Earth Day Awesomeness, from Conception to 2008

Smug Alert! It’s Earth Day, people!

Obviously, if you’re a fan of EarthFirst.com, you act as if every day is Earth Day (you do, of course, don’t you?), but that doesn’t mean the symbolism of the holiday isn’t significant to all of us. No, not because we get to go on Smug Alert. Luckily, for the most part, the general public no longer considers Earth Day to be that annoying day that sanctimonious little shits in Greenpeace t-shirts tell everyone else what to do with their pickup trucks and recyclables. More and more people are starting to actually, like, care and stuff.

How’d Earth Day start, after all, in this nation of McDonalds and fossil fuels? Envirolink.org has the scoop straight from the source. Senator Gaylord Nelson, founder of Earth Day, says the idea started back in 1962:

For several years, it had been troubling me that the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country. Finally, in November 1962, an idea occurred to me that was, I thought, a virtual cinch to put the environment into the political “limelight” once and for all. The idea was to persuade President Kennedy to give visibility to this issue by going on a national conservation tour. I flew to Washington to discuss the proposal with Attorney General Robert Kennedy, who liked the idea. So did the President. The President began his five-day, eleven-state conservation tour in September 1963. For many reasons the tour did not succeed in putting the issue onto the national political agenda. However, it was the germ of the idea that ultimately flowered into Earth Day.

Senator Nelson kept on truckin’ for the next seven years, trying to get the message out despite little interest from politicians. The people were starting to get it, though, and what better time than the summer of love, 1969, for it to take off? In September of that year, Senator Nelson announced that the following spring, April 1970, there would be a ‘nationwide grassroots demonstration on behalf of the environment’ and asked everyone to take part. The message spread, people got excited, and the day itself turned out to be a great success. 20 million people demonstrated in thousands of schools and communities nationwide, with Senator Nelson marveling that it ‘organized itself’.

Since then, Earth Day has been celebrated in thousands of different ways all over the world. Many cities center their festivities around local natural wonders and efforts to preserve them, while others take the chance to educate the public about what they can do to be ‘green’. At Earth Day events you can typically find local environmentally friendly retailers, purchase local organic food & beverages, participate in interactive exhibits and enjoy live music.

Of all the Earth Day celebrations, the largest and best known is the nationwide Green Apple Music Festival which actually took place this past weekend (April 18th-20th) in 8 cities around the U.S. including San Francisco, Los Angeles, Dallas, Denver, Chicago, Miami, Washington DC & NYC. In Miami, Menudo played. Menudo!

Others who celebrated over the weekend include Tokyo and Barcelona. Buenos Aires and Russia plan to be fashionably late, throwing their own Earth Day bashes on the 26th. Some of the happenings around the globe include awareness of genetic modification of our food, showing off new advances in green technology, cultural performances, and (in America) voter registration.

Sure, there are still people out there that think global warming isn’t real. And there are plenty of trees all over the world, so we’re not going to run out any time soon (eye roll), humans were meant to lord over the earth and everything will just adapt to our gluttony and gross misuse of the amazing natural bounty we’ve been blessed with by God, nature, science or what have you. Right? Uh, no, and that’s why you should take this opportunity to spread the Earth Day love.

So let’s all hold hands and sing: “Come on, people now people now… people driving hybrids people now…” Kidding, kidding. Ride your bike to work, attend a festival in your area, do something good for the earth or at least get outside. Or, you can join us as we live blog Earth Day, all day long! Come on, it will be fun (but you should take a break to go outside at some point, seriously).

Link [Envirolink]

Photo credit: South Park Studios & Wikimedia Commons

Brilliant! Drought-Stricken Florida Gives Nestle Unlimited Water for $230

Ah, Florida. With a reputation already sullied by dirty election politics and bonehead decision making, this latest news is funny, sad and totally unsurprising all at once.

Boing Boing has it:

The State of Florida has given a Nestle bottling plant the right to pump as much water as it can get out Madison Blue Springs State Park, which is presently in drought conditions. The right lasts until 2018, and cost Nestle $230 in permit fees. Florida is presently in bitter dispute with its neighboring states over a region-wide water-shortage.

$230. Total. No taxes, no fees - plus the state gave Nestle an outrageously large tax refund for this bottling operation. With some predicting that water shortages will place this precious commodity’s value above oil in the not-so-distant future, Florida has proven that politics trump the needs of its citizens any day of the week.

One wonders whether the clowns in office just run around in circles playing human whack-a-mole on each other all day. Maybe that would explain the astounding dearth of brain cells in lawmakers’ skulls.

