Organic Matter blogs

The NASA Ice Report

Fri, 15 Sep 2006 11:53:36 -0700

Hello Friends…

Scientists from NASA and the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) have announced measurements showing Arctic sea ice is hitting major lows. (http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/nasa-findings-on-global-warmin%29)

This past summer, Greenpeace explorers succeeded in making the first summer trek to the North Pole to document the impacts of global warming firsthand and to call attention to the plight of the polar bear. As part of the expedition, the explorers also collected data on ice thickness, snow cover and snow density and took snow samples for scientists at NSIDC.

NSIDC’s satellite data analysis shows that Arctic perennial sea ice, which remains all year-round, has shrunk by 14 percent between 2004 and 2005. These changes in Arctic sea ice are being linked to global warming and changes in wind patterns. The overall decrease in winter Arctic perennial sea ice totals 280,000 square miles - an area that is the size of Texas!

The good news is, scientists say we can avoid the worst if we act now. That's why Greenpeace is putting Congressional candidates in the hotseat. Find out more about how you can get involved www.greenpeace.org/usa/houseparty/

Santa Monica's Plan

Thu, 18 Aug 2005 01:01:15 -0700

I've been meaning to review Santa Monica's Sustainable City Plan for the last couple of months and I finally did so this past weekend. While I can not know how well the Santa Monica community has responded to the plan, the program itself is terrific.

Kevin McKeown, Santa Monica City Council member, reports that "residential recycling spiked by 11 percent when we instituted easy-to-use commingled recycling in our neighborhoods," so there is some encouraging news at this early stage, but Santa Monica officials will not be able to assess the effects of this comprehensive plan for some time.

Because they can be pursued via city ordinaces, the transportation and land use objectives will be more easily achieved. Economic measures, resource conservation, and "human dignity" considerations, on the other hand, are all addressed at length in the document, but aiming for "an annual increase over baseline" in the "percent[age] of Santa Monica residents who report that vegetable-based protein is the primary protein source for at least half their meals," for example, is not a matter for government regulation. (Can you imagine the furor resulting from proposed restrictions on per capita meat consumption?)

I will definitely be keeping my eye on Santa Monica. I expect to use their Sustainable City Plan as something of a template, wherever I may land. If you are at all interested in encouraging sustainable lifestyles in your own community, I recommend a read. (Find the .pdf here.)

Sustainability 101

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 11:00:25 -0700

I've been doing a lotta reading lately on books that will help inform a career of helping to create a sustainable economy, one organization at a time. And, it's clear from reading all of this that we've got to change the mainstream environmental thinking because it will NOT work

We've been raised on "reduce, reuse, recycle", which is all fine and good except one problem. It's an approach that tries to fix a fatally flawed model rather than redesigning it to work. That model is "cradle-to-grave". We need an economy based on a "Cradle-to-cradle" system. More below the fold...

Oil Bad. Freedom Good.

Fri, 24 Jun 2005 23:21:48 -0700

Oil surrounds our daily lives. Whether in the form of the millions of different plastics we have, heating our homes or fueling our transportation, oil remains a key piece of our energy requirements. What people don't always realize is that this is actually an oil addiction. We've grown accustomed to having it, a lot of it, at our fingertips. Whats the bad news here? Well, where shall we start? For one, the price of oil just recently topped $59 a barrel and gasoline in the San Francisco Bay Area is hitting upwards of $2.79 a gallon. Secondly, according to many different scientists Peak Oil is now officially a "threat" to the United States economy and way of life in that it will force us to change our ways and look more closely at alternative energy sources much sooner than we had hoped. Thirdly, the majority of our oil consumption occurs on the U.S. highways in the tanks of our SUVs a trucks. So, what are automakers doing to help us ditch oil? Making more gas guzzlers. Ford Motors is the worst as they have racked up the worst fuel efficiency ratings of any of the top 5 automakers over the last 5 years.

The New Yorker: Why intelligent design isn’t.

Thu, 26 May 2005 13:30:59 -0700

A growing peeve of mine lately, which I attribute to rubbing off from Christine (soon to be doctor of Biological Anthropology), has been how mainstream media and even publications with a more science/technical readership (like Wired) make blatantly wrong statements about Darwinism/evolution in relation to the religious right's attempts to have schools teach "Intelligent Design" as part of its larger "moral" crusade of telling Americans what they can and can not do/think. (Yes, I am the king of run on sentences) In contrast there is a great article in the latest New Yorker about "Intelligent Design" that everyone should check out. It does a good job going over just exactly what the "science" behind the political movement is and makes well informed responses to them.

Mother's Get Activated

Tue, 10 May 2005 14:30:44 -0700

The topic of getting our nation's mothers more involved in the environmental movement has been touched on in numerous blogs recently. Many feel that the green movement has failed to link mothers into the message of conservation, ecology and overall planet health. How could we have been so blind as to miss the connection between our mothers and our own Mother Earth?

