Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in ZiTa's LiveJournal:

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Sunday, July 23rd, 2006
4:56 pm	National Geographic's "A Deeper Shade of Green" Read it and weep, hah. If you get National Geographic the August issue also has a lot about New Orleans if you're interested. Yeah, I'm a nerd, whatever, I feel quite depressed after reading this article. Bah. A Deeper Shade of Green by Bill McKibben This is the year when we finally started to understand what we are in for. Exactly 12 months ago, an MIT professor named Kerry Emanuel published a paper in "Nature" showing that hurricanes had slowly but steadily been gaining in strength and duration for a generation. It didn't attract widespread attention for a few weeks- not until Katrina roared across the Gulf of Mexico and rendered half a million people refugees. The scenario kept repeating: Rita choking highways with fleeing Texans; Wilma setting an Atlantic Ocean record for barometric lows; Zeta spinning on New Year's Day. Meanwhile, other data kept pouring in from around the planet: Arctic sea ice melting past an irrevocable tipping point; thawing permafrost in northeasern Siberia creating so much methane that lakes didn't freeze even in the depths of boreal winter; the NASA calculation that 2005 had been the warmest year on record. In January, a trinity of announcements sealed the mood. First, British scientist James Lovelock, who invented the instrument that allowed us to detect our eroding ozone layer, published an essay predicting that we'd already added too much CO2 to the atmosphere and that runaway global warming was inevitable. He predicted that BILLIONS will die this century. A few days later came a less dramatic but equally alarming announcement. The steady and long-serving NASA climatologist James Hansen defied federal attempts to gag him and told reporters that new calculations about, among other things, the instability of Greenland's ice shelf showed "we can't let it go on another TEN years like this". If we did? Over time, the buildup of Co2 emissions would "imply changes that constitute practically a different planet". Less than ten years to reverse course. Not our kids' lifetimes, or our grandkids'. Oursssss. Finally, at month's end, even President Bush, as faithful a friend as the fossil fuel industry has ever had, announced America was "addicted to oil". Historians, I think, will look back on this as the time when denial finally began to crumble. When we finally began to understand that the planet as we've known it was at stake- and not from a possible scenario, like nuclear war, but from the consumption of the coal and oil and gas that power most of the actions of our lives. This is new. Humans have never faced a civilization-scale challenge before. Whether we deal with it gracefully or not depends, I believe, on what happens to that creed we call environmentalism. Environmentalism is mostly an American invention, one of the most powerful ideas we've offered to the rest of the planet. It arose here for a simple reason. We came to full consciousness while we were still in the process of subduing the nation's forests and prairies. In much of Asia and Europe, the woods were cut and the rivers tamed before the age of writers. Here, though, Henry David Thoreau could see the line between man and nature on his daily walks. George Perkins Marsh could watch what happened to the flow of streams when New England forests were cut down. Aldo Leopold could look on as the fierce green fire turned dull in the eyes of a gunned-down wolf. None of these environmentalists, or the hundreds of thousands of other women and men who believed passionately in such ideas, were able to slow the economic juggernaut that rushed across this continent, however. Most didn't think of that as their role; it didn't even cross their minds. They set up small islands of park and wilderness for the tide to rush around. And they worked, especially after Rachel Carson, to cure modernity's most toxic side effects, making sure certain chemicals were banned and the Clean Air Act passed. This movement has been remarkably effective. Even as our economy has grown larger, smog has also abated. We can swim in most of our rivers again. And our model has spread to the rest of the world. Other countries have adopted their own clean air acts, built their own national parks. And environmentalists can stil win great victories: The Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society (you should check out their websites!) and all the rest have managed so far, for instance, to preserve the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from drilling. But when it came time to deal with global warming, this kind of environmentalism flunked. Despite 20 years of increasingly dire warnings, American carbon emissions continue to grow; we won't even engage in the Kyoto Protocol, the