Tossing Mullet

The waning harvest

I suppose it was really cool to see the story about the bio-fuel gas stations showing up in Mobile, Alabama and to have Gov. Riley show up to bless the opening of the station at the corner of Airport Boulevard and Cody Road. A real “green” event – I didn’t think I’d live to see the day!

But the many crises that have assaulted our thought processes and our wallets over the past several weeks have certainly taken an emotional toll (not to mention financial) on just about everybody old enough to drive or have a bank account. The consequence is a grudging recognition and even more grudging acceptance (even by hard-core Republicans) that the world of the 21st century is pretty damned different from the 20th century – and not necessarily in a good way! The fact that this epiphany has occurred much faster than climate change is quite remarkable.

There is a raging debate over the commitment, politically and resource-wise, to ethanol derived specifically from corn, driving up the price and availability of the commodity. This is an issue because a huge portion of the entire world population depends on corn as a basic food source, even though flour tortillas seem to be overtaking corn in popularity.

The problems with corn are multiple – it has high energy demands to grow and harvest, requires water, fertilizers, and doesn’t deliver really high levels of energy yield compared to petroleum products and certainly not nuclear sources. It might address our dependence on imported oil, but it has created brand new problems while conceivably contributing to others like our big fat carbon footprint.

So be it, as long as we are willing to give up meat (or pay $10 a pound for hamburger) so that we can drive to the corner market to buy food that we can still afford – like soybeans and turnip greens. I’m too old to become a vegetarian.

Paul Roberts does a remarkable job of scaring the pants off of you in his newest book, “The End of Food.” His arguments are pure doomsday “Malthusian” and pretty darn persuasive. He accepts the conservative premise that the world population may actually become relatively stable as the practicality of some version of population control emerges across the planet.

His bottom line differs from Malthus in that the real problem is not population increase. It is the growing demand from the existing population for food that requires more energy, water and land to produce – like beef. God knows we’re beginning to worry about energy and water and I would argue that we should also be worried about land right here on the coast. We are watching farmland in both counties turn into sprawling subdivisions. And we’re just a microcosm of what’s happening across the nation and a lot of the world.

We are beginning to realize that all manner of resources can no longer be considered to be infinite, nor should they be restricted only to those that can afford them. Roberts’ account of the global mismanagement of food tries to explain how we can have millions of unhealthy people because they are either overweight or hungry – what’s wrong with that picture of the world? He argues that political, economic, and cultural forces all support the current unsustainable practices of massive agribusiness and that it will take a calamity to effect change.

The financial calamity of a couple of weeks ago could very well be the trigger since it has been almost as palpable as Hurricane Katrina. It may not have been as concentrated and intense as the storm, but it has had much further reaching consequences. It is ironic that now the “seventh generation of the Iroquois” will be vegetarians and broke, as well as hot as hell – some legacy for our kids’ kids!

Apparently there is very little that we can do to soften the blow of the financial “rescue” and it may be too late to really halt global warming, but there are things that we can do to address some of our other environmental problems. Actually the first thing that caught my eye about the gas station really wasn’t the “green” gas – it was the “green” car wash! It is highly unlikely that any of us think much about the impacts of car washing but they are there.

Surveys indicate that the average citizen does not fully understand the hydrologic connection between their yard, the street, the storm sewer and the streams. For example, a recent Roper survey found that just 22-percent of Americans know that stormwater runoff is the most common source of pollution of streams, rivers and oceans.

It was interesting to me to find that the Web “literature” spends a lot of words describing the sins of individual “chronic” car washers who wash their car at least once a month. That was an eye-opener for me because even my wife doesn’t make me wash her car that often, but apparently 60-percent of us are committed to this cultural phenomenon! The issue revolves around whether the wash water goes directly into stormwater lines, therefore untreated, or into wastewater lines that go to a waste treatment facility?

Numerous metals and other chemicals from hand wash stations, highway runoff and commercial car washes, as well as common detergents are known to harm and alter aquatic organisms and to exceed EPA standards. Even good public systems rarely remove the nutrients or heavy metals, both of which are threats to our coastal waters. Enough evidence exists from the West Coast, Texas and Canada for the EPA to see the metals, detritus and petroleum-based detergents from car washing as a threat to waters in North America. Even biodegradable detergents add to the Bay’s dissolved oxygen deficit.

Maybe the new “baby NASCAR” facility in Mobile County could use their venue as an environmental education opportunity promoting really “green” car washing. Theirs is not an audience usually characterized as exactly leaning toward the environment! The most effective practice found in other cities was simply to wash the car on the lawn where the really green stuff takes care of many of the problems – or just use my approach and let the rain take care of the problem.

George Crozier is Lagniappe columnist. Contact him at george@lagniappemobile.com.

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