Inside the ‘Tiny House Movement’

Watch the full episode. See more Need To Know.

Posted: September 1st, 2010
at 7:46am


Categories: fo' real?,green living

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US Food Waste Worth More Than Offshore Drilling

From New Scientist:

More energy is wasted in the perfectly edible food discarded by people in the US each year than is extracted annually from the oil and gas reserves off the nation’s coastlines.

Recent estimates suggest that 16 per cent of the energy consumed in the US is used to produce food. Yet at least 25 per cent of food is wasted each year. Michael Webber and Amanda Cuellar at the Center for International Energy and Environmental Policy at the University of Texas at Austin calculate that this is the equivalent of about 2150 trillion kilojoules lost each year.

That’s more than could be gained from many popular strategies to improve energy efficiency. It is also more than projections for how much energy the US could produce by making ethanol biofuel from grains.

.:newscientist.com->

Posted: August 2nd, 2010
at 6:06pm


Categories: food

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North Pacific Trash Gyre?

Recent events – including my own brewing exploits – have forced me to reconsider how much trash/pollution that we dump into the ocean on a daily basis. I mean, just today I drank 4 cans of soda, ate two meals out of Styrofoam containers (with three sets of plastic silverware and a stack of napkins). One you start to add things together, it’s a pretty staggering picture how much trash an average North American produces, just living a normal life. Now imagine that you actually produce something useful to society in any way, and you start to enter into a quagmire of epic proportions. I mean, I brew my own beer, which has got to be environmentally friendly in some way. However, in brewing, the cleaner your materials are the less chance you have of your beer being infected by wild yeasts. That, generally, ends up in a few teaspoons of iodine dissolved in a few gallons of water being dumped down the drain. Epic, mostly because it’s pretty clear that if and when we destroy our environment, the picnic’s over. Everything adds up.

Rant ended, I saw this article over at The Oyster’s Garter about the supposed “North Pacific Trash Gyre,” which is what it sounds like: a huge floating pile of Trash in the Pacific. Because our earth is some 75% water, it’s not a big deal that you don’t particularly notice this “trash gyre,” an effing whirpool of muck south of Cali, but it damn sure is a big deal that it’s there. And it’s the size of Texas.

The Pacific is not big enough, however, to hide all the plastic crap that comes pouring off North American and Asia. Many of the broken flipflops, lost plastic bags, abandoned waterbottles, and so forth collect in the North Pacific Gyre, which is essentially a big slow gentle whirlpool. But instead of sucking the trash down, it just collects at the center, forming a floating trash heap the size of Texas. LINK

Although the articles I quoted are old, The Oyster’s Garter, apparently run by a Miriam Goldstein, is probably the best continuing blog I’ve read on this subject in my short week of research.  Another article over there deals with the lack of images relevant to the story:

To really get a sense of how much plastic is in there, you have to do a trawl, which entails dragging a net with a bucket on the end behind your boat. Here’s a photo of a bongo trawl taken off of southern California. (Credit: Barbeau Lab, SIO) And here’s a photo of what a normal bongo trawl should produce – lots of zooplankton, a few invertebrates, and the occasional small fish.

Now, contrast this with the results of a trawl from the North Pacific Gyre. Here’s the bongo net being hauled up – see how the ocean looks normal? But the contents – plastic, plastic, and more plastic.* (Credit: Algalita Marine Research Foundation).  When all that plastic collects somewhere, you get beaches like this one in the NW Hawaiian Islands. LINK.

One dude was so struck by (what basically amounts to) the huge pile o’ shit in the ocean that he went on to found an organization dedicated to studying this situation.  Some of their pictures are used in this post.  You can find their page here: http://www.algalita.org/

Is Your Wine Vegetarian?

Those of us familiar with various brewing techniques already know about this, but it’s relevant for most of you.

One of the biggest problems with the old red-with-meat, white-with-fish wine pairing advice is that it entirely misses the boat on vegetables, and of course wines work beautifully with even vegetarian meals. But before we talk about pairing Syrah with seitan or Albariño with avocados, there’s something you may want to know: not all wines are — in the strictest sense of the words — vegan or even vegetarian.