one international effort to bring carbon emissions under some kind of control. A few western European nations are doing better, but even they are having trouble meeting their reduction targets. And the developing world is starting to flood the atmosphere with CO2 on an almost American scale. From 1990 to 2004, China's carbon emissions increased by 67 percent, nearly all of it the result of coal. We're now starting to realize this failure was almost inevitable. Environmentalism's method of handling global warming is flawed. The old paradigm works like this; We judge just about every issue by asking the question, Will this make the economy larger? If the answer is yes, then we embrace whatever is in question- globalization, factory farming, suburban spraawl. In this paradigm, the job of environmentalism is to cure the worst effects, and endless economic growth makes that job easier. If you're rich, you can more easily afford the catalytic converter for the end of the tailpipe that magically scrubs the sky above your city. But it turns out that, above all else, endless economic growth is built on the use of cheap fossil fuel. The industrial revolution began the day in 1712 that Thomas Newconmen figured out how to use a steam engine to pump water out of a coal mine, so that it could be mined more cheaply and easily, thus allowing more steam engines. Coal, oil, and natural gas were, and are, miraculous- compact, easily transportable, crammed with Btu, and cheap. Dig a hole in the ground, stick a pipe in the right place, and you get all the energy you could ever need. Precisely the same fuels that gave us our growth now threaten our civilization. BURN ONE GALLON OF GAS AND YOU RELEASE FIVE PPOUNDS OF CARBON INTO THE ATMOSPHERE! And as CHina demonstrates every day, the cheapest way to spur growth is by burning more fossil fuel. Even Benjamin Friedman, the Harvard economist who wrote a brilliant book last year defending the morality of economic growth, conceded that CO2 is the one major environmental contaminant for which no study has ever found any indication of improvement as living standards rise. Which means we might need a new idea. We need to stop asking, Will this make the conomy larger? Instead, we need to start asking, Will this pour more CO2 into the atmosphere? Some of the shift would be technological. If carbon carried a real price, then we'd be building windmills far faster than we are now! All cars would be hybrids, and all lightbulbs would be compact fluorescent (you guys should use these). Every new coal plant would be paying the steep price to separate carbon from its exhaust stream and store it underground. All that would help- but STILL not enough to meet Hansen's 10-yr prognostication, not eonugh to reduce worldwide carbon emissions by the 70% required to stabilize the climate at its current degree of disruption. For that to happen, we'd need to change as dramatically as our lightbulbs. We'd need to see ourselves differently- identity and desire would have to shift. Not out of a sense of idealism or asceticism or nostalgia for the 60s. Out of a sense of pure pragmatism. For instance, we've gotten used to eating across great distances. Because it's always summer somewhere, we've accustomed ourselves to a food system that delivers us fresh produce 365 days a year. The energy cost is incredible- growing and transporting a SINGLE CALORIE of iceberg lettuce from CA to the eastern US takes THIRTY SIX CALORIES of energy. What would it take to get us back to EATING MORE LOCALLY, to accepting what the seasons and smaller scale local farmers provide??? Or think about the houses we build! They're enormous- more than double the size they were in 1950, despite the fact that the humber of people in the average home continues to fall. Even a technologically efiicient furnace or AC struggles to heat or cool such a giant space- and the houses can only be built on big suburban lots, guaranteeing that their occupants will be entirely car-dependent. What would it take to make us consider smaller homes, closer to the center of town, where we could use the bus or a bike for daily transportation? It would require, I think, a movement that takes people's aspirations for good and secure and durable lives seriously. That akes those desires MORE seriously even than the consumer economy has taken them. We would need a kind of cultural environemtnalism that asks deeper questions than we're used to asking. How deep? Here's a data set just as interesting as the ongoing spike in planetary temperatures- and almost as depressing. Since researchers started trying to measure such things inthe years after World War II, the %age of Americans who consider themselves "very happy" with their lives has remained steady, even though the material standard of living has nearly tripled in the same period. More stuff is NOT making us happier- but we can't break out of the cycle that