It seems that more and more Americans are interested in conserving water—but shorter showers only go so far. It’s time to take the next step: Green the plumbing industry!

That’s the approach of GreenPlumbers USA, which is currently featured in our sister publication Natural Home. Adapted from a very successful program in Australia, GreenPlumbers USA trains plumbers in a variety of conservation techniques, “everything from solar hot water to how to conduct a detailed, 50-point water audit on homes and businesses,” says director Megan Lehtonen.

Top to bottom—manufacturers, wholesalers, contractors and plumbers—the entire industry needs to adapt to new technology and conservation procedures. For us, culture change means plumbers stepping up and taking the responsibility to become champions of conservation. America needs to save water, and the plumbing industry needs to be part of the solution.

More than 3,000 plumbers have taken the program’s 32-hour coarseload thus far, and Lehtonen expects to train at least 50,000 more in the next few years. “It’s really inspiring for us when a 50-year-old plumber gets excited about his trade all over again,” she says. “And you know that he will go out and be a representative for change.”

Source: Natural Home

Image by jrob86, licensed under Creative Commons.

Environmentalists are butting heads over the fate of the ancient Maya Forrest in Guatemala, according to Earth Island Journal. A confusing patchwork of governmental regulations is creating animosity and disagreement on how best to protect the 3,000 endemic species of plants and animals, the priceless artifacts inside the park, and the economic rights of the people who live there.

The government has given permits to locals for low-level, sustainable logging in the area in an effort to curb the massive deforestation inside the park. Some environmentalists insist that including locals in this way is the best way to proceed, because it gives people a stake in the environmental sustainability of the area. Others insist that stricter regulations are needed to promote international ecotourism, an effort that has been cast as “a misbegotten colonialist effort to strip Guatemalans of their jobs working the land, forcing them to drive buses and change bedsheets in tourist hotels.”

Either way, most people agree that the current path for the Maya Forrest is unsustainable. The Rainforest Alliance, for example, estimates that a quarter of the forest could disappear by 2025.

Source: Earth Island Journal 

Image by Willem van Bergen, licensed under Creative Commons.

Public wildlands such as parks and reserves are great—but they’re not enough to save the world’s flora and fauna from mass extinction due to climate change. To do that, writes Jeff Langholz in the September-October issue of World Watch, it will take private landowners with a conservation ethic.

Langholz suggests that we must formally protect around 20 percent of the earth’s land, and the only way to do this is to promote privately owned protected areas:

In many regions, the most critical biodiversity areas are in private hands, and hoping that governments will simply expropriate them—despite the legal, social, and political obstacles—is absurd. Instead of leaving protected-area establishment primarily to governments, we should stimulate a robust private-sector investment in protected-area creation.

There are many types of private landowners, Langholz points out, and they’re not all “affluent outsiders” like Doug and Kris Tompkins, who created the private Parque Pumalín reserve in Chile (pictured). Some are families whose lands have been in the family for generations. Some are nonprofits such as land trusts or for-profits such as corporations. And of course some are environmental organizations such as the Nature Conservancy and Audubon. Furthermore, these lands vary widely in the type of protection, from informal to formal. But Langholz suggests that they are essential, and that the conversation about them is changing:

John Stuart Mill commented that every great movement must go through three phases: ridicule, discussion, then adoption. Once ridiculed by the mainstream, the private protected areas movement is now the focus of considerable high-level discussion. The immense challenges facing society require that these discussions not only continue, but lead to concerted action.

Source: World Watch (article not available online)

Conservationists in the Ngorongoro Crater, a Tanzanian National Park, are searching for a compromise with the area’s native Maasai tribes, whose survival and longstanding traditions depend on killing lions.

The park’s protected lions are crossing Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA) borders and killing Maasai livestock during dry seasons. The Maasai orchestrate “revenge killings” in retaliation. Ceremonial group lion hunts are also a Maasai rite of passage.

But, “the resulting death rate threatens two of the four prides in the NCA,” writes Cheryl Lyn Dybas in the July issue of The Scientist:

Maasai graze their livestock in open pastures during the day, when one to three herdsmen—who are often very young—protect the cattle against lions. Cattle losses to lions  could be reduced if adults rather than children served as guards. Another solution: replacing wooden barriers with chain-link fencing in village corrals.

Source: The Scientist, Maasai Association 

Image by Frederic.Salein, licensed under Creative Commons.

