By God but we built some dams! We backed up the Kennebec in Maine and the Neuse in North Carolina and a hundred creeks and streams that once ran free. We stopped the Colorado with the Hoover, high as 35 houses, and because it pleased us we kept damming and diverting the river until it no longer reached the sea. We dammed our way out of the Great Depression with the Columbia’s Grand Coulee, a dam so immense you had to borrow another fellow’s mind because yours alone wasn’t big enough to wrap around it. Then we cleaved the Missouri with a bigger one still, the Fort Peck Dam, a jaw dropper so outsized they put it on the cover of the first issue of Life. We turned the Tennessee, the Columbia, and the Snake from continental arteries into still bathtubs. We dammed the Clearwater, the Boise, the Santiam, the Deschutes, the Skagit, the Willamette, and the McKenzie. We dammed Crystal River and Muddy Creek, the Little River and the Rio Grande. We dammed the Minnewawa and the Minnesota, and we dammed the Kalamazoo. We dammed the Swift and we dammed the Dead.
One day we looked up and saw 75,000 dams impounding more than half a million miles of river. We looked down and saw rivers scrubbed free of salmon and sturgeon and shad. Cold rivers ran warm, warm rivers ran cold, and fertile muddy banks turned barren.
And that’s when we stopped talking about dams as instruments of holy progress and started talking about blowing them out of the water.
Beyond the Valley of the Dammed
I will always love the style and wit of this introduction.
(via newtheoryoldlove)
Source: newtheoryoldlove
Ethical Style: How Your Leather Jacket Is Destroying the Environment
TL;DR: Leather is not a byproduct of cows killed for meat- you need more cows treated brutally, taking up more space, using more water. The process to make leather, also, requires an unnecessary amount of chemical pollution, and alternatives are not so better.
The cow is the most farmed animal on earth—at any given time, there are 1.5 million of them waiting to become beef. The beef industry’s stranglehold over the world’s dinner plates is a big problem for the environment (not to mention those million-and-a-half cows). But until the world’s diet changes, slipping on a pair of leather shoes or throwing on a leather handbag can seem like an honest attempt to try to use the whole animal.
Indeed, most leather that ends up on our feet and over our shoulders comes from cows. But numbers aligning meat and leather consumption are elusive. Consider this: Utter Pradesh is one of the highest-concentrated centers of leather production in the world. It’s also located in northern India, a beef-free country where the cow is considered holy and slaughtering is forbidden in many parts of the country.
That divide hints at a broader reality: Leather is a co-product of the meat industry, not a byproduct. More leather does require more cattle. And like most mass-production processes involving animals, the process gets ugly. Cows live in confinement in overcrowded stalls, where they’re plumped with hormones and force-fed with dubious fillers, or not fed enough, dehorned, and branded. Animal rights watch groups have reported cows being skinned while the animal is still conscious, among other cruel practices.
And those tight living conditions still manage to wreck havoc on huge sections of the earth’s surface. Cows feed off of crops that use up 33 percent of the world’s arable land. The Amazonian rain forest has been seriously depleted to make way for more animals. Brazil is the single largest exporter of unfinished leather to China, and more than 40 percent of Brazil’s cattle lives and grazes on former Amazonian grounds. According to the U.N., worldwide cattle-rearing for food and fashion is responsible for 18 percent of human-induced greenhouse gas emissions. Transportation only makes up 13 percent of that figure.
And the environmental damage doesn’t end when the cow stops emitting gas. After a cow is slaughtered, its hide is unhaired, degreased, tanned, dried, softened, recolored, and finished. The tanning process usually employs a mix of chromium and a huge amount of water. When that sludge is unceremoniously dumped, it can seep into the ground water, where basic chromium can quickly turn into the toxic chromium VI. (the same chemical that inspired Erin Brokovich to rally against Pacific Gas & Electric). Ingestion of the stuff can cause ulcers, severe kidney and liver damage, DNA mutation, and sometimes death. And though leather is considered a “natural” textile, the sheer volume of chemicals used in the tanning and finishing processes means that most leather is not biodegradable.
So far, the fashion world has failed to find a totally sustainable alternative to the real deal. “Cruelty-free” (and often cheaper!) alternatives to leather exist—though unless they’re specifically labeled “vegan,” many use glues that include animal leftovers. Matt and Nat makes fashionable leather handbag lookalikes, while Cri de Coeur and celebrity favorite OlsenHaus offer vegan shoes. Birkenstock even has its own nubuck and patent leather imitations, Birkibuc and Birki-Flor.
