Going Halfsies – A New And Improved Model

With a 56-pound English Bulldog as my companion, I can't really say that I live alone or in solitude.  As my youngest sister said recently, Mugsy is the perfect dog for a man because he makes all of the typical noises.

I assume she was referring to my brother-in-law, not me but she's right, this breed of Bulldog isn't stealth.  If they aren’t snoring, they are typically snorting, licking, slurping, purring, etc.

But I do eat out a lot, both because I don't really cook and because I enjoy good food and because it's simply my favorite way to socialize.  I learned recently from an article by Nona Willis Aronowitz, an Associate Editor for GOOD that “almost half the food produced in the United States today is thrown away-including $44 billion worth in the retail industry.”

This means that even though 50 million people in this country experience food insecurity or malnutrition, half of all the food produced in this country either becomes part of the 250,000,000 tons of garbage generated in this country each year or the 2%-3% composted annually in backyards.

GOOD has made me aware of a remarkable solution that I hope will be embraced by the many restaurants where I eat in Durham, North Carolina – rightfully ranked one of America's foodiest cities.

Go Halfsies with the slogan “eat less – give more” is a movement that encourages restaurants to give their restaurant-goers, such as me or you, a year around way to simultaneously eat a healthier meal portion, reduce food waste and support the fight against hunger.

Participating restaurants give patrons the option of ordering a meal and while paying the full price receive a half portion.  The restaurant then donates the other half of the price of that meal on behalf of the patron to the Halfsies organization where it is used to fight hunger.

Even better, 60% of the donated funds are redistributed to local nonprofits in the community where the participating restaurant customers and employees work and live, while 30% of the donated funds are used to address issues of poverty and hunger globally and the remaining 10% is used to cover the administrative and operating costs.

To me this seems like a major evolution of and improvement on the “restaurant week” model that often occurs at this time of year in many parts of the country, typically promoted by a private concern and where participating restaurants offer a prefix meal. 

Halfsies is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization based in Austin, Texas.  To learn more how this works and to encourage the participation of restaurants you might frequent to participate click on this link to open and print a short flyer.

This model for eating smaller portions while making it easier to give more to help those in need is as innovative as it is worthy and deserves our immediate time and attention to broaden awareness and generate participation.

Who Me? I Don’t Have Any Dialect

According to a study, conducted in 2009, newborns cry with an accent learned from the language patterns heard while in utero even though the full articulation of a language will not occur until seven or eight years after birth.

These are tidbits from the book published late last year entitled Now You See It by Professor Cathy N. Davidson, a local author and academician where I live, that I’ve recalled during the period that I've been forced to use voice-activated software to compose this blog while my wrist and arm continue to heal from an accident three months ago.

The software works okay but it has resulted in some hilarious typos. I was relieved this week when, without realizing it, I found I had actually been using the keyboard for several paragraphs until my hand gave out and I had to revert to dictating.

Apparently the voice activation software has been struggling with my dialect, which is defined as “a particular form of a language that is peculiar to a specific region or social group.”

It obviously doesn't understand “North Carolinian” which my family out west humorously noted I had begun to pick up within a few months after I moved here more than two decades ago.  Actually, there are many different dialects in this state and it's definitely not the first time in my life that I've been exposed to a regional dialect.

Where I grew up, in the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, teachers worked very hard during the first years of elementary school to convert any sign of the dialect of that region into Standard American English just as they did when my parents went to school there.

My paternal grandparents, with whom I had almost daily or weekly contact during my early years, spoke with a dialect they picked up from their grandparents who, in the mid-1800s had migrated up into those Rocky Mountains from the New England, Mid-Atlantic and South regions, where dialects had evolved from those of European ancestors.

For example, my grandparents used the words “crick” for “creek,” “card” for “cord,” and “harse” for “horse” etc.  It was probably more pronounced because they had ranched and homesteaded in that extremely rural area after migrating north from where my grandmother was born near Franklin, Idaho, the first town in that state and just a few miles south of where the Bear River Massacre had occurred just over two decades before my grandfather was born a few miles south in Richmond, Utah.

As humorously noted in this month’s issue of my university alumni magazine, that even today that dialect softens but varies only slightly as you move south from Eastern Idaho through Utah.  And I've noticed that in, Durham North Carolina where I live now, when history books portray quotes in the dialect of people living here back in the mid to late 1800s, it is very similar to those of my grandparents out in Idaho.

A good way to see what I mean or to check on the dialects in other states is to click on this link and then click on “maps and results” and then on the state of your choice or you can just click on a word or pronunciation and then see maps of the United States showing locations where that pronunciation is found.  For example, you can check facts such as the percentage of people who pronounce the word a certain way, e,g, those who say “pee-can” (17%) for “pecan” as we do in North Carolina or “pa-cahn” (21%) as we did in Idaho.

