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Easy and Fun Ways to Help Save the Planet: Sustainable Practices from the NASCO Eco-Sustainability Caucus
The Co-opers Do It Cleaner Post

I went to a meeting tonight at the annual North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO) meeting in the Michigan Union. We discussed sustainable options in communities. Here are some of the highlights from what we threw around in the round table (we were actually sitting on the floor).

A Worm Box

Throw your bread crusts, egg shells and other kitchen scraps (no citrus) into the a bin full of earthworms. Weeks later everything is earthworm casts.

For the houseplants in your life, use three bins. Stack them one above the other. Punch holes in the bottoms of the top two. Once a week, add a liter of water. Keeps the "soil" moist. Makes the worms happy. You get nutrient water for your plants.

If only your narrator had a house. They say that if you do it right, things don't stink.

An Eco-Fund

You a student? Work somewhere? Put some money in a fund to buy solar panels, windmills, or other energy-saving devices. Get your employer/principal/ruler to invest the money--or even just a portion of the money--saved from the device. The account will grow. As the account grows, you can buy more cost/energy/earth-saving devices. Neat idea, eh?

Thinking of Buying a Solar Panel? Experts say it takes as much energy to manufacture one as you'll ever get out of it. Plus there's a waiting list for buying them because there's a shortage of silicon. So do something with passive solar instead.

Your Power Company Can Help You Get Greener

Contact your power company to see about paying a little extra ($5-10) to contribute to a wind/solar/tidal power generator bank. This is an easy way to ensure that all the electricity you use comes from renewable sources. And you don't have to mess with any of the technology yourself.

For a roof with no toxic run-off, use baked galvinized steel.


A Fun Experiment


Teachers, here's an idea to show the connection between consumption and waste. For one week, have your students carry all the trash they generate. First it's confined to pockets. Then backpacks. Perhaps even garbage bags. Makes you think twice before taking that plastic fork with your cinna-bon (guilty as described). One of my friends collected his garbage for a whole year.

Paper or plastic? Neither.

posted by JJW 9:14 PM

 

Earth Headed for Global Warming Catastrophe
(Michael T. Neuman , Madison Independent Media Center)
[NOTE: This is only a summary of a lengthly article that is complete with many links to substantiating material. Click the link above for the full story.]

