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..A must read for for every US voter and concerned citizen.. challenges the reader to explore new possibilities and new mindsets that will ultimately be required if the world is truly ready to make a change.. amazon.com US only1. http://www.contracostatimes.com/berkeleyvoice/ci_12536568
Berkeley says bye to biodiesel
Posted: 06/06/2009 04:24:15 PM PDT
The City Council will consider formalizing its policy on the matter in September.
"Four years ago we looked at this and thought it was a really good idea to do biofuels when there were no crop-based biofuels, but the situation has changed beneath us," said Robert Clear a member of the city's Community Environmental Advisory Commission which recommended the city change its policy on biofuels.
In 2003, the city started using 100 percent biodiesel in its more than 100 cars and trucks that run on diesel fuel. But that biodiesel was derived from recycled frying grease. Over the years, the supply changed to a crop-based biofuel.
New thinking on that product and its implications for global warming have changed for the worse.
Although biodiesel pollutes less than regular diesel when it comes out of a tail pipe, the farming involved to produce crop-based biofuels actually increases pollution worldwide, city officials say.
Clear said American farmers who are now converting their crops to grow soy beans to meet the biodiesel demand are decreasing the amount of land used to grow food for people and cattle.
That in turn has caused an increase in demand for land to grow food in South America and South East Asia where farmers are burning down virgin forests. The burning of the forests releases carbon into the atmosphere and there is a decrease in the amount of carbon the plants suck out of the atmosphere: two big negatives for global warming.
Add that to the fact that American farmers are growing less food because they are using their land for biodiesel production and you have a crimp on worldwide food supplies that contributes to global hunger problems.
Both of those issues are something Berkeley policy makers don't want on their save-the-world agenda even though local pollution is reduced when their trucks are burning biodiesel.
"It no longer looks like a thing to encourage," Clear said. "It's really too bad, because we'd love to see some magic bullets."
One option is going back to using biodiesel from recycled fryer grease, but there just isn't enough of it to go around and it's hard on the engines, said Deputy Public Works Director Andrew Clough.
In 2005 the city had two diesel truck engines explode when the city got a bad batch of biodiesel made from recycled fryer grease.
"Right now it doesn't sound like there is a good option," Clough said. "What seemed like a really good idea maybe isn't such a good idea as we thought because of all the considerations."
Reach Doug Oakley at doakley@bayareanewsgroup.com
2. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jun/07/interview-daryl-hannah
[Whole article reproduced in order to give context. There is one reference to Hannah's cars running off fast-food leftover grease, another to a walnut-biodiesel powered limo, another to her biofuel advocacy after 9/11.]
'I'm a little bit of a nerd'
Mermaid, android, one-eyed psychopathic killer ... Daryl Hannah's startling performances mean she is no stranger to publicity. But it is as an environmentalist that she has attracted the biggest headlines. Gaby Wood joins her in Colorado to talk about the joy of living 'on the edge of civilisation'
- The Observer, Sunday 7 June 2009
Daryl Hannah in the Ecuadorean Amazon protesting against oil spills. Photograph: Dolores Ochoa/AP
We had arranged to meet for lunch in Malibu, then drive more than an hour north to a site where we would release a California condor into the wild. A production company had contacted Hannah to ask if she would participate in a documentary about endangered species they were making for the cable TV channel Showtime, and since she had only seen the magnificent 9ft wingspan of a condor once, she jumped at the chance. In the mid-1980s there were only 25 of them in existence, and now, after years of breeding in captivity, there are 85 condors flying free in California. Two weeks earlier, she had posted a notice on her website (www.dhlovelife.com) about two condors that had been shot in Big Sur and the $30,000 reward that was being offered if the shooter was found. It was just after this that the Showtime people got in touch.
Hannah, who is now 48, looks remarkably as she did when the world first saw her in films of the 1980s - Blade Runner, Splash, Roxanne, Wall Street, Steel Magnolias. She's still wispy haired and wafty voiced, very long and very lean (she tells me she did so much ballet as a kid that she can wrap her legs around her neck without stretching). Her eyes are pale blue, with a fleck of yellow that looks as though it's been imported from another species. And while she is still acting, her main occupation these days might best be described as being the good fairy of the biosphere.
