Owner: The Green Filter URL:http://www.thegreenfilter.com Join Date: Sun, 13 Apr 2008 21:05:12 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: Ideas, information and solutions to move society towards sustainability. Commentary on lifestyle, society, climate change, energy, peak oil and urban planning. Also coverage of scientific developments, current events regarding climate change and news abou Site statistics:Click here
Largest Remaining Ice Shelf in Arctic Breaking Up 2008-04-13 17:17:00 Readers of The Globe and Mail's climate change-related articles will know the website is infested with climate change deniers in the comments section. What I would like to know is how they explain something like this. I'll make some guesses just for humor's sake, and because I find it too heartbreaking and frustrating to even wade into the comments there.The reason the ice assessors can't find the poles measuring ice thickness is because some eco-saboteurs a la Michael Crichton's imagination came and stole them to back up their climate change hypothesis.The climate has always had warming periods and those kilometers long, meters wide cracks will close up any time now.It doesn't matter anyway, it's too expensive to do anything about climate change, and besides, Canada could use some warmer Read more:Largest
, Shelf
, Arctic
, Breaking
Why Globalization and Technology Make Us Vulnerable: William Rees 2008-04-11 21:42:00 William Rees is the ecological footprint guy. That is to say, he's the author of the first paper on the ecological footprint. I did a paper not so long ago which incorporated this concept. As I did research for the paper, just as you can see from listening to Rees, the circle of implications kept widening. Once you begin to think about the concept of how much productive space populations are actually using in relation to how much they have available to them, all sorts of conclusions show their ugly faces.Globalization and technology have allowed humanity to be successful (except you still "developing" countries) beyond what can be sustained. The developing countries are victims in this story. Basically, we rich countries have stolen from them to feed (and clothe and produce goods beyond wh Read more:Technology
, Vulnerable
, William
Walking: Activism, Distance and Travel Time Perception, Safety 2008-04-11 17:11:00 I'm a lazy human being, I admit it. But I still manage to walk more than anyone I know (except maybe my mom, she's pretty much superwoman, exercise edition). Because I'm lazy, I'm not going to rewrite the original version of this post - which was supposed to be on fashionable rain boots - which Blogger seems to have gobbled up without leaving a single crumb behind. Anyhow.I have a personal belief that walking is its own form of activism. Only the poor, crazy and disabled seem to do it anymore, crazy including "activists" like myself. Walking
makes streets safer because it puts more eyes on the street, it obviously reduces pollution (every time you walk you're doing your fellow (wo)man a favour, not to mention all the other flora and fauna by reducing emissions) and the more people do it, t Read more:Activism
, Travel
, Perception
, Safety
Climate Change, Peak Oil, Beer and Wine Shortage? 2008-04-09 13:59:00 I frequently read the Environment section on Yahoo! News. Normally it's filled with horrific or political news, such as "30% of bird species extinct by 2050" or "Fisheries collapse by 2040" or "Environmental organization sues to stop construction of coal plant." Over the past months I've often seen articles on wine production and climate change dotting the section. The first one, okay. But then it got to be a pattern, and I got a little annoyed. Wine drinkers, by stereotype, tend to be at least in the richer segment of the world's population, if not among the richest of the rich, depending on the wine. I thought, there must be more important, actually environment-related (as opposed to product-related) news to put in the section. Now they're talking about beer. Wine shortages might be a pr Read more:Climate
, Change
, Shortage
, Peak Oil
Cokie Roberts on the Daily Show 2008-04-09 13:05:00 Although I know it's no longer "cool" to be an overt feminist, I unfortunately can't help myself. Cokie Roberts
was great on The Daily
Show (Canadian link at the ComedyNetwork.ca) yesterday, talking about influential women in America's history. If you're from the U.S., I can't even provide a link because I'm automatically redirected, but if you're not familiar with the show, just Google comedycentral and you'll find your way to the clip.
