“For environmental, business, and political organizations alike, the term that has come to stand for the hope of the natural world is ‘sustainable,’ ” Curtis White writes in Tin House. “But you would be mistaken if you assumed that the point of sustainability was to change our ways.” In the essay that follows, an excerpt from his latest book The Barbaric Heart, White offers a vivid critique of the mainstream response to the environmental crisis.

At the core of our problems, White argues, is something he calls the Barbaric Heart—visible in the ways that our culture considers violence a virtue—and its fundamental discord with the professed values of sustainability. He writes:

The artful (if ruthless) use of violence is obviously something that we admire in those sectors of the culture that we most associate with success: athletics, the military, entertainment (especially that arena of the armchair warrior, Grand Theft Auto), the frightening world of financial markets (where, as the Economist put it, there are “barbarians at the vaults”), and the rapacious world we blandly call real estate development. . . .

The idea that we can “move mountains” is an expression of admiration. When it is done with mammoth machines provided by the Caterpillar Company of Peoria, Illinois, it is also a form of violence (as the sheered mountain tops of West Virginia confirm).

To any complaints about the disheartening destruction and injustice that comes with such power, the Barbaric Heart need only reply: the strong have always dominated the weak and then instructed them. That is how great civilizations have always been made, from the ancient Egyptians to the British in India to Karl Rove and George Bush.

It’s a whirling, complicated critique—but wholly worth reading. Tin House also followed up with White in a delightful e-mail interview.

Source: Tin House

A German environmental organization called Oro Verde produced this knockoff on naturalist illustrations. The message here, if you didn’t catch it when it hit you over the head, is stated explicitly

The destruction of the rainforest comes in many shapes. And there are all kinds of animal and plant species which suffer as a result. Every hour three different types of animal and plant life are made extinct. Help us to save the rainforest: www.oroverde.de

The blog No Caption Needed has posted a large image of the poster, called Diversity of Species in the Rainforest.

(Thanks Eyeteeth, No Caption Needed.)

Fireworks: Who could hate them? Plenty of people, it turns out:

Chris Conway hates fireworks for their “toxic consequences to our personal and environmental health.”

Troy Patterson at Slate hates fireworks for their “pomposity, aggression, triumphalism, and hubris.”

The U.K. campaign Ban the Bang hates fireworks because “all kinds of wild and domestic animals, but also children, the elderly and those of a nervous disposition can be seriously affected by modern, excessive fireworks.”

And finally, the blogger TexasLiberal hates fireworks because they’re dangerous, there’s a drought in his area (Houston), and you ought to be reading a book instead.

Or making fireworks out of yarn.

Happy Fourth of July. Kaboom!

Sources: Toxic Fireworks, Slate, Ban the Bang, TexasLiberal, Craft

Image courtesy of Chris Conway.

High upon a forested mountain that was a stronghold of FMLN guerrillas during El Salvador’s epic civil war, the president of a committee of local residents and former guerrillas shows Inter Press Service reporter Raúl Gutiérrez down into one of the notorious tunnels used for strategic advantage during the fighting.

“The first thing tourists ask about is where are the ‘tatús’,” says the guide, referring to the vast network of tunnels and underground shelters.

Gutiérrez describes these damp tunnels: They are “slightly over one metre wide, two metres high and several metres long. The tunnels are connected to small chambers and to breathing holes, which during the war were covered by vegetation.”

The reporter is not on some special media tour of the war zone. Locals hope to draw ecotourists to their particularily lush part of the world—then teach them something about their war.

“Half a kilometre away,” Gutiérrez writes, is “‘el hospitalito’ (the little hospital), another underground site where up to 20 wounded could be held temporarily.

“The idea is to offer the tourist something simple but authentic, to show what happened in the war, while we bring in funds to maintain the forest, through a sustainable management program that benefits the people of Chalatenango,” says Francisco Mejía, the treasurer of the Representative Committee of Beneficiaries of La Montañona.

Gutiérrez explains that “the group obtained ownership of the 300 hectares after the January 1992 peace agreement put an end to the war that left 75,000 dead, at least 6,000 forcibly disappeared and some 40,000 disabled.

Source: Inter Press Service

Mountaintop removal coal mining isn’t just destroying Appalachia’s landscape. It’s also also fracturing the region’s culture, including its traditional music. The "faith, politics, culture" magazine Sojourners reports on the Cowan Creek Mountain Music School in eastern Kentucky, which trains youngsters to play—and be proud of—the old-time music that has been losing its foothold in the hollers.

“East Kentucky is a very poor area, and it gets the short end of the stick in a lot of ways,” school founder Beverly May tells Sojourners. “There are terrible problems of environmental devastation and economic devastation from the strip-mining of coal. The kids see all this, and they know where they stand in the American scene. They’re hillbillies. The Cowan Creek School counters that. It says you have a heritage that is honored all over the world and is one of the main sources of all American popular music. Saving this music is a part of saving this regional community.”

Banjo player Randy Wilson, who teaches at the school, tells Sojourners that coal mining is still a touchy subject in the area: “We got some flak last summer because so many of our music school teachers publicly voiced opposition to strip-mining and mountaintop removal. Some people said we needed to be aware that many of the local people at our events also work for a coal company. It is a shame that we have to pit jobs against honoring our heritage, but that is how it is here in Appalachia.”

This internal conflict is also the thread running through the forthcoming book Something’s Rising: Appalachians Fighting Mountaintop Removal, which will be published in April by the University Press of Kentucky. The authors, Silas House and Jason Howard, both grew up in families with coal-mining backgrounds, and in the introduction they describe the pressure exerted on those who dare to speak out: “Many Appalachians find it difficult to oppose this practice because of the coal industry’s long history of convincing people that to protest any form of mining is to oppose an industry that has long been a major supplier of jobs within the region.”

The book goes on to both puncture that argument—mountaintop removal actually doesn’t provide many local jobs—and give voice to 12 courageous local witnesses to the devastation, including many who also draw connections between coal and culture. One is 86-year-old songwriter Jean Ritchie, sometimes called the “mother of folk,” whose music was recorded by famed musicologist Alan Lomax. In a song that still rings true, she sings of “black waters run down through the land” and says, “The memories, they just push right down on me sometimes.”

Look for more coverage of the book at Utne.com closer to April.

Image courtesy of Cowan Creek Mountain Music School.

Americans have been warned not to expect too much from Obama’s election too soon, but that doesn’t mean people can’t speculate. The Union of Concerned Scientists believes we’ll see an aggressive approach to climate change policy once Obama takes over, and 3QuarksDaily provides a nice summary of what the federal and state elections mean for science.

Obama and the next Congress are positioned to enact a comprehensive “Green Deal,” according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, that could modernize our energy infrastructure while stimulating the economy. Already, Obama plans to send delegates to December’s UN climate meeting in Poland, and Cosmos wonders whether Obama can break the deadlock gripping those talks.

One question still remains: Will these actions be enough to forestall the effects of the dangerous environmental regulations (or deregulations) that the New York Times blog speculates the Bush administration is pushing through during its last days in office?

Image by Ralph Alswang, licensed by Creative Commons.

A wiry thirtysomething guy bikes out of the Whole Foods parking lot, a pannier of organic produce strapped to his rack. He’s on his way home to make dinner after a couple of hours volunteering at the local Obama campaign headquarters. He inches down the driveway, waiting for an opportunity to turn right into the busy rush-hour traffic.

He sees an opening and jumps into the lane, pedaling quickly. But he’s not moving fast enough for a hulking SUV whose impatient driver doesn’t want to change lanes. She tailgates him for several yards, laying on the horn, then swerves into the other lane and tears past him, yelling something about getting on the sidewalk. The cyclist gives her a one-fingered salute, then notices a McCain-Palin sticker on her bumper.

Typical.

We are all guilty of certain prejudices. In the escalating (and increasingly dangerous) tensions between car commuters and bicycle riders, battle lines are drawn. As an avid cyclist leaning fairly hard to port, I had very little reason to interrogate the stereotypes embodied in the scenario above. But eventually a few needling questions penetrated my insulated sphere of thought: What if there are conservatives who ride bikes? What the hell do they look like? And where can I find them?

On the Internet, of course.

“I am a gun-owning, low-taxes, small-government, strong military, anti-baby murder, pro-big/small business, anti-social program, conservative Democrat,” wrote Maddyfish, a poster on Bike Forums, an Internet discussion forum where everyone from the casual hobbyist to the obsessive gearhead can discuss all things bike-related, from frame sizes to the best routes downtown. There are dozens such forums for bicyclists and I recently crashed three of them—Bike Forums, MPLS BikeLove, and Road Bike Review—with a simple question: Are there any conservative cyclists out there? Maddyfish (an online pseudonym) was one of the first to reply: “I find cycling to be a very conservative activity. It saves me money and time.”

And just like that, biking conservatives came out of the cyber-woodwork, offering their own mixtures of bike love and political philosophy. “I do not care about gas prices or the environment. I care about fun and getting where I am quickly,” wrote Old Scratch. “I’m a Libertarian,” wrote Charly17201. “I am extremely conservative, but definitely NOT a GOPer. … I ride my bike because it provides me the opportunity to save even more money for my pleasures now and my retirement in the future (and my retirement fund is NOT the responsibility of the government).”

The more liberal bikers in the forums repeated some variation of this formulation: “Drive to the ride = conservative; bike to the ride = liberal.” In other words, conservatives load bikes onto SUVs and drive them to a riding trail, while liberals incorporate their bikes into every aspect of their personal transportation, whether utilitarian or recreational. For moneyed conservatives with a large portion of their income budgeted for recreation, high-end bikes and gear have taken their place along golf as a rich man’s leisure activity.

But there are conservatives who integrate bikes into their lifestyle just as thoroughly as their liberal counterparts. Mitch Berg is a conservative talk-radio host whose blog, A Shot in the Dark, is divided between political content and chronicles if his experiences commuting by bicycle. “I grew up in rural North Dakota, and biking was one of my escapes when I was in high school and college,” he told me. “It’s my favorite way to try to stay in shape. And if gas fell to 25 cents a gallon, I’d still bike every day.”

Berg doesn’t believe there’s anything inherently political about riding a bike. “But people on both sides of the political aisle do ascribe political significance to biking. The lifestyle-statement bikers, of course, see the act as a political and social statement. And there’s a certain strain of conservatism that sees conspicuous consumption—driving an SUV and chortling at paying more for gas—as a way to poke a finger in the eyes of the environmental left.”

The impression that bikers are liberal is reinforced, Berg feels, by the most vocal and political members of bike culture. These are the folks who corner the media's spotlight (and draw drivers' resentment) with high-profile events like Critical Mass, a group ride that floods downtown streets in many cities at the end of each month as riders zealously reassert their rights to the paths normally traveled by cars. Similarly, when the price of gas climbed to $4 over the summer, the media couldn’t run enough stories about the unprecedented popularity of bike commuting. Activist bikers leveraged the newfound media attention to promote certain messages: that bicycling is an inherently political activity; that cyclists care about traditionally progressive causes like environmental protection; that more tax money should be allocated for bike paths and a transportation infrastructure that takes vehicles other than cars into account.

“The faction of bikers that is fundamentally political has done a good job of tying [bikes and politics] together,” Berg says. “The Green Party has wrapped itself around the bicycle.” But for many, biking is political because everything is political: “You need a public infrastructure to [bike],” wrote Cyclezealot, on Bike Forums. “So, cycling will always be affected by politics, like it or not.”

When politics does bleed into cycling, does it create tensions? I asked Berg if he ever feels outnumbered on group rides dominated by liberals, and if those differences ever come to the fore. “Of course,” he replied, “On several levels. I’m a conservative. I don’t believe in man-made global warming. I’m biking for reasons that are partly personal and partly capitalistic; I don’t want to pay $4 for gas.” But he has made liberal friends based on a common love of cycling. So has William Bain, a retired Naval officer living in the Pacific Northwest whose bike commute is a 43-mile round trip. “Cycling is the common bond I have with my liberal friends,” said Bain. “We can get in a heated passionate argument about politics and then go out and try to ride each other into the ground. Good clean fun.”