Link [Boing Boing]

Photo: Flickr user rexboggs5

Nature Deficit Disorder in the UK: 25 Percent of British 10-Year-Olds Never Play Outside by Themselves

I used to work in various national parks. One thing we hated was the tourist kids, the Prisoners of the Backseat. Whining, mewling, shrieking, occasionally vomiting–we thought they were remarkably bad-smelling little hominids. Sticky, too, should one happen to touch you. Yuck. We considered them beneath our notice, and were most pleased when they never left the backseat.

It was only quite some time later that I came to see the error in my thinking. But now, I’m not alone in that. People are beginning to notice that kids nowadays don’t get out much; in fact, I took the title of this entry from an entire book on the phenomenon (Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder, by Richard Louv). We covered the issue in EarthFirst here. It pops up all over now, as in this story from Great Britain that we found in the Daily Mail:

[A] quarter of all children between eight and 10 have never played outside without adult supervision.

Ministers are concerned that children now have fewer opportunities than ever to play outdoors thanks to over-zealous health and safety crackdowns and a “no ball games here” culture….

Research has found that the average age at which children are allowed outside without adult supervision has risen from around seven years in the 1960s and 70s to just over eight years now.

One in three parents will not even allow older children, aged eight to 17, to play outside the house or garden.

It’s not clear what effect this is all going to have on a child’s brain. One can only speculate. But I understand now that those vile kids in the backseat, the ones we used to curse, were the future of the national parks. In the coming years, if they don’t care about the parks, no one else will. I hope someone occasionally opened up the car door and let them out.

Link: [The Daily Mail]

Billy Knows a Tree When He Googles One: The Soccer Mom Syndrome

The big ass Chevy Suburban that just cut you off is not dangerous because of the cell phone-jabbing, 5′2″ super housewife behind the wheel. The real danger lives behind those tinted rear windows, in the murky back seat region, where billions of microchips and processors compete for the attention of the one little whiny occupant who reigns supreme. Fumbling from Gameboy to iPod to DVD remote control, it’s a wonder little Billy even finds the time to allow a finger to break free and troll after those boogers that are just dying to get out. Our little friend has driven through the forest a billion times, but has yet to so much as touch a tree.

In his discussion at the Aspen Environment Forum, EO Wilson (Pellegrino Research Professor in Entomology at Harvard) blamed the group that he lovingly referred to as “soccer moms” for the declining interest in nature and the environment amongst children.

DiscoverMagazine.com reports:

Wilson filled more than an hour of questions and answers with witty remarks and barbs. And to be sure, his tone was playful. Yet, there was a seriousness behind his “soccer mom” remarks that struck a cord with many people in the audience: Have children been largely cut off from nature because of technology?

Many people agreed that they have, with video games, the Internet and structured play times replacing — as comedian George Carlin commented in a recent skit — sitting outside in a yard with a stick wondering how to entertain themselves.

If Wilson is right, little urban zombies like Billy will one day rule the world, able to leap tall logarithmic search engines in a single bound, but stupidly worthless when it comes to differentiating between an acorn and a pine cone. These are tomorrow’s Republican Senators and Governors.

Links [Discover Magazine] & [The Aspen Environment Forum]

Photo credit: Flickr user MonkeyLeo13

President Bush To Throw First Pitch At New Green Stadium, Up is Down, War is Peace

Oh, the irony. In celebration of opening day for the first green-built professional stadium in the U.S., President George W. Bush will throw out the inaugural pitch. Seriously? Was Carrot Top busy? What about Gary Busey? Anyone else?

The official new home of the Washington Nationals baseball team, the stadium boasts a wide array of eco-friendly elements. Grist beautifully gives us the low-down,

The U.S. The LEED Silver certified ballpark was built on a restored brownfield, and many building materials were produced locally. The stadium boasts efficient lighting and plumbing, drought-resistant plants, a concession area with a green roof, filters to keep stormwater runoff out of the nearby Anacostia River, and proximity to public transit (as well as a shortage of parking).

The stadium will also use air-cooled chillers for concessions instead of water-cooled ones. This will likely result in savings of over six million gallons of water each year. All-in-all, about $611 million was spent on the project. For more, jump here.

Source: [Grist]

Hospitals Are Saving Millions and Reducing Their Landfill Load By Reusing Single Use Medical Devices

It’s great to hear that Hospitals are getting into the act on greening up the world. They’re starting to reuse items labeled for single use over and over again- things like scissors, scrubs, and bone cutting blades. This practice is legal as long as the hospital follows certain FDA guidelines, mostly by sending the items out to specialized companies who clean and sterilized them.

Medical device makers are, understandably, upset. They’re forecasting reduced demand for re-ordering of these ‘one use’ items and throwing out the spin that it’s dangerous to do anything but trash them and order a new one.