The fact is that while an increasing number of wines are technically vegan, a substantial number of wines still use animal-based products in the “fining” process: clarifying the wine by removing proteins, yeasts and solid materials that would otherwise make the wine cloudy and visually unappealing, or would even create off-flavors or aromas. Fining agents act as magnets for unwanted materials, and carry the glop to the bottom of the barrel or tank. Then the wine is “racked” — poured off into another holding container, where the wine is separated from the solids. Racking is just like decanting, except on a humongous scale.  LINK

Posted: March 10th, 2010
at 5:03pm


Categories: food

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Panda Pr0n?

Pandas are known to be isolated creatures and poor breeders, and in captivity the problem may be exacerbated. Zhihe and his team have tried a number of measures to try to cure the male panda of his woefully low libido — including showing videos of fellow pandas making love.

In the privacy of their own cages, captive male pandas watch the sights and sounds of love-making on TV. Hopefully, Zhihe says, they’ll be aroused.

“We’re sure the sound of the video will stimulate the panda and the males’ interest,” Zhihe said. LINK

Posted: March 9th, 2010
at 9:53am


Categories: green

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The Dream Reborn (My President Is Green)

YouTube Preview Image YouTube Preview Image

always good stuff from Green for All out of Oakland.

Posted: January 21st, 2010
at 12:01am


Categories: YouTube,coal,current events,green,green art,my ninjas please!

Comments: 2 comments


Pollan on the Daily Show

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Michael Pollan
www.thedailyshow.com

I like this little interview given that a) all of my college friends are now professed Pollan-ites and b) given the fact that the Corn Refiners of America are fighting an ad war to convince Americans that they are not fat and unhealthy because they eat a pissload of refined sugar (and everything else). Read about it here. Also, the youtube video below is oh so relevant.

YouTube Preview Image

The Pollan video was relinked from Grist.

Posted: January 16th, 2010
at 10:35am


Categories: food

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Rare Earths, Bane and Boon

(Photo by Thomas Lee, for NYT)

Below is an excerpt; to read the full story, please go to the New York Times by clicking here.

GUYUN VILLAGE, China Some of the greenest technologies of the age, from electric cars to efficient light bulbs to very large wind turbines, are made possible by an unusual group of elements called rare earths. The world’s dependence on these substances is rising fast.

Just one problem: These elements come almost entirely from China, from some of the most environmentally damaging mines in the country, in an industry dominated by criminal gangs.

Western capitals have suddenly grown worried over China’s near monopoly, which gives it a potential stranglehold on technologies of the future.

In Washington, Congress is fretting about the United States military’s dependence on Chinese rare earths, and has just ordered a study of potential alternatives.

Here in Guyun Village, a small community in southeastern China fringed by lush bamboo groves and banana trees, the environmental damage can be seen in the red-brown scars of barren clay that run down narrow valleys and the dead lands below, where emerald rice fields once grew.

Posted: December 26th, 2009
at 7:50pm


Categories: agriculture,clean businesses,not-so-green

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Sweet Spinach and Winter Gardens

I was reading NPR today and found an article about a food program initiative on educating youngins about health. As you may know, Michelle Obama has made childrens’ nutritional health one of her top priorities and is therefore invited the Share Our Strength program to peruse the white house winter gardens and to get a kitchen lesson from the White House Chef (the bald cat). Check out “Kids Taste A Sweeter Veggie, White House Style” via the NPR webpage.

I learned all sorts of ninjarish facts, for instance how spinach tastes sweeter when grown at colder temperatures. In short, I really liked the article.

Apparently, there are a whole bunch of greens that can be grown in colder (all the way down to freezing-ass) temperatures with the help of a cold-frame (pictured below) and a little patience. The fact that the First L. is down for this ish is ICE COLD. That’s good, I mean, like… it’s awesome. One of the best articles I read today was about winter gardening in Colorado. I’m not going to go into detail here but, checkachecka check it out!

UNDERCOVER: Gardening in Colorado throughout winter in a cold frame” (via Front Range Living)

Posted: December 22nd, 2009
at 6:18pm


Categories: agriculture,green,green living,organic

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Everyday Life as Climate Protest

The front lines of Copenhagen from the artists of The Canary Project via GOOD climate culture/counter culture:

3

Three vignettes from Copenhagen show that personal responses to the conference might be the greatest cultural happenings around.

