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New threats and a new attitude in 2010
Water is the reason there is life on Earth and not on other planets. And yet water appears to be the canary in the coal mine of climate change.
A new NASA study using 18 years of temperature data for California lakes found that Lake Tahoe, Clear Lake, Mono Lake and other large Northern California and Nevada lakes are warming faster than the surrounding atmosphere. Surface temperatures rose twice as fast as local air temperature.
Such dramatic changes, scientists say, will have major impacts on aquatic ecosystems. The invasive species that are already plaguing Lake Tahoe may be caused by the rising temperatures; in any case, routing them will become more difficult as water warms.
But perhaps the biggest problem is that the growing difference between surface and deep water temperatures will make it more difficult for the waters to mix, and mixing is necessary to supply oxygen at greater depths. Without oxygen, plants and animals die and the water becomes foul.
Another new study found that as oceans grow increasingly acidic due to their increased CO2 content, the water won't just become toxic to coral, but it will absorb less than half as much sound. That will mean trouble for the marine mammals at the top of the food chain, who use sound to communicate and to hunt.
Now, since it's almost the new year, I'm going to give a philosophical view of what this means (although my baser instincts, which enjoy cold fresh water more than anything, are crying out to be heard). Are these just items to add to a growing list of things to feel bad about? No. They are better considered part of a growing list of things to care about, as reasons to get involved in a global citizens' movement to ask for better from governments.
The meme casting environmentalists as downers who hate humans ought to go out with 2009. After all, what is more humanistic than caring about the many facets—water, trees, animals—of the planet you live on, and what could be darker than standing idly by while our habitat is destroyed? What is more optimistic than a belief that we can generate energy to power our uniquely human habits, like, say, blogging, without sending arsenic and lead and carbon dioxide into the air we breathe?
What do you think?
| December 29 2009 at 11:48 AM
Seeing green
Continuing with the visual theme of today's earlier post (announcing a wildlife photo contest), I wanted to point your attention to photographer Daniel Beltra, who was featured on ABC News for his work documenting the most exquisite and the most endangered natural places.
Daniel Beltra
New palm plantations in Indonesia
This link will take you directly to his photos.
Another green work of visual art was popular this week: an op-art piece in the New York Times. Without saying too much about it, I'll just assure you that it has something for everyone.
| November 23 2009 at 11:45 AM
Smells like green spirit
Perhaps the best indicator of how far our food system has gotten away from food is your nose: The powerful chemical products for sale there give mainstream supermarkets an eye-watering smell. As you wander the aisles, if you are used to natural markets, you may also wonder at how few of the items for sale count as food—not cheap food-like substances, as Michael Pollan would say. The whole experience begs the question of whether long-term exposure to unregulated chemicals from the next aisle over doesn't add to the list of undesirable ingredients in the food-like things supermarkets sell.
So if you're already green, it may not surprise you to learn that the janitors who clean these stores, with products provided by corporate purchasers, are asking for eco-friendlier products. After all, janitors are exposed to the cleaning products all day long and are in a particularly good position to know how corrosive they are. Their support also clearly shows that green cleaners work.
Of course, if you're not green, it may come as a shock that not everyone who's green is also a member of the urban elite...whatever that is.
Ah, you say, but the janitors don't have to pay for the cleaning supplies. True, but white vinegar costs less, not more, than Mr. Clean or Pine Sol, and baking soda, salt and Bon Ami are also cheap.
So join the janitors as they push Safeway and Lucky supermarkets to supply them with green cleaning products. They'll be rallying at the Safeway at Market and Dolores from 11 a.m. to noon tomorrow, and then at the Lucky store at Fulton and Masonic from noon to 1 p.m.
SEIU United Service Workers West
| November 04 2009 at 03:54 PM
Why I hate Burning Man
Burning Man is uber-progressive. You free yourself of capitalism for the weekend and experience only art; you free yourself of social roles and norms and enter a utopian world. Since Burning Man went green in 2007, what's not to love?
