Green Options

It’s time to get angry. This is what John Kerry, not exactly the most extreme guy, is saying to us. Is it the best solution?

This is what Kerry told advocates of climate legislation recently:

“I want you to go out there and start knocking on doors and talking to people and telling people this has to happen. You know, if the Tea Party folks can go out there and get angry because they think their taxes are too high, for God’s sake, a lot of citizens ought to get angry about the fact that they’re being killed and our planet is being injured by what’s happening on a daily basis by the way we provide our power and our fuel and the old practices that we have. That’s something worth getting angry about.” (emphasis mine)

As part of my Bachelor’s thesis in sociology and environmental studies, about 6 years ago, I studied the history of the environmental movement in great depth. Since then, I have been keeping my eye on things, on the bigger picture, as I work in different fields — natural and organic foods, city planning and sustainable development, alternative transportation, and, now, online journalism with a green tint.

The underlying question, consistently, is: “How do we avoid, or — worst case scenario — deal with, huge environmental collapse?”

The issues have only gotten bigger (see: Global Warming in the Arctic — Much Worse than We Thought!, Greenland Ice Sheet Melting Faster than Ever and Oceans Absorbing CO2, Preventing Climate Change — Good, Right? No). But we seem to be going down the same road consistently, despite all the amazing efforts of people trying to turn this car around (and transform it into something green-friendly). The environmental movement, perhaps bigger than ever, still seems on the brink of failure.

Email may be the norm of the day for expressing your opinion on political issues, but the phone still has its place. The organization 1Sky is hosting a national call-in day to the Senate — TODAY — to help push for good clean energy and climate legislation.

The national call-in event has already been picked up by the New York Times, so hopefully it will be quite successful.

We’ve got quite a few readers on this site, and I think that most of you are strong advocates of clean energy and good climate legislation. You can help 1Sky and the world by making this day one for Senators to remember.

1Sky provides you with a very quick and easy system for calling using their toll-free number. You call your Senators for free, don’t even have to find their phone numbers, and have a little guide with some talking points, or you are free to us your own.

Howard Zinn’s powerful multimedia event, The People Speak premieres this Sunday, December 13th, on the History Channel. The series draws on the experiences of scores of ordinary Americans, and is based on Howard Zinn’s hugely influential books, A People’s History of the United States and Voices of a People’s History of the United States. A cavalcade of artists perform excerpts from diaries, speeches, letters and personal histories, bringing inspiring first hand accounts of our nation’s past to life.

My friend Eliza reads her program during a free performance of The People Speak at San Francisco State University on my birthday earlier this month.

Filmmaker Ken Burns’ most recent PBS documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea, is a stunning and utterly engrossing tribute not only to our country’s many awe-inspiring natural landscapes, but also to our nation’s fundamental democratic principles. Burns interviews scores of ordinary people, from park rangers and activists to journalists and historians, as they trace the origins of our greatest collectively-owned resources, and share their unique personal experiences in the vast beauty of our national parks.

“When we look at the parks and we look at the United States and we examine the whole idea of democracy, I think that the park experience is an exploration of the idea of freedom.”

-Shelton Johnson, Park Ranger

In a previous post, I listed five of the best things I think you can do in order to live a sustainable lifestyle — #6-10. Now, here is the top five list.

Last Wednesday, as I was riding my bicycle down Third Street to the UCSF Mission Bay Farmer’s Market, my thoughts turned to the economist Jospeh Schumpeter and his seminal book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy”. Streams of loud cars and trucks barreled past me on the road, some of the vehicles nearly grazing me as oblivious drivers chattered on cell phones. As I continued pedaling down the street, images of organic daikon and Schumpeter’s theory of “Creative Destruction” swirled around [...]

$17 billion a year is spent by the advertising and marketing industry to shape our children’s desires and identities.

