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Тема
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 ЛЕЧЕБНАТА СИЛА НА СЛЪНЦЕТО
[re: Mod vege]
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| Автор |
Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 07.01.16 01:07 |
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В началото на 2014г. от едно ново Списание се свързаха с мен с молба да вземат интервю относно Лечебната сила на Слънцето. С огромна радост се съгласих да дам интервю, но по стечения на обстоятелствата това интервю не видя бял свят. Затова реших да го споделя с вас тук в Интернет, вярвайки че ще помогне на много хора да погледнат на Слънцето от един нов ъгъл.
1. Разкажете с няколко думи за себе си – (Ако искате можете да се представите с име и фамилия, къде живеете или професия, но ако не желаете – просто бихте могли да кажете, какво обичате да правите, какви неща харесвате).
Здравейте приятели, казвам се Деян Раднев, познат още с името Ширинан. Това е името на моята душа в духовния свят. То може да каже много повече за мен, отколкото аз мога да напиша за себе си в тези редове. Имената, които носят нашите души, са уникални и неповторими. В името се съдържа цялото знание за тяхната мисия и предназначение за общото благо и развитие на цялата Вселена. Те са като математическо уравнение с безброй неизвестни, които определят душите като неповторими. На 27 години съм и живея във Варна. Посветил съм живота си на каузи, които целят да помогнат, да сътворим един по-добър свят за живеене. – Свят, изграден от любов, в който хората не мислят никому лошо и са добронамерени едни към друг. На където и да погледнеш да виждаш разбирателство, мир, хармония и баланс. Свят, в който любовта е издигната на пиедестал като основна и най-важна градивна частица на всяко творене. Вярвам, че един ден това ще бъде нашата реалност!
2. Как се запалихте по идеята за „слънчевите хора“? Защо Ви хареса идеята?
В края на 2009г. попаднах на един семинар на индиеца Хира Ратан Манек, който всъщност открехна любопитството ми относно гледането на слънце. От тогава любопитството и жаждата за знание, относно слънчевото хранене, ме тласкаше да вървя по този път. Всъщност, тази практика е толкова стара, колкото е стар света. За древните е било толкова естествено това да се зареждат със слънчева енергия, колкото за нас е пиенето на вода. Няма нищо по естествено от това да захранваш себе си с енергия от слънцето. Та ние самите, на физическо ниво, произлизаме от него. Цялата позната материя е изградена от сгъстена светлина, образувала се от избухването на слънца. Поглеждайки към слънцето, вие сте в състояние на енергийно ниво да си набавите всичко необходимо, от което имате нужда. Самата идея да бъдеш слънчев човек провокира в мен положителни емоции, които ме карат да се чувствам щастлив. Това е и причината да ми харесва идеята за общество от слънчеви хора. За миг си представете един свят, изграден от такива хора. На където и да се обърнеш срещаш усмивка, добро настроение и положителни емоции. Това е и най-голямата ми мечта да заживеем в един свят, изграден от любов, а слънцето може много да помогне за това.
3. Различава ли се „слънчевото хранене“ от онова, което практикуват слънцеядите, които се отказват изцяло от храната? Трябва ли да правим разлика между двете неща?
Както вече споменах, зареждането със слънчева енергия е познато още от древността. В днешно времето, информация за това може да се срещне под различни наименования. Когато се говори за слънчево хранене или слънцеядство се разбира едно и също, казано по различен начин. Има много хора, които започват да гледат слънцето с цел да се откажат да приемат физическа храна. Да това е възможно, но е дълъг процес на траснформация. Когато тялото цял живот е функционирало в режим на хранене с твърда храна, не е толкова лесно да се пренастрои към нов начин на зареждане с енергия, който да задоволи всичките му нужди. Моят съвет към слънцеядите е, да не правят нищо насилствено и да оставят телата им да ги напътстват, защото те винаги ни дават сигнали, но ние не винаги им обръщаме внимание.
4. Доколкото разбирам, хората, които практикуват слънчево хранене, не е нужно да се отказват от нормалната храна, а гледат на слънчевата светлина като положителна енергия, която ги зарежда. Така ли е?
Да точно така. Всъщност повечето хора смятат, че най-голямото предимство, което дава гледането на слънце е това, че може да спреш консумацията на физическа храна. Но истината е, че това е много малка част от всичко останало, с което слънцето ежедневно ни дарява. Аз лично не препоръчвам на хората да се стремят на всяка цена да спрат приема на физическа храна. Да, колкото повече практикувате, толкова повече ще се изменят и хранителните ви навици, по един естествен начин. Самото ви тяло ще ви тласка постепенно да променяте своите хранителни навици като увеличавате приема на жива храна (това са плодове, зеленчуци, ядки, кълнове и др.), за сметка на термично и химично обработената, която е бедна на енергия и полезни вещества, и в същото време богата на токсини. Слънцето ще ви помогне да изградите едни по-добри хранителни навици. Ако желаете да станете вегетарианци, а в същото време сте правили неуспешни опити, знайте че най-лесния начин да го направите е като започнете да гледате слънцето. Така един ден ще се събудите и ще осъзнаете, че месото мириши гадно, предизвиквайки във вас неприятни чувства. Ще го спрете по един естествен начин, не защото си го налагате, а защото тялото ви вече не желае да го консумира. И това не е всичко. Една от основните причини хората да бъдат нещастни е липсата на енергия. Слънцето ще ви помогне това да се промени като захрани енергийните ви центрове и депа с нужното количество енергия, от която се нуждаете, за да бъдете истински щастливи. Ние сме като соларни панели, които не могат да живеят без слънчева светлина. С колкото повече енергия разполагаме в ежедневието си, толкова по-лесно ни е да преодоляваме всички трудности и препятствия, които живота ни поставя. Обичам да казвам, че слънцето е като наркотик - веднъж докоснали се до неговата способност да ви захранва с енергия, вече сте като пристрастени. Пожелавам ви да бъдете като всичко в природата, вечно устремени към слънчевите лъчи.
5. От колко време се занимавате със слънчево хранене и как Ви се отразява това – чувствате се по-добре, по-здрав?
Моята практика започна в началото на 2010г. От тогава насам много неща се промениха в живота ми към по-добро, но не мога да препиша всички заслуги на слънцето, защото то е само част от пътя, който извървях и продължавам да го правя. Определено слънцето ми помага да бъда по-жизнен и здрав, това е безспорен факт, който не мога да отрека. Спомням си един зимен ден на 2013г. когато дълго време на небосвода нямаше слънце, може би около месец. Тогава беше труден период за мен, защото на тогавашната ми работа бях натоварен с много задачи и имах малко време да ги изпълня (както е при повечето хора). Спомням си, че се чувствах много изтощен от липсата на енергия. Чувствах себе си празен отвътре, беше ми трудно да се усмихна. Колегите ме познаваха като вечно усмихнат човек и това, че усмивката бе слязла от лицето ми ги караше да си мислят, че нещо лошо се е случило с мен. Но това не бе така, просто чувствах себе си изтощен. Тогава беше зимен период, когато слънцето позволява целодневно да се гледа. Един щастлив ден слънцето проби облаците и се усмихна. Позволих си в една от почивките да изляза да го погледам. Спомням си как докато го гледах, силата в мен постепенно нарастваше. Сърцето ми започна да изпитва вълнение подобно на чувството, когато си влюбен. Когато се върнах на работното ми място, бях друг човек - усмихнат и щастлив от факта, че усещам себе си енергичен. Това е само едно от многобройните чудеса, на които е способно нашето прекрасно слънце.
6. Какво е усещането, когато гледате слънцето? Мир? Спокойствие? Енергия? Как се чувствате след това?
