If you ever visit the Death Valley National Park in California, you may notice large rocks with long trails behind them at Racetrack Playa (a dry lake bed). It looks like someone pushed the rocks along the surface. Only, it wasn’t ‘someone’. The rocks appear to slide across the playa all by themselves, but how they do it is a mystery, and no one has ever actually seen them move. There are a few theories, though.

Racetrack Playa is totally flat and almost always completely dry, with a surface covered in mudcracks and sediment made up of silt and clay. When it does rain, runoff from the mountains surrounding Racetrack Playa turn it into a shallow lake, transforming the surface into very soft and slippery mud.

From Geology.com:

Are They Moved by People or Animals?

The shape of trails behind the rocks suggest that they move during times when the floor of Racetrack Playa is covered with a very soft mud. A lack of disturbed mud around the rock trails eliminates the possibility of a human or animal pushing or assisting the motion of the rocks.

Are They Moved by Wind?

This is the favorite explanation. The prevailing winds that blow across Racetrack Playa travel from southwest to northeast. Most of the rock trails are parallel to this direction. This is strong evidence that wind is the prime mover or at least involved with the motion of the rocks.

Strong wind gusts are thought to nudge the rocks into motion. Once the rock begins to move a wind of much lower velocity can keep the rock in motion as it slides across the soft and very slippery mud. Curves in the rock trails are explained by shifts in wind direction or in how the wind interacts with an irregularly shaped rock.

There are a couple other theories, but most people agree that wind is the most likely culprit.  It may happen too slowly for anyone to see it happening, though, so we may never know for sure. It’s one of those strange mysteries of nature.

Link [Geology.com]

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The ‘Great Tortilla Crisis’ of 2006 is having an unexpected effect two years later – helping to determine the fate of ethanol as an energy source. Ethanol got the blame for rising food prices as American farmers used the corn they grew for fuel instead of food, making it too expensive for Mexico’s poor. Now, biofuel producers are searching for sources of energy that don’t take food off the table, turning to grass, grain stalks left behind by the harvest, garbage dumps and dinner table scraps.

From The Huffington Post:

Carlo Bakker’s tiny biofuel operation, World Mobile Plants, avoids edibles. He says his mini-refinery, loaded into a 40-foot shipping container on a flatbed truck, roams South Africa making biodiesel fuel from used cooking oil, or from sunflower seeds or the jatropha shrub, which grows in poor soil with little water. He says he plans eventually to use organic household waste as well.

Bakker says one mobile unit can make 260,000 gallons per year, which he sells for the equivalent of US$3.79 per gallon, on a par with regular diesel prices.

“We don’t compete with the food chain,” Bakker said during a biofuels conference in Amsterdam. “We see opportunities not only to make money but to help people.”

Now, we’re seeing a shift toward second-generation biofuels – those that use waste streams. Universities and corporate research laboratories are pouring millions of dollars into finding a way to break down woody or grassy biomass into cellulosic ethanol. We’re still a few years away from commercial plants, however.

Biofuel proponents are upset that all biofuels have been lumped together in this backlash, when some forms made from things like sugar cane don’t have an effect on the food supply. In Europe, biodiesel is made largely of rapeseed grown on disused land. Only 40% of crushed rapeseed is used for biodiesel while the rest is processed into animal feed.

However, biofuel still requires plenty of water and is sometimes grown on fertile cropland which, many argue, could be put to better use for food.

A long-term solution could still come from the biofuel industry, if they can solve these problems. Many people view biofuels as a ‘band-aid’ solution, however – only useful until we can move on to something that’s truly sustainable. There are those who believe that turning to genetic modification is the answer, but that’s a whole other can of worms and one that we hope will not be opened any time soon.

Link [The Huffington Post]
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

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Brown University is working toward a more sustainable global environment through three focus areas: research and training, community collaborations, university commitments and a great variety of student groups and initiatives that turn ideas into reality. The Providence, Rhode Island Ivy League school began their ‘Brown is Green’ environmental education and advocacy initiative way back in 1990, with the aim of expanding student involvement in identifying and solving environmental problems on campus, providing a model for other colleges and universities.

