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Is conflict prevention “green”?
John-Paul Flintoff, Sunday Times (UK)
For every £1 spent globally on conflict prevention £1885 is spent on arms and military resources.
Yup – nearly 2000 times as much, as the Archbishop of York, John Sentamu, told a meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Conflict Issues.
Why is this a green issue? Well, that spending could potentially be diverted towards things like building a green energy infrastructure. And by failing to destroy forest with Agent Orange and by not, after all, leaving land mines on prime agricultural sites, we could help to address things like food security.
(20 April 2009)
Lose weight to help the planet, researchers recommend
CBC News (Canada)
Staying slim helps reduce greenhouse gas emissions because heavier people tend to use vehicles more, say researchers who compared lean and obese populations.
In Sunday’s edition of the International Journal of Epidemiology, British researchers estimate that a lean population of one billion people would emit one billion tonnes less carbon dioxide equivalents per year, compared with a fat population.
“When it comes to food consumption, moving about in a heavy body is like driving around in a gas guzzler,” the researchers said.
The heavier that people’s bodies become, the harder and more unpleasant it is for them to move about. So they become more dependent on vehicles.
In addition, higher demand for food puts pressure on the transport system.
Staying slim “is good for health and for the environment,” the researchers concluded. “We need to be doing a lot more to reverse the global trend towards fatness, and recognize it as a key factor in the battle to reduce emissions and slow climate change.”
(19 April 2009)
Related from The Guardian:
Carbon emissions fuelled by high rates of obesity
Weighing up the costs of being obese
Are the Life-boats Sinking
Jurgen Heissner, Atamai Village Council
We are going to build life-rafts, not life boats – Observations by a life boat builder.
In Aotearoa, those islands in the far away South Pacific better known as New Zealand, a ‘last resort’ of sorts by itself, one of those often talked about post-fossil fuel lifeboat communities is being constructed.
A village is being laid out for initially 15 and later 45 households, within the anthropologically ‘ideal size’ of 50-500 inhabitants. The design is totally green, organic, permaculture based, post-fossil fuels with all the gear and equipment to navigate the energy descent and climate rapids. The village, instigated two and a half years ago by a handful of concerned environmentalists and business people with an intense sense of urgency, revolves around three concepts:
Community with pooled resources of capital, labour and expertise – the only safe way to embark into the future – going it alone is not a viable option.
Absolute and stringent ‘green technology’ of a not only efficient but also frugal kind – the only future-proof way to guarantee a lifestyle that can survive –embedded in an equally stringent permaculture land-use philosophy which always respects and enriches the natural settings which all human settlements are only a part of.
A village settlement pattern – the one pattern that has proven the hardiest, most flexible and longest lived one in human history. Villages also provide a universal and archetypal home for our deepest emotional connections, knowing of community, aesthetic sense of scale and longing for permanence embedded in natural cycles.
Existing settlement patterns are the imprints of suffering we have etched onto this earth and the very embodiment of our problems: Cities and mega-cities -the outcome of overshoot; suburbs of overconsumption, and depopulated and impoverished rural areas – the outcome of alienation from our life sources. All of this is depleting the one resource – resilience – which we will need most in the coming years to shelter ourselves and what we hold dear.
…Our time frame has shrunk from having 9 years to complete the project before ‘things would become difficult’ to less than half that time. The ‘difficult’ times are already here. With the collapse of investment in exploration and oil industry infrastructure a high amplitude oil price pattern during the descent period is now guaranteed and with it maximum economic havoc. So any hope it might become easier with the economy is misplaced.
Luckily, Atamai Village had a sufficient head-start but there is now little doubt that the number of lifeboats that will reach completion globally will be small. They all have to be funded within a ‘property development’ framework, and property development of any kind now being something with very modest, if any, prospects. Banks don’t lend for it, interest in it is anaemic and investors don’t want to know about it unless they have a sufficient understanding of what we face in the long run. So we don’t expect many more to get off the ground. It will be down to the few which are at a more advanced stages and can actually still be completed in time to provide us with the needed examples they were meant to be: Models for transition towns to convert into, places to ‘live the contribution’ to a sustainable future rather than ‘work on it’ and most importantly to shelter culture, which is what gets tossed overboard first on the sinking liner.
And all the while the biospheres sheer geophysical processes we triggered and whose visible effect we call climate chaos are aligning themselves towards tipping points to bring another time forcing to the table of any life boat building enterprise.
(20 April 2009)
D.C. Area Families Take Green to the Extreme
David A. Fahrenthold, Washington Post
Eco-Enthusiasts Step on Some Toes in a Bid to Reduce Their Carbon Footprints
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Across the Washington region, a few residents have embraced eco-friendly living with a fervor that makes Al Gore look like an oil company lobbyist. They give up everything from furnace heat (too many emissions) to store-bought meat (too much factory farming) to plans for a second child (too much of everything, given the average American’s environmental impact).
But for the people who have to live with these enthusiasts, this much green can sometimes be hard to take.
In many households, the result is a bubbling mix of bemusement, tension and furtive resistance. But the Washington area has already had at least one green divorce.
“You’re kind of in a perpetual state of feeling like you’re not measuring up,” said Janet Tupper, 50, of Cheverly, who is still happily married to her environmentalist husband. Because of his convictions, they layer up indoors during the winter: The house’s heat usually comes from a single stove burning wood pellets.
“I’m behind it. I’m supportive. I wish, you know — I wish it was easier,” Tupper said. “Our kids complain about us living like the Amish.”
… For those Washington area residents trying to give their families an eco-overhaul, the idea is that Earth Day — or at least the plant-a-tree, change-a-light bulb way Earth Day will be celebrated Wednesday — isn’t nearly enough.
They say that such problems as climate change and polluted waterways demand immediate shifts in the rhythms of modern living.
… Many spouses and children said they support what the family environmentalist is trying to do . . . but they’re not above snickering as he does it.
(20 April 2009)
Not a terrible article, but the framing is one-sided, rather typical of the commercial media. The message is that greenies are crazy eccentrics, and it’s hard on their normal spouses. For a better treatment of family tensions and sustainability, see many columns by Sharon Astyk, particularly The Sustainable Marriage.
How Green Is My Bottle?
Daniel Goleman and Gregory Norris, New York Times
Earth Day is this Wednesday, and all things “green” will be celebrated. But it’s worth asking: how environmentally friendly are “green” products, really? Consider, for example, this paragon of eco-virtue: the stainless steel water bottle that lets us hydrate without discarding endless plastic bottles. Using a method called life cycle assessment, we have evaluated the environmental and health impact of a stainless steel thermos — from the extraction and processing of its ingredients, to its manufacture, distribution, use and final disposal. There were some surprises. What we think of as “green” turns out to be less so (and, yes, sometimes more so) than we assume.
… One stainless steel bottle is obviously much worse than one plastic bottle. Producing that 300-gram stainless steel bottle requires seven times as much fossil fuel, releases 14 times more greenhouse gases, demands the extraction of hundreds of times more metal resources and causes hundreds of times more toxic risk to people and ecosystems than making a 32-gram plastic bottle. If you’re planning to take only one drink in your life, buy plastic.
But chances are buying that stainless steel bottle will prevent you from using and then throwing away countless plastic bottles.
(19 April 2009)
The point of the article seems obvious to me – that sustainable alternatives can take more energy to produce originally than disposables. Still I guess it’s good to go through the numbers.
What’s irritating is the framing and tone, as if this is an expose of green myths. Stainless steel bottles are an example of an investment which will yield returns over time. This is a basic idea in environnmental analyses, and is not unknown in economics.
The NY Times can do better. -BA