The technology firm AgriHouse has figured out a way to let plants send text messages when they need more water, IEEE Spectrum reports. The tiny sensors clip onto plant leaves and calculate the plants moisture. Then, when the plant gets too dry, the sensors a text the farmers. I envision it probably saying something like this:

OMG, I needs drink, pls.

Considering the roughly 129 billion liters of water consumed every day by commercial agriculture in the United States, AgriHouse believes the sensors could make a dramatic difference in agricultural water consumption.

Source:  IEEE Spectrum  

Dogs, with their highly attuned senses of smell, have been trained to find hidden drugs, bombs, and now endangered species. The Scientist reports that conservationists are training dogs to track down rare species of plants, some of which can be extremely hard for humans to find. Greg Fitzpatrick of the Nature Conservancy is exploring the possibility of using dogs to sniff out the Kincaid’s lupine, an endangered plant that is the one place where the endangered Fender’s blue butterfly lays its pin-sized eggs. He plans on submitting the results to conservation biology journals shortly.

You can watch a video of a dog searching out the rare Kincaid's lupine plant below:

Image by  Mark Hanna , licensed under  Creative Commons .

Source: The Scientist 

It’s a quintessentially American idea: Motivate people to conserve by turning green living into a competitive sport—that is if you consider vying with your neighbors to claim the lowest monthly utility bill a sport. The New York Times reports on a new trend among utility companies to include a report card, of sorts, on customers’ bills that ranks their energy use against their neighbors’, complete with smiley faces for those using the least energy. In Sacramento, the ranking system has been more effective than offering incentives like rebates. Similarly, Sustainablog recently highlighted a competition catching on at universities called RecycleMania, in which schools compete to recycle the most and minimize the amount of waste created on campus. According to a RecycleMania press release, the idea is simple: “By framing recycling in competitive terms, RecycleMania taps the same intercollegiate spirit that drives sports rivalries.”

(Thanks, World Changing.)

Sources: New York Times, Sustainablog, World Changing

 Image by Peter Kaminski, licensed under Creative Commons.

In an unusual collaboration, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive, and the conservation group Rare teamed up with individual artists to draw attention to eight United Nation World Heritage Sites, reports Orion magazine. All of the sites are threatened in some way—by lack of funding, floods of tourism, climate change, and a host of other pressures.

At the outset, many of the artists worried that they’d be forced into unimaginative advocacy work. “I remember thinking, ‘Do they want me to go make work about tortoises?’” said installation artist Ann Hamilton. “I mean, that is not exactly what I do.” But the museums and Rare allowed them room to respond as they saw fit. The resulting pieces highlight local issues in smart, sensitive ways.

Xu Bing, for instance, held workshops in primary schools near his site, Mount Kenya National Park. He told stories and drew pictures with the children to connect them more personally with the park, and then set up a website to auction off their work. The proceeds benefit a local organization that uses the money to replace trees lost to deforestation on Mount Kenya. 

Check out the article to read descriptions of the other projects, watch interviews with the artists, and browse a slideshow of the art. The pieces have been gathered as an exhibit, “Human/Nature: Artists Respond to a Changing Planet,” which is currently on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

Image courtesy of John Spooner, licensed under Creative Commons.    

The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has launched “One Million Acts of Green,” a campaign to mobilize everyone from TV studio execs to kids to commit basic green acts every day. Once you sign up, the site keeps track of your steps, and for every one you take, the website calculates its impact on the environment in kilograms of greenhouse gases saved.

The focus of the project is “not about overhauling your life; it’s about one act from each individual amassing to a million. It can be as simple as switching to compact fluorescent lightbulbs, starting a recycling program, or walking to work. You can do one act—or you can do all one million! It’s up to you… Together we can make an impact. Together we can make our lives, our communities, and our environment greener.”

Acts range from small changes in habit to home renovations, and the tangible impact on the environment gives the sense of working as a community. To date, participants have reported more than 634,000 green acts, saving an estimated 33 million kilograms of greenhouse gases.

The image of a perfect beach usually doesn’t include piles of seaweed and other natural debris. But though it’s not aesthetically pleasing, beach wrack, as those piles are called, is a vital part of a beach’s ecosystem. Grunion, a species of fish, depend on wrack to house their incubating eggs, and other shorebirds forage in wrack for food.