Докато гледате слънцето може да се чувствате по различни начини, но най-често срещаните са чувство на щастие, спокойствие, омиротвореност и смиреност. Слънцето помага на човек да погледне на живота от високо, помагайки му да бъде по-мъдър. Много често, когато съм имал нужда от съвет, съм се обръщал към слънцето. По време на практика отговорите, които съм търсил идват сами под формата на прозрение, мисли и вдъхновение. Самото слънце носи в себе си безгранична мъдрост, с която ни дарява всеки божи ден, независимо дали хората го оценяват, то осветява пътя ни ден, след ден. Съвета ми към вас е сами да усетите как бихте се чувствали, когато се захраните със слънчева енергия. Защото всеки сам по индивидуален начин преживява това чувство. Не му мислете много, а го направете!
7. Познавате ли други хора, които практикуват слънчево хранене?
Познавам, при това десетки. Повечето от тях започнаха да гледат слънцето вдъхновени от моите успехи. Слънцето ми помогна да променя живота си към по добро, за което съм му благодарен с цялото си сърце и душа. Също така, съм му благодарен, че стана повод да се запозная с други слънчеви хора, които ми станаха добри приятели в живота. Ако си мислите, че слънчевите хора са малко, тогава се лъжите. Просто те не обичат да говорят за това, защото обществото ги приема за странни. Ако се питате защо, си направете следния експеримент. Загледайте се втренчено в изгряващото или залязващото слънце и само наблюдавайте как постепенно ще съберете погледите на повечето минувачи, които преминават около вас. Нека това не ви спира, да бъдете слънчеви хора, защото един ден хората около вас ще ви питат как имате сили да се усмихвате, в този толкова мрачен свят. Тогава вие ще разкажете своята история, както сега аз правя това с вас.
8. Разказвате ли на Ваши приятели за слънчевото хранене? Или се притеснявате, че ще срещнете неразбиране, защото българите – по принцип, сме по-скептични към всичко ново и непознато?
Разговарям само с хора, които усещам, че биха ме разбрали. Не изпитвам потребност да убеждавам, когото и да е в правотата си, когато той самия е избрал да бъде скептик относно практиката гледане на слънцето. Аз уважавам тяхното решение, то е техен избор и аз нямам право да ги съдя за това, независимо, че от моя гледна точка те не знаят от какво се лишават. Всеки върви по своя път и вярвам, че рано или късно всеки ще намери пътя към светлината, разпалвайки искрицата любов вътре в себе си, която ще го направи един по-добър човек.
9. От всичко прочетено на сайта, имам усещането, че слънчевото хранене прилича ли по-скоро на медитация? Греша ли? Вие по какъв начин бихте го описали?
Да може да се каже, че е вид медитация. Дори съм убеден, че ако се направят научни изследвания те ще докажат, че мозъка по време на практика се настройва на честотите на алфа ниво. По време на практика, човек изпада в едно ниво, което сякаш сетивата му се изострят. По този начин, чрез тях той е в състояние да общува със слънцето. Трудно е да се обясни с думи, нужно е да се преживее. Самата дума медитация в съвременния свят много се е комерсиализирала и се е загубил истинския смисъл, който се влага в нея. Бих казал, че самото практикуване е вид вглъбяване, навлизане в себе си, помагайки ви да опознаете по-добре себе си и своята истинска същност. Да осъзнаете, кои сте вие и кои са истински важните неща за вас в живота ви.
10. Вие имате ли опит с подобни практики – дали някога сте практикували йога, интересували ли сте се от източна философия? Или напротив – християнин сте, и слънчевото хранене по никакъв начин не противоречи на това.
Да, Имам опит, но той не е придобит от практикуването на други учения като йога. Моят единствен учител е живота, той ме е научил на всичко, което знам. Няма нищо по-ценно от личния опит. Третата ми книга: "" , съм я посветил именно на това как хората сами да се научат да използват цялото изобилие от енергия, с което сме заобиколени. Слънцето е един от любимите ми източници на енергия, но не е единствен. Всеки източник на енергия притежава свой уникални характеристики, с които изпъква пред останалите. Честно казано, обичам книгите, но не ми остава много време да чета. Целенасочено не се интересувам от източна философия, но знам че тя съдържа в себе си много мъдрост, която е полезна за човечеството. Бих казал, че слънчевото гледане не противоречи на нито една религия и учение, въпреки че религиите обграждат в много рамки своите учения, като ни казват кое е правилно и кое не е. Аз вярвам, че всеки човек има право на личен избор и той е неприкосновен. Ако вие вярвате и усещате със сърцето си, че слънцето може да ви помогне, тогава независимо каква религия изповядвате и какво учение следвате, това не трябва да ви спира. За мен, най-правилното решение, което човек е способен да направи е да последва порива на своето сърце.
11. Кои са местата, където обичайно отивате, за да наблюдавате слънцето? Или мястото няма значение?
Най-много обичам да наблюдавам изгревите от брега на морето, а залезите някъде сред природата. Всъщност съм гледал от всевъзможни места слънцето. Дори от автобусна спирка, заобиколен от много хора, които са ме гледали малко странно, но любовта ми към слънцето е била по-силна от това да обръщам внимание какво си мислят останалите за мен в този миг. Най-доброто място за гледане на слънцето е място, където вие самите се чувствате добре, спокойни и необезпокоявани от странични влияния. Добре е да сте стъпили боси върху майката земя, но това ако не е възможно, може да се свържете с нея на енергийно ниво, като визуализирате как от краката ви се спускат енергийни нишки стигащи чак до нейното ядро. Но от опит ще ви кажа, че когато любовта ви към слънцето е силна няма никакво значение от къде го гледате, за вас е важно просто да го гледате. Когато сте влюбени, не ви интересува къде се намирате с любимия човек, най-важното за вас е да сте заедно, останалото е някак си на заден план. Същото е и със слънцето. Пожелавам на всеки един от вас да усети любовта на слънцето, с която то ни дарява всеки божи ден. Бъдете благословени!
Повече информация относно моя опит и практиката Гледане на Слънцето може да прочетете тук:
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Тема
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Изхвърлете вредните козметични продукти от банята
[re: Mod vege]
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| Автор |
Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 07.01.16 01:22 |
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Обикновено, когато хората чуят домашна козметика, си ислят, че трябва да отделят часове и да се снабдят с какви ли не странни съставки, за да я приготвят. Истината че, че алтернативите на повечето конвенционални козметични продукти са леснопостижими – и като време, и като средства. А това ще ви освободи от куп токсини и вредни съставки.
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Смесете 2 с.л. кокосово масло, 1 с.л. сода за хляб и 20 капки етерично масло (мента, канела или друго). Съхранявайте в стъклено бурканче и използвайте по малко количество на върха на лъжичка върху четката за зъби.
Кокосовото масло в чист вид можете да използвате за сваляне на грим. Намажете лицето си с лъжичка масло, втрийте добре кожата и забършете с кърпа. След това измийте лицето си както обикновено. Други масла със същия ефект са: сусамово масло, зехтин и масло от невен.
Ексфолиант за тяло пригответе с кокосово масло и остатъци от смлените и вече използвани за сутрешното кафе зърна. Обтрийте тялото си, кофеинът изглажда кожата, стимулира производството на колаген и повишава еластичността й. Спомага за премахване на целулит и мъртви клетки.
За ексфолиант за лице можете да използвате единствено сода бикарбонат. Смесете лъжица сода с няколко капки вода, обтрийте лицето си и отмийте. Содата почиства мръсотиите от порите, прави кожата гладка и спомага за отстраняването на петна. След подсушаване нанесете подхранващо масло.
Ексфолиант за устни пригответе със сол или захар. Смесете морска сол или кафява захар с малко зехтин и масажирайте устните и областта около тях. Отмийте с леко топла вода. Нанесете кокосово масло.
Е, убедихте ли се, че за тези няколко продукта са ви необходими 3-4 съставки, повечето от които навярно се намират във всякак кухня.Редактирано от Mod vege на 07.01.16 01:23.