Berg and Bain have allies in the government who see bicycle advocacy as a nonpartisan issue. Take Republican Greg Brophy, a Colorado state senator and an avid cyclist who competes in road bike marathons and uses his mountain bike to haul farm equipment. Brophy worked with Bicycle Colorado to pass Safe Routes to School and is supporting a “Green Lanes” bill to give bicyclists safer routes through metro areas.

Conservative cyclists don’t tend to get help from all their political allies, however. Some right-wing personalities know that biking is a hot-button issue and make pointed attacks on cyclists while reinforcing the liberal-cyclist stereotype. The Minneapolis Star-Tribune’s hard-right columnist Katherine Kersten earned the ire of the Twin Cities bike community in 2007 when she characterized Critical Mass as a mob of “serial lawbreakers” bent on ruining the lives of honorable citizen motorists. “Are you rushing to catch the last few innings of your son's baseball game? Trying to get to the show you promised your wife for her birthday? Critical Mass doesn't give a rip.”

Last fall, Twin Cities talk-radio host Jason Lewis made on-air remarks decrying the “bicycling crowd” as “just another liberal advocacy group.” He recycled a common anti-bike canard—that bicyclists have no rights to the roads because they don’t pay taxes to service those roads—before issuing a call to arms: “The people with the 2,000-pound vehicle need to start fighting back.” Lewis’ comments seem especially reckless in light of recent events: In September alone, four Twin Cities cyclists were killed in collisions with motor vehicles. One conservative blogger celebrates bike fatalities and gleefully anticipates more. “Keep it up,” he tells cyclists, “and the law of averages says we’ll have a few less Obama voters in November.”

While such critics tap into right-wing rage at all things liberal, conservative bikers appeal to a saner tenet of their political tradition: the free market's invisible hand. “Let the market roam free,” Berg exclaimed. “The higher gas goes, the more people will try biking.” And where there’s money to be made, bikes and bike-share programs will emerge. When the Republican National Convention came to the Twin Cities in September, for example, a bike-share program was there to greet it. Humana and Bikes Belong made 1,000 bikes available for rental during the convention, with 70 bikes staying behind as part of a permanent rental program.

Conservatives on bikes represent the breakdown of party-line stereotypes. They are heartening examples of crucial divergences from the lazy red/blue dichotomy the pundits are relentlessly hammering in these last frenzied days of campaign season. They are a microcosm in which a stereotype falls away to reveal an actual individual. What's more, they represent not just the abandonment of tired clichés, but more bikes on the road—something all of us on two wheels, regardless of our political idiosyncrasies, can agree is a good thing.

Image by  Kyknoord , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

Snapping photos amid a backdrop of coal mines and burning garbage dumps might be an unlikely vacation getaway, but for some environmental groups it's a new kind of eco-tourism. In a recent issue of Plenty magazine, Ben Whitford compiled a mini-guide to toxic eco-tours. Whitford spotlights five “brochures” for places offering a glimpse at the realities of pollution and gives a brief rundown of each—including who’s responsible, what to see, and Kodak moments. Those who are crunched for funds can skip the authentic rotten-egg smells and the chance to “sing hymns just 200 feet from an exploding mountain,” and stay home. Whitford also includes Superfund365, a virtual repository of a year's worth of toxic sites from across the country.

Image by steve r watson, licensed under Creative Commons.

Very few of us today ever experience true darkness. Artificial lighting smudges out the stars, confuses creatures of the night, wastes energy, and has damaging effects on human health. In “Let There Be Night: Testimony on Behalf of the Dark,” (University of Nevada Press, 2008) , editor Paul Bogard compiled thoughtful and evocative essays from 29 writers, poets, scientists, and scholars. Bogard encourages readers to take “this collection to their own favorite nighttime roost, somewhere with amber light to shade the darkness, somewhere with stars close by, somewhere with the scents and sounds of darkness.”

If we heed Bogard's advice, there's a lot we might glean from darkness. In one essay, environmental activist and writer Janisse Ray draws from personal experience to expound on spirituality: “What has confused us is the double entendre. Our desire for meaning keeps us reaching for greater clarity and luminosity. But we confound lucidity with kilowatts. We confuse artificial light with enlightenment. Therein lies a greater fear: that we humans might be so afraid of darkness that we, for a time, would destroy it, thus banishing the illumination that darkness brings.”

One of the most influential actors in the mainstream environmental movement has taken a radical turn in his views on the subject. James Gustave “Gus” Speth—whose contributions to environmental causes include cofounding the Natural Resources Defense Council, serving as a policy advisor to the Carter administration, and founding the environmental think tank World Resources Institute—is now pushing for a take-to-the-streets approach to the environmental crisis.

A dean at Yale University is not the most likely of candidates to call for civic upheaval, but Speth’s passion for the environment and his unyielding desire to save our planet from destruction leads him to a conclusion that is slowly becoming more prevalent in the mainstream movement. In an interview with Jeff Goodell in the Sept.-Oct. Orion (not yet available online), Speth shared his vision for a citizen-led movement that reimagines our current economy and state of mind in favor of environmental sustainability. This vision is spelled out in his new book, The Bridge at the Edge of the World (Yale University Press, 2008).

“The fundamental thing that’s happened is that our efforts to clean up the environment are being overwhelmed by the sheer increase in the size of the economy,” Speth tells Goodell. “And there’s no reason to think that won’t continue. So we have to ask, what is it about our society that puts such an extraordinary premium on growth? Is it justified? Why is that growth so destructive? And what do we do about it?

“Capitalism is a growth machine. What it really cares about is earning a profit and reinvesting a large share of that and growing continually … . And so all of these things combine to produce a type of capitalism that really doesn’t care about the environment, and doesn’t really care about people much either. What it really cares about is profits and growth, and the rest is more or less incidental. And until we change that system, my conclusion is that it will continue to be fundamentally destructive.”

Speth proposes we look for a “nonsocialist alternative” to capitalism. This revised capitalist system would require a series of transformations:

“The first would be a transformation in the market. There would be a real revolution in pricing. Things that are environmentally destructive would be—if they were really destructive—almost out of reach, prohibitively expensive.

“A second would be a transformation to a postgrowth society where what you really want is to grow very specific things that are desperately needed in a very targeted way—you know, care for the mentally ill, health-care accessibility, high-tech green-collar industries.

“A third would be a move to a wider variety of ownership patterns in the private sector. More co-ops, more employee ownership plans, and less rigid lines between the profit and the not-for-profit sectors.”

To get there, though, requires more than just policy orchestrated by the people on the top. Beyond his call for a serious bottom-up grassroots effort that “shakes up people’s consciousness and forces us to rethink what’s really important,” Speth also believes that a fundamental shift both in environmental groups’ focus and in our society’s values are crucial to saving the planet.

“I think that the environmental community needs to see political reform as central to its agenda, and it doesn’t now…the other thing that needs to happen is that there needs to be some fundamental challenge to our dominant values. It’s been addressed by religious organizations and psychologists and philosophers and countless others for a long time. But until we reconnect in a more profound way with ourselves and our communities and the natural world, it seems unlikely that we will deal successfully with our problems.”

Image by scottfeldstein, licensed under Creative Commons.

Can better stories help repair the broken bonds between people and nature? Granta seems to think so and its latest issue, “The New Nature Writing,” is a collection aimed squarely at that goal.

“The new nature writing,” writer Lydia Peelle told Granta editor Jason Cowley, “rather than being pastoral or descriptive or simply a natural history essay, has got to be couched in stories—whether fiction of non-fiction—where we as humans are present. Not only as observers, but as intrinsic elements.”

Peelle continues, “In my thinking, it is the tradition of the false notion of separation that has caused us so many problems and led to so much environmental degradation. I believe that it is our great challenge in the twenty-first century to remake the connection. I think our lives depend on it.”

Select essays from the issue are available online as well as web-only features including photo essays and interviews with some of the issue’s authors.

Image by Sea Frost , licensed under Creative Commons.

Why are some leaders still dragging their feet on climate change? There’s a host of reasons both political and scientific, but one provocative explanation I’ve never heard before was recently floated by Gar Lipow at Gristmill: “Somebody has to be Hitler.”

What Lipow means is that some thinkers—especially politically moderate and conservative ones—never address the threat of climate change because they’re too busy fomenting war against whichever node on the axis of evil is posing the greatest threat. “The year is eternally 1938, and the place eternally Munich. Peace is for dirty hippies. Problems like climate change are always going to have to wait for the current emergency to end, and for one last enemy to be defeated.”

Uttering the H-word is ordinarily the surest way to derail an otherwise legitimate debate—but it’s hard not to see support for Lipow’s theory in our current leadership. The Bush administration’s strategy of fear-based governance has been obsessed with hunting down real or imagined terrorists while conveniently ignoring—or flat-out denying the existence of—climate change and other environmental crises. And as long as this mindset grips those in power, as it has for most of the decade, real change in environmental policy cannot occur.

Protesting in the nude certainly gets people’s attention, but do the spectators recognize the protestors’ message? And furthermore, do they care? Sustainablog.org writer Adam Williams considers these questions after observing the World Naked Bike Ride in St. Louis earlier this summer. The event, which takes place in 20 countries, protests society’s crippling oil dependency and “indecent exposure” to air pollution. The problem is that it might be difficult for conservative legislators and voters to take the message seriously. “If conservatives are unlikely to respect and appreciate the collective perspective of clothes-free cyclists, then is anything gained by protesting oil dependency in the buff?”

Some strains of environmentalism seem a little too much like fads, rife with inconsistency and hypocrisy. In “Greener Than Thou,” from the July issue of Boston magazine, Joe Keohane sets his crosshairs on his city’s sillier green initiatives and the smug satisfaction accompanying them. It’s a piece worth reading not just for his commenary on Boston’s environmental concerns, but for the wry manner in which he roasts his self-righteous subjects.

The tone is playful at first: Keohane gets off some irreverent shots at the culture surrounding an all-raw vegan restaurant—“all around me people talked earnestly about what they were eating, save for a troika of lesbians who talked about lesbianism for a while”—and pokes fun at the mayor’s repurposing of the city’s nickname, from Beantown to Greentown.

But Keohane also makes a good point about the guilt trips and competition that can infect green initiatives, with people striving to outdo each other’s ostentatious displays of eco-consciousness, then chastising those who fall short. “This is a city widely known (and reviled) for possessing an unapologetically liberal worldview generously varnished with moral vanity, so it stands to reason that an  issue like this—which hits on politics, the environment, and social justice, and allows us to brag—would be like catnip here.”

Keohane also draws a clever analogy between the Puritans and this wave of environmental zealots hectoring their fellow citizens into Total Green Compliance. Faced with such a shrill brand of environmentalism, it’s tempting to throw one’s hands up in defeat and toss that recyclable bottle into the trash. Which brings us to Keohane’s final words of advice: “Do what’s right, go green to the fullest, sure, but at least try to avoid doing it in a way that makes people hate you and, out of sheer spite, do the opposite of what you do.”

Image by Paul Keleher, licensed by Creative Commons.

The idea of flushing human waste down the toilet, mixing it with water from the laundry, the shower, and the sink, and then trying to treat the whole effluent sludge using expensive, energy-intensive industrial plants is “totally insane” according to Arno Rosemarin, research and communications manager at the Stockholm Environment Institute, quoted in the Boston Globe. There are plenty of other options that people and governments can pursue for more sane and sustainable sanitation.

A global movement is afoot to harness the “neglected treasure” of human waste, Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes for the Boston Globe. Low-flush toilets, waterless urinals, and composting toilets are just the starting points. Tuhus-Dubrow also writes about “vacuum toilets”—like the ones found on airplanes—bathrooms designed to give nutrients to plants, and toilets designed to separate urine, feces, and greywater. A number of barriers, including psychological ones, are preventing this kind of technology from being implemented, but any one would be preferable to the “flush and forget” system currently in place.

A free movie site popped up last week featuring a solid selection of environmental films. SnagFilms lets viewers browse documentaries by category or title, stream them instantly, and add the films to their own sites. Environmental offerings include National Geographic and PBS specials, along with shorts and smaller films like The Future of Food, an exploration of genetically modified foods, and Okie Noodling, a feature-length film about bare-armed catfish-catching. Other doc categories include international, health, and history.

