Here’s an idea…let’s change the “American Way of Life” for the better.
According to Wikipedia, the concept of clean coal is said to be a solution to climate change and global warming by coal industry groups, while environmental groups believe it is greenwash. Greenpeace is a major opponent of the concept because emissions and wastes are not avoided, but are transferred from one waste stream to another.
As for the ad itself, the argument is built on fear and that’s not what we need to move forward as a nation. Does fear motivate? Certainly, but it’s an unethical tactic. Why not tout the strengths of coal industry’s claims? Why not convince people with irrefutable facts? I’m inclined to believe the coal industry doesn’t have those facts. If they did their ad agency would have mined them.
A good friend described his time in Chile like this: California 100 years ago. That is, it’s uncrowded and it’s natural beauty is unspoiled. I’ve wanted to go for an extended visit ever since.
Now, I’m reading Yvon Chouinard’s classic business book, Let My People Go Surfing. In it, he mentions that his good friend and fellow adventurer Doug Tompkins married former Patagonia CEO Kris McDivitt and moved to Chile, where the couple is using their money to buy up vast stretches of wild land in effort to create national parks. That piqued my curiosity, so I Googled them to learn more.
Over the past decade and a half, the Tompkinses have spent about $150 million to buy two dozen properties covering 2.2 million acres of Chile and Argentina, in what collectively amounts to the world’s largest privately run land conservation project.
At stake throughout the region is a historic opportunity much like the North American West in the 19th century — an underpopulated vastness of prairie, glacier-capped mountains and majestic forests that can still be grabbed by anyone with money and ambition.
“In the States, we can only protect small areas, but here, for $10 million you can buy a million-acre ranch,” said Chouinard, chairman of Patagonia Inc., who purchased 8,000 acres next to Valle Chacabuco and has donated funds to the park project. “There are tons of opportunities for creating parks, and now is the time,” Chouinard said. “Everything’s for sale. Sheep ranching is finished.”
The Tompkinses are among the most prominent individual donors to ecological and anti-globalization groups. Last year, two Sausalito foundations that they fund and control — Foundation for Deep Ecology and Conservation Land Trust — spent $15.7 million on conservation projects and grants to environmental and anti-free-trade groups.
As any reader of Natural Capitalism knows, there’s money to be made in sustainability.
Governing.com points out that one direction for budding green workers is to join the staff of a city government.
Fayetteville’s mayor, Dan Coody, is one of 805 mayors nationally who have signed pledges to slash their cities’ greenhouse gas emissions in line with targets set in the Kyoto Protocol. Those mayors have lapped up international praise for leading on climate change where Washington lagged. But the truth is, they are just now getting down to figuring out what exactly they have agreed to. What does it really mean to reduce a city’s carbon footprint?
About three dozen cities now have sustainability directors, and there are more whose job titles reflect either the broader fight against climate change or the somewhat narrower quest for energy efficiency. The idea is to have one person — or in Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle and other big cities, entire staffs — dedicated to squeezing greenhouse gas emissions out of the way government does business, and to serve as both a liaison and a beacon to businesses and citizens who want to limit their own carbon output.
I think he’ll be to Rome
As is the osprey to the fish, who takes it
By sovereignty of nature. -Shakespeare
Our local power provider, Palmetto Electric Co-op, is offering the community a chance to learn more about majestic raptors in our midst.
For years electric transmission towers have served as nesting homes for the migratory Osprey. As you drive across the Intracoastal Waterway to Hilton Head Island, you can spot the Ospreys congregating on the towers during the spring and summer months. Another tower—in Palmetto Electric’s own backyard—has also served as home to Osprey since 1988.
Each spring our feathered friends return to reside high atop the communications tower that overlooks Palmetto Electric’s Hilton Head Island operations center. This year new residents have taken over the nest and are settling in for the summer. Join Palmetto Electric in our second Osprey season as we get a bird’s-eye view thanks to a Web camera mounted nearby.
Osprey, commonly known as a “seahawk,” live to be 20 or more years old. They mate for life and migrate to South America and back every year. Their diet is 99% fish.
Have you read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s essay on energy in Vanity Fair? It’s well worth your time if you have yet to see it.
Here’s a quick look at the essential argument:
Carbon dependence has eroded our economic power, destroyed our moral authority, diminished our international influence and prestige, endangered our national security, and damaged our health and landscapes. It is subverting everything we value.