She divides her time between California and Colorado, and in both places she lives "off the grid", with her own sources of water and power. Her homes are powered by solar panels, her toilets are compost, her cars run on leftover grease from fast-food restaurants. One of them a Chevrolet El Camino pick-up painted a Batman-esque matt black has become something of a signature. She grows her own food and brings what she can't eat to a farmers' market; she keeps bees and makes honey, she knits, she sells teepees on her website. She gets excited about battery storage and new designs for low-profile wind turbines ("I'm a little bit of a nerd," she admits). She wears recycled necklaces made of boiled-down shotgun casings. She has more than 20 animals - horses, alpacas, chickens, dogs, cows - all of which are rescues. Occasionally someone will abandon a horse at the local vet's, and he'll ring her up and say: "Got another one for you." Recently she found a multicoloured frog several thousand miles from where it looked like it ought to be (an unwritten rule of the wild: all lost tropical frogs must make their way to Daryl Hannah's house). She's just adopted two more dogs from a shelter, though for the most part she just picks up strays. "I find stray dogs all the time," she says. "Don't you?"
The three best roles of Hannah's career have been otherworldly creatures - an android, a mermaid, the psychopathic one-eyed killer in Tarantino's Kill Bill - and you can see how such casting may have come about. But Hannah's otherwordliness is actually overworldliness: she just happens to love this planet in a way that exceeds most people's commitment.
"When people talk about reincarnation," Hannah tells me over an organic salad, "I always feel that if there is such a thing, this is definitely my first time, because I'm always amazed. I'm both amazed at how horrifically we can treat each other and all other living things, and also amazed at the wonder and the beauty. I'm like: 'Oh my God, look at that bird!' or 'Look at that flower!' literally every single day. I can't get over how people are putting so much energy and so many resources into going to Mars when everything we could ever dream of is on this planet, if we just take care of it. What do they have on Mars? They don't even have oxygen up there!"
I ask her what she could save if she could only save a few things.
"Oh, God! Sophie's Choice!" she says.
Well, I suggest, if you really want to help, don't you have to focus? "No, I don't think so," Hannah argues. "You know, a lot of people say: 'What are you? An environmentalist? A humanitarian? We're confused.' They want to put you in a little box. They don't understand unless you pick one thing and that's your thing - unless you say: 'I'm fighting for all shoes to be vegan shoes.' I just can't work that way - it's all interconnected to me, and what I'd like to do is help people understand that interconnection - that if you buy a T-shirt from a chainstore, it may have been made with sweat-shop labour, it may have been made by little kids, it definitely took more than nine years of drinking water to make that T-shirt, and it probably was processed with a whole bunch of chemicals as well. That's sort of what my challenge is - to help people understand that everything you do, or everything you don't do, has an effect."
She is suspicious of what she calls "green-washing lies": "You know, sustainable, eco, organic, green - they've all been co-opted. Everyone's taking advantage of people's genuine interest in a healthier life to use it as a marketing tool for their cynical agendas." Hannah says she heard an ad the other day that referred to Monsanto as "the future of food sustainability". She prefers to just say "ethical" or "responsible" or "thoughtful". I remind her that the dystopian worldview of Blade Runner was set in 2019 - only 10 years from now. Are we there yet? Is the world going bad?
"Well," she sighs in her best Dorothy-in-Oz voice, "we're certainly in a whole lot of trouble."
Along the Pacific Coast Highway, Hannah suggests we look out for dolphins. We're heading to the condor site now: Hannah, a make-up artist, the driver of the biodiesel limo she has insisted on (it runs on walnut-derived oil) and me. Outside the restaurant, a paparrazzo had lain in wait in the back of his SUV with tinted windows. Hannah had taken this in her stride, though she was painfully shy and constitutionally averse to the side effects of fame. (The height of the papfest was in the early 1990s, when she lived with JFK Jr, after which she became very private about her love life.) It certainly seems a far cry from the dolphins, with whom Hannah has of course swum in the wild - not in one of those groups where the boats chase the dolphins so people can swim with them (she objects to those: they disrupt the dolphins' sleep cycles), but on her own, with flippers and a snorkel. "They love to play Keep Away," she says. "If you're just swimming they don't care, but if you're goofing around, blowing bubbles and having fun, they totally want to come and check it out."
Much of our trip is like this, Hannah indicating a secret beach where she once saw four giant elk bucks walk out of the redwoods and down to the water, or telling us about two "cursed" hot springs, and an uncursed one you can get to "if you know which bushes to crawl through".
She grew up in Chicago, and when her father walked out and her mother married the millionaire Jerrold Wexler she eventually became one of seven sisters and a brother. Hannah now has 33 nieces and nephews: "They've done their part for the overpopulation crisis," she says with a giggle. Wexler, who died 10 years ago, legally adopted her, and she refers to him as her father; he was so well off his children were under threat, and Hannah went to school accompanied by bodyguards.
