Sustainablog

“For any viewer who has been camping, a tent may not sound like the most… comfortable living option.  On the other hand, it has some real benefits to my mission to live sustainably!

…Inhabiting it uses no energy–neither heating nor cooling is an issue.  While it might seem like it at first, a tent is not just a summer option…  Look like cramped quarters?

Well, it’s big enough to sleep in and to store my clothes in.  And that’s all I need.  It means I will be spending more time outside, in nature…

Plus, unlike in an apartment, I have the ability to develop my home in unlimited ways!  Stay tuned for later episodes that show how I modify and enhance my living space to be more and more manageable, including temperature control, comfort and additional amenties.”

Dear Readers,

Sust Enable was my dearest fantasy.  Sust Enable meant that I would solve the entire world’s problem of environmental sustainability all by myself.  In an urban setting and with no money.  What’s more, I’d do so while producing a film about it!  Take that, thousands of years of environmental degradation!

For those of you who have followed my tumultuous three-month sustainable living experiment through my blog posts here at Sustainablog, you may think the quoted text above is a strange thing to say, or even bizarrely humorous.  Indeed it is.  Above is the exact wording of my original script to the Sust Enable episode on Shelter, last updated sometime in May.  As I sit in the video editing suite listening over my previously recorded voiceover, I cannot help but laugh out loud at the absurd, unsubstantiated statements I am making.  But these are sour laughs.

Because once, I believed these statements were true.

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Starting next year, France will institute a “taxe pique-nique,” a tax on  plastic cups, knives and forks, and non-biodegradable paper plates and napkins. The goal, of course, is to discourage institutions and individuals from buying these one time use products that are harmful to the environment.

According to the Telegraph

A tax of 90 cents (71p) per kilogram (2.2 lbs) will be placed on plastic and paper throwaway cups from next year, aimed at cutting the average 360kg (793 lbs) of rubbish generated per person per year in France.

This concept  of imposing a tax, or a levy as the French environment minister, Jean-Louis Borloo calls it, on environmentally unfriendly products is not new in France. They already have what is known as “bonus-malus” system which places higher taxes on high polluting vehicles  and gives tax breaks for environmentally friendly cars.

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Quick trivia question: What’s the second verse to “The Farmer in the Dell”? Anybody? Here you go:

The farmer takes a wife,
The farmer takes a wife,
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife.

Talk about stale lyrics in dire need of an update. As women make up the largest and fastest growing group buying new farms today, we should be teaching kids something more like:

“The wife took over the farm.
To the land she did no harm,
Hi-ho, times change, you know, These chicks can really grow.”

Consider Iowa farmer, Denise O’Brien, chief song lyric rewriter and female farmer stereotype smasher extraordinaire. For the past twenty years she has led the charge of organizing and promoting the voice and face of women in agriculture and is founder of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. “Finally, the tides are starting to turn for women farmers as policies start to change,” explains O’Brien. “But it should have happened a long time ago and there’s still much we as women, from growers to grocery shoppers, can do to create a healthy food system for future generations.”

O’Brien racks up a history of seeing opportunity in crisis. Read the rest of this entry »

Seemingly unrelated to — and uncognizant of — recent news and outcry about the destruction of rain forest and beach in the Republic of Panama, as sustainablogger Alex Felsinger wrote about earlier this week, MTV Networks International is issuing 10 public service announcements to rally youth for the environment.

In a Sept. 15 article published by AdWeek, the new “MTV Switch” initiative will roll out as five PSAs and five short films, potentially reaching, MTV says, 560 million 15- to 25-year-old viewers in 162 countries. Read the rest of this entry »

Some people build houses. Others, go abroad and help build or rebuild communities. Still others build… mobile kitchens! Earlier this year, students from the University of Toronto’s master’s program at the faculty of architecture designed and built a mobile kitchen. So what you say? What’s so big about a kitchen table on wheels? Well, some people pimp their cars, these UofT students pimped their kitchen! This kitchen comes with a barbeque, seats about 50, and has garbage, recycling and composting bins available.
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Why do we have give-and-takes like this?

A: “Global warming exists. Let’s do something about it.”

