15 posts tagged “environment”
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.
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.
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.
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
(more at the link above)
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:
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.
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 :)
There is an article in today's New York Times Home and Garden section about my grad school (first time around) officemate and her husband. And their iguana (who I have met on several occasions).
Kara and I spent hours and hours talking about all things environmental. Look at her now :)
Living Day to Day by a Gospel of Green
March 8, 2007
Living Day to Day by a Gospel of Green
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN
VIENNA, Va.
THE Rev. Jim Ball is an evangelical Christian minister whose pulpit is parked in front of his townhouse. It’s a deep blue hybrid Toyota Prius, but it is not just any Toyota Prius. It is the original “What Would Jesus Drive?” car.
Four years ago Mr. Ball, the executive director of the nonprofit Evangelical Environmental Network, and his wife, Kara, drove the Prius from Texas east across the Bible Belt in a provocative stunt that, in keeping with the core mission of his organization, awakened evangelical churches to the threat of global warming. It also awakened Americans to the existence of the human hybrid known as a Green Evangelical.
It turns out that Jim and Kara Ball spend a lot of time thinking not just about what Jesus would drive, but also about how his people should wash their clothes, light their bathrooms, clean their windows, shop for groceries and furnish their living rooms — the day-to-day elements of what some Christian environmentalists call “creation care.”
“We like to buy used — we do that intentionally,” Mr. Ball said, surveying a desk, television cabinet, dining room table and end tables that the couple bought at their favorite thrift shop in rural Maryland, run by a Navy veteran named Bill. “Our stuff doesn’t necessarily match, but it goes enough.”
The end tables are made of mahogany. The Balls say they would never buy new mahogany furniture because the wood is often harvested from endangered rain forests, but they do not object to pre-owned mahogany.
“You’re not using up the resources again,” said Mr. Ball, a ruddy 45-year-old in a chamois shirt and Levis, who looks like he would be more at home with the Sierra Club than Pat Robertson’s “700 Club.” “It’s a form of recycling.”
While running a household on eco-friendly Christian principles requires a chain of small interlocking choices, Mr. Ball’s real gift is for large-scale strategizing. Raised in Texas as a Southern Baptist, he knew that conservative evangelicals had long been allergic to anything like environmentalism, associating it with hippies, communism, feminism, anti-corporatism, gun control and nature-worshipping paganism.
Mr. Ball spent the last seven years inviting evangelical pastors to sit down with climate scientists who shared the same born-again faith and corporate executives who were making an effort to reduce pollution. Progress was slow and he did not convince them all, but in the last year he has led an effort that has persuaded more than 100 influential evangelical pastors, theologians and organizational leaders — many of them political conservatives — to sign an “Evangelical Call to Action” on climate change.
Since his leading role in the “What Would Jesus Drive?” campaign, Mr. Ball has preferred to stay out of the limelight while pushing his new converts forward as frontmen. He figured that the Rev. Rick Warren, the megachurch pastor and author of “The Purpose Driven Life,” could attract far more Christians to the climate-change cause by preaching about creation care than he could.
But after some hesitation, Mr. and Mrs. Ball decided to allow a reporter to snoop around their modest two-bedroom townhouse, take notes in the basement and inspect their bathrooms, in the hope of getting across the point that you don’t have to live in a straw bale house in New Mexico outfitted with $150,000 in solar panels in order to play a role in reducing global warming.
“Do I really need all of this light?” said Mr. Ball, squinting at the bar of bare bulbs over the bathroom mirror. The bar was outfitted with curly compact fluorescent bulbs, like every light in the house except for two old-fashioned fixtures, for which the Balls could not find fluorescents that fit. It was an unconventional look, especially since there was a bulb only in every other socket. Mr. Ball said: “It’s a basic principle. Just use what you need. But it’s not do without.”
Mrs. Ball, who is 42, put it this way: “We have different habits, and once you have a habit it’s as easy as any other habit.”
They moved to this townhouse last August from a small town in Maryland, when Mrs. Ball got a job as the special assistant to the president of the National Wildlife Federation, a nonprofit organization focused on wildlife protection in Reston, Va. The house, in a development called Country Creek, has two bedrooms and 1,400 square feet, and cost them $435,000; they chose it because it was within walking distance of the Washington Metro.
