Green Options

Do you have a rain barrel for your home?

More and more homeowners are using rain barrels to conserve water while collecting soft, non-chlorinated rainwater to nourish grass and plants.

This weekend, in Calgary, Canada, Clean Calgary Association, in partnership with the City of Calgary, will hold its 8th Annual Rain Barrel Sale.

With spring coming, local residents there are thinking about their lawns and gardens. Water usage in Calgary doubles in the spring and summer due largely to lawn irrigation.

The Xingu River — home to some 600 species of fish — is one of the largest tributaries running through the Amazon. But not if the Brazilian state power company has their way.

What would be the world’s third largest dam, called the Belo Monte, would flood over 200 square miles of tropical rainforest; about the size of Tucson, AZ. It would also flood the homes of 19,000 people.

One of the biggest stories in the UK at present is the relationship between democracy and the police – or as it has been expressed several times by Nick Hardwick, chairman of the Independent Police Complaints Commission - the police needed to remember that they were “servants, not masters” of the public.

A new proposal to improve a 75-year-old dike, the Afsluitdijk, in The Netherlands could make it the world’s leading site for generating saltwater power— a clean, renewable energy source which is 30-40% more efficient than burning coal.

The breakthrough process, which is called reverse electrodialysis, captures the energy created when freshwater becomes saltier by mixing with seawater. Although scientists in the 1950s discovered that electricity could be generated this way, no one knew just how efficient the process could be until a recent study proved that a remarkable 80% of the energy could be recovered.

Climate change, developers, and logging are blamed

Since the winter of 2006, when a state of emergency was declared for 18 counties in the state, Western Washington has experienced increasingly dramatic annual flooding episodes creating a state of emergency in growing numbers of counties each year.

For the past three years here, the number of roads, farms, buildings, and houses damaged or destroyed increased—helped along by the landslides that usually follow in the wake of such flooding. Although with this year the number of landslides has been somewhat constrained, the total area of flooding has increased from the previous two years (several sections of Interstate 5 remained shut down as of Saturday night, Jan. 10), and tens of thousands of people have had to be evacuated over the past 10 days. The governor declared a state of emergency in late December, which has only abated in the past couple of days.

It would seem that a “trifecta” of reinforcing factors is to blame: climate change (an extra heavy dose of snow, followed by several days of heavy rains), upland forest clear-cutting (leaving less vegetation to soak up water and hold the soil in place), and over-development in flood plane areas (leaving too many people’s houses too low in the face of rising rivers) …all of which set the stage for the current state of emergency. The damage is still being tallied, and although the heavy rains have largely abated, repairs to roads and highways will take months if not a full year (and with state budgets so tight) or more.

Friends of the Earth has planned an extensive day of protest against the Australian Prime Minister’s declaration that Australia will decrease its carbon emissions a mere 5 percent by 2020. To illustrate the problem, activists dressed in emergency gear will surround four separate government offices with sandbags today.

Flooding has been a fact of life in Venice, Italy for over 700 years. However, the frequency and severity of the floods is increasing steadily.

Hurricane Ike battered Texas, causing untold damage for millions of home-owners in Houston and Galveston.  But some people in Chicago had a pretty bad weekend, too.

After raining all day on September 13 and 14, the Windy City became the flooded city.  The far-reaching tendrils of the hurricane dumped 9 inches of rain in less than 24 hours.  Roads and basements became water logged.  The Chicago River overflowed in some parts, leading to the evacuation of about 300 homes.  Flooding in Northwest Indiana led to the closure of Interstate 90.

What will a future world shaped by accelerating climate change look like? Imagine this season’s Atlantic hurricanes and devastating flooding in India, and kick those up a notch or three, says the head of the United Nation’s Environment Programme (UNEP). As of this June, the world has already seen some 400 natural disasters (including the non-weather-related Sichuan earthquake in China) rack up damages of $82 billion. [...]

Farming near a river bed is a great idea until it floods.  Soil near riverbeds tends to be more fertile, producing more abundant crops.  But when the river beds flood and drench contiguous farm land, the water can drag unwanted contaminants to the farmland, exposing health risks to anyone eating the crops from the flooded land.  What kinds of contaminants?  Anything in the flooded water: machine oil, sewage, garbage, medical waste, manure.

The post-Katrina rebuilding effort in New Orleans has a long way to go, but some residents, activists and volunteers are celebrating one small but noteworthy step after another toward a more sustainable city.

Their efforts take on a special poignancy with the start of yet another hurricane season (it officially began on June 1, though the tropical system Arthur formed a day early around the Yucatan Peninsula). With lingering La Niña conditions and water temperatures in parts of the Gulf of Mexico already a degree or two above average, there’s reason to be concerned.