Posted by Dave on May 17, 2010
Yeti by Philippe Semeria
The only question in regards to the death of the current green enthusiasm is, “Will the new green fad die via popular adoption, or via wholesale abandonment?” Well, I guess this is the first question, not the only. The second one would be, “What will green living look like when it is either abandoned or adopted?”
An intelligent reader (I know you are out there!) would of course respond, “Well, economical solutions will be adopted while unrealistic and utopian greening will be abandoned.” And while making sense, this sort of reasoning with the American people is redonculous at best and dangerous madness at worst. Just look at corn ethanol, still going strong all these years despite its fairly wide-known economic unfeasibility. And we all know that the milk of the female Yeti could be a financial boon for holistic medicine if someone would just put in the hard work to create a Yeti milking program, or at least learn to synthesize the stuff. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on July 24, 2009
Salt Lake City is going passive. Joe and Rebecca are teaming up with Brach Design and Fisher Custom Building to build Utah’s first certified passive house. That is the plan anyway. Brach Design is Utah’s only certified Passive House architect and this will be his first passive house if everything turns out right.
You may be thinking, “Who gives a diddly ding dang do.” But let me tell all you Flanders swearing neigh-sayers, this is pretty ding dang diddly cool. Let’s not forget that 76% of all electricity produced by U.S. power plants goes to the building sector. Passive House started up as PassivHaus in the UK, but that was too stinking European sounding for God-Bless-’Em-Americans, so we changed it to Passive House Institute US, but it is the same thing. Passive House is a certification that literally beats the insulation off of rating systems like LEED. The graphic shows it pretty well (although LEED is not pictured because it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges). But the point is that Passive House is the stiffest energy efficiency standard the world has seen by far. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 13, 2009
Their can be glory in death. It is true. But Lord, not in a prolonged, asthma induced suffocation due to a humanly inhabitable planet. But never fear! 350 is here! Bill McKibben is still alive and kicking, and while he ain’t no Leonidas, he along with alot of others have started up 350.org. The movement and the number are based on the report put forward by the NASA climatologist guy (James Hansen) in 2007 that said that if we don’t reduce the amount of CO2 we are pumping into the atmosphere to below 350 parts per million and pronto we will be screwed (meaning human life could meet some rather sucky hurdles of death). WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 5, 2009
Can we get there? Within the last 15 minutes of ABC’s show, Earth 2100, a positive picture of our potential future was painted. (How is that for alliteration?) The interviewed experts posed that it would be possible to perform the heavy lifting of global clean-up by 2050, with only the peripheries to remain after that. Really?
Now, many bloggers and commentators have spoken out that the first 100 minutes of the show were simply too devastatingly depressing. I don’t know. I thought the bulk of the show was pretty entertaining. Instead, it was the end that brought me crashing down into middle of the afternoon, bathrobe shuffling, bacon eating depression. If the bright, hopeful version of our future requires us to bond together globally in loving harmony in order to completely revolutionize our cultures, values and worldviews… I think I just peed a little.
WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on June 4, 2009
I by chance stumbled upon the last half of ABC’s show Earth 2100 a couple nights ago. Now understand, I just returned from a trip to Texas, the land of my birth. And Texas, with the exception of Austin, is not the land of environmental sensitivity. And so my frame of mind was stemming from what some other bloggers on the topic of Earth 2100 have been referring to as “the lowest common denominator.” Imagine my reverse culture shock when I found myself watching an acid trip induced, enviro-documentary/graphic novel about the end of humanity on prime time television.
Break out the shisha and tea. I need to relax. Now for the last couple of days most of the reviews on the show have been critical, but personally I think everyone needs to take a few puffs from the hookah. After you feel a little light headed you should keep reading. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on May 22, 2009
Henry ford, you were so close. While the early Ford championed all sorts of methods of making ethyl alcohol, one of those means was hemp. Like I stated a few days ago, one of the magic numbers for hemp is its high percentage of cellulose (the key ingredient for conversion into alcohol or other fuels. Ford created a hemp car that used hemp fibers in construction and ran on ethyl alcohol made from hemp. Momentum was gathering quickly for the natural and sustainable fuel revolution. Then oil, backed by powerful people and upstart companies like Dupont, stormed onto the scene. And you know the rest. Bit of a pisser, but what are you gonna’ do. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on May 19, 2009
So what makes hemp just so wonderful on the one hand and feared on the other? The magic number for hemp is its percentage of cellulose, which is as high as 77%. This makes it the number one producer of biomass on earth. Wood from most trees registers around 60% cellulose and obviously takes much longer to mature. Hemp can grow from germination to maturity in 3 to 4 months and produces around 5 tons of dry fiber stalk and 10 tons of biomass per acre. The last smoking gun is that hemp can be grown over vast portions of the earth’s land surfaces. It can grow anywhere from China’s temperate forested mountains to Mexico’s arid deserts to Canada’s cool farmland. (It grows best in warm, humid areas with over 25 inches of rain but only requires a bare minimum of 10 inches and a temperate climate.) WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on May 18, 2009
Damn you Reefer Madness, William Randolph Hearst, Dupont and racist American government of the 1930’s! Over 70 years later and we in the U.S. are still suffering the ill effects of banning marijuana and all its associates during a period of economic rebound that encouraged greed, paranoia, racism and lax political oversight. (Sound familiar?)
Industrial hemp was going strong throughout the 1920’s. It found uses in everything from paint to cosmetics to food. It is even rumored that the first pair of Levi jeans were made from Hemp in the mid-1800’s. (The evidence was destroyed in the great San Francisco fire.) People have long derided prohibition as one of the stupider achievements of American history, blaming it for (among other things) giving rise to organized crime. Well, if prohibition was stupid you have to lump reefer madness into the same category of dumb. WAIT! There is more to read… read on »
Posted by Dave on March 2, 2009
This entry might reveal a little too much about myself, but I just have to give a shout out to this little community in Missouri. Dancing Rabbit has been around for 10 years now and some might refer to them as a “Transition Community,” but they really are something different.
A Transition Community is, according to Transition Towns Wiki, “a small collection of motivated individuals within a community come together with a shared concern: how can our community respond to the challenges, and opportunities, of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”
I think this idea of transition towns/communities is awesome, and I hope to see it continue to catch on around the U.S. and the world. But from what I can tell about Dancing Rabbit (through their website) they are something pretty different. If a transition town is a group of people within a community, then what do you call a group of people that decide to start their own town? That is what Dancing Rabbit is trying to do. Their town is a small one right now at 30 people, but they claim to desire to reach 500 to 1000. Their covenants include things like not driving a personal vehicle (they share two for the whole community) and not using fossil fuels to heat their homes, etc.
I have been looking for community experiments like this one and am surprised it took me this long to find Dancing Rabbit. I was so excited to find them I thought there might be others like me out there. May the rabbit keep dancing.