With that in mind the Rainforest Action Network recently launched a year long campaign asking mothers and grandmothers around the world to mobilize and use their voices to help bring about change. And whats the message this growing assembly of motherly voices is communicating? It's time for Ford Motor Co. to turn itself around and start manufacturing zero-emssions vehicles. As part of RAN's Jumpstart Ford Campaign mothers from around the U.S. will be sending letters to Bill Ford Junior asking him to get back on track and commit his company to creating a safer, healthier and cleaner environment by building zero-emission vehicles. Ford Motor Company, is America's biggest gas guzzler, possessing the worst gas mileage of any American automaker for five straight years. And nearly seventy percent of the oil used in America today is used for transportation. How do we get off this addiction to oil? We bring change to the one of the largest auto companies in the world.

JP Morgan Will Lobby Gov't to Adopt Global Warming Strategy

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 00:44:44 -0700

(From the user blogs. Welcome, Japhet! -chris)

Perhaps you heard the huge news coming out of the financial sector last week: JP Morgan Adopts Green Policies. Why is this a big deal? I digress...

Rainforest Action Network and other environmental groups have been so successful in their campaigns over the past 5 years that corporations have become fearful of becoming a target of the group.

Vitamin C Hand Shower???

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 15:09:28 -0700

You really have to just go see this for yourself.

According to the website:

The Features of Vitamin C Hand Shower
1 Perfect Chlorine Removal.
2 Change the Water(weak acid)
3 Water Saving (50%)
4 Convient to use in low water pressure.
5 Anion radiation.

Vitamin C Hand shower is effective for
* Atopy skin and allergy sufferers
* Infant and children
* Asthma sufferers
* Irritated-eyes after shower
* Shining your hair
* Women and children with sensitive skin
* Skin disease
* Who dyes hair often

"Organic" Milk

Sat, 30 Apr 2005 00:44:01 -0700

(From the user blogs because there's a whole lot to the "organic" issue. Check out the USDA's National Organic Program and the California Organic Foods Act of 1990. -chris)

Just wanted to point out an interesting article about Horizon's "organic" milk over at Salon.com. (If you don't have a subscription to salon.com you can click the link to see one of their ads for a free single day pass.)

... Horizon is emblematic of 21st century agriculture. It's a brand of White Wave Foods, itself a division of $10 billion Dean Foods, the largest milk bottler in the country.

RFID, OLED, Organic Semiconductors and Electronic Ink

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:35:27 -0700

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) is a system of remotely storing and retrieving it using devices called RFID tags/transponders. An RFID tag is a small object, such as an adhesive sticker, that can be attached to or incorporated into a product that contains a unique identifier. The RFID transponder then read the tag wirelessly via radio frequency. You've most likely to have come across them as anti-theft tags on DVDs in the form of a square sticker that has a spiral shaped metal foil inside, cards you hold up against a reader to access secure areas (ex: buildings, parking lots, rooms, etc), or electronic highway toll payments (ex: EZ Pass, FasTrak, I-Pass, etc). RFIDs are currently being researched as a potential replacement of UPC (Universal Product Code) barcodes. The idea being that if every item in a store/warehouse had a RFID one could in theory have a real time inventory of what is on the shelf/warehouse and what needed to be stocked/reordered. The biggest constraint keeping retailers from using RFID at the moment is the cost, currently a RFID tag costs about $0.40 each. Ideally if the cost dropped below $.05 it would become more economically viable and adopted.

Get into my belly!

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:35:02 -0700

New York City is trying out a new high tech trash called "Big Belly" that runs on solar power, automatically compacts trash to 1/4 of its size, displays a red light when its full and wirelessly calls the to get emptied when needed. In theory these "smart trash cans" would be more efficient and reduce the consumption of diesel fuel used by only being picked up when full.

Possible Thylacine Sighting

Fri, 29 Apr 2005 00:30:29 -0700

My friend Derek passes along a clip regarding a possible thylacine sighting. The thylacine, a marsupial carnivore native to Tasmania that once ranged as far north as New Guinea, has been considered extinct since the last one died in the Hobart Zoo in the 1930s.

Here are some re-mastered films of thylacines in that zoo, including a lot of footage of "Ben," the last (known) living thylacine, a female despite the name.

Thylacines strongly resembled dogs - one common name for them was "Tasmanian wolf" - but they were no more closely related to dogs than are opossums or kangaroos. As mentioned above, they were marsupials. They bore non-viable live young that crawled to an external pouch to suckle until ready to face the outside world. The resemblance to dogs is an example of convergent evolution: certain body forms work well for certain tasks. If you're a cursorial predator of small animals, a dog-like body is a good thing to have, whether you're a thylacine, a wolf, or a hyena.

Cell Phone to Sunflower?

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:35:16 -0700

Cell Phone Turns Into Sunflower
A materials company, Pvaxx Research & Development, and the University of Warwick in the UK have developed a biodegradable polymer and used it in a prototype cellphone case. The cover of the case has an actual sunflower seed embedded in it. Theoretically, when you're trading up to a new phone, you plant the cover of the case and it provides nutrients to the seed as the gigantic sunflower grows. Of course, the rest of your phone still goes to a landfill where it leaches out heavy metals into the municipal water supply while the "green" cover is grabbing all the media attention on CNN.