Kill all screensavers
Roughtype.com [blog]
Combine an overabundance of computing power with the natural inclination
of corporate functionaries to launch useless initiatives, and you’ve got
a toxic recipe. Case in point: the company screensaver. Yes, I’m serious.
… By preventing monitors and processors from going to sleep, it was sucking up a ton of electricity. He also mentioned that a recent problem with sluggish server performance had been traced to geeky screensavers being run in the corporate data center.
I did some quick research on the electricity issue. A PC with a screensaver going can use well over 100 watts of power, compared with only about 10 watts in sleep mode. An analysis by the University of New Hampshire indicates that if an organization has 5,000 PCs that run screensavers 20 hours a week, the annual power consumed by those screensavers .accounts for emissions of 750,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, 5,858 pounds of sulfur oxide, and 1,544 pounds of nitrogen oxide..
Considering that there are something like 600 million PCs in use today and that it.s not unusual for people to leave screensavers running all night, we’re talking some big, ugly numbers. So turn off those damn screensavers. The life you save may be your own.
(29 November 2005)
Sustainable-ag legend Joel Salatin can farm — but can he write?
Tom Philpott, Grist
Over the past 20 years, Joel Salatin has emerged as a sort of guru of the sustainable-food movement. His 500-acre Polyface Farm in Swoope, Va., is legendary among a small circle of foodies for its robustly flavored beef, pork, chicken, and eggs. Among farmers, Salatin has won cult status for his innovations in multi-species, pasture-based animal husbandry. But readers of his new book, Holy Cows & Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer’s Guide to Farm Friendly Food, won’t be quite as impressed.
…Yet Salatin is doing important work, and amid the often-loose verbiage of Holy Cows are ideas that demand attention. The consumer’s first responsibility, for Salatin, is to figure out which farmers are growing with passion, with a love of their land and their product. He implores consumers to get to know the farmers who produce their food. Beautiful food, he implies, is grown in a beautiful place.
…Salatin doesn’t discuss his own “different approach” much in Holy Cows, but Michael Pollan delivered an apt description of it in an issue of Gourmet in 2002: “[I]f you ask Salatin what he does for a living, he’ll tell you he’s a ‘grass farmer.’ That’s because healthy grass is the key to everything that happens at Polyface, where a half-dozen animal species are raised together in a kind of concentrated ecological dance on the theme of symbiosis. Salatin is the choreographer, and these 100 acres of springy Shenandoah Valley pasture comprise his verdant stage.”
Environmentalists take note. Salatin is using his land to transform grass — which humans can’t metabolize — into high-quality protein. Feedlot beef production, which leans on petrochemical-intensive corn for fodder, requires 35 calories of fossil fuel to create one calorie of food. Salatin’s system burns a fraction of that.
(29 November 2005)
Meeting expectations
Tips for greening conferences and events
Joel Makower, Grist
Surely you’ve attended the Conference from Eco-Hell.
You know the one. It begins with an endless paper trail of direct-mail advertisements. It’s held in some remote suburban locale, accessible only by car. At registration, you are issued a conference bag filled with promotional papers and doodads you’ll never look at or use (most of which you’ll conveniently “forget” in your hotel room). Meals appear unappetizingly on disposable plastic dishes, and single-serve bottles of water and soda are everywhere you look. Then there’s that inch-thick pile of wasted paper known as the conference program.
And when it’s all over, as people load up into planes, trains, and automobiles for their trek home, piles of post-conference detritus get unceremoniously tossed into trash cans and dumpsters — an ecologically unfortunate meeting of bottles, dishes, surplus promotional “literature,” and more.
You’ve probably asked, “Isn’t there a better way?” Amy Spatrisano has asked that very question, and has concluded that there is.
(29 November 2005)