Mr. Ball can be in Washington, where he often meets with colleagues and visits Congressional offices, in about 45 minutes, although he works mainly at home, where the second bedroom is now a home office.
On a cold February afternoon, the thermostat was set at 65 degrees. Mr. Ball said that he often turns on his Presto Heat Dish space heater when he starts the day at his desk. If he migrates to another room, the heater is light enough to carry around. “If you’re cold, heat the place you are, instead of the whole place,” he said.
While Mrs. Ball prepared dinner, Mr. Ball gave a tour. The shower stall in the basement bathroom housed Iggy, a docile elderly iguana, five feet long from nose to tail. He was eating a salad of kale and bananas and sitting on a heat rock plugged into a timer. He is Mrs. Ball’s pet, rescued from an animal shelter, as are the three black cats, Emma, Spit and Midnight.
In the basement storage room, the hot water heater is swaddled in a blanket sealed with duct tape. There are shelves of Bi-O-Kleen laundry powder, Seventh Generation recycled paper towels, Trader Joe’s paper towels, Whole Foods dishwasher detergent, Oxi-Clean — a nonchlorine bleach — and cans of Coke.
“One thing about aluminum: it’s very recyclable,” Mr. Ball said.
They clean bathroom and kitchen surfaces with a mixture of hydrogen peroxide, vinegar and baking soda. They wipe their windows with newsprint doused in vinegar.
Over dinner, which began with a prayer, Mr. and Mrs. Ball recounted what they called their “creation-care romance.” They met in 2000 at a loud Christian music festival in Pennsylvania, called “Creation Fest,” where she was the chaperone for her church youth group and he was manning the table for the Evangelical Environmental Network, which he took over that year.
At the time, she was living on 70 acres in central Pennsylvania with a flock of chickens and two rare six-horned Jacob sheep and organizing churches and farmers in a watershed conservancy program. On one of their first dates, the sheep escaped to the woods. The Balls were engaged in three months, married in a year.
One of the first things he told her when they met was that he was devoted to the global warming issue, and probably would be for the rest of his life. In the seminary, he had dismissed environmentalism as unimportant compared to poverty and oppression and war. But while studying for a Ph.D. in theological ethics at Drew University, he was challenged by another student to reread what the Bible had to say about care for God’s creation.
“Colossians, chapter 1, verses 15 to 20 is the touchstone text for me,” he said. “ ‘All things have been created by Him and for Him. All things have been reconciled by His blood on the cross.’ The Apostle Paul tells us we are called to be ministers of reconciliation, and that means caring for all things.”
He read everything he could on energy policy, climate science and the history of environmentalism, but said one book in particular made him realize the connections between global warming and poverty. Asked what book, he said: “I’ll cop to it. It was ‘Earth in the Balance,’ ” the 1992 bestseller by Al Gore. “That might get me in some trouble,” he said. “I’m a great admirer of the vice president, but some people in my community aren’t.”
On their “What Would Jesus Drive?” tour, Mr. and Mrs. Ball returned to the Creation Fest in their Prius. “A few folks were hostile,” he recalled. “We got e-mails from people who thought we were being disrespectful to Jesus. They didn’t understand we were taking the question seriously, that Christians should be concerned about this. They felt it was some cheap stunt by environmentalists.
“I said to them, I’m literally taking Jesus as Lord of my life, of everything — including how I get around,” he said. “There’s nothing that falls outside that scope.”
via The Ethicurean
Michael Pollan (The Omnivore's Dilemma) hosted a debate between himself and John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods the other day at UC Berkeley's Journalism school. The webcast is here (I'm watching it now in another window).
He will also be hosting a teach-in on the Farm Bill on March 21.
Good stuff, if you're at all interested in food and since we all have to eat.....
The Nature Conservancy is my favorite national/international environmental organization. And not just because they gave me my first entre into professional life as a college intern. I like them for their straightforwardness. They don't send out petitions for their members to sign and spam their representatives. They don't make pronouncements about how you should conduct your life in order to be "green". They don't come door to door raising money for their latest campaign that sounds like every other guy's campaign.
They find pieces of land that need to be protected and they buy it*. Simple as that. They are the Real Estate Agent for the Earth. I think that is awesome.
*Actually, these days they broker a lot of deals with private landowners and government agencies for conservation easements rather than out-and-out purchasing.