B: “Screw you! Global warming is a commie, liberal farce!”

A: “We should harvest the wind and sun for energy.”

B: “Screw you! My car is set up for petroleum; my house likes coal-fired electricity…commie, liberal farce!”

“We should care about Earth and each other. Nothing stays the same; we’ve got to evolve.”

“Screw…farce!”

And so on.

Oh, and on the relatively civilized tip…

A: “Science demonstrates that global warming exists.”

B: (In the eloquence of Dick Cheney…) “So.”

I’m perplexed of late by the glaring contrast of view points on some important issues in our world. Not to mention the venom and vitriol that charges so many of the outbursts. And not to mention that facts seem irrelevant to many people, even when they honest-to-goodness exist.

Republican or Democrat? Conservative or Liberal? Science or Religion? United States or Everyone Else? Rich or poor? Self or Others? Us or Them? Read the rest of this entry »

This is a guest submission from John Addison, Publisher of the Clean Fleet Report.

My ninth trip to teach a workshop at Two World Trade Center never happened because of the great tragedy 9/11. On September 11, 2001, thanks to heroes like Avel Villanueva the hundreds of people working for Sun Microsystems in Two World Trade Center all quickly evacuated the building and survived. “Please, with calmness, go to the nearest exit. This is not a drill. Get out.” Only after several pages and inspecting the vast 25th and 26th floors did Avel personally leave. Three minutes later the second plane hit Two World Trade Center.

As our current president reminds us, “We are addicted to oil.” As we continue to spend billions for oil for countries hostile to our way of life, we continue in the words of Thomas Friedman to “finance both sides of the war on terror.” In his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, the Pulitzer Prize winning author shows us how to be free of this addiction.

Americans are not waiting ten years to replace a fraction of our foreign oil with new oil from Alaska. Americans are reducing our oil use now. Confronted with high prices at the pump, U.S. citizens drove 12 billion fewer miles in one month. People are taking advantage of flexwork, public transit, car pooling, sharing rides and sharing vehicles. Read the rest of this entry »

By Lester R. Brown

The social and economic gap between the world’s richest 1 billion people and its poorest 1 billion has no historical precedent. Not only is this gap wide, it is widening. The poorest billion are trapped at subsistence level and the richest billion are becoming wealthier with each passing year.

One way of narrowing the gap between rich and poor segments of society is by ensuring universal education. This means making sure that the 72 million children not enrolled in school are able to attend. Children without any formal education are starting life with a severe handicap, one that almost ensures they will remain in abject poverty and that the gap between the poor and the rich will continue to widen. In an increasingly integrated world, this widening gap itself becomes a source of instability. Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen focuses the point: “Illiteracy and innumeracy are a greater threat to humanity than terrorism.”

In the effort to achieve universal primary education, the World Bank has taken the lead with its Education for All plan, where any country with a well-designed plan to achieve this goal is eligible for Bank financial support. The three principal requirements are that a country submit a sensible plan to reach universal basic education, commit a meaningful share of its own resources to the plan, and have transparent budgeting and accounting practices. If fully implemented, all children in poor countries would get a primary school education by 2015, helping them to break out of poverty.

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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.

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When I moved from my Chicago apartment to a Wisconsin farm, I traded convenience for countryside. No more quick runs to the mini mart store at the end of the urban block for a missing ingredient. With civilization now a fifteen minute drive away, I’ve evolved to have all the necessities to do anything from feeding a round of B&B guests to whipping up multiple pear pies.

So here’s the simplest route to sustainability: keep a stocked pantry. Save money, time and fossil fuel – not to mention upping nutritional value — by dining chez you. Maybe not as sexy an eco initiative as backpacks with PV panels, but keeping an organized, stocked pantry goes a long way in creating a self-reliant, green kitchen and household.

Stocking the pantry saves time and money – two non-renewable resources and drains on greening our lifestyle. With a little planning and organization, your pantry will never let you down. I recently gushed about my pantry passion in an article for Hobby Farm Home magazine, going into more detail on stocking the kitchen.

Here’s a few starter tips: Read the rest of this entry »