Tag: Sustainability

Iowa Hosts Physicians for Social Responsibility

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date May 14, 2014

Student Physicians for Social Responsibility in Cedar Rapids — Student Physicians for Social Responsibility tour Kirkwood Community College

CEDAR RAPIDS– Iowa played host to the national organization Physicians for Social Responsibility (PSR) from May 6 through 10 at the Hotel at Kirkwood.

Iowa held center stage for meetings convened by national and international leaders of the 52 year old, Nobel peace prize winning organization. Thanks to the kind attention and assistance of the many expert hotel staff and the Kirkwood Community College affiliated training programs, this remarkable, first ever, national PSR gathering concluded a successful meeting on Saturday, May 10.

Those who attended the meetings work to address and reduce the humanitarian and health risks posed by the growing threat of nuclear weapons, the changing climate, and toxic environmental degradation. These first time visitors, initially quite skeptical about Iowa, were especially appreciative of its many unique offerings, both practical and recreational, available in and around the Kirkwood campus and the greater Cedar Rapids area.

The intractable challenges of our times were addressed in the meetings with U.S. Senate staff, Iowa elected officials, and online participants followed by experiences arranged by the Hotel at Kirkwood staff. Participants concerned about sustainability were able to visit and learn from the Kirkwood wind turbine and training center, the new Cedar Rapids LEED certified library with its green roof and inviting community center atmosphere, and the Kirkwood gardens and greenhouse. These tours, combined with the tasty, locally sourced and produced meals at the hotel, and an evening at the Cedar Valley Winery all served to showcase Iowa’s forward looking spirit and renew participants hopes for the future.

The troubled world presents us with so many new dangers and challenges. But the practical and creative talents of Iowans, especially those involved in Kirkwood’s uniquely integrated educational programs, services, entrepreneurship, and hotel partnership, manifest ample reasons for a positive outlook.

Board members, chapter leaders, staff and students from across the country join Iowa PSR in extending our deepest appreciation and gratitude to our hosts in Iowa. A special thanks to Tom Larkin of Senator Tom Harkin’s office, State Senator Rob Hogg of Cedar Rapids and State Representative Sally Stutsman of Johnson County. PSR leaders departed Iowa renewed by the gracious hospitality, insights and new sense of possibility gained by their experience.

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

Tags climate change, environment, Sustainability

Kitchen Garden

Garden Log 2014-05-06

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date May 6, 2014

LAKE MACBRIDE— Today I planted seeds outside. Arugula, Savoyed Spinach, Green Romaine Lettuce and Red Summer Crisp Lettuce.

I also drove the stakes for a fence around the first plot.

Tags Kitchen Garden, local food, Sustainability

Kitchen Garden

Apple Trees in Pink

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date May 6, 2014

LAKE MACBRIDE— The apple trees are in pink, which means the blooms will soon follow. Because my trees were not properly pruned until last winter, the number of blossoms will be low. Last year was the best ever for fruit, and 2014 tree energy is likely to be devoted to forming next year’s buds. Hopefully pruning cleared enough space for sunlight to encourage the fruit that does form.

Neighbors are out mowing lawns, and I am usually the last to make the first cut. I stopped trying to get an even and lush green lawn, eschewing chemical applications ten or more years ago. I bag my Spring clippings to use as mulch in the garden. A former neighbor once told me I should leave it to mulch the grass, but why waste it?

Two years of drought have thinned the grass, leaving a patchy mess before cutting. Where deer droppings fell are mountains of green. Once I mow, it will all even out… at least enough to stay out of the neighbors’ attention.

After a shift at a farm I hope to spend a few hours in the garden fencing the recently germinated spring vegetables. There is a burn pile on top of a tree stump. If winds are calm, I’ll burn it, hopefully taking the stump with it. I bought a bag of “natural charcoal” to use as a stump remover. If the burn pile doesn’t take this stump out, charcoal will be next.