Durham isn’t listed but it would be interesting to see what percent pronounce it “Dur-Ham,” as some telemarketers do, or “Derm” as some North Carolinians do or “Dooorrum” as others do or the much more prevalent “Duram” as I do. It is easy to identify “transplants” to this area simply based on how they pronounce Durham.

The link above is to The Harvard Dialect Survey.  But you probably won't be able to actually see how far your own diction has strayed until you test drive voice-activated software such as Dragon Naturally Speaking which I continue to use and am grateful for its invention.

Learning From A Devastating 60 Year Period

Nine years before the first of my ancestors arrived in America in 1639 there were more than a billion acres of forest covering half of what is now the United States of America.  Every county in my adopted home state of North Carolina was 75% or more forested.

Within a hundred years of first arriving on these shores, Americans had already begun to embrace the practice of replanting to replace and sustain forests, a sense of stewardship obviously lost on outdoor billboard companies and their allies in the North Carolina General Assembly who insisted on being exempt from this responsibility while winning approval for a constitutionally-questionable public gratuity to clear-cut 700,000 publicly owned roadside trees.

These companies are put to shame by George Washington, the father of our country, who, upon his return from leading the Continental Army to victory in the Revolutionary War, voluntarily replanted forests including stands of tulip poplars and other trees still being tended by arborists today as a lesson from our nation’s first president in both stewardship and good business practices.

The fact that a full two-thirds of the deforestation that has taken place in this country over the past nearly 400 years occurred during the 60 years between 1850 and 1910 was not lost on President Theodore Roosevelt, our 26th president, as he rode the train in 1901 carrying the body of the just-assassinated President McKinley back to Washington, DC.  While they were descending down toward Renovo, Pennsylvania from the upper Allegheny Mountains through the uplands of the Susquehanna River Roosevelt could see nothing but seas forested by nothing but stump and more stumps.

This area today, reforested and populated with elk herds and protected and made sustainable in the public interest with numerous state parks and forests, is highly ranked for hiking and river trails as well as working forests.  Much of this turnaround was driven by Roosevelt, a Republican who understood that the then-newly coined term "conservation” was crucial as a balance when the free market is unable to restrain itself from spilling “underpriced” costs on the public.

Better known today as one of America's most spectacular historic mansions, Biltmore Estate at the time George Vanderbilt first assembled it’s 100,000 acres, just 10 years before Roosevelt's inauguration, had already been deforested and blighted by over farming and unsustainable timber cutting.  Reforested by Vanderbilt, Biltmore is now known as part of the birthplace of forest conservation in America having groomed Gifford Pinchot, who rose to national prominence under Roosevelt to manage national forests, and for spinning off what became the beginning of Pisgah National Forest, one of the nation's first.

More than 40% of the South, by far this nation’s most forested region, had been deforested by 1910 with nearly all of that occurring in just the previous 60 years.  By comparison, the 150 million acres of forest in the Rocky Mountain region, much of which is managed in the public interest, has remained stable for nearly 400 years.

Today, not counting urban forests, about 76% of North Carolina's mountain region is forested, nearly all of it reforested except for one of the nation’s few remaining old growth groves, the tiny 3,800 acre Joyce Kilmer Memorial Forest, named for the author of the famous poem Trees.

By comparison only 59% of the coastal plain region and just 51% of the Piedmont or “foothills” region of North Carolina, where I live, remain as forest land, nearly all reforested.  By 1873 Piedmont counties such as Durham had been deforested from 75% or more acres in 1630 down to between 19% and 37%.  As agriculture declined, forest land in counties such as Durham recovered to as much as 50% where it stands today.

The challenge to forest lands today comes from urbanization and related fragmentation.  More than 12,000,000 acres will have fallen to development between 1992 and 2020 with another 19 million projected to fall between 2020 and 2040, a combined area nationwide as large as the state of North Carolina.

The nation’s development footprint grew from 10.1% in 1982 to 13.3% in 2000, the last year for which information appears to be available.  This expansion significantly exceeded population growth so the issue isn't growth versus no growth, but much smarter growth that includes compensation with the replanting of large specimen trees, putting a comprehensive market value on urban forests, valuing the benefits of large specimen trees in parking lots and downtowns and along all streets and other roadsides and medians.

The issue is also to place the full market value on sprawl that includes the spillover costs of infrastructure including highways for which such development pays far below its share of cost or, as in the case of light rail transit proposed in our area, is exempted entirely.

It is crucial that new development shoulder its true costs so that an appropriately higher market value is put on historic preservation and adaptive reuse of existing structures.

“I” State Confusion

It happened again.  Last week during a luncheon, after learning I was born in Idaho, a very nice lady seated near me responded “so what did you think of those caucuses.”

For some reason, like that famous 1976 cover of The New Yorker magazine, many people, especially in the Southeast including my adopted home state of North Carolina, seem to think only as far west as Iowa when they hear the place name of Idaho.

