The big names cannot help but pump out more sustainable paper products on an almost weekly basis. From biology college textbooks gone green to carbon friendly greeting cards, we’ve rounded up the top ten green papier goods that caught our eye.
7. So, the FSC is not perfect. But it’s a start and it speaks volumes when office supply giants like Staples start to sell what most of us want to start using already in […]
Today’s post is by Mel Peffers, a project manager in the Living Cities program at Environmental Defense Fund.
May 6 was World Asthma Day. Since car exhaust can lead to asthma as well as global warming, we thought it would be a good day to highlight the importance of not idling your car or truck engine.
What makes idling especially bad for health is that drivers tend to idle in gathering places - by sidewalks, schools, playgrounds, homes, and offices. Breathing in pollution close to the source is more dangerous than farther away.
Take a look at the evidence.
If anyone ever thought climate sciences were anything but complex, they obviously weren’t looking hard enough. Recent research from prominent UK and Brazilian climate scientists have found a link between reducing sulphur dioxide emissions from burning coal, and the increase in sea surface temperatures in the tropical north Atlantic, that heightens the risk of drought in the Amazon rainforest.
The Amazon is without a doubt one of the planet’s most valuable and important ecological resources; and not for logging. The rainforest contains approximately one tenth of the total carbon stored in land ecosystems, and recycles much of the rain that falls upon its leafy canopy.
Thus, any major change to its vegetation has massive implications for the global climate system.
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Mother’s Day began when social activist and poet Julia Ward Howe wrote the original Mother’s Day Proclamation after the Civil War in 1870.
In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask
That a general congress of women without limit of nationality,
May be appointed and held at someplace deemed most convenient
And the earliest period consistent with its objects,
To promote the alliance of the different nationalities,
The amicable settlement of international questions,
The great and general interests of peace.
This day began as a call to action, and it is only fitting this Sunday on Mother’s Day families take action on climate change and let their voices be heard. 1Sky is asking mothers and their children to create images to send to Congress urging them to remember the implications of climate change on the next generation. The images will be compiled and be taken to DC to be displayed and given to Congress.
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.
There’s nothing quite as nice as a really catchy title that perfectly sums up your story. If you want to leave it at that, then you’ve probably got the whole of the story. However if you want to know just a bit more about how climate change is affecting our planet’s poles, then keep reading.
Speaking in a telephone briefing last Friday, Jennifer Francis, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Jersey, said that the Arctic and Antarctic are exhibiting opposite effects to the climate change affecting our planet.
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While we’re on the subject: good Stumbleupon friend HarleyJane18 sent this to me last week. Houston Chronicle cartoonist Nick Anderson does some great 3D animation videos with song parodies… this one is based on Stevie Wonder’s “Higher Ground” (specifically the Red Hot Chili Peppers cover of it).
See also:
Ecoscraps: Shades of Green — The Four Horsemen
sustainablog: Shades of Green and The Green House: by Brad Gilchrist and Peter Menice (interview)
Every now and then one side of an argument or another will get a landfall win that just puts them over the top for awhile. In science, it doesn’t necessarily always hold, but just occasionally, this win does manage to help in the long run.
Well, for those of us who see man-made global warming as the backbone of our current climate change, that win has just been put in our laps.
A blog I had yet to hear about, DeSmogBlog, has managed to find at least 45 “outraged scientists” that once belonged to the famed Heartland Institute article entitled “500 Scientists with Documented Doubts of Man-Made Global Warming Scares” that, in reality, don’t doubt anything.
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Musicians keep cranking out the eco-songs… and that’s a great way to bring the green message to a broader audience. Wirehead’s “Losing Ground” is a call to action that’s a little bit 80s pop-rock (they list Toto as an influence), a little bit jazz-rock fusion (think Steely Dan), and a whole lot of of environmental awareness. Thanks to Wirehead drummer Clive Edwards for sharing this…
May 1: May Day.
For the average American working for a paycheck, May Day — a pagan spring ritual where you dance around a Maypole — marks yet another, less festive occasion.
From the first of January until around the first of May, all the money many of us will earn goes to pay our share of income tax to the US government.
Kiss those months — that money — goodbye (the present tax stimulus package is really just a refund).
We followed the advice of our parents, as most children do: get a good education, go to college and get a job — a nice, secure, well-paying one, with great fringe benefits, stock options or profit-sharing. But the bimonthly paychecks — after the government gets its share for income, Social Security and Medicare taxes — aren’t enough to keep up with the bills. Even with raises and promotions, many of us feel that we keep getting further in the hole, since the more we earn in earned income, the more it’s taxed. The reality is that the system is largely devised this way, not to tax the very rich but to exact a fee on the middle class and poor to keep these wage earners on the treadmaster of a job — or “promising career.”
Written by Dr. Bill Chameides, dean of the Nicholas School of the Environment and lead author of the forthcoming blog The Green Grok.
This post is Part 1 of a 2-part series on biofuels. Today’s post looks at corn; Part 2 will examine the most promising biofuels.
Who doesn’t want to be green? But beware of automobile ads claiming environmental benefits from home-grown ethanol. Almost all U.S. ethanol comes from corn and, as a fuel, corn just isn’t as “amaizing” as they say.
“What if we could live green by going yellow?” one TV spot asks. “What if we could lower greenhouse gas emissions,” it continues, promisingly, “with a fuel that grew back every year?” Sounds great doesn’t it? Sorry folks, it’s just not so.
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