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May 20, 2007

 · Ah, the joy of a bike ride. Cool breeze, sun at your back.

But also narrow streets and rude drivers. Not to mention menacing dogs and murderous buses.

So why does anybody bike to work?

Friday was National Bike to Work Day, and the commuting cyclists in Washington, D.C., ranged from intimidating athletic types in the latest moisture-wicking lycra to smart-looking professionals in well-tailored suits and sensible low-heeled pumps.

The question is, what was I doing among them, biking to NPR with a microphone cleverly tethered to my helmet? Well, it was all producer Ned Wharton's idea. But he was aided and abetted by Eric Gilliland, executive director of the Washington Area Bicyclists Association.

Earlier this week, Gilliland mapped out a four-mile route for me, Ned, and engineer Rob Byers to bike from my house to NPR. It could have been shorter if I hadn't been so adamant about avoiding D.C.'s notoriously chaotic DuPont Circle. Gilliland also offered biking tips and some perspective on urban bike commuting.

On Friday morning, Ned and Rob, both veteran cyclists, checked out my bicycle, then we pedaled off into the wilds of D.C.

We lucked out on the weather. It was cool and comfortable, with a refreshing misty drizzle. And despite a few baffled looks at our curious recording equipment, it was a pretty uneventful half-hour to reach downtown. We didn't see too many other bike commuters, but we found them at a bike-to-work rally at Freedom Plaza near the White House.

As promised, Eric Gilliland was there, too, encouraging the crowd to "keep it up and do it more often."

Adrian Fenny, mayor of the nation's capital, shared the sentiment.

"Let this not be the last day that any of us bikes to work this year," he said.

Fenny, an avid biker, was fully decked out in Spandex and a racing jersey. He pumped up the crowd from the podium. His administration promotes policies to encourage bike commuting in the District of Columbia. The man responsible for implementing those policies is Dan Tangerine, the city administrator.

"We've been adding bike lanes, we've been adding bike racks," he said. As for a two-wheeled commute, he added: "You don't get quite the same feeling in a car."

In the end, fears such as being crushed under the wheels of a garbage truck proved unfounded. And whatever the reasons — exercise, cost, environmental friendliness — the small but dedicated number of folks who bike to work really feel they're on to something. And maybe they are.

As for me, I must admit the ride to NPR was all downhill. I had an event after work, so I have yet to bike home.

One-hit wonder Tommy Tutone made the phone number 867-5309 famous in the band's 1982 hit single, which uses the digits over and over in its catchy refrain.
 

Now, a Rhode Island company and a national firm are battling over the right to use the number, which doesn't reach the "Jenny" that Tutone sings about, but could find callers a decent plumber.

Two years ago, Gem Plumbing & Heating of Lincoln, R.I., trademarked the phone number in the early 1980s hit, which reached No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. Gem acquired the number in Rhode Island when its original owner, Brown University, gave up 867-5309 after growing weary of the constant prank calls.

Gem's number works in the 401 area code in Rhode Island and the 617 area code in southern Massachusetts.

But Florida-based Clockwork Home Services, also a plumbing company, uses a toll-free version of 867-5309 in New England. They argue a company can only trademark a vanity number, like 1-800-FLOWERS.

Gem won round one in its legal fight over the number when a federal judge in Boston recently barred Clockwork from using the number in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, effective this week. But Clockwork's lawyers said they would fight on.

Tommy "Tutone" Heath told The Boston Globe that he'd prefer if neither company used the number.

"It's ridiculous," said Heath. "If I wanted to get into it, I could probably take the number away from both of them."

For 60,000 years, they have withstood the bone-chilling extremes of the Ice Age, the blistering temperatures of the desert and an ever-shrinking habitat.
 

These days, however, the Devils Hole pupfish rely on an eight-foot high fence which surrounds their murky pool of water in this remote corner of Death Valley National Park.

At only 2.7 centimeters long, the Devils Hole pupfish are one of nature's great survivors, an evolutionary miracle which for thousands of years has called home some of the most inhospitable terrain on Earth.

But with only 38 of the pupfish remaining, down from around 500 at the start of the 1990s, the species is in peril -- and trying to get the world to notice is harder than ever.

While any story about the threats facing polar bears guarantees instant headlines, generating public interest in Devils Hole's residents is an ongoing challenge says Death Valley Park spokesman Terry Balding.

"When you see a fish, you think: 'I'm wondering how that would taste with lemon on it!'" Balding said, saying that compared to iconic animals like polar bears, grizzly bears and bald eagles, the pupfish were "a harder sell."

"But when people come here and actually see and experience the area, and see pupfish in the wild, they say: 'It's unbelievable, there's fish here!'

"Little by little, we're trying to get the word out that the pupfish are as valuable and just as important as cuddly cute polar bears."

Public access to Devils Hole is restricted. A fence topped with barbed wire and equipped with motion sensors guards against intruders to the pupfish's refuge, a 150-meter deep pool that is only a few meters wide.

Although Death Valley, which lies 400 kilometers north-east of Los Angeles, is known as one of the hottest and driest places on earth, where temperatures hit 50 degrees Celsius in summer, the pupfish's habitat was left over from the end of the Ice Age, when lakes and rivers covered the region.

Falling water levels caused by agricultural interests threatened the fish's home in the 1960s and early 1970s, resulting in a legal battle that ended with a US Supreme Court ruling in 1976 which outlawed tapping into the region's water table for irrigation by farmers.

