New York Professionals Learn To Cook Up A Veggie Storm

By Madhava Smullen for ISKCON News on 31 Jul 2010

Divyambara`s cooking lesson

For the busy New York City professional, it’s difficult to imagine finding the time to cook, never mind whipping up a healthy and delicious vegetarian meal. But recently many have found that a balanced meat-free, home-cooked diet may not be so far out of their grasp.

The answer lies in Manhattan, where vegetarian cooking classes offered twice a week at the Bhakti Center—a spiritual educational facility based on the principles of Bhakti Yoga—are drawing ten to fifteen people per two-and-a half-hour session.

Teacher Divyambara Dasi, who has been practicing Bhakti yoga for twenty years and cooking for just as long, expects students to be able to cook their own dishes at home after only four classes. This is no cooking demonstration—it’s a hands-on experience, designed for maximum learning.

“I begin each class by introducing each dish we’re going to make and the main ingredients we’re going to use in a very visual, interesting way,” Divyambara says. “For example, I will say, ‘Today we’re going to cook quinoa.’ Then I will show it and my assistant, who is a certified nutritionist, will explain how it is the grain richest in protein. Or I will say, ‘Today we’ll be cooking a zucchini dish,’ and I’ll explain how it’s a good summer vegetable—cooling, refreshing, and easy to digest.”

Divyambara then splits her students into teams of two and has them cook a full six-course dinner. Each team focuses on a different dish—rice, vegetable, bread, drink, salad dressing, or dessert. They begin by reading their recipes, all of which are quick to make, nutritionally balanced, and promote long and healthy lives—there’s no refined products like white flour or white sugar, no fried food, and very little dairy.

Next, Divyambara spends some time at each team’s separate station to supervise them and explain step by step what they need to do.

“Many of my students have never used the kitchen at all—some don’t even know how to boil water or cut up vegetables,” she says. “But I’m right next to them and show them everything, they do it, and they pick it up quickly.”

Once in a while, amid the flurry of cooking, Divyambara will ring a bell, and everyone will stop what they’re doing and go quiet.

“I’ll say, ‘Okay, rice team! Tell us and show us what have you done so far,’” she explains. “In this way, by first reading about the recipe, then cooking it themselves, and finally explaining how they did it, they learn and retain a lot. What’s more, each team also becomes familiar with the different steps involved in the dishes the other teams are making.”

Divyambara has two reasons to ask her class not to taste anything while they’re cooking: one is purely hygienic, while the other is in preparation for blessing the finished meal. In the Bhakti tradition, she explains, we ask God to bless our food. She then chants Sanskrit prayers, and welcomes her students to offer their own prayers according to their faith. Sometimes she invites students—such as, on one occasion, a Jewish Rabbi—to say the main prayer.

She also evokes a feeling of gratitude by asking God to bless not only the meal and the cooks, but everybody else who contributed to the meal—the cows who gave the milk, the farmer in Peru who provided the quinoa, the truck driver, and the shopkeeper.

Finally, everyone sits down and eats together. “Because we’ve been consciously cooking together as an expression of love,” says Divyambara, “It’s a very beautiful atmosphere, and a very bonding experience.

During the last session of every month, Divyambara takes her class on a shopping excursion to the nearby health food and Indian grocery stores. “There are many spices and ingredients in the cooking that they’re unfamiliar with,” she explains. “Most of them don’t know what asafoetida is, for instance. So I show them how everything looks and smells, what is good quality and what isn’t.”

Most of Divyambara’s students are not vegetarian when they begin her classes, and are doubtful that they could sustain themselves on a meat-free diet, even if they wanted to. So Divyambara’s ultimate intention for her classes is for them to go home with an exceptional experience of a tasty vegetarian meal, and knowledge of how to prepare it.

“One woman told me when she came in, ‘Please forgive me, I don’t know anything—I mean anything,’” says Divyambara. “But in her first class, she made an amazing dish. Then she made the same thing for her boyfriend at home, and it turned out amazing again. It was the first time she had cooked anything on her own. She told me how empowering it felt to be confident that she could actually cook for herself and be a healthy vegetarian.”

But for the New York professionals who attend them, Divyambara’s classes are more than just learning how to cook. There’s a great sense of community, people connecting with one another, and spiritual nourishment. “I love the whole experience of teamwork,” commented Donna LeBlanc, a bestselling author and life coach for CEOs of Fortune 500 companies. “And the food tastes so magical. I swear that God enters it!”