More than 1,000 seedlings are growing in our bedroom, way more than usual. I am re-thinking how to plant everything. Maybe two full plots of tomatoes if we can afford the new cages. With all the varieties, this may be the year to make the most of it. I also want to plant all the germinated bell pepper seedlings to increase yield. Peppers don’t grow uniformly and the more plants, the more chances for decently formed vegetables. The celery is developing, but at this stage looks very delicate. I’m thinking about cucumbers and squash, but I want to wait a bit before planting them until after the squash beetle eggs.

Here’s hoping for some time in the garden and yard squeezed in between paid job in this complicated schedule of a life on the prairie.

Spring Flowers Brought from Indiana — Spring Flowers Brought to Iowa from Indiana

Tags homelife, Kitchen Garden, spring, Sustainability

Environment

Environment for Change

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date May 5, 2014

LAKE MACBRIDE— Green up has come and blossoming trees paint the landscape with their white and red petals. Back in the day, when work took me to Georgia and Tennessee, I managed to see dogwood in bloom most years. It was ersatz when reminders of spring were close by if we could have but recognized them.

Spring weather has been dicey and farmers are adapting. One farmer got sick of the fields coated with a thin layer of mud and headed into the house to stop looking at it. For some, planting began yesterday. With modern technology, the whole state could be planted in under a week— one of the ways farmers have adapted to global warming and climate change, although most wouldn’t talk about this.

The central question regarding global warming and climate change is whether people will join together and do something about it. Some are, and more will, but most don’t connect the dots. A common obstacle to progress has been that some people feel the problem is too big to deal with. There is no denying it is a complex problem that doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions.

What’s a person to do? Go on living.

If we don’t take care of ourselves first— by sustaining our lives together— we have little to offer. Taking care of ourselves is not optional.

At the same time, being self-centered is not good for us, or for society. There is plenty to occupy our bodies and minds on earth, and while some days we just get by, on others we rise to our potential and contribute something to a greater good. If this were a cafeteria, I would have another serving of the latter.

Life in consumer society may resemble a cafeteria, where we get a choice on everything, but it is not that. We have a home place, and somehow it has gotten to be a storage shed rather than a center for production. Once we make our choices, then meaningful articulation of our life becomes more important than accumulating additional things.

In the end, the case for taking action to mitigate the causes of global warming and climate change will be made by the environment itself. The environment doesn’t care much about humans.

It will become abundantly clear, and some say we are already there, that humans control our environment in a way we couldn’t when the population was much smaller. Logic won’t make the case to sustain what we have. It will be made of our existential experience and awareness that our lives have meaning beyond answers to the questions where will I stay tonight, and what will be my next meal. When people go hungry or without a place to sleep, it is difficult to think about much else, making change nearly impossible.

We live in an environment ready for change and there’s more to it than singlular voices on the platted land.

Tags climate change, environment, spring, Sustainability, The Climate Reality Project

Environment Sustainability

Changing Sprockets

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date May 3, 2014

LAKE MACBRIDE— It is time to shift gears from the environment to nuclear abolition— two aspects of the same thing. It’s a false choice to pick one over the other, as mismanaging either could have dire consequences for life as we know it. There are so many causes; and limited time.

What environmental and nuclear abolition advocacy have in common is they are global movements where the U.S. has taken a back seat.

Francesca Giovannini, the program director of the International Security and Energy Program of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, summarized the as-is situation with nuclear weapons in an article for Rotary International.

Although we live in the Post-Cold War era, we remain trapped in a nuclear weapons-reliant world order in which the maintenance of active nuclear arsenals provides ultimate assurance of both survivability and destruction. Today, we talk much less about nuclear weapons than we did during the bi-polar era and the public globally is generally unaware of the continuous existence of thousands of nuclear warheads targeting cities and populated neighborhoods across the globe.

The Rotary Action Group for Peace announced a collaboration between International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Rotary International:

Nobel Peace Laureates International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War and Physicians for Social Responsibility offer educational resources to Rotarian Action Group for Peace members interested in sharing information about nuclear weapons and peace with their Rotary clubs.