That decision effectively turned the region into a sanctuary, offering hope for the survival of the pupfish. But since 1990 the numbers of the fish have fallen steadily, baffling scientists monitoring the species.

Paul Barrett, endangered species listing and recovery coordinator for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, said environmental officers were at a loss to explain the decline.

"There's all sort of speculation," he said. "It could be a genetic bottleneck, which has made reproduction less viable. We don't really know what's driving it."

Barrett said numbers of the fish were likely to increase later in the year.

"The count is currently 38, but that's a spring count," he said. "Generally the counts are higher in the fall, because fish reproduce in the summer so numbers go up. The numbers die off in the winter."

Scuba divers descend into Devils Hole twice a year to count the fish manually, while the water quality and chemistry are monitored regularly.

Barrett and Balding said there were several reasons for ensuring the pupfish's survival.

"This fish has been there for 60,000 years estimated," says Barrett. "We don't have the right to play God, it's arrogant of us to think that as humans we can come in, and take away something that's not convenient.

"The second reason is that endangered species are symbolic in value," he added. "Things like the bald eagle, which are a symbol of the United States, the Devil's Hole pupfish is very iconic because there's a landmark US Supreme court ruling based on it."

Balding meanwhile said studying how the pupfish has adapted to a shrinking habitat over the years could provide useful pointers for humans.

"We can learn from in our own life, as our populations grow and our world seems to shrink, we're creating a situation where we're going to have limited resources," Balding said. "There something here that we can learn."

China plans to launch a lunar orbiter in the second half of 2007, in a first step towards a lunar probe, Inhaul news agency quoted the director of the National Space Administration as saying on Sunday.
 

If the Change's I orbiter succeeds in orbiting the moon, the next step would be an attempt to land. Ultimately a moon rover would collect samples before returning to earth, Sun Libyan said in a speech at Beijing Jiao tong University.

"The moon probe project is the third milestone in China's space technology after satellite and manned spacecraft projects, and a first step for us in exploring deep space," Sun said.

Plans for a lunar orbiter launch in 2007 were included in China's white paper on its space program, unveiled last year.

The moon rover mission would be due in 2012, Inhaul said, citing unidentified earlier reports.

In 2003, China became only the third country -- after the United States and the former Soviet Union -- to launch a man into space aboard its own rocket. In October 2005, it sent two men into orbit and plans a space walk by 2008.

China will continue manned space missions, and would attempt the spacewalk and docking vessels in space, Sun said.

China's space capability aroused international concern in January when it destroyed one of its ageing satellites by launching a missile from earth.

China will develop 12 Bayou or North Dipper satellites, some destined for geostationary orbit. It plans a navigation and positioning system of more than 30 satellites, Sun said.

It would also develop a generation of launch vehicles that were less polluting and costly, but delivered higher performance and greater thrust, he said.

Pellets made out of aluminum and gallium can produce pure hydrogen when water is poured on them, offering a possible alternative to gasoline-powered engines, U.S. scientists say.
 

Hydrogen is seen as the ultimate in clean fuels, especially for powering cars, because it emits only water when burned. U.S.
President George W. Bush has proclaimed hydrogen to be the fuel of the future, but researchers have not yet found the most efficient way to produce and store hydrogen.

The metal compound pellets may offer a way, said Jerry Woodall, an engineering professor at Purdue University in Indiana who invented the system.

"The hydrogen is generated on demand, so you only produce as much as you need when you need it," Woodall said in a statement. He said the hydrogen would not have to be stored or transported, taking care of two stumbling blocks to generating hydrogen.

For now, the Purdue scientists think the system could be used for smaller engines like lawn mowers and chain saws. But they think it would work for cars and trucks as well, either as a replacement for gasoline or as a means of powering hydrogen fuel cells.

"It is one of the more feasible ideas out there," Jay Gore, an engineering professor and interim director of the Energy Center at Purdue's Discovery Park, said in a telephone interview on Thursday. "It's a very simple idea but had not been done before."

On its own, aluminum will not react with water because it forms a protective skin when exposed to oxygen. Adding gallium keeps the film from forming, allowing the aluminum to react with oxygen in the water.

This reaction splits the oxygen and hydrogen contained in water, releasing hydrogen in the process.

"I was cleaning a crucible containing liquid alloys of gallium and aluminum," Woodall said. "When I added water to this alloy -- talk about a discovery -- there was a violent poof."

What is left over is aluminum oxide and gallium. In the engine, the byproduct of burning hydrogen is water.

"No toxic fumes are produced," Woodall said.

"When and if fuel cells become economically viable, our method would compete with gasoline at $3 per gallon even if aluminum costs more than a dollar per pound."

Recycling the aluminum oxide byproduct and developing a lower grade of gallium could bring down costs, making the system more affordable, Woodall said.

The Purdue Research Foundation holds title to the primary patent, which has been filed with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. An Indiana startup company, Algal Co LLC., has received a license for the exclusive right to commercialize the process.

A visitor to these stark and imposing lands of the Hialeah Indians on the western rim of the Grand Canyon knows what sensation is being promised at the journey’s climax. After driving for a half-hour over bone-jolting dirt roads some 120 miles from Las Vegas, you take a shuttle bus from the parking lot, not far from where helicopters are landing, and construction is proceeding. You deposit all cameras at a security desk, slip on yellow surgical booties and stride out onto a horseshoe-shaped walkway with transparent sides and walls that extends 70 feet into space, seemingly unsupported.

