The Serect Garden

The garden through the gate

The garden through the gate

Last weekend, I made a long trek to a completely forgotten and formerly useless corner of Ithaca’s campus. I walked along the twisted road past the pond and public safety office, into the heart of the maintenance and storage sheds, passed the old red barn (unseen from anywhere), onto a short road through the woods and then, in a bright, humid clearing I found four students, their faces in the dirt, scraping and digging into Ithaca’s newest vegetable garden.

Senior Taryn Hubbard and Junior Emma Hileman, two of the founders of the  IC Organic Garden club showed me around the garden. The garden is set in a small field in the back of the college which was ignored by the college except to be mowed every few weeks. Only about 100 feet by 100 feet, Taryn, Emma and their friends have managed to pack more variety of vegetables and herbs into their garden than you could find on an average weekend at the Ithaca Farmer’s Market.

One of the first things Emma proudly showed me was a patch of jalapenos. She practically begged for me to take some.

“We’ve got loads of ‘em,” she said.

Underground grew onions, beets, carrots and potatoes. In the northwest corner grew squash and green and yellow zucchini. Through the middle they grew rows of lettuce, chard and kale. In a robin egg blue kiddie pool grew all varieties of herbs: basil, dill, parsley, Rosemary, sage, oregano.  But clearly the biggest crop of the garden were the tomatoes. Big bunches, at least 10 of them, filled a whole row of the garden. But now comes the sad part of my tale: the unexpected disappointments of gardening.

This was an especially bad season for tomatoes with one of the worst blight outbreaks in memory. If you don’t, as I didn’t, know what blight is, it’s the same disease that caused the Irish potato famine. Emma and Taryn’s tomatoes are small, yellow and the leaves hang low and shriveled. The fruit appears to be rotting on the vine, but in fact it’s the fungal disease eating away at the tomatoes. The cool, wet summer has been good to the blight, but deadly for farmers around the Northeast, including Emma and Taryn.

To add to the unfortunate destruction, aphids chewed through much of their leafy greens, and a small family of baby rabbits, who hid themselves in the thick grass, were fenced inside of the vegetable paradise. They ate the lettuce, kale and carrots.

“It’s been a weird growing season,” said Taryn.

The big winner of the inaugural growing season goes to the butternut squash, beets, onions and, of course, the jalapenos, of which I took a handful for my own spicy use.

Senior Taryn Hubbard, center, digs through the earth for potatoes.

Senior Taryn Hubbard, center, digs through the earth for potatoes.

The IC gardening club has big plans for next years growing season, which includes expanding into the fallow lawn surrounding the garden. They would also like to open a small stand at the Ithaca Farmer’s market, which would include maple syrup from behind the Terraces and mushrooms growing in the woods near the garden. Associate professor Jason Hamilton has helped the group expand their garden, and is in charge of the maple syrup and mushroom projects. The Garden Club, which isn’t an officially registered club with the college, also received $500 from the HSBC commit-to-change grant, though Emma and Taryn admit they reached into their own pockets to put the garden together.

A major highlight of the summer, as you can guess, was when the whole group of friends, farmers and fellow weed-pullers, joined together around a table one summer evening to feast on their harvest. A big dinner of salads and pesto pasta was shared among this group with dirt-stained knees and sun-beat red necks. This earthy group believes college students should should be more in touch with the produce on their plates, and mused that the college should convert a large section of the quad into a garden.

“What a statement that would be!” said Emma.

While the days grow shorter and the nights colder, the summer has set on this growing season. But the secret garden, hiding in a wet corner of the college, will wait till next spring when Taryn, Emma and they hope a new (younger) group of friends come to turn the earth, pull the weeds and begin the cycle again.

“In general, the project feels like a success,” Taryn said. “I’m very proud.”

Set the date. The Age of Stupid is coming! LIVE!

You might have heard about this little British movie called “The Age of Stupid.” The brashly titled film injects the viewer into the year 2055 and the lonely, cold world of the last man on Earth. Pete Postlethwaite plays “The Archivist” who chronicles the beginning of the end, so called “The Age of Stupid,” through his computer of videos and images.

The UK premiere kicked off back in March, but on Monday, September 21 the movie will have it’s Global Premiere event.  Simulcast live from a solar tent located in downtown New York to over 400 movie theaters nationwide, the movie clearly intends to build big buzz at a critical time in the world’s history on the eve of the UN General Assembly’s climate session. Also this fall is the Copenhagen talks and the “ACES” bill in the Senate. Regal Cinema at the Shops at Ithaca mall is participating in this global event. Show time starts at 7:30 pm.