This Post is about Poverty 2008-03-28 22:54:00 I often think how lucky I am to have been born into a family that was decently well-off financially. I was able to get a loan for my first car (the same one I still own - and use seldom) only because my mother has been in the same, decently well paid job for decades and she agreed to co-sign. Many young people where I'm from get their first vehicle or financial help to do so from their families. Having a car is a big deal in North America today, where many cities are simply no longer designed for people who don't own one, people whose families don't have any extra income to spare for this luxury. Some neighbourhoods lack basic amenities, everything from health care to grocery stores. In neighbourhoods where the vast majority of residents are poor, stores and services may move out because t Read more:Poverty
Waste=Food 2008-03-25 20:39:00 If you're much of a green, you've no doubt heard of William McDonough. The following video talks about some of his work. When I saw the title, "Waste is Food," it seemed even crazier than what I was talking about here, so I had to watch the video. Things I found particularly interesting:McDonough talks about buildings being made to imitate nature, beyond just vegetating them. No matter how it's done, thinking of buildings as creating oxygen, fixing carbon, changing colors with the season (!) is a really useful way of looking at the possibilities. Fixing carbon on its own would help restore the balance. Changing colors with the season is interesting as well. It reminds me of sitting in a lecture and listening to my biology professor remarking how nobody's really quantified the impact of how
Note to Self, Not Green, On Software 2008-03-22 23:22:00 I've been spending my Easter weekend completing a project. I'm sure most people reading this have had the experience of "technological roadblocks." Because I spent several years in a country where English is not the primary language, and because my husband has a different first language, a lot of our software tends to remain English-challenged. Microsoft Office, for example. I often need this application, and when projects like this come up, I often need to do "operations" I don't normally do. Trying to figure them out in a foreign language often proves to be more trouble than it's worth. The workarounds were rather interesting. I'm making a note here so that maybe I'll remember next time how to deal with these "situations," rather than always having to "reinvent the wheel."I needed to mak Read more:Green
, Software
More bikes than cars 2008-03-16 18:50:00 How cool is this (found via Revolving Doors): Read more:bikes
On Removing Antibiotics in Water 2008-03-16 12:33:00 By now, a lot of people have read the recent news story about antibiotics in water, and I've had a few hits just in the last 24 hours looking for ways to filter it. I still don't know how you would filter them out, but I did do a little Googling myself and found that according to Dr. Craig Adams, the John and Susan Mathes Missouri Chair of Environmental Engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology, it's not such a big deal to remove antibiotics, it's just that cities have no reason to do so until they're required to:Adams and three colleagues received the Rudolph Hering Medal from the American Society of Civil Engineers in 2003 for research into the removal of antibiotics in drinking water. The research could become instrumental if governmental agencies require regulation Read more:Antibiotics
Problems Accessing Pages on the site - DNS Issues 2008-03-14 23:30:00 My site's being converted over to my own domain, www.thegreenfilter.com. You may have trouble accessing posts that aren't on the main page for the next couple days. If by some miracle someone is that impatient, I apologize for the inconvenience. Read more:Pages
, Issues
Plan B 3.0 by Lester Brown is out 2008-03-14 21:40:00 I posted on Plan B 2.0 by LesterBrown
over a year ago, and now 3.0 is out. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but this series of books tends to be the best guide out there for focusing on solutions, and they're freely available. And as Janet Larsen of the Earth Policy Institute states in her interview with Celsius, the solutions are already technologically possible, and in most cases already in action somewhere around the globe, now it's just a matter of spread, and speed of spread. This is important to remember, because I often hear from my friends and family that we need to develop more technology, don't we? No, we don't.
Finding Peace by Tapping into the Brain's Right Hemisphere 2008-03-14 15:32:00 Here's a new TED Talk that may seem a little out there, unless you can relate to what the speaker is talking about. Jill Bolte Taylor is someone who had worked researching the brain. She then woke up one day to find herself in the midst of a stroke. Her central point is that the brain's hemispheres are two very different places, and that by giving oneself over to the right hemisphere more often, as a group, humanity would be much better off. I've never had a stroke, but I wasn't exactly shocked by anything she said. For whatever reason, I've spontaneously had the sense of well-being and connectedness she talks about, to lesser and greater extents over the course of my life. I don't know exactly how you turn it off and on, but she's no doubt right that it's something useful to tap into from Read more:Peace
, Brain
, Right
