A 2005 TED talk by Majora Carter of Sustainable South Bronx. One of the most powerfully effective speakers on environmental justice: just listen to how she details the systematic dismantling of the Bronx and how IMPORTANT and DOABLE it is to rebuild the Bronx sustainably - and the rest of the world, too.
DANG.
China launched a surprise crackdown on plastic bags in January. Now production of ultra-thin bags is outlawed and supermarkets and shops are forbidden from handing out free carrier bags starting June 1.
Duuude. Worth your 5 minutes: AMAZING SEA CREATURES
And now back to your regularly-scheduled busy-ass workday.
Who do you think said this?
Each and every day, I wake up early and I work out. It gives me the opportunity to watch the sun come up, and it's so joyful for me to be able to see that. It renews my spirit and it gathers me up again to try and do more to preserve the environment and protect it for future generations.
A) Carl Pope, the Sierra Club
B) George W. Bush, President
C) Charlie Crist, Republican governor of Florida
D) Ted Kulongoski, Democratic governor of Oregon
Hint: he also blocked a massive coal-fired power plant in 2007, is pushing for more stringent CO2 emissions cuts to slow climate change, and has kind of a scary perma-tan.
Yes, friends, it's C. I was pretty pissed when Crist got elected, because, well, he's a Republican. But as far as they go, he's pretty alright. Especially when it comes to the environment.
(The above quote was from an interview in Grist)
Holy cow! Check this OUT!
Researchers at New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT) have developed an inexpensive solar cell that can be painted or printed on flexible plastic sheets. “The process is simple,” said lead researcher and author Somenath Mitra, PhD, professor and acting chair of NJIT’s Department of Chemistry and Environmental Sciences. “Someday homeowners will even be able to print sheets of these solar cells with inexpensive home-based inkjet printers. Consumers can then slap the finished product on a wall, roof or billboard to create their own power stations.”
I also love the way they talk about how the power is produced, because I love buckyballs:
Mitra and his research team took the carbon nanotubes and combined them with tiny carbon Buckyballs (known as fullerenes) to form snake-like structures. Buckyballs trap electrons, although they can’t make electrons flow. Add sunlight to excite the polymers, and the buckyballs will grab the electrons.
(via MoJo's Blue Marble)
OK, so I have some great friends from New Jersey. I do. But these ignorant tools who are suing their neighbor for erecting a quiet, attractive, clean-energy-generating windmill in his backyard deserve nothing but WINDMILL PUNCHES TO THEIR IGNORANT FACES.
Maybe because, as Mr. Mercurio’s neighbors Patricia Caplicki and John Miller say in the lawsuit, in a 14-mile-per-hour wind, the three fiberglass blades produce noise greater than 50 decibels, the rough equivalent of light traffic or a noisy refrigerator.The suit also says that the spinning blades throw “strobe-like shadows” on their property from noon to sunset. (NYT)
OH HORRORS. Come on, people. I hope I never live in a neighborhood where people are so small.
Say what you will about the fever-pitch debate surrounding the gray wolf's potential delisting from the Endangered Species List, it's a complex issue, but this, part of a lawsuit being brought by Friends of the Northern Yellowstone Elk Herd against the federal government for not delisting the wolf and handing over its management fast enough, just blows my mind:
“Friends petitions the court to recognize that wolves are being used as a bio-weapon targeting the civil rights, economy, customs, culture, and heritage of the citizens of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming.”
Yes, that's right. Those evil eco types are using wolves as BIO-WEAPONS.
p.s. Will have more on this/the ESA stuff from earlier this week soon. It's on my to-do list.
This Salon piece on the Bush administration's efforts to effectively gut the Endangered Species Act is startling, if depressingly unsurprising and not the first time this has happened.
From the lede:
The proposed changes limit the number of species that can be protected and curtail the acres of wildlife habitat to be preserved. It shifts authority to enforce the act from the federal government to the states, and it dilutes legal barriers that protect habitat from sprawl, logging or mining.
And, in case you doubt this administration's hostility toward endangered species, check this.
