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The Not-So-Badness of Guides to Green Living
Back in my post-collegiate salad days, a popular little paperback was published called "50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth." If I'm remembering correctly, it was one of the first books to suggest that we could shop, reuse, and recycle our way to a better world.
This seemed pretty appealing during the era when President Reagan was heating up the Cold War to the point that a nuclear exchange with the USSR seemed not just possible, but practically inevitable.
With those ICBMs locked and loaded, recycling the Sunday paper felt comfortingly tangible -- just as likely to protect the environment as marching in one more fringe political protest rally that the TV news and politicians would ignore.
Well, the US survived the Soviet Union -- and so did the market for green advice books. Two decades after "50 Simple Things," just try to enter a bookstore (virtual or actual) without bumping into over a dozen tomes offering advice on how to shop, eat, dress, and furnish our w...
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No Impact Week Day Four: Foreign Foods
To say I am disconnected from my food is an understatement. Root vegetables frighten me. A whole fresh squash makes about as much sense to me as cognitive neuroscience. Needless to say, I’m not really much of a cook. It’s not so much that I’ve tried and failed. The issue is that I don’t really feel like it. I would rather spend my time writing, walking the dogs or reading a good book. I tend to find myself in the frozen foods aisle quite often and I’m great with pre-made pasta and a jar of sauce.
Greg, on the other hand, is an amazing cook! And he likes to do it. We have a great system. He cooks, we eat, I do the dishes. I suggest ingredients for the stir-fry, he rolls his eyes and comes up with something better.
And then comes Eat Local day of No Impact Week and Greg, a bar manager at a local restaurant and pub, has to go to work, leaving me to fend for myself. I panicked. Which, in retrospect, wasn’t a bad thing because it gave me an awareness that I hadn’t yet been ... -
Having fun with science - Project FeederWatch
If you have any fondness for birds and have any room at all for a birdfeeder, then Project FeederWatch (http://www.birds.cornell.edu/pfw/ ) is a MUST. This year's count just started!
Basically, at a nominal cost, we ‘FeederWatchers', thousands of us across North America, regularly count the birds seen at our feeders and send the information to Cornell University.
Year in, year out, their world class Ornithology Department crunches the numbers and analyzes the movements of different species geographically, and also the long-term trends in populations and locations.
Last winter, 117,000 people were involved across all fifty states and almost every Canadian province, counting the maximum number of every species they saw at any one time. Although you might see three chickadees at one go, and later see another three, of course there is no real way of telling whether they are the same or different birds - but it is the trends from year to year that matter.
For instance, in the 2008-9 ...
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Nature Misunderstood
Does anyone else find it odd that the researchers on Isle Royale found the results to one of their most recent studies - wolves and moose improve biodiversity - to be unexpected?
I did not find the results to be at all surprising.
Animal corpses turn in to biological waste which decomposes into the necessary nutrients for local flora to flourish. The plant life provides the necessary nutrients for herbivores to survive. The herbivores provide the necessary nutrients through predation to carnivores. Carnivores die, decompose and, in turn, feed the plants, which feeds the herbivores, and so the cycle goes on.
The Isle Royale study was impressive in that they were able to get enough data to prove the assumptions. However, the descriptions of the results as surprising or unexpected left me wondering. How deep is the overall misunderstanding of nature?
Obviously, on pretty general observation, the depth of the misunderstanding is pretty extensive.
The wolves, for which I fight, are in the...
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Plight of the Humble Bee
Could half of our food supply actually be at risk now? by Larry Powell - No. 15 '09
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It seems that the news about disappearing bees isn't that bad after all.
It's worse!
(bee photo by l.p.)While the sad state of honeybees worldwide has now been well-documented, much less attention has been paid to their ungainly cousins, the bumblebees!
They, too are declining at an alarming rate and have been for at least a decade, possibly longer! But only recently have details of their predicament begun to emerge.
