The Dallas Green Zine

Longing for a garden? But perhaps you live in an apartment or your yard is too small? Consider participating in one of these community gardens:

• Community Harvest (Plano)
• Coppell Community Gardens (Coppell)

…or start a community garden! 

Community Harvest is a community garden in Plano where you can have your own 16′ x 4′ plot to grow fresh vegetables and more on large raised beds, using organic techniques. Ten percent of the food is donated to local food pantries.

The program started last February and 19 plots are already in use. If you’re interested in getting a plot for the 2008 growing season, call Community Harvest at 972-424-8989 and leave a message. This is a great opportunity to grow your own food, meet other gardeners and neighbors, learn from epxerienced gardeners, and contribute to local food pantries. Each lot costs $35 for the year. The Community Harvest garden, which is sponsored by the Community Unitarian Universalist Church, is located at 2875 E. Parker Road in Plano.

The Coppell Community Garden offers similar opportunities through Helping Hands Garden (at 255 Parkway Blvd.) and Ground Delivery Garden (at 450 Denton Tap. These two gardens have a total of 100 plots. Since the program started in 1998, over 27,000 pounds of fresh produce grown by volunteer gardens has been donated to families in need.

For more information about the Coppell gardens, contact kcb@ci.coppell.tx.us or 972-462-5191. There is also a website here.

Consider starting a community garden in your area. Identify those who have already started community gardens and ask them how they got started. Also, for more information, check out these links:

• American Community Gardening Association 
• Tips on Starting a Community Garden
• Resource Guide for Starting a Community Garden
• Starting a Community Garden

Texas utilities have no incentives to promote energy efficiency.  In fact, they have dis-incentives.  Energy efficiency translates into reduced sales, reduced revenue, and reduced profit.  The more electricity that is needed, the more money they make.  Therefore, we should not look to our utility companies to  support energy efficiency.

The attached study finds that a comprehensive effort to promote efficiency and other cost-saving demand reduction measures can meet Texas’ electricity needs more reliably, at a lower cost, and at a tremendous net economic benefit compared to building a new fleet of expensive and heavily polluting power plants. Over the next 15 years, boosting markets for more efficient products, lighting, cooling, heating and industrial processes can eliminate over 80% of forecast growth in electricity demand, while lowering consumers’ energy bills. With additional measures to further reduce electricity demand and enhance reliability, Texas can completely eliminate its “load growth,” resulting in a gradual decline in total electricity demand to more than 9% below current levels by 2021.

The attached document is Power to Save: An Alternative Path to Meet Electric Needs in Texas, which was obtained at the link below.  It starts with a short executive summary, and supporting detail follows.  Check it out.

http://www.ceres.org/pub/docs/Ceres_texas_power.pdf

At a time when the U.S. is only one of two countries that has not signed the Kyoto Treaty and the federal government is failing to act, mayors and other local leaders are taking the lead to curb global warming. Beginning with Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels, more than 200 mayors representing 42 million Americans in 38 states have signed the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement to reduce global warming carbon dioxide pollution in their cities to 7 percent below 1990 levels by 2012.

The Dallas Sierra Club is looking for volunteers who can help with the Cool Cities project to get mayors to sign the Climate Protection Agreement and provide public education on global warming. Many positive steps have been taken by cities whose mayors have signed. Click here for examples.

Some cities whose mayors have signed include Dallas, Westlake, Fairview, Coppell, Carrolton, Richardson, Frisco, Arlington, Denton, Hurst, McKinney, and Euless.

Whether your city has already come onboard or not, there are a few ways that you can volunteer.

• Speak about Climate Change and the Cool Cities effort to groups in your area.
• Help Schedule Other Volunteers. Help us find audiences for our Cool Cities public education presentation! We’ll give you instructions and a flyer, and we’ll assign a specific zip code for you to research. We’re looking for adult Sunday School audiences, PTA groups, homeowners’ associations, and business organizations that will let our public ed team members come speak. Some daytime phoning is required since you’ll be talking to people who are only available during business hours.
• Meetings with Mayors Being Scheduled. Join Our Lobbying Team! The script has been written and the exhibit notebooks loaded. Now all we need is YOU to commit to a meeting with a mayor to get another signature on the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement. We’ve got a lot of other cities on our target list. Let’s keep the momentum up! We’ll train you and team you with a partner. 

For more information, contact Ann Drumm at 214-350-6108 or attend the workshop on June 9th! For more information about the workshop, click here.