I am pleased to be part of the speaker’s bureau created to support the collaboration and look forward to reporting these new activities going forward.

Tags environment, politics, Sustainability, The Climate Reality Project, worklife

Writing

Local Food Delivery

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date May 2, 2014

NORTH LIBERTY— One of my part time jobs is working at a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm a few hours each week. The jobs are always interesting. Yesterday I delivered the first shares to customers in the parking lot of the First United Methodist Church. The nearby food pantry receives three shares plus any extra produce or unclaimed shares. This week’s share was baby bok choy, garlic chives, asparagus, lettuce, mixed greens, and for those that ordered them, a dozen eggs. Our customers are always pretty cool, and were talkative last night.

The quality of vegetables is always surprising and consistent. The sorting and packing takes most of a day’s work, and it is remarkable how much of care goes into each weekly share. While field workers in the Central Valley of California, Mexico, Peru or Immokalee, Florida may exercise care in their harvests, it is the personal and special treatment of CSA workers that makes a difference. We know the face of our farmer and that makes it personal.

I checked the garden and it is sopping wet still. We have had 1.61 inches of rain during the last seven days. The seeds are germinating, and it looks pretty good so far. However, the ground needs digging up, lettuce and kohlrabi transplanted, and fences put up. It will just have to wait until the ground dries out.

In the meanwhile, our kitchen is active this morning, making a breakfast stir fry that includes some bok choy, mixed greens and other delicious vegetables, mostly from local sources.

Tags local food, spring, Sustainability

Social Commentary Writing

First Share and Living in Society

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date April 29, 2014

Asian Greens in Scrambled Eggs with Vermont Cheese and Pickled Bits and Pieces

LAKE MACBRIDE— The first share from the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farm was ready yesterday— asparagus, lettuce, baby bok choy and Asian greens. Anticipation over spring and summer cooking is building, even if living on bits and pieces from the pantry will continue until the full flow of local produce is unleashed. Picking up the share at the farm was a fine beginning.

We had more than two inches of rain since Earth Day, so outdoor plants are growing. The garden is too wet to work, although as soon as the soil dries, seedlings are ready to go into the ground. Meanwhile I will go on living in society, and that is today’s topic.

The phrase “in society” has a particular usage here. It is part of a spectrum of relationships with people that contrasts with “chez nous,” the French term that refers to “at home” or “with us.” Maybe there is something else on this jumping green sphere (thanks Lord Buckley for this phrase), “outside society” or “foreign,” but most of our lives are spent chez nous or in society. My tag “homelife” could be changed to “chez nous” and sustain the meaning.

Living in society is that set of relationships which sustains a life on the plains. It includes friends, family, neighbors, workplaces, institutions, retail establishments, and organizations with which we associate or interact. The relationships are interpersonal, that is, specific people are associated with each part of society— it is not an abstraction.

When young, we don’t see our life in society this way. We had an ability to live in the moment without a history of interpersonal relationships, anchoring us into something else. As we age, we are more like a character in a William Faulkner novel that must work to suppress the endless flow of memory.

If experience connects us, the way we live in society is based on thousands of previous interactions. For example, someone ran for the U.S. Senate after a long, productive life. If I saw him today in any of a number of settings— at a retail store, at the retirement village, at a literature reading, at a veterans meeting, at a public demonstration— I would think of the courage he displayed by taking on personal debt to challenge an entrenched incumbent politician who would otherwise have run unopposed. I would also think of our many conversations over a period of years. Our relationship is driven by my respect for his courage, and I picture him when I think about the associations we share. When I use the phrase “in society,” it might be referring to an interaction we had, or one like it with someone else.

My usage of the phrase “in society” may have been explained by others who are smarter, but because it is organic there is a peculiar sense to it on this blog. It is personal, but not really, because is it also public.