A Bee's Plea:
I am a bumblebee. I'm an excellent pollinator of many different kinds of fruits and vegetables, important to you humans. In some cases (if I do say so), I'm even better at it than my more famous cousins, the honeybees. (You've probably heard more about them because they make lots of honey and I don... -
Disappearing Dollars: New Orleans Soil Clean-Up Money is Tied Up and Unspent
Hurricane Katrina and the failure of the levee system put the very existence of New Orleans in question. New Orleans was viewed by many as unsustainable and unworthy of being rebuilt, and some people actually verbalized a willingness to sacrifice the city. Arsenic and lead were discovered in soils and sediments after the flood, but instead of initiating clean up the contaminiation was ignored and residents were told it was safe to return. Keeping people out of their homes is not a solution, nor is repopulating contaminated neighborhoods. Our survival in the city and in the Gulf Coast region depends on a paradigm shift. Environmental remediation in New Orleans must be viewed within the broader, integrating principles of sustainable development. Cleaning up soil that is still contaminated with lead and arsenic, especially at child care sites, schools, and playgrounds where children are most likely to be exposed, is one key part of providing a safer future for the city.
After Katr... -
Day Three of No Impact Week: Walkin' it Off
About four months ago I moved back to Seattle, where I use a car almost daily, from New York City, where I was car-less for eight years. After eight years of daily, crowded and musty subway commuting, I have to admit that I was anxious to leave that all behind. And I did. I left it all on my behind, which has swollen eight pounds (one for every year I lived in the city) in just four months. Sure, my weight has always fluctuated. But this, two pounds a month for four months straight, all gain no loss—I don’t think you can call that fluctuation. There’s a pretty clear pattern here that I’m not a big fan of.
Let me say now that I LOVE Seattle—maybe even more than I love New York. With it’s ample green spaces, impressive compost and recycling program, fresh air and culture of conscious consumerism, I’ve had many of moments of relief upon finding the issues I care so deeply about, so deeply ingrained here. But when compared with Manhattan, Seattle’s public transportation ... -
More Is Less: Ocean absorbing less greenhouse gas pollution
The world ocean plays a major role in regulating the climate, in part by absorbing more than a quarter of the billions of tons of heat-trapping greenhouse gas that humans put into atmosphere.
Scientists have suspected that even as these human-propelled emissions rise, the ocean's capacity to store them is maxing out. Research released this week in the journal Nature adds new strength to that argument.
In their study, Samar Khatiwala of Columbia University and colleagues developed an ingenious mathematical method for charting the history of how much CO2 the ocean has absorbed since the beginning of the industrial era in 1765: by tracing the amount of human-produced CO2 in water masses of different ages and different geographic origins.
According to their findings, the ocean currently holds around 150 billion tons of carbon. Just over a decade ago, their calculations suggest, it was around 114 billion tons -- a figure that closely aligns with research published in 2004 ...
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Exploring the Benefits of Green Roof Architecture
In 2007, Columbia joined with nine other universities in the City in Mayor Bloomberg's PlaNYC Challenge, pledging to decrease carbon dioxide emissions 30 percent by 2017. One initiative that is in the process of being explored to aid with this effort is the expansion and development of green roof (or vegetated roof cover) architecture.
Photo 1: Green Roof Con Edison Training, Long Island City
According to the National Institute of Building Sciences Whole Building Design Guide there are two types of green roofs: extensive, which are the most common and lightweight consisting of 3-4" of soil and low growing vegetation, and intensive which consist of 4" or more of soil. Intensive green roofs can support a larger variety of plants, shrubs and trees.
All successful, well-designed green roofs employ several features that are not commonly found as part of your typical roof.
- Drainage: must maintain optimum growing conditions and manage heavy rainfall conditions without damage due to erosion ...
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Day Two of No Impact Week: Wading Through Wasted Stuff
This morning was triumphant. I opened my bag where I had been gathering garbage from the day before, and found it virtuously lean. The contents included one foil and film apple chips bag, one aluminum cat food can, one cardboard toilet paper roll, and one paper pint that once housed the delicious pumpkin sorbet I finally finished off last night. And these materials didn’t bother me at all because they were all the remnants of purchases made long before this experiment started, and therefore atypical of my new waste-free way of life. Or are they? The apple chips I can certainly get without packaging at the cooperative supermarket in my neighborhood. But what about the sorbet? I’m definitely not going to stop eating ice cream. I don’t think that would be healthy for me or for anyone who knows me. Maybe I should learn to make my own. Or maybe I can find a creamery that will fill reusable containers. Yes. I can do this.
But then there’s the cat food can. This is going to be a pr...
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Mowing the Lawn