GroovyGreen.com – Start Today :: Save Tomorrow

I had to pass this video along.  It is the story of one man’s effort to get the president to plant a victory garden on the lawn of the white house.  Worth a watch.

Eat The View, via Home Is…

Olivia Grange, the Minister of Information, Youth, Culture, and Sports, announced that this year’s Labor Day focus would be on increasing Jamaican food security. The cost of fuel and food has risen rapidly, leading to an unstable market in Jamaica. Ms. Grange urged citizens to plant backyard gardens to supplement their diet.

Beyond speeches and education, the government is distributing 200,000 packets of vegetable seeds to local schools.

Jamaican Gleaner News:

[Ms. Grange] said individuals living in urban communities affected by insufficient land space should instead look towards container gardening.
“Convert old drums into con-tainer gardens, planting vegetables like sweet peppers and tomatoes for your own use,” she said.
“Let us get our children and young people involved so they can experience the joy of watching a seed that they have planted grow.
“Grange said adults should also encourage youth to consider agricultural pursuits from an early age to ensure food security for years to come.
“This Labour Day, we want our schools to become involved in establishing school gardens, nurseries and greenhouses. As adults, let us work side by side with our children and help them to invest their energy and drive in laying a foundation for a pros-perous country,” said Grange.

Sharon Astyk, Aaron Newton, The Community Solution, and others have been pushing for this type of action to improve food security. The Cubans were forced to do so during the “Special Period” and showed surprising flexibility and growth in the local food supply. The Dervaes family at Path to Freedom is an exemplary example of what can be grown on a small plot of land.

It is my belief that this will be repeated in developing nations around the world, as the high cost of oil and food begins to threaten food security. Eventually, we’ll even see it in our neck of the woods. Kudos to Jamaican officials who have acted proactively. It will be interesting to monitor their progress.

It’s time for a new poll, this time a quickie.

Does your community recycle (i.e. pick up recycling during garbage collection)? Let us know. It still amazes me that there are communities that do not have recycling pick-up. I feel fortunate to live in a city were the recycling authority is very proactive. They are organizing Earth Day clean up events, and giving out prizes. OCRRA is running ads on syracuse.com currently to remind people that spring means that the composting sites around the city are opening up, and that a TV recycling campaign, and mercury thermometer collection will be taking place this month. Unlike most areas, our trash is not landfilled (although building debris must be). Our garbage is incinerated.

In my Environmental Impact Assessment class, we learned about the difficulty inherent in predicting the future of social and economic issues in environmental documents. In the case of our incinerator, which burns trash to make electricity, they built the incinerator way too large. The problem? They couldn’t predict that Onondaga County would start a recycling program and that residents would be so compliant with it. From the OCRRA website:

While a number of communities struggle to surpass the 20% recycling mark, Onondaga County’s households and commercial outlets are currently recycling better than 67% of the waste that once was buried in landfills.

How does your community stack up?

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Can a country really control the weather? Really?

China plans on using satellites, radar, and an IBM supercomputer combined with artillery and rocket launchers sporting silver iodide and and dry ice ammunition – to try and do just that.

And, if that doesn’t work? “Finally, any rain-heavy clouds that near the Bird’s Nest [stadium] will be seeded with chemicals to shrink droplets so that rain won’t fall until those clouds have passed over.”

Scary stuff. Indeed.

MIT Technology Review, via Cryptogon:

China’s national weather-engineering program is also the world’s largest, with approximately 1,500 weather modification professionals directing 30 aircraft and their crews, as well as 37,000 part-time workers–mostly peasant farmers–who are on call to blast away at clouds with 7,113 anti-aircraft guns and 4,991 rocket launchers.

I caught this story today from the AP, noting that this past week, members of the California Air Resources Board voted to relax restrictions (again!) on the number of zero-emissions vehicles that required to be sold in the state. This is the fourth such reduction and extension of the time frame.

California regulators have drastically cut the number of zero-emission vehicles required to be sold in the state by the year 2014, a decision that frustrated environmentalists but came as a relief to auto manufacturers.

The rules adopted Thursday put the number of electric and hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles that automakers sell in California at 7,500 by 2014 — a 70 percent reduction from the 2003 target.

[snip]

Auto manufacturers said they could not meet the California standard and needed more time to make affordable hydrogen and battery-powered cars.

“Pushing this technology into the market before they are commercially viable ties up resources that could be better utilized by advancing core technologies,” said Sara Rudy, an emissions regulatory manager at Ford Motor Co. “It is important at this stage to be nimble.”

“Waaaaaaaaaah! More time I tell you! Something something tie up resources, something something core technologies…”

CARB, since showing a big pair of brass balls in the 1990s, has been effectively neutered since in terms of truly progressive policy. Have they forgotten that they are setting the pace? Other states look to California emission standards to set their own. That is why this decision is so important. Instead of a ripple effect with improved standards there is a ripple of relaxed standards.

