Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Monday, October 20, 2008
Alarm on 'Fracking'
Environmental Advocates of New York is concerned about "fracking"
EANY is a busy organization with a serious focus on issues. Check out its site for activities around the state.
By the way, you can find some environmental definitions here.
EANY is a busy organization with a serious focus on issues. Check out its site for activities around the state.
By the way, you can find some environmental definitions here.
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Book: 'Going Green: A Wise Consumer's Guide'
From a review posted elsewhere:
If you're interested in tackling some global issues, you could always start with your lawn. In "Going Green: A Wise Consumer's Guide to a Shrinking Planet," the authors bring huge issues about the state of the planet down to a human, even mundane level.
They aren't the only ones to have taken this approach but theirs is particularly effective, since they speak for their ideas from personal experience.
The book keys on seven main areas:
Choosing energy efficient and clean transportation
Green housing
Land use
Food
Green and worker-friendly clothes
Forest use
Investments
There are a lot of ways to take up their ideas and plenty of ways to get motivated. If you need a little guilt to get started, there's the reminder that with our purchases, we may be supporting companies that are destroying habitats, warming the planet or damaging people's health. The latest failures on Wall Street remind us that corporations exist to make money and may be doing things we don't like.
Or we may just feel it's time to do the right thing, with an eye on the future and the well-being of those who come after us.
If you're interested in tackling some global issues, you could always start with your lawn. In "Going Green: A Wise Consumer's Guide to a Shrinking Planet," the authors bring huge issues about the state of the planet down to a human, even mundane level.
They aren't the only ones to have taken this approach but theirs is particularly effective, since they speak for their ideas from personal experience.
The book keys on seven main areas:
Choosing energy efficient and clean transportation
Green housing
Land use
Food
Green and worker-friendly clothes
Forest use
Investments
There are a lot of ways to take up their ideas and plenty of ways to get motivated. If you need a little guilt to get started, there's the reminder that with our purchases, we may be supporting companies that are destroying habitats, warming the planet or damaging people's health. The latest failures on Wall Street remind us that corporations exist to make money and may be doing things we don't like.
Or we may just feel it's time to do the right thing, with an eye on the future and the well-being of those who come after us.
Thursday, October 16, 2008
Bike Tour
From NYPIRG:
As part of Energy Awareness Month, the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG) and other environmental and civic organizations are organizing a statewide bike tour to raise awareness about the need to take action against global warming now.
As part of the bike tour, we are greeting the riders in locations around the state by holding public tour stops. At each stop, we will invite the media and call for strong reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, more clean energy such as wind and solar, and increased efforts toward energy conservation and efficiency.
Please come out (and bring others) to one of the following tour stops near you to show your support for our message.
Upstate leg of the tour: Buffalo Friday, 10/17 at 10AM - Delaware Park (behind Albright Knox)
Rochester Sunday 10/19 at 10 AM - Genesee Valley Park (behind the Tennis courts, enter from Scottsville Rd.)
Syracuse Tuesday 10/21 at 10 AM – next to DeWitt Town Hall
Utica Wednesday 10/22 at 12PM – Parking lot on Genesee St. between the Erie Canal and Mohawk River
Downstate leg of the tour: Stony Brook Friday 10/17 at 11:30 AM – SUNY campus, by the DEC regional office
NYC Sunday 10/19 at 12PM – at the steps of City Hall
Lower Hudson Valley Tuesday 10/21 at 11AM – Pace University, in front of the Library off of North Broadway
Mid- Hudson Valley Wednesday 10/22 at 11AM – Town park next to SUNY New Paltz campus
We will end with a rally to greet the riders in Albany on Sunday, October 26.
If you have questions, or to find out more information about this tour, please send an e-mail.
Tuesday, October 14, 2008
Blog Action Day Has Begun
Wednesday is Blog Action Day, whereupon thousands of bloggers from around the world contribute postings on a selected topic. Last year, it was environmentalism; this year it is poverty. I hope to have something later in the day that combines the two themes. Check out the B.A.D. site; there are many, many great blogs to choose from. And here's an early post to get the thoughts rolling.
Monday, October 13, 2008
2 LI-CAN Events
From LI-CAN (The Long Island Climate Action Network) sends the following:
LICAN, in partnership with Artistz Lounge, is excited to announce an art benefit show titled "We = the Earth", an Art Show Benefit for LI Climate Action Network (LI-CAN) this Saturday October 18, 2008 from 3:00 PM to 7 PM. Free music and refreshments.