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Тема
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30 от най-въздействащите екологични кампании
[re: Mod vege]
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Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 07.01.16 07:34 |
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[image]http://www.obekti.bg/sites/default/files/styles/article_large/public/gallery/1.jpeg[/image]
Уви, плажовете не се самопочистват. Агенция: Y&R, France
Когато виждаме родителите си ежедневно, не забелязваме как остаряват. Те обаче се променят много заради стреса, който изпитват постоянно. Природата също е наш родител. Нейният живот би трябвало да е много по-дълъг. Ние обаче изстискваме енергията й. Измъчваме природата, за да получим дребни облаги. Забравяме, че именно тя ни е дала живот.
Ние, в Obekti.bg, вярваме, че трябва да обръщаме по-голямо внимание на нашата планета. Затова решихме да ви представим тази колекция от въздействащи екологични кампании. Не забравяйте – когато убивате природата, вие убивате себе си.
[image]http://www.obekti.bg/sites/default/files/styles/article_large/public/gallery/1.jpeg[/image]
Онези, които помагат на природата, помагат и на себе си
Всичко, което изхвърляте, се връща при вас
Помогнете ни в битката с влиянието, което оказват козметичните тестове
Планетата плаща по-висока цена за всяко отрязано дърво
Най-голямото чудо на морето е, че все още е живо
Найлоновите торбички убиват
Представете си, че това е вашето дете
Природата изглежда бездомна
Опустиняването убива по 6000 вида на година
На всеки 60 секунди умира по един вид
Часът на Земята
Колко животни трябва да платят заради твоята козметика?
Животните не са клоуни
Когато оставяте лампите включени, не сте единствените, които плащат
Не си купувайте екзотични сувенири животни
Ако не го вдигнете, те ще го направят
Глобалното затопляне оставя много без дом
Спрете насилието над животни
Пестете хартия, спасете планетата
Изчезването на видовете не може да бъде ремонтирано
Вие виждате куче, а то - дом
Рециклирайте боклуците, а не самата природа...
... преди да е станало твърде късно
Подайте ръка на дивата природа
Използвайте само толкова, отколкото имате нужда
Щеше ли да ви пука повече, ако това беше панда?
Всяка минута изчезват по 15 кв км дъждовна гора
Спрете климатичните промени, преди те да са променили вас самите
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 Omega-3 conversion-3 times better with coconut oil
[re: Mod vege]
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Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 09.01.16 03:01 |
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There is general long-chain omega-3 deficiency amongst omnivores, vegetarians, vegans, and live-fooders alike, which includes approximately ninety-five percent of all pregnant women and about seventy-five percent of the general population. Hempseed, flaxseed, chia seed, and walnuts have short-chain omega-3s, which may convert to long-chain omegas at a rate of one to three percent. This conversion is more than doubled, up to six to ten percent, by adding coconut oil with these omega-3 nuts and seeds. In a recent pilot study by Dr. Gabriel, one tablespoon of chia oil and one tablespoon of coconut oil was the nutritional equivalent in the biological system of 200 IU of DHA and 100 IU of EPA—so we do have some non-supplemental ways to achieve adequate levels of DHA and EPA.
Gabriel Cousens, MD
“Conscious Parenting” http://ow.ly/WKZ8m
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Тема
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 Neoliberalism and its forgotten alternative
[re: Mod vege]
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Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 10.01.16 20:21 |
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DAVID RIDLEY 8 January 2016
About the author
David Ridley is a Lecturer in English and Journalism at Coventry University and is also currently studying for a Ph.D in Sociology at the University of Birmingham. His research investigates the possibility of a pragmatist, grass-roots sociology for a post-neoliberal society.
Related Articles
by WILLIAM DAVIES
The debate between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey throughout the 1920s points to an alternative to the neoliberal world view, submerged in the subsequent war between capitalism and communism.
View of the Acropolis, Rudolf Müller, 1863. Wikimedia Commons. Some rights reserved.
Criticisms of neoliberalism are proliferating, not just within the political and academic left, but within mainstream public opinion as well. Everywhere, people are beginning to seriously doubt whether markets will be able to produce another extended period of sustained growth, or whether they will solve the world's current problems or merely exacerbate them. Liberal economists are pointing to the .
This analysis of rising inequality has been built upon by other critics of neoliberalism who examine the social effects of this inequality, beginning with Pickett and Wilkinson's The Spirit Level: Why Equality is Better for Everyone, a path-breaking and hugely popular book that has led to , with research focusing in on inequality's and even health effects.
Aside from inequality, other critics have focused on how neoliberalism is incapable of solving the problem of climate change. Naomi Klein has, for a long time, pointed to with the deregulation of markets in the 1970s – for many people the beginning point of the rise of neoliberal hegemony in the west. Today there is an intensifying debate over the idea of 'natural capital', which see as an absurd move by neoliberal policy makers to apply the logic of the market to a problem that has, as Klein argues, only made the problem worse in the first place.
In what George Monbiot has referred to as the "", the natural 'commons' is turned into a potential new source of value which can be speculated on by investors. This form of speculation, of course, is what led to the 2008 financial crisis, with risk on sub-prime mortgages hedged into more and more complex 'derivatives', eventually bringing the whole intertwined financial world to its knees .
As Monbiot and others have correctly pointed out, the move to financialise natural resources is not intended to save the world, but to create another source of capital accumulation and thus save an increasingly desperate capitalist system.
The problem is that, despite growing dissatisfaction and criticism of neoliberalism, we don't seem to be able to shift this socio-economic structure in favour of a better one, or even just to a return to a more Keynesian inspired alternative. We seem to be stuck in what Mark Fisher has called a state of '', somehow, despite our apparent knowledge, coming to accept in practice Margaret Thatcher's insistence that 'there is no alternative', or Francis Fukuyama's idea of capitalism as the 'end of history'.
However, this inability to deal with contemporary neoliberalism in practice is not due to the victory of capitalism, but comes from an under-estimation of how far neoliberalism is a long-term, and very successful, political project with a coherent and shared 'world-view'. This world-view has its origins in a crisis of liberalism in the 1930s, as it faced what it saw as the return of authoritarianism, or 'arbitrary rule'.
Neoliberalism was an attempt by influential German economists, such as Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and social theorists, such as Max Weber and Walter Lippmann (in the US) to rescue and reformulate liberalism in theory, a theory that had itself originated historically (in the 17th and 18th centuries) as a critique of the arbitrary power of church and state. According to these theorists, liberalism had become incapable of dealing with what they saw as the contemporary manifestation of arbitrary rule in fascist Germany and Italy and communist Russia.
In an extraordinary book, The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, Philip Mirowski and other scholars describe how early neoliberal theorists and sympathisers came together in 1947 to form an exclusive, secretive and powerful club called the Mont Pèlerin Society. This was the beginning of 'a transnational movement' which accepted right from the beginning that undermining what they saw as the evils of economic planning would take a long time, lots of effort and careful coordination. As Mirowski points out in his conclusion, neoliberalism was never a conspiracy, “intricately structured long-term philosophical and political project”.
Contrary to popular belief and , 'neoliberalism' is not just a dirty word invented by left-wingers resenting the 'victory' of capitalism in the western world, but a term self-consciously chosen by what Mirowski and others refer to as the international 'thought collective' arising out of the Mont Pèlerin Society. This neoliberal thought collective bade their time, connecting and combining “key spheres and institutions – academia, the media, politics and business”, creating a new knowledge apparatus for the dissemination of propaganda, the “neoliberal partisan think-tank”, and eventually finding power through the victories of the political right in the 1970s, Thatcher in Britain and Reagan in the US.
To understand the true origins of neoliberalism, and therefore be able to rescue a convincing alternative, however, we must return to the work of Walter Lippmann. Lippmann was very much influenced by the emerging critique of economic planning that was beginning to appear in the 1920s, especially in the work of Ludwig von Mises, Boris Brutskus and Friedrich Hayek, reaching its high-point just before the outbreak of World War II. But before engaging with this critique explicitly in The Good Society, Lippmann had been mounting a devastating attack on what he considered to be the naivety of liberal democracy in two major works, Public Opinion and The Phantom Public.