Looked at another way, Burning Man is the anti-ecology. But before I get to that, which is my main point here on the Thin Green Line, let me first say that Burning Man isn't free of social norms at all. The Playa fills up almost exclusively with 20-40 year-old economically privileged white heterosexual people, the majority of whom exist on a fairly narrow swath of the political spectrum: the place where hippie meets libertarian. If the festival were as effective as some believers think at conjuring away normative biases, that wouldn't be the case.
Then there's the stuff they take: the labor- and transportation-intensive costumes created for one-time use, the DIY climate control machines, the generators, the fire dancing, the drugs (which, with the possible exception of marijuana aren't green...at all), the packaging, the bottled water, etc. Some of the art is made of reused and/or reusable materials, which is great, but some of it isn't. I wouldn't expect DaVinci to limit himself to reused materials, but let's be honest: Most of the "art" of the man is just "look at this cool thing I made" for the Man. And, really, watching a giant hunk of wood and whatever else burn just for kicks is the epitome of wastefulness.
The festival's green proclamation, while an important step, is a substance-lite exhortation of the kind that I've read on many a corporate website. Did I mention that Burning Man is a for-profit corporation? Whose leaders refused to take a stand when Sempra proposed building a coal-fired power plant nearby?
Burning Man is, at heart, a party—and it's one that thousands of people drive hundreds of miles to get to. It's great that they clean up after themselves when they're done, but driving that far to have a good time just plain ain't green.
So why do Burners drive out to the middle of nowhere to have fun, especially since so many of them hail from the same 2-3 cities? Because the natural world there—which is flat and barren—won't upstage their ego-shows. I don't mean that quite as harshly as it sounds—we all have egos, of course, and not everything that we do to feed them is inherently bad. But nature offers a radically different perspective on the ego: It makes you feel like a small part of something much bigger, which, empirical evidence suggests, does wonders for the psyche.
I'd venture that no matter how fantastic your costume, if you stand in front of Niagara Falls you'll feel silly. I'd further venture that not that many people would stop to look at you.
I'm sure the Burners reading this would protest that the festival is physically away from the everyday world so that participants can get psychologically away from the everyday world. But going outside of nature to do it overlooks the answer that's been there all along. Our human and social norms seem limiting and arbitrary because, well, they are. What's not limiting and arbitrary? The complex forces and landscapes and patterns and interactions of the huge planet that we live on. The one that made us. And pretending not to see that is as silly as some of the costumes on display.
Burners: Ready, aim, fire!
| September 08 2009 at 06:31 AM
The green case for Kindle
Local powerhouse the Cleantech Group released a report finding that using an e-reader such as the Amazon Kindle or the Sony Reader results in lower carbon emissions than buying new books.
Photo from Wikipedia licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License
The study found that reading three e-books a month for four years produces roughly 168 kilograms of CO2, whereas buying the same number of books results in more than 1,000 kilograms of CO2 as a result of deforestation, paper manufacture and shipping.
So are e-books an environmental slam dunk? Not exactly. Carbon emissions aside, the reading devices are likely to contain toxic materials commonly found in electronics (although Sony says its Reader is PVC-free). And the books-to-readers comparison leaves out the most obvious green options: used books or the public library.
| August 31 2009 at 12:26 PM
PETA's whale war over: Who won?
I blogged last week on PETA's billboard ad in Jacksonville, Fla., calling a fat woman a "whale" and asking people to "lose the blubber" by going vegetarian. I was not alone in calling the ad sexist.
PETA has replaced the ad with something less controversial.
The new ad feels a little like passive-aggressive gloating to me. Did PETA lose or win with its gross ad?
PETA's replacement ad
| August 26 2009 at 11:13 AM
Download tunes, save planet
TGL absolutely loves things that save you money and help the environment, so its author was veritably foaming at the mouth when he happened upon a study [pdf] concluding that downloading music results in far fewer carbon emissions than buying compact disks (H/T Green Inc.).
Carbon emissions for music distribution
Now, officially, of course, we're talking about paying to download music because downloading music for free would be violating music conglomerates' rights to musicians' creative products. (Learn more!)
