Hillary Johnson's blog

I came across this New York graffiti artist who works in moss, of all things, while perusing Inhabitat. her work reminds me of that of one of my favorite artists, Andy Goldsworthy, who makes art simply by moving things around in nature, and then photographing the oddly moving results--wet leaves plastered on a rock, sculptures made of icicles, etc.

Kate Coe has an excellent article up in Grist, describing a press conference she attended for the new eco-blockbuster, The 11th Hour. Coe describes the string of easy, vacuous questions lobbed at the film's star, Leo DiCaprio, and when it's her turn, asks if the film was made with union labor. Without discounting the falue of the film or the sincerity of DiCaprio's efforts, she raises the excellent question of whether it is any more ethical for a do-good film production company to use non-union workers than any other Hollywood film.

If ecological ventures arent's subjected to the same rules as any other venture, aren't we implying that they can't hold up in the free market? Coe is absolutely right that if we don't hold environmentalists to the same standards to which we hold industrialists, then they will never compete in the marketplace of ideas, let alone in a real-world economy. It's a fine thing to donate film profits to charity, but shouldn't a film about ethical, sustainable practices be ethically and sustainably made, meaning that the people who worked on it earned a fair wage? This isn't about picking on DiCaprio or the producers, but about questioning the basis on which we act as environmentalists--if we act like we're above profit, then we imply that there's no such thing as an ethical marketplace, and in doing so we marginalize ourselves at the same time that we fail to practice what we preach.

There's a nice post up at Green Options about planned energy-efficient communities around the country. Check it out! But it got me to musing about whatever happened to the town of Celebration, Florida, which Disney built as a planned idyllic community in 1994. Turns out the town was quietly sold off to a developer, and is now apparently just another suburb.  It's interesting how our notions of what constitutes the "perfect town" have changed in so few years....

I found an interesting item on the Green Options blog today, citing a study from a Minneapolis think tank that claims small, local power sources are more efficient than consolidated power plants: 

The “Economies and Diseconomies of Scale” concludes that bigger is not always better. The Minneapolis-based ILSR analyzed the costs and return of wind power and ethanol, both major renewable energy sources in the Upper Midwest. While they are both less expensive to produce on a large scale, the costs of having to transmit the energy across long distances can negate those savings. That, coupled with the fact that large projects are generally owned by corporate or out-of-state interests, makes smaller, local projects more beneficial for the immediate community.

This reminds me of work the Rocky Mountain Institute has been doing for years, advocating a distributed power grid, which has the added benefit of being more secure, ie, less disruptable by forces of nature or forces of evil.

A chemical used in the manufacture of food packaging, bisphenol A, has recently been shown to cause all sorts of ill effects in infants:

...everyone who drinks from hard plastic bottles or eats canned food has minute amounts of this hormone-like chemical in their bodies.

Now, a federal advisory panel is warning that the chemical could be causing neurological and behavior effects in unborn babies and young children.

Bisphenol A is a high production volume chemical used in the production of polycarbonate plastics and epoxy resins.

Polycarbonate plastics are used in food and drink packaging; resins are used as lacquers to coat metal products such as food cans, bottle tops, and water supply pipes.

When I was in India, the roadside chai shops used to serve beverages in disposable clay cups that looked a bit like tiny flowerpots. I can't vouch for the safety of the clay, which may for all I know have been full of pesticides and what have you, but it seemed an elegant solution to the very real need for disposable drinking vessels. And as usual, the healthier solution is also the more aesthetically pleasing one...

National Geographic's The Green Guide: This is one of the easier-to-navigate sites to cover our favorite topic, broken down by rooms of the house. Each section includes a general magazine-style article, a video and a product guide. Their quizzes are fun and you get information and feedback after each answer.

Okay, this is a bit off topic, but it's too outlandish not to mention: The government of Thailand has launched the world's first environmental satellite, according to Lime.  The satellite will help Thai government agencies monitor crops, and also to track illegal logging and spot the cultivation of opium poppies.  Big Green Brother? Maybe so, but they say you can't fool Mother Nature anyway. 

image sxc.hu 

I just stumbled on a quite well-constructed Environmental Voting Guide, which lists local races state by state and collects information like endorsements from environmental groups and links to voting records, etc. It's part of a site called Grinning Planet, which purports to be an environmental humor site, but is, aside from the voting guide, completely unnavigable and about as funny as a Hallmark greeting card (see the pic), so far as I can tell!

After watching the presidential debates last night, with Anderson Cooper's product placement-esque repeated mentions of YouTube, I can see that online video has found itself. But why hasn't internet radio caught on more than it already has? Downloadable audio is cheap to produce, consumes little bandwidth, and best of all, can be consumed while jogging.

It is too bad, then, that programs like Air America's EcoTalk are closing down rather than thriving. But then I stumbled upon Planet Check, which is a slickly produced (in a good way) online radio program that is doing something smart, which is syndicating their green lifestyle content, aimed at rock 'n roll listeners, to local AM and FM radio stations, and also making it available for listening on their website. Right now, they have loads of stuff on bio-diesel, oceans and forests, and the punk rockers who love them. I'd love to see (or rather hear) their version of MTV cribs--rockers talking about their green digs....

If you live in the Bay Area, EcoTuesday, featured below, is a social event that takes place in San Francisco. Green Drinks is an international organization with local monthly gatherings everywhere from Fargo to Finland. Why not start one where you live? A great resource for starting special intrest groups is MeetUp.com, where you can organize and publicize your own group, or find groups that already exist. A quick search for "green building" turns up Green Home Mondays in Forest Park, IL, Green Lifestyle in SW Florida, and the Chicago Natural Building Group, among others.