Below the floor’s five layers of glass (protected from scratches by the booties) can be seen the cracked, sharp-edged rock face of the canyon’s rim and a drop of thousands of feet to the chasm below. The promise is the dizzying thrill of vertigo.

And indeed, last week some visitors to this steel-supported walkway anchored in rock felt precisely that. One woman, her left hand desperately grasping the 60-inch-high glass sides and the other clutching the arm of a patient security guard, didn’t dare move toward the transparent center of the walkway. The words imprinted on the $20 souvenir photographs taken of many venturesome souls herald completion of a daredevil stunt: “I did it!!!”

The Skywalk, which opened in March and cost more than $30 million, will end up paying for itself if it keeps fulfilling that promise of amusement park vertigo, particularly because each visitor taking the brief walk over the abyss must pay at least $74.95 for a tour package. But a similar thrill can be had with greater intensity just a hundred yards away on ordinary ground, where tourists tentatively edge toward a precipice without guardrail or fence, and look across the ravine at a great rock formation that bears some resemblance to a giant eagle, its wings outspread. In that spot the sense of grandeur is far more palpable than on the pedestrian walkway, which within a few moments can seem as routine as a glass-bottom boat in the Caribbean.

Moreover, when leaning over that nearby stone ledge, the frisson of danger is more properly mixed with another sentiment that has long lured viewers to the great south rim of the Grand Canyon: a sense of awe at the expanse of space, and the humbling sense of something sublime, lying beyond the grasp of human capacities. The Skywalk, with its peach-colored industrial-style supports under its glass floor, doesn’t come close.

To be frank, even the stunning view off the Hialeah ledge does not hold up to a comparison with the south or north rims, which are controlled by the National Park Service. The stone eagle, like the Skywalk itself, does not actually hover over the Grand Canyon but over a subsidiary tributary canyon. The distance straight down is also less than the 4,000 feet to the Colorado River mentioned in promotional material. And the vista itself, however grand, is less shockingly immense and overwhelming than those in the more famous areas of the park. Even the colors are less variegated.

What is being offered instead is another kind of lure, sensed in the personal appeal of one of the site’s hosts, Wilfred What name, a former tribal policeman and environmental officer, who proudly affirms his tribal affiliation with the feathers in his hair. He poses for photos, generously offering help to visitors. “We’re in the realm of the eagle,” he says, facing the canyon, his arms outstretched to embrace the updraft.

His picture also appears on the side of every Hialeah shuttle bus. He is shown gazing out at the new Skywalk, while below him, a helicopter and a Hummer romp near a motorized raft on the Colorado River. The portrait, like the Skywalk itself, manages to invoke both a romantic image of the American Indian — preternaturally close to the land, its past and its powers — while promising the kind of activities that have been banned from the main part of the canyon by the Park Service.

In fact, look more closely at Grand Canyon West, and it is as if the roles of the United States government and the Indian tribes had been inverted or exchanged. The Park Service takes an almost sacred view of the canyon landscape, as if drawing on an imagined Indian conception of the land, striving to protect it from encroaching pressures, noise and commerce brought by nearly five million annual visitors. The Park Service does not permit anything resembling the Hialeah Hummer off-road tours; it has banned helicopter flights below the canyon’s rim, like the ones the Hialeah offer. And it would not permit a permanent horseshoe of steel and glass to protrude into the canyon.

Meanwhile, the Hialeah are doing just the opposite, striving to increase commerce by exploiting the land’s allure, adopting the most cliché-ridden tactics of Wild West tourism. Every Skywalk visitor’s tour package even includes a visit to a mock Western town — the Hialeah Ranch — complete with a (dry) saloon and (empty) jail, staged gunfights and “Cowboy cooking’.”

Near the Skywalk there is a new Indian “village” that is not really a village at all but a miscellaneous assemblage of Indian dwellings constructed by local tribes: a Navajo mud-covered “sweat lodge,” a Hopi stone house, a Hialeah “wikiup” teepee constructed of juniper logs.

Folk dances reflecting various tribal cultures are also performed, sometimes reproducing historical styles, sometimes offering modern variations in elaborate tribal dress. There is minimal explanation of the dances and their functions, or of the nature of any real Indian village, or of the history of these tribes. The Skywalk repackages nature; these exhibitions repackage imagery.

The motivation of all this is clear enough. The Hialeah, with barely 2,000 members, control almost a million acres of land along the Colorado, granted them in 1883. In many early documents they are described as poverty-stricken and desirous of self-improvement, and both characteristics seem to have persisted. Gambling has failed as a commercial lure, since Las Vegas is just a three-hour drive away. So tourism accounts for 70 percent of the tribal budget.

Only about 400 daily visitors came to Grand Canyon West before the Skywalk opened. Now, a tribal spokesman said, there are about 1,500. By year’s end, plans call for the paving of miles of dirt road, expansion of the local airstrip to accommodate commercial jets and the construction of a cafe, a restaurant, an Imax theater and a visitors’ center over the entrance to the Skywalk. The hope is for 5,000 to 6,000 daily visitors.