Unfortunately for them, and fortunately for the environment, the hospitals have shrinking budgets on their side. When there is an easy way for them to trim 40-60% off the cost of a line item they are going to pounce all over it.

The Wall Street Journal has it:

About $31.5 billion of single-use medical devices are sold annually in U.S. hospitals and surgery centers, of which around $150 million are recycled, according to Ascent Healthcare Solutions, a leading reprocessing company. John Grotting, Ascent’s chief executive, estimates that about $3.6 billion of single-use devices are safe for reprocessing, which could save the health-care industry about $1.8 billion a year. Ascent hospital customers eliminated about 1,684 tons of waste from their local landfills last year, a 31% increase over 2006, by using reprocessed devices, Ascent says.

Some people in the medical field think that some single use labeling is just a way for device manufacturers to pad their bottom line.

But hospital administrators and other experts say many products such as saw blades that were historically designated as reusable now carry single-use labels, with no obvious difference in the product.

“Single-use labeling is a real scam for a lot of devices, and by not using reprocessed devices where possible it is wasteful and not environmentally responsive, since these items have to be disposed of as biomedical waste,” says Kenneth Kizer, a consultant and former undersecretary for health at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. “The reuse of medical devices that are labeled for single-use only is a well-established and safe practice regulated by the FDA and utilized by most of the top-ranked hospitals in the country.”

Link [Wall Street Journal]

Deforestation is Driving Snakes Out of the Jungle and into Rio Di Janeiro

Snakes!

Deforestation!

Deforestation and Snakes!

It sucks to suffer from Ophidiophobia (fear of snakes)and live in Rio De Janeiro right now. The city is being invaded by snakes, driven from their forest home by logging. The AP has it:

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil: Snakes are increasingly invading the eastern Amazon’s largest city, driven from the rain forest by loggers and ranchers who are destroying the reptiles’ natural habitat, the government’s environmental protection agency said Tuesday.

The agency, known as Ibama, has been called out to capture 21 snakes this year in Belem, a sprawling metropolis of 1.5 million people at the mouth of the Amazon River, Ibama press officer Luciana Almeida said by telephone.

Link [International Herald Tribune]

Photo credit: Flickr user Chad Mill 

The Research Is In: Unwashed Hair Sucks Up More Pollution Than Clean Locks

What a week for unwashed hair.

On Thursday we wrote about the growing trend of people not washing their hair. The next day we read at Green Daily that unwashed hair actually cleans the air- it scrubs ozone from the atmosphere around your head. Unwashed hair sucks up seven times more ozone than freshly washed, there’s no word on how hair powered ‘doos do but I’d guess somewhere in between.

Either way, it’s a good excuse to pull out anytime you find yourself a few days past your last shower. “Hey, I’m just trying the save the world here. Think Globally, don’t wash my hair Locally”.

Link [Green Daily]

Photo from Flickr user bryankennedy

Leadville, Colorado Fears Billion Gallon Flood of Cancer and Pain

Leadville, Colorado is a scary place to live in these days. It’s a high altitude town- the highest incorporated in the U.S. at over 10,000 feet- contaminated by decades of mining the slopes above and around. It was at one time the largest silver mine in the world and over the decades has been host to soldiers from the nearby Army base, famous writers and celebrities, and even gunslinger Doc Holiday.

Today it’s filled with a people fearful of the billion gallons of polluted water plugged up in a tunnel overlooking town that’s threatening to pop. If it blows the entire town will be awash in a watery stew of deadly chemicals, lead, mercury, and other heavy metals. Leadville’s 2,700 residents could find themselves knee deep in cancer and death.

Groovy Green says not to worry though, officials are all over this one:

Peter Soeth, a spokesman for the Bureau of Reclamation, which acquired the drainage tunnel in 1959, said there was no immediate threat to Leadville’s 2,700 residents.

Officials point out that a speaker system to broadcast evacuation notices has already been installed near a mobile home park that has 300 residents near the tunnel’s portal.

I’d feel so safe if I knew that and lived in Leadville. A speaker system. They have a speaker system. Great F.S.M.

Link [MSNBC] via Groovy Green

China’s Brilliant Reforesting Scheme: Paint The Hillside Green

China is joining Tara Reid in going Green, but their definition of Green is “coat an entire hillside with oil based green paint.” A town in Southwest China requested their government green up an exposed hillside overlooking their town. They wanted them to plant some grasses and bushes to vegetate the slope. In a brilliant stroke of Chinese Govermentism, $60,000 of green paint (think Sherman Williams) and labor was spread out on the hillside.

It kind of looks like an exposed Kryptonite vein. Blech.

Link [Solve Climate]

Next Page »