Now that the economic recession gripping the world is causing free market ideals to be questioned, it’s time to examine its effects on our children.  Henry A. Giroux writes:

While the “empire of consumption” has been around for a long time, American society in the last thirty years has undergone a sea change in the daily lives of children - one marked by a major transition from a culture of innocence and social protection, however imperfect, to a culture of commodification. This is culture that does more than undermine the ideals of a secure and happy childhood; it also exhibits the bad faith of a society in which, for children, “there can be only one kind of value, market value; one kind of success, profit; one kind of existence, commodities; and one kind of social relationship, markets.”(2) Children now inhabit a cultural landscape in which they can only recognize themselves in terms preferred by the market.

No matter which presidential candidate walks away today with a key to the oval office, I’ll be a happy man. It’s not at all that I don’t care who sits in the hot seat on Pennsylvania Avenue - rather I’m just happy that I don’t need to be worried about a military coup or massive riots whether Obama or McCain wins the election.

Beyond the rhetoric, the mud-slinging, the polls, and even the “issues” is the fact that this “American Experiment” of democracy is greater than any candidate running for office, or political party. Like Thomas M. DeFrank at nydailynews says

“After 931 days of campaigning, 109 primaries and caucuses, 47 debates and $5 billion spent, this marathon election nears its historic finish. Whatever Tuesday’s verdict, America will demolish political barriers that have stood through 55 quadrennial contests by choosing its first African-American President or its first female vice president.”

The previous 2 presidential elections (2000, 2004) also generated record levels of interest and voters from both sides of the political fence, much like today’s election. Following those elections, the country seemed to become very politically divided and the whole thing created a new breed of partisan-based patriotism. No matter who wins today, the next president will have the challenge of uniting the country and bringing opinions together to reach consensus. So when it comes to eco-policy, just how different are democrats & republicans?

After months of a bitter and violent political dispute, Zimbabwe’s political protagonists have decided to take to the negotiating table.

Besides resolving the country’s longstanding socio-economic problems, the ongoing political talks in Zimbabwe will go a long way to start redressing the damage that has been inflicted onto the environment over the past decade.

A botched government led land reform programme resulted in the unmonitored movement of people and the untoward cutting down of trees and an increase in the poaching of endangered animal species.

Agency permanently extends comment period for alt. energy leases

In the fall of 2001, Jim Gordon of Energy Management Inc. (EMI) announced his intentions to build a 420 megawatt wind farm off the coast of Massachusetts - the nation’s first. Now, the long permitting process that was made even longer by powerful opposition groups, is nearing resolution…finally.

More than 40,000 individuals and organizations have submitted comments on an environmental review of the wind farm proposed for Nantucket Sound, according to an article in the Cape Cod Times.

“I’ve never seen anything like this before,” said Rodney Cluck, Cape Wind project manager for the U.S. Minerals Management Service, the lead federal agency to review Cape Wind Associates’ plan to build 130 wind turbines in Nantucket Sound, off the coast of Massachusetts. Originally, the comments were set to be released last Friday, but officials at the Minerals Management Service postponed the release to give agency staffers more time to organize the overwhelming public response to the proposed wind farm.

As a result of the scoping process’ popularity, the MMS announced that they would be preemptively extending the comment period for all of the remaining “Alternative Energy Leases” from 30 to 60 days.

The Environmental Protection Agency has begun a “National Dialogue” about what information the public needs from the agency and how the agency can better provide that information.

Interested parties can now let the agency know what they think on EPA’s new interactive Web page (I’d love to a fly on that digital wall). Additionally, agency officials will be made available occasionally online for interactive chat sessions. The first of these was held last Thursday, when EPA’s chief information officer Molly O’Neill was made available for answering questions interactively online.

It is no secret that, under the Bush administration, the EPA has cut back on information available to the public through channels like the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) and the EPA libraries. The administration has also been under tremendous scrutiny for interference with EPA science on several separate occasions throughout the last seven years. And in a recent report published by the Union of Concerned Scientists, 900 employees of the EPA feel like their work has been interfered with for political reasons; sixty-percent of those who responded to the Union’s survey encountered some form of executive manipulation.