The most carbon-intensive way to obtain an album is to have the CD shipped to you overnight. The second most carbon-intensive method is to drive to the store to buy it. The best way to buy a CD is to have it shipped ground from an online store.
Downloading it at home (or walking to the store) results in carbon emissions savings of 40 to 80 percent: 80 percent if you leave the files in digital form, and 40 percent if you record them to a CD yourself. That's because even blank CDs must be produced and shipped.
The study, which was financed by Microsoft and Intel, did not consider how people listen to music once they've obtained it. Three easy energy-saving tips for your iPod, for good measure:
- Always lock the device when not in use to avoid running down your battery.
- Remove it from its case when charging it.
- Create playlists you like, because skipping songs uses almost as much battery power as playing them (this from my own personal study).
| August 18 2009 at 11:59 AM
Can a movie make a difference?
This weekend saw the San Francisco opening of a film that poses the question of whether an audience's engagement in a film—What will happen? Will the good guys win?—can be carried out into the real world.
A small taste of what happens at the cove.
The film is The Cove, an action/adventure documentary about environmentalists, entertainers and athletes getting together to try to stop the barbaric mass-slaughter of dolphins in a tiny town in Japan.
In a sense, showbiz is the story. Ric O'Barry was the trainer for the show Flipper, which sparked the huge popular interest in dolphins that led dolphin-capture to become a big-money industry (a dolphin intended for performance can sell for up to $250,000). O'Barry went from being a participant in the industry to being its most famous opponent when Kathy, one of the dolphins that played Flipper, as he puts it, "committed suicide in [his] arms."
The dolphins did not thrive in captivity, and O'Barry began liberating captive dolphins the world over. That eventually led him to Taiji, Japan, where most show dolphins are captured and sold. Once there, he learned what happened to the dolphins that weren't selected for the Sea Worlds and swim-with-dolphin shows of the world—and it wasn't pretty.
The problem was proving it: Fishermen and government officials were extremely secretive about the dolphin slaughter, and had set up an impressive security apparatus to protect their secret. O'Barry eventually recruited the Oceanic Preservation Society, a group that uses photography to encourage and support marine environmentalism. The Cove doesn't record a campaign so much as it is a campaign to stop the dolphin slaughter. But with a team that includes rock concert organizers, activists, free divers (scuba divers who reject oxygen tanks) and a former Canadian covert-ops man, the campaign doesn't limit itself to earnest pleadings. It includes infrared cameras, cameras disguised as rocks, illegal swims with dolphins, government coverups, and a healthy dose of breaking and entering. It takes on Sea World, the International Whaling Commission, the Taiji city council and the Japanese government.
Which is to say, it's an excellent film that will have you at the edge of your seat one moment and in tears the next. The question is, can even a widely distributed film bring about concrete change? The environmental organizations, including the Bay Area's Earth Island Institute, that have signed on to the film's action arm, Save Japan Dolphins, hope so. And O'Barry, who's no longer a young man, observes in the film, that if he can't stop a barbaric slaughter of one of the planet's most intelligent species that brings little financial gain—dolphin meat contains 500 times the "safe" level of mercury and sells for pennies on the dollar when accurately labeled—he'll consider his life a failure. Man's penchant for spy thrillers and his ability to train exquisite creates to flip in the air won't look like much, either.
| August 10 2009 at 01:51 PM
Radio host and author Thom Hartmann talks about Threshold
Thom Hartmann, a former Air America radio host, currently hosts The Thom Hartmann Program, which claims to have more listeners than any other progressive talk show in the nation. Hartmann's book, The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight, inspired Leonardo DiCaprio's movie The 11th Hour. I talked to Hartmann about his most recent book, Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture (Viking, $22.95).
Wikipedia
Radio hosting and writing seem like radically different undertakings. One is interactive and spontaneous; one is solitary and highly planned. How did you wind up doing both, and how do you balance the two?