But unfortunately, these meatless alternatives don’t look so good from the ecological vantage point. Imitation leather is made from polyester, which does not come from renewable resources and is not biodegradable. Burning these materials can emit noxious gases into the atmosphere. One popular pleather base, PVC, is even known as the “poison plastic.”
Another option is real leather, done better. Cultivating hides from organically farmed cattle, and vegetable tanning it cuts down on both the ecological damage and cruelty concerns of the mainstream leather process. Vegetable tanning uses safe tannins that occur naturally in tree bark, but it has its problems, too—it is much more labor- and time-intensive than its chemical alternative, still uses a lot of water, and still requires cattle to be slaughtered.
No “eco-friendly” or “cruelty-free” option is perfect, but many represent an improvement on the status quo. As with every problematic item in our closets, we ultimately need to learn to buy less leather, smarter.
Global warming close to becoming irreversible-scientists | Reuters
“This is the critical decade. If we don’t get the curves turned around this decade we will cross those lines,” said Will Steffen, executive director of the Australian National University’s climate change institute, speaking at a conference in London.
Despite this sense of urgency, a new global climate treaty forcing the world’s biggest polluters, such as the United States and China, to curb emissions will only be agreed on by 2015 - to enter into force in 2020.
[…]
For ice sheets - huge refrigerators that slow down the warming of the planet - the tipping point has probably already been passed, Steffen said. The West Antarctic ice sheet has shrunk over the last decade and the Greenland ice sheet has lost around 200 cubic km (48 cubic miles) a year since the 1990s.
Most climate estimates agree the Amazon rainforest will get drier as the planet warms. Mass tree deaths caused by drought have raised fears it is on the verge of a tipping point, when it will stop absorbing emissions and add to them instead.
Around 1.6 billion tonnes of carbon were lost in 2005 from the rainforest and 2.2 billion tonnes in 2010, which has undone about 10 years of carbon sink activity, Steffen said.
One of the most worrying and unknown thresholds is the Siberian permafrost, which stores frozen carbon in the soil away from the atmosphere.
“There is about 1,600 billion tonnes of carbon there - about twice the amount in the atmosphere today - and the northern high latitudes are experiencing the most severe temperature change of any part of the planet,” he said.
In a worst case scenario, 30 to 63 billion tonnes of carbon a year could be released by 2040, rising to 232 to 380 billion tonnes by 2100. This compares to around 10 billion tonnes of CO2 released by fossil fuel use each year.
Increased CO2 in the atmosphere has also turned oceans more acidic as they absorb it. In the past 200 years, ocean acidification has happened at a speed not seen for around 60 million years, said Carol Turley at Plymouth Marine Laboratory.
This threatens coral reef development and could lead to the extinction of some species within decades, as well as to an increase in the number of predators.
Bolded emphasis mine. This is about the 50th post I’ve posted or reblogged about the climate “doomsday,” which should be the biggest story everyday but magically isn’t.
Source: sarahlee310
“I believe that the modern surface parking lot is ripe for transformation. Few of us spend much time thinking about parking beyond availability and convenience. But parking lots are, in fact, much more than spots to temporarily store cars: they are public spaces that have major impacts on the design of our cities and suburbs, on the natural environment and on the rhythms of daily life. We need to redefine what we mean by ‘parking lot’ to include something that not only allows a driver to park his car, but also offers a variety of other public uses, mitigates its effect on the environment and gives greater consideration to aesthetics and architectural context.
It’s estimated that there are three nonresidential parking spaces for every car in the United States. That adds up to almost 800 million parking spaces, covering about 4,360 square miles — an area larger than Puerto Rico. In some cities, like Orlando and Los Angeles, parking lots are estimated to cover at least one-third of the land area, making them one of the most salient landscape features of the built world.
Such coverage comes with environmental costs. The large, impervious surfaces of parking lots increase storm-water runoff, which damages watersheds. The exposed pavement increases the heat-island effect, by which urban regions are made warmer than surrounding rural areas. Since cars are immobile 95 percent of the time, you could plausibly argue that a Prius and a Hummer have much the same environmental impact: both occupy the same 9-by-18-foot rectangle of paved space.