And yet, there is ample reason to be hopeful.
We sit atop the second-largest geothermal resources in the world. The American Midwest is the Saudi Arabia of wind; indeed, North Dakota, Kansas, and Texas alone produce enough harnessable wind to meet all of the nation’s electricity demand. As for solar, according to a study in Scientific American, photovoltaic and solar-thermal installations across just 19 percent of the most barren desert land in the Southwest could supply nearly all of our nation’s electricity needs.
All I know is I want to be part of this clean energy boom. Entrepreneurs will solve what government won’t. Am I right?
Inhabit is encouraging citizens of the world to participate in tonight’s Earth Hour, an idea from World Wildlife Fund that asks us to turn off our lights for an hour (to conserve energy and build awareness for the growing need to do so).
Thanks to an article in Dwell, I’m freaking out right now. In a good way. I’m freaking because I just learned about El Cosmico, the new community art project from Bunkhouse Management.
Bunkhouse is the team behind the coolest hotel in the world, Austin’s Hotel San Jose. Their vision of El Cosmico is equally enthralling.
El Cosmico will be part yurt and hammock hotel, part residential living, part art-house, greenhouse and amphitheatre – a community space that fosters and agitates artistic and intellectual exchange. As part of the overall aim to build community in a creative and sustainable space, thirty renovated vintage trailers will make up a small village on the site.
This experiement is taking place in West Texas, outside the small town of Marfa.
Like any great community project, there is a blog to keep people in the loop.
The Arctic ice cap has collapsed at an unprecedented rate this summer and levels of sea ice in the region now stand at record lows, scientists have announced.
Experts say they are “stunned” by the loss of ice, with an area almost twice as big as the UK disappearing in the last week alone.
So much ice has melted this summer that the Northwest passage across the top of Canada is fully navigable, and observers say the Northeast passage along Russia’s Arctic coast could open later this month.
If the increased rate of melting continues, the summertime Arctic could be totally free of ice by 2030.
I just finished reading John Steinbeck’s Travels with Charley In Search of America, which is appropriate since our trip to Alaska was a journey towards self and our selves are thoroughly American. Yet, we’d like to think we are somehow separate from the mindless hordes that consitute “American†with a capital A.
Emerging from the Savage River Loop in Denali National Park on Tuesday, a middle-aged woman and man were standing at the trailhead talking. Upon our approach the woman asked, “Are you Americans?â€
“Yes,†we replied.
“Oh, thank god,†she snapped. “This place is crawling with foreigners.â€
Appalled once more by the attitudes of our fellow Americans, we didn’t hesitate to walk on and find a nice German couple observing a caribou through binoculars, which they kindly offered to share—the very thing Mrs. America refused to do. Allow me to add that Denali is a park with six million acres and only one lightly travelled road.
In Steinbeck’s travel chronicle he doesn’t find fault with the characters he encounters so readily. I believe he was a man of great compassion. In my narrative the faults compound and compete for supremacy.
After meeting the Germans, we boarded a loaded bus back to the Wilderness Access Center. Before we could get underway we had to contend with camera-slinging tourists fighting for window space along the right side, where the caribou we had been casually observing was wisely escaping up the embankment. A few miles down the road things really heated up when a bull moose was spotted. One over-zealous white shoed cameraman had the gall to bark orders at the moose. “Come on. To the right. That’s good. Head up. That’s it.†When he was satisfied that the moose was safely trapped inside his digital tool, he said to no one in particular, “I’m glad that moose showed up. I was gonna ask for my money back.â€
Alaska is a stunning place. We expected that. What was unexpected was how the beauty of the place would provide such stark contrast for observing those who visit it. A lot has been said about Americans and our essential character. More will be said. But one thing we know for sure, “Americans†(in the pejorative sense) are an ugly people living in a beautiful land.
Of course, we can’t in good conscience find fault with others without also seeing it ourselves. For no one in the country is totally immune from the sins or arrogance, ignorance and detachment from nature. It would also be half-baked not to mention the good people encountered on this trip, for there were many. My hope is this kind of raw exposure to the land and the beasts who are supported by it, including humankind, fuels our will to be better, kinder, smarter people. America certainly is “the beautiful.” Let’s learn from the land and be beautiful too.