This is part two of a GOOD mini-series by the Canary Project‘s Ed Morris on the cultural happenings surrounding COP15.

I.

I am running through the crowd with the French artist Thierry Geoffroy. He is saying (in a deep French accent): “Zee, it is getting dark. They are closing in. They are going to kill us all. This is the plan. But then we keep going and we move around a corner and Geoffroy is saying. Ah, but you see, now it is more calm. We have come to a different part. All that has past.”

Such was my experience of the mass protest in Copenhagen this past Saturday. Estimates vary widely as to how many marched. Fox News says 25,000; the organizers say 100,000; and the police say 60,000. There were arrests of 968 (this number appears exact).

In the media centers and on the street, more intense interest has been paid to the possibility of violence than any particular detail of the negotiations. This is understandable. In addition to our seemingly innate tendency to be fascinated and compelled by images of violence, there is the fact that the expression of violence is the one real thing happening here.

“Violence, when not in the hands of the law, threatens [the state] not by the ends that [the violence] may pursue but by its mere existence outside the law,” writes Walter Benjamin. “By what function violence can with reason seem so threatening to law and be so feared by it, must be especially evident where its application, even in the present legal system, is still permissible.”

1c

The example that Benjamin gives to illustrate this point in “A Critique of Violence” is the worker’s strike – the state allows it to happen, despite its violent nature, because the power of the massed workers is sufficiently dangerous. The strike, like the protest, is violent regardless of whether it employs overt violence as a particular technique because it opposes order and the interests that constitute the state. Of course, even protests and strikes can go too far in the eyes of the state and claim a level of violence that the state cannot abide without losing authority. Protest, in both its permitted and non-permitted forms (both of which, by Benjamin’s definition, are essentially violent) is the most available and most direct negotiating tool for the 6 billion people not inside the Bella Center.

II.

Four people from different parts of the world arrive at Lykkesholms Alle 7C. They are greeted by a Danish family: husband, wife, and three boys, the youngest a baby. Also in the home are three women from Peru – two dressed in traditional highland clothing, one in jeans?and a camera crew of two people. After some small talk and a little getting to know each other, people take seats around a coffee table, others on the floor, some on chairs and a sofa. The camera crew remains standing. The children come in and out. The older of the Peruvian women asks for a photo from each person. She places the photos (given in the form of IDs) on some yellow flowers in the middle of the table, then gives each person a yellow candle. Each person writes his or her name and also his or her wishes for the next year directly onto the candle. The woman then lights each candle, muttering various incantations. She sprinkles sugar over the flowers and the photos and the candles. And then we sit and wait for each flame to burn down the wax entirely. Where we were rushing before, we are not rushing now. It is just the 14 of us in the room and the early northern darkness that presses against the window becomes a hypnotic abyss.

2c

III.

A dinner of about 25 people in a home near the center of town: home-cooked food, arrangements of dried flowers on the table, and several bottles of wine. Many at the dinner are involved in one form or another with a labor-intensive intervention project that is calculated to have an effect on the media coverage of COP15. The dinner is a break in the preparatory work for this intervention. Again there is a camera crew filming the event. At some point, people start giving speeches. This has been planned, which surprises me, because everything leading up to it has seemed so casual. The first speech is by a scientist, who gives a long hymn to Tycho Brahe and the scientific process (truth above ideology, and so forth). He is followed by an art student talking about the power of images, who in turn is followed by a business professor on the topic of learning not to be frightened by the facts of a new world, who is followed by an artist and activist on the need to avoid the grips of institutions. Then the planned speeches end and one woman stands up and proposes that the fundamental problem with comprehending climate change is our inability to come to terms with death. She then speaks about a friend, Brad Will, who was recently shot dead during a protest. She gathers herself and sings a song the she and Will used to sing together. ??My karma is to good for you to worry ’bout the crazies / I love everybody and there’s nothing that I own??

I almost didn’t stay for the dinner. I said that I needed to go get some work done, that I was writing a blog about cultural response to the conference. The host said, “This is culture.”

Posted: December 17th, 2009
at 11:03pm


Categories: climate change,current events,geo-politics,green art,legal,my ninjas please!,policy

Comments: 1 comment


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