WONDERMINUTE (September 2010)

 …they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore; but they shall all sit under their own vines and under their own fig trees, and no one shall make them afraid Micah 4:3-4

 

Photo: Cadland, flickr.com

     Let your mind wander around a mental map of town and odds are that you can summon the location of at least one residential fruit tree that goes unharvested year-after-year. The summer 2010 issue of Urban Farm magazine highlights the work of California resident Anna Chan, known in her community as The Lemon Lady. Chan’s mission is to harvest local, unpicked residential fruit and to put it into the hands of those persons in her community for whom fresh fruit is unaffordable. In her first year of harvesting, Chan gleaned an estimated $90,000 worth of fruit which she donated to local food pantries. Growers at area farmer’s markets were happy to add to the cause their unsold produce after market-day sales had ended. Chan cites community networking, respect and gratitude as the things that grease the wheels of her efforts.
    From a wellness perspective, fruit juice alone does not provide the same nutrients nor fiber that fresh fruits provide. “Juice drinks” are another story altogether, wherein subsidized corn is turned into high fructose corn syrup and blended with water, coloring, flavorings and generally small percentages of actual fruit juice. It’s a difference between “energy-dense” (i.e., high-calorie) and “nutrient-dense” foods; with energy-dense foods being far cheaper in the short-term for the family on a tight budget. Consider how you might work to make fresh, whole foods available to families in need in our community by asking to harvest a neighbor’s fruit tree or supporting efforts to expand community gardens.

See Grist Online, “How the feds make bad-for-you food cheaper than healthful fare”

WONDERMINUTE (July/August 2010)

O LORD, how manifold are your works! In wisdom you have made them all; the earth is full of your creatures. Psalm 104:24

Photo: Vivian Stockman, Southwings.org

    On our recent trip to serve with Sharing with Appalachian People (SWAP) in Hindman, KY, the high school students and sponsors from church and I had the opportunity to visit a reclaimed mountaintop strip mine. Denuding mountaintops of vegetation and stripping off mineral resources poses significant danger to the health of both humans and wildlife. Draglines, large, surface-mining machines, can move 100+ cubic yards of earth in a single scoop! But the people of the region can’t imagine life without coal. Coal is what brought many of the families to the mountains generations ago, and mining provides income to sustain their families today. A modest step—perhaps a lesser evil—that seeks better equilibrium between industry and ecology is mountaintop reclamation in which denuded areas are planted with conservation grasses to stabilize and re-cover the surface mine with vegetation.
    The irony is that while the loss of deep forests has led to the decline of several species of neotropical migratory songbirds dependent on that habitat, the return of open grassland and additional forest-edge has meant an increase in other bird species which had experienced decline previously. Additionally, at this particular site, we found ourselves a stone’s throw from four individuals of a herd of resettled Elk. Once prevalent east of the Mississippi, Elk were extirpated from 90% of their pre-European-settlement range in the U.S. by the early 1900s.
    I say “a lesser evil” when speaking of mountaintop reclamation because the plant species chosen for revegetation are non-native, European hay grasses; shallow-rooted and poor food for native animals. Were reclamation efforts to shift to using deep-rooted native grasses capable of breaking up compacted mine soil and, further, planting the next generation of forest saplings, I could bring myself, perhaps, to call the work “a greater good.”

See: Mountaintop Removal/Valley Fill Coal Mining Impacts on Birds [American Bird Conservancy]