Sustainablog

The U.S. Mint is helping to bring America’s favorite bird back to its native skies!

Once abundant throughout American territories, the Bald Eagle has been negatively impacted by poaching, habitat destruction, pesticides and food source contamination. Its population has dropped from approximately 100,000 nesting pairs at the nation’s founding to just over 400 nesting pairs in the early 1960’s.

The Bald Eagle, nearing the brink of extinction just 35 years ago, has made remarkable progress and is still expanding its presence throughout our nation’s lands and skies. Public Law 108-486, signed by President George W. Bush on December 23, 2004, called for the United States Mint to mint and issue three commemorative coins that celebrate the encouraging recovery of the Bald Eagle species and the removal of the Bald Eagle from the Endangered Species List. Read the rest of this entry »

This blog post was written in response to some unusually caustic replies received on my last Sustainablog post, “The Dissonance Between Dreams: Re-writing the Sust Enable Episode Scripts.” It was composed in the interrim between the second-to-last comment, and the final comment, which clarifies the author’s tone a bit and does lay out some common ground.  However, based only on reading the comment quoted below, the commenter inspired deep meditation into myself and to what extent I am trying to exploit privilege–even while claiming to be 100% supportive of global sustainability.  View the comments here.

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“It’s only irrelevant in the context of one who still feels entitled to the comforts and privileges that being white in Western civilization has afforded her.”

Overall, I think the most crucial component of changing the world is not privilege: it is responsibility. As someone who was born into a world with social systems favoring her, it is my responsibility to address and counteract these effects. As someone who enjoys the benefits (but not the costs) of systems that hurt the environment for future generations, I have the responsibility to try to undo the harm done in my name or the name of the dollar I spend.

You disparage psychology, but I believe that our shared psychological needs-take Maslow’s pyramid, for example-absolutely influences the immediate decision-making process of every human being. For Americans, it means that we often don’t opt to do the most responsible thing, if it is not also the most convenient and most personally-positive thing as well. Once again, this all goes back to perspective-if a hot shower feels good to me immediately, and I will never feel the worldwide damage that such an action causes, then I can hide from such knowledge and forgive myself for a single shower. With millions of people making such inner decisions-in situations with varying stakes-well, most of us can see the problem we are facing now.

I think psychology will be key, too, in fixing this little biological oversight-we can create social systems which enforce a global responsibility in personal situations (where our limited perspectives are failing us). If we can unite on truly valuing the Earth’s biosphere, then we as people, as lawmakers, can create systems of justice-environmental justice-that as validly as possible account for additions and subtractions of valuable assets within the Earth’s limited resources. This idea may sound radical-but it is amazingly simple. Often, the average person forgets that he or she is a lawmaker-that laws are not sacred nor eternal. People make them and break them according to their needs. Read the rest of this entry »

By Lester R. Brown

One of the questions I am frequently asked when I am speaking in various countries is, given the environmental problems that the world is facing, can we make it? That is, can we avoid economic decline and the collapse of civilization? My answer is always the same: it depends on you and me, on what you and I do to reverse these trends. It means becoming politically active. Saving our civilization is not a spectator sport.

We have moved into this new world so fast that we have not yet fully grasped the meaning of what is happening. Traditionally, concern for our children has translated into getting them the best health care and education possible. But if we do not act quickly to reverse the earth’s environmental deterioration, eradicate poverty, and stabilize population, their world will decline economically and disintegrate politically.

The two overriding policy challenges are to restructure taxes and reorder fiscal priorities. Saving civilization means restructuring taxes to get the market to tell the ecological truth. And it means reordering fiscal priorities to get the resources needed for Plan B. Write, call, or e-mail your elected representative about the need for tax restructuring to create an honest market. Remind him or her that corporations that left costs off the books appeared to prosper in the short run, only to collapse in the long run.