A leading worldwide climate research institute in Hamburg, Germany predicted last week that the Earth is heading for a climate catastrophe in the next 100 years, with sea ice in the North Pole region predicted to completely melt in summer and extreme weather events increasing in both frequency and strength. . . . According to the climate prediction calculations of scientists at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, over the next century the climate will change more quickly than it ever has in the recent history of the earth. . . . As a consequence of the higher buildup of greenhouse "heat-trapping" gases in the atmosphere, the global mean temperature rises. The scientists expect that under certain conditions, sea ice in the arctic will completely melt. In Europe, summers will be drier and warmer, and this will affect agriculture. The winters will become warmer and wetter. Another consequence of the heated atmosphere will be extreme events like heavy precipitation with floods. Sea level could rise on average by as many as 30 centimeters. . . . Expressing concern at the findings, Klaus Toepfer, who heads of the United Nations Environment Program, said that the study's results underlined the need to address the issue immediately, especially in wake of recent anomalies shown by the weather throughout the world. . . . In Alaska last week, satellite images released by two US universities and the space agency NASA revealed that the amount of sea-ice cover over the polar ice cap has fallen dramatically over the past four years. . . . This summer, the legendary Northwest Passage through the Canadian Arctic from Europe to Asia was completely open except for a 60-mile swath of scattered ice floes. In earlier centuries, whole expeditions were lost as their crews tried to beat through thick ice and bitter cold. The Northeast Passage, north of the Siberian coast, was completely ice-free from August 15 through September 28. . . . Since the ocean is able to store large amounts of heat, the sea level will continue to rise even after the concentrations of the different greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are not increasing any more. . . . The trend in sea ice decline, lack of winter recovery, early onset of spring melting, and warmer-than-average temperatures suggest a system that is trapped in a loop of positive feedbacks, in which responses to inputs into the system cause it to shift even further away from normal . . . One of these positive feedbacks centers on increasingly warm temperatures. Serreze explained that as sea ice declines because of warmer temperatures, the loss of ice is likely to lead to still-further ice losses. Sea ice reflects much of the sun's radiation back into space, whereas dark ice-free ocean absorbs more of the sun's energy. As sea ice melts, Earth's overall albedo, the fraction of energy reflected away from the planet, decreases. The increased absorption of energy further warms the planet. . . . "Almost everywhere on earth, the forestry industry will have to husband different types of trees than it has until now", says Dr. Erich Roeckner, the project leader of the model calculations in Hamburg. . . . Of even more significance than the impacts of global warming on forestry will be the impacts on the world's animal populations. . . . four out of five migratory birds listed by the UN face problems ranging from lower water tables to increased droughts, spreading deserts and shifting food supplies in their crucial "fuelling stations" as they migrate; one-third of turtle nesting sites in the Caribbean - home to diminishing numbers of green, hawksbill and loggerhead turtles - would be swamped by a sea level rise of 50cm (20ins); shallow waters used by the endangered Mediterranean monk seal, dolphins, dugongs and manatees will slowly disappear; whales, salmon, cod, penguins and kittiwakes are being affected by shifts in distribution and abundance of krill and plankton, which has declined in places to a hundredth or thousandth of former numbers because of warmer sea-surface temperatures; and fewer chiffchaffs, blackbirds, robins and song thrushes are migrating from the UK due to warmer winters while egg-laying is also getting two to three weeks earlier than 30 years ago, showing a change in the birds' biological clocks. . . . Stranded polar bears are drowning in large numbers as they try to swim hundreds of miles to find increasingly scarce ice floes. Local hunters find their corpses floating on seas once coated in a thick skin of ice. . . . Last year, hunters found half a dozen bears that had drowned about 200 miles north of Barrow, on Alaska's northern coast. "It seems they had tried to swim for shore ... A polar bear might be able to swim 100 miles but not 400." . . . "Global warming is a reality for the Inuit. They see major changes affecting their lifestyle, with earlier springs, warmer summers and later falls", says Arctic explorer Will Steger. . . . And now there is evidence that polar bears are facing an unusual competitor - the grizzly bear. As the sub-Arctic tundra and wastelands thaw, the grizzly is moving north, colonizing areas where they were previously unable to survive. Life for Alaska's polar bears is rapidly becoming very precarious. . . . Already listed as "critically endangered", only about 700 mountain gorillas, including the distinctively marked adult male silverbacks, migrate within the cloud forests of the volcanic Virunga mountains of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Uganda. After a century of human persecution it faced extinction. Now its unique but marginal mountain forests - already heavily reduced by forestry - are shrinking, because of climate change. It will be forced to climb higher for cooler climates, but will effectively run out of mountain. . . . In many areas, it is the increase in extreme weather events that has posed the greatest environmental as well as economic threat. Scientists nationwide have recently compiled evidence suggesting the intensity and frequency of hurricanes are related to global warming. Several studies recently published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Georgia Tech's School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences show that there is a significant statistical relationship between the number of Category 4 and 5 hurricanes in the past few decades and the overall rising temperature of the ocean. . . . The decimation Hurricane Katrina has brought to Louisiana, Mississippi and parts of Alabama has sparked increasing scientific concerns about the threat of global warming to the United States. According to the National Climate Data System, Hurricane Katrina was one of the strongest storms to impact the coast of the United States during the last 100 years. Katrina's losses, in terms of human lives and social-economic property loss, have yet to be fully tabulated. As of Monday, the death toll in Louisiana alone stood at 964. . . . Yet many people in the U.S. remain uninformed or misinformed about the threat of global warming and the urgency of dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions from all sources in the U.S., which emits fully one-quarter of the world's greenhouse gases from human activity. The American corporation funded media and government at all levels in the U.S. have abdicated their responsibilities to proper inform citizens of the United States of the growing crisis of global warming and the need for swift and magnanimous action to slow it before the grave threats associated with it become reality. Corporate controlled media and government in the U.S. have become overly influenced by lobbyists for the oil, coal and fossil fuel dependent industries who have a vested interest in not slowing down fuel burning. As a result, many Americans have been misled into believing the severity of the global warming problem is less than what the scientific community has been predicting since 1995 when the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published its first report that recognizes the problem.

"Unless we change direction, we are likely to end up where we are headed." - Chinese proverb

posted by LoZo 9:31 AM