Along with beauty, fireworks create a beastly mix of pollutants
“Traces of metals, fuels and other toxics can stay in the air and water for days, even months. Scientists are creating cleaner versions, but they’re still not widely used.”

1. Go here and read Greenpa’s whole post about how to take action in the global food crisis.

2. Click and read all the links in the post. If you didn’t know things were this bad, educate yourself now. Stop to think about how things got this way.

3. Write to your representatives. Blog. Tell everybody you know. Express your outrage. Follow the other suggestions at the end of Greenpa’s post.

4. Don’t stop.

Don’t believe it? Cartoon creator Mike Adams wrote an article that just might change your mind at NaturalNews.com.

Come see our giant toxic stew! / 1,500 miles wide, floating in the Pacific, made of all your plastic crap. Bring the kids!

Have you heard? Did you see? It’s called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch (or Pacific Trash Vortex, among other awesome nicknames) and it’s a staggering phenomenon indeed and after reading up on it, I fully believe we must now revise our master list. Because surely this thing must be one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, the grand sociocultural melting pot of our time. Except for the fact that it’s, you know, revolting.

Our oceans are turning into plastic…are we?

A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility…and worse.

In case you need another reason to start eating local: As Imports Increase, a Tense Dependence on China

China has become the leading supplier of many food ingredients, such as apple juice, a primary sweetener in many foods; garlic and garlic powder, a major flavor agent; sausage casings and cocoa butter.

China now supplies 80 percent of the world’s ascorbic acid — vitamin C. It’s used as a preservative and nutritional enriching agent in thousands of foods. One-third of the world’s vitamin A now comes from China, along with much of the supply of vitamin B-12 and many health-food supplements, such as the amino acid lysine.

That is no accident. Chinese manufacturers have tried to corner the market in many food ingredients by under-pricing other suppliers.

Leo Hepner, a food-ingredient consultant based in London, says vitamin C is a good example.

“The price in 1995 was $15 per kilogram,” Hepner says. “Today, the price from China is $3.50.”

No one can compete with that. So most Western producers of vitamin C have shut down.

That’s globalization. But there’s a hidden price for cheap goods. Earlier this year, lead-contaminated multivitamins showed up on the shelves of U.S. retailers. And this spring, vitamin A from China contaminated with dangerous bacteria nearly ended up in European baby food.

Scary, really scary. Do yourself a favor and read this article — now.

Here are my results:

FOOD 2.7
MOBILITY 0.2
SHELTER 1
GOODS/SERVICES 0.7
TOTAL FOOTPRINT 5

IN COMPARISON, THE AVERAGE ECOLOGICAL FOOTPRINT IN YOUR COUNTRY IS 24 ACRES PER PERSON.

WORLDWIDE, THERE EXIST 4.5 BIOLOGICALLY PRODUCTIVE ACRES PER PERSON.

IF EVERYONE LIVED LIKE YOU, WE WOULD NEED 1.1 PLANETS.

Take the Earth Day Footprint Quiz

From How to Save the World:

Earlier this week a group of students from Caledon Countryside Alliance came to our house, thanks to a government grant, and told us, for free, how to look after our lawn while also conserving water and without using chemicals and other unnatural methods. I promised to share this with my neighbours, and I thought some readers might be interested, too.
How to Save the WorldRead more >>

Dave Pollard believes we’re in deep shit [and so do I] but he’s also offering positive solutions:

A period of great change is always turbulent and unsettling, and the transformation to a Relater-Sharer culture won’t be achieved in our lifetime. So we will need to be, like all pioneers, patient, indefatiguable, and aware that the beneficiaries of what we do starting now will be our descendents, future generations who will only know us from stories. As human beings, and as the species that created this mess in the first place, we owe them no less. We know, instinctively, that that is why we’re here.

Highly recommended: read The Truth About Nature, a three-part essay and then follow as many of Dave’s suggestions as you can:

The idea that six billion of us are needlessly and voluntarily living profoundly destructive, counter-intuitive, unhappy, unhealthy, unnatural, hard, self-limiting, self-sacrificing, deprived lives, and that all we need to do is learn the lessons of nature, change our minds, walk away from civilization and create an stunningly better, joyful life, and save the world in the process, is just too radical, too insane an idea for most people to accept.

I can accept that. Whether I can do it is another story. But Dave is starting to make me believe that I can:

The truth about nature is that she is inside us, all around us, just waiting for us to ask her what to do. The truth about civilization is that it was an honest mistake, an invention that was necessary at the time, a mere 30,000 years ago, when nature appeared to be letting us down and we thought we could do better. But now it has outlived its usefulness, and is out of control, and threatens the survival of all life on our planet, so it’s time to let it go. It’s time to move forward and imagine and invent a new culture, a sustainable one that works for all creatures on Earth, drawing on the best learnings from nature and the best innovations from civilization.