How much water does it take to make dinner?

Here are two excellent articles with absolutely outstanding graphics on the amount of water it takes to produce our food. 

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[Wired] [LA Times]

Tar Sands Incompatible with limiting climate change

More than 100 scientists from the U.S. and Canada called for a moratorium on the development of tar sands Wednesday, saying the carbon-intensive form of energy was "incompatible" with limiting climate change.

The scientists published 10 reasons why mining of tar sands — an energy source that's found largely in Alberta, Canada's Athabasca region and whose mining has led to significant deforestation and forest degradation in the province — needs to be halted. 

"Independent studies have demonstrated that mining and processing Albertan oil sands releases carcinogenic and toxic pollutants (e.g., heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic compounds) to the atmosphere from smoke stacks and evaporation, and to groundwater from leaching of tailings ponds," they wrote. 

[Climate Progress]

Remember Kalamazoo - 5 years later

Five years ago, a pipeline carrying crude oil from Canadian tar sands ruptured in Michigan, spilling over 1 million gallons into the Kalamazoo River in what would become the largest inland oil spill in U.S. history.

"The Kalamazoo River still isn't clean," Anthony Swift, director of NRDC's Canada Project, told OnEarth. "The EPA reached a point where additional cleanup might do more harm than good. Much of the river is still contaminated."

To Chris Wahmhoff, who grew up a mere 100 yards from the Kalamazoo River, the fifth anniversary... [is] just another step in the long fight to hold Enbridge accountable for the damage they caused. Wahmhoff remembers playing in the river nearly every day as a child — an avid kayaker, the river was an integral part of his life until the 2010 spill, when residents were told to stay away.

In 2012, Wahmhoff returned to the river alongside a former Enbridge employee, who told him about how the company had buried oil on the riverbanks. But he was shocked by what he saw when he finally returned to the river.

"I went to a river that I had been to every day of my life, and it was unrecognizable," he said. "It looked like a grave. There was no vegetation."

While at the river, Wahmhoff stepped into sand that should have been about 10 inches deep. Instead, he was swallowed by a quicksand-like substance that engulfed him to his waist. According to Wahmhoff, when his friends managed to pull him out of the sand, his leg was covered in black oil. Wahmhoff says that he threw up for three days straight, and developed a rash a month later. Now, in 2015, he has been diagnosed with a rare disease that he says is a product of his exposure to the bitumen from the oil spill.

"All of us on the ground, we definitely embrace the idea that we've been the canary in the coal mine," Wahmhoff said. "We want everyone to understand not just that there was an oil spill and not just that those chemicals make people sick, but that [oil companies] don't do a good job of protecting the community or informing the community about what dangers they face."

When the pipeline — an aging structure owned by Canadian oil company Enbridge Inc. — first ruptured, it was the middle of the night on July 25, 2010. It took more than 17 hours for Enbridge to cut off the pipeline's flow, a delayed response compounded by the company's dismissal of alarms as a malfunction and attempts to fix the problem by pumping more oil into the pipeline. By the time the pipeline had been shut off, more than 1 million gallons of tar sands crude oil had spilled into the Kalamazoo River, impacting nearly 40 miles of the river and 4,435 acres of shoreline.

The spill was especially devastating because of the nature of tar sands crude — a substance that OnEarth's Brian Palmer notes "looks more like dirt than conventional crude." To get tar sands crude to travel through pipelines, oil companies mix the substance with natural gas liquids to create something called diluted bitumen, or dilbit. When the tar sands crude leaked into the river, the natural gas liquids vaporized and drifted into nearby neighborhoods, forcing the evacuation of hundreds of residents who lived in the area. The tar sands bitumen, however, drifted to the bottom of the river. That made cleanup especially difficult, because most oil spill cleanup technology is meant to deal with surface-level oil, through skimmers and vacuums made to remove oil from the water's surface.

That technology was rendered essentially useless in the case of Kalamazoo, which was the first major pipeline disaster to involved diluted bitumen. Enbridge was forced to dredge the river to clean it, a costly and time consuming solution that proved not entirely effective. Even five years after the spill, environmentalists claim that tar sand bitumen remains in parts of the river.

[Climate Progress]

5 things you can do today

"The real war against climate is being fought on our plates, multiple times a day with every food choice we make," says Nil Zacharias, co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of One Green Planet, "one of the biggest challenges facing our planet, and our species is that we are knowingly eating ourselves into extinction, and doing very little about it."

As the leading organization at the forefront of the conscious consumerism movement, it is One Green Planet's view that our food choices have the power to heal our broken food system, give species a fighting chance for survival, and pave the way for a truly sustainable future.

We can all make a difference right now to help the planet step back from the point of no return by eating less of meat and dairy products and putting more plant-based foods on our plates. By choosing to eat more plant-based foods you can drastically cut your carbon footprint, save precious water supplies and help ensure that vital crop resources are fed to people, rather than livestock. With the wealth of plant-based options available, it has never been easier to eat with the planet in mind.

[One Green Planet]

The Beloved in Nature

My sister helped to create this incredibly beautiful and uplifting short video. I hope you are as moved by it as I was and encourage your friends and family members to watch it as well... 

University of San Francisco's President Father Paul Fitzgerald speaks about climate change, ending with a call to action: simplify and consume less. Incorporates many of the concepts in Pope Francis' Encyclical on climate change.

The video was produced by Green Impact.