You're right that in the process piece of it, there's a real radical difference between the two. But at a larger level, they're really kind of the same thing, which is trying to share ideas with people in ways that are meaningful and hopefully transformational. These have been two of my passions my whole life. When I was a little kid—literally eight years old, I used to watch Walter Cronkite and I would try to imitate him. I always thought doing news would be just the coolest thing, then when I was 16, I got a job as a DJ and kind of worked my way through college for a while and I had been writing the whole time. I always wanted to be a writer, and I always wanted to do broadcasting, and that's what I do. It's pretty cool to do what you always wanted to do.
In the book, you make a strong critique of the way we use—and overuse—the word sustainability. What does the word ultimately mean to you?
Well if we're going to continue to use the word sustainability we need to totally recalibrate its meaning [to mean that] we are part of interpenetrated by inseparable from the world around us, we need to view every part of the biosphere, from the mosquito to the redwood as equally sacred as we are—I know that flips out a lot of religious folks. But I'm concerned that if we don't recapture that in our culture, our culture is screwed or doomed. To be sustainable is not to be in our own human cocoon or cubicle, and say, here, look at this, we can make our machines work. It has to mean to be seamlessly integrated with all of nature. And that's not what it means for most people now; it means they can recycle their plastic bags or something.
What practical suggestions would you make for businesses and environmentalists who use the word to describe efforts at becoming more sustainable, which rarely means truly sustainable?
I think sustainable is fine, I just think we just need to broaden the frame. For example, we try to conserve water, but...the vast majority of water used is not used for bathing and washing—it has nothing to do with low-flow toilets; it's used by industrial processes and industrial agriculture. We can use fluorescent bulbs all day long, but the majority of our electricity is used by industry. You can go down the list where we're trying to be more sustainable and [every category is] dwarfed by what our military and our industry are using. We need a fundamental rethink of how we've constructed our economies: the idea that growth is good, and the understanding of the carrying capacity of the earth for human flesh. In the absence of oil, the planet had only a billion people on it and it was groaning under that—and, at that we were killing off whales like crazy. Arguably, the planet might only be able to handle half a billion people without oil—and we've hit peak oil. We've got to figure out how to keep the other 6.5 billion from starving, and to stop producing more of them. I mean we need some fundamental rethinks here and they all tie in to how we view ourselves in relation to each other and in relation to the planet.
It took all of human history to reach the first billion people in 1800; the second billion took only 130 years, and the fifth billion took just 14 years. We tell ourselves that this explosion of population is simply the way it is for human beings, but there are many cultures in the world that have been population-stable for, in some cases, tens of thousands of years. What we find that the most consistent factor that will stabilize a population, even within a single generation, is when women have power equal to men, and that's a huge cultural issue.
How did you come to the conclusion that women's rights is the determining factor in population?
There's been some pretty decent research on it over last couple decades, and I don't think it's something that's highly in dispute; it's just that it doesn't get talked about very much because it gets into religious issues, and scientists don't like to get into issues that deal with religion.
The country in Europe that has highest rate of birth control is Italy, which is almost entirely Catholic. What that means to me is that it is possible for the people in a culture to move faster than the religious institutions in a culture. We don't have to go out and teach the Catholic Church, or Muslims in countries where it's legal to have up to four wives, or teach the fundamentalist Mormons that their religion is wrong—we just have to empower the women.
The Old Testament has over 600 rules in it, most of which are ignored today—but that doesn't mean that there's been a wholesale rejection of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Many people get a lot of solace and meaning from their religion but they don't follow the rules.
Part of what's revolutionary about that point is simply that it allows you to talk about population control, while, as you note, most greens don't. What would you add to lists like "51 Ways to Save the Planet" to address the issue of population?
I would say that they're just nibbling around the edges. Most of the pop-culture environmental movement, the corporate-acceptable environmental movement is just nibbling around the edges. The real issue is culture: resacralizing our world...It doesn't have to be in a religious context, but reconnecting with a sense of awe—re-respecting the Earth might be a word that people would find less inflammatory—and resacralizing each other. The obvious sense of that is the empowerment of women and ending discrimination on the basis of race, sexual orientation and gender—those are the biggies I guess. In a way that change brings us to another very large frame, which is, are we going to be a we society or a me society? The Northern Europeans concluded long ago that they were a we society: They have very high taxes on high income, so they don't have super wealth; they have a very strong social safety net, so they don't have super poor, and everybody's part of we.
