Green Options

Like this post? Subscribe to our RSS feed and stay up to date.

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.

Americans are Reportedly Inhaling 10 billion Pounds of Chinese Toxic Fumes Annually

It was reported a few days ago that some 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach within the borders of the US annually, quoting numerous scientific estimates.

But the pollution figures that scientists studying the impact of Asian, and mostly Chinese, environmental waste in the atmosphere have suggested are more than alarming.

The real impact of the Asian Tigers, helped by their giant brother, China, which is now thought to have overtaken the US in emissions of greenhouse gases, may amount to a kind of colonization of the United States, and by extension, North America, potentially destabilizing weather patterns across the North Pacific and masking the effects of global warming.

It takes a village to raise a child, but apparently it takes only one blogger with a lawyer friend to hobble a whole city’s efforts to encourage bicycling.

Wall Street Journal writer Phred Dvorak describes all the sordid details in an article about San Francisco resident Rob Anderson, who has almost single-handedly stopped the city’s pro-bicycle plans cold.

Anderson began his crusade against bikes in 2004, when San Francisco officials unveiled a massive plan to create more bike lanes, bike parking and cycling incentives across the city. The plan set a goal of having bicycles responsible for 10 percent of all city trips by 2010.

According to a survey of 1,000 American adults, local and national environmental issues are of more concern, than global issues like global warming and climate change.

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 sneak peek on sneakers.

With ye olde cobbler long dead (re-soling Jesus’s Birkenstocks in forgotten profession heaven) and cheap production methods shortening the lives of shoes, Americans have gotten into the habit of pitching worn out (or simply undesired) kicks and buying new ones. Shoe-shopping has become something of a fetish, a joke, an emblem of the spoiled housewife who fills her emotional void with Italian suede.

We could go into Manolos, but we’ll focus here on sporty treads, not just to stay on-topic but because they account for a third of the U.S. shoes market.

The production of athletic shoes is infamously shady, from a human rights perspective. Historically, manufacturing giants such as Nike have followed cheap labor, exploiting workers in developing countries so that they might enjoy enormous profit margins. (Nike has really turned itself around in recent years, however, and is now one of the greener players on the field.)

Tim Hurst’s recent article in Red, Green, and Blue highlights John McCain’s talk on taking care of the environment–in the case of the article, specifically as it relates to renewable energy.

Sorry John, but not showing up to cast the deciding vote on important energy incentives that would promote renewables, speaks louder than words I’m afraid. I’m also afraid that sometimes mere talk wins out…

One of the great things about living in a developing country like Peru is that you can buy DVDs of new movies for a very low price. For instance, if you want a DVD of The Dark Knight, the new Batman movie, you can already buy it here. Not too shabby, eh?

Of course, you cannot be a stickler for quality with such DVDs, or you will be sorely disappointed. But if you like laughing along with audiences, wearing a hearing aid while watching movies, or pride yourself in your non-humble ability to tell people to sit down and shut up in the theater, then I’ve got a Kungfu Panda DVD that will be perfect for you.

It will probably come as no surprise to you that these kinds of DVDs are made by pirating businesses who use digital cameras to record new movies in theaters. They then distribute them quickly to the masses for profit. Peru, as well as many other developing countries where pirated DVDs are sold will unquestionably suffer over time from the pollution these DVDs will cause. To better understand why the environmental effect of DVDs will be proportionally greater in Peru than in a country like the United States, read on.

Every time that I see “Arctic” paired with “oil” in the one sentence, I start getting antsy. It can only mean one thing, and that one thing is eventually going to see oil spills coating ice-sheets rocking up on the front pages of our newspapers. And over and over people are reminded that whatever oil lays beneath those icy plains, won’t sustain the planet for very long.

A government-run US Geological Survey found that 90 billion barrels of oil and a vast quantity of natural gas is waiting beneath the Arctic Circle. These results came to light late last week, once again reenergizing publicity for the future of Arctic drilling.

According to the study, 90 billion barrels of crude, 1,670 trillion cubic feet of gas and 44 million barrels of natural gas liquids, are all just waiting for humans to come and extract them at any cost. Those humans will probably be representatives of the six countries that own – for a given value of “own” – stakes in the Arctic; Russia, Canada, Sweden, Norway, Greenland and the US.

“The Alaska platform really looms as the most obvious place to look for oil in the Arctic right now,” said USGS geologist Donald Gautier.

For as often as we do eat, it seems as if most of us don’t think too much about what we’re putting into our bodies. With food production so far removed from our every day lives, it’s easy to ignore where our food comes from and what it’s impact may be. But what we put on our plates has a larger footprint than what we drive. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations,

“Livestock production is one of the major causes of the world’s most pressing environmental problems, including global warming, land degradation, air and water pollution, and loss of biodiversity. Using a methodology that considers the entire commodity chain, it estimates that livestock are responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, a bigger share than that of transport.”

The things we choose to eat can obviously have an enormous impact on the planet and everything on it, including ourselves. Naturally then, our diet choices can say a lot about our ethics and beliefs. They can even be a political statement and a form of activism. I think that every choice we make has the potential to change the world, and certainly what I choose to eat has an impact.

At food stalls and in supermarkets in Chiang Mai, Thailand’s second largest city, plastics of all shapes and sizes are dolled out like confetti when you make a purchase of items. The fascination with plastic is so amazing that with a single purchase of several items you can end up with over five plastic bags when less could do.

What is surprising is the plastic bags come at no cost, so customers gladly accept the packaging.

There is no doubt that the plastic bags which are probably handed out in their millions throughout Chiang Mai, and other parts of Thailand come at a great cost to the environment.

In Thailand, as in many parts of the world, the use of plastics is at epidemic levels with serious consequences for the environment. According to www.reusable.com, a website that promotes fighting the massive over-consumption of plastic shopping bags, the world has consumed over 276 billion plastics this year and the number is rising by the second.

Kicking the addiction to plastic bags is one of the single most important positive things that individuals can do to both protect and keep the environment clean. But it appears that it will take the world a long time to rid itself of the plastic habit because there are too many financial interests vested into the continued production of plastic.

The “decider” has decided to screw each and every person with pulmonary disease with what appears to be a “who cares” attitude.  The headline above, taken from an American Lung Association news release, tells it all.  As a matter of fact, for the boomers coming on board who haven’t yet, or are just beginning to feel the effects of lung disease, you should be furious.

If this provision never becomes law, then those of you who may someday become victims of lung disease, will have to do without rehab when you reach Medicare age.

Congress overwhelmingly approved the Pulmonary and Cardiac Rehabilitation Act, which, among other things, would make life easier for Americans who suffer from lung disease.  This, you say, may not tie into environmentalism, but think again; coal smoke, smoking, second-hand smoke, pollutants in the air, all add to lung disease, and heaven knows we’ve had a century of air pollution pouring into our lungs.  It isn’t over yet.