“What you’re doing is more than just cooking,” said a PR professional for a major company. “It’s bringing people together on a higher level.”

Former students—who now number over 150—are keen to keep experiencing these things, even once they have completed the four-session program. So when some expressed this desire to Divyambara, she began to invite them to come and cook together again on one Sunday every month, and to invite their friends to come and eat.

“As in the classes, I split them into teams, and each team focuses on making a different dish,” Divyambara explains. “I am still there to guide them, but I have less of an active role, as we cook dishes they are already familiar with. The amazing thing was, the first time we did it, I was sure it would take at least three hours for the eight students to cook for the forty people that came. But in two hours, they had finished everything and left the kitchen completely clean!”

The food and the event was a success, as people bonded and students from different groups got to meet each other.

Divyambara hopes to make the monthly meet-ups a steady program, with possible plans to branch out to various locations around the city.

“I hope we can continue connecting with people and growing this community,” she says.

Read more: http://news.iskcon.com/node/3020/2010-07-31/new_york_professionals_learn_to_cook_up_a_veggie_storm#ixzz0vNsqnIh9

At Look At Goura-Vrndavana Temple In Brazil

By Madhava Smullen on 31 Jul 2010
from ISKCON News

The new temple in Goura-Vrindavana

Name: Goura-Vrindavana Farm

Address: Rod. Rio-Santos BR 101, Km 558, Graúna - Paraty RJ CEP 23970-000

Phone: +55 24 9962 5262 begin_of_the_skype_highlighting +55 24 9962 5262 end_of_the_skype_highlighting

Websites: http://goura.com.br, http://www.dharmashala.com.br/

Presiding Deities: Small deities of Pancha Tattva, Gaura Nitai, and Radha Krishna, as well as salagrama silas and govardhana silas. Large deities of Radha Vrindavana Chandra and Gaura Nitai will be installed in 2011.

President: Achyutananda Dasa.

Established in: 1983.

Temple Style: Current temple is a room used for worship in the community’s ashram. A new temple, stone-built with an oriental roof, will open in 2011.

Location: An 800-hectare farm in the middle of the Atlantic Rainforest, the largest forest reserve in Brazil. Since it extends all the way to the ocean, it is richer in plant life than the Amazon Rainforest. The ISKCON community is in Paraty, located between Brazil’s two largest cities, Rio De Janeior and Sao Paulo, and three-and-a-half hours’ drive from each.

Distinctive food offerings: Dried bananas grown on the farm and dried in the community’s own factory. And local roots Mandioca (also known as Cassava root) and Imhame, a kind of yam, also grown on the farm.

Number of residents: Twenty.

Number of visitors: Around seventy people visit to attend retreats every month.

Best time of year to visit: April to September, for a drier, more comfortable climate.

Goura Vrindavana was born back in 1983, when two devotee brothers, Setukara Dasa and Arcana Marya Dasa, bought a piece of land in Paraty. Other devotees began to move to the location and buy neighboring plots, adding to the original one. The community grew. But it wasn’t until 1998, when Purushatraya Swami joined the project, that it began to develop into a major ISKCON project.

Using his years of experience running other farms in Brazil and India, he divided the project into different departments and assigned each devotee a responsibility. His vision was for the farm to be financially sustainable on its own, rather than relying on donations or any outside source. Only once major progress had been made in that area did he plan to build a temple and worship Deities.

Today, his plan is perfectly on track.

Goura-Vrindavana has become financially self-sufficient through two ingenious initiatives: a guesthouse, and its very own dried banana factory.

“We have a banana plantation, and we grow, collect and dry the bananas ourselves,” explains president Achyutananda Dasa. “We then sell them to many stores in Rio De Janeiro and other cities, and they distribute them.

“Our guest house, Dharmashala, also brings us income, as people interested in eco-villages come and rent a room for some time, while they learn about simple-living and explore the beautiful forest and waterfalls. We also have a yoga studio which different yoga instructors from all over the country rent for retreats. Many of the people attending these are very receptive to Krishna consciousness—they go to the temple, listen to the classes and kirtan, and eat sanctified vegetarian food.”

