My 5: David Blume, Executive Director, International Institute for Ecological Agriculture
September 22, 2009 by
Caryn Green
Filed under
Agriculture, Biofuels, Blog, Books, Front Page, My 5, Organic
Blue Planet Green Living (BPGL) asked David Blume to answer two questions we like to ask our interviewees. Blume is the founder and Executive Director of the International Institute for Ecological Agriculture, author of Alcohol Can Be A Gas, and a frequent speaker at ecological, sustainability and agricultural conferences throughout the Americas. Following are his responses. — Julia Wasson, Publisher
5 Ways to Save the Planet
BPGL: What are the five most important things we can do to save the planet?
BLUME:
David Blume, Founder and Executive Director of the Institute for Sustainable Agriculture. Photo: Courtesy David Blume
- Stop buying oil. Replace oil with ethanol. Ethanol is a clean-burning, high-octane fuel that sells for around $1.80 a gallon. You don’t even have to pay more to do the right thing.
- Only buy organic products. Vote with your dollars to send the message that you’re not going to continue doing business as usual.
- Figure out what is enough. Instead of more, more, more, decide how much materialism you’re going to engage in and stop consuming beyond what’s enough.
- Grow at home. Growing your own food is a tremendously political act. If everybody grew some of their own food, we could cut down on the amount that has to be transported.
- Acknowledge that capitalism works best on a small local scale. Buy local products even if it costs more. Don’t spend your money so that the capital leaves your area forever. Localizing the economy takes down the whole multinational capitalist system.
2 Minutes with the President
BPGL: If you had two minutes to talk with President Obama, what would you say to him?
BLUME: We need to make a commitment to provide all our own energy from within our own borders in the next 10 years, on land and on sea, using solar, wind, and alcohol. If we accomplish that one goal, we could completely change the global perception of the U.S. from a giant, predatory parasite to an exporter of our own surplus energy.
David Blume
Founder and Executive Director
International Institute for Ecological Agriculture
Author, Alcohol Can Be A Gas
Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)
Related Post
From Swamp to Gas Pump – Cattails Take on New Role
A great platform for a Presidential campaign. But that job looks like a ball and chain around the neck. Making cattails and other aquatic weeds into fuel is the only way to finance their control. I’m working with 2 groups in Africa who are just starting to harvest cattails for charcoal making. Charcoal is the fuel that the local market is ready for, but I’m hoping to move them up later to healthier fuels. The quantities available are staggering, and the problems they cause have the people staggering. Cattails are a large part of African desertification and many other problems (flooding, quelea, malaria, bilharzia…) too. Thanks for pioneering the path I need to lead some distant friends down.
Reply
Caryn Green Reply:
September 24th, 2009 at 6:11 am
Stephen-
Your comments provide more evidence that so often the problem is the solution.
Thanks for entering the dialogue.
Reply
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