The New Green

Here’s a strange chicken story that was in the Poughkeepsie Journal today:

SAUGERTIES — The Catskill Animal Sanctuary will soon be home to 40 scrawny chickens seized in a raid on an illegal methamphetamine lab in Kansas City, Mo.

Two volunteers with the haven for abused and abandoned farm animals inSaugerties are flying to Terre Haute, Ind., to pick up the chickens and then drive a rental truck the nearly 1,000 miles back to Saugerties, said Michelle Alvarez, sanctuary director of communications. The birds are expected to arrive in Saugerties late Sunday evening.

“They’re going to drive all night,” Alvarez said Friday.

The neglected chickens were discovered during a recent police raid of a property in Kansas City where a woman was operating multiple crystal meth labs. The police found the woman was keeping dozens of chicken in an abandoned house with no heat, electricity or water.

“The chickens were emaciated,” Alvarez said.

A local dog and cat shelter in Kansas City took immediate possession of the chickens while a search for a permanent home began. The fact that the Catskill Animal Sanctuary recently built a new poultry barn that holds up to 75 birds is one reason the 40 starved chickens will be traveling halfway across the country to recover.

“We’re delighted to be able to help, and so grateful to our volunteers for their superhuman effort,” said Kathy Stevens, Catskill Animal Sanctuary director.

The chickens will be given thorough exams and any necessary medical treatment when they arrive in Saugerties. As soon as the birds are healthy, they will be available for adoption to those living within a two-hour drive of the sanctuary.

The shelter, though, does not offer for adoption any of its farm animals for food production.

“If we can’t find them permanent loving homes, they’ll always have a home here with us,” Alvarez said.

“Chickens are delightful animals,” Stevens said.

The Catskill Animal Sanctuary is a 100-acre haven for 12 species of farm animals, as well as a center for raising public awareness of agribusiness. Since 2001, the sanctuary has rescued more than 1,700 animals and worked with law enforcement to bring animal abusers to justice.

An ongoing capital campaign will allow the sanctuary to increase its capacity from 200 to 350 farm animals, Alvarez said.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the small things we can do that add up to a big impact. That is what has made me want to post some ideas hopefully once a week. In any case, I’ve chosen tuesday as my day. The idea of these tips is to spark awareness and not guilt. I think we sometimes get caught up in how bad so many different things are that it’s hard to think of the small things we can do to chip away at the problem.

So, these are my guilt-free tips. If you have any ideas of your own *please* email them to me and I will post them when I can.

Today’s tip is to lower the water usage in your toilet. A family of 4 typically uses 100 gallons of water a day, and the toilet is the biggest factor in the water consumption.

Ideally we would all have low-flow toilets, or the cool dual-flush ones that have a different amount of water to flush #1 and #2. If that’s not an option (remember, don’t feel guilty!) you can reduce the amount of water in your tank. This reduces the amount of water used per flush, which adds up pretty quickly.

When I was a kid, a lot of people put a brick in their toilet tank. The mass of the brick would reduce a brick-size mass of water in your tank. That’s the idea I’m working with today. The only problem with using a brick is that it begins to deteriorate in the water, which can cause problems with your pipes.

Instead of a brick, you can use a number of different objects. I love to go on hikes and nature walks, so my objective was to find a river rock. When we stayed with friends up in Woodstock, NY there were plenty of beautiful, smooth river rocks near their house. River rocks are great because their surface has been smoothed over by years of water flowing. They won’t deteriorate in your tank and cause problems.

If you can’t find a nice river rock, another solution is to take a plastic bottle or jug that is about 1 liter in size. Fill it with pebbles and seal it. The pebbles weigh it down, so it doesn’t float around and interfere with the workings of the toilet.

Of course, there’s the old saying, “If it’s yellow, let it mellow. If it’s brown, flush it down.” If you and your family are up for this (mine is not), you can save a lot of water by just not flushing as often.

Why is Portland light years ahead of New York City when it comes to just about every green initiative? With the population density that we have here it would make so much sense to have recycling cans on the street corners for all those darn water bottles, and to collect compost along with garbage. Not only don’t we have that, but now we don’t even have leaf pick up for all the fall leaves. But I digress…

This video was part of a Huffington Post article about Bijou restaurant in Portland and how they started composting all of their kitchen waste. Turns out Portland has a program called Portland Composts that connects businesses who want to compost, with haulers who specifically deal with compostables.

I live right by a huge restaurant row here in Brooklyn. With the restaurants came rodents, then hawks dining on the rodents and now raccoons dining on everything in sight, including attempts at eating my chickens. I’ve seen the amount of food that gets tossed by the restaurants and fantasize about opening a composting facility and stopping off at each restaurant to pick up the compost w/ a horse and cart. I doubt that fantasy will ever amount to anything, but it is nice to imagine.

I was just talking with a friend about trying to do the best you can (recycling, donating to charity, buying from farmer’s markets, etc.) and we both expressed how easy it is to be discouraged that we can’t/don’t do more. I look at our planet and can get overwhelmed by how we’ve managed to mess it up so badly. It doesn’t seem possible that we can do enough things to fix it up. One can try to be a perfect citizen of the Earth, but it’s nigh impossible, which is what leads to discouragement and giving up.

That’s the negative way of seeing the situation. However, on a positive note, we’ve seen many examples of how one small effort can lead to a bigger outcome. The ripple effect. Rather than try to be perfect in every way, I’m suggesting we choose the causes we feel the most strongly about and think about what we can do in those areas. Human rights, animal rights, food justice, saving the environment (this one should probably be broken down into smaller pieces like protecting animal habitats, and clean air and water), global warming, etc.

Working in one category overlaps into other areas as well. You can decide that you want to eat less meat or no meat because meat production is very polluting. That’s also pretty darn nice for the animals, so you get two good deeds for the price of one.

I’m going to post some things I currently do and some things I’m going to do to keep me on track and hopefully inspire you. If anyone can think of suggestions and/or a nice name for a weekly post title please feel free to share.

ps. The photo is of a shattered rock that I came across up in Woodstock, NY. It was just sitting on the ground without anything else pushing against it. I thought it was interesting that something as strong as a rock could just shatter like that. It’s my attempt at a metaphor. Don’t stress out. Even the strongest of us is still fragile.

Tomorrow is the 24th annual international coastal clean up. You can join millions of volunteers to pick up trash you see along the ocean’s edge. Spending a day at the beach and feeling good about helping the planet – what could be better??

Sign up for the 24th annual international coastal clean up here.

Earth Baby was founded by three California Bay Area families who saw the amount of disposable diapers they were sending to the landfill and wanted to do something about it. They launched Earth Baby, which is a service that delivers diapers and wipes. They come later to collect the used diapers and bring them to a composting facility. The composting process uses only .5 watt-hour of electricity per diaper (equivalent of running a 60 watt light bulb for 30 seconds), no water or chlorine bleach.

The diapers themselves are made of natural unbleached FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) certified wood pulp and a super-absorbent gel. They are 100% chlorine and fragrance free. The composted diapers are turned into a high-quality top-soil, which is used at local golf courses and sod farms.

I am a sucker for the stats that show how many trees have been saved by using recycled paper towels for a year, or how much energy I’ve saved over a year with just one compact fluorescent bulb. If you are like me, you will like to know that as of June 26, 2009, Earth Baby has composted 29,220 pounds of diapers to date.

They currently only service the Bay area, but their business is growing rapidly, so hopefully they will be available in other cities soon.