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Challenges and Advancements in Solar Cooking
Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
We recently got a note from someone who runs a volunteer agency in rural Kenya. She was writing about the benefits of solar cookers for villagers, and wondering why such a simple and potentially transformative existing technology has not been taken up more widely in place of traditional wood-fired cooking.
We published a piece a few years ago about solar cooking, at which time several readers piped up pointing out that while the benefits of this tool for human health and the environment are great, there are serious cultural and social factors inhibiting its adoption; namely, that removing the need for women to collect fuel and tend fire can upset gender roles, and that solar cooking may alter the taste of food, which is fundamentally disruptive to familiar experience.
The email sparked a little internal conversation which seemed worth opening again here, since there are likely a number of you out there with experience designing, distributing or using solar cookers.
(26 Feb 2007)
Cleaner consumption and the low-carbon life
Elisabeth Rosenthal, International Herald Tribune
…a “low-carbon” life will require changes in how we live, some simple, others fundamental, experts say. Such changes are not necessarily onerous, but do require a shift in public consciousness, as well as a willingness to do without conveniences that may now seem essential.
For individuals in the developed world, energy inefficiency and waste are so woven into the fabric of life that it is both very easy and very hard to change. Easy, because when you start to look through the lens of carbon emissions, you see clouds of these greenhouse gases everywhere. Hard, because we are so accustomed to our wasteful ways that we hardly notice them.
Some examples:
Last month, in New York City, I ordered a coffee at a deli, which was delivered to me in a paper cup, with a plastic lid, in a paper bag, with a pile of napkins, in a plastic bag. Millions of other people in New York start each morning in the same way. Most of that material is dumped in trash bins where it cannot be recycled and so is incinerated or sent to landfill.
Packaging is a major source of unnecessary emissions. When Hewlett- Packard changed to lighter, simpler packaging for its printer cartridges last week, it predicted an energy savings equivalent to getting 3,500 cars off the road for a year.
(22 Feb 2007)
Surprisingly enlightened article to appear in the mainstream media. -BA
Making green computing even greener
Gar Lipow, Gristmill
Jerome Woody writes about green computing. That raises the question: What would it take to make computers truly sustainable?
The first thing to note is that while we do need to consider the energy computers use in operation, it is dwarfed by what it takes to make them in the first place. Back in 2004, Eric Williams estimated that more than 80 percent of the energy a computer will use during its lifetime is consumed during manufacture [1]. To gain perspective on the total impact of computer manufacture (rather than just greenhouse emissions): the fossil fuels burned and water polluted during manufacture of a computer system typically weigh more than an SUV.
How do we reduce this?
There is some good news. Many of the right things to do in terms of operating energy also reduce manufacturing energy. For example, LCD monitors not only consume less energy in operation than CRTs, they also require less energy to manufacture [2].
…Lastly, we can achieve a great deal by extending computer lifespans. I doubt the predictions of an average two-year lifespan for computers ever quite came true, but there is no doubt that we throw away our computers awfully soon. Make computers with easier to open cases, and roomier bays. (Dell and many other manufacturers already do this.) Limit software license restrictions that forbid selling obsolete computers with old, obsolete software. That will encourage “second lives” for business computers that are currently scrapped to avoid copyright liabilities.
Make manufacturers liable for recycling computers at the end of their lives (as in Europe). This will encourage both longer lifespans and easier-to-recycle computers.
Though I’ve placed it last, increasing computer lifespan may be the single most important way to lower manufacturing impact.
(26 Feb 2007)
Peak Moment: Local Currencies: Replacing Scarcity with Trust
Janaia Donaldson, Peak Moment
Francis Ayley established over a dozen local currencies in the UK before moving to the U.S. He contrasts our standard, scarcity- and debt-based money system with local currencies in which “there’s always as much as you need.” Local currencies like his Fourth Corner Exchange issue money when members trade goods and services. Communities with local currencies will be less affected when recession or depression hits the mainstream economy. Episode 49.
(5 Feb 2007)
Report of change
Aaron Nuline, Powering Down
Human beings will continue to invest in and conform to the laws of large scale hierarchical systems despite the growing obviousness that such systems do damage both to individuals and our society as a whole. That is, we will continue doing what we’re doing until one of three things happens:
a. The rules of the natural world are fully enforced by the strictest of madams, Ms. Mother Nature.
b. Human beings are able to fully utilize consciousness and the extraordinary amount of information currently available to us to respond appropriately with change in advance of the coming culmination of problems that have been set in motion.
c. Something I can not foresee will happen.
What surprises me is that so many people want to talk about c. Not many people want to consider the first thought, that a large-scale die-off is possible post petroleum where many or even most human beings perish. I admit it’s a scary thought and I like to think it is only a very remote possibility, but mass extinction events are not out of the ordinary, historically speaking. It seems like few people want to consider the second possibility either, that we have the tools and the talents to work together to mitigate the ill effects of industrialization, including but not limited to: our addiction to fossil fuels that are about to enter into declining availability, large scale pollution of our air and water, massive losses and degradation of soils, climate change as a result of global warming, world hunger and widespread social injustice. It seems like we just want to close our eyes and hope it will be alright.
So the gloom and doomers have no hope and the green gadget people are overly optimistic, just waiting to buy the next product that will save the day. It seems to me that the work of people who don’t fall into these categories, who are worried and fearful about what’s coming ’round the corner but not ready to write off all human future existence, their work is to share a message of appropriate action.
(24 Feb 2007)
Lost in the bush 40 minutes from Auckland
New Zealand Herald
It takes just 40 minutes to drive from Auckland city to the place where the wild things are.
To an outsider, it is like arriving in Eden, or on a film set, or a 19th-century rural time warp.
Hidden down a winding gravel road, it is a stunning secret – 100 hectares of nikau palms and manuka, pukeko and a clutch of brown-skinned kids running wild on the riverbanks. It is where panelbeater Alan Chapman carved out a unique home in a patch of wet bush with his German-born love, Inge, in 1987.
They ate smoked goat meat, fern roots and fruit, keeping to themselves and shunning the trappings of modern life. Their first home was made of nikau fronds.
Now, 20 years later, Inge Chapman is a widow and mother of 10 children, living in the couple’s sixth home – tiny even by bach standards.
(25 Feb 2007)