While we pay skyrocketing gas prices at the pump, ExxonMobil is raking in record profits and using those profits to block efforts to reduce our dependence on oil and curb global warming. Who is really paying the price of Exxon’s decisions? 
  
As you probably know, for years ExxonMobil has been funding a network of groups that deny the science of global warming and mislead the public and policy makers about the urgency of the problem. Perhaps you have heard that Exxon stopped their cash flow to these groups. That’s what Exxon’s been telling the press - but a recent analysis shows otherwise!

Next Wednesday, May 30th, ExxonMobil will hold its annual shareholders meeting in downtown Dallas. Come Wednesday the 30th to hear the truth!
 
Your presence is needed to show the company’s board of directors and shareholders, and the media, that we’re not going to let up until Exxon ends its disinformation campaign on global warming!
  
Last year, our efforts in Dallas prompted the mainstream media to ask Exxon, for the first time in history, why the company was funding junk science. We
need your help to again create this type of influential coverage. 
  
Speakers include long-time leading environmental justice leader, Juan Parras, reps from Exxpose Exxon and Natural Resources Defense Council, and others. If
you came last year - wear your Exxpose Exxon T-shirt, or get a free one from Proxy-Mama, Valley Reed, at the stage. 
  
There’s a lot on the agenda in Dallas right now so if you can, please pass this alert on to your friends and networks and post it to your e-calendars to give
folks the opportunity to join with us on this important day. 

The Exxpose Exxon campaign is a collaborative effort of some of the nation’s largest environmental and public advocacy organizations (including the
Sierra Club) to educate and activate the public about ExxonMobil’s efforts to block action on global warming, drill in the Arctic Refuge, and keep America
addicted to oil. See more at
www.exxposeexxon.com/about_us/

Details of Upcoming Event 

WHEN: Wednesday, May 30, 2007 - 8 AM sharp (until around 9 AM)
WHAT: An open press conference and rally to Exxpose Exxon!
WHERE: Morton H. Meyerson Symphony Center at 2301 Flora Street in downtown Dallas . Take the DART rail to Pearl St. and walk a couple blocks to Flora or see more directions (http://www.meyersonsymphonycenter.com/directions.cfm).
RSVP: Click here to RSVP so we can count you in! (email shoover@exxposeexxon.com with the subject line “Count me in at 8AM on May 30th!”) Let us know also if you would be interested in attending the inside of the meeting.

  

For more information, visit: http://www.exxposeexxon.com/

[Most of this article was written by Heather Lowe, with a few added clarifications by the Dallas Green Zine.] 

The stability of native turtle populations in Texas is being threatened by commercial interests that are collecting the turtles and exporting them for food to Asia. Please join the efforts to urge the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission to adopt a ban on the commercial collection of native Texas turtles and other nongame species. (This ban was proposed by the Commission in April.) Please click here by May 23, 2007 and let the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission know that you agree with this critical piece of legislation!

Background:
The ban will affect multiple species that are nongame; however, the greatest protection it will provide is for turtles, because native turtles are being hunted commercially to satisfy changing food tastes in Asia.

Recent social changes in China have created a new middle class that is eager to pay top dollars for turtle meat, which is considered to be a Chinese delicacy. As a result, demand has skyrocketed and turtles in China and neighboring Southeast Asian countries have been virtually wiped out. Turtle farming is beginning to take hold in China, but cannot yet meet the market’s demand. So, the market is reaching out to other parts of the world, particularly North America where commerce and shipment capabilities already exist to ship turtles directly to Asia.

Here at home:
Most Texas turtles are currently classified as non-game species, which means there are no limitations on the numbers that can be harvested from the wild. There are a few individuals in Texas who are taking advantage of the lack of regulation and have made a business of supplying Texas turtles to the Asian food market. One trapper in particular has actively recruited and formed a “co-op” of 450 trappers throughout the state that helps him meet (self-reported) Asian contract quotas that exceed 300,000 turtles each year.

The human element:
Turtles are being sent not only to food markets in Asia, but also (in much smaller numbers) to Asian supermarkets in Texas. Some of these turtles are being trapped in bodies of water in which the fish have been deemed unsuitable for consumption due to high levels of heavy metals such as Mercury, PCBs, pesticides and other dangerous chemicals. Turtles are much longer-lived than fish, and therefore stand to accumulate many more toxins in their tissue over a lifetime, potentially posing a major health risk to the families who are purchasing their meat.