I am entering one of the richest periods of personal interaction in life. Old enough to have had experience, and young enough to gain new ones. Each day’s potential is vast midst the galaxy of people with whom I interact. Favoring the phrase “in society” enables me to talk about them without revealing where the specific interaction may have occurred. This protects people from unwanted intrusion into their lives, and enables the writing I do for a couple of hours each day.

Chez nous, we would have had breakfast of Asian greens mixed with scrambled eggs, Vermont cheddar cheese and pickled veggies from last season. In society I am part of the local food movement and post photos of my breakfast. Maybe I am drawing a fine line, but it is an important one for a writer.

Tags farming, Kitchen Garden, local food, Sustainability, Writing

Environment

Finishing the Gig

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date April 25, 2014

INDEPENDENCE— Last night I gave my tenth presentation for the Climate Reality Project, and have now completed 40 acts of leadership as a climate leader. This Earth week is a time to reflect on my recent experiences as part of the climate movement.

My contractual obligation with the organization may be complete, but the work will go on. Politico recently published an article based upon an interview with Al Gore, and there are some lessons to be learned.

There is no question that Gore has become a polarizing figure in the climate movement. We can’t blame him for making a living, and if he invests in companies that move the economy toward sustainability, much the better. At the same time, his $200 million net worth, and how he got it, are sticking points for many people I know and respect. That he is associated with the Climate Reality Project puts me, and others, on the defensive from the get go. I’m okay with that, but defending Al Gore is a distraction from the work, and at the end of the day, there is little about him that needs defending.

One concern expressed after my presentation was how to combat the proliferation of letters to the editor by obvious climate deniers. The answer I gave was simple. Ignore them and speak the truth. What the deniers want more than anything is to delay any change that moves us toward a sustainable future. The less we get involved in their spurious arguments, the more potential we have to advance ours. A denier with vested interests wants nothing better than to engage and distract people who seek a solution to the climate crisis.

Money is currently winning the conversation about climate, and it is not that of Al Gore or Tom Steyer, another wealthy member of the movement. The money is not from the Tides Foundation or Michael Bloomberg, which both fund environmental NGOs. The money is coming from the fossil fuels industry and from a host of foundations that want to delay meaningful government action on global warming. By contract, I work as a volunteer, where every tank of gasoline has been from my own checking account, which is miniscule compared to theirs.

The truth is on our side. Regardless of what people come up with as counter arguments, hundreds of millions of people on the planet are being affected by global warming. It is clear that the frequent droughts around the world are made worse by global warming. To an extent, it doesn’t matter that people try to deny it. At some point, and it won’t be long, the need for action will be so clear that people will rise up and take action. We are already seeing it in Syria, Egypt, and other Mediterranean countries caught up in the food shortage caused by the 2010 drought in Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. We are buffered from food price spikes it in the U.S. because of our sophisticated food supply chains, but eventually environmental incidents like the 2012 drought, which caused a 20 percent decline in the U.S. corn harvest, will impact our family budget as well.

How long will it take? Al Gore, quoting Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “not long.” I am ready for the work.

Tags environment, Sustainability, The Climate Reality Project, worklife

Work Life

Money Smart Week Presentation

Post author By Paul Deaton
Post date April 19, 2014

Prepared remarks for the Solon Public Library Money Smart Week presentation on April 19, 2014.

Thank you for coming to my talk titled “Alternate Living: Focus on Finance.”

This talk is partly about me, but it is really about you. I seek to present some of the ideas and financial tools I use to make a life, as an example of how to cope in a society that has changed dramatically since I grew up in the 1950s.

I hope to generate a discussion in the second part of the hour, that focuses on the idea that alternative living is not only possible, but is a necessary approach to life expectancies that stretch into our 80s and beyond thanks to adequate nutrition and good health that is endemic to our way of life in Iowa. I hope you find value in hearing my story.

My father worked at a meat packing plant in Davenport for $85 per week, and my mother worked at home. We had enough money to afford a home with a mortgage, food, clothing, parochial schools, transportation, health insurance and vacations on a household income of around $4,500 per year.