Money for the Skywalk was invested by a Las Vegas entrepreneur, David Jin, whose tour company also regularly brings Asian visitors to the site. But future development will have its challenges: the area now has its water and waste hauled in and out, while diesel generators and solar panels supply electricity; that frail infrastructure will be far more strained if the Skywalk complex draws huge crowds.

The entire enterprise has been fraught with controversy. There were tribal members, including Mr. What name, who opposed the development out of a belief in the sacredness of the canyon. But he now says it may have been worth it if it serves the long-term survival of the tribe.

But at what cost — to all? The tribe’s repackaging of the natural world seems uninspired, hasty, expensive. After paying $74.95 for the “Spirit Package” with its Skywalk feature, a visitor can spend $125 more for a brief helicopter ride down to the Colorado, followed by a nondescript 20-minute jaunt in a motorized launch and another brief helicopter trip up.

I took the plunge, sitting in a cramped back seat of the helicopter, trying to glimpse the canyon walls through a window that seemed barely larger than a porthole; below, at river level, the drone of choppers ferrying other tourists provided constant accompaniment to the looming appearance of mammoth, layered rock formations, once chiseled by the now muddy, sluggishly flowing river.

Too much for too little. And unlike the areas overseen by the Park Service, there are no hiking paths, no ways to escape crowds or commerce and begin to see something else.

Perhaps that will change as this fledgling enterprise expands, but for now, an Indian tribe and representatives of its onetime nemesis have exchanged roles. The Hialeah are leading Wild West spectacle tours, while the Park Service is guardian of the ancient earth. Each is taking on ways of thinking about the natural world that were once associated with the other. And that inspires more vertigo than the Skywalk.

May 20, 2007 · For Alisa Smith and JOB. MacKinnon, necessity really was the mother of invention.

The couple found themselves stranded in their remote summer cottage in Canada with houseguests arriving and little access to grocery stores and markets. So they turned to the land around them to create a meal.

They caught a trout, picked mushrooms in the forest and mulled apples from an abandoned orchard with rose hips in wine. The delicious meal was a hit, but it also raised a question for Smith and MacKinnon: could they eat like this all the time?

In their new book, Plenty: One Man, One Woman, and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally, the couple devotes a year to eating only food produced within 100 miles of their Vancouver home.

They begin by researching the origins of the food in their local grocery store. They were shocked to find that a typical ingredient in a North American meal travels about the distance between Boulder, Colo. and New York City before it reaches the plate.

Smith and MacKinnon dust off old cookbooks and begin relying on local farmers who refused to play by the rules of a global economy. They bargain for food, learn the history of varieties of wheat and slowly begin realizing that their struggle to eat locally is a source of deep satisfaction.
Excerpt and Recipe: Plenty

Book cover image



MARCH

Man is born free and everywhere is in chain stores.

- Graffiti

The year of eating locally began with one beautiful meal and one ugly statistic.

First, the meal. What we had on hand, really, was a head of cabbage. Deep inside its brainwork of folds it was probably nourishing enough, but the outer layers were greasy with rot, as though the vegetable were trying to be a metaphor for something. We had company to feed, and a three-week-old cabbage to offer them.

It wasn't as though we could step out to the local mega mart. We—Alisa and I—were at our "cottage" in northern British Columbia, more honestly a drafty, jauntily leaning, eighty-year old homestead that squats in a clearing between Sitka spruce and western red cedar trees large enough to crush it into splinters with the sweep of a limb. The front door looks out on a jumble of mountains named after long-forgotten British lords, from the peaks of which you can see, just to the northwest, the southern tip of the Alaska Panhandle. There is no corner store here. In fact, there is no electricity, no flush toilet, and no running water but for the Skeen River rapids known as the Devil's Elbow. They're just outside the back door. Our nearest neighbor is a black bear. There are also no roads. In fact, the only ways in or out are by canoe, by foot over the distance of a half-marathon to the nearest highway, or by the passenger train that passes once or twice a day, and not at all on Tuesdays. So: we had a cabbage, and a half-dozen mouths to feed for one more autumn evening. Necessity, as they say, can be a mother.

I can't remember now who said what, or how we made the plan, or even if we planned it at all. What I know is that my brother David, a strict vegetarian, hiked to the mouth of Fiddler Creek, which straight-lines out of a bowl of mountains so ancient they make you feel perpetually reborn, and reeled in an enormous Dolly Virden char. Our friends Kirk and Chandra, who are the sort of people who can tell a Berwick's wren from a refocus-crowned sparrow by ear, led a party into the forest and returned with pound upon pound of chanterelle, pine, and hedgehog mushrooms. I rooted through the tall grass to find the neglected garden plot where, months earlier, we had planted garlic and three kinds of potato; each turned up under the spade, as cool and autonomous as teenagers. Alisa cut baby dandelion leaves, while her mother picked apples and sour cherries from an abandoned orchard, and rose hips from the bushes that were attempting to swallow the outhouse. The fruit we steeped in red wine—all right, the wine came from Australia. Everything else we fried on the woodstove, all in a single huge pan.

It was delicious. It was a dinner that transcended the delicate freshness of the fish, the earthy goodness of the spuds that had sopped up the juices of mushrooms and garlic. The rich flavors were the evening's shallowest pleasure. We knew, now, that out there in the falling darkness the river and the forest spoke a subtle language we had only begun to learn. It was the kind of meal that, when the plates were clean, led some to dark corners to sleep with the hushing of the wind, and others to drink mulled wine until our voices had climbed an octave and finally deepened, in the small hours, into whispers. One of the night's final questions, passed around upon faces made golden by candlelight: Was there some way to carry this meal into the rest of our lives?