The movie has been receiving mixed reviews in scientific, environmental and entertainment world. Whether this tomato is fresh or rotten, there’s no doubt it will spark more conversation at the dinner table about climate change, and our individual and collective impact on the world.

- The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said the movie’s concept was “touch annoying and teenagery sometimes” but over all it deserves attention:

The passion, urgency and punch of this rough-and-ready film is real enough. It’s refreshing too. The cinema and its attendant media-comment industry appear to have endless space for every sort of smoothly mediocre irrelevancy in fact and fiction. There should be room for an essay on the most screamingly important problem that we all now face.

- The New York Times’ Steven Holden says that epic scope of the problem and the necessary changes in our behavior to overcome climate change may be too much for some theater-goers:

Cynics may assume that the ethic of consumerism is too deeply instilled in us to be changed, as is the faith in capitalism, which depends on continuous growth. If so, we might as well put the coming horrors out of our minds and live for the moment, while hoping for a miracle.

- The New Scientist’s Catherine Brahic says that while isolated weather events are not climate change, grouping them together does provide a powerful narrative:

It is worthy, though not riveting, cinema, but it has a very clever feature: much of the film is a patchwork of real news clips of remarkable single weather events from the early 2000s … By displaying these events side by side, the film compellingly shows that climate change is real, providing 20/20 hindsight while there is still time to act.

- Finally, Treehugger’s Leonora Oppenheim says the movie was a real downer:

After seeing a press screening of The Age of Stupid on Monday night in London I’m wondering if it’s possible to use too much stick? I left the theatre feeling pretty negative, as one couldn’t help to after seeing human kind wiped out with only poor Pete Postlethwaite left, stuck on his own talking to a computer screen. But as Ashok Sinha, Director of Stop Climate Chaos coalition, said after seeing the film, “It is not a film to make you happy. It’s a film to make you sit back and think ‘What is my role on this planet?’”

I’m very excited the see the film either way. It’s been three years since “An Inconvient Truth,” and America’s attention span is worse than a ADHD goldfish. We need another movie to provide that steel-toed boot kick in the ass. I’m hoping it’ll be the kick we need to truly go green.

See the full trailer here:

Wanna know about 350.org?

Here’s where you see the strange twist in my life coming together in one picture. While at the Student Involvement Fair last week, I was talking up The Ithacan. Y’know, encouraging they little ones to join our perverse group of journalism zombies. The usu.

I happened to be wearing my 350.org shirt that I received while at PowerShift ‘09, and one of the students asked me what it was all about. I turned my back to show off a globe, and within was written “A day of climate action - October 24, 2009.”

I bring this up because I know that some students are already planning on hosting a 350.org event on campus, and perhaps another one in the City of Ithaca. If you interested in helping out, contact your friendly neighborhood ICES member. I’ll stay on top of this, and let you know what else I hear.

Here’s a quick vid for a little more information on the topic:

The Van Jones Resignation

To start off, this isn’t what I want to be blogging about. I had a lovely post all ready to go about the new Gardening Club on campus, but news of Van Jones’ resignation has pulled my time away from more enjoyable things. I saw something out of the corner of my eye Saturday on CNN about Van Jones being linked to 9/11 conspiracy theorists, which I intended to check out the next morning. But I didn’t need to look past the front page of Yahoo! News. “Controversy over fiery remarks fells Obama adviser”.

What I saw on CNN was only the beginning of what Jones’ described in his resignation statement, which he gave late Saturday night, as “a vicious smear campaign against me.”

“They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide,” Jones’ stated in his resignation. The 9/11 conspiracy thing is concerning a minuscule petition Jones signed, which he stated he did not read thoroughly. Read David Roberts from grist.org assessment of the the “truther” controversy (also posted below).

It started back in April, when the conservative right “news sites” World Net Daily, which is famous for pushing the racist conspiracy theory alleging that President Obama wasn’t born in the U.S., and isn’t therefore a U.S. citizen, ran an article about Jones’ past as a communist sympathizer and radical. The article entitled “Will a ‘red’ help blacks go green?” must have caught the eye of Glenn Beck from Fox News because he too has been assaulting Jones over the past few months.