offers more stuff as our only real goal. What we really seem to want, according to the economists and psychologists conducting such research, is more community. Standard economic theory has long assured us that we're insatiable bundles of desires. That may be true, but more and more it feels like our greatest wish is for more contact w/other people. We've built the most hyper-individualized society the world has ever seen: According to some surveys, most Americans don't know their next-door neighbors!!!, which is a truly novel idea for primates. That's contributed to the great success of our economy- each of us rises and falls based on our own efforts, which is a great motivator. But it's also contributed to that gathering sense of dissatisfaction, and to that cloud of CO2. If everyone has to drive their own car everywhere (and the biggest car possible, to maximize their own safety), then it's hard to reduce emissions. If our idea of paradise remains a 4,000-square foot house on its own isolated lot, it's hard to imagine really rapid change. And so the article goes on and on and on and maybe it's a little boring and repetitive to read... but this stuff gets me so riled up... it's like we're all, myself included, just existing as zombies and not reacting to something that is extremely urgent in any significant way. Even though I have decided to major in environmental studies and devote my career to this stuff, my own lifestyle hardly practices what I preach. Poo poo platter. We should've joined the Native Americans instead of killing them. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 25th, 2006
3:43 pm	Study shows secret to gas-free beans Tue Apr 25, 10:57 AM ET WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Two strains of bacteria are the key to making beans flatulence-free, Venezuelan researchers reported on Tuesday. ADVERTISEMENT Yes No Yes No Yes No They identified two bacteria, Lactobacillus casei and Lactobacillus plantarum, which can be added to beans so they cause minimal distress to those who eat them, and to those around the bean-lovers, Marisela Granito of Simon Bolivar University in Caracas, Venezuela and colleagues reported. Flatulence is gas released by bacteria that live in the large intestine when they break down food. Fermenting makes food more digestible earlier on. Writing in the Journal of the Science of Food and Agriculture, Granito and colleagues found that adding these two gut bacteria to beans before cooking them made them even less likely to cause flatulence. They tested black beans, known scientifically as Phaseolus vulgaris. "Legumes, and particularly Phaseolus vulgaris, are an important source of nutrients, especially in developing countries," Granito's team wrote in the report. "In spite of being part of the staple diets of these populations, their consumption is limited by the flatulence they produce." Smart cooks know they can ferment beans, and make them less gas-inducing, by cooking them in the liquor from a previous batch. But Granito's team wanted to find out just which bacteria were responsible for this. When the researchers fermented black beans with the two bacteria, they found it decreased the soluble fiber content by more than 60 percent and lowered levels of raffinose, a compound known to cause gas, by 88 percent. They fed the beans to rats and then analyzed the rats' droppings to ensure that the beans were digested and kept their nutritional value. When pre-soaked in the L. casei, the beans stayed nutritious and produced few gas-causing compounds, they reported. "Therefore, the lactic acid bacteria involved in the bean fermentation, which include L. casei as a probiotic, could be used as functional starter cultures in the food industry," the researchers wrote. "Likewise, the cooking applied after induced fermentation produced an additional diminution of the compounds related to flatulence." YES!!! (Comment on this)
Friday, April 21st, 2006
8:43 pm	http://www.laumcstormrelief.com/templates/con30gl/default.asp?id=32649 u can check out the organization in NOLA that we'll hopefully be working with, and get the general info! OH SO SUPER COOL. (Comment on this)
Sunday, April 9th, 2006
3:25 pm	You are a Social Liberal (61% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (23% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test (Comment on this)
Saturday, March 25th, 2006
9:31 pm	if u wanna see new orleans pictures, log into Yahoo! with username icasb06 and password springbreak, and go to Photos. (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 19th, 2006
