Tag environment

Maybe We Should Declare War On It

By Brian Filed in News Tagged with BP, British Petroleum, Deepwater Horizon, environment, environmental impact, Gulf of Mexico, Ken Salazar, oil spill May 25th, 2010 @ 10:34 am

I don’t think anything I can say about the BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico can be as meaningful as these several things I have seen here and there on the Internet recently:

This photo in particular made me weep. A snowy egret lies dying in the oil-contaminated marsh that was its home:

This map shows you just how many oil rigs are already operating along the Gulf Coast. The impact from just ONE blowing out threatens millions of people and untold numbers of animals. Imagine two, or ten, or fifty of these blowing out because the oil companies chose to save a few bucks on safety and their lapdogs in Washington gladly took the cash and let them do it.

This video, featuring the frank views of someone in the business of cleaning up oil spills explains exactly why BP has done such a shitty job of cleaning up the spill to date and will continue to allow hundreds of miles of coastline to be destroyed (NSFW for very strong language):

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar has been widely quoted in the media as saying the Obama Administration would “keep a boot on the neck” of BP to pressure them to seal off the leak and clean up the contamination. I recommend he uses THIS boot:

Keep The Grass Off!

By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, News Tagged with environment, landscaping, lawn chemicals, lawns, pollution, water usage March 3rd, 2010 @ 12:47 pm

Even though winter has been hanging tough this year, spring will inevitably arrive, and, with it, the annual question of what to do about the lawn. I am not a fan of lawns, and not just because I am a lazy bastard, either. The American obsession with lawn care rates very high as a significant source of pollution: all those fucking chemicals people dump on their grass to keep it looking like the 7th Hole at Pebble Beach account for 90% of the chemical runoff that destroys rivers, ponds, and other watersheds, while the exhaust from an hour of using your gas-powered lawn mower is equivalent to driving 650 miles in a 1992-vintage automobile. Weed killer products contribute to undermining biodiversity in local plant life, allowing aggressive invader species like purple loosestrife to flourish and crowd out even more plants. All in all, kiddies, that fine manicured lawn is an environmental disaster, an advertisement for everything that is bad about our insistence on our unsustainable lifestyles.

Via Slashdot, of all places, I ran across this L.A. Times story this morning about a couple in the Southern California city of Orange, who are being sued by the city itself because they converted their lawn into a landscaped yard using bark and drought-tolerant plants. The couple say that their motivation was to use less water (the city has very tough watering restrictions in the first place) and they succeeded in reducing their water consumption by 75%, but the city also has an ordinance requiring homes to have at least 40% of their yard covered by living plants (e.g. grass). Even adding more plants did not assuage the officials. One would think that in Southern California, of all places, anything that contributed to lowering municipal water usage would be seen as beneficial, but once again the overarching short-sightedness of the value of grass overtakes common sense.

Enlightening (and Discouraging) Factoid Of The Day

By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with carbon footprint, environment, sustainability, water footprint October 28th, 2009 @ 11:37 am

This little chart from the July issue of Mother Jones was somewhat eye-opening to me. It lists a variety of consumer goods ranging from a microchip to a mid-size automobile and the amount of water needed to produce each article. For example: a 16-ounce bottle of Diet Coke requires 33 gallons of water to be produced. Now, there’s a decided lack of explanation as to how the author reached these numbers, but I presume the water is used in a wide variety of ways throughout the production cycle, not simply in a direct correlation to the item. Spread out over transportation, package manufacture, product manufacture, factory infrastructure, and other requirements, any single point in the process probably doesn’t consume all that much water, it’s the aggregate amount (further multiplied by the millions of units produced) that becomes mindblowing.

Water footprint calculations are rapidly becoming as critical to understanding the impact of mass production of consumer goods as carbon footprints, since the availability of potable water looms large as a serious global crisis. Whether people want to believe it or not, the day is approaching where we will be forced to make choices about everything we consume because of our willy-nilly approach to resource usage now.

Here’s another one to make your head spin: the carbon footprint of owning a pet in the industrialized nations is DOUBLE the carbon footprint of owning an SUV and driving it 6,200 miles per year. When the day comes, what’s it going to be: Fido or Ford?

When The Swallows Salmon Come Back To Capistrano Paris

By Brian Filed in Links, Science Tagged with environment, France, Paris, salmon, Seine River, sustainability September 2nd, 2009 @ 3:09 pm

Fishermen on the Seine at Poissy, by Claude Monet

The Seine River, which runs through the middle of Paris, was once home to dozens of species of fish, but, like many other urban rivers, eventually became too polluted to sustain them. Atlantic salmon were present in the river well into the mid-20th century but had not been seen since then.

So scientists and fishermen alike were thrilled to learn that this year as many as 1000 salmon had made the upstream swim from the ocean all the way to the City Of Lights . The return of the salmon is considered to be a significant milestone in France’s efforts to restore the Seine ecosystem, since they are one of the largest species of fish to live in that environment and require the presence of smaller food organisms, adequate oxygen levels, and other indicators of a healthy river.

Tag environment

Maybe We Should Declare War On It

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Keep The Grass Off!

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Enlightening (and Discouraging) Factoid Of The Day

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When The Swallows Salmon Come Back To Capistrano Paris

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