A better parking lot might be covered with solar canopies so that it could produce energy while lowering heat. Or perhaps it would be surfaced with a permeable material like porous asphalt and planted with trees in rows like an apple orchard, so that it could sequester carbon and clean contaminated runoff.”
Source: kateoplis
Natural Born Drillers
Quick TL;DR on my behalf for the article: people, namely Republicans, continue to claim that domestic drilling will help create jobs and give the economy a boost, and the only reason we are not doing so is because of the excessive regulation pushed by environmentalists. This is simply not true.
Paul Krugman:
More and more, Republicans are telling us that gasoline would be cheap and jobs plentiful if only we would stop protecting the environment and let energy companies do whatever they want.
[…]
The irony here is that these claims come just as events are confirming what everyone who did the math already knew, namely, that U.S. energy policy has very little effect either on oil prices or on overall U.S. employment. For the truth is that we’re already having a hydrocarbon boom, with U.S. oil and gas production rising and U.S. fuel imports dropping. If there were any truth to drill-here-drill-now, this boom should have yielded substantially lower gasoline prices and lots of new jobs. Predictably, however, it has done neither.
[…] it’s hard to claim that excessive regulation has crippled energy production. Indeed, reporting in The Times makes it clear that U.S. policy has been seriously negligent — that the environmental costs of fracking have been underplayed and ignored. But, in a way, that’s the point. The reality is that far from being hobbled by eco-freaks, the energy industry has been given a largely free hand to expand domestic oil and gas production, never mind the environment.
First up, oil prices. Unlike natural gas, which is expensive to ship across oceans, oil is traded on a world market — and the big developments moving prices in that market usually have little to do with events in the United States. Oil prices are up because of rising demand from China and other emerging economies, and more recently because of war scares in the Middle East; these forces easily outweigh any downward pressure on prices from rising U.S. production. And the same thing would happen if Republicans got their way and oil companies were set free to drill freely in the Gulf of Mexico and punch holes in the tundra: the effect on prices at the pump would be negligible.
Meanwhile, what about jobs? I have to admit that I started laughing when I saw The Wall Street Journal offering North Dakota as a role model. Yes, the oil boom there has pushed unemployment down to 3.2 percent, but that’s only possible because the whole state has fewer residents than metropolitan Albany — so few residents that adding a few thousand jobs in the state’s extractive sector is a really big deal. The comparable-sized fracking boom in Pennsylvania has had hardly any effect on the state’s overall employment picture, because, in the end, not that many jobs are involved.
And this tells us that giving the oil companies carte blanche isn’t a serious jobs program. Put it this way: Employment in oil and gas extraction has risen more than 50 percent since the middle of the last decade, but that amounts to only 70,000 jobs, around one-twentieth of 1 percent of total U.S. employment. So the idea that drill, baby, drill can cure our jobs deficit is basically a joke.
Why, then, are Republicans pretending otherwise? Part of the answer is that the party is rewarding its benefactors: the oil and gas industry doesn’t create many jobs, but it does spend a lot of money on lobbying and campaign contributions. The rest of the answer is simply the fact that conservatives have no other job-creation ideas to offer.
The four words that will define this century: The Earth is full.
Source: twitter.com
The human brain is a remarkable device that was designed to rise to special occasions. We are the progeny of people who hunted and gathered, whose lives were brief and whose greatest threat was a man with a stick. When terrorists attack, we respond with crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors would have. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain’s alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.
This post has been sitting in my drafts for a few months now:
You only have to talk to a climate scientist or someone well versed with that knowledge for a few minutes to realize if humans continue consuming resources and increasing population at the rate we are, Earth can only sustain for a few hundred, or a hundred years at most. Even those who are naive enough to cast anthropogenic climate change, or even natural climate change, off as a hoax, cannot be naive enough to think that, under status quo, our planet can sustain over 9 billion people.
Then why do we, myself included, carry on with our wasteful behaviors?
I came across this video of Dan Gilbert, a psychology professor at Harvard, answering this question from a psychological point of view. Here’s a quick summary:
Intentional vs. Natural
“Understanding what others are up to — what they know and want, what they are doing and planning — has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human,” we pay attention to actions, not accidents. Diseases and illnesses tend to worry us less than, say, airplanes flying into buildings. The former is something that “just happens,” and the latter is something done by other humans. Anthrax scares us more than influenza, even though nearly no one dies of anthrax over a year, whereas a quarter million to half-million people die of the flu.
