Going to try making a papaya flavored batch tomorrow.
Wondering about Merlin and Gandalf? After nurturing and watching the two cultures grow I decided to name them. Had to come up with two magical names - Merlin and Gandalf - for "magic" alive in my room.
Singer-songwriter Natalie Merchant has been out of the limelight for several years, but she is about to re-emerge with a new album. Merchant recently turned up on Britain's Ecologist website in a Q&A that revolves around her environmental activism , which apparently is still as important to her as when she sang the green anthem “Poison in the Well” with her band 10,000 Maniacs and collected Greenpeace donations at her shows. A resident of rural New York and the mother of a young daughter, she says she supports local environmental groups like Scenic Hudson, Clearwater and Riverkeeper and has thrown her weight behind area campaigns like one opposing logging in Allegany State Park. Here are some snippets from the interview:
What book or film would you recommend all politicians read or see?
“ Koyaanisqatsi , directed by Godfrey Reggio with an astounding soundtrack by Philip Glass, is the film I would suggest everyone see. I saw Koyaanisqatsi in a theater when it was first released in 1982, and the impact that it had upon me is still felt. This film is a prophetic vision of a world gone mad, out of scale and out of control. Without a single word spoken, it hints at the vastness and beauty of the world and then explains that we, tiny and insignificant creatures, have swarmed together to do irreparable damage to it.”
I'll add my vote to "Koyaanisqatsi" and recommend that you also watch "Baraka."
Until then watch:
"President Obama received the Nobel Peace Prize in Norway's capital today. In his own words, this is a 'call to action' rather than a recognition of his own accomplishments. So we're hoping he'll act on his promises to confront the global challenges of the 21st century. We're hoping he will confront the greatest one in history - climate change. Our activists are greeting him in Oslo and urging him to show strong leadership when he attends the UN Climate Summit in Copenhagen next week."
Senators John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, and Lindsey Graham are holding a press call right now to discuss their tri-partisan effort to build support for a Senate climate bill. During the call, which AP_ClimatePool is live tweeting, the senators said that the bill will include incentives for building nuclear power plants. As Mariah Blake reports for the upcoming issue of Mother Jones, what the nuclear industry really wants is for the federal government to underwrite new construction of new reactors that Wall Street has deemed too financially risky. (And when Wall Street thinks an investment is too risky, that should make you very nervous.) Now, it looks like the industry may just get its wish: According to AP's feed, one of the senators just said that a bill must include generous government loan guarantees for nuclear plants in order to secure GOP backing. In other words: the price of getting 60 votes for a climate bill could be a major taxpayer bailout of the nuclear industry.
For more than a decade, 57-year-old roofer and writer Joseph Jenkins has been advocating that we flush our toilets down the drain and put a bucket in the bathroom instead. When a bucket in one of his five bathrooms is full, he empties it in the compost pile in his backyard in rural Pennsylvania. Eventually he takes the resulting soil and spreads it over his vegetable garden as fertilizer.This is not the first post I had about this topic. I think the time has come. It will clearly help my garden - though will my family eat my veggies? And now even Time is jumping on the bandwagon.
"It's an alternative sanitation system," says Jenkins, "where there is no waste." His 255-page Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure is in its third edition and has been translated into five languages, but it has only recently begun to catch on. His message? Human manure, when properly managed, is odorless. His audience? Ecologically committed city dwellers who are looking to do more for the earth than just sort their trash or ride a bike to work.
"It's one of those life-changing books," says Erik Knutzen, 44, an eco-blogger in Los Angeles. "You read it, and the lightbulb just goes on." Now he eschews his porcelain potty for a big bucket with a toilet seat. He "flushes" by tossing in a scoop of sawdust, which not only neutralizes smells but also helps speed the breakdown of material for compost. Like many back-to-basics sophisticates, he believes Jenkins' humanure system is more sanitary and more rational than the conventional alternative. "Human waste is a perfectly good source of an important resource, nitrogen," Knutzen observes. "Water is a valuable resource too. Why mix the two and turn all of it into a problem?"
The Environmental Protection Agency took a major step Monday toward regulating greenhouses gases, concluding that climate changing pollution threatens the public health and the environment.A very big step. Wait until Rush gets a hold of this announcement.
The EPA said that the scientific evidence surrounding climate change clearly shows that greenhouse gases "threaten the public health and welfare of the American people" and that the pollutants — mainly carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels — should be regulated under the Clean Air Act.
As the cold temps are rolling in I can only dream of planting the seeds that I am drooling over in the many catalogs I have been looking at constantly.
Once the soiled products are collected and transported to the Knowaste facility, the products are sent to a shredder that breaks them apart. They are washed, sanitized, deactivated and mechanically separated into plastic components or organic residue. A special chemical treatment is used to deactivate the polymers.Bring a few of those plants here to the US. Think not only about baby diapers but all those adult diapers as well. Walk through a food store and look at all the diapers and incontinence products. As our population is aging, this will be the issue facing us.
Plastic materials are removed, filtered, cleaned and compressed into small pellets. The plastic is then recycled into a variety of products including shoe insoles, vinyl siding, wallpaper, bicycle helmets and roofing tiles, to name a few.
Non-recyclable waste is converted into green energy, which will power the facility or will be sold to the national grid. The water used during the process is treated and reused again.