Beach grooming, which scoops up these piles and flattens and redistributes sand, endangers the wrack’s fragile ecosystem and makes the shoreline more vulnerable to erosion. Grooming has been in effect for many of California’s beaches since the 1960s, but only recently did scientists and environmentalists pick up on the importance of a more natural beach look.

Scientists, activists, and beach managers have started to come together to address these concerns, reports Coastal Services. Recent efforts include a ban on grooming below the high tide line, and training workers and managers to recognize and avoid grunion breeding areas. The activist group (in the process of incorporating as the nonprofit Beach Ecology Coalition) is also exploring alternatives to current grooming practices, including seasonal or rotational grooming, hand grooming, or even leaving beaches untouched.

In order to address the potential unhappiness or confusion of the public at the idea of cluttered beaches, the group has launched a campaign to increase awareness of beach ecosystems and how proper action (or inaction) is vital to nature.

Image courtesy of willsfca, licensed under Creative Commons.

When it comes to conservation, all gun rights advocates are not created equal. And according to Pat Wray at High Country News, the National Rifle Association (NRA) is the worst of the worst.

Wray, a life member of the NRA, is running for the organization’s board of directors to try to change that. Wray is a hunter who wants his right to bear arms protected, but he also wants wildlife habitat protected, and at this the NRA is failing miserably, he says.

“The NRA’s ability to take money from hunters and use it in ways that will ultimately ruin hunting constitutes one of the most dishonest public relations campaigns ever perpetrated on the American people,” Wray writes.

Wray goes on to describe politicians the organization has supported, like former Rep. Richard Pombo, Sen. Larry Craig, and President Bush, who have sold off public lands to private companies or removed protections for roadless areas. As a member of the board, Wray says he would “Require the organization to work with politicians who care about the environment, wildlife and wild lands in addition to their support of our Second Amendment rights. The two are not mutually exclusive.”

While Wray tries to change the system from within, the American Hunters and Shooters Association (AHSA) is competing with the NRA from the outside, but with some of the same complaints.

At New West, Bill Schneider calls the AHSA “the bane of the NRA because it’s not just pro-gun but unlike the NRA, also pro-hunter.”

The NRA will spend up to $40 million to defeat Barack Obama this election season. Meanwhile, the AHSA will be throwing its weight—however much that is—behind Obama and emphasizing conservation in its message. As AHSA president Ray Schoenke stated, “Senator Obama’s commitment to conservation and protection of our natural resources and access to public lands demonstrates to us his commitment to America’s hunting and shooting heritage.”

For his part, Obama told Montana voters, “There is not a sportsman or hunter in Montana who is a legal possessor of firearms that has anything to worry about from me.”

Image by Richard Bartz, licensed under Creative Commons.

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.

Vermont’s tradition of frugality has been traced by some observers “to the short growing season, when nothing could be wasted,” writes Kirk Kardashian in the Vermont weekly Seven Days. Through his interviews with Vermont “back-to-the-landers,” Kardashian discovers that members of this otherwise unaffiliated group share an almost Depression-era sense of economy. The simplicity and intentionality of their lifestyles is perhaps more impressive than ever in an era of unparalleled American opulence and consumption.

Vermonter Robert “Dunnz” Dunn tells Kardashian, “I could have bought a BMW, did cocaine, and worked on 128,” referring to a highway outside Boston that’s lined with big engineering firms. “But it seemed like I needed to be one person saying, ‘I don’t want to contribute to the way the country’s going.’”

“If there are any hard and fast rules of New England frugality,” Kardashian concludes from his conversations with this thrift-oriented strain of conservationists, they might be distilled down to these five tenets:

• First: “You shouldn’t buy stuff you don’t need. The old farmers couldn’t buy frivolous things, so they didn’t.”
• Second: “Everybody needs some stuff…If you’ve got to buy something, make it as cheap as possible by amortizing its cost over a score of years.”
• Third: “Heavily research your major acquisitions: Know exactly what you’re buying.”
• Fourth: Buy things that are serviceable. “We always ask: Is it serviceable? If it is, it means we can buy parts and fix it.”
• Fifth: “Take the same conservationist approach to non-mechanical items that don’t break so much as wear out.”

For all but the handiest of us, mending our wares may mean making the acquaintance of our local cobbler. “In the comings and goings of daily life, we walk through soles, we pull off zippers, we come unstitched,” Kardashian writes. “This is where the cobbler comes in—if you can find one.”

—Jason Ericson