Species granted endangered status under the last 4 presidents:
Clinton - 521
Reagan - 253
Bush I - 234
George W. Bush - 57
(that's fewer than any administration in history, and each case had to be brought via lawsuit)
More on this later, after I do a little research - there's actually some interesting thinking going on in the enviro world re: how to improve the ESA and remove the current problems it's facing with private landowners and Measure 37-style calls for compensation.
I haven't really been following MoveOn lately, but this Salon piece is interesting - they're looking at MoveOn's stance on Iraq and when to withdraw in light of the fact that, hey, not everybody on that mailing list agrees about when/how to get out.
Now, however, with the Democrats running the House and Senate, MoveOn's stance on the Pelosi bill has led critics to suggest complicity with the new congressional power structure. MoveOn has settled for something less than ideal. It's the classic problem the outsider faces after getting inside: Now that it's got an in with the speaker of the House, has MoveOn lost its soul?It's true that Pariser, a 26-year-old who has worked for MoveOn since 2001, looks at the Iraq supplemental bill with a shrewdly pragmatic eye. Of all the Iraq plans discussed in Congress this week -- including one by liberal members calling for a quicker, complete withdrawal -- Pariser saw Pelosi's bill as the left's best chance. He saw it as the only one that could plausibly pass. And Pariser argues that its passage will help end the war. "Let's play this out," he says. "Congress passes a supplemental with a timeline attached and Bush is forced to veto it. That forces the Republicans to choose between an increasingly isolated president and the majority of the Congress and the majority of the American people." The bill is thus a starting point for future efforts. It builds legislative support, Pariser says, for an eventual congressional mandate to withdraw.
But some of the more radical (more idealistic? farther left?) peace movement groups think they've sold out by not endorsing an immediate-withdrawal option.
"Unfortunately we're living in a world where in order for anything to happen on Iraq that forces the president's hand, were going to need two thirds of Congress." MoveOn's strategy arises out of this parliamentary consideration; its goal is now legislative, to build toward two-thirds support in Congress.
I think this was a smart move. It's a compromise, sure, but it's something. How do you make that distinction between taking a truly principled (but very nearly doomed) stance and taking a compromised (but more likely to move forward) stance? Can you play parliamentary games and still call yourself an activist? An idealist?
Living and working in a deeply conservative, poor, rural community has put me into an even more pragmatic state of mind than usual; not only am I working against the overwhelming crush of inertia, there's also the matter of lack of resources. I'm learning that slow, incremental steps toward progress seem so much more, well, likely to succeed.
Speaking of pragmatic, Bill McKibben continues to be awesome. (also via Salon)
What do you say to someone who says, "I'll tell you when I've had enough. If I want another car, that should be my right."All I'm saying is this is a democracy. I don't have much patience for the argument that no one should tell me what to do ever. In a democracy we work on figuring out what kind of society we want to build. And if you want to make the argument that we'd be better off with all of us buying whatever car we want until the end of time, then you're going to have to deal with those of us who are pointing out some of the drawbacks.
He's long been one of the most strident voices for taking action on climate change, but he's practical about it. We don't have to chuck capitalism altogether, but we do have to rethink growth and recognize that, hey, marginal utility has diminishing returns.
Getting back to rural Oregon and changing the subject a bit, here's McKibben on a future that may be drastically affected by climate change. In a sense, this is the same kind of thing that I'm working toward with my job, except that I spend my time talking about floods and wildfires instead of global warming:
But if you stop to think about it, you start to understand that the communities we need to build in order to slow down global warming are the same kind of communities that are going to be resilient and durable enough to help adapt to that which we can't prevent. In the not very distant future, having neighbors is going to be more important than having belongings. Membership in a community is going to become important once again both psychologically and physically in the way that it's been for most of human history.
For example: many people in the county in which I work have no fire protection or emergency services - they're too remote. That means if your house catches fire, the only people who will come help you are your neighbors. And when you live out in the high desert, which has a fire cycle of about 30 years, you've got a damn good chance of your house catching fire. Or your barn. Or your crops. Or the range where you graze your cattle. When I go out and interview people in the county for my job, they tell me this over and over again - we are a tight-knit community. We take care of one another. Stuff happens, but we get each other through it.