Location: Artistz Lounge, 196 N. Belle Mead Rd Ste 1, East Setauket, NY 11733
Come browse the display of artwork, meet and network with other green individuals, enjoy the live music and refreshments, and help support LI-CAN! (LI-CAN will earn 10 percent of the proceeds from all art sales.)
Also, our LI-CAN Educator, MarciaGrace Tropin, will be giving a LI-CAN presentation ("How to lose 5,000 pounds in 30 days!") this Thursday, October 16, at 7:30 PM at the Conscience Bay Quakers, 4 Friends Way, St. James, NY 11780.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
Blanket Buy
We've gotten this interesting inquiry.
I'm looking for a warm blanket for a bed of any color, preferably multicolored parallel lines extending across the whole blanket or a yellow one. I am hoping to find one that was made locally on Long Island or if not on Long Island in New York State. Ideally, I want to find one that is made out of materials which were grown sustainably on Long Island or New York State. By sustainable, I mean that the operations involved in growing the material for the blanket and producing the blanket were in harmony with the environment and the workers involved were paid and treated well.
If you have ideas, please let Eli know.
I'm looking for a warm blanket for a bed of any color, preferably multicolored parallel lines extending across the whole blanket or a yellow one. I am hoping to find one that was made locally on Long Island or if not on Long Island in New York State. Ideally, I want to find one that is made out of materials which were grown sustainably on Long Island or New York State. By sustainable, I mean that the operations involved in growing the material for the blanket and producing the blanket were in harmony with the environment and the workers involved were paid and treated well.
If you have ideas, please let Eli know.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Donating the Recyclables
We received a question from Kristen Powers at Weiser LLP, asking about programs in Nassau County that would allow businesses to donate their recyclables to good causes. She notes that at a prior job, staffers were able to route their recyclables to a local church, which benefited a homeless shelter. She’d like to know more about possibilities for something similar; her firm is in Lake Success. Drop her or me an e-mail if you have specific information. Thanks.
Contacting Big Brothers of Nassau County to see if it has any interest has been the best suggestion so far. If this were happening nearer my house, I could probably find a charity. It's a shame to see good recyclable material go to waste.
Contacting Big Brothers of Nassau County to see if it has any interest has been the best suggestion so far. If this were happening nearer my house, I could probably find a charity. It's a shame to see good recyclable material go to waste.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
Review: 'American Earth'
I've just been re-reading my all-time favorite book, "American Earth:Environmental Writing Since Thoreau," which came out this spring.
Rarely do I say that you have to read a certain book or article. But really, you should if environmentalism interests you in the slightest, for the writing style, the sense of history and, of course, the content of the essays. The book is a compilation of 100 works, starting with Thoreau and ending with Paul Hawken and Rebecca Solnit in contemporary times. The essays will give you chills they are so good and, as happens with other forgotten strains of history, inform us that the fight to preserve nature didn't begin with Earth Day, though that creation by Denis Hayes introduced so many Americans to the issues and helped bring about current awareness of environmental crises.
The fight has been with us all along, sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered but always there to tell us why we need to be smarter about land use, treating nature with respect and keeping ourselves healthier in the process.
Some odd names, people you wouldn't expect to show up in an environmental collection, pop up here, offering remarkably smart observations, P.T. Barnum? Here he is, complaining about the ugliness of billboards; there's Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, writing in a dissent, arguing to give the Sierra Club standing to speak for nature; Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye and Lyndon Johnson turn up, too.
And of course, others better known for their environmentalism: Walt Whitman, Al Gore, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben (who edited this collection), Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Dillard and Amory B. Lovins. (A couple of them showed up in Time Magazine's "Heroes of the Environment" story last year.) All contribute a fresh insight; few lecture, though if you don't like what they have to say, maybe you won't care to read it here, either. But to me, one of the most significant contributions of the collection is to show the history of the battle, often fought on an individual basis, even before most of us knew there was a fight to be joined. So we get to read what, on their own, might seem rather quixotic, people who survived the hard times of the Dust Bowl, those who worried about the carrier pigeons, and rightly so, since they are now gone, an author who imagines the voice of cockroaches, quoting ants, to warn about stupid and destructive human behavior, or offer a "Smokey the Bear Sutra," and a poem from what has to be the best place name in the United States, Haiku, Hawaii.
