Category Archives: Environment
A Chance to Speak and Be Heard
The Environmental Protection Agency is soliciting ideas and comments from the public until March 19, 2010.
Give us your ideas on how we can:
Work better with others inside & outside the government
Solicit feedback from the public
Improve the availability & quality of information
Be more innovative & efficient
Create EPA’s Open Government Plan
Transparency and the willingness of government agencies to actively solicit public opinion only works if we are paying attention. So if you have an idea, or even if you don’t, head over to the website and participate in the discussion because the only way for the We, the People to participate in our governance is to participate.
h/t BoingBoing
Mushrooms Save the World!
Paul Stamets is not the most dynamic speaker, and sometimes it may be hard to follow the thread of his argument, but I guarantee that some of his ideas will blow your mind with possibilities and you’ll learn a side if fungi that is decidedly more interesting that a portobello mushroom sandwich.
Links to Make You More Betterer
My name’s Chris Jeavans. For one month I am attempting to live my normal life with one main change – no new plastic. That means no bags, no packaging, no plastic to hang around in landfill. In this blog I’ll keep you updated to let you know how I’m getting on.
[From BBC NEWS | Month without plastic ]
A seemingly simple proposition, but considering the amount of plastics in nearly everything we buy, it is much harder than simply cutting out the plastic bags and water bottles. Even if you don’t every try to duplicate Chris’s efforts, it will help you become more mindful of just how insidious plastic is these days, and just how much of it is filling up our landfills and just sitting there, decomposing at a ridiculously slow rate. A great gift to further generations: here you go kiddies, inherit a world full of plastic rubbish!
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Rowing solo across oceans might not be everybody’s idea of a dream job, but Roz Savage decided she’d had enough of her conventional London existence and wanted to do something special with her life. So in her mid-thirties she quit her job and bought a rowboat.
She now uses her adventures to raise awareness of environmental issues and inspire others to rise to their own challenges – no matter how big or daunting those challenges may seem.
[From The Voyage: Roz Savage: Rower, Writer, Speaker]
Reading Roz’s blog, listening to her podcasts with Leo Laporte, you quickly realize that doing amazing things takes far more focus, humility, and passion than it does courage. Check out her site and read about this amazing journey. I guarantee that Roz will share some thoughts that will be directly applicable to your own journey, whether that journey is artistic, domestic, or adventurous.
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We improve for the sake of improving that somewhere, at some distant point down the beaten road we’ll find happiness.
All the while we’re chasing happiness, we don’t realize the fatal, vicious circle we place ourselves in. We’ve habituated ourselves into placing our happiness in the future. We’ve conditioned ourselves into allowing happiness after some level of achievement, that never comes.
[From Finding Bliss: How to Reverse Engineer Happiness | PickTheBrain | Motivation and Self Improvement]
No easy answers, but this short column raises some interesting points, especially about our minds having evolved to be far more concerned with survival than happiness. Also, let’s just say your humble host here at LtL recognizes that this is one of his biggest challenges. So, when Yoda assessed Luke Skywalker in The Empire Strikes Back, I recognized, even when I was eleven or twelve, that I shared this trait:
All his life has he looked away… to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph.
Lately I’ve been using the term “mindful” a lot. I think in part as a way to try to remind myself that I should be paying more attention to my heres and my nows; that I should not take events and people and life for granted. Also, to be simply more aware of my environment and my actions. I also believe that for a great number of people, happiness is a scary proposition. We feel that we wouldn’t be ourselves, we wouldn’t know how to cope, we wouldn’t be interesting if we were happy. Grooves in the brain that keep us, like a damaged record, repeating the same three notes over and over and over and over again until something or someone comes along and pushes, gently, the needle from the groove and we can then go on to play our whole song, not some small portion of it.
Forget Biofuels – It’s Air All the Way, Baby!
Check it:
What’s sad is that, but for human greed and short-sightedness, this could have been the path for the automotive industry beginning over a century ago.
Oh, but you can’t make nearly the money on compressed air as you can on selling fuel, be it gasoline or biofuels or hydrogen. So yeah, all those corporations and selfish assholes who happen to control the means of production are going to sabotage these technologies, or poison our perceptions so that, in the end, money continues to line the pockets of the already obscenely rich.
Cynical? Who me?
Nahhh.
A New Meaning to “Hair of the Dog”
But one man’s problem is a nation’s opportunity. Has any scientist researched the practicality of replacing coal-fired power plants with new versions fueled by a never-ending supply of dog hair? Other promising possibilities: (1) automotive fuel additive (great opportunity for catchy brand name – Petkinol, Labrodiesel, or PetroK-9); (2) compressed pellets for use as mail padding to reduce styrofoam production; (3) wall and attic insulation (marketing slogan – “Turns your home into your second-best friend”).