The Goura-Vrindavana farm also produces nearly all of its own energy—the public area of the community is powered by a hydroelectric mill in a nearby river, with only families’ private homes using local electrical services.

“We are not one hundred per cent self-sufficient food-wise, because there are some things we cannot plant here, but we’re close,” Achyutananda says. “The devotees, and a few employees, plant sweet potatoes, carrots, zucchini, many herbs, and local roots such as Mandioca—which is also known as Cassava root—and Imhame, a kind of yam. We also grow fruit like papayas, oranges, bananas, and avocados.”

The community completely eschews use of machines—all farming is done by hand or with the assistance of bullock carts. Some fruit, such as lemon, jackfruit, peaches and berries grow naturally in the surrounding forest, and can simply be collected.

Until now, the community has been worshipping very small, uninstalled deities of Radha Krishna, Pancha-Tattva, and Gaura Nitai. But with this steady foundation of self-sufficiency in place, devotees began building a new temple in 2007. They plan to inaugurate it, with large installed deities of Radha Vrindavana-chandra and Gaura Nitai, in 2011.

“The temple will be 100 square metres, built all in stone, and feature an oriental-style roof,” says Achyutananda. “It will have four rooms and a kitchen to be used by the priests, and there will be a large area around it where we will plant fruits for the deities.”

The devotees at Goura-Vrindavana plan to keep increasing their sustainable income in the future by selling natural self-made products such as sugarcane molasses, and to improve tourism and access roads. They also plan to build a gurukula school for their children. But in the meantime, it’s already one of the most unique temples in ISKCON and an exciting place to visit.

“Goura Vrindavan is a spiritual and ecological sanctuary—a place where you can experience peace and quiet, go deep into spiritual practice, and explore the raw nature and beautiful waterfalls,” Achyutanda says. “And of course, it’s the only ISKCON temple right in the middle of the rainforest!”

Related Stories:

• Reggae Chant in the Slums Startles Brazilian Devotees
• ISKCON Curitiba Brings the Master to Brazil's Planned City
• Easter Retreat in Pandavas' Paradise
• Temple Profile: Seattle

Read more: http://news.iskcon.com/node/3021/2010-07-31/temple_profile_goura_vrindavana_farm_brazil#ixzz0vNr6zpEA

Daring To Pose A Challenge To The Oil Culture

From Amy Harmon at the New York times, part of the "Voices From The Spill" series

DULAC, La. — In this region so threatened by the BP oil spill, it has often seemed to residents that the only thing worse than losing tens of thousands of seafood industry jobs would be to lose their other major job source: the oil industry.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, a Republican, has called the Obama administration’s moratorium on offshore drilling “a second man-made disaster”; fishermen mourn the destruction of their way of life and defend Big Oil in the same breath; environmentalists call for restoring the battered coastline, not changing the national energy policy.

So when Patty Whitney, a community organizer here in Terrebonne Parish, asked a question at a recent conference about the state of the Louisiana coast, it was all she could do to keep her voice from shaking.

“We are constantly told, ‘You have to adapt to coastal land loss, you have to adapt because of the oil leak, you have to adapt to the new situation,’ ” she said. “When is our government going to adapt to new energy sources that aren’t harmful to our environment and the people who depend upon the environment?”

On the stage, the panel of engineers and environmental policy makers looked at one another. “Who would like to take that question?” the moderator asked.

The conference was financed by the state and by private donors — including the oil conglomerate ConocoPhillips, one of the region’s biggest landowners.

“You must be very brave,” another attendee, a professor at a local university, told Ms. Whitney during the break.

“Or very dumb,” she replied.

Born and raised in Houma, one of a family of 10, Ms. Whitney, 58, has long considered herself a closet radical when it comes to oil. Her mission at the grass-roots interfaith group Bisco is to help the disparate and largely disenfranchised groups in this region — African-Americans, Cajuns, American Indians — develop a political voice. As such, she has tried to keep her own mostly to herself.

But that is not easy for a Southerner with a gift of gab, a self-taught historian and a mother of three who takes umbrage at how the sugar companies, the fur companies and the oil companies have each come to the region and extracted its bounty.

“America needs oil, Patty,” a brother who is an engineer for an oil company told her at a recent family gathering.