In these books, Lippmann argued that at the heart of liberal democratic theory lies a fiction, that of the “sovereign and omnicompetent citizen”, which in turn leads democrats to rely uncritically on a myth of an active and responsible public, which is supposed to guarantee freedom against arbitrary rule. This myth, however, allows agents with special interests, such as the media, controlled by advertising, and the government, controlled by individuals with a desire to maintain power, to pretend that they are acting in the so-called 'public interest'. Realising, with Lippmann, that the public does not spring up 'spontaneously' with free speech, these agents create and manipulate public opinion in order to achieve their own ends.
In Public Opinion, Lippmann still held out hope for social science as a mediating “machinery of knowledge” to provide the truth to both decision makers and the public, a truth which the media is structurally just not able to provide (due to what might be called 'market failure', as people don't want to pay for the apparatus necessary for truth, and the sociological constraints of having to report the news quickly and efficiently). But by the time he wrote The Phantom Public, Lippmann had given way to a full blown pessimism regarding the capabilities of average citizens.
In a tirade of insults that runs through the book, the average member of the public is conceived “in the lowest terms”. they “will not be well informed, continuously interested, non-partisan, creative or executive”, and must be assumed as “inexpert”, “intermittent”, “slow to be aroused”, “quickly diverted” and “interested only when events have been melodramatised as a conflict”. Gone is the faith in science and expertise, with Lippmann's universal scepticism forcing him to “throw the baby out with the bath water”. He writes: “Modern society is not visible to anybody, nor intelligible continuously and as a whole”.
Mirowski and others have shown that Lippmann had a huge influence on the early foundations of neoliberalism. Upon reading The Good Society, enthusiastic future neoliberals organised a conference in Paris in 1938, called the Colloque Walter Lippmann, which served as a precursor and inspiration for the Mont Pèlerin Society. The Good Society anticipated many of the key ideas of the emerging neoliberal world-view: the need to reinvent liberalism, to somehow create the conditions for the market to flourish and to prevent arbitrary rule and authoritarianism, and most importantly, to restrict democratic involvement in decision making and to replace the expectation of positive freedom with a completely negative ideal of the individual as an emancipated entrepreneur and/or consumer.
But what linked the attack in The Good Society on economic planning to Lippmann's earlier work on democracy, and also to the work of key neoliberal Friedrich Hayek, was the epistemological rationalisation of both the market as answer to everything and of the restriction of democracy. Both Lippmann and Hayek worked with the assumption that no individual could know society as a whole, and therefore no individual, or even a group of individuals, can have access to the information required to make economic planning work, or to rule society in the name of the 'collective will'. The only rational way to run society, therefore, was through the 'natural logic' of the market.
However, the whole epistemological critique of planning and the public in Lippmann and Hayek rested on the assumption that knowledge is asocial. For 'democratic realists' and neoliberals alike, reality is something that the individual achieves by accurately representing, or forming a true picture in the mind of the outside world. In this case, of course, the individual has limited access to knowledge, no matter how well educated or intelligent we are. But Lippmann's earlier work, and his public debate with John Dewey throughout the 1920s and 30s, point to an alternative view, submerged in the subsequent war between capitalism and communism.
In Public Opinion, Lippmann argued that we see and understand the world primarily through 'stereotypes', the habits and customs of thought that guide our actions without realising, which he used to discredit 'public opinion'. Dewey agreed with Lippmann that an individual's capacity for knowledge was limited, and that . But Dewey also believed that these habits could be made intelligent through reflection upon the consequences of our actions, and through this process we could develop 'foresight' which would in turn further develop .
Dewey drew a far more positive conclusion than Lippmann: habits can be an incredible source of power and knowledge if we are only willing to work on ourselves.
These stereotypes and habits also give us access to social knowledge, as subconsciously we must have a deep understanding of how society works in order to act. We human beings are so much more intelligent than neoliberals give us credit for; the brain processes every second, most of which we are not aware of. According to Dewey, we have access to this submerged substratum of information, or 'qualitative' thought, through reflection; if we look deeply into our experience, we can make the connections which turn bare facts into truth, or for Dewey, into wisdom.
All our knowledge is social, everything we know is in some way derived from the shared understandings, customs and collective experience which we have come to refer to as 'culture'. This means that everything around us is a source of exploration and knowledge. Life itself is a learning process and the world is a classroom. This is what Dewey meant when he talked about ''.
As Josiah Ober has observed, looking at the success of ancient Athens, of harnessing “dispersed knowledge through the free choice of many people”. What Lippmann and Hayek fail to see, due to their attachment to extreme individualism, is that by tapping into the social nature of knowledge through collaborative reflection, the limitations imposed on us by our individual perspectives can be overcome. And democracy, in the positive Deweyan sense, is the most effective way of putting these perspectives to work.
Ironically, neoliberalism points to the way forward. The history of neoliberalism has taught us two things: firstly that no matter how unpopular an idea is at the time (and to say that neoliberalism was 'leaning against the wind' during the Great Depression of the 1930s is, to use Mirowski et al's words, an understatement), with enough hard work, determination and above all, organisation, today's outlier can become tomorrow's hegemonic world-view. Secondly, the public, like the perfect market, does not just spontaneously appear with negative freedom. We can try to engage people in collaborative social inquiry, try to develop their awareness of the conditions that limit participation, to deepen our collective understanding of social and political processes and therefore increase the public's potential for self-rule.
However, without creating the material and social conditions for participation, these efforts at condescension will be rightly met with scorn. Sociologists and social scientists need to be a part of an active process of giving back social inquiry to the public, emancipating this deeply human and social activity first and foremost from the elitism, specialisation and instrumentalism of academia. We may need to reduce the working week even further to enable people to have time for community activities and public research. We certainly need to prevent education from being turned towards a class-based, narrowly vocational process of training people to be profit-making machines.
We haven't got all the answers yet. But if we have an idea whose time has come, as the neoliberal 'thought-collective' have shown, we can perhaps win the battle in the end, and work it out as we go along.
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Реалистична статия: Eating Right Can Save theWorld
[re: Mod vege]
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Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 13.01.16 07:45 |
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By: Tim Zimmermann Jan 7, 2016
The endless cascade of nutritional information—about localism, vegetarianism, veganism, organic food, the environmental impact of eating meat, poultry, or fish, and more—makes the simple goal of a healthy, sustainable diet seem hopelessly complex. We talked to scientists, chefs, and farmers to get the ultimate rundown on how you should fuel up.
Fueling up should be healthy for you—and the planet. But how do you figure out the most sustainable diet? Photo: Hannah McCaughey (2), Sang An, Hannah McCaughey
"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are.” That’s what the French lawyer Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, who happened to have a deep love of gastronomy, wrote in 1825. A century later, a diet-hawking American nutritionist named Victor Lindlahr rendered it as: “You are what you eat.” I propose revising it further: Tell me what you eat and I will tell you how you impact the planet.
Most of us are aware that our food choices have environmental consequences. (Who hasn’t heard about the methane back draft from cows?) But when it comes to the specifics of why our decisions matter, we’re at a loss, bombarded with confusing choices in the grocery-store aisles about what to buy if we care about planetary health. Are organic fruits and vegetables really worth the higher prices, and are they better for the environment? If I’m a meat eater, should I opt for free-range, grass-fed beef? Is it OK to buy a pineapple flown in from Costa Rica, or should I eat only locally grown apples?
The science of food’s ecological footprint can be overwhelming, yet it’s important to understand it. For starters, in wealthy societies food consumption is estimated to account for 20 to 30 percent of the total footprint of a household. Feeding ourselves dominates our landscapes, using about half the ice-free land on earth. It sends us into the oceans, where we have fished nearly 90 percent of species to the brink or beyond. It affects all the planet’s natural systems, producing more than 30 percent of global greenhouse gases. Farming uses about 70 percent of our water and pollutes rivers with fertilizer and waste that in turn create vast coastal dead zones. The food on your plate touches everything.
