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Greetings!This edition of the Ecology Center newsletter contains an update on our work, with ideas for protecting the environment, building community, and creating justice. The Ecology Center has provided free, non-commercial information to the public since 1969. We help people make informed choices about issues that affect them, others, and the planet. To this end, we make the EcoCalendar, the EcoDirectory, and this Newsletter accessible and free to all. Please support us and the services we provide by becoming a member of the Ecology Center. You can visit our website at ecologycenter.org, read our blog, or follow us on Facebook. What's New at the Ecology Center? 1. The Ecology Center Store Shines a Light on Candles 2. Action Alert: Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative
3. Member Sale, Crafts Fairs, and Green Holiday Guides 4. News from the Farmers' Market EBT Project
5. Farmers' Market Re-selling Scandal: A Matter of Trust 6. Farm Tours: Pomo Tierra Ranch
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 1. The Ecology Center Store Shines a Light on Candles
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The Ecology Center Store regularly researches consumer products to determine the least toxic, most environmentally responsible choice. Store Manager Alison Moreno turned her investigative eye toward candles, just as we enter the darkest time of the year.
Candles can be a great way to help you relax or bring warmth to a room. However, candles are also one of the overlooked causes of poor indoor air quality and can especially affect your children's health. Most candles on the market today are made from paraffin wax or a blend of paraffin and other waxes. Paraffin is a derivative of petroleum; it's the final byproduct in the petroleum refining chain.
When burned, paraffin candles release carcinogenic toxins such as benzene, toluene, formaldehyde, acetaldehyde, acrolein, and soot into the air. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has determined that benzene and toluene are probable human carcinogens. There are much safer alternatives to paraffin-based candles that are not derived from fossil fuels.
Click here to read more.
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2. Action Alert: Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative
In the Spring of this year, Terrain Magazine covered the plight of Berkeley resident Sophie Hahn, an attorney and community activist who hired Willow Rosenthal, founder of West Oakland's food security project City Slicker Farms, to transform her dead lawn into an extremely productive urban farm. Instead of hiring a gardener to tend her roses, Hahn hired a farmer to tend her vegetables. Her backyard now produces enough food to feed five or six families. Hahn wanted to share the surplus with her neighbors, but also to offset the costs associated with producing the food. To that end, she wanted to charge her neighbors a small fee for weekly baskets of produce and eggs. The exchange would be similar to a Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) model, in which people pay a subscription fee to a farm in return for regular deliveries of seasonal food.
Hahn figured it would be easy to get a license from the City of Berkeley to run her mini-farm, since building a local food system is part of Berkeley's long-term Climate Action Plan. But that was not the case. The process of getting a license to do what she wanted turned out to be convoluted and expensive, so Hahn's plan stalled.
Since we covered Hahn's dilemma in the spring, she has joined forces with Berkeley City Councilperson Jesse Arreguin to change a few key paragraphs in the City's zoning code to accommodate the burgeoning urban agriculture movement. The Berkeley Food Policy Council, which the Ecology Center has recently re-invigorated after a decade hiatus, is advocating for the zoning code amendment that Arreguin introduced to the City Council in late October. The Berkeley City Council voted to ask the city's planning department to explore changing the laws. You can read the text of the proposed amendment here.
In pursuing this code change, which is also referred to as the Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative, Hahn's aims are simple: "The model we seek to enable allows families and individuals to leverage their investment in edible gardening know-how, infrastructure, materials and labor by sharing the bounty of their gardens with neighbors or friends - in exchange for other goods and/or monetary support."
From the Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative website:
While there are no limits on what can be grown in a residential Berkeley garden, the sale or trade of garden produce - even a cooperative arrangement between a few neighbors and friends - requires an onerous "Moderate Impact Home Occupation" permit. The need to obtain this costly and time consuming permit acts as a bar to small scale, virtually no-impact "Urban CSA" types of enterprise. The legislation being introduced amends the Zoning Code's permitting process for Moderate Impact Home Occupations, which already includes an exception for Teacher Related Home Occupations. A second exception is added for Non-Processed Edible Home Occupations, closely paralleling the terms of the exception for home teachers.