And the writing is lovely so if you just want to appreciate style, you'll find it here.
I'm a real fan of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan and McKibben, among others, but the beauty of this book is that it produces works previously unknown, to me, at least. And it was in the pages of this book that I learned about Archy the cockroach, a creation of Don Marquis who was warning us about natural destruction back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Here, from Archy, is a sampling from a report on "what the ants are saying":
It wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
and
america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
(Since he's a roach, Archy can't reach the shift key on a keyboard and so doesn't do punctuation or capitals.)
This book is a joy to read, a call to action, a report on history, a demand to save what we can now, and a wake for what we have already lost. Read it for all of those things and more.
Contributing to this book are:
Al Gore
Alan Durning
Aldo Leopold
Alice Walker
Amory B. Lovins
Annie Dillard
Barbara Kingsolver
Barry Lopez
Benton MacKay
Berton Roueche
Bill McKibben
Buckminster Fuller
Calvin B. DeWitt
Carl Anthony and Renee Soule
Caroline Henderson
Cesar Chavfez
Colin Fletcher
David Abram
David Quammen
David R. Brower
Denis Hayes
Don Marquis
Donald Cultross Peattie
E.B. White
E.O. Wilson
Edward Abbey
Edwin Way Teale
Eliot Porter
Frederick Law Olmsted
Friends of the Earth
Garrett Hardin
Gary Snyder
Gene Stratton-Porter
George B. Schaller
George Catlin
George Perkins Marsh
Gifford Pinchot
Helen and Scott Nearing
Henry Beston
Henry David Thoreau
Howard Zahniser
J. Sterling Morton
J.N. Darling
Jack Turner
Jane Jacobs
Janisse Ray
John Burroughs
John McPhee
John Muir
John Steinbeck
Jonathan Schell
Joni Mitchell
Joseph Lelyveld
Julia Butterfly Hill
Kenneth E. Boulding
Leslie Marmon Silko
Lewis Thomas
Linda Hogan
Lois Gibbs
Loren Elsley
Lydia Huntley Sigourney
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lynn White Jr.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Marvin Gaye
Mary Austin
Mary Oliver
Michael Pollan
N. Scott Momaday
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
P.T. Barnum
Paul Hawken
Paul R. Ehrlich
Philip K. Dick
R. Crumb
Rachel Carson
Rebecca Solnit
Richard Nelson
Rick Bass
Robert D. Bullard
Robert Marshall
Robinson Jeffers
Russell Baker
Sandra Steingraber
Scott Russell Sanders
Sigurd F. Olson
Stephanie Mills
Susan Fenimore Cooper
Table Rock Album
Terry Tempest Williams
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Roosevelt
W. S. Merwin
W.H.H. Murray
Walt Whitman
Wendell Berry
Wes Jackson
William Cronon
William O. Douglas
William T. Hornaday
Woody Guthrie
Rarely do I say that you have to read a certain book or article. But really, you should if environmentalism interests you in the slightest, for the writing style, the sense of history and, of course, the content of the essays. The book is a compilation of 100 works, starting with Thoreau and ending with Paul Hawken and Rebecca Solnit in contemporary times. The essays will give you chills they are so good and, as happens with other forgotten strains of history, inform us that the fight to preserve nature didn't begin with Earth Day, though that creation by Denis Hayes introduced so many Americans to the issues and helped bring about current awareness of environmental crises.
The fight has been with us all along, sometimes shouted, sometimes whispered but always there to tell us why we need to be smarter about land use, treating nature with respect and keeping ourselves healthier in the process.
Some odd names, people you wouldn't expect to show up in an environmental collection, pop up here, offering remarkably smart observations, P.T. Barnum? Here he is, complaining about the ugliness of billboards; there's Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, writing in a dissent, arguing to give the Sierra Club standing to speak for nature; Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye and Lyndon Johnson turn up, too.