“If you look at the heavy-hitter list of global-scale changes that are human induced, how we feed ourselves is invariably near the top,” says , a professor at Dalhousie University’s School for Resource and Environmental Studies (SRES) in Halifax, Nova Scotia, who has been studying the world’s food systems for 15 years. “But the great thing about food is that we have choices, and we have the opportunity to effect change three times a day.”
So what does a sustainable diet actually look like? I’ve thought a lot about my food choices and became a vegan a few years ago, but I still don’t know all the answers. So I set out to find them.
I didn’t go hunting for a crazed notion of perfection. I was simply looking for an attainable way to eat—whether you’re a vegan, a vegetarian, or an omnivore. Here’s what I discovered.
Paleo Is Stupid
One of my first stops is with Tyedmers. On a surprisingly warm evening for September in Halifax, he and dozens of SRES students are gathered on the back deck of a modest clapboard house to celebrate the start of the term. The only strange thing is what I see on many plates: hamburgers.
Admittedly, chicken and veggie burgers are also available. But the fact that an environmental-studies cookout features beef—perhaps the most vilified of all foods in terms of planetary impact—reminds me of the deep tension that exists between the urgency of what we know and the inertia of how we live. We love our meat. And any conversation about food and sustainability has to start with it.
Before I arrived, Tyedmers pointed me to a few landmark studies, the results of which are hard to ignore. Eighty percent of the world’s agricultural lands are allocated to animals, either for pasture or to produce food for them. More than 20 percent of all water consumed is used to grow grain to feed livestock. A estimated that livestock accounted for 15 percent of greenhouse-gas emissions, about the same as the entire global transport sector. Other analyses, which argue that the UN estimate doesn’t adequately account for things like the CO2 produced by the respiration of tens of billions of farm animals, estimate that livestock might be responsible for up to 51 percent of global emissions. “Meat is heat,” environmentalists like to say.
The type of meat you eat matters, too. A , a Washington, D.C., nonprofit, ranked the climate impact of various meats. Lamb was the worst offender: for every one kilogram (or 2.2 pounds) consumed, the EWG estimates that 86.6 pounds of greenhouse gases are produced. Beef was next, at 59.5 pounds of greenhouse gases. Then pork, at about 26.5 pounds. Chicken, at 15.4 pounds, is the most climate-efficient farmed meat.
Meat is equally disproportionate in its thirst for water. Beans and lentils require five gallons of water per gram of protein produced, chicken nine gallons, and beef 29.6.
Reductions in meat consumption can deliver outsize benefits to anyone trying to eat more sustainably. “The question isn’t beef or no beef,” says Tyedmers, who eats it about five times a year. “It’s the right quantities of it. There are grasslands on the planet that can support beef, but we need to focus on portions and frequency.”
The planetary implications of te protein-obsessed paleo diet produces an ire rarely seen in professors of the environment. "That`s an insane way to eat," Tyedmers scoffs. "They should be clubbed."
The average American currently packs away a staggering 185 pounds of meat a year, the equivalent of more than eight ounces a day. Yet the USDA’s 2010 dietary guidelines recommend just 3.7 ounces of meat per day—about a palm-size burger—which comes out to around 84 pounds per year. Eating the recommended amount would mean a 55 percent cut in meat consumption.
Here’s a sense of what the planet might reap in return. A concluded that a diet that is vegetarian five days a week and includes meat just two days a week would reduce greenhouse-gas emissions and water and land use by about 45 percent.
Does eating grass-fed, free-range meat let you off the hook? Not really, because meat takes a toll no matter how it’s raised. Studies actually show that a factory-farm animal emits fewer greenhouse gases than a free-range one, because it lives a shorter life. But Greg Fogel, a senior policy specialist at the , points out that factory farms in the U.S. produce 13 times as much sewage as the entire human population and that environmental impact is about more than greenhouse gases. “The meat you do eat should be grass-fed meat from managed grazing operations,” he says. “Rotational grazing systems recycle manure as fertilizer, improve wildlife habitat, and enhance plant root systems, increasing soil quality, water infiltration and flood control, and carbon sequestration.”
Right about now you might be thinking, Mmmmm, bacon. You might also be thinking, If I don’t eat much meat, how will I get enough protein? Not to worry. “We don’t need nearly as much animal protein in our diets as we currently enjoy,” Tyedmers says.
He’s right. The average American should consume about 0.36 grams of protein per pound of body weight per day, which works out to 70 grams of protein a day for a man. Recommendations for athletes range from 98 grams of protein a day for a weekend warrior to as much as 176 grams for competitive endurance athletes.
These aren’t difficult targets to hit. In the U.S., even vegetarians get about 27 percent more protein than the recommended daily allowance. Omnivores really pack it in, eating 60 percent more protein than a body needs. The extra protein is simply excreted, which Tyedmers derisively refers to as “pissing sustainability away.” The planetary implications of the protein-obsessed paleo diet, in particular, produces an ire rarely seen in professors of the environment—or Canadians.
“That’s an insane way to eat,” Tyedmers scoffs. “They should be clubbed.”
Get Smart About Seafood
Tyedmers and I move on to the topic of seafood. He stands and starts rummaging through a box of old fishing gear he has accumulated over the years while studying fisheries. “When it comes to nitrogen and phosphorous, greenhouse gases, and other global-scale phenomena, absolutely most seafood is much better than most terrestrial animal production,” he says.
Any assessment of seafood sustainability has to involve a careful look at stock management and how much bycatch is involved in the fishing method. Sorting through all the data is hugely complicated. I for this magazine in June 2015, and I recommended using the Monterey Bay Aquarium’s when considering what’s on offer at the fish counter or when dining out. The app uses a clear rating system to rank sustainability and does the hard work for you.
But Seafood Watch’s ratings don’t yet include climate impact, which adds up. Seafood caught by bottom trawling or from pots and traps, for example, burns a lot of diesel as the boats work back and forth over a fishing ground. (Bottom trawlers also tear up the seabed.) So if you’re a fan of trawled Norwegian lobster, sold as scampi, you’re tucking into a hard-shelled climate bomb that exceeds most beef in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions.
As it happens, the seafood with the smallest carbon footprint is frequently the seafood that’s best to eat if you’re looking to reduce pressure on wild fisheries. Mussels, the only animal protein I still eat, have more of a carbon “toeprint,” at one pound of greenhouse gases per pound of mussels. Clams and oysters are similar, and sardines are a climate-friendly superfood. Mackerel, herring, and anchovies are also relatively easy on the climate—if they aren’t caught by a trawler. If you can’t stand the smaller, oilier fishes, U.S.-caught Alaskan pollock, which comes from a reasonably managed fishery, has a modest climate impact, making it the real chicken of the sea.
Aquaculture, or fish farming, is equally method dependent. Aquaculture systems that don’t filter and recirculate the water, like net pens in the ocean, are on average comparable to poultry and pork in terms of greenhouse-gas emissions. Land-based recirculating aquaculture, with its climate-controlled facilities and electricity demands, can be more than twice as greenhouse-gas intensive as aquaculture that doesn’t recirculate. So catfish and tilapia farmed in ponds or net pens are more climate-friendly than the same fish from recirculating farms. How about consumer-favorite farmed salmon? According to EWG’s calculations, farmed salmon is comparable to pork’s somewhat hefty footprint.
Weighing all the nuances can make seafood selection a head-scratching process of trade-offs, even for an environmental-studies professor. “For every pound of Nova Scotia lobster I buy there was a pound of bait used, and that was mostly herring. And that herring was better food for me and would have fed more people,” Tyedmers tells me, noting that some lobster fisheries in the U.S. use three times as much bait. “Then you throw in the diesel fuel. Does that mean I don’t eat lobster? No, but I do it with consciousness and intent, and on a special occasion.”
