While we here at EcoLocalizer generally try to put a focus on the good eco-oriented stuff people are doing around the country, we’ll occasionally spot an egregious instance of anti-green behavior that shouldn’t go unmentioned … at least for the sake of public awareness.
And that’s the case with today’s post, in which we point out reports that a string of Burger King restaurants in Memphis have been spotted with storefront signs reading, “Global warming is baloney.”
You could call Becky Lerner Oregon’s answer to “Survivorman” … only she’s not a man, and she hasn’t been left stranded in the middle of nowhere with nothing but her wits and a pocketknife to help her survive.
Nope. This “Wild Girl,” as she calls herself, is in the middle of a week-long adventure in which she’s eating only food she can forage or catch on the wild streets of Portland. She’s blogging about her experience at Culture Change.
Running your car on used cooking oil is so 2008. The hottest feedstock for home-grown vehicle fuels is wood chips.
Well, maybe not everyone’s doing it. But at least one resident of Alabama is, and he’s trying to spread the word about his innovation.
Wayne Keith of Springville, Alabama, who’s a cattle rancher and a partner in Renewable Energy Systems LLC, was inspired to develop his Bio-Truck back in 2003, when gas prices reached $2 a gallon. Looking for a better way to fuel his 1984 Ford truck, which he uses extensively on his ranch, he started building a gasifier that produces syngas from the partial combustion of wood.
If you doubt there are a lot of clever and green do-it-yourselfers out there, check out Yahoo! Green’s Make It Green gallery, which features — as of today — 21 ideas from real people across the country looking to make the planet a better place.
For a $10 entry fee, anyone with a great do-it-yourself project can submit his or her idea to the site, where visitors can vote for the ideas they like best. Yahoo! will also put on display some of the top product ideas during next week’s Maker Faire in San Mateo, California.
If you think it’s tough to help fight climate change by riding your bike to work instead of driving, Utah resident Apa Sherpa will probably make you feel like a wimp. That’s because he’s just climbed to the top of Mount Everest to unveil a banner reading, “Stop Climate Change, Let the Himalayas Live!”
A resident of Salt Lake City since 2006, Apa, 49, has now climbed Everest a record 19 times since 1990 — including twice in 1992. His most recent ascent was part of a WWF Nepal campaign to raise awareness of how climate change is impacting the Himalayas.
Kudos to the six women who this week won the National Audubon Society’s Rachel Carson Awards.
The awards — named after the author of “Silent Spring,” the 1962 book widely credited with sparking the environmental movement — recognize women who “demonstrate great leadership and commitment to conservation.”
This year’s Rachel Carson Award winners include an oceanographer, an owner of an outdoor apparel business, a student conservation leader and three television executives who launched a green initiative for their channel.
Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management do more than study issues like carbon footprints and energy consumption … they’re ready to tackle such subjects hands-on.
That’s what a group of students, faculty and staff did last week when they put down their laptops and picked up some caulking guns.
Students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have won one of six U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) grants for economically sustainable programs that protect the environment.
Launched by doctoral candidates Amy Mueller and Matt Orosz, the MIT project aims to bring cheap and eco-friendly energy to parts of the world that are now off the grid. The focus of their efforts: Lesotho, in southern Africa, where many people now get their energy from highly polluting diesel generators.
The students’ alternative comes in the form of solar energy. Not the expensive, photovoltaic-dependent kind, but the affordable and easy-to-harness concentrating solar kind. Their energy generator uses a parabolic trough to concentrate the sun’s energy to heat water to provide steam energy as well as hot water.
Architect Howard Liddell has come up with a word to describe misfired green efforts that’s so brilliant I wanted to smack my forehead and say, “Why didn’t I this of that?” The word: “eco-bling.”
As an article in The Irish Times describes it, eco-bling is well-intended and expensive green technology that, once you crunch the numbers, doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. [...]
How neat is this? Two kids — brother and sister Dave and Catherine Cook — decided the age-old tradition of school yearbooks was just dumb … and decided to create an alternative that was not only more useful, more entertaining and more interactive for today’s up-and-coming generation, but could also help make the world a better place.
The Pennsylvania-based creators of myYearbook have gone beyond mere social networking to cause-based social networking. Their site’s Causes section encourages teens in the 10-million-member-and-counting network to turn their lunch money into real money for charity.