Wherever I end up settling down, I want to be able to feel that way about my community.
MoJo has a couple of good global warming news bits up today -
- Yes, it's gotten to the point where energy CEOs are scolding Bush.
- Estimating the costs of finally beginning to address global warming.
More later on this, 'cause Marc sent me an interesting article today that I want to think on too.
Know what's exciting? I'm going to be a moderator at the Idaho Environmental Summit!
It's the first of its kind for Idaho. I can't wait to meet people and get to networking!
I'll be moderating this session: Adaptive Management in Watershed Restoration Efforts: Potential Applications for Idaho’s Watersheds
Oh jeez. You want some more bad news today? I've been behind in my reading since I went to Eugene, and frankly I was a lot happier when I wasn't reading about this kind of depressing news:
Federal wetlands regulators have dropped a bombshell on environmentalists with a little-publicized proposal to relax restrictions on filling in certain wetlands along the entire Mississippi Gulf Coast to speed recovery from Hurricane Katrina. [...] The Corps’ proposal would allow property owners and developers to skirt the conventional "regional general permit" process for any projects that fill up to 5 acres of “low-quality” wetlands in the six southernmost Mississippi counties. Especially galling to environmentalists: The new process would also eliminate the requirement for public notice of such projects.
And call me a cynic, but somehow I doubt that the developers who are so antsy to get to work along the Gulf are planning to build low-income - or even affordable - housing on these wetlands. After all, there seems to be an insatiable appetite across the country for golf courses and condos these days.
Evans said his group’s chief concern when it comes to filling in wetlands is the potential for flooding. “People died unnecessarily in my watershed because of the Corps’ previous willingness to develop housing in places where housing does not belong," he said. “Floodwaters that instead would have been dispersed ended up in my mother’s living room, 4 miles from the beach.”
One of the reasons the Katrina fallout was so bad in the first place is how terribly the Army Corps has managed Louisiana's wetlands and water systems. And now they want to go and make it WORSE?
(MSNBC, via Facing South, which also hits on a new report slamming the Corps for claiming that it and its contractors were never guilty of negligence or malfeasance post-Katrina. You've got to be kidding.)
WHAT THE HELL. Rolling budget cuts across the National Wildlife Refuge System are coming to the Southeast, and the national picture is just as bad.
The 96 million acre National Wildlife Refuge System, managed by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, is buckling under the weight of persistent under-funding and a crippling $3.1 billion budget backlog. Without sufficient funding, the Service can not adequately manage and restore wildlife habitat, safely maintain facilities and provide quality education and outdoor recreation programs for millions of visitors. As a result, these chronic funding shortfalls have led the Fish and Wildlife Service to mark dozens of refuges for mothballing - a step that withdraws staff from the refuge and eliminates programs to manage public access and other activities on the refuges.
Seriously - NWRs have never operated with bloated budgets. These places operate on freaking shoestrings already and, like our national parks system and BLM land out West, are already perilously understaffed and in need of more money - not less.
(via Facing South)
Goal: to make enough social connections in Boise by the end of next summer to host a GREEN DRINKS. Get it started, get it active, get people excited, find someone to keep it going when (if?) I move on. Maybe meet some cute environmentalists.
This is an awesome idea - and apparently it's been happening in some cities since 1989. I've said it before and I'll say it again - activism is a million times more fun and more effective when people are working together as not just allies but friends.
(via Treehugger, from whence many good things come)
If you have the time to read one long article sometime in the next day or so, you should read the NYT Magazine's piece on elephants.
For a number of biologists and ethologists who have spent their careers studying elephant behavior, the attacks have become so abnormal in both number and kind that they can no longer be attributed entirely to the customary factors. Typically, elephant researchers have cited, as a cause of aggression, the high levels of testosterone in newly matured male elephants or the competition for land and resources between elephants and humans. But in “Elephant Breakdown,” a 2005 essay in the journal Nature, Bradshaw and several colleagues argued that today’s elephant populations are suffering from a form of chronic stress, a kind of species-wide trauma. Decades of poaching and culling and habitat loss, they claim, have so disrupted the intricate web of familial and societal relations by which young elephants have traditionally been raised in the wild, and by which established elephant herds are governed, that what we are now witnessing is nothing less than a precipitous collapse of elephant culture.[...]