"Growing up in the city, I always felt like nothing made sense, you know?" she tells me. "Like I was kind of an alien. I mean, I knew how to handle the city, but I always just felt: what is this?" she laughs. When she was seven her parents sent her to a "survival camp" in Colorado, where you had to pitch tents in the wilderness and dig your own latrines and tie up your horses. "And there I felt... comfortable," she remembers.
"I felt confident and calm, and things made more sense."
Hannah went on to nurture this affinity with the natural world privately, but on 9/11, that changed. "Before then I figured that the most powerful thing I could do was just live by my beliefs. But after 9/11, I saw Bush trying to confuse everybody and pretend that 9/11 was something to do with Iraq!" she laughs. "I kind of recognised the fact that it looked like we were heading towards a war for oil, not a war against terror, and since I had been off petroleum for a number of years, I felt it was imperative that I get out there and start letting people know that there are other options available to us. Most people were completely gobsmacked by the idea that cars could run on vegetable matter."
As we're approaching the condor site, the Showtime producers call to say they're running late: could we meet them at a coffee shop on the way, and then all drive on together? They give us directions. At the coffee shop, a "field co-ordinator" meets us and hands out release forms for us all to sign in case we end up in the documentary. Hannah looks over her contract very carefully.
She starts to cross things out. The field co-ordinator looks nervous. He puts her on the phone to his boss.
"I'm not going to sign anything that says my image can be used 'in all media now known or hereafter developed, in perpetuity throughout the universe'," Hannah says over the phone.
"What if they start doing hologram things on Mars?" There is a silence while the producer responds. "I know it's because of the internet," Hannah says. Silence. "I know it didn't exist seven years ago. But I won't license my likeness to something that doesn't exist yet!"
There are further negotiations and several phone calls. Hannah objects to a clause about "hidden cameras". She spots another about "fictionalised characters". She begins to think it's odd that the producers are putting up such a fight. The make-up artist interrupts the application of lip gloss. It's after 6pm, and we're still miles from the site. Surely they must be worried about losing the light?
"Is this like some kind of Borat situation?" Hannah asks, laughing. "Because I've never had a problem with this. I don't get it." The producer agrees to her changes, and we get back in the car.
Daryl Hannah is not dim about legal matters. She was arrested once, for trying to save a community farm in South Central LA, and she's ashamed it was just the once (some of the kids from the farm are coming to her house for a sleepover the weekend after we meet). "I used to try really hard not to be arrested," she says. "But after I got arrested for trying to protect the South Central Farm, I was sort of embarrassed that I hadn't had the balls to stand up even more strongly for what I believed in before."
By the time we get to the condor site at Lake Casitas, Hannah smells a rat. So far no one involved in the documentary has been able to tell us anything about the condor we'll be releasing. "Maybe I'm getting Punk'd or something," she says in the car. "But I'm not friends with Ashton Kutcher so I doubt it." Does he only punk his friends, I ask. "I don't know, but it seems like they all go 'Oh, Ashton!' and giggle."
We arrive. The driver parks at an angle so we can make a quick getaway if necessary. "Let's have a code," says Hannah. "If we're at all suspicious, we say: 'I've always loved condors.' And if I say: 'Sweet Wilhemina!' that means: 'This is bullshit - let's blow this popsicle stand!'" Now I am a big fan of many of Hannah's performances, but were any of her great strange roles a match for the effortlessly scripted masterpiece that is Daryl Hannah? I'm beginning to think not.
She gets out of the car and quickly thinks of something else: "We need a sign for if you can see me but not hear me," she says. "I'll do this" - she twists her fingers to spell "I love you" in sign language. Then she's taken off to meet the director while we wait. Moments later she's back, striding down the hill, feverishly making the sign for "I love you". The driver starts the car. "It's total fuckin' bullshit," she says, leaning into the window and taking off her mike. "I pretended I had to go to the bathroom. We're outta here!" And before the rest of the crew can catch up with her, we're gone. "Agh!" Hannah moans, putting her head in her hands. "I can't believe I got duped!"
It turns out that, a little way off, Hannah was introduced to a "director" who looked to her to be far too Central Casting to be true. There were three cameras and 15 crew members, which she knew to be too many for a nature documentary. The "director" then took her to meet a "research scientist", a woman in a miniskirt and lab coat who was peering from under too much blue eye shadow into the distance, supposedly looking for the perfect "condor release spot". The scientist told Hannah that she herself had been fed by condors in the wild for three days, at which point Hannah started to laugh, and pretended she needed to use the bathroom.
She calls her manager. "I'm telling you, that was a full-on Punk'd-Borat situation," she says. "The whole thing was a big 'let's make fun of celebrities' show." (Later, when I Google the production company named on the release forms, Little Duke Productions, all I can find is a random warning on someone's Twitter feed: "Beware of Little Duke Productions for Showtime.