“Then let them drill,” she retorted. “Let them drill in Yellowstone Park, in the Grand Canyon, in Puget Sound, off Martha’s Vineyard. Let them mess up their own places instead of just drilling in my beautiful Louisiana.”

And the spill, whose scope is still unknown, has prompted snippets of surprising conversations on the subject, even as the Senate on Thursday scrapped plans to take up a major climate change bill. Someone in church heard Ms. Whitney talking about the benefits of wind power the other week and signaled his agreement. Same with a woman in one of her community organizing networks.

“It’s at the point where people would consider talking about it, where before it was close to blasphemy,” Ms. Whitney said. “Me personally, I really and truly think the time is here, that even though it’s radical for this area, the idea of developing an alternative energy policy has come.”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 25, 2010, on page A23 of the New York edition.

What Are You Doing for Cow Protection?

By HH Sivarama Swami

Krsi goraksya vanijya. Krsi means ploughing or agriculture and goraksya, cow protection. These are the staples of society, this is what people live on. All living entities subsist on grains. So the ksatriyas may direct and instruct people, the brahmanas may perform their yajnas, but if they don’t eat then giving shelter or instruction is not going to work.

That eating is therefore the most essential aspect of life and this is why the vaisyas and their assistants, the sudras, are so integral that the other castes think that they are the most important people, because it is actually they who are feeding. Of course the vaisyas think that the brahmanas are the most important because they are taking the result of their work and offering it back to the Lord.

Srila Prabhupada said that this very common type of exchange was there but the responsibility of this goraksya, is it the duty of just some people? Some very very exclusive people? Is it the responsibility of all vaisyas, or is it for all grhastas or all devotees?

My proposition is that it is everyone’s responsibility. Just like everyone’s responsibility is chanting Hare Krishna, watering Tulasi devi, reading Bhagavatam. Similarly part of our common dharma is to protect cows. This is something that you see ingrained in communities like Bhaktivedanta Manor, where they have to limit the amount of cows they receive as gifts, and be very careful about the type of food that is offered to the cows, because to a greater or lesser degree all the devotees see the protection of cows as their dharma.

It is everyone’s dharma: the cow is our mother, she gives us milk while all over the rest of the world cows are being butchered, slaughtered, abused, and taken advantage of. Vaisnavas must take it as their responsibility to protect cows. Now, how do you protect cows? Does that mean that you have a cow on your balcony in downtown Singapore? No, that type of cow protection is actually cow abuse. You cannot just keep your own cow.

Cows only give milk if they have calves, which means you have to constantly have calves, which means you have to have a herd, and that is a full time business. So how is it that individuals should protect cows? They should in some way or another be connected to ISKCON’s herds. Srila Prabhupada established cow protection for instance in New Vrindavan, Gita Nagari, or as we have done here in Hungary at New Vraja-dhama. These herds are not the sole responsibility or duty of the local devotees in those places, they are the responsibility of the devotees and congregation of the local country. It is their responsibility to contribute to the cow protection, to donate towards the maintenance of the cow, to come and do some cow seva, and when they come to the temple they should bring some bhoga for the cows, to find out what items are needed by the cowherds.

Cow protection is everyone’s business, it is everyone’s responsibility. This is being written down as varnasrama dharma. If one does not contribute or participate directly in cow protection then he should know that he is neglecting his dharma. In other words he is adharmic.

This is in my view the greater picture of what varnasrama means. Varnasrama doesn’t mean that we simply philosophize about a way of life, but what are the duties of varnas and asramas, what are the duties that are common for all Vaisnavas, for all humans. And one of them is the protection of cows, just like chanting Hare Krsna is a common responsibility as mentioned earlier.

So, similairly, cow protection is a common responsibility for everyone. It doesn’t necessarily always occur to us, and even when it does, it’s difficult to get devotees interested. More difficult than getting devotees to do sankirtan, more difficult than getting someone to cook in the kitchen or be temple president, is to get devotees to be cowherds. To make devotees work with the cows, bulls, and oxen and to make that their life, it is very difficult for devotees to do this. “I am an educated person, I have this diploma and you want me to take care of cows? You want me to do that thing that God does? You want me to do that activity that is going on in the spiritual world?”