A week later we were back in our one-bedroom apartment in Vancouver, surrounded by two million other people and staring out the sitting-room window. We have a view of a parking lot and two perpetually overloaded Dumpsters. It was as good a place as any to contemplate the statistic. The number just kept turning up: in the reports that Alisa and I read as journalists; in the inch-long news briefs I've come to rely on as an early warning system for stories that would, in a few months or a few years, work their way into global headlines. According to the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, the food we eat now typically travels between 1,500 and 3,000 miles from farm to plate. The distance had increased by up to 25 percent between 1980 and 2001, when the study was published. It was likely continuing to climb.

I didn't know any more about it than that. It was enough. Like so many other people, Alisa and I had begun to search forways to live more lightly in an increasingly crowded and raggedy-assed world. There is no shortage of information about this bright blue planet and its merry trip to hell in a hand basket, and we had learned the necessary habit of shrugging off the latest news bites about "dead zones" in the Gulf of Mexico or creatures going extinct after 70 million years—70 million years—on Earth. What we could not ignore was the gut feeling, more common and more important than policy makers or even scientists like to admit, that things have gone sideways. That the winter snow is less deep than it was when we were children, the crabs fewer under the rocks by the shore, the birds at dawn too quiet, the forest oddly lonesome. That the weather and seasons have become strangers to us. And that we, the human species, are in one way or another responsible. Not guilty, but responsible.

The gut feeling affects people. I received a letter once, as a journalist, from a young man who had chained himself to a railing in a mall on the biggest shopping day of the year in America, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, and set himself on fire to protest rampant consumerism. He survived, barely, and was ordered into mental health care, but all of his opinions were of a kind commonly held by some of the most lucid and admired ecologists and social theorists of our times. A friend of mine, a relationship counselor, told me of a couple whose marriage was being tested by a disagreement over the point at which the world's reserves of cheap petroleum will surpass maximum production and begin to decline. Concerned for his child's future in an "end of oil" scenario, the husband, an otherwise typical health-care provider, wanted to go bush, learn how to tan buckskins, teach their boy to hunt and forage. The wife, equally concerned for the child, preferred everyday life in a society where carbonated soda is the leading source of calories in the diet of the average teenager and the New England Journal of Medicine reports that, owing to obesity and physical inactivity, the life spans of today's children may be shorter than those of their parents. So who's crazy?

A more typical response is the refusal to purchase an enormous, fuel-inefficient SUV. Alisa and I had made that choice. Yet, as the Leopold Center numbers seemed to suggest, we had no cause to feel holier-than-thou. Each time we sat down to eat, we were consuming products that had traveled the equivalent distance of a drive from Toronto, Ontario, to Whitehorse, Yukon Territory, or from New York City to Denver, Colorado. We were living on an SUV diet.

"I think we should try eating local food for a year."

We were at the breakfast table when these words came out of my mouth. Alisa did not look up at me as though I were insane. We had begun to do these kinds of things, insuring the car in the summer only and getting through the winter by bicycle; or living part of each year in a northern hideaway where the "emergency procedure" was to wave your arms in front of a passing freight train and then sit tight and wait—the following train was the one that would stop.

Besides, I do all the cooking.

Alisa had a pensive look on her face. "It might not even be possible," she said. A long pause settled between us. "What about sugar?"

She knew immediately, I think, that she had lost the argument. What about sugar? Well, I had learned one or two things about sugar over the previous year, while researching a book set in the Dominican Republic. The journey had taken me through the bates, the shanties inhabited by mainly ethnic Haitian sugar workers, certainly some of the world's poorest people. One afternoon I went out with a nun to pick up an elderly cane-cutter; there was a space for him in the old folks' home that had been set up by the Catholic sisters. We drove past walls of green cane stalks to a clearing with patched-together tin shelters and one room concrete shacks. The man was leaning against a wall, literally holding himself together with his hands. He had worked so hard and for so long that his hip socket had worn out, and he could not walk without pressing the femur into place. I carried his bag, which contained everything he had to show for a lifetime of labor. It was a schoolchild's backpack, with a broken zipper. Staring out at the men cutting cane as we departed, he said into the air, "Hungry. I've been hungry all these years."

I had taken on the irritating habit, whenever Alisa came to me with some complaint that I considered overly modern and urban, such as the effects of rainfall on suede or a pinched nerve from talking too long on the phone, of saying that I would make sure to let them know all about it in the bates.

I arched an eyebrow in Alisa's direction. The question of sugar was a reminder of why I wanted to try this local-eating experiment in the first place. It isn't only that our food is traveling great distances to reach us; we, too, have moved a great distance from our food. This most intimate nourishment, this stuff of life—where does it come from? Who produces it? How do they treat their soil, crops, animals? How do their choices—my choices—affect my neighbors and the air, land, and water that surround us? If I knew where my food and drink came from, would I still want to eat it? If even my daily bread has become a mystery, might that total disconnection be somehow linked to the niggling sense that at any moment the apocalyptic frogs might start falling from the sky?

"We'll use honey," I said to Alisa.

"Yeah," she replied doubtfully. "Honey."