Good advice. Or stick to mussels.
Vegans Aren't Perfect, Either
Clearly, eating less meat has big environmental payoffs. But what about not eating it at all? I’d never crunched the numbers to find out how much more climate-friendly a plant-based diet really is. The results are telling.
For example, in the Frontiers in Nutrition study, researchers compared the greenhouse-gas, water, and land footprints of a balanced 2,000-calorie vegetarian diet, including eggs and dairy, with those of a balanced 2,000-calorie omnivore diet that included one serving of meat per day: a 5.3-ounce steak. The vegetarian diet reduced greenhouse-gas emissions by 63 percent and required 61 percent less land and 67 percent less water.
Another study, in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, also compared an omnivorous diet to a vegetarian one. It considered a broad array of environmental impacts beyond climate change and land use—including cancer rates, effect on the ozone layer, and waterway pollution—to produce a more complete model. It concluded that the vegetarian diet had just 64 percent of the environmental impact of the omnivore diet.
How much of a bump can you get from giving up eggs and dairy and going vegan? Big enough to take seriously. The 2015 Frontiers in Nutrition study, for example, estimated that a vegan menu has a climate footprint 31 percent smaller than the vegetarian menu and 74 percent smaller than the omnivore menu, and a land footprint 7 percent smaller than the vegetarian and 64 percent less than the omnivore. It also reduces water demand by 9 percent over the vegetarian and 70 percent over the omnivore.
Food author Mark Bittman doesn`t want conscientious eaters to feel it`s all or nothing. "I`m not a vegan," he says. "I don`t think people need to be vegan. We could eat 90 percent less meat and be fine."
Vegetarians and vegans shouldn’t feel too righteous or complacent, however. When we stop eating meat, we turn to other forms of protein like nuts, legumes, and grains, and these have an environmental footprint worth considering, too.
Take the increasingly popular and thirsty almond. It notoriously takes a gallon of water to produce a single almond, and we’re eating seven times as many now as we did in 1972. Drought-plagued California produces 99 percent of American almonds, so bingeing on almonds and almond milk can be a water-intensive approach to fueling your body. (Good alternatives include coconut and hemp milk.) Nuts in general are an especially water-intensive way to get protein, requiring more than six times the water needed to produce equivalent protein from black beans, lentils, and chickpeas.
Still, perspective is important. Almonds require less than half the water per calorie of beef, and livestock feed and grazing in California sucks up more than twice the water used by almond and pistachio growers. Other healthy nonanimal calories, from cereals, legumes, roots, fruits, and vegetables, require about one-fifth the water used to produce the same number of animal calories.
Plant-based protein choices also carry different environmental costs. Wheat accounts for one-fifth the greenhouse-gas emissions of water-thirsty rice per gram of protein. Legumes are even better, at one-quarter the emissions of wheat. Being thoughtful about protein alternatives yields even more environmental payoff. Lentils and chickpeas, for example, are better than soybeans at fixing nitrogen in the soil and help you avoid soy’s GMO issues. And quinoa is packed with protein and grows well in a variety of soils.
Another fast-growing category of plant-based protein is —or meat methadone, as I think of them—often made of pea and soy proteins. I have tried most of them and tend to think that you can cook better food by delving into cuisines like Indian and Thai, which offer delicious recipes based on vegetables. But for anyone who simply can’t get beyond a craving for something meat-like, substitutes that contain no animal products produce about one-third the greenhouse gases of poultry.
While it’s clear that eating a more vegetarian or vegan diet takes pressure off the planet’s resources, former New York Times food columnist Mark Bittman doesn’t want conscientious eaters to feel it’s all or nothing. Bittman has long encouraged people to shift toward a more plant-based diet and is now partnered with a vegan-meal home-delivery service called the .
“I’m not a vegan,” he says. “I don’t think people need to be vegan. I don’t think that many people will become vegan. We could eat 90 percent less meat and be fine.”
You Should Go Organic
I live with a wife who’s a carnivore and two kids who are vegetarian, but the biggest debate in my household is over whether to buy organic or conventional fruits and produce. Based on vague notions that organic is better for the environment and aversions to the idea of herbicide- and pesticide-coated food, I am willing to pay the higher price for organic. My wife, Ilana, isn’t.
To find out if my organic preferences are worth it, I head to southern Pennsylvania, to the rolling 333-acre farmlands of the , , home to the longest-running side-by-side, organic-versus-conventional-farming trial in the U.S., to meet with Kristine Nichols, a soil microbiologist and Rodale’s chief scientist.
Organic farming, Nichols tells me, is really about the health of the soil and the ecosystems producing our food. Nichols wants to show me the difference between soil from conventional agriculture, which uses chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and soil from what Rodale calls regenerative organic agriculture, which uses natural pest management, extensive cover crops, and natural fertilizer like manure.
Nichols is wearing jeans and a T-shirt, and her brown hair is pulled back in a loose ponytail. She ushers me into a nondescript cinderblock shed, where the air is pungent with the smell of dirt. Nichols rummages through a pile of clear three-foot-long tubes containing core samples from Rodale’s farming-systems trial, and she arranges two of them—one organic, the other conventional—next to one another. The tops of the tubes, where the soil comes from the surface, are dark and chocolatey in color. This is the topsoil, Nichols explains, the prime growing layer known to scientists and farmers as the A horizon. She points out that the A horizon in the organic soil extends significantly deeper than in the conventional-soil sample, adding that there is more earthworm and other biologic activity throughout most of the organic-soil tube.
It takes the planet about 1,000 years to build an inch of topsoil. Rodale’s organic methods are changing that equation. “The soil’s got more microbial activity, and we’re getting organic matter deeper down into it,” Nichols says. “We’re building our A horizon. We grew three inches in 35 years.”
This is an important achievement, given that an estimated 90 percent of U.S. cropland loses soil at a rate 13 times what’s sustainable. “Feed the soil, not the plant,” organic farmers like to say. Apparently, it works.
Nichols then takes me out to the farming-systems trial to see late-summer conventional corn next to late-summer organic corn. For the conventional side of the trial, Rodale uses the most up-to-date techniques, which include GMO varieties and the same carefully calculated quantities of fertilizer and herbicide that commercial farmers use. Still, the conventional corn is not looking so good. The leaves are yellowish, and the plant has reddish blotches, signs of phosphorous and nitrogen deficiency. Heavy spring rains washed a lot of the fertilizer away, followed by a hot and dry August.
The organic corn just a few plots away looks greener and more vibrant. Instead of synthetic fertilizer, cover crops have been used to feed the soil with carbon and nutrients and act as a weed-deterring mulch layer. The richer soil, and the more active relationship between the corn plant and the A-horizon microbial world, helped the corn weather the dry summer better. And Rodale’s data shows that its organic corn yields 31 percent more in drought conditions than its conventionally grown corn, which is important in a climate-changing world.
Rodale’s organic growing methods deliver other environmental benefits. They use 45 percent less energy and produce 40 percent fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than the conventional growing systems. Other studies confirm the good news. One concluded that an omnivore diet of organic meat and vegetables has an environmental footprint 41 percent smaller than that of a conventional omnivore diet, and an organic vegetarian or vegan diet gets roughly the same benefit. When you consider that the estimated environmental and health-care costs of pesticide use in the U.S. every year is in the billions, I start to feel pretty good about my side of the organic-versus-conventional marital debate.
Finding an abundance of organic options usually means shopping at a higher-end grocery store or a farmers’ market, or buying a CSA share from a farm that uses regenerative organic practices. Whole Foods is trying to make sustainably farmed products easier to identify by rolling out of Good, Better, and Best for fruits, flowers, and vegetables. Products that meet the Certified Organic standard of the USDA are automatically granted a Good rating but have to meet additional criteria to move up the scale.
“Responsibly Grown is designed to give our shoppers more information about the products they’re buying,” says Liz Burkhart, a spokeswoman at Whole Foods. “This includes areas like water conservation, energy use, and farmworker welfare.”