And that is what is going on the spiritual world. That is what is going on where we are going–at least where I want to go is where there is only gopas and gopis. The whole social identity is based on go, on cows. There are milkmaids and there are cowherd men. And if we are not willing to be milkmaids and cowherd men here in the material world, if this service is beyond us and we cannot forsee how we are going to dedicate our lives to working with the cows, then were are we going? Then you had better look for somewhere other than Braja. Then you had better go to Dwaraka or Vaikuntha, where that is not a compulsory, integral part of life.

Because in the spiritual world, in Goloka Vrindavan, Krishna goes out every day to tend cows. And yet it is so difficult to get devotees to be cowherders, to see that this is a respectable future, and to stick with that service. Because once again, cow protection is something that we talk about as being against the principles of slaughtering the animals. We don’t believe in slaughtering the cow, we don’t believe in eating the meat of the cow, cows should be properly protected. But, when it comes to properly protecting the cows, are we willing to do it? Are we actually willing to dedicate our lives to taking care of cows? Or are we willing to participate and support the protection of cows?

Therefore, we should ask: “What am I doing for protecting my mother? What am I doing to sustain cow protection in my zone? It is my responsibility, my duty as a Vaisnava. Am I performing my dharmic duty?”

Our Beaker Is Starting To Boil

From Nicholas D. Kristof in the New York Times

David Breashears is one of America’s legendary mountain climbers, a man who has climbed Mount Everest five times and led the Everest IMAX film team in 1996.

These days, Mr. Breashears is still climbing the Himalayas, but he is lugging more than pitons and ice axes. He’s also carrying special cameras to document stunning declines in glaciers on the roof of the world.

Mr. Breashears first reached the top of Everest in 1983, and in many subsequent trips to the region he noticed the topography changing, the glaciers shrinking. So he dug out archive photos from early Himalayan expeditions, and then journeyed across ridges and crevasses to photograph from the exact same spots.

The pairs of matched photographs, old and new, are staggering. Time and again, the same glaciers have shrunk drastically in every direction, often losing hundreds of feet in height.

“I was just incredulous,” he told me. “We took measurements with laser rangefinders to measure the loss of height of the glaciers. The drop was often the equivalent of a 35- or 40-story building.”

Mr. Breashears led me through a display of these paired photographs at the Asia Society in New York. One 1921 photo by George Mallory, the famous mountaineer who died near the summit of Everest three years later, shows the Main Rongbuk Glacier. Mr. Breashears located the very spot from which Mallory had snapped that photo and took another — only it is a different scene, because the glacier has lost 330 feet of vertical ice.

Some research in social psychology suggests that our brains are not well adapted to protect ourselves from gradually encroaching harms. We evolved to be wary of saber-toothed tigers and blizzards, but not of climate change — and maybe that’s also why we in the news media tend to cover weather but not climate. The upshot is that we’re horrifyingly nonchalant at the prospect that rising carbon emissions may devastate our favorite planet.

NASA says that the January-through-June period this year was the hottest globally since measurements began in 1880. The Web site ClimateProgress.org, which calls for more action on climate change, suggests that 2010 is likely to be the warmest year on record. Likewise, the Global Snow Lab at Rutgers University says that the months of May and June had the lowest snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere since the lab began satellite observations in 1967.

So signs of danger abound, but like the proverbial slow-boiling frog, we seem unable to rouse ourselves.

(Actually, it seems that frogs will not remain in a beaker that is slowly heated. Snopes.com quotes a distinguished zoologist as saying that frogs become agitated as the temperature slowly rises and struggle to escape, although it does not specify how the zoologist knows this.)

From our own beaker, we’ve watched with glazed eyes as glaciers have retreated worldwide. Glacier National Park now has only about 25 glaciers, compared with around 150 a century ago. In the Himalayas, the shrinkage seems to be accelerating, with Chinese scientific measurements suggesting that some glaciers are now losing up to 26 feet in height per year.

Orville Schell, who runs China programs at the Asia Society, described passing a series of pagodas as he approached the Mingyong Glacier on the Tibetan plateau. The pagodas were viewing platforms, and had to be rebuilt as the glacier retreated: this monumental, almost eternal force of nature seemed mortally wounded.

“A glacier is a giant part of the alpine landscape, something we always saw as immortal,” Mr. Schell said. “But now this glacier is dying before our eyes.”