As we know, things have changed. In 2011, the estimated median household income in Solon was $61,394 or 14 times what my parents generated. Many people I meet believe that amount of income is not only needed, it may not be enough.

Something else has changed in 60 years, and what I am most concerned about is the value of work, the kind my mother did at home, and my father did at the plant, has been degraded and replaced with something else in our burgeoning consumer society. It has taken us away from the foundations upon which lives used to be built. Our lives must be about something besides consumption of stuff, and appreciating the value of work is a starting point.

My story is about getting back to a kind of living that is more diverse than holding one or two well paying jobs in a household and slaving away to save enough for retirement, whatever that is in the 21st century. One that enables us to earn a living wage, contribute to the broader society, and sustain our lives on the Iowa prairie.

I re-purposed my life in 2009 after 25 years in transportation and logistics. Our daughter graduated from college in 2007 with minimal debt, and my wife Jacque and I were in reasonably good financial shape. We had no chronic health conditions, and hopefully, a lot of years to live.

When I left CRST Logistics in Cedar Rapids, I was on track to earn a six figure salary, so with Jacque’s income from her part time job, we were doing better than average. I might have stayed on, and pursued the rewards of longevity, but there were vulnerabilities.

The Toyota Financial Services job seeker web site, says it in black and white: normal retirement age is 62, which is my current age. As I approached traditional retirement age, I didn’t know where I stood in the broader scheme of the company. I had contributed to the rapid and sustainable growth of CRST from a $60 million trucking company that thrived after the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 deregulated trucking, to a full transportation solutions company that earned more than $1 billion in revenues last year. I felt too young to slow down, but the company could hire three people for my salary, and when I left each position I held, they usually did. This is normal in large organizations, something we don’t hear much about. While I was treated fairly where I worked, there is no obligation for any company to keep employees until retirement. That’s just the way it is.

Another important aspect of my work was I felt ready for a change. While I helped build the company over 25 years, and had experienced its growth and the opportunities that go along with that, I felt stale. When our daughter graduated from college, I was not adjusting well to being an empty nester. This feeling increased as she chose to leave Iowa.

I felt ready for a change and on July 3, 2009, left the company for good. I was not ready to retire, even if I had a retirement cake and party when I left, and an unexpected call from the owner expressing his thanks for my 25 years of work.

If there are stages to life, which one am I in? My colleague at the Solon Economist, Milli Gilbaugh wrote about the trouble defining that stage past middle age, and before elderly, in a recent column.

I suppose it is nearly impossible to find a word for the stage of life I’m in; a word that seems accurate and inoffensive to everyone. As a matter of fact, I’ve had trouble knowing just what to call myself for some time.”

Ages seem to be rather neatly divided into 20-year segments, up until we reach 60 and are unceremoniously thrown into the ‘elderly’ cauldron, ready or not. The term ‘child’ generally includes everyone from birth through their teens. After that they are ‘adults’ for another 20 when they suddenly enter the category of “middle age” that will last until they turn 60. After that, we are apparently doomed forever to be ‘elderly’ which I think begins too soon and lasts too long.

What we need here is another 20 year category between ‘middle age’ and “elderly” that includes the years from sixty to eighty.

I couldn’t agree more. With good health, proper nutrition and financial sustainability, there is a lot of living to be done between 60 and 80.

Where I landed after a career in transportation was with a portfolio of activities, some paid and some not. I value all of the work I do and have to make choices on how I spend my time. My life is a systematic and thoughtful process of continuous evaluation and improvement.

My recent work has been general farm work, warehouse work, issue and candidate advocacy, public speaking, and writing. This is much different from my transportation career, which included experience in operations management, personnel recruitment, procurement and logistics. I have served on a number of non-profit boards, including the Johnson County Board of Health, and the Solon Senior Advocates, and am currently serving a four year term as one of three Big Grove Township Trustees. It keeps me busy, and there is a process to achieve financial sustainability over time, and that’s what I want to spend the balance of my time describing.

