Bill Nye the Science Guy is coming back to TV

While I no longer own a television, a deplorable percentage of my childhood was spent in front of the television despite my mother's best efforts. One show which kept me engrossed well into my high school years was Bill Nye the Science Guy, recently profiled here. He taught us about simple science by doing fun, wacky experiments in a bow tie and a lab boat.

Well, he's back. Discovery Communications has brought a new network on the air, Planet Green, which touts itself as "the first and only 24-hour eco-lifestyle television network with a robust online presence and community." According to Treehugger.com (great site!), Bill Nye will host "Stuff Happens," a new show premiering in early September that examines the origins of our consumer products.

Bill Nye is going to examine, in his bow tie and lab coat, the chemical and scientific elements of our household consumer items. I think we can imagine what he might find...

According to the network's site, the premiere show will be on "Breakfast," however, according to Treehugger.com, the sister site of the Planet Green network (I think it's there "robust online presence"), the premiere episode is about the bathroom. [despite the report on the network's website, the network's schedule agrees with Treehugger.com editor's note: A preview airs tonight, August 26, at 9pm Eastern on Planet Green, which focuses on breakfast.]

While I think that the nature of television continues the thoughtless consumer culture that has evolved in our society, the fact that Discovery Communications feels it is in their economic interest to create a television network dedicated to programming about sustainability and ecologically sensitive development shows the consumer demand is rising. Ultimately, the consumer is responsible in a market economy to accept or reject products--for better or worse, corporations can only be expected to produce what we demand. As the demand for ecological sustainability increases, the corporate structure will need to refine and reform accordingly in order to survive. Take, for example, T. Boone Pickens, who is investing the two-thirds of his $3 billion dollar energy empire in wind (which he clearly sits to profit from handsomely, since he owns the largest wind farm in America--an oilman can change to a "windman," but a profiteer is a profiteer).

Traditionally, business has been about growth and consumption. This has ultimately led to a depletion of resources and environmental abuse that is amounting in worldwide catastrophic effect. Yet, even by assuring the good ratings of this network and this program, we can make an inevitable impact.

I can't believe I'm writing this, but, watch your TV and turn your channel to Planet Green!
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Winona LaDuke talks about Thunder Beings

One of my favorite people, 1996 and 2000 Green Party vice-presidential candidate and activist Winona LaDuke, has an interview in Yes! Magazine. Ms. LaDuke has made her name with an amazingly impressive and positive resume as an activist for indigenous rights, and environmental and anti-nuclear movements as well. Born to a Jewish mother and Ojibwe father in LA, Ms. LaDuke now lives on the White Earth reservation in Minnesota, and is the executive director of Honor the Earth and White Earth Land Recovery Project (YOU REALLY NEED TO CLICK HERE!!!), in the interview Winona LaDuke spins a tale of traditional belief, traditional food and how to live and not destroy.

Ojibwe is a language of 8,000 verbs. The word for “work” is a strange construct for us. It doesn’t mean we aren’t a hard-working people, but in our language, the word is anokii, which means that whether you are fishing or weaving a basket, what you are doing is living—which is not the same thing as being paid a wage to do something.
After the harvest, we have a big feast, and we dance and tell stories. The anthropologists watched us, and they didn’t like that. They said we would never become civilized because we enjoyed our harvest too much. We did too much dancing, too much singing.
When you no longer enjoy your relationship to your food, to your plant relatives, to the harvest, to the dancing and singing—when you end up with a harvest that has no relationships or joy, I think that must be the mark of civilization and industrialized agriculture.