An Indian glaciologist, Syed Iqbal Hasnain, now at the Stimson Center in Washington, told me that most Himalayan glaciers are in retreat for three reasons. First is the overall warming tied to carbon emissions. Second, rain and snow patterns are changing, so that less new snow is added to replace what melts. Third, pollution from trucks and smoke covers glaciers with carbon soot so that their surfaces become darker and less reflective — causing them to melt more quickly.

The retreat of the glaciers threatens agriculture downstream. A study published last month in Science magazine indicated that glacier melt is essential for the Indus and Brahmaputra rivers, while less important a component of the Ganges, Yellow and Yangtze rivers. The potential disappearance of the glaciers, the report said, is “threatening the food security of an estimated 60 million people” in the Indus and Brahmaputra basins.

We Americans have been galvanized by the oil spill on our gulf coast, because we see tar balls and dead sea birds as visceral reminders of our hubris in deep sea drilling. The melting glaciers should be a similar warning of our hubris — and of the consequences that the earth will face for centuries unless we address carbon emissions today.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook, watch my YouTube videos videos and follow me on Twitter.

When Happy Cows Are Not Happy Cows

From author John Robbins at the Huffington Post

This past week, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill that will essentially prohibit, starting in 2015, any egg from being sold in the state that comes from caged hens. This bill became law 20 months after a majority of California voters approved Proposition 2, making it clear that concern for the living conditions of livestock is no longer the province of animal rights activists alone.

Recognizing how widespread concern about the humane treatment of farm animals has become, the California Milk Advisory Board has recently ramped up its 10-year "Happy Cow" advertising campaign with a new series of ads proclaiming that "Great milk comes from Happy Cows. Happy Cows come from California." These ads are now being shown across the nation.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the ads. For one, they weren't filmed in California at all. They were filmed in Auckland, New Zealand.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Current Milk Board ads claim that 99 percent of the state's dairy farms are family owned. But in order to arrive at this figure, they count as "dairy farms" rural households with one or two cows. Meanwhile, there are corporate-owned dairies in the San Joaquin Valley which have 15,000 or 20,000 cows. It is these far larger enterprises that produce the vast majority of California's milk.

My concern, let me emphasize, is not with small-scale family farms. I have no problem with the many hard-working families who treat their cows well, take care of the land and try to bring a healthy product to market. My problem is with the much larger agribusiness enterprises, the factory farms to whom the animals in their care are nothing but sources of revenue.

Thanks to the practices they employ, the amount of milk produced yearly by the average California cow is nearly 3,000 pounds more than the national average. This increased production may seem like a good thing, but it is achieved at great cost to the animals. The cows are routinely confined in extremely unnatural conditions, injected with hormones, fed antibiotics, and in general treated with all the compassion of four legged milk pumps. Roughly one third of California's cows suffer from painful udder infections, and more than half suffer from other infections and illnesses.

Although genetically engineered bovine growth hormone is banned in many countries including Canada, Australia, New Zealand and much of the European Union, it is widely used in California's largest dairy operations to increase milk production. Unfortunately, it also increases udder infections and lameness in the cows, markedly raises the amount of pus found in milk, and may increase the risk of cancer in consumers.

The natural lifespan of a dairy cow is about 25 years, but one-fourth of California's dairy cows are slaughtered each year (typically at four or five years old), because they've become crippled from painful foot infections or calcium depletion, or simply because they can no longer produce the unnaturally high amounts of milk required of them.

The Milk Board ads present the California dairy industry as a bucolic enterprise that operates in lush, grassy pastures. Some of the ads employ the slogan "So much grass, so little time." But California's dairy industry is concentrated in the dry and barren Central Valley. Here, the cows are typically kept in overcrowded, dirt feedlots. Some never see a blade of grass in their entire lives.

The ads show calves in meadows talking happily to their mothers. But the calves born to California dairy cows typically spend only 24 hours with their mothers, and some do not even get that much. Here is a video that reveals what actually happens to the calves:

The ads propagate the image that California dairy cows live in natural conditions and the practices of the dairy industry are in harmony with the environment. But the amount of excrement produced each year by the dairy cows in the 50-square mile area of California's Chino Basin would make a pile with the dimensions of a football field and as tall as the Empire State Building. When it rains heavily, dairy manure in the Chino Basin is washed straight into the Santa Ana River and some makes its way into the aquifer that supplies half of Orange County's drinking water.