SnagFilms is still in beta, so it has its flaws. It’s difficult to rewind and fast forward, there’s no time tracking, and one film I watched had advertisements haphazardly strewn throughout, without even the strategic placement of TV commercials. Some of SnagFilms’ selections are available on other video-sharing sites, so the company will either have to expand its exclusive offerings or rejigger its ads to placate viewers used to commercial-free content. 

The Prix Pictet is a heck of a photography prize. In its first year, the award promises a purse of 100,000 Swiss francs to the winner, and for all shortlisted photographers, an exhibition at the Palais de Toyko in Paris. The prize is for work that communicates urgent messages about sustainability, what the Prix Pictet website calls “perhaps the greatest single issue of the twenty-first century.” Indeed.

Over here at the Palais de Utne in Minneapolis, we weren’t surprised at all to see two of our favorite environmentally conscious photographers make the cut. Chris Jordan and David Maisel were shortlisted for the prize last Friday, with 16 other photographers, selected from a field of more than 200 nominated artists hailing from 43 countries.

Jordan is a Seattle-based photographer and artist whose series, “Running the Numbers: An American Self-Portrait,” we featured in our Sept.-Oct. 2007 issue. In that series, Jordan makes numbing statistics visible, shrinking an emblematic image and reproducing it thousands, even hundreds of thousands of times. (Stretched across a 60 by 80 inch panel, for example,1.14 million tiny folded paper bags represent the number used in the United States every hour.) The work that earned him a spot on the Prix Pictet shortlist is his book In Katrina’s Wake: Potraits of Loss from an Unnatural Disaster (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006). The inaugural Prix Pictet theme is water.

Maisel landed his shortlist position with pieces from “The Lake Project” and “Terminal Mirage,” part of his “Black Maps” series—surreal aerial photography of environmentally impacted landscapes. Utne’s readers will recognize one of his nominated photographs; Terminal Mirage 19 ran on the back page of our May-June 2006 issue. Later that same year, we did a story about Maisel’s evocative “Library of Dust” project, photographs of urns housing the unclaimed cremains of patients of the Oregon State Insane Asylum. The decaying copper canisters bloomed with otherworldly color.

The winner of the Prix Pictet, sponsored by Swiss bank Pictet & Cie in association with the Financial Times, will be announced on October 30, 2008.

Developing nations will soon benefit from personal stoves that combine energy efficiency and sustainable business models. Triple Pundit highlights efforts by EnviroFit and the Shell Foundation to distribute clean-burning biomass stoves in India.

EnviroFit, a Colorado-based nonprofit manufacturer, first became known for retrofitting two-stroke engines in Southeast Asia. Its stoves are designed to harness the power of “wood, crop waste, or animal dung” and produce nontoxic exhaust. This is valuable to India and other developing countries, where toxic indoor air pollution claims millions of lives every year. EnviroFit and Shell hope to subsidize the $12 to $50 cost of the stoves for families in need and eventually expand the program to Latin America and Africa.

Biomass stoves are part of an alternative-cooking trend that harnesses old technologies in new ways. Utne blogger Erik Helin pointed me to a spread in BackHome (article not available online) featuring the latest solar cooking technology, ranging from expensive high-tech cookers to do-it-yourself contraptions made from windshield shades and other materials. We’ve come a long way from the lukewarm hot dogs yielded up by the tin-foil-and-shoebox cookers my sixth-grade science class constructed.

Backyard and community gardening is growing like a compost-fed bean shoot, thanks to a spreading green consciousness, a desire to eat local and organic, and high and rising food prices.

In Seattle, more than 1,600 people are on a waiting list for gardening land at one of the city’s “P-Patch” plots, Crosscut reports. And some city officials are pushing for an inventory of public land that could be used to grow food, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, echoing Portland’s “Diggable City” initiative.

In the Bay Area, a new firm called MyFarm helps harried urban dwellers who want a garden in their yard but don’t always have the time or skills to maintain it, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. MyFarm plants, maintains, and harvests veggies for the landowner and sometimes, with larger gardens, for other subscribers in what is basically a backyard CSA (community supported agriculture) operation. Similar outfits already operate in other cities.

Across the pond, the BBC profiles a couple of backyard gardeners in the Midlands region who’ve been driven to exercise their green thumbs in part by a desire to save money.

Altogether, these trends point to a gardening renaissance that recalls the Victory Gardens of World War II—a project that San Francisco is in fact emulating with its Victory Gardens 2008+ project.

Despite overwhelming evidence that human-induced climate change is real, many doubters in Congress are still dragging their feet, blocking climate-change legislation like the recently defeated Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act.

In the provocatively titled Salon piece “Anti-Science Conservatives Must Be Stopped,” Joseph Romm aims squarely at legislators and pundits who bypass hard scientific evidence to make claims against global warming and block climate-change legislation—not because they’re conducting scientifically rigorous studies that might refute that evidence; not because they want to have an intellectually honest debate about that evidence; but simply because it’s fiscally advantageous for them to block any legislation that might weaken the corporations from whom they receive donations.

The consequences of allowing conservatives to keep stalling on climate-change legislation are terrifying, as Romm provides the figures to show how a reduction in carbon emissions isn’t going to happen naturally by letting free trade to push the gas prices higher, or even by the relatively tepid cap-and-trade initiative in the Lieberman-Warner bill. Instead of trying to implement these sorts of incremental changes, Romm urges progressives to write “aggressive energy-independence” bills with stringent limitations on carbon emissions and greater incentives for clean-energy technologies.

If conservatives manage to continue blocking a major climate-change policy reversal into the next decade, then 2025-2050 will become a period of what Romm ominously calls “planetary purgatory,” when the doomsday scenarios of rising sea levels and widespread desertification will attain irreversible momentum. By then, emissions would have to be cut by at least 75 percent in 25 years for change to happen, and that “would require a massive, sustained government intervention … on a scale that far surpasses what this country did during World War II.”

The irony here, of course, is that conservatives deplore government intervention, and yet by stubbornly resisting what they see as unnecessary federal meddling in the form of today’s climate change legislation, they’re all but ensuring that future generations will live in an era of unprecedented government involvement in every aspect of their lives, experiencing firsthand the very scenarios of rationing and regulation their forebears used as bogeymen to prevent real change back in the early 21st century. 

The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to step into the controversy over the Navy’s use of sonar in marine habitat off the coast of Southern California. Next term, the high court will hear the Navy’s appeal of a Ninth Circuit order to suspend or minimize the military exercises. 

Sonar has been blamed for whale strandings and severe injuries, though the Navy claims that the technology’s impacts are minimal and temporary. The science, however, is not what’s at the root of the case. Rather, as Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times explains, the judges will decide whether the executive branch has the right to overrule federal laws and statutes in “emergency circumstances”—the label the government used in January to claim that such exercises were necessary in a time of war. (That’s one more principle to be swept under the banner of the War on Terror.)

Military sonar is the most high-profile noise pollution in the ocean, but it’s not the only aural scourge for marine mammals. As Judith Lewis reports in our current issue, “researchers also worry about constant background noise in the sea: sound that causes little in the way of instant injury, and whose effects are harder to prove, but may have a long-term, chronic impact on marine mammals.” Think of the constant drone of cargo ships crisscrossing the globe, the seismic air guns blasting through waters as petroleum outfits hunt for oil, and the acoustic deterrents that fishing operations use to warn other animals off their nets. This noise might be preventing whales from hearing each other, finding mates, or navigating properly (which might send them crashing into ships). You should take a listen for yourself. We’ve compiled a few examples of the different sounds—natural and unnatural—ricocheting through the world’s waters in this online exclusive.

Israel has finally chosen a national bird, 60 years after its founding. (Americans should respect the delay; if we had too hastily selected our own national emblem, we might now have turkeys tattooed on every patriotic bicep.) Israel’s selection process was a feathered frenzy, the New Republic reports, unavoidable in a country that attracts 540 avian species (that’s 500 million specimens) during semi-annual migrations. “We are at the junction of three continents,” says Israeli ornithologist Yossi Leshem. “From a political point of view, this is disastrous, but for birds it is magnificent.” 

The bird that ascended to state symbolism is the hoopoe, which served as the messenger between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, according to the New York Times. (The hoopoe is not kosher, Reuters reports, so the national bird won’t face the disgrace of becoming any Jewish citizen’s dinner.) “It’s a good choice, all in all, a gorgeous bird with a crown-like crest,” writes the New Republic. “Any country would be proud to have it on its telephone cards.”

Summer hasn’t even officially begun, but we’ve already seen an abundance of freakish weather ranging from the inconvenient (blackouts caused by spring heat waves) to the disastrous (tornados, flash floods, and wildfires). Think Progress’ Wonk Room (thanks to Grist for the link) has assembled a list of the damage done by extreme weather just within the last month. The link between climate change and shifting weather patterns is getting harder to refute, and the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 statement (PDF)—asserting that global warming induced by human activity will most likely cause an “increase in the frequency of hot extremes, heat waves and heavy precipitation”—resonates even more strongly amid this spring’s meteorological abnormalities.

Image by  pingnews.com , licensed by  Creative Commons . 

You might think your home energy consumption is your own dirty little secret, but Lolly Merrell reports in the Bear Deluxe (#27; article not available online) that it is in fact probably public knowledge. “In most states, public service commissions require energy companies to provide the records of anyone’s power consumption upon request,” she writes. While making such requests is sometimes slow and cumbersome, she reports that more energy company websites “have made power snooping easy and inviting.”

Such snooping was famously used by a conservative group to shame Al Gore by publicizing the lavish energy use of his Nashville mansion. But Merrell points out that that the numbers can be used for constructive ends as well. She notes that a friend has gathered energy stats for her neighborhood and “plans to go door to door with a challenge: reduce each household’s consumption with the goal of lowering the entire neighborhood’s utility usage by 10 percent.” Now, if you’ll excuse me, my doorbell is ringing.

It’s possible to buy a down-filled comforter or parka without suffering guilt pangs about over-plucked birds. Down harvested from the nests of the common eider, reports Canadian Geographic, helps protect the formerly over-hunted ducks. The Canadian nonprofit Société Duvetnor Ltée, headed by retired biologist Jean Bedard, funds itself by selling eiderdown hand collected from 12,000 nests on the Île aux Lièvres, one of the islands it owns in Quebec’s St. Lawrence Estuary. “The down can be collected without damaging the ducks or their eggs and nests,” according to Hinterlands Who’s Who, a wildlife information site sponsored by the Canadian Wildlife Service and the Canadian Wildlife Federation. Société Duvetnor Ltée and another nonprofit, Société protectrice des eiders de l'estuaire, reinvest their net annual revenues of $50,000-$100,000 into protecting nesting grounds, reports the Quebec Management Plan for the Common Eider. 

In addition to generating revenue for preservation, Canadian eiderdown harvesters aid the scientific study of the eider. “Eiderdown harvesting activity in the estuary has made it possible to accumulate a series of unique scientific data that would otherwise have been obtained only at considerable expense,” write the authors of the Quebec Management Plan. “Eiderdown collectors should therefore be considered as partners in the protection and management of the eider rather than as commercial operators.” (The authors of the Management Plan include Société Duvetnor members.)

For duck lovers who can’t afford (or who ethically oppose) a $9,000 comforter, Société Duvetnor allows ecotourism on two of its islands. And don’t worry about disturbing the natives. To coexist with the myriad birds populating the islands, Société Duvetnor prohibits visitors from hiking in certain areas until the birds finish nesting in early July.

Medicinal herbs stave off a range of ills, including the common cold, joint stiffness, and herpes outbreaks. Soon, they might be able to stave off tiger poaching. The Wildlife Conservation Society Russia Program hopes to reduce Siberian tiger poaching by collecting and selling certified organic herbs, reports In Good Tilth (article not available online), the newspaper of the sustainable agriculture nonprofit Oregon Tilth. Russian villagers will collect Siberian ginseng root, wild rosehips, and Schisandra chinensis berries on organic certified land managed by local hunting clubs. The Wildlife Conservation Society hopes the income generated from selling organic medicinal herbs will reduce the temptation for locals to hunt or allow the hunting of the eight to 10 tigers who roam the area. Only 400 to 500 wild Siberian tigers remain worldwide.

