A commenter on Ben’s wood-powered truck post pointed us to a similar car hack. The truck above is also powered by a wood gas generator, except this one runs on coffee grounds. The Cafe Racer is a 1975 GMC pickup that essentially burns up used coffee to create a combustible gas. The gas is filtered on its way to the engine and, Viola, a caffeine-powered truck.
I just stumbled across this video of the well-known author, activist, and environmental scholar Bill McKibben explaining that, while he has been actively supporting Barrack Obama as part of “environmentalists for Obama,” he thinks the most important task at hand is to elect a Democrat to the White House.
McKibben is a champion of the environmental movement and he made it clear that policy action on climate change will require broad-based and sustained political support for it. (Running time 4 mins.) […]
New estimates place the death toll in Burma–also called Myanmar by the leaders of its strict military regime–at 100,000. In the initial wake of the cyclone, the brutal Burmese government made attempts to interfere with international aid agencies. In recent days, as reported on CNN, the Burmese government has changed its policies, saying “We are ready to speed up and strengthen our relief effort. We will accept aid from any corner.”
Here, you will find six organizations accepting charitable donations for relief work in Burma as well as five organizations possibly accepting volunteers for relief efforts.
Alaska Public Radio Network reports, at a recent press conference President Bush pushed for ANWR drilling as he “scolded” congress for preventing it thus far. Citing estimates from the Department of Energy, the President stated the possibility of ANWR producing 1 million barrels of oil per day translates to 27 million gallons of gas and diesel which would “likely” mean lower gas prices.
Following the press […]
[Author’s Note: This is the second of a 2-part essay on this topic. Part 1, Toxic Avengers, was posted on Thursday.]
Part 2: Turning Down the Thermostat
So the most toxic fumes polluting our planet may be coming right out of our very own mouths, churned up by the fires scorching our very own hearts.
Now, with the ever worsening state of bad news, bad policy, bad economy, and bad moods, each existing and new threat to the Earth understandably throws a spark on environmentalists’ waiting tinder. Admittedly, it is so hard not harbor anger over some of the policies and practices of our current administration (as well as past administrations), or of big business around the world, or of our fellow citizens who seem to care more about horsepower than living, breathing horses.
Nevertheless, I am convinced that we must not give in to our anger by acting and speaking hatefully or violently. I ask, how does it feel, in your heart and in your entire body, when you are in the midst of a fit of seemingly “righteous indignation”? Is it any wonder that “ire” rhymes with “fire,” not to mention “pyre”—as in funeral pyre? (Yes, yes, think here of the Doors song…go on, sing it in your head….) And so whenever we speak or act motivated by this fire within, we pollute the planet with burning negativity…and burn ourselves in the process. The energy we generate has no moral distinctions; it simply flows out and has its effects, just as coal smoke and exhaust simply rise into the atmosphere and trap the sun’s heat.
This is the worst pollution in so many ways. According to James Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis,” the planet is one immense living being in which everything exists in a state of essential symbiosis. So if we imagine the Earth, Gaia, as a living body, then our hatred is like a gland releasing toxins into the bloodstream and so poisoning the entire system. In a healthy body, every single cell and every part of every cell functions with the others in order to maintain homeostasis, so that the entire being is one vast system of mutual support at all levels. By contrast, some of the most debilitating conditions involve parts of the body attacking each other, as happens in the various auto-immune disorders such as rheumatoid arthritis, Lupus, and celiac disease.
We are at a point now where we must rely upon the love and compassion we feel for the life of our planet. We must let this love be our motivation as we strive to make changes in our individual lives, in the lives of those around us, and in the laws that govern society.
[Author’s Note: This is the first of a 2-part essay on this topic. Part 2 will be posted on Friday.]
Part 1: Toxic Avengers
The imperiled state of our planet seems to be growing more obvious by the day. It seems that a newfound ecological cognizance, if not Aldo Leopold’s “ecological conscience,” has been virtually enforced across the globe. (Sadly, America seems to be stuck at the back of class in so many ways….)
While I have tried diligently to educate myself on all fronts, mostly I am a very keen student of nature–whose classroom does not sit at the top of an ivory tower and to which everyone, every thing, is welcome. And nowadays, although the sunrises and sunsets often leave me speechless, and although the seasons still circle round me in their ancient dance, I feel as though the circle has become a downward spiral. I sense something suddenly happening in nature akin to what William Butler Yeats describes in “The Second Coming”:
The following ten stories, organized by region, made international headlines from April 27 to May 4 for their impact on the environment and society. For more stories that changed the world, see our archive, here.
Canada has proven once again that it is way ahead of the rest of world with its progressive government. Ontario has banned the use and sale of lawn and garden pesticides for homeowners. Quebec instituted a similar ban on 20 some pesticide products back in 2006.
The new ban is set to take effect by spring of 2009. Home Depot has already agreed to stop selling the pesticides by the end of 2008! This is a huge victory for anti-toxic supporters all over the continent. If only someone in the United States government could take such affirmative action we could all be spared. Ontario will basically phase out some 80 different chemicals and over 300 products that contain them.
Continue reading this article at the Environmental Blog. Join the discussion about this article at Care2.
For millennia, the land bridge has been a corridor allowing animal migration between North and South America. It now has some of the most highly concentrated biodiversity in Nicaragua. Conservation group, Paso Pacifico, wishes to permanently protect the land bridge from developers, but where could they find funding to make this dream a reality?
Enter the carbon offset company, CarbonFund. In league with Paso Pacifico and the Rainforest Alliance, carbon offsets offer the funding to make conservation of the Paso del Istmo land bridge a reality; and they’re not stopping at just conservation.
As we previously reported, New York Times columnist and author Thomas Friedman was officially “pied” last week, while giving an Earth Day Lecture at Brown University. Friedman was ambushed just as he began his talk, entitled “Green is the new Red, White & Blue.” The group that claimed responsibility call themselves “The Greenwash Guerillas.” In a statement issued today, they said they targeted Friedman…
“Because of his support for U.S. military intervention in the Middle East, neo-liberal economic policies that harm the world’s poor, and especially for promoting bogus solutions to the global climate crisis.“
“We sought to expose the hypocrisy of allowing Friedman, who is known for his influential support of U.S. wars for oil in the Middle East, to call himself an environmentalist,” said Margaret Little, the Brown University student responsible for the creamy projectiles.
There’s a review of this book that goes by the title “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth” and curiosity got the better of me to get to know how I have personally impacted on the future of our planet.
But then it has been around with us since just before Earth Day 1990. A lot of water have since passed under the bridge. Save the forests; there is a website and a rave blog too: 50 Simple Things.
Eco-friendly shopping, for instance, may be fashionable, but critics have argued it won’t reduce global warming. What has been the role of the Green Movement in ecological modernization?
Since the early 1980s, green as a political ideology championing ecological and environmental goals, has given the face of the Green movement a newer look, but not without the usual controversies: global warming, biofuels, or “agro-fuels” in more fluent eco-speak, solar-powered future, etc.
As if on cue, the kind of oppositional tactics used by radical environmentalists at a few Earth Day 1970 events that I just wrote about, emerged on Earth Day 2008 when Thomas Friedman took a pie in the face at Brown University [jump to video]. Friedman, of the New York Times and author of the bestselling The World is Flat, was ambushed just as his Earth Day talk on the politics and economics of global energy use had begun.
The action, as well as the ensuing discussions over at the blogs It’s Getting Hot in Here, and the Huffington Post, underscore the longstanding divide within the environmental movement between those who believe we should work within the system to address our most pressing environmental issues, and those who believe that the system itself is the cause of the environmental problems.
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