As for the higher prices of organic, I deal with the premium by buying smaller quantities and cooking moderate portions, which is beneficial to my wallet and to my family’s calorie count.
Buy Local
While what you eat is important, how it gets to your plate matters, too. One morning before dawn, I head into an industrial zone of Capitol Heights, Maryland, where I find Zeke Zechiel overseeing the morning deliveries for Zechiel used to be a nightclub owner, but 21 years ago he and his wife, a chef, decided they wanted to offer their community a better way to buy quality produce. Washington’s Green Grocer delivers subscribers a weekly box of organic (or conventional) fruits and vegetables. I find it a convenient way to buy organic.
Zechiel is 51, wearing cargo shorts, a T-shirt, and Keen sandals. He tries to buy as much as he can from farms within a few hundred miles of him. I see lots of boxes from the Lancaster Farm Fresh Cooperative in Pennsylvania. But I also see Mexican avocados, California brussels sprouts and cauliflower, and organic bananas imported from Central and South America.
“To sustain the company, there are certain things people want to have,” he says. “If we don’t have them, they won’t use us.”
Zechiel worries about the food miles required to give his subscribers the fruits and vegetables they expect. To address that concern, he launched a local-only box, which is now bought by about 20 percent of his 3,500 customers and is his fastest-growing offering. But he ruefully admits that he can’t make it both organic and local year-round, which he calls the holy grail, because it’s hard to get a wide selection of organic fruits from the wet, pest-prone mid-Atlantic region.
“If you want to eat local and organic year-round, you have to stock up and make jams and freeze or can stuff, which is an enormous effort,” he says. “It’s really hard to find someone so committed.”
Even his dedicated local-box customers often add on imported bananas. “People just gotta have their Saturday smoothies,” he says.
Food miles and the greenhouse-gas emissions they cause aren’t easy to understand. So much depends on the efficiency of the transport network. Anything flown in—say, fresh salmon from Alaska or cheese from Europe—arrives with a sizable climate footprint. But bananas or oranges packed tightly onto a container ship or a large truck do not. How do you compare a fully loaded semi driven cross-country from California with a local grower’s pickup truck that may have rolled only 100 miles to a farmers’ market with a few boxes in the bed?
Still, according to one analysis I found, buying local can reduce the impact of vegetable production by 10 to 30 percent. Other researchers have calculated that produce moving through the national transportation network that supplies large grocery stores travels an average of about 1,518 miles and emits five to seventeen times the greenhouse gases of regional and local food distribution. In contrast, locally sourced foods travel an average of just 45 miles.
So it makes sense to buy local whenever possible, another reason to spend time at the nearest farmers’ market. If you’re really dedicated to sustainable eating, that means eating seasonally as well. No more grapes and strawberries from Chile in February. I can only hope Zechiel will start selling local canned peaches to get me through winter.
You're Throwing Away Too Much Food
No matter where you come down on meat, organic, and shopping locally, there are two powerful sustainability strategies you can put to work right now. The first is to eat less. If the average omnivore, who eats around 3,500 calories a day, instead ate a diet closer to his basic nutritional requirement of 2,500 calories, he would likely reduce his environmental footprint by about 30 percent. An active person who works out daily needs closer to 2,800 calories, yielding a roughly 20 percent cut.
The second strategy: waste less. In the U.S., 40 percent of food—worth an estimated $165 billion—is thrown out every year. It’s an environmental and social-policy tragedy. According to the USDA, which in September to try and cut American food waste in half, the average family of four trashes two million calories a year, worth nearly $1,500. As a result, 25 percent of America’s water is used to produce food that is never eaten, and an estimated 28 percent of the planet’s agricultural land is used to grow food that ends up in the garbage. Food is the single largest solid-waste component of America’s landfills—an estimated 80 billion pounds—and emissions from it are equivalent to the greenhouse-gas output of 33 million cars.
In the U.S., 40 percent of food - worth an estimated $165 billion - is thrown out every year. It`S an environment tragedy. The average family of four trashes two million calories a year, worth nearly $1,500.
Wasting resource-intensive meat and seafood is particularly hard on the planet, yet consumers throw away an estimated 40 percent of the fresh and frozen fish they buy, 31 percent of the turkey, 25 percent of the pork, 16 percent of the beef, and 12 percent of the chicken. Peter Tyedmers says that consumer demand for fresh seafood leads to a lot of waste at the fish counter. There, if it isn’t sold by a certain date, it gets tossed.
“I have thrown out halibut steaks. They get lost in the fridge,” he says ruefully. “If you buy that halibut steak frozen, it just stays in the freezer.”
Restaurants and grocery stores are doing more to donate excess stock to food banks, and national food-service operators such as Aramark are discovering that innovations—like removing trays from cafeterias, which make it too easy to load up—can lead to dramatic reductions in waste. But how we personally shop and handle food at home is by far the biggest source of food waste, accounting for an estimated 47 percent. Restaurants are the next biggest, at 37 percent.
To combat this, I shop more often, buying for a day or two at a time instead of a week, so that less food gets lost in a packed refrigerator. I often ignore expiration dates, and I derive distinct pleasure from cooking up hashes, soups, and curries using all the leftovers I find on the edge of going bad. I have become the food-waste equivalent of the person who goes around turning everyone’s lights off. It can be annoying, but it works.
The Future Tastes Good
Blue Hill chef Dan Barber in New York. Photo: Katherine Wolkoff/Trunk Archive
I know all this conjures an image of an enviro-scolding hippie living on lentils. But fear not: eating more sustainably can be delicious.
For reassurance, I check in with Dan Barber, a dynamo chef and a seriously deep food thinker. First at his restaurant in New York City, and then at , which he opened near Tarrytown, New York, in 2004, Barber has been on a quest to create a more sustainable menu and prove that it can be extraordinary. That led him to a profound appreciation for the natural productivity possible at his family’s 138-acre New England farm, called Blue Hill, using regenerative organic methods. Today the farm rotates and produces a variety of crops and vegetables and uses livestock like cows, chickens, and pigs to spread and work nutrients into the soil.
Barber sees eating and food production as a negotiation with the landscape. What can it reasonably provide? How does a chef make the best use of everything it offers? How can the foods we eat sustain and build its fertility? When he looked at his menus and his cooking through that lens, he realized that he needed to reinvent the architecture of the American plate. Instead of a massive chunk of animal protein at the center flanked by a few vegetables, Barber envisioned the reverse. Vegetables and legumes or grains would be the headliners at the center, and animal protein would be the judicious accompaniment. Imagine a carrot steak, Barber proposed, with a side of braised second cuts of beef. He calls this the “third plate,” which became the title of his excellent book about his journey. Diners and restaurant reviewers have been ecstatic.
“It’s not to say you can’t enjoy a steak, but we really need to think hard about meat,” Barber says. “You can take very small amounts of meat and get great satisfactory umami”—or savory flavor.
Sustainability is little like religion: we`re all striving for an ideal, but it`s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve perfection. We sin a little here. We sin a little there. But a few simple adjustments help a lot.
It’s a hopeful vision, and the rest of the world is trying to catch up. Near the end of my visit in Halifax, Tyedmers and I eat lunch at , an organic restaurant in the North End. I have an eggplant, tomato, and green onion curry wrap; Tyedmers orders the chili con carne. “I’m a sucker for good chili,” he sighs. I ask Tyedmers why, given how much he knows about the environmental impacts of meat, he continues to eat it.
“If every male on the planet ate the way I do, we would have less of a problem, but we would still have a problem,” he says. He pauses, then says that it doesn’t make sense to focus all your sustainability efforts on just one facet of life, like eating. What matters is the overall footprint of the choices you make. He tells me that when he got married, he was apprehensive about having children, because population is such an engine of environmental crisis. His wife wanted the experience of raising children. In the end, they settled on one child.