What, though, was eating locally? We'd signed up with a company that delivered a weekly box of organic produce to our apartment. For a time we tried to order only "local" foods— products from British Columbia and neighboring Washington State. The delivery company, a very West Coast kind of operation, included on its invoices a tally of our products' average "food miles," or the distance they had traveled to reach our doorstep. Sometimes the average was as low as 250 miles. Sometimes, though, it closed in on 1,000. North Americans live in enormous landscapes. As the writer Wade Davis noted of just one great northern plateau in our part of the world, "you could hide England here and the British would never find it."

We were familiar with the "ecological footprint" model developed by the bioecologist Dr. William Rees of the University of British Columbia. The concept is simple enough: punch in a basic accounting of your housing, along with your transportation, diet, and energy-use habits, and Rees's computer program will approximate the number of acres' worth of the world's resources you consume in a year. That acreage is the size of your ecological footprint. To drive the point home, the software then alerts you to the number of Earths we human beings would need if everyone on the planet consumed in the same way you do. It's usually a shocker—nine planets is a typical figure for a standard issue North American.

Interestingly, Rees traces the roots of his eco-footprint brain wave to a single meal on his mother's family farm in southern Ontario when he was a boy. It was the early 1950s, "the protractor days," so some thirteen brothers, sisters, parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles were gathered on his grandmother's country porch for a workday lunch on a July afternoon. Young Bill looked down at his food and had a kind of epiphany. The baby carrots, the new potatoes, the fresh lettuce—there wasn't a single foodstuff on that plate that he hadn't had a hand in growing. It was a feeling, he remembers, like a rush of cold water being poured down his back. He was riveted. He was so excited he couldn't eat his lunch.

It was, like, everything was connected.

Rees's footprint calculator asks its users to estimate the average distance their food travels, giving as its lowest option "200 miles or less." When Alisa and I looked at a map, however, that distance didn't make sense. A 200-mile line, drawn outward from our apartment in Vancouver, might leap mountain ranges, cleave river valleys, enter landscapes so different from ours that if you took a stranger from one to the other, he might imagine he'd entered another country. Our West Coast landscape is defined by lushness and rain; 200 miles to the northeast the prairie is studded with prickly-pear cactus, and tumbleweeds roll along the shoulder of the highway.

Poring over the map that day, we considered, for the first time ever, the boundaries of the place in which we live. From the east flows the mighty Fraser River, the most productive salmon river in the world and, almost miraculously, never dammed. The great alluvial plain of the river, known simply as the Fraser Valley, widens from the foot of the Coast Range to the vast estuary where the fresh water meets the salt. Every inch of that valley is freighted with a million years' worth of soil perfect for the plough. Just to the north of the delta is the city of Vancouver, sprawling over two inlets and, increasingly, everything else besides. Farther north is Howe Sound, a classic fjord with canyons at its head that reach to the town of Pemberton, famous for its potatoes. There, again, closes a labyrinth of mountains. Look to the south, and it is just 38 miles to the Washington border and the Nook sack and Skagit lowlands, reverie landscapes less grand in scale than the Fraser Valley, but still places where a person has no trouble feeling small. Here, across an international border that wasn't drawn in ink until 1872, the Coast Range is known as the Cascade Mountains, peaks that wall in the farms between the summits and the sea. To the west is the ocean. But not the open ocean, not yet. The coast here is sheltered by Vancouver Island, itself the size of Vermont and hoary with forest. Between the mainland and the huge island are the Strait of Georgia, Juan de Fuci Strait, and Puget Sound, together forming a gulf that some now call the Smallish Sea after the name used by the Indian nations who have lived on its shores for millennia. By any name, it is jeweled with islands, some Canadian and some American, but most of them checkered with small farms and orchards. On the southern tip of Vancouver Island is the city of Victoria, capital of British Columbia, surrounded by farm holdings and precocious vineyards. At last, on the island's far western shore, roars the wild, open Pacific.

All of this, blessed with mild winters and rain that falls as if someone once prayed too long and too hard for it to come.

We drew it into a circle and measured the distance. It was, almost to perfection, 100 miles. The 100-Mile Diet. I stood up from the map and caught Alisa's eye. "This might turn out to be too easy," I said.

We chose the first day of spring to begin what we hoped would be a year-long experiment. Like urbanites everywhere, we imagined that, at the stroke of midnight on the last day of winter, fresh green shoots would burst from the earth to nourish us. The fact that a woolen sky and bone chill still pressed down on the city could hardly worry us.

We had a single ironclad rule: that every ingredient in every product we bought had to come from within 100 miles. On the other hand, we are of that generation that mistrusts dogma, doctrine, and ironclad rules in general. We allowed ourselves what we called "the social life amendment." Should friends have us over for dinner, or working life lead to a business lunch at a Thai restaurant, we would not hesitate. We were off the hook, too, when we traveled—even the Koran allows travelers a break from the fast of Ramadan—unless we were able to buy our own groceries and prepare our own meals. When traveling, we were also free to bring home products from within 100 miles of wherever we were. That said, we could not plan a trip to Hawaii because of a pineapple craving.

Puritanism was not the goal, and neither was life as a couple of back-to-the-landing hermits. Our purpose was a lifestyle experiment that challenged us to explore, and explore deeply, the idea of local eating. There was one final point that would ease us into the diet. We allowed ourselves to use up whatever nonlocal products we had in the house on the day that we stepped cold turkey into 100-mile shopping. And so, when the morning of March 21 dawned sodden and gray, we had our first fight.