The Brown is Green initiative addresses a number of goals including energy conservation, pollution reduction, eco-friendly design, energy efficiency, resource recovery, water conservation and transportation. Brown University now has an Energy and Environment Task Force that assesses the university’s environmental impact and works on ways to improve, as well as an Energy and Environmental Advisory Committee (EEAC) that develops goals and strategies to make Brown more green. The EEAC’s first set of recommendations, released in 2007, led to the creation of Brown’s Community Carbon Use Reduction program which works to reduce the university’s carbon footprint.

Brown University students have certainly proven to be passionate about making their school more eco-friendly and spreading these ideas to the community. Green organizations on campus include Emerging Green Leaders, comprised of students and young professionals intent on becoming part of the green building movement, and the Empower Student Group, which believes that Brown must take responsibility for its contribution to global warming and immediately work to end it.

Students are also leading the way toward better practices on campus. The Sustainable Food Initiative integrates local food and sustainable agriculture into student life through an on-campus, student run farm. The Brown Progress Initiative is a multidisciplinary think-tank for sustainable product design and development, seeking to cultivate innovative solutions that can solve current needs in a ‘green’ manner.

Brown has retrofitted many existing buildings on campus with more eco-friendly lighting, motors and mechanical equipment, and millions of dollars worth of additional improvements are in the pipeline for the next few years.  The university has also set goals to seek, at minimum, the Silver standard in LEED for all new construction and reduce greenhouse gas emissions for all newly acquired facilities by at least 15%.

Other ways in which this Ivy League institution has gone green include a ‘Bike to Brown’ support group, a fleet of university-owned hybrid, natural gas and biodiesel-fueled vehicles, and free bus transportation for students, faculty and staff. The Brown dining hall purchases locally grown and fairly traded food through its Community Harvest program, works to compost or recycle as much waste as possible and provides biodegradable to-go containers.

Read more about Brown’s efforts at the Brown Daily Herald, which frequently features environment-themed articles. Congratulations to everyone at Brown University for all of your achievements in such a short time period -  we’re looking forward to seeing what else you can do.

Link [Brown is Green]

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College students across the nation are coming together to demand ‘real food’ – local, organic, fair trade food via college farms, farm-to-cafeteria programs and other initiatives.  The Real Food Challenge loosely defines ‘real food’ as a holistic term they’re using to bring together a lot of different ideas people have about just and sustainable food. Since colleges and universities spend more than $4 billion on food every year, college students have the ability to directly influence a significant portion of the national food system.

From Real Food Challenge:

People are increasingly waking up to the need for change. The situation is dire, as environmental degradation, corporate consolidation, homogenization, and alienation become the hallmarks of our food system. The momentum for change is growing; consumers are demanding more real food, activists from across the country are linking up, and the buzz is growing all around. On hundreds of college campuses all around the country, the momentum has become a budding movement.

This movement, however, lacks common goals, a common framework, and a collective voice. Nor is this movement as diverse and widespread as it should be. If we move strategically and effectively, we can capitalize on the growing energy and bring the many elements of the campus food movement into collaboration, working towards a unified goal of more socially and environmentally conscious food.

We have shown that we have the passion, drive and wherewithal to make real change. Thousands of students are already working to create a more just and sustainable food system, and have demonstrated a commitment to the highest ideals of environmental sustainability and social justice.

Dozens of schools are already participating, including sustainability leaders like College of the Atlantic, Dartmouth College, Evergreen State College, Middlebury College, NYU and Warren Wilson College. Check out the list, and if your school isn’t on it, the Real Food Challenge website has all the details on how you can get involved.  The website also includes resources like a 10-step ‘Guide to Launch’, action ideas and downloadable posters.

This is a fantastic way for college students to exercise their power to make the world the way they want it to be. Why settle for pesticide-laden, mass-produced junk when you can demand better, and get it? This is a really well-organized campaign, and it’ll undoubtedly do a world of good in changing the way college students think of food.