The large-scale factory dairies in California's Central Valley produce more excrement than the entire human population of Texas. About 20 million Californians (65 percent of the state's population) rely on drinking water that is threatened by contamination from nitrates and other poisons stemming from dairy manure. Nitrates have been linked to cancer and birth defects.

The Milk Board defends the ads by saying they are entertaining, and are not intended to be taken seriously. But the Milk Board is not in the entertainment business. It has not spent hundreds of millions of dollars on this ad campaign to amuse the public, but to increase the sales of California dairy products. Besides, does misleading the public become legitimate just because it is done in an entertaining way?

The Milk Board knows that showing calves being taken away from their bellowing mothers and confined in tiny veal crates won't sell their product. Neither will showing emaciated, lame animals who have collapsed from a lifetime of hardship and over-milking, being taken to slaughterhouses and having their throats slit. But this is the reality for animals in the large-scale factory farms that produce most of the state's milk. Covering up this misery with fantasy ads of happy cows who are actually in New Zealand is not amusing. It is perpetrating a sham on the public.

This is why I have joined with People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) in a lawsuit that challenges the Milk Board's ads as unlawfully deceptive. Thus far, the Milk Board has prevailed in court, even though it's obvious that the ads lie to the public. Why? Because the California Milk Advisory Board is the marketing arm of the California Department of Agriculture, a government agency. And in California, in a truly Orwellian twist, government agencies are exempt from laws prohibiting false advertising.

Should we hold our advertisers, even if they are government agencies, accountable to reality? Should we require that what they tell us have some resemblance to the truth?

This month, PETA has erected billboards throughout the state that read, "California Cheese Comes From Miserable Cows." PETA, of course, is an animal rights group, but this issue is increasingly being recognized as one that concerns not only vegetarians and animal advocates. Consumers who want the animal products they buy to be from humanely raised animals can be found in every segment of society.

Consideration for the plight of animals is a central part of the American character. It is an essential part of who we are as a people. The "happy cow" ads are an insult to the legitimate humanitarian concerns of millions of people. As consumers, do we want to reward this sort of behavior with our hard-earned dollars?

Abraham Lincoln was speaking not only for vegetarians or for animal rights advocates when he said, "I care not much for a man's religion whose dog or cat are not the better for it."

To learn about steps you can take towards greater physical health, social conscience, and economic freedom, read my latest book The New Good Life: Living Better Than Ever in an Age of Less. For information about my work, and to sign up for my email-list, visit JohnRobbins.info.

After Elevated Park's Success, Other Cities Look Up

By KATE TAYLOR
Published: July 14, 2010 in the New York Times

Detroit is thinking big about an abandoned train station. Jersey City and Philadelphia have defunct railroad beds, and Chicago has old train tracks that don’t look like much now, but maybe they too...

The High Line’s success as an elevated park, its improbable evolution from old trestle into glittering urban amenity, has motivated a whole host of public officials and city planners to consider or revisit efforts to convert relics from their own industrial pasts into potential economic engines.

In many of these places there had already been some talk and visions of what might be, but now New York’s accomplishment is providing ammunition for boosters while giving skeptics much-needed evidence of the potential for success. The High Line has become, like bagels and CompStat, another kind of New York export.

“There’s a nice healthy competition between big American cities,” said Ben Helphand, who is pushing to create a park on a defunct rail line in Chicago. “That this has been done in New York puts the onus on us to do it ourselves and to give it a Chicago stamp.”

The High Line, an elevated freight spur that runs along the West Side of Manhattan and overlooks the Hudson River, was also nothing more than a crumbling eyesore 10 years ago. But since it opened as a park last year, its plantings and vistas, tasteful design and intricate weave through the redbrick bastions of New York’s meatpacking past and contemporary buildings by Frank Gehry and Jean Nouvel have been a hit. Though the High Line is not fully completed — plans have it potentially extending as far north as West 34th Street — more than two million people have already visited.

Developers from Rotterdam and Hong Kong have come looking for ideas. Officials from Jerusalem are hoping to visit. Recently a team from Singapore (Is there really anything old and rusty in Singapore?) spent time on the landscaped walkways that stretch from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street.

