Green Options

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Sarah Smarsh and Simran Sethi are writing a series on the impacts of everyday things. They will be posting previews on Green Options before launching the posts on Huffington Post Here’s a peek at pork.

It’s lunchtime, baby. Panda Garden. Porky goodness. Mooshu style.

The “other white meat” in your takeout container falls behind beef and chicken in American consumption, but we do pig out on pig—on average, each of us consumes 51 pounds of Wilbur annually. That translates to big impact on our water and air.

Due to the high variety of bacteria, worms and other undesirables in pig flesh, and because of the quick-spread disease potential of crowded pig farms, heavy doses of antibiotics are administered routinely. Those same drugs end up in your body via waste streaming into our water supply, and via that Mooshu pork to go. Other side dishes you might not have ordered include growth hormones to encourage meat-heavy livestock and vaccines injected to avoid profit-damaging disease.

Imagine that you are not here anymore. Your friends, your family, neighbors, all gone. Even I, your favorite green blogger, have vanished like a snuffed candle flame–not just from the blogosphere but from the entire bloody biosphere!

This scenario of modern Earth minus its most problematic children, us, is the subject of Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. In one of the most compelling, meticulously researched cultural thought experiments of recent years, Weisman examines the numerous ways that humanity has stamped its footprint on the Earth’s face and then what would likely happen if we simply went away.

Weisman’s books has received a lot of fanfare and awards, such as being Time magazine’s #1 non-fiction book of 2007 and a New York Times bestseller, so I have been anxious to read it for a while. But any expectations I had, as you may have, of some misanthropic environmentalist’s tirade against humankind quickly get exploded by Weisman’s more nuanced, balanced, intelligent approach. The result is an inspiring, if also at times disheartening, presentation of how life has endured and will endure with or without humans in the mix.

In this respect, Weisman’s final sentence in the Prelude provides a provocative launching point into the book: “Is it possible that, instead of heaving a huge biological sigh of relief, the world without us would miss us?”1 Having this idea of nature missing us as or after it takes over again keeps the reader wandering what trick Weisman (or nature!) has up his sleeve as he describes all the serious alterations we have made to the natural ecosystem. It also challenges the widely held assumption that Earth would be better off without us–and so likely happy to see us gone!

More than two decades ago, rock star Sting, and his wife, Trudie Styler, created The Rainforest Foundation and over the last 20 years it has expanded and diversified. There is the New York-based Rainforest Foundation Fund, backed by Sting, which provides funding for three branches - Rainforest Foundation US, Rainforest Foundation Norway, Rainforest Foundation UK (together they directly support projects in more than 20 countries that protect tropical rainforests and the people that live there)…

Every year an area of rainforest the size of England and Wales is cut down. This leaves local people homeless, drives animals and plants to extinction and releases more CO2 emissions (which cause climate change), than all of the world’s planes, trains and automobiles. Tropical deforestation is an issue that affects us all. ~The Rainforest Foundation

“Businesses and politicians have no part whatsoever to play in the solution: it is all about individual ‘non-civilians’.”

-Keith Farnish

The Sust Enable webcast series was spawned in a climax of understanding… years of myriad input and countless bits of information collected over time at once coalesced into one artistic, complex and beautiful vision.  I’ve never experienced anything else quite like it.  This is why I sometimes refer to the project as my “opus”–it artistically expresses and defines who I was before this period.  Who I will be after, too, is forever altered by the work’s creation.  Like giving birth to a living being, the act of creation transcends your own capacity to control it.

I can only imagine that Keith Farnish’s comprehensive A Matter of Scale was a similar labor of love.  One can sense the author’s own expressive burst in the feverish love with which he forms his ideas.

A Matter of Scale is an e-Book only; not yet a typical “print” book.  This could be for a number of reasons.  It could be the author’s environmental concerns of tree-felling for books.  Then, it could be the crux of his whole philosophy of taking personal responsibility for the actions affecting our global ecosystem.  But one thing is certain–A Matter of Scale is unpublished certainly NOT due to its lack of quality insight and urgent information.  For its own modest scale and scope, it packs a wallop.

Excerpted with permission from Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth and Baby Care by Jossey-Bass, A John Wiley & Sons Imprint.

For such a little person, a baby sure goes through a lot of laundry: diapers, bibs, sleepers, undershirts, blankets, sheets, socks, pants . . . and of course all the items the baby spits up on that also need to be cleaned—often. That’s why having a baby in the house turns the mundane washer and dryer into wonder machines of incredible convenience. This increase in laundry loads is also a good reason for you to focus your green efforts on the laundry room.