What Bradshaw and her colleagues describe would seem to be an extreme form of anthropocentric conjecture if the evidence that they’ve compiled from various elephant resesarchers, even on the strictly observational level, weren’t so compelling. The elephants of decimated herds, especially orphans who’ve watched the death of their parents and elders from poaching and culling, exhibit behavior typically associated with post-traumatic stress disorder and other trauma-related disorders in humans: abnormal startle response, unpredictable asocial behavior, inattentive mothering and hyperaggression. Studies of the various assaults on the rhinos in South Africa, meanwhile, have determined that the perpetrators were in all cases adolescent males that had witnessed their families being shot down in cullings. It was common for these elephants to have been tethered to the bodies of their dead and dying relatives until they could be rounded up for translocation to, as Bradshaw and Schore describe them, ‘‘locales lacking traditional social hierarchy of older bulls and intact natal family structures.’’
In fact, even the relatively few attempts that park officials have made to restore parts of the social fabric of elephant society have lent substance to the elephant-breakdown theory. When South African park rangers recently introduced a number of older bull elephants into several destabilized elephant herds in Pilanesburg and Addo, the wayward behavior — including unusually premature hormonal changes among the adolescent elephants — abated.
Really stunning... and really depressing.
Whoa. Did anybody know that the SUPER BOWL is CARBON NEUTRAL?
Seriously! (via the fabulous greenerMiami)
(Apparently it's through tree-planting. A little controversial, but I still support it.)
Suddenly I feel a lot better about having a cell phone that uses Virgin.
Sir Richard Branson, the British magnate and adventurer, said today that all future profits from his five airlines and train company, estimated at $3 billion through the next 10 years, would be invested in developing energy sources that do not contribute to global warming.He announced the pledge on the second day of the Clinton Global Initiative, a three-day meeting in Manhattan that amounts to a competitive festival of philanthropy run by former President Bill Clinton.
The money, he said, would be invested in a host of enterprises, including existing businesses within Mr. Branson’s Virgin Group of 200 companies, that are seeking ways to save energy or produce fuels not derived from coal and oil.
(via NYT)
It's a shocker, I know, but Bush's new climate change plan has been deemed ineffective by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
That said.. hey man, the fact that Bush actually now acknowledges global warming, however half-heartedly - and is allocating $3 billion for research - is absolutely fantastic.
Best enviro news of the day? A federal judge has reinstated Clinton's "roadless rule" on over 49 million acres of roadless wilderness across the country. The Bush administration had illegally (that is, they did it without following the procedure such an act would require) replaced it with a version allowing states to choose whether or not to allow roads.
Speaking of nature, and of Will Oldham (see the Eric & Will post below), the NYT calls Old Joy "one of the finest American films of the year." I hope it comes to Boise. I've been excited about this movie for most of the summer! (Trailer.)
(Will Oldham co-stars. It's set in Oregon. And oh, man oh man, that Yo La Tengo soundtrack...)
Talk about exciting news - looks like they're considering moving the Mississippi back on a more natural path to the Gulf.
“The thing is to stop wasting 120 million tons of sediment” the river carries into the Gulf of Mexico on an average year, Dr. Reed said. Because the bird-foot delta has grown so far into the gulf, she said, the river’s mouth is at the edge of the continental shelf. As a result, the sediment it carries ends up in deep water, where it is lost forever.A diversion would send the river’s richly muddy water into marshes or shallow-water areas where, Dr. Reed said, “the natural processes of waves, coastal currents and even storms can rework that sediment and bring it up and bring it into the coast.”