Link [Real Food Challenge]

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Graham Hill, founder of Treehugger, wrote about how the green retail industry can continue to beat the odds, and proposes a quick shift to ‘green retailing 3.0’. From The Huffington Post:

So how about leap-frogging to green retailing 3.0? This would combine the best of two worlds - the well-developing empire of Internet-based e-commerce and an expanded universe of truly well-designed and quality-made green goods. An example of an early attempt at this is the Green Home online store, and the UK’s Green Store.

However these, and really most e-commerce sites, have been hampered by an inability to give people a full shopping experience. But that is starting to change. Look at Zoomii, an online bookstore that copies Amazon’s pricing and shipping policies but lets you browse the bookshelves. Perhaps It won’t be long before your own (realistic) Second Life avatar can go in to a virtual store and try on the organic t-shirt and jeans you’ve been needing.

Seem far-fetched to think that those vast tracts of land now taken up by the behemoth buildings we call “malls” can be replaced by online sites and distributed networks of green suppliers? Well, E-bay probably seemed like a crazy idea not too long ago.

Hill points out that brick-and-mortar neighborhood stores with a green theme typically don’t have a great selection, and we can’t depend on mega-retailers to go green in any meaningful way, no matter how they might attempt to pander to environmentalists.

There are pros and cons to both local shopping and internet shopping, and that won’t change no matter how fancy and interactive online storefronts might become. Earth 911 has a rundown on the battle between online vs. local in-store shopping.

Hill’s ‘green retailing 3.0’ idea is intriguing, though. We’d certainly love to see the world of online shopping get a lot greener, and in order to do that on a large scale, stores need to entice even mainstream consumers to buy their merchandise.

Link [The Huffington Post] + [Earth 911]

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Extensive wildfires in Macedonia over the past two summers destroyed millions of trees, but the hills and forests of this Balkan country will be green again before too long. Thousands of Macedonians came together in a major reforestation drive, and planted six million trees in a single day.

From Reuters:

“Our goal is to make Macedonia “greener” and make people more aware of the needs of this planet,” said Macedonian opera singer Boris Trajanov, who initiated the project.

Thousands of people were bused to the planting sites, including more than 1,000 soldiers who planted some 200,000 seedlings at 14 sites.

“Just as we take care of our homes, we should take care of our planet,” said Silvana, boarding a bus with her two children. “We have no other place to live, that’s why I’m going.”

Trajanov told Reuters he hoped to spread the campaign across the whole Balkan region next year.

“If Macedonia, a country of two million people, can plant six million trees, we can only imagine how many trees can be planted in other, bigger countries,” he said.

Six million trees in a single day – that’s really impressive. Pretty inspiring to see so many people come together for the purpose of beautifying their country and repairing damage to the environment. And, this wasn’t even the first time – back in March, they planted 2 million trees, symbolizing one for each citizen in the nation. Imagine how much good we could do if even a fraction of the citizens of every other nation in the world followed suit!

Link [Reuters] via [The Huffington Post]
Photo credit: Balkan Analysis

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If you’re looking for some cheap, green ideas for holiday décor that don’t look like a fourth grader’s art project, Design Sponge has instructions for wine bottle candle holders that look chic and cost far less than store-bought décor. And no, this doesn’t entail simply sticking a taper candle into the mouth of a wine bottle. Using a glass cutter, you cut the bottles at varying heights to create a custom-made tablescape.

From Design Sponge:

Here’s what you’ll need:

-Glass cutting kit (we like this one or this one)
-Empty wine or beer bottles
-Sandpaper for polishing cut edges
-Candle
-Ice cube

Making a vase or candle holders out of a glass bottle isn’t rocket science, but it does take some practice. Don’t be upset or frustrated if you end up sacrificing a few bottles to the recycling bin before you master the fine art of scoring. To get started, adjust the cutter so that your bottle lies flat on the rollers with the scoring blade at your desired height. Using both hands, carefully roll the bottle towards you, keeping steady pressure as you create as straight a score line as possible around the entire bottle. Remember that to get a nice clean break in your glass it’s more important that the line be straight, not necessarily deep.

