Green Options

Meatout (now in its 25th year) has become the world’s largest and oldest annual grassroots diet education campaign.

Every year on the first day of spring, thousands of supporters in the United States and several other countries participate and encourage others to go meatless for a day (or a lifetime), and discover a more compassionate and healthy diet.

Many mainstream health advocacy organizations such as the American Cancer Society, the National Cancer Institute, the American Heart Association, and John Hopkins University promote the consumption of more plant-based foods.

Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed battery cells capable of charging in under a minute, an astonishing 100 times faster than a regular rechargable battery.

The breakthrough could revolutionize electric car battery technology and pave the way for ultra-fast charging electric vehicles in as little as two years.

The discovery came when MIT researchers Byoungwoo Kang and Gerbrand Ceder found out how to get a common lithium compound to release and take up lithium ions in a matter of seconds. According to Ceder, the compound, known as lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4), has a crystal structure that creates “perfectly sized tunnels for lithium to move through,” allowing the team to reach “ridiculously fast charging rates.”

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has announced that, as a result of its enforcement actions, U.S. companies will spend a record-breaking $11.8 billion on pollution control and projects to clean up the environment this year.

This blog post was written in response to some unusually caustic replies received on my last Sustainablog post, “The Dissonance Between Dreams: Re-writing the Sust Enable Episode Scripts.” It was composed in the interrim between the second-to-last comment, and the final comment, which clarifies the author’s tone a bit and does lay out some common ground.  However, based only on reading the comment quoted below, the commenter inspired deep meditation into myself and to what extent I am trying to exploit privilege–even while claiming to be 100% supportive of global sustainability.  View the comments here.

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“It’s only irrelevant in the context of one who still feels entitled to the comforts and privileges that being white in Western civilization has afforded her.”

Overall, I think the most crucial component of changing the world is not privilege: it is responsibility. As someone who was born into a world with social systems favoring her, it is my responsibility to address and counteract these effects. As someone who enjoys the benefits (but not the costs) of systems that hurt the environment for future generations, I have the responsibility to try to undo the harm done in my name or the name of the dollar I spend.

You disparage psychology, but I believe that our shared psychological needs-take Maslow’s pyramid, for example-absolutely influences the immediate decision-making process of every human being. For Americans, it means that we often don’t opt to do the most responsible thing, if it is not also the most convenient and most personally-positive thing as well. Once again, this all goes back to perspective-if a hot shower feels good to me immediately, and I will never feel the worldwide damage that such an action causes, then I can hide from such knowledge and forgive myself for a single shower. With millions of people making such inner decisions-in situations with varying stakes-well, most of us can see the problem we are facing now.

I think psychology will be key, too, in fixing this little biological oversight-we can create social systems which enforce a global responsibility in personal situations (where our limited perspectives are failing us). If we can unite on truly valuing the Earth’s biosphere, then we as people, as lawmakers, can create systems of justice-environmental justice-that as validly as possible account for additions and subtractions of valuable assets within the Earth’s limited resources. This idea may sound radical-but it is amazingly simple. Often, the average person forgets that he or she is a lawmaker-that laws are not sacred nor eternal. People make them and break them according to their needs.