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For all of you bird watching and naturalists out there, you must check out the lively posts and OUTSTANDING PHOTOS on The Brownstone Birding Blog, written by a Connecticut native with an interest in birding who shares his adventures in the great Connecticut outdoors.
The Director of Earth Policy Institute, Lester Brown, said on Treehugger.com, "the industry has done a real con job on the American public. I mean, designer water? Water that we pay more for than we pay for gasoline or for milk? We can easily provide the people of the planet with clean water."
So why do we continue to fall for it? In the name of convenience, expert branding, and a unfounded fear that tap water isn't as clean or as nourishing as beautifully packaged bottled water. The thing is, it just may be our false fear of unclean tap water that becomes our self-fulfilling prophecy.
The plastic manufacturing process, along with the fact that we throw away more than 30 billion plastic water bottles a year, (nearly all of which end up in landfills) doesn't bode well for a clean water supply a few decades from now. Especially since the bottled water we drink travels an average 2,500-5,000+ miles to our local store, emitting particulates into the air that fills with moisture and falls to the ground as raindrops into our water table.
All of those billions of tons of carbon emissions that are pumped into the atmosphere and the toxic landfill chemicals that filter back into the water supply as materials such as plastic break down (which takes thousands of years), can all be avoided by drinking from the tap! Go figure.
Twenty-one-year-old Mercedes DeMasi of Redding, Connecticut, has formed a group called Students for Environmental Action at West Connecticut State University. Top on her to-do list--a proposal detailing how the University can reduce its energy consumption by 10 percent within the next year by making small adjustments to day-to-day activities such as switching off lights, turning down thermostats and changing over to CFL bulbs. Her initiative and take-charge attitude also earned her a spot on the university energy council.
Students at Western Connecticut State University who want to join Students for Environmental Action can call Mercedes DeMasi at (203) 938-9016 or e-mail her at kobushihime@hotmail.com
There certainly is a lot to be fearful about these days. Even so, this project has nothing to do with fear. Not only is there "nothing to fear but fear itself," but fear paralyzes us into sitting by idle each day until the end of our lives when we are left to face that which is far worse than even sweaty-palms, lump-in-the-throat-fear----our regret.
The veil of denial about my own personal impact on climate change evaporated while viewing An Inconvenient Truth. I watched with my eyes open wide and dry from not wanting to miss a second. "Before you jump from denial...to despair...stop in the middle...and do something," struck a chord so deep inside that it rolled around, percolated, and echoed in my mind until CTGreenScene was born.
"At present most of us do nothing. We look away. We remain calm. We are silent. We take refuge in the hope that the holocaust won’t happen, and turn back to our individual concerns. We deny the truth that is all around us. Indifferent to the future of our kind, we grow indifferent to one another. We drift apart. We grow cold. We drowse our way to the end of the world. But if once we shook off our lethargy and fatigue and began to act, the climate would change. Just as inertia produces despair—a despair often so deep it does not know itself as despair—arousal and action would give us access to hope, and life would start to mend: not just life in its entirety but daily life, every individual life. At that point we would begin to withdraw from our role as both the victims and the perpetrators. …
We would no longer be the destroyers of mankind, but rather, a gateway through which the future generations would enter the world. Then the passion and will that we need to save ourselves would flood into our lives. The walls of indifference, inertia, and coldness that now isolate each of us from others, and all of us from the past and future generations, would melt, like snow in spring. …"
—Jonathan Schell, The Fate of the Earth
It's Back-to-School and what better time to kick off a great year by starting a school-wide recycling program! Check out these tips from Treehugger.com
1. Find out who else in your school is passionate about recycling and is willing to help!
2. Decide what can be recycled in your school district. Items such as paper, plastic, printer cartridges, batteries or clothing are all fair game.
3. Form a recycling club to be responsible for the program.
4. Determine who will get the recyclables to the transfer station. Some potential candidates include custodians, parents, volunteers or in many areas the trash company or town itself.
5. Decide where to store your schools recyclables until transport.
6. Find out how many classroom, lounge and cafeteria recycling containers will be needed, and then raise money for their purchase.
7. Have committee or club members make presentations to each classroom about the importance of recycling.
8. Weigh and measure recyclables and post this information for the entire school to see to encourage more recycling.
9. Hold contests and competitions between grade levels or classrooms to see who can recycle the most.
10. Find fun things to do with the funds raised by collecting bottle-return money!
11. Write to CTGreenScene and let us know how you made out!!!
Thanks to this post on Treehugger.com, we've discovered that our wish for kids books that deal with issues of sustainability has come true.