11:50 am	new orleans so i told deej id talk about new orleans in livejournal. and so i shall. basically everything is rotting, moldy, smells like hell, and there is debris everywhere. there were 50 foot waves that knocked over everything in their paths. on the doors of all the houses is spraypainted the number of dead bodies that were found inside, people and animals included. the houses almost all need to be gutted or bulldozed. many people want to save their homes if possible, but are not really sure if it's possible, and are just trying to anyway. none of them are getting insurance help beacuse the "flood" was a "man-made problem", and the hurricane didn't do the actual damage. everyone's overcharging people for services and living quarters. there is a tent city in walmart's parking lot, along with other aid to help homeless people. people are getting sick from breathing in the air; some have a type of bronchitis that will never go away. houses were washed clear off their foundations. some houses were hit by the hurricane so badly in MI that only foundations are left. there are new trailer parks being formed for people who want to come back and try to fix their homes. but everything has been sitting and rotting and molding for six months, progressively getting worse and worse. they need so many volunteer hands, and will for seven years. at the church we stayed at, that one church alone had a 600 family waiting list for people who needed their houses gutted and couldn't afford it. the rich people are starting to rebuild. but the majority of the people were not rich... i want to go back in the summer and i want to bring people. ill put up a link for pictures wen i figure out where people are posting their pictures. but yeah if you're interested let me know. new orleans is still mainly deserted after six months and many people feel depressed and hopeless; they think volunteers are "angels sent from God". it is completely worth 48 hours in a van =0P (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 14th, 2006
4:17 pm	anyone interested in going to new orleans for a week early during the summer break? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 24th, 2006
1:02 pm	i am obsessed with all the stuff that goes on in environmental society and sustainability meetings. it is freaky. but so much more meaningful than locking oneself up in a practice room. playing the piano DOES = easy $ however hahaha i have this church job now where i get $100 per mass. like dana i miss everyone a whole lot. college is not what i thought it would be, but you have to come to terms with it and make it something that you can be happy doing. everyone has the ability to do that. as usual the venture crew is being dysfunctional and not getting back to us about whether or not they'll offer us backpacking equipment. but im pretty sure they will =0) that should be fannnnnntastic... dana think u can go w/out pooping agen? we should ALL try it haha we can just eat rice and bananas the whole time and get wicked constipated. i am attempting to visit webo for like 2 days the weekend after i come back from new orleans. we shall seeeeeee!!!! i miss you guys and i sort of forgot about livejournal but it looks like you guys didn't so i just wanted to say i miss you =0) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 26th, 2006
10:29 pm	dana and betsy... even though i have no idea wut ur going thru (well i have ideas, but they are perhaps quite incorrect), i hope that you guys know that i like you both, a lot =0) i'm glad that you guys are so close together cuz u can get together and bond whenever u want =0) haha random. but yeah, im thinkin aboutcha all the time and just follow your heart and things will turn out okay. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 12th, 2006
11:17 pm	You scored as Journalism. You are an aspiring journalist, and you should major in journalism! Like me, you are passionate about writing and expressing yourself, and you want the world to understand your beliefs through writing. </td> Journalism 92% Anthropology 83% Philosophy 75% Sociology 75% Theater 75% Art 67% Dance 58% Psychology 58% Mathematics 58% English 58% Biology 58% Engineering 58% Linguistics 58% Chemistry 33% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com no music majors... what a bad quiz =0P (Comment on this)
Friday, January 6th, 2006
1:55 pm	To dream the impossible dream To fight the unbeatable foe To bear with unbearable sorrow To run where the brave dare not go To right the unrightable wrong To love pure and chaste from afar To try when your arms are too weary To reach the unreachable star! This is my quest! To follow that star! No matter how hopeless, No matter how far; To fight for the right Without question or pause To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cuase! And I know, if I'll only be true To this glorious quest, That my heart will lie peaceful and calm, When I'm laid to me rest. And the world will be better for this; That one man, scorned and covered with scars, Still strove with his last ounce of courage, To reach the unreachable stars. Current Mood: jubilant Current Music: The Impossible Dream from Man of La Mancha (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 11th, 2005