“It’s a lot,” she said, enough to cover 60 square miles half an inch deep every year, an amount that would slow or even reverse land loss in the state’s marshes, which have shrunk by about a quarter, more than 1,500 square miles, since the 1930’s. Such a program would not turn things around immediately, “but every year new land would be built,” said Joseph T. Kelley, a professor of marine geology at the University of Maine, who took part in the April meeting.
I just hope that this actually happens - and that it happens in time to help this region out. I also hope that the people who live in the region into which the Miss will flow are taken into consideration. There aren't many, it seems, but they need to be a part of the process.
(from NYT)
As if you needed another reason not to eat grouper (besides overfishing and high mercury levels) - the St. Pete Times ordered 11 grouper dishes in restaurants all over Tampa/St. Pete, and only 5 were actually grouper.
Seriously. And this isn't just at cheap dives - one of the dishes was a $23 champagne-braised "grouper."
Most of the nation's grouper supply comes from Florida's gulf coast, FYI. It's one of the most popular fish down here, and rightly so, but it's definitely an industry in trouble (Here's more on grouper from the St. Pete Times).
p.s. The NYT has a really thoughtful and succinct piece on what's up with fisheries. Filing this one under "useful things to send to people when they ask why they shouldn't be eating that tuna."
This is so sad. I loved this guy.
This is awesome, awesome, awesome, awesome - I read on Gristmill that Wal-Mart is gonna try to sell a low-energy swirl bulb (compact fluorescent) to every one of its hundred million regular customers. If they do that, the amount of energy saved will. be. huge.
From the original article in Fast Company -
What that means is that if every one of 110 million American households bought just one ice-cream-cone bulb, took it home, and screwed it in the place of an ordinary 60-watt bulb, the energy saved would be enough to power a city of 1.5 million people. One bulb swapped out, enough electricity saved to power all the homes in Delaware and Rhode Island. In terms of oil not burned, or greenhouse gases not exhausted into the atmosphere, one bulb is equivalent to taking 1.3 million cars off the roads.
AWESOME AWESOME AWESOME.
Also, look how great these bulbs are -
Swirl bulbs don't just work, they pay for themselves. They use so little power compared with old reliable bulbs, a $3 swirl pays for itself in lower electric bills in about five months. Screw one in, turn it on, and it's not just lighting your living room, it's dropping quarters in your pocket. The advantages pile up in a way to almost make one giddy. Compact fluorescents, even in heavy use, last 5, 7, 10 years. Years. Install one on your 30th birthday; it may be around to help illuminate your 40th.
ALL OF Y'ALL WHO ARE SITTING AROUND BORED AT HOME - how 'bout you go out and buy some new lightbulbs? Next time a bulb goes, you can replace one and not replace it again for 10 years!
Gristmill piece here.
Yeah, that doesn't happen too often. If I was up on my Gristmill more often I'd have heard about this sooner, but hey, better late than never -
After a hard-fought battle, NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association) has succeeded in closing off 654,000 square miles to commercial fishing (some just to bottom trawling, some to all fishing)!
That is a lot of ocean - and, as this USA Today piece notes, it's larger than the rest of our national conservation areas combined, which total approximately 420,000 square miles.
Why is this important? Because world fisheries are collapsing, and fast. Only 10 percent of big ocean fish (tuna, etc) are left compared to populations just 50 years ago. Anybody like Chilean Sea Bass? It's only been on the international market for a little more than a decade and already its population is in severe decline. Fish populations can rebound quickly - WHEN fisheries are closed to fishing, even if just temporarily, and if there are designated safe zones for fish reproduction that help to recharge the populations. So closing off big hunks of ocean is good for the fish, good for the environment (industrial fishing practices can be quite destructive, don't get me started, it's terrible), and, ultimately, good for fishermen and those of us who do love to eat fish.
Now, those 600,000+ square miles of ocean are, of course, just a drop in the vast oceanic bucket. And we've only got jurisdiction over waters within 200 miles of the US coastline. And closing the ocean doesn't mean there's a fence up - certainly some areas will be fished illegally (grrr). But still - hey, it's a start. Just like how the Nature Conservancy has bought a bunch of fishing permits in California with the intent to ease the burden on fisheries (Sorry, lost that link).