While it greatly pains me to post such slanderous, twisted and fear-mongering speech as Glenn Beck on this blog, it does help explain the irrational pressure the White House was under. But still, listen to how Beck twists Jones’ words. I was at the Powershift conference, and these words didn’t bother me. I’ve read Jones’ Times best-selling book, “The Green Collar Economy,” and I understood that his message wasn’t communism, but was “justice for all!” That wealth should be given to those who deserve it. A day’s work deserves a day’s pay is what Jones meant, not that we need to take from the white rich and give to the black poor.

For the best breakdown of everything that’s happened which lead to Jones’ resignation, check out Gawker’s article, “Who is Van Jones?”:

“So here we have a radical youth turned respectable liberal. Respectable enough to be on Time magazine listicles and win World Economic Forum prizes and everything. Respectable enough for Tom Friedman to profile him. And The New Yorker. Respectable enough for Meg Whitman, as in former eBay CEO and wealthy Republican California gubernatorial candidate and John McCain advisor Meg Whitman, to proclaim herself “a huge fan of Van Jones.”"

It explains that Jones was arrested but not a criminal. It qualifies him as a respectable activist for the black communities. What is most interesting in the piece is how one crazy blog/news site carries itself onto a right-winger commentator’s show, then a few “tea-party” activists bring it up at a town hall, which then needs to be covered by the Main Stream Media. It’s ridiculous! It goes from crazy to crazy to crazy and then passes through a legitimizing filter like CNN, which makes it real news. Beck, you talked about the vetting process? Well, how about vetting some of these stories from ones that are based in reality and not your fear-based radical right bubble?

Furthermore, I was again very happy with Grist.org coverage of this smear-campaign. David Roberts wrote an impassioned post early yesterday morning entitled, “Thoughts on Van Jones’ Resignation.” I don’t blame Roberts for getting a little peed off at Beck and the like:

“In other words, they don’t care what Van Jones does, they care what he is. Beck peddles a message that’s been around since America was born: They’re taking your country away. They—the non-white races, the immigrants, the urbanites, the communists, the elites—are stealing the country from nice, simple white Christians.  They’re taking what rightfully belongs to us, to Real Americans.”

Joe Romm from Climate Progress had little to say about the matter, and Andrew Revkin from the NYT’s Dot Earth blog didn’t say anything about the matter, but I guess it’s not really his subject. Treehugger, Switchboard were voiceless and even Think Progress, the blog for pushing back against the right, had little to say today, except to post their leader’s, President and CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund John Podesta’s statement.

On a personal note, this was a big disappointment for me. I remember first seeing Van Jones at the AASHE conference in North Carolina, and then again a month later in Washington, DC at the Center for American Progress. He is smart, passionate and invigorating. He’s a true leader, filled with gusto and fancy, sweet-sounding canned statements, but with evidence and chrisma to back it up. While the country looses a champion of green jobs in the White House, we don’t loose him all together. Jones has been on the streets, in classrooms and in front of podiums for a long time. It’s what he’s good at. It’s what he’s best at. I wish him the best of luck in his fight to “change the system!”

I’m Back!

It’s so difficult to look at everything that has happened over the past month and evaluate what is important enough to put into the first blog post of the new school year. In good news (which there’s a lot) we’ve got Residence Halls without paper towels (yay!), “Food, Inc.” had people talking about what they were eating at the dinner table, and the Cornell Cooperative Extension of Tompkins County will be offering a seminar series this fall to better our home energy efficiency.

In bad news, Ithaca College wasn’t listed among the Top 10 Green Colleges by Treehugger or the Princeton Review’s Top 15 Green Rating honor roll. In national news, you’ve probably heard about the chainsaw that was taken to “ACES” (American Clean Energy and Security Act). I think Jon Stewart said it best over the summer. And the “scariest polluter in America” is holding a “pro” America rally on Labor day to squash the clean energy bill. Some of your favorite guest stars include Sean Hannity, and Ted Nugent. If you’re wondering why this is so upsetting check out what Ron Perks from Switchboard had to say about it.

Besides increasing to a minimum of three posts a week, the blog is changing it’s coverage topics overall. Along with the great local coverage you’ve seen on the blog, I’ll also be expanding to more national news. I realized that with the tell-tale heart of the Copenhagen Climate Conference beating louder and louder, there’s a need for our campus and community to dig into these issues.

Welcome back Ithaca College! There’s a huge abundance of issues going on in our community. I’ll do my best to stay on top of everything, but if you hear a whisper or a bullhorn that you’d like to pass along, drop me a comment or an e-mail!

Closing words provided by: Congressman Caveman