Abuse Your Friend's Toilets

Abue Your Friend's Toilets

Today, as my first post on Rethos, I give you a very earth friendly tip that I just learned about last night from the plumber that was here fixing a leak in the bathroom.

This is my most recent post from one of my blogs, http://earththreat.org.

Do you feel like saving bazillions of gallons of fresh water? I will now tell you how.

No, this is not the pop bottle full of water or rocks in the toilet tank. That does not always work that great. The bottle can get in the way of your toilets moving parts. This method does not involve any bottles, rocks, water, or tools.

If you have ever taken the lid off of a toilet, you know that there is a float ball in there that attached to a thin metal rod. This float balls level determines the water level within the toilets tank. Get in there, grab that rod, and bend it downward a little. Next time the toilet is flushed and the tank refills the water level is forever lowered (unless it is bent back of course).

Think about all of the water that could be saved with this trick. Toilets get flushed a hell of a lot. If one gallon of water is saved per flush, and that toilet is flushed six times a day, you will be responsible for saving over 2,000 gallons of water per year. Abuse five of your friend’s toilets and you will save close to 11,000 gallons with a six flush daily average.

Let’s start abusing shall we? We should have a contest or something. Thanks for reading.

Call Out Litter Bugs

If you care about this planet, you do not litter. Tossing your trash aside instead of holding on to it until you find a garbage can is simply laziness.

Littering is obviously the most commonly broken law, but it is probably also the offense that most often goes unpunished. You see the signs, ‘Do Not Litter, Minimum fine $300′. These signs obviously don’t change a thing, but I guess it is some sign of effort from the authorities.

The police don’t do much about the problem, so I guess it’s about time you became an Earth Friendly Vigilante! If a person is walking the sidewalk in front of you and you see them toss an empty bottle to the side, return it to them.

Bring them back their trash, and say something like, “Excuse me, I think you dropped this”. An outed litter bug will most commonly feel embarrassed, take their trash back, and run.

If they act like an ### and say they dropped it on purpose, put them down with a verbal low blow. “Get the f%$# off my planet litter bug!!”, should work just fine.

This earth is truly here for the people that care for and protect it. Fight for your right to live in cleanliness.

Blog Action Day

What would happen if every blog published posts discussing the same issue, on the same day? One issue. One day. Thousands of voices.

On October 15th, bloggers around the web will unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind – the environment.

Blogspot

I’ve been blogging informally for a few months now, all about the environment and different ways you can alter your lifestyle or increase your understanding of nature. If that sounds interesting to you, please check out bringbacknature.blogspot.com. I would love some constructive criticism.

ECOLOGY DAY Saturday 15th

Ecology day in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue with Ryan Young (he ran for the green party) Saturday the 15th. The green coalition youth will be participating.

Save our Surf, Snow and H2o for Future Generations

The Mountain Fund’s partner, Save Our Snow Foundation, is on a mission to calculate, reduce, and offset greenhouse gas emissions and energy use, while also producing local alternative energy, and stimulating economic development for the outdoor sports industry.

Snow not only provides the medium for recreation in summer and winter sports, but also provides three quarters of the world’s drinking water, irrigation for agriculture, and the key for life on our entire planet.

Hot dog super-skier Alision Gannett founded “Save our Snow”, and has created a web site with tons of timely and useful information for ways we can reduce energy consumption and the resulting carbon release that comes from it.

Did you know… + The average home produces 12 tons (2,400 lbs.) of Carbon for heating and cooling. + An average car (20 MPG) -produces 6 tons (12,000 lbs.) of Carbon a year. + A medium flight round trip – 2.5 hours or 800 miles – produces 1.2 tons (2,400 lbs.) of Carbon.

You can take action! Buy renewable energy. Buy local, organic foods, clothing and products. Use Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs. Carpool, buy a hybrid or switch to biodiesel. Get an energy audit.

If you’d like more information about “Save Our Snow”, please contact Jenn Spradlin here at rethos, or directly at jenn@mountainfund.org.

"I Killed A Pigeon" (Great blog posting)

I love the way this person thinks. Go check this posting and his whole blog.

http://noimpactman.typepad.com/blog/2007/02/what_you_need_t.html

It’s about experiment with researching, developing and adopting a way of life for me and my little family—one wife, one toddler, one dog—to live in the heart of New York City while causing no net environmental impact.