By the way - The Fish List is a good consumer guide to which fish species are best to eat and which come from overfished, declining stocks. There are a lot of tasty specimens on the to-avoid list, I know. I love me some grouper and tuna. Nonetheless, it's a handy reference.
This is a perfect example of why I often have a hard time applying my New England lifestyle back home in Florida. It's constantly considered weird to be at all environmentally friendly.
greenerMIAMI goes and attempts to re-use a plastic grocery bag at Publix (something that we did all the time at the Co-Op in Hanover):
Me (to bagger): "I brought my own bag, thanks, just use this one."Bagger: Gives me a strange look, but comprehends. Puts bananas, cream cheese in my bag.
Cashier: Bagging my bread in a new bag.
Me: "I brought my own bag."
Cashier: Gives me really strange & confused look.
Me: "I only want to use the bag I brought." Take bread out of new bag.
Cashier: Throws new bag that bread was in for 2 seconds directly into trash.
Me: "Don't throw it out!"
Cashier: Confused. "Why?"
(read the rest of the exchange here)
Of course, the flip side to this is that if one person's doing it, that's fantastic and makes it that much easier for the next person who does it, and the next, and so on - and somebody's gotta start the ball rolling...
Oh, the terror! Here's what the coal industry thinks might happen if people actually do something to stop global warming:
According to the memo, environmentalists' efforts to combat global warming would realize the environmentalists' "dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of economic growth in favor of a smaller population, eating lower on the food chain, consuming a lot less and sharing a much lower level of resources much more equitably."
Sounds pretty good to me.
This is part of a leaked memo that's been circulating online - the coal industry is teaming up for a big propaganda blitz against global warming. This includes funding a scientist who "proved" that global warming was a myth by mixing up degrees and radians in his calculations.
This is the same guy who has, along with the National Review and plenty of mainstream media sources, misinterpreted Antarctic research - research that one of my own professors at Dartmouth is working on. One of the researchers wrote an op-ed for the Times that's currently #3 on its most-viewed articles list. Good.
I don't know HOW I haven't heard about these before now, but -
Loomstate makes 100% organic jeans. Chic ones.
I've been looking for new jeans ever since I wore holes into my old ones. Now I've found them. All y'all sustainability-minded fashion plates out there best buy a pair the next time you're in the market for some jeans, OK?
(p.s. Sally says Levi's is coming out with an organic line of jeans this fall too. Man, maybe I need two new pairs of jeans...)
So Vanity Fair has profiled General Electric CEO Jeffrey Immelt and his new "green is green" plan for GE.
It's actually a really interesting piece - Immelt has come under fire for taking a gamble on new energy technologies that will hopefully put GE at the forefront of the post-fossil-fuel-dependence world.
This is classic - look at how differently the left and right are responding to his plan:
He frames these goals in the words of Thomas Edison, who said, "I never perfected an invention that I did not think about in terms of the service it might give to others. I find out what the world needs, then I proceed to invent." In fact, the only way a supersize company can be successful in the long term, says Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute, a D.C.-based environmental think tank, is if it foresees major historical changes ahead of time and capitalizes on those trends. "Immelt anticipates that he is going to operate in a world with increasingly limited access to oil and increasingly rigid constraints on greenhouse gasses," Lash says. "He's developing precisely the solutions that those conditions will demand."But, asks Patrick Michaels, an environmental fellow at the right-leaning Cato Institute, what if Immelt is wrong about those conditionsor even the time frame during which they play out? What if concerns about climate change subside in the next few years, or, more plausibly, new oil resources are freed up? "Mr. Immelt is overestimating the urgency of these threats in my opinion," says Michaels.
Immelt is, as the article makes clear, in this for the money, not the happy little trees. The guy's a Dartmouth alum and was president of Phi Delt while there. Y'all Dartmouth people know what that means. But hey - if a non-environmentalist who heads one of the largest corporations in the world thinks moving on to clean energy is a good idea, maybe we're starting to get somewhere.
Apparently GE has also collaborated on a report that claims the US could meet its electrical demand from wind power alone - wow (via Gristmill).