I'm now blogging at river2sea72.wordpress.com - please join me there!

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There are a number of sites for finding out how your community stacks up on a variety of environmental factors.  Today I discovered Scorecard, which gives in-depth reports on toxics, water quality, air quality, and environmental justice in any zip code you choose.  It also provides a sliding scale showing where your community falls relative to other communities in the nation.  Mine is pretty bad by most measures, which is depressing.

Another good site is SustainLane Government, which provides a yearly scorecard for major cities based on factors such as public transportation, green building, and planning.  Again, my city ranks near the bottom.

Finally, if your interest is in water quality specifically, EPA's Surf Your Watershed provides a wealth of information, not only on the status of water quality but also about organizations you can get involved with to help monitor water quality and to help with cleanups and advocacy.

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NPR has a two-part series this week on the comeback of Bald Eagles in the Chesapeake Bay area.

The first part includes a lengthy interview with a biology professor from my alma mater, William and Mary (in the Center for Conservation Biology, which did not exist while I was there).  Even better, there is this animated map showing nesting locations from 1970 to 2000 (go to the site to see the animation).

Nesting_map200

The second part focuses on  the competition for Bayfront property between private land owners and the eagles.  Eighty percent of the eagle breeding areas are on private land, so their fate is in the hands of individuals.

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Related to my post yesterday on plastic bag-hate.  NPR had a good story this morning on San Francisco's proposed ban on plastic bags.  The grocery industry opposes it.  But their logic doesn't hold water.

"In our opinion, it will frustrate our efforts to continue to reduce, re-use and recycle carry-out bags," Larkin [president of the California Grocers Association] said.

On the other hand, Larkin conceeded that

[There will be a] potential domino effect if San Francisco bans plastic grocery bags. Larkin says he expects a potential ban here would spread in California. The bags have already been outlawed in South Africa, Taiwan and Bangladesh. Ireland imposes a plastic-bag tax.

My prediction?  The world will continue to turn around its axis even if plastic bags are outlawed everywhere.  And sea creatures will be spared from swallowing them (thinking they are food) and suffocating to death.

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This is the project that has been on my mind.  A new genre of craft is emerging that utilizes recycled materials in part to create a use for things otherwise destined for the trash heap and to raise awareness of the vast quantities of waste we generate in our daily activities.  These objects can be quite beautiful.

One of my biggest pet peeves is the plastic bag.  And I'm not the only one.  Ikea will start charging a nickel for each plastic bag used (as opposed to the existing model in many grocery stores, which give you a nickel off your order for each bag you re-use).  There is flickr group that aggregates photos of plastic bags in the environment and those put to good re-use.  Reusablebags.com provides lots of interesting facts on disposable bags and the savings that could be realized by consumers Bringing Your Own Bag (BYOB).  I keep a heap of canvas bags in my car trunk at all times so that when I am out shopping, I always have one or a dozen on hand. 

Still, we do accumulate some bags (my hubby always 'forgets' to bring the canvas bags in when he does an errand) - our 2 daily newspapers come wrapped in one or two bags each day.  I have been saving up these newspaper 'condoms' for a while and now have enough to make something.  I'm planning to combine my interest in crochet and the natural world (particularly the ocean) to create some plastic bag crochet sea creatures.  I don't think I'll ever top gooseflesh's amazing sea creatures but I'd like to create something worthy of the hyperbolic crochet coral reef project I've been invited to contribute to.

My first challenge is to create the 'yarn' - not as straightforward as these instructions for plastic shopping bags.  The newspaper 'condoms' are long and narrow and cutting straight strips will make a lot of little loops that will be tedious to combine.

As this project progresses, I plan to post updates and photos.  Ideas and suggestions are welcome.

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I didn't really intend to have two posts on mapping and the environment today; I actually have another project on my mind, but that's how it goes.

Via Google Blog:

A bird's eye view of mountaintop destruction with Google Earth

Posted by Mary Anne Hitt, Executive Director, Appalachian Voices

The first time I flew over southern West Virginia and saw mountaintop removal coal mining from the air, I knew that if everyone could see what I had seen—mountain after mountain blown up and then dumped into streams in the neighboring valleys—they would think twice about where their electricity came from the next time they flipped a light switch.