I’m definitely byung the book when it comes out.

Shoreline Cleanup of Anse-a-L'Orme (22nd of Sept)

On the 22nd, there will be a shoreline cleanup of the Anse-a-l’Orme (Montreal, Quebec, Canada) shoreline happening from 10am to 1pm.

For more information, go to

http://groups.google.com/group/greencoalitionyouth

Diamonds

Econ-Atrocity: Ten Reasons Why You Should Never Accept a Diamond Ring from Anyone, Under Any Circumstances, Even If They Really Want to Give You One Thursday, February 14, 2002

By Liz Stanton, CPE Staff Economist

1. You’ve Been Psychologically Conditioned To Want a Diamond. The diamond engagement ring is a 63-year-old invention of N.W.Ayer advertising agency. The De Beers diamond cartel contracted N.W.Ayer to create a demand for what are, essentially, useless hunks of rock.

2. Diamonds are Priced Well Above Their Value. The De Beers cartel has systematically held diamond prices at levels far greater than their abundance would generate under anything even remotely resembling perfect competition. All diamonds not already under its control are bought by the cartel, and then the De Beers cartel carefully managed world diamond supply in order to keep prices steadily high.

3. Diamonds Have No Resale or Investment Value. Any diamond that you buy or receive will indeed be yours forever: De Beers’ advertising deliberately brain-washed women not to sell; the steady price is a tool to prevent speculation in diamonds; and no dealer will buy a diamond from you. You can only sell it at a diamond purchasing center or a pawn shop where you will receive a tiny fraction of its original “value.”

4. Diamond Miners are Disproportionately Exposed to HIV/AIDS. Many diamond mining camps enforce all-male, no-family rules. Men contract HIV/AIDS from camp sex-workers, while women married to miners have no access to employment, no income outside of their husbands and no bargaining power for negotiating safe sex, and thus are at extremely high risk of contracting HIV.

5. Open-Pit Diamond Mines Pose Environmental Threats. Diamond mines are open pits where salts, heavy minerals, organisms, oil, and chemicals from mining equipment freely leach into ground-water, endangering people in nearby mining camps and villages, as well as downstream plants and animals.

6. Diamond Mine-Owners Violate Indigenous People’s Rights. Diamond mines in Australia, Canada, India and many countries in Africa are situated on lands traditionally associated with indigenous peoples. Many of these communities have been displaced, while others remain, often at great cost to their health, livelihoods and traditional cultures.

7. Slave Laborers Cut and Polish Diamonds. More than one-half of the world’s diamonds are processed in India where many of the cutters and polishers are bonded child laborers. Bonded children work to pay off the debts of their relatives, often unsuccessfully. When they reach adulthood their debt is passed on to their younger siblings or to their own children.

8. Conflict Diamonds Fund Civil Wars in Africa. There is no reliable way to insure that your diamond was not mined or stolen by government or rebel military forces in order to finance civil conflict. Conflict diamonds are traded either for guns or for cash to pay and feed soldiers.

9. Diamond Wars are Fought Using Child Warriors. Many diamond producing governments and rebel forces use children as soldiers, laborers in military camps, and sex slaves. Child soldiers are given drugs to overcome their fear and reluctance to participate in atrocities.

10. Small Arms Trade is Intimately Related to Diamond Smuggling. Illicit diamonds inflame the clandestine trade of small arms. There are 500 million small arms in the world today which are used to kill 500,000 people annually, the vast majority of whom are non-combatants.