Our sister publication Mother Earth News has an online rundown of a fun little springtime DIY project: making kites from recycled materials.

You can choose from designs that use paper bags or newspaper. Or you can go with non-recycled (but still inexpensive) fare such as paper, foam balls, and feathers. For the expert kite-flyer and -maker, there’s some guidance on DIY sport and stunt kites, too.

Image by ronnie44052, licensed under Creative Commons.

Many green-minded people give lip service to the idea of local produce, but how many of us eat local all winter long? An organic gardener in Vermont is pioneering a new type of greenhouse that might make winter growing more feasible for aspiring locavores by using heated soil.

In its spring issue, Vermont’s Local Banquet magazine pays a visit to Carol Stedman’s greenhouse, where in January “the air temperature inside was only slightly higher than outside … but a thermometer stuck deep in the dirt read a balmy 60 degrees.” Stedman uses tubes to circulate warm water through the soil, a system she calls “radiant dirt heating.” Her can-do attitude and experimental spirit might just get you started on planning and designing your own “cool greenhouse” for next winter.

Treehugger reports that London is taking material efficiency into consideration in designing its stadium for the 2012 Olympic Games. The facility will be built from with as many recyclable materials as possible, including a hemp roof. The stadium will also be demountable, meaning it can be disassembled, moved, and rebuilt in a new city. It will be largely bolted together, rather than welded, and break down into pieces that can fit on cargo ships. This new philosophy of “low impact” games and reusable stadia might afford poorer countries the opportunity to host future Games. Chicago, a possible 2016 host, is also considering more reusable and versatile construction materials.

Outdoor retailer Cabela’s inspires an almost religious following among hunters and anglers who make pilgrimages to its humongous shrinelike stores filled with taxidermied trophy game. But New West magazine reports that Cabela’s lost some of its flock in Montana by acting like an 800-pound gorilla.

In New West’s premiere issue, writer Bill Schneider cites two reasons for a revolt among some Cabela’s customers. For one, Cabela’s got involved in a real estate business, Cabela’s Trophy Properties, that could reduce access to land used by hunters and anglers. For another, the store threw its weight around with “aggressive subsidy requests” from local governments in places where it wanted to build new locations. (The magazine’s affiliated website, NewWest.net, has covered the controversy online.)

The real estate blunder seems to have been the biggest misfire. After word got out, “The Montana Wildlife Federation, the state’s largest sporting group, told its 7,000 members to return or burn Cabela’s catalogs,” writes Schneider. “And they did.” Cabela’s backed off and started making concessions to its critics, but not before taking a shot to the flank.

I’ve long wondered how any truly conservation-minded hunter or angler could give money to Cabela’s. Not only does the store seem to glorify the worst elements of the hook-and-bullet crowd by focusing on spectacle and trophies over subsistence and conservation, it has strong ties to the environmentally destructive Bush administration. (The environment, it should be noted, is where game fish and animals live.) As Slate has reported, the Bush-Cheney campaign made a string of campaign stops in Cabela’s stores, and founders Dick and Mary Cabela “maxed out as donors to President Bush’s 2004 campaign and [have] given thousands of dollars more to other Republican candidates and organizations.”

Cabela’s may be seeing the limits of its influence, however. Bush is now a very lame duck, Cheney has distanced himself from any hunting affiliations for obvious reasons, and, Schneider reports, Cabela’s has announced a dramatic cutback in its store openings—including one proposed for Billings, Montana.

Image of lion at Cabela's licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

With everything going green, it seems only appropriate that the laundry room, a veritable vacuum of energy and water waste, would be a likely site for improvement. 

The environmental parenting blog Eco Child’s Play offers a host of suggestions for more environmentally friendly laundering. The tips come from the 2007 book Raising Baby Green: The Earth-Friendly Guide to Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Baby Care, by pediatrician Dr. Alan Greene. 

One of his recommendations is to use a front-loading washing machine (look for an Energy Star) instead of a top-loader. This will save as much as 15 gallons of water per load and use half as much energy. 

Greene also advises alternative means of fabric softening (add 1/4 cup of baking soda to the wash cycle), combating static cling (add 1/4 cup of white vinegar to the wash water), and water softening (“use a soap-based, rather than detergent-based, cleaner”). 

Image by Joshua Sherurcij, licensed under Wikimedia Commons.

Michael Reynolds is the mastermind behind Earthships, which makes him sound like some sort of space renegade. Reynolds is a rebel, profiled in the Walrus, but his transgressions are mundane: breaking state ordinances and county building codes to create sustainable homes dubbed Earthships. His work leaves little time for savvy branding to fight the prevailing belief that off-the-grid living means inhabiting a yurt. 

In the late 1980s, when his architect peers were busy “distinguishing architecture from mere building, liberating it from the plebian world of functionality,” Reynolds was building the first commissioned, decidedly functional Earthship in New Mexico. Reynolds’ designs aren’t sleek—the U-shaped buildings resemble a hybrid “between The Hobbit’s Bag End burrow and the Tatooine farmstead of Luke Skywalker’s youth”—but they are efficient.

“Reynolds’ houses verge on 100 percent self-sufficiency. They harvest their own water, treat their own sewage, generate their own electricity, self-heat, and self-cool,” the Walrus reports. The walls are made of mortar-encased recycled cans and tires, and they have been successfully sustainable in the deserts of New Mexico, the jungles of Bolivia, and the mountains of British Columbia. For Reynolds’ designs to enjoy greater popularity, he’ll need more accommodating building codes. Of course, the Walrus seems to hint, a less snigger-inducing name for his structures wouldn’t hurt either. 

Image by Matthew Yglesias, licensed under Creative Commons.

The home aquarium trade is endangering coral reefs and hobbyists’ beloved marine pets. To stem the tide of destruction, consumers have to get involved.

As far as pets go, fish don’t have the most outgoing, cuddly personalities. But their brilliant colors and graceful movements have made aquariums vaunted fixtures in more than 800,000 U.S. households.

A home aquarium sounds harmless, but the trade that brings fish from coral reefs to our homes and dentist offices is deadly and unsustainable. Once lively reefs are being emptied of their inhabitants, leaving these crucial hubs of biodiversity in crisis. It’s a complex problem, with no easy solutions. Governing bodies haven’t stepped in to regulate the trade, and that means the power to make a difference lies in consumers’ hands.

The problem begins long before colorful butterfly fish and Banggai cardinalfish reach pet stores. Most fish come from coral reefs in the Philippines and Indonesia, where local fishermen make a living plundering fragile ecosystems that already have been damaged by warming waters (a phenomenon driven by climate change). Exporters pay fishermen per fish, says Drew Weiner, director of Reef Protection International, a Berkeley, California-based organization that seeks to educate the public about the aquarium trade and coral reefs. This pay-per-fish system has led to a deadly practice: Fishermen use cyanide to temporarily stun fish and make them easier to catch.  But less than 1 in 10 fish survive a cyanide stun, so the majority of stunned fish die hours later and arrive in the United States floating belly-up. On top of that, cyanide can damage surrounding coral and marine life not targeted for capture.

Even fish that are never exposed to cyanide frequently perish from trauma caused by the long trip from coral reefs to Los Angeles (where most major importers are located) to pet stores around the country. The result is millions of dead fish that don’t reach aquariums, further exacerbating demand for fish from over-harvested coral reefs.

Although the issue has gotten some coverage by the environmental press, the mainstream media have largely ignored the problem. The aquarium trade accounts for less than 1 percent of all the revenue generated from the ocean, so the problem hasn’t garnered attention on a large scale, Weiner says. The two largest sources of ocean revenue—recreation and commercial fishing—draw far more focus and have far stronger lobbying bases fighting for their interests.

A few legislative attempts to regulate the industry never made it off the ground, according to Barbara Best, a coastal resource and policy adviser for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), a government agency that provides nonmilitary foreign aid. In the context of coral reef protection, USAID has been working with countries like the Philippines to promote economic development while sustaining biodiversity. USAID serves as a member of the U.S. Coral Reef Task Force, a partnership of government agencies formed to create a national action plan for protecting coral reefs. In the National Action Plan to Conserve Coral Reefs, created in 2000, the Task Force called for improved domestic laws regulating the import of marine animals into the United States, but Best says it didn’t go anywhere. She cites a variety of factors for the stalled effort, including the difficulty of enacting effective legislation, concern for fishermen whose livelihoods depend on the trade, and other issues being prioritized by Congress.

Another program, the Marine Aquarium Council (MAC), has tried to self-regulate the trade through an international certification program. Although MAC was created with good intentions, the program was never able to achieve its goal of certifying all the players in the trade, according to Weiner.

“It's not something that's been paid much attention to, but it's a huge story because [MAC] sucked $20 million out of the donor community for this misguided certification program that was flawed from the start,” Weiner says. (Best acknowledges that USAID was one such donor; the agency financially supported MAC for three years but dropped support after realizing the program wasn’t effective.)

With an unsuccessful certification program and no laws regulating import of marine animals, captive breeding programs and consumer education appear to be the most viable solutions to the problem.

Captive breeding aims to reduce demand for wild fish by raising would-be pets in tanks and then exporting them to pet stores. But consumer education about the environmental benefits of purchasing captive bred fish is crucial: Less than 10 percent of aquarium species are currently tank-raised, and consumer demand remains high for species that are not easily bred in captivity.

Weiner says that—given consumer demand and legislative blockades—an all-out ban on the import of marine animals might be the only option to ensure the protection of coral reefs.

“[A ban] might be the easiest thing to do politically: Since there are so few stakeholders, who will complain? It'd be different if you were to try to shut down the commercial fishing industry,” Weiner says.

But a ban could also push the trade further underground, Best says. And that could make the industry even more difficult to manage. 

This leaves all hope with consumers. Hobbyists can reduce demand for wild fish by buying captive bred species whenever possible. If captive bred fish aren’t available, consumers should try to choose species that are less susceptible to endangerment. To help hobbyists, Reef Protection International (RPI) has created a Reef Fish Guide that directs consumers on which species of fish are safe for purchase. For example, the combtooth blenny is on RPI’s “take it home” list because it easily adapts to a home aquarium and isn’t at high risk for disease. Even though the fish isn’t currently captive bred, the species breeds frequently enough in the wild that it isn’t threatened by endangerment. On the other hand, the moorish idol is on RPI’s “keep it wild” list (i.e., don’t buy it) because less than 5 percent survive the transport to home aquariums, and if they do make it that far, they are highly susceptible to disease.

Finding captive bred fish or fish on the “take it home” list can be tricky, especially when dealing with large pet store chains. At Petco.com, consumers can order 78 species of marine fish for home delivery, three of which (the cleaner wrasse, panther grouper, and large angelfish) aren’t recommended for purchase by RPI for various reasons. Petco sells captive bred fish, but the website doesn’t consistently specify which fish are captive bred. (A Petco representative, Ryan May, told Utne.com via email that though some of the website’s and stores’ stocks are wild, most of its fish are captive bred and that the company is “always on the lookout for new resources so we can eventually not have a need for non-captive bred species in our stores.”)   

Instead of going straight to the big chain pet stores, Weiner recommends consumers seek advice from their local aquarium hobbyist club. These groups usually have current information on where to buy sustainably captured fish and corals. The Marine Aquarium Societies of North America maintains a database of 157 hobbyist clubs in the United States and Canada. These clubs often link to smaller, local pet and aquarium stores, where staff is knowledgeable about sustainability issues.

Jake Hagberg is the owner of Discovery Aquatics, an aquarium service and installation store near Minneapolis that doesn’t sell fish, and is a lifelong, passionate aquarium hobbyist.

“A lot of stores don’t give hobbyists the education they need to be successful,” Hagberg says. “They bring in fish that are really colorful and beautiful, but they don’t last long in captivity.”

If consumers don’t stop demanding endangered wild fish, they may be in the market for a new hobby.