“We could have a full-time job if we wanted to just do tours,” said Lisa Tziona Switkin of James Corner Field Operations, the lead designer on the project. She has walked the park with people from Memphis, Atlanta, Chicago and elsewhere. Many of these visitors are interested in the potential for using outmoded infrastructure to add green space and transportation options as well as to promote cultural and commercial revitalization. Part of the fascination with the High Line, which is operated by the city and the nonprofit Friends group, is that it is more than just a pretty place. The neighborhoods it runs through — the meatpacking district and Chelsea — were already glamorous with many restaurants, bars and art galleries. But the opening of the High Line has made those areas even more of a destination and encouraged the Whitney Museum of American Art to build a museum there.

In the early days the founders of the Friends of the High Line, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, drew their own inspiration from the development of the Promenade Plantée in Paris, an elevated park built beginning in 1988 on an abandoned railroad viaduct.

Now their success is encouraging others. In Philadelphia the idea is to turn the Reading Viaduct, which is 60 feet wide, into an elevated park and bike path.

“Our viaduct is much wider, which gives us more opportunity in some way,” said Paul R. Levy, the president of a business improvement group that is exploring the plan there.

The proposal is the brainchild of John Struble, a furniture maker, and Sarah McEneaney, an artist, who live near the viaduct and who met Mr. David in 2003 when he walked the span with them.

“He totally inspired us,” Ms. McEneaney said. “We got a lot of advice early on.” Still, she said, the project had little momentum until the High Line opened. “That sparked a lot more interest from the city administration,” she said.

Now the business-improvement quarter, known as the Center City District, is conducting a feasibility study focused in part on whether building the park would bring new development to the neighborhood, where many buildings are vacant.

“I was a nonbeliever until I actually walked on the High Line,” Mr. Levy said. “It was a complete turnaround for me.”

Alan Greenberger, the deputy mayor for economic development in Philadelphia, expressed caution about whether what was done in New York could be reproduced elsewhere. “People do look at the economic success and say that’s inspiring,” he said. “Can you replicate it? That’s another story.”

In Chicago, Mr. Helphand is president of Friends of the Bloomingdale Trail, a group modeled after the organization that Mr. Hammond and Mr. David direct. He acknowledged that Chicago does not have the army of private philanthropists that New York does, but said there was still lots of enthusiasm.

“We don’t have Diane von Furstenberg,” he said, referring to a prominent supporter of the High Line, “though we do have a celebrity chef.” (The first two sections of the High Line cost $152 million, $44 million of which was raised by Friends of the High Line.)

Recently, Chicago commissioned a design master plan from a team that includes a firm that was a runner-up in the competition to design the High Line.

Not everyone in Chicago, or other cities for that matter, embraces the notion that all good ideas start in New York. Janet Attarian, a project director for the Chicago Transportation Department, said that the plan for the Bloomingdale Trail has been around since the late 1990s. “It is something that we have been cogitating for a while,” she said.

The Bloomingdale Trail is almost three miles long, twice the length of the High Line, and is wide enough to accommodate bike traffic, which will give it a certain functionality that the High Line lacks.

“In the mornings there will be a rush hour of bicycles,” Mr. Helphand predicted. “It’s the east-west nonmotorized transportation route that we don’t have.”

Jersey City officials, who can practically see the High Line across the Hudson River, want to turn a downtown railroad embankment into an elevated park and transportation corridor. The effort is complicated by a legal battle with a developer that is now in mediation. The City Council on Wednesday voted to raise funds to acquire the embankment should the city win the fight.

Maureen Crowley, a coordinator for the Embankment Preservation Coalition, said that Mr. David and Mr. Hammond have advised the group, and that Mr. Hammond recently joined its advisory board.

The coalition organized a tour of the High Line last year for Mayor Jerramiah T. Healy and several other Jersey City officials, who were impressed, Ms. Crowley said.

Other recent participants in a High Line tour were from Paris, a group of officials from La Défense, that city’s business district. They sought ideas for shaping development in their own neighborhood. The group’s leader, Philippe Chaix, had been involved in developing the Promenade Plantée, the High Line’s muse a decade ago.

“When we were beginning to take the High Line around,” Mr. David recalled, “being able to point to the Promenade Plantée was huge to us. It’s exciting that the High Line can act in the same way — be something that other projects can point to and say, ‘This may sound unusual, but look, they’ve done it here, and look how successful it is.’ ”

A version of this article appeared in print on July 15, 2010, on page A1 of the New York edition.