References:

• Collier, Paul, “Economic Causes of Civil Conflict and Their Implications for Policy,” World Bank, June 15, 2000.
• Epstein, Edward Jay, “Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond?“, The Atlantic Monthly, February 1982.
• Global Witness, “Conflict Diamonds: Possibilities for the Identification, Certification and Control of Diamonds,” A Briefing Document, June 2000.
• Human Rights Watch/Asia, “The Small Hands of Slavery: Bonded Child Labor In India,” Human Rights Watch Children’s Rights Project.
• Human Rights Watch, “Children’s Rights: Stop the Use of Child Soldiers.”
• Kerlin, Katherine “Diamonds Aren’t Forever: Environmental Degradation and Civil War in the Gem Trade,” E: The Environment Magazine.
• Le Billon, Philippe, “Angola’s Political Economy of War: The Role of Oil and Diamonds, 1975-2000,” African Affairs, (2001), 100, p.55-80
• Mines and Communities, “The Mining Curse: The roles of mining in ‘underdeveloped’ economies,” Minewatch Asia Pacific/Nostromo Briefing Paper, February 1999.
• Other Facets, Number 1, April 2001; Number 2, June 2001; Number 3, October 2001, www.partnershipafricacanada.org/hsdp/of.html [dead link]

© 2002 Center for Popular Economics

Sierra Youth Coalition Benefit Concert (Sept 23rd)

A Musical Sunday in Montreal West

Featuring Rosemary Shaw _violin Member of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra

3pm, Sunday September 23rd 1 hour concert – perfect for young families!

Montreal West United Church Corner of Westminster & Curzon Tickets $10 at the door 514-482-3210 www.mwuc.org

This concert will benefit the Sierra Youth Coalition – the youth arm of the Sierra Club of Canada. Founded in 1996, SYC has grown into a national youth environmental coalition with members across Canada. Their main programs focus on promoting environmental sustainability in high schools, communities and university campuses across Canada

Go Green this Fall

A Dozen Tips for a Greener Autumn

A lot of the basics, but a good reminder for spreading awareness! Read posting

Consumer Consequences

If everyone lived like me, we would need 2.8 earths. And apparently that’s a half-decent score…

Parking spaces become temporary parks

Temporary parks dominate parking spaces across the U.S. reporter’s notebookOn the third-annual PARK Day, urban parking spaces across the country were commandeered and turned into small oases. Photos: Put up a PARK lot By Daniel Terdiman Staff Writer, CNET News.com Published: September 21, 2007, 5:22 PM PDT

reporter’s notebook SAN FRANCISCO—It’s a gorgeous Friday morning and Jennifer McLaughlin is blending a smoothie in her rooftop garden.

Except this garden isn’t at her house, it’s not permanent, and it’s not even on a rooftop. In fact, it’s a temporary oasis of grass, a bench and a few chairs, some young pepper plants, some even younger brown-egged hen chicks, and it has all been installed in a parking space a stone’s throw, and in full view of, City Hall.

And McLaughlin is vigorously riding a bicycle that in turn is powering the blender for her smoothie.

This is all part of PARK Day, a collaboration between San Francisco non-profits Rebar and Public Architecture and the national Trust for Public Land, during which more than 40 cities across the country have seen countless groups take over parking spaces and turn them into an extremely wide variety of interpretations of the “public park.”

“People have gotten inspired because it’s easy to understand (how to) improve the quality of urban habitat,” said John Bela, a co-founder of Rebar. “People are taking their ideas into the streets. People are transforming these parking spots into extraordinary, creative acts, and acts of generosity.”

For McLaughlin and her colleagues from the San Francisco Department of Public Health who have set up a demonstration of what a sustainable rooftop garden looks and feels like, PARK Day is a wonderful chance to spread the message that urban environments don’t have to be a never-ending field of concrete and steel, and that even if you don’t have a traditional garden, you shouldn’t feel cut off from a life with green things.”

“The whole concept is to promote more open spaces,” McLaughlin said. “If you can’t have it on the ground floor, get it going on the rooftop.”

On this third PARK Day-the first occurred in 2005 when Rebar set up a temporary park in a single San Francisco parking spot-the creative spirit is definitely in the air, and it’s not just ordinary citizens who are getting involved.

Even San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom has gotten on board, said Bela, who explained that the mayor had donated his personal parking space outside City Hall to the cause. Reached by phone, Bela said that he and some others from Rebar had parked their “human-powered, mobile public open space” in the mayor’s parking spot and that “people are chilling out and relaxing in the park.” Photos: Put up a PARK lot

Not far away, and around the corner from McLaughlin’s temporary park, Kathleen O’Day and several people from San Francisco’s Department of Public Works and Recreation and Parks department have set up what they’re calling a healing garden.