5:31 pm	Hallelujah it is almost done! i will not even know what to do with myself as i sprint out of ford hall at 7pm on Wednesday... ill probably start kissing hte ground and bawling. my hands are icy cold and they won't change. (Comment on this)
Monday, December 5th, 2005
1:47 pm	doobeedoobeedoo vacation is so close but it is CONSTANTLY on my mind and so time moves unbearably slowly... but life is good even when you think it sucks; even tough we give ourselves very little freedom in the routine of our lives, every freaking day is ours to do with as we wish. kind of a scary thought actually. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 30th, 2005
11:36 am	people = all that really matter =0) (not any of the stuff we get stressed out about) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 27th, 2005
12:09 am	ho hum i love you guys. i can't wait until christmas break. besides secret santas i do not want to give/receive anything for the holidays... holiday shopping is yucky. things that aren't bought r different tho =0) even if you hate musical theater, i would recommend seeing Rent just because it reminds you so much about how important human connections are... and i thought back to the rccc many times during that movie =0) good bye westborough but ill see you agen in 19 days. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 19th, 2005
10:01 pm	hmm hmm hmmmmm “it is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge” –einstein “teaching is not always about passing on what you know, it is about passing on who you are” –julia loggins “You will find as you look back upon your life that the moments when you have really lived are the moments when you have done things in a spirit of love” –henry Drummond “The first recipe for happiness is: Avoid too lengthy meditations on the past” –andre maurois “we should have no regrets… the past is finished. There is nothing to be gained by going over it. Whatever it gave us in the experiences it brought us was something we had to know.” –rebecca beard “God gave us memory that we might have roses in December” James Barrie “today is the first day of the rest of your life” abbie hoffman “tomorrow hopes we have learned something from yesterday” –john wayne “it is one of the blessings of old friends that you can afford to be stupid with them” –ralph waldo emerson “I still say I’m a little different, because success to me is not having the most money, or having the biggest car or the biggest house. Success is just being happy” –herschel walker “success is like a fart- only your own smells nice” –james Hogan “that man is a success who has lived well, laughed often and loved much” –robert louis Stevenson “the sole meaning of life is to serve humanity” –leo Tolstoy “only a life lived for others is a life worth while” –einstein “I have found that if you love life, life will love you back” –arthur rubinstein “Love your enemies. It makes them so damned mad” –P.D. East “Remember that you are all people and that all people are you” –joy harjo “There are no rules. Just follow your heart.” –Robin Williams “If you really want something you can figure out how to make it happen.” –cher “No person has the right to rain on your dreams”b –marian wright Edelman “reality is something u rise above” –liza minelli “if you don’t fail now and again, it’s a sign you’re playing it safe” –woody allen “from a little spark may burst a mighty flame” –dante Alighieri “no guts, no glory” (Comment on this)
Friday, November 18th, 2005
1:49 pm	is it possible to feel content and discontent at the same time, to love yourself and hate yourself at the same time? to be as happy as can be and depressed at the same time? to have an ego and be selfless at the same time? (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 13th, 2005
11:20 am	if what you're doing makes you feel ALIVE, then gosh dernit by golly just keep on doin it! if what you're doing is anything besides that, then maybe it's not worth quite so much of you're time =0P that is wut i have been figuring out lately. Enlightening, i know. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, November 6th, 2005
1:54 pm	tornado watch out in the boonies =0P i remember the time i saw a tornado on the way back from ithaca and i didn't even no it until i saw that there had been one on the news.. i thought it wuz just a huge rainstorm type of thing in the distance. are we in kansas or something jajaja. (Comment on this)
Thursday, November 3rd, 2005
8:17 pm	mvjmike: GUESS WHAT mvjmike: MICHAEL GOT A 100 ON HIS HEALTH VAGINA QUIZ TODAY iluvSBSP666: post it on ur locker mvjmike: hahahaha i taped it to my pants mvjmike: cause it was ilke a diagram betsy i took ur quiz that wuz really cool thanks! if everyone were like me we'd need 2.2 planets... YIKES! i suck... gotta work on that... kathleen GOOD LUCK with ur play =0) eddis buns and the likes good luck at neds =0) (1 Comment |Comment on this)