Granted, it's kind of a tabloid stunt to immediately mention that a man eats roadkill when he may intend his broader message to be about sustainability and the distance between us and our food, but I'm going to do it anyway. I came across a few links about urban foraging with a twist. Urban foraging includes things like collecting edible vegetables, plants, and herbs from vegetation that is growing around the city, in parks and so on...but for non-vegetarians, where's the meat? (Obviously, my answer to that question would be: in the dumpster. We get more meat than we can deal with so we often distribute more of it to friends than we keep ourselves). The articles offered another take on the location of the meat: dead on the road or living in the pond, in the park, in the garbage in the back alley... (The roadkill article is cleverly titled "The 100 Mile-an-hour Diet").

Sojourners and the United Nations are the latest in a series of bad press for biodiesel (or "agrofuels" in general) which is not completely undeserved and not completely new to me. I'm more interested in biodiesel than ethanol (at least corn based ethanol) and I'd heard of the countries, like Malaysia, which burned forests to grow palm oil for biodiesel. I'd heard of the Nitrous Oxide issue (biodiesel produces a higher level than regular diesel, although much lower on a variety of other greenhouse gases). I knew that biodiesel wasn't a silver bullet to solve all our problems -- that even at maximum production it would only satisfy a fraction of our current demand. But I'm interested in the little niche markets that can be tapped for fuel, like animal fats and waste vegetable oil (WVO), which can be converted into biodiesel. (I have toyed with the idea of converting our car to run on straight vegetable oil and making a symbiotic relationship with a nearby take-out Chinese food restaurant, where I'd collect their waste oil and filter it for fuel use, but I'm not convinced it's without risk to the engine). The biodiesel we get from our co-op is from local soybeans, so we are probably contributing to an increase in the cost of tofu, but I still think it's a step better than conventional diesel or gasoline. Hopefully the fact that the demand is here can focus attention and research dollars on renewable alternatives to petroleum. Despite the ominous tone to the Sojourners article, I think I mostly agree with it -- especially the last part: the best solution to the issue is to use less fuel of any variety. Click below for short clips and links to the full articles.

With the political firestorm surrounding Clintons' remarks about Martin Luther King Jr. and Lyndon Johnson, MLKjr's birthday yesterday, and the MLK holiday coming up this weekend, this seemed appropriate: put MLK on the 20 dollar bill.

Quote: King symbolizes the triumph of love over hatred, of nonviolence over violence, and of community values over money values.

No American is more qualified than King to replace Andrew Jackson on the twenty-dollar bill. Jackson's presidential legacy is marked by the barbaric Indian Removal Act which evicted at least 47,000 Creek, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokee and Seminole Indians from their homes so their land could be turned into cotton-growing slave plantations. The Indian Removal Act led directly to the infamous Trail of Tears, where four thousand Cherokee men, women and children died in a forced march west.

Our strategy is to gather names to pressure President Bush and Congress to put King on the 20. Together we can make this happen!

I'm a big fan of non-profit design. I've been daydreaming since my college days about one permutation or another of my plan to start a non-profit design firm or focus a freelance career around non-profits. I continue to work on this idea, and I think it's still a real option for the future (after Janel is done with her dissertation, assuming we have to move somewhere when she gets a job offer). And, of course, the diversity of non-profits and projects is my favorite part of working where I currently work. So I was pleased to stumble on a design blog that focuses on exactly the kind of design that interests me most. Osocio "...is dedicated to social advertising and non-profit campaigns...the place where marketing and activism collide."  Here's a few environmental campaigns that caught my eye.