This might be the best of the day’s parks. It is a stunningly beautiful setup adjacent to San Francisco’s Main Library that is complete with a wall of bamboo, a bunch of other tall plants, 10 feet or so of healthy grass, a small garden pond filled with dahlias and two distinct spaces.

One side is designed for social interaction, O’Day said, while the other is for solo contemplation. In its entirety, the park, known as “Frankie’s Garden,” is dedicated to the (hopeful) healing of O’Day’s brother, Frankie, who is battling stage four hodgkin’s disease, and who is preparing for a stem cell transplant at a hospital in Boston.

“The whole idea was we wanted to create a garden that would be great for people to come and relax and get away from the city,” said O’Day. “So the idea (became) a healing garden because they knew what was going on with my brother.

Many of the temporary parks around San Francisco were dedicated to specific demonstration or community-oriented purposes.

For example, on Folsom Street, there was a dog park, complete with dozens of tennis balls and a rectangle of grass for any wandering pooches to circuit. Nearby were three other temporary spaces set up in parking spaces: a long table with plenty of chairs for sitting and reading, a beauty salon outside a cosmetology school, and a bike repair outlet.

In addition, a block or two away, Blair Randall and several others from San Francisco’s Garden for the Environment were doing hourly demonstrations of worm composting.

“My take is that it allows people to see established urban areas in a new way,” said Randall, “because I think urban areas become quite literally concrete in our minds, but we have all the power to change that. I don’t think you know the value of something until it’s gone. Being able to stop in at a garden in an urban area allows people to say, ‘Oh, wait, we don’t have this.’”

In a way, PARK Day was a dress rehearsal for what Public Architecture hopes will be a series of permanent installations set up in urban streets.

According to John Peterson of Public Architecture, the organization is planning on installing what he called a “bioswale,” a system that will capture storm water runoff from the street, filter it and send it back into the ground water. The system is expected to be installed next year in San Francisco’s South of Market district.

But for now, residents of San Francisco and the other cities participating-New York, Seattle, Portland, Miami and others-will have to be satisfied with one day of these terrific temporary oases. Now on News.com The XP alternative for Vista PCs Photos: The tools that make tech Blog: Make money from home—sort of Extra: Nobel laureate disses manned spaceflight

As an observer, I can say it’s quite a wonderful feeling to be walking down a heavily trafficked street and stumble upon one of these little pieces of green paradise amidst the asphalt and cars. Some, like the “Park-Fi,” which offered passersby benches and free Wi-Fi, were going for a community feel. Others were just trying to make an artistic statement.

But either way, the experience was positive and enriching. After all, how often do we get to see our cities deviate from the never-ending rush of cars, commerce and rules.

Of course, even PARK Day had its rules. Those who had commandeered parking spaces had to pay the meters.

At one point, at McLaughlin’s sustainable rooftop garden, a couple of her colleagues noticed that a meter maid was coming.

“We’d better feed the meter,” they said urgently.

But over at the temporary beauty salon, where there weren’t any meters, but where the space was in a one-hour parking zone, Cara Buglil said the meter maid was simply driving by and honking happily at her and her fellow cosmetologists.

First Audio from the Institute for Sustainablility Education and Action

First in a series of audio interviews between Margery Moore of the Institute for Sustainablility Education and Action in Salt Spring Island, (Near Victoria, B.C. Canada) and Philip McMaster, McMaster Institute of Sustainable Commerce.

This unedited interview was recorded at the offices of the Institute for Sustainability Education and Action on September 20th 2007.

We are looking for someone who is expert in audio editing, to make these raw interviews into something tighter and shorter.

This is the first of 6 segments, of 5-10 minutes in length.

http://www.dragonpreneur.com/audio/RawSSI/saltspringA.mp3

If there are requests in the comment area for the additional segements, they will be posted in series as requested.

Walden Warming

MAY 10, 1853, was a warm day outside Concord, Massachusetts—an early spring day when a New Englander outdoors would “begin to think of thin coats,” noted Henry David Thoreau. Walking from Concord towards Saw Mill Brook, Thoreau jotted down what he saw. “The deciduous woods were in their hoary youth,” he wrote, “every expanding bud swaddled with downy webs.” Nodding trillium had flower buds, and hornbeam was about to bloom. Pear trees had blossomed, and the butternut buds were the most pronounced of all the woods’ hickories. He heard the spring’s first veery. “It is remarkable,” wrote Thoreau, “that I saw this morning for the first time the bobolink, gold robin [most likely a northern oriole], and kingbird.”