“Eventually there is going to be a day when [pet stores] don't have fish to sell,” Weiner says.

Image by jon hanson, licensed under Creative Commons.

DDT’s back. No, not in the form of a tortured debate about whether or not the toxic chemical really was good for malaria-plagued nations. Rather, the insecticide is seeping to a comeback via melting Antarctic glaciers. 

New Scientist reports that DDT is again showing up in penguins.

The trace levels found will not harm the birds, but the presence of the chemical could be an indication that other frozen pollutants will be released because of climate change, says Heidi Geisz, a marine biologist at Virginia Institute of Marine Science in Gloucester in the US. She led a team that sampled DDT levels in the penguins.

And here’s the more alarming bit: The DDT might have some frozen friends:

She worries that glaciers could release an alphabet soup of chemical pollutants into the ocean, including PCBs and PBDEs – industrial chemicals that have been linked to health problems in humans.

Image by elisfanclub, licensed under Creative Commons.

 If the future of nuclear power were as bright as its most enthusiastic supporters suggest it is, investors would be flocking to it like electrons to nuclei. But “the smart money is heading for the exits,” reports the Spring 2008 Solutions, the newsletter of the Rocky Mountain Institute energy think tank.

“The private capital market isn’t investing in new nuclear plants, and without financing, capitalist utilities aren’t buying,” write Amory Lovins, Imran Sheikh, and Alex Markevitch, in an article starkly titled “Forget Nuclear.” “In the United States, even government subsidies approaching or exceeding new nuclear power’s total cost have failed to entice Wall Street.”

The article goes on to crunch the numbers behind nuclear vs. renewable energy options, and lands, not surprisingly, yet authoritatively, on the side of renewables. In typical Rocky Mountain Institute style, the report is technical but not obtuse and even, in conclusion, quite impassioned:

“Isn’t it time we forgot about nuclear power?” the authors ask. “Informed capitalists have. Politicians and pundits should, too.”

Elsewhere in the issue, the institute thanks recent donors, and under the category of “Integrators”—those who gave $5,000 to $9,999—is R.E.M./Athens L.L.C., the business end of the little rock band from Georgia. I guess “Green” isn’t just the name of one of their albums.

Objectivity is boring. The determined even-handedness of “GMOs: The Seeds of Discord” at the Cité des Sciences et de l'Industrie in Paris is stultifiying after a few placards for anyone familiar with the issues surrounding genetically modified organisms. The interest of the exhibit, then, lies in unearthing the careful concession France is making on the topic.

The exhibit portrays the controversy over GMOs as a dispute between two camps led by the modification-happy United States, on one hand, pitted against “a line of resistance in France and a few other European countries, brandishing the precautionary principles.” So why would principle-brandishing France allow any GMOs within its borders?

France has hope in “second-generation” GMOs, which could increase the protein or omega-3 content of crops, allow crops to grow in arid regions or saline soil, and increase the storage time for grains. Unlike current GMOs, which are portrayed as profiting seed and pesticide companies like Monsanto, second-generation GMOs hold promise for the greater good. North America dominates current second-generation research, according to the exhibit, but France set aside 45 million Euros for research in 2009-2011.

It’s a contradictory move for France when it claims to be in the anti-GMO vanguard. After all, the nation recently outlawed the cultivation of Bt maize, a Monsanto seed that produces its own insecticide. Rather than categorically dismissing GMOs, then, the French seem to be cautiously awaiting GMOs that can combat serious food shortages rather than just individual pests and weeds.

 Read a review of a book critiquing scientific support for GMOs in the May/June issue of Utne Reader.

Image by Féron Benjamin, licensed under Creative Commons.

The great spring bird migration is under way, and here in Minnesota, right in the fast lane of the Mississippi flyway, we’re seeing all kinds of winged travelers. Loons and mergansers are clustering on lakes, awaiting a late ice-out on more northern waters. Hawks are circling and screeching out territorial threats. The juncos are already here and gone, having high-tailed it to their summer places in the boreal forest.

The modern birdwatcher can track this spectacular avian parade not just with binoculars and spotting scopes, but also with Nexrad radar. The Minnesota Birdnerd blog tipped me to this radar image from just after midnight last night, showing patterns of circles around Nexrad stations that indicate migrating birds aloft. To learn more about tracking migrating birds by radar, check out these tips from the Wisconsin Society for Ornithology.

Environmentalist Derrick Jensen, author of Endgame and, most recently, As the World Burns, is the closest thing today’s green movement has to Ed Abbey, dispensing unvarnished and often inconvenient truths with a daggerlike delivery. A Q&A with Jensen in the spring issue of Northern California’s Terrain magazine is notable for prompting zinger after zinger sure to either inflame or inspire. A few of my favorites:

• “I got an email from a woman who told me I just seemed angry. I wanted to say how sad it is that I feel wounded at the death of the planet. There’s a tremendous fear of anger at the hands of the so-called resistance. She wanted me to meditate. The salmon don’t give a shit about whether we meditate—they care about the dams.”
• “I heard a radio show about the world-saving machine that can convert carbon dioxide to oxygen. The guy who runs Virgin airlines is going to give millions to develop this technology. We have it already. They’re called trees.”
• “Any social construct, including industrial capitalism, is simply that—a social construct. What’s real are these huckleberries and redwood trees.”

—Keith Goetzman

I’m a daily bike commuter who does most of my own bike maintenance, and I’m tired of reading the wholly impractical advice doled out by many manuals and magazines. Advice like, “Clean your chain after every ride.” Are you freaking serious? I’m lucky if I can find the time to clean my chain monthly, let alone after every ride. So I love the seat-of-the-pants, low-budget guidance offered in The Chainbreaker Bike Book (Microcosm Publishing), a new do-it-yourself bike maintenance guide that keeps things simple, straightforward, and, most importantly, real.

The first half of the book is a guide to choosing and maintaining a bike and all its components, while the second half contains reprints of the Chainbreaker bike zine, which was published from 2001 to 2005. As far as I’m concerned, the zine reprints are just a bonus to a first-rate, fun-to-read bike manual that walks you through everything from how to true a wheel to how to avoid the dreaded “chain suck.”

The authors, Shelley Lynn Jackson and Ethan Clark, have a conversational voice and a down-to-earth attitude that favors reuse and eschews trendiness and unnecessary expense. “Bikes give people self-reliance, but the high-end bike shop tries to take that away,” they write. They freely admit that their manual is “slightly limited and maybe a little old school,” and that’s exactly why I like it.

Finding sources of bureaucratic waste to keep your job sounds like a lifetime employment guarantee. For sustainability directors like John Coleman in Fayetteville, Arkansas, reports Governing, curtailing that waste requires little more than parroting the advice of any penny-pinching parent. Turn off the lights when you leave the room; turn down the heat at night.

More than 800 mayors of American cities pledged to slash urban emissions, and about three dozen of those cities have sustainability directors, sometimes with entire staffs, to turn those pledges into action. At this early stage, the work is simple for sustainability directors, who can target inefficient government facilities for instant savings. In addition, sustainability directors “serve as both a liaison and a beacon to businesses and citizens who want to limit their own carbon output” and facilitate sustainability networking. “There are people with ideas, and there are people with money. But it still takes someone such as Coleman to make the introductions.”

As simple savings become harder to come by, solutions will require more innovation, as well as the political savvy to pitch changes like retrofitting buildings to tight-budgeted cities, Governing suggests, even if such changes will save money in the long run.

The kernel at the core of every conventional economic model is alluringly simple: Growth is good. But due in large part to our planet’s finite resources, this premise is fundamentally flawed, the April issue of the Ecologist points out in an enlightening group of stories dubbed “The Earth vs. the Economy” (articles not available online) that call into question everything we’ve been taught about goods and services, supply and demand.

“When Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations, life was hard, the world vast and the supply depot of nature seemed without limit. . . . How could goods lead to anything but good?” writes Jonathan Rowe in the leadoff article, “The End of Economics.”

“More than two centuries later, that assumption no longer works. . . . The connection between wealth and weal, goods and good, has become increasingly frayed,” he posits. Rowe goes on to construct a withering critique of prevailing economic thought and describe the “epidemic of market-related disease” that is sickening both humans and the planet.

In subsequent articles, ecological economist Herman E. Daly puts forth the framework of a new economic model, and Andrew Simms points out that the current British recession (sound familiar?) may present “a good time for a rethink” of old assumptions. Simms reminds us that such thinking isn’t entirely new, or even all that radical: Forty years ago, he notes, Robert Kennedy famously pointed out that the GNP measures everything “except that which makes life worthwhile.”

—Keith Goetzman

There’s nothing like frightening news to ruin a good night’s sleep, especially if the news in question concerns the chemical components used in mattress production. You can’t count sheep if they’ve been vaporized in a cloud of carcinogenic fumes. And carcinogens, such as formaldehyde, are just one of the lovely chemicals that make up the beds we lie down in, according to a recent piece in Mother Jones (subscription required).

While long-term data about the general health risks of mattresses is lacking and difficult to acquire, a few particular brands seem notably questionable. For instance, Walter Bader, author of the book Toxic Bedrooms, had an Atlanta lab test a memory-foam mattress, which conforms to your resting position, and the results sniffed out 61 chemical emissions, including the “carcinogens benzene and naphthalene,” according to MoJo. Moreover, the chemicals, such as antimony oxide and, again, formaldehyde, used to ensure that mattresses are flame-retardant—federal regulations (pdf) require that mattresses resist catching fire from an open flame for 30 minutes—may pose, beyond cancer risks, allergic discomfort to those sensitive to chemicals.

Given the void of data, we should take this news with a measured acceptance. Still, some reliably harmless alternatives, produced with natural latex, organic cotton batting, and organic wool, exist for those seeking a safe mattress. If only beds could be made with the incredibly soft, imaginary wool from the sheep who lull you to sleep. But then the question becomes: Could you fall asleep to shorn sheep? That’d be weird. Forget I brought it up.

—Michael Rowe

Has the very idea of a President Bush speech on climate change driven you to skip work today and stay home with a six-pack or a bottle? If so, Dave Loos at EnviroWonk has just the activity for you.

— Steve Thorngate  

Image by Justin Cormack,  licensed under Creative Commons.

Goldman Prize–winner Marina Rikhvanova talks about rallying Russians to protect their environment

interview by Lisa Gulya 

Civil society in Russia has withered since its post-perestroika heyday. Controls on nongovernmental organizations have tightened, independent media have disappeared, and bureaucratic corruption persists. These conditions, along with the Soviet legacy of an industry-first, environment-be-damned development approach, make Russian environmental protection and restoration daunting. Russian biologist Marina Rikhvanova is undeterred.

Rikhvanova was one of six winners of the prestigious 2008 Goldman Environmental Prize announced Monday, recognized for her grassroots activism protecting Siberia’s Lake Baikal. Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest freshwater lake, is home to 1,700 unique plant and animal species. In Soviet times, a pulp mill damaged the lake's ecosystem by pumping pollution into its water. In 1996, UNESCO noted concern about the lake’s pollution when it declared Baikal a World Heritage Site.

Rikhvanova works with her organization, Baikal Environmental Wave, to protect the lake and its environs through letter-writing, marches, protests, and collaboration with international volunteers. Her most visible victory was the culmination of a four-year campaign against an oil pipeline that would have come within a half-mile of Lake Baikal. She and volunteers gathered more than 20,000 signatures to oppose the proposed pipeline route. In 2006, Rikhvanova led thousands of Russians into the streets of the city of Irkutsk to protest. Soon after, President Vladimir Putin ordered the pipeline to be rerouted. Rikhvanova’s recent efforts have focused on opposing nuclear enrichment and power plants that would threaten Baikal.

Utne.com talked with Rikhvanova about her work and winning the Goldman Prize.

How will the Goldman Prize help your work?

This award will help most importantly my office, my organization, and the environmental movement in the Baikal region to help protect the lake. But even more importantly, this award raises the visibility of our work, and people [in the government] will listen to us more now that I have won this award.

How do you think President-elect Dmitry Medvedev will treat environmental issues?