The amendment has been referred to the Berkeley Planning Department, which is mulling the implications of allowing small-scale retail sales of produce in residential neighborhoods. They will be weighing what kinds of impacts the changes might have, including whether or not they would lead to larger-scale commercial farming operations in city limits. The Planning Department is also evaluating whether changes to zoning law to facilitate urban agriculture should be considered a priority at all.
The Ecology Center encourages you to sign on as a supporter of the Berkeley Edible Garden Initiative, as part of the larger effort to bring greater food security and advance Berkeley's Climate Action goals.
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 3. Member Sale, Crafts Fairs, and Green Holiday Guides
The holidays are almost upon us. Many of us will be feasting, traveling, gifting, and coming together with friends and family. The increased consumption that occurs around the holidays results in increased quantities of waste. However, the increased togetherness offers many opportunities to share ideas and model your commitment to sustainability. The Ecology Center aims to make it easier for you to make thoughtful choices this season. To that end, we host sales and crafts fairs, and offer these free guides:
Member Appreciation Sale & Holiday Store Hours
Please note the Ecology Center Store's December hours:
December 1 - 23: Tuesday - Sunday 11am - 6pm
December 24: 11am - 4pm
December 25 - January 3: Closed
Sunday, December 5th is our annual Member Appreciation Sale.
Stop in for free gifts, hot cider, and a 20% members-only discount on all regularly priced store merchandise.
Great Gift Ideas from the Ecology Center Store
This holiday, give gifts full of possibility, like seeds, cookbooks, or botanical paints. A thoughtful purchase from the Ecology Center Store can be the first step down the path of simplicity, sustainability, or self-sufficiency. We stock a wide variety of "Do it yourself" books. Our seasonal produce wheel, stainless steel lunch kits, and ziploc bag drying racks make terrific gifts. We have a large selection of safe, reclaimed, and sustainably harvested wooden toys. PlanToys are made from old rubberwood trees that have ceased producing rubber. The company uses only non-toxic, environmentally friendly glues, dyes, and finishes. Give a boost to the recycling industry by buying recycled glass and paper gifts. Stimulate organic agriculture by purchasing clothing made from organically grown fibers. A gift to a friend can also be a gift to the earth. Who wouldn't love a gift certificate for the Ecology Center Store or the Berkeley Farmers' Market?
Berkeley Farmers' Market Holiday Crafts Fair
Saturdays, December 4, 11, and 18 10am - 4pm at Civic Center Park in Berkeley The Berkeley Farmers' Market 19th annual Holiday Crafts Fair features California's best organic farmers, great hot lunch options, live music all day, and local craftspeople and artisans selling a variety of beautiful handcrafted gifts such as ceramics, fine art, jewelry, cards, clothes, tote bags, body products, toys, garden tools, and bike trailers. Our Farmers' Market staff has developed Craft Fair Environmental Guidelines that vendors adhere to, which ensure that their craft products are environmentally sound. The holidays are a blizzard of economic activity. Spend with intention: go local and keep your dollars circulating within the community! |
4. News from the Farmers' Market EBT Project
 The use of electronic benefit transfer cards (EBT) - which replaced paper food stamps in the late 90s - is on the rise at farmers' markets around the state, thanks in part to the work of the Ecology Center's Farmers' Market EBT Project.
The latest numbers, provided by the California Department of Social Services, show combined EBT use at California Farmers' Markets currently at about $150,000 per month, and growing. Although this is still a small percentage of total EBT use, it's all healthy food from local farmers going directly to people who need it most.
Many California farmers' markets opened their markets to food stamp shoppers for the first time this year, and many other markets expanded outreach and incentives to bring in more EBT shoppers. However, there are still plenty of markets that do not accept EBT. Thankfully, the Ecology Center's Farmers' Market EBT Project has been funded by CDFA for another year so that we can offer technical assistance to more California farmers' markets implementing and promoting EBT access at the markets.