Key points:

• Export data confirms that more than 250,000 wild-caught turtles were shipped out of D/FW airport alone from 2002 to 2005.
• This kind of harvest is unsustainable based on turtle biology. Very few young turtles survive to adulthood and those that do are late to mature sexually. Turtle populations make up for their losses by living a long time (50-70 years in some cases) and producing young each year. Removing large, mature females from the population – which fetch the most money – is devastating to populations.
• The traps that are used are often dangerous for not only turtles, but other species as well. When not used correctly, there is a high risk of drowning for any animals that enter the traps.
• Currently four species of non-marine turtles in Texas are protected. However, given that many species look similar to one another, there is a potential for misidentification when large shipments of turtles are being sent out of the state. In essence, under the current regulations, there is a potential for protected turtles to be harvested simply because they are getting mixed in with the large numbers of non-protected species.
• It is irresponsible to continue to allow the harvest of Texas turtles for food markets given the potential of contamination and the health risk to the humans that consume them.
• Texas currently has some of the most lenient regulations in the country in regard to the commercial harvest of turtles.
• Given the fact that Asian turtle populations have been virtually eliminated in just 15 to 20 years, it is only reasonable to assume that Texas turtle populations would face the same fate when subjected to the same levels of harvest.

The Good News!
The Texas Parks & Wildlife Commission (TPWC) has taken a huge step toward banning the commercial harvest of all wild turtles in Texas. In April, the commissioners moved to propose a complete ban, which is now posted for review and available for public comment.  However, the TPWC is under considerable pressure from commercial interests to not uphold this ban.  Allowing the continued commercial collection of red-eared sliders, softshells and snapping turtles from private waters is being considered. However, there is no way to distinguish a turtle trapped in private waters from one trapped in public waters – making this is an unenforceable decision that will continue to drain populations from public waters.  Once private stock ponds are cleared, collectors will most likely turn to public areas such as rivers and streams.

On May 23 and 24, the commissioners will meet again and will review the comments that they have received. This is where you come in! Please click here by May 23 and let the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission know that you agree with this critical piece of legislation! While you’re there, feel free to include some of the key points that you feel most passionately about and please congratulate the commission for taking action on this conservation crisis. Please also forward this message to friends who are passionate about protecting Texas’ wildlife.

Very recently, the U.S. has been losing as much as 70% of its bee population. Among the worst hit places, Texas and parts of the east coast are experiencing losses of 70% and California has seen colonies drop by 30-60%. The phenomenon is also occurring in Europe as well.

Possible Causes

Honey bees are dying in the millions and no one is sure why. The bees are becoming disoriented and not returning to their hives. Scientists are calling this phenomenon ‘Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) A wide range of causes is being considered, everything from a parasite, a virus, bacteria, pesticides, genetically-modified crops… even radiation from cell phones.

Many scientists think that the primary suspects are a parasite, an unknown virus, some kind of bacteria, pesticides, or a combination of two or more of these factors. It may be that one factor weakens the honeybee and the second kills it. The few surviving bees have multiple infections suggesting possibly a problem with the insects’ immune system.

Among the most common pesticide concerns are neonicotinoids, which are widely-used and already known to be poisonous to bees.

Major Agricultural and Business Losses?

According to a recent article in the Economist, “Honey production is worth just $200m a year, but bees pollinate $15 billion-worth of fruit, vegetables and nuts, especially the $2 billion almond business.”

In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Among these plants are: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash, cucumbers, citrus fruits, peaches, kiwi, pears, pumpkins, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons. Bees also pollinate alfalfa sprouts for cattle.

For more info, check out these links:

The Flight of the Honeybee: A Mystery That Matters

Honeybees Vanish, Leaving Keepers in Peril

Are GM Crops Killing Bees?

Local beekeepers say drought may be factor in scattered reports of dwindling bee colonies

The Westbrook Passive/Active Solar Home Tour showed how smart design work with roof overhangs can save lots of energy. The picture below shows how the roof overhang keeps the Summer sunlight from coming directly into the windows, but allows the Winter sunlight to come directly in through the windows to help heat the house in Winter.

click on image for larger version

The window shades are pulled up from the bottom of the window instead of the top so if you want to block the direct sunlight in the winter you can just pull the shades up to stop direct light but it will still allow non-direct sun light in at the top of the window. Very cool design.

The 2,700 square-foot home has an average electric bill of $79/month (835 kWh/mo) and an average water bill of $13/month (2,800 gallons/mo). These resource-saving results were achieved using a variety of strategies. For more information about the Westbrook home, click here.