We’ll see what happens. But I can say that Medvedev in a recent speech did talk about environmental concerns and that they are worth addressing. Unfortunately, often words are not the same as actions.

You’ve talked about the need to improve the parks and preserves surrounding Lake Baikal. How can they be improved?

Unfortunately, the status of these protected areas is pretty weak today in Russia. There isn’t the legal system and the regulations needed to ensure their strength and longevity. Unfortunately, people who have their own self-interest and material gain in mind often achieve the post of directors of these protected areas and exploit the resources of these protected areas to their own gain rather than putting their first priority as protecting the land and the lake.

Who are your strongest supporters among the Russian public?

Everyone supports us from the smallest to the oldest. But if we’re talking about numbers, our greatest numbers of participants come from youth and the elderly because they have free time they can give to the work. The elderly are thinking already about the kind of world they’re leaving their descendants, their children, and grandchildren. And the youth are very active and very creative.

Control of nongovernmentnal organizations has tightened in Russia in recent years, and there’s suspicion of organizations with foreign ties. What is the role of international participants in your organization?

The suspicions are there and the attitude in the government is strange right now, but it doesn’t matter. International participation in our work is still very important.

We have amazing international volunteers. Sometimes our volunteers even come up with their own projects. For example, there’s a woman who’s working with us through the Tahoe-Baikal Institute and she came up with the idea of doing a summer school for children. The kids spent two summers at the school and had a great time. These were underprivileged kids who otherwise would not have had an opportunity to go to Lake Baikal. They were very happy.

Is tourism to the Baikal area helpful or harmful?

It helps and harms at the same time. On the one hand, tourism is a source of income for local residents. On the other hand, it’s sort of a wild, uncontrolled, unregulated development. And we need to be setting aside areas that are exempt from development.

Last year we started a competition to find the best places to develop tourism and to promote those places specifically to contain the tourism. One interesting result is that we’re seeing some people who used to work in some of the protected areas, the preserves and the reserves, as well as some former foresters, go into the tourism business. They’re able to practice different methods to, for example, attract wild birds to their territory and other species to make it a more attractive place for tourists.           

I’ve been really pleasantly surprised by interest from business, and overall my impression is that the tourism industry and many people involved want to ensure sustainable tourism. Of course I can’t say that everyone is like that, but there are people like that.

What were the most effective forms of activism for your organization?

To be diverse in one’s actions. Because people get sick of the same format of action, and the mass media are not going to pay attention if we do the same kind of meetings and actions week after week. Therefore, we try to conduct lots of different kinds of events. Not long ago we organized a walk across Lake Baikal. We did a concert on April Fool’s Day. 

What is the biggest environmental threat in Russia today?  

The biggest problem in Russia today is the convergence of business and government. Business works hand in hand with the federal government to exploit natural resources. And they act without fear of punishment.

Another question has to do with pollution, essentially the remains of industrial development in Soviet times. Also, there’s just no economic incentive for businesses to promote energy efficiency and to promote greener practices and to minimize waste produced. 

Another problem is there’s no independent legal system in Russia. We really need an independent court system. Then we could actually force people to answer for their actions that destroy the environment.

The nuclear energy industry isn’t just mounting a P.R. campaign about the great green hope of nuclear power. It’s also applying good old political pressure to get its way, the Texas Observer reports, strong-arming Texas environmental regulators in order to win approval for a huge nuclear waste landfill over scientists’ objections.

The Dallas-based firm Waste Control Specialists is close to securing approval for a low-level nuclear waste landfill in Andrews County, Texas, Forrest Wilder reports. If the company scores two more necessary licenses from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ), “Waste Control could bury more than 60 million cubic feet of waste over the span of 30 years, more than half the volume of the new Dallas Cowboys stadium,” he writes. Which of course would be a radioactive dream come true for all the people who are talking about a nuclear renaissance but still unsure exactly where all that waste is going to go.

The licensing process has led to a clash at the TCEQ between the scientists and engineers who oppose Waste Control’s plans and agency managers bent on approving the licenses. Three employees have even quit because of frustration with the licensing process, Wilder reports. Chief among their reservations were indications that the dump might be dangerously close to the water table and that Waste Control had previous “radiation protection issues” with worker safety.

—Keith Goetzman

Visiting my mom’s office building as a child, I often found small birds with freshly broken necks in the hedges outside, lying compacted and still, like sleeping babies. One hundred million birds are killed each year in the United States by collisions with buildings, the New York City Audubon Society writes in its free, 55-page, downloadable booklet, Bird-Safe Building Guidelines. This spectacle of my childhood could perhaps have been avoided, reports BuildingGreen.com, by building modifications as simple as “placing patterns on the glass or adding shading screens in front of the windows” or simply by turning the lights off at night, when large numbers of birds migrate.

—Jason Ericson

Kiribati is a 32-island nation in the South Pacific that’s acutely aware of environmental issues, since it faces the threat of inundation from rising sea levels caused by climate change. Perhaps in part because of this heightened awareness, the nation recently established the largest protected marine reserve in the world.

According to Julia Whitty at Mother Jones, the Phoenix Islands Protection Area is “a California-size ocean wilderness of pristine coral reefs and rich fish populations threatened by overfishing and climate change.” Conservation and protection come in the form of restricting commercial fishing in the area. Subsistence fishing is still permitted for local communities in designated areas.

—Erik Helin

When taking a dog on a walk, pet owners are faced with an environmental conundrum: What do you do with your dog’s poo? Using a plastic bag and throwing it in the trash means covering an organic substance with inorganic material and sending it to the city dump. That seems unnecessarily environmentally destructive. So what to do? Utne Reader’s sister publication, Mother Earth News, has some tips on what to do with your pet’s dirty business. The article recommends burying the stuff at least 100 feet from any water sources. If that’s not possible, dog owners can also invest in some biodegradable doggy bags.

—Bennett Gordon

Government efforts to foster fitness have expanded from passive public service announcements to interventionist urban planning. Spiked finds attempts to create obesity-combating “fit towns” in the United Kingdom downright Orwellian. It concedes that more attractive stairways and improved lighting in parks are sensible steps. But suggest giving pedestrians and cyclists roadway priority, and Spiked grows indignant. UK lawmakers—audaciously!—proposed limiting office parking to cycle-sized spaces. (Spiked’s virulent anti-bicycle commentators might commiserate with U.S. Transportation Secretary Mary Peters, who drew a link between bike path funding and Minnesota’s August bridge collapse.) Yet compared to the stupidity Salon chronicled in October of U.S. “parking requirements” that result in overabundant, frequently unoccupied pavement, urban design that encourages outdoor time and self-propelled travel seems downright sensible, not despotic.

—Lisa Gulya

Forget hot wax and nipple clamps. The darkest and most twisted examples of sadomasochism are found under beds and in sock drawers the world over. Consider the phthalates-rich butt plug, whose toxins are slowly poisoning its user’s body via the holiest of holies. Or the discarded rubber dildo, buried in a landfill and contaminating the groundwater. These instruments of pleasure may in fact be causing environmental and biological pain, Molly Freedenberg writes for the San Francisco Bay Guardian. And while their actual impact may be overstated—especially in comparison to other harmful, more widely used items—its not difficult to play it safe and find these same items made from more eco-friendly (but no less user-friendly) materials, like the seaweed-based dildo created by Love Piece. Or get creative and make your own. Just don’t forget the sandpaper.

—Morgan Winters

“Dr. Vino” Tyler Colman claims to have calculated the carbon footprint of wine and come up with a simple answer: If you live west of the line he’s drawn through the middle of the country, you should buy wine from California, and if you live east of the line, you’re better off buying from East Coast or European wineries. You may have good reason to think twice about his findings, however.

Colman and his partner Pablo Paster use their research paper to unload a metric ton of scientific-sounding chatter, largely regarding variables and calculations that are either undeniable or not on the table, and then use this data to somehow carve out their precise line. Easily digestible, easily reprintable. Colman and Paster’s proscriptions about wine buying have run, seemingly unquestioned, in several places, including a New York Times op-ed and in a non-peer-reviewed section of Science (subscription required).

But their research is suspect. First, they look at just three wineries located in three widely disparate growing regions, Yellow Tail (New South Wales, Australia), Coulee de Serrant (Loire, France), and a hypothetical “cult” winery in California’s Napa Valley. These three wineries ship wine to just one major market, Chicago. (Colman, when he’s not professing at New York University, happens to teach at the University of Chicago.)

Large cargo ships are said to carry the bottles from the Australian and European wineries. These ships dock in the U.S. (Los Angeles for Yellow Tail; New Jersey for Coulee de Serrant) and the wine is then hauled by road or rail to its Chicago destination. By comparison, the imaginary Napa winery (call it L’Strawman) ships exclusively by air overnight express.

Basically, Colman and Paster use lots of fancy footwork (and irrelevant calculations) to say that shipping a bottle of wine via sea and land is more efficient than flying the same bottle in a plane, even for a shorter distance, if you divide the carbon output by the number of bottles each vessel can carry. But they are comparing apples to oranges and vastly oversimplifying the issue. If they compared apples to apples—mass market to mass market (or cult wine to cult wine), normal carriers to normal carriers—it is unlikely that Colman and Paster would get a simple line dividing the country. Or, for that matter, very much attention.

(Thanks to David Egerton, Ph.D. candidate, University of Louisville.)

—Jason Ericson

The power of architecture as a way to imagine an ideal society is alive in Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut. His most recent project, a pair of proposed Paris buildings dubbed Anti-Smog, is a testament to green design concepts, featuring solar power, wind power, and a “smog eating exterior,” according to Ali Kriscenski of the design blog Inhabitat.

The prototype for the project shows one football-shaped building known as Solar Drop. “The exterior is fitted with 250 square meters of solar photovoltaic panels and coated in titanium dioxide (TiO2),” writes Kriscenski. “The PV system produces on-site electrical energy while the TiO2 coating works with ultraviolet radiation to interact with particulates in the air, break down organics and reduce airborne pollutants and contaminants.”

The second structure, the Wind Tower, harnesses the gusting urban winds for energy.

The buildings are designed to be suspended over a Parisian canal and a defunct railroad track. Anti-Smog would be used as art galleries, public meeting rooms, and gathering spaces. Learn more about the project here.

—Erik Helin

California’s Salton Sea isn’t just a body of water, it’s an epic tale of environmental tinkering gone wrong wrapped up in a storyline that involves real estate fever, massive fish kills, congressman Sonny Bono, and more than a few sunburned eccentrics. High Country News tells part of the strange tale in its March 3 issue. For a cinematic, even weirder take on the sea and its characters, check out the documentary film Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, now out on DVD, which is reviewed in the March-April Utne Reader.

—Keith Goetzman

There’s no surer way to bathe your brain in dopamine than to contemplate buying something. “Retail therapy” isn’t a learned behavior, the Ecologist reports in its February issue (article not available online), it’s the result of evolving from hunter-gatherers.

Our hand-to-mouth ancestors lived in the era of survival of the avaricious. In the Neolithic period, you crafted millions of hand-axes to display “what a high-status, reproductively worthwhile hominid you were.” According to a 2007 Journal of Neuroscience article, “hedonistic hotspots”—mechanisms for feeling desire—outnumber those for feeling pleasure, prodding us to lust over the prospect of more without giving us equal enjoyment upon attainment. Now, thanks to global capitalism, many in the Western world are able to accumulate even more, but with more serious environmental ramifications. Not only are our buying binges a holdover of a physical survival strategy, some scientists posit that we are practicing “terror management,” staving off feelings of mortality with more goods.

Rather than continue to consume and then stress about large-scale damage, the Ecologist advises us to learn to say enough and find a balance that is personally sustainable, not to succumb to the short-lived high of buying. We have to accept that we’re not immortal and that we can’t have it all, even if our brains try to convince us—they’re programmed “to persuade our bodies out of bed on cold mornings.” Making social connections, practicing gratitude, and cooperating are more sustainable ways to feel good.

—Lisa Gulya

February 9 was a historic day in the environmental shaming of the Unites States as Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, broke ground on Masdar City, a $22 billion municipality that will be carless, solar powered, and almost entirely self-contained. Water will come from a seawater desalinization plant, produce will come from surrounding greenhouses, and all waste will be composted or recycled, writes the New York Times.