Now it’s time for the fire and ice. Light your candle, and holding the score line directly above the flame, slowly rotate the bottle for 20-30 seconds. Then do a few quick rotations so that the score line is evenly heated all around. Next, grab an ice cube and slide it along the score. This is where it gets interesting. If you hear any clicks or tiny cracking noises, this is a good sign. Most bottles won’t separate during the first round, so you may have to repeat the fire and ice routine a few times before the bottle magically (and cleanly!) snaps in two.

Soften the cut edges of the glass with sandpaper and you’ve got yourself a perfect little vase (or candle holder, or drinking glass)… Experiment with different sizes and heights and you’ll see that the possibilities are endless!

This could be really beautiful with jewel-toned bottles in different shapes. It’s a great way to reuse the many wine bottles your family imbibed on Thanksgiving, and it totally cuts out the need to run out and consume more crap you don’t need. Check back with EarthFirst over the coming weeks for more cool DIY holiday projects.

Link [Design Sponge]

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From The New York Times:

In Wyoming and Colorado in 2006 there were a million acres of dead trees. Last year it was 1.5 million. This year it is expected to total over two million. In the Canadian provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, the problem is most severe. It is the largest known insect infestation in the history of North America, officials said. British Columbia has lost 33 million acres of lodgepole pine forest, and a freak wind event in 2006 blew mountain pine beetles, a species of bark beetle, over the Continental Divide to northern Alberta. Experts fear that the beetles could travel all the way to the Great Lakes.

In the next three to five years, Mr. Kyhl said, virtually all of Colorado’s lodgepole pine trees over five inches in diameter will be lost, about five million acres. “Already in many places, every lodgepole over five inches is dead as far as the eye can see,” he said.

Foresters say the historic outbreak has several causes. Because fires have been suppressed for so long, all forests are roughly the same age, and the trees are big enough to be susceptible to beetles. A decade of drought has weakened the trees. And hard winters have softened, which allows the beetles to flourish and expand their range.

The beetle drills through the pine bark and digs a hole in the wood where it lays its eggs. The larvae inject a fungus to stop the tree from moving sap, which could drown them, and that fungus stains the wood blue. The trees emit a white, candle wax-like resin into the beetle’s drill hole in an attempt to fight them off, which sometimes works – but in some cases, the beetle emits a pheromone call for reinforcements, causing a swarm that kills the tree.

The reason for all of this? Warming temperatures. Decades ago, temperatures dropped to 30 or 40 degrees below zero in the Rockies, which kept infestations like this at bay. Now, the beetles have free reign. And, the death of all these trees is of course having a major effect on the forest ecosystem. In Yellowstone, for example, the white pine trees falling prey to the beetles grow nuts rich in fat, which grizzly bears depend upon for survival. Flash floods could also be a problem, and all of these dry forests are at major risk of fast-spreading fire.

This is one of the most obvious ways in which we’re already experiencing the effects of global warming here in North America. If this isn’t a blaring siren of warning, I don’t know what is.

Link [The New York Times]
Photo credit: Dion Manastyrski, B.C Ministry of Forests and Range

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Graveyards take up a lot of space. Before the growing population became a pressing problem, people didn’t think too much about the efficiency of dedicating large swaths of perfectly good land to store skeletons for an indefinite length of time. By now we should know better – we’re wasting perfectly good land and if we keep on creating cemeteries at the rate we are today the whole world will end up covered in them. So, the idea to turn a sunny expanse of graves into a solar power plant is a fantastic first step toward common sense.

From TIME Magazine:

Santa Coloma is the first city in Spain to convert its municipal burial place into what is essentially a power plant. The installation consists of 462 solar panels spread over roughly 10,700 sq. ft. (1000 sq. m.), and has a capacity of 100 kilowatts, enough to meet the energy needs of 60 families.