Since the 1980s with Reagan and Thatcher and Milton Friedman winning the Nobel Prize, we've celebrated ourselves as a me society, and what it's brought about is incredible destruction of our social fabric, our environment, and of many countries around the world. We need to have a national conversation about whether we're a we or a me society. And I think what we'd find is that majority of Americans really want to live in a we society.
What's your beef with Thomas Friedman?
He was the main cheerleader for [free market economics] with The Olive Tree and the Lexus. That book was very influential in the Reagan era in convincing people to go this way. The unfortunate reality is, Friedman got it completely wrong; he didn't do his homework. For two decades [Japan] heavily subsidized Toyota [the company that makes the Lexus]; they made it illegal to sell American cars in Japan. The Lexus was result of government subsidies and protectionisms: if you want a poster child on how to build up an industry, it should be the Lexus. And Friedman turned it totally on its head. It's a little bizarre, actually; economists read this book and go huh?—or at least those that aren't enthralled to the Cato Institute.
You certainly seem to be arguing for a return to big government and protectionism as important parts of ameliorating the environmental crisis. Those are not politically popular ideas—how do you imagine us getting back to them?
People don't know the history of this country and other countries and don't realize that the economies doing well around the world are those that are heavily protected: China, Japan, and the European Union heavily protect their products.
Alexander Hamilton put forward in 1791 his "Report on Manufactures"; he laid out a plan on how to create an economy that was self-sustaining, and a big piece of that was tariffs. We had strong tariffs in place from 1793 to the 1980s, and the result of that was that we made our own clothes and food and TVs, and we don't make any of that anymore. We've become a country that exports raw materials—we export trash and wood—and imports finished products, and that's a pretty textbook definition of a third world economy. We were the largest creditor and now we're the largest debtor. Thirty years of free market economics brought to you by Ronald Reagan and Thomas Friedman has destroyed this country. We've made some big mistakes, and they've really only helped transnational corporations. There are entire think tanks devoted to pushing these ideas, like the Cato Institute, and they're very well funded.
Using health care as the example, the question is not do you want a government bureaucrat between you and your doctor, because we can't all afford to insure ourselves individually. The question is really do you want a representative to a democratic institution that is answerable to we the people, or do you want Bill McGuire—who, when he left UnitedHealth Group he had taken a 10-year compensation package of $1.78 billion—standing between you and your doctor? If you don't like the way your health care company is doing something and you try to protest, they will laugh at you, and if you show up at their office with a sign, they will have you arrested for trespassing. If you don't like the way the government is handling your health care, you can call your congressman or picket his office or run against him in the next election.
| August 06 2009 at 03:19 PM
Pee in the shower to save the rainforest
As water becomes an increasingly hot topic, there's more and more public discourse about a private act: peeing. In the 80s, Western U.S. states brought in the slogan, "If it's yellow, let it mellow; if it's brown, flush it down."
Now, in Brazil, a new public service announcement says, "Go green—go in the shower." And that second go means pee.
While all of these ways of peeing, as well as peeing on a leaf pile in the back yard, do save water, I have to wonder about the PR value of getting, literally, in people's business. After all, I don't want people peeing in public showers, or leaving their yellow to mellow in my (water-saver) toilet unless I know them pretty well. And there's already a backlash against the preachy aspects of green.
More substantively, micromanaging individuals with suggestions for micro-saver actions like this one directs attention away from the really big industrial polluters. I'm talking about companies that leave the lights on all night and the water running all day and industries that haven't even tweaked their processes for easy energy savings, as a recent McKinsey report on efficiency showed. Before I pee on my feet in a Navy shower under an aerated faucet, shouldn't they be forced to do some of those things?
What do you think?
| August 05 2009 at 07:22 AM