The groundbreaking came on the heels of a January announcement by the Masdar Initiative, a renewable energy investment company, that the UAE will commit $15 billion dollars for initial research on sustainable programs. This investment represents the biggest government-sponsored renewable energy program in the world, and it comes from a nation that gained much of its wealth through oil and natural gas. This fact has some wondering: Can one grand progressive step erase decades of carbon emissions irresponsibility?

(Thanks, Groovy Green.)

—Erik Helin

Further fueling suspicions that People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals dreams up campaigns by asking conservatives, “What would tick you off the most?” Stratton Lawrence of the Charleston (South Carolina) City Paper reports that the group is lobbying for a 10-cents-a-pound federal meat tax.

PETA likens this “sin tax” to ones already “placed on tobacco, alcohol, and gasoline for their costly effect on the environment and public health,” Lawrence writes. Revenue from this proposed bill (that will never, ever pass) would fund education about the benefits of eating less meat.

“Even though the average American adult would only pay $20 more per year with this tax, it would encourage reduced meat consumption,” PETA’s Ashley Byrne tells Lawrence. “That could save a family thousands in health care costs.”

In pairing the word “meat,” considered icky by most vegetarians, with “tax,” perhaps the most hated word in the English language, PETA, in typical fashion, seems to be saying: Let’s see how polarized this thing can get. Supply-side might be a better place to start—by raising industry standards for environmental remediation or, as one small livestock farmer suggested to Lawrence, by rolling back the huge government subsidies being handed away to factory farms.

—Jason Ericson

The “cap-and-trade” strategy for reducing greenhouse gases isn’t a new idea. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to understand. Even after reading numerous articles on it, the concept of an emissions market where companies can trade shares of pollution still makes my head spin. But in “The (Very Profitable) Economics of Emissions” in the Jan.-Feb. issue of Mental Floss (article not available online), writer Sam Kean makes sense of an abstract idea:

Instead of looking for ways to dump pollution, companies “own” their emissions output and can trade it like a commodity. For instance, if a business has 25,000 permits but only needs 20,000, then it can sell the extra shares for cash. Or, if a company unexpectedly exceeds its pollution limit, it can buy extra permits to cover itself.

The result is a “cap-and-trade” market, which allows the government to screw down maximum emissions levels and lessen pollution by taking shares out of circulation. When shares disappear, the supply goes down, and the remaining shares become more expensive. Eventually, it costs companies too much to simply buy extra permits and prompts them to invest in cleaner technology.

—Sarah Pumroy

The iPhone was universally greeted with ticker-tape parades, satisfied high fives, and people dancing in the streets. Well, almost. Since it was unveiled, the feather rufflers at Greenpeace have been skeptical of the revolutionary phone for environmental reasons. Back in May 2007, a month before the iPhone dropped, Apple CEO Steve Jobs made a commitment to phasing out all brominated flame retardants (BFRs) and chlorinated plastic polyvinyl chloride (PVC) in Apple products by the end of 2008. PVC and BFRs are toxic pollutants hazardous to the environment once they enter the waste stream. A study by Greenpeace revealed concerning levels of both toxins in the iPhone.

Apple has been under fire by environmentalist for years over its iPod batteries, which have proven to be short-lived and environmentally hazardous. The company was specifically targeted because of its image as an environmentally conscious company, and because of astronomical iPod sales, the Christian Science Monitor wrote in 2005.

As a possible act of redemption, however, Apple has now unleashed the Macbook Air, an eco-friendly laptop so skinny the tabloids think it’s anorexic. Starre at Eco-Chick has a rundown of the computer’s green credentials, which include an absence of both PVC and BFRs, as well as a packaging reduction of 56 percent. Plus, she points out, it’s sexy.

—Erik Helin

Major media outlets have been humming about Tata Motors’ new $2,500 car, the Nano, which is expected to speed into mass production in India later this year. While many in the West were previously unfamiliar with Tata, an informative profile in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki reports that the $30 billion conglomerate has been sparking India’s industrial sector since the 19th century. However, it is the company’s impossibly cheap car that has prompted worldwide media attention, fueling fears about the potential environmental impact of putting automobile ownership within reach of a market containing more than a billion people.

Gavin Rabinowitz of the Associated Press sounded the eco-alarm in a story picked up by USA Today, ABC News, and many other news outlets. Somini Sengupta of the New York Times noted these environmental concerns and added that because India lacks a driving culture like that in the United States, wacky high jinks, like dodging elephants in the road, might also ensue.

As Gwynne Dyer points out in the Toronto weekly Now, such hysteria is hypocritical, given that cars in the United States and Canada are more environmentally onerous since they are larger and far more numerous.

Dyer writes, “Clucking disapprovingly about mass car ownership in India or China misses the point entirely. At the moment, there are only 11 private cars for every thousand Indians. There are 477 cars for every thousand Americans.” Dyers proposes we adopt a “contraction and convergence” model like the one pioneered by Aubrey Meyer, whereby developed and developing countries agree on a future meeting point for their emissions.

—Jason Ericson

There are so many tips on going green, or eating green, or driving green, or sleeping green, that scientists have estimated that eliminating green-tips lists from environmental journalists’ repertoires would save over a million trees’ worth of paper a year. (Not really.) The environmental giant the Nature Conservancy has jumped into the game and surprised us all with some actually innovative tips from bona fide experts in the Everyday Environmentalist. These tips range from the simple, like replacing your car with a bike trailer, to the unexpected (drill holes in logs to provide bees a home to help protect pollinators from colony collapse disorder), to the nigh-on impossible (“You should only put on your skin ingredients that you would be able to eat as well”). They’re asking for readers’ tips, too. I bet Utne folks could come up with some sure to surprise them!

—Brendan Mackie

Would Sen. John McCain be a good environmental president? Don’t bet the planet on it. Joseph Romm at Salon writes that although the Republican nominee-to-be is the only GOP candidate who believes in the science of global warming and who has proposed legislation to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, his green credentials are shaky at best.

“While McCain may understand the scale of the climate problem, he does not appear to understand the scale of the solution,” writes Romm. Unless a President McCain appointed judges and agency heads who would not gut efforts to address climate change—something he’d be unlikely to do—he wouldn’t make much headway. Romm also points out that McCain has backed huge subsidies for nuclear power, yet he “remarkably” told Grist in an interview last October that wind and solar need no such help.

Over at Huffington Post, Arianna Huffington also calls out McCain on his environmental wishy-washiness in “End of a Romance: Why the Media and Independent Voters Need to Break Up With John McCain”:

“The old John McCain talked about trying to do something about global warming and encourage renewable energy. The new John McCain didn’t show up for a vote last week on a bill that included tax incentives for clean energy, even though he was in D.C. And then his staff misled environmentalists who called to protest by telling them that he had voted for it.”

McCain is still getting mileage out of the “maverick” label that no longer applies, Huffington claims. But perhaps he’s still a maverick when compared to green voters: He’s got almost nothing in common with them.

—Keith Goetzman

Image by  Geoffrey Chandler , licensed under Creative Commons.

As the Olympics approach, all eyes are on Beijing—and they’re noticing that the view is pretty smoggy. Despite China’s promise of cleaner air for the Summer Games, which begin on August 8, many observers are speculating that the world’s top athletes will probably be breathing some of the world’s most noxious air.

The New York Times recently reported that many Olympic teams are “preparing for the worst” in terms of air quality. For the U.S. athletes, that means training elsewhere, delaying their arrival as long as possible, and maybe even donning filter masks until competition time, at the risk of offending their Chinese hosts.

There’s more at stake than feelings. Kathryn Minnick takes a deeper look at the environmental backdrop to the games in the Winter 2008 issue of Earth Island Journal (article not available online), noting that “the big question is whether short-term ‘face’ or long-term change will win out.”

The games “have morphed into a pageant of environmental correctness,” Minnick writes, with China making a host of green promises in order to land the coveted games. Beijing has been making real progress in some areas, for instance, changing its power generation mix, tightening car emission standards, and cleaning up some of its most polluting factories. And the Chinese have included lots of flashy, high-tech green features in high-profile Olympic venues like the “Bird’s Nest” main stadium and the “Water Cube” swimming stadium.

However, other goals appear to be overblown or perhaps unattainable, environmental observers tell Minnick, and that pesky smog problem looms. Air quality figures for the final day of a four-day August trial test went “mysteriously missing,” Minnick writes.

“China’s attempt to stage a green Olympics is a good sign,” she concludes, “even if being sustainable was a requirement for holding the Games more than it was a free choice.”

—Keith Goetzman

Photo by Peng Bo, licensed under Creative Commons.

The claim that mass consumerism is killing the planet isn’t new, but perhaps it’s best made by French author Hervé Kempf. In an article from the French-Canadian newspaper Le Devoir translated on the website Truthout, Louis-Gilles Francoeur highlights the relationship between economics and the environment explored in Kempf’s new book, Comment les riches détruisent la planète (How the Rich Destroy the Planet).*  Kempf sees economic disparity and ecological destruction as symptoms of a single disease: capitalism. The system’s rigidity makes it incapable of supporting the changes needed to remedy our present environmental crisis, Kempf believes, and the only solution is to “bring down the rich.”

(Thanks, Adbusters.)

—Morgan Winters

* Correction: Due to an editing error, the newspaper Le Devoir was originally identified as French. It is French Canadian.

Eking out a living from meager government pensions, grandmothers in poor suburban South African townships have staged a revolution. But while their cities were once hotbeds of anti-apartheid sentiment, this uprising is gentler. It involves growing vegetables. Supported by the environmental group Abalimi Bezekhaya, grandmothers have set up organic community farms, helping to feed their neighbors and gain some self-sufficiency. AllAfrica.com has a series of articles, photo galleries, and videos about the farms.

—Brendan Mackie

Energy-efficient compact fluorescent bulbs may be lighting all of our homes within 10 years, but by next fall, they will cause the lights to turn out in six Cleveland-area General Electric plants.

Hundreds of union light bulb makers will lose their jobs, reports Lisa Rab in the Cleveland Scene, because it’s cheaper to make CFLs in countries with an abundance of cheap labor, like China or Hungary. Due to China’s careful strategic insights and planning in the 1990s, Rab reports that this notorious polluter now “produces an estimated 80 percent of the world’s CFLs.”

Rab’s report puts a wrinkle in the typical feel-good environmental interest story by highlighting the competing toll on fairly paid, union labor. In response to the layoffs, the union began a “Screw That Bulb” campaign to get the word out that GE was shipping its light-bulb jobs overseas. Union official David Raleigh told Rab, “The facilities are here….[GE owns] the buildings. You have a trained work force that can be adapted. It really is a shame.”

—Jason Ericson

China’s exporters are increasingly cornering markets on ingredients in prepared foods, some of which will go on to be labeled “local,” reports Wayne Roberts in Toronto’s Now magazine.

Such foods can be deemed local because their packing and packaging costs as much as their ingredients. Customs limitations, however, make it difficult to gauge the quality of Chinese ingredients and the environmental standards under which they were grown.

Chinese ingredients that dominate the prepared foods market, Roberts reports, include apples, apple juice, dried berries, organic frozen broccoli, cinnamon, fish, garlic, honey, vanilla, and xanthum gum.

—Jason Ericson

Kathryn Blume’s traveling one-woman show The Boycott raises profound questions, such as, “What do men prefer, gas-guzzling motor vehicles or their wives’ carnal affections?” Blume’s monologue, based on the Aristophanes comedy Lysistrata, follows First Lady Lyssa Stratton as she singlehandedly tries to end global warming. Lyssa vows to abstain from sex until her husband solves climate change, and she urges other women to do the same. Check out Blume’s monologue here:

(Thanks, Orion.)

 —Morgan Winters

Traveling by plane to academic conferences exacerbates climate change, Mark Pedelty writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education, yet the topic is rarely broached by those in academia: “Perhaps that is because our most sacred privilege is at stake. We love to travel.”

Pedelty, an associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, doesn’t spare himself as he serves up an unflinching but humorous critique of scholars who “travel to meet, greet, and, in one of our more ironic roles, preach the gospel of sustainability.”