And of course, others better known for their environmentalism: Walt Whitman, Al Gore, John Steinbeck, Rachel Carson, Bill McKibben (who edited this collection), Barbara Kingsolver, Annie Dillard and Amory B. Lovins. (A couple of them showed up in Time Magazine's "Heroes of the Environment" story last year.) All contribute a fresh insight; few lecture, though if you don't like what they have to say, maybe you won't care to read it here, either. But to me, one of the most significant contributions of the collection is to show the history of the battle, often fought on an individual basis, even before most of us knew there was a fight to be joined. So we get to read what, on their own, might seem rather quixotic, people who survived the hard times of the Dust Bowl, those who worried about the carrier pigeons, and rightly so, since they are now gone, an author who imagines the voice of cockroaches, quoting ants, to warn about stupid and destructive human behavior, or offer a "Smokey the Bear Sutra," and a poem from what has to be the best place name in the United States, Haiku, Hawaii.
And the writing is lovely so if you just want to appreciate style, you'll find it here.
I'm a real fan of Barbara Kingsolver, Michael Pollan and McKibben, among others, but the beauty of this book is that it produces works previously unknown, to me, at least. And it was in the pages of this book that I learned about Archy the cockroach, a creation of Don Marquis who was warning us about natural destruction back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Here, from Archy, is a sampling from a report on "what the ants are saying":
It wont be long now it wont be long
man is making deserts of the earth
it wont be long now
before man will have used it up
and
america was once a paradise
of timberland and stream
but it is dying because of the greed
and money lust of a thousand little kings
(Since he's a roach, Archy can't reach the shift key on a keyboard and so doesn't do punctuation or capitals.)
This book is a joy to read, a call to action, a report on history, a demand to save what we can now, and a wake for what we have already lost. Read it for all of those things and more.
Contributing to this book are:
Al Gore
Alan Durning
Aldo Leopold
Alice Walker
Amory B. Lovins
Annie Dillard
Barbara Kingsolver
Barry Lopez
Benton MacKay
Berton Roueche
Bill McKibben
Buckminster Fuller
Calvin B. DeWitt
Carl Anthony and Renee Soule
Caroline Henderson
Cesar Chavfez
Colin Fletcher
David Abram
David Quammen
David R. Brower
Denis Hayes
Don Marquis
Donald Cultross Peattie
E.B. White
E.O. Wilson
Edward Abbey
Edwin Way Teale
Eliot Porter
Frederick Law Olmsted
Friends of the Earth
Garrett Hardin
Gary Snyder
Gene Stratton-Porter
George B. Schaller
George Catlin
George Perkins Marsh
Gifford Pinchot
Helen and Scott Nearing
Henry Beston
Henry David Thoreau
Howard Zahniser
J. Sterling Morton
J.N. Darling
Jack Turner
Jane Jacobs
Janisse Ray
John Burroughs
John McPhee
John Muir
John Steinbeck
Jonathan Schell
Joni Mitchell
Joseph Lelyveld
Julia Butterfly Hill
Kenneth E. Boulding
Leslie Marmon Silko
Lewis Thomas
Linda Hogan
Lois Gibbs
Loren Elsley
Lydia Huntley Sigourney
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lynn White Jr.
Marjory Stoneman Douglas
Marvin Gaye
Mary Austin
Mary Oliver
Michael Pollan
N. Scott Momaday
Nathaniel Southgate Shaler
P.T. Barnum
Paul Hawken
Paul R. Ehrlich
Philip K. Dick
R. Crumb
Rachel Carson
Rebecca Solnit
Richard Nelson
Rick Bass
Robert D. Bullard
Robert Marshall
Robinson Jeffers
Russell Baker
Sandra Steingraber
Scott Russell Sanders
Sigurd F. Olson
Stephanie Mills
Susan Fenimore Cooper
Table Rock Album
Terry Tempest Williams
Theodore Dreiser
Theodore Roosevelt
W. S. Merwin
W.H.H. Murray
Walt Whitman
Wendell Berry
Wes Jackson
William Cronon
William O. Douglas
William T. Hornaday
Woody Guthrie
Reminder: Solar Tour
The National Solar Tour and Green Buildings Open House is set for Saturday, Oct.4.
The tour is coordinated locally by Renewable Energy Long Island (RELI) and the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA).
Saturday, Oct.4, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
You can sign up here
The tour is coordinated locally by Renewable Energy Long Island (RELI) and the Long Island Power Authority (LIPA).
Saturday, Oct.4, 10 a.m.-4 p.m.
You can sign up here
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