Remarkable, too, that he kept such meticulous records. In fact, on almost every spring morning between 1851 and 1858, long after his private tenure at Walden Pond, Thoreau explored the ponds and shady woods around Concord, observing nature. For day after day, year after year, he searched for the first blooms of more than 300 plant species and watched for the first arrivals of migrating birds.

Today, nearly 160 years later, Thoreau’s detailed observations form the basis of a long-term study of how climate change is altering the timing of seasonal biological events—or phenology—and how such shifts may in turn impact the wildlife and wild places of an entire region. Researchers from Boston University have assembled a vast array of biological data—arboretum specimens, old photographs and the observations of local citizens, in addition to Thoreau’s journals—to produce a baseline of springtime events for the Concord area. Comparing these data to the results of their own exhaustive, five-year effort to walk, literally, in Thoreau’s footsteps, the scientists can now tell a story that New England’s favorite naturalist-philosopher might never have imagined: As Massachusetts warms, flowers are blooming, trees are leafing out, and birds are arriving as many as three weeks earlier than they did in the mid-nineteenth century. “If Thoreau were alive today, he would be very concerned about this,” says Richard Primack, a biology professor at Boston University and lead researcher on the project.

NOTING NATURE Thoreau, famous for his prodigious note-keeping, recorded his seasonal observations in tables sketched on large sheets of surveyor’s paper. “I take infinite pains to know all of the phenomena of the spring,” he explained in one journal entry. Thoreau intended to publish a book about the unfolding of spring in the woods around Concord, but his death in 1862 derailed the project, and his notes were scattered among library collections across the country.

Four years ago, however, Primack learned that an independent New Hampshire scholar named Brad Dean had spent 10 years tracking down these original sheets, making copies and reassembling the data. By then, Primack, author of A Primer on Conservation Biology, was looking for studies demonstrating physical evidence of global warming. He and graduate student Abraham Miller-Rushing couldn’t believe their good fortune. Still, it took Primack’s team nearly nine months to decipher Thoreau’s famously poor handwriting and archaic species names and plug the information into a usable spreadsheet.

At the same time, the scientists’ sleuthing uncovered a trove of other regional records to augment Thoreau’s notes. At Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum, one of the oldest public botanical gardens in the United States, they were able to compare the flowering times of 229 plants in 2003 with records of flowering times of the same individual plants going back as far as 1885. In Concord, they found a collection of images from a photographer, Herbert Wendell Gleason, who between 1900 and 1921 took and dated photographs of many of the plants and places mentioned in Thoreau’s journals. From these, the scientists gleaned flowering data on 17 species of wild plants, including pink lady’s slipper, which flowered six weeks earlier in 2005 than in 1917.

Some of the richest sources of data turned out to be citizen-scientists in the mold of Thoreau himself. From 1888 to 1902, a Concord shopkeeper named Alfred Hosmer, inspired by Thoreau’s writings, recorded the first flowering dates of more than 700 plant species in the area. A passionate nature aficionado named Pennie Logemann provided flowering records between 1963 and 1993. And for more than half a century, Middleborough, Massachusetts, resident Kathleen Anderson has kept meticulous track of the timing of bird arrivals, plant flowerings and spring choruses of frogs and toads on her 100-acre farm. “I keep a stack of those desk calendars with one full page for each day of the week,” she explains, “and I was pretty intense about it. I noted weather conditions, temperature, rainfall, and whatever I happened to notice. Were the Canada mayflowers blooming? Were the juncos around? It was for my own enjoyment. It never occurred to me that these records would be of any use or interest to anyone whatsoever”—until she was contacted by Primack and Miller-Rushing, who crunched her observations into their expanding database.

The researchers, meanwhile, were making their own detailed observations. For the past five years, Primack and Miller-Rushing have traveled to Concord three times a week in spring and summer, walking the woods to ask the same questions that Thoreau asked: When do the flowers bloom? When do the birds return? So far, they have amassed another 100,000 data entries about the phenology of springtime plants and birds.