Inspired in part by an editorial in the British Medical Journal on the carbon footprint of medical conferences, Pedelty encourages his fellow academics to videoconference whenever possible and to start asking hard questions like, “Did I really need to fly to New York to hear that?”

—Keith Goetzman

For many of us born after World War II, the idea that America depends on its citizens to procreate in order to maintain its status as a world power seems a bit archaic. Sure, we recognize that somebody has to do it, but propagation is hardly seen as the patriotic obligation it once was. If you grew up during the Reagan/Bush years, for example, memories of massive unemployment scares might logically eclipse fears of a waning population too small to fill the jobs that make society function. But dwindling population levels have actually been a major threat to American dominance in the global marketplace, at least according to an article in the Washington Post. So it is with a palpable sense of relief that the Post reports that, for the first time since 1971, the United States has reached a fertility rate above the coveted population replacement milestone, a level where the number of children reaching adolescence is equal to the death rate. This is pretty good news for the country, the article suggests.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian offers a decidedly different response to the news of U.S. population growth in a blog posting by Amanda Witherell. The world’s resources are already stretched dangerously thin sustaining our present population, Witherell points out. An increase in population—particularly in an über-consumerist society like ours, where the increase would have an exponentially more drastic environmental impact than in a developing nation—would be unconscionable.

According to the Post article, “the ‘replacement rate’ is generally considered desirable by demographers and sociologists because it means a country is producing enough young people to replace and support aging workers....” This positive perception of the replacement rate, of course, presumes that our present population is ideal and, consequently, that changes in the size of our population and necessary workforce are unfavorable alternatives to some other, yet-to-be-discovered solution to our environmental problems. Witherell points out in another article that limiting the population is an obvious step toward corralling carbon emissions and the burden we put on natural resources. Too obvious a step, apparently. This preference for an abstract, or even nonexistent, solution reminds us that, at least in America, the simple answer is hardly ever the right answer. Better to offer our children a shot at the great legacy of solving global warming. They’ll thank us, I’m sure. Every single, last one of them.

—Morgan Winters

Photo by Jenn Rensel, licensed under Creative Commons.

You’ve got to hand it to corporate America. While the profit-mad behemoth has previously abused the environment the same way a drunken house guest abuses your bathroom, some companies have started taking a greener view of things. Sierra magazine reports that consumer pressure has greened up a lot of business. And this doesn’t apply just to green-branded businesses like Whole Foods. Businesses across the board have found that green measures can boost their profits. This thinking is spreading through the whole supply chain, the chain of goods and services from which three-quarters of a company’s carbon footprint comes.

For a long time, big business and environmentalists could never get along. But companies are fast learning that conserving their resources saves money, thereby increasing profit. And as the environmental movement scores more converts, consumers themselves begin to demand socially responsible goods.

“Corporate social responsibility” is becoming dizzyingly popular, according to the British newspaper the Economist, in a sometimes critical special report by Daniel Franklin. “$1 out of every $9 under professional management in America now involves an element of ‘socially responsible investment,’ according to Geoffrey Heal of Columbia Business School.” But the corporate social responsibility movement isn’t even close to perfect. While it’s appealing as a buzzword, the practice has confused a good many in business. But Franklin delivers a hopeful conclusion: When corporate social responsibility is done right, it can deliver a lot of good and increase profit. Which is good news for all of us.

—Brendan Mackie

The subgroup of evangelicals who preoccupy themselves with the apocalypse are widely criticized, both from inside the larger Christian community and out. This is due not only to their penchant for seriously lousy fiction (read: Left Behind) and film (witness: A Thief in the Night). Critics see real danger in end-times obsession, with its emphasis on a vengeful God, its cynical and paternalistic brand of Zionism, and its potential for apathy toward environmental preservation.

Of course, people and their beliefs are inevitably more complicated than they seem—as Brenda Peterson learned from her neighbor George while volunteering to protect vulnerable baby seals. Writing for Orion, Peterson describes a four-hour “seal sitting” shift where she and her neighbor keep an eye on a seal pup, left alone on the beach while its mother hunts for fish. George tries to engage Peterson in conversation about the second coming of Christ, an effort that she persistently rebuffs. Despite his otherworldly theology, Peterson quietly considers the fact that her end-times obsessed neighbor genuinely cares for nature—and for her:

With a pang I realized that while some End-Timers may not have the stamina and constancy for compassion, for “suffering with,” many…feel real concern for the infidel loved ones they will abandon. And watching George’s expectant face, I reminded myself that his spiritual stewardship, like that of some other evangelicals, did include other species and the natural world. Not long before, George had built a floating platform for an injured pup so he could find sanctuary offshore while saltwater and sun healed his gash from a boat propeller.

Later, it dawns on Peterson just how much the two of them have in common:

“Anytime now,” George murmured, “the mother will return. That’s my favorite part.”

And then I understood something about my neighbor and about myself. All of us know what it feels like to wait for someone to call, to finally come home, to recognize our love, to reunite with those of us who long for something more, something greater than ourselves. Maybe it will come in the night, in that twinkling of an eye. Maybe it will save us from a lonely beach.

—Steve Thorngate

Five cents a bottle doesn’t seem like much, but the bottled water tax that hit Chicago at the beginning of the new year has left the bottled water industry feeling all wet, reports Sustainablog’s Jason Phillip.

Bottled water is an environmentalist’s worst nightmare, ballooning landfills with plastic—less than 20 percent of plastic bottles are ever recycled—and encouraging waste, all for a product that we can easily get by picking up a glass and walking to the nearest sink. Bottled water could even be the first barrage in the unsettling privatization of public water supplies, Leif Utne has suggested in Utne Reader.

But we’re not in clear water yet. The Chicago tax, the first such levy in the nation, is being challenged in court by industry trade groups that argue it’s unfair because it doesn’t apply to other noncarbonated beverages such as sports drinks, coffee, or chocolate milk. Of course, Chicago does not provide inexpensive chocolate milk from the taps, otherwise I would move there, so taxing bottled water seems reasonable. But in the end it’s up for the courts to decide.

The poor bottled water manufacturers have a point, though: One bottled beverage has the same grim environmental footprint as any other. So why should water be singled out for shaming? Maybe because bottled water has become a symbol of Americans’ wanton wastefulness. We are paying for something we can get for free and destroying the earth in the process. Taken liken that, a five-cent tax doesn’t seem too hefty.

—Brendan Mackie

January means list time. Everyone feels entitled to publish an annual top ten list around the New Year, looking back on 2007’s notable scientific discoveries, blunders, and cat videos. But Sustainable Industries is looking ahead. The monthly green business magazine, nominated for a 2007 Utne Independent Press Award for its environmental coverage, has put out its annual Trend Watch, with in-depth articles on eight green business trends we can expect to see in 2008.

One thing to anticipate in 2008 is growth in the green building products industry. Despite worries over the U.S. housing slump, the green building market has been growing rapidly, with the market for green building materials increasing a whopping 23 percent annually from 2004 to 2006. Sustainable Industries attributes the growth to consumer demand, stricter building codes, and the reduced operating costs that come with green buildings.

But consumers aren’t satisfied with just living in green buildings—they also want to be able to keep tabs on their energy consumption within the home. Which is why Sustainable Industries predicts we will see an increase in technology that gives consumers easy access to energy usage information: “A growing number of savvy companies are providing value-added services that help individual users make sense of the environmental data available, using the now-ubiquitous cell phones, PDAs, laptops and other personal communication tools available.” One such tool, featured in Good magazine, shows how much energy is sucked up by common household appliances even when they are turned off. And Sustainable Industries reports that Nissan plans to add displays to vehicles that tell the driver how their acceleration and braking behaviors affect fuel efficiency.

Other predictions for 2008? Expect to see advances in battery operated cars, increased reliance on renewable energy sources, and a consolidation of green media sources.

—Sarah Pumroy

What in Gaia’s name were the folks at the Foundation for Deep Ecology thinking when they decided to publish the humongous photo-driven monstrosity of a book called Thrillcraft: The Environmental Consequences of Motorized Recreation?

The hardcover, which was released in November and distributed by Chelsea Green, has 274 gigantic pages—they’re about the size of an LP record—is an inch and a half thick, and weighs in at nearly six pounds. And although Chelsea Green notes on its website that it “prints . . . on chlorine-free recycled paper, using soy-based inks, whenever possible,” there’s no such disclaimer in Thrillcraft, which is perhaps the Chelsea Green title most in need of greenification.

Presumably, the large format is intended to showcase the photographs, which depict a stream of adrenaline junkies riding ATVs, dirt bikes, dune buggies, personal watercraft, snowmobiles, and the like, along with the resulting destruction: trashed wetlands, trampled desert soils, bullet-blasted trail signs. A few postcardy wilderness photos are thrown in to starkly illustrate the alternative to this “yahoo culture” (the editor’s preferred term).

Problem is, the overall photo quality is quite poor, with grainy low-resolution images and washed-out colors that remind me of those decades-old Time-Life photo books I always see in the “free” box at yard sales. Add in overly earnest, clumsy captions (“A young girl takes time to smell the flowers—a reflective experience antithetical to thrillcraft culture”) and this is a coffee-table book that on first browse isn’t even good enough to display on your sustainably manufactured coffee table.

Editorially, the book is a mixed bag. In between all those photos, it’s got twenty-some essays about various aspects of the gearheads-vs.-greens battle. Some of the pieces, such as those by wilderness essayist-novelist Rick Bass and Audubon editor-at-large Ted Williams, are writerly and engaging, but many others are by academics whose thesis-style explications will have you flipping ahead to the next monster truck rally double-spread. And the overall tenor of Thrillcraft, from the dedication page (“To the late, great public lands”) to the glossary (“abusement parks,” “wreckreation”), comes off as shrill and simplistic.

I’m totally on board with Thrillcraft’s message, that motorized recreation is, on the whole, doing grave and irreparable damage to U.S. public lands, especially in the West. And I can rant against motors with the best of them when the whine of snowmobiles disrupts my cross-country ski trek or a powerboat nearly swamps my canoe. But if an ideological ally like me finds this book tone-deaf in its presentation, over-the-top in its rhetoric, and flat-out wasteful in its production, what exactly is it good for? I suppose you could always chuck it at an annoying off-roader. But at 60 bucks a copy, that would be an expensive projectile.

—Keith Goetzman

A new tool in the fight against global warming might be hopping around the Australian outback. A recent report (PDF) by Greenpeace suggests that using kangaroos, instead of cows, as a source of meat could make a substantial impact on Australia’s carbon footprint. Eating cuddly marsupial for dinner might sound unnatural to Americans, but kangaroo has been a part of Australian cuisine from time immemorial. It fact, the practice fits perfectly with many established ideas of green living: eat local, free-range meats; raise animals that help sustain the land; cultivate indigenous plants and animals. Most importantly, according to Greenpeace, kangaroos don’t release as much methane gas as cows do.

—Morgan Winters 

(Thanks, Shameless Carnivore.)

Think everybody who drives a hybrid car must either be a hypocritical celeb or a guilt-ridden boomer? Think again. The U.S. Army has been fiddling with hybrid cars to make the next generation of fuel-efficient military vehicles, says this army researcher. Maybe the military is as sick of the Hummer as the rest of us are.

Thanks, ecogeek! —Brendan Mackie

After years of toiling as a deliveryman, Susumu Hashimoto of Japan was finally able to fulfill a lifelong dream: he bought land for farming and began practicing natural agriculture. "I believe the farmer is the closest servant to God," Hashimoto told Lisa M. Hamilton of Orion.

The natural agriculture that Hashimoto practices is based on the philosophies of Mokichi Okada, who believed that healing the world begins with "relearning how to respect life." Natural agriculturists achieve this by creating a strong bond between farmer, land, and consumer. The labor is a mutual responsibility between farmer and consumer in which consumers support the farmers any way they can, from collecting payments to picking weeds.

Followers of this practice trust that the Earth will provide, and they, in turn, surrender to their environment. The food produced on this land is not only a means of sustenance, but also a shared sacrament. –Cara Binder