There was Alisa, spooning cocoa into a mug. Certain friends had snorted that the 100-mile diet would be easier for Alisa and me because neither of us drinks coffee, which wreaks havoc on our respective nervous systems. We had found a gentler replacement in hot chocolate, though, and a morning caffeine hit by any other name is still a morning caffeine hit.

"We have to start this clean," I said firmly. "A 100-percent local breakfast."

"It's in the rules," she said.

"But I'm not having any."

"And I am."

"You can't have any if I'm not having any." I could hear the eight-year-old in my voice, but couldn't seem to control him. Every spoonful she took without me was a lost share in the precious cargo. "It wouldn't be fair." "There's no 'you can't if I'm not' in the rules," she snapped back. "You're robbing me of future hot chocolate!" There was some mutual sulking over plates of potato fritters.

For the inaugural dinner, we had invited two good friends: Ron, whose interest in the arcane politics of food had led him to work cooking healthy dinners alongside heroin and crack addicts on the desperate streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside; and Keri, who is married to Ron and may be the first genuine green thumb I have ever known. Keri could spit a tomato seed into a dirty ashtray and harvest pendulous, sweet-to-bursting beefsteaks precisely eighty days later. Not even she had any sprouts coming up yet in her garden, though.

We had some shopping to do. The nearest grocery to our house, just three blocks away, is what once was called a "supermarket" but is now on the small end of mid-size. The morning was gray enough that the bank of front windows glowed, making even the parking lot seem cheery. I'd never entirely lost that childhood sense of importance that comes with the submissive giving-way of an automatic door, and today we were paying more than the usual attention to such familiar details, the way the shelves stood just as tall as our reach, the corridors of brightly packaged products incessantly refreshed.

All of it, gone. There was nothing there for us. Nothing. All of that plenty, vanished in an instant of cockeyed imagination. It would be a year without ice cream. A year without salad dressing. A year without all-purpose flour, soup mix, olives, olive oil, Miracle Whip. Without ketchup, Cheerios, Peek Freaks Fruit Crèmes, peanut butter, Rip-L-Chips, Philadelphia cream cheese, Tabasco sauce, Campbell's Chunky New England Clam Chowder, creamed corn, Minute Maid orange juice, no-name cola, Egos, bulk pine nuts, Orville Redenbacher's popcorn, chipotle peppers, High Liner Multigrain Tilapia Fillets. The shopping aisles represented a kind of miracle. They were the terminus of a quarter-century of progress from a postwar North American diet that defined shrimp cocktail as exotic and offered maybe six brands of beer; they were a paean to a decade of global trade deregulation that finally collapsed as the world's richest nations refused to sincerely reduce the gross subsidies to—what else?— their farms and their farmers. A single supermarket today may carry 45,000 different items; 17,000 new food products are introduced each year in the United States. Yet here we were in the modern horn of plenty, and almost nothing came from the people or the landscape that surrounded us. How had our food system come to this?

We finally turned up our first few food choices in the produce department. Criminal mushrooms and potatoes from the Fraser Valley farmlands, perhaps 50 miles away. There was also a handful of greenhouse red peppers and tomatoes; later we found bottles of local milk. A trip to Capers Community Market, a premium grocery renowned for organic food, was only marginally better. Capers is a small chain store with what passes for venerable roots in a city as young as Vancouver; the flagship store opened its doors twenty years ago, staffed by the kind of people who called themselves "capricots" and felt okay about occasionally being paid in food. Since then, Capers has been subsumed into Wild Oats Markets, Inc., the Boulder, Colorado–based natural-food empire that today reports annual sales of over $1 billion. The produce manager still has dreadlocks and rides a bike to work, however, and blue stickers had recently begun to identify locally grown fruit and vegetables. Of course, this was the first day of spring. There was a sale on Happy Planet Organic Smoothies and Soy co Rice Shreds, but not a lot local on offer.

Ron called in the afternoon. "We're going to be a little bit late," he said.

"That's probably a good thing," I replied. "Can we bring anything?"

I laughed.

At 7:30 p.m., the table was set in what a real estate agent would call our "dining nook." We had, through a comprehensive search of our district's grocers and specialty shops, come up with quite a spread. For the salad, slices of greenhouse cucumber from the Fraser River delta, some 15 miles away. Each was capped with a slaw of winter keeper organic carrots from Friesen Farm, legendary for its salad mix and located a comfortable 30 miles from where we were sitting, and beet and kohlrabi from our own community garden plot, precisely a quarter-mile away. Steamed kale, also from our garden. Spring salmon, which the fellow in the fish shop assured us was "local," though in fact it was caught off the west coast of Vancouver Island, near the outer limit of our self-imposed entrapment. I fried the fish in unsalted organic butter from a dairy whose cows we'd seen placidly free-ranging while we were cycling on a Fraser River island (21 miles away), infusing it with sage leaves from a plant on our balcony (zero miles). On the side, fritters of organic, free-range eggs (57 miles) and grated potato (99 miles) and turnip (30 miles), each one slathered in organic yogurt (15 miles) and sprigs of anise, which grows around the neighborhood like a weed. The only nonlocal product on the table was the salt in the shaker, from a bagful we had bought weeks earlier that came from Oregon, a few hundred miles away.