Civilization's downward spiral in literature, music 2008-03-13 13:56:00 I've noticed more social commentary in music and books lately, and I'm wondering if anyone else has examples of songs or books they've read that are run through with a bleak outlook on the future, and maybe especially works that acknowledge that, but then disregard it again, like there's nothing to be done.I first started thinking on this a month or more ago, when I noticed that a dance track by an old favourite has a sort of R-rated bubblegum chorus but in between was some serious unhappiness about a meaning-stripped society. Then I just finished reading The Echo Maker by Richard Powers, which is stuffed with (dis)illusioned, desperate characters. Pardon my analysis, because it's no doubt way off the mark, but I'll try to give a rundown anyway.Throughout the story is the backdrop of the s Read more:Civilization
Antibiotics not just in meat anymore 2008-03-10 22:07:00 So everybody who has a reason to be concerned about their consumption of antibiotics pretty much knows that meat and other animal products are full of them (or they're not paying attention). Well, now you can worry about your fruits, veg and grain too.In several recent studies of soil fertilized with livestock manure or with the sludge product from waste water treatment plants, American scientists found earthworms had accumulated those same compounds, while vegetables — including corn, lettuce and potatoes — had absorbed antibiotics. "These results raise potential human health concerns," wrote researchers.This is because most (all?) water and sewage treatment is incapable of completely removing medications and hormones from our water. This has been an issue on my radar screen for a whi Read more:Antibiotics
Morality, Religion and Green Values 2008-03-10 17:16:00 I've been kicking around the idea of how a lot of "green" activities are actually also morally upright. I sort of alluded to this in my previous post when I complained how not composting seems wrong in the face of soil degradation that can be linked with famine and may increasingly be so in the future.It's an interesting idea because a lot of religious organizations and movements seem to feel threatened by the green movement (though that's changing rapidly) because it seems to them to smack of something pagan, or worshiping the "Creation" instead of the Creator. I'm a spiritual person. I was raised Christian-ish. I don't think there's any disconnect between Christianity and having green values. When we protect our environment, we generally protect ourselves. When we make sure nutrients are Read more:Green
, Morality
, Religion
, Values
Moving, Scaling Back 2008-03-09 14:50:00 I'm moving at the end of this month. My new home will be considerably smaller and so my husband and I are forced to get rid of some of our stuff. A lot of the furniture and clothing and other still obviously useful items will go to Value Village. The trouble is, what do you do with things that have no obvious use anymore?For example, I recently broke my laundry hamper's frame. This is a product made of metal tubes and held together at the corners by plastic corner pieces. I broke the plastic corners on two corners. Now I have a series of metal tubes, the bag, and a piece of mesh material. I can see keeping the bag, maybe. I thought about trying to repair it. New connections could be made from metal at my husband's shop, but this isn't ideal. I could look for new plastic connections or impr Read more:Moving
, Scaling
Bleak Greens 2008-03-02 17:31:00 Admittedly, I'm sort of on board with this outlook. It's the first time I've seen it published so blatantly in the mainstream media though. An excerpt:On the day we meet, the Daily Mail has launched a campaign to rid Britain of plastic shopping bags. The initiative sits comfortably within the current canon of eco ideas, next to ethical consumption, carbon offsetting, recycling and so on - all of which are premised on the calculation that individual lifestyle adjustments can still save the planet. This is, Lovelock says, a deluded fantasy. Most of the things we have been told to do might make us feel better, but they won't make any difference. Global warming has passed the tipping point, and catastrophe is unstoppable."It's just too late for it," he says. "Perhaps if we'd gone along routes Read more:Bleak
, Greens
Green the City...or Just Your House 2007-11-16 16:37:00 Everybody who follows the green beat knows green roofs are cool, and cooling. I would argue that they're still not getting enough attention, and neither is the importance of vegetation in urban areas in general. I'm going to go back to my own city as an example.What makes industrial areas so unpleasant? I think when it comes down to it, it's all the greyness, the paved-ness. Of course industrial areas are also often filled with "weird" smells and loud sounds you wouldn't find near residential. These added bits of unpleasantness just add to the argument for more vegetation in these areas. Green
roofs have been found to lower local temperatures in urban areas, tamping down the urban heat island effect somewhat, meaning less greenhouse gases spent on cooling. They also have been shown to redu Read more:House
Green Social Networking, Tree-Nation 2007-11-02 16:41:00 Plenty Magazine has a post on green social networking sites. I'm not much of a social networker, at least not actively, but I did find Tree-Nation pretty interesting. The idea is not so much social networking as to raise money to plant eight million trees in Niger against desertification. For between 10 and 75 Euros you can pay for a tree to be planted. The community side does seem to have some weight, as I gathered from looking at their Digg style eco-news pages with various stories and sprinkling of votes. Read more:Green
, Social