WHAT THE FLOWERS SAY Pooling their data, the researchers have discovered that many plants in the Concord region are flowering more than a week earlier today than when Thoreau made his observations. Highbush blueberry—one of Thoreau’s favorite wild edibles—is blooming some two weeks earlier than it did 150 years ago. Yellow wood sorrel can be found in bloom about a month earlier. During this same period, Primack says, long-term weather data show that the average temperature of a Concord spring has increased by approximately 4.5 degrees F.

Much of the temperature rise in the intensely developed Northeast is due to what’s known as the urban heat island effect—parking lots, streets and buildings absorb heat while vegetation loss lessens the release of cooling water from trees and other plants. But at least some of it can be attributed to global warming, says Primack. And on Anderson’s farm, many of the wild creatures that appear regularly each spring seem to be responding. Wood ducks are arriving about a month earlier than they did 30 years ago, for example, while ruby-throated hummingbirds show up more than 18 days sooner.

Scientists say such changes have the potential to wreak ecological havoc if interdependent species do not shift in concert. Many birds, for example, have evolved to time their spring migrations to take advantage of a flush of food sources. In New England, warbler species such as the black-throated blue warbler and American redstart feed heavily on leaf-eating caterpillars, which peak in abundance after leaf out and before leaves mature and grow tough.

In northern Europe, biologists already have found troubling evidence that one migratory bird, the pied flycatcher, has suffered from getting out of sync with its springtime food source. In the past, flycatchers arrived from their West African wintering grounds just as winter moth caterpillars were hatching. But warmer springs have pushed the caterpillar’s emergence date two weeks earlier—unbeknownst to flycatchers that are still 2,800 miles away. In regions where the timing of caterpillar abundance has shifted the most, researchers have documented a 90 percent decline in flycatcher numbers. In the United States, a similar “potential for mistimed relationships is very real,” says Primack, “but it is understudied.”

A COLD HARD LOOK To increase much needed data on global warming’s impact on U.S. species, some scientists propose identifying and training a network of modern-day Thoreaus. According to Primack, Miller-Rushing and other researchers, there is the potential for a rich interaction between scientists and members of the general public interested in gathering observations on natural phenomena such as plant flowering and the arrival of migratory birds. Countries such as England, Belgium and Canada have long embraced monitoring programs that rely, in part, on observations of nonscientists. Recently, a consortium of U.S. government agencies and academic institutions, with funding from the National Science Foundation, launched just such an effort, the National Phenological Network, to help researchers collect and disseminate information about seasonal changes.

“We desperately need a wall-to-wall, coast-to-coast network of phenological observation points—literally thousands of points on par with what is being done with meteorological observations,” explains Julio Betancourt, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey’s Desert Laboratory in Tucson, Arizona, and one of the network’s founders. Volunteer observers are an important part of the process. The group’s Project BudBurst, begun as a pilot program in spring 2007, will launch nationally in January 2008. Volunteers from across the country are asked to choose from a long list of plants to watch for signs of a particular phenophase, such as budburst, first leaf or first flower, and to report observations online.

“So much of the discussion about global climate change has centered on numbers—fractions and degrees of fractions,” says biologist Mark D. Schwartz of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who is helping to coordinate the network’s startup. “But when you talk about how lilacs are blooming six days earlier than they were 30 years ago, people start relating to the issue. And tell them that they can involve themselves in the process of documenting these changes, and that makes it very real.

”That’s something Kathleen Anderson understands well. “This kind of work should inspire more people to be more observant,” she says. At the age of 84, she still keeps notebooks handy at home, in the car and in the kitchen. “And it really doesn’t matter where you live. If you look closely, you’ll find enough things to interest you in the little bit of land that is around you.”

After all, as Thoreau told his friend and sometime walking companion, Ellery Channing, in 1859, “There is nothing but the seasons.” By which he might have meant that the seasons will tell all, to those who wish to hear.

Writer T. Edward Nickens is based in North Carolina. To find out how to participate in the National Phenological Network, go to www.usanpn.org.