May be dangerous. Please RT.") The manager promises to look into it.
Once she's over the initial shock, or relief, Hannah says she's sad we didn't choose one of the other things we'd planned to do together - and it's true, she and her assistant had put months of effort into thinking which issues they could shed light on: a Panamanian tribe threatened by the construction of hydroelectric dams; the environmental disasters caused by mountaintop removal in Virginia and Tennessee; the inhabitants seeking to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
All are, as she puts it, "struggles that get little media coverage and desperately need solidarity". "I'm sorry to drag you along on this farce," she says quietly. Despite this, though, she is remarkably good natured about the whole thing. "I'm sure they thought: 'Environmentalists tend to be humourless'," she muses. "Although my approach is to be rather light-hearted about things. Because if you don't enjoy life, what's the point in trying to save it?"
A few days afterwards I speak to Daryl's uncle Haskell Wexler, the esteemed cinematographer of such classics as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and the director of some seminally progressive documentaries of the 1960s. When I tell him the story of the condor hoax, he encourages me to consider the incident more broadly. "You have to ask yourself: what forces are at work that would like to discredit what Daryl stands for?" he says. "I would say it's the same forces which say we cannot clean up the pollution that's going into the air right now because it'll cost too much, and who the hell cares about the goddamn polar bears when we're in an economic crisis? The priorities of people in power are threatened by Daryl's statements about her beliefs. You see, it's a compliment to her."
Unlike him, Wexler says, his niece is not a firebrand by nature. She came into her activism "gradually and politely", and she's always been a loner, "which is good because it means she's not dogmatic... You know," he continues, "in our culture, visibility gives you some power. How people use that visibility as citizens of the world is a matter of character and a matter of conscience.
She's chosen, as a matter of character and conscience, to say something positive about humans and about the planet and to say that time is running short. So I think that she's a beautiful character."
Night begins to fall as we drive back to Malibu. We go over the events of the surreal afternoon, and wait for the producers to ring and explain. They never do (and don't return my calls later). Intermittently, after long silences, we burst into laughter - a weird shared state of convalescent hysteria - and somewhere along the road in the dark, Hannah tells me about the first time the ruling culture thought she was crazy.
When she was about six, the teachers at her private Catholic school called her mother and said:
"'There's absolutely no reason for her to be here: nothing's going in, nothing comes out, she's just gone.' I was pretty non-communicative," Hannah admits. "I went through a whole battery of tests. They gave me this Rorschach test and said: OK, what do you see?
I said: I see a lion and a cave... and I'd tell these whole long stories and they'd go: OK, that's enough. And I'm like: 'Don't you want to hear the rest?' They showed me some other things. One was this picture of a guy sitting over a creek. He was holding a fishing pole, and on the end of the fishing line was a boot. They said: 'What is he feeling?' And you're supposed to give an answer like: 'He's disappointed', or sad or whatever. I said he was thrilled. To me, he lost his boot the week before when he was fishing there, and now he'd found it. It all made sense! But they didn't ask me why, they just thought: 'That's the wrong answer.' They wanted to institutionalise me."
She assumes that her symptoms were "a reaction to my mother and father's dissolution, and probably the unhealthy parts of their relationship that made me retreat to the safety of an imaginary world, you know? That's a natural survival instinct." Instead of institutionalising her, her mother took her to live on a Caribbean island for a year, where she got to "fully roam the wilds of my imagination". When she got back, she continued to live in her head but kept it a secret.
I ask when she finally grew into herself. "Oh, I'm still pretty awkward," she laughs, "trust me! But I'm less embarrassed about being a one percenter. I'm more proud of it now. So although I'm uncomfortable in all kinds of situations, I'm not as self-conscious when I don't blend. I don't want to blend ... in a mall, you know?"
In Malibu, she lives in a one-room cabin built in the 1920s as a hunting lodge. Because it's so small, she's erected a couple of yurts outside to house passing friends who've hit hard times. She loves the fact that it's "wide-open, wild space" - "We don't even have a DSL line," she laughs.
Gandhi had something like eight possessions when he died, she tells me; "and you think: you know what? How much do you actually need? I'm at the edge of civilisation, and that's just where I'm comfortable."
[Ends]
My Present Celebs.. miranda lambert,
Avril Lavigne,
kristen stewart,
Jennifer Lopez,
Leighton Meester,
Tamsin Egerton,
Ellen Pompeo.
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Biofuels are a wide range of fuels which are in some way derived from biomass.
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