"I have a feeling we're going to be eating a lot of potatoes," said Alisa, as she tucked into her third potato-centric meal of the day.

"Ah, but think of how they'll change with the seasons," said Ron, who I suspect is an actual optimist. Even his last name, Plow right, has a can-do, family-farm lilt, though it's also undeniably pornographic. And indeed, his reddish, muttonchops sideburns bring to mind both blue-movie stars and The Old Farmer's Almanac. "Think of how excited you'll be to see the first baby potatoes. They'll be like jewels to you. They'll taste like nothing you've ever eaten before."

Keri, not an optimist, looked at Ron as though he were crazy. She looked at all of us as though we were crazy.

For dessert, triangles of warmed organic brie from Salt Spring Island in the Strait of Georgia (37 miles), topped with frozen blueberries from the exurban town of Agassiz (74 miles), drizzled with a cranberry juice (74) and honey (14) reduction. To drink, a bottle of white wine (32) and four glasses of a 7-percentalcohol hard apple mead in a style called "cyser," presumably because that is how a very drunk person pronounces the word "cider." It came from the Cowichan Valley, about 59 miles away on Vancouver Island, from the appropriately named Morrisdale cider. The average distance from farm to plate for the entire meal? About 43 miles, an improvement of 1,457 on the Leopold Center's more conservative statistics.

"Jesus, you guys," said Ron, as he pushed back from what was inarguably a feast, a cornucopia, a horn-of-freaking-plenty. "That was amazing."

"How will we ever survive?" I mused, cradling my belly.

And we allowed ourselves this moment of happiness. Because the grocery bill for that single meal had come to $128.87. Alisa was polite enough to wait until our company had left to say the obvious. "This might not even be possible."

This is the part where some childhood memory is supposed to lift me above all doubt and equivocation. Like the time when I ran through the wind-rippled fields to my grandfather as he worked the soil with his old tractor. I handed him his brown-bag lunch, and he smiled and pulled me up onto his knee. Together we steered into the shade of an orchard, grandpa carrying me on his shoulders to reach for two perfect, sun-dappled peaches . . .

But no. There isn't any moment. I was raised with three brothers on a healthy but suburban diet, with more shredded wheat and less chocolate milk than I would have liked. We had nearly a quarter-acre of garden that I raided for strawberries but resented weeding. I have my share of fond recollections of family and food, but I also remember how, as a boy, I would inhale my dinner so I could get away from my fighting parents; I remember my mother working too hard to feel The Joy of Cooking. The smell of fresh-baked cinnamon buns on the weekends wasn't enough to keep our family together. Food is not, to me, the hearth of kinship or the storehouse of sweet memories. It has never been sacred ground.

Can I admit, then, that a part of me silently questioned my own idea for a year of eating locally? That the essential pointlessness of such a gesture is not lost on me? I am acutely aware that efforts like the 100-mile diet are readily dismissed as "the new earnestness," which is currently enjoying a very temporary cool, and I am not deluded enough to feel that I'm making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world. Both of these contemporary platitudes contain kernels of truth, but both are also overwhelmed by stark realities. I have traveled these ethical pathways in one way or another for twenty years now, choosing to ride a bicycle in homicidal traffic, to reuse my tinfoil and plastic bags as though I lived in the Depression, to shop little and buy less. It doesn't make me feel "good." It makes me feel like an alien. As I pedal through another midwinter rainfall, virtually every indicator of global ecological health continues to worsen, from biodiversity to energy consumption, and my being has done little to change the world. My actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world's hungry.

Most of my acquaintances explain away these compulsions of mine as guilt, the environmentalist equivalent of the hair shirt. (Most of my friends, incidentally, are similarly compulsive.) But I don't consider myself guilty, and I've never been quick to wag the finger of shame. I have groped around for a better hypothesis, and the closest I've come, oddly enough, brings me back to northern British Columbia and the place where the 100-mile diet idea took root.

In 1966 the writer Edward Hoagland left New York City to wander the wilder frontiers of my province, for reasons he was unable to explain even to himself. It was an experiment, I suppose, in much the same way that choosing to eat locally is an experiment. At one point Hoagland settled for a time not at all far—about 40 linear miles—from the shack on the Skeen River where Alisa and I had wondered what to do with a moldering cabbage. He returned to New York with the question that might be the only explanation for how our own grand adventure got started. "The problem everywhere nowadays turns on how we shall decide to live. Neither the government leaders nor the demographers have been able to supply an answer."

And he repeated the question, more plainly:

"How shall we live?"

Recipe: Potato Amuse Bouche

1 large beet, peeled

1 large mashing potato, pared and cubed

3 tbsp blue cheese 1tbsp unsweetened applesauce

1 tbsp butter

Slice beets into 1/4-inch-thick rounds. Steam until tender throughout and set aside. Boil potato until soft. Strain, reserving 1 cup of cooking liquid. Mash with blue cheese, adding cooking liquid as needed to achieve a creamy consistency. Spoon balls of potato mixture onto a cookie sheet and roast on the highest rack in the oven until golden. Meanwhile, melt butter in a small saucepan. Add applesauce and stir together over low heat. Cut beet slices into triangles or hearts, or leave as rounds. Place a potato ball in the middle of each beet slice. Drizzle with apple butter. Serve in the center of a very large plate, alone and a little heartbreaking.