Ideas - Part One: Realistic, humane public transit for extreme climates 2007-11-02 16:40:00 This is a musey post, you've been warned. I haven't posted much in months, mainly because I've been ridiculously busy trying to pay my bills. Now my seasonal job is ending and I ditched my office gig because it turned out sitting at a computer all day wasn't so great for me. As a result, I've had a bit more time to not only think, but also to write. Some of the things I've been thinking about will follow in separate posts. First:I live in a cold city. I recently bought a car (part of the unhappy bill paying stressy time) because transportation to one of my jobs was entirely unavailable and a car was required as shelter, and for the other job public transportation was unreliable and would mean two hours commuting time everyday or more if the bus didn't show up as expected. I don't like to Read more:Realistic
Ancient forests and the importance of science 2007-05-03 16:36:00 I'm trying to have a relatively electronics-free day, reading a book I just picked up from the library, but I had to connect online to type up a passage from The Wild Trees by Richard Preston:A piece of Lobaria [a lichen] the size of a child's hand might take ten years to grow to that size. (Lobaria is a comparatively fast grower. Some lichens can take twenty years to become the size of a dime.) It can take years or decades for some species of lichens to spread from one tree to the next. "If a whole mountainside has been cut, it will be a very long time before the Lobaria comes back, " Antoine said. "You start to see it after about two hundred years. But you don't see big, juicy, drippy abundances of these lichens for centuries. You only see it now in old-growth Douglas-fir forests Read more:Ancient
Environment vs. Health: Too Little Sun Cause For Concern 2008-04-14 15:21:00 More and more, it's becoming obvious that the state of the environment and our lifestyles play a major role in health. As people have shifted out of an agricultural lifestyle and moved into office jobs and other indoor work, a lot of new illnesses have appeared. News articles have been written on the effects of mold, "sick buildings", toxins in the materials used in construction that make it more toxic to be indoors than outdoors and also on how lack of sun exposure effects health.This issue is a personal one to me. I'm still in my twenties, but I've had a lot of health problems. At one point I determined I probably wasn't getting enough Vitamin D (i.e. sun exposure), so I made a conscious effort to get at least 15 minutes a day, which is really the bare minimum for pale skin. Once again I Read more:Environment
, Health
, Cause
, Concern
Environment vs. Health 2008-04-15 14:32:00 As I was going through my regular health webpage reads, I came across a post about air pollution and exercising outdoors. The tips to help deal with this were somewhat interesting, but I found the comments and the belief that exercising indoors, particularly in a gym ironic, frustrating and funny all at once. Gyms are another indicator that our society has gotten a little bit upside down. These are heated and cooled, lighted places where people can use machines that may or may not require electricity to make sure they're getting enough exercise. The irony is that people seem to think, "Well, I'm safe from outdoor air pollution because I exercise indoors." Meanwhile, gyms and driving to and from them only contributes more to air pollution (especially if they get their power from coal, as ma Read more:Environment
, Health
For Current and Aspiring Vermicomposters 2008-04-17 21:47:00 Weird trivia that might make worm composting sexier:In those days [1777], most gardeners viewed worms as pests, but their importance had been noticed long before. Cleopatra saw them as sacred because they were important to the fertility of the mud laid down by the Nile, and established a cadre of priests entirely devoted to their wellbeing.I've been vermicomposting for a year and a half now, off and on (sometimes the bin gets too full, or I need to change over to a new bin and keep procrastinating on doing it). I just gave away a bunch of compost and hope to try some out on my new place's garden this year. Some people have fish tanks. I prefer my worm bin. Not as pretty, but definitely more practical (and cheaper). Read more:Current
, Aspiring
Cities' Industrial Areas: Where We Hide Our Mess 2008-04-17 19:11:00 I went for my daily walk in an industrial section today. This was not really what I planned to do, but things didn't work out as planned. Anyway, several points about my walk:Cities
are really not pedestrian friendly. It's not always obviously where you can walk and where not, and you don't want to end up walking where only cars are supposed to be. Even using Google Earth to look for footpaths doesn't always make things clear before you're out in the real world getting lost. (As an aside, Google Earth is great for tracking distances when you're not in a car. You can use the ruler tool and select path, and the unit of measurement (km or miles, etc), and then you use you mouse to click from point to point on the path you want measured.)Industrial
areas are society's equivalent to under a tee
Smarten Up, Society! 2008-04-17 18:44:00 Reading an article on CBC about high gas prices, I came across this comment:The fuel price is actually very low when you consider what you get for it.You know the price of fuel is too low when: Trucks are a fashion statement; People leave their cars idling outside shops where we all have to inhale that stuff; suburbs are devoid of groceries; ordinary people avoid transit; we leave our homes heated when at work and even on vacation (houses are even designed to never have the heat shut off); horses are driven from place to place (they used to actually be a MODE of transportation!)It's encouraging to see other people just as baffled as I am. Read more:Society
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