Or better yet, gather some like-minded friends together to meet with your elected representatives to discuss why we need to raise environmental taxes and reduce income taxes. Before the meeting, draft a brief statement of your collective concerns and the policy initiatives needed. Feel free to download the information on tax restructuring in Chapter 13 of Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization from the Earth Policy Institute Web site to use in these efforts. Read the rest of this entry »

If you think you have an idea that could change the world, or the reality for many people, Google wants to hear about it. And, if they like it, they might pay you up to $10 million.

Project “10 to the 100th”, in honour of Google’s 10th anniversary of helping you surf the web (and email and calendar and who knows what else these days), the internet behemoth is asking people to submit their ideas that will have broad impacts on people’s lives. Read the rest of this entry »

Got some epazote, gai choy on your farmers market list this week? As new immigrant farmers plant agriculture careers on American soil, our produce options increase with fresh flavorful options like the pungent Mexican herb, epazote, or Asian mustard cabbage, known by the Hmong as gai choy.

But these new farmers represent more than undiscovered greens. Like the American pioneers of 150 years ago, this current crop of immigrants also seeks a new and better life through working the soil. However, these new immigrants don’t need to forge along and isolated out on the prairie today. Through our food purchases we can seek out and support this new face of American agriculture. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s official, India must work towards the use of biofuels. On September 12th the Indian government announced a new national biofuels policy: By 2017 it will aim to meet 20% of India’s diesel demand with fuel derived from plants rather than fossils.

But where will it come from? According to the National Council of Applied Economic Research, a Delhi think-tank, it means setting aside 14m hectares of land, for the growth of jatropha, a key biofuels raw material. Read the rest of this entry »

Does proximity to water give a city an advantage when it comes to sustainability rankings?

According to SustainLane who just released their 2008 Sustainable City rankings, city traits that are already set in stone like geography and layout play a huge role. Take the greenest cities in America: Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and New York. Four out of the five them are situated on the coast and were built before suburbia existed. Read the rest of this entry »

As the world continues to be shaken up by horror stories on Wall Street, it might be worth taking a few steps back to consider your immediate quality of life.

SustainLane, a San Francisco based green media company has just announced its brand new U.S. city rankings today. Starting in 2005, SustainLane went through an exorbitant examination of sustainability initiatives in U.S. cities looking at a variety of factors: average traffic commutes, affordable housing, waste diversion, green space, energy usage, green buildings, natural disaster risk, air quality, water quality, public transportation, local food sources, and government innovations. James Elsen, the founder of SustainLane explains it in his article What’s A Sustainable City, Anyway ? Read the rest of this entry »

It seems these days that you can’t get away from reading about carbon anywhere. From supermarket shelves to rental car counters, carbon labels and carbon offset offers are showing up everywhere. Part of this is because of the importance of and growing concern about global warming. But there’s another good reason: it’s a great single currency with which to compare the energy use and environmental impacts of very different kinds of activities and products. Pre-carbon, you had to use units like British thermal units (BTUs) or joules to compare the relative impacts of using gasoline to electricity or natural gas to fuel oil. Even then the calculations could be difficult and the results not very tangible to those of us who aren’t chemists. Carbon content makes it much easier. We can all envision carbon dioxide gas coming out of our tailpipes and smokestacks, so it’s tangible. And a carbon estimate allows you to quickly compare the relative environmental impacts of different product choices.

There is a price with this growing success, though: if you can’t measure the impact of something with carbon, then it can lose out in the court of public opinion. The environmental impacts of some items that are low (or unmeasurable) in carbon but high on other dimensions (water use, stormwater runoff production, etc) are often minimized. An increase in biofuels, for instance, might reduce the carbon content of motor fuels. But what if the biofuels are grown with intense nitrogen fertilizers that double the size of the summer dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico? Of what if we build 50 new nuclear power plants only to find that they exhaust regional supplies of fresh water for their cooling towers?

Read the rest of this entry »

“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.

Read the rest of this entry »