The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer

I read this as a fulfillment of one of the 2026 Goodreads reading challenges--it fulfilled a category that was hard for me because I had read about 80% of the books that qualified already. Otherwise I would likely not have found this. It is about looking inwards, building with what you have and being grateful and appreciative for what you have. When you look at a berry, the serviceberry is featured here, but any wild berry will do--what do you see? In her latest book, the US botanist and author views a tiny fruit through all of these that it does--it feeds the wild life around it, who in turn help it to spread when you expel the seeds, all the interconnected ways a berry becomes an integral part of our world. Then she goes on to illuminate the much bigger questions about how we humans relate to plants, to the natural world and to each other. The author is a university professor, a botanist, and a citizen of the Potawatomi nation, and she is becoming one of the best known environmental writers working today.

Textile Environmental Impact

I listened to a very impactful talk by Patty Murphy on zero waste quilting, and how she started down the path of using every bit of fabric from a quilting project. Here are some sobering statistics. These are numbers from the EU, where they addressing human impact on the environment, but we can extrapolate to elsewhere. 1. It takes a lot of water to produce textile, plus land to grow cotton and other fibres. To make a single cotton t-shirt, 2,700 litres of fresh water are required according to estimates, enough to meet one person’s drinking needs for 2.5 years. There are green house gas emissions to factor in as well/ 2. The textile sector was the third largest source of water degradation and land use in 2020. In that year, it took on average nine cubic metres of water, 400 square metres of land and 391 kilogrammes (kg) of raw materials to provide clothes and shoes for each EU citizen. 3. Textile production is estimated to be responsible for about 20% of global clean water pollution from dyeing and finishing products. 4. A single laundry load of polyester clothes can discharge 700,000 microplastic fibres that can end up in the food chain. The majority of microplastics from textiles are released during the first few washes. So mindfulness about the environmental impact is key, upcycling is good as well, and making good use of your quilting fabric stash is an earth friendlier goal.

The Air We Smell

The Southern California problem with the air quality around the Sriracha plant may at first sound frivolous, or like a first world problem, but as a long time Midwesterner, I do get how the smell in your neighborhood could drive you to distraction.

There are two things--the first is that when city folk move to farm country they may not at first fully appreciate that the romance of living amongst livestock comes with some attendant noise and aroma.  Like the children's book says, everything poops, and it usually doesn't smell all that wonderful.  On the other hand, high density animal feeding lots can make the air quite aromatic (and maybe not innocuous to the lungs) for neighbors all around.  It is time to start facing the fact that when we live densely we need to have different air quality standards in order to co-habitate.  I love Sriracha, but I do have an element of sympathy with the factory's neighbors.

Green Grocer

The question is whether having your groceries delivered is good for the environment and the answer is yes--and if you allow for the deliverer to pick the time of delivery, then it is a huge savings.  There are a number of services available on-line to have groceries delivered--Amazon and Google are just two, with grocery stores getting into the act as well.  This doesn't have to be a luxury--it can be a reduction of our carbon footprint.

This falls into the 'have your cake and eat it too' category.  Researchers Anne Goodchild and Erika Wygonik in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Washington published their findings in the Journal of the Transportation Research Forum.  They
 compiled data in Seattle and the outlying areas (urban and rural households) and assumed that every household was a possible delivery-service customer. Then, they randomly drew a portion of those households from that data to identify customers and assign them to their closest grocery store. This allowed them to reach across the entire city, without bias toward factors such as demographics and income level.

They used an Environmental Protection Agency modeling tool to calculate emissions at a much more detailed level than previous studies have done. Using factors such as vehicle type, speed and roadway type, they calculated the carbon dioxide produced for every mile for every vehicle.
Emissions reductions were seen across both the densest parts and more suburban areas of Seattle. This suggests that grocery delivery in rural areas could lower carbon dioxide production quite dramatically.

“We tend to think of grocery delivery services as benefiting urban areas, but they have really significant potential to offset the environmental impacts of personal shopping in rural areas as well,” Wygonik said.

Work commuters are offered a number of incentives to reduce traffic on the roads through discounted transit fares, vanpools and carpooling options. Given the emissions reductions possible through grocery delivery services, the research raises the question of whether government or industry leaders should consider incentives for consumers to order their groceries online and save on trips to the store.

Exxon Oil Pipeline Failure

We have all the same images that we have come to expect with oil spills--usually they are on coastlines, but Arkansas became an inland sea of oil over the weekend.  Pictures of vast quantities of oil in places where it doesn't belong abound (despite efforts to keep the press away).  The heart wrenching pictures of unsuspecting wildlife caught in the mucky goo, most of them to die of it, but often not until they have been washed and manhandled by people attempting to save them.

Exxon admitted yesterday that they have sopped up 12,000 gallons so far--how much of that is oil versus water is yet to be determined, but given that they have yet to get the place spotless, that would be about 15% of the daily capacity of the Pegasus pipeline.  The Sierra Club puts the oil on the ground at 86,000 gallons, which would be the better part of a days worth out in people's yards and streams and who knows what else.

Now, it is entirely possible that the proposed Keystone pipeline would not suffer from the problems that the pipelines that were built in the 1940's and 1950's are subject to, and maybe it isn't fair to compare the two--but the timing of this spill is not good for porponents of pipelines as a way to have oil travel.  I personally would far rather see the money spent on updating the national grid, modernizing power throughout the country, increasing solar and wind more broadly, and burying our power lines--because global climate change is here to stay, and we might as well start dealing with it.

The pessimist in me says that until we empty all the oil out of the ground we are not going to relent on that as an energy source, no matter what the consequences, both long and short term, are.   We do have to talk about compensation to people whose lives and property are disrupted or ruined as a result of pipeline failures.  Sad, and all too predictable.