Ultimately, Winona LaDuke sets out a very positive look at possibilities. She tells it like it is, and unfortunately, "it" is a depressing tale of how governments, corporations, and pure consumer ignorance has led to the absolute depletion of indigenous food practices and indigenous food knowledge--worldwide. But LaDuke shows us this positive example from her own homestead,

We are growing more of our own food. About seven years ago, we got a handful of Bear Island flint corn from a seed bank and now we have about five acres of it. The corn is higher in amino acids, antioxidants, and fiber than anything we can buy in the store.
The traditional varieties of food that we grew as indigenous peoples—before they industrialized them and bred out much of the nutritional value—are the best answer to our diabetes. A third of our population is diabetic. We give elders and diabetic families traditional foods every month: buffalo meat, wild rice, hominy.
My 8-year-old, Gwekaanimad, and I started a pilot project with the school lunch program after I saw that they were eating pre-packaged food from
Sodexho, Sysco, and Food Services of America. We try to give our school kids a buffalo a month and also some deer meat, some local pork, and local turkeys. We started growing and raising our own. It’s just a start. We had to de-colonize our kids, too, because they got used to thinking that their food was that other stuff.
We plowed 150 gardens last year on our reservation. I’m a big proponent of gardens, not lawns. It turns out in most reservation housing projects you can’t grow food. That spot in front of your house is where you park your car, or your dogs will trample it, or your cousin will drive over it. So we’re putting two-foot-tall grow boxes up there, and you can grow a lot of vegetables in them.
Our goal is to produce enough food for a thousand families in five years. And these foods we are growing in anishinaabe akiing are not addicted to petroleum, and they don’t require irrigation or all those inputs. These strong plant relatives just require songs and care for the soil. And in a time of climate destabilization, that is what you want to be growing. You don’t want to be guessing with some hybrid.

Personally, I'm going to listen to Winona LaDuke about rice LONG before I listen to Uncle Ben.
Really, click above, read the interview, buy some rice and other goods (Minnesota's closer than Thailand or India, even if it isn't local!), but more importantly, you can trust it came from a positive source.

Thank you, Winona LaDuke, for a lifetime of positive action, creation and living.
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One MORE reason to move to Hawaii

The Honolulu Star Bulletin editorializes:

"The 50th state is the first in the nation to require solar water heaters to be installed on new single-family homes,"

and a good thing! Hawaii is setting themselves up as a model of positive development, following countries like Israel--who has had mandatory solar heating on all residences except for towers with inadequate roof-space since the 1970s. This means that 90% of family homes in Israel have solar water heaters.

Why every city in America doesn't do this, is beyond me. But here's one example of someone who took the matter into their own hands--literally.
Or if you're not feeling up to that challenge, they're actually pretty reasonably priced.

I'm writing Mayor Villaraigosa of Los Angeles today. Why not write your mayor, too? Even if you're in Israel or Hawaii! Just to say, Thank you!
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Some healthy competition

The Huffington Post is reporting a totally new take on "beating the jones'." Neighborly competition may be a highlight of human nature. We've all seen those people who build a bigger extension, put up more Christmas lights, buy a nicer car, anything to out-do the neighbors. But now, Bill Nye (the Science Guy, of former child-TV fame) and Ed Begley, Jr. (with a TV and film resume too long to list) have entered into a friendly, neighborly competition that should serve as a model for that competitive bug that resides in every human. Find out what it is...

Ed Begley, Jr. has long been an activist for clean green living. He is a former owner of the GM EV1 (watch "Who Killed the Electric Car?"), has a line of green cleaning supplies and is one of the more outspoken voices in Hollywood against climate change and has been so for at least two decades, long before the green-fad was upon us. Ed Begley and Bill Nye reside in Studio City, CA and when Bill Nye moved in two years ago the two began a "greener than him" competition. The article at The Huffington Post lists all the specs of each actor's green abode, and it is impressive.

Clearly one needs lots of cash to create such a home in today's world, but they can be a model for us all on rethinking competition. Furthermore, some of their improvements, like collecting rainwater for cleaning and watering plants or growing simple garden foods like herbs and greens, are things we can ALL do to reduce our "carbon footprints."

So, while we may not all have the financial ability to challenge our neighbor to a "greener than thou" spat of competition we can each challenge ourselves to make small changes. Bring your own reusable bags to the store to carry off your locally grown produce, re-use your plastic goods instead of sending them to the recycling plant and assume it's all ok (for a good, but out-dated read on the problems with traditional recycling, look here), use green businesses when you can and there's more.

I, for one, encourage the competition between Mr. Nye and Mr. Begley and encourage us all to reduce our own carbon footprint.

Thank you, Bill Nye and Ed Begley, for being a model of healthy competition.

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