Link
I would gladly add my cat’s hair to this project, although I wonder if the cat hair would react badly to the dog hair?
Turn Them Lights Out, Bubba!
Today, hundreds of thousands of people, and hundreds of cities across the world are participating in Earth Hour. From 8 pm – 9 pm local time, people all over the world will be turning off their lights. In homes, businesses, city & state government facilities, the lights go dark as a way to raise awareness of energy consumption and conservation.
From their website:
Earth Hour was created by WWF in Sydney, Australia in 2007, and in one year has grown from an event in one city to a global movement. In 2008, millions of people, businesses, governments and civic organizations in nearly 200 cities around the globe will turn out for Earth Hour. More than 100 cities across North America will participate, including the US flagships–Atlanta, Chicago, Phoenix and San Francisco and Ottawa, Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver.
We invite everyone throughout North America and around the world to turn off the lights for an hour starting at 8 p.m. (your own local time)–whether at home or at work, with friends and family or solo, in a big city or a small town.
Will you be doing this today? If so, drop a comment with some ideas of how to use that dark hour. I’m contemplating Scrabble by candlelight, possibly listening to some audio fiction through the iPod, writing letters to friends that I haven’t talked to in too long a time, or, maybe even just sitting quietly and contemplatively. How odd would that be?!!
Bottled Water = The Suck
The more I find out about bottled water and the environmental and human costs that producing bottled water incur, the more I am convinced that we – and by “we” I mean “I” – need to make some changes. Tonight I attended a meeting of my food coop and one of the items up for discussion was the proposal to stop selling bottled water at the coop. They presented some compelling evidence of just how bad the whole bottled water industry is and I was reminded of the article I’d read by Charles Fishman. After reading the article I definitely stopped buying Fiji water, in part because:
And in Fiji, a state-of-the-art factory spins out more than a million bottles a day of the hippest bottled water on the U.S. market today, while more than half the people in Fiji do not have safe, reliable drinking water. Which means it is easier for the typical American in Beverly Hills or Baltimore to get a drink of safe, pure, refreshing Fiji water than it is for most people in Fiji.
It’s hard to drink that water without tasting blood and pain. So I stopped, thinking that Poland Springs, because it traveled less miles and because I recycle was a decent compromise.
And yet . . .
Read Fishman’s article, “Message in a Bottle” and I guarantee you won’t be able to buy bottled water without at least a twinge of guild, knowing that you are contributing, even in a small way, to an industry that has profound and negative implications for us all.
I can’t say I’ll never ever ever buy bottled water again, but from tonight on, I’m going to make a concerted effort to stop supporting this industry.
Technorati Tags: bottled water, fiji, environment, sustainability, water
Invasion of the Indestructible Plastic Bags
So, one of the ways we are screwing over ourselves and the planet is the sheer, overwhelming, mindbogglingly huge amount of plastic that we litter around our world.
Plastic does not die. Maybe, someday, all the bags, tops, six-pack rings, etc. will find their way below the earth’s crust and be destroyed by the fires of molten rock. But until then (hundreds of millions to billions of years if every), we are increasingly choking our world with plastic refuse.
Recycle what you can, of course. But what about all those plastic garbage bags? I’m trying to figure out ways to conserve, to help reduce the growing plastic tide.
Idea #1
Where I work, every desk has a trash can, but there is also a large trash can in the kitchen. Everyday, the trash is emptied from all the trash cans by simply removing the bags from each and every one if there is any trash in the cans. Which means that if I throw one yogurt container in the trash at my desk, I have just contributed one more plastic bag to the deluge. So I simply have started making the effort to throw away all my trash in the kitchen’s trash can instead of the one at my desk.
Is it as convenient. No.
On a scale of inconvenience, however, it’s probably .001 on a scale of 10.
Idea #2:
Paper instead of plastic. I don’t know about where you live, but I rarely see this as an option in NYC. However, when I went home to visit the ‘rents in RI, one of the big grocery stores still offered the choice. Take paper when you can and then recycle.
Idea #3:
Reuse. Reuse. Reuse. Until the holes in the bags grow too big. Then maybe put one old bag inside another old bag (as long as the holes don’t match up) and reuse.
Idea #4:
Buy your own reusable shopping bags.
And then make sure you remember to use them!
I would love to hear more ideas from anybody. Drop ‘em in the comments.
Technorati Tags: plastic bags, environment, recycling
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