Excerpt from “Sowing Revolution: Seed Libraries Offer Hope for Freedom of Food” by Bill McDorman & Stephen Thomas:

A consciousness shift is taking place around the politics of food in the modern world. People are waking up to the battle raging over our dinner plates and realizing that victory hinges upon who controls the tiny seeds that are the source of all sustenance. To restore our freedom over food, it is essential that every community have access to a collectively owned treasure chest of seeds. Seed libraries represent our best hope for reclaiming this independence. As an added benefit, they boost regional biodiversity and resiliency by encouraging the cultivation of new crop varieties adapted to local growing conditions. With global temperatures on the rise and financial markets plummeting, a robust network of community foodsheds to replace the shaky monolith of industrial agriculture has become imperative for human survival.

The seed library story begins, appropriately, with a rebellion. In late November 1999, thousands of anti-globalization activists descended on Seattle to protest a meeting of the World Trade Organization. The massive demonstrations shut down the city for days. Sascha DuBrul, a 24-year-old activist and New York native living in Berkeley, took part in the protests and returned to California charged with excitement. “It was a really vibrant time,” he recalls. “Here in the Bay Area, there were all these amazing projects starting up that are still around.”

Seeds were DuBrul’s newly discovered passion. While interning at a CSA farm in British Colombia the previous year, he became fascinated by the invigorating genetic relationships that arose when domestic crops intermingled with their wild relatives. Diversity was the key to the health of a community, he realized, be it plant or human. This idea had great relevance to urban spaces where people live in close quarters but thrive on cultural differences. “I had this vision of articulating the relationship between biological and cultural diversity, and bringing that idea to kids in the city,” says DuBrul.

That opportunity soon came following a Faustian deal between the University of California at Berkeley and the Swiss agribusiness giant Novartis. One of the first decrees under the alliance was for the eviction of an on-campus CSA farm to make way for trials of genetically modified corn. “There were all these seeds left over in a cabinet and nothing was going on,” recalls DuBrul. “So I thought, ‘Hey, why don’t we start a seed library?’ We could have a collection of seeds that people can take out, and then have regular seed saving workshops where gardeners can come and learn the basic techniques.” His vision quickly blossomed into the first seed lending library: the Bay Area Seed Interchange Library, or BASIL.

DuBrul counts an unlikely pair of inspirations behind his BASIL project: Gary Paul Nabhan, co-founder of Native Seeds/SEARCH and father of the local food movement, and the Black Panthers. “Reading [Nabhan’s] book Enduring Seeds rocked my world,” he says, “and the Panthers had this history of community controlled movements where people took over their communities for their own.” Over the next nine months BASIL flourished out of the nonprofit Ecology Center as a grassroots hub for seed saving and self-reliance in the Berkeley community.

http://www.storyofstuff.org/2012/01/22/take-that-plastic-bags/

If your listening gets your wheels turning, or reminds you of another great project, the Story of Stuff is soliciting suggestions for future podcasts. Submit them here!

ECOLOGY CENTER ON COLLECTING ALL PLASTICS
By Martin Bourque, Executive Director, Berkeley Ecology Center

There is a saying in the resource recovery industry that goes something like: “If you collect enough of anything, someone will buy it”. That has certainly proved true for mixed rigid 3 to 7 plastics increasing collected though municipal recycling programs. As the plastics industry campaign to get cities to “collect all plastics” makes headway, there is an increasingly consistent feedstock flowing – across the Pacific. For many years there were no consistent markets for these post consumer plastics but that is changing.

Following up on the widely referenced Report of the Berkeley Plastic Task Force of 1996, the Berkeley Ecology Center recently partnered with the WuHu Ecology Center in China to visit a plastics processing facility that lives on the discards of the Western US. In essence we found that with relatively low labor costs they are able to manually sort and reprocess, with simple low tech methods, many categories of plastics into flake and pellet for domestic Chinese markets. Their water, air, and solid emissions controls would certainly not pass muster in the US, but did have some basic controls and waste water recycling. While we were left with many questions, clearly 3 to 7 plastics processing is alive and well in China.

So as markets increase, the legitimate question “Should Berkeley collect and process additional plastics?” is continually being reevaluated. It is important to note that this is not a matter of answering the simple question that many cities and haulers ask “Can we get rid of it?” There are numerous costs and benefits to adding new materials and considering operational, environmental, and economic issues is just a good start.

Swimming upstream against the flood waters of consumer plastics by refusing to collect and process them is a legitimate part of the discussion, but in the end it really comes down to more practical concerns. Clearly the addition of plastics does not pay for itself at this point, and we recently watched as the City of Albany approved Waste Management’s addition of rigid plastics – along with a 45% rate increase. This certainly begs the question of “How much does it really cost?”