The idea came from Esteve Serret, director of Conste, a company that manages Santa Coloma’s cemetery. Serret had long been interested in renewable energy, and one day, as he worked with his father in the graveyard, he realized they were standing in a potent site for it. “To produce solar energy you need a wide open space,” Serret says. “and in Santa Coloma, the biggest open space is the cemetery.” Indeed, the city’s 124,000 inhabitants are squeezed into a bare 1.54 sq. miles (4 sq. km.) of space — and much of that land is mountainous.

Serret had only to convince the cemetery’s owners: the municipal government. That turned out to be easy, especially because the $935,000 it would cost to install the panels would come from Conste and Endesa, a major power company. “Why not? we thought,” says Begoña Bellete, councilwoman for environmental affairs. “A city like ours has to commit itself to being on the frontlines of the fight against climate change. And this was a great opportunity because the financing would be private. All we had to do was provide the space.”

This is a fantastic start, and in Spain, other cities are already warming up to the idea. Neighboring Barcelona has inquired about the project. It’s hard to imagine this catching on in America, though, what with the complete and unapologetic sense of entitlement to the ideas of the past, whether they work in today’s world or not. Regardless, something’s got to give, soon.

Link [TIME Magazine]

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Bill McKibben knows more about environmentalism, genetic engineering and climate change than you and me. A lot more. In fact, as noted in an article about him by The Nation, he’s the go-to guy for keynote speeches, forewords, blurbs and anthologies. He has been writing about these topics since the ‘80s and has written a long list of well-respected books including The End of Nature, The Age of Missing Information, Maybe One, Enough and Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

In 2006, McKibben led the organization of one of the largest demonstrations to raise awareness about global warming in history, cementing his already admirable reputation as a leading American environmentalist. Al Gore has said that McKibben’s descriptions of the problem of climate change made a huge impression on him as a senator, helping to shape his revolutionary work in environmentalism.

You may have already seen McKibben’s writing at Grist, where he’s a frequent guest author and is also on the board of directors.  He also contributes to The New York Times, The Atlantic Monthly, Mother Jones, The National Geographic, Rolling Stone and Outside.

He’s been honored with both the Guggenheim and the Lyndhurst fellowships, won a Lannan Literary Award and has been given honorary degrees from a variety of colleges including Green Mountain College and the State University of New York. He’s currently a scholar in residence at Middlebury College in Vermont, where he also directs the Middlebury Fellowships in Environmental Journalism.

McKibben is also co-founder of 350.org, an international grassroots campaign to spread awareness of the need to keep CO2 levels in the atmosphere at 350 parts per million or lower. The idea sprang from a speech given by NASA climate scientist James Hansen, in which he said that levels above 350ppm were too high, at least “if humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted.”

Of their efforts, McKibben wrote at Grist.org,

Our plan — again, with your help — is to take the number 350 and beat it into every head and heart on planet Earth, to tattoo it into every brain. If our fellow earthlings know nothing else about climate change, they need to know that 350 lies in the direction of safety. We are busy trying to find artists, musicians, activists, preachers, athletes, and, well, normal people in all corners of the globe who will figure out how to make 350 the most well-known number on the planet.

Already it’s starting — 350 cyclists circling through Salt Lake City, earning real publicity as they did so. I was in Honolulu yesterday, where activists are figuring out how to put red tarps on the roofs of 350 homes in a single neighborhood that could have solar PV panels if only the utility would get out of the way. In Maui today, people promised to assemble 350 surfers off the beach for a photo. At an evangelical conference last week, pastors were talking about ringing their bells 350 times.

McKibben also founded StepItUp07.org, an online organizing hub for a National Day of Climate Action, April 14th, 2007. On that day, people gathered for hundreds of rallies around the world to ask Congress to cut carbon by 80% by 2050. McKibben himself led a 5-day walk across Vermont to demand action on global warming, and Step it Up 07 has been described as the largest day of protest about climate change in the nation’s history.

Many people credit McKibben with bringing the concept of climate change to the masses, making it easy to understand in his book, ‘End of Nature’. That was obviously just the beginning, as McKibben makes it his life’s work to make sure people understand just how important of an issue climate change really is, and continues to inspire people to act every day, all around the world.

Bill McKibben’s Green Score: 88,572

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