There are four financial tools I want to discuss, retirement, financial management, research and development, and investment.

Let me cross retirement off the list right away. What an outdated concept in an era when companies are shedding liabilities like pensions and health insurance like there is no tomorrow. Perhaps there is a role for retirement among people who perform physical labor for a career, as they may truly need to slow down and take it easy at age 62. But the idea that we save for a lifetime to enjoy a well financed retirement life, as we hear from financial planners of every stripe, is a joke. The reality is that people in the United States have one of the lowest household savings rates in the world, ranking 22nd among industrialized nations. We say we should be saving for retirement, but aren’t. A better process for aging is needed.

We all know life doesn’t stop, and neither do expenses. What I propose as a replacement for retirement is re-imaging what the years between ages 60 and 80 could be: a portfolio approach to financial sustainability. It begins with the idea that all work has value whether it is compensated or not.

If you look at my weekly activities, they include about 20 hours working as a shift supervisor at a warehouse, 10-15 hours working for the weekly newspaper, 3-5 hours working on a farm, 20 or more hours writing at home, and 5-8 hours volunteering with various organizations. The balance of my time is spent gardening, cooking, reading, doing chores and most importantly, networking.

I am constantly seeking new opportunities to earn income, but have little interest in going back to work that requires 60-70 hours a week of my time and excludes other opportunities. There is too much risk in that. Like large companies that have research and development operations, so too, we should be constantly in the hunt for interesting opportunities for engaging and useful work. When we find a new opportunity it needs to be evaluated and fit into time constraints. There is a process for that.

This is where financial management comes in. It is important to use a few tools that are common in business to evaluate and make improvements in our financial situation. Most important is periodic reporting and planning.

Each month I sit down and write a report of what happened. This is not a personal diary, but a tool to think about what happened, what is important, and what needs to change to sustain our lives. I share this with my spouse, so I have an audience and potential feedback.

The report begins with a general discussion about health and welfare. If we don’t have and maintain good health, getting along can be a challenge. It pays to formally think about it, put it into words and make needed changes on a regular basis.

The second section is a financial report that covers periodic income and expenses, and highlights things that were different about a particular month. It included a budget analysis, which helps identify problems before they happen.

I also keep track of certain activities, like events, meetings, business development activities, and others and record them in the third section. I refer to this often as memory sometimes fails me.

The final section is a balance sheet depicting assets and liabilities. This is a basic and fundamental tool to know where one stands financially and the library has some good resources on this.

My goal is to develop a stable analytical platform from which I can explore opportunities for part time work, temporary jobs and projects that will produce value. My current focus is to add more farm work.

Over time, the kinds of activities may change, but the biggest risk we may face is getting stuck in something that is neither sustainable nor good for us. Retirement is replaceable, and that can be a good thing, especially if we have a process for positive change.

Research and development is mostly about networking. I have found it is important to get out of the house and talk to real people about what is going on in society. There are more than enough volunteer opportunities, so most often, I seek to develop a particular interest when I network with people, that will hopefully point to income opportunities.

One of the key roles work with non-profits served after leaving my transportation career was to introduce me to a wide range of people n the community. There is value in friendship and working on a common purpose, and it is important to maintain engagement in some non-profit volunteer work as part of a sustainable portfolio.

Lastly, I want to discuss investment, and I don’t mean stocks and bonds. Financial resources are important, but I found the best investments have been in myself.

The key lesson I learned has been that many small investments of time and resources are better than staking a single claim on something big. The benefit is that if one source of income goes away, or an investment doesn’t make a return, it is not devastating to replace part of a financial system rather than a single high stake investment. This is what successful business people do, and why shouldn’t we operate the same way? We should.

This has been my personal story about choices I made for sustaining a sound financial life, and some of the tools I have used. Thank you for coming to listen and now let’s open the floor to questions.

Tags Sustainability, worklife