Besides diapers from nurseries, the new Birmingham plant will also accept adult hygiene waste from nursing homes and hospitals. The Birmingham facility is the first of five proposed plants in the UK.
Established in 1989, Knowaste recycles other absorbent hygiene products besides diapers – bed-liners, adult incontinence and feminine hygiene products. The company’s main recycling facility is located in Toronto, Canada.
Just think, you can use that Depends today and wear a bike helmet made from that same Depend. You'll be protected on both ends.
Cultural shift - easier said than dome, but very important and definitely needed.by Ted StrongCHARLOTTESVILLE, VA -- A passive populace obsessed with easy answers has led to an economy that is destroying America's land, author Wendell Berry told a packed-in crowd at the University of Virginia on Thursday evening.
"Simple solutions will always lead to complex problems, surprising simple minds," he said.
n a lecture in the full auditorium of the Mary and David Harrison Institute for American History, Literature and Culture/Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, Berry outlined the need for small-scale landholders engaging in forestry and farming, as opposed to the industrial-scale operations now in place.
The talk was so popular that seats in the auditorium ran out long before the 5:30 speech began. Eventually, a pair of university police officers shooed away the overflow crowd waiting outside.
Even some of those who made it inside were left without seats, and Berry invited them to sit on the stage near him.
Large-scale and corporate operations cause long-term damage to the environment and to rural cultures, he told the crowd.
Farm and timber economies that simply export raw materials for processing elsewhere kill towns because they also export jobs, he said.
"And then you will be exporting your young people to take those jobs," he said.
He added, "Our tendency has been to fasten upon one product and allow that one to determine the local land economy."
Berry, a poet, novelist and essayist, is part of a movement that is trying to spark high-level discussion by proposing a 50-year farm bill that calls for, among other things, a switch to majority perennial crops.
"It would take cattle, hogs and poultry out of the animal factory and put them back on farms, where they belong," he said.
He also advocated a more integrated approach to forestry and agriculture as part of what he called a vision for the future.
"Like you all, I hope, I am skeptical of visions," he said. "So I hasten to point out that it is a modest vision."
And he said it's not in high-level political discussion that most of his hope lies.
Instead, he cited "leadership from the bottom" as a trend that could take his ideas forward.
He praised moves such as farmers' markets and community-supported agriculture programs, wherein residents buy "shares" in local farms and reap regular installments of produce in return.
He said the movement's not about nostalgia, but learning lessons from the past.
"I think we have to go back to our old agrarian ideals," he said.
To do that, he said, will require a cultural shift.
Are you listening Santa?
Image via Conmoto
The TURN Fireplace, designed Schweiger & Viererbl, is a beautiful solution to effective room heating. It can be rotated 360 degrees, then locked in a position at set increments. Rather than having the warmth on one side of a room never reaching the far wall before, this design puts the fireplace back where it's supposed to be - smack dab in the middle of the room.
Up until now, most people have likely regarded bird-feeders as merely a pleasant addition to their gardens. But scientists have recently discovered that bird-feeders in the UK are actually having a serious long term impact on the birds that eat from them--so large an impact that researchers believe the feeders have brought about the first evolutionary step in a brand new species.So in theory, no damage. But it really makes you wonder, in 50 years a new species has evolved because of man. And evolved simply because of a birdfeeder.
According to the BBC, scientists have found that bird-feeders have had a major impact on European birds called blackcaps. The blackcaps' natural instinct has historically been to migrate to Spain to spend their winters, where they feed on fruits and berries. But the rise of bird-feeders in the UK have changed that. Scientists discovered that blackcaps "follow a different "evolutionary path" if they spend the winter eating food put out for them in UK gardens."
Those blackcaps that have opted instead to head north to the UK begun to form a brand new species of bird...The new blackcaps sport different plumage, beaks, and wings. They have rounder wings thanks to the shorter trip they now make, and longer narrower beaks--the better to eat from bird feeders, of course. These evolutionary changes took place in a mere 50 years...So what's the end impact of all of this--has man intruded on nature and disrupted yet another fragile ecosystem by sticking bird feeders all over the place for his own amusement? Or created a Frankenstein bird never meant for life in this world?
Thankfully, no--the scientists actually seem to think that the Brits have done the birds a favor: Dr. Schaeffer says, "[The birds have] found a better overwintering area that is closer to the breeding ground, where they can obtain food easily. And I also think its positive news for us, because it means not all the changes we produce are necessarily bad, and that some species have the potential to adapt quickly to the changes." Well, that's good to know--we humans are capable of doing a little good on this planet after all.
So, get rid of the feeders? Guess we don't have to worry about that. But what about other things we use and make? What damage are we doing with our other practices?
Of course, the dollar is much more important than some stupid whale! Looks like wolf-killing Sarah trained this guy pretty good.
Photo via iwona_kellie
The beluga whales of Cook Inlet have dwindled in population from around 1,300 in the early 1980s to around 300 today. They're genetically and behaviorally unique based on where they live, but their people-populated living space is part of what keeps them in harm's way. And the governor of Alaska Sean Parnell is doing nothing to assist them in gaining a proposed 3,000 mile area of protected space.
Parnell is arguing that the protected area will only harm commerce while doing nothing to boost beluga numbers.