The Green Washing Machine

If you’re buying a new washer, remember to look for Energy Star models. Traditional top-loading washing machines use about forty gallons of water per load, whereas Energy Star washers use only about 25 gallons per load. That’s a 40 percent savings in water, which translates into an energy cost savings of almost 50 percent.10Make that new machine a front-loader. Front-loading machines work on a horizontal axis that saves both water and energy. A top-loading machine must be filled with water in order to keep the clothing wet and then an agitator swirls the water around, but a front-loading machine uses less water because the tub does not need to be filled completely; the tub itself rotates, making the clothes tumble in the water.

We spend a lot of our time looking at research and studies that focuses on one particular aspect of the planet. Rarely does anyone spend the time to look at a multitude of aspects, to acquire a look at the overall picture. It seems like science is all about proving the big picture by proving a small portion of that big picture.

However critics will be the first to tell us that the small picture does not necessarily reflect the big picture. Just like a jigsaw of the planet Earth, you might think that the whole planet is blue if they are the only pieces of the puzzle you saw, but look at it in total, and you’ll find a few solid bits as well!

So that is why a new study has assembled information never before gathered together in one spot. The study looked at a vast array of physical and biological systems across our planet, and looked at if and how they were being affected by global warming. The study appears in the May 15 issue of the journal Nature.

She goes by so many names:
Mother Nature.
Mother Earth.
Mother Goddess.
Gaia.

She takes so many forms:
The dance of the seasons.
The ripples of a river.
The textures of a mountain range emblazoned by the morning sun.
The crash of a wave on sand.

She is very old yet laughs with the voice of a babe.

She dies continually yet is continually reborn.

She is
mother and daughter,
womb and tomb,
cradle and grave,
virgin and lover,
begetter and betrayer.
She is all of these things.
She is what She is.

And so when I wake on this day, I sense Her there to greet me.

She
stirs me,
embraces me,
warms me,
feeds me,
supports me,
protects me,
entertains me,
teaches me,
guides me,
cleanses me,
rocks me,
and tucks me in to sleep.

And so on this day, I give thanks to Her in all of Her forms.
I kiss her as my Mother and my Lover.
I learn from Her as my Teacher and my Guide.
I bow to Her, in all of Her awesome splendor, with piety and devotion.

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.

The other day, my daughter asked me what time it was. I gazed up at the sun and told her it was 3:30 pm.  She checked her watch, and then in astonishment asked me how I knew the time.  She had no idea that you could tell time from the sun, even after we had just visited the Sundial Bridge and read the time from its cast shadows.  I was reminded of a project I used to do as part of a unit on solar energy when I was teaching K-8:  Human sundials.

To help children learn how the sun moves across the sky and how shadows are formed, the human sundial project takes a whole day.  First thing in the morning when the sun is up, go outside with your child and trace their shadow with some chalk.  Mark an X where your child is standing so they can return to the same spot.  Switch roles and have your child trace your shadow in a different spot. Then, return every hour and repeat tracing your shadows and recording the time on each shadow. By the end of the day, your child will see how their shadow moves in accordance with the sun’s path, as well as changes shape.

Finding fiction to enjoy has aways been a challenge for me. Thankfully, that issue didn’t arise while I was reading the first book of Lee Welles’ Gaia Girls series titled Enter the Earth. (Full disclosure: Lee Welles writes for this blog, but I was assigned to review her books before she came on board.) The premise of her series, listed as for ages 9 and up, is as follows:

What would you do if you could hear the Earth asking for help? In the Gaia Girls book series, that is what happens to four girls, each from a different region of the world. They are approached by Gaia, the living organism of the Earth. Each is endowed with powers over one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. They must learn to use their powers to help Gaia survive the effects of modern humanity.

The first book centers around a girl named Elizabeth Angier and one very eventful summer at her family farm in New York state. She and the family’s undeniably lovable dog Maizey take on a big business factory farming operation that is trying to buy up all the farms in her town. On top of that, her best friend is moving not only out of town but out of state to Florida. Just as her troubles start to reach their boiling point, Elizabeth is greeted by an eager otter named Gaia who will change her world forever.

The more we learn about the Earth’s ecosystems, the more we discover how elegantly, beautifully and mind-numbingly complex are the interactions among humans, animals, plants and their environment. Life, it turns out, really does come with myriad butterfly effects.

That’s what makes a project just getting under way in the South [...]