The decision is expected to affect 12 other states that had adopted California’s target for zero-emission vehicles.

Is it time for another state (Ahem, New York?) to step up and take the lead in auto emissions reduction? I think so.

Photo via kqedquest at flickr

Aside from its addictive properties, cocaine is getting a new bad rap. Yes, cocaine is apparently not only bad for you, but it’s hard on the environment as well.

The Register reports:

Snorting cocaine is an environmental crime whatever your views on drug use, scientists declared last week.

A panel of scientists meeting at the Natural History Museum in London last week detailed how the production of the drug and its trafficking affect biodiversity and contribute to climate change.

The production of a gram of cocaine means the destruction of four square metres of Colombian forest, they said, raising the question of which supermodels, popstars and city types should be lined up with hummer drivers and big game hunters in the environmental most-wanted stakes.

Colombia is one of the most biodiverse countries in the planet, and also the biggest cocaine producer. Bad combination.

On the other hand, combating the production of coca plants in the “war on drugs” might be even more environmentally devastating.

Finally, the Colombian government’s efforts to eradicate the plantations only serve to exacerbate the situation. They use planes to spray herbicides over coca plantations, with predictably gruesome consequences for insects, amphibians and other plants in the area. Growers then move to other areas, clear the native vegetation and start all over again.

So readers, put down the nose candy. Back away from the environmentally un-friendly happy dust.  You’ll save a few acres of forest.  Same warning to the DEA, lay off the environmentally devastating herbicides – please?

pic via Wikipedia 

I take a night class at school where the professor (a really nice guy) brings us in two pizzas to share during class time. The class has a small group discussion format, and the pizza really hits the spot at the end of a long day. Tonight, however, the professor apologized for not bring in the usual pies, but did bring in some left over delicious wings from a meeting that he had attended prior to arriving, and a crate of tangerines. There are about 16 of us in the class, and there were about 20 wings in the container. We each took one wing as we came in, knowing that there more of us on the way to class. As I sat down to my “dinner”, my thoughts drifted…

You see, there have been many (maybe some would say a few too many) times that I’ve sat down to a nice big platter full of hot crispy steaming wings. Most of the time, I’d just eat the meaty parts and leave a good bit of it behind. But tonight there weren’t a seemingly endless supply of wings, there was just enough to go around. And you know what? It made that one I was able to have all the more delicious. None of it was wasted, and I savored every bite. Everyone in the class realized that there were just enough wings to go around, and made sure to leave enough for the classmates that would be coming in after us.

I wonder, won’t our experience with peak oil share some similarities? Once we realize that there might be “only enough to go around”, could we become aware of all of the things that oil does for us, and stop taking it for granted? Won’t we savor every last drop and try not to waste a thing? Will we realize that there are generations to come after us, that will still need their share too? Will it help persuade us to look more seriously at alternatives? (I had 2 tangerines and a wing instead of the usual two slices of pizza tonight…)  Might we be wrong about human nature, and how we’ll react to peak oil?

Maybe not. But all I know is when I left class tonight, there were two wings left in the container. And that gave me a glimmer of hope.

There is little doubt that during that last 60 years we here in America have transformed our manmade landscape in a way that is fundamentally different from any form of human habitation ever known. While many have flocked to this new way of organizing the spaces in which we live, critics have noticed the shortcomings and have loudly pointed them out. It’s been suggested that the development of the suburbs here in the U.S. was a really bad idea. Author James Kunstler describes suburbia as, “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world.” The ability of most citizens to own and cheaply operate an automobile means we’ve had access to a level of mobility never before experienced. The outgrowth of which has been a sprawling pattern of living that changed the rules about how and where we live, work, and play and how we get there and back. We are now more spread out than ever before, mostly getting back and forth from one place to another by driving alone in our cars. This could turn out to be a really bad thing.

As the cost of fueling those cars increases, it’s becoming obvious we’ve foolishly put too many of our eggs into one basket. And as America wakes up to the realities of a changing climate, it’s also painfully obvious that soloing around in a huge fleet of carbon emitters isn’t the most thoughtful way to transport ourselves from one side of suburbia to the other. The question is, as the expansive nature of suburban life becomes too expensive, both economically and ecologically, what will we do with this great “misallocation” of resources? Read more »

A personalized license plate in the United Arab Emirates fetches $14 million dollars at a charity auction.

Via Al Arabiya:

It is not huge compared to my family’s fortune,” Saeed Abdel Ghaffar Khouri said after bidding 52.2 million dirhams (14.2 million dollars) for an Abu Dhabi license plate bearing the single number “1″.

“The price is fair. After all, who among us does not want to be number one,” Khouri told AFP.

[snip]

Khouri conceded to AFP that he would have been willing to pay up to 100 million dirhams (27.4 million dollars) to get his hands on the number “1″.

From here, via Inspired Protagonist.