Last year, I read a book on mountain top removal called Lost Mountain, which detailed the destruction of one mountain via this process and it is shocking and extremely sad.  If you have any familiarity with Google Earth or have been looking for an excuse to try it out, this layer is absolutely worth the trouble.

Lost Mountain: A Year in the Vanishing Wilderness Radical Strip Mining and the Devastation ofAppalac

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One of my favorite books about mapping is How to Lie with Maps by Mark Monmonier which is not really about how to lie with maps but about how our worldview is constructed based on maps that have their own inherent flaws.  Or in some cases, how maps have been constructed to promote a particular worldview (i.e. that the U.S.S.R. was a massive threat during the Cold War).

Here is a site that presents different views of the world based on things like wealth, illeteracy among women, violence, carbon emissions, and nuclear waste: Worldmapper.  The group running this project is also working on maps that show depletion of resources, exploitation and debt.

If you see a map you like, you can generate a pdf poster with the category compared to total population or even download the data into excel.

Look at the U.S.'s giant fat ass in this image showing fuel use:

119

How to Lie with Maps (2nd Edition)

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For the Converted, and a Few Others
By BRENDAN I. KOERNER

SOME vegetarians exhibit a missionary impulse, forever trying to convince their friends that eating meat is cruel, unhealthy or wasteful. When spoken words — or a copy of “The Jungle” — fail to persuade, these herbivores may start using disturbing visual aids: photographs of caged calves or documentaries on the short, brutish lives of confined chickens.

Vegetarians who prefer a more whimsical approach, however, can now choose the four-plate Food for Thought dishware set. Three of the plates are decorated with clinical schematics of commonly eaten animals, showing exactly where bacon is hacked off a pig, or loin chops removed from a lamb — potentially unpleasant reminders of meat’s back story. And, as a macabre twist, one of the plates features a similarly diagrammed dog, implicitly asking what separates an Angus bull from a beloved family pet. (More at the link above)

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Just found this blog, Green as a Thistle, written by a Canadian journalist who is making one change a day for an entire year to reduce her environmental footprint. Good inspiration.

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One of my resolutions for the year was to switch at least three conventional products to environmentally-friendly, cruelty-free products. Last week, I switched my laundry detergent. I have to be really careful about how I wash clothes because David is extremely allergic to perfumes/additives, etc. against his skin. I have for years been using perfume/dye/phosphate free All or Purex liquid. I've wanted to switch to powder because the cost of transport for dry goods is much less than for liquid (because on a per volume basis, the dry goods go a lot farther).

Anyway, at Whole Foods last week, I spied a box of Bi-O-Kleen laundry detergent powder which does 100 loads at $16.99 per box. I was a little leery of buying such a large quantity of untested product, but I did it anyway. I have so far used it for four loads and am very pleased. Powders I've used in the past did not completely dissolve and would leave horrible residue all over the clothes, but this does not. It has a nice pleasant citrus smell while you are washing but completely fades by the time the clothes are dry. Works equally well in hot and cold and gets clothes very clean.

I'm still a huge fan of Ecover's stain remover and with the two working together, even Sadie's school clothes look like new.

I've also made a minor switch from liquid Seventh Generation dishwashing liquid to Ecover's dishwashing powder (for the transport cost reasons mentioned above).

And a final note, I think we have found a CSA to join for this year. The nearby Conservative Synagogue has teamed up with an organic farm just south of Atlanta to form Tuv Ha'Aretz, Atlanta's first Jewish CSA. The synagogue is walking distance to our house, and we can easily walk over there with a wagon after work or dinner on Wednesday nights to get our produce or pick it up on our way home from work. It's not cheap ($700 for 20 weeks, or $35/week), but that compares pretty well with the other CSA's I've looked at (usually $30 for you-pick-it-up or $40 for delivery). Maybe for a field trip one day, we can take Sadie down to the farm to visit where our food comes from :)

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