Historically CalRecycle has created incentives for plastics collection and processing by subsidizing these materials, but recent breakdowns in the CRV payments structure and state budget highlight why this cannot be the sole basis of such a collection model. For several years Berkeley has been involved in exploring California based plastics recycling efforts that can not only get rid of the stuff, but create jobs, economic development, and infrastructure here, with high labor and environmental standards. We hope this approach will dawn a new day, getting back to the roots of why we pioneered curbside collection nearly 40 years ago.

Currently, it seems clear that Berkeley is not prepared to increase rates to its customers, and while most other Cities brace for a new round of rate increases, Berkeley is holding flat. This means new collection programs of any kind are probably off the table for some time. As the City of Berkeley works though developing its new Zero Waste Strategic Plan, the issue of collecting and processing more plastic types will certainly be a part of the conversation, to be evaluated like everything else in a cost benefit analysis.

COLLECTION IS NOT RECYCLING
Sara MacKusick, Executive Director, Community Conservation Centers

Collection IS NOT recycling. Most plastic picked up in recycling collections is not “recycled,” that is, re-manufactured into a similar or new product, such as making a new glass bottle from a used glass bottle.

CRV plastic bottles are collected by everyone because a hefty California redemption value is paid to the collector. Even this plastic is not recycled but re-used for products such as children’s’ toys, rigid plastic buckets or tubs, wearing apparel, plastic lumber, carpeting, etc. which will be sent to the landfill when worn out or broken.

While many cities claim to recycle all plastics it is doubtful they actually succeed. Most collected plastic ends up in the landfill because:
- most plastic, other than CRV bottles, remains in residual trash after sorting,
– usually, little or no effort is made to pick non-CRV plastics from the mix,
- the plastic that is separated from collected recyclables is typically mixed together, and this mix has minimal, if any, market value,
– most mixed plastic is shipped to China where a significant portion ends up in their landfill, or worse.

CalRecycle estimates that the rate of plastic recycling in California is less than five percent of the 3.8 million tons of plastic in the waste stream. But even that five percent probably represents plastic that has been landfilled or shipped halfway around the world. Collecting, sorting and shipping plastic is extremely expensive, so why spend money to collect if it’s only going to end up in the local landfill or a landfill in China?

Not only is the plastics’ industry polluting our planet with ever-increasing plastic production, they simultaneously have deluded the public into thinking all plastic is recycled by printing the revolving arrows, #1 through #7, on plastic products. Those seven plastic grades are meaningless, because even plastics within a grade cannot be recycled together because of different additives to make the plastic rigid, or flexible, or clear, or pigmented or….

But since people believe plastic is recycled, they don’t hesitate to buy it and plastic usage continues to proliferate. This, in turn, leads to a public outcry to include plastics in local and municipal recycling programs. Responding to public pressure, many jurisdictions have added more or all plastic to their recycling collections. This response is not good public policy and simply costs the rate-payer more money as they “pretend” to recycle plastic.

http://www.economist.com/node/21543563

http://earthjustice.org/blog/2012-january/the-end-of-america-s-coal-era

[Photo by Mike.Hanlon]

Read Stopwaste.org’s news release for more details:
http://www.stopwaste.org/home/index.asp?page=33&recordid=294

And Californians Against Waste has a great summary as well: http://www.cawrecycles.org/whats_new/recycling_news/jan26_alamedaco_ordinances

[Photo by catbagan]

Here’s the synopsis of the story:
“Pacha is a little girl with big dreams who spends a lot of time in front of screens and in the city. After an asthma attack, her mother gives her a pair of magical pajamas that make her dreams come to life! She meets an unlikely group of animals, and together they decide to organize a Nature Festival to unite all species and perform for a better world!”

The book Pacha’s Pajamas will be on sale at the Ecology Center Store, along with Pacha’s Pajamas musical EP, a CD featuring rapper/actor Mos Def, poet/rapper Talib Kweli, and talented kids!

Click here for contact information and additional details.

[Photo of Oxfam "Hungry for Climate Action" by Oxfam International ]

The exchange will be this Saturday, 1/21/12, from 12-3pm.
Find the best varieties for growing your own fruit; discover local favorites and near-forgotten heirlooms.

* Hundreds of varieties of budwood for grafting: apple, pear, quince, plum, peach, nectarine, apricot, cherry, and more.
* Cuttings to root: grape, fig, pomegranate, kiwi fruit, mulberry, and more.
* Rootstocks and grafting supplies.
* Grafting class and demo at 12:15pm and 1pm.
* Custom and assisted grafting of your selected variety onto a rootstock.
* Plant drawing; silent auction.
* Questions answered, secrets revealed, beginners welcome.
* Bring your list of desired varieties, plastic bags, a pen, and tape to label the scions you take home.

For a more detailed explanation about what to expect at the scion exchange, click here.
For the main event info page, click here.

[Photo by Hayes Valley Farm]