Amoral?
We don’t have a moral tie, except for I guess environmentalists, animal activists, philosophers studying this kind of thing, to climate change. We judge women about sex, people for what they eat, but as Daniel Gilbert says it, “human societies […don’t have] a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry.” Drinking from a plastic water bottle doesn’t make us feel like we’re doing something wrong, (okay it makes me feel like I’m doing something wrong, but for most people, this mental connection isn’t there.)
“Threat to our future, not our afternoon.”
We don’t think global warming is happening in our lifetime. This is wrong, but that’s the way we see it. It’s going to happen tomorrow, not tonight, we can put it off. Part of the reason our species has thrived on our planet is because of our ability to think of the future, but even then, we still think more in terms of now and the few minutes following that.
Gradual vs. Abrupt Change
This is a trick I picked up quickly when it came to televisions and volume. Someone tells you to the lower the volume, and you can lower it drastically so they notice, and then turn it back up one notch at a time, and they won’t notice. Global warming is happening slowly. If you could travel at intervals of twenty years, the change would seem abrupt, and you’d go back to the present and share how devastating climate change is. If you stayed in the present, the changes would happen at sluggish pace and you wouldn’t register them as something harmful, as is happening now.
Amazonian Mushroom Eats Indestructible Plastics
We use polyurethane to make just about everything—garden hoses, furniture, the entirety of my local 99-cent store. It’s easy to produce, durable, and dirt cheap. What it isn’t is recyclable—there isn’t a single natural process that breaks it down. That is until a newly-discovered Amazonian fungus takes a bite.
Pestalotiopsis microspora (not shown) is a resident of the Ecuadorian rainforest and was discovered by a group of student researchers led by molecular biochemistry professor Scott Strobel as part of Yale’s annual Rainforest Expedition and Laboratory. It’s the first fungus species to be able to survive exclusively on polyurethane and, more importantly, able to do so in anaerobic conditions—the same conditions found in the bottom of landfills. This makes the fungus a prime candidate for bioremediation projects that could finally provide an alternative to just burying the plastic and hoping for the best.
When in doubt, mushrooms. Always, always, always.
Source: anticapitalist
Renewable Energy Standards: If It Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It
When your local utility buys more renewable energy to power your lights and computers, what more do you get besides the power? You get cleaner air, fewer respiratory health problems, and lower health-care costs.
You get local jobs building and maintaining green power plants and a better foothold in the fast-growing, multi-billion dollar global renewable energy industry.
If you use the power to charge the new plug-in electric vehicles now available, you reduce our imports of foreign oil and increase our energy security.
And finally, you reduce the greenhouse gases that are leading to the severe, threatening weather events spurred by global climate change.
Remind me again, what is wrong with renewable energy standards? (I mean this half rhetorically and half because I really don’t know if there is anything, haha.)
Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere continues its inexorable rise
The heart of the climate problem is that our burning of fossil fuels along with other human activities have thrown the atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases out of balance, and their concentration in the atmosphere is growing faster and faster. This classic record from Mauna Loa in Hawai’i shows the growth in the CO2 concentration in the past half century. But it’s worse than that: CO2 concentrations in our atmosphere are now higher than at any time in the past million years, and perhaps higher than in the past 15 million years. The concentration of carbon dioxide is higher today than in a million years. Higher concentrations of greenhouse gases leads to a hotter planet.
We like to blame corporations for the ills that follow, but in truth we’ve made this compact with ourselves. After all, we know the roots of the great economic deals we’re getting. They come from workers forced to settle for lower wages and benefits. They come from companies that shed their loyalties to communities and morph into global supply chains. They come from CEOs who take home exorbitant paychecks. And they come from industries that often wreak havoc on the environment.
How Capitalism Is Killing Democracy
Then why are we complacent? Why am I complacent?
Source: foreignpolicy.com
The balance of nature is built of a series of interrelationships between living things, and between living things and their environment. You can’t just step in with some brute force and change one thing without changing many others. Now this doesn’t mean of course that we must never interfere, that we must not attempt to tilt that balance of nature in our favor but when we do make this attempt we must know what we are doing. We must know the consequences.
How ironic.
Goal this week in trying to be a better person: Drink more water- not from plastic bottles.
Seeing the amount of plastic bottles one residence hall goes through in a week is absolutely crazy.
Source: grist.org
Here are some 