"There’s a couple of new books out for kids that have just been released by the Eden Project, gotten some great reviews, and may be a terrific addition to a school library or home collection. After all, what better than a classroom or bedtime story with a positive message about protecting the environment?
The first is George Saves the World by Lunchtime, by Jo Readman and Ley Honor Roberts which features a boy named George, his sister, dog, and grandfather. The message to kids being that yes, you can help save the world through simple everyday actions such as repairing items that are broken and recycling regularly as his grandfather teaches him throughout the book.
The second book being The World Came To My Place Today. It’s been written by the same pair of authors with the same set of characters, but discusses where everyday household items actually come from. And with most kids today probably suspecting all good things come from stores while completely missing the connection with the environment that actually provides them, I suspect that helping kids understand their personal impact on the environment is tops on the list of teachers and parents everywhere. Happy Reading!"
The Ocean Conservancy’s 22nd annual International Coastal Cleanup will involve hundreds of thousands of volunteers around the globe on Saturday, September 15, 2007.
Locally, volunteers of the Norwalk River Watershed Association [NRWA], Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, other groups, and members of the public are encouraged to participate in “pollution prevention” by teaming up to remove trash from our region of the Long Island Sound’s shoreline. Trash removed from the shore saves marine animals’ lives and can improve water quality, and so Ed Holowinko of NRWA will be at Norwalk’s Veteran’s Park at 9 AM to organize local volunteers who want to take part in this global effort. Please call Ed at 203.852.7187 to register your interest. Volunteers working for three hours will satisfy the hands-on component required to earn the Norwalk River Watershed Patch. Visit www.norwalkriver.org for details.
For people who wish to work in other geographic locations, online registration may be done at the Ocean Conservancy’s website; visit www.oceanconservancy.org, and click on the International Coastal Cleanup “Register Now” box. Boaters who can clean up coastal islands and boat ramp areas are especially appreciated!
Governor M. Jodi Rell has introduced a new state law, Public Act 07-189, that creates a mandatory recycling program for certain major electronic appliances such as computers and televisions, slated to begin in 2009, Government Technology reports.
Under the law, manufacturers of those devices will have to register with the state Department of Environmental Protection, starting in 2009, and pay an annual fee that DEP will use to administer the recycling program. Also in 2009, cities and towns will be required to begin providing for the recycling of the affected devices, including making arrangements for collection and transportation of the devices to a DEP-approved recycler.
The new law specifically exempts certain smaller electronic devices from the recycling requirement, including cell phones, PDAs, calculators and pagers, computers or TVs that are parts of a motor vehicle or household appliance, home telephones (unless they have a video display larger than 4 inches diagonally) and devices that are part of equipment used in an industrial, commercial or medical setting.
Source: EnvironmentalLeader.com
Special thanks to Colin Beavan for helping me compute 2 plus 2. You can find this video clip and other great stuff on his No Impact Man blog.Energy Star homes are built for maximum energy efficiency and includes things like installing insulating windows and doors, using super-insulation in walls and roofs, installing Energy Star appliances, and sealing ductwork, windows and other potential leaky areas. Luckily, there are rebates and financial incentives for building Energy Star in Connecticut. Perhaps that's why they're catching on. Want to save money, help the environment and build or remodel Energy Star?
Connecticut rated among the top 15 states for new Energy Star homes, and nearly 200,000 new homes nationwide earned the Energy Star in 2006, bringing the total number of Energy Star qualified homes across the nation to almost 750,000, according to the EPA. To date, these homes have locked in annual savings of more than $180 million for homeowners by saving over 1 billion kWh of electricity and 100 million therms of natural gas.
Energy Star homes are least 15 percent more energy efficient than homes built to the 2004 International Residential Code, and include additional energy-saving features that typically make them 20 to 30 percent more efficient than standard homes. Build more efficiently--it just makes sense.
Source: environementalleader.com
Lest we invent more "bandaid solutions" to global warming that may have an even bigger negative impact on the planet, it pays to do a little research before jumping on the biofuel bandwagon...as I was so apt to do!
According to the Sierra Club, "biofuels can be made from nearly any organic material, but corn, which is the source of 95 percent of U.S. ethanol, would reduce global warming emissions only about 15 percent on average compared to gasoline. Cellulosic ethanol, made from switchgrass, slash, and agricultural byproducts, could cut emissions by more than 90 percent. But it's not commercially available. And then there's sugarcane ethanol, which is booming in Brazil, soybean biodiesel, and cooking grease biodiesel, even biodiesel made from algae -- all with their various pros and cons.
Want help separating the wheat from the chaff? Check out "Bio-hope, Bio-hype" in the most recent issue of Sierra, complete with a useful chart comparing six different biofuels."
Source: Sierra, August 2007
