Reduce

The New York Times reports today that increasing demand for plant oils is causing food prices to spike worldwide. And John Gray argues in The Guardian that Bushies and environmentalists alike are too focused on switching to alternative fuel sources. Gray's headlining claim is that we need "the technologies we fear", primarily nuclear power, to stave off global warming. However, his argument rests on the observation that "the most fundamental fact about the environmental crisis [...] is that it cannot be resolved without a major reduction in our impact on the Earth.

In other words, eco shopping and wind farms are just a small part of the equation; a bigger part is reducing consumption of fuel and the manufactured goods that require more fuel for production and transportation.

Fair Trade Salvage Furniture

My neighborhood Gristede's is now carrying fair trade sugar. Better yet, in the midst of trying to get a new (to me)* book case I stumbled across Bazaar de la Paz, which imports furniture from Indonesia made out of salvaged wood, with fittings made of salvaged brass. The company is also certified as complying with fair trade practices, and is replanting forests to become carbon neutral. Beautiful furniture you can feel really good about buying: check 'em out.


*Used is even better: it keeps something out of the landfill and avoids the various ecological costs of new production, including shipping of components and the finished product as well as the various chemicals used in manufacture. But after weeks of combing Craig's List, I wasn't coming up with a whole lot other than Ikea particleboard, and ten years out of grad school, I'm trying to stop living like a student.

Foiled

The good folks at the 181st Street Beautification Project have put up signs: the compost bins are full, and they can't take any more compost until spring. Not only was I going to start composting again (I fell off the ... barrel ... last fall), but I was going to get a little exercise by walking over there to drop off my apple cores and beet peels four or five days a week.

Wrote a letter today to New Jersey Governor Corzine, asking him to spend some of the increase in roads taxes to improve service on New Jersey Transit train and bus lines. If you want to get people off the roads, there has to be a viable alternative, and two hours and forty-five minutes one way to get from my home in Manhattan to my job 65 miles away in New Jersey isn't viable.

The Fife Diet

The idea started in Canada, and now it's been adopted by a family in Scotland, where people are more conscious than we here in the US about the consequences for global warming of air-freighting strawberries between hemispheres: eat only food grown within 100 miles of one's home. If it can be done in Scotland--in the winter!--it ought to be possible here in NYC. Especially with the help of a large freezer and some planning ahead during the summer months. I'm going to have to try to get the family on board.

"Web Log" Turns Ten

The BBC reports today that Jorn Barger created the term "Web Log" ten years ago to refer to his regularly updated collection of links. Given that definition, it turns out I'm not ten years behind the times after all; I started my own web page collection of links interesting to me some time late in the last century, and I did update it periodically, if not daily. But having just started my own Blog, in the current meaning of the term, it's a bit dismaying to read that there are now at least 70 million of them out there. Moreover:

Technorati, which keeps an eye on the blogosphere, estimates that there are now 120,000 new blogs being created every day. Posts are being added to blogs at a rate of 17 per second - a total of 1.5 million per day, says the firm.

This makes the chance that I'll find readership for this blog seem rather remote.

Climate Change

The New York Times has been covering the climate talks in Indonesia for the past several days, often running the story at the top of the web edition. on line at the moment concerns climate talks on-going in Indonesia. Articles note that the Bush administration has been sharply criticized for its reluctance to make any substantial commitments to limiting the use of fossil fuels and, therefore, to the release of greenhouse gases that warm the planet.

Yet the paper also provides a helpful list of "The 53 Places to Go in 2008" (published December 9). The top ten: Laos, Lisbon, Tunisia, Mauritius, Miami (Mid-Beach and South Beach), Maldives, Death Valley, Courchevel, and Libya. Among the remaining 43 places, just four are in the United States: San Francisco, Detroit, San Diego, and (at 53rd place) New York.

Without apparent irony, the article comments: "The ice-capped peak of Kilimanjaro, Africa's highest mountain, is melting at an alarming rate. Within several decades, scientists predict, the glaciers will have completely disappeared" and then goes on to comment: Expect more adventure seekers to tackle the climb next year: One outfitter, International Mountain Guides, has seven trips scheduled for 2008."

The article does not mention the amount of fossil fuels burned in traveling to the remote places on the list, nor of the local impact of increased tourism on already fragile environments. Air travel is a major culprit in global warming for various reasons, including huge amounts of fuel burned, the impact on the upper atmosphere of contrails (those trailing lines you can see following airplanes through the sky), and the vast increases in numbers of flights in the past few decades.

The Times has published plenty of articles and op-ed pieces about climate change. But there's not a lot of attention to individual responsibility, in terms of the decisions the little people make day in and day out, year in and year out, and the impact of those decisions on the earth. In the article "Study Details How U.S. Could Cut 28% of Greenhouse Gases," published last month, Matthew L. Wald focuses on regulatory change that would force consumers and government bodies to reduce energy consumption.

These are important points. Moreover, town and city management should focus on encouraging rather than discouraging walking, cycling and use of public transit. But there's another major piece of the puzzle: Individuals, and especially those who are well-off or relatively so, need to take responsibility for reducing their own carbon footprint.

The editors of the Times ought to be using their considerable informational power to encourage individual choices that reduce energy use, rather than suggesting travel itineraries that will only contribute to global warming.

Electric Bug

The idea sounded simple, and the instructions were clear enough. They involved two short pieces of wire, a flashlight bulb, a C battery, pipe cleaners, and some stiff paper. One piece of wire gets taped to the negative end of the battery and up along the side of the battery; the other piece gets wound around the bulb which then gets taped onto the positive end of the battery. The other ends of the wires stick out the top: antennae; the pipe cleaners and stiff paper get cut down and attached as legs and wings. (I departed from protocol and used duct tape for the wings to match the completely duct-tape-covered battery/body.) The kid is supposed to touch the two antennae to various household objects and see if the "nose" lights up to learn about conductivity.

How hard can it be?

How hard can it be to get the rounded bottom of the flashlight bulb to stay aligned with the round protrusion from the top of the battery?

With a kid poking and prodding and asking if it's done yet?

Well, it's done. The bulb is wiggly, but it is possible to wiggle it back into place. The conductivity testing part of the project was over in minutes and I found the thing lying around on the kitchen floor this morning.

This is why I don't home-school.