This year we saw new support for farmers' market EBT systems through the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service (FNS) farmers' market program. Many applied, and a few California market projects were funded by the USDA Farmers' Market Promotion Program to start or expand EBT access. The Ecology Center Farmers' Market EBT Project provided assistance to more than twenty market associations setting up new EBT access systems, from Yreka to San Diego, and we posted new useful resources and links for farmers' markets on our website.
Through our Farmers' Market EBT Project, we offer personalized help to market managers to set up systems for accounting, staffing, and farmer training. Our markets were the first in the state to accept EBT, so we have a wealth of knowledge and experience to share. The Ecology Center can design customized fliers and posters for promoting the markets to EBT cardholders and can help connect market associations with community partners to together promote EBT access more widely. We can also design and order free tokens to be used as scrip for markets starting EBT programs.
Case Study
The Modesto Certified Farmers' Market has been operating in downtown Modesto since 1979, most recently with hard-working market manager Marie Uber in charge. This summer, while managing two markets each week with more than 30 farmers, Uber worked through the applications, contracts, logistics, and promotions of setting up the markets to accept EBT, with help from the Ecology Center Farmers' Market EBT Project.
It took a little more than three months for Uber to go from first applying to accept EBT to finally having a wireless POS and tokens, farmers trained, signs up, and all systems in place for her first EBT customers. The application was a bit of a challenge, and, as sometimes happens, there were delays due to equipment problems that needed fixing. But everything finally came together in August. The program is doing about $200 each week in EBT business at the two weekly markets. Uber knows that more SNAP customers would enjoy supporting local farmers at the markets if they knew their EBT cards are now welcome, and she is trying hard to get a story about the magic of wooden nickels and wireless terminals to her local paper.
Read more about other markets we have assisted through our EBT Project here.
As California unemployment remains high, more people than ever need help from food assistance programs, and are shopping for groceries with EBT cards. The Ecology Center remains committed to the principle that everyone should have access to fresh, healthy food, and we are working hard to make that a reality.
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5. Farmers' Market Re-selling Scandal: A Matter of Trust
 This past fall, an NBC affiliate in Los Angeles conducted an undercover investigation of several farmers' markets in Southern California, and found multiple instances of vendors lying about what they were selling and what they were growing. They were simply reselling produce that they were obtaining elsewhere. Many of the residents who shop at farmers' markets intentionally shop there to directly support the farmers who are growing their food. This recent expose has spurred much mistrust. How can you be sure that the farmers from whom you bought food at a farmers' market actually grew that food? How can you be sure that they grew it in the manner that they are advertising, such as organically?
Click here to read more.
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6. Farm Tours: Pomo Tierra Ranch
 Katie H. Michel, BFM Operations Manager, recently traveled to Pomo Tierra Ranch in the Anderson Valley. Here's what she learned about this Berkeley Farmers' Market vendor.
I drove through the gate at Pomo Tierra in the late afternoon. The property is located near Yorkville on Highway 128, which winds through the Anderson Valley in southern Mendocino County. I say "property" as opposed to "farm," because, as I learned during my visit, the name "Pomo Tierra" signifies more than the farm enterprise we know at our markets - it names a collective that has existed there since the early 1970s.
The name "Pomo Tierra" itself has multiple readings. The Pomo people are one linguistic branch of the Native American people of northern California, and so, "Pomo Tierra," may signify "land of the Pomo." Alternately, in French, "Pomme de Terre" means "apple of the earth," a phrase that usually refers to the potato. Of course, Bernie grows both apples and potatoes, making this play on words particularly apt.
Click here to read more.
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Did you know that you can call us with your environmental questions? Our Information Desk staff will give you referrals and provide information to help you make sound ecological choices. Email erc@ecologycenter.org or give us a call at 510-548-2220 x233. To subscribe to or unsubscribe from this newsletter, send a note to newsletter@ecologycenter.org.
The Ecology Center is a membership organization providing environmental information and direct services to promote sustainable living and a healthy, socially just world. Please support this community resource for the environment by becoming a member or by making a donation. Support our work on-line at http://www.ecologycenter.org/donate/
[Banner photo credits: Beck Cowles, Arthur Chapman, Frances Kawamoto, Susy Morris]
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