m thrilled to find spiders, wasps, bees, and other bugs in our yard but fire ants are not welcome. Fire ants are aptly named – the bites burn and sting for a week or more – and they are very aggressive. This year our yard was home to more than usual, which meant we ended up with more bites than usual. With two small children and a dog, we couldn’t just let them stay. Read more