NWF Takes Action: Fighting Global Warming

Combating global warming is a top priority for NWF, which is, among other activities, supporting national legislation to reduce greenhouse gases, publishing reports on warming’s impact on wildlife and collaborating with its state affiliates on a variety of grassroots efforts. For more information, including how you can get involved, visit www.nwf.org/globalwarming.

Reform the Darn Farm Bill

I thought they already dealt with the monster FARM BILL (which comes up for renewal every 5 years) but apparently it’s still out there. This is a super-key piece of legislation that hugely effects both the environment and public health. The food industry is a monster (one of the biggest marketers to kids) and they continually get exactly what they want out of this bill… anyhoo check out Oxfam’s campaign about reforming the bill.

Planet Friendly love in China, A Bike Wedding

Green weddings seem to be all the rage these days, and the trend seems to be growing around the world. The picture above is of a bike wedding held in Anyang City in China on Saturday, which also happened to be Car-Free Day. For more thoughts on green weddings, check out our comprehensive guide on How to Green Your Wedding, or you can even read about this author’s own celebrations on a goat farm in North Carolina.

Congratulations to the happy couple, and thanks John for the tip!::China View::via site visit::

Otesha bike tour video

This video was made by Tim Reeves-Horton about the East Coast Otesha bike tour team. You can see part of their theatre performance and other cool stuff… http://www.southshorenow.ca/video/otesha/

A Word on Beach Erosion

So when I got home from work today I started a painting. It was nothing exciting; just a simple oil-based mock up of the ocean. As the work progressed, I decided that it would be worth my time to stroll down to the beach and snap a few pictures of said ocean. What I ended up with was several shots of a five-meter stretch of sand separating A1A from the angry sea herself. What once had been a long, lovely stretch of seashore was now a heavily eroded shadow of its former self. Where had all of my sand gone?
You see, I’m from Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Lauderdale is more or less a slightly smaller version of Miami, with slightly better drivers, and even lovelier beaches. Besides feeding our largely tourism-based economy, the local sands serve as a home for a wide variety of native plant life. In addition to that, these delicate banks serve as the incubator for the native sea turtles. But where did we put those beaches?
The answer lies in the natural flow of the ocean. In Fort Lauderdale, As well as pretty much any other costal area, there exists a longshore current. It is aptly named, in that the current moves… along the shore.
One of the most important results of this natural phenomenon is a continuous influx of sand. Our beaches need this sand to replenish the coastline when the waves begin to take their toll. So then, what happens when we hinder that longshore drift? Bad things happen. The beaches go away, and with them the natural plant life and animal habitat. One little sliver of coastline, so very delicate, and so very evanescent.
So we ask ourselves, “Self, why has all of the sand stopped coming down to lovely South Florida?” And the answer can be summed up with this one, simple photograph:

Aerial view of Port Everglades, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.
That photo is of Port Everglades, which is the heart of the Fort Lauderdale trade, yachting, fishing, and cruise ship industries, to name a few. What this picture illustrates is the effect of jetties on the flow of sand down the coastline. As you can see, the north (right-hand) side of the jetty has built up quite a beach, because it hinders the flow of the longshore current and has created a repository for the sand carried by it.
On the other hand, the south (left-hand) side of the jetty shows a clear and obvious lack of beach. This side of port everglades features one of the few coastal parks we have, and unfortunately erosion is taking its toll on John U. Lloyd state park. The location of the jetty is clearly responsible for the deteriorating state of the coastline, which has resulted in considerable strain on the rare dune flora that grows in close proximity to the ocean.
Throughout my high school days I volunteered at this park, and watched the delicate sands wash away with the tides, time, and hurricanes. When will a permanent solution be found for the troubles that ail this town’s seashore? I believe that as soon as the value of our environment begins to outweigh the cost of its upkeep, that day will come. Let’s hope that it is not too late. Let’s hope our grandchildren know what a sea turtle is, and can see the beauty of the dune grasses blowing in the wind, not in a picture, but before their very eyes.

Special thanks to:

David McRee and BeachHunter.net for the use of his photograph of the eroded shoreline. BeachHunter.net is an awesome site for anything and everything beach-related.

And SkyPic.com for allowing me to link to their wonderful aerial shot of Port Everglades. Check them out too!

Al Gore and the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize

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