Granted, along with Indiana and Illinois, they are both “I” states and all four are known for growing vegetables that are starches.  But Idaho is about much more than famous potatoes. 

As a boy, whenever we traveled across the state to visit adjacent Washington, one of six states that border Idaho along with a foreign country, I was always mystified that Washington State’s nickname, self-proclaimed by a realtor is “The Evergreen State.”  After traveling across Idaho through several mountain ranges and carpets of forest it always appeared to me that the majority of Washington state was actually barren Columbia Plateau which does in fact cover nearly 40%.

Sixty-percent of Idaho is covered by national forests alone.  But just as the City Council in nearby Raleigh did when it emerged from a recent meeting to humorously self-proclaim it the city of innovation in hopes it might become one and catch up with Durham, an enthusiast in Idaho leapfrogged its dominance for timber, cattle, horses and gemstones in the early part of the last century to proclaim it famous for potatoes in hopes the then fledgling crop would catch on 1,700 miles east in the Chicago restaurants of another I-state.

Today, savvy marketers understand that genuine and overarching place brands must reflect traits that a community or state truly owns in the minds of both external and internal audiences rather than just the momentary aspirations of boosters.  It is critical that places be able to deliver on the personalities they convey.

That same basaltic Columbia Plateau spills out of Washington and carves to the south of Idaho's 80 recognized mountain ranges, straddling the mighty Snake River through the small portion now famous for potatoes as it curls up through Eastern Idaho stopping short of my birthplace along the North Fork of the river in the northeast tip of that nook bordering Montana and Wyoming where the Targhee National Forest scales the 10,000 foot Centennial and the 14,000 foot Teton ranges bordering Yellowstone National Park.

With its extended northern panhandle, Idaho is deceptively large, eclipsing all of the New England states combined.  If all of the lower 48 states were ironed out flat, Idaho is so mountainous that it would be the largest. It also has waterfalls higher than Niagara, canyons deeper than the Grand Canyon, 2000 natural lakes, 16,000 miles of rivers and streams (nine of which are designated wild and scenic) and 50 mountain peaks over 10,000 feet.

While not ethnically diverse by any standard, Idaho has the largest community of Basques outside of Spain and France and it is the aboriginal home of nine tribes of native American Indians, four of which still have a major federally-recognized presence today.

Idaho is also much more sparsely populated than most states with just 19 persons per square mile compared to 87 nationwide and 196 in North Carolina.

But even had she been thinking 1100 miles further west than Iowa, my seat mate at the luncheon would still have been partly correct.  This year the Idaho Republican Party will switch from a primary to caucuses to elect delegates.

So while Iowa and Idaho are quite different geographically, they are not all that different politically.

Blasting Away 250 Million Tons Of Garbage

There is an excellent article by David Wolman in the February issue of Wired Magazine about the progress being made in the effort to use plasma technology to transform garbage into reusable gases such as hydrogen and carbon monoxide or electricity, in other words, energy.

Wolman humorously makes a great point when he writes that “we throw two-thirds of it in landfills while somehow managing to feel virtuous that we put last night’s empty wine bottle in the recycling bin.”  He also cites figures showing that the US generates about 250,000,000 tons of trash a year, with only about 85,000,000 tons of it being diverted into composting and recycling.

The article details the incredible progress made by a venture named S4 Energy Solutions, which, financed in part by millions of dollars in backing from the 12.5 billion dollar Waste Management, is refining a process to convert  municipal, commercial, industrial and medical waste streams into renewable energy and industrial products using plasma arc technology.

Given the the daily capacity of their test facility there may one day be up to 34,000 such plants making the nation’s 3000 active landfills obsolete and hopefully, even processing waste from more than 10,000 old ones to rescue at-risk groundwater.

The article reminded me of another article I read almost two decades ago by John McPhee in the New Yorker magazine, entitled Duty Of Care and again later in a compilation entitled Irons In The Fire detailing the now successful efforts by entrepreneurs to recycle what was then 250 million tires discarded each year in the US.  Today the annual number is more than 300 million tires or one per year for every person in the country.

I enjoy Wired Magazine and to me it is well worth the subscription to be able to read the full version of articles like these well before they  eventually appear the web, and ever since I began reading John McPhee's articles and books in the late 1970s (which by the way, was about the time work on plasma gasification began) I never miss an opportunity to  find a new one.

At the time of McPhee’s article there were over 1 billion discarded tires in massive stockpiles around the country but today 90% of all tires generated annually are now being recycled to an end-use market and the number of remaining stockpiles is down around 100 million, so I don't find it strange at all to believe that one day in the near future 100% of all garbage could be recycled into energy.

Even 36 years after it was first published, McPhee’s book entitled Coming Into The Country captures the essence of The Great Land, where I lived and worked most of the 1980s, better than any other.

But then again I am the kind of guy who’s fascinated by the How It’s Made TV series on the Science Channel.