It’s a good point. Ilana and I have two children, and whatever choices I make with regard to the sustainability of my diet or lifestyle will likely pale next to that second child’s life of consumption. Tyedmers made a hard choice when it came to reproduction but still eats meat. I made a hard choice to stop eating meat but had two children. I can never regret having a beautiful second child in my life, but I have to confess that Tyedmers’s choices are probably of greater benefit to the planet than mine. I also consider the irony that I flew to Halifax to report a story on sustainability, the equivalent of eating roughly 40 pounds of steak.
Sustainability, it seems, is a little like religion: we’re all striving for an ideal, but it’s difficult, if not impossible, to achieve perfection. We sin a little here. We sin a little there. The omnivore who hunts for an elk each fall for his meat—or maybe even eats roadkill—and raises his own chickens for eggs, grows his own organic vegetables and fruit, and cans food for the winter is eating pretty damn sustainably. So is the backyard-gardening vegan. But that’s a degree of virtue many of us will never achieve.
Still, a few simple adjustments help a lot. Stop worrying so much about not getting enough protein, and remember that plant-based protein is a lot easier on the planet than animal protein. Buy organic food whenever you can. Source your food as locally as possible, and eat seasonally to avoid racking up major food miles. Eat less and waste less. Be open-minded and creative about new cuisines. Relax. Have fun. Sustainable eating isn’t synonymous with masochism.
“We think of everything related to the environment as something we are doing wrong or have to give up,” Dan Barber says. “But people can do something about it in a way that is pleasurable. We can actualize change through hedonism.”
Who can’t rally behind that?
Correspondent Tim Zimmermann wrote about in June 2015.
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Тема
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 Жестокост над животните-огледало на действителност
[re: Mod vege]
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| Автор |
Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 13.01.16 21:46 |
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Редактирано от Mod vege на 13.01.16 21:47.
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Тема
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 д-р ОЛЕГ ТОРСУНОВ в България - семинар "Развитие..
[re: Mod vege]
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Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 20.01.16 01:27 |
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- семинар "Развитие на личността"
clock
February 20 - February 22
Feb 20 at 6 PM to Feb 22 at 7 PM in UTC+02
Зала 8 НДК
Сдружение за благотворителност "Диамантено дърво" представя:
За първи път в България д-р ОЛЕГ ТОРСУНОВ с тридневен семинар на тема „РАЗВИТИЕ НА ЛИЧНОСТТА“.
Пакетната цена за семинара за трите дни е 75 лв!
(по-долу следва подробна информация за видовете билети и цени)
ТЕМИТЕ НА СЕМИНАРА
20.02.2016
* Ум, интелигентност и чувства като атрибути на вътрешния свят на човека
* Цели в живота на човека и неговото предназначение
* Характер на човека, неговият егоизъм и съдба
21.02.2016
* Задължения на човека в съответствие с вътрешната му природа
* Как да регламентираме своя живот
* Избавяне от недостатъците на характера
22.02.2016
* Развитие на интелигентността, триумф над вътрешните врагове на човека
* Позитивни настройки и медитации
* Практики за преодоляване на трудностите на съдбата
Семинарът ще бъде проведен в три поредни дни:
- 20.02.2016г. от 18:00ч.
- 21.02.2016г. от 18:00ч.
- 22.02.2016г. от 19:00ч.
КЪДЕ – гр. София, НДК (Зала 8)
Осигурен е симултантен (синхронен) превод за всички желаещи
БИЛЕТИ:
Цена до 10.02.2016г.
За една лекция - 35 лв
За две лекции - 55 лв
За трите лекции * - 75 лв
Цена от 11.02. до 19.02.2016г.
Съответно - 45 лв, 65 лв, 85* лв
Цена от 20.02. до 22.02.2016г.
Съответно - 50 лв, 70 лв и 90* лв
* Всеки участник, закупил комбиниран билет за трите лекции, ще получи подарък - книга на д-р Олег Торсунов.
Билети:
- В мрежата на Eventim.bg
- Билетен център на НДК
- В офиса на Сдружение „Диамантено дърво“
По време на лекциите ще бъдат предоставени безплатни здравни консултации по методиките за лечение на д-р Торсунов на тридесет участника в семинара, избрани на случаен принцип.
За повече информация:
www.facebook.com/torsunov.bg
info@blago.bg
0897 933 883
ПОВЕЧЕ ЗА ЛЕКТОРА И СЕМИНАРА:
Д-р ОЛЕГ ТОРСУНОВ е сред водещите специалисти по Аюрведа в Западния свят. Създадената от него оригинална методика за лечение комбинира грижата за духа, ума и тялото. Харизматичен лектор и автор на множество книги, д-р Торсунов представя познанието на древните Веди по разбираем и лесно приложим начин. Темите, които засяга са: психология на семейните отношения, правилно възпитание на децата, ведическа култура и медицина, астрология, личностното развитие и промяна на съдбата.
СЕМИНАРЪТ „Развитие на личността“, който ще бъде представен в България, е насочен към широката аудитория от желаещите да работят върху себе си, мислещи и развиващи се личности. Предназначен е за хората, които не са съгласни със своята жизнена ситуация в момента и искат да я променят в личен, в професионален и в здравословен план. Защото лечението на тялото е непълно без лечение на духа, емоциите и ума.
Участниците в семинара ще се насладят на добра, приятелска атмосфера, ще имат въможност да зададат въпросите, които ги вълнуват.
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Тема
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 EPA Finally Admitted: Popular Pesticide Kills Bees
[re: Mod vege]
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Mod vege (старо куче) |
| Публикувано | 23.01.16 02:13 |
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—By Tom Philpott
Bees are dying in record numbers—and now the government admits that an extremely common pesticide is at least partially to blame.
For , the Environmental Protection Agency has been under pressure from environmentalists and beekeepers to reconsider its approval of a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, based on a suggesting they harm bees and other pollinators at tiny doses. In a released Wednesday, the EPA basically conceded the case.
The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year.
Marketed by European chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer, both in the United States and globally. In 2009, the agency commenced a long, slow process of reassessing them—not as a class, but rather one by one (there are ). Meanwhile, tens of millions of acres of farmland are treated with neonics each year, and the health of US honeybee hives continues to be dismal.
The EPA's long-awaited assessment focused on how one of the most prominent neonics—Bayer's imidacloprid—affects bees. The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year, an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.
Reviewing dozens of studies from independent and industry-funded researchers, the EPA's risk-assessment team established that when bees encounter imidacloprid at levels above 25 parts per billion—a common level for neonics in farm fields—they suffer harm. "These effects include decreases in pollinators as well as less honey produced," the EPA's .
The crops most likely to expose honeybees to harmful levels of imidacloprid are cotton and citrus, while "corn and leafy vegetables either do not produce nectar or have residues below the EPA identified level." Note in the below that a substantial amount of imidacloprid goes into the US cotton crop.
Imidacloprid use has surged in recent years. Uh-oh.
Meanwhile, the fact that the EPA says imidacloprid-treated corn likely doesn't harm bees sounds comforting, but as the same shows, corn gets little or no imidacloprid. (It gets , clothianidin, whose EPA risk assessment hasn't .)
Soybeans could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable."
The biggest imidacloprid-treated crop of all is soybeans, and soy remains an information black hole. The EPA assessment notes that soybeans are "attractive to bees via pollen and nectar," meaning they could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable," both from Bayer and from independent researchers. Oops. Mind you, imidacloprid has been registered for use by the EPA since the 1990s.
The agency still has to consider public comments on the bee assessment it just released, and it also has to complete a risk assessment of imidacloprid's effect on other species. In addition to their impact on bees, neonic pesticides may also harm , , and , recent studies suggest. Then there are the assessments of the other four neonic products that need to be done. Meanwhile, a coalition of beekeepers and environmental groups filed a in federal court Wednesday pointing out that the agency has never properly assessed neonics in their most widely used form: as seed coatings, which are then taken up by crops.
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